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Index for this page...
All The Following Items Were Posted On May 1, 2009
Used loosely, it refers to any community of individuals who live peaceably with one another for their common good -- people who for the most part are not related in any way by ties of blood or of consanguinity. In this sense of the word, the fifty states that are member of the American union are states, and so too is the United States of America. However, the fifty states of the American union are not properly called states, because they do not have any external sovereignty; they cannot make war and peace with foreign communities, they cannot make alliances with them, or enter into treaties with them. Philosophically, a state can be said to exist only when it is a community ruled by a person or persons who hold public office or offices that are defined by a constitution that the community has formulated and ratified. Another word for such a community, in which the rulers have no power vested in them personally, but only in the offices to which they have been elected or appointed, is a "republic." In this sense of the term, a community ruled by a king or despot is not a state. Aristotle puts his finger on this point of difference between communities that are and communities that are not states in which the rulers are either elected or appointed officeholders. The citizens are those who rule and are ruled in turn -- rulers when they are public officials and ruled when they are returned to private life as citizens no longer in office. In ancient Greece the city (or polis) was a state or republic. The word "citizen" drives its meaning from that fact. Only a person who is governed constitutionally is properly called a citizen. If the constitutionally governed communities of Greek antiquity had been called "republics" instead of "city-states," the word "republican" could have been used instead of "citizen." In the world today most of its population lives under dictatorships, not in republics. A very small percentage of the world's population lives in states that are clearly republics. Source: Adler's Philosophical Dictionary: 125 Key Terms for the Philosopher's Lexicon. Have you a copy of this book in your personal library? If not, consider getting one. Read Max Weismann's review of this book by Clicking Here.
René Descartes (1596-1650): French rationalist philosopher Descartes was a French philosopher and mathematician. He proposed a dualistic philosophy based on the separation of soul and body, mind and matter, and sought to establish his system on mathematics and pure reason. His most famous dictum "Cogito ergo sum" is usually translated as "I think, therefore I am." He also made important contributions to the disciplines of mathematics and astronomy.
Excerpted from Meditations, by René Descartes. Read about René Descartes in The Radical Academy. Books by and about Rene Descartes. In the Classic Philosophers: The Philosophy of Rene Descartes.
FOR THE RECORD Six years ago Katherine S. Pollard jumped at an opportunity to join the international team that was identifying the sequence of DNA bases, or "letters," in the genome of the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). As a biostatistician with a long-standing interest in human origins, she was eager to line up the human DNA sequence next to that of our closest living relative and take stock. A humbling truth emerged: our DNA blueprints are nearly 99 percent identical to theirs. That is, of the three billion letters that make up the human genome, only 15 million of them--less than 1 percent--have changed in the six million years or so since the human and chimp lineages diverged. Evolutionary theory holds that the vast majority of these changes had little or no effect on our biology. But somewhere among those roughly 15 million bases lay the differences that made us human. Pollard was determined to find them. Since then, she and others have made tantalizing progress in identifying a number of DNA sequences that set us apart from chimps. Source: Scientific American Writing About Values Lifts Some Students' Grades Some seventh graders who were struggling in class did significantly better after performing a series of brief confidence-building writing exercises, and the improvements continued through eighth grade, researchers are reporting Thursday. The students who benefited most were blacks who were doing poorly, the study found; the exercises made no difference for whites, or for black students who were already doing well. Experts cautioned that the writing was hardly transforming: Those who benefited were still barely getting C's, on average, by the end of middle school. Yet the results were surprising, because interventions to improve school performance tend to have short-term benefits, and the writing assignments were simple, 15-minute efforts. ... The study was published in the journal Science. Source: New York Times Across time and cultures, humans have extolled the virtues of self-understanding, emotional stability, compassion, morality and empathy for others. These are, it's said, the universal traits of wisdom, valued everywhere. Which got two researchers at the University of California San Diego thinking: Is there a neurobiological basis for wisdom? Is being wise all about wiring? Writing in the current issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. Dilip Jeste, chief of geriatric psychiatry at UCSD, and Dr. Thomas Meeks, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry, say the answer might be yes. They have proposed a "speculative" model that suggests wisdom combines portions of the brain's older limbic system, a region governing emotional behavior, with the prefrontal cortex, a more recently evolved part of the brain associated with reasoning, decision-making and value judgment. Source: San Diego Union-Tribune Found: The Brain's Centre of Wisdom Scientists have identified the seat of human wisdom by pinpointing parts of the brain that guide us when we face difficult moral dilemmas. Sophisticated brain scanning techniques have found that humans respond by activating areas associated with the primitive emotions of sex, fear and anger as well as our capability for abstract thought. The findings, to be published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, represent a significant incursion into territory once regarded as the domain of religion and philosophy. Source: The (London) Times Near-Death Experiences: Heaven Can Wait When doctors returned to check on the patient who had almost died and been in a deep coma before being resuscitated, he thanked them for all the work they had done. He had, he told the surprised team of medics, been very impressed and had watched everything they had done. He had heard all that had been said, too .... He then went on to describe in detail the room where he had been treated--although he had never been conscious in there. That near-death experience is one of a number recorded by Dutch doctors and one of thousands of similar cases that have now been documented in a major worldwide study. New research shows that many critically ill kidney dialysis patients have similar experiences, and that almost one in 10 heart-arrest survivors also report near-death experiences whose features include out of body sensations, bright lights, dark tunnels, and images of life events and spiritual entities. Source: The Independent (UK) Commentary: Why Science Doesn't Make Sense Wouldn't it be great if science was a cool, logical process? If you could work out how the universe ticks without making the chilling discovery that most of it is missing? Or if, when you were investigating the placebo effect, you didn't find that some licensed drugs only work when you know you're taking them? Unfortunately, as these examples show, things don't often work as neatly as scientists might like. Doing science is messy and difficult - and that's before you factor in its human side. Jealous rivals, journal editors who think your subject is a joke, or colleagues with a lot to lose if your latest discovery pans out: other people can all make the scientific life a difficult one. ... In science, it was ever thus; progress is far harder-won than you might imagine. Experimental anomalies are often the things that expose the shortcomings of contemporary thinking--so you might imagine that they would be greeted with delight. Yet the opposite is usually true: the things that don't make sense are often the downfall of any scientists who embrace them. Source: The Telegraph (UK) What is it like to be a baby? For centuries, this question would have seemed absurd: behind that adorable facade was a mostly empty head. A baby, after all, is missing most of the capabilities that define the human mind, such as language and the ability to reason. Rene Descartes argued that the young child was entirely bound by sensation, hopelessly trapped in the confusing rush of the here and now. A newborn, in this sense, is just a lump of need, a bundle of reflexes that can only eat and cry. To think like a baby is to not think at all. Modern science has largely agreed, spending decades outlining all the things that babies couldn't do because their brains had yet to develop. They were unable to focus, delay gratification, or even express their desires. ... Now, however, scientists have begun to dramatically revise their concept of a baby's mind. Source: Boston Globe 5 Years After: Portugal's Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem--it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections. Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank. Source: Scientific American
A LITTLE OF THIS & A LITTLE OF THAT A Little Wisdom: "The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts." -- Bergan Evans A Little Advice: "To find a friend one must close one eye -- to keep him, two." -- Norman Douglas A Little Quip: "If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons." -- James Thurber A Little Proverb: "It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them." -- Alfred Adler A Little Question: "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" -- Mark Twain A Little Reflection: "He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know." -- Abraham Lincoln A Little One-Liner: "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." -- Oscar Wilde A Little Admission: "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." -- Mark Twain A Little Observation: "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go." -- Oscar Wilde A Little Warning: "If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." -- Catherine Aird A Little Quote: "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." -- Winston Churchill A Little Politics: "I love a dog. He does nothing for political reasons." -- Will Rogers
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