Incentives for improving research productivity at universities prevail in global academia. However, the rationale, methodology, and impact of such incentives and consequent evaluation regimes are in need of scrutinization. This paper explores the influences of financial and career-related publishing incentive schemes on research cultures. It draws on an analysis of 75 interviews with academics, senior university administrators, and journal editors from China, a country that has seen widespread reliance on international publication counts in research evaluation and reward systems. The study (...) focuses on humanities and social sciences as disciplinary sites, which embody distinct characteristics and have experienced the introduction of incentive schemes in China since the early 2000s. Findings reveal tensions between internationalization and indigenization, quality and quantity, integrity and instrumentalism, equity and inequity in Chinese academia. In particular, we argue that a blanket incentive scheme could reinforce a managerial culture in higher education, encourage performative objectification of academics, and jeopardize their agency. We thereby challenge ‘one-size-fits-all’ policymaking, and suggest instead that institutions should have the opportunity to adopt an ethical and ‘human-oriented’ approach when developing their research incentives and evaluation mechanisms. (shrink)

Sir Francis Bacon, statesman, essayist and philosopher, studied law and rose to high office as Lord Chancellor. He had enormous influence on the change of direction for scientific method from speculative and philosophical in the Aristotelian tradition to experimental and factual. Bacon's philosophical influence extended to Locke and through him to subsequent English schools of psychology and ethics. Abroad, his influence also extended to Leibniz, Huygens and Voltaire who called him 'le pere de la philosophie experimentale'. This edition contains (...) all Bacon's philosophical works as well as translations, plus literary and professional works, and includes illuminating introductions and explanatory footnotes by the three editors as well as a new introduction by Graham Rees. (shrink)

The most comprehensive collection available in paperback of Bacon’s philosophical and scientific writings, this volume offers Bacon's major works in their entirety, or in substantive selections, revised from the classic 19th century editions of Spedding, Ellis, and Heath. Selections from some of Bacon's natural histories round out this edition by showing the types of compilations that he believed would most contribute to the third part of his Great Instauration. Each work has a separate brief introduction indicating the major themes (...) developed. In her general Introduction, Sargent gives a biographical sketch of Bacon's early life, education, and legal career, discusses the major components of his philosophical project, and traces his influence on subsequent natural philosophy. In addition, she looks at the primarily negative evaluations of Bacon's methodological writings by philosophers of science in the first half of the twentieth century, the reassessments of his works that took place as the influence of logical empiricism declined, and the current revival of interest in Bacon that coincides with the focus on experimental practice today. A bibliography and index complete the text. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wuthering Heights: The Romantic AscentMartha NussbaumI“If I were in heaven, Nelly,” she said, “I should be extremely miserable.”“I dreamt, once, that I was there.... [H]eaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where (...) I woke sobbing for joy.” 1Cathy’s soul cannot live in the Christian heaven. For her soul, she explains, is the same as Heathcliff’s soul, and the heavenly soul of Linton is as different from theirs “as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire” (p. 95). Much later, as she lies on her deathbed, now the wife of Edgar Linton, thinking the Linton thought that what she wants is an escape into “that glorious world” of paradise and peace, Heathcliff watches her with burning eyes. At last she calls to him:In her eagerness she rose and supported herself on the arm of the chair. At that earnest appeal he turned to her, looking absolutely desperate. His eyes, wide and wet, at last flashed fiercely on her; his breast heaved convulsively. An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring, and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive: in fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the nearest seat, and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy. I did not feel as if I were in the company of a creature of my own species: it appeared that he would not understand, though I spoke to him; so I stood off, and held my tongue, in great perplexity.(pp. 188–89) [End Page 362]Brontë’s description alludes to the imagery of the Christian ascent tradition. As in Augustine and Dante, love is a flame that animates the eyes, a lightning bolt that pierces the fog of our obtuse daily condition; as in that tradition, love’s energy causes the lover to leap away from the petty egoism of the daily into an ecstatic and mutually loving embrace. But we know we are far from the world of the Christian ascent, even its erotic Augustinian form. Cathy’s spring is not an upward, but a horizontal movement—not toward heaven, but toward her beloved moors and winds, severed from which she would find heaven miserable; not toward God but toward Heathcliff, the lover of her soul. Nor is there redemption into heaven in this work; there is, if anything, a redemption from a world dominated by the imagination of heaven, into a world that the pious Ellen Dean can recognize only as an animal world, a world inhabited by creatures of a different species, who probably do not understand language, so thoroughly are they identified with the energy of the body. A few hours after Cathy’s death Heathcliff, as Ellen Dean tells us, in a sudden “paroxysm of ungovernable passion,” dashes his head against the knotted trunk of a tree, splashing the bark with blood, “and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast being goaded to death with knives and spears” (p. 197). It is in his world alone, it would seem, that flame is truly found. As Cathy said to Edgar Linton, “Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever: your veins are full of ice-water; but mine are boiling, and the sight of such chillness makes them dance.”Brontë’s novel situates itself within a long tradition of writing about love and its ascent or purification. This tradition, inaugurated by Socrates’ description of the ladder of love in Plato’s Symposium, is continued by later Platonists, and radically reformulated by Christian thinkers, who stress, against Plato, the soul’s receptivity and vulnerability to the inscrutable operations of grace. In both the Platonic and... (shrink)

This essay is a philosophical reading of Don DeLillo’s novel, The Body Artist, and his essay, “In the Ruins of the Future.” Focusing on the issues of loss, mourning, and terror after the attacks of September the 11th, I argue that DeLillo gives a picture of mourning as something that occurs through a loss of language. This loss does not end language; instead, it occurs through language.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the AmoresBetty Rose NagleBarbara Weiden Boyd. Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xii 1 252 pp. Cloth, $39.50.The “literary love affair” (130) in the Amores is as much (or more) an affair conducted with literature as it is one represented in literature. Although Barbara Boyd never puts it that way, (...) this is the essence of her argument. In her reading, this three-book collection of amatory elegies is the narrative of Ovid’s early career as a poet. This novel use of the genre—for literary autobiography—is one of the ways in which Ovid expands its boundaries. In Ovid’s Literary Loves Boyd intends to help readers appreciate the originality of the Amores, in part by showing in it the beginnings of that interest in redefining generic boundaries which in the past decade we have come to recognize, through the work of Stephen Hinds and others, as a hallmark of Ovid’s whole corpus.In her introduction, “The Isolation of Ovid’s Amores,” Boyd digests and assesses the current opinion about Ovid’s collection. Its “literary isolation” has resulted from the combined effects of the “generic fallacy” and what she calls the “progressive fallacy.” The latter (her own coinage) is the critical position which holds either that “what comes first is worst” or that “what comes last is worst” (5); accordingly, the Amores are early Ovid and hence inferior, and Ovid is the last of the elegists and hence inferior. As an antidote to the “generic fallacy” Boyd proposes James Zetzel’s “challenge of generic freedom,” itself the latest variation of Kroll’s “Kreuzung der Gattungen.” [End Page 468]Chapter 1, “Reused Language: Genre and Influence in the Interpretation of the Amores,” takes its point of departure from a comparison of the two propemptica Am. 2.11 and Propertius 1.8a. Boyd sets out “both to simplify and to clarify a method for reading imitation in the Amores” (19), and in doing so she makes a substantial contribution to the typology of imitation in Latin literature as a whole. She does this by bringing together two unlikely bedfellows, integrating G. P. Goold’s ideas about Ovid’s “formulae” and “instinctive” versification with G. B. Conte’s concepts of “poetic memory” and poetic language as “reused language.” She also employs Conte’s distinction between “exemplary model” (verbatim imitation) and “code model” (the system of generic rules familiar beforehand) and Richard Thomas’s preference for the term “reference” instead of “imitation.” For her purposes she distinguishes (30–31) between a “parallel,” which may “simply be a common topos” (30) rather than an actual imitation; a “formula,” which may be “a very precise mark of a poetic tradition” (30) without making a specific reference; and a “reference,” which is likely to engage with a whole tradition rather than simply allude to a single source. Finally, she distinguishes (47) “external allusion” (to another poet) from “self-imitation,” which in turn is differentiated into “’internal reference’ proper” (to an earlier poem in the same collection) and “self-imitation” (“reference across works”). These latter may well be, as she claims, “two different, though related, phenomena” (47), but “self-imitation” is not relevant to Boyd’s own discussion until her last chapter. In posing the question “How do we recognize ‘imitation’?” she distinguishes between imitation of “form and theme” (33) and imitation of “content” (34), using the latter term rather idiosyncratically to include “precise features, such as style, diction, and metrical character” (34).Chapter 2, “Literary Means and Ends: Ovid’s Ludus Poeticus,” continues the treatment of imitation in considering Ovid’s practice of “multiple allusion” (67, 89), according to Boyd “an aspect of his style that is far too little recognized and understood” (67). The goal is to clarify how Ovid views his literary past and what meaning his sources have for his use of them—in brief, as she neatly summarizes, “to move beyond equating Ovid’s inspiration and purpose with Propertius and parody, respectively” (50). She shows how in creating Sulmo as a literary landscape (Am. 2.16... (shrink)

This book is a unique study of the work of Gabriel Marcel, a twentieth-century philosopher of international renown. This book brings a fresh perspective to the examination of Marcel's thought, highlighting facets of interest to many different audiences and presenting a clear exposition of the nature of creative fidelity.

The very ingenious and closely reasoned article of Mr. L. R. Palmer seems to us to deserve examination, the more so as we totally disagree with his views, both from the point of view of etymology and that of Religionsforschung. To put his conclusions briefly, he supposes mactus to be derived from a hypothetical verb macio, signifying ‘bespatter, sprinkle’; mactus then would properly mean ‘sprinkled’, and might also be used of the substance which was sprinkled or poured, thus accounting for (...) the double construction of the secondary verb mactare. In particular, Mr. Palmer supposes that macte uirtute alludes to the blood with which the warrior thus addressed is besprinkled, and so to his tabu condition. To the whole of this construction we object, holding that the old derivation from the root MAG is correct and that mactus signifies ‘increased’, ‘made greater or stronger’, mactare properly ‘to put someone in the condition of being mactus’, and by an easy transition ‘to sacrifice a victim’. (shrink)

Fern Logan’s collection of photographic portraits documents the emergence of the African American artist into mainstream American art. The Artist Portrait Series captures sixty significant artists from the late twentieth century.

"Plato texts, a retrieve": p. [108]-174.

Earl Conee has argued that the metaphysics of personal identity is irrelevant to the morality of abortion. He claims that doing all the substantial work in abortion arguments are moral principles and they garner no support from rival metaphysics theories. Conee argues that not only can both immaterialist and materialist theories of the self posit our origins at fertilization, but positing such a beginning doesn’t even have any significant impact on the permissibility of abortion. We argue that this thesis is (...) wrong on both accounts. We do so, in part, by relying on a hylomorphic rather than a Cartesian conception of the soul. There are good reasons for believing such a soul theory can favor an earlier origin than the leading materialist accounts. We also show that the theological metaphysics of hylomorphism provide greater support for a pro-life position than the Cartesian position Conee discusses. However, we argue that even on a materialistic account of personal identity, metaphysics has substantial bearing upon the morality of early abortions. (shrink)

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation is frequently performed on patients who, in retrospect, had a very low chance of survival. This is because all patients are ‘For cardiopulmonary resuscitation’ on admission to hospital by default, and delays occur before cardiopulmonary resuscitation can be ‘de-prescribed’. This article reviews the nature of potential harms caused by futile cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the reasons why de-prescription may be delayed, recent legal judgements relevant to timely do not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation decision making, and the possible detrimental effects of do (...) not attempt cardiopulmonary resuscitation discussions on end of life care. The moral and operational feasibility of a model in which informed consent must be obtained before cardiopulmonary resuscitation is attempted in some patient groups is then explored. (shrink)

Among the results of this paper are the following: 1. Every Boolean (ultra) power is the union of an updirected elementary family of direct ultrapowers. 2. Under certain conditions, a finitely iterated Boolean ultrapower is isomorphic to a single Boolean ultrapower. 3. A ω-bounded filtral power is an elementary substructure of a filtral power. 4. Let K be an elementary class closed under updirected unions (e.g., if K is an amalgamation class); then K is closed under finite products if and (...) only if K is closed under reduced products if and only if K is a Horn class. (shrink)

« Nous savons que nous voulons nous retrouver. Tout ce dont nous avons besoin, c’est des cérémonies qui nous rassembleront » écrit la poétesse afro-féministe Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Les noms que nous utilisons pour nous dire font parfois office de cérémonies : un nom nous appelle, et nous répondons à son invocation. Ce peut être un cri de ralliement « Not GAY as in Happy but QUEER as in Fuck You! », mais même les collectifs les plus émeutiers et les (...) plus retors à l’identification courent le risque, en se nommant, de se voir réassigner à résidence par l’interpellation policière (« hé toi, là-bas! »). Comment éviter les pièges de l’identité? Les études queer ont élaboré le concept de désidentification pour décrire la tentative fugitive d’échapper aux marquages policiers des identités. Ce texte tente de détailler les enjeux politiques de ce refus d’identification en le situant dans les allers-retours franco-états-uniens des études et des activismes queer. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 59-61.

We doubt that primary sociopathy is adaptive, for three reasons: First, its prevalence is too low to require an adaptive explanation. Second, a common sequela of damage to the orbito-frontal lobes is Any pattern of behavior that can be produced by brain damage is unlikely to be adaptive. Third, we argue that most human social behavior is not under tight genetic control, but is produced by open-ended calculation of fitness-contingencies.