Love and Saint Augustine. By Hannah Arendt. Edited and with an interpretative essay by Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), xx + 233 pages. Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self‐Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation. By Brian Stock (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 463 pages.

In this paper, I explore a possible interpretation of Heidegger’s Nazism, viz., that Heidegger read or interpreted Nazism’s program in terms of the program Fichte expressed in Addresses to the German Nation. I regard Fichte as a Fürsprecher for Heidegger’s politics, and claim that Heidegger appropriated Fichte’s thought in a similar manner to the way that he appropriated Kant’s thought in Kant and theProblem of Metaphysics. In this sense, what we may have is a retrieval of Fichte’s political and educational (...) suggestions for Heidegger’s political views.Dans cet article j’explore une interprétation possible de l’adhésion heideggérienne au nazisme, en prétendant que Heidegger aborde le programme nazi à partir du programme fichtéen, tel que présenté dans les Discours à la nation allemande. Je considère Fichte comme le Fürsprecher, le porte-parole, de la politique heideggérienne, et soutiens que Heidegger se serait approprié la pensée de Fichte, dela même façon qu’il s’est approprié la pensée de Kant dans Kant et le problème de la métaphysique. En ce sens, l’on pourrait reconnaître que Heidegger a puisé à même la philosophie fichtéenne de la politique et de l’education afin de nourrir ses positions politiques. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a possible interpretation of Heidegger’s Nazism, viz., that Heidegger read or interpreted Nazism’s program in terms of the program Fichte expressed in Addresses to the German Nation. I regard Fichte as a Fürsprecher for Heidegger’s politics, and claim that Heidegger appropriated Fichte’s thought in a similar manner to the way that he appropriated Kant’s thought in Kant and theProblem of Metaphysics. In this sense, what we may have is a retrieval of Fichte’s political and educational (...) suggestions for Heidegger’s political views.Dans cet article j’explore une interprétation possible de l’adhésion heideggérienne au nazisme, en prétendant que Heidegger aborde le programme nazi à partir du programme fichtéen, tel que présenté dans les Discours à la nation allemande. Je considère Fichte comme le Fürsprecher, le porte-parole, de la politique heideggérienne, et soutiens que Heidegger se serait approprié la pensée de Fichte, dela même façon qu’il s’est approprié la pensée de Kant dans Kant et le problème de la métaphysique. En ce sens, l’on pourrait reconnaître que Heidegger a puisé à même la philosophie fichtéenne de la politique et de l’education afin de nourrir ses positions politiques. (shrink)

In a brief section of The Characteristics of the Present Age, Fichte presents one of the strangest ideas to have arisen in transcendental thought: that wit is related to what Fichte calls the highest idea and to truth. The concept of wit does not arise anywhere else in Fichte's philosophy, and he does not analyze it completely in either The Characteristics of the Present Age or his philosophical texts. I contend that Fichte does not expand upon his idea because his (...) understanding of wit arises out of the Kantian analysis of wit, even though Fichte gives his own spin to Kant's view. What I show in this paper is how Fichte both appropriates and alters Kant's understanding of wit, and how wit serves a social/political function in Fichte's thought. (shrink)

This dissertation is an investigation into the mode of self-understanding that arises once the conception of subjectivity is displaced from its foundational position in metaphysics. I examine the problem of the displacement of the subject by focusing on the philosophy of Kant and Heidegger. I choose Kant and Heidegger for two reasons: first, Kant's Copernican Revolution places the subject at the ground of metaphysics and defines the place of the subject in philosophy up to the contemporary period; second, Heidegger's investigation (...) of Kant displaces the metaphysical conception of the subject and gives rise to other possible understandings of the self. ;The dissertation consists of four chapters. First, I develop the problem of displacement, place my dissertation within the context of contemporary thought, and discuss three modes of reading the history of philosophy. Of the three readings, I choose to conduct both a destructive and a deconstructive reading of the history of philosophy. Second, I explain the Kantian conception of subjectivity in terms of the Copernican Revolution and introduce the Kantian conception of the imagination. Third, I examine the relationship between the imagination and subjectivity as it emerges in the two transcendental deductions of the Critique of Pure Reason. In this chapter, I show the ontological priority of the imagination in Kant's thought. Contrary to the 'orthodox' body of Kantian interpretation, I argue that Kant retrieves the findings of the A deduction within the B deduction and that the imagination maintains its place of importance in Kant's thought. Fourth, I examine Heidegger's understanding of the imagination in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I show how the temporal character of the imagination displaces the conception of a self-grounding subject and replaces the subject with an understanding of ourselves as the questioner. After discussing this mode of the self, I show how the imagination deconstructs subjectivity and the metaphysical project. The deconstructive reading leads to a discussion of the self within a Derridean and Nietzschean context. (shrink)

The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens. By Philip Brook Manville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), xiv + 265 pp., $17.95/£14.95 paper. Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War. By Barry S. Strauss (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), xv + 283 pp., $16.95/ £12.95 paper.

Knowledge and expertise -- Knowledge and action -- The nature of professional action in urban planning.

Isaac Newton was indisputably one of the greatest scientists in history. His achievements in mathematics and physics marked the culmination of the movement that brought modern science into being. Richard Westfall's biography captures in engaging detail both his private life and scientific career, presenting a complex picture of Newton the man, and as scientist, philosopher, theologian, alchemist, public figure, President of the Royal Society, and Warden of the Royal Mint. An abridged version of his magisterial study Never at Rest, (...) this concise biography makes Westfall's highly acclaimed portrait of Newton newly accessible to general readers. (shrink)

Conflicts of interest have been reduced to financial conflicts. The National Institutes of Health’s new rules for managing conflicts of interest in medical research, the first major change to the regulations in over 15 years, address only financial ties. Although several commentators urged that the regulations also cover non-financial interests, the Department of Health and Human Services declined to do so. Similarly, the Institute of Medicine’s influential 2009 Conflict of Interest Report focuses almost exclusively on financial conflicts. Institutional policies at (...) academic medical centers and guidance from professional bodies and medical journals also primarily emphasize financial ties. Even broadly worded rules are applied more readily to financial ties than non-financial interests, such as the regulations that restrict institutional review board members with conflicting interests from participating in protocol reviews. (shrink)

Athletics, body imagery and spectacle : Greco-Roman practices, discourses and ideologies -- The politics of representation : English sport as an object and project of modernity -- "Staging" (capitalist/colonial) modernity : international exhibitions and Olympics -- German modernism, anti-modernism and the critical theory of sport -- A savage sorting of "winners" and "losers" : modernization, development, sport, and the challenge of slums.

This study investigates the relationships among Machiavellianism, attitudes towards the perceived importance of corporate ethics and social responsibility, referred to here as PRESOR attitudes, and certain attitudes toward environmental responsibility, i.e., support for corporate environmental accountability and environmentally motivated purchasing intentions, amongst undergraduate students. Data were collected from a survey of all final year undergraduate students at a university in Hong Kong. Structural equations analyses were used to investigate the associations amongst the variables. The study finds that Machiavellianism and belief (...) in the importance of CESR play important roles in the development of university students’ attitudes toward certain environmental issues. Specifically, high Machiavellian students expressed lower levels of belief in the importance of CESR, which in turn were associated with weaker pro-environment views. The findings suggest that educational efforts to cultivate students’ PRESOR attitudes and/or reduce their levels of Machiavellianism would enhance their pro-environment views. (shrink)

Taking Isaac Newton at his own word, historians have long agreed that the decade of the 1660s, when Newton was a young man in his twenties, was the critical period in his scientific career. In the years 1665 and 1666, he has told us, he hit on the ideas of cosmic gravitation, the composition of white light, and the fluxional calculus. The elaboration of these basic ideas constituted his scientific achievement. Nevertheless, the decade of the 1660s has remained a virtual (...) blank in our knowledge of Newton. It need not remain so always. His papers contain a wealth of manuscripts from his undergraduate years and the period immediately following. The first volume of his mathematical papers, which will soon be published, will demonstrate how extensive the information on his early mathematical development is. The development of his non-mathematical studies, especially of what I shall call his scientific studies to distinguish them from the mathematical, can be followed as well—in his reading notes, in his notebooks, above all in the passage in his philosophical notebook labelled Quaestiones quaedam Philosophicae. In this passage we see emerging into consciousness for the first time the questions on which Newton's philosophy of nature was built. (shrink)

MicroRNAs are non‐coding regulators of gene expression and key factors in development, disease, and targets for bioengineering. Consequently, microRNAs have become essential elements of already burgeoning draft plant genome descriptions where their annotation is often particularly poor, contributing unduly to the corruption of public databases. Using the Citrus sinensis as an example, we highlight and review common failings of miRNAome annotations. Understanding and exploiting the role of miRNAs in plant biology will be stymied unless the research community acts decisively to (...) improve the accuracy of miRNAome annotations. We encourage genome annotation teams to do it right or not at all. (shrink)

As a result of health care reform, medicine has entered a new era of comparative effectiveness. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act created the nation’s first comprehensive comparative effectiveness research program, investing in CER at record levels and establishing a new regulatory framework for oversight of the research. CER attracts considerable enthusiasm as a tool for reform because it compares competing interventions to determine which works best, supplying critical information for medical decision-making and health policy. In theory, better evidence (...) of how treatments fare relative to one another will translate to better medical care. According to some optimistic accounts, CER can lead to a “revolution” in clinical practice, has transformative power “to reshape major portions of the practice of medicine,” and represents a major “turning point” for the health care system. (shrink)

Recent scandals involving accounting firms raise serious concerns about ethical attitudes in the provision of professional tax services. Enhancing the ethics education of prospective tax professionals presents a means through which this situation can be improved. In order to promote such educational development, this study describes the infusion of an ethics intervention in a tax planning course at a university in Hong Kong. Also, the findings of an exploratory survey into theeffect of the course on student attitudes towards the ethicality (...) of tax avoidance and evasion are reported. The findings show that student attitudes towards the ethicality of tax avoidance, but not towards tax evasion, became more critical following the course. Several opportunities for future research are proposed. (shrink)