Abstract This paper is a close textual criticism of Theodosius Dobzhansky's Genetics and the Origin of Species. It argues that the book succeeds as interdisciplinary communication by promoting polysemy. The professional goals of two scientific communities are embedded in the text in such a way that each audience reads the call for co?operative action as implicit support for their own methods.

In the years of the post-Darwinian debate, many American naturalists invoked the name of Lamarck to signal their belief in a purposive and anti-Darwinian view of evolution. Yet Weismann’s theory of germ-plasm continuity undermined the shared tenet of the neo-Lamarckian theories as well as the idea of the interchangeability between biological and social heredity. Edward Drinker Cope, the leader of the so-called “American School,” defended his neo-Lamarckian philosophy against every attempt to redefine the relationship between behavior, development, and heredity beyond (...) the epigenetic model of inheritance. This paper explores Cope’s late-career defense of neo-Lamarckism. Particular attention is dedicated to the debate he had with James Mark Baldwin before the publication of Baldwin’s own “A New Factor in Evolution”. I argue that Cope’s criticism was partly due to the fact that Baldwin’s theory of social heredity threatened Cope’s biologistic stance, as well as his attempt to preserve design in nature. This theoretical attitude had a remarkable impact on Baldwin’s arguments for the theory of organic selection. (shrink)

Gerald Odonis' treatise on contracts, restitutions, and excommunication is one of his earliest works, composed in Toulouse ca. 1315-17. Mainly based on Peter John Olivi's De contractibus, but using a variety of other sources and offering some original arguments as well, it is remarkable for its pragmatic approach to economic phenomena. His rejection of the rational argument against usury reveals a casual use of the bull Exiit qui seminat, defining Franciscan poverty, as well as a change of assumptions in the (...) approach to economic exchange. Whereas various explanations can be provided for the provocative aspect of this youthful treatise, all in all, it can best be described as a free and uninhibited interpretation of the scholastic tradition. (shrink)

Gerald Odonis' treatise on contracts, restitutions, and excommunication is one of his earliest works, composed in Toulouse ca. 1315-17. Mainly based on Peter John Olivi's De contractibus, but using a variety of other sources and offering some original arguments as well, it is remarkable for its pragmatic approach to economic phenomena. His rejection of the rational argument against usury reveals a casual use of the bull Exiit qui seminat, defining Franciscan poverty, as well as a change of assumptions in the (...) approach to economic exchange. Whereas various explanations can be provided for the provocative aspect of this youthful treatise, all in all, it can best be described as a free and uninhibited interpretation of the scholastic tradition. (shrink)

Scholars have often considered evolutionary social theories a product of Positivist scientism and the naturalization of ethics. Yet the theistic foundations of many evolutionary theories proposed between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries bolstered the belief that following natural laws was morally desirable, if not vital, to guaranteeing social and moral progress. In the early twentieth century, American paleontologist and leading evolutionist Henry Fairfield Osborn represented one of the most authoritative advocates of this interpretation of natural normativity. Particularly during the (...) last years of his career, Osborn used theological arguments to reinforce his advocacy of evolutionary ethics and social control policies, which led him to challenge his “old master” Thomas Huxley regarding the separation between evolution and moral conduct. This article examines the development of Osborn’s evolutionary ethics, with particular regard to its bearing on the American debate on euthenics. I argue that theistic topics played a major rhetorical role in the attempt to justify normative conclusions drawn from ostensible laws of evolution. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert in the White House's coronavirus task force, is challenged to offer responsible public communication of science despite working under a habitual liar who has no tolerance for criticism or dissent. Fauci manages this rhetorical exigence by using strategic ambiguity, the topos of the honest broker, dissociation, and a narrative that constrains executive decision making.

Greek Memories aims to identify and examine the central concepts underlying the theories and practices of memory in the Greek world, from the archaic period to Late Antiquity, across all the main literary genres, and to trace some fundamental changes in these theories and practices. It explores the interaction and development of different 'disciplinary' approaches to memory in Ancient Greece, which will enable a fuller and deeper understanding of the whole phenomenon, and of its specific manifestations. This collection of papers (...) contributes to enriching the current scholarly discussion by refocusing it on the question of how various theories and practices of memory, recollection, and forgetting play themselves out in specific texts and authors from Ancient Greece, within a wide chronological span, and across a broad range of genres and disciplines. (shrink)

This book gathers the latest advances in the field of history of science and technology, as presented by leading international researchers at the 8th International Symposium on History of Machines and Mechanisms (HMM), held in Ankara, Turkey on April 18-20, 2024. The Symposium, which was promoted by the permanent commission for the History of Machine and Mechanism Science (MMS) of IFToMM, provided an international forum to present and discuss historical developments in the field of MMS. The contents cover all aspects (...) of the development of MMS from antiquity until the present era and its historiography: modern reviews of past works, engineers in history and their works, the development of theories, history of the design of machines and mechanisms, historical developments of mechanical design and automation, historical developments of teaching, the history of schools of engineering, the education of engineers. The contributions, which were selected by means of a rigorous international peer-review process, highlight numerous exciting ideas that will spur novel research directions and foster multidisciplinary collaborations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoricians Identified:A Call to Interdisciplinary Action and How it Resonated in the Field of RhetoricChristine Isager and Sine Nørholm Just"I actually like this book a lot, but I am not sure how comfortable I am with liking it," wrote William Keith (1995, 488) in a review of the original 1993 edition of Steve Fuller's Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge (PREK), in which rhetoric is invited to participate (...) in the interdisciplinary reconfiguration of Science and Technology Studies (STS). This hesitant enthusiasm aptly exemplifies how an interdisciplinary invitation is likely to make its addressees squirm as they watch their professional aims being defined and then redefined by a disciplinary outsider who points out a place for them in a novel disciplinary constellation. Moreover, and more specifically, Keith's comment exemplifies how PREK was received by rhetoricians. On the surface, the reviews were glowing. In Philosophy and Rhetoric as well as in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Keith expressed certain doubts about Fuller's work, but still he described it as "important," "exceptional," "superb" (1996; 1995). In the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Kenneth S. Zagacki called PREK both "excellent" and "exciting" (1995), and he was backed by John Angus Campbell and Keith R. Benson a year later when the same journal included PREK in an omnibus review entitled "The Rhetorical Turn in Science Studies" (Campbell and Benson 1996). Like Alan Gross, who reviewed the book in College English together with a number of works on workplace writing (1994), Campbell and Benson placed PREK at the cutting edge of rhetorical theory.The initial excitement over PREK forms a sharp contrast to the quite negligible impact that the book has had on the field of rhetoric in the decade that has passed since it was first published. In this essay we will undertake a close reading of the book along with the five above-mentioned reviews, looking for an explanation of the peculiar fate that met Steve [End Page 248] Fuller's proposal in the rhetorical disciplinary context. Our conclusion is that on reading the book, rhetoricians felt so flattered by Fuller's confident handling of rhetoric that the task of introducing and applying rhetorical theory in STS seemed, on the whole, to have been done for them. Furthermore, Fuller's attempts to construct a rhetorical agency are subverted by his idiosyncratic, i.e., inimitable, professional approach, which is also reflected in his style of writing. At once presumptuous and colloquial, his rhetoric serves to impress and entertain, but it fails to engage his audience substantially and to enact the interpenetrative stance that was intended to be the hallmark of PREK and that continues to be the commendable chief concern of Steve Fuller and his fellow social epistemologists.Text-Intertext and IdentificationInterdisciplinary invitations or, rather, interdisciplinary inspirational works of science were originally described as a noteworthy rhetorical genre by Leah Ceccarelli (2001). Ceccarelli explores how claims to scientific unity have handled a primary constraint: their multiple audiences. Fuller explicitly positions PREK within the genre of interdisciplinary inspiration by asserting that "the success of this book... should be measured in terms of its ability to persuade philosophers, theoretical humanists and social scientists, STS practitioners, and rhetoricians of science to see each other as engaged in a common enterprise" (1993, xii-xiii). We will not, however, be examining PREK's ability to be strategically opaque (as Fuller puts it), polysemous(Ceccarelli's term), or otherwise adapted to address its multiple audiences. Instead, we focus solely on Fuller's address to rhetoricians and study how he identifies with this particular audience. Ceccarelli recognizes the importance of ethical appeal in interdisciplinary invitations by positing the establishment of both an authoritative and personal authorial persona as a generic criterion. We follow this lead and add a Burkean emphasis on identification.According to Kenneth Burke, identification is a prior condition for persuasion "precisely because there is division" (Burke 1969, 22). The speaker's success depends on his ability to imitate the ways of his audience and to create a common ground or perspective that makes collective action possible. Burke's work allows us to distinguish three rhetorical strategies of identification. The first strategy... (shrink)

A revision of George Kennedy's translation of, introdution to, and commentary on Aristotle's On Rhetoric. His translation is most accurate, his general introduction is the most thorough and insightful, and his brief introductions to sections of the work, along with his explanatory footnotes, are the most useful available.

Recent research on algebraic models of _quasi-Nelson logic_ has brought new attention to a number of classes of algebras which result from enriching (subreducts of) Heyting algebras with a special modal operator, known in the literature as a _nucleus_. Among these various algebraic structures, for which we employ the umbrella term _intuitionistic modal algebras_, some have been studied since at least the 1970s, usually within the framework of topology and sheaf theory. Others may seem more exotic, for their primitive operations (...) arise from algebraic terms of the intuitionistic modal language which have not been previously considered. We shall for instance investigate the variety of _weak implicative semilattices_, whose members are (non-necessarily distributive) meet semilattices endowed with a nucleus and an implication operation which is not a relative pseudo-complement but satisfies the postulates of Celani and Jansana’s strict implication. For each of these new classes of algebras we establish a representation and a topological duality which generalize the known ones for Heyting algebras enriched with a nucleus. (shrink)

Transcript of speeches by a Hindu philosopher, chiefly on Hindu philosophy and Hinduism.

Classical text on Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika philosophy; with Āloka Sanskrit commentary.

Classical work on Vedanta; includes Bhāṣyaratnaprabhā of Govindānanda and Śārīrakamīmāṃsābhāṣya of Śaṅkarācārya.

Classical work on Vedanta by Bādarāyaṇa; includes Śārīraka vijñānam bhāṣya of Śrī Madhusūdana Ojhā.

Purpose. The article is aimed to substantiate the view on the phenomenon of laughter as a subject of semiotic analysis, which leads to the following tasks: to reveal the possibilities of semiotics application in the study of laughter nature; to analyze the phenomenon of laughter as a cultural and natural phenomenon, as a sign and as an attribute; to consider the place of laughter in culture, which is understood as a sign system. Theoretical basis. The semiotic approach proceeds from the (...) fact that human lives in the world of signs, all the surrounding reality can be interpreted as a sign system. The basic concept of semiotics is the concept of a sign. The theoretical basis of the article is understanding the culture as a sign-symbolic system. Laughter is considered as a phenomenon ontologically rooted in human culture. At the same time, laughter is on the edge of culture. The research is based on the work of semiotic authors, cultural researchers, and the researchers of laughter. Originality. The originality lies in the application of the semiotic method to the research of laughter phenomenon, consideration of the dialectics of natural and cultural, signedness and non-signedness, manifested in the phenomenon of laughter. Conclusions. Laughter is considered as a psychophysiological phenomenon and as a cultural phenomenon. Laughter acts as an emotional manifestation, a physiological reaction, but socially and culturally mediated. In any case, laughter indicates an emotional or cognitive state of a human. Laughter acts as a process and result of the interpretation of a sign, a reaction to a sign. Laughter is a form and a means of communication. Being a natural phenomenon, in the process of social evolution, laughter acquires signedness, is integrated by culture as a sign system, and, at the same time, maintains a connection with nature. Thus, laughter occupies an ambivalent position between nature and culture. In the phenomenon of laughter, the dual state of human is revealed. In laughter, boundaries are blurred, the unity and opposition of natural and cultural, biological and social, soul and body, thought and feeling, sign and attribute are manifested. (shrink)

Eco-labels emphasize information disclosure as a tool to induce environmentally friendly behaviors by both firms and consumers. The goal of eco-labels is to reduce information asymmetry between producers and consumers over the environmental attributes of a product or service. However, by focusing on this information asymmetry, rather than on how the label meets consumer needs, eco-labels may send irrelevant, confusing, or even detrimental messages to consumers. In this article, the authors investigate how the environmental signal of eco-labels interacts with product (...) characteristics such as brand, quality, and price. In a discrete choice experiment, the authors examine consumer response to two similar eco-labels for wine, one associated with a quality reduction and the other not. The results show that respondents preferred both eco-labeled wines over otherwise identical conventional counterparts when the price was lower and the wine was from a lower quality region. However, they preferred conventional, more expensive wine from a high-quality region. This preference indicates that respondents not only obtain some warm glow value from eco-labeled wine but also possibly interpret eco-labeling as a signal of lower quality. This relationship held across both types of eco-labels, meaning that consumers did not understand the difference between them. This research contributes to the literature on information disclosure policies by highlighting important elements for effective eco-labels. These elements include consumer awareness and understanding of the eco-label, and consumer willingness to pay for an eco-labeled product. The results emphasize the need to create eco-labels that communicate clearly both the environmental attributes and the private benefits associated with them. (shrink)

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

This book completes medical care by adding the comprehensive humanistic perspectives and philosophy of medicine.

Purpose. To consider the uniqueness of Descartes’ way of interpreting poetry as a type of philosophizing that makes it possible to comprehend the metaphysical nature of man. Its implementation involves the consistent solution of the following tasks: a) understanding methodological changes in the philosophy of the 20th century in the process of actualization of anthropological interest; b) argumentation of the importance of poetic thinking for early Descartes in the process of addressing modern historians of philosophy and the thinker’s texts. Theoretical (...) basis. I rely on the conceptual positions of phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics. Originality. Finding of the study is that poetic thinking is the most authentic way of meaningful comprehension of the metaphysicity of man. The paper outlines the nature of the expression of this correlation in the philosophizing of the 20th-21th centuries and substantiates the thesis about the importance of the poetic principle for understanding the phenomenon of man in early works by Descartes. Conclusions. The paper examined the methodological shifts in anthropologically oriented philosophizing of the 20th-21th centuries and focused on the manifestations of related moments in the philosophical legacy of Descartes. The latter demonstrates the existence of a still underestimated version of interpreting the metaphysical foundations of human existence, the form of understanding of which is poetic thinking. It is a form of caring for the humane in man. (shrink)