If one interprets the ‘ecology of technology’ as the study of technology in relation to its environment, there are two important levels at which this study can be made. It is possible to consider the different environments in Europe, Japan and the USA, and look for the different technological influences which accompany them. At a more general level, one can look at those factors which are common to all three environments, and which are associated with generic similarities in the technology (...) of all three areas.The paper considers both aspects as they have been experienced in Europe in some attempts to develop a ‘human-centred technology’. (shrink)

A nascent science in the sixteenth century rejected explanations in terms of purpose in favour of causality, and this bias has persisted and grown stronger. It has unfortunate consequences in areas where social and ethical considerations should prevail, and the paper describes a search extending over 20 years for a way in which these consequences could be avoided.

In a recent book, ‘Machines with a Purpose’, many of the unattractive features of our technology were traced to a view of the world which has predominated in science for nearly four hundred years. This is, that nature, and everything that it contains, operates causally and without purpose. To counter this view, an alternative, purposive view was developed. The paper gives a simple account of this development, of other related work, and of the underlying motivation.

In the paper, three propositions are put forward. First, that intellectual structures of wide scope commonly lead to conclusions which are ethically unacceptable; secondly that the ethically unacceptable consequences of science arise from one particular presupposition which it adopts, namely that of causality; thirdly, that causality is no essential part of science.

In Paradigms and Barriers Howard Margolis offers an innovative interpretation of Thomas S. Kuhn's landmark idea of "paradigm shifts," applying insights from cognitive psychology to the history and philosophy of science. Building upon the arguments in his acclaimed Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, Margolis suggests that the breaking down of particular habits of mind—of critical "barriers"—is key to understanding the processes through which one model or concept is supplanted by another. Margolis focuses on those revolutionary paradigm shifts— such as the (...) switch from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican worldview—where challenges to entrenched habits of mind are marked by incomprehension or indifference to a new paradigm. Margolis argues that the critical problem for a revolutionary shift in thinking lies in the robustness of the habits of mind that reject the new ideas, relative to the habits of mind that accept the new ideas. Margolis applies his theory to famous cases in the history of science, offering detailed explanations for the transition from Ptolemaic to cosmological astronomy, the emergence of probability, the overthrow of phlogiston, and the emergence of the central role of experiment in the seventeenth century. He in turn uses these historical examples to address larger issues, especially the nature of belief formation and contemporary debates about the nature of science and the evolution of scientific ideas. Howard Margolis is a professor in the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and in the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Selfishness, Altruism, and Rationality and Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, both published by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

It was probably Rousseau who first thought of dreams as ennobling experiences. Anyone who has ever read Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire must be struck by the dreamlike quality of Rousseau's meditations. This dreamlike quality is still with us, and those who experience it find themselves ennobled by it. Witness Martin Luther King's famous "1 have a dream. " Dreaming and inspiration raise the artist to the top rung in the ladder ofhuman relations. That is probably the prevailing view among educated (...) people of our time. Rousseau made that view respectable and predominant. Yet in another sense, the problem is much older. It is the problem of political philosophy and poetry, the problem of Socrates and Aristophanes, of Plato and Homer. Yet, while antiquity usually gives the crown to philosophy, since Rous seau, the alternative view tends to prevail. The distinction is not, however, a formal one. Sir Philip Sidney enlisted Plato on the side of poetry. The true distinction is between imagination and reason. If reason is to rule, as Aristotle points out,l the most architectonic of the sciences, that is political science, should rule. It is political philosophy which must determine the nature of the arts which will help or which will hinder the good of the city or the polity. That does not mean that a mere professor should stand in judgment of Shake speare, Bacon, and Rembrandt. It means that ifhe studies these three great artists, he is not over-stepping disciplinary limits. (shrink)

Like Henry Harris, I began doing intensive research on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the mid-sixties. I recall going through all the chapters as a graduate student during one academic year, and looking around for commentaries. The only English-language commentary available was Loewenberg's Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues in the Life of Mind, which was suggestive of the dialectic taking place in the book, but not much help in getting over the “rough spots”. This gave me an incentive to work through Jean (...) Hyppolite's commentary, not yet translated into English, with my basic reading-knowledge of French. My 1976 Hegel's Phenomenology, Part I: Analysis and Commentary was one of the first in a long line of Anglophone commentaries. Harris in his introduction to Vol. I. mentions this effort at “analysis”, along with Findlay's “analysis” accompanying the 1977 Miller translation of the Phenomenology, as incentives for the inclusion of his own improved running analysis in the present commentary. I have included discussions of numerous partial or complete commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology in review articles published in 1971 in the American Philosophical Quarterly and Teorema, in 1979 in the American Philosophical Quarterly, and in 1981 in Hegel-Studien. Harris has the advantage of producing the most recent of all these commentaries, and in a way offers us a compendium of everything that has been done on the Phenomenology. His analysis and commentary includes a survey of the literature, in which almost all previous laborers in the field can find themselves commended or criticized in the endnotes. Thus I find comments like “Kainz has completely misunderstood the argument here”, “This is a point which Kainz has grasped more definitely than most commentators”, “[Kainz] does not deserve the brickbat Flay hurls at him”, and so forth. Other commentators, living and dead – Flay, Pöggeler, Navickas, Kenneth and Merold Westphal, Heidegger, Lauer, Werner Becker, Kojève, Wahl, Hyppolite, Labarrière, Bonsiepen, Forster, Shklar, Solomon, Werner Marx, and Robert Williams — are similarly discussed and critiqued. For some of us Anglophone commentators, such remarks may seem like red marks on essays from a patient professor. But certainly no one will mind, since Harris has spent more time and energy on this very specialized project than any of us. In fact, some former commentators almost have a “conflict of interest” in reviewing Harris' work, since so many of us have benefited at various points in our research from Harris' personal support and criticism. But in academics, as in life, mentors cannot always be assured of loyalty. (shrink)

To sum up on forms and rightness. No one wants poetry to be like filling out a form, though plenty of poems look dismally like it. The forms were there to be wrestled with mightily, because they silently and emptily, till one filled them up with the thing said, stood for the recalcitrant outside and other that knows nothing of the human will. The mindless rigidity in principle of the verse patterns suggestively compounded with the sinewy nature of the speaking (...) voice that flowed in continuous energy through the marked-off graph of foot and line and strophe. Together they might be taken to stand for two powers of the mind that ought to work with and against one another to the same effect: the streamy nature of association, said Coleridge, that thinking curbs and rudders. Ezra Pound's commandment to the poet, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome, is a good warning against monotonous cadences; but taken literally it invites the reply that Beethoven did both. For art is a place where you make choices, sometimes difficult ones that require you decide not between good and bad but between this good and that: very often it is between the beauty of a line and the sense of the whole thing. A proverb says you can't do two things at once; but it is conspicuous that in art you must always be doing two things at once, knowing that that is only the minimum requirement: And twofold Always. May God us keepFrom Single vision & Newton's sleep! Howard Nemerov, professor of English at Washington University, is the author of, among other works, Figures of Thought: Speculations on the Meaning of Poetry and Other Essays and The Collected Poems, for which he received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1978. See also: "Strict Form in Poetry: Would Jacob Wrestle with a Flabby Angel" by Peter Viereck in Vol. 5, No. 2. (shrink)

The work of Northrop Frye, evenly divided as it is between those earlier and later literatures and equally influential in both fields, will serve to illustrate the literary-historical myth I have begun to describe. "Romanticism," he writes, "is a 'sentimental' form of romance, and the fairy tale, for the most part, a 'sentimental' form of folk tale."1 Frye's terms are directly adopted from Schiller's famous essay, "Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung," though "naive" for Frye means simply "primitive" or "popular" and (...) is not historically identified, as it is in Schiller, with "classical," while "sentimental," as in Schiller, means "later" or "sophisticated." In adopting Schiller's terms, however, Frye has also adopted, though less obviously, Schiller's historical scheme. In the theory of modes that opens the Anatomy, Frye's division of Western literature into a descending scale from "myth" through "romance," "high mimetic," and "low mimetic" to "irony" is correlated to the historical periods in which each mode successively dominates: classical, medieval, Renaissance, eighteenth century, nineteenth century, and modern. Like Schiller's starker contrast of the "naive" or classical poet in touch with the natural world and the "sentimental" or Romantic poet alienated from it by modern civilization, Frye's logical and chronological scheme conceives literary history as a process of disintegration or displacement away from the natural integrity and univocality of myth and toward the self-conscious distancing and discontinuities of irony. The history of literature moves, following hard upon an Enlightenment conception of cultural history that derives as much from Rousseau as from Schiller and Friedrich von Schlegel, from the anonymous universality of myth to the individuality or eccentricity of modern fiction. Frye systematically avoids valorizing this "progress of poetry" in any of the ways it has been successively valorized by various schools of ancients and moderns, classics and Romantics, over the past three centuries. Yet he nonetheless repeats the historical scheme that underlies and generates these schools and their quarrels in the first place. It may turn out that the weakness of Frye's rehabilitation of romance is not his avoidance of history, as is commonly charged, but his inability to do without a version of it. · 1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism , p. 35. Howard Felperin is the author of Shakespearean Romance and Shakespearean Representation. He has taught at Harvard, the University of California, and Yale and is currently Robert Wallace Professor of English at the University of Melbourne, Australia. (shrink)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-4317-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8229-4317-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Science — Philosophy. 2. Science — Social aspects. 3. Values. 4. Science and civilization. I. Carrier, Martin. II. Howard, Don, professor. III. Kourany ...

Whether we are morally obligated to obey the law is the central question addressed by Joseph Raz in his most recent work entitled, The Authority of Law. It is a question which divides positivists from natural law adherents. Professor Raz, a self-proclaimed positivist, concludes that “there is no general moral obligation to obey [the law], not even in a good society.” Rather, for Raz he individual must obey the law only if he respects it. “His respect,” says Raz, “is (...) the source of obligation,” leading one to conclude that for Raz the authority of law is the individual. The question of whether we are morally bound to obey the law is not a novel one; foremost among those who have addressed it are Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. Each does so, it is important to note, in terms of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of government, which, in turn, is based upon a correct understanding of the nature of man and human happiness. The law of an illegitimate government, argues St. Thomas, “since it is not in accordance with reason, is not a law absolutely speaking, but rather a perversion of law.”. (shrink)

Perhaps Hoffmann's quarter of a century residence in the U.S., explains some of the tics in this provocative and yet frustrating book. The author was born in Vienna and educated in France, where he was a student of Raymond Aron, an interpretor of Gaullism, and spiritual father of the well-known In Search of France. He knows how to turn theory against supposed pragmatists while brandishing a tactical realism in the face of Utopian naiveté. As a Harvard professor, on the (...) other hand, he is more relaxed and dialogues mainly with his contemporaries (whom he supposes well known and worthy of attention). (shrink)

This is a comment on Professor Holm Tetens' paper, 'Scientific Objectivity with a Human Face'.

“His hypothesis is that if you take dope you’re going to end up taking smack, but he’d actually got an incorrect application of Bayes’ theorem... the gateway theory, all obviously complete bollocks, based on a professor’s ineptitude in statistics.”.

Johann Heinrich Alsted, professor of philosophy and theology at the Calvinist academy of Heborn, was a man of many parts. A deputy to the famous Synod of Dort and greatest encyclopaedist of his age, he was also a pioneer of Calvinist millenarianism and a devoted student of astrology, alchemy, Lullism, and the works of Giordano Bruno. From the mainstream Reformed tradition, Alsted and his circle inherited the zeal for further reformation of church, state, and society; but with this they (...) blended hermetic dreams of a general reformation and the restoration of primordial perfection to the fallen human nature through Lullist and alchemical panaceas. However paradoxical from a strictly Calvinist standpoint, this loose synthesis helped prepare the programme of Alsted's greatest student, Jan Amos Cominius, and the following generation of central European universal reformers. Alsted's intellectual biography opens up unexpected perspectives on the reforming movements of the seventeenth century, and provides an invaluable introduction to many of the central ideas, individuals and institutions of this neglected era of central European intellectual history. (shrink)

This paper explores how the physicist John Tyndall transformed himself from humble surveyor and schoolmaster into an internationally applauded icon of science. Beginning with his appointment as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in 1853, I show how Tyndall’s worries about his social class and Irish origins, his painstaking attention to his lecturing performance and skilled use of the material and architectural resources of the Royal Institution were vital to his eventual success as a popular expositor and (...) ambassador for science. Secondly I explore the implications of Tyndall’s ‘popularity’ with respect to debates over the meaning and value of scientific ‘popularisation’. In support of recent work challenging diffusionist models of science communication, I show how Tyndall’s interactions with his audiences illustrate the symbiotic relationship between producer and consumer of ‘popular’ science. By examining the views of Tyndall’s critics—notably the ‘North British’ group of physicists—and his defenders and rivals in the domain of popular scientific lecturing, I show that disputes over Tyndall’s authority reflected anxieties about what constituted popular science and the transient boundaries between instruction and entertainment. The term ‘popularisation’ enjoyed many different uses in these debates, not least of all as a rheorical device with which to either exalt or destroy a scientist’s credibility. Author Keywords: John Tyndall; Audiences; Popularisation; Popular; Physics; Royal Institution. (shrink)

Processes of adapting complex information for broad audiences became a pressing concern by the turn of the twentieth century. Channels of communication ranged from public lectures to printed books designed to serve a social class eager for self-improvement. Through analyzing a course of public lectures given by George Howard Darwin (1845–1912) for the Lowell Institute in Boston and the monograph he based on these, The Tides and Kindred Phenomena of the Solar System (1898), this article connects the important practices (...) of public lecturing and book production–two aspects of knowledge dissemination that tend to be studied as separate entities. Darwin, Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and son of the famous naturalist, relied on a diverse material culture when lecturing and producing a book. Giving a new account of Darwin’s scientific work through exploring his adaption of it for broader audiences, this article connects the diverse material culture Darwin employed in talks to the practice of producing a published book. The content of objects demonstrated and the lantern slides projected during Darwin’s lectures evolved to form a book designed to engage broad sectors of society in Europe and the United States. Darwin’s lectures were attended at full capacity, while The Tides was soon printed in numerous English editions and translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, and Spanish. (shrink)

O propósito deste livro é preencher a lacuna existente no mercado editorial brasileiro no que diz respeito a obras de cunho acadêmico sobre hinduísmo e filosofia indiana. Essa lacuna se reflete, dentre outras, na inexistência de publicações em português que pretendam ir além do mero aspecto introdutório deste que é um dos maiores clássicos da literatura religiosa indiana e mundial: a Bhagavad-gita; também se reflete na inexistência de literatura especializada sobre as várias tradições indianas que têm a Bhagavad- gita como (...) um de seus textos canônicos. -/- Reunindo professores e pesquisadores do Brasil, Israel, Estados Unidos e Reino Unido, este volume apresenta uma visão acadêmica e acessível da Bhagavad-gita centrada em dois aspectos principais: introdução e contextualização da Gita no que se refere à sua história, estrutura e conceitos-chave, de um lado, e análise detalhada de algumas das noções e temas mais relevantes do texto, de outro. Também proporciona visão geral de uma das tradições da Índia - tanto vedanta como vaishava - que mais sofreram influência da teologia e filosofia da Bhagavad-gita: o vaishnavismo gaudiya de Caitanya (1486-1533). -/- O livro encontra-se estruturado em três grupos, ou partes. A primeira, intitulada "Visão Geral da Bhagavad-gita", é composta de dois capítulos e tem como objetivo introduzir o leitor ao Gita como um todo. A segunda, intitulada "Conceitos e Tópicos-Chave da Bhagavad-gita", contém cinco capítulos, cada um centrado na análise de um conceito ou tópico específico da Gita. A terceira e última parte, intitulada "Hinduísmo e Vaishnavismo", é composta por três capítulos e visa apresentar o vaishnavismo, mais especificamente o vaishnavismo gaudiya, situando-o dentro do contexto mais geral do que hoje se denomina hinduísmo. (shrink)

Contributing Authors: Lilli Alanen & Frans Svensson, David Alm, Gustaf Arrhenius, Gunnar Björnsson, Luc Bovens, Richard Bradley, Geoffrey Brennan & Nicholas Southwood, John Broome, Linus Broström & Mats Johansson, Johan Brännmark, Krister Bykvist, John Cantwell, Erik Carlson, David Copp, Roger Crisp, Sven Danielsson, Dan Egonsson, Fred Feldman, Roger Fjellström, Marc Fleurbaey, Margaret Gilbert, Olav Gjelsvik, Kathrin Glüer & Peter Pagin, Ebba Gullberg & Sten Lindström, Peter Gärdenfors, Sven Ove Hansson, Jana Holsanova, Nils Holtug, Victoria Höög, Magnus Jiborn, Karsten Klint Jensen, (...) Sigurður Kristinsson, Isaac Levi, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, David Makinson, Anna-Sofia Maurin, Philippe Mongin, Kevin Mulligan, Lennart Nordenfelt, Jonas Olson, Erik J. Olsson, Ingmar Persson, Johannes Persson, Björn Petersson, Philip Pettit, Hans Rott, Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Krister Segerberg, John Skorupski, Howard Sobel, Fredrik Stjernberg, Fred Stoutland, Caj Strandberg, Pär Sundström, Folke Tersman, Torbjörn Tännsjö, Peter Vallentyne, Bruno Verbeek, Stella Villarmea, and Michael J. Zimmerman. (shrink)

This book-review was written by Professor Pierre Dubois just before his untimely death. The Editors are grateful to his wife, Dr Elfrieda Dubois, for preparing the text for publication in History of European Ideas.

The essential premise of the human-centered technology paradigm was clearly formulated by Howard Rosenbrock in the 1970s: technology should enrich rather than impoverish people’s work and life conditions. The increasing influence of technology in modern societies has been seen by some as offering great promise for the future, but by others as creating the electronic surveillance and/or manipulation of human genes, minds and beliefs. This paper approaches technological worlds as cultural visions in order to discuss and reflect the (...) paradoxical process of viewing technology as part of a hope for a more sustainable and human-centered future as well as part of an apocalypse of surveillance, violence and catastrophes. (shrink)

In this book, 13 leading philosophers of science focus on the work of Professor Howard Stein, best known for his study of the intimate connection between ...

The 14th International Congress of Philosophy, held late last summer in Vienna, had an entire subsection devoted to Hegel. Several papers were presented by philosophers from America, including: "Hegel In Light of His First American Followers", by Professor Loyd D. Easton of Ohio Wesleyan University; "Hegel and Husserl", by Professor W.H. Werkmeister of The Florida State University; "Hegel's Theory of Signification & The Origin of Dialectic", by Professor Daniel Cook of Herbert H. Lehman College ; "Beginning the (...) System: Kierkegaard and Hegel", by Professor Robert Perkins, University of South Alabama. These papers and others will be published in the Congress Proceedings. Inquiries should be directed to the University of Vienna Department of Philosophy. * * * Professor H.S. Harris of Glendon College, York University, Toronto, will shortly have published in a volume titled Essays in Honour of Max Fisch "The Fragment on Faith and Being in Hegel's Early Theological Writings". The essay contains the text translation and a full commentary on the fragment Glauben und Sein in Nohl. * * * The Fall issue of Philosophy Today contain an article by Professor Howard P. Kainz of Marquette University titled "Hegel's Characterization of Truth in the Phenomenology". * * * James F. Donaldson of Texas Technological College has an article titled "The Origin of Hegel's Dialectic" in the current issue of Lavel Theologique et Philosophique. A brief abstract of the paper may be found in the Fall, 1969 Philosopher's Index. (shrink)

Research on collaborative professionalism may be enriched by inquiries into the lived experiences of teachers. The question of what collaboration is like for teachers has not been taken up widely in the literature. The meaning of collaboration as a coming together of individuals who share, design, and co-create for purposes that are aligned with generative possibilities of producing something new, of understanding something in a novel way, and to combine perspectives, personalities, experiences and expertise, represents a new area for research. (...) This paper presents a phenomenological analysis of teachers’ lived experiences of collaboration. To ask these questions requires an orientation to the lived experience of teacher collaboration. For the purposes of this paper, two themes – collaboration and a creative imaginary, and collaboration and relationality – are described as unique structures of human experience. This research supports the conclusion that research in the field of collaborative professionalism and teacher collaboration may be significantly deepened by inquiries into concrete lived experiences of teacher collaboration. (shrink)

Rational actions reflect beliefs and preferences in certain orderly ways. The problem of theory is to explain which beliefs and preferences are relevant to the rationality of particular actions, and exactly how they are relevant. One distinction of interest here is between an agent's beliefs and preferences just before an action's time, and his beliefs and preferences at its time. Theorists do not agree about the times of beliefs and desires that are relevant to the rationality of action. Another distinction (...) is between actions that would, in one sense or another, maximize expected utilities given relevant beliefs and desires, and actions, decisions for which would, in one sense or another, be stable. There is disagreement about the relevance of these things to the rationality of actions. Here, in the first part below, several possible positions on these issues are explained and compared. In the second part, I contrast perspectives on these issues, and comment on arguments that might be brought against the position I favor. In the third part, I restate and elaborate on this position. (shrink)

CHAPTER I POLITICAL FAITH AND UTOPIAN THOUGHT In the three and a half centuries since Bacon and the miller prayed for peace among the willows, countless men ...

The idea that reasoning is a singular accomplishment of the human species has an ancient pedigree.Yet this idea remains as controversial as it is ancient. Those who would deny reasoning to nonhuman animals typically hold a language-based conception of inference which places it beyond the reach of languageless creatures. Others reject such an anthropocentric conception of reasoning on the basis of similar performance by humans and animals in some reasoning tasks, such as transitive inference. Here, building on the modal similarity (...) theory of Vigo [J Exp Theor Artif Intell, 2008 (in press)], we offer an account in which reasoning depends on a core suite of subsymbolic processes for similarity assessment, discrimination, and categorization. We argue that premise-based inference operates through these subsymbolic processes, even in humans. Given the robust discrimination and categorization abilities of some species of nonhuman animals, we believe that they should also be regarded as capable of simple forms of inference. Finally, we explain how this account of reasoning applies to the kinds of transitive inferences that many nonhuman animals display. (shrink)

Employing the National Institute of Mental Health-funded Prevention of Suicide in Primary Care Elderly Collaborative Trial as a case study, we discuss 2 sets of ethical issues: obtaining informed consent for a clinic-based intervention study and using treatment as usual (TAU) as the control condition. We then address these ethical issues in the context of the debate about the quality improvement efforts of health care organizations. Our analysis reveals the tension between ethics and scientific integrity involved with using TAU as (...) a control condition and the difficulty in designing high-quality research in a community-based setting. (shrink)