OBJECTIVES: To study and describe how a group of senior researchers and a group of postgraduate students perceived the so-called "grey zone" between normal scientific practice and obvious misconduct. DESIGN: A questionnaire concerning various practices including dishonesty and obvious misconduct. The answers were obtained by means of a visual analogue scale (VAS). The central (two quarters) of the VAS were designated as a grey zone. SETTING: A Swedish medical faculty. SURVEY SAMPLE: 30 senior researchers and 30 postgraduate students. RESULTS: Twenty (...) of the senior researchers and 25 of the postgraduate students answered the questionnaire. In five cases out of 14 the senior researchers' median was found to be clearly within the interval of the grey zone, compared with three cases for the postgraduate students. Three examples of experienced misconduct were provided. Compared with postgraduate students, established researchers do not call for more research ethical guidelines and restrictions. CONCLUSION: Although the results indicate that consensus exists regarding certain obvious types of misconduct the response pattern also indicates that there is no general consensus on several procedures. (shrink)

The discovery of the inscription with the name of [M]iltiades, which confirmed the statement in Dionysius Halicarnassensis 7. 3. 1 that a Miltiades was archon at Athens in 524/3, prompts a reconsideration of the problems presented by the accounts in Herodotus and in Marcellinus Life of Thucydides concerning the Philaid family. To the question, who is this Miltiades, the following answers have been given. ‘He is not a Philaid.’ The objection to this answer is that the Peisistratids either occupied the (...) archonship themselves or gave it to members of leading families, such as Cleisthenes the Alcmeonid in 525/4; if then this Miltiades was a member of a leading family, he is almost certainly a member of the Philaid family. ‘He is the elder Miltiades who founded the settlement in the Chersonese.’ In Herodotus' account Miltiades left Athens, where he was already powerful, at the beginning of a tyranny by Peisistratus; then after several operations in the Chersonese Miltiades was rescued by Croesus. The year in which Miltiades left Athens was either 561/0 or 556/5 and almost certainly the latter; for in 561/0 Croesus was not on the throne. The year 546 may be excluded; for in 546 autumn and winter Croesus had neither the time nor the opportunity to concern himself with Miltiades, since Cyrus was then at war with Lydia and seized Sardis.2 If Miltiades was powerful in 556/5, he was at that date no youngster but at least in his thirties—a man born say c. 590. In 524/3, being well on in his sixties and having spent thirty years and more in the Chersonese, this Miltiades is unlikely to have been the eponymous archon. We conclude, then, that the archon Miltiades in 524/3 was a different and younger Miltiades. Having cleared the ground on these two points, I turn to the central problem, whether there were two men called Miltiades, one born c. 590 and the other the general who died of a wound soon after 489, or whether there were three men called Miltiades, one of whom was in a generation intermediate between Miltiades born c. 590 and Miltiades dead c. 489. Either solution is chronologically possible. (shrink)

I wish now to return to the elementary characterization of languagehood in section III and its rationalization in section IV and say something by way of conclusion. The account given may or may not have a large number of fascinating and important consequences, but I shall confine myself to a couple of minor points and one not so minor.Let us suppose that there are either an infinite number of extra-linguistic entities (which seems plausible) or an infinite number of possible expressions (...) (inscriptibles). Then, since the Descriptive Part of a language is just a finite mapping of expressions onto entities, there will be an infinite number of languages. The point is pretty obvious anyway. A language is presumably a linguistic structure (whatever that is) thatcould be used by intelligent creatures in exchanging information and in doing logic. There is no reason at all to suppose that the number of such structures is finite.The second minor point is derivative. There is no essential differencequa languages between the so-called natural languages and the so-called artificial languages. Consider hammers. Some hammers are actually used to drive nails. Some perish in warehouse fires before they ever have that honor. But all are equally hammers. It's the same with languages. Some are actually used, the vast majority, including the “artificial” languages defined in semantics books, are never used. But apart from differences in richness and complexity, all are equally languages.8But the major point I wished to bring out in this paper is the contrast between a language and its use, or, if you like, between a language and speech behaviour. I labored the distinction in my introductory remarks and in the body of the paper I offered a sketch of a purely semantical definition of ‘language’. Insofar as the apparatus goes any distance towards bringing order out of chaos then this circumstance vindicates the distinction. We say that Alexander is able to ride Bucephalus and is able to speak Greek. Just as in the first case we distinguish between what Alexander is able to do, namely ride Bucephalus, and what he is able to ride, namely, Bucephalus, so in the second we should distinguish between what Alexander is able todo, namely, speak Greek, and what he is able tospeak, namely, Greek. Strictly speaking, of course, we have to recognize the linguistician's commonplace distinction, within use, between the ability or competence to speak (use) a language and specific exercises of that ability, or performances9. This is the distinction between ‘He speaks English’ and ‘He is now speaking English’.Another example, closer to present concerns. We would have no trouble distinguishing between the ability to play the Bach Chaconne and performances of the Chaconne on the one hand, and on the other, the Chaconne itself; between what the violinist is able todo (viz., play the Chaconne) and what he is able to play (viz., the Chaconne). And once we accept the distinction we would expect to be able to describe the Chaconne —which is a sequence of sounds - independently of the behavior involved in playing it. An unedited score in fact does this. It is the violinteacher who talks about double stopping and so on.10 In the same way, it seems to me, if we accept the distinction between a language and its use we commit ourselves to discovering ways of giving a phonological-syntactical-semantical characterization of a languagewithout reference to behavior, without employing the word ‘uses’ - and this demand has exactly the same rationale as the demand that we keep psychology out of logic. Then in pure pragmatics, the word ‘uses’ comes into its own. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Criminal Law, Pain Relief, and Physician Aid in DyingFaye Girsh, Ed.D., Executive DirectorMadam:The article by Cantor and Thomas on “Pain Relief, Acceleration of Death, and Criminal Law” (KIEJ, June 1996) was a tortured attempt to develop criteria for the humane and compassionate physician who tries to serve the needs of a patient in unremitting pain. There are three areas that merit comment.The authors dealt with pain medications that might (...) have the undesirable side effect of causing death. They did not mention tolerance, which usually occurs in a patient with chronic pain and which would require exceedingly high doses to be effective. They did not mention barbiturates, which are preferable to opiates in causing death and which are used increasingly by compassionate physicians to answer the pleas of their suffering patients, but for which there is no excuse about alleviating pain. Would the criminal law just call the prescription of a lethal dose of barbiturates a reckless act and require conviction? Fortunately, juries, as the authors point out, do not balance these formulas on the head of a pin. When they see the circumstances under which these doctors do help their patients, they choose to nullify the law and would ignore the suggestions made in this article.The authors refer to the “consent” of the patient. They do not mention that these doctors are operating with more than consent; they are administering these medications because suffering patients are begging them to put them out of their pain and the indignities of the dying process. The article discusses the process as though it were the same as consent to elective surgery. These patients—with AIDS, cancer, and hopeless neurological degeneration—are not simply agreeing to a procedure; they are desperately seeking a way out. If the criminal law were to develop criteria for physician aid in dying, certainly one of them should be the active, witnessed, repeated request of such a patient for a certain, quick, painless, gentle death.The third point is that physicians do not face prosecution when administering no treatment to a patient whose life could be saved with treatment but who chooses not to receive it. This has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court; no criteria for suffering, alternatives, terminality, justifiability, or unbearability are required. The doctor can stand by while the patient dies what may be a protracted, difficult death, but it is within the law. What matters in this situation is the decision of the patient to refuse treatment, and that is absolute. How ironic that the patient who cannot refuse treatment must, with his or her doctor, jump through all these hoops to achieve a peaceful death.One worries that the physician who must balance the risk of “risky pain relief” against the accusation of recklessness will err in the direction of allowing [End Page 103] the patient to bear the pain rather than help with a dose of analgesics that might be considered beyond the stipulated “risk.”Why don’t we just be honest about it? Allow dying or hopelessly ill patients to make the decision about what they want by passing a carefully defined law allowing euthanasia rather than balancing the risk and trying to determine the “purpose” of the physician’s ministrations. We protect some patients from themselves while allowing others almost complete autonomy to make the choice of ending their lives. The authors were right in saying that proponents of rational laws consider this sheer hypocrisy.Faye Girsh, Executive DirectorHemlock Society U.S.A. Denver, COFaye Girsh misconceives our article’s objective as an “attempt to develop criteria” for the humane physician. Our goal in writing the paper was to analyze the current criminal law framework in the hope of sharpening debate and engendering normative critiques. We readily acknowledge tensions in the current legal framework and would support changes in that framework.Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The clinical introduction of medical devices often occurs with relatively little oversight, regulation and (long-term) follow-up. Some recent controversies underscore the weaknesses of the current regime, such as the complications surrounding the metal-on-metal hip implants and the scandal surrounding the global breast implant scare of silicone implants made by France's Poly Implant Prothese (PIP) Company. The absence of national registries hampered the collection of reliable information on the risks and harms of the PIP breast implants. To warrant long-term safety, a (...) case can be made for mandatory post-marketing surveillance by means of the establishment of compulsory registries. In this edition of Public Health Ethics, Schofield calls for debate on how such a registry system should be initiated and maintained and how it would relate to the ethical requirement of consent. Here we use breast implant registries as a case to discuss whether and when a so-called ‘thick opt-out’ would be an appropriate method to include people in medical device registries. We conclude that a thick opt-out procedure for medical device registries is only justifiable in cases where inclusion does not involve burdens (or very low), when it does not involve a sensitive subject and when the data are stored anonymously (or at least not directly linked to the medical record). Otherwise, inclusion should be sought by means of an opt-in. (shrink)

Calls are increasing for American health care to be organized as a learning health care system, defined by the Institute of Medicine as a health care system “in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.” We applaud this conception, and in this paper, we put forward a new ethics framework for it. No such (...) framework has previously been articulated. The goals of our framework are twofold: to support the transformation to a learning health care system and to help ensure that learning activities carried out within such a system are conducted in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

Calls are increasing for American health care to be organized as a learning health care system, defined by the Institute of Medicine as a health care system “in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.” We applaud this conception, and in this paper, we put forward a new ethics framework for it. No such (...) framework has previously been articulated. The goals of our framework are twofold: to support the transformation to a learning health care system and to help ensure that learning activities carried out within such a system are conducted in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

Beneath metaphysical problems there often lies a conflict between what we want to be true and what we believe to be true. Nathan provides a general account of the resolution of this conflict as a philosophical objective, showing that there are ways of thinking it through systematically with a view to resolving or alleviating it. The author also studies in detail a set of interrelated conflicts about the freedom and the reality of the will. He shows how difficult it is (...) to find a freedom either of decision or of action which is both an object of reflective desire and an object of rational belief. He also examines conflicts about volition as such, contending that the veridicality of volitional experience is no less easy to doubt than the veridicality of our experience of colors. In this context, arguments emerge for a voluntarist theory of the self. Nathan's important book will be essential reading for all philosophers interested in free will, volition, the self, and the methodology of metaphysics. (shrink)

The former part of this paper attempted to show— 1. That in Anaxagoras' scheme of physics the following substances were elements: The animal substances ; The vegetable substances ; The so-called Opposites ; and 2. That there is no evidence that Anaxagoras asserted any substances to be homoeomerous, and that, even if he had done so, the word ‘homoeomerous’ does not bear the meanings often attached to it by those theories which assume he made the assertion. The meaning of is, (...) μοιομερς is, not ‘simple in substance,’ i.e. ‘elementary,’ but ‘simple in formation.’. (shrink)

The focus of this study was to analyze the content, distribution, and comparative genome relationships of 996 chromosome bin-mapped expressed sequence tags accounting for 2266 restriction fragments on the homoeologous group 3 chromosomes of hexaploid wheat. Of these loci, 634, 884, and 748 were mapped on chromosomes 3A, 3B, and 3D, respectively. The individual chromosome bin maps revealed bins with a high density of mapped ESTs in the distal region and bins of low density in the proximal region of the (...) chromosome arms, with the exception of 3DS and 3DL. These distributions were more localized on the higher-resolution group 3 consensus map with intermediate regions of high-mapped-EST density on both chromosome arms. Gene ontology classification of mapped ESTs was not significantly different for homoeologous group 3 chromosomes compared to the other groups. A combined analysis of the individual bin maps using 537 of the mapped ESTs revealed rearrangements between the group 3 chromosomes. Approximately 232 of the consensus mapped ESTs matched sequences on rice chromosome 1 and revealed large- and small-scale differences in gene order. Of the group 3 mapped EST unigenes ∼21 and 32% matched the Arabidopsis coding regions and proteins, respectively, but no chromosome-level gene order conservation was detected. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Hume's Skepticism about Inductive Inference N. SCOTT ARNOLD IT HAS BEEN A COMMONPLACE among commentators on Hume's philosophy that he was a radical skeptic about inductive inference. In addition, he is alleged to have been the first philosopher to pose the so-called problem of induction. Until recently, however, Hume's argument in this connection has not been subject to very close scrutiny. As attention has become focused on this (...) argument, a debate has been shaping up concerning just what Hume intended to establish here. The principal purpose of this article is to settle this interpretive issue as decisively as the texts permit. I should also like to locate Hume's main argument about induction in the larger context of his discussion of skepti- cism in book 1 of the Treatise. I shall suggest that arguments for the radical skepticism commonly attributed to Hume can be found only very late in book 1 of the Treatise and that the most famous argument about inductive inference establishes and is intended to establish only a relatively modest form of skepticism. The argument under consideration can found in book l, part 3, section 6 of the Treatise. It can also be found in essays 4 and 5 of the Enquiries and in the abstract of the Treatise published anonymously by Hume. I shall concen- trate on the Treatise version since it is the first and perhaps most explicit formulation of the argument and because part of my purpose is to place this argument in the larger context of book 1 of the Treatise. The received opinion concerning Hume's argument has it that Hume was highly skeptical about the mind's claims to knowledge about the future (or, more generally, about the unobserved). All beliefs arrived at via inductive I should like to thank M. G. Anderson, John Bahde, Jon Nordy, and Robert Paul Wolff, as well as David Fate Norton and a referee for the Journal of the History of Philosophy, for helpful comments on earlier drafts on this article. 32 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY inferences are unreasonable or unjustified. The alternative interpretation, to be defended below, is that Hume held that no such belief is or can be rendered certain relative to past experience and that such beliefs are not, upon that account, unreasonable or unjustified. Something like this inter- pretation has been defended by Tom L. Beauchamp, Thomas Mappes, and Alexander Rosenberg. ~ My view differs from theirs in that I shall argue that Hume did offer arguments for the more radical skepticism commonly attri- buted to him (though it is unclear whether he regarded them as decisive). These arguments, however, come at the end of book ~ of the Treatise and are independent of the more famous argument to be discussed below. Defenders of the received view are both numerous and distinguished. Versions of this interpretation of the main argument can be found in the writings of Karl Popper, Wesley Salmon, F. L. Will, and Norman Kemp Smith; most recently a variation on the standard interpretation has been defended by Barry Stroud. The fullest and most elaborate defense of the standard interpretation can be found in a monograph by D. C. Stove. '~ Stove's discussion is perhaps the most impressive because of his painstaking efforts to lay bare the structure of Hume's reasoning and to give a line-by- line analysis of the argument. This has the effect of bringing more clearly into focus the main grounds for the standard view. If this standard interpre- tation is correct, then Hume's position is that scientific method is epistemically no better than "superstition" and "enthusiasm." And, Hume would be among those for whom this claim, if true, would be very bad news, because one of his primary purposes in the Treatise is to construct a science of man. Thus, this argument is of considerable internal significance because, if my opponents are correct, Hume appears to have cut the ground out from under what he took to be one of his most important projects -- the construc- tion of a science of man. The other feature of this argument that makes it worthy of serious con- sideration is that it is philosophically... (shrink)

Among the Greek manuscripts in the Earl of Leicester's library at Holkham, which were recently acquired by the Bodleian Library throuth the generosity of the Dulverton Trust, is a volume containing eight of Aristophanes' plays. This manuscript is not included in the list of Aristophanes' manuscripts compilied by J. W. White, and it seems that no editor has ever consulted it. The object of this paper is to describe the manuscript, which will be called L, to prove that it is (...) an almost complete copy of the Triclinian edition of Aristophanes. (shrink)

Among the Greek manuscripts in the Earl of Leicester's library at Holkham, which were recently acquired by the Bodleian Library throuth the generosity of the Dulverton Trust, is a volume containing eight of Aristophanes' plays. This manuscript is not included in the list of Aristophanes' manuscripts compilied by J. W. White, and it seems that no editor has ever consulted it. The object of this paper is to describe the manuscript, which will be called L, to prove that it is (...) an almost complete copy of the Triclinian edition of Aristophanes. (shrink)

1. The ideal of spatio-temporally unrestricted generalisation, which marks all post-mythological thinking about nature, marks no more than the continuity of totemism in political casuistry. No unrestricted principle of Socialism or Conservatism or Liberal Democracy is defensible unless it is accorded a moral ultimacy which almost no one fully conscious of what he was about would actually want to accord it. If this bare platitude is to be fully assimilated, it needs both concrete exemplification and support of the systematic kind. (...) Liberal principles are well provided for in these respects: J. F. Stephen showed in brilliant detail that, from a utilitarian point of view, the question whether liberty even in advanced societies is irrespective of time and place a good or a bad thing is an irrational question—”as irrational as the question whether fire is a good or a bad thing.” But demonstrations and illustrations of the restricted nature of our other popular political principles are not so easily come by, and the critical survey of standard prodemocratic arguments, which makes up Part III of this paper, is meant to supply a part of the deficiency. (shrink)

A.N. Prior once showed that on certain apparently reasonable assumptions, a thesis sometimes associated with the name of Hume to the effect that no set of factual statements can ever entail an evaluative statement, is quite untenable. We assume only that there is at least one statement of each kind, and that the negation of a factual statement is factual — a principle we may call ‘N'. Now consider the disjunction F V E of some factual with some evaluative (...) statement. Since the disjunction is entailed by F, a factual statement, it must, if principle H is correct, be classified as factual. But by N, ∽ F is also factual, and this together with F V E entails E, thus violating H since E was exhypothesi an evaluative statement. (shrink)

The problem of the rational and the irrational has been one of the most important problems of philosophy since philosophy's birth, for what is philosophy if not meditation on the structure of the universe and of man, immersed in it: Is the universe rational, or is it at bottom irrational and hence unknowable and unpredictable? Are our means of coming to know being [bytie] rational, or can one reach the depths of being only through intuition, illumination, and so forth? Let (...) me immediately make the qualification that the questions posed are improper, for to separate the rational and the irrational is from various points of view extremely unphilosophical. Just as the one cannot exist without the many, just as there is no being without nonbeing, no left without right, no night without day, and no male without female, so there is in philosophy no rational without the irrational. To disregard or consciously reject either the rational or the irrational level of being leads to truly tragic consequences: not only is an invalid theoretical schema created that impoverishes reality, but a knowingly false idea of the universe and of man's situation in it is formed. Let us recall our, if one may call it that, most recent past. The Stalinist-Brezhnevist ideology without further ado simply forbade the irrational and commanded that the world be regarded as rational, lucid, and transparent. The powers that be taught philosophers and their ilk to "think" of being as exclusively of this world, a very simple world, each part of which was easy to describe, explain, and render comprehensible to all without exception. L. Gozman and A. Etkind have persuasively demonstrated how on the basis of such a theoretical postulate were built the corresponding moral, political, and scientific constructions, which became out-and-out caricatures . For example, the authors wrote, a "simple" person, who "had not studied in the universities," was considered the bearer of true morality and goodness. On the other hand, anything that was incomprehensible, that did not fit into a rationalistic framework, was declared an ill-intentioned muddling of a harmonious world that harbored no essential secrets. But if the world is simple and comprehensible, then all the work of scientists is a meaningless waste of the nation's money, and their discoveries and conclusions are an attempt to take people in. The broadest circulation was given to popularized scientific literature and educational lectures that helped the reader and the listener to develop the assurance that he was clear about everything, with the exception of why specialists were unable to get to the bottom of such obvious questions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek RebirthA. L. HermanImagining Karma, Ethical Transformation in Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. By Gananath Obeyesekere. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 448 pp.Gananath Obeyesekere, professor emeritus of anthropology at Princeton University, is probably one of the world's greatest living anthropologists. The proof of that assertion lies in this his latest work on comparative anthropology, a study of the concept (...) and practice of rebirth—"reincarnation" as he calls it—from ancient Greece and India to modern West Africa, Melanesia, and North America. In what follows let me briefly set forth what I understand his central thesis to be, the evidence for it, and the conclusions to be drawn from it. I will end with two very modest problems connected with this altogether intriguing and brilliant investigation into the doctrine of rebirth.As a modified structural anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere rejects the rationalist model structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. He follows instead the lead of two of his empiricist predecessors, Max Weber and Fernand Braudel, pointing out that structures, types, or models "are constructions of scholars, not universals waiting to be discovered" (p. 351). Consequently, as this book aptly proves, Obeyesekere's own "imagined" models are based on parole data following the actual language of the cultures being studied.Obeyesekere thus begins his book with an elementary rebirth structure based on such parole. He refers to this primitive, first structure as "rebirth eschatology," which entails the rebirth of a deceased's soul into the body of a newborn relative of the deceased but without any determining ethical component as found in the more sophisticated and complex "karmic eschatologies." Such ethically neutral kin group rebirths are found among certain small-scale societies in West Africa, the Trobriand Islands, the Northwest American coast tribes, and the Inuits (Eskimos). Obeyesekere [End Page 303] draws extensively on field studies of these groups to bolster his conclusions about them. This simple rebirth eschatology is non-Indic in origin, Obeyesekere claims, since no evidence of influences have been found between these practitioners of rebirth eschatology and work relating to the Indic religions (Hinduism and Buddhism). The entry of the soul into postdeath life, either in this world or the world of the ancestors, depends not at all, consequently, on one's this-worldly behavior such that "morality does not affect the fate of the soul after death" (p. 74).Obeyesekere turns next to the "transformation" of this rebirth eschatology. It occurs with the introduction of the concept of ethicization, "the processes whereby morally right or wrong action becomes a religiously right or wrong action that in turn affects a person's destiny after death" (p. 75). It is Obeyesekere's contention that when ethicization is systematically introduced into any rebirth eschatology the latter must logically transform itself into a so-called "karmic eschatology." In other words, this second topological model or conceptual structure, karmic eschatology, the new ethicized rebirth eschatology, says that the otherworld for the dead is not simply a way station for departed souls waiting to be reborn, but rather that otherworld is now a place of retribution and punishment. Kinship affiliation alone no longer determines who goes where after death but moral action does. My own guess is that rebirth eschatology was introduced to answer the question of why the grandchild resembles the deceased grandparent. Karmic eschatology, on the other hand, was probably introduced to solve a more complex and sophisticated puzzle: Why is it, if there really is justice in the universe, that the wicked never get appropriately punished and the good never get sufficiently rewarded? At this stage of transformation, the law of karma, or some other principle of universal justice, now says that everyone gets what's coming to them, either in this life or the next, and that rebirth is necessary to make that principle of justice workable.1 In arguing that "rebirth cannot be divorced from ethics; it looks as if it is generated from ethics" (p. 82), Obeyesekere would seem to concur that karmic eschatology was introduced to answer the question: Why do the wicked seem to prosper and the good appear to suffer?Following... (shrink)

The source-criticism2 of Diodorus XVI has been dominated by the principle of argument from detail. Thus, if two details in Diodorus' text are found to conflict, they are assumed to derive from different sources and, if similar, from the same source; and, where a fragment of an ancient historian is found to resemble a passage in Diodorus, that historian is assumed to be the source employed by Diodorus in that passage; finally, when a sufficient mosaic of such details is pieced (...) together, general divisions are drawn to embrace each separate detail. But this principle is of questionable value: for it implies the tacit assumption that Diodorus made no mistake in compressing or transcribing detail, added no colour himself, and could only have derived a given detail, described in a given manner, from the one ancient historian whose description of that detail is preserved. When one remembers that Diodorus is a careless and unintelligent compiler of a compendious narrative, who aimed like Ephorus at lending each book a unity, and that the fragments of the many historians whom Diodorus may have excerpted are very scanty, it is clear that this principle admits of a large margin of error. (shrink)

It was a characteristic of Macedonian custom that a name was used in a special and in a general sense. For example, ‘Foot-Companions’ was the name of a Bodyguard of Philip and also of the men of the Phalanx-Brigades from Lower Macedonia, and ‘Hypaspists’ was the name of Infantry-Guardsmen of Alexander and also of the men of three Hypaspist Phalanx-Brigades. Geographical names were repeated: there were at least two regions and two cities called ‘Emathia’, two or three regions called ‘Doberus’, (...) four cites called Philippi or Philippopolis, and Alexandrias galore. To a modern mind this makes for confusion. That is certainly the case with the names ‘Macedonia’ and ‘Macedones’, which I shall treat separately in this article. (shrink)

Those who have studied the Athenian system of command in the fifth century have confined themselves almost entirely to the period after 440 B.C. They have raked over the evidence to discover signs of double representation of one tribe on the board of strategi, or of a supreme among the or of a chairman at least of the board of strategi. On the other hand little attention is paid to the progressive diminution of the military functions of the archon polemarchus (...) within the state and to the great problems created in external affairs by the Persian Wars with the formation of the Greek League and then of the Athenian Alliance. Yet these matters are vital to the evolution of the system of command which can be seen in operation after 440 B.C. In particular the decisive steps were probably taken in 480–466 B.C., when Athens' national system of command had first to be integrated into a command-system of combined forces headed by Sparta in the Persian Wars and then adapted to take over the command of combined forces in continuous warfare against Persia. In this article I try to study the whole field and to avoid applying to the early part of the period the theories which have been evolved hitherto with special reference to Pericles in 440–428 B.C. The article consists of the following sections. A, Strategos and Hegemon in 501/0. B, C, current ideas on the modern term D, the historical origins of the so-called E, summary of conclusions. (shrink)

Those who have studied the Athenian system of command in the fifth century have confined themselves almost entirely to the period after 440 B.C. They have raked over the evidence to discover signs of double representation of one tribe on the board of strategi, or of a supreme among the or of a chairman at least of the board of strategi. On the other hand little attention is paid to the progressive diminution of the military functions of the archon polemarchus (...) within the state and to the great problems created in external affairs by the Persian Wars with the formation of the Greek League and then of the Athenian Alliance. Yet these matters are vital to the evolution of the system of command which can be seen in operation after 440 B.C. In particular the decisive steps were probably taken in 480–466 B.C., when Athens' national system of command had first to be integrated into a command-system of combined forces headed by Sparta in the Persian Wars and then adapted to take over the command of combined forces in continuous warfare against Persia. In this article I try to study the whole field and to avoid applying to the early part of the period the theories which have been evolved hitherto with special reference to Pericles in 440–428 B.C. The article consists of the following sections. A, Strategos and Hegemon in 501/0. B, C, current ideas on the modern term D, the historical origins of the so-called E, summary of conclusions. (shrink)

Photo by Jonathan Ford on Unsplash ABSTRACT Since 2008, an average of twenty million people per year have been displaced by weather events. Climate migration creates a special setting for a duty to rescue. A duty to rescue is a moral rather than legal duty and imposes on a bystander to take an active role in preventing serious harm to someone else. This paper analyzes the idea of expanding a duty to rescue to climate migration. We address who should have (...) the duty and to whom the duty should extend. The paper discusses ways to define and apply the duty to rescue as well as its limitations, arguing that it may take the form of an ethical duty to prepare. INTRODUCTION Climate migration creates a special setting for a duty to rescue. A duty to rescue is a moral rather than legal duty and imposes on a bystander to take an active role in preventing serious harm to someone else. Examples of circumstances range from person-to-person intimate rescue to saving those in poverty, even in distant parts of the world.[1] Since 2008, an average of twenty million people per year have been displaced by weather events.[2] Circumstances like being thrust from homes under the threat of fire, mudslide, and flooding vary greatly from long-term changes like land becoming too arid for crops or temperatures increasing annually gradually pushing up the number of heat-related deaths, with the area slowly becoming uninhabitable. Imminence in fleeing affects resettling and need for rescue with important implications for how the duty to rescue might apply. This paper reevaluates the ethical framing of the duty to rescue and, while it is arguably a stretch, applies it to climate migration. Climate migration has become common and is expected to increase due to rises in sea level, increases in weather events that make areas uninhabitable, and changes to land that preclude farming or other necessary land uses. We argue that a duty to rescue may help highlight who has moral obligations to whom. Because the problem is so large in scope, we suggest a change in the ethical limits to humans' duty to rescue other humans who are in distress. We imagine an expansion or extension of the duty to rescue to meet some of the basic needs created by climate migration. Yet how it should expand, and how much depend on ethical framing and practical limitations. l. Expanding the Geographical Boundaries Two commonly recognized emergencies, Hurricane Katrina in the case of weather events and the current COVID-19 pandemic, provide a historical and current backdrop to evaluate ethical obligations as more disasters displace people. A significant reassessment of the ethical scope of an obligation to rescue in the case of weather events will be limited by the ability to render aid to those in distress in the case of a planet-wide weather catastrophe. The problems may overwhelm the ability to rescue or the reasonableness of attempting rescue. The extent of the moral obligation borne by humans to other humans in the case of a weather event has been largely defined by its locality and limited geographic influence. Whether we are imagining the scope of ethical obligation in the case of hurricane, flood, tornado, drought, or wildfire events, the perceived ethical obligation is significantly defined by the limited impact of these weather events on people outside the zone of the weather event's direct impact, yet close to that zone. A hurricane affecting New Orleans will not have immediate impact on the residents of California or even those on the northeast coast of the United States until a later time. Wildfires in the Pacific Northwest do not impair the ability of those in the rest of the country to come forward with assistance. But as climate migration crosses international borders, and climate events occur simultaneously in many regions, a more expansive duty to rescue may provide the ethical impulse to help those who live afar or migrate long distances. In this respect, the need for help in the event of widespread climate migration due to global warming is more like a pandemic than a weather event. Its broad impact area diminishes the capability of nearly the entire balance of the human population to help due to those populations' awareness that they will, in short order, have the same need for the same resources, from the same cause. Those living near current flood zones may find their historically safe havens are also a flood zone. Those previously best positioned to rescue may find themselves also needing to relocate. Thus, we may observe the need for new rescuers. ll. The Rule of Rescue The Rule of Rescue as defined by Al Jonsen describes the moral impetus or knee jerk reaction to save identifiable people facing death.[3] A duty to rescue has since been expanded beyond imminent death and beyond the near and identifiable. But there are limitations. For example, by most accounts, the ethical duty tends not to require extreme bodily risk or financial depletion. In comparing Good Samaritans to humanitarians, Scott M. James argues the duty to rescue arises from unique dependence, but the ethical obligation to help strangers through humanitarian aid is of a different nature.[4] The wrongness of failing to help is arguably more egregious when one is in a unique position to help. Like in the tragedy of the commons, where there is no unique positioning, when the global community is called upon to help, each individual in it may feel less obliged to do so. Climate migration falls in between—it requires helping strangers, yet it may move forward without anyone seeing themselves as uniquely positioned to help until those strangers become part of communities, at which time, there may be more moral justification to help a community member in need. Generally, arguments about Good Samaritans hinge on extraordinary acts, praiseworthy because they are acts of compassion, not obligation. Now all US states have Good Samaritan laws[5] which protect helpers from liability for help gone wrong or for a failure to succeed once engaged in an act of rescue. Extraordinary help as a moral good is thus somewhat encouraged through legal protection, but not imposed. Conversely, jobs like firefighting, search and rescue, and emergency medical care tend to oblige employees to take on risks that would be extraordinary if undertaken by the average bystander, yet they are rendered ordinary rescue as part of the job. Three states, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Vermont have a broad duty to rescue, adding legal considerations to an otherwise moral conundrum. The laws do not require bystanders to take on risk for the sake of rescuing strangers.[6] The moral duty will require looking beyond law, but it is unclear how the moral duty to rescue should be distributed in the case of climate migration. A bare minimum would prevent taking advantage of newcomers, paying sub-minimum wage, and discriminating against them. Yet such a minimum is hardly rescue. lll. An Ethical Rather than Legal Duty The difficulty in defining the duty to rescue as a legal obligation is that it is difficult to determine the extent of risk a rescuer ought to be required to take. The nature of this ethical duty is also arguably tied to the experiences of both the rescuer and the rescued. There are subjective aspects like what someone perceives as a danger that make it difficult to write enforceable laws requiring rescue. It is one thing to expect a rescuer to step into several inches of relatively warm water to lift a person lying face down in a pond and enable them to breathe. It is something altogether different to expect that rescuer to dive into frigid water and attempt to extricate someone trapped in a submerged automobile. As the legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart observed, it is always easier to define application of the core intention of any rule, whether law or ethical norm. It is more difficult to create legal certainty about how the law applies to what he described as “penumbra circumstances”. In the case of a hurricane, it is easier to define what surplus resources are available in areas geographically remote from the impact of the storm and demand, as a moral obligation, that those nearby but outside the area provide assistance. It is more difficult to obligate people, organizations, or governments to supply a quantity of medication or some number of ventilators to an adjacent community when they expect to imminently need them for their own community. In the early stages of climate migration, the ethics of extreme weather event assistance, a common application of the duty to rescue, will be useful and appropriate. The rising sea levels first experienced by island nations in the South Pacific[7] will not render those living in other coastal communities, those with greater available “high ground”, unable to supply resources to those in need. But when sea level rise and climate change affect more communities simultaneously, albeit in varying degree, the task of defining what response is ethically obligatory becomes increasingly complicated. Pinpointing the obligations of those communities which are resource rich to those communities which are resource deprived, and of those partly affected to those more severely affected may become necessary. The limitations of the traditional duty to rescue could expand to meet the needs. lV. Contribution to the Problem Many argue that the duty to rescue may depend on any appropriate claim of those needing rescue. One issue is whether preferential claims among those who can identify the source of the harm should call for a greater duty or whether everyone in need should be approached as like candidates for rescue, shaping the duty as equal across those on the receiving end. As climate change does have human-made causes, there are strong arguments to impose a greater ethical duty on any entity that caused the climate-related problems leading to the mass exodus. While the global north is often implicated in pollution that causes migration, industries like energy, transportation, and agriculture are tied to climate change and associated with significant greenhouse gas emissions.[8] Practices like directing agriculture to less sustainable single crop growth generally made land less farmable. Yet it is difficult to place blame and identify specific causal relationships as most migration is due to many factors. A movement toward greater accountability can be reframed as a greater duty to rescue, a duty to engage in the extraordinary. The fossil fuel industry, for example, should have a larger obligation than the average person. Similarly, some may argue anyone unjustly enriching themselves while contributing to climate change or people who over-consume have an elevated duty to rescue.[9] Climate change lawsuits demonstrate an eagerness to hold governments and corporations accountable, despite difficulty proving causation. V. The Most Vulnerable One ethical dimension of climate migration that remains unexplored is how a duty to rescue applies to vulnerable populations who stand to be left behind or unable to migrate without assistance. Researchers from the Global North working across the Global South are increasingly observing the phenomenon of ethics dumping, where the research ethics of some countries are imposed on research subjects in other countries.[10] In that vein, rescuers should be careful not to impose unwelcome cultural standards or exploit people who are in the process of migrating. There is a gap in discussions reflecting voices that have been left out. The duty to rescue is incomplete without an attempt to understand the ethical experiences of those being rescued. The actual people affected by climate migration who are the least likely to have the means to migrate, or to do so without extreme hardship, should have a voice informing the global community including those in a position to carry out rescue. People who have the means and are young and healthy may easily make decisions to avoid the catastrophic consequences that climate migration brings. However, what about those who are left behind? For example, especially recognizing cultural differences, the homeless community, disabled community, refugees, the elderly community, and women[11] and children may suffer differently and call for more attention. In some parts of the world, human rights are severely constrained. An ethical duty to rescue, with many considerations and variables, may be more justified in the case of those most in need. As climate migration continues and increases significantly, it may be reasonable to ask the local and global community to focus on those least well positioned to migrate successfully. In this context, the use of phenomenology to understand the lived experiences of those migrating, sometimes termed “ethical experiences”, may help flesh out how a duty to rescue takes shape. The discussion of duty and obligation requires an articulation of the ethical experiences (how the local community in need of rescue views the proposed rescue). Then, the obligation to interpret the duty as ‘one shall not’ or ‘one must’ can be focused on the migrants’ needs rather than the rescuers’ feelings of obligation.[12] A revised theory of the duty to rescue taking into account the asymmetrical experiences of communities involved could ensure that the needs of people whose living situations, gender, ethnicity, age, or race impact their ability to even begin the migration process are considered. In this discussion, the rescuing is directed toward communities /collectives of persons migrating, whether at once or across a period of time. Often, the climate migrant may not be in a state to articulate the nature of this event when it happens, given its subjective proximity. Yet, when communities are given the space and opportunity to articulate their shared values, the ethical action of rescue derives its meaningfulness from the community rather than the rescuers. In other words, allowing climate migrants to explain their feelings can add complexity to what some see as a binary receiver-giver (of rescue) dynamic. This is necessary because the concept of vulnerable populations is fraught with problematic assumptions. There have been various definitions and criteria to determine what would constitute vulnerable populations.[13] For example, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change[14] identifies and assesses vulnerable populations. These criteria may be helpful. However, they do not provide the full picture. Rather than identifying categorical criteria of vulnerable populations, engaging with people who are experiencing climate migration and listening to their current experiences and concerns helps determine need. Knowing what people need may prevent the kneejerk reaction to label people who are quite resilient yet have appropriate needs “vulnerable”. Proceeding with caution is important because the duty to rescue has hierarchical underpinnings of "us" and "them." Often when people swoop in to save, there are good and bad consequences of the intervention. We should proceed with caution because often the helper misses the actual needs of those in need. The only way to combat this would be to make sure that people are empowered to inform those agencies that are able to help. In addition to more practical approaches, large scale oral histories could allow those who have migrated already to share their experiences. It would be important to capture the lived experiences of people who are already experiencing the consequences of climate migration or of other migration like that due to political or economic extreme events. These experiences could shape our analysis of whether people in fact wish for rescue. If so, further conversations can determine best actions as well as give important insight into what resources might be necessary to empower people now and in the future. Vl. A Duty to Rescue as a Duty to Prepare If we view Good Samaritans as going above and beyond, then a duty to rescue, something ethically compelled, must bring rescue out of the framework of charity and place it in the context of humanity and obligations. Such a view would also support expanding the geographical reach of the otherwise more proximate duty. The duty may be stronger and take shape in a more workable way if it applies to preparing places expecting to see an influx of people due to climate migration and to helping those most in need. The duty may arise out of expectations of what type of community the place welcoming those migrating due to climate should be—does it want to offer good housing, schooling, and medical care as well as economic opportunity to new people? And if so, at what cost, or with which risks? If the newcomers are viewed as community members rather than strangers, a model of acceptance may lead to better preparation. Some considerations like whether the actions will reasonably help the persons in need of rescue[15] will shape the application of a duty to rescue in the context of climate migration. Similarly, ensuring that people have the chance to articulate their values may help communities support the newcomers. New relationships should not be defined as migrant and rescuer. Voluntariness in participation and not forcing any action deemed rescue would help ensure the human rights of those migrating. In the United States, President Biden issued an executive order addressing impending climate migration steeped in a duty to prepare by making plans for resettlement and to address the impact of climate migration.[16] Vll. At What Risk? As we investigate the ethical obligations to meet even basic needs, we must also ask what level of risk is ethically compelled. There is an extraordinary need to integrate newcomers successfully, but it is difficult to stretch an ethical duty to rescue to require all the prerequisites for successful climate migration. Even defining success would create deep ethical arguments. As observed in almost all migrations, extraordinary charitable acts may be the key to success, while an ethical duty to rescue must try to require the important government and community-based basics and ensuring respect for human rights. That is, the migrating people should be rescued from circumstances that contradict basic human rights. Rather than comparing communities to bystanders, mere places where people will arrive and need to hash out how to find housing, jobs, education, and opportunity, a duty of preparation may be the key to rescue those disenfranchised by migration. There are cultural, personal, physical, psycho-social, and geopolitical issues surrounding how to best help those needing to permanently relocate. Ethics arguments will certainly range from “do nothing”, which may fail people, to “do everything”, which could waste taxpayer money in futile over-preparation while failing to actually help. Communities must avoid planning exclusively for one scenario only to have it not take place. Striking the balance, a duty to rescue as it could apply to climate migration should set goals of societal integration, and providing the basics like education, housing, food, health care, and job opportunity, the precursors to flourishing. Recommending the extraordinary, morally preferred but perhaps not compulsory, when charitable actors are participating, or when wrongdoers are compensating, may be more workable than seeing the duty to rescue as compelling people or local governments to take on significant financial and personal risk for newcomers. While humanitarian ethics supports helping everyone, it is likely that people who resettle in advance of a need to flee will find themselves with more choices and opportunities. Help is warranted for those with more dire needs. Preparing for them may do just that. Vlll. Rescue Prior to Migration and Rescue in the Process of Resettlement The duty to enable the migration in the first-place hints to the inadequacy of a duty to prepare. The traditional duty to rescue perhaps steps in if rescue looks like those geographically just out of harm's way rescuing those in danger. That resembles the traditional moral requirement, or duty to rescue according to the Rule of Rescue. Humanitarian aid typically provided by many institutions makes sense and is in place, although financial support for additional humanitarian aid is always needed. Despite having moved to purportedly more capable communities, migrant communities may be able to develop more egalitarian orders of living. Rather than continually being identified as having been rescued, it is important to make sure people keep or make social ties during and after migration. Immigrants often face social isolation.[17] Small shifts in gestural language also have the potential to welcome people and show they are valued. For instance, some migrants may not like questions like “Where are you from?” and “What brings you here?” as they emphasize differences over fitting in. CONCLUSION The ethical duty to rescue should be expanded to better match those in need of relocation with a welcome environment and the resources needed to achieve success and fully integrate socially and culturally. Expanding a dialogue that includes the voices of people who have recently migrated whether due to violence, poverty, or climate, could properly frame the extent of the duty. If we are to apply the duty of rescue to climate migration, rescuers should avoid labeling people vulnerable, dependent, or needy, although there is reason to focus on those whose needs are the most dire. A soft duty to rescue people during the course of climate migration can come in the form of preparation. People will need help finding housing, education, access to food, and employment. Ultimately, to help them help themselves may be the best goal. While the obligations should be borne differently by people, whether due to a special responsibility, or a special relationship that creates a clearer duty, the global community must prepare for its role in rescuing those displaced by climate events. By helping those displaced at the start of the climate migration process according to a more commonly held notion of the duty to rescue, and by preparing to incorporate newcomers successfully according to an expanded duty to rescue, effectively a duty to prepare, countries that take on climate refugees may find themselves rewarded by the cultural diversity and workplace talents that people bring. A duty to those at a distance is a reasonable expansion of the duty to rescue. But what one ought to do in the global community varies somewhat from the traditional Rule of Rescue. - [1] Singer, P. (1972). Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1(3): 229-43. [2] Irfan, U. (2022, March 16). Why We Still Don’t Yet Know How Bad Climate Migration Will Get. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2022/3/16/22960468/ipcc-climate-change-migration-migrant-refugee, citing the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2022). Sixth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2022, Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/ [3] McKie, J., Richardson, J. (2003) The Rule of Rescue. Social Science & Medicine, 56(12): 2407-2419. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-9536(02)00244-7. [4] James, S.M. (2007). Good Samaritans, Good Humanitarians. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 24(3):238-254. [5] Overview of Good Samaritan laws. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/good-samaritan-law-states [6] Fifield, J. (2017, Sept. 19). Why It’s Hard to Punish ‘Bad Samaritans’. Stateline Blog, Pew Charitable Trusts, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2017/09/19/why-its-hard-to-punish -bad-samaritans [7] Cassella, C. (2019). There’s a Climate Threat Facing Pacific Islands That’s More Dire Than Losing Land, Science Alert, https://www.sciencealert.com/pacific-islanders-are-in-a-climate-crisis-as-rising-sea-levels-threaten -water; Hassan, H. R., and Cliff, V. (2019). For Small Island Nations, Climate Change is not a Threat. It’s Already Here, World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/island-nations-maldives-climate-change/ [8] For example, Lyons, K. (2019). Australia Coal use is Existential threat to Pacific Islanders, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/12/australia-coal-use-is-existential-threat-to-pacific-is lands-says-fiji-pm [9] Cripps, E. (2013). Climate Change and the Moral Agent: Individual Duties in an Interdependent World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [10] Schroeder, D., Chatfield, K., Singh, M., Chennells, R., and Herissone-Kelly, P.. Ethics Dumping and the Need for a Global Code of Conduct. In Cham. (Ed.)(2019). Equitable Research Partnerships. SpringerBriefs in Research and Innovation Governance. Springer. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15745-6_1 [11] Giudice L.C., Llamas-Clark E.F., DeNicola N., Pandipati, S., Zlatnik, M.G., Decena, D.C.D., Woodruff, T.J., Conry, J.A. (2021). Climate Change, Women’s Health, and the Role of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Leadership, International J Gynecol Obstet, 155(3), 345-356. 10.1002/ijgo.13958 [12] See Ferrarello, S. and Zapien, N. (2020). Ethical Experience: A Phenomenology, Bloomsbury. (for understanding phenomenological determinants of ethical action). [13] McLeman, R.A., Hunter, L.M., (2010). Migration in the context of vulnerability and adaptation to climate change: insights from analogues. Wiley Interdiscip Rev Clim Change, 1(3): 450-461. [14] Least Developed Countries Expert Group. (2018). Considerations Regarding Vulnerable Groups, Communities and Ecosystems in the Context of the National Adaptation Plans: United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. [15] Jecker, N.S. 2013. "The Problem with Rescue Medicine." J Med Philos, 38(1):64-81. [16] White House Report. (February 9, 2021), Executive Order (E.O.) 14013, “Rebuilding and Enhancing Programs to Resettle Refugees and Planning for the Impact of Climate Change on Migration.” (calls on the National Security Advisor to prepare a report on climate change and its impact on migration. “This report marks the first time the U.S. Government is officially reporting on the link between climate change and migration.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/27/executive-order-on-tackling -the-climate-crisis-at-home-and-abroad/ [17] Torres, J.M., Casey, J.A. (2017) The centrality of social ties to climate migration and mental health. BMC Public Health, 17: 600. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-017-4508-0. (shrink)

No man can live without ideas, for every human action, internal or external, is of necessity enacted by virtue of certain ideas. In these ideas a man believes; they guide his actions, and ultimately his whole life. Study of these ideas and principles is one of the distinctive tasks of the history of philosophy. But were we to restrict the field of interest of the history of philosophy to a mere detached academic "cataloguing" of past ideas, the history of philosophy (...) itself would have joined long ago the interminable line of barren catalogued ideas. The study of the wisdom of past ages, however, is very much alive. Not only is it alive, but in the words ot Wilhelm Dilthey: "What man is, he learns through history. "l Thus, the culture of every generation is inevitably related, whether thetically or antithetically, to the previous one, and the politi cal and economic struggles of any present are always the consequences of an earlier and perhaps even fiercer battle of ideas. I t is imperative to know the history of the philosophies that nourish the present if we wish to know ourselves and the world about us. The Socratic call to self-knowledge is as indispensable a condition of a truly human existence today as it was in the fifth century B. C. (shrink)

Outside France the epistemology of G. Bachelard is unknown ; in France his influence is considerable, especially on philosophers like L. Althusser, M. Foucault, G. Canguilhem, J. Hyppolite, M. Serres, G. G. Granger, D. Lecourt and many others. Bachelard occupies a strategic point on the crossroads of all theoretical debates concerning science. The fact that he seems to give satisfactory answers on the problems which have risen after the breakdown of the logical-positivistic philosophy of science, justifies an exposition and evaluation (...) of his original contribution to philosophy. The author distinguishes the following items. 1. The determination of Bachelards philosophy as a scientific philosophy which is wedded to a history of the sciences, especially the natural sciences. 2. The 'systematicity' as the criterium of science against other, traditional, criteria like empiricalness, logical deducibility, correspondence with reality and so on. 3. The rectification-principle : the formation of a scientific system cannot be conceived otherwise than as the restructuring or reorganisation of the ruling system or system-sets. 4. The transformation of scientific knowledge shows many discontinuities in all its phases and branches. Bachelard calls them ruptures. 5. The translation of a theory into another, more coherent and comprehensive one, is baptised as a 'dialectisation' of the concept. By a dialectisation a system is both generalised and specified. Formal logic, which is based on identity and the principle of the excluded middle, is not able to interprete this dynamic aspect of scientific thinking. 6. Central in Bachelards philosophy is also the concept of recurrence. Each new organisation of the scientific system (global or partial) sheds new light on their history and their logical foundations. History has to be rewritten after each progress. Recurrence, however, also has systematic implications. Science always desimplifies its own evidences. 7. The scientist has to demolish the obstacles which he made himself by surcharging the content of the concepts not in use and by not assimilating them in the system. 8. Bachelards philosophy of science is both idealistic and realistic ; the phenomenology becomes phenomenotechnique under the hands and in the brains of the scientist. 9. He always denies (negativity) the earlier theories and objects by incorporating them in new relationships. 10. This constructive aspect of theory formation is the same in natural science and mathematics. Bachelard opposes the logical-positivistic idea that these are methodically dissimilar. In a critical commentary the author discusses the question of 'dialectical logic' in the sciences, in relation to some recent research in this field by I. Lakatos en Errol E. Harris. In his opinion the epistemology of Bachelard affords a creative renewal of the understanding of science, although further research is needed in many aspects. (shrink)

A.N. Prior once showed that on certain apparently reasonable assumptions, a thesis sometimes associated with the name of Hume to the effect that no set of factual statements can ever entail an evaluative statement, is quite untenable. We assume only that there is at least one statement of each kind, and that the negation of a factual statement is factual — a principle we may call ‘N'. Now consider the disjunction F V E of some factual with some evaluative (...) statement. Since the disjunction is entailed by F, a factual statement, it must, if principle H is correct, be classified as factual. But by N, ∽ F is also factual, and this together with F V E entails E, thus violating H since E was exhypothesi an evaluative statement. (shrink)

The article looks into the issues, outlined in M. Baker's The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar. This work is notable for the parametric theory of the languages, set out in it, according to which languages are different, nevertheless retaining the ability to be compared. That can be further supported by the assertion that the differences among languages are determined by "a smallish number of discreet elements, called parameters."What is more, the diversity of language reveals a certain (...) regularity, very much resembling that of Mendeleev's periodic table of chemical elements. Our research team of professional linguists and philosophers put this claim to a critical analysis, the results of which are featured in this article. One of the major ones among them is the supposition that Baker, in accordance with the traditions of Chomsky generative linguistics, turns temporal continuums into special relations. He did that without discussing the consequences of such move, which made it impossible to develop the psychological and linguistic aspect of the subject raised by him. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Discussions PARMENIDES THE PROPHET~ The latest word on Parmenides comes from a recent and exhaustive study by Leonardo Tar~n. 1 Among other illuminating and novel interpretations, Tarhn argues that Parmenides was not, after all, guilty of the confusion between the existential and copulative senses of "to be," that he did not identify thinking with Being, and that he had no conception of atemporal reality.~ In these and (...) other respects Tar~n's volume makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of Parmenides. One might judge, however, that Tars work is unusually insensitive to the religious element in Parmenides' poem, and in this respect his analysis seems to echo Reinhardt's unfortunate judgment which calls Parmenides "einen Denker, der keinen Wunsch kennt als Erkenntnis, keine Fessel ffihlt als Logik, den Gott und Geffihl gleichgiiltig lassen." s This inadequacy of TarAn's approach to Parmenides is evident in his treatment of the poem in general, and especially the prologue. The prologue to Parmenides' poem has always been a source of debate. After exploring and rejecting the allegorical interpretation of Sextus (the main source for the proem), Tar~n then systematically examines and rejects the modern interpretations which (among others) make it out to be a shamanistic rapture (Diels, Cornford), Orphic apocalypse (Burnet), religious revelation (Jaeger, Bowra), and mystical experience (Verdenius).4 TarAn judges that Parmenides did not intend his journey to be taken as a reality in any sense, largely on the grounds (1) that Parmenides speaks of his journey as a repeated experience. To take seriously the iterative expressions of the prologue (e.g. fr. 1, lines 1, 3, 8) is incompatible with interpretations which construe it to refer to a specific occasion.6 He supports the conclusion that the proem is nothing more than a literary device with the observations (2) that symbolic interpretations are incongruous with the fact that the goddess expounds her doctrine without symbols, and (3) that the appeal is to Logos, the rational, critical faculty; (4) that the goddess remains anonymous shows that she stands for no religious figure at all ("the 'revelation' is the truth discovered by Parmenides himself"); and (5) that Parmenides could hardly expect us to take seriously the reality of the goddess and other elements in the proem, the reality of which would be entirely incompatible with the thesis of the poem, viz. that reality is One and that all multiplicity and distinction is unreal. ~ z Parmenides: A Text with Translation, Commentary, and Critical Essays (Princeton, 1965). See my review of this work in The Classical Journal, LXII (1967),232ff. aParmenides und die Geschiehtc der griechischen Philosophic (Bonn, 1916),p. 256. 4TarGn,p. 17ft.Guthrie believes that Parmenides recognized an affinity between his search for truth, and his religious activity and mystical experience, and that he reflected this in his mystical-allegorical prologue (History of Greek Philosophy [Cambridge, 1965],II, 13). Guthrie was not, apparently, aware of Ta~n's work when he wrote his second volume; and on the matter of the prologue he favors the work of Mansfeld (Offenbarung des Parmenides und die menschlichc Welt [Assen, 1964],chap. IV), and Bowra ("The Proem of Parmenides," Classical Philology, XXXII [1987],97ff). Tar~n, p. 30. * P. 30f. [67] 68 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY It is probably true that interpretations which find all sorts of religious elements in the proem (and the poem as a whole) go too far. On the other hand, Tar~n gives the impression that Parmenides was nothing more than a pedantic academician, and in this respect he tends to sin in the opposite direction. First, the possible religious significance of the prologue does not depend on its being taken to refer to a literal experience; but even if it did, it need not refer to a specific event; and even if that were so, it is a little forced to exclude a specific event in view of the iterative expressions which may be no more than a function of poetic style. As for his second charge, Tar~n seems unaware that the main part of the poem hardly lends itself to symbolic expression, and afortiori the prologue, with its symbolism, sets the religious mood for... (shrink)

The objective of the study was to investigate the relationship between childhood IQ of parents and characteristics of their adult offspring. It was a prospective family cohort study linked to a mental ability survey of the parents and set in Renfrew and Paisley in Scotland. Participants were 1921-born men and women who took part in the Scottish Mental Survey in 1932 and the Renfrew/Paisley study in the 1970s, and whose offspring took part in the Midspan Family study in 1996. There (...) were 286 offspring from 179 families. Parental IQ was related to some, but not all characteristics of offspring. Greater parental IQ was associated with taller offspring. Parental IQ was inversely related to number of cigarettes smoked by offspring. Higher parental IQ was associated with better education, offspring social class and offspring deprivation category. There were no significant relationships between parental IQ and offspring systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, lung function, weight, body mass index, waist hip ratio, housing, alcohol consumption, marital status, car use and exercise. Structural equation modelling showed parental IQ associated with offspring education directly and mediated via parental social class. Offspring education was associated with offspring smoking and social class. The smoking finding may have implications for targeting of health education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:74 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Jennifer L. Holland “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust”: Children and Young Adults in the Anti-Abortion Movement During the last three decades of the twentieth century, children across the United States regularly encountered adults who both hailed them as survivors of a holocaust and pleaded with them not to perpetrate one. These adults were not talking about war, (...) at least not in a traditional sense. They were talking about legal abortion. Children and young adults often heard this pitch in school presentations like one made in the mid-1970s by a California anti-abortion group, United Parents Under God, in which pictures of aborted fetuses (whose “feet will never kick a football... run on a playground... or play hopscotch”) and their imagined lost life stories were the centerpiece. Next to pictures of aborted fetuses were pictures of two prematurely born infants of color (the only people of color in the presentation) who were supposedly in danger under Roe v. Wade. With murder hovering in the air, activists asked their teen audience, “Is someone you love next?” According to these California anti-abortion activists, young people were physically and intellectually vulnerable to pro-choice views because they inhabited “atheistic” classrooms “where evil can no longer be called ‘evil.’” “You are quite literally ‘trapped’ in a completely ‘pagan’ situation in our secular society and schools and we must reach you anyway we can,” they continued. In the so-called “pro-life” worldview, liberals were brainwashing children and young people through the media, public schools, and many other institutions. Jennifer L. Holland 75 “Women’s liberal abortion speakers,” political scientists, “who typically work for the STATE” and for whom the “ends justify the means,” and new “secular-science textbooks”—all were trying to frighten teenagers to “into killing [their] OWN OFFSPRING,” activists said. Anti-abortion women, “ordinary women... who LOVE you” according to the California presentation, sought to protect children while feminist “witches... distort [ed] God’s purposes of sexuality.”1 In order to counteract what they viewed as corruption, anti-abortion activists had to wage a counter -battle, politicizing children in order to make them innocent again. In practice, that meant bringing the abortion wars—with their attendant graphic imagery and discussions of immorality, murder, and “holocausts ”—into the haven of childhood. From the movement’s early days, anti-abortion activists waged their fight in the name of innocent young people; abortion, they said, was a genocide of children. While these activists were certainly not the only US movement to use the supposed vulnerability of children to elicit public support for their cause, they also did something different. For the anti-abortion movement, children and young adults were more than just endangered innocents; they were also potential perpetrators. Young people, it seemed, were more liberal than their elders, having allegedly been reared in and indoctrinated by liberal culture. They seemed, in short, to be a potentially pro-choice generation. Thus, adult activists spoke more to and about young people at the end of the century. Adults needed young people to speak for fetuses as “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust,” but they also needed to convert and save America through them. The anti-abortion narrative of childhood vulnerability offered the restoration of social hierarchies as a solution to the problem of abortion. It was “women’s liberal abortion speakers” and feminist “witches” who were the sources of societal indoctrination. Pro-choice women separated sex and reproduction, thus undermining women’s role in society and changing their relationships with men. More subtly, anti-abortion 1. United Parents Under God, “That They May Live: A Presentation on Abortion,” n.d., folder 1, United Parents Under God Ephemeral Materials, Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Kansas Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas. This publication was probably created in the early to mid-1970s because the few citations contained within are from between 1970 and 1973. 76 Jennifer L. Holland activists—who were almost always white—mourned the loss of past racial hierarchies while also envisioning theirs as a civil rights movement. In the California presentation mentioned above, activists explicitly compared abortion to mandated... (shrink)

Polyclonal antibodies raised against the human erythrocyte nucleoside transporter were used to investigate the distribution of the nucleoside transporters in the placenta. Immunoblots of brush-border membranes isolated from the human syncytiotrophoblast revealed a cross-reactive species that co-migrated with the erythrocyte nucleoside transporter as a broad band of apparent M 55,000. In contrast, no labelling was detected in basal membranes containing a similar number of equilibrative nucleoside transporters as assessed by nitrobenzylthioinosine -binding. The absence of cross-reactive epitopes in basal membranes and (...) their presence in brush-border membranes was confirmed by confocal immunofluorescence microscopy. The results suggest that at least two isoforms of the NBMPR-sensitive nucleoside transporter are present in the human placenta. The lumenal surfaces of fetal capillaries, small placental vessels and umbilical vein ware also strongly labelled by the antibody, a finding that suggests that the high fetal-placental adenosine uptake previously reported is due to endothelial transporters. (shrink)

European animal disease policy seems to find its justification in a “harm to other” principle. Limiting the freedom of animal keepers—e.g., by culling their animals—is justified by the aim to prevent harm, i.e., the spreading of the disease. The picture, however, is more complicated. Both during the control of outbreaks and in the prevention of notifiable, animal diseases the government is confronted with conflicting claims of stakeholders who anticipate running a risk to be harmed by each other, and who ask (...) for government intervention. In this paper, we first argue that in a policy that aims to prevent animal diseases, the focus shifts from limiting “harm” to weighing conflicting claims with respect to “risks of harm.” Therefore, we claim that the harm principle is no longer a sufficient justification for governmental intervention in animal disease prevention. A policy that has to deal with and distribute conflicting risks of harm needs additional value assumptions that guide this process of assessment and distribution. We show that currently, policies are based on assumptions that are mainly economic considerations. In order to show the limitations of these considerations, we use the interests and position of keepers of backyard animals as an example. Based on the problems they faced during and after the recent outbreaks, we defend the thesis that in order to develop a sustainable animal disease policy other than economic assumptions need to be taken into account. (shrink)

Entre los filósofos contemporáneos que más han hecho por el desarrollo y la consolidación académica de la historia del pensamiento español, destaca la figura de José Luis Abellán. Este libro, escrito por algunos de los más importantes especialistas en esta disciplina, pretende clarificar críticamente la obra de Abellán y recorrer algunos de los temas a los que mayor relevancia ha concedido el autor de la vasta e imprescindible "Historia crítica del pensamiento español". El erasmismo, el mito de Cristo, la generación (...) del 98, Ortega y Gasset y sus discípulos o el exilio del siglo veinte, son algunos de los temas abordados por los autores del libro, y sobre los que José Luis Abellán nos ha ofrecido artículos y monografías imprescindibles para conocer la historia de la filosofía española. (shrink)

Let A and B be subsets of the reals. Say that A κ ≥ B, if there is a real a such that the relation "x ∈ B" is uniformly Δ 1 (a, A) in L[ ω x,a,A 1 , x,a,A]. This reducibility induces an equivalence relation $\equiv_\kappa$ on the sets of reals; the $\equiv_\kappa$ -equivalence class of a set is called its Kleene degree. Let K be the structure that consists of the Kleene degrees and the induced partial order (...) K ≥. A substructure of K that is of interest is P, the Kleene degrees of the Π 1 1 sets of reals. If sharps exist, then there is not much to P, as Steel [9] has shown that the existence of sharps implies that P has only two elements: the degree of the empty set and the degree of the complete Π 1 1 set. Legrand [4] used the hypothesis that there is a real whose sharp does not exist to show that there are incomparable elements in P; in the context of V = L, Hrbacek has shown that P is dense and has no minimal pairs. The Hrbacek results led Simpson [6] to make the following conjecture: if V = L, then p forms a universal homogeneous upper semilattice with 0 and 1. Simpson's conjecture is shown to be false by showing that if V = L, then Godel's maximal thin Π 1 1 set is the infimum of two strictly larger elements of P. The second main result deals with the notion of jump in K. Let A' be the complete Kleene enumerable set relative to A. Say that A is low-n if A (n) has the same degree as $\varnothing^{(n)}$ , and A is high-n if A (n) has the same degree as $\varnothing^{(n + 1)}$ . Simpson and Weitkamp [7] have shown that there is a high (high-1) incomplete Π 1 1 set in L. They have also shown that various other Π 1 1 sets are neither high nor low in L. Legrand [5] extended their results by showing that, if there is a real x such that x # does not exist, then there is an element of P that, for all n, is neither low-n nor high-n. In § 2, ZFC is used to show that, for all n, if A is Π 1 1 and low-n then A is Borel. The proof uses a strengthened version of Jensen's theorem on sequences of admissible ordinals that appears in [7, Simpson-Weitkamp]. (shrink)

Bioethicists frequently call for empirical researchers to engage participants and community members in their research, but don't themselves typically engage community members in their normative research. In this article, we describe an effort to include members of the public in normative discussions about the risks, potential benefits, and ethical responsibilities of social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research. We reflect on what might—and might not— be gained from engaging the public in normative scholarship and on lessons learned about public perspectives (...) on the risks and potential benefits of SBG research and the responsible conduct and communication of such research. We also provide procedural lessons for others in bioethics who are interested in engaging members of the public in their research. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present the theoretical and philosophical assumptions of the Nursing Manifesto , written by three activist scholars whose objective was to promote emancipatory nursing research, practice, and education within the dialogue and praxis of social justice. Inspired by discussions with a number of nurse philosophers at the 2008 Knowledge Conference in Boston, two of the original Manifesto authors and two colleagues discussed the need to explicate emancipatory knowing as it emerged from the Manifesto . (...) Our analysis yielded an epistemological framework based on liberation principles to advance praxis in the discipline of nursing. This paper adds to what is already known on this topic, as there is not an explicit contribution to the literature of this specific Manifesto , its significance, and utility for the discipline. While each of us have written on emancipatory knowing and social justice in a variety of works, it is in this article that we identify, as a unit of knowledge production and as a direction towards praxis, a set of critical values that arose from the emancipatory conscience-ness and intention seen in the framework of the Nursing Manifesto. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to present the theoretical and philosophical assumptions of the Nursing Manifesto, written by three activist scholars whose objective was to promote emancipatory nursing research, practice, and education within the dialogue and praxis of social justice. Inspired by discussions with a number of nurse philosophers at the 2008 Knowledge Conference in Boston, two of the original Manifesto authors and two colleagues discussed the need to explicate emancipatory knowing as it emerged from the Manifesto. Our analysis (...) yielded an epistemological framework based on liberation principles to advance praxis in the discipline of nursing. This paper adds to what is already known on this topic, as there is not an explicit contribution to the literature of this specific Manifesto, its significance, and utility for the discipline. While each of us have written on emancipatory knowing and social justice in a variety of works, it is in this article that we identify, as a unit of knowledge production and as a direction towards praxis, a set of critical values that arose from the emancipatory conscience-ness and intention seen in the framework of the Nursing Manifesto. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Womb as Synecdoche: Introduction to Irigaray’s Deconstruction of Plato’s CaveKristi L. Krumnow (bio)“Le prisonnier n’était déjà plus dans une matrice mais dans une caverne, tentative de figuration, de métaphorisation, de la cavité utérine.”(347)1Entering the used bookstore in a university city not too far from Paris, I was anxious to find a copy of a certain Luce Irigaray book. When asked, the bookstore owner politely mocked me about wanting one (...) of her books. What could I possibly want that for? After all, the study of Irigaray was very popular in the 1970s and 1980s, but today, “C’est bien passé, Madame,” he enlightened me. While the bookshop owner was correct in assessing a time frame of the academic popularity of Irigaray’s work, I would argue that the work she did at the onset of 1970s feminism is no more passé than the philosophers she deconstructed. For this reason, I read Irigaray’s work alongside the work of founder-philosopher-father Plato, in order to highlight the timeless relevance of a supposed irrelevant work as “passé” as Luce Irigaray’s Spéculum de l’autre femme. In this analysis, I argue that the negligence of her reading of Plato’s cave and subsequent amnesia of it clearly substantiate her steadfast claim that masculine universality eradicates the feminine and does so quite ironically and even jarringly, as shown by the critical dismissal of Plato’s cave in Spéculum.2Irigaray’s work does indeed come out of a French national context highly invested in the studies of antiquity and, by the postwar ’60s and ’70s, in the questioning of social, cultural, and political institutions (Egéa-Kuehne 200; Leonard, “Irigaray’s Cave” 159–64; Leonard, “Classics” 143; Leonard,Athens 1–14), but this historical fact does not marginalize her work nor subject it to a mere temporal estrangement of feminism, as the male bookstore owner had insinuated. It certainly is a point of fact that Irigaray questioned the father of Western philosophical truth. In fact, reconsidering Plato was tempting to someone, like Luce Irigaray, invested in cultural and academic revolutions, someone who questioned and doubted, like other cultural revolutionaries3 of the late 1960s and early ’70s. The bookstore owner seemed to be saying that the tide has returned to normal, that is, the “normal” that signifies complacency, the “normal” that no longer questions the supposed truth-bearers. He seemed to be pontificating, “it is no longer status quo not to be status quo,” or more precisely, “The revolution is over. Now, go home, girls.” [End Page 69]Spéculum de l’autre femme, the WholeLuce Irigaray’s work Spéculum de l’autre femme [Speculum of the Other Woman]4 is anything but status quo. In an idiosyncratic prose indicative of her deconstructive project, Irigaray daringly reads untouched historical and philosophical works, ones that for millennia have remained a critical and foundational part of Western discourse. Her methodology is complex and knotty because the rhetoric used twists and winds through its own words, sentences, scenes, and discourse, thereby intentionally effecting an implosion within language.5 While on the one hand she innocently participates in an evaluation of Platonism that Derrida made fashionable a few years prior with “deconstruction” of “La Pharmacie de Platon” (Leonard, Athens 190), what she unveils by rereading Plato’s work à la Derrida is the proliferation and predominance of certain philosophical images and ideas. She names this proliferation “patriarchy,” referencing the “phallus” as the symbol of patriarchy and its dominant masculine discourse, thereby calling every thing masculine-related “phallologic,” all of which are neologisms borrowed and employed from either Derrida or her teacher Lacan. Inevitably, she centers her whole argument on certain Western texts as the cause and consequent advancement of the masculine. Spéculum appears daunting in its 462-page French original,6 although no less truncated, albeit ordered, footnoted, and proportionally spaced, in the English translation (Gill 9). In order to facilitate comprehension of a charged and impressive topic, Irigaray relies on images to elucidate her reading by employing ambitious albeit ancient Greek philosophical metaphors of light, sun, and vision. As she does... (shrink)

In the creep literature, time has often been elevated from its role as a means of ordering events to that of a fully fledged state variable. It is hoped that this paper will highlight the dangers of this approach and will illustrate the proper role of time in mathematical physics, emphasizing the important distinction between coordinate and state variables.

The rise of precision medicine has led to an unprecedented focus on human biological material in biomedical research. In addition, rapid advances in stem cell technology, regenerative medicine and synthetic biology are leading to more complex human tissue structures and new applications with tremendous potential for medicine. While promising, these developments also raise several ethical and practical challenges which have been the subject of extensive academic debate. These debates have led to increasing calls for longitudinal governance arrangements between tissue providers (...) and biobanks that go beyond the initial moment of obtaining consent, such as closer involvement of tissue providers in what happens to their tissue, and more active participatory approaches to the governance of biobanks. However, in spite of these calls, such measures are being adopted slowly in practice, and there remains a strong tendency to focus on the consent procedure as the tool for addressing the ethical challenges of contemporary biobanking. In this paper, we argue that one of the barriers to this transition is the dominant language pervading the field of human tissue research, in which the provision of tissue is phrased as a ‘donation’ or ‘gift’, and tissue providers are referred to as ‘donors’. Because of the performative qualities of language, the effect of using ‘donation’ and ‘donor’ shapes a professional culture in which biobank participants are perceived as passive providers of tissue free from further considerations or entitlements. This hampers the kind of participatory approaches to governance that are deemed necessary to adequately address the ethical challenges currently faced in human tissue research. Rather than reinforcing this idea through language, we need to pave the way for the kind of participatory approaches to governance that are being extensively argued for by starting with the appropriate terminology. (shrink)

Il ne suffit plus de s'interroger sur l'art littéraire mis au service de la composition des récits bibliques ; il faut poser aux textes eux-mêmes la question de la littérature, discerner l'effet de la littérature sur ce qu'on appelle la Bible. Car la littérature n'est pas un simple effet construit, mais d'abord, culturellement, un mode d'expression qui induit également une réception, une compréhension de ce qu'il exprime. L'exemple de l'appel d'Abraham et de la “ ligature d'Isaac ”, le rappel de (...) la création et la figure de Job ouvrent à cette dimension littéraire essentielle à la Bible qui ne se contente pas d'échanger ou de transmettre des expériences, mais se définit elle-même comme expérience ou épreuve adressée à ses lecteurs.It is no longer enough to question oneself about literary art put to the service of the composition of biblical narratives. One must put the question of literature to the texts themselves, discern the effect of literature on that which one calls the Bible. For literature is just no simply composed, but above all a cultural type of expression that calls for a reception, an understanding of that which it expresses. The examples of the call of Abraham, and the "binding of Isaac ", the recall of creation and the figure of job, give this a literary dimension that is essential to the Bible, which does not stop at exchanging or transmitting some experiences, but defines itself as experience or test addressed to its readers. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is proposed that experts are able to integrate prior contextual knowledge with emergent visual information to make complex predictive judgments about the world around them, often under heightened levels of uncertainty and extreme time constraints. However, limited knowledge exists about the impact of anxiety on the use of such contextual priors when forming our decisions. We provide a novel insight into the combined impact of contextual priors and anxiety on anticipation in soccer. Altogether, 12 expert soccer players were required (...) to predict the actions of an oncoming opponent while viewing life-sized video simulations of 2-versus-2 defensive scenarios. Performance effectiveness and processing efficiency were measured under four conditions: no contextual priors about the action tendencies of the opponent and low anxiety ; no CP and high anxiety ; CP and LA; CP and HA. The provision of contextual priors did not affect processing efficiency, but it improved performance effectiveness... (shrink)

I defend a one category ontology: an ontology that denies that we need more than one fundamental category to support the ontological structure of the world. Categorical fundamentality is understood in terms of the metaphysically prior, as that in which everything else in the world consists. One category ontologies are deeply appealing, because their ontological simplicity gives them an unmatched elegance and spareness. I’m a fan of a one category ontology that collapses the distinction between particular and property, replacing it (...) with a single fundamental category of intrinsic characters or qualities. We may describe the qualities as qualitative charactersor as modes, perhaps on the model of Aristotelian qualitative (nonsubstantial) kinds, and I will use the term “properties” interchangeably with “qualities”. The qualities are repeatable and reasonably sparse, although, as I discuss in section 2.6, there are empirical reasons that may suggest, depending on one’s preferred fundamental physical theory, that they include irreducibly intensive qualities. There are no uninstantiated qualities. I also assume that the fundamental qualitative natures are intrinsic, although physics may ultimately suggest that some of them are extrinsic. On my view, matter, concrete objects, abstract objects, and perhaps even spacetime are constructed from mereological fusions of qualities, so the world is simply a vast mixture of qualities, including polyadic properties (i.e., relations). This means that everything there is, including concrete objects like persons or stars, is a quality, a qualitative fusion, or a portion of the extended qualitative fusion that is the worldwhole. I call my view mereological bundle theory. (shrink)

In a pair of very important papers, namely “Space, Time and Individuals” in the Journal of Philosophy for October 1955 and “The Indestructibility and Immutability of Substances” in Philosophical Studies for April 1956, Professor N. L. Wilson began something which badly needed beginning, namely the construction of a logically rigorous “substance-language” in which we talk about enduring and changing individuals as we do in common speech, as opposed to the “space-time” language favoured by very many mathematical logicians, perhaps most notably (...) by Quine. This enterprise of Wilson's is one with which I could hardly sympathize more heartily than I do; and one wishes for this logically rigorous “substance-language” not only when one is reading Quine but also when one is reading many other people. How fantastic it is, for instance, that Kotarbinski1 should call his metaphysics “Reism” when the very last kind of entity it has room for is things —instead of them it just has the world-lines or life-histories of things; “fourdimensional worms”, as Wilson says. Wilson, moreover, has at least one point of superiority to another rebel against space-time talk, P. F. Strawson; namely he does seriously attempt to meet formalism with formalism—to show that logical rigour is not a monopoly of the other side. At another point, however, Strawson seems to me to see further than Wilson; he is aware that substance-talk cannot be carried on without tenses, whereas Wilson tries to do without them. Wilson, in short, has indeed brought us out of Egypt; but as yet has us still wandering about the Sinai Peninsula; the Promised Land is a little further on than he has taken us. (shrink)

"The fixed person for fixed duties, who in older societies was such a godsend, in the future ill be a public danger." Twenty years ago, a single legal metaphor accurately captured the role that American society accorded to physicians. The physician was "c- tain of the ship." Physicians were in charge of the clinic, the Operating room, and the health care team, responsible - and held accountabl- for all that happened within the scope of their supervision. This grant of responsibility (...) carried with it a corresponding grant of authority; like the ship's captain, the physician was answerable to no one regarding the practice of his art. However compelling the metaphor, few would disagree that the mandate accorded to the medical profession by society is changing. As a result of pressures from a number of diverse directions - including technological advances, the development of new health professionals, changes in health care financing and delivery, the recent emphasis on consumer choice and patients' rights - what our society expects phy- cians to do and to be is different now. The purpose of this volume is to examine and evaluate the conceptual foundations and the moral imp- cations of that difference. Each of the twelve essays of this volume assesses the current and future validity of the "captain of the ship" metaphor from a different perspective. The essays are grouped into four sections. In Section I, Russell Maulitz explores the physician's role historically. (shrink)

This article makes the case for a contemporary philosophy of Islam to help Muslims surmount the challenges of postmodernity and to transcend the hiatuses and obstacles that Muslims face in their interaction and relationships with non-Muslims. It argues that the philosophy of critical realism so fittingly underlabours for the contemporary interpretation, clarification and conceptual deepening of Islamic doctrine and practice as to suggest and necessitate the development of a distinctive Islamic critical realist philosophy, social and educational theory and world-view, specifically (...) suited for this purpose. This approach is called Islamic critical realism. (shrink)

Chapter I announces the aim of the book, which is, to deal with the question: What is a language? It also registers complaints against current semantical methods. The sections here are closely related to Quine's Two Dogmas, but the author finds himself dissatisfied, not just with analyticity, but also with logical truth, truth, designation. The difficulties are of two orders. In one case they would be dissolved by having general definitions of the terms in question. In the other case we (...) should have to discuss use of a language and that would take us into pragmatics. It turns out that to get our "general" definitions we have to define "language," "logical truth," and "G-designation" all at once, so to speak. Chapter II lays down criteria of adequacy for a definition of "language": two languages are identical if and only if they have the same vocabulary and every expression has the same significance in one language as it has in the other. Now the author has to cope with "significance." In Chapter III, he follows Quine in holding that an extensional languages recognizes at most individuals, truth-values, and classes; and an intensional or modal language recognizes at most individual concepts, properties, and propositions. The author wants to have it both ways: like lots of people, he wants individuals and properties and propositions. To have it both ways, he has to work out a new semantical method ; and since his properties and propositions are not the familiar intensions, he has to call them G-properties and G-propositions. If these entities are named in the language then they are G-designated by their names. (shrink)

One of the most important problems for contemporary Catholicism is its dialogue with the contemporary world. In recent years, the leaders of the Catholic Church have been speaking of this with increasing frequency. The Catholic journal La Civiltà cattolica has even written of the need to found a "theology of dialogue" . The recent papal encyclicals - "Mater et Magistra" , "Pacem in Terris" , and "Ecclesiam suam" - express the effort of the leaders of Catholicism to establish more intimate (...) contacts with the world in which the religious people of today find themselves. It is therefore no accident that this problem of dialogue was taken up in discussions at the Second Ecumenical Council and particularly at its third session held in the autumn of 1964. (shrink)