Charles Babbage was an English mathematician, philosopher and mechanical engineer who invented the concept of a programmable computer. From 1828 to 1839 he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position whose holders have included Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking. A proponent of natural religion, he published The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise in 1837 as his personal response to The Bridgewater Treatises, a series of books on theology and science that had recently appeared. Disputing the claim that science (...) disfavours religion, Babbage wrote 'that there exists no such fatal collision between the words of Scripture and the facts of nature'. He argues on the basis of reason and experience alone, drawing a parallel between his work on the calculating engine and God as the divine programmer of the universe. Eloquently written, and underpinned by mathematical arguments, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise is a landmark work of natural theology. (shrink)

Charles Babbage'sReflections on the Decline of Science in England… is very well known to historians of science who are aware of its role in the movement to found the British Association for the Advancement of Science and to reform the Royal Society. The work is probably responsible, in large measure, for the assumption that science in Great Britain was in a marked decline in the early decades of the last century, an assumption rarely subject to exact analysis although (...) fairly widely held. Not as widely known is a reply to Babbage written by Gerard Moll of Utrecht and presented to the English reading public by Faraday, one of the men attacked in Babbage's volume. To the best of my knowledge, Babbage's only published rejoinder to Moll appeared in 1851, dismissing Moll and other critics as not having challenged his facts. (shrink)

In what follows, I appeal to Charles Babbage’s discussion of the division of mental labor to provide evidence that—at least with respect to the social acquisition, storage, retrieval, and transmission of knowledge—epistemologists have, for a broad range of phenomena of crucial importance to actual knowers in their epistemic practices in everyday life, failed adequately to appreciate the significance of socially distributed cognition. If the discussion here is successful, I will have demonstrated that a particular presumption widely held within (...) the contemporary discussion of the epistemology of testimony—a presumption that I will term the personalist requirement—fails to account for those very practices of knowers that I detail here. I will then conclude by suggesting that an alternate account of testimonial warrant, one that has heretofore been underappreciated, ought to be given more serious consideration—in particular because it is well suited to account for those actual practices of knowers that the personalist requirement leaves unrecognized. (shrink)

The design of good notation is a cause that was dear to Charles Babbage's heart throughout his career. He was convinced of the "immense power of signs" (1864, 364), both to rigorously express complex ideas and to facilitate the discovery of new ones. As a young man, he promoted the Leibnizian notation for the calculus in England, and later he developed a Mechanical Notation for designing his computational engines. In addition, he reflected on the principles that underlie the (...) design of good mathematical notations. In this paper, we discuss these reflections, which can be found somewhat scattered in Babbage's writings, for the first time in a systematic way. Babbage's desiderata for mathematical notations are presented as ten guidelines pertinent to notational design and its application to both individual symbols and complex expressions. To illustrate the applicability of these guidelines in non-mathematical domains, some aspects of his Mechanical Notation are also discussed. (shrink)

This article examines life assurance and the politics of ‘big data’ in mid-19th-century Britain. The datasets generated by life assurance companies were vast archives of information about human longevity. Actuaries distilled these archives into mortality tables – immensely valuable tools for predicting mortality and so pricing risk. The status of the mortality table was ambiguous, being both a public and a private object: often computed from company records they could also be extrapolated from public projects such as the census, or (...) clerical records. Life assurance more generally straddled the line between private enterprise and collective endeavour, though its advocates stressed the public interest in its success. Reforming actuaries such as Thomas Rowe Edmonds wanted the data on which mortality tables were based to be made publicly available, but faced resistance. Such resistance undermined insurers’ claims to be scientific in spirit and hindered Edmonds’s personal quest for a law of mortality. Edmonds pushed instead for an open actuarial science alongside fellow travellers at the Statistical Society of London, which was populated by statisticians such as William Farr as well as by radical mathematicians such as Charles Babbage. The article explores Babbage’s little-known foray into the world of insurance, both as a budding actuary but also as a fierce critic of the industry. These debates over the construction, ownership, and accessibility of insurance datasets show that concern about the politics of big data did not begin in the 21st century. (shrink)

CHARLES BABBAGE, OUTSTANDING 19TH CENTURY FIGURE ON THEORY OF COMPUTING, URGES ON PROTO-GOODMANIAN AND NEO-MAIMONIDEAN GROUNDS THAT HUME IS QUITE WRONG ABOUT THE PROBABILITY OF MIRACLES’ OCCURRING. AQUINAS’ CLASSIFICATIONS OF MIRACLES INDICATE THAT NOT SINGLE PROBABILITY JUDGMENT IS ALWAYS RIGHT. BABBAGE’S WORK ON COMPUTING STILL CIRCULATES, BUT HIS NINTH BRIDGEWATER TREATISE (ON MIRACLES) HAS LONG DESERVED REPUBLICATION.

The possible impact of general philosophical ideas on the choice of research subject in mathematics is the topic of this paper. I examine a specific case in which the philosophical background is provided by a discussion on the role of language in science, which is associated with the work of Condillac. The area of mathematics considered is functional equations, a difficult chapter of mathematical analysis that began to be developed between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the (...) nineteenth century. The researcher is Charles Babbage , a young British mathematician deeply interested in the recent work of French mathematicians and philosophers of science. (shrink)

In the 1860s and 1870s the logic of Boole and the calculating machines of Babbage were key resources in W. S. Jevons’s attempt to construct a mechanical model of the mind, and both therefore played an important role in Jevons’s attempted revolution in economic theory. In this same period both Boole and Babbage were studied within the Cambridge Moral Sciences Tripos, but the Cambridge reading of Boole and Babbage was much more circumspect. Implicitly following the division of (...) the moral sciences into material and ‘real’ as established by the Rev. Grote, John Venn treated Boole’s logic as a purely formal science, while Alfred Marshall based his psychological model of the mechanical part of the human mind upon Babbage’s two-level machine. From the different perspectives of logic and psychology, Venn and Marshall did not simply incorporate their readings of Boole and Babbage, but also attempted to establish the limits to any mechanical explanation of the mind. This comparison of the attitudes to mental science of Jevons and Marshall provides a foundation from which the differing conceptions of economic theory of the two men can be established.Keywords: Alfred Marshall; Charles Babbage; George Boole; John Venn; Logic; Psychology. (shrink)

Charles Babbage began the quest to build an intelligent machine in the nineteenth century. Despite finishing neither the Difference nor the Analytical engine, he was aware that the use of mental language for describing the functioning of such machines was figurative. In order to reverse this cautious stance, Alan Turing postulated two decisive ideas that contributed to give birth to Artificial Intelligence: the Turing machine and the Turing test. Nevertheless, a philosophical problem arises from regarding intelligence simulation and (...) make-believe as sufficient to establish that programmed computers are intelligent and have mental states, especially given the nature of mind and its characteristic first-person viewpoint. The origin of Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly linked to the accounts that inspired John Searle to coin the term strong AI ―or the view that simply equates computers and minds. Especially emphasising the divergence between algorithmic processes and intentional mental states, the Chinese Room thought experiment shows that, since the mind is embodied and able to realise when linguistic understanding takes place, mental states require material implementation, a point that directly conflicts with the accounts that reduce the mind to the functioning of a programmed computer. The experience of linguistic understanding with its typical quale leads to other important philosophical issues. Searle’s theory of intentionality holds that intentional mental states have conditions of satisfaction and appear in semantic networks; thus people know when they understand and what terms are about. In contrast, a number of philosophers maintain that consciousness is only an illusion and that it plays no substantial biological role. However, consciousness is a built-in feature of the system. Moreover, neurological evidence suggests that conscious mental states, qualia and emotions enhance survival chances and are an important part of the phenomenal side of mental life and its causal underpinnings. This renders an important gap between simulating a mind and replicating the properties that allow having mental states and consciousness. On this score, the Turing test and the evidence it offers clearly overestimate simulation and verisimilar make-believe, since such evidence is insufficient to establish that programmed computers have mental life. In summary, this dissertation criticises views which hold that programmed computers are minds and minds are nothing but computers. Despite the arguments in favour of such an equation, they all fail to properly reduce the mind and its first-person viewpoint. Accordingly, the burden of proof still lies with the advocates of strong AI and with those who are willing to deny fundamental parts of the mind to make room for machine intelligence. (shrink)

Introduction -- Karl Marx's concept of alienation -- Objectification, alienation, and estrangement -- Other origins of alienation and objectification -- Marx's account of alienation : from early to late -- The alienated object of production : commodity fetishism -- The alienated means of production : machine fetishism -- Machines and the transformation of work -- Marx's energeticist turn -- The first law of thermodynamics -- From arbeit to arbeitskraft -- The second law of thermodynamics -- Machines in the communist future (...) -- Technology and the boundaries of nature -- Material wealth and value : the Grundrisse's fragment on machines -- The strife between technology and capital : the fall in the rate of profit -- Enjoyment not value : challenging the logic of exhaustion -- Man himself as fixed capital -- Class kinship and the redistribution of the means of production -- Machines in the capitalist reality -- Between thermodynamics and humanism : approaching capital -- Machinery as an historical category of production -- Machines, trains, and other capitalist monsters -- Rough, foul-mouthed boys : women's monstrous laboring bodies -- Wage labor and race -- Wage labor and sexuality -- Machinery and revolution -- Alienation beyond Marx -- Science and technology in Marx's excerpt notebooks -- Karl Marx and Charles Babbage -- Machines and temporality : the treadmill effect and free time -- Technophobia and technophilia -- Technophobia and twentieth-century theory. (shrink)

This article reviews and brings together two literatures: classical political economists’ views on the skilling or deskilling nature of technological change in England, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when they wrote, are compared with the empirical evidence about the skill effects of technological change that emerges from studies of economic historians. In both literatures, we look at both the skill impacts of technological change and at the “inducement mechanisms” that are envisaged for the introduction of new technologies. Adam Smith (...) and Karl Marx both regarded the deskilling of the labour force as the predominant form of biased technical change, but other authors such as Charles Babbage also took account of capital-skill complementarities and skill-enhancing effects of technological change. For Smith, the deskilling bias was an unintended by-product of the increasing division of labour, which in his view “naturally” led to ever more simplification of workers’ tasks. As opposed to Smith, Marx considered unskilled-biased technical change as a bourgeois weapon in the class struggle for impairing the workers’ bargaining position. Studies of economic historians lend support to Marx’s hypothesis about the inducement mechanisms for the introduction of unskilled-biased innovations, but have produced no clear-cut empirical evidence for a deskilling tendency of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technological change as a whole. Industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rather led to labour polarization, by simultaneously deskilling a large part of the workforce and raising the demand for some high-skilled workers. (shrink)

More than any other aspect of the Second Scientific Revolution, the remarkable revitalization or British mathematics and mathematical physics during the first half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most deserving of the name. While the newly constituted sciences of biology and geology were undergoing their first revolution, as it were, the reform of British mathematics was truly and self-consciously the story of a second coming of age. ‘Discovered by Fermat, cocinnated and rendered analytical by Newton, and enriched by (...) Leibniz with a powerful and comprehensive notation’, wrote the young John Herschel and Charles Babbage of the calculus in 1813, ‘as if the soil of this country [was] unfavourable to its cultivation, it soon drooped and almost faded into neglect; and we now have to re-import the exotic, with nearly a century of foreign improvement, and to render it once more indigenous among us’. (shrink)

This volume is the first extensive study of the historical and philosophical connections between technology and mathematics. Coverage includes the use of mathematics in ancient as well as modern technology, devices and machines for computation, cryptology, mathematics in technological education, the epistemology of computer-mediated proofs, and the relationship between technological and mathematical computability. The book also examines the work of such historical figures as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing.

• Intelligent Tasks: Finding the Next Term of a Sequence • Difference Analysis of Polynomial Sequences • Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine • Finding the Form of the Sequence. • Gaussian Elimination. • Example Application: the Pie Cutting Sequence • What has this to do with Intelligence? • What has it all to do with Consciousness (if anything)?

Dans la première moitié du xixe siècle en Angleterre, autour de Charles babbage (1791–1871), John F. W. Herschel (1792–1871), George Peacock (1791–1858), Duncan F. Gregory (1813–1844), Augustus de Morgan (1806–1871), George Boole (1815–1864), et d'autres auteurs moins connus, un réseau d'algébristes renouvelle singulièrement la conception de l'algèbre, à tel point que leur travail est le plus souvent interprété comme émergence des travaux sur l'algèbre abstraite. Comme ces algébristes sont également des réformateurs impliqués dans la réorganisation de la science, (...) il s'agira de proposer de ces travaux une lecture plus contextuelle, afin d'éclairer leur inscription parmi les effects de la Révolution industrielle (1760–1830), et d'analyser leur rôle de médiation culturelle entre les racines d'un savoir universitaire fondé sur la fidélité aux Anciens, et de nouvelles formes d'élaboration des connaissances. Une médiation marquée par un premier rapprochement entre algèbre et logique. (shrink)

Michael S. Mahoney, professor of the history of science at Princeton University, died in 2008. Born in 1939, Mahoney was already a seasoned historian of mathematics when he became one of the first senior historians to take an interest in the history of computing. He was by no means the first: for example, individuals such as I. B. Cohen at Harvard University and Derek de Solla Price at Yale University had been interested since the 1960s. Moreover, several institutions were already (...) actively engaged: the Smithsonian Institution, the Charles Babbage Institute (founded 1979), the Computer Museum in Boston, and similar organizations in Europe. A journal, the Annals of the History of Computing, was established in 1979. .. (shrink)

Concern over the nature of AI is, for the tastes many AI scientists, probably overdone. In this they are like all other scientists. Working scientists worry about experiments, data, and theories, not foundational issues such as what their work is really about or whether their discipline is methodologically healthy. However, most scientists aren’t in a field that is approximately fifty years old. Even relatively new fields such as nonlinear dynamics or branches of biochemistry are in fact advances in older established (...) sciences and are therefore much more settled. Of course, by stretching things, AI can be said to have a history reaching back t o Charles Babbage, and possibly back beyond that to Leibnitz. However, all of that is best viewed as prelude. AI’s history is punctuated with the invention of the computer (and, if one wants t o stretch our history back to the 1930s, the development of the notion of computation by Turing, Church, and others). Hence, AI really began (or began in earnest) sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s (some mark the conference a t Dartmouth in the summer of 1957 as the moment of our birth). And since those years we simply have not had time to settle into a routine science attacking reasonably well understood questions (for example, many of the questions some of us regard as supreme are regarded by others as inconsequential or mere excursions). (shrink)

The history of the dyestuffs industry during the period 1775–1860 is interesting for three reasons. In the first place it was in connection with the manufacture of synthetic dyestuffs, begun in 1856, that the industrial research laboratory and the organization scientist first unmistakably appeared in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Secondly, there are the enigmas of W. H. Perkin, the man who discovered and manufactured the first coal-tar colours, but who retired somewhat abruptly from the industry in 1874: (...) just after the synthesis of alizarine. Thirdly, the dyestuffs industry was in intimate association with the textile industries which had for a long time been subject to frequent radical scientific and technological innovation. Among the most important of these we may mention John Smeaton's classic paper of 1759 on the maximum work obtainable from a given fall of water: a problem important not only for the abstract science of mechanics, but also for the design of waterwheels—the main source of power for the early textile mills. (The waterwheel was not, during the eighteenth century, the epitome of the quaint and picturesque: it was in the van of scientific and technical progress.) Again, the textile industries were quick to employ the Watt rotative engine; previously a two cylinder Newcomen engine had been tried out. Bleaching powders, based on Scheele's discovery of chlorine and its properties, were rapidly adopted: in this context one cannot help contrasting the indifference of medical science to Davy's early suggestion of using nitrous oxide as an anaesthetic; or Faraday's comment in 1818 on the anaesthetic power of sulphuric ether. The textile industries saw, over this period, a rapid succession of new machines, the pace of invention being so hot that in 1832 Charles Babbage reported that machines became obsolete long before they wore out. A Salford cotton mill was the first industrial establishment to use gas lighting: James Thomson, calico printer, introduced gas lighting to the town of Clitheroe when he installed it in his works. And there were many other important technical and scientific innovations. It was to supply these industries, so well accustomed to change, that the synthetic coal-tar dyestuffs were introduced from 1856 onwards. It is interesting that, so far as we can see, the appearance of these synthetic dyestuffs was the last in the series of major innovations in the textiles and related industries: at least until recent times. (shrink)

This volume is the first extensive study of the historical and philosophical connections between technology and mathematics. Coverage includes the use of mathematics in ancient as well as modern technology, devices and machines for computation, cryptology, mathematics in technological education, the epistemology of computer-mediated proofs, and the relationship between technological and mathematical computability. The book also examines the work of such historical figures as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing.

Leibniz may be considered as the first computer scientist. He made major contributions to engineering and information science. He invented the binary system, fundamental for virtually all modern computer architectures. He built a decimal based machine that executed all four arithmetical operations and outlined a binary computer. The concepts of lingua characteristica (formal language, programming language) and calculus ratiocinator (formal inference engine or computer program) are the base of the modern logic and information science. Leibniz was groping towards hardware and (...) software concepts worked out much later by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. He anticipated the universal Turing machine. (shrink)

The Utrecht professor of physics Gerrit Moll , well-known for his defence of British science against Charles Babbage's Reflections on the Decline of Science in England , did—in co-operation with members of the Natuurkundig Gezelschap at Utrecht—important work on the reception in The Netherlands of the new electromagnetic and electrodynamic discoveries . He also carried out fundamental research into the lifting power of electromagnets, which he had seen during his visit to London in 1828. In 1830, Moll published (...) his experiments with strong electromagnets having maximum lifting powers of 38 kilograms. With the results of similar experiments performed in the United States by Joseph Henry and Philip ten Eyck in mind, Moll continued his experiments with stronger electromagnets . Furthermore; he investigated the ability of very small galvanic batteries to develop a perceptible magnetism in a great horseshoe . A practical physicist, Moll was hardly interested in theoretical explanations. In The Netherlands his experiments aroused interest in the practical applications of electro- magnetic force. In the present paper, Moll's contributions to the science of electromagnetism and electrodynamics are discussed. (shrink)

In 1815, the clever, courted and cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet. Ada didn't. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most (...) progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron's little girl was introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits. Educated by some of the most learned minds in England, she combined that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart and a visionary imagination. As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a steam-driven flying horse. As an exuberant and boldly unconventional young woman, she amplified her explanations of Charles Babbage's unbuilt calculating engine to predict, as nobody would do for another century, the dawn today of our modern computer age. When Ada died - like her father, she was only 36 - great things seemed still to lie ahead for her as a passionate astronomer. Even while mired in debt from gambling and crippled by cancer, she was frenetically employing Faraday's experiments with light refraction to explore the analysis of distant stars. Drawing on fascinating new material, Seymour reveals the ways in which Byron, long after his death, continued to shape the lives and reputations both of his wife and his daughter. During her life, Lady Byron was praised as a paragon of virtue; within ten years of her death, she was vilified as a disgrace to her sex. Well over a hundred years later, Annabella Milbanke is still perceived as a prudish wife and cruelly controlling mother. But her hidden devotion to Byron and her tender ambitions for his mercurial, brilliant daughter reveal a deeply complex but unsuspectedly sympathetic personality. Miranda Seymour has written a masterful portrait of two remarkable women, revealing how two turbulent lives were often governed and always haunted by the dangerously enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that extraordinary father whom Ada never knew. (shrink)

A study of the making of George Peacock's highly influential, yet disturbingly split, 1830 account of algebra as an entanglement of two separate undertakings: arithmetical and symbolical or formal.

Human rights have become one of the most important moral concepts in global political life over the last 60 years. Charles Beitz, one of the world's leading philosophers, offers a compelling new examination of the idea of a human right.

The publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859 ignited a public storm he neither wanted nor enjoyed. Having offered his book as a contribution to science, Darwin discovered to his dismay that it was received as an affront by many scientists and as a sacrilege by clergy and Christian citizens. To answer the criticism that his theory was a theory only, and a wild one at that, he published two volumes in 1868 to demonstrate that evolution was (...) obvious to anyone who cared to look at a bull in a pasture or a dog on a hearth. In response to those who insisted that species were distinct since creation, Darwin pointed to breeders of pigs and pigeons. In reply to those who protested that human intervention is one thing and natural selection another, he argued, "If organic beings had not possessed an inherent tendency to vary, man could have done nothing." To counter those who scorned his descriptions of species in exotic places, he submitted local evidence of cabbages and cauliflower. Based on a wide array of sources, from ancient pictographs to Polish roosters, from skins and from skeletons, from scientific journals and breeding manuals, Darwin assembled a mass of proof--and a hypothesis about species reversion that risked his reputation anew. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication is a two-volume compilation of his thorough and intensive research and the revolutionary conclusions that resulted. The first portion of his work is dedicated to a meticulous analysis of various aspects of plant and animal life, including an inventory of varieties and their physical and behavioral characteristics, investigation of the impact of a species' surrounding environment and the role that both natural and forced changes in this environment have had. Darwin then turns to a richly detailed discussion of the roles of inheritance and crossing in the development of species. A wealth of illustrations further support and enhance his findings. This fascinating, invaluable, and courageous undertaking eventually formed the foundation for our current understanding of evolution. "In science as in politics the victors tend to write the history books. As a result, the record of the past is edited, intentionally or unintentionally, so that it focuses mainly on the precursors of contemporary orthodoxy. Such a focus may accurately represent the genealogy of modern ideas, but it almost inevitably misrepresents the historical experience of their progenitors... Even the powerful, persuasive, and ultimately triumphant theory of evolution by natural selection required not only defense, but repeated buttressing and revision. Variation showed Darwin hard at work on this rearguard action, using the materials he had at hand... His information was gleaned from the observations of fanciers, breeders, and amateur naturalists, as well as from the treatises of those on the cutting edge of zoology and botany. As hindsight narrows the historical spotlight, it imposes its own sense of hierarchy on the preoccupations of the past. But Darwin was interested in all of these topics, valued all of these sources, and belonged, to a greater or lesser extent, to all of these communities."--from the Introduction. (shrink)

Charles Parsons examines the notion of object, with the aim to navigate between nominalism, denying that distinctively mathematical objects exist, and forms of Platonism that postulate a transcendent realm of such objects. He introduces the central mathematical notion of structure and defends a version of the structuralist view of mathematical objects, according to which their existence is relative to a structure and they have no more of a 'nature' than that confers on them. Parsons also analyzes the concept of (...) intuition and presents a conception of it distantly inspired by that of Kant, which describes a basic kind of access to abstract objects and an element of a first conception of the infinite. (shrink)

Autonomy is a vital principle in medical law and ethics. It occupies a prominent place in all medico-legal and ethical debate. But there is a dangerous presumption that it should have the only vote, or at least the casting vote. This book is an assault on that presumption, and an audit of autonomy's extraordinary status. This book surveys the main issues in medical law, noting in relation to each issue the power wielded by autonomy, asking whether that power can be (...) justified, and suggesting how other principles can and should contribute to the law. It concludes that autonomy's status cannot be intellectually or ethically justified, and that positive discrimination in favour of the other balancing principles is urgently needed in order to avoid some sinister results. 'This book is a sustained attack on the hegemony of the idea of autonomy in medical ethics and law. Charles Foster is no respecter of authority, whether of university professors or of law Lords. He grabs his readers by their lapels and shakes sense into them through a combination of no-nonsense rhetoric and subtle argument that is difficult to resist.' Tony Hope, Professor of Medical Ethics, Oxford University 'This book is unlikely to be in pristine state by the time you have finished reading it. Whether that is because you have thrown it in the air in celebration or thrown it across the room in frustration will depend on your perspective. But this book cannot leave you cold. It is a powerful polemic on the dominance of autonomy in medical law, which demands a reaction. Charles Foster sets out a powerful case that academic medical lawyers have elevated autonomy to a status it does not deserve in either ethical or legal terms. In a highly engaging, accessible account, he challenges many of the views which have become orthodox within the academic community. This will be a book which demands and will attract considerable debate.' Jonathan Herring, Exeter College, Oxford University 'This is a learned, lively and thought-provoking discussion of problems central to the courts' approach to ethical issues in medical law. What principles are involved? More significantly, which really underlie and inform the process of seeking justice in difficult cases? Charles Foster persuasively argues, and demonstrates, that respect for autonomy is but one of a number of ethical principles which interact and may conflict. He also addresses the sensitive issue of the extent to which thoughts and factors which go to influence legal decisions may not appear in the judgments.' Adrian Whitfield QC. 'Introducing the Jake La Motta of medical ethics. Foster is an academic street-fighter who has bloodied his hands in the court room. He provides a stinging, relentless, ground attack on the Goliath of medical ethics: the central place of autonomy in liberal medical ethics. This is now the first port of call for those who feel that medical ethics has become autonomized.' Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. "This important book offers a robust challenge to anyone, whether lawyer or 'ethicist', who sees respect for autonomy as the only game in town. It argues eloquently and effectively that, on the one hand, despite the reverence paid to it by judges, in practice the law, even in the context of consent, weaves together a number of moral threads of which autonomy is merely one, in the pursuit of a good decision. It argues on the other hand, that were the day-to-day practice of law to be guided primarily by respect for autonomy, this would be wrong. Foster concludes that whilst, 'any society that does not have laws robustly protecting autonomy is an unsafe and unhappy one', so too would be a society in which too much emphasis was placed on respect for autonomy at the expense of other important moral principles. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of autonomy and indeed of medical ethics, in the law." Michael Parker, Professor of Bioethics, University of Oxford. (shrink)

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition (...) and the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism. Praise for the previous edition. (shrink)

Investigates a complex structure of morality, the demands such morality places on individuals, and the behavioral consequences of the system of right and wrong.

Charles Taylor; X*—The Validity of Transcendental Arguments, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 79, Issue 1, 1 June 1979, Pages 151–166, https://do.

Battle Hall Davies' brother Nick ran away from home when she was in high school. Now he has found her and she is going to stay with him for the summer before starting college. Battle discovers that neither she nor her brother is the person she thought they were.