'the oldest biography of Spinoza', La Vie de Mr. Spinosa, which in the manuscript copies is often followed by L'Esprit de M. Spinosa. Margaret Jacob, in her Radical Enlightenment, contended that the Traite was written by a radical group of Freemasons in The Hague in the early eighteenth century. Silvia Berti has offered evidence it was written by Jan Vroesen. Various discussions in the early eighteenth century consider many possi ble authors from the Renaissance onwards to whom the work might (...) be attributed. The Trois imposteurs has attracted quite a bit of recent attention as one of the most significant irreligious clandestine writings available in the Enlightenment, which is most important for understanding the develop ment of religious scepticism, radical deism, and even atheism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars for the last couple of decades have been trying to assess when the work was actually written or compiled and by whom. In view of the widespread distribution of manu scripts of the work all over Europe, they have also been seeking to find out who was influenced by the work, and what it represented for its time. Hitherto unknown manuscripts are being turned up in public and private libraries all over Europe and the United States. (shrink)

An important measure of the validity and utility of basic behavioral research is the extent to which it can be applied in real life. Basic research on behavioral momentum and the model unifying choice and resistance to change (Nevin & Grace 1999) has stimulated the development of behavioral technologies aimed at increasing the persistence of adaptive behavior and decreasing maladaptive choices.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Treatise of the Three Impostors and the Problem of Enlightenment: A New Translation of the Traité des trois Imposteurs by Abraham AndersonJan W. WojcikAbraham Anderson. The Treatise of the Three Impostors and the Problem of Enlightenment: A New Translation of the Traité des trois Imposteurs. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1997. Pp. xiv + 165. Cloth, $52.50. Paper, $21.95.This work results from a seminar, organized by (...) Richard H. Popkin, sponsored by the Foundation for Intellectual History, and held in Leiden in 1990, in which various [End Page 368] aspects of the history and significance of the Traité de trois Imposteurs were studied. As the title of the work indicates, it contains an English translation of the Traité. It also contains three short essays of commentary (the second of which is a modified version of Anderson’s contribution to the volume of essays which resulted from the Leiden seminar, Heterodoxy, Spinozism and Free Thought in Early Eighteenth Century Europe: Studies on the Traité des trois Imposteurs, edited by S. Berti, F. Charles-Daubert, and R. H. Popkin). There is a select bibliography, but no index.The Treatise consists of a critique of revelation (which is exposed as a fiction of the imagination), along with a discussion of the ways in which claims to revelation made by crafty politicians have enslaved humankind. It also includes scurrilous stories about three of the main alleged impostors: Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, as well as a more philosophical discussion of God, the soul, and demons.The translation is of Pierre Rétat’s 1973 edition of the 1777 edition of the Traité. This edition was chosen out of a number of virtually identical editions because it is accompanied by three very brief documents related to the Treatise (“Sentiments Concerning the Treatise of the Three Impostors: Extract of a Letter or Dissertation of Mr. de La Monnoye on this Subject,” a “Response to the Dissertation of Mr. de La Monnoye,” and a “Copy of Article IX of the Second Part of the First Volume of the Mémoires de Littérature”). Anderson’s reasons for selecting this edition are sound. The accompanying documents are of interest in their own right; in addition, they are the focus of Anderson’s essays of commentary and are (as he claims) necessary for a proper understanding of the significance of the Treatise. Although earlier English translations exist (1844, reprinted 1846, reprinted 1904) they are either not readily available or are not reliable in that the manuscript original is not readily identifiable. Hence Anderson’s translation is a welcome addition to the literature for those (both specialists and nonspecialists) whose circumstances do not permit a study of the 1777 French edition.The first two essays of commentary concern political issues, as indicated by their inclusion in “Part I: The Politics of the Traité des trois Imposteurs.” In the first, entitled “On a Section of Prosper Marchand’s Private Catalogue,” Anderson refutes the claim made by Margaret C. Jacob in The Radical Enlightenment that a section of Prosper Marchand’s library catalogue shows that Marchand considered the Traité to be in the tradition of Protestant radicalism and republicanism. After a careful analysis of the works listed in this section of the catalogue, Anderson concludes that (with one exception) the books in this section constitute a bibliography of works that “either exemplify the uses of literary study for the defense of orthodoxy or belong to a literary tradition of the cynical study of those uses, or consist in a parody and public exposure of that cynical study” (81). In the second essay, “Sallengre, La Monnoye, and the Traité des trois Imposteurs,” Anderson argues that rather than being a work of radical propaganda, the Traité was part of a satirical campaign against the “conformist libertine intelligentia” (x) of Louis XIV—those who believed that the fact of imposture ought not become public knowledge because they believed that religion ought to serve to enforce the rights of monarchy.“Part 2: Philosophy in the Traité des trois Imposteurs” consists of a single essay, “Descartes the Impostor, Bayle, and the Hidden Origins of Enlightenment.” Here, Anderson explores puzzling aspects of the... (shrink)

Counterfactual imaginings are known to have far reaching implications. In the present experiment, we ask if imagining events from one's past can affect memory for childhood events. We draw on the social psychology literature showing that imagining a future event increases the subjective likelihood that the event will occur. The concepts of cognitive availability and the source monitoring framework provide reasons to expect that imagination may inflate confidence that a childhood event occurred. However, people routinely produce myriad counterfactual imaginings (i.e., (...) daydreams and fantasies) but usually do not confuse them with past experiences. To determine the effects of imagining a childhood event, we pretested subjects on how confident they were that a number of childhood events had happened, asked them to imagine some of those events, and then gathered new confidence measures. For each of the target items, imagination inflated confidence that the event had occurred in childhood. We discuss implications for situations in which imagination is used as an aid in searching for presumably lost memories. (shrink)

The new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on the Use of a Single Institutional Review Board (sIRB) for Multi-Site Research was adopted primarily to simplify and speed the review of complex multisite clinical trials. However, speeding review requires overcoming a number of obstacles. Perhaps the most substantial obstacle is the time and effort needed to develop reliance agreements among the participating sites. We conducted 102 semistructured interviews with sIRB personnel, including directors, chairs, reviewers, and staff, from 20 IRBs that (...) acted as sIRBs for multisite research, including 6 commercial/independent sIRBs, and 10 university-based academic and 4 federal sIRBs. Almost without exception, the interviewees agreed that reliance agreements were complex, difficult to develop, and time-consuming. A major problem for relying sites was that different agreements specified different responsibilities for the relying sites. Attitudes differed about whether these problems will be resolved as IRB staff and managers become more experienced with sIRBs. However it is clear that the process of developing reliance agreements must be simplified. Federal assistance in standardizing at least some sections of reliance agreements might reduce the difficulties involved. (shrink)

We characterize Δ20-categoricity in Boolean algebras and linear orderings under some extra effectiveness conditions. We begin with a study of the relativized notion in these structures.

As time passed, I discovered with surprise that the important role I assigned to literature was not recognized by everyone.iThis essay constitutes one aspect of an overall project to spell out the implications for the literary arts of Wittgenstein's systematic distinction between acts of description that carry truth values and acts of expression that display states of mind and feeling but do not describe them. My full case will require a book. That is good news for me but bad news (...) for the present reader, since I feel I have to offer a painfully brief version of my overall theoretical position as a backdrop for what I will say about appreciation. Expressions elicit or solicit attunement rather than propose .. (shrink)

Although his work and life have been well documented, John Dewey's role in the postwar peace movement has been generally overlooked. In America's Peace-Minded Educator, the authors take a close look at John Dewey's many undertakings on behalf of world peace.

This book interrogates the nature and state of African American citizenship through the prism of Social Contract Theory. Challenging the United States’ commitment to African American citizenship, this book explores the idea of Social Nullification, the decision to reject, revoke and re-define the social contract with a state and society. Charles F. Peterson surveys the history of Social Contract Theory, examines Nullification as political and legal theory, argues public policy as a measure of the state’s commitment to the contractarian relationship (...) and frames the writings and activism of Martin R. Delany, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the African American Reparations Movement as examples of Social Nullification and challenges to the terms of Black life in America. (shrink)

" -- Dr. Daniel Gardner, Cornell University Medical College Charles Stevens, a prominent neurobiologist who originally trained as a biophysicist (with George Uhlenbeck and Mark Kac), wrote this book almost by accident.

This article extends the brief description of cognition previously offered in the adaptational theory of consciousness (ATC). Here I suggest how unconscious and conscious minds interact to achieve mutual cognitive development. Interactions occur in an extended moment of subjective time consisting of perceptual, associational, and affective scenes. During the extended moment, the conscious self becomes time-agile, shuttling between the past, present, and future in order to assemble ideas within global awareness that produce pleasure. The products of its cognitive journeys are (...) saved as synaptic modifications by the unconscious mind's mnemonic functions. As this occurs, instincts and the conscious self's implementation of cultural values are brought into better alignment. (shrink)

Memory exhibits episodic superposition, an analog of the quantum superposition of physical states: Before a cue for a presented or unpresented item is administered on a memory test, the item has the simultaneous potential to occupy all members of a mutually exclusive set of episodic states, though it occupies only one of those states after the cue is administered. This phenomenon can be modeled with a nonadditive probability model called overdistribution (OD), which implements fuzzy-trace theory's distinction between verbatim and gist (...) representations. We show that it can also be modeled based on quantum probability theory. A quantum episodic memory (QEM) model is developed, which is derived from quantum probability theory but also implements the process conceptions of global matching memory models. OD and QEM have different strengths, and the current challenge is to identify contrasting empirical predictions that can be used to pit them against each other. (shrink)

This book examines the strengths and weaknesses of four salient epistemological orientations in the field – positivism, relativism, interpretivism, and intersubjectivism – to identify the characteristics of a theoretically-informed epistemology for social science.

In many classes of structures, each computable structure has computable dimension 1 or $\omega$. Nevertheless, Goncharov showed that for each $n < \omega$, there exists a computable structure with computable dimension $n$. In this paper we show that, under one natural definition of relativized computable dimension, no computable structure has finite relativized computable dimension greater than 1.

Econometric analysis of discrete choice has made considerable use of random utility models to interpret observed choice behavior. Much empirical research concerns choice problems in which persons act with partial knowledge of the utilities of the feasible actions. Economists use random expected utility models to analyze such choice problems. A common practice is to specify fully the expectations that persons hold, in which case choice analysis reduces to inference on preferences alone. However, the expectations assumptions made in empirical research rarely (...) have much foundation. To enable more credible research, this paper considers inference when one specifies a set of expectations that decision makers may plausibly hold. I first pose the idea in abstraction and then specialize to binary response with linear utilities, where the analysis is particularly straightforward. I initially assume that decision makers possess unique subjective probability distributions on the states of nature and make choices that maximize expected utility. I later consider the possibility that persons place only partial probabilistic structure on the states of nature and make undominated choices. (shrink)