This inspiring work presents a truly knowledge-based approach to education as an alternative to the current curriculum that is based on consolidating pre-conceived ideas. It demonstrates the advantages of the new curriculum, both in terms of acquiring knowledge and preventing current problems such as technological disasters, global injustice, and environmental destruction. It also shows how it can eliminate plagiarism, low retention in classrooms, non-representative grading, and other common problems. Examples are given from various disciplines, ranging from science and engineering to (...) philosophy and law. (shrink)

This volume brings the remarkable writings of Russian liberal thinker Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin to English-language readers for the first time. The collection includes key essays in which Chicherin addresses the central political and social problems that confronted Russia from 1855 to the opening years of the twentieth century. Chicherin’s ideological alternatives to the Bolshevik plan for revolutionary transformation of Russia not only provide valuable historical insights, but also are highly relevant to current political discussion of liberalism in Russia and in (...) the West. In a comprehensive introduction to the book, G. M. Hamburg discusses the development of Chicherin’s thought and places it in historical context. Chicherin, Hamburg says, was a powerful and sophisticated but often misunderstood defender of civil and political rights. Like his fellow liberals in Russia, Chicherin was heavily influenced by German idealism and particularly by Hegel. He departed from many, however, in favoring a market economy and advocating that reform efforts be tailored to local conditions and traditions. In this collection Chicherin explores such contemporary issues as the abolition of serfdom, Russian education, and the need for a constitution. He also tackles broad philosophical problems—the nature of liberty and equality, styles of political discourse—and comments on such philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Hegel, and Marx. (shrink)

This book, focusing on the history of religious and political thinking in early modern Russia, demonstrates that Russia’s path toward enlightenment began long _before_ Peter the Great’s opening to the West. Examining a broad range of writings, G. M. Hamburg shows why Russia’s enlightenment constituted a precondition for the explosive emergence of nineteenth-century writers such as Fedor Dostoyevsky and Vladimir Soloviev.

Volume 35 contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2018-19. Works: Commentary on _De Anima_, Nicomachean Ethics. Topics: Humean motivation, memory-oblivion & myth, final causality and ontology of life.

One group of commentators takes book 10 as determinative and thus tortures the text in book 1 to say the same thing. This position is described as intellectualist or exclusivist and produces certain puzzles in reading Aristotle’s ethical theory. These puzzles are not benign since the privileged position given wisdom in book 10 seems at odds with the discussion of virtue in book 1 and its development in the Nicomachean Ethics as a whole. Indeed, Aristotle appears inconsistent or even contradictory, (...) recommending in these two brief chapters of book 10 a life devoted to contemplation that only grudgingly allows for the necessity of the practical life discussed in such detail in the rest of his ethical works. If this is the case, under what conditions are we expected to forgo contemplation to engage in the various activities of the moral virtues? Since no conditions are spelled out in the text, the range of speculation is confused and ways around the apparent inconsistencies complex. (shrink)

The great age of Russian philosophy spans the century between 1830 and 1930 - from the famous Slavophile-Westernizer controversy of the 1830s and 1840s, through the 'Silver Age' of Russian culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the formation of a Russian 'philosophical emigration' in the wake of the Russian Revolution. This volume is a major history and interpretation of Russian philosophy in this period. Eighteen chapters discuss Russian philosophy's main figures, schools and controversies, while simultaneously pursuing a (...) common central theme: the development of a distinctive Russian tradition of philosophical humanism focused on the defence of human dignity. As this volume shows, the century-long debate over the meaning and grounds of human dignity, freedom and the just society involved thinkers of all backgrounds and positions, transcending easy classification as 'religious' or 'secular'. The debate still resonates strongly today. (shrink)

Volume XXX contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2013-14. They feature: _Philebus_, _Republic_, _Theaetetus_ and _Alcibiades I_, _Sophist_, and _Symposium_, _Apology_ and _Phaedo_, on pleasure, knowledge, the city, and the philosopher.

This volume, the twenty-seventh year of published proceedings, contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2010-11. The papers treat thinkers ranging from Philolaus, Plato and Aristotle, to Plotinus.

This paper uses the notion of Galois-connection to examine the relation between valuation-spaces and logics. Every valuation-space gives rise to a logic, and every logic gives rise to a valuation space, where the resulting pair of functions form a Galois-connection, and the composite functions are closure-operators. A valuation-space (resp., logic) is said to be complete precisely if it is Galois-closed. Two theorems are proven. A logic is complete if and only if it is reflexive and transitive. A valuation-space is complete (...) if and only if it is closed under formation of super-valuations. (shrink)

Management plays an important role in reinforcing ethics in organizations. To support this aim, managers must use incentive and goal programs in ethical ways. This study examines experimentally the potential ethical costs associated with incentive-driven and goal-induced employee behavior from a managerial perspective. In a quasi-experimental setting, 243 MBA students with significant professional work experience evaluated a hypothetical employee’s ethical behavior under incentive pay systems modeled on a business case. In the role of the employee’s manager, participants evaluated the ethicality (...) of the employee’s incentive-driven and goal-induced ethical/unethical behavior and the outcomes of behavior, with consequences that were either favorable or unfavorable to the organization. The results indicated that participants discounted the ethical considerations of incentive-driven and goal-induced behavior when consequences were favorable to the organization. Participants’ morals and outcome orientations were also significantly related to their ethical judgments and intentions to intervene. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Pickering & Garrod (P&G) consider the possibility that inner speech might be a product of forward production models. Here I consider the idea of inner speech as a forward model in light of empirical work from the past few decades, concluding that, while forward models could contribute to it, inner speech nonetheless requires activity from the implementers.

Volume XXIX contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2012-13. The papers feature Plato's Republic and Timaeus, examine Aristotle on generation, analogy and method, and analyze Proclus on first principles.

Logical matrices for orthomodular logic are introduced. The underlying algebraic structures are orthomodular lattices, where the conditional connective is the Sasaki arrow. An axiomatic calculusOMC is proposed for the orthomodular-valid formulas.OMC is based on two primitive connectives — the conditional, and the falsity constant. Of the five axiom schemata and two rules, only one pertains to the falsity constant. Soundness is routine. Completeness is demonstrated using standard algebraic techniques. The Lindenbaum-Tarski algebra ofOMC is constructed, and it is shown to be (...) an orthomodular lattice whose unit element is the equivalence class of theses ofOMC. (shrink)

This volume includes an element that is a departure in this series, the lengthy Introduction by Carlos Steel, which puts, in revised form, his article with F. Bossier, “Priscianus Lydus en de In de Anima van Pseudo-Simplicius,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 34 : 761–822. The editor’s decision to include this discussion of the author of the commentary on the soul is to be commended. An English version gives wider access to the carefully constructed argument of Steel and Bossier, and its placement (...) in this volume gives the reader the immediate opportunity to test the hypothesis by comparing the two different works, translated by Huby and Steel respectively. Huby, moreover, in her brief introduction and notes, highlights in an evenhanded way the pros and cons of the argument. She points out the possibility that the similarity of both works may indicate a common reliance on Iamblichus rather than the common authorship forcefully argued by Steel. At a minimum, however, Steel demonstrates that the author of the commentary cannot be Simplicius, with the attribution to Priscian somewhat more circumstantial. Finally, it is also quite delightful to find the Greek of the introduction untransliterated. It is much more useful for scholarly purposes, especially since the grounding of Steel’s argument in terms of Greek style and vocabulary cannot be decided by comparing the two translations. The reader must go back to the Greek text itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RANSOM'S GOD WITHOUT THUNDER: REMYTHOLOGIZING VIOLENCE AND POETICIZING THE SACRED Gary M. Ciuba Kent State University From tree-lined Vanderbilt University of 1930 Nashville, the modernist poet and critic John Crowe Ransom longed to hear in his imagination the God who thundered fiercely in ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. The God of sacrifice who in Homer's Iliad, "his thunder striking terror," received libations from the warring armies (230). The (...) God of jealousy who in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound "drove the sleepless thunderbolt, / plunged the fire spurting shaft/ down" on Typhon for defying heaven with his violence (46). The God of vengeance who in Ovid's Metamorphoses sent "blinding / Thunder [to shake] Olympus, and Pelim / Thrust down by heaven's bolt crashed over Ossa" when the giants piled mountain upon mountain to reach Jove's throne (35). The God ofviolence who in Psalm 78:48 delivered the cattle ofthe obstinate Egyptians "to the hail, and their flocks to hot thunderbolts" or who in 1 Samuel 7:10 "thundered with great thunder" to smite the Philistines. In God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy Ransom attacked the modern heresy that deprived the deity ofsuch awful might and summoned Americans to live under a new myth of sacred violence. IfRansom listened with the ears ofthe Methodist faith in which he had been raised, he might have heard how the god of old was muted at the university where he studied and later taught. Ten years before Ransom was born, Methodist-sponsored Vanderbilt had eliminated the lectureship of naturalist Alexander Winched because hisPre-Adamites had challenged the Creation story in Genesis. But in 1914, when Ransom returned to his alma Gary M. Ciuba41 mater to begin more than two decades of teaching there, the Methodists ended their affiliation with Vanderbilt because of a dispute about church governance of the university (Bailey 9-10, 31-4). When the Scopes Trial caused a furor in 1925, Ransom was invited by Vanderbilt to condemn the Fundamentalists to the southeast in Dayton. He refused-not because he sided with the anti-Darwinists but because he believed that the tyranny of science was threateningthe poetic foundation ofreligion (Quinlan 40, n. 3). Ransom's thunderless plight was virtually imagined by H.L. Mencken, one of the most stinging critics of the creationists, when in 1922 he penned a tongue-in-cheek lament forthe passing ofthe ancient deities. "Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king ofthe gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus," Mencken mock-elegized in "Memorial Service." "But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today?" (95). God Without Thunder provides the answer to Mencken's archly lugubrious question: it is John Crowe Ransom. Grieving the demise ofthe deity ofyore, Ransom's treatise on the religious imagination heralds a one-man revival of Jupiter Tonans. Ransom believes that the god ofantiquity has been muffled bythe spirit of scientific abstraction that reigns notjust in Tennessee but across all of America.7 Hetraces this modern cult ofthe mind beyond the current efforts ofreligion to seek a rapprochement with biology and physics; beyond the science-driven Prometheus of Shelley, the rationalism of the Protestant Reformation, and the inquiry of Copernicus; beyond the errors of early Christianity, to a kind of primal sin. Humans have used their intelligence first to set themselves above nature, then to order the world according to their ways, and finally to exploit all ofcreation for their use. Demystified by science, thunder has become not the mighty weapon ofthe ancient God who tolerated no rivals but only the noise of heated and expanding air. Ransom views science as having such ultimacy that it exercises a mimetic function: it provides Girardian models for desire. "Science directs us to amuse ourselves, between desires," Ransom writes, "by simulating 7 Louis Rubin reads Ransom's "Armageddon" as a poetic companion piece to God Without Thunder, for it tells how divine wrath has been compromised amid the suavities of the modern world At the apocalyptic battle of the poem's title, a militant... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Photo-credit to Chicago Sun-Times and James Mescall. 4 "The town is beastly and the weather was vile": Bertrand Russell in Chicago, 1938-1939 Visiting Chicago in 1867, Lord Amberley offered his wife an appreciation of the city: "The country around Chicago is flat and ugly; the town itself has good buildings but has a rough unfinished appearance which does not contribute to its attractions."l While Bertrand Russell is known to (...) have accepted and developed particular aspects of his father's thought, it is more likely that his own visits to Chicago, rather than this nineteenth -century appraisal, brought him to the opinion that "the town is beastly and the weather was vile."z One might suppose Russell's longest stay reaffirmed his image of the city suggested in a 1922 article expressing fear of "a slow destruction of the civilization of China" through which "the big towns will become like Chicago."3 Here, Russell appears to have envisioned this city as an amorphous collection of streets and structures manifesting the least desirable values of American capitalism. In his Autobiography a single paragraph is devoted to his 1938-1939 experience of "the bleak hideousness of Chicago" (II, p. 332). Yet there was far more to Russell's six-month sojourn than the little he chose to recall in print. One-half year is a significant period in anyone's life, even for a man who lived ninety-seven (and a half) years. This article, then, presents an account of Russell's coming to and departure from Chicago and his diverse activities while a professor at the University of Chicago. The need to secure some permanent academic position was strongly felt by Russell in the mid-1930s. His ~aertrand and Patricia Russell, The Amberley Papers (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), p. 57. zThe Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1968), II, p. 332. 3"How Washington Can Help China", New Republic, 4 Jan. 1922, p. 154. / 5 second marriage had ended and a third was beginn~ng; ~ar­ ticipation in the Beacon Hill experimen~ w~s behlnd hlmj and journalistic writing, though ~ contlnulng so~rce of income, was ceasing to be attractlve: No~ a d~slre to return to philosophical work, recurrlng fl~anclal troubles, and the fear of another, far m~r~ destr~ctlve.European~ar all contributed toward his declslon to lnvestlgate Amerlcan possibilities. My feelings are threefold: (a) I' have a lot of ideas in,my head that I long to work at and believe important (b) I am faced with such poverty that I may be unable to give a proper education to the child that is coming (c) That Europe is no place for children with the imminent risk of war--particularly England, which is ' 4 likely to suffer most in the next war. At first, with the help of his American publisher, Warder Norton, Russell approached Princeton University hoping for a research post "on the foundations of mathematics and philosophy" (letter to Norton, 13 Jan. 1937). But no prospect materialized, and he requested Norton to inquire at universities such as Columbia and Harvard. Finally in the spring of 1937 Russell received a letter from Professor Scott Buchanan who then represented the University of Chicago's Committee on the Liberal Arts (COTLA). Buchanan offered a place on COTLA with only minor teaching duties. Writing to Norton that this "seems a very agreeable job", Russell nevertheless suggested the post "may be reactionary and the sort of thing my radical friends would think I ought not to be connected with. '" it is a committee concerned with a conservative reform of education." But the invitation promised adequate time for independent research, and Russell, quite characteristically, concluded "my wish is to accept, but not if doing so would be wicked" (letter of 30 Apr. 1937). However, Buchanan, having soon thereafter left the University of Chicago for a Maryland college, corresponded no further with Russell. The COTLA job offer was officially withdrawn. Only in January 1938 did Russell again hear from a University of Chicago spokesman. Aware that Russell had been somewhat brusquely treated, Professor Richard P. McKeon of the Department of Philosophy now wrote "in the... (shrink)

Moutsopoulos provides a rich reading of the Greek philosophical tradition in relation to Greek culture and history, from the classical world, through the Byzantine period, to the reestablishment of Greek independence in the early nineteenth century. His thesis concerns the particularity of Greek culture, which is captured in a sense of freedom that serves as the basis for the development of Greek philosophy, and its universal contribution, especially to European history, but now also on the global scene. This may sound (...) ambitious and tending toward oversimplification, but this collection of articles, published in various places over the last thirty years, provides a picture of Greek philosophy not often appreciated and over a span of time rarely considered. (shrink)

The sociobiology of bacteria, largely unappreciated and ignored by the microbiology research community two decades ago is now a major research area, catalyzed to a significant degree by studies of communication and cooperative behavior among the myxobacteria and in quorum sensing (QS) and biofilm formation by pseudomonads and other microbes. Recently, the topic of multicellular cooperative behaviors among bacteria has been increasingly considered in the context of evolutionary biology. Here we discuss the significance of two recent studies1,2 of the phenomenon (...) of “cheating” mutants and their exploitation of cooperating microbial populations of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. BioEssays 30:296–298, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Gastrulation is the process of early development that reorganizes cells into the three fundamental tissue types of ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm. It is a coordinated series of morphogenetic and molecular changes that exemplify many developmental phenomena. In this review, we explore one of the classic developmental systems, the sea urchin embryo, where investigators from different backgrounds have converged on a common interest to study the origin, morphogenesis, and developmental regulation of the endoderm. The sea urchin embryo is remarkably plastic in (...) its developmental potential, and the endoderm is especially instructive for its morphological and molecular responsiveness to inductive cell interactions. We start by examining and integrating the several models for the morphogenetic mechanisms of invagination and tissue elongation, the basic processes of endoderm morphogenesis in this embryo. We next critique the proposed mechanisms of inductive gene regulation in the endoderm that exemplifies a concept of modular transcriptional regulation. Finally, we end with an examination of the current molecular models to explain cell fate determination of the endoderm. Recent progress at the molecular level should soon allow us to explain the seminal experimental observations made in this embryo over a hundred years ago. BioEssays 21:459–471, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The farthest east on the transcontinental road to China which ancient travellers from the Mediterranean borderlands are known to have attained was reached by a party that made its way as far as the Stone Tower, a station in the region of the Pamirs, not far from the watershed between the Mediterranean and the Yellow Seas. This expedition was organized by a member of an old business family, named and described as The only reference to Maes in ancient literature is (...) in a brief notice by Ptolemy , which he derived from his main source, the geographer Marinus of Tyre. Can we find out anything more about this great entrepreneur? (shrink)

Zubiri presents a critique of modernism and return to phenomena in primordial apprehension. Only 'notes' are apprehended; as real they need to be repossessed by logos or reason, related to other notes in the field or unified as the world. Zubiri seeks to overcome the dualism of sensing and knowing and introducing transcendent objects. His target extends to ancient and medieval philosophy, charged with introducing the problem. So he reads Plato's Sophist as positing being, known independent of the senses, and (...) the genera, derived deductively from being. This misreads Plato, reducing him to Parmenides. Rereading Plato, using Zubiri's scheme, reveals 'primordial apprehension' in the Theaetetus, with logos and reason in the Sophist. Like Zubiri, Plato's goal is to reconnect language and reality as apprehended. Unlike Zubiri, Plato sees communication as human dialogue, not just a feature of apprehended 'notes.' /// A apreensão primordial de Zubiri constitui uma crítica posmoderna e um retorno ao fenómeno. Segundo ele, o que se apreende são apenas 'notas'; estas, porém, exigem ser reassumidas pelo logos ou pela razão, encontrando-se sempre em relação com outras no campo que lhes é próprio ou unificadas enquanto mundo. Zubiri pretende sobretudo superar o dualismo entre sentimento e inteligência associado com a introdução de objectos transcendentais. A sua crítica extende-se à filosofia antiga e medieval, pois que, segundo ele, aqui se iniciou esta problemática da transcendentali-dade. Zubiri lê o Sofista precisamente como se Platão procedesse aqui a uma afirmação do ser, conhecido independentemente dos sentidos, e dos géneros, dedutivamente derivados do ser. O artigo pretende mostrar ser esta uma falsa interpretação de Platão, reduzindo-o a Parménides e, por isso, sugere uma releitura de Platão, baseada num esquema zubiriano, de modo a se poder discernir seja a noção de "apreensão primordial" no Teeteto ou de logos e razão no Sofista. Finalmente, mostra ainda como, tal como Zubiri, a meta de Platão está no estabelecimento de uma conexão entre a linguagem e a realidade apreendida. Ao mesmo tempo, porém, mostra como, ao contrário de Zubiri, a comunicação em Platão é vista como um verdadeiro diálogo humano e não apenas como aspecto de uma simples 'nota.'. (shrink)

In a recent Article Carla Kary attempts to show that there should be a significant moral difference between instances of killing and letting die. I shall maintain in Section I that Kary's argument is somewhat weakened by the failure to note an important ambiguity in the notion of killing a person. I shall also argue in Section II that a similar ambiguity affects the notion of letting someone die, and that the failure to note this latter ambiguity also weakens the (...) position developed by Robert Coburn with regard to defective newborns. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In the present paper I describe a general formal semantic scheme for the interpretation of quantum mechanics (QM), and on the basis of this scheme I examine the modal interpretation of QM — both the Copenhagen and the anti-Copenhagen variants — proposed by van Fraassen [19, 20, 21], This is intended to be a fragment of a larger work [12] which additionally investigates a number of closely related interpretations, including ones proposed by Bub and Demopoulos [1, 2, 3, 4], Fine (...) [5, 6], and Krips [16, 17].Formal semantically speaking (see, e.g., Thomason [18]), a logic L may be characterized as an ordered pair, where SYN is the underlying syntax (language) of L, and SEM is the semantics of L, which consists of a class of semantic assignments on SYN. (shrink)