More than 30 years ago in Annals of Science, Dr. Eric Forbes of the University of Edinburgh published the correspondence between Carl Gauss and Great Britain's Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. Five of the letters he listed as missing have now been discovered, along with two entirely new letters he was unaware of. Their nearly complete correspondence can now be read for the first time in 200 years.

Papers presented cover: new approaches to evolutionary epistemology, new applications, critical evaluations, and the nature of the mind. Paper edition (unseen), $25.50. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Purpose Although surrogate decision-making is prevalent in intensive care units and concerns with decision quality are well documented, little is known about how clinicians help family members understand the surrogate role. We investigated whether and how clinicians provide normative guidance to families regarding how to function as a surrogate. Subjects and methods We audiorecorded and transcribed 73 ICU family conferences in which clinicians anticipated discussing goals of care for incapacitated patients at high risk of death. We developed and applied a (...) coding framework to identify normative statements by clinicians regarding what considerations should guide surrogates’ decisions, including whether clinicians explained one or more of Buchanan and Brock’s three standard principles of SDM to family members. Results Clinicians made at least one statement about how to perform the surrogate role in 24 conferences ). We observed three general types of normative guidance provided to surrogates, with some conferences containing more than one type of guidance: counselling about one or more standard principles of SDM ; counselling surrogates to make decisions centred on the patient as a person, without specifying how to accomplish that ; and counselling surrogates to make decisions based on the family’s values. Conclusions Clinicians did not provide normative guidance about the surrogate role in two-thirds of family conferences for incapacitated patients at high risk for death. When they did, clinicians’ guidance was often incomplete and sometimes conflicted with standard principles of SDM. Future work is needed to understand whether providing explicit guidance on how to perform the surrogate role improves decision-making or mitigates surrogates’ psychological distress. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore some issues regarding the different modes of generality at stake in the formation of transdisciplinary concepts within the production of ‘theory’ in the humanities and social sciences. Focused around Jacques Derrida’s seminal account of ‘writing’ in his 1967 book Of Grammatology, the article outlines what it defines as a logic of generalization at stake in Derrida’s elaborations of a quasi-transcendental ‘inscription in general’. Starting out from the questions thereby raised about the relationship between such forms (...) of generality and those historically ascribed to philosophy, the article concludes by contrasting Derrida’s generalized writing with more recent returns to ‘metaphysics’ in the work of Bruno Latour and others. Against the immediately ‘ontological’ orientation of much recent ‘new materialist’ or ‘object-oriented’ thought, the article argues for the necessity of ‘different levels of writing in general’ through a continual folding back of absolute generalization into historically specific disciplinary crossings and exchanges; something suggested by but never really developed in Derrida’s own work. (shrink)

Journalism and media ethics texts commonly invoke Aristotle's Golden Mean as a principal ethical theory that models such journalistic values as balance, fairness, and proportion. Working from Aristotle's text, this article argues that the Golden Mean model, as widely understood and applied to media ethics, seriously belies Aristotle's intent. It also shortchanges the reality of our moral agency and epistemic responsibility. A more authentic rendering of Aristotle's theory of acting rightly, moreover, has profound implications for communication ethicists and media practitioners.

Using a base of philosophical athropology, this article suggests that an ethical analysis of persuasion must include not just the logic human response, but culture and experience as well. The authors propose potential maxims for ethical behavior in advertising and public relations and applies them to two case studies, political advertising and the Bridgestone/Firestone controversy.

The concepts, health and disease, have received considerable attention in philosophy of medicine. The first goal of this paper is to demonstrate that three prominent analyses of health and disease can be synthesized if one assumes that medicine is both theoretical and practical, and, therefore, value-laden. The second goal of this paper is to give an account of one route by which evaluative and factual claims come together in medical knowledge, during medical conversations between clinicians and patients. Accomplishing these two (...) goals together yields an epistemology of medicine that moves past debates about health and disease. On this view the conceptual foundations of medicine rest on subjective and objective claims about health states and their evaluations. By making subjective and objective claims, patients and clinicians negotiate whether patients’ health states are sufficiently dysfunctional to warrant medical intervention, leading to the formation of complementary illness narratives, which are anchored to different degrees in personal experience and medical theory. On this view, health and disease are supplanted as the conceptual foundations of medicine. Rather, medicine is better understood in terms of two basic aims: The first aim of medicine is to fully understand patients in scientific and personal terms; the second aim is to intervene upon patients’ states of illness in ways that are consistent with full understanding. (shrink)

Résumé La sous-traitance dans les métiers londoniens est un phénomène massif au XVIIIe siècle qui transforme l’économie et la culture technique artisanales. Elle est liée à la recherche de producteurs qualifiés capables de répondre à la demande en nombre d’articles hautement composites, censés varier les effets visuels et fonctionnels des objets de consommation. L’économie de la variété, appliquée à une production importante, favorise l’extension des circuits entre producteurs et l’essor des marchés de production, c’est-à-dire une organisation ramifiée complexe fondée sur (...) la mobilisation d’opérateurs externes spécialisés, sous l’égide d’artisans-entrepreneurs. Nous nous proposons d’examiner l’impact de cette organisation du travail sur la culture technique et les identités professionnelles en milieu artisanal. On abordera cette question d’une part à travers l’écrit économique, d’autre part à partir d’actes de la pratique. (shrink)

These volumes bring together some 110 articles on this great economist, analysing his life, his work, and his impact on modern economic analysis. Whilst all aspects of his work are addressed, the greatest emphasis is on his impact on the development of modern trade theory. The collection includes articles by Paul Samuelson, Don Patinkin, and Rudiger Dornbusch and will be an invaluable work of reference for anyone studying the development of modern economics.

This old difficulty has recently received a new explanation from the pen of Dr. E. G. Hardy . Dr. Hardy believes—and his view has met with some acceptance—that the disability, under which these Gallic candidates for admission to the Senate laboured, was the want of a municipalis origo. Up to this time, he contends, only Romans who were members of a town of Roman or Latin rights were eligible for admission to the Senate. Now in the Tres Galliae there were (...) practically no such towns: these Gallic chiefs possessed the ciuitas individually by special grant and not as members of any municipality. Hence the door of the curia was closed to them while it was open to Romans from Lugdunum or Vienna. (shrink)

Using the work of Lacan but with reference to a number of other philosophers, this article argues eight main theses: first of all, that non-Platonic philosophical construction follows after a foundational destruction; second, that philosophy generally has a nothing outside its text, one that allows for the formation of that text—for example, Kant forms the text of phenomena only by way of the noumena; third, that this transcendental nothing renders all identities ideal, however that is conceived—an example being Badiou’s notion (...) of “belonging,” one derived from the work of Georg Cantor and Paul Cohen; fourth, that a consequence of this ideality is mereological nihilism; fifth, due to this mereological nihilism any existent is only ever an aggregate, that is, an aggregate of some base element, or “stuff ”—a position that returns such philosophy to that of the ancients; sixth, this collapses idealism and materialism into each other, a collapse marked by what is referred to throughout as an impossible monism. Moreover, this impossible monism is a result of philosophy’s constant production of a bastard trinity—a dual monism, as it were. Seventh, that there are two models of difference evident in non-Platonic philosophy: the first is that of a block, with difference cut into it—like Swiss cheese, as it were—while the second is a flux which we seek to arrest with local regimes of stability. Eighth, and finally, that theology, in line with Plato, suggests the possibility of another difference, namely, a peaceable one. (shrink)

Professor Kai Nielsen is one of the most forceful proponents of the view that theological assertions have no factual reference because they are compatible with any empirical state of affairs; no evidence, it is alleged, is allowed to count as falsification of such assertions, and therefore they spuriously purport to be what they are not. In this he follows the well-known essay by Professor Antony Flew in which the same argument was advanced, and Nielsen's own most recent contribution on the (...) subject in Religious Studies should be read against the background of his earlier controversy with Professors John Hick and George Mavrodes in The Canadian Journal of Theology. In this latest article he broadens the canvas to question the significance of applying language and concepts appropriate to the realm of empirical observation to anything that is held to transcend it; and this is the substance of Part II of his paper, in which he engages in debate with Professor Ian Crombie, treading well-worn ground that has been the subject of innumerable philosophical discussions. The rest of the paper, however, is a restatement of his earlier contention, and it is with this more limited issue that I shall be concerned in what follows. For I believe that Nielsen is wrong in two quite fundamental respects: he is mistaken in supposing that theological assertions are compatible with any empirical state of affairs: he bases his critique of theological assertions on a far too uncritical appraisal of the principles of verification and falsification in the case of ordinary factual statements. If I am right, the larger questions raised in Part II will still remain open, but it is high time that the ‘verification-falsification argument’ should be shown to be unfounded. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.3 (2001) 207-224 [Access article in PDF] Virtual Witnessing and the Role of the Reader in a New Natural Philosophy Richard Cunningham [Figures]How did the self-described new natural philosophies of the early modern period displace other philosophic (moral, ethical, legal), and specifically religious, discourses as the locus of truth in our culture? Natural philosophy's rejection of disputation and of revelation as means of producing truth (...) in favor of the "discovery" of truth was more accurately an introduction of the invention of truth than of its discovery, and this invention demanded the creation of and participation of a certain kind of reader. Rhetorical examination of the early modern magnetic philosopher William Gilbert's most influential work, De Magnete, 1 will help us understand the "paradigm change," to use Thomas Kuhn's oft-misquoted term, 2 from a culture that accepted probabilistic truth in the natural realm to one that expected moral certainty, from a culture that accepted revelation as a legitimate means of access to truth to one that increasingly recognized only the "discovery" of truth through sensual experience disciplined through experiment.One way this paradigm change was effected was through the inclusion of the reader as an active participant in the new natural philosophies. The reader was included in the new natural philosophies by engendering in him desires for particular forms of knowledge and particular ways of attaining that knowledge. Peter Dear notes that "in the seventeenth century old practices changed and new ones appeared. Those changing practices represent shifts in the meaning of experience itself" (12-13), and he then asks the question that might well have been on the tongues of many as the old practices gave way to the new: "how can a universal knowledge-claim about the natural world be justified on the basis of singular items of individual experience?" (13). A crucially important way to justify the universal knowledge-claim on singular items of individual experience [End Page 207] was through the employment of a technique Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have labeled "virtual witnessing" (60-65). Briefly, "virtual witnessing" describes the use of linguistic resources to produce a vicarious experience enabling a reader to confer agreement as though she had actually been present when an experiment was conducted. Virtual witnessing alone, however, cannot explain how the scientific became the dominant truth-producing paradigm in our culture. Virtual witnessing intermingled with a variety of other elements in early modern natural philosophy to encourage readers to participate in the invention of "true" accounts of the world in which we live. In this article I will apply the tools of rhetorical analysis as I use the example of De Magnete to elaborate on how a Foucauldian form of disciplinary impulse combined in the early modern period with the technology of virtual witnessing to create an audience inculcated with desire, interest, and belief in the new natural philosophy, which had to precede and accompany expansion of the scientific into the dominant truth-producing paradigm it has long since become.For the sake of clarity I should expound upon the two key elements of my argument, "discipline," in the Foucauldian sense in which I use the term, and "virtual witnessing." According to Michel Foucault, "discipline" is "a political anatomy of detail... situated on the axis that links the singular and the multiple" (139-49), and I argue that this point, on the "axis that links the singular and the multiple," is exactly the point that enables modern science. William Gilbert's De Magnete can help us understand how knowledge and power--or epistemê and technê, to use another, perhaps more rhetorically inflected, vocabulary--combined in the early modern period to produce the effects that would become those of modern science. Gilbert provides an excellent example of the movement from the production of truth through revelation to the production of truth through discovery and the experimental method. De Magnete persuades its reader by rendering visible a formerly invisible "universal nature," 3 so that truth is no longer warranted by the invisible workings... (shrink)

An important function of the self is to identify external objects that are potentially personally relevant. We suggest that such objects may be identified through mere ownership. Extant research suggests that encoding information in a self-relevant context enhances memory , thus an experiment was designed to test the impact of ownership on memory performance. Participants either moved or observed the movement of picture cards into two baskets; one of which belonged to self and one which belonged to another participant. A (...) subsequent recognition test revealed that there was a significant memory advantage for objects that were owned by self. Acting on items had no impact on memory. Results are discussed with reference to the importance of self-object associations in cognition. (shrink)

Against the dominant trend in contemporary republicanism, which views Roman political theory as providing significant resources to contemporary emancipatory projects, this article reads the Roman legal and political theoretical tradition as revealing above all the capacity of Republican resources to be coopted in support of monarchic domination. It does so by tracing changes in doctrines of liberty, popular sovereignty, magistracy and majoritarianism from the period of the free Republic into the Principate and thence into the Justinianic codifications, as well as (...) their reception in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Italy. Along the way it urges a more nuanced view of the sources of the Republican tradition: an awareness both of when specific sources on Rome became available to late medieval and early modern thinkers and of the imperial origins of the major sources available before the sixteenth century. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

"The Religious Thought of the Greeks" by Clifford Herschel Moore. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to (...) everyone in a high-quality digital format. (shrink)

A fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and of the Royal Society, William Clifford (1845–79) made his reputation in applied mathematics, but his interests ranged far more widely, encompassing ethics, evolution, metaphysics and philosophy of mind. This posthumously collected two-volume work, first published in 1879, bears witness to the dexterity and eclecticism of this Victorian thinker, whose commitment to the most abstract principles of mathematics and the most concrete details of human experience resulted in vivid and often unexpected arguments. Volume (...) 2 shows Clifford's thorough engagement with scientific thought as a method for illuminating ethical and moral questions. Essays such as 'Body and Mind', 'On the Scientific Basis of Morals' and 'The Ethics of Belief' all variously demonstrate Clifford's core tenet: that beliefs - whether they guide human action or scientific enquiry - 'can never suffer from investigation'. (shrink)

Inspired by the person and writings of C.S. Lewis, this book examines pertinent and pressing issues in living the Christian faith today. Experts in their fields share their insights and conclusions.

Seven Curricular Landscapes offers a holistic presentation and critique of what the author considers to be the seven major types of curricula. This book, which is suitable for both upper-division and graduate education courses, differs from previous holistic approaches in that it closely considers the holistic implications of postmodernism, adds new categories and terms to the holistic repertoire, includes the latest developments in transpersonal theory, examines the Existentialist curriculum as a spiritual phenomenon, and discusses the curricular implications of both Eastern (...) and Western spirituality. (shrink)