Kings, Countries, Peoples: Selected Studies on the Achaemenid Empire. By Pierre Briant, translated by Amélie Kuhrt. Oriens et Occidens, vol. 26. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017. Pp. xxv + 633. €99.

Le volume Chemin faisant réunit vingt-et-un articles rassemblés en hommage à l’historien de la Grèce classique Pierre Brulé et aux activités qu’il a développées au sein du CRESCAM-LAHM (UMR 6566). Il peut ainsi servir de pendant à La Grèce d’à côté, un recueil d’articles de P. Brulé publié en 2007 : les compagnonnages de l’historien, illustrés par la participation de P. Briant, de M.-M. Mactoux, de L. Bruit-Zaidman, de R. Parker, de S. Georgoudi, de M. Jost, de V. Dasen (...) ou d’A. Powell, pour n... (shrink)

The eight papers in this collection, which were delivered at the Fourth Annual Conference in Philosophy at the University of Georgia in February, 1971, deal with a variety of topics related to the current controversy about man’s use of his environment. The contributors, Eugene P. Odum, William T. Blackstone, Joel Feinberg, Charles Hartshorne, Walter O’Briant, Nicholas Rescher, Robert G. Burton, and Pete A. Y. Gunter, discuss such issues as overpopulation, man’s relation to nature, man’s attitude toward his environment, and (...) the proper role of technology in industrialized societies. Two especially interesting papers are Rescher’s "The Environmental Crisis and the Quality of Life" and Feinberg’s "The Rights of Animals and Unborn Generations." Rescher believes that Americans can avoid bitter disappointment only by realizing that no significant improvement in the quality of their environment is possible. He is aware that this realization will be painful because it involves surrendering the deeply held convictions that the quality of our life will continually improve and that our technology can overcome any physical obstacles. Feinberg discusses some of the complex issues involved in deciding whether people are obligated to leave a satisfactory environment for those who will come in the future. He contends that there is no obligation to add additional people; but, insofar as it is known that there will be future generations, we are obligated to consider their interests. The book has a helpful introduction by the editor which summarizes the position and arguments of each contributor.—M.G. (shrink)

Bertrand Russells Buch A Cntical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz bildet einen Meilenstein in der Leibniz-Forschung, vor allem in den angelsächsischen Ländern. In diesem Aufsatz untersuche ich zunächst die Entstehungsgeschichte dieses Werkes (Russells intensive Beschäftigung mit Leibniz anläßlich einer Vorlesung, die Quellen, die Russell benutzt hat, und die Hilfe und Unterstützung, die ihm von Philosophen wie James Ward und G. E. Moore zuteil wurden). Anschließend behandle ich das Echo, das Russells Buch gefunden hat. Am Schluß suche ich Russells Einstellung (...) zu Leibniz' Denken zu verdeutlichen. Dabei berücksichtige ich Russells spätere Werke, soweit sie mit Leibniz in Beziehung stehen. Meine Aufmerksamkeit gilt im besonderen Maß dem Briefwechsel mit Louis Couturat und dem Einfluß, den Couturat auf Russell ausgeübt hat. As an original and critical position regarding Leibniz, Russell's [A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz] is not outdated. It is a work still young, one worked out by the "young Russell", and of fundamental importance for the historical and philosophical investigation of Bertrand Russell's thought. But even more fundamental is what we derive from reading it : the understanding of the history of philosophy in terms of dialogue, where the speculative affinities are properly complemented by that critical perspective which calls into question those divergences which set the limit of philosophical reflections and assess their value circumstantially. (shrink)

In this essay I survey the philosophy of the seventeenth-century German thinker Gottfried Leibniz as a preliminary to eliciting some of the implications of his views for environmental philosophy. Reference is also made to the views of the ancient atomists, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Spinoza.

Dieser Artikel ist eine Antwort auf Dr. J. G. Cottinghams The Role of the Malignant Demon. Ich stelle die folgenden Behauptungen von Dr. Cottingham in Frage: 1) daß die Sätze der Logik und Mathematik in der ersten Meditation nur nebenbei behandelt werden; 2) daß Descartes glaubt, daß die Sätze der Mathematik keine Existenzbedeutung haben; 3) daß „parum curant“ bedeutet „sie kümmern sich wenig um“; 4) daß die Hypothese des bösen Dämons nur eine subsidiäre Rolle spiele.

The changing milieu of research—increasingly global, interdisciplinary and collaborative—prompts greater emphasis on cultural context and upon partnership with international scholars and diverse community groups. Ethics training, however, tends to ignore the cross-cultural challenges of making ethical choices. This paper confronts those challenges by presenting a new curricular model developed by an international team. It examines ethics across a very broad range of situations, using case studies and employing the perspectives of social science, humanities and the sciences. The course has been (...) developed and taught in a highly collaborative way, involving researchers and students at Zhejiang University, the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and Brown University. The article presents the curricular modules of the course, learning outcomes, an assessment framework developed for the project, and a discussion of evaluation findings. (shrink)

This paper examines the implications of digital remediation which translates and transforms an older text, endowing it with new life, in relation to the project #LauraSpeaks, a translation and remediation of Pellegra Bongiovanni’s Risposte di Madonna Laura alle rime di Messer Francesco Petrarca, in nome della medesima. Divided into three different sections, it describes the steps involved in this project, from the discovery of the original text and the analysis of Bongiovanni’s contribution within the realm of Petrarchism, moving to a (...) discussion of the translation of her work from Italian to English and the creation of the “Twitterature” version of the text, then finally to an analysis of the text’s transformation into the film medium. This paper also investigates the theoretical premises of digital remediation and the role that hypertext plays in multiplying opportunities for meaning-making and in enriching the act of reading and writing. (shrink)

This paper is about the good side of modal logic, the bad side of modal logic, and how hybrid logic takes the good and fixes the bad.In essence, modal logic is a simple formalism for working with relational structures . But modal logic has no mechanism for referring to or reasoning about the individual nodes in such structures, and this lessens its effectiveness as a representation formalism. In their simplest form, hybrid logics are upgraded modal logics in which reference to (...) individual nodes is possible.But hybrid logic is a rather unusual modal upgrade. It pushes one simple idea as far as it will go: represent all information as formulas. This turns out to be the key needed to draw together a surprisingly diverse range of work . Moreover, it displays a number of knowledge representation issues in a new light, notably the importance of sorting. (shrink)

A brief overview of _A Philosophy of Cover Songs_, highlighting some of the main themes in the book. The first part addresses the nature of covers and makes some important initial distinctions. The second part addresses the appreciation and evaluation of covers. The third part addresses covers as a clue to the ontology of songs. Written to introduce a session at the American Society for Aesthetics Rocky Mountain Division meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico (July 13, 2024).

This chapter explores what it can mean to say that culinary products (i.e., recipes and their outputs) are creative. It answers this question by distinguishing between three different kinds of creativity (idle, productive, and super-productive creativity) and two different kinds of creative domains, locked-in and expandable ones. It argues that culinary products can be creative in the three different ways just mentioned and that, accordingly, the creative domain constituted by the culinary arts turns out to be an expandable one.

We live in a world of rapidly advancing, revolutionary technologies that are not just reshaping our world and wars, but also creating a host of ethical questions that must be dealt with. But in trying to answer them, we must also explore why exactly is it so hard to have effective discussions about ethics, technology, and war in the first place? This article delves into the all-too-rarely discussed underlying issues that challenge the field of ethics when it comes to talking (...) about war, weapons, and moral conduct. These issues include the difficulty of communicating across fields; the complexity of real world dilemmas versus the seminar room and laboratory; the magnified role that money and funding sources play in shaping not just who gets to talk, but what they research; cross-cultural differences; the growing role of geographic and temporal distance issues; suspicion of the actual value of law and ethics in a harsh realm like war; and a growing suspicion of science itself. If we hope better to address our growing ethical concerns, we must face up to these underlying issues as well. (shrink)

Purpose: A study was made of attitudes of clinical geneticists regarding the age at which minors should be allowed to undergo a carrier test and the reasons they provide to explain their answer. Methods: European clinical institutions where genetic counselling is offered to patients were contacted. 177 (63%) of the 287 eligible respondents answered a questionnaire. Results: Clinical geneticists were significantly more in favour of providing a carrier test to a younger person if the request was made together with the (...) parents than if the adolescent requested the test personally. Although a large fraction of respondents (16%–30%) were “neither unwilling nor willing” to provide a carrier test to a 16-year-old adolescent who requested the test personally, for most disorders slightly more clinical geneticists were “very willing” or “willing”. Conclusion: Age is not the only decisive element when considering the participation of adolescents in decisions affecting their health. The clinical geneticists referred to cognitive, emotional and sexual maturity and the support of parents as crucial elements in their comments regarding when to tell children about their genetic risk or to allow adolescents to request a carrier test. (shrink)

In his book, The Principles of Mathematics , the young Bertrand Russell abandoned the common-sense notion that the whole must be greater than its part, and argued that wholes and their parts can be similar, e.g. where both are infinite series, the one being a sub-series of the other. He also rejected the popular view that the idea of an infinite number is self-contradictory, and that an infinite set or collection is an impossibility. In this paper, I intend to re-examine (...) Russell's wisdom in doing both these things, and see if it might not have made more sense, and caused his enterprise fewer problems, if he had simply stuck to our commonplace ideas. To this end, I shall also be considering his treatment of certain paradoxes that he claims can only be resolved by the abandonment of the above notions, as well as certain others which his theories appear to have generated. (shrink)