Vitalism, from its early modern to its Enlightenment forms (from Glisson and Willis to La Caze and Barthez), is notoriously opposed to intervention into the living sphere. Experiment, quantification, measurement are all ‘vivisectionist’, morally suspect and worse, they alter and warp the ‘life’ of the subject. They are good for studying corpses, not living individuals. This much is well known, and it has disqualified vitalist medicine from having a place in standard histories of medicine, until recent, post-Foucauldian maneuvers have sought (...) to change the situation (but for unrelated, contextualist reasons). What is perhaps more suprising is that if we consider the emergence of medical ‘theory’ as a whole, from Harvey through to Locke and Sydenham, is the presence of a sustained anti-experimentalist line of argument, and this from the ‘empiricist’ (not Cartesian or Boerhaavian rationalist) side. It would seem then that ‘empiricks’, medical empiricists and other protagonists of an ‘embodied empiricism’ are not Boylean experimentalists who seek to map out Nature in its transparency, but deliberately archaic, Hippocratic observers of living bodies. (shrink)

Three problems are raised for Nicholas Georgalis’s recent work: (1) a problem with regard to the supposed noninferential knowledge of minimal content, (2) a problem with the “necessary condition” Georgalis stipulates for the legitimate application of a first-person methodology to a science of the mind, and (3) a problem with regard to denying phenomenal content to intentional acts.

Let us now consider the third class of statements, those completely nonrestrictive. For example, "Something exists." Since this is the pure contradictory of the wholly restrictive, "Nothing exists," which we have found reason to regard as impossible, and since the contradictory of an impossible statement is necessary, we should expect "Something exists" to be necessarily true, a statement valid a priori. And we see that it excludes nothing from existence, except bare "nothing" itself. But the existence of bare nothing is (...) no existence. Further, "Something exists" is in no conceivable circumstances falsifiable, since the falsifying experience would have to exist, and it would also have to be the experience of something existing--at least if, as I should maintain, experience is essentially a relative term, requiring that to which it is relative, or of which it is the experience. But though "Something exists" is unfalsifiable, it is verified every moment. Could the verifiable but in any conceivable world absolutely unfalsifiable be false? I hold that the necessarily true must be knowable as true and only as true, and that, conversely, whatever is in principle verifiable though not falsifiable is thereby shown to be necessarily true. (shrink)

Abstract John Breuilly's Nationalism and the State provides an indispensable guide to the history of nationalist doctrines and practices since 1800. Yet it misses a crucial dynamic. Top?down nationalizing efforts by European rulers generated bottom?up demands for autonomy or independence by political entrepreneurs claiming to represent distinct nations. Those demands gained credibility and strength when third parties such as great powers and international organizations validated them. This process established an evolving international procedure and an incentive structure that promote top?down suppression (...) of minorities, bottom?up bids for recognition, and violent struggles among the parties. (shrink)

It has generally been assumed since the 1950s that the African elephant known to classical antiquity, and thus the one used, inter alia, by Carthage and Ptolemaic Egypt, is the forest elephant, which is even smaller in stature than the Asian or Indian elephant. Yet a recent scientific study using DNA evidence has asserted that it was the larger bush or savannah elephant that was used in antiquity. This study adduces literary sources pertaining to habitat and representational evidence to explore (...) the issue of the most likely species of African elephant known to the ancient Mediterranean world. (shrink)

How do modern Muslims adapt their traditions to engage with today's world? Charles Tripp's erudite and incisive book considers one of the most significant challenges faced by Muslims over the last sixty years: the challenge of capitalism. By reference to the works of noted Muslim scholars, the author shows how, faced by this challenge, these intellectuals devised a range of strategies which have enabled Muslims to remain true to their faith, whilst engaging effectively with a world not of their (...) own making. The work is framed around the development of their ideas on Islamic socialism, economics and the rationale for Islamic banking. While some Muslims have resorted to confrontation or insularity to cope with the challenges of modernity, most have aspired to innovation and ingenuity in the search for compromise and interaction with global capitalism in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Annotation. "What is life? What does it means to be alive? Is the Earth a super-organism? Is God necessary? In Biology and the Riddle of Life Charles Birch confronts these fundamental questions at a time when such topics as genetic engineering, cloning and ecology have been prominent in the news. Birch confronts the impression that modern biology has answers to all that there is to be known about life. We need to move towards an understanding of living creatures as (...) subjects, and not only as objects, in order to probe life's hidden secrets - what it is to be alive, what it is to experience pain, and what it is to be in love. The answer must include the meaning of life for us as individuals. Birch proposes a new perspective to bring subject and object together. This is the black box he has opened."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Perhaps more than any other major historical phenomena, we tend to look through revolutions as much as we look at them, and ascribe to them meanings that have little to do with the intentions and e...

Since structural descriptions rather than ostensive ones are required by the logic of the cultural sciences, the Platonic eidos as a regulative idea continues to play a creative role in establishing the formal unity of historical concepts. Paul Natorp, Troeltsch’s neo-Kantian contemporary and early proponent of the logicist thesis in Germany, first construed mathematical logic as a Platonistic search for the unconditioned in the form of absolutely foundational concepts or categories of thought. The hidden Platonism expressed in Troeltsch’s formal logic (...) of history is rather close to Natorp’s reading of the Platonic ideas as functions of knowledge, as methods, unities, and pure postulates of thought whose cognitive role is to be comprehensive, heuristic, and revelatory. Moreover, such characteristic 19th-century Hegelian histories of philosophical concepts as those of Adolf Trendelenburg and Gustav Teichmüller, or F. C. Bauer’s dialectical historical methodology of congruence and manifestation in ecclesiastical historicity, were Platonically oriented in that development meant fulfillment as abstract pristination [[sic]] or as the progressively emergent pure logic of historical ideas. The same climate of thought is expressed in F. H. Bradley’s version of the Identity of Indiscernibles and a Platonic-Hegelian ascent of concepts is present even later in Nicolai Hartmann’s neo-idealist treatment of the realization of concepts as "living spirit" in the progressive movement of research itself. (shrink)

La première grande question qui se pose au lecteur de la Critique de la Raison Dialectique est certainement celle des rapports entre les problématiques sartrienne et marxiste. Dans sa conclusion à Questions de Méthode, Sartre la forrnule clairement en écrivant que l'existentialisme « ne remet rien en question, sauf un déterminisme mécaniste qui n'est précisément pas marxiste et qu'on a introduit du dehors dans cette philosophie totale. Il veut, lui aussi, situer l'homme dans sa classe et dans les conflits qui (...) l'opposent aux autres classes à partir du mode et des relations de production. Mais il veut tenter cette ‘situation’, à partir de l'existence, c'est-à-dire de la compréhension ». En termes plus généraux, l'existentialisme « veut dans le Savoir même et dans l'universalité des concepts réintroduire l'indépassable singularité de l'aventure humaine ». Nous sommes donc ici simultanément en présence d'une profession de foi dans le marxisme—car même la carence que Sartre reproche à celui-ci, l'élimination de l'homme, «tient à l'événement et non aux principes mêmes de la doctrine»—et d'une volonté d'introduire dans cette philosophie une méthode propre à l'idéologie de l'existence. (shrink)

One common objection to ethical vegetarianism—that is, vegetarianism for ethical reasons—concerns the morality of the predator-prey relationship. If it is morally acceptable for wolves to kill sheep for food, why is it wrong for human beings to eat meat? The objection raised here is sometimes called the “predation argument.” In this article, I critically examine three versions of the argument.

Originally published in 1960, The Edge of Objectivity helped to establish the history of science as a full-fledged academic discipline. In the mid-1950s, a young professor at Princeton named Charles Gillispie began teaching Humanities 304, one of the first undergraduate courses offered anywhere in the world on the history of science. From Galileo's analysis of motion to theories of evolution and relativity, Gillispie introduces key concepts, individuals, and themes. The Edge of Objectivity arose out of this course. It must (...) have been a lively class. The Edge of Objectivity is pointed, opinionated, and selective. Even at six hundred pages, the book is, as the title suggests, an essay. Gillispie is unafraid to rate Mendel higher than Darwin, Maxwell above Faraday. Full of wry turns of phrase, the book effectively captures people and places. And throughout the book, Gillispie pushes an argument. He views science as the progressive development of more objective, detached, mathematical ways of viewing the world, and he orchestrates his characters and ideas around this theme. This edition of Charles Coulston Gillispie's landmark book introduces a new generation of readers to his provocative and enlightening account of the advancement of scientific thought over the course of four centuries. Since the original publication of The Edge of Objectivity, historians of science have focused increasingly on the social context of science rather than its internal dynamics, and they have frequently viewed science more as a threatening instance of power than as an accumulation of knowledge. Nevertheless, Gillispie's book remains a sophisticated, fast-moving, idiosyncratic account of the development of scientific ideas over four hundred years, by one of the founding intellects in the history of science. Featuring a new foreword by Theodore Porter, who places the work in its intellectual context and the development of the field, this edition of The Edge of Objectivity is a monumental work by one of the founding intellects of the history of science. (shrink)

The author explores recent cases involving Church closure, cancellation of historical figures, instructional materials in public schools, display of religious symbols on public land, and his current work defending the First Amendment rights of Christian bakers.

Pričujoči prispevek izpostavlja razliko med dvema nasprotujočima si teorijama modernosti: kulturno in akulturno teorijo. Prva pripoznava, da moderna znanost in tehnologija kakor tudi moderna družbena organizacija temeljijo na določenih sklopih vrednot. Slednja – prevladujoča – prikazuje proces zatona tradicionalne družbe in njeno nadomestitev z nevtralnim, »naravnim« redom. Tako naj bi bil moralni individualizem denimo naravni način obnašanja po sesutju mitov in zablod antičnih časov. Avtor izpostavlja iluzornost domnev te teorije in njenih negativnih učinkov in predlaga bolj raznoliko, pluralistično pojmovanje modernosti (...) v različnih predelih sveta.This article distinguishes two opposed theories of modernity : the cultural and the acultural theory. The former admits that modern science and technology as well as modern social organization are based on determined set of values. The latter - which is the dominant one - pictures the process of the demise of traditional society and its replacement by a neutral,"natural" order. Thus, modern individualism, for example, is assumed to be a natural way to behave once the myth and error of the ancient times have been dissipated.The author points out the illusory assumptions of this theory and its negative effects, suggesting notably a more diverse, pluralistic conception of modernity in the different parts of the world. (shrink)

The effort to revise the Declaration of Helsinki and the CIOMS Guidelines has sparked a sometimes vitriolic debate centering on the use of placebo controls.