The first look at the philosophical issues behind Charlaine Harris's _New York Times_ bestsellers _The Southern Vampire Mysteries_ and the _True Blood_ television series Teeming with complex, mythical characters in the shape of vampires, telepaths, shapeshifters, and the like, _True Blood_, the popular HBO series adapted from Charlaine Harris's bestselling _The Southern Vampire Mysteries_, has a rich collection of themes to explore, from sex and romance to bigotry and violence to death and immortality. The goings-on in the mythical town of (...) Bon Temps, Louisiana, where vampires satiate their blood lust and openly commingle with ordinary humans, present no shortages of juicy metaphysical morsels to sink your teeth into. Now _True Blood and Philosophy_ calls on the minds of some of history's great thinkers to perform some philosophical bloodletting on such topics as Sookie and the metaphysics of mindreading; Maryann and sacrificial religion; werewolves, shapeshifters and personal identity; vampire politics, evil, desire, and much more. The first book to explore the philosophical issues and themes behind the _True Blood_ novels and television series Adds a new dimension to your understanding of _True Blood_ characters and themes The perfect companion to the start of the third season on HBO and the release of the second season on DVD Smart and entertaining_, True Blood and Philosophy_ provides food—or blood—for thought, and a fun, new way to look at the series. (shrink)

NEW BLOOD EDITION: Contains three new chapters from Season 3. This new edition is available as an E-BOOK ONLY and contains three chapters not found in the print book! The first look at the philosophical issues behind Charlaine Harris's _New York Times_ bestsellers _The Southern Vampire Mysteries_ and the _True Blood_ television series! Teeming with complex, mythical characters in the shape of vampires, telepaths, shapeshifters, and the like, _True Blood_, the popular HBO series adapted from Charlaine Harris's bestselling The (...) Southern Vampire Mysteries, has a rich collection of themes to explore, from sex and romance to bigotry and violence to death and immortality. The goings-on in the mythical town of Bon Temps, Louisiana, where vampires satiate their blood lust and openly commingle with ordinary humans, present no shortages of juicy metaphysical morsels to sink your teeth into. Now _True Blood and Philosophy_ calls on the minds of some of history's great thinkers to perform some philosophical bloodletting on such topics as Sookie and the metaphysics of mindreading; Maryann and sacrificial religion; werewolves, shapeshifters and personal identity; vampire politics, evil, desire, and much more. The first book to explore the philosophical issues and themes behind the _True Blood_ novels and television series Adds a new dimension to your understanding of _True Blood_ characters and themes The perfect companion to the start of the third season on HBO and the release of the second season on DVD Smart and entertaining_, True Blood and Philosophy_ provides food -- or blood -- for thought, and a fun, new way to look at the series. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:82 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY PEIRGE'S MARGINALIA IN W. T. HARRIS' Hegel's Logic Among the most eminent philosophers of nineteenth-century America were William Torrey Harris (1835-1909) and Charles Sanders Peirce (18391914 ). The former, by his establishment in 1867 of The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, furnished a starting point for American philosophical maturity. The latter, who contributed to that iournal, has been considered America's greatest logician. It may therefore be (...) of interest to examine Peirce's marginalia in the first edition of Harris' chief work, Hegel's Logic: A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1890). Discovered by the present writer on a New York book-stall, in a cheaply priced, coverless, and water-stained copy, and now in his possession, it bears imprinted on the reverse of the title page: "Harvard University: Philos. Dept. Library. Gift of Mrs. Charles S. Peirce. June 28, 1915." Shortly after Peirce, in depressed circumstances, died on April 19, 1914, the Harvard Philosophy Department acquired from his wife the manuscripts that were published in the Collected Papers.1 Harris' Hegel's Logic, which presumably accompanied that transaction, contains several marginal annotations, mostly in faded ink, in a neat, small hand, similar to that reproduced in the frontispiece to Volume IV of Peirce's Collected Papers. Recalling a notable philosophical conjunction, the markings also reveal aspects of Peirce's character and confirm his complex attitude toward Hegel, crucial to the development of his philosophy. Peirce's shifting view and persistent concern regarding Hegel may be traced in some other remarks. For example, in a letter to Harris dated January 1, 1868, he says, "I admit there is music in the logic of Hegel, but that is all I discover there. ''2 In another letter to Harris, dated May 13, 1868, he indicates his ambivalence: "But as I should draw the line... I should come on the same side as Hegel, because I am idealistic. I do not 1eel very much opposed to Hegel, though I think his main point.s tin his own estimate of importance) are wrong. ''s About 1890, Peirce declared, "I reiect his philosophy in toto, ''~ and about 1896, he accused Hegel of reaching "each category from the last preceding by virtually calling 'next!'-5 Yet, in 1903, he acclaimed Hegel "in some respects the greatest philosopher that ever lived. ''6 And, in the very same year, reviewing another treatment of Hegel's logic, and including a reference to Harris' t Eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss,and Arthur Burks (Vols.I-VIII; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958). 2,.C.S. Peirce to W. T. Harris." ed. WallaceNethery, The Personalist,XLIII (19fi2),37. I am indebted to Dr. Nethery for his kindness in letting me see these letters in advanceof publication. sIbid.,40. 4Collected Papers,I, 193. 5 Ibid., I, 246. eIbid., I, 277. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 83 treatise, Peirce flatly remarks: "But all these Hegelians--Harris, XVallace, Hibben, Everett, etc.--who dog the steps of their master in almost textual comments, are profoundly unfaithful to the spirit of his philosophy... the Logik now condemns itself. ''7 A constant feature in Peirce's negative attitude toward Hegel concerns the latter's failure to equip himself scientifically to deal with a subject the American considered basically scientific. For instance, about 1899, Peirce writes: Hegel, while regarding scientific men with disdain, has for his chief topic the importance of continuity, which was the very idea the mathematicians and physicists had been chiefly engaged in following out for three centuries. This made Hegel's work less correct and excellent in itself than it might have been; and at the same time hid its true mode of affinity with the scientific thought into which the life of the race had been chiefly laid up. It was a misfortune for Hegelism~ a misfortune for "philosophy," and a misfortune (in lesser degree) for science: Although Peirce adds, "My philosophy resuscitates Hegel, though in a strange costume, ''9 and his dialectic parallels Hegel's, he attempts to escape the Hegelian subjectivism by an "objective logic" and by avoiding Hegel's supposed mathematical ignorance. "Most of what is true in... (shrink)

_Pluriverse_, the final work of the American poet and philosopher Benjamin Paul Blood, was published posthumously in 1920. After an experience of the anaesthetic nitrous oxide during a dental operation, Blood came to the conclusion that his mind had been opened, that he had undergone a mystical experience, and that he had come to a realisation of the true nature of reality. This title is the fullest exposition of Blood’s esoteric Christian philosophy-cum-theology, which, though deemed wildly (...) eccentric by commentators both during his lifetime and later in the twentieth century, was nonetheless one of the most influential sources for American mystical-empiricism. In particular, Blood’s thought was a major inspiration for William James, and can be seen to prefigure the latter’s concept of Sciousness directly. (shrink)

Critognatus’ speech has long been recognized as heavily by Caesar's hand, although few have questioned whether any speech was delivered by the Arvernian noble at all; and it has long puzzled readers with its contradictory manner and fierce criticism of Rome. But the etymologizing wordplay across several languages demonstrated below (along with other distinctly comical elements) renders it more than likely that both the speech and the speaker are products of the author's imagination. In its Nabokovian mode, it offers a (...) glimpse of Caesar the linguist and introduces a playfulness into the dire situation before Alesia that suggests that the ‘Barley-Muncher’ and his speech should be reconsidered in a different, more humorous light. (shrink)

There is a widespread consensus that a commodification of body parts is to be prevented. Numerous policy papers by international organizations extend this view to the blood supply and recommend a system of uncompensated volunteers in this area—often, however, without making the arguments for this view explicit. This situation seems to indicate that a relevant source of justified worry or unease about the blood supply system has to do with the issue of commodification. As a result, the current (...) health minister of Ontario is proposing a ban on compensation even for blood plasma—despite the fact that Canada can only generate 30 % of the plasma needed for fractionation into important plasma protein products and has to purchase the rest abroad. In the following, I am going to suggest a number of alternative perspectives on the debate in order to facilitate a less dogmatic and more differentiated debate about the matter. Especially in light of the often over-simplified notions of altruism and commodification, I conclude that the debate has not conclusively established that it would be morally objectionable to provide blood plasma donors with monetary compensation or with other forms of explicit social recognition as an incentive. This is especially true of donations for fractionation into medicinal products by profit-oriented pharmaceutical companies. (shrink)

The period in the history of blood transfusion that I discuss is roughly 1628, the date of publication of Harvey’s work on blood circulation, De Motu Cordis, and 1668, the year of the first allegedly successful transfusion of blood into a human subject by a French physician Jean Denis, and the official order to prohibit the procedure. The subject of special interest in this history is Robert Desgabets, an early defender and teacher of the Cartesian philosophy at (...) St. Maur, in the region of Lorraine, France. Desgabets’ Discourse de la communication ou transfusion du sang Communication or Transfusion of Blood contains a defence and description of the procedure. This three page manuscript is a lecture delivered at one of the meetings held at M. de Montmor in July 1658. Letters and documents which describe the events of these conferences during Desgabets’ eight month stay in Paris in 1658, indicate that he had numerous discussions with the Cartesian physicist Jacques Rohault and also with another leading Cartesian scientist, Gerauld Cordemoy. In addition, Desgabets is said to have frequently attended the meetings where he showed his interest in many scientific questions. I provide evidence that Desgabets was not an arm-chair scientist: he performed experiments, and he designed and created an apparatus to carry out the procedure of blood transfusion. I show how Desgabets’s Cartesian conception of mechanism and body had theological as well as epistemological underpinnings and consequences. For Desgabets, experiments on blood transfusion were as much demonstrations of the truth of the Cartesian metaphysics as they were demonstrations of the possibility of transubstantiation. The role of experiment was to provide demonstrations of the first principles or truths of physics and theology by connecting them to the way God actually made the world. The upshot of Desgabets's treatment of expérience is that it is integral to the knowledge of essences, and hence to the discovery of the truth of things. In placing expérience at the very foundation of true knowledge, Desgabets reconstructs Cartesianism on an empiricist foundation. (shrink)

This is certainly true for every translation, because every translation must necessarily accomplish the transition of the spirit of one language into that of another.We all know who and what Creon was. He was a tyrant—a proto-Nazi, according to French playwright Jean Anouilh. He was not even the same person in Sophocles's three Theban plays, according to translator H. D. F. Kitto.2 He was Antigone's uncle, her mother's brother. He was a symbol of the transition from a "rule of (...) tradition" to a "rule of law" in ancient Greece, according to political scientist Catherine A. Holland.3 We also all know what those terms mean—tyrant, the same person, uncle, brother, rule of tradition, rule of law.... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Augustine on the True Presence and the Eucharist as Sacrament of UnityElizabeth KleinAugustine's understanding of the Eucharist has been a thorny topic for theologians (both within the academy and without) since the Reformation.1 Ulrich Zwingli cited Augustine as an authority in favor of his merely symbolic understanding of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist at the colloquy of Marburg, to which Martin Luther reportedly conceded: "You have (...) Augustine and Fulgentius on your side, but we have all the other fathers."2 John Calvin also insistently took Augustine to be in his camp on the question of the Eucharist, citing, for example, Augustine's John commentary in a refutation of the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation—specifically regarding what happens when an unbeliever eats of the Eucharist: "Let those, therefore, who make unbelievers partakers of the flesh and blood of Christ, if they would agree with Augustine, set before us the visible body of Christ, since, according to him, the whole truth is spiritual."3 To this day, some Protestant commentators maintain a narrative about the theology of the Eucharist that follows a trajectory something like this: Augustine had a more spiritual or symbolic understanding of the [End Page 1325] sacrament, but this understanding was slowly effaced in the early to late Middle Ages, and then recovered at the Reformation. Correspondingly, in academia, Augustine's theology of the sacraments is often ignored or underplayed, no doubt in part due to the inheritance of this Protestant memorialist narrative.At the heart of the debate over Augustine's view of the Eucharist is his view of the effect of the sacraments. Are the sacraments, and the Eucharist in particular, a cause of sanctification for Augustine? Or are they merely a kind of symbol or reminder, one means among many for strengthening faith? Phillip Cary, perhaps the most vigorous opponent of seeing any efficacy in Augustine's sacramental theology, argues that Augustine "has no room for such a notion, which I shall label 'efficacious external means of grace.'"4 But, at the same time, the Catechism of the Catholic Church draws liberally from Augustine in its description of the Eucharist and its effects (for example, see §§1372, 1396, and 1398), as does Thomas Aquinas—particularly on the question pertaining to the effect of the sacrament.5How can Augustine's legacy be so hotly contested, claimed by two opposing camps on such an essential theological question? The short answer is that Augustine speaks about Christ's presence in the Eucharist as symbolic and as real in equal measure, and that both modes of expression were entirely natural to him. But that is not a wholly adequate answer. What is Augustine's Eucharistic theology and how does it accommodate this breadth of expression? What does the Eucharist really mean for him? Part of the difficulty of discerning Augustine's Eucharistic theology is his reticence to speak about it directly,6 but let us take as our point of departure two passages from book [End Page 1326] 1 of De doctrina Christiana in which Augustine explicitly mentions the Eucharist and where he sounds, at first blush, very much like a Zwinglian.Those, you see, who practice or venerate some kind of thing which is a significant sign, unaware of what it signifies, are enslaved under signs, while those who either carry out or venerate useful signs established by God, fully understanding their force and significance, are not in fact venerating what can be seen and passes away, but rather that reality to which all such things are to be referred.... In this time, though, after the clearest indication of our freedom has shone upon us in the resurrection of our Lord, we are no longer burdened with the heavy duty of carrying out even those signs [i.e., of the old covenant] whose meaning we now understand. But the Lord himself and the discipline of the apostles has handed down to us just a few signs instead of many, and these so easy to perform, and so awesome to understand, and so pure and chaste to celebrate, such as the sacrament of baptism, and the celebration of the Lord's body and... (shrink)

The article looks again at the English debate over Anglo-Scottish union in the period 1603 to 1607. It reconstructs what marriage meant to contemporaries, as sociocultural practice as well as political model. It argues that Englishmen's attention to their local circumstances -- sui generis since the Henrician reformation -- sank the union project. The debate also promoted a distrust of blood-right kingship that was crucial to its abolition a generation later. The body of the paper is designed as a (...) case study of how to situate 'ideas in context'. It is intended to challenge, by example, key assumptions that inform the dominant model for that project, articulated pre- eminently in Quentin Skinner's work. The conclusion addresses the theoretical dimension explicitly, critiquing Skinner's rationalist model with specific reference to his recent work on conceptions of liberty in seventeenth-century England. (shrink)

I propose this account of community formation, which finds bodies, ungraspable difference and the expression of meaning inextricably linked, in order to address a neglect of the sociality of the body in current models of community. That neglect, I submit, explains why some models of community, while keen to promote multiculturalism and tolerance of difference, can tend toward the opposite. This is true of communitarianism and related models that would base community on the commonality of meaning and unity of (...) identity. Against the emphasis on individualism in liberal political theory, communitarians understand community to be built through shared practices, dialogue, common social meanings and traditions, and on the interrelation, mutual recognition, and knowledge of the other as derived from a Hegelian notion of identity formation. (shrink)

Christian theology on the Eucharist, already since the Gospel of John refers to the scarcity and abundance of food, by linking this Sacrament to the hunger suffered by the Israelites in the desert and their further satiation with manna from heaven. Saint Albert the Great, in his reflection on the Eucharist, includes several ideas taken from his scientific knowledge, especially from Aristotle. These considerations build one of his personal contributions to theological understanding of the spiritualis manducatio that takes place in (...) the Holy Mass. These explanations will be explored in order to understand in which sense the Eucharist is true food and true drink. (shrink)

This collection fills a gap in the current literature in philosophy and film by focusing on the question: How would thinking in philosophy and film be transformed if race were formally incorporated moved from its margins to the center? The collection’s contributors anchor their discussions of race through considerations of specific films and television series, which serve as illustrative examples from which the essays’ theorizations are drawn. Inclusive and current in its selection of films and genres, the collection incorporates dramas, (...) comedies, horror, and science fiction films into its discussions, as well as recent and popular titles of interest, such as _Twilight_, _Avatar_, _Machete_, _True Blood_, and _The Matrix _and _The Help_. The essays compel readers to think more deeply about the films they have seen and their experiences of these narratives. (shrink)

Is consistency the sort of thing that could provide a guide to mathematical ontology? If so, which notion of consistency suits this purpose? Mark Balaguer holds such a view in the context of platonism, the view that mathematical objects are non-causal, non-spatiotemporal, and non-mental. For the purposes of this paper, we will examine several notions of consistency with respect to how they can provide a platon-ist epistemology of mathematics. Only a Gödelian notion, we suggest, can provide a satisfactory guide to (...) a platonist ontology. Is consistency the sort of thing that could provide a guide to mathematical ontology? If so, which notion of consistency suits this purpose? Mark Bala-guer holds such a view in the context of platonism, the view that mathematical objects are non-causal, non-spatiotemporal, and non-mental. Balaguer's version of Platonism, Full-Blooded Platonism (FBP), is the view that "there are as many abstract mathematical objects as there could be-i.e., there actually exist abstract mathematical objects of all possible kinds" (Balaguer, 2017, p. 381). He continues: Since FBP says that there are abstract mathematical objects of all possible kinds, it follows that if FBP is true, then every purely mathematical theory that could be true-i.e., that is internally consistent-accurately describes some collection of actually existing abstract objects. Thus it follows from FBP that in order to acquire knowledge of abstract objects, all we have to do is come up with an internally consistent purely mathematical theory (and know that it is internally consistent). (Balaguer, 2017, p. 381) * To be published in 43rd International Wittgenstein Symposium proceedings. (shrink)

Part 1. FOUNDERS AND FIRSTCOMERS1: David Zimmerman: 'Protests Butter no Parsnips': Lord Beveridge and the Rescue of Refugee Academics from Europe, 1933-19382: William Lanouette: A Narrow Margin of Hope: Leo Szilard in the Founding Days of CARA3: Paul Weindling: From Refugee Assistance to Freedom of Learning: the Strategic Vision of A. V. Hill, 1933-19644: Gustav Born: Refugee Scientists in a New Environment5: Georgina Ferry: Max Perutz and the SPSLPART 2. TESS - THE LINCHPIN6: Paul Broda: Esther Simpson: A Correspondence7: Lewis (...) Elton: Eva and EstherPART 3. ASSOCIATES AND ALLIES8: Gerald Kreft: 'Dedicated to Represent the True Spirit of the German Nation in the World': Philipp Schwartz, Founder of the Notgemeinschaft9: Tibor Frank: Organized Rescue Operations in Europe and the United States, 1933-194510: Susan Cohen: In Defence of Academic Women Refugees: The British Federation of University Women11: Stina Lyon: Karl Mannheim and Viola Klein: Refugee Sociologists in Search of Social Democratic PracticePART 4. REVERSING THE GAZE12: Christian Fleck: Austrian Refugee Social Scientists13: Antoon de Baets: Plutarch's Thesis: The Contribution of Refugee Historians to Historical Writing, 1945-201014: Marina Yu Sorokina: Within Two Tyrannies: The Soviet Academic Refugees of the Second World War15: Antonín Kostlán and Soña Strbáñová: Czech Scholars in Exile, 1948-198916: Shula Marks: 'Bending the rules': South African Refugees in the UK, 1960-198017: Alan Phillips: Refugee Academics from Chile: WUS-SPSL CollaborationLucia Muñoz: Postscript. (shrink)

Context: Immunity includes cognitive concepts: the organism is thought to specifically recognize foreign materials and develop a memory of these encounters. Vaccines are thought to work by enhancing this immunological memory. Lymphocytes are key cells and specific antibodies are key molecules in immune recognition. Antibodies are blood proteins called “immunoglobulins.” Spontaneously formed immunoglobulins are seen as “natural” antibodies to dietary components and commensal bacteria. Immune cognition is used simply as a didactic metaphor. Problem: Do the cognitive aspects of immunology (...) stem from the activities of cells and molecules, or are they ascribed by the immunologist operating as a human observer? (1) An immense variety of immunoglobulins may bind to the same antigen with different binding energies. It is the immunologist who arbitrates the boundary between those that are specific (and declared antibodies) and those that are not. Specific antibodies serve as functional labels pasted onto natural immunoglobulins, as if they were recognizing elements. Is this “arbitration” the true cognitive event ascribed to immunoglobulins and lymphocytes? (2) A major impasse exists between progress in experimental immunology and its translation into clinical results. A proper understanding of immunological activity demands a wider view of an organism’s biology and, also, of the interference of human observers in delineating experimental realities, such as the specificity of immune recognition. Maturana’s biology of cognition and language provides one such approach. Method: Use of Maturana’s biology of cognition and language concepts to describe immunological activity. Results: A whole new understanding of immunological activity is suggested. Implications: A major change in the way of seeing is proposed that may eventually help the translation of this knowledge into clinical results. Furthermore, the immune system may also become a proper model for cognitive analyses. (shrink)

On July 14, 1866 Franz Brentano stepped up to the pulpit to defend his thesis that “the true method of philosophy is none other than that of the natural sciences”. This thesis bound his first students to him and became the north star of his school, against the complex background of the progress and specialization of the natural sciences as well as the growth and professionalization of universities. I will discuss the project of the renewal of philosophy as science (...) in the School of Brentano and how this aimed to provide a scientific foundation for the humanities independently from the natural sciences, while preserving the unity of science. Through his well-known re-introduction of the concept of intentionality as criterion to distinguish internal and external perception, Brentano was able to supply an empirical foundation for the Geisteswissenschaften. While philosophy would use the method of natural science, its domain would not be nature, but consciousness: a full-blooded science of the mind that did not require a reduction to the physical in order to be scientific. Brentano’s science of consciousness was empirical, but not experimental, and relied on subjective methods, but was not introspective. Brentano’s students Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Edmund Husserl and others came to occupy important chairs in philosophy throughout Europe. While they were certainly not all orthodox followers, they adapted and spread his theories far and wide in the schools and movements they founded and influenced: Gestalt psychology, Prague linguistics, phenomenology, etc.. Moreover, the 19th century idea of scientific research as a collaborative and collective achievement led to a division of labor in Brentano’s school. Each of his students was meant to work out a part of the greater whole: Stumpf, the philosophy of sound and music; Marty, language; Meinong the history of philosophy; Husserl, mathematics; etc. Yet all of them also contributed to the shared project of the renewal of philosophy as science and discussed the (foundational) relation of philosophy to other sciences in programmatic works. Though often forgotten and overlooked due to contingent historical circumstances, the scientific paradigm of the School of Brentano was very fruitful and highly influential in philosophy and the human sciences in general, throughout the second half of the 19th and into the 20th centuries. Yet it is relevant then as now to preserve the independent scientific dignity of the humanities. (shrink)

In addition to empirical adequacy and compatibility with other current theories, scientific theories are commonly judged on three criteria â simplicity, elegance, and fertility. Fertility has received comparatively little attention in the philosophical literature. A definition of a certain sort of fertility, called P-fertility, proposed by Ernan McMullin, is that it consists in the capacity of a theory to be successfully modified over time to explain new experimental data or theoretical insights. McMullin made the major claim that he has a (...) novel and perhaps the sole argument for Scientific Realism. His argument involves two strands (i) theories must be considered diachronically and it is an historical fact that long standing successful scientific theories are P-fertile, and (ii) the correct explanation of this fact is that these theories reflect the realities of a mind-independent world. A rebuttal of McMullinâs position given in the literature is considered and rejected. His argument therefore requires further consideration. The plausible first strand of McMullinâs argument is accepted for the purposes of discussion, and thus the observation requires explanation, either along McMullinâs own lines or otherwise. The concept of diachronicity and the implications of accepting a diachronic view of scientific theories are considered. The identity of theory across time can be understood both from a Realist and an Anti-realist perspective via the concept of significant claims in the successive versions of the long standing successful theories. This defuses a possible objection to McMullinâs argument, namely that by assuming diachronicity he begs the question against the Anti-realist. Explanations of the conjunction of success and P-fertility are examined from the perspective of Scientific Realism and the major current Anti-realist stances â Entity Realism, Structural Realism, Instrumentalism, and Internal Realism. 3 To justify the second strand of McMullinâs argument, a notion of the approximate truth or of the verisimilitude of theories is required. Inter alia it is argued that a distinction must be made between the approximate truth of a scientific theory and that of a simple assertion or a simple narrative. The concepts of the approximate truth of scientific theories and their verisimilitude are explored and some serious difficulties are identified. First, it is difficult to accommodate differences in respect as well as in degree in delineating the nature of an approximately true theory. Second, it is difficult to give a satisfactory account of the metric used to assess the verisimilitude of theories. It is argued that in any case no version of these concepts can adequately support the second strand of McMullinâs thesis. This is because, at best, approximate truth and verisimilitude can only support a pragmatic claim â the improved empirical adequacy of successive versions of the long standing theory. In contrast, McMullinâs thesis requires that successor versions generally are better theories. Third, there is an intractable theory dependent weighting problem posed by the open ended nature of scientific theories in contrast with the closed narratives describing idealized models. The role of the approximate truth of scientific theories is explored, within the frameworks of Realism and Anti-realism, with regard to the possible responses to the existence of two highly successful, well corroborated, but incompatible theories â general relativity and quantum mechanics. It is suggested that Scientific Realism itself, not only McMullinâs argument for Scientific Realism, requires the notion of approximate truth or verisimilitude of theories. Putnamâs Internal Realism is considered, and, if as I suggest, no adequate account of the concepts of the approximate truth or verisimilitude of scientific theories can be given, Internal Realism (which need not draw on these concepts because of its denial that there is a unique correct description of the world) is more plausible than the full blooded Scientific Realism advocated by McMullin, despite granting the claim of the historical observation of the conjunction between long standing successful theories and their P-fertility. (shrink)

The more we know about medicine, the more we realize that many health questions have no one true answer. Realizing this, and thinking carefully about how medicine asks patients to treat their conditions, leads us to some questions. How reliable are the guidelines that might form the basis of doctors’ advice? Is it wrong, after all, to base an approach to medicine on patients’ preferences? And, given that there is often a distance between the treatment a doctor advises and (...) what a patient would like to do, how do we bridge the gap—especially in a health culture of inequality, technical proficiency, and increasing costs? In practical, engaging, narrative-driven chapters about common health conditions that millions of Americans are familiar with—depression and high blood pressure, arthritis and diabetes—Dr. Zackary Berger of Johns Hopkins demystifies the often bewildering disconnect between patients and doctors and asks us all to think more clearly about how best to protect and cure the human body. (shrink)

The history of scientific illustrations is a story that correspond the cultural, economic, political and scientific history of the world. A look into the history of sciences displays that pictures and illustrations had a decisive role for the sciences progressive success and rising societal status from the sixteenth century. The illustrations visualized the unknown to graspable facts. Without the pictures the new discovered continents, the blood circulatory system and the body’s muscles had remained theoretical proclamations. The scientific discoveries became (...) visible and communicated, to a wider audience by its illustrations. The scientific illustrations and maps were intertwined with an epistemic ambition to unveil the true natural order. During the seventeenth century the concept of objectivity was interpreted as a quest for revealing nature’s ideal order, a task only feasible for the brilliant artist to accomplish. The epistemic ambition concurred with the belief that only one true ontological order existed that the scientific knowledge had to uncover. This concept of objectivity was succeeded by the modern concept of objectivity which equated objectivity with impartiality and elimination of the scientist’s subjective bias. The view from “nowhere” is still a valid, ruling definition of objectivity. However, the presence and huge expansion of computational pictures in the sciences as well in everyday life raises the question if a new sense of objectivity is framed. In physics and chemistry the produced pictures intend to be contributions to an ongoing theoretical discussion, about a nature in constant flux, let it be molecules or artificially processed materials in the nanoscale. The traveller designs her own map in advance, mixing the Google earth features with the personal arrangements. For both the scientists and the laymen the modernist objective virtues of detachment, impartiality and disinterestedness have been supplemented by a return of subjective involvements. (shrink)

The Kantian theory of moral worth, because it emphasizes the role of reason, has been universally castigated for being disaffecting, impersonal and alienating. My thesis is that, to the contrary, it is through its emphasis on reason that the Kantian view is able to give a full-blooded place to our sentiments, partial ties and projects in morality. ;My first task is to show how standard interpretations of Kant's theory misrepresent his true concerns. Typically, his views are treated as nothing (...) more than a theory of moral praise. Since only actions from duty are praiseworthy, on this interpretation, actions from sympathy or friendship are not. At the core of my thesis is a rejection of this interpretation. Kant's account is, I maintain, addressed first and foremost to moral agents deliberating about alternative actions, policies and plans of life. Their concern is not to determine the praiseworthiness of these alternatives, but their prudential and moral worth. And to say, along with Kant, that actions from duty alone are of moral worth is simply to say that they alone express what any moral deliberator, on proper reflection, will recognize that she must preserve and promote in all contexts, namely, a good will. ;My second task is to disentangle moral worth from other kinds of evaluation. Moral worth cannot be adequately captured by the ideas of merit, virtue or ethical action, I argue. Indeed, these all allow for motives other than duty. This itself shows that Kant's views are not overly disaffecting. Of course, Kant is famous for holding that we must strive to act from duty. But this need not be impersonal or alienating. In many ways, I argue, quite the opposite is the case. Even though acting from duty requires an impartial perspective, it is also deeply personal. For only that impartiality which we recognize as imposed by our own reason is required by morality. So ultimately it is out of respect for what are our own deepest commitments that Kant maintains that we ought to act. And while this could require setting aside important interests, I show that this is not as problematic as some have thought. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

In this lively series of conversations with writer Michel Treguer, René Girard revisits the major concepts of mimetic theory and explores science, democracy, and the nature of God and freedom. Girard affirms that “our unprecedented present is incomprehensible without Christianity.” Globalization has unified the world, yet civil war and terrorism persist despite free trade and economic growth. Because of mimetic desire and the rivalry it generates, asserts Girard, “whether we’re talking about marriage, friendship, professional relationships, issues with neighbors or matters (...) of national unity, human relations are always under threat.” Literary masters including Marivaux, Dostoevsky, and Joyce understood this, as did archaic religion, which warded off violence with blood sacrifice. Christianity brought a new understanding of sacrifice, giving rise not only to modern rationality and science but also to a fragile system that is, in Girard’s words, “always teetering between a new golden age and a destructive apocalypse.” Treguer, a skeptic of mimetic theory, wonders: “Is what he’s telling me true...or is it just a nice story, a way of looking at things?” In response, Girard makes a compelling case for his theory. (shrink)

The "trembling balance" in Lawrence's work, considered either as theoretical system or in its phenomenological form, is characterized by the dynamic qualities of interrelatedness and flux. Cowan shows that, in Lawrence's conception, the dynamic experience of life's quickness necessarily involves giving up static equilibrium in the ebb and flow of human consciousness between self and other, bringing about a sequence of stability, instability, resilience, and creative change. Lawrence's conception of art as a recreation of the "trembling balance" of life is (...) explored in his treatment of the figure of the artist in a number of his major novels. Because his conception of art is biologically based, Lawrence locates the aesthetic balance he seeks to establish between blood consciousness and spiritual consciousness firmly in the body, most often in the imagery of the male body. Lawrence identifies with Melville, who was for him an example of the "true artist" as myth-maker, reconciling Christian and pagan consciousness in an organic symbolism rooted in unconscious experience. Cowan provides a critical study of Lawrence's dualism, dealing with ideas and issues that were intensely personal for Lawrence. (shrink)

While the COVID-19 pandemic riveted public attention on questions regarding how to respond reasonably to risk of illness, everyday medical care involves more mundane forms of pharmaceutical risk management for conditions like high blood pressure, prediabetes, or high cholesterol. This essay, and the collection it introduces, explore medicalization of risk as a theological problem, drawing on resources such as the Sermon on the Mount that caution us about the potential dangers of risk management to Christian discipleship. Medicalization of risk (...) threatens to become an idol that promises immanent security at the cost of one’s relationship with God and others. It misleads contemporary society as to the true human end and medicine’s own capabilities to provide temporal salvation. The essays in this special issue illustrate these problems with respect to pharmaceutical risk management. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Martha Nussbaum FICTIONS OF THE SOUL* Gertrude says, "O Hamlet speak no more. / Thou turnst mine eyes into my very soul." He made her see her soul, then, with a speech. And many types of speeches try to do what Hamlet did here. They present us with accounts or pictures of ourselves, attempting to communicate to us some truth about what we really are — or (to use (...) what is already a certain sort of picture) to show us die insides of our human souls. These truths about ourselves are delivered in many different styles and forms: some through structured argument, some through more devious or more violent strategies. One distinguished thinker compared his discourse about the nature of the soul to dry translucent shafts of sunlight diat disperse the dark shadows of false belief. Another represents the recipient of a true account of the inside of her soul as crying out in pain: "These words like daggers enter in my ears." Clearly there ought to be connections between the way a drinker or writer conceives of the soul and the way he or she constructs a discourse to convey important trudis to such a soul — including, and especially, the truth about the nature of the soul. Whether we are to be approached with sunbeams or with daggers, whether we need light or violent motion to show us what we are: this seems to depend upon what, in fact, we are. On the answer to questions such as: Are our souls transparent? opaque? open? thick-skinned? And: is getting in touch with a human soul like shining light through a diamond? Like embracing a friend? Like drawing blood? To speak more prosaically, on die answers to questions such as: How does a soul arrive at truth? What elements does it have that promote and impede understanding? What is die subject matter or content of the most important truths about it? And in what sort of activity does knowing it consist? A story or account of die soul is, then, told. The telling, if the story is a good one, is not accidentally connected with the content of the told. And this * Editor's note: This article, as well as the contributions by Joseph Margolis, Félix MartínezBonati, and Sanford Freedman which follow it, grew out of a symposium on "Styles of Fictionality," held at Harvard University in 1981. Other papers from that symposium appeared in the April, 1983 issue of Philosophy and Literature. 145 146PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE ought to be so whether die teller is a literary artist, whom we suppose always to be conscious of the nature of the stylistic choices, or a philosopher, whom we often think of as avoiding or eschewing style altogether. No stylistic choice can be presumed to be neutral — not even the choice to write in a flat or neutral style. My aim in this article is to begin working on the complicated connections between a view of what a human soul is and a view about how to address that sort of soul in writing, in die communication of die view.1 I have chosen two very different views, associated with two extremely different styles. One will be an intellectualistic view of die person, expressed in a style commonly associated widi philosophical writing; the other, expressed in a literary narrative, will be severely critical of intellectualism. The philosophical view is associated with a harsh criticism ofliterary art, the literary view widi an equally harsh criticism of philosophical investigation. In each case, I want to ask how the story that is told engages, in the telling, widi the reader's soul, and how the telling and the told are matched. I have chosen two extremes not because I wish to suggest diat these positions somehow express the essence of the philosophical or the literary, but because diey speak to and criticize one another in an illuminating way. By seeing their opposing elements starkly and schematically set out, we will be in a better position, should we wish to, to imagine an alternative between them. My philosophical protagonist will be Plato — or certain aspects of Plato; the literary opponent will be Proust. I shall, in... (shrink)

Our aim is to expand the regulative ideal governing consent. We argue that consent should not only be informed but also based on rational beliefs. We argue that holding true beliefs promotes autonomy. Information is important insofar as it helps a person to hold the relevant true beliefs. But in order to hold the relevant true beliefs, competent people must also think rationally. Insofar as information is important, rational deliberation is important. Just as physicians should aim to (...) provide relevant information regarding the medical procedures prior to patients consenting to have those procedures, they should also assist patients to think more rationally. We distinguish between rational choice/action and rational belief. While autonomous choice need not necessarily be rational, it should be based on rational belief. The implication for the doctrine of informed consent and the practice of medicine is that, if physicians are to respect patient autonomy and help patients to choose and act more rationally, not only must they provide information, but they should care more about the theoretical rationality of their patients. They should not abandon their patients to irrationality. They should help their patients to deliberate more effectively and to care more about thinking rationally. We illustrate these arguments in the context of Jehovah's Witnesses refusing life-saving blood transfusions. Insofar as Jehovah's Witnesses should be informed of the consequences of their actions, they should also deliberate rationally about these consequences. (shrink)

In the UK, it has been proposed that alongside the current advice to abstain from alcohol completely in pregnancy, there should be increased screening of pregnant women for alcohol consumption in order to prevent instances of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. The Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network published guidelines in 2019 recommending that standardised screening questionnaires and associated use of biomarkers should be considered to identify alcohol exposure in pregnancy. This was followed in 2020 by the National Institute for Health and Care (...) Excellence Draft Quality Standard, which recommended that pregnant women should have information on their alcohol consumption recorded throughout their pregnancy and this information transferred to the child’s health records. Most recently, Public Health England has stated that the alcohol intake of all women should be recorded throughout pregnancy, not just at the initial booking appointment and that tools such as blood biomarkers and meconium testing should be researched in order to determine true prevalence rates of alcohol in pregnancy. We argue that this proposed enhanced screening undermines women’s autonomy and their legal right to be sufficiently informed to consent to screening. We argue that there is no evidence that this kind of screening will result in a reduction of fetal harm and there is a danger that undermining the autonomy of women and the trust relationship between women and healthcare professionals may even increase harm to future children. (shrink)

Galton greeted Darwin's theory of pangenesis with enthusiasm, and tried to test the assumption that the hereditary particles circulate in the blood by transfusion experiments on rabbits. The failure of these experiments led him to reject this assumption, and in the 1870s he developed an alternative theory of heredity, which incorporated those parts of Darwin's theory that did not involve the transportation of hereditary particles throughout the system. He supposed that the fertilized ovum contains a large number of hereditary (...) elements, which he collectively called the "stirp," a few of which are patent, developing into particular cell types, while the rest remain latent; the latent elements can be transmitted to the next generation, while the patent elements, with rare exceptions, cannot since they have developed into cells. The problem with this theory is that it does not explain the similarity between parent and child unless there is a high correlation between latent and patent elements. Galton probably came to realize this problem during his subsequent statistical work on heredity, and he quietly dropped the idea that patent elements are not transmitted in Natural Inheritance (1889). Galton thought that brothers and sisters had identical stirps, and he attributed differences between them to variability in the choice of patent elements from the stirp, that is to say to developmental variability. He attributed the likeness of monozygotic twins to the similarity of their developmental environment. Galton's twin method was to track the life history changes of twins to see whether twins who were similar at birth diverged in dissimilar environments or whether twins who were dissimilar at birth converged in similar environments. It is quite different from the modern twin method of comparing the similarities between monozygotic and dizygotic twins, on the assumption that monozygotic twins are genetically identical whereas dizygotic twins are not. It has been argued that Galton foreshadowed Weismann's theory of the continuity of the germ-plasm, but this is only true in a weak sense. They both believed that the inheritance of acquired characters was either rare or impossible, but Galton did not forestall the essential part of Weismann's theory, that the germ-plasm of the zygote is doubled, with one part being reserved for the formation of the germ-cells. (shrink)

Dummett’s The Logical Foundations of Metaphysics (LFM) outlines an ambitious project that has been at the core of his work during the last forty years. The project is built around a particular conception of the theory of meaning (or philosophy of language), according to which such a theory should constitute the corner stone of philosophy and, in particular, provide answers to various metaphysical questions. The present paper is intended as a critical evaluation of some of the main features of that (...) approach. My negative answer to the title’s question notwithstanding, I find Dummett’s analyses, which both inform and are guided by his project, of very high value. Among the subjects to be discussed here, which relate to but are not fully reflected in the title, are the concept of a full-blooded theory (in 4.) Davidson’s program (in 5.) and holism, to which the last third of this paper (section 6.) is devoted. That section can be read independently; to some extent, this is also true of 4. and 5. taken together. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Contemplative Classroom, or Learning by Heart in the Age of GoogleBarbara NewmanIn his provocative essay “Slow Knowledge,” David Orr outlines the countervailing assumptions of what he calls “the culture of fast knowledge.” Among these are the widely shared, though rarely examined, beliefs that “only that which can be measured is true knowledge; the more knowledge we have, the better; there are no significant distinctions between information and (...) knowledge; and wisdom is an undefinable, hence unimportant category.”1 If all this were true, it would follow that computers are fast overtaking humans as the next intelligent species. Or, to put it differently, the two species have been colluding for some time to produce smarter machines and dumber people, as we humans abdicate more and more of our mental tasks. Moreover, when it comes time to weigh values—to ask not how quickly or efficiently some task can be done, but whether it ought to be done at all—we are strangely disinclined to challenge digital fatalism, which has become the default logic of late capitalism. Whenever a new digital option appears, we assume that if it can be done and someone somewhere is doing it, then it should be done and we ought to do it too. So even the local hardware store has to be on Facebook so customers can “like” it, and the AAR needs a Twitter account to send weekly tweets. We seldom pause to ask questions about means and ends, unintended consequences, or the sheer mindless clutter of our lives—let alone the implications of this or that new app for our descendants down to the seventh generation, or the enlightenment of all sentient beings. Surface obliterates depth; instant stimulation trumps mature reflection; short-term profit overrules the long-range good.Computers themselves are of course morally neutral. Nonetheless, it is useful to recall why contemplation is the antithesis of the fast knowledge they promote. Contemplative practice is grounded in such values as presence, mindfulness, inwardness, and the integration of mind and body. The last point is worth stressing, for all knowledge, even the most spiritual, is embodied; we are still biological beings, not cyborgs. Though contemplatives of the past have often been fierce ascetics, even the most emaciated hermit could scarcely despise the body to the degree that we find in [End Page 3] some contemporary Internet addicts. Consider the following, reported in July 2012 in Newsweek:When the new DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] is released next year, Internet Addiction Disorder will be included for the first time, albeit in an appendix tagged for “further study.” China, Taiwan, and Korea recently accepted the diagnosis, and began treating problematic Web use as a grave national health crisis. In those countries,... the story is sensational front-page news. One young couple neglected its infant to death while nourishing a virtual baby online. A young man fatally bludgeoned his mother for suggesting he log off (and then used her credit card to rack up more hours). At least 10 ultra-Web users, serviced by one-click noodle delivery, have died of blood clots from sitting too long.2Even short of such extremes, numerous studies have linked excessive Internet use in the United States with increased rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and obsessive-compulsive behavior. Teens admit to being exhausted by the constant need to update their Facebook status and answer countless texts, yet they are afraid to log off for fear that some excitement may pass them by. There is even a new acronym, FOMO, for the fear of missing out. If a central aim of contemplative practice is to dismantle and disengage from the “false self,” there is no better tool for constructing false selves than social media. In her book Alone Together, the social psychologist Sherry Turkle quotes a young man who told her, “What I learned in high school was profiles, profiles, profiles, how to make a me.”3 Another student said he maintained four avatars onscreen at all times, along with his email, video games, and—yes—coursework. His “real life,” he said, was “just one more window,... not usually my best one.”4But social... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From Parnassus to EdenChristopher McDonoughFor Rebekah SmithIn these pages some seven years ago, Robert Renehan (1992) discussed the passage from book 19 of the Odyssey in which the young Odysseus’ cousins sing a healing incantation over his wound in the wilderness of Mount Parnassus. 1 Renehan was specifically interested in bringing to light the Old Irish comparanda, so as to display the Indo-European roots of this particular form of (...) magical healing; he was clear in stating, nonetheless, that such practices are found in many other parts of the world. To encounter this custom, however, it is not necessary to study ancient Ireland or Greece, as I discovered by surprise in class one day.When lecturing on the Odyssey in the past, I have always enjoyed lingering over this particular scene, presenting to students Erich Auerbach’s ideas on mimesis as well as more general folkloric material. 2 In addition to the Irish evidence adduced by Renehan, I have usually mentioned anecdotes about the brauchers (wizards) of the Pennsylvania Dutch, some of whom could still blood by chanting—even over the telephone (see Dorson 1964, 115). Thus it was, in the fall of 1995, that I was giving a guest lecture on book 19 for a classical mythology class at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I had just finished reciting some of the stories above, when a student raised his hand to ask, “Is that anything like talking out fire?” Before I could respond, another student also spoke up. “I was thinking that, too,” she said.A few others were nodding their heads in recognition, though the majority of the class looked perplexed. I certainly was, since I had no idea what they were talking about. The first student explained that he [End Page 297] was from Eden, North Carolina, a Piedmont town near the Virginia border; that, in this area, there were old women who could talk out fire; that, if a person had been burned, such a woman could be hired to speak to the fire and convince it to leave the body; that his own grandmother was such a woman; and that he himself as a child had had a burn talked out of his hand, which hand—the very hand he had raised!—he now raised again as dramatic testimony of the treatment. A few other students said that they too were familiar with the custom, though none had quite so intimate a familiarity as he.In the days that followed I did a little research on the topic, fearing that I may have been hoodwinked by some true son of crafty Autolykos. But his story checked out: the phenomenon of “talking the fire out of a burn” is well attested in North Carolina and throughout the South. 3 While folklorists have collected many accounts of this type of healing, perhaps the most vivid description is given by Southern writer Harry Crews. In A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978 = 1993, 17–170), a memoir of his upbringing in Depression-era rural Georgia, the author relates that, while playing as a boy, he had fallen into a cast-iron tub filled with boiling water for skinning hogs; over two-thirds of his body was scalded and, he recalls, the skin of his left hand came off “like a wet glove.” His family was too remote and too poor for a hospital trip, and had to rely on some makeshift arrangements set up by the local doctor. Shortly thereafter, however, they were visited by a rough character named Hollis Toomey, known throughout the area for his ability to talk out fire. Crews recounts what happened next:Hollis Toomey’s voice was low like the quiet rasping of a file on metal. I couldn’t hear most of what he had to say, but that was all right because I stopped burning before he ever started talking. He talked to the fire like an old and respected adversary, but one he had beaten consistently and had come to beat again. I don’t remember him once looking at my face while he explained: “Fire, this boy is mine. This bed is mine... (shrink)

We tend to think that the two great scourges of humankind, sexism and racism, have been around since the beginning of time. With regard to sexism, this is true. Aristotle, for example, thought women are malformed men: they do not have rational souls; they do not have enough soul heat to think properly or to boil their menstrual blood into semen; and, the cruelest cut of all, they are inferior because they have one less tooth than men. Aristotle (...) also believed, along with his compatriots, that all non-Greeks were barbarians and that slavery, especially for those of an inferior class or those captured in war, was completely justified. But Aristotle, and all other ancients of whom we are aware, did not ever think of discriminating against people because of the color of their skin. (shrink)

If a state with liberal political and justificatory commitments extends benefits of various kinds to persons forming families, what qualifications may such a state place on the right to access to those benefits? I will make two assumptions for the purposes of this paper. The first is the political and justificatory terrain of some form of political or otherwise non-perfectionist liberalism. The assumption is that we are considering the resources and limitations of a community of persons who accept moral pluralism (...) (if not a specific doctrine like the "burdens of judgment"), some priority for individual freedom, and the obligation to justify public coercion and exclusion in terms accessible and fair to all members of morally and culturally diverse society. The second is that it is justified for a liberal state to recognize some forms of domestic partnerships or families in the first place and extend further benefits to them such as tax credits or laws extending (or facilitating the extension of) medical or social insurance. It is, of course, possible to imagine the argument that the liberal state gets out of the marriage business by getting out of it entirely - by extending no recognition or positive rights to families whatsoever beyond negative non-interference rights. I am interested in the dilemma of a society broadly like existing liberal ones which is committed both to subsidizing families and also to justificatory neutrality (expressed in American constitutional legal terms as the requirement of providing a "rational basis" for unequal treatment). Given these assumptions, I believe that the most justifiable policy on liberal grounds is not the institution of "marriage" increasingly open to new constituent relationships but rather a status of "registered domestic partnership" which fulfills the social and moral aims behind subsidizing the family but is entirely neutral not only to the gender or even to the numbers of the partners, but also to the affective and emotional content of domestic life and the purposes behind contracting domestic partnerships. So is there a right to polygamy and incestuous marriage? There is not a specific right to either and thus there is no a priori reason why some restrictions or even prohibitions on them might not be justified, but the same is true for every specific act where a general right to the freedom exists. I argue in this paper, however, that the arguments compatible with public reason for prohibiting them outright, or even for excluding them from the permissible types of legally registered partnerships, are quite weak. I argue that objections to polygamy from (1) female autonomy, (2) damage to children, (3) fairness in the marital market, and (4) the unfair burdening of society are serious and worth refuting, but do not establish a victorious case against multi-member relationships. As to incest, there are two separate questions. The first is whether the new institution of "registered domestic partnerships" should be open to them. The answer to that, given the state's lack of interest in citizens' reasons for forming partnerships and in what they do whilst being registered in one, is clearly "yes." The second is whether, entirely separate from the issue of legal recognition of domestic partnership, the state has a legitimate rational interest in deterring, preventing or punishing consanguineous sexual relations between close blood relations (first-degree incest). Here, the objections to allowing such relations are those from (1) child abuse; (2) unfair burdening of society; and (3) the creation of bad lives. I argue that while rape and other forms of child abuse would be no more legal or tolerated than they are now, the concern about any form of weakening a society's legal and political resources to combat such abuses does indeed register on the justificatory scale, but does not prove that such first-degree incestuous sexual relations are inherently bad enough to warrant intervention. I then argue that the concern about unfairly burdening society with unhealthy persons is not as dangerously totalitarian as we might initially fear, but nor is it strong enough to justify an outright prohibition. Finally, I argue that a concern to dissuade persons from creating certain kinds of lives (children with extreme birth defects) is also not as dangerously totalitarian as we might initially fear, and in fact goes further towards explaining why we might have a legitimate interest in intervening. Nonetheless, I argue that the criminalization of such acts only make sense when they are indicators of other offenses, namely negligence or abuse, and it thus seems that the act of consanguineous reproduction is itself insufficient. (shrink)

In 1848, the _Götheborgs Dagblad _newspaper was revived after a ten-year gap, and launched the anonymous submission column entitled ‘Anonyma Lådan’ (the Anonymous Box). In January and February 1849, many antisemitic letters and articles were published in the Swedish newspapers. Some letters defending Jews and Judaism were published in both ‘Anonyma Lådan’ and _Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning_. Short of blood libel, the antisemitic side accused Jews of typical anti-Jewish stereotypes: for example, greed, hypocrisy and Jewish hatred of Christianity. Anti-antisemitic (...) writers proclaimed a Christian identity that was based on humanism, stating that one could not be a true Christian if one attacked and hated Jews and Judaism. The Jewish congregation in Gothenburg and the society Judiska Intresset (The Jewish Cause) both chose a non-engaged approach to the antisemitic attacks in the newspaper, since it was not respectable to engage in such debates and, in their view, it would only cause more anti-Jewish sentiments if they did so. In this art­icle, it is argued that the reasons behind the attacks were societal changes, but also, more importantly, that with ‘Anonyma Lådan’, antisemitic sentiments found a platform where such sentiments could be freely expressed. (shrink)

Physicians place significant weight on the distinction between acts and omissions. Most believe that autonomous refusals for procedures, such as blood transfusions and resuscitation, ought to be respected, but they feel no similar obligation to accede to requests for treatment that will, in the physician’s opinion, harm the patient (e.g., assisted death). Thus, there is an asymmetry. In this paper, we challenge the strength of this distinction by arguing that the ordering of values should be the same in both (...) cases. The reason for respecting refusals is that, in such cases, autonomy outweighs well-being. We argue that the same should be true in request cases, which means that requests should not be denied only due to the treatment being too harmful in the physician’s opinion. Our strategy is to consider and reject a number of arguments for the asymmetrical view, including an appeal to the doing–allowing distinction and positive and negative rights. The duty to respect refusals is still greater than the duty to grant requests on our view, but, by arguing that the ordering of values is the same in both cases, we show that there is less of a distinction in healthcare between requests and refusals than many currently believe. (shrink)

Is it worse to kill someone than to let someone die? It seems obvious to common sense that it is worse. We allow people to die, for example, when we fail to contribute money to famine-relief efforts; but even if we feel somewhat guilty, we do not consider ourselves murderers. Nor do we feel like accessories to murder when we fail to give blood, sign an organ-donor card, or do any of the other things that could save lives. Common (...) sense tells us that, while we may not kill people, our duty to give them aid is much more limited. Some philosophers, however, have argued that common sense is wrong about this. They have defended the Equivalence Thesis, which says that killing and letting die are equally bad. This is a more specific version of the idea that there is no moral difference between making something happen and allowing it to happen. The Equivalence Thesis is a radical conception that would require changes in our ordinary moral beliefs. If it is true, then obviously our duty to give aid is much stronger than we commonly assume. But our views about other matters, such as euthanasia, will also be affected. Many people believe that “passive euthanasia”--allowing terminal patients to die, rather than pointlessly prolonging their lives--is sometimes permissible; but they also believe that killing patients is always wrong. If the Equivalence Thesis is true, this combination of beliefs is inconsistent. The idea behind the Equivalence Thesis is not that every individual case of letting die is equally as bad as every individual case of killing. Obviously, if we compare an ordinary murder--say, a man killing his wife out of jealousy--with the actions of a physician who humanely permits a suffering patient to die, the murder is much worse. Rather, the idea is that the difference between killing and letting die does not itself make a difference to the moral assessment of the actions. Other factors may still be important. (shrink)

A valuable gain of our times is that many fables—true, some of the most terrible ones—have become true stories, and many allegories and metaphors have become almost literal. Take this verse: today we hardly hear in it any poetic convention; everything is the commonplace reality of our age—both its brutishness and its blood, and even the gluing together of its vertebrae after various great breaks. Therefore a clear question is posed; and surely the age is coming to (...) an end and an answer is needed. So then, who was able to do it? Who managed to glue things together? Among the few names and fates that may be given in reply, one of the most indisputable is the name of Aleksei Fedorovich Losev. Yes, he had occasion to do so. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Can Two Wrongs Make a Right?Toby Williamson (bio)"Service users, carers, and professionals disagree about the nature of mental disorder in startling new revelation!" On first appearances Fulford and Colombo's use of linguistic-analytic and empirical methods to demonstrate this point may not seem as if it is telling those in the mental health world anything that they do not already know. The bipolar/dialectical axis (choose your preferred term depending on (...) your ideological position) with the anti-psychiatry movement at one end and the biogeneticists at the other is both well-known and well-documented. Yet it is precisely that flippancy, and the practical implications that flow from it, that make this work so fundamentally important to the theory, application, and experience of mental health practice at the beginning of the twenty-first century.Discussions about different models of mental disorder usually play themselves out in arguments within services, or between services and service users and informal carers, about the most appropriate approach to take in addressing a service users needs, or in abstract discussions (often over a drink after work) about the nature of mental health and mental health problems. From blood and fur flying in the bull pit, to swallows endlessly chasing their tails high in the sky. Sadly, the results of this all too often are bitter and unresolved conflicts, different parties digging themselves even further into defensive, entrenched positions, and the least powerful (usually service users) suffering the most as a consequence. Both sides believe the other to be wrong yet cannot convince them of this; an example, albeit with slight variation, of two wrongs not making a right. Rarely are the debates grounded in a constructive, creative, and problem-solving approach on a day-to-day basis, partly because hitherto there does not seem to have been either sufficient empirical evidence to base this upon, or the conceptual as well as practical tools with which to grapple with the issues.Generally speaking, mainstream research in mental health has tended to focus on issues such as symptoms and treatment interventions (James and Burns 2002). However, surveys of service users' views still show considerable problems in the way services are received and experienced by users (Rose 2001). Other surveys, together with user-led research, such as Strategies for Living at the Mental Health Foundation, have also shown how the focus of users' concerns maybe very different to that of service providers (Faulkner and Layzell 2000; Nicholls et al, 2003; Repper 2000). Indeed, a piece of research carried out in the 1990s, which would probably still hold true today, showed that service users prioritized practical issues such as personal finance, housing, and social support, whereas professionals saw issues such as treatment and monitoring as being the highest priority (Shepherd, Murray, and Muijen 1995). Combining this, one might well argue that there is fairly clear evidence of the [End Page 159] differences in value bases and models of mental disorder deployed by service users and mental health professionals. However, actually trying to scientifically map this, and taking into account differences between professions, not to mention the views of informal carers, would appear to be a gargantuan task. Yet Fulford and Colombo appear to have very successfully done this in the research supporting this article, as well as the article itself. Their discussion of the concept of mental disorder, and the difficulties of defining it, not only effortlessly demonstrates the theoretical and philosophical problems that lie at the heart of psychiatry and mental health systems, of which Professor Fulford along with others has already written extensively (Dickenson and Fulford 2000), but also should resonate at a very practical level for most people who have been at the providing or receiving end of mental health services. But going beyond this they also provide perhaps the simplest, yet most effective solution—to embrace diversity and find ways of working with it, rather than running shy of it or even worse, attempting to homogenize it. As they say, "the difficulties in use presented by the concept of mental disorder are not a liability, heuristically speaking, but an asset" (Fulford and Colombo 2004, 132).The article is also very timely because... (shrink)

Meinong’s thought has been rediscovered in recent times by analytic philosophy: his object theory has significant consequences in formal ontology, and especially his account of impossible objects has proved itself to be decisive in a wide range of fields, from logic up to ontology of fiction. Rejecting the traditional ‘prejudice in favour of the real’, Meinong investigates what there is not: a peculiar non-existing object is precisely the fictional object, which exemplifies a number of properties without existing in the same (...) way as flesh-and-blood detectives do. Fictional objects are in some sense incomplete objects, whose core of constituent properties is not completely determined. Now, what does it imply to hold that a fictional object may also occur in true statements? We shall deal with the objections raised by Russell and Quine against Meinong’s view, pointing out limits and advantages of both perspectives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CHRISTOLOGY IN POLITICAL AND LIBERATION THEOLOGY R. R. RENO Creighton University Omaha, Nebraska Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems ; and he has a name inscribed which no one knows but (...) himself. He is clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him on white horses. From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, King of kings and Lord of lords. Revelation 19:11-16 SHARP IS THE SWORD of The Word of God: so proclaims a growing body of literature in political and liberation theology. Although this literature evidences a deep pluralism when describing wherein the sword is sharp and toward what it is aimed, the unifying claim is that Christianity has decisive political significance. And this significance takes an explicitly theoretical form. Unlike other politically directed theological programs (e.g., Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Rauschenbush, Paul Lehmann), political and liberation theologies do not restrict the practical to a pre- or post-theoretical moment. The practical questions of liberation and justice are internal to explicitly theological reflection. The manner in which questions of liberation and justice are 291 292 R. R. RENO woven into the fabric of theology is manifold. Juan Luis Segundo, in Liberation of Theology, presents an account of theological method which is necessarily political.1 He attempts to show that, to the degree that it is faithful, theological reflection must be constituted by ideological critique and transformative social commitment. In a similar although more ambiguous way, Matthew Lamb's Solidarity with Victims seeks to build social and political issues into the ground floor of method.2 On a different front, Jiirgen Moltmann's Theology of Hope emphasizes the necessarily political dimension of eschatology.3 Quite far removed from the radicalism of most political and liberation theologies, but equally important and increasingly self-conscious of its theological context, the Roman Catholic human rights tradition can be seen as a political theology which chooses to operate within the context of a strong doctrine of creation.4 1 Juan Luis Segundo, Liberation of Theology. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1976). 2 Lamb's program is more than a methodological proposal for theology in itself. He promotes an interesting mixture of critical theory and interdisciplinary study as a path for all inquiry. The result is a pastiche of Adorno and Lonergan. Lamb explains his interdiscipinary vision as follows : " Such a noetic praxis of theologizing would develop academically institutionalized ways of promoting an intellectual conversion (metanoia) whereby the suffering witness of the victims of history would challenge the systems and theories constitutive of our world experience " (Victims, p. 17). However, the critical element of this interdisciplinary "noetic praxis" which Lamb draws from Adorno's Negative Dialectics militates against this " institutionalized" use. At the deepest level Adorno questions the very possibility of a noetic practice which mediates the reality of experience, and he certainly rejects any institutional reification of the small insights which we might garner. For Adorno, critical thought cannot mediate the actual suffering of concrete individuals ; rather, its ultimate impotence in the face of such a reality mirrors the suffering of finite beings. Thought bears witness formally not materially. This basic feature of Adorno's thought runs counter to Lonergan's cognitive optimism, making Lamb's program interesting but implausible. Matthew Lamb, Solidarity with Victims (New York: Crossroad, 1982). SJiirgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope. (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). 4 David Hollenbach's Claims in Confiict (New York: Paulist Press, 1979) provides an example of a recent attempt to uncover the theological foundations for a theory of rights. Showing that the language of rights flows from a basic respect... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Removing the Mask: Hopeless Isolation to Intersex AdvocacyAlexandra von KlanStrangers undoubtedly perceive me as female, but I identify as an intersex woman. My karyotype is 46,XY, a typically defined marker of male biological sex, and I was born with undeveloped, non–functioning gonads. As an intersex person, I know firsthand the negative consequences of pathologizing intersex people’s lived experience by categorizing otherwise healthy, functioning organs and bodies as abnormal. The (...) following narrative recounts conversations and interactions with medical providers during my diagnosis and subsequent treatment of pure XY gonadal dys-genesis, sometimes referred to as Swyer Syndrome. I hope to elaborate upon emotionally significant actions and inactions of medical care providers to expose consequential effects on my emotional processing, physical health, and self–actualization.In December 1988, I was born with “typical” female genitalia. No one knew I was an intersex woman with 46,XY karyotype. Thus, there was no hesitation in the announcement of the birth of a girl in the delivery room or later, on my birth certificate. My parents raised me as a girl and dressed their firstborn in culturally normative feminine garments and accessories: lace frilly frocks, oversized bows, white stockings, and black patent leather Mary Jane’s. I embraced femininity and expressed this gender identity throughout my childhood and adolescence. I’m the eldest of six children split between two households.In January 2005, a month after my sixteenth birthday, delayed puberty and absent menstruation prompted an appointment to a local women’s health center. Nurses collected blood samples and administered an MRI scan on my pelvic region. A week later, my father received a perplexing phone call. An inexperienced doctor told him “there must be something wrong” with me, because lab results revealed I was “chromosomally male.” My father recalls the information presented like, based on the evidence, “your daughter may not be completely female,” and that is that. His impression was that she knew little about the subject and was a bit clueless. She did not mention Swyer Syndrome, or any diagnosis for that matter.Up to this point, I was unaware that a member of my extended family also had Swyer Syndrome. Born in the 1950s, secrecy engulfed her medical treatment and doctors warned her parents against revealing her true chromosomal sex in order to prevent the hysterical panic and depression they [End Page E14] thought the truth would bring. Years later, she sought her medical records and unearthed the truth. Shortly after my father received that dubious phone call, my relative’s endocrinologist provided a referral to his mentor, “Doctor A,” a clinical reproductive endocrinologist.Under Doctor A’s care, I experienced the first of many pelvic exams. Much to my discomfort, Doctor A inspected my semi–clothed body with a male resident in the room. As a people–pleasing teen, I granted permission for his presence; I didn’t voice my preference for a female alternative. Doctor A’s cold hands pressed around each undeveloped breast, pulled a gown away from my hips to inspect a sparse patch of pubic hair, and conducted an examination of my vaginal canal.Shortly after the examination, Doctor A charted Swyer Syndrome as the official diagnosis. Speaking to my father and me, he described my condition as an extremely rare genetic mutation. He told us that Swyer Syndrome was an intersex condition, a group of congenital disorders impacting a person’s internal or external reproductive systems, including endocrine function and genitalia. He explained I had atypical streak gonads instead of ovaries and that, despite having typical male sex chromosomes, I was still very much a girl. He disclosed that my vaginal canal was moderate in length, perhaps further evidence—or consolation—that my body possessed normative female reproductive attributes after all.Next, Doctor A identified a pressing medical concern—golf–ball–sized benign tumors had developed on each streak gonad; if allowed to remain, they would pose an increasing risk of malignancy. We scheduled an appointment for laparoscopic gonadectomy six months later. I left his office with a 3–month prescription for estrogen and progesterone oral tablets. On the way home, we drove to an electronics store where my father... (shrink)

At one point in his treatise against the ‘Gnostics’ Plotinus treats his adversaries as men of flesh and blood, not merely as proponents of false books and false beliefs: For I feel a certain shame with regard to some of my friends , who, having chanced upon this doctrine before the beginning of our friendship, have continued to adhere to it for reasons that I cannot understand. Not that they themselves show any compunction in saying what they say: they (...) may believe what they say to be true , but perhaps they rather wish others to be persuaded of the truth of their own opinions. (shrink)

Gyula begins with a contrast between contemporary scare-quotes essentialism and Aristotelian full-blooded essentialism. The former is a semantic thesis couched in the vocabulary of possible-worlds semantics, holding that some terms are rigid designators, while the latter is a metaphysical thesis, couched in a more ancient vocabulary, holding that things have essences. Gyula argues that the more traditional metaphysical framework deserves reconsideration, both because it can help us with problems arising from the contemporary approach, and because it possesses greater expressive power (...) than the contemporary approach. He presents a fragmentary formal semantics for the traditional approach, and argues that this semantics enables us to see how the problems of contemporary essentialism can be avoided while at the same time other properly metaphysical issues, which are unapproachable from within the contemporary model due to its expressive weakness, become available for investigation. The semantics that he presents seems intended to establish the intelligibility of the traditional vocabulary, and so of the thesis of Aristotelian essentialism which is couched in it. Gyula then argues that this thesis is in fact true, using the vocabulary which the semantics has rendered legitimate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Most Crucial Gesture for a Living BeingLuce Irigaray (bio)When I wrote L'oubli de l'air, my first book on Heidegger, published in 1983–translated as The Forgetting of Air in 1999–the problem of breathing was almost ignored, strange, even inappropriate. As it was for the figure of Antigone, which is connected to it, in Speculum in 1974, to speak of air seemed to be irrelevant, not to say suspicious. In (...) our Western tradition, life as such was not a subject that could be culturally approached. It was too trivial and not worthy of Culture. We are just beginning to understand where that has led us. Indeed, breathing is the most crucial key component of our relation to ourselves, to the other(s) and to the world. And it is a pity that we only discover that because our breathing is now more than ever put in danger.Breathing in relating to ourselvesComing into the world requires us to breathe by ourselves. We were conceived by two different beings and, in the womb of our mother, we received oxygen through her blood. Being born means assuming the fact that we are each only one(s), alone, and we must take charge of our own being to live. This, at first, happens naturally. Our body breathes to survive. But no one and nothing, at least in the West, teaches us how to develop this breathing–except, sometimes, by singing… And yet, our breath is that which allows us to reach our full humanity.Breathing is necessary not only to survive but also to transform a mere natural existence into a human and spiritual existence that remains fleshly. In our tradition, the spiritual, and more generally the cultural, is considered to be something abstract, which is imposed on us to master and dominate our natural belonging. Such a way of conceiving of our becoming human splits us into two irreconcilable parts, of which one rests uncultivated in the family home, or at least at the level of the so-called private life, and the other is dependent on authorities who are presumed to know the path we must follow to become cultured and spiritual. Thus, the development of our existence evades our responsibility and our [End Page 207] shaping. We are torn between a subjection to nature and a subjection to culture, without reaching our unity and the possibility of a real being in charge of our existence and of a becoming of our own. Besides, the latter is paralyzed by the split between our body and our mind, each needing the other to evolve as a human being.It could be otherwise, if our upbringing and our school and academic education would include how to cultivate our breathing. As is the case in the beginning of our life, breathing by ourselves is the condition of our autonomous and personal development. A living being must grow to remain alive and it must grow in faithfulness to its own origin. In fact, few people continue growing beyond a natural development. This means that they then begin to die and never become really human–which requires a becoming other than merely natural. They are sort of automata, resulting from a certain time and place determined by history and the environment. They do not live and behave according to a dynamism and an identity of their own. They are products of a socio-cultural milieu, pieces of a constructed world, without bringing to the world the unique and irreducible presence of a living being.To be capable of a true faithfulness to ourselves, we must cultivate our breathing, which permits us to continuously pass from our bodily belonging to a personal, cultured belonging by transforming the properties of our own breath. Indeed, this can evolve from a more material and undifferentiated to a more subtle, individual and spiritual nature and consistency. It is so much so that our Judeo-Christian tradition asserts that we were born of the breath of God. After doing yoga for more than forty years, I would like to suggest that we can be born again by making our breathing spiritual. What is more, we then... (shrink)

Descartes thought he could suppose he was the victim of massive deception in regard to the external world. In fact he undertakes the supposing of it.I will … suppose that … a certain evil spirit, not less clever and deceitful than powerful, has bent all his efforts to deceiving me. I will think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all other external things are nothing but illusions and dreams that he has used to trick my (...) credulity. I will regard myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, but believing falsely that I have all these things.Seated comfortably by his fire, Descartes imagines a remote possibility. Perhaps he is just a mind in the clutches of a deceiving demon. If Descartes is this man lounging here in his dressing gown, he is not vastly deceived; but if he is that mind, he is deceived indeed. The two possibilities are taken to be experientially indiscernible; and Descartes is assuming that the contents of his beliefs and the senses of his claims remain the same in either case. Thus, for example, whether he is this man or that mind, he believes he has two hands. But, and this is crucial, his belief is false if he is that mind, and true if he is this man. We begin to see what is required of cartesian semantics, and cartesian theories of the content of belief. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:And When May I Cry?Juggling Emotions in Healthcare InterpretingMateo Rutherford-RojasDisclaimers. All names have been changed to protect the privacy of the patient and the patient's family.Baby Oliver had been in the NICU almost since he was born. Oliver was born with a relatively simple congenital problem, which required him to have a routine corrective surgery.Unfortunately, routine surgeries don't always deliver routine results. Due to unexpected complications during the operation (...) and a prolonged lack of blood flow, several of Oliver's tiny organs suffered partial necrosis. It was just a matter of time until little Oliver's life could no longer be sustained with tubes, pumps, liquids, and pain medications. How much time Oliver's tiny body could hold out was unclear—he had days, maybe a week. The care team had already communicated to Oliver's parents, who were still teens themselves, the options that were available. The team provided sufficient medical detail for the parents to understand the logic of the situation. They faced the most difficult decision any parent—past, present, or future—would ever have to make. Before his birth, the parents expected to take little Oliver home, to love and nurture him, and witness him grow well into adulthood. Now, they had two choices. They could either choose to disconnect Oliver from the machines and let him die in their loving arms or watch him fade away, connected to his incubator and accompanying equipment, barely able to touch him through the multiple life-sustaining wires and tubes.The message had been delivered in Oliver's parents' language many times. In fact, every Spanish interpreter on staff had worked with the care team and Oliver's family at some time during their stay. Their ears heard it, but their minds could not comprehend how a routine operation could end like this. It is in these moments that most people rely heavily on their faith, as did Oliver's parents; waiting for God's miracle to happen.Perhaps it was the Chaplain's suggestion that God's miracles are not dependent on medical machines and life-sustaining equipment. Or that perhaps God needs Oliver and knows his family is strong enough to let him go. But at moments like these, religious philosophy and the nature of God do not provide a simple and clear answer. Still, someone has to decide, "Yes, it's time to hold him and say goodbye" or "No, we are not yet ready to let go of our hope."I don't know what the final deciding factor was or when that moment came for these young parents so full of love and hope for their new family. All I know is that I had the tremendous honor and [End Page E6] responsibility of interpreting for the parents and the care team when the gravity of the situation had penetrated all those human mechanisms of self-preservation. Oliver's parents chose to embrace their son, hold him in their arms one last time, and say, "Goodbye, we love you."This situation is not unusual at our hospital. As one of the nation's primary academic children's hospitals, patients come to us for miracle cures or to die in comfort and peace. In this case, what was unusual and touched the hearts of everyone in the room—surgeons, specialists of every organ system, bedside nurses, chaplains, social workers, and yes, the interpreter—was the final message the parents had for the care team. "Please, please, our only wish is that no parent ever have to make a decision like this again, please." We were all shocked and humbled by these anciently wise teenage souls whose hearts were broken, and their primary concern was for every other parent in the world, whom they would never meet—"May they never feel our pain."How I wish their desires had come true. However, soon after the situation with Baby Oliver, I would find myself again in the NICU interpreting the same messages to two other families, though their stories were distinctly different. Unlike little Oliver, the babies in the later cases were diagnosed with genetic disorders that presented little... (shrink)

Multivariate pattern analysis can reveal new information from neuroimaging data to illuminate human cognition and its disturbances. Here, we develop a methodological approach, based on multivariate statistical/machine learning and time series analysis, to discern cognitive processing stages from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) time series. We apply this method to data recorded from a group of healthy adults whilst performing a virtual reality version of the delayed win-shift radial arm maze (RAM) task. This task (...) has been frequently used to study working memory and decision making in rodents. Using linear classifiers and multivariate test statistics in conjunction with time series bootstraps, we show that different cognitive stages of the task, as defined by the experimenter, namely, the encoding/retrieval, choice, reward and delay stages, can be statistically discriminated from the BOLD time series in brain areas relevant for decision making and working memory. Discrimination of these task stages was significantly reduced during poor behavioral performance in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), but not in the primary visual cortex (V1). Experimenter-defined dissection of time series into class labels based on task structure was confirmed by an unsupervised, bottom-up approach based on Hidden Markov Models. Furthermore, we show that different groupings of recorded time points into cognitive event classes can be used to test hypotheses about the specific cognitive role of a given brain region during task execution. We found that whilst the DLPFC strongly differentiated between task stages associated with different memory loads, but not between different visual-spatial aspects, the reverse was true for V1. Our methodology illustrates how different aspects of cognitive information processing during one and the same task can be separated and attributed to specific brain regions based on information contained in multivariate patterns of voxel activity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Memorial Tribute to Leroy RounerEliot DeutschLeroy Rouner was an extraordinary academic leader, productive and creative scholar, brilliant teacher—and most importantly, I believe, an exemplary person. As a leader, in addition to serving in many administrative positions, Lee directed with great skill and flair the Institute for Philosophy and Religion at Boston University from its inception to the time of his retirement a couple of years ago. As a (...) scholar doing original work on the philosophy of civil religion he also edited over 20 volumes published by the University of Notre Dame Press on specific topics and themes from lectures presented at his Institute by thinkers of international repute from many different backgrounds and cultures. As a teacher he inspired his students wherever he taught to think clearly about basic issues in philosophy and religion as a form of praxis to what it means to live a flourishing life. I recall vividly when he visited a seminar of mine and urged the graduate students to be passionate about their work; indeed, he said, "I always want to see blood on the pages of my student's papers."As a person, Lee exhibited throughout the many years I knew him a spontaneous generosity of spirit and means that reflected his deep religiosity. Lee was compassionate by nature and a true believer in the redemptive power of faith, but he could at the same time both acknowledge and celebrate a genuine plurality of spiritual possibilities. Lee had a rare capacity for friendship and a great sense of humor that allowed him to never take himself too seriously or anyone else for that matter who, not uncommonly in our profession, tend to center the world on themselves. Lee was above all devoted to his family and whenever a lapse of time of our meeting face to face occurred he would phone or send a letter to bring me up to date on the activities of his wife and children, of whom he was justifiably proud.I first met Lee in 1969 when he attended one of our East-West Philosophers' Conferences here in Honolulu. We felt an immediate affinity that deepened over the years. He subsequently visited with us here as an invited lecturer, as a Visiting Professor and as a participant in all the East-West Philosophers' Conferences and the Research Conferences of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy held here since 1969. I also had many opportunities to visit him and his Institute in Boston, especially during the time I spent in 1985 as a visiting professor at Harvard. We also joyously attended at the same time many academic meetings in cities throughout the country and in a numerous places abroad.My indebtedness to Lee is very large indeed—the most striking example of which was when, during the middle of a Fall semester many years ago, Lee flew from Boston to Honolulu to preside over the marriage of my wife Marcia and me. With that most generous gift, we were assured of an enduring and wonderful togetherness.Lee was a very dear friend and will be sorely missed by us and by the many friends he made here during his frequent visits. We do take consolation, though, in knowing that wherever the angels dwell so does the spirit of Leroy Rouner. [End Page 369]Eliot DeutschDepartment of Philosophy, University of Hawai'iCopyright © 2006 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)