Compiled by an archaeologist and philosopher of science, Science at the Frontiers: Perspectives on the History and Philosophy of Science supplements current literature in the history and philosophy of science with essays approaching the traditional problems of the field from new perspectives and highlighting disciplines usually overlooked by the canon. William H. Krieger brings together scientists from a number of disciplines to answer these questions and more in a volume appropriate for both students and academics in the field.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 273-295 [Access article in PDF] Billy Budd:Melville's Dilemma Lester H. Hunt I THE CHAIN OF EVENTS NARRATED in Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative)—how Billy is falsely accused of plotting mutiny by his Master-at-Arms, John Claggart, how Billy accidentally kills Claggart and, finally, is executed at the urging of the Captain of the Ship, Edward Fairfax Vere, despite Vere's personal (...) conviction that Billy does not deserve to be killed—is simple enough. The text itself, nonetheless, is troublesomely complex. It is a very difficult work to interpret with both honesty and confidence. Melville unflinchingly represents to us the moral horror of what Captain Vere does to Billy, and yet he also depicts Vere himself with a respect that borders on admiration. The attentive reader experiences a painful cognitive dissonance that can only be soothed by a coherent interpretation, and perhaps by a bit of philosophy.Given the way in which the text of Billy Budd emerged—it was assembled by scholars, long after Melville's death, from a confusing collection of manuscript pages he had left behind when he died—it may well be an unfinished work. It is possible that ill health and death overtook Melville before he had a chance to iron out the inconsistencies that inevitably arise as a book is written, and it is therefore also possible that some of our sense of dissonance is produced by this brute fact. 1 Whether or not this is the case, this book is, according to the view I will present here, at least very close to being coherent. The point of view it represents is actually quite appropriate to an unfinished work, and little damaged by textual indeterminateness. Billy Budd is about the inescapably dilemmatic nature of certain choices. It alleges the impossibility of resolving them in any comfortable way. Melville beckons us to [End Page 273] look through the window of Billy Budd into an abyss of undecidability, and perhaps a text that contains some chaos within itself will better serve as such a window than one that does not.The best way to begin trying to understand how we should take this work is to begin at its very beginning. The very beginning of a story is of course its title, and the title of this story, or more exactly its subtitle, tells quite literally what sort of story it is. It is an "inside" narrative. Of course, this immediately raises the question of what an inside narrative is. Inside what? Are we supposed to contrast it with an outside narrative? And what sort of story would that be?Melville does not leave us entirely without an answer to this question. Billy Budd does contain another story, one that contrasts so sharply with the main narrative that it might well be described as its opposite: it is virtually an inverted version of the book's plot. In an "authorized weekly publication" quoted at some length at the end of the book, the events of Melville's tale are briefly recounted. In this version of the story, apparently the only officially sanctioned one, Billy Budd is depicted as the ringleader of a genuine mutiny, who "vindictively stabbed" Claggart for exposing him. Claggart is motivated only by a "strong patriotic impulse" and Billy Budd by "extreme depravity."This account, Melville tells, us was written "for the most part" sincerely enough, "though the medium, partly rumor, through which the facts must have reached the writer served to deflect and in part falsify them" (1432.27-30). 2 It could be called an "outside" narrative in virtue of the fact that its author was not there and consequently was not in a position to know what actually happened. The most direct way to give literal meaning to the "inside" status of Melville's main narrative is simply to observe that it gives a view from inside the ship, from inside the Bellipotent. It represents things that were known by people who were there, and precisely because they were there.This... (shrink)

My office is in a medical building in suburban Washington, D.C. —in Bethesda, named for the Biblical healing pool. All of the offices of my building are occupied by medical specialists, representing the most sophisticated training in the application of the scientific method. Downstairs and of service to all of us is a pharmacy, looking for all the world like a research laboratory with its gleaming surface, meticulous cleanliness, micro-balances, records, reference books, and cash register. It is neatly stocked with (...) modern, physiologically-defined preparations of active, predictable drugs. Among the enzymes, hormones, antibiotics, and chemo therapeutics for neoplasm, are a few newly hatched, unfledged remedies, but most are dependable and thoroughly assayed. The intently busy, white-coated, unsentimental pharmacists serve a hard-headed group of practitioners and a neighborhood of upper-class, well-educated patients. It is disconcerting, then, to see the undersurface of this sophistication, the irrational shadows beneath the science. On the front counter of the pharmacy are displayed attractive colored advertisements and pleasantly seductive inducements to self-improvement through diet cults and foods, tranquilizers, energizers, protein supplements, happiness promisers, preparations to enhance sexuality, vitamins artfully combined, and many packeted stuffs of no rational or pretended use whatsoever. “Why,” I ask the gimlet-eyed pharmacist, “do you have this large display of ‘Il Wah Genuine Chinese Ginseng, the Miraculous Herb of Life’? Doesn't it violate your university training? Your integrity as a modernist?” “Oh,” says he, “ginseng makes you feel better! You have more energy. You can do more! Lots of athletes use it, and people who work too hard and feel exhausted. It's only $3.45 a package. The prescriptions you give me once in a while yield no profit, but I sell a lot of ginseng. I use it myself!” Bemused, I walk back to my office, wondering about the easy abandonment of rationality, and pull down a box of medicinals collected the year before at an open-air pharmacy in the riverside markets of Brazil. The box gives forth deliciously rich forest smells. The packets within contain barks, roots, seeds, all of purported medical value. Other packets have amulets, charms, and protectives. The colorful labels on some of the patent medicines invoke ancient saints and healers, and promise happiness, health, prosperity and power. The essential rationale for their use in indigenous medicine was illusive to me despite many conversations with indigenous healers, and many times I have gone through the hundreds of items trying to find the key to what Brazilian and North American people fundamentally want from a pharmacy. In both cultures, where does magic stop and science begin? Do shops in both countries vend talismans in the search for the enhanced life, and fetishes against death? How much of all drug use is ritual and inchoate expectation? How can we reduce the mystification and incrementally increase the rationality of our pharmacopeia? (shrink)

These lines come from the passage describing the mourning of the natural world following the death of Orpheus. A. D. Melville translates as follows:[‘ … ] and naiads wore,and Dryads too, their mourning robes of blackAnd hair dishevelled.’.

These lines come from the passage describing the mourning of the natural world following the death of Orpheus. A. D. Melville translates as follows: [‘ … ] and naiads wore, and Dryads too, their mourning robes of black And hair dishevelled.’.

I have three aims in this essay. I want to offer an example of an interdisciplinary historical inquiry combining literary criticism with the relatively new field of critical legal studies. I intend to use this historical inquiry to argue that the ambiguity of literary texts might better be understood in terms of an era’s social contradictions rather than in terms of the inherent qualities of literary language or rhetoric and, conversely, that a text’s ambiguity can help us expose the contradictions (...) masked by an era’s dominant ideology. I try to prove my assertion by applying my method to Herman Melville’s three most famous short works—“Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and Bill Budd, Sailor—works dealing with the law and lawyers and widely acknowledged as ambiguous.1 I will base my critical inquiry into these stories on Melville’s relationship with his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, who, while sitting as the chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts from 1830 to 1860, wrote some of the most important opinions in what Roscoe Pound has called “the formative era of American law.”2Before I get started, I should clarify what this study does not entail. By using Shaw and his legal decisions in conjunction with Melville’s fiction, I am not conducting a positivistic influence study. My method will not depend on the positivist assumption that Shaw’s legal opinions can be used to illuminate Melville’s texts only when his direct knowledge of Shaw’s opinions can be proved. Nor will I limit myself to a traditional psychoanalytic reading: my emphasis is on political and social issues, and too often these issues are deflected by translating them into psychological ones. At the same time, I recognize that critics concerned with political and social issues too often neglect questions raised by a writer’s individual situation. I compare Shaw to Melville not to reduce Melville’s politics to psychology but to prevent a political study from neglecting the political implications of psychology, to remind us—as the title of Fredric Jameson’s book The Political Unconscious reminds us—that psychological questions always have political implications. 1. See Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby,” and Billy Budd, Sailor, “Billy Budd, Sailor” and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver ; all further references to these works will be included in the text.2. See Roscoe Pound, The Formative Era of American Law . For discussions of Melville and Lemuel Shaw, see Charles Roberts Anderson, Melville in the South Seas, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature, no. 138 , pp. 432-33; Charles H. Foster, “Something in Emblems: A Reinterpretation of Moby-Dick,” New England Quarterly 34 : 3-35; Robert L. Gale, “Bartleby—Melville’s Father-in-Law,” Annali sezione Germanica, Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli 5 : 57-72; Keith Huntress, “ ‘Guinea” of White-Jacket and Chief Justice Shaw,” American Literature 43 : 639-41; Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race and Violence in Melville’s America , pp. 9-11 and 40; John Stark, “Melville, Lemuel Shaw, and ‘Bartleby,’ “ in Bartleby, the Inscrutable: A Collection of Comentary on Herman Melville’s Tale “Bartleby the Scrivener,” ed. M. Thomas Inge , all further references to this work, abbreviated JA, will be included in the text. Brook Thomas teaches English and American literature at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. He is the author of James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Book of Many Happy Returns and is at work on a study of the relations between law and literature in antebellum America. (shrink)

The "trembling balance" in Lawrence's work, considered either as theoretical system or in its phenomenological form, is characterized by the dynamic qualities of interrelatedness and flux. Cowan shows that, in Lawrence's conception, the dynamic experience of life's quickness necessarily involves giving up static equilibrium in the ebb and flow of human consciousness between self and other, bringing about a sequence of stability, instability, resilience, and creative change. Lawrence's conception of art as a recreation of the "trembling balance" of life is (...) explored in his treatment of the figure of the artist in a number of his major novels. Because his conception of art is biologically based, Lawrence locates the aesthetic balance he seeks to establish between blood consciousness and spiritual consciousness firmly in the body, most often in the imagery of the male body. Lawrence identifies with Melville, who was for him an example of the "true artist" as myth-maker, reconciling Christian and pagan consciousness in an organic symbolism rooted in unconscious experience. Cowan provides a critical study of Lawrence's dualism, dealing with ideas and issues that were intensely personal for Lawrence. (shrink)

Most work to date seeking to link CSR level and performance has treated CSR as a strictly firm level variable. It is the argument of this author that any investigation of CSR that fails to incorporate industry level realities, particularly of an economic nature, will be fatally deficient. Hypotheses are proposed, building off the work of James Post, the gravamen of which is that CSR level depends significantly on industrial and economic status. The hypotheses are tested against a currently popular (...) database and receive moderate support. (shrink)

Several defences, viewed in this study as specifications or 'offspring' of the 'parent' greater-good defence, have been formulated in response to the charge that Christianity is untenable because God's existence is incompatible with evil's existence. In this first book-length study of the parent defence, Stewart begins with careful definitions of the omni-attributes central to the dispute: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence. The parent defence is traced to tenets of theism and variant accounts of the defence considered. Plantinga's modal free-will defence and Hick's (...) and Yandell's soul-growth specifications are carefully analyzed and several difficulties resolved. An original formulation of a redemption specification and an original account of the origin of moral evil are offered. Stewart argues that the defences are rightly viewed as a family of defences falling under the greater-good heading, and that they comprise a complementary apologetic complex that refutes the claim of inconsistency. (shrink)

Robert A. Hatch - Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.3 395-397 Book Review Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century Peter N. Miller. Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. xv + 234. Cloth, $40.00. N.-C. Fabri de Peiresc was no philosopher—not by modern lights—nor does he bear much resemblance to (...) his contemporaries, Bacon, Hobbes, or Descartes. Not least, Peiresc should not be confused with his singular friend and biographer, Pierre Gassendi. Compared to these philosophers, Peiresc's thought was unsystematic, his interests undisciplined. As Peter N. Miller argues—sometimes brilliantly—Peiresc was an antiquarian. And indeed, more than any contemporary, the "Prince of Erudition" has come to epitomize the Renaissance ideal of Humanist, Scholar, and Patron. But if Peiresc was no philosopher, neither was he content to write about the "Life of Letters." Peiresc lived it—perhaps to excess—perhaps too literally. Peiresc was no philosopher because his curiosity was unbound, not least, Peiresc published nothing, nary a.. (shrink)

The Trump Administration's governance of COVID-19 racial health disparities data has become a key front in the viral war against the pandemic and racial health injustice. In this paper, I analyze how the COVID-19 pandemic joins an already ongoing racial spectacle and system of structural gaslighting organized around “racial health disparities” in the United States and globally. The field of racial health disparities has yet to question the domain assumptions that uphold its field of investigation; as a result, the entire (...) reform program called for by racial health disparities science is already featured on the menu of the white supremacist power structure. The societal infrastructure that produces scientific knowledge about patterns of health and disease in the human population needs to confront its structural position as part of the racial spectacle organized around racial health disparities in the United States. This paper offers an interpretation of racial antimatter to explain why the data will not save us in the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing on articulations of racial spectacle and structural gaslighting within critical race theory and Afropessimist thought. By positioning events in the COVID-19 pandemic together within the same racially speculative frame, I show how the collection of racial health disparities data came up against white supremacists’ political ambitions in a time-space where the demand for human life to matter and the iterative regeneration of racial antimatter collided. This paper highlights the need for ongoing analysis of the unfolding and future spectacles organized around racial health disparities. (shrink)

Unity in government -- The family in English history -- Medieval English sovereignty -- The old jury -- Becket and the law.

`Therefore this terror and darkness of the mind Not by the sun's rays, nor the bright shafts of day, Must be dispersed, as is most necessary, But by the face of nature and her laws.' Lucretius' poem On the Nature of the Universe combines a scientific and philosophical treatise with some of the greatest poetry ever written. With intense moral fervour Lucretius demonstrates to humanity that in death there is nothing to fear since the soul is mortal, and the world (...) and everything in it is governed not by the gods, but by the mechanical laws of nature. By believing this, men can live in peace of mind and happiness. Lucretius bases his argument on the atomic theory expounded by the Greek philosopher Epicurus. His poem explores sensation, sex, cosmology, meteorology, and geology through acute observation of the beauties of the natural world and with moving sympathy for man's place in it. Sir Ronald Melville's accessible and accurate verse translation is complemented by an introduction and notes situating Lucretius' scientific theories within the thought of 1st century BCE Rome and discussing the Epicurean philosophy that was his inspiration and why the issues Lucretius' poem raisies about the scientific and poetical views of the world continue to be important. (shrink)