(2000). Full transcript of inaugural AARST Science Policy Forum, New York Hilton, Friday 20 November 1998, 7?9 pm. Social Epistemology: Vol. 14, No. 2-3, pp. 131-180.

The earth's temperature, with rapid global warming over the past 30 years, is now passing through a period of relatively stable climate that has existed for more than 10,000 years. Further warming of more than 1°C will make the earth warmer than it has been in a million years. "Business-as-usual" scenarios, with fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions continuing to increase approximately 2 percent annually for several more decades, yield additional warming of 2° to 3°C this century and imply changes that (...) constitute practically a different planet. Multiple lines of evidence indicate that the earth's climate is nearing, but has not passed, a tipping point, beyond which it will be impossible to avoid climate change with far-ranging undesirable consequences. The changes include not only loss of the Arctic as we know it, with all that implies for wildlife and indigenous peoples, but losses on a much vaster scale because of worldwide rising seas. Sea level will increase slowly at first, as losses at the fringes of Greenland and Antarctica due to accelerating ice streams are partly balanced by increased snowfall and ice sheet thickening in the ice sheet interiors. But as Greenland and West Antarctic ice is softened and lubricated by melt-water and as buttressing ice shelves disappear because of a warming ocean, the balance will tip to rapid ice loss, bringing multiple positive feedbacks into play and causing cataclysmic ice sheet disintegration. The earth's history suggests that with warming of 2° to 3°C, the new equilibrium sea level will include not only most of the ice from Greenland and West Antarctica, but a portion of East Antarctica, raising sea level of the order of 25 meters. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

During the years leading up to World War I, America experienced a crisis of civic identity. How could a country founded on liberal principles and composed of increasingly diverse cultures unite to safeguard individuals and promote social justice? In this book, Jonathan Hansen tells the story of a group of American intellectuals who believed the solution to this crisis lay in rethinking the meaning of liberalism. Intellectuals such as William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, and (...) W. E. B. Du Bois repudiated liberalism's association with acquisitive individualism and laissez-faire economics, advocating a model of liberal citizenship whose virtues and commitments amount to what Hansen calls cosmopolitan patriotism. Rooted not in war but in dedication to social equity, cosmopolitan patriotism favored the fight against sexism, racism, and political corruption in the United States over battles against foreign foes. Its adherents held the domestic and foreign policy of the United States to its own democratic ideals and maintained that promoting democracy universally constituted the ultimate form of self-defense. Perhaps most important, the cosmopolitan patriots regarded critical engagement with one's country as the essence of patriotism, thereby justifying scrutiny of American militarism in wartime. (shrink)

The essays range from Hegel and Modernism to Marcel Duchamp and the Avant-Garde, postmodern poetics, boredom and Proust, the romance of Arendt and Heidegger, ...

If dominating functions in ω ω are adjoined repeatedly over a model of GCH via a finite-support c.c.c. iteration, then in the resulting generic extension there are no long towers, every well-ordered unbounded family of increasing functions is a scale, and the splitting number s (and hence the distributivity number h) remains at ω 1.

We study the I-ultrafilters on ω, where I is a collection of subsets of a set X, usually R or ω 1 . The I-ultrafilters usually contain the P-points, often as a small proper subset. We study relations between I-ultrafilters for various I, and closure of I-ultrafilters under ultrafilter sums. We consider, but do not settle, the question whether I-ultrafilters always exist.

We study the $I$-ultrafilters on $\omega$, where $I$ is a collection of subsets of a set $X$, usually $\mathbb{R}$ or $\omega_1$. The $I$-ultrafilters usually contain the $P$-points, often as a small proper subset. We study relations between $I$-ultrafilters for various $I$, and closure of $I$-ultrafilters under ultrafilter sums. We consider, but do not settle, the question whether $I$-ultrafilters always exist.

Several canonical partition theorems are obtained, including a simultaneous generalization of Neumer's lemma and the Erdos-Rado theorem. The canonical partition relation for infinite cardinals is completely determined, answering a question of Erdos and Rado. Counterexamples are given showing that in several ways these results cannot be improved.

Let κ denote a regular uncountable cardinal and NS the normal ideal of nonstationary subsets of κ. Our results concern the well-known open question whether NS fails to be κ + -saturated, i.e., are there κ + stationary subsets of κ with pairwise intersections nonstationary? Our first observation is: Theorem. NS is κ + -saturated iff for every normal ideal J on κ there is a stationary set $A \subseteq \kappa$ such that $J = NS \mid A = \{X \subseteq (...) \kappa:X \cap A \in NS\}$ . Turning our attention to large cardinals, we extend the usual (weak) Mahlo hierarchy to define "greatly Mahlo" cardinals and obtain the following: Theorem. If κ is greatly Mahlo then NS is not κ + -saturated. Theorem. If κ is ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable (e.g., weakly compact), ethereal (e.g., subtle), or carries a κ-saturated ideal, then κ is greatly Mahlo. Moreover, there is a stationary set of greatly Mahlo cardinals below any ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable cardinal. These methods apply to other normal ideals as well; e.g., the subtle ideal on an ineffable cardinal κ is not κ + -saturated. (shrink)

One of the contemporary results of Germany’s memorial conundrum is the rise of its “counter-monuments”: brazen, painfully self-conscious memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premises of their being. On the former site of Hamburg’s greatest synagogue, at Bornplatz, Margrit Kahl has assembled an intricate mosaic tracing the complex lines of the synagogue’s roof construction: a palimpsest for a building and community that no longer exist. Norbert Radermacher bathes a guilty landscape in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood with the inscribed light of (...) its past. Alfred Hrdlicka began a monument in Hamburg to counter—and thereby neutralize—an indestructible Nazi monument nearby. In a suburb of Hamburg, Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz have erected a black pillar against fascism and for peace designed to disappear altogether over time. The very heart of Berlin, former site of the gestapo headquarters, remains a great, gaping wound as politicians, artists, and various committees forever debate the most appropriate memorial for this site.4 4. The long-burning debate surrounding projected memorials, to the Gestapo-Gelände in particular, continues to exemplify both the German memorial conundrum and the state’s painstaking attempts to articulate it. For an excellent documentation of the process, see Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS und Reichssicherheitshauptamt auf dem “Prinz-Albrecht-Gelände,” ed. Reinhard Rürup . For a shorter account, see James E. Young, “The Topography of German Memory,” The Journal of Art 1 : 30. James E. Young is assistant professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation and The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning in Europe, Israel, and America , from which this essay is drawn. He is also the curator of “The Art of Memory,” an exhibition at the Jewish Museum of New York. (shrink)

We study various aspects of the size, including the cardinality, of closed unbounded subsets of [λ]<κ, especially when λ = κ+n for n ε ω. The problem is resolved into the study of the size of certain stationary sets. Relative to the existence of an ω1-Erdös cardinal it is shown consistent that ωω3 < ωω13 and every closed unbounded subsetof [ω3]<ω2 has cardinality ωω13. A weakening of the ω1-Erdös property, ω1-remarkability, is defined and shown to be retained under a large (...) class of Easton-like forcings applied to ω1-Erdös cardinals. A class of reverse-Easton forcings preserving α-Erdösness is also described, with special attention to the establishment of □-principles. Article Outline. (shrink)