The structures of specific chromosome regions, centromeres and telomeres, present a number of puzzles. As functions performed by these regions are ubiquitous and essential, their DNA, proteins and chromatin structure are expected to be conserved. Recent studies of centromeric DNA from human, Drosophila and plant species have demonstrated that a hidden universal centromere‐specific sequence is highly unlikely. The DNA of telomeres is more conserved consisting of a tandemly repeated 6–8 bp Arabidopsis‐like sequence in a majority of organisms as diverse as (...) protozoan, fungi, mammals and plants. However, there are alternatives to short DNA repeats at the ends of chromosomes and for telomere elongation by telomerase. Here we focus on the similarities and diversity that exist among the structural elements, DNA sequences and proteins, that make up terminal domains (telomeres and subtelomeres), and how organisms use these in different ways to fulfil the functions of end‐replication and end‐protection. BioEssays 27:685–697, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

What is the law of the law? What produces our craven subservience to linguistic norms, and our shocking indifference to the phenomenon of universal suffering? In a path-breaking new work of philosophy, Louis Wolcher seeks to answer these questions from the standpoint of Zen Buddhism. Bringing an Eastern sensibility into contact with three of the most important themes in Western philosophy, Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy meticulously investigates three of the twentieth century's most important philosophers: Martin Heidegger (...) - on being, Emmanuel Levinas - on ethics, and Ludwig Wittgenstein - on language. In the context of the larger Western obsession with transcending the ordinary, Louis Wolcher argues that the yearning for transcendence is born of the illusion that there is a fundamental difference between the ordinary and the profound. Employing Zen koans and stories to advance a 'deflationary' view of language and knowledge, he goes on to argue that the norms of transcendence to which we cling are not eternal truths but artefacts of desperate minds adrift on a sea of impermanence. What used to seem so majestically True, Right and Just thus shows itself to be utterly mundane: as merely true, right and just. What is left, however, is not nihilism - for clinging to a view of 'nothingness' is just as deluded as clinging to a view of 'somethingness' - but rather a new beginning of compassionate concern for the suffering of others. Beyond Transcendence in Law and Philosophy is a strikingly original synthesis of Eastern and Western thought. It will enlighten philosophers and legal theorists, as well as those who are interested in or open to the insights of Zen Buddhism. (shrink)

The founding premise of this book is that the nimbus of prestige which once surrounded the idea of justice has now been dimmed to such a degree that it is no longer sufficient to secure the possibility of a good conscience for those who undertake, in good faith, to make the world a better place in the spheres of politics and law. The many decent human beings who have noticed and experienced this diminishment of justice’s prestige find themselves in a (...) thoroughly disenchanted_ _existential situation. For them the attempt to do justice without the illusion of being grounded in something beyond the sheer facticity of their own performances is a distinctly ethical theme which cries out to be investigated in its own right. Heeding the cry, this book asks and attempts to answer the following fundamental ethical question_: Is a life in the law – even one spent in the pursuit of justice – worth living, and if so, how can a disenchanted person come to bear the living of it without constantly having to engage in self-deception?_ If Nietzsche is right that living without illusions is impossible for human beings, then the most important ethical implication of this essentially anthropological fact goes far beyond the question of what illusions we ought to choose. It must also include the question whether we should succumb to that most seductive and pernicious of all illusions: namely, the belief that exercising great care and responsibility in choosing our illusions – which we might then call our ‘principles of justice’ – excuses us ethically for what we do to others in their name. The culmination of a 10 year legal-philosophical project, this book will appeal to graduate students, scholars and curious non-academic intellectuals interested in continental philosophy, critical legal theory, postmodern theology, the philosophy of human rights, and the study of individual ethics in the context of law. (shrink)

A volume of studies in natural language semantics which brings together work by philosophers, logicians and linguists. The main topics treated are: quantification and reference in natural language; the relations between formal logic, programming languages and natural language; pragmatics and discourse meaning; surface syntax and logical meaning. The volume derives from a colloquium organised in 1973 by the Kings College Research Centre, Cambridge and the papers have been edited for publication by Professor Keenan. It is hoped that the collection will (...) make available some of the best work in this fast-moving field and will stimulate further progress by juxtaposing the different approaches and interests represented here. (shrink)

The excellent quality and depth of the various essays make [the book] an invaluable resource....It is likely to become essential reading in its field.—CHOICE.

Freedom and the Rule of Law takes a critical look at the historical beginnings of law in the United States, and how that history has influenced current trends regarding law and freedom. Anthony Peacock has compiled articles that examine the relationship between freedom and the rule of law in America. The rule of law is fundamental to all liberal constitutional regimes whose political orders recognize the equal natural rights of all.

This article describes some potential uses of Bayesian estimation for time-series and panel data models by incorporating information from prior probabilities in addition to observed data. Drawing on econometrics and other literatures we illustrate the use of informative “shrinkage” or “small variance” priors while extending prior work on the general cross-lagged panel model. Using a panel dataset of national income and subjective well-being we describe three key benefits of these priors. First, they shrink parameter estimates toward zero or toward each (...) other for time-varying parameters, which lends additional support for an income → SWB effect that is not supported with maximum likelihood. This is useful because, second, these priors increase model parsimony and the stability of estimates and thus improve out-of-sample predictions and interpretability, which means estimated effect should also be more trustworthy than under ML. Third, these priors allow estimating otherwise under-identified models under ML, allowing higher-order lagged effects and time-varying parameters that are otherwise impossible to estimate using observed data alone. In conclusion we note some of the responsibilities that come with the use of priors which, departing from typical commentaries on their scientific applications, we describe as involving reflection on how best to apply modeling tools to address matters of worldly concern. (shrink)

The renowned occult scholar Arthur Edward Waite left no stone unturned when preparing this meticulously researched volume on the life and works of the French mystic Louis Claude de Saint-Martin. Drawing on contemporary biographies, correspondences, and all the source materials that were available to him at the time, he put together a biography and summary of Saint-MartinÍs work that is still unsurpassed to this day. This edition is presented with modernised typography and a new and expanded index.

By placing Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012) in counterpoint with Said’s After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986), this essay aims to shed new light on Butler’s political and ethical writing, revealing, in particular, the ways in which a politics of cohabitation is inseparable from the process of translation. Both Butler and Said articulate the difficult yet necessary task of establishing a just cohabitation through the translation between two histories of exile, Jewish and Palestinian. Firstly, (...) I examine Butler’s efforts to derive a principle of cohabitation from the Jewish history of diaspora, arguing that it should be understood as a response to Said’s reflections on Jewishness in Freud and the Non-European. I then seek to illuminate how statelessness structures the interplay of text and image in After the Last Sky, arguing that exilic tension provides the framework for Said’s rethinking of comparativism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd 76 Reviews REAPPRAISING GILBERT MURRAY Louis Greenspan Religious Studies / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4k1 [email protected] ChristopherStray,ed.GilbertMurrayReassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. xii, 400. £65; £27.50 (pb). Cdn. $156 (hb). us$55 (pb). isbn 978-0-19-920879-1 (hb). For much of the Wrst half of the twentieth century Gilbert Murray was a leading Wgure in (...) British academia, in British theatre, on the British and American lecture circuits and even in British politics. He was admired by the community of scholars as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the most prestigious position in classical scholarship in the English-speaking world. He was also esteemed by a wider reading public as the champion of a magisterial liberalism rooted in classical Greek culture. Finally he was respected by the world at large as a liberal activist who, during World War 1, wrote well-argued pamphlets in support of the war and who later became co-chairman of the League of Nations Union, an organization that in the ’20s and ’30s attracted 400,000 members. Among his companions were George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, both of whom remained his friends for life. As chief editor of the Home University Library he commissioned Russell’s The Problems of Philosophyz, which is still unsurpassed as an introduction to this subject. Today he is forgotten. Younger classical scholars would endorse the statement by Fowler (quoted in this volume): “in spite of his great fame when he was alive, he might never have written, so far as most scholars are concerned today” (p. 58). His role as the public intellectual who connected modern liberalism with Hellenism has been taken over by the followers of Leo Strauss who view this connection rather diTerently than Murray did. As for his liberal activism, when he died in 1957 Murray was regarded aTectionately as a noble ghost of Victorian liberalism past, whose passionate advocacy of the League of Nations was seen as well meaning and futile as the organization he had championed. In the ’60s and ’70s his words and deeds were swept away in the tides of anti-liberal fervour that inspired the newly emerging leftist revolutionaries and neo-conservatives. At Wrst perusal Gilbert Murray Reassessed zhas the format of festschrifts and other scholarly reviews of the accomplishments of a particular writer. There are articles on every aspect of Murray’s activities: his translations of Greek drama, his critical editions of Euripides, his views of Hellenism, his post-World War 1 September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 77 internationalism and even his lectures on the bbc, all by specialists in these topics. But this volume is more than a summing up of Murray’s contributions to scholarship. The aim of the volume is to revive Murray the public intellectual, a voice of liberalism that deserves a new hearing. The book could have been entitled Gilbert Murray Retrieved for Our Timesz: a contribution to the struggle to Wnd a liberalism that addresses the anti-liberal, anti-intellectual forces that threaten us today. In this spirit the volume is dedicated to those who died in the London terrorist attack of July 2005. The volume opens with two sets of memoirs, one by Murray’s grandchildren Ann Pauladan and Alexander Murray, the other Francis West’s account of Murray ’s reXections on an Australian childhood. The memoirs of his grandchildren, aTectionate and charming, seem less interested in refashioning Gilbert Murray for our time. They still portray Murray as one who inhabited a world that is no more, the proponent of a liberalism that was naively optimistic and top heavy with reason at the expense of the emotions. Murray’s optimism is evident in their anecdote about an encounter between Murray and Sir Edward Grey, during a summer walk in 1914. Murray opened the conversation by scoUng at rumours of impending war in Europe, for him impossible between civilized powers. Grey closed it by assuring him that war was certain, thus causing the speechless and horriWed Murray... (shrink)

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The literary relations between the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude Movement have, we believe, been sufficiently documented. It has been demonstrated that Senghor, Damas and Césaire avidly perused the pages of Crisis, Opportunity and Garvey's Negro World—Journals in which Langston Hughes, Claude Mckay, Countee Cullen and Jean Tommer—the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, first had their poems published. It is equally literary history now, that some of the poems of the Afro-American writers were reprinted in such Parisian Black-oriented journals and (...) little magazines as Les Continents, La Dépêche Africaine, Le Cri des Nègres, La Revue du Monde Noir and Légitime Défense. In this dissemination of ideas across the Atlantic, Paulette Nardal, Edward A. Jones, Louis T. Achille and Mercer Cook played the important role of literary intermediaries through their translations. (shrink)

Recently, Edward Furton commented on an article that we published in Health Care Ethics USA concerning the philosophical and theological anthropology informing the discussion of appropriate care for individuals with gender dysphoria and intersex conditions. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify the points we made in that article, particularly the metaphysical mechanics underlying our contention that, as part of a unified human person, the human rational soul is sexed. We hope this more in-depth metaphysical explanation shows that Furton’s concern, (...) while valid insofar as our position may have needed clarifying, is nevertheless ill-founded with respect to our contention that actually existent human rational souls are sexed. (shrink)

Introduction: the use and abuse of Thomas Paine in the transatlantic world / Sam Edwards and Marcus Morris -- Part I. The image and idea(s) of Paine: origins, use and reuse -- The image of Tom: Paine in print and portraiture / W.A. Speck -- "I am made to say what I never wrote": deism, spiritualism and ventriloquizing Paine, c.1790s-1850s / Patrick W. Hughes -- All Paine: the American mind and the creation of the League of Nations and the U.N. (...) / Michael Holm -- The distortion of Thomas Paine's philosophy of government / Gary Berton -- Part II. Discovering and using Paine's radicalism -- "Revolutions are the order of the day": Atlantic fragments of Thomas Paine, c.1819-1832 / Matteo Battistini -- Posthumous Paine in the United Kingdom, 1809-1832: Jacobin or loyalist cult? / Matthew Roberts -- "The neglect of Paine seems particularly strange at the present political juncture": explaining British socialists' relationship to Paine, c. 1884-1914 / Marcus Morris -- Citizens of the world: Paine and the political prisoners transported to Australia / Tony Moore -- Part III. Remembering and remaking Paine -- Common sense on the Lower East Side: Thomas Paine and the era of immigration, c.1900-1950 / Louis Mazzari -- "A monument in every city?": Thomas Paine in memoriam / Theodore Marotta -- "He came from America didn't he?": the Thetford Statue controversy and the problem of Paine in transatlantic memory, c.1909-1970 / Sam Edwards -- Afterword: the struggle for Paine's memory and the making of American democracy / Harvey J. Kaye. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 282-284 [Access article in PDF] Bruce Kuklick. A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 326. Cloth, $30.00. Scott L. Pratt. Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii + 316. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $21.95. In his earlier works Bruce Kuklick has studied major figures and (...) episodes in the evolution of American thought, most famously the Golden Age of Harvard. In the present book he proposes to tell the whole story. Beginning, as it must, with Jonathan Edwards, Part I traces the long and difficult process by which philosophy gradually distinguishes itself from theology. Part II deals magisterially with the age of pragmatism, from Darwin to Dewey, and Part III with professional philosophy in the twentieth century. Kuklick's account of this latest development, briefly adumbrated in his previous books, is the freshest and (to this retired professional) most engaging part of the narrative. Once philosophy had loosened the bonds that tied it to theology, once sciences like psychology, originally parts of philosophy, had declared independence and set out on their own, and once philosophy's role as counselor to private morals and public policy had been taken over by psychoanalysis, economics, sociology, and political science, philosophers had to discover a new identity for themselves. Inspired by logical positivism and the linguistic ruminations of the late Wittgenstein, professional philosophy came to mean, very largely, a preoccupation with problems of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and epistemology. The result was that, apart from undergraduate lectures and occasional ventures into the popular media, what philosophers said and wrote, intelligible only to other philosophers, became irrelevant to just about everything of personal and public interest, and even to the traditional concerns of philosophy itself with the nature of reality and the conduct of life.The eventual arrival in the American academy of phenomenology, existentialism, and deconstruction, in spite of their apparent engagement with "real life" and their appeal to undergraduates, only bred another species of professionals and precipitated the familiar antagonism between analytic and continental philosophy. Late in the last century Richard Rorty, a preeminent analytic philosopher, broke ranks, discovered first Heidegger and Derrida, then William James and John Dewey, and declared himself a pragmatist. He characterized philosophy as a single voice in the conversation of the West, which also included literature, literary criticism, the arts, and all the sciences both natural and humane. But he remains a philosopher of language. The pragmatism of the nineteenth century was a low-mimetic [End Page 282] form of the high-mimetic idealism from which it emerged: from Royce to James. Rorty's pragmatism not only takes for granted the (often implicit) materialism and atheism of analytic philosophy, but is itself a new way of understanding and using language. It has been called, inverting James, an old name for a new way of thinking.But I need to correct this overly simple account. As Kuklick is aware, philosophy in America, though it did succeed in detaching itself from theology, has never wholly dissolved its ties to religion. Royce and James in the nineteenth century and Dewey in the twentieth continued to be preoccupied with religious questions, especially with the apparent conflict of religion and science suggested by Darwin's theory. Religious interests survive, barely, in "critical realism." And even though analytic philosophy would seem to be most comfortable with atheism, more than a few thinkers trained in analysis have combined analytic logic and religious faith. Witness the Society of Christian Philosophers. On the whole, however, professional philosophy has been devoid of religious, socio-political, or existential interest. This should not be surprising. All genuine professions serve an end beyond themselves—as medicine serves health, law justice, and theology salvation. But when philosophy becomes a "profession," it has no end but self-preservation, i.e., creating more philosophers and finding jobs for them.One slightly disconcerting feature of Kuklick's... (shrink)

In this essay I discuss the idea of deploying workshops in phenomenology -- i.e., teaching the discipline by practising it. I focus on the model proposed by Herbert Spiegelberg, the first person to give systematic attention to this idea and the first to institutionalize it over a period of several years. Drawing on my experience in several of the workshops he led at Washington University, St. Louis, I detail the method he recommended in preparation for a workshop I ten (...) led at the inaugural meeting of To the Things Themselves at the University of New Hampshire. (shrink)

A systematic philosophy that presupposes an ecocentric world view, rather than a homocentric or egocentric world view, can be a viable resource for investigating issues in environmental philosophy and conservation ethics. Generally speaking, the Japanese philosophical and religious tradition represents a commitment to ecocentrism. This philosophical orientation is in concert with the world view of manynaturalists. We explore one example of ecocentrism by unveiling the crosscultural connection between the naturalistic philosophy of Louis Agassiz, a nineteenth-century French-American biologist, and the (...) early writings of Nishida Kitarō, a twentieth-century Japanese philosopher. We suggest that the central player in understanding the ecocentric connection between Agassiz and Nishida is American philosopher-psychologist William James. James was once a student of Agassiz and his writings influenced Nishida's early work. Related issues concerning conservation ethics and the Japanese intellectual tradition are also addressed. (shrink)

The struggles in the first half of 1471 in which Edward IV recovered the throne produced various pieces of historical writing. It is generally assumed that the basic work is the chronicle written in the official interest, called the Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV, which was edited by John Bruce for the Camden Society in 1838 from the British Museum manuscript Harleian 543, a copy by John Stow from the book of Master Fleetwood, the Recorder of (...) London. This chronicle was used, though in a more complete version that that of Stow's transscript, by the Flemish chronicler Jean Wavrin, and there is also a shorter French narrative, which Bruce considered an abridgement of the fuller text, and which C. L. Kingsford in his major study of English fifteenth-century chronicles regarded as of no importance. A text of the shorter version seems to have been one source of the account of Edward's recovery of the crown in Thomas Basin's History of Louis XI, though he does not use all of it and must have had additional material. (shrink)

This volume commemorates the 6th centennial of the birth of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), a Renaissance polymath whose interests included law, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, theology, mysticism and relations between Christians and non-Christian peoples. The contributors to this volume reflect Cusanus' multiple interests; and, by doing so they commemorate three deceased luminaries of the American Cusanus Society: F. Edward Cranz, Thomas P. McTighe and Charles Trinkaus. Contributors include: Christopher M. Bellitto, H. Lawrence Bond, Elizabeth Brient, Louis Dupré, Wilhelm Dupré, (...) Walter Andreas Euler, Lawrence Hundersmarck, Thomas M. Izbicki, Dennis D. Martin, Yelena Matusevich, Bernard McGinn, Clyde Lee Miller, Thomas E. Morrissey, Brian A. Pavlac, and Morimichi Watanabe. Publications by Charles Trinkaus: - Edited by C. Trinkaus and H.A. Oberman, The pursuit of holiness in late medieval and renaissance religion, ISBN: 978 90 04 03791 5 (Out of print). (shrink)

Empathy remains poorly understood, under-theorized, and subject to conflicting and opportunistic uses. Its systematic role in human experience has not been analyzed and interpreted from top to bottom. In this book, the author attempts to provide such an analysis in the philosophical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, analytic philosophy of language, and psychoanalysis. applying his interpretation of empathy to the philosophical issues of intentionality, the emotions, and the checkered transformations of empathy itself. In doing so the author aims to rescue empathy (...) from the margins of intelligibility and reveal its central role in our understanding of the emotions, the integrity of our relations with others, and human community (“intersubjectivity”). -/- The work draws on both the Anglo-American (“analytic”) tradition of ordinary language philosophy and the continental ones of phenomenology and hermeneutics. This work follows the movement of empathy from the periphery of ethics, aesthetics, and theory of mind to a key place in establishing and maintaining the integrity and emotional equilibrium of dynamic interrelations with other individuals. Beginning with the philosophical infrastructure of the hermeneutics of empathy, this work thoroughly explains the complex architecture of empathy, tracing it downward through the levels of authentic human interrelations, empathy with unexpressed emotions, the empathic penetrability of cognitively impenetrable affect, the first-ever intentional analysis of both the empathizer and the “empathasand” in interrelation, and the hermeneutic infrastructure. The consequences of empathy are exposed in the context of the emotions, cognitive impenetrability, empathy and altruism, and the intentionality of empathy as accessed through language and story telling. Drawing on the multi-method approach of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and story telling, this work demonstrates that empathy forms the foundation for community in ways not clearly appreciated in the on-going debate. In a bootstrap operation that is guided by Heidegger’s call for a “special hermeneutic of empathy,” this work achieves a delicate balancing act of unpacking the rich intellectual traditions from which empathy - the phenomenon itself, not the concept - emerged historically. The result is an exposure of the deep structure of empathy as a fundamentally human capability for creating possibilities of community and human relations. (shrink)