Objectives: to assess physicians’ and patients’ views in Saudi Arabia towards involving the patient versus the family in the process of diagnosis disclosure and decision-making, and to compare them with views from the USA and Japan.Design: A self-completion questionnaire was translated to Arabic and validated.Participants: Physicians from different specialties and ranks and patients in a hospital or attending outpatient clinics from 6 different regions in KSA.Results: In the case of a patient with incurable cancer, 67% of doctors and 51% of (...) patients indicated that they would inform the patient in preference to the family of the diagnosis . Assuming the family already knew, 56% of doctors and 49% of patients would tell the patient even if family objected . However, in the case of HIV infection, 59% of physicians and 81% of patients would inform the family about HIV status without the patient’s consent . With regards to withholding ventilatory support, about 50% of doctors and over 60% of patients supported the use of mechanical ventilation in a patient with advanced cancer, regardless of the wishes of the patient or the family. Finally, the majority of doctors and patients were against assisted suicide.Conclusions: Although there was more recognition for a patient’s autonomy amongst physicians, most patients preferred a family centred model of care. Views towards information disclosure were midway between those of the USA and Japan. Distinctively, however, decisions regarding life prolonging therapy and assisted suicide were not influenced to a great extent by wishes of the patient or family, but more likely by religious beliefs. (shrink)

What is colour vision for? In the popular imagination colour vision is for “seeing the colours” — adding hue to the achromatic world of shape, depth and motion. On this view colour vision plays little more than an ornamental role, lending glamour to an otherwise monochrome world. This idea has guided much theorising about colour within vision science and philosophy. However, we argue that a broader approach is needed. Recent research in the psychology of colour demonstrates that colour vision is (...) integral to a variety of visual processes, helping us to perform many types of visual tasks. We discuss some of this research and consider its implications for philosophical theories of colour. (shrink)

Objectives: To study the consent process experienced by participants who are enrolled in a molecular genetic research study that aims to find new genetic mutations responsible for an apparently inherited disorder.Design: Semi-structured interviews and analysis/description of main themes.Participants: 78 members of 52 families who had been recruited to a molecular genetic study.Results: People were well informed about the goals, risks and benefits of the genetic research study but could not remember the consent process. They had mostly been recruited to take (...) part by trusted clinicians or their relatives but had little memory of, or concern about signing consent forms. Families appeared to regard the research as a continuation of their, or their relatives’, clinical care.Conclusions: Ethical review should be more flexible in its attitude to consent forms and written information sheets for some sorts of research. For rare genetic disease studies where research has been discussed fully within the clinical setting then the consent obtained at that time could suffice rather than needing extra consent at a later stage. However, clinician-researchers will need to ensure that their duty of care extends for the duration of the research and beyond. (shrink)

Placebo-controlled trials are controversial when individuals might be denied existing beneficial medical interventions. In the case of malaria, most patients die in rural villages without healthcare facilities. An artesunate suppository that can be given by minimally skilled persons might be of value when patients suddenly become too ill for oral treatment but are several hours from a facility that can give injectable treatment for severe disease. In such situations, by default, no treatment is (or can be) given until the patient (...) reaches a facility, making the placebo control design clinically relevant; alternative bioequivalence designs at the facility would misrepresent reality and risk incorrect conclusions. We describe the ethical issues underpinning a placebo-controlled trial in severe malaria. To protect patients and minimise risk, all patients were referred immediately to hospital so that each had a higher chance of prompt treatment through participation. There was no difference between artesunate and placebo in patients who reached clinic rapidly; among those who could not, a single artesunate suppository significantly reduced death or permanent disability, a finding of direct and indirect benefit to patients in participating villages and elsewhere. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a new concept named the uniform single valued neutrosophic graph. An illustrative example and some properties are examined. Next, we develop an algorithmic approach for computing the complement of the single valued neutrosophic graph. A numerical example is demonstrated for computing the complement of single valued neutrosophic graphs and uniform single valued neutrosophic graph.

The chronic worldwide lack of organs for transplantation and the continuing improvement of strategies for in situ organ preservation have led to renewed interest in elective non-therapeutic ventilation of potential organ donors. Two types of situation may be eligible for elective intensive care: patients definitely evolving towards brain death and patients suitable as controlled non-heart beating organ donors after life-supporting therapies have been assessed as futile and withdrawn. Assessment of the ethical acceptability and the risks of these strategies is essential. (...) We here offer such an ethical assessment using the four principles of medical ethics of Beauchamp and Childress applying them in their broadest sense so as to include patients and their families, their caregivers, other potential recipients of intensive care, and indeed society as a whole. The main ethical problems emerging are the definition of beneficence for the potential organ donor, the dilemma between the duty to respect a dying patient's autonomy and the duty not to harm him/her, and the possible psychological and social harm for families, caregivers other potential recipients of therapeutic intensive care, and society more generally. Caution is expressed about the ethical acceptability of elective non-therapeutic ventilation, along with some proposals for precautionary measures to be taken if it is to be implemented. (shrink)

A collection of eighteen papers, all but three previously published, the earliest in 1952 and the latest in 1973. Johnstone’s views are well known among metaphilosophers and philosophers of rhetoric, but they deserve wider dissemination because of their greater relevance indicated below.

Synaesthesia is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces photisms, i.e. mental percepts of colours. R is a 20 year old colour blind subject who, in addition to the relatively common grapheme-colour synaesthesia, presents a rarely reported cross modal perception in which a variety of visual stimuli elicit aura-like percepts of colour. In R, photisms seem to be closely related to the affective valence of stimuli and (...) typically bring out a consistent pattern of emotional responses. The present case study suggests that colours might be an intrinsic category of the human brain. We developed an empirical methodology that allowed us to study the subject's otherwise inaccessible phenomenological experience. First, we found that R shows a Stroop effect elicited by photisms despite the fact that he does not show a regular Stroop with real colours. Secondly, by manipulating the colour context we confirmed that colours can alter R's emotional evaluation of the stimuli. Furthermore, we demonstrated that R's auras may actually lead to a partially inverted emotional spectrum where certain stimuli bring out emotional reactions opposite to the normal ones. These findings can only be accounted for by considering R's subjective colour experience or qualia. Therefore the present paper defends the view that qualia are a useful scientific concept that can be approached and studied by experimental methods. (shrink)

A collection of 24 out of the 35 papers presented at the Fourth Scandinavian Logic Symposium and First Soviet-Finnish Logic Conference, which took place simultaneously in Finland in 1976. Topics covered are proof theory, set theory, model theory, recursion theory, infinitary languages, generalized quantifiers, truthlikeness, natural language, and "philosophical logic." There is a paper by George Kreisel which discusses an intriguing distinction between the theory of proofs and general proof theory, the latter being the study of the allegedly definitional or (...) essential property of proofs, the former being the study of structural features such as length of proofs and of relations between proofs and other things. There is a paper by Hintikka in which he applies his "game-theoretical semantics" developed elsewhere to quantifiers in natural languages, e.g., the analysis of sentences like "some novel by every novelist is mentioned by every critic". I found the most interesting paper to be the one by Bengt Hansson, which studies the nature of paradoxes by articulating an analogy with mathematical equations, the crucial property about the latter being that they do not always have solutions. Almost all papers are highly technical and thus aimed at experts of the specialties mentioned in the book’s title.—M.A.F. (shrink)

Besides the well-known Aesthetics, Logic, Philosophy of the Practical, and the Vico and Hegel books, Croce is the author of about three dozen other philosophical works, one in a series of "Philosophical Essays," another in a series of "Miscellaneous Writings," and a third one in the 44-volume series on "Literary and Political History." As editor and quasi-publisher of his own books, Croce himself probably contributed to philosophers’ neglect of these less theoretical, less systematic works by giving to the first three (...) books mentioned above the editorial label of "Philosophy of Mind" and listing them before the others in the collected edition of his works. If one takes the trouble to read all his works, it becomes very difficult, however, to find a coherent structure in terms of which one can understand the somewhat different views one finds, as one might expect since they span a period of about 60 years; nor can one easily make sense of the various changes that Croce’s views underwent. The present book is a serious and important attempt to identify such structures and to reduce such changes to developments. (shrink)

These two books jointly constitute volume 13 of the University of Western Ontario Series in the Philosophy of Science and consist of papers resulting from a workshop held at that university in the spring of 1975. Contributors to the first volume include such notables as Richard C. Jeffrey, Isaac Levi, and R. Duncan Luce. As an introduction to the papers, the editors’ preface is a statement of the goals of the original conference distributed to the invited participants. Twelve of the (...) eighteen papers in the first volume, and five out of nine in the second, deal with technical topics in decision theory and thus call for consideration by experts. This is so even though decision theory is broadly conceived by the editors to include the theory of games, of rational acceptance or rational belief, of value dynamics, and of individual decision-making. One of their main aims is "to explore the view that the concept of rationality [derivable from game theory] has both explanatory and normative force, that both dimensions of this concept can be theoretically integrated, that the explanatory force has far-reaching applications in all social scientific disciplines, and that the normative theories must become empirically controlled by the results of the explanatory theory". (shrink)

Salutary reading for all philosophers, and not only for inductive logicians, philosophers of science and law, this important book presents an elaborate theory of inductive reasoning whose substantive features are as strikingly original as the approach is rare. First, the theory is based on concrete, real, actual, and significant instances of inductive reasoning, e.g., Karl von Frisch’s work on bees; that is, though its aim is genuinely theoretical in the sense that it engages in the proper amounts of idealization, abstraction, (...) systematization, precision, and rigor, it never loses sight of the fact that "theories in the philosophy of science, like theories in science itself, have to face up to the challenge of appropriately accredited experience within their appointed domains". Second, a central subject matter being analyzed is legal reasoning, that is, the types of proofs and arguments used by juries, judges, and lawyers in the Anglo-American system of jurisprudence, where criminal charges have to be proved beyond reasonable doubt and civil cases have to be argued on the balance of probability. Thus, in effect, Cohen’s synthesis of juridical and of scientific reasoning is an admirable example of the bridging of two "cultures." Third, and most importantly, the concept of "inductive probability," in terms of which Cohen makes sense out of his subject matter, is incommensurable with that of "mathematical probability," namely the classical calculus of chance according to which probability is measurable, additive, transitive, and obeys a multiplicational principle for conjunction and a complementational one for negation. This is not to say that "inductive probability" is a hazy, mysterious, or unstructured concept, and Cohen goes to great lengths to show that it is ordinal, modal, and formally analyzable; what it does mean is that essential types of reasoning in science and in law involve probable inferences whose probabilities are nonquantitative. Hence, though Cohen does not stress the qualitative nature of inductive probability, his book will be welcome by those who conceive of philosophy as scientia qualitatum. Specific conclusions reached by Cohen are that, in general, probability may be conceived as degree of provability, that differences in proof-rules generate different special cases of probability, that inductive probability may be viewed as the special case where the proof-rules are incomplete, that inductive probability is to inductive support as deducibility is to logical truth, and that some recent epistemological scepticism may be refuted by Cohen’s inductive logic. Finally, he sees himself in the British inductivist tradition, interpreting his predecessors as groping toward a logic of inductive support and probability rather than a methodology of discovery: from Bacon he develops the notion of eliminative induction but rejects that of induction by enumeration; Mill’s canons are analyzed as special cases of Cohen’s own "method of relevant variables," except for the method of residues, which is rejected as invalid ; he takes his critique of mathematical probability as a vindication of Hume’s thesis that "probability or reasoning from conjecture may be divided into two kinds, viz., that which is founded on chance and that which arises from causes" ; Whewell’s consilience of induction is justified ; and from Keynes, he develops the notion of the "weight" of evidence but rejects his mathematicist approach.—M. A. F. (shrink)

This collection contains such a wealth of topics that it deserves the attention of anyone seriously interested in what its title denotes, namely the philosophy of the history of philosophy. The content of the various essays, along with their translated titles, can be described as follows. "The New Aspects of the Philosophy of the History of Philosophy" claims to be, but is not, an introduction to the other essays; it abounds in obscurities and does not even make the effort of (...) integrating the various contributions into some common themes. "Meta-philosophy and History of Philosophy" is partly a methodological discussion of the connections among philosophy, metaphilosophy, and history of philosophy, and partly a discussion from a psychological-psychoanalytical and cultural anthropological point of view of questions like the following: whether anything like progress exists in the history of philosophy, what is the meaning of the whole philosophical history, and what are its prospects for the future. "Heidegger, Schelling, and German Idealism" discusses the relations between the history of philosophy and the philosophy of existence, using primarily Heidegger’s lectures on Schelling as a case study. "Hermeneutic Experience and Philosophical Historiography" is a discussion primarily of the theory of historical interpretation in Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode, and secondarily of some of its consequences for the study of the history of philosophy; it is highly informative, but one cannot fail to lament the fact that the author reports Gadamer’s critiques of historicism without any explicit indication that, besides Dilthey’s version, there exists Croce’s brand of historicism, which in my judgment is very similar to Gadamer’s hermeneutics as reported in this essay. "History of Art as History of Philosophy?" is a thoughtful and provocative brief discussion of the divergence between the histories of art and of philosophy; it also suggests that, nevertheless, data and facts from art-history can be used by the historian of philosophy for the reconstruction of the philosophical concepts of epochs and cultures whose available historical records abound in the field of art but are lacking in the area of philosophy. "The Hegelian Left and the History of Philosophy" is an analysis of some of the historiography of the 19th century Hegelian Left. "-Philosophy and the Theology of Secularization discusses the interconnections among philosophy, history of philosophy, the contemporary historical situation, and political philosophy, developing a Gentilean critique of the theology of secularization; it argues that Gentile’s critique refutes some presuppositions of this theology, namely, the idea of the progressive character of contemporary history and that of the irreversible process of secularization. "Philosophy of Religion and History of Philosophy," though terminologically and stylistically obscure, is a very stimulating justification of the thesis that an adequate philosophy of religion is to be grounded on a philosophy of history, which in turn is to be grounded on an all-encompassing history of philosophy; independently of the adequacy of this justification, the author makes a number of very suggestive comparisons between the history and historiography of philosophy and the history and historiography of the Church, such as the following: the analogy of the relationships between theology and Church history and between philosophy and philosophical history, the analogy between the "history of ideas" and ecumenical Church history, the analogy between the position of Hegel in philosophical history and that of Jesus in Church history, and the analogy between the visible/ invisible Church distinction in religious studies and the history/theory distinction in philosophical inquiry. "Beyond the Historical Disease" discusses to what extent philosophical hermeneutics solves Nietzsche’s problem that there is a conflict between historiographical awareness and the capacity to make history; it answers that, in spite of its insights, hermeneutics fails, and that the solution lies in the direction of certain suggestions found in Sartre’s Question of Méthode. "Interpretation and Translatability of Philosophical Texts" discusses certain problems in the theory of meaning from the point of view of analytical philosophy, and in relation to the meaning of philosophical passages. "Epistemology, Hermeneutics, and Analytical-Philosophical Historiography" is an interesting mixture of a critique of the view that contemporary analytical philosophy is ahistorical, a discussion of the similarities between Popper’s epistemology and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, and a study of the interplay between Popper’s epistemology and his interpretation of Plato in The Open Society and its Enemies. "Information Theory and Philosophy" studies the relation between science and the history of philosophy by comparing and contrasting certain philosophical ideas of Leibniz and Kant with recent results in information theory. A final essay deals with "The Myth of Faust in Kierkegaard."—M.A.F. (shrink)

After a chapter which is an introduction to and summary of the rest of the book, chapter 2 begins by criticizing various attempts to do away with theories, such as the Reichenbach-Salmon conception of theoretical truth in terms of observational consequences, and the Ramsey strategy of replacing first-order theoretical sentences by second-order nontheoretical ones; it then argues against hypothetico-deductivist theories of confirmation on the grounds that they are unable to handle the relevance of evidence to theory, whether or not other (...) formal constraints or even nonformal ones such as simplicity and explanatory power are added to those theories; it ends with an exposition of the Reichenbach-Carnap conventionalist thesis that the confirmation of hypotheses with evidence presupposes analytic principles connecting hypothetical and empirical concepts. Chapter 3 criticizes Bayesian theories of confirmation on such grounds as that the a priori arguments for Bayesian restrictions on beliefs are insufficient; that the Bayesian explanations of notions like variety of evidence, ad hocness, and simplicity are inadequate; and that they cannot account, without drastic revisions, for the relevance of evidence to theory, especially old evidence to new theory. Chapter 4 is an unsympathetic account of historically oriented philosophies of science; Lakatos’s notion of progressive research programs and Laudan’s theory of problem-solving effectiveness are found to be insufficiently precise and dubbed examples of "new fuzziness", while the Sneed-Stegmüller dynamics of theories is regarded as "a paradigm of misplaced rigor" ; and all three are criticized as unable to explicate the concept of evidential relevance. Chapter 5 is a formal and informal elaboration of the basic idea in Glymour’s account of theory and evidence, namely that confirmation or support is a three-term relation among evidence, hypothesis, and theory, so that evidence confirms an hypothesis only relative to a theory, and such that evidence e confirms hypothesis h relative to T if T with e implies, but T without e does not imply, an instance of h, and T with e does not imply a comparable hypothesis h’ different from h; the most interesting part of this chapter is a series of discussions showing how such an idea makes sense of the "methodological truisms" that it is possible selectively to test certain parts of a theory but not others, that a theory is supported better by a greater variety of evidence, that redundant or physically meaningless quantities are an undesirable feature of theories, that there are no inviolable rules, that a "white shoe" does not confirm "all ravens are black," that a theory is more useful and better supported than the set of its observational consequences, and that the hypothetico-deductive method often works. Since Glymour claims no originality for the conception of this general account, but only for its description, he plausibly thinks it necessary to apply it to some important historical cases of actual science; he does so in the next chapter by discussing at some length the structure and merits of Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy, of Newton’s universal gravitation, of nineteenth century atomism, of Freud’s Rat Man, and of general relativity. For example, he argues convincingly that Copernicanism was better supported by the evidence available even before the telescope because it alone, and not the Ptolemaic theory, can determine some planetary properties which are presupposed by both theories, can test and confirm some common hypotheses, and can be confirmed in an essential rather than incidental manner; and though Glymour admits that the Copernicans tended to argue in terms of explanatory rather than confirmatory superiority, he sketches an interesting account of the relation between explanation and confirmation which strengthens his case. He also analyzes the text at the beginning of book 3 of Newton’s Principia and compiles a reconstruction of the intricate details of the inferential structure of the argument to universal gravitation; his impressive reconstruction clearly shows that Newton’s method is neither the inductivist one he himself thought he was following, nor the one attributed to him by Pierre Duhem, but rather one in accordance with Glymour’s so-called "bootstrap strategy" of repeatedly using the evidence from Kepler’s second and third laws, from lunar data, and from falling bodies, together with the theory consisting of the second and third laws of motion, to arrive at increasingly general instances of the principle of universal gravitation. Glymour’s account of arguments for and against the atomic theory from Thomson to Cannizzaro is his longest historical example, but he himself admits that this illustration of the bootstrap strategy is "certainly not the neatest", and rather "diffuse, and perhaps disconnected". Chapter 7 is a detailed application of the same principles to the technique known among social scientists as "causal modeling"; since such "causal models" are essentially systems of algebraic equations, Glymour’s account shows indirectly that the bootstrap strategy is applicable to any scientific theory presented as a set of algebraic equations; this, of course is not surprising, since the formal considerations with which Glymour begins the exposition of his theory in chapter 5 involve systems of algebraic equations. Chapter 8 is an attempt to apply Glymour’s theory of evidence to the very common scientific practice of curve-fitting, where one measures values of two or more quantities and then infers a functional relationship; Glymour argues that simpler polynomials are preferred because they are tested more frequently and more severely by the data and because they are more informative; but then he criticizes his own explanation and concludes that "the bootstrap procedures of chapter 5 do not seem to help the problem much more than a whit" ; this is admirably honest, but if one wants an additional logical or methodological rationale, then one would perhaps have to go to the meta-level and say that Glymour is here testing his own theory, and he is more interested in a further illustration of the bootstrap methodology even with a failed test, than he is to claim universal or exclusive validity for it. In chapter 9 Glymour uses his bootstrap theory of confirmation to criticize geometrical conventionalism; he considers the alternative theories of space or space-time proposed by conventionalists to show the radical undetermination of geometries by evidence, for example, a non-Euclidean geometry with no universal force instead of Newtonian gravitation with Euclidean geometry; he argues that such alternatives are simply not as well tested as the originals and that their equivalence to the originals is questionable. The last chapter is a brief discussion of further problems worthy of future investigation. (shrink)

This is a volume in the so-called "Modern Masters" series, which deals with an eclectic group including such figures as Einstein, Freud, Gandhi, Chomsky, and Che Guevara. The book is a general, introductory account of Popper’s philosophy and as such useful. For though one may not agree that Popper is a "figure of world importance" and "the greatest living philosopher of science", it is true that Popper’s philosophy is important enough to deserve more attention and discussion that it has so (...) far received; and this applies both at the level of technical philosophy and of general culture. (shrink)

This is a textbook on reasoning but deserves attention because of its pedagogical novelty, because it provides the foundations for a valuable approach to logic, and because of the philosophical nature of the theory of reasoning.

This is a diligent and competent account of Popper’s philosophy of natural science primarily, and secondarily of his philosophy of the social sciences. There are discussions of such topics as the anti-positivistic origin of Popper’s views, his interpretation of probability, his theory of corroboration, his critique of Carnap, his elaboration of indeterminism, and his interpretation of quantum theory. In a chapter dealing with subjectivism, Ackermann develops Popperian arguments against the views of Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn and gives an insightful (...) elaboration of Popper’s evolutionary epistemology. (shrink)

The problem of rationality is nowadays studied in an explicit fashion mostly by philosophers of science, the prevailing assumption being that science is rationality par excellence, so that an analysis of science will yield an understanding of rationality. It is therefore with great interest that one opens this book whose suggestive title gives the impression of approaching the problem in a more original way, namely from the point of view of logic. However, one finds the logic in question to be (...) conventional formal logic, and the problem touched upon only in those parts of the book dealing with the question of the role of formalization and formal methods in rationality, which parts constitute only a small portion of the work. The author advocates a view he calls metaformalism, which he describes obscurely as "the grammar of the connectivity and integration of viewpoints, the technical embodiment of magnanimity and love" ; sociologically as stemming from "the writings of Polanyi... Popper... Butterfield, Conant, Kuhn, Agassi, Feyerabend, Hanson, Sellars, Wartofsky and... Patrick Heelan" ; and insightfully as such that it "would bring a qualitative change to modern logic—a science which has been widening itself more than it has been deepening in roots. It would be the kind of technical development which would underwrite the view that logic cannot be fully understood without being seen in its relationship with rational competence and human subjectivity. A ’system logic’ would perhaps point to this relationship more strongly than propositional logic". (shrink)

Metaepistemology may be defined in the obvious manner as the study of the aim, nature, sources, structure, etc. of theories of knowledge, not of "lower-level" knowledge per se but of theories thereof; the increasing popularity of the field may be seen from the publication of, and attention received by, such a book as Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Habermas is the leading contemporary exponent of what has come to be known as the Frankfurt School or Critical Theory (...) approach to philosophy; his two most important books are perhaps Theory and Practice and Knowledge and Human Interests, and though metaepistemology is not the only theme of these books, it is an important aspect of them. Kortian's book is an expository account of Habermas's metaepistemology and centers around those two works; it includes an account of how Habermas's views originate from classical German philosophy, and this account is, and is meant to be, a reconstruction of Habermas's own statement, elaborated at great length in his Knowledge and Human Interests. The etymological rationale of the term "metacritique" is that epistemology may be regarded as critique of knowledge, and when we go one level higher we get critique of critique of knowledge, that is, metacritique. The term "argument" in the book's subtitle will suggest a more consequential series of theses than I am able to find in its account, nevertheless there are several theses worth mentioning both for their intrinsic interest and because they are characteristic of Habermas. (shrink)

This is an excellent introductory account of Socrates’s life and thought. The most valuable aspect of the book is that his experiences and ideas are integrated in such a way that his ideas are always shown to arise in the context of some concrete event of his life. Of course, in the case of Socrates, it is not difficult to display such synthesis of what may be called theory and practice: in fact, what the present author gives us is an (...) original translation of selected parts of 13 of the most Socratic of Plato’s dialogues, interspersed with a running commentary designed to give relevant information, to make necessary clarifications, and to convey her own interpretations. Nevertheless, it is always good to be reminded that such was the essential characteristic of the philosophy of "the father of Western philosophy." The book is beautified by 12 original drawings by Joseph Sheppard representing various faces and scenes discussed in the text; these drawings, besides making the book a pleasant and interesting work of art, bring additional life to discussions in the text, though their content and form alone would have been more than sufficient in bringing Socrates to life. There is also an introduction by George N. Shuster discussing the relevance and value of Socrates for contemporary culture. (shrink)

The history of natural philosophy is something of a no-man’s land between the history of philosophy on one side and the history of science on the other. This situation derives in part from the fact that natural philosophy itself is unpopular among both philosophers and scientists. Nevertheless, the historiographical situation is rather lamentable since the sharp science/ philosophy distinction did not emerge until relatively recent historical times and since the historical sensibility requires one to respect the beliefs of the historical (...) agents. The present book—a translation from the 1968 La philosophie naturelle de Galilée—is to be welcomed insofar as it helps to correct this lamentable situation. It does so by means of a long discussion of the Aristotelian and medieval doctrines of motion which concludes that Aristotle, the medievals, and Galileo can all be seen to be trying to solve the same basic problem in natural philosophy. It would be difficult, after Clavelin’s book, to maintain, for example, that Aristotle’s problem was the philosophical or metaphysical problem of motion, whereas Galileo’s was the scientific problem. There is a continuity of the basic problem, as regards motion, from Aristotle to Galileo which is not to be confused either with a continuity of particular subsidiary problems or with a continuity of solutions. Clavelin is at pains to point out and emphasize the originality of Galileo’s contribution, as stemming from the novelty of his particular subsidiary problems and of his solutions. In fact, the reason that Clavelin himself gives for beginning the book with a long discussion of the pre-Galilean doctrines of motion is that he wants better to explain and justify that originality. (shrink)