Over sixty years ago, it was written of early Greek tyranny that it ‘had arisen only in towns where an industrial and commercial regime tended to prevail over rural economy, but where an iron hand was needed to mobilize the masses and to launch them in assault on the privileged classes… But tyranny nowhere endured. After it had performed the services which the popular classes expected of it, after it had powerfully contributed to material prosperity and to the development of (...) democracy, it disappeared with an astonishing rapidity… The people regarded tyranny only as an expedient. They used it as a battering ram with which to demolish the citadel of the oligarchs, and when their end had been achieved they hastily abandoned the weapon which wounded their hands.’ Thus Gustav Glotz, whose view found favour with de Ste Croix. He too concluded with appeal to Aristotle, who in a famous passage declared that unlike monarchy, which arises to help ‘the great and good’ against the People, and the monarch who is appointed as one of ‘the great and good’, ‘the tyrant comes from the People and the multitude to confront the men of note and prevent the People being unjustly treated by them. This is clear from what actually happened, for, generally speaking, the majority of the tyrants became tyrants from being demagogues so to speak, having got themselves trusted by their abusive attacks on the men of note.’ Against this view of Aristotle and all his latter-day satellites, this paper is directed. (shrink)

This paper emphasizes the crucial role of variation, at several different levels, for a detailed historical understanding of the development of the biomedical sciences. Going beyond valuable recent studies that focus on model organisms, experimental systems and instruments, we argue that all of these categories can be accommodated within our approach, which pays special attention to organismal and cultural variation. Our empirical examples are drawn in particular from recent historical studies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century genetics and physiology. Based on (...) the quasi-paradoxical conclusion that biological and cultural variation both constrains and enables innovation in the biomedical sciences, we argue that more attention should be paid to variation as an analytical category in the historiography of the life sciences. (shrink)

In CQ n.s. 26 . 62–84 I argued that the defeat of Sparta in 371 B.C. was not due to the pursuit of unwise policies towards the other Greek states. Unwise policies there had been. Sparta being by no means superior to Athens in the formulation of foreign policy, but these did not affect the position on the eve of Leuctra when, with Thebes politically isolated, and with some of the Boeotians disaffected, Cieombrotus at the head of a numerically superior (...) Spartan and allied army was poised for the, destruction of Theban power; a triumph of policy it must have seemed. Sparta failed for military reasons. Her army was unequal to the military genius of Epaminondas. (shrink)

In 404 Sparta stood supreme, militarily and politically master of Greece, in concord with Persia. By 362, the year at which Xenophon terminated his history on the sad note of ‘even greater confusion and uncertainty’, she was eclipsed militarily, never to win a great battle again; and so far from being master even of the Peloponnese that she would spend the rest of time struggling to recover her own ancestral domain of Messenia, no longer a world power, merely a local (...) wrangler. The reasons for all this which are to seek are of absorbing interest and prime importance for the history of Greece, but it is hard to resist the temptation to connect the change with the policies of Agesilaus whose reign virtually coincided with the period in question. He was king for forty-one years and over thirty of them well before the battle of Leuctra and he had influence in the state unequalled as far as we can tell by any other king. (shrink)

Isolated neutron stars undergoing non-radial oscillations are expected to emit gravitational waves in the kilohertz frequency range. To date, radio astronomers have located about 1,300 pulsars, and can estimate that there are about 2×108 neutron stars in the galaxy. Many of these are surely old and cold enough that their interiors will contain matter in the superfluid or superconducting state. In fact, the so-called glitch phenomenon in pulsars (a sudden spin-up of the pulsar's crust) is best described by assuming the (...) presence of superfluid neutrons and superconducting protons in the inner crusts and cores of the pulsars. Recently there has been much progress on modelling the dynamics of superfluid neutron stars in both the Newtonian and general relativistic regimes. We will discuss some of the main results of this recent work, perhaps the most important being that superfluidity should affect the gravitational waves from neutron stars (emitted, for instance, during a glitch) by modifying both the rotational properties of the background star and the modes of oscillation of the perturbed configuration. Finally, we present an analysis of the so-called zero-frequency subspace (i.e., the space of time-independent perturbations) and determine that it is spanned by two sets of polar (or spheroidal) and two sets of axial (or toroidal) degenerate perturbations for the general relativistic system. As in the Newtonian case, the polar perturbations are the g-modes which are missing from the pulsation spectrum of a non-rotating configuration, and the axial perturbations should lead to two sets of r-modes when the degeneracy of the frequencies is broken by having the background rotate. (shrink)

The title of this presentation may suggest that the subject is homocystinuria. It is not. Rather, the subject is how our epistemology influences our concept of disease, which in turn determines our ability to help patients.

There is widespread agreement among philosophers that William James's well-known attempt to justify religious faith in ‘The Will to Believe’ is a failure. But despite the fact that James wrote his essay as a reply to the ‘tough-minded’ ethics of belief represented by such thinkers as W. K. Clifford and T. H. Huxley, the reasons commonly given today for rejecting James's position seem to be mostly based on the same principle of intellectual ethics that motivated Clifford and Huxley. Clifford, it (...) may be recalled, maintained that ‘It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’. Although this is a rather rhetorical way of stating it, the principle is basically the same one adhered to by most scientists and philosophers who consider themselves rigorous and ‘objective’ thinkers. Even philosophers not associated with the hardheaded modern Anglo-American style of empiricism commonly pledge their allegiance to such a principle. For example, Brand Blanshard holds that the ‘main principle’ of the ethics of belief is that one should ‘equate one's assent to the evidence’ and he then goes on to criticize James, on the basis of this principle, for advocating self-deception and intellectual dishonesty. (shrink)

The humanitarian thought did not encounter such challenges that we face today. Biotechnologies outline the perspectives of “posthuman” personology, while digitalization and robotization of almost all spheres of social practice bring to the fore the idea of homodicy – justifying the need for human existence. The article analyzes four blocks of challenges to humanitarian knowledge: (1) achievements in medicine, prosthetics, transplantology and genetic engineering, which outlined the separation of a sentient subject from traditional anthropomorphism (“posthuman” personology); (2) studies of the (...) brain neurophysiology, which advanced new arguments against free will; (3) costs of ill-considered propaganda of human rights; (4) digitization of almost all socio-cultural practices – from economics and military affairs to the formation and functioning of authority. Digitalization permeates all these “problematization fields,” setting their common conceptual and technological platform. In this regard, the question arises of the humanitarian expertise of modern technologies and the projects of education, communication and management, which implemented with their help. That expertise deals with not only the consequences, progress or even the possibility of implementing such projects, but also with their necessity. The focus and criteria of such expertise are important. Obviously, it cannot be directed only at the preservation of the biological species of homo sapiens and the conditions of its survival. Paradoxical choice arises in a situation where freedom and free will are questioned: which is more important – homo or sapiens? It is time for a clear distinction between the concepts of humanism and humanitarianism, including in the latter the posthuman personology. If humanitarianism is a personology of free spirit, then humanism seems to have a place next to economism and nationalism as forms of confined humanitarianism. This wide range of problems requires comprehension not only of their content but also of the methodology of the humanities and of the prospects of the humanities in modern society. (shrink)

In this article, the authors study the problem of balance of trust and mistrust associated with the turbulence of modern society, redundancy, and heterogeneity of information and communication flows creating a contradictory picture of the world. Social networks are considered as one of the basic modern information resources creating previously unavailable opportunities for communication, interaction, information sharing, and commonality construction. Social networks users broadcast the experience of constructing communications in real daily life in the Internet community forming circles of ‘friends‘, (...) building a chain of weak social ties; but the problem of trusting ‘friends‘ remains not solved in global space. A survey of users of social networks, conducted as part of this study, demonstrates conflicting findings. The opinions of ‘friends‘ does not always have an impact on the degree of trusting events, information, groups, likes, and dislikes to other users. Users often trust strangers and less familiar people. The social networks demonstrates the demand for uniting ‘brige-building‘ trust. However, the trust remains extremely narrow throughout, leading to fragmentation and alienation of individuals from each other in an attempt to find their safe niche. Distrust of narrow and wide radius leads to far-reaching consequences and greater uncertainty in society, not creating the preconditions for openness and the vision of the future. (shrink)