Since archaeology is fundamentally the study of the human past, which is what the word “archaeology” connotes according to its Greek etymology, it is part of the humanities. However, archaeologists work in teams with scientists and employ quantitative techniques and comparative methods of the social sciences; archaeologists are thus an academic hybrid and are pleased to live in the interstices of many disciplines. In this article we review the history of archaeology in the humanities and explore some new directions in (...) archaeological research. We discuss the enduring questions of origins of the antiquity of humanity, religion and art, the first agricultural villages, and the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. We also consider new agendas in archaeology: historical archaeology, landscapes in the past and present, material studies of the present, and how archaeologists are engaged in modern politics. (shrink)

Since the l960s, archaeology has become increasingly taught in universities and practiced on a growing scale by national and local heritage agencies throughout the world. This book addresses the criticisms of postmodernist writers about archaeology's social role, and asserts its intellectual importance and achievements in discovering real facts about the human past. It looks forward to the creation of a truly global consciousness of the origins of human societies and civilizations.

Chapter I: The Geometry of Visibles 1 . The N on- Euclidean Geometry of Visibles In the chapter "The Geometry of Visibles" in Inquiry into the Human Mind, ...

Marx admirait grandement Aristote. En aurait-il pour autant accepté l'étrange réactualisation de l'ontologie, cette proto-science de "l'être en tant qu'être"? Toute son oeuvre atteste au contraire qu'elle relevait à ses yeux de "l'ancienne philosophie", conçue à une époque où se confondaient encore toutes les branches du savoir et dont il fallait "sortir d'un bond". L'élaboration par lui et ses continuateurs de cette logique supérieure qu'est la dialectique matérialiste offrait désormais la clé d'une connaissance positive d'un monde s'expliquant par lui-même, sans (...) adjonction d'aucune sorte. On peut s'étonner qu'au soir de sa vie, Georges Lukacs (1885-1971), une des figures les plus marquantes du marxisme contemporain, se soit lancé dans l'impossible tentative de réanimer cette antiquité philosophique. Riche en développements sur le travail et l'aliénation, sa monumentale Ontologie de l'être social n'en révèle pas moins un significatif écartèlement entre le penseur marxiste et l'homme de la Mitteleuropa qu'il ne dépouilla sans doute jamais complètement en lui. (shrink)

This essay considers the issue of informed consent as it arose in the context of 1960s living kidney donors. In one of the earliest empirical inquiries into informed consent, psychiatrists Carl H. Fellner and John R. Marshall interviewed donors about their decision‐making process and their experience and reflections on donorship. In their much‐cited 1970 paper, the physicians reported that living donors, rather than reaching a reasoned, intellectual, and unemotional decision about donating a kidney (as stipulated in the Ethical Guidelines for (...) Organ Transplantation issued by the American Medical Association's Judicial Council), instead made instantaneous and “irrational” decisions about participation. Fellner and Marshall's studies contributed to the public debate and professional discussion about the moral and ethical dimensions of donorship, even as they challenged the developing consensus on informed consent. (shrink)

: President Clinton's charge to the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments included the identification of ethical and legal standards for evaluating government-sponsored radiation experiments conducted during the Cold War. In this paper, we review the traditional account of the history of American research ethics, and then highlight and explain the significance of a number of the Committee's historical findings as they relate to this account. These findings include both the national defense establishment's struggles with legal and insurance issues concerning (...) human experiments, and the medical profession's perspective on human experimentation in the years following the Nuremberg Medical Trials. We conclude that the Committee's work both enriches the traditional view of the history of research ethics and opens important new areas for study. (shrink)

Schopenhauer is famously abusive toward his philosophical contemporary and rival, Friedrich William Joseph von Schelling. This chapter examines the motivations for Schopenhauer’s immoderate attitude and the substance behind the insults. It looks carefully at both the nature of the insults and substantive critical objections Schopenhauer had to Schelling’s philosophy, both to Schelling’s metaphysical description of the thing-in-itself and Schelling’s epistemic mechanism of intellectual intuition. It concludes that Schopenhauer’s substantive criticism is reasonable and that Schopenhauer does in fact avoid Schelling’s errors: (...) still, the vehemence of the abuse is best perhaps explained by the proximity of their philosophies, not the distance. Indeed, both are developing metaphysics of will with full and conflicted awareness of the Kantian epistemic strictures against metaphysics. In view of this, Schopenhauer is particularly concerned to mark his own project as legitimate by highlighting the manner in which he avoids Schelling’s errors. (shrink)

This book uses an incidence approach to look at the economic repercussions of birth defects. The authors investigate eighteen of the most clinically significant birth defects affecting 35,000 newborns each year in our country. Their assessments suggest that the annual cost of these eighteen birth defects, together, is more than eight billion dollars . The authors describe in detail their methodology and data sources while providing thorough accounts of each of the eighteen birth defects. Waitzman, Scheffler, and Romano break new (...) ground by using reports from the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program in order to provide cost estimates. They illustrate to the reader how cost estimates of specific birth defects can be used to justify prevention interventions and strategies. In chapter seven, they provide an important example, showing cost-benefit analysis of a program of folate supplementation of food to prevent neutral tube defects. Contents: List of Tables; Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; The Application of Cost-of-Illness Methodology To Birth Defects; The Direct Medical Costs of Birth Defects; Nonmedical Direct Costs of Birth Defects: Developmental Services and Special Education; The Indirect Costs of Birth Defects; Premature Mortality and Heightened Morbidity; An Assessment of Total Costs and Policy Implications; Description of Birth Defects; Description of Major Data Sources; Index. (shrink)

We are even less aware of our internal organs and the physiological processes that keep us alive. In this fascinating work, Drew Leder examines all the ways in which the body is absent—forgotten, alien, uncontrollable, obscured.

Descartes' proof that his essence is thinking.--Thoughtless brutes.--Descartes' proof that he is essentially a non-material thing.--Behaviorism as a philosophy of psychology.--The privacy of experience.--Wittgenstein on the nature of mind.--The myth of cognitive processes and structures.--Moore and Wittgenstein on the sense of "I know."--The groundlessness of belief.

Ackn o wledgments I owe special gratitude to Professors Hugo Adam Bedau and John Rawls for many helpful discussions of the general idea and scope, ...

This book provides essential reading for anyone with an academic or professional interest in business ethics today.

In the last few years, a remarkable convergence of interests and results has emerged between scholars interested in the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives and cognitive scientists studying the mind and brain within the predictive processing (PP) framework. This convergence has so far proven fruitful for both sides: while PP is increasingly adopted as a framework for understanding aesthetic phenomena, the arts and aesthetics, examined under the lens of PP, are starting to be seen as important windows (...) into our mental functioning. The result is a vast and fast-growing research programme that promises to deliver important insights into our aesthetic encounters as well as a wide range of psychological phenomena of general interest. Here, we present this developing research programme, describing its grounds and highlighting its prospects. We start by clarifying how the study of the arts and aesthetics encounters the PP picture of mental functioning (§1). We then go on to outline the prospects of this encounter for the fields involved: philosophy and history of art (§2), psychology of aesthetics and neuroaesthetics (§3) and psychology and neuroscience more generally (§4). The upshot is an ambitious but well-defined framework within which aesthetics and cognitive science can partner up to illuminate crucial aspects of the human mind. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives’. -/- . (shrink)

Unified theory of cognition -- Psychological laws -- Foundations of person cognition -- Functional theory of attitudes -- Attitude integration theories -- Comparisons of attitude theories -- Moral algebra -- Group dynamics -- Cognitive theory of judgment-decision -- General theory -- Experimental methods -- Unified science of psychology.

The rapidly increasing numbers of elderly people in our society have raised some important moral questions: How should we distribute social resources among different age groups? What does justice require from both the young and the old? In this book, Norman Daniels offers the first systematic philosophical discussion of these urgent questions, advocating what he calls a "lifespan" approach to the problem: Since, as they age, people pass through a variety of institutions, the challenge of caring for the elderly (...) becomes the prudent allocation of public resources among the various stages of people's lives. Using this philosophical approach, Daniels addresses specific public policy issues such as the allocation of medical funds, the adequacy of long-term care, current Medicare cost-containment measures, and the equitable distribution of income support over the lifespan and between generations. (shrink)

El ensayo siguiente consiste en una reinterpretación de la obra de Frantz Fanon a partir de la problemática biopolítica iniciada por Michel Foucault. Se analizan los procesos a través de los cuales las vidas de los colonizados se determinan como inhumanas, y se insertan dentro de un "lenguaje de pura violencia", es decir de una red de poderes violentos, soberanos y totalizantes. Fanón va a pensar una puesta en jaque de aquel estado de excepción permanente colonial a partir de la (...) violencia misma, ya que se tratara para él de transformar, sobre la práctica de las luchas, la violencia en ejercicio del descubrimiento de la verdad. In this essay we approach Franz Fanon's work from a biopolitical standpoint as initiated by Michel Foucault. We analyze the processes that lead to the notion of colonized people's life as less than human with a "language of pure violence", that is, within a network of violent powers at the same time sovereign and totalizing. Fanón intends to check that permanent "state of emergency" of the colonies by means of violence itself, since fighting can be transformed from violence alone to the fight for the discovery of truth. (shrink)

A powerful work of moral and political philosophy.The idea which I shall present here came to me more or less out of the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend a day at Headingley and I was reading a book about the death camp at Sobibor... The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction involved for me in this train journey... had the effect of fixing my thoughts on one of the more dreadful features (...) of human coexistence, when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to me. In The Contract of Mutual Indifference, Norman Geras discusses a central aspect of the experience of the Holocaust with a view to exploring its most important contemporary implications. In a bold and powerful synthesis of memorial, literary record, historical reflection and political theory, he focuses on the figure of the bystander -- the bystander to the destruction of the Jews of Europe and the bystander to more recent atrocities -- to consider the moral consequences of looking on without active response at persecution and great suffering. Geras argues that the tragedy of European Jewry, so widely pondered by historians, social scientists, psychologists, theologians and others, has not yet found its proper reflection within political philosophy. Attempting to fill the gap, he adapts an old idea from within that tradition of enquiry, the idea of the social contract, to the task of thinking about the triangular relation between perpetrators, victims and bystanders, and draws a somber conclusion from it. Geras goes on to ask how far this conclusion may be offset by the hypothesis of a universal duty to bring aid. The Contract of Mutual Indifference is an original and challenging work, aimed at the complacent abstraction of much contemporary theory. It is supplemented by three shorter essays on the implications of the Jewish catastrophe for conceptions of human nature and progress and for certain types of Marxist explanation. (shrink)

Some people will confront Alzheimer's with a measure of resignation, a determination to struggle against the progressive debilitation and to extract whatever comforts and benefits they can from their remaining existence. They are entitled to pursue that resolute path. For other people, like myself, protracted maintenance during progressive cognitive dysfunction and helplessness is an intolerably degrading prospect. The critical question for those of us seeking to avoid protracted dementia is how best to accomplish that objective.One strategy is to engineer one's (...) own death while still mentally competent to do so (even in the stage of mild dementia). If I were to use a preemptive strategy in the face of a dementia diagnosis, I would probably choose to stop eating and drinking, a process known as voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. An alternative tactic for avoiding prolonged dementia would be to allow oneself to decline into moderate dementia—thus losing capacity to perform self‐deliverance or even to make serious medical decisions—but before getting to that point to provide advance instructions rejecting prospective life‐sustaining medical interventions. These advance instructions would authorize palliative but not curative measures. My current personal instructions define the point of intolerable cognitive decline triggering medical nonintervention as “mental deterioration to a point when I can no longer read and understand written material such as a newspaper or financial records such as a checkbook.” These instructions dictate allowing my demise at a point of moderate dementia when I may not be perceptibly suffering, when I may still be getting some rudimentary satisfaction from my debilitated life, and when I no longer recall the preoccupation with personally intolerable indignity that motivated my instructions. Can I expect that my advance instructions will be implemented in those circumstances? Is it lawful, and is it moral for a surrogate decision‐maker and associated caregivers to allow an uncomprehending, ostensibly content but demented individual to die? My analysis herein contends that it is not only lawful and moral but also legally required to implement clear, considered advance instructions even at a stage of moderate dementia. (shrink)

Hamblin distinguished between formal and descriptive dialectic. Formal normative models of deliberation dialogue have been strongly emphasized as argumentation frameworks in computer science. But making such models of deliberation applicable to real natural language examples has reached a point where the descriptive aspect needs more interdisciplinary work. The new formal and computational models of deliberation dialogue that are being built in computer science seem to be closely related to some already existing and very well established computing technologies such as problem (...) solving and decision making, but whether or how dialectical argumentation can be helpful to support these systems remains an open question. The aim of this paper is to examine some real examples of argumentation that seem to hover on the borderlines between deliberation, problem solving and decision making. (shrink)

This brief essay describes the purpose, the content, and the development, by a group of Hastings Center fellows and a scholar at the Center, of the Hastings Center Bioethics Timeline. The timeline covers the wide range of contemporary events pertaining to the intersection of bioethics with the medical and biological sciences, health care, and health policy, as well as the medical arts and medical humanities. A collaborative effort that documents events in a collaborative field, the timeline is meant to be (...) updated and edited so that it improves over time. (shrink)

This book presents an entirely new answer to the question: “What is fair?” In their radical approach to ethics, Frohlich and Oppenheimer argue that much of the empirical methodology of the natural sciences should be applied to the ethical questions of fairness and justice.

“Marx did not reject the idea of a human nature. He was right not to do so.” That is the conclusion of this passionate and polemical new work by Norman Geras. In it, he places the sixth of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach under rigorous scrutiny. He argues that this ambiguous statement—widely cited as evidence that Marx broke with all conceptions of human nature in 1845—must be read in the context of Marx’s work as a whole. His later writings are (...) informed by an idea of a specifically human nature that fulfills both explanatory and normative functions. The belief that Marx’s historical materialism entailed a denial of the conception of human nature is, Geras writes, “an old fixation, which the Althusserian influence in this matter has fed upon … Because this fixation still exists and is misguided, it is still necessary to challenge it.” One hundred years after Marx’s death, this timely essay—combining the strengths of analytical philosophy and classical Marxism—rediscovers a central part of his heritage. (shrink)

In this article I use Kantian moral philosophy to develop a concept of meaningful work. Specifically, a Kantian would argue that work is meaningful if (1) it is freely entered into, (2) it allows the worker to exercise her autonomy and independence, (3) it enables the worker to develop her rational capacities, (4) it provides a wage sufficient for physical welfare, (5) it supports the moral development of employees and (6) it is not paternalistic. I then provide examples of contemporary (...) management practices that provide meaningful work in this sense. (shrink)

Introduction This book aims at continuing a conversation. It takes for interlocutor a writer who is himself today indefatigable in engaging with the ideas ...

Installation art is one of the most important and provocative developments in the visual arts during the last half century and has become a key focus of artists and of contemporary museums. It is also seen as particularly challenging or even disliked by many viewers, and-due to its unique in situ, immersive setting-is equally regarded as difficult or even beyond the grasp of present methods in empirical aesthetic psychology. In this paper, we introduce an exploratory study with installation art, utilizing (...) a collection of techniques to capture the eclectic, the embodied, and often the emotionally-charged viewing experience. We present results from an investigation of two pieces, both part of Olafur Eliasson's exhibition "Baroque, Baroque" held at the Belvedere museum in Vienna. These were assessed by administered pre- and post-viewing questionnaires focusing on emotion, meaning-making, and appraisals, in tandem with mobile eye tracking to consider viewers' attention to both installed artworks and/or the museum environment. The data showed differences in participants' emotional states, appraisals, and visual exploration, which together paint a picture of the aesthetic reactions to the works. These differences also showed how viewers' appraisal strategies, meaning making, and physical actions facilitated relatively more or less deep engagement with, and enjoyment of, the art pieces. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for museum studies, art education, and theory in empirical aesthetics. (shrink)

We argue performance in the serial reaction time task is associated with gradations of awareness that provide examples of fringe consciousness [Mangan, B. . Taking phenomenology seriously: the “fringe” and its implications for cognitive research. Consciousness and Cognition, 2, 89–108, Mangan, B. . The conscious “fringe”: Bringing William James up to date. In B. J. Baars, W. P. Banks & J. B. Newman , Essential sources in the scientific study of consciousness . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.], and address limitations (...) of the traditional SRT procedure, including criticism of exclusion generation tasks. Two experiments are conducted with a modified SRT procedure where irrelevant stimulus attributes obscure the sequence rule. Our modified paradigm, which includes a novel exclusion task, makes it easier to demonstrate a previously controversial influence of response stimulus interval on awareness. It also allows identification of participants showing fringe consciousness rather than explicit sequence knowledge, as reflected by dissociations between different awareness measures. The NEO-PI-R variable Openness to Feelings influenced the diversity of subjective feelings reported during two awareness measures, but not the degree of learning and awareness as previously found with traditional SRT tasks [Norman, E., Price, M. C., & Duff, S. C. . Fringe consciousness in sequence learning: the influence of individual differences. Consciousness and Cognition, 15, 723–760.]. This suggests possible distinctions between two components of fringe consciousness. (shrink)

This book presents an entirely new answer to the question: “What is fair?” In their radical approach to ethics, Frohlich and Oppenheimer argue that much of the empirical methodology of the natural sciences should be applied to the ethical questions of fairness and justice.

Bodily pain and distress come in many forms. They can well up from within at times of serious illness, but the body can also be subjected to harsh treatment from outside. The medical system is often cold and depersonalized, and much worse are conditions experienced by prisoners in our age of mass incarceration, and by animals trapped in our factory farms. In this pioneering book, Drew Leder offers bold new ways to rethink how we create and treat distress, clearing the (...) way for more humane social practices. Leder draws on literary examples, clinical and philosophical sources, his medical training, and his own struggle with chronic pain. He levies a challenge to the capitalist and Cartesian models that rule modern medicine. Similarly, he looks at the root paradigms of our penitentiary and factory farm systems and the way these produce distressed bodies, asking how such institutions can be reformed. Writing with coauthors ranging from a prominent cardiologist to long-term inmates, he explores alternative environments that can better humanize—even spiritualize—the way we treat one another, offering a very different vision of medical, criminal justice, and food systems. Ultimately Leder proposes not just new answers to important bioethical questions but new ways of questioning accepted concepts and practices. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War. By Susan E. Lederer.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1919.