It is strange to write for the pages of this journal a statement which will not come under the eye of its founding editor, Sheldon Sacks. For nearly five years everything that appeared in Critical Inquiry—articles, critical responses, editorial comments—was a matter of painstaking and passionate concern to Shelly Sacks. With a flow of questions and suggestions and a talent for unabashed cajolery, he generated articles and rejoinders to those articles. He worked tirelessly in editorial consultation and correspondence with contributors, (...) especially young writers, helping them to discover the best way of giving form to their ideas. Among the essays submitted to this journal he searched eagerly, even anxiously, for those which seemed, in his words, "right for C.I." What was right for C. I. was never, for Shelly Sacks, a cut-and-dried choice. In his own intellectual life, in his teaching and writing, he delighted in arguing important general questions: theories of representation in the arts, points of possible intersection between linguistic science and literary criticism, the interplay of social forces and cultural expressions. Not surprisingly, in reconnoitering for Critical Inquiry, he found special satisfaction in identifying writers who shared his passion for reexamining fundamental topics in the intellectual disciplines. If such writers made their case forcefully, so much the better: in choosing an essay for publication he assessed its capacity to stimulate interesting counterargument. At no time, however, did Shelly Sacks confuse his own beliefs with the nature of intellectual discourse. As an editor he was hospitable to writers whose premises he questioned and whose conclusions he deplored. Nor did Shelly attempt to achieve a spurious catholicity by following a quiet quota system designed to give each major line of interpretation—deconstructionist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, what have you—an occasional airing in Critical Inquiry. For Shelly each article stood on its own ground: if its author dealt responsibly and freshly with an interesting problem, that was enough. And, along with his commitment to theoretical inquiry, he responded warmly to the personal, the offbeat, the idiosyncratic. He regarded the feature Artists on Art, for example, as a central element in our design. As an editor Sheldon Sacks was above all a shaper. He labored to find and suggest connections in the phenomena of intellectual life. Even the construction of a table of contents for a typical Critical Inquiry issue became for him an opportunity to influence the reader's experience of what we offered. The eminence of an author or the allure of a title were put to one side as Shelly sought to orchestrate, through placement, a kind of intellectual counterpoint from one essay to another. Unheard melodies, doubtless, for many of us, but for Shelly real and sustaining. In this valedictory note we have spoken of Sheldon Sacks' editorial accomplishment—in our friendly view, a very distinguished one—rather than of the personal qualities which made working alongside him an exhilarating experience. We should report, however, that for more than half the life of this journal Shelly was ill and knew that the time available to him was likely to be relatively brief. Faced with this diminishing perspective, he did not—indeed it is more accurate to say he could not—moderate his involvement with the life of this journal. At his death, as at the launching of this enterprise, he held to the high ambition that Critical Inquiry encourage comeliness, vigor, and continuity in the discourse of our time. The appropriate "critical response" to this great loss is that Sheldon Sacks’ editorial colleagues, and our publisher, the University of Chicago Press, pledge whatever talents and energies we possess to the continuing life of the journal he imagined and brought into being. (shrink)

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

This article discusses two central methodological postulates (adequacy and subjective meaning) pertaining to the social sciences brought forward by Alfred Schütz, and as presented by Lester Embree’s ‘Economics in the Context of Alfred Schütz’s Theory of Science’. The relationship between the postulates and the actual practice of economics is discussed. The author shows how Schütz’s writings describe a spectrum of methods that ranges from low abstraction and an attempt to understand individual plans and purposes on the one hand to highly (...) abstract and aggregate modeling on the other. It is argued that the distribution of economic contributions is heavily skewed toward the latter. The second part of the article presents recent work by economists who have resisted this trend, and who have begun to expand our understanding of economic processes by taking seriously the notion of economics as a social science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.4 (2000) 549-557 [Access article in PDF] Cato Orationes 66 and the Case Against M.' Acilius Glabrio In 189 B.C.E. J. Bradford Churchill THE RACE FOR THE CENSORSHIP of 189 became the setting for one of the most dramatic domestic political disputes of the early second century. 1 M. Porcius Cato (cos. 195) was seeking the censorship, and among his competitors was another homo novus, (...) M.' Acilius Glabrio (cos. 191). Now, Cato had served as tribunus militum under the consul Glabrio during the campaign of 191 against Antiochus III in Greece. Cato had led a flanking expedition to decide the battle at Thermopylae, at the conclusion of which the king's camp was invaded and plundered. 2 Cato said that after the battle, Glabrio had embraced him and cried out that neither he nor the Roman people could repay his good services. 3 Glabrio sent Cato home with news of the victory. 4Now, in the race for the censorship of 189, public opinion was inclining in favor of Glabrio because he had conducted a lavish distribution of congiaria--vessels, perhaps precious, filled with wine or oil. The nobles among the competitors took umbrage at his being preferred to them, and two tribunes, P. Sempronius Gracchus and C. Sempronius Rutilus, brought Glabrio to trial on the charge "that there was some amount of the royal money and booty taken in the camp of Antiochus which he had neither carried in the triumph nor deposited in the treasury." 5 Legates and military tribunes were called to testify, and most visible among them was Cato, who had a reputation for integrity, but [End Page 549] because he was testifying against an opponent in a political race, his influence was diminished. The substance of Cato's testimony, as Livy summarized it, was that he had seen some gold and silver vessels among the royal booty at the sack of the camp, and had not seen them in the triumph.Glabrio withdrew from the race after a fine had been proposed and twice argued, and the case lapsed. He vilified Cato as a perjurious hypocrite for attacking a fellow homo novus for something the nobles usually passed over in silence. 6We have a fragment of a speech Cato gave against Glabrio, and his trial is the only appropriate occasion which is known to us. The fragment itself is clearly designed to set up a contrast between Cato and Glabrio, but the text is corrupt. The codex Farnesianus of Festus has the following entry (Fest. p. 268L): Penatores: qui penus gestant. Cato adversus M.' Acilium quarta: "postquam nativitas ex navibus eduxi, non ex militibus atque nautis piscatores penatores fici, sed arum dedi." First there are several problems which are relatively minor and no longer yield much controversy. The word quarta indicates there were at least four speeches "against Acilius." More often than not, this is dismissed as a simple error. 7 The word nativitas is clearly foreign to the context, and was long ago emended to navitas, as a poetic and archaic variant on nautas. 8 The transmitted fici is regularly and reasonably emended to feci. 9 [End Page 550]The more difficult question centers on the phrase sed arum dedi. André Dacier, in an early modern edition of Festus (Amsterdam 1700), emended arum to aurum. 10 Much later, Theodor Mommsen offered the conjecture arma. 11 This is now the prevailing reading, accepted most significantly by Enrica Malcovati (1953, 39) in the authoritative edition of the Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta. 12 Maria Teresa Sblendorio Cugusi (1982, 77), following Lindsay (1913, 268), printed and obelized arum, but in her commentary (1982, 215) considered Mommsen's emendation preferable to Dacier's because the latter "appears inconsistent with the context." I intend to show that this is rather the opposite of the case, and we ought to accept Dacier's emendation. 13With Mommsen's conjecture, the passage reads: "When I brought sailors off the ships, I didn't make fishers and provisioners out of soldiers... (shrink)

In a previous paper a theory of program size formally identical to information theory was developed. The entropy of an individual finite object was defined to be the size in bits of the smallest program for calculating it. It was shown that this is − log2 of the probability that the object is obtained by means of a program whose successive bits are chosen by flipping an unbiased coin. Here a theory of the entropy of recursively enumerable sets of objects (...) is proposed which includes the previous theory as the special case of sets having a single element. The primary concept in the generalized theory is the probability that a computing machine enumerates a given set when its program is manufactured by coin flipping. The entropy of a set is defined to be − log2 of this probability. (shrink)

Metaphysics has had a long history of debate over its viability, and substantivity. This thesis explores issues connected to the realism question within the domain of metaphysics, ultimately aiming to defend a realist, substantive metaphysics by responding to so-called deflationary approaches, which have become prominent, and well supported within the recent metametaphysical and metaontological literature. To this end, I begin by examining the changing nature of the realism question. I argue that characterising realism and anti-realism through theories of truth unduly (...) places epistemology prior to ontology, and is unwarranted in assuming a non-neutrality between theories of truth and positions within the realism debate. I therefore propose a characterisation of realism and anti-realism understood through truthmaking. This produces a suitable working characterisation of realism that will be used within the remainder of this project. In the second section, I trace the historical influences upon current deflationary approaches to metaphysics, most prominently those of Carnap, and Putnam. I argue that Quine’s supposed attack on Carnap’s anti-metaphysical thought fails, and show how current deflationary thought, most prominently exhibited by Hirsch, came to focus on linguistically derived concerns over the substantivity of metaphysics. In the third section, I outline a number of issues for the deflationist, and defend the coherency and legitimacy of the unrestricted existential quantifier. Focusing on the linguistic aspect of deflationism, I argue that the conception of language that the deflationist relies upon lacks suitable empirical and theoretical support within linguistics and other related domains. Furthermore, I suggest that linguistic analysis in fact supports the claim that the quantifier carries no inherent restrictions. This restores our ability to suitably posit the unrestricted existential quantifier, as a quantifier wherein the domain is only restricted by metaphysically substantive restrictions. Through this, I argue that metaphysics is a substantive domain of discourse. Lastly, I sketch a positive account of how, under an empirically and theoretically justified conception of language, metaphysics can be coherently held to be a realist, substantive enterprise, contra claims that hold that the nature of language inherently prevents metaphysics being considered to be a substantive domain of discourse. (shrink)

Like any other group of philosophers, scholastic thinkers from the Middle Ages disagreed about even the most fundamental of concepts. With their characteristic style of rigorous semantic and logical analysis, they produced a wide variety of diverse theories about a huge number of topics. The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy offers readers an outstanding survey of many of these diverse theories, on a wide array of subjects. Its 35 chapters, all written exclusively for this Companion by leading international scholars, are (...) organized into seven parts: I Language and Logic II Metaphysics III Cosmology and Physics IV Psychology V Cognition VI Ethics and Moral Philosophy VII Political Philosophy In addition to shedding new light on the most well-known philosophical debates and problems of the medieval era, the Companion brings to the fore topics that may not traditionally be associated with scholastic philosophy, but were in fact a veritable part of the tradition. These include chapters covering scholastic theories about propositions, atomism, consciousness, and democracy and representation. The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy is a helpful, comprehensive introduction to the field for undergraduate students and other newcomers as well as a unique and valuable resource for researchers in all areas of philosophy. (shrink)

The papers in this volume reflect much of the current unease of a world that perceives itself once more at the edge of chaos. The authors present different vistas of that experience and their inherent dialectic, expressed in numerous and ceaseless conflicts between ordering and disordering processes. They can be read as comments on the ongoing processes that lead toward greater complexity.

Costly signalling theory has become a common explanation for honest communication when interests conflict. In this paper, we provide an alternative explanation for partially honest communication that does not require significant signal costs. We show that this alternative is at least as plausible as traditional costly signalling, and we suggest a number of experiments that might be used to distinguish the two theories.

This paper addresses several questions related to the nature, production, and use of animal-human (a-h) chimeras. At the heart of the issue is whether certain types of a-h chimeras should be brought into existence, and, if they are, how we should treat such creatures. In our current research environment, we recognize a dichotomy between research involving nonhuman animal subjects and research involving human subjects, and the classification of a research protocol into one of these categories will trigger different ethical standards (...) as to the moral permissibility of the research in question. Are a-h chimeras entitled to the more restrictive and protective ethical standards applied to human research subjects? We elucidate an Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical framework in which to argue how such chimeras ought to be defined ontologically. We then examine when the creation of, and experimentation upon, certain types of a-h chimeras may be morally permissible. (shrink)