Dennis Gabor devised a new concept for optical imaging in 1947 that went by a variety of names over the following decade: holoscopy, wavefront reconstruction, interference microscopy, diffraction microscopy and Gaboroscopy. A well-connected and creative research engineer, Gabor worked actively to publicize and exploit his concept, but the scheme failed to capture the interest of many researchers. Gabor’s theory was repeatedly deemed unintuitive and baffling; the technique was appraised by his contemporaries to be of dubious practicality (...) and, at best, constrained to a narrow branch of science. By the late 1950s, Gabor’s subject had been assessed by its handful of practitioners to be a white elephant. Nevertheless, the concept was later rehabilitated by the research of Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks at the University of Michigan, and Yury Denisyuk at the Vavilov Institute in Leningrad. What had been judged a failure was recast as a success: evaluations of Gabor’s work were transformed during the 1960s, when it was represented as the foundation on which to construct the new and distinctly different subject of holography, a re-evaluation that gained the Nobel Prize for Physics for Gabor alone in 1971. This paper focuses on the difficulties experienced in constructing a meaningful subject, a practical application and a viable technical community from Gabor’s ideas during the decade 1947-1957. (shrink)

In the last few years holography has celebrated some important anniversaries: in 2010 the 50th anniversary of the light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation (LASER) invention; in 2011 the 40th anniversary of the Nobel Prize awarded to the Hungarian scientist Dennis Gabor for inventing holography and in 2012 the 50th anniversary of the first holograms. Holography can create an accurate visual simulation, with total parallax: a replica of the real object made of light, which has the real (...) object’s visual properties but is immaterial, intangible. The holographic images are volumetric and exist in a real and measurable space, and are not based on the Renaissance perspective, which can represent the three-dimensional physical space in a bi-dimensional one. In the near future, holography-based techniques will open up new possibilities in the visualization domain, allowing new visual worlds. In the meantime, holography can be a useful technical and theoretical tool for reflecting on how our everyday mediascape works. The media can produce, reproduce and transmit bi-dimensional images on flat supports. The media system has a high degree of coherence and the images share similar morphostructural rules, and thus can be transferred from one medium to another without any fundamental information loss: bi-dimensionality and image-support coincidently appear to be the basis of this high level of translatability. Conversely, holograms cannot be displayed through the usual media without losing their peculiarity: they require new displays, new visual media and new genres of communication, even if they hybridize with the existing media. Holography stands apart from the media realm, which in part explains the difficulties of this technique in emerging and integrating into the mediascape. Holography suggests a new visual universe within a culture where visual simulation is the most effective communication system, and it lets us reflect on the need for a more comprehensive definition of ‘image’. It is easy to imagine that future images will also be holographic and that we will communicate more and more through them, in a delicate balance between presence and absence, immediacy and remoteness, materiality and immateriality, matter and energy. Holography can work as a model in science, for example in the study of brain activity in the Holonomic Brain Theory, originated by Austrian psychologist Karl Pribram and initially developed in collaboration with physicist David Bohm to explain human cognition. Holography can also be a model in physics, for example in the idea of the physicist David Bohm of an ‘implicate order’ in the universe, where global structure can be found in each small part – the universe would be a gigantic and wonderfully detailed hologram. More recently, theoretical results on black holes suggest that the idea of a holographic universe is a viable hypothesis. And in the field of quantum gravity and string theories the ‘holographic principle’ suggests that the entire universe can be considered as a two-dimensional information structure, and that the three-dimensional world we observe is but a description at a macroscopic scale and at low energies. (shrink)

I discuss the early history of holography and explore how perceptions, applications, and forecasts of the subject were shaped by prior experience. I focus on the work of Dennis Gabor (1900–1979) in England,Yury N. Denisyuk (1927-2005) in the Soviet Union, and Emmett N. Leith (1927–2005) and Juris Upatnieks (b. 1936) in the United States. I show that the evolution of holography was simultaneously promoted and constrained by its identification as an analog of photography, an association that influenced its (...) assessment by successive audiences of practitioners, entrepreneurs, and consumers. One consequence is that holography can be seen as an example of a modern technical subject that has been shaped by cultural influences more powerfully than generally appreciated. Conversely, the understanding of this new science and technology in terms of an older one helps to explain why the cultural effects of holography have been more muted than anticipated by forecasters between the 1960s and 1990s. (shrink)

The history of holography, the technology of three-dimensional imaging that grew rapidly during the 1960s, has been written primarily by its historical actors and, like many new inventions, its concepts and activities became surrounded by myths and myth-making. The first historical account was disseminated by the central character of this paper, George W. Stroke, while a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Michigan. His claims embroiled several workers active in the field of holography and information processing during the (...) 1960s, but transcended personality conflicts: they influenced the early historiography of holography and the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Physics to Dennis Gabor in 1971. An extended discussion of these episodes, based on archival research, publications analysis and interviews with participants, reveals the importance and extraordinary allure of intellectual priority for practicing scientists, and how its history and explanations are woven from multiple accounts and contemporary interpretations. (shrink)

In a world of limited resources, competition between the young and old prompt difficult questions of justice. In countries with public pension and health care systems, or with aging populations, there is often a concern that members of different generations are not always treated fairly. Dennis McKerlie's monograph examines justice between age-groups with the ultimate goal of a new theory of justice that effectively grapples with those questions. In the realm of public policy and medical ethics this is an (...) important and timely topic, but surprisingly one that has received relatively little attention from moral philosophers. McKerlie develops a comprehensive view of fairness between age groups that applies the egalitarian values of equality, or priority for the badly off, to temporal parts of lives -- not just to complete lives. (shrink)

The call for 'sustainable degrowth' has recently turned into a focal point of critical social and ecological debate, as well as a framework for diverse strands of activism. So far, little is known about the motives, attitudes and practices of grassroots activists within the degrowth spectrum. This article presents results of a survey conducted at the 2014 International Degrowth Conference, revealing both the presence of a widely shared basic consensus among respondents and their broad division into five distinguishable sub-currents. A (...) cluster analysis shows that degrowth provides a framework for a diversity of critical and transformational approaches. We identify and describe five such currents: eco-radical sufficiency-oriented critics of civilisation; moderate immanent reformers; a transitory group of voluntarist-pacifist idealists; the modernist rationalist Left; and the alternative practical Left. (shrink)

Classic studies of explanation, such as those of Hempel and Bromberger, took it for granted that an explanation-seeking question of the form "Why P?" should be understood as asking about the proposition P. This view has been recently challenged by Bas van Fraassen and Alan Garfinkel. They acknowledge that some questions have the surface form "Why P?", but they hold that a correct reading for why-questions should take the form "Why P (rather than Q)?", where Q is a contrasting alternative. (...) This contrast theory is discussed here. It is argued that, properly understood, the contrast theory and the propositional approach can and should give equivalent readings to why-questions. (shrink)

In a world of limited resources, competition between the young and old prompt difficult questions of justice. In countries with public pension and health care systems, or with aging populations, there is often a concern that members of different generations are not always treated fairly. Dennis McKerlie's monograph examines justice between age-groups with the ultimate goal of a new theory of justice that effectively grapples with those questions. In the realm of public policy and medical ethics this is an (...) important and timely topic, but surprisingly one that has received relatively little attention from moral philosophers. McKerlie develops a comprehensive view of fairness between age groups that applies the egalitarian values of equality, or priority for the badly off, to temporal parts of lives -- not just to complete lives. (shrink)

The article examines whether realist theory should adopt a philosophical anarchist position concerning political obligation. The conclusions are mixed. Drawing on a distinction between strong and weak theories of political obligation (in the terminology of the paper, strong theories are committed to morality-based theorizing while weak theories depart from it), the article argues that philosophical anarchism and realist theory are natural allies against strong theories of political obligation but they must part company when it comes to weak theories because it (...) is exactly their departure from morality-based theorizing that can make weak theories especially appealing to realists. In addition, two further objections can be raised against philosophical anarchism on realist grounds: first, philosophical anarchists are drawn to undesirably sweeping conclusions about the non-existence of legitimate political authority or the extreme scarcity of genuine political relations by their Kantian or Lockean background assumptions and, second, Simmons seems to have an implicit weak theory of political obligation which could be, ironically, much more appealing to realists than his overall Lockean anarchism or his sweeping criticism of weak theories. All in all, can a realist be an anarchist? Probably, but definitely not on philosophical anarchist grounds. (shrink)

A study involving purchasing managers was conducted to test specific Hunt-Vitell theoretical propositions concerning the determinants of managers' teleological evaluations. We extended the Hunt-Vitell model by developing a new integrative construct, namely the desirability of consequences to self versus others. We hypothesized that desirability of consequences affects teleological evaluations in that the more desirable the consequences of a particular action, the more likely managers evaluate that action positively. The results of the present study provided support for this hypothesis. Furthermore, we (...) extended the Hunt-Vitell model by developing a new integrative construct, namely the desirability of consequences of self versus others. We hypothesized that cognitive moral development moderates the relationship between the desirability of consequences of self versus others and teleological evaluation. The results failed to support this hypothesis. We explained the lack of support in terms of the level of aggregation of the data, the possibility of the confounding effect of respondents' sensitivity to ethical issues, and the possibility that deontological evaluations confounded the respondents' teleological judgments. Future research and managerial implications of the findings were also discussed. (shrink)

Hospital ethics, familiar enough in practice but surprisingly neglected in the literature, deals with the ethical problems that arise distinctively or typically in hospitals. More precisely, it consists of the ethical principles that shouldgovern 1) the conduct of healthcare professionals and other staff in their capacities as members of the hospital as an institution, and 2) the conduct of the hospital itself as an institution. It is a species of institutional ethics, which focuses on the ethical problems created or significantly (...) shaped by the institutional setting in which they occur. (shrink)

This book is a personal history and apology, written by one of this century's most distinguished small mammal ecologists, for a life in science spent working on problems for which no final dramatic conclusion was reached. Included along the way are some important anecdotes and history about Charles Elton and the pioneering work at the Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford University, from which most of modern population ecology has grown, and insigts on the philosophy and practice of science.

The position that I seek to defend in this article is that the epistemological hegemony that is presently one of the defining characters of the relationship between Africa and the global North is a form of injustice which makes the talk of ‘global justice’ illusory. In arguing thus, I submit that denying the indigenous people of Africa an epistemology that is comparable to epistemologies from other geopolitical centres translates to questioning their humanity which is a form of injustice. I thus (...) proceed to argue that, as a precondition to an authentic discourse on the possibility of ‘global justice’; epistemic injustice must first be challenged and rejected. In so doing, I am defending the position that the acceptance and respect for the diversity of the peoples of this world and their epistemologies is imperative if genuine justice at global level is to be realised. (shrink)

The paper is organized around two major, but closely interconnected goals. First, the paper’s principal aim is to offer a normative theory of political obligations that is based on certain insights of philosophical anarchism, theories of associative obligations and political realism. Second, the paper aims to offer a normative theoretical framework to examine political obligations in contemporary non-democratic contexts that does not vindicate non-democratic regimes and that does not exclude political obligations from the terrain of moral normativity. The theory of (...) political obligations this paper proposes can be briefly summarized as follows: political obligations are duties of compliance with the political authority claims of those who exercise political power. Their primary ground is membership. The mere fact of membership has moral weight in its own right and it is also inseparably embedded into a rich context of moral reasons for action that includes general reasons; ad hoc reasons; regime-specific reasons applying to every subject; and regime-specific offices that attribute specific responsibilities to individuals and groups. This rich context of typical moral reasons plays an important role in deciding what needs to be done, all things considered, with respect to the political authority claims. This account attempts to describe compliance in terms of genuine political obligations and also claims to be a plausible and general account. It does not claim to be a theoretically coherent moral justification for political obligations, however, just a theoretically coherent account of the varied sources and limitations of political obligations. (shrink)

This review argues that Edward Hall’s outstanding new book on the political thought of three outstanding 20th-century thinkers – Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams – has three major substantial contributions to contemporary realism: it offers convincing realist interpretations of their oeuvres, extracts inspiring new ideas from their works for future theorizing and provides powerful arguments in defence of a liberal realist position. However, given Hall’s expertise in Williams’ thought, it might be surprising that the chapters about Hampshire seem (...) the most interesting and most convincing parts of the book because they address some of the most fundamental issues of realism in an especially concise and well-written form. (shrink)

This volume, the third in this Springer series, contains selected papers from the four workshops organized by the ESF Research Networking Programme "The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective" (PSE) in 2010: Pluralism in the Foundations of Statistics Points of Contact between the Philosophy of Physics and the Philosophy of Biology The Debate on Mathematical Modeling in the Social Sciences Historical Debates about Logic, Probability and Statistics The volume is accordingly divided in four sections, each of them containing papers (...) coming from the workshop focussing on one of these themes. While the programme's core topic for the year 2010 was probability and statistics, the organizers of the workshops embraced the opportunity of building bridges to more or less closely connected issues in general philosophy of science, philosophy of physics and philosophy of the special sciences. However, papers that analyze the concept of probability for various philosophical purposes are clearly a major theme in this volume, as it was in the previous volumes of the same series. This reflects the impressive productivity of probabilistic approaches in the philosophy of science, which form an important part of what has become known as formal epistemology - although, of course, there are non-probabilistic approaches in formal epistemology as well. It is probably fair to say that Europe has been particularly strong in this area of philosophy in recent years.​ . (shrink)

This article offers a realist interpretation of Tacitus’s analysis of political failure. Tacitus described the early Roman Empire as a balance between the conflicting and irreconcilable values and interests of the emperor, the army, and the senate. For him Stoic-republican morality in itself—without the intervention of a political standard demanding political agency in every circumstance—cannot provide an all-purpose guide to action. He provides a fine-grained analysis of types of political failure, such as failing to act, or to realize one’s limited (...) scope for maneuver, or the inevitability of failure given particular political circumstances. Tacitus also describes Thrasea, a moderate member of the senatorial opposition to Nero, as an exceptionally laudable figure. His preference for moderate politics places Tacitus on the side of contemporary status-quo oriented, liberal, realists (e.g., Bernard Williams), rather than on the side of radical realists (e.g., Raymond Geuss, Enzo Rossi), but the central lesson of his understanding of Roman politics is not so much that political order is fragile as that the cost of political failure can indeed be unbearably high. (shrink)

Can a bomb ever be "clean"? Are we relieved to be warned that there will be an " odor " when once we were told that something would "stink"? Or, to put it another way, when is a euphemism a mark of good taste and when is it a sign of verbal obfuscation? To answer such questions, D.J. Enright invited sixteen distinguished writers to ponder and explore the ubiquitous phenomenon of euphemism. The result is a delightful and provocative collection that (...) not only includes general reflections on euphemism and its history but also treats such specific categories as sex, death, and other natural functions; politics; the language of the great Christian texts; euphamisms spoken to and by children; the law; medicine; office life; and the jargon of official spokesmen, military communiques, and tyrants. Such writers as Diane Johnson, Robert Nisbet, John Gross, Robert Burchfield, and Joseph Epstein bring a variety of perspectives and sensibilities to bear on these topics. Because euphemisms are so intimate and integral to our thinking, any study of them is bound to throw light on the human condition, both past and present. In these essays, humor jostles horror and the homely alternates with the farfetched. Taken together they form an eloquent and often amusing testament to the richness of the subject. About the Author: D.J. Enright is a noted English poet and critic. He recently compiled and edited The Oxford Book of Death. (shrink)

Based on analyses of a 2016 German survey, this article contributes to debates on 'societal nature relations' by investigating the systematic differences between socially specific types of social relations with nature in a flexible capitalist society. It presents a typology of ten different 'syndromes' of attitudes toward social and environmental issues, which are then grouped to distinguish between four ideal types of social relationships with nature: dominance, conscious mutual dependency, alienation and contradiction. These are located in Pierre Bourdieu's (1984) social (...) space to illustrate how social relationships with nature correspond to people's positions within the totality of social relations. Understanding how people's perceptions of and actions pertaining to nature are shaped by their positions in these intersecting relations of domination - both within social space and between society and nature - is an important precondition for developing transformative strategies that will be capable of gaining majority support in flexible capitalist societies. (shrink)

Contemporary Kant-scholarship has a tendency to allign Kant’s understanding of depravity closer to Erasmus than Luther in their famous debate on the freedom of the will (1520–1527). While, at face value, some paragraphs do warrant such a claim, I will argue that Kant’s understanding of the radical evil will draws closer to Luther than Erasmus in a number of elements. These elements are (1) the intervention of the Wille for progress towards the good, (2) a positive choice for evil, (3) (...) the inscrutability of moral progress, (4) the rejection of prudence as a means for salvation and (5) the rejection of moral sentimentalism. I believe that Kant-scholarship mistakenly pegs Kant’s rational Enlightenment optimism for an existential optimism while Kant’s view of fallen nature draws closer to Lutheran than Erasmusian depravity. A tacit Lutheran influence pervades Kant’s moral philosophy which could explain the influence Kant’s has had on some more pessimistic 19th century philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. (shrink)

Arguably, Caribbean development has evolved through three distinct historical periods in international political economy and currently must find its way in a fourth—the new multipolar world order. The hitherto three periods were characterized by a system of multipolar colonial imperial empires, bipolar cold war with neocolonialism, and unipolar neoliberalism. The purpose here is to unlock the door to critical thinking on Caribbean social, political, and economic policies for the new multipolarity. The region must dial back its blind pursuit of self-regulating (...) market policies and exercise its sovereign right to determine development paths based on its cultural and historical heritage. A descriptive analysis of theorizing about Caribbean development in each of the periods is presented before some specific sets of conditions are identified for policy formation and operationalization in the new multipolarity. (shrink)

Biomedical research on humans is an important part of medical progress. But, when lives are at risk, safety and ethical practices need to be the top priority. The need for the committees that regulate and oversee such research -- institutional review boards, or IRBs -- is growing. IRB members face difficult decisions every day. Evaluating the Science and Ethics of Research on Humans is a guide for new and veteran members of IRBs that will help them better understand the issues (...) involved and the tasks they will be required to perform. The most important purpose of an IRB is to protect the lives of human participants. For three major research areas -- drugs, medical devices, and genetic information -- Dennis J. Mazur shares the methods he has found useful in protecting human participants through the systematic review of scientific protocols and informed consent forms and through adherence to the federal regulations that apply. New members will gain understanding of how proposed research projects are to be reviewed from both scientific and ethical dimensions, how and when to ask key questions of principal investigators, how to work with principal investigators and research teams to ensure the best protection of human participants, and why to schedule regularly spaced reviews of a project that may have adverse outcomes. Based on Mazur's thirty years of research experience, this accessible and informative guide will give all IRB members the tools they need to protect human lives and facilitate the research process. (shrink)

Discussions about freedom of speech and academic freedom today are about the limits to those freedoms. However, these discussions take place mostly in the higher education trade press and do not receive any serious attention from academics and educationalists. In this paper several key arguments for limiting academic freedom are identified, examined and placed in an historical context. That contextualisation shows that with the disappearance of social and political struggles to extend freedom in society there has come a narrowing of (...) academic life and a new and impoverished concept of 'academic freedom' for a diminished idea of the human subject, of humanity and of human potential. (shrink)

(2008). 2007 AESA Presidential Address Conflict of the Faculties: Democratic Progressivism in the Age of “No Child Left Behind”. Educational Studies: Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 94-113.

This present paper analyses the ethical implications of the upward growth of black market trading in Zimbabwe in the context of its political economy of crisis that was predominant from 2000 to 2008. It argues that the growth of black market trading during the stated period can be situated in the prevailing political economy of crisis and strained state-market relations. Poor policy decisions by government as well as the imposition of targeted sanctions on the country by the United States of (...) America (USA) and European Union (EU) contributed to this crisis. Grounded on the theoretical framework of political economy, such an analysis of the ethical implication of black market trading is necessary for students of business ethics not only because black market trading has had some significant implications on the economy of Zimbabwe, but also because it leads us to question the extent to which people take ethics to be of importance in business. (shrink)

This present paper analyses the ethical implications of the upward growth of black market trading in Zimbabwe in the context of its political economy of crisis that was predominant from 2000 to 2008. It argues that the growth of black market trading during the stated period can be situated in the prevailing political economy of crisis and strained state-market relations. Poor policy decisions by government as well as the imposition of targeted sanctions on the country by the United States of (...) America (USA) and European Union (EU) contributed to this crisis. Grounded on the theoretical framework of political economy, such an analysis of the ethical implication of black market trading is necessary for students of business ethics not only because black market trading has had some significant implications on the economy of Zimbabwe, but also because it leads us to question the extent to which people take ethics to be of importance in business. (shrink)

In this paper, I show that the strong relations of knowledge, power and liberation are worth reassessing and clarifying in light of the indigenous people of Africa’s quest for epistemic liberation....

How justified are those who think that the clamour for one-party politics in Africa was inspired by the character of African consensual democracy such as the one defended by Kwasi Wiredu? I show that though Wiredu’s consensual democracy may share some similarities with a one-party polity, it does not necessarily follow that it has inspired the emergence of one-party polities in Africa. Similarly, the absence of any discernible similarities between African consensual democracy and one-party polity may not also necessarily entail (...) that the former has not inspired the latter. When one considers the ontological nature of Wiredu’s consensual democracy and the one-party polity, it becomes contentious to claim that the latter emerges from the former. However, based on Wiredu’s idea of consensual democracy, one might argue that consensual democracy has a common ancestry with a one-party polity because they both seem to emerge from “party1”. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how a world government constructed from the perspectives of both the global North and the global South could be a more promising one as it seeks to challenge the idea of world government constructed principally from the perspective of one geopolitical centre. I will call this position the ‘inclusive world government paradigm’. Specifically, after giving a brief presentation of some reasons behind the construction of a world government, I proceed to consider Luis Cabrera’s idea of (...) world government that essentially denotes assisting the global impoverished to improve their lives through progressive, democratically accountable integration between states. Thereafter, I offer some responses to Cabrera’s idea of world government. Finally, I suggest how the idea of world government could be understood differently if both the global North and the global South could be its co-creators and influence its agenda. I reckon that this could only be possible if the asymmetrical power relations in the present world are reversed and replaced by a more just and a more respectful relationship between these geopolitical centres. (shrink)

Although rational choice theory has enjoyed only modest predictive success, it provides a powerful explanatory mechanism for social processes involving strategic interaction among individuals and it stimulates interesting empirical inquiries. Rather than present competing theories to compare against rational choice, Don Green and Ian Shapiro have merely alluded to alternative explanatory variables such as culture, institutions, and social norms, without showing either how these factors can be incorporated into a more powerful theory, or how they are inconsistent with rational choice (...) theory. It is likely that any eventual theory of the origin and maintenance of social institutions, norms, and values will have to reserve a central place for rational action. (shrink)