We examine “de Broglie-Bohm” causal trajectories for the two electrons in a nonrelativistic helium atom, taking into account the spin-dependent momentum terms that arise from the Pauli current. Given that this many-body problem is not exactly solvable, we examine approximations to various helium eigenstates provided by a low-dimensional basis comprised of tensor products of one-particle hydrogenic eigenstates.First to be considered are the simplest approximations to the ground and first-excited electronic states found in every introductory quantum mechanics textbook. For example, the (...) trajectories associated with the simple 1s(1)1s(2) approximation to the ground state are, to say the least, nontrivial and nonclassical.We then examine higher-dimensional approximations, i.e., eigenstates Ψ α of the Hamiltonian in this truncated basis, and show that ∇ i S α =0 for both particles, implying that only the spin-dependent momentum term contributes to electronic motion. This result is independent of the size of the truncated basis set, implying that the qualitative features of the trajectories will be the same, regardless of the accuracy of the eigenfunction approximation.The electronic motion associated with these eigenstates is quite specialized due to the condition that the spins of the two electrons comprise a two-spin eigenfunction of the total spin operator. The electrons either (i) remain stationary or (ii) execute circular orbits around the z-axis with constant velocity. (shrink)

Background: Patient autonomy has been promoted as the most important principle to guide difficult clinical decisions. To examine whether practising physicians indeed value patient autonomy above other considerations, physicians were asked to weight patient autonomy against three other criteria that often influence doctors’ decisions. Associations between physicians’ religious characteristics and their weighting of the criteria were also examined. Methods: Mailed survey in 2007 of a stratified random sample of 1000 US primary care physicians, selected from the American Medical Association masterfile. (...) Physicians were asked how much weight should be given to the following: (1) the patient’s expressed wishes and values, (2) the physician’s own judgment about what is in the patient’s best interest, (3) standards and recommendations from professional medical bodies and (4) moral guidelines from religious traditions. Results: Response rate 51% (446/879). Half of physicians (55%) gave the patient’s expressed wishes and values “the highest possible weight”. In comparative analysis, 40% gave patient wishes more weight than the other three factors, and 13% ranked patient wishes behind some other factor. Religious doctors tended to give less weight to the patient’s expressed wishes. For example, 47% of doctors with high intrinsic religious motivation gave patient wishes the “highest possible weight”, versus 67% of those with low (OR 0.5; 95% CI 0.3 to 0.8). Conclusions: Doctors believe patient wishes and values are important, but other considerations are often equally or more important. This suggests that patient autonomy does not guide physicians’ decisions as much as is often recommended in the ethics literature. (shrink)

We construct a nonlow2 r.e. degree d such that every positive extension of embeddings property that holds below every low2 degree holds below d. Indeed, we can also guarantee the converse so that there is a low r.e. degree c such that that the extension of embeddings properties true below c are exactly the ones true belowd.Moreover, we can also guarantee that no b ≤ d is the base of a nonsplitting pair.

Hume's is/ought distinction has long limited the role of empirical research in ethics, saying that data about what something is cannot yield conclusions about the way things ought to be. However, interest in empirical research in ethics has been growing despite this countervailing principle. We attribute some of this increased interest to a conceptual breakdown of the is/ought distinction. MacIntyre, in reviewing the history of the is/ought distinction, argues that is and ought are not strictly separate realms but exist in (...) a close relationship that is clarified by adopting a teleological orientation. We propose that, instead of recovering a teleological orientation, society tends to generate its own goals via democratic methods like those described by Rousseau or adopt agnosticism about teleology such as described by Richard Rorty. In both latter scenarios, the distinction between is and ought is obscured, and the role for empirical research grows, but for controversial reasons. MacIntyre warns that the is/ought distinction should remain, but reminds ethicists to make careful arguments about when and why it is legitimate to move from is to ought. (shrink)

Mongolian traditional teaching of reasoning.

Data taken by the Mark II detector at the PEP storage ring was used to measure the rate of dilepton production in multihadronic events produced by e+e- annihilation at √s=29 GeV. We determine the probability that a hadron initially containing a b quark decays to a positive lepton to be 0.17-0.08+0.15, with 90% confidence level limits of 0.06 and 0.38. © 1990.

After setting up the classic Platonic doctrine of universals, Zabeeh reviews the Aristotelian and British empiricist attacks on this doctrine, and the doctrine of general ideas. Zabeeh's own "new" look consists in a reworking of many currently familiar ideas to come up with the position that universals are the meanings of general terms and the meanings of general terms are the way in which they are used. While this may do as the start of a semantical theory of universals, it (...) hardly touches the problem of their ontological status. The same basic semantical theory is compatible with realism, conceptualism, or nominalism, as Carnap has shown. Page 33 belongs in place of page 34, page 34 in place of page 32.—E. A. R. (shrink)

This is an excellent addition to Bobbs-Merrill's "Text and Commentary Series." In addition to the text of the Principles, there are eleven critical essays, three of which are original with this volume. Turbayne has arranged the essays to parallel the unfolding of the major themes in the Principles. Thus, he himself opens with "Berkeley's Metaphysical Grammar," which picks up and develops the theme of the centrality of the study of language to the philosophical enterprise, a point Berkeley makes in his (...) "Preface." Next, W. H. Hay and Richard Van Iten are paired together with different perspectives on Berkeley's nominalism. By way of comment on esse is percipi, G. E. Moore and W. T. Stace present their respective refutations of idealism and realism. Richard Popkin discusses skepticism and Berkeley. Popper examines the ways in which Berkeley anticipated Mach and Einstein, as well as significant features of contemporary philosophy of science. Turbayne and Cornman offer differing appraisals of the philosophy of mind that is sketched in the Principles. Paul Olscamp attempts to systematize the elements of Berkeley's critical theory. Finally, J. D. Mabbott treats of "The Place of God in Berkeley's Philosophy" and argues for a radical voluntarism in Berkeley--a not surprising analysis, but one which often gets buried under the epistemological issues raised in the Principles. Turbayne has also supplied an excellent introduction, a chronology of Berkeley's life, a working bibliography, and an analytical index. This enhances the usefulness of an already first-rate book.--E. A. R. (shrink)

Another title in the Modern Studies in Philosophy published by Doubleday under the general editorship of Amélie O. Rorty. Thirteen essays plus part of J. L. Ackrill's translation of the Categories are included. The view is mainly from Oxford and is, in the words of the editor, "piecemeal" and "pluralistic." What this means is that there are three essays on Aristotle's logic, two on his categories, four on his metaphysics, and four on his ethics. Nothing on Aristotle's psychology is included. (...) This, however, is due more to the fact that little has been written on this Aristotelian topic in Anglo-American circles than to editorial oversight. The essays by Woods, Moravcsik, and Urmson were written especially for this volume and the Austin article also appears for the first time. A short bibliography is appended.--E. A. R. (shrink)

Twenty-five selections have been added to this introductory anthology, at least one in each of the eight sections. Most of these additions are from recent sources, and, in particular, the sections on "Body, Mind, and Death" and "Moral Judgments" have been beefed up through these additions. Edwards' section introductions have been revised over the original edition, but Pap's were left as is. The value of the previously excellent, annotated bibliographies has been enhanced by bringing them up to date. In all, (...) A Modern Introduction remains a first-rate text for topic-centered, introductory, philosophy courses.—E. A. R. (shrink)

The author attacks the authenticity and credibility of the biblical tradition in general, with special emphasis on the New Testament Gospels, arguing from the rational and factual contradictions in the text. Christ is an eschatologically deluded ethical teacher whose real message was some sort of esthetic humanitarianism. Unitarianism represents the faith of the future. The naivete of the author may be a virtue in itself, but not in a field where responsible scholarship is a prerequisite.—E. A. R.

This volume can be considered a supplement to A. Plantinga's similar book on the Ontological argument, and includes classic texts and contemporary commentary on both the Cosmological and the Teleological arguments, though there is no extended consideration of the problem of evil as it bears particularly on the Teleological argument. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume and Kant give the classic arguments for and against the Cosmological argument. Geach, Edwards, Plantinga, and Penelhum provide the contemporary commentary. Paley, Hume, Mill, and Kant state (...) and criticize the classical Teleological argument, while A. E. Taylor, Ducasse, and Broad provide the contemporary rejoinder. A concluding postscript includes articles by Smart and Taylor, with a brief selection from Tillich. It is helpful to have as much of the material as is possible on the theistic arguments under one cover. It is unfortunate, however, that editorial limitations and imagination were not stretched or reapportioned to provide some contemporary commentary from outside the orbit of Anglo-American philosophy. In addition, the editor's introduction contains some serious misstatements about the classical Cosmological arguments. The classical argument did not maintain in any sense that God is a "self-causing cause" or that the "Prime Mover is not only the initial member in a temporal series..." ; God is not "the initial member in a temporal series" at all. Nor does the editor distinguish between natural theology and the philosophy of religion; something close to obfuscation is the consequence of this failure in his remark that linguistic analysis has "demonstrated that a definition of God is the starting point for the philosophy of religion."—E. A. R. (shrink)

A popular, ecumenical effort that avoids theologizing, this book offers a short summary of each of the books of the Bible according to content, purpose, style, author and date.—E. A. R.

This is a competent and sympathetic introduction to the life and thought of Leibniz. It reads, on the surface, like an encyclopedia article or a chapter in a critical history of philosophy. But there is a meta-critical strain governing the exposition. Within a limited space, Van Peursen has molded a presentation which manages to balance considerations of what was central to Leibniz' philosophy from Leibniz' point of view with issues which have special relevance for contemporary philosophy. For example, Van Peursen (...) devotes his longest chapter, "The Logic of an Optimal World: Truth, Freedom, God," to the teleological and ethical roots of Leibniz' ontology. Leibniz preferred to stress the nature/grace and best-of-all-possible-worlds aspects of this teleological ontology. But contemporary philosophy has difficulty relating to this way of expressing the Platonic notion of the primacy of the good over the true. So Van Peursen, while not neglecting Leibniz' focus, also draws attention to a modern reworking of this point: the idea, familiar to contemporary semiotic, that syntactics must ultimately be grounded in pragmatics. Beginning students will find this introduction readable and genuinely helpful. Teachers of philosophy will benefit from the author's historical acuity as well as the clarity of exposition. An index and a brief bibliography are included.--E. A. R. (shrink)

Adherence to a few basic principles of textbook reading compilation have made this one of the more worthwhile introductory philosophy texts. In the first place, the editors have given lengthy and frequently complete texts. Anselm's Proslogium, Descartes' Meditations, Plato's Phaedo, and Kant's Prolegomena are given complete or nearly complete; there is a ninety-one page extract from Locke's Essay, over fifty pages of James and nearly forty pages from Whitehead. This still leaves room for ample primary material by Leibniz, Hume, and (...) Schopenhauer. The plan of the book is to frame the important primary text with intellectually contemporaneous discussion of the problems treated in the primary text, and then to bracket each section with a prologue and epilogue drawn—except in the final section where Plato has the last word—from twentieth-century literature relevant to the issues under discussion in each section. The authors are thus able to provide an historical and thematic introduction to philosophy, which together cannot help but impress the beginning student with the unity of philosophical experience. Obviously no single textbook will ever escape the need for supplementation; this one in particular will require those who would like their students to be exposed to more phenomenology and existentialism, and, to a lesser degree, analytical philosophy, to introduce additional reading. But Epstein and Kennedy have provided the basic skeleton to which may be added as much flesh as the instructor desires.—E. A. R. (shrink)

Sixteen articles by fifteen authors, two of which, the ones by Plantinga and Kenny, have never appeared in this form before. Three of the selections have been translated for the first time from French: those by B. A. O. Williams, E. Bréhier, and P. H. J. Hoenen. The latter two selections are the sole representatives of French Cartesian scholarship. This is unfortunate, as Descartes' positive contribution to modern philosophy is better reflected in recent phenomenological and existential philosophy. The dominant tone (...) of this volume is negative and piecemeal, though in terms of this limited approach to Cartesian studies there are many excellent essays in this volume. The balance of the contributors includes Ayer, Moore, Ryle, A. K. Stout, Malcolm, Hintikka, Gewirth, Prichard, Frankfurt, and Alston. The editor has included a very comprehensive bibliography.—E. A. R. (shrink)

This is Duquesne's second book about the current crisis threatening the healthy continuance of the Roman Catholic institution of the priesthood. Roughly three-quarters of the present book is spent rehearsing, in anecdotal and quasi-sociological and psychological fashion, the accelerated thinning of the priestly ranks, which must be alarming to even the most ostrich-headed bishop. In the last part of the book Duquesne puts forth his own proposals as to what must be done if the Church, as an institution, is to (...) retain its special ministers, and thus survive. Celibacy will have to become optional; there must be greater diversification in types of ministry and priestly formation; professionalization must be increased and rationalized; smaller, more tightly-knit communities, on the model of some of the communities in the so-called underground Church, will have to become the rule rather than the exception; etc. The book breaks no real new ground, but is a highly readable summary of the situation in this area to date.--E. A. R. (shrink)

There are no changes of note between this re-issue of Field's book and the previous edition. The book first appeared in 1930 and still remains a solid introduction to the background of Plato's philosophy. The first part gives a sober and balanced account of Plato's life and the form and chronology of the dialogues. The second and third parts detail the moral, political, literary, and philosophical setting of Plato's thought. Three appendices are added. The first defends the authenticity of all (...) but the first and second epistles; the second defends the general accuracy of Aristotle's account of the Platonic forms; the third is a lengthy and valuable summary, with texts, of the history of "Socrates and Plato in Post-Aristotelian Tradition." Field's particular virtue is the consistency with which he separates fact from conjecture in the account of Plato and his work. He is not himself above conjecturing in order to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge, but his conjectures are clearly indicated and moderate in character.--E. A. R. (shrink)

This volume can be considered a supplement to A. Plantinga's similar book on the Ontological argument, and includes classic texts and contemporary commentary on both the Cosmological and the Teleological arguments, though there is no extended consideration of the problem of evil as it bears particularly on the Teleological argument. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume and Kant give the classic arguments for and against the Cosmological argument. Geach, Edwards, Plantinga, and Penelhum provide the contemporary commentary. Paley, Hume, Mill, and Kant state (...) and criticize the classical Teleological argument, while A. E. Taylor, Ducasse, and Broad provide the contemporary rejoinder. A concluding postscript includes articles by Smart and Taylor, with a brief selection from Tillich. It is helpful to have as much of the material as is possible on the theistic arguments under one cover. It is unfortunate, however, that editorial limitations and imagination were not stretched or reapportioned to provide some contemporary commentary from outside the orbit of Anglo-American philosophy. In addition, the editor's introduction contains some serious misstatements about the classical Cosmological arguments. The classical argument did not maintain in any sense that God is a "self-causing cause" or that the "Prime Mover is not only the initial member in a temporal series..." ; God is not "the initial member in a temporal series" at all. Nor does the editor distinguish between natural theology and the philosophy of religion; something close to obfuscation is the consequence of this failure in his remark that linguistic analysis has "demonstrated that a definition of God is the starting point for the philosophy of religion."—E. A. R. (shrink)

Eleven previously published essays presenting a moderately unified argument in favor of the general conception of what Jonas calls the "Philosophy of Life," as well as detailed arguments pointing in the direction of a non-dualistic, realistic, and non-naturalistic philosophy of mind. The "nons" are deliberately placed, as Jonas spends the better part of the book questioning the tenability of dualistic and, especially, materialistic and mechanistically oriented theories of mind. With extraordinary historical sensitivity—at times threatening to dissolve a problem by laying (...) bare the conceptual confusions which surrounded its origins—and with a better than working knowledge of biology and physiology, not to mention anthropology, Jonas argues, on the one hand, that the clues to the dynamism and structure of mind are to be found in such organic features as sentience, motility, and emotion: e.g., the conceptual strands that unite in the notions of causality and truth are rooted in the respective experiences of force and resistance, and vision. On the other hand, Jonas argues for the irreducibility of the subject-object structure of man's relation to nature on the grounds that this is the necessary burden of subjectivity. In all, the book is an impressive performance.—E. A. R. (shrink)

The average, general readings in philosophy anthology have five to seven readings on necessary truth. This volume has fourteen. The old workhorses are here: Kant on synthetic and analytic propositions, Mill on necessary truths, Ayer on the a priori, Quine, Grice, and Strawson on dogmas of empiricism. In addition, Pap has two items, one in the middle of an exchange with Putnam over reds, greens, and the synthetic a priori. There is a tough logical analysis by Hintikka, contributions by Jonathan (...) Bennett and Hanson, and a final exchange between Katz and Quine. The selections are by no means comprehensive, but, as the editors note, this would have been impossible. A seventeen-page bibliography comes closer to fulfilling the completeness criterion. The editors include a short introduction, which really should have been expanded, since it raises some of the ontological issues that implicitly guide the debate that takes place among the selections.--E. A. R. (shrink)

An exciting attempt to establish and elaborate in some detail a method which will achieve the proper compromise between "scientific precision" and "humanistic significance" in cultural anthropology and the history of ideas. The author begins by distinguishing theoretical from overt behavior; the former is his concern, and is defined to encompass the higher products of a given culture: poetry, painting, politics, and metaphysics are the chief examples utilized. A set of seven linear and bi-polar "axes-of-bias" are then detailed as a (...) schematic tool for arriving at the common denominator which may be said to characterize each of these cultural expressions. Sample axes are the Continuity/discreteness axis-bias, Static/dynamic axis-bias, and Order/disorder axis-bias. In addition, the claim is made that the question of whether or not the works of a given personality coincide with a previously determined syndrome can be significantly decided through a content analysis of his works, which results in a profile drawn from his placement on each of these axes. The title of the book is taken from the fact that Romanticism is the chief phenomenon by which the method is tested. The author is careful to guard himself against claiming "objective truth" for any of his analyses, let alone for any of the syndromes he has detailed; and it is this, namely his heuristic theory of theories, that the philosopher will find most interesting, and, perhaps, most debatable.—E. A. R. (shrink)

A dialectically rather than chronologically ordered survey: it moves first through the outright dualism of Descartes, to the primacy-of-soul position of Plato, and then to the extremes of Feuerbachian materialism and Berkeleyean immaterialism. Then, returning to pre-philosophical foundations in an attempt to recapture the lived phenomenon of body-soul unity that each of the above philosophers acknowledged, but lost in a welter of reductive abstractions, Van Peursen considers the non-dualistic and non-reductivist conceptions of primitive man, Homeric man, and Biblical man. Coming (...) back to the philosophers, this time to those of a more hylomorphic stamp, Van Peursen critically discusses Aristotle, and the corps vécu analyses of Gehlen, Plessner, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Finally, Van Peursen treats the variegated positions of Wittgenstein, Hampshire, and Ryle; the former two coming in for guarded endorsement while Ryle is set forth sympathetically, but attacked for his doctrine of the merely indexical "I." In the last chapter, Van Peursen's own phenomenological version of an "I" which is simultaneously embodied and transcendent—the latter owing to its structure as an "oriented" embodiment—is presented in a suggestive but sketchy fashion. The book is valuable as an introduction, and if, in the end, one is prepared to agree with the spirit, if not the letter, of Van Peursen's embodiment theory, then the metaphilosophical lesson he has tried to drum in throughout the book, namely, the danger inherent in philosophers hypostatizing philosophical or scientific abstractions to the detriment of the integral reality which is man, will make this something more than simply a sensitive survey.—E. A R. (shrink)

The book is divided into two parts, the shorter of which documents and discusses the authoritative and Biblical sources for the Christian, and specifically Catholic, notion of natural law. The second section is taken up with conceptual analyses of such notions as the relation between nature and grace, nature and historical situation, and primary and secondary determinations of the natural law. A final chapter considers the possibility and scope of a Christian Sociology. The, in principle, complete integration of nature and (...) grace is maintained throughout in opposition to what Fuchs types as the postulated antinomy between these two orders that characterizes most Protestant theologies. The major confrontation between the Catholic and Protestant positions takes place in the footnotes, which are consequently of extensive bibliographical value.—E. A. R. (shrink)

The merits of this sourcebook are too innumerable to list in entirety but it must be said that it has achieved an almost perfect balance among the requirements of representativeness, comprehensiveness, and structured presentation. The only traditions in religion which are not represented are Christianity and Judaism, and Eliade has made the right decision to presuppose a familiarity with this material on the part of the student so that he might present more material, within a manageable compass, on religions which (...) are less familiar to the occidental mind. There are 360 separate but moderately cross-referenced entries, and in choosing these Eliade has drawn on the primary documents, of course, most heavily. Where these are lacking, however, as is particularly the case with primitive religions, he has provided deftly selected accounts taken from anthropological studies. The selections are grouped around six main themes: I. Gods, Goddesses, and Supernatural Beings; II. Myths of Creation and Origin; III. Man and the Sacred; IV. Death, Afterlife, Eschatology; V. Specialists of the Sacred: From Medicine Men to Mystics and Founders of Religions; VI. Speculations on Man and God. Each of these sections is then subdivided into between five and ten parts, with occasional further structuration going on in some of the subparts. The book would complement any systematic study in comparative religion, and, as might be suspected, meshes beautifully with Eliade's own Patterns in Comparative Religion.—E. A. R. (shrink)

The book is divided into three sections: Law and Ethics, Natural Law, and Judicial Reasoning. The list of contributors is distinguished, but the articles are scarcely that. J. C. Murray's criticism of J. Rawls' attempt to locate justice in a legal order by means of the concept of "fair play," S. G. Brown's criticism of K. Neilsen's nearly ranting attack on Natural Law, and K. Stern's brilliantly suggestive attack on the normative/descriptive dichotomy were all bright spots; but they are not (...) enough to rescue the book from mediocrity.—E. A. R. (shrink)

Hart calls attention to the hitherto unread Bentham which is being made available for the first time in the Athlone Press edition of his works. A re-reading of the complete Bentham is not likely to change the basic picture of his philosophy that is now available, but it will, argues Hart, provide the secure ground for a more fundamental understanding of utilitarianism. And this is a sine qua non for an as-yet-wanting adequate critique of utilitarianism.—E. A. R.

With the exception of standard selections from Moore, Ross, and Prichard, "Contemporary" means post Frankena's "The Naturalistic Fallacy", with most of the selections coming from the literature of the last fifteen years. "Ethical Theory" means Anglo-American analytical ethics, with Frankena, Rawls, and Stevenson holding up the American end. The depth-coverage achieved is perhaps justification enough for such a single-minded approach, and Margolis has not wasted the advantages of his chosen framework by indulging in any idiosyncrasies; the papers are all important (...) because they provoked or significantly continued the twentieth-century discussion. Included are Austin's "Ifs and Cans," Rawls' "Justice as Fairness" and "Two Concepts of Rules," Hare's "'Ought' and Imperatives," and Hampshire's "Fallacies in Moral Philosophy." Other authors represented are Ryle, Nowell-Smith, Foot, Strawson, Hart, Peters, and Quinton. "Moore and Metaethics" and "Duty, Self-Interest, and Welfare" are the two main section groupings. Margolis has put some care into a well-ordered, seventeen page bibliography.—E. A. R. (shrink)

Elsasser outlines in an informal but meticulous fashion an organismic biology which promises, in his opinion, to combine the best features of epigenetic vitalism and preformationist mechanism. Mechanistic reductionism is for Elsasser an unverifiable metaphysical hypothesis; i.e., if the postulate of infinite homogenous classes is dropped from the axiomatics of Van Neumann's proof that the state of any system is, in principle, Quantum Mechanically determinable, it becomes combinatorically obvious that biological systems and classes are radically inhomogenous [[sic]], a fact which (...) operationally bars the way to any complete reductionism. The door is thus opened to an open-ended theoretical biology in which all questions do not have a truth-functional equivalent answer according to the axioms and laws of the science, and prediction in the science becomes statistical in a nonabsolute way. Elsasser is a physicist with more than a casual acquaintance with biology and his argument benefits by his obvious expertise in both of these areas. Philosophically, however, he is a lightweight and relies, in particular, too much on the ontological ice that might be cut by operationalism. Theories are not verified in the stringent operational sense; they are confirmed in a way which is not logically tied to the requirement that all laws be inductively established. Elsasser, however, has so much to say on the problem of reductionism in biology that is of obvious value that the book is easily recommended over these caveats.—E. A. R. (shrink)

Volume VI in Doubleday's Modern Studies in Philosophy series. Martin is responsible for the ten Locke essays, Armstrong for the twelve on Berkeley. The essays on Locke are by Ryle, Yolton, Jackson, Barnes, Bennett, Flew, Monson, Macpherson, and Ryan. The last three cover Locke's political philosophy while the others inevitably concern themselves with Locke's psychology and epistemology. The Berkeley essays are by Broad, Luce, Grave, Marc-Wogau, Cummins, Mabbott, Bennett, Furlong, Beardsley, Thomson, and Popper. Popper's essay is on "Berkeley as Precursor (...) of Mach and Einstein." As with Locke, the other topics are predictable, though a total of three essays are devoted to the role of "God" in Berkeley's philosophy. An index and a short bibliography are appended.--E. A. R. (shrink)

Zaner's "contributions" are expository, critical, and original, in that order of extension. The major part of the text is taken up with an exposition and criticism of the theories of embodiment of Marcel, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, with a strong emphasis on the unacknowledged borrowings of the latter two from Marcel-and, to a less obvious, but equally as important extent, of all three from Bergson. "Embodiment" is taken as a technical term referring to the on-going process by which consciousness relates itself (...) to the world in and through its body. Zaner is sharply critical of what he regards as the ontological bias of each of the three men whose theory of embodiment he examines; for while he is willing to admit the central importance of this problem to philosophy as a whole, he regards an ontological handling of it as a subversion of the ontological neutrality of the phenomenological methods developed by Husserl. The original section of the book outlines a program for a "descriptive-explicative analysis" of the phenomenon of embodiment along basically Husserlian lines, and is extremely suggestive, though highly condensed. An extensive appendix includes the original texts of the major passages cited throughout the book.—E. A. R. (shrink)

A detailed, paragraph by paragraph, interpretation of the De Ente et Essentia. Bobik has supplied his own translation of the text. It is only incidental that his claim to this being the only full-scale commentary in English is negated by the new translation of the Cajetan Commentary ; but the undergraduate and the student who has not yet thoroughly studied the tradition is bound to find Bobik's Interpretation much more approachable than Cajetan's Commentary. Bobik concentrates heavily upon distinguishing and keeping (...) straight the logical and metaphysical themes in Thomas' work and is able to delineate, with more than usual success, Thomas' doctrine of first and second intentions and the always thorny problem of universals. Though his is definitely an interpretive rather than an historical and textual approach, Bobik explicitly rejects such aggiornamentizing as the existential interpretation of Thomas, specifically the reading of esse as "act of existing" rather than as the less theoretically loaded "being." This perhaps accounts for his failure to mention one possible interpretation of the prima via which does not regard the demonstration as limited to a cause of physical motion—as Bobik seems to think. Bobik's efforts may well provoke rather than be provocative for many neo-scholastically oriented philosophers, but there is a good deal of light thrown on Thomas' metaphysics that would be lost if this attitude held sway.—E. A. R. (shrink)

This addition to Herder's "Quaestiones Disputatae" Series is a portion of Rahner's and Overhage's Das Problem der Hominisation; it is very nicely self-contained. After a rapid review of what the ecclesiastical and scriptural sources have to say about the problem of human origins and evolution as a possible explanation of these origins, Rahner launches into a metaphysical analysis of the concepts of "spirit" and "matter," on the one hand, and "causality" and "becoming," on the other. The method is transcendental and (...) the epistemology is that of a critical realism like that of Maréchal and Lonergan. The major innovation comes in Rahner's interpretation of Aristotelian efficient causality. Taking noetic transcendence, i.e., intentional becoming, as the paradigm for all becoming—anything less being a deficient form of the activity of being as spirit—Rahner argues in favor of a cause transcending itself in the production of an effect, whether immanent or transitive. Thus Rahner sees no essential contradiction between the traditional notion of causality, so interpreted, and a theory of biological and human emergence. The going is always rough through Rahner, but the speculative asides he scatters throughout this book on such questions as the unity of the biosphere and sub-organic telism are enough in themselves to justify the trip.—E. A. R. (shrink)

An attractive student edition of the Kritik. The text follows the Akademie edition but with an eye on both of the original editions of 1781 and 1787. The Preface, Deduction, etc. of the A edition are, of course, appended. There is some cause for complaint in that the A and B edition page numbers are included at the bottom of the page and not marginally, an oversight which will make reference inconvenient or inaccurate. A regular index and a valuable analytical (...) index of Kant's own definitions of key terms are included. In addition, the editors have added an appendix detailing the apparatus employed in arriving at this particular edition. Unfortunately the price of the hard-cover edition was not indicated, but the paper edition was given at 10.80 DM.—E. A. R. (shrink)

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in 2018 to harmonize data privacy and security laws across the European Union (EU). It applies to any organization collecting personal data in the EU. To date, service-level consent has been used as a proportionate approach for clinical trials, which implement low-risk, routine, service-wide interventions for which individual consent is considered inappropriate. In the context of public health research, GDPR now requires that individuals have the option to choose whether their data may (...) be used for research, which presents a challenge when consent has been given by the clinical service and not by individual service users. We report here on development of a pragmatic opt-out solution to this consent paradox in the context of a partner notification intervention trial in sexual health clinics in the UK. Our approach supports the individual’s right to withhold their data from trial analysis while routinely offering the same care to all patients. (shrink)

Another edition of the Essay with little, outside of the fact that it is abridged, to distinguish it from various other editions already out in paper.—E. A. R.

Embodiment, Vesey maintains, is the term applied to our experience of an unmediated movement of our body and an unmediated awareness within perceptual experience. Vesey argues for embodiment as the most satisfying explanation of the mind-body relationship chiefly by arguing against substance dualism as presented by the Local Sign theory of sensation and the Ideo-motor theory of bodily movement. The former is deficient because it rests on the false empirical assumption that all perceptual capacities are learned; the latter is inadequate (...) for more complex reasons, the development of which leads Vesey through his own theory of perception and movement. Vesey's own theory rests on contrast between causal, substance dualism and his own favored, non-causal, subject-object duality, which avoids an absolute dualism because of the internal relatedness of its key terms from the outset. The first half of the book presents a concise review and criticism of current non-dualistic views of the mind-body relation other than that of embodiment; here Vesey has a brief and somewhat unsatisfying skirmish with double aspect and identity theories.—E. A. R. (shrink)