Biblical ethics -- The insights of history.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:OSCAR WILDE AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM by Guy Willoughby Towards the beginning ofthe hugely entertaining and provocative manifesto called "The Critic as Artist" (1890),1 Oscar Wilde causes the well-named discipulus Ernest to inquire of the suave magister, Gilbert: "But what are the two supreme and highest arts?" The prompt answer takes us to the heart ofWilde's aesthetic priorities: "Life and Literature," says Gilbert: "Life and the perfect expression (...) of life" (p. 1016). The aim of this discussion is, first, to consider the terms of Oscar Wilde's aesthetics; second, to relate them to tendencies in contemporary theory. I will be arguing, in sum, that the ideas entertained in his essays, and demonstrated in his fictions, have suggestive implications for our practices today—particularly in die light of a gathering rapprochement across the range of cultural study. The abiding theme ofOscar Wilde's writings is his insistence throughout not merely on art's primacy, but on the vital importance ofaesthetic criteria to life itself. In de Profundü (1897), that extraordinary attempt at self-definition, the author claims that it is only by conceiving of one's existence as an art-statement, as a dynamic convergence of forces extending in time and place, that trial, humiliation, and reversal—the shocks the flesh is heir to—can be imaginatively subsumed into a composite whole. He summed up the argument of the apologia thus to André Gide: "My life is like a work of art; an artist never starts the 316 Guy Willoughby317 same thing twice... or if he does, it's that he hasn't succeeded. My life before prison was as successful as possible. Now it's something that's over."2 Accordingly, he ascribes in de Profundis the greatest value to the frank acceptance of all one's deeds and susceptibilities, no matter how vicious or unlovely: "to reject one's experiences is to arrest one's development," he writes. "Whatever is realised is right" (p. 916). It is noteworthy, furthermore, that Wilde oudines this same argument under varying conditions throughout his work as essayist, story-teller, and playwright. In his wry but delicately tuned fairy tales, the most successful heroes and heroines are those who—like the litde Nightingale, the young King, or the Star-Child—manage to transform their lives into images of complex, artistic unity, suggestive of the radical power of the imagination. As the author ofde Profundis was to remark: "every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be the fulfilment of a prophecy" (p. 928). Likewise, the elegant rhetorical strategies of Wilde's two critical dialogues announce art's power to starde and provoke its spectators into new attitudes, and—in particular—to suggest a transference ofaesthetic criteria to life itself. Artistic appreciation develops "that sense of form which is the basis of creative no less than of critical achievement," which may then be profitably applied to one's disparate experience: "it is form that creates not merely the critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct, that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things under their conditions of beauty" ("The Critic as Artist," p. 1052). It is only by cultivating a flexible, formalist oudook that a cramping and static Weltanschauung may be avoided; ethical distinctions too must be recast, if a successful life-as-artwork is to be sustained. Thus, writes Wilde, "Ethics, like natural selection, makes existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, makes life lovely and wonderful, fills it with new forms, and gives it progress, variety and change" (p. 1058). Moreover, the critical or aesthetic impulse—and the point of Wilde's essay is that the terms are interchangeable—has overall a vital cosmopolitan function; it will heal all human divisions, "by insisting on the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms" (p. 1057). If we transfer aesthetic criteria from art to life, therefore, we will discover a new raison d'être in a skeptical age; we will understand that our apprehension of symmetry in art offers a motive for restoring a novel order to our own lives, singly and together. So it will be that "form [will... (shrink)

Complex demonstratives, expressions of the form 'That F', 'These Fs', etc., have traditionally been taken to be referring terms. Yet they exhibit many of the features of quantified noun phrases. This has led some philosophers to suggest that demonstrative determiners are a special kind of quantifier, which can be paraphrased using a context sensitive definite description. Both these views contain elements of the truth, though each is mistaken. We advance a novel account of the semantic form of complex demonstratives that (...) shows how to reconcile the view that they function like quantified noun phrases with the view that simple demonstratives function as context sensitive referring terms wherever they occur. If we are right, previous accounts of complex demonstratives have misconceived their semantic role; and philosophers relying on the majority view in employing complex demonstratives in analysis have proceeded on a false assumption. (shrink)

Private law governs our most pervasive relationships with other people: the wrongs we do to one another, the property we own and exclude from others' use, the contracts we make and break, and the benefits realized at another's expense that we cannot justly retain. The major rules of private law are well known, but how they are organized, explained, and justified is a matter of fierce debate by lawyers, economists, and philosophers.

This volume of essays deals with the problem of relativism, in particular cultural relativism. If our society knows better than other societies, how do we know that it knows better? There is a profound irony in the fact that this self-doubt has become most acute in the one civilisation that has persuaded the rest of the world to emulate it. The claim to cognitive superiority is often restricted, of course, to the limited sphere of natural science and technology; and that (...) immediately raises the second main theme of this volume - the differences between the human and natural sciences. These essays reach towards a new style and mode of enquiry - a mixture of philosophy, history and anthropology - that promises to prove more revealing and fruitful. (shrink)

There is a relationship between reading and math skills, as well as comorbidity between reading and math disorders. A mutual foundation for this comorbidity could be that the quality of phonological representations is important for both early reading and arithmetic. In this study, we examine this hypothesis in a sample traced longitudinally from preschool to first grade. The results show that phonological awareness does not explain development in arithmetic, but that there is an indirect effect between phoneme awareness in preschool (...) and arithmetic in first grade via phoneme awareness in first grade. This effect is, however, weak and restricted to verbal arithmetic and not arithmetic fluency. This finding is only partly in line with other studies, and a reason could be that this study more strongly controls for confounders and previous skills than other studies. (shrink)

Community-researcher partnerships constitute one of the most important recent developments in biomedical ethics. The partnerships protect vulnerable communities within which research is conducted and help ensure that the communities benefit from the research. At the same time, they embody deep, core values about the social nature of persons and the value of community that significantly modify the radical individualism too often associated with the prevailing concepts of autonomy and respect for persons. This article examines the burgeoning literature on community-researcher partnerships (...) to identify the main ways of thinking ethically about the obligations of investigators and the roles and rights of communities in scientific research. The paper helps to uncover the deep commonalities and differences that mark the current debate in this emerging arena of research ethics, a debate over the social nature of persons that is beginning to influence the understanding of other bioethical issues. (shrink)

Now I may not be an educated man . . . But it seems to me to go against common sense to ask what the poet is ‘trying to say’. The poem isn’t a code for something easily understood. The poem is what he is trying to say.

The author reviews the history of the science of man in relation to contemporary problems and offers proposals for a true merger of science and philosophy.

What is the ontological status of temporal becoming, of the present, or the now? We shall consider in turn four answers to this question: (i) the objective-property doctrine, (ii) the thought-reflexive analysis, (iii) the tensed-exemplification view, and (iv) the form-of-thought account.

This paper advances a general argument, inspired by some remarks of Davidson, to show that appeal to meanings as entities in the theory of meaning is neither necessary nor sufficient for carrying out the tasks of the theory of meaning. The crucial point is that appeal to meaning as entities fails to provide us with an understanding of any expression of a language except insofar as we pick it out with an expression we understand which we tacitly recognize to be (...) a translation of the term whose meaning we want to illuminate by the appeal to assigning to it a meaning. The meaning drops out as irrelevant: the work is done, and can only be done, by matching terms already understood with terms they translate. (shrink)

This book addresses the most important questions asked about higher education: What should its content be? What should we educate for, and why? What constitutes a meaningful liberal education, as distinct from mere training for a vocation? These and many other questions are addressed by Reuben Abel, M.H. Abrams, Robert L. Bartley, Ronald Berman, Also S. Bernardo, Wm. Theodore deBary, Gray Dorsey, Joseph Dunner, Nathan Glazer, Feliks Gross, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Gerald Holton, Sidney Hook, Charles Issawi, Montimer R. Kadish, Paul (...) class='Hi'>Oscar Krissteller, paul Kurtz, Herbert I. London, Ernest Nagel, Henry R. Novotny, Frederick A. Olafson, Michael Rabin, Howard B. Radest, Joseph J. Schwab, Robert F. Sexton, Thomas Sowell, John B. Stephenson, and Miro M. Todorovich. (shrink)

The article concentrates on a key concept of the Fin de Siecle in Europe – namely, “dilettantism” and its connection with Czech Decadent literature. Dilettantism, as explained by Paul Bourget in his essay on Ernest Renan , is characterized by the individual’s refusal to forego any possible experience by adhering to a setmode of life. The “dilettante critic” originates in the idea of the “critic as artist” as developed by Oscar Wilde, who in turn is indebted to Pater’s (...) conception of the “aesthetic critic.” In dilettantism there are many pitfalls: the dilettante may be the perfect embodiment of the “Decadent” type with his Willenskrankheit, hypertrophied analysis, over-refinement, hyper-aestheticism, eclecticism, and sterility. Arnošt Procházka , for instance, applies the term “dilettante” to Andrea Sperelli , modelled on Huysmans’s Des Esseintes. The controversies over Dilettantism appear here as an expression of an exclusive concern with “life,” a concept that a cornerstone of philosophical debate of the period. (shrink)

This article argues for a way out of the swamping problem by showing where his virtue epistemology substantially departs from traditional process reliabilism and how such departure is enough to protect the former from issues that affect the way the latter accounts for the value of knowledge over mere true belief.

This paper is inter-disciplinary. Its disadvantage is that the author is not sufficiently conversant with the disciplines it is inter. He may however, like Lord Wavell, claim that at least the thread that binds them is his own.The paper is of philosophic interest in that it is inspired by, and hopes to shed some light on, the notion of an ideal language. It is of interest to social anthropology in that its main subject is kinship structure. It may be of (...) interest to mathematicians in setting a task. (shrink)

I am grateful to both Richards, Foley and Fumerton, for the time and attention that they have given to my work. I have certainly learned from their excellent comments, just as I expected. Given the constraints, however, I must be selective in my response. First of all, I will aim to present my view of human knowledge in a broader context. Against this background I will then respond to several of the points they have made.

Worldwide, antibiotic use is increasing, but many infections against which antibiotics are applied are not even caused by bacteria. Over‐the‐counter and internet sales preclude physician oversight. Regional differences, between and within countries highlight many potential factors influencing antibiotic use. Taking a systems perspective that considers pharmaceutical commodity chains, we examine antibiotic overuse from the vantage point of both sides of the therapeutic relationship. We examine patterns and expectations of practitioners and patients, institutional policies and pressures, the business strategies of pharmaceutical (...) companies and distributors, and cultural drivers of variation. Solutions to improve antibiotic stewardship include practitioners taking greater responsibility for their antibiotic prescribing, increasing the role of caregivers as diagnosticians rather than medicine providers, improving their communication to patients about antibiotic treatment consequences, lessening the economic influences on prescribing, and identifying antibiotic alternatives. (shrink)