The editors welcome letters from readers, although we cannot guarantee that all will be published. To ensure timeliness, correspondents must respond to an article within seven weeks and not exceed two double‐spaced pages. Letters become the property of the editors and may be edited and shortened at our discretion.

The editors welcome letters from readers, although we cannot guarantee that all will be published. To ensure timeliness, correspondents must respond to an article within seven weeks and not exceed two double‐spaced pages. Letters become the property of the editors and may be edited and shortened at our discretion.

An anthology of philosophical essays and abstracts ranging from Plato to C. D. Broad. The work includes specific discussions of the philosophy of science, religion, politics, and value, as well as discussions concerned with the more general issues of epistemology and metaphysics.--T. M. G.

This powerful, original, and tendentious book was written in 1940, published in Russia in 1965, and is now available in English. It suffers from many shortcomings--repetitiousness, oversimplification, the exclusion of material which fails to fit the author's thesis. It also inevitably reflects ignorance of scholarship since the thirties, which has tended to deny Rabelais' alleged agnosticism and nudged him closer to orthodoxy. But it represents nonetheless an important advance in the understanding of Rabelais' book, and defends provocatively an unfashionable theory (...) of the Renaissance. Bakhtin lays heaviest stress on his author's freedom to play with authorized symbols and solemn institutions in the spirit of the carnival, a spirit deriving from folk humor. The common folk of town and country delighted in improprieties, turned all serious values and structures upside down, dwelt subversively and coarsely on the "bodily lower stratum." Just as food enters the body and is eliminated, so all authorized solemnity enters Pantagruel and is turned into fun. This peasant laughter remains unafraid before age and death because it recognizes the simultaneous destruction and creation in all experience. The medieval hierarchical conception of the universe is replaced in Rabelais and in the entire Renaissance by a new horizontal perspective upon the individual in history. This new perspective fastens particularly upon the body and renders it good-humoredly grotesque. Bakhtin seriously underestimates the breadth of both Renaissance religious feeling and neo-Platonic speculation as well as the strength of medieval survivals. But specific readings of Rabelais' text are genuinely enlightening even when they distort or simplify his meaning.--T. M. G. (shrink)

This short study attempts to demonstrate the importance for Rabelais's thought and art of the "Platonic-Hermetic" current in antique and Renaissance intellectual history. The demonstration is weakened by the author's failure to sketch a history of this tradition, and one is left to gather from intermittent allusions and from footnotes whom he considers its principle spokesmen and what he considers its main tenets and spokesmen to be. According to Masters, Rabelais's writing is grounded in a Platonic dialectic which plays with (...) the tensions between reality and appearance, intellect and matter, soul and body, God and man. The presence of the divine in human affairs is manifested by such images as the androgyne and the pantagruelion. The recurrent Rabelaisian image of drinking can be understood on several levels. In its most literal sense, it points to the pleasure of festive conviviality. At a higher level, it involves the enlightened exchange of ideas, and at the highest, evoked in the episode of the Dive Bouteille, drinking suggests the acquisition of self-knowledge and, with self-knowledge, all other knowledge proper to the human mind. The Hermetic sciences can lead man in three directions: downward to the black arts; outward toward a salutary investigation of the world; or finally upward to an "intuitive dialectic" and a mystical union with the godhead. Although Masters' interpretations of specific images and episodes sometimes lack tact, his erudition should enhance the book's interest both for intellectual historians and Rabelaisian specialists.--T. M. G. (shrink)

A brief summary of ancient thinkers who contribute to a theory of the physical universe, ranging from Anaximander to Proclus, with a major emphasis on pre-Aristotelian thought. Included in the work are many well-chosen abstracts of primary sources, such as Hippocrates' "On the Sacred Disease" and Parmenides' "On Nature." De Santillana presents a lively account of his materials, together with helpful illustrations. There is a rather insensitive portrayal of Aristotle as a mere synopticist of earlier theories and as primarily concerned (...) with "a tidiness of words."--T. M. G. (shrink)

We introduce a simple model for so-called spin-echo experiments. We show that the model is a mincing system. On the basis of this model we study fine-grained entropy and coarse-grained entropy descriptions of these experiments. The coarse-grained description is shown to be unable to provide an explanation of the echo signals, as a result of the way in which it ignores dynamically generated correlations. This conclusion is extended to the general debate on the foundations of statistical mechanics. We emphasize the (...) need for an appropriate mechanism to explain the gradual suppression over time of the correlations in a thermodynamic system. We argue that such a mechanism can only be provided by the interventionist approach, in which the interaction of the system with its environment is taken into account. Irreversible behavior is then seen to arise not as a result of limited measurement accuracy , but as a result of the fact that thermodynamic systems are limited systems which interact with their environment. A detailed discussion is given of recent objections to the interventionist approach in the literature. (shrink)

The self seems to be a unitary entity remaining stable across time. Nevertheless, current theorizing conceptualizes the self as a number of interacting sub-systems involving perception, intention and action (self-model). One important function of such a self-model is to distinguish between events occurring as a result of one's own actions and events occurring as the result of somebody else's actions. We conducted an fMRI experiment that compared brain activation after an abrupt mismatch between one's own movement and its visual consequences (...) with an abrupt mismatch between one's own movement and somebody else's visually perceived hand movement. A right fronto-parietal network was selectively active during a sudden mismatch between one's own observed and performed hand action. (shrink)

The purpose of this qualitative study was to analyse nurses’ professional dignity in their everyday working lives. We explored the factors that affect nursing professional dignity in practice that emerge in relationships with health professionals, among clinical nurses working in hospitals and in community settings in central Italy. The main themes identified were: (i) nursing professional dignity perceived as an achievement; (ii) recognition of dignity beyond professional roles. These two concepts are interconnected. This study provides insights into professional dignity in (...) nursing being perceived as an achievement linked to the intrinsic dignity of every human being. The ‘nursing professional dignity perceived as an achievement’ was perceived as having declined in different social factors. Some factors of nursing professional dignity perceived as an achievement were attained more easily in community settings. ‘Recognition of dignity beyond professional roles’ underpins the intrinsic dignity as an expression of humanity, embedded in persons regardless of any profession, and values, such as: respect, moral integrity, humility, working conscientiously and kindness. (shrink)

We provide the results of a systematic key-informant review of medical humanities curricula at fourteen of Canada’s seventeen medical schools. This survey was the first of its kind. We found a wide diversity of views among medical educators as to what constitutes the medical humanities, and a lack of consensus on how best to train medical students in the field. In fact, it is not clear that consensus has been attempted – or is even desirable – given that Canadian medical (...) humanities programs are largely shaped by individual educators’ interests, experience and passions. This anarchic approach to teaching the medical humanities contrasts sharply with teaching in the clinical sciences where national accreditation processes attempt to ensure that doctors graduating from different schools have roughly the same knowledge (or at least have passed the same exams). We argue that medical humanities are marginalized in Canadian curricula because they are considered to be at odds philosophically with the current dominant culture of evidence-based medicine (EBM). In such a culture where adhering to a consensual standard is a measure of worth, the medical humanities – which defy easy metrical appraisal – are vulnerable. We close with a plea for medical education to become more comfortable in the borderlands between EBM and humanities approaches. (shrink)