The following are some of the entries received in the contest presented in our March, 1960 issue. The starred essays were judged as winners and were awarded $25.00 prizes.

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

REMARKS ON EVOLUTION AND TIME-SCALES, Graham Cairns-Smith; HODGSON'S BLACK BOX, Thomas Clark; DO HODGSON'S PROPOSITIONS UNIQUELY CHARACTERIZE FREE WILL?, Ravi Gomatam; WHAT SHOULD WE RETAIN FROM A PLAIN PERSON'S CONCEPT OF FREE WILL?, Gilberto Gomes; ISOLATING DISPARATE CHALLENGES TO HODGSON'S ACCOUNT OF FREE WILL, Liberty Jaswal; FREE AGENCY AND LAWS OF NATURE, Robert Kane; SCIENCE VERSUS REALIZATION OF VALUE, NOT DETERMINISM VERSUS CHOICE, Nicholas Maxwell; COMMENTS ON HODGSON, J.J.C. Smart; THE VIEW FROM WITHIN, Sean Spence; COMMENTARY ON HODGSON, Henry (...) Stapp. (shrink)

This article falls into two parts: the first is an analysis, in the light of my earlier discussions of and of the Homeric usage of and the second, an attempt to show that, as in the case of the effects of Homeric usage persist to a considerable degree in the moral philosophy of Aristotle. In the earlier discussions I have argued that the higher value placed upon the competitive in Greek entails that co-operative relationships, even when valued and necessary, take (...) the form dictated by the more valued qualities, the The most general words to denote co-operative relationships in Greek are and its derivatives: my purpose here is to show how the Homeric usage of these words is related to the Homeric standard and to Homeric society, and to sketch in the outline of a wider discussion, which I hope to be able to fill in later. (shrink)

Originally published in 1965 and written by one of the world's leading experts in animal behaviour, this book was written just as the impact of DNA on biology, genetics ethology and biophysics was being felt. The book reviews these developments and analyses the affect they have on our view of our own nature and of ethical and moral sense. It is particularly concerned with the impact of DNA and genetics on philosophic thought.

Charles Sanders Peirce, who contributed the term pragmatism to the language of philosophy, insisted always that the term was intended to designate a method. Pragmatism, he warned, is not a Weltanschauung, nor a doctrine of metaphysics, nor even an “attempt to determine any truth of things.” It is simply a method of ascertaining meanings, of making them clear, and of pointing a way for the successful determination of the truth of things. Peirce's practice consistently belied his preaching in this regard, (...) for his exposition of the method involved a metaphysical system of considerable scope; and this, it seems to me, was unavoidable. Yet it was as a method that Peirce first presented his distinctive point of view, and it is primarily as a method that I wish to consider it here. Into metaphysics, or Weltanschauung, we shall surely be led; despite Peirce's pronouncement, I make no apology for that. (shrink)

The literary criticism of the Greeks and Romans furnishes some of the most baffling documents which have come down to us from antiquity. Nor could it be otherwise. Few elements of language can be at once so ephemeral and so elusive as the overtones of words used in aesthetic contexts; even in our own language it is only with a conscious effort that the appropriate overtones of words used by quite recent critics can be recalled. Such recall must be much (...) more difficult where the reader is concerned with a dead language; in the case of some terms it may well be virtually impossible; but where the ancient critic is discussing ethical criteria for literature, as Aristotle does in Poetics 13, the modern interpreter is in a somewhat better position, for ethical terms are used in wider contexts, contexts which involve action, and there is more opportunity for studying their usage and endeavouring to recapture their elusive overtones. (shrink)

Since other readers of Mr. Creed's recent interesting article may find themselves in a similar puzzlement to my own over certain statements there made, I offer this reply in the hope of providing elucidation. It is clear that someone named Adkins has perpetrated something heinous; but that ‘someone’ manifestly holds views which differ in a number of important respects from my own. The most convenient method of demonstrating this fact would be to juxtapose passages of Creed with passages of my (...) Merit and Responsibility; but since space does not permit the juxtaposition of whole passages, I confine myself in the first part of this article to juxtaposing the references. (shrink)

A number of scholars have discussed the difficulty of preserving accurately—or at all—information about the past1 in the Greek Dark Ages when the literacy of Minoan/Mycenean Greece had been lost. Such preservation necessarily depended on the memories of the members of the society, especially those of the professional ‘rememberers’, the bards of the oral tradition: in such a society, if knowledge of an event is to be available to future generations, it must not be forgotten.

Providing the most thorough coverage available in one volume, this comprehensive, broadly based collection offers a wide variety of selections in four major genres, and also includes a section on film. Each of the five sections contains a detailed critical introduction to each form, brief biographies of the authors, and a clear, concise editorial apparatus. Updated and revised throughout, the new Fourth Edition adds essays by Margaret Mead, Russell Baker, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and Alice Walker; fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, (...) Ursula K. LeGuin, Anton Chekov, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, Donald Barthelme, and James McPherson; poems by John Donne, Robert Browning, Walt Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Philip Levine, and Louise Gluck; and plays by August Wilson, Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, and Vaclav Havel. The chapter devoted to film examines the relation of film to literature and gives the complete screenplay for Citizen Kane plus close analysis of a scene from the film. With its innovative structure, comprehensive coverage, and insightful and stimulating presentation of all kinds of literature, this is an anthology readers will turn to again and again. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 139 twenty years ago has slowly given way to an awareness that cross-cultural differences are real enough to call for different rules of behavior and different sets of values. Several possibilities are still open to the ethicist concerned with the problem of relativism. We may want to reconsider more carefully than ever before the connotations of "relative," of "action" and of "culture" in the context of those (...) anthropologists whose claims are said to be detrimental to ethics. Of these terms so crucial for what Moser calls relativism of right, only the first has been analyzed from opposite perspectives by Stevenson and Berlin. So far as I know, no one has treated "relative" as a relational term in the fruitful way suggested by Berlin.19 We may also come to realize that the issue of relativism is too much imbedded in historical and metaphysical tenets and thus is not amenable to the ahistorical treatment of the logical status of moral judgment. Thus we may want to rewrite its whole history by exploiting one of the best facets of Moser's essay. That is, a comparative study of the sociology of knowledge with the organic model of cultural anthropology. Lastly we may agree with A. Edel and consider the whole issue a closed chapter in the history of philosophy, and move on to the philosophically more fruitful investigation of the why and wherefore of moral change between generations and between historical periods. L. M. PALMER University of Delaware Ernst Cassirer: Scientific Knowledge and the Concept of Man. By Seymour W. Itzkoff. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971. Pp. xi +286. $9.95) There is a sense in which the title of this book is misleading. To be sure, Dr. Itzkoff does deal with Cassirer and with Cassirer's neo-Kantian conception of scientific knowledge and of man. But there is more to the book than this. The first seven chapters are, in effect, a demonstration that "Cassirer left us with a difficult theoretical dilemma: the existence of two contrasting and opposed views of human nature" (p. 172). The last two chapters (pp. 172-252) are the author's attempt to bring those two views into harmony within the framework of contemporary science and philosophical analysis. The first two chapters (pp. 1-37) trace briefly the development of philosophical thought from the time of "the intellectual revolution set in motion by Galileo" to Kant's "Copernican revolution"--to the Kantian thesis, that is, that "the fundamental act of perception and the structuring of experience itseLf depend upon... 'transcendental apperception' as a 'condition of the possibility of perception itself'" (p. 27). It is the concern with "form and function" rather than with "substance and reality," which the Marburg neo-Kantians, and with them Cassirer, accepted as the lasting achievement of Kant's "critical philosophy." But Cassirer found in Kant also a "parallel concern... for humanistic disciplines" (p. 33) and, as "a central theme," the assertion of the "autonomy of human nature" (p. 35). The survey is suggestive but, in some respects, it is also inaccurate. For example, Kant's presumed "lapse into a radical subjectivism" cannot be justified by the reference, in passing, as it were, to the Opus postumum (p. 29)--although the fault is here perhaps that of Norman Kemp Smith rather than that of the author. A more ~o I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), pp. 96-106. 140 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY serious misrepresentation of Kant may be found in the author's acceptance of T. D. Weldon's statement that "the categories... supply principles which are... essential to the existing of a unitary self-consciousness" (p. 32), for this is precisely the reverse of the Kantian position. Also, it is hardly accurate to speak of "Kant's postulation of laws of ethical behavior" (p. 36), for, surely, the various formulations of the categorical imperative are not "laws of ethical behavior" but criteria of such laws. Chapters 3 and 4 (pp. 38-98) are devoted to discussions of the nature of scientific knowledge. Kant's initial commitment to Newtonian mechanics is, of course, a wellknown fact; but Professor Itzkoff quite correctly points out... (shrink)