The examination of the cleroterium by Sterling Dow left few questions connected with it untouched. His publications on this ingenious device are as follows: ‘Allotment Machines', Prytaneis: A Study of the Inscriptions Honoring the Athenian Councillors, Hesperia, Suppl. i 198–215, with photographs ; ‘Aristotle, the Kleroteria, and the Courts’, HSCP 1 1–34 ; ‘Kleroterion’, in PW, Suppl. vii, col. 322–328. G. Klaffenbach summarised Dow's analysis in ‘Antike Losungsapparate’, Die Antike xiv 353–355. Prior to Dow, notice of one fragment of a (...) cleroterium was published by B. Tamaro, ‘Pianta Epigrafica dell’ Acropoli', ASAA iv/v 63 nr. 124. P has clear photographs of all remains then known. There are drawings in PW based on the drawing of I and photographs of I, II, III, X, and XI in P—Dow labelled the remains with roman numerals; I follow his labelling. Drawings in P are found opposite the photographs of I and of VI; in H, as frontispiece. Since Dow's publications appeared, there has been no reconsideration of his work nor any re-examination of his reconstruction. This is proof of the quality of his work.In 1960 when I first studied Dow's reconstruction, I relied on the excellent and revealing photographs in P. My own mechanical aptitude made me feel uneasy over certain small details in the reconstruction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Learning Christ: Ignatius of Antioch and the Mystery of Redemption by Gregory VallDavid Vincent Meconi S.J.Learning Christ: Ignatius of Antioch and the Mystery of Redemption. By Gregory Vall. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013. Pp. xii + 401. $69.95 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8132-2158-8.In the first decade of the first Christian century, the bishop of Antioch found himself surrounded by imperial guards under order to drag (...) him back to Rome to face the consequences of his supposed atheism and traitorous leadership in Christ’s Church. Eusebius’s episcopal list places Ignatius as the third bishop of Antioch, after Saints Peter and Evodius, reigning in Antioch from ca. 70 to 107. Ignatius was a larger-than-life character; even as a child he was supposedly the little boy whom the Lord embraced and held up as an example of heavenly simplicity (Matt 18:2-4). In ten clear and illuminating chapters, Gregory Vall brings the reader through the many legends and apocryphal assumptions surrounding Ignatius and his thinking. Vall’s purpose in writing this work is to show contemporary scholars the levels of richness and theological insight in Ignatius’s relatively small epistolary corpus.The first two chapters treat Ignatius’s use of Scripture and how his reading of the canon plays out in his theology of salvation. “Scripture and Economy” (chap. 1) and “Issues in Ignatian Scholarship” (chap. 2) show not only the massive amount of scholarly attention such a relatively small amount of writing has generated over the centuries, but also why the way Ignatius read and [End Page 321] used Sacred Scripture is still important today. The five guiding loci Vall would have the reader keep in mind are how Ignatius consistently assumes (1) the necessary connection between “theology” (God’s very self) and God’s economy in creation, (2) the link between creation and redemption, (3) the relationship between the Old and New Covenants of God and his chosen ones, (4) the sending of the Son who comes to impart the Spirit, and (5) the life of the pilgrim-sojourner who simultaneously is a future beholder of eternal glory.With these guiding principles in place, Ignatius proves to be a Christian thinker who understands that mystical transformation, and not moral achievement, is what saves us. Accordingly, here we become the students of one who sees himself teaching on behalf of Jesus Christ. This is ecclesia for Ignatius, a place where those called out of the world come together as one so as to be illumined into true Christ-bearers. For Ignatius, therefore, “theology is properly an ecclesial activity and not merely the function of isolated individuals. Our place, then, is to sit alongside Ignatius and contemplate the mystery of redemption with him” (86), thereby developing a visceral sympathy for the things of Christ, drawing near to God and to the people of God in truth and in love. Theology and all Christian activity are consummated in nothing other than Love himself, charity being the only true mark of the theologian.The next three chapters thus turn to Ignatius’s theology of the Godhead: “Jesus and the Father” (chap. 3), “Flesh and Spirit” (chap. 4), and “Faith and Love” (chap. 5). Here, the fundamental theology of Ignatius is handled masterfully. A true contrast to the starts and attempts and to the Gnostic leanings, as well as to the fundamental errors, of the second century, Ignatius amazingly proves to be a loving pastor as well as a sophisticated theologian anticipating accurately later Church formulae. Vall takes care to show how Ignatius advances Pauline insights faithfully while never being afraid to adapt scriptural terms and traditions to meet the challenges of his own flock.Especially important in this middle section is how Ignatius saw the Christian life as teleologically unifying earth and heaven, anticipating Augustine of Hippo’s wordplay of living in spe but not yet in re. Since the Logos is the first and last principle () of reality, but has now even taken on flesh and revealed the fullness of the Father to those still on their way, “the person of Christ, his deeds, and... (shrink)

Looking at John Milbank's recent turn to Fr. Sergej Bulgakov, this paper argues that the theological and philosophical commitments they share are overshadowed by a deeper difference concerning the role each assigns the church in secular culture. It turns to Milbank's roots in Augustine's philosophy of history, which he argues could have allowed the church to overtake the pagan (which founds the secular) were it not for his distinction between the "visible" church and its deferred (eschatological) perfection. Bulgakov also criticizes (...) Augustine's doctrine of the church, or so he thinks. He actually misreads Augustine, accusing the bishop of holding a doctrine of the church that Milbank would have liked him to have held. This suggests that Bulgakov would not agree with Milbank's view that the church should "enact" God's judgment in history by opposing itself to the secular. (shrink)

For over a century, the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard has been at the center of a number of important discussions, concerning not only philosophy and theology, but also, more recently, fields such as social thought, psychology, and contemporary aesthetics, especially literary theory. Despite his relatively short life, Kierkegaard was an extraordinarily prolific writer, as attested to by the 26-volume Princeton University Press edition of all of his published writings. But Kierkegaard left behind nearly as much unpublished writing, most of which (...) consists of what are called his "journals and notebooks." Kierkegaard has long been recognized as one of history's great journal keepers, but only rather small portions of his journals and notebooks are what we usually understand by the term “diaries.” By far the greater part of Kierkegaard’s journals and notebooks consists of reflections on a myriad of subjects—philosophical, religious, political, personal. Studying his journals and notebooks takes us into his workshop, where we can see his entire universe of thought. We can witness the genesis of his published works, to be sure—but we can also see whole galaxies of concepts, new insights, and fragments, large and small, of partially completed but unpublished works. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks enables us to see the thinker in dialogue with his times and with himself. Kierkegaard wrote his journals in a two-column format, one for his initial entries and the second for the extensive marginal comments that he added later. This edition of the journals reproduces this format, includes several photographs of original manuscript pages, and contains extensive scholarly commentary on the various entries and on the history of the manuscripts being reproduced. Volume 9 of this 11-volume series includes five of Kierkegaard’s important “NB” journals, which span from June 1852 to August 1854. This period was marked by Kierkegaard’s increasing preoccupation with what he saw as an unbridgeable gulf in Christianity—between the absolute ideal of the religion of the New Testament and the official, state-sanctioned culture of “Christendom,” which, embodied by the Danish People’s Church, Kierkegaard rejected with increasing vehemence. Crucially, Kierkegaard’s nemesis, Bishop Jakob Peter Mynster, died during this period and, in the months following, Kierkegaard can be seen moving inexorably toward the famous “attack on Christendom” with which he ended his life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 12.3 (2002) 305-323 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 41 Bioethics and Cloning, Part I Susan Cartier Poland and Laura Jane Bishop This is Part One of a two part Scope Note on Bioethics and Cloning. Part Two will be published in the December 2002 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal and as a separate reprint. Contents For Parts 1 And (...) 2 Part 1Part 2I.History of the ScienceI.Ethical PerspectivesII.Historical CommentaryII.Religious PerspectivesIII.Animal WelfareIII.Fiction and FilmIV.Laws and Legal Literature"Clone" is a collective noun (I, Stewart 1997, p. 771). A collective noun names a group and is composed of individual members, such as "herd" or "flock." Derived from the Greek kl¯on for twig or slip, "clone" was first used in biology to describe the aggregate of asexually produced progeny of an individual, either naturally occurring or man-made; the definition later expanded to mean a group of genetically identical members who originate from a single ancestor. Thus, a clone is a group that results from the process of asexual reproduction.In nature, cloning occurs either by parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilization) or by fission (embryo splitting). In a pioneering experiment in 1952, Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King (I, 1952), cancer researchers at the Institute for Cancer Research (today part of the Fox Chase Cancer Center) in Philadelphia, demonstrated on frogs another method of cloning by transplanting nuclei into enucleated cells, a technique called "nuclear transplantation," which John B. Gurdon and colleagues (I, 1958, 1975) used to create clones of frogs.Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, two back-to-back frauds in cloning occurred. First, the cloning of a human described by American science journalist David Rorvik in the 1978 book In His Image was called a hoax by a court in [End Page 305] 1982. Second, the cloning of three mice, announced by German wunderkind Karl Illmensee to scientific circles in 1979 (and to the public in 1981), could not be proven to be true, according to convincing evidence by McGrath and Solter (I) published in 1984.With their pronouncement that mammalian cloning was impossible, McGrath and Solter essentially stopped cloning research and funding for such biological research. So by the mid-1980s, instead of further investigating cloning, developmental biologists studied embryology related to in vitro fertilization, while molecular biologists studied recombinant DNA under the newly relaxed NIH guidelines. These two strands of scientific investigation came together in the work of Ian Wilmut, who created in vitro embryos using nuclear transplantation to reproduce genetically engineered cattle. Wilmut was seeking a way to increase the successful birth rate when, in the 1990s, he produced identical twin sheep, Megan and Morag, cloned from an embryonic cell, followed by another sheep, Dolly, cloned from an adult cell. The birth of a mammal from an embryo whose genetic material came from an adult cell firmly re-established the possibility of cloning from adults. Prior to Dolly's birth, scientists believed that adult cells lost the ability to dedifferentiate—i.e., to become unspecialized—and so could not direct the development of an embryo through to birth.The 1997 announcement of Dolly's birth initiated the present widespread discussion of cloning. Because of its potentially vast applications across human health, medicine, agriculture, and business/economics, cloning raises a host of issues including those concerning: genetics and genetic engineering, patenting, animal rights and/or animal welfare (especially for transgenic, research, or cloned animals), organ transplantation, reproduction, eugenics, pharmacology (drug production using transgenic animals), research practices, informed consent, stem cell research, women's rights, children's rights, parental rights and responsibilities, and theology and philosophy. It fosters questions about the meaning and purpose of life, the limits of human powers to intervene in research and therapy, and what it means to be human or animal. In addition, environmentalists and organic farmers raise concerns about the effect of novel animals and plants on the environment, while nutritionists and the lay public wonder... (shrink)

The argument presented in this paper is not a direct attack or defence of the Chinese Room Argument (CRA), but relates to the premise at its heart, that syntax is not sufficient for semantics, via the closely associated propositions that semantics is not intrinsic to syntax and that syntax is not intrinsic to physics. However, in contrast to the CRA’s critique of the link between syntax and semantics, this paper will explore the associated link between syntax and physics. The main (...) argument presented here is not significantly original – it is a simple reflection upon that originally given by Hilary Putnam (Putnam 1988) and criticised by David Chalmers and others: instead of seeking to justify Putnam’s claim that, “every open system implements every Finite State Automaton (FSA)”, and hence that psychological states of the brain cannot be functional states of a computer, I will seek to establish the weaker result that, over a finite time window every open system implements the trace of a particular FSA Q, as it executes program (p) on input (x). That this result leads to panpsychism is clear as, equating Q (p, x) to a specific Strong AI program that is claimed to instantiate phenomenal states as it executes, and following Putnam’s procedure, identical computational (and ex hypothesi phenomenal) states (ubiquitous little ‘pixies’) can be found in every open physical system. (shrink)

Claudian's carm. min. 50 which is addressed ‘In Jacobum Magistrum Equitum’ has recently been the subject of a detailed study by J. Vanderspoel. In it he reviews what little we know about the career of Jacobus using as his second source in this matter the letter of Vigilius, bishop of Tridentum, to John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, the heading of which reports that the relics of the martyrs Sisinnius, Alexander and Martyrius reached Constantinople ‘per Jacobum virum illustrem’. Whilst (...) I am willing to accept the argument that the relics must have been delivered by about A.D. 400, if not earlier, and that Jacobus received the office of magister equitum subsequent to this, I have some misgivings about the treatment afforded the earlier career of Jacobus, and it is to this matter which I wish to draw attention here. (shrink)

First published in 1952, British Empirical Philosophers is a comprehensive picture of one of the most important movements in the history of philosophic thought. In his introduction, Professor A. J. Ayer distinguishes the main problems of empiricism and gives a critical account of the ways in which the philosophers whose writings are included in this volume attempted to solve them. Editors Ayer and Raymond Winch bring together an authoritative abridgement of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding ; Bishop George (...) Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge ; almost the entire first book of David Hume’s Treatise Concerning Human Nature ; and extracts from Thomas Reid’s Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man and John Stuart Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. (shrink)

How can we imagine a future not driven by capitalist assumptions about humans and the wider world? How are a range of contemporary artistic and popular cultural practices already providing pathways to post-capitalist futures? Authors from a variety of disciplines answer these questions through writings on blues and hip hop, virtual reality, post-colonial science fiction, virtual gaming, riot grrrls and punk, raku pottery, post-pornography fanzines, zombie films, and role playing. The essays in Art as Revolt are clustered around themes such (...) as technology and the future, aesthetics and resistance, and ethnographies of the self beyond traditional understandings of identity. Using philosophies of immanence – describing a system that gives rise to itself, independent of outside forces – drawn from a rich and evolving tradition that includes Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Braidotti, the authors and editors provide an engrossing range of analysis and speculation. Together the essays, written by experts in their fields, stage an important collective, transdisciplinary conversation about how best to talk about art and politics today. Sophisticated in its theoretical and philosophical premises, and engaging some of the most pressing questions in cultural studies and artistic practice today, Art as Revolt does not provide comfortable closure. Instead, it is understood by its authors to be a “Dionysian machine,” a generator of open-ended possibility and potential that challenges readers to affirm their own belief in the futures of this world. Contributors include Timothy J. Beck, Mark Bishop, Dave Collins, David Fancy, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Malisa Kurtz, Nicole Land, Eric Lochhead, Douglas Ord, Joanna Perkins, Peter Rehberg, Chris Richardson, Hans Skott-Myhre, and Kathleen Skott-Myhre. (shrink)

First published in 1952, British Empirical Philosophers is a comprehensive picture of one of the most important movements in the history of philosophic thought. In his introduction, Professor A. J. Ayer distinguishes the main problems of empiricism and gives a critical account of the ways in which the philosophers whose writings are included in this volume attempted to solve them. Editors Ayer and Raymond Winch bring together an authoritative abridgement of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding ; Bishop George (...) Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge ; almost the entire first book of David Hume’s Treatise Concerning Human Nature ; and extracts from Thomas Reid’s Essay on the Intellectual Powers of Man and John Stuart Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. (shrink)

Joseph Butler was an Anglican priest and later a bishop who wrote about ethics, religion, and other philosophical themes. He is not well known today. During his lifetime and into the early part of the twentieth century he was better known especially for his major work the Analogy of Religion (1736). Today he is known mostly for his sermons which are interpreted as essays on ethics and for his essay on identity. Butler had a profound effect on J. H. (...) Newman, Matthew Arnold, and W. E. Gladstone and some effect on many other popular, academic, and professional readers. This book is as much about Butler’s sources and his reception as it is about the way he arranged and presented the evidence in the first half of the 18th century. He was a good man and is recognized by the Anglican church as a divine. We have no interest in taking a nostalgic look at a quaint figure in English church history. To those who claim Butler is unknown, that he was “blown out of the water” by John Wesley or Karl Barth, or Cornelius van Til, we can only say Butler is not as well known in the 20th and 21st centuries as in the 19th, but he is certainly not unknown to those who have taken any interest in philosophy, religion, or ethics. Today there has been a revival of interest in Bishop Butler. Our concern is to build and maintain a bridge that will help to keep this momentum. He offers an ethic that is universal and clearly Christian, yet it is based on the nature of man. Kant had a similar project, but in our opinion, Butler makes more compelling arguments. What is of interest to the Christian apologist is Butler’s work in this area. The purpose of this book is to present Butler’s ideas. We believe that his ethics have a universality that is applicable to people of all religious faiths and those that have none. It is common sense way of looking at ethics for everyday interaction. This book is a narrative argument presenting in detail how Butler’s creative arrangement of the evidence served as a bridge between the ancients as known in the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew originals, and the moderns, mostly Anglophone, who constituted Butler’s work environment and his reception in the latter day down to the present. We can hardly expect everyone to agree with Butler on all points, we certainly do not. The point at issue is rather whether he merits a seat at the present-day round table of deliberation on matters pertaining to philosophy, religion, and ethics. (shrink)

“What do you see when you look at your face in the mirror?” asks J. David Velleman in introducing his philosophical theory of action. He takes this simple act of self-scrutiny as a model for the reflective reasoning of rational agents: our efforts to understand our existence and conduct are aided by our efforts to make it intelligible. Reflective reasoning, Velleman argues, constitutes practical reasoning. By applying this conception, _Practical Reflection_ develops philosophical accounts of intention, free will, and the (...) foundation of morals. This new edition of _Practical Reflection_ contains the original 1989 text along with a new introduction and is the latest entry in The David Hume Series of Philosophy and Cognitive Science Reissues, which keeps in print previously published indispensable works in the area of cognitive science. _ _ _ _. (shrink)

There are two versions of the language-of-thought hypothesis (LOT): Representational LOT (roughly, structured representation), introduced by Ockham, and computational LOT (roughly, symbolic computation) introduced by Fodor. Like many others, I oppose the latter but not the former. Quilty-Dunn et al. defend representational LOT, but they do not defend the strong computational LOT thesis central to the classical-connectionist debate.

Just as our scientific inquiries are framed by our prior conception of what can be observed ? that is, of observables ? so our practical deliberations are framed by our prior conception of what can be done, that is, of doables. And doables are socially constructed, with the result that they vary between societies. I explore how doables are constructed and conclude with some remarks about the implications for moral relativism.

Does the capacity to think require the capacity to sense? A lively debate on this topic runs throughout the history of philosophy and now animates discussions of artificial intelligence. Many have argued that AI systems such as large language models cannot think and understand if they lack sensory grounding. I argue that thought does not require sensory grounding: there can be pure thinkers who can think without any sensory capacities. As a result, the absence of sensory grounding does not entail (...) that large language models cannot think or understand. I also consider to what extent quasi-sensory grounding can at least boost the performance of a language model. (shrink)

This chapter provides a rich philosophical discussion of superintelligence, a widely discussed piece that has encouraged philosophers of mind to take transhumanism, mind uploading, and the singularity more seriously. It starts with the argument for a singularity: is there good reason to believe that there will be an intelligence explosion? Next, the chapter considers how to negotiate the singularity: if it is possible that there will be a singularity, how can we maximize the chances of a good outcome? Finally, it (...) considers the place of humans in a post‐singularity world, with special attention to questions about uploading: can an uploaded human be conscious, and will uploading preserve personal identity? The chapter also analyzes whether there are certain constraints on design of artificial intelligence (AI) and AI+ that we might impose, in order to increase the chances of a good outcome. (shrink)

In this, his last work, J. David Greenstone provides an important new analysis of American liberalism and of Lincoln's unique contribution to the nation's political life. Greenstone addresses Louis Hartz's well-known claim that a tradition of liberal consensus has characterized American political life from the time of the founders. Although he acknowledges the force of Hartz's thesis, Greenstone nevertheless finds it inadequate for explaining prominent instances of American political discord, most notably the Civil War. Originally published in 1993. The (...) Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Images of myself being Napoleon can scarcely merely be images of the physical figure of Napoleon.... They will rather be images of, for instance, the desolation at Austerlitz as viewed by me vaguely aware of my short stature and my cockaded hat, my hand in my tunic.

Slavery has long stood as a mirror image to the conception of a free person in republican theory. This essay contends that slavery deserves this central status in a theory of freedom, but a more thorough examination of slavery in theory and in practice will reveal additional insights about freedom previously unacknowledged by republicans. Slavery combines imperium (state domination) and dominium (private domination) in a way that both destroys freedom today and diminishes opportunities to achieve freedom tomorrow. Dominium and imperium (...) working together are a greater affront to freedom than either working alone. However, an examination of slavery in practice, focusing on the experiences of American slaves, demonstrates that republicanisms’ acknowledged strategies for freedom-seeking, acquiring insulation from domination through law and through norms, do not encompass the full range of options. Slaves also seek freedom through physical absence, economic activity, and culture. The account of slavery and freedom developed here suggests republican accounts of freedom should either give up their focus on thresholds of freedom, or consider the possibility of a plural conception of freedom that extends beyond just freedom as non-domination to include freedom as collective world-making, or both. (shrink)

The terms `endurance' and `perdurance' are commonly thought to denote distinct ways for an object to persist, but it is surprisingly hard to say what these are. The common approach, defining them in terms of temporal parts, is mistaken, because it does not lead to two coherent philosophical alternatives: endurance so understood becomes conceptually incoherent, while perdurance becomes not just true but a conceptual truth. Instead, we propose a different way to articulate the distinction, in terms of identity rather than (...) temporal parts: an object endures if its identity is determined at every moment at which it exists. We make precise what it means for the identity of an object to be determined at a moment. We also discuss what role the endurance / perdurance distinction, so understood, should play in the debates about time, material objects and personal identity. (shrink)

Decision theory comprises, first, a mathematical formalization of the relations among value, belief, and preference; and second, a set of prescriptions for rational preference. Both aspects of the theory are embodied in a single mathematical proof. The problem in the foundations of decision theory is to explain how elements of one and the same proof can serve both functions. I hope to solve this problem in a way that anchors the decision-theoretic norms of rational preference in fundamental intuitions about rationality (...) in general. I will thus depart from the tradition of anchoring those norms in intui-tions about gambling strategies or preference structures of the sort that are the special concern of the theory itself. Although my interpretation is meant to capture what is right about the decision-theoretic conception of rational preference, it will lead me to argue that there is also something fundamentally wrong about that conception. In my view, decision theory tells us how to be rational in our preferences because it tells us how to have preferences that make sense; but there are ways of making sense that outrun, and may in fact conflict with, the prescriptions of decision theory. (shrink)

There was a strong consensus in the commentaries that animals' performances in metacognition paradigms indicate high-level decisional processes that cannot be explained associatively. Our response summarizes this consensus and the support for the idea that these performances demonstrate animal metacognition. We amplify the idea that there is an adaptive advantage favoring animals who can – in an immediate moment of difficulty or uncertainty – construct a decisional assemblage that lets them find an appropriate behavioral solution. A working consciousness would serve (...) this function well. This explains why animals may have the functional equivalent of human declarative consciousness. However, like other commentators who were friendly to this equivalence, we approach carefully the stronger claims that animals' metacognitive performances imply full-blown self-awareness or phenomenal consciousness. We discuss the commentators' interesting ideas for future research, as well as their intriguing ideas about the evolution and development of metacognition and its relation to theory of mind. We also discuss residual confusions about existing research and remaining methodological issues. (shrink)

What do "raves" have to do with eighteenth-century Romanticism, or the latest communication technologies with historical ideas about language, media, and culture? Today’s culture dazzles us with technological marvels and media spectacles. While we find them entertaining, just as often they are troubling — they seem to contradict common sense, eliciting such questions as What is real? or What is reality? and What is language? or What does language do? These questions, once confined to scholars, have become everyone’s concern. Some (...) of the best answers might be found in an unexpected source: Romanticism. Too often we bring the values of the Enlightenment, particularly that of reason, to critique phenomena not inherently rational, such as pop culture or the Internet. This means that much criticism of current culture already has an intellectual foundation antagonistic to it — inviting postmodern arguments that suggest history has ended and reality is an illusion. In contrast, Romanticism, a cultural movement founded in Germany and England during the late eighteenth century, offers us an archive of concepts surprisingly sensitive to these problems. The Romantics were poets, dreamers, and politicians who advanced ideas that anticipated much contemporary thinking. David Black has organized these ideas systematically, and has then applied them to key issues in communications, such as representation, audience, and the information society, as well as to significant debates in cultural studies. As a result, The Politics of Enchantment offers a new theory of media and culture that is grounded in intellectual history, yet as feverishly current as the latest digital device. (shrink)

Transdisciplinary research knits together knowledge from diverse epistemic communities in addressing social-environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, climate crises, food insecurity, and public health. This paper reflects on the roles of philosophy of science in transdisciplinary research while focusing on Indigenous and other subaltern forms of knowledge. We offer a critical assessment of demarcationist approaches in philosophy of science and outline a constructive alternative of transdisciplinary philosophy of science. While a demarcationist focus obscures the complex relations between epistemic communities, transdisciplinary (...) philosophy of science provides resources for meeting epistemic and political challenges of collaborative knowledge production. (shrink)

How a "right to die" may become a "coercive option".