After World War II political science, especially comparative politics, was transformed by a "scientific revolution." Harry Eckstein, an influential spokesman in the revolution's forefront, went on to make a great variety of contributions in subsequent decades. These eleven essays, written over thirty years, cover the major issues in comparative politics, from civil war to "civic inclusion"—that is, "the tendency over time to include in politics, in workplace decision-making, in education, and in other institutional realms, people previously excluded from (...) participation." Eckstein also deals with political science as a field: how it relates to political practice, how it developed in the prewar period, and how it emerged from the first postwar reshaping. In this first collection of his work, Eckstein reflects on the issues and events—his personal experiences as a refugee from Nazi Germany and as an observer of European politics and cultures—that underlie and unify his thinking. _Regarding Politics_ presents in one powerful volume the career of one of the leading comparative political scientists of our times. (shrink)

Ted Shotter's founding of the London Medical Group 50 years ago in 1963 had several far reaching implications for medical ethics, as other papers in this issue indicate. Most significant for the joint authors of this short paper was his founding of the quarterly Journal of Medical Ethics in 1975, with Alastair Campbell as its first editor-in-chief. In 1980 Raanan Gillon began his 20-year editorship . Gillon was succeeded in 2001 by Julian Savulescu, followed by John Harris and Soren Holm (...) in 2004, with Julian Savulescu starting his second and current term in 2011. In 2000 an additional special edition of the JME, Medical Humanities , was published, under the founding joint editorship of Martyn Evans and David Greaves. In 2003 Jane Macnaughton succeeded David Greaves as joint editor. Deborah Kirklin, under whose auspices MH became an independent journal, took over in 2008, and she was succeeded in 2013 by Sue Eckstein. This short paper offers reminiscences and reflections from the two journals’ various editors.From the start the JME was committed to clearly expressed reasoned discussion of ethical issues arising from or related to medical practice and research. In particular, both Edward Shotter and Alastair Campbell, each a cleric , were at pains to make clear that the JME was not a religious journal and that it had no sort of partisan axe to grind.Campbell's appointment as founding editor was something of a surprise, as the original intention had been to appoint a medical doctor, who could be expected to know medical practice from the inside. However, in 1972 Campbell, a Joint Secretary of the Edinburgh Medical Group, had published Moral dilemmas in medicine. …. (shrink)

Harry Eckstein’s long-standing (but ever-changing) hypothesis that a nation’s political stability is a function of “congruence” between the “authority patterns” exhibited by the government and those displayed by nearly every sort of institution under that government’s aegis involved a highly complex politico-psychological theory. As a result, it was quite difficult either to confirm or disconfirm. While there have been a number of suggested revisions that apparently simplify his thesis, they suffer either from vagueness or a failure to take (...) democracy to be a system that requires an actual commitment to majoritarianism. In this paper a revision is offered that utilizes a small number of completely dichotomous variables that are easily subject to empirical tests. This revised theory (of “consonance” rather than congruence) is also explicitly majoritarian, enabling it to shed light on the essential nature of democratic regimes. (shrink)

Although liberals too often forget it, the health of the liberal publicorder depends on our ability to constitute not only political institutions and limits on power, but appropriate patterns of social lifeand citizen character. Liberal character traits and political virtuesdo not, after all, come about “naturally” or by the deliverance of an “invisible hand.” Even Adam Smith did not think that, as we will see below. Harry Eckstein gets closer to themark by suggesting that “stable governments…are the productof (...) 'accidental' conjunctions of conditions which do sometimes, but rarely, occur in actual societies.”. (shrink)

_Brill's Companion to the Reception of Presocratic Natural Philosophy in Later Classical Thought_ explores both explicit and hidden influences of Presocratic (6-4th c. BCE) early scientific concepts, such as nature, elements, principles, soul, organization, causation, purpose, and cosmos in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Hippocratic philosophy.

If consciousness emerges into ontological reality at some point in nature, as system complexity increases, then it also ‘submerges’ at some adjoining point, as structures simplify. This has led some to posit a ‘latent-consciousness’ in what Bohr saw as the consciousness-like spontaneity of quantum phenomena. Yet to move on this basis to Whitehead's ontological pan-experientialism or to direct quantum explanations of consciousness faces serious epistemological limitations -- perhaps being more unwittingly projective than genuinely explanatory. More reasonable would be an epistemological (...) pan- experientialism in the sense of the later James. Consciousness, as the ultimate lens and medium of all knowledge, is inseparable from the physical reality it would know, especially at the very limits of empirical observation in microphysics. ‘Submerged’ consciousness is better understood in Jamesian pragmatic terms than via assumed but unprovable ontologies. (shrink)

Debating Education puts two leading scholars in conversation with each other on the subject of education-specifically, what role, if any, markets should play in policy reform. The authors focus on the nature, function, and legitimate scope of voluntary exchange as a form of social relation, and how education raises concerns that are not at issue when it comes to trading relationships between consenting adults.

'Mass terms', words like water, rice and traffic, have proved very difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike count nouns such as house or dog, they cannot be viewed as part of a logical set and differ in their grammatical properties. In this study, motivated by the need to design a computer program for understanding natural language utterances incorporating mass terms, Harry Bunt provides a thorough analysis of the problem and offers an original and detailed solution. (...) An extension of classical set theory, Ensemble Theory, is defined, and this provides the conceptual basis of a framework for the analysis of natural language meaning which Dr Bunt calls Two-level model-theoretic semantics. The validity of the framework is convincingly demonstrated by the formal analysis of a fragment of English including sentences with quantified and modified mass terms. Separate chapters of the book are devoted to an axiomatic definition of Ensemble Theory and a detailed discussion of its status as a mathematical formalism. (shrink)

Shelly Kagan has recently defended the view that it is morally worse for a human being to suffer some harm than it is for a lower animal (such as a dog or a cow) to suffer a harm that is equally severe (ceteris paribus). In this paper, I argue that this view receives rather less support from our intuitions than one might at first suppose. According to Kagan, moreover, an individual’s moral status depends partly upon her ‘modal capacities.’ In this (...) paper, I argue that the most natural strategy for justifying Kagan’s theory faces some important challenges. More generally, I argue that philosophers who wish to defend the view that human beings have a higher moral status than that of the lower animals face a dilemma. Either their theory of moral status will imply (unacceptably) that some severely cognitively impaired human beings have a significantly lower moral status than that of typical human beings, or these philosophers will be forced to ground moral status in a set of properties so far removed from a subject’s actual capacities that it will become difficult to see why these kinds of properties should have such moral importance. (shrink)

This collection of articles, mostly by philosophers, but including two doctors and an economic historian, is intended as a contribution to applied ethics and medical ethics. The articles tackle two questions: how can the autonomy of the elderly be increased, and how can a just proportion of medical resources be secured for them? The seven articles dealing with the first question apply work in the theory of ethics on the nature and limits of autonomy to the particular case study of (...) the elderly: there are a number of detailed conclusions about what can and should be done, and a general consensus that, while the right to die with dignity is important, even more important is the improvement of the quality of life. The seven articles dealing with resources examine the problems created by an ageing population and the arguements for discriminating against the elderly: the main conclusions is that none of these arguments are sound or convincing. Overall the book seeks to make both a theoretical and a practical contribution to this field. (shrink)

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Monogamy, I’ve argued, faces a pressing problem: the difficulty of finding a morally relevant difference between its restriction on having additional partners and a restriction on having additional friends. To the extent that we’d find a restriction on having additional friends morally troubling, that puts pressure on us to judge the same about monogamy. This argument, however, has recently come under attack by Kyle York, who defends monogamy on grounds of specialness, practicality, and jealousy. In this paper I’ll argue that, (...) pace York, these defenses of monogamy all fail. (shrink)

This book defends the constructivist view of science, namely, the view that scientific theories are mental constructions in the mind of the scientist, rather than the realist view that scientific theories are accounts of what nature itself is like. To prove this point, evolution theory is contrasted with "creation science" as two paradigms or extremely divergent theories, each of which, as a mental construct, explains the data or facts of the natural world equally well. Contents: Realism vs. Constructivism; Meaning and (...) Reference in the Natural Sciences; The Role of Paradigm in the Creationism Controversy; Science As Mental Construction. (shrink)

Excerpt from A Study in the Ethics of the Early Romantic School in Germany It is very probable that any writer or group of writers will be subjected to the pen of the critic, whether they abound in deficiencies or not. But, should the ethics of the individual or group diverge somewhat from the line drawn by society, there is no limit to the untold severity of merciless criticism, no element of defense in the many comments. Still it must be (...) remembered that no one can calculate the depth of a body of water by merely scanning the surface: nor can anyone fully realize the profundity of any situation by viewing it superficially. In other words, it is absolutely necessary that the critic resort to detailed investigation. He must go below the surface to solve the complicated problems which may be presented. Thereby he will acquaint himself with the factors that mould the pattern for the times. Then again, the average human being does or says as he or she sees fit, and can very often furnish justifiable reasons therefor. Everyone reserves for oneself the privileged right of personal opinion and belief. But herein lies a decisive difference. Some people are lovers of the truth, and therefore speak candidly and act openly; others are prone to lose courage and try to hide behind a transparent veil of false modesty. Those, who can be included within this latter category, are only reticent and untrue to themselves, simply because they are in the majority. If the proportion be reversed, they would be more than glad to feel the relief from the pressure removed. But those poor unfortunates, who are forced by their nature and spurred on by their immediate environment to be outspoken, become down-trodden social outcasts. If we ask ourselves why this is so, the answer is: primarily because they are in the minority, as all persecuted classes are. No credit or encouragement is given them for their originality. Yet they are as determined as ever in their aim, and proceed with the innovations that are criteria for their own development. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

‘Interactional expertise’ is developed through linguistic interaction without full scale practical immersion in a culture. Interactional expertise is the medium of communication in peer review in science, in review committees, and in interdisciplinary projects. It is also the medium of specialist journalists and of interpretative methods in the social sciences. We describe imitation game experiments designed to make concrete the idea of interactional expertise. The experiments show that the linguistic performance of those well socialized in the language of a specialist (...) group is indistinguishable from those with full blown practical socialization but distinguishable from those who are not well socialized. The imitation game can also be used to indicate whether an individual can enter an esoteric domain and master the interactional expertise, a skill required by interpretative sociologists of science, anthropologists, ethnographers, and the like.Keywords: Expertise; Interactional expertise; Imitation game; Turing test; Colour blindness; Interpretative methods. (shrink)

Kant's account of the experience of the sublime in nature and the incommensurability of its bases in the two European traditions of philosophy that feed into modern cognitive psychology, the holism of Leibniz and the analytic reductionism of Locke, are used to develop a new theory of human nature in terms of developmental interactions between initially separate cognitive domains. More recent illustrations of this separation/interaction are found in debates over 'emergence' in modern science and theories of consciousness. Shifting from competitive (...) epistemologies to a resulting ontology of human nature, the cognitive development of mind through childhood can itself be understood as multiple but necessarily incomplete fusions between person knowing and a thing/tool knowing , based here on a Vygotskian model of their reciprocal internalizations, and leading into our ostensibly differentiated and humanly unique multiple adult intelligences. A consequence is that human consciousness, while based on these selective and necessarily partial domain integrations, as in the separate directionalities of spirituality and science/technology, is fundamentally and permanently unbalanced. Kant's sublime and Rudolf Otto's related analysis of numinous-uncanny feeling exemplify the inner dynamism of this intrinsic unbalance, constituting the species specific form of the perpetual orientation to novelty that drives us forward toward the very best and very worst of the human condition. (shrink)

Having outlined a theory of bullshit and falsehood, Harry G. Frankfurt turns to what lies beyond them: the truth, a concept not as obvious as some might expect. Our culture's devotion to bullshit may seem much stronger than our apparently halfhearted attachment to truth. Some people won't even acknowledge "true" and "false" as meaningful categories, and even those who claim to love truth cause the rest of us to wonder whether they, too, aren't simply full of it. Practically speaking, (...) many of us deploy the truth only when absolutely necessary, often finding alternatives to be more saleable, and yet somehow civilization seems to be muddling along. But where are we headed? Is our fast and easy way with the facts actually crippling us? Or is it "all good"? Really, what's the use of truth, anyway? With the same leavening wit and commonsense wisdom that animates his pathbreaking work On Bullshit, Frankfurt encourages us to take another look at the truth: there may be something there that is perhaps too plain to notice but for which we have a mostly unacknowledged yet deep-seated passion. His book will have sentient beings across America asking, "The truth—why didn't I think of that?". (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept. I also defend Robust Temporalism against several common objections, and I highlight its relevance to a (...) number of practical policy debates, including longtermism. My conclusion is that Robust Temporalism is a moral live option, that deserves to be taken much more seriously in the future. (shrink)