John Ayrton Paris, writer and physician, became a member of the Linnean Society in 1810, and served as president of the Royal College of Physicians from 1844 until his death. Intended for children and originally composed for the author's family, this three-volume work about science was first published in 1827. Dedicated to the writer Maria Edgeworth and with illustrations by George Cruikshank, it aims 'to blend amusement with instruction', since youth, as Paris writes, 'is naturally addicted to amusement'. (...) Topics covered in Volume 1 include momentum, geometry, elasticity and rotatory motion; the science behind these is demonstrated using a yo-yo, a jack-in-the-box and a slingshot, among various other toys and games. A fascinating and popular text in the history of science education, the engaging narrative seeks to prove 'how profitably, and agreeably, the machinery of fiction may be worked for the dissemination of truth'. (shrink)

Through close reading of medical and cultural texts, this article demonstrates how the narrativisation of relational harm underpinned the emerging categorisation of ‘addiction’ in the 19th century: excessive consumption was conceived through its detrimental impact upon others, and more specifically, upon the family. The problem was portrayed as physiological, psychological, and social: ‘addiction’ could not be located securely within a single individual, nor was it conceived simply as a social vice. While other societal themes emerge in the medical writing of (...) the period, such as the relationship between drinking and criminality, and the visibility of drinking in the working-classes, these are not presented as proto-diagnostic criteria in the same way as relational harm. In theorising addiction, medicine relied upon rhetorical devices and narrative modes, and authors and artists took an active role in defining the terms of the debate around drinking, drug use, and gambling. Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank represent childhood through the adult's compulsive behaviour, which the child witnesses, while the adult's behaviour itself is conceived as harm directed towards child. The article demonstrates how 21st-century attitudes, particularly located in the fields of psychiatric diagnosis and child protection social work, echo debates established by 19th-century narratives, arguing that that the disease model of addiction was closely associated with the medico-legal production of childhood. Nineteenth-century narratives of addiction therefore anticipate late 20th- and 21st-century attitudes regarding the impact of parental substance use upon children. (shrink)

Cognitive science is a child of the 1950s, the product of a time when psychology, anthropology and linguistics were redefining themselves and computer science and neuroscience as disciplines were coming into existence. Psychology could not participate in the cognitive revolution until it had freed itself from behaviorism, thus restoring cognition to scientific respectability. By then, it was becoming clear in several disciplines that the solution to some of their problems depended crucially on solving problems traditionally allocated to other disciplines. Collaboration (...) was called for: this is a personal account of how it came about. (shrink)

Evidence is presented to show that the role of a generative grammar of a natural language is not merely to generate the grammatical sentences of that language, but also to relate them to their logical forms. The notion of logical form is to be made sense of in terms a natural logic, a logical for natural language, whose goals are to express all concepts capable of being expressed in natural language, to characterize all the valid inferences that can be made (...) in natural language, and to mesh with adequate linguistic descriptions of all natural languages. The latter requirement imposes empirical linguistic constraints on natural logic. A number of examples are discussed. (shrink)

This essay proposes African-based ethical solutions to profound human problems and a working African model to address those problems. The model promotes sustainability through advanced agroecological and information communication technologies. The essay’s first section reviews the ethical ground of that model in the work of the Senegalese scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop. The essay’s second section examines an applied African model for translating African ethical speculation into practice. Deeply immersed in European and African ethics, Godfrey Nzamujo developed the Songhaï Centers to (...) solve the problem of rural poverty in seventeen African countries. Harnessing advanced technologies within a holistic agroecological ecosystem, Nzamujo’s villages furnish education spanning the fields of ethics, information communication technology, microbiology, international development, and mechanical, electrical, civil and biological engineering in a community-based and centered development enterprise. The essay proposes a global consortium of ecovillages based on Nzamujo’s model. The final section explores funding methods for the consortium. The conclusion contemplates a return to Africa to supplement environmental ethics that enhance life’s future on earth. (shrink)

The Archaeology of Semiotics and the social order of things is edited by George Nash and George Children and brings together 15 thought-provoking chapters from contributors around the world. A sequel to an earlier volume published in 1997, it tackles the problem of understanding how complex communities interact with landscape and shows how the rules concerning landscape constitute a recognised and readable grammar. The mechanisms underlying landscape grammar are both physical and mental, being based in part on the (...) mindset of the individual; the same landscape can thus evoke different meanings for different people and at different times. People's perception has greatly influenced the construction of landscapes over millennia but, until recently, the potential of this area has been largely untapped. Apart from chapters focusing solely upon human interaction with landscape, there are several which skilfully integrate artefacts and place with landscape (e.g. Gheorghiu and Sognnes). Other chapters look at the way people have marked the landscape through such mechanisms as rock-art (e.g. Clegg, Devereux, Estévez, Fossati, Kelleher and Skier). Rock-art establishes personal and communal identity in relation to landscape and it is clear that other forms of visual expression were in place which distinctively created special places within the landscape. Landscape constructs can bind cultures together; bringing the old ways of reading the landscape into contemporary life (e.g. Smiseth). Defining early and late prehistoric landscapes and segregating these into, say, mundane domestic and ritualised spaces rely on both clear and subtle archaeologies and in this volume distinct monument clustering and ritualised linearity are considered (e.g. Mason and Nash). A volume such as this cannot escape the influence of New World approaches, such as anthropology, and in many respects chapters by Bender, Muller and Merritt give context to other chapters within the book. Finally, one must consider text as a means of constructing landscape and this is considered by Heyd, who eloquently deconstructs the travel diary of a 17th century Japanese poet. This will be an important volume for archaeologists, landscape scholars and students. The many approaches used are tried and tested, forming an invaluable resource and not just another edited book. (shrink)

This paper investigates the quantifier "there exist unboundedly many" in the context of first-order arithmetic. An alternative axiomatization is found for Peano arithmetic based on an axiom schema of regularity: The union of boundedly many bounded sets is bounded. We also obtain combinatorial equivalents of certain second-order theories associated with cuts in nonstandard models of arithmetic.

Jewish law takes an approach to self-defense that differs dramatically from the conventional assumptions of Western secular legal systems. The central theme of Talmudic jurisprudence is that self-defense rests on a duty not to stand idly by while one's neighbor suffers. “Do not stand on the blood of one's neighbor,” as the point is cryptically put in Leviticus 19:16. This way of thinking about self-defense departs in two significant ways from common Western assumptions. First, it stresses that the roots of (...) self-defense are a duty rather than a right to act; second, it treats the case of third-party defense as logically prior to the first-party case of self -defense. (shrink)

In trying to say what modernism is , we must remind ourselves that it cannot and must not—to be properly described and understood—be confined only to the arts of music, literature, painting, sculpture, theater, architecture, those arts with which we normally associate the term “culture.” Modernism can be said to embrace, in the broadest terms, not only the arts of Western culture but also science, technology, the family, marriage, sexuality, economics, the politics of democracy, the politics of authoritarianism, the politics (...) of totalitarianism, and such academic disciplines as philosophy and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology . Its influence and effects have been all-pervasive. No corner of twentieth-century life has escaped its profound alteration of both the individual and society. It has radicalized all levels of human existence.What, then, is modernism?Some have described it as a state of “chronic revolution,” that is, revolution against the past, against tradition, against history itself. Others have pointed to its voracious appetite for innovation, for the search for the “new,” for the hunger to be “original”—to be the first and last with something unique and difference, whatever that something might be or in whatever area of human endeavor it might arise.Still others have characterized modernism as the application to all realms of human life of forms of structural rationalization, that is, finding rationally structured ways of being and doing regardless of consequences and, more especially, rationalizing away the mysteries and questions which have to do with meaning, that is, morality and ethics—those areas that lie outside the purely rational. And still others have viewed modernism as a condition of freedom within which the individual can be himself, unfettered and uninhibited, released from the drag of superego and conscience, a separate entity of being, unanswerable to others whether in the form of individuals or society as a whole.Last but not least, there are those who continue to see modernism as a self-perpetuating form of avant-gardism, always at the point of the interface between the present and the future, always ready to move on to the next stage because living itself is a process of constant change, constant motion, perpetual transformation. George Rochberg is the composer of a large body of musical works and the author of a recently published collection of essays, The Aesthetics of Survival, A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music. He is currently writing his fifth symphony, on a commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1983 he retired from the University of Pennsylvania as Emeritus Annenberg Professor of the Humanities. (shrink)

This paper explores Kierkegaard's journals and papers for the year 1838, with a focus on his religious development in this year, his relationship with his father, and his early response to Hegelianism. A closer examination of the materials shows that the journals are, in fact, an extremely problematic source in each area, often requiring the supplement of later, published work. Still questions remain open, but several myths about the young Kierkegaard are shown to be of dubious value. /// O presente (...) artigo explora os diários e os manuscritos de Kierkegaard referentes ao ano de 1838, focalizando a sua atenção no desenvolvimento religioso de Kierkegaard durante esse ano, bem como nas suas relações com o próprio pai e nas suas primeiras respostas ao Hegelianismo. O autor do artigo demonstra que um exame atento dos materiais acaba por revelar os mesmos como fonte problemática de informação em cada uma dessas áreas, exigindo, por isso, serem suplementados com referências a textos escritos e publicados mais tarde. Apesar de haver importantes questões que têm de permanecer em aberto, o presente artigo demonstra o carácter duvidoso de alguns dos mitos em circulação sobre o jovem Kierkegaard. (shrink)

This paper elucidates the notion that action is creative through the social imaginaries perspective. Hans Joas’s critique of sociological theories on action developed in The Creativity of Action (1996 [1992]) argued that creativity is an essential concept to better understand social action. Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur employ an understanding of action as being inextricably connected to the social imaginary and capable of bringing forth historically novel forms of being and doing. An elucidation of Castoriadis’s dichotomy between the instituted and (...) instituting imaginaries and Ricoeur’s distinction of the ideological and utopian poles of the cultural imagination bring to the surface points of convergence and divergence in their respective understandings of the social imaginary and historical novelty. Inspired by Joas’s critique of sociological theories of action through pragmatism, which is underlined by a critique of the philosophical anthropological assumptions held by structuralism, this essay argues that Castoriadis’s and Ricoeur’s distinct insights on the creative dimension of social action and the way in which social reality emerges can elucidate further an anti-structuralist philosophical anthropology that can help inform sociological theories of action. (shrink)

This comprehensive text offers a systematic and thematic approach to West's philosophical work. It moves the reader through his distinctive form of prophetic pragmatism, his historicist and improvisational philosophy of religion, his socialist democratic and truncated Marxist political philosophy, and his reflections on a range of cultural issues.

In an attempt to subject representative texts of a dozen ancient authors to a more or less Socratic inquiry, the noted scholar George Anastaplo suggests in The Thinker as Artist how one might usefully read as well as enjoy such texts, which illustrate the thinking done by the greatest artists and how they "talk" among themselves across the centuries. In doing so, he does not presume to repeat the many fine things said about these and like authors, but rather (...) he discusses what he himself has noticed about them, text by text. Drawing upon a series of classical authors ranging from Homer and Sappho to Plato and Aristotle, Anastaplo examines issues relating to chance, art, nature, and divinity present in the artful works of philosophers and other thinkers. As he has done in his earlier work, Anastaplo mines the great texts to help us discover who we are and what we should be. Some of the works used are familiar, while others were once better known than they are now. The approach to all of them is fresh and provocative, demonstrating the value of such texts in showing the reader what to look for and how to talk about matters that have always engaged thoughtful human beings. These imaginative yet disciplined discussions of important texts of ancient Greek thought and of Raphael's The School of Athens should appeal to both the specialist and the general reader. (shrink)

We test conformity-related values applying the value-pragmatics hypothesis by evaluating how personal values related to compliance moderate the relationships between situational factors and unethical decisions. We examine the direct and indirect effects of the values of traditionalism, conformity, and stimulation, as they combine with the situational factors of rewards and punishments in the person–situation interaction model. We find strong support for the value-pragmatics view of ethical decision making and further build support for the person–situation interaction model.