At the turn of the 17th century, in Romanian philosophy the nobility of spirit is seen as a certain but intermediate value, to be cherished while man waits for his divine reward, which is everlasting life, as presented in Divanul [The Divan] by Dimitrie Cantemir. Two hundred and fifty years later, man is regarded as having evolved from the animal forms of life in Mihai Ralea’s systematic presentation Explicarea omului [An Explanation of Man], and the sole meaning of nobility is (...) the revolutionary one, the heroic one, that is the ethical one. From a totally different point of view, during the interwar period, Constantin Micu Stavilă developed a general theory of man and society thus compellingly arguing against the claims of all ideologists of the natural genesis of human spirituality. In this theory the nobility of spirit was said to come from work and creation. By presenting these examples, my intention is to rediscover this spiritual, moral and socio-cultural ideal in order to find its place, role and profile in designing a new view of human nature, for a more decent human world. (shrink)

Child analysis has occupied a special place in the history of psychoanalysis because of the challenges it poses to practitioners and the clashes it has provoked among its advocates. Since the early days in Vienna under Sigmund Freud child psychoanalysts have tried to comprehend and make comprehensible to others the psychosomatic troubles of childhood and to adapt clinical and therapeutic approaches to all the stages of development of the baby, the child, the adolescent and the young adult. Claudine and (...) Pierre Geissmann trace the history and development of child analysis over the last century and assess the contributions made by pioneers of the discipline, whose efforts to expand its theoretical foundations led to conflict between schools of thought, most notably to the rift between Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Now taught and practised widely in Europe, the USA and South America, child and adolescent psychoanalysis is unique in the insight it gives into the psychological aspects of child development, and in the therapeutic benefits it can bring both to the child and its family. (shrink)

The Institute of Social Research, from which the Frankfurt School developed, was founded in the early years of the Weimar Republic. It survived the Nazi era in exile, to become an important centre of social theory in the postwar era. Early members of the school, such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, developed a form of Marxist theory known as Critical Theory, which became influential in the study of class, politics, culture and ideology. The work of more recent members, and in (...) particular Habermas, has received wide attention throughout Europe and North America. Tom Bottomore's study takes a new and controversial look at the contributions of the Frankfurt School to modern sociology, examining several issues not previously discussed elsewhere. He discusses the neglect of history and political economy by the critical theorists, and considers the relationship of the later Frankfurt School to the radical movements of the 1960s and the present time. His critical analysis makes the school's writers accessible, through an assessment of their work and an exploration of the relationship of Critical Theory to other forms of sociological thought, especially positivism and structuralism. (shrink)

In 2015, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals set an ethical imperative: end extreme poverty and hunger by 2030. Microfranchising can contribute to this critical effort by offering nonprofit organizations and businesses an opportunity to rapidly scale entrepreneurship within Base of the Pyramid markets. However, while abundant literature exists on traditional franchising, we know little about how to leverage microfranchising in resource-scarce contexts to alleviate poverty. To address this gap, we report a longitudinal case study of a microfranchise network (...) aimed at providing timely access to quality, affordable agricultural input, and services for millions of small-scale farmers in Bangladesh. Anchored in the BOP and microfranchise literature and drawing on innovation theory as an analytical lens, we provide a detailed account of how CARE—a global humanitarian and development non-governmental organization—developed and managed the network. We found that context played a strong role and that adaptability therefore was key to successfully recruiting and engaging BOP entrepreneurs and other business partners in the network. Moreover, as members joined the network with past ties and established practices, managing these path dependencies had important implications for network performance. Network sustainability in terms of financial and social impact was also a key theme that required careful consideration throughout network development. We combine these empirical findings with extant literature to discuss contributions to the theory and practice of microfranchising and innovation networking in the BOP context. (shrink)

In the first half, I suggest that Kant’s conception of our moral life goes through a significant shift after 1793, with reverberations in his eschatology. The earlier account, based on the postulate of immortality, describes our moral life as an endless pursuit of the highest good, but all this changes in the later account, and I point out three possible reasons for this change of heart. In the second half, I explore how the considerations Kant brings up to argue for (...) his accounts can inform our process of formulating positions with respect to the afterlife. I argue that, in the absence of a convincing theoretical proof for or against the afterlife as well as apodictically certain knowledge of how demanding the moral law is, the Kantian strategy would be to ask which account of our moral life delivers the kind of contentment that can sustain our moral resolve. I also point out a way theists might be able to find contentment despite their moral failures by imagining God’s moral kenosis. (shrink)

From 1930 onwards, György Lukács considers ‘uneven development’ the typical relational form between economic progress and the corresponding evolution of other fields of human activity. In the early thirties Lukács focuses on the problem of elaborating an independent Marxist aesthetics, but then necessarily find himself having to deal with the general configuration of Marx’s alleged philosophy. The general theory illustrated in The Ontology of Social Being is where this philosophy, considered as a Weltanschauung, is given its final framework. His (...) reflection on the ‘specificity’ of the aesthetic experience, as part of the broader framework of the main fields of art, science and everyday life, is the theoretical medium Lukács used in the fifties and sixties to fine-tune the need that had arisen decades earlier to attribute Marxism with genuine philosophical universality. (shrink)

Henry Sidgwick taught G.E. Moore as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge. Moore found Sidgwick’s personality less than attractive and his lectures “rather dull”. Still, philosophically speaking, Moore absorbed a great deal from Sidgwick. In the Preface to the Trinity College Prize Fellowship dissertation that he submitted in 1898, just two years after graduation, he wrote “For my ethical views it will be obvious how much I owe to Prof. Sidgwick.” Later, in Principia Ethica, Moore credited Sidgwick with having (...) “first clearly exposed the [naturalistic] fallacy” – a fallacy putatively committed when one defines naturalistically or super-naturalistically “good” – which was one of the book’s main ambitions (PE 39; also 17, 59). It is therefore unsurprising that Moore remarks in the intellectual autobiography he wrote years later that “From…[Sidgwick’s] published works…I have gained a good deal, and his clarity and his belief in Common Sense were very sympathetic to me.” This influence did not, however, prevent Moore from registering disagreements with Sidgwick, the sharpest of which concern the viability of egoism and the nature of the good. The disagreements between Sidgwick and Moore speak to many important moral theoretical issues arising both within and without the utilitarian tradition in ethical thinking. Because the two share much in common, a critical comparison of them on a range of moral philosophical questions proves instructive. It will tell us in particular something about the general direction of ethical thinking in the utilitarian tradition at the dawn of the twentieth century. This chapter has four parts. Part I compares the versions of utilitarianism to which Sidgwick and Moore subscribed. Part II examines the arguments each provides for the view. Part III discusses their conflicting theories of value. Part IV sums things up. (shrink)

This article identifies the context of Augustine's theology of grace. His disappointing experiences as a priest and young bishop impacted his theological notions of gratia, especially as they would mature during the Pelagian crisis. Using Cyprian as an authority, Augustine argued against the Donatist idea of grace solely through membership in the 'pure' church and sacramental grace only via ministers free from ecclesial-sin (traditio). Instead, Augustine argued that all grace is solely through God and that all humanity and the earthly (...) Church was a mixed body of the fallen and blessed and in need of divine grace. (shrink)

This article identifies the context of Augustine's theology of grace. His disappointing experiences as a priest and young bishop impacted his theological notions of gratia, especially as they would mature during the Pelagian crisis. Using Cyprian as an authority, Augustine argued against the Donatist idea of grace solely through membership in the 'pure' church and sacramental grace only via ministers free from ecclesial-sin (traditio). Instead, Augustine argued that all grace is solely through God and that all humanity and the earthly (...) Church was a mixed body of the fallen and blessed and in need of divine grace. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to the reconstruction of some stage of the proces leading to the emergence in modern science the concept of Infinite „Euclidean” space to geometry of the Elements in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Some historical medieval sources and views concerning Archytas, Cleomedes, Proclus, Simplicius, Aganis, al-Nayrizi and the Arabs, Boetius, Gerard of Cremona, Albertus Magnus et al., are described analyzed and compared. The small changes in the understanding of geometry in the Elements during the (...) ages are reconstructed up to the first explicit use of the concept of infinity in geometry by Nicole Oresme. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the emergence of professional biology have privileged not only metropolis over province, but research over teaching and laboratory over museum. This paper seeks to supplement earlier studies of the ‘transformation of biology’ in the late nineteenth century by exploring in detail the developments within three biology departments in Northern English civic colleges. By outlining changes in the teaching practices, research topics and the accommodation of the departments, the authors demonstrate both locally contingent factors in their (...) class='Hi'>development and continuities with existing traditions in natural history. The appointment of Arthur Milnes Marshall in preference to Louis Miall to the new zoology chair in Manchester in 1879 casts light on contemporary views of the laboratory and museum as ‘equal though different’. The transformation in biology, in Northern England at least, was shaped more by such local institutional changes than by a phoenix-like rise of the laboratory from the ashes of the museum—more by the rhetorical construction of a professional academic community than any dramatic shift in sites. In this period the biology laboratory supplemented, rather than eclipsed, the museum, and the dichotomy between the ‘naturalist’ and the ‘experimentalist’ was far from clear-cut. (shrink)

Many philosophers and a few psychologists think that we understand our own minds before we understand those of others. Most developmental psychologists think that children understand their own minds at about the same time they understand other minds, by using the same cognitive abilities. I disagree with both views. I think that children understand other minds before they understand their own. Their self-understanding depends on some cognitive abilities that develop later than, and independently of, the abilities involved in understanding other (...) minds. This is the general theme of this chapter. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the emergence of professional biology have privileged not only metropolis over province, but research over teaching and laboratory over museum. This paper seeks to supplement earlier studies of the 'transformation of biology' in the late nineteenth century by exploring in detail the developments within three biology departments in Northern English civic colleges. By outlining changes in the teaching practices, research topics and the accommodation of the departments, the authors demonstrate both locally contingent factors in their (...) class='Hi'>development and continuities with existing traditions in natural history. The appointment of Arthur Milnes Marshall in preference to Louis Miall to the new zoology chair in Manchester in 1879 casts light on contemporary views of the laboratory and museum as 'equal though different'. The transformation in biology, in Northern England at least, was shaped more by such local institutional changes than by a phoenix-like rise of the laboratory from the ashes of the museum-more by the rhetorical construction of a professional academic community than any dramatic shift in sites. In this period the biology laboratory supplemented, rather than eclipsed, the museum, and the dichotomy between the 'naturalist' and the 'experimentalist' was far from clear-cut. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant spent many of his younger years working on what are generally considered his masterpieces: the three _Critiques_. But his work did not stop there: in later life he began to reconsider subjects such as anthropology, and topics including colonialism, race and peace. In _Late Kant_, Peter Fenves becomes one of the first to thoroughly explore Kant's later writings and give them the detailed scholarly attention they deserve. In his opening chapters, Fenves examines in detail the various essays in (...) which Kant invents, formulates and complicates the thesis of 'radical evil' - a thesis which serves as the point of departure for all his later writings. _Late Kant_ then turns towards the counter-thesis of 'radical mean-ness', which states that human beings exist on earth for the sake of another species or race of human beings. The consequences of this startling thesis are that human beings cannot claim possession of the earth, but must rather prepare the earth for its rightful owners. _Late Kant _is the first book to develop the 'geo-ethics' of Kant's thought, and the idea that human beings must be prepared to concede their space for another kind of human. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the later works of Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

Aristotle divided arguments that persuade into the rhetorical (which happen to persuade), the dialectical (which are strong so ought to persuade to some degree) and the demonstrative (which must persuade if rightly understood). Dialectical arguments were long neglected, partly because Aristotle did not write a book about them. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth century late scholastic authors such as Medina, Cano and Soto developed a sound theory of probable arguments, those that have logical and not merely psychological force (...) but fall short of demonstration. Informed by late medieval treatments of the law of evidence and problems in moral theology and aleatory contracts, they considered the reasons that could render legal, moral, theological, commercial and historical arguments strong though not demonstrative. At the same time, demonstrative arguments became better understood as Galileo and other figures of the Scientific Revolution used mathematical proof in arguments in physics. Galileo moved both dialectical and demonstrative arguments into mathematical territory. (shrink)

Frederick C. Beiser presents the first book to be written on two of the most important idealist philosophers in Germany after Hegel: Adolf Trendelenburg and Rudolf Lotze. Beiser addresses every aspect of their philosophy-- logic, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics--and traces their intellectual development from their youth until their death.

The history of drug/vaccine development has included major advances guided primarily by risk/benefit analyses concerning the innovative agent, not by evidence-based clinical trials (Phase I–IV). Because the approval for new drugs is hindered under the present process, the system requires restructuring. The Phase I/II study period should be more flexible, using the “environment of knowledge” about the new agent, plus risk/benefit assessments. Phase III, as presently constructed, does not add new adverse events data, it provides a narrower profile of (...) drug efficacy than properly done Phase II studies, and placebo-controlled trials continue to raise unresolved ethical and social issues. Phase III studies should be abandoned for most drugs, and substituted with properly powered Phase II doseranging studies plus careful post-marketing surveillance. Phase III should be a penalty for poor drug development, not a regulatory requirement. (shrink)

Major changes took place during the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the ways that the brain tissue was maintained, manipulated and studied, and, consequently, in the ways that its structure, functions and pathologies were seen and represented in neurological literature. The paper exemplifies these changes by comparing German neuroanatomy in the 1860s and early 1870s with the turn-of-the-century view of the brain . It argues for the crucial importance of a method—serial sectioning—to the emergence of the new view (...) of the brain. Serial sectioning in turn owes its existence to the new techniques in staining and sectioning that were introduced in the 1870s and 1880s. In particular, the paper highlights the role of a cutting device, the microtome, in enabling serial sectioning and in thereby contributing to the emergence of a new view of the brain. (shrink)

Authored by an interdisciplinary team of experts, including historians, classicists, philosophers and theologians, this original collection of essays offers the first authoritative analysis of the multifaceted reception of Greek ethics in late antiquity and Byzantium, opening up a hitherto under-explored topic in the history of Greek philosophy. The essays discuss the sophisticated ways in which moral themes and controversies from antiquity were reinvigorated and transformed by later authors to align with their philosophical and religious outlook in each period. Topics (...) examined range from ethics and politics in Neoplatonism and ethos in the context of rhetorical theory and performance to textual exegesis on Aristotelian ethics. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy, classics, patristic theology, and those working on the history of education and the development of Greek ethics. (shrink)

This study investigated the effects of internal and demographic variables on civic development in late adolescence using the construct civic purpose. We conducted surveys on civic engagement with 480 high school seniors, and surveyed them again two years later. Using multivariate regression and linear mixed models, we tested the main effects of civic purpose dimensions (beyond-the-self motivation, future civic intention), ethnicity, and education on civic development from Time 1 to Time 2. Results showed that while there is (...) an overall decrease in civic engagement in the transition out of high school, both internal and social factors protected participants from steep civic decline. Interaction effects varied. Ethnicity and education interacted in different ways with the dimensions of civic purpose to predict change in traditional and expressive political engagement, and community service engagement. (shrink)

The origins of the evolutionary concept of history have normally been associated with the development of an organicist notion of society. The meaning of this notion, in turn, has been assumed as something perfectly established and clear, almost self-evident. This assumption has prevented any close scrutiny of it. As this article tries to show, the idea of "organism" that underlies the emergence of the evolutionary concept of history, far from being "self-evident," has an intricate history and underwent a number (...) of radical and successive redefinitions from the mid-eighteenth century up to approximately 1830 . More specifically, this paper traces some of these transformations in order to contextualize and shed some new light on Herder's philosophy of history and the complex process of its inception-a process that was not concluded by the end of his intellectual career. As the article shows, Herder did not actually succeed in solving some key problems involved in an evolutionary concept of history. The difficulties he found were analogous to those that emerged at that very moment in the development of a dynamic, ontogenetical theory , and both were ultimately linked to the combination of some uneven developments produced in the natural sciences of that time. Herder's philosophy of history thus appears as a paradoxical case of a system of thought that formulates problems which it is still radically unable to solve, lacking the tools to devise a possible solution for them. (shrink)

In her analysis the author comes to the conclusion, that Wittgenstein's conception of ethics in the end of 1920s was marked by: 1. an ambiguous and confusing explanation of the term "ethics"; 2. continuously putting stress on fact/value diffe_rence as well as on the ethical being beyond the expression; 3. introducing the difference between the relative and the absolute use of the words "good" and "right", "value" and differentiating between relative and absolute value judgments; 4. claiming the first person discourse (...) as the only possible ethical discourse, The shift in Wittgenstein's views of ethics consists in that 1. Wittgenstein started to use the word "ethics" in its traditional meaning; 2. in his discussions of ethics he deals with moral problems of everyday life; 3. he makes his views on the absolute judgments´ being beyond expression more accurate; 4. he takes ethics as an theoretical system; 5. he sees ethics not as one doctrine, but rather as a whole consisting of several theoretical systems; 6. the influence of language game on ethical system becomes visible. Nevertheless, considering ethics in its traditional meaning did not depress his understanding of ethics as something higher, transcendent and God related. (shrink)

The late scholastic era was, among others, contemporary to the “emergence of probability”, the German academic philosophy from Leibniz to Kant, and the introduction of Newtonian physics. Within this era, two branches of the late-scholastic analysis of induction can be identified, one which can be thought of as a continual development of earlier scholastic approaches, while the other one absorbed influences of early modern philosophy, mathematics, and physics. Both branches of scholastic philosophy share the terminology of modalities, (...) probability, and forms of arguments. Furthermore, induction was commonly considered valid as a result of being a covert syllogism. Last but not least, there appears to be a difference in emphasis between the two traditions’ analyses of induction: while Tolomei discussed the theological presuppositions of induction, Amort’s “leges contingentium” exemplify the principles of induction by aleatory phenomena and Boscovich’s rules for inductive arguments are predominately concerned with the generalisation of macro-level observations to the micro-level. (shrink)

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, osteoporosis is described as a major public health problem of pandemic proportions, affecting millions of people, and women in particular, around the globe. This situation is frequently described as a result of an aging population, but it is also a consequence of a substantial transformation of the medical understanding and definition of osteoporosis in the latter half of the twentieth century. In this article, the authors trace the transformation of a biologically based understanding (...) of the condition involving a few patients, to the current statistically based definition of osteoporosis from which only a few remain untouched. At the center of this development is the measurement of bone mineral density through densitometrics, combining the use of imaging techniques and statistical epidemiology. (shrink)

Between 1893 and 1908, at least six private consortia and the municipality of Baghdad were denied permission to operate steamships on the Tigris and Euphrates on the grounds that a navigation concession had already been granted to the Privy Purse. The Privy Purse justified its insistence on monopoly with reference to the emerging ideology of development, though its ideas about the role of steam technology in nafia stood in contrast to those of private investors and other Ottoman bureaucrats. Working (...) from the hazine-i hassa’s planning memos and contracts, I show that the private treasury envisioned a primarily agrarian future for Iraq, with steamships serving agricultural aims. As such, it focused on envisioning future steamships rather than managing its existing fleet, while still acquiring dominance over land and transport in the region. However, private companies and officials contested this vision, emphasizing the materiality of existing steamships, their roles in trade, and the potential for commercial competition as a means of resisting British imperial encroachment. After the Committee of Union and Progress came to power in 1908, the Privy Purse was disestablished and its properties reverted to the Finance Ministry, opening a brief window during which steamship companies were encouraged to proliferate. Quickly, however, new comprehensive schemes were proposed, though with railways replacing steamships as the corollary to Iraq’s imagined riches. Engaging questions about the futurity of both infrastructure and capital, as well as those posed by the technology-in-use paradigm, this article suggests that the hazine-i hassa is a rich starting point for analysis because the scalar and ontological tensions it embodied highlight how different kinds of futures interact in development planning to affect the present. (shrink)

Developments in Anglo-American philosophy during the first half of the 20th Century closely tracked developments that were occurring in continental philosophy during this period. This should not surprise us. Aside from the fertile communication between these ostensibly separate traditions, both were responding to problems associated with the rise of mass society. Rabid nationalism, corporate statism, and totalitarianism posed a profound challenge to the idealistic rationalism of neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosophies. The decline of the individual – classically conceived by the 18th-century (...) Enlightenment as a self-determining agent – provoked strong reactions. While some philosophical tendencies sought to re-conceive the relationship between individual, society, and nature in more organic ways that radically departed from the subjectivism associated with classical Cartesianism, other tendencies sought to do just the opposite. This is one way of putting the difference between the two major movements within Anglo-American philosophy that I will be discussing in this essay. American pragmatism, which achieved the pinnacle of its popularity prior to 1940, traces its lineage back to empiricism as well as German Idealism. With the exception of William James, who is best known for his defense of radical empiricism, the other two important 20th century pragmatists, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, embraced a post-metaphysical version of Hegelian dialectics that was starkly antithetical to both Cartesian rationalism and atomistic empiricism. By contrast, logical positivism, which maintained a lively hold on Anglo-American thought as late as the sixties, reacted against Hegelian philosophy in all its forms, and accordingly resurrected both the Cartesian method of conceptual analysis as well as its atomistic ontology. In this respect, positivism is closer in spirit to Husserlian phenomenology and French structuralism, while pragmatism is closer in spirit to Heideggerian existentialism and its French progeny. As a general rule, the pragmatists’ embrace of methodological holism served as counterpoint to the positivists’ endorsement of methodological individualism. However, in contrast to their continental counterparts, pragmatists and positivists shared the naturalistic approach to philosophical explanation that had been the hallmark of Anglo-American philosophy since Bacon. (shrink)

한말 기호학계는 호락논쟁이 학문 외적인 것으로 변질되고, ‘리무위’, ‘심시기’를 기반으로 하는 전통적 입장과는 다른 다양한 학설들이 크게 호응을 얻게 되면서 학계의 급속한 분열 현상이 발생하게 된다. 하지만 한말 기호학계 성리학자들은 학계 내부의 갈등을 종식시키려는 동일한 지향점을 가지고 학계를 통합할 수 있는 일련의 노력들을 기울인다. 그럼에도 불구하고, 한말 기호학계는 다양한 학문적 입장 차이를 보였으며, 특히 자가설을 수립하여 이를 통해 새롭게 문인 집단화 하는 현상이 발생한다. 대표적으로 심주리의 성리설을 제시한 화서, 노사학파 그리고 리무위, 기유위, 성즉리, 심시기의 전통적 입장에 대해서는 동일하게 수용하면서도 미세한 (...) 입장 차이를 보였던 간재, 연재, 의당학파가 공존하고 있었다. 그리고 기호학계의 학문적 분화와 학파 분열의 과정을 통해 한말 기호학계를 비롯한 이 시기 성리학계를 특징짓는 심설논쟁이 광범위하게 펼쳐진다. 하지만 끝내 합의되지 않는 서로간의 논쟁 속에서도 이들 모두가 추구한 공통된 가치가 있으니 바로 성리학의 궁극적 목적인 도덕적 이상사회를 건설하는 것이었다. 결과론적으로 본다면 비록 그들이 추구했던 목적은 이루어지지 않았지만, 한말이라는 엄중한 시기에 이러한 요청이 더욱 절실하였음을 그들이 치열하게 펼쳤던 심설논쟁을 통해 확인할 수 있다. (shrink)

During the 1870s animal morphologists and embryologists at Cambridge University came to dominate British zoology, quickly establishing an international reputation. Earlier accounts of the Cambridge school have portrayed this success as short-lived, and attributed the school's failure to a more general movement within the life sciences away from museum-based description, towards laboratory-based experiment. More recent work has shown that the shift in the life sciences to experimental work was locally contingent and highly varied, often drawing on and incorporating aspects of (...) museum work. Thus in order to understand the more general changes, studies of particular sites are needed. Here I examine the organisation of teaching at Cambridge, both in terms of the spaces in which it was taught and the ways in which teaching and examining were organised, to bring out the complexities of the 'revolt from morphology' and to show in more detail the institutional aspects that intertwined with intellectual change. Francis Maitland Balfour, as head of the Cambridge school, was able to make use of family connections and his own personal wealth to promote morphology. His successor lacked these resources, and one competition within the natural sciences at Cambridge intensified, morphology was unable to compete properly. (shrink)

This essay proposes that What Is Philosophy? (1991), written in collaboration with Félix Guattari, not only presents a summary of Gilles Deleuze’s late creative period and, to some extent, a recapitulation of his entire oeuvre but also constitutes his third masterwork. The essay begins by tracing Deleuze’s three periods, especially the development of his thought during the last period, and the process of writing his final book. Then it explores the inextricable connection between the method of creation that (...) results from What Is Philosophy? and its stylistic devices. Through its refined composition and succinct prose, the book puts itself at the service of the approach that leads to bringing forth philosophical concepts, and it attunes the reader to the creative activity. Thus, like The Logic of Sense (1969) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), it forms a masterwork in which Deleuze’s philosophical efforts that spanned a whole period are condensed and mobilized such that while reading one finds oneself exposed to these efforts and is forced to continue them. (shrink)

cannot grasp what is at stake in it without taking both its claims and its tone seriously. Read philosophically, Danto wants to reconceive art’s aesthetic dimension as those features that ‘inflect’ our attitude towards a work’s meaning, and to distinguish, in so doing, between beauty that is and beauty that is not internal to that meaning. Although welcome, I argue that his attempt to carry this through is compromised by his countervailing tendency to conceive the aesthetic in non-cognitive terms. Read (...) as a work of philosophical confession, on the other hand, I suggest that Danto’s late turn to aesthetics may be illuminated through a comparison with Philip Guston’s late turn to figuration. To do so, I draw parallels between Guston’s development as a painter and Danto’s philosophical trajectory. Danto concludes that, though necessary to life, beauty is not necessary to art; I conclude that, on this account, only an aesthetic art makes a warranted claim on our attention. (shrink)

This book presents and evaluates the late philosophy (Spätphilosophie) of F. W. J. Schelling (1775-1854) across a wide range of issues, ranging from relation between pure thinking and being, to the philosophy of mythology and religion, to the philosophy of history, to questions concerning the philosophy of nature and freedom. Simultaneously, it discusses Hegel's treatment of similar issues, and systematically compares the two thinkers. This is the first time, in an English-language publication, that these two major German Idealists have (...) been compared in such detail along such a broad front. The book begins with three chapters exploring the development of Schelling's thinking concerning transcendental philosophy, nature and teleology, human freedom, and the theory of history, from his earliest publications up to his middle years. Against this background, the book then presents Schelling's distinction between "positive" and "negative" philosophy, the defining mark of his late philosophy. It explores his theory of pure a priori thinking (negative philosophy), and his account of the transition from negative to positive philosophy. The major components of Schelling's positive philosophy, including his conception of "un-pre-thinkable being", and his theories of mythology and revelation, are then discussed. Throughout, a comparative assessment of Hegel's approach similar issues is sustained. Schelling emerges as a philosopher who traced his own highly distinctive path through the thicket of problems bequeathed by Kant, and whose systematic responses to these problems still merit serious consideration as alternatives to those of Hegel. (shrink)

Introspection, or metacognition, is the capacity to reflect on our own thoughts and behaviours. Here, we investigated how one specific metacognitive ability develops in adolescence, a period of life associated with the emergence of self-concept and enhanced self-awareness. We employed a task that dissociates objective performance on a visual task from metacognitive ability in a group of 56 participants aged between 11 and 41 years. Metacognitive ability improved significantly with age during adolescence, was highest in late adolescence and plateaued (...) going into adulthood. Our results suggest that awareness of one’s own perceptual decisions shows a prolonged developmental trajectory during adolescence. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between sexual science and evolutionary models of human development and progress. It examines the ways in which late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexual scientists constructed the sexual instinct as an evolutionary force that not only served a reproductive purpose, but was also pivotal to the social, moral, and cultural development of human societies. Sexual scientists challenged the idea that non-reproductive sexualities were necessarily perverse, pathological, or degenerative by linking sexual desire (...) to the evolution of sociality, often focusing on forms of relationality and care that exceeded biological kinship. As a result, non-reproductive sexual expressions, including homosexual and non-reproductive heterosexual behaviours, were interpreted as manifestations of a sexual instinct operating in the service of human development. These claims were reliant on cross-cultural and historical comparisons of sexual values, behaviours, and customs that rehearsed and reinforced imperial narratives of development premised on racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies. Sexual scientists mapped diverse sexual behaviours in terms of their perceived evolutionary benefits, contributing to colonial narratives that distinguished between different cultures according to imagined trajectories of development. These contestations around the sexual instinct and its developmental functions played a vital role in allowing sexual science to authorize itself as a field of knowledge that promised to provide expertise required to manage sexual life and secure the global development of human civilization. (shrink)

According to current scholarly consensus, the pre- and post-exilic strata of Biblical Hebrew differ sufficiently to allow for the relative dating of biblical texts on linguistic grounds. Challengers to this view have objected that the received orthography of the Hebrew Bible, which is fuller than that of any pre-exilic epigraphic source, shows that no pre-exilic biblical text escaped post-exilic spelling revision. Moreover, so it is claimed, susceptibility to scribal modification on the level of orthography implies susceptibility to scribal modification on (...) the higher linguistic levels as well, which would effectively obscure a text’s original linguistic profile. In the present article it is argued that the degree of scribal modification involved in the process of orthographical revision was not so great as to distort irremediably the picture of linguistic development seen in biblical literature, so that distinctively late linguistic features can still be distinguished from their classical counterparts. Significantly, as has been argued elsewhere, diachronic development is still discernible even in the domain of orthography, a fact demonstrated on the basis of several examples, including the spelling of the qṭol-pattern qal infinitive construct. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Late-Marxist, Post-Poststructuralist Critical NebulosityWendell V. HarrisIllustration, by J. Hillis Miller; 168 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, $35.00.The title of J. Hillis Miller’s Illustration is apt in a way other than the author anticipated: it is a composite illustration of most of what makes so much of contemporary literary and aesthetic criticism unsatisfying if not nugatory. Initial evidence of the lack of cogent conceptualization is the disparateness of (...) the two long essays jammed between the covers of the book. Part One is entitled “The Work of Cultural Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction” and Part Two “Word and Image.” Miller explains the relationship by saying what while the first section of the book “will attempt to understand” the shift in literary studies toward theory and especially cultural studies, the second section “will explore the relations of picture to word as one practical and theoretical issue important to cultural studies” (p. 9). But that connection is (fleetingly) asserted in the midst of an argument so fragmented and confused that whole sections must here be passed over without comment.What is most striking about Part One is the thought-disabling imprecision of many of the key terms and the not unrelated way in which the argument follows well-travelled modes of Marxist and poststructuralist thought. The title of Part One, “The Work of Cultural Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” is of course intended to [End Page 127] link Miller’s first essay to what is probably the best-known of Walter Benjamin’s essays, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Both seek not only to link changing technological possibilities to the direction of cultural change, but to suggest that such changes should be harnessed to the work of political revolution. Miller might have been warned by the deficiencies of Benjamin’s over-rated essay. Benjamin begins his essay by applauding Marx for so cogently showing “what could be expected of capitalism in the future”: the prophecy Benjamin derives from Marx is “that one could expect [capitalism] not only to exploit the proletariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself” (p. 217). 1 There is still plenty of exploitation to be found in the world, not excluding the most economically (capitalistically) developed countries, but it requires real intellectual contortions to argue that the growth and exploitation of a proletariat has increased where capitalism has most developed; the assertion that the world is moving toward the abolition of capitalism hardly requires comment.Benjamin’s closing argument, the point toward which his entire essay is presumably driving, substitutes a clever slogan for thought. “The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life” (p. 241). But, writes Benjamin in his closing sentence, “Communism responds by politicizing art” (p. 242). Miller attempts to explain the distinction: “To aestheticize politics is to treat the state as though it were a work of art” while the “politicizing of art... means affirming the political value and force of art” (p. 10). Well, it is of course possible to assume such a meaning for Benjamin’s words, especially since it is hard to know exactly what they mean, but why make so much of an essay which begins by endorsing a prophecy that has become increasingly dubious, ends in an ambiguous formulation, and in between mixes obvious and trivial observations with a highly questionable argument about the disappearance of the “aura” of a work as a result of mechanical reproduction? As for the latter, the cheap reproduction of, for example, certain of Van Gogh’s paintings can be argued to “debase” them, but if they mean little to those who encounter them only on cheap posters or computer screens, they can scarcely mean less than they did to those unaware of their existence before the age of mechanical reproduction. And after all, if the original paintings have not retained their “aura,” museums could simply fill their rooms with reproductions.The reason Miller links his essay to that of Benjamin is presumably to demonstrate his allegiance to the form of Marxist thought so frequently... (shrink)