What makes an act of killing morally wrong is not that the act causes loss of life or consciousness but rather that the act causes loss of all remaining abilities. This account implies that it is not even pro tanto morally wrong to kill patients who are universally and irreversibly disabled, because they have no abilities to lose. Applied to vital organ transplantation, this account undermines the dead donor rule and shows how current practices are compatible with morality.

We are very grateful to the commentators for taking the time to respond to our little article, ‘What Makes Killing Wrong?’ They raise many points, so we cannot respond to them all, but we do want to head off a few misinterpretations.Our critics in this journal avoid one careless misinterpretation, but less informed readers have pressed this misinterpretation in popular venues, so we need to start by renouncing it. We do not deny that killing humans is morally wrong. To the (...) contrary, we argue that killing humans is almost always morally wrong, because killing humans is almost always disabling, and disabling is morally wrong. Here we do not disagree with common sense. We also do not deny that killing partially or even profoundly disabled humans is morally wrong. People who are disabled in some ways still retain many other valuable abilities. This should be obvious. To kill a person with some disabilities but many other valuable abilities is to disable that person, so that is morally wrong. Here again we do not disagree with common sense. The one and only surprising application of our theory is to humans who are alive but totally disabled. We argue that, apart from special circumstances, it is not morally wrong to kill live humans who are totally disabled, whereas many people think that it would be morally wrong to kill even in these extreme and unusual cases, because they assume that killing is morally wrong for reasons apart from disabling.What could those reasons be? DeGrazia mentions three possibilities. First, ‘the harm of killing —in those ordinary cases in …. (shrink)

O presente artigo aborda a evolução da representação do corpo masculino na moda contemporânea, destacando a transição de uma imagem delgada e associada à homossexualidade e à AIDS para um ideal de corpo musculoso e viril. A pesquisa foca na influência do mercado de moda e do poder de compra dos grupos homossexuais nessa transformação. Discute-se como a masculinidade é uma construção social e como a mídia e a moda disseminam o corpo masculino como objeto de desejo e consumo. A (...) análise abrange desde a ascensão dos direitos das mulheres até o papel da fotografia e das redes sociais na perpetuação desse ideal corporal​. (shrink)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin Miller have presented an account of why killing is wrong that implies it can be permissible to kill certain human beings in order to use their organs for transplantation.1 Since I am going to criticise their arguments, I will begin by applauding their willingness to defend an unpopular position and by registering my agreement with their substantive conclusion about organ procurement. The criticisms I will offer are intended to be friendly in spirit; but they are (...) also, of course, meant to be effective.Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller argue that the wrongness of killing is reducible to the wrongness of disabling, in particular, the wrongness of totally disabling. ‘The rule against disabling,’ they write, ‘fully explains all that is bad and wrong with… killing.’1One might think that their view is just a slight modification of the familiar view that the wrongness of killing is reducible to the wrongness of harming. According to this view, killing is normally gravely wrong because it inflicts on its victim a particularly grievous harm by depriving him of all the good that his future life would otherwise have contained. If the authors' view were just a restatement of this harm-based account of the wrongness of killing, one might conclude that their emphasis on disability is needlessly provocative. But in fact their view is quite different. This is because disabling is only one form of harming. On might seriously harm a person—for example, by causing him to experience mild chronic pain for the remainder of his life—without in any way disabling him. He would retain all his abilities but would be less comfortable while exercising them. Because there are thus forms of harming that are not instances of disabling, a rule …. (shrink)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin Miller1 make a convincing case for their claim that what is wrong about killing someone is that one is putting the person in a state of universal and irreversible disability. Thus, killing in and of itself is not an additional harm for a person who has been universally and irreversibly disabled. The implications for such a view are, as they note, quite wide-ranging. Given advances in medical technology, there are individuals being kept alive now who (...) are universally and irreversibly disabled. Not only would death not be viewed as an additional harm, but it may also be the case that the organs of such individuals should be made available to save the lives of those who are not universally and irreversibly disabled. Given how Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller spell out what universal and irreversible mean, I am in broad …. (shrink)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin G Miller recently argued that the wrongness of killing is best explained by the harm that comes to the victim, and that ‘total disability’ best explains the nature of this harm. Hence, killing patients who are already totally disabled is not wrong. I maintain that their notion of total disability is ambiguous and that they beg the question with respect to whether there are abilities left over that remain relevant for the goods of personhood and (...) human worth. If these goods remain, then something more is lost in death than in ‘total disability,’ and their explanation of what makes killing wrong comes up short. But if total disability is equivalent with death, then their argument is an interesting one. (shrink)

In this issue, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin G. Miller argue that what makes killing wrong, when it is wrong, is not that it ends life, but that it causes complete and irreversible disability—what they call total disability. They hold that the wrongness of killing should be explained by reference to the harm that killing causes to the person who dies. And the only harm of this sort that killing causes, they argue, is the harm of being totally disabled: once (...) one is totally disabled, there is no further harm to one in losing one's life. It is no worse to be dead, and thus totally disabled, than it is to be totally disabled but alive.In fact, Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller concede that the story may be more complicated than this. For example, it may be that what makes killing wrong, when it is wrong, is not that it causes harm, but that it is intended to do so, or that it violates a right which protects against harm. But either way, harm plays a crucial role in explaining the wrongness of killing, and the relevant harm, they claim, is the harm of being disabled, not that of losing one's life.The Authors’ argument has important implications for medical ethics. Their view implies that killing a person need not be wrong when that person is already completely and irreversibly disabled. This suggests, for example, that the dead donor rule in organ donation is mistaken. Contrary to the rule, it could be morally permissible to harvest organs from a living donor provided that the donor is totally disabled. Harvesting organs will kill the donor, but it will not disable her, since the donor has no abilities left to lose.Four …. (shrink)

This volume explores the philosophical issues involved in the idea of petitionary prayer, where this is conceived as an activity designed to influence the action of the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good God of traditional theism. Theists have always recognized various logical and moral limits to divine action in the world, but do these limits leave any space among God's reasons for petitionary prayer to make a difference? Petitionary Prayer: A Philosophical Investigation develops a new account of the conditions required for (...) a petitionary prayer to be answered by employing the notion of contrastive explanation. With careful attention to recent developments in metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory, Scott A. Davison surveys the contemporary literature on this question. He considers questions about human freedom and responsibility in relation to different views of divine providence, along with the puzzles inherent in Christian teachings concerning petitionary prayer. Davison develops new challenges to the coherence of the idea of answered petitionary prayer based upon the nature of divine freedom, the limits of human knowledge, and the nature of those good things that require a recipient's permission before they can be given. He proposes new defences, building upon careful analysis of the shortcomings of previous proposals and clarifying the issues for future debate. (shrink)

I sketch here an intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types, which are individuated in part by historical paths (re)production. Although attractive, this view has been rejected by a number of authors on the basis of general claims about abstract objects. On consideration, however, these general claims are overgeneralizations, which whilst true of some abstracta, are not true of all abstract objects, and in particular, are not true of created types. The intuitive picture of repeatable artworks as created types (...) is, then, left in place. (shrink)

It is often thought that the numerous contradictory perspectives in Margaret Cavendish's writings demonstrate her inability to reconcile her feminism with her conservative, royalist politics. In this book Lisa Walters challenges this view and demonstrates that Cavendish's ideas more closely resemble republican thought, and that her methodology is the foundation for subversive political, scientific and gender theories. With an interdisciplinary focus Walters closely examines Cavendish's work and its context, providing the reader with an enriched understanding of women's contribution (...) to early modern scientific theory, political philosophy, culture and folklore. Considering also Cavendish's ideas in relation to Hobbes and Paracelsus, this volume is of great interest to scholars and students of literature, philosophy, history of ideas, political theory, gender studies and history of science. (shrink)

In the wake of the non-ideal theory turn in political philosophy, few have paused to ask: Is non-ideal theory a form of ideology? And perhaps even fewer have paused to ask: Is the debate between ideal/non-ideal theorists itself a form of ideology? To the first question, I argue that non-ideal theory is ideological in virtue of the fact that it rules out more utopian ways of theorizing by methodological fiat, and in so doing, risks entrenching an unjust status quo. To (...) the second question, I argue that the debate between ideal/non-ideal theorists is itself a form of ideology, one which serves to reinforce the status quo by convincing political philosophers/theorists that the most pressing problems are problems about what we should think about what we are doing. But this is false. An upshot of my argument is that we ought to abandon the ideal/non-ideal theory debate and address the pressing problems of political philosophy head-on in pluralist fashion, oscillating back and forth between these two modes of theorizing without a decision procedure to tell us when we should take up one perspective or the other. (shrink)

Are a material object, such as a statue, and its constituting matter, the clay, parts of one another? One wouldn't have thought so, and yet a number of philosophers have argued that they are. I review the arguments for this surprising claim showing how they all fail. I then consider two arguments against the view concluding that there are both pre-theoretical and theoretical considerations for denying that the statue and the clay are mutual parts.

I reply to Ahmed’s rejection (2011) of my argument (Walters 2009) that all counterfactuals with true antecedents and consequents are themselves true.

The standard semantics for counterfactuals ensures that any counterfactual with a true antecedent and true consequent is itself true. There have been many recent attempts to amend the standard semantics to avoid this result. I show that these proposals invalidate a number of further principles of the standard logic of counterfactuals. The case against the automatic truth of counterfactuals with true components does not extend to these further principles, however, so it is not clear that rejecting the latter should be (...) a consequence of rejecting the former. Instead I consider how one might defuse putative counterexamples to the truth of true-true counterfactuals. (shrink)

Is A & C sufficient for the truth of ‘if A were the case, C would be the case’? Jonathan Bennett thinks not, although the counterexample he gives is inconsistent with his own account of counterfactuals. In any case, I argue that anyone who accepts the case of Morgenbesser's coin, as Bennett does, should reject Bennett’s counterexample. Moreover, I show that the principle underlying his counterexample is unmotivated and indeed false. More generally, I argue that Morgenbesser’s coin commits us to (...) the sufficiency of A & C for the truth of the corresponding counterfactual. (shrink)

Traditional theists believe that there exists an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly loving, and perfectly good God. They also believe that God created the world, sustains it in being from moment to moment, and providentially guides all events, in accordance with a plan, towards a good ending. Historically, most traditional theists have believed that God sometimes answers prayers for particular things. In keeping with the literature on this subject, these prayers are referred to as ‘petitionary prayers’. This article discusses several problems related (...) to the concept of the traditional theistic God's answering petitionary prayers. (shrink)

The debate over Hypothetical Syllogism is locked in stalemate. Although putative natural language counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism abound, many philosophers defend Hypothetical Syllogism, arguing that the alleged counterexamples involve an illicit shift in context. The proper lesson to draw from the putative counterexamples, they argue, is that natural language conditionals are context-sensitive conditionals which obey Hypothetical Syllogism. In order to make progress on the issue, I consider and improve upon Morreau’s proof of the invalidity of Hypothetical Syllogism. The improved proof (...) relies upon the semantic claim that conditionals with antecedents irrelevant to the obtaining of an already true consequent are themselves true. Moreover, this semantic insight allows us to provide compelling counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism that are resistant to the usual contextualist response. (shrink)

Introduction: the advance of governmentality -- Foucault, power, and governmentality: introduction; what is governmentality?; beyond the microphysics of power?; from theory of the state to genealogy of the state; history of the art of government; pastoral power; raison d'état; liberal governmentality; five propositions on foucault and governmentality -- Governmentality 3.4.7.: introduction; governmentality after Foucault; governmentality and the political sciences; some problems in governmentality -- Foucault effect redux? some notes on international governmentality studies: constellation; a few preliminary observations; problems and debates (...) in international governmentality studies -- Reconnecting governmentality and genealogy: introduction; genealogy and governmentality; pluralizing genealogy; practicing genealogy; lines of descent: the family tree of power?; counter-memory and re-serialization; the retrieval of forgotten struggles and subjugated knowledges -- Conclusion: encountering governmentality: governmentality as a new cartography of power; from mapping to encountering; governmentality and politics. (shrink)

I present and discuss a counterexample to Kendall Walton's necessary condition for fictionality that arises from considering serial fictions. I argue that although Walton has not in fact provided a necessary condition for fictionality, a more complex version of Walton's condition is immune from the counterexample.

Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so. Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. Many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection.. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In this paper, I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the Envy Objection is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of (...) the charge, what it reveals, and what can be said in response to it. I develop what Bernard Williams might call a vindicatory genealogy of envy, thereby allowing us to see that envy, rather than undermining egalitarian intuitions, can in fact play a distinct justificatory role (when it is fitting), which undermines the Envy Objection. (shrink)

Few ideas have excited greater interest among theologians in recent decades than the idea of 'participation'. In thinking about creation, it is the notion that everything comes from, and depends upon, God, inviting the language of sharing, or of an exemplar and its images; in thinking about redemption, it points to the restoration of that image, and is expressed in the language of communion with God and with the redeemed community. In this volume, Andrew Davison considers these themes in (...) unprecedented breadth, investigating the fundamental character of participation as it can be applied to a wide range of theological topics. Exploring what it means to know, to love, to do good, and to live together well, he shows how these ideas animate a particular understanding of human life and how we relate to the world around us. His book offers the most comprehensive survey of participation to date, contributing to detailed discussions of these themes among academic theologians. (shrink)

Moti Mizrahi (2013) presents some novel counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism (HS) for indicative conditionals. I show that they are not compelling as they neglect the complicated ways in which conditionals and modals interact. I then briefly outline why HS should nevertheless be rejected.

What sorts of things are there in the world? Clearly enough, there are concrete, material things; but are there other things too, perhaps nonconcrete or non-material things? Some people believe that there are such things, which are often called abstract ; purported examples of such objects include numbers, properties, possible but non-actual states of affairs, propositions, and sets. Following a long-standing tradition, I shall describe persons who believe that there are abstract objects as ‘platonists’. In this paper, I shall not (...) directly address the plausibility of platonism, as compared with its rivals; instead, I shall confine my attention to one way in which some people have tried to combine platonism and theism. More specifically, I shall concentrate upon the claim that abstract objects depend upon God ontologically ; I shall argue that platonistic theists should reject DEP in favour of the claim that abstract objects exist independently of God . In order to evaluate the relative merits of DEP versus IND, it will be helpful to examine in some detail a particular articulation of DEP. When it comes to recent work on DEP, we can do no better in this regard than to examine the recent work of Thomas V. Morris and Christopher H. Menzel. According Morris and Menzel, there is a sense in which God literally creates such abstracta through engaging in intellective activities. (shrink)

This Special Issue [available free online] co-edited by Peg Brand Weiser (University of Arizona) and R. Scott Kretchmar (Pennsylvania State University) is entitled, "The Myles Brand (1942-2009) Era at the NCAA: A Tribute and Scholarly Review." The late Myles Brand was a philosopher (of action theory; social and political applied philosophy, philosophy of sport), former department chair (University of Illinois at Chicago; University of Arizona), dean (Arizona), provost (The Ohio State University), president (University of Oregon; Indiana University), and fourth president (...) of the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association). [An extensive website created in 2020 by Peg Brand Weiser of over 300 entries of his work--speeches, essays, podcasts, and videos--can be found at a website under his name.] This Special Issue includes insightful essays on the legacy of Myles Brand by authors who dig deeply into continuing controversies within higher education, intercollegiate athletics, and the values, principles, and style of Brand's leadership. They take up the gauntlet to dissect and disseminate Brand's lasting influence on the institution of the NCAA in terms of the decisions and policies enacted between 2003 and 2009 that continue to affect the well-being of today's student-athletes, the sustainability of high-cost intercollegiate competition, and now, the "threat to" or "abandonment of" (depending on your point of view) "amateur status" due to students' newfound economic agency and ability to profit from NILs (Name, Image, Likeness) monetary deals. Essays include a co-authored "Editors' Introduction;" an introductory preface by John R. Thelin ("From Chaos to Coherence: Myles Brand and the Balancing of Academics and Athletics"); a short remembrance by Josh Brand ("Myles Brand, My Father"); and essays by Peg Brand Weiser ("Life is an Adventure: From Action Theory to Action"); R. Scott Kretchmar ("President Brand's Gambit: Inviting Scholars Inside the Tent"); Walter Harrison ("Myles Brand and the Responsibility of Leadership"); Heather Reid ("Amateurism, Professionalism and the Value of College Sports"); Lou Mats ("Myles Brand: Intercollegiate Athletics Within the Limits of the Academic Mission Alone'); Welch Suggs and Jennifer Hoffman ("Myles Brand's Collegiate Model and the Post-Amateurism World of College Sports"); David K. Wiggins ("Myles Brand: A Leader Deeply Committed to Diversity, Inclusiveness, and Social Justice"); C. Keith Harrison, Bernard Franklin, and Whitney Griffin ("Myles Brand's Philosophy of the Value of Intercollegiate Athletics: A Collaborative Effort and the Perspective of Two Black Males on Educational Achievement at the NCAA"); and Rodney Fort ("Myles Brand's College Sports Sustainability: 'Amateurism,' Finances, and Institutional Balance. (shrink)

: In 1998, researchers discovered that embryonic stem cells could be derived from early human embryos. This discovery has raised a series of ethical and public-policy questions that are now being confronted by multiple international organizations, nations, cultures, and religious traditions. This essay surveys policies for human embryonic stem cell research in four regions of the world, reports on the recent debate at the United Nations about one type of such research, and reviews the positions that various religious traditions have (...) adopted regarding this novel type of research. In several instances the religious traditions seem to have influenced the public-policy debates. (shrink)

I argue that the best available parent view, in its present formulation, struggles to accommodate for our very weighty duty not to perpetuate historical injustices. I offer an alternative view that reconciles this tension.

Walters analyses Canadian and global information highway policy and practices from a philosophical, human rights framework that views freedom and well-being as the necessary conditions of human action.

Typically when a person dies, a number of negative consequences result. Some of these consequences can be framed in terms of loss: lost opportunities, lost income, lost abilities and lost relationships, to name a few. In addition, dying often involves physical and existential suffering, causes grief for loved ones and may result in temporary or eternal damnation. In fact, it may be that killing is considered so very wrong—relative to other harmful actions—because of the many varieties of harm it causes.In (...) a recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin G Miller claim ‘we need an explanation that captures the full extent of what is wrong with killing’.1 But of course we don't. There is no shortage of reasons why killing is wrong and there is no reason to think something must be wrong for only one reason. Their contention that ‘there is nothing bad about death or killing other than disability or disabling’ simply defies common sense. While disabling someone is indeed harmful, from a moral standpoint there is more to death than disability and there are always other negative consequences to killing that can be legitimately offered as reasons why it should not be done. Rather than a full account of why killing is wrong, I suspect what Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller are after is a sufficient explanation of the wrongness of killing. Such an account would allow for other negative consequences of killing, but in no case would it need them to explain why killing is wrong. Unfortunately, as I discuss below, their account fails both as a full and as a sufficient explanation of the wrongness of killing.To argue their point, Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller begin with a thought experiment in which Abe robs and fatally shoots Betty. Why is …. (shrink)

Andrew McGonigal presents some interesting data concerning truth in serial fictions.1 Such data has been taken by McGonigal, Cameron and Caplan to motivate some form of contextualism or relativism. I argue, however, that many of these approaches are problematic, and that all are under-motivated as the data can be explained in a standard invariantist semantic framework given some independently plausible principles.

Nicholas Wolterstorff: Practices of belief: selected essays, volume 2 (Terence Cuneo, ed.) Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 255-258 DOI 10.1007/s11153-011-9287-4 Authors Scott A. Davison, Philosophy Program, Morehead State University, 150 University Blvd., 354A Rader Hall, Morehead, KY 40351, USA Journal International Journal for Philosophy of Religion Online ISSN 1572-8684 Print ISSN 0020-7047 Journal Volume Volume 70 Journal Issue Volume 70, Number 3.

Shamik Dasgupta (2016) proposes to tame the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) to apply to only non-autonomous facts, which are facts that are apt for explanation. Call this strategy to tame the PSR the taming strategy. In a recent paper, Della Rocca (2020a) argues that proponents of the taming strategy, in attempting to formulate a restricted version of the PSR, nevertheless find themselves committed to endorsing a form of radical monism, which, in turn, leads right back to an untamed-PSR. Suppose, (...) for the sake of argument, that Della Rocca is right. My question is this: Is there reason to believe the principle of sufficient reason (in its untamed version)? In this paper, I argue that it is impossible for there to be a reason to believe the untamed-PSR. (shrink)

Homosexual aversion therapy enjoyed two brief but intense periods of clinical experimentation: between 1950 and 1962 in Czechoslovakia, and between 1962 and 1975 in the British Commonwealth. The specific context of its emergence was the geopolitical polarization of the Cold War and a parallel polarization within psychological medicine between Pavlovian and Freudian paradigms. In 1949, the Pavlovian paradigm became the guiding doctrine in the Communist bloc, characterized by a psychophysiological or materialist understanding of mental illness. It was taken up by (...) therapists in Western countries who were critical of psychoanalysis and sought more ‘scientific’ diagnostic and therapeutic methods that focused on empirical evidence and treating actual symptoms. However, their attitude towards homosexuality often played a decisive role in how they used aversion therapy. Whereas Czechoslovakian researchers cautioned readers about low success rates and agitated for homosexual law reform in 1961, most of their anglophone counterparts selectively ignored or misrepresented the results of ‘the Prague experiment’, instead celebrating single-case ‘success’ stories in their effort to correct ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation. In histories of queer sexuality and its pathologization, the behaviourist paradigm remains almost entirely unmapped. This article provides the most detailed study to date of aversion therapy literature from both sides of the East/West border. In doing so, it contributes to the project not only of ‘decentring Western sexualities’, but of decentring Western sexological knowledge. Given its Pavlovian origins, the history of homosexual aversion therapy can be fully understood only in the context of Cold War transnational sexological knowledge exchange. (shrink)

Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality have been responsible for the major transitions in levels of selection and individuality in natural history, such as the origins of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms, and eusocial insects. The integrated hierarchical organization of life thereby emerged as groups of individuals repeatedly evolved into new and more complex kinds of individuals. The Social Protocell Hypothesis proposes that the integrated hierarchical organization of human culture can also be understood as the outcome of an ETI—one that produced (...) a “cultural organism” from a substrate of socially learned traditions that were contained in growing and dividing social communities. The SPH predicts that a threshold degree of evolutionary individuality would have been achieved by 2.0–2.5 Mya, followed by an increasing degree of evolutionary individuality as the ETI unfolded. We here assess the SPH by applying a battery of criteria—developed to assess evolutionary individuality in biological units—to cultural units across the evolutionary history of Homo. We find an increasing agreement with these criteria, which buttresses the claim that an ETI occurred in the cultural realm. (shrink)

I argue that a well-known argument concerning moral luck supports something like the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP), despite the attacks on PAP by Harry Frankfurt and John Martin Fischer.

Recent accounts of the life of Protagoras differ widely from one another in their treatment of the ancient sources, and in the conclusions which they draw from them. A re-examination of the evidence, undertaken in 1949–50 as part of a study of the Prometheus trilogy, has convinced me that a new discussion is urgently needed if we are to place the earlier stages of the sophistic movement in the right context historically; and the purpose of this paper is to lay (...) at least a part of the foundation for such a discussion. Since the evidence for the life of Protagoras includes some allusions to his relations with Democritus, and there are some obvious affinities between the careers of Protagoras and Anaxagoras, I have added a short account of the relevant points in the biography of Democritus and a more detailed study of the evidence for the life of Anaxagoras. (shrink)

The introduction of the trireme into Greek navies was an event of great political importance, which may fairly be compared to the introduction of the ‘all-big-gun’ battleship into the British Navy in 1907. Heavier, more powerful, and capable of carrying more πιβται, but making greater demands on timber supplies and manpower, the trireme not only rendered obsolete all existing Greek line-of-battle ships but gave a decisive advantage to those States whose resources in materials and men enabled them to create and (...) maintain adequate fleets of the new type of warship.1 It is a mark of the insufficiency of our sources for early Greek history that we nowhere find an explicit statement of the date at which this revolution occurred, or of the identity of the person responsible. (shrink)

The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe (1946) by Glenn Clark is a work of biography and philosophy, exploring the life and ideas of the versatile artist, writer, and philosopher Walter Russell. New Thought writer and professor Glenn Clark (b. 1882, d. 1956) was a fervent believer in the power of prayer and the Light of God to reveal the secrets of the universe. As he explains in Chapter One: We Go Seeking, he had been searching "...for a (...) man who has discovered the universal law which lies back of the Sermon on the Mount, and who consciously uses that law with full awareness of its meaning, and full obedience to its principles." He believed that he had found that man in Walter Russell. Walter Russell (b. 1871, d. 1963) was a man who seemed preternaturally adept at everything he wished to try. After being removed from school at the age of nine and sent to work at a dry goods store, he worked a number of low-paying jobs. But he had "absolute faith...that anything can come to one who trusts to the unlimited help of the Universal Intelligence that is within so long as one works within the law and always gives more to others than they expect, and does it cheerfully and courteously." Throughout his life, he found success as a musician, painter, sculptor, writer, ice skater, philosopher, and lecturer. He was commissioned to sculpt a 28-figure Mark Twain Memorial just a few years after he began sculpting. And in 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked him to sculpt the Four Freedoms Monument. He designed several buildings in New York City and invented the cooperative ownership model (aka the co-op). And most of these pursuits were undertaken with no formal education. By the time Clark met with Russell, he had achieved success in his artistic, literary, architectural, physical, and even scientific pursuits. So when Clark was searching for a man who knew the secrets of the universe and was referred to Russell on more than one occasion, he knew that he had to meet him. Large portions of the book, particularly in the chapters We Meet the Man, We Meet the Man of Action, and The Five Laws of Success, are presented as an interview with Russell, giving us insight into his beliefs straight from the source. "Every successful man or great genius has three particular qualities in common," he says. "The most conspicuous of these is that they all produce a prodigious amount of work. The second is that they never know fatigue. And the third is that their minds grow more brilliant as they grow older, instead of less brilliant. Great men's lives begin at forty, where the mediocre man's life ends. The genius remains an ever-flowing fountain of creative achievement until the very last breath he draws." At the heart of Russell's philosophy is a belief that every man "has consummate genius within him. Some appear to have it more than others only because they are aware of it more than others are, and the awareness or unawareness of it is what makes each one of them into masters or holds them down to mediocrity..." To know that we have genius inside of us, and to have absolute faith in our inner voice and in the Universe, is to unlock that genius. Through the story of Russell's brilliant life and his Five Personal Laws of Success (humility, reverence, inspiration, deep purpose, and joy), the reader gets a plain-language example of genius-in-action. He demonstrated his great energy, lack of fatigue, and "ever-flowing fountain" of genius throughout his long life, maintaining his creativity until his death in 1963 at the age of 92. (shrink)