An important short study of Nietzsche by the famed European critic. Included are selections from the Brandes-Nietzsche correspondence.

Sir Isaac Newton was one of the greatest scientists of all time, a thinker of extraordinary range and creativity who has left enduring legacies in mathematics and the natural sciences. In this volume a team of distinguished contributors examine all the main aspects of Newton's thought, including not only his approach to space, time, mechanics, and universal gravity in his Principia, his research in optics, and his contributions to mathematics, but also his more clandestine investigations into alchemy, theology, and prophecy, (...) which have sometimes been overshadowed by his mathematical and scientific interests. (shrink)

While deductive validity provides the limiting upper bound for evaluating the strength and quality of inferences, by itself it is an inadequate tool for evaluating arguments, arguing, and argumentation. Similar remarks can be made about rhetorical success and dialectical closure. Then what would count as ideal argumentation? In this paper we introduce the concept of cognitive compathy to point in the direction of one way to answer that question. It is a feature of our argumentation rather than my argument or (...) your argument. In that respect, compathy is like the harmonies achieved by an accomplished choir, the spontaneous coordination of athletic teamwork, or the experience of improvising jazz musicians when they are all in the flow together. It is a characteristic of arguments, not a virtue that can be attributed to individual arguers. It makes argumentation more than just the sum of its individual parts. The concept of cognitive compathy is brought into focus by locating it at the confluence of two lines of thought. First, we work up to the concept of compathy by contrasting it with empathy and sympathy in the context of emotions, which is then transplanted into epistemic, cognitive, and argumentative soil. Second, the concept is analytically linked to ideal argumentation by way of authenticity in communication. In the final section, we explore the extent to which argumentative virtues are conducive to producing compathetic argumentation, but reach the unhappy conclusion that the extra value of compathetic argumentation also transcends the evaluative reach of virtue argumentation theory. (shrink)

Introduction: Motherese, or emotional infant directed speech, is the specific form of speech used by parents to address their infants. The prosody of IDS has affective properties, expresses caregiver involvement, is a marker of caregiver-infant interaction quality. IDS prosodic characteristics can be detected with automatic analysis. We aimed to explore whether pregnant women “speak” to their unborn baby, whether they use motherese while speaking and whether anxio-depressive or obstetrical status impacts speaking to the fetus.Participants and Methods: We conducted an observational (...) study of pregnant women with gestational ages from 26 to 38 weeks. Women were recruited in a university hospital department of obstetrics. Thirty-five women agreed to participate in the study, and 26 audio records were exploitable. We collected obstetrical and sociodemographic data, pregnancy outcomes, anxiety and depressive status using the Covy and Raskin Scales, and life events using the Sensations During Pregnancy and Life Event Questionnaire. Each participant was left alone with an audio recorder with a recommendation to feel free to speak to her fetus as she would have done at home. The recording was stopped after 3 min. Audio recordings were analyzed by two methods: psycholinguist experts' annotation and computational objective automatic analyses.Results: Most mothers reported speaking to their fetuses. We found a correlation between maternal first perceptions of fetal movements and the start of mother's speaking to fetus. Motherese prosody was detected with both annotation and automatic analysis with a significant correlation between the two methods. In this exploratory study, motherese use was not associated with maternal anxiodepressive or obstetrical status. However, the more future mothers were depressed, the less they spoke with their fetuses during the recording.Conclusion: Fetal directed speech can be detected during pregnancy, and it contains a period of prosody that shares the same characteristics of motherese that can be described as prenatal motherese or emotional fetal-directed speech. This means that pregnant women start using motherese much earlier than expected. FDS seems to be correlated with maternal first perceptions of fetal movements and depression scores. However, more research is needed to confirm these exploratory results. (shrink)

Calling an argument “merely academic” impugns its seriousness, belittles its substance, dis-misses its importance, and deflates hope of resolution, while ruling out negotiation and compromise. How-ever, “purely academic” argumentation, as an idealized limit case, is a valuable analytical tool for argumen-tation theorists because while the telos of academic argumentation may be cognitive, it is cognitive in the service of a community, which, in turn, is a community in the service of the cognitive.

We examined the course of caregiver motherese and the course of the infant’s response based on home movies from two single cases: a boy with typical development and a boy with autistic development. We first blindly assessed infant CG interaction using the Observer computer-based coding procedure, then analyzed speech CG production using a computerized algorithm. Finally we fused the two procedures and filtered for co-occurrence. In this exploratory study we found that the course of CG parentese differed based on gender (...) and child status. The course of an infant’s response to CG vocalization differed according to the type of speech and child status. Mothers spent more time interacting with infants, and fathers appeared to interact with their child preferentially between 12 and 18 months in the TD boy, but not in the AD boy. The TD boy responded equally well to motherese compared to other speech after 1 year of age. For the AD boy, the responses to both types of speech were lower than in the boy with TD and decreased from the second to the third semester. Keywords: Autism; motherese; early interaction; computational methods. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Ethics and Critical Care Medicine. John C. Moskop and Loretta Kopelman, eds. Dordrecht: D. Reidel “Ethical Moments in Critical Care Medicine,” symposium issue of Critical Care Clinics. James P. Orlowski and George A. Kanoti, eds.

The most important Jewish source for Hermann Cohen's rational theology of Judaism is Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed . Indeed, the Guide is of such importance that Cohen bases his entire idealistic interpretation of the Jewish religion on it. In particular, Cohen derives his discussion of the continued authority of Mosaic law from the Guide . What follows focuses on Cohen's discussion of the “Law” in his Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism , (...) and attempts to fill a gap in recent Cohen research by dealing with questions of halakhah and the interpretation of rabbinical sources. Cohen's original reading of, inter alia, Guide III.31-32 led him to formulate a theory wherein Mosaic law—and by extension Judaism—guarantees the highest end of human morality. In identifying God with this end, Cohen eventually finds the ultimate criterion for the decision of how much of traditional Jewish law must still be observed in the need for the preservation of the purest monotheism—another central point in Maimonides' philosophy. (shrink)

The genes involved in methionine biosynthesis are scattered throughout the Escherichia coli chromosome and are controlled in a similar but not coordinated manner. The product of the metJ gene and S‐adenosylmethionine are involved in the repression of this ‘regulon’.

Review Essay of G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978, 2000).

Anlasslich des 100. Todestages von Hermann Cohen und 100 Jahre nach Erscheinen seines Spatwerkes "Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums" behandelt dieser Band im Spannungsfeld von Philosophie und Religion die Frage des Nationalen, die im gegenwartigen Prozess der Radikalisierung und Politisierung der religiosen und philosophischen Grundfragen von Vernunft und Ethik zunehmend an Bedeutung gewinnt. Eine Bedingung fur das Verstandnis von Cohens Kantkritik ist in diesem Zusammenhang ein systematisches Zusammenlesen seiner erkenntnistheoretischen Werke mit seinen "Judischen Schriften". Um dem (...) Judentum, sowohl im Deutsch-Nationalen als auch in der "christlichen Kultur", einen Ort einzuraumen, bricht Cohen die Begriffe des Nationalismus und der Kultur als solche auf und idealisiert sie humanistisch-universal. Den ethischen Idealismus sah Cohen gleichermassen begrundet in der Religion der Propheten, der sich die doppelsinnige Einheit von Monotheismus und Messianismus, d.h. das Ziel der einen Menschheit am Ende der Tage, verdankt. Der ursachliche Zusammenhang zwischen Monotheismus, Wahrheit, Ethik und Jurisprudenz im Judentum fuhrt Cohen in seinem Spatwerk zu einer neuen Definition von Religion und Kultur. (shrink)

This two-volume work bridges the gap between introductory expositions of logic or set theory on one hand, and the research literature on the other. It can be used as a text in an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate course in mathematics, computer science, or philosophy. The volumes are written in a user-friendly conversational lecture style that makes them equally effective for self-study or class use. Volume II, on formal (ZFC) set theory, incorporates a self-contained 'chapter 0' on proof techniques so (...) that it is based on formal logic, in the style of Bourbaki. The emphasis on basic techniques will provide the reader with a solid foundation in set theory and provides a context for the presentation of advanced topics such as absoluteness, relative consistency results, two expositions of Godel's constructible universe, numerous ways of viewing recursion, and a chapter on Cohen forcing. (shrink)

At the 1969 annual meeting of the American Association for the Ad vancement ofScience, held in Boston on December 27-29, a sequence of symposia on the philosophical foundations of science was organized jointly by Section L of the Association and the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science. Section L is devoted to the history, philos ophy, logic and sociology of science, with broad connotations extended both to 'science' and to 'philosophy'. With collaboration generously extended by other and more specialized (...) Sections of the AAAS, the Section L program took an unusually rich range of topics, and indeed the audiences were large, and the discussions lively. This book, regrettably delayed in publication, contains the major papers from those symposia of 1969. In addition, it contains the distin guished George Sarton Memorial Lecture of that meeting, 'Boltzmann, Monocycles and Mechanical Explanation' by Martin J. Klein. Some additions and omissions should be noted: In Part 1, dedicated to the 450th anniversary of the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, we have been una bie to include a contrihution by Elmer Belt who was prevented by storms from participating. In Part II, on physics and the explanation of life, we were unable to persuade Isaac Asimov to overcome his modesty about the historical remarks he made under the title 'Arrhenius Revisited'. (shrink)