This book consists of fifteen dialogues between Bryan Magee and some of the outstanding thinkers of the twentieth century. It includes contributions from Isaiah Berlin, Noam Chomsky, W. V. O. Quine, A. J. Ayer, Iris Murdoch, and Herbert Marcuse.

Concluding with four philosophical essays, this volume of case studies demonstrates how the inventive and persuasive dimensions of scholarly discourse point the way to forms of argument appropriate to our postmodern age.

The study of mental illness by the methods of molecular genetics is still in its infancy, but the use of genetic markers in psychiatry may potentially lead to a Virchowian revolution in the conception of mental illness. Genetic markers may define novel clusters of patients having diverse clinical presentations but sharing a common genetic and mechanistic basis. Such clusters may differ radically from the conventional classification schemes of psychiatric illness. However, the reduction of even relatively simple Mendelian phenomena to molecular (...) genetics has been shown to be a surprisingly complex and problematic enterprise. Mental illnesses exist at many levels of including social, environmental, and developmental interactions. Reductionistic shifts in the classification of such a disease entity will have to address the interlevel dynamics that take place within the structure of theories of mental illness. The question of how molecular analysis of psychiatric disease will impact on the structure of existing theories and classification systems is the central topic of this paper. (shrink)

Professor Tucker in the C.R. vol. xi. pp. 341 sqq. has revolutionized our notions of ‘doubtful syllables’: we have now learned that such syllables are normally short, and that lengthening is the licence.

In the course of reading some of these writers I have made the following notes. Some of the suggestions have very probably been anticipated, and in such cases I can only plead the legal maxim, superflua non nocent. The references are to volume and page of Spengel's edition , and Anon. 1. 427 has been cited as Cornutus.