Presents an interpretation of the famous engraved title page of Hobbes's Leviathan, in which the ‘person’ of the state is depicted as a colossal figure composed of smaller individual figures. It argues that the origins of this design can be found in an optical device developed by the French scientist Jean François Niceron, which used a specially cut lens to create a single composite figure out of separate smaller figures; and it explores the significance of this for Hobbes's theory of (...) ‘representation’. (shrink)

The relationship between evidence-based medicine (EBM) and clinical judgement is the subject of conceptual and practical dispute. For example, EBM and clinical guidelines are seen to increasingly dominate medical decision-making at the expense of other, human elements, and to threaten the art of medicine. Clinical wisdom always remains open to question. We want to know why particular beliefs are held, and the epistemological status of claims based in wisdom or experience. The paper critically appraises a number of claims and distinctions, (...) and attempts to clarify the connections between EBM, clinical experience and judgement, and the objective and evaluative categories of medicine. I conclude that to demystify clinical wisdom is not to devalue it. EBM ought not be conceived as needing to be limited or balanced by clinical wisdom, since if its language is translatable into terms comprehensible and applicable to individuals, it helps constitute clinical wisdom. Failure to appreciate this constitutive relation will help perpetuate medical paternalism and delay the adoption of properly evidence-based practice, which would be both unethical and unwise. (shrink)

Assesses the European reception of Hobbes's thought from c.1640 to c.1750. It begins by discussing the publishing history of his works on the Continent, and the various attempts to edit or translate them. Then it considers the reception of his writings, dividing the European writers into three categories: the defenders of orthodoxy, who reacted against Hobbes's ideas because they regarded them as extreme; the radicals, who celebrated and developed his ideas—also because they regarded them as extreme; and a broader third (...) category, consisting of those who engaged in more or less positive ways with Hobbesian theories, not to shake the foundations of orthodoxy, but to develop arguments and positions within the intellectual mainstream. It suggests that this third category was larger and more significant than has hitherto been recognized. Finally, the essay considers Hobbes's own relationship to the ‘Republic of Letters’ of his time. (shrink)

This guide explains Derrida’s key concepts through examples from across the whole spectrum of the arts, looking at the work of architects such as Bernard ...

Ian Little offers a new defence of utilitarianism as a basis for assessing the role of the State. Lucidly and elegantly he explains how the three disciplines of philosophy, economics, and politics can be integrated to provide guidance on issues of public policy. Anyone interested in public affairs will be enlightened by Little's crisp analysis and any student taking an interdisciplinary course in social science will find a clear framework for thinking about the subject.

This article offers a theological description of one practice necessary for good local belonging: the creative practice of naming local creatures, both human and non-human. I explore the practice of naming as forming local belonging in dialogue with new nature writers in the British Isles and Jean-Louis Chrétien. I offer a brief review of the scope of theologies of place in the United Kingdom before turning to the themes of displacement and naming in new British nature writing. Finally, I use (...) Jean-Louis Chrétien's theological accounts of naming and corporate prayer, to examine the effect of naming in transforming one's relation to one's locality, and propose that the Church's creative participation in local naming—especially in prayer—offers a transforming narrative as to the kinds of local belonging which ought to be pursued. (shrink)

Malcolm Skilbeck; Curriculum Aims and Objectives: Taking a Means to an End, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 6, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 62–72, htt.

Malcolm Bull offers a detailed analysis of nihilism in Nietzsche's works. Along with accompanying commentaries by Cascardi and Clark, he explores the significance of Nietzscheís views given the fact that a wide range of readers have come to embrace his ideas as new orthodoxy. There seem to be no anti-Nietzscheans today, but Bull demonstrates that this wide embrace of Nietzsche runs counter to the very meaning of nihilism as Nietzsche understood it.

Presents the discovery that the majority of the so‐called ‘Hobbes Manuscripts’ preserved at Chatsworth are not in Hobbes's hand, but in that of his friend Robert Payne; they probably passed to Hobbes only after Payne's death. Using this information, and a reconstruction of part of Payne's library, it describes Payne's career and intellectual life, and tries to assess the nature of his relationship with Hobbes. It also examines the quasi‐mechanistic treatise known as the ‘Short Tract’, and argues that this work (...) was composed not by Hobbes but by Payne. (shrink)

Of this batch of books 1 the one I found most compelling reading was Sarah Waterlow's Nature, Change and Agency . This work is an intense meditative commentary on the most important portions of the Physics; it probes beneath the text of Aristotle's loosely organized treatise to exhibit its deep structure. Waterlow attempts to show how Aristotle's apparently independent and self-contained discussions in Books I, II, III-IV and VIII all rest on a single notion, viz. that the world consists of (...) natural substances, understood as things engaged each in a unitary pattern of change whose source and determining plan is within themselves. (shrink)

Erdelyi's argument for integrating clinical data on repression, mainly Freudian, with laboratory findings suffers from logical and factual errors concerning Freudian repression and about experiments on forgetting.

If any words are unmistakably Ciceronian, these are. Every schoolboy knew them. Generations of Latin prose composers have trotted them out with unassailable confidence. It seems almost indelicate to suggest that they are not Ciceronian at all; but it would solve the problem presented by Sallust Cat. 20.9 if this were the case. Sallust's placing of the hallowed words in the mouth of Catiline has always been something of a scandal, to be laughed off , or played down.

In a previous study the author proposed that the third edition of Leviathan was produced not long before 1702 . An alternative view, dating the edition to 1670 and suggesting that it incorporated corrections by Hobbes, was put forward by the late Karl Schuhmann; it was based on both typographical and textual evidence. This article considers Schuhmann's arguments and finds them unconvincing. It also adduces some new evidence , on the basis of which it proposes that this edition was produced (...) in the period 1695-1702, probably by the printer John Darby. (shrink)