One implication of Bell’s theorem is that there cannot in general be hidden variable models for quantum mechanics that both are noncontextual and retain the structure of a classical probability space. Thus, some hidden variable programs aim to retain noncontextuality at the cost of using a generalization of the Kolmogorov probability axioms. We generalize a theorem of Feintzeig to show that such programs are committed to the existence of a finite null cover for some quantum mechanical experiments, i.e., a finite (...) collection of probability zero events whose disjunction exhausts the space of experimental possibilities. (shrink)

If our choices make us who we are, then what does that mean when these choices are made in the human-machine interface? Developing a clear understanding of how human decision making is influenced by automated systems in the environment is critical because, as human-machine interfaces and assistive robotics become even more ubiquitous in everyday life, many daily decisions will be an emergent result of the interactions between the human and the machine – not stemming solely from the human. For example, (...) choices can be influenced by the relative locations and motor costs of the response options, as well as by the timing of the response prompts. In drift diffusion model simulations of response-prompt timing manipulations, we find that it is only relatively equibiased choices that will be successfully influenced by this kind of perturbation. However, with drift diffusion model simulations of motor cost manipulations, we find that even relatively biased choices can still show some influence of the perturbation. We report the results of a two-alternative forced-choice experiment with a computer mouse modified to have a subtle velocity bias in a pre-determined direction for each trial, inducing an increased motor cost to move the cursor away from the pre-designated target direction. With queries that have each been normed in advance to be equibiased in people’s preferences, the participant will often begin their mouse movement before their cognitive choice has been finalized, and the directional bias in the mouse velocity exerts a small but significant influence on their final choice. With queries that are not equibiased, a similar influence is observed. By exploring the synergies that are developed between humans and machines and tracking their temporal dynamics, this work aims to provide insight into our evolving decisions. (shrink)

“There is no world of thought that is not a world of language,” Walter Benjamin remarked, “and one only sees in the world what is preconditioned by ...

:High-fidelity simulation is a relatively new teaching modality, which is gaining widespread acceptance in medical education. To date, dozens of studies have proven the usefulness of HFS in improving student, resident, and attending physician performance, with similar results in the allied health fields. Although many studies have analyzed the utility of simulation, few have investigated why it works. A recent study illustrated that permissive failure, leading to simulated mortality, is one HFS method that can improve long-term performance. Critics maintain, however, (...) that the use of simulated death is troubling and excessive. Given the controversy regarding simulated death, we consider the data about the educational value and the emotional harms associated with them, expecting that evidence could be useful in resolving the question. The goal of this narrative review is to explore the argument against simulated mortality and provide educators with an imperative as to why it can be safely utilized. (shrink)

This article provides a survey of Walker Percy's criticism of what Pope Benedict XVI calls “scientificity,” which entails a constriction of the dynamic interaction of faith and reason. The process can result in the diminishment of ethical considerations raised by science's impact on public policy. Beginning in the 1950s, Percy begins speculating about the negative influence of scientificity. The threat of a political regime using weapons of mass destruction is only one of several menacing developments. The desacrilization of human life (...) from cradle to grave leads Percy to assert that modern science's impact is often radically incoherent. In The Moviegoer, Percy finds his existential and theistic voice that would enable him to advance his critique of science. (shrink)

This text, which is part of a project, ‘Toward a Politics and Poetics of Singularity’, explores the implications of a phrase used more or less simultaneously, although independently, by Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, ‘the single trait’. In his 1962 lectures on the problem of identification, Jacques Lacan focused on this phrase in Freud in order to exemplify the difference between the subject and the signifier. The use of the phrase by Benjamin in his essay on ‘Destiny and (...) Character’ inflects the discussion toward questions of ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’, and thereby links the singularity of the signifying process to literary and theatrical forms. (shrink)

This article is a study of the trajectory of the contemporary French liberal philosopher Marcel Gauchet from his early, ‘anarchist’ commitments through the 1970s to his discovery and defense of liberalism, notably as expressed in his 1980 revival and interpretation of his 19th-century countryman Benjamin Constant’s post-revolutionary liberalism. Discussed in the article are Gauchet’s devotion to and revision of the portrait of primitive society he inherited from the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, how his early political and theoretical concerns are (...) transmuted in Gauchet’s reading of Constant, and the relevance of this trajectory for comprehending even Gauchet’s most recent pronouncements about the nature and future of liberal society. (shrink)

At the same time as the modern idea of the state was taking shape, Hugo Grotius , Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf formulated three distinctive foundational approaches to international order and law beyond the state. They differed in their views of obligation in the state of nature , in the extent to which they regarded these sovereign states as analogous to individuals in the state of nature, and in the effects they attributed to commerce as a driver of sociability (...) and of norm-structured interactions not dependent on an overarching state. Each built on shared Roman and sixteenth-century foundations . Section II argues: 1) that Grotius's natural law was not simply an anti-skeptical construction based on self-preservation , but continued a Roman legal tradition; 2) that Hobbes's account of natural law beyond the state was essentially prudential, not moral ; and 3) that commerce as a driver of social and moral order had a substantial and under-appreciated impact on international legal order. Each contributed to the thought of later writers such as Emer de Vattel , David Hume , and Adam Smith , and eventually to the empirical legal methodologies of Jeremy Bentham and Georg Friedrich von Martens. (shrink)

The title of this book echoes a phrase used by the Washington Post to describethe American attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the start of the war againstIraq. Its theme is the notion of targeting (skopos) as the name of an intentionalstructure in which the subject tries to confirm its invulnerability by aiming todestroy a target. At the center of the first chapter is Odysseus’s killing of the suitors;the second concerns Carl Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form; thethird and fourth (...) treat Freud’s “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” and“The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion.” Weber then traces the emergenceof an alternative to targeting, first within military and strategic thinking itself(“Network Centered Warfare”), and then in Walter Benjamin’s readings of“Capitalism as Religion” and “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin.”. (shrink)

ABSTRACT While Samuel DeCanio is correct to maintain that the state has considerable autonomy due to the public’s vast ignorance of the government’s affairs, he neglects to consider that the public’s ignorance also stems from the deceptions of the politically powerful, who withhold and distort information in a variety of ways. This can take the form of outright lies; anonymous leaks; press and video releases that don’t mention the originating group or its interests; giving reporters access to otherwise inaccessible (...) information, so that they will report favorably on a certain program or event; publicity stunts from groups as far afield as nasa and the Los Angeles Homeless Service Authority; or the financing of periodicals that are sympathetic towards one’s cause. State autonomy induced by public ignorance may thus be generated by the state itself. (shrink)

Waiting for Godot’s many commentators have emphasized the absurdity of hope in the play, but there has not been an account of how the play reprises hope’s historical transformation and weakening in modernity. This essay provides that account, arguing that Beckett’s Waiting for Godot sponsors a form of hope appropriate to the predicaments of modern societies. Godot stages the blockage of hope by reflecting the obsolescence and fragmentation of the religious and progressive legitimations for the concept that used to be (...) broadly convincing. Despite this blockage, however, Godot does not give in to nihilism. It, rather, models a form of responsible, self-aware hope appropriate to an historical situation where hope does not admit of rational justification. To develop this interpretation of the play and to defend its minimalist conception of hope, the essay draws on Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and aesthetics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.3 (2001) 15-29 [Access article in PDF] Globality, Organization, Class Samuel Weber 1 Although one could hardly imagine a topic more far-ranging than "Theory, Globalization, and the Remains of the University," it can be argued that it does not range far enough. Or perhaps ranges too far. For the questions suggested by this concatenation of terms cannot be limited to the fate or future of "theory" in (...) whatever will remain of the "university" in a globalized world. And yet it is no doubt significant that "theory" leads the parade—significant but also perhaps part of the problem. For not just etymology links "theory" to notions such as detached contemplation, spectatorship, and appropriation through vision. The history and practice that have been associated with this term continue, even today, to be indebted to the dualist paradigm of an underlying subject—today reformulated as "agent" or "position"—confronting and comprehending an ob-ject. And yet, if we are still discussing "theory," here and today, it is by virtue of a series of texts that have persistently and powerfully questioned the subject-object paradigm that has dominated theoretical discourse at least since Descartes, and sought to elaborate alternatives to it. Those alternatives have almost always involved a reflection upon language as the medium of a practice that is no longer "theoretical" in the traditional sense, because it no longer works within the parameters of the subject-object model of cognition and truth. From Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger, de Man, and Derrida, the subject-object model of cognition has been reinterpreted as an effect of the medium of language, a medium that articulates itself through the reading, writing, and repetition of texts, understood as concatenations of significance that both respond to and address an irreducible alterity.The "university" has always occupied an equivocal position with respect to this "linguistic" problematization of the subject-object model of cognition and truth: not only because "the university" as such has never existed—not at least as the singular universal implied by the definite article—but even more, because of the traditional claim of universities to serve as places where universally valid cognition is both transmitted and produced. In this sense, notions such as "the globalization of the university" simply continue the universalizing claims built into universities and promoted by them in order to justify their social existence and dependency.The very notion, or rather figure, implied in the notion of "globalization" tends to strengthen such universalism. Coming after the struggle between Communist and Capitalist camps in the Cold War, "Globalization" stresses that there is no place left on the "globe" where the capitalist system, its values, its power, and way of life can be contested. The "globe" is all there is, and despite its diversity, it is to have a single future, prolongation of the prevailing relation of forces. Globalization is thus the successor to the notion of "One World," itself a recent offshoot of the "universal history" that was the Enlightenment heir of the Christian eschatological narrative. [End Page 15]But the university has also been one of the few places in modern society where such universalizing and homogenizing tendencies have also been reflected, reworked, and criticized, if not resisted. Thus, if the names mentioned above have any credence at all in the English-speaking world, it is in large part by virtue of its universities, which have extended a certain hospitality to their writings. Like all hospitality, however, that of the universities has rarely been a neutral one. There, as elsewhere, writings are admitted as legitimate "objects" of study only under the double condition, first, of being linked to "proper names," and second, of being received and validated by existing disciplines. In short, writings are received for study in universities on the condition that they be certified as proper "theoretical objects" for "theoretical subjects" defined and validated through their appurtenance to the existing academic division of labor. This division of labor founds its disciplines in the subject-object model of cognition and of truth.This is why the hermeneutic and poststructuralist turn (back) to language as a signifying medium rather than... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Philosophy Can't Say About Literature:Stanley Cavell and EndgameBenjamin H. OgdenIn "Ending the Waiting Game," the philosopher of ordinary language Stanley Cavell attempts to say what Samuel Beckett's Endgame means by explaining what the characters in the play mean by what they say. Cavell attempts to do the very thing that the work says cannot be done, or mocks as foolish and misguided, or resists giving clues to (...) how it could ever be done: he tries to say just "how Beckett's objects mean at all, the original source of their conviction."1 This is not simply a reading tactic that Cavell thinks is well-suited to the difficult task of making sense of a difficult play. It is a demonstration of the theory of language (ordinary language philosophy) that Cavell defends and applies in his collection of essays Must We Mean What We Say?, of which "Ending the Waiting Game" is a chapter. Cavell's literary criticism is in the service of his philosophy. His work of criticism is in search of something that it must find (that is, something that it claims to have found even when it may not have); what it must find is a work of literature that demonstrates the utility and validity of ordinary language philosophy.If we are to take issue with Cavell for too strenuously transposing philosophy onto literature, then we must also know something of the philosophy he draws upon. Ordinary language philosophy traces its origins to Wittgenstein, and was popularized by J. L. Austin and Gilbert Ryle at Oxford in the 1940's. It is a branch of analytic philosophy that foregoes any attempt to create an "ideal philosophical language" of the sort Wittgenstein developed in his early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Instead of seeing the abstractions and ambiguities of ordinary usage as something to be supplanted by a more logically rigorous system, ordinary language philosophers argue that debates over the meaning [End Page 126] of abstract terms come about precisely because words are removed from their ordinary context. For Cavell, the whole idea of an "ideal language" is absurd because, as anyone who has ever tried to learn a foreign language knows, every language has its own unique set of usages and idioms and unspoken rules. In order to speak a language properly, then, one cannot just know the dictionary or formal definitions of words (its "ideal" generative grammar), but must understand the "natural environment" in which phrases and words are logical or appropriate. Often these contexts (which determine the rules for "what we should say when" [p. 20]) invest words with meanings that you won't find in any dictionary, and cannot be catalogued in a grammatical or syntactical system.So, if one asks, "Did you dress that way voluntarily?" (p. 9), the word "voluntarily" takes on a meaning that is not included among its dictionary definitions (according to Cavell). Clearly, in asking whether you dress voluntarily one is not asking whether you have free-will to dress as you please, but is calling attention to the funny way you dress. In this case, successful communication is only possible if the one who is being questioned understands from context and the ordinary use of language precisely what is being asked. If he answers, "Of course I dressed voluntarily, I believe in free will," he will have misspoken, been incorrect. Clearly, he doesn't understand what the question must mean because the statement "MUST MEAN that my clothes are peculiar" (p. 9). For it to mean anything else would be a mistake and a misuse of language by the speaker, or a misunderstanding of language by the listener. To learn a language (which for Cavell means to become like a native speaker) is to learn the nature of the contingency between the explicit meaning of an expression and the occasion on which an expression is appropriate, and to be aware of what you must mean when you speak (what you cannot help but mean or imply by the language you use).What this means is that for Cavell reading literature becomes a process of readers "naturalizing ourselves to a new form of life, a new... (shrink)

It is one thing to consider what human rights have been and another to inquire into what they could be. In this essay, I present a history of human rights vis-à-vis decolonization. I follow the scholarship of Samuel Moyn to suggest that human rights presented a “moral alternative” to political utopias. The question remains how to politicize the moral energy around human rights today. I argue that defending what Édouard Glissant calls a “right to opacity” could politicize the ethical (...) energy around human rights today. Glissant’s right to opacity outlines a blueprint for the praxis of human rights to shift from a “functional model” to a “critical model,” to use Enrique Dussel’s distinction. My ultimate aim is to show how social movements around human rights and decolonization could converge today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 126-127 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment T. J. Hochstrasser. Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 246. Cloth, $54.95. In a worthy addition to Cambridge's Ideas in Context series, T. J. Hochstrasser undertakes an excavation. His aim is to provide a description, and to (...) demonstrate the importance within the German Frühaufklärung, of a largely forgotten philosophical approach: eclecticism. Hochstrasser argues that the triumph of Wolffian rationalism in the Protestant universities in the middle of the eighteenth century occluded the importance of eclecticism for Kant, who in turn occluded it for everyone afterward. But the price of forgetting eclecticism is high. Not only are we left with no account--or a skewed account--of the development of German thought from the first stirrings of the Enlightenment to the emergence of the Critical philosophy, but our understanding of the development of the historiography of philosophy is badly compromised. For among their many accomplishments--in natural jurisprudence, in university reform--the eclectics were the first critical historians of philosophy, their distinctive genres being historically aware treatises on natural law and Whig histories of natural jurisprudence. Hochstrasser's study traces the development of eclecticism, from the work of its founders, Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius, through a devolution in the hands of Thomasius's later disciples, to the eventual oblivion in the middle of the eighteenth century. This review will focus on the beginning of this narrative, as Pufendorf is the leading figure in the book.Eclecticism began with Pufendorf's attempt, in his mature work on natural law, to reconcile his conflicting inheritances from Grotius and Hobbes without simply endorsing the work of either. He was impressed both by Grotius's explanation of the law of nations in terms of human sociability--but also by Hobbes's criticisms of Grotius, rooted in the latter's analysis of the state of nature. At the same time, he wished to reject Grotius's method of induction from sociological observation and Hobbes's minimally constrained voluntarism. Contributing further to his perplexity was his increasing disaffection from the geometric approach he had adopted in his Elementa Jurisprudentiae Universalis.The way out of this impasse, Hochstrasser contends, was revealed to Pufendorf in correspondence with Hermann Conring, the leading constitutional lawyer of his time, and Johann Böcler, Grotius's most erudite commentator. Böcler chastised Pufendorf for his neglect of history, and both of Pufendorf's correspondents pointed out his need for some non-Hobbesian criterion by which he could validate his first principles, whatever they turned out to be. Stung particularly by Böcler's remarks, Pufendorf returned to the Stoics and there discovered a via media between Hobbes's pessimism and Grotius's optimism: a synthesis anticipating Kant's doctrine of "unsocial sociability." For the purposes of Hochstrasser's study, the key aspects of Pufendorf's solution are these: first, it avoids mere voluntarism; second, it does this by means of a moral epistemology that sharply distinguishes natural law [End Page 126] from moral theology; finally, the validating criterion for Pufendorf's first principles is located in critical appropriation of the history of moral philosophy. These were to be hallmarks of Pufendorf's school.On the first and second points, Hochstrasser seems to me substantively correct, though I think he misunderstands the nature of Pufendorf's escape from mere voluntarism and thereby underplays the religious dimensions of Pufendorf's theory. Among recent Anglo-American commentators on Pufendorf, only Robert Adams has in my view properly construed Pufendorf's thought: that it involves a command theory of obligation proper, but posits the natural advantageousness of some hierarchies as a buttress against mere voluntarism. Hochstrasser is thus right to insist, against Leibniz, that Pufendorf's account of obligation is coherent. But he is wrong to suggest that "there was nothing in Pufendorf's theory... to oblige him to introduce fear of punishment by a superior... " (105). He is... (shrink)

O estudo consiste na discussão da perspectiva larrosiana do conceito de experiência, a partir do livro Tremores. Partiu da pergunta: O conceito de experiência como acontecimento fundamenta a necessidade de uma nova língua educacional? O método tratou de pesquisa bibliográfica que teve o início na revisão de literatura sobre o tema, análise sistemática do livro Tremores, da mesma forma que problematização em torno do conceito de acontecimento em Martin Heidegger e de experiência em Walter Benjamin. Como resultado, o conceito (...) de experiência se expressa como raridade e deve ser pensado como acontecimento capaz de trazer novos sentidos. Para Larrosa, pensar novos sentidos é pensar novas realidades, tendo como base os sentidos gerados pelos mecanismos de subjetivação que existem em cada indivíduo. Sendo o sentido individual e subjetivo, é responsável por mostrar a cada indivíduo uma forma de experiência. Assim, a aposta diz respeito à necessidade de se repensar as linguagens, das quais emergem o mundo de cada indivíduo, e, além disso, de pensar a pedagogia como transformadora do que já existe por meio da linguagem. A linguagem possibilita a compreensão de si e do outro, em uma realidade abstrata que se perdeu das palavras e se distanciou da verdadeira experiência e do mundo real, enquanto acontecimento. Por derradeiro, o estudo demonstrou a necessidade de uma nova língua para a educação em Jorge Larrosa, como necessidade de fortalecimento da potência que habita entre aqueles que escutam e aqueles que falam, dos que não desejam colocar fim à identidade do sujeito, destruí-la, mas dar possibilidades para que a identidade se abra a novas significações, a fim de construir o acontecimento, a abertura e o conhecimento. (shrink)

The notion of 'the West' is commonly used in politics, the media, and in the academic world. To date, our idea of 'the West' has been largely assumed and effective, but has not been examined in detail from a theoretical perspective. Uses of 'the West' combines a range of original and topical approaches to evaluate what 'the West' really does, and how the idea is being used in everyday political practice. This book examines a range of uses of 'the West', (...) and traces how 'the West' works in a broad array of conceptual and empirical contexts, ranging from the return of geopolitics - via a critical review of the debates surrounding Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilization thesis - to the question of the future of 'the West'. Analysis extends further to the repercussions of the war on terror on Western democracy and the processes of delineating the Western from the non-Western, as well as observations of the institutional transformations of Western order. (shrink)

Benjamin S. Bloom and a large committee of educators did extensive research to develop a taxonomy of global educational goals and of ways to measure their achievement in the classroom. The result was a taxonomy of three domains: Cognitive, Affective, and Motor Skills. This paper examines the cognitive and affective domains and applies them to teaching business ethics. Each of the six levels of the cognitive domain is explained. A six-step case method model is used to illustrate how (...) the six cognitive levels might be used and tested in the classroom. The five levels of the affective domain are also described. They are illustrated behaviorally in terms of a student's increasing interest, motivation and commitment to business ethics. (shrink)

This book introduces readers to central concepts and ideas in Mexican philosophy. Couched in stories and anecdotes from the author's life, the book offers these concepts and ideas as orientations, recommendations, or exhortation for navigating today's world. The structure and the style of the book aims at making these accessible to both specialists and non-specialist or anyone who may have had some experience with contemporary forms of marginalization, alienation, objectification, or any of the various forms of dread and accidentality familiar (...) to modern life. This, the author thinks, is most of us. Narrowing down the scope of the tradition, the author draws from the history of Mexican philosophy in the 20th century, as it is at this time that Mexican philosophy comes into its own. The book begins with two short introductions, one is an introduction philosophy in Mexico, the other to Mexican philosophy. Here, readers are introduced to Alfonso de la Veracruz, who offered the first philosophy course in the Americas in 1540 in the monastery of a small town in Michoacán, Mexico. From there, it presents four main themes from Mexican philosophy that recur in the philosophical literature. The remainder of the book serves as a "guide" for living a better, more fulfilling life. The main characters in what the author considers an uncontroversial retelling of Mexican philosophy are Antonio Caso, Samuel Ramos, Emilio Uranga, Leopoldo Zea, Jorge Portilla, Rosario Castellanos, Elsa Cecilia Frost, and, of course, persons in the author's own life. (shrink)

Without question the Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, by Benjamin Bloom and associates, is currently the most influential work in the theory of curriculum. Here I summarize Bloom’s taxonomies, survey a variety of criticisms raised by others, and conclude that there are serious philosophical problems remainmg to be addressed concerning both the structure and scope of the taxonomies.

With Being Me Being You, Samuel Fleischacker provides a reconstruction and defense of Adam Smith’s account of empathy, and the role it plays in building moral consensus, motivating moral behavior, and correcting our biases, prejudices, and tendency to demonize one another. He sees this book as an intervention in recent debates about the role that empathy plays in our morality. For some, such as Paul Bloom, Joshua Greene, Jesse Prinz, and others, empathy, or our capacity for fellow-feeling, tends (...) to misguide us in the best of cases, and more often reinforces faction and tribalism in morals and politics. These utilitarians, as Fleischacker refers to them, propose that empathy take a back seat to cost-benefit analysis in moral decision-making. As an intervention, the book is largely successful. Fleischacker’s defense of empathy is nuanced and escapes the myopic enthusiasm to which many partisans of empathy are prone. Anyone looking to understand the relationship between empathy and morality would do well to grapple with Being Me Being You. Still, Fleischacker overlooks that Smith would most likely be less convinced of the idea that greater empathy can help us overcome the great challenges of our time. (shrink)

The paper suggests that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s arguments against sympathy after the French Revolution, Walter Benjamin’s claims against empathy following the traumatic shock of Modernity and the First World War, and Hannah Arendt’s critical take on compassion. after the Holocaust are similar responses to singular historical crises. Reconsidering Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) and its evocation of Hermann Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1891), I show first that the novella bears the traces of an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (...) “The Appeal to Law” (1809). Then, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writings on trauma in Illuminations (1968, edited by Arendt), I discuss the political importance Arendt attaches to the proper way of telling a story, at a time when “the communicability of experience is decreasing” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 86). Through the analysis of Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” and Arendt’s “heartless” report on the Eichmann trial (1963), I equally show that, according to Arendt, testimonies must be narrated, or rather performed, in a dispassionate, dry, and compact manner so that they can be historically and politically relevant. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFrom 1797 to 1801 a controversy played out on the pages of the Medical Repository, the first scientific journal published in the United States. At its centre was the well-known feud between the followers of Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley, the lone supporter of the phlogiston model. The American debate, however, had more than two sides. The Americans chemists, Samuel Latham Mitchill and Benjamin Woodhouse, who rushed to support Priestley did not defend his scientific views. Rather, as citizens (...) of a republic, they defended his right to have them. They also castigated the assertions of the “French chemists,” whose claims that the new chemistry obviated debate seemed unsettlingly similar to the dictatorial ambitions of the French state. Using the Medical Repository, Mitchill and Woodhouse sought a compromise that validated the new chemistry, but united it with a more egalitarian form of discourse. The desired balance eluded them. Priestley proved too stubborn, and as the French Revolution descended into dictatorship and war, Mitchill and Woodhouse came more to realize that truly prising French chemistry from the culture of the revolutionary era. The episode left Mitchill and Woodhouse disillusioned with chemistry and hoping to redirect scientific enthusiasm to more pious ends. (shrink)

Aesthetic form is a figure moving through a rain storm, an image perhaps from Susanne Langer, one illuminatingly apposite to Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of form, drawn from the idea of determinate negation—though Adorno never would have provided so open-handed an image. But Langer and Adorno’s thinking in any case derives ensemble from what is a secret to no one who has ever thought about it, as is easily documented in a pinch by thousands of years of Neoplatonists. And if (...) that one insight is commonly given with or without philosophical qualification, the problem of the perception, presentation, and comprehension of that movement—which is anything but a fact, except in the etymological sense of being a deed, and may not be there to be seen at all—its critical discernment, hardly amounting to yea or nay, inevitably runs up against the puzzle that it can neither be imitated or simply discussed. Though without an element of each, and not as if they might just be stirred together, what is at stake is failed. But whatever the difficulties involved, and they are necessarily insuperable, what is first of all important, so far as this commentary on Samuel Beckett’s What Where is concerned, is that Beckett himself found this, his last work for the theater, on stage a failure. All the same, the sense in which this work is Beckett’s Tempest is the reason for this close commentary of the work’s stage script. The intention here, then, is the reverse of Adorno’s essay on Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, which was a labor in the disillusionment of a reputed masterpiece (Alienated Masterpiece). It should be noted, incidentally, that the discussion of the Westminster Chimes, which here figures centrally, is not a claim to establish the work’s origins but an aspect of that problem of presentation, already mentioned. So far as the origin of this essay goes, however, it is written in memory of Rolf Tiedemann (1932–2018) in appreciation of his magisterial editions of the collected works of Adorno and Walter Benjamin, his life work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant and the Possibility of Progress: From Modern Hopes to Postmodern Anxieties ed. by Paul T. Wilford and Samuel A. StonerBenedikt BrunnerPaul T. Wilford and Samuel A. Stoner, editors. Kant and the Possibility of Progress: From Modern Hopes to Postmodern Anxieties. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 328. Hardback, $65.00.Our present does not invite, let alone suggest, particularly optimistic expectations for the future. This volume, (...) edited by Paul Wilford and Samuel Stoner, not only analyzes the historical foundations of Kant's idea of progress but also explores contemporary reflections on such questions as the following: Do we still believe in the possibility of progress? And if not, why has this ability been lost? What about liberal democracy, which is contested from many sides?In addition to a lucid introduction, which clarifies the concepts of modernity and postmodernity, the volume assembles thirteen chapters. While the first seven chapters deal with the idea of progress in Kant, the remaining six contributions shed light on the history of that idea after Kant. Within the framework of this review, only selected articles can be discussed. In chapter 1, Oliver Sensen examines the idea of moral progress in the individual. In chapter 2, Kate Moran asks the fundamental question: should we believe in moral progress? According to Kant, the human being possesses "a duty to avoid despondency" (46). Following Kant, she encourages us not to go down the road of misanthropy as a consequence of one's own or others' moral failure, but "to be generous in our assessments of others" (46). In chapter 3, Jens Timmermann takes up this aspect again and illustrates clearly how complex Kant's concept of moral progress is. Moreover, he highlights that moral progress has a double meaning for Kant: "first in a fundamental change of priorities—privileging morality over self-interest—and then in an ever-closer approximation to a perfectionist ideal of virtue" (61). Like some of the other contributors to this volume, however, Timmermann remains rather vague regarding possible avenues for further research. Two other contributions deal specifically with Kant's relationship to religion. In chapter 5, Naomi Fisher asks how God, teleology, and progress are connected in the third Critique. She argues that in the 1790s, Kant made concrete new efforts to integrate different strands of his philosophy "and to develop a more unified view of the human being as free and natural" (93). Chapter 6 is a joint contribution by the two editors of this volume entitled "Realizing the Ethical Community." Their focus is on Kant's religious writings and their role in the context of a "Reformation of Culture." They notice—an observation as important as it is exciting—that Kant tempered his ambitious goal regarding the moral betterment of human beings with his ideas about radical evil. At the same time, Kant insisted that people must become aware of their duty to improve themselves.In the second section, Kant is brought into conversation with his contemporaries and some of his successors. In chapter 8, Karl Ameriks provides an overview of the relationship between history, progress, and autonomy in Kant, Herder, and beyond. In chapter 9, Richard L. Velkley analyzes the significance of language, embodiment, and the supersensual in Fichte. In chapter 10, Mark Alznauer examines the concept of philosophical history in Hegel.The volume concludes with three different but equally stimulating contributions. In chapter 11, Ryan S. Kemp argues that Kierkegaard "relocated" the concept of the Highest Good: "Unlike Kant, who regards happiness as realizable (if at all) only in an afterlife, Kierkegaard seems to think that the person who truly embraces the self-denial of Christian love, can, even now, receive the world in joy" (200). In this approach, Kierkegaard was clearly different from his predecessors in the German idealistic tradition. In chapter 12, entitled "Kant and Benjamin on Hope, History, and the Task of Interpretation," C. Allen [End Page 159] Speight shows that Walter Benjamin stands in Kant's tradition while also diverging from him in some important respects. From Kant's universalizing assumptions, especially in relation to progress, Benjamin moved "toward a distinctive, messianically influenced sense of time where interruption and immanent... (shrink)

El ensayo examina el carácter crítico de la ironía romántica de Friedrich Schlegel siguiendo las consideraciones y apropiaciones de Walter Benjamin, Harold Bloom y Paul de Man. También, el ensayo pretende mostrar el paralelismo de la actitud crítica de la ironía con tres figuras literarias románticas: el esteta, el dandy y el âneur. Estas criaturas, unidas por una fe profética en el arte, hacen de la ironía una profesión que se mueve entre la creación y la destrucción. La (...) apropiación en el contexto post-estructuralista nos permite percibir a la ironía en una incomprensión radical, desarrollando un patrón estético que opera entre la creación y la aniquilación. (shrink)

This article critically examines the different ways in which American Enlightenment thinkers confronted the future of being white in the early republic as political economists, natural historians, physicians, and anatomists of the mind. Just as philosophes experimented on the nature of blackness in Bordeaux's Royal Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society supported novel approaches to the racial classification of whiteness. An appeal to Scottish Enlightenment racial theories connected the diverging thought of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Stanhope (...) Smith, and Benjamin Rush as prominent members of this society between 1743 and 1826. In doing so, Franklin industrialised the political economy of a ‘purely white’ nation. Jefferson naturalised the language of whiteness. Smith universalised the intellectual and moral cultivation of whiteness. And Rush medicalised an architype of a healthy mind and body as white. This article argues that Scottish philosophy informed radically different ideas about how to become white in the early American republic. (shrink)

Starting from Nicholas Zurbrugg’s dismissal of the negative ‘B-Effect’ in postmodernism, which he associates with ‘Benjamin, Brecht, Beckett, Barthes, Baudrillard, and Bourdieu’, this essay examines the common rationale behind convergent affirmations of a neutrality or minimalism, often mistaken for nihilism, at key junctures in the works of Samuel Beckett and Roland Barthes, adding Maurice Blanchot as a critical link. The argument unfolds along a double axis: it first considers the formal role of ‘chatter’ or ‘idle speech’ and the (...) fragment(ary in writing) in the three ‘B-writers’ before relating them to different constructions of temporality, such as the ‘future anterior’ and the après-coup, in their thematizations of ‘catastrophe’ and ‘disaster’ as indirect responses to personal or historical trauma and death. A brief concluding paragraph highlights how time’s suspensiveness leads to different forms of waiting across Barthes, Blanchot and Beckett. (shrink)

Samuel Fleischacker's book is a very welcome addition both to scholarship on Adam Smith and to the burgeoning field of empathy studies. Fleischacker brings decades of excellent and influential work on Smith to the popular topic of empathy to show that Smithian empathy (Smith uses the term "sympathy" for this capacity), with some updates, has a crucial role to play in our ethical practices. In doing so, Fleischacker offers important responses to some perennial objections to Smith's empathy-based moral theory, (...) and to the recent critiques of empathy from Paul Bloom and Jesse Prinz. But Fleischacker does more than just delineate and defend Smithian empathy in this book; he also makes a compelling case for an eclectic, humanistic, and empathy-based ethics. (shrink)

In Virtual Worlds, Benjamin Woolley examines the reality of virtual reality.

Public health and service delivery programmes, interventions and policies (collectively, ‘programmes’) are typically developed and implemented for the primary purpose of effecting change rather than generating knowledge. Nonetheless, evaluations of these programmes may produce valuable learning that helps determine effectiveness and costs as well as informing design and implementation of future programmes. Such studies might be termed ‘opportunistic evaluations’, since they are responsive to emergent opportunities rather than being studies of interventions that are initiated or designed by researchers. However, current (...) ethical guidance and registration procedures make little allowance for scenarios where researchers have played no role in the development or implementation of a programme, but nevertheless plan to conduct a prospective evaluation. We explore the limitations of the guidance and procedures with respect to opportunistic evaluations, providing a number of examples. We propose that one key missing distinction in current guidance is moral responsibility: researchers can only be held accountable for those aspects of a study over which they have control. We argue that requiring researchers to justify an intervention, programme or policy that would occur regardless of their involvement prevents or hinders research in the public interest without providing any further protections to research participants. We recommend that trial consent and ethics procedures allow for a clear separation of responsibilities for the intervention and the evaluation. (shrink)

Master Sorai's Responsals was to eighteenth-century Japan what The Prince was to Renaissance Italy. Like Machiavelli, Ogyu Sorai was a humanist scholar who served a prince and drew on his experiences as a house philosopher and on his vast knowledge of history and political affairs in his work. In 1720, when he began to write the letters that comprise this text, the Tokugawa regime was more than a hundred years old and beset with grave administrative and fiscal problems, about which (...) Sorai had much to say.Samuel Yamashita's impressive translation of this work offers modern readers a rare glimpse of the prevailing political discourse of the day and the specific concepts that rulers had at their disposal as they struggled to manage their domains, find talented men for their bureaucracies, create new sources of revenue, and keep their subjects well fed and happy.Sorai himself, of course, is a presence in the text. He is by tunes earnest, frank, impatient, utterly confident, and occasionally condescending. Unlike his Renaissance counterpart, he is something of an optimist: he was convinced that the introduction of archaic Chinese culture and institutions to Japan would solve its myriad problems.Well-versed in Chinese history, philosophy, religion, medicine, and belles lettres, Sorai holds forth on everything from archaic Chinese divination to Sung poetry and prose. He offers advice on how to become a Confucian gentleman, how to learn to read classical Chinese, and which books to read and which to avoid. He even discusses his belief in a sentient, Chinese-style "heaven," a topic not well understood by modern scholars. Long regarded as one of Sorai's best works, Master Sorai's Reponsals bristles with the sharp and clear opinions of the most influential thinker of Tokugawa Japan. (shrink)