Applications of Artificial Intelligence, particularly Expert Systems, are rapidly increasing. This science promises to give computer-based systems the capability of reasoning and decision making in near human-like fashion. Whether used for farm management or intelligent machine control, Expert Systems will find many agricultural applications. Much of the development and distribution of such systems will probably take place in the public sector, particularly the Cooperative Extension Service. A major nontechnical factor affecting the development and extensive use of Expert Systems is the (...) legal issue of products, liability, and negligence. The legal issues surrounding Expert Systems have not yet been fully tested and defined by the courts. Developers and users of Expert Systems must consider these factors for each particular application. (shrink)

In Victoria, Australia, the law regulating abortion was reformed in 2008, and a clause was introduced requiring doctors with a conscientious objection to abortion to refer women to another provid...

Emerging from the intersection of the virtual world with the real."--BOOK JACKET.

Moral imagination is a central component of moral agency and person‐centred care. Becoming moral agents who can sustain attention on patients and their families through their illness and suffering involves imagining the other, what moral possibilities are available, what choices to make, and how one wants to be. This relationship between moral agency, moral imagination, and personhood can be effaced by a focus on task‐driven technical rationality within the multifaceted challenges of contemporary healthcare. Similarly, facilitating students' moral agency can also (...) be obscured by the task‐driven technical rationality of teaching. The development of moral agency requires deliberate attention across the trajectory of nursing education. To prepare nursing students for one practice challenge, workplace violence, we developed a multimodal education intervention which included a simulated learning experience (SLE). To enhance the realism and consistency of the educational experience, 11 nursing students were trained as simulated participants (SP). As part of a larger study to examine knowledge acquisition and practice confidence of learners who completed the SLE, we explored the experience of being the SP through interviews and a focus group with the SP students. The SP described how their multiple performances contributed to imagining the situation ‘on both sides’ prompting empathy, a reconsideration of their moral agency, and the potential to prevent violence in the workplace beyond technical rational techniques, such as verbal de‐escalation scripts. The empirical findings from the SP prompted a philosophical exploration into moral imagination. We summarise the multimodal educational intervention and relevant findings, and then, using Johnson's conception of moral imagination and relevant nursing literature, we discuss the significance of the SP embodied experiences and their professional formation. We suggest that SLEs offer a unique avenue to create pedagogical spaces which promote moral imagination, thereby teaching for moral agency and person‐centred care. (shrink)

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)

In 1720, Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande wrote Physicis elementa mathematica, experimentis confirmata. Sive introductio ad philosophiam Newtonianam. Although he was undoubtedly one of the most important popularizers of Newtonian physics, experimental methodology and epistemology in the 1720s, his empirical claim somehow backfired: in applying tenets of Newtonian methodology, he was ultimately led to validate the Leibnizian principle of the conservation of living forces, contrary to the Newtonians. This conclusion invited a great deal of anger, particularly from Samuel Clarke who, in (...) a volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society from 1729, accused ’s Gravesande of having written the book with the aim of “darkening Newton’s philosophy”. In a reply, which ’s Gravesande published as a supplement to his Essay upon a New Theory of the Collision of Bodies, he developed a hybrid methodology that relied upon both experimentation and reason. In my paper, I shall thoroughly analyse this interesting combination. (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)

In this article I would like to show that Charles Darwin conscientiously developed his theory of natural selection conforming to criteria of John Herschel, one of the leading philosophers of science at his time. Therefor I will present Herschel's methodology and search for the criteria in Darwin's _Origin of Species_. I conclude with Herschel's negative reaction to Darwin's theory, showing that Herschel himself probably could not comply with his own criteria. _German_ In diesem Aufsatz möchte ich zeigen, dass sich Charles (...) Darwin bei der Entwicklung seiner Theorie gewissenhaft an den wissenschaftstheoretischen Kriterien seiner Zeit orientierte, die maßgeblich von John Herschel geprägt wurden. Dazu werde ich zuerst die Methodologie Herschels vorstellen, um anschließend Darwins _Entstehung der Arten_ auf diese wissenschaftstheoretischen Kriterien hin zu untersuchen. Abschließend soll an der Reaktion Herschels auf Darwins Theorie gezeigt werden, dass Herschel seine eigenen Kriterien nicht erfüllt hat, weil er sich nicht von seinem,,Vorurteil der Meinung“ befreien konnte. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From the Executive EditorDonald R. KelleyTwenty years ago the Journal of the History of Ideas moved from Temple University to the University of Rochester (through the efforts especially of J. Paul Hunter, then dean of the college of arts and sciences, and Lewis White Beck, professor of philosophy), and I replaced Philip Wiener, who had been editor for forty-five years, the first issue under my supervision being that of (...) July 1985. A year later Robin Ladrach joined me as assistant and then as associate editor, and in 1991 we both moved along with the JHI to Rutgers University (through the efforts especially of Richard McCormick, then dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and now president of the university). Now the Journal has moved to the University of Pennsylvania, and I pass on the editorship to a committee composed of Warren Breckman, Martin J. Burke, Anthony Grafton, and Ann E. Moyer, with Robin Ladrach continuing as managing editor.We changed our face in 1990, but otherwise we have maintained a remarkably steady course since the days of Arthur O. Lovejoy, original founder of the JHI in 1940, with articles submitted and articles published continuing in mostly the same quantity and intellectual range and following the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural vision established by Lovejoy in the 1930s (history of philosophy, science, political thought, historiography, religion, literature, art, and music) but also modified by intervening intellectual and cultural changes (and so enhanced by studies in the human sciences, gender, women's history, globalism, animals, etc.). Such change has for the most part not been from conscious editorial policy, except indirectly, but rather "from below," and the role of the editor has been that not of cultural critic but of observer, whose reflections have appeared in "Horizons of Intellectual History," JHI, 48 (1987), 143–69; "What is Happening to the History of Ideas?" JHI, 51 (1990), 3–25; "JHI 2000," JHI, 61 (2000), 153–56; and The History of Ideas: Canon and Variations (Rochester, N.Y., 1990), which contains also the reflections of Lovejoy and other earlier authors. The new regime may well introduce new departures, but I [End Page 475] believe that it will continue to rely and perhaps draw on the old Lovejovian tradition which has made this journal a successful and enduring international enterprise.Donald R. KelleyExecutive Editor Emeritus Rutgers UniversityCopyright © 2005 The Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.... (shrink)

Anne-Lise Rey’s account of Maupertuis’s physical theology challenges the efforts on the part of commentators to align his work with Newton, Leibniz, or critics of Leibniz by examining the innovative epistemological principles that inform his Essay on Cosmology (1750). Through an analysis of his proofs of the existence of God in this work, she investigates Maupertuis’s view on how we can obtain certain knowledge of nature and the place he affords to experimentation and contingency in this regard. Rey claims (...) that Maupertuis, despite his hostility toward Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff, did not abolish the idea of a metaphysics of nature per se, but tried to strike a new balance between, on the one hand, the deduction of laws from the nature of bodies and, on the other hand, experimentation. More specifically, she argues that Maupertuis in the Essay on Cosmology affirms our epistemic incapacity to grasp the whole system of nature and, hence, argues that the probable truths we can obtain in physics by means of experiments are superior to the geometrical truths that Descartes and his followers aimed to establish in both physics and metaphysics. (shrink)

In his monumental 1687 work, _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica_, known familiarly as the _Principia_, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science. Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles. (...) This authoritative, modern translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, the first in more than 285 years, is based on the 1726 edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms. Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the _Principia_ also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system. The translation-only edition of this preeminent work is truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students. (shrink)

Anne-Lise Rey | : L’article montre qu’après la « révolution scientifique » opérée par l’introduction des idées de Newton en France, Émilie du Châtelet a construit un dispositif épistémique inventif qui lui permet d’articuler principes métaphysiques et experimental philosophy. Je cherche à exposer que, s’il y a bien une relative invisibilité du travail philosophique d’Émilie du Châtelet dans l’historiographie des Lumières, cela tient à la fois au statut de femme savante à cette époque, mais aussi à la situation philosophique (...) d’Émilie du Châtelet, qui ne peut se réduire à aucune filiation et qui élabore une philosophie naturelle originale. | : This paper shows that after the “Scientific Revolution” stemming from the introduction of Newton’s ideas in France, Émilie du Châtelet developed an innovative epistemic framework that allowed her to reconcile metaphysical principles with experimental philosophy. The author aims to show that the relative invisibility of Émilie du Châtelet’s philosophical work within the historiography of the enlightenment is due both to her status as a learned woman at that time and to the philosophical position of Émilie du Châtelet, which cannot be reduced to a single philosophical affiliation and which allows her to develop an original account of natural philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the connection between narrative ethics and the increasing emphasis on historical consciousness as a way to cultivate moral responsibility in history education. I use Timothy Findley’s World War I novel, The Wars, as an example of how teachers might help students to see history neither simply as a collection of artefacts from the past, nor as an effort to construct an objective view about what went on in those other times and places, but rather as (...) something that makes ethical demands on us here and now. Theoretically, this paper draws on Adam Zachary Newton’s conception of narrative ethics and Roger Simon’s conception of historical consciousness, both of which rest on the Levinasian themes of irreducible difference, the face, and subjectivity as a position of ethical responsibility to and for the other. (shrink)

In his monumental 1687 work, _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica_, known familiarly as the _Principia_, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science. Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles. (...) This authoritative, modern translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, the first in more than 285 years, is based on the 1726 edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms. Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the _Principia_ also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system. The illuminating Guide to Newton's _Principia_ by I. Bernard Cohen makes this preeminent work truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students. (shrink)

In his monumental 1687 work, _Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica_, known familiarly as the _Principia_, Isaac Newton laid out in mathematical terms the principles of time, force, and motion that have guided the development of modern physical science. Even after more than three centuries and the revolutions of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, Newtonian physics continues to account for many of the phenomena of the observed world, and Newtonian celestial dynamics is used to determine the orbits of our space vehicles. (...) This authoritative, modern translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman, the first in more than 285 years, is based on the 1726 edition, the final revised version approved by Newton; it includes extracts from the earlier editions, corrects errors found in earlier versions, and replaces archaic English with contemporary prose and up-to-date mathematical forms. Newton's principles describe acceleration, deceleration, and inertial movement; fluid dynamics; and the motions of the earth, moon, planets, and comets. A great work in itself, the _Principia_ also revolutionized the methods of scientific investigation. It set forth the fundamental three laws of motion and the law of universal gravity, the physical principles that account for the Copernican system of the world as emended by Kepler, thus effectively ending controversy concerning the Copernican planetary system. The translation-only edition of this preeminent work is truly accessible for today's scientists, scholars, and students. (shrink)

Recent research in philosophy of science suggests that the relationship which scientists have towards the artifacts of science, i.e. their theories, is considerably richer than many traditional accounts of scientific appraisal would lead us to believe. Problem-solving methodologists, in particular, advocating a pragmatic account of scientific theories, argue that traditional methodologies have tended to focus exclusively on one modality of appraisal--that of theory acceptance, and have advanced normative proposals which provide only for assessments of the empirical well-foundedness of scientific theories. (...) As a result, it is held, these traditional accounts are unable to accommodate certain historical cases in which conceptual considerations have played a vital role in scientific appraisal, and in which the behavior of scientists clearly indicates something less or other than theory acceptance on their part. ;In this essay, a problem-solving methodology is adopted in the interests of contributing to this recent research in philosophy of science by critically assessing and further developing selected features of it. Two historical case-studies are presented. The first examines the theories of space and of motion advanced by Descartes and Newton, while the second explores atomism and affinitism in nineteenth-century chemical theory. These cases are used to establish: that conceptual considerations have figured significantly in the assessments which scientists make of their theories; that scientists do something more than accept or reject theories, they pursue them; and that in defending their decisions to pursue or not to pursue a theory, scientists typically do make reference to the promise, or lack of promise, of the theory. Specific normative proposals are developed which are intended to enrich our appreciation of scientific appraisal by providing an account of what it is to pursue a theory, of what it is for a theory to be promising, and of the role of conceptual considerations in supporting judgements of theory promise. (shrink)

Over the last few years a resurgence of Newtonian studies has led to a deeper understanding of several aspects of his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. Besides the new translation of Newton's masterpiece, these contributions touched on his mathematical style, investigative method, experimental endeavors, and conceptual systematization of key notions in mechanics and the science of motion (I. Newton, The `Principia'. A new translation by I. Bernard Cohen and Anne Whitman assisted by Julia Budenz (Berkeley: University of California Press, (...) 1999), hereafter New translation. Readers can find a useful bibliography on Newton in I.B. Cohen and G. Smith, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, hereafter Cambridge Companion), 465–80.). With regard to the last topic, recent works have identified two notions where Newton's choices look unclear and scholarly opinion is divided. These notions are materiae vis insita or vis inertiae, namely the inherent force of matter or force of inertia, and vis centrifuga or centrifugal force. It is my conviction that the two notions became inter-related in Newton's thought starting from the time of composition of the Principia and that a new look at them will simultaneously clarify matters about both. Newton's beliefs about the nature of centrifugal force did not affect his calculations of planetary and cometary orbits in the Principia, but they are none the less of considerable intellectual interest.After a brief introduction on Huygens and the early Newton, Sect. 2 focuses on Newton's views in the Principia and its preliminary manuscripts. Section 3 presents a summarized account of Leibniz's views, which are necessary for understanding Newton's criticism of them. This is the subject of Sect. 4, where we find his views most fully spelled out. (shrink)

Contributors:Todd Alden, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, David Brown, Gilles Deleuze, Craig Ellwood, Bob Flanagan, Michel Foucault, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Mike Kelley, Joseph Kosuth, Chris Kraus, Julia Kristeva, Don Kubly, Sylvère Lotringer, Deran Ludd, John Miller, Eileen Myles, Darcy Jo Paley, Ann Rower, Sue Spaid, Frances Stark, Mark Stritzel, James Tyler.

Dispositional compatibilists argue that a proper understanding of our abilities vindicates both compatibilism and the principle of Alternate Possibilities (the claim that the ability to do otherwise is required for freedom and moral responsibility). In this paper, I argue that this is mistaken. Both analyses of dispositions and abilities should distinguish between local and global dispositions or abilities. Once this distinction is in place, we see that neither thesis is established by an analysis of abilities.

Two significant, apparently unrelated, trends have emerged in American society and medicine. First, American medicine is reexamining its approach to dying. The Institute of Medicine, the American Medical Association and private funding organizations have recognized that too many dying people suffer from pain and other distress that clinicians can prevent or relieve. Second, this past decade has marked a sharp increase in the number of physicians prosecuted for criminal negligence based on arguably negligent patient care. The case often cited as (...) a watershed is People u. Einaugfer, which involved a New York nursing home patient whose physician was convicted in 1993 of two criminal misdemeanors after he ordered an elderly dialysis patient to be tube fed through a peritoneal dialysis Catheter.How is the growing awareness of dying patients’ pain and the increasing willingness of prosecutors to charge physicians with crimes connected? Pain at the end of life is frequently treated with narcotics, prescription drugs that are closely regulated by state and federal law. That complex web of laws—and a growing fear of legal sanctions—has deterred physicians from prescribing controlled substances. As those legal sanctions move from disciplinary actions to criminal charges, physicians’ fears may expand. (shrink)

This article analyzes the experiences of ecologists who used data they did not collect themselves. Specifically, the author examines the processes by which ecologists understand and assess the quality of the data they reuse, and investigates the role that standard methods of data collection play in these processes. Standardization is one means by which scientific knowledge is transported from local to public spheres. While standards can be helpful, the results show that knowledge of the local context is critical to ecologists' (...) reuse of data. Yet, this information is often left behind as data move from the private to the public world. The knowledge that ecologists acquire through fieldwork enables them to recover the local details that are so critical to their comprehension of data collected by others. Social processes also play a role in ecologists' efforts to judge the quality of data they reuse. (shrink)

The causal theory of properties is standardly combined with a realist's ontology of universals or tropes. In this paper, I consider an uncharted alternative – a nominalist causal theory of properties. I discuss advantages and disadvantages of the resulting theory of properties, and explore the Rylean understanding of causal powers that emerges.

I consider a grand, yet neglected proposal put forward by Shoemaker—a functionalist theory of all properties. I argue that two possible ways of developing this proposal meet with substantial objections. However, if we are prepared to endorse an ontology of tropes, one of these functionalist analyses can be developed into an original and informative theory of properties.

Background The South African legal framework requires mandatory parental/legal guardian consent for all research with children. Ethics guidelines provide some reprieve by allowing RECs to grant waivers of parental or guardianship consent in certain defined circumstances. In the first instance, consent may be provided by a proxy when parents or guardians are unavailable, for example with orphaned children. In the second instance, guidelines permit adolescent self-consent when the nature of the study justifies this approach, for example, research on sensitive issues (...) like sexual behaviour or substance use. Discussion South African guidelines set several conditions that must be met for waivers to be granted. These norms overlap with those in international guidelines. However, the ethical norms, especially related to self-consent are sometimes vague. This article critically evaluates the consent norms in the national ethics guidelines and makes recommendations for reform to ethics guidelines in a way that recognises the value of child participation in research, their evolving decision-making capacity and their best interests. Conclusion Recommendations are made to harmonise ethics guidelines and law in a way that promotes child participation in research, to ensure additional protections for adolescents when self-consent is allowed, and to withdraw procedural requirements for the community endorsement of self-consent strategies. (shrink)

Near the beginning of Charles Baudelaire’s Salon of 1846—one of the most brilliant and intellectually ambitious essays in art criticism ever written—the twenty-five-year-old author states that “the critic should arm himself from the start with a sure criterion, a criterion drawn from nature, and should then carry out his duty with a passion; for a critic does not cease to be a man, and passion draws similar temperaments together and exalts the reason to fresh heights.”1 It may be the emphasis (...) on passion, indeed on strong personal feeling of every kind, not only here but everywhere in the Salon, that has prevented commentators from taking wholly seriously the possibility that a single criterion is in fact at work throughout it. But what if that criterion operates in the realm of feeling, if it is itself a feeling or complex of feelings, and if, moreover, as Baudelaire as much as says, no conflict between the claims of reason and of passion exists within his conception of the critical enterprise? Not that scholars have failed to recognize either the brilliance or the ambitiousness of the Salon of 1846; on the contrary, it is widely regarded as the major extrapoetic text of Baudelaire’s early career and especially in recent years has received extensive commentary. But by and large, those who have written about it have focused primarily on topics, such as Baudelaire’s conception of nature, his vision of the creative process, and the relation of his ideas to those of other critics, that seem to me, if not quite pseudoproblems, at any rate concerns that lead us to ignore what the text may be saying about its own manner of proceeding.2 I acknowledge, too, that certain features of that manner—the mixture of irony and seriousness in the opening dedication to the bourgeois, the many abrupt fluctuations of tone in the body of the essay, the seeming breaks in the argument from section to section, the texture and movement of the prose—could hardly be less systematic in effect. And yet it would not be hard to show that the Salon as a whole is the product of a remarkable effort, not merely to ground the judgment of individual works of art in a single experiential principle but also to bind together a number of diverse concerns—pictorial, literary, political, philosophical—in an intellectually coherent structure every part of which is meant to be consonant with every other. No wonder the last sentence of the Salon apostrophizes Balzac: the sheer inclusiveness of Baudelaire’s undertaking recalls nothing so much as the scope of the Comédie humaine. 1. Charles Baudelaire, Salon of 1846, Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne , pp. 101-2. All further references to the Salon of 1846 will be included parenthetically in the text . I have also consulted the recent edition, Baudelaire: “Salon de 1846,” ed. David Kelley , which includes a useful introduction and bibliography.2. See, for example, Margaret Gilman, Baudelaire, the Critic , pp. 12-53 and 77-111; F. W. Leakey, “Les Esthétiques de Baudelaire: Le ‘Système’ des annés 1844-1847,” Revue des sciences humaines, n.s., fasc. 127 : 481-96, and Baudelaire and Nature , pp. 73-88; and Kelley, “Deux Aspects du Salon de 1846 de Baudelaire : La Dédicace aux bourgeois et la couleur,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 5 : 331-46, and introduction to Baudelaire: “Salon de 1846,” pp. 1-114. Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louis and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. He is currently at work on a book on Gustave Courbet. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry, “The Structure of Beholding in Courbet’s Burial at Ornans,” appeared in the June 1983 issue. (shrink)

The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key topics, subjects, thinkers, and debates in feminist philosophy. Fifty-six entries, written by an international team of contributors specifically for the _Companion_, are organized into five sections: Engaging the Past Mind, Body, and World Knowledge, Language, and Science Intersections Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics. The volume provides a mutually enriching representation of the several philosophical traditions that contribute to feminist philosophy, including the analytic and continental traditions. (...) It also foregrounds issues of global concern and scope; shows how feminist theory meshes with rich theoretical approaches that start from transgender identities, race and ethnicity, sexuality, disabilities, and other axes of identity and oppression; and highlights the interdisciplinarity of feminist philosophy and the ways that it both critiques and contributes to the whole range of subfields within philosophy. (shrink)

Considerations upon the nature of properties and laws have led some philosophers to claim that the correct epistemic attitude with regards to the intrinsic properties of particulars is scepticism. I examine one particularly clear version of this line of argument, and contend that a serious form of scepticism is not established. However, I argue that the theories of properties and laws underlying the argument have unwanted metaphysical implications. These provide a stronger reason to jettison the analyses. I end by sketching (...) an alternative view that avoids these difficulties. -/- . (shrink)

_This illuminating account of contemporary American Buddhism shows the remarkable ways the tradition has changed over the past generation_ The past couple of decades have witnessed Buddhist communities both continuing the modernization of Buddhism and questioning some of its limitations. In this fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing religious landscape, Ann Gleig illuminates the aspirations and struggles of younger North American Buddhists during a period she identifies as a distinct stage in the assimilation of Buddhism to the West. She observes (...) both the emergence of new innovative forms of deinstitutionalized Buddhism that blur the boundaries between the religious and secular, and a revalorization of traditional elements of Buddhism, such as ethics and community, that were discarded in the modernization process. Based on extensive ethnographic and textual research, the book ranges from mindfulness debates in the Vipassana network to the sex scandals in American Zen, while exploring issues around racial diversity and social justice, the impact of new technologies, and generational differences between baby boomer, Gen X, and millennial teachers. (shrink)

The feminist philosopher and social scientist shows how "gendering" has affected the social and natural sciences as she reconciles the long-standing dichotomy between the quantitative and qualitative methods and demonstrates the tandem use of both experimental and intuitive approaches.

Relatively few articles discuss the ethical issues that accompany healthcare in rural areas. This article presents and discusses the key findings obtained from multi-method research studies conducted over a 9-year period of time in a multi-state rural area. It challenges the efficacy of current models for bioethics, shows what kinds of ethical issues develop in rural communities, and offers a framework for envisioning resources and approaches that may be more appropriate.

"Ann Plato was the first black to publish a collection of essays, in 1841."--Newsweek.

Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, has always been acknowledged as a great literary figure but has never been thought of as a philosophical original. This book treats Montaigne as a serious thinker in his own right, taking as its point of departure Montaigne's description of himself as 'an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher'. Whereas previous commentators have treated Montaigne's Essays as embodying a scepticism harking back to classical sources, Ann Hartle offers an account that reveals Montaigne's thought to (...) be dialectical, transforming sceptical doubt into wonder at the most familiar aspects of life. This major reassessment of a much admired but also much underestimated thinker will interest a wide range of historians of philosophy as well as scholars in comparative literature, French studies and the history of ideas. (shrink)