The early biographies of Gandhi were more or less hagiographies, telling the story of Gandhi, the saintly politician and the liberator of colonial India. Even though Gandhi himself had discussed the topics of his lustfulness and his decision to embrace celibacy in his 1927 autobiography, these matters were glossed over or simply ignored. As time has gone on, Gandhi has caused increasing problems for those of his biographers and interpreters who wanted to hold him up as a paragon but also (...) wanted to tell the truth. And more recently, reevaluations of the Gandhi story have at times bordered on the sensational through the documentation of his eccentricities and religious austerities and in particular his attitudes to sexuality and his ‘experiments’ with the power of celibacy.In 1946, Nirmal Kumar Bose became Gandhi’s translator and secretary during the Mahatma’s Noakhali pilgrimage to bring peace to war-torn rural Bengal. He commenced what would become a central battlefield of Gandhi schol .. (shrink)

Although the physician’s use and misuse of power have been discussed in the social sciences and in literature, they have never been explored in medical ethics until now. In this book, Dr. Howard Brody argues that the central task is not to reduce the physician’s power, as others have suggested, but to develop guidelines for its use, so that the doctor shares with the patient both information and the responsibility for deciding on appropriate treatment. Dr. Brody first reviews literary (...) works dealing with medical power, from Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” to stories by William Carlos Williams, Vonda McIntyre, and Richard Selzer. These works, he shows, reveal the healers’ ambivalence over their own powers and patients’ fears of the abuse of power. Dr. Brody then points out important but neglected ethical issues that emerge from an analysis of power, such as the tension between care of individual patients and the pressures of the doctor’s workload; the rescue fantasy that impels some physicians to extraordinary lengths to save a life; and the economic system, which rewards surgeons and other specialists more than it does physicians who spend time talking with patients about their problems. He also shows how the perspective of shared power can shed new light on standard topics in medical ethics—from informed consent and confidentiality to resource allocation and cost containment. (shrink)

Many theorists, in their search for a better explanation of the dynamics of structure and agency, have expressed the need for a theory in which reflexivity and habitus are reconciled. In this article, we argue that a dissociative theory of mind can provide the essential framework in which habitual routines and reflexivity function in parallel. This is explored using the examples of athletic training and hypnosis, where the interplay between conscious and unconscious mechanisms is displayed. In both settings, there is (...) evidence to show that conscious reflexiveness and intersubjective and unconscious automatic processes are necessary to reach the desired outcome. We conclude that a dissociative theory of mind can shed new light on the relationship between habitus and reflexivity. (shrink)

Recently, as I have become more computer-literate, I have noticed some interesting parallels between computer mechanisms and Aquinas’ metaphysics of angelic faculties. The present essay expands on some of the analogies which Aquinas himself, though no proponent of AI theory, might have found interesting.

A reexamination of democracy, which during the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment seemed to offer a much-desired escape from arbitrary class structures and oppressive governments, but has not proven to be a sure formula or a simple solution. An awareness of the true complexities of democracy requires an understanding of a perennial dialectic residing at the heart of democracy, and manifesting itself in specific dialectical relationships: between elitism and populism, liberty and equality, smallness and bigness, religion and secular life, politics and economics, etc. (...) This book argues that such dialectical relationships, originally most explicit in particular nations, are also manifest in international relations. (shrink)

Like Henry Harris, I began doing intensive research on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in the mid-sixties. I recall going through all the chapters as a graduate student during one academic year, and looking around for commentaries. The only English-language commentary available was Loewenberg's Hegel's Phenomenology: Dialogues in the Life of Mind, which was suggestive of the dialectic taking place in the book, but not much help in getting over the “rough spots”. This gave me an incentive to work through Jean (...) Hyppolite's commentary, not yet translated into English, with my basic reading-knowledge of French. My 1976 Hegel's Phenomenology, Part I: Analysis and Commentary was one of the first in a long line of Anglophone commentaries. Harris in his introduction to Vol. I. mentions this effort at “analysis”, along with Findlay's “analysis” accompanying the 1977 Miller translation of the Phenomenology, as incentives for the inclusion of his own improved running analysis in the present commentary. I have included discussions of numerous partial or complete commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology in review articles published in 1971 in the American Philosophical Quarterly and Teorema, in 1979 in the American Philosophical Quarterly, and in 1981 in Hegel-Studien. Harris has the advantage of producing the most recent of all these commentaries, and in a way offers us a compendium of everything that has been done on the Phenomenology. His analysis and commentary includes a survey of the literature, in which almost all previous laborers in the field can find themselves commended or criticized in the endnotes. Thus I find comments like “Kainz has completely misunderstood the argument here”, “This is a point which Kainz has grasped more definitely than most commentators”, “[Kainz] does not deserve the brickbat Flay hurls at him”, and so forth. Other commentators, living and dead – Flay, Pöggeler, Navickas, Kenneth and Merold Westphal, Heidegger, Lauer, Werner Becker, Kojève, Wahl, Hyppolite, Labarrière, Bonsiepen, Forster, Shklar, Solomon, Werner Marx, and Robert Williams — are similarly discussed and critiqued. For some of us Anglophone commentators, such remarks may seem like red marks on essays from a patient professor. But certainly no one will mind, since Harris has spent more time and energy on this very specialized project than any of us. In fact, some former commentators almost have a “conflict of interest” in reviewing Harris' work, since so many of us have benefited at various points in our research from Harris' personal support and criticism. But in academics, as in life, mentors cannot always be assured of loyalty. (shrink)

Her importance seems to hinge on the fact that she is both a symbol and a historical reality.

The domestic legal obstacles to affirmative action to address the problem of the color line that have arisen in the United States in the past 30 years have become the occasion for discouragement and even despair in the face of the persistent racial disparities in American life. This is due, in part, to the limits of our domestic vocabulary for speaking about such initiatives. In this paper I argue that Christian ethics, with the help of the resources of the emergent (...) minority rights dialogue in international human rights, can play an important role in securing the cultural transformation needed to broaden our vocabulary and reframe our thinking so that our efforts to secure racial justice are not bound by the limits of the conventional domestic vocabulary. Specifically, I argue that the new international discussion of "the right to self-determination" can be usefully employed within Christian ethics to secure the cultural, moral and legal changes needed to secure racial justice in the United States. (shrink)

This article reevaluates research on gender differences in sexual attitudes, a literature characterized by misuse of attitude scales and misinterpretation of those gender differences that are obtained. A study by Hendrick, Hendrick, Slapion-Foote, and Foote is used to illustrate these pitfalls. The gender differences in sexual attitudes obtained in this study, characterized by Hendrick et al. as indicative of women's greater sexual conservatism, are interpreted here as reflections of the different social structural positions of women and men.

Inquisitiveness has been found to be a characteristic of successful global managers. The paper distinguishes inquisitiveness from purposeless curiosity andshows that it is a virtue. It suggests that the practice of inquisitiveness is akin to abduction, the method of reasoning described by Charles S. Peirce distinct from deduction and induction, and essential to creativity. It then suggests that an enhanced capacity for inquisitiveness and abduction will increase the capacity for moral imagination and hence improve moral decision-making (and perhaps moral behaviour).

In considering the development and course of the American welfare state, there are some places which are better starting points than others. One such place is the State Street corridor, the series of high-rise Chicago Housing Authority public-housing projects which loom over Lake Michigan. Most Chicagoans, like their counterparts in other cities, have become inured to conditions there: a murder rate far in excess of that of the city as a whole, a society of unemployed single mothers, deferred maintenance that (...) makes stairwells, plazas, and elevators places of danger. Author Alex Kotlowitz decribes the situation of a mother of two boys in Chicago's Henry Horner Homes: “She lived in daily fear that something might happen to her young ones.… Already that year, 57 children had been killed in the city, five in the Horner area, including two, aged eight and six, who died from smoke inhalation when firefighters had to climb the 14 stories to their apartment. Both of the building's elevators were broken.”. (shrink)

‘It is not likely that anything absolutely new can be added to the interpretation of this familiar poem.’ So G. L. Hendrickson forty five years ago. It need scarcely be noted that in spite of these cautionary words much has been written on this ode in the intervening years. With hesitation I add here a few words on what seems to me an overlooked yet central aspect of this poem.

Bailey posed the problem succinctly and clearly: ‘Though you can be said to “fashion a dream for yourself”, it is not easy to see how you can do it for someone else.’ He agrees with Giussani: somnia = ineptae fabulae, which is unexceptionable. But in fact Bailey's objection to the ‘literal’ meaning of the text is baseless. Dream control was indeed practised in antiquity.

Servius was surely not the first to show discomfort with Vergil's choice of the word violaverit. Observing that the simile in lines 67–8 derives from Homer , he seems to be apologizing for Vergil when he explains that the poet's violaverit translates Homer's νινη. And discomfort there should be. The notion of ‘tainting, spoiling, damaging, defiling’ that violare should carry seems out of place both for the ivory-image and for the picture of the beautiful girl. Modern commentators have been no (...) less troubled than Servius. Unwilling, however, to see Vergil as blindly enslaved to Homer, they have offered another explanation: violare here is tied to the violentia of her lover Turnus. ‘Vergil connects the violentia of Turnus with the staining of the ivory in the simile used to describe Lavinia's blush.’ should like to add a third explanation for Vergil's choice of violare. (shrink)

Interaction of ligands such as epidermal growth factor and interferon‐γ with the extracellular domains of their plasma membrane receptors results in internalization followed by translocation into the nucleus of the ligand and/or receptor. There has been reluctance, however, to ascribe signaling importance to this, the focus instead being on second messenger pathways, including mobilization of kinases and inducible transcription factors (TFs). The latter, however, fails to explain the fact that so many ligands stimulate the same second messenger cascades/TFs, and yet (...) show distinct gene activation profiles. This is particularly apt in the case of the seven STAT TFs that are held to be the mediators of the distinct cellular functions of over 60 ligands. The current review focuses on five representative nuclear localizing ligands for which there is documentation of translocation into the cytosol and nucleus through well‐characterized pathways, in addition to a role in gene activation by ligand/receptor in the nucleus. BioEssays 26:993‐1004, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)