The book compares modern Jewish and Hindu thought through discussing selected writers with reference to common issues treated by them, issues which are still relevant today. The writers are Mahatma Gandhi, Max Nordau, A.D. Gordon, Martin Buber, Sri Aurobindo, Rav Kook and Rabindranath Tagore. The issues include the following: the critique of civilisation, the concept of labour, self-definition vis-a-vis 'east' and 'west', the pursuit of 'realisation' either individually or collectively, the use of evolution as a resource concept, and the critique (...) of nationalism which ran parallel to its pursuit. (shrink)
An outdated geography supplies the bond among the thirty‐one articles in Sur les traces des Cassini. In the seventeenth century, when the Italians Gian Domenico Cassini and his nephew Giacomo Filippo Maraldi were born in Perinaldo, north of Genoa, their birthplace belonged to the County of Nice. Hence the rationale of building a set of papers on astronomy in the south of France around Cassini I and his family, which for four generations ran the Royal Observatory in Paris.Over half the (...) articles concern the Cassinis, mostly Cassini I and his great‐great‐grandson and namesake Cassini IV. There was also a Cassini V, Henri de Cassini, who countered the family genius and stamina by preferring botany and dying early, of the same outbreak of cholera that took the life of Sadi Carnot, without having created Cassini VI. He had already entered the Academy of Sciences with a push from his father. “I dare to beg of you [Cassini IV wrote to his fellow academician A. M. Ampère] to consider whether this unique situation in the history of letters, [a family's] devotion to the sciences for five successive generations and 170 years, ought not add some weight to the scientific credentials of my son.” It is hard to refuse the children of important alumni.The portion of Traces dealing more directly with astronomy in the south of France gets off to a distant start. Pytheas of Marseilles, who lived about 350 b.c., sailed to the Orkneys and the Baltic and earned himself the reputation of a liar back home for his stories of midnight suns and frozen lakes. He measured the latitude of Marseilles, the obliquity of the ecliptic, and the size of the earth. Ptolemy praised him. Strabo did not: “Pytheas lied about everything and covered it up with his knowledge of astronomy and numbers.”No traces worth following up were laid down for just under two thousand years. Then, in 1580, Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc first saw the light of day. He lived in Italy for four years as a very young man, deepening his knowledge of astronomy and human nature and meeting the main future actors in the Galileo affair: Galileo himself, Bellarmine, and Matteo Barberini . At his center in Aix‐la‐Provence, Peiresc made many useful astronomical observations, some in collaboration with Pierre Gassendi. He died in harness, worrying about the change of the obliquity since the days of Pytheas.There follow articles on Provençal astronomers who determined longitude and latitude at sea, on neglected observers in Languedoc who assisted the cause of the Enlightenment, and on modern observatories in the south of France. The political circumstances after the defeat of 1870–1871 favored decentralization of astronomy away from the Paris Observatory. In Italy, too, recent political events—the unification of 1870—made a restructuring of astronomical institutions desirable and possible. But whereas France had too few observatories, Italy had too many. Georges Rayet and Pietro Tacchini, both astrophysicists, compared the circumstances in their countries and made mutually reinforcing proposals to their colleagues and governments. Their respective proposals, most of which were enacted, called for reassigning some Italian observatories to meteorological work, building new observatories in Besançon, Bordeaux, and Lyon, and refurbishing older ones at Marseilles and Toulouse. Once again, as in the days of Cassini I, Italy made a decisive contribution to the practice of astronomy in France.Sur les traces des Cassini mixes slight and weighty work, admits antiquarian and broader approaches, offers new documentation, displays pertinent illustrations, and does it all at a high level of scholarship. Since, because of its title, the book's primary audience probably will be people interested in the Cassinis, its fullest articles about them may usefully be mentioned here: Anna Cassini on Cassini's brief return to Italy, 1694–1696; Claude Teillet on the provincial life and poetry of Cassini IV; Christiane Demeulenaere‐Douyère on the Cassinis and the Académie des Sciences; Fabrizio Bonoli and Alessandro Braccesi on Cassini I's astronomical work in Bologna, with full bibliography; and Monique Pelletier on the Cassini map of France, on which she has written a book . Pytheas and Peiresc are the subjects of collaborative articles by Simone Arzano and Yvon Georgelin. (shrink)
For the past thirty years, Hal Foster has pushed the boundaries of cultural criticism, establishing a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said consider the full range of postmodern cultural production, from the writing of John Cage, to Cindy Sherman's film stills, to Barbara Kruger's collages. With a redesigned cover and a new afterword that (...) situates the book in relation to contemporary criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic provides a strong introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already engaged in discussions of postmodern art, culture, and criticism. Includes a new afterword by Hal Foster and 12 black and white photographs. (shrink)
Hal Draper was born in Brooklyn in 1914, to East European Jewish immigrant parents. In 1932 he became active in the Student League for Industrial Democracy and the Socialist Party youth section, the Young People's Socialist League. A leader of the Student Strikes Against War, he became an associate editor of Socialist Appeal in 1934. In 1937, the socialist youth, led by Draper and Ernest Erber, voted to support the Fourth International after Trotsky's followers entered the Socialist Party. Draper opposed (...) the subsequent split in the SP, which Trotsky and James P. Cannon deliberately provoked, but left with the Trotskyists and became the national secretary of the Socialist Workers’ Party's youth group, a member of its first National Executive, and the secretary of the party's National Education Department. Irving Howe, a YPSL comrade, later recalled his admiration. Draper was, ‘genuinely learned in Marxism, with a mind that marched from one theorem to another as if God were clearing his way’, a youth leader who ‘would speak for us with a razored lucidity’ in debate with the Stalinists. Draper was part of the minority when the SWP split in 1940 over two issues, the ‘Russian question’ and the ‘bureaucratic conservatism’ of James P. Cannon's internal party regime. Draper became a founder member of the Workers’ Party, led by Max Shachtman, which developed an analysis of the Soviet Union as neither a ‘workers’ state’ nor state capitalist but a new form of exploiting class society, bureaucratic collectivism. The WP refused to ‘defend the Soviet Union’ and developed a distinctive democratic revolutionary Marxism, summed up by the slogan, ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow but the Third Camp of Independent Socialism!’. And, in reaction to Cannon's monolithic conception of the party, the WP developed a highly democratic internal political culture marked by ‘an atmosphere of genuine tolerance’ unceasing internal debate carried in the public press, and untrammelled rights for minorities. (shrink)
Baṣran Muʿtazilite Theology: Abū ʿAlī Muḥammad b. Khallād’s Kitāb al-Uṣūl and Its Reception. Edited by Camilla Adang; Wilferd Madelung; and Sabine Schmidtke. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 85. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. iv + 8 + 306. $170.
This essay is a review of Ronald Dworkin's recent essay on equality of resources. Many of the ideas discussed by Dworkin have also been examined by economists with, I believe, considerable insight. Unfortunately, economists tend to write for economists, not for philosophers, and their insights are seldom communicated properly to noneconomists. Of course, the same criticism can be levied on philosophers! But perhaps legal theorists are less subject to this criticism. One of the great contributions of Dworkin is that he (...) is very readable; and the quality of his exposition makes these ideas accessible to a wide audience of philosophers, lawyers, and social scientists in general. (shrink)
The first robot homicide was committed in 1981, according to my files. I have a yellowed clipping dated 12/9/81 from the Philadelphia Inquirer--not the National Enquirer--with the headline: Robot killed repairman, Japan reports The story was an anti-climax: at the Kawasaki Heavy Industries plant in Akashi, a malfunctioning robotic arm pushed a repairman against a gearwheel-milling machine, crushing him to death. The repairman had failed to follow proper instructions for shutting down the arm before entering the workspace. Why, indeed, had (...) this industrial accident in Japan been reported in a Philadelphia newspaper? Every day somewhere in the world a human worker is killed by one machine or another. The difference, of course, was that in the public imagination at least, this was no ordinary machine; this was a robot, a machine that might have a mind, might have evil intentions, might be capable not just of homicide but of murder. (shrink)
The human loss of the sense of sacred has been driven by a mechanization of the world that privileges the mundane and the material. Yet the earliest surviving history of the human mind reveals a widespread, embodied human faculty for perception of the cosmos and an intimate human relation to the cosmos. This history hints of an origin story that may be partly recovered by sacred relics of human prehistory.
The recent renewed interest in the foundation of quantum statistical mechanics and in the dynamics of isolated quantum systems has led to a revival of the old approach by von Neumann to investigate the problem of thermalization only in terms of quantum dynamics in an isolated system [1, 2]. It has been demonstrated in some general or concrete settings that a pure initial state evolving under quantum dynamics indeed approaches an equilibrium state [3–9]. The underlying idea that a single pure (...) quantum state can fully describe thermal equilibrium has also become much more concrete [10–12]. (shrink)
Social insects show us very little about the evolution of complex human society. As more relevant literature demonstrates, ultrasociality is a cause rather than an effect of human social evolution.
Over the past two decades, a new picture of the unconscious has emerged from a variety of disciplines that are broadly part of cognitive science. According to this picture, unconscious processes seem to be capable of doing many things that were thought to require intention, deliberation, and conscious awareness. Moreover, they accomplish these things without the conflict and drama of the psychoanalytic unconscious. These processes range from complex information processing, through goal pursuit and emotions, to cognitive control and self-regulation. This (...) collection of 20 original chapters by leading researchers examines the unconscious from social, cognitive, and neuroscientific viewpoints, presenting some of the most important developments at the heart of this new picture of the unconscious. The New Unconscious will be an important resource on the unconscious for researchers in psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience. (shrink)
There is a presumption in some circles that the identification of an externality or a public good presents a prima facie case for government intervention. Tyler Cowen has assembled a group of articles that challenge this view by arguing that the market, broadly construed, can handle many problems of public goods and externalities that are normally considered the province of the state. Although these articles present a stimulating perspective on problems of externalities and public goods, several of the essays overstate (...) their case and misrepresent the standard theory of public goods and externalities. (shrink)
In vocational rehabilitation, empowerment is understood as the notion that people should make an active, autonomous choice to find their way back to the labour process. Following this line of reasoning, the concept of empowerment implicitly points to a specific kind of activation strategy, namely labour participation. This activation approach has received criticism for being paternalistic, disciplining and having a one-sided orientation on labour participation. Although we share this theoretical criticism, we want to go beyond it by paying attention to (...) the practical consequences of understanding empowerment as an activation strategy. Inspired by the field of Science and Technology Studies, we will explore the meaning of empowerment and activation in concrete practices of vocational rehabilitation in the Netherlands. Our analysis is based on the narratives of people with a work disability about their lives and the vocational rehabilitation programmes they participated in. We present five illustrative cases that how empowerment is ‘done’ in the practice of vocational rehabilitation and its unintended effects. Our analysis demonstrates that activation strategies seem to be caught in a paradox: instead of including people in society, they have excluding consequences. Vocational rehabilitation professionals can go beyond this paradox by learning from the ways in which empowerment is ‘done’ by clients in vocational rehabilitation programmes. (shrink)
The modern ethical framework demands informed consent for research participation that includes disclosure of material information, as well as alternatives. The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic (COVID-19) results in illness that often involves rapid deterioration. Despite the urgent need to find therapy, obtaining informed consent for COVID-19 research is needed. The current pandemic presents three types of challenges for investigators faced with obtaining informed consent for research participation: (1) uncertainty over key information to informed consent, (2) time (...) and pressure constraints, and (3) obligations regarding disclosure of new alternative therapies and re-consent. To mitigate consenting challenges, primary investigators need to work together to jointly promote urgent care and research into COVID-19. Actions they can take include (1) prior plan addressing ways to incorporate clinical research into clinical practice in emergency, (2) consider patients vulnerable with early deliberation on the consent process, (3) seek Legally Authorized Representatives (LARs), (4) create a collaborative research teams, (5) aim to consent once, despite evolving information during the pandemic, and (6) aim to match patients to a trial that will most benefit them. The COVID-19 pandemic both exacerbates existing challenges and raises unique obstacles for consent that require forethought and mindfulness to overcome. While research teams and clinician-investigators will need to be sensitive to their own contexts and adapt solutions accordingly, they can meet the challenge of obtaining genuinely informed consent during the current pandemic. (shrink)
An anthropological view of the publishing industry sees it as a culture with its own assumptions and patterns, in which publishing companies are macro-communities associated with micro-communities of readers. Anthropology sees ‘digital culture’ in a comparable way. Awareness of the cultural characteristics of publishing as a culture and of digital culture can turn their differences into synergies that benefit both. Examples from anthropological research and from publishing show that some processes are comparable. One is the process in which material value (...) is transformed into cultural value, with the benefit of increasing the cohesion of a community. Another occurs when communities interlink their cultural processes in cultural–commercial ecosystems, to mutual benefit. Anthropological insights suggest how strategies, at project level and at the level of international cooperation, can bridge the cultural divide between traditional publishing values and digital opportunities and so help businesses survive and succeed in times of change. (shrink)
This paper takes issue with those commentators of Heidegger's philosophy whose point of entry into his thinking is the inherited prejudices of others. It demonstrates that if prior judgments are suspended, so that Heidegger's texts are permitted to speak for themselves, the truth of his `position', more a wege than a static motionless point, gradually and inexorably begins to emerge. I take Pope Benedict's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, to draw the theological contours of a truly post-modern ethic. I then (...) hold up Heidegger's philosophy, as this is characterized principally though not exclusively in his lecture Der Satz Der Identität, to consider possible symmetries. Finally I offer an answer to the question: does Heidegger's thought have ethical consequences? (shrink)
I argue that, contrary to some critics, the notion of conscious experience is a good candidate for denoting a distinct and scientifically interesting phenomenon in the brain. I base this claim mainly on an analysis of neuropsychological data concerning deficits resulting from various types of brain damage as well as some additional supporting empirical evidence. These data strongly point to the hypothesis that conscious experience expresses information that is available for global, integrated, and flexible behavior.
With a few yet increasing number of exceptions, the cognitive sciences enthusiastically endorsed the idea that there are basic facial expressions of emotions that are created by specific configurations of facial muscles. We review evidence that suggests an inherent role for context in emotion perception. Context does not merely change emotion perception at the edges; it leads to radical categorical changes. The reviewed findings suggest that configurations of facial muscles are inherently ambiguous, and they call for a different approach towards (...) the understanding of facial expressions of emotions. Prices of sticking with the modal view, and advantages of an expanded view, are succinctly reviewed. (shrink)
We study the problem of the approach to equilibrium in a macroscopic quantum system in an abstract setting. We prove that, for a typical choice of “nonequilibrium subspaceâ€, any initial state (from the energy shell) thermalizes, and in fact does so very quickly, on the order of the Boltzmann time Ï„ B := h/(k B T ). This apparently unrealistic, but mathematically rigorous, conclusion has the important physical implication that the moderately slow decay observed in reality is not typical in (...) the present setting. (shrink)
In A Philosophical, Scientific and Theological Defense for the Notion That a God Exists, Hal Flemings presents an overview of the history of the debate on the question of the existence of God. In an objective fashion, Flemings provides equal voice to opposing views while not hiding his own. He treats the problem of evil from a new perspective, which includes moral evil and natural evil and discusses the relationship between God and the theoretical and factual sciences.
