An abundance of information about lung development in animal models exists; however, comparatively little is known about lung development in humans. Recent advances using primary human lung tissue combined with the use of human in vitro model systems, such as human pluripotent stem cell‐derived tissue, have led to a growing understanding of the mechanisms governing human lung development. They have illuminated key differences between animal models and humans, underscoring the need for continued advancements in modeling human lung development and utilizing (...) human tissue. This review discusses the use of human tissue and the use of human in vitro model systems that have been leveraged to better understand key regulators of human lung development and that have identified uniquely human features of development. This review also examines the implementation and challenges of human model systems and discusses how they can be applied to address knowledge gaps. (shrink)

This article questions the meanings and expression of "citizenship" in the context of new Latina and Latino migration into the southeastern United States-a region long marked by legally policed racial systems and now experiencing the varied shocks of globalization. Focused on a legislative campaign that won access to a state-issued driver's licence for undocumented migrants in Tennessee in spring 2001, the article explores some of the tensions that emerged on the road to this unlikely victory and raises questions for the (...) immigrants' rights movement in the US about the costs and gains that may follow from different ways of framing its demands. The dominant frame this particular campaign adopted was a pragmatic and politically acceptable call to improve traffic safety, one that reflected a conscious choice to downplay issues of rights, justice or global perspective. Yet the article also reports that the campaign in fact created and used opportunities for activists to raise issues related to migrant rights. It also made a dramatic, albeit temporary, improvement in the daily lives of migrants in the state. The article then sketches three citizenship norms that current struggles might prefigure. These three norms are: the full right to international mobility of human beings; the right to identity; and duties of citizenship in a globalizing world. (shrink)

Contained in this rather short but quite excellent Clarke F. Ansley Award winning work is a skillful presentation of an intriguing thesis: Spinoza’s definition and criterion of truth follows neither the strictly correspondence nor the strictly coherence lines which many commentators have suspected. Rather, says Mark, Spinoza’s doctrine follows the "ontological" view of truth, prevalent in ancient and medieval times. To be true is to be a being, a thing which "is." It is the author’s contention that there are (...) texts which seem to be evidence in favor of interpreting Spinoza’s doctrine along the lines of a correspondence theory, and there are still other texts which seem to betray a kind of family resemblance to the coherence theory of truth. Most commentators, says Mark, have either focused their entire attention on one or the other of these sets of texts, or else pointed out the discrepancy and went on to something else. But what Mark here suggests to us is a rather bold and interesting approach, which, to Mark’s mind, accomplishes the task of facing squarely both sets of texts without compromising either, and without reducing Spinoza to contradiction. (shrink)

Each member of pragmatism's triumvirate is the subject of a separate study which sketches his intellectual biography, surveys his philosophical position, and takes account of the typical criticisms. The accounts are not subtle.--A. E. F.

This book presents a comprehensive and detailed exploration of the relationship between the thought of G.W.F. Hegel and that of John McDowell, the latter of whom is widely considered to be one of the most influential living analytic philosophers. It serves as a point of entry in McDowell’s and Hegel’s philosophy, and a substantial contribution to ongoing debates on perceptual experience and perceptual justification, naturalism, human freedom and action. The chapters gathered in this volume, as well as McDowell’s responses, make (...) it clear that McDowell’s work paves the way for an original reading of Hegel’s texts. His conceptual framework allows for new interpretive possibilities in Hegel’s philosophy which, until now, have remained largely unexplored. Moreover, these interpretations shed light on various aspects of continuity and discontinuity between the philosophies of these two authors, thus defining more clearly their positions on specific issues. In addition, they allow us to see Hegel’s thought as containing a number of conceptual tools that might be useful for advancing McDowell’s own philosophy and contemporary philosophy in general. (shrink)

What do pictures and mental images have in common? The contemporary tendency to reject mental picture theories of imagery suggests that the answer is: not much. We show that pictures and visual imagery have something important in common. They both contribute to mental simulations: pictures as inputs and mental images as outputs. But we reject the idea that mental images involve mental pictures, and we use simulation theory to strengthen the anti-pictorialist's case. Along the way we try to account for (...) caricature and for some basic features of pictorial representations. (shrink)

This article explains Aquinas's attempt to show, within an Aristotelian framework, how the soul can be both a substance in its own right and the form of the body. I argue that although Aquinas' theory is logically consistent, its plausibility is weakened by the fact that it requires a significant modification of the Aristotelian conceptions of both substance and form.

While the ancients described the world as a single organism and the medieval view was theological in nature, modern thought has envisioned the world as a mechanism composed of smaller mechanisms. Raziel Abelson argues that this mechanistic explanation, when applied to human action, is dangerous because it "threatens us with a kind of spiritual annihilation...;[and] it undermines our belief in freedom of the will and with it the reality of choice, value, and moral responsibility." In Lawless Mind, he presents a (...) theory about the relationship between mind and body in order to show how voluntary actions can be causally explained while still allowing for free will.Abelson attempts to reconcile the centuries-old debate between determinists and free-willers by making a distinction between two kinds of causality. "The impact of this [mechanistic] view on psychology, ethics, and politics is such as to replace moral judgment with the search for causal mechanisms. In psychology it results in reducing moral wisdom to medical therapy, in politics it reduces statesmanship to game theory and rational persuasion to behavioral modification, and in ethics it reduces moral responsibility to social conformity. If we are all programmed automata, as mechanism suggests, then the way to improve our performances is to hire a mechanic of the mind to tinker with our wiring. Is this the way to think about ourselves? I shall try to show that it is not."Abelson's novel theory of mind and psychological causality provides solutions for problems in metaphysics, ethics, psychology, and the social sciences. The issues addressed include free will and responsibility, mind-body interaction, models of psychotherapy, causal explanations in sociology, and the difference between minds and computers. Author note: Raziel Abelson is Professor of Philosophy at New York University and author of Persons: A Study of Philosophical Psychology. (shrink)

One of the fundamental questions raised by Ruchkin, Grafman, Cameron, and Berndt's (Ruchkin et al.'s) interpretation of no distinct specialized neural networks for short-term storage buffers and long-term memory systems, is that of the link between perception and memory processes. In this framework, we take the opportunity in this commentary to discuss a specific working memory task involving percept formation, temporary retention, auditory imagery, and the attention-based maintenance of information, that is, the verbal transformation effect.

Seminar papers; Study with special reference to Advaita philosophy of Śaṅkarācārya.

What is the role of the media in the construction of collectively shared ideas about the past? Our analysis of the coverage and framing of the dictatorship in current newspapers intends to contribute to the understanding of the ways in which media discourse uses the past to serve present political interests, related to an increase in revisionist political discourse. We conducted a discourse analysis of how the Uruguayan press approaches framing the latest dictatorship, to identify how key events in the (...) public discussion of the dictatorial past are defined in the present. Along with this, identified representations they construct in terms of responsibilities attributed to actors associated with the dictatorship. We found that journalistic practices tend to avoid explanations and elaborations of historical events reproducing historical narrative frames with no additional commentaries. They do this by reproducing historical framing through bundling up various source messages from social media, idiomatic phrases and intertextual links. The appeal to these discourse practices produces polyphonic texts with less lexical density that make comprehension more dependent on reader’s background knowledge. These mediated and mediatized memories reproduce hegemonic discourses about the meanings of the past through journalistic practices that erase responsibility contributing to revisionist discourses. (shrink)

Our concerns fall into three areas: (1) Barsalou fails to make clear what simulators are (vs. what they do); (2) activation of perceptual areas of the brain during thought does not distinguish between the activation's being constitutive of concepts or a mere causal consequence (Barsalou needs the former); and (3) Barsalou's attempt to explain how modal symbols handle abstraction fails.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Plot Taxonomies and IntentionalityJon AdamsEver popular among the various topics occupying non-academic conversations about literature—such as the identity of the real author of the plays attributed to "Shakespeare"—is the notion that there exists only a finite number of storylines, and that all the stories we know are only ever complications or rehearsals of these few, elementary plots. What is the status of that claim? The issue gains a renewed (...) relevance in light of literary criticism's recent interest in the possibilities of employing evolutionary psychology as a means of naturalising literary study, but interest in plot taxonomies stretches a long way back. Why might we seek to categorise plots into a finite taxonomy? And what are the implications of the claim if true?Organising literature into any classificatory scheme is an attempt to achieve something like the coherence that the natural sciences have achieved—in chemistry and physics with the composition of the periodic table, and in biology with Linnaean classification. Much of science's epistemic prestige is rooted in the enormous success with which they have organised and categorised their subject of study. In searching for mechanism and pattern, the natural sciences proceed confidently from the belief that those mechanisms and patterns exist to be discovered, and that (relatively) simple rules underlie the manifest complexity of natural phenomena.Unfortunately, the study of literary fiction has no such security. There are two senses here in which we can talk of literature being patterned. At the micro-level, we have the question of whether individual works can be thought of as internally patterned. Usually, this type of patterning is easy enough to establish and recognise, and something the author is (or ought to be) in a good position to control. But, of course, internal [End Page 102] structures are not always conspicuous, and readers faced with an overtly complex text, like Pound's Cantos, or Finnegans Wake, have no guarantee that there is sense to be made of it. Surface complexity may shield a profound and subtle architecture, or the work may be as unstructured, fragmentary, and chaotic as it initially appears. A frustrated Wayne C. Booth draws attention to the problem: "One can't be sure that Finnegans Wake is not a great novel; perhaps someday readers will discover that the complex structure they now dream of and quarrel about is a realizable structure, an experienced structure. I doubt it, but it may happen. Until then, each new intricacy discovered... reveals precisely nothing more than that: a new intricacy."1 What's missing is a conceptual centre around which overall coherence might be achieved from what had seemed to be unconnected parts. Even so, if this sort of centre cannot be found in the individual work, it may yet obtain between works. In other words, The Cantos or Finnegans Wake may yet occupy nodal roles in a larger system, within which they acquire a previously unrecognized unity and order. This type of organization is something the individual author is obviously in a much less suitable position to control. Nonetheless, mapping out this larger, macro-level order is a task that literary criticism might want to take on. There is the example Borges uses of how Kafka's work retrospectively confers a familial similarity upon previously unconnected works. The quality of being "Kafkaesque" is the only thing common to the pieces, but was not apparent (or rather—the paradox that excites Borges—did not exist) prior to Kafka's writing.2 This is the second sense in which literature might be thought of as patterned; that is, not within works, but across them. On the larger scale, is it possible that literature as a whole could be understood as patterned?The notion that literature can be understood "as a whole," and its corollary, that a literature so understood would submit to taxonomical classification, is an enduring one. Anthropologists and art historians have long acknowledged that there appear to be recurring themes, motifs, and commonalities across world cultures, and consequently, commonalities among the narratives those cultures construct and consume. Cataloguing these similarities has produced a variety of classificatory systems.In the mid-nineteenth century, German scholar Adolf... (shrink)

The notions of failure and denial are co-constitutive of both “global” theory and social order. Though these concepts have been used to evoke an array of metaphors and images to under­stand the condition of international relations as a knowledge production site and in rela­tion to other social sciences, they have not been deemed pivotal for much theorizing of world politics’ events, including the “success” of a sovereign state, or the subjects and knowledge production of decolonial realities. The article critically assesses (...) how the term failure is used by IR’s scholarly community as signifier and analogy and what it signifies and analogizes. It grapples with Bruno Latour’s “The Immense Cry Channeled” by Pope Francis and ‘“Love your Monsters.’” It concludes with a discussion of the ethics of critical theory and its empha­sis on critique. I problematize its critical moves to lodge racializations in the enslaved and colonized body and body politic of ‘failed’ states, and the normative projects it bolsters. I also point to its broader social and political implications, including its acknowledging of certain publics at the expense of others and its death limits in times of terror and the Anthropocene. I finally argue for a ‘global’ decolonizing social analysis that in an Fanonian sense, is a “real leap” as it introduces “invention into existence” by rupturing evolutionary trajectories and linear temporalities (i.e., pure immanence, or transcendentalism). (shrink)

Resumen: Este artículo postula que el mejor modo de leer la Relectio de Indis de Francisco de Vitoria es considerar que no solo se trata de un texto que pertenece al género de análisis político. Para fundar esta hipótesis de lectura la investigación discurre en tres niveles: analiza el contexto de producción del texto; fija las características de los textos de análisis político y propone un autor y lector modelos de la Relectio. La conclusión de la investigación distingue entre interpretación (...) y uso del texto, y sostiene que la interpretación de la Relectio exige que el lector empírico conozca los tres niveles de análisis, mientras que el uso del texto exige considerar que él trata un conjunto de soluciones a problemas perennes en las sociedades: los dilemas interculturales.: This article postulates that the best way of reading Francisco Victoria’s Relectio of Indis is having in mind that it not only is about a text which belongs to the political analysis genre. To support this reading hypothesis, the investigation proceeds in three levels: First, it analyzes the context of production of the text; second, it sets the features of the texts of political analysis and; third, it proposes an author and model reader of the Relectio. The conclusion of the investigation distinguishes between interpretation and the use of text as well as it holds that the interpretation of the Relectio demands the empiric reader to know the three levels of analysis, whereas the use of the text demands him to deal with a set of solutions to perennial problems in societies: intercultural dilemmas. (shrink)

Dear Readers,Welcome to this issue of our beloved Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics! In this sweltering heat we are all seeking for some cool and comfort. We bring this issue of BJB on different ethical practices and bring up related questions. Are we respecting the rights of every human being when we are either doing research or practicing health service provision? What are the minimum norms and standards to be maintained or are we circumventing those? The issue looks into different issues (...) and provides us with indepth information, queries, fears and reservations.In the article on Knowledge, attitude and practice of medical ethics among medical intern students in a Medical College in Kathmandu, Ramesh P Aacharyaand Yagya L Shakya, report on a Knowledge Attitude and Practice survey of 46 medical undergraduate interns of Maharajgunj Medical Campus. The result of the survey is quite interesting. ‘Doctors know the best irrespective of patients’ opinion was agreed upon by 35 %, ‘Confidentiality cannot be kept in modern era and should be abandoned’ was strongly disagreed by 34.8% and disagreed by 60.9%. The Authors hope that the findings will assist the faculties to strengthen the teaching of medical ethics and guiding the interns for ethical professional conduct. In the article titled Organizational Justice and Employee’s Service Behavior in the Healthcare Organizations in Bangladesh is an agenda for Research, Md. Nuruzzaman and Md. Humayun Kabir Talukder present a conceptual framework and a set of hypotheses regarding the relationships among distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, employee’s citizenship behaviour, role prescribed behaviour and counterproductive behavior in the healthcare organizations in Bangladesh. The authors state that the purpose is to assist the policy makers and service providers in identifying desirable and undesirable HRM practices in order to maintain optimum level of employee commitment for ensuring quality and efficient service delivery to the communities. Though the article is theoretical it may be useful for the policy makers and service providers. If an operational research could be carried out to test the hypothesis the practical utility of the concept could be tested in Bangladesh.Zoheb Rafique in the article Ethical Justification of Conducting Research Trials in Lower and Middle Income Countries Including Pakistan: The Responsibilities of Research Enterprises explores the ethical aspects of research sponsored by commercial agencies. He looks into the factors that influence selection of a study site for a sponsored trial particularly in traditional countries like Pakistan where cultural values add to the problem in assuring that research is conducted in an ethical manner. In this paper, the Author discusses the responsibilities of researchers and funders in low and middle income countries like Pakistan and the ethical justifications of doing research trials in developing countries. He concludes that research participants should be fully informed about the research trial and their participation and it is their right to know all risks and benefits so that they have the option of rejecting participation.The article on Ethical aspects of Dhaka University Tele-medicine System by Ahmed Raihan Abir provides and analysis of the tele- medicine system in Dhaka University. The Author is a member of an extended group at Dhaka University (DU) which has been developing telemedicine equipment and data acquisition software to promote telemedicine practice in Bangladesh. Recently the Telemedicine group of DU and a local NGO named SAMAMA with support from Service innovation fund (SIF) of the Prime Minister Office (PMO) of Bangladesh took the initiative to establish eight rural telemedicine centers and one expert center for the field trial of telemedicine in Bangladesh. The aim of this paper is to examine the ethical challenges of such health care system and the effort to overcome these problems before starting the field trial. The author looks into the details of Data confidentiality and security, Responsibilities of Doctor and Rural Technician, Quality of service and Implications of telemedicine in Bangladesh. He concludes that DU telemedicine project will essentially bring the services of qualified medical experts to the doorsteps of the common people throughout the country, even in the remote rural areas. Although a telemedicine cannot match a face to face consultation, DU tele-medicine system is much better than no consultation at all.Sifat Rahman in the article on Ethical Issues of Fair Subject Selection in Research provides an overview of the criterion for maintaining ethical standards for conducting research. The Author reviews the three fundamental conditions to be met for adhering to strict ethical standards which are: Respect for Persons by protecting the autonomy of people, treating them with courtesy and respect and obtaining informed consent.; Beneficence which incorporates the philosophy of "Do no harm" while maximizing benefits for the research project and minimizing risks to the research subjects; and Justice by ensuring that reasonable, non-exploitative, and well-considered procedures are administered fairly. Finally the Author concludes that Researchers must be truthful and conduct no deception.Dear Readers, as you can see from the above ethics and maintaining the values in research and services are of utmost importance in the improvement of the quality of life. Through our queries, questions and sense of respect for every living being can our endeavors to ensure ethics in all spheres of development be successful.Dear Readers, please keep on sending your articles, notes or thoughts to us. Your participation will make a difference in the quality of our lives.Best regardsTahera AhmedEditor. (shrink)

We are rational creatures, in that we are beings on whom demands of rationality are appropriate. But by our rationality it doesn't follow that we always live up to those demands. In those cases, we fail to be rational, but it is in a way that is different from how rocks, tadpoles, and gum fail to be rational. For them, we use the term ‘arational.’ They don't have the demands, but we do. The demands of rationality bear on us because (...) we have minds that can move us to act, inspire us to create, and bring us to believe in ways that are responsible and directed. My interests here are the demands rationality places on our beliefs. Beliefs aim at the truth, and so one of the demands of being a rational creature with beliefs is that we manage them in a way that is pursuant of the truth. Reasons and reasoning play the primary role in that management – we ought to believe on the basis of good reasons. That is, if you believe something, you think that you're right about the world in some way or another. You believe because you think that something is true. Now, p's truth is different from all ways it could be false, and your being right about p isn't just some arbitrary commitment, one that could just as well have been its negation. This non-arbitrary specificity of beliefs is constituted by the fact that they are held on the basis of reasons. Arguments are our model for how these reasons go – we offer some premises and show how they support a conclusion. Of course, arbitrary premises won't do, so you've got to have some reason for holding them as opposed to some others. Every premise, then, is a conclusion in need of an argument, and for arguments to be acceptable, we've got to do due diligence on the premises. This, however, leads to a disturbing pattern – for every premise we turn into a conclusion, we've got at least one other premise in need of another argument. Pretty soon, even the simplest arguments are going to get very, very complicated. (shrink)

In a lengthy article E. Scerri and J. Worrall put forward the case for a novel ‘accommodationist’ version of the events surrounding the development of Mendeleef's Periodic Table 1869–1899. However these authors lay undue stress on the fact that President of the Royal Society of London Spottiswoode made absolutely no mention of Mendeleef's famous predictions in the Davy Medal eulogy in 1883 and undue stress on the fact that Cleve's classic 1879 Scandium paper contained an acknowledgement of Mendeleef's prior prediction (...) of eka-boron.They also fail to analyse in any detail the so-called ‘rare earth problem’ which, in the opinion of this author, causes problems for their account but not for a predictivist account. (shrink)

Mauchaussat gives a detailed, chronological, and dense picture of Lachelier's thought and its milieu. He studies with erudition the connections with thinkers of analogous tendencies: Maine de Biran, Ravaisson, Boutroux, and Brunschvicg, and, outside the French tradition, Lachelier's relations and debts to Kant.--A. R.

Este artículo pretende establecer una relación entre la frase “Dios ha muerto” y el tema de la ciencia en Nietzsche. Para tal fin, se hará un análisis de la frase “Dios ha muerto” a la luz de la reciente interpretación hecha en el mundo alemán. En segundo lugar, nos ocuparemos de los conceptos de ausencia y caos para determinar si dichas nociones pueden ser consideradas como un paso ulterior a la “muerte de Dios”. Finalmente, revisaremos el tema de la ciencia: (...) las opiniones que Nietzsche tenía de la misma, las implicaciones que se desprenden de sus obras y, sobre todo, el nexo directo de la ciencia con dicha muerte. El vínculo entre estos temas permite una nueva comprensión del futuro de las investigaciones sobre el filósofo de Röcken. This article aims to establish a relationship between the phrase “God has died” and the theme of science in Nietzsche. For this purpose, an analysis of the phrase “God has died” will be made in the light of the recent interpretation made in the German world. Secondly, we will deal with the concepts of absence and chaos to determine if these notions can be considered as a further step to the “death of God”. Finally, we will review the subject of science: Nietzsche's views on it, the implications that stem from its works and, above all, the direct nexus of science with that death. The link between these themes leads to a new understanding of the future of research on the philosophy of Röcken. (shrink)

This paper is an endeavor to discuss Gilbert Ryle’s philosophy of mind in convergence with some contemporary debates, particularly the “immediacy” debate of first-person authority. An attempt has been made to show that Ryle’s thought when analyzed through the prism of immediacy debate of first-person authority also seems to claim and endorse first-person authority.

As Hegel once said, in Byzantium, between homoousis and homoiousis, the difference of one letter could decide over the life and death of thousands. As the present essay would like to argue, Byzantine thinking was not only attentive to conceptual, but also to iconic differences. The iconoclastic controversy arose from two different interpretations of the nature of images: whereas iconoclastic philosophy is based on the assumption of a fundamental ‘iconic identity’, iconophile philosophy defends the idea of ‘iconic difference’. While the (...) reception in the Latin West of the controversies over the image as a mere problem of referentiality of the Letter explains why its originality has remained underestimated for centuries, re-examining Byzantine visual thinking in the light of today’s ‘iconic turn’ reveals its striking modernity. (shrink)

Dans son oeuvre tardive, Merleau-Ponty a souligné les convergences entre une pensée philosophique et une pensée s’exprimant par l’écriture littéraire, considérant que toutes deux répondent à une tâche commune liée à la description du monde. Ses premiers écrits théoriques – Simone de Beauvoir comme Jean-Paul Sartre l’ont souligné – sont quant à eux marqués par une distance plus nette vis-à-vis de la pratique littéraire. Pourtant, bien avant de publier ses premières monographies, Merleau-Ponty est l’auteur d’un livre écrit pour le compte (...) d’un autre : Nord. Récit de l’arctique, paru en 1928 chez Grasset. Le roman qui traite de la vie d’un explorateur dans le grand nord canadien, entre commerce de fourrures entre rencontre avec les Inuits, n’est qu’un travail de commande, que Merleau-Ponty ne revendiquera jamais. On trouve cependant dans cet écrit de jeunesse quelques motifs intéressants qui préfigurent sa pensée à venir. In his late writings, Merleau-Ponty stressed the convergences between philosophy and literature, highlighting their “common task” of describing the world. His early philosophical texts though – both Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre pointed this out – insist on demarcating themselves from literature. However, well before publishing his first monographs, Merleau-Ponty had already written a book on someone else’s behalf: Nord. Récit de l’arctique, published in 1928 by French publisher Grasset. The novel, which deals with the life of an explorer in Canada’s far north, between fur trade and encounters with the Inuit, is the result of ghostwriting, carried out for a friend. Merleau-Ponty later never stood to that book. There are nonetheless some interesting motifs in this early piece of writing that prefigure his future thinking.Nei suoi ultimi scritti, Merleau-Ponty ha sottolineato le convergenze tra filosofia e letteratura, evidenziando il loro “comune compito” nel descrivere il mondo. I suoi primi testi filosofici – lo hanno sottolineato sia Simone de Beauvoir che Jean-Paul Sartre – insistono però a distinguersi dalla letteratura. Tuttavia, ben prima di pubblicare le sue monografie, Merleau-Ponty aveva già scritto un libro per conto terzi: Nord. Récit de l’arctique, pubblicato nel 1928 per le stampe di Grasset. Per questo romanzo, che tratta della vita di un esploratore nell’estremo nord canadese, tra commercio di pellicce e incontri con gli Inuit, Merleau-Ponty fa da ‘ghostwriter’ ad un amico. Mentre ulteriormente, egli non si avvalse mai della paternità del romanzo, questo primo scritto contiene già alcuni spunti che prefigurano il suo pensiero futuro. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. The first is to use contemporary discussions of naïve realist theories of perception to offer an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception. The second is to use consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception to outline a distinctive version of a naïve realist theory of perception. In a Merleau-Pontian spirit, these two aims are inter-dependent.

This is an interesting study with a great deal of information on Eliade's main themes and a detailed account of his understanding of myth.

The Empirical school of medicine, which arose in the third century BCE, defined itself in opposition to rationalist tendencies in medical thought. Causal explanation, which typically appeals to hidden, theoretical entities, is most at home in rationalist physiology and pathology, and much of what the Empiricists had to say about causes belongs to their anti-rationalist polemics. Over the course of the school’s history, however, some members appropriated the language and idea of cause, though always in ways that was consistent with (...) its defining commitment to Empiricism. (shrink)

In her recent paper ‘The Epistemology of Propaganda’ Rachel McKinnon discusses what she refers to as ‘TERF propaganda’. We take issue with three points in her paper. The first is her rejection of the claim that ‘TERF’ is a misogynistic slur. The second is the examples she presents as commitments of so-called ‘TERFs’, in order to establish that radical (and gender critical) feminists rely on a flawed ideology. The third is her claim that standpoint epistemology can be used to establish (...) that such feminists are wrong to worry about a threat of male violence in relation to trans women. In Section 1 we argue that ‘TERF’ is not a merely descriptive term; that to the extent that McKinnon offers considerations in support of the claim that ‘TERF’ is not a slur, these considerations fail; and that ‘TERF’ is a slur according to several prominent accounts in the contemporary literature. In Section 2, we argue that McKinnon misrepresents the position of gender critical feminists, and in doing so fails to establish the claim that the ideology behind these positions is flawed. In Section 3 we argue that McKinnon’s criticism of Stanley fails, and one implication of this is that those she characterizes as ‘positively privileged’ cannot rely on the standpoint-relative knowledge of those she characterizes as ‘negatively privileged’. We also emphasize in this section McKinnon’s failure to understand and account for multiple axes of oppression, of which the cis/trans axis is only one. (shrink)

Altmann, a mathematical physicist (Oxford U.) provides a philosophical framework for educated lay readers to understand the meaning of natural law, the scientific method, and causality in science. Reviewing the classical approach to time, space, and the laws of mechanics, he also explains key modern concepts such as randomness, probability, the nature of mathematics, Godel's theorems, and quantum mechanics. Altmann considers the reactions of various philosophical schools--including idealism, physicalism, cultural relativism, and social constructivism--to scientific developments. Annotation copyrighted by Book News (...) Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

With both the Roman Empire and contemporary scholarship as backdrop, this book contrasts the Imperial Platonism of Plotinus with Plato's own by distinguishing one as a master enlightening disciples, and the other as an Athenian teacher who taught students to discover the truth for themselves in the Academy.

In recent years the debate over free trade has heated up and has taken the form of violence in Seattle, Washington D.C., Quebec, and Genoa. Groups either embrace free trade or condemn it. In fact, it seems impossible to reconcile the arguments put forward by the supporters and the protestors. In this paper I want to investigate the problem by using Bernard Lonergan’s work on economics.

This volume argues that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion and his thought in general continue to be highly relevant for present and future research on interreligious relations.

This article examines the nonhistoricist higher-order compatibilist theory of moral responsibility devised and defended by Harry G. Frankfurt. Intuitions about certain kinds of cases of moral responsibility cast significant doubt on the wide irrelevancy clause of the nonhistoricist feature of Frankfurt’s theory. It will be argued that, while the questions of the nature and ascription of moral responsibility must be separated in doing moral responsibility theory, the questions of whether or not and the extent to which an agent is morally (...) responsible for performing certain kinds of actions cannot be settled without also answering the question of the history of that agent’s attitudes, preferences, etc. which may have contributed to the agent’s performing such actions. Thus Frankfurt’s repeated claim that the history of an agent’s action is “irrelevant” to the question of that agent’s moral responsibility for it is rendered dubious, thereby rendering problematic the strongly nonhistoricist component of his theory. The methodological difference between my challenge to Frankfurt’s nonhistoricism and those of others is that, while others have challenged Frankfurt’s nonhistoriciams by way of thought experiments involving hyper-manipulation, mine presents a set of counter-examples to his nonhistoricism which emanate from morality and the law. Indeed, if my counter-example is plausible, then Frankfurt’s nonhistoricism cannot make good sense of some standard instances of racism. Furthermore, while many believe that racist hate crimes ought to be punished more heavily than crimes committed absent hate, the argument herein provides reasons for mitigating, rather than increasing, the responsibility and punishments of many such crimes. What matters in such cases is the extent to which the hatred accompanying said crimes has a history in the agent’s life, one which makes it significantly difficult for her to do other than what she did in committing the racist crime. (shrink)

When we remember a past situation, the emotional import of the latter often transpires in a modified form at the phenomenological level of our present memory. When it does, we experience what is sometimes called an “affective memory.” Theorists of memories have disagreed about the status of affective memories. Sceptics claim that the relationship between memory and emotion can only be of two types: either the memory is about a past emotion (the emotion is part of what is remembered), or (...) it causes a present emotion (the emotion is a separable effect of the memory). We argue that there is a third option, which points to an emotional way of representing the past situation. Drawing from Peter Goldie’s account of mental narratives, we show that three levels of mental perspective are involved in memories: the perspective of the represented subject (the character, if there is one), the perspective of the representing subject (the author), and the intermediary perspective of the narrator (who may remain virtual). Affective memories are cases in which the narrator’s emotional perspective has direct implications for the author’s emotional perspective, even if the former typically differs from the latter. (shrink)

Literature on indoctrination has focused on imparting and revising beliefs, but it has hardly considered the way of teaching and acquiring certainties—in Wittgenstein’s sense. Therefore, the role played by rationality in the acquisition of our linguistic practices has been overestimated. Furthermore, analyses of the relationship between certainty and indoctrination contain major errors. In this paper, the clarification of the aforementioned issues leads me to suggest the avoidance of the term ‘indoctrination’ so as to avoid focusing on the suitability of the (...) case to the concept rather than on the analysis of the case itself. This should facilitate that the process of helping children to acquire a world-picture—by teaching them to ignore alternatives to certainties—is definitely accepted as normal and natural, for many beliefs are expected to end up becoming ungrounded certainties not only in the medium or long term, but also, and above all, in the short term. (shrink)

For students and the general reader, this is the best English translation of the entire 'Laws' available. I give several examples of important lines that are translated well in this edition, but I take issue with the translation of some other lines and with part of Schofield's introduction on grounds that these parts do not reveal Plato's political and cosmic holism as clearly as they could have.

This paper is addressed to recent theoretical discussions of the Anthropocene, in particular Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene (Open Universities Press, 2018), which argues: “As we drift past tipping points that put future biota at risk, while a post-truth regime institutes the denial of ‘climate change’ (as fake news), and as Silicon Valley assistants snatch decision and memory, and as gene-editing and a financially-engineered bifurcation advances over the rising hum of extinction events and the innumerable toxins and conceptual opiates that Anthropocene Talk (...) fascinated itself with—in short, as ‘the Anthropocene’ discloses itself as a dead-end trap…”. The objective of this paper is therefore twofold: (1) to discuss how the Anthropocene is appropriated to certain ideological discourses (paradoxically) to maintain the hegemony of precisely those systems of production that have most accelerated climate change etc.; (2) to consider how the factography of the Anthropocene is exploited in this process to mask the ideological character of industry-aligned “technocratic” environmental management. The paper is not concerned with specific case studies in terms of government and industry policy, or climate science, but rather with the ways in which the discourse of the Anthropocene has been inflected within the humanities and the broader cultural field—that is to say, ideologically, as a system or logic of meaning. How the Anthropocene “means” is, in this respect, a question of some importance. This paper does not attempt to address all the facets of this question, but focuses upon a central “apocalyptic” strain in the discourse of the Anthropocene drawn particularly from Francis Fukuyama’s millennial posthumanism and centred in the question of “sustainability” as catastrophe management—with the risk that real environmental degradation will become an alibi for a revived neoliberalism. In other words, that the critical Earth system transformations that characterise the Anthropocene are themselves commodities, and that the project of their amelioration is in process of defining a future (opportunistic) “crisis” rhetoric with a global political franchise. The ideological import of the Anthropocene stems precisely from the fact that it is planetary and, while catalysed by human agency, independent in its specific behaviour from it. The Anthropocene objectively presents as the contemporary counterpart of the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction and the most compelling argument for a new kind of technological “arms race.” But it also presents as the condition of an emerging ideological discourse which will determine how this race is run. From the discourse on “energy security” to the widespread “security crackdown” on environmental activists across the so-called developed & developing world, the Anthropocene has come to represent the co-option of a scientific factography for the thinly disguised resurgence of “ideological science” of the Fukuyamaesque variety (post-history, post-human). For Fukuyama, the true meaning of “posthuman” is thus the accomplishment of humanity’s historical mission. As the “End of History” designates an end of ideological struggle, so too the dénouement of the Anthropocene and the “ends of man” represent the accomplished purpose of species warfare: dominion, not simply over the world, but over all possible worlds. According to this narrative, science—like technology—must be uniquely at the service of the maintenance of the global order, organised around a universal appeal to “crisis management.” It is precisely for this reason that what calls itself post-human masks the return of an ever-more-apocalyptic Humanism. (shrink)