In the movie, Memento, the hero, Leonard, suffers from a form of anterograde amnesia that results in an inability to lay down new memories. Nonetheless, he sets out on a quest to find his wife’s killer, aided by the use of notes, annotated polaroids, and (for the most important pieces of information obtained) body tattoos. Using these resources he attempts to build up a stock of new beliefs and to thus piece together the puzzle of his wife’s death. At (...) one point in the movie, a character exasperated by Leonard’s lack of biological recall, shouts. (shrink)

Klein and Clark initiated a debate about libertarian theory to which this paper hopes to add. Starting with the old libertarian principle of “direct liberty” Klein and Clark introduced two new concepts to complete it: “indirect liberty,” and also direct liberty plus indirect liberty, which sums to “overall liberty.” In my critique of this article of theirs , I congratulated them for their creativity, but rejected these innovations. In Klein and Clark , these authors responded to my (...) initial criticism. The present essay hopes to fruitfully continue the discussion of these new concepts of liberty. (shrink)

The ideas of Sauer, Darby, Clark, and Meinig have had a formative influence on the making of modern Anglo-American historical geography. These scholars emphasized the spatial- and place-focused orientation of geography, contrasting it with history's concern with time, the past, and change. Historical geography was conceived as combining the spatial interests of geography with the temporal interest of history, creating a field concerned with changing spatial patterns and landscapes. This idea of historical geography avoided issues in the philosophy of (...) history by making the historical geographer a kind of spectator to external changes in the ways things were ordered and arranged on the face of the earth. This "natural history" view of historical geography failed to deal with history conceived as an autonomous mode of understanding in which the scholar's task is to understand human activity as an embodiment of thought. Historical geography is more adequately conceived as a Collingwoodian-type historical discipline, in which the task of the historical geographer is aimed at rethinking and displaying the thought of historical agents as their actions relate to the physical environment. The traditional subject matter of historical geography is not thereby redefined, but a change in the way geography is seen in its relation to history is necessitated. (shrink)

John Dewey presented The Public and Its Problems in a series of lectures in 1926, shortly after Walter Lippmann published two influential works, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public . In those works, Lippmann had denied that broad publics should share in determining public policy. He argued that the policy issues were far removed from the lives of ordinary citizens, whose collective opinion, as a result, would inevitably be ill-informed, self-interested and readily manipulated.Dewey countered that the problem of public (...) opinion was not primarily lack of information, but rather of community formation. A democratic community, he argued, could overcome the ignorance and narrow self-interest that plagued .. (shrink)