Originally published 1961. Translation of "Meditaciones del Quijote :Meditacion preliminar. Meditacion primera." (1914). Contents: Reader...; Preliminary Meditation; First Meditation (Brief Treatise on the Novel).

Gratitude is usually conceived as a uniquely appropriate response to goodwill. A grateful person is bound to reward an act of goodwill in some appropriately proportionate way. I argue that goodwill, when interpreted as love, should require no reward. Consequently, the idea of gratitude as a proportionate response to love is not intelligible. However, goodwill can also be understood merely as a disinterested concern. Such forms of goodwill are involved in reciprocal relationships. But gratitude has no place in these relationships (...) either. (shrink)

On most accounts present in the literature, the complex experience of shame has the injury to self-esteem as its main component. A major objection to this idea is that it fails to differentiate between shame and disappointment in oneself. I argue that previous attempts to respond to the objection are unsatisfactory. I argue further that the distinction should refer to the different ways the subject's self-esteem is formed. A necessary requirement for shame is that the standards and values by which (...) the subject judges himself are borrowed from a canon of values the subject accepts as a given. The proper focus of shame is the fact of conformity to that canon. Those agents who have a different conception of self-esteem and who freely set and alter their own values are prone to self-disappointment, but not to shame. (shrink)

El libro contiene doce lecciones dadas por el autor en la Universidad Central de Madrid en 1933. Ortega desarrolla el planteamiento de los problemas generales de la historia y de la "historiología". Analiza los acontecimientos que causaron el inicio y evolución del pensamiento moderno. La vida de Galileo, en su opinión, marca el inicio del imperio de la razón pura, que comienza con la "rebelión de las ciencias" frente al dominio precedente de la teología. Se hace un estudio del cristianismo (...) como forma de vida, su aparición, justificación histórica y desarrollo, hasta convertirse en el elemento central de la cultura occidental. El autor analiza el cristianismo al margen de la fe y de cualquier dimensión sobrenatural, lo que le lleva a tratar la religión como una más entre las teorías filosóficas existentes. Ortega considera equivocadamente que la base del cristianismo es el reconocimiento de la nulidad del hombre y de la naturaleza. La verdadera línea de desarrollo de la filosofía cristiana --marcada, según él, por Duns Scoto, Eckhart y Nicolás Cusano--, desemboca necesariamente en una completa ruptura entre la fe y la razón. La doctrina de Santo Tomás habría supuesto, en cambio, una deformación del cristianismo, un intento de "racionalizar la fe" mediante la introducción del aristotelismo en el estudio de la teología. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: Health-based journal clubs have been in place for over 100 years. Participants meet regularly to critique research articles, to improve their understanding of research design, statistics and critical appraisal. However, there is no standard process of conducting an effective journal club. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify core processes of a successful health journal club. METHOD: We searched a range of library databases using established keywords. All research designs were initially considered to establish the body of evidence. (...) Experimental or comparative papers were then critically appraised for methodological quality and information was extracted on effective journal club processes. RESULTS: We identified 101 articles, of which 21 comprised the body of evidence. Of these, 12 described journal club effectiveness. Methodological quality was moderate. The papers described many processes of effective journal clubs. Over 80% papers reported that journal club intervention was effective in improving knowledge and critical appraisal skills. Few papers reported on the psychometric properties of their outcome instruments. No paper reported on the translation of evidence from journal club into clinical practice. CONCLUSION: Characteristics of successful journal clubs included regular and anticipated meetings, mandatory attendance, clear long- and short-term purpose, appropriate meeting timing and incentives, a trained journal club leader to choose papers and lead discussion, circulating papers prior to the meeting, using the internet for wider dissemination and data storage, using established critical appraisal processes and summarizing journal club findings. (shrink)

The equations of state for the ideal classical gas are generalized with two characteristic constants known as the state indices. A simple and complete representation is developed for the super-ideal gas, with explicit results which are general enough to cover a wide range of equilibrium systems and states. Evidence and justification are provided in terms of examples and results of statistical physics. The new model should prove useful for treating problems involving physical behavior and properties which might otherwise call for (...) specialized or advanced methods of statistical mechanics. (shrink)

"This concise, elegant essay on the roots and historical justification of philosophy marks a decisive step in posing the problem of what philosophy is.

For a world mired in catastrophe, nothing could be more urgent than the question of survival. In this theoretically and methodologically groundbreaking book, Adam Y. Stern calls for a critical reevaluation of survival as a contemporary regime of representation. In Survival, Stern asks what texts, what institutions, and what traditions have made survival a recognizable element of our current political vocabulary. The book begins by suggesting that the interpretive key lies in the discursive prominence of "Jewish survival." Yet the Jewish (...) example, he argues, is less a marker of Jewish history than an index of Christianity's impact on the modern, secular, political imagination. With this inversion, the book repositions Jewish survival as the supplemental effect and mask of a more capacious political theology of Christian survival. The argument proceeds by taking major moments in twentieth-century philosophy, theology, and political theory as occasions for collecting the scattered elements of survival's theological-political archive. Through readings of canonical texts by secular and Jewish thinkers—Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud—Stern shows that survival belongs to a history of debates about the sovereignty and subjection of Christ's body. Interrogating survival as a rhetorical formation, the book intervenes in discussions about biopolitics, secularism, political theology, and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)