(1974). The American Philosophical Society and the rise of astronomy in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. Annals of Science: Vol. 31, No. 5, pp. 407-427.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:BoredomWalter E. BromanBoredom, by Patricia Meyer Spacks; xii & 289 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, $24.95 paper.Scholars who have been immersed in the eighteenth century are often imbued with a penchant for common sense and develop a rich, lucid style. Professor Spacks exemplifies these qualities admirably. In spite of the sludgy title, this is a stimulating and rewarding book. Until now my only thinking about boredom (...) has happened while watching goldfish or cows and wondering if they were slowly perishing of boredom. Otherwise, boredom has been a gray experience accompanying committee meetings or reading insurance prose, but scarcely a matter for philosophy. Professor Spacks shows that there is much here for serious thought. She traces the history of boredom, mainly as manifested in novels. “This book’s project is to investigate boredom’s imaginative functions during the past two and a half centuries, mainly in England, where speakers first labeled the condition early in the second half of the eighteenth century” (p. 6). In this period the idea of boredom was still influenced by Christian thought. Thus, Johnson saw Boswell’s boredom in Scotland as a lapse in Christian morality, a lack of personal resources. Johnson felt the universal power of boredom; it invaded even “the Happy Valley of Rasselas,” but he insisted on the moral duty of opposing it with spirited effort. Women writers of the period are pictured as doing just that—heroically defeating a boredom imposed upon women by society through the vivacity and energy of language in their epistles and narration. Professor Spacks depicts the early nineteenth century as afflicting later decades with sensibility and didactic tedium and developing complex new aspects of boredom as a mode of aggression that could shrivel people, arts, and society. “To real aristocrats belongs the repudiation of feeling—passion and compassion—that constitutes boredom” (p. 201). In the twentieth century boredom becomes ubiquitous and has “enormous and essentially unalterable power” (p. ix). This century is like a fulfillment of Pope’s vision of universal dullness at the end of The Dunciad.During the course of this history we become almost convinced that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women hunkered in a cotton-wrapped male-dominated world which went to great lengths to normalize female boredom. “Often tedium attends compliant virtue” (p. 78). This idea of [End Page 506] oppressed and suffering women is repeated in the text to the point of—well—boring the reader. From my reading in general and from this book I garnered the impression that eighteenth-century women were for the most part tough, alive, and intelligent masters of boredom. I can almost hear their spirits crying, “save the pity!”Professor Spacks fulfills the older mission of criticism to promote interest and attention, and provide insight. Like literature, this mission aims to defeat boredom. We are rewarded with a brilliant discussion of Sense and Sensibility, showing us how Austen’s subtle rhetoric guides the reader’s perception of what is interesting—to learn to find seemingly dull Elinor and Edward actually interesting, to thwart our shallower driftings. In a similar vein with moral bearings Professor Spacks manages to stir interest in a discussion of Wordsworth’s “The Idiot Boy.” We recall how Wordsworth militated against the human inclination to depend upon gross and violent stimulants. He proposed that we ought to be interested in what is moral and thereby genuinely interesting. In “The Idiot Boy” he aimed to enlarge our moral attention span to embrace the lowly and unlikely. I began to feel much less like a moral derelict when Professor Spacks admitted that she too finds “The Idiot Boy” boring.This is such a rewarding book that I feel uncomfortably churlish in pointing out that aspects of the book are irksome. In general, her sentences are beautiful, but in large tracts of the book we find an Emersonian discursiveness where the discussions are crumbly and anfractuous, tacking from this to that. We don’t get enough sustained driving down a clear track. She suggests in passing that Hannah More’s Coelebs is boring to the later nineteenth century when people become more concerned with inner conflicts and... (shrink)

Progressive supranuclear palsy is a movement disorder with prominent tau neuropathology. Brain diseases with abnormal tau deposits are called tauopathies, the most common of which is Alzheimer's disease. Environmental causes of tauopathies include repetitive head trauma associated with some sports. To identify common genetic variation contributing to risk for tauopathies, we carried out a genome-wide association study of 1,114 individuals with PSP and 3,247 controls followed by a second stage in which we genotyped 1,051 cases and 3,560 controls for the (...) stage 1 SNPs that yielded P ≤ 10-3. We found significant previously unidentified signals associated with PSP risk at STX6, EIF2AK3 and MOBP. We confirmed two independent variants in MAPT affecting risk for PSP, one of which influences MAPT brain expression. The genes implicated encode proteins for vesicle-membrane fusion at the Golgi-endosomal interface, for the endoplasmic reticulum unfolded protein response and for a myelin structural component. © 2011 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The Logic of Law Making in Islam: Women and Prayer in the Legal Tradition. By Behnam Sadeghi. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. xxi + 215. $99.99, £64.99.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 169-171 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume The Passion for Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume, by Adam Potkay; 241 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, $42.50. This book is a sustained attack on the widespread impression that Samuel Johnson and David Hume were antithetical characters, a notion largely nourished by that memorable moment when (...) Boswell brings up Hume "and other skeptical innovators" and Johnson replies, as we all remember, "Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to error. Truth, sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they have gone to milk the bull." Professor Potkay feels that this image has radically distorted our perception of the truth.A large part of the problem, as Potkay sees it, is that the Johnson of the biography is not the same as the Johnson seen in his writings. Boswell, he claims, "superbly fashioned a Johnson after his own heart" (p. 29). Biography is beset with the misapprehensions we all have of another individual, but personal writing is equally subject to rhetorical posturing, selective memory, and other histrionics of the ego.Potkay makes a strong and interesting case for the proposition that Johnson and Hume were in accord as to their ideas of happiness. "Johnson and Hume set forth largely compatible visions of human happiness that, while rooted in Cicero, draw as well on modern authors..." (p. 5). In this view, happiness is intrinsically social, the inverse of Sartre's L'enfer, c'est les autres. We are estimable in our own eyes only if we are so in the eyes of others. The astronomer in Rasselas finally surmounts his delusion that he controls the weather only by leaving his solitude for the society of others. Hume declared that perfect solitude is the greatest punishment that we can suffer (p. 60). Hume and Johnson both agree that cities afford the greatest happiness through a multiplicity of agreeable consciousness--London for Johnson and Paris for Hume.Potkay argues that the chief ethic in the writings of both Hume and Johnson [End Page 169] "is the eclectic, Ciceronian brand of Stoicism Hume delineates in 'the Stoic', a sociable Stoicism whose end is 'the moderating of our passions, the enlightening of our reason'" (p. 77). The path to happiness lies in cultivating reason and moderating passion. However, unlike ethicists that downgrade the passions, Hume and Johnson see the passions as necessary and good. As against the whole duty of man, they think that pride is good, unless it causes pain to others. This is fresh news for those of us who have squirmed in Sunday school classes when pride was severely denounced and humility recommended--squirmed in spite of our reverence for Milton. Johnson and Hume viewed pride and the pleasure derived from praise as inspiring progress in trades, professions, arts, and science. It excites ingenuity. This is what we didn't dare say in Sunday school.Potkay searches indefatigably for parallels between the two men. We are told that they both rejected the hard determinism that some thinkers derived from Newtonian physics. In the midst of all this we have another discussion of tragedy, pity and fear, etc., the sort of thing that requires the reckless exuberance of youth in order to relish. Are we expected to feel astonished that here too we find them in accord? The parallels between the two men are pushed to the point that a reader might begin to suspect that there is a hidden half of the text that is being withheld, perhaps countervailing evidence. We begin to feel that lurking suspicion evoked by someone too zealously dedicated to a thesis.By the middle of the book, a reader is likely to be convinced that far from going forth to milk the bull, Hume was almost an intellectual twin of Johnson. At the same time, though, sepia thoughts begin to seep into the mind. We notice that these parallel thoughts... (shrink)

Virtues are standardly understood as (1) essentially dispositions to perform certain actions and (2) having only instrumental value as motives to fulfill moral duties which can be fulfilled by persons lacking the virtue because the duties mandate only certain act-types. The argument of this article is that the duties of beneficence, gratitude and self-respect cannot be stated in terms of obligatory act-types because they cannot be fulfilled (except in deficient form) by persons lacking the appropriate virtue; they are, rather, duties (...) to cultivate specific virtues which therefore cannot themselves be defined in terms of obligatory actions. (shrink)

Huemer [33] argues against the killing of animals. I offer a critical libertarian analysis of his claim.

Rawls’s theory of justice has been criticized for allowing individuals by their own voluntary choice to make themselves members of the ‘least advantaged’ class and thereby eligible, albeit undeservedly, for the benefits mandated by the Difference Principle. I argue, first, that this criticism overlooks the fact that the Difference Principle applies only to the lifetime expectations of representative persons and, second, that it is possible to implement the Difference Principle (and the social minimum) through policies that do not create work (...) disincentives or require making objectionable moral judgments about who is and who is not deserving of assistance. (shrink)

During the past thirty years, scholars and commentators have produced a flood of articles and books on almost every aspect and feature of Berkeley's work. There are, however, very few points on which these commentators agree. Since the debate shows no signs of abating, Walter Creery has gathered together a collection of the more significant articles in this extremely useful and accessible form. These three volumes gather together eighty-seven articles on Berkeley's views on the central issues of the philosophy (...) of language, the theory of vision, qualities, general ideas, matter, the theory of mind, and notions. The collection contains articles both harshly critical of Berkeley as well as those sympathetic with the philosopher's views, and there has been an attempt to balance the selection between the immaterialist and idealist theories. (shrink)

What is the proper punishment from the perspective of the libertarian philosophy? More specifically, in what way, if at all, may a thief benefit from his robbery? The present essay attempts to wrestle with these challenging questions.

SummaryThis paper sets the developmental view of Piaget and the structural perspective of Lonergan in juxtaposition for the purpose of allowing their complementary approaches on objectivity to jointly illuminate their common epistemological theme of the constitutive role of the creative and constructive knowing subject at the heart of the cognitive process, as well as to highlight what I argue is their commonly shared and fundamental epistemological thesis of self‐transcending subjectivity: the radical identity of genuine objectivity and authentic subjectivity — that (...) subjectivity is objective insofar as it transcends itself.RésuméCet article met la vue génétique de Piaget en parallèle avec la perspective structurale de Lonergan. Leurs approches complémentaires de l'objectivitééclairent leur thème épistémologique commun, c'est‐à‐dire le rôle du sujet connaissant créateur et constructeur au cœur du processus de connaissance. L'auteur souligne leur thèse épistémologique commune qu'il appelle subjectivité auto‐transcendante: l'identité radicale de la véritable objectivité et de l'authentique subjectivité, car cette subjectivité est objective dans la mesure où elle se transcende elle‐même.ZusammenfassungEs wird der genetische Standpunkt Piagets mit dem strukturalen von Lonergan verglichen, um zu zeigen, wie ihre komplementären Betrachtungsweisen der Objektivität den gemeinsamen erkenntnistheoretischen Gegenstand ihrer Untersuchung, nämlich die konstitutive Rolle des schöpferischen und konstruierenden Erkenntnissubjekts im Erkenntnisprozess, beleuchten. Es geht um die gemeinsame, fundamental These der sich selbst transzendierenden Subjektivität: die radikale Identität der wahren Objektivität und der echten Subjektivität. Das Subjektive kann nur, sofern es sich selbst trans‐zendiert, objektiv werden. (shrink)

I consider three questions concerning the relation of the good will to the moral worth of actions. (1) Does a good will consist simply in acting from the motive of duty? (2) Does acting from the motive of duty presuppose that one has a good will? (3) Does the fact that one has a good wilI entail that all of one’s duty-fulfilling actions have moral worth, even if they are not (directly) motivated by duty? I argue that while only persons (...) with a good will are capable of acting from the motive of duty, it does not follow either that a good will consists in acting from duty or that if one has a good will, all of one’s dutiful actions will be motivated by duty. Whereas the good will is constituted by the agent’s highest-order maxim (the moral law itself), moral worth is a function of the agent’s first-order maxims. (shrink)

Erik Erikson's work in psychosocial developmental theory has made valuable contributions to the field of religious ethics on some very basic issues. This paper makes scattered elements of Erikson's explicit ethical perspective available in concise fashion for critical ethical reflection. It does this in such a way as to highlight the centrally important fact for religious ethics that implicitly operative in Erikson's view is a criterion of "self-transcendence" as definitive of mature personal (fully human, ethical) development.

After reviewing Newman’s famous defense of conscience in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875), this essay assembles Newman’s lifelong reflections on conscience—from his Anglican sermons to his Grammar of Assent (1870)—in a threefold structure: desire, discernment, and demand.

As a way of overcoming the conflict between the Apologia’s focus on Liberalism and Frank Turner’s recent insistence that the real Tractarian target was Evangelicalism, this essay proposes that Newman’s fundamental opponent was subjectivism.