This article provides ethical guidance on using race in health research as a variable or in defining the study population. To this end, a plain, non-exhaustive checklist is provided for researchers and research ethics committees, preceded by a brief introduction on the need for justification when using race as a variable or in defining a study population, the problem of exoticism, that distinctions pertain between race, ethnicity and ancestry, the problematic naming of races, and that race does not serve well (...) as a presumed biological construct in genetic research. (shrink)

The N ational Assembly held in the Frankfurt Paulskirche in 1848, which opened w ith high hopes for the unification o f Germ any on parliam entary constitutional principles, was left to die a year later, in the telling phrase o f D onoso Cortes, ‘like a street w om an in the gu tter’. In the period o f reaction that followed, during w hich the Paulskirche convention came to be described as the ‘parliam ent o f pro­ fessors’, (...) one o f its m em bers, Georg G ottfried Gervinus, was accused, in a trial for high treason, o f attem pting to prove the historical inevitability o f the supersession o f monarchical forms by republican forms. This was Gervinus’s second experience as a professorial m artyr. In 1837 he had been one o f the professors at the U niversity o f G ottingen, the ‘Gottingen Seven’, w ho protested the revocation o f the H anoverian constitution. For this he had been banished and given three days to leave the kingdom. The lesson he, and m any other liberal thinkers, learned from these experiences was that the Germ an middle classes were incapable o f perform ing the historical role assigned to them; they lacked the political will to establish a republican order. (shrink)

In this essay we will consider another basic topic: the problem of the nature of the distinctions between Sitte, Brauch, Wert, Mode, and Recht, on which Weber's discussion relies. These discussions typically involved the untranslatable concept of Sitte, which marks a contrast between practices or customs with normative force and “mere practice.” There is a close parallel to this distinction in American social thought in W. G. Sumner's latinate distinction between the mores and folkways of a society. In what follows (...) we shall simply use the German term as a reminder of its long history in German philosophy. Weber was obviously aware of this history, as was Jhering. Our aim will be to examine Weber's modifications of the received version of these distinctions and to consider the Implications of these modifications. As we shall see, what Weber represents as an innocuous classificatory problem contains a much more significant conceptual transformation, which bears on the general image of modernity as rationalization constructed by Weber. (shrink)

It was the general practice until not at all long ago to look at Turner as one of the moderns, if not as one of the founding fathers of modern art. He was a man straddling the fence between two periods, but he was looking forward. In a history of art that marches through time, forever endorsing what is about to be forgotten, wrapping up, as it were, one style to open eagerly the package of the next, such a (...) position is most enviable for, no matter where the times may be going, it is a hallmark of greatness to be ahead of one's time. There were things to be explained, of course, Turner himself, a keen pessimist, did not approved of the future and had little use for the present.1 His love of art was schooled on Reynolds' Discourses, and he remained loyal to them; his poets were Thomson and Pope and, among contemporaries, the rather frigid but delicate Samuel Rogers, a classicist par excellence. Above all, however, Turner looked back to classical antiquity for training and guidance, and for the delectation of his heart. And the poetry of the ancients, such as he could obtain it in translation, was as important to him as their art. What does one do with a declared classicist whom a historicizing hindsight feels compelled to rescue as a man of the future by making him a Romantic? It is a challenge stylistic analysis likes to meet, for it goes beneath what it declares to be the surface of a work of art to find its style, the essence that must conform to the presumed spirit of the age in question. The triumphant result of such studies in depth is a forgone conclusion as much as it is a surprise to the uninitiated. The facade of the Louvre, for example, used to suffice to make it a building in the classical style; it took the acumen of a Wölfflin to prove that it really was "baroque." The more the artist struggled not to be of his time, the more, poor man, he betrayed to the analyst that he was of his time. The Louvre facade stands convicted of being "classicizing-baroque."2 · 1. On Turner's view of the modern art of his time see John Gage, Color in Turner: Poetry and Truth , pp.97-105. On his literary education and taste see the seminal essay by Jerrold Ziff, "Turner on Poetry and Painting, " Studies in Romanticism 3 no. 4 : 193-215. Turner's poetical writings have been edited by Jack Lindsay, The Sunset Ship: The Poems of J.M.W. Turner . For the most recent and also most elegantly practical introduction to the work and life of Turner, see the catalogue of the Turner Exhibition of the Royal Academy and the Tate Gallery, Turner, 1775-1851 . · 2. This is now a commonplace of art historical teaching. See, for example, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 6th ed. Horst de la Croix and Richard G. Tansey , p. 632. On the theory behind the application to the particular case, see Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger . Philipp Fehl, artist and art historian, is currently preparing a collection of essays, Art and Morality: Studies in the History of the Classical Tradition. He is a professor in the department of art and design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Farewell to Jokes: The Last Capricci of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and the Tradition of Irony in Venetian Painting" was published in Summer 1979 in Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

This volume is a critical edition of the ten-year correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of Europe’s most influential early modern thinkers, and Bartholomew Des Bosses, a Jesuit theologian who was keen to bring together Leibniz’s philosophy and the Aristotelian philosophy and religious doctrines accepted by his order. The letters offer crucial insights into Leibniz’s final metaphysics and into the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. Brandon C. Look and Donald Rutherford present seventy-one of Leibniz’s and Des Bosses’s letters in (...) the original Latin and in careful English translation. Few of the letters have been translated into English before. The editors also provide extensive annotations, deletions, and marginalia from Leibniz’s various drafts, and a substantial introduction setting the context for the correspondence and analyzing the main philosophical issues. (shrink)

In this book G. W. Leibniz presents not only his reflections on predestination and election but also a more detailed account of the problem of evil than is found in any of his other works apart from the _Theodicy_. Surprisingly, his _Dissertation on Predestination and Grace_ has never before been published in any form. Michael J. Murray's project of translating, editing, and providing commentary for the volume will therefore attract great interest among scholars and students of Leibniz's philosophy and theology. (...) Leibniz addresses such topics as free will, moral responsibility, divine causation, justice, punishment, divine foreknowledge, and human freedom, revealing crucial aspects of the genesis of his mature metaphysics and the theological motivations behind it. (shrink)

Haeckels theory of recapitulation shall be extended by the following rule: During the ontogenetical recapitulation of the phenotypical effects, the recapitulation of the phylogenetical natural selection factors according to the genotypical potentials is a condition of manifestation. The phylogenetical natural selectionfactor produces the activation of the gen as ontogenetical manifestation-stimulus. Factor of natural selection is the one of the extern or intern environment to which has happened the adaption in the phylogenesis. Concerning the intern environments the phenotypical effect of the (...) preliminary phase of development is not only the phylogenetical factor of natural selection according to the genotypical potential of the following phase of development, but also the ontogenetical stimulus of manifestation for the phenotypical effect of the following phase of development. Phenotypical effects can present themselves as stimulus-dependencial modifications, which are bound to the manifestation-stimulus and cease after its disappearence. They can also present themselves as stimulus-independencial lasting modifications, which become independent from the manifestation-stimulus and remain preserved after its ceasing, because the gen once activated by the stimulus reproduces itself in the state of being activated and is so transmitted during the multiplication of cells from cell to cell and during the multiplication of organisms from generation to generation. This view gives new chances for interpretating causal connections of the phylogenetical evolution and involution as well as new possibilities for an explanation of evolutionary mechanism of maturation and of involutionary mechanism of ageing in the ontogenesis and also the occuring appearences of acceleration and retardation.DieHaeckel'sche Rekapitulationstheorie wird durch die folgende Rekapitulationsregel erweitert: Bei der ontogenetischen Rekapitulation der erscheinungsbildlichen Leistungen ist die Rekapitulation der phylogenetischen Auslesefaktoren der entsprechenden erbildlichen Fähigkeiten Manifestationsbedingung. Der phylogenetische Auslesefaktor bewirkt als ontogenetischer Manifestationsreiz die Genaktivierung. Auslesefaktor ist derjenige Faktor der äusseren oder inneren Umwelt, an den in der Phylogenese die Anpassung erfolgt ist. Im Bereich der inneren Umwelt ist daher die erscheinungsbildliche Leistung der vorhergehenden Entwicklungsstufe sowohl der phylogenetische Auslesefaktor für die erbbildliche Fähigkeit der nachfolgenden Entwicklungsstufe als auch der ontogenetische Manifestationsreiz für die erscheinungsbildliche Leistung der nachfolgenden Entwicklungsstufe. Die erscheinungsbildlichen Leistungen können als reizabhängige Modifikation auftreten, die also vom Manifestationsreiz abhängig bleibt und nach seinem Aufhören auch wieder verschwindet, sie können aber auch als reizunabhängige Dauermodifikation auftreten, die also vom Manifestationsreiz unabhängig wird und nach seinem Aufhören erhalten bleibt, weil das durch den Reiz einmal aktivierte Gen sich im Status des Aktiviertseins bei der Zellvermehrung von Zelle zu Zelle und bei der Vermehrung der Organismen von Generation zu Generation fortpflanzt. Damit ergeben sich neue Möglichkeiten einer Deutung der Kausalzusammenhänge bei der phylogenetischen Evolution und Involution, sowie neue Ansätze einer Erklärung des Evolutionsmechanismus der Reifung und des Involutionsmechanismus des Alterns in der Ontogenese, sowie der dabei auftretenden Erscheinungen der Acceleration und der Retardation. (shrink)

[Plutarch] records that Augustus passed a winter on the island of Aegina, rather than in Athens, as a sign of his wrath toward the Athenians. Paul Graindor assumed that the most likely time for Augustus to have been angry with the Athenians was immediately after Actium, and so he dated [Plutarch]'s anecdote to the winter of 31/30. This is impossible.

This response to two academic conferences—“Local Knowledge and Microidentities,” held in England in 2004, and “Patrie d’origine et patries électives,” held in France in 2009—argues that “the idea of the local can only arise from a supralocal perspective” and, thus, that there is no local knowledge without a cosmopolitan knowledge more widely shared. Contributions to the conferences remarked on the widespread existence in Greek and Roman antiquity of bicultural identity and of hypermultiple citizenship. Therefore, despite much evidence of strong attachments (...) by ancient Greeks and Romans to local places and traditions, this brief essay concludes that the concept of microidentity is “hopelessly simplistic.”. (shrink)