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 place of man in Darwin's development of a theory of transmutation has been obscured by his manner of disclosure. Comparing the 1837–1839 period to his entire career as a theorist suggests that it was Darwin's practice to present himself and his work only before the most select scientific audiences, and then in accordance with their expectations. The negative implications of this rule for his publication on man are clear enough: finding no general invitation in science to publish as a (...) theorist and no contemporary scientific audience for the sorts of inquiries he was making on man, he was silent, at least until such time as he could publish on the strength of reputation alone. Now, with the availability of manuscripts from the early period, what was once hidden stands revealed. It is clear from Darwin's notebooks that man played a dual role in the formation of his theory: as a zoological species to be incorporated into the theory and as the primary vehicle for the study of behavior. On the first score, integrating man into the theory provoked Darwin to break with the traditional view of man's place in nature and to reject a major element in the scientific notion of progressive development. On the second score, the study of behavior led Darwin outside natural history and thence, unexpectedly, to Malthus and natural selection.One is left with the certainty that the subject of man was a central element in Darwin's formulation of his species theory. To an extent, then, the public judgment of Darwin was right all along, for the public had always sensed that Darwin spoke to a larger audience than that formed around science. On the basis of new evidence, we can add that Darwin drew from that larger audience as well. There are of course ironies to this conclusion: that Darwin the professional drew so heavily from fields where he was the amateur, that as a transparent man his inner life should prove so at odds with the manner in which he presented himself, and that his arrival at a strong sense of himself—the revolutionary “I” of his notebooks—should occur just as he stepped beyond science to engage the general culture. But when one considers the inherent difficulties of Darwin's subject and the magnitude of his claims respecting man, these ironies are perhaps not surprising at all but those of a kind which might be anticipated. (shrink)

This argument has emphasized the professional character of Darwin's early activities, largely in order to balance the usual portrayal of the amateurishness of his early training and field of study. Arguing this way has revealed the interplay between Darwin's personal interests and his professional obligations, the latter being particularly important for the period from October 1836 to July 1837. In several instances, notably the treatment of his collections, the progress of his thought followed the professional lead directly. In the absence (...) of such a lead Darwin did not pursue certain issues, if only for lack of time. Thus the subject of man did not figure in his initial formulation of a transmutationist position. Only after the commitment to the new point of view had been made did the issues emerge which will be treated in Part II of this article. However, we may close by noting Darwin's inherited disposition on the subject: in the summer of 1837 Darwin responded to Lyell's claim that the change from irrational animal to rational man represented “a phenomenon of a distinct kind from the passage from the more simple to the more perfect forms of animal organization and instinct” with a fanciful doodle in the margin.121 The thoughts behind the bemused scribbling were to occupy a good portion of Darwin's time for the next two years. (shrink)

Loris Malaguzzi (1920 - 1994) was the pioneer of the Reggio Emilia approach to teaching young children. An ever-increasing number of teachers and educationalists from all over the world now come to study the Reggio pre-school's unique methods, and this is largely due to Malaguzzi's devotion, work and commitment over 45 years, and the small group of teachers and educators he trained and with whom he developed his methods. The principles that underpin the Reggio Emilia approach are fundamental to the (...) way in which Early Childhood Education is being shaped around the world today. The work of Loris Malaguzzi was rooted in a strong sociocultural framework, meaning it was a considered response to what was needed for particular communities and their needs. Sandra Smidt here considers the life of this remarkable man, and through a pedagogical perspective explores his approach on topics including: - Relationships; - Observation; - Creativity; - Questioning; - Justice; - Equality; - Politics. Accessible and informative, this introductory yet in-depth look at Malaguzzi's life and work will be of huge benefit to anyone working with young children in an educational capacity, including parents, and will be essential reading for students on early childhood education courses. (shrink)

The body mandala, or, How your brain maps the world -- The little man in the brain, or, Why your genitals are even smaller than you think -- Dueling body maps, or, Why you still feel fat after losing weight -- The homunculus in the game, or, When thinking is as good as doing -- Plasticity gone awry, or, When body maps go blurry -- Broken body maps, or, Why Dr. Strangelove couldn't keep his hand down -- The bubble around (...) the body, or, Why you seek elbow room -- Sticks and stones and cyberbones, or, The end of the body as we know it? -- Mirror, mirror, or, Why yawning is contagious -- Heart of the mandala, or, My insula made me do it -- Afterword, or, The you-ness of you. (shrink)

SummaryPhilosophic questions about the adequacy of our prevailing Western conceptions of rationality have emerged from the growing recognition that one cannot simply “add women” as objects of knowledge to the existing bodies of our social and natural knowledge. Recent research in psychology and in moral development theory suggests that our understandings of the rationality of human activity are distorted and obscured by systematically identifying as universally desireable, as Human goals, conceptions of the self, others, and the appropriate relationships between the (...) two which are distinctively masculine. The essay suggests some implications of these research findings for the ways philosophers think about “the problems of philosophy”, moral theory, the role of formality and abstractness, and the “rational reconstructions” of the history of science.RésuméDes questions philosophiques se sont posées, a propos de ľadéquation de nos conceptions occidentales courantes de la rationalité, du fait de la reconnaissance qu'on ne peut pas simplement ajouter les femmes comme objets de connaissance aux corpus existants de notre connais‐sance sociale et naturelle. Des recherches récentes en psychologie et en théorie du développement moral suggèrent que notre comprèhension de la rationalité de ľactivité humaine est déformee et obscurcie par une identification systématique, comme universellement désirables, comme buts de ľhumanité, des conceptions de soi, des autres et des relations entre les deux qui sont distincte‐ment masculines. Cet essai suggère quelques applications de ces resultats de recherche quant à la maniere dont les philosophes pensent les problèmes de la philosophies la morale, le rôle du formel et de ľabstrait et les reconstuctions rationnelles de ľhistoire de la science.ZusammenfassungPhilosophische Fragen ïber die Angemessenheit unserer vorherrschenden Auffassungen von Rationalität im Westen sind durch die wachsende Einsicht entstanden, dass man nicht einfach Frauen als Objekte dem bestehenden Korpus unserer Sozial‐ und Naturwissenschaften hinzufügen kann. Neuere Forschungen in Psychologie und Theorien der moralischen Entwicklung legen nahe, dass unser Verstandnis der Rationalität von menschlichen Handlungen dadurch verzerrl und verdunkelt wird, dass systematische Auffassungen vom Selbst, den andern und den unter ihnen angebrachten Beziehungen als allgemein wünschbare Ziele anerkannt werden, die spezi‐fisch männlich sind. Es werden einige Implikationen dieser Forschungen t'iir die Art, wie Philoso‐phen über die Probleme der Philosophie denken, aufgezeigt – u.a. in bezug auf die Theorie der Moral, die Rolle der Formalisierung und Abstraktion, und die rationalen Rekonstruktionen der Geschichte der Wissenschaft. (shrink)

In 'No Apocalypse. Not Now' Derrida claims that 'literature produces its referent as a fictive or fabulous referent, which is itself dependent on the possibility of archivising...'. Taking the Kipling archive as its point of reference, this article considers the claims involved in the idea of a literary archive (with its appeals to authority, intention, origin, propri ety). In view of the continuing fascination with the details and events of Kipling's life (the interweaving of his public and private self, and (...) especially his connections with India and with Imperialism, and with Indian and English worlds and values), what does the history of Kipling's archive tell us, and how is this related to the location and repression of cultural anxieties (and, in particular, to notions of nation and national character). From the unacknowledged use of a quotation from 'If' in an advertisement for a patent tonic in 1919 to the appear ance of Kipling as hypertext in the 1997 Microsoft Word advertisement in the Sunday Supplements, which or whose 'Kipling' is in question in the iconicity of the continuing and contemporary representations of him. As in Derrida's description of De Man, Kipling is now a ghost of the culture. (shrink)

This paper attempts to demonstrate that in Emmanuel Levinas’ thinking, justice is the necessary opening – and dissolution- of the “I” which makes fecundity – procreation – possible, and that in that same measure makes possible that the Logos transforms into a “desire to say” and the world into a “among us”. At the same time it wants to demonstrate that this notion of justice is directly related to the ideas of expression and nudity. Due to which the “Other” imposes (...) itself in front of the “same” , as man, singular and vulnerable, and that in the same measure it is linked to the notion of the Face and its particular mode of manifestation. In this respect, we propose that justice. As long as necessary condition, can fund an ethically constituted world, where an “erotic order” mandates over logic orderings. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)

The central argument of Youpa's book is that Spinoza's moral philosophy offers a distinctive variety of moral realism, grounded in a standard of human nature. In this review essay, I provide an overview of Youpa's remarkably lucid interpretation of Spinoza. However, I also critique Youpa's conception of the 'free man' as an objective standard of perfection which (a) applies equally to all humans, and (b) which has objective moral force in the sense that it ought to be approached. I sketch (...) an alternative reading of Spinoza which denies a shared human essence, and which denies that an individual ought to become more perfect than they in fact are. I argue that Youpa's reading rests on the conflation of Spinoza's concepts of active power and adequate causation. I then suggest that Youpa's resultant excessive focus on a rational human essence as 'what we fundamentally are' leads him to downplay a more developmental and imaginative dimension to Spinoza's moral philosophy. (shrink)

This study explored the nature of patient advocacy among 40 institutionally employed registered nurses, nurse managers, clinical nurse specialists and nursing administrators. Participants were asked to define patient advocacy, to discuss their experiences with advocacy in institutions and their perceptions of risk associated with advocacy in institutional settings, and to identify one concept central to patient advocacy. The results delineated conceptual definitions of advocacy and numerous factors that influence nurses' decisions about acting as patient advocates in institutions. Additionally, they showed (...) striking similarities between conceptual terms used to define advocacy and terms used to define caring. Cet article est basé sur une enquête auprés de quarante infirmiers/ères, directeurs/ directrices, infirmiers/ères spécialisé(e)s et administrateurs employés dans des institu tions. On a demandé aux participants de définir la défense des malades, de discuter de leurs expériences concernant cette activité dans les institutions, de leurs perceptions des risques courus au cours de la défense et d'identifier un principe central à la défense des malades. Les résultats de l'enquête présentaient des définitions conceptuels de la défense ainsi que de nombreux éléments qui influencent les décisions prises par les infirmiers/ères qui assument la défence des malades dans les institutions. En plus, les résultats montraient de grandes ressemblances entre les expressions conceptuelles utilisées pour définir cette défense et les expressions utilisées pour définir les soins. In dieser Studie wird untersucht, was vierzig in Insitutionen angestellte Pflegende, Man ager, und andere Pflegeexperten unter Fürsprache verstehen, wie sie sie definieren, und was ihre Erfahrung mit Fürsprache am Arbeitsort ist. Die Beteiligten wurden gefragt, wie sie die Risiken der Fürsprache in Institutionen einschätzen, und sie wurden aufgefordert, ein allgemein gültiges Konzept für Patientenfürsprache zu identifizieren. Das Resultat zeigt begriffliche Definitionen der Fürsprache sowei verschiedene Faktoren, die die Entscheidungen des Pflegepersonals beeinflussen, wenn sie als Fürsprecher der Patienten handeln. Zugleich zeigte diese Studie auch grosse Aehnlichkeiten zwischen Begriffen der Fürsprache und der Pflege. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coward Conscience and Bad Conscience in Shakespeare and NietzscheSandra BonettoGeorge Bernard Shaw once observed that the whole of Nietzsche was expressed in three lines that Shakespeare puts into the mouth of one of his greatest villains, Richard III 1 : "Conscience is but a word that cowards use / Devised at first to keep the strong in awe / Our strong arms be our conscience; swords, our law" (5.6). (...) More specifically, perhaps, these lines invite a comparison between Shakespeare's repeated association of conscience with cowardice in Richard III, 2 and Nietzsche's negative evaluation of bad conscience, notably in On the Genealogy of Morals. 3 The aim of this article is to offer such a comparative analysis in order to demonstrate that Shakespeare's coward conscience anticipates Nietzsche's understanding of the bad conscience (das schlechte Gewissen) as "the consciousness of guilt" (GM, II, p. 67), including its involvement with the notions of debt, sin, punishment, and God.INietzsche devoted the Second Essay of his Genealogy to the discussion of bad conscience, its origins, and related matters, notably guilt (Schuld) and its relation to duty (Pflicht) and debt (Schuld). The German term Schuld denotes both guilt and debt, and both senses are inextricably linked in Nietzsche's analysis. The bad conscience as consciousness of guilt is also [End Page 512] the consciousness of a debt owed—to another individual, society, and above all to the Christian God. The debt owed to God is one that can never be repaid, so that Christian morality necessitates guilt as "eternal punishment" for man's original transgression (see GM, II, pp. 91–92). Thus, Nietzsche argues, the descriptive equivalent of bad conscience, in the language of Christianity, is sin—"this is the priestly name for the... bad conscience" (GM, III, p. 140). In other words, sin is essentially a debt contracted with God. This is evident, for instance, in the substitution of the word "sin" for "debt" (ophéilema) in the formula of the Our Father as found in St. Luke. Even in the more general description, e.g. in the passage of St. Matthew where Jesus is explaining the implications of the petition "Forgive us or debts as we forgive our debtors," where the expressions paràptoma (fault, error) and armatia (aberration, failing, defect in relation to a norm or whole) are the more common terms used to denote sin, the sense of debt is implicit—we only accept our failure in relation to the Christian norm or whole if we accept that we "owe it to God" to live up to that norm in the first place. Moreover, the notion of debt brings with it the debtor's fear of failing to repay the creditor, so that a fear of punishment results from the sense of not living up to the contractual relationship with God.According to Nietzsche, the basis for the bad conscience and guilt, which he further defines as "anger directed against the self" (GM, I, p. 45), is cruelty, a natural human disposition that is displayed unabashedly in punishment. Bad conscience, he argues, is cruelty turned inward and essentially amounts to self-punishment or "psychical cruelty"—a form of subliminal suffering we impose on ourselves. Speaking of the "psychology of conscience," Nietzsche emphasises therefore that conscience "is not 'the voice of God in man'—it is rather the instinct of cruelty that turns back after it can no longer discharge itself externally" (GM, "A Polemic," p. 312). Bad conscience, or sin, is cruelty directed backwards, at oneself. In short, Nietzsche holds that the bad conscience, experienced by us as the "bite" or "sting" of conscience (morsus conscientiae; Gewissensbiss), results from the internalisation of instincts, notably the instincts to cruelty. Rather than acting on natural impulses, man has come to stifle and repress them: "Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the "'bad conscience'" (GM, II, p.85).Anticipating Freud's theory of repression and pre-empting his psychological interpretation of conscience as superego (Über-Ich), Nietzsche argues, "all instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn [End Page 513... (shrink)

Este artículo intenta poner en evidencia que en el pensamiento de Emmanuel Lévinas la justicia es la condición necesaria de apertura -y disolución- del "yo" que hace posible la fecundidad -la "procreación"-, y que en esa misma medida el Logos se transforme en un "quiere decir" y el mundo en un "entre-nosotros". Asimismo, evidencia que esta noción de justicia está directamente vinculada a las ideas de "expresión" y "desnudez", gracias a las cuales el Otro se impone ante el "mismo" como (...) hombre, singular y vulnerable; y que en igual medida está enlazada a la noción de rostro y a su modo particular de manifestación. Proponemos, en este sentido, que la justicia, en tanto que condición necesaria puede fundar un mundo constituido éticamente, en el que prime un "orden erótico" por sobre los ordenamientos lógicos. This paper attempts to demonstrate that in Emmanuel Lévinas' thinking, justice is the necessary opening - and dissolution- of the "I" which makes fecundity - procreation - possible, and that in that same measure makes possible that the Logos transforms into a "desire to say" and the world into a "among us". At the same time it wants to demonstrate that this notion ofjustice is directly related to the ideas of expression and nudity. Due to which the "Other" imposes itself in front of the "same", as man, singular and vulnerable, and that in the same measure it is linked to the notion of the Face and its particular mode of manifestation. In this respect, we propose that justice. As long as necessary condition, can fund an ethically constituted world, where an "erotic order" mandates over logic orderings. (shrink)

In both the phenomenological ontology of Martin Heidegger and the pragmatism of Charles Peirce, the rejection of the Kantian phenomenal/noumenal distinction leads to a rejection of the alternatives of realism or idealism as well. In their respective denials of such an existential or ontological gap between appearance or phenomena and the ontologically real, they each establish a fundamental intentional unity between man and world which cannot be understood within the framework of realism or of idealism and which reveals deeply rooted (...) affinities between the two positions. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 36 Heft: 2 Seiten: 416-420.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 471 One would have liked amplification of the final chapter on "Descartes and History," first, as to how he was a product of the intellectual climate of his times, and secondly, as to the influence exerted by "the father of modern philosophy" at home and abroad. Even brief comments would have been welcome--for example, on Descartes's reaction to the Thomistic heritage, to Montaigne, Pyrrhonism, and Stoicism, Jesuit (...) formation, to the theory of "honn~te homme" capable of wielding the sword and the pen. The book mentions Chomsky; but why is there no reference to the exchange of four letters between Descartes and the Cambridge Piatonist Henry More on language as the criterion of reason to distinguish man from beast? The crucial role of theology in that age could be further emphasized, as well as the three-cornered nature of the century's combat between "the old philosophers," the Cartesians, and the empiricists who gathered strength after Gassendi. One looks in vain for reference to Descartes's role in denigrating history and promoting the moderns as a possible influence first in "la querelle des anciens et des modernes" and then in the Enlightenment faith in progress. The chapter would have been enriched by comment on Descartes's influence on "iatrophysical" and "iatrochemical" iatromechanism, particularly in the medical sciences. No doubt because of limitations of space, the internationalism of Descartes's "rayonnement " was not brought to light. In Holland, England, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland the sparks spread. But it is not fair to blame an author for not writing someone else's book with more on the history of ideas. Dr. R6e, the Editor of Philosophy and its Past, has made a personal and significant contribution to Cartesiana. We are grateful to him for helping us to understand Descartes. LEONORA COHEN ROSENFIELD University of Maryland Giambattista Vico's Science of Humanity. Ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Phillip Verene. (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976. Pp. xxix + 480. $16.50) This is the second of two volumes of essays on Giambattista Vico, the early eighteenthcentury Neopolitan philosopher of history. The first volume was part of, and served to signal, a fairly intense quickening of interest in Vico.' Since its publication at least a half dozen books on Vico have appeared in English. The first Vico Conference to be held in this country took place in January, 1976, coinciding with the publication of this second volume.2 The Conference and the two volumes represent an effort to stimulate an interest in and manifest the riches of Vico's thought. They must surely be the fruits of a labor of love on the part of Professor Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Director of the Institute for Vichian Studies and co-editor of both volumes. The publication of the second volume, coming at the end of the most fruitful decade in Vichian scholarship in the English-speaking world, provides an opportunity for some assessment of the general trends emerging within that scholarship. I prefer to discuss two related but distinguishableaspects of those trends: first, their interdisciplinarycharacter, and second, the increasingly divergent nature of both the historical and methodological approaches to Vico. On the whole, the predominant disciplinary interest in Vico in books published or translated into English before 1969 has been philosophical and has been heavily influenced by Croce's ' Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969). "Vico and Contemporary Thought," sponsored by the Institute for VicoStudies, associated with the Casa ltaliana of Columbia University and the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. 472 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY idealist interpretation. Vichian research has been enriched and broadened in the last ten years by the growth of philological studies, and the present volume is representative of this development. It is divided almost equally between articles in philology and philosophy. The primarily philological articles range from analyses, occasionally technical, of Vico's ideas about language and myth, 3 to Vico's place in the historical development of linguistics, rhetoric, and language usage from Aristotle to the eighteenth century4 and to his relevance for the contemporary study of language usage and... (shrink)

This is an interview with Professor Sandra Gilbert, undoubtedly one of feminism's most prominent theorists. The interview was conducted in Ghent in the spring of 2000. Sandra Gilbert's name is most often used in conjunction with that of Professor Susan Gubar as the author of The Madwoman in the Attic and the trilogy No Man's Land. In the course of the interview Professor Gilbert talks about the hurdles she had to cross as a young woman academic, the choices (...) she had to make as a mother, her successful collaboration with Susan Gubar and her current, quite controversial viewpoints concerning women's studies versus gender studies and essentialism. (shrink)

Sandra Lee Bartky criticises the account of meaning contained in Heidegger's ontology in Being and Time. In her view, Heidegger must choose between the claim that meaning is received and the claim that it is created, but is unable to do so. This paper argues that Bartky's criticism is misconceived, by showing that meaning, as Heidegger understands it, is necessarily both created and received. According to a number of influential commentators, the ultimate source of meaning is das Man – (...) Heidegger's conception of the social world. This paper initially considers, but ultimately rejects, the view that the source of meaning, as Heidegger presents it, is social. Instead, this paper argues that meaning is rooted in what Heidegger calls ‘letting be’. Letting be articulates a distinctive relationship between the human being (Dasein) and entities. This relationship, it is argued, accommodates the notion of meaning as both received and created, by reconstituting these terms within a context that defines the human being as an interpreting entity, therefore showing that letting be should be understood as the ultimate source of meaning in Heidegger's ontology. (shrink)

Biological knowledge does not fit the image of science that philosophers have developed. Many argue that biology has no laws. Here I criticize standard normative accounts of law and defend an alternative, pragmatic approach. I argue that a multidimensional conceptual framework should replace the standard dichotomous law/ accident distinction in order to display important differences in the kinds of causal structure found in nature and the corresponding scientific representations of those structures. To this end I explore the dimensions of stability, (...) strength, and degree of abstraction that characterize the variety of scientific knowledge claims found in biology and other sciences. (shrink)

The `fact' of pluralism in science is nosurprise. Yet, if science is representing andexplaining the structure of the oneworld, why is there such a diversity ofrepresentations and explanations in somedomains? In this paper I consider severalphilosophical accounts of scientific pluralismthat explain the persistence of bothcompetitive and compatible alternatives. PaulSherman's `Levels of Analysis' account suggeststhat in biology competition betweenexplanations can be partitioned by the type ofquestion being investigated. I argue that thisaccount does not locate competition andcompatibility correctly. I then defend anintegrative (...) model for understanding pluralism. This view is based on taking seriously both thecomplexity and contingency of biologicalorganization and the idealized character ofbiological models. On this view, explanationbecomes, among other things, the location forthe integration of diverse models. I explicatemy argument by an analysis of explanations ofdivision of labor in social insects. (shrink)

The controversy regarding the unit of selection is fundamentally a dispute about what is the correct causal structure of the process of evolution by natural selection and its ontological commitments. By characterizing the process as consisting of two essential steps--interaction and transmission--a singular answer to the unit question becomes ambiguous. With such an account on hand, two recent defenses of competing units of selection are considered. Richard Dawkins maintains that the gene is the appropriate unit of selection and Robert Brandon, (...) in response, argues that the individual organism is better suited to the role. This paper argues that by making explicit the underlying questions that each of these views addresses, the apparent conflict can be resolved. Furthermore, such a resolution allows for a more complete and realistic understanding of the process of evolution by natural selection. (shrink)

According to a view assumed by many scientists and philosophers of science and standardly found in science textbooks, it is controlled ex perience which provides the basis for distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable theories in science: acceptable theories are those which can pass empirical tests. It has often been thought that a certain sort of test is particularly significant: 'crucial experiments' provide supporting empiri cal evidence for one theory while providing conclusive evidence against another. However, in 1906 Pierre Duhem argued (...) that the falsification of a theory is necessarily ambiguous and therefore that there are no crucial experiments; one can never be sure that it is a given theory rather than auxiliary or background hypotheses which experiment has falsified. w. V. Quine has concurred in this judgment, arguing that "our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not indi vidually but only as a corporate body". Some philosophers have thought that the Duhem-Quine thesis gra tuitously raises perplexities. Others see it as doubly significant; these philosophers think that it provides a base for criticism of the foundational view of knowledge which has dominated much of western thought since Descartes, and they think that it opens the door to a new and fruitful way to conceive of scientific progress in particular and of the nature and growth of knowledge in general. (shrink)

We prove the following result which is due to the third author. Let [Formula: see text]. If [Formula: see text] determinacy and [Formula: see text] determinacy both hold true and there is no [Formula: see text]-definable [Formula: see text]-sequence of pairwise distinct reals, then [Formula: see text] exists and is [Formula: see text]-iterable. The proof yields that [Formula: see text] determinacy implies that [Formula: see text] exists and is [Formula: see text]-iterable for all reals [Formula: see text]. A consequence is (...) the Determinacy Transfer Theorem for arbitrary [Formula: see text], namely the statement that [Formula: see text] determinacy implies [Formula: see text] determinacy. (shrink)

Where the old objectivity question asked, Objectivity or relativism: which side are you on?, the new one refuses this choice, seeking instead to bypass widely recognized problems with the conceptual framework that restricts the choices to these two. It asks, How can the notion of objectivity be updated and made useful for contemporary knowledge-seeking projects? One response to this question is the strong objectivity program that draws on feminist standpoint epistemology to provide a kind of logic of discovery for maximizing (...) our ability to block might makes right in the sciences. It does so by delinking the neutrality ideal from standards for maximizing objectivity, since neutrality is now widely recognized as not only not necessary, not only not helpful, but, worst of all, an obstacle to maximizing objectivity when knowledge-distorting interests and values have constituted a research project. Strong objectivity provides a method for correcting this kind of situation. However, standpoint approaches have their own limitations which are quite different from the misreadings of them upon which most critics have tended to focus. Unfortunately, historically limited epistemologies and philosophies of science are all we get to choose from at this moment in history. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It has long been held that the structure of a protein is determined solely by the interactions of the atoms in the sequence of amino acids of which it is composed, and thus the stable, biologically functional conformation should be predictable by ab initio or de novo methods. However, except for small proteins, ab initio predictions have not been successful. We explain why this is the case and argue that the relationship among the different methods, models, and representations of (...) protein structure is one of integrative pluralism. Our defence appeals to specific features of the complexity of the functional protein structure and to the partial character of representation in general. We present examples of integrative strategies in protein science. _1._ Introduction _2._ Partiality of Representation _3._ Protein Functional Complexity _4._ Modelling Protein Structure _4.1_ Integrating ab initio and experimental models _4.2_ Integrating multiple experimental models _5._ Conclusion. (shrink)

It has been claimed that ceteris paribus laws, rather than strict laws are the proper aim of the special sciences. This is so because the causal regularities found in these domains are exception-ridden, being contingent on the presence of the appropriate conditions and the absence of interfering factors. I argue that the ceteris paribus strategy obscures rather than illuminates the important similarities and differences between representations of causal regularities in the exact and inexact sciences. In particular, a detailed account of (...) the types and degrees of contingency found in the domain of biology permits a more adequate understanding of the relations among the sciences. (shrink)

In this article I consider the challenges for exporting causal knowledge raised by complex biological systems. In particular, James Woodward’s interventionist approach to causality identified three types of stability in causal explanation: invariance, modularity, and insensitivity. I consider an example of robust degeneracy in genetic regulatory networks and knockout experimental practice to pose methodological and conceptual questions for our understanding of causal explanation in biology. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of (...) Pittsburgh, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This collection of essays, first published two decades ago, presents central feminist critiques and analyses of natural and social sciences and their philosophies. Unfortunately, in spite of the brilliant body of research and scholarship in these fields in subsequent decades, the insights of these essays remain as timely now as they were then: philosophy and the sciences still presume kinds of social innocence to which they are not entitled. The essays focus on Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx; on (...) the 'adversary method' model of philosophic reasoning; on principles of individuation on philosophical ontology and philosophy of language; on individualistic assumptions in psychology; functionalism in sociological and biological theory; evolutionary theory; the methodology of political science; and conceptions of objective inquiry in the sciences. In taking insights of both Liberal and Marxian women's movements into the purportedly most abstract and value-free areas of Western thought, these essays chart sexist and androcentric assumptions, claims and practices in the cognitive, technical cores of Western sciences and their philosophies. They begin to identify the distinctive aspects of women's experiences and locations in male-supremacist social structures which can provide resources needed for the creation of post-androcentric thinking in research, scholarship, and public policy. Such uses of feminist insights remain controversial today, and even among some feminists. These authors were all junior researchers and scholars two decades ago; today many are among the most distinguished senior scholars in their fields. Their work here provides a splendid opportunity for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy and the social sciences to explore some of the most intriguing and controversial challenges to disciplinary projects and to public policy today. (shrink)

It has long been held that the structure of a protein is determined solely by the interactions of the atoms in the sequence of amino acids of which it is composed, and thus the stable, biologically functional conformation should be predictable by ab initio or de novo methods. However, except for small proteins, ab initio predictions have not been successful. We explain why this is the case and argue that the relationship among the different methods, models, and representations of protein (...) structure is one of integrative pluralism. Our defence appeals to specific features of the complexity of the functional protein structure and to the partial character of representation in general. We present examples of integrative strategies in protein science. 1. Introduction2. Partiality of Representation3. Protein Functional Complexity4. Modelling Protein Structure4.1 Integrating ab initio and experimental models4.2 Integrating multiple experimental models5. Conclusion. (shrink)

Do moral appraisals shape judgments of intentionality? A traditional view is that individuals first evaluate whether an action has been carried out intentionally. Then they use this evaluation as input for their moral judgments. Recent studies, however, have shown that individuals’ moral appraisals can also influence their intentionality attributions. They attribute intentionality to the negative side effect of a given action, but not to the positive side effect of the same action. In three experiments, we show that this asymmetry is (...) a robust effect that critically depends on the agent’s beliefs. The asymmetry is reduced when agents are described as not knowing that their action can bring about side effects, and is eliminated when they are deemed to hold a false belief about the consequences of their actions. These results suggest that both evaluative and epistemic considerations are used in intentionality attribution. (shrink)