This chapter presents the text of a lecture on legal orders in Europe given at the British Academy's 2008 Law Lecture. This text suggests that developments in European and international law make it increasingly hard to sustain the view that a single system of law operates within each sovereign territory. It explains that in Europe, different legal orders seem to coexist, in relation to the same issues, within the same legal space; and questions constantly arise about which law is to (...) prevail. (shrink)

Book Three of George Santayana's letters covers a period of intense intellectual activity in Santayana's life, and the correspondence reflects the establishment of his mature philosophy. Santayana becomes more permanently established in Italy, but continues to travel in France, Spain, and England. The year 1927 marks the beginning of his long friendship with Daniel Cory, who became his literary secretary and eventually his literary executor. Also, with the death of Santayana's half-brother Robert, George Sturgis, Robert's son, becomes an important part (...) of Santayana's life and letters as his financial manager. Santayana continues to write to his sister Susana, as well as to numerous friends and fellow philosophers, including Bernard Berenson, Robert Seymour Bridges, Curt John Ducasse, John Erskine, Horace Meyer Kaller, Lewis Mumford, George Herbert Palmer, John Francis Stanley Russell, Herbert Wallace Schneider, Charles Augustus Strong, Paul Weiss, and Harry Austryn Wolfson. Other correspondents include Wendell T. Bush, Alys Gregory, Marianne Moore, John Middleton Murray, and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Spiritual Experience and Psychopathology”Francis G. Lu (bio), David Lukoff (bio), and Robert P. Turner (bio)Jackson and Fulford have written an impor-tant paper which addresses an area of increasing interest in the United States—the relationship between religious/spiritual experiences and psychopathology. Using primarily the Present State Examination as the diagnostic framework, the authors describe in rich clinical detail three patients where certain phenomena lead to a possible diagnosis (...) of schizophrenia. However, the patients’ outcomes were uniformly positive—how can this be? The authors argue persuasively for the importance of a contextual assessment “in which psychotic phenomena themselves are embedded in the values and beliefs of the person concerned.” In this commentary, we will first present innovations in the DSM-IV relevant to cultural and religious/spiritual issues, which complement the authors’ conclusions, and then comment upon the paper from this perspective.In the DSM-IV Introduction (1994), a section entitled “Ethnic and Cultural Considerations” provides a rationale for innovations in DSM-IV that better enables its use with culturally diverse individuals: “A clinician who is unfamiliar with the nuances of an individual’s cultural frame of references may incorrectly judge as psychopathology those normal variations in behavior, belief, or experience that are particular to the individual’s culture. For example, certain religious practices or beliefs (e.g., hearing or seeing a deceased relative during bereavement) may be misdiagnosed as manifestations of a Psychotic Disorder” (xxiv). In the introduction, three types of information are cited: 1) sections entitled “Age, Gender and Cultural Considerations” in the text of ninety diagnostic categories discuss clinical variations due to these factors; 2) an Outline for Cultural Formulation designed to assist the clinician in systematically evaluating and reporting the impact of the individual’s cultural context; and 3) a Glossary of Culture-Bound Syndromes. These innovations, based on recommendations of the NIMH Workgroup on Culture, Diagnosis and Care to the Task Force on DSM-IV, are described in extensive detail in an important recent book (Mezzich, Kleinman, Fabrega, and Parron 1996).As an example of the importance of the Age, Gender, and Cultural Consideration section relevant to religious and spiritual experiences, consider the section in the text describing schizophrenia, where the following appears: “Clinicians assessing the symptoms of Schizophrenia in socioeconomic or cultural situations that are different from their own must take cultural differences into account. Ideas that may appear to be delusional in one culture (e.g., sorcery and witchcraft) may be commonly held in another. In some cultures, visual or auditory hallucinations with a [End Page 75] religious content may be a normal part of religious experience (e.g., seeing the Virgin Mary or hearing God’s voice)” (281). Secondly, in the analogous section of the text describing Brief Psychotic Disorder, the following appears: “It is important to distinguish symptoms of Brief Psychotic Disorder from culturally sanctioned response patterns. For example, in some religious ceremonies, an individual may report hearing voices, but these do not generally persist and are not perceived as abnormal by most members of the person’s community” (303).The Outline for Cultural Formulation provides the clinician a concise tool to specify the following information concerning the cultural context that is relevant to clinical care: cultural identity of the individual, cultural explanations of the individual’s illness, cultural factors related to psychosocial environment and levels of functioning, cultural elements of the relationship between the individual and the clinician, and overall cultural assessment for diagnosis and care. Religion is explicitly mentioned in the third section so as to encourage the assessment of “the role of religion... in providing emotional, instrumental, and information support” (1994, 844). This outline for cultural formulation is more fully explicated in a recent chapter by Lu, Lim, and Mezzich (1995).A major innovation in DSM-IV relevant to this topic is the new diagnostic category entitled Religious or Spiritual Problem defined as follows: “This category can be used when the focus of clinical attention is a religious or spiritual problem. Examples include distressing experiences that involve loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a new faith, or questioning of spiritual values that may not necessarily be related to an organized... (shrink)

The information required for perception may be available in the energy arrays that stimulate sensory organs but in a form not directly suitable for the planning and execution of the organism's actions in the environment. The requisite form of information is obtained, with no loss of adequate perception, by representation of sensory stimuli in frames of reference determined by internal control signals producing actions. This process seems evolutionarily advantageous but makes perception essentially non-direct, regardless of the degree of intra- or (...) inter-modal sensory integration. (shrink)

Introduction IT is generally agreed that Charles Sanders Peirce was one of America's greatest philosophers, yet even today there is little agreement as to ...

The relevance of Marx’s theory of value and his ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ to the analysis of the financial crisis of 2007–8 and the ensuing global slump is affirmed. The hypertrophic growth of unproductive constant capital, including the wages of ‘socially necessary’ unproductive labour and tax revenues, is identified as an important manifestation of an historical-structural crisis of capitalism, alongside the increasing weight of fictitious capital and the proliferation of fictitious profits in the (...) lead-up to the financial crisis. These phenomena have obscured the deepest roots of the global slump in the long-term profitability problems of productive capital – that is, in a crisis of surplus-value production. With these considerations taken into account, a better empirical assessment of trends in the composition of capital becomes possible, and with it a more accurate understanding of the impact of the ongoing displacement of living labour from production on the average rate of profit and the future of US and global capitalism. (shrink)

This is the first critical edition since the nineteenth century of Bacon's principal philosophical work in English, The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon. Of the proficience and advancement of Learning, divine and humane - traditionally known as The Advancement of Learning.

Discussion surrounding Marx's distinction between productive and unproductive labor too often fails to distinguish between the various forms that unproductive labor may assume and is too hasty to subsume the income of workers "unproductively" employed by capital as a non-profit component of social surplus-value. Against this, it may be argued that many forms of unproductive labor are socially necessary to the social capital and are therefore properly viewed as systemic overhead costs. As such, they should be treated, in value-theoretical terms, (...) as elements of the constant capital flow. The implications of this approach are explored for crisis theory and the evolution of the class structure with particular reference to the Canadian experience in this century. (shrink)

The idea that human history evinces a pattern of development rooted in the propensity of human beings toward technical forms of rationality is fundamental to Marx's materialist conception of history. Yet the "dialectic of forces and relations of production" as traditionally conceived in historical-materialist discourse has found only weak expressions in social formations dominated by precapitalist modes of production. The hypothesis is advanced that the role of simple commodity production and exchange in such formations may be decisive to the emergence (...) of cognitive faculties capable of giving a systematic impulse to the development of science and technology, and therefore to a precapitalist forces-relations dialectic. This suggests a new way of appreciating Marx's "ranking" of the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and capitalist modes of production as "progressive epochs" in the development of human society, while illuminating the socio-historical provenance (and sources of variability) of the categories of human thought. (shrink)

The controversy surrounding the status of dialectics in Marxist thought has failed to take the full measure of the persistent influence of ontological dualism and its corollary, dualistic social ontology. Yet an explicit critique of dualism is essential to materialist dialectics and to a Marxist-socialist theory and pedagogy that discloses the specific role of capitalist social relations in impeding human progress. A dialectical-monistic ontology associated with Marx's "new" (historical) materialism requires systematic conceptual elaboration, as illuminated by a dialecticalontological triad embracing (...) "the natural," "the social" and "conscious activity." The usefulness of this triad is illustrated by exploring how dialectical-monistic and dualistic ontologies stimulate very different ways of understanding a key question in social theory: the concept of economic value. (shrink)