In reviewing Ellis' OCT of Catullus, Housman scorned the ‘diction and metre’ of Carm. 64.37, ‘Pharsaliam coeunt, Pharsalia tecta frequentant’. Yet several subsequent editors have agreed with Ellis and have also refrained from emending Pharsaliam. Even if there has not been enough discomfort with the MS reading to put some editors off retaining it, they might yet welcome a piece of positive evidence to support this decision. I will make the case that a passage in Statius' Achilleid may indicate that (...) the later poet was familiar with the line as the MSS have it. (shrink)

In his paper ‘Has the Ontological Argument Been Refuted?’, 97–110) William F. Vallicella argues that my attempt to show that the Ontological Argument begs the question is unsuccessful. 1 I believe he is wrong about this, but before endeavouring to vindicate my position I must first make clear what precisely is the point at issue between us. The Ontological Argument is not a single argument, but a family of arguments. Newly devised formulations of the argument are frequently put forward by (...) philosophers in an effort to avoid difficulties that have been pointed out in previous versions. As a consequence there is no possibility of a conclusive proof that every form of the argument embodies the same fallacy. Nevertheless, one can, I believe, prove that all the standard versions of the argument embody a certain fallacy and that, given the nature of the argument, it is therefore unlikely that the argument can be formulated in such a way as to avoid this difficulty. What I tried to show in my paper is that the six best-known versions of the argument all beg the question and that they do so at the same point in the argument, namely when it is asserted that it is possible that an absolutely perfect being exists. It is difficult to see how an ontological argument could be formulated without including this claim as one of its premises, since the distinguishing badge of the argument is the inference from the possibility of an absolutely perfect being to its actuality. It must be unlikely then, if my criticism of these six versions is correct, that there is any way of formulating the argument that avoids this fallacy. (shrink)

What lies at the heart of physical inquiry? What are the foundational ideas and working assumptions that inform the enterprise of natural science? What principles guide research? How do scientists decide whether they are building theories in the right direction? Is there a right direction? Do physical theories actually approximate an objective reality, or are they simply useful summaries, mnemonics for experimental results? This book is Nobel Prize winner Jim Peebles's contribution to such big, classic debates in the philosophy of (...) science, drawing on a lifetime of experience as a leading physicist and taking the development of physical cosmology as a "worked example." He begins with a consideration of the history of thought about the nature of the physical sciences since Einstein, culminating in a succinct statement of what he sees as the fundamental working assumptions of physics. Then, through a careful examination of the development of the general theory of relativity, Einstein's cosmological principle, the big bang theory, and our current model of the universe, he makes the argument that physical theories ultimately are useful approximations to an objective reality whose nature science is discovering. An essential reflection on and interrogation of the nature and practice of science by a giant in the field, The Whole Truth will be illuminating reading for cosmologists, physicists, and historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science alike. (shrink)

Although Frege is now one of the most important figures in analytical philosophy, there are virtually no full-length studies available. Walker does not try to present all of Frege—that would be a monumental undertaking—but only to consider the philosophical aspects of his thought. Frege's theory of functions, concepts, and objects is first studied; then naming and describing are related to predication and thence to concepts; the notion of the sense of words and expressions, and then the notion of truth, especially (...) as picture-truth, is analyzed with their assistance. The last sections view Frege's general idea of the use of language and symbols, the nature of scientific laws, and the nature of numbers. The author sees Frege as tending to shift his interest from logic to ordinary language and so to the problems of expression in general; this view is reflected in the book itself. The affinities which the author sees with the work of Frege and Wittgenstein is only occasionally treated, but he does make it clear that the Tractatus owes much to Frege. Generally, this compact work will serve well in the study and interpretation of the work of the nineteenth century's greatest logician.—P. J. M. (shrink)

As the single most important experience in the lives of all people, the process and event of death must be handled carefully by the medical community. Twentieth-century advances in life-sustaining technology impose new areas of concern on those who are responsible for dying persons. Physicians and surrogates alike must be ready and willing to decide not to intervene in the dying process, indeed to hasten it, when they see the autonomy and dignity of patients threatened. In addition, the very ways (...) we talk about death and dying need to come under scrutiny, and it is likely that our technical advances should be parallelled by equally arduous advances in the semantic and rhetorical approaches we take to death. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dharma Bums: The Beat Generation and the Making of Countercultural PilgrimageP. J. JohnstonI believe in the sweetness of Jesus And Buddha— I believe, In St. Francis, Avaloki Tesvara, the Saints Of First Century India A D And Scholars Santidevan And Otherwise Santayanan Everywhere.(Kerouac 1959: 15)Preliminary Polemics“PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary 2007: 133As Beat commentator Stephen Prothero describes in his article “On the (...) Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest” (1991), the Beats and their pilgrimages have most emphatically not been taken seriously. Both critics and scholars have been unkind to members of the Beat generation, and this unkindness has manifested itself in relative neglect of the Beats in all possible aspects of scholarly investigation. But nowhere does this appear more pronounced than in the area of Beat religion. Though some recent scholarship has been picking up from this earlier neglect and it is now [End Page 165] possible to find serious biographies of most of the major Beat writers and some belated attention to the movement as a literary phenomenon, the only book-length treatment of Beat Buddhism I was able to locate (Tonkinson 1995) hardly qualifies as a scholarly work and was published not by an academic press but as a special feature of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. Prothero hypothesizes that this is because of the movement’s reputation as rebellious and antinomian—in its heyday the movement was characterized in identical unsavory terms by publications representing interests as diverse as Life and Playboy, with the latter describing the Beats as “nihilists” and the former claiming that the Beats were at war with “Mom, Dad, Politics, Marriage, the Savings Bank, Organized Religion, Literary Elegance, Law, the Ivy League Suit and Higher Education, to say nothing of the Automatic Dishwasher, the Cellophane-wrapped Soda Cracker, the Split-Level House and the clean, or peace-provoking H-bomb” (Prothero 1991: 206). Norman Podhoretz of Partisan Review went further still, claiming that the Beats were “hostile to civilization” and that the movement as a whole amounted to “a revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and crippled of soul” and “an affirmation of death” (ibid., 206). One couldn’t ask for a more passionate disavowal of the Beats or a more thorough polemic that the movement was profoundly antireligious.This could not contrast more with the Beats’ representation of their movement and its aims, with Jack Kerouac going so far as to reinterpret the crucial term “Beat” (a term for someone down and out originally borrowed from criminal street jive) as a noun derived from the adjective “beatific,” a specifically religious term familiar from such phrases as “the beatific vision” (ibid., 206–207). Several of the representative Beat writers were practicing Buddhists, influencing the entire movement to such an extent that Buddhist ideas and imagery suffused Beat literature as a whole. Ginsberg and Kerouac especially emphasized the positive and constructive elements of their spiritual vision, arguing that literature such as On the Road and Howl should be understood as religious affirmations of what is good and holy rather than as purely critical undertakings: “For the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was German (Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out” (ibid., 206–207). Or, as Allen Ginsberg put it less lyrically (and rather more bluntly): “Howl is an ‘Affirmation’ by individual experience of God, sex, drugs, and absurdity... the poems are religious and I meant them to be” (ibid., 207).But for the most part, Beat asseverations in no way diminished scholarly wariness about the Beat movement and its spirituality—as Prothero concludes, “the tendency among literary scholars is to see these [religious] concerns as tangential rather than constitutive” while “historians of American religion who have explored beat spirituality have tended to focus almost exclusively on the beats’ engagement with Zen and then to dismiss that engagement as haphazard” (ibid., 207).It is my contention that the mainstream scholarly neglect of Beat spirituality is in some part... (shrink)

The author's central thesis is that a knowledge of set theory can be put to good use by the linguist interested in the syntax of natural languages. The author first points out the role of set theory in formal science, and then gives a short summary of some of the more important ideas. He then develops certain relations in set theory which are of special importance in the study of languages. A fair number of examples—admittedly in rather trivial form—which occur (...) in the study of language are exhibited to show some of the applications in mind. The last few pages are devoted to a review of how his thesis has fared. Although it may seem obvious to some that set theory is the means par excellence for the formal study of any discipline, many linguists apparently do not yet see this; this book will go some way toward demonstrating this.—P. J. M. (shrink)

This study, under the title of an explanation of the New Nyäya views on negation, deals with the Navya-nyäya as a whole. The peculiarity of their theory of negation is that one can see the absence of an object in a given place. It includes the Sanskrit texts and translations of the Abhäva-väda of Gangesa and the Nañ-väda of Raghunätha. Though written for both Sanskritists and philosophers, the frequent use of Sanskrit terms almost requires that the reader be a Sanskritist--though (...) by keeping in mind the translations, previously given, it could be valuable. This is not an exposition of logic for beginners, but an exposition for scholars of a particular system. Renditions into modern logic are given throughout. Chapter headings include: On Cognition; The Content of Cognition and the Meaning Problem; On Relation; The Counterpositive of an Absence; The Ontological Status of Content-ness; The Relational Adjuncts; The Limitors and Quantificational Logic; Circularity; On Negation.--P. J. H. (shrink)

This is an annotated translation of the "King Dohäs," a work by the Indian Tantric sage Saraha. It is sub-titled "A Study in the History of Buddhist Thought." The first part is commentary by the translator on "The Tradition about Saraha and His Works," "The Teaching of the Dohäs," and "Existence versus Essence." The second part is the song itself, only nine pages. The third part is two commentaries, one by the Nepalese scholar sKye-med bde-chen and the other by the (...) Tibetan Lama Karma Phrin-las-pa. The original texts are not given though two sample pages are given for the sake of satisfying curiosity about the form of the books, etc. Because the translation is interspersed with terms taken from modern existential philosophy, the average reader and even the Buddhist scholar will have difficulty with the work. It is best suited for someone who is familiar with existential works and who would like to see the terminology applied to Buddhism.--P. J. H. (shrink)

Even though this book is not a general introduction to Buddhism, it does contain some articles which are of interest to the general reader. The book is a compilation of articles that the author wrote over thirty years of scholarship in Buddhism. The chapter on The Prajñäpäräitä-hrdaya Sutra is strictly limited to scholars of Sanskrit; for it is a presentation not only of just the text in Sanskrit but also of a commentary which relies heavily on Sanskrit. The three chapters (...) on recent progress in Buddhist studies, Buddhist philosophy and its European parallels, and spurious parallels to Buddhist philosophy are excellent indicators of the state of Buddhist studies in the West. Three chapters are primarily translations: The Meditation on Death, The Lotus of the Good Law; On Plants; and The Perfection of Wisdom in Seven Hundred Lines. Where the translator gives his own commentary it is interesting to see how he admittedly has interpreted the teachings for a Western audience, including himself. Other chapters include: Buddhist saviors, Mahayana Buddhism, The Development of Prajñäpäramitä Thought, The Composition of the Astasähasrikä Prajñäpäramitä, Hate, Love and Perfect Wisdom, and the Iconography of the Prajñäpäräitä. Some of the chapters are strictly limited to scholars who have already done work in the field; the others require at least an introductory knowledge of Buddhism to be very fruitful. The subjects reflect the author's monumental work on the wisdom treatises of Mahayana Buddhism.--P. J. H. (shrink)

Although Frege is now one of the most important figures in analytical philosophy, there are virtually no full-length studies available. Walker does not try to present all of Frege—that would be a monumental undertaking—but only to consider the philosophical aspects of his thought. Frege's theory of functions, concepts, and objects is first studied; then naming and describing are related to predication and thence to concepts; the notion of the sense of words and expressions, and then the notion of truth, especially (...) as picture-truth, is analyzed with their assistance. The last sections view Frege's general idea of the use of language and symbols, the nature of scientific laws, and the nature of numbers. The author sees Frege as tending to shift his interest from logic to ordinary language and so to the problems of expression in general; this view is reflected in the book itself. The affinities which the author sees with the work of Frege and Wittgenstein is only occasionally treated, but he does make it clear that the Tractatus owes much to Frege. Generally, this compact work will serve well in the study and interpretation of the work of the nineteenth century's greatest logician.—P. J. M. (shrink)

This is the first of a proposed fifty volumes of the Brahma-Mïmämsä, inquiry into the Vedas and the highest reality, Brahman. The author is a follower of the last great innovator in Indian philosophy, Madhva. Thus his inquiry into Brahman is an exposition of the philosophy of Madhva, but since Madhva sought to present and reject the views of the previous commentators, Raghavendrachar's work treats the other two great Vedanta commentators, Samkara and Ramanuja. Samkara's view is considered generally to be (...) nondualistic; Rämänuja's a qualified nondualism; and Madhva's, a dualism. However, this Indian Professor seeks to show that Madhva is not a dualist but a monist, for though Madhva accepted both Brahman and the world as real, only Brahman is an independent reality. The world is a dependent reality. Rigorously rejecting Samkara's view that the world is a product of an illusory, baseless ignorance, Madhva establishes the world as a reality dependent on Brahman because it is a product of Brahman. Madhva's work is a commentary on the Brahma-Sutras of Bädaräyana which are an exposition of the contents of the Vedas and Upanisads. This volume presents Madhva's commentary on the first section of the Brahma-Sutras, called the Brahma-Sutra-Bhäsya, and three other short works by Madhva on the same section, his Anu-Vyäkyäna, Nyäya-Vivarana, and Anu-Bhäsya. The commentaries of Jayatïrtha are given throughout. All texts are given in transliterated Sanskrit with translation and extensive commentary by the translator. The author sees Indian philosophy as a unity culminating in Madhva, and his conviction is evident throughout the book. This volume is strictly limited to students of Indian philosophy who are accustomed to dealing with Sanskrit terminology, for very frequently the Sanskrit terms are given without translation. Also, because Raghavendrachar concords with Madhva's view that inquiry into Brahman is endless and that the purpose of endless inquiry is to saturate oneself in the independent reality of Visnu, only those students of Indian philosophy who are interested in such saturation could keep with the book cover to cover. The book is especially suited for someone who wants to concentrate on Madhva and who is interested in reading the Sanskrit texts; from that viewpoint he can appreciate the lengthy discussion of terms.--P. J. H. (shrink)

This monograph is the first really systematic study of the model theory of many-valued logic. The authors develop model theory for systems of logic whose truth-values lie in a compact topological space; the results are analogous to those for two-valued logic—they yield the two valued logics as special cases—but often the methods of proof are more complicated and tend to reveal some of the deep structure of these logics. There is presupposed a fair knowledge of naive set theory and point-set (...) topology, but no knowledge of classical logic is required although it will be of help in seeing the motivation behind various results. The first three chapters are concerned with preliminaries on topology, model theory, and continuous logic. The next chapter examines the relation of elementary equivalence among models, including the downward Skolem-Löwenheim theorem; the fifth chapter contains the generalizations of such classical results as the compactness and upward S-L theorems. The authors specialize their work in the sixth chapter to consider certain particular kinds of models: saturated models, universal models. The last chapter considers classes of models closed under various algebraic operations. There is a bibliography, historical notes, and indices of exercises, symbols, and definitions. This book is the prolegomenon to any future study of many-valued logic.—P. J. M. (shrink)

This is one of the best studies to date on the philosophy of emptiness, established by the Buddhist scholar Nägärjuna. It not only presents an exposition of emptiness, the lack of self-existent entities, but also gives the background in India at the time of the formulation of the Mädhyamika and analyzes the structures of religious apprehension in Indian thought. Streng finds three types of religious realization: mythic, intuitive, and dialectical. He clearly sees and demonstrates that the doctrine of emptiness is (...) not a teaching of an unqualified base of phenomena, and thus classifies this system as a dialectical structure. The second part is devoted to a study of the system itself; the third, to placing that system in the context of Indian religious thought; the fourth, to relating the doctrine of emptiness to the general problem of religious knowledge as a means for ultimate transformation. Thus, the book is by no means limited to Buddhologists or Indologists. The almost constant translation of Buddhist Sanskrit terms into English makes this work available to all interested in philosophy and religious thought. The appendix contains translations of the whole of the Mülamadhyamakakärikäs and of the Vigrahavyävartanï both by Nägärjuna. Because the texts are root or fundamental texts, and thus brief, the translations are not easily comprehensible; however, those parts can be skipped over as the principle being exemplified is the same in every instance. Because this book places the concept of emptiness in its proper perspective, distinguishing emptiness from an all-pervasive base out of which phenomena are produced, and yet appreciates the spiritual value of the doctrine, it is a must for all who wish to know more of the more profound aspects of Buddhist philosophy.--P. J. H. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Interpreting the MengziPhilip J. IvanhoeMencius: Contexts and Interpretations. Edited by Alan K. L. Chan. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 328. Hardcover $51.00.Mencius: Contexts and Interpretations, edited by Alan K. L. Chan, is an important collection of essays from a scholarly conference held at the National University of Singapore in 1999. It begins with a concise yet incisive introduction to Mengzi, his work, and the various (...) contributions to the volume. The essays engage the Mengzi from a wide range of perspectives and employ a variety of different approaches. One of its many virtues is the inclusion of articles that explore the relationship of the text to recently excavated Guodian material. The primary audience of these essays is other scholars. However, several contributions could be understood and appreciated by nonspecialists as well.In the lead essay, Ning Chen criticizes a wide range of current accounts concerning the background of Mengzi's theory of human nature and argues that because of these mistaken impressions about Mengzi's intellectual context contemporary scholars fail to appreciate important features of Mengzi's own theory. Chen argues that in order to understand Mengzi's theory it is necessary to appreciate that he was responding to a heretofore unnoticed Mohist theory of human nature and to views that we find in certain Guodian texts. Both of these sources describe "inegalitarian" theories of human nature, and such theories served as a central focus of not only Mengzi's but Xunzi's theory of human nature as well.Some may find Chen's claims about the Mohist theory of human nature in need of further support. His evidence is a single passage from the later, dialectical chapters and the reading of this passage remains highly controversial. Given the importance of this issue for Mengzi and the significant debates Mengzi has with Mohists in various places in the Mengzi, it is quite strange that we see no direct reference to this theory in the text, nor do we find evidence of it in the core chapters of the Mozi. Chen argues that his interpretation is superior to that of Wu Yujing, who argues that the Mohists advocated the view that human nature was ethically neutral. However, Chen does not mention that others have produced quite impressive arguments in support of this same conclusion, for example David S. Nivison.Chen presents interesting and impressive textual work on Guodian texts and no one can deny that this material adds to our understanding of early Chinese philosophy. However, it is not yet clear how, if at all, these texts change our interpretation of Mengzi's theory itself. Even on the issue of what motivated thinkers like Mengzi [End Page 249] and Xunzi to argue for more "egalitarian" theories, it is not clear that Chen has identified anything strikingly new. While the Guodian texts do describe new and interesting theories concerning the character of human nature, these are not the first "inegalitarian" theories. Perhaps more important, one need not see thinkers like Mengzi as responding only or even primarily to explicit theories about human nature; there was ample motivation to argue for a fundamental moral equality among human beings in order to resist the inertia of hereditary rule. As Donald Munro argued in his classic work, The Concept of Man in Early China, this is a distinctive feature of early Chinese thought. It seems reasonable to believe that on some not-too-deep level, all these theories about human nature were responding to the political and social realities of the times.I have some concern about Chen's tendency, which is common among those working on Guodian material, to infer direct causal influence between these texts and later philosophical writings. As all philosophers know, inference is a tricky affair. If we find an earlier culture A, whose members wore trousers with two legs, and a later culture B, whose members also wore trousers with two legs, we might be led to infer that B picked up this practice from A. This would be rash. Both may have adopted the practice from a third culture C or each may have come upon the idea independently—after all, they... (shrink)

This is the first English translation of the work of Eugenio Garin, one of the foremost modern historians of the Italian Renaissance. The present text, translated so intelligently, is based on the revised Italian edition of 1958.. Garin treats the growth of Italian humanism from Petrarch in the fourteenth century to its point of radical transformation with Tommaso Campanella at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The commentary on Giordano Bruno is especially clear, concise, and penetrating. For Garin, the elements (...) of Renaissance humanism are multiple. It sought its own rhetoric and shrank from the dry syllogistic reasoning of scholastic philosophy. It used philology as an essential tool and basis of a revolutionary historiography. As well, Renaissance humanism was engage in civic life. In seeing Renaissance humanism as the link with the modern world, Garin opposes those historians of science who posit medieval science and philosophy as the vital bridge. Garin minimizes the importance of Aristotelianism and finds Renaissance humanism severely hostile to scholasticism. Nevertheless, the book is a rich mine of facts, summarization, and syntheses of texts; the very index of the book, restricted to Italian Renaissance figures, occupies five pages of double columns. In addition, Peter Munz has written an introduction which is a full-blown critique—P. J. M. (shrink)

This book is one of the series entitled "Rare Masterpieces of Philosophy and Science" and it is entitled to both distinctions. The papers collected here are virtually unobtainable except in the most complete libraries; and de Morgan's work is clearly that of a master-between Boole and Frege, he is the leading figure in formal logic. The papers found herein include the series of six on the syllogism published between 1846 and 1868, together with three shorter notes concerning logical phraseology, a (...) syllabus for a system of logic, and an encyclopaedia article whose topic is logic. The editor has added a useful introduction which, among other important services, allows us to see de Morgan, not, as we today see him, as a founder of symbolic logic, but as a rival of William Hamilton, engaged in controversy much of his life.—P. J. M. (shrink)

Thoughtful people who look at the world scene and see civilization in danger of collapse or extinction, are not without hope that by taking thought they may discover remedies. The trouble has been brilliantly diagnosed by Alexis Carrel in his best-selling publication, Man the Unknown, a book that is both scientific and wise. Silva Mello, in the volume before us, tackles the same question, but the flavour is quite different. His book pulsates with feeling and love of humanity, as well (...) as great sincerity, but the approach to problems is intuitive rather than analytical. The English version is based on the fourth Portuguese edition, the book having achieved high popularity in Latin America. (shrink)

It is generally recognised that Western civilization is faced with a double threat to its survival, communism from without and disintegration from within. The latter had its beginnings in the Renaissance and the Reformation, both of which had disruptive effects of a size that is now being more or less clearly seen. We also see that there is urgent need to offset the consequences of these movements, and as rapidly as possible. To-day the accent is on co-operation between the diverse (...) elements of Western culture, and a good deal of thought is being given to devising ways and means of bringing the estranged components together, and re-establishing a unity akin to that which formerly existed in Christendom. (shrink)

Professor Bridgman is a physicist of distinction who has contributed to the philosophy of physics. Dissatisfied with the traditional obscurities and irrationalities of certain branches of his subject, he evolved for himself a logic of modern physics, and focussed his attention on that aspect of scientific method which he called “operational”. His name has been associated with “operational research” and “operational definition” ever since. The present volume, a second and enlarged edition, is a collection of non-technical writings that illustrate what (...) the operational point of view can lead to. The papers are of varying length, some of them quite slight, and the quality is likewise variable. It seems to me the book would improve with pruning, and editing. Besides some irksome mannerisms, there are crudities of style that one would wish to see removed. (shrink)

This is a very informative and lucid account of the career of a central philosophical topic in eighteenth‐century Britain, the debate between libertarians and necessitarians, from Locke to Dugald Stewart. The work has many strengths, and I learnt much from it. It will be of great interest to historians of the period, but the readership should be wider than that. Those working on the debate today should also read this book. Harris (quite legitimately) does not see his task as that (...) of a historian of philosophy, mining old texts in pursuit of contemporary discussion. Instead he seeks to understand the philosophers and their problems on their own terms. In doing so, however, he offers an alternative perspective that may be enlightening to those in the thick of present‐day trench warfare. He not only discusses some neglected figures but also changes our understanding of those with whom we are familiar, especially Hume. I begin by laying out the main themes of the book and its contents. I then discuss Harris' treatment of Hume in more detail. (shrink)

By the time George Wilton Field concluded his work at the marine laboratory his initial scientific concerns had forced him directly into local politics. He pleaded with little success with the community of South Kingstown, and with no success with the town of Narragansett, to create and maintain a permanent breach:Is it not possible for the acute business sense and the broad philanthropy of the community to sweep aside petty, local, and personal jealousies which are now blocking practical progress for (...) the establishment of a permanent breach at Point Judith Pond? It is truly criminal neglect which permits fifteen hundred acres of valuable water-farming area to lie practically idle and rapidly deteriorate with each passing year.... In the opinion of the writer the Point Judith Pond and those of similar type could be made the seat of oyster, clam, crab, herring, white perch, and striped bass fisheries.30In the summer of 1899 Field was invited to teach a summer course on echinoderms at the MBL in Woods Hole, and to conduct summer research in a laboratory of the U.S. Fish Commission, also located at Woods Hole. When the summer was over, he remained there. Whether he had intentions of returning to resume his position in Rhode Island is unclear. At this point all correspondence with the Agricultural Experiment Station ceases, and Field's last report is a brief statement in the annual report of the experiment station for 1900 wherein he laments the variety of experiments he has not been able to carry to conclusion, such as a study of the artificial fertilization of water analogous to the method of chemically fertilizing the land for crops.The correspondence reveals that the enthusiasm Field brought to Point Judith Pond in 1896 was gradually sapped by his own fragile health, by three years' exposure to the local politics surrounding the southern Rhode Island fishing industry, and by a college administration determined to remove the stench of his invertebrates. He sought a refuge in the sheltered world of pure research at the U.S. Fish Commission Laboratory, where he set out to investigate the “Origin of Sex” using, as his animal models, squid and toadfish.On November 14, 1899, the Board of Managers of the college ordered the director of the experiment station to dispose of the marine laboratory at Point Judith Pond.31 How long the laboratory at Buttonwood Point survived in the institutional memory of the University of Rhode Island is open to question. The current Graduate School of Oceanography, in the event, traces its history back to 1937, not 1896.Nevertheless, Field and his one-room marine station established a precedent of land-grant marine research that other state colleges would follow, including Rhode Island itself, which reestablished its marine station, this time permanently, at South Ferry in 1937. In his brief research career in Rhode Island, George Wilton Field had discovered the same coastal attributes that would lead later to the creation of one of the world's major marine research centers at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography.And, in a measure of triumph for his work, little more than a year after Field left for Woods Hole and his laboratory was dismantled, the town of South Kingstown voted the funds necessary to begin the construction of a permanent breachway.32 Whether Field's scientific reasoning and the conclusions of his marine research played any part in finally deciding the thirty-year-old debate in the affirmative will probably never be known. What is evident is that Field had no patience for those who could not see the results of his research as clearly as he could himself. (shrink)

Exposure of man to chemical agents can occur intentionally, as in the treatment of disease, or inadvertently because the environment contains a wide range of synthetic or naturally occurring chemicals. The alkylating agents are a diverse group of compounds (Fig. 1) and comprise a good example of such xenobiotics, since much is known about their occurrence, and their biological effects include carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, toxicity and teratogenicity.Exposure to potentially carcinogenic alkylating agents such as nitrosamines may occur occupationally, from cigarette smoke, from (...) certain foodstuffs and even endogenously through the ingestion of the appropriate precursor chemicals.1 At the other extreme, the cytotoxic effects of agents such as the chloroethylating nitrosamides or mustards have been exploited in the design of certain antitumour drugs.2 The effectiveness of antitumour agents and the other, mostly adverse, biological effects of alkylating agents have been ascribed to their ability to damage cellular macromolecules, in particular DNA. This review concentrates on investigations carried out over the past two years on the role of DNA damage in carcinogenesis, but we shall see how recent advances in this area of research have also led to a better understanding of the mechanisms of the cytotoxic effects of alkylating antitumour agents. (shrink)

This essay places Foucault's work into a philosophical context, recognizing that Foucault is difficult to place and demonstrates that Foucault remains in the Kantian tradition of philosophy, even if he sits at the margins of that tradition. For Kant, the forms of intuition—space and time—are the a priori conditions of the possibility of human experience and knowledge. For Foucault, the a priori conditions are political space and historical time. Foucault sees political space as central to understanding both the subject and (...) objects of medicine, psychiatry, and the social sciences. Through this analysis one can see that medicine's metaphysics is a metaphysics of efficient causation, where medicine's objects are subjected to mechanisms of efficient control. (shrink)

According to Berkeley, then, the unconscious process of inference of the scientist goes as follows. He notices that, when he does not have his house within visual range, he cannot see it just by wishing to; and that, when he does have it within visual range and his eyes open, he cannot prevent himself from seeing it just by wishing not to. He therefore infers that he is not the efficient cause of these sensations. But, since he holds that they (...) must have some efficient cause, he concludes that this is a congeries of "material substances," which are numerically distinct and partly dissimilar from the sensations, and which exist even when unperceived, or "externally to the mind." As a psychological theory, this seems to be at any rate plausible. (shrink)

The philosophical problems of liberty may be classified as those of definition, of justification and of distribution. They are so complex that there is a danger of being unable to see the wood for the trees. It may be helpful, therefore, to provide an aerial photograph of a large part of the wood, namely, the liberty ofindividual persons. But it is, of course, a photograph taken from an individual point of view, as Leibniz would have put it.

The concept of civil society has once again emerged as a viable mechanism for developing and sustaining deliberative democracy. However, an essential component of many strategies to sustain civil society appears lacking, especially when we see the growing cynicism and apathy among citizens. What is missing is a strategy for training or encouraging citizens to participate more fully in civil society. The skills of advocacy can, at least in part, help renew civic activism. Thus, the role of advocacy will be (...) explored as a potential way to resuscitate civil society. (shrink)

David Lewis modified his original theory of causation in response to the problem of ‘late preemption’ (see 1973b; 1986b: 193-212). However, as we will see, there is a crucial difference between genuine and preempted causes that Lewis must appeal to if his solution is to work. We argue that once this difference is recognized, an altogether better solution to the preemption problem presents itself.

The fact that education is, and must be, a process of enculturation for those being educated gives us some, but by no means enough, guidance as to what we would expect to see going on in our schools. For given that our educational institutions are part of our culture and, given that anything that is part of our culture will transmit cultural messages, if we put children in school and let them play all day, or simply asked teachers to explain (...) their hobbies to the children, then some processes of enculturalisation would be going on. But no one with any real concern for either our children or their education would think such things fulfil a proper role for schools. Certainly if, as Arnold thought, education is a question of passing on, or trying to pass on, the features from our culture that we value, then any such reliance on random processes must be ruled out. Instead we have to select those aspects of our culture which we wish our children to partake of and insist that our educational establishments make sustained and intentional efforts to ensure such participation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Being and Freedom: On Late Modern Ethics in Europe by John SkorupskiJ. P. MessinaJohn Skorupski. Being and Freedom: On Late Modern Ethics in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 560. Hardcover, $130.00.John Skorupski's Being and Freedom traces the development of modern ethics in France, Germany, and England, as set in motion by two great revolutions: the French Revolution and Kant's methodological revolution in the Critique of Pure (...) Reason. I begin this review by offering [End Page 714] a brief summary of the book (which consists of eight lengthy chapters, an introduction, and a brief conclusion). I then raise some interpretive worries and offer an overall assessment.In chapter 1, Skorupski reminds us that the French Revolution, a physical struggle between opposing factions, was also a battleground of ideas. In opposing the ancien régime, revolutionaries took aim at the "Catholic-feudal order" (27). Underlying this order was an ethical view, "holism," according to which a person lives well through excellent performance of community roles assigned by family, state, and church. When individual interests conflict with these social roles, the latter take precedence. Revolutionaries (partially inspired by Rousseau) railed against this. On their view, persons were born for freedom, not the chains of traditional life. To realize such freedom demanded a radical democratic state. Here, too, fidelity to the ethical whole (the Republic) sometimes required sacrifices on the part of individuals. But in a properly constituted republic, these sacrifices would be self-imposed requirements of the general will.As revolution turned to terror and blood became the regular currency of sacrifice, critics like Guizot saw the ancien régime's parochialism as a symptom of a larger problem with its underlying ethics, one it shared with the radicals aligned against it: its commitment to holism. Holism says that some social entities have a good not reducible to the good of their members. Additionally, these social wholes have their own rights that sometimes override individual rights (28, 59). These features make it easy for holist orders to justify sacrificing individuals for collective goods. If this is the disease, individualism of the sort associated with Kantian ethics can seem to be the cure.Chapter 2 argues that the new critical philosophy resulting from Kant's "Copernican" Revolution is a mixed bag. On the one hand, Kant offers no good reason for positing a noumenal world and locating freedom there (77–79). On the other hand, there is lasting promise in the idea that morality follows from each person's individual autonomy. And yet, in the end, Kant's arguments fail here, too. For deriving morality from autonomy requires an explicit commitment to impartiality, which does not follow from autonomy (83–102). And, even when suitably modified, Kant's ethical principles risk emptiness if they fail to take content from our relationships and social roles (112, 148). Unfortunately, Kant suggests that doing so would perpetrate heteronomy, making such emptiness inevitable (102).By chapter 3, the tension between holist and individualist conceptions of ethics has become Skorupski's central leitmotif. On the one hand, individualists are well positioned to resist oppression and terror. On the other hand, individualism risks atomism and alienation from our attachments and feelings. Such alienation leads Schiller to reject Kant's views on freedom and virtue (161). For our author, this is as it should be.Skorupski next turns to Fichte. Although Fichte takes a step away from transcendental idealism by making intellectual intuition the hallmark of our subjectivity (173), he agrees with Kant that morality follows from autonomy. Indeed, for Fichte, autonomy commits us to striving for full self-sufficiency, which appears to court a similar atomism. Yet this impression is corrected when Fichte turns to politics. There, Fichte grounds rights (as permissible demands) in mutual recognition (182–83). This positions him to see the state and the family as ethical wholes (187–88), pointing away from Kantian individualism back toward holism.Hegel takes these steps away from Kant to their logical conclusion. As Skorupski explains in chapter 4, Hegel argues that the individualist systems grounded in autonomy and abstract right (Moralität) mark but stages on the way to moral... (shrink)

The most recent commentator on this line, D. R. Shackleton Bailey, states that ‘spiritus is breath rather than odour’ and he has the support of some commentators, Marcilius, for example, who amends notus to motus, and Hertzberg, who takes it as sweet breath, citing Mart. 3. 65. 1. So also most translators : an exception is D. Paganelli who translates ‘aucun souffle, aucune odeur d'adultère’. However, the parallels cited by Shackleton Bailey are irrelevant to this situation: Afranius 243, Ach. Tat. (...) 2. 37. 9, and Claud. Carm. Min. 29. 33 all refer to the period just before, during, or immediately after the sexual act. It is most unlikely that this is the case in Propertius' poem. Propertius has come to see if Cynthia has spent the night alone; it is not a question of catching her inflagrante delicto, but of finding some rival there or the evidence of his stay not yet removed. Cynthia is indignant at her lover's suspicions and lest he should think that his rival had left earlier, she coarsely specifies the evidence that Propertius might expect to find, including spiritus admisso notus adulterio. (shrink)

The most recent commentator on this line, D. R. Shackleton Bailey, states that ‘spiritus is breath rather than odour’ and he has the support of some commentators, Marcilius, for example, who amends notus to motus, and Hertzberg, who takes it as sweet breath, citing Mart. 3. 65. 1. So also most translators : an exception is D. Paganelli who translates ‘aucun souffle, aucune odeur d'adultère’. However, the parallels cited by Shackleton Bailey are irrelevant to this situation: Afranius 243, Ach. Tat. (...) 2. 37. 9, and Claud. Carm. Min. 29. 33 all refer to the period just before, during, or immediately after the sexual act. It is most unlikely that this is the case in Propertius' poem. Propertius has come to see if Cynthia has spent the night alone; it is not a question of catching her inflagrante delicto, but of finding some rival there or the evidence of his stay not yet removed. Cynthia is indignant at her lover's suspicions and lest he should think that his rival had left earlier, she coarsely specifies the evidence that Propertius might expect to find, including spiritus admisso notus adulterio. (shrink)

Can business humanize its stakeholders? And if so, how does this relate to moral consideration for stakeholders? In this paper we compare two business orientations that are relevant for current business theory and practice: a stakeholder orientation and a profit orientation. We empirically investigate the causal relationships between business orientation, humanization, and moral consideration. We report the results of six experiments, making use of different operationalizations of a stakeholder and profit orientation, different stakeholders, and different participant samples. Our findings support (...) the prediction that individual stakeholders observing a stakeholder-oriented firm see the firm’s other stakeholders as more human than individual stakeholders observing a profit-oriented firm. This humanization, in turn, increases individual stakeholders’ moral consideration for the firm’s other stakeholders. Our findings underscore the importance of humanization for stakeholders’ moral consideration for each other. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the firm as a moral community of stakeholders. Specifically, we move away from a focus on managers, and how they can make business more moral. Instead we direct attention to stakeholders, and how business can make these stakeholders more moral. (shrink)

Universal Grammar (UG) is indeed evolutionarily implausible. But if languages are just to a large primate brain, it is hard to see why other primates do not have complex languages. The answer is that humans have evolved a specialized and uniquely human cognitive architecture, whose main function is to compute mappings between arbitrary signals and communicative intentions. This underlies the development of language in the human species.

A central claim in stakeholder theory is that, if we see stakeholders as human beings, we will attribute higher moral standing or show more moral consideration to stakeholders. But would the same hold for firms? In this paper, I apply the concepts of humanization and moral standing to firms, and I predict that individuals attribute higher moral standing to stakeholder-oriented than to profit-oriented firms, because individuals attribute more experience to stakeholder-oriented than to profit-oriented firms. Five experiments support these predictions across (...) different operationalizations of stakeholder and profit orientations. The analyses show that moral standing attributions are not fully explained by attributions of agency to firms, or by attributions of experience or agency to human stakeholders. By unearthing the importance of experience attributions for moral standing attributions to firms, this work provides novel insights in ongoing legal, philosophical and public debates related to firms’ moral standing. The findings also bring the debate about firms’ moral standing to the heart of stakeholder theory, and lead to new normative and descriptive research questions about the interests of firms and their stakeholders. (shrink)

There are quantum solutions for computational problems that make use of interference at some stage in the algorithm. These stages can be mapped into the physical setting of a single particle travelling through a many-armed interferometer. There has been recent foundational interest in theories beyond quantum theory. Here, we present a generalized formulation of computation in the context of a many-armed interferometer, and explore how theories can differ from quantum theory and still perform distributed calculations in this set-up. We shall (...) see that quaternionic quantum theory proves a suitable candidate, whereas box-world does not. We also find that a classical hidden variable model first presented by Spekkens : 32100, 2007) can also be used for this type of computation due to the epistemic restriction placed on the hidden variable. (shrink)

The first is that we are wrong to suggest that the mainstream is no longer limited to a restrictive orthodoxy of beliefs and assumptions that discourages dissenting voices. In developing his argument, Vernengo claims that our characterization of a cutting edge branch of the mainstream that does not hold to a neoclassical orthodoxy is misleading. Although he states that he accepts our characterization of the economics profession as a complex adaptive system, with many competing views, he sees the cutting edge (...) as a sham. He argues that the true role of the cutting edge is to allow the mainstream to “sound reasonable when talking about reality, while orthodoxy provides authority to the cutting edge.” He calls this an “organized hypocrisy” and calls us naive about the sociology of the economics profession. Because of this naiveté on our part he believes that we are giving bad advice to advocate that heterodox economists should think of themselves as economists first and heterodox economists second. (shrink)

Comparative genomics has proven a fruitful approach to acquire many functional and evolutionary insights into core cellular processes. Here it is argued that in order to perform accurate and interesting comparative genomics, one first and foremost has to be able to recognize, postulate, and revise different evolutionary scenarios. After all, these studies lack a simple protocol, due to different proteins having different evolutionary dynamics and demanding different approaches. The authors here discuss this challenge from a practical (what are the observations?) (...) and conceptual (how do these indicate a specific evolutionary scenario?) viewpoint, with the aim to guide investigators who want to analyze the evolution of their protein(s) of interest. By sharing how the authors draft, test, and update such a scenario and how it directs their investigations, the authors hope to illuminate how to execute molecular evolution studies and how to interpret them. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/VCt3l2pbdbQ. (shrink)

What does it mean to consider the world of AI through a Christian lens? Rapid developments in AI continue to reshape society, raising new ethical questions and challenging our understanding of the human person. Encountering Artificial Intelligence draws on Pope Francis’ discussion of a culture of encounter and broader themes in Catholic social thought in order to examine how current AI applications affect human relationships in various social spheres and offers concrete recommendations for better implementation. The document also explores questions (...) regarding personhood, consciousness, and the kinds of relationships humans might have with even the most advanced AI. Through these discussions, this book investigates the theoretical and practical challenges to interpersonal encounter raised by the age of AI. (AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture of the Dicastery of Culture and Education of the Holy See). (shrink)

Systems thinking is a general worldview concerning the nature of reality. It sees the world as composed of systems, and all particular entities populating reality as linked with other entities – the emergence of new properties denies the flatland of plain materiality, and generates entities of a higher order. Spirituality in historical and modern traditions has minimally amounted to relating oneself to a larger or higher systemic whole, which confers meaning to particular cases of existence. In some religious traditions this (...) larger systemic whole has been understood as a transcendental sphere of existence, whereas in other religious and spiritual traditions it has been seen as an immanent thatness. The search for spirituality and wisdom has never been confined to religious traditions, but has inspired other systems thinkers as well, for example in philosophy, the New Age movement, in developmental psychology, biology, or futures research. The American philosopher and theoretical psychologist Ken Wilber has discussed, re-interpreted and synthesized various views on spiritual development as well as systems thinking and has provided input for the New Age movement, comparative religion, developmental psychology, and world philosophy. In this article we will discuss the relationship between systems thinking and spirituality and will assess Ken Wilber’s contribution to their conceptualization. (shrink)

Over the last decade, empirical research on compassion has burgeoned in the biomedical, clinical, translational, and foundational sciences. Increasingly sophisticated understandings and measures of compassion continue to emerge from the abundance of multi- and cross-disciplinary studies. Naturally, the diversity of research methods and theoretical frameworks employed presents a significant challenge to consensus and synthesis of this knowledge. To bring the empirical findings of separate and sometimes siloed disciplines into conversation with one another requires an examination of their disparate assumptions about (...) what compassion is and how it can be known. Here, we present an integrated theoretical review of methodologies used in the empirical study of compassion. Our goal is to highlight the distinguishing features of each of these ways of knowing compassion, as well as the strengths and limitations of applying them to specific research questions. We hope this will provide useful tools for selecting methods that are tailored to explicit objectives (methods matching), taking advantage of methodological complementarity across disciplines (methods-mixing), and incorporating the empirical study of compassion into fields in which it may be missing. (shrink)