In this chapter Alessandro Capone’s claim as the intimate relationship between legal reasoning and indirect reports is investigated through looking at legal citation practices, use of case law, and statutory and constitutional interpretation. Capone’s thought is informed in the chapter through a reference to the work of Ronald Dworkin and Edward H. Levi. The conclusion of the chapter is that Capone is correct that use of indirect reporting in law is ubiquitous and therefore warrants careful study. Further, and opposite of (...) Dworkin’s hope for a univocal use of indirect reports, Levi’s analysis emphasizes the bottom-up, conversational and polyvocal aspects of legal reasoning as is noted by Capone. This in turn requires eliminating the hope for finding or imposing a determinate and univocal meaning on legal citation, case law, and statutory and constitutional interpretation. Instead, continuing dialogue is required. Indeed, legal process should try to include as many voices in the construction of meaning as possible. (shrink)

This report describes the rationale, approaches, organization, and resource development leading to a large-scale deletion bin map of the hexaploid wheat genome. Accompanying reports in this issue detail results from chromosome bin-mapping of expressed sequence tags representing genes onto the seven homoeologous chromosome groups and a global analysis of the entire mapped wheat EST data set. Among the resources developed were the first extensive public wheat EST collection. Described are protocols for sequencing, sequence processing, EST nomenclature, and the assembly of (...) ESTs into contigs. These contigs plus singletons were used for selection of distinct sequence motif unigenes. Selected ESTs were rearrayed, validated by 5′ and 3′ sequencing, and amplified for probing a series of wheat aneuploid and deletion stocks. Images and data for all Southern hybridizations were deposited in databases and were used by the coordinators for each of the seven homoeologous chromosome groups to validate the mapping results. Results from this project have established the foundation for future developments in wheat genomics. (shrink)

By 1910 the Cambridge University physiology department had become the kernel of British physiology. Between 1909 and 1914 an astonishing number of young and talented scientists passed through the laboratory. The University College department was also a stimulating place of study under the dynamic leadership of Ernest Starling.I have argued that the reasons for this metropolitan axis within British physiology lie with the social structure of late-Victorian and Edwardian higher education. Cambridge, Oxford, and University College London were national institutions attracting (...) students from all over England and Wales. In contrast, the provincial colleges drew their clientele from relatively narrow geographic radii. Generally, also, these institutions were regarded as socially inferior to the longer-established universities.A brief survey of the biographies of some British physiologists demonstrates how physiology, as an occupation, became, over the later decades of the century, socially elite. The scientists who achieved full-time posts in the 1870s generally came from somewhat marginal backgrounds. Foster, like his mentors T. H. Huxley and William Sharpey, came from a non-conformist family. Edward Schäfer was also a dissenter and, like Foster, began his professional career as a general practitioner.Physiologists of the succeeding generation, however, came from wealthy families with established intellectual traditions. John Scott Haldane, nephew of John Burdon Sanderson, was the brother of the politician R. B. Haldane and uncle of the historian A. R. B. Haldane.71 Joseph Barcroft was one of the most affluent of all physiologists.72 His family's wealth derived from linen manufacturing. He attended the Ley's School Cambridge, where his schoolmates included Henry Dale, later Director of the National Institute for Medical Research; F. A. Bainbridge, who eventually became Professor of Physiology at St. Bartholomew's Hospital; and the Cambridge historian J. H. Clapham. A. V. Hill, Professor of Physiology at Manchester and, subsequently, London, married Margaret Keynes, sister of John Maynard Keynes and niece of Sir Walter Langdon Brown, Professor of Physic at Cambridge. Margaret Keynes's younger brother, the surgeon Sir Geoffrey Keynes, married a granddaughter of Charles Darwin; their son Richard Keynes also became a physiologist at Cambridge.These families were part of a new class emerging during the late Victorian period, descendants of the great reforming radicals of the 1830s, who had begun to achieve power through positions in the universities, the professions, and the civil service. Their social prestige rested upon their intellectual expertise. Physiology was an appealing research discipline to these groups because of its clear dissociation from industry and commerce. And because physiology's “practical” face was medicine, its acceptability was reinforced by professional ties.The nature of the Physiological Society confirms this image of physiology as an elite science. By the turn of the century the Society had taken on some of the characteristics of a dining club. The scientific meetings were generally followed by dinner: if the Society met at Oxford, they were entertained at Burdon Sanderson's college, Magdalen.73 Through a “black ball” system, unwanted candidates could be excluded. In 1912, when the question of admitting foreigners was discussed, E. H. Starling wrote to Edward Schäfer: “the Society has very much in it the nature of a club, and a certain amount of personal knowledge of the candidate is always desirable.”74.The developing institutional structure of physiology in late Victorian Britain indicates, therefore, that we must look beyond the achievements of individuals and departments to understand why physiology flourished. The discipline became part of a new social order in which the professional middle classes assumed increasing power. These groups valued intellectual skill, especially in the pure scienes, as forces both for self-advancement and for progress within society. (shrink)

Over ten years ago Professor A. E. Taylor pointed out that one of the most unfortunate effects of that philosophical conquest of England by Germany in the nineteenth century was the almost complete neglect of the great line of British moralists from Cumberland to Price. Little has been done since then to remedy this defect. There is a widespread study of Bishop Butler by students in our Universities, but as regards the other members of the series, there appear no (...) signs of a renaissance. The selections of Mr. Selby-Bigge are admirable, but they serve, as all selections from the authors of a period must, to focus attention on historical similarities, not to stimulate to an examination of individual philosophies. (shrink)

Joseph Butler was an Anglican priest and later a bishop who wrote about ethics, religion, and other philosophical themes. He is not well known today. During his lifetime and into the early part of the twentieth century he was better known especially for his major work the Analogy of Religion (1736). Today he is known mostly for his sermons which are interpreted as essays on ethics and for his essay on identity. Butler had a profound effect on J. (...) H. Newman, Matthew Arnold, and W. E. Gladstone and some effect on many other popular, academic, and professional readers. This book is as much about Butler’s sources and his reception as it is about the way he arranged and presented the evidence in the first half of the 18th century. He was a good man and is recognized by the Anglican church as a divine. We have no interest in taking a nostalgic look at a quaint figure in English church history. To those who claim Butler is unknown, that he was “blown out of the water” by John Wesley or Karl Barth, or Cornelius van Til, we can only say Butler is not as well known in the 20th and 21st centuries as in the 19th, but he is certainly not unknown to those who have taken any interest in philosophy, religion, or ethics. Today there has been a revival of interest in Bishop Butler. Our concern is to build and maintain a bridge that will help to keep this momentum. He offers an ethic that is universal and clearly Christian, yet it is based on the nature of man. Kant had a similar project, but in our opinion, Butler makes more compelling arguments. What is of interest to the Christian apologist is Butler’s work in this area. The purpose of this book is to present Butler’s ideas. We believe that his ethics have a universality that is applicable to people of all religious faiths and those that have none. It is common sense way of looking at ethics for everyday interaction. This book is a narrative argument presenting in detail how Butler’s creative arrangement of the evidence served as a bridge between the ancients as known in the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew originals, and the moderns, mostly Anglophone, who constituted Butler’s work environment and his reception in the latter day down to the present. We can hardly expect everyone to agree with Butler on all points, we certainly do not. The point at issue is rather whether he merits a seat at the present-day round table of deliberation on matters pertaining to philosophy, religion, and ethics. (shrink)

According to many orthodox Christian theologies Jesus is not merely sinless but impeccable: he not only did not sin but could not. This is puzzling because one can only sin by doing something else and, prima face, Jesus can do actions that you or I could do by which we would sin. I suggest that appearances to the contrary, Jesus cannot do a variety of actions that a merely human duplicate could do. His doing sinful actions is compossible with a (...) range of empirical facts about his physical abilities and circumstances of the sort we ordinarily take into account in assessing what a person can do, but not with a wider range of theological facts concerning his divinity. Like Tim, Lewis’s time-traveler, who can kill Grandfather relative to facts about his immediate circumstances and abilities but not relative to a wider range of facts, Jesus ‘can’ in the ordinary sense sin, though he will not, but relative to a wider range of facts which obtain in virtue of his divinity, cannot. (shrink)

Dion is a human person, Lefty is his left foot, and Theon is Lefty-Complement, a proper part of Dion. Lefty is annihilated and Dion survives left-footless. After Lefty’s annihilation Theon, if he survives, occupies the same region as Dion. I suggest that this scenario be understood as a fusion case in which Dion and Theon, initially overlapping but distinct, are identical after Lefty’s annihilation and propose an account of proper names that allows us to say that Dion and Theon have (...) ‘become identical’ without commitment to occasional identity or other controversial metaphysical doctrines. The proposed solution employs the semantics developed by Wolfgang Schwarz to address the ‘paradox of occasional identity’, posed by puzzle cases of fission, to deal with the problem of Dion and Theon, a body-minus puzzle. (shrink)

_Rabghūzī’s_ _Stories of the Prophets_, written in Khwarezmian Turkish (14th century) contains an account of the life of the biblical prophets and of the Prophet Muḥammed.

In dit boek neemt de Tsjechisch-Nederlandse geleerde Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670) een centrale plaats in. Met zijn filosofie en onderwijsleer wilde hij de menselijkheid in de samenleving bevorderen. Hij kwam ervoor op dat mensen met verschillende levensbeschouwelijke visies konden samenwerken om dit doel te helpen realiseren. Ook komen rozenkruisers en vrijmetselaars aan de orde, die reeds in de zestiende en zeventiende eeuw van zich lieten horen. Anders dan de kerken deden, manifesteerden zij een onafhankelijkheid van denken en een streven naar (...) meer menselijkheid in de cultuur.0In hun denken en spreken spelen ook de ideeën van Comenius een rol, direct of indirect, kritisch ondervragend of opbouwend, maar altijd inspirerend. (shrink)

Scientific pluralism is an issue at the forefront of philosophy of science. This landmark work addresses the question, Can pluralism be advanced as a general, philosophical interpretation of science?

In 'Een handvol filosofen' staan de filosofen centraal die sinds de oprichting van de Vrije Universiteit in 1880 aan deze instelling verbonden zijn geweest. Het gaat hierbij niet alleen om de inhoud van hun werk, maar ook om de personen zelf. Er waren filosofiedocenten die zich met de universiteit identificeerden en zich volledig konden ontplooien. Er waren er echter ook voor wie dit niet gold, die geïsoleerd of in gewetensnood raakten. Veel filosofiestudenten waren actief betrokken bij wat er in hun (...) faculteit gebeurde. Zij namen initiatieven, protesteerden soms tegen de gang van zaken en kozen partij in conflictsituaties. Sinds het eind van de jaren zestig van de twintigste eeuw verloor de Vrije Universiteit geleidelijk haar christelijk karakter. Tegenwoordig werken alle stafleden vanuit hun eigen motivatie mee aan een hoofdzakelijk seculier geworden universiteit, die ruimte biedt voor religieuze en levensbeschouwelijke diversiteit. (shrink)