Book reviewed in this article: The New Health Care For Profit: Doctors and Hospitals in a Competitive Environment. Edited by Bradford H. Gray The Healing Mission and the Business Ethic. By Robert M. Cunningham The Medical Industrial Complex. By Stanley Wohl.

This book offers philosophy in the key of life.

Reissued with a new preface, this famous collection of essays covers a remarkably wide range of philosophical issues, including essays on Wittgenstein, Austin, Kierkegaard, and the philosophy of language, and extending beyond philosophy into discussions of music and drama. Previous edition hb ISBN (1976): 0-521-21116-6 Previous edition pb ISBN (1976): 0-521-29048-1.

"As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don't have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism's roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on (...) the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics--the language and beliefs that separate people into an 'us' and a 'them.' He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations. He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation's past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare. These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership. By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics--charged by rhetoric and myth--can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals."--Jacket. (shrink)

"This is a timely collection of important papers.

Gustav Radbruch war Deutschlands beruhmtester Rechtsphilosoph im 20. Jahrhundert. Seine gehaltvollen, aber auch spannungsreichen Schriften pragen die deutschsprachige Rechtsphilosophie bis heute. Im Zentrum von Radbruchs Lehre steht sein neukantianisch gepragter Rechtsbegriff, der im Laufe der Zeit eine Reihe von Veranderungen erfahren hat. Die Beitrage in diesem Band sind Radbruchs Rechtsbegriff im Allgemeinen und den Wandlungen dieses Rechtsbregriffs im Besonderen gewidmet. Nach der orthodoxen Lesart vertrat Radbruch vor dem Kriege eine rechtspositivistische Lehre, wurde unter dem Eindruck der nationalsozialistischen Grauel jedoch zum (...) Naturrecht bekehrt. Zunehmend wird gesehen, dass diese 'Bekehrungsthese' zu Ungereimtheiten fuhrt. Verschiedene Beitrage dieses Bandes betonen demgegenuber die Kontinuitat nichtpositivistischer Elemente in der Entwicklung von Radbruchs Rechtsbegriff. Mit Beitragen von: Hidehiko Adachi, Martin Borowski, Horst Dreier, Ralf Dreier, An dreas Funke, Ulfrid Neumann, Stanley L. Paulson, Joachim Renzikowski, Hubert Rottleuthner, Marc Andre Wiegand. (shrink)

A collection of 17 important readings provide those unfamiliar with Cavell's work with an overview of its strategic purpose, its central themes, and its argumentative development. The readings are taken from every one of the major fields in which Cavell has been involved--aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of Wittgenstein, Austin, Emerson, literary criticism, film theory, and psychoanalysis. Brief editorial introductions to each piece are included. A previously unpublished essay on Wittgenstein serves as an epilogue. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., (...) Portland, OR. (shrink)

In the aftermath of emotivism and behaviourism, cognitivist theories of emotion became current in both philosophy and psychology. These theories, though varied, have in common that emotions require propositional attitudes such as beliefs or evaluations. Accordingly, cognitivist theories characterize emotions themselves with features of such attitudes, including syntax, semantic meaning, and justifiability.

A division has arisen within the naturalist school of moral philosophy, with the contenders being "the emotive theorists vs. the cognitive theorists." the author suggests that the fundamental agreements between the groups far outweigh the peripheral and sometimes illusory disagreements. the article establishes the areas of agreement, deals with illusory disagreements, and indicates the peripheral disagreements can be considered disagreements in emphasis. (staff).

Writing in continuous gratitude to Gary Matthews's wonderful project of rescuing childhood from its disregard, not to say banishment, in professional philosophy, I relate here certain moments in his considerations of early childhood to moments in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, which opens with a scene of childhood from Augustine's Confessions, and also to moments in later stages of childhood (as Matthews also significantly indicates) and, beyond that, to adolescent crises and to what I have called philosophy as "the education of grown-ups." (...) I raise the issue of whether we are to see the "odd" questions of early childhood as proto-science, which will eventually graduate into better science, or as proto-philosophy, which will be continuously elaborated in philosophical investigation. This raises the question of whether philosophy is to be regarded, early or late, as inseparable from science or, as the later Wittgenstein urges, autonomous with respect to science's glamorous advances. (shrink)

Proceeding on the assumption that confusion in Renaissance criticism arises from the way we talk and the vocabularies we use, Stewart investigates typical assertions in recent criticism of Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert, using a Wittgensteinian method of investigation. This involves taking a thing, usually a statement, apart. If a statement, under such scrutiny, seems to make no sense, or to lead critics into blind alleys, then we must try to clarify the expression. As Stewart asserts, if we are to (...) go on together in critical conversation, then we must find a way to sort out the confusion that arises from our language. While Wittgenstein's thought has long been utilized by literary critics, this study represents the first sustained application of ordinary language philosophy to the vocabulary and assumptions of current criticism. This study is an original and important book⎯one likely to be of great interest to philosophers as well as literary theorists. While Renaissance Talk is primarily concerned with Renaissance and early modern studies, its patient but relentless exposure of what sometimes passes for scholarly criticism, along with its exemplary corrective explication of misinterpreted passages from the writings of major authors, makes it useful reading for a wide range of Literary Studies students and scholars. (shrink)

Touching on the work of philosophers including Richardson, Kant, Hume, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Dewey, this study examines the history of what philosophers have had to say about "Shakespeare" as a subject of philosophy, from the seventeenth-century to the present. Stewart's volume will be of interest to Shakespeareans, literary critics, and philosophers.

This new edition of Baran and Davis's successful text provides a comprehensive, historically based, introduction to mass communication theory. Clearly written with examples, graphics, and other materials to illustrate key theories, this edition traces the emergence of two main bodies of mass communication theory: social, behavioral and critical, cultural. The authors emphasize that media theories are human creations that typically are intended to address specific problems or issues.

Science and religion have long been thought incompatible. But nowhere has this apparent contradiction been more fully resolved than in the figure of A. S. Eddington (1882–1944), a pioneer in astrophysics, relativity, and the popularization of science, and a devout Quaker. Practical Mystic uses the figure of Eddington to shows how religious and scientific values can interact and overlap without compromising the integrity of either. Eddington was a world-class scientist who not only maintained his religious belief throughout his scientific career (...) but also defended the interrelation of science and religion while drawing inspiration from both for his practices. For instance, at a time when a strict adherence to deductive principles of physics had proved fruitless for understanding the nature of stars, insights from Quaker mysticism led Eddington to argue that an outlook less concerned with certainty and more concerned with further exploration was necessary to overcome the obstacles of incomplete and uncertain knowledge. By examining this intersection between liberal religion and astrophysics, Practical Mystic questions many common assumptions about the relationship between science and spirituality. Matthew Stanley’s analysis of Eddington’s personal convictions also reveals much about the practice, production, and dissemination of scientific knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Coming away from a first reading of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic,” my sense of its pertinence to what I have written on film melodrama is so urgent that I find myself unwilling to make public the foregoing latest installment of my thoughts on the subject without including some initial responses, however hurried and improvisatory they must be now, to the material she has so remarkably brought together. Her work, among (...) other matters, proposes an understanding of James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” that to my mind cannot sensibly be passed by in thinking further about James’s achievement. Since in readdressing James’s text in my preceding remarks about Now, Voyager, and specifying my reason in having adduced it at the end of my earlier account Letter from an Unknown Woman by describing that film’s philosophical design—relating the melodrama of the unknown woman to the woman’s assignment to prove the man’s existence, or preservation, to him, or for him, hence impossibly attempting to perform his cogito, the taking on of his subjectivity, overcoming his skepticism by accepting that subjectivity as undeniable—I am understandably interested, to begin with, in tracing out the connection between things Sedgwick says about John Marcher’s “two secrets” and things I have said about secrecy as a cover for the idea of “privacy” in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s fantasy of a private language. (shrink)

The current sociotechnical enterprise known as technology assessment (TA) is examined. Applying Skolimowski's analysis of epistemic possibility, the two foci of TA activities, impact analysis and policy analysis are shown to involve different logical and methodological forms. Impact analysis is shown to follow the logic of applied science while policy analysis involves the logic of technological design. Methodological implications of this distinction are isolated. Areas requiring conceptual clarification internal to TA practice are identified and limitations of the overall approach are (...) articulated. (shrink)

The paradox that individually rational actions collectively can lead to irrational outcomes is exemplified in human appropriation of a class of goods known as "common-pool resources" : natural or humanly created resource systems which are large enough to make it costly to exclude potential beneficiaries. Appropriations of common-pool resources for private use tend toward abusive practices that lead to the loss of the resource in question: the tragedy of thecommons. Prescriptions for escape from tragedy have involved two institutions, each applied (...) largely in isolation from the other: private markets and government coercion . Yet examples exist of local institutions that have utilized mixtures of public and private practices and have survived for hundreds of years.Two problems further exacerbate efforts to avoid the tragic nature of common-pool resource use. One, given the current level of knowledge, the role of the resource is not recognized for what it is. It is, thus, in a fundamental, epistemological sense invisible. Two, if the resource is recognized, it may not be considered scarce, thus placing it outside the scrutiny of economic theory. Both types of error are addressed by the emerging field of ecological economics.This paper discusses common pool resources, locates the ambiguities that make their identification difficult, and argues that avoidance of a CPR loss is inadequately addressed by sharply separated market and state institutions. When the resource is recognized for what it is, a common-pool good, which is subject to overexploitation, it may be possible to identify creative combinations of public and private institutions that can combine to save that resource. Disparate examples of self-organized enterprises, public/private utilities, and "green" taxes, to name a few, provide empirical content for developing theories of self-organized collective action. (shrink)

Water is the major contributor to the eating and keeping qualities and structure of baked products. Its management and control during preparation, processing, baking, cooling and storage is essential for the optimisation of product quality. This successful and highly practical volume describes in detail the role and control of water in the formation of cake batters, bread, pastry and biscuit doughs, their subsequent processing and the baked product. Now in a fully revised and updated second edition, the book has been (...) expanded and developed through the inclusion of new information and references related to the formation and processing of batters and dough into baked products. The new edition includes a selection of case studies based on practical experience in the manufacture and optimisation of baked products. Each case study, illustrated as appropriate, considers the various roles that water may play in different manufacturing contexts. The book is aimed at food scientists and technologists in bakery companies; ingredient suppliers; flour millers; researchers and students in academic food science departments. (shrink)