This paper emphasizes the crucial role of variation, at several different levels, for a detailed historical understanding of the development of the biomedical sciences. Going beyond valuable recent studies that focus on model organisms, experimental systems and instruments, we argue that all of these categories can be accommodated within our approach, which pays special attention to organismal and cultural variation. Our empirical examples are drawn in particular from recent historical studies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century genetics and physiology. Based on (...) the quasi-paradoxical conclusion that biological and cultural variation both constrains and enables innovation in the biomedical sciences, we argue that more attention should be paid to variation as an analytical category in the historiography of the life sciences. (shrink)

: Conservation efforts are only as sustainable as the social and political context within which they take place. The weakening or collapse of sociopolitical frameworks during wartime can lead to habitat destruction and the erosion of conservation policies, but in some cases, may also confer ecological benefits through altered settlement patterns and reduced resource exploitation. Over 90% of the major armed conflicts between 1950 and 2000 occurred within countries containing biodiversity hotspots, and more than 80% took place directly within hotspot areas. (...) Less than one-third of the 34 recognized hotspots escaped significant conflict during this period, and most suffered repeated episodes of violence. This pattern was remarkably consistent over these 5 decades. Evidence from the war-torn Eastern Afromontane hotspot suggests that biodiversity conservation is improved when international nongovernmental organizations support local protected area staff and remain engaged throughout the conflict. With biodiversity hotspots concentrated in politically volatile regions, the conservation community must maintain continuous involvement during periods of war, and biodiversity conservation should be incorporated into military, reconstruction, and humanitarian programs in the world’s conflict zones. (shrink)

By this book, Burrell wants to correct the reading of the most familiar of Aquinas’s texts, particularly those concerning God, esse, and actus. His corrective depends on the assertion that Aquinas has and uses a "philosophical grammar." Examples of devices from this grammar are the distinctions between concrete and abstract terms, between existential and predicative uses of "to be," and between the thing signified and the mode of its signification. With these and other "maneuvers," Aquinas is able to fulfill the (...) "theological task he sets himself: to elucidate the parameters of responsible discourse about God". It is only by insisting that the texts in the prima pars of the Summa, Qq. 3-11, are not a doctrine of God that we may be faithful to Aquinas’s apophatic injunction: we can know of God only what he is not. What the Scholastics wanted to make into a tractatus de Deo is in fact only "a series of restrictions on what we might appropriately say". (shrink)

Moreau sketches here with enthusiasm the large features of Aquinas’s epistemology. He is not, as he makes clear, a Thomist either by training or by avowal. The book is not, then, a specialist’s monograph or dogmatic treatise. It is Moreau’s attempt to hear what Aquinas will say to the great questions. The attempt is largely successful in attending to Aquinas’s remarks, though it does not catch their ambiguities.

In his struggle to vindicate the religious enterprise from the charge that it is unfalsifiable and meaningless, McKinnon reduces both science and religion to distorted caricatures, ignores the centrality of the problems of evil, anguish, absurdity, and the egocentric predicament for religion, and asserts that religion and science are fundamentally one and the same. He builds his thesis on a distinction between "assertional," "self-instructional," and "ontological-linguistic" intentionality of utterances. By equivocating about whether these usages are logically independent, McKinnon holds that, (...) as "self-instructional," utterances are outside the positivist's arena. He presses the noteworthy point--that utterances sometimes are intended to report an existential stance--in such a way as to divert attention from the vast differences between religious and scientific methods and subject matter. Not content with leaving religious utterances restricted to mere reporting, McKinnon builds a case for bypassing positivistic attack under the other two usages by trading on a supposed incommensurability between particulars and universals. E.g., he holds that "God is love" must be indeterminate and unfalsifiable since both nouns are universals and since God is incomprehensible. And so it goes, a battle between straw men on a shifting field of honor for a prize of dubious worth. Notwithstanding, this is a thought provoking treatment of a difficult topic.--M. D. P. (shrink)

The core of Lescoe’s new book is a critical edition of the first treatise of book 4 from Ulrich of Strasbourg’s Summa de bono. After Aquinas, Ulrich is Albert the Great’s best known disciple; he was certainly the more faithful. Ulrich’s Summa is, indeed, an enormous treatise built along Albertinian lines, mirroring in its eclecticism and its extent the range of Albert’s own concerns. "It is very apparent," Lescoe writes, "... that Ulrich depended on his master for much of his (...) doctrinal and even literal inspiration. His merit lies not so much in his originality of thought as in the work of synthesis and organization". Perhaps partly because of this, and given the ascendancy of Thomism among the Dominicans from an early date, the Summa de bono lies mostly unedited. A critical edition of book 1 was published in 1930 by Daguillon and a few other sections have been transcribed in unpublished dissertations and theses. But even with Lescoe’s present contribution, three-quarters of the Summa remains untranscribed and almost ninety-five percent of the work remains unprinted. (shrink)

This collection of reprinted social philosophy broadly surveys and introduces problems and positions vis-à-vis the concept of right. Using the tools of ordinary language analysis, M. MacDonald evaluates the attempts of other writers to resolve the tensions between civil and moral responsibility. H. L. A. Hart argues that "... if there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right." His laudatory deductive exercise and categorization of rights suggests no leads for answering the (...) hypothetical he poses. While MacDonald and Hart raise no gut issues, G. Vlastos gives a common sense analysis of the main stream of classical debate, couching his inquiry in terms of conflicts between collective and distributive justice. His article both includes the scope and surpasses the stopping points of the earlier selections. Through leading to a philosophical discussion of the workings of the denial of human rights within the segregationist position, R. Wasserstrom unmasks the practical stakes involved in what the others leave as an academic problem. H. Morris's witty analysis of a hypothetical "right to be punished" lays bare the fact that social institutions embody some concept of right, duty, and obligation. He leaves the reader with the unanswered but clearly indicated question of which concept of right does one want society to sanction. Also included are: J. Locke's The Second Treatise of Civil Government, Chapters two and five; J. Bentham's Anarchical Fallacies; The Virginia Declaration of Rights ; Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens ; Universal Declaration of Human Rights ; and a portion of the Declaration of Independence of the U.S.A.--M. D. P. (shrink)

This "little brochure," as Gilson himself imagined it, belongs to a book, The Philosophical Constants of Being, which he had in draft at his death. Gouhier has followed Gilson's suggestions in detaching these two chapters from the draft in order to publish them as Difficult Atheism. The first chapter, which carries the same title, is a much revised version of an essay which appeared in The Great Ideas Today. The second chapter, entitled "On Behalf of the Handmaid," is the French (...) translation of a piece read before a theological conference in 1967. A brochure containing occasional pieces might not seem to promise much. But Gilson does think seriously in these two essays about the converse questions, whether atheism is philosophically tenable and whether believing philosophers can appropriately be asked to combat it with proofs. (shrink)

This monograph presents itself as an account of the various roles played by notions of participation in Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles. Lazzaro intends that the study be one of a series which will track these notions through the whole of the Thomist corpus. To judge by his repeated references, Lazzaro seems also to conceive this project as a confirmation and amplification of the accounts already given by Cornelio Fabro. It is not entirely clear what Lazzaro intends to add to Fabro—perhaps (...) further "documentation," perhaps a few nuances of interpretation. (shrink)