Rene Descartes's motto challenges his would-be historians: "He lives well who hides well." He hid even in the Discourse on Method, where he professed to recount the story of his "entire life, " but said almost nothing about his childhood and youth. He mentioned neither family nor friends, and he boasted a total freedom from irrational passions. In the Discourse, which presented a new way of achieving certain truth through mathematical reason, Descartes stressed just one event, a day of thinking (...) at the beginning of winter, 1619. Tucked away in an unpublished notebook, however, Descartes also left the Olympica, which documented the wildly irrational dreams he had the night of November 10, 1619, and gave his own enthusiastic interpretations. Embarrassed scholars have tried to reason away this record and even the dreams themselves. Adapting clinical methods to historical research, John Cole offers the first systematic interpretation of the Olympian dreams. He argues that they expressed and masked Descartes's unresolved conflicts: his guilt at having rejected the law career for which he had been trained and which his lawyer father had wanted him to pursue, and his shame over early failures to satisfy the high expectations of his friend and mentor, Isaac Beeckman. Cole shows us how a critical historian can make sense of such irrational material and lets us see the creation of an egocentric and rationalist philosophy. (shrink)

The paper argues that Israel Kirzner’s theory of entrepreneurship has been influential on a number of related “dynamic” theories of organization. Kirzner’s theory is animated by a dual concern – the process of rentseeking behavior and the fundamental incompletness of knowledge. Placed in a technological and institutional context, this theory points to the importance of dynamic transaction costs: the coordination costs of acting upon an innovative rent-seeking opportunity. In some contexts, this kind of cost can explain vertical integration; in other (...) contexts, it can explain the reverse phenomenon: vertical disintegration.Cet article soutient que la théorie de l’entrepreneur d’Israel Kirzner a influencé un grand nombre de théories dynamiques de l’organisation. La théorie kirznerienne est animée par un objectif double : – le processus de comportement de recherche de rente et l’incomplétude fondamentale de la connaissance. Replacée dans un contexte technologique et institutionnel, cette théorie souligne l’importance des coûts de transaction dynamiques : les coûts de transaction liés à une opportunité dans la recherche de rente innovante. Dans certaines situations, cette catégorie de coûts peut expliquer l’intégration verticale ; dans d’autres, elle peut expliquer le phénomène inverse : la désintégration verticale. (shrink)

La logique--La géométrie--Questions diverses--Considérations sur différentes sciences--Note I. Sur la géométrie projective--Note II. Éclaircissements divers (Notions de groupe, sur les notions premières, sur la classification des sciences).

This article re-visits the critiques of anthropocentricism levied against John Dewey by his contemporaries and offers a reading of this critique through the lens of nonhuman agency using the theoretical work of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, particularly the latter’s coverage of Dewey’s theory of democracy. This work culminates into an argument for envisioning Dewey’s publics as constituted by human and nonhuman bodies, anticipating in some ways the work of contemporary posthumanists and new materialists. This leads us to not only (...) re-think Dewey’s typecasting as unabashedly anthropocentric but also reinvigorates the use value of Dewey’s thinking in the context of contemporary ecological issues. (shrink)

Originally published in 1958.The history of Morley College provides an illuminating case-history of the growth and spread of adult education in the second half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries. Morley College is unique in that it was one of the first of such institutions to proclaim and inculcate absolute sex and class equality. It has always been guided by democratic principles in the sense that the students have been encouraged to play a definite part in (...) the administration of the college – an ethos which continues to this day. (shrink)

accepted without a compelling materialistic mechnot add that some books might give you terminal anism. Charles Darwin provided this mechanism in..

Women who had had breast cancer and had been enrolled in a large genetic breast cancer epidemiological study were interviewed about their experience of participation in the study, their attitudes to the confidentiality of data, and the feedback of personal and general research results. Collection of family history information seemed more salient in indicating the genetic nature of the study than the enrolment information sheet. There were no concerns about confidentiality.While participants would have welcomed general feedback about the results of (...) the study and were critical that this had not been provided, the feedback of personal information proved complicated and, sometimes, difficult. It is suggested that individual feedback of genetic test information in epidemiological studies should be undertaken only when there are specific reasons. (shrink)

In 1914, James Leuba, a psychologist at Bryn Mawr, conducted several surveys of scientists and college students regarding their religious beliefs, publishing his findings in a 1916 book titled The Belief in God and Immortality. Among scientists generally, 41.8 percent indicated they were believers in a personal God (defined as a being to whom one could pray, expecting a response), whereas 41.5 percent expressed disbelief in such a God and 16.7 percent declared themselves to be agnostic. Among elite scientists (those (...) with an asterisk by their names in James McKean Cattell's American Men of Science), the percentage of believers was lower, at 31.6 percent. Among elite biologists, the subset who believed in God was even smaller—16.9 percent. In 1996 and 1998, Edward Larson and Larry Witham replicated Leuba's study, publishing their findings in the April 23, 1997, and July 23, 1998, issues of Nature. Their surveys revealed that of all scientists questioned, 39.3 percent professed belief in a personal God, about the same as in the 1914 study. However, among elite scientists—now defined as members of the National Academy of Sciences—the proportion who were believers had plummeted to 7 percent, with biologists showing the least religious conviction at 5.5 percent. In the general population of the United States, some 86 percent profess belief in the existence of a personal God, according to a 1999 Gallup poll. These figures dramatically indicate the great no-mans land separating the religious convictions of ordinary citizens from those of the scientific community, especially its leading members. This dissensus has fueled many of the bitter battles recently fought over evolution and stem cells and has ignited explosive devices laid along several political byways. (shrink)

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Arguments are advanced that a theory of possible worlds cannot be a theory of meaning for modal statements, And lewis's version of the theory in his "counterfactuals" is used as a particular stalking-Horse. (a) 'possible world', Though used referentially, Is defined in a way that makes it non-Referential, And moreover, The theory does not supply or validate proposals for criteria that individuate worlds; hence the theory seems incomprehensible. (b) the theory yields no useable account of truth-Conditions for modal statements. (c) (...) a conceptualist version of the theory cannot overcome these problems. (d) lewis's similarity theory of possible worlds as a semantics for counterfactuals sustains in many cases (including one he cites) intuitively untrue counterfactuals and rejects many intuitively correct ones. (shrink)

The graphic novel Asterios Polyp uses the story of Asterios, a laughable “paper architect,” who has never produced a building, to tackle the challenging topics of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Asterios goes on a journey conforming with the Hero’s Journey or Monomyth, but he arrives not at the rarified or transcendent, but the humble and concrete. Plato saw the sensible world of particulars as populated by imperfect imitations, and imitative art (like graphic novels) as (...) even further removed from truth, Asterios Polyp cleverly uses pictures, their colors, lines, and other properties to illustrate its claims and vindicate and celebrate the particular, though not at the expense of the universal. We learn with Asterios that to live a good life and find peace in the world, we must integrate the abstract and the concrete, the universal and particular. (shrink)

Logical psychologism is the position that logic is a special branch of psychology, that logical laws are descriptíons of experience to be arrived at through observation, and are a posteriori.The accepted arguments against logical psychologism are effective only when directed against this extreme version. However, the clauses in the above characterization are independent and ambiguous, and may be considered separately. This separation permits a reconsideration of less extreme attempts to tie logic to psychology, such as those defended by Mill and (...) Boole. It also provides the basis for a reexamination of the relationship between logic and psychology, and raises the possibility of a deeper investigation into the nature of logic itself. (shrink)

This article revisits a famous staple of the Vergilian tradition, Servius's heavily contested scholion on the actress Volumnia Cytheris's theatrical rendition of Vergil's sixth Eclogue. By shifting the focus of inquiry from the strictly historical question ‘ did it happen?’ it cuts through, identifies and disentangles a nexus of prejudices which have led to the devaluing of Servius's information. The sidelining or dismissal of this piece of evidence, I argue, has more to teach us about our own culturally entrenched and (...) discipline-inherited assumptions than about what could have happened in late Republican Rome. Scrutiny of the evidence on the stage re-mediation of high poetry suggests it is entirely plausible that Cytheris would have performed a theatricalized version of Vergil's masterpiece. Indeed at the very heart of the story lies the convergence between élite poetry and the world of professional stage artists. Moreover, Cytheris's possible performance of a repertoire that coincides with the mythological core of pantomime dancing in its artistic maturity opens pivotal questions concerning what Plutarch aptly calls the “full association and mutual entanglement” between the arts of poetry and dance. Taking Servius seriously gives us the impetus to explore more decisively dimensions of Roman life that have been messily sidelined as a result of the systematic privileging of “texts” in our surveys of Roman intellectual landscapes over the centuries. Even if Servius's extract turned out to be no more than a “myth”, an “anecdote”, as such narratives go, this is an incredibly helpful one, provided we are willing to press it into the service of larger inquiries regarding the “circulation” of cultural energy between élite and popular culture. (shrink)

On one standard philosophical position adopted by evolutionary naturalists, human ethical systems are nothing more than evolutionary adaptations that facilitate social behavior. Belief in an absolute moral foundation is therefore in error. But evolutionary naturalism, by its commitment to the basic valutional concept of fitness, reveals another, logical error: standard conceptions of value in terms of simple predication and properties are mistaken. Valuation has instead, a relational structure that makes reference to respects, subjects and environments. This relational nature is illustrated (...) by the analogy commonly drawn between value and color. Color perception, as recognized by the ecological concept, is relational and dependent on subject and environment. In a similar way, value is relational and dependent on subject and environment. This makes value subjective, but also objective in that it is grounded on facts about mattering. At bottom, values are complex relational facts. The view presented here, unlike other prominent relational and naturalistic conceptions of value, recognizes the full range of valuation in nature. The advantages of this relational conception are first, that it gets valuation right; second, it provides a framework to better explain and understand valuation in all its varieties and patterns. (shrink)

In a late reminiscence, Goethe recalled that during his close association with the poet Friedrich Schiller, he was constantly defending “the rights of nature" against his friend's “gospel of freedom.”1 Goethe’s characterization of his own view was artfully ironic, alluding as it did to the French Revolution's proclamation of the "Rights of Man." His remark implied that values lay within nature, values that had authority comparable to those ascribed to human beings by the architects of the Revolution. During the time (...) Goethe made his defense, he also faced another revolution, in which Schiller was a partisan—that of Kant in the intellectual sphere. Both upheavals had undermined the autonomy of nature, replacing her authority with that of human will and understanding. Previous papers in this volume have recorded the shifting fortunes of nature that brought her to this stage of jeopardy. In the early classical period, nature as a unified whole had not yet arisen. Animate and inanimate objects had natures— characteristic modes of action—but there was as yet, according Slatkin, no articulate concept of nature as a whole standing over against human beings. Park has described a long period of transition, when nature became personified in the form of a didactic female, a figure imaginatively based, it would seem, upon the system of a 1 natural philosophy that stood in contrast to the revealed wisdom of God. Nature in this guise yet derived her authority and nurturing capacity from that higher, divine power. During the seventeenth century, writers like Mandeville, as Allen has shown, began to suspect that nature might be a chimera, a fictive creature that disguised humanity's own hidden desires and inclinations. These doubts grew during the next century—with the likes of Hume accelerating the skepticism— till finally, in the two revolutions that so troubled Goethe, nature was completely stripped of her authority. Goethe had become confirmed in his defense of the rights of nature during his travels to Italy during the years 1786-1788. (shrink)

The book stands somewhat apart from the rest of Freud's writings as a study of normal, rather than pathological psychology, and, although it contains the most closely reasoned accounts of complicated psychological processes that Freud ever gave, it remains one of his most readable works. It includes a rich collection of jokes, particularly those of Jewish folk tradition, in which Freud clearly revelled.

The consciousness of the hosts is a major theme in Westworld, and for good reason. Hosts are not philosophical zombies. The hosts act like they have feelings, like they suffer and fear, like they enjoy the yellow, pink, and blue tones of a beautiful sunset. This chapter examines the analogs of memory, perception, and emotion in hosts. Hosts have a very troubling relationship to memory. Although using a different visual style would denote unique host experience, using the same visual style (...) to depict both human and host experience is not a strong indicator that the hosts are conscious, or that they have similar experiences to humans. Host perception, memory, and emotions all seem different from human, but the cinematic medium does not grant us immediate access to host experience, and neither the testimony of the creators, nor the hosts is totally reliable. (shrink)

The term “race” and its equivalent in several languages gained currency in the seventeenth century to describe descendents of the same family or house. The word was also used to refer to a tribe or nation, as in the Germanic races. Only in the nineteenth century did the term take on the taxonomic meaning of a distinctive group or variety within a human or animal species.

Everyday artistic creativity is downplayed in our schools, our lives, our culture. Yet here is an essential language of our lives, opening us to important ways of knowing, truth, beauty, and means for creative coping, as individuals and as cultures. Views of John Dewey and Suzanne Langer are each considered. A devaluation of artistic creativity may also reflect unacknowledged biases related to emotional "versus" intellectual knowing, gender stereotyping, science "versus" art, individualism "versus" interdependence, false stereotypes of creative "unhealth," and eminent (...) "versus" everyday creativity. Addressing these holds promise for our personal well-being and development, and our greater health as cultures. (shrink)