This book dares to challenge natural selection--not in the name of religion but in the name of good science. Most scientists are so terrified of religious attacks on the theory of evolution that it is never examined critically. There are significant scientific and philosophical problems with the theory of natural selection. Darwin claimed the factors that determine the course of evolution are very largely environmental. Empirical results in biology are increasingly calling this thesis into question. The authors show that Darwinism (...) is committed to inferring, from the premise that a kind of creature with a certain trait was selected, the conclusion that that kind of creature was selected for having that trait. Though such inferences are fallacious, they are nevertheless unavoidable within the Darwinist framework. Ultimately, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini level a devastating critique against Darwinist orthodoxy and suggest new ways of thinking about evolution.--From publisher description. (shrink)

In their book What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini construct an a priori philosophical argument and an empirical biological argument. The biological argument aims to show that natural selection is much less important in the evolutionary process than many biologists maintain. The a priori argument begins with the claim that there cannot be selection for one but not the other of two traits that are perfectly correlated in a population; it concludes that there cannot be an (...) evolutionary theory of adaptation. This article focuses mainly on the a priori argument. (shrink)

What Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini got wrong about Darwin and evolution.

The purpose of this paper is to defend, contra Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (F&PP), that the theory of natural selection (NS) is a perfectly bona fide empirical unified explanatory theory. F&PP claim there is nothing non-truistic, counterfactual-supporting, of an “adaptive” character and common to different explanations of trait evolution. In his debate with Fodor, and in other works, Sober defends NS but claims that, compared with classical mechanics (CM) and other standard theories, NS is peculiar in that its explanatory models are (...) a priori (a trait shared with few other theories). We argue that NS provides perfectly bona fide adaptive explanations of phenotype evolution, unified by a common natural-selection guiding principle. First, we introduce the debate and reply to F&PP’s main argument against NS. Then, by reviewing different examples and analyzing Fisher’s model in detail, we show that NS explanations of phenotypic evolution share a General Natural Selection Principle. Third, by elaborating an analogy with CM, we argue against F&PP’s claim that such a principle would be a mere truism and thus explanatorily useless, and against Sober’s thesis that NS models/explanations have a priori components that are not present in CM and other common empirical theories. Irrespective of differences in other respects, the NS guiding principle has the same epistemic status as other guiding principles in other highly unified theories such as CM. We argue that only by pointing to the guiding principle-driven nature that it shares with CM and other highly unified theories, something no-one has done yet in this debate, one can definitively show that NS is not defective in F&PP’s sense: in the respects relevant to the debate, Natural Selection is as defective and as epistemically peculiar as Classical Mechanics and other never questioned theories. (shrink)

With Wrong Turnings, Geoffrey Hodgson has produced perhaps the most ambitious and comprehensive critique of major trends within the global Left—from within the Left—in recent memory. Engaging many...

I was prompted to write a book by re-reading Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto for the first time in half a century and wondering how well they would stand up in the light of what present-day sociologists can fairly claim to know that Plato, Hobbes, and Marx did not. None of them were doing social science as that term is nowadays understood. But all three advance conclusions derived from evidence for how human beings do, or would, or might, behave (...) under different environmental and historical conditions. If these arguments are bad ones, this will presumably undermine the larger purposes which the three texts are intended to serve. Or will it? (shrink)

I aim to establish in this article why Aribiah Attoe, like other determinists before him, got it wrong in arguing for the possibility of predeterminism in a materially evolving universe. I will do this by proving two things: I will first establish the inconsistency of the idea of predeterminism in an evolving universe. Then, I argue that the adirectionality presupposed by an evolutionary universe gives room for free will and negates the argument for a predeterministic universe. I aim to (...) achieve the above by exposing why the view which upholds the universe and all existents within it as lacking free will – or the possibility of adirectionality – stems from a category error on the part of the determinists. Lastly, I defend the position that for predeterminism to stand a chance against the free will of animate things-in-the-world, it must deny the possibility of an evolving/expanding universe that is adirectional and suggestive of boundlessness, and the possibility that some events are not fundamentally necessary reactions to previous states of affairs. (shrink)

In his Scientific Representation (2008), van Fraassen argues that measuring is a form of representation. In fact, every measurement pinpoints its target in accordance with specific operational rules within an already-constructed theoretical space, in which certain conceptual interconnections can be represented. Reichenbach’s 1920 account of coordination is particularly interesting in this connection. Even though recent reassessments of this account do not do full justice to some important elements lying behind it, they do have the merit of focusing on a different (...) aspect of his early work that traditional interpretations of relativized a priori principles have unfortunately neglected in favour of a more “structural” role for coordination. In Reichenbach’s early work, however, the idea of coordination was employed not only to indicate theory-specific fundamental principles such as the ones suggested in the literature on conventional principles in science, but also to refer to more “basic” assumptions. In Reichenbach, these principles are preconditions both of the individuation of physical magnitudes and of their measurement, and, as such, they are necessary to approach the world in the first instance. This paper aims to reassess Reichenbach’s approach to coordination and to the representation of physical quantities in light of recent literature on measurement and scientific representation. (shrink)

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, many economists have blamed economics for having failed to warn us. Paul Krugman, for example, in a well-known New York Times Magazine article, suggests that Classical economists were blinded by the beauty of mathematics, and that Keynesian economics is the path of the future. This paper argues that the evolution of economic thinking is much more nuanced than Krugman portrays it, and that instead of embracing what has become known as Keynesian (...) economics, macroeconomists should rather re-embrace the broader Classical economic tradition, of which Keynes was an important part. (shrink)

Deconstructive and poststructuralist theories are commonly accused of rejecting all principles of justice and therefore “collaborating with evil.” A canonical example is Martha Nussbaum’s “The Professor of Parody” on the work of Judith Butler. The merits of Nussbaum’s argument and of the “common critique” turn on choosing between two alternative interpretations of Butler’s corpus and of poststructuralism in general. First, assumed in Nussbaum’s critique, is “universal poststructuralism.” Second is “contextual poststructuralism,” which is not susceptible to the common critique. According to (...) the latter and better reading of Butler, subversion and deconstruction take place within a background comprising relatively stable sets of norms, structures of meaning, practices and values. A background that is a necessary enabling condition of deconstructing and performing subversion or parody, and which may include moral norms and principles. Moreover, Nussbaum’s critique may be incommensurable with Butler’s project. Finally, ascribing Butler’s theory the general proposition of rejecting all norms and moral principles ignores the temporal and particularistic nature of Butler’s deconstructive agenda. (shrink)

Mind &Language, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 376-392, June 2019.

In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism for biological evolution in his most famous work, On the Origin of Species. However, Origin makes little mention of humans. Despite this, Darwin thought deeply about humans and in 1871 published The Descent of Man, his influential and controversial book in which he applied evolutionary theory to humans and detailed his theory of sexual selection. February 2021 will mark the 150th anniversay of it's publication. In A Most Interesting Problem, twelve leading anthropologists, biologists, (...) and journalists revisit The Descent. Following the same organization as the first edition of Descent - less the large section on sexual selection -- each author reviews what Darwin wrote in Descent, comparing his words to what we now know now. There are chapters on evidence for human evolution, our place in the family tree, the origins of civilization, human races, intelligence, and sex differences. An introduction by Darwin biolographer and historian Janet Browne provides context for Descent and a conclusion by Science magazine journalist Ann Gibbons looks to the future of the study of human evolution. All the chapters are written with a broad audience in mind. Ultimately, readers learn that Darwin was remarkably prophetic in some of his predictions, such as that the earliest human fossils would be discovered in Africa. But he was wrong in other areas, particularly in regards to variations between the sexes and races. Thus, A Most Interesting Problem is not so much a celebration of Darwin as it is a tribute to how science works, how scientific ideas are tested, and the role of evidence in helping structure narratives of human origins. The reader is left with a view of how far we have come in our quest for understanding human origins, biological variation, behavior, and evolution. (shrink)

This essay traces the influence of Carl Schmitt on an interpretative tendency found in a number of contemporary readings of Kant’s political philosophy. This influence can be traced back to two basic commitments: the idea that Kant’s philosophy seeks to defend a pacifist and humanitarian ideal of history and progress, and that political conflict must, for this reason, be somehow pacified or eradicated. I argue that these ‘anti-conflict’ readings of Kant go astray in ignoring the systemic role conflict plays in (...) Kant’s understanding of agency and freedom on the one hand, and in overlooking that this conflict is not empirical but normative, and thereby, unavoidable. In light of this ‘agential conflict’, Schmitt’s critique to Kant begins to lose all its force. (shrink)

“The real issue concerns the need for authentic and representative black leadership being included within the highest levels of the legislative decision-making of South Africa. Apart from this, all other overtures for change would be void.”.

That Kant’s moral thought is invoked by both advocates and opponents of a right to assisted dying attests to both the allure and and the elusiveness of Kant’s moral thought. In particular, the theses that individuals have a right to a ‘death with dignity’ and that assisting someone to die contravenes her dignity appear to gesture at one of Kant’s signature moral notions, dignity. The purposes of this article are to outline Kant’s understanding of dignity and its implications for the (...) ethics of assisted dying. According to Kant, that which has dignity must be treated as an end in itself and may not permissibly be exchanged for that which merely has price. Kant’s reasoning thus seems to preclude acts of self-killing, including voluntary assisted dying, that rest on individual self-interest, since a person’s interests merely have price. However, a recognizably Kantian view of dignity can permit assisted dying under two sets of circumstances: First, it can be permissible for agents who anticipate a degradation of their rational agency due to conditions such as dementia to direct others to end their lives once sufficiently demented. In so doing, such agents in effect exercise a right to impose obligations on others regarding how their bodies, which will at some future point no longer be the vessels of their rational agency, are to be disposed of. Second, Kant errs in supposing that our dignity can stem solely from our moral personality, i.e., from our capacity to abide by universalizable moral principles. Rather, complete dignity also requires the capacity for setting discretionary ends and the means to those ends, i.e., the dignity of humanity. Individuals with prolonged and intense depression, in severe pain, or with serious disability may lack humanity while retaining their moral personality. In such cases, I propose that their opting to end their lives, with or without the assistance of others, does not amount to exchanging their dignified selves for something which merely has price and is therefore not objectionable on Kantian grounds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How The Mule Got Its Tale: Moretti’s Darwinian BricolageGeoffrey Winthrop-Young* (bio)Franco Moretti. Atlas Of The European Novel. London: Verso, 1998. [AN]Franco Moretti. Modern Epic: The World System From Goethe To García Márquez. Trans. Quentin Hoare. London: Verso, 1996. [ME]1. Darwinian Preliminaries1805: Cousin de Grainville, Le dernier homme. A world in which humans have displaced the oceans dies from ecological exhaustion. 1836: Louis Geoffroy, Napoléon et la conquête du monde. (...) A history in which Napoleon wins at Waterloo and becomes emperor of the world. 1854: Charlemagne-Ischir Defontenay, Star ou Psi de Cassiopée. A distant planetary system filled with its own mythologies, histories and migration patterns.... A litany of lost names and titles: dead, discarded, ignored, out of print, reduced to pulp and brief entries in reference books, known only to experts specializing in early French science fiction. Cut off from each other with little sense of coherence or continuity, two generations of writers had been probing the many possibilities of a new literary form, some of them in highly imaginative ways, but nobody could have foretold the fate of what Félix Bodin had named littérature futuriste. Suddenly, the literary equivalent of a mass extinction wiped out a broad spectrum of conjectural imaginations. Did they deserve their fate? Wrong question. Who is to blame for their disappearance? Cui bono? The prime suspect, no doubt, is Jules Verne. “It was as if SF had for sixty years sought in vain for an institutional ‘landing point,’” surmises Marc Angenot, before pointing out that Verne’s success coincided with, indeed was based on, the repression of a wide array of promising alternatives [64]. Displaying that jovial bluntness which in his days passed for commendable virility, he extracted certain formal features from his environment, eliminated the rest, and engineered his selections into a highly marketable literary model. A lot began with Verne, but a lot ended with him, too.At the outset a rapidly emerging set of random and undirected variations opens up a multiplicity of future possibilities; then a choice is made, a selection that locks in one particular variant while locking out the competition. Subsequently, a winner—who need not be the best or most promising candidate, but who by virtue of his selection manages to impose definite constraints on future developments—spawns a tradition that coasts along until another crisis is heralded by yet another round of proliferation and selection. Readers familiar with Franco Moretti’s work will recognize this Darwinian scenario, which provides the theoretical backbone for his analyses. In the programmatic essay “On Literary Evolution” in the revised edition of Signs Taken for Wonders, it allows him to whittle down the development of the European novel from its experimental phase in the eighteenth century to the victory of the Bildungsroman in the nineteenth century and its subsequent disintegration to what must be the shortest account of the history of the novel ever written: “Novels/novel/novels” [264]. In The Way of the World it helps explain how it was possible for the Bildungsroman “to emerge victorious from that veritable ‘struggle for existence’ between various narrative forms that took place at the [End Page 18] turn of the eighteenth century” [10]. Modern Epic, in turn, uses the Darwinian model to plot the evolution of the hybrid genre announced in its title, while Atlas of the European Novel explains the morphological change novels undergo when they move from one space to another. But why Darwin? Or, since “Darwin” means many different things to many different Darwinists: why this punctuated, nongradualist, highly contingency-tolerant Gouldian Darwin? How much do we gain by applying the proliferation/lock-in sequence to the development of devices, texts, and genres? What motivates the optimism that the Darwinian paradigm may “help us to explain in a new—and better—way numerous questions that literary history has never succeeded in resolving satisfactorily”? [ME 5].But then why raise these arcane questions? Surely, Moretti’s books center on more relevant issues. Atlas is about space—and given the current critical focus on space, what more timely topic could there be? And what more obvious criticism than... (shrink)

The dominant response to Peter Singer’s defense of an extremely demanding duty of aid argues that an affluent person’s duty of aid is limited by her moral entitlement to live her own life. This paper argues that this entitlement provides a basis not for limiting an affluent person’s duty of aid but rather for the claim that she too is wronged by a world marked by widespread desperate need; and the wrong she suffers is a distinctive one: the activation (...) of a duty of aid so demanding that it dominates her life, crowding out her own valuable projects and involvements. (shrink)

Prescription opioid abuse (POA) is an escalating clinical and public health problem. Physician worries about iatrogenic addiction and whether patients are ‘drug seeking’, ‘abusing’ and ‘diverting’ prescription opioids exist against a backdrop of professional and legal consequences of prescribing that have created a climate of distrust in chronic pain management. One attempt to circumvent these worries is the use of opioid contracts that outline conditions patients must agree to in order to receive opioids. Opioid contracts have received some scholarly attention, (...) with trust and trustworthiness identified as key values and virtues. However, few articles have provided a critical account of trust and trustworthiness in this context, particularly when there exists disagreement about their role in terms of enhancing or detracting from the patient–physician relationship. This paper argues that opioid contracts represent a misleading appeal to patient–physician trust. Assuming the patient is untrustworthy may wrongfully undermine the credibility of the patient's testimony, which may exacerbate certain vulnerabilities of the person in pain. However, misplaced trust in certain patients may render the physician vulnerable to the potential harms of POA. If patients distrust their physician, or feel distrusted by them, this may destabilise the therapeutic relationship and compromise care. A process of epistemic humility may help cultivate mutual patient–physician trust. Epistemic humility is a collaborative effort between physicians and patients that recognises the role of patients’ subjective knowledge in enhancing physicians’ self-understanding of their theoretical and practice frameworks, values and assumptions about the motivations of certain patients who report chronic pain. (shrink)

The right to religious liberty as for instance set out in the European Convention of Human Rights protects acts of religious observance. Such protection can clash with other considerations, including laws aimed at protecting other state interests. Religious freedom therefore requires an account of when the right should lead to exemptions from other laws and when the right can legitimately be limited. Alan Patten has proposed a Fair Opportunity view of the normative logic of religious liberty. But Patten’s view faces (...) several problems. The normative work in his view is mainly done by added accounts of reasonable claims and of justifiability. So, the Fair Opportunity view in itself does not provide a normative criterion. Defenses of the Fair Opportunity view must therefore turn on the theoretical preferability of its structural features. But the Fair Opportunity view has the wrong form to capture the right to freedom of religion. The form of the right to freedom of religion is due to how its point is to address how states limit the liberty of citizens. Given a practice dependent approach, which assigns importance to the point and purpose of the right to freedom of religion, Patten’s theory is thus problematic. (shrink)

Rawls intended the difference principle to be a liberal egalitarian principle of justice. By that I mean he intended it to provide a moral justification for a moderate amount of redistribution of income from the most advantaged members of society to the least. But since the difference principle was introduced, economic inequality has increased dramatically, reaching levels now not seen since just before the Great Depression, levels that Rawls surely would have thought perverse. Many blame this increase on the rise (...) of supply-side economics and the dramatic cuts in marginal tax rates enacted by the supply-siders for corporations and those already at the top of the income distribution. But I contend that the difference principle, or at least the ethos that the difference principle embodies and represents, is also partially to blame. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to explain how the difference principle, the ideas and arguments of the supply-siders, and this dramatic rise in inequality are connected, to identify where the difference principle went wrong, and to discuss what those who remain committed to the liberal egalitarian ideals that the difference principle was thought to represent might do about it. (shrink)

My paper is divided into three parts. In the first two parts, I intend to briefly explore three things Michael Polanyi got wrong followed by three things that Polanyi got right. In the final section, I will show how some sectors of contemporary microbiology are finding mechanisms that guide evolutionary development—just as Polanyi expected they would. Despite limitations, therefore, I shall conclude that Polanyi’s surmise that there are philogenetic forces guiding evolution has the prospect of being embraced by modern (...) science. (shrink)

As a critic, I am in the unenviable position of agreeing with nearly all of what Mark does in this lucid, erudite and creative book. My comments will hence not be aimed at showing what he got wrong, as much as an attempt from a Madhyamaka point of view to suggest another way of seeing things, in particular another way of seeing how one might think of how Madhyamaka philosophers, such as Någårjuna and Candrak¥rti, see conventional truth, our engagement (...) with conventional truth, and the status of persons. I suspect that this alternative is also in the minds of earlier Buddhist philosophers, and that Madhyamaka may be more an explicit working out of ideas implicit in the tradition than a radical break. If this suspicion—for which I will not argue here—is correct, this alternative is also available to those to whom Mark refers as “reductionists.” I think that this way of seeing things may put certain ideas in Buddhist philosophy into better focus, and may indeed make them more attractive as well. (shrink)

In a series of articles and in a recent book, What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor has objected to Darwin’s principle of natural selection on the grounds that it assumes nature has intentions.1 Despite the near universal rejection of Fodor’s argument by biologists and philosophers of biology (myself included),2 I now believe he was almost right. I will show this through a historical examination of a principle that Darwin thought as important as natural selection, his principle of divergence. The (...) principle was designed to explain a phenomenon obvious to any observer of nature, namely, that animals and plants form a hierarchy of clusters. Theodosius Dobzhansky made this the motivating observation of his great synthesizing work, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937): “the living world is not a single array of individuals in which any two variants are connected by a series of intergrades, but an array of more or less distinctly separate arrays, intermediates between which are absent or at least rare. . . Small.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thucydides: The Peloponnesian WarSimon HornblowerSteven Lattimore, trans. Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War. With introduction and notes. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1998. xxii + 513 pp. 4 maps. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $12.95.This translation is generally faithful and readable, with many excellent notes. It is clearly the product of much labor and valuable thought. In accuracy (with the exceptions noted below) it is superior to Warner, though less faithful than Hobbes. (...) However, it is marred by omissions and garbling of names, which should be put right urgently in a reprinting, and the emphasis of the notes is uneven in important respects.1. Omissions: whole chunks of Greek are sometimes omitted.a. The worst, because longest, instance is 5.111.4: an entire eight–line paragraph of Greek has disappeared from the translation of the Melian Dialogue, containing among other things the Athenians' "moderate proposal" that the Melians should agree to accept tributary status.b. At 3.105.2 has disappeared from the translation, which is in fact ungrammatical English at this point ("set up camp at in Amphilochia").c. At 4.121.1 the interesting words have not been translated (did the people of Skione "go up to greet" Brasidas or did they "offer him first–fruits"?). [End Page 646]d. At 6.9.2, Nikias' first speech at Athens before the Sicilian expedition,, is not translated.e. At 7.71.5 (great sea battle in Syracuse harbor) is not translated.2. Proper names garbled: names of persons and places are regularly garbled or got wrong. This is specially regrettable in a book which rightly sees names as important, without however considering how the evidence of epigraphy might bear on the question. See for instance the ingenious note on "Philokrates son of Demeas" on p. 301 (Th. 5.116), or that on the patronymics on p. 414 (note on 8.5), or that on Euphemos ("Good speaker" as Lattimore renders it, though "auspicious" might be closer) on p. 346 (Th. 6.81–87). Here, however, "almost certainly" is much too strong for the various identifications suggested, in view of the commonness of the name Euphemos at Athens; see the entry in vol. II (1994) of the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (1987–), a work never cited by Lattimore. In the following list I give Lattimore's page numbers with Thucydidean references in parentheses:27 (1.52) for "Leagoras" read "Leogoras"; 52 (1.107) for "Kitinion" read "Kytinion"; 67 (1.139) for "Milesippos" read "Melesippos" (correct at 2.12); 80 (2.12) for "Diaokritos" read "Diakritos"; 84 (2.19) for "Rhetoi" read "Rheitoi"; 108 (2.66) for "Anaristos" read "Aneristos"; 125 (2.96) for "Triballio" read "Triballoi"; 142 (3.26) for "Kleombrotos" read "Kleomenes"; 144 (3.31) for "Tein" read "Teian"; 175 (3.93) for "Kenion" read "Kenaion"; 214, 261, and 274 (4.56, 5.14, and 5.41) for "Kynosouria" read "Kynouria"; 224 (4.78) for "Striophokos" read the good epigraphically attested Thessalian name "Strophakos"; 225 (4.78) for "Phagion" read "Phakion"; 238 (4.107) for "Gelepsis" read "Galepsos"; 242 (4.118) for "Tomeos" read "Tomeus"; 254 (5.1 and in footnote) for "Pharnakos" read "Pharnakes"; 263 (5.18) for "Spartalos" read "Spartolos," and for "Ptoleon" read "Pteleon"; 308 (6.4) for "Krataimones" read "Krataimenes," and for "Anaxilos" read "Anaxilas"; 310 (6.8) for "Laches" read "Lamachos"; 335 (6.59) for "Hippokles" read "Hippoklos"; 339 (6.65) for "Symaistos" read "Symaithos"; 339 (6.66) for "Anopos" read "Anapos," as also at pp. 355 (6.96) and 381 (7.42), but note that at p. 402 (7.78) the name has come out as "Anopis"; 359 (6.105) for "Laispodios" read "Laispodias"; 386 (7.50) for "Kyrnaians" read "Kyrenaians"; 416 (8.10 n.) for "Speraion" read "Speiraion"; 431 (8.44) for "Kamieros" read "Kameiros"; 465 (8.101) for "Lektos" read "Lekton." Most of these names are, oddly enough, given correctly in the index. "Anapos" is correct on map 3.3. Omission of variant readings of proper names: since Lattimore does sometimes discuss textual variants and emendations, I give some other places where it would have been helpful to flag a variant.a. P. 224 (4.76): Ptoiodoros is... (shrink)

I argue that Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda differed in their conclusions regarding the status of Indigenous persons at least partly because las Casas had significant, yet incomplete, understanding of Indigenous persons, culture and societies and Sepúlveda had mere knowledge of them. To this end, I show that the epistemic state of understanding explains why Las Casas properly concluded that Indigenous persons deserve the same moral status afforded to Europeans. And I show how las Casas’ understanding (...) of Indigenous persons, culture and societies related to what he got wrong about Indigenous persons. (shrink)

Most commentators think that Plato's account of the varieties of false pleasure is disjointed and that various types of false pleasure he identifies are false in different ways. It really doesn't look that way to me: I think that the discussion is unified, and that Plato starts with less difficult cases to build up to a point about more important but less clear cases. In this paper, I do my best to show how this might work. I don't think I (...) will ever work on this again: the experience of writing this paper and dealing with frustrating refereeing practices has led me to pretty much switch to aesthetics. I'm much happier. But here are the fruits of my labor. I know there are a few details I got wrong (in particular a place or two where I should have scrutinized Frede's translation more closely), but I still think that I'm on the right track. I hope it's useful to someone. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Life in LimboM. ChiuWhen my son was 7 years old, he began complaining of headaches. They were frequent, but never seemed severe. “I have a headache!” was always followed by “Can I watch TV?” I didn’t believe the pain was real until it woke him up in the middle of the night. I knew then that something must be wrong. I approached our pediatrician, who said it sounded (...) like migraines, but we should order an MRI to rule anything out. The appointment was scheduled several months in advance, and I always had the urge to cancel it. I was pretty sure my son just wanted to watch TV. The pediatrician told me I might as well do the MRI. He told me that if we skipped it and something was wrong, I would never be able to live with the regret. We kept the Monday morning appointment, and went to the MRI expecting reassurance that nothing was wrong. Instead, we got a phone call later that day. They needed to see us on immediately, but wouldn’t tell me why. Of course, I knew something was wrong. “Is it a tumor?” I asked. “This isn’t something we can discuss on the phone” was the answer I got. An appointment was scheduled for Wednesday. Two days might be “immediately” to medical professionals, but to a parent who just heard that her child had an abnormal MRI, it was an eternity. I planned my son’s funeral in those two days.Our meeting with the Neurologist began with reviewing the MRI. “See this spot here? It shouldn’t be there”. A tumor. 1 ½ × 1 ½ × 2 ½ cm tumor, in the right thalamus. Small, they said. Looks like a Low Grade Glioma they said. The kind of tumor you want to have, if you have to have a brain tumor. A biopsy was scheduled for two weeks later. The [End Page E2] biopsy confirmed it was a Juvenile Pilocytic Astrocytoma (JPA). The neurosurgeon was confident she could remove all of the tumor. We were at one of the best Children’s Hospitals in the world. We were in good hands.A few days before the surgery, a friend who is a medical doctor suggested we get a second opinion. “It couldn’t hurt, it could help”, my husband said. Fortunately, he just sold a start–up company, and was planning to take a few months off from work before starting his next venture. He had time to research, talk to friends in the medical field and make phone calls.Our second opinion from another leading hospital reviewed the MRI’s with us. The neurosurgeon asked, “Did they say tumor? One?” Yes, they did. “See this here?” he said, pointing to a second spot on the MRI. He said it was possibly a second tumor, or more likely, an extension of the first. It was in inoperable location. Surgery wasn’t an option. Chemo would be our best choice. Why would we cut into our son’s brain to remove part of the tumor when he would need to do chemo anyway? Why not try chemo first?I would like to say that we do not fault our original neuro–oncology team for missing this second abnormality. It is hard to notice an ant in the room when there is an elephant staring at you. People make mistakes, and tumors don’t always look the same. That’s what second opinions are for. That is why doctors should encourage patients to get second opinions.We scheduled the surgery for port implantation, and got busy educating ourselves about chemo regimes. It was going to be a long journey. 18 months of transfusions with a pretty low success rate and a high rate of secondary complications. Unsure if we were doing the right thing, we got a third opinion. I am so grateful that my husband was between jobs and had time to devote to finding the best possible treatment for our son. We were financially stable and had great insurance. What do people do when they don’t have this luxury?By now, several months had passed since our first MRI. Our... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Night ShiftCalvin R. GrossI don't like working at night anymore. Too much goes wrong when you're alone.I'm sitting at my desk in the middle of the cardiac intensive care unit, and it's far later than I'd like to be awake—two or three in the morning. Things are calm, almost pleasant. I can hear the occasional alarm going off—an imperfectly positioned blood pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter with a (...) poor waveform, a ventilator with secretions in it. The night's initial frenzied work is done; my new admissions are tucked away, and my overnight to-dos are completed. Now it's just time to sit and wait. I could sleep, but despite the calm, I'm too afraid to leave the unit to rest. The fellow has gone to bed hours ago, and now it's just me. Sure, I'm surrounded by experienced nurses who know their work well, but somehow, I'm the one in charge. A brand-new second-year resident, the only doctor there. I'm no intern, that's for sure, but I've never led a code before, and I've only ever placed one central line without supervision. As second years go, I'm as fresh as they come.The daytime, you see, is far different than nights. There's a large (and even bloated) team of two attendings, two fellows, two pharmacists, and more importantly, multiple other residents. When you don't know what to do for a patient, there's always someone there to bounce ideas off of. When something difficult or surprising happens, there are peers and mentors to process with. At night, it's the opposite—no peers, no mentors, only a group of experienced nurses, whose circle is closed to me, the outsider. I long to be a part of that large and bloated daytime team."Can you come into 23? I think his pupils are a different size."I'm startled out of my thoughts. 23 … All I can remember from sign-out that evening is that he's young, close to my age, and supposedly stable. I look at my notes, a catalogue of tragedies: early onset heart failure, multiple prior suicide attempts, intubated because of pulmonary edema, and a left-ventricular assist device (LVAD) that's malfunctioning. I walk over to the room and look at the nurse at the other side of the bed. She's in the early phases of her career too—less than a year on the job—but she's still more experienced than me. I take a flashlight, open his eyelids, and look at the pupils. Sure enough, one of them is much larger than the other. When I shine the light into each eye, the large one doesn't change. When I turn his head from side to side, his eyes stay fixed. We look [End Page 83] at each other, she and I. We both know something terrible is happening."Should we maybe wake the fellow up?" she asks tentatively.I nod my head in agreement, glad to have been offered a suggestion. It's the right thing to do. I walk to the fellow's call room, knock on the door, and wake him up. He's set to work 24 hours and would like nothing more than to keep resting. He sleepily comes with me to the bedside, looks at the pupils as well, and says, "With the sedation on, your exam isn't going to be the most accurate. We should start by scanning his head, and then go from there. Wake me back up if you need me, but I know you've got this one."I don't think that I deserve the confidence he has in me. I walk back to my desk, open the patient's chart, and place the order for an urgent CT scan. The machinery of the hospital starts to rumble as the imaging schedulers find a spot in the queue for the scan, the patient's nurse and respiratory therapist disconnect and reconnect cables and tubes, the technicalities of the scan are ironed out, and he is... (shrink)

This article is a presentation of the problem of human nature in Dostoevsky's writings. Its author does not agree that the great Russian thinker would give his assent to any of the two opposing ideas: neither that man is good by nature nor that his fate from the moment of birth is tragic. Dostoevsky has proved that freedom constitutes the core of human being. When this freedom is used in a wrong way man becomes bad, and if it is (...) used according to Jesus Christ teachings, he may attain righteousness due to His Grace. In such circumstances, there is no space for any predetermination. Man is free, if he wants to be free. He has got free will. He is always responsible for everything he has done. Dostoevsky uses the term n a t u r e in two different meanings. The first one is essential and refers to the notion of freedom. Consequently, Dostoevsky claims, human nature is beyond full cognition. The second meaning of the term nature refers to the attributes of a particular nation. The differences between nations are further evidence of freedom, which manifests in an infinity of ways. Nature understood as such can be changed and comprehended. The change requires much effort over a long period of time but can by achieved. To capture the full picture of the problem of human nature in Dostoevsky's ultimately it works, both meanings of the above notion should be the taken into consideration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I Didn’t Like It, but I Recommend It: An Undergraduate Reflects on Contemplation in the ClassroomLauren RodgersWhile taking Introduction to World Religions as a first-year college student, I became acutely aware that my preconceived notions about religions were often wrong, and I had been oblivious to the diversity and complexity of the traditions I began to study. During subsequent semesters, I studied Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, and during (...) the spring semester of my junior year I was happy to add Buddhism to my schedule. In that class, I not only examined manifold Buddhist teachings and histories, but engaged in a form of Buddhist practice, too. Four days a week, my fellow students and I arranged our zafus in a straight line, bowed, and adjusted our postures to commence fifteen to twenty minutes of zazen. By the end of the semester, I concluded that although I am very ambivalent about this meditation practice, I nonetheless believe that contemplative practices can be valuable tools in the academic setting.Because we were partaking in a religious practice in an academic setting, there were possibilities for ethical conflicts. My professor raised these and we discussed them several times during the first half of the semester, before we collectively agreed to give zazen a try. The only Buddhist in the room was my professor, so I agree that it was essential for her to stress that zazen was optional, and that if anyone felt uncomfortable in any way, it was okay to opt out. My professor reiterated this several times. I am not a follower of any religious tradition, so I did not have any conflicting feelings. Several of my classmates were Christian, but, like me, most were excited to give it a try. I think there was no sense of conflict because Buddhism involves a lot of practices geared toward developing insight on the basis of experience, and zazen does not require belief in a higher power. Buddhism does acknowledge the existence of gods, but they are irrelevant to the spiritual path. Also, my professor is an ordained Zen priest, and therefore very familiar with zazen. I did not have any doubts that we were taught an authentic practice by someone qualified to teach it.Just as there was no pressure to participate, I did not feel that I was forced to like zazen or hold back any feelings of opposition; I was free to express how I felt and why. At first I did not like it because it hurt my back, and instead of sitting there in pain [End Page 119] every day, I let my professor know and she helped me make some adjustments to my posture. But I disliked meditation for other reasons, as well. I rarely, if ever, was able to stop my mind from being like a monkey on a jungle gym. As we sat, we repeatedly counted to ten and fixed our gaze on a spot in front of us. I was told that it is natural for my mind to bounce around and wander off while counting, but I did not expect it would happen before I got to four. Adding to my frustration was the fact that 70 percent of the time, my thoughts were focused on all of the work that I needed to get done before the end of the day. Even though I only sat for fifteen minutes, I got antsy and staying still was not helpful. It makes me wonder, though, whether or how my feelings would change if I did zazen in the summer when my stress levels are way down. Or what if I meditated for more than fifteen minutes? How long would it take before my mind settled down? Would it get worse?Although my restlessness was not the most pleasant experience, I did have days where I found meditation helpful personally. In addition to zazen, we also tried walking meditation, and on nice days we meditated outside near a waterfall on campus. The sound of the water was really soothing, and I noticed that my mind wandered much less. Sometimes it was a relaxing break during the day, and even if I... (shrink)

In the literature on free will, fatalism, and determinism, a distinction is commonly made between temporally intrinsic (‘hard’) and temporally relational (‘soft’) facts at times; determinism, for instance, is the thesis that the temporally intrinsic state of the world at some given past time, together with the laws, entails a unique future (relative to that time). Further, it is commonly supposed by incompatibilists that only the ‘hard facts’ about the past are fixed and beyond our control, whereas the ‘soft facts’ (...) about the past needn’t be. A substantial literature arose in connection with this distinction, though no consensus emerged as to the proper way to analyze it. It is time, I believe, to revisit these issues. The central claim of this paper is that the attempts to analyze the hard/soft fact distinction got off on fundamentally the wrong track. The crucial feature of soft facts is that they (in some sense) depend on the future. Following recent work on the notion of dependence, however, I argue that the literature on the soft/hard distinction has failed to capture the sense of dependence at stake. This is because such attempts have tried to capture softness in terms of purely modal notions like entailment and necessitation. As I hope to show, however, such notions cannot capture the sort of asymmetrical dependence relevant to soft facthood. Arguing for this claim is the first goal of this paper. My second goal is to gesture towards what an adequate account of soft facthood will really look like. (shrink)

John Ziman's 'open-ended essay', searching, as much of his work does, for 'the grounds of belief in science' covers such a range of disciplines and topics in a serious and engaging way that it is difficult to single out which parts to address. At the end he suggests that 'if you think that I have got it all wrong in your particular speciality, please do weigh in and tell us all how things really are over there'. In my case, (...) in the disciplines of history and anthropology, there is no need to do so. While specialists might disagree with certain interpretations, or complain that complex debates have been over-simplified, I think that most would agree with Ziman's central arguments. (shrink)

In this paper I shall examine Aristotle's treatment of a certain puzzle concerning change. In section I, I shall show that within a certain standard framework for the semantics of subject-predicate sentences a number of things that Aristotle wants to maintain do not make sense. Then, I shall outline a somewhat non-standard account of the semantics for such sentences — arguably Aristotle's — and show how the proposals concerning change fit quite naturally into this framework. The results of this exercise (...) will enable us to say something quite precise about applications of some obscure but characteristically Aristotelian doctrines: that ‘is’ is ‘said in many ways,’ that his predecessors got the Law of Opposites wrong. They also shed some light upon Aristotle's ontology of predicables. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spontaneity, Savaging, and Praise in Pindar's Sixth PaeanAnne Pippin BurnettThe fragments of Pindar's Sixth Paean—almost all of the opening strophe survives, as well as sixty consecutive lines of mythic narrative1—add up to a complex song that celebrates gracious gods even as its cult cry greets a destructive epiphany. Critical discussion has nonetheless limited itself to two narrow questions: the nature of the song's ceremonial occasion (who sings, and has (...) something gone wrong?), and the relation of its mythic episode to that of Nemean 7 (how is this Neoptolemus tale more offensive than the one told in the epinician?).2 Since these are the established "problems," I shall let them dictate a double approach to what is meant to be a more engaged reading of this Delphic song.First, the actualities of the occasion. Because the opening lines of Paean 6 describe the singers3 as rescuers come in a time of need, most scholars believe that there was something irregular about its performance. The song begins in this way:(1–18)By Olympian Zeus I beg you,mantic golden Pytho, with Aphrodite and the Graces4receive me, songful prophet of the Muses,5at this sacred season,for by Castalia's bronze–fenced springI heard an orphaned sound deprivedof dancing men, and so I cameto guard your citizens from insufficiencyand to defend the honors that are mine. [End Page 494] Obedient to my heart, like child to cherished mother, Ientered Apollo's grove, thisnursery of feasts and crowns where Delphic maidsin throngs sing Leto's sonand strike their feet upon the ground,close to the shady omphalos of Earth.These lines have inspired extended discussion because they seem to report an extraordinary event—the unexpected appearance of a chorus. Who are these singers, scholars ask, and why do they burst, à l'improviste, into a sacred place that is somehow benighted? Wilamowitz supposed that, the usual festival chorus of Delphians having for some reason failed to materialize, Pindar now comes with a group of his own to save the day,6 and this emergency theory, in one form or another, has dominated subsequent discussion. Scholars ask whether the members of this pinch–hitting chorus are locals, Thebans, or perhaps, asWilamowitz supposed, visiting Aeginetans? And they wonder about the exact nature of the crisis. Has a commissioned poem failed to arrive, so that Pindar simply trained the expectant dancers in a last–minute substitute song? Or is it a chorus that has gone missing, one that never got trained or was not dispatched, as it should have been, from abroad? These questions are put and answered in various ways, but all who have written about this song agree almost to a man that its opening speaks for a poet7 who actually rescues a threatened festival by training and bringing [End Page 495] a surprise chorus as an unexpected gift to Delphi.8 I prefer to argue, on the contrary, that this self–portrait of a chorus that hastens to a performance spot is not a bit of Pindaric autobiography but an elegant example of a favorite choral convention, the "arrival fiction."9 The problems of occasion, even that of the dancers' identity, all shift or disappear when the "emergency" of these opening lines is understood as a poetic contrivance.Spontaneity was a professed ideal in the Greek world, and those who performed in any realm simply because they were trained to do so were paradoxically expected to be disorderly and inharmonious (, P. O. 2.86).10 Best celebrations and most truthful praise would come from hearts and minds immediately moved to celebrate and praise, and yet according to Greek festival practice these activities also demanded a multiplicity of participants if they were to have their greatest effect. Ideally, then, a community would give thanks or attempt placation through a group of singing and dancing individuals, each following his own impulsive response to a festive stimulus, all performing with limbs and voices in perfect unison. This was the model offered by the very first singing of a Delphic paean, when all the sailors followed Apollo... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Religious Background of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy RICHARD H. POPKIN IT IS AN EXCEEDINGLY GREAT PLEASURE tO participate in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Journal of the Historyof Philosophy.The editor, Professor Makkreel, offered me the opportunity to discuss the rationale for my present research, which I hope has some relevance for future research in the history of philosophy. At a symposium at the American Philosophical Association meeting in Washington (...) in December x985, I argued for taking the historyof philosophy seriously, that is, understanding thinkers and ideas in their actual historical contexts, instead of detaching them into some ahistorical ethereal realm. I argued that one could not make sense of a philosopher's thought detached from his time and circumstances. His ideas could not be understood unless one took account of the language, the usages, the issues and the concerns of the thinker and his time. The all too frequent "reconstruction" of philosophers ' thoughts sees them instead as logical machines, simply moving from clearly stated premises to their logical consequences. As many of us have sought to show, this often grossly distorts what Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz and others might have actually thought, and misses much of what they were probably thinking about. I should like to carry this theme further by examining the need to take seriously the religious aspect of philosophizing. I will center on the intellectual scene of the seventeenth century, which I am currently working on though I believe many of the same points could be made about any period in the history of philosophy. Among historians of science there is an ongoing debate about whether the history of the subject should be studied internally or externally. The [:35] 36 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY internalists examine a set of ideas presented by scientist A, and trace their use or development by scientist B. The study that results is primarily the tracing of the course of a set of ideas through a time period. Background data about the scientists, their problems, and their place in society are regarded as of little relevance. The externalists insist that one cannot understand why various questions became important, why various individuals tried to solve them, why they used certain kinds of possible solutions instead of others, etc., unless one knows the external conditions of the time. This has spawned a lot of interesting research into the way scientific studies went on, who supported them, who did them, how they got accepted, and so on. The sociology and even anthropology of science is now a thriving research area, yielding many amazing studies about the scientific world and how it functioned. In so doing, scholars have not just examined the great successful scientists, the Keplers, Galileos, Harveys, and Newtons, but also the small fry, the mediocre, the poor scientists, and even the incompetent ones. They have examined why wrong-headed theories were supported, and accepted, while evidence supporting other theories was readily available. Their concern with the actual course of scientific development as an ongoing part of intellectual history is vital to understanding the scientific world of today, which plays such an overwhelming role in our society. So, some people study the education of the good, the mediocre, the bad scientists; their relative social statuses, incomes, and so on. The religious concerns are, of course, an obvious part of the story from Copernicus to Kepler to Newton to Darwin to Freud to Einstein. The scientists were involved in an ongoing religious world that influenced the role of science. The above named scientists had their religious or irreligious views that were involved with their scientific concerns. And, as we know too well, the impact of their work on religion has been of great importance to the broader intellectual world, and the impact of religion on the acceptance of their science has been and is part of the ongoing intellectual world. This interest amongst historians of science in the sociology, psychology, and anthropology of science has hardly rubbed off on the historians of philosophy. Most of the leading scholars of the last few decades in this work are hardly known and rarely cited in studies in the history of philosophy. We... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coughin'/Coffin AirAdilifu Nama (bio)Rummaging through the early remnants of a society that is facing climatic transformations, a single microbe forced America to pause, ponder and grasp the meaning of mortality in the early spring of 2020. Such a characterization is much more poetic than necessary, yet it is a frail attempt to capture the grand scale of the psychological and economic disorientation that has assailed the world and continues (...) to make suffocation a pervasive and global experience. Unfortunately, against a backdrop of pandemic savagery, a new spectacle of suffocation emerged to rival COVID-19's viral chokehold on humanity. On May 25th, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, went down the streets of Minneapolis to buy a pack of cigarettes at his local grocery store. Shortly afterward, a new barbarism was broadcast for millions to partake in primetime consumption. The world witnessed a white police officer place his knee on Floyd's neck as he lay handcuffed, face on the pavement. The medical stat line reads "suffocation to death" but, in reality, Floyd cried out for his mother while a white man murdered him in broad daylight, had his knee pressed against Floyd's neck for over nine minutes: nine minutes that feels like nine hours to see it unfold. Floyd's final moments consisted of cries for his mother, the woman who breathed him into being. She had already passed but his last breaths before he died was for his mother, and with that, the world was reminded that America was birthed out of violence.America, where petty settler concerns were repackaged as God's imperative to morally justify the eradication of the indigenous population and cultural molestation resulted in annual holidays of thanks for bounties stolen and scalps delivered. Despite this, for far too many Americans, the true "gung-ho" spirit of rugged American individualism and notions of exceptionalism is not in declarations of accomplishment but found in the radical real-estate politics of manifest destiny and a torture economy, commonly referred to as American enslavement. This system of wealth extraction enshrined the public ruin of Black bodies with public beatings to compel compliance, and later public lynchings to intimidate and psychologically terrorize Black folk into a forever state of political timidity. Public lynching was the booby prized bait-and-switch from a [End Page 140] Reconstruction paradise to an extra-legal purgatory of terroristic intimidation: a spiffed-up spectacle of human degradation inspired by the old American barbarism of Indian removal and witch burning.When it comes to American lynching, not only was it a morbid spectacle but, for some, a depraved keepsake for posterity. If one missed Black corpses dangling from sturdy tree limbs, and the grapevine could only deliver soured tidbits and not juicy details of the slaying, a picture was worth a thousand obscene words. The alchemy of flash powder mixed with white smoke created eerie postcards to purchase by the time you got to town. This was some of that ole time religion. How could it not get worse than that? But when it concerns the destruction of Black bodies, like a morbid merry-go-round, something wicked this way comes. New incarnations of public death practices are guaranteed to return with extreme prejudice, laying waste to Black bodies, minds, dreams, and futures. Live births are not shown on television, but when it concerns Black folk, live deaths are shown ad nauseam. And there will be reruns, brothers and sisters. This was the traumatic reality of the digital documentation of George Floyd's savage public execution. The reruns of his tortured asphyxiation.Although political injustices, massacres, and wars have ebbed and flowed, waxed, and waned over decades, Black folk have lived in a constant state of vulnerability of negation; for Black folk, there is no place for us to catch our breath, to grab a brief respite from race in America. This is a cornerstone of the Black Experience in America. The cost of being the wrong color can leave you breathless: at the park playing, in group homes, police detention cells, making a sojourn back to the crib after a quick Skittles run, jogging around town... (shrink)

It could be said that after Hegel’s, Philosophy in the world begun its downturn, falling in chaos during more than one hundred years. The Science study the specific thing replaced the philosophy as the King position in human’s knowledge. But, in fact, the science was born by philosophy. From 19th century, people could study the specific object by way of science, not philosophy. Of course, the best way to study the specific thing is the science. But, to study the onto, (...) science does not work. The onto is the target object of philosophy. The specific object is not the target study object of philosophy! The object for philosophy is the onto. But, in 19th and 20th century, people did not know this very well, viewing all the specific thing was studied very well by science, the scholars of philosophy were very upset. this is because they did not know the target object of philosophy is the onto, not the specific object. If they want to get a kind of specific object in nature to be the object of philosophy, of course, they would get defeated by the science, which was really the history. Finally, some got a field, called the phenomena, then, the phenomenology begun, but the phenomenology is not philosophy. Now, the human have got very large achievement in study of nature object. as per ontology and cognition logic, the onto is the root basis of every object, but, to get to know the specific object is the correct way for to get to know the onto. Now, with theachievement of study various object, philosophy could get new progress in study the onto. Following is the abstract explain why the phenomenology is not philosophy. From the very beginning of philosophy, people know the reality, the onto is hided in the phenomena, philosophy’s task is to find out the essence, the reality hided in the phenomena. At the time about early 20th century, there came out a kind of philosophy, called Phenomenology, ever developed ardently during last century for several decades, even now, it is still there, continue split philosophy, bring confusion to philosophy. Philosophy was produced by study the essence of object, especially the onto of everything. but in Phenomenology, there is no essence or the onto hided in the nature, it regard the phenomena as the study object, it deny the onto exists. The onto is the target object of philosophy over the past 2000 more years, but the phenomenology deny the onto, then, how could the phenomenology still regard itself as “philosophy”? Obviously, the phenomenology is not philosophy. Of course, the onto is there, longlive with the nature, the sun, the space. To get to know the onto, is the long live study for human. So, the phenomenology is wrong, at least wrong in the regard of the philosophy. Because of phenomenology’s ridiculous study object and theme, it produced various kinds of ridiculous answer and explain, by its main study such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and latter, The structuralism, post structuralism and post modernism ect.. Finally, philosophy was split, falling apart in everything, it seemed any kind thing or phenomena could produce a kind of philosophy, what more ridiculous is any kind of phenomena ever expected to explain the nature the world the space by its several points of view about itself. this make philosophy look like garbage, loss the glory it ever had. Now, it is high time to say that the phenomenology, since it deny the essence and the onto in the nature, is not philosophy. It shall not be called as philosophy. philosophy’s target object is the onto, which is the root basis of everything, the root theory in the space. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristophanes: ThesmophoriazusaeElizabeth W. ScharffenbergerColin Austin and S. Douglas Olson, eds. Aristophanes: Thesmophoriazusae. With intro. and comm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. cviii + 363 pp. 2 color plates. Cloth, $195.This long-awaited edition of Thesmophoriazusae is a welcome newcomer to the Oxford University Press series of commentaries on the comedies of Aristophanes. Colin Austin and S. Douglas Olson have collaborated to produce a generous work of scholarship that offers (...) a comprehensive perspective on this Aristophanic comedy, which playfully imagines the tragedian Euripides and his kinsman-by-marriage (the "Inlaw") fighting for their lives as they seek to allay the wrath of the matrons of Athens, who have been angered by Euripides' representations of female characters, during an annual women's festival (the Thesmophoria) honoring Demeter and Persephone. The volume offers a new and carefully edited text, which incorporates emendations that Austin has already proposed in separately published articles, and an informative apparatus criticus. On every page of the text there is a second apparatus (standard in Oxford University Press's recently published editions of Aristophanes) that indicates where words and verses are cited in the works of later authors (e.g., Philostratus, Lucian) and [End Page 140] in ancient and medieval lexica (e.g., Hesychius, the Suda). The introduction and meticulously detailed commentary supply extensive information about the comedy, the circumstances of its original production in 411 b.c.e., its relationship to other Aristophanic dramas, the history of its transmission, and a host of related topics. A bibliography, two indices (one for Greek words and one for general references), and two color plates of the Würzburg krater, representing the comedy's parody of Euripides' Telephus, complete the volume. Students and scholars with a variety of interests and needs will find this edition of Thesmophoriazusae most useful. Thanks to its editors' erudition and the thoughtfulness of their presentation, it is also a pleasure to read.In the introduction's summary of Thesmophoriazusae's manuscript tradition (lxxxix-xcviii), the survey of the most frequent errors in Ravennas 429 ("R," the tenth-century manuscript that is the only independent witness for its complete text) permits readers to get a sense of the kinds of emendations that have become common property in most of the editions published since the Renaissance. These conventional emendations aside, Thesmophoriazusae's text still leaves much room for editorial discretion, which Austin and Olson always exercise judiciously (even if one disagrees on occasion with their choices). Most importantly, a keen appreciation of Aristophanes' humor consistently informs their decisions concerning emendation, as is revealed by the interpretations of the jokes in 12 (defending the verse against deletion), 232 (retaining R's α), 242 (retaining R's and accepting Medaglia's restoration of ), 912 (retaining R's ), and 1094 (accepting Brunck's supplement ). They are also guided by the concern for making the text square with fifth-century Attic usage: see, e.g., the restoration of (for ) to 758-59 and the preferences for (over the transmitted v) in 173 and 478 and for (over the transmitted ) in 554.An unusual textual feature in this comedy—and an editorial challenge—is the pidgin-Greek spoken by the Scythian archer who guards the captured Inlaw in 1001-1225. Austin and Olson print his part without accents because, as they explain in the commentary's note on these verses (which also supplies a helpful list of the idiosyncrasies in his speech), "he must consistently have got [the accents] wrong" (308). Other editorial decisions (e.g., Austin's for R's unmetrical in 1088) bear out the editors' perception of the Scythian as a consistently bad speaker of Greek (325, n. on 1087-89).The comedy's lyric passages arguably present its thorniest set of editorial challenges. Most of the songs are marked by complexities in their rhythmic patterns; there is relatively little strophic responsion, and the two showcased parodies of tragic lyric (Agathon's song in 101-29 and the Inlaw's reworking of Andromeda's lament in 1015-55) feature elaborate polymetry that additionally complicates the tasks of interpreting and editing. Austin and Olson generally concur with the colometry and analysis of Thesmophoriazusae's songs that L. P... (shrink)

In the heat of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln made a speech in which he referred sympathetically to the Southern rebels. A member of the audience lambasted him for wanting to treat his enemies kindly when he ought to be thinking of destroying them. Lincoln's answer: "Why, madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?" Harshness and cruelty were to be banished from the moral imagination of the nation he was trying to save. The late (...) Jack Maple, a famously flamboyant but phenomenally effective former deputy commissioner of the NYPD, wrote that "the more information a detective has, the more creative, authoritative and effective he or she can be." Under attack in 2001, and then at war in Iraq in 2003, American law enforcement, intelligence and military really didn't have much information at first. They rounded up the usual suspects, but didn't know what usual meant. So they smacked people around, and that was always a bad idea, as Maple said: "Forget that smacking somebody around is illegal and just plain wrong, it's also the quickest way to ruin the chances of getting a statement of any kind." Professional interrogators talk about building empathy and dependence. Maple would get down on his knees and pray with a suspect if he thought that would work. But the best technique? "If you can get them to laugh, you'll get a statement. That's always true." Internal CIA documents reveal that empathy is also likely what got Abu Zubaydah to reveal how Al Qaeda planned 9/11 and its other operations. His torture brought nothing of real value, only the moral demeaning of his tormentors.... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Solving the Jigsaw PuzzlePeggy CadetIn my medical record, there is an enigmatic note. It was written as a consultation request from a pediatric endocrinologist to a plastic surgeon while I was hospitalized at age 13 (in the late 1960s) for mastectomy. The note reads:You have seen this unfortunate teenager with the feminizing testis [older name for androgen insensitivity] syndrome on several occasions in the past in reference to the (...) construction of a penis. Would appreciate your seeing him again to evaluate the problem. He is firmly fixed in the male gender role despite efforts on the part of his father to persuade him of the logic of a change.The surgeon’s response (also in my notes) was:The prospect of creating an acceptable penis in this patient seems to me very remote. There is nothing there except an enlarged clitoris. This could be mobilized and might project a few cm but cannot be made into a male organ of normal dimensions. The hair distribution and the perineum is also feminine which compounds the reconstruction problem.Since the decision has been made to go along with the male gender I suppose that mobilization of the penis–clitoris is reasonable. Urethral reconstruction will be possible only much later....I saw this note for the first time at age 21 but didn’t think it was particularly significant until many years later. At the time I had other, much more pressing concerns, as I had reached the conclusion by then that I had been mis–assigned as a boy and that the only way for me to have a reasonable and happy life would be for me to change to living as a girl. It was not a surprise that my doctors had been completely on the wrong track about my “gender”. I was also not about to bring this up with the endocrinologist, a person who had terrified me as a child and whom I still found a bit intimidating.I do remember the surgeon stopping by and examining me briefly without explaining who he was or why he was there. I had a somewhat longer, but equally uninformative (for me) visit from a child psychiatrist. The note requesting a consultation from the psychiatrist reads:Would you see while he is here recovering from his mastectomy? Since he began to show mammary growth 18 months ago his father has put him under considerable pressure to undergo another change in gender role. has resisted but he is quite depressed. We would appreciate any suggestions you may have.I actually have no recollection at all of anything like pressure from my father to change to living as a girl. What I actually experienced was more like 180 degrees away from that—the expectation that I should try to be more masculine. As I remember, my father was bothered by my having breasts and was the one who initiated the physician contacts that led to mastectomy. (My mother had died when I was five, leaving him to rear me as a single parent.)As my father recollected to me many years later, he had asked the pediatric endocrinologist to explain all of my treatment options and alternatives to me. I can only guess, but possibly the pediatric endocrinologist interpreted this as my father wanting me to change to living as a girl. As a young [End Page E1] adult, I got the impression that this particular doctor tended to mistake asking for information about possible treatments for requesting treatment. The idea of a patient gathering information and making informed decisions may not have figured prominently in his thinking. On the office visit when I was 21 and first mentioned to him that I might want to live as a girl, he told me that gender identity was “an unshakable conviction,” so perhaps his idea was that gender was just not something a person could make an ordinary decision about, weighing the pros and cons.My father knew—but at age 13 I didn’t—that the original decision for me to grow up as a boy had been made in a somewhat haphazard way. I had entered... (shrink)

IN THIS CHARMINGLY DISARMING FASHION Quine got us off on the wrong foot. No ontologist is interested in the attempt to give a complete inventory of the things which are. He is, indeed, interested in the sorts of things which are, but not just any list of sorts of things would interest him. There are, one might well say, white dogs, brown dogs, and brown and white dogs. Clearly these are some of the sorts of things there are. But (...) such a list is of profound disinterest to ontologists because, I take it, such things are all of a more general sort, and it is the more general sorts of things which interest them. But, of course, dogs and frogs are more general sorts of things and ontologists are not interested in them either. There is something radically uninteresting even about the more general sorts of things so long as they are not in some sense ontologically basic or ultimate. The ontologist, we might say, is very much interested in providing, among other things, a list of the ultimate sorts of things. And here there is much room for disagreement. But, unfortunately, the ontologist’s interest can now no longer be said to be simple or clear, for it is by no means obvious what might be meant by such a phrase as "ontologically basic." It is the aim of this paper to get a little closer than has Quine to an understanding of what this phrase might come to. (shrink)

The paper has two main aims, one larger and one slightly narrower. The larger aim is to undermine further a tendency that has dogged the interpretation of Platonic political philosophy in modern times, despite some dissenting voices: the tendency to begin from the assumption that Plato¿s thinking changed and developed over time, as if we already had privileged access to his biography. The slightly narrower aim is to reply to two charges of intellectual parricide made against Plato. The first is (...) explicit and well known: that he recommended political structures of a sort that would exclude the free-ranging philosophical inquiry sponsored by Socrates. The second is implicit in the standard reading of the Politicus, and says that Plato actually came to approve (however reluctantly) of Athens¿ execution of his teacher. I argue that the relevant passage (Plt. 297C - 302B) has been misunderstood, and that it is in fact fully consistent with the blanket criticism we find in the Republic of all existing forms of constitution. The Athenian democracy still got it wrong, both in general, and in making the particular decision to kill off old Socrates. I also argue that so far from proposing to abolish Socratic inquiry, Plato¿s political works as a whole (Republic, Politicus and Laws included) are actually designed to show the need for it. (shrink)