It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. (...) In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions. (shrink)

The reader begins with an original paper by the editors that introduces the social-personality perspective on motivational science and provides an integrated review of empirical and theoretical contributions. Major issues in motivational science are identified that form the basis for the organization of the book. Each section of the book also has a brief introduction, suggested additional readings, and questions for discussion.

Music to create a universe -- Theme, Part 1: the haunting melody -- Theme, Part 2: creativity -- Theme, Part 3: Freud and Mahler -- Coda -- Interlude -- Tender is the night -- Interlude -- Ingmar Bergman's persona -- Coda: Saraband -- Music and alchemy : Beethoven -- Gallery of the soul : Munch, Kahlo, Rivera -- To the lighthouse -- The fisher king and the handless maiden -- Prelude: the Alexandria quartet -- The Alexandria quartet -- Interlude: industrialization (...) as seen by Antonioni and Lawrence -- Gustav Mahler -- Epilogue -- The end of boundaries -- Georgia O'Keeffe: the touch of desire -- Music in film : introduction to chapters 14 & 15 -- The piano -- Tim winton's the riders -- Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Strindberg -- Pelleas and Melisande -- Finale: why I wrote this book. (shrink)

oes anything exist outside culture? Is there anything that we do that is free of the distortions of our tastes and customs? That isn't irrevocably shaped by the languages we speak or our material interests? Is there anything out there that we can assume to be noncultural or transcultural or even universal?

Dubler’s commentary focuses on knowledge of clinical medicine and “institutional savvy” as pieces of the skill set required of bioethics mediators. Here, I describe why, as a practical matter, such requirements are unlikely to be achieved by a meaningful number of aspirants. Simultaneously, I examine the reasons why Dubler’s criteria are inherently risk-laden and would be better addressed as a dialogue among experienced practitioners regarding the merits of alternative stylistic approaches, rather than as universal threshold criteria for the practice of (...) bioethics mediation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The First (1996) Edition of the Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre: A ReviewEdward ChamplinWerner Eck, Antonio Caballos, and Fernando Fernández, eds. Das Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996. xiv 1 329 pp. 20 pls. Cloth, DM 142. (Vestigia 48)Can a committee write a report? Yes and no. The question of authorship is relevant as much to the book under review as to the (...) extraordinary text which it presents.The document is a very long Latin inscription (176 lines) recording a decree of the Senate passed late in a.d. 20 after the trial, suicide, and posthumous condemnation of Cn. Calpurnius Piso, the former legate of Syria. Copies began to turn up, all within the boundaries of Roman Baetica, in the late 1980s, one virtually complete, one partial, and fragments of some four or five other versions. Appropriately, their first publication has appeared in two versions, the one under review here in German, the other in Spanish. Most of the material is shared by both volumes, but the German edition adds a concluding chapter on the political importance of the document, while the Spanish version has considerably more on the physical properties of the bronze tablets and on the Spanish historical context—and on it the authors’ names are offered in alphabetical order. The German text scrupulously presents itself throughout as having three authors, and no hint is given as to who was responsible for which section. Let us speculate. The first three chapters, on the origins of the texts, on their physical condition, along with diplomatic transcriptions of each copy, and on the reconstruction and translation of the original text as received in Baetica, may represent the work of a team, but the subsequent chapters (4, prosopographical information; 5, the date of the trial; 6, commentary; 7, the transmission of the text to and within Baetica; and 8, the senatus consultum as political document) all bear the clear imprint of Werner Eck. That is, the prose is lapidary (Eck seems incapable of ambiguity or ellipsis); the erudition is [End Page 117] formidable; the argumentation is thorough, balanced, and imaginative; and the relative rapidity of publication is astonishing. Above all, Eck has made the book a work of truly international collaboration: between 1991 and 1996 he discussed the text at colloquia and at seminars in 38 universities (“among others”); some 60 scholars are thanked for help and criticism; and the notes are replete with specific acknowledgments to these and yet others for written and verbal comments and for reviews of unpublished work. The result is a formidable edition, clearly setting out the terms for future debates. Thus, appropriately for a decree of the Senate, the book is the work of one author, or of three, or of scores: for convenience we will call the author(s) E.As word of the SCPP’s discovery spread, scholarly excitement grew, for two reasons, one historiographical, one historical. Here is a contemporary version of a dramatic crisis familiar from the riveting account in Tacitus (Ann. 2.41–3.19): the bitter enmity between Tiberius’ legate Piso and Tiberius’ nephew and adopted son Germanicus Caesar, the suspicious death of Germanicus in 19, Piso’s trial and suicide, the passions of the plebs, the tensions within the domus Augusta and the Senate, and the brooding ambiguity of the princeps. Hence we can perhaps peer over the shoulder of Rome’s greatest historian in his study as he selects and shapes his material. At the same time, we are also offered a posed, but vivid and detailed, snapshot of power and ideology in the new principate at a time when the roles of the partners in government—that is, the princeps, his colleague (if any), and the Senate—are still being defined and the threat of civil war is still a real terror. And beyond these the document is a trove of information, constitutional, administrative, legal (both private and criminal), economic, linguistic, religious, prosopographical, topographical. To take but one instance, light is cast on several words in the evolving vocabulary of power, for here we find the earliest use of the word donativum in the sense of... (shrink)

Any cognitive orientation toward nature is interconnected with how the metaphysical structure of nature itself is understood. In the Aristotelian tradition, the primary unit of being is considered to be the substantial form, which constitutes the being and essence of entities. In the mechanistic tradition, the primary units are considered to be minute particles out of which larger entities are constructed. Correspondingly, Aristotelian scientific methodology seeks to gain insight into the substantial forms through a study of the outer properties of (...) entities. This is accomplished in demonstration. On the other hand, scientific methodology inthe mechanist tradition seeks to reduce entities to their smallest particles in order to determine how properties are produced through the interaction of such particles. This paper shows how, through certain transformations in Aristotelian techne, mechanistic metaphysics arose with its attendant methodological stance of seeking an operational knowledge of nature. (shrink)

The moral act consists of object, intention, and circumstances. The word intention, as commonly used, is often mistaken for the technical meaning of the word intention as employed by philosophers. This produces confusion in the description of moral acts. The common use of intention signifies motive, or one's reason for action. We commonly say that someone has a good intention even though what he or she does is wrong. For example, we describe someone who wants to alleviate suffering, and so (...) euthanizes a patient, as having a good intention. To the contrary, in the Catholic moral tradition, intention means an action that is done voluntarily and knowingly. A nurse who kills a patient has a bad intention because he or she acts freely and with knowledge. Alleviating suffering is indeed a good motive for action, but motives are formulated through deliberation prior to action. (shrink)

The dual responsibility of maintaining our copies of ancient writings in a state in which they reflect their originals intelligibly and authentically and of reinterpreting these writings in a manner which is both faithful and useful to later generations and their problems is so demanding that it has very frequently seemed justly to call forth a division of labor. But the divorce between the scholar and the philosophical interpreter has not always been fertile, as the more pedantic and frantic interpretations (...) of Plato demonstrate. Professor Brumbaugh seeks to avoid the specialist's isolation by uniting the two functions in his Plato on the One. The result is the unusual combination of the soundest and most elaborate work on the text of the second part of the Parmenides, so far as I can determine, yet done in this country, and in addition some very imaginative and varied philosophical interpretations. (shrink)

A brief analysis of the processes of measurement common to any science reveal a paradox. This paradox is encountered when one tries to make clear how formal statements are related to experience in such a way that factual statements, such as statements about measurements, result. I believe that this paradox bears an analogy to the “fallacy of the third man” which disturbed Plato. Be that as it may, this paradox has not been satisfactorily solved in modern times, although a full (...) comprehension of the processes of measurement would require its solution. In this paper I wish to do nothing more than present a statement of the difficulty. (shrink)

Moving from an historical analysis of the Catholic Church's gradual endorsement of liberal democracy to an explication of the ethical and political thought of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, Persons and Liberal Democracy concisely explains the relatively recent shift in the Church's political theory and, in the process, defends what could be deemed a non-statist form of welfare liberalism. This book offers a systematic account of John Paul's philosophical and theological ethics and their relationship to the key elements of his political (...) thought and then brings this thought into conversation with some important strands of Christian and secular political theory deliberating the nature and legitimacy of liberalism. (shrink)