The present piece focuses on the influence of Plotinus' understanding of time and eternity as articulated in Plotinus' third and fifth Enneads upon Mīr Dāmād's (d. 1631–2) conception of eternity, perpetuity, and time found in his Book of Blazing Brands (Kitab al‐Qabasāt). Although Mīr Dāmād's conception of eternity, perpetuity, and time resembles that of Plotinus' cosmology and ontology, he departs from Plotinus' hypostases in establishing strict parameters for each domain. Unlike Plotinus, Mīr Dāmād argues that the realm of eternity is (...) reserved for God alone, while the realm of Perpetuity contains the Platonic Forms. For Mīr Dāmād, the realm of time is an effect of the realm of Perpetuity and a tool for human beings to understand how to measure events in the temporal world. Unlike many other Shī'ite philosophers, Mīr Dāmād's articulation of these three cosmological realms incorporates thought found in the works of both prominent Sunni and Shī'ite scholars such as Ibn Sīnā, Abū Ḥāmid al‐Ghāzālī, Suhrawardī, and Naṣīr al‐Dīn Ṭūsī. Although his most successful student, Mullā Ṣadrā Shirazī, had ultimately disagreed with his teacher's cosmological doctrine, he remained influenced by the multitude of sources that his teacher had used. (shrink)

"The day will come when not only my writings, but precisely my life--the intriguing secret of all the machinery--will be studied and studied." Søren Kierkegaard's remarkable combination of genius and peculiarity made this a fair if arrogant prediction. But Kierkegaard's life has been notoriously hard to study, so complex was the web of fact and fiction in his work. Joakim Garff's biography of Kierkegaard is thus a landmark achievement. A seamless blend of history, philosophy, and psychological insight, all conveyed with (...) novelistic verve, this is the most comprehensive and penetrating account yet written of the life and works of the enigmatic Dane who changed the course of intellectual history. Garff portrays Kierkegaard not as the all-controlling impresario behind some of the most important works of modern philosophy and religious thought--books credited with founding existentialism and prefiguring postmodernism--but rather as a man whose writings came to control him. Kierkegaard saw himself as a vessel for his writings, a tool in the hand of God, and eventually as a martyr singled out to call for the end of "Christendom." Garff explores the events and relationships that formed Kierkegaard, including his guilt-ridden relationship with his father, his rivalry with his brother, and his famously tortured relationship with his fiancée Regine Olsen. He recreates the squalor and splendor of Golden Age Copenhagen and the intellectual milieu in which Kierkegaard found himself increasingly embattled and mercilessly caricatured. Acclaimed as a major cultural event on its publication in Denmark in 2000, this book, here presented in an exceptionally crisp and elegant translation, will be the definitive account of Kierkegaard's life for years to come. (shrink)

In this third paper in a series on stochastic electrodynamics (SED), the nonrelativistic dipole approximation harmonic oscillator-zero-point field system is subjected to an arbitrary classical electromagnetic radiation field. The ensemble-averaged phase-space distribution and the two independent ensemble-averaged Liouville or Fokker-Planck equations that it satisfies are derived in closed form without furtner approximation. One of these Liouville equations is shown to be exactly equivalent to the usual Schrödinger equation supplemented by small radiative corrections and an explicit radiation reaction (RR) vector potential (...) that is similar to the Crisp-Jaynes semiclassical theory (SCT) RR potential. The wave function in this SED Schrödinger equation is shown to have thea priori significance of position probability amplitude. The other Liouville equation has no counterpart in ordinary quantum mechanics, and is shown to restrict initial conditions such that (i) The Wigner-type phase-space distribution is always positive, (ii) in the absence of an applied field, the only allowed solution of both equations is the quantum ground state, and (iii) if a previously applied field is suddenly turned off, then spontaneous transitions occur, with no need for a triggering perturbation as in SCT, until the system is in the ground state. It is also shown that the oscillator energy is a fluctuating quantity that must take on a continuum of values, with average value equal to the quantum ground-state energy plus a contribution due to the applied classical field. (shrink)

This is the first in a series of papers that present a new classical statistical treatment of the system of a charged harmonic oscillator (HO) immersed in an omnipresent stochastic zero-point (ZP) electromagnetic radiation field. This paper establishes the Gaussian statistical properties of this ZP field using Bourret's postulate that all statistical moments of the stochastic field plane waves at a given space-time point should agree with their corresponding quantized field vacuum expectations. This postulate is more than adequate to derive (...) the Planck spectrum classically via Boyer's and Theimer's methods, but it requires that the stochastic amplitude of each linearly polarized plane wave in the field contain two independent Gaussian random variables, not just a random phase as has sometimes been assumed. In the succeeding papers in the series, the total motion of a charged HO is described by a fully renormalized dipole-approximation Abraham-Lorentz equation. This leads without further approximation to the following major results concerning this stochastic electrodynamics (SED) of the HO: i) The ensemble-average Liouville equation for the oscillator-ZP field system in the presence of an arbitrary applied classical radiation field is exactly equivalent to the usual time-dependent Schrödinger equation supplemented by an explicit radiation reaction vector potential similar to that of the Crisp-Jaynes-Stroud theory; ii) this SED Schrödinger equation for the HO is incomplete, insmuch as there exists a companion equation that restricts initial conditions such that the corresponding Wigner phase-space distribution is always positive; iii) the wave function of the SED Schrödinger equation has thea priori significance of position probability amplitude; iv) first-order transition rates predicted for the HO by this theory agree with those predicted by quantum electrodynamics for resonance absorption and spontaneous emission, which occurs with no triggering necessary; and v) if SED is taken seriously, then the concepts of quantized energies and photons must be abandoned. (shrink)

This is a remarkably crisp and lucid comparison between Bultmann and Jaspers organized around the former's concept of Christian faith and the latter's notion of philosophical faith. Many of the issues arise from an actual dialogue between the two men over a period of years. Long's book develops some of the two men's difficulties with and misunderstandings of each other. The two men display similarities in their rejection of positivism and system-building and in their recognition of risk and commitment (...) in man's coming to know himself and his relation to the transcendent. But they also have important differences, the most significant and representative of which concerns whether or not to accept any one tradition as being central, authoritative, or exclusively helpful in the quest for self-understanding. For Jaspers, who rejects the centrality of Jesus, every tradition, whether authoritative or kerygmatic, is relative and ambiguous with no particular claim on man. In accepting one particular manifestation of truth as definitive, says Jaspers, theology has turned what is by nature incomprehensible into an object of understanding. Long traces these similarities and differences through chapters on revelation, language, science, and reason. Long's thorough grasp of the issues and the clarity and simplicity of his presentation place the usefulness and importance of this book beyond the topic of Bultmann and Jaspers. With a meta-critical perspective, Long opens up the border between Philosophy and Theology on the Existentialist front in perhaps a more promising way than similar attempts to open it up on the front of linguistic analysis.--S. O. H. (shrink)

A. H. Louie's More Than Life Itself is an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organization of entailment relations in living systems. This book represents a synergy of the mathematical theories of categories, lattices, and modelling, and the result is a synthetic biology that provides a characterization of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a specialization of mechanism, but an expansive generalization of it. Organisms and machines share some common features, but organisms (...) are not machines. Life is defined by a relational closure that places it beyond the reach of physicochemical and mechanistic dogma, outside the reductionistic universe, and into the realm of impredicativity. Function dictates structure. Complexity brings forth living beings. (shrink)

OBJECTIVES: To compare the practices of local research ethics committees and the time they take to obtain ethical approval for a multi-centre study. DESIGN: A retrospective analysis of outcome of applications for a multi-centre study to local research ethics committees. SETTING: Thirty-six local research ethics committees covering 38 district health authorities in England. MAIN MEASURES: Response of chairmen and women, the time required to obtain approval, and questions asked in application forms. RESULTS: We received replies from all 36 chairmen contacted: (...) four (11%) granted their approval, and 32 (89%) required our proposal to be considered by their local research ethics committee. Three committees asked us to attend their meetings. The application was approved by all 36 local research ethics committees but the time to obtain ethical approval varied between six to 208 days. One third of the committees did not approve the project within three months, and three took longer than six months. There was considerable variation in the issues raised by local research ethics committees and none conformed exactly to the Royal College of Physicians' guidelines. CONCLUSION: Obtaining ethical approval for a multi-centre study is time-consuming. There is much diversity in the practice of local research ethics committees. Our data support the recommendation for a central or regional review body of multi-centre studies which will be acceptable to all local research ethics committees. (shrink)

Background: Older, frail patients with multimorbidity are at an especially high risk for disease severity and death from COVID-19. The social restrictions proved challenging for the residents, their relatives, and the care staff. While these restrictions clearly impacted daily life in Norwegian nursing homes, knowledge about how the pandemic influenced nursing practice is sparse. Aim: The aim of the study was to illuminate ethical difficult situations experienced by Norwegian nurses working in nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research design and (...) participants: The research design involved semistructured individual interviews conducted with 15 nurses working in 8 nursing homes in 3 health regions in Norway, within both urban and rural areas. Ethical considerations: Oral and written information about the study was provided before the participants gave their written consent. The transcribed interviews were de-identified. The study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data. Findings: Four ethical difficult situations were identified: (a) turning the nursing home into a prison; (b) using medication to maintain peace and order; (c) being left alone with the responsibility; and (d) s. impact on decision-making. Conclusions: The nurses’ ethical challenges were intertwined with external factors, such as national and local guidelines, and the nurses’ own internalized factors, which were connected to their subjective professionality. This duality inflicted emotional distress and gave nurses few opportunities to perform nursing in a professionally sound and safe manner. (shrink)

Nietzsche's opinions on philosophy and aesthetics developed under strong and lasting impulses from classical antiquity. These were not always the same, for at various periods in his life Nietzsche placed Heraclitus, Empedocles, Aeschylus, and even Socrates and Plato on the highest summit of wisdom. In his so-called first stage of development the pre-Socratics were generally his favourite thinkers, and in the third and last stage these same figures tend to come into prominence again. On the other hand, in the works (...) of Nietzsche's second, rationalistic period, when he was particularly influenced by Comte, Voltaire, and Darwin, Socrates and Plato—usually so hated and despised—are mentioned with affection, with gratitude or even with warm enthusiasm; and so, over and over again, is Epicurus. (shrink)

This is a remarkably crisp and lucid comparison between Bultmann and Jaspers organized around the former's concept of Christian faith and the latter's notion of philosophical faith. Many of the issues arise from an actual dialogue between the two men over a period of years. Long's book develops some of the two men's difficulties with and misunderstandings of each other. The two men display similarities in their rejection of positivism and system-building and in their recognition of risk and commitment (...) in man's coming to know himself and his relation to the transcendent. But they also have important differences, the most significant and representative of which concerns whether or not to accept any one tradition as being central, authoritative, or exclusively helpful in the quest for self-understanding. For Jaspers, who rejects the centrality of Jesus, every tradition, whether authoritative or kerygmatic, is relative and ambiguous with no particular claim on man. In accepting one particular manifestation of truth as definitive, says Jaspers, theology has turned what is by nature incomprehensible into an object of understanding. Long traces these similarities and differences through chapters on revelation, language, science, and reason. Long's thorough grasp of the issues and the clarity and simplicity of his presentation place the usefulness and importance of this book beyond the topic of Bultmann and Jaspers. With a meta-critical perspective, Long opens up the border between Philosophy and Theology on the Existentialist front in perhaps a more promising way than similar attempts to open it up on the front of linguistic analysis.--S. O. H. (shrink)

This monograph offers a crisp, comprehensive summary of the discoveries to date in the field of pre-biological evolution. Supported by extensive references to recent research and quite technical in treatment, the work is comprehensible to any reader with a beginner's knowledge of organic chemistry because the author is careful to focus his discussion around three hypothetical stages of abiotic evolution. The author's argument that the histories of the universe, of the earth, of nature and of man form a continuous (...) evolutionary thread is persuasive, although admittedly an extrapolation based on his conviction in the uniformity of chemical function. The book provides an impressive glimpse into the scope, power and imagination of Soviet scientific research.—T. R. H. (shrink)

Each contributor to this volume, collected in conjunction with St. Louis University's sesquicentennial celebrations, addresses himself to the title topic in terms of his own field. The first part of the book contains essays grouped loosely under the theme "The Environment of Learning." This section is introduced by Ong with a thumbnail portrait of the knowledge explosion, its history, its technological apparatus, its social implications, and its undergirding presupposition: a faith in the intelligibility of the universe. Other essays in the (...) section cover university education, education in Africa, international politics, urban problems, and architecture. In his essay, McLuhan moves from a discussion of architecture to an explanation of a certain art form which integrates separate environmental fragments into a gestalt fusion of artist, art form, and art work. This art form, this "happening," for post-mechanical man is the environment itself plus the programmed structuring of its elements. John Macquarrie builds a doctrine of human responsibility using the creation myth and a little Heidegger to portray man not as the sovereign over creation but as its steward and guardian. The second section deals with specific areas of knowledge. J. R. Zacharias leads off with a superficial account of how scientific training, with its emphasis on objectivity, can lead to moral sureness and of how scientists make moral decisions. This ethical emphasis is maintained as other contributors in biology, law, and business discuss the impact of technology in their area and the "way out" possibilities of the future. The final three essays are moderate by comparison. J. D. Collins, speaking for philosophy, points out that philosophers are characteristically more concerned with their past than with their future, that they delay in order to reflect when others barge ahead, and that consequently for them the knowledge explosion has also been a knowledge implosion. However, he does manage a discussion of philosophy's new "developing patterns," the most significant for him being the convergence of phenomenology and language analysis. M. Eliade gives a short account of the history of religions, and Karl Rahner ends the book with a crisp essay relating Christian eschatology to secular ideologies of the future.--S. O. H. (shrink)

Theories of beauty are often divided into the objective and the subjective. I am doubtful whether a rigid distinction between the two can be maintained. It is difficult for an objective theory to assert that the impression of beauty is received quite passively, without any reaction or co-operation on the part of the subject, which is likely to be similar in the various cases.

THE cult of “art for art's sake,” which had a great vogue at the end of the last century, was, in pictorial art, set aside, or rather absorbed between the two wars by other cults of a similar nature, such as the cult of pure form, of plastic form, of cubism, and these in their turn have been pushed into the background by the sinister spectre of the unconscious. There are genuine problems behind these cults, and they are by no (...) means easy problems. The cult of art for art's sake fell into disrepute; but this was not so much because of its artistic products as because of the kind of life which the devotees of this cult thought they were entitled to lead. (shrink)

The monumental works of Bertrand Russell and Louis Couturat have set a firm pattern of interpretation which many follow in their approach to the Philosophy of Leibniz. In the Preface to the second edition of The Philosophy of Leibniz , Russell reaffirms his contention that “Leibniz’s philosophy was almost entirely derived from his logic”. He welcomes the support provided in Couturat’s La Logique de Leibniz . Russell remarks “No candid reader—can doubt that Leibniz’s metaphysic was derived by him from the (...) subject-predicate logic. This appears, for example, from the paper ‘Primae Veritates’ where all the main doctrines of the Monadology are deduced, with terse logical rigor from the premises; ‘Always therefore the predicate or consequent adheres in the subject or antecedent, and in this fact consists the nature of truth in general—But this is true in every affirmative truth, universal or singular, necessary or contingent’.” Referring further to Couturat, he points out that in his book the “Principle of Sufficient Reason” and “The Identity of Indiscernibles” are “expressly deduced—from the analytic character of all true propositions”. In short, Russell is contending that in formulating his metaphysics Leibniz used the rigorous methods of deductive logic and employed “models” drawn from logic to construct his “picture of reality”, i.e. his metaphysics. (shrink)

: In many discussions, whether general or academic, the Holocaust is used as a warning of how initially small corruptions can lead to terrible consequences. In particular, it has been seen as illustrating the ‘slippery slope’from euthanasia to murder, as showing the consequences of an exaggerated respect for law, and as showing the effects of a corrupt ideology. It is argued that these three points are all somewhat inaccurate, and that 1) the ‘slippery slope’occurred much earlier, the so‐called ‘euthanasia’programme being (...) already murder; 2) it was power rather than law that was excessively respected; and 3) it was the corruption of the sense of moral responsibility that did the real harm, rather than the establishment of any coherent ideology. (shrink)

It has been argued that if an animal is psychologically like us, there may be more scientific reason to experiment upon it, but less moral justification to do so. Some scientists deny the existence of this dilemma, claiming that although there are scientifically valuable similarities between humans and animals that make experimentation worthwhile, humans are at the same time unique and fundamentally different. This latter response is, ironically, typical of pre-Darwinian beliefs in the relationship between human and non-human animals. Another (...) irony is that debate about such issues has facilitated the participation once more of philosophers in questions concerning experimental psychology: ironic because laboratory-oriented psychologists, especially since the turn of the last century, had been eager to establish the independence of their subject from any influence of philosophy and its investigative methods, as well as from any kind of anthropomorphism.In Britain, certainly more so than in the United States, ethical constraints have prevented the development of psychological research with animals along certain routes. By the 1980s British professional and academic societies had published codes of conduct and guidelines for their members, in part responding to public concern about the welfare of animals in the psychological laboratory. What led to the establishment of these codes and guidelines? This paper analyses the historical background against which professional concern for ethical cost in experimental animal psychology began to take shape, leading to the societies' open pronouncements of the 1980s. (shrink)

This is the first-ever critical history of sociology in Britain, written by one of the world's leading scholars in the field. A. H. Halsey presents a vivid and authoritative picture of the neglect, expansion, fragmentation, and explosion of the discipline during the past century. The book examines the literary and scientific contributions to the origin of the discipline, and the challenges faced by the discipline at the dawn of a new century.

In recent years, the genetic testing and selection of IVF embryos, known as preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), has gained much traction in clinical assisted reproduction for preventing transmission of genetic defects. However, a more recent ethically and morally controversial development in PGT is its possible use in selecting IVF embryos for optimal intelligence quotient (IQ) and other non–disease-related socially desirable traits, such as tallness, fair complexion, athletic ability, and eye and hair colour, based on polygenic risk scores (PRS), in what (...) is referred to as PGT-P. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning–based analysis of big data sets collated from genome sequencing of specific human ethnic populations can be used to estimate an individual embryo’s likelihood of developing such multifactorial traits by analysing the combination of specific genetic variants within its genome. Superficially, this technique appears compliant with Islamic principles and ethics. Because there is no modification of the human genome, there is no tampering with Allah’s creation (_taghyīr khalq Allah_). Nevertheless, a more critical analysis based on the five maxims of Islamic jurisprudence (_qawa'id fiqhiyyah_) that are often utilized in discourses on Islamic bioethics, namely _qaṣd_ (intention), _yaqın̄_ (certainty), _ḍarar_ (injury), _ḍarūra_ (necessity), and _`urf_ (custom), would instead reveal some major ethical and moral flaws of this new medical technology in the selection of non–disease-related socially desirable traits, and its non-compliance with the spirit and essence of Islamic law (shariah). Muslim scholars, jurists, doctors, and biomedical scientists should debate this further and issue a fatwa on this new medical technology platform. (shrink)

Edited with New Translation by Richard McKirahan With a New Preface by Malcolm Schofield This book is a revised and expanded version of A.H. Coxon's full critical edition of the extant remains of Parmenides of Elea—the fifth-century B.C. philosopher by many considered "one of the greatest and most astonishing thinkers of all times." Coxon's presentation of the complete ancient evidence for Parmenides and his comprehensive examination of the fragments, unsurpassed to this day, have proven invaluable to our understanding of the (...) Eleatic since the book's first publication in 1986. This edition, edited by Richard McKirahan and with a new preface by Malcolm Schofield, is released on the 100th anniversary of Coxon's birth. This new edition for the first time includes English translations of the testimonia and of any Ancient Greek throughout the book, as well as an English/Greek glossary by Richard McKirahan, and revisions by the late author himself. The text consists of Coxon's collations of the relevant folios of manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus, Proclus and Simplicius and includes all extant fragments, a commentary, the testimonia, a complete list of sources, linguistic parallels from both earlier and later authors, and the fullest critical apparatus that has appeared since Diels’ _Poetarum Philosophorum Fragmenta _. The collection of testimonia includes the philosophical discussions of Parmenides by Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, most of which had been omitted by Diels. The introduction discusses the history of the text, the language and form of the poem, Parmenides’ use and understanding of the verb ‘to be’, his place in the history of earlier and later philosophy and the biographical tradition. In the commentary Coxon deals in detail with both the language and the subject matter of the poem and pays full attention to Parmenides’ account of the physical world. The appendix relates later Eleatic arguments to those of Parmenides. (shrink)

The phenomenological calculus is a relational paradigm for complex systems, closely related in substance and spirit to Robert Rosen’s own approach. Its mathematical language is multilinear algebra. The epistemological exploration continues in this paper, with the expansion of the phenomenological calculus into the realm of anisotropy.

On the basis of previous studies in relational biology and the phenomenological calculus, in my contribution I outline the mathematical foundations of biological perception generally, and visual perception specifically. In this approach, the premise is that objects in nature are not directly accessible, and that real manifestations are projections of these invariant objects. The morphology of observables is mathematically entailed by the duality of projections and projectors in a bilinear algebra that is the phenomenological calculus. The relationships between what is (...) not directly accessible (which can be defined as noumena) and phenomena may be explicated in terms of metabolism and repair, whence a geometric theory of the perceived, the visible in particular, may be formulated in the category-theoretic language of relational biology. (shrink)

The Bhagavad-Gītā is the most important text in the smrti literature of India, as distinct from the śruti literature which is traditionally regarded as ultimately authoritative. The Bhagavad-Gītā has been assigned a date ranging from the fifth century B.C. to the second century B.C. The Indian religious tradition places the Gītā at the end of the third age of the present cycle of the universe and the beginning of the fourth, namely the Kali Yuga to which we belong.

The term Sustainable Development has been used in many different contexts and consequently has come to represent many different ideas. The purpose of this paper was to explore the underlying meaning of the term Sustainable Development, and to assess the dominant ethic behind such meaning. Through this exploration, we uncovered a change in the semantic meaning of the term, and described what that meaning entails. The term Sustainable Development had the potential, we argue, to stimulate discursive engagement with respect to (...) the future development of society within an ethical framework based around the values of inclusivity, diversity, and integration. The importance of philosophical context within which the term is used influences the definitional process of meaning, and has been simulated into the language of the dominant scientific-economic paradigm. We go on to explore how this meaning change has come about. In doing so we looked to the Enlightenment period and the resulting philosophies to explore the foundations of meaning, and then to the work of Jürgen Habermas to explain how the scientific-economic paradigm came to dominate the meaning of Sustainable Development. (shrink)