A translation of a dialogue between Evelyne Grossman and Jacob Rogozinski on Artaud, Deleuze, and the status of the ego.

The guiding theme of these essays by aesthetician, musician, and Santayana scholar Morris Grossman is the importance of preserving the tension between what can be unified and what is disorganized, random, and miscellaneous. Grossman described this as the tension between art and morality: Art arrests a sense of change and yields moments of unguarded enjoyment and peace; but soon, shifting circumstances compel evaluation, decision, and action. According to Grossman, the best art preserves the tension between the aesthetic (...) consummation of experience and the press of morality understood as the business of navigating conflicts, making choices, and meeting needs. This concern was intimately related to his reading of George Santayana. The best philosophy, like the best art, preserves the tension between what can be ordered and what resists assimilation, and Grossman read Santayana as exemplifying this virtue in his embrace of multiple perspectives. Other scholars have noted the multiplicity or irony in Santayana's work, but Grossman was unique in taking such a style to be a substantive part of Santayana's philosophizing. (shrink)

1. Metaphysics -- 2. The mind -- 3. Desire and emotion -- 4. Freedom from bondage -- 5. Transcendence.

This book is a collection from the articles of 'The Skeptic' and brings together the best from the magazine's archive in one myth-busting volume. It includes mystery articles on the weeping statue at a Dublin suburban home, Turin Shroud, Britain's Roswell, Nostradamus's predictions and UFOs.

The changing world of health care finance has led to a paradigm shift in health care with health care being viewed more and more as a commodity. Many have argued that such a paradigm shift is incompatible with the very nature of medicine and health care. But such arguments raise more questions than they answer. There are important assumptions about basic concepts of health care and markets that frame such arguments.

Introduction: Christian moral action -- Stanley Hauerwas -- Reinhard Hütter -- Common threads -- Thomas Aquinas -- Toward an ecumenical ethic of grace -- Conclusion: A community-centered ecumenical ethic of grace.

Mitochondria contain a molecular genetic system to express the 13 protein components of the electron transport system encoded in the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA). Defects in the function of this system result in some diaseases, many of which are multisystem disorders, prominently involving highly aerobic, postmitotic tissues. These defects can be caused by large‐scale rearrangements of mtDNA, by point mutations, or by nuclear gene mutations resulting in abnormalities in mtDNA. Although any of these mutations would be expected to produce a similar (...) clinical phenotype by compromising oxidative phosphorylation, the surprising and puzzling result is that different clinical phenotypes are generally associated with specific mtDNA mutations. Moreover, the same mutation can produce a distinct clinical phenotype in different individuals or pedigrees. MtDNA rearrangements are also found in aged individuals, but at a subclinical level, suggesting that normal and pathological processes can differ by the effect of genetic or environmental factors on the error rate of mtDNA replication. (shrink)

Writing an accessible introduction to process theology is no easy task. As Roland Faber notes, “Process theology is a quite complex phenomenon”. Yet this is the task he sets out for himself in The Becoming of God: Process Theology, Philosophy, and Multireligious Engagement. While Faber describes his book as an introduction to process theology, it would perhaps be better described as an introduction to the thought of Alfred North Whitehead and its theological implications.In typical Faber fashion, this poetic introduction to (...) Whitehead is thorough, complex, and insightful. Ranging across issues of science, religious studies, theology, and philosophy, Faber tackles some of the most complicated thought problems... (shrink)

Mindfulness, derived from Buddhist psychology and philosophy, has gained broad popularity in the last decades, due importantly to scientific interest and findings. Yet Buddhist mindfulness developed in Asian pre-scientific culture and religion, and is predicated upon long-term cultivation of introspective awareness of lived experience, not highly accessible to empirical study. Further complicating the ‘science' of mindfulness, mindfulness's very definition is multifaceted, resistant to dismantling and requires substantial amounts of personal practice to gain expertise. Most scientists investigating mindfulness have not achieved (...) a high level of this expertise. Here I address how mindfulness is currently being invented as a scientific fact or object of inquiry. The intrinsic porosity of subjective and objective factors influencing the investigation of mindfulness is highlighted: the evolving body of ‘scientific' experts, instruments used to measure mindfulness, the alliances of funders and other supporters of mindfulness research, and the public representation of the related findings. (shrink)

Several philosophers of science have claimed that the conceptual difficulties of quantum mechanics can be resolved by appealing to a particular interpretation of probability theory. For example, Popper bases his treatment of quantum mechanics on the propensity interpretation of probability, and Margenau bases his treatment of quantum mechanics on the frequency interpretation of probability. The purpose of this paper is (i) to consider and reject such claims, and (ii) to discuss the question of whether the ψ -function refers to an (...) individual system or to an ensemble of systems. (shrink)

For four decades _Sources of Chinese Tradition_ has served to introduce Western readers to Chinese civilization as it has been seen through basic writings and historical documents of the Chinese themselves. Now in its second edition, revised and extended through Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin-era China, this classic volume remains unrivaled for its wide selection of source readings on history, society, and thought in the world's largest nation. Award-winning China scholar Wm. Theodore de Bary--who edited the first edition in 1960--and (...) his coeditor Richard Lufrano have revised and updated the second volume of Sources to reflect the interactions of ideas, institutions, and historical events from the seventeenth century up to the present day. Beginning with Qing civilization and continuing to contemporary times, volume II brings together key source texts from more than three centuries of Chinese history, with opening essays by noted China authorities providing context for readers not familiar with the period in question. Here are just a few of the topics covered in this second volume of _Sources of Chinese Tradition:_ • Early Sino-Western contacts in the seventeenth century; • Four centuries of Chinese reflections on differences between Eastern and Western civilizations; • Nineteenth- and twentieth-century reform movements, with treatises on women's rights, modern science, and literary reform; • Controversies over the place of Confucianism in modern Chinese society; • The nationalist revolution--including readings from Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek; • The communist revolution--with central writings by Mao Zedong; • Works from contemporary China--featuring political essays from Deng Xiaoping and dissidents including Wei Jingsheng. With more than two hundred selections in lucid, readable translation by today's most renowned experts on Chinese language and civilization, _Sources of Chinese Tradition_ will continue to be recognized as the standard for source readings on Chinese civilization, an indispensable learning tool for scholars and students of Asian civilizations. (shrink)

The history of Physical Science appears to exhibit, periodically, a race between the acmulation of data and the ability of its codification to find a natural place for much of the empirical findings. If the codifying scheme is a mathematical theory, capable of interpolation and extrapolation, according to the rules of the particular branch of mathematics employed, the ablest handlers of the theory are frequently confronted with a situation in which mathematical computation alone does not suffice. In such a situation (...) the introduction of symbols, whose interpretation is not direct and simple is resorted to. This symbol is usually involved in a mathematical relation by a species of reasoning, which may be somewhat unfamiliar and remote from customary habits of thought. It is generally accepted as physically valid, if the mathematical formulation which involves it can produce results which account for the mass of data uncovered by experimenters. As an example of such a procedure we may mention the case of the Schrödinger Ψ-symbol, a symbol which was involved in Schrödinger's famous matter wave equation. The successes which such a theory enjoyed, particularly, in its initial stages, in formally relating the relative positions and intensities of spectral lines, with the atomistic concepts of gross matter which were inferred from the data of macroscopic measurement, such as the atomic mass, the electronic charge, Planck quantum of action, etc.,—these successes, gave a certain physical dignity to the Ψ-function itself. This dignity was further enhanced by the disclosure, by Schrödinger, of four functions of the Ψ-symbol which held the same place in the “continuity equation” as the classical charge density and the three components of current density. The successes accompanying this discovery for spectroscopic problems, in particular, are well known to Physicists. (shrink)

"Exhibition dates: The Phillips Collection, Oct. 10, 2009-Jan. 10, 2010; University of New Mexico Art Museum, Feb. 6-May 30, 2010; University of Virginia Museum of Art, Aug. 7-Oct. 10, 2010; University of British Columbia, Museum of Anthropology Oct. 29, 2010-Jan. 23, 2011." --T.p. verso.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophocles’s Enemy Sisters: Antigone and IsmeneWm. Blake Tyrrell (bio) and Larry J. BennettAt the core of the Oedipus myth, as Sophocles presents it, is the proposition that all masculine relationships are based on reciprocal acts of violence. Laius, taking his cue from the oracle, violently rejects Oedipus out of fear that his son will seize his throne and invade his conjugal bed. Oedipus, taking his cue from the oracle, (...) does away with Laius, violently rebuffs the sphinx, then takes their places—as king and “scourge of the city,” respectively. Again, Oedipus, taking his cue from the oracle, plots the death of that unknown figure who may be seeking to usurp his own position. Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias, each taking his cue from the oracle, seek one another’s downfall.All these acts of violence gradually wear away the differences that exist not only in the same family but throughout the community.—René Girard, Violence and the SacredRené Girard does not include feminine relationships in his assessment of the Oedipus myth, yet the same redundancy that characterizes the males marks the females.1 Jocasta conjoins in one person multiple and redundant social roles: she is the mother and wife of the same person, for which she [End Page 1] hangs herself, leaving for Oedipus “many pains that a mother’s furies fulfilled” (Homer Odyssey 11.279–80). Her daughters, their father’s sisters, manifest kinship redundancy in two persons. Incest produces circularly, reverting to a sibling of the parent rather than moving forward with a descendant. The absence of linear progression from one generation to the next creates a sameness and equilibrium that thwart separation and individuality. Oedipus’s brothers/sons fail in their adult roles, because neither can overcome the other’s right to the throne of Thebes and the mastery of its royal household. They are enemy brothers locked in reciprocal violence.2 Antigone and Ismene have escaped notice not only as enemy sisters but even as products of the same incest. Audiences for Sophocles’s Antigone have viewed them as “normal” women and cooperated with his characters in emphasizing the differences between them. They have assumed from Antigone’s betrothal to Haemon and resistance to Creon that she is the elder, more mature sister.3 They tend to accept without question that Antigone engages in burial rituals with Polyneices’s corpse (241–58) and returns to it (442–35).4 Bernard M. W. Knox’s critically powerful concept of the “Sophoclean hero” has bolstered this view of Antigone while reducing Ismene to a foil, and abetted the tendency of modern producers of the play to cast an older or more famous actress in the role of Antigone.5 Naturalistic readings like that of C. M. Bowra—“seeing that Ismene is her only close relative in the world, Antigone is remarkably cold to her”6—have masked the source and hence the vehemence of Antigone’s fury.That the reciprocity of the violence between Ismene and Antigone has gone unnoticed is understandable in view of the familiarity of the conflict between their brothers. Males in Greek society pursued difference by striving to excel as aristoi (best) in competition for prestige, wealth, and power.7 Whenever Eteocles and Polyneices came together, each asserted a right to Oedipus’s household and throne that was equally matched, and violence ensued from the equilibrium. On the other hand, Greek women were not supposed to compete with one another for distinction. They wove wool for clothes, maintained the household, and cared for the children, the sick, and the dead, activities that required cooperation away from public view.8 Proximity to other women was the norm and desideratum. Moreover, lawgivers like Solon based their funeral legislation on the premise that every woman wanted to participate in mourning.9 For the sake of public tranquillity, legislators tried to limit the numbers of women participants by imposing restrictions according to degrees of kinship, for instance, to children of fifth cousins. In this context, women were interchangeable, and the places they held during birth, coming of age in wedding ceremonies, and death, [End Page 2] were open to more than one woman. Closeness and... (shrink)