Introduction THOMAS C. HELLER AND DAVID E. WELLBERY A he essays that follow originated in a conference entitled "Reconstructing Individualism," held at ...

Although contemporary historical novels share a number of features with the traditional historical novel, as analysed by Lukács (1981), they display a fundamental change in the perception of history, evident in the disappearance of the omniscient narrator, in their choice of significant and representative figures, and scepticism regarding teleology of history or the world-historical role of war and violence. On the one hand, history has become a riddle, and this is reflected in the preference for the form of the detective (...) novel, for which the model is The Name of the Rose (Eco 1983). On the other hand, there is a clear preference for two historical periods: the collapse of the ancient world and the birth of the modern from the Renaissance to the 18th century. (shrink)

This collection examines the life and thought of Agnes Heller, who rose to international acclaim as a Marxist dissident in Eastern Europe.

How might advanced neuroscience—in which perfect neuro-predictions are possible—interact with ordinary judgments of free will? We propose that peoples' intuitive ideas about indeterminist free will are both imported into and intrude into their representation of neuroscientific scenarios and present six experiments demonstrating intrusion and importing effects in the context of scenarios depicting perfect neuro-prediction. In light of our findings, we suggest that the intuitive commitment to indeterminist free will may be resilient in the face of scientific evidence against such free (...) will. (shrink)

Definition of the problemOrganisations play a vital role in modern societies. This article presumes a lack of sufficient organisational reflection of well-established forms of ethics and ethics counselling in institutions belonging to the health sector or sees particular challenges where it is implemented.ArgumentsWe have therefore conceived a procedural type of organisational ethics which critically examines the organisational fit of processes in terms of ethical reflection, leading to practicable suggestions.ConclusionsOn the one hand they relate to where differences are established when asking (...) for the good; on the other hand they are concerned with background theories and the organisational fit of the reflection settings. (shrink)

A comprehensive and stimulating study which presents the views of 71 leading theorists on the underlying mechanisms and functions of the primary visual cortex.

We must critically rethink race and genetics in the context of the new genetic breakthroughs and haplotype mapping. We must avoid the slippery slope of turning socially constructed racial categories into genetic realities. It is a potentially dangerous arena given the history of racialized science in the United States and globally. Indeed, the new advances must be viewed in the context of a long history of racial inequality, continuing into the current period. This is more than a question of how (...) carefully we use categories of analysis such as race. Justice and equity must be core to our considerations. There is a community stake in this work that must be seriously considered and included in decision making. A progressive and critical analysis is in order. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we (...) take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

Approaching the idea from three viewpoints, The author contends that eternal recurrence is a central and unifying theme in nietzsche's thought. She first considers its scientific basis, Arguing for a reinterpretation of the doctrine because nietzsche did not subscribe to the classical atomism of his time. She then considers the idea in its metaphysical perspective: it represents a repudiation of platonism and an affirmation of life. Finally, Urging the unity of the metaphysical and the ethical in nietzsche's philosophy, The author (...) interprets eternal recurrence as an idea created by life itself to serve life by strengthening the will to power. (staff). (shrink)

Social theory has much to gain from taking up the challenges of conceptualizing ‘mental health’. Such an approach to the stunting of human mental life in conditions of adversity requires us to open up the black box of ‘environment’, and to develop a vitalist biosocial science, informed by and in conversation with the life sciences and the neurosciences. In this paper we draw on both classical and contemporary social theory to begin this task. We explore human inhabitation – how humans (...) inhabit their ‘ecological niches’ – and examine a number of conceptual developments that ‘deconstruct’ the binary distinction between organism and environment. We argue that we must understand the neurological, ecological and social pathways and mechanisms that shape human (mental) life if we are to address the central concerns of our discipline with inequity and injustice as these are inscribed into the bodies and souls of human beings. (shrink)

Recent research indicates that compensation structure can be used by firms to discourage their employees from whistleblowing. We extend the ethics literature by examining how compensation structures and financial rewards work together to influence managers’ decisions to blow the whistle. Results from an experiment indicate that compensation with restricted stock, relative to stock payments that lack restrictions, can enhance the likelihood that managers will blow the whistle when large rewards are available. However, restricted stock can also threaten the effectiveness of (...) whistleblowing systems without the presence of large financial rewards for whistleblowing. Thus, the large potential rewards for whistleblowing enacted by the Dodd–Frank Act appear timely as firms are moving toward compensation agreements that include greater proportions of restricted stock. (shrink)

The British Museum, based in Montague House, Bloomsbury, opened its doors on 15 January 1759, as the world's first state-owned public museum. The Museum's collection mostly originated from Sir Hans Sloane, whose vast holdings were purchased by Parliament shortly after his death. The largest component of this collection was objects of natural history, including a herbarium made up of 265 bound volumes, many of which were classified according to the late seventeenth-century system of John Ray. The 1750s saw the emergence (...) of Linnaean binomial nomenclature, following the publication of Carl Linnaeus'Species Plantarum andSystema Naturae. In order to adopt this new system for their collections, the Trustees of the British Museum chose to employ the Swedish naturalist and former student of Linnaeus, Daniel Solander to reclassify the collection. Solander was ordered to devise a new system for classifying and cataloguing Sloane's natural history collection, which would allow both Linnaeans and those who followed earlier systems to access it. Solander's work was essential for allowing the British Museum to realize its aim of becoming a public centre of learning, adapting the collection to reflect the diversity of classificatory practices which were existent by the 1760s. This task engaged Solander until 1768, when he received an offer from Joseph Banks to accompany him on HMSEndeavourto the Pacific. (shrink)

Making interactions between humans and artificial agents successful is a major goal of interaction design. The aim of this paper is to provide researchers conducting interaction studies a new framework for the evaluation of robot believability. By critically examining the ordinary sense of believability, we first argue that currently available notions of it are underspecified for rigorous application in an experimental setting. We then define four concepts that capture different senses of believability, each of which connects directly to an empirical (...) methodology. Finally, we show how this framework has been and can be used in the construction of interaction studies by applying it to our own work in human–robot interaction. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the appearance of circularity in descartes' arguments is due to a lack of precision in his statements of them, Rather than to any flaw in his reasoning. The clear and distinct perceptions presupposed in the demonstrations of the existence of God are not the same as those whose reliability depends upon the existence of god. He is presupposing the reliability only of those clear and distinct perceptions which are known through the light of nature and have (...) metaphysical certainty in that they cannot be imagined false even on the demon hypothesis. And the only clear and distinct perceptions whose reliability he is demonstrating are those which are not known through the light of nature with metaphysical certainty but are subject to metaphysical doubt on the demon hypothesis, Even though they have moral or psychological certainty. (shrink)

Dominical categories are categories in which the notions of partial morphisms and their domains become explicit, with the latter being endomorphisms rather than subobjects of their sources. These categories form the basis for a novel abstract formulation of recursion theory, to which the present paper is devoted. The abstractness has of course its usual concomitant advantage of generality: it is interesting to see that many of the fundamental results of recursion theory remain valid in contexts far removed from their classic (...) manifestations. A principal reason for introducing this new formulation is to achieve an algebraization of the generalized incompleteness theorem, by providing a category-theoretic development of the concepts and tools of elementary recursion theory that are inherent in demonstrating the theorem.Dominical recursion theory avoids the commitment to sets and partial functions which is characteristic of other formulations, and thus allows for an intrinsic recursion theory within such structures as polyadic algebras. It is worthy of notice that much of elementary recursion theory can be developedwithout referencetoelements.By Gödel's generalized incompleteness theorem for consistent arithmetical systemTwe mean any statement of the following sort: if every recursive set is definable inT, thenTis essentially undecidable [41]; or if all recursive functions are definable inT, thenTis essentially undecidable [41]; or if every recursive set is definable inT, thenT0andR0 are recursively inseparable [39]; or if all re sets are representable inT, thenT0is creative [28], [39]; or ifTis a Rosser theory, thenT0andR0are effectively inseparable [39]. (shrink)

This paper sets out to answer four apparently unconnected questions, which, however, I hope to show to be parts of one question: Why did Haimon kill himself over the body of Antigone? Why did Philinnion return for three nights to her father's house? Why is it unlawful to leave a story unfinished? Why is a magician sometimes torn in pieces by his own devils, or otherwise destroyed by his own magic?

It is not without a certain feeling of surprise that I find the fragment preserved by Strabo VIII. 3, 20, and somewhat doubtfully ascribed by him to Stesichoros, still commonly attributed to that writer. As the purpose of this note is to give what seem to me cogent reasons for holding that no poem of such a metre and content could be by an author of any possible date earlier than Alexandrian times, I cite the passage of Strabo in full. (...) It runs as follows, and is part of an argument for the existence of an ancient city called Samos in Elis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the AmoresBetty Rose NagleBarbara Weiden Boyd. Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xii 1 252 pp. Cloth, $39.50.The “literary love affair” (130) in the Amores is as much (or more) an affair conducted with literature as it is one represented in literature. Although Barbara Boyd never puts it that way, (...) this is the essence of her argument. In her reading, this three-book collection of amatory elegies is the narrative of Ovid’s early career as a poet. This novel use of the genre—for literary autobiography—is one of the ways in which Ovid expands its boundaries. In Ovid’s Literary Loves Boyd intends to help readers appreciate the originality of the Amores, in part by showing in it the beginnings of that interest in redefining generic boundaries which in the past decade we have come to recognize, through the work of Stephen Hinds and others, as a hallmark of Ovid’s whole corpus.In her introduction, “The Isolation of Ovid’s Amores,” Boyd digests and assesses the current opinion about Ovid’s collection. Its “literary isolation” has resulted from the combined effects of the “generic fallacy” and what she calls the “progressive fallacy.” The latter (her own coinage) is the critical position which holds either that “what comes first is worst” or that “what comes last is worst” (5); accordingly, the Amores are early Ovid and hence inferior, and Ovid is the last of the elegists and hence inferior. As an antidote to the “generic fallacy” Boyd proposes James Zetzel’s “challenge of generic freedom,” itself the latest variation of Kroll’s “Kreuzung der Gattungen.” [End Page 468]Chapter 1, “Reused Language: Genre and Influence in the Interpretation of the Amores,” takes its point of departure from a comparison of the two propemptica Am. 2.11 and Propertius 1.8a. Boyd sets out “both to simplify and to clarify a method for reading imitation in the Amores” (19), and in doing so she makes a substantial contribution to the typology of imitation in Latin literature as a whole. She does this by bringing together two unlikely bedfellows, integrating G. P. Goold’s ideas about Ovid’s “formulae” and “instinctive” versification with G. B. Conte’s concepts of “poetic memory” and poetic language as “reused language.” She also employs Conte’s distinction between “exemplary model” (verbatim imitation) and “code model” (the system of generic rules familiar beforehand) and Richard Thomas’s preference for the term “reference” instead of “imitation.” For her purposes she distinguishes (30–31) between a “parallel,” which may “simply be a common topos” (30) rather than an actual imitation; a “formula,” which may be “a very precise mark of a poetic tradition” (30) without making a specific reference; and a “reference,” which is likely to engage with a whole tradition rather than simply allude to a single source. Finally, she distinguishes (47) “external allusion” (to another poet) from “self-imitation,” which in turn is differentiated into “’internal reference’ proper” (to an earlier poem in the same collection) and “self-imitation” (“reference across works”). These latter may well be, as she claims, “two different, though related, phenomena” (47), but “self-imitation” is not relevant to Boyd’s own discussion until her last chapter. In posing the question “How do we recognize ‘imitation’?” she distinguishes between imitation of “form and theme” (33) and imitation of “content” (34), using the latter term rather idiosyncratically to include “precise features, such as style, diction, and metrical character” (34).Chapter 2, “Literary Means and Ends: Ovid’s Ludus Poeticus,” continues the treatment of imitation in considering Ovid’s practice of “multiple allusion” (67, 89), according to Boyd “an aspect of his style that is far too little recognized and understood” (67). The goal is to clarify how Ovid views his literary past and what meaning his sources have for his use of them—in brief, as she neatly summarizes, “to move beyond equating Ovid’s inspiration and purpose with Propertius and parody, respectively” (50). She shows how in creating Sulmo as a literary landscape (Am. 2.16... (shrink)

A close examination of the relation between philosophy and myth reveals important functional parallels in some of their basic means of operation that helps shed some light on philosophy's overall task. A crucial aspect of the structural similarity between philosophy and myth is the generation of what Hans Blumenberg calls “significance.” I argue that the preservation and enhancement of significance (through a strong affinity to myth) is an essential and overlooked aspect of philosophy's task, one best accomplished through the world‐orienting (...) work of speculative philosophy. By weaving the fragmented insights, criticisms, lessons, and methods of the more “specialized” analytic, pragmatic, critical, postmodern, deconstructivist, and other methods of thought together in a systematic way, speculative philosophy may be able to provide us with the kind of world orientation needed for developing a healthier, richer, more profound understanding of ourselves and our proper place within the world. (shrink)

The poetic … would be that which you desire to learn, but from and of the other, thanks to the other and under dictation, by heart. Derrida, “Che cos’è la Poesia?” 227 I dare not pretend to be any...

I have worked in the field of aging research for 35 years, as of this writing. Over that time, most academics who work in the area have become convinced that great strides have been made in solving the scientific problem of aging.

Item context effects refer to the impact of features of a test on an examinee’s item responses. These effects cannot be explained by the abilities measured by the test. Investigations typically focus on only a single type of item context effects, such as item position effects, or mode effects, thereby ignoring the fact that different item context effects might operate simultaneously. In this study, two different types of context effects were modeled simultaneously drawing on data from an item calibration study (...) of a multidimensional computerized test (N = 1,632) assessing student competencies in mathematics, science, and reading. We present a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) parameterization of the multidimensional Rasch model including item position effects (distinguishing between within-block position effects and block position effects), domain order effects, and the interactions between them. Results show that both types of context effects played a role, and that the moderating effect of domain orders was very strong. The findings have direct consequences for planning and applying mixed domain assessment designs. (shrink)