Meteorology IV.12, the final chapter of Aristotle’s “chemical” treatise, is a major text for the traditional view that Aristotle believed in universal teleology, the idea that everything in the cosmos—including the elements, earth, water, air, and fire—is what it is because of the goal or good it serves. But in the context of the rest of Meteorology IV, a different picture emerges. Meteorology IV.1–11 analyze the dispositional properties of material compounds (malleability, elasticity, etc.), examine the behavior of stuffs when heated (...) and cooled, and provide the resources to classify kinds in terms of their material composition and dispositional properties. Meteorology IV.12 places itself within that larger investigation but takes a different approach, examining those same materials from the perspective of their functions in bodies of greater complexity (e.g., the function of flesh in an organism). I argue that the teleological account of, say, the elements is limited to their function in the composition of complex kinds, such as living organisms, and that outside such a complex the elements behave as they do, not for the sake of some good they serve but “of necessity,” according to their material natures and interactions with other materials. (shrink)

Drawing on interviews with 140 young British males, this article explores the ways in which men talk about their own bodies and bodily practices, and those of other men. The specific focus of interest is a variety of body modification practices. We argue, however, that the significance of this analysis extends beyond the topic of body modification. In discussing the appearance of their bodies, the men we interviewed talked less about muscle and skin than about their own selves located within (...) particular social, cultural and moral universes. This article shows that, in talking about seemingly trivial questions such as whether to have one’s nose pierced or join a gym, men are actively engaged in regulating normative masculinity. Our analysis lends support to the claim that the body has become a new (identity) project in high/late/post-modernity, but shows how fraught with difficulties this project is for young men who must simultaneously work on and discipline their bodies while disavowing any (inappropriate) interest in their own appearance. The analysis highlights the pervasive individualism of young men’s discourses, and the absence of alternative ways of making sense of embodied experiences. (shrink)

The extensive community use of complementary medicine can no longer be overlooked in the practice of hospital medicine. Protocols need to be developed and implemented so that health professionals can deal with the issues surrounding the use of CM. Policy development has generally focussed on the supply of CM in hospital but another approach, which is based on consideration of the ethical and legal context, is presented here. Such an approach demands clarification of institutional policy for individuals who are competent (...) and those who are incapable of self-administration or non-competent. (shrink)

Uncovering the historical roots of naturalistic, secular contemporary ethics, in this volume Michael Gill shows how the British moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries completed a Copernican revolution in moral philosophy. They effected a shift from thinking of morality as independent of human nature to thinking of it as part of human nature itself. He also shows how the British Moralists - sometimes inadvertently, sometimes by design - disengaged ethical thinking, first from distinctly Christian ideas and then from (...) theistic commitments altogether. Examining in detail the arguments of Whichcote, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson against Calvinist conceptions of original sin and egoistic conceptions of human motivation, Gill also demonstrates how Hume combined the ideas of earlier British moralists with his own insights to produce an account of morality and human nature that undermined some of his predecessors' most deeply held philosophical goals. (shrink)

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"Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. Plato's retelling of the discourses between Socrates and his friends on such subjects (...) as love and desire, truth and illusion, spiritual transcendence and the qualities of a good ruler, profoundly affected the ways in which we view human relationships, society and leadership - and shaped the whole tradition of Western philosophy."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Erving Goffman’s “Asylums” is a key text in the development of contemporary, community-orientated mental health practice. It has survived as a trenchant critique of the asylum as total institution, and its publication in 1961 in book form marked a further stage in the discrediting of the asylum model of mental health care. In this paper, some responses from a range of disciplines to this text, 50 years on, are presented. A consultant psychiatrist with a special interest in cultural psychiatry and (...) mental health legislation, two collaborating psychotherapists in adult and forensic mental health, a philosopher, and a recent medical graduate, present their varying responses to the text. The editors present these with the hope of encouraging further dialogue and debate from service users, carers, clinicians, and academics and researchers across a range of disciplines. (shrink)

Plato famously promised to complement the Sophist and the Statesman with another work on a third sort of expert, the philosopher--but we do not have this final dialogue. Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher, but did not write it, in order to stimulate his audience and encourage his readers to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato's investigation (...) of knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, the second part of which presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. Gill contends that the dialogues leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher's method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato's philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato's exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose. (shrink)

Replacing animal procedures with methods such as cells and tissues in vitro, volunteer studies, physicochemical techniques and computer modelling, is driven by legislative, scientific and moral imperatives. Non‐animal approaches are now considered as advanced methods that can overcome many of the limitations of animal experiments. In testing medicines and chemicals, in vitro assays have spared hundreds of thousands of animals. In contrast, academic animal use continues to rise and the concept of replacement seems less well accepted in university research. Even (...) so, some animal procedures have been replaced in neurological, reproductive and dentistry research and progress is being made in fields such as respiratory illnesses, pain and sepsis. Systematic reviews of the transferability of animal data to the clinical setting may encourage a fresh look for novel non‐animal methods and, as mainstream funding becomes available, more advances in replacement are expected. BioEssays 29:918–926, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

An engaging account of how Shaftesbury revolutionized Western philosophy At the turn of the eighteenth century, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, developed the first comprehensive philosophy of beauty to be written in English. It revolutionized Western philosophy. In A Philosophy of Beauty, Michael Gill presents an engaging account of how Shaftesbury’s thought profoundly shaped modern ideas of nature, religion, morality, and art—and why, despite its long neglect, it remains compelling today. Before Shaftesbury’s magnum opus, Charactersticks of (...) Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, it was common to see wilderness as ugly, to associate religion with fear and morality with unpleasant restriction, and to dismiss art as trivial or even corrupting. But Shaftesbury argued that nature, religion, virtue, and art can all be truly beautiful, and that cherishing and cultivating beauty is what makes life worth living. And, as Gill shows, this view had a huge impact on the development of natural religion, moral sense theory, aesthetics, and environmentalism. Combining captivating historical details and flashes of humor, A Philosophy of Beauty not only rediscovers and illuminates a fascinating philosopher but also offers an inspiring reflection about the role beauty can play in our lives. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the ethical theories of Cynics and Stoics. Cynicism traces its origins to Diogenes of Sinope, the most colourful and outrageous of all such founders of philosophical movements. The core Cynic doctrines articulate the principles embodied in Diogenes' way of life. The central theme is that of following nature, understood as leading a life of extreme primitiveness or self-chosen bestiality. Stoicism offers an alternative to Aristotle, who has been the main Classical source of inspiration for those evolving modern (...) versions of virtue ethics. A striking feature of Stoic ethical theory lies in its combination of radical moral rigour or aspiration and a strongly naturalistic outlook. (shrink)

This timely collection of essays is the first to be written on the work of Maurice Blanchot in English. One of the finest writers of our time, Blanchot is a contemporary of Bataille and Levinas; his writing has influenced the likes of Derrida and Foucault. Eminent commentators featured here include: Simon Critchley, Paul Davies, Cristopher Fynsk, Rodolphe Gasche, Leslie Hill, Michael Holland, Jeffery Mehlman, Roger Laporte, Ian Maclachlan, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Gillian Rose and Ann Smock. The essays consider the political implications (...) of Blanchot's questioning the relationship between philosophy and literature. In addition, the provocative issue of Blanchot's politics during the 1930s is clarified by a letter from Blanchot to one of the contributors, published here for the first time. Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing is a crucial selection for all students of philosophy, literature or French studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.1 (2003) 143-146 [Access article in PDF] William V. Harris. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii + 468 pp. Cloth, $49.95. It is a mark of evolving interests in the discipline that a well-known ancient historian should choose to write a major book on the ancient understanding of a single emotion. This reflects both (...) an ever-widening conception of what social history can include (and of how social and political history are interconnected) and the intense study in recent years of ancient ideas about the nature and therapy of the emotions, especially in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy. This book combines specificity of focus with breadth of evidence examined. The topic is not just anger but, more precisely, the ideology, broadly understood, of anger control. The evidence discussed ranges from Homer to early Christian ideas in late antiquity; it embraces literature, historiography, and philosophy, among much else. The combination of a single line of enquiry and comprehensiveness of material is crucial to the character and value of this study.The project of the book can be defined more exactly. Harris sets out to examine the evidence for ancient thought about anger and to contextualize it, placing it in a socially oriented history of ideas. This project explains the structure of the book. Part 1 considers the relevant material, above all the Hellenistic-Roman philosophical treatises on control of anger, and explores questions of method and approach. Key points include the difference between Greek or Roman and modern English vocabulary, such as the Greek distinction between violent temper ( orge \) and "spirit" or impulse ( thumos), and the importance of placing the Hellenistic treatises in a developing tradition of emotional self-control from the fifth century B.C. onwards. Part 2, the largest, connects Greco-Roman thought about the restraint of anger with salient features of political and social structure; this is extended, in part 3, to family life and the treatment of slaves. Part 4 returns to ancient ideas, especially in philosophy, about anger as a "sickness of soul" to be treated by "therapy"; these ideas are now placed within a larger history of anger control from archaic Greece to late antiquity.Inevitably, with a topic of such breadth, some of the discussion surveys material examined more fully by scholars writing from more specialist standpoints. This is so, for instance, in the review of philosophical ideas on control of anger in chapters 6 and 14-15 (though these ideas have not, I think, been assembled before in a single study). The main originality of the book lies in the social contextualization of ideas, particularly in parts 2 and 3. Here, a set of substantively new claims are offered, bearing especially on the explanation of the [End Page 143] prominence of the theme of anger control in Greek and Roman culture. For instance, the presentation of Achilles' rage in the Iliad as intensely problematic, taken with the more positive characterization of Odysseus' revenge (which depends on restraint of anger) in the Odyssey, is seen as expressing a growing awareness of the dangers of heroic or kingly rage in a period (ca. 700 B.C.) when the Greek archaic city-states were emerging from their pre-polis form (chapter 7, especially 145-46). Analogously, the preoccupation with the destructive impact of violent anger ( orge \) and the reiterated stress on emotional control ( so \ phrosune \) in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., in contexts such as drama, historiography, and oratory, are taken as integral elements of the growth of cooperative life in the polis. Harris draws on Norbert Elias's thesis that the internalisation of doctrines restraining the motives (including anger) that generate violent aggression constitutes a key part of the development of civilized society (150).A comparably wide range of sources is reviewed for Roman attitudes; much of the evidence is drawn from the late Republic, a period when violent anger played a major role in the disruption of social and political order—although this connection is not... (shrink)