In the years 1829 and 1830 there appeared in Geneva a short-lived journal called l'Utilitaire, edited by Antoine-Élysée Cherbuliez. In the preface to the first issue, the editor wrote that he was working ‘in the spirit of Bentham’, but did not wish to found a party tied to Bentham's name. He wished to emulate Bentham's thinking in so far as it was synonymous with a detached, neutral perspective on the world, a viewpoint superior to the strife of factions. Having spoken (...) eulogisti-cally of Bentham in these terms, the writer added that a well-merited share of the Englishman's glory belonged to Dumont. The names of Jeremy Bentham and Étienne Dumont ‘must no more be separated than those of Kepler and Newton’. After giving some consideration to the question of why Dumont's work was so important for Bentham, I shall concentrate in this article on why the Genevan became so committed to the task of disseminating the utilitarian thought of his English mentor. I will be focusing on the initial stages of Dumont's editorial and translation work in the 1790s and will not be attempting here to give a comprehensive history of a relationship that lasted nearly forty years. (shrink)

This book shows how, during the 20th century, evils such as totalitarianism, tyranny, war, and genocide became indelibly linked to the fascist cause, and examines the enduring and popular appeal of an ideology that has counted princes, poets, and war heroes among its most fervent adherents. From the followers of Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, the Arab leader who met with Adolf Hitler in November 1942 to the murderous death squads of the Croatian Ustasha to certain members of the British Establishment, fascism's (...) heady brew of extreme nationalism and revolutionary violence has attracted followers from across all religions, races, and classes. Now widely reviled, fascism became an immensely powerful political force in Western Europe throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s. How did civilized nations like Italy, Germany, Austria, and others succumb to an ideology now regarded by the political mainstream as barbarous and beyond the pale? World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia covers all the key personalities and movements throughout the history of fascism and brings to light some of the ideology's lesser-known aspects, from Hindu extremists in India to the influential role of certain women in fascist movements. How did an ideology which was openly boastful of its belief in violence come to seduce the elites of some of the most civilized nations on earth? What can explain fascism's enduring appeal? (shrink)

(2012). The French Idea of History: Joseph de Maistre and his heirs 1794–1854. Intellectual History Review: Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 313-314. doi: 10.1080/17496977.2012.694192.

Long known solely as fascism’s precursor, Joseph de Maistre re-emerges in this volume as a versatile thinker with a colossally diverse posterity whose continuing relevance in Europe is ensured by his theorization of the encounter between tradition and modernity.

Most commonly, the scientific realism debate is seen as dividing those who do and do not think that the striking empirical and practical successes of at least our best scientific theories indicate with high probability that those theories are ‘approximately true’. But I want to suggest that this characterization of the debate has far outlived its usefulness. Not only does it obscure the central differences between two profoundly different types of contemporary scientific realist, but even more importantly it serves to (...) disguise the most substantial points of actual disagreement between these two kinds of realists and those who instead think the historical record of scientific inquiry itself reveals that such realism is untenable in either form. (shrink)

We analyse the extent of possible computations following Hogarth ([2004]) conducted in Malament–Hogarth (MH) spacetimes, and Etesi and Németi ([2002]) in the special subclass containing rotating Kerr black holes. Hogarth ([1994]) had shown that any arithmetic statement could be resolved in a suitable MH spacetime. Etesi and Németi ([2002]) had shown that some relations on natural numbers that are neither universal nor co-universal, can be decided in Kerr spacetimes, and had asked specifically as to the extent of computational limits there. (...) The purpose of this note is to address this question, and further show that MH spacetimes can compute far beyond the arithmetic: effectively Borel statements (so hyperarithmetic in second-order number theory, or the structure of analysis) can likewise be resolved: Theorem A. If H is any hyperarithmetic predicate on integers, then there is an MH spacetime in which any query ? n H ? can be computed. In one sense this is best possible, as there is an upper bound to computational ability in any spacetime, which is thus a universal constant of that spacetime. Theorem C. Assuming the (modest and standard) requirement that spacetime manifolds be paracompact and Hausdorff, for any spacetime there will be a countable ordinal upper bound, , on the complexity of questions in the Borel hierarchy computable in it. Introduction 1.1 History and preliminaries Hyperarithmetic Computations in MH Spacetimes 2.1 Generalising SADn regions 2.2 The complexity of questions decidable in Kerr spacetimes An Upper Bound on Computational Complexity for Each Spacetime CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

We look at various notions of a class of definability operations that generalise inductive operations, and are characterised as “revision operations”. More particularly we: (i) characterise the revision theoretically definable subsets of a countable acceptable structure; (ii) show that the categorical truth set of Belnap and Gupta’s theory of truth over arithmetic using \emph{fully varied revision} sequences yields a complete \Pi13 set of integers; (iii) the set of \emph{stably categorical} sentences using their revision operator ψ is similarly \Pi13 and which (...) is complete in Gödel’s universe of constructible sets L; (iv) give an alternative account of a theory of truth—realistic variance that simplifies full variance, whilst at the same time arriving at Kripkean fixed points. (shrink)

Objective: The objectives of this study are to understand the current functions, structure and operation of hospital ethics committees (HECs) in Shanghai and to facilitate their improvement. Methods: (1) A questionnaire survey, (2) interviews with secretaries and (3) on-site document reviews of HECs in Shanghai were used in the study, which surveyed 33 hospitals. Results: In Shanghai, 57.56% of the surveyed hospitals established HECs from 1998 to 2005. Most HECs used bioethical review of research involving human subjects as well as (...) bioethical review or consultation regarding medical care services and administrative decision- making. Of the surveyed HECs, 14.3% did not provide any formal bioethical training to the HECs’ members and many HECs had no standard operating procedures. Some HECs had no clear definition of what was “conflict of interest” that should be considered by the HECs, while 44.4% of the HECs did not perform continuing review. Discussion: After the issues of related national regulations, more and more hospitals established HECs in Shanghai, but the functions of HECs need to be further developed and formal training on bioethics should be provided to HEC members. To assure the independence and good performance of HECs, the conflict of interest procedure, the standard operating procedures and bioethical review should be improved. Conclusion: HECs in Shanghai had developed in the preceding 10 years and they played great roles in protecting the rights and welfare of human subjects and patients; some areas need improvement. (shrink)

This paper situates the moral domain of practice within the context of a particular description of nursing practice – one that sees human interaction at the heart of that practice. Such a description fits not only with professional rhetoric but also with literature from patients and recent empirical work exploring the nature of nursing practice.Martha Levine in her 1977 description of ethics, within the context of nursing practice, indicated that what was important from an ethical perspective was how we interact (...) with each other, with patients and colleagues, on a daily basis. What enables such interaction to display moral sensitivity, insight into patient need, and a focus on the good for the patient? Of relevance when answering this question is the empirical evidence indicating that professional socialization, as a nurse or a doctor, may dull the individual’s moral sense. If this is the case, cognizance needs to be taken of such evidence when identifying theoretical approaches from mainstream ethics that may provide insight and value for nurse education. It is suggested that such insight and value can be gained from a consideration of the work of Aristotle, Murdoch, and Vetlesen. (shrink)

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

In his explorations of time-consciousness, Edmund Husserl often draws upon the examples of a musical tone or melody to describe temporal experience. Yet, Husserl's arguments are not about music per se, and he never engages with the internal structures and dynamics of music. More specifically, Husserl does not discuss rhythm and metre, the principal temporal modalities of music. Nonetheless, Husserl's thoughts on time-consciousness have a direct bearing on the perception of musical metre, and particularly so with respect to Christopher Hasty's (...) ideas concerning metric projection. Hasty grounds his ideas on metric projection on the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead: my view is that he is better served by Husserl. This is because Husserl's understanding of the interrelationship between 'temporal fading' and 'temporal duration' enables us to account for the sense of the unfolding realization of a specific duration, a sense that is essential to the capacity to project musical metre. (shrink)

Dit boek is een inleiding in het denken over recht en staat met een zwaar accent op de vraag hoe de staat om moet gaan met religie. 0Paul Cliteur en Afshin Ellian zijn hoogleraar encyclopedie van de rechtswetenschap aan de universiteit van Leiden.

Context: This conceptual paper tries to tackle the advantages and the limitations that might arise from including second-order science into global climate change sciences, a research area that traditionally focuses on first-order approaches and that is currently attracting a lot of media and public attention. Problem: The high profile of climate change research seems to provoke a certain dilemma for scientists: despite the slowly increasing realization within the sciences that our knowledge is temporary, tentative, uncertain, and far from stable, the (...) public expectations towards science and scientific knowledge are still the opposite: that scientific results should prove to be objective, reliable, and authoritative. As a way to handle the uncertainty, scientists tend to produce “varieties of scenarios” instead of clear statements, as well as reports that articulate different scientific opinions about the causes and dynamics of change for this specific field of research. (shrink)

Dio-Xiphilinus, Herodian, and the Historia Augusta give three apparently contradictory accounts of the circumstances in which Commodus' all-powerful praetorian prefect, Sex. Tigidius Perennis, was overthrown in A.D. 185. My purpose here is not to try to decide between them, but primarily to correct what I think a patent misinterpretation, now current, of a crucial statement in that given by Xiphilinus in his epitome of Dio.