Ross Poole displays the social content of the various conceptions of morality at work in contemporary society, and casts a strikingly fresh light on such fundamental problems as the place of reason in ethics, moral objectivity and the distinction between duty and virtue. The book provides a critical account of the moral theories of a number of major philosophers, including Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Habermas, Rawls, Gewirth and MacIntyre. It also presents a systematic critique of three of the most significant responses (...) to modernity: liberalism, nationalism and nihilism. It takes seriously the suggestion that men and women are subject to different conceptions of morality, and places the issue of gender at the centre of moral philosophy. Poole has written a valuable addition to the Ideas series. (shrink)

Provides an integrated introduction to artificial intelligence. Develops AI representation schemes and describes their uses for diverse applications, from autonomous robots to diagnostic assistants to infobots. DLC: Artificial intelligence.

Nation and Identity provides a concise and comprehensive account of the place of national identity in modern life. Ross Poole argues that the nation became a fundamental organising principle of social, political and moral life during the period of early modernity and that is has provided the organising principle of much liberal, republican and democratic thought. Ross Poole offers us a new and urgently needed analysis of the concept of identity, arguing that we are now in a position to envisage (...) the end of nationalism. We see that the impact of issues like multiculturalism, republicanism, and indigenous rights have made it very difficult to see how the possibility of a postnational cosmopolitanism could not degenerate into a nihilistic moral universe. Nation and Identity will be a fascinating read for all those interested in issues of national identity, both politically and philosophically. (shrink)

Prokaryotes are generally assumed to be the oldest existing form of life on earth. This assumption, however, makes it difficult to understand certain aspects of the transition from earlier stages in the origin of life to more complex ones, and it does not account for many apparently ancient features in the eukaryotes. From a model of the RNA world, based on relic RNA species in modern organisms, one can infer that there was an absolute requirement for a high-accuracy RNA replicase (...) even before proteins evolved. In addition, we argue here that the ribosome (together with the RNAs involved in its assembly) is so large that it must have had a prior function before protein synthesis. A model that connects and equates these two requirements (high-accuracy RNA replicase and prior function of the ribosome) can explain many steps in the origin of life while accounting for the observation that eukaryotes have retained more vestiges of the RNA world. The later derivation of prokaryote RNA metabolism and genome structure can be accounted for by the two complementary mechanisms of r-selection and thermoreduction. BioEssays 21:880–889, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Two problems involving Thucydides and medicine have attracted intense treatment by classical scholars and medical men working separately or in combination. They are, first, the nature of the Athenian Plague which Thucydides describes and, second, the possibility of his having been influenced by the doctrines and outlook of Hippocrates and his followers. It is the purpose of the present paper to reconsider both these problems, to indicate some false assumptions made in the methodology of previous attempts to identify the Plague, (...) and to suggest a somewhat radical revaluation of Thucydides' approach to medical matters compared with that of Hippocrates. (shrink)

Numerous scenarios explain the origin of the eukaryote cell by fusion or endosymbiosis between an archaeon and a bacterium (and sometimes a third partner). We evaluate these hypotheses using the following three criteria. Can the data be explained by the null hypothesis that new features arise sequentially along a stem lineage? Second, hypotheses involving an archaeon and a bacterium should undergo standard phylogenetic tests of gene distribution. Third, accounting for past events by processes observed in modern cells is preferable to (...) postulating unknown processes that have never been observed. For example, there are many eukaryote examples of bacteria as endosymbionts or endoparasites, but none known in archaea. Strictly post‐hoc hypotheses that ignore this third criterion should be avoided. Applying these three criteria significantly narrows the number of plausible hypotheses. Given current knowledge, our conclusion is that the eukaryote lineage must have diverged from an ancestor of archaea well prior to the origin of the mitochondrion. Significantly, the absence of ancestrally amitochondriate eukaryotes (archezoa) among extant eukaryotes is neither evidence for an archaeal host for the ancestor of mitochondria, nor evidence against a eukaryotic host. BioEssays 29: 74–84, 2007. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This paper questions the assumption that the term 'person' designates what we essentially are or ought to be. I use Hegel to argue against Locke and Kant that personal identity is not the foundation of certain legal and moral practices but their effect; and Nietzsche to suggest that being a person is the price we pay for certain kinds of social life. The concept of a person is an abstraction from our human and embodied existence, and to assume that it (...) picks out what is central to our existence makes it impossible to understand the moral significance of birth, growth, dependence, sexuality, procreation and death. (shrink)

An important role of memory, both individual and collective, is to remind us of what we owe to the past. To understand this role, we need to conceive memory not merely in cognitive terms, but also as what Nietzsche called "memory of the will." It is this "conative" aspect of memory which explains the link between memory and identity. There still remain problems of how to explain how a collective memory "of the will" is transmitted over long periods of time, (...) and how to explain certain familiar pathologies . In the later parts of the paper, I look at Jan Assmann's important contributions to this question. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Neo-Idealist Reception of Kant in the Moscow Psychological SocietyRandall A. Poole*The Moscow Psychological Society, founded in 1885 at Moscow University, was the philosophical center of the revolt against positivism in the Russian Silver Age. By the end of its activity in 1922 it had played the major role in the growth of professional philosophy in Russia. 1 The Society owes its name to its founder, M. M. Troitsky (...) (1835–99), an empiricist psychologist. Although it sponsored significant psychological research, its greater importance in the history of Russian philosophy began to emerge already in 1888, when Nikolai Ia. Grot (1852–99) took over as director. Grot’s principal colleagues in the affairs of the Society included the major Russian idealist philosophers Vladimir S. Solov’ev (1853–1900), Sergei N. Trubetskoi (1862–1905), and Lev M. Lopatin (1855–1920). In 1889 the Psychological Society began publication of Russia’s first regular, specialized journal in philosophy, Questions of Philosophy and Psychology (Voprosy Filosofii i Psikhologii). Grot characterized the journal’s prevailing direction as idealist or, “in respect to method, metaphysical.” 2While the cultural revival of the Silver Age mounted a broad-based revolt against positivism, neo-idealist philosophy in the Psychological Society was distinctive in the theoretical depth of its critique. Positivism was remarkably pervasive [End Page 319] in Russia from the middle of the nineteenth century. The main characteristics of this positivist Weltanschauung were reductionism, which dismissed as a meaningless proposition (neither analytic nor empirical) the possibility of being beyond the positively-given data of sense experience, i.e., phenomena in space and time; scientism, the claim, consistent with the positivist reduction of being to natural phenomena, that the methodology of the natural sciences covered eve-rything; and utopianism, the hope that the application of natural scientific methods to man and society would make human existence as regular and well-ordered as nature. 3 The defining trait was reductionism or, in other words, naturalism or atheism: the reduction of being to nature. In ethics, epistemology, ontology, and social philosophy neo-idealism emerged as a response to these characteristics. Its development by philosophers in the Psychological Society, apart from comprising a basic chapter in the history of Russian thought, informs the European-wide revolt against positivism characteristic of fin-de-siècle culture.According to scientistic positivism, philosophy had no distinctive methodology and thus no legitimate right to exist as its own type of scientific (nauchnyi or wissenschaftlich) discipline. Empirical sciences were the only sciences; philosophy could at best serve as a field that systematized empirical research. Against these claims Russian neo-idealists sought to advance the autonomy of philosophy by showing that the positivist measure of reality was far from exhaustive and that what it did not exhaust comprised the domain of philosophy. This domain was human consciousness itself, to the extent it could be shown to be irreducible to empirical experience (the positivist sphere). Neo-idealism thus took shape as a type of philosophy of consciousness. In the inaugural issue of Questions of Philosophy and Psychology S. N. Trubetskoi published the first installment of a large essay bearing the title, “On the Nature of Human Consciousness.” “The question of the nature of consciousness is the principal question of philosophy, not only of psychology,” Trubetskoi wrote, “for in consciousness we know everything that we know.” 4 Trubetskoi and his colleagues in the Psychological Society were convinced that philosophy had to develop through specification of its own internal standards and through autonomization from the spurious criteria positivism applied externally to it. Their goal was to match, in theoretical rigor, the professionalism associated with the natural sciences by making philosophy “scientific,” but on idealist, not empirical grounds. [End Page 320]The Kantian Critique of PositivismIn their defense of the self against positivist reductionism and naturalism, neo-idealists of the Psychological Society were deeply indebted to Kant, in both epistemology and moral philosophy. This claim revises the traditional view that Russian philosophy developed without significant assistance from Kant. 5In two ways Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason defends the minimal idealist claim that not everything intellectual can be reduced to the natural (sensible or psychological), that consciousness cannot... (shrink)

This article charts the rise of a new, and increasingly influential, theory of public law: common law constitutionalism. The theory can best be seen as a response to a ‘crisis’ within contemporary public law thought produced by an array of different pressures: Thatcherite reformation of the state; the growing prominence (and potential politicization) of judicial review; constitutionalization of the EU; and trends towards globalization. The core of argument underlying the theory is elucidated by means of an analysis of the work (...) of a number of leading public law scholars. The essence of the theory is the reconfiguration of public law as a species of constitutional politics centred on the common law court. The theory constitutes, it is suggested, an attempt to turn inwards, in the face of change, towards the familiar form of the common law, reinvigorated as a burgeoning site of normativity. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractYeast mitochondria frequently mutate, and some dysfunctional mitochondria out-compete wild-type versions. The retrograde response enables yeast to tolerate dysfunction, but also produces ribosomal DNA circles (ERCs). We propose that ERC accumulation increases expression of the rDNA antisense gene, TAR1, which counteracts spread of respiration-deficient mitochondria in matings with wild-type yeast.

This essay is an explication and analysis of the work of Sergei Kotliarevskii, a major Russian liberal theorist, focusing on his 1915 treatise Vlast’ i pravo. Problema pravovogo gosudarstva (Power and Law: The Problem of the Lawful State). Although the “lawful state” has long been a subject of interest and controversy (even at the definitional level) among historians and political scientists, curiously Kotliarevskii has not received the attention he deserves. His study of the concept of the lawful state, which for (...) him was integrally related to the ideal of the rule of law, is an important Russian contribution to the history and philosophy of law and the state. This essay explores the philosophical sources and contexts of his work; his understanding of the relationship among power, law, and thestate; his thesis that religious ideas and institutions were most important in the historical development of legal consciousness; his consideration of the modern constitutional state; and his conviction that personhood—the absolute value and dignity of the human person—was the ultimate justification for the rule of law. (shrink)

This essay is an explication and analysis of the work of Sergei Kotliarevskii, a major Russian liberal theorist, focusing on his 1915 treatise Vlast’ i pravo. Problema pravovogo gosudarstva (Power and Law: The Problem of the Lawful State). Although the “lawful state” has long been a subject of interest and controversy (even at the definitional level) among historians and political scientists, curiously Kotliarevskii has not received the attention he deserves. His study of the concept of the lawful state, which for (...) him was integrally related to the ideal of the rule of law, is an important Russian contribution to the history and philosophy of law and the state. This essay explores the philosophical sources and contexts of his work; his understanding of the relationship among power, law, and thestate; his thesis that religious ideas and institutions were most important in the historical development of legal consciousness; his consideration of the modern constitutional state; and his conviction that personhood—the absolute value and dignity of the human person—was the ultimate justification for the rule of law. (shrink)

“Scaldic verses,” said Gabriel Turville-Petre, “can tell us little about the history of England, but the history of England may give us confidence in the authenticity of some scaldic verses.” A similar skepticism was voiced by Alistair Campbell.

The vector product method developed in previous articles for space rotations and Lorentz transformations is extended to the cases of four-vectors, anti-symmetric tensors, and their transformations in Minkowski space. The electromagnetic fields are expressed in “six-vector” form using the notationH +iE, and this vector form is shown to be relativistically invariant. The wave equations of electromagnetism are derived using these vector products. The following three equations are deduced, which summarize electrodynamics in a compact form: (1) Maxwell's four equations expressed as (...) one, (2) the scalar and vector potential wave equations combined into one relation, and (3) the wave equations for the electric and magnetic fields and the continuity equation combined together. Space inversion, time reversal, and magnetic monopoles are also treated. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.