Admirers of Whitehead who know him best have suggested that Wordsworth had possibly a greater influence upon him than anyone except Plato. Nowhere apparently has Whitehead admitted such an influence, as he has that of Plato and Locke and that of William James, Bergson, and Alexander among traditional and contemporary philosophers But he had a predilection for poetry, and attributes to the great poets philosophical importance. They capture uniquely, he says, “a fragrance of experience”; and “… express deep intuitions of (...) mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact.” As observers of nature both Wordsworth and Whitehead ascribed to animate and inanimate life a degree of feeling or satisfaction in the course of being and becoming. Like the poet, Whitehead must have found “joy in widest commonalty spread.” The multiplication table, he noted at one time, “… is no good to the realist. It shuts him up with Plato's ideas out of space and out of time” when “… like Wordsworth and the rest of us he wants to hear the throstle sing.”. (shrink)

. Although the courts have ruled that companies are legal persons, they have not yet made clear the extent to which political free speech for corporations is limited by the strictures legitimately placed upon corporate commercial speech. I explore the question of whether or not companies can properly be said to have the right to civil free speech or whether corporate speech is always de facto commercial speech not subject to the same sorts of legal protections as is the right (...) to civil free speech. In the absence of clearly defined legal precedent, I emphasize moral reasons for determining the appropriate limits of corporate civil free speech. Appealing to arguments typically used to justify individual rights to civil free speech, I examine the extent to which this sort of justification may or may not be legitimately extended to corporations. I conclude that corporate rights to civil free speech must be restricted because granting rights of free speech to institutions may, in practice, undermine the moral rationale and practical feasibility of guaranteeing rights of civil free speech to individuals. Furthermore, I argue that granting corporations full rights to civil free speech will undercut attempts to develop good moral character in corporate institutions by undermining the efforts of watchdog organizations. (shrink)

Plato famously promised to complement the Sophist and the Statesman with another work on a third sort of expert, the philosopher--but we do not have this final dialogue. Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher, but did not write it, in order to stimulate his audience and encourage his readers to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato's investigation (...) of knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, the second part of which presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. Gill contends that the dialogues leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher's method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato's philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato's exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose. (shrink)

In the Philippines, all transplant centers are mandated by the Department of Health (DOH) to have a Hospital Transplant Ethics Committee (HTEC) to ensure that donations are altruistic, voluntary and free of coercion/commercial transactions. This study was undertaken primarily to describe the organizational and functional profile of existing HTECs and identify areas for improvement. This is a descriptive cross‐sectional study. There was variation in their logistical arrangements (support from hospital, filing systems, office spaces), operations (length and frequency of meetings, number (...) of referrals) and membership (composition, qualifications, occupation, training). The approval rate for donor‐recipient pairs is high with the majority of cases made by living non‐related donors. Appropriate reasons were cited for rejection. The perception of HTECs is that they are competent and confident in their decision‐making. However, there is a need to standardize HTEC composition, provide operating procedures and additional training which can be done by the DOH. (shrink)

One hundred years after Gestalt views first took hold our understanding of how perceptual processes organize the visual field into objects and their local backgrounds has progressed substantially. We now know that in addition to the image-based properties that the Gestalt psychologists identified as relevant, a myriad of other image-based factors influence figure–ground organization, as do subjective factors such as past experience, attention, and intentions. Moreover, properties of grounds as well as properties of figures play a role. The recent use (...) of indirect measures and brain imaging techniques has revealed that there is much more processing of the regions ultimately perceived as grounds than is supposed in traditional approaches, and that competition and feedback are involved in figure–ground organization. These recent advances offer great promise for uncovering the mechanisms that organize the visual field into figures and grounds. (shrink)

Mary Midgley argues in her powerful new book that far from being the opposite of science, myth is a central part of it. In brilliant prose, she claims that myths are neither lies nor mere stories but a network of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.

In _Michael Polanyi and His Generation_, Mary Jo Nye investigates the role that Michael Polanyi and several of his contemporaries played in the emergence of the social turn in the philosophy of science. This turn involved seeing science as a socially based enterprise that does not rely on empiricism and reason alone but on social communities, behavioral norms, and personal commitments. Nye argues that the roots of the social turn are to be found in the scientific culture and political (...) events of Europe in the 1930s, when scientific intellectuals struggled to defend the universal status of scientific knowledge and to justify public support for science in an era of economic catastrophe, Stalinism and Fascism, and increased demands for applications of science to industry and social welfare. At the center of this struggle was Polanyi, who Nye contends was one of the first advocates of this new conception of science. Nye reconstructs Polanyi’s scientific and political milieus in Budapest, Berlin, and Manchester from the 1910s to the 1950s and explains how he and other natural scientists and social scientists of his generation—including J. D. Bernal, Ludwik Fleck, Karl Mannheim, and Robert K. Merton—and the next, such as Thomas Kuhn, forged a politically charged philosophy of science, one that newly emphasized the social construction of science. (shrink)

_Strange Wonder_ confronts Western philosophy's ambivalent relationship to the Platonic "wonder" that reveals the strangeness of the everyday. On the one hand, this wonder is said to be the origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished as swiftly as possible. By endeavoring to resolve wonder's indeterminacy into certainty and calculability, philosophy paradoxically secures itself at the expense of its own condition of possibility. _Strange Wonder_ locates a (...) reopening of wonder's primordial uncertainty in the work of Martin Heidegger, for whom wonder is first experienced as the shock at the groundlessness of things and then as an astonishment that things nevertheless _are_. Mary-Jane Rubenstein traces this double movement through the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida, ultimately thematizing wonder as the awesome, awful opening that exposes thinking to devastation as well as transformation. Rubenstein's study shows that wonder reveals the extraordinary in and through the ordinary, and is therefore crucial to the task of reimagining political, religious, and ethical terrain. (shrink)

_Strange Wonder_ confronts Western philosophy's ambivalent relationship to the Platonic "wonder" that reveals the strangeness of the everyday. On the one hand, this wonder is said to be the origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished as swiftly as possible. By endeavoring to resolve wonder's indeterminacy into certainty and calculability, philosophy paradoxically secures itself at the expense of its own condition of possibility. _Strange Wonder_ locates a (...) reopening of wonder's primordial uncertainty in the work of Martin Heidegger, for whom wonder is first experienced as the shock at the groundlessness of things and then as an astonishment that things nevertheless _are_. Mary-Jane Rubenstein traces this double movement through the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida, ultimately thematizing wonder as the awesome, awful opening that exposes thinking to devastation as well as transformation. Rubenstein's study shows that wonder reveals the extraordinary in and through the ordinary, and is therefore crucial to the task of reimagining political, religious, and ethical terrain. (shrink)

Renowned philosopher Mary Midgley explores the remarkable gap that has opened up between our own understanding of our sense of our self and today's scientific orthodoxy that claims the self to be nothing more than an elaborate illusion. Bringing her formidable acuity and analytic skills to bear, she exposes some very odd claims and muddled thinking on the part of cognitive scientists and psychologists when it comes to talk about the self. Well-known philosophical problems in causality, subjectivity, empiricism, free (...) will and determinsim are shown to have been glossed over by scientists claiming that the self is no more than a jumble of brain-cells. Midgley argues powerfully and persuasively that the rich variety of our imaginative life cannot be contained in the narrow bounds of a highly puritanical materialism that equates brain and self. The denial of the self has been sustained by the belief that physical science requires it, but there is not just one such pattern of thought but many others which all help to explain the different kinds of problems that arise in our life, argues Midgley. Physics' amazing contemporary successes spring from attacking problems that arise within physics, not from outside. It is no more sensible to give a physical answer to a moral problem than it is to give political answers to physical ones. 'Are you an Illusion?' is an impassioned defence of the importance of our own experiences - the subjective sources of thought - which are every bit as necessary for the world as the objective ones such as brain cells. (shrink)

Between 1937 and 1940 the Taxonomic Principles Committee of the newly-founded Association for the Study of Systematics in Relation to General Biology (later the Systematics Association) attempted to define the relationship between evolution and taxonomy. The people who took part in the discussion were W.T. Calman, C.R.P. Diver, J.S.L. Gilmour, J.S. Huxley, W.D. Lang, J.R. Norman, R. Melville, O.W. Richards, M.A. Smith, T.A. Sprague, H. Hamshaw Thomas, W.B. Turrill, B.P. Uvarov, A.F. Watkins, E.I. White, and A.J. Wilmott. Most of the (...) botanists asserted that taxonomy was a practical matter to be kept distinct from phylogenetic speculation, and most of the zoologists insisted that taxonomists must strive to represent evolution if they wished to be scientific. The disagreement seemed to be hardening rather than approaching compromise when World War Two stopped the committee's work. (shrink)

Ornaments are the most common and ubiquitous art form of the Late Pleistocene. This fact suggests a common, fundamental function somewhat different to other kinds of Paleolithic art. While the capacity for artistic expression could be considerably older than the record of preserved art would suggest, beads signal a novel development in the efficiency and flexibility of visual communication technology. The Upper Paleolithic was a period of considerable regional differentiation in material culture, yet there is remarkable consistency in the dominant (...) shapes and sizes of Paleolithic beads over more than 25,000 years and across vast areas, even though they were made from diverse materials and, in the case of mollusc shells, diverse taxonomic families. Cultural and linguistic continuity cannot explain the meta-pattern. The evidence indicates that widespread adoption of beads of redundant form was not only about local and subregional communication of personal identity or group affinity, but also an expansion in the geographic scale of social networks. The conformity of the beads grew spontaneously and in a self-organizing manner from individuals’ interest in tapping into the network as a means for spreading social and environmental risk. (shrink)

Just Life reorients ethics and politics around the generativity of mothers and daughters rather than the right to property and the sexual proprieties of the Oedipal drama. Invoking two concrete universals – everyone is born of a woman and everyone needs to eat – Rawlinson rethinks labor and food as relationships that make ethical claims and sustain agency. Just Life counters the capitalization of bodies under biopower with the solidarity of sovereign bodies.

D.T. Suzuki. A Biography. A. Irwin Switzer III. Edited and enlarged by John Snelling. The Buddhist Society, London 1985. 63 pp. I11.

Imaging Wisdom, Seeing and Knowing in the Art of Indian Buddhism. Jacob N. Kinnard. Curzon Press, Richmond 1999. xi, 210 pp., 16 figures. £40.00. ISBN 0-7007-1083-3.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This paper examines the effects of three different types of father absence on the timing of life history events among women in rural Bangladesh. Age at marriage and age at first birth are compared across women who experienced different father presence/absence conditions as children. Survival analyses show that daughters of fathers who divorced their mothers or deserted their families have consistently younger ages at marriage and first birth than other women. In contrast, daughters whose fathers were labor migrants have consistently (...) older ages at marriage and first birth. Daughters whose fathers died when they were children show older ages at marriage and first birth than women with divorced/deserted fathers and women with fathers present. These effects may be mediated by high socioeconomic status and high levels of parental investment among the children of labor migrants, and a combination of low investment, high psychosocial stress, and low alloparental investment among women with divorced/deserted fathers. Our findings are most consistent with the Child Development Theory model of female life history strategies, though the Paternal Investment and Psychosocial Acceleration models also help explain differences between women in low paternal investment situations (e.g., father divorced/abandoned vs. father dead). Father absence in and of itself seems to have little effect on the life history strategies of Bangladeshi women once key reasons for or correlates of absence are controlled, and none of the models is a good predictor of why women with deceased fathers have delayed life histories compared with women whose fathers are present. (shrink)

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, legal commentators and bioethicists asked whether other constitutional rights were on the chopping block (Coh...

It is 2048 BE; the Anonyma Network, represented by a young philosopher known affectionately as Annie, offers this fiftieth anniversary edition of Mary Daly's revolutionary work of Radical Elemental Feminism, Quintessence ... Realizing the Archaic Future. Mary Daly has, for the past thirty years, been at the forefront of radical feminist thinking. Here she exposes and examines the abuses women face at the end of the twentieth century - for example, the dangerous rhetoric of the Promise Keepers; the (...) systematic rape of women in war zones like Bosnia; and the invasive manipulation of women's bodies and all of nature in genetic engineering, fertility experiments, and cloning. But she also offers a "Far-Out Vision and Hope for Wonderlusting Women" who are beginning to discover Quintessence: Spirit that fills the universe and gives it life and vitality. (shrink)