An algebraic block-diagonalization of the Dirac Hamiltonian in a time-independent external field reveals a charge-index conservation law which forbids the physical phenomena of the Klein paradox type and guarantees a single-particle nature of the Dirac equation in strong external fields. Simultaneously, the method defines simpler quantum-mechanical objects—paulions and antipaulions, whose 2-component wave functions determine the Dirac electron states through exact operator relations. Based on algebraic symmetry, the presented theory leads to a new understanding of the Dirac equation physics, (...) including new insight into the Dirac measurements and a consistent scheme of relativistic quantum mechanics of electron in the paulion representation. Along with analysis of the mathematical anatomy of the Klein paradox falsity, a complete set of paradox-free eigenfunctions for the Klein problem is obtained and investigated via stationary solutions of the Pauli-like equations with respective paulion Hamiltonians. It is shown that the physically correct Dirac states in the Klein zone are characterized by the total particle reflection from the potential step and satisfy the fundamental charge-index conservation law. (shrink)

A careful examination of the fundamentals of electromagnetic theory shows that due to the underlying mathematical assumptions required for Stokes’ Theorem, global charge conservation cannot be guaranteed in topologically non-trivial spacetimes. However, in order to break the charge conservation mechanism we must also allow the electromagnetic excitation fields \, \ to possess a gauge freedom, just as the electromagnetic scalar and vector potentials \ and \ do. This has implications for the treatment of electromagnetism in spacetimes (...) where black holes both form and then evaporate, as well as extending the possibilities for treating vacuum polarisation. Using this gauge freedom of \, \ we also propose an alternative to the accepted notion that a charge passing through a wormhole necessarily leads to an additional charge on the wormhole’s mouth. (shrink)

In 1918, Emmy Noether published a (now famous) theorem establishing a general connection between continuous 'global' symmetries and conserved quantities. In fact, Noether's paper contains two theorems, and the second of these deals with 'local' symmetries; prima facie, this second theorem has nothing to do with conserved quantities. In the same year, Hermann Weyl independently made the first attempt to derive conservation of electric charge from a postulated gauge symmetry. In the light of Noether's work, it is puzzling (...) that Weyl's argument uses local gauge symmetry. This paper explores the relationships between Weyl's work, Noether's two theorems, and the modern connection between gauge symmetry and conservation of electric charge. This includes showing that Weyl's connection is essentially an application of Noether's second theorem, with a novel twist. (shrink)

In recent decades conservation biology has achieved a high position among the sciences. This is certainly true of South Africa, a small country, but the third most biodiverse in the world. This article traces some aspects of the transformation of South African wildlife management during the 1930s to the 1960s from game reserves based on custodianship and the "balance of nature" into scientifically managed national parks with a philosophy of "command and control" or "management by intervention." In 1910 the (...) four British colonies had formed the Union of South Africa, and by the 1920s there was wide acceptance of national parks, a development influenced by their success in the United States. It was not, however, until after the Second World War, that management of the expanding conservation estate altered from a rather unsystematic laissez faire variety, into more scientifically informed management practices with an efficient bureaucracy in charge. This was achieved by modifications in organizational structures and institutional cultures initiated by a change of government in 1948 which, this article argues, impacted in turn on wildlife management and shaped and professionalized many aspects of that field science. "Management by intervention" was the hallmark of South African wildlife and conservation biology from the 1960s until recently, when there have been shifts towards "adaptive resource management" in a period of further change in the country's politics. (shrink)

There is growing evidence to suggest that employees’ perceptions of their employer’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) positively influences their attitude and behavior. An increasing number of scholars have called for further explorations of the microfoundations of CSR. To that end, this study takes the conservation of resources perspective to examine relationships and the perception of CSR by employees, considering areas such as thriving at work, task significance, and employees taking charge. By analyzing 444 questionnaires completed by employees in (...) China and using the conditional process analysis to test a hypothesis, results showed that the association between employees’ CSR perception and taking charge is significantly and positively correlated, with thriving at work mediating the connection. We also found that task significance negatively moderates the mediating effect between CSR and taking charge, such that the lower the level of task significance of a job, the more positive the effect of CSR on taking charge via thriving at work. These findings have theoretical implications for micro-level CSR research and managerial implications for entrepreneurs. (shrink)

Cross-term conservation relationships for electromagnetic energy, linear momentum, and angular momentum are derived and discussed here. When two or more sources of electromagnetic fields are present, these relationships connect the cross terms that appear in the traditional expressions for the electromagnetic (1) energy, (2) linear momentum, and (3) angular momentum, over to, respectively, (1) the sum of the rates of work, (2) the sum of the forces, and (3) the sum of the torques, that are due to the fields (...) of each charge or current source acting upon the other charge and current sources. These relationships, although not new, appear to be rarely recognized and used in the physics literature. As shown here, they can be extremely helpful for solving and gaining a deeper physical understanding into a rather diverse range of interesting problems in electrodynamics, including (1) aspects of Poynting's theorem when applied to charged point particles, (2) the detailed physical basis of electrostatic analysis, (3) understanding the connection between different techniques used in the past for solving Casimir force problems, and (4) reconciling the invalidity of Newton's third law in electrodynamics. (shrink)

Renouvier had argued that Comte's philosophy of science yielded very conservative normative advice regarding the sciences. Fedi, Becquemont, Logue, and Mouy have suggested the same charge could be leveled at Renouvier regarding evolutionary theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and set theory. This paper shows Renouvier's views were not unreasonable given what was known at the time. Further, Renouvier had a deeper appreciation than Comte of human fallibility and did not proscribe any area of research, even those with which he disagree.

The presented enhanced version of Eriksen’s theorem defines an universal transform of the Foldy–Wouthuysen type and in any external static electromagnetic field reveals a discrete symmetry of Dirac’s equation, responsible for existence of a highly influential conserved quantum number—the charge index distinguishing two branches of DE spectrum. It launches the charge-index formalism obeying the charge-index conservation law. Via its unique ability to manipulate each spectrum branch independently, the CIF creates a perfect charge-symmetric architecture of Dirac’s (...) quantum mechanics, which resolves all the riddles of the standard DE theory. Besides the abstract CIF algebra, the paper discusses: the novel accurate charge-symmetric definition of the electric-current density; DE in the true-particle representation, where electrons and positrons coexist on equal footing; flawless “natural” scheme of second quantization; and new physical grounds for the Fermi–Dirac statistics. As a fundamental quantum law, the CICL originates from the kinetic-energy sign conservation and leads to a novel single-particle physics in strong-field situations. Prohibiting Klein’s tunneling in Klein’s zone via the CICL, the precise CIF algebra defines a new class of weakly singular DE solutions, strictly confined in the coordinate space and experiencing the total reflection from the potential barrier. (shrink)

The application of evolutionary theory to human behavior has elicited a variety of critiques, some of which charge that this approach expresses or encourages conservative or reactionary political agendas. In a survey of graduate students in psychology, Tybur, Miller, and Gangestad (Human Nature, 18, 313–328, 2007) found that the political attitudes of those who use an evolutionary approach did not differ from those of other psychology grad students. Here, we present results from a directed online survey of a broad (...) sample of graduate students in anthropology that assays political views. We found that evolutionary anthropology graduate students were very liberal in their political beliefs, overwhelmingly voted for a liberal U.S. presidential candidate in the 2008 election, and identified with liberal political parties; in this, they were almost indistinguishable from non-evolutionary anthropology students. Our results contradict the view that evolutionary anthropologists hold conservative or reactionary political views. We discuss some possible reasons for the persistence of this view in terms of the sociology of science. (shrink)

Some unusual relations between stress tensors, conservation and equations of motion are briefly reviewed.

In popular lay discourse, objections to human biological enhancement technologies are sometimes expressed in terms of the charge that they are unnatural. This paper critiques the literal claim that seems to be presented here, namely that such technologies are in some ordinary sense ’unnatural' and that it follows from this they are immoral. Such a conceptual ’nature argument' is unsound. However, the paper contends that this does not mean that the charge of unnaturalness should be dismissed out of (...) hand. Rather, the charge of unnaturalness made by a non-philosophically trained public can be construed as expressive of a general attitude of conservative concern about enhancement technologies. Viewed in this way, the charge invites philosophers to take seriously the underlying empirical concerns that underpin these widespread lay reactions. (shrink)

“You argue like Carl Schmitt!” This charge has long been considered slanderous within German leftist circles and could have resulted in political ostracism. Today things are somewhat different, but not too much. When Ellen Kennedy first insisted on Schmitt's influence on the Frankfurt School a couple of years ago in Ludwigsburg, she may not have been aware of die problem Schmitt poses in Germany, and thus may have been taken aback by the defensive reactions of, among others, Habermas. Be (...) that as it may, Kennedy should by now know better than to reiterate the thesis. Despite many qualifications, her argument remains that Schmitt's authoritarian political philosophy in the Weimar Republic was implicitly or explicitly inherited by the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

In August 2001,just after President Bush announced his stem cell funding policy and the creation of a new Presidents Council on Bioethics PCB), the new chair of the PCB, Leon Kass, set out his philosophy for constructing public bioethics bodies: There are several ways of running commissions, he said. One is to stack it with your people, make them homogenous, and force a consensus. Another is to make them heterogeneous, so that you can only come to the lowest common denominator. (...) We re not going to adopt either. We are going to allow the debate to be developed and heard. Now, three years, sixteen meetings, and five reports later, there are nagging questions about whether this council indeed has allowed the debate to be developed and heard. And the charge of politicizing public bioethics to a degree heretofore unknown and stifling the voices of dissenting members comes not from the political left but from President Bushs own appointees, including one scientist who was dismissed from further service. (shrink)

The long-running debates between between conservatives and libertarians are vigorous and highly charged, dealing with ideas about the very nature of liberty and morality. Like no other single work, _Freedom and Virtue_ explores what unites and divides the adherents of these two important American traditions—shedding much light on our current political landscape.

Examining the process of action at a distance, we arrive at the following conclusions: (a) The virtual photons and mesons transmitting Coulomb and nuclear forces, respectively, do not arise from “temporary violations of energy conservation,” but, on the contrary, exactly embody the potential energy corresponding to the relevant forceF that they transmit on their collision with the charged particles or nucleons via the formula Δp=FΔt. (b) In the case of an attractive force, the energy of these photons and mesons (...) is negative. The way this comes about is made clear by a more detailed investigation of Feynman's notion of “traveling backward in time.” (c) The action corresponding to, e.g., a virtual photon's appearance is exactly one quantumh, which fact is responsible for the unobservability of such photons. Some consequences of the revised conception of potential energy for, e.g., the tunnel and the Bohm-Aharonov effect are mentioned. (shrink)

The electric field of an orbiting charge or electron observed in the rotating frame takes on a circular trajectory with a maximum radius of \. The resultant extended electromagnetic structure is used to derive the spin–orbit energy of the orbiting electron. A surprising result of the derived expression is that the orbital velocity has a specific value ) in close agreement ) with the experimentally determined value for the fine structure constant ). Furthermore, the derived spin–orbit expression does not (...) include a g-factor ) which means that the Larmor and Thomas precessions are equal and opposite, resulting in zero net precession in the lab frame. These results suggest that the quantised fine structure constant and by extension Planck’s constant, are a natural extension of classical electromagnetism and conservation of energy in a rotating frame. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the benefit of studying a classical version of chromodynamics in order to better understand color charge in quantum chromodynamics. Standard presentations of the conservation and confinement of color charge serve to obscure the Lie-algebra-valued character of the conserved Noether charge. This article shows how we can remove these obscuring factors by studying color charge from the vantage point of classical chromodynamics. This key example of color charge illustrates the larger methodological benefit (...) of this classical vantage point: interpreting classical gauge theories helps to delineate the uniquely quantum features of quantum field theories. (shrink)

This study examines the relationship between corporate philanthropy (CP) and audit fees. Using corporate donation data from China, our investigation finds that CP is significantly positively associated with audit fees. Resource-seeking purpose and the enhanced publicity effect may be plausible channels behind this relationship. We further find that the frequency and intensity of donations reinforce this positive association. Additional analysis reveals that the resource-seeking effect exists in any type of enterprise, while the enhanced publicity effect only exists in non-SOEs. Our (...) main results remain robust to a battery of additional tests. Overall, our findings suggest that by increasing audit workload and prospective audit risk, CP could make auditors more conservative such that they charge a higher audit fee. This article emphasizes the dialectic institutional stakeholder perspective in understanding the economic consequences of CP. Both the theoretical contributions and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

The charge of hypocrisy has been made in connection with several recent events—namely, the pair of "sex scandals" involving, respectively, Rep. Mark Foley and Sen. Larry Craig, the former, a Republican member of the House from Florida and the latter a Republican senator from Idaho. Foley was accused of sending sexually suggestive messages to teenage boys who had been or who were at the time congressional pages, and Craig was arrested for lewd conduct in a men's bathroom and pleaded (...) guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct. Both Foley and Craig faced immediate calls for resignation by their critics on the other side of the aisle. Both were also criticized by members of their own party. For simplicity, the Democratic critics of Foley and Craig are called "progressives" while their Republican critics are called "conservatives." There are, however, significant logical differences between the criticisms of Foley and Craig by progressives and the similar criticisms of them by conservatives. Since conservatives are generally more critical of sexual indiscretion, their criticisms of Foley and Craig are generally consistent with their own values. Since, however, progressives are generally more tolerant of sexual indiscretions, their criticisms of these men are often inconsistent. Specifically, some progressives find Foley and Craig blameworthy for hypocrisy over acts which, had they been committed by progressives, they would not see as blameworthy. This is why progressives shift the criticism to a different level—namely, that these men are hypocritical. Since Foley and Craig had been champions of "family values," progressives cannot consistently criticize them for their sexual indiscretions. The criticism has to be that, since these men had violated their own conservative standards of morality, they are hypocritical. (shrink)

It is shown that a newly derived “exact expression” for radiation of an accelerated charge in the recent literature is simply incorrect, having arisen because of a wrong relativistic transformation of the distance parameter. The ensuing claim that the newly derived expression alone satisfies the energy conservation for the electromagnetic radiation, is based on a wrong reasoning where a proper distinction between the time during which the radiation is received and the time for emission (retarded time of the (...) charge) was not maintained. (shrink)

According to two critics, Georgia Warnke and John Caputo, Gadamer's hermeneutics is inherently "conservative" insofar as he appeals to tradition as a constituent in understanding. They insist that he simply preserves the ideals, norms and values of the Western metaphysical tradition without critically examining them. I do not agree and will argue that views like this depend upon several false assumptions -- for example, that Gadamer reifies the text as a "thing-in-itself" and remains trapped in subjectivism. I will begin by (...) examining some of the ways in which these charges might be warranted before proceeding to defend him. (shrink)

Les hommes ont toujours agi sur eux-mêmes, et pris en charge leur propre évolution. Avec aujourd'hui deux traits absolument nouveaux. D'une part, les capacités d'action de l'espèce humaine sur elle-même sont incomparablement plus puissantes que par le passé, notamment dans le domaine des technologies de la vie. D'autre part, nous contrôlons si bien notre milieu et l'avons si parfaitement aménagé pour notre survie que nous avons mis en danger notre environnement. Le philosophe Peter Sloterdijk conduit une réflexion peu conventionnelle (...) sur ce double déséquilibre, déséquilibre de la domestication de l'homme par lui-même, déséquilibre de l'environnement par la mobilisation infinie des ressources. En prolongeant ses réflexions, il s'agit ici de réfléchir à cette situation. Faut-il poursuivre et même accélérer sur la voie de la mutation, en inventant le nouvel homme, c'est-à-dire le surhomme? Ou faut-il à nouveau penser la nature humaine dans sa finitude et, contre la mobilisation infinie, en appeler à la dé-mobilisation et à la voie du Tao, mais au risque de l'étouffement dans la mesure, la sagesse et l'ennui? (shrink)

Most of us came into ecology with memories of special personal places. A cliff top that Claude Monet might have painted. Allen as a youth spent his holidays on the Dorset Coast near Swanage; he can still smell the sea breeze of his childhood. Curtin grow up on a farm in southwestern Wisconsin, the dew of the grass and the bright green on a June morning remains vivid. The catching of reptiles and insects for him awakened a curiosity about the (...) natural world that has remained to this day. But once into the field there came the scholarship. With ever tighter grant monies, the pressure to publish takes so much of the fun out of it. A climate of unbridled careerism prevails and shows itself in the incremental state of the literature: little things to list on this year's activities report. There are now even predatory journals that cynically do not seriously review submissions, and only collect page charges. As journal editors have a desperate time getting reviews done by mature scholars, instead of a hand off to their overworked graduate students. So what is to be done - how can we bring the joy and importance of discovery back into it all? After all ecology is done by human beings. Mostly it is a personal mission, for what great ecologists write is frequently personal and life changing. So an undercurrent of this book is to remind and reveal the original purpose of science. Not professional advancement, but the genuine search for novel ideas and the imperative to share hard won insights and personal passions. (shrink)

Aberrations -- Absorption -- Accuracy and precision -- Alpha radiation -- Amplitude -- Angular forces -- Angular momentum -- Antenna -- Arago dot -- Aperture -- Archimedes's principle -- Band theory of solids -- Bernoulli's principle -- Beta radiation -- Blackbody radiation -- Bohr atom -- Bose condensation -- Bra-ket notation -- British thermal unit (BTU) -- Calculating system efficiency -- Circular motion -- Closed systems and isolated systems -- Concave and convex -- Conservation of charge -- (...) class='Hi'>Conservation of energy -- Convection and conduction -- Cosmic radiation -- Crest and trough -- Density and specific gravity -- Diode -- Distance and area -- Distortion -- Doppler effect -- Dynamic systems theory -- Edison effect -- Eigenvectors -- Elastic and inelastic collisions -- Electric circuits: Parallel vs series, diagrams and components -- Electric potential -- Energy and power -- Enthalpy -- Entropy -- Euler's laws of motion -- Falling bodies and physics -- Faraday's law -- Feynman diagrams -- Flywheel -- Focal point -- Free body diagram -- Frequency -- Gamma radiation -- Gauss's law -- Gluon -- Gravitational potential energy -- Harmonic oscillator -- Harmonics -- Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- Higgs boson -- Horsepower -- Ideal gas law -- Joule --. (shrink)

I discuss a model inspired from the string/brane framework, in which our Universe is represented (after perhaps appropriate compactification) as a three brane, propagating in a bulk space time punctured by D0-brane (D-particle) defects. As the D3-brane world moves in the bulk, the D-particles cross it, and from an effective observer on D3 the situation looks like a “space-time foam” with the defects “flashing” on and off (“D-particle foam”). The open strings, with their ends attached on the brane, which represent (...) matter in this scenario, can interact with the D-particles on the D3-brane universe in a topologically non-trivial manner, involving splitting and capture of the strings by the D0-brane defects. Such processes are consistently described by logarithmic conformal field theories on the world-sheet of the strings. Physically, they result in effective decoherence of the string matter on the D3 brane, and as a result, of CPT Violation, but of a type that implies an ill-defined nature of the effective CPT operator. Due to electric charge conservation, only electrically neutral (string) matter can exhibit such interactions with the D-particle foam. This may have unique, experimentally detectable (in principle), consequences for electrically-neutral entangled quantum matter states on the brane world, in particular the modification of the pertinent Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) Correlation in neutral mesons in an appropriate meson factory. For the simplest scenarios, the order of magnitude of such effects might lie within the sensitivity of upgraded φ-meson factories. (shrink)

Swedish hunters sometimes appeal to an inviolate ‘right to exist’ for wolves, apparently rejecting NIMBY. Nevertheless, the conditions existence hunters impose on wolves in practice fundamentally contradict their use of right to exist language. Hunters appeal to this language hoping to gain uptake in a conservation and management discourse demanding appropriately objective ecological language. However, their contradictory use of ‘right to exist' opens them up to the charge that they are being deceptive – indeed, right to exist is (...) a 'disguised NIMBY!' We address this situation by distinguishing hunters’ criticisms of wolves from the procedures for reaching objective policy decisions. (shrink)

Examples of uniformly moving charge distributions that possess conserved electromagnetic stress tensors are exhibited. These constitute stable systems with covariantly characterized electromagnetic mass. This note, on a topic to which Paul Dirac made a significant contribution in 1938, is dedicated to him for his 80th birthday.

In his violent charge against the French Revolution, Edmund Burke elevated the political debate to a philosophical level. His deepest argument consisted in reproaching revolutionaries for sinning by apriorism, seeking to deduce, like geometricians, a new constitution from the abstract principles set out in the Declaration of Human Rights. Taken up by the German disciples of Burke, this criticism of the method adopted by the Constituent Assembly drew from the empiricist postulates of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment all the conservative implications (...) already concealed in Hume’s political and historical texts. Yet, it is from the outset on this speculative ground that the defence of the right of revolution is played out in Fichte. Reproaching empiricism for reducing the mind to the “blind mechanism of the association of ideas”, passively determined by an exteriority in itself, Fichte intends, on the contrary, to base the experience itself on the activity of an absolutely independent “I-in-itself”. Conceived as a free causality, thus being able to free oneself from Humian “customary conjunctions” in order to begin a new series in the order of phenomena, man, for Fichte, not only has the “faculty of self-improvement”, but the very law of his freedom even makes it his duty. With regard to this categorical imperative of self-improvement, there is no Common Law, nor Ancient Constitution, nor “inheritance from our forefathers” that can stand. Hence, Fichte does not shrink from revolution if these venerable institutions of the past are an obstacle to man’s destiny. (shrink)

William M. Epstein charges that most current social welfare programs are not held to credible standards in their design or their results. Rather than spending less on such research and programs, however, Epstein suggests we should spend much more, and do the job right. The American public and policymakers need to rely on social science research for objective, credible information when trying to solve problems of employment, affordable housing, effective health care, and family integrity. But, Epstein contends, politicians treat welfare (...) issues as ideological battlegrounds; they demand immediate results from questionable data and implement policies long before social researchers can complete their analyses. Social scientists often play into the political agenda, supporting poorly conceived programs and doing little to test and revise them. Analyzing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and the recent welfare reform act, Food Stamps, Medicaid, job training, social services, and other programs, Epstein systematically challenges the conservative’s vain hope that neglect is therapeutic for the poor, as well as the liberal’s conceit that a little bit of assistance is sufficient. (shrink)

In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the (...) culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values, and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza, Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars. (shrink)

"Giambattista Vico conçoit une nature humaine tripartite. Il désigne la parole comme médiatrice entre le corps et l'âme ; et la vérité humaine comme convertibilité du verum factum. À l'encontre de l'intellectualisme spéculatif, il découvre une matérialité grossière décisive de la condition humaine propre à son processus évolutif. La praxis s'installe, ainsi, au centre de sa philosophie comme un avènement sémiotique et historique. En combinant l'historisation du langage et la lecture de l'histoire, l'objet de cette philosophie devient une plaidoirie en (...) faveur de l'autodidaxie des nations à édifier des civilisations et de la connaissance de soi comme faiseur de l'histoire de la nation. Selon Vico, l'établissement l'Universel et l'Éternel dans la pensée philosophique du 18e siècle marginalise les dynamiques locales, les corps et les âmes. Afin de combler ce manquement, il crée la notion des modifications des " mentes " en établissant la participation du local et sa temporalité appropriée dans l'universel et l'éternel. La prise en charge de l'intériorité appropriée aux sociétés régule la compréhension des médiations anthropologiques, des forces sémiotiques, ainsi que celle des déplacements des topiques de l'homme à l'acmé de sa civilité. Elle gère la continuité historique des choses humaines en tant que réalisation collective historiée. Conséquemment, le droit édicté selon les " citations des écrivains " court le risque d'opposer l'hégémonie du modèle prétendument universel à l'ordre socialement intériorisé. Néanmoins, l'exigence jurisprudentielle est une pratique de légitimation d'un gouvernement humain qui conserve simultanément la dignité et l'autonomie des nations."--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)

As the international momentum of the school effectiveness movement continues, its exponents remain largely impervious to criticism. This paper argues that while they may not readily align themselves with the individualistic aspects of Conservative social philosophy, their methodology necessarily secretes an atomised social ontology. The charge of ideological commitment rests on the fact that the essentially positivist epistemology employed by school effectiveness researchers presupposes an ontology of closed systems and atomistic events. Thus any notion of the structuring of life-chances (...) is automatically ruled out of court. The reciprocity of social ontology and methodology is explored in order to account for the myopia of the school effectiveness movement. (shrink)

Pragmatism presents itself as a technical reflection upon experimentation. This technique takes two forms : the evaluation of the propositions, utterances, and ideas through their effects ; the construction and invention of new propositions in charge of accounting for experimentation as a continuous movement of changes and transformations. This article attempts to reclaim this technical approach and to build on its basis a reflection on power . Such a reflection must break free from any definition which would link power (...) to conservation, domination or mastery, and favour an approach attentive to effects and transformations. (shrink)

On doit à l’économiste américain d’origine allemande, Richard A. Musgrave, la formulation des critères d’Équité Horizontale (ÉH) et d’Équité Verticale (ÉV). Étant donnée une base fiscale, l’ÉH veut que les égaux soient traités également, alors que l’ÉV exige que les inégaux soient traités inégalement (par exemple que les plus riches payent proportionnellement plus d’impôts). Musgrave opère en 1959 une redescription créative de considérations d’équité qui ont une longue histoire de Hobbes à Buchanan, en passant notamment par la fameuse maxime de (...) Adam Smith. La reconstruction généalogique montre que l’ÉV et l’ÉH relèvent de la justice distributive au sens aristotélicien du terme. Un critère purement formel, l’équité en matière d’impôt signifie l’égalité proportionnelle dans la répartition des charges communes à tous les individus membres d’une communauté politique. À défaut d’un consensus théorique sur la manière de conceptualiser les contribuables, l’ÉH conserve tout de même une valeur de principe régulateur dans le cadre non idéal de débats de réforme fiscale.Codes JEL : H20, B11, B12, B20, B40, D63. (shrink)

In today’s America the persistence of crushing poverty in the midst of staggering affluence no longer incites the righteous jeremiads it once did. Resigned acceptance of this paradox is fueled by a sense that poverty lies beyond the moral and technical scope of government remediation. The failure of experts to reach agreement on the causes of poverty merely exacerbates our despair. Are the causes internal to the poor – reflecting their more or less voluntary choices? Or do they emanate from (...) structures beyond their control? If both of these explanations are true, poverty experts will need to shift their focus to a hitherto under-theorized concept: coercion. I defend this claim by appealing to distinct areas of philosophical inquiry: social epistemology and moral theory. Poverty knowledge is directly related to both of these inquiries. The aim of poverty knowledge is clearly moral: to reduce suffering and to empower the weak. While the former aim is grounded in utilitarian thinking, the latter aim is grounded in the social contractarian insight that poverty is unjustly coercive, imposing excessive limits on the opportunities and choices of the poor that render them vulnerable to domination by others. Equally obvious is the social nature of poverty knowledge. All knowledge depends on the reliable testimony of others. Poverty knowledge not only ostensibly offers us the most reliable, scientific beliefs about the causes and effects of poverty, thereby determining how we morally judge the poor and their poverty, but it reciprocally bases its understanding of poverty on what the poor themselves have to say about it. What unites both social epistemology and moral theory – at least the social contract variants I will be examining here – is concern about the limits and possibilities of rational choice. As poverty knowledge came of age in the fifties and sixties, it absorbed the language of rational choice prevalent in economics, especially the Keynesian economics whose moral underpinnings can be found in Rawlsian social contract theory. Echoing a different economic theory supported by a different, more libertarian, brand of social contract theory, poverty expertise in the eighties continued to use an abstract model of rational choice. I submit that, in both early and later epochs of poverty expertise, reliance on rational choice reasoning prevented poverty experts from appreciating the coercive impact of poverty on the poor. Social epistemology explains this failure by demonstrating the poverty of rational choice thinking and its mistaken reliance on inflated commonsense expectations about the capacity of individuals to calculate their long-term interests, free from the distortions of social bias. Social epistemology not only exhibits the dangers of not relying on expert testimony, but it also exhibits the dangers of relying on an unreliable source of expert testimony that has removed itself from its human subject matter. In order for poverty experts to become more reliable educators about poverty’s coercive impact on the poor they must return to their discipline’s social epistemological roots. Only a more descriptive and explanatory sociology can narrate a comprehensive story about how the lived experience of poverty relates to the larger social system. The social contractarian model best suited to underwriting this kind of poverty knowledge, I submit, is the discourse theoretic model that has been championed by Jürgen Habermas. When applied as a pedagogical method of dialog and not as a social contractarian model of rational normative consent, discourse theory highlights the unique epistemological advantages of empathetic understanding that are so essential to dispelling stereotypes about the poor. Dispelling these stereotypes is the first step toward respecting the poor as free agents who are nonetheless forced to make suboptimal choices. My defense of these claims proceeds as follows: Part One argues that poverty expertise rightly deserves the opprobrium critics have heaped on it. The charge – leveled by progressives and conservatives alike - that such expertise is ideological is true to the extent that poverty knowledge has all-too-easily accommodated the political aims of the agency that has funded it: the federal government. The shift from the war on poverty to the war on the poor – and the resulting shift from blaming poverty on economic structures to blaming it on the culture of poverty – would not have been possible without an increased emphasis on data gathering aimed at measuring poverty rather than describing it. Part Two assesses the consequences of turning away from qualitative research to statistical analysis: the coercive nature of poverty becomes invisible beneath the surface of aggregate individual choices. The failure to grasp how voluntary choices, ostensibly based on rational, self-interested calculations, can be coerced by social structures - and thereby lead to sub-optimizing behavior – invites the conclusion that the poor have only themselves to blame for their misery. Part Three suggests that this pathologization of the poor directly controverts the major aim of poverty research: to empower the poor as free and equal parties to the social contract. I argue that the different varieties of social contract theory that have justified poverty expertise over the last forty years – the welfarist model pioneered by Rawls and the market-based model defended by Nozick – embrace the same rational choice models favored by poverty experts and so conspire with the latter in neglecting important dimensions of poverty-related coercion. While the welfarist model conceals the coercive nature of bureaucratically administered entitlement programs and top-down urban renewal policies, the market-based model conceals the coercive nature of economic class structures. The discourse-theoretic alternative proposed by Habermas endorses a populist, democratic response to the overly abstract rational choice assumptions embedded in these other models. Despite this advance over its counterparts, the chief advantage of discourse theory for poverty knowledge, I submit, resides less in its proposed procedure of rational collective choice than in its heuristic as a dialogical method of social learning. I demonstrate this claim in Part Four, where I turn to the social epistemological insights of Allen Buchanan. Social epistemology offers a much needed corrective to theories of knowledge that rely on the reasoning capacities of isolated individuals. By stressing the connection between moral response and social belief, on one hand, and the dependence of social belief on epistemic authorities, on the other, social epistemologists suggest ways in which we can learn to distinguish reliable from unreliable authorities and become aware of our own error-prone cognitive proclivities. Their insights need to be supplemented by moral epistemologists who stress the affective dimension of knowledge, above all, the role that empathy plays in understanding the plight of others. Drawing from victim narratives, Diana Meyers shows that switching between first-person experiences of one's own and third-person reconstructions of others' experiences is essential to appreciating the gravity of human rights violations and the seriousness of human rights claims. It goes without saying that such empathy is just as essential to understanding the plight of the poor. Meyers mainly has in mind empathetic understanding that has been facilitated by third-person observation and literary encounter, but the importance of visceral and corporeal representation suggests that face-to-face dialog may sometimes be a more effective way to facilitate empathetic understanding. (shrink)

Over the past couple of decades, both the news media and mainstream literature have been awash with stories of some sort of renascent nationalism and populism. Some citizens have begun to express lack of confidence in core representative institutions, accusing politicians and entrepreneurs of having lost touch with the concerns of ordinary people. They demand protection from transnational economic forces undercutting their access to jobs, wages, and benefits, and in addition, from the threats of terrorism associated with Islamic extremism. In (...) this piece, their questioning of liberal civil rights was reviewed. Efforts at liberal homogenization were examined, and the charge that conservative views trivialize the ethics of universal human care, love and collaboration, which are at the heart of creating enduring peace in the world, was considered. (shrink)

A cornerstone of physics, Maxwell‘s theory of electromagnetism, apparently contains a fatal flaw. The standard expressions for the electromagnetic field energy and the self-mass of an electron of finite extension do not obey Einstein‘s famous equation, \, but instead fulfill this relation with a factor 4/3 on the left-hand side. Furthermore, the energy and momentum of the electromagnetic field associated with the charge fail to transform as a four-vector. Many famous physicists have contributed to the debate of this so-called (...) 4/3-problem without arriving at a complete solution. It has generally been assumed that, as originally suggested by Poincaré, the problems are connected to the question of stability of the charge distribution, and that relativistic equivalence between energy and self-mass can only be restored by inclusion of stabilizing forces. Alternative solutions to the problems have also been proposed. Nearly a century ago Fermi suggested a covariant definition of the electromagnetic energy and momentum, and sixty years later Kalckar et al. argued that the 4/3 problem is caused by omission of a relativistic correction in the standard evaluation of the self-force from Coulomb self-interaction. However, the relation between these suggestions has not been clear. We show that the relativistic correction implies that the mechanical momentum of an accelerated rigid body must be defined as the sum of the momenta of its parts for fixed time in the momentary rest frame of the body. For the total momentum of particles and field to be conserved, the total energy–momentum tensor must be divergence free, and this then requires that the momentum of the associated electromagnetic field be defined in the same way, consistent with the suggestion by Fermi. This comprehensive solution of the 4/3-problem demonstrates that there is no conflict of Maxwell‘s theory with special relativity and the questions of equivalence of electromagnetic energy and self-mass and of stability of a classical charge distribution are independent. In appendices we discuss the relations of our treatment with Fermi‘s seminal paper and with a classic paper by Dirac where he evaluated the damping self-force on a point electron from transport of energy and momentum in the electromagnetic field. (shrink)

I will present a refutation of 6 and 7 inconsistency claim. Using the proof by Kiessling, I will show that Classical Electrodynamics can be applied consistently and can preserve energy conservation to the problem of charged, accelerated particles. This refutes the core of Frisch's inconsistency claim. Additionally, I will argue that Frisch's proof and the resulting debate is based on a comparison of different, approximate, explicit solutions to the Maxwell–Lorentz equations. However, in order to be informative on the foundations (...) of CED, an analysis would have to be focussed on the Maxwell–Lorentz equations as coupled system of equations. (shrink)

Loyalty has been charged with being an outdated, conservative virtue. I argue that loyalty as a virtue is not only allowable, but important to the way we view the world. Furthermore, to define any virtue without first bracketing the virtue within common understanding, is to redefine the language of the virtue and render the conversation a failure.

Over recent years religious conservatives in the United States have fervently contested the idea of a liberal, secular public sphere. This article urges scholars to consider that contest in light of the history of the New Christian Right (NCR) of the late 1970s and 1980s. NCR activists, intellectuals, lawyers, and government officials advanced a critique of Rawlsian political liberalism, one charging that public institutions were not the bastions of neutrality supposed by American liberals. Contrary to the U.S. Constitution’s ban on (...) an establishment of religion, this critique alleged, cultural elites and judges had lifted the “religion” of secular humanism up to a preferred status while attempting to purge the public sphere of Christianity. Focusing on a pair of federal court cases from the 1980s, this article considers one of the NCR‘s most fascinating strategies––defining as a “religion” the very secularism meant to contain religion to private life. (shrink)

Comment combattre la langue de bois ? Ce devrait être la première préoccupation des commentateurs politiques, chargés de commenter, d’analyser et d’éditorialiser. Mais, comme celle des hommes politiques, la langue de bois des commentateurs a pour objectif principal de ne pas tout dire. Elle est faite pour leur permettre de s’adresser au plus grand nombre, sans choquer, souvent même en délivrant à l’auditeur ou au lecteur une pensée dans laquelle il peut se reconnaître. Il existe aussi une autre sorte de (...) langue de bois, plus problématique dans les métiers de commentateurs : une langue de bois réflexe, faite de formules creuses, de poncifs et de métaphores . Par ailleurs, l’une des tendances les plus spectaculaires de ces dernières années est l’avènement de ce que l’on peut appeler le « parler cash », façon de rejeter la langue de bois. Une parole cash devient un acte politique en lui-même, un acte creux, et les journalistes en sont coresponsables puisque travaillant à jet continu avec Internet et les chaînes tout-info. En revanche, le numérique permet de conserver et de classer ce qui se dit. La mémoire politique s’est démocratisée et Internet met à la disposition de chacun l’ensemble des propos des hommes politiques. Cette évolution du rapport entre le discours et son commentaire est bienvenue après des décennies de consanguinité entre les politiques et les commentateurs.How do you fight doublespeak? This ought to be the main concern of every political commentator, whose job is to comment on, analyse and editorialise what politicians say. But, like politicians, commentators use a language whose main purpose is to not say everything. It is made for them to address the widest possible audience, without giving offence and often by offering listeners or readers thoughts they can recognise as their own. This sort of language also exists in another more problematical form among commentators, as a kind of reflexive newspeak made up of clichés, commonplaces and metaphors involving warfare, sports or cookery. One of the more spectacular trends in the last few years is the advent of what the French call « parler cash », meaning « rude straight talk », as an antidote to doublespeak. « Talking rude and straight » then becomes a political – and hollow – act in itself, for which journalists are equally responsible since they are constantly working live with the Internet and 24-hour news channels. On the other hand, everything that is said can now be stored and classified on digital media. The archives of politics are becoming available to all and anyone can use the Internet to access anything a politician has ever said. This is a welcome development for the relationship between discourse and commentary, after decades of blood relationships between politicians and political commentators. (shrink)

The peculiarities of mechanical motion in Minkovski space with three-dimensional time are considered. A variation principle for deriving equations of motion is defined and the vector nature of energy and conservation laws for six-dimensional energy-momentum vector are discussed. Difficulties connected with vacuum instability and the possibility of anomalous nuclear reactions are removed due to the time irreversibility principle. The motion of a charged particle in a constant electric field is studied as an example of multitime processes. Some results concerning (...) planet motion in the multitime gravitation field are presented. (shrink)

The magnetic dipole moment of the Kerr–Newman metric, defined by mass \, electrical charge \ and angular momentum \, is \, corresponding, for all values of \, to a gyromagnetic ratio \, which is also the value of the intrinsic gyromagnetic ratio of the electron, as first noted by Carter. Here, we argue that this result can be understood in terms of the particle-wave complementarity principle. For \ can only be defined at asymptotic spatial infinity, where the metric appears (...) to describe a spinning point particle, and therefore setting \, \, we necessarily have a model of the electron. From the Dirac equation we can construct a covariantly conserved four-current \ that is the source of the electromagnetic field generated by the charge \. The result \ then follows from the minimal gauge principle \ which is implicit in the formulation of the spinorial wave equation, and which can also be justified from the line action for a spin-1/2 point particle interacting with an external electromagnetic field, due to Berezin and Marinov. By contrast, analysis of the gyrogravito-magnetic effect, investigated classically by Wald and quantum mechanically by Adler et al., yields the result \ in all non-relativistic cases, which can be explained from the principle of equivalence. The results are in accord with the correspondence principle. (shrink)

Ecology is indispensable to understanding the biological world and addressing the environmental problems humanity faces. Its philosophy has never been more important. In this book, James Justus introduces readers to the philosophically rich issues ecology poses. Besides its crucial role in biological science generally, climate change, biodiversity loss, and other looming environmental challenges make ecology's role in understanding such threats and identifying solutions to them all the more critical. When ecology is applied and its insights marshalled to address these problems (...) and guide policy formation, interesting philosophical issues emerge. Justus sets them out in detail, and explores the often ethically charged dimensions of applied ecological science, using accessible language and a wealth of scientifically-informed examples. (shrink)

In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Among other things, it found that states may refuse to expand Medicaid to all individuals earning less than 133% of the federal poverty line. In this article, I evaluate the strongest conservative objection to the Medicaid expansion, which runs as follows: "Defenders of the ACA promised that the Medicaid expansion (and all other parts of the ACA) would be paid for with compensating (...) cuts. However, it’s arguable that that claim is false and that the government is likely to follow its well-worn pattern of charging at least some of the increased spending to the national debt. Debt is already at dangerous levels, and adding to it increases the risk of a serious fiscal crisis. We should therefore oppose the Medicaid expansion." After laying out this argument, I evaluate its central claims and draw three main conclusions. First, some people could reasonably believe the assumptions behind the fiscal objection, and thus reasonably oppose the Medicaid expansion as well. Second, despite the fact that reasonable critics could hold those assumptions, most critics do not, and so they should not reject the Medicaid expansion on these fiscal grounds. Third, supporters of the ACA and the Medicaid expansion can reasonably reject the assumptions behind the fiscal objection, and thus the objection itself. (shrink)

This dissertation is designed to discuss central issues raised by two of the evolutionary behavioral sciences, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Both sciences purport to be able to explain the origins of human behavioral and cognitive adaptations respectively and give us some insight into "human nature." My purpose is to go some way towards determining how well these two sciences do as means of determining human evolutionary origins, both by examining some of the central issues that they face, and by examining (...) several case studies in which their methods have been applied to specific human behaviors. ;Sociobiology in particular has had a bad reputation, at least in part because s few of its proponents have used the project as a forum for pushing conservative social values. It has attracted a lot of criticism: in particular for being unwarrantedly adaptationist, and for addressing its explanations at behavior, rather than at psychology. Evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, has been better received; there is some belief that it is a more appropriate, less "behaviorist" project than sociobiology. I spend the first part of the dissertation examining some of these criticisms; however, I believe the charge adaptationism to be founded on the practices of individuals rather than being a central commitment of the project; I also conclude that the claim that behaviors cannot be adaptations to be unfounded. Furthermore, far from being a better project than sociobiology, I conclude that evolutionary psychology relies on a flawed central commitment to universal domain-specificity to establish its psychological conclusions, and its models rely on an unanalyzed notion of good design. ;In the second part of the dissertation I evaluate three well known and controversial studies that use sociobiological or evolutionary psychological methods to try to account for some bard to understand elements of human behavior: namely infanticide, art and altruism, and rape. Although the quality of this work is rather mixed, I conclude there is reason to think that natural selection is implicated to some degree in the origins of some of these behaviors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:138 In 2010 the city of Colorado Springs was strapped for cash. Government officials announced that they would either have to raise revenue through increased taxation or cut public services—­ in some cases rather severely—­ including, perhaps, police and fire protection, and even more basic bits of municipal infrastructure. The city shut down one-­ third of residential streetlights and closed public restrooms. Citi­ zens were outraged, but a majority (...) of voters had recently defeated a proposed tax increase. It’s tempting to suppose that the city was trying to teach its citizens a lesson: if you want public services, you have to be willing to pay for them. Colorado Springs is, and has been for some time now, a died-­in-­the-­wool small-­government, anti-­tax-­increase, fiscally conservative town. As Colorado Springs resident Bo Sharifi put it, “As soon as I hear government [say] ‘Oh, we need more money’... I guess I kind of automatically assume there’s probably some other things you could probably cut before firemen, policemen, city lights and that sort of thing.”1 On the surface, that seems reasonable. So... what comes to mind? How about food stamps? What about WIC? Of course these are federal services, not funded by Coloradans alone. There’s government, and then there’s government. Well, how about... well... what? Doesn’t the government spend money on all sorts of things we could very easily do without? Perhaps. Isn’t it part of our job to know or to decide which things these are? If we don’t trust government, even more obviously we don’t trust it with our money, though we pretty clearly have no idea how public funds are actually allocated or spent. When asked whether he remembered the proposed tax increase that the city had voted against, Sharifi replied, “maybe.” Bo and his wife were charged $125 to have Connected: How Trains, Genes, Pineapples, Piano Keys, and a Few Disasters Transformed Americans at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century By Steven Cassedy Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014 JOHN MARIANA Book Reviews 139 their streetlight turned back on. Bo’s wife Sara viewed this as extortion. “By shoveling out a hundred dollars to turn on a streetlight that we kind of felt was supposed to be on anyway, that it was giving them what they wanted,” she said. They who? One resident wrote the city of Colorado Springs a check for $300 to turn the lights on for his entire neighborhood. City Councilwoman Jan Martin pointed out to him that the total cost to the individual Colorado Springs taxpayer to keep the streetlights on—­and to fund the maintenance of public parks and medians, as well as community centers and pre-­recession-­level police and fire services—­by approving the tax increase would have been: $200. He replied that he would never vote for a tax increase. In other words, as the reporter who covered the story (Robert Smith) observed, he would rather pay more to keep the streetlights on in his own neighborhood than to pay for all city services combined. Smith remarked that “Colorado Springs was stepping away from one of the things that we take for granted in most American cities: that we’re all in it together—­ at least when it comes to basic services.”2 As near as I can tell, this is the moral of Steven Cassedy’s exceptionally timely Connected: that we’re all in it together. For much of the book Cassedy merely traces the history of the emergence in the consciousness of ordinary Americans of the concept of the social network, but he is not so much talking about the notion of a network society as such, as I understand him. Or, at any rate, the network society as such is not really his main concern. He is talking about the idea of social, political, national, and ultimately global and universal human interconnectedness that was a distinct product of the complex networked structures (both concrete and abstract) that came to constitute modern American life in the twentieth century (and of course life pretty much everywhere ), and about our understanding of ourselves as so networked.3 On this... (shrink)

According to conventional wisdom, local gauge symmetry is not a symmetry of nature, but an artifact of how our theories represent nature. But a study of the so-called theta-vacuum appears to refute this view. The ground state of a quantized non-Abelian Yang-Mills gauge theory is characterized by a real-valued, dimensionless parameter theta—a fundamental new constant of nature. The structure of this vacuum state is often said to arise from a degeneracy of the vacuum of the corresponding classical theory, which degeneracy (...) allegedly arises from the fact that “large” (but not “small”) local gauge transformations connect physically distinct states of zero field energy. If that is right, then some local gauge transformations do generate empirical symmetries. In defending conventional wisdom against this challenge I hope to clarify the meaning of empirical symmetry while deepening our understanding of gauge transformations. I distinguish empirical from theoretical symmetries. Using Galileo’s ship and Faraday’s cube as illustrations, I say when an empirical symmetry is implied by a theoretical symmetry. I explain how the theta-vacuum arises, and how “large” gauge transformations differ from “small” ones. I then present two analogies from elementary quantum mechanics. By applying my analysis of the relation between empirical and theoretical symmetries, I show which analogy faithfully portrays the character of the vacuum state of a classical non-Abelian Yang-Mills gauge theory. The upshot is that “large” as well as “small” gauge transformations are purely formal symmetries of non-Abelian Yang-Mills gauge theories, whether classical or quantized. It is still worth distinguishing between these kinds of symmetries. An analysis of gauge within the constrained-Hamiltonian formalism yields the result that “large” gauge transformations should not be classified as gauge transformations; indeed, nor should “global” gauge transformations. In a theory in which boundary conditions are modeled dynamically, “global” gauge transformations may be associated with physical symmetries, corresponding to translations of these extra dynamical variables. Such translations are symmetries if and only if charge is conserved. But it is hard to argue that these symmetries are empirical, and in any case they do not correspond to any constant phase change in a quantum state. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dominion over Wildlife? An Environmental Theology of Human–Wildlife Relations by Stephen M. VantasselColeman FanninDominion over Wildlife? An Environmental Theology of Human–Wildlife Relations Stephen M. Vantassel Eugene, OR: Resource, 2009. 232pp. $26.00In Dominion over Wildlife?, Stephen Vantassel, a scholar with professional experience in animal damage control, provides a substantive examination of the neglected subject of human–wildlife relations. For this, he is to be commended. Although ultimately disappointing, his argument (...) indicates that much work remains to be done in this area.Vantassel’s subtitle is somewhat misleading since he devotes the bulk of the book to a polemic against a small group he terms “Christian Animal Rights (CAR) activists”—especially Anglican theologian Andrew Linzey and his followers—who question the idea that God grants humans dominion over creation (“Dominionism”), including the moral right to manage, kill, and eat animals. “The critical question... is whether CAR activists are correct in their belief that Scripture exhorts us to adopt a vegetarian and non-violent stance toward animals” (14). Vantassel’s response is more exegetical than theological, and in the mode of conservative evangelical apologetics, he devotes chapters to refuting CAR activists’ appeals to the Old Testament (specifically the covenant of Creation, the narratives of the Fall and Noah, the sacrificial system, and passages that support humane treatment of animals); the New Testament (Christ’s concern for animals, a Christus Victor view of the atonement, and an Edenic eschatology); ethics (compassion, restraint, and stewardship); and science (a case study of whether trapping is unnecessarily cruel and environmentally irresponsible). Only in the final chapter does he propose his model of “Shepherdism,” which “avoids the negative stereotypes held against Dominionism, while upholding God’s decree that humans maintain their superintendence over animals” (160). Shepherdism centers on the principles that creation is “God’s property,” that humans are charged with being its caretakers, and that Christ is a model for behavior toward it. Vantassel insists that humans should treat wildlife humanely and not exterminate species.For Vantassel, theology is a matter of individuals—largely apart from church or tradition—reading an inerrant Bible to discern God’s commands. Likewise, ethics is a matter of individuals using reason to construct arguments that “stand on their own merits” and “may still be sufficient to persuade, if not compel, Christian behavior even if Scripture does not mandate the behavior” (99). This [End Page 193] is not the forum for criticizing these approaches, but they not only distance Vantassel’s argument from scholarship in the field—which he does not engage—but also make it unlikely that it will persuade those who do not read the Bible or view God in the same way. To note two examples, on the basis of Amos 4, he contends that “some environmental problems are caused not through our direct abuse of the land but through our disobedience, which God then punishes through sending environmental catastrophes” (165n13), and on the basis of Christ’s acceptance of fishing with nets (Luke 5:4), he contends that “Christians are permitted to not only eat animals, they may employ means to capture them that will cause pain and injury” (171). Indeed, as a lifelong hunter who shares Vantassel’s basic position, I found myself more sympathetic to the CAR activists’ arguments toward which he is frequently uncharitable; he associates them with Darwinism and feminist and liberation theologies, labels their hermeneutics “modernistic” for stressing narrative, and variously calls their ideas “absurd,” “incredulous,” and “strange.”Vantassel discusses a number of helpful statistics and studies, and he rightly points out the problems posed by factory farming, the disproportionate effects of environmental degradation on the poor, and the practical difficulties of vegetarianism. However, his preoccupation with exegesis means that he underemphasizes these issues and overlooks others, including hunting becoming a trophy-obsessed, technology-dominated “sport.” Hopefully he and other scholars will produce more on this subject in the near future.Coleman FanninBaylor UniversityCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)