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Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Nature contact has associations with emotional ill-being and well-being. However, the mechanisms underlying these associations are not fully understood. We hypothesised that increased adaptive and decreased maladaptive emotion regulation strategies would be a pathway linking nature contact to ill-being and well-being. Using data from a survey of 600 U.S.-based adults administered online in 2022, we conducted structural equation modelling to test our hypotheses. We found that (1) frequency of nature contact was significantly associated with lesser emotional ill-being and greater emotional (...) well-being, (2) effective emotion regulation was significantly associated with lesser emotional ill-being and greater emotional well-being, and (3) the associations of higher frequency of nature contact with these benefits were partly explained via emotion regulation. Moreover, we found a nonlinear relationship for the associations of duration of nature contact with some outcomes, with a rise in benefits up to certain amounts of time, and a levelling off after these points. These findings support and extend previous work that demonstrates that the associations of nature contact with emotional ill-being and well-being may be partly explained by changes in emotion regulation. (shrink)

From their relative obscurity over the past three decades, varied strains of Ebola disease have emerged as a substantial global biothreat. The current outbreak of Ebola, beginning in March 2014 in Guinea, is projected to infect tens of thousands of people before being brought under control. Some estimate the outbreak could exceed 100,000 cases and extend another 12-18 months. Ebola’s spread has the potential to extend across the globe, but is concentrated in several African countries. Collectively, these countries are home (...) to nearly 290 million people. Among Liberia’s population of 4.1 million, over 1,100 people have already died from Ebola in less than 6 months; by comparison, if this same outbreak and death rate occurred in the United States, over 88,000 Americans would perish. (shrink)

From their relative obscurity over the past three decades, varied strains of Ebola disease have emerged as a substantial global biothreat. The current outbreak of Ebola, beginning in March 2014 in Guinea, is projected to infect tens of thousands of people before being brought under control. Some estimate the outbreak could exceed 100,000 cases and extend another 12-18 months. Ebola’s spread has the potential to extend across the globe, but is concentrated in several African countries. Collectively, these countries are home (...) to nearly 290 million people. Among Liberia’s population of 4.1 million, over 1,100 people have already died from Ebola in less than 6 months; by comparison, if this same outbreak and death rate occurred in the United States, over 88,000 Americans would perish. (shrink)

Flesh of My Flesh is a collection of articles by today's most respected scientists, philosophers, bioethicists, theologians, and law professors about whether we should allow human cloning. It includes historical pieces to provide background for the current debate. Religious, philosophical, and legal points of view are all represented.

In a pioneering book, Philosophy of Microbiology, Maureen O’Malley argues for the philosophical importance of microbes through an examination of their impact on ecosystems, evolution, biological classification, collaborative behavior, and multicellular organisms. She identifies many understudied conceptual issues in the study of microbes. If philosophers follow her lead, the philosophy of biology will be expanded and enriched.

This article calls for a critical re-evaluation of Walzer’s theory of justice. It argues that there is a deep tension between Walzer’s social criticism and his complex equality. Social criticism is based on the normative value of a connected and ‘whole’ self, and complex equality is based upon a value pluralism that threatens to fragment this sense of wholeness. Walzer therefore commissions a tacit premise, borrowing from the same ‘political philosophy’ that he explicitly repudiates, and which social criticism is intended (...) to supplant. This premise is a Kantian-inspired conception of self; brought to the argument as an a priori premise and thus in violation of Walzer’s own stated commitment to ‘internalism’ and ‘interpretation’. Furthermore, this same conception of self is the moral source of Walzer’s substantive commitment to the universal value of pluralist political regimes. The article closes with a suggested reconciliation of the inherent tension within Walzer’s theory. (shrink)

In 1976 Raymond Williams commented, ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.’ Such implied difficulty has not prevented Bloomsbury Academic, since the 2000s, from publishing around forty series of their well-produced and generously illustrated Cultural Histories, with, according to their website, a further fifty in progress. Each series contains six volumes, each book covering, in theory, the same chronological period (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the age of empire and (...) the modern age), though there is some variation depending on precise topic. The idea is that one can use these books not only to read ‘horizontally’ about a subject across time, but also ‘vertically’ through different subjects in the same period – a idea made easier by the e-texts of the series on Bloomsbury's website. (shrink)

DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded in (...) its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

From Karl Marx to Alexandre Kojève to Luce Irigaray, many writers have explored the implications of the famous master-slave dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.1 An interesting debate has developed out of the possible gender connotations of this dialectic—a debate that has centered largely on the theory that the master could represent man, with the slave consequently representing woman. A close analysis of the Phenomenology reveals that both the master and the slave are, in fact, supposed to be men. But (...) is it possible to preserve the core ideas of the Phenomenology while simultaneously recasting both the master and the slave as women? And what are the ramifications of this reconfiguration?These questions. (shrink)

Bringing between two covers the most influential and accessible articles on Plato's Republic, this collection illuminates what is widely held to be the most important work of Western philosophy and political theory. It will be valuable not only to philosophers, but to political theorists, historians, classicists, literary scholars, and interested general readers.

Why do we need government? A common view is that government is necessary to constrain people's conduct toward one another, because people are not sufficiently virtuous to exercise the requisite degree of control on their own. This view was expressed perspicuously, and artfully, by liberal thinker James Madison, in The Federalist, number 51, where he wrote: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Madison's idea is shared by writers ranging across the political spectrum. It finds clear expression (...) in the Marxist view that the state will gradually wither away after a communist revolution, as unalienated “communist man” emerges. And it is implied by the libertarian view that government's only legitimate function is to control the unfortunate and immoral tendency of some individuals to violate the moral rights of others. (shrink)

In this lucid and engaging book focusing on the early Heidegger, James Reid argues that Heidegger sets the foundations for a "phronetic ethics". As Reid later says, "Sein und Zeit could be said to make substantial contributions to 'meta-ethical' reflection on the source of our sense of why, on what basis, we take ourselves to be bound by one thing rather than another". Reid's early Heidegger provides the hermeneutical tools for an ontological meta-ethics that can illuminate "normative questions and (...) questions about the status of normativity as such".Gleaning a meta-ethics from Heidegger depends on arguing that the existential analytic of Dasein proceeds from what Reid calls Heidegger's "ethical... (shrink)

ABSTRACT As the most famous critic of John Stuart Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen has often been assumed to have been a religious conservative or even reactionary. In contrast to these assessments, this article shows that Stephen's most consistent enemies were what he took to be the two most significant religious forces of the modern world: Ultramontane Catholicism and Comtean Positivism. The article explores his objections to these two religious ideologies, which he saw as sharing certain harmful features. It then (...) shows that his famous critiques of John Stuart Mill and liberalism had much in common with his attacks on Ultramontanism and Positivism; for example, he charged that they rested on an implausible philosophical anthropology and that they degraded the state. (shrink)

The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual (...) virtues, editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

Time’s arrow is necessary for progress from a past that has already happened to a future that is only potential until creatively determined in the present. But time’s arrow is unnecessary in Einstein’s so-called block universe, so there is no creative unfolding in an actual present. How can there be an actual present when there is no universal moment of simultaneity? Events in various places will have different presents according to the position, velocity, and nature of the perceiver. Standing against (...) this view is traditional common sense since we normally experience time’s arrow as reality and the present as our place in the stream of consciousness, but we err to imagine we are living in the actual present. The present of our daily experience is actually a specious present, according to E. Robert Kelly (later popularized by William James), or duration, according to Henri Bergson, an habitus, as elucidated by Kerby (1991), or, simply, the psychological present (Adams, 2010) – all terms indicating that our experienced present so consists of the past overlapping into the future that any potential for acting from the creative moment is crowded out. Yet, for philosophers of process from Herakleitos onward, it is the philosophies of change or process that treat time’s arrow and the creative fire of the actual present as realities. In this essay, I examine the most well known but possibly least understood process cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead to seek out this elusive but actual present. In doing so, I will also ask if process philosophy is itself an example of the creative imagination and if this relates to doing science. I conclude Whitehead's process philosophy falls short of allowing for the actual creative spontaneity of a dynamic (eternal) present. (shrink)

Eric Gregory's Politics and the Order of Love takes up an audacious project: enlisting Saint Augustine in order to "help imagine a better liberalism." This article first provides a summary of Gregory's argument, focusing on his emphasis on love as a "motivation" for neighborly care, and hence democratic participation. This involves tracing the theme of motivation in the book, which is tied to his articulation of liberal perfectionism and an emphasis on civic virtue. In conclusion I raise the (...) question of whether his project has ignored a key aspect of Augustine's account of love, namely, the role of the Holy Spirit, thereby demarcating the limits of Gregory's "rational reconstruction" of Augustine. (shrink)

We explore themes in Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan’s work and apply his Ethics and Economic Progress to problems facing individuals and firms. We focus on Buchanan’s analysis of the individual work ethic, his exhortations to “pay the preacher” of the “institutions of moral-ethical communication,” and his notion of law as “public capital.” We highlight several ways people with other-regarding preferences can contribute to social flourishing and some of the ways those who have “affected to trade for the (...) public good” might want to redirect their efforts. We show how Buchanan’s work has considerable implications for business ethics. Just as his economic analysis of politics changed how we understand government, we think his economic analysis of ethics can (and should) change how we understand business. (shrink)

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 10, 2015, on page SR9 of the New York edition of The New York Times with the headline : “Rhythms of the Brain”. It is also online here. IN 1890, the American psychologist William James famously likened our conscious experience to the flow of a stream. “A ‘river' or a ‘stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described,” he wrote. “In talking of it hereafter, let's call (...) it the stream of thought, consciousness, or subjective life.” - Biologie – Nouvel article. (shrink)

The recent conception of biodiversity proposed by James Maclaurin and Sterelny was developed mostly with macrobiological life in mind. They suggest that we measure biodiversity by dividing life into natural units (typically species) and quantifying the differences among units using phenetic rather than phylogenetic measures of distance. They identify problems in implementing quantitative phylogenetic notions of difference for non-prokaryotic species. I suggest that if we focus on microbiological life forms that engage in frequent, promiscuous lateral gene transfer (LGT), and (...) their associated reticulated phylogenies, we need to rethink the notion of species as the natural unit, and we discover additional problems with phylogenetic notions of distance. These problems suggest that a phenetic approach based on morphospaces has just as much appeal, if not more, for microbes as they do for multi-cellular life. Facts about LGT, however, offer no new insight into the additional challenge of reconciling units and differences into a single measure of biodiversity. (shrink)

When picking up a book titled Licensed to Practice: The Supreme Court Defines the American Medical Profession, one cannot be faulted for expecting a rather dry legal discourse on the Supreme Court case that cemented medical licensure as the norm of American life. James Mohr dispels these expectations from the very first page of the volume. Instead of recitation of legal doctrine, Mohr begins with a murder mystery. While we know from the very first pages the answer to “whodunit,” (...) the rest of the book masterfully explains why they did it. As it turns out, what led to the murder was an intense fight over the proper way to practice medicine. Mohr’s work is.. (shrink)

What happens to the inner light of consciousness with the death of the individual body and brain? Reductive materialism assumes it simply fades to black. Others think of consciousness as indicating a continuation of self, a transformation, an awakening or even alternatives based on the quality of life experience. In this issue, speculation drawn from theoretic research are presented. -/- Table of Contents Epigraph: From “The Immortal”, Jorge Luis Borges iii Editor’s Introduction: I Killed a Squirrel the Other Day, (...) class='Hi'>Gregory M. Nixon iv-xi Research Essays The Tilde Fallacy and Reincarnation: Variations on a "Skeptical" Argument Teed Rockwell 862-881 Death, Consciousness, and Phenomenology, Steve Bindeman 882-899 The Idealist View of Consciousness After Death, Bernardo Kastrup 900-909 Consciousness, a Cosmic Phenomenon—A Hypothesis, Eva Déli 910-930 The Theory of a Natural Afterlife: A Newfound, Real Possibility for What Awaits Us at Death, Bryon K. Ehlmann 931-950 Near-Death Cases Desegregating Non-Locality/Disembodiment via Quantum Mediated Consciousness: An Extended Version of the Cell-Soul Pathway, Contzen Pereira & J Shashi Kiran Reddy 951-968 On the Possible Existence of Quantum Consciousness After Brain Death, Massimo Pregnolato & Alfredo Pereira Jr. 969-991 Science and Postmortem Survival, Edward F. Kelly 992-1011 Explorations ISS Theory: Cosmic Consciousness, Self, and Life Beyond Death in a Hyperdimensional Physics, Chris H. Hardy 1012-1035 Does the Consciousness End, Remain Awake, or Transform After Death? Radivoj Stankovich (with Micho Durdevich) 1036-1050 Big Bang Spirituality, Life, and Death, Ken Bausch 1051-1063 Death, Consciousness and the Quantum Paradigm, Ronald Peter Glasberg 1064-1077 Living With Limits: The Continuum of Consciousness, Donald Brackett 1078-1098 Mysticism, Consciousness, Death, Mike Sosteric 1099-1118 What Dies? Eternalism and the Afterlife in William James, Jonathan Bricklin 1119-1140 Theories of Consciousness and Death: Does Consciousness End, Continue, Awaken, or Transform When the Body Dies? Roger Cook 1141-1153 It’s the Other Way Around: Matter is a Form of Consciousness and Death is the End of the Illusion of Life in the World, James P. Kowall & Pradeep B. Deshpande 1154-1208 Statements A Feminine Vision for the World Consciousness, & a New Outrageous Ontology, Lorna Green 1209-1217 The Mask of Eternity: The Quest for Immortality and the Afterlife, Iona Miller 1218-1228 Are We Really “such stuff as dreams are made on”? Chris Nunn 1229-1225 Is the Afterlife a Non-Question? (Let's Hope Not), Deepak Chopra 1226-1230 Life After Death? An Improbable Essay, Stuart Kauffman 1231-1236. (shrink)

"The documents gathered in this volume cut a winding path through the tumultuous final thirty-three months of Leibniz's life, from March 1714 to his death on 14 November 1716. The disputes with Newton and his followers over the discovery of the calculus and, later, over the issues in natural philosophy and theology that came to dominate Leibniz's correspondence with Samuel Clarke certainly loom large in the story of these years. But as the title of this volume is intended to convey, (...) the letters exchanged between Leibniz and Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, Electoral Princess of Braunschweig-Luneburg and later Princess of Wales, also figure prominently in their telling, and I have included their complete extant correspondence from 1714 to 1716. These letters are of particular interest inasmuch as they provide valuable insights into how and why Leibniz's correspondence with Clarke arose, and why it developed as it did, with Caroline in the role of influential go-between; whence the title, The Leibniz-Caroline-Clarke Correspondence. But there is more; for these letters provide a window into the evolving personal relationship between Leibniz and Caroline. Much of the early correspondence between Leibniz and Caroline after her arrival in England is filled with thoughtful and engaging exchanges about philosophy, literature, and politics, about people Caroline was meeting in England, about those known by Leibniz far and wide, about the new royal family in England, headed by George I (Georg Ludwig of Braunschweig-Luneburg), as well as gossip about affairs of state in both England and Europe at large. Beyond the interest they hold for Leibniz scholars in particular, many of these exchanges should also be of interest to historians of early 18th-century England and Europe, and especially to those interested in the period immediately preceding and following the Hanoverian succession to the throne of England. But even quite early on in their correspondence Leibniz seemed to sense a threat to his relationship with Caroline, and a worrisome paranoia began to creep into some of his letters to her, letters in which he expressed concerns about her continuing allegiance to him now that she had been installed in England amongst his rivals. As the correspondence progressed, Leibniz's paranoia only deepened; but it was nevertheless prophetic of a tragic truth to come. For the letters exchanged between Leibniz and Caroline document the rather sad story of the slow but steady erosion of Caroline's loyalty to Leibniz after she departed Hanover on 12 October 1714 and landed in England at Margate in Kent on 22 October as the new Princess of Wales and future Queen of England. In 1727 the Scottish poet James Thomson penned A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, calling him "our philosophic sun," and it was by force of the political and cultural mass of this sun that Caroline was eventually, and inexorably, drawn into its orbit, and away from Leibniz". (shrink)

John Stuart Mill (1806-73) is widely regarded as the leading liberal philosopher, economist, and political theorist of nineteenth century Britain. In his lifetime he was best known for his System of Logic (1843) and the Principles of Political Economy (1848). Today Mill is chiefly identified with On Liberty (1859), perhaps the definitive text of modern liberal statement of its subject, and probably the single most important work of modern political thought. Mill was also the first major male feminist thinker of (...) the period (author of The Subjection of Women, 1869), and the first, as an MP, to introduce a bill for female enfranchisement before Parliament. This Very Short Introduction offers a brief survey of the life and key ideas of this most influential Victorian British writer. Moving chronologically, Gregory Claeys outlines the philosophical background out of which Mill developed, chiefly through the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. He demonstrates how Mill's personal life, especially his 'mental crisis' of 1827, and his relationship with Harriet Taylor, were integral to his intellectual development. Throughout Claeys considers Mill's key works set within the context of his lesser writings and correspondence, and discusses the more controversial aspects of his thought concerning religion, secularism, and birth control. (shrink)

This paper examines the status of naturalism in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and John Dewey. Despite the many points of overlap and agreement between Husserl’s and Dewey’s philosophical projects, there remains one glaring difference, namely, the place and status of naturalism in their approaches. For Husserl, naturalism is an enemy to be vanquished. For Dewey, naturalism is the only method that can put philosophy back in touch with the concerns of human beings. This paper will demonstrate the remarkable similarities (...) between Husserl’s and Dewey’s thought before contending that Dewey’s “naturalistic humanism” offers a conception of naturalism which is compatible with Husserlian phenomenology. Furthermore, reading these two philosophers together, this paper argues, can point the way forward to a naturalism which avoids the dismissal of the contributions made by knowing subjects carried out by dominant contemporary strains of reductive naturalism. (shrink)

This is a collection of fifty essays featured in Edward R. Murrow's 1950s This I Believe radio series. It includes such celebrities of the twentieth century as Pearl Buck, Norman Cousins, Margaret Mead, James Michener, Jackie Robinson, and Harry Truman. With an introduction by Edward R. Murrow and a foreword by Dan Gediman, executive producer of the contemporary This I Believe radio broadcasts, heard weekly on public radio.

This is a collection of fifty essays featured in Edward R. Murrow's 1950s This I Believe radio series. It includes such celebrities of the twentieth century as Pearl Buck, Norman Cousins, Margaret Mead, James Michener, Jackie Robinson, and Harry Truman. With an introduction by Edward R. Murrow and a foreword by Dan Gediman, executive producer of the contemporary This I Believe radio broadcasts, heard weekly on public radio.

IN HIS ESSAY The Paradox of Socrates," Gregory Vlastos paints a vivid and moving portrait of Socrates, or, as he puts it: "the Platonic Socrates, or, to be more precise, the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues." That the man who emerges from these early dialogues is something very like the actual Socrates is Vlastos’s opinion. He argues, with great plausibility, that the Xenophontic Socrates is not a man who, on the one hand, could have provoked the Athenians into indicting (...) him and convicting him for subversion of Athenian faith and morals, and on the other could have aroused the devotion of an Alcibiades. The question of the "authentic" Socrates is the kind of question which simply does not admit of any ultimate solution, so there will always be divergent opinions, but regardless of whether or not Plato does portray the real Socrates as he knew him, it is certainly the Platonic Socrates who has exercised the decisive influence down through the centuries. Therefore irrespective of whether one accepts Vlastos’s argument, it is worthwhile examining what Vlastos distills from the dialogues as his "recreation of the thought and character of the man," and testing it for its adequacy. (shrink)

James K. A. Smith’s Awaiting the King is the most effective popularization of Augustine’s political thought currently available, but its reliance on the work of Oliver O’Donovan obscures uncomfortable elements of Augustine’s thought, and it does not adequately address how the racial and socioeconomic composition of Christian communities is itself formative.

In this article, I expand upon Slavoj Zižek’s “anamorphic” reading of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. In this reading, Zižek distinguishes between the film’s ostensible narrative structure, the “foreground,” as he calls it, and the “background,” wherein the social and spiritual dissolution endemic to Cuaron’s dystopian England draws the viewer into a recognition of the dire conditions plaguing the post-9/11, post-Iraq invasion, neoliberal world. The foreground plots the conventional trajectory of the main character Theo from ordinary, disaffected man to self-sacrificing (...) hero, one whose martyrdom might pave the way for a new era of regeneration. According to Zižek, in this context the foreground merely entertains, while propagating some well-worn clichés about heroic individualism as demonstrated through Hollywood’s generic conventions of an action-adventure/political thriller/science-fiction film. Zižek contends that these conventions are essential to the revelation of the film’s progressive politics, as “the fate of the individual hero is the prism through which … [one] see[s] the background even more sharply.” Zižek’s framing of Theo merely as a “prism” limits our understanding of the film by not taking into account its status as an adaptation of P.D. James’ The Children of Men. This article offers such an account by interpreting the differences between the film and its literary source as one informed by the transition from Cold War to post-9/11 neoliberal conceptions of identity and politics. To articulate the terms of this argument and its implications, I turn to another narrative depicting the identity and politics at the end of history, Francis Fukuyama’s infamous The End of History and the Last Man, published the same year as James’ novel, both offering meditations on the Cold War and speculations on its aftermath. Incorporating these two texts into Zižek’s anamorphic paradigm contributes to our understanding of the film’s message regarding the “state of things” during the post-9/11 era, as well as the Cold War era that preceded it, as perceived through the eyes of Theo adapted to suit the respective dystopian conditions of the novel and film. (shrink)

In his "an ambiguity in the "sophist"," gregory vlastos showed that statements about forms in the central section of the "sophist" may be either 'ordinary' or 'pauline' predications. This paper refutes vlastos's claim that plato was "utterly unaware" of this ambiguity. 255c-e is taken to be the crucial passage here. This paper adapts the interpretation given by michael frede of this passage and shows that the sense of plato's partaking- terms (which are used to analyze statements about forms) switches (...) from a 'pauline' to an 'ordinary' usage at a definite point in the text which falls at the end of the crucial passage. the context and content of the passage determine that the switch is deliberate on plato's part. An analysis of an earlier passage, 250a-e, confirms this point. (shrink)

In relation to a thesis put forward by Marx Wartofsky, we seek to show that a historiography of mathematics requires an analysis of the ontology of the part of mathematics under scrutiny. Following Ian Hacking, we point out that in the history of mathematics the amount of contingency is larger than is usually thought. As a case study, we analyze the historians’ approach to interpreting James Gregory’s expression ultimate terms in his paper attempting to prove the irrationality of (...) \. Here Gregory referred to the last or ultimate terms of a series. More broadly, we analyze the following questions: which modern framework is more appropriate for interpreting the procedures at work in texts from the early history of infinitesimal analysis? As well as the related question: what is a logical theory that is close to something early modern mathematicians could have used when studying infinite series and quadrature problems? We argue that what has been routinely viewed from the viewpoint of classical analysis as an example of an “unrigorous” practice, in fact finds close procedural proxies in modern infinitesimal theories. We analyze a mix of social and religious reasons that had led to the suppression of both the religious order of Gregory’s teacher degli Angeli, and Gregory’s books at Venice, in the late 1660s. (shrink)

Textbook Islam, nation building, and the question of violence / Gregory Starrett and Eleanor Abdella Doumato -- Egypt : promoting tolerance, defending against Islamism / James A. Toronto and Muhammad S. Eissa -- Iran : a Shi'ite curriculum to serve the Islamic state / Golnar Mehran -- Jordan : prescription for obedience and conformity / Betty Anderson -- Kuwait : striving to align Islam with Western values / Taghreed Alqudsi-Ghabra -- Oman : cultivating good citizens and religious virtue (...) / Mandana E. Limbert -- The Palestinian national authority : the politics of writing and interpreting curricula. Genesis of a new curriculum / Nathan Brown ; A conflict of historical narratives / Seif Da'Na -- Saudi Arabia : from "Wahhabi" roots to contemporary revisionism / Eleanor Abdella Doumato -- Syria : secularism, Arabism, and Sunni orthodoxy / Joshua Landis -- Turkey : sanctifying a secular state / Ozlem Altan -- Textbook meanings and the power of interpretation / Gregory Starrett -- Conclusion : tailor-made Islam / Eleanor Abdella Doumato and Gregory Starrett. (shrink)

A distinction attributed to Gregory Palamas involves claiming that God’s essence and energies/activities are distinct, yet equally ‘uncreated.’ Traditionally, this Palamite distinction was attacked by some Latin theologians as compromising divine simplicity. A classical view holds that no properties really inhere in God, because God enters into no composition of any kind, including composition of substance and accident. God’s energies/activities seem like properties inhering in God or otherwise composing some kind of part of God. I will argue that, contrary (...) to appearances, the Palamite distinction is a consequence of commitment to a classical view of divine simplicity. (shrink)