That brings me to the crux of my disagreement with Hillis Miller. The central contention is not simply that I am sometimes, or always, wrong in my interpretation, but instead that I—like other traditional historians—can never be right in my interpretation. For Miller assents to Nietzsche's challenge of "the concept of 'rightness' in interpretation," and to Nietzsche's assertion that "the same text authorizes innumerable interpretations : there is no 'correct' interpretation."1 Nietzsche's views of interpretation, as Miller says, are relevant to (...) the recent deconstructive theorists, including Jacques Derrida and himself, who have "reinterpreted Nietzsche" or have written "directly or indirectly under his aegis." He goes on to quote a number of statements from Nietzsche's The Will to Power to the effect, as Miller puts it, "that reading is never the objective identifying of a sense but the importation of meaning into a text which had no meaning 'in itself.'" For example: "Ultimately, man finds in things nothing but what he himself has imported into them." "In fact interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something."2 On the face of it, such sweeping deconstructive claims might suggest those of Lewis Carroll's linguistic philosopher, who asserted that meaning is imported into a text by the interpreter's will to power: "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things.""The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all." But of course I don't believe that such deconstructive claims are, in Humpty Dumpty fashion, simply dogmatic assertions. Instead, they are conclusions which are derived from particular linguistic premises. I want, in the time remaining, to present what I make out to be the elected linguistic premises, first of Jacques Derrida, then of Hillis Miller, in the confidence that if I misinterpret these theories, my errors will soon be challenged and corrected. Let me eliminate suspense by saying at the beginning that I don't think that their radically skeptical conclusions from these premises are wrong. On the contrary, I believe that their conclusions are right—in fact, they are infallibly right, and that's where the trouble lies. · 1. "Tradition and Difference," Diacritics 2 : 8, 12.· 2. Ibid. M. H. Abrams’s contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne Booth" and "Behaviorism and Deconstruction: A Comment on Morse Peckham's 'The Infinitude of Pluralism'". (shrink)

Bhattacharyya, K. The Advaita concept of subjectivity.--Deutsch, E. Reflections on some aspects of the theory of rasa.--Nakamura, H. The dawn of modern thought in the East.--Organ, T. Causality, Indian and Greek.--Chatterjee, M. On types of classification.--Lacombe, O. Transcendental imagination.--Bahm, A. J. Standards for comparative philosophy.--Herring, H. Appearance, its significance and meaning in the history of philosophy.--Chang Chung-yuan. Pre-rational harmony in Heidegger's essential thinking and Chʼan thought.--Staal, J. F. Making sense of the Buddhist tetralemma.--Enomiya-Lassalle, H. M. The mysticism of Carl Albrecht (...) and Zen.--Parrinder, G. The nature of mysticism.--Cairns, G. E. Axiological contributions of East and West to the spiritual development of mankind.--Mayeda, S. Śaṇkara's view of ethics.--Mercier, A. On peace.--Barlingay, S. S. A discussion of some aspects of Gaudapāda's philosophy. (shrink)

The Search for the Legacy of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is a collection of essays from experts in a variety of fields seeking to redefine the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The essayists place the legacy of the study within the evolution of racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Contributors include two leading historians on the study, two former United States Surgeons General, and other prominent scholars from a wide range of fields.

The following statement is a report of the Committee on Philosophy in Education of the American Philosophical Association and was approved by the Association's Board of Officers in September, 1959. The Committee was composed of the following: C. W. Hendel, Chairman, H. G. Alexander, R. M. Chisholm, Max Fisch, Lucius Garvin, Douglas Morgan, A. E. Murphy, Charner Perry, and R. G. Turnbull. Primary responsibility for the preparation of this report belonged to a subcommittee composed of Roderick M. Chisholm, Chairman, H. (...) G. Alexander, Lewis Hahn, Paul C. Hayner, and Charles W. Hendel. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Shortly after bacteriologist Paul de Kruif had been dismissed from a research position at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, he started contributing to a novel in collaboration with the future Nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis. The novel, Arrowsmith, would become one of the most famous satires on medicine and science. Using de Kruif’s correspondence with his idol Jacques Loeb, this paper describes the many ways in which medical science is depicted in Arrowsmith. This article compares the novel with de (...) Kruif’s and Loeb’s biographies, and focuses on the struggles of the main character, Martin Arrowsmith, as an allegory of the institutionalisation of medical research in the US, shows that Sinclair’s purpose is to caricaturise scientific work in modern medical research institutions anywhere and shows that the novel depicts a reductionist philosophy of research that seems to contradict the “messiness” of medical practice. (shrink)

The Ohio State University Press is to be congratulated, and Lennon and Olscamp are to be thanked for this book. Nicholas Malebranche has always been a major philosopher on the Continent but he has been less well-known in recent times within the English-speaking world. The Search was twice translated into English at the close of the seventeenth century and Malebranche was widely read and commented upon in English in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Locke wrote about Malebranche. David (...) Hume not only cites him, Hume's analysis of causation is thought to owe much to Malebranche's doctrine. Some of Berkeley's earliest critics took him to be a Malebranchist. A. A. Luce argued some years ago that Malebranche is one of the most important philosophical influences upon Berkeley. Accordingly it is a delight to have the full text available and I hope it will be possible to produce a paper-back version. This translation is based on the edition of the Oeuvres complètes de Malebranche under the general editorship of André Robinet. This includes definitive editions of the Recherche and the Éclaircissements edited by Geneviève Rodis-Lewis. (shrink)

Modelling data in applied areas particularly in reliability engineering is a prominent research topic. Statistical models play a vital role in modelling reliability data and are useful for further decision-making policies. In this paper, we study a new class of distributions with one additional shape parameter, called a new generalized exponential-X family. Some of its properties are taken into account. The maximum likelihood approach is adopted to obtain the estimates of the model parameters. For assessing the performance of these estimators, (...) a comprehensive Monte Carlo simulation study is carried out. The usefulness of the proposed family is demonstrated by means of a real-life application representing the failure times of electronic components. The fitted results show that the new generalized exponential-X family provides a close fit to data. Finally, considering the failure times data, the Bayesian analysis and performance of Gibbs sampling are discussed. The diagnostics measures such as the Raftery–Lewis, Geweke, and Gelman–Rubin are applied to check the convergence of the algorithm. (shrink)