Feldman and Levin present a model for movement control in which the system is said to seek equilibrium points, active movement being produced by shifting frames of reference in space. It is argued that whatever merit this model might have is limited to an understanding of “the how” and not “the why” we move. In this way the authors seem to be forced into a dualistic position leaving the upper level of the proposed control hierarchy “floating.”.

Shortages of new therapeutics to treat coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have forced clinicians, public health officials, and health systems to grapple with difficult questions about how to fairly allocate potentially life-saving treatments when there are not enough for all patients in need (1). Shortages have occurred with remdesivir, tocilizumab, monoclonal antibodies, and the oral antiviral Paxlovid (2) -/- Ensuring equitable allocation is especially important in light of the disproportionate burden experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic by disadvantaged groups, including Black, Hispanic/Latino and (...) Indigenous communities, individuals with certain disabilities, and low-income persons. However, many health systems have resorted to first-come, first-served approaches to allocation, which tend to disadvantage individuals with barriers in access to care (3). There is mounting evidence of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in access to medications for COVID-19 (4, 5). -/- One potential method to promote equitable allocation is to use a weighted lottery, which is an allocation strategy that gives all eligible patients a chance to receive the scarce treatment while also allowing the assignment of higher or lower chances according to other ethical considerations (6). We sought to assess the feasibility of implementing a weighted lottery to allocate scarce COVID-19 medications in a large U.S. health system and to determine whether the weighted lottery promotes equitable allocation. (shrink)

Gray takes an information-processing paradigm as his departure point, invoking a comparator as part of the system. He concludes that consciousness is to be found “in” the comparator but is unable to point to how the comparison takes place. Thus, the comparator turns out not to be an entity arising out of brain research per se, but out of the logic of the paradigm. In this way, Gray both reinvents dualism and remains trapped in the language game of his own (...) model – ending up dealing with the unknowable. (shrink)

Although efforts have been made to increase the opportunities for American-born minorities to obtain doctoral degrees in business, the actual number of business students who are American-born minorities has been extremely low. At the same time more than half of all PhD candidates in business schools are foreign-born. We suggest that business schools owe an ethical duty to provide role models for minority business students, and that this duty can be achieved by initiating Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) programs that (...) can enable working professionals who are American-born minorities to obtain terminal degrees in business. We outline eight steps that can be taken to implement a viable and cost effective DBA program. (shrink)

Mr. T. H. Mcpherson has given, in a recent article in PHILOSOPHY , various reasons for supposing that there was a development in Butler's ethics from the Sermons to the Analogy . He argues that Butler was in the Sermons a “rational egoist” or “Ethical Eudaemonist,” and in the Analogy an Intuitionist. By “Ethical Eudaemonism” he seems1 to mean that “the ground or criterion of rightness is conduciveness to the agent's interest” or that “it is the happiness-producing character of acts (...) that makes them right” . I shall use the phrase “McPherson's view” to denote the theory that this was Butler's view in the Sermons. (shrink)

We report on the small-scale (0.5 13 h - 1M, a large-scale bias of ~2.0 and a satellite fraction of 12 ± 2 per cent. Thus, these galaxies occupy haloes with average masses in between those of the higher redshift BOSS CMASS sample and the original SDSS I/II luminous red galaxy sample © 2012 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society © doi:10.1093/mnras/sts314.

Carbon monoxide intoxication leads to acute and chronic neurological deficits, but little is known about the specific noxious mechanisms. 1 H magnetic resonance spectroscopy may allow insight into the pathophysiology of CO poisoning by monitoring neurochemical disturbances, yet only limited information is available to date on the use of this protocol in determining the neurological effects of CO poisoning. To further examine the short-term and long-term effects of CO on the central nervous system, we have studied seven patients with CO (...) poisoning assessed by gray and white matter MRS, magnetic resonance imaging and neuropsychological testing. Five patients suffered from acute high-dose CO intoxication and were in coma for 1–6 days. In these patients, MRI revealed hyperintensities of the white matter and globus pallidus and also showed increased choline and decreased N -acetyl aspartate ratios to creatine, predominantly in the white matter. Lactate peaks were detected in two patients during the early phase of high-dose CO poisoning. Two patients with chronic low-dose CO exposure and without loss of consciousness had normal MRI and MRS scans. On follow-up. five of our seven patients had long-lasting intellectual impairment, including one individual with low-dose CO exposure. The MRS results showed persisting biochemical alterations despite the MRI scan showing normalization of morphological changes. In conclusion, the MRS was normal in patients suffering from chronic low-dose CO exposure; in contrast, patients with high-dose exposure showed abnormal gray and white matter levels of NAA/Cr, Cho/Cr and lactate, as detected by 1 H MRS, suggesting disturbances of neuronal function, membrane metabolism and anaerobic energy metabolism, respectively. Early increases in Cho/Cr and decreases of NAA/Cr may be related to a poor long-term outcome, but confirmation by future studies is needed. (shrink)

This book is not about the theory of Forms as such, but about Plato’s epistemological realism, his view, in opposition to Protagorean relativism, that there is a realm of fact that counts as the common object of our true beliefs, judgments, and knowledge. This book fills a longstanding need for a lucid, condensed, readable account of aspects of Plato’s thought that emerge in certain of Plato’s middle and later dialogues and pose issues of contemporary philosophical merit. It is White’s (...) contention that Plato’s discontent with the "method of hypothesis" tentatively tried in Meno, Phaedo, and Republic, and his theory of naming in the Cratylus, lead to the breakdown of his theory of knowledge and, eventually, of the possibility of meaningful inquiry, with the objects of inquiry framed in advance by a specification of the object. The key thesis in White’s contention appears to be a view that he attributes to the Cratylus, that "the genuine use of a name is thought to require the apprehension of its nominatum, in a way excluding any confusion of it with other things" ; for, if the only thing that can be named is a Form, and if believing, judging, and knowing are a kind of being confronted in one’s mental "visual" field with an object, and we cannot accept the beliefs of others for purposes of inquiry, then how is it possible to inquire about, or to define what one already apprehends and recognizes? (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

IntroductionResilience is a factor in how youth respond to adversity. The 88-item Adolescent Resilience Questionnaire is a comprehensive, multi-dimensional self-report measure of resilience developed with Australian youth.MethodsUsing a cross-sectional adolescent population, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to replicate the original factor structure. Over half of the adolescents were non-white and 9th graders with a mean age of 15.5.ResultsOur exploratory factor analysis shortened the measure for which we conducted the psychometric analyses. The original factor structure was not replicated. The exploratory (...) factor analysis provided a 49-item measure. Internal consistency reliability for all 12 factors ranged from acceptable. The revised factor total scores were highly and significantly correlated with item–total correlation coefficients.ConclusionThis revised shorter 49-item version of the Adolescent Resilience Questionnaire could be deployed and has acceptable psychometric properties. (shrink)

The current investigation was designed to examine the association of parenting during late childhood and early adolescence, a time of rapid physical development, with biological propensity for inflammation. Based on life course theory, it was hypothesized that parenting during this period of rapid growth and development would be associated with biological outcomes and self-reported health assessed in young adulthood. It was expected that association of parenting with health would be mediated either by effects on methylation of a key inflammatory factor, (...) Tumor necrosis factor (TNF), or else by association with a pro-inflammatory shift in the distribution of mononuclear blood cells. Supporting expectations, in a sample of 398 African American youth residing in rural Georgia, followed from age 11 to age 19, parenting at ages 11–13 was associated with youth reports of better health at age 19. We found that parenting was associated with changes in TNF methylation as well as with changes in cell-type composition. However, whereas methylation of TNF was a significant mediator of the association of parenting with young adult health, variation in mononuclear white blood cell types was not a significant mediator of the association of parenting with young adult health. The current research suggests the potential value of examining the health-related effects of parenting in late childhood and early adolescence. Further examination of protection against pro-inflammatory tendencies conferred by parenting appears warranted. (shrink)

Transpersonal psychology: Dean, S. R. The ultraconscious mind. Arasteh, A. R. Final integration in the adult personality.--The nature of madness: First, E. Visions, voyages, and new interpretations of madness. Van Dusen, W. Hallucinations as the world of spirits.--Biofeedback: White, J. The yogi in the lab. Kiefer, D. EEG alpha feedback and subjective states of consciousness.--Meditation research: Griffith, F. F. Meditation research: its personal and social implications. Kiefer, D. Intermeditation notes: reports from inner space.--Psychic research: Honorton, C. Tracing ESP through (...) altered states of consciousness. Johnson, C. W. Unexplored areas of parapsychology.--Paraphysics: White, J. Plants, polygraphs, and paraphysics. Reiser, O. L. Messages to and from the galaxy.--Biotechnology: Beal, J. B. The new biotechnology. Tiller, W. A. Energy fields and the human body.--The neurosciences: Conway, H. Life, death, and antimatter. Floyd, K. Of time and mind: from paradox to paradigm.--Ecological consciousness: Smith, R. A. Our passport to evolutionary awareness. Esser, A. H. Synergy and social pollution in the communal imagery of mankind.--Space travel and extraterrestrial life: Mitchell, E. D. Global consciousness and the view from space. White, J. Exobiology--where science fiction meets science fact.--Death as an altered state of consciousness: Tietze, T. R. Some perspectives on survival. Noyes, R. Dying and mystical consciousness. (shrink)

There has been some controversy about whether or not in the 'Enneads' sensible matter is generated by a higher principle. If not, is sensible matter eternally self-subsisting? If so, what precisely is the manner of its generation? H.-R. Schwyzer argued that sensible matter is not generated because generation implies corruption. Kevin Corrigan, on the contrary, argued not only that sensible matter is generated but also that there are multiple generations of such matter. In this paper, the authors re-examine some key (...) texts and conclude that a careful reading of the 'Enneads' indicates that neither Schwyzer's nor Corrigan's account is plausible. Rather, in the 'Enneads' both intelligible matter and sensible matter are generated by higher principles in the sense that both eternally depend on these higher principles for their existence but not insofar as they have a beginning in time. Moreover, there is exactly one generation of sensible matter rather than multiple generations. (shrink)

AimWhite matter changes in individuals at ultra-high risk for psychosis (UHR) may be involved in the transition to psychosis. Sleep-wake disturbances commonly precede the first psychotic episode and predict development of psychosis. We examined associations between white matter microstructure and sleep-wake disturbances in UHR individuals compared to healthy controls (HC), as well as explored the confounding effect of medication, substance use, and level of psychopathology.MethodsSixty-four UHR individuals and 35 HC underwent clinical interviews and diffusion weighted imaging. Group differences on (...) global and callosal mean fractional anisotropy (FA) was tested using general linear modeling. Sleep-wake disturbances were evaluated using the subjective measures disturbed sleep index (DSI) and disturbed awakening index (AWI) from the Karolinska Sleep Questionnaire, supported by objective sleep measures from one-night actigraphy. The primary analyses comprised partial correlation analyses between global FA/callosal FA and sleep-wake measures. Secondary analyses investigated multivariate patterns of covariance between measures of sleep-wake disturbances and FA in 48 white matter regions of interest using partial least square correlations.ResultsUltra-high risk for psychosis individuals displayed lower global FA (F = 14.56, p < 0.001) and lower callosal FA (F = 11.34, p = 0.001) compared to HC. Subjective sleep-wake disturbances were significantly higher among the UHR individuals (DSI: F = 27.59, p < 0.001, AWI: F = 36.42, p < 0.001). Lower callosal FA was correlated with increased wake after sleep onset (r = −0.34, p = 0.011) and increased sleep fragmentation index (r = −0.31, p = 0.019) in UHR individuals. Multivariate analyses identified a pattern of covariance in regional FA which were associated with DSI and AWI in UHR individuals (p = 0.028), but not in HC. Substance use, sleep medication and antipsychotic medication did not significantly confound these associations. The association with objective sleep-wake measures was sustained when controlling for level of depressive and UHR symptoms, but symptom level confounded the covariation between FA and subjective sleep-wake measures in the multivariate analyses.ConclusionCompromised callosal microstructure in UHR individuals was related to objectively observed disruptions in sleep-wake functioning. Lower FA in ventrally located regions was associated with subjectively measured sleep-wake disturbances and was partly explained by psychopathology. These findings call for further investigation of sleep disturbances as a potential treatment target. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:J. H. Hexter 1910–1996Donald R. KelleyJ. H. Hexter, one of the leading intellectual historians of this century and a close associate of this Journal, died on 8 December 1996. Jack Hexter was a great scholar, talented writer and polemicist, devoted baseball fan, and authentic American humorist, who made wit and facetiousness part of his historiographical tool-kit. He was also an American character, as he made insistently clear in his (...) writings, especially his autobiographical account, “By Any Other Name,” which explained (among other things) why he came to be called “Jack,” why he resisted advice to change it, and other onomastic adventures.Jack taught at Queens College (N.Y., not, he pointed out, the one in South Carolina), 1939–57; Washington University (St. Louis, not Seattle or George Washington U.), 1957–64 and again 1978–86; and Yale University (one did not have to add, “New Haven”) 1965–85, where he was Director of the Center for Parliamentary History. At Washington University he was founding Director of the Center for the History of Freedom, which was devoted to a collaborative, multi-volume study of the history of liberty in the West that would realize the dream that Lord Acton called his “madonna of the future”—the difference being that Jack’s vision is already on the way to fulfillment, with the publication of the volume edited by him on Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War (1992), followed by seven more volumes up to 1996, with more to come.Hexter published books and articles in a variety of fields, finding notoriety especially in his essay of 1958, “Storm over the Gentry,” and later in public jousts with Christopher Hill and others and more retrospective censures of (among others) A. W. Pollard and R. H. Tawney; and he was a master of the Macaulayan art of the review-essay (collected in On Historians, 1979). His article on “Braudel and le monde braudelien” was a mischievous masterpiece of satire which, according to a private communication to Jack, Braudel himself enjoyed in his Olympian way, including the good-natured charge of excessive appetite for facts—“Je vais me dire: ne joue pas trop au Rabelais, sois sage, ne mange pas tout, n’aie les yeux plus gros que le ventre!” (personal letter, 8 February 1973). Several generations of graduate students learned what was involved in doing history from his “The Historian and his Day” (1954), which (like “Storm”), he enjoyed recalling, was rejected by the AHR. He was amused, too, at learning that his article on “The Rhetoric of History” (written for the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences) was a harbinger of the rhetorical turn taken a few years later signalled by the historiographical work of Hayden White and others. He was a pioneer, too, in the intensive study of political languages (Visions of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation, 1973), though he lamented the fact that his work on Machiavelli’s and Seyssel’s political vocabulary had to be carried out before the age of computer technology.My first contact with Jack came through my mentor Garrett Mattingly, who was the contemporary historian Jack “most admired” (as he made plain in his contribution to Mattingly’s festschrift). In 1962 Mattingly told me that the plan to publish Hexter’s translation of Seyssel’s Monarchy of France for the Columbia Records Series had to be abandoned because of the first (I think) of Jack’s several heart attacks. I was able to use the mimeographed version for some years before Jack asked me to take over this project, originally visited on him by C. H. McIlwain. It was his suggestion that [End Page 349] we dedicate the collaborative volume, with nice ambiguity, to both McIlwain and Mattingly (who had also been a student of McIlwain) from “two of their deeply devoted students.”In this brief and perhaps overpersonal note (though nothing could be “too personal” for Jack) I will not add further to the store of Hexterian anecdotes, which I began collecting at Queens College, where Jack had already left the makings of a legend in the 1950s. I would just add... (shrink)

In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of a robust sampled-data H ∞ load frequency control scheme for power systems with randomly occurring time-varying delays. By using the input-delay technique, the sampled-data LFC model is reformulated as a continuous time-delay representation. Then, Bernoulli-distributed white noise sequences are used to describe randomly occurring time-varying delays in the sampled-data LFC model. Some less conservative conditions are achieved by utilizing the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional and employing Jensen inequality and reciprocal convex combination lemma to (...) ensure the considered power system has mean-square asymptotic stability under the designed control scheme. The derived results are based on linear matrix inequalities that can readily be solved using the MATLAB LMI toolbox. The criteria obtained are used to analyze the upper bounds for time delays, and a comparison study to validate the efficacy of the presented method is presented. (shrink)

This small anthology contains thirteen essays by eleven authors on the question: What are the defining characteristics of morality? What makes a judgment, an attitude, or an argument a moral one? The selection of articles is excellent. Ethicians included are: C. H. Whitely, A. MacIntyre, W. K. Frankena, C. C. W. Taylor, Neil Cooper, P. F. Strawson, T. L. S. Sprigge, P. Foot, K. Baier, G. E. M. Anscombe, D. F. Gauthier. An obvious objection to the pursuit of a definition (...) would be to suggest, as Whitely does, that there are no defining traits for all uses of "moral" or "morality": one can hope only to find family resemblances in the uses of the words. Others insist that there is a more precise and consistent use of these notions in ordinary language, though there may be different senses of the word moral, each with sufficiently clear defining traits. In a useful introduction that provides a unifying background for the essays, the editors suggest that six chief candidates appear for the role of the leading characteristic of morality: moral rules and principles can be defined by reference to their capacity for universality, their prescriptivity, their overriding force, the importance they have, the forms of sanctions appealed to, or by reference to their content. The authors in their essays do not, of course, define morality simply in terms of any one of these features; but they do stress or deny the importance of each of these features. Students will find this a helpful work, and there is a good bibliography.--R. D. L. (shrink)

Racism as an independent topic of investigation in philosophy has considerably developed since the 1990s, when it appeared as part of growing debates that, on the one hand, investigated the political meaning of race and, on the other, its ontology and whether it existed at all. Likewise, with the idea of racism, its broadly normative meaning is critiqued by some philosophers, while others ask how best to conceive of it and identify its immorality. There were a few early and significant (...) forays in philosophy about the nature of racism, of which three works stand out because of the way they set the terms of the debate: David Theo Goldberg's Racist Culture, Charles W. Mills’ The Racial Contract, and Jorge L.A. Garcia's “The Heart of Racism.”1 This collection reacts to the latter fork in the discussion but does so in ways that significantly touch on the former.The collection begins with Jorge L. Garcia's “Virtue Ethics in Social Theory: Defending a Volitional Analysis of Racism from Tommie Shelby's Challenges.” It is a clarification and defense of his influential volitional analysis of racism (VAR) from three prominent objections: that VAR inadequately accounts for the immorality of racism because it relies on the assumed wrongness of racism built into ordinary usage of the term ‘racist;’ that it mistakenly separates intention from belief; and that it does not fully account for the racism of some troubling mental states that cannot be traced back to a racist ill-will. Garcia's account of racism as fundamentally rooted in racist ill-will, along with Lawrence Blum's, is representative of agent-centered theories of racism. Not only do they attempt to explain individual or personal racism, but they also hold that racism in institutions, structures, or systems traces back to the racism of persons.Current accounts of structural racism, however, claim that it exists and operates independently of infection from intentionally racist persons, that the focus on racist persons cannot adequately account for how racism works in society, and that, instead, we should concentrate on structures and ideologies. Amelia Wirts sharply defends this view in her, “What does it mean to say ‘The Criminal Justice System is Racist’?” She explains how structural racism applies to America's criminal justice system and other “intermediate” (between individual and societal level) structures. Wirts argues that personal accounts of racism, and in particular Garcia's VAR, do not adequately account for the patterns of racial disparity in the criminal justice system or its disproportionate harm to black people. She advocates, instead, for a patterned view of structural racism, the patterns of which operate “as if it were designed to disproportionately harm” some racialized group. Additionally, Wirts adds that such patterns are particularly racist when they fuel racist ideological symbols, as the criminal justice system does in relation to the idea of the black criminal.Structural analyses of racism are powerfully instructive, and Alisa Bierria, in “Structural Racism Within Reason,” offers an account that takes an epistemic turn that advances our understanding of their meaning. More than the idea that personal and structural racism beget each other in continuous looping effects, and more than the view that racism is best understood as an ideology that provides the content to racist attitudes or policy proscriptions, she argues that structural racism structures reason. Drawing on the 2012 case of Marissa Alexander, who unsuccessfully tried to use Florida's Stand Your Ground Law to justify her firing a warning shot at her estranged, abusive husband to protect herself from his murderous threat, Bierra argues that structural racism extends constructed and controlling intentions onto its targets, and, as in the case she discusses, it uses those constructed and fictional intentions to justify their punishment and depriving them of equal justice.Structural analyses of racism are essential additions to the philosophical understanding of racism that have appropriately challenged the centrality of agent-centered accounts. The increasing academic focus on structural explanations, however, along with the current overuse of “systemic racism” in popular discourse, threatens to eclipse the value of accounts of agent-centered accounts. In “Is Racism Essentially Systemic?” Michael Hardimon counsels against this trend. He reminds us that racism is not essentially systemic, and that the dominance of structural explanations could obscure its other forms and even the proper understanding of structural racism. Indeed, structures once constructed might operate independently of human intention, but they are designed, initiated, and often operated by persons.After considering the direction of the current philosophical discussion about the meaning of racism and its immorality, the next set of articles expands the discussion into matters of class, xenophobia, and white nationalism. Lawrence Blum's “Race and Class Together” starts it off. Blum builds class into his analysis of racism and critiques its absence in anti-racist theory. He argues that paying attention to class is required to secure justice for the victims of racism because pursuing justice is often a matter of both. Blum contends that race and class are “normatively distinct axes of injustice” and that, depending on the question, racial injustice needs to be addressed separately. However, there are aspects of racial injustice that can only be dealt with through a class analysis and require class or combined class–race focused policies. Pointing to the fact that many of the members of groups targeted by racism (he considers blacks, Indigenous peoples, and Latinxs) share cross-class interests, which includes shared interests with some whites, which they do not share with more economically privileged members of their own groups, Blum argues that these interests should be addressed through “class-focused policies,” in a manner that will secure justice for disadvantaged racial groups.Shifting from the class-race analysis, José Jorge Mendoza, in “‘Go Back to Where You Came From!’ Racism, Xenophobia, and White Nationalism,” turns our attention toward white nationalism to examine whether it is best understood as an expression of racism or xenophobia. Although he recognizes the importance of xenophobia in white nationalism, Mendoza does not neglect its connections with racist ideas. However, he acknowledges that emphasizing the role of race in condemnations of white nationalism risks overextending the concept of race, i.e., in regards to pan-racial groups, because some members of those groups are racially identified as white. Thus, the charge of racism against white nationalism in such cases may not clearly apply. To deal with those cases, Mendoza cleverly decouples the ideas of “radicalization” and “racial formation,” and he puts forward a new concept, “racial disintegration,” to account for the operation and shifting targets of white nationalism.In the final piece, David H. Kim and I discuss xenophobia and racism in the case of “Anti-Asian Racism.” We move from general theories of racism to inquire about what is at the base of anti-Asian racism. Little is said in contemporary accounts of racism about anti-Asian racism. This is due, in part, to the high level of abstraction in those discussions but also because much of the literature takes anti-blackness as the model of racism. Our piece addresses this lacuna in a manner not beholden to the black-white binary. We discuss how the idea of anti-Asian racism is a conceptual problem in the American context dominated by that binary. We then argue that xenophobia as a form of civic ostracism, and to some extent xenophilia, play a particular role in how anti-Asian racism functions and its immorality.The pieces in this collection resonate with current events and controversies involving racism and illustrate the potential of the debate to relate to and speak those events, not just to the specialized interests of a cloistered academic conversation. Each piece demonstrates the potential for extending vital lines of debate and discussion that touches the raw nerve of the public discussion of racism. (shrink)

Two new ways of looking at forms of knowledge were practiced in France roughly between 1965 and 1985. The postwar Annales school of history broke from "narrative" historical accounts to "nonnarrative" accountssynchronic, quantitative accounts not in story form. At the same time, the structuralists made history a special target as they began questioning the primacy and security of meaning and the strategies for constructing meaning in narratives. If structuralism and its aftermath is to be said to have had an effect (...) on history, it would be the reinvention of reading, conceiving reading as a more complex and elusive process than it formerly had been, and exposing more and more of the accepted, fundamental components of human life as constructions. Three writers, Paul Ricoeur, F. R. Ankersmit, and Hayden White, recognize narrativity as a worldview, rejecting the Annales school distinction between narrative and nonnarrative history. These three see story history as a genre. They agree with the poststructuralists on the allegorical nature of history, but their arguments are, unconventionally, morally based. Their discussions of the constructions of narratives serve less to undermine history than to reground it as a humane discourse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Choice and Virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics ALFRED R. MELE COM~rNTATORS ON THr Nicomachean Ethics (NE) have long been laboring under the influence of a serious misunderstanding of one of the key terms in Aristotle's moral philosophy and theory of action. This term is prohairesis (choice), the importance of which is indicated by Aristotle's assertions that choice is the proximate efficient cause of action (NE 6. 1139a31--32) and (...) that in which "the essential elements of virtue and character" lie (NE 8. x163a2'~-23). The accepted view is that Aristotle employs two importantly different notions of choice in the NE, one on which the term refers exclusively to means or things which are pros (toward, related to)' ends and another on which it does not have this reference? This "two notion" interpretation is motivated by the following three considerations: i. Aristotle's good or virtuous agent is said (NE 2. 11o5a28-33, cf. NE 6. 1144ax8-2o ) to choose actions for their own sakes; but, according to the This paper is derived in part from a chapter of my doctoral dissertation, which was submitted to the University of Michigan in January of 1979. 1 would like to express my gratitttde to the chairman of my dissertation committee, Nicholas P. White, for his comments and criticisms on the relevant sections during the preparation of my dissertation and to theJHP's anonymous reviewers for their helpful criticisms and queries. ' It has often been pointed out that things which are pros an end are not necessarily "means," in the ordinary sense of the word. E.g., constituents of an end are pros the end, but they are not means to it. See, e.g., Nicomachean Ethics, Book 6, trans. Leonard H. G. Greenwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19o9), pp. 46-47, 53ff.: and John M. Cooper, Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 1o-22. ' Among the many proponents of this "two notion" interpretation are William D. Ross and Donald J. Allan. See Ross, Aristotle, 5th ed. (London: Methuen, t953), p. 2oo. See Allan, The Philosophy of Aristotle, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 197o), p. 132; idem, "Aristotle 's Account of the Origin of Moral Principles," Xlth International Congress of Philosophy 12 (1953):124; idem, "The Practical Syllogism," in Autour d'Aristote, Studies for A. Mansion (Louvain : Publications Universitaires, 1955). Richard Sorabji, in "Aristotle on the Role of Intellect in Virtue" (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 74 l t973-74]:t t6), says that he has noticed sixteen commentators who take this view. [4o5] 406 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY so-called formal account of prohairesis (NE 3. 2-3, 6. 2), the object of choice is what has been decided upon by deliberation (bouleuais), and what is decided upon by deliberation is a "means" to an end. 2. Aristotle says that choice is "closely bound up with virtue" and "discriminates characters better than actions do" (1 1t lb5; cf. t i lob3t, 1117a 5, 1163a22, 1t64bi); but commentators argue that these claims about choice are false unless choice is "of ends." 3. Though Aristotle holds that the impetuous akrat~s (incontinent agent) does not deliberate (e.g., t 152a 18-19), he says that the akrat~s' choice is good (1152ax5--17; cf. l l51a5-- 7, 29--32); and this appears to contradict his position in Book 3 that the object of choice is what is decided upon by deliberation, s In this paper I shall show that only one (philosophically significant) notion ofprohairesis is employed in the NE, namely, the notion developed in the "formal account" of deliberation and choice (3- 2-3, 6. 2), according to which choice is specifically of things which are pros ends. This point has several interesting applications. For example, it makes it easier to find in Aristotle (as I shall briefly explain) a comprehensive theory of practical reasoning or inference rather than several unconnected accounts of what practical inference is like in different types of cases; and it is helpful in clarifying what is involved in the evaluation of character on Aristotle's view (see Sec. ~). However, though I do think that the main point to be made... (shrink)