National decline is typically blamed on special interests from the demand side of politics corrupting a country's institutions. The usual demand-side suspects include crony capitalists, consumer activists, economic elites, and labor unions. Less attention is given to government insiders on the supply side of politics - rulers, elected officials, bureaucrats, and public employees. In autocracies and democracies, government insiders have the motive, means, and opportunity to co-opt political power for their benefit and at the expense of national well-being. Many storied (...) empires have succumbed to such inside jobs. Today, they imperil countries as different as China and the United States. Democracy - government by the people - does not ensure government for the people. Understanding how government insiders use their power to subvert the public interest - and how these negative consequences can be mitigated - is the topic of this book by Mark A. Zupan. (shrink)

Measuring gene expression on a global scale has been one of the vexing problems of cell biology. Velculescu et al.(1) recently proposed a system for identifying gene expression levels based on very short sequence tags – about nine base pairs – located at a specific site within a gene transcript. By coupling the strategy to current automated sequencing machines and the large expressed sequence tag databases, it should be possible to follow changes in gene expression for large numbers of genes (...) economically and accurately. (shrink)

When businesses fail, their ability to honor agreements, uphold promises, and act on the higher ideals of their mission statements is often compromised. Following the ethical maxim that Aought implies can, @ business ethicists often grant that our practical obligations have to be understood against the backdrop of the relative scarcity or abundance of the business and social environment. Nothing brings on scarcity more dramatically than the total liquidation of a business =s assets. Bankruptcy protection and reorganization can, and probably (...) should, lead businesses to cut back on some of their obligations. But even if we allow this concession to practical exigency, we can still ask probing questions about how the.. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the general problem of how to give a philosophical account of the nature of representation by looking at three specific philosophies of language and the philosophic treatment of fictional discourse. I argue that Edmund Husserl, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin all try to give accounts of meaning by arguing for what I call a "closure of meaning" in language. The closure thesis is the claim that some set of criteria can exhaustively determine the ways in which (...) language can be meaningful. This thesis is implicit in Husserl's theory of expressive meaning in the Logical Investigations, in Wittgenstein's picture theory, and in J. L. Austin's pragmatic account of meaning in speech act theory. My general thesis is that the three philosophers in question do not successfully defend the closure thesis for linguistic representation. Since fictional discourse is a source of counterexamples to the closure thesis, I look specifically at two recent philosophical accounts of fiction by David Lewis and John Searle. I criticize these attempts to account for fictional discourse within referential and pragmatic theories of language. Since such attempts are usually part of a closure thesis, my discussion of fiction provides further reasons for doubting the general possibility of accounting for a closure of meaning in language. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new way of measuring progress in international politics, an approach that focuses on the symbolic and ideological work of international organizations. Although such a strategy is not entirely new to the study of International Relations, it has not been a common, accessible way of assessing how well international organizations work to effect change. The more famous methods have been legalistic—investigations of how international organizations have created new international law in the issue-areas under investigation1—and bureaucratic—studies of how (...) international organizations create machinery to deal with the problems2. But in a world where domestic and international discourse is more mediated than ever before by television, radio, the Internet, newspapers, and other means of mass communication, the argument here is that propaganda is a third arena that must be taken into account when exploring the work of international organizations. The international organization in question here is the United Nations, and the issue-area examined is gender equality, a topic that is also variously described as “women's rights,” “women's issues”, or the “women's movement”. The paper explains first why the topic of the UN and women's rights is important, I then examine the propaganda role of the UN in the struggle for gender equality, and the paper concludes with a critical analysis of the UN's propaganda work in relation to this issue. (shrink)

Dia·mytho·log·õmen: the first person plural present subjunctive active form of the verb διαμυθολογέω, ‘to converse,’ or, more literally, ‘to tell stories,’ and more literally still, ‘to speak about by way of myth.’ Adapted from Plato’s Phaedo (70b6), the word functions in the title as a hortatory subjunctive: ‘Let us converse, tell stories, mythologize.’ The book depicts through narrative the various activities of a philosopher, as a thinker, a teacher, a scholar, and a creative-intellectual writer. With reference to various philosophers, to (...) Plato and Nietzsche in particular, it develops accounts of philosophy as ‘Creative Pyrrhonism’ and of the philosopher as superior to the sage. (shrink)

Since the beginning ofthe 1980s, successive Belgian governments have pursued a social security policy that is a combination of cutting social expenditure on the one hand and improving the plight of lower income categories among benefit recipients on the other. This has been realised by means of a strategy of 'targeting within universalism ', i.e. improving the benefits for the poor and restricting them for the better off, but without abolishing the entitlements oft he latter category completely. The Belgian experience (...) puts inperspective the 'middle class matters' argument, which predicts that, if cuts are made in social expenditure,the middle classes will use their political resources to defend the provisions they benefit from and to diminish the benefits reserved for the poor. (shrink)

Translations of the “myths” from Plato’s Protagoras (320c-324d), Symposium (189c-193d), Republic (614b-621d), Timaeus (20d-25d and 29d-34b), and Kritias (108e-121c).

Sampson’s hypothesis that the entry of Western society into a post-modern era of “globalization” will necessitate a change in the conceptualization of the person is discussed in light of relevant group process research and current world events. While it does not seem likely that any fundamental change in the theory of the person will occur, it is plausible that the present form of individualism will adapt to the conditions of this new era. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page 84-86.

Boeckx & Stjepanovic (2001) claim to have evidence from the analysis of pseudogapping that head movement is best viewed as not occurring in the overt syntax, but rather in the PF component. In this squib, I will show that all of the movements that are needed in the analysis of pseudo-gapping are phrasal, hence demonstrating that the analysis of pseudo-gapping shows nothing about the place of head movement in the grammar.1 Their evidence is based on Lasnik’s (1995) analysis of pseudo-gapping, (...) exemplified in.. (shrink)

This chapter is about the influence of Alexander on John Anderson. It begins with an account of Alexander’s Australian heritage as one way to understand his egalitarian leanings towards all finite things in the universe so as not to privilege mind over everything else, as idealists did. A comparative analysis of Anderson’s metaphysics in reaction to Alexander’s system is provided, with detailed commentary on Anderson’s lectures, both published and unpublished. Finally, an explanation is given as to why Alexander and Anderson’s (...) empiricism fell out of favour, which gives some insights into how to place them in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

The recent philosophical literature on religious experience has mostly been concerned with experiences which are taken by the subject of the experience to be directly of God or some other supernatural entity, or to involve some suspension of the subject–object structure of conventional experience. In this paper I consider a further kind of experience, where the sense of God is mediated by way of an appreciation of the existential meanings which are presented by a material context. In this way the (...) paper aims to extend the standard philosophical concept of religious experience so as to take account of phenomenological treatments of sacred place, and to give more prominence to the materially mediated or sacramental character of much religious experience. (shrink)

Over the last thirty years, personal debt loads have increased dramatically. Lower income earners borrow money to purchase basic goods and services, so their debt is frequently non-discretionary. The impact of non-discretionary personal debt on debtors can be as, if not more, harmful than government regulations that have been declared unconstitutional. In this regard, the impact of personal debt is tantamount to the impact of a civil rights violation. What separates the impact of unconstitutional state action from that of personal (...) debt is the assumption that only the latter are the result of consensual transactions. Consent, however, is not a dyadic phenomenon, it exists in gradations. The quality of consent is weakened when the agent is making choices in response to pressures, and the empiricalquestion of the extent to which a consent transaction is unforced is distinct from the normative question of whether a transaction is legitimate, or fair. It is necessary to devise a new taxonomy of language to clearly distinguish the empirical and normative questions. This elucidates the fact that lower income people are under more pressure to borrow money than are upper income individuals to pay progressive rates of income tax. To argue that the latter are ‘coerced,’ is to admit that the low income individual’s decision to borrow is similarly forced. This admission suggests that a significant portion of citizens of market-based economies (notably Canada and the U.S.) are being forced to endure harms tantamount to civil rights violations. The admission also suggests that free markets harbour forces that undermine individual autonomy, and the absence of corrective state regulation exacerbates the problem. (shrink)

(2013). SLUMBERING KISSES, SHAMELESS ENTANGLEMENTS: “la découverte de freud”. Angelaki: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 3-15.

Generalizedn-gons are certain geometric structures (incidence geometries) that generalize the concept of projective planes (the nontrivial generalized 3-gons are exactly the projective planes).In a simplified world, every generalizedn-gon of finite Morley rank would be an algebraic one, i.e., one of the three families described in [9] for example. To our horror, John Baldwin [2], using methods discovered by Hrushovski [7], constructed ℵ1-categorical projective planes which are not algebraic. The projective planes that Baldwin constructed fail to be algebraic in a dramatic (...) way.Indeed, every algebraic projective plane over an algebraically closed field is Desarguesian [12]. In particular, an algebraically closed field (isomorphic to the base field) can be interpreted in every one of them. However, in the projective planes that Baldwin constructed, one cannot even interpret an infinite group.In this article we show that the same phenomenon occurs for the generalizedn-gons ifn≥ 3 is an odd integer. For each suchnwe constructmany nonisomorphic generalizedn-gons of finite Morley rank that do not interpret an infinite group. As one may expect, our method is inspired by Hrushovski and Baldwin, and we follow Baldwin's line of approach. Quite often our proofs are a verification of the fact that the proofs of Baldwin [2] forn= 3 carry over to an arbitrary positive odd integern(which is sometimes far from being obvious). As in [2], we begin by defining a certain collection of finite graphsK* and a binary relation ≤ on these graphs. We show that (K*, ≤) satisfies the amalgamation property. (shrink)

A major study of renowned British Philosopher Roger Scruton, one of the most accomplished figures to have emerged from the British academy in the latter half of ...

For philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, an outcome of the Plato-led victory of philosophers over poets is the ‘conquest of abundance’ where abstraction replaces the ‘richness of being’. This poignant motif is visible in the project of the social sciences, where theory describes classificatory schemas that can be imposed upon the social world to categorise and, subsequently, explain it. However, Homer’s writings provide a completely different frame of reference. By reimagining ourselves within this work we may be able to rethink (...) and reconfigure our understanding of science, and perhaps even the practice of science. This paper reports on a Feyerabendian ‘experiment’ in sociology of science which attempts to write contemporary scientific production from the frame of reference of Homer. This new methodology leads to fragments of epic poetry which act as a provocation to, and a disruption of, sociology of science and STS and their ways of making sense of science in society. (shrink)

This article considers the potential for a researcher to use their own creative practice as a method of data collection. Much of the published material in this field focuses on more theoretical positions, with limited use being made of specific PhDs that illustrate the context in which practice was undertaken by the researcher. It explores strategies for data collection and researcher motivation during what the author identifies as "researcher practice." This is achieved through the use of three PhD case studies. (...) Methods of data collection focus on: the use of output from practice for quantitative data collection, the use of output from practice for qualitative data collection, and the use of output from practice for data translation. The article discusses the methodologies employed in the case studies to identify themes which enable the definition of a generic researcher practitioner methodology. It notes the significance of creative practice in support of data collection and the differences between researcher practice and commercial practice, and emphasises the contribution of researcher practice towards personal motivation. (shrink)

The prolific English poet John Lydgate has been known as the “monk of Bury” since the early fifteenth century. Both his popularity and perceptions of his literary merit have fluctuated wildly since his zenith as the famous laureate of Henry V, Henry VI and Duke Humphrey, but readers have been constant in their association of Lydgate with the Benedictine abbey from which the epithet derives. However, there has been remarkably little examination of the details of Lydgate's existence at Bury: the (...) critical emphasis has been on Lydgate's contact with Lancastrian society rather than on his quotidian life as a monk. “To trace in detail the connection between the Bury library and the characteristic configuration of Lydgate's thought and work, to see how his mind was formed and influenced by the books with which he was in such familiar contact” remains an unfulfilled desire. In particular, given the range of Lydgate's literary and intellectual allusions, it is surprising that there has been no full attempt to compare what we know of Bury's sizeable late medieval library, catalogued in the late fourteenth century by Henry Kirkstede, with Lydgate's poetic output. Likewise, few critics have attempted to trace connections between Lydgate's poetry and the intellectual and cultural atmosphere of a grand Benedictine abbey in the late medieval period. This article, a study of one manuscript from Bury that Lydgate certainly handled and that is typical of the type of book he would have encountered in great numbers in the monastic library, endeavours to reassert the importance to his poetry of the environment in which Lydgate spent most of his life. (shrink)

This essay describes the emergence of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as an object of conspiratorial intrigue and imagination, offering a snapshot of the “9/11 truth movement” and its various theories as they began to reach full bloom. Theories about the attacks have come to constitute the dominant conspiratorial present – a present that looks remarkably like the mid- and late-twentieth-century past, despite significant changes in information technology and the continuing institutionalization and ironization of conspiracy (...) theory as an influential form of popular politics. In addition to the 9/11 conspiracy community, the essay considers the battle over the 9/11 Commission’s review of the government’s failure to anticipate the terrorist attacks. The Commission engaged in knowing and savvy efforts to respond to conspiracy theories and to preempt popular belief in them, offering an authoritative narrative (or, more precisely, set of narratives) to explain what occurred. Meanwhile, the 9/11 truth movement made equally knowing and savvy efforts to critique the official account, responding with its own efforts to reinterpret and re-narrate the attacks, their causes, and what they signify about the contemporary world. While the 9/11 Commission may have criticized the federal government and its intelligence services for their failures of imagination prior to the attacks, the truth movement criticized the Commission either for a failure of imagination – an explanation for the attacks that could see through the “official” account – or for a quite imaginative cover-up of the hidden truths of 9/11. By considering the clash between official authorities and an active conspiracy community, this essay considers how the movement attempted to form a collective political and scholarly community, producing a blizzard of texts offering narratives that compete with the ones told by the Commission that seek the impossible grail of conspiracy theory: the truth. The essay also considers the effects, if any, of the state’s attempt to preempt and respond to conspiracy theories. (shrink)

This essay traces the history of the Karl Rahner Society between the years 1998 and 2019. It lists the achievements of the society’s coordinators, many of the books and articles about Rahner published by members of the society, and the role played in the society by Presidents of the Catholic Theological Society of America. The essay also identifies three persistent themes of the society: Rahner and his contemporaries, Rahner and the Catholic Church, and Rahner and ecumenism.

(2013). Electronic Fences Make Good Neighbors: The Importance of Medical Records Managers to Protecting Autonomy. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 50-52. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2013.767965.