L'Alcibiade est sans doute l'un des dialogues platoniciens qui a ete le plus lu et le plus apprecie dans l'antiquite: a preuve les multiples citations que l'on en trouve un peu partout ou encore le fait exceptionnel que l'on en a conserve deux commentaires neoplatoniciens. C'est que jamais, a la difference des modernes, les anciens n'ont doute de l'authenticite de ce dialogue, dans lequel certains voyaient meme, comme Jamblique, un resume parfait de la philosophie de Platon.

"Edition bilingue grec ancien-français. Commentaire de la première partie du Parménide composé d'un prologue traitant de questions préliminaires et de l'exégèse du texte, divisée en lemmes et fondée sur la distinction entre explication générale et explication du détail.

Les Prolegomenes a la Philosophie de Platon sont un manuel d'ecole neoplatonicien. Il s'inspire d'un modele dont Proclus a du etre l'auteur, mais l'origine de ce texte est presque surement alexandrine et doit dater de la premiere moitie du Vle siecle. Cette oeuvre est essentielle pour comprendre comment etait diffuse l'enseignement platonicien, et pour mieux saisir le mouvement des idees de l'Antiquite finissante. Dans une importante introduction, L. O. Westerink a retrace l'histoire de l'ecole d'Alexandrie et celle du genre (...) litteraire de ces introductions a Platon et a Aristote. (shrink)

Dans ce volume considérable, on été réunies les contributions d'un Congrès international tenu à Louvain en 1998 pour marquer l'achèvement de la première édition de la Théologie Platonicienne de Proclus. Ces contributions, toutes rigoureusement centrées sur la Théol. Plat. concernent (1) les principes et les sources de la Théol. plat. (2) Les méthodes théologiques de Proclus (3) La postérité de la Théol. plat. dans le monde grec, païen comme chrétien, et dans le monde islamique. Des indices très détaillés (...) permettent de retrouver tous les passages cités et commentés dans ce volume. (shrink)

L'Isagoge est une introduction aux Categories. Porphyre y definit les cinq predicables (genre, espece, difference, propre et accident) et formule ce qui, grace a Boece, deviendra le principal probleme logique et metaphysique du Moyen Age occidental - le probleme des universaux -, ouvrant la querelle qui, jusqu'a la fin du XVe siecle, verra s'affronter realistes et nominalistes. La traduction francaise ici proposee est accompagnee du texte grec original et de la traduction latine de Boece.

Standard quantum theory is inadequate to explain the mechanisms by which potential becomes actual. It is inadequate and therefore unable to describe generation of events. Niels Bohr emphasized long ago that the classical part of the world is necessary. John Bell stressed the same point: that “measurement≓ cannot even be defined within the standard quantum theory, and he sought a solution within hidden variable theories and his concept of “beables.≓Today it is customary to try to explain emergence of the classical (...) world through a decoherence mechanism due to “environment.≓ But, we believe, as it was with the concept of measurement, “environment≓ itself cannot be defined within the standard quantum theory.We have proposed a semiphenomenological solution to this problem by introducing explicitly, from the very beginning, classical degrees of freedom, and by coupling these degrees of freedom, through a Lindblad type coupling, to the quantum world. The resulting theory, we call “event-enhanced quantum theory.≓ EEQT allows us to describe an event-generating mechanism for individual quantum systems under continuous observation. The objections of John Bell are met and precise definitions of an “experiment≓ and of a “measurement≓ have been given within EEQT. However EEQT is, essentially, a nonrelativistic theory.In the present paper we extend the ideas of L. P. Horwitz and C. Piron and we propose a relativistic version of EEQT, with an event-generating algorithm for spin one-half particle detectors. The algorithm is based on proper time formulation of the relalivistic quantum theory. Although we use indefinite metric, all the probabilities controlling the random process of the detector clicks are nonnegative. (shrink)

Proclus' Elements of Theology is a concise summa of the Neoplatonic system in its fully developed form; and for the student of late Greek thought second in importance only to the Enneads of Plotinus. Professor Dodds has provided a critical text based on a personal examination of some forty manuscripts, together with an English translation and a philosophical and linguistic commentary. First published in 1933, this second edition includes an Appendix of Addenda et Corrigenda and is widely regarded and (...) respected as the definitive edition of the text today. (shrink)

The passage of a spin-1/2neutral particle through a region of uniform magnetic field and the corresponding precession mechanism is analyzed from the viewpoint of scattering theory, with particular consideration of the role of the field boundaries.

This is the first English translation of Proclus' commentary on Plato's Parmenides. Glenn Morrow's death occurred while he was less than halfway through the translation, which was completed by John Dillon. A major work of the great Neoplatonist philosopher, the commentary is an intellectual tour de force that greatly influenced later medieval and Renaissance thought. As the notes and introductory summaries explain, it comprises a full account of Proclus' own metaphysical system, disguised, as is so much Neoplatonic philosophy, (...) in the form of a commentary. (shrink)

This is the introduction to the Ashgate volume on Rawls in their history of political thought series. It puts Rawls's life and work in context and then discusses the essays included in the volume, essays of high quality likely to shape scholarship on Rawls for the coming decades.

This essay takes a deviant stance against the prevailing perspective on globalization as an imperialistic enterprise championed by the Western nations to perpetuate their exploitative tendencies on the underdeveloped nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America. While it acknowledges that globalization has sometimes been used to exploit third world countries, nevertheless there is some salutary underpinning within globalization that can enhance growth and social order especially in the third world countries. This underpinning factor stems from certain universal, not necessarily absolute, (...) values and principles that can regulate human social behaviour especially at the political realm. It establishes a synergy of globalization and political claims based on universal standard of morality, the jettisoning of negative cultural claims, and avoidance of authoritarianism predicated on rigid cultural identity in the guise of protecting national sovereignty. It concludes on the need for a global basis as justificationist paradigm of political claim in Africa based on common good and justice as pivots of African cultural renewal. (shrink)

We investigate two formalizations of Optimality Theory, a successful paradigm in linguistics.We first give an order-theoretic counterpart for the data and processinvolved in candidate evaluation.Basically, we represent each constraint as a function that assigns every candidate a degree of violation.As for the second formalization, we define (after Samek-Lodovici and Prince) constraints as operations that select the best candidates out of a set of candidates.We prove that these two formalizations are equivalent (accordingly, there is no loss of generality with using violation (...) marks and dispensing with them is only apparent).Importantly, we show that the second formalization is equivalent with a class of operations over sets of formulas in a given logical language.As a result, we prove that Optimality Theory can be characterized by certain cumulative logics.So, applying Optimality Theory is shown to be reasoning by the rules of cumulative logics. (shrink)

We characterize strict Mittag-Leffler modules in terms of free realizations of positive primitive formulas, and rings over which projectives are trivial in terms of various notions of separability of strict Mittag-Leffler modules. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Technology and Ethics. A European Quest for Responsible Engineering, edited by B. Heriard Dubreuil and his team (University Lille) is in many regards an innovative publication. It is the first fully European contribution to the field of engineering ethics and the result of an intensive cooperation between ethicists and engineers from all the member countries of the European Union. The basic structure of the book is both the distinction and interaction between three levels of analysis: personal responsibility of engineers, the (...) institutional level (business organisations) and the impact of technology on society and culture. On the personal level, the book deals with problems such as the role of professional codes and the fact that engineers must cope with flexibility, shorter lines of decision and erosion of the boundaries between private and professional life. On the meso level, the book deals with different aspects of decision making in the context of business organizations, such as quality management, technology assessment procedures, business ethics committees etc... On the macro level, the authors focus on the power of technology. Together with the influences from other social, economic and political actors, the decisions of engineers change the world in a way which is of moral significance. (shrink)

This translation and commentary is based on the Critical Text and Indices of Proclus: Commentary on the First Alcibiades of Plato, Amsterdam 1954, by L. G. Westerink. Index II has been of great help in the translation, and the commentary is much indebted to the critical apparatus. Dr. Westerink has also been kind enough to forward his views on the relatively few problems which the Greek text has presented. A further debt is owed to the review of Dr. Westerink's (...) text by Prof. E. R. Dodds in GNOMON 1955 p. 164-1, chiefly for some references and some emendations to the Greek text. W. R. M. Lamb's Loeb translation of Alcibiades I has helped considerably in construing the lemmata, which Signor Antonio Carlini has found to have been inserted by a later hand from a Plato MSS. of the W family. Evidence for this is their discrepancy with the text as read in the main body of the commentary (d. Studi Classici e Orientali, vol. x, Pisa 1961). On the personal side, the whole work has received the benefit of constant advice from Prof. A. H. Armstrong. It was he who first suggested the undertaking, and he has been kind enough to read through the translation and commentary, making many corrections and helpful suggestions. In particular lowe him the parallels with Plotinus and thanks for a Socratic patience in my more obtuse moments. (shrink)

The commentary on Plato's Republic by Proclus (d. 485 CE), which takes the form of a series of essays, is the only sustained treatment of the dialogue to survive from antiquity. This three-volume edition presents the first complete English translation of Proclus' text, together with a general introduction that argues for the unity of Proclus' Commentary and orients the reader to the use that the Neoplatonists made of Plato's Republic in their educational program. Each volume is completed (...) by a Greek word index and an English-Greek glossary that will help non-specialists to track the occurrence of key terms throughout the translated text. The first volume of the edition presents Proclus' essays on the point and purpose of Plato's dialogue, the arguments against Thrasymachus in Book I, the rules for correct poetic depictions of the divine, a series of problems about the status of poetry across all Plato's works, and finally an essay arguing for the fundamental agreement of Plato's philosophy with the divine wisdom of Homer which is, in Proclus' view, allegorically communicated through his poems. (shrink)

In this review essay, I first set out and then subject to criticism the main claims advanced by William Talbott in his excellent recent book, “Which Rights Should be Universal?”. Talbott offers a conception of basic universal human rights as the minimally necessary and sufficient conditions to political legitimacy. I argue that his conception is at once too robustly liberal and democratic and too inattentive to key features of the rule of law to play this role. I suggest that John (...) Rawls’s conception of human rights comes closer to hitting the mark Talbott sets for himself and that Talbott incorrectly rejects Rawls’s view. I conclude that what likely divides Talbott and Rawls is that Rawls, but not Talbott, explicitly frames the inquiry into the minimally necessary and sufficient conditions to political legitimacy in terms of a liberal democratic people attempting to determine, as a matter of its just foreign policy, whether or not to recognize other organized polities as independent and self-determining within the international order. (shrink)

The occurrence of hiccoughs (hiccups) is very widespread and yet their neuronal origin and physiological significance are still unresolved. Several hypotheses have been proposed. Here we consider a phylogenetic perspective, starting from the concept that the ventilatory central pattern generator of lower vertebrates provides the base upon which central pattern generators of higher vertebrates develop. Hiccoughs are characterized by glottal closure during inspiration and by early development in relation to lung ventilation. They are inhibited when the concentration of inhaled CO2 (...) is increased and they can be abolished by the drug baclofen (an agonist of the GABAB receptor). These properties are shared by ventilatory motor patterns of lower vertebrates, leading to the hypothesis that hiccough is the expression of archaic motor patterns and particularly the motor pattern of gill ventilation in bimodal breathers such as most frogs. A circuit that can generate hiccoughs may persist in mammals because it has permitted the development of pattern generators for other useful functions of the pharynx and chest wall muscles, such as suckling or eupneic breathing. BioEssays 25:182–188, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

When commenting on Aristotle Ph. 1.3, 187a1, Simplicius in Ph. 1.3, 146, 29–147,2 establishes an equivalence between the shining «silver egg» (ὤεον ἀργύφεον) of Orpheus (fr. 70 Kern) and the Parmenidean being or, rather, one of the determinations with which Parmenides, in the section of his Poem devoted to the so-called Way of Truth, indicates the ἐόν, i.e., «resembling the mass of a well-rounded sphere» (εὐκύκλου σφαίρης ἐναλίγκιον ὄγκωι – DK 28 B 8.43). The equivalence established here is found in (...) the great digression about Parmenides (in Ph. 142, 28–148, 24), where Simplicius puts forward an interpretation of Parmenides that identifies the Parmenidean being-one (τὸ ἓν ὄν) with the intelligible (τὸ νοητόν), which, in another passages of the same commentary, is also qualified with the metaphysical concept of “unified” (τὸ ἡνωμένον) that is taken from Damascius. The aim of the present paper is to trace back the Neo-Platonic assumptions of this identification. In particular, we will focus on Damascius Pr. 2.55.40, 14–19 and 3.123.160, 1–3 Westerink, since these passages contain insights into the Orphic theology that is referred to as “usual”, “common” or “rhapsodic”, as well as a contextual “translation” of various Orphic concepts (e.g. ὤεον ἀργύφεον) in terms of Neo-Platonic metaphysics. The metaphysical transposition of the mythical image of the silver egg goes back, however, to Proclus (in Ti. 1.428, 8–9), who assumes the identity between Plato’s being (“being in the primary sense”, τὸ πρώτως [...] ὄν) and the Orphic egg (ταὐτὸν τό τε Πλάτωνος ὂν καὶ τὸ Ὀρφικὸν ὠόν). One cannot, at the same time, exclude a priori the possibility that the Orphic motif of the silver egg circulated in the Magna Graecia of Parmenides already from at least the 6th century BC. It is possible, as Colli hypothesised, that already Ibycus (who certainly knew Orpheus, fr. 25 Page) betrays a certain knowledge of it in fr. 4.4–5 Page, where we find the expression ἐν ὠέωι ἀργυρέωι. This article demonstrates that Proclus and Damascius embedded the Orphic concept of ὤεον ἀργύφεον into their Neo-Platonic metaphysics by showing its potential for speculative order. (shrink)

Rationale, aims and objectives This randomized controlled trial was designed to evaluate the 2-year costs and effects of a proactive, public health nursing case management approach compared with a self-directed approach for 129 single parents (98% were mothers) on social assistance in a Canadian setting. A total of 43% of these parents had a major depressive disorder and 38% had two or three other health conditions at baseline. Methods Study participants were recruited over a 12 month period and randomized into (...) two groups: one receiving proactive public health nursing and one which did not. Results At 2 years, 69 single parents with 123 children receiving proactive public health nursing (compared with 60 parents with 91 children who did not receive public health nursing services) showed a slightly greater reduction in dysthymia and slightly higher social adjustment. There was no difference between the public health and control groups in total per parent annual cost of health and support services. However, costs were averted due to a 12% difference in non-use of social assistance in the previous 12 months for parents in the public health nursing group. This translates into an annual cost saving of $240 000 (Canadian) of costs averted within 1 year for every 100 parents. Conclusions In the context of a system of national health and social insurance, this study supports the fact that it is no more costly to proactively service this population of parents on social assistance. (shrink)

Trees architectural study shows gradients in the meristematic activity. This activity is described by the number of internodes per growth unit, which is considered as the output of a dynamic random process. Several species were observed, which led us to propose and then estimate some mathematical models. Computing the functioning of a tree in a given environment therefore involves finding the probability function of the meristems and following the evolution of the parameters of this law along the botanical gradients (order, (...) trend, acrotony) within its architecture. (shrink)

A new formulation of the cusp catastrophe is used to model the fundamental biological functions of predation and reproduction. This new representation lies on the decomposition of the overall cusp potential in two component potentials individualising the conflicting pregnances. It results in a more accurate and less problematic description than the original proposition by R. Thom, mostly due to the use of parameters with strong physical and evocative power. For instance, it gives a very suggestive account for such biologically significant (...) processes as digestion and assimilation, or pregnancy and delivery. Two couples of parameters are used in the new representation of the cusp: one defines the exact shape of the conflicting attractors which symbolises genetic coding, the other controls the deformation of -and interaction between- the two attractors and represent hormonal effects. This new description strikingly echoes Heidegger's philosophical thought on ontological difference, by giving a representation of the distinct concepts of entity and Being. It thus precludes a previous criticism concerning the impossibility for catastrophic models to depict the entity level. Such a type of representation might be useful in translating syntactical-semantic models of catastrophe theory into computer language. (shrink)

Dogmatic Metaphysics and Tschirnhaus's M ethodology MARTIN SCHONFELD ACCORDING TO STANDARD COMMENTARIES, Tschirnhaus's main work, Medicina mentis, ~ supposedly furnished the methodological basis for the Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics. ~ Christian Wolff and his disciples, at any rate, preferred to think so. Wolff taught classes on Tschirnhaus and claimed that he had developed his own tenets on the basis of Tschirnhaus's ideas; Johann Christoph Gottsched praised the Medicina mentis as the basic methodology of the Wolffian enlightenment.3 Mirroring these views, W. Wundt and (...) H. J. de Vleeschauwer saw in Tschirnhaus the inventor of the "geometric method" adopted by the School Philosophers.4 According to M. ' Medicina Mentis, sive Tentamen genuinae Logicae, in qua disseritur de Methodo detegendi incoKaitas veritates, Amsterdam, 1687. Second and revised edition, Medicina Mentis, sive Artis inveniendi Praecepta generalia, Leipzig, 1695. ~For example, cf. Wilhelm Windelband, Geschichte der Philosophie, 3~o-33 and 356; Friedrich Ueberweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, III: ~95-97, 3 x~ 34o-43; A. Robert Caponigri, A History of Western Philosophy (Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame.. (shrink)

Gifford Pinchot was a noted forestry expert, a conservationist, and governor of Pennsylvania. Rachel Carson, celebrated for her groundbreaking books that raised awareness of the negative human impact on the natural environment, was born, raised, and educated in Pennsylvania. Although these Pennsylvanians are both environmentalists, they approached the natural environment very differently and embody two main positions in contemporary environmental ethics. After situating their environmental legacies among contemporary environmental ethics, this paper then discusses implications of the irreconcilability of their positions (...) on environmental progress; the concept of environmental legacy; and the importance of reflecting on the lives of environmentalists like Pinchot and Carson. (shrink)