In this paper we examine the study of minerals from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century in the light of the work of Michel Foucault on the history of systems of thought. In spite of a certain number of theoretical problems, Foucault's enterprise opens up to the historian of science a vast terrain for exploration. But this is the place neither for a general exegesis nor for a general criticism of his position; our aim here is the more modest (...) one of taking certain points from Foucault's study,The order of things, and seeing how far they can be extended into an area not explicitly considered in that work. (shrink)

A non-epistemological history of historical epistemology Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9501-5 Authors W. R. Albury, School of Humanities, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

(2008). Medicine and Statecraft in The Book of the Courtier ∗. Intellectual History Review: Vol. 18, Humanism and Medicine in the Early Modern Era, pp. 75-89.

Eric Olsen argues from the fact that we once existed as fetal individuals to the conclusion that the Standard View of personal identity is mistaken. I shall establish that a similar argument focusing upon dead people opposes Olson’s favored Biological View of personal identity.

Significant research has been devoted to detecting people in images and videos. In this paper we describe a human de- tection method that augments widely used edge-based fea- tures with texture and color information, providing us with a much richer descriptor set. This augmentation results in an extremely high-dimensional feature space (more than 170,000 dimensions). In such high-dimensional spaces, classical machine learning algorithms such as SVMs are nearly intractable with respect to training. Furthermore, the number of training samples is much (...) smaller than the dimensionality of the feature space, by at least an order of magnitude. Finally, the extraction of features from a densely sampled grid structure leads to a high degree of multicollinearity. To circumvent these data characteristics, we employ Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis, an effi- cient dimensionality reduction technique, one which pre- serves significant discriminative information, to project the data onto a much lower dimensional subspace (20 dimen- sions, reduced from the original 170,000). Our human de- tection system, employing PLS analysis over the enriched descriptor set, is shown to outperform state-of-the-art tech- niques on three varied datasets including the popular INRIA pedestrian dataset, the low-resolution gray-scale Daim- lerChrysler pedestrian dataset, and the ETHZ pedestrian dataset consisting of full-length videos of crowded scenes. (shrink)

Two recent papers by Michael Burke bearing upon the persistence of people and commonplace things illustrate the fact that the quest for synchronic ontological economy is likely to encourage a disturbing diachronic proliferation of entities. This discussion argues that Burke's promise of ontological economy is seriously compromised by the fact that his proposed metaphysic does violence to standard intuitions concerning the persistence of people and commonplace things. In effect, Burke would have us achieve synchronic economy (rejection of coincident entities) by (...) postulating strongly counterintuitive transtemporal claims of numerical diversity. The argument is made that the price of Burkean economy is too high. (shrink)

Only those whose work and interests have led them to notice it, will have realised, in all probability, the remarkable extent to which the term organization has gained currency, or acquired new and special emphasis, throughout the entire range of scientific and sociological literature during the last ten or twenty years.In biology and bio-chemistry organization has been discussed or used as a technical term, mostly since 1930 by at least thirty well-known authors; amongst the more prominent are Huxley, Wilson, Woodger, (...) Cannon, Waddington, McDougall, Needham, Block, Hopkins and Sherrington. Under this magic term some authors refer to the physico-chemical nature of the cell or cytoplasm, and usually with special reference to selective or directive catalysis; others to the general constitution or structure of the organism and almost indistinguishable from general morphology and physiology; others to embryological development as such ; others more especially to “relations” between cells, organs and structural parts, often in an abstract sense; others refer more particularly to a hypothetical integrating and/or co-ordinating factor : a few refer to re-constitution from dissociated cells as observed in experiments with Sponges and Hydroids. (shrink)