If one takes a course in philosophy to-day at a British university, a discreet silence is usually observed about existentialism. Often the professors understand little of its methods or its doctrine. If their excuse in part is the inaccessibility in English of standard existentialist texts, it is true also that philosophers trained in the “critical philosophy” now in vogue feel a certain aversion to existentialism or, at all events, to the notion they have formed of it. If Christianity was a (...) scandal to the Greeks and remains a scandal, as Dr. Brunner has recently told us, to contemporary humanists, existentialism is a scandal to the positivists. The latter are aware that the existentialists habitually trespass in the fields of religion, ethics, aesthetics and psychology, fields which, on the positivist view, should be reserved to other disciplines than philosophy, which has its own distinctive subject-matter and approach. They know that certain existentialists, notably Heidegger, provide a happy hunting ground for examples of “metaphysics.” They have heard that existentialism has sought to turn the tables on positivism by accusing it, if not of metaphysics, at all events of a barrenness of significant content, of a preoccupation with mere logistics which removes philosophy completely from men's business and bosoms. If the positivist accuses the existentialist of perpetrating “nonsense” in a technical sense, the latter retorts by accusing the positivist of reducing philosophy to nonsense in a pragmatic sense. (shrink)

These texts, the property of the Egypt Exploration Society, were purchased, together with other literary and documentary material, from a Greek lady at Medînet-el-Faiyûm by Dr. J. de M. Johnson in 1914. I am grateful to the Secretary of the Society for permission to publish them.

We are entering an era in which “cultural construction of the body” refers to a literal technological enterprise. This era was anticipated in the 1920s by geneticist J. B. S. Haldane in a lecture which inspired Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In that lecture, Haldane reinterpreted the Greek myth of Daedalus and the Minotaur as heroic fable. Seventy years later another geneticist, François Jacob, used the same myth as cautionary tale. Here I explain the Minotaur's “genetic” monstrosity in terms of (...) disability and hybridity, using the movie Gattaca to argue that ancient fears of monstrously disabled bodies are being recycled as bioethics. (shrink)

Book list for independent research component Aizenman, J., and Pinto, B. (eds.), Managing Economic Volatility and Crises: A Practitioner’s Guide. Cambridge U.P. 978-0521855242..

A supertask is a task that consists in infinitely many component steps, but which in some sense is completed in a finite amount of time. Supertasks were studied by the pre-Socratics and continue to be objects of interest to modern philosophers, logicians and physicists. The term “super-task” itself was coined by J.F. Thomson (1954). Here we begin with an overview of the analysis of supertasks and their mechanics. We then discuss the possibility of supertasks from the perspective of general relativity.

We discuss some recent work by Tim Maudlin concerning Black Hole Information Loss. We argue, contra Maudlin, that there is a paradox, in the straightforward sense that there are propositions that appear true, but which are incompatible with one another. We discuss the significance of the paradox and Maudlin's response to it.

Leibnizian metaphysics underpins the universally held view that spacetime must be inextendible – that it must be “as large as it can be” in a sense. But here we demonstrate a surprising fact within the context of general relativity: the property of inextendibility turns out to be unstable when attention is restricted to certain collections of “physically reasonable”spacetimes.

Introduction: conceptual analysis of teaching, by B. P. Komisar and T. W. Nelson.--A concept of teaching, by B. O. Smith.--The concept of teaching, by I. Sheffler.--A topology of the teaching concept, by T. F. Green.--Teaching: act and enterprise, by B. P. Komisar.--Must an education have an aim? By R. S. Peters.--Curriculum as a field of study, by D. Heubner.--Can and should means-ends reasoning be used in teaching? By C. J. B. Macmillan and J. E. McClellan.

The Rev’d Roland Allen’s grandson ventures to speculate on the attitudes his grandfather might be expected to have adopted regarding several of today’s controversial issues. After rehearsing briefly Roland’s published and unpublished work, Hubert Allen reviews, both on the basis of Roland’s expressed opinions and by inference from remarks made by him or by members of his immediate family, how he believes his grandfather would have reacted to six matters of current or recent controversy, namely: Modern Translations of the Bible, (...) The Role of Women in the Church, Homosexuality, Ecumenism, Inter-Faith Dialogue, and the proposed Anglican Covenant. (shrink)

This paper explores a remarkable convergence of ideas and evidence, previously presented in separate places by its authors. That convergence has now become so persuasive that we believe we are working within substantially the same broad framework. Taylor's mathematical papers on neuronal systems involved in consciousness dovetail well with work by Newman and Baars on the thalamocortical system, suggesting a brain mechanism much like the global workspace architecture developed by Baars (see references below). This architecture is relational, in the sense (...) that it continuously mediates the interaction of input with memory. While our approaches overlap in a number of ways, each of us tends to focus on different areas of detail. What is most striking, and we believe significant, is the extent of consensus, which we believe to be consistent with other contemporary approaches by Weiskrantz, Gray, Crick and Koch, Edelman, Gazzaniga, Newell and colleagues, Posner, Baddeley, and a number of others. We suggest that cognitive neuroscience is moving toward a shared understanding of consciousness in the brain. (shrink)

As the community corrections system has moved away from a focus on rehabilitation, it has been suggested that criminal offenders are no longer understood psychologically, but rather as rational actors for whom criminality is a choice. Rehabilitative efforts thus aim to guide these choices. Utilizing mixed methodology that draws on observational, interview, and case note data collected within the probation/parole system of a western U.S. state, I suggest that both officers’ conceptualizations of the criminal self and the rehabilitative strategies they (...) use are gendered. I find that officers view the male criminal self as flawed or underdeveloped and the female as permeable and amorphous, that is, lacking firm boundaries. In response to these constructions, officers aim to rehabilitate men largely by encouraging economic roles and responsibilities, while for women, rehabilitation aims to solidify boundaries: discouraging relationship formation and containing emotions. The differences identified point to ways in which gendered concepts of the criminal self contribute to gender disparities in contemporary supervision. (shrink)