Measured inequality has increased tremendously between the 1960s and 1990s, not only in the United States but throughout the majority of industrial nations. Wages among people of the same race and gender have become less equal. The hours worked by men have fallen, and the drop has been more pronounced among those who earn lower wages—as a result, inequality in labor income, which is the product of the wage rate and hours worked, has increased relative to inequality in wage rates. (...) Moreover, among married couples, employment of the wives of high-income men has increased until these wives are approximately as likely to be employed outside the home as are the wives of low-income men, who have always worked for wages. In addition, due to assortative mating, wage rates of husbands and wives are positively correlated, and it is clear that the growth in inequality of labor incomes among families has outstripped the growth in inequality in individual labor income. Finally, only the highest-income families have savings in excess of home equity and company-sponsored pensions, which implies that inequality in wealth among families has been exacerbated by the growth in stock prices. (shrink)

University of Chicago Press, 2001 Review by Adriano Palma, Ph.D. on Aug 1st 2001 Volume: 5, Number: 31.

The influence of historiography on aspects of political thought in France, Italy and Germany. In recent years the overlap between political thought and historiography has changed the boundaries of intellectual history. Donald Kelley, the longtime editor of The Journal of the History of Ideas has played a leading part in this process. These essays by his friends and former students follow in his footsteps. The collection is divided into three parts: France, England [six essays], and Italy and Germany [four (...) essays]. Anthony Grafton and John Salmon provide an introduction, and the volume concludes with a bibliography of Donald Kelley's many works. Historians and Ideologues is designed for those with an interest in the contribution of historiography to political thought, and will be a timely addition to the growing reaction against the postmodern scepticism in historiographical research in this field. Contributors include Ann Blair, Julian Franklin, Kathleen Parrow, David Harris Sacks, Sarah Hanley, Daniel Woolf, Gordon Schochet, Joseph Levine, John Pocock, Perez Zagorin, William Connell, Donald Phillip Verene, and Michael Carhart. Anthony Grafton is a Professor in the Department of History at Princeton University. John Salmon is the Marjorie Walter Goodheart Emeritus Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College. (shrink)

The Cambridge Companion to Socrates is a collection of essays providing a comprehensive guide to Socrates, the most famous Greek philosopher. Because Socrates himself wrote nothing, our evidence comes from the writings of his friends (above all Plato), his enemies, and later writers. Socrates is thus a literary figure as well as a historical person. Both aspects of Socrates' legacy are covered in this volume. Socrates' character is full of paradox, and so are his philosophical views. These paradoxes have led (...) to deep differences in scholar's interpretation of Socrates and his thought. Mirroring this wide range of thought about Socrates, this volume's contributors are unusually diverse in their background and perspective. The essays in this volume were authored by classical philologists, philosophers, and historians from Germany, Francophone Canada, Britain, and the United States, and they represent a range of interpretive and philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Finally, in four chapters greatly expanded for this edition, Griffin considers the latest scientific research on animal consciousness, pro and con, and...

I argue that consciousness is an aspect of an agent's intelligence, hence of its ability to deal adaptively with the world. In particular, it allows for the possibility of noting and correcting the agent's errors, as actions performed by itself. This in turn requires a robust self-concept as part of the agent's world model; the appropriate notion of self here is a special one, allowing for a very strong kind of self-reference. It also requires the capability to come to see (...) that world model as residing in its belief base , while then representing the actual world as possibly different, i.e., forming a new world-model. This suggests particular computational mechanisms by which consciousness occurs, ones that conceivably could be discovered by neuroscientists, as well as built into artificial systems that may need such capabilities. Consciousness, then, is not an epiphenomenon at all, but rather a key part of the functional architecture of suitably intelligent agents, hence amenable to study as much as any other architectural feature. I also argue that ignorance of how subjective states could be essentially functional does not itself lend credibility to the view that such states are not essentially functional; the strong self-reference proposal here is one possible functional explanation of consciousness. (shrink)

Sightings of the revolutionary comet that appeared in the skies of evolutionary biology in 1976—the selfish gene—date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries. It became generally recognized that genes were located on chromosomes and compete with each other in a manner consistent with the later appellation “selfish.” Chromosomes were seen as disruptable by the apparently random “cut and paste” process known as recombination. However, each gene was only a small part of its chromosome. On a statistical basis a (...) gene should escape disruption for many generations. This led George Williams and Richard Dawkins to a new definition of the gene, differing from conventional biochemical definitions in that there were no consistent genic boundaries. There had been no previous sightings of another revolutionary, albeit less verbally spectacular, comet that appeared in 1975—the homostability principle of Akiyoshi Wada. Each gene has a base composition “accent” that distinguishes it from its neighbors. We now see that recombination can be triggered by the shift in base composition at genic boundaries. Hence, the Williams-Dawkins definition approaches the conventional definitions. (shrink)

The Cambridge Companion to Socrates is a collection of essays providing a comprehensive guide to Socrates, the most famous Greek philosopher. Because Socrates himself wrote nothing, our evidence comes from the writings of his friends , his enemies, and later writers. Socrates is thus a literary figure as well as a historical person. Both aspects of Socrates' legacy are covered in this volume. Socrates' character is full of paradox, and so are his philosophical views. These paradoxes have led to deep (...) differences in scholars' interpretations of Socrates and his thought. Mirroring this wide range of thought about Socrates, this volume's contributors are unusually diverse in their background and perspective. The essays in this volume were authored by classical philologists, philosophers and historians from Germany, Francophone Canada, Britain and the United States, and they represent a range of interpretive and philosophical traditions. (shrink)

The 'history of ideas', better known these days as intellectual history, is a flourishing field of study which has been the object of much controversy but hardly any historical exploration. This major new work from Donald R. Kelley is the first comprehensive history of intellectual history, tracing the study of the history of thought from ancient, medieval and early modern times, its emergence as the 'history of ideas' in the 18th century, and its subsequent expansion. The point of departure (...) for this study is the perspective opened up by Victor Cousin in the early 19th-century on 'Eclecticism' and its association with the history of philosophy established by Renaissance scholars. Kelley considers a broad range of topics, including the rivalry between 'ideas' and language, the rise of cultural history, the contributions of certain 19th- and 20th-century practitioners of the history of ideas in interdisciplinary areas of philosophy, literature and the sciences, and finally the current state of intellectual history. The central theme of the book is the interplay between the canon of philosophical thought and the tradition of language and textual study, the divergence of the latter marking the 'descent of ideas' into the realm of cultural history. (shrink)

Sightings of the revolutionary comet that appeared in the skies of evolutionary biology in 1976—the selfish gene—date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries. It became generally recognized that genes were located on chromosomes and compete with each other in a manner consistent with the later appellation “selfish.” Chromosomes were seen as disruptable by the apparently random “cut and paste” process known as recombination. However, each gene was only a small part of its chromosome. On a statistical basis a (...) gene should escape disruption for many generations. This led George Williams and Richard Dawkins to a new definition of the gene, differing from conventional biochemical definitions in that there were no consistent genic boundaries. There had been no previous sightings of another revolutionary, albeit less verbally spectacular, comet that appeared in 1975—the homostability principle of Akiyoshi Wada. Each gene has a base composition “accent” that distinguishes it from its neighbors. We now see that recombination can be triggered by the shift in base composition at genic boundaries. Hence, the Williams-Dawkins definition approaches the conventional definitions. (shrink)

A collection of essays from some of the world's leading intellectual historians, representing an international spectrum of research into the history of philosophy, intellect, science and music. This collection of essays addresses, in specific historical ways and from particular disciplinary standpoints, the problem of knowledge and what used to be called the classification of the sciences. What is, or what passes for, knowledge? What are its divisions, and how should they be related? Who possesses this knowledge, and to what uses (...) has it been put? How is it transmitted, and how can its history be understood and written? Ranging across the epistemological barrier formed by the revolution of modern science, these contributions inquire into the changing disciplinary patterns of the tumultuous times between the renaissance and the enlightenment, that saw the fragmentation of old ideals and the creation of European modernity. Contributors: Donald R. Kelley, Ann Blair, Paul Nelles, Constance Blackwell, Ulrich Schneider, Martin Mulsow, J.B. Schneewind, Donald Verene, Peter Miller, Ann Moyers, Michael Seidler, Anthony Pagden, Paula Findlen, Anthony Grafton, Heikki Mikkeli, Nicholas Jardine, Londa Schiebinger. (shrink)

My purpose is to offer an assessment of the scientific legacy of Converse's “Belief Systems” by reviewing five productive lines of research stimulated by his authoritative analysis and unsettling conclusions. First I recount the later life history of Converse's notion of “nonattitudes,” and suggest that as important as nonattitudes are, we should be paying at least as much attention to their opposite: attitudes held with conviction. Second, I argue that the problem of insufficient information that resides at the center of (...) Converse's analysis has not gone away, and that newly fashioned models of information processing offer only partial remedies. Third, I suggest that the concept of the “average voter” is a malicious fiction, as it blinds us to the enormous variation in political attention, interest, and knowledge that characterizes mass publics, in Converse's time as in our own. Fourth, I develop an affirmative aspect of Converse's analysis that has mostly been overlooked: namely, that if ideological reasoning is beyond most citizens’ capacity and interest, they might fall back on a simple and reasonable alternative, which I will call “group‐centrism.” And fifth, I consider the possibility that while the majority of individual citizens falls short of democratic standards, the public as a whole might do rather well. (shrink)

The use of analogy is an important component of human cognition. The type of analogy we produce and communicate depends heavily on a number of factors, such as the setting, the level of domain expertise present, and the speaker's goal or intent. In this observational study, we recorded economics experts during scientific discussion and examined the categorical distance and structural depth of the analogies they produced. We also sought to characterize the purpose of the analogies that were generated. Our results (...) supported previous conclusions about the infrequency of superficial similarity in subject-generated analogs, but also showed that distance and depth characteristics were more evenly balanced than in previous observational studies. This finding was likely due to the nature of the goals of the participants, as well as the broader nature of their expertise. An analysis of analogical purpose indicated that the generation of concrete source examples of more general target concepts was most prevalent. We also noted frequent instances of analogies intended to form visual images of source concepts. Other common purposes for analogies were the addition of colorful speech, inclusion (i.e., subsumption) of a target into a source concept, or differentiation between source and target concepts. We found no association between depth and either of the other _two_ characteristics, but our findings suggest a relationship between purpose and distance; i.e., that visual imagery typically entailed an outside-domain source whereas exemplification was most frequently accomplished using within-domain analogies. Overall, we observed a rich and diverse set of spontaneously produced analogical comparisons. The high degree of expertise within the observed group along with the richly comparative nature of the economics discipline likely contributed to this analogical abundance. (shrink)

The theory of evolution unites the past, present, and future of living things. It puts humanity's place in the universe into necessary perspective. Despite a history of controversy, the evidence for evolution continues to accumulate as a result of many separate strands of incredible scientific sleuthing. In The Story of Evolution in 25 Discoveries, Donald R. Prothero explores the most fascinating breakthroughs in piecing together the evidence for evolution. In twenty-five vignettes, he recounts the dramatic stories of the people (...) who made crucial discoveries, placing each moment in the context of what it represented for the progress of science. He tackles topics like what it means to see evolution in action and the distance between species in space and time, following figures from Darwin to lesser-known researchers as they unlock the mysteries of the fossil record, the earth, and the universe. The book also features the stories of animal species strange and familiar, including humans-and our ties to some of our closest relatives and more distant cousins. Prothero's wide-ranging tales showcase awe-inspiring and bizarre aspects of nature and the powerful insights they give us into the way that life works. (shrink)

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein chose as his prime exemplar of certainty the fact that the skulls of normal people are filled with neural tissue, not sawdust. In 1980 the British pediatrician John Lorber reported that some normal adults, apparently cured of childhood hydrocephaly, had no more than 5 % of the volume of normal brain tissue. While initially disbelieved, Lorber’s observations have since been independently confirmed by clinicians in France and Brazil. Thus Wittgenstein’s certainty has become uncertain. Furthermore, the paradox (...) that the human brain’s information content appears to exceed the storage capacity of even normal-sized brains, requires resolution. This article is one of a series on disparities between brain size and its assumed information content, as seen in cases of savant syndrome, microcephaly, and hydrocephaly, and with special reference to the Victorian era views of Conan Doyle, Samuel Butler, and Darwin’s research associate, George Romanes. The articles argue that, albeit unlikely, the scope of explanations must not exclude extracorporeal information storage. (shrink)

In Fortunes of History Donald R. Kelley offers an authoritative examination of historical writing during the "long nineteenth century"--the years from the French Revolution to those just after the First World War. He provides a comprehensive analysis of the theories and practices of British, French, German, Italian, and American schools of historical thought, their principal figures, and their distinctive methods and self-understandings. Kelley treats the modern traditions of European world and national historiography from the Enlightenment to the "new histories" (...) of the twentieth century, attending not only to major authors and schools but also to methods, scholarship, criticisms, controversies, ideological questions, and relations to other disciplines. (shrink)

Aberrations -- Absorption -- Accuracy and precision -- Alpha radiation -- Amplitude -- Angular forces -- Angular momentum -- Antenna -- Arago dot -- Aperture -- Archimedes's principle -- Band theory of solids -- Bernoulli's principle -- Beta radiation -- Blackbody radiation -- Bohr atom -- Bose condensation -- Bra-ket notation -- British thermal unit (BTU) -- Calculating system efficiency -- Circular motion -- Closed systems and isolated systems -- Concave and convex -- Conservation of charge -- Conservation of energy (...) -- Convection and conduction -- Cosmic radiation -- Crest and trough -- Density and specific gravity -- Diode -- Distance and area -- Distortion -- Doppler effect -- Dynamic systems theory -- Edison effect -- Eigenvectors -- Elastic and inelastic collisions -- Electric circuits: Parallel vs series, diagrams and components -- Electric potential -- Energy and power -- Enthalpy -- Entropy -- Euler's laws of motion -- Falling bodies and physics -- Faraday's law -- Feynman diagrams -- Flywheel -- Focal point -- Free body diagram -- Frequency -- Gamma radiation -- Gauss's law -- Gluon -- Gravitational potential energy -- Harmonic oscillator -- Harmonics -- Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- Higgs boson -- Horsepower -- Ideal gas law -- Joule --. (shrink)

Jung said that all human beings have a religious instinct, a longing for wholeness, and that God is a part of every human being. This volume organizes more than 6,000 references to "God" in Jung's work and contains a chronology of his writing on the subject.

In this book, one of the world's leading intellectual historians offers a critical survey of Western historical thought and writing from the pre-classical era to the late eighteenth century. Donald R. Kelley focuses on persistent themes and methodology, including questions of myth, national origins, chronology, language, literary forms, rhetoric, translation, historical method and criticism, theory and practice of interpretation, cultural studies, philosophy of history, and "historicism." Kelley begins by analyzing the dual tradition established by the foundational works of Greek (...) historiography--Herodotus's broad cultural and antiquarian inquiry and the contrasting model of Thucydides' contemporary political and analytical narrative. He then examines the many variations on and departures from these themes produced in writings from Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian antiquity, in medieval chronicles, in national histories and revisions of history during the Renaissance and Reformation, and in the rise of erudite and enlightened history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Throughout, Kelley discusses how later historians viewed their predecessors, including both supporters and detractors of the authors in question. The book, which is a companion volume to Kelley's highly praised anthology Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, will be a valuable resource for scholars and students interested in interpretations of the past. (shrink)

Arthur O. Lovejoy conceived of the history of ideas as an interdisciplinary study, encompassing a variety of fields, including literary history, comparative literature, the history of folklore and ethnography, the history of language and the history of religious beliefs. This volume gathers together some of the most significant articles concerning the theory and practice of intellectual history, by Lovejoy himself and other scholars. Contributors: DONALD R. KELLEY, ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY, FREDERICK J. TEGGART, LEO SPITZER, THEODORE SPENCER, ABRAHAM EDEL, PAUL (...) O. KRISTELLER, PHILIP P. WIENER, JOSEPH A. MAZZEO, LEONARD KRIEGER, DANIEL J. WILSON, EDWARD P. MAHONEY, FRANCIS OAKLEY,JOHANN HUIZINGA, JOSEPH KATZ, CALVIN G. RAND, NILS B. KVASTAD, LESTER G. CROCKER and PATRICK H. HUTTON. (shrink)

In animals' natural lives, uncertainty is normal; and certainty, exceptional. Evaluating ambiguous information is essential for survival: Does what is seen, heard, or smelled mean danger? Does that gesture mean aggression or fear? Is he confident or uncertain? If they are conscious of anything, the content of animals' awareness probably includes crucial uncertainties, both their own and those of others.

This study blends together ethical philosophy, neurocognitive-evolutionary studies, and literary theory to explore how imaginative discourse addresses a distinctively human deep sociality, and by doing so helps shape cultural and literary history. Deep sociality, arising from an improbable evolutionary history, both entwines and leaves non-reconciled what is felt to be significant for us and what ethical sense seems to call us to acknowledge as significant, independent of ourselves. Ethical Sense and Literary Significance connects literary and cultural history without reducing the (...) literary to a mere expression of something else. It argues that affective differences between non-egocentric and egocentric registers of significance are integral to the bioculturally evolved deep sociality that verbal art addresses-often in unsettling and socially critical ways. Much imaginative discourse, in early societies as well as recent ones, brings ethical sense and literary significance together in ways that reveal their intricate but non-harmonized internal entwinement. Drawing on contemporary scholarship in the humanities and sciences, Donald R. Wehrs explores the implications of interdisciplinary approaches to topics central to a wide range of fields beyond literary studies, including neuroscience, anthropology, phenomenological philosophy, comparative history, and social psychology. (shrink)

Notes and Discussions Philodoxy: Mere Opinion and Question of History the "Philosophy as... rigorous science-- the dream is over." Edmund Husserl 1. MERE OPINION From the beginning philosophy has not only had a love affair with wisdom but also a special claim on truth and a concomitant contempt for mere opinion. Parmenides left a poem in which he contrasted the "way of truth," which was the path taken by Plato and his followers, with the "way of opinion," which was paved (...) with falsehood and deceit.' Arcesilaus defended opinion in the sense that he refused to concede certain truth to any ideas2 On such grounds Cicero concluded that the wise man should hold no opinions.s In the self-constituting canon of philosophy "opinion" has always been a pejorative term, designating an inferior sort of knowledge based not on demon- stration but on belief and associated in particular with the much-maligned Sophists, who languished under a "dark shadow" for centu- ries.4 As Macrobius wrote: "Opinion is born of failure of memory," meaning the preexistent form of knowledge -- ideas -- which was Platonic recollection;5 and for Aquinas, "opinion is knowledge of those things about which we do not have certain knowledge. ''6 In general, questions of "opinion" or "prejudice" have seldom been posed by 'Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers , 156. See also T. Sprute, Der Begriff der doxa in der platonische.. (shrink)

Notes and Discussions Philodoxy: Mere Opinion and Question of History the "Philosophy as... rigorous science-- the dream is over." Edmund Husserl 1. MERE OPINION From the beginning philosophy has not only had a love affair with wisdom but also a special claim on truth and a concomitant contempt for mere opinion. Parmenides left a poem in which he contrasted the "way of truth," which was the path taken by Plato and his followers, with the "way of opinion," which was paved (...) with falsehood and deceit.' Arcesilaus defended opinion in the sense that he refused to concede certain truth to any ideas2 On such grounds Cicero concluded that the wise man should hold no opinions.s In the self-constituting canon of philosophy "opinion" has always been a pejorative term, designating an inferior sort of knowledge based not on demon- stration but on belief and associated in particular with the much-maligned Sophists, who languished under a "dark shadow" for centu- ries.4 As Macrobius wrote: "Opinion is born of failure of memory," meaning the preexistent form of knowledge -- ideas -- which was Platonic recollection;5 and for Aquinas, "opinion is knowledge of those things about which we do not have certain knowledge. ''6 In general, questions of "opinion" or "prejudice" have seldom been posed by 'Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, 156. See also T. Sprute, Der Begriff der doxa in der platonische... (shrink)

Examples of terror generated by an aircraft disaster, of human courtship behaviour, and of the application of laboratory techniques to the commercial training of animals suggest (1) that emotion is simply the subjective counterpart of (objective) motivation (so that separate brain mechanisms would be an embarrassment) and (2) the apparent involvement of reward and punishment is a consequence of the excessively narrow range of experimental procedures used and has no foundation in the design of the brain.