Resenha do livro de Juan Adolfo Bonaccini, Maria de Paz Nunes Medeiros, Markus Figueira de Silva e Oscar Frederico Bauchwitz (Org.). Metafísica: história e problemas: atas do I Colóquio Internacional da Metafísica . Natal: EDUFRN, 2006, 332 páginas. [Coleçáo Metafísica n. 5].

John Sallis of Duquesne University has edited this fine collection of essays on Heidegger as a tribute to the latter on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. Some of the contributions are papers that were read at a Heidegger Symposium at Duquesne in October, 1966. There is a brief letter by Heidegger addressed to Arthur Schrynemakers, chairman of the Symposium, in which Heidegger submits a set of questions for the consideration of the Symposium participants. Sallis contributes an article which responds (...) to these questions. Zygmunt Adamczewski's contribution is a commentary and elaboration of some issues, e.g., the translation of Wesen, which he discussed personally with Heidegger in 1968. Edward Ballard gives a very clear-headed account of Heidegger's critique of science. There is an excellent account of the "Ereignis" by Theodore Kisiel and of "Time and Being" by André Schuwer. Other contributors include C. D. Keyes, Thomas Langan, Ralph Powell, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka and John Wild. The volume is lacking in two respects. Except for a brief piece by Langan and for certain implications of Powell's study, there is no really sustained and well-developed critique of Heidegger either internal or external, sympathetic or unsympathetic, a failure not uncommon among Heideggerians. Moreover, there is no index of any kind--of topics, of names, or of texts of Heidegger--which impairs the book's usefulness. --J. D. C. (shrink)

Erickson has written an exceptionally interesting book which belongs to the growing body of literature seeking to find the common points of philosophic concern that exist between phenomenology and analytic philosophy--to "swim the Channel" as it is put. He thinks primarily in the analytic tradition, but, from a purely quantitative point of view, most of this study is devoted to the analysis of Heidegger's thought. The most frequent analytic references are to Wittgenstein. In the first chapter, he seeks to (...) find some linguistic basis for raising the question of the meaning of Being--and not just of 'Being' and he engages in a lengthy discussion of the possible kinds of participal [[sic]] uses 'Being' might have in Heidegger's celebrated "question of Being." In the second chapter, he argues strongly for the possibility of an extra-linguistic meaning, a possibility uniformly neglected by the analytic "monoscopic" tradition. In Chapter three, he finds a common basis for phenomenology and for the analytic tradition in the "transcendental turn" that contemporary philosophy has taken. He rightly points out that for both phenomenology and analysis it is in language that, as Heidegger says, "things first come into being and are." This is an extremely important observation and fundamental to any bridge-building of these two traditions. The last chapter discusses the fact that Dasein understands itself in terms of its world: self-reflection is mediated by things. Among other things he argues in favor of Heidegger's views on the "ready-to-hand."--The most serious objection one can raise against this book is its character as a book: it has no really apparent beginning, middle and end. It originated in four previously published articles and it is doubtful that Erickson has succeeded in welding them together into a unity. The four chapters considered separately however are insightful and suggestive.--J. D. C. (shrink)

Theoretical arguments that psychopathy eliminates individual responsibility for illegal behavior and can therefore serve as a basis for an insanity defense are largely premised on emotional characteristics of psychopathy that impede the individual’s capacity to appreciate right from wrong. We offer arguments and countervailing evidence indicating psychopaths do have the capacity to appreciate right from wrong and therefore should not be absolved of criminal responsibility.

Progress in understanding mineral evolution, Earth’s changing near-surface mineralogy through time, depends on the availability of detailed information on mineral localities of known ages and geologic settings. A comprehensive database including this information, employing the mindat.org web site as a platform, is now being implemented. This resource will incorporate software to correlate a range of mineral occurrences and properties vs. time, and it will thus facilitate studies of the chang- ing diversity, distribution, associations, and characteristics of individual minerals as well (...) as mineral groups. The Mineral Evolution Database thus holds the prospect of revealing mineralogical records of important geophysical, geochemical, and biological events in Earth history. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the macroscopic quantum behavior of simple superconducting circuits. Starting from a Lagrangian for electromagnetic field with broken gauge symmetry, we construct a quantum circuit model for a superconducting weak link (SQUID) ring, together with the appropriate canonical commutation relations. We demonstrate that this model can be used to describe macroscopic excitations of the superconducting condensate and the localized charge states found in some ultrasmall-capacitance weak-link devices.

The statistical properties of a single quantum object and an ensemble of independent such objects are considered in detail for two-level systems. Computer simulations of dynamic zero-point quantum fluctuations for a single quantum object are reported and compared with analytic solutions for the ensemble case.

Behavioral biologists have long sought to link behavioral units (e.g., aggression, depression, sociopathy) with biological units (e.g., genes, neurotransmitters, hormones, neuroanatomical loci). These units, originally contrived for descriptive purposes, often lead to misunderstandings when they are reified for purposes of causal analysis. This genetic and biochemical explanation for sociopathy reflects such problems.