Attitude Of Mind Research Articles

The Formation of the Foreign Office Economic Relations Section, 1930–1937

In December 1930 Sir Victor Wellesley, the deputy under secretary at the Foreign Office, and its expert on Far Eastern finance, circulated a 29-page ‘Proposal for the establishment of a Politico-Economic Intelligence Department in the Foreign Office.’ This memorandum was prompted by the growing importance of tariffs, and various forms of investment, as instruments of foreign policy, and concern at his colleagues' failure to understand the political consequences. With economic nationalism in the ascendant, Wellesley recognized that Britain soon would have to consider whether she would ‘take part in the scramble for economic hegemony’. He hoped Cabinet would decide against tariffs and imperial preference, but was worried that the Foreign Office would be ill-equipped to defend this viewpoint. It was not that the Office lacked adequate sources of economic information, but rather that the division of duties between the Department of Overseas Trade and the Foreign Office precluded their assimilation with political appreciations. Although seventy five per cent of the work of the average mission was economic or commercial, this was generally left to the commercial counsellor, who reported directly to the Department of Overseas Trade. Political dispatches were forwarded to the appropriate Foreign Office department and there examined in virtual isolation. Moreover, the dominant attitude of mind among senior diplomats was, if not actually predisposed against economic work, at least so lacking in understanding that their efforts were often misdirected.

The Habit of Deference: The Imperial Factor and the “University Question“ in Upper Canada

“Imperialism,” like “empire,” is a word with many connotations; briefly, it describes an attitude of mind to the possession and use of dependent territories by the metropolitan power and the effect of colonization on the society and polity of the colonized. Despite attempts to discover a common basis to imperialist thinking at all times in history, most historians perceive differences, both in degree and kind, between different empires and at various times in the history of a single empire. They approach their task either with a definition of “imperialism” or a theory about the phenomenon it is meant to describe, and are concerned primarily with the effects of policies rather than how and why they were made; or they ask why something happened when it did, in the way it did, and are concerned primarily with the making of policy and the motives of the policy-makers.Following the second approach, this paper explores one of the most crucial and continuous questions that imperial administrators had to resolve: the problem of self-government in colonies of European settlement, leading to the ultimate transfer of power; and by looking at the “University Question” in Upper Canada during the half-century after 1791, it examines how the perpetual adjustment that was “policy-making” actually happened. More specifically, in answering the question, “Who ran the British Empire?”, it is concerned not so much with the effects of Britain's control over subject peoples as with the method by which it exercised that control.

The just provision of health care: a reply to Elizabeth Telfer.

Dr Hillel Steiner in this reply to Elizabeth Telfer takes each of her arguments for different arrangements of a health service and examines them--'four positions which can be located on a linear ideological spectrum'--and adds a fifth which could have the effect of 'turning the alleged linear spectrum into a circle'. Underlying both Elizabeth Telfer's article and Dr Steiner's reply, the base is inescapably a 'political' one, but cannot be abandoned in favour of purely philosophical concepts. Whatever the attitude of mind of the reader of these two papers to the provision of a health service, the stimulus to more careful assessments of our own National Health Service and its problems can only be good.

Participation or alienation

Worker participation is currently attracting a great deal of attention. Books, articles and conferences centre round the subject and we are constantly hearing about worker directors, two‐tier boards and other means by which it might be brought into effect. But when the man on the assembly line is told that his union has appointed a representative on the board, will this guarantee that he feels he is participating effectively in the operations of the company in which he works? Opinions differ on this and related questions so it might be worthwhile to stand aside for a moment and consider what participation really depends on. Fundamentally it is an attitude of mind and this cannot always be linked with methods of representation.

Scottish Philosophy and British Physics 1750–1880: A Study in the Foundations of the Victorian Scientific Style

Richard Olson Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1975 in UK pp vii + 349 price £9.20 When a science historian studies some sciencein relation to the intellectual climate of its day, it is valuable for him to note the educational antecedents of the scientists. The general education provided at Edinburgh and other Scottish universities included philosophy and metaphysics, influencing attitudes of mind and ways of thinking.

Morality and Egoism

In every society there are certain rules which its members are expected to observe, certain ways of behaving and attitudes of mind which are commonly and officially praised or blamed, and classified as virtues or vices. This practice of requiring or banning certain types of action and praising or blaming certain dispositions of character I shall call the morality of the society. Morality in this sense imposes some restraints upon the operation of self-interest, requiring the members of the society sometimes to behave to their own disadvantage in order to carry out a rule or exercise a virtue. Obedience to the demands of morality will be enforced by penalties of various kinds. But I do not count a rule as belonging to the morality of a society if obedience to it depends mainly on the fear of penalties imposed by a minority of powerful persons. Moral rules and ideals are those which have the general support of the members, in that most of them are in favour of these rules being obeyed and these ideals pursued. Since morality depends on common consent, and is derived from the opinions and attitudes of the members in general, every member is entitled and expected to contribute towards defining and eliciting moral conduct by forming and expressing opinions about right and wrong. Such opinions I will call moral judgements: that is, I shall mean by a moral judgement a judgement about the rules and standards which the members of the society should be required and encouraged to live by. I think this is one admissible way of using the words 'morality' and 'moral judgement'; I am not suggesting that it is the only one. A moral judgement in this sense-a judgement about the modes of acting, feeling and thinking to be recommended and enforced in the community-must conform to certain conditions of both form and content. Formally, such a judgement must either be general, taking the form 'If anybody is in circumstances of the kind X, he must behave in the manner Y, or it must be an application of some such generalisation to a particular case. For moral judgements are concerned with public standards, which can be formulated, promulgated, enforced, taught, learned, followed on principle or from habit without reflection. For a morality has the essential purpose of enabling men to trust one another by assuring one man of the way another man will behave. So of this sort of moral judgement we can say that whoever affirms it must be ready to agree that either the judgement itself or the principle of which it is an application should be a universal law-universal, that is to say, in the society in question. Of course, many philosophers have held that this universalisability is essential to moral judgements. My point is that this claim is not to be justified by reference to some a priori Idea of Reason, but by regarding moral judgements as concerned with standards that must be public, teachable and enforceable, and provide reliable expectations of the behaviour of others. There is of course no formal

The Title of Prometheus Desmotes

All I hope to do in this note is to reinforce Lesky's protest against ‘the attitude of mind shown by many modern scholars, who refuse to admit that there is a Prometheus problem at all, and pass over in silence so many arguments which deserve the most careful attention’. One reason why the majority of scholars are so sanguine about the peculiarities of Prometheus Desmotes is that they take it for granted that the surviving play was the first of a trilogy, and that the remainder of the trilogy would somehow or other have resolved some or most or all of the problems of the surviving part. It is assumed that the second play was, as the titles apparently proclaim, Prometheus Luomenos: the chief exception to this view is W. Schmid, the much reviled but scarcely refuted champion of the bastardy of Prom. Desm., who argued that the surviving play was written in the third quarter of the fifth century by an imitator of Aeschylus. Next it is usually supposed that Prometheus Purphoros (a title in the catalogue in M, twice cited elsewhere) was the third play—though there have been more respectable exceptions to that step. The fourth Prometheus title (twice cited by Pollux), Prometheus Purkaeus, is very plausibly taken to be the satyr play of 472 B.C., called simply Προυηθεύς in the hypothesis to Pers. Despite this, no-one seems to have questioned the easy assumption that the other three Prometheus titles are evidence for the connected trilogy. I shall offer here a neglected reason for thinking that, on the contrary, the titles are evidence that the Prometheus plays were not produced together. The argument is pedantic, even irritating, but it is nonetheless coherent and hard to contradict.

CAN YOU PASS THE PROFIT TEST?

VIRTUALLY every industrialist would impugn that politically engendered attitude of mind which condemns profit as a dirty word rather than welcomes it as a measure of a job well done and a need well met. Yet there are many managers with responsibility for central services who resent being judged by that same meter — profitability as the key indicator of effective performance.

Time and Chance

That there is something unsatisfying about the scientific concept of nature has for long been recognized, and not least by scientists themselves. Of course there have been some remarkable changes in the foundations of science during the present century, and these have lessened the previously ‘mechanistic’ character of scientific theory; but it still remains true that physical science finds no place in its scheme of things for life and consciousness. “The ancients,” wrote Paul Valéry, “set their philosophy to peopling the universe as ardently as we, in our time, have set ours to emptying it of all life.” And similarly A.N. Whitehead has spoken of the opening up, since Descartes, of a deep division between two distinct and incompatible attitudes of mind; we seek to believe simultaneously in the mechanical theory of nature and in the self-determining or creative character of living things. Hence there is a radical inconsistency, he says, at the basis of modern thought.

Scientists and politics

In his recent article (Physics Bulletin March) contrasting science with politics, to the detriment of the latter, in which we are told: 'What politicians need is ... the scientific attitude of mind', Professor Lipson made three errors, all in favour of science. At the risk of seeming to be antipathetic towards science, which I certainly am not, and in hope of promoting a deeper analysis of the social institutions of science and politics than Lipson's facile contrast permitted, I offer possible corrections.

Scientific attitudes

According to Professor Lipson, in the 'Opinion' column of the March Physics Bulletin, what politicians need is 'the scientific attitude of mind.' So, I would suggest, do scientists who wish to write about politics and a good starting point would be to observe, as dispassionately as possible, the object of their studies.

SIR GEORGE FREDERIC STILL ON THE CHILD'S TEMPER

Sir George Frederic Still (1868-1941), one of the greatest figures of British pediatrics, wrote, in addition to his superb textbook, a largely unappreciated book entitled Common Happenings in Childhood (1938). In this charming book consisting of essays, studies and stray thoughts about everyday phenomena of a child's life, Still had this to say about temper as seen in children. "This is not a homily, nor is it philosophic discourse de moribus, it is just a collection of stray thoughts upon temper, especially as seen in children. When we speak of being ‘in a temper’ we usually mean a bad temper, but temper in itself has no such one-sided significance, there is good temper as well as bad temper. I am no psychologist and shall not attempt to define temper in terms of psychology, indeed a study of works upon that subject rather suggests that the psychologist knows nothing about temper. He makes great play with the emotions, e.g. anger, but he has nothing to say about that attitude of mind which we call bad-tempered or good-tempered. We all know what we mean by these terms: on the one hand, the sullen, irritable, contrary-minded, passionate; on the other, the bright, cheerful, responsive, ‘not easily provoked.’ A stray ebullition of anger or irritation is not necessarily an indication of bad temper, by which we mean rather an habitual tendency. We all have our flash-point of anger or irritation, but in some the flash-point of irritation is lower than the average: these are they whom we call bad-tempered.

Language science in the tertiary curriculum

The goal of linguistics has been in dispute since its origin as a scientific discipline. The situation remains confused and consequently the curricular position of linguistics is ambiguous. An examination of the historical reasons for this indicates the following conclusions: At the time when language was first proposed as a subject for scientific study the natural sciences were still dominated by the mechanical model of Newtonian physics; this attitude of mind has inhibited the development of linguistics.

Septimius Severus at Lepcis Magna and Cyrene

Lepcis and Cyrene in Roman times were two very different cities, each typical of the province to which it belonged—Lepcis to Africa Proconsularis, one of the most successfully ‘Romanized’ provinces of the Roman Empire, and Cyrene to the province of Crete and Cyrene which always remained part of the Greek-speaking world and retained much of its Greek character and institutions. Architecturally, Lepcis today is one of the most impressively Roman cities, with its splendid public buildings, which include the grand Severan Forum and Basilica and the massive Hadrianic Thermae, and its spacious streets. Cyrene, in contrast, preserves an image that is severely Greek, dominated by austere Doric architecture. Even in quite late Roman times there seems to have been a determined effort to preserve the old forms, so that the Capitolium, for example, on the edge of the old Agora, was re-built under Antoninus Pius as a Greek building.On the occasion of the Libya exhibition, I have tried to find a theme to bring together these two very diverse provinces that both form part of the modern Libyan Arab Republic. The choice of Septimius Severus, emperor from A.D. 193–211, needs some explanation. He was, of course, born at Lepcis probably in 146; he was there again as legatus of his uncle, the Proconsul of Africa; he may have gone there as Emperor in A.D. 203 during a grand tour of Africa and personally planned the great building programme which transformed his home-city. There is, on the other hand, no record of his ever having been at Cyrene, though he might have gone there as a boy. It is generally believed, indeed, that his first experience of the Greek-speaking empire was when he went to Syria to serve under Pertinax in A.D. 180. He does, however, provide a suitable link in that he was commemorated by sculptured monuments in both places, and the attitudes of mind which these monuments reflect, help us, I think to understand the underlying unity as well as the diversity of the two provinces.

Population Growth and Environment: Some Aspects of the Problem in the United States and the Response

Population growth has been traditionally regarded with some satisfaction in the United States, being associated with economic and social benefits and rising standards of living. Population expansion has, inter alia, provided an increasing labour force, larger and more varied markets and a widening range of opportunity for individuals. By 1967, however, as the U.S. population officially passed the 200 million mark, reactions were becoming decidedly ambivalent. Expressions of pride and pleasure, and the anticipation of further economic growth were somewhat soured by the widely publicized views of conservationists and ‘environmentalists’ (a rather newer breed). The old attitude of mind in fact paid little heed to the problems accompanying large population expansion and rapid changes both in patterns of living and in geographical distribution. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, concern about these matters began to grow, and the assumed arrival of the 200 millionth American heralded a sizeable campaign concerned with the threat, so called, of ‘over-population’. Stewart Udall, then Secretary of the Interior, writing a Foreword to his Department's report ‘The Population Challenge’, stated flatly ‘The greatest threat to quality of living in this country is overpopulation’. He spoke of the challenge of a soaring population; the shrinking amount of space per head; the gathering storm of conflict on space allocation, on resource utilization and on the preservation of the quality of environment. The headings of various sections of that report – ‘A Rationed Tomorrow’; ‘So Much and No More’; ‘Planning for the Pinch’ – all reflect urgent concern about the size and rate of growth of U.S. population with its growing pressure on land and other resources.

Debate on Israel

Does a Jewish state belong in an area where, even as late as 1947, majority of population was Arab? How can Israel be imagined, even in most diffuse sense, as a continuation of moral heritage of Judaism if its existence depends upon a historical injustice? These questions are not asked by an Arab but by an American Jew, and not a Jew treated as a traitor and outcast by American Jewish communities but a highly respected and distinguished scholar writing in most sophisticated American Jewish periodical, Commentary. 1 Robert Alter's article was not a hasty piece of reporting composed in heat of a crisis like June War but a reflective essay entitled Zionism for 70's. Alter does not feel that this question about manifest historical injustice of Israel is an insignificant one. Rather, he maintains that it is the one basic question that is pressed with greater urgency these days from many sides. In article he discusses issue as it has been raised not by a Palestinian but by a Jew, George Steiner, literary critic and author, fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, England. Steiner expressed his thoughts in no anti-Zionist gathering but as one of three principal speakers at 1968 annual American-Israel Dialogue in Israel, whose papers and discussions were published in American Jewish Congress BiWeekly. 2 The fundamental importance of issue that Alter and Steiner face, its timeliness, prominence of authors treating it all these would have made discussion interesting in any case. But there is more. For non-Jews who are sharply divided over Arab-Israeli problem, presentations of these two Jews may provoke wholesome reflections on both substance of problem and an attitude of mind in treating it.

Epodes

Horace was writing hisEpodes1at the same time as he was writingSatires. The nameEpodesis derived from the metrical term ό ἐπῳδός (і.е. στίχος) which signifies the second and shorter line of a couplet, but Horace himself referred to them asiambi(soEpod. 14. 7,Epist. i. 19. 23). The collection is titledLiber Epodonin the MSS. and the title was used by grammarians of the fourth and fifth centuries. Butiambigives a better idea of their basic inspiration. Horace says of them(Epist. i. 19. 21-5):So he claims(a)originality,(b)Archilochus as a model,(c)that he was the first Roman to use Archilochus as a model, and(d)that he discarded the vicious personal invective of Archilochus. The judgement disregards Catullus, who had writteniambibefore Horace, but whose similarity to Archilochus did not extend far beyond metre and invective. There is a consistency in Horace’s poetic career: he began by recreating the poetry of Archilochus in hisEpodes, and his later—and greatest— work was the recreation in hisOdesof the lyric poetry of poets like Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar. There is a similarly close relationship between theSatiresand theEpistles;and, furthermore, all of his writing uses an autobiographical technique. There is another sort of consistency too, for basicallyEpodesandSatiresexpress a similar attitude of mind: anger, contempt, and amusement are the fundamental emotions (though he often transcends these emotions in both works), and a plausible case can be made out for regarding this as a sign of a young man of low social status, unsure of himself and his talent, and already finding ways of expressing a personality that were not too self-revealing. TheOdesandEpistles, on the other hand, express a more meditative, more philosophical, more humane attitude, yet ultimately no more self-revealing.

Primitivism and Impossible Art

If the guilt accumulated in the civilized domination of man by man can ever be redeemed by freedom, then the ‘original sin’ must be committed again. …Herbert Marcuse, Eros and CivilizationPrimitivism refers to an attitude of mind working from a cultural state to an imagined pre-cultural state uncontaminated by the ills of civilization. It arises out of the suspicion (even conviction, depending on how bad things appear) that civilization has brought with it a progressive deterioration of the true state of being. It then becomes necessary to return to an exemplary pre-civilized (primitive) state in order to rediscover the fundamental realities of life, which will obviate the ills and restore modern fragmentation to wholeness. Within such thought, the essential human condition always precedes the actual; this idea shapes our location within the infinity of time, for we move continually forward to an ultimate return (Mircea Eliade). More abstractly, the Millennium always achieves the past—a perfected, mythologized past.

Real or imaginary hypophallism: a cause of inferiority feelings and morbid sexual jealousy.

Sexual jealousy is both an attitude of mind and an emotional state: the latter resulting from a blending of emotions aroused by an affront to the instincts of mating, self-assertion and acquisition. Sexual jealousy is of particular interest to the psychiatrist, since in its morbid manifestations it destroys marital harmony (Gillard, 1896) and may lead to homicide or suicide (Mowat, 1966). Sexual jealousy may be regarded as a normal reaction but it is abnormal when: (a) the jealous person is haunted by what the ‘man in the street’ would recognize as a groundless conviction that his or her sexual partner has been, or will be, unfaithful; or (b) jealousy engendered by actual infidelity is of such intensity as to render the person dangerously aggressive. Examples of the second category are Ruth Ellis, who shot dead her unfaithful lover; and Pilar Garcia-Compte, who killed her husband after he had refused to break with his mistress.

Ground-to-Air Launch Weapons

Operational research is an attitude of mind and a collection of techniques. Although the people who make up the engineering strength of a guided weapons firm find that attitude of mind congenial and commonly approach their problems predisposed to use the techniques, it is uncommon to encounter an OR group in any great strength.This is perhaps because the grouping of people by techniques in such firms is more natural when those techniques bear a direct relation to the firm's products. Despite the fact that a substantial body of practitioners is not to be found in close association, practices which are recognisable as OR are to be found throughout the course of a project.