“To whom is the Consecration of Medal, Stature or even Pyramid more jusly due, than to … the late Illustraious Boyle? … for the happy Improvement of Otto Guericks Magdeburg Exhausterm and for his Profound and Noble Researches into all the abstruser Parts and Recesses of the most useful Philosophy … I have named the Illustrious Boyle, and fix his Trophy here.”John Evelyn, Numismata, 1697.

This book is less about disjunction than about the English word ‘or’, and it is less for than against formal logicians—more exactly, against those who maintain that formal logic can be applied in certain ways to the evaluation of reasoning formulated in ordinary English. Nevertheless, there are many things to interest such of those persons who are willing to overlook the frequent animadversions directed against their kind in the book, and this review will concentrate on them.

The thesis of this book is that Herbert Marcuse is "indispensable to the theory and practice of the New Left." The one-dimensional quality of contemporary everyday life is to be disrupted by a critical theory of society based upon the works of Karl Marx as interpreted and brought to bear upon the 20th Century. Hence, this collection of six New Left studies on Herbert Marcuse is called Critical Interruptions. The contributors are former students of Marcuse and all are younger than (...) thirty-five. The work is dedicated to Theodor W. Adorno and Ho Chi-Minh. The book is poorly edited; not only does the heavy Marcusean terminology make intelligibility slow; but poor rhetoric, grammar and punctuation also add to the slowness of the pace. The content of the essays, however, is uniformly very worthwhile and the book deserves a careful reading. The Marcuse Festschrift of 1967, edited by Kurt H. Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr., entitled The Critical Spirit, was a collection of essays "in honor of Herbert Marcuse." This 1970 book, Critical Interruptions, is addressed to the exposition, up-dating and critique of Marcuse himself. Therefore, this present work is of immediate help to all readers and students of Marcuse. Paul Breines, the editor, wrote the first essay, "From Guru to Spectre: Marcuse and the Implosion of the Movement"; this is a history of Marcuse's relation to the New Left over the past few years. The second essay, "Individuation as Praxis," by Shierry M. Weber, is an incisive and insightful critique of the New Left while studying the meaning of praxis, the personal dimensions of individuality and exploring realistic alternatives for a viable counter culture. "Reversals and Lost Meanings" by Russell Jacoby is a short attempt at dialectics. William Leiss' study, "The Critical Theory of Society: Present Situation and Future Tasks," is a fine review of the major representatives of the Frankfurt School of social philosophers. "On Sexuality and Politics in the Work of Herbert Marcuse" by John David Ober, explains the continuity and development in Marcuse's thought on sexuality from Eros and Civilization through One-Dimensional Man. Finally, the last essay, "One-Dimensionality: The Universal Semiotic of Technological Experience" by Jeremy J. Shapiro is an extended commentary on Marcuse's most recent thought as applied to the advancing technology of the age. The editor openly disclaims any inner unity to the six essays. The studies, however, reveal that at least these six students of Marcuse from the New Left understand the Master very well and are able to extend his thought successfully to key contemporary issues. At the end, there is a greater unity to the book than the editor anticipated.--E. W. R. (shrink)

Theodore Roszak wrote of the counter-culture, Charles Reich of Consciousness III, and Alvin Toiler of Future Shock. In Culture Out Of Anarchy, Judson Jerome, an eminently successful college teacher with all the sensitivity of an accomplished poet, brings all these concerns to bear upon the reconstruction of American higher education. Jerome, however, has no clear consistent thesis, and his proposals for academic change seem rather vague, general, and even undramatic. Part I, entitled "The Fifth Estate," describes the social/political context of (...) contemporary academe. Part II, "Threshold of Change," describes six recent experimental colleges. Part III, "Tomorrow's Schools...," is Jerome's prognostication for the reconstruction of American colleges and universities. It seems from evidence in the book that the author had students tape a number of interviews, these tapes forming the background for much of the book. There are no documentary references and index. The result is that much of the book reads like an interminable college-student bull session. The discussion is serious and intense, interspersed with many personal experiences and suffused throughout with high idealism. But the reader is apt to suffer from the same kind of hangover one feels after sitting through an all-night session. One remembers many personal details, but he can recall very few well-defined principles and has no carefully constructed proposals for genuine educational reform. Perhaps professional educators can read Culture Out Of Anarchy and distill enough essence to rejuvenate the old forms of education. Or perhaps today's anarchists can see in this book the emerging new culture. There are others who only feel dulled with a foggy hangover.--E. W. R. (shrink)

Activity anorexia illustrates selection of behavior at the biological, behavioral, and neural levels. Based on evolutionary history, food depletion increases the reinforcement value of physical activity that, in turn, decreases the reinforcement effectiveness of eating – resulting in activity anorexia. Neural opiates participate in the selection of physical activity during periods of food depletion.

Seeking parallels among disciplines can have both risks and benefits. Finding parallels may be a vacuous exercise in categorization, generating no new insights. And pointing to analogous functions may cause us to treat them as homologous. Hull et al. have provided a basis for the generation of insights in different selectionist areas, without confusing analogy with homology.

An impressive addition to the growing corpus of phenomenologica by a young phenomenologist who has already contributed significantly to phenomenology as a translator of two works of Mikel Dufrenne and as the author of almost a dozen articles centering upon the role of imagination in philosophy, art, and psychology. Imagining attends to the very core of phenomenological method which rests upon the technique of imaginative variation as the means to eidetic intuition. Though guided by Husserl especially, the work is not (...) about phenomenology, but is an actual specimen of phenomenology. Significantly, too, the author also takes his bearings from suggestions in Wittgenstein, Strawson, Austin, and Ryle and displays an awareness of the whole history of the treatment of imagination in philosophy, psychology, and art criticism. But the focus is upon the Sache selbst, on the phenomena of imagining as they present themselves directly in experience. If at times the works of phenomenologists appear to be diffuse, cumbersome, and linguistically opaque, the present work is remarkably clear and well-organized—almost establishing a new genre in phenomenological writing. Perhaps some indebtedness to Weiss shows through in the author’s attempt, not only to describe, but to systematize the field of the phenomena in question; the influence of the analysts appears in the clarity of the overall style. (shrink)

The present study applies a new method for investigating dynamic unconscious processes. The method consists of selection of words from patient interview and test protocols that in the clinicians' judgments capture the patients' conscious symptom experience and the hypothetical unconscious conflict related to the symptom, subliminal and supraliminal presentation of these words, signal analysis of event-related potentials obtained to the word presentations. Eight phobics and three patients suffering from pathological grief reactions served as subjects. A time-frequency ERP analysis revealed that (...) subjects' ERPs classified the unconscious conflict words better subliminally than supraliminally, while the reverse was true for the conscious symptom words = 2.82, p = .011). The relationship between frequency and latency revealed a similar mirror image pattern for the unconscious conflict and conscious symptom words . This method demonstrated that objective, brain-based evidence for unconscious conflict can be obtained. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se presenta, desde la filosofía, primeramente la tesis de L. Zea, según el cual la universidad del hombre americano, se halla en la aceptación de la diversidad concreta de las pluriformes maneras de ser de los americanos. Europa recién ahora se pone filosóficamente el problema de la pluralidad cultural. Se analiza luego la forma de considerar el gobierno y las leyes tanto de los americanos sajones como de los americanos latinos, cuando construyen sus propias formas de (...) ser. Se considera el intento y el fracaso al querer éstos imitar a aquéllos. Trata, además, la hipótesis de L. Zea según el cual la identidad de los pueblos latinoamericanos está en no tener ninguna que lo marque como pueblo y hombre común a toda América Latina, salvo ciertos rasgos de conducta común, derivados del talante conquistador español. Ortega y Gasset prolonga este análisis y lo centra en las influencias de la inmigración en Argentina, de lo que -entre otras causas- surge una explicación para ciertas conductas que dan forma a la identidad de los argentinos. Algo no ha cambiado en el modo de ser argentino: éste no se dedica primeramente a vivir la vida, sino a hacer fortuna y defenderse. Se identifica por lo que posee o desea poseer.This article presents, from a philosophical stand, firstly Leopoldo Zea's thesis according to which the American man's universality resides in his acceptance of the concrete diversity of the various ways of being American. Only now Europe is starting to consider philosophically the problem of cultural pluralism. Secondly, we analyze the way the Saxon Americans and the Latin Americans consider government and laws during their respective processes of becoming their own selves. We examine the intent and subsequent failure of the latter at trying to imitate the former; also, Zea's thesis according to which the identity of Latin American peoples lies precisely in not having a unique identity that define them as a man and people common to all Latin America, except for some behavioral traits deriving from the Spanish conqueror temper. Ortega y Gasset extends this analysis focusing on Argentina's immigration and concluding that this partially accounts for the Argentinean behavior and identity, their priority being to make a fortune and to defend themselves. Their identity rises from what they have or what they want to have. (shrink)