Deborah J. Brown - Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 173-175 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Deborah Brown University of Queensland Gary Steiner. Descartes as a Moral Thinker: Christianity, Technology, Nihilism. JHP Book Series. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004. Pp. 352. Cloth, $60.00. This work takes as its starting point the need to ground Descartes's moral philosophy in something (...) more fundamental than human reason. Finding inspiration in Heidegger's lament, "In what soil do the roots of tree of philosophy find their support?" , Steiner proceeds to ground the "concrete content and absolute authority" of Descartes's moral principles in his Christian faith . This is a book with a mission: to keep the secularizing readers of Descartes's philosophy from the Church door. It stands as an important reminder that in understanding Descartes we cannot ignore his theology and achieves this goal in a lucid and erudite fashion. But the central tenet of the book—that Descartes subordinated much of his thinking about morals to the authority of religion—is, in my view, fundamentally mistaken. Steiner's Descartes is the pivotal transitional figure between the orthodox Christianity of the late scholastic period and the secular modernism of.. (shrink)

It is often assumed that in the collapse of the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature that results from the rise of mechanical philosophies in the early modern period, the collapse falls on the side of art. That is, all of the diversity among natures that was explained previously as differences among substantial forms came to be seen simply as differences in arrangements of matter according to laws instituted by the “divine artificer”, God. This paper argues that, for René Descartes, (...) the collapse occurs on both sides. Natures are artefacts of God, and human artefacts, under some conditions, can be classified as natures or, at least, continuous within nature. Drawing on developments across both horticulture and engineering in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as Descartes’ mechanical philosophy, this paper explores challenges to the Aristotelian nature/art distinction. The question then is what, in the advent of this collapse, are human artificers doing when they construct artefacts? Are they replicating God’s powers by creating new natures, or are they doing something else, and if so, what might that be? It is argued that we should view human invention for Descartes not as creating new natures so much as discovering them. These findings have consequences for how we interpret Descartes’ use of the term “nature” in relation to automata and other artefacts produced by human hands. (shrink)

Summary Americans import large amounts of sugar, levy a stiff tariff on it, and base this tariff on the saccharine content of each sample, and thus the assessment of sugar quality for tax purposes was enormously important. It was also among the most difficult challenges of a scientific or technical nature facing the federal government in the nineteenth century, and the issues it raised would often recur as science-based quality control became an essential feature of industry.

Since military planners must know the size and shape of the earth if they hope to track earth-orbiting satellites and to target missiles on distant lands, geodesy was an important concern of the two superpowers during the Cold War. The most important geodetic product in the United States was a series of increasingly powerful World Geodetic Systems, the first of which was published for the Department of Defense in 1960. Although WGS 60 was created because of intense international rivalries, it (...) reflected the intense rivalries between America's Army and its Air Force, and it introduced the notion of 'political geodesy'. My attention to American events does not indicate a lack of interest in the Soviet story; rather, I hope that historians with better language skills and better access to Soviet documents will examine geodetic research on the other side of the former Iron Curtain. (shrink)

There is, currently, much resistance to so-maligned Cartesian or internalist theories of meaning and mental content in the philosophies of mind and language. Internalist semantics tend to view the meaning of psychological attitudes as primary and that of public language items as essentially derivative. Moreover, internalists regard meaning as determined by internal facts--mental representations, mental sentences, conceptual roles, cognitive procedures--to name the favourites. In opposition, externalists argue that meaning is determined by external causal and social factors. They claim to provide (...) a more naturalistic theory of meaning; one more amenable to the sciences. I shall argue, however, that externalism is, at present, deeply flawed. ;As an internalist, I am less concerned by social versions of externalism for as I argue in chapter 2, it is not obvious that the sociolinguistic hypothesis is incompatible with internalism. The focus of this thesis is on causal theories of meaning and mental content. ;In chapter 1, I demonstrate, by means of the Swampman thought experiment, some of the absurd consequences of holding both that causal interaction with objects is a necessary condition for being able to have thoughts about those objects, and that causal interaction, in general, is a necessary condition for thought at all. The topic for chapter 2 is: To what extent and how does the res itself contribute to the meaning of a referring term in a language? I argue that the only coherent form of causal externalism is one that presupposes the truth of essentialism. In chapter 3 the legitimacy of the connection between the causal theory of reference and essentialism is called into question. ;If semantic relations are primarily causal they ought to be ripe for naturalistic reduction. I examine three attempts to get such reductions underway, in chapter 4. In chapter 5, I deign to speak for Descartes, risky though that be, and try to defend him against his twentieth century adversaries' charge that he is the founder of individualism--the most extreme of internalisms for it claims that the notion of psychological content is essentially a syntactic notion. ;In chapter 6, I return to the swamp and argue for an internalist conception of psychological content. To the charge that internalists cannot answer questions of the form: What makes a thought about one thing rather than another?, I argue that we must reconceive the role of thought in locating us in the world. The externalists have it backward; it is not the world which fixes our thought but our thought which fixes our relation to the world. In the conclusion, chapter 7, I make some remarks about the two traditional problems which I see as having divided philosophers into internalists and externalists: the problem of synonymy and the singularity question. Externalists have often thought themselves to have the upper hand in answering the latter, whilst dismissing the former as a non-problem. I argue, on the one hand, that synonymy is a real problem and that internalists are more likely to be able to explain it. On the other hand, I argue that externalists do not fare as well on the singularity question as they like to think. (shrink)

The connections between science and education, disciplines which are usually considered separately, were particulary strong in the U.S.A. in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Many American scientists at that time were employed as educators, and interested in matters of pedagogy. Like educators they were interested in popularizing their subject, and promoting it into a profession. The overlapping of science and education was especially evident in the area of apparatus. The philosophical apparatus that American scientists were acquiring at a (...) great rate might be considered scientific. In fact, it was often used for public demonstrations of natural philosophy, and seldom used for the advancement of science. In many instances this apparatus was indistinguishable from that developed for the educational reform known as object teaching. The proliferation of this apparatus was furthered by a growing apparatus industry operating within a growing consumer culture. (shrink)

In this essay, Deborah Bird Rose takes up Val Plumwood's challenge that Western thought needs radical revitalization by pursuing the liveliness of the biosphere and human ontologies of connectivity. The first part looks at obstacles to the West's understanding of Earth as a place of lively, interactive connectivities that promote diversity, complexity, and relationality. In this context Rose offers a brief overview of Indigenous animisms. The second part explores the question of liveliness. It is taken as given that (...) the West now seeks ontological legitimacy in science, and so this discussion focuses on what biological scientists have contributed to contemporary ontology wars. The third part examines trauma in the Garden of Eden narrative, highlighting both the disaster of the story and its continuing relevance. Drawing on the work of theologians, in particular, Rose seeks in this section to recuperate a mythic foundation for a Western animism from within that great site of loss. (shrink)

‘We were driving through Death Valley, an American-Australian and two Aussies, taking the scenic route from Las Vegas to Santa Cruz.’ This multi-voiced account of multispecies encounters along a highway takes up the challenge of playful and humorous writing that is as well deeply serious and theoretically provocative. Our travels brought us into what Donna Haraway calls the contact zone: a region of recognition and response. The contact zone is a place of significant questions: ‘Who are you, and so who (...) are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?’ Events were everything in this ecology of play, in which the movements of all the actors involved the material field in its entirety. We were brought into dances of approach and withdrawal, dances emerging directly, to paraphrase Brian Massumi, from the dynamic relation between a myriad of charged particles. (shrink)

In this essay I examine four modes of thinking about the betrayals involved in the planned mass deaths of animals, specifically the wild donkeys of North Australia. I consider the wild, but in contrast to the positive valence this concept has acquired in environmental literature, I work with a set of negative connotations that I encountered in conversations with Aboriginal people in North Australia. I explore the wild as a form of narcissism, to use Hatley’s terminology, and I engage with (...) animal mass deaths as an outcome of processes of disconnection and catastrophe. My analysis examines how the colonising wild is the tearing apart of the fabric of life and death on earth. (shrink)

Perceptions of dingoes range from kin to pest. Social and ecological justice researcher Deborah Bird Rose explores the ethical dimensions of our relationship with this top predator.

Death narratives, nurturance, and transitive crossings within species and between species open pathways into entanglements of life of earth. This paper engages with time in both sequential and synchronous modes, investigating interfaces where time, species, and nourishment become densely knotted up in ethics of gift, motion, death, life, and desire. The further aim is to consider the dynamic ripples generated by anthropogenic mass death in multispecies knots of ethical time, and to gesture toward a practice of writing as witness.

We argue for a naturalistic account for appraising scientific methods that carries non-trivial normative force. We develop our approach by comparison with Laudan’s (American Philosophical Quarterly 24:19–31, 1987, Philosophy of Science 57:20–33, 1990) “normative naturalism” based on correlating means (various scientific methods) with ends (e.g., reliability). We argue that such a meta-methodology based on means–ends correlations is unreliable and cannot achieve its normative goals. We suggest another approach for meta-methodology based on a conglomeration of tools and strategies (from statistical modeling, (...) experimental design, and related fields) that affords forward looking procedures for learning from error and for controlling error. The resulting “error statistical” appraisal is empirical—methods are appraised by examining their capacities to control error. At the same time, this account is normative, in that the strategies that pass muster are claims about how actually to proceed in given contexts to reach reliable inferences from limited data. (shrink)

A portrait of Australian flying fox life in the Anthropocene illuminates startlingly familiar stories. These animals are participants in most of the major catastrophic events, as well as contestations about rescue, of contemporary life on Earth: warfare, man-made mass death, famine, urbanisation, emerging diseases, climate change, biosecurity, conservation, and local/international NGO aid. They are endangered, and are involved in all four of the major factors causing extinctions: habitat loss, overexploitation, introduced species, and extinction cascades. My account of flying foxes in (...) Australia rests on the understanding of species articulated both vigorously and eloquently by Donna Haraway : we and others are entangled in knots of species who are co-shaping each other in layers of reciprocating complexity. I seek to engage both the living, warm-blooded beings whose lives are threatened, and the excruciatingly dynamic deathscape that is surrounding them/us. Positioned, like much of life on Earth today, in zones of increasing conflict and terror, the lives and deaths of flying foxes tell us that in the Anthropocene there is no way out of entanglements within multispecies communities. Rather than seeking to erect more impenetrable barriers against others, relational ethics for living and dying in the Anthropocene urge us to assume ever greater mutuality and accountability as intradependent members of the suffering family of life on Earth. (shrink)

Many voices today call for a profound rethinking of European identity. If we wish to answer their call, however, it is necessary to start with a reconsideration of the notion of boundaries, particularly as they are at work in the Mediterranean region. The knowledge and cultural values of the Mediterranean may be the driving force able to overcome the impasse from which Europe seems unable to free itself. This volume focuses on the opportunity to employ Mediterranean knowledge and cultural values (...) as a stimulus for the review of European policies, in the interest of creating a solid bridge between different cultural legacies and over the daunting challenges of our shared future. This means being able to stay simul outside and inside the borders, within and beyond the un-limit; looking for an image of Europe which finally stops thinking about the Mediterranean as its internal vulnus, as its lesion and contamination. (shrink)

As we move our social institutions from paper and ink based operations to the electronic medium, we invisibly create a type of surveillance society, a panopticon society. It is not the traditional surveillance society in which government officials follow citizens around because they are concerned about threats to the political order. Instead it is piecemeal surveillance by public and private organizations. Piecemeal though it is, It creates the potential for the old kind of surveillance on an even grander scale. The (...) panopticon is the prison environment described by Foucault in which prison cells are arranged in a large circle with the side facing the inside of the circle open to view. The guard tower is placed in the middle of the circle so that guards can see everything that goes on in every cell. When we contemplate all the electronic data that is now gathered about each of us as we move through our everyday lives --- intelligent highway systems, consumer transactions, traffic patterns on the internet, medical records, financial records, and so on --- there seems little doubt that we are moving into a panopticon. The social issues that arise from this are too numerous to detail here, but data retention is an important part of it. In the paper-and-ink world, documents are filed, files are boxed, boxes are put away or thrown away. The capacity for data retrieval and manipulation is, thereby, limited by the sheer difficulty and cost of storing, finding, searching, and manipulating large numbers of paper files. This inconvenience functions as a mechanism whereby the system forgets past information, not unlike the way we ourselves forget. However, the story is very different in the digital world; digital information is easy to store, easy to search and manipulate, and inexpensive to keep over extensive periods of time. Digitalized information systems tend, therefore, to collect extensive ancillary information and to retain this information indefinitely. Such lack of forgetfulness is likely to hamper the ability of individuals to shed their past, and start over with a clean slate. Concerns about data retention were expressed in the early literature on the social impact of computing, but for the most part the issue has dropped from sight. Rarely, has the social good of discarding accumulated personal data been addressed. In this paper, we want to make the case by examining diverse cases in which retention of information by either business or governmental institutions hinders the ability of individuals to start over or to act autonomously. We hope our argument for the good of forgetfulness will challenge the standard framework in which such issues have traditionally been debated. The privacy debate exemplifies the traditional framework insofar as it has been characterized as involving an inherent tension between, on the one hand, the needs of organizations and institutions for more accurate and efficient information systems so as to further their goals and, on the other hand, the desire of individuals to have information about them kept private. Regan argues against this framing of the privacy issue in favor of one that recognizes the social importance of personal privacy. We will examine the non-forgetfulness of information systems as a problem threatening not just individual interests but social good as well. Cryptography is often cited as the technology that will give us privacy and mediate against surveillance. One of the uses of cryptography, encryption, will allow us, some hope, to create confidentiality and relationships of trust that will facilitate many of the social arrangements we now have and perhaps make them even more secure than they are now. Electronic cash, for example, could be created in such a form that it would have the anonymity associated now with hard cash Others are less optimistic of the potential for cryptography to re-create relationships of trust in the new medium. One important point that already seems clear is that even if encryption technology will protect the confidentiality and integrity of electronic transactions and data, it will NOT stop the observation of traffic patterns on networks. This seems an important distinction to put on the table. Our patterns of communication will continue to be available, no matter what is encrypted, and an amazing amount of information can be gleaned from this data. In a sense, it means content integrity but no anonymity. This will indubitably impact how we interact and with whom we interact. (shrink)

Background Moral distress is a serious problem for health care personnel. Surveys, individual interviews, and focus groups may not capture all of the effects of, and responses to, moral distress. Therefore, we used a new participatory action research approach—moral conflict assessment (MCA)—to characterize moral distress and to facilitate the development of interventions for this problem. Aim To characterize moral distress by analyzing responses of intensive care unit (ICU) personnel who participated in the MCA process. Research Design In this qualitative study, (...) we invited all ICU personnel at 3 urban hospitals to participate in individual or group sessions using the 8-step MCA tool. These sessions were facilitated by either a clinical ethicist or a counseling psychologist who was trained in this process. During each session, one of the researchers took notes and prepared a report for each MCA which were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Participants and Research Context A total of 24 participants took part in 15 sessions, individually or in groups; 14 were nurses and nurse leaders, 2 were physicians, and 8 were other health professionals. Ethical Considerations This study was approved by the Providence Health Care/University of British Columbia Behavioural Research Ethics Board. Each participant provided written informed consent. Results The main causes of moral distress related to goals of care, communication, teamwork, respect for patient’s preferences, and the managerial system. Suggested solutions included communication strategies and educational activities for health care providers, patients, family members, and others about teamwork, advance directives, and end-of-life care. Participants acknowledged that using the MCA process helped them to reflect on their own thoughts and use their moral agency to turn a distressing situation into a learning and improvement opportunity. Conclusions Using the MCA tool helped participants to characterize their moral distress in a systematic way, and to arrive at new potential solutions. (shrink)

Whilst previous observational studies have linked negative thought processes such as an external locus of control and holding negative cognitive styles with depression, the directionality of these associations and the potential role that these factors play in the transition to adulthood and parenthood has not yet been investigated. This study examined the association between locus of control and negative cognitive styles in adolescence and probable depression in young adulthood and whether parenthood moderated these associations. Using a UK prospective population-based birth (...) cohort study: the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, we examined the association between external locus of control and negative cognitive styles in adolescence with odds of depression in 4,301 young adults using logistic regression models unadjusted and adjusted for potential confounding factors. Interaction terms were employed to examine whether parenthood moderated these associations. Over 20% of young adults in our sample were at or above the clinical threshold indicating probable depression. For each standard deviation increase in external locus of control in adolescence, there was a 19% higher odds of having probable depression in young adulthood, after adjusting for various confounding factors including baseline mood and different demographic and life events variables. Similarly, for each SD increase in negative cognitive styles in adolescence, there was a 29% higher odds of having probable depression in the adjusted model. We found little evidence that parenthood status moderated the relationship between external locus of control or negative cognitive styles in adolescence and probable depression following adjustment for confounding factors. Effect estimates were comparable when performed in the complete case dataset. These findings suggest that having an external locus of control and holding negative cognitive styles in mid- to late adolescence is associated with an increased likelihood of probable depression in young adulthood. (shrink)

In a statement too strong even to summarize his own views, Jean-Paul Sartre famously declares in “Existentialism is a Humanism” that “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.” It is bad faith, according to him, to attribute what I am to my family, culture, condition, etc., because through awareness of what I am and have been, I can determine whether what I am will continue into the future. Human being, as a result, is nothing but what (...) he or she has chosen or decided. In “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” Jean Améry rejects that view.He explicitly rejects the idea that “I am what I am for myself and in myself, and nothing else.” In doing so, he is one of a group of Jewish thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, who reject Sartre’s ideas about Jewish identity and identi ty more generally, ideas expressed particularly in Reflections on the Jewish Question but amplified by views expressed in “Existentialism is a Humanism” and Being and Nothingness.Those in the group go out of their way to express their gratitude to Sartre f or writing on “the Jewish question” after the war --Sartre who wrote because he saw no mention of the 77,000 Jews in France who were deported and murdered by the Nazis. (shrink)

Différend: A case of conflict between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments. . . . A wrong results from the fact that the rules of the genre of discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or genres of discourse. This paper looks at the State of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) Guidelines for Music Teacher Education, a governmentally defined technology of (...) accountability for preservice teacher education.1 In this investigation I draw upon Jean-François Lyotard’s2 analysis of différends to frame the conflict between the state-authorized technologies for accountability (DPI Guidelines) and .. (shrink)

Oyeyemi's critique of racism in the United States focuses on the visual binary between whiteness and blackness, which she shows working in multiple ways to warp and distort relationships. In the Whitman family, children are valued (or not valued) according to how their skin color registers on a scale determined by white superiority. Oyeyemi's approach to racism takes the circuitous route of retelling the fairy tale of “Little Snow White,” thus calling into her own narrative a foundational text of Western (...) cultural aesthetics which links beauty to whiteness. (Snow White, whose skin is “white as snow,” is “fairest in the land.”) Rather than narrate a new version of the fairy tale, Oyeyemi separates out its elements – magic mirror, evil stepmother, and beautiful white stepdaughter – and develops each into a new thematic configuration. My analysis focuses on the subtle ways that Oyeyemi's reshaping of mirror, evil stepmother, and innocent beautiful young girl exposes the harms to children inflicted by allegiance to a (false) structure of visible difference between white skin and black skin. (shrink)

The following views were presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Seminar “Teaching Ethics in Science and Engineering”, 10–11 February 1993 organized by Stephanie J. Bird , Penny J. Gilmer and Terrell W. Bynum . Opragen Publications thanks the AAAS, seminar organizers and authors for permission to publish extracts from the conference. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions of AAAS or its Board of Directors.

This paper treats a topos found in Greek poetry from the archaic to the Hellenistic period, involving a confrontation between antagonistic and contrasting species of birds. Tracing the continuities and distinctions among the uses of the conceit in Hesiod, Pindar, and Callimachus, I argue that on each occasion it serves poets as a means of articulating their literary personae and the ethical, stylistic, and generic choices shaping their compositions. Not just a means of poetic polemic, self-definition, and self-positioning, the avian (...) terms used within the conceit also come to figure in the literary critical vocabulary of the late fifth century and its redeployment in Hellenistic times. (shrink)

_Memory, Myth, and Seduction_ reveals the development and evolution of Jean-Georges Schimek's thinking on unconscious fantasy and the interpretive process derived from a close reading of Freud as well as contemporary psychoanalysis. Contributing richly to North American psychoanalytic thought, Schimek challenges local views from the perspective of continental discourse. A practicing psychoanalyst, teacher, and consummate Freud scholar, Schimek sought to clarify Freud's concepts and theories and to disentangle complexities borne of inconsistencies in Freud's assumptions and expositions. This book is (...) divided thematically into three sections. The first concerns fantasy and interpretation as they play out in the analytic situation, and the manner in which analyst and patient coconstruct meaning and reconstruct and recover memory. The second consists of two seminal papers which provide the sequence of steps in the five revisions in Freud's seduction theory. Schimek's careful scholarship lays out the data of Freud's writing, which allows one to draw one's own conclusions about the implications of the changes in the theory that he made. In the third, more theoretical section, he provides a foundation for understanding many of today's discussions about unconscious fantasy, dreaming, remembering, consciousness, affect, self-reflection, mentalization, and implicit relational knowing. He clarifies and illustrates Freud's original formulations through a careful reading of sections of _The Interpretation of Dreams_, and a study of Freud's famous Signorelli parapraxis. Skillfully arranged and carefully edited by Deborah Browning and including a foreword by Alan Bass, this collection of Schimek's published and unpublished papers will be of interest to practicing psychoanalysts, psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapists, and students of the history of ideas and philosophy who have a particular interest in fantasy, interpretation, and Freud. (shrink)

It is widely apparent in our hyper-globalized world that the epistemologies, institutions, and practices underwriting it have reached a state of profound crisis. In the globalized world, everything is inevitably brought into proximity and correlation. Wars, natural disasters, climatic upheaval, nor political and economic turmoil, none of these can be effectively isolated, insulated, instituted, even immunized, as something apart, something that might be considered proper only to itself. This collected edition considers this crisis of the proper with a focus on (...) Italian political theorist Roberto Esposito’s work on community, immunity, and biopolitics. This collection introduces Esposito’s work to a wider English-speaking audience and provides many important contributions to the burgeoning scholarship on his political theory. Important international scholars working in this area examine and analyze his theory from a variety of perspectives, including those of biopolitics, feminism, political theory, the history of philosophy , property, community, and gift economies. The collection also includes previously untranslated essays by Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy. This collection will be of interest to those just discovering Esposito and for those who are already familiar with his work. This book was originally published as a Special Issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the representations of alter ego figures in a Black Modernist work, Passing, by Nella Larsen and in a contemporary black British novel by Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bi...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern PhilosophyJean-Robert ArmogatheRiccardo Pozzo, editor. The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004. Pp. xvi + 336. Cloth, $69.95.The status of a "great" philosopher is to stand out for centuries, asking questions in such a way that the answers can never be definitive. Not so many of them are able to stand such a severe (...) proof. Aristotle phrased some questions we are still groping to answer. It was a very good idea to ask thirteen scholars to deliver a lecture series at the Catholic University of America during the Fall 1999 about the reception of Aristotle's theory of intellectual virtues (Nich. Ethics VI). The speakers did not stick to this issue, and enlarged their purpose to a general approach of Aristotle's receptions in various moments of Western modern philosophy.Edward Mahoney complements Charles Schmitt's basic introduction to Aristotle and the Renaissance, with some very valuable pages about Cardinal Bessarion's contribution to the Byzantine debate aroused in 1439 by Plethon's comparison between Plato and Aristotle (in favor of the former). Along with Charles Schmitt, Antonino Poppi is the best specialist of the Paduan tradition, and wrote a very qualified paper about Zabarella (1533-89), who shaped Aristotelianism into the rigorous science of the schoolbooks: for centuries, Aristotle is read through Zabarella's glasses. Apart from a bird's view on recent Galilean studies (where Alistair Crombie is not mentioned), William A. Wallace makes his point about Aristotle's influence on Galilean logics, linking Galileo's 1640 letter to Liceti (where he states that, in matters of logic, he has been an Aristotelian all his life) to the scientist's deep knowledge as revealed by the logical questions in one of the juvenile treatises (ms 27 in Florence, more thoroughly studied in Wallace's book, Galileo's Logic of Discovery and Proof [Dordrecht, 1992]). John Doyle, a specialist of Late Scholastic Philosophy, figures out a [End Page 209] strange character, the French Jesuit André Semery (1630-1717), who taught for thirty years at the Collegium romanum. In a very anti-Aristotelian way, he holds a definite belief in metaphysical beings of reason. The boundary between what we can think and say is quietly stepped over, when Semery and other Jesuits begin to think about thinking, opening a very modern path which leads to Brentano and Quine. Christia Mercer states that Leibniz's combination of a Platonist epistemology with an Aristotelian conception of nature brings a very innovative view in ethics. A very forceful paper by Richard L. Velkley compares Rousseau's politics to Aristotle's view of man (the paper became a chapter of his 2002 impressive book Being after Rousseau), while Riccardo Pozzo gives a short presentation of Aristotle's reception in modern Germany, and an elaborate analysis of Kant's debt to Aristotle for the intellectual virtues. Hegel's appropriation of Aristotelian intellect is presented by Alfredo Ferrarin, while Michael Davis reconstructs Nietzsche's path from Aristotle to the tragedy and back, in a very convincing way. Husserl (Richard Cobb-Stevens), Heidegger (Stanley Rosen), Wittgenstein (Daniel Dahlstrom) and Gadamer (Enrico Berti) conclude brilliantly the series, showing how the thought of the Stagirite fertilized contemporary philosophers, in a permanent dialogue of disagreement or borrowing, never at rest, and never leaving anyone indifferent. The old Greek man remains a vivid debater for our age of anxiety.Jean-Robert ArmogatheThe University of Paris-SorbonneCopyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

Lacker (1981) and Lacker & Akin (1988) developed a mathematical model of follicular maturation and ovulation; this model of only four parameters accounts for a large number of results obtained over the past decade or more on the control of follicular growth and ovulation in mammals. It establishes a single law of maturation for each follicle which describes the interactions between growing follicles. The function put forward is sufficient to explain the constancy of the number of ovulations or large follicles (...) in a female as well as the variability of this number among strains or species and for either induced or spontaneous ovulators. According to the model, the number of ovulations or large follicles lies between two limits that are themselves simple functions of two parameters of the model. Moreover, Lacker's model exhibits interesting characteristics in agreement with results obtained by physiologists: in particular, it predicts that the number of ovulating or large follicles is independent of:1. the total number of maturing follicles, 2. the process of recruitment of newly maturing follicles towards the terminal maturation (Poisson or other), 3. the form of the LH or FSH secretion curves as functions of the systemic level of oestradiol. The model further predicts that 4. selection and dominance of follicles result from the feedback between the ovary and the hypophysis through the interactions between follicles; these interactions are expressed by the maturation function of the model. 5. recovery from atresia is possible for a follicle: from decreasing, the rate of secretion of oestradiol may increase. 6. the revised model suggests a renewal of follicles during the sexual cycle, as waves of follicular growth. Lacker's model is a model of strict dominance; it maintains a hierarchy of the follicles as soon as they start their final maturation to the ovulations as that is observed in bird or reptile ovary. Such a strict hierarchy is possible but it is probably not a general situation in all mammals. We therefore modified the maturing function of the follicle in order to make it compatible with the observations of physiologists: follicles always interact as in the initial model but they individually become old, the hierarchy of follicles can be modified with time and the largest follicles do not indefinitely grow as in the initial model. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern PhilosophyJean-Robert ArmogatheRiccardo Pozzo, editor. The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004. Pp. xvi + 336. Cloth, $69.95.The status of a "great" philosopher is to stand out for centuries, asking questions in such a way that the answers can never be definitive. Not so many of them are able to stand such a severe (...) proof. Aristotle phrased some questions we are still groping to answer. It was a very good idea to ask thirteen scholars to deliver a lecture series at the Catholic University of America during the Fall 1999 about the reception of Aristotle's theory of intellectual virtues (Nich. Ethics VI). The speakers did not stick to this issue, and enlarged their purpose to a general approach of Aristotle's receptions in various moments of Western modern philosophy.Edward Mahoney complements Charles Schmitt's basic introduction to Aristotle and the Renaissance, with some very valuable pages about Cardinal Bessarion's contribution to the Byzantine debate aroused in 1439 by Plethon's comparison between Plato and Aristotle (in favor of the former). Along with Charles Schmitt, Antonino Poppi is the best specialist of the Paduan tradition, and wrote a very qualified paper about Zabarella (1533-89), who shaped Aristotelianism into the rigorous science of the schoolbooks: for centuries, Aristotle is read through Zabarella's glasses. Apart from a bird's view on recent Galilean studies (where Alistair Crombie is not mentioned), William A. Wallace makes his point about Aristotle's influence on Galilean logics, linking Galileo's 1640 letter to Liceti (where he states that, in matters of logic, he has been an Aristotelian all his life) to the scientist's deep knowledge as revealed by the logical questions in one of the juvenile treatises (ms 27 in Florence, more thoroughly studied in Wallace's book, Galileo's Logic of Discovery and Proof [Dordrecht, 1992]). John Doyle, a specialist of Late Scholastic Philosophy, figures out a [End Page 209] strange character, the French Jesuit André Semery (1630-1717), who taught for thirty years at the Collegium romanum. In a very anti-Aristotelian way, he holds a definite belief in metaphysical beings of reason. The boundary between what we can think and say is quietly stepped over, when Semery and other Jesuits begin to think about thinking, opening a very modern path which leads to Brentano and Quine. Christia Mercer states that Leibniz's combination of a Platonist epistemology with an Aristotelian conception of nature brings a very innovative view in ethics. A very forceful paper by Richard L. Velkley compares Rousseau's politics to Aristotle's view of man (the paper became a chapter of his 2002 impressive book Being after Rousseau), while Riccardo Pozzo gives a short presentation of Aristotle's reception in modern Germany, and an elaborate analysis of Kant's debt to Aristotle for the intellectual virtues. Hegel's appropriation of Aristotelian intellect is presented by Alfredo Ferrarin, while Michael Davis reconstructs Nietzsche's path from Aristotle to the tragedy and back, in a very convincing way. Husserl (Richard Cobb-Stevens), Heidegger (Stanley Rosen), Wittgenstein (Daniel Dahlstrom) and Gadamer (Enrico Berti) conclude brilliantly the series, showing how the thought of the Stagirite fertilized contemporary philosophers, in a permanent dialogue of disagreement or borrowing, never at rest, and never leaving anyone indifferent. The old Greek man remains a vivid debater for our age of anxiety.Jean-Robert ArmogatheThe University of Paris-SorbonneCopyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

Le nom du devin gallois Myrddin a reçu plusieurs étymologies qui satisfont plus ou moins : Myrddin viendrait de *moridunon « Forteresse de la mer », de *mŏrĭi̯īn- « celui de la Mer » ou mirzin / milzin « délicat ». Par ailleurs, le nom roman de Merlin serait celui d’un oiseau, français « merle » ou « Faucon ». Cette étude phonétique, lexicale et mythologique tente de montrer comment Myrddin et Merlin dérivent de la thématisation, bien attestée, du vieux (...) celtique *mero « fou » et que cette appellation a dû signifier « le Maître de la folie », c’est-à-dire « l’Inspiré ». The name of the welsh seer Myrddin has received many etymologies which are more or less satisfactory: Myrddin would come from *moridunon “Fortress of the sea”, from *mŏrĭi̯īn “One of the Sea” or from mirzin / milzin “delicate”. Moreover, Merlin’s roman name would be that of a bird, “Blackbird” or “Falcon”. This phonetical, lexical and mythological analysis try to show how Myrddin and Merlin are connected with the well attested old Celtic stem *mero “mad” and that this designation would have been “The Master of the madness”, which means “The Inspired”. (shrink)

Ecology shows that living beings, with all their diversity, make up a homogenous system on the earth's surface, with rules that are no less exacting than those applicable to gravitational astronomy (celestial mechanics). The physical energy coming from the sun in the form of radiation is attracted by green plant-life, be it vegetation growing on the land or microscopic algae floating on the surface of the ocean; this energy is then transformed into chemical energy, with, incidentally, a modest yield, due (...) to the process of chlorophyllian synthesis. This stage is the only one to include a productive process—an anabolism. Other sorts of living beings derive their energy and the elements necessary for their sustenance and multiplication from organic matter devised in this way. Some vegetarian animals feed on them and are in their turn prey to predators which are themselves devoured by other predators. Food chains, grouped in bunches or network systems, are thus established on the principle of a complex pyramid. Each consumer occupies a place at a trophic level, which is clearly defined, where he guarantees the conveyance of matter and energy which are degraded in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. These biological mechanisms entail numerous species, ranging from the most elementary forms of life to birds and mammals. Decomposition agents then recycle the mineral elements and make them available to plants. In any given area, the inert chemical elements and the community of living beings (embracing all species) together constitute a biological entity or ecosystem, this is a kind of supraspecific organism which functions with a certain flexibility, and yet is ordered down to the last detail. Just as a man consists of a heart, lungs, a liver, so a natural community consists of “organs” which are each made up of one of the various constituent species. These ecosystems are the fundamental units of the living world and they are relatively independent of one another, although exchanges do occur between them. They all come together to form a balanced system which encompasses the whole complex of living beings. This is the biosphere, a gigantic mechanism with innumerable cogs and gears which have evolved in harmony with each other throughout the whole of history, going as far back as the first trace of life on earth. (shrink)

The concept of “life” certainly is of some use to distinguish birds and beavers from water and stones. This pragmatic usefulness has led to its construal as a categorical predicate that can sift out living entities from non-living ones depending on their possessing specific properties—reproduction, metabolism, evolvability etc. In this paper, we argue against this binary construal of life. Using text-mining methods across over 30,000 scientific articles, we defend instead a degrees-of-life view and show how these methods can contribute to (...) experimental philosophy of science and concept explication. We apply topic-modeling algorithms to identify which specific properties are attributed to a target set of entities (bacteria, archaea, viruses, prions, plasmids, phages and the molecule of adenine). Eight major clusters of properties were identified together with their relative relevance for each target entity (two that relate to metabolism and catalysis, one to genetics, one to evolvability, one to structure, and—rather unexpectedly—three that concern interactions with the environment broadly construed). While aligning with intuitions—for instance about viruses being less alive than bacteria—these quantitative results also reveal differential degrees of performance that have so far remained elusive or overlooked. Taken together, these analyses provide a conceptual “lifeness space” that makes it possible to move away from a categorical construal of life by empirically assessing the relative lifeness of more-or-less alive entities. (shrink)

Despite the challenges associated with virtually mediated communication, remote collaboration is a defining characteristic of online multiplayer gaming communities. Inspired by the teamwork exhibited by players in first-person shooter games, this study investigated the verbal and behavioral coordination of four-player teams playing a cooperative online video game. The game, Desert Herding, involved teams consisting of three ground players and one drone operator tasked to locate, corral, and contain evasive robot agents scattered across a large desert environment. Ground players could move (...) throughout the environment, while the drone operator’s role was akin to that of a “spectator” with a bird’s-eye view, with access to veridical information of the locations of teammates and the to-be-corralled agents. Categorical recurrence quantification analysis was used to measure the communication dynamics of teams as they completed the task. Demands on coordination were manipulated by varying the ground players’ ability to observe the environment with the use of game “fog.” Results show that catRQA was sensitive to changes to task visibility, with reductions in task visibility reorganizing how participants conversed during the game to maintain team situation awareness. The results are discussed in the context of future work that can address how team coordination can be augmented with the inclusion of artificial agents, as synthetic teammates. (shrink)

After reviewing the literature on current knowledge about consciousness in humans, we present a state-of-the art discussion on consciousness and related key concepts in animals. Obviously much fewer publications are available on non-human species than on humans, most of them relating to laboratory or wild animal species, and only few to livestock species. Human consciousness is by definition subjective and private. Animal consciousness is usually assessed through behavioural performance. Behaviour involves a wide array of cognitive processes that have to be (...) assessed separately using specific experimental protocols. Accordingly, several processes indicative of the presence of consciousness are discussed: perception and cognition, awareness of the bodily-self, self-related knowledge of the environment (including social environment). When available, specific examples are given in livestock species. Next, we review the existing evidence regarding neuronal correlates of consciousness, and emphasize the difficulty of linking aspects of consciousness to specific neural structures across the phyla because high-level cognitive abilities may have evolved independently along evolution. Several mammalian brain structures (cortex and midbrain) are involved in the manifestations of consciousness, while the equivalent functional structures for birds and fishes would likely be the pallium/tectum and midbrain. Caution is required before excluding consciousness in species not having the same brain structures as the mammalian ones as different neural architectures may mediate comparable processes. Finally, specific neurophysiological mechanisms appear to be strongly linked to the emergence of consciousness, namely neural synchrony and neural feedback. Considering the limited amount of data available and the few animal species studied so far, we conclude that different manifestations of consciousness can be observed in animals but that further refinement is still needed to characterize their level and content in each species. Further research is required to clarify these issues, especially in livestock species. (shrink)

The dynamical hypothesis has served to explore the ways in which cognitive agents can be understood dynamically and considered dynamical systems. Originally used to explain simple physical systems as a metaphor for cognition (i.e., the Watt governor) and eventually more complex animal systems (e.g., bird flocks), we argue that the dynamical hypothesis is among the most viable approaches to understanding pressing modern-day issues that arise from collective human behavior in online social networks. First, we discuss how the dynamical hypothesis (...) is positioned to describe, predict, and explain the time-evolving nature of complex systems. Next, we adopt an interdisciplinary perspective to describe how online social networks are appropriately understood as dynamical systems. We introduce a dynamical modeling approach to reveal information about emergent properties in social media, where radicalized conspiratorial beliefs arise via coordination between user-level and community-level comments. Lastly, we contrast how the dynamical hypothesis differs from alternatives in explaining collective human behavior in social networks. (shrink)

Inspired by a (process) phenomenological reading of Deborah Bird Rose’s 1988 article “Exploring an Aboriginal Land Ethic,” and drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s claim that knowledge is “in the hands,” this paper explores the intersection of Merleau-Ponty’s embodied, process phenomenology and Indigenous Australian place-based ontologies. Rather than the moral demands or consequences of adopting an “Aboriginal land ethic,” the present paper is concerned with the ontological and epistemological – or, broadly speaking, the phenomenological – underpinnings of such a land ethic. (...) Contra Rose’s claim that, in the Western tradition, we “have very little idea of what a non-human-centred cosmos looks like and how it can be thought to work,” it is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s fundamental thought provides us with a viable pathway towards a non-human-centred phenomenological ontology that, somewhat paradoxically, is nevertheless grounded in the lived body. It is suggested that such an approach is compatible with, and complimentary to, the traditional Indigenous Australian ways of being and knowing outlined by Rose. (shrink)