Kinds Of Things Research Articles

Angela, Agnes, Esther, and Ivy

Angela, Agnes, Esther, and Ivy Amy C. Evans (bio) Pearl spiked her drink. And then I made a painting about it. I like to think of my paintings as portraits, each one a document of a specific moment in someone’s life. But the people are strangers, and their stories are told in my imagination. It all starts with an object. I’m constantly seeking out vintage packaging, fabric, and accessories to illustrate the lives of the people—mostly women—I want to introduce to viewers. When seemingly unrelated objects fall next to each other, they add meaning to the mundane and become unique portraits, the individual elements coming together to offer a peek into the conjured lives of my motley cast of characters. I feel a kinship with these women—all strong, independent ladies who might be just a little bit set in their ways—and the titles of the pieces offer glimpses into their oddball thoughts and routines. (Of course, Pearl likes bourbon with her Tang.) I gravitate to food-related packaging for its connection to another era—one of cheese-laden casseroles, mayonnaise-drenched salads, and strong drinks at lunch. These gals cook from cans and boxes so they can spend their time on other, more important things. My home studio is full of vintage trinkets and treasures that find their way into my paintings. The rusty root beer lid from a barbecue joint in Tennessee, butter packaging from New Orleans, or an oyster shell I slid into my pocket on a trip to Florida are the kinds of things that are tucked into the nooks and crannies of my creative space. Some items get recycled and crop up in multiple paintings (I’m particularly fond of rabbit’s foot key chains), creating a personal iconography that I rely on to help tell these stories. The finished paintings are objects in themselves. All of my portraits are done in acrylic on wood panels and finished with a coat of varnish, adding depth to the image and making the object more durable—like a final coat of nail polish. I’d like to hang out with Pearl, wouldn’t you? [End Page 8] Click for larger view View full resolution Agnes loved combing mayonnaise through her hair curls, 24×24”, acrylic on wood panel, 2014. [End Page 9] Click for larger view View full resolution Pearl spiked her drink, 11×16”, acrylic on wood panel, 2012. [End Page 10] Click for larger view View full resolution Marge had her usual breakfast, and then she took her usual measurements, 24×24”, acrylic on wood panel, 2014. [End Page 11] Click for larger view View full resolution Vi went home to celebrate, 16×24”, acrylic on wood panel, 2012. [End Page 12] Click for larger view View full resolution Esther set her hair before massaging her feet, 24×12”, acrylic on wood panel, 2014. [End Page 13] Click for larger view View full resolution Angela ran a bath, lit a cigarette, and read some poetry, 24×12”, acrylic on wood panel, 2014. [End Page 14] Amy C. Evans Amy C. Evans is an artist and independent documentarian based in Houston, Texas, and served as the oral historian for the Southern Foodways Alliance for twelve years. Whether picking up an old lard can at an antique mall and wondering about the life of its previous owner or interviewing a soul food cook about his signature sweet potato pie, Amy is constantly curious about the lives of others. She also happens to appreciate a good meringue and can never eat too many oysters. You can see more of her work at www.amycevans.com. Copyright © 2015 Center for the Study of the American South

Children’s developing understanding of what and how they learn

What do children know about learning? Children between 4 and 10years of age were asked what they thought the word learning meant and then engaged in a structured interview about what kinds of things they learned and how they learned those things. Most of the 4- and 5-year-olds’ responses to these questions indicated a lack of awareness about the nature of learning or how learning occurs. In contrast, the 8- to 10-year-olds showed a strong understanding of learning as a process and could often generate explicit metacognitive responses indicating that they understood under what circumstances learning would occur. The 6- and 7-year-olds were in a transitional stage between these two levels of understanding. We discuss the implications of this development with children’s theory-of-mind development more generally.

Reasons as the Unity Among the Varieties of Goodness

AbstractOur concepts of good simpliciter, good for, and good as a particular kind of thing must share some common element. I argue that all three types of goodness can be analysed in terms of the reasons that there are for a certain sets of agents to have pro‐attitudes. To this end I provide new and compelling accounts of good for and goodness of a kind in terms of reasons for pro‐attitudes that are more explanatorily illuminating than competing accounts and that evade the objections that undermine previous accounts of good for and goodness of a kind in terms of reasons.

What Kind of Thing is Resilience?

What Kind of Thing is Resilience?

Theoretical Structure of Metaphors in Emotional Design

The concept of metaphors, originated from linguistics and rhetoric, has often been employed as a method by which designers express their emotional inspirations and intangible design concepts. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) defined metaphor as “understanding and experiencing one kind of things in terms of another”, metaphor can be used to help designers to express the abstract and intangible substance of a design concept (something) through a metaphoric expression (something else). Since a figurative comparison is a part of our cognitive process to make sense of our world, designers tend to use a metaphoric comparison between a design offering and a design concept they want to connote to. The original rhetoric structure of metaphor, “X is Y”, however, is sometimes improperly employed and used in limitation by designers, especially for students or novice designers. As a result, they sometimes produce a clichéd design outcome (e.g. kitsch) that is just a visual mimicry of a proposed metaphor. The visual resemblance of a metaphoric expression, however, is a limited way of using metaphor in a design process, which is closer to “similes”, whose rhetoric structure is “A is like (as) B”. Given the confusion above, this paper attempts to investigate the fundamentals of metaphors and proposes the syllogistic configuration, “X is to T what T is to Y”, where T refers to the attributes of the metaphor and the concept of new design. Furthermore, a diagram to compare the attributes of both target and source is proposed to emphasize the association of the metaphoric design rather than taking its visual appearance only. Potentially, I hope this study helps designers to see metaphor not just as a complete and static image but as a way to create a manifold relationship so that they embellish their new design concepts and emphasize distinctive product properties.

Children show heightened knew-it-all-along errors when learning new facts about kinds: Evidence for the power of kind representations in children's thinking.

Several proposals in the literature on conceptual development converge on the claim that information about kinds of things in the world has a privileged status in children's cognition, insofar as it is acquired, manipulated, and stored with surprising ease. Our goal in the present studies (N = 440) was to test a prediction of this claim. Specifically, if the early cognitive system privileges kind (or generic) information in the proposed ways, then learning new facts about kinds should be so seamless that it is often accompanied by an impression that these facts were known all along. To test this prediction, we presented 4- to 7-year-old children with novel kind-wide and individual-specific facts, and we then asked children whether they had prior knowledge of these facts. As predicted, children were under the impression that they had known the kind-wide facts more often than the individual-specific facts, even though in reality they had just learned both (Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 5). Importantly, learning facts about (nongeneric) plural sets of individuals was not similarly accompanied by heightened knew-it-all-along errors (Experiment 4), highlighting the privileged status of kind information per se. Finally, we found that young children were able to correctly recognize their previous ignorance of newly learned generic facts when this ignorance was made salient before the learning event (Experiment 6), suggesting that children's frequent knew-it-all-along impressions about such facts truly stem from metacognitive difficulties rather than being a methodological artifact. In sum, these 6 studies indicate that learning information about kinds is accompanied by heightened knew-it-all-along errors. More broadly, this evidence supports the view that early cognition privileges kind representations.

Doing: Self-discovery and Empowerment through Clarity of Purpose

In the previous chapter we ended with a discussion of morality and ethics and we addressed the emotional content to moral judgement whether the moral obligation to act and to take action in a social framework or moral value when we make reference to character, motives, or intentions. However, there are also judgements of nonmoral value or simply value judgements. In those we evaluate, not so much actions, persons, motives, and the like, but all sorts of other things: cars, paintings, experiences, forms of government, and what not. We say they are good, bad desirable, undesirable, and so on, but we do not mean that they are morally good or morally bad, since they are generally not the kinds of things that can be morally good or bad. This chapter will focus on doing as it pertains to increasing value. One typical use of the term value pertains to quantity of one good that is exchangeable for the quantity of another good. In this context we refer to value not in terms of personal utility satisfying human wants as it relates to time, place or the possession of something that gives satisfaction. We also are not addressing here use value that is the usefulness to the individual directly. We are referring to value that persons have in a network of exchange. Let's be quite clear that we are not about to embark on a discussion

Ambiguity and Audience Response

Ambiguity and Audience Response FELIX BUDELMANN, LAURIE MAGUIRE, AND BEN TEASDALE In Milton’s Paradise Lost, ambiguity is the tool of the devil. Satan’s “ambiguous words” are “replete with guile,” functioning as a linguistic Venus (or Eve) fly-catcher (v.703 and VI.568; ix, 737).1 By contrast, in 20th-century poetry and criticism, ambiguity becomes the highest good, the mark of the great creator. William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) was the work that established polysemy as the semantic shibboleth that distinguishes great poets and great poetry from lesser poets and their poetry. Consequently, Empson’s interest is in the poet: even as he analyses how poetic language, “ambiguous and with double sense deluding” (Paradise Regained i.435), affects the reader, his focus is on creation rather than reception. His seven types of ambiguity are seven kinds of things that authors and texts do. But the text is not the only place where ambiguity resides. In much thinking about literature in the latter parts of the twentieth century, ambiguity inserts itself in the reading process. For Wolfgang Iser, the doyen of reader response, “the blank in the fictional text induces and guides the reader’s constitutive activity.”2 Reading—all reading, and especially reading of literary texts—is an exercise in ambiguity. This fundamental interpretative stance is mirrored in much thinking about theater, a genre in which the receiver is visibly present. This is how actor Richard McCabe, playing Iago, describes the final moment of Michael Attenborough’s production of Othello for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1999: Our production ended in a tableau, with the three dead bodies in the foreground and myself at the rear of the stage, heavily guarded arion 23.3 winter 2016 and with my back to the audience. As the lights went down, I would turn slowly and regard the bodies in profile, with a deliberately neutral expression in my face. This, as I discovered through the run, was regarded variously as being sorrowful, triumphant, bewildered or empty—which shows how an audience will supply any ambiguity with an interpretation.3 Greg Doran aimed for a similar effect at the end of his production of Othello for the RSC in 2004, as Antony Sher [Iago] explains: Iago was left in a sitting position after Othello wounded him; handcuffed , head bowed. Then … just before a snap black out, we had Iago suddenly look up, confronting the audience with his eyes. Greg wanted the moment to be a strange, final aside, enigmatic, open to your own interpretation. [our italics]4 The effects of ambiguity on audiences prove a fascination for theater practitioners. In this essay, we want to develop the shift in focus from Empson’s poetry on the page to McCabe’s / Doran’s audience response to drama by experimentally assessing and analyzing the reactions of a live audience. We had run an experiment on a live audience with live theater once before when, for an article on character, we commissioned stagings of Sophocles’ Antigone and Shakespeare’s King Lear.5 For our second experiment , on ambiguity, we used film extracts from two ancient Greek and two Shakespeare plays—Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, Sophocles’ Ajax, Shakespeare’s Othello and The Winter’s Tale—to test how audiences process ambiguity in the theater. An audience of 72 participants watched four film extracts, each of which was approximately five minutes in duration; the auditorium was purpose-built for film projection and the viewing experience was commensurate with that of a movie theater. After each extract, the audience members filled in a questionnaire. This article reports and analyzes what we found. Before setting out what we did, it is as well to make clear what we (deliberately) didn’t do. This is not an essay about textual ambiguity and audience response 90 ambiguity. We do not emulate Empson, either by theorizing textual ambiguity in general or by analyzing individual texts. Even less do we try to use audience responses to arrive at objective truths about the texts. The texts are not our chief interest here. Nor, secondly, is this an essay about the locus—or rather loci—of ambiguity in drama. We do not...

Emergent Substances, Physical Properties, Action Explanations

This paper proposes that if individual X ‘inherits’ property F from individual Y, we should be leery of explanations that appeal to X’s being F. This bears on what I’ll call “emergent substance dualism”, the view that human persons or selves are metaphysically fundamental or “new kinds of things with new kinds of causal powers” even though they depend in some sense on physical particulars (Baker in Persons and bodies: a constitution view. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, 22, 20; Lowe in Erkenntnis 65(1):5–23, 2006; Personal agency. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008). Two of the most prominent advocates of this view, Lynne Rudder Baker and E.J. Lowe, suggest that emergent particulars have physical properties in virtue of the relations they bear to physical particulars—they ‘inherit’ their physical properties. In Sect. 1, I argue that having a property F this way is not instantiating F. In Sect. 2, I raise concerns that if emergent particulars don’t instantiate physical properties, then facts about emergent particulars don’t explain intentional actions. I suggest that emergent dualism would be more attractive if it could avoid this apparent consequence. In Sect. 3, I propose a view according to which some instances of physical properties are instantiated by both an emergent particular and its body.

Allegory and Language in Koryo Pseudo-biographies

In this article, I examine Kory? pseudo-biographies as allegorical representation of the view of human nature depicted in the Mencius. Kim Ch’ang-nyong has revealed through comparative research that Kory? writers consulted anthologies known as lei shu when writing pseudo-biographies. The lei shu reprinted texts under subject categories such as “wine.” In this article, I will discuss the significance of the theme of “things of the same kind” in lei shu and pseudo-biographies, with reference to Neo-Confucianism, particularly the view of human nature expressed in the Mencius. Moreover, as Pak H?iby?ng has observed, Yi Kyu-bo synthesized Zhuangzi’s perception of oneness with the Way, with Mencius’ belief that our minds are “of a kind” in having the capacity for goodness. The layers of plot were possible through word play such as paranomasia, in which metaphor was used for its literal and metaphorical meaning. This tracing of a metaphor to its source expressed the theme of “inquiry” (yuan) that Han Yu and Yi Ch’?m emphasized in their writings in the genre of the “inquiry,” and in the pseudo-biography, with its tracing of representations of a subject in texts.

Towards a taxonomy of spatial scale‐dependence

Spatial scale‐dependence is a ubiquitous feature of ecological systems. This presents a challenge for ecologists who seek to discern general principles. A solution is to search for generalities in patterns of scale‐dependence – that is, what kinds of things are scale‐dependent, in what ways, and why? I argue that this is likely to be a productive way forward for ecology, but that progress in this direction is currently hindered by the conflation of a set of distinct concepts under the category of ‘scale‐dependence’. Here, I propose a taxonomy of spatial scale‐dependence that categorizes its major types in hopes of moving towards a more formal and unambiguous vocabulary. I argue that three major distinctions are necessary and sufficient for this goal: that between grain size and extent (the scale component), between data and models (the subject), and between true and perceived scale‐dependence (the class). I illustrate the need for these distinctions with a set of examples demonstrating causes of different types of scale‐dependence. I then describe how this taxonomy relates to an array of scale‐related concepts from other fields. Finally, I discuss the generalization that biotic interactions are most important at small scales in light of this taxonomy.

Blackwelder and Cross collaborate in family medicine clinic

When Brian Cross, PharmD, first went to work for the Indian Health Service (IHS) on the San Carlos Apache Reservation in eastern Arizona in 1991, he believed that the physician-pharmacist collaboration that he encountered there—a model pioneered by the IHS and a handful of other federal agencies and private health care systems—as common across the country.

Making Change: Can Ethnographic Research about Women Makers Change the Future of Computing?

Two ethnographers from different parts of the same technology company set out to explore the role of women and girls in the worldwide maker movement. We wanted to know who is currently participating in the maker phenomenon, how they became makers, what motivates them to continue making, what kinds of things they make, and what their hopes are for the future. Most importantly, we investigated why women are underrepresented in the realm of tech making with the explicit goal of being change agents and triggers of transformation both within our company and in the broader technology landscape.

Portable Storage Device Management in Linux

The world of information technology and communication is moving towards standardization of hardware ports. All kind of communication is now using USB as the port as it is universally recognized hardware medium of data communication. It is become flexible and easy to use kind of things with portable USB storage devices to copy data from one system to another system. It is possible to copy data within seconds with the help of portable USB flash memory devices. It has leaded insecurity of data storage on computer system. Various surveys has shown after network copy only USB data copy has made data insecure on computer . It is also the source of malwares in the system. To disable the USB ports is not the solution to this problem because almost all peripheral devices now uses the USB ports for communication. So, we have implemented a system which has complete USB storage enable and disable control for Linux operating system. The administrator will decide the storage devices connected to USB must be enabled or disabled . We experimented the algorithm on Linux kernel version 3.11 onwards on Debian based linux distributions. We have got 100% success rate of the said system with zero percent performance degradation.

Downhole Fiber-Optic Monitoring: An Evolving Technology

Fiber Optics It has been an impressive comeback for a technology that once stood on the brink of failure. The upstream oil and gas industry has largely resolved crippling technical challenges that shortened the life of fiber-optic cables in downhole applications and is now working on a big encore. The developers of the technology have been successful in showing operators what can be gained by using permanent fiber-optic monitoring in a small number of wells. The next step is to broaden the market by expanding what the technology can do. A number of research and development projects aimed at maturing new applications for fiber-optic systems are in progress. Taken together, they stand to improve the return on investment for operators as the technology slowly takes the shape of a central nervous system for oil and gas wells. Put simply, those working in the fiber-optic sector want to provide engineers with real numbers to enable managed production strategies that will increase overall production. The most widely used form of fiber-optic technology today is by far distributed temperature sensing (DTS) and thus its development is relatively mature. Initially, many of Schlumberger’s customers viewed DTS as a niche product. But after pumping down more than 17 million ft of fiberoptic cable into more than 1,500 wells, the oilfield service company is experiencing greater global demand than ever, something it credits to better data. “In the old days, the fiber data was marred by reliability, by fiber darkening, and those kinds of things. The big growth that we are seeing today is really because of the improved reliability, ease of data transmission, and customers having a lot more confidence in the data and being able to use that data,” said John Lovell, product line manager of distributed measurement and completions division at Schlumberger. “Now that we have good data going, you can start moving from a qualitative assessment to much more of a quantitative assessment.” However, for all the benefits that downhole fiber optics is delivering, more breakthroughs are needed to bring about the next evolutionary step of the technology. Multiple companies are working on ways to adapt fiber optics to determine flow characteristics and related physical properties inside the pipe and near the wellbore. Managing the ever-growing sets of data being produced specifically through distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is an ongoing problem that needs to be solved. More work is under way to expand the computer systems and applications used by service providers so operators can use competing laser and optical receiving systems, known as interrogator units, and draw out the data in a universal format for interpenetration. Oil and gas companies also need more ways to integrate and correlate the fiber-optic data with conventional production data. And then there is the unresolved issue of how the data should be shared between the service providers and the operators. “These are all good problems to have,” said Zafar Kamal, manager of sensors and systems integration at BP. “I think they will be solved, it is just a question of how efficiently can we do it, how fast we can do it, and who gets there first.”

EHPE: a history of the future

A grand convergence looms. It seems at least plausible that health and physical education may soon be lived by students in ways that are radically different from the past and sharply at odds with the imaginings of its founders and generations of academic aficionados. Perhaps in some respects, the differences will be superficial and less important than the continuities. Nonetheless, I draw connections between some recent futurist literature, developments in social theory and trends in health education, physical education and school-based health intervention—fields that I collectively call ‘HPE’—in order to imagine their digital futures. I contend that there is much for these fields to consider as developments in digital technology, the commercialisation of education, the spread of surveillance culture and medicalisation reshape how people think about HPE and its reason for being. But rather than an apocalyptic warning, this is an invitation to others to engage with some important questions that, although already urgent, have gone largely unnoticed. For example, what kind of thing will eHPE be if/when it exists primarily to generate profits and monitor and measure the minutiae of everyday life? At the very least, my argument here is that if it is not already the case, questions of pedagogical process and effectiveness may soon struggle for relevance in HPE's digital future.

PENEGAKAN HUKUM YANG BERORIENTASI PADA KEBERLANJUTAN SUMBER DAYA IKAN

Area of Indonesia consists of 80% water, which contains abundance of potential fish resources, Those fish resources should be utilized for as much as prosperity and welfare for Indonesian. In fact, fish resources haven’t enhanced the living standard, which is sustainable and equitable. Issues on fisheries come up such as exaggeration of fishing, theft fish, illegal fishing activities and the use of fish resources that exceeding the generation of fish itself. That circumstance will cause harm for the state, the fishermen, as well as people in general. The use of tools that harm the nature will cause the decrease of fish resources and threat the sustainability of fish resources. The aim of writing this article is to analyze law enforcement related to the sustainability of fish resources and the sustainability of fish resources, viewed from the perspective of justice. As the result of the study, law enforcement to protect the fish resources generally has not given attention to the sustainability of fish resources, therefore fishermen still use unfriendly tools to catch the fishes. Those unfriendly tools will cause the occurrence of over-fishing and will impact to the environmental damages. Those kinds of things will destruct the fishes, therefore the quantity of fish will have deteriorated and even could be extinct. Those environmental damages would suffer the present generation as well as the next generation since they couldn’t consume fish which is very essential for the growth of the human body and eradicate the job for the people as the fishermen. The present generation will be sinful if the next generation will get the impact of what the present generation done. In order to reduce more over-fishing activities and the distrust of the fish habitat it needs the law enforcement, which is oriented to the sustainability of fish resources. The sustainability of fishery resources couldn’t maintain its existence, this could be seen as the symbol of environmental damages. In this case, the law also needs to make integration of fish resources sustainability to be processed so that it will result output law enforcement which is oriented to fish resources sustainability. As a conclusion, in law enforcement oriented to fish resources sustainability, it needs to be thought by the lawmaker to embed that the law should contain idea or concept about justice, legal certainty, the significance of fish resources and the implementation of the law itself. In the fish resources utilization and law enforcements, it needs to pay attention to the justice principle; intergenerational equity; intergenerational equity; precautionary; conservation of biological diversity; conservation of biological diversity.

Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America by Paula M. Kane (review)

Reviewed by: Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America by Paula M. Kane James M. O’Toole (bio) Paula M. Kane , Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America ( Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press , 2013 ). 328 pages. This kind of thing just doesn’t happen, right? A pious young woman from a respectable enough family sees a crucifix in blood appear mysteriously on her body. She enters a convent, and once there the visible signs of divinely ordained torment multiply. She is confined to a wheelchair and suffers unending agony, requiring more or less constant care from her fellow sisters. There are even reports that the stigmata, the signs of Jesus’s own wounds, are also visited on her. Symbolic markings would appear first on her flesh and then be miraculously transferred to nearby walls. She is examined by doctors, both medical and spiritual, and most of them conclude that all this is neither delusion nor deception. Her life is brief and full of trials, but she endures all and becomes an inspiration by willingly accepting her sufferings; they have redemptive power, not only for herself but indeed for the whole world. It is quite a story, one we would readily accept as a tale from medieval Spain, perhaps, but in the United States of America in the 1920s? No, in that historical time and place, this simply does not happen. But of course it did, and Paula Kane’s Sister Thorn and Catholic Mysticism in Modern America examines the case of Margaret Reilly (known in religion as Sister Mary Crown of Thorns), weaving a skillful analysis that prompts us to reconsider what we think we know about Catholicism in America. The story at least starts in a familiar way. An immigrant family, committed to the faith of their ancestors, achieved a certain upward mobility, but success was always fragile. A life in the Church offered an outlet, the convent [End Page 127] channeling the energies of women whose opportunities were otherwise narrowly prescribed. The particular religious order in this case is near-ideal grist for the scholarly mill: the Sisters of the Good Shepherd who worked with “fallen” women and girls, thus operating at the busy intersection of religion, gender, and the larger social forces of urban life. A deep devotional culture supported the meaning that others came to find in Thorn’s case. Even in a world that liked to think extravagant manifestations of the supernatural had been banished, driven out by science, this case could not be so easily dismissed. Reports of other stigmatics, including those that were obviously false, only served to confirm the apparent genuineness here. An effort to have Thorn recognized as a saint began even while she was still alive, but the cause lost steam after her death in 1937, caught in shifting expectations about the requirements for that honor: “heroic virtue” in the ordinary things of life rather than “wonder-working” became the standard. With the mystic’s death, she was largely forgotten. Kane’s book concludes with a sad little photograph (taken by the author) of Thorn’s gravestone in Peekskill, New York: plain, worn, attracting no notice. But there is so much more here. Particularly interesting to me was the large cast of characters, mostly men, who became involved in the case and emerged, in Kane’s word, as Thorn’s “champions.” The personal physician of the cardinal archbishop of New York, for example, was among the first to examine her. While we might expect nothing but skepticism from him, he became her stoutest defender. Support was also forthcoming from another doctor, James J. Walsh, one of the most curious figures in early twentieth century American Catholicism. A former seminarian who became a neurologist and medical school dean, Walsh was what passed for a “public intellectual” in the Church at the time, writing a book called The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries (1907), which made the case that Catholic culture trumped all comers and always had; that very odd book remained a staple in American Catholic colleges and universities for half a century. European experts— some of whom were even Jesuits and who could argue with them...

Dispensing with Ontological Levels: an Illustration

Does metaphysics, or does it not, need ontological levels? Should metaphysics endorse the thesis that things of some kinds are ontologically more fundamental than things of some other kinds? Must it be a datum of metaphysics that entities of certain kinds are ontologically grounded in entities of certain other kinds? Must it be a feature of any adequate metaphysical theory that it awards a special ontological status to entities of certain kinds and denies this special status to entities of other kinds? There are two ways to approach these questions (or this question — for the four questions I have asked are essentially the same question). I’ll call them, tendentiously perhaps, the Bad Way and the Good Way. This is the Bad Way:

In pursuit of the gene: an interview with James Schwartz.

A few years ago, a friend suggested I take a look at a new book on the history of genetics written by independent scholar James Schwartz. Since my appetite for this kind of thing appears insatiable, I ordered the book and devoured it over a weekend. In In Pursuit of the Gene, Schwartz examines the brilliance of Mendel and Darwin; eavesdrops on the debates of Galton, Bateson, Pearson, Wendel, and De Vries; alights in the fly room of the early Drosophilists Morgan, Sturtevant, and Bridges; and settles at last on the highly unsettled Hermann Muller. This book is a must-read for anyone who is curious about genetics, and that means you, dear reader!