In this chapter, I offer a constructivist account of practical reasoning as both generative and transformative in response to calls from philosophers as diverse as Iris Murdoch and Gilbert Harman, who have urged the development of a more nuanced picture of reasoning that incorporates revisionary and revelatory changes in viewpoint. Within this context, I describe sensitivity to facts as a form of emotional engagement that is also partially constitutive of facts. I consider both the epistemological and ontological aspects of (...) this claim. From an epistemological point of view, my claim is that agents strengthen their discernment of relevant facts through emotional engagement. From an ontological point of view, my claim is that, through emotional engagement, agents alter their immediate relationship to objects, changing not only “what matters” but also the “facts of the matter”. To an important extent, then, facts are inseparable from the subjective concerns of the agent. This is not to say that there are no subject-independent facts of the matter, nor that objects are mere projections of an agent’s sensibility onto the cold, colorless canvass of valueless reality. Rather, my claim is that the ontological boundary between facts and values—and the normative status of facts—are both internal to the practical perspective, defined by an agent’s particular concerns and within shared practices of mutual recognition. The most relevant implications of the constructivist view are found at the level of prospective rationality, that is, within the temporal dimension of rationality. Emotional engagement fosters changes in perspective, but this should not be read as simply arbitrary fluctuations. Despite being perspectival, such changes are applied to a subject-independent field, which gains further intelligibility through the agent’s altered relationship to those circumstances. By examining the dynamics of such changes, we acquire a more nuanced theoretical vocabulary to help make sense of the prospective dimension of practical reasoning within which ordinary agents are engaged. (shrink)

This paper explores the nature of ourexperiences of values– ourvalueceptions. In the recent literature, two main standpoints have emerged. On the one hand, the ‘Meinongian’ side claims that axiological properties are experienced exclusively in emotions. On the other hand, the ‘Hildebrandian’ side contends that since valueceptions can be ‘cold’, they are not accomplished in emotions but rather reside in ‘value-feelings’ – emotions, in this framework, being conceived of asreactionsto the values thus revealed. The aim of the paper is to (...) argue that theHusserlianphenomenology of affectivity, especially as it is developed during his Göttingen period, can help to overcome these two accounts. I start by pointing out that, contrary to what most scholars have assumed so far, Husserl’s theory of valueception is not tantamount to Meinong’s, as it is very sensitive to ‘Hildebrandian’ arguments (Part 2). The core of the paper is then devoted to a systematic reconstruction of Husserl’s solution to this controversy. Drawing on the analogy between thing-perceptions and value-perceptions (Part 3), I show, first, that ‘cold’ valueceptions are to be identified with empty apprehensions (Auffassungen) of value, in which an emotion is notactually experiencedbut isanticipatedin such-and-such kinaesthetic circumstances (Part 4); second, that the realization of this anticipation amounts to thefulfillmentof the valueception (Part 5). As a result, Husserl acknowledges the relevance of ‘value-feelings’, yet his account appears more satisfactory than traditional ‘Hildebrandian’ theories in that it demystifies these ‘value-feelings’ by reducing them topotential emotions. (shrink)

The organization of the mobile atomic exhibition, Mostra Atomica, designed by the United States Information Service to travel through Italy in 1954–55, had to meet technical, scientific, artistic, and political challenges. The head of the group in charge of the exhibition was architect Peter G. Harnden whose pedigree in the intelligence and training in architecture were an ideal match for leading the unit dedicated to exhibitions. The political sensitivity of the Mostra Atomica also required the intervention of the Italian (...) Ministry of the Interior to guarantee safe mobility and secure shows. In every major town, American and British diplomats attended the local opening ceremony, while the very symbol of science diplomacy was Enrico Fermi, whose recorded message praised international cooperation. All in all, the USIS campaign promoting peaceful applications of nuclear physics was successful in reaching and involving Italian society. Visual and spatial aesthetics were particularly relevant: the geometrical design of the exposition rooms conveyed a strong sense of modernity that contrasted with the artistic heritage of Italian cities. The present article is based on archival files, newspaper reports, and photographs that document who was responsible for planning, setting up, and reporting this Cold War propaganda event. (shrink)

Christine Korsgaard has become one of the leading interpreters of Kant's moral philosophy. She is identified with a small group of philosophers who are intent on producing a version of Kant's moral philosophy that is at once sensitive to its historical roots while revealing its particular relevance to contemporary problems. She rejects the traditional picture of Kant's ethics as a cold vision of the moral life which emphasises duty at the expense of love and value. Rather, Kant's work is (...) seen as providing a resource for addressing not only the metaphysics of morals, but also for tackling practical questions about personal relations, politics, and everyday human interaction. This collection contains some of the finest current work on Kant's ethics and will command the attention of all those involved in teaching and studying moral theory. (shrink)

IntroductionSimilarities in morphology, physiological function, and neurophysiological findings between median and ulnar nerves are not unequivocal. Our previous study confirmed differences in motor fiber parameters between these nerves in healthy persons. We made an attempt to assess and compare the physiological parameters of different sensation modalities in median and ulnar nerves.MethodsThe study was performed in 31 healthy, right-handed volunteers: 17 women, 14 men, mean age 44.8 ± 15.5 years. Standard sensory conduction tests in the median and ulnar nerves were performed (...) together with the estimation of vibratory, temperature, and warm- and cold-induced pain thresholds in the C7 and C8 dermatomes on the palm, using quantitative sensory testing.ResultsThere were no statistically significant differences in the standard sensory conduction test in the median and ulnar nerves across the whole group: between right and left hands, and between women and men. We revealed differences in the temperature and pain thresholds between these nerves, mainly in low temperature perception. There were no differences in estimated thresholds between sides or in female and male groups. The vibratory limits did not differ significantly between nerves, and subgroups.ConclusionThe study confirmed the differences in the physiological sensory perception between the median and ulnar nerves. The median nerve is more sensitive to temperature stimulation than the ulnar nerve, but simultaneously less sensitive to pain-inducing temperature stimuli. These findings should be considered during the examination of hand nerve pathology. (shrink)

A sensory receptor, in any organism anywhere, is sensitive through time to some distribution - energy, motion, molecular shape - indeed, anything that can produce an effect. The sensitivity is rarely direct: for example, it may track changes in relative variation rather than the absolute change of state (as when the skin responds to colder and hotter instead of to cold and hot as such); it may track differing variations under different conditions (the eyes' dark-adaptation; adaptation to sound (...) frequencies can lower the difference threshold; the kinesthetic sense will shut down if a limb is held in a stationary position too long - the limb 'going to sleep'); it may be subject to distortion of the input from overloading (dazzle producing strong-after-images); it may not be confined to one channel of sensitivity (the retina is sensitive to pressure; the hands can feel some strong sound-vibrations, the tympanum of the ear records touch). Strictly speaking there is no limit as to what intensities and what ranges receptors could be sensitive. Sharks are sensitive to electrostatic fields, homing pigeons to magnetic fields; snakes to infra-red rays; bacteria to acid concentrations; perhaps there has even been a mutant organism sensitive to the passage of cosmic rays, even though that would hardly have bestowed any conceivable survival value. What is irrefutable is that individual receptors differ markedly from organism to organism, between different members of the species (one dog being better at tracing smells than another; one person being able to sense light-waves of 375 nanometres, another not; children able to hear 20,000 Hz, older persons not), and between receptors of the same kind within one organism (one eye being sensitive to 765 nm and the other not; one ear deaf to 15,000 Hz and over, the other not). There are also just-noticeable-differences (JND's), in that one person can see two shades of a colour where another sees only one; similarly with sounds. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 310—311. Writing Death . Jeremy Fernando, foreword by Avital Ronell. Den Haag: Uitgeverij. 2011 ISBN: 978-90-817091-0-1 Rite and ceremony as well as legend bound the living and the dead in a common partnership. They were esthetic but they were more than esthetic. The rites of mourning expressed more than grief; the war and harvest dance were more than a gathering of energy for tasks to be performed; magic was more than a way of commanding forces of nature (...) to do the bidding of man; feasts were more than a satisfaction of hunger. Each of these communal modes of activity united the practical, the social, and the educative in an integrated whole having esthetic form.(1) Jeremy Fernando’s Writing Death is a sensitive attempt at exploring the depths and heights to which the processes of mourning can take us. Death, as an absence, renders all gestures (for what is mourning but a gesture with many faces) surrounding it at once as a possibility and an impossibility. Fernando poses questions that often elude the mourner and the mourned—the same, and different—by raising the specter of subject and object; by compelling the examination of what it actually means to mourn; and most crucially, by considering the very status of possibility itself that the act of mourning foregrounds. Mourning, he reminds us, is premised upon memory (remembrance, recollection), the shadow of forgetting upon which is perpetually cast—the inextricability between memory and forgetting haunts the living more than it does the dead. And if grief has anything to do with it, mourning can quite easily be mistaken for an attempt to remember in order to forget; an attempt, in other words, to deny death, deny the one thing that confirms mortality. As if living has anything to do with it. What, then, of writing death? It becomes an unceasing process of locating—and addressing—possibility itself: the passing as possibility; loss as possibility; impossibility as, and of, naming this possibility. In confronting the passing on, it is possible, nay inevitable, to move on, move away from the site of loss, of grief. All the while, we forget, Fernando reminds us, that mourning has little to do with the dead, and a whole lot to do with the living, the mourning self. Here, he echoes Dewey’s consolidation of rituals and ceremonies, of the dead and of the living, all as parts of a larger unity, of a social, public gesture meant to sate a private need: In trying to “get over it,” are we trying to get over ourselves? Or more than that: are we trying to get over the fact that we can never quite get over ourselves? (Fernando, 77) As if guilt has anything to do with it. And “it” continues to be the point that he is driving at, driving towards. “It” is the possibility and impossibility, death and life, memory and forgetting, lost and cherished. “It” is what eludes mourning, eludes attempts to overcome grief. Nonetheless, move on, he must. And Fernando does this in fewer moves than a 12-step program—hardly therapeutic, but intellectually satisfying. Writing Death attends to some of the pertinent aspects of the act of mourning—both as gesture and as meditation: eulogy, distress (call), tears, and the question of how (beyond ritual, beyond sentimentality) to mourn. And what’s love got to do with it? Everything and nothing. Mourning, after all, is an articulation of love, but it is also one that forces the mourner to be selective, as with myth-making, in the recollection: Remembering only ever occurs in exception to memory—quite possibly in betrayal of a memory. In this way, each remembrance is a naming of that memory, a naming of something as memory, bringing with it an act of violence. (40) Mourning is thus not only an act of fictionalizing, it is also an act of reading, to continually be compelled to respond to another, all the while keeping vigil against a reconceptualization of the dead, without, therefore, misreading the dead. This can only be done, Fernando argues, by all the while “maintaining the otherness of the other. After all, one must try not to forget that one cannot be too close—space is needed—to touch.” (82) There is also tacit acknowledgement that doing so foregrounds the fact that the selectivity of memory becomes exclusive, and concretizes into a singularity, thus negating the multi-dimensionality of a life lived – and thus killing the already dead. Writing Death is framed by two eulogies—or the approximations of eulogies; approximation because both foreground and call into question the eulogy as a genre. The first is Avital Ronell’s foreword to the book, remembering Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe; the second is Fernando’s own response to the passing of a mentor, Jean Baudrillard. Both are not merely attempts to philosophize their way out of the act of mourning. Both are in fact deeply moving pieces that remind us of the emotional possibilities that may reside within any intellectual undertaking, that the latter need not be cold and devoid of feelings. And whereas Writing Death does not attempt to make any philosophical claim for humanism, the underlying wistfulness of both pieces does suggest that there is a proper place for deep-seated human response to death. We can (and the book does) intellectualize and problematize the acts of mourning and grieving, but these do not diminish the fact that we mourn and grieve. And, framing Writing Death as the two eulogies do, Jeremy Fernando perhaps finally, and inadvertently, names “It”—it is, above everything else, Human. August, 2011 Singapore NOTES (1) Dewey, John. Art as Experience . New York: Perigee, 1934. (shrink)

“A sentimental layman would feel, and ought to feel, horrified, on being admitted into [an expert art] critic's mind, to see how cold, how thin, how void of human significance, are the motives for favour or disfavour that there prevail.” Thus writes William James. The art-world is dominated by critics who sneer and sentimentality, resist evocation, and issue stale, dispassionate appraisals. Memorized standards are coolly deployed to scan works for the features that are currently in fashion, before an icy (...) verdict is delivered. Untutored art enthusiasts make aesthetic judgments in an entirely differently way. For them, appraisal is read off “the sounding board of the body.” They use their emotions. Thus, according to James, there are two ways to assess art: cold and hot. So who is right, the rhapsodical museum-goer or the effete professional critic? As a first pass, I side with the rhapsodies. I think dispassionate appraisal is parasitic on passionate appraisal. Cool reason can never be sufficient on its own to assess artistic merit. This is a corollary of “aesthetic sentimentalism”—a view was championed by Hume and other British moralists. Of course, aesthetic sentimentalism does not entail that critics are wrong when they depart from the bubbling masses. It entails merely that good critics must be slaves to their own passions. Hacks may deliver aesthetic judgments dispassionately, but more sensitive critics have been known to muster an occasional gasp or thrill. Perhaps the refined emotions of professional critics have more validity than the crude gushings of James ’s “sentimental layman.” True beauty may be restricted to those works that elicit goosebumps in skilled viewers. Hume flirts with this idea. He thinks John Milton is objectively better than John Ogilby. Why? Because John Dryden said so, and he should know. John D. can arbitrate between the merits of John M. (shrink)

Autonomy is a vital principle in medical law and ethics. It occupies a prominent place in all medico-legal and ethical debate. But there is a dangerous presumption that it should have the only vote, or at least the casting vote. This book is an assault on that presumption, and an audit of autonomy's extraordinary status. This book surveys the main issues in medical law, noting in relation to each issue the power wielded by autonomy, asking whether that power can be (...) justified, and suggesting how other principles can and should contribute to the law. It concludes that autonomy's status cannot be intellectually or ethically justified, and that positive discrimination in favour of the other balancing principles is urgently needed in order to avoid some sinister results. 'This book is a sustained attack on the hegemony of the idea of autonomy in medical ethics and law. Charles Foster is no respecter of authority, whether of university professors or of law Lords. He grabs his readers by their lapels and shakes sense into them through a combination of no-nonsense rhetoric and subtle argument that is difficult to resist.' Tony Hope, Professor of Medical Ethics, Oxford University 'This book is unlikely to be in pristine state by the time you have finished reading it. Whether that is because you have thrown it in the air in celebration or thrown it across the room in frustration will depend on your perspective. But this book cannot leave you cold. It is a powerful polemic on the dominance of autonomy in medical law, which demands a reaction. Charles Foster sets out a powerful case that academic medical lawyers have elevated autonomy to a status it does not deserve in either ethical or legal terms. In a highly engaging, accessible account, he challenges many of the views which have become orthodox within the academic community. This will be a book which demands and will attract considerable debate.' Jonathan Herring, Exeter College, Oxford University 'This is a learned, lively and thought-provoking discussion of problems central to the courts' approach to ethical issues in medical law. What principles are involved? More significantly, which really underlie and inform the process of seeking justice in difficult cases? Charles Foster persuasively argues, and demonstrates, that respect for autonomy is but one of a number of ethical principles which interact and may conflict. He also addresses the sensitive issue of the extent to which thoughts and factors which go to influence legal decisions may not appear in the judgments.' Adrian Whitfield QC. 'Introducing the Jake La Motta of medical ethics. Foster is an academic street-fighter who has bloodied his hands in the court room. He provides a stinging, relentless, ground attack on the Goliath of medical ethics: the central place of autonomy in liberal medical ethics. This is now the first port of call for those who feel that medical ethics has become autonomized.' Julian Savulescu, Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics, University of Oxford. "This important book offers a robust challenge to anyone, whether lawyer or 'ethicist', who sees respect for autonomy as the only game in town. It argues eloquently and effectively that, on the one hand, despite the reverence paid to it by judges, in practice the law, even in the context of consent, weaves together a number of moral threads of which autonomy is merely one, in the pursuit of a good decision. It argues on the other hand, that were the day-to-day practice of law to be guided primarily by respect for autonomy, this would be wrong. Foster concludes that whilst, 'any society that does not have laws robustly protecting autonomy is an unsafe and unhappy one', so too would be a society in which too much emphasis was placed on respect for autonomy at the expense of other important moral principles. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of autonomy and indeed of medical ethics, in the law." Michael Parker, Professor of Bioethics, University of Oxford. (shrink)

This book presents fresh insights into analogue quantum simulation. It argues that these simulations are a new instrument of science. They require a bespoke philosophical analysis, sensitive to both the similarities to and the differences with conventional scientific practices such as analogical argument, experimentation, and classical simulation. -/- The analysis situates the various forms of analogue quantum simulation on the methodological map of modern science. In doing so, it clarifies the functions that analogue quantum simulation serves in scientific practice. To (...) this end, the authors introduce a number of important terminological distinctions. They establish that analogue quantum ‘computation' and ‘emulation' are distinct scientific practices and lead to distinct forms of scientific understanding. The authors also demonstrate the normative value of the computation vs. emulation distinction at both an epistemic and a pragmatic level. -/- The volume features a range of detailed case studies focusing on: i) cold atom computation of many-body localisation and the Higgs mode; ii) photonic emulation of quantum effects in biological systems; and iii) emulation of Hawking radiation in dispersive optical media. Overall, readers will discover a normative framework to isolate and support the goals of scientists undertaking analogue quantum simulation and emulation. This framework will prove useful to both working scientists and philosophers of science interested in cutting-edge scientific practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One striking feature of On the Genealogy of Morals is how it is written. Nietzsche employs a literary style that provokes his readers' emotions. In Beyond Selflessness, Christopher Janaway argues that such a literary approach is integral to Nietzsche's philosophical goals. Feeling the emotions Nietzsche's style arouses is necessary for understanding the views he defends. I argue that Janaway's position is mistaken. The evidence at our disposal fails to establish that emotion is ever necessary for cognition. However, I maintain (...) that we do have good evidence for a slightly weaker claim. The emotionally sensitive person is epistemically better off than the cold and dispassionate person. There are some truths he or she will be more likely to believe and will have better reasons for believing. I conclude that Janaway is right to defend the philosophical importance of Nietzsche's literary writing style. His error is simply that he overstates the case. (shrink)

Narratives surrounding ionizing radiation have often minimized radioactivity’s impact on the health of human and non-human animals and the natural environment. Many Cold War research policies, practices, and interpretations drove nuclear technology forward by institutionally obscuring empirical evidence of radiation’s disproportionate and low-dose harm—a legacy we still confront. Women, children, and pregnancy development are particularly sensitive to exposure from radioactivity, suffering more damage per dose than adult males, even down to small doses, making low doses a cornerstone of concern. (...) Evidence of compounding generational damage could indicate increased sensitivity through heritable impact. This essay examines the existing empirical evidence demonstrating these sensitivities, and how research institutions and regulatory authorities have devalued them, willingly sacrificing health in the service of maintaining and expanding nuclear technology. Radiation’s disproportionate impacts should now be the research and policy focus, as society is poised to make crucial and long-lasting decisions regarding climate change mitigation and future energy sources. (shrink)

The motifs of love and seduction in the Phaedrus are not about sexual love but about philosophy, and particularly about two different approaches to philosophy, one engaged and emotionally, even poetically, involved and one cold, rational and detached. Socrates' palinode speech in the Phaedrus contrasts the lover of beauty whose philosophical sensitivities enable the wings to grow and intellectual vision to occur, with the cool rational character of the non-lover who has no place for love of beauty and cares (...) only for utility and reason. When Socrates took the part of the non-lover, and denigrated the value of love in philosophical enquiry, in his first speech that attacked love as a distorting factor, and praised reason devoid of emotion, he had been seduced by a calculating and over-rational love of "speeches" which is the dominant character of Phaedrus, cool lover of reason with no emotional intelligence. (shrink)

There used to be a time when anyone in religious circles who thought about personal identity in the tradition of Locke or Hume would quickly and firmly be silenced, not with an argument but with a kind of confession of faith: human beings are created by God with a soul and a body; the soul is immortal and the body will be restored to its original glory in the resurrection. With this sort of statement, the servants of the church obstructed (...) any rational investigation into the nature of the human person because they believed that such a topic was unsuitable for the autonomous thinking that modernity gave rise to. Whether one regrets or welcomes it, the influence of religion is on the wane and there is now a general feeling that no authority can be ascribed to what is not open to rational interrogation.If rational thought always coincided with wisdom, this would not cause any substantial problems. There would not even be anything wrong with foolish or impetuous thinking, were it not that such thinking can result in concrete political and legal measures. For instance, Francis Galton's idea that the quality of a person could be identified with the quality of their inherited characteristics would not have presented any danger were it not for the fact that, on the basis of this idea, eugenics was practised until quite recently, even in the most `civilized' of countries. Obviously there is something that can be said for a religious authority tempering over-enthusiastic declarations about such sensitive matters.The implication of the traditional dogma concerning the human person was that all human life must be respected. In borderline cases dealing with the beginning and end of life, this dogma had to be interpreted. The ability to do this, however, seems not to rest on clear and rational arguments but on the kind of wisdom that is based more on a common understanding, trust and compassion than on cold, rational principles.Whether one can ascribe authority to religious dogma will depend on the extent to which one accepts the idea that our ethical beliefs can be supported by rational arguments. Certain philosophers have doubts about this. In `Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy', Bernard Williams demonstrates that ethical convictions can only be understood as forms of confidence: we have confidence that someone or something is important, that it is advisable to be courageous in certain circumstances, that it is important to be loyal or that it is meaningful to remain faithful. If this is true, the question that must be posed is the following one: what if confidence is lacking? What if indifference or boredom take over? What if nothing appears any longer to be worthy of care or struggle? In such circumstances, being courageous or faithful is no longer so evident. In communities where it makes little difference to do one thing and to ignore others, heroes and saints are comparatively rare and philosophers feel themselves called upon to defend the credit-worthiness of ethical concepts with rational arguments and complex theories. Williams believes that in such cases they are biting off more than they can chew. It is difficult, if not impossible, to argue over moral confidence, and when we do, the results are often narrow-minded.I leave it to the reader of the present issue to judge whether Williams is correct or not. In the articles by Göran Collste, `Should Every Human Being Get Health Care?', and John Hymers, `Not a Modest Proposal: Peter Singer and the Definition of Person', we can review a series of rational considerations about the human person that could give rise to concrete political and legal measures. The two subsequent articles deal with the relevance of conceptions of the person for concrete economic practice. Rudi Visker is dealing with the problem of a multicultural society and Armin Grunwald presents some reflections on technology development between social science and philosophy. (shrink)

Condorcet's classical Enlightenment statement of human progress became an essential element of nineteenth- and twentieth-century consciousness, but by the millennium grand narratives had fallen victim to a disillusioned cultural climate. Now Steven Pinker, like Condorcet drawing on a wide range of contemporary “knowledges,” has reasserted a sweeping narrative of human progress in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Mapping a spectacular long-term decline in person-on-person violence and reduction in deaths due to war, Pinker celebrates the spread (...) of a cultural pattern of self-restraint, sensitivity to human suffering, and recent regard for human rights, due to the modern state and gentle commerce capitalism.For Pinker the human condition has gotten steadily better, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. Why then are so many so negative about modernity? Citing the psychology of temporal proximity to horrific events and the bad-news predilection of the media, Pinker ignores the specifically modern and less directly brutal institutionalized forms of violence as well as the profound ambivalence of progress. He decisively demonstrates the drop in certain kinds of violence, but his account becomes strangely ideological, recapitulating key Cold-War themes—the individual against totalitarianism, the Enlightenment against the counter-Enlightenment, rationalism and freedom against murderous utopianism—distorting his study in the name of gentle commerce, Marxism, and anti-Communism. (shrink)

Doctors have always thought, it seems, that the female body is more susceptible to illness than the male. Ancient medicine founded this dogma on the doctrine of elementary qualities, in attributing to woman a cold and humid constitution. As heat is the principal instrument which nature uses to produce the forces of the body and to maintain them, it must be lacking in woman, as is proved by her weakness, the softness of her limbs, her lack of external sexual (...) organs and the crudeness of her menstrual blood. If the Aristotelians and the Galenists diverge, in the Renaissance and in the XVIIth century, about the nature—fertile or not—of the “female seed,” they agree to pledge the female body to illnesses. Such a predisposition is explained by the female constitution: its coldness and its humidity, as well as retaining women's strength badly, contribute to giving them a “soft, slack body, of rare texture,” little suited to letting the body fluids, of which it is full, circulate correctly; their blood, corrupted by humidity, instead of being properly heated like it is in men, accumulates, blocks up the too small blood-vessels and causes all the illnesses of which they are the habitual victims. To this it is necessary to add the pathogenic importance of the womb, “a part of the body so sensitive and so easily upset, that its least indisposition causes an infinity of strange and almost unbearable evils.” The indispositions which affect this part of the body are always in relation to humidity or dryness, that is with “the two excrements” which it receives: sperm and menstrual blood. Whether, insufficiently impregnated by the virile liquor, “it mounts to the liver and other higher parts of the body to suck humidity from them until it becomes moist,” or it retains for an abnormally long time the seed, which decays inside it; or the periods are suppressed, or on the other hand they are produced too often; all womens illnesses are a question of impeded or excessive discharge. (shrink)

The U.S. relations to Democratic People’s Republic of Korea are since the end of the Cold War revolving around achieving a state of nuclear free Korean peninsula. As non-proliferation is a long term of American foreign policy, relations to North Korea could be categorized primarily under this umbrella. However, the issue of North Korean political system also plays role as it belongs to the other important, more normative category of U.S. foreign policy which is the protection of human rights (...) and spreading of democracy and liberal values. In addition, the North Korean issue influences U.S. relations and interests in broader region of Northeast Asia, its bilateral alliances with South Korea and Japan as well as sensitive and complex relations to People’s Republic of China. As the current administration of president Donald J. Trump published its National security strategy and was fully occupied with the situation on Korean peninsula in its first year, the aim of the paper is to analyse the changes in evolution of U.S. North Korean policy under last three administrations, look at the different strategies adopted in order to achieve the same aim, the denuclearization. The paper does not provide a thorough analysis, neither looks at all documents adopted and presented in the U.S. or within the U.N. It more focuses on the general principles of particular strategies, most significant events in mutual relations as recorded by involved governmental officials and also weaknesses of these strategies as none has achieved desirable result. In conclusion, several options for current administration are drawn, however all of them require significant compromises and could be accompanied with series of setbacks dangerous for regional stability and U.S. position in the region. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace StevensTom McBrideThings Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, by Simon Critchley. 137 pp. New York: Routledge, 2005; $22.50.This book—a brief meditation on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and an even shorter one on the cinema of Terrence Malick—might have been a disaster. The author, a philosopher, is sometimes in worried denial that Stevens is an "anti-realist" (...) or a "transcendental realist," and one occasionally senses that in the ancient tension between philosophy and poetry, herding the poets into the philosopher's pen is a bullying way to resolve the conflict. But the book isn't a catastrophe at all; it's a lucid, ruminative, and personable reading of Stevens (and Malick) that even offers a good general guide to the reading of poetry in what Critchley calls "the wake of romanticism" (motto: "God is dead; therefore I am").Critchley's major idea is twofold: that poetry is a therapeutic art form because it slows us down and encourages, about countless subjects, "the whole voluptuousness of looking"; and that Stevens's poetry is informed by a contest between a poetry of "supreme fictions" (in which phenomena come under the [End Page 503] dominion of a potent imagination) and a poetry of "antipodes" (in which phenomena resist the imagination—they "merely are"—and thus reduce the imagination to impotence). Here Critchley affirms a usual view of Stevens as a poet of the weather—another way of saying that he is a modernist with strong roots in the Romantic movement—and he notes that the supreme fiction poems often tend to be set in summer, when the imagination seems especially yeasty, while the antipodean poems tend to be set in winter, when the miserly realness of things seems to rule the earth. In his sensitive and astute reading, however, Critchley remarks upon something else: that in his late poems Stevens seems more overtly metaphysical (Critchely says Stevens is the most philosophically interesting poet of the twentieth century) and that his later poems are set more and more in the seasons of transition (late autumn/early spring). Late in Stevens's career the battle between supreme fictions and antipodes is therefore played out in the same, often overtly philosophical poems. Here Critchley's commentary is at its most astute. Occasional lovers of Wallace Stevens's poetry will remember why they adore his work, and have a better idea why.However, lest readers get the wrong idea, some careful qualifications about the dialectic between Stevens's summer and winter poems are in order. For one thing, the poems of supreme fictions always leave phenomena with their particularity, their ordinariness, their concreteness. To cite one such poem, "Anecdote of the Jar," although the poet imaginatively places "a jar in Tennessee" that makes "the lovely wilderness / Surround that hill," the wilderness' birds and bushes, even the jar itself, remain birds and bushes and jars ("gray and bare"). Here Critchley reinterprets Samuel Taylor Coleridge's distinction between "fancy" and "imagination." Fancy dreams of what does not exist, while imagination transfigures what does. Stevens's poems of supreme fiction are always imaginative, never fanciful.A second qualification: Critchley argues that for Stevens (as well as for a number of philosophers) human ways of knowing are always informed, sooner or later, by the conceptual imagination. In that sense a rose is never just a rose, although we need not become overly fanciful about what a cigar might be. And this leads us to a third one: When readers get to the wintry, antipodean poems—the poems of "anti-poetry"—they will find Stevens suggesting that the only way to view objects without imagination is to imagine what that would be like. Even earlier in his career Stevens became interested in this paradox, as in "The Snow Man" where he muses:One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter [End Page 504] Of the January sun; and not... (shrink)

The hopes fostered by the end of the Cold War have been shattered, in this troubled beginning of the XXI century, both by a new kind of extreme violence, transnational terrorism, and-more recently-by a global economic downturn with no end yet in sight. Facing these challenges, world governance suffers from the inadequacy both of political theory and of institutions. This book invites us to go back to basics, i.e. to revisit the very foundations of political and moral theory, and (...) reconsider in the light of the present global predicament the relationship between ends and means, the concept of liberty, the precept of solidarity. Terrorism is a test case of our capacity to look beyond our narrow political options in order to attain the common goal of banning it legally, politically and morally. In order to do that, we will have to be able to define terrorism in a way that recognizes it as distinct from other forms, sometimes equally repulsive but different, of violence. It is an effort that requires at the same time ethical sensitivity and a new kind if non-ideological realism. The same effort that must allow us to build and strengthen new international institutions, from the economy to international criminal law. (shrink)

Of all the sciences, philosophy is the most concrete and comprehensive. The sense of cold, remote spaces which it is apt to generate in us is the result of this very width and concreteness. The philosopher has to condense the many-sided variety of human life and express it through the symbols of a common language. The symbols are at best only semi-transparent.ness descends upon him the moment they become opaque. Philosophy, in fact, is useless to us unless we can (...) see through it. If we cannot, the fault may be ours. If it is the philosopher's, then his failure is a failure to be wide enough or concrete enough. He needs above all to be sympathetically sensitive to the wide range of human interests, because it is this as a whole that he is bidden to systematize. He must give a single answer, and for that he must formulate a single question. Therefore his first problem is to discover the unity of problems. (shrink)

Volume 23, Issue 3-4, November - December 2024, Page 219-244.

Some contextually sensitive expressions are such that their context independent conventional meanings need to be in some way supplemented in context for the expressions to secure semantic values in those contexts. As we’ll see, it is not clear that there is a paradigm here, but ‘he’ used demonstratively is a clear example of such an expression. Call expressions of this sort supplementives in order to highlight the fact that their context independent meanings need to be supplemented in context for them (...) to have semantic values relative to the context. Many philosophers and linguists think that there is a lot of contextual sensitivity in natural language that goes well beyond the pure indexicals and supplementives like ‘he’. Constructions/expressions that are good candidates for being contextually sensitive include: quantifiers, gradable adjectives including “predicates of personal taste”, modals, conditionals, possessives and relational expressions taking implicit arguments. It would appear that in none of these cases does the expression/construction in question have a context independent meaning that when placed in context suffices to secure a semantic value for the expression/construction in the context. In each case, some sort of supplementation is required to do this. Hence, all these expressions are supplementives in my sense. For a given supplementive, the question arises as to what the mechanism is for supplementing its conventional meanings in context so as to secure a semantic value for it in context. That is, what form does the supplementation take? The question also arises as to whether different supplementives require different kinds of supplementation. Let us call an account of what, in addition to its conventional meaning, secures a semantic value for a supplementive in context a metasemantics for that supplementive. So we can put our two questions thus: what is the proper metasemantics for a given supplementive; and do all supplementives have the same metasemantics? In the present work, I sketch the metasemantics I formulated for demonstratives in earlier work. Next, I briefly consider a number of other supplementives that I think the metasemantics I propose plausibly applies to and explain why I think that. Finally, I consider the prospects for extending the account to all supplementives. In so doing, I take up arguments due to Michael Glanzberg to the effect that supplementives are governed by two different metasemantics and attempt to respond to them. (shrink)

It is usually the case that scientists examine either ecological systems or social systems, yet the need for an interdisciplinary approach to the problems of environmental management and sustainable development is becoming increasingly obvious. Developed under the auspices of the Beijer Institute in Stockholm, this new book analyses social and ecological linkages in selected ecosystems using an international and interdisciplinary case study approach. The chapters provide detailed information on a variety of management practices for dealing with environmental change. Taken as (...) a whole, the book will contribute to the greater understanding of essential social responses to changes in ecosystems, including the generation, accumulation and transmission of ecological knowledge, structure and dynamics of institutions, and the cultural values underlying these responses. A set of new (or rediscovered) principles for sustainable ecosystem management is also presented. Linking Social and Ecological Systems will be of value to natural and social scientists interested in sustainability. (shrink)

In September 1950, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) dedicated its annual meeting to a "Golden Jubilee of Genetics" that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the rediscovery of Mendel's work. This program, originally intended as a small ceremony attached to the coattails of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) meeting, turned into a publicity juggernaut that generated coverage on Mendel and the accomplishments of Western genetics in countless newspapers and radio broadcasts. The Golden Jubilee merits historical attention as both (...) an intriguing instance of scientific commemoration and as an early example of Cold War political theatre. Instead of condemning either Lysenko or Soviet genetics, the Golden Jubilee would celebrate Mendel – and, not coincidentally, the practical achievements in plant and animal breeding his work had made possible. The American geneticists' focus on the achievements of Western genetics as both practical and theoretical, international, and, above all, non-ideological and non-controversial, was fully intended to demonstrate the success of the Western model of science to both the American public and scientists abroad at a key transition point in the Cold War. An implicit part of this article's argument, therefore, is the pervasive impact of the Cold War in unanticipated corners of postwar scientific culture. (shrink)

Radio Free Europe used balloons to drop leaflets in an attempt to supplement radio with printed words in the 1950s—a historical moment when closing borders, censoring the press, jamming foreign radios, tapping telephone lines, and tracking letters from abroad created an almost hermetically sealed space without many means for exchanging information across the Iron Curtain. This article traces how distorted and limited information shaped Cold War propaganda and practices of information-gathering. The article further examines unpredictable environmental factors that were (...) transformed into persuasive political rhetoric. A comparative analysis of communist media shows similarities of imagination in a visual propaganda campaign across five communist countries. Fantasies evolved into an object of public interest when propaganda strategies embraced a language of facts. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there are good motivations for a relativist account of the domain-sensitivity of quantifier phrases. I will frame the problem as a puzzle involving what looks like a logically valid inference, yet one whose premises are true while the conclusion is false. After discussing some existing accounts, literalist and contextualist, I will present and argue for an account that may be said to be relativist in the following sense: (i) a domain of quantification is (...) required for determining truth value, but is idle in determining semantic content, and (ii) the same sentence, as used on one and the same occasion, may receive different truth values relative to different domains. (shrink)

We propose a new relevance sensitive model for representing and revising belief structures, which relies on a notion of partial language splitting and tolerates some amount of inconsistency while retaining classical logic. The model preserves an agent's ability to answer queries in a coherent way using Belnap's four-valued logic. Axioms analogous to the AGM axioms hold for this new model. The distinction between implicit and explicit beliefs is represented and psychologically plausible, computationally tractable procedures for query answering and belief..

Hot-cold empathy gaps are a pervasive phenomena wherein one’s predictions about others tend to skew ‘in the direction’ of one’s own current visceral states. For instance, when one predicts how hungry someone else is, one’s prediction will tend to reflect one’s own current hunger state. These gaps also obtain intrapersonally, when one attempts to predict what one oneself would do at a different time. In this paper, we do three things: We draw on empirical evidence to argue that so-called (...) hot-cold empathy gaps arise when one projects one’s own current state into a simulation about another. Second, we argue that this process does not typically confer knowledge, even when the predictions it produces happen to be accurate. Third, we suggest that these results can be used to develop a challenge for L.A. Paul's view that authentic action sometimes requires subjective knowledge of one’s own values and how these values relate to relevant outcomes. We then sketch an alternative view of the epistemic grounds of authenticity, one on which authenticity requires a kind of understanding. The relevant form of understanding can be achieved by subjective knowledge but can also be achieved elsewise, such as through testimony from a close friend about what one values. (shrink)

A preference method probed infants` perception of object motion on an inclined plane. Infants viewed videotaped events in which a ball rolled downward (or upward) while speeding up (or slowing down). Then infants were tested with events in which the ball moved in the opposite direction with appropriate or inappropriate acceleration. Infants aged 7 months, but not 5 months, looked longer at the test event with inappropriate acceleration, suggesting emerging sensitivity to gravity. A further study tested whether infants appreciate (...) that a stationary object released on an incline moves downward rather than upward; findings again were positive at 7 months and negative at 5 months. A final study provided evidence, nevertheless, that 5-monthold infants discriminate downward from upward motion and relate downward motion in videotaped events to downward motion in live events. Sensitivity to certain effects of gravity appears to develop in infancy. (shrink)

This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictly intellectual non-political (...) projects. In fact, the refugee philosophers of science were highly active politically and debated questions about values inside and outside science, as a result of which their philosophy of science was scrutinized politically both from within and without the profession, by such institutions as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It will prove absorbing reading to philosophers and historians of science, intellectual historians, and scholars of Cold War studies. (shrink)

In Cold War Freud Dagmar Herzog uncovers the astonishing array of concepts of human selfhood which circulated across the globe in the aftermath of World War II. Against the backdrop of Nazism and the Holocaust, the sexual revolution, feminism, gay rights, and anticolonial and antiwar activism, she charts the heated battles which raged over Freud's legacy. From the postwar US to Europe and Latin America, she reveals how competing theories of desire, anxiety, aggression, guilt, trauma and pleasure emerged and (...) were then transformed to serve both conservative and subversive ends in a fundamental rethinking of the very nature of the human self and its motivations. Her findings shed new light on psychoanalysis' enduring contribution to the enigma of the relationship between nature and culture, and the ways in which social contexts enter into and shape the innermost recesses of individual psyches. (shrink)

In what ways is students’ participation in school related to their participation and becoming subjects across the school context and other contexts in which they participate? This is the question analyzed in this paper, based on observations of, and narratives and perspectives provided by, three 15-year-old ethnic minority boys and their teachers at a school in Denmark. Drawing upon Davies’ concept of teaching-as-usual, I explore exclusions and marginalization inside school before exploring how these can be seen as connected to, and (...) seemingly having an impact on, the lives the students lead outside school, with an understanding of this connection rooted in Holzkamp’s concept of conduct of everyday life. In this regard, I make use of concepts of recognition ) and viable life in order to point to how a lack of such within the school tends to drive the students away from the school context, while simultaneously driving them towards other contexts outside school, with gang related street communities being a particularly potential one. (shrink)

By unravelling the complexities and dynamics of a collaboration between scientists in India and West Germany to establish a cryogenic network, this paper intends to contribute to our understanding of the transnational movement of research technologies during the Cold War. In 1971, a cryogenic laboratory including a helium and a nitrogen liquefier was set up at the physics department of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras as part of the Indo-German partnership at IIT Madras between 1959 and 1974. (...) As a generic research technology with many applications, cryogenics became crucial for a solid state research agenda for semiconductor development. After initial difficulties, Ramaswami Srinivasan at IIT Madras and Gustav Klipping of the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin built a successful collaboration based on mutual trust and on Indian and German scientists travelling and working in each other's laboratories. If the initial motivation of the Indo-German partnership was informed by the logic of Cold War development policy, Klipping and Srinivasan developed their collaboration into a vibrant cryogenic research network around different actors, instruments, and skills moving between India and the Federal Republic of Germany. (shrink)

In the December 2015 Issue of the Police Journal Sam Poyser and Rebecca Milne addressed the subject of miscarriages of justice. Cold case investigations can address some of these wrongs. The salient points for attention are those just before his sudden death: Milligan was appointed Private Secretary to Jonathan Aitken, the then Minister of Arms in the Conservative government in 1994. The known facts are as follows: 1. Stephen David Wyatt Milligan was found deceased on Tuesday 8th February 1994 (...) at his Chiswick, West London house where he lived alone. His body was found by his secretary Vera Taggart who was told by Julie Kirkbride where a spare key to his London house was kept and who decided to go to his house that day because he was not answering his telephone. Police said he had made one last telephone call on Saturday evening at 9.00pm. 2. Stephen David Wyatt Milligan had been the elected Member of Parliament (‘MP’) for Eastleigh in Hampshire since 1992. 3. The important topics this MP was addressing in 1994 at the time of his death included: (i) rail privatization plans and the impact through job losses on communities, especially his own constituency of Eastleigh; (ii) arms dealings with Saudi Arabia, especially with his previous intelligence gathered as an economics journalist for esteemed publications; (iii) the UK military industry; (iv) homosexuality among senior government Ministers, as revealed by British footballer Fasanu; (v) personal relationship and planned marriage to his fiancée (Julie Kirkbride) who at the time was a political journalist. 4. Stephen Milligan was also appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Jonathan Aitken, Arms Minister and this position must have required that he came ‘up to speed’ on international arms trade and indeed its relation to bribery and corruption across jurisdictions. Milligan’s experience and knowledge as a former high-level political and economics journalist must have been of huge benefit to government minister Jonathan Aitken who was later imprisoned for perjury. 5. Regarding Stephen Milligan’s death in 1994, the Guardian newspaper in their immediate obituary said that ‘The death of one of the government's most outspoken and loyal supporters will pose a stiff electoral test for the Tories to surmount. He was on the left of the Tory party - he had even had a brief flirtation with the SDP when it was formed - and was a noted Euro-enthusiast… the death of one of the government's most outspoken and loyal supporters will pose a stiff electoral test for the Tories to surmount. Regarding Stephen Milligan’s sudden and unexpected death in 1994, MP David Willetts (Conservative, Havant) said in March 2015, in his address in the House of Commons. ‘…The inevitable ups and downs and triumphs and disasters of politics are among the great features of this place. There are colleagues in all parts of the House who are tolerant and understanding. There are friendships that keep the downs as well as the ups of politics in perspective. Having entered the House in 1992, I think particularly of two good friends, Judith Chaplin and Stephen Milligan, who both died within two years of being elected; that loss stayed with me for a long time...’ 6. On 28 February 2000, in the House of Commons, at Column 106, Mr Mike Hancock (Portsmouth) said, on the deaths of Michael Colvin and of Stephen Milligan MP: ‘I knew Michael Colvin for nearly 30 years, from when he was first elected to Hampshire county council. During my time as leader of that council, he and the late former Member of Parliament for Eastleigh, Stephen Milligan, were usually the only Members of Parliament who readily supported the council when necessary. Michael Colvin supported many ventures in the county of Hampshire. He will be missed here, in his constituency, and in Europe, and I stress that Hampshire has lost a staunch supporter. I am sure that the county will at some stage want to record its regret at his death and its deepest appreciation of the part that he played in its life....’ -/- Mike Hancock had, like Stephen Milligan, served on the Select Committee on Defence. It is interesting that he mentioned Stephen Milligan’s support as MP for Eastleigh when Milligan had only been so appointed a couple of years before his sudden death, as compared to 30 years of support from Mike Colvin. 7. Mr Andrew Robathan (for Blaby) said in the House of Commons Hansard Debates on 27 January1997, (Column 62) (on the registering of sex offenders): ‘I remember the death of my honourable friend Stephen Milligan, who represented Eastleigh. The press reports of the time stated that each Metropolitan police station had a police officer in the pay of newspapers. I do not know whether that is true, but I am aware that the police are not renowned for being entirely secure with their information…’ This statement is mischievous and it has been demonstrated time and time again, as being untrue, especially during the recent press inquiry leading to the four-volume Leveson Report, published in November 2012, into phone hacking and the ethics and culture of the UK media, pursuant to section 26 of the Inquiries Act 2005, and ordered by the House of Commons to be printed on 29 November 2012, ISBN: 9780102981063, by the Stationery Office Limited on behalf of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. In Volume 4 of the 2012 Leveson Report, chapter 4 concluded on the Press Complaints Commission (‘PCC’) and its effectiveness and revealed that the PCC does not initiate its own investigations other than those ‘needed to head off criticism of the press or self-regulation- or to accept complaints from third parties across the board and on a transparent basis… and the report states that ‘the resources of the police are limited’ in terms of being able to fully inspect the Press and media reports. (shrink)

Modal knowledge accounts that are based on standards possible-worlds semantics face well-known problems when it comes to knowledge of necessities. Beliefs in necessities are trivially sensitive and safe and, therefore, trivially constitute knowledge according to these accounts. In this paper, I will first argue that existing solutions to this necessity problem, which accept standard possible-worlds semantics, are unsatisfactory. In order to solve the necessity problem, I will utilize an unorthodox account of counterfactuals, as proposed by Nolan, on which we also (...) consider impossible worlds. Nolan’s account for counterpossibles delivers the intuitively correct result for sensitivity i.e. S’s belief is sensitive in intuitive cases of knowledge of necessities and insensitive in intuitive cases of knowledge failure. However, we acquire the same plausible result for safety only if we reject his strangeness of impossibility condition and accept the modal closeness of impossible worlds. In this case, the necessity problem can be analogously solved for sensitivity and safety. For some, such non-moderate accounts might come at too high a cost. In this respect, sensitivity is better off than safety when it comes to knowing necessities. (shrink)

Sensitivity has sometimes been thought to be a highly epistemologically significant property, serving as a proxy for a kind of responsiveness to the facts that ensure that the truth of our beliefs isn’t just a lucky coincidence. But it's an imperfect proxy: there are various well-known cases in which sensitivity-based anti-luck conditions return the wrong verdicts. And as a result of these failures, contemporary theorists often dismiss such conditions out of hand. I show here, though, that a (...) class='Hi'>sensitivity-based understanding of epistemic luck can be developed that respects what was attractive about sensitivity-based approaches in the first place but that's immune to these failures. (shrink)