bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Wittgenstein: My Wicked Heart
Authors: Mcginn Colin
Published: November 2023

Was Wittgenstein a spiritual as well as a philosophical genius? Ray Monk’s exceptionally fine and fat biography puts us in a better position to answer this question than we have been hitherto.

Perhaps the best place to begin trying to understand Wittgenstein’s character is with the photographs that exist of his face. He himself advised friends to pay more attention to people’s faces and often passed remarks about the faces of others, saying (according to Theodore Redpath) of Locke that he had “a nice face,” of Descartes that he had “the face of a murderer,” of T. S. Eliot that he had “a modern face” (meant disapprovingly). I recommend, in particular, a striking picture of Wittgenstein, reproduced in Monk’s book, which was taken in Swansea in 1945 by Ben Richards—a young man almost forty years Wittgenstein’s junior, with whom he was then despairingly in love.
Wittgenstein: Seething
Authors: Mcginn Colin
Published: November 2023

When I saw you last I was confirmed in a view which had arisen in me last term already: you then made it very clear to me that you were tired of my conversation etc. Now please don’t think that/ mind that! Why shouldn’t you be tired of me, I don’t believe for a moment that I can be entertaining or interesting to you. What I did mind was to hear through your words an undertone of grudge or annoyance. Perhaps these are not exactly the right words but it was that sort of thing. I couldn’t make out for some time what could be the cause of it all, until a thought came into my head which was by an accident proved to be correct. It was this: I thought probably you think that I cultivate your friendship amongst other reasons to be able to get some financial assistance from you if I should be in need (as you imagined I might be some day). This thought was very disagreeable to me.
Russell: You Would Not Want to Be Him
Authors: Mcginn Colin
Published: November 2023

Bertrand Russell’s first and formative love affair was with symbolic logic. But the relationship, though fertile, was troubled. Beginning in rapture, as he molded and extended the new concepts and techniques, sweeping away the barren detritus of two millennia, the affair eventually foundered on a stinging paradox, unexpected and intractable, which abruptly took the shine off the whole thing. His devotion crumbled, and he was driven to seek comfort elsewhere, never quite regaining his former idealism. It must have been very disillusioning, and no doubt tainted his other romantic involvements, which also began in ecstasy and then became mired in refractoriness of one kind or another. For the antinomial is not adorable. And if logic can’t be trusted, what can?

. Along with Frege, Peano, and others, Russell constructed the basic machinery of modern mathematical logic, clearing up the defects of the older syllogistic logic, and putting the new logic to use in the analysis of mathematics itself. The program was to provide a rigorous demonstration of classical mathematics in purely logical (including set-theoretic) terms, thus setting mathematics on a transparently secure foundation.
Fodor: Mental Representations
Authors: Mcginn Colin
Published: November 2023

In Mental Acts, published in 1957, P. T. Geach proposed that judgment be understood in terms of “mental utterances” in an “interior language.” Judging, he supposed, consists in the mind’s exercise of concepts, and the content of a judgment comprises a complex of Ideas which represent things in the world; his suggestion was that these Ideas be identified with words—to judge that the sky is blue is to say in one’s heart “the sky is blue.” This theory, or something very like it, has recently been advocated by Jerry Fodor (among others) under the title “the language of thought,” though Geach’s early statement of the theory is not mentioned. In this new collection of essays, mostly reprints of earlier publications, Fodor’s chief concern is to expound and defend what he calls the Representational Theory of the Mind (RTM). RTM, as Fodor expounds it, is the thesis that to have thoughts is to be related to internal formulae in a (probably innate and universal) language, these formulae having both syntactic and semantic properties; mental processes such as reasoning consist in computational operations performed upon these formulae.
Putnam: Ideal Justifications
Authors: Mcginn Colin
Published: November 2023

Since the publication in 1975 of Hilary Putnam’s second volume of collected papers, he has been changing his views; he has, indeed, been undergoing something of a conversion. As he confesses in the introduction to the present volume, there was a time when he was an unqualified realist, hostile to verificationism in any form; when he believed that reference to things in the world was unproblematic and semantically primary; and when he took truth to consist in a relation of correspondence between thought and a mindindependent world. But now Putnam has come to believe that all this is wrong, or at least highly misleading: the papers collected in this third volume set out to explain why.

There is much to commend in these efforts: his discussion is, as always, lively and stimulating; he takes on the big issues with uninhibited freshness; he ingeniously connects what may have seemed like separate questions. There are, however, some regrettable lapses in both conception and presentation: formulations of key positions are obscure and elusive, relying upon a liberal use of inverted commas to suggest that more is being meant by the quoted phrase than it literally says; there is a tendency to resort to shrill sloganizing when rigorous argument is what is wanted, possibly as a result of hasty composition; and there are moments of pretentiousness and selfcongratulation.
Quine: Theories and Things
Authors: Mcginn Colin
Published: November 2023

Quine’s latest collection of essays is somewhat of a miscellany: it ranges from the strictly logical, through the narrowly philosophical, to the accessibly popular. The slighter essays make for enjoyable reading, displaying Quine’s flawless prose to good effect, while the weightier essays helpfully clarify and extend his already familiar doctrines. In this review I shall comment critically upon some of these doctrines as thus clarified and extended, in the hope that the issues, and Quine’s stand on them, will come into sharper focus.

The opening essay, “Things and Their Place in Theories,” begins, strikingly enough, with this sentence: “Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggering of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors” (p. 1). This conception of the point and payoff of referring to objects, in both ordinary talk and theoretical science, is recognizably pragmatist in spirit: saying what there is is wielding an instrument whose function it is to predict and control certain events (“sensory triggerings”) in the speaker. Such a conception would not, of course, be shared by all philosophers of science.
39
Authors: Mcginn Colin
Published: November 2023

Thus, for Russell, ethical knowledge enjoys the privileges and securities that the rationalists discerned in our knowledge of logic and mathematics: immediacy, certainty, necessity. It is a paradigm of what true knowledge should be like, and contrasts sharply, in Russell’s epistemology, with the empirical knowledge we seek in science. There Russell finds only uncertainty, indirectness, and questionable inference. We know the world of science merely “by description,” as a projection from what we are immediately “acquainted with,” and we must rely on indirect, subjective “signs” if we are to venture any objective knowledge at all.
Aesthetics and Politics
Authors: Erkkila Betsy
Published: November 2023

In his 1844 essay “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson described an American poet who did not exist. “Our logrolling, our stumps and their politics, our fisheries, our Negroes, and Indians, our boasts, and our repudiations, the wrath of rogues, and the pusillanimity of honest men, the northern trade, the southern planting, the western clearing, Oregon, and Texas, are yet unsung.” Critics have been quick to point out that Whitman’s poems appear to be a direct response to Emerson’s call for an American poet.2 Emerson himself responded to the 1855 Leaves of Grassin an act of literary recognition that was as generous as it was prophetic. Only a few weeks after Whitman sent him a copy of his poems, Emerson wrote: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging” (LGC,p. 732). Gratified by Emerson’s recognition, Whitman published the letter along with his own letter addressing Emerson as “dear Friend and Master” in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass.
Leaves of Grass and the Body Politic
Authors: Erkkila Betsy
Published: November 2023

The publication of Leaves of Grassin 1855 was not an escape from politics but a continuation of politics by other means. The poems were, in Whitman’s words, an attempt to provide “some worthy record of that entire faith and acceptance (‘to justify the ways of God to man’ is Milton’s well-known and ambitious phrase) which is the foundation of moral America” (PW,II, 729). Whitman’s reference to John Milton’s Paradise Lostis instructive, for like his epic forebear, he attempts to mythologize the historically specific political struggles of his time as universal and divinely ordained. As a work of visionary democracy, Leaves of Grassis split between Whitman’s desire to speak for and against his age. While the self-sovereign individual and utopian social community of his poems represent an implicit critique of the actual conditions of industrial and commercial transformation, Whitman’s ideological investment in the political system led him to “justify” when he did not actually silence the more disagreeable workings of free-enter-prise democracy in nineteenth-century America. Although Whitman was cognizant of the ways that past literature participated in and justified the domination, power, and interests of an aristocratic class system, he never fully acknowledged the extent of his own ideological complicity as the celebrator of American democracy. The fervent Tom Paine democrat of Leaves of Grassis (mis)represented as a nonpartisan citizen of the world, a figure who stands simultaneously in-side and outside social time and above the squalor of political contest:
The Union War
Authors: Erkkila Betsy
Published: November 2023

The Civil War took place in part because the American people decided that it must take place in order to affirm the rational and divine order of the universe. From the time when slavery was written into the Constitution to Lincoln’s second inaugural address, the spectre of civil war as the just retribution for the sin of slavery haunted the American political imagination. While the Constitution was being debated, the Congregational minister Samuel Hopkins, one of Jonathan Edwards’s leading disciples, expressed his fear that civil war would be the consequence of writing slavery into the law of the land: How does it appear in the light of Heaven, and of all good men, well in-formed, that thoseStates, who have been fighting for liberty, and consider themselves as the highest and most noble example of zeal for it, cannot agree in any political constitution, unless it indulge and authorize them to enslave their fellow men. I think if this constitution be not adopted, as it is, without any alteration, we shall have none, and shall be in a state of anarchy, and probably civil war: therefore, I wish to have it adopted: but still, as I said, I fear. And perhaps civil war will not be avoided, ifit be adopted.’
The Truman Doctrine and the Beginnings of Global Strategy
Authors: Jones Howard
Published: November 2023

The Truman Doctrine has been the subject of debate since its announcement in March 1947. Critics have called it the “first shot of the Cold War”; a global license for American imperialism; an exaggerated response to an imagined communist menace that scared Americans with rhetoric and contributed to McCarthyism; a reactionary policy that placed the United States on the side opposite freedom and social, political, and economic reforms; proof of an “arrogance of power” that helped lead the United States into Vietnam. Defenders have hailed the declaration as evidence of America’s determination to contain Soviet communism; an assurance of the nation’s commitment to Free World principles; a promise by America to safeguard the world against totalitarianism; a generous aid program designed to help first Greece and. Turkey and then any nation that could prove need.
Pardon and the Rehabilitative Ideal
Authors: Moore Kathleen Dean
Published: November 2023

Under the influence of Bentham’s optimism, philosophers, social scientists, and jurists alike hoped that the new born twentieth century would be an era of penal reform. The hope was that the humanity of law and the power of science would be harnessed together to achieve social goals; American prisons would become rehabilitation centers from which offenders would issue forth, transformed into productive members of society. Since sentences would be fitted to the rehabilitative needs of each individual, there would no longer be a need for the institution of pardon. Pardons would wither away, and they would not be missed-for their presuppositions of moral guilt were inconsistent with the new faith that offenders were sick or defective or confused, but never wicked.
Pardoning in Transition
Authors: Moore Kathleen Dean
Published: November 2023

To this day, courts, legislatures, and philosophers are still working out the details of a system of punishment based on commensurate deserts. Pardon and punishment have always been closely connected, both in theory and in practice. So it is no surprise that, as the system of punishment disentangles itself from the old theory-even while carrying the weight of the new theory-the pardoning power, stumbling beside punishment, needs to redefine itself and its new direction. To date, there has not been a major change in the theoretical justification for pardon that parallels the shift in justification for punishment.
Moralistic Retributivism
Authors: Moore Kathleen Dean
Published: November 2023

Moralistic retributivism is the patriarch in the retributivist family tree. The oldest form of retributivism and the parent of most new retributivist theories, it is also the most scorned and neglected. This is the sort of theory people usually have in mind when they criticize retributivism for having an excess of enthusiasm for other peoples’ pain, for being an old-fashioned, busybody, vindictive kind of justice. At the same time, it is the theory of justice that probably most closely corresponds to commonsense views of justice, what F. H. Bradley called the “vulgar” view.’
Justified Pardons: Excuses
Authors: Moore Kathleen Dean
Published: November 2023

The good reasons for pardoning grouped here as ‘excuses’ are justified by the principles of legalistic retributivism. To see how legalistic retributivism justifies pardons, consider the straight-forward fact description of a crime, provided by this familiar rhyme: The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, All on a summer’s day. The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts, And quickly ran away.
Justified Pardons: Justifications
Authors: Moore Kathleen Dean
Published: November 2023

Seventy-three-year-old Emily Gilbert was so sick with Alzheimer’s disease and osteoporosis that she begged her husband, Roswell Gilbert, to shoot her. He granted her that last wish; he pumped two bullets from a 9-mm Luger into her brain, and then he turned himself in. A jury took only four hours to convict him of first-degree murder; the seventy-five-year-old retired electrical engineer will not be eligible for parole until his hundredth birthday. He was astonished.
Matter & Force
Authors: Vailati Ezio
Published: November 2023

Given the metaphysical and theological ground on which Leibniz had decided to mount his last attack against Newtonianism, physical issues played an ancillary role, and consequently those which the disputants perceived more directly tied to the positions they wanted to press received the earliest and greatest attention. Leibniz kept attacking Newtonian gravitation as miraculous or occult and the view that the quantity of force in matter is decreasing as leading to a debased notion of God. Similarly, Clarke criticized Leibniz’s claim, that the quantity of matter is infinite and its force conserved, as conducive to the effective expulsion of God from the universe.
Positive and Negative Duty in the Liberal Tradition: An Overview
Authors: Smith Patricia
Published: November 2023

This is what Thomas Hobbes thought life would be like without a civil society to bring order and morality into the world: a war of all against all. Anarchy. Almost the worst situation imaginable. Almost. Organized aggression (such as Hitlers death camps) is arguably worse, but if so, anarchy runs a very close second. Anarchy is the antithesis of peace.
The Duty of Charity and the Equivalence Thesis
Authors: Smith Patricia
Published: November 2023

In two widely discussed and important articles, James Rachels and Peter Singer have formulated powerful arguments to the effect that there is no morally relevant difference between positive and negative duties as such (or at least between killing and letting die), and consequently that our general failure to save the lives of many who now die from starvation and malnutrition is more or less equivalent to negligent homicide.
Conclusion
Authors: Russell Bertrand
Published: November 2023

IN the foregoing pages we have traced, in brief outline, some of the more notable conflicts between the theologians and the men of science during the past four centuries, and we have tried to estimate the bearing of present-day science upon presentday theology. We have seen that, in the period since Copernicus, whenever science and theology have disagreed, science has proved victorious. We have seen also that, where practical issues were involved, as in witchcraft and medicine, science has stood for the diminution of suffering, while theology has encouraged man’s natural savagery. The spread of the scientific outlook, as opposed to the theological, has indisputably made, hitherto, for happiness. The issue is now, however, entering upon a wholly new phase, and this for two reasons : first, that scientific technique is becoming more important in its effects than the scientific temper of mind ; secondly, that newer religions are taking the place of Christianity, and repeating the errors of which Christianity has repented.
Russell’s Logicist Program
Authors: Landini Gregory
Published: November 2023

It is well known that Russell’s original conception of logicism differed from that of Frege. Exactly how they differed is, however, a thorny subject. Frege’s logicism proclaimed that arithmetic is logic. Geometry was excluded, and as Grattan-Guinness points out, it is not even clear how much of analysis he wanted. Russell’s logicism, on the contrary, was that all of “pure mathematics” is logic. Not a few regard Russell’s conception of “pure mathematics” as confused. If so, the whole of Russell’s work is marred by this original sin. It is important, therefore, to understand what Russell meant in speaking of “pure mathematics.” It is no less important to properly grasp Frege and Russell’s conceptions of logic. This is the focus of the present chapter.
The Logic Of The Principles Of Mathematics
Authors: Landini Gregory
Published: November 2023

In May of 1903, Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics appeared. The book was the crescendo of Russell’s studies on relations, setting forth a detailed explanation of how the logic of relations can encompass (non-applied) mathematics (including rational dynamics and geometry). This chapter focuses on the foundation of that explanation-viz., the characterization of logic in Principles as the science of propositions. Russell’s formal calculus for logic is set forth and its improvements over Peano’s work are noted. Next the ontology of propositions underwriting that logic is discussed. Here we shall find that the old maxim quodlibet ens est unum is the fundamental ontological doctrine of Principles.
The New Theory Of The Variable
Authors: Landini Gregory
Published: November 2023

Principles offered an analysis of the constituents of propositions which was to ground the use of unrestricted variables in the formal calculus for logic. The ground was an analysis of the use of variables by means of the notion of denotation and the substitution of one entity in a proposition (occurring as term of the proposition) for another. The fundamental notion was that of “occurring as term of a proposition” (or “logical subject”).
The “Na-Classes” Theory
Authors: Landini Gregory
Published: November 2023

6.0 In the last chapter we discussed the theory of propositional functions proxied in the substitutional theory by the use of matrices. We now turn to classes. It not at all easy to recover the treatment of class symbols from Russell’s writings and publications. Russell’s published works are sketchy about the details. Many worknotes have been lost and one must piece together the theory of classes from the remaining fragments. There is a brief development of the theory of classes in “On the Substitutional Theory of Classes and Relations.” This continues in the September 1906 “Les paradoxes de la logique.” Nonetheless, in the April-May manuscript “On Substitution” there are hints of another approach which, if we can extrapolate from the scant remarks, offers a new treatment of the extensionality of classes and a correction of flaws in the earlier approach.
The “No-Relations/’ Theory
Authors: Landini Gregory
Published: November 2023

The substitutional proxy for the language of propositional functions that is, a type-indexed language which allows predicate variables in subject and predicate positions was discussed in Chapter 5. The substitutional treatment for symbols for relations-in-extension (hereafter “relationse “) is a natural continuation of the technique applied to class symbols examined in Chapter 6. In dealing with relationse, one might think it natural to adopt the 1912/4 Wiener-Kuratowski definition of ordered pair. This would be to have: (x, y) = df {{x}, {x, y}}.
Les Paradoxes De La Logique
Authors: Landini Gregory
Published: November 2023

As we saw in Part II, the substitutional theory parallels the so-called “simple theory of types” of attributes (“propositional functions in an ontological sense”). As in the simple theory, cardinal numbers repeat on each type level. But the reduplication of arithmetic within the types--a zero, one, and so on, on each type level---is now wholly unobjectionable. It is an entirely natural consequence of the proxy--that is, the non-assumption that every open wff comprehends an attribute. Indeed, substitution avoids the simple theory’s problem of justifying a hierarchy of attributes. There is no hierarchy of entities at all! Neither is there any need for an axiom of infinity.
Predicting Catastrophe
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

Circular No. 5636 of the International Astronomical Union, published on 15 October 1992, stated that the Swift-Tuttle comet (named in 1862) might collide with the Earth on 14 August 2126. The comet is large enough to threaten the continuation of civilized life on this planet. The second sighting of what could be the most important object in human history was by an amateur Japanese astronomer. The announcement triggered a rash of measurements, and a more accurate prediction of the comet’s path showed both that it is the comet that was seen in China in 69 B.C., and that we will be safe in 2126 but may be in danger on 26 August 3044.
From Newton to De Sade: The Partial Triumph of Reason
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

Something encouraging happened in seventeenth-century Europe. It became more fashionable to shout, “That’s not reasonable!” than to whisper, “That’s heretical!” Some call the period that culminated in the 1760s the Age of Reason, some speak of the Enlightenment. The French, who were at the heart of the Enlightenment, called it “le siècle des lumières.” It was a time of intense intellectual excitement, a time when men began to feel that they had the ability to understand and control the world and that the means by which to achieve those aims were not revelation and dogma but intelligence, reason, and science.
The Nineteenth Century
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

In 1834, during a discussion in the Chambre des Deputes, the distinguished French physicist Arago was asked to justify his request for government support of the sciences. His colleagues demanded to know what practical beneflts had accrued from the discoveries of science? Arago could only think of one example: the lightning conductor.
The Material Trinity: The Atom
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

In 1863, Ernest Solvay, a Belgian industrial chemist, announced a new process for making washing soda. It made him a fortune, which allowed him to engage in philanthropy and to express offbeat opinions, such as his belief in the evil of inherited wealth and the undesirability of money in general. Among the projects to which his own undesirable money went was a series of international meetings, the Solvay Conferences. Einstein attended the first Solvay Conference on Physics, held in Brussels in 1911, and was given the honor of being the final speaker. Madame Curie was also there, but the most significant talks were given by two other participants: Ernest Rutherford, who announced the discovery of the atomic nucleus, and Jean Perrin, who gave the most convincing evidence until that time that atoms actually exist.
Energy
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

A man meets a woman on a bitterly cold, windy Chicago street corner. Her hands are freezing, his are warm. He presents her with a bunch of faded flowers and then, humming, “Your tiny hands are frozen,” warms her hands with his. There have been three very different kinds of transfer between them. One was material and tangible: the flowers. The other two were intangible and involved no material transfer: the heat that went from his hands to hers, and the information that went from his mouth and eyes to her brain. There are very many intangible transfers between animate and inanimate objects, transfers that appear at flrst to have nothing in common but in fact are closely linked.
Entropy: Intimations of Mortality
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

Open a can of petrol in a closed room. The room is also thermally isolated; heat cannot enter or leave. The smell of petrol will slowly spread through the room. The mechanism is simple: molecules leave the can and meander across the room. Why do they leave the can? Because, in the can, in the space above the liquid petrol, they are moving. Some of them will, purely by chance, find their way out of the neck of the bottle. It is absolutely essential to realize that they do not purposefully make their way to the opening; remember the blind, deaf, radarless, unsmelling flies of Chapter 1? In fact, some of the molecules that have left the can may find their way back, not because of a homing instinct but purely by chance. Molecules have no will. It would be a scary world if they did.
Chaos
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

Is prediction possible? When the astrologer confidently tells you that you will meet a tall dark man this year, she is merely exploiting the fact that about 5% of the population fall into that category, and if you leave the house there is almost no chance that you will not meet a tall dark man within a year.
In a Monastery Garden
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884) bred pea plants in a monastery in Brno, Austria, because he was interested in inheritance. Mendel concentrated on the inheritance of a very small number of characteristics, and those one at a time. He started off with plants that had been inbred so as to give a uniform population. Thus Mendel took plants with long stems, that had been inbred for at least two generations until all offspring had long stems. Similarly, he bred “pure” short-stem plants.
The Descent of Man
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

Copernicus and Galileo moved the Earth from the center of the solar system and invoked the wrath of the Church, because they had removed man from the center of the universe.1 An earlier heliocentric hypothesis, put forward by Aristarchus in the third century B.c., was greeted by a demand that the author be indicted on a charge of impiety. Darwinism was worse; evolution not only denied the literal interpretation of Genesis but also questioned the uniqueness of man.
Life: The Molecular Battle
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

In the last 350 years, the formulation of a small number of unifying concepts has allowed us to rationalize much of what we know of the living world. We have already seen examples, in Darwinian evolution, Mendelian genetics, and the genetic code. Other major concepts include the eighteenth-century system of classification of living forms and the nineteenth-century concepts of the cell and the germ theory of disease.
The Origin of Life? Take Your Choice
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

I do not know the origin of life. Those of us who hold, like I do, that life emerged spontaneously from inanimate matter are, we must admit, at a distinctly embarrassing disadvantage: we have not yet come up with a convincing mechanism for abiogenesis. In his presidential address to the 1871 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Lord Kelvin stated, “Dead matter cannot become living without coming under the influence of matter previously alive. This seems to be as sure a teaching of science as the law of gravitation.” If he is right, which I doubt, then life must have been present in the universe for all past time.
The Elementary Particles
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

Little girls are made of quarks and leptons. Likewise little boys, and everything else in the universe. The reign of the triumvirate of the proton, neutron, and electron was short-lived. In 1932, the year that Chadwick discovered the neutron, Carl Anderson detected a fourth particle, with the mass of the electron but positively charged. The positron, which Dirac had predicted, is stable if left on its own but has a permanent suicide pact with the electron, both particles vanishing and leaving two y-rays. The positron was discovered by observing the particles generated by the collision of cosmic rays with matter.
The Tree of Death
Authors: Silver Brian L
Published: November 2023

Ironically--considering that it was Miller who wrote these sentences-sin, disease, and death are today more associated with sex than with Miller’s target, science. But he is far from alone; antagonism to science is widespread, and at the end of our journey it is worth pausing to see why the search for knowledge is not universally applauded. I came up against the opposition early on.
How Much Common Belief is Necessary for a Convention?
Authors: Hyun Song Shin , Williamson Timothy
Published: November 2023

Coordination problems come in many forms. A case of particular interest to students of norms and conventions is that in which the payoff function of the coordination game depends on the state of nature. In such an environment, the possibility of conditioning one’s actions on some signal of the state of nature adds an extra dimension to the coordination problem, and makes it a more accurate representation of the problem of day-to-day interaction in which individuals face a variety of coordination problems determined by the state of nature. In such an environment, the problem becomes one of coordinating on the most advantageous set of rules of action, where each player’s rule of action maps a possible realization of his signal to an action.
DNA and the Language of Genes
Authors: Clark William R
Published: November 2023

When E. B. Wilson suggested in 1895 that heredity might have a chemical basis, he was thinking specifically of the nucleic acid component. But this was no more than an inspired guess on his part and, indeed, of the two major components of chromatin, nucleic acid seemed to many the less likely candidate. The problem was in the perceived possibilities for information content: DNA is composed of only four basic nucleotides. The hereditary material-genes-must contain the blue¬ print for the construction of an entire organism. How can only four nucleotides be used to spell out the enormous complexity of a complete animal or plant? Proteins, on the other hand, are polymers of amino acids, of which there are twenty different kinds. This is close to the number ofletters in most alphabets. Thus, even for scientists convinced of the chemical basis of heredity, proteins seemed intuitively to be a more likely candidate for the transmission of information from one generation to the next.
Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Disease
Authors: Clark William R
Published: November 2023

Severe combined immunodeficiency disease (SCIO) is truly as bad as it sounds. As with cystic fibrosis, SCIO is an inherited disease involving mutations of a single gene in an afflicted child. But unlike CF, where there is only one gene in the entire human population responsible for the disease, SCIO can be caused by mutations in any one of a number of different genes affecting largely the T cell arm of the immune response. In CF, defects in the single gene responsible, the chloride ion transporter (CFTR), affect a wide range of cells and tissues in the body, resulting in a spectrum of seemingly unrelated disorders. In SCIO, defects in several quite distinct genes can cripple a single type of white blood cell (the T lymphocyte or T cell), causing a single, highly focussed medical problem: susceptibility to infectious disease. When untreated, SCIO is uniformly lethal within the first year or two oflife. Fortunately, SCIO is a relatively rare genetic disorder; only about forty “SCIO kids” are born each year in the U.S. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to treat, and the majority of affected children still die of the disease.
The journey Begins The Clinical Trials for ADA-SCID
Authors: Clark William R
Published: November 2023

The possibilities for applying the emerging techniques of molecular biology to human gene therapy were appreciated by a handful of people as early as the late 1960s, although at that time no one had the slightest idea of how human genes might be isolated. The first human gene would not even be cloned for another dozen or so years. But there were tantalizing clues of what might lie ahead. In the 1960s, a physician-scientist named Stanfield Rogers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories made an extraordinary observation with the common wart-causing Shope papilloma virus. One of the genes carried by this virus encodes an enzyme called arginase, which degrades excess amounts of the amino acid arginine. In addition to its role as a building block of protein, arginine also plays a role of its own as an intermediate in the processing of nitrogenous wastes in the body. Rogers noted that in rabbits infected with the Shope virus, the levels of arginine in the blood were unusually low. This did not particularly bother the rabbits; in fact high levels of arginine can be toxic.
The Ethics of Molecular Medicine
Authors: Clark William R
Published: November 2023

When the implications of molecular biology for human medicine first began to dawn on those working in the field, even the molecular biologists were nervous. It was the scientists themselves, remember, who called for the Asilomar meeting in 1974, not a watchful press or wary politicians; not perennial naysayers or doomsday prophets of science. It was molecular biologists, who knew better than anyone else at the time what the stakes might be, who blew the whistle and asked for time out to sort through the implications of what they were getting themselves into. It was the scientists, and those first few physicians who understood the clinical implications of experiments still confined to bacteria and viruses, who called upon the government to take an active hand in helping regulate what they were about to do.
Why the Santiago of I8I4 to I822 can’t hold a candle to the Santiago of I86o
Authors: Rosales Vicente Pérez
Published: November 2023

What sort of place was Santiago in r814? What, back then, was this city that has grown so big for its age and that along with its more or less justified claims to metropolitan status still harbors the petty ways of a village? Apart from the wonderful Chilean sky and the impressive view of the Andes, the Santiago of 1814, the delight of its happy citizens, was, for the newly arrived foreigner, a remote and dismal town, whose low and crudely fashioned buildings, though neatly lined up along straight streets, lacked any architectural distinction. The value of this jewel of the so-called Kingdom of Chile was further reduced by the filth in which it was set, for though it rose on the fertile plain of the Mapocho River, it was bordered by the Mapocho dump on the north, the Canada dump on the south, the Santa Lucia dump on the east, and the San Miguel-San Pablo dump on the west.
Marcd’s tribulations. —Chacabuco. —A great soirie in honor if the conquering army. —The coat of arms of Chile. — The defeat at Cancha Rayada. —Second emigration to Mendoza. —The death if Luis and]uan]osi Carrera.
Authors: Rosales Vicente Pérez
Published: November 2023

By this time Don Mariano Osorio was no longer in charge. He had been succeeded by another proconsul, named Casimiro l’v1arc6 del Pont, less competent than his predecessor, though no less cruel. The prisoners on Juan Fernandez, from whom we received only infrequent news, were still subject to the whims of their jailers on that New World Ceuta,8 lacking all hope, while in the hearts of their relatives and other patriots in the so-called Kingdom of Chile, helplessly crushed by the abuses of arbitrary power, a store of affronts was building whose explosion, once it came, was bound to sweep Spanish rule from our soil forever.
How Lord Spencer repaid the kindnesses done him in Chile. —Brazil —The first steamship to reach Rio deJaneiro— What people thought if steamships in those days—Slavery. — Brazil S achievement if independence—The famous writer Maria Graham. —The earthquake if I822. —O’Higgins— National holidays. — Chile in I824—A remarkable proclamation by General Luis Aury— Camilo Henriquez’s views on immi”gration.
Authors: Rosales Vicente Pérez
Published: November 2023

Though in 1810 Chile was called a kingdom, it really resembled a farm rented to a bad tenant less concerned with the future of the property than with his own profit; and only on the day it came once more into the hands of its rightful owners could it begin to enjoy the benefits that always flow from direct contact with the civilized world after a time
My arrival in Chile.— The newcomer.— The apprentice rancher.—The distiller.— Why our factories fail.—The shopkeeper.—The physician.—My debut as a journalist.— Consequences of sudden wealth. Tobacco and cattle smuggling in the Andes.— Cast your bread upon the waters.
Authors: Rosales Vicente Pérez
Published: November 2023

If in our day our proud Valparaiso seems so depressing and even repulsive to the new arrival from Europe who has not yet come to know it, imagine the impression it made in 1830, with its unkempt gullies, its hovels defying the waves on the paltry bit of terra firma that lay between the sea and the hills, a few ships riding at anchor in the bay, and that endless street or country road lined by a motley collection of huts and shacks and leading from what they called the port to the foot of the famous old Polanco grade A foreigner, for whom America meant primeval forests, palm groves, flocks of screeching cockatoos, and gold for the taking, would cross hill after
Revolutions.—Santa Cruz’s War.—An execution in Curic6.— The price of traveling without a passport. — The risks of lying, even if opportunely.—] dodge San Carlos and flee to La Rioja.—Natural riches between San Carlos and Famatina. —Mummies. —Fossils.—Chilecito de Famatina. —Trade with Chile.— Cattle prices. —Tobacco and tobacco smuggling. — Erroneous view of the Andes as a single chain of mountains. — The geographer Napp’s mistakes concerning the base and eleva—tion of the Andes. —The rewards of painting saints. —My disastrous return to Chile.
Authors: Rosales Vicente Pérez
Published: November 2023

The peoples of America would have been untrue to the ideals that led them to face the vicissitudes of the bloody struggle leading to their political emancipation if they had remained static after smashing the Spanish yoke.
One of the partners goes to San Francisco. — The city of Sacramento. —I save Alvarez from being hanged —Food poisoning in Sacramento. — Stockton. — San Francisco.— The ups and downs ofbusiness life in San Francisco. — The feverish activity of its inhabitants.—Ajudge judged by a criminal. — Causes of the bad feelings between Yankees and Chileans. —Brannan’s timely intervention. “Expulsion of the Chileans from the gold fields. —My hasty return in search of my brothers.
Authors: Rosales Vicente Pérez
Published: November 2023

Spring was coming in all its splendor, embroidering the green fields of glorious California with its fair flowers, when we decided that one of us should go to town, both to pay off our debts and to pick up let ters from the devoted mother who in Chile was weeping for the absence of her sons.
The Country And The City King Curtis And The Structure Of Black Urbanity
Authors: Meisel Perry
Published: November 2023

Let us turn to another site in the West, some seventy years after Wilde’s visit to Colorado. The time is September 1958; the place, a recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico. There is a cowboy and there is a dandy. One is Buddy Holly, singing a tune called “Reminiscing”; the other is “King” Curtis Ousley, tenor saxophonist from New York and inventor of yakety sax, joining Buddy for the recording session. A tight, foxy oompah tune written by Curtis (it was released under Holly’s name only posthumously, in August of 1962), “Reminiscing” requires an almost electric crispness from the horn, and Curtis discovers a yakety way to deliver it with a remarkable and surprising freshness, very different from the honkheavy repetitions of early rock and roll sax, and a style formalized by Curtis’s lead horn on the Coasters’ hit single “Yakety Yak” earlier in the same year. To say that Curtis dresses up Buddy’s sound (as he did the sound of so many artists, including that of Aretha Franklin, the Shirelles, and Wilson Pickett) is an apt and historically exact metaphor to use to describe both the tune and the larger genesis of Curtis’s horn.
The Psychedelic Sublime
Authors: Meisel Perry
Published: November 2023

Let us cast our gaze across the Atlantic, back to England.

It is just after the French Revolution, and not long after the loss of the American colonies. Aristocracy is besieged. Its indifference is beginning to fail as a style, or at least to be an inappropriate response given the pressures of the age. It needs a prop, and finds it in the figure of George “Beau” Brummell, the first famous dandy. A ceremonial military officer attached to the court of George III and a favorite of the Prince of Wales, Brummell retired from his regiment in 1798 and took a house in London, spreading the influence of his languid manner and affected and elegant mode of dress until debts ruined him in 1816. Ellen Moers, in her classic study The Dandy: From Brummell to Beerbohm (1960), traces the roots of the term dandy to a song that handsomely uniformed British soldiers sang about the ragtag American troops during the Revolutionary War (1960, n-13). Everyone knows the song-”Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The term is thus “an ambiguous symbol” (13), as Moers puts it, since it blurred the line between who was who at the very moment that the dandy British trooper aimed it, with presumable contempt, at his American counterpart.
“I Second That Emotion”
Authors: Meisel Perry
Published: November 2023

As rhythm and blues develops into the premier mode of blues tradition in the late Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, the dominant singers of each of these eras refine our paradigm with extraordinary precision. Otis Redding’s rapacious voice, for example, explores the endless postures appropriate to the band driving it from behind, amazing us with the multiplicity of stances and tonalities through which it can flash, each of which has a stable tie to the sharp horns and deep rhythm section of Booker T. Jones’s Stax studio ensemble. Voice, horns, and rhythm section among them stage any series of dialogues or dialectics instead of fortifying a hierarchic relation between band and voice alone. The shouts remind us that this is indeed merely a person singing, even though their sheer percussiveness also takes away the very difference between voice and instruments that the shouting seems to advance. Like Armstrong, Redding crosses a dirty tone with legato phrasing, but, unlike Armstrong, he also needs the unabashed screams to reinvent Armstrong’s crossing from country to city, recovering the field holler that Armstrong himself absorbs. Redding crosses back again to the country from the city, reimagining blues tradition by virtue of the preacherly stance from which his vocal inflections also derive. He uses gospel to revise Armstrong, but he also uses Armstrong to revise gospel. Here Redding makes the structure of mature, achieved r & b or soul music altogether clear: the crossing of blues and gospel, like the crossing of blues with country, is another kind of trick played at or by the crossroads.
The Cowboy, The Dandy, And Willa Cather
Authors: Meisel Perry
Published: November 2023

Everyone knows that literary modernism is related to blues tradition, but no one knows just how. The common preoccupation with boundaries, however, gives us the clue we need as we cross over from the nineteenth to the twentieth century in our literary travels. Dominant culture’s customary estimation of the kinship between jazz and modern literature is well represented by the primitivism that both presumably share, a primitivism whose language and assumptions D. H. Lawrence, for example, makes abundantly clear in his reading of Freud in 1921. However unintentionally, Lawrence’s metaphor of “the darkness” (1921, 5) into which Freud the explorer descends links modern imagination with expansionism and colonialism, and links them both, as Lawrence’s American disciple Norman Mailer will go on to show in The White Negro (1957) and An American Dream (1965), to a negotiation with the savage energy assigned to blackness as though it were the eruption of pure natural force. Like nature in blues tradition, however, nature in modernism is more often the occasion for a meditation on form than the expression of a primitive state paradoxically-and problematically-represented by black culture and its achievements.