University of Chicago Press, 2001 Review by Adriano Palma, Ph.D. on Aug 1st 2001 Volume: 5, Number: 31.

Finally, in four chapters greatly expanded for this edition, Griffin considers the latest scientific research on animal consciousness, pro and con, and...

Measured inequality has increased tremendously between the 1960s and 1990s, not only in the United States but throughout the majority of industrial nations. Wages among people of the same race and gender have become less equal. The hours worked by men have fallen, and the drop has been more pronounced among those who earn lower wages—as a result, inequality in labor income, which is the product of the wage rate and hours worked, has increased relative to inequality in wage rates. (...) Moreover, among married couples, employment of the wives of high-income men has increased until these wives are approximately as likely to be employed outside the home as are the wives of low-income men, who have always worked for wages. In addition, due to assortative mating, wage rates of husbands and wives are positively correlated, and it is clear that the growth in inequality of labor incomes among families has outstripped the growth in inequality in individual labor income. Finally, only the highest-income families have savings in excess of home equity and company-sponsored pensions, which implies that inequality in wealth among families has been exacerbated by the growth in stock prices. (shrink)

The view that the initiation of branching into two sympatric species may not require natural selection emerged in Victorian times. In the 1980s paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould gave a theoretical underpinning of this nongenic “chromosomal” view, thus reinstating Richard Goldschmidt’s “heresy” of the 1930s. From modeling studies with computer-generated “biomorphs,” zoologist Richard Dawkins also affirmed Goldschmidt, proclaiming the “evolution of evolvability.” However, in the 1990s, while Gould and Dawkins were recanting, bioinformatic, biochemical, and cytological studies were providing a deeper underpinning. (...) In 2001 this came under attack from leaders in the field who favored Dawkins’ genic emphasis. Now, with growing evidence for the uncoupling of speciation from adaptation, we can reinstate again Goldschmidt’s view and clarify its 19th-century roots. (shrink)

The Cambridge Companion to Socrates is a collection of essays providing a comprehensive guide to Socrates, the most famous Greek philosopher. Because Socrates himself wrote nothing, our evidence comes from the writings of his friends (above all Plato), his enemies, and later writers. Socrates is thus a literary figure as well as a historical person. Both aspects of Socrates' legacy are covered in this volume. Socrates' character is full of paradox, and so are his philosophical views. These paradoxes have led (...) to deep differences in scholar's interpretation of Socrates and his thought. Mirroring this wide range of thought about Socrates, this volume's contributors are unusually diverse in their background and perspective. The essays in this volume were authored by classical philologists, philosophers, and historians from Germany, Francophone Canada, Britain, and the United States, and they represent a range of interpretive and philosophical traditions. (shrink)

My purpose is to offer an assessment of the scientific legacy of Converse's “Belief Systems” by reviewing five productive lines of research stimulated by his authoritative analysis and unsettling conclusions. First I recount the later life history of Converse's notion of “nonattitudes,” and suggest that as important as nonattitudes are, we should be paying at least as much attention to their opposite: attitudes held with conviction. Second, I argue that the problem of insufficient information that resides at the center of (...) Converse's analysis has not gone away, and that newly fashioned models of information processing offer only partial remedies. Third, I suggest that the concept of the “average voter” is a malicious fiction, as it blinds us to the enormous variation in political attention, interest, and knowledge that characterizes mass publics, in Converse's time as in our own. Fourth, I develop an affirmative aspect of Converse's analysis that has mostly been overlooked: namely, that if ideological reasoning is beyond most citizens’ capacity and interest, they might fall back on a simple and reasonable alternative, which I will call “group‐centrism.” And fifth, I consider the possibility that while the majority of individual citizens falls short of democratic standards, the public as a whole might do rather well. (shrink)

The theory of evolution unites the past, present, and future of living things. It puts humanity's place in the universe into necessary perspective. Despite a history of controversy, the evidence for evolution continues to accumulate as a result of many separate strands of incredible scientific sleuthing. In The Story of Evolution in 25 Discoveries, Donald R. Prothero explores the most fascinating breakthroughs in piecing together the evidence for evolution. In twenty-five vignettes, he recounts the dramatic stories of the people (...) who made crucial discoveries, placing each moment in the context of what it represented for the progress of science. He tackles topics like what it means to see evolution in action and the distance between species in space and time, following figures from Darwin to lesser-known researchers as they unlock the mysteries of the fossil record, the earth, and the universe. The book also features the stories of animal species strange and familiar, including humans-and our ties to some of our closest relatives and more distant cousins. Prothero's wide-ranging tales showcase awe-inspiring and bizarre aspects of nature and the powerful insights they give us into the way that life works. (shrink)

I argue that consciousness is an aspect of an agent's intelligence, hence of its ability to deal adaptively with the world. In particular, it allows for the possibility of noting and correcting the agent's errors, as actions performed by itself. This in turn requires a robust self-concept as part of the agent's world model; the appropriate notion of self here is a special one, allowing for a very strong kind of self-reference. It also requires the capability to come to see (...) that world model as residing in its belief base , while then representing the actual world as possibly different, i.e., forming a new world-model. This suggests particular computational mechanisms by which consciousness occurs, ones that conceivably could be discovered by neuroscientists, as well as built into artificial systems that may need such capabilities. Consciousness, then, is not an epiphenomenon at all, but rather a key part of the functional architecture of suitably intelligent agents, hence amenable to study as much as any other architectural feature. I also argue that ignorance of how subjective states could be essentially functional does not itself lend credibility to the view that such states are not essentially functional; the strong self-reference proposal here is one possible functional explanation of consciousness. (shrink)

The Cambridge Companion to Socrates is a collection of essays providing a comprehensive guide to Socrates, the most famous Greek philosopher. Because Socrates himself wrote nothing, our evidence comes from the writings of his friends , his enemies, and later writers. Socrates is thus a literary figure as well as a historical person. Both aspects of Socrates' legacy are covered in this volume. Socrates' character is full of paradox, and so are his philosophical views. These paradoxes have led to deep (...) differences in scholars' interpretations of Socrates and his thought. Mirroring this wide range of thought about Socrates, this volume's contributors are unusually diverse in their background and perspective. The essays in this volume were authored by classical philologists, philosophers and historians from Germany, Francophone Canada, Britain and the United States, and they represent a range of interpretive and philosophical traditions. (shrink)

. Hindu law represents one of the least known, yet most sophisticated traditions of legal theory and jurisprudence in world history. Hindu jurisprudential texts contain elaborate and careful philosophical reflections on the nature of law and religion. The nature of Hindu law as a tradition has been subject to some debate and some misunderstanding both within and especially outside of specialist circles. The present essay utilizes the familiar framework of legal realism to describe the fundamental concepts of law and legal (...) procedure in Hindu jurisprudence. Questions about the place of natural law theory and legal positivism in relation to Hindu law are also considered. (shrink)

Sightings of the revolutionary comet that appeared in the skies of evolutionary biology in 1976—the selfish gene—date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries. It became generally recognized that genes were located on chromosomes and compete with each other in a manner consistent with the later appellation “selfish.” Chromosomes were seen as disruptable by the apparently random “cut and paste” process known as recombination. However, each gene was only a small part of its chromosome. On a statistical basis a (...) gene should escape disruption for many generations. This led George Williams and Richard Dawkins to a new definition of the gene, differing from conventional biochemical definitions in that there were no consistent genic boundaries. There had been no previous sightings of another revolutionary, albeit less verbally spectacular, comet that appeared in 1975—the homostability principle of Akiyoshi Wada. Each gene has a base composition “accent” that distinguishes it from its neighbors. We now see that recombination can be triggered by the shift in base composition at genic boundaries. Hence, the Williams-Dawkins definition approaches the conventional definitions. (shrink)

The influence of historiography on aspects of political thought in France, Italy and Germany. In recent years the overlap between political thought and historiography has changed the boundaries of intellectual history. Donald Kelley, the longtime editor of The Journal of the History of Ideas has played a leading part in this process. These essays by his friends and former students follow in his footsteps. The collection is divided into three parts: France, England [six essays], and Italy and Germany [four (...) essays]. Anthony Grafton and John Salmon provide an introduction, and the volume concludes with a bibliography of Donald Kelley's many works. Historians and Ideologues is designed for those with an interest in the contribution of historiography to political thought, and will be a timely addition to the growing reaction against the postmodern scepticism in historiographical research in this field. Contributors include Ann Blair, Julian Franklin, Kathleen Parrow, David Harris Sacks, Sarah Hanley, Daniel Woolf, Gordon Schochet, Joseph Levine, John Pocock, Perez Zagorin, William Connell, Donald Phillip Verene, and Michael Carhart. Anthony Grafton is a Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. John Salmon is the Marjorie Walter Goodheart Emeritus Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College. (shrink)

Eminent scientists are well-placed to bring the novel works of others, even if not in their own areas of expertise, to general attention. In so doing, they may be able to extend original accounts or introduce new terminologies, but they are basically messengers, not innovators. In the 1940s an evolutionary theory of biological aging was explained by Peter Medawar, and informational concepts relating to DNA were explained by Erwin Schrödinger. Both explanations were eventually traced back to the Victorian polymath Samuel (...) Butler—one by Medawar’s research associate Alex Comfort, and the other, albeit indirectly, by Schrödinger himself. In his time Butler’s works were too erudite for general readers and too laden with populist jargon for contemporary experts to take seriously. However, today it appears counterfactually plausible that an early acceptance of his ideas would have greatly quickened the pace of research. (shrink)

Four years after the death of Charles Darwin, his research associate, George Romanes, invoked a mysterious process—“physiological selection”—that could often have secured reproductive isolation independently of, and prior to, natural selection, so leading to an origin of species. This postulate of two sequential selection modes can now be regarded as leading to modern “chromosomal,” as opposed to “genic,” speciation theories. Romanes’ abstractions—which confounded many, but not all, of his contemporaries—equate with divergences in parental DNA sequences that impede meiotic pairing in (...) their hybrid offspring, so rendering that offspring sterile. Unlike Darwin, Romanes saw hybrid sterility as a parental, rather than offspring, phenotype that would, within a species, reproductively isolate certain parents from each other while not impeding their crossing with other parents. This group selection would have empowered natural selection to act more advantageously than in its absence. Given suitable conditions, there could then be divergence from one species into two. The present essay introduces Romanes’ “Physiological Selection; an Additional Suggestion on the Origin of Species” 19:337–411; available as supplementary material in the online version of this essay) for the journal’s “Classics in Biological Theory” collection. (shrink)

The 'history of ideas', better known these days as intellectual history, is a flourishing field of study which has been the object of much controversy but hardly any historical exploration. This major new work from Donald R. Kelley is the first comprehensive history of intellectual history, tracing the study of the history of thought from ancient, medieval and early modern times, its emergence as the 'history of ideas' in the 18th century, and its subsequent expansion. The point of departure (...) for this study is the perspective opened up by Victor Cousin in the early 19th-century on 'Eclecticism' and its association with the history of philosophy established by Renaissance scholars. Kelley considers a broad range of topics, including the rivalry between 'ideas' and language, the rise of cultural history, the contributions of certain 19th- and 20th-century practitioners of the history of ideas in interdisciplinary areas of philosophy, literature and the sciences, and finally the current state of intellectual history. The central theme of the book is the interplay between the canon of philosophical thought and the tradition of language and textual study, the divergence of the latter marking the 'descent of ideas' into the realm of cultural history. (shrink)

The history of ideas is an interdisciplinary field that began as an offshoot of the history of philosophy and was transformed by notions of perspective and cultural context drawn from the tradition of historical studies. The result is the practice of intellectual history, which has been carried out between the poles of inquiry commonly known as internalist and externalist, corresponding to mental phenomena and collective behavior in cultural surroundings. These are not opposed but rather complementary methods, and intellectual history may (...) be seen as the inside of cultural history and cultural history as the outside of intellectual history, the intellectual historian's task being to bring the two into alliance. (shrink)