How does a country achieve a public capital market in which firms can raise capital from investors? In seeking clues and hypotheses, this article looks back to the dawn of the public corporation in the United States. The battles for control of the Erie Railroad, known as the "Scarlet Woman of Wall Street," a reference to its ill repute, stand at the symbolic center of these developments. The battles for control, which waxed and waned between 1868 and 1872, involved: the (...) titan of the transportation age, Cornelius Vanderbilt; the brilliant and notorious stock market manipulator and takeover entrepreneur, Jay Gould; the largest and most powerful railroad of the era, the Pennsylvania; control over rail transportation to New York City; and the politics and courts of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. It was played out in the securities markets, the courts, the legislatures, and the newspapers and attracted the attention, and condemnation, of some of the leading commentators of the day. Rereading this history from the vantage point of the end of the twentieth century, several features are striking. First, the battles are remarkably familiar: they are recognizably modern battles for control over a widely-held corporation. Second, many of the tactics utilized are now illegal. Finally, surprising connections emerge between antitrust, federalism, and the emergence of public capital markets. (shrink)

ArgumentSince the linguistic turn, the role of rhetoric in the circulation and the popular representation of knowledge has been widely accepted in science studies. This article aims to analyze not a textual form of scientific rhetoric, but the crucial role of materiality in scientific debates. It introduces the concept ofmaterial rhetoricto understand the promotional regimes in which material objects play an essential argumentative role. It analyzes the phenomenon by looking at two students of prehistory from nineteenth-century Belgium.In the study of (...) human prehistory and evolution, material data are either fairly abundant stone tools or very scarce fossil bones. These two types of material data stand for two different strategies in material rhetoric. In this article, the first strategy is exemplified by Aimé Rutot, who gathered great masses of eoliths. The second strategy is typified by the example of Julien Fraipont, who based his scientific career on only two Neanderthal skeletons. Rutot sent his “artifacts” to a very wide audience, while Fraipont showed his skeletons to only a few selected scholars. Unlike Rutot, however, Fraipont was able to monitor his audience's interpretation of the finds by means of personal contacts. What an archaeologist gains in reach, he or she apparently loses in control. In this article we argue that only those scholars who find the right balance between the extremes of reach and control will prove to be successful. (shrink)

Any appeal to a right raises the question of a corresponding duty. If one bears a right, then who bears the duty to respect, protect, and enforce that right? In this essay, I contend that human rights claims need not be oriented to or reliant on the state. I start from and conclude with lessons from the 2016 protests at Standing Rock. Standing Rock, I argue, exemplifies critical theory that organizes communities through the language of human (...) rights. (shrink)

Is the creative act like a volcano: an outburst that lights up the universe? This volume connects reason with desire and the arts in ways that enable us to imagine how creativity can bring us closer to the truth. The artistic quest for freedom stands in stark contrast to philosophy's call to subordinate art to reason and tradition. The struggle between them has culminated in artistic attempts to subsume philosophical matters within the domain of art. One central question in this (...) study is what the consequences will be of a final dissolution of the boundary between the two domains: will all that remains of the artwork be an abstract howl of the rock – our rock, the planet – itself? (shrink)

Compassionate and Practical Advice Helps Readers Move through Hard Times There are things in life that knock us to the ground. The death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the betrayal of a friend, the turmoil of complex family issues. Sometimes it feels as though life is falling down around us. In those world-rocking times, we can hang on to hurts or we can surrender our pain to the One who promises us abundant life. In this practical (...) and encouraging book, trusted author Elizabeth B. Brown shows weary readers not only how to survive life's difficulties but how to move beyond them to a place of strength and confidence. She shows them that they are not alone and are not destined for a life defined by the chaos of crises. Then she shows readers how to understand and accept their situation, surround themselves with people who can guide and encourage them, and grow through the process. (shrink)

Often coherentism is taken to be the view that justification is solely a function of the coherence among a person's beliefs. I offer a counterexample to the idea that when so understood coherence is sufficient for justification. I then argue that the counterexample will still work if coherence is understood as coherence among a person's beliefs and experiences. I defend a form of nondoxastic foundationalism that takes sensations and philosophical intuitions as basic and sees nearly all other justification as depending (...) on inference to the best explanation. I take up Wilfrid Sellars's Dilemma, which starts with the idea that the foundations must be either propositional in nature or not. The argument continues: if they are, they stand in need of justification; if they are not, they cannot confer justification. It concludes that there cannot be foundations that confer justification on other beliefs. I deny both horns of this dilemma, arguing that philosophical intuitions are propositional but do not stand in need of justification and that sensations are not propositional but can confer justification on perceptual beliefs. (shrink)

The theory of visual perception that Irvin Rock develops and supports in this book with numerous original experiments, views perception as the outcome of a process of unconscious inference, problem solving, and the building of structural descriptions of the external world.

Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.

In this paper, I will describe how Brentano was able to integrate descriptive philosophy and logical analysis fruitfully by pointing out Brentano’s concept of philosophy as a rigorous science. First I will clarify how Brentano attempted to turn philosophy into a rigorous descriptive science by applying scientific methods to philosophical questions. After spelling out the implications of such a descriptive understanding of philosophy, I will contrast this descriptive view of philosophy with a semantic-analytic understanding of philosophy as proposed by Frege. (...) After having thus set the stage I will argue that the current separation of philosophy into the seemingly antithetical strands of phenomenology and analytic philosophy may be seen as a consequence of how the term ‘rigorous science’ in ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’ is interpreted: Does a rigorous science grasp its object with as much exactitude as possible? Or is a science rigorous when its theories are expressed unambiguously, and their implications are drawn with precision? In the course of this investigation I will also point out how Brentano’s integrative use of descriptive philosophy and analysis can provide a suitable starting point for an equally successful integration of these methods in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

In this contribution, I will argue for an ontological understanding of time as temporality. This, however, implies that in a certain sense being is temporality, by which I mean that on an ontological level temporality is nothing but the process of change, i.e. the dynamic aspect of being in its becoming, changing, and perishing, and that concrete beings are not merely in time, but they are temporal. This leads to the conclusion that actual time is the process of change that (...) becoming beings are, as well as the conclusion that reality is fundamentally temporal as argued by process metaphysicians like Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze. The investigation begins with first establishing the methodological difficulties involved in thinking temporality as an ontological feature. In a second step, dynamic ontologies are introduced as the conceptual background best suited to think ontological temporality and their difference to event-ontologies is explained. Finally, the distinction between temporality and linear time is clarified. This introduction of temporality ends with some arguments for the existence of temporality that are inspired by Aristotle’s famous investigations into the nature of time. After having thus introduced temporality as an ontological feature and argued for the existence and relevance of it, its implications for our understanding of the dimensions of time and especially for anticipation are discussed. (shrink)

This paper explores the financial reporting scandals of the past decade and the resulting U.S. legislative attempts to impose ethical behavior and control the incidence of new reporting problems via the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. We begin with a brief historical perspective followed by assertions of ethical consequences of legislation with discussions of key recent corporate scandals, the motives for the frauds, and the consequences. Ethics related provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are discussed with the potential impact of the legislation on the (...) likelihood of similar future frauds and accompanying prognosis for future corporate ethical behavior. (shrink)

During the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota, USA/Turtle Island, a group of military veterans knelt in front of Oceti Sakowin Elders asking forgiveness for centuries of settler colonial military ventures in Oceti Sakowin Territory. Leonard Crow Dog forgave them and immediately demanded respect for Native Nations throughout the U.S. Lacking such respect, he said, Native people will cease paying taxes. Crow Dog’s post-forgiveness remarks speak to the political context of the military veterans’ request: They seek collective forgiveness (...) amidst ongoing occupation and harms committed by the collective they represent. In this chapter, I examine this case study and argue that ongoing harm undermines requests for forgiveness on behalf of collectives. I look to the work of Glen Coultard, Waziyatawin, and Leanne Simpson to consider what a responsible request for collective forgiveness would entail. (shrink)

One Health is a novel paradigm that recognizes that human and non-human animal health is interlinked through our shared environment. Increasingly prominent in public health responses to zoonoses, OH differs from traditional approaches to animal-borne infectious risks, because it also aims to promote the health of animals and ecological systems. Despite the widespread adoption of OH, culling remains a key component of institutional responses to the risks of zoonoses. Using the threats posed by highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses to human (...) and animal health, economic activity and food security as a case exemplar, we explore whether culling and other standard control measures for animal-borne infectious disease might be justified as part of OH approaches. Our central premise is that OH requires us to reformulate ‘health’ as universal good that is best shared across species boundaries such that human health and well-being are contingent upon identifying and meeting the relevant sets of human and non-human interests and shared dependencies. Our purpose is to further nascent discussions about the ethical dimensions of OH and begin to describe the principles around which a public health agenda that truly seeks to co-promote human and non-human health could potentially begin to be implemented. (shrink)

Based on a creative use of the phenomenological method, we argue that a close examination of the temporality of objects reveals the future as genuinely open. Without aiming to decide the matter of phenomenological realism, we suggest that this method can be used to investigate the mode of being of objects in their own temporality. By bracketing the anticipatory structure of experience, one can get a sense of objects’ temporality as independent of consciousness. This contributes to the current Realism versus (...) Idealism debates, but it does so without taking sides. The starting point is neither an analysis of pure consciousness, nor attempts to describe objects in-themselves, but the idea that things can be phenomenologically grasped through the difference between their temporality and our own. By being methodically “open to the future,” one can become aware of the sui generis temporality of objects as different from the temporality shaped by our anticipation. (shrink)

Although Kant is often considered the philosopher who ended the reign of metaphysical dogmatism, the situation is not quite so clear. On the one hand, this analysis must bear in mind that Kant himself had a great interest in metaphysics, insofar as it was not dogmatic – Kant himself considered his Critique to be just a reform of metaphysics. On the other hand, the Critique of Pure Reason itself is a result of certain metaphysical-dogmatic preliminary decisions. In order to show (...) how one-sided the idea is that Kant simply did away with metaphysics, I will draw attention to the metaphysical presuppositions that shape the Critique of Pure Reason. The first thinker who attempted to explicate the metaphysical basis of the Critique was Kant’s friend and colleague Johann Georg Hamann. With Hamann’s guidance I will argue that even his Critique of Pure Reason was based on metaphysical presuppositions and that such an influence by metaphysical preliminary decisions is inevitable – even for such a sharp critic of metaphysical dogmatism as Kant. At the same time this text provides an introduction to Hamann’s thought, a thinker ahead of his times. (shrink)

This paper investigates the correlation of Thinking, as understood by Martin Heidegger, and his concept of Thing.

It is a puzzling fact that the Greek term for Nature ‘physis’ could be used to refer to i) reality as a whole, ii) the nature of something, iii) to individual material beings or materiality and iv) all things that are self-generating. In order to understand and tie together this wide array of possible meanings, I will consider the thesis that ‘physis’ was in fact used as a concept of being, a term naming the fundamental property of all of reality (...) in the early pre-Socratics, poets and scientists before 500 BCE. Investigating ‘physis’ in this way can give us a way of thinking about Nature as a dynamic and creative but material process that goes far beyond the classical understanding of Nature as the sum of things that self-generate or the modern mathematical understanding of Nature born with Galileo, dominant to this day. (shrink)

For centuries most ontological systems have been based on the presupposition that the paradigmatic type of being is the kind of being things like stones and houses have. But if one looks at the beginning of Philosophy, at the emergence of philosophic thought, this choice was not obvious. For the pre-Socratics and even for Plato and Aristotle it was not obvious that reality is composed out of static and distinct elements. In this paper I investigate this relationship between a static (...) and a dynamic account of reality both in its historic as well as systematic dimension. I argue that ontologies are ultimately based on an analysis of predication and that dynamic ontologies are mainly based on an empirical or phenomenological investigation of singular and concrete reality. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 18 Heft: 2 Seiten: 153-166.

This article attempts a contextual study of the origin and early development of August Kekulé's theory of aromatic compounds. The terminus a quo is essentially August Hofmann's coining of the modern chemical denotation of ‘aromatic’ in 1855; the terminus ad quem is the first full codification of Kekulé's theory in the sixth fascicle of his Lehrbuch der organischen Chemie, published in the summer of 1866. Kekulé's theory is viewed in context with the earlier and concurrent experimental work of such chemists (...) as Hermann Kolbe, Friedrich Beilstein, Rudolph Fittig, and Hugo Müller. The reception of the theory is briefly examined. Attention is paid to the role of Kekulé's molecular models and of his celebrated dream anecdote of the snake that seizes its own tail. The episode is used as a case study for the continuity of scientific progress, and to illustrate the close reciprocal interactions of hypothesis and experiment in the evolution of a scientific theory. (shrink)

Within the field of medical ethics, discussions related to public health have mainly concentrated on issues that are closely tied to research and practice involving technologies and professional services, including vaccination, screening, and insurance coverage. Broader determinants of population health have received less attention, although this situation is rapidly changing. Against this backdrop, our specific contribution to the literature on ethics and law vis-à-vis promoting population health is to open up the ubiquitous presence of pets within cities and towns for (...) further discussion. An expanding body of research suggests that pet animals are deeply relevant to people’s health (negatively and positively). Pet bylaws adopted by town and city councils have largely escaped notice, yet they are meaningful to consider in relation to everyday practices, social norms, and cultural values, and thus in relation to population health. Nevertheless, not least because they pivot on defining pets as private property belonging to individual people, pet bylaws raise emotionally charged ethical issues that have yet to be tackled in any of the health research on pet ownership. The literature in moral philosophy on animals is vast, and we do not claim to advance this field here. Rather, we pragmatically seek to reconcile philosophical objections to pet ownership with both animal welfare and public health. In doing so, we foreground theorizations of personhood and property from sociocultural anthropology. (shrink)

Some recent philosophers of science have argued that chemistry in the nineteenth century “largely lacked theoretical foundations, and showed little progress in supplying such foundations” until around 1900, or even later. In particular, nineteenth-century atomic theory, it is said, “played no useful part” in the crowning achievement of nineteenth-century chemistry, the powerful subdiscipline of organic chemistry. This paper offers a contrary view. The idea that chemistry only gained useful theoretical foundations when it began to merge with physics, it will be (...) argued, is based on an implicit conception of scientific theory that is too narrow, and too exclusively oriented to the science of physics. A broader understanding of scientific theory, and one that is more appropriate to the science of chemistry, reveals the essential part that theory played in the development of chemistry in the nineteenth century. It also offers implications for our understanding of the nature of chemical theory today. (shrink)

This daily diary study examined the within-person coupling between four emotion regulation strategies and both subjective well-being and perceived stress in daily life of geriatric nurses. Participants (N = 89) described how they regulated their emotions in terms of cognitive reappraisal and suppression. They also indicated their subjective well-being and level of perceived stress each day over three weeks. At the within-person level, cognitive reappraisal intended to increase positive emotions was positively associated with higher subjective well-being and negatively associated with (...) perceived stress. Suppression of the expression of positive emotions was negatively associated with subjective well-being and positively associated with perceived stress. However, cognitive reappraisal intended to down-regulate negative emotions and suppression as a strategy to inhibit the expression of negative emotions were not associated with daily well-being or perceived stress. Off-days were rated as days with higher subjective well-being and lower perceived stress in contrast to working days. At the between-person level, individuals who reported more daily negative affect reported increased suppression of positive emotions, corroborating the within-person findings. Moreover, findings indicated that nurses with more years of experience in the job reported higher subjective well-being and less perceived stress. These results provide insights into important daily emotional processes of geriatric nurses, both at workdays and in their leisure time. (shrink)

In a publication of 1831 later seen as a milestone in the development of chemistry, Justus Liebig announced a new apparatus for the analysis of organic compounds and provided analytical results for fifteen substances. In this paper we used the detailed descriptions published by Liebig in 1837 to reconstruct his apparatus and methods for hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen analysis. Our replications of his analyses of racemic acid, cinchonine, narcotine, and urea reveal that his two pieces of apparatus give excellent results (...) for carbon and hydrogen content, but erratic results for nitrogen. The results corroborate the assessments of Liebig and his contemporaries, and show that the analytical method for carbon and hydrogen analysis was remarkably accurate. We offer this case, with its convincing replicability, not only to clarify the nature of Liebig's innovations, but also as a new model for understanding broader contested issues in the philosophy and sociology of science. Our analysis suggests that the great shift in science from gentlemanly avocation to professional vocation was tightly linked to laboratory practice, and not just to social networks and context. It also provides the basis for a critique of H. M. Collins's theory of the 'experimenters' regress'. (shrink)