Continuity Thesis Research Articles

Pierre Duhem’s good sense as a guide to theory choice

This paper examines Duhem’s concept of good sense as an attempt to support a non rule-governed account of rationality in theory choice. Faced with the underdetermination of theory by evidence thesis and the continuity thesis, Duhem tried to account for the ability of scientists to choose theories that continuously grow to a natural classification. I will examine the concept of good sense and the problems that stem from it. I will also present a recent attempt by David Stump to link good sense to virtue epistemology. I will argue that even though this approach can be useful for the better comprehension of the concept of good sense, there are some substantial differences between virtue epistemologists and Duhem. In the light of this reconstruction of good sense, I will propose a possible way to interpret the concept of good sense, which overcomes the noted problems and fits better with Duhem’s views on scientific method and motivation in developing the concept of good sense.

What is Tort Law for? Part 1: The Place of Corrective Justice

In this paper I discuss the proposal that the law of torts exists to do justice, more specifically corrective justice, between the parties to a tort case. My aims include clarifying the proposal and defending it against some objections (as well as saving it from some defences that it could do without). Gradually the paper turns to a discussion of the rationale for doing corrective justice. I defend what I call the 'continuity thesis' according to which at least part of the rationale for doing corrective justice is to mitigate one's wrongs, including one's torts. I try to show how much of the law of torts this thesis helps to explain, but also what it leaves unexplained. In the process I show (what I will discuss in a later companion paper) that 'corrective justice' cannot be a complete answer to the question of what tort law is for.

Biosymbols: Symbols in Life and Mind

The strong continuity thesis postulates that the properties of mind are an enriched version of the properties of life, and thus that life and mind differ in degree and not kind. A philosophical problem for this view is the ostensive discontinuity between humans and other animals in virtue of our use of symbols—particularly the presumption that the symbolic nature of human cognition bears no relation to the basic properties of life. In this paper, we make the case that a genuine account of strong continuity requires the identification of some sort of correlate of symbol-use in basic life properties. Our strategy is three-fold: 1) we argue that examples of proto-symbolism in simple living systems would be consistent with an evolutionary trajectory that ultimately produced symbolic cognition in humans; 2) we introduce Gordon Tomkins’ biological notion of ‘symbol’ as something that represents to the organism a feature of its environment that is significant to its survival; and 3) we employ this biological understanding of symbol-use to suggest that the symbolic nature of human cognition can be understood as an enriched version of the basic symbolic properties of life, thus preserving life-mind continuity in this context.

The threat of ‘woolly-haired grandchildren’: Race, the colonial family and German nationalism

The German colonial world was marked by an ostensibly self-evident boundary between the white ruler and the black ruled that situated Europeans and indigenous peoples as diametrically opposed and socially discrete. This situation, however, was problematised by the gendered and sexualised interactions between European and indigenous society. The result was often a slippage between the administrative attempts to create recognisably ‘German’ families (perceived in racial terms), and the antinomian realities of human relationships that transgressed racial lines. This in turn gave rise to reproductive anxieties in the face of a new liminal population of ‘half-castes’ ( Mischlinge) that refused the white–black, master–slave dialectic of the colonial ideal. Many historians have recently attempted to link the troubled history of race relations in German Southwest Africa to the later history of Nazi anti-Semitism and genocide, by focusing on the apparent continuities between the Holocaust and the Herero–Nama wars. However, an alternative genealogy for the Holocaust that refutes this genocidal continuity thesis is possible through an investigation of the origins and contents of the debates about the nature of the German colonial family and its relationship to German citizenship between 1904 and 1914.

Intention and Attempt

Anglo-American criminal law traditionally demands a criminal purpose for an attempt conviction, even when the crime attempted requires only foresight or recklessness. Some legal philosophers have defended this rule by appeal to an alleged difference in the “moral character” or “intentional structure” of intended versus non-intended harms. I argue that there are reasons to be skeptical of any such differences; and that even if conceded, it is only on the basis of an unworkable view of criminal responsibility that such a distinction would support a rule restricting attempts to criminal purpose. I defend instead the “continuity thesis,” according to which attempts are functionally continuous with endangerment offenses: both are legal efforts to regulate unreasonably dangerous conduct. The upshot of the continuity thesis is that there is little substantive difference between attempt and endangerment in principle, no matter how they are labeled in law.

Sociality and the life–mind continuity thesis

The life-mind continuity thesis holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to life. The biggest challenge faced by proponents of this thesis is to show how an explanatory framework that accounts for basic biological processes can be systematically extended to incorporate the highest reaches of human cognition. We suggest that this apparent 'cognitive gap' between minimal and human forms of life appears insurmountable largely because of the methodological individualism that is prevalent in cognitive science. Accordingly, a twofold strategy is used to show how a consideration of sociality can address both sides of the cognitive gap: (1) it is argued from a systemic perspective that inter-agent interactions can extend the behavioral domain of even the simplest agents and (2) it is argued from a phenomenological perspective that the cognitive attitude characteristic of adult human beings is essentially intersubjectively constituted, in particular with respect to the possibility of perceiving objects as detached from our own immediate concerns. These two complementary considerations of the constitutive role of inter-agent interactions for mind and cognition indicate that sociality is an indispensable element of the life-mind continuity thesis and of cognitive science more generally.

How Should We Remember Vatican II?

AbstractWhat happened at Vatican II and the significance of its decisions is strongly contested in the Church today. There is a struggle over the memory of the Council. It is suggested that two hermeneutics are in use, continuity versus discontinuity. On the one hand, it is said that privileging the ‘event’ of the Council as the interpretative key for reading its documents leads to an ideological distortion and introduces discontinuity with tradition. On the other hand, it is held that the continuity thesis plays down the real changes the Council introduced and, while unexceptional as a theological principle, it is being deployed as a polemical ideology, restricting necessary change. This article distinguishes between theological principle and experience in relation to continuity/discontinuity. It argues that the event of the Council is to be found as much in its effects in the Church at large as what took place in Rome. It analyses the phenomenology of change at both levels and concludes that the tensions between the need for continuity and the impulses of discontinuity need to be recognised and worked with rather than repressed.

Intentionality, Cognitive Integration and the Continuity Thesis

Naturalistic philosophers ought to think that the mind is continuous with the rest of the world and should not, therefore, be surprised by the findings of the extended mind, cognitive integration and enactivism. Not everyone is convinced that all mental phenomena are continuous with the rest of the world. For example, intentionality is often formulated in a way that makes the mind discontinuous with the rest of the world. This is a consequence of Brentano’s formulation of intentionality, I suggest, and can be overcome by revealing that the concept of intentional directedness as he receives it from the Scholastics is quite consistent with the continuity thesis. It is only when intentional directedness is conjoined with intentional inexistence that intentionality and content are consistent with a discontinuity thesis (such as Brentano’s thesis). This makes room to develop an account of intentional directedness that is consistent with the continuity thesis in the form of Peirce’s representational principle. I also argue against a form of the discontinuity thesis in the guise of the derived/underived content distinction. Having shown that intentionality is consistent with the continuity thesis I argue that we should focus on intentionality and representation as bodily enacted. I conclude that we would be better off focussing on representation and intentionality in action rather than giving abstract functional accounts of extended cognition.

Dangerous Conflation?: A Review of Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

32 Historically Speaking January/February 2008 Dangerous Conflation? A Review of Robert Kagan's Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century Frank Ninkovich Robert Kagan is best known as the author Of Paradise andPower (2003), an analysis of American and European views of international relations that features the much-quoted tag line, "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." As one of the signers of the Project for the New American Century letter to President Clinton inJanuary 1998 that recommended forcible regime change in Iraq, he is also known as a neoconservative advocate of a muscular foreign policy. With the recent appearance of DangerousNation:America's Foreign Policyfrom ItsEarliestDays to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Knopf, 2006), the first volume of his revisionist history of U.S. foreign relations, the word on the historical grapevine is that the book is a rebuttal to liberal internationalists who view the Bush administration's foreign policies as a historical aberration. Though it could easily be interpreted in diis way, I will try to review the book on its merits as a work of history. Kagan's ambitious goal is to demolish the narrative of discontinuity, the leap from isolationism to world power that has become second nature in the way we think about die history of U.S. foreign relations. Specifically, he wants to dismande "the pervasive myth of America as isolationist and passive until provoked." His book is "more about expansion and ambition, idealistic as well as materialistic , than about isolationist exemplars and cities upon hills." From earliest colonial times, he asserts, Americans were involved actively in a career of expansion —commercial, cultural, territorial, and ideological —so much so that the die was cast by die time of the Revolution. "By 1776," he says, "the ambitions driving Americans toward their future overwhelming global power were already in place." If anything, these appetites were enhanced by the universalist ideology upon which the republic was founded, which assured that "foreign policy and national identity were intimately bound togetiier." This propensity to aggressive idealism did not rule out hardheaded calculations of national interest whose net effect was isolationism. But isolation and nonentanglementwere merely tactics that could not be upgraded to basic principles because "American liberalism was inherendy entangling." This argument combines and recasts elements of older interpretive traditions. William Appleman Williams and the Wisconsin School of diplomatic historians long ago articulated a continuity thesis diat portrayed the U.S. as an ideologically driven expansionist republic, though in their telling it was a story of imperialism in which the nation was propelled outward principally by economic "open door" motives . Kagan does not neglect economic factors or material pursuits; indeed, he often highlights the imperatives of the marketplace. But economic growth is forced to compete for space in his story with even more potent and mutually reinforcing drivers of expansion : idealism and power. Kagan's emphasis on power and principle also has interpretive precursors in the realist tradition that Kagan's ambitious goal is to demolish the narrative of discontinuity, the leap from isolationism to world power that has become second nature in the way we think about the history of U.S. foreign relations. first emerged among diplomatic historians in the 1950s. He would agree with the realists that the desire for power is universal, but he parts company with their tendency to see American idealism as a regrettable congenital defect whose symptoms, left untreated , flare up from time to time and needlessly inflict much pain and suffering. For Kagan, idealism is integral to the nation's identity. Thus Americans conceived of themselves from the get-go not only as the rightful heirs of the British Empire, but also as a universal nation whose ideological principles "transcended blood ties and national boundaries ." Though future American conflicts would trumpet America's attachment to ideals, he acknowledges that at times this tendency "cast a harsh glare upon the hypocrisies of a nation that proclaimed universal rights yet did not universally honor them." This criticism, which is repeated in a number of places, suggests that practice should have been squared with principle, in contrast to the...

What does the Last Wittgenstein's Continuity Thesis Mean?

What does the Last Wittgenstein's Continuity Thesis Mean?

Deutsche Marinen im Wandel: Vom Symbol nationaler Einheit zum Instrument internationaler Sicherheit (review)

Reviewed by: Deutsche Marinen im Wandel: Vom Symbol nationaler Einheit zum Instrument internationaler Sicherheit Keith W. Bird Deutsche Marinen im Wandel: Vom Symbol nationaler Einheit zum Instrument internationaler Sicherheit. Edited by Werner Rahn. Vol. 63, Beiträge zur Militärgeschichte (Militärgeschichtlichen Forschungsamt) Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2005. ISBN 3-486-57674-7. Pp. ix, 738. Euro 49.80. The richness of current German naval historiography is fully evident in this collection of thirty essays published by the Military History Research Office (MGFA) in Potsdam, edited by the former head of the MGFA, Werner Rahn. Written primarily by German authors, only eight of the essays are new; the others were previously published, but updated in part for this publication. Beginning with a foreword by the Inspekteur der Marine, Vice Admiral Lutz Feldt, and a dedication to the retiring chief of the MGFA, Jörg Duppler, this book celebrates the role of the German navy from its beginning as a symbol of national unity (1848) to its role as an instrument of international security in the twenty-first century (its subtitle). The essays document the historical roots of the German navy beginning with the Middle Ages, the founding of the "first" German fleet in 1848 (celebrated as the official anniversary of the navy today), the era of the two World Wars, the Cold War, the unification of the two German states and the role of the renamed (1990) Deutsche Marine's role in the world 1991–2004. The concluding essay is Rahn's "Twelve Theses" on the development of the navy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which provides a framework of the major themes of each period of German naval history. The fact that the majority of the authors are active or retired German naval officers reflects the importance of naval history in the education and training of the naval officer corps. The role of history as the "bearer of tradition" and as a vehicle for instilling "enthusiasm and responsibility for the soldierly profession" gives this volume a flavor of a more general (and selective) introduction to the history of the navy than the "unity of focus" that characterized the MGFA's 1972 study of the debate over the domestic and foreign policy implications of fleet-building (Marine und Marinepolitik im kaiserliche Deutschland 1871–1914). In spite of its scope, however, this collection does not ignore a critical confrontation with the navy's two attempts to become a maritime power in the Wilhelmian and Nazi eras as the inclusion of thirteen contributions to the period of the two World Wars demonstrates, especially those of Gerhard Schreiber (the continuity of naval leadership between 1897 and 1945), Michael Salewski (the ideology and reality of the maritime Third Reich) and Herbert Kraus (Admiral Karl Dönitz). Nevertheless, its subtitle suggests a more politically acceptable "continuity thesis" connecting the democratic ideals of the mid-nineteenth-century Bundesflotte to today's Deutsche Marine than the leaders of the Imperial Navy or Kriegsmarine would have acknowledged. Given the extensive historiographical debate over the last 30 years concerning the aims of German navalism (see this author's review essay "The Tirpitz Legacy" in the July 2005 JMH), there also seem to be some notable [End Page 245] omissions. The two essays by Günter Moltmann and Bernard Kroener evaluating the 1848 fleet ambitions overlook the expansionist nature of the Frankfurt Parliament's naval aims and other "continuity" themes raised in earlier studies such as Günter Wollstein's 1977 Das "Grossdeutschland" der Paulskirche or Wolfgang Petter's 1982 "Programmierter Untergang" in the MGFA's 1982 Militärgeschichte. This reviewer would also have expected Holger Herwig to be included for his critical observations on the social and political views of the Kaiser's naval officers instead of his essay on the influence of Mahan. The welcome inclusion of Rolf Hobson provides the latest scholarship into the origins of Tirpitz's sea power ideology but also raises new questions about whether domestic politics played a role in Tirpitz's fleet building as opposed to his "ideology of sea power" and the arguments over whether Germany's navalism was "unique." Within the limitations of this type of anthology, there is...

Contextualizing Scientific Discovery from Alchemy to Electrochemistry

Mordechai Feingold. The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture. (New York: The New York Public Library, 2004). Pp. 218. $22.50. June Z. Fullmer. Young Humphry Davy: The Making of an Experimental Chemist. (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 2000). Pp. 385. $30.00. [End Page 258] William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe. Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Pp. 344. $29.00. Giuliano Pancaldi. Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Pp. 381. $24.95. In recent years, the role of context has become a focal point in the historiography of science. Recognizing that scientific theory and practice cannot be unproblematically isolated from the time and place of their creation, historians of science are increasingly challenging the traditional narratives that reduce the production of scientific knowledge to a linear succession of key experiments and theories. The four books reviewed here reflect this trend; while the authors do not all share the same contextual focus, they all seek to present a narrative of scientific discovery that goes beyond the confines of the laboratory. Without minimizing the individual accomplishments of the scientists they are studying, they make skillful use of both primary and secondary sources to situate the works of Robert Boyle, George Starkey (Newman and Principe), Isaac Newton (Feingold), Alessandro Volta (Pancaldi), and Humphry Davy (Fullmer) in the socio-cultural, political, and intellectual climates in which they were produced. In Alchemy Tried in the Fire, Newman and Principe focus primarily on intellectual context, seeking to correct the commonly held belief that seventeenth-century chemistry represented a radical break from the traditions of medieval alchemy. Building upon their earlier studies of the English chemist Boyle, whose Sceptical Chymist is traditionally viewed as one of the first works of modern chemistry, and the American-born Starkey, who penned several alchemical tracts under the pseudonym of Eirenaeus Pilalethes, they argue convincingly that a close examination of "the content and practice of laboratory chymistry in the early modern period" (2) reveals more continuity than rupture with alchemy. The return to the archaic spelling "chymistry" further underscores this continuity; as explained in Newman and Principe's 1998 article, "Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake" (Early Science and Medicine 3 [1998] 32–65), the use of "chymistry" to represent the undifferentiated domain of seventeenth-century alchemy/chemistry enables one to avoid the anachronism and potential arbitrariness resulting from the use of the modern terms. The first chapter introduces Boyle and Starkey, focusing on the differences in their educations and early intellectual interests. Prior to their meeting in early 1651, the two men "were, in more than one way, an ocean apart" (7); Starkey, who was to become Boyle's principal tutor in chemistry, was by then already a highly experienced laboratory chemist while Boyle's experimental efforts were still limited and secondary to his ethical preoccupations. His efforts to improve the moral character of humanity had already resulted in several examples of devotional literature, including a set of fictional letters entitled Amorous Controversies, intended to instill in readers a profound devotion to God. But as the authors note, due to Starkey's influence, "within a very few years his devotion to devotion would be transmuted into a devotion to experimental natural philosophy" (7). The chapter concludes with a discussion of Boyle's presentation of his relationship to the chemistry of his day, which strengthens the book's continuity thesis by demonstrating that Boyle's desire to distinguish himself from his predecessors led him to misrepresent the revolutionary nature of his own work. Chapter Two traces the development of chemistry from the late medieval period to the [End Page 259] work of Starkey's own preceptor, Joan Baptista Van Helmont. The use of quantitative techniques commonly thought to have originated with Antoine Lavoisier's "balance-sheet" method in the late eighteenth...

On the Consequences of Defensive Professionalism: Recent Changes in the Legal Labour Process

This study of change in the legal profession argues that governmental policies, combined with economic recession and supply-side considerations, have led to decline in the legal profession's historical performance, and a defensive strategy which preserves the status and earning power of equity partners. Related responses include a drive towards organizational consolidation, a long-term increase in the numbers of salaried solicitors, and fewer non-fee-earning support staff. This involves a shift from external (or occupational) closure regimes, which sanction entry to the profession, to internal (or organizational) mechanisms, which regulate progression through the professional hierarchy. The paper challenges hypotheses of deprofessionalization and managerialization, and lends empirical support to Freidson's continuity thesis whereby reorganization is safeguarding traditional privileges and rewards for certain sections of the profession at the cost of a progressive process of intra-occupational stratification.

Perspectives on the animal mind*

Charles Darwin was one of the first to propose a unified framework with which to understand human and animal behavior. The foundation of Darwin’s framework is his theory of descent with modification. What Darwin was convinced that theory allowed him to say about human and animal behavior is exemplified in the ‘continuity thesis.’ As Darwin put it, ‘there is a much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes, as a lamprey or lancelet, and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and a man; yet this interval is filled up by numberless gradations’ (Darwin 1871 [1936]: 453). Darwin’s continuity thesis is the foundation of contemporary studies of animal behavior; it is, along with contemporary evolutionary theory, what unifies the field of animal behavior. This special issue brings together papers in the tradition of the cognitive approach to animal behavior, an approach to animal behavior which attributes ‘mentality’ to animals. Donald Griffin (1978) named this approach ‘cognitive ethology’ in 1978 with the specific aim of creating a research program that explored the mental lives of non-human animals. Notice what Griffin was after: He wanted to explore the mental lives of non-human animals, not justify the claim that non-human animals have mental lives. In this effort, Griffin reflected earlier critics in psychology who came to the view that psychological behaviorism was not viable as an approach to explaining adequately human capacities. Griffin’s cognitive ethology is Darwin’s continuity thesis full steam ahead. Ultimately, the perspectives on animal minds staked out in the papers collected here are driven by a cognitive approach to the study of animal behavior. Indeed, the perspectives run deep, articulating differences in approach to such study as well as to the sorts of conclusions that such studies support. There is a mix of historical, philosophical, and scientific papers covering considerable * Save for Browne’s paper, the work collected here was originally presented at the 39th Annual

The Heuristic Structure of Scientific Knowledge

AbstractWe examine two major perspectives in the literature on domain specificity in cognition: in one of them cognitive modules are "intuitive theories"; in the other they are dispositional structures. Both of these positions accept that there is a continuous line from ordinary to scientific reasoning; nevertheless they interpret this continuity differently. We propose an alternative way of understanding the relation between ordinary and scientific reasoning: the continuity thesis holds because heuristic structures play a fundamental role in both types of reasoning. Our main contention is that cognitive modules can be thought of as heuristic structures and that, since science is a complex of practices that embody different heuristic structures, science should be understood as a complex of cognitive modules.

Enlightenment from Below: German-Hungarian Patriots in Eighteenth-Century Hungary

Paradox and Contradiction often characterized the formation and evolution of national identity in the Hungarian Kingdom. Starting in the mid nineteenth century, an explosion occurred in efforts to recover supposedly ancient “ethnic” memory as historians, linguists, and archeologists produced one great breakthrough after another, revolutionizing their conceptions of the past. At the same time, an equally strong forgetting of the complex multicultural and multiethnic reality of the region also transpired.1The parallel processes of recovering and forgetting intensified after the end of World War I. By the 1930s and 1940s, Slovak historians had reconstructed their history on the foundations of the Great Moravian Empire, Romanian textbooks became dominated by the Daco-Roman continuity thesis, and Hungarian historical narratives were almost exclusively concerned with the history of the Magyars. While historians did occasionally write books that were not biased in favor of their respective ethnic-national groups, they remained marginalized and, most importantly, the mass of students learning history at the middle, high school, and university levels were only superficially introduced to the role other ethnic groups played in their history.

Comments on Frederic M. Scherer’s “Heinrich von Stackelberg’s Marktform und Gleichgewicht”

Reviews the international response to Marktform und Gleichgewicht, and questions the reactions of astonishment by some critics, including Scherer, concerning Stackelberg’s explanation of disequilibrium of certain market structures. Defends Stackelberg’s standpoint by considering the specific historical context. Looks at Cournot’s continuity thesis and challenges the assumption of analogous market configurations. Suggests that Stackelberg’s theoretical derivations may have been intended to provoke further scientific study.

Once More unto the Breach: Britain's Guarantee to Poland, March 1939

In the continuing debate on the origins and ends of appeasement,' three generations of tough-minded historians have sifted through the ruins of Britain's pre-war foreign policy planning. After the war, western historians tended to condemn the Munich Agreement and its makers, and described the 31 March 1939 guarantee to Poland as the point when British leaders belatedly stood up to Hitler, though often with a caveat criticizing the exclusion of the Soviet Union. A.J.P. Taylor and certain of his students challenged this dominant interpretation; they argued that the guarantee was the continuation of appeasement, as it allowed for further territorial revision in Europe. In Taylor's view, however, appeasement was entirely justified, as it represented a principled attempt to avoid war. After the 1968-9 opening of the relevant British documents under the thirty-year rule, the third generation of postwar historians submitted the policy of appeasement to a fundamental reassessment. They emphasized the strategic and economic constraints which severely limited the options of the Cabinet in its responses to nazi Germany, and many exonerated the then Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, of previous charges of craven behaviour at Munich. Strangely, historians have subjected the British guarantee to Poland of 31 March 1939 to a very different process of revision. Several historians have questioned the early orthodoxy, and offered a set of widely divergent explanations of both the expectations and intentions of British statesmen. Simon Newman dominates the field. He argues a continuity thesis: Britain's traditional foreign policy never allowed for the domination of the European continent by any one power, and Chamberlain's Cabinet maintained that policy even during 1938, as it resisted nazi expansion at all points short of war. In Newman's view, the only change in

Are the different hypotheses on the emergence of life as different as they seem?

This paper calls attention to a philosophical presupposition, coined here “the continuity thesis” which underlies and unites the different, often conflicting, hypotheses in the origin of life field. This presupposition, a necessary condition for any scientific investigation of the origin of life problem, has two components. First, it contends that there is no unbridgeable gap between inorganic matter and life. Second, it regards the emergence of life as a highly probable process. Examining several current origin-of-life theories. I indicate the implicit or explicit role played by the “continuity thesis” in each of them. In addition, I identify the rivals of the “thesis” within the scientific community — “the almost miracle camp.” Though adopting the anti-vitalistic aspect of the “continuity thesis”, this camp regards the emergence of life as involving highly improbable events. Since it seems that the chemistry of the prebiotic stages and of molecular self-organization processes rules out the possibility that life is the result of a “happy accident,” I claim that the “almost miracle” view implies in fact, a creationist position.

The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on Arkansas: Persistence in the Midst of Ruin (review)

266CIVIL WAR HISTORY context for many matters that he does cover. Terms such as "squatter sovereignty ," moreover, appear suddenly without any explanation at all. Factual errors further undermine Heidler's credibility. I found four mistakes regarding John A. Quitman, a large number when one considers that Quitman appears on only fourteen pages and in an illustration caption. Twice, for instance, Heidler tells us diat Quitman served in the U.S. Senate. Careless phrasing further generates misleading impressions. Thus, Heidler suggests that the Tertium Quids first emerged afterthe Warof 1812, thatthe federal governmentrarely enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, and that the 'Tariff of Abominations" resulted from a Jacksonian plot to raise the tariffto such high levels tiiat it would fail. Heidler could have avoided most of his errors, as well as rendered a more comprehensive account, had he more thoroughly utilized the secondary sources that he Usts in his bibliography and cast his net just a bit more widely for additional scholarship. I find it curious, for instance, that Heidler lists Ronald Takaki's article on the movement in South CaroUna to revive the African slave trade but not his book-length A Pro-Slavery Crusade (1971). Pulling the Temple Down may be one of those rare instances when the commendable goal of telling one's story from the primary sources obscures the story itself. Robert E. May Purdue University The Impact ofthe Civil War andReconstruction onArkansas: Persistence in the MidstofRuin. By Carl H. Moneyhon. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994. Pp. 288. $35.00.) A commendable modern tendency in Southern historical writing has been to take a broader view than that imposed by the rigors of dissertation writing. As historians begin to digest material over longer time spans, they invariably become aware ofconnections and continuity. Professor Moneyhon, who began as a Texas Reconstructionist, has been working backward in time as weU as moving eastward to Arkansas in recent years. In this work, he attempts to find unity in three areas of history: antebeUum, CivU War, and Reconstruction. This places him within the continuity school ofmodern Southern historiography. This school has questioned the general interpretation of the postbellum era laid by C. Vann Woodward in his 1951 overview, Origins ofthe New South. Where Woodward saw economic, social, and poUtical change, his modern critics find continuity. Arkansas had less than forty years to develop its antebellum institutions, saw them overthrown in four especially violent and destructive war years (or more, of course, if we count the violence of Reconstruction as a continuation of the war), and endured the Republicans for only six years. A frontier state in 1 836 when admitted to the Union, it remained one in i860 and in 1890. Professor Moneyhon supports the view that cotton, landlords, and Democrats regained the ascendancy in 1874 they had possessed in i860. He makes BOOK REVIEWS267 the best case he can for the endurance of both a poUtical and economic elite, who, he argues, dominated prewar Ufe, orchestrated the state's secession, and survived the resulting debacle better than those lower on the social scale. Professor Moneyhon, the leading Marxist among current Arkansas historians, supports these views primarily from economic grounds and gives lesser weight to a number ofcultural factors. These include the determination of the Arkansas masses to keep the state as unmodernized as possible. The eUte discovered early that it might be permitted to hold office but not to govern. Also the Civil War defeat created psychological realities in Arkansas that often outweighed economic considerations. Indeed, evidence that the Bourbons recaptured the state after 1874 is hard to come by. FuU proof of the continuity thesis requires a chronological leap to at least 1920. Too many issues were stiU undecided in 1874 for this to be a suitable stopping point. Each of his three sections is based on extensive readings of primary sources basted with a tolerable tad of statistical seasonings. None is, of course, a complete history of the period, and it remains a problem for those wishing to look more in depth at both the poUtical and social issues of Arkansas Reconstruction that this period stiU has not been accorded a modern comprehensive account. Nevertheless, readers wiU...