In the April number of the Quarterly Mr. Pearson discussed seversal passages of the Rhesus. On two of these I wish to offer a few observations.

Cancer and its treatment pose challenges that affect not only patients but also their significant others, including intimate partners. Accumulating evidence suggests that couples’ ability to communicate effectively plays a major role in the psychological adjustment of both individuals and the quality of their relationship. Two key conceptual models have been proposed to account for how couple communication impacts psychological and relationship adjustment: the social-cognitive processing (SCP) model and the relationship intimacy (RI) model. These models posit different mechanisms and outcomes, (...) and thus have different implications for intervention. The purpose of this project is to test and compare the utility of these models using comprehensive and methodologically rigorous methods. Aims are: (1) to examine the overall fit of the SCP and RI models in explaining patient and partner psychological and relationship adjustment as they occur on a day-to-day basis and over the course of 1 year; (2) to examine the fit of the models for different subgroups (males vs. females, and patients vs. partners); and (3) to examine the utility of various methods of assessing communication by examining the degree to which baseline indices from different measurement strategies predict self-reported adjustment at 1-year follow up. The study employs a longitudinal, multi-method approach to examining communication processes including: standard self-report questionnaires assessing process and outcome variables collected quarterly over the course of 1 year; smartphone-based ecological momentary assessments to sample participant reports in real time; and laboratory-based couple conversations from which we derive observational measures of communicative behavior and affective expression, as well as vocal indices of emotional arousal. Participants are patients with stage II-IV breast, colon, rectal, or lung cancer and their spouses/partners, recruited from two NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers. Results will be published in scientific journals, presented at scientific conferences, and conveyed to a larger audience through infographics and social media outlets. Findings will inform theory, measurement, and the design and implementation of efficacious interventions aimed at optimizing both patient and partner well-being. (shrink)

Introducing students to the core philosophical issues surrounding modern physics and the ideas, which have shaped our current understanding of the subject, the book is based on lectures by H. W. Watson and sets out to illuminate and implicate the inextricably entwined nature of philosophy and physics and the importance of logic.

Capturing the lively modernist milieu of Kenneth Burke's early career in Greenwich Village, where Burke arrived in 1915 fresh from high school in Pittsburgh, this book discovers him as an intellectual apprentice conversing with "the moderns." Burke found himself in the midst of an avant-garde peopled by Malcolm Cowley, Marianne Moore, Jean Toomer, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, Allen Tate, Hart Crane, Alfred Stieglitz, and a host of other fascinating figures. Burke himself, who died in 1993 at the (...) age of 96, has been hailed as America's most brilliant and suggestive critic and the most significant theorist of rhetoric since Cicero. Many schools of thought have claimed him as their own, but Burke has defied classification and indeed has often been considered a solitary, eccentric genius immune to intellectual fashions. But Burke's formative work of the 1920s, when he first defined himself and his work in the context of the modernist conversation, has gone relatively unexamined. Here we see Burke living and working with the crowd of poets, painters, and dramatists affiliated with Others magazine, Stieglitz's "291" gallery, and Eugene O'Neill's Provincetown Players; the leftists associated with the magazines The Masses and Seven Arts; the Dadaists; and the modernist writers working on literary journals like The Dial, where Burke in his capacity as an associate editor saw T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" into print for the first time and provided other editorial services for Thomas Mann, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and many other writers of note. Burke also met the iconoclasts of the older generation represented by Theodore Dreiser and H. L. Mencken, the New Humanists, and the literary nationalists who founded Contact and The New Republic. Jack Selzer shows how Burke's own early poems, fiction, and essays emerged from and contributed to the modernist conversation in Greenwich Village. He draws on a wonderfully rich array of letters between Burke and his modernist friends and on the memoirs of his associates to create a vibrant portrait of the young Burke's transformation from aesthete to social critic. (shrink)

W. H. Walsh; XII—Historical Causation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 217–236, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

W. H. Walsh; XII—Historical Causation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 217–236, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

Goldstein attempts to establish a middle position between the idealist and the realist arguments concerning truth and fact in history. Though fact serves as the touchstone of truth, we cannot verify propositions, especially historical propositions, in terms of fact. Nowell-Smith argues that Goldstein cannot acknowledge the importance of reality for everyday affairs, while denying its importance in history. Goldstein could have avoided such problems by realizing that if he is an opponent of historical realism, he must be a supporter of (...) historical idealism. He could resolve Nowell-Smith's objections by adopting the Kantian argument which contrasts two types of judgment; judgment proper and particular attempts at judgment. Statements of objective fact, including historical facts, would be considered judgment proper. This would still allow for some judgments which did not fulfill objective criteria, but could count as knowledge. (shrink)

Hume's explicit pronouncements about truth are few and unenlightening. In a well-known passage near the beginning of Book III of the Treatise he writes that ‘Reason is the discovery of truth or falsehood. Truth or falsehood consists in an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact.’ Hume's main concern in this passage, however, is not with the concept of truth, but with his thesis that moral distinctions are not derived (...) from reason: he introduces his reference to truth only with a view to showing that our ‘passions, volitions and actions … being original facts and realities, complete in themselves,’ are not susceptible of the agreement and disagreement spoken of, and therefore cannot be said to be true or false, in conformity with or contrary to reason. The account of truth given here is not elaborated, and perhaps not even thought to need elaboration. Similarly with another passage a few pages earlier in which Hume says that ‘Truth is of two kinds, consisting either in the discovery of the proportions of ideas, considered as such, or in the conformity of our ideas of objects to their real existence’. Here again his interest is not in truth itself but in ‘curiosity, or the love of truth,’ the passion which, Hume says, ‘was the first source of all our inquiries’. Hume seems to take it for granted that nothing more needs to be said about what it is to discover ‘the proportions of ideas, considered as such,’ or about the circumstances in which we can speak of there being ‘conformity’ or the lack of it between our ideas of objects and their real existence. So far as he is concerned the central point to grasp is the distinction between propositions which have to do with relations of ideas and those which express, or purport to express, matters of fact. Once this distinction is clear, the nature of truth is supposed to be plain. (shrink)

Hume's explicit pronouncements about truth are few and unenlightening. In a well-known passage near the beginning of Book III of the Treatise he writes that ‘Reason is the discovery of truth or falsehood. Truth or falsehood consists in an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to real existence and matter of fact.’ Hume's main concern in this passage, however, is not with the concept of truth, but with his thesis that moral distinctions are not derived (...) from reason: he introduces his reference to truth only with a view to showing that our ‘passions, volitions and actions … being original facts and realities, complete in themselves,’ are not susceptible of the agreement and disagreement spoken of, and therefore cannot be said to be true or false, in conformity with or contrary to reason. The account of truth given here is not elaborated, and perhaps not even thought to need elaboration. Similarly with another passage a few pages earlier in which Hume says that ‘Truth is of two kinds, consisting either in the discovery of the proportions of ideas, considered as such, or in the conformity of our ideas of objects to their real existence’. Here again his interest is not in truth itself but in ‘curiosity, or the love of truth,’ the passion which, Hume says, ‘was the first source of all our inquiries’. Hume seems to take it for granted that nothing more needs to be said about what it is to discover ‘the proportions of ideas, considered as such,’ or about the circumstances in which we can speak of there being ‘conformity’ or the lack of it between our ideas of objects and their real existence. So far as he is concerned the central point to grasp is the distinction between propositions which have to do with relations of ideas and those which express, or purport to express, matters of fact. Once this distinction is clear, the nature of truth is supposed to be plain. (shrink)