Few figures of the Middle Ages command the attention of so many modern disciplines as Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253). Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science are all areas which his life and thought continue to have significance and to inspire re-interpretation. Accompanied by a series of original commentaries, this new edition of Grosseteste's work, with English translation, draws together the perspectives of modern scientists and medieval specialists. Volume I of a six volume series, Knowing and Speaking presents two of the earliest (...) of Grosseteste's works, the treatises On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds. These are accompanied by a significant Middle English treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts whose anonymous fifteenth-century author translated and excerpted passages from Grosseteste's treatises in a re-imagining of their structure and function.0Each work is treated separately within the volume, which is constructed in three parts. On the Liberal Arts sets Grosseteste's thoughts on the arts subjects and emphasises moral concerns about the purpose of learning. On the Generation of Sounds builds on the theories and statements of On the Liberal Arts in connection to the production of sound, elaborating the earlier position, relating the generation of sounds to human vocal and speech production. (shrink)

kerekh 1. Mifṿan maʼamarim meratḳim meha-ḥayim ha-yom yomiyim ha-medabrim el ha-lev ṿe-lo notnim la-hizdamnut la-ḥalof mi-beli le-hashʼir ṭaʻam shel ʻod.

En este capítulo, defendemos la tesis de que ciertas injusticias epistémicas relacionadas al testimonio que afectan a las personas privadas de la libertad están en tensión con la deliberación democrática. En la primera sección, ofrecemos una breve discusión de la noción de la deliberación democrática. En la segunda sección, presentamos cuatro variedades de injusticia epistémica relacionadas al testimonio. En la tercera sección, consideramos algunos casos de estas variedades de injusticia epistémica en el sistema carcelario a modo ilustrativo y explicaremos cómo (...) esto crea una tensión con la deliberación democrática. (shrink)

Este ensayo plantea una cuestión filosófica perseguida como investigación histórica que desemboca en una explicación sociológica en torno a la medición de la ciencia. Medir, etimológicamente relacionado con una praecisio adquiere su sentido más profundo en una era postontológica para describir las implicaciones culturales de un mundo privado de metafísica. Basado en un relato sucinto del surgimiento del pensamiento bibliométrico enmarcado por el debate historiográfico de principios del siglo XX entre historiadores seriales e historiadores del evento, este ensayo une tanto (...) el significado postontológico como la evidencia histórica en un análisis sociológico de la ciencia y políticas tecnológicas en la Colombia del cambio de siglo que conlleva una transformaciónradical de la universidad como institución social, del estatus del conocimiento en la sociedad contemporánea y de la identidad de nosotros los académicos que habitamos ese espacio. (shrink)

Jack Miles, a former member of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), and Mark Taylor, a philosophical atheist, have both in different ways brought religious and philosophical concerns into the wider world. Approaching the end of their careers as well as the end of their lives, they were prompted by the advent of a deadly pandemic amid worldwide political crises to think through matters of "ultimate concern": what is the human self, embedded as it is in a cosmos of nonhuman (...) and artificial intelligences? Within this larger ecology, what is the meaning of individual death? And can philosophy help us intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually understand and accept our fundamental impermanence? The authors' sense of urgency about their impending mortality, the worth of a life, the grief of loss and what was left undone, the fragility of existence, the uncertainty of the ending permeate their conversations. Readers will be drawn into the inner lives, the hidden fears and emotions, the existential dread experienced by these two exceptional philosophers facing life's close in extraordinary times when both annihilation and revolutionary new beginnings seem equally possible. The authors glean insight from Kierkegaard and Weil, Dickinson and Baldwin, Nagarjuna and Mahavira, Bateson and El Greco, leavened with a little Gluck, Auden, Borges, Ella Fitzgerald, and Hamilton. Reminiscent of the intimate conversations in "My Dinner with Andre," they confront an unknown future. Combining the diary's closeness to the self with the reflection of the personal letter much as Karl Ove Knausgaard combines diary with novelistic realism, these two distinctive voices are uncompromising, immediate, and raw. At the book's end they decide that their dialogue "will continue to change us even after one of us, perhaps both of us, dies." Ghosts may not be holy spirits, but even an atheist can believe that they are real. (shrink)

The Monographs produced by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) apply rigorous procedures for the scientific review and evaluation of carcinogenic hazards by independent experts. The Preamble to the IARC Monographs, which outlines these procedures, was updated in 2019, following recommendations of a 2018 expert Advisory Group. This article presents the key features of the updated Preamble, a major milestone that will enable IARC to take advantage of recent scientific and procedural advances made during the 12 years since (...) the last Preamble amendments. The updated Preamble formalizes important developments already being pioneered in the Monographs Programme. These developments were taken forward in a clarified and strengthened process for identifying, reviewing, evaluating and integrating evidence to identify causes of human cancer. The advancements adopted include strengthening of systematic review methodologies; greater emphasis on mechanistic evidence, based on key characteristics of carcinogens; greater consideration of quality and informativeness in the critical evaluation of epidemiological studies, including their exposure assessment methods; improved harmonization of evaluation criteria for the different evidence streams; and a single-step process of integrating evidence on cancer in humans, cancer in experimental animals and mechanisms for reaching overall evaluations. In all, the updated Preamble underpins a stronger and more transparent method for the identification of carcinogenic hazards, the essential first step in cancer prevention. (shrink)

De los relatos que Jack London ha consagrado al boxeo, A Piece of Steak es sin dudas aquel que merece hoy nuestra mayor atención, e incluso un lugar en el panteón de los textos literarios sobre el Noble Arte, y junto a él otros tres títulos..

El artículo estudia los imaginarios construidos alrededor de la América salvaje, como contraparte del ideal civilizatorio de la cultura occidental. Propone reconstruir sus huellas a partir de la literatura, y especialmente, en la obra de Jack Kerouac. Sus novelas, inspiradas en el motivo del viaje y en la fuga hacia lo exótico, sirven para recomponer la representación de las relaciones entre la América del norte y Centroamérica, pero también con América del Sur, relaciones asociadas a la fábula de un (...) mundo de aventuras, inhóspito y desconocido. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Adolf Meyer: Psychiatric AnarchistS. Nassir Ghaemi (bio)KeywordsMeyer, biopsychosocial model, Jaspers, pluralism, philosophy, psychiatryThey had weekly lunches in 1920s New York City: In one door stepped a stooped philosopher, with a mustache and a twinkle, perhaps ruminating on some recent Marxist theory; in the other door came the elegant Swiss physician, goateed and erudite. Every week, for a time, John Dewey (leader of American pragmatism) and Adolf Meyer (dean of (...) mid-twentieth century American psychiatry and long-time chair of the Johns Hopkins psychiatry department) lunched together and, somewhere in those conversations—one might imagine—the field of philosophy and psychiatry was born (Meyer 1948, 152).Yet pragmatism—as a proper school of philosophy—does not capture Meyer’s psychiatry. Rather, the core of his thinking, in my view, is to be found in a vague term that deserves analysis: eclecticism.EclecticismIt has been said that eclecticism is a vice in theory but a virtue in practice (Stone 1981), which highlights why so many are attracted to it. Deep down, practitioners just want to be free: They believe that their freedom of choice will tailor treatments best to patients and thus result in best outcomes. As a conceptual theory for psychiatry, eclecticism is a model that views any theory or method as potentially correct, but no theory or method as definitively incorrect. There is no way to avoid an “anything goes” practice with eclecticism: It is—to use a political analogy—an anarchism of mind.William James once remarked that the basis for all philosophies lies in the personalities of philosophers. So it was with Meyer’s eclecticism: congenial personally, he seemed congenitally incapable of disagreeing with any person. Any idea, even the most unusual, would receive a respectful hearing from Meyer. (Double brings out new, excellent documentary evidence of this extreme indecision in the drafts of Meyer’s unsent letters to the behaviorist John Watson.) Although quaint and commendable pedagogically, this excessive open mindedness left American psychiatry—so dependent on Meyer—prey to hard-headed biological radicals and psychoanalytic dogmatists. This is where his eclecticism failed us.Enabling Biological ExtremismMeyer played a key role in legitimizing extreme biological approaches. In addition to his interest in insulin coma (which Double mentions), Meyer enabled the popularization of colectomy and frontal [End Page 341] lobotomy. Psychiatric colectomy, developed by Henry Cotton, was based on the focal toxin theory of mental illness—the idea that mental illness was caused by toxins released by bacteria in the body, the specific locations of which where were the colon and rotted teeth. In one hundred case reports, with mostly short-term follow-up, published in his prominent text, The Defective Delinquent and Insane (Cotton 1921), Cotton laid out his case, which Meyer legitimized by writing a generous foreword. Meyer’s authority was powerful enough to render Cotton’s limited evidence base much more credible than it might otherwise have been. In the 1920s and 1930s, tens of thousands colectomies and full mouth teeth extractions were conducted in patients with mental illness. (Meyer himself sometimes recommended it).1The other biological extremist story is more famous. In a 1936 conference, with Meyer in attendance, the neurologist Walter Freeman presented, for the first time, cases of refractory schizophrenia treated with a new method: frontal lobotomy. Psychoanalyst attendees protested that Freeman was proposing nothing more than mutilation of the brain; yet Meyer intervened in favor of Free-man (“I am not antagonistic to this work, but find it very interesting” [El-Hai 2005]). Unfortunately, Freeman, like Cotton, was a dogmatist: Over time, he performed frontal lobotomy more and more extensively, not just as a treatment of last resort in the most ill schizophrenics (as in the first cases presented to Meyer), but later as a treatment of first resort for the mildest mood disorders. (By 1950 Freeman had personally conducted 2400 transorbital lobotomies, an “office procedure” that allowed him to lobotomize a patient in 15 minutes [El-Hai 2005]).2Lest my critique of Meyer in that era be seen as a Whiggish interpretation of history (the claim that we are so much smarter than those shrinks of the past; in fact I think... (shrink)

En 1982, Jack Goody publicó _Cooking, Cuisine and Class. _ _A Study in Comparative Sociology. _En esta obra, Goody se interesó por las culturas culinarias de diferentes espacios geográficos del mundo, así como por la relación entre el desarrollo de una cocina refinada y el surgimiento de una sociedad compleja. Entre sus conclusiones, demostró que la manera de comer constituye un aspecto ensencial en cualquier sociedad. Más en concreto, señaló que en diferentes culturas europeas y asiáticas el surgimiento de (...) una cocina compleja se debía asociar al desarrollo de un “hombre jerárquico”. Bajo esta premisa, el presente artículo pretende analizar cómo cambiaron las culturas alimentarias de los pueblos germanos y de los romanos desde que entraron en contacto unos y otros, tomando como punto de partida y de referencia la _Germania _de Tácito, primer relato articulado sobre las tribus germanas, y, como punto de llegada, el final de la Antigüedad. (shrink)

We argue that ‘locality’, perhaps the most mundane term in ecology, holds a basic ambiguity: two concepts of space—nomothetic and idiographic—which are both necessary for a rigorous resurvey to “the same” locality in the field, are committed to different practices with no common measurement. A case study unfolds the failure of the standard assumption that an exogenous grid of longitude and latitude, as fine‐grained as one wishes, suffices for revisiting a species locality. We briefly suggest a scale‐dependent “resolution” for this (...) replication problem, since it has no general, rational solution. *Received January 2008; revised April 2009. †To contact the authors, please write to: Ayelet Shavit, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Tel‐Hai Academic College, Upper Galilee, 12210 Israel; e‐mail: ashavit@telhai.ac.il . James Griesemer, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616; e‐mail: jrgriesemer@ucdavis.edu . Biodiversity is largely a matter of real estate. And, as with other real estate, location is everything. (Kiester at el. 1996 ). (shrink)

In their simplest form, consensus gentium arguments for theism argue that theism is true on the basis that everyone believes that theism is true. While such arguments may have been popular in history, they have all but fallen from grace in the philosophy of religion. In this short paper, we reconsider the neglected topic of consensus gentium arguments, paying particular attention to the value of such arguments when deployed in the defence of theistic belief. We argue that while consensus gentium (...) arguments are unlikely to offer anything close to overwhelming support for theism, their probative value is nevertheless underappreciated, and that they have been unfairly maligned as a consequence. (shrink)

This paper argues for two propositions. (I) Large asymmetries of power, status and influence exist between economists. These asymmetries constitute a hierarchy that is steeper than it could be and steeper than hierarchies in other disciplines. (II) This situation has potentially significant epistemic consequences. I collect data on the social organization of economics to show (I). I then argue that the hierarchy in economics heightens conservative selection biases, restricts criticism between economists and disincentivizes the development of novel research. These factors (...) together constrain economics’ capacity to develop new beliefs and reduce the likelihood that its outputs will be true. (shrink)

This article queries the sense of `violence' in Derrida's early work, especially Of Grammatology. After a thorough reading of Derrida's analyses, and an inspection of his own moral and political rhetoric interspersed through his writing on writing, I offer a criticism of Derrida's treatment of violence. Derrida figures socio-political or `empirical' violence as conditioned by the more basic play of the trace; the `transcendental' violence of inscription and law. This move brings him within a hair's-breadth of affirming a violence more (...) mythic than transcendental; or mythic because transcendental and ostensibly `necessary'. (shrink)

Cases of past absence involve agents noticing in retrospect that an object or property was absent, such as when one notices later that a colleague was not at a talk. In Sanskrit philosophy, such cases are introduced by Kumārila as counterexamples to the claim that knowledge of absence is perceptual, but further take on a life of their own as a topic of inquiry among Kumārila’s commentators and their Nyāya interlocutors. In this essay, I examine the Nyāya philosopher Gaṅgeśa’s epistemology (...) of past absence, according to which agents learn that a recollectable object or property was absent by inferring its past absence from failing to recall that object or property. Gaṅgeśa’s account is best appreciated against the backdrop of earlier theories and their shortcomings, and I begin by presenting historical views leading up to his. I identify two groups of views about the epistemology of past absence: recollection views, according to which cases of past absence involve agents recalling negative information; and recollection failure views, according to which cases of past absence involve agents failing to recall positive information. I reconstruct two early recollection views: a Bhāṭṭa view belonging to Uṃveka, and a competing Nyāya view belonging to Jayanta and Bhāsarvajña. I then examine Śālikanātha and Sucarita’s critiques of recollection views, following which I reconstruct a Bhāṭṭa recollection failure view belonging to Pārthasārathi. I then examine Gaṅgeśa’s critiques of Pārthasārathi’s account and the recollection failure view he constructs out of its shortcomings. (shrink)

Perhaps the time has finally arrived for a fuller appreciation of Ernst Bloch, the eminent Marxist philosopher of the “not-yet.” At the very least, Wayne Hudson's book will make Bloch's ideas better-known in America, and known in a manner that Bloch himself would have approved. Hudson's incisive and cogent study gives readers an inkling of the diverse and provocative Blochian theories that are there for us to “inherit,” if we can learn to sift the gems of light from the poetical (...) and somewhat esoteric philosopher's pen. Given Bloch's voluminous output and the incredible demands he places on his readers, Hudson's work illuminates a way into and beyond Bloch's ideas. (shrink)

with the publication in this issue of Alice Ragni's "Bibliographia Claubergiana : Tracking a Crossroads in the History of Philosophy," we inaugurate a new series in the JHP, Research Tools for Historians of Philosophy. This series will publish occasional article-length studies that serve as resources for philosophers who do primary text scholarship: bibliographies, catalogs of manuscripts and correspondence, information about libraries and research collections, editions of previously unpublished sources, translations of sources previously unavailable in major European languages, and so on. (...) In the queue for volume 58 next year is an inventory of the correspondence of Elisabeth of... (shrink)

This paper will seek firstly to understand Deleuze’s main challenges to phenomenology, particularly as they are expressed in The Logic of Sense and What is Philosophy?, although reference will also be made to Pure Immanence and Difference and Repetition. We will then turn to a discussion of one of the few passages in which Deleuze directly engages with Merleau-Ponty, which occurs in the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? In this text, he and Guattari offer a critique of what (...) they call the “final avatar” of phenomenology – that is, the “fleshism” that Merleau-Ponty proposes in his unfinished but justly famous work, The Visible and the Invisible. It will be argued that both Deleuze’s basic criticisms of phenomenology, as well as he and Guattari’s problems with the concept of the flesh, do not adequately come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is not obviously partisan to what Deleuze finds problematic in this tradition, despite continuing to identify himself as a phenomenologist, and is working within a surprisingly similar framework in certain key respects. In fact, in the more positive part of this paper, we will compare Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, and Deleuze’s equally infamous univocity of being, as a means to consider the broader question of the ways in which the two philosophers consider ontological thought, its meaning and its conditions. It is our belief that through properly understanding both positions, a rapprochement, or at least the foundation for one, can be established between these two important thinkers. (shrink)

This article presents a new approach to understanding ritual: embodied world construction. Informed by phenomenology and a philosophy of embodiment, this approach argues that rituals can (re)shape the structure of an individual's perceptual world. Ritual participation transforms how the world appears for an individual through the inculcation of new perceptual habits, enabling the perception of objects and properties which could not previously be apprehended. This theory is then applied to two case studies from an existing ethnographic study of North American (...) evangelicalism, indicating how the theory of embodied world construction can shed new light on how individuals are shaped by ritual practice. (shrink)

The history of the Frankfurt School cannot be fully told without examining the relationships of Critical Theorists to their Jewish family backgrounds. Jewish matters had significant effects on key figures in the Frankfurt School, including Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse. At some points, their Jewish family backgrounds clarify their life paths; at others, these backgrounds help to explain why the leaders of the School stressed the significance of antisemitism. In the post-Second World War (...) era, the differing relationships of Critical Theorists to their Jewish origins illuminate their distinctive stances toward Israel. This book investigates how the Jewish backgrounds of major Critical Theorists, and the ways in which they related to their origins, impacted upon their work, the history of the Frankfurt School, and differences that emerged among them over time. (shrink)

Ascriptions of objectivity carry significant weight. But they can also cause confusion because wildly different ideas of what it means to be objective are common. Faced with this, some philosophers have argued that objectivity should be eliminated. I will argue, against one such position, that objectivity can be useful even though it is plural. I will then propose a contextualist approach for dealing with objectivity as a way of rescuing what is useful about objectivity while acknowledging its plurality.

In a series of joint papers, Teppo Felin and Nicolai J. Foss recently launched a microfoundations project in the field of strategic management. Felin and Foss observe that extant explanations in strategic management are predominantly collectivist or macro. Routines and organizational capabilities, which are supposed to be properties of firms, loom large in the field of strategic management. Routines figure as explanantia in explanations of firm behavior and firm performance, for example. Felin and Foss plead for a replacement of such (...) macro-explanations by micro-explanations. Such a replacement is needed, Felin and Foss argue, because macro-explanations are necessarily incomplete: they miss out on crucial links in the causal chain that connect macro phenomena with each other. I argue that this argument is flawed. It is based on a doubtful if not outright incorrect understanding and use of Coleman’s diagram. In a sense to be explained below, only if Coleman’s diagram is squared it can accurately account for the relations between individual action and interaction, routines and firm behavior and firm performance. Once Coleman’s diagram is squared, one can see why and how macro-explanations need not miss out on any link in the causal chains that connect macro phenomena. Micro-analyses are still needed, not to highlight and specify causal links that macro-explanations miss out on, but to check whether the many properties that are ascribed to routines in macro-explanations of firm behavior are warranted. (shrink)

Biology lacks a central organism concept that unambiguously marks the distinction between organism and non-organism because the most important questions about organisms do not depend on this concept. I argue that the two main ways to discover useful biological generalizations about multicellular organization--the study of homology within multicellular lineages and of convergent evolution across lineages in which multicellularity has been independently established--do not require what would have to be a stipulative sharpening of an organism concept.

Later Nyāya philosophers maintain that absences are real particulars, irreducible to any positives, that we perceive. The fourteenth-century Nyāya philosopher Gaṅgeśa argues for a condition on absence perception according to which we always perceive an absence as an absence of its counterpositive, or its corresponding absent object or property. Call this condition the ‘counterpositive condition’. Gaṅgeśa shows that the counterpositive condition is both supported by a plausible thesis about the epistemology of relational properties and motivates the defence of absence as (...) irreducible. But against Gaṅgeśa, the sixteenth-century Nyāya philosopher Raghunātha and his seventeenth-century commentators Bhavānanda, Jagadīśa, and Gadādhara identify cases in which the counterpositive condition fails. In this article, I examine the Nyāya-internal debate over this condition. I conclude that Raghunātha makes a compelling case that the counterpositive condition fails. (shrink)

Despite seemingly ambiguous writings, Beard is a relativist. Beard states that if historical conceptions are relative, then relativity is relative; this is not a rejection of relativism. As times change, doctrines become outmoded. Beard's times were right for relativism, so he was a relativist, despite his knowledge of its eventual demise. Relativism cannot provide the historian with a frame of reference to interpret the "totality of history." He must choose a comprehensive and informed frame. Beard seems to indicate that historians (...) can forecast the future; yet, this contradicts his rejection of absolute historical truths. He is not discussing forecasting future events, but forecasting future frames of reference. (shrink)