Rescher's introduction combines interesting and salient material on the sources of this work and the study of logic in al-Fârâbî's time. The translation has marginal page and line references to the Arabic text.--C. E. B.

Rousseau considered the Émile to be the most important of all his writings and thought it would be the one to seal his reputation as a thinker. It is not that the Émile is different in any fundamental respect from his other writings, for Rousseau insisted that however the subject might vary he always wrote according to the same principles. No, it is simply that Rousseau develops his basic argument more clearly and at greater length in this, his last substantive (...) work explicitly intended for the public. As Rousseau would have it, this work shows most clearly that man is good by nature, that he is naturally attracted to justice as well as order, that both vice and error are foreign to his original make-up, that they arose only because of society, and that the ills from which man now suffers because of the poor organization of society can be mitigated. These and many other intriguing lines of thought are developed in the Émile as Rousseau pursues his declared goal of explaining how to raise a youth according to nature. Yet until now the subtlety, not to mention the simple formal structure, of Rousseau’s treatise has not been accessible to the English-reading public. With this new translation of the Émile, Allan Bloom has made it possible for those who read only English to encounter Rousseau on his own terms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish OrientalismE. C. Graf (bio)My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good than harm.—Miguel (...) de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation]We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale.—Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation]While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”!—Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28–30 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child (c. 1490). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ©1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening (1941). Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ©1999 Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York.For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. 1 The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts [End Page 68] to describe it. 2 Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes.Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. 3 Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 4 Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries.In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a... (shrink)

For all of the emphasis on quality improvement—as well as the acknowledged overlap between assessment of the quality of healthcare services and clinical ethics—the quality of clinical ethics consultation has received scant attention, especially in terms of empirical measurement. Recognizing this need, the second edition of Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation identified four domains of ethics quality: (1) ethicality, (2) stakeholders’ satisfaction, (3) resolution of the presenting conflict/dilemma, and (4) education that translates into knowledge. This study is the (...) first, to our knowledge, to directly measure all of these domains. Here we describe the quality improvement process undertaken at a tertiary care academic medical center, as well as the tools developed to measure the quality of ethics consultation, which include post-consultation satisfaction surveys and weekly case conferences. The information gained through these tools helps to improve not only the process of ethics consultation, but also the measurement and assurance of quality. (shrink)

The influence of age and formal education on the development of moral reasoning in a Spanish sample of students was assessed by using a Spanish translation of Rest's Defining Issues Test. Our results support the hypothesis that moral development is highly related to both variables in our cultural context, although more so with formal education than with age.

The Emergence of Israel in the Twelfth and Eleventh Centuries B.C.E. By Volkmar Fritz, translated by James W. Barker. Biblical Encyclopedia, vol. 2. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011. Pp. xviii + 268. $32.95.

Some properties and an algorithm for solving systems of multivariate polynomial equations over finite fields are presented. It is then shown how formulas of propositional logics can be translated into polynomials over finite fields in such a way that several logic problems are expressed in terms of algebraic problems. Consequently, algebraic properties and algorithms can be used to solve the algebraically-represented logic problems. The methods described herein combine and generalise those of various previous works.

This early study is a key work, along with several other preliminary essays, for understanding the genesis of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Well translated and with an excellent introduction and notes, the book contains the critical thesis that former theories of the imagination confused perception with imagination, and that imagination was properly recognized first by Husserl and was subsequently further clarified by Sartre in his notion of the nihilating consciousness. --E. S. C.

The debate over how to best guide HIV-infected mothers in resource-poor settings on infant feeding is more than two decades old. Globally, breastfeeding is responsible for approximately 300,000 HIV infections per year, while at the same time, UNICEF estimates that not breastfeeding (formula feeding with contaminated water) is responsible for 1.5 million child deaths per year. The largest burden of these infections and deaths occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using this region as an example of the burden faced more generally in (...) other resource-poor settings, we contrast the evolution of the clinical standard of care for infant feeding with HIV-infected mothers in high-income countries to the current international clinical guidelines for HIV-infected mothers and infant feeding in resource-poor settings. While the international guidelines of exclusive breastfeeding for a 6-month period seem to offer the least-worst strategy for reducing mother-to-child transmission of HIV during infancy while conferring some immunity through breastfeeding post-6 months, we argue that the impact of the policy on mothers and healthcare workers on the ground is not well understood. The harm reduction approach on the level of health policy translates into a complicated, painful moral dilemma for HIV-positive mothers and those offering them guidance on infant feeding. We argue that the underlying socio-economic disparities that continue to fuel the need for a harm reduction policy on infant feeding and the harm to women and children justify: (1) that higher priority be given to solving the infant feeding dilemma with improved data on safe feeding alternatives, and (2) support of innovative, community-driven solutions that address the particular economic and cultural challenges that continue to result in HIV-transmission to children within these communities. (shrink)

Technology has advanced significantly over the past decades. Significant changes have occurred in the field of translation with the development of programs such as Google.translate and Yandex.translator. The presented applications are already being actively implemented in translation agencies to optimize translation activities, where written translations of documents, articles, annotations, etc. must be provided to customers as quick as possible. While working with popular science text, online programs help translators gain time, but this requires to edit the text. The artistic (...) style requires more concentration and dedication, because. the means of expression presented in it require taking into account the context and nuances of the use of certain units of language. Machine translation has the potential to become an indispensable assistant in the hands of a translator. This article discusses machine translation of expressive means, namely metaphors. The study is illustrated with examples and a comparative analysis of the translation of metaphorical units is carried out, the classification of metaphors is identified and an analysis is carried out with which means of expression the translator is able to cope with. The difficulties of translating metaphors are analyzed. (shrink)

In the history of the Indian grammatical tradition, Bhartṛhari (about fifth century C.E.) is the fourth great grammarian - after Pāṇini, Kātyāyana and Patañjali - and the first to make the philosophical aspects of language and grammar the main subject of an independent work. This work, the Vākyapadīya (VP), consists of about 2000 philosophical couplets or kārikās. Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, the VP has been known to Western Sanskritists, but its language-philosophical contents have started to receive (...) serious attention only in the last few decennia. The subject matter of the VP resonates strongly with crucial themes in twentieth-century Western thought, although the background and the way the issues are elaborated are quite different. Scholars have compared and contrasted Bhartṛhari's ideas with those of de Saussure, Wittgenstein and Derrida. A theme which, as a leitmotiv, pervades the entire VP is the relation between language, thought and reality. In several Indian traditions, a proper insight into this relation was (and still is) held to be of importance for attaining 'liberation'. (shrink)

Bacteria use trans‐translation to rescue stalled ribosomes and target incomplete proteins for proteolysis. Despite similarities between tRNAs and transfer‐messenger RNA (tmRNA), the key molecule for trans‐translation, new structural and biochemical data show important differences between translation and trans‐translation at most steps of the pathways. tmRNA and its binding partner, SmpB, bind in the A site of the ribosome but do not trigger the same movements of nucleotides in the rRNA that are required for codon recognition by tRNA. tmRNA‐SmpB moves from (...) the A site to the P site of the ribosome without subunit rotation to generate hybrid states, and moves from the P site to a site outside the ribosome instead of to the E site. During catalysis, transpeptidation to tmRNA appears to require the ribosomal protein bL27, which is dispensable for translation, suggesting that this protein may be conserved in bacteria due to trans‐translation. These differences provide insights into the fundamental nature of trans‐translation, and provide targets for new antibiotics that may have decrease cross‐reactivity with eukaryotic ribosomes. (shrink)

Israel in the Persian Period: The Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.E. By Erhard S. Gerstenberger, translated by Siegfried S. Schatzmann. Biblical Encyclopedia, vol. 8. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011. Pp. xviii + 575. $65.95.

Italian translation of "Holes and Other Superficialities" (1994).

Few figures of the Middle Ages command the attention of so many modern disciplines as Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253). Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science are all areas which his life and thought continue to have significance and to inspire re-interpretation. Accompanied by a series of original commentaries, this new edition of Grosseteste's work, with English translation, draws together the perspectives of modern scientists and medieval specialists. Volume I of a six volume series, Knowing and Speaking presents two of the earliest (...) of Grosseteste's works, the treatises On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds. These are accompanied by a significant Middle English treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts whose anonymous fifteenth-century author translated and excerpted passages from Grosseteste's treatises in a re-imagining of their structure and function.0Each work is treated separately within the volume, which is constructed in three parts. On the Liberal Arts sets Grosseteste's thoughts on the arts subjects and emphasises moral concerns about the purpose of learning. On the Generation of Sounds builds on the theories and statements of On the Liberal Arts in connection to the production of sound, elaborating the earlier position, relating the generation of sounds to human vocal and speech production. (shrink)