This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

The twenty volumes of the Robinet edition of the Oeuvres complètes de Malebranche contain a breadth, depth, and complexity of systemic metaphysical thinking that rivals that of any of the Modern philosophers. Yet there is no readily available translation in English of any of the works of Malebranche. This situation is a scandal of linguistic parochialism and textbook conservatism. Besides that, Malebranche is hard. Only four booklength studies have been attempted in English on the Malebranchean system in recent times: (...) class='Hi'>Ralph Withington Church’s A Study in the Philosophy of Malebranche, Beatrice K. Rome’s The Philosophy of Malebranche, Craig Walton’s De la recherche de bien: A Study of Malebranche’s Science of Ethics, and now Daisie Radner’s historical/analytical study, Malebranche. In my estimation, this last is the best. Radner places Malebranche firmly in "The Cartesian Framework" and then provides comprehensive and concise expositions and interpretations in her six remaining chapters on the major Malebranchean themes: "Causality: The Doctrine of Occasionalism," "Vision in God," "Four Ways of Knowing," "Intelligible Extension," "The Polemic Concerning Ideas," "Will and Method." Her text is clean, and some of the arguments are elegantly expressed. Large amounts of Malebranchean metaphysics are distilled into detailed expositions compactly conveyed in a few pages. The substance of Malebranche’s critics and previous interpreters is chiseled down unmercifully, but is always fair. What remains is a solid, balanced précis of the essential content and structure of Malebranche’s highly original metaphysical system. (shrink)

As a student and collaborator of Louis Agassiz on the study of fishes, F. W. Putnam gave promise of becoming a leading ichthyologist with special interest in taxonomy generally and the Etheostomidae in particular. While he was noted briefly in these fields, contributed a number of minor papers, and aided in the posthumous publications of some of Agassiz's work on fishes, he neither reached his original goal nor completed his major projected works. For in 1874 he switched careers and was (...) appointed Curator of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and is remembered today primarily as a founder of American archaeology rather than as a systematic ichthyologist. (shrink)

In replying to Jay Schleusener, I have also answered many of the objections put less abstractly, though often more sharply, by Stanley Fish. For instance, Fish's assertion that my category of unintended negative consequences "will be filled by whatever does not accord with what Rader has decreed to be the positive constructive intention" is essentially the same charge brought by Schleusener and requires no further substantive answer than I have already offered here and, for that matter, in my original essay. (...) I would point out, however, that in this remark as elsewhere Fish loads his statements with inaccurate pejoratives: I do not decree but postulate the positive constructive intention and test it for explanatory adequacy by deduction open at every point to the counterdemonstration of fallacy. I would point out also that, in making this charge, he operates under different explanatory standards from those he adopts elsewhere. The statement quoted imputes to my theory as a special defect the fact of its supposedly self-fulfilling and nonfalsifiable character, whereas later Fish clearly asserts that all interpretations including his own are necessarily self-confirming. Ralph W. Rader has written Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. Among his influential articles are "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson" and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies." He is professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" , "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms", and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks". (shrink)

Nanotechnology, as with many technologies before it, places a strain on existing legislation and poses a challenge to all administrative agencies tasked with regulating technology-based products. It is easy to see how statutory schemes become outdated, as our ability to understand and affect the world progresses. In this article, we address the regulatory problems that nanotechnology posses for the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) classification structure for ‘‘drugs’’ and ‘‘devices.’’ The last major modification to these terms was in 1976, with (...) the enactment of the Medical Device Amendments. There are serious practical differences for a classification as a drug or device in terms of time to market and research. Drugs are classified, primarily, as acting by ‘‘chemical action.’’ We lay out some legal, philosophic, and scientific tools that serve to provide a useful, as well as legally and scientifically faithful, distinction between drugs and devices for the purpose of regulatory classification. These issues we raise are worth the consideration of anyone who is interested in the regulation of nano-products or other novel technologies. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to present the major factors that lead to ethical dissolution in an organization. Specifically, drawing from a wide spectrum of sources, this study explores the impact of organizational, individual, and contextual factors that converge to contribute to ethical dissolution. Acknowledging that ethical decisions are, in the final analysis, made by individuals, this study presents a model of ethical dissolution that gives insight into how a variety of elements coalesce to draw individuals into decisions that (...) result in the ethical undoing of an otherwise healthy organization. ENRON, TYCO and WorldCom did not happen in a vacuum. Nor can such debacles be explained as simply one or two individuals who were morally corrupt. The ethical breakdowns that occurred in these companies happened over a period of time, involved numerous individuals both inside and outside of the organization, and brought about the implosion of viable companies. Seeking to extend the work of previous researchers, this study attempts to tie together a disparate set of factors into a cohesive explanation of ethical breakdowns in organizations. (shrink)

We are free to get our theories where we will. As Einstein said, the emergence of a theory is like an egg laid by a chicken, "auf einmal ist es da.1" In practice theories are usually derived as improvements on earlier theories, as better tools are refinements of earlier, cruder ones; and they are directed explanatorily not at the facts of their own construction but at independently specifiable facts which, left unexplained by earlier theories, have therefore refuted them. A new (...) theory should cogently and directly explain all that its predecessors explain and in addition those particular facts which they conspicuously do not explain. The ideal is to have the simplest possible premises explaining most precisely the widest possible range of problematical facts. · 1. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times , p.173 n. Ralph W. Rader has written Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. Among his influential articles are "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson" and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-Century Studies." He is professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" , "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms", and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks". (shrink)

The most distinctive and highly valued poems of the modern era offer an image of a dramatized "I" acting in a concrete setting. The variety and importance of the poems which fall under this description are suggested simply by the mention of such names as "Elegy Written in a Country Courtyard," "Tintern Abbey," "Ode to a Nightingale," "Ulysses," "My Last Duchess," "Dover Beach," "The Windhover," "The Darkling Thrush," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," "The Love Song of J. Alfred (...) Prufrock," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The power and beauty of such poems seems intimately connected with the fact of their dramatic integrity and autonomy, and we have all been taught, in analyzing them, to refer to a "speaker" existing independent of the poet and to avoid the "intentional" and "biographical" fallacies which spuriously link the poem to the poet and the world outside the poem. Such an approach tends to undercut any notion that a poem has a single definite meaning, the meaning the poet gave it, and to support the idea that the meaning of a poem is indeterminate and/or multiple. All this is quite in accord with the orthodox critical doctrine that poetic language is differentiated from scientific language and preserved from competition with it by the fact that it is nonreferential, making no claim upon the real world; and complex, indefinite, and alogical, where scientific language is simple, definite, and logical. Ralph W. Rader is chairman of the department of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" , "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" , and "The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks" . Professor Rader's influential studies include Tennyson's "Maud": The Biography Genesis, "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson," and "The Concept of Genre and Eighteenth-century Studies.". (shrink)

“O, rocks!” Molly exclaims in impatience with Bloom’s first definition of metempsychosis, “tell us in plain words” . Looking forward, then, we remember that Bloom asks Murphy if he has seen the Rock of Gibraltar and asks further what year that would have been and if Murphy remembers the boats that plied the strait. “I’m tired of all them rocks in the sea,” replies Murphy . Bloom’s interest derives from Molly’s connection with Gibraltar, and Molly herself in her monologue remembers (...) the boats well and thinks of missing the boat at Algeciras , just before the book ends with her thoughts of the awful deepdown torrent,” the tide that moves like a river through the strait. Imaginatively she moves with that torrent, figuratively the torrent of time that plunges from the future to the past, which she accepts, with her yes, going deeply with the flow of life, and with her goes Murphy/Joyce, touching on Gibraltar at last. Molly remembers Ulysses S. Grant getting off a boat in Gibraltar, an occurrence that Adams sees as unduly stretching probability merely in order to bring Molly in incidental touch with a man named Ulysses.19 But remembering that Murphy is a “wily old customer,” we may remember also that the Ulysses of Joyce’s favorite Dante cannot rest with Penelope but, in search of knowledge and excellence, moves on through the two rocks of the straits of Gibraltar, the pillars of Hercules, to further adventure and also to destruction; and we may then think that with this reference, Joyce took pains to tell us that the Ulysses of this book here completes in hidden climax the design and purpose of his work, and sails on to oblivion, or rather to dispersion and reconstitution as everyone in the new adventure of Finnegans Wake. 19. See Adams, Surface and Symbol, p. 233. Ralph W. Rader, professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Tennyson’s “Maud”: The Biographical Genesis. He is currently working on a theoretical study of form in the novel and other genres. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry include “The Literary Theoretical Contribution of Sheldon Sacks” and “The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms”. (shrink)

Behind all of Sheldon Sacks' writing and teaching lay an intense belief in the objectivity of literary experience and our capacity to achieve a shared conceptual understanding of the forms which underlie it. Literary criticism for him was not the critic's unique and unrepeatable performance but a serious inquiry—a critical inquiry—seeking explicit and precise explanatory concepts which others could grasp, test, and build upon. His effort was to show that we could in significant measure understand and explain literature and its (...) value as standing independent of our understanding and explanation, and it was this double emphasis on the real being of literature and the possibility of valid conceptualization of it which gave his thought its appeal for those whom it influences. His creative constitution—and the length and circumstances of his life—were such as to allow only the one sustained effort of Fiction and the Shape of Belief and a series of articles in which he modified and expanded the application of the ideas developed therein. Yet in this relatively small body of work he revised and extended the ideas of the Chicago School within which he worked so as to achieve what seem to me genuine advances in the explicit conception of novelistic forms—what might be called portable ideas, sharp and definite enough to be adopted and used and in their turn revised and redefined by others; this sets them apart from much critical work and marks their value and his intention. Ralph W. Rader, chairman of the department of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of Tennyson's "Maud": The Biographical Genesis. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "Fact, Theory, and Literary Explanation" , "Explaining Our Literary Understanding: A Response to Jay Schleusener and Stanley Fish" , and "The Dramatic Monologue and Related Lyric Forms". (shrink)

It is not the details in the account of the tabernacle that make up its significance but the underlying notion that God elects to be present with God's people. In both the ritual of liturgy and the commonality of daily life, God's presence is an act of grace, made in sovereign freedom.

The study compares Canadian and U.S. marketing researchers' attitudes, perceptions and intentions related to several areas of ethical concern. A particular focus involves salience of norms common to marketing research codes of ethics (COEs) and familiarity of such codes to marketing research professionals. Researchers' attitudes towards today's ethical climate are identified and compared between the two countries. Relationships are examined between familiarity, ethical intention and salience. Results indicate that U.S. and Canadian marketing researchers have similar perceptions of the relative importance (...) of specific ethical norms, but worldwide COEs do not reflect these perceptions. Canadian marketing researchers report having a greater familiarity with their firms' adopted COEs, but this finding is moderated by the type of researcher. Among other findings, results indicate that familiarity influences ethical intention only for highly salient issues. (shrink)

When considering the interactions between rhetoric and argumentation, readers of this journal will no doubt be reminded of the seminal work of Henry W. Johnstone Jr. (1959; 1978) who gathered both concerns together in ways that were designed to engage philosophers and persuade them of the intellectual seriousness of both enterprises. He was, of course, a principal force among those who brought Chaïm Perelman’s work to the attention of audiences in North America, and he himself entered into deep and fruitful (...) dialogues with Perelman by way of reviewing the value that rhetoric brought to argumentation and logic, as well as to philosophy generally. His interest in philosophical argumentation prompted an early .. (shrink)

Late antiquity was a crucial period for the development of the Christian church. Christianity went from a persecuted to a favored religion; and after a period of internecine struggle, Nicene-Chalcedonian Christianity prevailed as orthodoxy throughout the Mediterranean world. Ancient sources and modern studies dealing with this period are replete with discussions of the church as it developed within the territorial confines of the Roman Empire. But both virtually ignore the barbarian churches that existed during the fourth through the sixth centuries, (...) which were often heterodox and, initially, located beyond the imperial frontiers. (shrink)

While the members of the school of Logical Empiricism may differ in various details, nearly all of them are opposed to metaphysics on the ground that a scientific metaphysics is the only possible one. All philosophy is to become scientific. This assumption is based on their epistemological criterion of verifiability which appears to be a basic doctrine of this school. The implications of this doctrine have not been worked out in detail by many, but one of the most explicit accounts (...) has been given by A. J. Ayer in his book on Language, Truth and Logic, which can be taken as a representative work in its attack on metaphysics. (shrink)

We describe a novel affect-inspired mechanism to improve the performance of computational systems operating in dynamic environments. In particular, we designed a mechanism that is based on aspects of the fear response in humans to dynamically reallocate operating system-level central processing unit (CPU) resources to processes as they are needed to deal with time-critical events. We evaluated this system in the MINIX® and Linux® operating systems and in three different testing environments (two simulated, one live). We found the affect-based system (...) was not only able to react more rapidly to time-critical events as intended, but since the dynamic processes for handling these events did not need to use significant CPU when they were not in time-critical situations, our simulated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was able to perform even non-emergency tasks at a higher level of efficiency and reactivity than was possible in the standard implementation. (shrink)

Hume's sceptical arguments regarding induction have not yet been successfully answered. However, I shall not in this paper discuss the important attempts to answer Hume since that would be too lengthy a task. On the supposition that Hume's sceptical arguments have not been met, the empirical world is a place where, as the popular metaphor goes, all the glue has been removed. For the Humean sceptic, the only empirical knowledge that we can have is given to us in immediate perception. (...) We have no reason to believe that the patterns of future events will in any way resemble patterns of events in the present or past. We have no reason to believe even that present events not observed resemble present events that are observed, or that knowledge of past and present can be any guide in making new discoveries about what took place in the past. What we have is an ideal setting for the calculation of a priori probabilities. We have a field of distinct events having no logical or evidential ties to one another. The attempt to justify induction that I wish to present is an appeal to a priori probability. (shrink)

This article evaluates the oversight of drugs and medical devices by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration using an integration of public policy, law, and bioethics approaches and employing multiple assessment criteria, including economic, social, safety, and technological. Throughout, assessments employing both the multiple criteria and a method of expert elicitation are combined with the existing literature, case law, and regulations providing an integrative historical case study approach. The goal is to provide useful information from multiple disciplines and perspectives to (...) guide discussions regarding appropriate oversight frameworks for nanobiotechnology applications under the FDA’s purview. (shrink)

This article evaluates the oversight of drugs and medical devices by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration using an integration of public policy, law, and bioethics approaches and employing multiple assessment criteria, including economic, social, safety, and technological. Criteria assessment and expert elicitation are combined with existing literature, case law, and regulations in an integrative historical case studies approach. We then use our findings as a tool to explore possibilities for effective oversight and regulatory mechanisms for nanobiotechnology. Section I describes (...) oversight mechanisms for human drugs and medical devices and presents current nanotechnology products. Section II describes the results of expert elicitation research. Section III highlights key criteria and relates them to the literature and larger debate. We conclude with broad lessons for the oversight of nanobiotechnology informed by Sections I-III in order to provide useful analysis from multiple disciplines and perspectives to guide discussions regarding appropriate FDA oversight. (shrink)

The phrase "identity in difference" has been regarded by some thinkers as a matter of mere mystery-mongering. How can differences nevertheless be identical? The phrase is transparently absurd.

Hume's sceptical arguments regarding induction have not yet been successfully answered. However, I shall not in this paper discuss the important attempts to answer Hume since that would be too lengthy a task. On the supposition that Hume's sceptical arguments have not been met, the empirical world is a place where, as the popular metaphor goes, all the glue has been removed. For the Humean sceptic, the only empirical knowledge that we can have is given to us in immediate perception. (...) We have no reason to believe that the patterns of future events will in any way resemble patterns of events in the present or past. We have no reason to believe even that present events not observed resemble present events that are observed, or that knowledge of past and present can be any guide in making new discoveries about what took place in the past. What we have is an ideal setting for the calculation of a priori probabilities. We have a field of distinct events having no logical or evidential ties to one another. The attempt to justify induction that I wish to present is an appeal to a priori probability. (shrink)

In this article i defend the claim that an individual is no more and no less than a bundle of instances of properties against the following objections: (1) the concept of an instance of a property presupposes the concept of an individual. i argue that it presupposes only that no instance of a property exists independently of other instances. (2) if a thing were only a bundle of instances of properties, then properties would qualify properties. this objection commits the fallacy (...) of composition. (3) a bundle constituting an individual needs a component which is not a property to individuate it. i argue that such a bundle individuates itself. (4) the bundle theory makes change impossible. i argue against this claim by distinguishing a thing's numerical identity from its "complete" identity. (5) the bundle theory makes all true statements about individuals analytically true. i show that, at least for one interpretation of 'analytically true', this is not so. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)