Those familiar with Whitehead's thought may wish to skim Part One: Background and Foundations and pass on to Part Two: Value Theory in General and in Particular, which is Weisenbeck's main contribution to the literature on Whitehead. In discussing the general theory, Weisenbeck calls attention to the relational character of value. He argues that Whitehead's worlds of possible and realized values are essentially related; neither has value apart from the other. Similarly, value is neither wholly in subjects nor wholly in (...) objects; it is a relationship between the valuing subject and the valuable object. The author divides Whitehead's value theory into three principal species: aesthetic, religious, and moral. The chapter on aesthetic values contains a careful examination of Whitehead's distinction between appearance and reality and an analysis of beauty as the highest value. In the section on religious values he discusses man's relationship to God and man's emotional and volitional response to the religious vision of unity and perfection. Of special interest is the section on moral values where Weisenbeck shows the connection between morality and the aesthetic ideals to be attained. In view of his emphasis on ideals and the role of love in human action Weisenbeck would presumably side against those who have attributed a private interest theory to Whitehead. The author has performed an important service in sorting out the various senses of value terms in Whitehead and in tracing their relationships.--T. P. A. (shrink)

McFarland discusses Kant's concept of teleology only insofar as it pertains to natural science, although the concept also has importance for Kant's aesthetics, ethics, and philosophies of history and religion. The study is devoted to an explication of the concept--rather than a developed interpretation-written from the belief that there is "no similar attempt to deal strictly with Kant's treatment of teleology." McFarland is apparently unaware of Klaus Düsing's more comprehensive treatment of the concept in Die Teleologie in Kants Weltbegriff which (...) includes a bibliography of the literature on the subject. Nevertheless, McFarland does draw attention to several crucial aspects of Kant's view and places it in historical perspective, showing its similarity to Hume's argument in the Dialogues. The author points out that teleology functions as a regulative concept for Kant; although we cannot attribute design to the composition of the world, we can use it heuristically to lead us to new mechanical explanations and toward a systematization of knowledge. Moreover, as a subjective principle it enables us to make sense out of organic beings which are unintelligible to us on mechanical models. McFarland argues that since organic purposiveness is a subjective principle of organization it cannot be used to solve the problem of induction and that Kant has not explained why empirical laws are objectively necessary. Although this book omits much, it will be useful to the reader desiring a brief explanation of how Kant uses the concept in parts of the first Critique and in the Critique of Teleological Judgement.--T. P. A. (shrink)

The subject matter of this book is not as limited as one might expect from the title. The author's intention is to explicate Kant's concept of geography and relate it to more recent geographical thought, but this project draws him into issues concerning the relationships which the various Kantian sciences bear to each other. What emerges is an account of the architectonic of science as it develops in Kant's thought. May calls attention to the methodological differences between the theoretical and (...) empirical sciences and argues somewhat indecisively that Kant has expanded his view of space and time in the latter. Perhaps the strongest part of the book is May's discussion of the use of teleological judgments as heuristic devices for science. Here he shows the role of the reflective judgment in building up a system of empirical concepts out of the given. A translation of Kant's introduction to Physische Geographie and a bibliography are appended.--T. P. A. (shrink)

Social evolution theory conventionally takes an externalist explanatory stance, treating observed cooperation as explanandum and the positive assortment of cooperative behaviour as explanans. We ask how the circumstances bringing about this positive assortment arose in the first place. Rather than merely push the explanatory problem back a step, we move from an externalist to an interactionist explanatory stance, in the spirit of Lewontin and the Niche Construction theorists. We develop a theory of ‘social niche construction’ in which we consider biological (...) entities to be both the subject and object of their own social evolution. Some important cases of the evolution of cooperation have the side-effect of causing changes in the hierarchical level at which the evolutionary process acts. This is because the traits that act to align the fitness interests of particles in a collective can also act to diminish the extent to which those particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance, while augmenting the extent to which collectives of such particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance. In this way, we can explain upward transitions in the hierarchical level at which the Darwinian machine operates in terms of particle-level selection, even though the outcome of the process is a collective-level selection regime. Our theory avoids the logical and metaphysical paradoxes faced by other attempts to explain evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

Objectives To investigate empirically the motivations for not consenting to DNA biobanking in a Swedish population-based study and to discuss the implications. Design Structured questionnaires and semistructured interviews. Setting A longitudinal epidemiological project (PART) ongoing since 1998 in Stockholm, Sweden. The DNA-collection wave took place during 2006–7. Participants 903 individuals completed the questionnaire (participation rate 36%) and 23 were interviewed. All individuals had participated in both non-genetic waves of the project, but refused to contribute saliva samples during the DNA-collection wave. (...) Main outcome measures Motivations behind refusing to consent to DNA biobanking, with subsequent focus on participants' explanations regarding this unwillingness. Results Public refusal to consent to DNA biobanking, as revealed by the questionnaire, was mainly explained by a lack of personal relevance of DNA contribution and feelings of discomfort related to the DNA being used for purposes other than the respective study. Interviews of individuals representing the second motivation, revealed a significant mistrust of DNA biobank studies. The underlying beliefs and attitudes were associated with concerns about integrity, privacy, suspiciousness and insecurity. However, most interviewees were supportive of genetic research per se and interpreted their mistrust in the light of distressing environmental influences. Conclusion The results suggest a need for guidelines on benefit sharing, as well as trustworthy and stable measures to maintain privacy, as a means for increasing personal relevance and trust among potential participants in genetic research. Measures taken from biobanks seem insufficient in maintaining and increasing trust, suggesting that broader societal measures should be taken. (shrink)

The ethical theory espoused by a philosopher is often dominated by certain implicit epistemological assumptions. These “ways of knowing” may in turn be dominated by personality preferences that give rise to certain preferred worldviews that undergird various philosophies. Such preferred worldviews are seen in We believe positions, stated or unstated. The meaning of these claims about the interconnections of unexamined assumptions and their philosophical implications may be seen through an example. This paper will examine certain crucial aspects of the thought (...) of John Doris, who promotes a form of situationist ethics. This example is intended to be suggestive rather than conclusive. It points to the need for an openness to other epistemological assumptions that might permit a more comprehensive appreciation of what moral agency involves, beyond what arises from the restricted methods of analytical philosophy and a positivist worldview. There have been other efforts to meet the situationist challenge to classical Aristotelian ethics, yet surprisingly little attention has been given to the role of implicit epistemologies and unexamined psychologies. This paper offers a critical examination of these prior We believe positions. (shrink)

Divided into two parts, the first concentrates on the logical properties of propositions, their relation to facts and sentences, and the parallel objects of commands and questions. The second part examines theories of intentionality and discusses the relationship between different theories of naming and different accounts of belief.

Nothing is known of the poet Grattius except that he was a contemporary of Ovid. However, certain peculiarities in the text of hisCynegeticasuggest that he wrote for public performance, that the poem was presented atludi scaeniciwhere dancers and singers were performing too, that the Palatine temple of Apollo was probably where the event took place, and that the most likely occasion for it was one of the ‘quinquennial’ games celebrating the defeat of Cleopatra.

Artist Leonid Filatov. Kakimi raznorodnymi talantami on odaren! YArkij kinorezhisser. Blistatel'nyj parodist. Skazochnik. I vse, chto on delal - pechal'noe i mudroe - na radost' nam. Ego poeziya sozdaet obrazy dushevnoj zhizni lyudej, nepohozhih drug na druga, dazhe protivostoyaschih drug drugu. Eto svojstvo istinnogo iskusstva. Komedijnaya p'esa po motivam bessmertnogo romana Dyuma otkryla nam esche odnu storonu ego darovanij.

We first consider the entailment logic MC, based on meaning containment, which contains neither the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM) nor the Disjunctive Syllogism (DS). We then argue that the DS may be assumed at least on a similar basis as the assumption of the LEM, which is then justified over a finite domain or for a recursive property over an infinite domain. In the latter case, use is made of Mathematical Induction. We then show that an instance of the (...) LEM is intrumental in the proof of Cantor's Theorem, and we then argue that this is based on a more general form than can be reasonably justified. We briefly consider the impact of our approach on arithmetic and naive set theory, and compare it with intuitionist mathematics and briefly with recursive mathematics. Our "Four Basic Logical Issues" paper would provide useful background, the current paper being an application of the some of the ideas in it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Life of Roman Republicanism by Joy ConnollyT. P. WisemanJoy Connolly. The Life of Roman Republicanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. xix + 228 pp. Cloth. $39.95.This book was written for the best of reasons. Joy Connolly explains in her preface that she began to study the republican tradition in 2001, when “the Bush administration’s imprudence, paranoia, and disregard of democratic values stoked in me an anger equalled (...) only by the disgust I felt at my own and my fellow citizens’ inability or unwillingness to stand up to it” (xiv). The failure of the Left caused her “to ask questions that might help us to respond more intelligently and humanly to the situation in which we find ourselves” (xv). In particular, in this book her aim has been to exploit texts from the late Roman republic, to which students of political science have not paid enough attention, and thus recover “the suppressed history of republican political thought” (204). As she says in [End Page 372] conclusion, “I have sought to offer practical tools for civic education by articulating learnable practices of knowing the world that characterize late republican texts” (208, author’s emphasis). How well has this admirable ambition been achieved?According to the introduction, “[t]his book seeks to place Cicero’s Verrines, Caesarian orations, Republic, and Laws; Sallust’s Catiline and Jugurtha; and Horace’s Satires at the center of the republican tradition” (1); however, the Verrines and De legibus get only a couple of paragraphs each, and only one of the “Caesarian” orations is discussed at all. The actual contents are: chapter 1 on De republica (“Where Politics Begins”), which “presents Cicero as a thinker concerned with a collective of antagonists and competing interests, against conventional portrayals of his ideal republic as a homogeneous, unified, harmonious community” (20); chapter 2 on Sallust (“Justice in the World”), which argues that “Sallust’s withholding of judgment at the end of Jugurtha signifies the ways in which agents in the decaying republic withhold justice on a larger scale” (20); chapter 3 on Horace Satires I (“Non-Sovereign Freedom”), in which the obvious question (asked only at the end), “what might political and social progressives find worthy of consideration in Horace today?”, is answered with “Horatian satire undoes the claim to sovereignty that usually partners claims to moral judgment” (154); chapter 4 on Cicero’s view of oratory (“Dividual Advocacy”), which “reflects on the Roman preoccupation with faces, situations, the mutability of selfhood, and the degree to which the divided self mirrors the division of the polity” (21); and chapter 5 on Pro Marcello (“Imagination, Finitude, Responsibility, Irony”), which argues that “[b]y adopting hyperbole as the governing figure of this new style of senatorial speech, Cicero holds out the promise not of a morally legible universe, but of a recognition that every Roman now lives in conditions virtually ‘impossible to believe’, the emergence of one ruler, under whom the chains of traditional obligations do not consistently hold” (183). The short conclusion (“The Republic Remastered”) attacks “the tendency, dominant since the nineteenth-century emergence of sociology and economics, to treat human beings primarily as rational calculators or creatures of practical wisdom” (203) and expresses the hope that “close attention to these texts has the capacity to reshape the way we think about civic wisdom—the way schools teach history, literature, civics, and philosophy—about public discourse, especially public commentary on political oratory, and about the conversations we citizens hold among ourselves” (207).I have deliberately used the author’s own words to indicate what the book attempts to do, because I would find it impossible to summarise its argument any other way. Even with these formulae to help, Connolly’s selective and apparently random approach imposes a heavy burden on the reader to construct a coherent framework for her ideas. I think there are two main reasons for this. The first is a direct result of Connolly’s impressive mastery of the political-sciences literature. It is an excellent thing to be so thoroughly familiar with the works of Hannah Arendt, Simon Critchley, John Dewey, Michel Foucault, Dean Hammer, Bonnie Honig, Andreas Kalyvas, George Kareb... (shrink)

It is the almost unanimous opinion of modern scholars' that this man is M. Licinius Crassus. Manutius's explanation, that ex Nanneianis is a reference to Crassus' profiteering in the proscriptions and in particular to the property of one Nanneius, to be identified with the Nannius named as a proscription victim in Comm. Pet. 9, is accepted without hesitation.

Sisenna Historiarum lib. iii: Lucium Memmium, socerum Gai Scriboni, tribunum plebis, quern Marci Livi consiliarium fuisse callebant et tune Gurionis oratorem … . Erat Hortensius in bello primo anno miles, altero tribunus militum, Sulpicius legatus; aberat etiam M. Antonius; exercebatur una lege iudicium Varia, ceteris propter bellum intermissis; cui frequens aderam, quamquam pro se ipsi dicebant oratores non illi quidem principes, L. Memmius et Q. Pompeius, sed oratores tamen, teste diserto utique [Jahn: MSS. uterque] Philippo, cuius in testimonio contentio et (...) vim accusatoris habebat et copiam. Reliqui qui turn principes numerabantur in magistratibus erant cotidieque fere a nobis in contionibus audiebantur …. (shrink)

Le volume s'enquiert des liens entre l'affectivite et l'activite philosophique. Sur le mode historique et/ou problematique il s'agit de traiter de questions telles que: Y a-t-il une ou des tonalites affectives specifiques a la philosophie: etonnement, angoisse, ennui, serenite, melancolie,...? L'activite philosophique est-elle associee a un deni de l'affectivite et sous quelles formes: nihilisme, detachement, refoulement...? Quel rapport le philosophe noue-t-il a l'ambivalence de l'affect (indecidabilite, double bind,...)? Qu'en est-il de la reception thematique de l'affectivite en philosophie: une philosophie ou (...) une phenomenologie de l'affectivite est-elle possible? Quel statut philosophique pour des sciences nouvelles - les neurosciences -qui pretendent etudier objectivement et techniquement l'affectivit. (shrink)