Where does my body begin? Where does it end? What is inside my body? What is outside? What is primary? What is secondary? What is natural? What is artificial? Science fiction has long imagined a future fusion of humanity with technology. Today, many of us—especially people with health issues such as autoimmune diseases—have functionally become hybrids connected to other machines and to other bodies. The combination of artificial intelligence with implants, transplants, prostheses, and genetic reprogramming is transforming medical research (...) and treatment, and it is now also transforming what we thought was human nature. Mark C. Taylor identifies this process as “intervolution” and explores how it is weaving together smart things and smart bodies to create new forms of life. Our wired bodies are no longer freestanding individuals, but interconnected nodes in worldwide networks. Recognizing this transformation overturns deeply entrenched distinctions and oppositions between minds and bodies. Intervolution reveals that we are already cyborgs, integral cogs in what will become a superorganism of bodies and things. (shrink)

The age of information, media, and virtuality is transforming every aspect of human experience. Questions that have long haunted the philosophical imagination are becoming urgent practical concerns: Where does the natural end and the artificial begin? Is there a difference between the material and the immaterial? In his new work, Mark C. Taylor extends his ongoing investigation of postmodern worlds by critically examining a wide range of contemporary cultural practices. Nothing defines postmodernism so well as its refusal of (...) depth, its emphasis on appearance and spectacle, its tendency to collapse a three-dimensional world in which image and reality are distinct into a two-dimensional world in which they merge. The postmodern world, Taylor argues, is a world of surfaces, and the postmodern condition is one of profound superficiality. For many cultural commentators, postmodernism's inescapable play of surfaces is cause for despair. Taylor, on the other hand, shows that the disappearance of depth in postmodern culture is actually a liberation repleat with creative possibilities. Taylor introduces readers to a popular culture in which detectives--the postmodern heroes of Paul Auster and Dennis Potter--lift surfaces only to find more surfaces, and in which fashion advertising plays transparency against hiding. Taylor looks at the contemporary preoccupation with body piercing and tattooing, and asks whether these practices actually reveal or conceal. Phrenology and skin diseases, the "religious" architecture of Las Vegas, the limitless spread of computer networks--all are brought within the scope of Taylor's brilliant analysis. Postmodernism, he shows, has given us a new sense of the superficial, one in which the issue is not the absence of meaning but its uncontrollable, ecstatic proliferation. Embodying the very tendencies it analyzes, Hiding is unique. Conceived and developed with well-known designers Michael Rock and Susan Sellars, this work transgresses the boundary that customarily separates graphic design from the story within a text. The product of nearly three decades of reflection and writing, Hiding opens a window on contemporary culture. To follow the remarkable course Taylor charts is to see both our present and past differently and to encounter a future as disorienting as it is alluring. (shrink)

“To hear silence is to find stillness in the midst of the restlessness that makes creative life possible and the inescapability of death acceptable.” So writes Mark C. Taylor in his latest book, a philosophy of silence for our nervous, chattering age. How do we find silence—and more importantly, how do we understand it—amid the incessant buzz of the networks that enmesh us? Have we forgotten how to listen to each other, to recognize the virtues of modesty and reticence, (...) and to appreciate the resonance of silence? Are we less prepared than ever for the ultimate silence that awaits us all? Taylor wants us to pause long enough to hear what is not said and to attend to what remains unsayable. In his account, our way to hearing silence is, paradoxically, to see it. He explores the many variations of silence by considering the work of leading modern and postmodern visual artists, including Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, James Turrell, and Anish Kapoor. Developing the insights of philosophers, theologians, writers, and composers, Taylor weaves a rich narrative modeled on the Stations of the Cross. His chapter titles suggest our positions toward silence: Without. Before. From. Beyond. Against. Within. Between. Toward. Around. With. In. Recasting Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit and Kierkegaard’s stages on life’s way, Taylor translates the traditional Via Dolorosa into a Nietzschean Via Jubilosa that affirms light in the midst of darkness. Seeing Silence is a thoughtful meditation that invites readers to linger long enough to see silence, and, in this way, perhaps to hear once again the wordless Word that once was named “God.”. (shrink)

The desert has long been a theme in Mark C. Taylor’s work, from his inquiries into the religious significance of Las Vegas to his writings on earthworks artist Michael Heizer. At once haunted by absence and loss, the desert, for Taylor, is a place of exile and wandering, of temptation and tribulation. Bones, in turn, speak to his abiding interest in remnants, ruins, ritual, and immanence. Taylor combines his fascination in the detritus of the desert and its philosophical (...) significance with his work in photography in Mystic Bones. A collection of remarkably elegant close-up images of weathered bones—remains of cattle, elk, and deer skeletons gathered from the desert of the American West—Mystic Bones pairs each photograph with a philosophical aphorism. These images are buttressed by a major essay, “Rubbings of Reality,” in which Taylor explores the use of bones in the religious rituals of native inhabitants of the Western desert and, more broadly, the appearance of bones in myth and religious reality. Meditating on the way in which bones paradoxically embody both the personal and the impersonal—at one time they are our very substance, but eventually they become our last remnants, anonymous, memorializing oblivion—Taylor here suggests ways in which natural processes can be thought of as art, and bones as art objects. Bones, Taylor writes, “draw us elsewhere.” To follow their traces beyond the edge of the human is to wander into ageless times and open spaces where everything familiar becomes strange. By revealing beauty hidden in the most unexpected places, these haunting images refigure death in a way that allows life to be seen anew. A bold new work from a respected philosopher of religion, Mystic Bones is Taylor’s his most personal statement of after-God theology. (shrink)

The challenges public comprehensive universities face today are expanding—they have been challenged to enroll and graduate more students, adopt new technologies that lower cost without sacrificing quality, and align program and curricular offerings with the skills that employers require. While these universities have a long history of adapting to change, today’s environment will likely test the capabilities of even the most adaptive institutions. This volume assembles a team of experts from a variety of disciplines to examine both the history (...) of the comprehensive university and what lies ahead. Overall, the book grapples with such questions as: How do these institutions adapt to serve the growing population of non-traditional students? How well do they prepare graduates for the labor market? Can partnerships between community colleges and comprehensive universities bolster student success? The University Next Door draws much-needed attention to a set of institutions that has historically received little notice, yet play an important role in meeting our new attainment goals and helping the American economy grow. Book Features: Examines the role of comprehensive universities from start to finish—their history and future. Uses empirical analysis to explore complex questions about which students choose these universities and why. Explores how these institutions might struggle under a federal ratings system such as the one proposed by President Obama. Discusses how these institutions can better monitor the needs of the economy and better educate students to fill those needs. Provides recommendations to inform future decisions about higher education policy. (shrink)

At the intersection of meta-ethics and philosophy of science, Nicholas Sturgeon’s “Moral Explanation” ([1985] 1988), Richard Boyd’s “How to be a Moral Realist” (1988), and David Brink’s Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (1989) inaugurated a sustained argument for the claim that moral kinds like right action and virtuous agent are scientifically investigable natural kinds. The corresponding position is called “non-reductive ethical naturalism,” or “NEN.” Ethical nonnaturalists, by contrast, argue that moral kinds are genuine and objective, but not natural. (...) This dissertation is largely a challenge to non-reductive ethical naturalism from the viewpoint of ethical nonnaturalism. An introduction, four fairly independent chapters, and a conclusion comprise this dissertation. The introduction (chapter one) situates and summarizes the arguments in the four chapters that immediately follow, and the concluding chapter (chapter six) describes future work related to the arguments in this dissertation. I now turn to chapters two through five. In chapter two, I shore up what I believe are weakness in Derek Parfit’s Triviality Objection to reductive ethical naturalism and then present a challenge to the NEN theorist, which, I argue, the NEN theorist must but ultimately cannot meet. The challenge is to sketch an empirical experiment whereby we can adjudicate between competing moral hypotheses. I explain in terms of experimental design and evaluation why the challenge cannot be met. Chapters three and four focus on the semantics and reference relations of kind terms. In chapter three, I defend the Causal Externalist (CE) theory of semantics and reference against an objection distilled from two articles by Åsa Marie Wikforss. The objection is that CE implies a paradox, escape from which forces the CE theorist upon the horns of a dilemma. I show how the CE theorist can avoid the dilemma by allowing that the intensions of some artificial-kind terms (e.g., ‘jade’) are not given by descriptions associated with the terms. One consequence of this move, however, is that it casts doubt upon the coherence of the claim that moral-kind terms (e.g., ‘morally required action’) are natural-kind terms. In chapter four, I defend Terence Horgan and Mark Timmons’s Moral-Twin Earth argument from three critical responses put forward in recent paper by David Merli. NEN theorists claim that CE can account for the semantics and reference of moral-kind terms. As per Horgan and Timmons (H&T), however, our responses to the Moral-Twin Earth thought experiment give us reason to doubt the NEN theorists’ claim. Against H&T’s argument, however, Merli presents three independent, critical responses, and in this chapter I defend H&T’s argument in a way that is friendly to the ethical nonnaturalist. One upshot is, I contend, that the ethical nonnaturalist can and indeed should co-opt H&T’s argument for his own use. In chapter five, I return to kinds themselves, specifically those in biology. I first point out that ethical nonnaturalism appeals to a metaphysical thesis about nonnatural value, which need not be limited to the moral domain. Then, I argue that biological naturalism alone cannot give a satisfying realist account of biological kinds like HEART and NEURON. Finally, I show that by conjoining the concept of Cummins functions as recently defended by Paul Davies, a thesis about nonnatural value, and Ned Block’s Disney Principle regarding structural properties, the nonnaturalist, unlike the naturalist, can offer a satisfying realist account of biological kinds. (shrink)

Creating focal lesions in primary visual cortex (V1) provides an opportunity to study the role of extra-geniculo-striate pathways for activating extrastriate visual cortex. Previous studies have shown that more than 95% of neurons in macaque area V2 and V3 stop firing after reversibly cooling V1 [1,2,3]. However, no studies on long term recovery in areas V2, V3 following permanent V1 lesions have been reported in the macaque. Here we use macaque fMRI to study area V2, V3 activity patterns from (...) 1 to 22 months after lesioning area V1. We find that visually driven BOLD responses persist inside the V1-lesion projection zones (LPZ) of areas V2 and V3, but are reduced in strength by ,70%, on average, compared to prelesion levels. Monitoring the LPZ activity over time starting one month following the V1 lesion did not reveal systematic changes in BOLD signal amplitude. Surprisingly, the retinotopic organization inside the LPZ of areas V2, V3 remained similar to that of the non-lesioned hemisphere, suggesting that LPZ activation in V2, V3 is not the result of input arising from nearby (non-lesioned) V1 cortex. Electrophysiology recordings of multi-unit activity corroborated the BOLD observations: visually driven multi-unit responses could be elicited inside the V2 LPZ, even when the visual stimulus was entirely contained within the scotoma induced by the V1 lesion. Restricting the stimulus to the intact visual hemi-field produced no significant BOLD modulation inside the V2, V3 LPZs. We conclude that the observed activity patterns are largely mediated by parallel, V1-bypassing, subcortical pathways that can activate areas V2 and V3 in the absence of V1 input. Such pathways may contribute to the behavioral phenomenon of blindsight. (shrink)

Performance on working memory (WM) tasks may partially be supported by long-term memory (LTM) processing. Hence, brain activation recently being implicated in WM may actually have been driven by (incidental) LTM formation. We examined which brain regions actually support successful WM processing, rather than being confounded by LTM processes, during the maintenance and probe phase of a WM task. We administered a four-pair (faces and houses) associative delayed-match-to-sample (WM) task using event-related fMRI and a subsequent associative recognition LTM task, (...) using the same stimuli. This enabled us to analyze subsequent memory effects for both the WM and the LTM test by contrasting correctly recognized pairs with incorrect pairs for either task. Critically, with respect to the subsequent WM effect, we computed this analysis exclusively for trials that were forgotten in the subsequent LTM recognition task. Hence, brain activity associated with successful WM processing was less likely to be confounded by incidental LTM formation. The subsequent LTM effect, in contrast, was analyzed exclusively for pairs that previously had been correctly recognized in the WM task, disclosing brain regions involved in successful LTM formation after successful WM processing. Results for the subsequent WM effect showed no significantly activated brain areas for WM maintenance, possibly due to an insensitivity of fMRI to mechanisms underlying active WM maintenance. In contrast, a correct decision at WM probe was linked to activation in the “retrieval success network” (anterior and posterior midline brain structures). The subsequent LTM analyses revealed greater activation in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex in the early phase of the maintenance stage. No supra-threshold activation was found during the WM probe. Together, we obtained clearer insights in which brain regions support successful WM and LTM without the potential confound of the respective memory system. (shrink)

BackgroundExtremely violent events such as terrorist attacks and mass shootings form a severe risk for the health and wellbeing of affected individuals. In this study based on a public health monitor, we focus on the health impact of the Utrecht tram shooting, which took place in the morning of March 18th 2019. A lone gunman opened fire on passengers within a moving tram. Four people died, and six people were injured in this attack. The attack resulted in nationwide commotion and (...) drew much media attention. Aim of this study was to increase insight into the health effects for the survivors, and whether they received the needed care and support.MethodsSemi-structured interviews with accompanying questionnaires were conducted at six and 18 months post-attack. Overall, 21 survivors participated in the first series of interviews, 15 in the second series. Qualitative data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, quantitative data was only described because of the low sample size.ResultsAt both six and 18 months after the attack many survivors had been able to resume daily life, and most rated their overall health as good or excellent. At the same time, a substantial portion suffered from health problems such as posttraumatic stress symptoms and other complaints, and needed professional care. Furthermore, those in need did not always find their own way to appropriate care through the existing health system: half of the survivors still needed support in finding the right care 18 months later.ConclusionAlthough the design and implementation of this public health monitor were accompanied by multiple challenges, it was possible to track a portion of the survivors and gain insight in the considerable health burden of the attack. Also, it is clear in this study that the health impact of terrorism affects survivors in the long run and requires attention from health authorities and professionals, as survivors were not able to find the right care by themselves. (shrink)

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

Returning genomic research results to family members raises complex questions. Genomic research on life-limiting conditions such as cancer, and research involving storage and reanalysis of data and specimens long into the future, makes these questions pressing. This author group, funded by an NIH grant, published consensus recommendations presenting a framework. This follow-up paper offers concrete guidance and tools for implementation. The group collected and analyzed relevant documents and guidance, including tools from the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium. The authors (...) then negotiated a consensus toolkit of processes and documents. That toolkit offers sample consent and notification documents plus decision flow-charts to address return of results to family of living and deceased participants, in adult and pediatric research. Core concerns are eliciting participant preferences on sharing results with family and on choice of a representative to make decisions about sharing after participant death. (shrink)

Subliminal primes are assumed to produce weaker and short-lived effects on subsequent behavior compared to clearly visible primes. However, this difference in priming effect may be due to differences in signal strength, rather than level of awareness. In the present study we manipulated prime discriminability by using metacontrast masks and pseudomasks, while keeping the prime strength equal. This manipulation resulted in large differences in discriminability of the primes. However, both immediate response priming and long-term response priming was equal for (...) the poorly discriminable and well discriminable primes, and equal for groups that differed markedly in terms of how well they could discriminate the primes. Our findings imply that discriminability of information is independent of both the immediate and long-term effects that information can have on behavior. (shrink)

How best to avoid the Levinas Effect, as it has been called, the tendency to make Emmanuel Levinas everything to everyone? One way is to demonstrate that Levinas's thinking does not fit into any of the categories by which we ordinarily approach political theory. If one were forced to categorize Levinas's political theory, the term "inverted liberalism " would come closest to the mark. As long, that is, as one emphasizes the term "inverted" over "liberalism." Levinas's defense of (...) liberalism is likely the strangest defense the reader has encountered. We should, argues Levinas, foster and protect the individual because only the individual can see the tears of the other, the tears that even the just regime cannot see. The individual is to be fostered and protected for the sake of the other individual. Whether this has anything to do with "real" liberalism, and whether it should, is the topic of this essay. (shrink)

Updated and revised, the Second Edition of _Danto and His Critics_ presents a series of essays by leading Danto scholars who offer their critical assessment of the influential works and ideas of Arthur C. Danto, the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University and long-time art critic for _The Nation_. Reflects Danto's revisions in his theory of art, reworking his views in ways that have not been systematically addressed elsewhere Features essays that critically assess the (...) changes in Danto's thoughts and locate Danto's revised theory in the larger context of his work and of aesthetics generally Speaks in original ways to the relation of Danto's philosophy of art to his theory of mind Connects and integrates Danto's ideas on the nature of knowledge, action, aesthetics, history, and mind, as well as his provocative thoughts on the philosophy of art for the reader. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 29, Number 1, April 2003, pp. 89-98 Another "Curious Legend" about Hume's An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature MARK G. SPENCER I In 1938, J. M. Keynes and P. Sraffa edited and introduced for Cambridge University Press a reprinting of An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature.1 The Abstract they claimed in their subtitle was "A Pamphlet hitherto unknown by DAVID HUME." (...) Arguing against a number of nineteenth and early-twentieth -century scholars who attributed authorship of an abstract of the Treatise to Adam Smith, Keynes and Sraffa convincingly documented in their introductory essay many solid reasons for thinking that the pamphlet being reprinted was Hume's.2 Sixty years on, their account dispelling this "curious legend" of Smith's authorship has now become the received opinion. T.E. Jessop accepted Keynes and Sraffa's argument (having seen it in proof before the edition was published) in his bibliography of 1938, and Norman Kemp Smith gave their version an early supportive review.3 E.C. Mossner, in his well-known biography of Hume, accepted wholeheartedly Keynes and Sraffa's findings.4 When in 1978 the Selby-Bigge's edition of Hume's Treatise saw its second edition the text of the Abstract was appended and a note gave P.H. Nidditch's opinion that "Hume's authorship is overwhelmingly likely."5 More recently Mark G. Spencer is Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of History, University of Toronto. Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St. George St., Toronto, Ontario MSS 3GS, Canada. [email protected] 90 Mark G. Spencer in the pages of this journal, Jeff Broome, David Raynor, and David Fate Norton have all helped buttress the case for Hume's authorship, as did R. W. Connon and M. Pollard elsewhere.6 Despite an occasional dissenting voice,7 the Abstract is now widely, and rightly (or so it seems to this author), thought to have been Hume's. But with all of this scholarly attention focused on confirming Hume's authorship, another much more contentious aspect of Keynes and Sraffa's interpretation has gone largely unnoticed. Keynes and Sraffa's billing of the Abstract as "A Pamphlet hitherto unknown by DAVID HUME," suggested that before 1938 the Abstract had not been attributed publicly to Hume and that the contents of the pamphlet also had been completely unknown. "Students of Hume have known that an abstract of the Treatise was made and intended for publication," wrote a reviewer of Keynes and Sraffa, "[b]ut no copy of this abstract was known to exist: indeed it was usually supposed that the abstract had never been printed at all."8 Relying on Keynes and Sraffa it would be easy to suppose that the Abstract was never publicly ascribed to Hume and even that the contents of the pamphlet had been overlooked entirely until Keynes and Sraffa came along. One of the purposes of the present short essay is to dispel, once and for all, that misunderstanding about the Abstract. Norman Kemp Smith went part of the way toward that end in 1938 when he reviewed Keynes and Sraffa's edition. But in the process Kemp Smith introduced another "curious legend" that has slipped into scholarly acceptance with little comment and no debate. We will see that it is a mistake to argue, as Kemp Smith did, that Hume's authorship of a sixpenny pamphlet was known to readers of An universal biographical and historical dictionary, published in 1800. There is no discussion of Hume's Abstract in that book. However, the Abstract was discussed in print in at least three different publications between 1818 and 1827, long after its initial publication in 1740 and long before Keynes and Sraffa brought it to the attention of their audience in 1938. While pre-1938 Hume scholars had overlooked the Abstract, at least one of Hume's early nineteenth-century critics knew of the Abstract's existence, attributed the work to Hume, and even quoted extensively from Hume's "Preface." Most interesting of all, Hume's authorship of the Abstract was interpreted in ways that are telling of the historical reception of... (shrink)

Existing estimates of optimal climate policy ignore the possibility that carbon tax revenues could be used in a progressive way; model results therefore typically imply that near-term climate action comes at some cost to the poor. Using the Nested Inequalities Climate Economy (NICE) model, we show that an equal per capita refund of carbon tax revenues implies that achieving a 2 °C target can pay large and immediate dividends for improving well-being, reducing inequality and alleviating poverty. In an optimal policy (...) calculation that weighs the benefits against the costs of mitigation, the recommended policy is characterized by aggressive near-term climate action followed by a slower climb towards full decarbonization; this pattern—which is driven by a carbon revenue Laffer curve—prevents runaway warming while also preserving tax revenues for redistribution. Accounting for these dynamics corrects a long-standing bias against strong immediate climate action in the optimal policy literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:508 BOOK REVIEWS Margerie tells us that Augustine surely held that Genesis contains such a plural sense, with the added affirmation that Moses, whom Augustine considers to be the author ofthe Pentateuch, thanks to a transient beatific vision, personally foresaw and intended all the interpretations that would later be given. In keeping with his careful and cautious approach, near the end of the book Father de Margerie admits the (...) limitations of Augustine, limitations which Augustine himself often perceived. "First, Augustine's strictly exegetical works are rather limited.... His sustained commentaries are few, those which have reached us concern Genesis, Job, the Letters to the Galatians and part of that to the Romans, the Gospel, and the First Letter of John" (126). Secondly, Augustine had only a slight knowledge of Biblical Greek. He usually worked from the Latin Bible. He seldom referred systematically to the Greek. Further, he had "but a smattering of Hebrew, acquired indirectly through his familiarity with Punic" (126). Finally-a very large admission- "he, along with nearly all the Fathers, failed to analyze adequately the literal meaning of numerous texts he sought to interpret" (126). In spite of such limitations, Augustine and the other Fathers do provide us with many insights into sound doctrine. This is especially useful since so many of the errors of today, advertised as new, are merely ancient mistakes rejected centuries ago by the Fathers. Therefore we are all indebted to Father de Margerie for helping to call us back to what is so very good in the Fathers. Father de Margerie has rendered a singular service to scholarship in his first two volumes of study of Patristic exegesis. The present volume, the third, is a worthy successor to the first two. Notre Dame Institute Alexandria, Virginia WILLIAM G. MOST The Primacy of Love: An Introduction to the Ethics of Thomas Aquinas. By PAUL J. WADELL, C.P. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1992. Pp. 162. $11.95. Friends of God: Virtues and Gifts in Aquinas. By PAUL J. WADELL, C.P. American University Studies, Series VII: Theology and Religion, vol. 76. New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Pp. x + 148. Drawing from the virtue-ethics orientation of his earlier work, Friendship and the Moral Life (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), Paul Wadell has written two books that seek to accomplish two distinctly different BOOK REVIEWS 509 objectives: to produce a work that can serve as a general introduction to Thomas Aquinas's teaching about ethics, and to produce a monograph that urges a different approach to the interpretation of Thomas's ethical teaching. But both books share a common interest of Wadell's: showing that Thomas's ethics is an ethics of genuine affection. Whether he is judged to have reached the two objectives is a question that is likely to be answered differently by moralists, depending upon the issues and approaches that shape their own understanding of Thomistic moral theology. At the very least, Wadell has produced two well-crafted books that are trend-setting works in a long and promising career, works whose approach is surely to become familiar as more and more writers emphasize virtue ethics with regard to the moral teaching of Aquinas. And at most, Wadell has shown himself to be both a fine teacher of Thomas's ethical thought and an incisive scholar in identifying the subterranean movements of the Common Doctor's thought. I shall consider The Primacy ofLove first, which, although it appeared second, is a good intelligible backdrop for presenting the more sophisticated and important argument of Friends ofGod. Waddell's introduction to Thomas's ethics is not really a synopsis of the Secunda pars of the Summa theologiae, though the lion's share of the material he employs is from there, and in something of its original order. It is rather a sympathetic, almost affectionate, portrait of Thomas's ethical teaching. The book does not introduce the reader to the technicalities of Thomas's thought, or to the bewildering debates surrounding the practical syllogism and natural law that have characterized the secondary literature in the second half of this century. Wadell-and others, I imagine-would consider this a strength... (shrink)

This paper seeks to reinterpret the life and work of J. B. S. Haldane by focusing on an illuminating but largely ignored essay he published in 1927, "The Last Judgment" -- the sequel to his better known work, "Daedalus" (1924). This astonishing essay expresses a vision of the human future over the next 40,000,000 years, one that revises and updates Wellsian futurism with the long range implications of the "new biology" for human destiny. That vision served as a kind (...) of lifelong credo, one that infused and informed his diverse scientific work, political activities, and popular writing, and that gave unity and coherence to his remarkable career. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:154. 1 HUME AND THE GOD-HYPOTHESIS Interpretation of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion has always been contentious. While some think it obvious that Philo is Hume's spokesman, others think it is Cleanthes. Whether or not Philo is Hume's spokesman, he certainly produces the better argument. Nonetheless, that argument is flawed by an assumption which I doubt Hume ever questioned. I want to consider that assumption, but want to make (...) it clear that it is not my intention to defend Cleanthes' position. The second thing I want to do in this paper, which I have not seen done elsewhere, is to connect Hume's arguments in the Dialogues with his anthropological account of religiosity. Perhaps the least contentious thing about the Dialogues is that Demea's a priori position is not taken too seriously, nor is much time spent on the first cause argument, so important from Aristotle to Leibniz. What is given serious attention is what might be described as the 'God-hypothesis', which is more or less the Argument from Design. Philo rejects the argument for reasons we shall review below, but makes a concession. The concession is basically that it is intelligible to contend that the cause or causes of order in the world bear some resemblance to human intelligence. The catch, which is the point driven home against Cleanthes, is that, while intelligible, the idea is utterly pointless. Philo says: If the whole of Natural Theology... resolves itself into one simple...proposition, That_ the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence : If this proposition be not capable of extension...If it affords no inference that affects human life... if the analogy... can be carried no farther... (203) then it is without point. Hume is willing to let the theist have his vague analogy, for it serves no point. In fact, the theist cannot 155. win, for to the extent that the God-hypothesis might have explanatory power, it approaches the status of an empirical hypothesis, and as such loses theological import. The Dialogues should be devastating, yet seem to miss the mark. Suppose we look a bit more closely at what is going on. The position Cleanthes elaborates is an hypothesis to the effect that the world exhibits order and that that order is best explained by the postulation of an orderer. Cleanthes' moves are a bit more complicated, as we shall see in a moment, but this is the essential point. The hypothesis is conceived by Hume as either competing with or completing science. In the Enquiry we read that The religious hypothesis...must be considered only as a particular method of accounting for the visible phenomena of the universe : but no.just reasoner will ever presume to infer from it any single fact, and alter or add to the phenomena, in any single particular. (237) The passage is virtually a summary of Philo's thesis. There can be no move from an inferred cause to anything further in terms of either facts or properties. Cleanthes may be grudgingly granted his causal supposition, but he is not allowed to use it. Again: And what can you say more, allowing all your suppositions and reasonings?... (0)ur conduct and deportment in life is still the same... You persist in imagining, that, if we grant that divine existence,...you may safely infer consequences from it... You seem not to remember, that all your reasonings... can only be drawn from effects to causes... (238) The crucial failure is that All the philosophy...and all the religion... will never be able to carry us beyond the usual cause of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behaviour different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life. (244) God, as putative cause simply makes no difference, so long as we conform to the standards of rational thought. 156. It is important to be clear that what is being rejected is God as "a fruitful rival to scientific explanatory notions, such as gravity". The rejection of God as explanatory principle turns on the illegitimacy of Cleanthes' moves. As Peter Jones puts it, Cleanthes makes two inferences... (shrink)

The word “emergent” was suggested by George Henry Lewes for specialized use in contradistinction to “resultant.” Little came of the suggestion, so far as I know, for some forty years. All that Lewes had to say on the matter is comprised within half a dozen, or at most eleven, pages, at the close of a long-winded, but at that time not negligible, discussion of Force and Cause, and is preceded by a section on Hume's Theory of Causation. This leads (...) up to the statement: ‘There are two classes of effects markedly distinguishable as resultants and enter gents.’ Even here there was nothing new save in the adoption and adaptation of the word ‘emergent’ in place, let us say, of John Stuart Mill's ‘heteropathic effects.’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42.3 (2006) 459-461 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Minutes of the Business Meeting Charles Sanders Peirce Society 28 December 2006Following the annual scholarly meeting, with papers by President Vincent Colapietro, "Reflective Acknowledgment and Practical Identity: Kant and Peirce on the Reflexive Stance" and Essay Contest winner Shannon Dea, "'Merely a Veil over the Living Thought': Math and Logic in Peirce's Forgotten Spinoza Review," (...) President Colapietro called the meeting to order shortly after 7 o'clock in Concourse B of the New York Hilton.The minutes of the 2003 and 2004 meetings, published in the Fall, 2004, and Summer 2005 Transactions respectively, were approved.Vincent Colapietro delivered the following report from the President and Executive Committee:André De Tienne's proposal to adopt the address of the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI as the official address of the Peirce Society was accepted.It was agreed that announcements for the Peirce Essay Contest should be placed in the Transactions and in other appropriate publications (e.g. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy and the S.A.A.P. newsletter) by mid-year if possible. It was also agreed that some length limits should be set for submitted essays and that there should be a requirement that essays meet the general standard of a submission for publication in a journal.There was discussion of the desirability of separating the collection of membership dues from subscription to the Transactions. The chief reasons for thinking that this separation might be called for are 1) the increasing availability of the Transactions through university library electronic subscriptions and 2) the higher cost of foreign subscriptions (making membership in the Society far most costly for foreign members). It was decided to revisit this issue in a year or two (after the new arrangement with IU Press has become more settled).Vincent Colapietro, Mark Migotti, and Nathan Houser were appointed to serve as a "meta" committee to form, with the approval of the Executive Committee, a "regular" committee to organize the 2014 Peirce World Congress. They will also recommend a chair for the committee and a location for the congress. Indianapolis was favored by members present.It was agreed that a list of rules and procedures for conducting Society business should be drawn up for the guidance of new Society office holders. These lists will include the rules and procedures for fulfilling the functions of the various offices, for running meetings, time-tables for making decisions, and so on. N. Houser will work on this with André Tienne and Mark Migotti to draft these lists. [End Page 459]It was agreed that the outgoing Chair of the Nominating Committee should communicate with the incoming Chair a list of the candidates who were considered but not nominated, along with the basis for consideration.Peter Hare delivered the following report on the Transactions:Starting with the fall issue, the Transactions is being published by Indiana University Press. Editorial arrangements are unchanged. Although the transition has been time-consuming in the short run, the new publishing arrangements promise in the long run to increase greatly the journal's impact on the world of scholarship. This year has also been difficult because a key staff member in our previous publishing arrangements failed us. In 2005 we had 499 member/subscribers (406 domestic and 93 foreign). The bank balance is $4008.Vincent Colapietro delivered for Mark Migotti a preliminary version of the following financial report :2005 income was $1,713.05 ($1,497 in membership dues and $216.05 in interest). 2005 expenditures were c. $1,987.40: ($500 for the essay contest prize, $550 for travel subvention and dinner for the contest winner; 674.40 for mailings; $128.40 for web-site fees; $75 dues to the Logic and Methodology section of the International Society for the Philosophy of Science, and $60.00 for a subsidized membership for CISPEC).As of December 31, 2005, the Society's assets were: $10,625.92, a decrease of $.274... (shrink)

Almost everybody has a conscience, though it may not play a dominating or even very prominent role in his life. To have a conscience is to classify some kinds of action as morally right and others as morally wrong, and to be disposed to do the former and avoid doing the latter. To judge an action as morally right or wrong is not to judge it as advantageous or disadvantageous to the agent; the motive for acting conscientiously cannot be pure (...) self-interest. It is a mark of my thinking an action morally right that I am disposed to do it even though doing it will involve me in a net loss of enjoyment or a net surplus of suffering. A man who is only disposed to do such things as he thinks will increase his happiness in the long run has no conscience. Conscience presents itself to a person as a kind of constraint which he cannot evade on the ground that it will be inconvenient to comply with it. (shrink)

The theory of punctuated equilibrium holds that long periods of morphological stasis in fossil lineages are interrupted by bursts of geologically rapid evolutionary change. Philip Kitcher’s long and distinguished career is not directly analogous to this pattern, but his philosophy exhibits stasis and change. He has both maintained a position or line of argument consistently and shifted significantly in his views. These evolutionary patterns are on display in the volume co-edited by Mark Couch and Jessica Pfeifer, both (...) of whom were advised by Kitcher though at different institutions. The Philosophy of Philip Kitcher consists of an introduction plus 11 chapters devoted to central themes in Kitcher’s oeuvre. In each chapter, distinguished colleagues offer sustained engagement with one theme followed by a succinct and magnanimous response from Kitcher. The format is illuminating and helps display the complex evolutionary dynamics in the thought of an eminent contemporary philosopher. (shrink)

Moral and legal notions engaged in clinical ethics should not only possess analytic clarity but a sound basis in empirical findings. The latter condition brings into question the expansion of the mature minor exception. The mature minor exception in the healthcare law of the United States has served to enable those under the legal age to consent to medical treatment. Although originally developed primarily for minors in emergency or quasi-emergency need for health care, it was expanded especially from the 1970s (...) in order to cover unemancipated minors older than 14 years. This expansion initially appeared plausible, given psychological data that showed the intellectual capacity of minors over 14 to recognize the causal connection between their choices and the consequences of their choices. However, subsequent psychological studies have shown that minors generally fail to have realistic affective and evaluative appreciations of the consequences of their decisions, because they tend to over-emphasize short-term benefits and underestimate long-term risks. Also, unlike most decisionmakers over 21, the decisions of minors are more often marked by the lack of adequate impulse control, all of which is reflected in the far higher involvement of adolescents in acts of violence, intentional injury, and serious automobile accidents. These effects are more evident in circumstances that elicit elevated affective responses. The advent of brain imaging has allowed the actual visualization of qualitative differences between how minors versus persons over the age of 21 generally assess risks and benefits and make decisions. In the case of most under the age of 21, subcortical systems fail adequately to be checked by the prefrontal systems that are involved in adult executive decisions. The neuroanatomical and psychological model developed by Casey, Jones, and Summerville offers an empirical insight into the qualitative differences in the neuroanatomical and neuropsychological bases of adolescent versus adult decision making. These and other data, as well as developing law bearing on the culpability of juvenile criminal offenders, argue for critically re-evaluating the expansion of the mature minor exception with regard to medical decision making, as well as in support of a rebuttable presumption in favor of treating minors as immature decisionmakers. The clinical ethics of adolescent medical decision making will need foundationally to be reconsidered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Clinical Bioethics at NIH:History and A New VisionJohn C. Fletcher (bio)On July 3, 1995, Dr. John I. Gallin, Director of the Magnuson Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), convened a one-day "Conference on the Future of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Intramural Program." Conferees included NIH officials and a panel of consultants from bioethics programs around the nation.1 The subject was the future (...) of NIH's intramural bioethics program and specifically a vision of a new multi-component program, presented by Dr. Gallin, the first speaker. Dr. Harold Varmus, Director of NIH, was there to assure his support for Dr. Gallin's vision. This author, honored to be second speaker, was invited to sketch a brief history of bioethics at NIH. The present article reviews some of this history and then reports on Dr. Gallin's proposal, points of consensus among speakers and conferees, and the search for a Chief of the Clinical Bioethics Program.History of Bioethics at NIHIt is often said that NIH is a well-kept secret as the nation's leading biomedical research facility. Also, few people know that NIH has a long history in bioethics. Some key events in that history are shown in Figure 1, beginning with two that occurred prior to the birth of bioethics. NIH made an early policy response to protect human subjects of research and to find acceptable limits for scientific freedom. The Clinical Center (CC), a 550-bed research hospital, opened in 1953. A subcommittee of the Medical Board, the Clinical Research Committee (CRC), was formed for prior group review of all studies with normal volunteers. The traditional practice was for researchers themselves to decide when studies would begin, which subjects to recruit, and whether informed consent would be sought. The CRC intervention bit into this tradition. In addition, patient studies that posed significant risks or departed widely from medical practice were reviewed by referral from the Clinical Directors of the various Institutes. Was this CRC an early institutional review [End Page 355] board (IRB)? As a guest researcher, I was permitted to observe the CRCs meetings between 1966 and 1969. It functioned much like an IRB but had no community or non-scientist members. Other IRB-like review groups undoubtedly existed prior to the CRC. Robert Levine (personal communication, September 7, 1995) recalls that Beth Israel Hospital in Boston had one in 1938. Historical research is clearly needed on the earliest forms of research review.Table 1. Bioethics at NIHEventYearClinical Research Committee1953Surgeon-General's PPO #1291966NIGMS funds Hastings Genetics Group1973OPRR's Mission1974NLM's grant to KennedyInstitute for Bibliography of Bioethics1974Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee1974STEP Series Bioethics Speakers1975Pre-IRBs at the CC1975-76Assistant for Bioethics to Director, CC1977RAC-Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee1983Lipsett Proposal (ICD)1983Liaison Group, CC1983Bioethics Program, CC1985Durable Power of Attorney for Researchwith Incapacitated Subjects1985-86NLM funds National Reference Centerfor Bioethics Literature1985National Institute for Nursing Research1986Bioethics Post-Doctoral Fellows Program1989ELSI Program1989Bioethicists on CC-IRBs1989CC-Ethics Committee1990Office of Human Subjects Research1992 [End Page 356]Between 1963 and 1967, the media exposed instances of ethically troubling research, and Beecher (1966) and Pappworth (1967) published sharp criticisms of the weak state of research ethics. In 1966, Surgeon-General William Stewart and NIH Director James Shannon issued a policy requiring local group review of all research involving human subjects before making an application for NIH peer review (Surgeon General 1966). The policy was the first in any nation to mandate ethics committees for clinical research. However, it did not apply to the NIH intramural program until Congress passed the National Research Act in 1974 (Public Law 93-348; 202, 88 Stat. 342, 1974). This lag permitted NIH intramural investigators the luxury of feeling above the norms imposed on ordinary mortals and guaranteed more resistance to the inevitable change to come. Resistance to change marked the intramural program from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s... (shrink)

The United States Supreme Court has long recognized the value of scientific evidence - especially when compared to other types of evidence such as eyewitness identifications, confessions, and informant testimony. For example, in Escobedo v. Illinois, the Court observed: “We have learned the lesson of history, ancient and modern, that a system of criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the ‘confession’ will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system (...) which depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skillful investigation.” Similarly, in Davis v. Mississippi, the Court commented:Detention for fingerprinting may constitute a much less serious intrusion upon personal security than other types of police searches and detentions. Fingerprinting involves none of the probing into an individual's private life and thoughts that marks an interrogation or search. Nor can fingerprint detention be employed repeatedly to harass any individual, since the police need only one set of each person's prints. Furthermore, fingerprinting is an inherently more reliable and effective crime-solving tool than eyewitness identifications or confessions and is not subject to such abuses as the improper line-up and the “third degree.”. (shrink)

Papers from the conference on AI Risk (published in JETAI), supplemented by additional work. --- If the intelligence of artificial systems were to surpass that of humans, humanity would face significant risks. The time has come to consider these issues, and this consideration must include progress in artificial intelligence (AI) as much as insights from AI theory. -- Featuring contributions from leading experts and thinkers in artificial intelligence, Risks of Artificial Intelligence is the first volume of collected chapters dedicated to (...) examining the risks of AI. The book evaluates predictions of the future of AI, proposes ways to ensure that AI systems will be beneficial to humans, and then critically evaluates such proposals. 1 Vincent C. Müller, Editorial: Risks of Artificial Intelligence - 2 Steve Omohundro, Autonomous Technology and the Greater Human Good - 3 Stuart Armstrong, Kaj Sotala and Sean O’Heigeartaigh, The Errors, Insights and Lessons of Famous AI Predictions - and What they Mean for the Future - 4 Ted Goertzel, The Path to More General Artificial Intelligence - 5 Miles Brundage, Limitations and Risks of Machine Ethics - 6 Roman Yampolskiy, Utility Function Security in Artificially Intelligent Agents - 7 Ben Goertzel, GOLEM: Toward an AGI Meta-Architecture Enabling Both Goal Preservation and Radical Self-Improvement - 8 Alexey Potapov and Sergey Rodionov, Universal Empathy and Ethical Bias for Artificial General Intelligence - 9 András Kornai, Bounding the Impact of AGI - 10 Anders Sandberg, Ethics and Impact of Brain Emulations 11 Daniel Dewey, Long-Term Strategies for Ending Existential Risk from Fast Takeoff - 12 Mark Bishop, The Singularity, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI -. (shrink)

Nostalgia is a fond longing for the past that has been shown to increase feelings of meaning, social connectedness, and self-continuity. Although nostalgia for personal memories provides intra- and interpersonal benefits, there may be negative consequences of group-based nostalgia on the perception and acceptance of others. The presented research examined national nostalgia, and its effects on group identification and political attitudes in the United States. In a sample of US voters, tendencies to feel personal and national nostalgia are associated with (...) markedly different emotional and attitudinal profiles. Higher levels of national nostalgia predicted both positive attitudes toward President Trump and racial prejudice, though there was no evidence of such relationships with personal nostalgia. National nostalgia most strongly predicted positive attitudes toward president Trump among those high in racial prejudice. Furthermore, nostalgia's positive relationship with racial prejudice was partially mediated by perceived outgroup threat. Results from this study will help us better understand how the experience of national nostalgia can influence attitudes and motivate political behavior. (shrink)

Mark Crooks has given a helpful discussion of Daniel Dennett's "philosophical abolition of mind," adding to the list of reasons why many philosophers jokingly say Dennett should have titled his 1991 book "Consciousness Explained Away". As Crooks argues, Dennett really is committed 'to our phenomenal experience, beliefs, desires, etc. as all being illusory in the strongest possible sense. Yet, when it comes to free will, Dennett fights hard to maintain that free will is something more than an illusion, that (...) it is a capacity our neurophysiological machinery has. Dennett's new book-like his writings on mind and consciousness-is short on argument and long on rhetoric and cute stories. And herein lies Dennett's greatest strength, to seemingly make palatable ideas that many people think stand no chance. This, however, is also his greatest weakness in that ultimately the rhetoric fails to carry the day under closer scrutiny. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Analysis of the degree of intraspecific morphological polymorphism during the evolutionary history of trilobites using an informatic approach1 provides striking evidence of a long‐suspected but previously unsubstantiated pattern: degrees of polymorphism are markedly higher in phylogenetically basal, stratigraphically early species. This unequivocal pattern prompts further exploration of the relationship between microevolutionary variance and macroevolutionary history. It demonstrates that the ‘traditional’ fossil record of skeletonized organisms can provide unique insight into questions of major evolutionary interest. BioEssays 29:1081–1084, 2007. © 2007 (...) Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

There are many passages in Plato which look as if they alluded to well-worn practices, discussions, or lessons in the Academy. As is natural with allusions, they are often marked by a puzzling brevity or oddity of expression. One need not assume that they are always conscious allusions; for every writer has moments of obscurity which are due not so much to his conclusions as to his reaching them along lines that have long been familiar to Mm. To appreciate (...) his whole meaning the reader has then to infer as best he can the writer's train of thought. I wish to suggest that the language in which Dialectic is described in the later Dialogues presupposes a particular and probably familiar method of illustrating it. This was a geometrical illustration of the rules of Division by means of a divided line. By failing to notice it readers have not been led into any important misunderstanding of the Academy's rules. But I hope it will appear that the recognition of it makes Plato's manner of describing Division intelligible to an extent that is otherwise difficult. It is only a tentative suggestion, and would perhaps not have been worth making but for the possibility that some points of interest might at the same time emerge for those who were unconvinced by it. (shrink)

There are many passages in Plato which look as if they alluded to well-worn practices, discussions, or lessons in the Academy. As is natural with allusions, they are often marked by a puzzling brevity or oddity of expression. One need not assume that they are always conscious allusions; for every writer has moments of obscurity which are due not so much to his conclusions as to his reaching them along lines that have long been familiar to Mm. To appreciate (...) his whole meaning the reader has then to infer as best he can the writer's train of thought. I wish to suggest that the language in which Dialectic is described in the later Dialogues presupposes a particular and probably familiar method of illustrating it. This was a geometrical illustration of the rules of Division by means of a divided line. By failing to notice it readers have not been led into any important misunderstanding of the Academy's rules. But I hope it will appear that the recognition of it makes Plato's manner of describing Division intelligible to an extent that is otherwise difficult. It is only a tentative suggestion, and would perhaps not have been worth making but for the possibility that some points of interest might at the same time emerge for those who were unconvinced by it. (shrink)

I’m certainly not alone in noting that the year 2011 brings, for those of us who are students of the work of Frantz Fanon, two different anniversaries. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Les damnés de la terre , Fanon’s final book and, for many, his most lasting achievement. But it also marks the fiftieth anniversary of Fanon’s death: he died, tragically young, on December 6, 1961, not long after the book’s publication. It is no (...) exaggeration to say that Les damnés de la terre was composed by Fanon from his deathbed, and that he was well aware that he was racing death as he rushed to complete the manuscript, as his publisher François Maspero remarked, “in pitiful haste.” Fanon had managed to complete it by July, although, as he told a friend, “I should have liked to have written something more.” As David Macey notes in his indispensable biography, “Fanon did see copies of his last book, but for its first readers, Les damnés de la terre was a posthumous work.” The book and Fanon’s death thus come to us bound inextricably together, fifty years later. So it would seem that we have an anniversary to celebrate (and in doing so, we would thus be celebrating the continuing relevance of a classic work, as this special issue intends us to do), but also a death to mourn. If I proceed to make a suggestion that will seem at first to be the height of perversity, let me preface it by saying that this suggestion is occasioned by what I believe to be Fanon’s greatest legacy, a legacy of unsparing intellectual and political commitment. For I want to begin by suggesting that this year brings us the mournful fact that fifty years on, Les damnés de la terre remains, in many ways, as relevant to our contemporary world as it was in 1961; but conversely, the anniversary of Fanon’s death offers us a cause for celebration. . (shrink)

This volume offers a comparative analysis of the challenges facing center-left parties in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, the European Union, Poland, and Russia. Among the questions addressed are: -If the traditional social bases of left parties are now too limited for winning in majoritarian politics, what kind of coalitions and ideas, which reach beyond those bases and yet retain them, may be effective? - If the answer to the first question is that such umbrella coalitions are too (...) torn to be workable, what is the alternative? What is gained and lost in moves toward the center or further to the left? - Is coalition politics sufficient for governance in terms of both policy and the long-term political health of a party, or must there be a central, guiding set of ideas around which coalitions are formed? - What are the inherent weaknesses of market-oriented parties against which democratic center-left parties might appeal and win? - To what extent do national histories and political cultures both provide resources for, and set constraints and limits on, what parties may creatively do with political appeals and policies? The center of political gravity differs in these countries, with the United States and United Kingdom to the right and France and Germany to the left. Neither Poland nor Russia has been able to develop a party of this kind with any political strength. These essays explore how center-left parties, positioned as they are in the electoral spectrum, cope with the challenge of establishing an ideology to distinguish themselves from center-right parties and, while remaining both moderate and progressive, or even radical, try also to capture the center of politics. Contributors are David S. Bell, Alonzo L. Hamby, Uwe Jun, Robert Ladrech, Thomas F. Remington, Hubert Tworzecki, and Mark Wickham-Jones. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Effecting AffectionThe Corporeal Ethics of Gins and ArakawaGordon C. F. Bearn (bio)No one has yet determined what the body can do …—Spinoza, Ethics, 1677, Part III, proposition 2, ScholiumWhat could be the educational relevance of an architecture designed to make its inhabitants live forever? At first, it is hard to take seriously that Madeline Gins and Arakawa, in their work Architectural Body, are trying to escape mortality. Many are (...) those who smile and say that what they call "the architectural surrounds" that they have designed and built for what they call "organisms that person" are intriguing enough, but this idea of slipping death's grip… Really. They say. Hmmm. And they clear their throats. But is it really that unusual to think that what inspires philosophical thinking is death? And insofar as death has inspired philosophy, hasn't it inspired escape—and if not escape from death itself then at least escape from its terrors? Plato's Phaedo is an early instance of this, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus is a more recent one, no less explicit in its discussion of death. Gins and Arakawa are therefore part of a long and traditional line of philosophers who's thinking never quite loses sight of death. But why are philosophers concerned with death?The reason is simple. By and large, philosophers don't like it here. They would rather be somewhere else. And what don't they like about it here? Often, almost invariably, it is becoming that bothers them. Becoming. And they don't like becoming both for existential and metaphysical reasons. Existentially, "becoming" means change. Today's friends may betray you tomorrow, or the next day. And even if they don't, they will die. And be gone. You too. Soon enough. Dead. Existentially, change and becoming ruin everything we care about—people and projects. Metaphysically, "becoming" is a threat to the dream of understanding, the dream of forming a precise [End Page 40] picture of the world. I learned this from the opening pages of Deleuze's Logic of Sense. On top of the cake, beautifully marked in currants, are the words "EAT ME," and Alice did. She ate the cake and grew taller. And what, you may wonder, is the problem with that? It happens at children's parties every day, even after eating normal cake.Common sense assumes that at any moment Alice will be a certain height, and that as the moments pass her height will increase. But this is just as if we had taken an egg-slicer to her becoming taller, turning becoming into a succession of unchanging slices of being. This egg-sliced reality is good enough for ordinary work, and it is good enough, by means of the calculus, for science and for physics. But it is not good enough for metaphysics. If at a given moment Alice is really becoming taller, then at that moment, while she is becoming, she must paradoxically be both a definite height h, and also not h. If there is becoming, then the world cannot be completely conceptually represented. And if everything is becoming, then nothing can be conceptually represented. That is the metaphysical difficulty with becoming, and so philosophers run from becoming. They run both from death and from what is beyond representation.They tend to go in either of two directions. Up or down. Either up to eternity if you are drawn to the transcendent, or down to the rough ground, the earth, if you are drawn to the ordinary. In either case, the negation implicit in becoming, whether it is the negation of life or the negation of our dreams of conceptual representation, both of these negations are themselves negated. It is the old philosophical gambit: backing by double negation into an ersatz affirmation. Gins and Arakawa join neither of these two ways of escaping becoming. But first let us see why these two negations are disappointing.Take the way up first. This is famously the technique of Plato's Phaedo. Worried that your lover or your mother or you yourself is going to die, Plato's Socrates carves out room for the eternity of the form of human... (shrink)

The territorial contraction and speaker-reduction undergone by the Welsh language during the past few centuries has resulted in its categorization by many linguists as an obsolescent language. This study illustrates that, although it is undeniably showing some signs of decline, Welsh stands in marked contrast to many previously documented cases of language death. Against this backdrop of contraction a steady revitalization is taking place. Based upon extensive fieldwork in two sociolinguistically contrasting communities, this book is the first to examine the (...) position and nature of contemporary Welsh with reference to both obsolescence-related developments and changes under way in the dialects. Jones focuses on immersion education, long heralded as the saviour of the language and, by examining the variety of Welsh being produced by immersion pupils, seeks to determine whether this claim is justified, or whether such pupils are in fact 'speaking immersion'. As well as discussing the recent linguistic change shown by contemporary Welsh within the language death framework, the author examines the ways in which the language has been standardized and their repercussions for language maintenance. By way of comparison these tensions and implications are also explored with reference to the other varieties of P-Celtic, namely Breton and Cornish. Series Information: Oxford Studies in Language Contact Series Editor: Professor Suzanne Romaine, Merton College, Oxford Series ISBN: 0-19-961466-0 Series Description: Most of the world's speech communities are multilingual, and contact between languages is thus an important force in the everyday lives of most people. Studies of language contact should therefore form an integral part of work in theoretical, social, and historical linguistics. This series makes available a collection of research monographs which present case studies of language contact around the world. As well as providing an indispensable source of data for the serious researcher, it contributes significantly to theoretical developments in the field. (shrink)

The United States Supreme Court has long recognized the value of scientific evidence – especially when compared to other types of evidence such as eyewitness identifications, confessions, and informant testimony. For example, inEscobedo v. Illinois, the Court observed: “We have learned the lesson of history, ancient and modern, that a system of criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the –confession— will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system which (...) depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skillful investigation.” Similarly, inDavis v. Mississippi, the Court commented:Detention for fingerprinting may constitute a much less serious intrusion upon personal security than other types of police searches and detentions. Fingerprinting involves none of the probing into an individual's private life and thoughts that marks an interrogation or search. Nor can fingerprint detention be employed repeatedly to harass any individual, since the police need only one set of each person's prints. Furthermore, fingerprinting is an inherently more reliable and effective crime-solving tool than eyewitness identifications or confessions and is not subject to such abuses as the improper line-up and the “third degree.”. (shrink)

Once upon a time, there were two large black boxes, A and B, connected by a long insulated copper wire. On box A there were two buttons, marked *a* and *b*, and on box B there were three lights, red, green, and amber. Scientists studying the behavior of the boxes had observed that whenever you pushed the *a* button on box A, the red light flashed briefly on box B, and whenever you pushed the *b* button on box A, (...) the green light flashed briefly. The amber light never seemed to flash. They performed a few billion trials, under a very wide variety of conditions, and found no exceptions. There seemed to them to be a causal regularity, which they conveniently summarized thus. (shrink)

David Eso and Kay Burns edition of philosopher Leo Ferraris previously unpublished 1973 manuscript brings to light a long forgotten satirical work, which, in an age of fake news, possesses renewed relevance. The editors contextualize The Earth is Flat! for the reader with a scholarly introduction and a humorous Forewarning. Author, Leo Ferrari, draws on his extensive knowledge of classical thought and its key figures to present a history of ideas that is sometimes accurate, sometimes speculative. Speculative or alternative (...) aspects of this history support his Flat Earth theme, as do a number of scientific experiments outlined, which the reader is encouraged to try. He traces the conflict between Globularist and Planoterrestrial beliefs from antiquity to his contemporary moment of the early 1970s, marked by space exploration. Later chapters chart the activities and philosophies of the Flat Earth Society of Canada, including Ferraris experience on the lecture circuit and in media platforms. The authors method is to blur the line between seriousness and humour and to show that intellectual work can also be good fun. He uses the idea of a spinning, spherical planet to symbolically represent the alienating effects of technological modernity. (shrink)

Mark C. Murphy addresses the question of how God's ethics differs from human ethics. Murphy suggests that God is not subject to the moral norms to which we humans are subject. This has immediate implications for the argument from evil: we cannot assume that an absolutely perfect being is in any way bound to prevent the evils of this world.

Recently fiction has been given a central role in the engagement in philosophical thinking, especially within an educational setting. We find many configurations of this intersection of the narrative and the philosophical and the variances among them need noting if we are to critically examine how each form works. But there remains a troubling question: can fiction really offer up philosophical ideas without failing as literature and missing the mark as philosophy? While allegories and analogies have a long (...) and fruitful history of elucidating complex philosophical ideas, philosophers have taken pains to differentiate themselves from the crafter of tales. Philosophers have tended to prefer clear and sustained thinking through rational arguments over imaginative suggestion. Fiction is not philosophy. This paper will explore the different forms that narrative-as-philosophy can take and offer an assessment of the relative merits of these stories as invitations to philosophical thinking. (shrink)

In the first book wholly concerned with divine authority, Mark C. Murphy explores the extent of God's rule over created rational beings. The author challenges the view—widely supported by theists and nontheists alike—that if God exists, then humans must be bound by an obligation of obedience to this being. He demonstrates that this view, the "authority thesis," cannot be sustained by any of the arguments routinely advanced on its behalf, including those drawn from perfect being theology, metaethical theory, normative (...) principles, and even Scripture and tradition. After exposing the inadequacies of the various arguments for the authority thesis, he develops his own solution to the problem of whether, and to what extent, God is authoritative. For Murphy, divine authority is a contingent matter: while created rational beings have decisive reason to subject themselves to the divine rule, they are under divine authority only insofar as they have chosen to allow God's decisions to take the place of their own in their practical reasoning. The author formulates and defends his arguments for this view, and notes its implications for understanding the distinctiveness of Christian ethics. (shrink)

It is often claimed that John Finnis's natural law theory is detachable from the ultimate theistic explanation that he offers in the final chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights. My aim in this paper is to think through the question of the detachability of Finnis's theistic explanation of the natural law from the remainder of his natural law view, both in Natural Law and Natural Rights and beyond. I argue that Finnis's theistic explanation of the natural law as actually (...) presented can be, without too much strain, treated as largely detachable in the way that his readers have by and large supposed it to be; indeed, Finnis's account as actually presented really amounts to no explanation of the natural law at all, theistic or otherwise, and that fact accounts in part for the ease with which Finnis's natural law view can be detached from theism of that final chapter. Nevertheless, the considerations raised in that chapter militate in favor of a much more thoroughgoing, largely nondetachable theistic account. And it is just such an account that we find Finnis affirming in the development of his views after Natural Law and Natural Rights. (shrink)

Does God's existence make a difference to how we explain morality? Mark C. Murphy critiques the two dominant theistic accounts of morality--natural law theory and divine command theory--and presents a novel third view. He argues that we can value natural facts about humans and their good, while keeping God at the centre of our moral explanations.

"_The Moment of Complexity_ is a profoundly original work. In remarkable and insightful ways, Mark Taylor traces an entirely new way to view the evolution of our culture, detailing how information theory and the scientific concept of complexity can be used to understand recent developments in the arts and humanities. This book will ultimately be seen as a classic."-John L. Casti, Santa Fe Institute, author of _Gödel: A Life of Logic, the Mind, and Mathematics_ The science of complexity accounts (...) for that inscrutable mix of chaos and order that governs our natural world. Complexity explains how networks emerge and function, how species organize into ecosystems, how stars form into galaxies, and how just a few sequences of DNA can account for so many different life forms. Recently, the idea of complexity has taken the worlds of business and politics by storm. The concept is used to account for phenomena as varied as the behavior of the stock market, the response of voting populations, and the effects of risk management. Even Disney has used complexity theory to manage crowd control at its theme parks. Given the startling development of new information technologies, we now live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change occurs faster than our ability to comprehend it. With _The Moment of Complexity_, Mark C. Taylor offers a timely map for this unfamiliar terrain opening in our midst, unfolding an original philosophy through a remarkable synthesis of science and culture. According to Taylor, complexity is not just a breakthrough scientific concept, but the defining quality of the post-Cold War era. The flux of digital currents swirling around us, he argues, has created a new network culture with its own distinctive logic and dynamic. Drawing on resources from information theory and evolutionary biology, Taylor explains the operation of complex adaptive systems in social and cultural processes and captures a whole new zeitgeist in the making. To appreciate the significance of our emerging network culture, he claims, we need not only to understand contemporary scientific and technological transformations, but also to explore the subtle influences of art, architecture, philosophy, religion, and higher education. _The Moment of Complexity_, then, is a remarkable work of cultural analysis on a scale rarely seen today. To follow its trajectory is to learn how we arrived at this critical moment in our culture, and to know where we might head in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

I offer a reading of the role of freedom in Descartes’ Meditations and other writings that sees freedom’s role in “assenting to ideas” as a matter of psychological possibility, and its role in acti...

This article is a précis of Mark C. Murphy’s _Divine Holiness and Divine Action_ (Oxford University Press, 2021), which offers an account of God’s holiness and of the difference this view of God’s holiness should make to our understanding of divine action.