The inductive category formation framework, an influential set of theories of learning in psychology and artificial intelligence, is deeply flawed. In this framework a set of necessary and sufficient features is taken to define a category. Such definitions are not functionally justified, are not used by people, and are not inducible by a learning system. Inductive theories depend on having access to all and only relevant features, which is not only impossible but begs a key question in learning. The crucial (...) roles of other cognitive processes (such as explanation and credit assignment) are ignored or oversimplified. Learning necessarily involves pragmatic considerations that can only be handled by complex cognitive processes.We provide an alternative framework for learning according to which category definitions must be based on category function. The learning system invokes other cognitive processes to accomplish difficult tasks, makes inferences, analyses and decides among potential features, and specifies how and when categories are to be generated and modified. We also examine the methodological underpinnings of the two approaches and compare their motivations. (shrink)

Depue & Collins's (D&C's) work relies on extrapolation from data obtained through studies in experimental animals, and needs support from studies of the role of dopamine (DA) neurotransmission in human behaviour. Here we review evidence from two sources: (1) studies of patients with Parkinson's disease and (2) positron emission tomography (PET) studies of DA neurotransmission, which we believe lend support to Depue & Collins's theory, and which can potentially form the basis for a true neurochemistry of personality.

Forensic science error rates are needlessly high. Applying the perspective of veritistic social epistemology to forensic science could produce new institutional designs that would lower forensic error rates. We make such an application through experiments in the laboratory with human subjects. Redundancy is the key to error prevention, discovery, and elimination. In the “monopoly epistemics” characterizing forensics today, one privileged actor is asked to identify the truth. In “democratic epistemics,” several independent parties are asked. In an experiment contrasting them, democratic (...) epistemics reduced the rate at which biased observers obscured the truth by two-thirds. These results highlight, first, the potential of “epistemic systems design,” which employs the techniques of economic systems design to address issues of veracity rather than efficiency, and second, the value of “experimental epistemology,” which employs experimental techniques in the study of science. (shrink)

Publié dans la série « Studies in Imperialism », le livre de Dianne Lawrence place la culture matérielle au cœur du questionnement qu’elle poursuit sur la vie des femmes britanniques dans des colonies aussi différentes que l’Australie, la Nouvelle-Zélande, le Cap, l’Inde ou l’Afrique de l’Ouest. Elle s’intéresse au rôle que jouent les vêtements, les espaces de réception, le jardin et la nourriture dans la fabrication des « genteel women » – des femmes « comme il faut ». L’expérience (...) de la vie... (shrink)

This collection of essays on themes in the work of John Locke , George Berkeley , and David Hume , provides a deepened understanding of major issues raised in the Empiricist tradition. In exploring their shared belief in the experiential nature of mental constructs, The Empiricists illuminates the different methodologies of these great Enlightenment philosophers and introduces students to important metaphysical and epistemological issues including the theory of ideas, personal identity, and skepticism. It will be especially useful in courses devoted (...) to the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

The last few years have seen a remarkable revival of interest in the virtues, which have regained their central role in moral philosophy. This thought-provoking new collection is a much-needed survey of virtue ethics and virtue theory. The specially commissioned articles by an international team of philosophers represent the state of the art in this subject and will set the agenda for future work in the area. The contributors--including Lawrence Blum, John Cottingham, Julia Driver, Rosalind Hursthouse, Terence Irwin, Susan (...) Moller Okin, Onora O'Neill, Michael Slote, Michael Stocker, and David Wiggins--cover practical virtue ethics, ancient views of the virtues, impartiality and partiality, Kant, utilitarianism, human nature, natural and artificial virtues, virtue and the good life, the vices, emotions, politics, feminism, moral education, and community. (shrink)

The ArgumentEinstein's mass-energy relationship was not confirmed experimentally until 1933 when Bainbridge showed that the Cockcroft-Walton experiment afforded a test of it. Earlier, however, it had been used constantly in the analysis of nuclear reactions, as can be seen in those involved in the determination of the mass of the neutron. Chadwick in 1932 was convinced that the neutron mass was about 1.0067 amu (atomic mass units), indicating that the neutron was a proton-electron compound, since that figure was less than (...) the sum of the proton and electron masses. Chadwick's value was challenged in 1933 by Lawrence, who proposed a much lower value of 1.0006 amu, and by Curie and Joliot, who proposed a much higher value of 1.011 amu.Much controversy ensued; eventually, Chadwick and Goldhaber showed in 1934 that the neutron mass was about 1.0080 amu, greater than the sum of the proton and electron masses, proving that the neutron was a new elementary particle (which could decay spontaneously), and providing conclusive experimental support for excluding electrons from the nucleus. These results remained unchanged with further refinements in the last decimal place, the entire pursuit of which provided still further vindication of Einstein's massenergy relationship. (shrink)

Bringing together 20 foundational texts in contemporary modernist criticism in one accessible volume, this book explores the debates that have transformed the field of modernist studies at the turn of the millennium and into the 21st century. The New Modernist Studies Reader features chapters covering the major topics central to the study of modernism today, including: Feminism, gender and sexuality; Empire and race; Print and media cultures; Historical and geographical debates. Each text includes an introductory summary of its historical and (...) intellectual contexts, as well as guides to further reading to help students and teachers explore the ideas further. Includes essential texts by leading critics such as: Pascale Casanova, Anne Anlin Cheng, Brent Hayes Edwards, Rita Felski, Susan Stanford Friedman, Mark Goble, Miriam Hansen, Andreas Huyssen, David James, Fredric Jameson, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Mark S. Morrisson, Michael North, Jessica Pressman, Lawrence Rainey, Paul K. Saint-Amour, Bonnie Kime Scott, Urmila Seshagiri, Robert Spoo, and Rebecca Walkowitz. (shrink)

Aristotelian naturalism is a good vantage point from which to consider the moral implications of evolution. Sociobiologists err in arguing that evolution is the basis for morality: not all or only moral features and institutions are selected for. Nor does the longevity of an institution argue for its moral status. On the other hand, facts about human capacities can have implications concerning human obligations, as Aristotle suggests. Aristotle’s eudaimonistic approach to ethics suggests that the notion of interests is far subtler (...) than many have realized, and leaves open the possibility that cooperativeness may be adaptive, virtuous, and a good thing for the agent. Lawrence and Nohria argue along remarkably similar lines, and they provide evidence against those who would question the existence of character. But promising as the Aristotelian approach is, it seems to give an inadequate account of our moral responsibility to those who are not members of our community. (shrink)

In this review of two books, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography, by Stephen Gaukroger, and Descartes and his Contemporaries: Meditations, Objections, and Replies, edited by Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, I consider arguments about the motivation of Descartes for writing the Meditations on First Philosophy. According to Gaukroger, Descartes wrote the Meditations simply to legitimate his natural philosophy, which he had already worked out, for an audience of theologians and Scholastic philosophers, whom he feared would condemn it (as Galileo had been (...) condemned by the Inquisition in 1633). If Gaukroger is right, it would explain something that is not mentioned in the collection edited by Ariew and Grene, namely, that five of the seven sets of objections are from theologians, and that the strong objections made by philosophers Gassendi and Hobbes are given relatively short shrift, whereas, the weak objections made by the Jesuit theologian Pierre Bourdin are responded to at great length. Gaukroger, however, has an extremely implausible interpretation of Descartes's position on animals, according to which Descartes held that animals had thoughts and experiences, just not thoughts and experiences like ours, and hence, that he did not think of animals as machines (the "bete machine" hypothesis). (shrink)

"...T S Eliot was unimpressed by Freud. Eliot preferred the more approachable Roger Vittoz. It was only Scofield Thayer, who in his prolonged therapy with Sigmund Freud can be said to have brought anything Freudian in the classically psychoanalytic sense to Modernism." This is from the review. The review of the book is contrarian as the book under review is. The salient points of the book are interrogated in this review.

The economist Paul Samuelson acknowledged that he was a disciple of Edwin Bidwell Wilson (1879–1964), an American polymath who was a protégé of Josiah Willard Gibbs. Wilson’s influence on the development of sciences in America has been relatively neglected, as he mostly acted behind the scenes of academia at the organizational and pedagogical fronts. At the basis of his activism were original ideas about the foundations of mathematics and science. This essay reconstructs Wilson’s career and foundational discussions, which evolved (...) as he reacted to David Hilbert’s mathematics, Bertrand Russell’s logic, Henri Poincaré’s conventionalism, Karl Pearson’s statistics, Charles Sanders Peirce’s inference theory, and Lawrence Henderson’s work in social sciences. In brief, after having started his professional life as a mathematician at Yale University (1902–1907), Wilson marginalized himself from mathematics and joined other academic communities and fields, working in mathematical physics at MIT (1907–1922) and in statistics, social science, and economics at Harvard University (1922–retirement). He defined mathematics as a language, meaning by this that mathematics and science were reciprocally indispensable, with the former providing structure and the latter meaning. In an American exceptionalist spirit, Wilson also meant to suggest that homegrown mathematical and scientific traditions should prevail over European ones. (shrink)

In recent years a number of books have been published that offer short autobiographical essays of academics, focusing on their research and how their life history affected their scholarly development. These could be labeled as "intellectual journey narratives." Some volumes focus on philosophers and their religious faith or lack thereof (e.g., Clark, 1997, Antony, 2007). Psychology has its own version of the intellectual journey narrative, in T. S. Krawiec's (1972, 1974, 1978) multivolume set of autobiographical essays by contemporary psychologists. In (...) 1987, Rosemary Pilkington edited her first volume of essays entitled Men and Women of Parapsychology: Personal Reflections, Esprit Volume 1. It contains autobiographical essays by Jule Eisenbud, Montague Ullman, Jan Ehrenwald, Eileen Coly, Joseph H. Rush, Gertrude R. Schmeidler, Emilio Servadio, Renée Haynes, Hans Bender, Karlis Osis, George Zorab and Bernard Grad. The second (2013) volume contains autobiographical essays by Mary Rose Barrington, Eberhard Bauer, William Braud (now deceased), Stephen Braude, Richard S. Broughton, Larry Dossey, Sally Rhine Feather, Erlendur Haraldsson, Arthur Hastings, Stanley Krippner, Lawrence LeShan, Roger Nelson, John Palmer, Guy Leon Playfair, William G. Roll (now deceased), Serena Roney-Dougal, Stephan A. Schwartz, Rex G. Stanford, Russell Targ, Charles T. Tart, and Walter von Lucadou. Between the two volumes almost every significant contemporary parapsychologist is represented, with the major exceptions being the late John Beloff and the late Ian Stevenson. (shrink)

Rogers, C. R. and Skinner, B. F. Some issues concerning the control of human behavior.--Broudy, H. S. Didactics, heuristics, and philetics.--Craig, R. An analysis of the psychology of moral development of Lawrence Kohlberg.--Scudder, J. R., Jr. Freedom with authority: a Buber model for teaching.--Hook, S. Some educational attitudes and poses.--Strike, K. A. Freedom, autonomy, and teaching.--Elkind, D. Piaget and Montessori.--Raywid, M. A. Irrationalism and the new reformism.--Doll, W. E., Jr. A methodology of experience: the process of inquiry.--Neff, F. (...) C. Competency-based teaching and trained fleas.--Brown, A. "What could be bad?" Some reflections on the accountability movement. (shrink)

The theoretical debate on the nature of narrative has been mainly concerned with literary narratives, whereas forms of non-literary and especially pictorial narrativity have been somewhat neglected. In this paper, however, I shall discuss narrativity specifically with regard to pictorial objects in order to clarify how pictorial storytelling may be based on the activation of mentally stored action and scene schemas. Approaches from cognitive psychology, such as the work of Schank, Roger C. & Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, plans, goals (...) and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Mandler, Jean Matter. 1984. Stories, scripts, and scenes: Aspects of schema theory. London/hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Schank, Roger C. 1995. Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, suggest that cognition crucially depends on the storage and retrieval of action scripts or schemata, that is, narrative structures, which may occur at various levels of abstraction. These schemas incorporate generalized knowledge about event sequences, such as the order in which specific events will take place; causal, enabling, or conventionalized relations between these events, and what kind of events occur in certain action sequences. There also are scene schemas that are characterized by spatial rather than temporal relations. Further kinds of schemas seem also to play a decisive role. Drawing upon considerations from schema and script theory, I will focus on some concrete examples of pictorial narration, more specifically depictions of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, where narrative schema structures become involved and, indeed, the comprehensibility of the pictures as such presuppose mental script representations. (shrink)

Adriano Ardovino, Raccogliere il mondo. Per una fenomenologia della rete [Angela Maiello] • Clive Bell, L’Arte [Filippo Focosi] • Alessandro Bertinetto, Il pensiero dei suoni. Temi di filosofia della musica [Domenica Lentini] • Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature. How Mind Emerged From Matter [Mariagrazia Portera] • Roger Scruton, La bellezza. Ragione ed esperienza estetica [Filippo Focosi] • Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience. Sigfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theoder W. Adorno [Domenico Spinosa] • Lawrence Barsalou, scritti sulla “Grounded Cognition” [Gialuca (...) Consoli] • Dis-forme , Università degli Studi di Palermo, 28-29 maggio 2012 [Michele Bertolini e Pietro Conte]. (shrink)

Scientism: The New Orthodoxy is a comprehensive philosophical overview of the question of scientism, discussing the place of science in the humanities and religion. Clarifying and defining the key terms in play in discussions of scientism, this collection identifies the dimensions that differentiate science from scientism. Leading scholars appraise the means available to science, covering the impact of the neurosciences and the new challenges it presents for the law and the self. Illustrating the effect of scientism on the humanities, Scientism: (...) The New Orthodoxy addresses what science is. This provocative collection is an important contribution to the humanities in the 21st century. Contributors include: Peter Hacker, Bastian van Fraassen, Kenneth Schaffner, Roger Scruton, James K.A. Smith, Richard Swinburne, Lawrence Principe and Richard Williams. (shrink)

This is a fascinating exploration of the nature and power of human intelligence, and the way it has singled us out from the rest of the animal kingdom. Human success in the face of the rigours of the physical world and human dominance within the animal kingdom are due to intelligence: those tools of the mind that give us access to the stored experience of humankind and allow us to reason, to test our ideas, and to plan for the future. (...) How we define intelligence, what it consists of, how it evolved, and how we can enhance it in the future are the questions addressed by the eight expert contributors to this remarkable book. The volume originates in the seventh annual series of Darwin College Lectures, delivered in Cambridge in 1992, and includes contributions from Simha Arom, George Butterworth, Daniel Bennett, Richard Gregory, Nicholas Mackintosh, Roger Penrose, Roger Schank and Lawrence Birnbaum. (shrink)

Emily Dickinson is the most paradoxical of poets: the very poet of paradox. By way of voluminous biographical material, not to mention the extraordinary intimacy of her poetry, it would seem that we know everything about her; yet the common experience of reading her work, particularly if the poems are read sequentially, is that we come away seeming to know nothing. We could recognize her inimitable voice anywhere—in the “prose” of her letters no less than in her poetry—yet it is (...) a voice of the most deliberate, the most teasing anonymity. “I’m Nobody!” is a proclamation to be interpreted in the most literal of ways. Like no other poet before her and like very few after her—Rilke comes most readily to mind, and, perhaps, Yeats and Lawrence—Dickinson exposes her heart’s most subtle secrets; she confesses the very sentiments that, in society, would have embarrassed her dog . Yet who is this “I” at the center of experience? In her astonishing body of 1,775 poems Dickinson records what is surely one of the most meticulous examinations of the phenomenon of human “consciousness” ever undertaken. The poet’s persona—the tantalizing “I”—seems, in nearly every poem, to be addressing us directly with perceptions that are ours as well as hers. The poems’ refusal to be rhetorical, their daunting intimacy, suggests the self-evident in the way that certain Zen koans and riddles do while being indecipherable. But what is challenged is, perhaps, “meaning” itself: Wonder—is not precisely KnowingAnd not precisely Knowing not—A beautiful but bleak conditionHe has not lived who has not felt—Suspense—is his maturer Sister—Whether Adult Delight is PainOr of itself a new misgiving—This is the Gnat that mangles men— [1331, ca. 1874]1 1. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson ; subsequent references in the text to the poems will cite the Johnson number and the date assigned by Johnson to each poem. Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University and the author most recently of the booklength essay On Boxing. “Soul at the White Heat” will be included in her book of essays, Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, to be published in the spring of 1988. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Particularity, Presence, Art Teaching, and LearningJulia Kellman (bio)The Awful, the Particular, and the TranscendentYears ago in a life drawing class during graduate school, for who knows what reason, I chose to focus my drawing on the model's head and not on her entire form. She was wearing an enormous and elaborate black velvet hat with yards of veiling and several large red silk roses. The combination of textures, shadows, (...) colors, forms, and the suggestion of a story, of meaning beyond the exercise itself, drew me in I think. Using an entire large sheet of tan-colored drawing paper, soft vine charcoal, and a kneaded rubber eraser I began to draw, moving from the impossible hat to the model's high cheekbones, deep-set shadowed eyes, soft cheeks, and curved neck. Somewhere between the top of the paper (the crown of her hat) and the woman's face, however, my hand, my self, the drawing, the young woman, and the hat merged by some means outside my control. I was the act of drawing. I was the charcoal, the curved cheek, the dark eyes, the wonderful hat. There were no boundaries among us. No distances. The drawing, it seemed, drew me at the same time that it revealed an image of the model and her black velvet hat on the paper and tied me to the woman seated before me. I was exalted, transported, amazed.Now, as I think back to that drawing, I understand it as my first clear art experience of doing, not thinking, being, not observing that all artists encounter on their best days. It was, in another way of considering, my initial encounter with the fact that "the imaginative faculty, especially as engaged in the art process is one of the strongest and clearest ways in which we can learn within the qualitative, immediate present, within kairotic as opposed to chronic time, or within the eternal present,"1 as the art educator Kenneth [End Page 51] Beittel explains. Or, put another way, it was my experience with the fact that, as the writer Lawrence Weschler suggests in his biography of the artist Robert Irwin, "Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."2 Or, as the sculptor Anne Truitt explains, drawing can be "a direct channel between one's [my] experience and one's [my] hand."3This transformation from a distinct see-er and seen to a single entity sharing both time and space, from a distant relationship to intimacy, from a world of the generalized to the place of the particular brings us to the intertwined themes of this article: the importance of the awesome transcendent particularity of the singular—person, creature, place, object, plant, or moment in art and, similarly, religious contemplation and the likeness and/or overlap of artistic engagement with spiritual experience.In order for us to examine the artist in the midst of creating, and to explore our theme of art's relationship to the awful (think of the older usage meaning "full of awe" here) particularity of thisness as John Dun Sotus4 describes the perfection of the particular and specific, as well as to explore the relationship of art making, art learning, art teaching, and spiritual experience, exemplars are necessary. Our first exemplar is Gordie, a member of the art class I teach at a local hospital. He, as much as anyone, exemplifies artistic engagement with the current moment, its thisness in fact, and he illustrates the art maker's/learner's engagement with pure doing in the act of creating an image. Our second exemplar, the filmmaker, writer, and painter Derek Jarman,5 exemplifies by his lifetime of creative accomplishment an artist in the most literal manner. And even in the last years of his life—as sculptor, gardener, landscape designer, writer, and creator of a place of great beauty—he illuminates in both his words and in his garden his engagement with the present moment, with particularity, and with the spiritual quality that permeates his world.Gordie's Tale: Art and FlowersGordie accompanied his friend Roger to the first art class to be held at the hospital for people with... (shrink)

These essays by some of the most prominent figures in linguistics, artificial intelligence, and psychology explore the problems involved in creating a general cognitive science that will treat language, thought, and behavior in an integrated fashion. They address the fundamental questions of the relations between linguistic structures and cognitive processes, between cognitive processes and language behavior, and between language behavior and linguistic structure. Contents: Introduction, Thomas G. Bever (Columbia University), John M. Carroll and Lance A. Miller (IBM Thomas J. Watson (...) Research Center). "Philosophy and "Linguistics: An Outline of Platonist Grammar, Jerrold J. Katz (CUNY). Sense and Reference in a Psychologically Based Semantics, Ray Jackendoff (Brandeis University). Some Thoughts on the Boundaries and Components of Linguistics, Charles J. Fillmore (University of California, Berkeley). Psychology: Approaches to the Study of the Psychology of Language, Walter Kintsch (University of Colorado). Toward An Abstract Performance Grammar, Charles E. Osgood (University of Illinois). Upgrading a Mind, David Premack (University of Pennsylvania). Computational "Models: "Memory, Meaning, and Syntax, Roger Schank (Yale University) and Lawrence Birnbaum (Yale University). Some Inadequate Theories of Human Language Processing, Mitchell P. Marcus (AT&T Bell Laboratories). (shrink)

This is a slightly longer version of an entry prepared for the 2nd edition of The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, edited by Steven Durlauf and Lawrence Blume (Palgrave-Macmillan, forthcoming). Since the New Palgrave does not include acknowledgments, I should use this chance to thank Roger Backhouse, Philippe Fontaine, Daniel Kahneman, Kyu Sang Lee, Ivan Moscati, and Vernon Smith for their help and suggestions in preparing this paper.

Content Description The origins and uses of the classical moral theories / Roger Sullivan -- Wisdom as foundational ethical theory in Thomas Aquinas / Lawrence Dewan -- Descartes and the ethics of generosity / Leslie Armour -- Is pity the basis of ethics? : Nietzsche versus Schopenhauer / T.L.S. Sprigge -- Jacques Maritain and Karol Wojtyla : approches to modernity / Kenneth Schmitz -- On the foundations of ethics / Hugo Meynell -- Ethics, the humanities, and the formation of (...) persons / Thomas De Koninck -- Personal identity and the sense of duty / Elizabeth Trott -- Passing through : women's experiences and ethics / Monique Dumais -- Ladri'ere's eschatology of reason and the foundations of ethics / Louis Perron -- The foundations of ethics and moral practices / William Sweet. (shrink)

It is not without a certain emotion that one opens this book devoted to the memory of a great scholar of medieval thought who worked and lived in the certainty that there cannot be a conflict between the Christian faith and science. In a significant essay, Benedict M. Ashley defends the idea of the philosophy of nature as continuous or identical with natural science. Ashley does allow, however, for so many divergences between philosophy of nature and natural science due to (...) later developments in science that this identification must be qualified. Steven E. Baldner points out some of the contradictions of Hartshorne's atomism: Hartshorne denies change and real causality. Anthony J. Celano recalls that Robert Kilwardby was very much aware that happiness as described by Aristotle is quite different from the beatitude promised by the Christian faith. The order of the divine entitative attributes in the Summa theologiae I, qq. 3-11 has baffled many a commentator. Lawrence Dewan connects it with some texts of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Jeremiah Hackett studies Roger Bacon's Moralis philosophia. Dealing with Luther's attitude toward St. Thomas, Denis R. Tanz accepts Erasmus's verdict that the weight given to Thomas in theology was an important factor in propelling Luther out of the Roman Catholic orbit. This opinion, however, confounds appearances with the real reason for leaving, namely, estrangement from several central positions of Catholic doctrine. It is a tribute to the Catholicity of Thomas that after 1519 Luther came to identify the Pope, the Church and all scholastic doctors with the Thomists and said that the Church had become the synagogue of the papists and the Thomists: Thomas had been made the arbiter of heresy. Mark F. Johnson stresses the sapiential character of the sacra doctrina. Mark D. Jordan wrestles with the question why Thomas wrote his Aristotelian commentaries. Arguing in the line of Owens's interpretation he reduces their importance with regard to Thomas's own positions. Jordan seems to think that Thomas's philosophy cannot be formulated without his theology, an explanation which is hardly satisfactory. Armand Maurer submits some reflections on St. Thomas's notion of presence. The question to what extent Albert the Great contributed to Aquinas's treatises of the morality of human acts and of natural law is examined by Ernest J. McCullough. Walter H. Principe points out how, according to Aquinas, food is assimilated into the veritas humanae naturae. Eric A. Reitan retraces Weisheipl's analysis of Aristotle's Physics and of St. Thomas' Commentary: the axiom, "whatever is moved, is moved by another" can be understood only within the context of the general science of nature. In his Liber de causis et processu universitatis Albert came to hold the same position as Thomas on the demonstrability of creation and of its beginning in time. Two final articles concern the difficulties underlying Aristotle's arguments in Physics 7 and 8, and Aquinas and Newton on causality: William Wallace connects Newton's universal gravitation with the axiom that nothing acts on itself. (shrink)

A new biography of one of the founding fathers of the Scientific Revolution, Robert Boyle, is no easy undertaking, but no scholar is better poised to give us a revisionist view of this iconic figure than Michael Hunter. For fourteen years Hunter, together with Edward Davis, supervised the definitive fourteen‐volume edition of Boyle's complete works, published and unpublished. This was the first such undertaking since the 1744 edition compiled by the cleric and antiquary Thomas Birch. Almost no Boyle scholar has (...) been as privileged—or as dogged—in probing every bit of Boyle's legendary scribblings as Hunter. With his new biography, which gestated for decades and reflects the accumulating wisdom gained only with disciplined, persistent, and wide‐ranging reading, Hunter has shed new light on Boyle's life and character. Specialists will delight in having Hunter's path‐breaking articles gathered together in one volume from journals as far ranging as the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and Medical History to the more standard venues of the profession.Which Boyle have historians of early modern science more recently encountered, and how does Hunter's book enhance or change our understanding? Richard S. Westfall and Marie Boas Hall produced portraits of Boyle as a bona fide, uncomplicated mechanist devoted to testing his view of the universe by frequent experimentation. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in their Leviathan and the Air‐Pump set the stage for a more complex version of Boyle. They portrayed him as a consummate strategist who craftily used his experimental philosophy to serve his own conservative political and social agendas. Shapin's more recent A Social History of Truth claimed that Boyle relied heavily on his social status to carefully craft his public image as a gentleman in order to gain credibility and trust from his audiences. Lawrence Principe in his Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest has shown us a Boyle who was passionately committed to alchemy and fascinated by, if fearful of, magic. Barbara Kaplan in her Divulging of Useful Truths in Physick emphasized Boyle's long‐standing interests in medical issues and medical practices.What sort of Boyle does Hunter offer his audience, and how has his high place in Boyle scholarship enabled him to present such a novel interpretation? Hunter shows us a Boyle whose fully complex personality directly contributed to, and thwarted, his scientific production as an experimenter. Hunter's analysis is not deeply seated in psychoanalytical theory but, rather, emerges from a fine‐grained analysis of Boyle's intense religious preoccupations. In the case of Boyle, Hunter argues, earlier eighteenth‐century biographers—including Gilbert Burnet, Roger North, Henry Miles, and William Wooton—produced adulation for a figure whose deep religiosity enhanced his scientific endeavors. Rather than casting his lot with contemporaries who sought a conservative solution to church and state relations after 1660, Boyle had troubling religious preoccupations so that things for him were not so simple, as Hunter shows. Indeed, Boyle befriended and associated with men who were openly acknowledged as mystics and enthusiasts and never allied himself exclusively—or even primarily—with Church of England spokesmen or ecclesiastics. Moreover, Hunter argues, Boyle felt more acutely aware of the dangers of excessive rationalism than he did of the claims of direct divine inspiration. Boyle's religious anxieties, far from mere youthful preoccupations, plagued him throughout his lifetime. Hunter reproduces Boyle's notes on two full confessional interviews he had with two prominent churchmen toward the end of his life. The two churchmen, Gilbert Burnet and Edward Stillingfleet, appeared unsympathetic with the great man's scruples over the legitimacy of his ownership of considerable lands once belonging to the Church. But for Boyle this was no trivial matter; throughout his life he was similarly plagued about the moral rectitude of inheritances from his wealthy father, about constant incursions of blasphemous thoughts, and about the moral propriety of taking oaths. Indeed, for Hunter Boyle's obsessive concern in salving his conscience induced his refusal to accept the presidency of the Royal Society in 1680 because of the oath‐taking necessitated by the position. His tortuous, obsessive religious preoccupations, Hunter argues, find their parallels in Boyle's equally exacting procedures related to his punctilious scientific experiments. Thus, while some historians might see the scrupulous religiosity of Boyle as “dysfunctional,” the same instincts and personality features made him a highly “functional” scientist.Hunter's careful probing of Boyle's defensive apologies, frequently found as prefatory material in his published treatises, reveals another side of Boyle, hitherto largely ignored by his biographers. Excessively concerned about his reputation for establishing new empirical findings, Boyle reveals himself to Hunter in several instances as a masterful dissembler or plagiarist, careful in the extreme to conceal his debts to empirics, compilers, and less learned or less socially prominent men, including George Starkey, William Salmon, Johann Glauber, J. J. Becher, and Jean‐Baptiste DuHamel. What emerges from Hunter's depiction is the antithesis of the decisive, manipulative, socially prepossessing Boyle that Shapin has depicted. What Hunter furnishes is a Boyle who is perhaps far more insecure than the one historians have allowed themselves to envision and who struggled to hide his own vulnerability and inadequacy.In a satisfying exploration of Boyle's connections with medical circles, Hunter searches to explain why Boyle, well known among his contemporaries for enjoying a constant state of ill health and for his dissatisfaction with learned Galenic medicine passed down by the esteemed physicians of his day, was, nevertheless, so loath to publish his stinging criticisms of the medical profession. Historians have long recognized that Boyle evinced strong interest in medical matters from the time of his early researches with physicians in the 1650s in Oxford and that he continued to write about medical issues for the next several decades of his life. But Boyle was acutely aware—as his prefaces attest—that he was not a member of the profession and that his access to sick bodies was severely constricted by his status as a gentleman. Hunter suggests that Boyle's reticence in publishing his attacks on the Galenists owed something to his social position—he was, after all, on good social terms with many eminent physicians. His deference, Hunter argues, owed not just to his hesitation to attack a well‐respected profession, but also to his diffidence about proclaiming universal truths on matters as changeable—and ultimately untestable—as sick human bodies. Hunter further probes another paradox of Boyle's life. We know that Boyle freely gave out his medical advice and medicines that were produced in his private laboratory to friends and acquaintances and that, furthermore, he saw this as a moral duty and Christian charity. Yet Boyle, the champion of open communication in matters of natural philosophy, steadfastly refused to publish his medicine recipes . His unpublished drafts reveal a Boyle who was sharply committed to widening the access of his poor countrymen to chemically prepared and effective medicines. But Boyle stopped well short of making these recipes available for wider dissemination through the medium of print. Why? Again Hunter presents no simple answers but suggests a medley of motives. Exquisitely sensitive to his own reputation, Boyle, in part, may have censored himself lest he be seen as the equal of empirics, apothecaries, and quacksalvers, all abundant and thriving in London in the 1670s. Despite his high‐minded sense of philanthropy, Boyle was particularly concerned about his public persona, so much so that his private passions at times took second seat. Hunter suggests a similar explanation for Boyle's refusal to forthrightly publish his investigations of supernatural phenomena, including witchcraft, visions, angelic apparitions, and second sight. In addition to his strong religious scruples that such investigations might be tainted by demonic participation, Boyle censored himself out of his fear of the charge of easy credulity. As popular satires of experimenters were beginning to pour forth from the pens of Thomas Shadwell and Samuel Butler, Boyle must have smarted at the thought of being classified among those indulging in magical pursuits unbecoming to a genteel experimenter. Hunter concludes by revealing a Boyle far from being a confident showman and expositor of the new science. Instead he shows us a conflicted, ambivalent man who suffered from his high social status, even as he manipulated it for his own aggrandizement or for that of the Royal Society and its experimental program.Hunter's depiction of a tortured man—hitherto most often conceived as an iconic devotee of experimental science or as a consummate, self‐fashioning, smooth‐talking gentleman—will not sit well with some historians. Nor will his characterization of Boyle's lifelong religious scruples sit well. Just as Lawrence Principe presented readers with a disturbing vision of a Boyle duped by alchemical operators or conversing with angelic voices, Hunter offers up a tentative, hesitant, and uncertain man who does not seem to fit with earlier portraits. With extremely convincing and documented evidence, Hunter draws a complex, strong personality that left its stamp on his scientific agenda. Hunter's most piercing insight is to see Boyle's deep‐seated diffidence not as an obstacle to his science but as a driving force behind his commitment to experimentalism. In the end Hunter's view will outlast earlier, less complex versions. (shrink)

In this book, Lawrence Sklar demonstrates the interdependence of science and philosophy by examining a number of crucial problems on the nature of space and ...

1.Summary The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Sunyata’. Nagarjuna is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? That nothing can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was Nagarjuna denying (...) the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. This is the heart of Nagarjuna’s ideas. In the 19th century a more or less unknown Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Goberti, spoke about relations as the mean and as bonds between things. Later, in quantum physics and in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead we are talking about interactions and entanglements. These ideas of relatedness or connections or entanglements in Eastern and Western modes of thought are the main idea of this essay. Not all entanglements are known. Just two examples: the nature of quantum entanglements is not known. Quantum entanglements should be faster than light. That's why Albert Einstein had some doubts. A second example: the completely unknown connections between the mind and the brain. Other examples are mysterious like the connections between birds in a flock. Some are a little known like gravitational forces. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realized that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna, we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalization. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalization might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. (Plato 424 – 348 Befor Current Era) The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. 5. Key terms: Quantum Physics. Why quantum physics? European modes of thought had no idea of the space between two this. They were bound to the ideas of substance or subject, two main metaphysical traditions of European philosophical history, two main principles. These substances and these subjects are two immaterial bodies which were considered by traditional European metaphysics as lying, as a sort of core, inside the objects or underlying the empirical reality of our world. The first European scientist who saw with his inner eye the forces between two things had been Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism. Later physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and others followed his view in modern physics. This is a fifth point of my work. I compare Nagarjuna with European scientific modes of thought for a better understanding of Asia. I do not compare Nagarjuna with European philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein. The principles and metaphysical foundations of physical sciences are more representative for European modes of thought than the ideas of Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and they are more precise. And slowly we are beginning to understand these principles. Let me take as an example the interpretation of quantum entanglement by the British mathematician Roger Penrose. Penrose discusses in the year of 2000 the experiences of quantum entanglement where light is separated over a distance of 100 kilometers and still remains connected in an unknown way. These are well known experiments in the last 30 years. Very strange for European modes of thought. The light should be either separated or connected. That is the expectation most European modes of thought tell us. Aristotle had been the first. Aristotle (384 - 322 Before Current Era) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He told us the following principle as a metaphysical foundation: Either a situation exists or not. There is not a third possibility. Now listen to Roger Penrose: “Quantum entanglement is a very strange type of thing. It is somewhere between objects being separate and being in communication with each other” (Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press. 2000 page 66). This sentence of Roger Penrose is a first step of a philosophical generalization in a Whiteheadian sense. 6. Key terms: ‘The metaphysical foundations of modern science’ had been examined particularly by three European and American philosophers: E. A. Burtt, A.N. Whitehead and Hans-Georg Gadamer, by Gadamer eminently in his late writings on Heraclitus and Parmenides. I try to follow the approaches of these philosophers of relational views and of anti-substantialism. By ‘metaphysical foundations’ Edwin Arthur Burtt does not understand transcendental ideas but simply the principles that are underlying sciences. -/- 7. Key terms: ‘Complementarity’, ‘interactions’, ‘entanglements’. Since 1927 quantum physics has three key terms which give an indication to the fundamental physical reality: Complementarity, interactions and entanglement. These three notions are akin to Nagarjuna’s relational view of reality. They are akin and they are very precise, so that Buddhism might learn something from these descriptions and quantum physicists might learn from Nagarjuna’s examples and views of reality. They might learn to do a first step in a philosophical generalisation of quantum physical experiments. All of us we might learn how objects are entangled or going arm in arm. [The end of the summary.] -/- « Wenn du gerade das, wodurch auch immer du gefesselt bist, erkennst, wirst du zur Freiheit gelangen. Wenn du diesen speziellen Pfad verwirklichst, gelangst du in einem Leben zur Buddhaschaft. Deswegen verhält es sich folgendermaßen : Wenn plötzlich die Geistesregung « Begierde » enststeht, dann betrachte, ohne ihr zu folgen, direkt ihre Essenz und verweile in dieser Betrachtung, ohne Ablenkungen zuzulassen. Auf diese Weise reinigt Begierde sich selbst, ohne aufgegeben zu werden, da sie ohne Grundlage und Ursprung entsteht. Das wird « Befreiung in sich selbst », « unterscheidende ursprüngliche Weisheit » oder Buddha Amitabha » genannt ». Jigden Sumgön, Licht, das die Dunkelheit durchbricht, Otter Verlag, München 2006, Seite 47, 48 . (shrink)