James A. Diefenbeck, Wayward Reflections on the History ofPhilosophyThomas R. Flynn Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason. Volume 1:Toward an Existential Theory of HistoryMark Golden and Peter Toohey Inventing Ancient Culture:Historicism, Periodization and the Ancient WorldZenonas Norkus Istorika: Istorinis IvadasEverett Zimmerman The Boundaries of Fiction: History and theEighteenth‐Century British Novel.

In "How Do We Know It Is Now Now?" David Braddon-Mitchell (Analysis 2004) develops an objection to the thesis that the past is real but the future is not. He notes my response to this, namely that the past, although real, is lifeless and (a fortiori?) lacking in sentience. He argues, however, that this response, which I call 'the past is dead hypothesis', is not tenable if combined with 'special relativity'. My purpose in this reply is to (...) argue that, on the contrary, 'special relativity' supports the thesis that the future is unreal. (shrink)

This paper is about the open future response to fatalistic arguments. I first present a typical fatalistic argument and then spell out the open future response as a response to that argument. Then I raise the question of how the open future response can be independently justified. I consider some possible ways in which the response might be defended, and I try to show that none of these is a plausible, non-question-begging defense. Next I formulate what I take to be (...) the only plausible, nonquestion-begging defense of the open future response. This defense involves both (i) the claim that the laws of nature are indeterministic and (ii) a certain version of the correspondence theory of truth. Finally, I argue that there is a very surprising consequence of justifying the open future response by making the defense in question, namely, that the past is sometimes open. Fatalism is the view that whatever will happen in the future is inevitable, due to certain considerations about truth and time. Fatalism, in turn, is normally taken to imply that there is no such thing as genuine, human free will. Suppose that I am an anti-fatalist. Suppose I believe that Joe Montana is free to choose what he will have for lunch tomorrow, and suppose I take this case to be a paradigmatic example of one involving both evitability and human free will. Now suppose that I meet a fatalist, who presents the following argument.1.. (shrink)

I want to join Dummett in saying that the reality of the past (and, by analogy, the reality of the future) is an issue of realism versus anti-realism: (Dummett 1969) If you affirm the reality of the past, you are a realist about the past. If you deny the reality of the past, you are an anti-realist about the past. (And likewise, in each case, for the future). It makes sense to think of these issues (...) by analogy with realism about the external world, unobservable objects, mathematical objects, universals, and so on. These are all properly described as ontological issues. (shrink)

The essays in this book exhibit a commendably high level of scholarship. They are written by an accomplished group of thinkers (some of them well-known and well-established and some of them relatively new and worth keeping in view). All the essays are new to this book (except the two on rights). The book is well produced (I noted only a dropped note superscript in Gaus’s chapter and a missing ‘not’ on p.

The past is deeply important to many of us. But our concern about history can seem puzzling and needs justification. After all, the past cannot be changed: we can help the living needy, but the tears we shed for the long dead victims of past tragedies help no one. Attempts to justify our concern about history typically take one of two opposing forms. It is assumed either that such concern must be justified in instrumental or otherwise self-centered (...) and present-centered terms or that our interest in history must be utterly disinterested and pursued for its own sake. But neither approach can fully explain, or justify, our concern about the past. I propose a third approach, on which the past matters because it contains much that is of value—all those past people and the things they did or had endured—and this value calls for our fitting response. In short: the significance of the past is past significance. (shrink)

Combining the methodologies of art history, aesthetics and cultural history, this book opens up new ways of looking at the phenomenon of ruins.

"AGM members lunch." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (198), pp. 13.

This article presents an account from people who are now academic researchers who supported people with learning disabilities in the 1970s and 1980s. It explores how a practitioners and an academic engaged in researching and teaching social welfare issues from a social model and critical rights perspective, remember and have come to terms with oppressive practices from the past. The paper includes instances of resistance to unethical systems and behaviours, but also painful memories of compliance. The authors reflect on (...) their ethical positions in their past practice and discuss the importance of remembering and acknowledging. (shrink)

This Article reinterprets the period from 1935 to 1973 as a “long exception” to the sustained pattern of legal hostility to labor organizing in the United States. While the National Labor Relations Act and the broader New Deal were once regarded as secure solutions to the “labor question” in America, in retrospect they only offered a partial, temporary, and extraordinary respite from state and corporate opposition to the collective interests of working people. The decades from the thirties through the seventies (...) witnessed the rise and fall of union density as well as the fall and rise of inequality that stands out in contrast to the rest of American history since the industrial revolution. However, because of the extraordinary circumstances of that era, the New Deal serves as a poor historical metaphor for those interested in labor’s revival. The circumstances that created the New Deal are unlikely to be repeated, thus the future of labor organizing and the law will look more like the deep and difficult past of American history prior to the 1930s than like the “modern” age of organizing and collective bargaining. (shrink)

In response to the catastrophes of the twentieth century, contemporary writers were often led to revolutionize inherited forms of philosophical presentation. And now, in an age of Anthropocene extinction, such experiments have become necessary once again. To comprehend this most recent of disasters, the present essay develops a practice of the philosophical fragment which, by returning to contemporaneous accounts of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Chernobyl, seeks to demonstrate what was both anticipated by and wholly unforeseen from within the perspective of earlier (...) attempts at contending with natural and societal disasters. By tracking the changing status of the skies in such writers as Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras, Günther Anders, Svetlana Alexievich, and Greta Thunberg, the present essay distinguishes this longer twentieth-century history of destruction from the work of extermination now underway. (shrink)

Ann M. Blair -- Lorraine Daston -- Benjamin Elman -- Anthony Grafton -- Jill Kraye -- Peter N. Miller -- Jean-Louis Quantin -- Quentin Skinner.

Religion -- Nation -- Class -- Gender -- Race -- Civilization.

This article focuses on the role of past standards stories and how they are deployed strategically in ways that shape the process of standards creation. It draws upon an ethnographic study over multiple years of standards meetings, discussions, and online activity. Building on existing work that examines how standards are shaped by stories, this study follows the development of Augmented Reality Markup Language and maps how the story of Hypertext Markup Language became the key story that actors utilized and (...) debated to push for participation, agreement, and material development of the standard. The authors present several different ways the recurring HTML story was effective at various points in the process as a diagnostic tool, promissory future, empirical evidence, and confidence building measure. Understanding these strategic deployments serves as an empirical example of how recurring stories of the past can shape standards development. These mappings illustrate how standards can be built on past standards sociologically as well as technologically and also broadens our theoretical tools for understanding the importance of stories in the sociology of standards. (shrink)

The cultural and temporal context that any archaeologist is a part of will necessarily bias the way in which he or she interprets material remains. While interpretation is a crucial part of the archaeological process, the preconceived notions an archaeologist may hold can colour their interpretation of the society in question. Through examples such as the excavations at Knossos in Crete, the effect such biases can have on archaeological interpretation and discourse is studied.

Ex ante predicted outcomes should be interpreted as counterfactuals (potential histories), with errors as the spread between outcomes. But error rates have error rates. We reapply measurements of uncertainty about the estimation errors of the estimation errors of an estimation treated as branching counterfactuals. Such recursions of epistemic uncertainty have markedly different distributial properties from conventional sampling error, and lead to fatter tails in the projections than in past realizations. Counterfactuals of error rates always lead to fat tails, regardless (...) of the probability distribution used. A mere .01% branching error rate about the STD (itself an error rate), and .01% branching error rate about that error rate, etc. (recursing all the way) results in explosive (and infinite) moments higher than 1. Missing any degree of regress leads to the underestimation of small probabilities and concave payoffs (a standard example of which is Fukushima). The paper states the conditions under which higher order rates of uncertainty (expressed in spreads of counterfactuals) alters the shapes the of final distribution and shows which a priori beliefs about conterfactuals are needed to accept the reliability of conventional probabilistic methods (thin tails or mildly fat tails). (shrink)

Purpose: We sought to examine the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) literature research and scholarship types, topics, and contributing community fields of training as a first step to charting the broader ELSI community’s future priorities and goals. Methods: We categorized 642 articles and book chapters meeting inclusion criteria for content in both human genetics or genomics and ethics or ELSI during a 5-year period (2003–2008) according to research and scholarship types, topics, and the area of advanced training of the (...) first-listed author. Research and scholarship type categories were developed and characterized through in-depth review of 95 randomly sampled publications from the larger group. Results: There is a single dominant approach to ELSI, which focuses on ethical and other social issues “downstream” of advances in genomics, the contributors to which predominately have advanced training in medicine or science fields other than social science. A comparatively low percentage of publications primarily offer policy recommendations, and these are much more likely to be written by those with advanced training in law than is the case for the literature as a whole. Social science studies predominately employ qualitative methods and vary significantly with respect to the extent and types of recommendations offered. Two further types of ELSI research and scholarship offer alternative models for so-called “normative” work in this field. Conclusion: Considering topics, training, and types of ELSI research and scholarship from the most recent past allows for a baseline perspective that is sorely needed in charting this field’s future course. (shrink)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2008.

The production of a number of vaccines involves the use of cell-lines originally derived from fetuses directly aborted in the 1960s and 1970s. Such cell-lines, indeed sometimes the very same ones, are important to on-going research, including at Catholic institutions. The cells currently used are removed by a number of decades and by a significant number of cellular generations from the original cells. Moreover, the original cells extracted from the bodies of the aborted fetuses were transformed to produce the cell (...) lines, since otherwise they would be incapable of the kind of culturing that is required. (shrink)