The Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology. Volume 11, Historicizing Theories, Identities, and Nations, examines the work and influence of scholars, including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, A. Irving Hallowell, and Edward Westermarck, and anthropological practices (...) and theories in Vietnam and Ukraine as well as the United States. Contributions also focus on the influence of Western thought and practice on anthropological traditions, as well as issues of relativism, physical anthropology, language, epistemology, ethnography, and social synergy. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 2, Page 111-112, February 2022.

Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut across various theories and domains of ecology. These assumptions should be clearly addressed, notably for the sake (...) of an effective comparison and integration across domains, and for assessing whether or not to use functional diversity approaches for developing ecological management strategies. The objective of this contribution is to identify and critically analyze the most salient of these assumptions. To this aim, we provide an “epistemic roadmap” that pinpoints these assumptions along a set of historical, conceptual, empirical, theoretical, and normative dimensions. (shrink)

Ce livre propose de relire la philosophie de Walter Benjamin à partir de sa cosmologie. Le cosmos de Benjamin n'est pas un univers ordonné, composé de corps célestes identifiables, mais l'occasion d'une expérience fulgurante: dans l'univers post-copernicien de Benjamin, l'intériorité du désir et l'extériorité des étoiles, le politique et le théologique, le présent et le distant passé se rencontrent sans fusionner. Situant Benjamin dans la tradition philosophique (G. W. Leibniz, K. Marx, F. Hegel) tout en s'appuyant sur des pensées contemporaines (...) (J. Butler, S. Hartmann, M. Löwy), ce livre crée une 'correspondance' entre Benjamin et notre actualité. Dans un monde soumis aux replis nationalistes, aux virus destructeurs d'altérité et à l'intrusion technologique, le lointain semble s'évanouir. En prise avec l'histoire la plus récente, celle du New Space et de la Sixième Extinction, de Black Lives Matter et des Communes éphémères, ce livre soutient qu'aucune transformation politique radicale, aucune émancipation, aucun communisme n'est possible, et souhaitable, sans relation avec un lointain telle l'Étoile du Nord que les esclaves en fuite suivaient dans le ciel nocturne pour les guider vers la liberté."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This is a review of Alexandre Kojève, The Religious Metaphysics of Vladimir Solovyov, translated by Ilya Merlin and Mikhail Pozdniakov, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018. This slim book is a translation of Kojève’s essay “La métaphysique religieuse de Vladimir Soloviev,” which was first published in two installments in the Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses in 1934. The French text was itself based on Kojève’s doctoral dissertation, Die religiöse Philosophie Wladimir Solowjews, defended in Heidelberg under the direction of Karl Jaspers (...) in 1926. The translation is accompanied by an introduction from the translators discussing translation issues. In this review, I summarize Kojève’s essay and editorialize on the issue of the principal influences on Solovyov’s metaphysics. Kojève claims that most of Solovyov’s metaphysics was in fact borrowed from Schelling and perhaps also to some extent from Jakob Böhme. If that is the case, then what is usually considered the prototypical Russian metaphysics is... not Russian. (shrink)

The central theme of the prologue is the notion of responsibility, as well it might be, given the subject, Accordingly, those first seven pages swamp the reader with the word “responsibility” to the point where they could be described as “variations on the theme.” Inundation, alas, is not elucidation, and all closer references to the notion remain impenetrability elliptic: Derrida possesses the unique art of combining extreme ellipsis with extreme verbosity. In fact these “variation” are more musical than analytic: “responsibility” (...) comes close to being a Wagnerian leitmotiv. Like a characteristic melody, the word winds through the text in a constant sequence of appearances and temporary disappearances, ever expected, always ready to reemerge. Although there is no clear-cut line of argument, there does seem to be a general direction of development. The question of de Man’s responsibility, which we might have thought to be crucial, is touched on only briefly and vaguely; we read much more about responsibility to de Man. Ours and Derrida’s: “responsibility” is associated with “responding,” which is increasingly read as Derrida’s obligation to respond for de Man. From the outset, this emphasis evokes the danger of an apologia rather than the conscientious quest for truth that is demanded in the same breath. There are further suggestions of this nature when Derrida later briefly returns to this subject and this style. “Responding for the other” is here connected with transference, allegory , and prosopopeia—that is, connected with two rhetorical categories and psychoanalytic one. To write about responsibility with so little reference to ethical categories is something of a tour de force. W. Wolfgang Holdheim, professor of comparative literature and romance studies and Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Liberal Studies at Cornell University, has published numerous articles on literature and literary theory as well as a number of books, including The Hermeneutic Mode. (shrink)

Metaphysics and language: Quine, W. V. O. On the individuation of attributes. Körner, S. On some relations between logic and metaphysics. Marcus, R. B. Does the principle of substitutivity rest on a mistake? Van Fraassen, B. C. Platonism's pyrrhic victory. Martin, R. M. On some prepositional relations. Kearns, J. T. Sentences and propositions.--Basic and combinatorial logic: Orgass, R. J. Extended basic logic and ordinal numbers. Curry, H. B. Representation of Markov algorithms by combinators.--Implication and consistency: Anderson, A. R. Fitch on (...) consistency. Belnap, N. D., Jr. Grammatical propaedeutic. Thomason, R. H. Decidability in the logic of conditionals. Myhill, J. Levels of implication.--Deontic, epistemic, and erotetic logic: Bacon, J. Belief as relative knowledge. Wu, K. J. Believing and disbelieving. Kordig, C. R. Relativized deontic modalities. Harrah, D. A system for erotetic sentences. (shrink)

Investigators of animal behavior since the eighteenth century have sought to make their work integral to the enterprises of natural history and/or the life sciences. In their efforts to do so, they have frequently based their claims of authority on the advantages offered by the special places where they have conducted their research. The zoo, the laboratory, and the field have been major settings for animal behavior studies. The issue of the relative advantages of these different sites has been a (...) persistent one in the history of animal behavior studies up to and including the work of the ethologists of the twentieth century. (shrink)

For the sake of clarity and brevity, this chapter uses binary language as regards gender. Chrisjen Avasarala's team is shoving her back into the modern equivalent of the role Aristotle established for women. Aristotle tried to explain why women could not be good politicians. Women were in a subservient position because, at least according to Aristotle, they were, rare to medium. Men were well done, which meant that the “courage of men lies in commanding, a woman's lies in obeying.” Surely (...) the women of the Romantic Era, immortalized so strikingly in paintings such as Frederic Leighton's Flaming June, Edmund Blair Leighton's The Accolade, and Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia. At a couple of points, Romantic‐Era philosophy intersects with Avasarala's treatment in The Expanse. (shrink)

When the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris learned in 1836 that it had the chance to buy a live, young orangutan, it was excited by the prospect. Specimens were the focus of the Museum’s activities, and this particular specimen seemed especially promising, not only because the Museum had very few orangutan specimens in its collection, but also because of what was perceived to be the orangutan’s unique place in the natural order of things, namely, at the very boundary between the (...) animal kingdom and humans. Frédéric Cuvier, the superintendent of the Museum’s menagerie, urged that studying the orangutan’s mental faculties would help resolve fundamental questions regarding the similarities and differences between animals and humans. Archival and printed sources allow one to reconstruct the orangutan’s capture, acquisition, and subsequent career at the menagerie in greater detail than has generally been possible for animals of nineteenth-century zoos. Scientists, artists, the public, the press, and even musicians sought to engage with the orangutan, seeing in it not just another ape or monkey but a special creature unto itself at the animal/human boundary. Key to their fascination with the orangutan was the question of proximity—just how close was the orangutan to humans? The orangutan’s story illuminates not only how the animal-human boundary was conceived at the time but also the problematic status of the zoo as a site for scientific research and the roles of scientific and non-scientific actors alike in constructing how the orangutan was understood. (shrink)

Frederic William Farrar was a cleric of the Church of England, schoolteacher and author. He was a pallbearer at the funeral of Charles Darwin in 1882. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles secret society.

Catholic Social Teaching on labor unions as promulgated by Pope Leo XIII and several of his successors is contrary to the form of unionism imposed on American workers and employers by the National Labor Relations Act. Since many of the coercive aspects of the NLRA are replicated in laws adopted in several to papal condemnation. The 1986 pastoral letter of the American Conference of Catholic Bishops promulgates views on unionism that are inconsistent with papal teaching. Frederic Bastiat, a French (...) lay Catholic and economist, correctly understood the issues of unionism and may have influenced the views of Leo XIII.L’enseignement social catholique sur les syndicats tel qu’il fut promulgué par le Pape Léon XIII et plusieurs de ses successeurs est contraire à la forme de syndicalisme imposée aux travailleurs et aux employés américains par la NLRA. Depuis beaucoup des aspects coercitifs de la NLRA ont été repris dans des lois adoptées.La lettre pastorale de 1986 de la Conférence Américaine des Evêques Catholiques promulgue des vues sur le syndicalisme qui sont contraires à l’enseignement papal. Frédéric Bastiat, catholique français et économiste, avait compris correctement les enjeux du syndicalisme et peut avoir influencé les vues de Léon XIII. (shrink)