This treatise was written c. 1200, and is the earliest known philosophical work by an Oxford master. Its great interest is that it demonstrates the way in which the first generation of scholars used the translations of Greek and Arabic philosophical scientific texts which had just become available in Western Europe.

On April 15, 2013, two bombs were ignited near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring hundreds. The news “frames” used to depict the Boston Marathon bombings have...

The interrelationships among a number of variables and their effect on ethical decision making was explored. Teams of students and managers participated in a competitive management simulation. Based on prior research, the effects of performance, environmental change, team age, and type of team on the level of ethical behavior were hypothesized. The findings indicate that multiple variables may interact in such a fashion that significance is lost.

As a means of conveying difficult personal experiences, illness narratives and their analysis have the potential to increase awareness of patients’ lives and circumstances. Becoming sensitised to the linguistic texture of narrative offers readers a means of increasing narrative understanding. Using the fictional narrative of The Bell Jar , this paper outlines a novel method for exploring the language of illness narratives. Corpus stylistics provides new insights into narrative texture and demonstrates the importance of recurrent linguistic features in shaping meaning. (...) The paper concludes by proposing the application of a similar methodology to non-fictional illness narratives in therapeutic contexts. (shrink)

New mechanisms to ensure that counter ter ror ism ac t ivit ies do not contravene international law or ethical values and principles will require careful design. Apart from the ethical and legal grounds, there are good practical rea-sons to design more effective counterter-rorism measures. Preventable harms to population health contribute to mistrust and instability and undermine the stated objectives of the intelligence services.

The AAR-SBL Women’s Caucus session on ‘Beyond Down and Dirty: From Good to Great Sex’ revisited the Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World’s Religions project and book with the participation of two of its co-editors, Mary E. Hunt and Patricia Beattie Jung, and co-author and collaborator, Wanda Defeilt. Scholar colleagues, Brandy Daniels, Fitri Junoes, and Alicia Besa Panganiban, presented intriguing papers on feminist religious and ethical reflections on what constitutes great sex as they examined the issues discussed by (...) feminist scholars and activist authors of Good Sex. Moreover, the session was an exhilarating dialogue of international, interreligious, and intergenerational perspectives on what women think is great sex. It was an exciting starting ground for intergenerational discussion with senior scholars, associated with the Good Sex book, providing generous, constructive, and well-considered responses to the presentations of their colleagues. The diverse international audience of masters, doctoral and senior scholars – male and female – was included in the complex, fun, and challenging discussion of sex. Amidst various issues raised, there was a consensus that discussions on great sex must address issues of safety, justice, and pleasure. Overall the session was a success as the platform for the presentations modelled a feminist method that was intentionally designed to give more time for discussion, not only among panelists but also with the audience. (shrink)

The field of Artificial Intelligence has produced so many new concepts--or at least vivid and more structured versions of old concepts--that it would be surprising if none of them turned out to be of value to students of animal behavior. Which will be most valuable? I will resist the temptation to engage in either prophecy or salesmanship; instead of attempting to answer the question: "How might Artificial Intelligence inform the study of animal behavior?" I will concentrate on the obverse: "How (...) might the study of animal behavior inform research in Artificial Intelligence?". (shrink)

This article addresses the general ethical issues of accessing online personal data for research purposes. The authors discuss the practical aspects of online research with a specific case study that illustrates the ethical challenges encountered when accessing data from Kooth, an online youth web-counselling service. This paper firstly highlights the relevance of a process-based approach to ethics when accessing highly sensitive data and then discusses the ethical considerations and potential challenges regarding the accessing of public data from Digital Mental Health (...) services. It presents solutions that aim to protect young DMH service users as well as the DMH providers and researchers mining such data. Special consideration is given to service users’ expectations of what their data might be used for, as well as their perceptions of whether the data they post is public, private or open. We provide recommendations for planning and designing online research that includes vulnerable young people as research participants in an ethical manner. We emphasise the distinction between public, private and open data, which is crucial to comprehend the ethical challenges in accessing DMH data. Among our key recommendations, we foreground the need to consider a collaborative approach with the DMH providers while respecting service users’ control over personal data, and we propose the implementation of digital solutions embedded within the platform for explicit opt-out/opt-in recruitment strategies and ‘read more’ options. (shrink)

A response to a critique by Roger W. Hunt of my views on the eventual likely need to use age as a standard for the allocation of expensive, high-technology, life-extending medical care for the elderly. The response encompasses three elements: 1. that while the elderly have a substantial claim to publicly-provided health care, it cannot be an unlimited claim; 2. that a health care system which provided a decent, coherent set of medical and social services for the elderly would (...) be sufficient, even if some limits had to be set; and 3. allocation and rationing decisions should not be made by individual doctors at the bedside but by regional or national policy. (shrink)

Daniel Callahan has argued that economic and social benefits would result from a policy of withholding medical treatments which prolong life in persons over a certain age. He claims 'the real goal of medicine' is to conquer death and prolong life with the use of technology, regardless of the age and quality of life of the patient, and this has been responsible for the escalation of health care expenditure. Callahan's proposal is based on economic rationalism but there is little (...) evidence to suggest that substantial economic savings could be achieved. Moreover, his argument raises serious moral objections. A policy of withholding treatments from members of a social group involves elements of compulsion and discrimination, both of which would intrude on the doctor-patient relationship, undermine the autonomy of elderly patients, and invoke the slippery slope towards involuntary forms of euthanasia. Life-death decisions should be based on more than the one criterion of age, and take account of more relevant factors such as the patient's usual state of well-being, her/his expressed wishes, informed consent and the type of illness. Any move to the implementation and enforcement of the policy Callahan recommends would be rejected by health professionals and the public. (shrink)

This article argues that killing animals for food represents an extreme case within Christian moral thinking comparable to Karl Barth's Grenzfall argument against such violent acts as suicide, abortion, killing in self‐defense, capital punishment, and war. This position is in contrast to the view of many environmental philosophers who hold human hunting to be comparable to animal predation. It also disputes the language of substitutionary sacrifice prevalent in some Christian discussions of meat eating.

Cross-cultural studies have revealed broad quantitative associations between subsistence practice and demographic parameters for preindustrial populations. One explanation is that variationin the availability of suitable weaning foods influenced the frequency and duration of breastfeeding and thus the length of interbirth intervals and the probability of child survival (the “weaning food availability” hypothesis). We examine the available data on weaning age variation in preindustrial populations and report results of a cross-cultural test of the predictions that weaning occurred earlier in agricultural and (...) pastoral populations because dairy and cereal production increased the availability of easily digestible, nutrientrich foods appropriate for weaning. We found that, contrary to predictions, supplementation with liquid foods other than breast milk was delayed in agricultural populations relative to less agriculturally dependent ones and complementary feeding with solid foods was delayed in pastoral populations relative to those less dependent on herding. Although the duration of breastfeeding was longer in populations dependent on hunting, there was no qualitative evidence that such populations lacked foods appropriate for weaning. The patterns observed suggest that the relationships between demography and subsistence observed among preindustrial societies cannot be explained by the “weaning food availability” hypothesis. We discuss the implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying prehistoric human demography, subsistence shifts, allocation to parenting and mating effort, and the evolutionary implications of tradeoffs between diet and disease. (shrink)

Game theory is a formal approach to behavior that focuses on the strategic aspect of situations. The game theoretic approach originates in economics but has been embraced by scholars across disciplines, including many philosophers and biologists. This approach has an important weakness: the strategic aspect of a situation, which is its defining quality in game theory, is often not its most salient quality in human cognition. Evidence from a wide range of experiments highlights this shortcoming. Previous theoretical and empirical work (...) has sought to address this weakness by considering learning across an ensemble of multiple games simultaneously. Here we extend this framework, incorporating artificial neural networks, to allow for an investigation of the interaction between the perceptual and functional similarity of the games composing the larger ensemble. Using this framework, we conduct a theoretical investigation of a population that encounters both stag hunts and prisoner’s dilemmas, two situations that are strategically different but which may or may not be perceptually similar. (shrink)

In the game theory literature, Garrett Hardin’s famous allegory of the “tragedy of the commons” has been modeled as a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, labeled the Herder Problem (or, sometimes, the Commons Dilemma). This brief paper argues that important differences in the institutional structures of the standard Prisoner’s Dilemma and Herder Problem render the two games different in kind. Specifically, institutional impediments to communication and cooperation that ensure a dominant strategy of defection in the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma are absent (...) in the Herder Problem. Their absence does not ensure that players will achieve a welfare-enhancing, cooperative solution to the Herders Problem, but does create far more opportunity for players to alter the expected payoffs through cooperative arrangements. In a properly modeled Herder Problem—along the lines of an assurance game—defection would not always be the dominant strategy. Consequently, the Herder Problem is not in the nature of a Prisoner’s Dilemma. (shrink)

Researchers have long been interested in how owners affect firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance. However, owners face diverging ethical preferences between funding and potentially benefiting from their firms’ CSR performance. To better understand owners’ influence on firms’ CSR performance, we focus on ultimate controlling owners with the highest control rights over their firms. We theorize that ultimate controlling owners with more control rights have stronger motivations and greater decision-making power to promote firms’ CSR performance to demonstrate that they are (...) responsible owners and gain legitimacy and goodwill from their stakeholders. Moreover, we explore how this positive relationship is strengthened when ultimate controlling owners and their firms share similar corporate names and receive increased financial analyst coverage, as these conditions increase the likelihood of gaining legitimacy and goodwill through their firms’ improved CSR performance. We test our theory using a sample of 852 publicly listed Chinese firms from 2008 to 2017. Our findings support our theoretical predictions and contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how differences in ownership structure and owner type associated with ultimate controlling owners shape their motives and power to affect CSR performance in their firms. (shrink)

Suppose we discovered that all the women in the Slobbovian culture exhibit a strong preference for blue-handled knives and red-handled forks. They would rather starve than eat with utensils of the wrong color. We’d be rightly puzzled, and eager to find an explanation. ‘Well,” these women tell us, “blue-handled knives are snazzier, you know. And just look at them: these red-handled forks are, well, just plain beautiful!” This should not satisfy us. Why do they say this? Their answers may make (...) sense to them, and even to us, once we’ve managed to insert ourselves to some degree into their culture, but that is not the end of it. We want to know why there is a culture with such apparently arbitrary and unmotivated preferences. To us outsiders, the need for an answer stands out, even if the Slobbovians themselves think their answers are self-evident and quite satisfying. Similarly, we may think it is just obvious that laughter is the appropriate response to humor. Why are some female shapes sexy and others not? Isn’t it obvious? Just look at them! But that is not the end of it. The universalities, regularities and trends in our responses to the world do indeed guarantee, trivially, that they are part of “human nature,” but that still leaves the question of why. Something must pay for these extravagant features. What? To answer, we need to adopt an evolutionary point of view, which encourages us to look at all aspects of human nature from the sort of alien, Martian perspective that science thrives on. This perspective, self-consciously objective and bristling with hooks for attachment to the rest of science, is anathema to John Dupré. It reeks of “reductionism” and “scientism” and “economism”. He wants to preserve and even privilege the traditional “explanations” of such features of human nature, not just as part of the story but as a part that excuses us from hunting for deeper, unifying explanations of the same features. Wittgenstein famously said that explanation has to stop somewhere, and Dupré seems to want it to stop just before these curiously invasive evolutionary questions get posed. (shrink)

Modern attitudes to meat in both men and women reflect a strong meat-masculinity association. Sex differences in the relationship between meat and masculinity have not been previously explored. In the current study we used two IATs (implicit association tasks), a visual search task, and a questionnaire to measure implicit and explicit attitudes toward meat in men and women. Men exhibited stronger implicit associations between meat and healthiness than did women, but both sexes associated meat more strongly with ‘healthy’ than ‘unhealthy’ (...) concepts. As ‘healthy’ was operationalized in the current study using terms such as “virile” and “powerful,” this suggests that a meat-strength/power association may mediate the meat-masculinity link readily observed across western cultures. The sex difference was not related to explicit attitudes to meat, nor was it attributable to a variety of other factors, such as a generally more positive disposition toward meat in men than women. Men also exhibited an attention bias toward meats, compared to non-meat foods, while females exhibited more caution when searching for non-meat foods, compared to meat. These biases were not related to implicit attitudes, but did tend to increase with increasing hunger levels. Potential ultimate explanations for these differences, including sex differences in bio-physiological needs and receptivity to social signals are discussed. (shrink)

The origin of insulin‐expressing β‐cells in the adult mammalian pancreas is controversial. During normal tissue turnover and following injury, β‐cells may be replaced by duplication of existing β‐cells.1 However, an alternative source of β‐cells has recently been proposed based on neogenesis from a Ngn3‐positive population present in regenerating pancreatic ducts.2 The appearance of β‐cells from Ngn3‐positive progenitors is reminiscent of normal pancreas development, and Ngn3‐expressing cells isolated from regenerating pancreas can generate the full repertoire of endocrine phenotypes. The isolation and (...) characterisation of the equivalent human progenitors may represent a significant step forward in the hunt for a cure for diabetes. BioEssays 30:617–620, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

INTENSIONAL LOGIC §1. Natural Language and Intensional Logic When we speak of a theory of meaning for a natural language such as English, we have in mind an ...

The human world is replete with narratives - narratives of our making that are uniquely appreciated by us. Some thinkers have afforded special importance to our capacity to generate such narratives, seeing it as variously enabling us to: exercise our imaginations in unique ways; engender an understanding of actions performed for reasons; and provide a basis for the kind of reflection and evaluation that matters vitally to moral and self development. Perhaps most radically, some hold that narratives are essential for (...) the constitution of human selves. This volume brings together nine original contributions in which the individual authors advance, develop and challenge proposals of these kinds. They critically examine the place and importance of narratives in human lives and consider the underlying capacities that permit us to produce and utilise these special artifacts. All of the papers are written in a non-technical and accessible style. (shrink)

This text focuses on the theory of popular politics constructed within the context of analytical Marxism, and asks if rational choice theory provides an adequate basis for explaining patterns of social, political and economic behaviour in traditional China.

Although torture can establish guilt through confession, how are judgments of guilt made when tortured suspects do not confess? We suggest that perceived guilt is based inappropriately upon how much pain suspects appear to suffer during torture. Two psychological theories provide competing predictions about the link between pain and perceived blame: cognitive dissonance, which links pain to blame, and moral typecasting, which links pain to innocence. We hypothesized that dissonance might characterize the relationship between torture and blame for those close (...) to the torture, while moral typecasting might characterize this relationship for those more distant from it. Accordingly, this experiment placed participants into one of two different roles in which people may be exposed to torture. Participants in the proximal role of prison staffer saw suffering torture victims as relatively more guilty, while participants in the relatively distant role of a radio listener saw suffering victims as more innocent. (shrink)

Since political theorist Leo Strauss’s death in 1973, American interpreters have heatedly debated his intellectual legacy. Daniel Tanguay recovers Strauss from the atmosphere of partisan debate that has dominated American journalistic, political, and academic discussions of his work. Tanguay offers in crystal-clear prose the first assessment of the whole of Strauss’s thought, a daunting task owing to the vastness and scope of Strauss’s writings. This comprehensive overview of Strauss’s thought is indispensable for anyone seeking to understand his philosophy and (...) legacy. Tanguay gives special attention to Strauss’s little-known formative years, 1920-1938, during which the philosopher elaborated _the_ theme of his research, what he termed the “theological-political problem.” Tanguay shows the connection of this theme to other major elements in Strauss’s thought, such as the Quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns, the return to classical natural right, the art of esoteric writing, and his critique of modernity. In so doing, the author approaches what is at the heart of Strauss’s work: God and politics. Rescuing Strauss from polemics and ill-defined generalizations about his ideas, Tanguay provides instead an important and timely analysis of a major philosophical thinker of the twentieth century. (shrink)

In order to clarify the Stoics’ reasons for polemicizing against the other philosophical schools, one has to examine the place and function of dialectic in the Stoic system. It emerges that, instead of the heuristic role that it plays in Academic teaching, for the Stoics dialectic has only a defensive function : it is not used to find out the truth through a critical examination of opposing arguments, but to defend against any objection a truth that is known beforehand. This (...) Stoic belief that they were in possession of truth would then be somewhat similar to a religious faith. (shrink)

Philosophy of Jazz discusses the philosophical relevance of jazz, showing that jazz and European art music have more in common than many assume.

Saadya ben Joseph al-Fayyumi, gaon of the rabbinic academy at Sura and one of the preeminent Jewish thinkers of the medieval period, attempted to create a complete statement of Jewish religious philosophy in which all strands of philosophical thought were to be knit into a unified system. In _The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs_, Saadya sought to rescue believers from "a sea of doubt and the waters of confusion" into which they had been cast by Christianity, Islam, and other faiths. (...) By employing philosophical--or kalamic--argumentation to examine and defend traditional Jewish beliefs, Saadya hoped to turn blind faith into conviction based on rational understanding. First published in 1946, and reprinted here without alteration, Alexander Altmann’s judicious abridgment of his own translation has remained the standard edition of this influential work. A new Introduction by Daniel Frank sets Saadya’s work in its broader historical, cultural, and philosophical contexts. (shrink)

Many experiments have demonstrated that people fail to detect seemingly large visual changes in their environment. Despite these failures, most people confidently predict that they would see changes that are actually almost impossible to see. Therefore, in at least some situations visual experience is demonstrably not what people think it is. This paper describes a line of research suggesting that overconfidence about change detection reflects a deeper metacognitive error founded on beliefs about attention and the role of meaning as a (...) support for a coherent perceptual experience. Accordingly, CBB does not occur in all situations , while the scope of the phenomenon remains broad enough to suggest more than a misunderstanding of a small niche of visual experience. I finish by arguing that despite the very small amount of research on visual metacognition, these beliefs are critical to understand. (shrink)

It has been proposed that inferring personal authorship for an event gives rise to intentional binding, a perceptual illusion in which one’s action and inferred effect seem closer in time than they otherwise would (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002). Using a novel, naturalistic paradigm, we conducted two experiments to test this hypothesis and examine the relationship between binding and self-reported authorship. In both experiments, an important authorship indicator – consistency between one’s action and a subsequent event – was manipulated, and (...) its effects on binding and self-reported authorship were measured. Results showed that action-event consistency enhanced both binding and self-reported authorship, supporting the hypothesis that binding arises from an inference of authorship. At the same time, evidence for a dissociation emerged, with consistency having a more robust effect on self-reports than on binding. Taken together, these results suggest that binding and self-reports reveal different aspects of the sense of authorship. Ó 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Imagine a gadget, call it “brain-ovision,” for brain scanning that doesn’t create pictures of brains at all. That’s right, no orbs spattered with colorful “activations” that need to be interpreted by neuroanatomists. Instead, with brain-o-vision, what a brain sees is what you get—an image of what that brain is experiencing. If the person who owns the brain is envisioning lunch, up pops a cheeseburger on the screen. If the person is reading a book, the screen shows the words. For that (...) matter, if the brain owner is feeling pain, perhaps brain-o-vision could reach out and swat the viewer with a rolled-up newspaper. Brain-ovision could give us access to another person’s consciousness. Technologies for brain-o-vision are beginning to seem possible. We are learning how brain activations map onto emotions, memories, and mental processes, and it won’t be long before we might translate activations into Google searches for images of what the brain is thinking. There is a specific brain area linked with face perception, for instance, and even a neuron that fires when it sees Jennifer Aniston. So why, in principle, shouldn’t we be able to scan a brain and discover when it is looking at her—and eventually even learn what she’s wearing? Of course, it may be many years to the beta version. But imagine that everything works out and brain-o-vision goes on sale at Wal- Mart. Could the device solve the problem of whether consciousness causes behavior? With direct evidence of a person’s consciousness, we could do science on the question. We could observe regularities in the relation between consciousness and behavior. If the consciousness always preceded the behavior, we could arrive at the inductive inference of causation and, as scientists, be quite happy that we had established a causal connection. (shrink)

Respondents saw photos and vignettes on the characters in random order (Appendix A), and selected a survey from a set of descriptions of 18 mental capacities or 6 personal judgments (Appendix B). For the survey, images and descriptions of the two characters to be compared appeared with a five-point scale anchored by “Much more this one” below each image, “Slightly more this one” next, and “Both equally” between the images. Respondents also supplied demographic information and made 7-point Likerttype ratings on (...) religious belief (“I consider myself to be strongly religious” and “I believe that God exists”) and afterlife belief (“I believe that people whose bodies are dead continue to live on spiritually”). On survey completion, respondents were shown how their rank ordering of the characters compared with the mean of others who had completed the same survey. Respondents.. (shrink)

'Lebendiges Judentum', schreibt Walter Benjamin 1930 an Gershom Scholem, 'habe ich in durchaus keiner anderen Gestalt kennengelernt als in dir.' Scholem, Historiker der Kabbala, früher Zionist, scharfer Kritiker der jüdischen Assimilation, Freund und Herausgeber Benjamins ist eine schillernde Gestalt und Autor faszinierender Texte. Die in den letzten Jahren veröffentlichten Jugendtagebücher und -briefe geben Einsicht in die Entwicklung des jungen Scholem und die Werkstatt seines Schreibens. Nach heftigen persönlichen Krisen und vehementen Auseinandersetzungen mit seinen Mitzionisten lernt Scholem, 'im Namen' des Judentums (...) zu sprechen. Er eignet sich die jüdische Überlieferung an und entwirft eine Philosophie und Theologie des 'Kommentars'. Als Historiker der Kabbala macht Scholem die verschlossene Welt mystischer Texte durch eine dynamische Lektüre zum Kraftfeld jüdischer Identität. Der Band führt einen jungen Intellektuellen auf der Suche nach sich und dem Judentum vor, er untersucht die Verflechtung von politischen, theologischen und wissenschaftlichen Schriften und leuchtet deren intellektual-geschichtliche Kontexte aus. (shrink)

Des origines à la fin du cinquième siècle. Les Présocratiques -- La période classique. Socrate ; Platon ; Aristote et l'école péripatéticienne -- Les philosophies hellénistiques. La critique de la religion populaire à l'âge hellénistique et la philosophie épicurienne de la religion ; La religion des Stoïciens.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.3 (2003) 469-471 [Access article in PDF] Warner and Shaw's Medea Ruth Scodel What should we, as classicists, want from contemporary productions of ancient dramas? As scholars, we tend to be historicists: whether or not we locate the basis for interpretation in an author, we usually locate it in the original context, if only because that is our expertise and the basis for our authority. (...) The study of tragedy has in recent years been dominated by new historicism, which places the plays firmly within the discursive world of fifth-century Athens. Typically, however, the more embedded the plays are in their own cultural discourse, the less immediately they speak within ours. Simultaneously, reception studies have flowered but do not provide much help in thinking about how our scholarly reception might or should interact with the theater. What do we hope productions will offer the broader public? What do we hope to learn from them for ourselves?A recent high-profile production of Medea invites such questions. 1 Warner and Shaw's Medea is filtered not through new historicism or even old historicism but through the miseries of contemporary divorce. (In a panel discussion at the University of Michigan, Shaw told anecdotes of divorcing couples who chopped up antique beds or gave away their spouse's wine cellars.) Generally favorably received by critics and audiences, it was severely criticized by Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review of Books. He calls it "vulgar, noisy, and uncomprehending" for its focus on the personal rather on the political. 2 Insisting that tragic women do not represent real women (or not just real women) but are "rather symbolic entities representing everything 'other' to that smoothly coherent citizen identity," Mendelsohn argues that "Warner's Euripides fails because it mistakes 'our' women for Euripides' women." As a [End Page 469] historicist, he objects that a production that ignores the political in the play thereby reduces it to domestic melodrama.There are at least two questions here. Whatever else Euripides' women were, Aristophanes shows plainly that members of the original audience thought they were representatives of real women. This Medea assumes that Euripides' women are near enough to our women. That is an acceptable working assumption. More troublesome is the other side of Mendelsohn's objection: that this production develops only one aspect of a complex play and is therefore reductive. That is undeniably true. Indeed, the reading of Euripides behind this production is in some ways perverse. Inevitably, as a scholar I feel troubled at having it offered to an audience as Euripides ("a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer").And yet: the set (with the pool of water that has become so frequent in recent theater) is littered with concrete blocks, as if Jason and Medea were in the middle of a remodeling project when Jason left. We classicists are used to prior knowledge of our plays, but this production fights our tendency to see tragedy as enacting the already known. Just as the set is not finished, Medea is uncertain, and her ignorance of what she is going to do allows even the professional to indulge in the illusion of not knowing the outcome. (Whether or not Euripides invented the murder of the children, the original audience did not know exactly what would happen.) The first half is very funny. Medea herself seems intensely aware that there is something fundamentally ridiculous about passion and revenge. Shaw delivers lines, especially gnomes, with ironic distance, as if they were already clichés and she were already tired of them. Hence her Medea is not the one familiar to Classicists, the adherent of a typical male heroic code, but rather a woman who says these things because they are available, exhausted by the banality of her own suffering. Her self-consciousness is reminiscent of Seneca's Medea; however, she is not working towards a self that already exists, but hunting for an acceptable role to play. Educated moderns surely often have this experience of feeling trapped in situations where our emotions... (shrink)

Since the 1970s, a sea change has marked the politics of science in the United States. In the quarter century after World War II, a broad, bipartisan consensus prevailed on the promotion and uses of science in American society: first, that the federal government should support research and training in technically meritorious fields of likely long-term benefit to national defense, the economy, and health; second, that the benefits of this investment should be developed into useful products by the private sector; (...) and that public policy in technically related areas should be shaped by drawing on highly qualified, non-partisan expertise. Since the 1970s, that bipartisan consensus has corroded, ushering in a New Politics of Science in the U.S. Ideological restrictions, largely from the political right, have prohibited or severely constricted federal support of research in areas such as human therapeutic cloning, human stem cells, in vitro fertilization, and human embryo research. The devotion to privatization and entrepreneurship in the name of high technology competitiveness has, in areas such as biotechnology, blurred the lines both intellectually and institutionally between academia and industry, with questionable consequences for the public interest. And nonpartisanship in the scientific advisory system has been succeeded by unashamed partisanship, fueled by the mobilization of expertise on the right in issues ranging from the teaching of evolution in the schools to global warming. The reasons for this sea change can be found in the larger rightward shift over the period on both the foreign and domestic fronts. (shrink)