bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Multiple Joint Replacements
Authors: Liveson Jay Allan
Published: November 2023

A 78-year-old man underwent multiple joint replacements over the previous 2 years because of right hip and bilateral shoulder pathology. After all symptoms referred to these joints disappeared, he noticed diffuse leg pains exacerbated on walking, especially up stairs. They were not relieved by standing or bending forward, but abated after sitting. He was told that he had “spinal stenosis.” Medical history was of bilateral ulnar nerve release at the elbows, prostatectomy and radiotherapy 8 years previously for cancer; gall bladder was removed 7 years previously.
Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome Unresponsive to Surgery
Authors: Liveson Jay Allan
Published: November 2023

A 77-year-old woman was referred preoperatively to confirm a right posterior tarsal tunnel syndrome. She had developed burning pain on her right sole which had worsened during the previous 2 months. Surgery had been performed on the left ankle for similar symptoms 10 years before with no resolution of her symptoms. One toe was amputated. She denied numbness, back pain, and hand symptoms. Her pain was relieved somewhat on walking. Medical history included hypertension and a mild cerebrovascular accident. Family history was of diabetes mellitus.
Facial and Hearing Deficit After Biking Accident
Authors: Liveson Jay Allan
Published: November 2023

Three weeks previously, a 21-year-old cyclist was thrown from his bicycle while mountain biking in Italy. He awoke in the emergency room after 10 hours of coma noting only a left clavicular fracture and stitches in his left elbow. There were signs of contusion on the left side of his head and a slight decrease in this hearing on the left. He was told of a fractured left temporal bone and inner ear. Over the next 2 weeks there was a progression of ringing in his ear, deterioration of hearing, and left facial paralysis. The last was accompanied by a metallic taste and increase in tearing. The function started to return for the previous few days. He never lost strength, sensation, or balance. Medical history included pancreatitis last year.
A Theory of Information and Misinformation
Authors: Koons Robert C
Published: November 2023

Attempts to explicate the phenomenon of representation naturalistically, say, in terms of causal connection, often founder on the problem of explaining the possibility of error. Suppose, for example, that we attempt to explain representation along these lines: fact (s, a) represents fact (s’, 7) iff (s’, 7) is a causally necessary condition of (s, a). Such an account, of course, leaves no room for the possibility of misrepresentation, if ‘necessary condition’ is interpreted strictly.
Teleology as Higher-Order Causation
Authors: Koons Robert C
Published: November 2023

In the last forty years, the theory of teleology and biological function has experienced a surprising renaissance in analytic philosophy. Charles Taylor was a pioneer in this field through his 1964 The Explanation of Behavior (Taylor (1964)). Taylor’s lead has been followed by Larry Wright, Andrew Wood field, and Ruth Garrett Millikan.
The Quarrel Between Philosophy And Poetry: A Reexamination of Poetry’s Role in Plato’s Republic
Authors: Levin Susan B
Published: November 2023

Plato’s opposition to poetry in his treatment of human character in Republic 2–3 and 10 has prompted extensive scholarly debate. Prominent topics of inquiry have included the link between the dialogue’s early and late reflections, discussions of which often center on the concept of mimesis, and the question of what function Plato ultimately reserves for poetry. Commentators have also treated the connections between Plato’s account of poetry in the Republic and views of it expressed in other dialogues, particularly the Apology, Ion, Meno, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Laws. What has received far less attention, however, is the role played by the Cratylus in Plato’s critique of the literary tradition, and hence the relation between his handling of poets there and in the Republic.
Extravehicular Activity: Performing EVA Safely
Authors: Buckey Jay C
Published: November 2023

In his historic first extravehicular activity (EVA), Alexi Leonov faced almost every medical risk an EVA can present. Leonov left his Voskhod 2 capsule in March 1965 to begin the first spacewalk ever performed. All went well until he tried to get back into the capsule. His suit was pressurized to 5.9 psi (40.5 kPa), and he had difficulty maneuvering. He reduced the suit pressure to 3.7 psi (25.5 kPa), helping his mobility, but also greatly increasing his risk for decompression sickness. His efforts to get back inside his capsule generated more heat than his suit could remove, causing his body temperature to increase, his heart rate to rise, and his visor to fog. Even though his spacewalk lasted only 12 minutes, by the end Leonov was dehydrated and physically exhausted.
Natural Law and Laws of Nature
Authors: Fort Timothy L
Published: November 2023

My instinct is to entitle this chapter “Natural Law (Sort Of).” This is because what I present in this chapter is a limited version of natural law. It certainly does not pretend to be a full rendering of the natural law tradition. The spokesperson on whose work I mostly rely, legal scholar John Finnis, is not often applied to corporate theory. Moreover, in addition to this selective use of normative natural law categories, I plan to begin to introduce some notions from biology and anthropology. Natural law is no stranger for such integration with science: Aristotle was, after all, also a biologist. But it seems that normative versions of natural law are often less reliant on such sciences, with some important exceptions that will be noted. Thus, this chapter will be a version of natural law a bit different from what a philosopher, theologian, or academic lawyer might typically expect when seeing the term.
Phenotypic Consequences of Chromosome Doubling
Authors: Levin Donald A
Published: November 2023

It is important to uncouple the effects of chromosome doubling from those of hybridization or genome coexistence, because only then can we understand the manifold effects of polyploidy alone (autopolyploid) within individuals, populations, and species. The effects of chromosome doubling per se generally have been viewed as maladaptive. Levin (1945) argued that chromosome doubling radically alters the balance of multiple factors acting on a single character and that only through hybridization and selection may this imbalance be restored. Stebbins (1971, p. 126) suggested that chromosome doubling alone would hinder the evolutionary success of higher plants. I take a contrary position. In this chapter I contend that autopolyploid may generate novel types of plants and in tum may facilitate character evolution and speciation. In many species autopolyploid may significantly alter the cytological, biochemical, physiological, and developmental attributes of organisms. Autopolyploid thus may have unique or transgressed tolerances and traits that may allow the exploitation of habitats beyond the limits of their diploid progenitors. Chromosome doubling occurs in existing polyploidy, but it is more likely to produce a positive effect from a diploid base (Gottschalk, 1976). Thus, most comparisons that follow involve diploids.
Stit: Introductory theory, semantics, and applications
Authors: Belnap Nuel , Perloff Michael , Xu Ming
Published: November 2023

In chapter 1 we followed and extended the idea, going back at least to Anselm, of treating agency as a modality-a modality that represents through an intensional operator the agency, or action, of some individual in bringing about a particular state of affairs.* We proposed that using the stit construction as a normal form, when we are confused, is a happy way to clarify some aspects of action and agency. In this chapter we sharpen our understanding of stit-and thereby, if we are right, of agency. The central idea is that the concept of action must be understood in relation to an open future, and we formulate a rigorous theory that tries to understand how action is compatible with and indeed requires indeterminism. In this way we essay a contribution to what Kane 1998 calls “the intelligibility question” (p. 105).
Small yet important differences from earlier proposals
Authors: Belnap Nuel , Perloff Michael , Xu Ming
Published: November 2023

In chapter 1 we introduced [a stit: Q], the stit sentence, solely to represent agentive sentences.* We stated some theses about stit and agency, and we presented a “mini-history,” going back to St. Anselm, of earlier proposals to treat agency through a modal construction. Then in chapter 2 we provided a theory of branching alternative histories as a foundation for two semantic accounts of [a stit: Q]-the achievement and deliberative stits-and we explored some applications of the achievement stit. Here we propose to deal in more detail with some earlier discussions to which we alluded in our “mini-history.”
Could have done otherwise
Authors: Belnap Nuel , Perloff Michael , Xu Ming
Published: November 2023

The complexity of the connections among actions, moral responsibility, and the alternatives open to an agent have long tormented philosophers.* Hume, for example, the most famous of all compatibilists, claims that universal determinism is not only consistent with human freedom but necessary for morality (An Enquiry Concerning Human Knowledge, section 8, part 1). His view is that while agents are able to choose among alternatives, there is the liberty of voluntary action. We think that is right. On the other hand, Hume asserts, morality is without foundation if actions are not fully determined. We think that is wrong. Our intent, however, is neither to joust with Hume nor directly to engage more modern entrants in the “free will “ tourneys. Instead we recount a tale that begins with the following proposition, one that might have puzzled even such as Don Quixote of La Mancha and his squire, Sancho Panza.
Multiple and joint agency
Authors: Belnap Nuel , Perloff Michael , Xu Ming
Published: November 2023

The goal of this chapter is to inspect some structural aspects of multiple and joint agency, a task sufficiently complex to give pause to the three inseparables, Aramis, Athos, and Porthos.*
Marcus and the problem of nested deontic modalities
Authors: Belnap Nuel , Perloff Michael , Xu Ming
Published: November 2023

Marcus 1966, “Iterated deontic modalities,” is re-readable, and re-compelling.* Marcus argues that standard deontic logic makes too little sense of putting one deontic modality inside another. Even now deontic logicians shy away from nesting their modalities one within the scope of another. One of the reasons apparent from her argument is this: Direct iteration is of little use.
Deontic kinematics and austere strategics
Authors: Belnap Nuel , Perloff Michael , Xu Ming
Published: November 2023

Deontic concepts are naturally linked with strategic concepts.* Surely any obligation can be viewed as an obligation to follow a certain strategy in the austere sense of chapter 13, always making such choices, depending on circumstances, as conduce to satisfying the obligation. Conversely, to follow a strategy can be viewed as very like living up to a set of deontic requirements, “doing what the strategy requires.” We do not here directly discuss such common-speech linkages. Instead we report a specific and detailed theoretical linkage that allows reciprocal illumination between certain deontic concepts and certain strategic concepts. An unexpected result is the connection between the no choice between undivided histories condition from the austere theory of strategies, and a new deontic kinematic condition adduced by Thomason to help describe how oughts fit into branching time.
Neurologic Complications of Acute Environmental Injuries
Authors: Wijdicks Eelco F M
Published: November 2023

The forces of nature or hostile outdoor enrivonments may create treacherous conditions. Any of these geographical hazards may seriously endanger lives. Environmental injuries may occur in several persons at the same time, and reconstruction of the event may be difficult because of panic-stricken bystanders. Such an event often triggers a disaster plan. Other situations are more foreseeable, subtle, and closer to home. In children and young adults, accidental injuries are one of the leading causes of death and disability.
Populations of and Threats to Rare Plants of the Herb Layer: More Challenges and Opportunities for Conservation Biologists
Authors: Jolls Claudia L
Published: November 2023

In 1982, Paulette Bierzychudek presented a seminal review on population biology of shade-tolerant herbs of temperate deciduous forests. Her focus was largely on life histories, demography, and processes occurring at the population level,inspired,in part,by Harper’s (1977) treatise. In her opinion, our knowledge of herbs of particular forests was incomplete, particularly for coniferous forests, floodplains, rocky ledges, forested dunes, savannahs, and subtropical forests. Particular taxa were underrepresented in the literature as well. For example, at the time, no life-history study had yet been done on many shade-tolerant herbs that flower in later summer (Newell and Tramer 1978; Bierzychudek 1982a). Bierzychudek concluded that inadequate information existed for making generalizations about life histories of deciduous forest herbs, particularly their population growth rates or the temporal stability of their population sizes or structures.
Response of the Herbaceous Layer to Disturbance in Eastern Forests
Authors: Roberts Mark R , Gilliam Frank S
Published: November 2023

Various definitions of disturbance have been proposed, some restricted to discrete events (White and Pickett 1985) and others including long-term environmental influations (Ryan 1991). We restrict our discussion to relatively discrete events because these are more readily tractable, and most types of direct management interventions (e.g., forest harvesting) are discrete in time and space. Accordingly, we adopt the definitions of White and Pickett (1985) as our working definitions of disturbance: “any relatively discrete event in time that disrupts ecosystem, community, or population structure and changes resources, substrate availability, or the physical environment” (p. 7). We recognize the admonition of Pickett et al. (1989) that disturbance affects all levels of organization differently, from individuals to ecosystems and landscapes, and that most empirical work focuses on effects of disturbance on community structure rather than on ecological processes.
Endemism Index
Authors: Mayr Ernst , Diamond Jared
Published: November 2023

Our analysis in parts III, IV, and V of this book has been at the level of individual species. We asked how the 191 analyzed species of Northern Melanesian birds differ from each other in their patterns of geographic variation and speciation, and how those species differences can be explained. Now, in part VI, we switch to an analysis at the level of islands. We ask how islands differ from each other in the patterns of geographic variation and speciation of their avifaunas, and how those island differences can be explained. Northern Melanesian islands vary greatly as regards geography. They come in all sizes, from giant New Britain (35,742 km2) to tiny islands of a fraction of a hectare. Four islands reach elevations of more than 2,000 m, while many others barely rise above the high-tide mark. Some are located centrally within Northern Melanesia, some peripherally. Some islands are isolated, while others are clustered into discrete groups, which lie, in turn, at various distances from each other. Some islands were connected to each other during the Pleistocene, while others rose recently from the sea by uplift or volcanic activity and have never been connected. As we explain in this part of our book, all of these geographic factors affect the formation of endemic taxa and the completion of speciation.
The Establishment of Geographic Isolates
Authors: Mayr Ernst , Diamond Jared
Published: November 2023

Genetic differentiation within an initially conspecific population can proceed in three different ways. Two of those ways were already mentioned in chapter 16 in connection with peripatric and dichopatric speciation. The first is through primary isolation: colonizing individuals from a source population may succeed in crossing a major barrier to reach an area or island previously unoccupied by their species. There, they found a new population, which thus is immediately isolated from the source population by the barrier. The barrier may be a water gap between islands, or an ecological barrier within a single land mass (such as a mountain range separating lowland areas, a low-lying area separating mountains, or a dry savanna or desert separating forested areas). Already at its moment of founding, the new population may differ from its parent source population as a result of the founder effect; the gene frequencies of the founding individuals may happen to differ from the average gene frequencies in the source population. Once founded, the new population may or may not survive long enough for genetic differentiation to proceed further, depending on the colonized island’s area and the population density of the species. In addition, the continued flow of conspecific individuals from the source population across the barrier may or may not be high enough to inhibit differentiation, depending especially on the width of the barrier and the vagility of the species.
The Art of Singing Twentieth-Century Music
Authors: Mabry Sharon
Published: November 2023

This question has haunted singers for decades. Let’s investigate some answers. In pedagogical terms, it seems absurd to summarily banish one hundred years of vocal music from a singer’s programmable repertoire, whether it be the twentieth century or the eighteenth century, without giving the music a thorough reading over a considerable period of study. The musical offerings of the twentieth century are so diverse in style, mood, interpretation, and genre that any voice type should be able to find pieces suitable for study or performance.
The Skeptical Sublime
Authors: Noggle James
Published: November 2023

This book argues that philosophical skepticism helps define the aesthetic experience of the sublime in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature, especially the poetry of Alexander Pope. Skeptical doubt appears in the period as an astonishing force in discourse that cannot be controlled—“doubt’s boundless Sea,” in Rochester’s words—and as such is consistently seen as affiliated with the sublime, itself emerging as an important way to conceive of excessive power in rhetoric, nature, psychology, religion, and politics. This view of skepticism as a force affecting discourse beyond its practitioners’ control links Noggle’s discussion to other theoretical accounts of sublimity, especially psychoanalytic and ideological ones, that emphasize the sublime’s activation of unconscious personal and cultural anxieties and contradictions. But because The Skeptical Sublime demonstrates the sublime’s roots in the epistemological obsessions of Pope and his age, it also grounds such theories in what is historically evident in the period’s writing. The skeptical sublime is a concrete, primary instance of the transformation of modernity’s main epistemological liability, its loss of certainty, into an aesthetic asset—retaining, however, much of the unsettling irony of its origins in radical doubt. By examining the cultural function of such persistent instability, this book seeks to clarify the aesthetic ideology of major writers like Pope, Swift, Dryden, and Rochester, among others, who have been seen, sometimes confusingly, as both reactionary and supportive of the liberal-Whig model of taste and civil society increasingly dominant in the period. While they participate in the construction of proto-aesthetic categories like the sublime to stabilize British culture after decades of civil war and revolution, their appreciation of the skepticism maintained by these means of stabilization helps them express ambivalence about the emerging social order and distinguishes their views from the more providentially assured appeals to the sublime of their ideological opponents.
To Become or Not to Become: Using Yourself to Create a Believable Character
Authors: Ostwald David F
Published: November 2023

The most efficient way to enter your character’s reality is by using the Magical if. Developed by the great Russian acting teacher Constantin Stanislavski, this amazing tool is no more than the provocative phrase “I’m going to behave as if . . .” Although these words may seem innocuous, they can powerfully stimulate your imagination. They can lift you directly into your character’s world and help you generate believable actions that express your character’s feelings.
Your Character’s Universe: Analyzing the Dramatic Structure of Music-Theater Pieces
Authors: Ostwald David F
Published: November 2023

The overwhelming majority of music-theater pieces are built from closely similar blueprints. They combine four kinds of building blocks—the first three of which they share with spoken theater pieces—to create variations of a stock dramatic structure. This common origin allows you to construct believable characters by using only a few powerful tools that are applicable to songs, art songs, lieder, musicals, and operas alike.
Being Believable in Any Role on Any Stage: Heightening
Authors: Ostwald David F
Published: November 2023

How can you create a believable character when you are singing in a cavernous theater over a noisy orchestra while executing the gestures of people who are exploring the extremes of human feelings and who moreover may be from distant epochs and an unfamiliar social class?
Phages with Segmented Double-Stranded RNA Genomes
Authors: Mindich Leonard
Published: November 2023

The first member of this family of bacteriophages, the Cystoviridae, was isolated in 1973. This phage, named f6, was found to have a genome of three double-stranded RNA molecules packaged within a polyhedral nucleocapsid surrounded by a lipid-containing membrane (47, 52). The basic outlines of the life cycle of f6 were described in several reviews (25, 29). Since that time, a number of important advances have been made. The structures of the virus and subviral particles have been defined through the application of cryo-electron microscopy (1,7). The structure of the RNA-dependent polymerase has been elucidated through X-ray diffraction studies on protein crystals (2, 3). The reassembly of inner core particles of both f6 and f8 has been accomplished with pure individual proteins (21, 40). The packaging of the genomic segments has been elucidated and several reverse genetic systems have been developed (27, 28, 48). Recombination between the genomic segments has been described (26). In addition, a number of relatives of f6 have been isolated from nature, enlarging the family of Cystoviridae (31).
The Bacteriophage Mu
Authors: Paolozzi Luciano , Ghelardini Patrizia
Published: November 2023

Mu was the first mobile genetic element identified in prokaryotes. Since its first isolation, in 1963, it has attracted the interest of many biologists. This interest is a consequence of its double nature: Mu is both a bacteriophage and a transposon. Studies on Mu began when L. Taylor published a paper on a new temperate bacteriophage that showed the unusual ability to insert its DNA in multiple sites of the host genome. This integration was coupled with the induction of mutations in the host cell (236). The insertional mutagenesis phenomenon was thus described for the first time and it was shown that when sensitive bacteria (Escherichia coli K12) were infected with bacteriophage Mu, they exhibited increased mutation rates at many genetic loci. The prophage was always linked to the chromosomal site of the induced mutation. These properties were similar to those of the ‘‘controlling elements’’ postulated by Barbara McClintock (176), consisting of DNA moving from one position to another in the maize chromosome that resulted in modification and even suppression of the function of some genes.
The Nature and Complexities of Narrative
Authors: Brody Howard
Published: November 2023

If the scientific physician is likely to resist any analysis of medical practice that thrusts storytelling onto center stage, the analytic philosopher is equally likely to object to this analysis. Storytelling is such a broad term, it might be argued, that there is really no place in medicine where one could not be said to be telling stories of one sort or another, and so the metaphor of storytelling cannot be used to distinguish one set of activities from others within medicine. It is therefore useful to be reminded that the story, in the study of literature and cultural anthropology, is a concept denoting a particular form and function, and that reasonably precise descriptions and theories of storytelling are available if one chooses to take advantage of them. Moreover, broadened interest in story and narrative in fields as diverse as medicine, philosophy, psychology, and communications theory has increased the number of helpful definitions and descriptions from varying perspectives. It turns out that not only is the telling of stories a specific sort of act, it is an act that has important implications for the very organization of human knowledge and of other human actions.
Dimensions of Sickness
Authors: Brody Howard
Published: November 2023

Philosophical investigations into the nature of health and disease have provided many insights and some frustrations. I attribute many of the frustrations to the notion that only by abstracting the idea of disease from the particular context of the sickness episode and the sick person can one arrive at the “essence” of disease, which is what counts as true philosophical knowledge. This approach becomes less plausible when we consider examples like this statement: “The sick person faces marked alterations in his personhood. . . . his ‘worth’ and sense of self-worth as a person are all subject to drastic modification” (Rollin 1979: 164-165). On its face this generalization seems defensible, and yet with further thought we are bound to ask—is this true of any episode of illness? If we then look at a previous passage in the same paper and note that this author has included warts as an undoubted, bona fide example of a “sickness,” then the generalization about “drastic modifications in selfworth” becomes questionable.
Sick Roles: Practices and Life Plans
Authors: Brody Howard
Published: November 2023

Woolf, it seems, would have approved of two monumental twentieth-century novels, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward. The novels have several things in common that will repay careful study. Both depict a central character or characters who arc sick and who spend most of the novel in a place of sickness among those who share the same disease. To set the stage and to place the main characters in a broader context, the authors must show us a number of sick persons, each suffering or coping with his disease in a different way. (The diseases, tuberculosis and cancer, are chronic conditions that behave differently at different stages of their processes and that strike different parts of the body, thus allowing maxi mal variability in how the individuals are affected by them.)
Sickness and Social Relations
Authors: Brody Howard
Published: November 2023

To discern how sickness affects one’s close associates, we must move away from first-person narratives of the sickness experience in order to hear the stories as told from others’ viewpoints. Many literary works about illness allow us to shift perspectives, seeing the illness at different times both from the sufferer’s point of view and also from the point of view of close associates. The short story “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka (1979) is one such work. Kafka tells his story with a focus on the afflicted individual but allows us easily to reconstruct the stories and experiences of the other characters.
Conclusion: The Patient–Health Professional Relationship as a Narrative
Authors: Brody Howard
Published: November 2023

It is time to bring back and integrate two notions we discussed earlier: the “joint construction of narrative” as a collaborative task for the health-care professional and the patient, and Margaret Urban Walker’s concept of the “narrative of relationship.” These notions will find a comfortable home in some health-care settings, but not in others.

After modern medical ethics had been in full swing for ten or fifteen years, some critics began to take it to task for focusing on unusual and dramatic cases from hospital practice and neglecting the more commonplace situations that arise in primary care settings. If we focus on unusual cases in hospitals and in highly specialized practices, we are most likely to find ourselves in a bureaucratic world in which a principlist ethics seems most appropriate and a highly personalized ethics seems most out of place (Evans 2000)— a place where the patient necessarily seeks “the care of strangers” (Burt 1979).
Darwin’s Achievement ( 1985)
Authors: Kitcher Philip
Published: November 2023

By 1844 Charles Darwin had begun to feel that his growing friendship with Joseph Hooker was strong enough to be tested by the revelation of his unorthodox ideas on “the species question.” Darwin’s disclosure cost him some misgivings: “it is like confessing a murder,” he wrote. Yet, little more than a quarter of a century later, Darwin’s heresy had won endorsements from many prominent scientists in Britain, Europe, and the United States. By 1871, Thomas Henry Huxley was prepared to declare that “in a dozen years the ‘Origin of Species’ has worked as complete a revolution in Biological Science as the ‘Principia’ did in Astronomy.”
Developmental Decomposition and the Future of Human Behavioral Ecology (1990)
Authors: Kitcher Philip
Published: November 2023

Every gardener knows the problem. Simply removing the weeds from your soil is useless, for the bare space that results will surely be invaded anew unless you take more active steps, introducing and nurturing the varieties of plants that you want. Similarly, a critique of human sociobiology that simply uproots the current occupants of this part of the intellectual landscape will not suffice. Effective criticism should supply the seeds for a new enterprise.

In 1985 I surveyed the main efforts of sociobiologists to provide conclusions about human social behavior. On the view I developed (see especially Vaulting Ambition, chapter 4), the field of sociobiology is generated through the application of evolutionary ideas to the study of social behavior. Nobody can protest that application in principle, even when the species under study is our own. However, there are deep confusions in attempting to use evolutionary analyses to resolve the nature nurture problem or to erect a grand theory of human nature. Thus, part of the sociobiological enterprise as it has sometimes and most popularly been conceived should be simply abandoned. What remains should be thoroughly cleansed. For, as I endeavored to show,3 the applications of evolutionary ideas to human social behavior are notably less rigorous and careful than the best work in the evolutionary study of the behavior of nonhuman animals.
Born-Again Creationism (2002)
Authors: Kitcher Philip
Published: November 2023

In the beginning, Creationists believed that the world was young. But Creation “science” was without form and void. A deluge of objections drowned the idea that major kinds of plants and animals had been fashioned a few thousand years ago, and hardly modified since. Then the spirit of piety brooded on the waters and brought forth something new. “Let there be design!” exclaimed the reformers-and lo! there was Born-Again Creationism.

Out in Santee, California, about twenty miles from where I used to live, the old movement, dedicated to the possibility of interpreting Genesis literally, continues to ply its wares. Its spokesmen still peddle the familiar fallacies, their misunderstandings of the second law of thermodynamics, their curious views about radiometric dating with apparently revolutionary implications for microphysics, the plundering of debates in evolutionary theory for lines that can be usefully separated from their context, and so forth. But the most prominent Creationists on the current intellectual scene are a new species, much smoother and more sawy. Not for them the commitment to a literal interpretation of Genesis with all the attendant difficulties. Some of them even veer close to accepting the so-called “fact of evolution,” the claim, adopted by most scientists within a dozen years of the publication of Darwin’s Origin, that living things are related and that the history of life has been a process of descent with modification. The sticking point for the Born-Again Creationists, as it was for many late-nineteenth-century thinkers, is the mechanism of evolutionary change. They want to argue that natural selection is inadequate, indeed that no natural process could have produced the diversity of organisms, and thus that there must be some designing agent, who didn’t just start the process but who has intervened throughout the history of life.
The Household as Repair Shop
Authors: Spelman Elizabeth V
Published: November 2023

The human being—the entertainer formerly known as Man—is the repairing animal. Repair certainly is n’t the only work humans do, nor are we the only animals that do it. And no doubt there already are plenty of venerable and captivating portraits of Homo sapiens—as the rational animal, the political animal, the social animal, the animal that really-and-not-just-apparently uses language, the only thinking thing that also has emotions, the only thinking thing that worries about whether it is the only thinking thing. But there is a powerful and fascinating case for regarding Homo sapiens as Homo reparans.
Resentment and Assurance
Authors: Walker Margaret Urban
Published: November 2023

Resentment is a kind of anger. It is widely agreed that resentment predicates some kind of wrong at others’ hands and that it is in some way a defensive emotion in its operation or its manner of expression. The most widely cited contemporary account of resentment, Jean Hampton’s, renders the anger, wrong, and need for defense in a particularly colorful way. Hampton’s is an individualistic and agonistic account of resentment. Beings acutely aware of their “value and rank” are moved to anger by injuries to themselves that challenge their presumed standings, and they are mobilized in fearful defense of the self-esteem these standings under-write.
Genocide and Social Death
Authors: Card Claudia
Published: November 2023

This essay develops the hypothesis that social death is utterly central to the evil of genocide, not just when genocide is primarily cultural but even when it is homicidal on a massive scale. It is social death that enables us to distinguish the peculiar evil of genocide from the evils of other mass murders. Even genocidal murders can be viewed as extreme means to the primary end of social death.
Introduction
Authors: Hobson Fred
Published: November 2023

One hardly needs to make a case for the prominence of William Faulkner and his novel Absalom, Absalom! In the American literary canon. Harold Bloom may not have spoken for everyone—but he certainly did for many—when he wrote in 1986, “By universal consent of critics and common readers, Faulkner now is recognized as the strongest American novelist of this century.” As for Absalom, Cleanth Brooks, writing in 1963, considered the work “the greatest of [Faulkner’s] novels,” and Joseph Urgo, in American Literature in 1990, pronounced it Faulkner’s “greatest novel, his most complex and rewarding literary work.” Dirk Kuyk, Jr., in Sutpen’s Design (1990) goes even further: not only does Absalom, Absalom! “tower among” Faulkner’s work, but “we can now hear it described as the greatest American novel of the century... joining Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn at the pinnacle of American fiction.” Faulkner himself had a similar view. In January 1936, just as he was wrapping up the novel, he said to a friend, “I think it’s the best novel yet written by an American.”
History and the Sense of the Tragic
Authors: Brooks Cleanth
Published: November 2023

Absalom, absalom ! in my opinion the greatest of Faulk- ner’s novels, is probably the least well understood of all of his books. The property of a great work, as T. S. Eliot remarked long ago, is to communicate before it is understood, and Absalom, Absalom! passes this test triumphantly. It has meant something very powerful and important to all sorts of people, and who is to say that, under the circumstances, this something was not the thing to be said to that particular reader? To the young French- man who had served in the maquis, to the young writer in New York interested in problems of technique, a little weary from having given his days and nights to the prose of Henry James, to the Shrevlin McCannons all over Canada and the United States with their myths of the South compounded out of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Strange Fruit—to all of these, Absalom, Absalom! had some-thing to give. That is important, and I do not mean to disparage it. Yet the book has its own rights, as it were, and in proportion as we admire it, we shall want to see not merely what we can make of it but what it makes of itself.
The Signifying Abstraction:Reading “the Negro” in Absalom, Absalom!
Authors: Davis Thadious
Published: November 2023

A black presence dominates Absalom, Absalom!as it does perhaps no other Faulkner novel. Nowhere else is it so apparent that the Negro is an abstract force confounding southern life both past and present even while, paradoxically, stimulating much of that life and art. The material or experiential realities of black people do not figure into the conception of “the Negro,” an essentialized, always already “typed” configuration. A symbolic statement of this idea is suggested by the action of Miss Rosa Coldfield, one of the participants and narrators, who attempts to lift the weight of a coffin bearing the body of Charles Bon (whom she has never seen either alive or dead) in order to ascertain whether Bon’s body is, in fact, inside. In essence, she desires to validate Bon’s existence from sensory evidence; she is determined to know whether he is flesh or an imaginative construct. However, Miss Rosa is forced to apply not the most expedient sensory mechanism (that is, sight) but the only one available to her, and that one is insufficient for such a determination.
Sutpen’s Design
Authors: Kuyk Dirk
Published: November 2023

You see , i had a design in my mind.” In William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! that line occurs more than two-thirds of the way through the book.1 Readers, eager or driven to press on, do not pause to think about it, but the line repays contemplation. By design, Thomas Sutpen certainly means a plan that he had conceived and had sought to carry out. Design might mean still more. Because Sutpen was seeking retaliation, design might imply a plan of attack: Sutpen might have formed a design upon someone or something. Whatever design means to Sutpen— and I think that his meaning is far from fully understood—his tone, as he speaks the line, expresses neither repentance nor bravado. Sutpen calls the design his own not as an admission or a claim but as a plain statement of fact. The coldness of his tone and his lack of shame and remorse have led many readers to condemn him. They may read design ironically, as if Sutpen is unknowingly condemning himself for a brutal, selfish scheme.
Death and the Brain
Authors: Black Ira B
Published: November 2023

Though Enoch had faithfully taken nostrums prescribed by the neurologist for the past six months, he noticed no improvement. His wife grew alarmed by his lapses. Of course, he no longer worked his accustomed five-and-a-half-day week. Through mutual agreement, he visited the office two or three days a week. Participation in merger and acquisition negotiations was out of the question, but he still engaged in behind-the-scenes discussions, and occasionally contributed an acute insight that surprised and delighted his concerned partners. With the near-constant support and intervention of Ruth, his long-time administrator, and Tania, his personal secretary, he appropriately dispensed his reduced responsibilities at the firm.
Arguments against Materialism
Authors: Searle John R
Published: November 2023

In the last chapter I presented some of the history of recent materialism, and I considered arguments against some versions, especially against behaviorism, type identity theory, and eliminative materialism. In this chapter I will present the most common arguments against materialism, concentrating on functionalism, because it is currently the most influential version of materialism. In general, these attacks have the same logical structure: the materialist account leaves out some essential feature of the mind such as consciousness or intentionality. In the jargon of philosophers, the materialist analysis fails to give sufficient conditions for mental phenomena, because it is possible to satisfy the materialist analysis and not have the appropriate mental phenomena. Strictly speaking, functionalism does not require materialism. The functionalist defines mental states in terms of causal relations and the causal relations could in principle be in anything. It just happens, as the world turned out, that they are in physical brains, physical computers, and other physical systems. The functionalist analysis is supposed to be a conceptual truth that analyzes mental concepts in causal terms. The fact that these causal relations are realized in human brains is an empirical discovery, not a conceptual truth. But the driving motivation for functionalism was a materialist rejection of dualism. Functionalists want to analyze mental phenomena in a way that avoids any reference to anything intrinsically subjective and nonphysical.
Consciousness Part II The Structure of Consciousness and Neurobiology
Authors: Searle John R
Published: November 2023

In the last chapter I described a certain basic ontology. We need to keep this ontology in mind, with all its simplicity and even crudity, while we now explore the remarkable complexity and uniqueness of consciousness. Though the basic ontology is simple, the resulting phenomena are complicated and the details of their neurobiological relations to the brain are difficult to understand and at present largely unknown. Once we have solved the relatively easy philosophical problem, we have very difficult neurobiological problems left over.
Perception
Authors: Searle John R
Published: November 2023

One of the chief functions of the mind, both in our day-to-day living and over the long evolutionary haul, is to relate us to the rest of the world, especially by way of perception and action. To put the point in the simplest possible terms, by perception we take in information about the world, we then coordinate this information both consciously and unconsciously, and make decisions or other-wise form intentions, which result in actions by way of which we cope with the world. In this chapter we will consider the relations between perception and the world that exists apart from our perceptions, what philosophers like to call, misleadingly, the “external world.”
A Brief History of the Paradox
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

Philosophy written in English is overwhelmingly analytic philosophy, and the techniques and predilections of analytic philosophy are not only unhistorical but anti-historical, and hostile to textual commentary. Analytic usually aspires to a very high degree of clarity and precision of formulation and argument, and it often seeks to be informed by, and consistent with, current natural science. In an earlier era, analytic philosophy aimed at agreement with ordinary linguistic intuitions or common sense beliefs, or both. All of these aspects of the subject sit uneasily with the use of historical texts for philosophical illumination. How, then, can substantial history of philosophy find a place in analytic philosophy? If history of philosophy includes the respectful, intelligent use of writings from the past to address problems that are being debated in the current philosophical journals, then history of philosophy may well belong to analytic philosophy. But if history of philosophy is more than this; if it is concerned with interpreting and reinterpreting a certain canon, or perhaps making a case for extending this canon, its connection with analytic philosophy is less clear. More obscure still is the connection between analytic philosophy and a kind of history of philosophy that is unapologetically antiquarian. This is the kind of history of philosophy that emphasises the status of a philosophical text as one document among others from a faraway intellectual world, and that tries to acquaint us with that world in order to produce understanding of the document. In this book, ten distinguished historians of philosophy, mostly trained in the analytic tradition, explore the tensions between, and the possibilities of reconciling, analytic philosophy and history of philosophy.
Sisyphus’s Rock and Zeno’s Paradoxes
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

Sisyphus was condemned to push a boulder uphill only to have it roll back under its own weight. Hades condemned him to do this over and over, for eternity in the underworld. Is the attempt to solve paradoxes equally futile? Most of the central paradoxes that philosophers now study were being discussed over two thousand years ago. Albert Camus argues that Sisyphus is a heroic figure. Sisyphus gains victory in defeat; the very attempt to do the impossible ennobles him. Some philosophers justify the struggle with paradoxes in the same defiant way. I do not think you can try to do what you believe to be impossible. You try by moving toward your goal. If you believe that nothing you do can bring you closer, nothing you do counts as trying.
Hume’s All-Consuming Ideas
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

David Hume (1711–1776) looked more “like a turtle-eating alderman” than a philosopher. When this cheerful Scot became popular in the French salons, the philosophes poked fun at his stoutness. Once, as Hume entered a room, d’Alembert quoted from the beginning of St. John’s Gospel: “And the word was made flesh.” A lady admirer of le bon David riposted “And the word was made lovable.” After Hume achieved his ambition of literary fame, his friends urged him to update his best seller, History of England. “Gentlemen, you do me too much honor, but I have four reasons for not writing: I am too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich.” Hume preferred supper parties. At one he hosted, a guest complained about the spitefulness of the world.
Kant and the Antinomy of Pure Reason
Authors: Sorensen Roy
Published: November 2023

Dr. Jean-Christophe Marchand conjectures that the Critique of Pure Reason was produced by a brain tumor. Until the age of forty-seven, the scientist Immanuel Kant wrote clearly. Astronomers recognize him as the inventor of the nebular hypothesis: planets, stars, and galaxies formed from dust that swirled together under the force of gravity. In the Natural History and Theory of the Heavens Kant writes, “Millions and whole myriads of millions of centuries will flow on, during which always new worlds and systems of worlds will be formed The creation is never finished or complete.” Kant (1724-1804) had an active social life that consisted mostly of dinner parties. There are a few hints at romance. In one letter, dated June 12, 1762, Frau Maria Charlotta Jacobi sends Kant a kiss from her and her girlfriend. She suggests that Kant “may wind her watch” the next time they meet.