This study examines the role of acculturation in shaping consumers’ views of ethics. Specifically, it examines the relationships between the desire to keep one’s original culture, the desire to adopt the host culture, and the four dimensions of the Muncy and Vitell (Journal of Business Research Ethics 24(4), 297, 1992) consumer ethics scale. Using two separate immigrant populations – one of former Middle-Eastern residents now living in the U.S. and the other of Asian immigrants in the U.S. – results indicate (...) that those who want to keep their original culture are less tolerant of unethical consumer activities, while those who are more willing to adopt the host culture are more tolerant of these same consumer activities. Furthermore, the immigrants in both studies who are more tolerant of unethical consumer activities are those who are generally somewhat younger and with less formal education. The relationship between gender and consumer ethics was not significant. (shrink)

This is a controlled and enlightening study of the concept of method during the Renaissance. The text is rich in quotations, supplemented by very numerous footnotes. By dint of letting the evidence speak for itself, Gilbert succeeds in deepening the understanding of the Renaissance and consequently of the significance of the methodological innovations that followed it in the 17th century.--S. M. W.

The phenomenological effects of deep brain stimulation (DBS) on the self of the patient remains poorly understood and under described in the literature, despite growing evidence that a significant number of patients experience postoperative neuropsychiatric changes. To address this lack of phenomenological evidence, we conducted in-depth, semistructured interviews with 17 patients with Parkinson's disease who had undergone DBS. Exploring the subjective character specific to patients' experience of being implanted gives empirical and conceptual understanding of the potential phenomenon of DBS-induced self-estrangement. (...) Our study concluded that (1) the more patients preoperatively felt alienated by their illness, the more they experienced postoperative self-estrangement, and (2) the notion of self-estrangement seems to exist in association with certain common qualitative characters, namely, loss of control, which reflects a deteriorative estrangement, and distorted perception of capacities, which reveals a restorative estrangement. These findings indicate that subjective self-reports help us to understand some aspects of the potential phenomenon of DBS-induced self-estrangement. (shrink)

Behavior, language, development, identity, and science—all of these phenomena are commonly characterized as 'social' in nature. But what does it mean to be 'social'? Is there any intrinsic 'mark' of the social shared by these phenomena? In the first book to shed light on this foundational question, twelve distinguished philosophers and social scientists from several disciplines debate the mark of the social. Their varied answers will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, and anyone interested in the theoretical foundations (...) of the social sciences. (shrink)

Geron recently announced that it had begun enrolling patients in the world's first-in-human clinical trial involving cells derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). This trial raises important questions regarding the future of hESC-based therapies, especially in spinal cord injury (SCI) patients. We address some safety and efficacy concerns with this research, as well as the ethics of fair subject selection. We consider other populations that might be better for this research: chronic complete SCI patients for a safety trial, subacute (...) incomplete SCI patients for an efficacy trial, and perhaps primary progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) patients for a combined safety and efficacy trial. (shrink)

Throughout his life, John Tyler Bonner contributed to major transformations in the fields of developmental and evolutionary biology. He pondered the evolution of complexity and the significance of randomness in evolution, and was instrumental in the formation of evolutionary developmental biology. His contributions were vast, ranging from highly technical scientific articles to numerous books written for a broad audience. This historical vignette gathers reflections by several prominent researchers on the greatness of John Bonner and the implications of his work.

The article Deflating the "DBS causes personality changes" bubble, written by Frederic Gilbert, J. N. M. Viaña and C. Ineichen, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 19 June 2018 without open access.

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 1, Page 25-41, January 2022.

In her article, Pascale Hess raises the issue of whether her proposed model may be extrapolated and applied to clinical research fields other than stem cell-based interventions in the brain (SCBI-B) (Hess 2012). Broadly summarized, Hess’s model suggests prioritizing efficacy over safety in phase 1 trials involving irreversible interventions in the brain, when clinical criteria meet the appropriate population suffering from “degenerative brain diseases” (Hess 2012). Although there is a need to reconsider the traditional phase 1 model, especially with respect (...) to first-in-human clinical trials involving novel technologies, the question arises as to whether it is appropriate to advocate for a new model that prioritizes efficacy over safety across all phase 1 clinical research trials involving irreversible interventions in the brain. -/- . (shrink)

Although Caenorhabditis elegans was chosen and modified to be an organism that would facilitate a reductionist program for neurogenetics, recent research has provided evidence for properties that are emergent from the neurons. While neurogenetic advances have been made using C. elegans which may be useful in explaining human neurobiology, there are severe limitations on C. elegans to explain any significant human behavior.

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

A definition of [George] Eliot as renunciatory culture-mother may seem an odd preface to a discussion of Silas Marner since, of all her novels, this richly constructed work is the one in which the empty pack of daughterhood appears fullest, the honey of femininity most unpunished. I want to argue, however, that this “legendary tale,” whose status as a schoolroom classic makes it almost as much a textbook as a novel, examines the relationship between woman’s fate and the structure of (...) society in order to explicate the meaning of the empty pack of daughterhood. More specifically, this story of an adoptive father, an orphan daughter, and a dead mother broods on events that are actually or symbolically situated on the margins or boundaries of society, where culture must enter into a dialectical struggle with nature, in order to show how the young female human animal is converted into the human daughter, wife, and mother. Finally, then, this fictionalized “daughteronomy” becomes a female myth of origin narrated by a severe literary mother uses the vehicle of a half-allegorical family romance to urge acquiescence in the law of the Father.If Silas Marner is not obviously a story about the empty pack of daughterhood, it is plainly, of course, a “legendary tale” about a wanderer with a heavy yet empty pack. In fact, it is through the image of the packman that the story, in Eliot’s own words, “came across my other plans by a sudden inspiration”—and, clearly, her vision of this burdened outsider is a re-vision of the Romantic wanderer who haunts the borders of society, seeking a local habitation and a name.11 I would argue further, though, that Eliot’s depiction of Silas Marner’s alienation begins to explain Ruby Redinger’s sense that the author of this “fluid and metaphoric” story “is” both Eppie, the redemptive daughter, and Silas, the redeemed father. For in examining the outcast weaver’s marginality, this novelist of the “hidden life” examines also her own female disinheritance and marginality.12 11. Eliot to Blackwood, 12 Jan. 1861, quoted in Ruby V. Redinger, George Eliot: The Emergent Self , p. 436. As Susan Garber has suggested to me, the resonant image of the “packman” may be associated with the figure of Bob Jakin in The Mill on the Floss , the itinerant pack-bearing peddler who brings Maggie Tulliver a number of books, the most crucial of which is Tomas à Kempis’ treatise on Christian renunciation .12. Rediner, George Eliot, p. 439; Eliot, “Finale,” Middlemarch, p. 896. Sandra M. Gilbert, now professor of English at the University of California, Davis, will join the Department of English at Princeton University in fall 1985. Her most recent works include a collection of poems, Emily’s Bread , and, coedited with Susan Gubar, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English . In addition, she is at work on Mother Rites: Studies in Literature and Maternity, a project from which “Life’s Empty Pack” is drawn, and, with Susan Gubar, on No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, a sequel to their collaborative Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . “Costumes of the Mind: Transvestitism as Metaphor in Modern Literature” appeared in the Winter 1980 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Teaching children to ask and answer questions is critically important if they are to learn to talk and reason effectively together, particularly during inquiry-based science where they are required to investigate topics, consider alternative propositions and hypotheses, and problem-solve together to propose answers, explanations, and prediction to problems at hand. This study involved 108 students (53 boys and 55 girls) from seven, Year 7 teachers’ classrooms in five primary schools in Brisbane, Australia. Teachers were randomly allocated by school to one (...) of two conditions: the metacognitive questioning condition (Trained condition) or the prescriptive questioning condition (Untrained condition). Data on students’ discourse and reasoning and problem-solving (RP-S) were collected across Times 1 and 2. The results showed that while there were significant differences in the discourse categories of the students in the two conditions at Time 1, the only significant difference was in questioning behaviour at Time 2 with the students in the trained condition continuing to ask more questions than their untrained peers. Given that these students had been taught to specifically ask ‘thinking’ questions that probed and interrogated information, these results are not surprising. A follow-up examination of students’ discourse during their small group discussions illustrated how these students interacted with each other to probe and interrogate information by providing explanations and reasons to make their thinking explicit and by using analogies to verbally represent concepts they were trying to express. Results on the follow-up reasoning and problem-solving (RP-S) tasks indicated that students in the Trained and Untrained conditions improved their scores from Time 1 to Time 2 although the change was not significantly different between conditions. (shrink)

Using this case, Lavazza and Reichlin (2018) explored the ethical dilemmas associated with decision making in people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), specifically when their new preferences conflict...

There is a striking difference, however, between the ways female and male modernists define and describe literal or figurative costumes. Balancing self against mask, true garment against false costume, Yeats articulates a perception of himself and his place in society that most other male modernists share, even those who experiment more radically with costume as metaphor. But female modernists like Woolf, together with their post-modernist heirs, imagine costumes of the mind with much greater irony and ambiguity, in part because women's (...) clothing is more closely connected with the pressures and oppressions of gender and in part because women have far more to gain from the identification of costume with self or gender. Because clothing powerfully defines sex roles, both overt and covert fantasies of transvestism are often associated with the intensified clothes consciousness expressed by these writers. But although such imagery is crucially important in works by Joyce, Lawrence, and Eliot on the one hand, and in works by Barnes, Woolf, and H. D. on the other, it functions very differently for male modernists from the way it operates for female modernists.Sandra M. Gilbert, professor of English at the University of California at Davis, is the author of Acts of Attention: The Poems of D.H. Lawrence and In the Fourth World; the coauthor, with Susan Gubar, of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, and its sequel, No Man's Land: The Woman Writer and the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination. (shrink)

We’d like to do a little hypnosis on you. Imagine that you’re ensconced in your own family room, your study, or your queen-sized bed. Settling back, you pick up the remote, flick on the TV, and naturally you turn to PBS. This is what you hear:Host 1: Good evening. Welcome to Masterpiece Theatre. Because Alistair Cooke is away on assignment in Alaska, we’ve agreed to host the show tonight, and that’s both a pleasure and a privilege because our program this (...) evening marks the beginning of a fascinating new series, a first on television: Masterpiece Theatre will present you with a docudrama entitled “Masterpiece Theatre.”Host 2: Like “The First Churchills,” this show analyzes the situation of real-life people—tonight, people in the academy. Names have not been changed to protect either the innocent or the guilty, but all the situations are fictive and at times words that may never have been spoken are put into the mouths of people who did not speak them. Other lines, however, are direct quotations from various written sources, although none of the characters, as we depict them, should be confused with any “actual” persons, whether or not those persons would scribe to the idea of their own reality. Like “Upstairs/Downstairs,” this program will introduce you to a spectrum of characters from many walks of life. What’s different about tonight’s episode, though, is that all these characters have passionate opinions about the show itself. Why, the very idea of Masterpiece Theatre drives some of them to Guerrilla Theatre, others to Theatre of the Absurd. Yes, you’ve always already guessed it: we focus tonight on a drama involving what we used to call humanists—now for some a dirty word—and most of our characters are in deep trouble. Sandra M. Gilbert, professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and Susan Gubar, professor of English at Indiana University, are coauthors of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words and Volume II: Sexchanges , the first installments of a three-part sequel to their Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . They have also coedited The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English. (shrink)

That the pattern into which Lentricchia seeks to assimilate Stevens is politically charged becomes clearest when we turn to the following oddly incomprehensible statement: “In the literary culture that Stevens would create, the ‘phallic’ would not have been the curse word of some recent feminist criticism but the name of a limited, because male, respect for literature” . At the point where he makes this assertion, Lentricchia has been persuasively demonstrating that Stevens was “encouraged … to fantasize the potential social (...) authority of the literary as phallic authority” . But suddenly the critic’s measured discourse is disrupted by obviously personal feelings about the “curse word of some recent feminist criticism” and by a dazzlingly illogical definition of “respect for literature.” Such a disruption suggests that, in making his apparently objective argument about Stevens, Lentricchia has some other not so hidden agenda—and, of course, his peculiar decision to link his discussion of Stevens with an attack on The Madwoman in the Attic further supports this conclusion. What most strikingly reinforces the point, however, is the hysterical—or perhaps, with some recent feminist linguists, we should say “testerical”—rhetoric in which he couches his assault on our work.14 14. The term “testeria,” for male “hysteria,” is proposed by Juli Loesch in “Testeria and Penisolence—A Scourge to Humankind,” Aphra: The Feminist Literary Magazine, 4, 1 : 43-45; quoted in Casey Miller and Kate Swift, Words and Women: New Language in New Times , pp. 60-61. Sandra M. Gilbert, professor of English at Princeton University, and Susan Gubar, professor of English at Indiana University, are coauthors of No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume I: The War of the Words , the first installment of a three-part sequel to their Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination . They have also coedited The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Tradition in English. (shrink)

The information contained within the linear sequence of bases (the genome) must be faithfully replicated in each cell cycle, with a balance of constancy and variation taking place over the course of evolution. Recently, it has become clear that additional information important for genetic regulation is contained within the chromatin proteins associated with DNA (the epigenome). Epigenetic information also must be faithfully duplicated in each cell cycle, with a balance of constancy and variation taking place during the course of development (...) to achieve differentiation while maintaining identity within cell lineages. Both the genome and the epigenome are synthesized at the replication fork, so the events occurring during S‐phase provide a critical window of opportunity for eliciting change or maintaining existing genetic states. Cells discriminate between different states of chromatin through the activities of proteins that selectively modify the structure of chromatin. Several recent studies report the localization of certain chromatin modifying proteins to replication forks at specific times during S‐phase. Since transcriptionally active and inactive chromosome domains generally replicate at different times during S‐phase, this spatiotemporal regulation of chromatin assembly proteins may be an integral part of epigenetic inheritance. BioEssays 25:647–656, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This landmark collection of essays by six renowned philosophers explores the implications of the contentious realism/antirealism debate for epistemology. The essays examine issues such as whether epistemology needs to be realist, the bearing of a realist conception of truth on epistemology, and realism and antirealism in terms of a pragmatist conception of epistemic justification. Richard Rorty's essay provides a critical commentary on the other five.

Teaching students to ask and answer questions is critically important if they are to engage in reasoned argumentation, problem-solving, and learning. This study involved 35 groups of grade 6 children from 18 classrooms in three conditions (cognitive questioning condition, community of inquiry condition, and the comparison condition) who were videotaped as they worked on specific inquiry-based science tasks. The study also involved the teachers in these classrooms who were audio-taped as they interacted with the children during these tasks. The results (...) show that while there were no significant differences in the children's explanatory behaviour across the two time periods, there were significant differences in the total verbal interactions between the children in the cognitive questioning condition and their peers in the community of inquiry and comparison conditions. Furthermore, the children in the cognitive questioning condition obtained higher reasoning and problem-solving scores than peers in the other conditions. Interestingly, while there were no significant differences between the teachers’ basic and extended mediating behaviours in the three conditions at Times 1 and 2, there was a significant difference in extended mediation behaviours with the teachers demonstrating nearly three times more extended mediation to promote students’ learning at Time 2 than they did at Time 1. Teacher intervention in providing guidance in how to interact during cooperative, inquiry-based science appears to be critical to helping students engage in higher-level thinking and learning. (shrink)

Recent studies suggest that vertebrate genetic material ingested by invertebrates (iDNA) can be used to investigate vertebrate ecology. Given the ubiquity of invertebrates that feed on vertebrates across the globe, iDNA might qualify as a very powerful tool for 21st century population and conservation biologists. Here, we identify some invertebrate characteristics that will likely influence iDNA retrieval and elaborate on the potential uses of invertebrate‐derived information. We hypothesize that beyond inventorying local faunal diversity, iDNA should allow for more profound insights (...) into wildlife population density, size, mortality, and infectious agents. Based on the similarities of iDNA with other low‐quality sources of DNA, a general technical framework for iDNA analyses is proposed. As it is likely that no such thing as a single ideal iDNA sampler exists, forthcoming research efforts should aim at cataloguing invertebrate properties relevant to iDNA retrieval so as to guide future usage of the invertebrate tool box. (shrink)

The text in which the original JRE editors announced the mission of their newly launched scholarly journal is susceptible to different readings. While Ronald Green has interpreted it as an intention to "effect" a "movement from Christian ethics to religious ethics," the author expresses doubt that any such general framework of "religious ethics" can be discerned in or imposed on distinctive religious traditions. He suggests that the problem of "parochialism and Western bias" is best addressed not through the imperialism of (...) the generic but through sustained attention to the distinctive and particular in all its variations. (shrink)

One of us [Gilbert, M.. “Collective Belief and Scientific Change.” Sociality and Responsibility. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 37-49.] has proposed that ascriptions of beliefs to scientific communities generally involve a common notion of collective belief described by her in numerous places. A given collective belief involves a joint commitment of the parties, who thereby constitute what Gilbert refers to as a plural subject. Assuming that this interpretive hypothesis is correct, and that some of the belief ascriptions in (...) question are true, then the members of some scientific communities have obligations that may act as barriers both to the generation and, hence, the fair evaluation of new ideas and to changes in their community’s beliefs. We argue that this may help to explain Thomas Kuhn’s observations on “normal science”, and go on to develop the relationship between Gilbert's proposal and several features of a group of physicists working on a fundamental physical theory called “string theory”, as described by physicist Lee Smolin [Smolin, L.. The Trouble with Physics. Mariner Books: New York.]. We argue that the features of the string theory community that Smolin cites are well explained by the hypothesis that the community is a plural subject of belief. (shrink)

The government itself, which is the only mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable [with the standing army] to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. Henry Thoreau, in “Civil Disobedience” It is easy to say — and often (...) is said — that we cannot have tolerable relations with new revolutionary regimes. The problem is that our anticommunist paranoia has made it impossible to find out. We do not know whether Mao's declared interest in a relationship with the Americans in the 1940s or Ho Chi Minh's were sincere. And the reason we don't know is that we never tried to find out. Those who reported it was a possibility were hounded out of the foreign service because of our suspicion and fear of communism. The legacy of that era brings to mind Ivan the Terrible's practice of murdering the bearer of bad news. We are more civilized than that; we have been content simply to ruin people's careers. J. William Fulbright, in The Price of Empire This poisonous thing I'm trying to describe is [a] characteristic way of dealing with criticism. It used to be enough to brand a critic as a radical or a leftist to make people turn away. Now we need only to call him a liberal. Soon “moderate” will be the M word, “conservative” will be the C word and only fascists will be in the mainstream. E. L. Doctorow, Brandeis Commencement, May 21, 1989 We have lived with violence for seven years It was not worth one single life But the patriot's fist is at her throat Her voice is in mortal danger... Adrienne Rich, “Natural Resources,” in Dream of a Common Language. (shrink)

The government itself, which is the only mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable [with the standing army] to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure. Henry Thoreau, in “Civil Disobedience”It is easy to say — and often is (...) said — that we cannot have tolerable relations with new revolutionary regimes. The problem is that our anticommunist paranoia has made it impossible to find out. We do not know whether Mao's declared interest in a relationship with the Americans in the 1940s or Ho Chi Minh's were sincere. And the reason we don't know is that we never tried to find out. Those who reported it was a possibility were hounded out of the foreign service because of our suspicion and fear of communism. The legacy of that era brings to mind Ivan the Terrible's practice of murdering the bearer of bad news. We are more civilized than that; we have been content simply to ruin people's careers. J. William Fulbright, in The Price of Empire (1989) This poisonous thing I'm trying to describe is [a] characteristic way of dealing with criticism. It used to be enough to brand a critic as a radical or a leftist to make people turn away. Now we need only to call him a liberal. Soon “moderate” will be the M word, “conservative” will be the C word and only fascists will be in the mainstream. E. L. Doctorow, Brandeis Commencement, May 21, 1989We have lived with violence for seven yearsIt was not worth one single lifeBut the patriot's fist is at her throatHer voice is in mortal danger...Adrienne Rich, “Natural Resources,” in Dream of a Common Language (Norton, 1978). (shrink)

If this book were a film, it would be rated M-with a caution that 'some viewers may be disturbed by some scenes'. In CATCHING THE KNOWLEDGE WAVE? Jane Gilbert takes apart many long-held ideas about knowledge and education. She says that knowledge is now a verb, not a noun-something we do rather than something we have-and explores the ways our schools need to change to prepare people to participate in the knowledge-based societies of the future. The knowledge society is (...) an idea that is widely discussed, but not well understood. Knowledge is developing a new meaning, one that is quite different to the one our schools were built on. Because of this, knowledge society developments are a major challenge for our schools. We cannot address this challenge by adding more ideas to our existing structures. We need a completely new framework-one that takes account of knowledge's new meaning, but also gives everyone an equal opportunity to succeed. If this seems like a tall order, it probably is-however this book attempts to map out such a framework. This is a book to argue with, to agree or disagree with, but above all to read-the future of our public education system is at stake. (shrink)

The historical crisis, by J. T. Marcus.--History and the search for identity, by P. Smith.--The role of history, by J. H. Plumb.--History as progress, by E. H. Carr.--On optimism, by P. Gay.--The purpose of history, by G. R. Elton.--The uses of history, by D. H. Fischer.--The dangers of history, by H. Butterfield.--Unity of history, by P. Smith.--History as private enterprise, by H. Zinn.--The historian and his day, by J. H. Hexter.--Present interest, by S. Kracauer.--On becoming an historian, by M. Duberman.--Vietnam (...) analogy: Greece, not Munich, by A. J. Mayer.--Analogies, by D. H. Fischer.--The tragic element in modern international conflict, by H. Butterfield. (shrink)

Using print ads and recognizing the role of visual images in argument (Groarke) and the presence of arguments in ads (Slade), this paper argues that the work of argumentation theorists from Aristotle to van Eemeren and Grootendorst can be used to support the thesis that ads are arguments. I cite as evidence definitions, demarcations, delineations, and descriptions of argument put forth by leading scholars in the field of argumentation. This includes Aristotle, Informal Logic, Toulmin (Claim, Data, Warrant, Backing, Qualifier, Rebuttal), (...) Johnson and Blair (argument as “reasons or evidence as grounds or support for an opinion”), Gilbert (Multi-Modal Argumentation), and van Eemeren and Grootendorst (argumentation as a social activity and pragma-dialectics). I show how, although just fitting a particular advertisement to someone’s definition does not mean that all ads are arguments, nevertheless, the fact that we can find in an ad all these elements from this variety of scholars over time, leaves us reasonably secure in stating that an ad is indeed an argument. Since my argument would be the same for practically any ad, I am using only one ad. I do, however, use the kind of ad that is least likely to seem to be an argument: an ad with few words, an ad which is mostly visual. If I can show how even an almost entirely visual ad can be analyzed as an argument using the terms of all these scholars of argumentation, I will maintain that most ads could be analyzed in the same way. (shrink)

We owe the problem of the speckled hen to Gilbert Ryle. It was suggested to A.J. Ayer by Ryle in connection with Ayer’s account of seeing. Suppose that you are standing before a speckled hen with your eyes trained on it. You are in good light and nothing is obstructing your view. You see the hen in a single glance. The hen has 47 speckles on its facing side, let us say, and the hen ap­ pears speckled to you. (...) On Ayer’s view, in seeing the hen, you directly see a speckled sense-datum or appearance. Ryle wondered how many speckles there are on the sense-datum. After all, intu­ itively, the hen does not appear to you to have 47 speckles. And if this is the case, then it does not present to you an appearance with 47 speckles. Equally, however, the hen does not appear to you not to have 47 speckles. So, it does not present an appearance that lacks 47 speckles either. (shrink)

Each inhabitant of our world Gilbert calls an id quod est or subsistens. Its main constituents are the subsistentiae and these are accompanied by the 'accidents', quantity and quality. The subsistent owes its status to a collection of inferior members of the Aristotelian class of accidents, which to Gilbert 's mind are rather 'accessories' or 'attachments from without'. The term 'substantia' is used both to stand for substance and substantial form, i.e., that by which something is subsistent. The (...) collection of subsistentiae or the forma totius is called natura. However, 'natura' is also used to stand for either just one subsistentia or all the forms found in a subsistens even including its 'accidental' forms. The inclusion of all kinds of accidents is seldom found in the intension of the word 'natura'. One of the key notions featuring in Gilbert 's ontology is esse aliquid. 'To be a-something' has a threefold import. First, it means 'to be only some thing', and to miss perfection. Second, it has the positive sense of 'being a something', i.e. 'being determinate and well-delineated', not indefinite, not formless that is. Third, 'to be a something' implies concreteness, corporealness and singularity. (shrink)

Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff wrote surprisingly often to British colleagues. Usually it was a matter of a letter or two. The prolonged exchange with Gilbert Murray is the exception. More typical is the brief but important one with Sir James George Frazer. Extant evidence attests that he corresponded with some forty Englishmen and Scots. I omit Anglo-Irish: J.B. Bury, J.P. Mahaffy, L.C. Purser and the papyrologist, J.G. Smyly. The evidence is incomplete because most letters after the letter N were stolen (...) and burned in the Berlin winter 1945–6. A first catalogue of his British correspondents is assembled. Because of the remoteness of much published biographical material, I include references to the important published sources and occasionally publish a document which otherwise would be forgotten. For the first time Wilamowitz's influence on the English scholars of his time is precisely documented. (shrink)

Is a social complex identical to many united people or is it a group entity in addition to the people? For specificity, I will assume that a social complex is a plural subject in Margaret Gilbert’s sense. By appeal to my theory of Aspects, according to which there can be qualitative difference without numerical difference, I give an answer that is a middle way between metaphysical individualism and metaphysical holism. This answer will enable answers to two additional metaphysical questions: (...) (i) how can two social complexes have all the same members and (ii) how can there be a social complex of social complexes? (shrink)