This article explores the use of walking interviews as a research method. In spite of a wave of interest in methods which take interviewing out of the "safe," stationary environment, there has been limited work critically examining the techniques for undertaking such work. Curiously for a method which takes an explicitly spatial approach, few projects have attempted to rigorously connect what participants say with where they say it. The article reviews three case studies where the authors have used different techniques, (...) including GPS, for locating the interview in space. The article concludes by arguing that researchers considering using walking interviews need to think carefully about what kinds of data they wish to generate when deciding which approach to adopt. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 69~ created mind will reflect the divine essence in its own unique way (e.g., 77, 83) helps to solve some of the problems which Parkinson finds in the pbenomenalism that he attributes to Leibniz (see xxxi and xxxiv) and also partly motivates the original formulation of Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernibles (50 and his doctrine of marks and traces (51). But the point of The (...) Yale Leibniz surely has less to do with interpretation and more to do with text. Parkinson's translations are generally good. There are only a few cases where the English obscures both Leibniz's Latin and his argument (e.g., a paragraph on p. i 14 contains instances of the Latinfigura which are translated differently). That The Yale Leibniz has the excellent policy of including the original language on facing pages renders irrelevant the fact that one is bound to disagree with this qualified translator on some minor points. Parkinson's edition might have been a bit more scholar-friendly than it is: while his text contains both the page and essay numbers of the Academy edition, his table of contents contains neither; this means that one can neither make a quick comparison between the contents of the two volumes nor easily move back and forth between them. Nor is one privy, in Parkinson's text, to the many and important corrections which Leibniz made to his essays and which are carefully noted in the Academy volume. This is a serious flaw: these papers afford an extraordinary ringside seat on the development of beibniz's philosophy; it is a pity that many of the details of this metaphysical sparring remain out of sight. Despite these minor disappointments, Parkinson's edition of De Summa Rerum remains a genuinely helpful research tool. By taking on these enormously difficult and profoundly important texts and by placing them so securely in the context of Leibniz's later thought, he has done us a very great favor. He has also whetted our appetite for more of The Yale Leibniz. CHRISTIA MERCER Columbia University Claudio Cesa and Norbert Hinske, eds. Kant und seinJahrhundert: Gedenkschriftfiir Giorgio ToneUi. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993. Pp. xiv + ~lZ. NP. Far-reaching both in historical and philosophical scope as well as in the diversity of scholars represented, this volume is a tribute to an important contemporary historian of philosophy, Giorgio Tonelli (1928-1978). A glance through the seventeen-page chronological bibliography confirms the breadth of Tonelli's historical interests, ranging over work on Albrecht von Hailer, Heine, and Maupertuis as well as his wellknown works on Kant and earlier figures of the Enlightenment. The editors point out in their brief introduction that Tonelli's work was important as an antidote to an earlier tendency in Kant scholarship to read Kant through the lenses of German idealism, rather than focusing on the Kantian corpus in the context of earlier traditions and philosophical achievements. "Sein Jahrhundert" includes essays that encompass the whole of the eighteenth century, as well as important seventeenth-century influences. The volume is quite 692 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER ~995 appropriately international and multilinguai, reflecting Tonelli's own background and widespread influence. The essays are for the most part clearly written, well-informed and carefully argued interpretations of important Enlightenment figures that aim to refocus our attention on neglected or misinterpreted aspects of these philosophers' views. What follows will give interested readers a brief overview of the contents. In "Corsi, Ricorsi and the Way Out of Modern Barbarism in Vico's New Science," Craig Walton offers an interesting 'third way' of reading Vico's notions of"course" and "recourse" that parallels Tonelli's approach to Kant. Walton argues against anachronistic idealist interpretations of corsi/ricorsi as cyclic or recurrence concepts, and also against ahistorical readings of these notions as aesthetic or ironic. Rather, for Vico, the "storia ideale eterna'" is to be understood as purposeful but open-ended, and this can only be fully appreciated if the notion of ricorso is interpreted as the possibility of human response to the course of human history. Ezequiel de Olaso's "Spinoza et l'Espagne ~clair6e... (shrink)

After the public announcement of the invention of the camera in 1839, photography spread swiftly round the world, and by the early 1850s the medium had become well-established in the Indian subcontinent. In a land characterised by the variety and splendour of its architecture and landscapes, and the diversity of its peoples and customs, India offered the photographic artist an unsurpassed range of subject matter. In addition to the artistic achievements of international masters of photography like Dr John Murray and (...) Samuel Bourne, official encouragement of the medium as a documentary tool came from the East India Company. By the mid-1850s a remarkable visual 'archive' had been created, which charted the architectural heritage and ethnic composition of the subcontinent. This book, which accompanied a major exhibition of 19th century images from India, traces the development of photography from 1850 to 1900, when the ascendency of the large format camera and print began to crumble in the face of the simplified amateur camera. Drawn from the collections of the British Library, and Howard and Jane Ricketts, the book is illustrated with some of the finest photographs produced in India during the latter half of the nineteenth century, many never previously reproduced. (shrink)

This collection of essays by one of the country's leading property theorists revitalizes the liberal personality theory of property. Departing from traditional libertarian and economic theories of property, Margaret Jane Radin argues that the law should take into account nonmonetary personal value attached to property—and that some things, such as bodily integrity, are so personal they should not be considered property at all. Gathered here are pieces ranging from Radin's classic early essay on property and personhood to her recent (...) works on governmental "taking" of private property. Margaret Jane Radin is professor of law at Stanford University. She is the author of over twenty-five articles on legal and political theory. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Within eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition we can distinguish at least three main theoretical positions: (i) Buffon’s mechanism, (ii) Reimarus’ theory of instincts, and (iii) the sensationalism of Condillac and Leroy. In this paper, I adopt a philosophical perspective on this debate and argue that in order to fully understand the justification Buffon, Reimarus, Condillac, and Leroy gave for their respective theories, we must pay special attention to the theoretical virtues these naturalists alluded to while justifying their position. These theoretical (...) virtues have received little to no attention in the literature on eighteenth-century animal cognition, but figure prominently in the justification of the mechanist, instinctive, and sensationalist theories of animal behavior. Through my philosophical study of the role of theoretical virtues in eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition, we obtain a deeper understanding of how theoretical virtues were conceptualized in eighteenth-century science and how they influenced the justification of theories of animal cognition. (shrink)

Biology in the Critical Philosophy and the Opus postumum Hein van den Berg. Parts of Chap. 2 have been previously published in Hein van den Berg (2011), “ Kant's Conception of Proper Science.” Synthese 183 (1): 7–26. Parts of Chap.

In this paper I revisit Gilbert Harman's arguments for a "clutter avoidance" norm. The norm -- which says that we ought to avoid cluttering our minds with trivialities -- is widely endorsed. I argue that it has some fairly dramatic consequences for normative epistemology.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about (...) the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world. (shrink)

This article builds on feminist scholarship on new biologies and the body to describe the temporal politics of epigenetic research related to the human placenta. Drawing on interviews with scientists and observations at conferences and in laboratories, we argue that epigenetic research simultaneously positions placenta tissue as a way back into maternal and fetal bodies following birth, as a lens onto children’s future well-being, and as a bankable resource for ongoing research. Our findings reflect how developmental models of health have (...) helped recast the placenta as an agential organ that is uniquely responsive to environments during pregnancy and capable of embodying biological evidence about the effects of in utero experiences after birth. We develop the concept of ‘recursive embodiment’ to describe how placenta epigenetics is reimagining relationships between bodies and environments across developmental, epigenetic, and generational time, and the impacts this has for experiences of pregnancy and responsibilities related to children’s health. (shrink)

Ernst Mayr argued that the emergence of biology as a special science in the early nineteenth century was possible due to the demise of the mathematical model of science and its insistence on demonstrative knowledge. More recently, John Zammito has claimed that the rise of biology as a special science was due to a distinctive experimental, anti-metaphysical, anti-mathematical, and anti-rationalist strand of thought coming from outside of Germany. In this paper we argue that this narrative neglects the important role played (...) by the mathematical and axiomatic model of science in the emergence of biology as a special science. We show that several major actors involved in the emergence of biology as a science in Germany were working with an axiomatic conception of science that goes back at least to Aristotle and was popular in mid-eighteenth-century German academic circles due to its endorsement by Christian Wolff. More specifically, we show that at least two major contributors to the emergence of biology in Germany—Caspar Friedrich Wolff and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus—sought to provide a conception of the new science of life that satisfies the criteria of a traditional axiomatic ideal of science. Both C.F. Wolff and Treviranus took over strong commitments to the axiomatic model of science from major philosophers of their time, Christian Wolff and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, respectively. The ideal of biology as an axiomatic science with specific biological fundamental concepts and principles thus played a role in the emergence of biology as a special science. (shrink)

The extent to which EU countries take on their ‘fair share’ of asylum seekers is a contentious issue. Luc Bovens and Jane von Rabenau write on concern within Germany that the country is taking on a higher burden than other EU states. They argue that when compared on a per capita basis with similar EU countries, Germany performs relatively poorly in terms of acceptances for new refugees. Where Germany performs better is with respect to the size of the existing (...) refugee population within the country, however this may be a reflection of the difficulty refugees experience in gaining German citizenship. (shrink)

"Multiverse" cosmologies imagine our universe as just one of a vast number of others. While this idea has captivated philosophy, religion, and literature for millennia, it is now being considered as a scientific hypothesis--with different models emerging from cosmology, quantum mechanics, and string theory. Beginning with ancient Atomist and Stoic philosophies, Mary-Jane Rubenstein links contemporary models of the multiverse to their forerunners and explores the reasons for their recent appearance. One concerns the so-called fine-tuning of the universe: nature's constants (...) are so delicately calibrated that it seems they have been set just right to allow life to emerge. For some thinkers, these "fine-tunings" are evidence of the existence of God; for others, however, and for most physicists, "God" is an insufficient scientific explanation. Hence the allure of the multiverse: if all possible worlds exist somewhere, then like monkeys hammering out Shakespeare, one universe is bound to be suitable for life. Of course, this hypothesis replaces God with an equally baffling article of faith: the existence of universes beyond, before, or after our own, eternally generated yet forever inaccessible to observation or experiment. In their very efforts to sidestep metaphysics, theoretical physicists propose multiverse scenarios that collide with it and even produce counter-theological narratives. Far from invalidating multiverse hypotheses, Rubenstein argues, this interdisciplinary collision actually secures their scientific viability. We may therefore be witnessing a radical reconfiguration of physics, philosophy, and religion in the modern turn to the multiverse. (shrink)

Drawing on recent advances in analytic epistemology, feminist scholarship, and philosophy of science, Jane Duran's Toward a Feminist Epistemology is the first book that spells out in the detail required by a supportable epistemology what a feminist theory of knowledge would entail.

In this book Jane Kneller focuses on the role of imagination as a creative power in Kant's aesthetics and in his overall philosophical enterprise. She analyzes Kant's account of imaginative freedom and the relation between imaginative free play and human social and moral development, showing various ways in which his aesthetics of disinterested reflection produce moral interests. She situates these aspects of his aesthetic theory within the context of German aesthetics of the eighteenth century, arguing that Kant's contribution is (...) a bridge between early theories of aesthetic moral education and the early Romanticism of the last decade of that century. In so doing, her book brings the two most important German philosophers of Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kant and Novalis, into dialogue. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in both Kant studies and German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (shrink)

Kant’s teleology as presented in the Critique of Judgment is commonly interpreted in relation to the late eighteenth-century biological research of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In the present paper, I show that this interpretative perspective is incomplete. Understanding Kant’s views on teleology and biology requires a consideration of the teleological and biological views of Christian Wolff and his rationalist successors. By reconstructing the Wolffian roots of Kant’s teleology, I identify several little known sources of Kant’s views on biology. I argue that (...) one of Kant’s main contributions to eighteenth-century debates on biology consisted in demarcating biology from metaphysics. Kant rejected Wolffian views on the hierarchy of sciences, according to which propositions specifying the functions of organisms are derived from theological truths. In addition, Kant argued that organic self-organization necessitates a teleological description in order to show that self-organization does not support materialism. By demarcating biology and metaphysics, Kant made a small yet important contribution to establishing biology as a science. (shrink)

Kant is well known for his restrictive conception of proper science. In the present paper I will try to explain why Kant adopted this conception. I will identify three core conditions which Kant thinks a proper science must satisfy: systematicity, objective grounding, and apodictic certainty. These conditions conform to conditions codified in the Classical Model of Science. Kant’s infamous claim that any proper natural science must be mathematical should be understood on the basis of these conditions. In order to substantiate (...) this reading, I will show that only in this way it can be explained why Kant thought (1) that mathematics has a particular foundational function with respect to the natural sciences and (2) as such secures their scientific status. (shrink)

This paper analyzes Immanuel Kant’s views on mechanical explanation on the basis of Christian Wolff’s idea of scientific demonstration. Kant takes mechanical explanations to explain properties of wholes in terms of their parts. I reconstruct the nature of such explanations by showing how part-whole conceptualizations in Wolff’s logic and metaphysics shape the ideal of a proper and explanatory scientific demonstration. This logico-philosophical background elucidates why Kant construes mechanical explanations as ideal explanations of nature.

In this new interpretation of the political writings of Hannah Arendt, Lisa Jane Disch focuses on an issue that remains central to today's debates in political philosophy and feminist theory: the relationship of experience to critical understanding. Discussing a range of Arendt's work including unpublished writings, Disch explores the function of storytelling as a form of critical theory beyond the limits of philosophy.

Diagrams make it possible to present scientific facts in more abstract and generalized form. While some detail is lost, simplified and accessible knowledge is gained. E. B. Wilson's work in cytology provides a case study of changing uses of diagrams and accompanying abstraction. In his early work, Wilson presented his data in photographs, which he saw as coming closest to “fact.” As he gained confidence in his interpretations, and as he sought to provide a generalized textbook account of cell development, (...) he relied on increasingly abstract diagrams. In addition, he came to see that highly abstract and even schematic drawings could provide more than pictures directly from life. (shrink)

Im Berliner Wissenschaftsjahr 2010 wird die Charité, das größte Universitätsklinikum Europas, ihr 300-jähriges Jubiläum feiern. Zu diesem Anlass entstand der vorliegende Band,,Charité 300 - Geschichte, Gegenwart, Horizonte". Es zeigt, wie aus dem 1710 als Pesthaus vor den Toren Berlins gegründeten Krankenhaus heute eines der international führenden Zentren medizinischer Forschung und Lehre wurde. Schwerpunkt ist dabei die rasante Entwicklung der Charité in den Jahren seit der Wende und die Zukunftsperspektiven dieses traditionsreichen Wissenschaftsstandorts von Weltrang. Jubiläumspublikation zur 300-Jahr-Feier.

Early number skills represent critical milestones in children's cognitive development and are shaped over years of interacting with quantities and numerals in various contexts. Several connectionist computational models have attempted to emulate how certain number concepts may be learned, represented, and processed in the brain. However, these models mainly used highly simplified inputs and focused on limited tasks. We expand on previous work in two directions: First, we train a model end-to-end on video demonstrations in a synthetic environment with multimodal (...) visual and language inputs. Second, we use a more holistic dataset of 35 tasks, covering enumeration, set comparisons, symbolic digits, and seriation. The order in which the model acquires tasks reflects input length and variability, and the resulting trajectories mostly fit with findings from educational psychology. The trained model also displays symbolic and non-symbolic size and distance effects. Using techniques from interpretability research, we investigate how our attention-based model integrates cross-modal representations and binds them into context-specific associative networks to solve different tasks. We compare models trained with and without symbolic inputs and find that the purely non-symbolic model employs more processing-intensive strategies to determine set size. (shrink)

Historians have emphasized the appearance of a productive research program in genetics after 1910, and philosophers and biologists have considered endorsement of genetics as a progressive move, indeed as a starting point for modern experimental biology. These efforts focus on what biology had changed to. This paper examines the condition from which biology moved, stressing the way in which Americans held heredity and development as a natural, intimately intertwined couple. Heredity accounts for likenesses, development for variation, and the two act (...) together throughout an individual's life. This discussion establishes the antecedent conditions necessary to explain the split of genetics and embryology and addresses the reasons for the split. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of Robert Stecker’s account of aesthetic experience and its relation to aesthetic and artistic values. The analysis will demonstrate that Stecker’s formulation of aesthetic experience as it stands is incompatible with his arguments for nonaesthetic artistic values. Rather than multiplying the values associated with aesthetic experience, a deeper understanding of that experience will best serve to clarify problems at the core of the discipline.

In a series of recent papers, Randall and Foulis have developed a generalized theory of probability (operational statistics) which is based on the notion of a physical operation. They have shown that the quantum logic description of quantum mechanics can be naturally imbedded into this generalized theory of probability. In this paper we shall investigate the role of entropy (in the sense of Shannon's theory of information) in operational statistics. We shall find that there are several related entropy concepts in (...) operational statistics. We shall examine the relationships between these different entropy concepts and examine their implications for the foundations of quantum theory. We shall also examine the extension of the Jaynes inference scheme to the operational statistics formalism, and apply the latter to the case of quantum statistical mechanics. (shrink)

Acetyltransferase enzymes expressed in hepatic and extrahepatic tissues are products of an acetyltransferase gene locus. Acetylation capacity is regulated by simple autosomal Mendelian inheritance of two codominant alleles at this locus. Human slow acetylators are predisposed to bladder cancer from arylamine chemicals. The role of the bladder in arylamine metabolism and of bladder acetyltransferases in the etiology of bladder cancer is not fully understood, but the acetylator genotype‐dependent expression of arylamine N‐acetyltransferase and N‐hydroxyarylamine O‐acetyltransferase in bladder cytosol may contribute towards (...) the genetic predisposition of human slow acetylators to arylamine‐induced bladder cancer. (shrink)

In a series of recent papers, Randall and Foulis report the development of a generalized theory of probability which is based on the concept of a physical operation. A central concept in this theory is that of a generalized sample space. In this paper, we introduce a generalized sample space, which for historial reasons we shall call the Poincaré sphere sample space. We investigate the relationship between this nonclassical sample space and its classical analogs, and find that the key to (...) this relationship is found in the use of idealized (Gedanken) experiments. The Poincaré sphere sample space is seen to describe a “photon” description of polarization, and the classical analogs represent different classical descriptions. We also discuss superposition and entropy for the Poincaré sphere sample space and its classical analogs, and we comment on the application of this generalized theory of probability to problems in the foundations of quantum theory. (shrink)

Are psychiatric disorders natural kinds? This question has received a lot of attention within present-day philosophy of psychiatry, where many authors debate the ontology and nature of mental disorders. Similarly, historians of psychiatry, dating back to Foucault, have debated whether psychiatric researchers conceived of mental disorders as natural kinds or not. However, historians of psychiatry have paid little to no attention to the influence of (a) theories within logic, and (b) theories within metaphysics on psychiatric accounts of proper method, and (...) on accounts of the nature and classification of mental disorders. Historically, however, logic and metaphysics have extensively shaped methods and interpretations of classifications in the natural sciences. This paper corrects this lacuna in the history of psychiatry, and demonstrates that theories within logic and metaphysics, articulated by Christian Wolff (1679-1754), have significantly shaped the conception of medical method and (psychiatric) nosology of the influential nosologist Boissier De Sauvages (1706-1767). After treating Sauvages, I discuss the method of the influential nosologist William Cullen (1710-1790), and demonstrate the continuity between the classificatory methods of Sauvages and Cullen. I show that both Sauvages and Cullen were essentialists concerning medical diseases in general and psychiatric disorders in particular, contributing to the history of conceptions of the ontology and nature of mental disorders. (shrink)