An unpublished satirical work, writtenc.1848–1854, provides fresh insight into the most famous scientific voyage of the nineteenth century. John Clunies Ross, settler of Cocos-Keeling – which HMSBeaglevisited in April 1836 – felt that Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin had ‘depreciated’ the atoll on which he and his family had settled a decade earlier. Producing a mock ‘supplement’ to a new edition of FitzRoy'sNarrative, Ross criticized their science and their casual appropriation of local knowledge. Ross's virtually unknown (...) work is intriguing not only for its glimpse of theBeaglevoyage, but also as a self-portrait of an imperial scientific reader. An experienced merchant seaman and trader–entrepreneur with decades of experience in the region, Ross had a very different perspective from that of FitzRoy or Darwin. Yet he shared many of their assumptions about the importance of natural knowledge, embracing it as part of his own imperial projects. Showing the global reach of print culture, he used editing and revision as satirical weapons, insisting on his right to participate as both reader and author in scientific debate. (shrink)

These essays constitute a welcome addition to the current re-engagement with the ethical thought of a prominent late Victorian philosopher and reformer. Henry Sidgwick wrote the first professional work of modern moral philosophy, yet one century after his death his thought remains relevant to the present revival of interest in the question of how we should live. -/- How does moral philosophy fit in with the more general use of practical reason? - a still puzzling and deeply contested problem. Which (...) actions are appropriate for an intellectual? - i.e., how should the moral thought of the professional few in the universities be related to the thought and action of the many in the world outside? Sidgwick's solutions to these questions are discussed and criticised by a distinguished group of scholars, providing new insights into these recurring issues of moral philosophy. (shrink)

Ross Poole displays the social content of the various conceptions of morality at work in contemporary society, and casts a strikingly fresh light on such fundamental problems as the place of reason in ethics, moral objectivity and the distinction between duty and virtue. The book provides a critical account of the moral theories of a number of major philosophers, including Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Habermas, Rawls, Gewirth and MacIntyre. It also presents a systematic critique of three of the most significant (...) responses to modernity: liberalism, nationalism and nihilism. It takes seriously the suggestion that men and women are subject to different conceptions of morality, and places the issue of gender at the centre of moral philosophy. Poole has written a valuable addition to the Ideas series. (shrink)

Systemic existential conditions are indelible aspects of a client's reflective and nonreflective modes of consciousness, and therefore fall within the purview of philosophical counseling. This paper focuses on the experience of the dehumanization that is a function of the monetization of all aspects of post-modern neoliberal society. Monetization demands radical self-abandonment, self-anesthesia, auto-aggressive self-exploitation and addiction for functionality within the system. The bankrupt logic of pandemic terrorism confirms that monetization has become the preeminent measure of value. Monetization distorts both reason (...) and value, concealing a covert nihilism masquerading as the new metaphysics. The symbiotic natural world evidences a level of cooperation and coexistence that escapes monetization. Therefore, a monetized society is a society at odds with the world ecosystemand life itself. Caught in a labyrinth ofmonetized dehumanization, clients often participate in the fictional metanarrative of belief in unlimited individual possibility as a hedge against anxiety, depression, powerlessness, anomie, and the logical loop of cognitive dissonance. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Spinoza Leibniz.

Paul Klee’s Ad Parnassum is a summing up of his explorations of new directions in painting, including Cubism, Pointillism, and “pure painting,” and his tenure at the Bauhaus. This large work is a complex composition of abbreviated geometric forms, dominated by a pyramid-shaped structure, color fields, a solid colored sun-like circle, and various substructures and under fields of color. Entirely constructed upon a pattern of white dots of different glazes, this mesmerizing painting creates a scintillating experience through these dots in (...) relation to the color fields. As part of new movements that wished to reexamine the nature of painting itself, and ultimately ideas of time and space, Klee both broke down traditional temporal and spatial treatment in art and illuminated the subjective space of his paintings through color and form. He expanded the new techniques by developing his own ideas of geometric form and color modalities, which are finely expressed in Ad Parnassum. This paper also discusses Klee’s complex incorporation of language elements and the effect of his travels in North Africa. Ultimately, one notices a reckoning of subjectivity and objectivity in all this, with, in this key painting, a highlighting of the relationship between stasis and flux, at its deepest level, releasing an affect of the aesthetic sublime in its viewer. (shrink)

I wish to take up the subject ... in relation to a set of practices in late antiquity. Among the Greeks, these practices took the form of a precept: epimeleisthai sautou, "to take care of yourself," to take "care of the self," "to be concerned, to take care of yourself."The precept of the "care of the self" [souci de soi] was, for the Greeks, one of the main principles of cities, one of the main rules for social and personal conduct (...) and for the art of life. For us now, this notion is rather obscure and faded. (Foucault, TS, 19). (shrink)

Smith's university studies at Glasgow are described: in Greek, introducing him to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus; Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, including Locke's empiricism; and Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics, which had seminal lessons for him in methodology. Above all, the inspiration of the teaching of Francis Hutcheson is assessed, who seized Smith's imagination with his teaching of ethics and economics as part of his jurisprudence course. Hutcheson's development of moral sense and benevolence theory is highlighted, as providing a kind of (...) moral Newtonianism, offering answers in ‘new light’ or liberal theology to the ‘old light’ Calvinist stress on human depravity, and in moral philosophy to the egoistic theory of Hobbes and Mandeville. Clearly, Smith received great intellectual stimulation at Glasgow, and his ability was recognized with the award of a scholarship to Oxford in 1740. (shrink)

Lee and Schwarz interpret meta-analytic research and replication studies as providing evidence for the robustness of cleansing effects. We argue that the currently available evidence is unconvincing because publication bias and the opportunistic use of researcher degrees of freedom appear to have inflated meta-analytic effect size estimates, and preregistered replications failed to find any evidence of cleansing effects.

Editing Wikipedia is probably the best way for historians of science to spend their working hours. I became an historian of science because the history of science touches on virtually every important social and political issue in the modern world. I wanted to help put the field where it ought to be, at the center of any program of liberal and/or scientific education—part of the baseline of cultural literacy. When I entered grad school, it was a great letdown to realize (...) just how small a part of academic life involves reaching beyond the walls of academe. Public service is not part of the scholar social role until one reaches full professor, if ever. But while my original motivation to edit Wikipedia was an impulse toward service, that is not primarily why it is incumbent upon scholars in the history of science and her sister fields to join me... (shrink)

Let K be a finite set of finite structures. We give a syntactic characterization of the property: every element of K is injective in ISP(K). We use this result to establish that A is injective in ISP(A) for every two-element algebra A.

Evolution means different things at different stages of development. Higher stage explanations for it are downward assimilated at lower stages. Different scientific explanations for evolution also reflect different stages of development. Hierarchical complexity of tasks in evolution is a behavioral analytic explanation. It is selection processes of various kinds in tandem with changes in selection tasks' orders of hierarchical complexity. There is neither teleology nor evolutionary favoring of the highest stages of performance. Selection tasks at higher orders of complexity increasingly (...) decenter at all scales of behaviors from thought to history's social periods. These processes account for sociopolitical conflicts over evolution. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis special issue of Social Epistemology has its origin in two symposia organised by the Contemporary Philosophy of Technology Research Group at the University of Birmingham. These we...