This is an articulate and intelligent book on the greatest German thinker of the period between Leibniz and Kant. Lessing's position had been a rather complex one. Irritated by the flatness of the Aufklärung and its deism yet opposed to the historical claims of Christianity, he attempted to elaborate a philosophy of history in which the tenets of historical religion would receive their just appreciation. The author of the present book is extremely well versed in the philosophical and theological context (...) of Lessing's thought and it is only after a most valuable first part on "Historical Background" that he initiates us into Lessing's thought proper. Attacks on Lessing, especially after the publication of Reimarus' writings, were frequent and we are given our share of some of the best or at least most interesting criticisms raised against Lessing. At the end of the book there is a particularly fine chapter on the Leibnizean roots of his philosophy of religion.--M. J. V. (shrink)

There has been a most deserving movement in the last years to unite in one volume the most important scholarly articles written on the same topic yet published in different learned journals. The present volume is devoted to the problems of medieval German and Dutch mysticism from its beginnings to The Imitation of Christ. The selection is interesting and varied yet a certain technical narrowness pervades the whole volume. Instead of sharing the pages somewhat equally between philological and philosophico-theological articles, (...) there is a heavy preponderance of the purely philological and of the strictly historical. Moreover, the papers of a more philosophical character talk less to the philosophically interested reader than to the specialist in the history of medieval philosophy. Of course, there are welcome exceptions like the fine study of Joseph Koch on Eckhart's doctrine of analogy or A. Ampe's article on the "essential return of the soul to God according to Jan Van Ruysbroeck"--but the general tone of the volume is such that the non-specialist would have difficulty to be interested in many of its chapters.--M. J. V. (shrink)

Hamann is one of the greatest religious writers of the eighteenth century in Germany. He is the person whom Schelling, Hegel, and Kierkegaard admired, read, and quoted. This book treats the major themes and insights of Hamann. Texts of Hamann are represented by a large number of quotations. Hamann never wrote a systematic treatise; he wrote short, devastating, illuminating essays and criticisms, as well as letters. Especially interesting are the chapters dealing with Hamann's criticism of contemporary philosophy, and his views (...) concerning the relation of philosophy and faith. This is a fine study which helps the reader to gain some orientation and perspective on Hamann's subtle and obscure writings.--M. J. V. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Charm and Speed: Virtuosity in the Performing ArtsAnthony J. PalmerV. A. Howard, Charm and Speed: Virtuosity in the Performing Arts (New York: Peter Lang, 2008)There may be one other book on virtuosity, but nothing that approaches the depth of argument put forth by V. A. Howard in Charm and Speed. As the author states, “[t]his book offers an interpretation, analysis, and reconstruction of the concept of virtuosity which (...) plays so prominent a role in historical, critical, and theoretical discussions of artistic performance.”1 The book is not an easy read, however, because of Howard’s customarily esoteric vocabulary. While the writing is in fine style, there are too many occasions where the reader may be hampered by having to pause to reconsider what was stated, especially in some of the longer sentences, or because a dictionary consultation is warranted.Nevertheless, this is a must-read for voice and instrumental students and their teachers, coaches, and accompanists. Moreover, this book is a must-read for anyone working with performing artists; Howard covers the performance arts broadly, including theatre and dance as well. If you only surmise what virtuosity is, you will become intimately aware of its meaning and all its ramifications.Its casual use suggests that virtuosity can be found everywhere, from auto mechanics to baristas and even include, as Howard describes, cheetahs on the hunt and the kill. And although the cheetah is perfectly suited to find food to feed her [End Page 101] cubs, the intentional development of techniques and a conscious plan to attack her prey is questionable; she acts out of instinct. We can admire various manifestations of excellence, but their qualities do not measure up to the characteristics of virtuosity. Excellence in execution is not by such virtue virtuosic.The fact is performance in the arts requires a special understanding of virtuosity that must be narrowly applied under appropriate conditions. The ten chapters comprising the book deal with every facet of virtuosity in performance and clarify the issues forcefully and accurately. Charm and Speed is a brief treatise of only 134 pages, plus notes and a 3-page appendix. But in those chapters lie explanations to which most professional performers, teachers, and subsidiary personnel may need to give serious consideration. On the other end of the spectrum, for those who may require a less than keenly argued thesis, how much does one really need to know about virtuosity to enjoy fine, but lesser, performance? Some differences do need to be noted, however, and confusing virtuosity with other artistic appellations could be eliminated.At the outset, virtuosity can easily be confused with creativity, but the latter is more general while “a judgment of virtuosity is necessarily grounded in the observables of execution.”2 Howard’s outline of the conditions of virtuosity is carried throughout the discussion. Three parts comprise any consideration: 1) the performing individual or group “inclusive of training and manifest talent,” judged by experts; 2) the domain of the performance—acting, dancing, and playing the violin—must be specified; and 3) the audience comprised of a general audience and “critics, colleagues, and institutions” must render appropriate judgment.3 Virtuosity is not a single state but requires both process and achievement.Howard narrows his discussion on virtuosity to those in the performing arts, “to those who play instruments, or sing or act, dance or conduct,”4 with no other reason or intention but to render the artwork with unique interpretations at the highest level possible. Howard restricts discourse to allographic5 works in the Western tradition, an important distinction that I had considered questionable at first, but came to realize that virtuosity considered on a wider scale could be overly complicated. My experience with Japanese performing art, for example, would have to examine, Nô, Bunraku, Kabuki theatre, and traditional vocal and instrumental performance, among other things, all quite complex in their own right. Can a puppet in Bunraku be a virtuoso, or would it be the puppeteer? Further, Korean art forms such as pansori and African arts, where some cultures are communal rather than performed by superb practitioners, would all have to be considered. When the whole world is examined... (shrink)

To encourage corporations to contribute positively to the environment in which they operate, voluntary self-regulatory codes (SRC) have been enacted and refined over the past 15 years. Two of the most prominent are the United Nations Global Compact and the Global Reporting Initiative. In this paper, we explore the impact of different stakeholders' pressures on the selection of strategic choices to join SRCs. Our results show that corporations react differently to different sets of stakeholder pressures and that the SRC selection (...) depends on the type and intensiveness of the stakeholder pressures as well as the resources at hand to respond to those pressures. Our contribution offers a more specific and finely variegated analysis of firmstakeholder interactions. (shrink)

George Du Maurier’s best-selling novel, Trilby (1894), is as important because of its defiance of social and cultural norms as it is for its apparent compliance with them. Trilby is a fiction that, like its eponymous heroine, attempts to negotiate the perilously fine line between the highbrow and the lowbrow, or to put it another way, between fine art and political commentary on one side, and pornography and sensationalism on the other. This article examines the way that Du (...) Maurier engages his readership in this textual tease – his seduction of the reader – by suggesting the possibility of a peep show where everything that Victorian respectability abhors may be on display, and then his narratological dressing of the text, to ensure that where there is sexual non-conformity there is also moralism, and where there is social confrontation there is also historical distance. Understanding the textual appeal of Trilby as a character, the artist’s model who enchanted the fin-de-siècle reading public, is essential to appreciating how the discourses of pornography and fine art interact and have consequently evolved. This article therefore examines why Trilby succeeded with the Victorians where other, similarly sexually active heroines – such as Thomas Hardy’s Sue Bridehead – failed. Trilby the novel and Trilby the woman are both broken down by their author into manageable parts, a pornographic fetishistic technique that simultaneously eroticises, and makes more palatable, the textual and the physical bodies. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce a collection of isols having some interesting properties. Imagine a collection W of regressive isols with the following features: u, v ϵ W implies that u ⩽ v or v ⩽ u, u ⩽ v and v ϵ W imply u ϵ W, W contains ℕ = {0,1,2,…} and some infinite isols, and u eϵ W, u infinite, and u + v regressive imply u + v ϵ W. That such a collection W exists is (...) proved in our paper. It has many nice features. It also satisfies u, v ϵ W, u ⩽ v and u infinite imply v ⩽ g for some recursive combinatorial function g, and each u ϵ W is hereditarily odd-even and is hereditarily recursively strongly torre. The collection W that we obtain may be characterized in terms of a semiring of isols D introduced by J. C. E. Dekker in [5]. We will show that W = D, where c is an infinite regressive isol that is called completely torre. (shrink)

In 1924 W. W. Tarn published an article in which he attempted to prove that the mother of Philip V of Macedon was the Epirot princess Phthia. Previously all historians had accepted the statement of Eusebius that Philip was the son of Demetrius II and Chryseis, whom, after the death of her husband, the Macedonians gave in marriage to Antigonus Doson. Despite the cogency of Tarn's arguments, his theory has been rejected by both Beloch and Dinsmoor, who adhere to the (...) traditional view. This problem of the identity of Philip's mother is one of considerable importance, and consequently in this paper I intend to collect the evidence once again and subject it to a careful analysis. The results will be found strongly to corroborate Tarn's contention. (shrink)

Paul Engelmann was Adolf Loos's favorite pupil, private secretary to Karl Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein's most important interlocutor in the years between 1916 and 1928 as well as his partner in building the Stonborough House. Thus it was that the trenchant critique of modernity associated with Wittgenstein's Vienna originated around Paul Engelmann. The present volume of essays from an international symposium in Aarhus, Denmark in 1999 offers an interdisciplinary perspective on issues bearing upon architecture, language and cultural criticism as they (...) relate to the life's work of Paul Engelmann. (shrink)

Electrical resistivity and ac-calorimetric measurements reveal a complex magnetic phase diagram for single crystals of the ferromagnetic Kondo-lattice compound CeAgSb2 at high pressures up to 80 kbar. The ferromagnetic order at TC = 9.6 K at ambient pressure is completely suppressed at a critical pressure PC = 35 kbar. Another magnetic transition, possibly antiferromagnetic, found above 27 kbar, attains a maximum value TN 6 K at 44 kbar and then appears to be completely suppressed by 50 kbar. Thermodynamic and transport (...) measurements in the ferromagnetic state indicate an energy gap Δ 30 K in the spin-wave excitation spectrum at ambient pressure which decreases to Δ 10 K at P = 30 kbar. No superconductivity is observed at ambient pressure above T 0.1 K, under applied pressure in the ferromagnetic state (P = 28.5 kbar), nor in the antiferromagnetic state (P = 33 − 46 kbar) above 0.3 K. © 2003 The American Physical Society. (shrink)

We define and study the class of all stack algebras as the class of all minimal algebras in a variety defined by an infinite recursively enumerable set of equations. Among a number of results, we show that the initial model of the variety is computable, that its equational theory is decidable, but that its equational deduction problem is undecidable. We show that it cannot be finitely axiomatised by equations, but it can be finitely axiomatised by equations with a hidden sort (...) and functions. This class of all stack algebras, together with its specifications, can be used to survey the many models in the literature on stacks in a systematic way, and hence give the study of the stack some mathematical coherence. Article Outline. (shrink)

The double slit experiment for a massive scalar particle is described using intuitionistic logic with quantum real numbers as the numerical values of the particle's position and momentum. The model assigns physical reality to single quantum particles. Its truth values are given open subsets of state space interpreted as the ontological conditions of a particle. Each condition determines quantum real number values for all the particle's attributes. Questions, unanswerable in the standard theories, concerning the behaviour of single particles in the (...) experiment are answered. (shrink)

The problems of the tolal energy and quasilocalenergy density or an isolated spherically symmetric static system in general relativity (GR) are considered with examples of some exact suintions. The field formulation of GR dereloped earlier hy L. P. Grishchuk. el al. (1984). in ihe framework of which all the dynamical fields, including the gravitation field, are considered in a fixed background spacetime is used intensively. The exact Schwarzschild and Reissner Nordstrom solutions are investigated in detail, and the results are compared (...) with those in the recent work by J. D. Brown and J. W. York. Jr. (1993) as well as discussed with respect to the principle of nonlocalization of the gravitational energy in GR. Those examples are illustrative and simple because the background is selected as Minkowski spacetime and, in fact, the field configurations are studied in the framework of special relativity. It is shown that some problems of the Schwarzschild solution which are difficult to resolve in the standard geometrical framework of GR are resolved in the framework of the field formulation. (shrink)

Objectives: To foster the development of a privacy-protective, sustainable cross-border information system in the framework of a European public health project. Materials and methods: A targeted privacy impact assessment was implemented to identify the best architecture for a European information system for diabetes directly tapping into clinical registries. Four steps were used to provide input to software designers and developers: a structured literature search, analysis of data flow scenarios or options, creation of an ad hoc questionnaire and conduction of a (...) Delphi procedure. Results: The literature search identified a core set of relevant papers on privacy. Technicians envisaged three candidate system architectures, with associated data flows, to source an information flow questionnaire that was submitted to the Delphi panel for the selection of the best architecture. A detailed scheme envisaging an “aggregation by group of patients” was finally chosen, based upon the exchange of finely tuned summary tables. Conclusions: Public health information systems should be carefully engineered only after a clear strategy for privacy protection has been planned, to avoid breaching current regulations and future concerns and to optimise the development of statistical routines. The BIRO project delivers a specific method of privacy impact assessment that can be conveniently used in similar situations across Europe. (shrink)

This paper investigates the behavior of conformal fluctuations of space-time geometry that are admissible under the quantized version of Einstein's general relativity. The approach to quantum gravity is via path integrals. It is shown that considerable simplification results when only the conformal degrees of freedom are considered under this scheme, so much so that it is possible to write down a formal kernel in the most general case where the space-time contains arbitrary distributions of particles with no other interaction except (...) gravity. The behavior of this kernel near the classical space-time singularity then shows that quantum fluctuations inevitably diverge near the singularity. It is shown further that the root cause of this divergence lies in the fact that the Green's function for the conformally invariant scalar wave equation diverges at the singularity. The limitations on the validity of classical general relativity near the space-time singularity are discussed and it is argued that the notion of singularity itself needs to be radically modified once the quantum effects are taken into account. (shrink)

There is still some confusion over the literary evidence for the methods by which children and others learnt to write in the ancient world. There are four main sources: the analogy between the methods of thegrammatistesand the function of the laws in Plato,Protagoras326c–d, three passages in Quintilian, a passage from one of Seneca's letters and a short analogy in Maximus of Tyre.

In the paper, the multilevel concept of methodology of science is reviewed. The author distinguishes five levels in the methodology of science. These levels vary in degree of generality and the nature of the relationship with philosophy. The first, most general level of the methodology of ways of learning of the studies on the application of science to philosophical methods such as dialectical and metaphysical. The doctrine of general scientific ways of knowing is the second, less common level of methodology (...) of science. The essence of scientific methods is studied at this level, given their theoretical rationale. There are heuristic dignity, epistemological possibilities, and the boundaries of applicability are identified. The third level of the methodology of science is the study of the system of general scientific ways of learning applied in any basic science. In addition to knowledge of the essence of these methods for the researcher requires knowledge of the basic problems of this science. The fourth level of the methodology of science is the study of the system of general scientific ways of learning and epistemological problems in any basic science. The fifth level of the methodology of science are the problems of narrower plan. This study questions the use of certain, specific methods of scientific learning. Thus, the methodology of science is complex and has a complicated structure. The two most general level the methodology are philosophical, the next two are common to philosophy and science, the fifth level is of a specifically scientific nature. (shrink)

The last half century has been characterized by a growth in the regulation of clinical research nationally and internationally. Each area of research on human subjects has been the subject of a vast academic literature and extensive public policy debate, from issues of informed consent to that of regulatory structures. Professor Bernard Dickens has provided an outstanding contribution to this debate internationally through his many innovative and incisive papers in this area. This paper provides an English lawyer’s perspective upon the (...) increasing regulation of clinical research practices and asks – does regulation equate with effective rights protection? From Nuremberg onwards, there has been concern to ensure that research practices are ethical and in accordance with legal principles. So, for example, there have been statements such as the Declaration of Helsinki, which was initially produced in 1964. In the European context in particular, notably influential statements have been the European Convention on Human Rights, which has been followed by the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine and, more recently, a Draft Additional Protocol on medical research. (shrink)