D. Boulanger. Colloque Lamarck Paris, Vrin, 1980 EVOLUTION DU GROUPE DES NUMMULITES C'est en 1801 que Lamarck dans son Système des animaux sans vertèbres proposa le genre Nummulites qu'il considéra comme le 89e des ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 166-169 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Cross-Examining Socrates: A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato's Early Dialogues Cross-Examining Socrates: A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato's Early Dialogues, by John Beversluis; xii & 416 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, $69.95. This book is more than a cross-examination of Socrates: it is a carefully wrought indictment. Beversluis, unlike Socrates' historical adversaries Anytus and (...) Meletus, brings philosophically serious charges against Socrates by offering a rigorous defense of the interlocutors in Plato's early dialogues, the so-called Socratic dialogues. In so doing, he charts new territory in the vast area of recent analytic scholarship on Plato.According to traditional readings, Socrates deploys his elenchus to defeat his interlocutors, leaving them "either to retreat in anger or to submit to his power." Allegedly, Plato, guided by his Socratic intellectualism, draws them as distinctive, complex characters, though intellectually and thus ethically flawed. Beversluis argues against this standard view, providing sympathetic reassessment of Socrates' interlocutors. Although some previous scholars have defended some of the interlocutors, Beversluis widens the scope of the argument, leveling a scathing attack on Socratic intellectualism and its correlative method of moral education.He deals not only with Socrates' interlocutors and their logical defeats, but also with the idea of an interlocutor, and in so doing casts light on the philosophical dialogue as a genre. This emerges in the first and perhaps most original chapter, entitled "The Socratic Interlocutor," which may be of value to readers interested in philosophical writing or the philosophy of literature more generally. Here he illuminates Plato's use of the interlocutor, in part, by contrasting it with that of other philosophers who wrote in dialogue form, such as Augustine, Anselm, Hume, and Berkeley. The Socratic interlocutors are not, he says, "embodiments of error." Socrates, unlike the protagonists drawn by these other authors, does not subject them to his scrutiny in order to make them accept his beliefs, but rather to reject theirs. Beversluis claims that Plato's portrayal expresses his Socratic belief in the good life as one of bewilderment and uncertainty, a view, Beversluis rightly says, Plato will come to repudiate in his middle dialogues. Beversluis is clearly aware of the disparity between the [End Page 166] discomfort Socrates visits on his interlocutors and that which he is willing to endure himself.While many interpreters forgive Socrates' lapses of logic, Beversluis is unsparing. There is no reason, he thinks, to judge Socrates' arguments by any other criterion than their logical merits, and he therefore rejects the idea that Socrates' most fallacious arguments are valuable for psychological illumination. He also rejects Vlastos's view that only those of Socrates' arguments that are offered "seriously" should be criticized seriously. If they appear to be logical arguments, Beversluis contends, they must be assessed on their logical merits, not their rhetorical or therapeutic virtues. Some might find this approach rather arid until they see that Beversluis is warning the reader not to be dazzled by Socrates as the interlocutors are.It is widely believed that the aim of Socratic elenchus is to uncover the structure of a person's beliefs and to show that it is either internally inconsistent or at best unreflectively constructed. Beversluis's account, however, portrays Socrates as a Svengali who makes people assent to claims they would not otherwise accept. If this is right, Socrates is not actually elucidating the interlocutor's real beliefs. Beversluis challenges the notion of sincere assent, both as an interpretative guide to the early dialogues and as an epistemic concept. He points out that sincere belief is not simply an occurrent interior state accompanying, and indicated by, a verbal act of assent; rather, it emerges from the totality of a person's lived character, from the relation between word and act.Some readers will object to his axiom that a character in a literary work, and thus in a Platonic dialogue, has a life subject to scrutiny outside of the literary work. In his brief... (shrink)

In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurring meanings in the heterogeneous use of different value types and their association with worldviews and other key concepts. From frequent uses, we determine a core meaning for each value type, which is (...) sufficiently inclusive to serve as an umbrella over different understandings in the literature and specific enough to help highlight its difference from the other types of values. Finally, we discuss convergences, overlapping areas, and fuzzy boundaries between different value types to facilitate dialogue, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the methods for valuation of nature's contributions to people, including ecosystem services, to inform policy and direct future research. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Fictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative TheoryCarol S. GouldFictions of Discourse: Reading Narrative Theory, by Patrick O’Neill; x & 188 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, $35.00 paper.Patrick O’Neill serves up a rich stew of narratology, reader-reception theory, and a postmodern theory of truth. Many narratologists have taken the postmodern turn, while others have pursued a reception-theory route. Either path requires careful navigation, and the combined one even (...) more so. Classical narratology focuses on the textual structure with its network of various narratological relations. Reader-reception theory assigns to the reader a leading role in the creation of the text. O’Neill in various ways challenges or at least reformulates the notions of both text and reader, endorsing as he does a postmodern theory of truth which he terms the “Zeno Principle.” This principle is that “narrative discourse is always potentially subversive of the story it would seem to reconstruct” (p. 7). The Zeno Principle is a version of what he understands to be the Heisenberg Principle, namely that “discourse (including theoretical discourse) at least potentially subverts the story it sets out to narrate, and ultimately itself also” (p. 9). O’Neill contends that his narratological project will support the Zeno Principle. If successful, though, his endeavor will of course meet the usual self-destructive fate of such theories. But its self-annihilation seems not to discourage O’Neill, who finds all theories essentially “ludic.” O’Neill’s undertaking is ambitious; I shall focus on just a few of his moves.First of all, it is no surprise to hear that postmodernism is not new nor even that it has a classical pedigree. But it will probably astound—not to say sadden—the reader to see O’Neill locate its origins in the paradoxes of Zeno—the fifth-century Eleatic, the logician so well known for defending the epistemic primacy of reason, one of the uncontested intellectual progenitors of Plato, who remains the explicit target of Derridean fire. This is not simply a persnickety objection to O’Neill’s terminology, but a reflection on the broad implications he draws from his narratological investigations.Plato, working in the Eleatic (Zenoian) tradition, draws our attention to the perspectival nature of literature and would extend this to all empirical discourse. Any empirical narrative—history, biography, or literature—is in principle illusory because merely perspectival. Plato, true intellectual heir of Zeno, anticipates the narratological enterprise in this respect, while demonstrating [End Page 532] the exclusive epistemic integrity of logical thought. One finds this of course in his Republic, but nowhere are his narratological sympathies more evident than in the Symposium, with its many tiers of narration. He prefigures, then, the modern insight that all narrative is, in Wayne Booth’s terms, rhetoric and in narratological terms, focalized.If we grant with Zeno, Plato, and other friends of rationality that empirical discourse is perspectival or focalized, we can see that narrative must place us in some hypothetical vantage point: from another standpoint, the world looks different and assumes new contours and mood. Once we acknowledge that no one point of view is more privileged than another, our perceptions seem less stable. Lolita, for example, told from the viewpoint of the nymphet herself, would be a different story. Moreover, any narrative must be mediated by narrative perspective, and as O’Neill indicates, the narrative vantage point may not be that of the narrator or implied author. As he puts it, “Voice and vision... [may] derive from separate points of origin” (p. 84).In a sense, then, all empirical discourse is subversive. But does it follow that all theoretical discourse is therefore subversive? O’Neill scrutinizes fictional discourse, and helpfully so for us. But the perspectival nature of literary or empirical narrative hardly suffices to cast doubt on the notion of truth per se. The real Zeno Principle is the Platonic one that however arbitrarily empirical perspective might shift, rational intuition does not. If one wants to challenge that view, one must defend the Protagoras Principle, the true classical articulation of postmodernism. Aristotle, after all, wrestles with this in his Metaphysics rather than in his Poetics.O’Neill... (shrink)

A century after the advent of quantum mechanics and general relativity, both theories enjoy incredible empirical success, constituting the cornerstones of modern physics. Yet, paradoxically, they suffer from deep-rooted, so-far intractable, conflicts. Motivations for violations of the notion of relativistic locality include the Bell’s inequalities for hidden variable theories, the cosmological horizon problem, and Lorentz-violating approaches to quantum geometrodynamics, such as Horava–Lifshitz gravity. Here, we explore a recent proposal for a “real ensemble” non-local description of quantum mechanics, in which “particles” (...) can copy each others’ observable values AND phases, independent of their spatial separation. We first specify the exact theory, ensuring that it is consistent and has quantum mechanics as a fixed point, where all particles with the same values for a given observable have the same phases. We then study the stability of this fixed point numerically, and analytically, for simple models. We provide evidence that most systems are locally stable to small deviations from quantum mechanics, and furthermore, the phase variance per value of the observable, as well as systematic deviations from quantum mechanics, decay as \ time)\, where \. Interestingly, this convergence is controlled by the absolute value of energy, suggesting a possible connection to gravitational physics. Finally, we discuss different issues related to this theory, as well as potential novel applications for the spectrum of primordial cosmological perturbations and the cosmological constant problem. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Method and Mathematics:Peter Ramus's Histories of the SciencesRobert GouldingPeter Ramus (1515–72) was, at first sight, the least likely person to write an influential history of mathematics. For one thing, he was clearly no great mathematician himself. His sympathetic biographer Nicholas Nancel related that Ramus would spend the mornings being coached in mathematics by a team of experts he had assembled, and in the afternoon would lecture on the very (...) same subjects.1 But there can be no doubt that Ramus held mathematics in particular esteem and even played a crucial role in linking philosophical discourse to mathematics and in promoting the use of quadrivial reasoning in the study of the natural world.2The origins for his enthusiasm for mathematics are to be found in his account of the nature of the arts and critique of the curriculum of the universities. From his earliest career, Ramus was a logician and remained one in all his works, whether writing on mathematics or Virgil, and he conceived [End Page 63] of all the arts, especially mathematics, as unchanging structures of necessarily true propositions—not prima facie a position which lends itself to notions of historical change and development.3 His career as a historian of mathematics, I will argue, was directed by problems that arose in his theoretical understanding of mathematics as he began to immerse himself in the sciences of the ancient world.Ramus and the Reform of DialecticRamus set out his fundamental logical positions in his very first printed work, the Dialecticae institutiones (Education in Dialectic) of 1543, a contribution to the ongoing humanist attack on scholastic logic, in which Ramus rehearsed many of the commonplace criticisms of the university dialectic. Humanists complained that logic no longer concerned itself with real human reasoning; instead, it had become a discipline studied for its own sake, using its own incomprehensible jargon, and was of no practical interest. The new humanist dialectics of Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola attempted to teach the kind of practical reasoning useful for composing a speech or letter, and they borrowed extensively from rhetorical works of Cicero and Quintilian to develop a highly rhetoricized logic. Questions about the formal validity of arguments were of little interest; what mattered was whether the arguments were persuasive.4In his Dialecticae institutiones, Ramus took this humanist reformulation of dialectic a step further. Dialectic—or, in fact, any art or science—consisted of nature, doctrine, and exercise. The natural workings of the mind formed the most significant element. Doctrine was nothing more than a record of natural reasoning; in importance it paled next to nature and practice.5 The logic of the universities bore no resemblance to the true, natural dialectic, as he argued at length in the companion volume to the Institutiones, the innocuously titled but exuberantly offensive Aristotelicae animadversiones [End Page 64] (Observations on Aristotle).6 The question, then, remained: how can we gain access to this "natural reasoning"?Ramus's answer was surprising. He asks us to find a group of men—not scholars, but completely uneducated vineyard workers. Question them about the coming year: the fertility of the soil, the quality and quantity of the crop. "And then," he writes "from their minds as from a mirror an image of nature will be reflected."7 In the reasoned replies of these uneducated men, says Ramus, we discover every part of logic needed for any purpose, whether everyday discourse or composition of poetry: the invention of arguments, the assessment of their truth and their proper and orderly presentation. Other humanists had praised man's natural logical faculties, elevating them over artificial technique, but Ramus was the first to look beyond the walls of the university and the writings of the ancients to find natural dialectic at work.If even the uneducated have some possession of the arts, then the arts taught at the university should do no more than clear away the misleading junk in the mind, and allow its natural clarity to shine through.8 Logic should be easy to learn—not because this is a pedagogic ideal, but from the very nature of the art. And if logic as it is... (shrink)

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

The earlier volume in this series dealt with two religions of Indian origin, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The Indian religious scene, however, is characterized by not only religions which originated in India but also by religions which entered India from outside India and made their home here. Thus religious life in India has been enlivened throughout its history by the presence of religions of foreign origin on its soil almost from the very time they came into existence. This volume covers (...) three such religions—Zoraoastrianism, Judaism, and Islam. In the case of Zoraostianism, even its very beginnings are intertwined with India, as Zoroastrianism reformed a preexisting religion which had strong links to the Vedic heritage of India. This relationship took on a new dimension when a Zoroastrian community, fearing persecution in Persia after its Arab conquest, sought shelter in western India and ultimately went on to produce India’s pioneering nationalist in the figure of Dadabhai Naoroji ( 1825-1917), also known as the Grand Old Man of India. Jews found refuge in south India after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E. and have remained a part of the Indian religious scene since then, some even returning to Israel after it was founded in 1948. Islam arrived in Kerala as soon as it was founded and one of the earliest mosques in the history of Islam is found in India. Islam differs from the previously mentioned religions inasmuch as it went on to gain political hegemony over parts of the country for considerable periods of time, which meant that its impact on the religious life of the subcontinent has been greater compared to the other religions. It has also meant that Islam has existed in a religiously plural environment in India for a longer period than elsewhere in the world so that not only has Islam left a mark on India, India has also left its mark on it. Indeed all the three religions covered in this volume share this dual feature, that they have profoundly influenced Indian religious life and have also in turn been profoundly influenced by their presence in India. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nomadic Turns:Epistemology, Experience, and Women University Band DirectorsElizabeth GouldMusic education occupations in the U.S. have been segregated by gender and race for decades. While women are most likely to teach young students in classroom settings, men are most likely to teach older students in all settings, but most particularly in wind/percussion ensembles.1 Despite gender-affirmative employment practices, men constitute a large majority among band directors at all levels.2 At the (...) postsecondary level in the U.S., women constitute less than 10%.3 In all cases and all levels, the vast majority of band directors are white. Occupational segregation inhibits the development of individuals' careers as well as the development of the profession as individuals choose or are hired for positions based on their gender and/or race rather than their abilities.In terms of women university band directors, researchers have investigated employment trends,4 personal and occupational characteristics,5 occupational role models, and professional identity.6 Their findings generally have supported the hypotheses that historical precedent, traditional socialization, discrimination, segregation, and lack of role models contribute to their persistently low percentage as band directors. Longitudinal studies7 demonstrate that the percentage of women band directors has not increased significantly, and may be actually [End Page 147] declining after thirty years of enforcing affirmative action laws, which would suggest that these interventions have not provided the basis for enacting change in the profession. Further, change does not seem possible if members of the profession do not understand what causes the situation to persist. For example, while the College Band Directors National Association has supported the Linda A. Hartley and Deborah A. Sheldon study,8 their concern seems to be in only identifying the extent of the situation with the intention of increasing the number of women and non-white individuals who are band directors within the profession as it currently is constructed. This empirical approach is inadequate because it addresses neither the values held by members of the profession, nor its structure, which as previous research indicates, is poorly understood and must change to make possible meaningful increases in the number of women and non-white people.The profession of conducting university bands exists within the profession of music education in general, which, of course, exists within the profession of music. Clearly, one cannot be adequately understood without placing it in the context of the others. What is needed, then, are richer, more substantive, and meaningful understandings of the professions in general and of specific questions within them in particular, as they may provide the basis on which change can be possible. In addition to addressing the issue of persistent occupational gender and racial segregation, questions that may be addressed include positionalities9 of bands in the music education profession, the relationship of performance/conducting to the music profession, and the role of the musician in society in general. In order to accomplish this, I propose an analytical method that is both postmodern and feminist, and in which the philosophical figuration of the nomad, as explicated by Rosi Braidotti,10 is central.Postmodern/Feminist AnalysisDescribed variously as a "philosophical perspective,"11 a "sensibility,"12 and a historical moment,13 postmodernism resists definition. It may be understood as a way of perceiving the world that accepts and even embraces contradictions and uncertainties while rejecting commonly accepted cultural beliefs and practices, including humanist understandings of identity, representation, and the subject. This is a "postmodernism of resistance"14 that interrogates cultural practices, focusing on what is unexpected, marginalized, and silenced, opening spaces for change. In contrast, analysis based on modernism is constrained by binary oppositions that inscribe the positionalities of social groups. These oppositions are exemplified by Subject/Other (for example, male/female, reason/emotion) and consist of asymmetrical power relations in which the former is privileged over the latter, and the latter is defined in terms of not-the former. Postmodern analysis [End Page 148] reveals what these dualisms exclude, distort, or obscure, and provides flexibility for research from a variety of perspectives. Braidotti describes it as a "new kind of theoretical style"15 in terms of thinking, design, and analysis of research, a style... (shrink)

The paper questions the extent to which MacIntyre’s current ethical and political outlook should be traced to a project begun in After Virtue. It is argued that, instead, a critical break comes in 1985 with his adoption of a ‘Thomistic Aristotelian’ standpoint. After Virtue’s ‘positive thesis’, by contrast, is a distinct position in MacIntyre’s intellectual journey, and the standpoint of After Virtue embodies substantial commitments not only in conflict with, but antithetical to, MacIntyre’s later worldview-mostly clearly illustrated in the contrasting (...) positions on moral conflict and tragedy. (shrink)

Pons Asinorum Or The Future of Nonsense George Edinger and E J C Neep Originally published in 1929. "A most entertaining essay, rich in quotation from the old masters of clownship’s craft." Saturday Review The author maintains that true nonsense must be aimless humour – the humour that makes fun as opposed to the humour that makes fun of something. 88pp Democritus Or The Future of Laughter Gerald Gould Originally published in 1929. "Democritus is bound to be among the favourites (...) of the series. Gould’s humour glances at history, morality, and humanity…wise and witty writing." Observer Democritus is intended to illustrate the prevailing fashion in laughter and on the basis of historical and philosophical principles to forecast the humour of the future. 90pp Mrs Fisher Or The Future of Humour Robert Graves Originally published in 1928 "Mr Graves is the best man who could have been chosen to write on this subject." Daily Express "…perfectly irresponsible, as a joker should be." The Times This volume analyzes humour with a solemnity which becomes almost nightmarish. 90pp Babel Or the Past, Present and Future of Human Speech Richard Paget Originally published in 1930. "…stimulating and absorbing." Journal of Education This volume discusses human speech and treats it as a growth which must be tamed if it is to fulfil its highest purpose as a symbolism for human thought. 86pp. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Histories of Science in Early Modern Europe:IntroductionRobert GouldingIn 1713, Pierre Rémond de Montmort wrote to the mathematician Nicolas Bernoulli:It would be desirable if someone wanted to take the trouble to instruct how and in what order the discoveries in mathematics have come about.... The histories of painting, of music, of medicine have been written. A good history of mathematics, especially of geometry, would be a much more interesting and (...) useful work.... Such a work, if done well, could be regarded to some extent as a history of the human mind, since it is in this science, more than in anything else, that man makes known that gift of intelligence that God has given him to rise above all other creatures.1Such a history of mathematics was attempted by Jean-Etienne Montucla in his Histoire des mathématiques (first printed in 1758, and reissued in a [End Page 33] greatly expanded form in 1799).2 Montucla's great work is generally acknowledged as the first genuine history of mathematics. According to some modern historians, previous attempts at such a history had amounted to little more than collections of anecdotes, biographies or exhaustive bibliographies: "jumbles of names, dates and titles," as one writer in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography characterized them.3 Montucla, on the other hand, was thoroughly animated by the Enlightenment project expressed in Rémond's letter, and his Histoire was a philosophical history of the "development of the human mind," as he himself described it.4 It was precisely Montucla's vision of what mathematics meant and his conviction that mathematics itself must change in order to reflect the historical elevation of the human intellect, that allowed him to transform the scattered dates and anecdotes of his predecessors into a genuine history. All subsequent histories of mathematics—until the most recent social histories5 —have been in a sense "footnotes to Montucla."The papers here argue that there were indeed histories of mathematics before Montucla which are worthy of scholarly attention, and that the dismissal of Renaissance histories of science as nothing more than a "cloud of fine adjectives and metaphors" is unfair (although it contains a germ of truth). Anthony Grafton has argued in an article on the historical writings of Cardano, Rheticus, and Kepler, that the purpose of such texts was not so much to trace what actually happened, as to justify the study of a subject often derided—by both humanist and scholastic writers—as obscure, useless and undignified.6 The following four papers go further in arguing that writings in this genre (or, at least, some writings in this genre) were not limited to this characteristically humanist objective. Authors did not just use their histories to persuade others. They themselves relied on historical narratives in order to think about their discipline, define its parts, distinguish among its acceptable and unacceptable forms and prescribe its content [End Page 34] and method of teaching. By placing their discipline into a historical context shared by other, more mainstream humanistic arts, moreover, they could draw upon the large, narrative structures which Renaissance humanists had adapted to understand human intellectual and cultural development, origins, progress and decline.James Byrne's article highlights a disparity of vision between those humanists who treated the origin of the arts as just another subject for humanistic display; and those (like Regiomontanus) who were invested in the arts and wrote their histories from an insider's perspective. Alongside Regiomontanus, one could include several other authors treated in this collection, such as Thomas Vaughan, Peter Ramus, and Henry Savile. In each case, history provided a means for working through problems of the legitimacy and nature of their disciplines. While their writings are not "histories of the human mind," their interests went beyond mere rehearsal of anecdotes. Ramus's histories, for instance, written 200 years before Montucla's Histoire, had the kind of unifying vision which de Montmort demanded, and shared Montucla's concern to find a meaning in the development of mathematics. Ramus, and the supporters and detractors he spawned, were convinced that constructing the history of this science was crucial to understanding how and why human beings have... (shrink)

A panel titled Feminist Philosophy after Twenty Years was organized by Carol C. Gould for the session sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women at the American Philosophical Association's 1993 Eastern Division Meeting, December 30, 1993 in Atlanta, GA. The remarks of the three panelists, Linda Lopez McAlister, Ann Ferguson and Kathy Addelson are printed below.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000Carol S. GouldJapan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000. By Jan Walsh Hokenson. Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Pp. 520. $80.00.Jan Walsh Hokenson's masterful work, Japan, France, and East-West Aesthetics: French Literature, 1867-2000, traces the migration of the Japanese aesthetic into French art, through French literature, and ultimately into Western modernism and postmodernism. Despite the title, this (...) book goes beyond French poetics, for it deals with some philosophical views about knowledge and art, and it offers an extended argument for the value of comparative studies, including comparative philosophy. The author moves easily among the areas of literature, art, and philosophy, all of which she discusses with authority.Her story begins with the birth of 'japonisme,' the term coined by critic Philippe Burty in 1876 to refer to the passion-artistic and commercial-for things Japanese. She identifies three waves of japonisme in French literature: pre-World War I, between the wars, and post-World War II. She leads the reader through each of these waves, detailing the cultural and artistic milieu in each and closely analyzing key figures.For the origins of japonisme, Hokenson takes us to the studio of Parisian engraver, printmaker, and designer Felix Bracquemond in 1856, which was just after the end of Sakoku. Bracquemond, according to the "most persistent legend," [End Page 699] opened a box of Asian ceramics and discovered that they were wrapped in extraordinary materials-layers of Hokusai woodcut prints the likes of which he had never seen. He summoned members of his circle, which included Manet, Degas, and Whistler (pp. 13-15). It is thus through an intriguing historical contingency that this relatively inexpensive, mass-produced art form would become the inspiration for some of the most personal and expensive art works today. More relevant to Hokenson's interest, however, is the fact that these woodcuts would be a seminal force in the direction of French letters.Had Bracquemond not had the vision to see the artistry of these prints or had the shipper used a different packing material, would Western painting and literature have taken a different turn? Would the West have seen impressionism, symbolism, or art nouveau? Would Proust, Claudel, Mallarmé, and others have written different works? From Hokenson's account one gleans that the French avant-garde eye was ready to see Hokusai and others, for artists felt that the mimetic view of art had led them to an impasse. Visual and literary artists were ready to abandon the Renaissance ideals of verisimilitude, perspective, the integrity of space, and the linearity of time. They were ready to accept the fragmentation of picture space, perspectivism, and suggestiveness that were all characteristic of the Japanese aesthetic.She explains how Henri Bergson, with his theories of intuition and subjective time, provided a philosophical foundation for the artistic commitments of the early japonistes. She documents the access many of the japonistes had to Bergson. Bergson, like the japoniste poets and painters themselves, emerged from a French tradition of using subjectivity as a starting point. The reader sees this respect for the subjective interact with various Japanese influences over the course of the twentieth century. The receptiveness to the haiku exemplifies this phenomenon, as it begins from a fleeting, intuitive, personal experience. She points out that "by 2000, the haiku was almost a commonplace in French poetry" (p. 407).Although she says little about what Bergson may have absorbed from the japonistes, she does tell of the little-known influence exerted by the Japanese phenomenologist Kuki Shūzō in 1928 on Jean-Paul Sartre. Both Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir either forgot this relationship or forgot to mention it in their respective narratives about the development of existentialism. Indeed, this was not discovered, Hokenson reports, until the 1980s. She rightly points out that that this changes the usual story about French philosophy in the early twentieth century, for it means that Sartre became acquainted with German phenomenology before 1932 and from someone other than Raymond Aron (pp. 333-334, 343, 474 n. 10). In a fascinating discussion of Kuki's... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:White Collar Zen: Using Zen Principles to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Your Career GoalsCarol S. GouldWhite Collar Zen: Using Zen Principles to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Your Career Goals. By Steven Heine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. ix + 198.In these days of corporate corruption, downsizing, and outsourcing, not to mention the continuous cutbacks in the Academy, it is no surprise that people are open to (...) unconventional ways of looking at life and work. Several years ago, Epicurus became a best-selling author in Italy, and more recently we have seen philosophical approaches from authors such as Alain de Botton (Consolations of Philosophy), Lou Marinoff (Plato, Not Prozac), and Tom Morris (If Aristotle Ran General Motors), to name a few. Steven Heine's White Collar Zen: Using Zen Principles to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Your Career Goals applies as well to the academic as to the corporate workplace.Heine has written White Collar Zen from the standpoint of a scholar of Buddhism and a professional academic administrator. That he has been extremely successful [End Page 123] at both should make one take a serious look at this book. Given the indifference of both institutions and the natural world to human suffering (think of Enron and Hurricane Katrina), we all need survival skills, and Heine shows us how we can acquire them in our professional lives by applying Zen philosophy. While his expressed purpose is not to illuminate the subtleties of Zen, the attentive nonspecialist reader can glean much about the tradition nonetheless and, like the Zen specialist, find new paths for navigating around the foxholes in organizations.Zen, as Heine points out, infiltrated American culture over one hundred years ago and has made its way into subcultures beyond the American-Japanese, for example the worlds of psychotherapy, the arts, medicine, and even some of the more liberal branches of Judaism and Christianity. In case a novice feels unprepared to use Zen for success, Heine points out that Zen has great flexibility, that it is not orthodoxy. "Discover your own way... of 'being Zen,"' he tells us (p. 10).While it might seem clear that Zen could foster creativity, introspection, and self-understanding, the philosophical reader might raise two questions about using Zen to achieve worldly power. First, how can Zen, with its well-known requirement for periods of solitude, be a guide in the workplace? Second, is this endeavor consistent with the Zen principles that the ego is a mirage and that desires are fruitless?Heine does not explicitly address these matters as problems, but the reader will find them resolved by the end of the book. Do not be deceived by his informal tone or his hip references to the likes of Bob Dylan. The logic of this book is carefully mapped out. As for the first issue, Heine demonstrates that the sort of isolation prescribed by Zen makes us more fit for organizational life. With regard to the second, human life, according to Zen, is a series of constantly vanishing moments. Success is simply survival and gaining the ability to be in each moment fully. The Zen philosophy, like the Heraclitean, does not shy away from the inconsistencies to which reflection leads us. Thus, Zen does not require that we resolve the tension between the twin needs for solitude and life with others. White Collar Zen is a guide to accepting this fact without anxiety.The self, according to Zen, is not an atomic individual, but something constantly in flux and part of a whole. Everything is Buddha nature, and meditation is the way to discover it. The Unmoving Mind is the state within each of us that can transcend the perspective of our own desires, peculiarities, interests, and ego. To look at events from the standpoint of the Unmoving Mind is to look at them from a higher perspective. It gives one tremendous freedom to choose wisely, because this cleanses the self of petty resentments. When a conflict can be resolved in a way that benefits everyone, each individual will benefit. When one is glued to one's own vantage point, it is difficult to want to act for the benefit... (shrink)

The technique of covers is now well established in semigroup theory. The idea is, given a semigroup S, to find a semigroup having a better understood structure than that of S, and an onto morphism of a specific kind from to S. With the right conditions on , the behaviour of S is closely linked to that of . If S is finite one aims to choose a finite . The celebrated results for inverse semigroups of McAlister in the 1970s (...) form the flagship of this theory.Weakly left quasi-ample semigroups form a quasivariety (of algebras of type(2, 1)), properly containing the classes of groups, and of inverse, left ample, and weakly left ample semigroups. We show how the existence of finite proper covers for semigroups in this quasivariety is a consequence of Ashs powerful theorem for pointlike sets. Our approach is to obtain a cover of a weakly left quasi-ample semigroup S as a subalgebra of S × G, where G is a group. It follows immediately from the fact that weakly left quasi-ample semigroups form a quasivariety, that is weakly left quasi-ample. We can then specialise our covering results to the quasivarieties of weakly left ample, and left ample semigroups. The latter have natural representations as (2, 1)-subalgebras of partial (one-one) transformations, where the unary operation takes a transformation to the identity map in the domain of . In the final part of this paper we consider representations of weakly left quasi-ample semigroups. (shrink)

Normativism is the view that logic provides rules for correct reasoning. Some influential critics of normativism, such as Gilbert Harman, claim that logical rules provide reasoners with bad or misleading standards. Others, such as Gillian Russell, claim that logic is a descriptive subject and thus cannot, given Hume’s law, provide rules for reasoning. We think these critics are mistaken. Our aim in this paper is to defend normativism by sketching an alternative way of thinking about the normative force of logical (...) rules. On our view, logical rules are best characterized, in a broadly Rossian manner, as intellectual prima facie duties; i.e., they provide standards for evaluating reasoning and reasoners that are universal and authoritative, but not absolute. This position accommodates the inherent normativity of logic, contra Russell, while circumventing the challenges to normativism raised by Harman. (shrink)