This history of human origin studies covers a wide range of disciplines. This important new study analyses a number of key episodes from palaeolithic archaeology, palaeoanthropology, primatology and evolutionary theory in terms of various ideas on how one should go about such reconstructions and what, if any, the uses of such historiographical exercises can be for current research in these disciplines. Their carefully argued point is that studying the history of palaeoanthropological thinking about the past can enhance the quality of (...) current research on human origins. The main issues in the present volume are the uses of disciplinary history in terms of present-day research concerns, the relative weight of cultural and other 'external' contexts, and continuity and change in theoretical perspectives. The book's overall approach is an epistemological one. It does not, in other words, primarily address anthropological data as such, but our ways of handling such data in terms of our most fundamental, but usually quite implicit theoretical presuppositions. (shrink)

Kritische bijdragen over ideologisch gekleurde vormen van westerse culturele antropologie.

In the 21st century, the screen - the Internet screen, the television screen, the video screen and all sorts of combinations thereof - will be booming in our visual and infotechno culture. Screen-based art, already a prominent and topical part of visual culture in the 1990s, will expand even more. In this volume, digital art - the new media - as well as its connectedness to cinema will be the subject of investigation. The starting point is a two-day symposium organized (...) by the Netherlands Media Art Institute Montevideo/TBA, in collaboration with the _L&B _ series and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Issues which emerged during the course of investigation deal with questions such as: How could screen-based art be distinguished from other art forms? Could screen-based art theoretically be understood in one definite model or should one search for various possibilities and/or models? Could screen-based art be canonized? What are the physical and theoretical forms of representation for screen-based art? What are the idiosyncratic concepts geared towards screen-based art? This volume includes various arguments, positions, and statements by artists, curators, philosophers, and theorists. The participants are Marie-Luise Angerer, Annette W. Balkema, René Beekman, Raymond Bellour, Peter Bogers, Joost Bolten, Noël Carroll, Sean Cubitt, Cãlin Dan, Chris Dercon, Honoré d'O, Anne-Marie Duquet, Ken Feingold, Ursula Frohne, hARTware curators, Heiner Holtappels, Aernout Mik, Patricia Pisters, Nicolaus Schafhausen, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Sloterdijk, Ed S. Tan, Barbara Visser and Siegfried Zielinski. (shrink)

Der Band vereinigt die Vorträge der internationalen Vorlesungsreihe “Tierrechte” an der Universität Heidelberg im Sommersemester 2006. Herausgegeben von der Interdisziplinären Arbeitsgemeinschaft Tierethik (IAT) mit ihren gegenwärtigen und früheren Mitgliedern Katharina Blesch, Alexandra Breunig, Stefan Buss, Guillaume Dondainas, Rainer Ebert, Florian Fruth, Nils Kessler, Matthias Müller, Uta Panten, Anette Reimelt, Bernd Schälling, Jürgen Schneele, Adriana Sixt-Sailer, Manja Unger und Alexander Zehmisch, setzt er die mit der Vorlesungsreihe begonnenen Bemühungen um eine unvoreingenommene Vermittlung der tierethischen Forschung fort. Der Band will es Lesern (...) und Leserinnen ermöglichen, von verschiedenen Seiten Einblick in den modernen Tierrechtsdiskurs zu erhalten. Beiträge lieferten: Silke Bitz, Gieri Bolliger, Carl Cohen, Raymond Corbey, Eugen Drewermann, Mylan Engel Jr., Antoine F. Goetschel, Helmut F. Kaplan, Eisenhart von Loeper, Jörg Luy, Renate Rastätter, Tom Regan, Kurt Remele, Hanna Rheinz, Peter S. Wenz, Markus Wild, Hanno Würbel. (shrink)

Tom Gundling. First in Line: Tracing Our Ape Ancestry. xiii + 204 pp., apps., bibl., index. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005. $25 .; Raymond Corbey. The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal–Human Boundary. x + 227 pp., illus., bibl., index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. $65 ; $23.99.

Philosophers-professionals and the armchair variety-are given to defending comprehensive world views. Raymond Geuss, one of the most celebrated thinkers of our time, dispenses with this ambition for intellectual unity. Ranging across the history of art and ideas, Geuss argues for flexibility, doubt, and the accommodation of unresolved complexity.

" By the end, we can see the cause to which Hume has been true throughout the work.

Its first paradigms are in the writings of Marx and Freud. In this book Raymond Geuss sets out these fundamental claims and asks whether they can be made good.

David Hume's essay Of Moral Prejudices offers a spirited defense of "all the most endearing sentiments of the hearts, all the most useful biases and instincts, ...

Outside Ethics brings together some of the most important and provocative works by one of the most creative philosophers writing today. Seeking to expand the scope of contemporary moral and political philosophy, Raymond Geuss here presents essays bound by a shared skepticism about a particular way of thinking about what is important in human life--a way of thinking that, in his view, is characteristic of contemporary Western societies and isolates three broad categories of things as important: subjective individual preferences, (...) knowledge, and restrictions on actions that affect other people. He sets these categories in a wider context and explores various human phenomena--including poetry, art, religion, and certain kinds of history and social criticism--that do not fit easily into these categories. As its title suggests, this book seeks a place outside conventional ethics.Following a brief introduction, Geuss sets out his main concerns with a focus on ethics and politics. He then expands these themes by discussing freedom, virtue, the good life, and happiness. Next he examines Theodor Adorno's views on the relation between suffering and knowledge, the nature of religion, and the role of history in giving us critical distances from existing identities. From here he moves to aesthetic concerns. The volume closes by looking at what it is for a human life to have "gaps"--to be incomplete, radically unsatisfactory, or a failure. (shrink)

Between 2013 and 2016, West Africa experienced the largest ever outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease. In the absence of registered treatments or vaccines to control this lethal disease, the World Health Organization coordinated and supported research to expedite identification of interventions that could control the outbreak and improve future control efforts. Consequently, the World Health Organization Research Ethics Review Committee was heavily involved in reviews and ethics discussions. It reviewed 24 new and 22 amended protocols for research studies including interventional (...) and observational studies. WHO-ERC provided the reviews within on average 6 working days. The WHO-ERC often could not provide immediate approval of protocols for reasons which were not Ebola Virus Disease specific but related to protocol inconsistencies, missing information and complex informed consents. WHO-ERC considerations on Ebola Virus Disease specific issues are presented. To accelerate study approval in future public health emergencies, we recommend: internally consistent and complete submissions with information documents in language participants are likely to understand, close collaboration between local and international researchers from research inception, generation of template agreements for data and sample sharing and use during the ongoing global consultations on bio-banks, formation of Joint Scientific Advisory and Data Safety Review Committees for all studies linked to a particular intervention or group of interventions, formation of a Joint Ethics Review Committee with representatives of the Ethics Committees of all institutions and countries involved to strengthen reviews through the different perspectives provided without the ‘opportunity costs’ for time to final approval of multiple, independent reviews, direct information exchange between the chairs of advisory, safety review and ethics committees, more Ethics Committee support for investigators than is standard and a global consultation on criteria for inclusion of pregnant women and children in interventional studies for conditions which put them at particularly high risk of mortality or other irreversible adverse outcomes under standard-of-care. (shrink)

In recent decades in North American social and moral philosophy, alongside the development and discussion of widely influential theories of justice, taken as Rawls takes it as the ‘first virtue of social institutions,’ there has been a counter-movement gathering strength, one coming from some interesting sources. For some of the most outspoken of the diverse group who have in a variety of ways been challenging the assumed supremacy of justice among the moral and social virtues are members of those sections (...) of society whom one might have expected to be especially aware of the supreme importance of justice, namely blacks and women. Those who have only recently won recognition of their equal rights, who have only recently seen the correction or partial correction of long-standing racist and sexist injustices to their race and sex, are among the philosophers now suggesting that justice is only one virtue among many, and one that may need the presence of the others in order to deliver its own undenied value. Among these philosophers of the philosophical counterculture, as it were - but an increasingly large counterculture - I include Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Stocker, Lawrence Blum, Michael Slote, Laurence Thomas, Claudia Card, Alison Jaggar, Susan Wolf and a whole group of men and women, myself included, who have been influenced by the writings of Harvard educational psychologist Carol Gilligan, whose book In a Different Voice caused a considerable stir both in the popular press and, more slowly, in the philosophical journals. (shrink)

The Cautious Jealous Virtue is an illuminating meditation that will interest not only Hume scholars but also those interested in the issues of justice and in ...

Recipient of Choice Magazine's 1996 Outstanding Academic Book Award Author Raymond Morrow outlines and recounts the development of the major tenets of critical theory, exemplifying them through the works of two of their most influential, recent adherents: Jürgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens. Beginning with a comprehensive yet meticulous explication of critical theory and its history, the author next discusses it within the context of a research program; his work concludes with an examination of empirical methods. Emphasizing the connections between (...) critical theory, empirical research, and social science methodology, Morrow's volume offers refreshing insights on traditional and current material. (shrink)

Raymond Callahan's lively study exposes the alarming lengths to which school administrators went, particularly in the period from 1910 to 1930, in sacrificing educational goals to the demands of business procedures.

This book is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on the nature of the self, personal identity and survival. Its distinctive methodology is one that is phenomenologically descriptive rather than metaphysical and normative. On the basis of this approach Raymond Martin shows that the distinction between self and other is not nearly as fundamental a feature of our so-called egoistic values as has been traditionally thought. He explains how the belief in a self as a fixed, continuous point (...) of observation enters into our experience of ourselves and the world. He also reveals the explosive implications this thesis has for recent debates over personal identity and what matters in survival. This is the first book of analytic philosophy directly on the phenomenology of identity and survival. It builds bridges between analytic and phenomenological traditions and, thus, to open up a new field of investigation. (shrink)

The relationship between sociology and bioethics has been an uneasy one. It has been described as contentious and adversarial, and at least some of the sociologists who have ventured into the territory of medical ethics report back on unfriendly natives. This bioethical ill will toward sociology is not without cause. Sociologists have been quite critical of what they call (with not-so-subtle pejorative overtones) the bioethical project.Two decades ago - when bioethics was just getting up on its organizational feet - Renée (...) Fox and Judith Swazey leveled the charge of cultural myopia against bioethics, noting that this myopia generally manifests itself in the form of systematic inattention to the social and cultural sources and implications of its own thought. They go on to sayifbioethics is an indicator of the general state of American ideas, values, and beliefs, of our collective self knowledge, and our understanding of other societies and cultures - then there is every reason to be worried about who we are, what we have become, and where we are going. (shrink)

Category theory has become central to certain aspects of theoretical physics. Bain has recently argued that this has significance for ontic structural realism. We argue against this claim. In so doing, we uncover two pervasive forms of category-theoretic generalization. We call these ‘generalization by duality’ and ‘generalization by categorifying physical processes’. We describe in detail how these arise, and explain their significance using detailed examples. We show that their significance is two-fold: the articulation of high-level physical concepts, and the generation (...) of new models. 1 Introduction2 Categories and Structuralism 2.1 Categories: abstract and concrete 2.2 Structuralism: simple and ontic3 Bain’s Two Strategies 3.1 A first strategy for defending Objectless 3.2 A second strategy for defending Objectless4 Two Forms of Categorical Generalization 4.1 Generalization by duality 4.2 Generalization by categorification 4.3 The role of category theory in physics5 Conclusion. (shrink)

It has been my great honor to serve as editor of “Metaphor and Symbol” for the last 19 years. Yet all good things must come to an end and with this issue I am stepping down from my duties as editor...

Both a morality, like Kant's, which relies on wrongdoers' guilt feelings and expectation of punishment, as enforcement for its requirements, and one which, like Hume's, relies on the feelings of shame and expectation of their fellows' contempt which will be felt by those showing lack of the moral virtues, seem to merit the charge that morality is an intrinsically cruel institution. The prospects for a gentle non-punitive morality are explored, and Hume's views found more promising, for this purpose, than Kant's.

Cognitive theories of metaphor understanding are typically described in terms of the mappings between different kinds of abstract, schematic, disembodied knowledge. My claim in this paper is that part of our ability to make sense of metaphorical language, both individual utterances and extended narratives, resides in the automatic construction of a simulation whereby we imagine performing the bodily actions referred to in the language. Thus, understanding metaphorical expressions like ‘grasp a concept’ or ‘get over’ an emotion involve simulating what it (...) must be like to engage in these specific activities, even though these actions are, strictly speaking, impossible to physically perform. This process of building a simulation, one that is fundamentally embodied in being constrained by past and present bodily experiences, has specific consequences for how verbal metaphors are understood, and how cognitive scientists, more generally, characterize the nature of metaphorical language and thought. (shrink)

Both in ethics and in epistemology one source of scepticism in its contemporary version is the realization, often belated, of the full consequences of atheism. Modern non-moral philosophy looks back to Descartes as its father figure, but disowns the Third Meditation. But if God does not underwrite one's cognitive powers, what does? The largely unknown evolution of them, which is just a version of Descartes’ unreliable demon? “Let us … grant that all that is here said of God is a (...) fable, nevertheless in whatever way they suppose that I have arived at the state of being that I have reached, whether they attribute it to fate or to accident, or make out that it is by a continual succession of antecedents, or by some other method — since to err and deceive oneself is a defect, it is clear that the greater will be the probability of my being so imperfect as to deceive myself ever, as is the Author to whom they assign my being the less powerful”. (shrink)