In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.3 (2001) 415-428 [Access article in PDF] Brief Mention Tantalus Helene P. Foley John Barton's Tantalus bills itself repeatedly as "leftovers from the epic cycle." 1 Although his cycle of plays--nine in the stage performance and ten, with prologue and epilogue, in the published script--also remakes some late Euripidean plays, the spirit of the piece as a whole is far more reminiscent of what we (...) know of cyclic epic than tragedy or even the Iliad and Odyssey themselves, which, as Aristotle's Poetics points out, are plotted in a distinctively tragic manner with a single unifying action. Sir Peter Hall and Edward Hall's performance version, which premiered in fall 2000 at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and then traveled to England, is conveniently divided into hour-long segments with intermissions and meal breaks that cater to the sensibilities and attention spans of viewers accustomed to televised series like Masterpiece Theater. Any attempt to recapture the tight plotting, intensity, complexity, and tension of tragedy would inevitably fail in a performance of this scale. Instead, the viewer is drawn into a long and varied narrative replete with surprising shifts in tone, ranging from ironic to lyrical, from painful to comic; episodes drawn from obscure mythological sources or, occasionally, invented, take center stage, while episodes familiar from Homer and tragedy are deliberately deleted. Viewers can follow characters and children of characters over the series of plays and see the traits of siblings and parents emerge with variation in close relatives--an effect enhanced onstage by the fact that these relatives are often played by the same actors. Like cyclic epic, Tantalus fills in the gaps left by Homer [End Page 427] in the Trojan saga and aspires to tantalize its viewers with the possibi415lity of multiple and unstable versions of mythic truth. In addition, although the play repeatedly evokes the image of the rock of Tantalus poised to crash with finality on everyone's head, it largely espouses a cyclic and inconclusive view of history, in which events and human errors relentlessly repeat themselves without acquiring accessible meaning. "Until the great rock falls / What has happened already / Will happen again: / That is god-law, Agamemnon, / As it's man-law on earth. / Epikou Kuklou leipsana" (362).Playwright Barton and the directors fell out during the rehearsal process; the Irish playwright Colin Teevan shortened, revised, and in some critical ways transformed and trivialized Barton's original script. The stage version retains Barton's concern with the futility of war and human action but radically revises the major point of the original. Barton's script above all engages its audience in the myth-making process and the elusive truth of stories: "Who is to Blame? What is the Truth? Could it be Otherwise?" His script opens with a group of twelve "girls" (Barton's term) sleeping on barren ground. Nine (in the performance, ten) of the girls become a chorus, and the remaining ones (the script says four, though the total of twelve demands three, so there may be an error in the script here) play various female parts throughout the cycle. The group has missed the (real or mythical) boat and begins to tell one another conflicting myths about the origin of the world. The chorus, which claims to know all the traditional Greek myths, wants to know which version is true. It debates whether to drink from the nearby oracular streams of Trophonius. (One stream makes one forget the present moment; the other makes one remember even things one does not consciously know.)A poet (and tutor to Dionysus) enters with a wine bag. The skeptical chorus, which at first prefers its own stories and one truth, is lured into testing out the poet's bag of masks and engaging with multiple conflicting stories. "If you want to know the future / You must go into the past" (511). The poet and the four women don new roles and reenact story fragments for the increasingly engaged chorus. The chorus women toss stones over their shoulders in imitation of the Greek creation... (shrink)

In vitro fertilisation is now an established technique for treating some forms of infertility, yet it remains ethically controversial. New developments, such as embryo donation and embryo freezing, have led to further discussion. We briefly discuss the ethical aspects of IVF, focusing on the issues of resource allocation, the 'unnaturalness' of the procedure, the moral status of the embryo, surrogate motherhood, and restrictions on access to IVF. We argue that, on the whole, IVF is an ethically justifiable method of assisting (...) infertile couples. (shrink)

BackgroundPlagiarism is common and threatens the integrity of the scientific literature. However, its detection is time consuming and difficult, presenting challenges to editors and publishers who are entrusted with ensuring the integrity of published literature.MethodsIn this study, the extent of plagiarism in manuscripts submitted to a major specialty medical journal was documented. We manually curated submitted manuscripts and deemed an article contained plagiarism if one sentence had 80 % of the words copied from another published paper. Commercial plagiarism detection (...) software was utilized and its use was optimized.ResultsIn 400 consecutively submitted manuscripts, 17 % of submissions contained unacceptable levels of plagiarized material with 82 % of plagiarized manuscripts submitted from countries where English was not an official language. Using the most commonly employed commercial plagiarism detection software, sensitivity and specificity were studied with regard to the generated plagiarism score. The cutoff score maximizing both sensitivity and specificity was 15 % (sensitivity 84.8 % and specificity 80.5 %).ConclusionsPlagiarism was a common occurrence among manuscripts submitted for publication to a major American specialty medical journal and most manuscripts with plagiarized material were submitted from countries in which English was not an official language. The use of commercial plagiarism detection software can be optimized by selecting a cutoff score that reflects desired sensitivity and specificity. (shrink)

1. Naturalism Naturalism, it has been said, is the distinctive development in philosophy over the last thirty years. There has been a naturalistic turn away from the a priori methods of traditional philosophy to a conception of philosophy as continuous with natural science. The doctrine has been extensively discussed and has won considerable following in the USA. This is, on the whole, not true of Britain and continental Europe, where the pragmatist tradition never took root, and the temptations of scientism (...) in philosophy were less alluring. Contemporary American naturalism originates in the writings of Quine, the metaphysician of twentieth-century science. With extraordinary panache, he painted a largescale picture of human nature, of language and of the web of belief. I believe that in almost every major respect, it is, like the picture painted by Descartes, the great metaphysician of seventeenth-century science, mistaken. But it evidently appeals to the spirit of the times. So it is worthy of critical examination and careful refutation. I shall argue that the naturalistic turn is a cul-de-sac – a turn that is to be passed by if we are to keep to the highroad of good sense. Naturalism, like so many of Quine’s doctrines, was propounded in response to Carnap. As Quine understood matters, Carnap had been persuaded by Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World that it is the task of philosophy to demonstrate that our knowledge of the external world is a logical construction out of, and hence can be reduced to, elementary experiences. Quine rejected the reductionism of Carnap’s Logischer Aufbau, and found the idealist basis uncongenial to his own dogmatic realist behaviourism, inspired by Watson and later reinforced by Skinner. The rejection of reductionism and ‘unregenerate realism’, Quine averred, were the sources of his naturalism (FME 72). What exactly was this? We can distinguish in Quine between three different but inter-related programmes for future philosophy: epistemological, ontological and philosophical naturalism. Naturalized epistemology is to displace traditional epistemology, transforming the investigation into ‘an enterprise within natural science’ (NNK 68) – a psychological enterprise of investigating how the ‘input’ of radiation, etc., impinging on the nerve endings of human beings can ‘ultimately’ result in an ‘output’ of our theoretical descriptions of the external world.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading Aristotle with Thomas Aquinas: His Commentaries on Aristotle’s Major Works by Leo J. EldersEfrem Jindráček O.P.Reading Aristotle with Thomas Aquinas: His Commentaries on Aristotle’s Major Works. By Leo J. Elders. Edited by JÖrgen Vijgen. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023. Pp. xi + 560. $75.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-8132-3579-0.The prolific Thomistic scholar Jörgen Vijgen has edited a new book by the well-known and (...) recently deceased Thomistic Dutch philosopher, university [End Page 718] professor, and religious priest Leo J. Elders, S.V.D. (1926–2019). According to the bookplate, the book is based on the French original Aristote et Thomas d’Aquin (Paris, 2018), but according to the editor’s preface it is the original English version: “while originally written in English, a French translation appeared already in 2018” (vii). In any case, this is a very precise and interesting panoramic presentation of all twelve of Thomas’s commentaries on Aristotle’s books. The presentations are arranged not according to the chronological sequence of Thomas’s writing, but rather according to the order in which we usually arrange the treatises of Aristotle (i.e., from On Interpretation to Politics). The text is based on Elders’s lecturing activities in Houston in the 1980s, which he himself revised and added to towards the end of his life. It is also obviously a thematic follow-up to several of his articles continuously published on the subject (“Saint Thomas d’Aquin et Aristote,” Revue Thomiste 88 [1988]: 357–76; “St. Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary of Aristoteles’s Physics,” Doctor Angelicus 7 [2007]: 17–51; “The Aristotelian Commentaries of St. Thomas Aquinas,” The Review of Metaphysics 63 [2009]: 29–53).The author has, of course, chosen the best existing Latin editions of Thomas’s texts (Leonine and Marietti), but for the sake of easier editing and citation he has kept the numbering of the paragraphs according to the Marietti edition. Each chapter devoted to one of Thomas’s commentaries has almost the same structure (the presentation of Aristotelian text, Thomas’s intention and commentary according to uniform books, concluding remarks). The book concludes with an extremely comprehensive bibliography (511–25), index of names (527–31) and a subject index (533–36).Elders articulates the basic philosophical question that drives this work in the preface: “if they [Thomas’s commentaries] contained Thomas’s own philosophy and if they were a reliable presentation of Aristotle’s thought, or, on the contrary, if they deformed it in some place by introducing some of Thomas’s Christian faith and theology” (ix). After the analysis of Thomas’s twelve commentaries, Elders arrived at the conclusion that “the commentaries are a masterful and faithful presentation of Aristotle’s thought and of that of Thomas himself. Thomas’s Christian faith does not falsify or alternate the text, but give occasionally an outlook at what lies behind philosophical thought” (ibid.).In the Introduction (1–13), Elders discusses the objections of other contemporary scholars (É. Gilson, J. Owens, M. D. Jordan, H. V. Jaffa) who have reached different positions, even with the help of texts that are, on the contrary, close to the author’s view (D.-M. Chenu, C. Kaczor, F. del Punta). And not only that: “In order to trace the relatively few texts where Thomas disagrees with certain doctrine of Aristotle or completes certain statements, my method is to go through each chapter of the different commentaries and to note where Thomas makes observations and advances a different explanation. In order to do so, it seemed best to present a summary of the contents of the different chapters of each treatise, noting those places where Thomas makes [End Page 719] corrections and additions, or brings in sentences expressing truths of the Christian faith” (13).In order to examine Elders’s analytical reading of Thomas’s commentaries, we will consider three representative chapters: namely, his treatment of Thomas’s commentaries on Peri hermeneias (14–58), Meteorologica (205–32), and Metaphysics (311–400). These three commentaries are unequal in several respects: not all were completed by Thomas himself, and not all... (shrink)

Between 1787, and the end of his life in 1832, Bentham turned his attention to the development and application of economic ideas and principles within the general structure of his legislative project. For seventeen years this interest was manifested through a number of books and pamphlets, most of which remained in manuscript form, that develop a distinctive approach to economic questions. Although Bentham was influenced by Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, he (...) neither adopted a Smithian vocabulary for addressing questions of economic principle and policy, nor did he accept many of the distinctive features of Smith's economic theory. One consequence of this was that Bentham played almost no part in the development of the emerging science of political economy in the early nineteenth century. The standard histories of economics all emphasize how little he contributed to the mainstream of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century debate by concentrating attention on his utilitarianism and the psychology of hedonism on which it is premised. Others have argued that the calculating nature of his theory of practical reason reduced the whole legislative project to a crude attempt to apply economics to all aspects of social and political life. Put at its simplest this argument amounts to the erroneous claim that Bentham's science of legislation is reducible to the science of political economy. A different but equally dangerous error would be to argue that because Bentham's conception of the science of legislation comprehends all the basic forms of social relationships, there can be no science of political economy as there is no autonomous sphere of activity governed by the principles of economics. This approach is no doubt attractive from an historical point of view given that the major premise of this argument is true, and that many of Bentham's ‘economic’ arguments are couched in terms of his theory of legislation. Yet it fails to account for the undoubted importance of political economy within Bentham's writings, not just on finance, economic policy, colonies and preventive police, but also in other aspects of his utilitarian public policy such as prison reform, pauper management, and even constitutional reform. All of these works reflect a conception of political economy in its broadest terms. However, this conception of political economy differs in many respects from that of Bentham's contemporaries, and for this reason Bentham's distinctive approach to problems of economics and political economy has largely been misunderstood. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 147 The Godly Image: Christ and Salvation in Catholic Thought from Anselm to Aquinas. By ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. Studies in historical theology. v. 6. Petersham, Mass.: St. Bede's Publications, 1990. Pp. xxiv + 214. $14.95 (paper). The Godly Image presents a retouched version of the author's dissertation, first published in 1982 as Christian Satisfaction in Aquinas: Towards a Personalist Understanding (Washington, DC: University Press of America). Seeking (...) a broader audience, the author has dropped the dissertation's numerous Latin footnotes, shortened and enlivened the chapter titles, and streamlined some of his arguments (e.g., pp. 9395 ). He has as well corrected (e.g., on Pannenberg, p. xxii; on Anselm, p. 157) or toned down (e.g., the description of monastic theology, p. 1) earlier statements. Reference to the possibility that Aquinas suffered a nervous breakdown disappears (p. 18). Still, the work remains substantially the same, reproducing even some typos (e.g., William of St. Armour [sic], p. 3) from the original. The new subtitle, Christ and Salvation in Catholic Thought from Anselm to Aquinas, is unfortunate. First, it leads one to expect a survey of the major soteriological positions articulated in the period between the two, hut such is not forthcoming. The work remains what the original title indicated, a study in the thought of Aquinas. Second, in that work Anselm plays hut a perfunctory role, serving as the foil from whose mercantile model (p. 73) or juridical mentality (p. 91) Thomas can advance to a more appropriately interpersonal grasp of the mode of our salvation. This reading of Anselm, however, leaves him in the hands of liberal Protestant historians of doctrine of the nineteenth century, and, as the bibliography indicates, it ignores more recent literature which rightly stresses the metaphysical and religious depth of Anselm's key concept of iustitia. For a precise rendering of the relation between Anselm and Aquinas, one may wish to place greater emphasis on ST III, q.14, a.I, ad 1. In that text Aquinas accomplishes two things. First, he integrates Anselm's concept of satis· faction with the traditional religious insight that, in some sense, Christ suffered what sinners deserve to suffer. At the same time he deepens the concept by rendering explicit the place of love and obedience as the formal element in satisfaction and thus rejoins Anselm in rejecting any strict notion of penal substitution. These reservations aside, the author's thorough, comprehensive, and competent investigation into Aquinas fills a lacuna in the history of soteriology, a lacuna, one regrets to say, still left open by the work of his immediate predecessor, B. Catao. At the same time the scope 148 BOOK REVIEWS of the author's work offers a further and important contribution. By researching Thomas's thought on satisfaction in the context of penance as well as soteriology, the author manages to suggest, and explicitly, that the generative matrix for Thomas's theoretic work in both areas lies in the cruciform dynamics of Christian conversion, the life of grace. With this insight he opens a door from historical theology to a contemporary systematics. Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. WILLIAM P. LOEWE Free Will and the Christian Faith. By W. S. ANGLIN. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. vii + 218. $55.00 (cloth). W. S. Anglin, a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Mathematics at McGill University, has produced a highly compact and compelling volume which attempts in just 218 pages to prove God's existence, to argue for personal immortality, to defend the coherence of theism against the problem of evil, to provide cogent analyses of both omnipotence and omniscience, and to examine criteria for distinguishing divine revelation from other forms of communication. The thread holding these rather motley swatches of cloth together is the author's concentration on libertarian freedom which weaves throughout the above issues in one way or another. It shows up in the expected places (e.g., in the so-called 'free will defense' of the problem of evil) but also in places hitherto unexpected (Anglin nicely argues that if humans are truly free in the libertarian sense, then it is appropriate and necessary that the Scriptures take the... (shrink)

The term 'systems theory' is used to characterize a set of disparate yet related approaches to fields as varied as information theory, cybernetics, biology, sociology, history, literature, and philosophy. What unites each of these traditions of systems theory is a shared focus on general features of systems and their fundamental importance for diverse areas of life. Yet there are considerable differences among these traditions, and each tradition has developed its own methodologies, journals, and forms of anaylsis. This book explores this (...) terrain and provides an overview of and guide to the traditions of systems theory in their considerable variety. The book draws attention to the traditions of systems theory in their historical development, especially as related to the humanities and social sciences, and shows how from these traditions various contemporary developments have ensued. It provides a guide for strains of thought that are key to understanding 20th century intellectual life in many areas. (shrink)

Social evolution theory conventionally takes an externalist explanatory stance, treating observed cooperation as explanandum and the positive assortment of cooperative behaviour as explanans. We ask how the circumstances bringing about this positive assortment arose in the first place. Rather than merely push the explanatory problem back a step, we move from an externalist to an interactionist explanatory stance, in the spirit of Lewontin and the Niche Construction theorists. We develop a theory of ‘social niche construction’ in which we consider biological (...) entities to be both the subject and object of their own social evolution. Some important cases of the evolution of cooperation have the side-effect of causing changes in the hierarchical level at which the evolutionary process acts. This is because the traits that act to align the fitness interests of particles in a collective can also act to diminish the extent to which those particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance, while augmenting the extent to which collectives of such particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance. In this way, we can explain upward transitions in the hierarchical level at which the Darwinian machine operates in terms of particle-level selection, even though the outcome of the process is a collective-level selection regime. Our theory avoids the logical and metaphysical paradoxes faced by other attempts to explain evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

This volume ranges in time over a very long period and covers the Greeks' most original contributions to intellectual history. It begins and ends with philosophy, but it also includes major sections on historiography and oratory. Although each of these areas had functions which in the modern world would not be considered 'Literary', the ancients made a less sharp distinction between intellectual and artistic production, and the authors included in this volume are some of Europe's most powerful stylists: Plato, (...) Herodotus, Thucydides and Demosthenes. (shrink)

I provide a novel argument in favour of majority rule. In particular, I consider the distribution of voter satisfaction in response to the outcome of a vote and prove that under certain conditions majority rule minimizes the level of inequality present in the distribution of voter satisfaction. This finding is reinforced by a computer simulation as well as an analysis of over four decades of polling data. Results complement existing procedural justifications of majority rule, demonstrating that majority rule ensures equality (...) at the level of both procedure and outcome. (shrink)

One major argument against prohibiting euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is that there is no rational basis for distinguishing between killing and allowing to die: if we permit patients to die by forgoing life-sustaining treatments, then we also ought to permit euthanasia and PAS. In this paper, the author argues, contra this claim, that it is in fact coherent to differentiate between killing and allowing to die. To develop this argument, the author provides an analysis of Saint Augustine’s distinction (...) between martyrdom and suicide, highlighting the relevance of intention in the assessment of an agent’s actions. As a general matter of ethics, the intentions of agents, not just the outcomes of their actions, matter enormously for drawing distinctions between what is permissible and what is impermissible. Constructing an Augustinian account of this distinction between killing and allowing to die, the author argues that it is coherent to hold that assisted suicide is wrong, while also accepting that it is permissible to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatments. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson has been a major and influential spokesman for ordinary language philosophy throughout the late twentieth century, studying the relationship between common language and the language of formal logic. This reissue of his collection of early essays, Logico-Linguistic Papers, is published with a brand new introduction by Professor Strawson but, apart from minor corrections to the text, these classic essays remain original and intact. Logico-Linguistic Papers contains Strawson's major essay, 'On Referring', in which he disputed Bertrand Russell's (...) theory of definite descriptions, distinguishing between referring to an entity and asserting its existence. The book contains twelve essays in all, grouped by subject matter. The first five are concerned with the topic of singular reference and predication and the last three are all responses to J.L. Austin's treatment of the topic of truth. Strawson disputes the correspondence theory of truth, maintaining that facts are what statements state. The remaining papers deal with meaning, speech acts, logical truth and Chomsky's views on syntax. (shrink)

This article discusses what level of consent is needed from a child or parent before a primary-school medical can take place . It also considers whether there are occasions when a doctor can see a child if the parents have failed to give consent or have explicitly refused consent.Primary-school children are considered incompetent to make decisions about their own medical treatment and so their consent does not need to be gained before a medical takes place, although it is highly desirable (...) to obtain it. However, a doctor cannot justify a decision to see a child purely in terms of the benefit conferred on the child. Parents can be wronged if their wishes are ignored and usually those wishes should be considered overriding. Normally, general consent, which need not be fully informed, is needed before a school medical. However, if a child is considered to be in danger of being harmed significantly or suspected to have a major medical condition, a medical should go ahead regardless of the level of consent obtained from the parent, so that a reasonable standard of health is maintained for the child. (shrink)

Background: Despite a gradual shift in the focus of medical care among terminally ill patients to a palliative model, studies suggest that many children with life-limiting chronic illnesses continue to die in hospital after prolonged periods of inpatient admission and mechanical ventilation.Objectives: To examine the characteristics and location of death among hospitalised children, investigate yearwise trends in these characteristics and test the hypothesis that professional ethical guidance from the UK Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health would lead to significant (...) changes in the characteristics of death among hospitalised children.Methods: Routine administrative data from one large tertiary-level UK children’s hospital was examined over a 7-year period for children aged 0–18 years. Demographic details, location of deaths, source of admission , length of stay and final diagnoses were studied. Statistical significance was tested by the Kruskal–Wallis analysis of ranks and median test , χ2 test and Cochran–Armitage test .Results: Of the 1127 deaths occurring in hospital over the 7-year period, the majority were among infants. The main diagnoses at death included congenital malformations , perinatal diseases , cardiovascular disorders and neoplasms . Most deaths occurred in an intensive care unit environment , with a significant increase over the years . There was a clear increase in the proportion of admissions from in-hospital among the ICU cohort . Infants with congenital malformations and perinatal conditions were more likely to die in an ICU , and older children with malignancy outside the ICU . Children stayed for a median of 13 days on a hospital ward before being admitted to an ICU where they died.Conclusions: A greater proportion of hospitalised children are dying in an ICU environment. Our experience indicates that professional ethical guidance by itself may be inadequate in reversing the trends observed in this study. (shrink)

We are reviewing and summarizing evidence for the processes of acquisition of information outside of conscious awareness (processing information about covariations, nonconscious indirect and interactive inferences, self-perpetuation of procedural knowledge). A considerable amount of data indicates that as compared to consciously controlled cognition, the nonconscious information-acquisition processes are not only much faster but also structurally more sophisticated in the sense that they are capable of efficient processing of multidimensional and interactive relations between variables. Those mechanisms of nonconscious acquisition of information (...) provide a major channel for the development of procedural knowledge which is indispensable for such important aspects of cognitive functioning as encoding and interpretation of stimuli and the triggering emotional reactions. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis had a profound influence on formation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. However, at the same time, he rejects Freud’s idea that the unconscious consists of latent mental contents that cause a certain type of behavior. Instead of a hidden experience, Merleau-Ponty argues that the unconscious is an ambiguous consciousness. In The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception, he specifies this ambiguity by means of the concepts of habit, bad faith, bodily expression, affective intentionality and body schema. In this paper, (...) I will present the interconnection of these aspects of the human existence, following Merleau-Ponty’s two early major works. Further, I will show the difference of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of bad faith from that of Sartre, and, finally, I will suggest a limitation of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to the unconscious. (shrink)

Educators studied are: Francis Parker, John Dewey, Rudolf Steiner, Hugh Mearns, and Laura Zirbes.

One of the gains to be reckoned from the study of nomenclature in the sepulchral inscriptions of the early empire is the gradual abandonment of attempts to distinguish between slave and freeborn on the basis of personal name or cognomen alone, especially when this is of Latin derivation. Nevertheless, one still finds personal cognomina in undated inscriptions adduced as sole evidence for the origin or status of individuals below senatorial rank. Thus in a standard work on freedmen in the early (...) empire, recently reprinted, names such as Agilis, Amandus, Auctus, Communis, Donatus, Faustus, Felix, etc., are said to be commonly servile, but others such as Aquila, Bassus, Capito, Cams, Celer, Crescens, etc., are taken as ingenuous. The criteria used in making such a distinction are subjective and arbitrary and the statistics based on them are largely valueless. It is the purpose of this note to consider briefly on this question the evidence of the personal nomenclature of the Imperial slaves and freedmen. In this group, the Familia Caesaris, no problem of status arises, and the fact that the majority of their inscriptions can be dated, at least approximately, makes it possible to trace the chronological development of the use of cognomina ingenua by one important group of servile origin from the first to the early third century A.D. Moreover, such a development is useful evidence for change in the social structure of the early empire. (shrink)

This major study examines the most fundamental categories in terms of which we conceive of ourselves, critically surveying the concepts of substance, causation, agency, teleology, rationality, mind, body and person, and elaborating the conceptual fields in which they are embedded. The culmination of 40 years of thought on the philosophy of mind and the nature of the mankind Written by one of the world’s leading philosophers, the co-author of the monumental 4 volume _Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations_ Uses (...) broad categories, such as substance, causation, agency and power to examine how we think about ourselves and our nature Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of human nature are sketched and contrasted Individual chapters clarify and provide an historical overview of a specific concept, then link the concept to ideas contained in other chapters. (shrink)

The Rule of Double Effect has played an important role in bioethics, especially during the last fifty years. Its major application in bioethics has been in providing physicians who are opposed to euthanasia with a moral justification for using opioid analgesics in treating the pain of patients whose death might thereby be hastened. It has also prominently been applied to certain obstetric cases. The scope of application of double effect is actually much broader than medical ethics, extending to cover (...) such topics as strategic bombing in warfare. This article, while general in theory, concentrates on its applications in medical ethics. (shrink)

The conception of first‐person knowledge of thought and experience was present in antiquity. It played a major role in Western philosophy in the early modern era as an integral part of the Cartesian and Lockean conceptions of the mind. If inner sense is a form of introspective self‐observation yielding knowledge, as it seemed to be, then awareness of the contents of the mind appears to be analogous to what we take to be awareness or consciousness of objects by the (...) exercise of a perceptual faculty. Descartes thought that the impossibility of doubt implied the presence of complete certainty. Consequently, he cast what he called 'thoughts' in the role of the certain foundations of empirical knowledge. Both Locke and Descartes supposed that one is conscious of what passes in the mind, and that what one is conscious of one knows to exist or obtain. (shrink)

We identify a novel ‘cultural red king effect’ that, in many cases, results in stable arrangements which are to the detriment of minority groups. In particular, we show inequalities disadvantaging minority groups can naturally arise under an adaptive process when minority and majority members must routinely determine how to divide resources amongst themselves. We contend that these results show how inequalities disadvantaging minorities can likely arise by dint of their relative size and need not be a result of either explicit (...) nor implicit prejudices, nor due to intrinsic differences between minority and majority members. (shrink)

Context: Constructivist teachers who find themselves working within an educational system that adopts a realist epistemology, may find themselves at odds with their own beliefs when they catch themselves paying closer attention to the knowledge authorities intend them to teach rather than the knowledge being constructed by their learners. Method: In the preliminary analysis of the mathematical learning of six low-performing Year 7 boys in a Maltese secondary school, whom one of us taught during the scholastic year 2014-15, we constructed (...) a conceptual framework which would help us analyze the extent to which he managed to be sensitive to constructivism in a typical classroom setting. We describe the development of the framework M-N-L as a viable analytical tool to search for significant moments in the lessons in which the teacher appeared to engage in what we define as “constructivist teaching” during mathematics lessons. The development of M-N-L is part of a research program investigating the way low-performing students make mathematical sense of new notation with the help of the software Grid Algebra. Results: M-N-L was found to be an effective instrument which helped to determine the extent to which the teacher was sensitive to his own constructivist beliefs while trying to negotiate a balance between the mathematical concepts he was expected to teach and the conceptual constructions of his students. Implications: One major implication is that it is indeed possible for mathematics teachers to be sensitive to the individual constructions of their learners without losing sight of the concepts that society, represented by curriculum planners, deems necessary for students to learn. The other is that researchers in the field of education may find M-N-L a helpful tool to analyze CT during typical didactical situations established in classroom settings. (shrink)

The claim of the multiple realizability of mental states by brain states has been a major feature of the dominant philosophy of mind of the late 20th century. The claim is usually motivated by evidence that mental states are multiply realized, both within humans and between humans and other species. We challenge this contention by focusing on how neuroscientists differentiate brain areas. The fact that they rely centrally on psychological measures in mapping the brain and do so in a (...) comparative fashion undercuts the likelihood that, at least within organic life forms, we are likely to find cases of multiply realized psychological functions. (shrink)

Hybridization is a method invented by Arthur Prior for extending the expressive power of modal languages. Although developed in interesting ways by Robert Bull, and by the Sofia school , the method remains little known. In our view this has deprived temporal logic of a valuable tool.The aim of the paper is to explain why hybridization is useful in temporal logic. We make two major points, the first technical, the second conceptual. First, we show that hybridization gives rise to (...) well-behaved logics that exhibit an interesting synergy between modal and classical ideas. This synergy, obvious for hybrid languages with full first-order expressive strength, is demonstrated for a weaker local language capable of defining the Until operator; we provide a minimal axiomatization, and show that in a wide range of temporally interesting cases extended completeness results can be obtained automatically. Second, we argue that the idea of sorted atomic symbols which underpins the hybrid enterprise can be developed further. To illustrate this, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a simple hybrid language which can quantify over paths. (shrink)