This is the first English translation of Pierre Bayle's political pamphlet, Ce que c'est que la France toute catholique of 1686. Now that Bayle has received renewed attention from scholars such as Jonathan Israel and Gianluca Mori, it is time to introduce his political ideas to English-speaking readers who cannot read the original. And although a selection of the political writings from the Historical and Critical Dictionary has been published, much of Bayle's political thought has not been translated. This translation (...) complements recent editions of Bayle's Thoughts on the Comet and Philosophical Commentary, along with a forthcoming translation of his Conversations Between Maxime and Thémiste. A substantial introduction explores the context and reviews scholarly interpretations, and notes to the text explain references. (shrink)

First surprise! You make the brain itself into an idea, and consequently, also the five senses and the whole body. Thus you can no longer talk about sensations; that would be saying that a great idea, an idea of specific dimensions or an infinite number of small ideas, however you feel like explaining it to us, becomes the vehicle that seizes all other ideas, except of course yours, which finds no place there and doesn’t come up [to the mind].

As his editor John L. Stanley points out, Georges Sorel was "that fascinating polymath." This volume, the third in his selected works in the English language published by Transaction, emphasizes Sorel's extraordinary writings in the philosophy of science, religion, culture, and art. For those who know Sorel only as author of Reflections on Violence, the present volume will come as a forceful reminder of the range and depth of Sorelian efforts to construct a world view. Sorel is throughout concerned (...) with the moral development of human beings. In this sense, his writings on politics are of a piece with his writings on religion, "facticity" of human history and society. Sorel's earliest writings were on religion, and key portions of that period are reflected in selections here. And he went on from there to study the sociology of science, the ways in which science fits into the cultural history of civilization and present day social relationships of industrial society. Stanley provides a profound framework based on two decades of close study and translation of Sorel's texts. He helps to explain how the partial theories of Sorel lead to holistic intellectual consequences, how the psychological method does not foreclose political activism, and how historical limits can be transformed against a background of aesthetics or considerations of taste. He shows that Sorel comes as a close as Manheim and Simmel and Durkheim to the creation of a modern social science--albeit he lacks the overall philosophical theorems of people like Marx and Weber. In Sorel we have a first-class mind at work. And in Stanley, we have a first-class analyst at work. Together, the volume adds up to something special for the political scientist, sociologist, art historian, theologian--in short for those to whom the ideal of a human science endures. John L. Stanley is professor of political science at the University of California at Riverside. He is the author of The Sociology of Virtue: The Political and Social Theories of Georges Sorel. He has written many articles and reviews on the history of European political theory. With his wife, Charlotte Stanley, he has been long engaged in the translation of the works of Georges Sorel. (shrink)

A popular view in contemporary Boltzmannian statistical mechanics is to interpret the measures as typicality measures. In measure-theoretic dynamical systems theory measures can similarly be interpreted as typicality measures. However, a justification why these measures are a good choice of typicality measures is missing, and the paper attempts to fill this gap. The paper first argues that Pitowsky's (2012) justification of typicality measures does not fit the bill. Then a first proposal of how to justify typicality measures is presented. The (...) main premises are that typicality measures are invariant and are related to the initial probability distribution of interest (which are translation-continuous or translation-close). The conclusions are two theorems which show that the standard measures of statistical mechanics and dynamical systems are typicality measures. There may be other typicality measures, but they agree about judgements of typicality. Finally, it is proven that if systems are ergodic or epsilon-ergodic, there are uniqueness results about typicality measures. (shrink)

Though their biographies vastly differ, Karl Barth's long-term extra-marital relationship with Charlotte von Kirschbaum and John H. Yoder's sexual crimes have been the focus of a range of reactions and proposed approaches on how to read the theology of the two theologians given their biographies. This article will examine those critical responses using an analytical framework appropriated from Sameer Yadav's work on cognate conversations about locating and remedying the causes of white supremacy in the church: are the problems due (...) to problematic theology, problematic institutional practice, or both? A correct diagnosis helps the theologian to then propose the right remedy. This adapted framework will be applied to the cases of Barth and Yoder to critically examine how Steven Plant and Rachel Muers respond to Barth's biography and how Stanley Hauerwas and Hilary Scarsella respond to Yoder's biography. After demonstrating how the different respondents address the issue as one primarily of problematic theology or problematic institutional practices, I will argue that it is both theology and practice that must be addressed in order to satisfactorily deal with the reality and scale of infection when it comes to influential theologians. Sample treatments will be offered for responding to Barth's and Yoder's biographies. (shrink)

This collection of fourteen original essays addresses the seminal contribution of Franz Brentano and his heirs, to philosophy of language. Despite the great interest provoked by the Brentanian tradition and its multiple connections with early analytic philosophy, precious little is known about the Brentanian contribution to philosophy of language. The aim of this new collection is to fill this gap by providing the reader with a more thorough understanding of the legacy of Brentano and his school, in their pursuit of (...) a unique research programme according to which the analysis of meaning is inseparable from philosophical inquiries into what goes on in the mind and what there is in the world. In three parts, the volume first reconstructs Brentano’s pathbreaking thoughts on meaning and grammatical illusions, exploring their strong connections with the Austro-German tradition and analytic philosophy. It then addresses the multifaceted debates on the objectivity of meaning in the Brentano School and its aftermath. Finally, part three explores Brentano’s wider legacy, namely: Husserl’s theory of modification and typicality, Bühler’s theory of linguistic and non-linguistic expressions, and Wittgenstein’s thoughts on guidance and rule-following. The result is a unique collection of essays which shows the significance, originality and timely character of the Brentanian philosophy of language. (shrink)

This chapter discusses a version of the descriptive account of content which is compatible with rigidity thesis (RT) and critiques of RT. The rigidity of proper names demonstrates that utterances of sentences containing proper names, and utterances of sentences differing from those sentences only in containing non‐rigid descriptions in place of the proper names, differ in content. The fact that natural‐language proper names are rigid designators is an empirical discovery about natural language. The chapter intends to be a survey of (...) both the background and contemporary discussion of this discovery. However, the survey takes place in the context of an evaluation of the extent to which the discovery that English proper names are rigid itself threatens the descriptive picture of the content of names. The goal is to show that the exact philosophical significance of the discovery that natural‐language proper names are rigid designators is still, and should still be, a matter of controversy. (shrink)

Compared with mainstream medicine and complementary and alternative therapies, the practice of psychotherapy has enjoyed a relative pass when it comes to ethical evaluation. Therefore, contributions to the, although slowly growing, body of literature on psychotherapy ethics are to be welcomed. In his paper ‘Psychotherapy, placebos, and informed consent’, Garson Leder takes issue with what he calls the ‘go open’ project in psychotherapy ethics—the idea that the so-called ‘common factors’ in therapy should be disclosed to prospective patients. Although Leder does (...) not give a detailed list, the common factors include therapist characteristics, patient characteristics, and the working alliance. He argues that the project advocating disclosure of these factors is flawed on two grounds: that information about common factors is not necessary for informed consent; and clarity about specific mechanisms of change in therapy is consistent with ‘many theory-specific forms of psychotherapy’. There are multiple serious problems with Leder’s critique of the recent literature, including how he represents the contours of the debate, which I list, and address in this response. (shrink)

Patients have to be respected with dignity as the masters of their own lives. The problem, however, is that autonomy may become so dominant and the fundamental value of caring in professional nursing that the patient’s dignity is affected. The aim of this article is to point out some of the issues with the interplay between autonomy, also called self-management and dignity. Given voice to the patient perspective the background is provided by cases from research conducted through qualitative interviews with (...) patients and expanded by summarizing empirical research concerning the interplay between autonomy and dignity. The search strategy and the research question gave five empirical research papers and three theoretical studies and concept analyses. A concise overview of the relevant research contains information about all the major elements of the studies. The background research and an interpretative summary address new issues to be taken into account in dignity conserving care. (shrink)

Explores the meaning of death, how people of different times, regions, and religions have coped with it, and the progress and effects of the war waged against it by researchers, physicians, and surgeons.

In an earlier paper we proved that a universal Horn class generated by finitely many finite structures has a model companion. If the language has only finitely many fundamental operations then the theory of the model companion admits a primitive recursive elimination of quantifiers and is primitive recursive. The theory of the model companion is ℵ 0 -categorical iff it is complete iff the universal Horn class has the joint embedding property iff the universal Horn class is generated by a (...) single finite structure. In the last section we look at structure theorems for the model companions of universal Horn classes generated by functionally complete algebras, in particular for the cases of rings and groups. (shrink)

In four studies, we investigated the role of remembering, reflecting on, and mutating personal past moral transgressions to learn from those moral mistakes and to form intentions for moral improvement. Participants reported having ruminated on their past wrongdoings, particularly their more severe transgressions, and they reported having frequently thought about morally better ways in which they could have acted instead (i.e., morally upward counterfactuals; Studies 1–3). The more that participants reported having mentally simulated morally better ways in which they could (...) have acted, the stronger their intentions were to improve in the future (Studies 2 and 3). Implementing an experimental manipulation, we then found that making accessible a morally upward counterfactual after committing a moral transgression strengthened reported intentions for moral improvement—relative to resimulating the remembered event and considering morally worse ways in which they could have acted instead (Study 4). We discuss the implications of these results for competing theoretical views on the relationship between memory and morality and for functional theories of counterfactual thinking. (shrink)

Ctesias’ World. Classica et Orientalia, vol. 1. Edited by Josef Wieshöfer; Robert Rollinger; and Giovanni Lanfranchi. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011. Pp. 546, illus. €88.

Die Sicht auf die Welt zwischen Ost und West. Edited by Robert Rollinger. Classica et Orientalia, vol. 12. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017. Pp. x + 231 + 119, map in pocket. €79.

This chapter deals with the background and implementation of the registration of slaves on the island of Trinidad after 1813. Registration was introduced by James Stephen in the British Colonial Office as a means of limiting the inflow of slaves in the illegal slave trade. Slave registration was extended to the other British colonies and then extended every three years until the end of slavery in 1834. Other registrations of slaves are noted, including the manifests of the coastal shipping of (...) slaves in the USA after 1808. (shrink)

Exploring the economic, cultural and political role of slavery in different societies, this volume includes selections from historians, economists and contemporaries - from those enslaved as well as from free members of slave owning societies.

There have been two principal paradigms for the formulation of the causal relation--logical implication and functional relationship. In this paper, I present a case for preferring the functional relationship formulation and then discuss how the functional relationship formulation may be implemented in the probabilistic case in a manner analogous to the way others have implemented the logical implication formulation in the probabilistic case. I show how the "local independence" assumption found in many models used in the behavioral and social sciences (...) is a consequence of the functional relation concept of probabilistic causality. I also discuss why causal relations are underdetermined in experience and are to be dealt with pragmatically in a hypothesis-testing framework. (shrink)

In Chapter V of Res Cogitans, Zeno Vendler argues that any analysis of “x knows that p” that has “x believes that p” in the analysans is incorrect. The reason he gives is that the “that p” in “x knows that p” is not the same grammatical object as the “that p” in “x believes that p”. As Vendler puts it, there are thats and thats. The view that there are two kinds of “that” clause, one which follows “know” and (...) another which follows “believe”, is attacked by O.R. Jones in his article “Can One Believe What One Knows?”. (shrink)

Two methods of dietary recording, the 24-hr recall and the weighed dietary intake methods, are considered appropriate for estimating energy and nutrient intakes in studies of human fertility. The former method gives lower estimates than the latter, although weighed intakes may underestimate true intakes. Examination of food intakes of pregnant, lactating, and non-pregnant, non-lactating New Guinean women shows their diet to be less homogeneous than is generally assumed for groups in developing countries. As a result direct observations of food intake (...) for a limited number of days are not sufficiently accurate for the estimation of intake of most of the nutrients examined. Rather the study design should reflect the variability of intakes of the nutrients and groups under consideration. (shrink)

It is argued that a reformulation of classical measure theory is necessary if the theory is to accurately describe measurements of physical phenomena. The postulates of a generalized measure theory are given and the fundamentals of this theory are developed, and the reader is introduced to some open questions and possible applications. Specifically, generalized measure spaces and integration theory are considered, the partial order structure is studied, and applications to hidden variables and the logic of quantum mechanics are given.

We construct a quantum logic which generates the usual quark states. It follows from this model that quarks can combine only in quark-antiquark pairs and quark (and antiquark) triples. The ground meson and baryon states are also generated and gluons are discussed.

In contrast to attempts that have been made to measure the clarity of reporting of the methods of clinical trials in journal articles, we report here an attempt to measure the accuracy of methods reporting. We focus in this article on eligibility criteria as a test case for the reporting of clinical trial methods. We examined the reporting of eligibility criteria in the protocol, methods paper (if applicable), journal article, and Clinical Alert for articles appearing in print between January 1988 (...) and September 1994 for which a Clinical Alert had been issued. Eligibility criteria were further classified into five categories in order to examine the content of information loss, if any. On average, 82% of protocol eligibility criteria were reported in methods papers. Journal articles and Clinical Alerts fared somewhat worse: 63% of criteria were reported in journal articles, 19% in Clinical Alerts. In all three categories of medical communication, the reporting of criteria that defined the study disease tended to be complete; reporting of criteria relating to trial precision, patient safety, legal and ethical concerns, and administrative considerations, was not complete. We found that criteria for clinical trial eligibility are frequently under-reported in medical communications. Moreover, some of the criteria omitted are of considerable clinical importance. We suggest that in the design phase of clinical trials, proposed eligibility criteria be scrutinized closely. Those criteria that survive this scrutiny and that have clinical import must be reported upon fully and accurately when communicating trial results. (shrink)