During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, physics was regularly taught as part of instruction in philosophy and the arts at Central European schools and universities. However, physics did not have a special or privileged status within that instruction. Three general indicators of this lack of special status are suggested in this article. First, teachers of physics usually were paid less than teachers of most other university-level subject-matters. Second, very few Central European academics during this period appear to have made (...) a career out of teaching physics. And third, Reformation Era schools and universities in Central Europe emphasized language instruction; such instruction not only was instrumental in promoting the confessional-i.e., Calvinist, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic-agendas of those same schools and universities, but also helped to prepare students for service in nascent but growing state governments. (shrink)

Published in 1999. The articles in this collection focus on instruction - and writings arising from that instruction - in philosophy and the arts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with emphasis on Central Europe. The introduction brings together and expands upon many of the topics discussed - and conclusions reached - in the remaining seven articles. Four of these articles are devoted to examining the significance of two ancient authors (Aristotle and Cicero) and of two more recent ones (Petrus (...) Ramus and Bartholomew Keckermann). The article on Keckermann is based in part on previously unpublished biographical and bibliographical source materials. Two concepts - encyclopedia and philosophy - as utilized in the 16th and 17th centuries constitute the subject matter of separate articles. And one article focuses primarily on curriculum plans written during the 16th and early 17th centuries. These eight articles are based on a wide array of printed and manuscript source materials which are cited together with library/archive locations and call numbers and which are made more easily accessible through three indices at the conclusion of this volume. (shrink)

In two recent papers Perez Laraudogoitia has described a variety of supertasks involving elastic collisions in Newtonian systems containing a denumerably infinite set of particles. He maintains that these various supertasks give examples of systems in which energy is not conserved, particles at rest begin to move spontaneously, particles disappear from a system, and particles are created ex nihilo. An analysis of these supertasks suggests that they involve systems that do not satisfy the mathematical conditions required of Newtonian systems at (...) the time the supertask is due to be completed, or else they rely on the application of the time-reversal transformation to states which are not well-defined. Consequently, it is unjustified to conclude that the paradoxical results are arising from within the framework of Newtonian mechanics. In the last part of this article, we discuss various aspects of the physics of these supertasks. (shrink)

A version of nonstandard analysis, Internal Set Theory, has been used to provide a resolution of Zeno's paradoxes of motion. This resolution is inadequate because the application of Internal Set Theory to the paradoxes requires a model of the world that is not in accordance with either experience or intuition. A model of standard mathematics in which the ordinary real numbers are defined in terms of rational intervals does provide a formalism for understanding the paradoxes. This model suggests that in (...) discussing motion, only intervals, rather than instants, of time are meaningful. The approach presented here reconciles resolutions of the paradoxes based on considering a finite number of acts with those based on analysis of the full infinite set Zeno seems to require. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the classical and quantum mechanics of performing an infinite number of acts in a finite time. (shrink)

Yoga has come to be an icon of Indian culture and civilization, and it is widely regarded as being timeless and unchanging. Based on extensive ethnographic research and an analysis of both ancient and modern texts, Yoga in Modern India challenges this popular view by examining the history of yoga, focusing on its emergence in modern India and its dramatically changing form and significance in the twentieth century. Joseph Alter argues that yoga's transformation into a popular activity idolized for (...) its health value is based on modern ideas about science and medicine. Alter centers his analysis on an interpretation of the seminal work of Swami Kuvalayananda, one of the chief architects of the Yoga Renaissance in the early twentieth century. From this point of orientation he explores current interpretations of yoga and considers how practitioners of yogic medicine and fitness combine the ideas of biology, physiology, and anatomy with those of metaphysics, transcendence, and magical power. The first serious ethnographic history of modern yoga in India, this fluently written book is must reading not only for students and scholars but also practitioners who seek a deeper understanding of how yoga developed over time into the exceedingly popular phenomenon it is today. (shrink)

"[A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness] represents, I believe, a very important beginning of a deservingly serious effort to make the whole ...

In this volume, Joseph Catalano offers an in-depth exploration of Jean-Paul Sartre's four major philosophical writings: Being and Nothingness, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, and The Family Idiot. These works have been immensely influential, but they are long and difficult and thus challenging for both students and scholars. Catalano here demonstrates the interrelation of these four works, their internal logic, and how they provide insights into important but overlooked aspects of Sartre's thought, such as (...) the body, childhood, and evil. The book begins with Sartre's final work, The Family Idiot, and systematically works backward to Being and Nothingness. Catalano then repeats the study by advancing chronologically, beginning with Being and Nothingness and ending with The Family Idiot and an afterword on Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Readers will appreciate Catalano's subtle readings as well as the new insights that he brings to Sartre's oeuvre. (shrink)

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason ranks with Being and Nothingness as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the Critique to its deserved place among Sartre’s works and within philosophical discourse as (...) a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano asserts—the delivery of history into the hands of the average person. Sartre’s concern in the Critique is with the historical significance of everyday life. Can we, he asks, as individuals or even collectively, direct the course of our history? A historical context for our lives is given to us at birth, but we sustain that context with even our most mundane actions—buying a newspaper, waiting in line, eating a meal. In looking at history, Sartre argues, reason can never separate the historical situation of the investigator from the investigation. Thus reason falls into a dialectic, always depending upon the past for guidance but always being reshaped by the present. Clearly showing the influence of Marx on Sartre’s thought, the Critique adds the historical dimension lacking in Being and Nothingness. In placing the Critique within the corpus of Sartre’s philosophical writings, Catalano argues that it represents a development rather than a break from Sartre’s existentialist phase. Catalano has organized his commentary to follow the Critique and has supplied clear examples and concrete expositions of the most difficult ideas. He explicates the dialogue between Marx and Sartre that is internal to the text, and he also discusses Sartre’s Search for Method, which is published separately from the Critique in English editions. (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is an outstanding reference source to this exciting subject and the first collection of its kind. Comprising 40 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into clear sections addressing the following central topics: -/- • Historical Philosophical Engagements with Cities -/- • Modern and Contemporary Philosophical Theories of the City -/- • Urban Aesthetics -/- • Urban Politics -/- • Citizenship -/- • Urban Environments and the Creation/Destruction of (...) Place. -/- The concluding section, Urban Engagements, contains interviews with philosophers discussing their engagement with students and the wider public on issues and initiatives including experiential learning, civic and community engagement, disability rights and access, environmental degradation, professional diversity, social justice, and globalization. -/- Essential reading for students and researchers in environmental philosophy, aesthetics, and political philosophy, The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City is also a useful resource for those in related fields, such as geography, urban studies, sociology, and political science. (shrink)

Genetic discrimination is becoming an increasingly important problem in the United States. Information acquired from genetic tests has been used by insurance companies to reject applications for insurance policies and to refuse payment for the treatment of illnesses. Numerous states and the United States Congress have passed or are considering passage of laws that would forbid such use of genetic information by health insurance companies. Here we argue that much of this legislation is severely flawed because of the difficulty in (...) distinguishing genetic from nongenetic tests. In addition, barring the use by insurance companies of a genetic test but not a nongenetic test (conceivably for the same multifactorial disease) raises issues of fairness in health insurance. These arguments suggest that ultimately the problems arising from genetic discrimination cannot be solved by narrowly focused legislation but only by a modification of the entire health care system. (shrink)

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason ranks with Being and Nothingness as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the Critique to its deserved place among Sartre’s works and within philosophical discourse as (...) a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano asserts—the delivery of history into the hands of the average person. Sartre’s concern in the Critique is with the historical significance of everyday life. Can we, he asks, as individuals or even collectively, direct the course of our history? A historical context for our lives is given to us at birth, but we sustain that context with even our most mundane actions—buying a newspaper, waiting in line, eating a meal. In looking at history, Sartre argues, reason can never separate the historical situation of the investigator from the investigation. Thus reason falls into a dialectic, always depending upon the past for guidance but always being reshaped by the present. Clearly showing the influence of Marx on Sartre’s thought, the Critique adds the historical dimension lacking in Being and Nothingness. In placing the Critique within the corpus of Sartre’s philosophical writings, Catalano argues that it represents a development rather than a break from Sartre’s existentialist phase. Catalano has organized his commentary to follow the Critique and has supplied clear examples and concrete expositions of the most difficult ideas. He explicates the dialogue between Marx and Sartre that is internal to the text, and he also discusses Sartre’s Search for Method, which is published separately from the Critique in English editions. (shrink)

What must the United States do to remain the global superpower and stop alienating the rest of the world? The author of the bestselling "The Paradox of American Power" has one clear answer: soft power.

The rapidly changing field of genetics affects society through advances in health-care and through implications of genetic research. This study addresses the impacts of new genetic discoveries and technologies on different segments of today's society. The book begins with a chapter on genetic complexity, and subsequent chapters discuss moral and ethical questions arising from today's genetics from the perspectives of health care professionals, the media, the general public, special interest groups and commercial interests.

The main purpose of this paper is to bring out some significant humanistic characteristics of Chinese religious thought. My account is limited to what is originally and typically Chinese. That is to say, it will exclude what has been influenced by Buddhism from India or Christianity from the Western world. Some of the theses of this paper are based on scholarly works, while others are drawn from the author's primary experience.

The author of Governance in a Globalizing World probes the limits of American power, offering a compelling argument for the world's lone superpower to forge cooperative relationships with nations around the world.

Nationalism can be closely associated with powerful feelings about the relationship among cultural heritage, identity and embodied experience. Almost by definition this relationship is expressed in terms of continuity, distinctiveness and the purity of tradition, to an extent that nationalistic sentiments can be said to be ‘visceral.’ Contrasting the way in which the body is implicated in nature cure and Ayurveda, two forms of medicine closely linked to nationalism in India, this article presents an analytical perspective on the embodiment of (...) viscerality to provide a more nuanced understanding of how these experiences blur distinctions of cultural continuity and how an ecology of the body shapes the cultural politics of tradition in India. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Crafting Marks Into MeaningsJoseph S. CatalanoIn his fascinating book about the Mayan Code, Michael D. Coe writes, “I challenge any native English speaker to avoid thinking of the word ‘twelve’ when looking at ‘12,’ or an Italian to avoid the utterance ‘dodici’ when going through the same performance.” 1 I accept the challenge, and claim that I have done just that. What shall the reply be—“I should not have (...) done so?” One suspects that linguists confuse theoretical problems about writing and reading with the experience itself.The nature of reading and writing is difficult to understand because on the one hand it seems to involve a complex of conventional marks, but on the other hand these marks seem capable of being understood independently of their relationship to speech or to things. One can claim, of course, that the competent reader works under an illusion: meaning comes to a script through spoken language, through a deep-structured language, through concepts, or through the way the neurons work in the brain. Without denying that the written word enters into many relations, I want to make a case that the history of writing shows that we have crafted marks into meanings and, therefore, that a text is meaningful on the level of the script itself.Before proceeding, I want both to clarify my use of the term “script,” and to give the basic outline of this essay. Studies on writing frequently distinguish among writing systems, scripts, and orthographies. Writing system is the most general of these terms. For example, the alphabet forms one writing system, and Chinese characters another. A script is a particular form of writing system; examples are the Roman alphabetic script and the Greek alphabetic script. An orthography is the way a particular language uses a script; for example, the way the English or [End Page 47] French languages use the Roman alphabetic script. In the concrete, however, there are only orthographies, and without wishing to challenge the traditional distinction, I will frequently interchange script and orthography.The first part of the essay is a discussion of my perspective on writing. My perspective is a substantive part of my case about writing, and I will clarify it at some length. Then I will examine some of the steps that led to our ability to read and write fluently. I will be recommending that in reading histories about writing, we view speech merely as a mediation through which written marks are crafted into meanings. My claim is that every artifact, indeed, every thing, needs to be correctly “read” in order to be used, and that the invention of an elegant system of writing lifts this readability from its specific materiality. For example, to use a fork properly one must be able to read this use in the fork. Language lifts this readability from the matter of the fork, the silver or stainless steel, and makes the readability itself an object.IRecall the last time you were engrossed while reading a novel. Most likely, you were not concerned with questions about the meaning of meaning or the difference between meaning and signification. But did your engaged reading and writing involve an inner speech and, if it did, how did you recognize homonyms, for example the difference between there and their? I suspect that only a small part of our vocabulary is acquired by vocalization. But more importantly, I want to question whether writing must be related to speech to be understood.Frank Smith has persistently questioned the belief that reading must involve vocalizations, and he has criticized the notion that the best way to proceed with reading instruction is by mapping speech onto print. In Understanding Reading, he writes: “Phonics is complicated.... We now know that if we really expect to give children a mastery of phonetics, that we are not talking about a dozen or so rules. We are talking about 166 rules, which will still not account for hundreds of the words they might expect to meet in their early reading.” 2In Reading, he notes: “How is it possible to recognize written words without sounding them out? The answer is that we recognize words in... (shrink)

As a consequence of the problems caused by genetic discrimination, federal and state law makers are being pressured to pass a legislative remedy. A primary question is whether the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 applies to individuals with a potentially disabling genetic disorder who are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic and may never become ill and to healthy individuals who are carriers of genetic conditions. At present, this question has relevance principally for individuals with the genotype for single gene disorders, like (...) Huntington disease and hemochromatosis, and to asymptomatic carriers of single gene disorders such as cystic fibrosis. Although many such single gene conditions exist, the total incidence of these conditions in the U.S. population is less than 0.4 percent. However, the question concerning the applicability of the ADA will become increasingly important because genetic tests will almost certainly be developed in the near future for common multifactorial diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and certain forms of cancer. (shrink)

An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises important questions about sociality, ecology and communication in contexts that encompass many different forms of life. As such, these questions are important for understanding the problem of religion in relation to social theory, as well as understanding our collective, biosocial animal history and the development of human culture, as an articulation of power, on an evolutionary time scale. The argument presented here is that biosemiotics provides a framework for extending Talal Asad’s genealogical critique of (...) religion to culture more broadly, providing an important perspective on power in relation to communication and in relation to the ‘supernatural’ attributes of language in a multi-species environment of signs and sign relationships. (shrink)

This chapter is a call to philosophers to philosophize for their cities and not merely in them. As business-model approaches to higher education increasingly dominate, the place for philosophy within the Academy is likely to continue shrinking. It is the argument of this chapter that demonstrating the importance of philosophy demands a that we shift our focus from the problems and concerns of our colleagues to those of our neighbors. The chapter concludes with some examples of what a more urban-oriented (...) philosophy might involve. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

As a consequence of the problems caused by genetic discrimination, federal and state law makers are being pressured to pass a legislative remedy. A primary question is whether the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 applies to individuals with a potentially disabling genetic disorder who are pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic and may never become ill and to healthy individuals who are carriers of genetic conditions. At present, this question has relevance principally for individuals with the genotype for single gene disorders, like (...) Huntington disease and hemochromatosis, and to asymptomatic carriers of single gene disorders such as cystic fibrosis. Although many such single gene conditions exist, the total incidence of these conditions in the U.S. population is less than 0.4 percent. However, the question concerning the applicability of the ADA will become increasingly important because genetic tests will almost certainly be developed in the near future for common multifactorial diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and certain forms of cancer. (shrink)

Born into a poor, Muslim family at the end of the 19th century, Gama became World Champion wrestler by defeating the reigning Polish champion in London in 1910. By focusing on the life of Gama, the heroic representations of Gama that appear in the Hindi language literature, and the transformations in wrestling regimens that have occurred over the past several centuries, I locate the discourse and practice of wrestling within a context of intersecting concerns with nationalism, class identity and embodied (...) consciousness. To articulate the way in which subaltern identity is embodied in relation to nationalist ideas about masculine fitness, and in relation to the state as a political institution, I provide an analytic interpretation of the heroic body that focuses on themes of nervousness and obsession. (shrink)