The most compelling evidence for Epstein et al.'s central thesis that adult second language acquisition is constrained by the innate cognitive structures that constrain native language acquisition would be evidence of poverty of the stimulus. Although there are studies that point to such evidence, Epstein et al.'s primary form of argumentation, targetlike performance by second-language acquiring adults, is much less convincing.

Here we review 37 modern neuroimaging studies in an attempt to address this question posed by Halstead (1947) as he and other icons of the last century endeavored to understand how brain and behavior are linked through the expression of intelligence and reason. Reviewing studies from functional (i.e., functional magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography) and structural (i.e., magnetic resonance spectroscopy, diffusion tensor imaging, voxel-based morphometry) neuroimaging paradigms, we report a striking consensus suggesting that variations in a distributed network predict (...) individual differences found on intelligence and reasoning tasks. We describe this network as the Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT). The P-FIT model includes, by Brodmann areas (BAs): the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (BAs 6, 9, 10, 45, 46, 47), the inferior (BAs 39, 40) and superior (BA 7) parietal lobule, the anterior cingulate (BA 32), and regions within the temporal (BAs 21, 37) and occipital (BAs 18, 19) lobes. White matter regions (i.e., arcuate fasciculus) are also implicated. The P-FIT is examined in light of findings from human lesion studies, including missile wounds, frontal lobotomy/leukotomy, temporal lobectomy, and lesions resulting in damage to the language network (e.g., aphasia), as well as findings from imaging research identifying brain regions under significant genetic control. Overall, we conclude that modern neuroimaging techniques are beginning to articulate a biology of intelligence. We propose that the P-FIT provides a parsimonious account for many of the empirical observations, to date, which relate individual differences in intelligence test scores to variations in brain structure and function. Moreover, the model provides a framework for testing new hypotheses in future experimental designs. (shrink)

To what extent should states accommodate religious liberty claims? Can the pluralist state be neutral between religions and secularism? This book explores contemporary legal controversies regarding the protection of religious liberty from a theoretical and comparative perspective, looking at issues such as family and parenting, medical treatment, education, employment, religious group autonomy, and freedom of expression.

This important new introduction to Nietzsche's philosophical work provides readers with an excellent framework for understanding the central concerns of his philosophical and cultural writings. It shows how Nietzsche's ideas have had a profound influence on European philosophy and why, in recent years, Nietzsche scholarship has become the battleground for debates between the analytic and continental traditions over philosophical method. The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, the author discusses morality, religion and nihilism to show why (...) Nietzsche rejects certain components of the Western philosophical and religious traditions as well as the implications of this rejection. In the second part, the author explores Nietzsche's ambivalent and sophisticated reflections on some of philosophy's biggest questions. These include his criticisms of metaphysics, his analysis of truth and knowledge, and his reflections on the self and consciousness. In the final section, Welshon discusses some of the ways in which Nietzsche transcends, or is thought to transcend, the Western philosophical tradition, with chapters on the will to power, politics, and the flourishing life. (shrink)

THE CASE OF SOCRATES, like that of Antigone, holds a high place in the history of the discussion of civil disobedience. Yet the position which Socrates took on this question is seemingly unclear, even with respect to its broadest outlines. This is exhibited by a surprising and considerable divergence of opinion, bearing on what Socrates did and said, in some of the recent writings on civil disobedience.

This article argues that secularism is not neutral. Secularization is a process, the secular state is a structure, whereas secularism is a political philosophy. Secularism takes two main forms: first, a “benevolent” secularism that endeavours to treat all religious and nonreligious belief systems even-handedly, and, second, a “hostile” kind that privileges unbelief and excludes religion from the public sphere. I analyze the European Court of Human Rights decision in Lautsi v Italy, which illustrates these types. The article concludes that secularism (...) as a political philosophy cannot be neutral, and the secular state is not neutral in its effects, standpoint, governing assumptions or treatment of religious truth claims. (shrink)

`The first and only book to explore, at once, the field of my work and its limits, with both the intimacy and distance required: doubling and shadowing. It gives me great pleasure to find something that, beyond commentary, sees what I see and at the same time what I am unable to see' - Jean Baudrillard Baudrillard is a controversial figure. His work tends to fascinate and infuriate readers in equal numbers. Yet there is no doubting his importance to the (...) key debates in culture and theory of the last ten years. A prolific author, readers sometimes find it difficult to tease out the consistencies in Baudrillard's arguments. This book seeks to redress the balance. It aims to go beyond his writings on consumer objects, the Gulf War and America, to identify the fundamental logic that underpins his writings. It does this through a series of close readings of his main texts, paying particular attention to the form and internal coherence of his arguments. The book contends that, just as Baudrillard himself grapples with the problems of how to criticize self-defining systems, so we cannot simply hold Baudrillard up against external standards but must seek to judge him on his own terms. Jean Baudrillard: A Defence of the Real will be an indispensable text for all those interested in social theory who want a general introduction to Baudrillard's work. (shrink)

This article is a critical review of work on the concept of rights, Including the concept of human rights, From 1963 to 1978. Our focus is mainly on issues of the analysis of rights and human rights. We do not deal with the closely related issues bearing on the normative foundations of moral and human rights. Nor have we attempted much in the way of historical treatment of our topic. Section I surveys general characterizations of rights. In section ii, We (...) discuss treatments of the defeasibility of rights with special attention to the notion of a prima facie right. Section iii takes up attempts to give an account of human rights. Section iv provides a brief conclusion. A bibliography listing what we take to be the most important works in this area, Including everything cited, Concludes our essay. (shrink)

An Essay on Metaphysics is one of the finest works of the great Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood : in it he considers the nature of philosophy, especially of metaphysics, and puts forward his original and influential theories of absolute presuppositions, causation, and the logic of question and answer. Three fascinating unpublished pieces by Collingwood have been added for this revised edition: they illuminate and amplify the ideas of the Essay, to which they are closely related. The editor Rex Martin (...) contributes a substantial introduction telling the story of the composition of all these works, discussing their major themes, and setting them in the context of Collingwood's philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

An Essay on Metaphysics is one of the finest works of the great Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood : in it he considers the nature of philosophy, especially of metaphysics, and puts forward his original and influential theories of absolute presuppositions, causation, and the logic of question and answer. Three fascinating unpublished pieces by Collingwood have been added for this revised edition: they illuminate and amplify the ideas of the Essay, to which they are closely related. The editor Rex Martin (...) contributes a substantial introduction telling the story of the composition of all these works, discussing their major themes, and setting them in the context of Collingwood's philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

I argue that, on plausible assumptions, anomalous entails monism epiphenomenalism of the mental. The plausible assumptions are (1) events are particulars; (2) causal relations are extensional; (3) mental properties are epiphrastic. A principle defender of anomalous monism, Donald Davidson, acknowledges that anomalous monism is committed to (1) and (2). I argue that it is committed to (3) as well. Given (1), (2), and (3), epiphenomenalism of the mental falls out immediately. Three attempts to salvage anomalous monism from epiphenomenalism of the (...) mental are examined and rejected. I conclude with reflections on the status of non-reductive physicalism. (shrink)

An analysis and assessment of Nietzsche's metapsychology. Nietzsche is neither a dualist nor a physical reductionist about the mind. Instead, he is best interpreted as thinking that the mind is embodied and embedded in a larger natural and social environment with which it is dynamically engaged.

Two jarring results concerning the main theses of Georg Henrik von Wright's Explanation and Understanding are reached through an examination and criticism of his project. It is shown, contrary to his settled judgment both in EU and subsequently, that the schema of practical inference is a causal principle, and that it is nomological in character. But one feature of von Wright's overall analysis holds up and continues to show promise: his idea of understanding explanation. This idea combines the EU account (...) of the schema and its instantiation with the notion of an intelligible connection of these instantiating elements with one another. Here the schema is deployed in conjunction with the test of intelligible connection as one of its conditions of application. The schema, so deployed, is revisable on the basis of experiences that do not conform to what we expect them to be when they are regimented in accordance with the model of understanding explanation; thus, even though the schema is not a general law, we have a basis for characterizing it as nomological, nonetheless. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way by Richard SchachtRex WelshonRichard Schacht, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. xvii + 375 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-82283-3 (cloth); 978-0-226-82286-0 (e-book). Cloth, $49.00; e-book, $48.99.Over the course of his distinguished career, Richard Schacht has written on alienation, value theory, and philosophical anthropology; he has analyzed the work of Hegel and coauthored a set of reflections (...) on Richard Wagner with Philip Kitcher. He has also recently completed the gigantic task of editing the two-volume Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant, and he is the sole editor of the set’s second volume, The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant: The Interpretive Tradition. Still, for all of these achievements, his most enduring influence on philosophy is likely through his fifty-year-long engagement with the work of Nietzsche, which has produced several books and several dozen articles.Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way is Schacht’s most recent contribution to Nietzsche scholarship. In this book, Schacht investigates the following two-part question: What kind of philosopher was Nietzsche, and what kind of philosophy did he produce? Each of Schacht’s answers reveals a consummate knowledge of Nietzsche’s entire corpus, a comprehensive appreciation of his philosophical project, and a scrupulous appraisal of his philosophical contributions. At once magisterial, scholarly, astute, judicious, congenial, challenging, and occasionally frustrating, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy could have been written only by Schacht, and that is to say, among other things, that it is unique and deserving of praise.Schacht divides Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy into two parts. In the six chapters of the first and longer part, he canvases Nietzsche’s philosophical self-discovery following BT and UM. For Schacht, Nietzsche’s philosophical development begins in the latter half of the 1870s, after he resigned his professorship at the University of Basel, and ends with his 1889 collapse. So, after a prologue first chapter in which the challenges of understanding what kind of philosopher Nietzsche strove to become are discussed, Schacht examines, [End Page 232] in turn, 1878’s HH and 1881’s D (chapter 2); 1882’s Joyful Inquiry (GS), Books I–IV (chapter 3); Z, published in installments between 1883 and 1885 (chapter 4); BGE, from 1886, and 1887’s Joyful Inquiry, Book V (chapter 5); and then 1887’s GM and the final works from 1888, TI, CW, The A, and EH (chapter 6). In the second and somewhat shorter part of the book, Schacht allots five successive chapters to consider whether, and in what ways, Nietzsche can be identified as a nihilist, an existentialist, an individualist, a free spirit, and a naturalist.Given its scope, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy cannot be expected to provide, and should not be criticized for not providing, the kind of detailed topical analyses typical of so much Nietzsche scholarship from the past forty years. Indeed, diving deeply into the current scholarly debates is not one of Schacht’s goals. He tells us he is not interested in trying “to read and understand Nietzsche in terms of the conventions in the recent philosophical literature on various matters being debated as though he were a participant in them” (xiv). Rather, he wants to provide a reading of “Nietzsche’s kind of philosophy on its own terms,” as presented by someone who not only has “a lifetime of engagement with Nietzsche’s texts and thought” but also “cares deeply about philosophy and its future, and Nietzsche’s potential importance in that context” (xiv).Interpreting Nietzsche thusly has limitations. After all, the relation between philosophy and its own past is intimate, reflexive, and continuously interpretive, so one might wonder how Schacht proposes to exhibit Nietzsche’s importance to philosophy without understanding how his thought relates to the discipline’s current state or to what its future might yet become. But perhaps this concern is uncharitable; perhaps Schacht’s point is instead an admonishment against thinking too quickly that because Nietzsche was so far ahead of his time and anticipated so much that has... (shrink)

Democratic societies tolerate intolerance, but that obligation finds its limit when the security of its citizens is jeopardized or its institutions of liberty are imperiled. Similarly, universities tolerate intolerance, but that obligation finds its limit when threatened by weaponized intolerance advocates who disenfranchise and denigrate community members and imperil academic norms and professional standards of conduct. Then, just as democratic societies must protect their threatened citizens and safeguard their imperiled institutions of liberty, so universities must protect their threatened community members (...) and safeguard their imperiled norms and standards. I argue for these conclusions by establishing a conflict between what the First Amendment legally permits university community members to express and what the norms of the university and the professional standards that structure academic freedom require from university community members. I argue that given the First Amendment, universities are legally obliged to tolerate even weaponized intolerance in campus public forums even if not in the classroom. I then recommend three responses to weaponized intolerance on campus that are consistent with the First Amendment: denunciation and protest, provision of safe space, and affirmation of academic values, norms, and standards. I reject three frequently encountered responses to weaponized intolerance as inconsistent with the First Amendment: heckler’s vetoes, student speech codes, and speaker bans. And I argue that one response—disruptive protest that falls short of a heckler’s veto—is legally permissible for students and faculty members but is ruled out for faculty members by academic norms and professional standards. (shrink)

This article explores the recurrent global claim by indigenous peoples for their spiritual concerns to be taken seriously and given appropriate effect in public policy. The secular liberal state's commitment to ideals of religious neutrality and equal treatment of all faiths and none is clearly tested to the degree it privileges traditional indigenous religion in the name of fostering indigenous culture. This dilemma has been acutely raised in New Zealand where Maori metaphysical concerns—the appeasement of taniwha (spiritual monsters) and the (...) evils of mingling the mauri (life-force) of human and non-human species in genetic engineering—have been subjected to judicial scrutiny. Quite apart from issues of justiciability, the legal acknowledgment of indigenous spirituality raises questions about the continued secularity of the state. This essay traverses the varying responses to indigenous spirituality, especially criticisms that such recognition constitutes government countenancing of primitive superstition, a fostering of paganism or naked religious favouritism. (shrink)

Wind turbine noise is annoying and has been linked to increased levels of psychological distress, stress, difficulty falling asleep, and sleep interruption. For these reasons, there is a need for competently designed noise standards to safeguard community health and well-being. The authors identify key considerations for the development of wind turbine noise standards, which emphasize a more social and humanistic approach to the assessment of new energy technologies in society.

This essay begins by offering a reading of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy, in which we are unable to decide whether or not the couple we see there is married. But rather than coming down ourselves on one side or another, we ask why it is that their love for each other might be expressed only through their game-playing. And we follow this confusion between the real and the artificial throughout Kiarostami's career – from the “lie” that structures social (...) reality in Where is the Friend's House? through the character Sabzian's “confession” in Close-Up and beyond. We argue that it is in its putting together of the real and the fictional that Kiarostami's cinema at once continues and marks a break with Italian Neo-Realism and with usual conceptions of the “spiritual.” In Kiarostami's cinema, the spiritual is not to be opposed to the real or the represented, but is only to be seen through them. That other world is here, just as the afterlife is now. (shrink)

‘On the “Subject” of Žižek’ is a three-part review essay looking at two recent texts on Žižek’s political interventions: Sean Homer’s Slavoj Žižek and Radical Politics, which takes up Žižek’s writings on the Balkan Wars, and Adam’s Kotsko’s series of web posts on Žižek on the refugee “crisis” in Europe. As well, it examines Zizek’s 2016 book on Islamic terrorism and the same “crisis”, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours. Through a close reading of (...) Žižek’s text, the review asks what is the proper philosophical response to these contemporary events. It proposes that critics of Žižek’s intellectual interventions fail properly to grasp his Hegelian method, which at once is to propose solutions and to think the limits and conditions of possibility of such solutions. It ultimately suggests that such solutions are their own failure, which are intended to lead to a better thinking of our situation – a thinking, consistent with Žižek’s Hegelian method, that could not have been arrived directly, but only through and as the failure of previous solutions. (shrink)

In the late 1990s, Rosalind Krauss, one of the principal theorists of post-modernism in the arts, began using the term "post-medium" in her work. It was a nod to the American "ordinary language" philosopher Stanley Cavell, who had been thinking through a concept of medium in art for 30 years. Today with the decline of post-modernism, Stanley Cavell has emerged as one of the most important figures for thinking again about the visual arts, film and theatre. Stanley Cavell and the (...) Arts looks at Cavell's extensive writings on a wide variety of artforms and at a number of writers (Michael Fried, William Rothman) influenced by his work. Over a 50-year career, Cavell wrote about visual art, photography, classical music, Shakespeare, the plays of Samuel Beckett and perhaps most notably Hollywood cinema. Stanley Cavell and the Arts offers an overview of Cavell's writings on the arts, situating them within his wider philosophical practice, analysing in detail his treatment of particular art forms and looking at the work of those he has deeply shaped. (shrink)

This essay is an analysis of a series of writings by the Australian intellectual historian Ian Hunter on the subject of 'theory'. It examines the methodological issues raised by attempting to write a history of theory. The essay particularly seeks to analyse the various aporias at stake in Hunter's project: between the empirical and the transcendental, between history and the event, and between theory and 'empirical' history.

Of course, music performance has a long “artisanal” history. After all, the training of musicians to perform has been the mainstay of academies and conservatoria for centuries. But the discipline of music performance as part of an academic musicology is a much more recent invention. We argue that it arises some time in the 1960s, when scholars could begin to write comparative histories of performance and think difference choices as to performance style. Against the now sterile authentic/non-authentic, modern/post-modern debates that (...) characterise contemporary music studies, we propose that the various approaches might be classified according to the three Lacanian registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. We put forward a certain “Real” at stake in performance, although it could never be the basis of any practice, musical manifesto or even properly belong to a history of music performance. (shrink)

This article examines William Rothman’s recent essay on Vertigo , ‘Scottie’s Dream, Judy’s Plan, Madeleine’s Revenge’, and particularly his suggestion that in a crucial scene towards the end of the film the character Judy deliberately puts on jewellery in order that Scottie becomes aware that she was the actress who played Madeleine. We look at why Rothman was previously unable to see this in the film, why Judy is unable directly to tell Scottie and why for Rothman a deep truth (...) of the film is this inability of Judy to tell Scottie. In order to address these issues, this article looks at art historian Michael Fried’s notion of “absorption”, and particularly that interpretation of it offered by Lacanian cultural theorist Joan Copjec in ‘The Invention of Crying and the Antitheatrics of the Act’ in her collection Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. (shrink)

Proust reminds us many times in the pages of In Search of Lost Time that there is no such thing as a singular or unchanging self.1 When viewing the novel as a whole, this point is most evident in the journey of Marcel, the narrator, who has to become a myriad of Marcels before he reaches the library of the Guermantes and the discovery of what he must write about. But the theme is also prevalent in a more intimate reading (...) of the novel's many vignettes. Swann, for instance, cannot understand the torment he has gone through for a woman who wasn't his type precisely because he has ceased to be the Swann who desired Odette. Rather, the newfound subjectivity he inhabits at the end of Swann in Love takes him back to an... (shrink)

It has been claimed that several of the rights in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights - in particular the social and economic rights to the provision of welfare in, for example, education - cannot literally be rights of everybody. We find two main lines of analysis that have been raised to back up this claim. One of these lines is theoretical or normative in nature. Here I take up Onora O’Neill’s concern with the counterpart obligations that attach to (...) the UDHR social and economic rights. She argues that these obligations do not have a universal character and cannot backstop universal moral rights. I suggest ways around her argument. The other main line concerns feasibility. Here I take up the argument that the UDHR social and economic rights apparently cannot, under existing conditions, be fulfilled at even a minimal level for millions upon millions of people. James Nickel, well aware of this problem, argues that these rights nonetheless do not, on grounds of infeasibility, fail of universality. I try to counter his argument. But I add, in conclusion, that these pressing practical problems with the UDHR welfare rights could possibly be removed in time, with concentrated effort. (shrink)

Among Collingwood’s major books his Essay on Philosophical Method is, perhaps, the least well-known. There were a few reviews, some unfavorable, at the time of publication and, after that, an essay or two. But the book has largely been ignored.

This paper pays special attention to T.H. Green's account of rights as developed in the Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation. Green's theory can be viewed as having at least two main levels. The first level is his general account of rights, emphasizing the notions of social recognition, of a power or capacity that each right-holder has, and of the common good subserved by proper rights. The second level is that of universal rights; here special attention will be paid (...) to Green's critique of seventeenth-century natural rights and to the theory of human rights that Green evolved to replace and improve upon the old natural rights tradition. In its account of contemporary human rights theory, the paperwill emphasize the special role that social recognition plays in both the moral project of justifying human rights and in the institutionalization that is a necessary feature of any fully constituted human right, functioning at full capacity. (shrink)

This chapter brings overlapping consensus and its relation to constitutional consensus together, center stage. Since constitutional consensus on its own goes a considerable distance toward providing political stability, the chapter explains how overlapping consensus goes beyond constitutional consensus. What overlapping consensus supplies, which freestanding justification and constitutional consensus can't, is a distinctive set of comprehensive moral and religious reasons endorsing and thereby justifying, each for its own reasons, the liberal order. The chapter takes up the difficult question whether traditional utilitarianism (...) could figure in an overlapping consensus that assigns priority to the “rights, liberties, and opportunities” characteristic of liberalism over the “claims of the general good.” It attempts to provide an argument for saying that a well‐known version of utilitarianism (called indirect utilitarianism) could in fact be part of an overlapping consensus so conceived. (shrink)

The paper has three main sections. The first is concerned with developing the idea of a democratic system of rights. The second section turns, then, to constructing an idea of economic justice suitable to such a system. The paper concludes, in its final section, with a brief reflection on and assessment of the general line of argument taken.

This paper lays out the background and main features of Rawls’s new theory of justice. This is a theory that he began adumbrating about 1980 and that is given its fullest statement in his recent book Political Liberalism. I identify the main patterns of justification Rawls attempts to provide for his new theory and suggest a problem with one of these patterns in particular. The main lines of my analysis engage Rawls’s idea of constitutional consensus and his account of political (...) stability. (shrink)

An article by Mark Repenshek and a letter by Edward Delaquil published recently in The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly underscore the urgent need for further moral and magisterial clarification regarding a number of highly complex and difficult bioethical issues. These involve ex utero therapeutic genomic interventions, the practice of in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer, and the ongoing debate over the morality of embryo adoption to help resolve the “absurd” fate of countless, cryopreserved human embryos. This essay critiques and argues (...) against the use of therapeutic IVF, helps clarify why embryo transfer and embryo adoption do not violate the sacred bond of marriage, and uses key magisterial passages from both Donum vitae and the Catechism of the Catholic Church to defend the practice of embryo transfer. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 14.2 : 227–234. (shrink)

This article seeks to consider the ways in which substitutes for religion have been found both through a discussion of the treatment of religion in the classical sociological theories of Weber; Durkheim and Marx and then the way in which in modern societies alternative sets of belief and practices which fulfi l the same function as religion have been developed in the Communist and the postCommunist and Western worlds.

The sentence that comprises 5.31.5 in Caesar's Bellum Gallicum has long been felt to be problematic. It was deleted entirely by H. Meusel. A. Klotz posited a lacuna after quare. Others sought smaller adjustments. Yet, the defence of the text as transmitted also drew advocates and the debate quietened. The current Teubner edition, by W. Hering in 1987, prints the transmitted text and does not acknowledge the debate in the apparatus criticus. I propose a new solution, one that reinterprets the (...) sentence in context and requires a small textual change from et to nec. I will first set the context and identify problems with the conventional understanding of 5.31.5. (shrink)

Ultraviolet radiation activates the expression of a wide variety of genes, by pathways which differ between the short non‐solar ultraviolet C (UVC) wavelengths, which are strongly absorbed by nucleic acids, and the long solar ultraviolet A (UVA, 320–380 nm) wavelengths, which generate active oxygen intermediates. Intermediate solar ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths in the UVB (290–320 nm) range also contain an oxidative component, but more closely resemble UVC in their gene activating properties. Short wavelength UV, in common with other extracellular stimuli including (...) growth factors, activates signal transduction events that involve both stress‐ and mitogen‐activated protein kinase cascades. The extrapolation of the complex modulation of gene expression that ensues to the consequences of natural UV exposure requires careful attention to the details of doses and wavelength employed in the model experiments. Nevertheless, there is evidence that UVB irrradiation of skin can activate the expression of proteins including immunomodulating cytokines, ornithine decarboxylase and, to a limited extent, nuclear oncogene products, as well as lead to stabilisation of p53. Non‐cytotoxic doses of UVA radiation also lead to the strong activation of several genes which would be expected to have functional relevance in vivo. (shrink)

The underdetermination of intentional explanation by motor behavior complicates inferences drawn from preserved artifacts in the archaeological record to intentions in their production. Without knowledge of a producer's intentions, inferences drawn from those intentions to required cognitive abilities for having those intentions is also complicated.

The paper develops a theory of human rights under three main headings: that ways of acting or of being treated require effective normative justification, that they must have authoritative political endorsement or acknowledgement, and that they must be maintained by conforming conduct and, where need be, by governmental enforcement. The paper, then, applies this notion of human rights to two main cases: as constitutional rights within individual states, and as international human rights maintained by confederations of states or by looser (...) international coalitions. (shrink)

It would make a wonderful musical study – perhaps someone has already done it – to compare the various operatic and instrumental versions of the famous myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. [...] We know all too well the anxiety question par excellence, the disquieting “ Che vuoi? ” traversing our symbolically embedded lives. So, let me indulge a bit in this uncanny zone and ask: “ Che vogliamo? ”, what is our goal with this issue? Why did we start this (...) project? To be honest, I’m more than uncomfortable with this question, as it pushes me dangerously close to the awkward regions of the Lacanian “ Moi, la vérité, je parle ”. Nevertheless, for the greater good let me play this role for a little while and do my best to outline an answer. (shrink)

This essay develops a general account of one type of explanation found in history in particular: that an individual action is conceived as an exemplification of a rather complex schema of practical inference, under the provision that the facts which instantiate the various terms of the schema have an intelligible connection to one another. The essay then raises the question whether historians, anthropologists, and their contemporaneous audience can have an internal understanding of the actions of others, where those others come (...) from radically different cultures or times from the historians or anthropologists. An account is offered that, arguably, can resolve this problem and do justice to both the claim of internal understanding and the presumed cultural differentness between the agents studied and the historians and anthropologists who do the study. (shrink)

This article offers a detailed response to a recent article in this Journal by Charles Robertson titled “A Thomistic Analysis of Embryo Adoption.” A careful review of important terminology that is used in both Donum vitae and Dignitas personae was undertaken, and a summary is included to help define frequently misleading and even mistaken concepts and terms that can often lead to erroneous conclusions. This article focuses on Donum vitae I.3 and n. 2275 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, (...) which provide strong magiste­rial support for the liceity of embryo transfer and, ultimately, for the morality of embryo adoption as the only moral solution for “orphaned” embryos. The conclusion offers a faithful interpretation and resolution of the difficult passages in Donum vitae I.5 and Dignitas personae n. 19 regarding the magisterial liceity of both embryo transfer and embryo adoption. (shrink)

In "Nietzsche's Perspectivism", Steven Hales and Rex Welshon offer an analytic approach to Nietzsche's important idea that truth is perspectival. Drawing on Nietzsche's entire published corpus, along with manuscripts he never saw to press, they assess the different perspectivisms at work in Nietzsche's views with regard to truth, logic, causality, knowledge, consciousness, and the self. They also examine Nietzsche's perspectivist ontology of power and the attendant claims that substances and subjects are illusory while forces and alliances of power constitute the (...) only reality. Hales and Welshon present Nietzsche's treatment of perspectivism as both more complex and more fruitful than the common view of it as a doctrine that truth is not objective. Neither a metaphor nor a methodology, perspectivism emerges as a protean concept akin to a unifying theme; an alternative to the absolutism that recurs in science, philosophy, and religion; and a technique for revealing the unimagined possibilities open to every individual. (shrink)

This study examines Australian tax agents' perceptions of the ethical environment in which they practice, within the context of an income tax system based on self-assessment principles. The research identifies and ranks an inventory of ethical issues in terms of perceived frequency of occurrence and importance to Western Australian tax agents. In addition, the extent and influence of ethical concerns in the profession are evaluated.The study has determined that the most frequently cited ethical issue is the failure to make reasonable (...) enquiries where information or documentation provided by a client appears to be inaccurate or incomplete. The most important ethical problem is a failure to ensure confidentiality with regard to privileged client information. When the frequency of occurrence and importance means are compared, inadequate technical competence, failure to make reasonable enquiries/conduct research, continuing to act for a client where there is incorrect information, and conflicts in distinguishing between tax planning and tax avoidance emerge as the high frequency/high importance issues. Although acknowledging the potential for unethical actions in tax practice, Western Australian tax agents consider that they carry out their professional activities within an ethical environment. (shrink)

Three leading scholars examine one of the oldest professorships, the Lady Margaret's Chair of Divinity at Cambridge, plotting its development in the context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history. The current Lady Margaret's Professor Graham Stanton sets the scene with an introduction briefly considering theology at Cambridge before 1502 and after 1649. In the two main chapters Richard Rex - an authority on John Fisher, first holder of the Chair - deploys new evidence to propose changes in the list of early (...) professors and shows how their appointment and dismissal reflected the vagaries of the Reformation; and Patrick Collinson investigates how the Elizabethan and early Stuart professors continued to be caught up in the religious and political turmoil of the times. There is a complete list of holders from 1502 to the present. (shrink)

Something of the nature of Rotenstreich’s book can be gained from its title. The main title suggests a coherent and unified account of Hegel’s “shift” from substance to subject; the subtitle, however, seems to point in a somewhat different direction and to suggest a collection of essays on a variety of Hegelian topics. Actually the book itself falls somewhere between the coherence of a single thematic treatment and the diffuseness of a set of disparate essays. Hence, though the shift from (...) substance to subject is the “principal concern”, the “running thread” of his book, Professor Rotenstreich manages in it to touch on a great number of subjects in Hegel’s systematic philosophy. Accordingly, most of the chapters could be read as independent essays, with some of them seeming further afield from the central theme - the shift - in Hegel’s system than do others. (shrink)

This book consists of fourteen essays. Two are reprints of articles from Inquiry and the remaining dozen are articles from the journal Studies in Soviet Thought. The articles, by competent Western specialists in Soviet philosophy, cover a wide range of topics informatively and would, taken as a whole, give the reader a good picture of where Soviet philosophy stands today. The book represents a solid job of philosophical reportage. In this endeavor I would note one conspicuous shortcoming: there is not (...) an adequate treatment of Soviet philosophy of science in the volume. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:480 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY categories can be applied to the objects of moral distinctions. Nor, on the other hand, can moral distinctions be derived from causal reasoning, although naturally we can make causal inferences about moral distinctions. In the Humean account, moral distinctions must be impressions derived from a moral sense existing independently of any consideration of divine sanction. Hume, in effect, separates ethics from religion, though he admits (...) that the idea of a divine pattern of reward and punishment may reinforce moral behavior. I have tried to give a brief summary of the book's main points, and I will now turn to what is necessarily a rather random and selective criticism of the many features and arguments Capaldi pursues. My first and main criticism is that Capaldi has been too ambitious in trying to cover the whole range of Hume's thought in a fairly small book. He would be the last to deny the extent and profundity of Hume's thought, and his reader is therefore left rather breathless as he is led on a gallop from one mountain top to another. Secondly, while fully accepting the importance of Newton as an influence on Hume, I see no reason to insist on its exclusiveness. Brief mention is made of Bayle, but Hutcheson is cast aside while lesser but influential figures like Mandeville are scarcely mentioned. The reader should be warned as well that there is a scholarly view that considers Hume to have been deluded about the extent of his own Newtonianism" and plenty of respectable support for putting him in the sensationalist tradtion of Locke and Berkeley.s No doubt Newton is, above all others, the leading influence on Hume, but in ideas, as in affairs, fruitfulness often results from a plurality of relationships. Other faults in the book seem to result from taking everything Hume said as gospel. Thus Capaldi says if Hume is mistaken, he is only mistaken about facts because Hume claimed to be concerned only with them. This is bad question begging. Nor when Hume firmly commits himself to psychologism, is there any reason why we need not point out that giving psychological explanations for moral behavior, though considerably advanced by Hume, need not be the end nor even the beginning of our questions about ethics. A passing tribute might have been made to Kant and to other externalists who rejected Hume's approach. Smaller points can be made about particular passages: thus, in a rather muddled paragraph Hume emerges as the Copernicus rather than the Newton of the social sciences (a term that I think, despite Hume's pretensions, we should be careful of using in the context of eighteenth-century studies). I would not like to leave the reader with the impression that these remarks mean that I did not enjoy Capaldi's book. He has given us plenty to think about in his analysis, and he surely demonstrates that the old, rigidified exegesis of textbook Hume is dead and buried and that we are now in a much more exciting.world of Hume scholarship. MALCOLM JACK London Franr Hemsterhuis. By Heinz Moenkemeyer. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. Pp. 206. $9.95) This little-known eighteenth-century Dutch philosopher (1721-1790) wrote all his philosophical works, many of them dialogues, in French. No doubt he was hoping that the language 4See, for example, an opinion that Newton's influence was minimal in L. L. Laudan, "Thomas Reid and the Newtonian Turn of British Methodological Thought," in The Methodological Heritage of Newton (Oxford, 1970), p. 105. See Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London, 1961), p. 634, for the connection with Berkeley. On the influence of Hutcheson see T. E. Jessop, "The Misunderstood Hume," in Hume and the Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1974), p. 11. For a viewof Mandeville's influence on Hume see F. A. Hayek, "Dr. Bernard Mandeville," Proceedings of the British Academy LII (1966) : 139. BOOK REVIEWS 481 of Voltaire would help him reach a wider, more cultivated audience; but his use of French is also a sign that his works had been composed with the philosophical currents of the French Englightenment very much in mind, and that he wanted... (shrink)