It was love at first sight when Jonathan Calvert saw the Matterhorn in 1953. Something in the way the mountain held sway over him inspired a lifelong passion for natural beauty and adventure. Over the next fifty years, Calvert climbed, hiked, trekked, sailed, kayaked, and dog-sledded in wild places across the globe, following his urge to know. And he hasn t quit yet. In July 2014, he will spend a month in Central Asia traveling the Silk Road through (...) the Pamirs and Tian Shan mountains. In 2015 Calvert returns to the Antarctic in a sailboat to kayak and camp. This book is a record of his adventures, told through memoir, journals, and photographs. Calvert has devoted his life to exploring the world and himself, and he has never gotten to the bottom of the wellspring that is curiosity. Calvert has walked in the footsteps of early explorers, camped above the clouds, come face-to-tusk with a walrus, and, within yards of a summit, talked down the inner voice that cajoled him to quit. He has stumbled into crevasses, kayaked in quiet waters above whales, suffered altitude sickness, and called his family via radio and cell phone relay from a precipitous ledge to say, I made it. Discovering early in life that striking out by himself got the job done best, Calvert is no stranger to singular travels and travails. Yes, he adventures with comrades roped in as a team, paddling together, or taking his turn at the ship s helm but ultimately the journey is one s own. Throughout his life, Calvert has jumped at chance after chance, among them: climbing Alaska s Mount McKinley, Argentina s Aconcagua, and mountains in Switzerland, France, Tanzania, and Nepal; trekking in Tibet, Bhutan, England, and Pakistan; and kayaking the coast of Greenland and the Zhupanova River in the Kamchatka Peninsula. Where s that? Explore these pages, and then you will know.". (shrink)

A high profile context in which physics and biology meet today is in the new field of systems biology. Systems biology is a fascinating subject for sociological investigation because the demands of interdisciplinary collaboration have brought epistemological issues and debates front and centre in discussions amongst systems biologists in conference settings, in publications, and in laboratory coffee rooms. One could argue that systems biologists are conducting their own philosophy of science. This paper explores the epistemic aspirations of the field by (...) drawing on interviews with scientists working in systems biology, attendance at systems biology conferences and workshops, and visits to systems biology laboratories. It examines the discourses of systems biologists, looking at how they position their work in relation to previous types of biological inquiry, particularly molecular biology. For example, they raise the issue of reductionism to distinguish systems biology from molecular biology. This comparison with molecular biology leads to discussions about the goals and aspirations of systems biology, including epistemic commitments to quantification, rigor and predictability. Some systems biologists aspire to make biology more similar to physics and engineering by making living systems calculable, modelable and ultimately predictable—a research programme that is perhaps taken to its most extreme form in systems biology’s sister discipline: synthetic biology. Other systems biologists, however, do not think that the standards of the physical sciences are the standards by which we should measure the achievements of systems biology, and doubt whether such standards will ever be applicable to ‘dirty, unruly living systems’. This paper explores these epistemic tensions and reflects on their sociological dimensions and their consequences for future work in the life sciences. (shrink)

In the mid-1990s, the company Human Genome Sciences submitted three potentially revolutionary patent applications to the US Patent and Trademark Office, each of which claimed the entire genome sequence of a microorganism. The patent examiners, however, objected to these applications, and after negotiation they were eventually re-written to resemble more traditional gene patents. In this paper, which is based on a study of the patent examination files, we examine the reasons why these patent applications were unsuccessful in their original form. (...) We show that with respect to utility and novelty, the patent attorney’s case built on an understanding of the genome as a computer-related invention. The patent examiners did not object to the patenting of complete genome sequences as computer-related inventions on moral grounds or in terms of the distinction between a discovery and an invention. Instead, their objections were based on classification, rules and procedure. Rather than patent examiners having a notion of a genome that should not be patented, the notion of a ‘genome’, and the ways in which it may be different from a ‘gene’, played no role in these debates. We discuss the consequences of our findings for patenting in the biosciences. (shrink)

THE MOST SACRED FREEDOM includes eight essays that were first presented at the 2014 A.V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the seventh annual conference sponsored by Mercer Universitys Thomas C. and Ramona E. McDonald Center for Americas Founding Principles. Together, these essays explore the great principle of religious liberty by charting its development in the Western tradition and reconsidering its place at Americas founding. The book begins with a comparison between the flood accounts in Genesis and the Mesopotamian (...) Atra-Has's and advances all the way to the 2014 Supreme Court case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. The intervening chapters examine the contributions of figures such as Emperor Julian, Roger Williams, Cecilius Calvert, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the American Founders. Contributors to the volume are Steven Grosby, Jeremiah H. Russell, Maura Jane Farrelly, Daniel Cullen, John Witte, Jr., Scott Yenor, David Ramsey, and Michael Novak. (shrink)

Unlike its predecessors, this systematic survey of the law of Athens is based on explicit discussion of how the subject might be studies, incorporating topics such as the democratic political system and social structure. Technical and legal terms are explained in a comprehensive glossary.

In this paper I argue that RadicalInterpretation (RI), taken to be a methodological doctrine regarding the conditions under which an interpretation of an utterance is both warranted and correct, has unacceptable implications for the conditions on (ascriptions of) understanding. The notion of understanding at play is that which underwrites the testimonial transmission of knowledge. After developing this notion I argue that, on the assumption of RI, hearers will fail to have such understanding in situations in which we should want to (...) maintain otherwise. The overall effect of the argument is to provide a heretofore unexamined source of motivation for anti-individualistic approaches to the semantics of utterances. (shrink)

This paper summarizes the longstanding debate over psychology's fragmentation by illustrating two principal impediments to the fostering of consensus and unity. The paper then discusses the important benefits of past dialogue concerning these issues, suggesting that some progress has been made in dealing with problems of disunity and fragmentation, particularly at the metatheoretical and philosophical levels. This general discussion then forms the backdrop for the following articles, which together form a single argument in favor of a hermeneutic approach to the (...) problem of fragmentation. (shrink)

This target article draws together two groups of experimental studies on the control of human movement through peripheral feedback and centrally generated signals of motor commands. First, during natural movement, feedback from muscle, joint, and cutaneous afferents changes; in human subjects these changes have reflex and kinesthetic consequences. Recent psychophysical and microneurographic evidence suggests that joint and even cutaneous afferents may have a proprioceptive role. Second, the role of centrally generated motor commands in the control of normal movements and movements (...) following acute and chronic deafferentation is reviewed. There is increasing evidence that subjects can perceive their motor commands under various conditions, but that this is inadequate for normal movement; deficits in motor performance arise when the reliance on proprioceptive feedback is abolished either experimentally or because of pathology. During natural movement, the CNS appears to have access to functionally useful input from a range of peripheral receptors as well as from internally generated command signals. The unanswered questions that remain suggest a number of avenues for further research. (shrink)

An able and clear defense of Bradley's principal theses and the underlying conception of metaphysical enterprise. "This is a book about a metaphysician, about metaphysics, and, most importantly, it attempts to develop elements of a metaphysical position long the lines of what is called Absolute Idealism." The Introduction takes up the Verificationists [[sic]] argument and two recent accounts of metaphysics. Part I devotes ten Chapters to the elucidation and defense of Bradley's conception of reality. It culminates in examining three alternative (...) accounts of "Real". Part II considers "the major philosophical theories of the self in order to defend Bradley's Theory of the self within his metaphysical scheme."--A. S. C. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive and appreciative account of Dewey’s philosophy of value. It succeeds in rectifying certain current misconceptions of Dewey’s aims and contributions to moral philosophy, and in clearly presenting a coherent theory of value. Gouinlock begins his account by laying stress upon Dewey’s Experience and Nature as a key to Dewey’s thought. Chapter 1 is devoted to this task. It is held that "Dewey develops and articulates an inclusive philosophy by characterizing such things as art, science, and value (...) with a common set of concepts denoting the generic traits of experience." There is also a discussion of Dewey’s philosophic method and the uses and abuses of experience. Chapter 2 deals with man and nature and Dewey’s critical response to bifurcation between mind and body, and the relation between individual and society. Chapter 3 begins with Nature and Value. Here one finds a good discussion of ends-in-view and values. A great stress is laid on Dewey’s use of metaphysical concepts in value analysis, in particular the needed stress on the inclusive unity of means and end. (shrink)

The present commentary on it greatly contributes to the understanding of thisvery important work. In fact, it is a good expositary commentary, lucidly explaning the knotty points. It evinces deep study and understanding of Navya-Nyaya and its methodology.yhus, the sukhabodhika Tippanika represents a positive and distinctive contribution to the vast commercial literature on the Tattvacimtamani.

This chapter examines the role of the situation model in referential processing and how it can link what appear to be incompatible results from studies of monologue and dialogue as well as studies of reading and visual-world eye tracking. It shows that data from experiments on pronoun resolution in reading indicate a two-step model, in which candidate antecedents for an anaphor are first identified on the basis of gender matching and number matching, then evaluated with respect to the overall situation (...) model. In similar visual-world studies, these stages are seemingly collapsed together, which can be explained in terms of differences in how the situation model is related to the text versus the visual display of potential referents. The chapter suggests that comparing these different types of studies can elucidate the processes of reference resolution. (shrink)

I TRY to do the following things in this paper. I. To show briefly how one might argue for the mutual dependence of our demonstrative and descriptive conventions as they now stand. II. To suggest that this duality of convention may be a dispensable, though in some ways desirable, aspect of language and that if one of these conventions is non-essential it is our descriptive conventions. III. To show something of the philosophical implications of such a ‘non-word’ language. Perhaps not (...) the least uninteresting among these implications is what may then be said about our demonstrative and descriptive conventions as they now stand and especially what this might mean for attempts to reduce our demonstrative to our descriptive conventions, which involves us again in section I. It might be said that, while section I offers some linguistic facts, sections II and III attempt to show the contingency of some of these linguistic facts. (shrink)