Historian James H. Jones published the first edition of Bad Blood, the definitive history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in 1981. Its clear-eyed examination of that research and its implications remains a bioethics classic, and the 30-year anniversary of its publication served as the impetus for the reexamination of research ethics that this symposium presents. Recent revelations about the United States Public Health Service study that infected mental patients and prisoners in Guatemala with syphilis in the late 1940s in order (...) to determine the efficacy of treatment represent only one of the many attestations to the persistence of ongoing, critical, and underaddressed issues in research ethics that Bad Blood first explored. Those issues include, but are not limited to: the complex and contested matters of the value of a given research question, the validity of the clinical trial designed to address it, and the priorities of science. (shrink)

It is tempting to think that we have heard just about all we want or need to know about race. As the above quotes indicate, modern notions of race have always revolved around the faculty of vision, with supplementary contributions from other senses such as hearing, as Arendt notes in a tacit allusion to one mark of Jewish difference—the way they sounded when concentrated in urban settings. Yet two very recent works—Mark M. Smith's How Race Is Made and Anne C. (...) Rose's Psychology and Selfhood in the Segregated South —have much to teach us about how race has “worked”, particularly in the twentieth-century South but also, by implication, in the United States in general. Both works assume that, historically, race is no mere add-on to the self, a kind of externality that, once detected, can be relatively easily excised. Rather, it stands right at the heart of personal and group identity in a nation where race and ethnicity continue to assume surprising new shapes and forms. (shrink)

My interest here is in the way Leo Strauss and his followers, the Straussians, have dealt with race and rights, race and slavery in the history of the United States. I want, first, to assess Leo Strauss's rather ambivalent attitude toward America and explore the various ways that his followers have in turn analyzed the Lockean underpinnings of the American “regime,” sometimes in contradistinction to Strauss's views on the topic. With that established, I turn to the account, particularly that offered (...) by Harry Jaffa, of how slavery and race comported—or did not—with the Straussian account of the political foundations of the new nation and how latter-day followers of Strauss have dealt with the persisting topic of race and racism in America. Overall, I want to make two large points. First, the Straussian commitment to superhistorical standards provides the Straussians with a moral perspective on slavery, race, and racism. Second, though race and slavery have been less than central among the concerns of most followers of Strauss, the contributions of Jaffa and others have significantly shaped the present American conservative position on race, including the idea of color-blindness. (shrink)

Introduction: Hannah Arendt's world -- Guilt and responsibility -- The origins of totalitarianism in America -- Rediscovering the world -- Arendt, Tocqueville, and Cold War America -- Arendt, Riesman, and America as mass society -- Arendt and postwar American thought -- Reflections/refractions of race, 1945-1955 -- Arendt, the schools, and civil rights -- The Eichmann case -- Against the liberal grain -- The revolutionary traditions -- The crises of Arendt's republic -- Conclusion: once more: the film, Eichmann, and evil.

Professor Margaret Canovan wrote two studies of the work of German-Jewish émigré political theorist, Hannah Arendt. The first, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, appeared in 1974, while Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought was published in 1992. Both were intended for the Anglophone world, especially the US and Great Britain, although Arendt’s reception was more favorable in America where she settled in 1941 than in the UK. An historian of political thought at Keele University, UK, Canovan was (...) ideal to bring Arendt to a general academic audience not to aim at a highly specialized readership deeply grounded in German thought. Though Canovan emphasized the conservative dimensions of Arendt’s thought, her conclusion was, finally, that Arendt’s political thought was a form of modern “republicanism” not an argument for inherited political traditions or a plea for New Left radicalism. It was a plea for pluralism, as it were. (shrink)

Two treatises on memory which have come down to us from antiquity are Aristotle’s “On memory and recollection” and Plotinus’ “On perception and memory” ; the latter also wrote at length about memory in his “Problems connected with the soul”. In both authors memory is treated as a ‘modest’ faculty: both authors assume the existence of a persistent subject to whom memory belongs; and basic cognitive capacities are assumed on which memory depends. In particular, both theories use phantasia to explain (...) memory. Aristotle takes representations to be changes in concrete living things which arise from actual perception. To be connected to the original perception the representation has to be taken as a copy of the original experience ‑ this is the way Aristotle defines memory at the end of his investigation. Plotinus does not define memory: he is concerned with the question of what remembers. This is of course the soul, which goes through different stages of incarnation and disincarnation. Since the disembodied soul can remember, so he does not have Aristotle’s resources for explaining the continued presence of representations as changes in the concrete thing. Instead, he thinks that when acquiring a memory we acquire a capacity in respect of the object of the memory, namely to make it present at a later time. (shrink)

"This collection of essays owes its inception to a symposium held in Munich 8-10th September 2003"--P. [i].

This essay reflects on three strategic visions of how society might develop in the direction of a more environmentally responsible culture. These strategies - green technology, ecocentrism, and civic environmentalism - offer promising elements of what we need. However, each fails in different ways to successfully explain how citizens, caught up in consumerist practices and their supporting belief systems, can be led to take the transformative steps needed to build a culture that engages responsibly and respectfully with the natural environment. (...) This essay aims to acknowledge the contributions of these three approaches, while also critically reflecting on their limitations. The core limitation is the unresolved clash between ecocentrism's focus on the vulnerability of nature's intrinsic value to any anthropogenic intervention and civic environmentalism's focus on the revival of strong civic democracy as a gateway to environmental health. (shrink)

I defend the view that the design of the built environment should be a proper part of environmental ethics. An environmentally responsible culture should be one in which citizens take responsibility for the domesticated environments in which they live, as well as for their effects on wild nature. How we build our world reveals both the possibilities in nature and our own stance toward the world. Our constructions and contrivances also objectively constrain the possibilities for the development of a human (...) way of life integrated with wild nature. An environmentally responsible culture should require a built world that reflects and projects care and respect toward nature. (shrink)

Man an Organic Community - Vol. 1 is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1893. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has (...) become rare and historical knowledge for the future. (shrink)

Aristotle's "Parva Naturalia" culminates in definitions of the stages of the life cycle, from the generation of a new living thing up to death. This book provides a detailed reading of the end of the "Parva Naturalia" and shows how it completes the investigation into life begun in the "De Anima".

Environmental ethics has traditionally focused on a defense of the intrinsic value of animals and wild habitats. However, this ethical project needs to be supplemented by a consideration of the kind of culture that can take such an ethical point of view seriously. This essay argues that one component of an environmentally responsible culture is its domesticated environment. How we construct the domesticated environment has an impact on our perception of our own identities and our relations to wild nature. If (...) we care about wild nature, we must also care about the domesticated environment in which we live our lives. This essay contributes to an ethical reflection on the need to overcome the traditional dualism between domesticated and wild, built and natural that permeates environmental ethical thinking. (shrink)

This essay articulates the importance of the domesticated landscape for a mature environmental ethics. Human beings are spatial beings, deeply implicated in their relationships to places, both wild and domesticated. Human identity evolves contextually through interaction with a "world." If this world obscures our perception of wild nature, it will be difficult to motivate the social and psychological will to imagine, let alone participate in, a culture that values environmentally responsible conduct. My argument is informed by a pragmatist suspicion of (...) fixed dualisms separating humans from nature, the wild from the domesticated, and the natural from the artificial. Drawing on a variety of sources, the essay calls for greater attention to the ways in which the making of our domesticated worlds can contribute to or undermine our ability to take the intrinsic value of nature seriously. (shrink)

In Menciusiia6 all humans are said to have ‘a heart that does not bear the suffering of others’. I argue that this statement is illustrated, rather than proven, by the example of our reaction to a child about to fall into a well. This illustration can be located at the most basic level of ethical universals : basic ethical training; further steps in a ladder of reflection are universal reflection on ethical norms themselves, which may finally be related universally to (...) non‐ethical concerns. (shrink)

Hunting is a complex phenomenon. l examine it from four different perspectives-animal liberation, the land ethic, primitivism, and ecofeminism-and find no moral justification for sport hunting in any of them. At the same time, however, I argue that there are theoretical flaws in each of these approaches. Animal liberationists focus too much on the individual animal and ignore the difference between domestic and wild animals. Leopold’s land ethic fails to come to terms with the self-domestication of humans. I argue that (...) the holism of the land ethic does not in itself justify hunting as a human act of predation appropriate to the demands of wild biotic communities. Primitivists, such as Paul Shepard and Ortega y Gasset, mistakenly argue that hunting is an essential part of human nature and hence part of a healthy return to a natural way of life. Their argument marginalizes women’s relations to nature. Finally, I take seriously the ecofeminist claim that sport hunting is a symptom ofpatriarchy’s fixation on death and violence, although I criticize the more radical claim that women are closer to nature than men. Hunting should be investigated within the broader context of patriarchal social relations between men and women. As an act of violence it constitutes one element of a cultural matrix which is destructive to hoth women and nature. (shrink)

The surviving portion of the tenth-century Egyptian Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Tamīmī’s recently edited Ṭīb al-ʿarūs has several formulas relating to the dying and perfuming of textiles. Some refer to the use of carved molds to impress designs upon textiles. Tamīmī’s formulas treat in particular the application of gold leaf and perfumed dye pastes with blocks, but presuppose the technology of using blocks to apply designs to textiles and include a vocabulary of technical terms for the process. This textual evidence provides (...) additional context for surviving early medieval Islamic block-printed gilded textiles. The attestation of the use of blocks to decorate textiles is contemporary with the use of blocks to print Arabic amulet texts, known by the tenth century from extant specimens and some literary evidence. (shrink)

Ren in the Lunyu is often taken to be virtue; if virtue is taken to be excellence as performing a function, as Plato understands it, this is not persuasive. Nor is it easy to show how ren encompasses or implies all other virtues. Ren is furthermore ambiguous—it is used both in a wide sense and specifically as benevolence; in fact there are at least six accounts of what ren is in the Lunyu. This ambiguity cannot be made harmless by use (...) of speech act theory, since commands, for example, require satisfaction conditions for them to be comprehensible. I conclude on a skeptical note: how ren is to be understood as virtue, if at all, remains unclear. (shrink)