Tuition and government funding does not adequately support the mission of many colleges and universities, and increasingly, corporations are responding to this need by making payments to institutions of higher learning with significant contracted expectations, including influence of the curriculum and content of college courses. One large, public banking corporation, BB&T, has funded grants to more than 60 colleges and universities in the United States to address what the corporation refers to as the “moral foundations of capitalism.” These grants vary (...) in size but average $1.1 million and typically require design of a new course that includes discussion of Atlas Shrugged, one of the novels of the author Ayn Rand. With many of the participating universities, the agreement with BB&T also stipulates the creation of chaired faculty positions, library reading rooms, designated capitalism centers, speaker series, scholarships, and the distribution of free student copies of Atlas Shrugged. Several ethics concerns about these grants, including their threat to academic freedom, are discussed in this article, as well as the need for focused guidance for university administrators regarding the temptation of large donations with attached questionable expectations. (shrink)

The Avatar: The Last Airbender ( ATLA ) series as a whole portrays Aang's journey from being a scared boy, who ran from his training, to becoming Avatar Aang, who is able to face Fire Lord Ozai. ATLA similarly emphasizes such connections in its portrait of Aang's quest, for his journey toward maturity draws on the work and play he shares with many others before the series comes to its conclusion. Ogyen Trinley Dorje expresses a similar (...) awareness of the weight of an exalted title in his experience as the Karmapa. Aang grows in the community, illustrating the Karmapa's words about the importance of relying on others. Dorje highlights the Buddhist teaching that competition creates the illusion that life is a zero‐sum game and that it undermines our happiness. As the Karmapa emphasizes, interconnectedness does not negate individuality. (shrink)

Luca Del Baldo's Visionary Academy of Ocular Mentality is an extraordinary testament in the recent history of visual studies. It brings together a group of outstanding scholars who have devoted their lives to art history, philosophy, history, ethnology, focussing predominantly on questions of human perception and imagination. Working from photographs provided by the scholars, Luca del Baldo painted his series of 96 portraits reproduced in this book. The portraits are accompanied by texts written by the persons portrayed, in response (...) to their portrayal, and as an exchange: the artist gifted the original painting to the portrayed person, and the portrayed gifted her or his response. "The result is a unique and profound conversation between image and text focussed on the enigma of the human face in all its mediations.". (shrink)

This chapter aims to establish what it is that bloodbending is, according to its treatment in the Avatar: The Last Airbender ( ATLA ) series. It explores why this is particularly bad in ways that other forms of bending are not. The chapter addresses the question about potentially permissible forms of bloodbending and whether this affects or does not affect Katara and the Council of Republic City's decision to ban bloodbending in The Legend of Korra. Bloodbending was discovered (...) by Hama, a southern waterbender who was held in captivity by firebenders in a prison where waterbenders were deprived of water. The practice of bloodbending has brought about objectionable consequences, but in ATLA the consequences are miniscule compared to almost all other forms of bending at the end of the Hundred Year War. In order to show what makes bloodbending particularly objectionable, the chapter describes the philosopher Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

This chapter aims to establish what it is that bloodbending is, according to its treatment in the Avatar: The Last Airbender ( ATLA ) series. It explores why this is particularly bad in ways that other forms of bending are not. The chapter addresses the question about potentially permissible forms of bloodbending and whether this affects or does not affect Katara and the Council of Republic City's decision to ban bloodbending in The Legend of Korra. Bloodbending was discovered (...) by Hama, a southern waterbender who was held in captivity by firebenders in a prison where waterbenders were deprived of water. The practice of bloodbending has brought about objectionable consequences, but in ATLA the consequences are miniscule compared to almost all other forms of bending at the end of the Hundred Year War. In order to show what makes bloodbending particularly objectionable, the chapter describes the philosopher Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

El texto presenta una visión detallada sobre la importancia y operación del Observatorio de la Red Iberoamericana de Bioética (ORIBI), argumentando la relevancia de la bioética en la contemporaneidad. La bioética, definida como la ética aplicada a la vida, ha expandido su influencia más allá de la medicina para abarcar áreas como el medio ambiente, derechos humanos y lucha contra la pobreza, destacando el enfoque interdisciplinario esencial para abordar dilemas éticos complejos. El ORIBI, desarrollado por el Centro Anáhuac de Desarrollo (...) Estratégico en Bioética (CADEBI), busca consolidar algunos esfuerzos dispersos en Iberoamérica, fomentando la colaboración regional en investigación, formación y gestión de la bioética. Se destaca la necesidad de trabajo colaborativo entre observatorios existentes, aprovechando recursos y conocimientos para promover el bienestar social. El ORIBI planea su acción en torno al monitoreo continuo, análisis de actividades y red de vinculación, apoyándose en herramientas como el Atlas Iberoamericano de Bioética y una serie de indicadores de seguimiento. Este enfoque estratégico y flexible permite adaptar la operación del observatorio a desafíos emergentes. (shrink)

Based on a series of lectures given in 1983 given by Dr. Leonard Peikoff, this book analyzes the philosophy of the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and outlines how to apply these principles to everyday life. Original. 20,000 first printing.

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo determinar los tipos de actividades de reformulación conversacional que aparecen en conversaciones en adultos mayores con diferentes niveles de desempeño cognitivo: normales y trastorno cognitivo leve, a partir de una tarea de construcción de un discurso narrativo-argumentativo. Desde una perspectiva de investigación cualitativa, se obtuvo un corpus de 4 entrevistas, que fue codificado con la ayuda del software ATLAS.ti lo que permitió la generación de conceptos y el desarrollo de explicaciones a partir de los (...) datos, los que fueron contrastados con el marco teórico disponible. Los resultados indicaron que los hablantes realizaron actividades de auto-reformulación auto-iniciada, auto-reformulación iniciada por otro y hetero-reformulación derivada del auto-inicio. Las dos primeras se redujeron en los hablantes identificados con trastorno cognitivo leve, mientras que el último tipo de actividad fue el más frecuente y dominante en la conversación. Los hablantes con trastorno cognitivo leve realizaron reformulaciones que no corregían o adecuaban el discurso, por lo que no cumplieron con la finalidad de la reparación. This study aimed to determine the types of activities of conversational reformulation that occur during oral dialogues with older adults who have varying levels of cognitive performance. Study participants, who ranged between normal cognitive function and mild cognitive impairment, were given the task of constructing a narrative-argumentative dialogue. For qualitative investigation purposes, a corpus of four interviews was obtained. Each series of interviews were encoded using ATLAS.ti software which generated linked concepts and explanations from the data. Findings were then compared with the available theoretical framework. The results indicated that participants exhibited three modes of reformulation technique: self-initiated self-reformulation activities; self-reformulation started by another person; and hetero-reformulation derived from self-start. The first two were reduced in speakers exhibiting mild cognitive impairment, while the latter was the most frequent and dominant mode in the conversation. Speakers with mild cognitive impairment executed reformulations that did not correct or enhance the speech, and as such did not meet the purpose of reformulation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Maps for the Classical World: Where Do We Go from Here?Richard TalbertThe apa’s classical atlas project was conceived as the means to an end, and rightly so. Good maps were taken to be vital tools for understanding ancient history and culture at any level, and the ones available in the early 1980s were altogether woefully inadequate. The project was designed to fill this void by preparing a comprehensive atlas (...) for publication in the not-too-distant future.To make a definitive claim at this moment that the target of publication by the end of 1999 will be met must still rank as hubris. Without doubt, however, the odds have increasingly shifted over the past few years in favor of timely completion. As everyone knows, the problems of designing, funding, and developing any ambitious collaborative project are immense, and the atlas has been handed its full share of such difficulties and more. Yet gradually the difficulties seem to have been surmounted, and the project—at present, anyway—remains resolutely on schedule, as much to the surprise of its Director as to everyone else.As the odds have shifted, so, too, has my own perception of the project as an end. To be sure, the maps appearing in the atlas volume will offer the intended comprehensive vision of the physical and cultural landscape of classical antiquity that has been so seriously lacking since Carl Müller provided the last one for William Smith’s Atlas of Ancient Geography in the 1870s. Further gains are assured, too. In particular, to accommodate different needs, it should certainly prove practical to issue the maps in a variety of alternative formats—in sets of loose sheets, for example (with or without cultural data marked on the ancient physical landscape), as wall-maps, slides, digitized images, even a reduced-size textbook atlas. One way or another, these maps have the potential to exert a formative influence on our perception of the classical landscape for many decades to come.Even at the current stage, well before publication, the Atlas Project [End Page 323] has already stimulated fresh attention to cartography: this has grown without any special effort on the project’s part. Most notably, colleagues have become aware that there is now for the first time somewhere to which they can turn as they seek out suitable cartographic materials and design for their research or publications or field survey.Classical studies worldwide would benefit immensely if that “somewhere” were to be made a permanent “center,” established around the same time as the publication of the Atlas of the Greek and Roman World. In the creation of the atlas, both materials and expertise have been accumulated, which it would be irresponsible simply to abandon. The materials cover a wide range—from elements for all the aeronautical charts forming the physical bases for the atlas maps, to copies of older rare maps devoted to classical antiquity.Such maps (and whatever text accompanies them) are by no means necessarily all about to be rendered obsolete by the atlas. The French “archaeological atlases” of Algeria and Tunisia, for example, were compiled by the Brigades Topographiques in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at scales as generous as 1 : 50,000, whereas the atlas limits itself to 1 : 500,000 in this region (and the area covered by one map at 1 : 500,000 corresponds to literally dozens at 1 : 50,000). Thus for any study with a close focus on Algeria or Tunisia, these French series remain indispensable, although the Tunisian one, with its two editions, is exceptionally rare and hard to obtain. Typically, the few libraries that hold this material have bound the original loose sheet maps into books (rendering it impossible to use the sheets individually), and for obvious reasons, they are not willing lenders. The Atlas Project, I imagine, has been the first to photograph the printed map sheets onto transparent plastic positives. These are sturdy, dimensionally stable, and immune from the fading and deterioration of paper; in addition, when they are laid on top of other maps, everything underneath remains visible.Examples of further cartographic materials for the classical world which will continue to... (shrink)

Classical Soviet Marxism-Leninism is in the process of dissolution, with some parts of the ideology being rejected, others retained in one form or another, and new components being adopted. At the same time, a wide-ranging pluralism of new objectives and forms of consciousness has emerged in Soviet intellectual life. Since both the motives for restructuring and also the braking effects acting on the process of perestrojka are significantly dependent upon intellectual and ideological developments, attentive observations of these developments is of (...) particular importance for the assessment of the evolutionary propects of the Soviet Union. At present the situation on the ideological-intellectual front can be characterized as follows:1. Although official changes in the ideology did not begin until 1989 they have caught up to the initial perestrojka in political and cultural life. 2. Perestrojka has continually waned in importance as an ideological by-word largely under the influence of Gorbachv''s new thinking which has turned attention to the dramatic history of the Soviet Union and the plight of the human individual in a society with few prospects for the future. 3. In philosophy the new textbook published in 1989/90 introduces a series of crucial innovations that put paid to a number of classical shibboleths of the Marxist-Leninist world view. 4. Academic philosophy has shifted more and more to a reexamination of the history of philosophy as well as to a reappraisal of pre-revolutionary Russian thought. 5. The critique of Stalinism has gradually given way to a critique of Marxist principles generally, and even Lenin has become the subject of criticism. 6. Fast on the heels of the new thinking and the ideological deconstruction come the voices of political orientations whose differences are so pronounced as to have warranted the compilation of an Atlas of ideologies. 7. The search for a new moral identity has concentrated on three sources: the reestablishment of links with classical Russian culture, the renewal of links with Europe, and the deep-seated need to commit oneself to some ideal for sacrifice. 8. The economic crisis has produced attitudes hostile to individual gain and speculation. 9. Given the nature of the Soviet crisis intellectual cooperation with the West has to take forms which promote the rekindling of a sense of all-human awareness of the transcendent and reinforce the experience of common humanity. 10. The establishment of all-European academic institutions designed in their very structure to engage in mutual cooperation could have a catalytic effect on the reconfiguration of Europe. (shrink)

Howard R. Jarrell International Meditation Bibliography 1950-1982. ATLA Bibliography Series No. 12, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., Metuchen, NJ 1985. Distributed by Bailey Bros & Swinfen Ltd, Folkestone. x + 432pp. £35.40.

This article explores human genetic diversity research east of what was the iron curtain. It follows the technique of “genogeographic mapping” back to its early Soviet origins and up to the post-Soviet era. Bringing together the history of genogeographic mapping and genealogies of “nationality” and “race” in the USSR, I discuss how populations and belonging were enacted in late Soviet biological anthropology and human genetics. While genogeography had originally been developed within the early Soviet livestock economy, anthropologists, public health scientists, (...) and medical geneticists reanimated the technique in the late 1960s after the end of the Lysenko era and its ban on classical genetics. In the 1970s, population geneticists pursued a project to compile all genetic data on the USSR population, resulting in a “genogeographic atlas,” consisting of series of tables as well as maps projecting genetic markers onto geographic grids. Following the post-Soviet trajectories of these maps, I examine the ways in which human genetic diversity studies realign with renegotiations of difference in today’s Russian Federation. The exploration of the Soviet case of human genetic diversity research contributes to our understanding of the varied ways in which racializing discourses were entangled in the project of modernization. (shrink)

Despite Michel Serres’s caution with figures of the limit, border, and boundary which philosophy and social theory put into play, his work can fruitfully be read as a proposal to rethink limits for a social and natural contract. By following up on the intimate connection between limits and law in his work, this paper shines a light on Serres’s argument for a parallelism of limits and laws; and particularly highlights the partially underacknowledged role of entropy for this matter. First, attention (...) will be drawn to the role of topological boundaries for Serres’s structural consideration of a natural contract in a number of his works (e.g., The Natural Contract, Atlas, Hominescence), in order to demonstrate the indispensable connection between topological boundaries, a topologically conceived ethics, and a topological approach to law. This grounds the argument for a second step, which will focus on the role of entropy and entropic difference for his understanding of processes of social organization as well as a proposal of a “new natural contract.” Similarly, this will emphasize the linkages between entropic figures of the limit and respective conceptions of a contract. This “new natural contract,” as Serres calls it, not only goes a long way in connecting themes around thermodynamic and informational entropy of the early Hermès series to his later employments of entropy in social theory, but also integrates different criticisms of his earlier natural contract and critiques of a Western-centric form of naturalism. The aim of this paper is to show that Serres’s approach to entropy engenders a reconsideration of a natural contract that not only thoroughly integrates his own non-essentialist and non-dualistic understanding of nature, but that opens up a horizon of resonances with feminist and postcolonial critiques of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Background: The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the deficiencies that characterize the functioning of the Italian national health system. Prisons have always mirrored the most radical expressions of these weaknesses. During the early stages of the pandemic, prison facilities across Italy underwent a series of changes dictated by the need to ensure the safety of the prisoners and staff. The adoption of these rules contributed to a total or partial redefinition of many central facets of life in prison, such (...) as intake procedures for new arrivals and the ways prisoners were allowed to communicate with their families.Objectives: The aim of this qualitative study was to analyze the testimony of penitentiary healthcare workers in prisons throughout Italy to determine the impact of COVID-19 on their professional and personal lives.Participants: Thirty-eight participants were contacted and 20 decided to participate in the interview. The sample was made up of 10 women and 10 men. All the participants were members of the healthcare staff of a penitentiary facility. All were recruited through an Italian association whose mission is the development, promotion, and implementation of social solidarity projects including prisoners' social and health care. This study was facilitated through representatives serving in nine different regions of Italy. The participants were divided according to their professional roles in prisons.Method: In-depth interviews were conducted by telephone or online using telecommunication platforms. The transcribed texts underwent thematic analysis using the Atlas.ti software to identify patterns of meaning across the dataset.Results: Four main themes emerged from the analysis: Interpersonal difficulties, management and operational difficulties, the personal distress and bereavement of healthcare workers, and the distress of inmates. The importance of relationship management skills when interacting with prisoners emerged as a key topic in many interviews, and the participants highlighted the need for adequate training. The increase in prisoners' anxiety made communication more difficult.Conclusions: The findings suggest that healthcare workers in jails need emergency-oriented training. Participants described their feeling of loneliness and quasi-abandonment when carrying out their duties during the pandemic. In particular, they underscored the need for psychological guidance to better manage altered reactions with prisoners and colleagues as a result of heightened death anxiety and isolation. (shrink)

I reconstruct the discovery of the Higgs boson by the ATLAS collaboration at CERN as the application of a series of inferences from effects to causes. I show to what extent such diagnostic causal inferences can be based on well established knowledge gained in previous experiments. To this extent, causal reasoning can be used to infer the existence of entities, rather than just causal relationships between them. The resulting account relies on the principle of causality, attributes only a heuristic (...) role to the theory’s predictions, and shows how, and to what extent, data selection can be used to exclude alternative causes, even “unconceived” ones. (shrink)

Last year (2005) marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of Russell’s classic ‘On denoting’. It should not cast any shadow on that great work to note that the problems it provided solutions to are still the subject of controversy. Two of those problems involved noun phrases (NPs) which fail to denote. Russell’s examples (1a) and (1b) (1) a. The king of France is bald. b. The king of France is not bald. are puzzling because they have the form of (...) simple contradictories, and yet we are not inclined to say either one is true. Example (2) (2) Pegasus does not exist. is even more problematic; the lack of denotation for Pegasus, which makes the sentence true, also seems to rob it of a meaningful constituent. Once the king of France is unpacked according to Russell’s analysis, (1b) is revealed to be ambiguous. It’s logical forms are given in (3). (3) a. ∃x[Kx ∧ ∀y[Ky ↔ y=x] ∧ ¬Bx] b. ¬∃x[Kx ∧ ∀y[Ky ↔ y=x] ∧ Bx] (3a) says that there is a unique (French) king who is not bald (obviously false), but (3b), the logical contradictory of (1a) says that it is not the case that there is a unique king who is bald (which is true). We can apply the analysis to sentence (2) once we recognize Pegasus as a concealed definite description, e.g. the winged horse of Greek mythology. (2) can then be unpacked as (4) (4) ¬∃x[Wx ∧ ∀y[Wy ↔ y=x]] which seems both meaningful and true, as required. Problems solved. Well, not quite. Strawson (1950) challenged the first solution above, arguing that neither (1a) nor (1b) could be used to assert the existence of a king of France. Rather, use of such sentences presupposes the existence of a king of France, and failing that existence, neither of (1a) or (1b) could be used to make either a true or a false statement – in Strawson’s words, “the question of whether it’s true or false simply doesn’t arise” (Strawson 1950, 330).1 In an extended series of essays, and one book, Jay Atlas (1977, 1978, 1979, 1989, 2004) has taken issue with the work of both Russell and Strawson.. (shrink)

In the history of zoology the English anatomist Morrison Watson (1845–1885) is considered to be the discoverer of the masculinized sexual organs of the spotted hyena. Beginning in 1877, Watson had published a series of anatomical studies on the spotted hyena (Watson, 1877, 1878, 1881, Watson and Young, 1879), in which he, in which he for the first time made public the anatomical peculiarities of the female spotted hyena’s genitalia. This scientific achievement is well documented. But now we can (...) also state that a hundred years before Watson the Dutch amateur zoologist Robert Jacob Gordon (1743–1795), while serving in the Scots Brigades at the Cape of Good Hope, had already made the same discovery and merely unfortunate personal circumstances prevented publication. During his stay at the Cape, Gordon had studied spotted hyenas intensively and recorded his observations in accurate drawings and comments. These drawings have been preserved as part of a large collection of animal drawings entitled Gordon Atlas. With his discovery, Gordon actually was the first to provide empirical evidence of a “curious and inexplicable case of dimorphism” (Darwin on a beetle) in mammalians, long before Étienne Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire (Cours de l’histoire naturelle des mammifères, 1829) started examining masculinized sexual organs in the mole or Darwin recognized the importance of sexual dimorphism (Descent of Man, 1871). In this paper we reproduce for the first time all hyena drawings from the Gordon Atlas, including Gordon’s handwritten notes in the margins in the original Dutch and in translation. Additionally, we briefly delineate the knowledge about the South African spotted hyena in Gordon’s time and indicate that we doubt Watson’s explanation for the age-old confusion about the hyena. (shrink)

The comparison of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms and Levi-Strauss’ structural anthropology requires a clarification of their definitions of morphology, transformation and translatability. We will expose the morphological field where Cassirer’s aesthetics emerges in relation to Goethe, who represents an important source for Levi-Strauss as well. Defining the concept of transformation is supposed to follow his modifications of the key ideas of the German poet and biologist, by taking account of the new point of view provided by the theory (...) of groups of transformation which the mathematician Felix Klein developed in the »circle of Erlangen «. Then we will show how Edgar Wind, a brilliant student of Cassirer, invents a kind of morphological aesthetics to provide art history with a methodology, and we will give some examples for the application of the concept of building series of pictures in the field of art history. We will examine the global function of the tables of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, Erwin Panofsky’s wellknown iconological interpretation of Durer’s Melencolia I and then, by contrast, the creation of a virtual series of masks through an imaginative variation which Levi-Strauss creates to give sense to a particular Ameridian mask found during his investigations. Finally, we will investigate the problems appearing by the definition of transformation as translatability in both Cassirer’s and Levi-Strauss’ semiologies. We will ask for their uses of the model of translation in linguistics to compare different forms of structural homologies. (shrink)

In 1958, Nathaniel Branden founded what would become the Nathaniel Branden Institute and launched the Objectivist movement through a course of twenty lectures he called “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” In 2009, that lecture series became a book and an important historical record. This review captures the essence of those lectures while also taking a close look at Branden’s philosophical odyssey. It attempts to recount whether and how far the man whom Ayn Rand saw as the living image of (...) John Galt distanced himself from the guidance he had once given in the years after NBI closed its doors forever. (shrink)

In this essay I use my Non-Monotonic account of “Only Proper Noun” sentences to challenge the Standard Views on the Downard Monotonicity of “Few N” Quantifier sentences. I also review the history of the L. Horn – J.D. Atlas Debate on ‘Only Proper Noun’ sentences and its implications for quantifier noun phrases like “Few N”, and I assess the promise of L. Horn’s Pragmatic Theory of Negative Polarity Item Licensing.

This book expounds and defends a new conception of the relation between truth and meaning. Atlas argues that the sense of a sense-general sentence radically underdetermines its truth-conditional content. He applies this linguistic analysis to illuminate old and new philosophical problems of meaning, truth, falsity, negation, existence, presupposition, and implicature. In particular, he demonstrates how the concept of ambiguity has been misused and confused with other concepts of meaning, and how the interface between semantics and pragmatics has been misunderstood. The (...) problems he tackles are common to philosophy, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, and his conclusions will be of interest to all those working in these fields. (shrink)

In Atlas (1991, 1993, 1996b) I argued that sentences containing the generalized quantifier NP ‘only a’ , where ‘a’ is an individual constant, in sentences like ‘Only God can make a tree’, ‘Only Muriel voted for Hubert’[Horn 1969], sometimes license Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) like ever and minimizer NPIs like give…a red cent and sometimes do not, as the data in (1a), (2a), (3a), and (4) show. Data from Horn (1996b) and McCawley (1981, 1988) showed that ‘only a’ would license (...) some minimizer NPIs, e.g. (5). In fact the only data that Horn (2005) presents to defend the view that ‘only a’ is a NPI licenser are examples containing the minimizers lift a finger, gives a hoot, and at all. But it is only on the grounds of the distributional evidence of licensing minimizer NPIs that Horn (e.g. Horn 2005) calls ‘only a’ a “negative” generalized quantifier NP. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the Atlas-Kempson Thesis that sentences of the form The A is not B are not ambiguous but rather semantically general (Quine), non-specific (Zwicky and Sadock), or vague (G. Lakoff). This observation refutes the 1970 Davidson-Harman hypothesis that underlying structures, as full semantic representations, are logical forms. It undermines the conception of semantical presupposition, removes a support for the existence of truth-value gaps for presuppositional sentences (the remaining arguments for which are viciously circular), and lifts (...) the Russell-Strawson dispute of 1950–1964 from stalemate to a formulation in which a resolution is possible for the first time. Suggestions of Davidson, Montague, Stalnaker, Kaplan and H. P. Grice are shown to be inadequate semantic descriptions of negative, presuppositional sentences. I briefly discuss the radical Pragmatics view of my 1975 publications and suggest that it too fails to do justice to the linguistic data. I speculate that Semantic Representations should be given the form (more or less) of computer programs, describable in Dana Scott's mathematical semantics for programming languages. (shrink)

This paper revisits Moses Mendelssohn’s political theology through his early aesthetic writings, and in conjunction with his later writing on politics and religion, unearths a model of religious toleration that can respond to many contemporary critiques of tolerance, especially those which draw from Jacobi and Schmitt’s decisionist political theology.

This volume is the first part of a larger work on the philosophy of Solomon Maimon and its systematic place in the history of thought. Here we deal with so me of the fundamental themes of Maimon's philosophy, including his examination of Kant's philosophy, his re lation to such immediate post-Kantians as Reinhold and Schulze, and the relation between him and Fichte. The second volume will concern itself with such aspects of Maimon's theoretical philosophy as the prob lem of the (...) categories, the relation between idea and fiction, the concept of a universal soul, and practical philosophy, that is, ethics and the philosophy of law. Chapters V, VII, and X of this volume contain, with substantial revisions in form and content, material that appeared originally in scholarly periodicals. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Hebrcw Union College A nnual for permission to use the substance of my articles: "Solomon Maimon's Treatment of the Problems of Antinomies and Its Relation to Maimonides," H.U.C.A., Vol. XXI; "Maimon and Mai monides," H.U.C.A., Vol. XXII, part one; and to the Journal 0/ the History 0/ I deas, for permission to use the substance of my essay "Solomon Maimon's Doctrine of Infinite Reason and Its Historical Relations," J.H.I., Vol. XIII, No. 2. (shrink)

This paper proposes that Moses Mendelssohn’s Morning Hours be viewed as the final chapter in a philosophy of imperfection that Mendelssohn had been developing over the course of his life. It is further argued that this philosophy of imperfection is still of philosophical interest. After demonstrating that the concept of imperfection animates Mendelssohn’s early work, this paper turns towards the specific arguments about imperfection Mendelssohn made in the midst of the pantheism controversy—in particular, the claim that human imperfection attests to (...) an independent existence. Simply put: God knows human imperfection, but does not possess it. Therefore, there is a sense in which humans, because of our imperfections, are distinct from God. It is shown that, at least in part, Mendelssohn’s entry into the pantheism controversy, and his willingness to engage even his recently departed friend Lessing in argument, is part of his strategy to preserve his philosophy of imperfection. (shrink)

When philosophers think about mental phenomena, they focus on several features of human experience: (1) the existence of consciousness, (2) the intentionality of mental states, that property by which beliefs, desires, anger, etc. are directed at, are about, or refer to objects and states of affairs, (3) subjectivity, characterized by my feeling my pains but not yours, by my experiencing the world and myself from my point of view and not yours, (4) mental causation, that thoughts and feelings have physical (...) effects on the world: I decide to raise my arm and my arm rises. In a world described by theories of physics and chemistry, what place in that physical description do descriptions of the mental have? (shrink)

The potential for dual use of research in the life sciences to be misused for harm raises a range of problems for the scientific community and policy makers. Various legal and ethical strategies are being implemented to reduce the threat of the misuse of research and knowledge in the life sciences by establishing a culture of responsible conduct.

The arguments that Fodor (1987: 150-52) gives in support of a Language of Thought are apparently straightforward. (1) Linguistic capacities are "systematic", in the sense that if one understands the words 'John loves Mary' one also understands the form of words 'Mary loves John'. In other words, sentences have a combinatorial semantics, because they have constituent structure. (2) If cognitive capacities are systematic in the same way, they must have constituent structure also. Thus there is a Language of Thought. The (...) essential connection between language and thought that the argument requires is: Since the function of language is to express thought, to understand a sentence is to grasp the thought that its utterance standardly conveys. So from the systematicity of sentences it follows that anyone who can grasp the thought that John loves Mary can grasp the thought that Mary loves John. Thought must be as systematic as language, for the best empirical explanation of the psychological fact that one who grasps the thought that John loves Mary can grasp the thought that Mary loves John is that grasping a thought is standing in some thinking relation to a complex entity whose constituents are MARY, X LOVES Y, and JOHN and semantic relations among MARY, X LOVES Y, and JOHN. So sayeth Fodor (1987). (shrink)

In his recent book "Sweet Dreams: philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness," Dennett renews his attack on a philosophical notion of qualia, the success of which attack is required if his brand of Functionalism is to survive. He also articulates once again what he takes to be essential to his notion of consciousness. I shall argue that his new, central argument against the philosophical concept of qualia fails. In passing I point out a difficulty that David Rosenthal's "higher-order thought" (...) theory of consciousness also faces in accounting for qualia. I then contrast Dennett's newest account of consciousness with interestingly different conceptions by contemporary neuro-scientists, and I suggest that philosophers should take the recent suggestions by neuro-scientists more seriously as a subject for philosophical investigation. (shrink)

A Linguistic Analysis of Prior, Quine, and Searle on Propositional Attitudes, Martinich on Fictional Reference, Taglicht on the Active/Passive Mood Distinction in English, etc.

The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis, introduces new perspectives on desire and longing, in and outside of the analytic relationship._ _This exciting volume explores the known and unknown, ghosts and demons, sexuality and lust. Galit Atlas discusses the subjects of sex and desire and explores what she terms the Enigmatic and the Pragmatic aspects of sexuality, longing, female desire, sexual inhibition, pregnancy, parenthood and creativity. The author focuses on the levels of communication that take place in (...) the most intimate settings: between mothers and their babies; between lovers; in the unconscious bond of two people— in the consulting room, where two individuals sit alone in one room, looking and listening, breathing and dreaming. Atlas examines the ways in which different languages, translations and integrations focus on birth, death, sexuality, and human bonds. In _The Enigma of Desire_ each chapter opens with a narrative, a therapeutic story which illustrates both the analyst’s and patient’s desires and the ways these interact and emerge in the consulting room. This book will be of interest to anyone who is interested in the intricacies of sex and desire and of great appeal to psychoanalysts, therapists and mental health professionals. (shrink)

This fresh look at the philosophy of language focuses on the interface between a theory of literal meaning and pragmatics--a philosophical examination of the relationship between meaning and language use and its contexts. Here, Atlas develops the contrast between verbal ambiguity and verbal generality, works out a detailed theory of conversational inference using the work of Paul Grice on Implicature as a starting point, and gives an account of their interface as an example of the relationship between Chomsky's Internalist Semantics (...) and Language Performance. Atlas then discusses consequences of his theory of the Interface for the distinction between metaphorical and literal language, for Grice's account of meaning, for the Analytic/Synthetic distinction, for Meaning Holism, and for Formal Semantics of Natural Language. This book makes an important contribution to the philosophy of language and will appeal to philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists. (shrink)

Moses Maimondes, born March 30, 1135, the eight hundredth anniversary of whose birth we now commemorate, is one of those universal spirits who mastered the whole realm of knowledge of their time. His fruitful and extensive literary activity covered many fields: astronomy, medicine, Talmud, and philosophy. His works on medicine were in former tunes highly esteemed. In the field of philosophy he strove for the synthesis of Aristotelianism and revealed religion, an endeavour which was of paramount importance for the later (...) development of philosophic thought. His influence as a philosopher is not confined to the sphere of Jewish thought, but has left a lasting impression on the history of philosophy in general. (shrink)

It is not rare to find students of language interested in the many ways in which speakers talk about Fred or about the weather, assert of Fred or of the weather that he is fat or that it is fine. Many philosophers, logicians, and linguists share an interest in what words or phrases designate or describe, and what speakers refer to, mention, and say things about. But it is also notable that the Grammarian and the Philosopher, especially the Metaphysician, have (...) looked at intentionality in different ways. In this lecture I sketch the ways that the Philosophers Nelson Goodman and W.V.O Quine and by contrast the Grammarians have analyzed and used the notion of Aboutness, in Quine’s case in his famous argument against Quantifying Into intensional sentences. Goodman’s and Quine’s analyses are motivated by different intellectual goals from the Linguists’. By contrast Linguists have the notion of Topic Noun Phrase. I shall argue that the Linguists’ notion of Topic Noun Phrase offers clarification and an intellectual advance over Goodman’s and Quine’s notions, especially in the treatment of propositional attitude sentences. (shrink)