The North American environmental movement has historically sought to redress the depletion and degradation of natural resources that has been the legacy of the industrial revolution. Predominant in this approach has been the preservation of wilderness, conservation of species biodiversity and the restoration of natural ecosystems. While the results of such activity have often been commendable, several scholars have pointed out that the environmental movement has inherited an unfortunate bias against urban environments, and consequently, a blind spot to ways in (...) which densely populated built spaces can serve to enhance rather than degrade efforts to achieve sustainability. After exploring this concern we argue that environmental architecture can serve as a counter-balance to this bias, focused, as it is, on the ways in which the construction and organisation of built spaces for humans can help or hinder the pursuit of environmental priorities. But if environmental architecture is to take this role then it must be understood in a broader context, one which does not exclude other moral, political and aesthetic values in the production of human environments. We will highlight several examples of how environmental architecture has combined success and failure at taking a broader view of environmental questions, with a specific focus on one green skyscraper that may be good for the natural environment but not necessarily for the human environment of the city. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this study is to explore the validity and reliability of the School Participant Empowerment Scale amongst science and mathematics teachers. Using a sample of 257 elementary a...

My title is taken from the frontispiece to Ogilby's translation of Aesop ; since every Renaissance poet believed the statement to be true, let me start with my own example. John Denham's only play, The Sophy, published in August 1642, is a tale about the perils of jealousy. The good prince Mirza, after a miraculous victory over the Turks, returns in glory to his father's court, but leaves it shortly thereafter. In his absense, Haly, the evil courtier, follows a friend's (...) advice to " work on [the king's] fears, till fear hath made him cruel"1 and poisons the king's mind with jealousy against his son. Mirza returns only to be brutally blinded and killed, and the emperor soon dies stricken with remorse. Now it happens that Parliament justified all its actions in the months preceding the civil war on the grounds of the "fears and jealousies" that the king had inspired. Charles was incensed by the slogan and claimed angrily that he, if anyone, had the most cause for fears and jealousies.2 Denham obviously decided that here was the all-consuming topic around which a predominantly royalist drama could be written. He followed what I believe was the standard practice - the method that Fulke Greville said Sidney used and that Congreve repeated at the end of the century when he declared of The Double Dealer that "I design'd the Moral first, and to that Moral I invented the Fable."3 He found a plot in Thomas Herbert's Travels into Diverse Parts of Asia that recorded some terrible cruelties and catastrophes caused by jealousy, and he added the point that the emperor's mind had been wrought upon by his counselor. There is no evidence that the play was ever acted, but the most casual reader would have said to himself, "Yes, history reminds us that states destroy themselves through fears and jealousies, and we should abate our own before it is too late." · 1. Sir John Denham, The Poetical Works, ed. Theodore Howard Banks, 2d ed. , p.245. The references to fear and jealousy are so ubiquitous in the play that they need not be listed here.· 2. On March 1, 1642, in the angriest of his replies to Parliament so far, Charles exclaimed, "You speake of Jealousies and Feares: Lay your hands to your hearts, and aske your selves whether I may not likewise be disturbed with Feares and Jealousies: And if so, I assure you this Message hath nothing lessened them" . Although phrases like "distempers and jealousies" had been used earlier, Clarendon on two occasions is quite specific that "fears and jealousies" were "the new words which served to justify all indispositions and to excuse all disorders" in January 1642 . Taken with other evidence, Clarendon's remarks strongly suggest that The Sophy was written after Coopers Hill, and during seven months preceding its publication in August 1642.· 3. William Congreve, The Complete Plays, ed. Herbert Davis , p. 119. And compare John Donne in Sermons, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson are George R. Potter , 9:274: "All wayes of teaching are Rule and Example: and though ordinarily the Rule be first placed, yet the Rule it selfe is made of Examples...for, Example in matter of Doctrine, is as Assimiliation in matter of Nourishment; The Example makes that that is proposed for our learning and farther instruction, like something which we knew before, as Assimilation makes that meat, which we have received and digested, like those parts which are in our bodies before."John M. Wallace, author of Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell and articles on Milton, Dryden Denham, Traherne, and Arnold, is professor of English at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

The permutation of basic atoms—nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and phosphorus―into the biomolecules DNA and RNA, subsequently evolved in cells and brains, defining the origin of life and intelligence, remains unexplained. Equally the origin of the genetic information and the intertwined nature of ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ involved in the evolution of bio-molecules and the cells are shrouded in mystery. This treatise aims at exploring individual and swarm behaviour patterns which potentially hint at as yet unknown biological principles. It reviews theories of (...) evolution with perspectives from the earth sciences, commencing with the earliest observed records of life. This is followed by reviews and discussion of the building blocks of life, marine and terrestrial communities, the arthropods, birds and finally humans. It is suggested that, further to the mutation/natural selection processes established by Darwin and Wallace, an understanding of the evolution of intelligence remains little understood. A directionality of evolutionary trajectories is evident, not least the purposeful thinking process of humans as well as animals. It is not clear how directional intelligence, manifested for example by the collective intelligence of arthropod colonies, has evolved from mutation/natural selection processes. Potential clues for the understanding of life and evolution are provided by Aristotle’s dictum of “the whole being greater than the sum of the parts”, Niels Bohr’s principle of quantum complementarity and George Ellis’ theory of top-down causality. Inherent in the question of the origin of life is an anthropocentric bias, related to the self-referential Anthropic Principle and theological paradigms of man’s supposed dominion over all other species. The Anthropic Principle, however, should be capable of being circumvented using the scientific falsification method, assuming universal verified constants of physics. The phenomenon of the human mastery of fire and the splitting of the atom, leading to the seventh major mass extinction of species, remains incomprehensible. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s work on moral responsibility is well-known. However, an important implication of the landmark “Freedom and Resentment” has gone unnoticed. Specifically, a natural development of Strawson’s position is that we should understand being morally responsible as having externalistically construed pragmatic criteria, not individualistically construed psychological ones. This runs counter to the contemporary ways of studying moral responsibility. I show the deficiencies of such contemporary work in relation to Strawson by critically examining the positions of John Martin Fischer and Mark (...) Ravizza, R. Jay Wallace, and Philip Pettit for problems due to individualistic assumptions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:130 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY statesmen who, for reasons of international politics, would wish this to be so; but if it were so, it would not in itself mean that American philosophy was any better. Although it is a useful literary device to select one theme by which to discuss major figures in a given period, and while the particular theme that Smith has selected is fairly appropriate (once we (...) have reconciled ourselves to the loss of Santayana), it is, I think, a mistake to overlook the diversity that has characterized American philosophic effort from colonial days to the present. But these criticisms, even if just, cannot detract from an extremely wellorganized, beautifully expressed, and immensely readable discussion of four or five American philosophers. Whether there is one spirit or several, its (or theirs) expression in American philosophers has been handsomely dealt with by Professor Smith. GERALD RUNKLE Southern Illinois University The Varieties of Goodness. By Georg Henrik von Wright. (New York: The Humanities Press, International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method [12], 1963. Pp. xiv + 222. $5.50.) To review this volume critically and adequately is out of the question here; it is a major contribution to the theory of values and deserves to be studied carefully from this point of view. Here we can merely call attention to its historical significance and relation to other classics. It already has won a place in the history of the analysis of the good and should take its place in the series of classics, especially in the series which von Wright himself suggests--the ethical writing of Aristotle, Kant, and G. E. Moore. The relation to Aristotle is most evident and most rewarding, and the following comments are made in order to stress this historical relation. In 1959 and 1960 the author delivered the Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews and entitled them "Norms and Values, an Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Morals and Legislation." This volume contains the second series, the one on values; the first, on norms, is to follow. The fact that the lectures on norms came first and this publication on values comes first is philosophically significant. A system of ethics, according to von Wright, is a body of normative concepts whose aim is practical rather than theoretical. But this volume, he insists, is not a system of ethics but an inquiry into how judgments of value are true or false. This conceptual analysis of the good lays a "conceptual foundation" for a theory of norms. Values and norms are definitely distinguished and given independent analyses. The transition from BOOK REVIEWS 131 an analysis of the varieties of goodness to the theory of norms is indicated in the last three chapters (VIII, 'good' and 'must'; IX, Duty; X, Justice), but the theory itself is to come in the second volume, based on the first series of the Gifford Lectures. Both volumes are intended as "conceptual analyses": instrumental value, technical excellence, beneficence, hedonic good, good man, good action, etc. --these varieties of good are treated here not as "states of affairs" but as concepts (p. 91). Though the general range of subject-matter is similar to that of Aristotle's Ethics, von Wright wishes to be clear in distinguishing between the concepts or judgments of goodness and the actual affairs of morals and legislation, a distinction which is ambiguous in Aristotle. Subjectmatter for Aristotle is "'legomena" and in practical or teleological sciences (such as is the case of this volume) the legomena (things-said) become in effect prolegomena. But for von Wright a philosophical analysis should concern itself not with the arts of morals and politics themselves but solely with their "conceptual foundations." The notion that practical affairs have conceptual foundations (not mere formulations) is characteristic of contemporary analysis and would probably be repudiated by Aristotle, who was careful to keep legomenaand phenomena intimately related; if either were foundational to the other, the arts themselves and not their concepts or "verbalizations " would be the basic factor. It is significant that even in von Wright's meticulous analysis, the distinction between the concepts and the affairs conceptualized is less evident in the later chapters, and the problems of the true... (shrink)

But play, you must,A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,A tune upon the blue guitarOf things exactly as they are.—Wallace Stevens.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Material Life of Roman Slaves by Sandra R. Joshel, Lauren Hackworth PetersenJuan P. LewisSandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hackworth Petersen. The Material Life of Roman Slaves. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. xv + 286 pp. 16 color plates. Hardback, £65.00.This is an original book, even though it is does not contain new research or new findings. The title may be somewhat misleading. Rather than (...) a general study of Roman slaves’ material culture, the reader will find here an anthropology of the architecture of the spaces and built environments in which slaves dwelt and toiled (5). Thus, the focus is not so much on the material conditions in which slaves lived or the artifacts they worked with, but on the layout of a small set of first century c.e. houses, streets and economic units, mostly found in the Bay of Naples, Ostia, and the ager Cosanus. The study of space serves Joshel and Hackworth Petersen as an attempt to reconstruct slaves’ responses, through adaptation and challenge, to the choreography of movements imposed on them by their masters.Methodologically, this investigation operates on the distinction developed by Michel De Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life [1988]) between the strategies of the powerful to delimit a space in which power relations can be managed to their own advantage and the tactics of the weak to seize the opportunities to use an imposed spatial order for their own ends (8). The authors see their work as “an act of remembrance” (222). Their aim is to make invisible slaves visible again. Slaves, they contend, have not only been silenced in classical texts written by and from the point of view of slave owners. In the process of collecting and analyzing ancient material, and in the crafting of their historic narratives, modern archaeologists, art historians, and even tourism authorities have “actively, if unwittingly made [slaves] disappear” (3). To redress the imbalance, Joshel and Hackworth Petersen walk away from mere static descriptions of archaeological sites and concentrate on the dynamic of slaves’ movements within those spaces.Although the authors rely on other archaeologists and historians’ fieldwork and interpretation of the material remains, they themselves visited most of the sites and buildings they describe. The book is profusely illustrated with sixteen plates and 170 figures, among which we find the authors’ own photographs of some of the structures they discuss, such as doorways, storage rooms, stairs, porticos, kitchens, street benches, and fountains. Other illustrations consist of maps of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Ostia (19–21), street plans of Pompeii (plates VI, VII, and XI), and building plans of the houses, workshops and villae dealt with in the body of the text. Constant cross-reference to these images and drawings helps the reader to see and understand space in three dimensions, something [End Page 709] that it is not always easy to elicit from illustrations and archaeological reports in which findings are presented in a two-dimensional plane.The book is divided into six chapters. The Introduction (chap. 1) lays out the aims of the book and the methodological approach chosen by the authors. In the next four chapters, the discussion of built environments moves from the inside to the outside and from an urban set-up to the rural world. Chapter 2 focuses on the architectural layout of houses from Campania and Rome’s port-town, Ostia: namely, the houses of the Menander, Julius Polybius, Sutoria Primigenia, the Smith, Lucretius Fronto, the Ceii, the Vetii, and the Gilded Cupids in Pompeii; the houses of the Corinthian Atrium, the Mosaic Atrium, the Alcove, the Beautiful Courtyard, the Samnite, and the Grand Portal in Herculaneum; and the Ostian house of the Muses.The analysis of the Roman domestic landscape uses Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s two axes of differentiation between the grand and the humble and the public and the private (Houses and Societies in Pompeii and Herculaneum [1994]:38), but the emphasis is on the slaves’ perspective within this framework, rather than the owners’—even though the latter is not absent. Particular attention is given to doorways and how they helped to choreograph movements through their diverse heights and hierarchical positions... (shrink)

This collection of essays provides a comprehensive view of the economic thought of the Scottish Enlightenment. Organized as a chronological account of the rise and progress of political economy in eighteenth century Scotland, each chapter discusses the way in which the moral and economic improvement of the Scottish nation became a common concern. Contributors not only explore the economic discourses of David Hume, James Steuart and Adam Smith but also consider the neglected economic writings of Andrew Fletcher, Robert (...) class='Hi'>Wallace, Francis Hutcheson, William Robertson, John Millar and Dugald Stewart. This book addresses the question of how these economic writings interacted with the moral, political and historical arguments of the time and shows how contemporary issues related to the union with England, natural jurisprudence, classical republicanism and manners and civilization all contained an economic dimension. Key chapters include: The ancient modern controversy in the Scottish Enlightenment The 'Scottish Triangle' in the shaping of political economy: David Hume, Sir James Steuart and Adam Smith Civilization and history in Lord Kames and William Robertson Adam Smith in Japan This view of the origin of economic science in Britain is markedly different from traditional accounts and will be of interest to economic, political and social historians. (shrink)

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) open up the possibility of new forms of relationship and engagement, which form part of the sociality of modern society, leading some to characterize this as a transition to an "information society", a "network society", or a "third industrial revolution". This has implications for Social Quality, especially in terms of social cohesion, social inclusion and social empowerment. Drawing upon recent research we find that ICTs have added new dimensions to social life in ways that go (...) beyond the original formulations of the digital divide. Conversely, Social Quality can also add important insights into our understanding of the relationship between society and technology. The article argues that discussions of Social Quality should take these dimensions into account. (shrink)

Written by experts in the field, this volume presents a comprehensive investigation into the relationship between argumentation theory and the philosophy of mathematical practice. Argumentation theory studies reasoning and argument, and especially those aspects not addressed, or not addressed well, by formal deduction. The philosophy of mathematical practice diverges from mainstream philosophy of mathematics in the emphasis it places on what the majority of working mathematicians actually do, rather than on mathematical foundations. -/- The book begins by first challenging the (...) assumption that there is no role for informal logic in mathematics. Next, it details the usefulness of argumentation theory in the understanding of mathematical practice, offering an impressively diverse set of examples, covering the history of mathematics, mathematics education and, perhaps surprisingly, formal proof verification. From there, the book demonstrates that mathematics also offers a valuable testbed for argumentation theory. Coverage concludes by defending attention to mathematical argumentation as the basis for new perspectives on the philosophy of mathematics. ​. (shrink)

In eighteen lively chapters, Andrew Pessin examines the most unusual ideas from the ancient Greeks and contemporary thinkers, how they have influenced the course of Western thought, and why, despite being so odd, they just might be correct. ·Time is an illusion. ·Your thoughts do not exist inside your head. ·There is no physical world ·And more!

_A penetrating and provocative exploration of human mortality, from Epicurus to Joan Didion_ For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will eventually face in death. Can any of these consolations honestly reconcile us to our inevitable (...) demise? In this timely book, Andrew Stark tests the psychological truth of these consolations and searches our collective literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions for answers to the question of how we, in the twenty-first century, might accept our mortal condition. Ranging from Epicurus and Heidegger to bucket lists, the flaming out of rock stars, and the retiring of sports jerseys, Stark’s poignant and learned exploration shows how these consolations, taken together, reveal death as a blessing no matter how much we may love life. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 279—285. Concerning its Transitive Nature, the Conversion of Native Americans of Spanish Colonial California, Indoctrinated Catholicism, & the Creation There’s no direct archaeological evidence that Jesus ever existed. 1 I memorized the Act of Contrition. I don’t remember it now, except the beginning: Forgive me Father for I have sinned . . . This was in preparation for the Sacrament of Holy Reconciliation, where in a confessional I confessed my sins to Father Scott, who looked like Jesus, (...) at least in Western cultural representations of Jesus since the middle ages, and if Jesus put on a few pounds. Father Scott was long-haired, redheaded, bearded, chubby, and tall. When he left church with the procession of altar servers and Eucharistic ministers, yelling, “Sing a Good Song Unto the Lord,” he smiled, hands folded, and he gazed over his parishioners, and bounced along. For four months every year he lived among the Crow Nation in Montana, where towards the end of his tenure at Our Lady of Refuge, they adopted him as an honorary member of their tribe. * This is the prayer we chanted, holding hands, every night before dinner: Bless us oh Lord, for these our gifts, which we are about to receive, our bounty through Christ, our Lord, Amen. Then we all said, God bless the cook! When we were with my grandparents, Grandpa said, God bless Chicky, and Holly, and Harvey, and Boots—all the dead dogs. * My sister tells me that she sits next to a handsome man on a flight across the country. After chitchat, she withdraws her book. She’s reading Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography . After a few moments, the handsome man also reads from his book—his leather-bound Bible. Sister thinks, Oh, Jesus—too bad. She falls asleep. Later, settled in Nashville, she opens her volume and out falls a Jesus-covered card that reads, You can still find God and Salvation! Because that handsome God-fearing young man saw that word— pornography . * I suppose Father Jim’s dark hair, beard, and glasses made me think doctoral-ly of him. He called while I was in the midst of a breakup, after I’d twice attempted suicide, and my mother was desperate for help. She somehow found and phoned him. And Jim, now years out of Our Lady of Refuge’s parish, twenty years since my baptism, years even since he’d left the priesthood and the Catholic faith, still made the effort to bring me back into the fold. He said, “Have you seen a priest?” I did not respond, as I was more shocked to hear his voice than anything, so I said, “How are you, Father Jim? Sorry, I guess I shouldn’t call you ‘Father.’” And I said, “Why did you leave the priesthood? Do you have a girlfriend?” He said that I should call him just “Jim.” He said, “Do you need someone to talk to?” I said, “Not really.” He said, “Call your mother; she’s worried about you.” That was the last time I talked to Father Jim. * Mother let me know just how disappointed Jesus was. I cried and cried, and said I was sorry. Into my hands she placed my missal, ordered forty Rosaries. She said next Saturday I would go to confession. I hated confession. Who wouldn’t? * I realize, of course, that this page is a kind of confessional. * The Kumeyaay, Ipai, Tipai, Chumash, Esselen, Rumsen—all Native Americans of Alta California—shared similarities in their religions. Southern Californian tribes made use of Datura, or jimpson weed, a hallucinogen, for religious rituals. In the creation, God made brother sky and sister earth. Brother and sister mated, and sister gave birth to all things on Earth, including people, but it was difficult to distinguish people from all other aspects of Earth because everything was alive: granite and obsidian, the Pacific and its waves, the San Diego and Los Angeles Rivers. Wiyot—a hero—was very powerful, born from lightning, the son of the Creator and a virgin. When Wiyot thought that human women’s legs were more beautiful than Frog’s, Frog became jealous and poisoned Wiyot. The dying Wiyot went to all the people’s villages, and he distributed his power among them. He said, “When I die, I should be cremated.” The people built the fire and funeral pyre. When the fire was ready, and the people about to place Wiyot’s body upon it, Coyote came and snatched away Wiyot’s heart. * My friend Nick told me once how he ate some jimpson weed and that he hallucinated for three days. His family took a road trip and, while driving over the Sierra Nevada mountains, he kept seeing dinosaurs roaming the open meadows and charging down snowy slopes. So it’s no wonder that Native Americans who ingested this plant would have developed religion. * Walking Castroville’s streets after school I got into fights but mostly watched other boys scrabbling on the asphalt. I went to Burger King for Whoppers. Me and my friends cussed. Antonio admonished me when I said, “damn,” while strutting a sidewalk alongside the church. He said, “Jaime”—pronounced Hi-May, which was what all the Mexicans called me—“you’re crazy, eh. Don’t cuss at the church.” He meant while at church, as in, within its vicinity. I said, “We’re not in church.” Once we’d crossed the street, Tony said, “Damn dude, you’re fuckin crazy!” * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra raised the Eucharistic goblet to his lips, and candlelight danced on the blood’s tiny waves. Incense clouded the church so completely that some of the Pame natives grew nauseous. So, too, felt Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra later that night, as he bent over a ceramic bowl and vomited blood, not only the Lord’s, but his own, for poison had laced the sacred vessel into which he poured the sacrament. The physician tending to the sick prelate urged him to take the remedy he’d prepared. But Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra refused, said that he would pray, for he had never taken any medicine in his life, and he never would. * The Chumash of El Valle de Los Osos called themselves the Stishni, separating themselves from Chumash of other regions, those varying tribes of the central California coast that spoke mutually unintelligible dialects of their Hokan language. This made learning their languages impossible for the Spanish friars, to say nothing of translating the Doctrina. Thus the priests baptized few natives, despite the help that the tribes offered the fledgling settlements in the form of meat and acorn meal, which the Spaniards found repugnant. Some from these cultures, feeling threatened by the newcomers, shot flaming arrows into the thatched roofs of the mission structures. And why wouldn’t they feel threatened when priests chastised them for performing, for example, their Coyote Dance, wherein a man donning a coyote-skin-and-skull costume dances while a singer sings his tale, which laments the human feces strewn imaginatively about the Earth? Coyote, meantime, tries to get an onlooker to lick his genitals, and finally engages in public sexual intercourse with a female tribe member or two, then ends the dance by defecating. Though the Franciscans called such forbidden acts devilry , the Chumash maintained their Datura cult religion, along with the enforced Christianity. For the Chumash, the Earth was made of two enormous snakes that caused earthquakes when they slithered past one another—a vast reptilian tectonics. In the 20th century, long after Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra and his cohorts had died, when asked by an anthropologist about religious contradictions, conflating the Datura and Christian cults, a Chumash man replied, incredulous: “But these are two different religions.” * When Portolá ordered that if by March 19th, the feast day of St. Joseph, the San Antonio had not arrived in San Diego Bay to relieve them, the Sacred Expedition to Nueva California would be abandoned, Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra prayed a novena for San José’s intercession. And lo, a lookout sighted the San Antonio ’s sails—what seemed to the priest a miracle—that very Saint’s feast day. Europeans would stay in California, and Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra would continue to reap a great harvest of souls for the Lord. By the end of mission secularization in 1836—sixty-six years after the San Antonio rescued the Spaniards—Native American populations in California had declined by seventy-three percent. * When Peter the Aleut would not renounce his Eastern Orthodox faith the padre of San Francisco had a toe severed from each foot with each refusal, totaling ten. The native Ohlones employed in this gruesome task—their obsidian chiseled knives tearing through skin and grinding bone—continued as per their orders, and cut off also each of Peter’s fingers (equals a total of twenty refusals). They quartered the martyr, spilled his bowels, as if from bear attack, attack by a bear in the shape of a Catholic. * Blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra absolutely believed that the slow rate of conversion for the native people was due to the influence of the Devil, who had been outraged by the coming of the Catholics to California, this region that he had long held in his dominion. * In his reception speech for the Nobel Prize for Literature, John Steinbeck said, “Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope. So that today, St. John the Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the end is the Word, and the Word is Man—and the Word is with Men.” * In 1602, when Sebastián Vizcaíno and his friars sang mass on Catalina Island, as many as a hundred Pimungans witnessed the rite, asking by signs what it was about. According to Vizcaíno’s records, the Californians marveled not a little at the idea of Heaven and at the image of Jesus crucified. * Vizcaíno was brought to a prairie on Santa Catalina Island where the Pimungans worshipped their sun god. Upon the prairie they had placed an icon, a headless figure with horns protruding from the body, a figure that Vizcaíno predictably described as a demon. The Pimungans urged Vizcaíno not to approach the image of their deity, but he ignored them. He placed his crucifix against the wooden figurine and prayed the Our Father. Vizcaíno told the natives that his prayer was from Heaven, and that their god was the Devil. Vizcaíno held out his crucifix, encouraging the Pimungans to touch it and receive Jesus. He pointed at the sky and indicated Heaven. The Pimungans worshipped a sun deity, so they were impressed with this white man and his description of his god, for their gods seemed to be one and the same. It’s no wonder then that Vizcaíno’s diary reports the natives being pleased with this exchange. “Surely,” the diary says, “they will be converted to our Holy Faith.” * The Miwok women wailed and scratched at their faces when their men consorted with Sir Francis Drake and the other Englishmen who had landed on California’s coast in the summer of 1579. “The blood streaming downe along their brests, besides despoiling the upper parts of their bodies of those single coverings . . .they would with furie cast themselves upon the ground . . . on hard stones, knobby hillocks, stocks of wood, and pricking bushes.” Drake and his men fell themselves to their knees in prayer, their eyes Heavenward, so that the natives might see they prayed to God and they too might worship God then their eyes that had been so blinded by the deceiver might be opened. * Father Fray Antonio de la Ascención—Carmelite friar in Vizcaíno’s party—writes that the Indians of California can “easily and with very little labor be taught our Holy Catholic faith, and that they would receive it well and lovingly.” He calls for two hundred older and honorable soldiers to ensure brotherhood during the conquest, so that peace and love—the best tools to pacify pagans—should reign. The religious, the friar says, should likewise be wise and loving to easily quell animosities between Spaniards and the heathen, and therefore avoid war. The Spaniards should bring with them trinkets—beads, mirrors, knives—to distribute amongst the gentiles, so that they might come to love the Christians, and see “that they are coming to their lands to give them that of which they bring, and not to take away the Indians’ possessions, and may understand that they are seeking the good of their souls.” No women are to accompany the conquest, says Father Fray Antonio, “to avoid offenses to God.” * In 1955 Wallace Stevens admitted himself to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. There, it’s rumored he converted to Catholicism before dying of stomach cancer, exclaiming to his priest after the baptism, “Now I am in the fold.” Stevens’s late-career poems seem less cynical, more in awe of being and death (read “Metaphor as Degeneration” from The Auroras of Autumn ). He could have chosen from at least three secular hospitals in Hartford at the time. * I was reading Stevens’s Collected Poems when I joined eHarmony and listed that as my “currently reading” book among the “more than twelve” books a year that I would read. I fell in love with my wife when she said, “Are you sending your work out to literary journals?” Prior to this, the first girl I talked to on the phone, when I explained my doctoral exams, said, “So, you’re like, reading Stephen King and stuff?” When I said not exactly she responded defensively: “He must be doing something right, since he makes all that money.” * Mom walked me, my brother, and sister, through the Stations of the Cross. We did this on Ash Wednesdays, or whenever she thought we needed extra God after church. It might’ve happened before church, though that’s unlikely because we were always late. Anyway, it’s easiest to walk the Stations of the Cross when there’s no one else around. To walk the actual Stations means one goes to Jerusalem and walks the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the Stations elsewhere—usually paintings, or low-relief sculptures upon church walls—serve as a kind of virtual Dolorosa. Mom held our hands and started from the rear of Our Lady of Refuge: the First Station. Mom said we should say a prayer at each Station and to think of all the pain Jesus went through so that we could go to Heaven. It was hard to keep thinking about that one thing for so long. My mind went to that Saturday’s little league game, to the donut and chocolate milk (our after-church reward from Castroville Bakery), and as I grew older I thought about girls. When you’re thirteen you can’t not think about the girl’s butt in the pew in front of yours as she kneels and stands to pray throughout mass. * It grew increasingly juvenile to lie awake at night daring myself to utter a simple sentence. Even if I said I didn’t believe in God, wouldn’t He know the truth? He was omniscient, like a narrator. Even the idea of Him as a him ceased making sense. Not only did this come with a budding realization of my paternalistic culture, but due to the simple question of why? If God was everything, everywhere, all knowing, then why would he be a man? There’s that question: If God is a man then God must have a penis, and if so, what for? * The Catholic Church incorporates some modern scientific research into its dogma concerning the formation of the Universe, Solar System, and Earth, as well as evolution. According to Catholic doctrine, in approximately the fifth millennia BCE, humans began to worship the one true God. Those humans were Adam and Eve, though the Church says humans had been around for thousands of years prior to Adam and Eve. The Church claims to be infallible. Every time the Church changes its doctrine it remains infallible. * One Catholic writer, Tom Meagher, writes that “Modernism[—]the idea that we come to our beliefs individually through emotional or personal experiences[—]has crept into our Catholic schools.” * Catholics believe that evil spirits, given power through Original Sin, can imbue ordinary inanimate objects of everyday use. Thus, such objects should be blessed in order to induce in them the desire to serve the good. Such objects are not limited to, but include, “new ships and boats, railways and trains, bridges, fountains, wells, cornmills, limekilns, smelting furnaces, telegrams, steam engines, and machines for providing electricity.” * In The Sound of Music Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer sing together: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could...” * To explain competing theories on the very early universe, and pre-verse would be another book. What was the inflaton? Did (mem)branes collide, initiating the Big Bang, as opposed to Lemaître’s primordial atom, a singularity? Without a unified theory there’s gravity hanging out there, fucking everything up. We cannot make sense of the mechanics of the Planck Epoch—0-10-34 seconds into the Universe’s creation—named for Max Planck, who stumbled into the discovery of quantum mechanics in the early twentieth century. * My students often ask if I believe in God, since I espouse evolution, the Big Bang, Science, reject a strictly biblical or creationist theory of the Universe. I tell them that yes, I believe in God, though not the God that they imagine one must believe in. * When questioned regarding the rumor that, before his death, founder of quantum mechanics Max Planck had converted to Catholicism, he replied that he did not believe “in a personal God, let alone a Christian God.” * Physicist and Catholic priest George Lemaître, who formulated the theory and wrote the 1946 book The Primeval Atom Hypothesis , was made a household name by then-detractor Fred Hoyle, who pejoratively referred to the idea as a “Big Bang.” * Suicide is a mortal sin. To end one’s own life one must have despair, which is to lose hope, which is to lose faith, and to disbelieve in God. * Archaeology has uncovered graffiti in all of California’s missions—Indian pictographs inscribed into the adobe, covered with layers of whitewash. Native deities and depictions of cultural practices show that tribespeople never fully gave up their native traditions even after baptism and coming to the missions. There was something inside Native Californians that would never die. (shrink)

Ubiquitous healthcare is an emerging area of technology that uses a large number of environmental and patient sensors and actuators to monitor and improve patients' physical and mental condition. Tiny sensors gather data on almost any physiological characteristic that can be used to diagnose health problems. This technology faces some challenging ethical questions, ranging from the small-scale individual issues of trust and efficacy to the societal issues of health and longevity gaps related to economic status. It presents particular problems in (...) combining developing computer/information/media ethics with established medical ethics. This article describes a practice-based ethics approach, considering in particular the areas of privacy, agency, equity and liability. It raises questions that ubiquitous healthcare will force practitioners to face as they develop ubiquitous healthcare systems. Medicine is a controlled profession whose practise is commonly restricted by government-appointed authorities, whereas computer software and hardware development is notoriously lacking in such regimes. (shrink)

Volume 13, Issue 4, December 2022, Page 626-635.

The present stage in the development of our society is marked by serious changes in social morality. The building of communism is entering a new stage. The man of the communist future is taking shape and being perfected before our eyes. Under these conditions, the Party - and this was emphasized at its Twenty-Fourth Congress - requires of a worker in the arts a thorough examination of contemporary life and of its hero to the full extent of his talent, and (...) demands that his ethical convictions and awareness of spirit be developed. Since this is the case, it is natural that literary criticism faces new, lofty tasks: tasks of analyzing literature in connection with those economic, societal, and moral processes which characterize social existence today. This was stated clearly both at the Party Congress and in the Resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU "On Criticism in Literature and the Arts" [O literaturno-khudozhestvennoi kritiki]. (shrink)

The essays in this collection were originally given at the international colloquium Cent Ans de Bataille: La Bataille de Cent Ans held at the Fondació Tàpies in Barcelona in September 1998. They are written from a variety of perspectives but are drawn together by the singular aim of addressing and interrogating Georges Bataille as our contemporary whose fascination with the rupture between mythical and experimental forms of discourse defines our own age as much as it did in Bataille's own time. (...) More precisely, the essays in this collection range over Bataille's status as a novelist, a poet, an art critic, a philosopher and a prophet of post-modernity with this aim in mind. They not only seek to advance and clarify debate about Bataille's present status in the post-modern canon but also shed new light on the complex relation between Bataille and the present generation of readers who have come to him through the prism of post-modernist thought. It is of significance for each writer in this collection, most crucially, that the premonition of catastrophe which defined Bataille's fluid political positions is also located between tragedy and irony. (shrink)

Newton’s laws of motion imply that any plurality of particles whatsoever considered as a whole obeys Newton’s laws. Nevertheless, I define a Newtonian composite object as an object for the purposes of Newtonian mechanics in which the atoms act in casual dependence on one another in such a way that the whole is structurally stable in many interactions. An elastic solid object is a type of a Newtonian composite object in which each atom is in stable spatial equilibrium relative to (...) the others — it can only move slightly relative to its position in the lattice of inter-atomic spatial relations. It is easy to generalize the notion of Newtonian composite object and define a general composite object. (shrink)

Kōūhala’s Līlāvaī, a romance in Prakrit verse from around 800 CE, has two types of constructions that present “syntactical difficulties” : the use of mhi in the meaning of maē, and the use of amhēhi and tumhēhi in the meanings of amhē and tumhē. This article reviews the phenomena and puts them into the context of expressions of agency in related Indic languages, arguing that Prakrit’s split ergativity is implicated in both cases. A further conclusion is that the particle hi (...) is all but absent from Kōūhala’s Prakrit. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:154, DAVID HUME'S PRACTICAL ECONOMICS As Professor Eugene Rotwein emphasized in his introduction to David Hume: Writings on Economics (Madison, 1955), the philosopher made his observations on the eve of the industrial revolution in a period of accelerating change. Very often — as in the latter half of the seventeenth century — times of flux and turmoil call forth Utopian thinkers, who propose the creation of hierarchical, communal, authoritarian (...) societies, often patterned after a supposed golden 2 age. Hume emphatically rejected Utopian schemes of this kind. "All plans of government which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind," he said, 3 "are plainly imaginary." He repeatedly warned as well that "projectors" and visionaries would disrupt the balance in government between liberty and authority. Thus he could speak of or make reference to "the visionary system or ravings of Plato" (in The Republic), the ultimate impracticality of More's Utopia and James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana, and the absurdity of Robert Wallace's theories on 4 population and the paper money schemes of John Law. Even the Utopian republics of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the Scottish patriot whom Hume admired as "a man of undaunted courage and inflexible principles," were dismissed with the others on practical grounds. The key word we have extracted from Hume's economics is practicality. Much as Hume would have liked to have designed an empirical "science of man" — which, incidentally, would have permitted him to propose his own infallible scheme of political economy — he realized that his own attempts had fallen far short of his goal. Thus his nine essays devoted especially to economics: "Of Commerce," "Of Refinement 155. in the Arts," "Of Money," "Of Interest," "Of the Balance of Trade," "Of the Jealousy of Trade," "Of Taxes," "Of Public Credit," and "Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations," are cautious in approach and pragmatic in spirit. Most of these essays were specifically designed to challenge prevailing assumptions and Utopian grand schemes of one sort or another. In "Of Commerce," for example, Hume rejects the idea that a nation can achieve greatness as an agricultural utopia. In "Of Refinement in the Arts" he takes issue with certain religious thinkers who 7 denote luxury as evil. In "Of Money" he is critical of those who believe that an injection of money into O the economy will work long-term wonders, and in "Of Interest" he argues with those who reason that the 9 plenty of money leads to low interest rates. "Of the Balance of Trade" and "Of the Jealousy of Trade" are directed against the protectionist policies of the mercantilists, "Of Taxes" rejects the French physiocratic single tax on land, and "Of Public Credit" deplores the expedients of Lord Oxford's partisans to draw bills on posterity and imprudently 12 use public credit to create paper riches. Finally, he addressed his essay, "Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations" to a refutation of the doomsday thinking of 13 the Reverend Robert Wallace of Edinburgh. This is not to imply, however, that Hume's economic thought was merely negative, or that he believed governments could safely entrust their powers over the economy to an "invisible hand." Even Hume's advocacy of free trade (which his friend and pupil Adam Smith, of course, applied with less caution) left the government with room to maneuver. Hume was willing to employ both the market and authority in designs for human progress. In seeking his mix of "action, 156. consumption, liveliness and indolence," a contradictory, counter-poised economic actor, the individual, was not a simple pleasure maximizer, nor did the acquisition of wealth and luxury make him a villain. He was a person in whom the complex springs of action, the causes of labour, needed first one, now another counter-weight. Society benefited from both 14 free trade and from tariff. Hume believed that industrial development and the advancement of commerce were the springboards to progress and happiness. Less is less and more is more; Hume never got these simple verities mixed up. "The same age," he said, "which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skillful weavers, and ship-carpenters.... The spirit of the age... (shrink)

In playfully pessimistic and thought-provoking essays, author Andrew McMurry explores a vital but fundamentally perverse human practice: destroying our planet while imagining we are not. How are humans able to do this? Entertaining Futility: Despair and Hope in the Time of Climate Change investigates the discourses of hope, progress, and optimism in the era of climate change, concepts that, McMurry argues, are polite names for blind faith, greed, and wishful thinking. The itemized list of humanity’s arrogance can quickly lead (...) to despair, so McMurry compensates by presenting the news in a darkly comic and irreverent style. McMurry believes human culture relies on a full suite of rhetorical tricks to distract us from our own demise. He investigates the role language, discourse, media, and technology play in shaping perceptions and misperceptions of our complex environmental crises. Writing in a mode that freely mixes the scholarly, fictive, poetic, and personal, McMurry draws on philosophy, history, ecology, film, science fiction, and pop culture to raise questions that are difficult to face, let alone answer. In the author’s words, “our age is utterly paralyzing unless you can crack jokes about it.” Entertaining Futility offers no easy solutions to today’s environmental calamities and, in fact, claims that perhaps the continual proposing of solutions is part of the problem. Instead, McMurry encourages readers to examine their own deeply held beliefs about the environment and the future and to look more closely at where those beliefs originate. By pulling back the curtain, he reveals the rhetorical and cultural ruses that distract us from the reality of our environmental crises. (shrink)

In his Notes on Philosophy , which he began writing in 1796, Friedrich Schlegel asserts that ‘The fact that one person understands the other is philosophically incomprehensible, but it is certainly magical.’ In the interim a large amount of philosophical effort has been expended on trying to refute Schlegel's first claim. The fact is, though, that what Michael Dummett calls a ‘fullblooded theory of meaning’ is now looking less and less like a really feasible philosophical enterprise, so Schlegel may have (...) actually been right. Dummett maintains that a ‘full-blooded theory of meaning’ ‘must give an explicit account, not only of what anyone must know in order to know the meaning of any given expression, but of what constitutes having such knowledge’. However, as I shall try to show via aspects of the hermeneutic tradition, it is precisely this way of talking about meaning and understanding that renders them incomprehensible. The differences between approaching the issue of understanding from the hermeneutic tradition and approaching it from the analytical tradition can, I want to suggest, tell us something important about the state of philosophy today. My aim is eventually to suggest that we need to understand the analytical version of the ‘linguistic turn’ in modern philosophy as a perhaps rather questionable aspect of a much more important ‘hermeneutic turn’, whose implications are now becoming apparent in more and more diverse areas of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

This thesis is a critique of functionalism in the philosophy of mind. I distinguish three tenets, or 'dogmas' of functionalism, viz: Mental states are causes of behaviour; Mental states can, in principle, be defined in non-mental terms; We understand everything, or at least everything of importance, about the mental states of people, by subsuming token mental states under one or other mental state type. ;The first dogma is rejected in the form which identifies mental state types with physical types, on (...) the ground that it commits us to the doubtful possibilities of mental states without any relevant behaviour, and behaviour without a relevant mental state . It is found to be not mandatory in the form which identifies mental state types with functional types, on the ground that the phenomena appealed to in support of the dogma is consistent with a view of mental states which endorses the dogma in at best a trite and philosophically uninteresting sense . The second dogma is rejected on the ground that cannot account for what I call the 'affective animation' of the behaviour of creatures with mental states . I develop a concept I call personal response---the kind of response we have to other human beings as opposed to inanimate nature---and defend principle which says: Commonsense understanding that someone is in a mental state requires proneness to a personal response in relation to that person. ;Certain implications are drawn from for reductionism, for meta-ethics, and for the third dogma . I argue that the third dogma is false on the around that it cannot account for our sense of the individuality of persons, unless that very notion of individuality, which comes from quite outside functionalism, is used to gloss the idea of subsumption under a type. (shrink)