Biological science does not try to distinguish between health and disease. Biology is concerned with the interaction between living organisms and their environment. What we call health or disease is quite irrelevant.These reactions between the individual and his environment are complex. The individual and his surroundings form an integrated system which we can arbitrarily divide into two parts. There is an “external” component, by which we mean such factors as light, heat, percentage of oxygen in the air, quantity of minerals (...) or vitamins in food, micro-organisms in food or air, and so on. These can induce changes in what we arbitrarily call the “internal” component. Here we include such crude factors as anatomical structures, or finer details like composition of intercellular fluid, or secretions of glands, or changes of electrical potential in nerve or muscle. (shrink)

It is an interesting paradox that on the one hand intemperate enthusiasm greets new medical discoveries. On the other hand, the lack of science in medicine is paraded from time to time, usually as a matter of apologetics, as, when a physician wishes to excuse an error, a lawyer to discredit a physician, or a jury to render a verdict contrary to medical evidence. Philosophers who insist on the mathematical or quantitative aspects in any definition of science ascribe very little (...) that is truly scientific to biology in general or to its daughter medicine in particular. Jerome Frank comments approvingly that “many scientific-minded physicians today deny that medicine is, or is likely ever to be, a science.” Articulate physicians themselves may be highly critical. Dr. Ian Stevenson, for example, declares, “Medicine will not achieve the status of a science until the basic laws of health and disease have been disclosed. But the search for these laws has hardly begun.” Stevenson goes on to point out that instead of seeking basic laws, medicine is concentrating on facts, from which no laws emerge. (shrink)

Jean-Luc MARION, De surcroît. Études sur les phénomènes saturés ; Magda KING, A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time ; Andreas MICHEL, Die französische Heidegger-Rezeption und ihre sprachlichen Konsequenzen ; Alfred DENKER, Historical Dictionary of Heidegger’s Philosophy ; John B. BROUGH & Lester EMBREE, The Many Faces of Time ; Daniel O. DAHLSTROM, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth ; Cristina LAFONT, Heidegger, Language, And World-Disclosure ; Eliane ESCOUBAS & Bernhard WALDENFELS, Phénoménologie française et phénoménologie allemande ; Eckard WOLZ-GOTTWALD, Transformation (...) der Phänomenologie. Zur Mystik bei Husserl und Heidegger ; Martin HEIDEGGER, Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity ; Arkadiusz CHRUDZIMSKI, Die Erkenntnistheorie von Roman Ingarden ; Jocelyn BENOIST, L’apriori conceptuel. Bolzano, Husserl, Schlick ; Dennis King KEENAN, Death and Responsibility. The “Work” of Levinas ; Dan ZAHAVI, Self-awareness, Temporality, and Alterity. Central Topics in Phenomenology ; Sonya SIKKA, Forms of Transcendence. Heidegger and Medieval Mystical Theology ; Alfred DENKER, Omdat filosoferen leven is. Een archeologie van Martin Heideggers Sein und Zeit; Seán HAND, The Levinas Reader ; ; Ion MINCÃ, Informatica şi teoria cunoaşterii. O paradigmã fenomenologicã a domeniului hardware ; John van BUREN, The Young Heidegger. Rumor of the Hidden King. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews The Growth of Medical Thought. By Lester S. King. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Pp. ix + 254. $5.50.) The author of this book is "a pathologist with a background in history and philosophy," to quote from the jacket. This combination of interests is reflected in the Preface itself, where it is stated, "The history of medicine is part of the history of ideas." (...) However, the text itself, unfortunately, is too episodic in treatment and too homiletic in tone to do justice to the explicit goal the author sets for himself at the very outset, which is "to indicate the growth of medical science and the patterns of medical doctrine," by a consideration of a few key figures in the history of Western medicine who represent certain distinct trends in medical theory. In his previous book, The Medical World of the 18th Century (1958), the author likened the historian to the photographer, but he forgot to bring out that a good historian needs (to exploit his own analogy) a movie camera in order to exhibit adequately the growth of things. An ordinary camera will not do for historiography. The volume opens with ancient Greek medicine and ends with the pioneers in molecular pathology. In the present reviewer's opinion, the most effective chapters of the book are the ones dealing with two of the most controversial figures in the whole history of medicine, namely, Galen and Paracelsus. For there more than anywhere else in the book, we learn the sobering lesson that just because, say, Galen's "doctrine of faculties" in Roman medicine is "wrong" (that is, false in fact), from the standpoint of modern science, is no reason for calling it "foolish" (that is, false in theory) --Moli~re to the contrary notwithstanding (p. 77). While Galen's Aristotelian "modes of thought may seem somewhat strange to us," Dr. King insists, "we must preserve a judicious historical attitude" (p. 49) towards them just the same, if our objective is to understand their raison d'etre in the first place. He uses the same criterion with respect to Paracelsus, even though he spoils his case a bit by contradicting himself concerning that bombastic figure of Renaissance medicine, describing him on one page as "essentially a poet and not a scientist or philosopher" (p. 125), and then declaring on another that he "was at heart a philosopher" (p. 137). Now, no matter whether we agree with the author's interpretation of Paracelsus as a "Neo-Platonist" in medicine, he deserves credit for discussing [2s7] 238 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY that enigmatic Swiss iatrochemist sympathetically. In any event, Dr. King's sympathetic approach to Paracelsus manages to throw considerable light on the Paracelsian advice to all future physicians: Don't read books! Read the stars, but read them "in Neo-Platonic fashion" (p. 114)! While the author is "judicious" about Galen and Paracelsus in particular, he is far from being so when it comes to Friedrich Hoffmann, a medical materialist and "systematist" from Halle in the eighteenth century. Paradoxically enough, Dr. King has a marked antipathy for the doctor of "sympathy " himself (p. 173). Incidentally, the only other physician in the book who is not liked--apparently for his being polemical (p. 215)--is a famous fellow-pathologist of the last century, Rudolf Virchow. Still, it is only fair to add that the author acknowledges fully Virchow's important contributions to the field of cellular pathology. Finally, Dr. King not only has his likes and dislikes as to the medical men he actually selects from modern medicine to represent changes in theory of disease, but he seems also to have a definite bias in another and more serious sense. With the exception of the Epilogue and Chapter IV, which includes Vesalius and Harvey as well as Hoffmann, all the episodes of modern medicine deemed worthy of study derive from the Germanic world. Curiously enough, although there is no discussion of the germ theory of disease as such in the book, there is mention of Koch, but not of Pasteur. And French physiologist Claude Bernard, the great medical philosopher who tried to do in the nineteenth century for scientific medicine what... (shrink)

Political Theologies of Justice: Meritocratic Values from a Global Perspective Michael Puett In fourth century BCE China, a religious revolutionary named Mozi emerged. In opposition to much of the religious practices and assumptions of the time, Mozi announced that Heaven, the highest god, was a just and non-capricious deity who had created the world for humanity. As a just deity, Heaven rewarded good humans and punished bad ones. And Heaven charged humans with creating a political order that did the same: (...) Moreover, there are ways that I (Mozi) know Heaven loves the people deeply. It shaped and made the sun, moon, stars, and constellations so as to illuminate and guide [the people]. It formed and made the four seasons, spring, autumn, winter, and summer, so as to weave them into order. It sent down thunder, snow, frost, rain, and dew so as to make the five grains, hemp, and silk grow and prosper, and sent the people to obtain materials and benefit from them. It arranged and made mountains, streams, gorges, and valleys, and distributed and bestowed the hundred affairs so as to oversee and supervise the goodness and badness of the people. It made kings, dukes, and lords and charged them with, first, rewarding the worthy and punishing the wicked, and, second, plundering the metals, wood, birds, and beasts and working the five grains, hemp, and silk so as to make the materials for people's clothing and food. (shrink)

A school of thought traceable to the political writings of Bodin and Hobbes believes that "order" is the cardinal principle which takes precedence over "justice" - which is reduced to conformity. The main concern of this book is to analyse this tradition through study of its progenitors.

The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist "Adam," which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam's conclusions through manual experiments. To describe Adam's research, we have developed an ontology and logical language. The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different (...) research units in a nested treelike structure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logical description. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Surfing the Sublime:Tim Winton's Breath and Eco-HeroismSteve Mentz (bio)The sublime represents an ecological problem. Breathing poses an entangled solution. Surfing, in which a human body stands upright inside a rotating barrel of unbreathable whitewater, provides a way to imagine the connection between these two things.The sublime has represented an elevated category of literary language since the classical writer Longinus's On the Sublime (~1st century CE). From the start, the (...) sublime captures grandeur and also an excess that challenges human thinking. Many of the essential Romantic and Post-Romantic tropes of the sublime that would later appear in dense philosophical accounts, from Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida, show themselves embryonically in Longinus's brief classical description.1 The key force of sublime style, Longinus emphasizes, is irrationality: "A lofty passage does not convince the reason of the reader, but takes him out of himself. That which is admirable ever confounds our judgment" (1.4). The conceptual violence of the sublime strains our imaginations almost to breaking, and Longinus's intuition that sublimity always sits on the far side of human comprehension becomes a central feature of this idea in literary history. Although we know very little about Longinus the author–neither his name nor the century in which he lived are certain–he fingers the particular pleasurable pain and rupture of coherence that would become the signature of the sublime in modern poetics. The problem with the sublime perspective is that it craves rupture, centers the human imagination, and refuses to make space for nonhuman collaborators. The opposite of the sublime's imaginative conquest of the world may be simple breathing, the taking of alien air into one's lungs and body, and the environmental dependence each breath marks.The philosopher Graham Harman has recently traced the sublime lineage of Burke and Kant to Lyotard, Levinas, Derrida, and other twentieth-century thinkers, in order to reject the concept as fundamentally [End Page 79] anthropocentric. Harman instead advocates for a philosophy that does not require the shaping structures of human perspective. He argues for an ecological art that engages with the world beyond the merely human perspective, "art that explores unforeseen interactions between the different parts of the external world." What Harman terms "unsublime ecology" might reasonably be described as an inhuman ecological perspective. The philosopher reminds us that the sublime has always been, both from Longinus and in Harman's reading explicitly from Kant and Burke to Lyotard and Derrida, a ju-jitsu trick in which the imagination of a (white male) subject reintegrates what it cannot fully comprehend. The list of poetic works whose language most commonly appears as exemplary of the sublime–Milton's Paradise Lost, Shelley's "Mont Blanc," Shakespeare's King Lear, Wordsworth's The Prelude–suggest that the mode appeals to poetic egoists of a particularly masculinine type.2The heroic sublime of these poets and theorists falters on the physical fact of breathing. Each day of their lives, more than 20,000 times per day, every one of these men, even stern, blind Milton dictating his prophetic poem to dutiful daughters after his revolution had failed, drew nonhuman air into and out of his lungs, exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide. Each man's thinking continued, while their minds dwelled little on how their body's dependence on alien matter to suspire might impinge upon the heroic sense of self. Even prophets and geniuses, even Wordsworth and Derrida, depend on unconscious patterns. Even the greatest of poets breathes.That's where surfing comes in, in particular Tim Winton's 2008 surf novel Breath, which relates a minor-key epic of surfing against breathing. The novel's core figures devote themselves to intentional oxygen deprivation: our teenage narrator-hero Pikelet; his rebellious buddy Loonie; Sando, the Australian surf-seer they follow; and Sando's American one-time freestyle skier wife, Eva (note the unsubtle symbolism of her name), whose injured knee keeps her off the snow but does not prevent her from chasing sublimity through self-suffocating games that involve sex, a plastic bag, and eventually Pikelet. To court mortality by cutting... (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to raise a question about the relationship between theories of responsibility, on the one hand, and a commitment to conscious attitudes, on the other. Our question has rarely been raised previously. Among those who believe in the reality of human freedom, compatibilists have traditionally devoted their energies to providing an account that can avoid any commitment to the falsity of determinism while successfully accommodating a range of intuitive examples. Libertarians, in contrast, have aimed to (...) show that either physical indeterminacy or a certain kind of agent causation can find a place in the world for what they take to be genuine freedom. Few have considered whether moral responsibility requires a commitment to conscious attitudes.2 Our question derives from a confluence of two sources. First, there is reason to think that conscious attitudes matter to theories of responsibility, either directly, as a result of the latter’s commitments, or indirectly, by virtue of the assumptions that they make about certain intuitive examples. Second, there is accumulating evidence suggesting that there aren’t any conscious mental states possessing the sorts of causal roles required of propositional attitudes. Since theorists of responsibility should in general be concerned to make their views compatible with plausible claims about the natural world, the implications of this data should be carefully considered. Our aim is therefore to motivate and begin exploring answers to the following conditional question: If it should turn out that there are no conscious attitudes, then what would be the implications of this fact (if any) for theories of responsibility? We propose that theorists who aren’t skeptics about moral responsibility should examine their accounts, asking whether their theories (or the examples that motivate them) could survive the discovery that there are no conscious judgments, decisions, or evaluations. Since we take it that moral theorizing in general should operate with the weakest possible empirical assumptions about the natural world, such theorists should consider whether their accounts could be motivated in such a way as to be free of any commitment to the existence of conscious attitudes.. (shrink)

Control-based accounts of moral responsibility face a familiar problem. There are some actions which look like obvious cases of responsibility but which appear equally obviously to lack the requisite control. Drunk-driving cases are canonical instances. The familiar solution to this problem is to appeal to tracing. Though the drunk driver isn't in control at the time of the crash, this is because he previously drank to excess, an action over which he did plausibly exercise the requisite control. Tracing seeks to (...) show that an agent's responsibility for some outcome can be traced back to a prior exercise of control which caused the later lack of control. These and related cases have led many theorists to treat tracing as an indispensable component of any adequate theory of responsibility. This paper argues that tracing is in fact dispensable. I offer two strategies for explaining responsibility in drunk-driving cases : responsibility can either be exhaustively modeled on recklessness, or exhaustively modeled on negligence. Neither explanation, however, relies on tracing. If I'm right, the case for tracing is seriously weakened. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Building Literacy Bridges for Adolescents Using Holocaust Literature and TheatreWayne Brinda (bio)IntroductionDo you have a sibling or best friend whom you dared to do something? Did you ever slip surreptitiously into a place where you should not be? What if your best friend or sibling later became your enemy because of a situation beyond your control? Could that happen? What would you do? Think about those questions as you (...) read this excerpt from In My Brother's Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith after the Holocaust and visualize the action:The boys look more alike than brothers. In fact, they are identical twins, indistinguishable in the smooth innocence of their faces, their wide brown eyes, and their hair, nearly shaven to their scalps to thwart the summer heat... At the entrance to the grand church of St. Stephen's Basilica in Budapest, the boys slip surreptitiously through the six-inch-wide opening of the formidable oak middle door, with its inlaid bronze portraits of the Hungarian kings. They giggle gleefully and a bit nervously as they peer into the dimly lit chamber, which feels refreshingly cool in contrast to the scorching afternoon sun they have just escaped. The twins mimic and build on each other's playful daring. Even their spirited laughter is identical, punctuated by squeals of delight... Let's go find his hand. What? St. Stephen's hand. I heard that his hand is kept in a golden box behind the altar somewhere. Let's go find it. No. We're not supposed to be back there. That's the craziest thing I ever heard—a king's hand inside a box in a church. He must have been pretty mad when they cut his hand off.1 [End Page 31]This small theatrical imaginative experience begins the adventure of two twin Hungarian Jewish boys who became caught up in World War II, the Holocaust, communism, and the aftermath.Those two boys became the father and uncle of the author, Eugene Pogany, who wrote In My Brother's Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith after the Holocaust. Pogany recalls and tries to reconcile their experiences, differences, and conflicts with each other that lasted a lifetime and beyond. As educators and those who work with adolescents, we seek to reconcile the past experiences and conflicts our students have with reading by finding strategies that bridge adolescents and literature. Two powerful tools for building such bridges are nonfiction literature written about the experiences of young people and adults during and after the Holocaust and using theatre to bring these stories to life.McEwan noted that as literature becomes complex, adolescents tend to struggle with comprehension and may forgo the idea of discovering enjoyment.2 Incorporating nonfiction stories from the Holocaust with innovative theatre experiences of the literature into the curriculum can engage students in literature with complex themes, characters, and plots. This is especially true when the learning is assessed by using projects developed by, with, and for young adolescents. As a result, the literature becomes comprehensible, accessible, relevant, enjoyable, and aesthetically stimulating.As an educator, researcher, and artistic director of a theatre for young adults, I reflect on the charge by Snow and Biancarosa that educators need to "figure out how to ensure that every student gets beyond the basic literacy skills of the early-elementary grades, to the more challenging and more rewarding literacy of the middle and secondary school years."3 For some students, literacy bridges are gateways to new worlds, skills, and possibilities for enjoyment. For students who struggle with reading, those bridges are obstacles they are afraid or even refuse to cross because of past fears or failures. Even with guidance and support, many students will stop reading when the text becomes complex or never even attempt to read the book when they decide it has no relevancy or purpose after looking at its title, skimming the back, looking for pictures, or counting the pages.This leads to a question and thoughts that inspired my research on using Holocaust literature and theatre to engage young students in discovering, comprehending, visualizing, and aesthetically enjoying the literary experience:• What can be done in the... (shrink)

There are two broadly competing pictures of moral responsibility. On the view I favor, to be responsible for some action is to be related to it in such a way that licenses attributing certain properties to the agent, properties like blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Responsibility is attributability. A different view understands being responsible in terms of our practices of holding each other responsible. Responsibility is accountability, which “involves a social setting in which we demand (require) certain conduct from one another and (...) respond adversely to one another’s failures to comply with these demands” (Watson, Philos Top 24:227–248, 1996). My concern here is the relation between moral responsibility and desert. Plausibly, if someone is morally responsible for something wrong then they deserve blame, and it is on the basis of them being morally responsible and its being wrong that they deserve blame. In this paper, I try to make progress toward understanding why it would follow that being morally responsible for something supports a desert claim. I propose to do this by exploring how the “two faces” of responsibility should proceed. An important upshot is that we gain a new currency by which to evaluate extant theories of responsibility that might favor one or the other conception: do they carry plausible desert commitments? To illustrate this benefit, I argue that accountability theory carries implausible implications for deserved praise. (shrink)

Obstacles to Divine Revelation examines the notion that there are obstacles to God giving revelation, if God exists. Rolfe King argues that exploring these significantly refines ideas of evidence for God, including the claim that God must operate within a logically necessary structure of revelation. Examining obstacles to divine revelation clarifies this structure and paves the way to evaluating its significance.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century makes hardly any reference to the ethics of inequality. Surprisingly, this is an omission shared by most of his critics. In this paper I investigate the literature on which he and his reviewers might have drawn and speculate on the reasons why they did not. I outline the four ‘views of society’ and the related issues in moral philosophy that were presented by Michael Schneider in his book on the distribution of wealth. I (...) then summarise the criticisms of Piketty made by those few reviewers who did show some interest in ethical questions and examine the slightly earlier and quite different case against reducing inequality made by one of these critics, N. Gregory Mankiw. I consider the economic, political and social costs of inequality identified in a book-length study of Piketty’s work by Steven Pressman, and conclude by reflecting on the reasons for the widespread neglect of moral philosophy by mainstream economists. (shrink)

each associate, and be means of which each unites himself to all, obeying only himself and still remaining as free as before. [The Solution]: Each of us puts in common his person and his entire power under the supreme direction of the general will (la..

The information‐transference account of teaching takes it to be a process in which information is transferred from one person's mind to another's. Augustine argues that this is impossible, since in order to understand something the person who understands must come to see why it is so, and that is an internal episode of awareness that isn't caused by an outside source. Augustine's insight here is contrasted with the contemporary view, following Wittgenstein, that learning is a matter of conformity to rules (...) (public norms). The case is made that teaching and learning pose philosophical problems that contemporary theories don't address, and a brief examination of Searle's Chinese Room example suggests that its plausibility derives from Augustine's insight that mere rule‐following behavior isn't enough to explain the phenomenon of understanding at the heart of knowledge. A reconstruction of Augustine's epistemological claims, divorced from his discredited views in the philosophy of language, is also provided. (shrink)

This new edition accords more attention to women's voices from the third world and to the urgent ethical and environmental concerns being addressed by women. It also provides a greatly expanded bibliography and a new Epilogue.

A referendum on abortion in the Republic of Ireland a while ago was strongly influenced by a curious case that aroused great controversy. You probably remember it, but I'll briefly recap the main points. A (very) young rape victim wanted an abortion (or her parents wanted it for her -- I'm not really sure, but it doesn't matter here). She was not only denied it, abortion being illegal in the Republic, but was prevented by a court ruling from going to (...) get one in a country where abortion is allowed. Now, I'm not concerned here with the moral question of abortion itself; what interests me is the confusion evinced (but apparently not felt) by most of those whose comments on the case were reported -- a confusion that afflicted those on both sides of the debate. The results of the recent referendum have reflected the confusion perfectly, with the Irish people offering their collective opinion that a woman shouldn't be allowed an abortion even if her life is endangered, but that women should be allowed free access to information about abortion and to travel to countries where abortion is legal. This would still have denied an abortion to the young rape victim, but would have allowed her to come to England for one. The confusion, it seems to me, is a symptom of two dangerous tendencies of thought concerning other people's moral beliefs -- tendencies which are often linked. (shrink)

I take "philosophy" to be an English word referring to a certain kind of thinking, a certain kind of approach to a certain kind of problem. To explain those "certain kind of"s would take a book; perhaps the best I can do here is gesture at what it is that English-language philosophers do.