Walter Kendrick traces the relatively recent concept of pornography—the word was not coined until the late 18th century—which became a public issue once the printing press gave ordinary people access to the erotica of the Greeks and Romans, the art and literature of the French enlightenment, and the poems of the Earl of Rochester and John Cleland's _Fanny Hill_. From the secret museums to the pornography trials of _Madame Bovary_ and _Lady Chatterly's Lover_, to Mapplethorpe, cable TV, and (...) the Internet, Kendrick explores how conceptions of pornography relate to issues of freedom of expression and censorship. (shrink)

This article explores the relation between two different modes of cosmology: the social and the scientific. Over the twentieth century, scientific understandings of the dimensions and operations of the physical universe changed dramatically, significantly prompted by astronomical and astrophysical research undertaken at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. Could those understandings be readily translated into social theory? Studies across a range of disciplines have intimated that the scientific cosmos might be less essential to the worlds of meaning and belonging (...) that people and communities compose around themselves than more local and relational models of an ordered whole. The article applies that proposition to the Mount Wilson Observatory itself, arguing that the observatory’s founder, George Ellery Hale, and his acolytes were deeply invested in practices of terrestrial place-making, the politics of belonging, and the cadences of civilizational time as applied to their city and its region. Moreover, they struggled to construct a philosophy integrating the cosmos they were seeking to fix at home with the contortions and careering trajectories of the universal whole. (shrink)

The Dialectical Forge identifies dialectical disputation as a primary formative dynamic in the evolution of pre-modern Islamic legal systems, promoting dialectic from relative obscurity to a more appropriate position at the forefront of Islamic legal studies. The author introduces and develops a dialectics-based analytical method for the study of pre-modern Islamic legal argumentation, examines parallels and divergences between Aristotelian dialectic and early juridical jadal-theory, and proposes a multi-component paradigm—the Dialectical Forge Model—to account for the power of jadal in shaping Islamic (...) law and legal theory.In addition to overviews of current evolutionary narratives for Islamic legal theory and dialectic, and expositions on key texts, this work shines an analytical light upon the considerably sophisticated “proto-system” of juridical dialectical teaching and practice evident in Islam’s second century, several generations before the first “full-system” treatises of legal and dialectical theory were composed. This proto-system is revealed from analyses of dialectical sequences in the 2nd/8th century Kitāb Ikhtilāf al-ʿIrāqiyyīn / ʿIrāqiyyayn through a lens molded from 5th/11th century jadal-theory treatises. Specific features thus uncovered inform the elaboration of a Dialectical Forge Model, whose more general components and functions are explored in closing chapters. (shrink)

This is the fullest existing collection of the texts, for the moment only in Italian translation, with an introduction, notes, general presentation of the texts, various indexes (part of this material is to be found in an attached CD).

Neuroscientific evidence has educated us in the ways in which the brain mediates our thought and behavior and, therefore, forced us to critically examine how we conceive of free will. This volume, featuring contributions from an international and interdisciplinary group of distinguished researchers and scholars, explores how our increasing knowledge of the brain can elucidate the concept of the will and whether or to what extent it is free. It also examines how brain science can inform our normative judgments of (...) moral and criminal responsibility for our actions. Some chapters point out the different respects in which mental disorders can compromise the will and others show how different forms of neuromodulation can reveal the neural underpinning of the mental capacities associated with the will and can restore or enhance them when they are impaired. (shrink)

Aims to show graduate students and researchers the vital benefits of integrating mathematics into their study and experience of the physical world. This book details numerous topics from the frontiers of modern physics and mathematics such as convergence, Green functions, complex analysis, Fourier series and Fourier transform, tensors, and others.

This book aims merely to study the human values that were sought and realized by Greek democracy, the chief problems that it faced, the measure of success and ...

In this paper the author seeks to clearly define the distinctions between religion and theology in the interest of furthering the discussion on religion. The author defines the two phrases, as well as the term empathy and how the former two relate to the latter. The author uses both ancient and modern references to establish the nature of empathy, and discuss how religion and theology have been confused in the past. Lastly, the author discusses the future of theology in civilization.

What is the role of consciousness in nature? The science of consciousness has largely neglected the question through its emphasis on human experience. In this précis of A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, I outline how we can move from a top-down approach that begins with investigations in humans to an evolutionary bottom-up approach that targets the adaptive origins of even the most minimal forms of subjective experience. I will also offer an introduction to the central thesis of (...) the book, i.e. the pathological complexity thesis, according to which consciousness evolved in order to enable animals to adaptively respond to their life history challenges. (shrink)

uber das Programm der kommenden Philosophie. ZUr Kritik der Gewalt. SChicksal und Charakter. GEschichtsphilosophische Thesen. THeologisch-politisches Fragment.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This paper intends to open a discussion on how certain dangerous kinds of deceptive reasoning can be defined, in which way it is achieved in a discussion, and which would be the strategies for defense against such deceptive attacks on the light of some principles accepted as fundamental for rationality and logic.

Contents: Kant.- Panfideismus.- Goethe und Fichte.- Romantik.- Schelling.- Hegel und die Hegelsche Schule.- Mythos, gläubigkeit und glaube.

This essay examines Michael Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowing and seeks to clarify and elaborate upon its claims. Tacit knowing, which is conscious although inarticulate, must be distinguished from tacit processes, which are largely unconscious. Schematization is explored as a primary tacit process that humans share with all animals. This tacit process organizes and secures, in long-term memory, information of interest provided by receptors and those learned skifls conducive to survival. Human empirical knowing integrates schematized subsidiaries info articulate explicitness through (...) culturally-embedded symbols evoked in terms of felt fittingness. (shrink)

The providential state.--The collectivist movement.--The reconstruction of liberalism.--The testament of liberty.

In this paper, we present an argument showing why the general properties of a self-organizing system (e.g. being far from equilibrium) may be too weak to characterize biological and proto-biological systems. The special character of biological systems, tell us that its distinctive capacities could have been developed in pre-biotic times. In other words, the basic properties of life would be better comprehended if we think that they were much more likely early in time. We developed a conceptual proposal on the (...) origins of pre-biotic world, a kind of protocellular system which is made up of simple molecular compounds interconnecting three different types of processes. The interrelation of these processes characterizes the “Informational Dynamical System” (our conceptualprotocell proposal) as an autonomous dynamical system that can maintain by itself in far from equilibrium state, as opposed to those that depend on external causes. Consequently it follows that, in the dawn of pre-biotic world, there was no DNA or RNA or proteins to begin with. As well, our proposal implies the separation of biological evolution from the kind of open-ended evolution that gave rise to first breed of animate matter. (shrink)