The basic relationship between people should be care, and the caring life is the highest which humans can live. Unfortunately, care that is not thoughtful slides into illegitimate intrusion on autonomy. Autonomy is a basic good, and we should not abridge it without good reason. On the other hand, it is not the only good. We must sometimes intervene in the lives of others to protect them from grave harms or provide them with important benefits. The reflective person, therefore, needs (...) guidelines for caring. Some contemporary moralists condemn paternalism categorically. This work examines weaknesses in their arguments and proposes new guidelines for paternalism, which it calls "parentalism" to avoid the patriarchal connotations of the old term. Its antiparentalism is more moderate than standard antipaternalism based on an exaggerated respect for autonomy. The work explores implications for both the personal sphere of interactions between individuals, such as friends and family members, and the public sphere of institutions, legislation, and the professional practices. (shrink)

Aworkshop was held August 26–28, 2015, by the Earth- Life Science Institute (ELSI) Origins Network (EON, see Appendix I) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This meeting gathered a diverse group of around 40 scholars researching the origins of life (OoL) from various perspectives with the intent to find common ground, identify key questions and investigations for progress, and guide EON by suggesting a roadmap of activities. Specific challenges that the attendees were encouraged to address included the following: What key (...) questions, ideas, and investigations should the OoL research community address in the near and long term? How can this community better organize itself and prioritize its efforts? What roles can particular subfields play, and what can ELSI and EON do to facilitate research progress? (See also Appendix II.) The present document is a product of that workshop; a white paper that serves as a record of the discussion that took place and a guide and stimulus to the solution of the most urgent and important issues in the study of the OoL. This paper is not intended to be comprehensive or a balanced representation of the opinions of the entire OoL research community. It is intended to present a number of important position statements that contain many aspirational goals and suggestions as to how progress can be made in understanding the OoL. The key role played in the field by current societies and recurring meetings over the past many decades is fully acknowledged, including the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) and its official journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, as well as the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). (shrink)

In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory (...) of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the “bottom up” approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the “top down” approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. With respect to history, we outline several independent paths that have led to some of the approaches now prevalent in origins-of-life studies. These include one path from early views of life through the scientific revolutions brought about by Linnaeus (von Linn.), Wöhler, Miller, and others. In this approach, new theories, tools, and evidence guide new thoughts about the nature of life and its origin.We also describe another family of paths motivated by a” circularity” approach to life, which is guided by such thinkers as Maturana & Varela, Gánti, Rosen, and others. These views echo ideas developed by Kant and Aristotle, though they do so using modern science in ways that produce exciting avenues of investigation. By exploring the history of these ideas, we can see how many of the issues that currently interest us have been guided by the contexts in which the ideas were developed. The disciplinary backgrounds of each of these scholars has influenced the questions they sought to answer, the experiments they envisioned, and the kinds of data they collected. We conclude by encouraging scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore ways in which they can interact to provide a deeper understanding of the conceptual assumptions, structure, and history of origins-of-life research. This may be useful to help frame future research agendas and bring awareness to the multifaceted issues facing this challenging scientific question. (shrink)

Julian H. Franklin, scholar of constitutionalism in the late sixteenth century, has extended his researches into the late seventeenth century with this fine work on Locke and Locke’s immediate sources. Franklin’s book is short, concise, well-focused and carefully argued. It is also thought-provoking to a degree one would not expect from the modesty or historicity of the subject. Controversy over this problem of political rhetoric and science, once heated while lives and fates were involved, is now cold, and the problem (...) no longer seems to be ours. Franklin follows the reasoning of past thinkers and deftly joins in when he can, providing for us an exemplary model of political theory on the quiet: he makes old arguments relevant to us without forcing them and he detaches us from our alleged necessities without resorting to silly hypotheses. (shrink)

The association between New York City’s all-over structure and the play that unfolds within it relative to difference and identity is very pertinent but is not specific enough, in my opinion. On the one hand, all of Mondrian’s neoplastic works are constituted by an opposition between the variable and the invariable . On the other hand, the type of identity produced in New York City relies on repetition, a principle which, we know, explicitly governs a whole range of paintings predating (...) neoplasticism. New York City differs from the “classic” neoplastic works, as well as from the 1918-19 modular paintings with which it seems to have a good deal in common. It is, in part, because he never discusses this last point that Masheck doesn’t entirely grasp the amplitude of the reversal that Mondrian effected in his New York works.In fact, as James Johnson Sweeney realized quite early, one must go back o the 1917 works, which gave rise to modular grids for the two years that followed, in order to understand what happens not only in New York City but also in the two Boogie-Woogie paintings.3Everyone is aware of the extraordinarily rapid evolution of Mondrian’s work during the years immediately preceding the foundation of neoplasticism: under the influence of Bart van der Leck, he dopted the colored plane and the black dash on a white background as elements of his composition for the two Compositions in Color, A and B . Mondrian, who had not yet found a means of perspicuously relating these diverse elements , tied both plane and dashes together by way of an optical dynamism, based largely on their superimposition. The immediate consequence was to make the background recede optically. The next step was the five Compositions , all entitled “With Colored Planes” . Here all superimposition was eliminated, as well as all “line.” In the last two of these canvases, the background itself is divided without remainder in to planes of different shades of white. The colored rectangles are on the way to alignment. In spite of this, the rectangles fluctuate and, consequently, the background is hollowed out behind them. 3. See James Johnson Sweeney, “Mondrian, the Dutch and De Stijl,” Art News 50 : 63. Meyer Schapiro made a similar remark, at about the same time, in his courses. 4. When I refer to a number accompanied by “Seuphor,” it refers to the “catalog by group” included in Michel Seuphor’s book on the artist. See Seuphor [Ferdinand Louis Berckelaers], Piet Mondrian; sa vie, son oeuvre, 2d ed. . Yve-Alain Bois is associate professor of art history at the Johns Hopkins University. He has published a number of essays on twentieth-century art, architecture, and criticism and is currently working on Mondrian’s neoplastic years and on a history of axonometric perspective. Amy Reiter-McIntosh is a lecturer at the University of Chicago. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was a translation of Ernesto Laclau’s “Psychanalyse et marxisme”. (shrink)

But Williams had created a field of historical study, where his white counterparts had not. Single-handedly and without the blessing or approval of the academic community, Williams had called attention to the importance of including Afro-Americans in any acceptable and comprehensive history of the nation long before the historians of various groups of European-Americans or Asian-Americans had begun to advocate a similar treatment for their groups. And if Williams did not impress the white professional historians, he gave heart and encouragement (...) to future Afro-American historians. When the History of the Negro Troops appeared in 1887, nineteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois was a college senior at Fisk University and editor-in-chief of the student magazine, The Fisk Herald. In the columns of the Herald Du Bois wrote, "At last we have a historian; not merely a Negro historian, but a man who judged by his merits alone has written a splendid narrative. The Herald congratulates George W. Williams, and the race, which may justly be . . . [proud] of him."1 Many years later, Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and of the Journal of Negro History, described Williams' History of the Negro Troops as "one of the most valuable accounts of the Civil War."2 With words like these from Du Bois and Woodson, on whose shoulders much of the second stage of Afro-American historiography would rest, it is not too much to say that George Washington Williams was responsible for the beginnings of Afro-American historiography. · 1. The Fisk Herald, January 1888, p. 8.· 2. Woodson's appraisal of Williams was found among his papers and made available to me by Dr. Charles H. Wesley when he was executive director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which had been founded by Woodson in 1915. John Hope Franklin, president-elect of the American Historical Society, has written a biography of George Washington Williams. He is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the author of, among other works, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans and A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North. (shrink)

Covers the whole field of Christian ethics, past and present, for every interested reader.

This book explores how and when biology emerged as a science in Germany. Beginning with the debate about organism between Georg Ernst Stahl and Gottfried Leibniz at the start of the eighteenth century, John Zammito traces the development of a new research program, culminating in 1800, in the formulation of developmental morphology. He shows how over the course of the century, naturalists undertook to transform some domains of natural history into a distinct branch of natural philosophy, which attempted not (...) only to describe but to explain the natural world and became, ultimately, the science of biology. (shrink)

State‐of‐the‐art surveys such as John H. Zammito has produced are usually read prior to engaging seriously upon some course of study. Yet his book will be even more helpful, perhaps, to those who can look retrospectively upon the field of science studies in order to consider how the field has changed and whether postmodernism remains the threat that Zammito thinks it. By explicitly including the history of the development of the philosophy of language in a history of science studies, (...) he makes an original, provocative claim that goes beyond the wealth of information on Quine and Kuhn’s supposed refutation of the Vienna Circle’s positivism, the creation of the Edinburgh School’s sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and the debates that followed in the wake of each. Analytic philosophers from Quine to Rorty and Continental philosophers from Derrida to the postmoderns thus play a central role in the development of science studies, despite the fact that they focus on language in general rather than on science. (shrink)