Man Ought Research Articles

Ethical Issues on Cloning and Genetically Modified Products

Science and Technology have greatly improved man’s quality of life as new discoveries are designed to nurture a healthy and long life. Science and Technology can be described as two sides of a coin as science discovers the problem and technology provides the product to solve that particular problem that affects the well-being of mankind. Philosophy, like science, is a discipline that is hinged on rational thinking and the pursuit of truth. The branch of philosophy that is concerned with how man ought to live in the society is Ethics. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that deals with rightness and wrongness of human actions. It also determines the rightness or wrongness of technological innovations and their effect on the health of man. There are numerous scientific discoveries in the area of genetic engineering but this paper is limited to cloning and genetic modification. In this work, ethical implications of these scientific discoveries were identified. This paper shall use the method of conceptual analysis. It intends to address the ethical implications of cloning and genetically modified products for mankind. The paper concludes that the benefits of these scientific developments should be embraced as they outweigh the cons and provide succour to beneficiaries which is the objective of Science and Technology. The welfare of mankind is the concern of ethics as well as science and technology.

Compelled Decryption and the Right Against Self-Incrimination: Obsta Principiis

Amidst the debate over compelled decryption, most courts and commentators have failed to recognize that the Act of Production Doctrine has swallowed the right against self-incrimination. The right against self-incrimination was created for the express purpose of preventing the government from compelling self-incrimination, particularly in the form of oral or written testimony, or by the production of incriminating books and papers. The English and early-American cases make this point in no uncertain terms. “[T]he reason why in such cases a man needs not to answer, is, because that no man ought to accuse himself” and “the defendant is never forced to produce any evidence, though he should hold it in his hands in court.” Yet, in the compelled decryption cases, the right against self-incrimination sounds quite different. In addressing the question of whether a person can be compelled to “produce” a password under the Act of Production Doctrine, one court expressed its understanding that “[t]here is some support for the idea that the written disclosure of the password would amount to direct testimony.” Another court held that the compelled verbal disclosure of a password did not offend the Fifth Amendment because “the communication was sought only for its content and the content has no other value or significance.” The stakes in the compelled decryption cases are immense. The right against self-incrimination is not just a right to silence, it protects the human conscience, the right to privacy, and the value of books and papers. The right against self-incrimination also defines the difference between inquisitorial and accusatorial systems of legal procedure. Should the Act of Production Doctrine persist, the right against self-incrimination will disappear and the principles supported and protected by the right will be washed away. Therefore, this work proceeds in four parts. Part I briefly addresses the question of constitutional interpretation before continuing on to examine the origin and development of the right against self-incrimination in England and America. Then, Part II addresses the history of the Supreme Court’s self-incrimination jurisprudence. Part II first tracks the Court’s original and constitutionally faithful doctrine of self-incrimination, which is termed the Boyd-Bram Analysis. Part II then examines how the Court slowly abandoned the Boyd-Bram Analysis in favor of doctrines fundamentally opposed to the right against self-incrimination, including the Act of Production Doctrine. Part II also provides a detailed analysis of the Act of Production Doctrine’s many faults, and details how the Court was unable to clarify the doctrine in subsequent cases. The chaos that defines the compelled decryption cases is the subject of Part III. As an initial matter, Part III provides a detailed but accessible explanation of how encryption works and addresses common misconceptions. With a technical understanding of encryption in hand, Part III then argues that the inherent flaws of the Act of Production Doctrine explain why the state and lower federal courts have been unable to agree about even the most basic questions of self-incrimination. The two major sources of confusion are linked to the Act of Production Doctrine’s concept of communications and a subsidiary analysis known as the Foregone Conclusion Doctrine. Part III provides a series of tables and figures which quantify the scale of disagreement and confusion over the issue of compelled decryption. Part IV examines the impact of the Supreme Court’s retreat from the Boyd-Bram Analysis on the right against self-incrimination, how the issue of compelled decryption is properly treated under the Fifth Amendment, and the future of self-incrimination jurisprudence. Part IV makes three primary arguments. First, Part IV argues that the compelled decryption cases and the Act of production Doctrine are a direct threat to the letter and spirit of the right against self-incrimination. Second, that compelled decryption violates the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Third, that the Boyd-Bram Analysis is well-positioned to become the Supreme Court’s primary doctrine of self-incrimination.

Antihistoricism of Lev Shestov

Lev Shestov did not belong to those philosophers for whom philosophy of history was the central theme. However, the very time he lived in did not allow him to remain completely apart from reflecting on historical events. History, according to Shestov, should be understood as what is dealt with personal relations between man and God. In this situation, man ought to constantly make a free moral choice, which is not determined by the reason. Thus, the Russian thinker demonstrates the approach to understanding history, which became widespread several decades later when philosophers had to take into consideration the tragic phenomena of totalitarian regimes and two world wars to conclude that any conception of rationalized history implies, on the one hand, the annihilation of man as a subject of history, and, on the other hand, the destruction of many thousands of human lives. It is the permanent moral choice that, according to Shestov, determines not only the fate of a man, but also the fate of the mankind, and even the fate of God. In Shestov’s philosophy, God is described as something incomprehensible for man rather than the almighty power that predestines all the events in the world history by means of endowing them with definite meanings. Shestov believed that man can become absolutely free only if he relies on God completely, without any rational justifications. The author shows that Shestov’s criticism of any methodology in historical research which aims at interpreting history in a rational way was an attempt to protect man and his freedom from the curse of rationalism. It is this protection that should be considered, in the author’s opinion, the core value of his existential philosophy of history.

Why God Had to Have an Immaculate Mother

AbstractAnselm's argument for the salvific necessity of the Incarnation in his Cur Deus Homo is justly famous and elegantly simple: only man ought; only God can; therefore, only a God-man both ought and can (atone for sin). Unfortunately it is a paralogism, trading on an equivocal use of ‘ought’. It is not difficult, however, to reconceive the meaning of the terms ‘ought’ and ‘can’ in a way that both renders the argument formally valid and deepens our christology. Sin may be conceived, per Anselm's own insistence, as a condition of the human soul in its relation to God, a failure of the human will to establish itself in harmonious union with the divine will. If the integrity of created human nature requires that its psychological conditions are propagated together with it, then one who has both the duty and ability to atone for sin must be descended from Adam but must enjoy the original justice of the soul that Adam rejected and deformed in himself. Thus, systematically reconstructing Anselm's argument has the surprising consequence of enabling us to posit an argument for the salvific necessity of the Immaculate Conception as a preparatory stage in the hypostatic union of the Incarnation.

"Coniugalia praecepta" Plutarcha o życiu żon

The good wife, as Plutrach taught, ought to have no feeling of her own, but she should join with her husband in seriousness and sportiveness, in soberness and laughter. The husband has to be pure and clean from all connexion with others when he approach his wife and her virtue, her exclusive devotion to her husband, her constancy, and her affection, ought to be most in evidence. The man ought to exercise control over the woman, not as the owner has control over a piece of property, but, as the soul colonists the body, by entering into her feelings and being knit to her through goodwill. He is teacher of philosophy, she is his disciple: for his wife husband must collect from every source what is useful and carrying it within his own self impart it to her, and then discusses it with her, and makes the best of these doctrines her favourite and familiar themes.

Litigation Process Method (LPM)

The sixth Law of Nature, is this, “that upon caution of the Future time, a man ought to pardon the offenses past of he or she that repented, and desire it. For Pardon, is nothing but granting of Peace.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1950)

Psychiatry is a clinical neuroscience, but how do we move the field?

‘‘Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, grief, despondency, and lamentations. And by this, in a special manner, we acquire wisdom and knowledge, and see and hear, and know what are foul and what are fair, what are bad and what are good, what are sweet and what are unsavory. And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us. All these things we endure from the brain when it is not healthy.’’

Paradise Regained and the Restoration Church of England: Pieties in Dialogue

Paradise Regained and the Restoration Church of England:Pieties in Dialogue Edmund Christie White Piety manuals were bestseller material in Restoration England. The vast appetite for such books in the decades following the return of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 is exemplified by the case of The Practice of Christian Graces; or, The Whole Duty of Man. Published anonymously in 1657 and heavily influenced by previous popular manuals written by Henry Hammond (Practicall Catechisme, 1644/45) and Jeremy Taylor (Holy Living, 1650), it is estimated that The Whole Duty of Man “enjoyed the greatest number of editions [of all contemporary piety manuals] between 1660 and 1711, perhaps forty-five in all, again probably enough copies (135,000) for every tenth family.”1 On top of this there were three well-received sequels: The Gentleman’s Calling (1662), The Causes of the Decay of Christian Piety (1667), and The Government of the Tongue (1667). These books presented practical guidance in an easily comprehensible style on how to live a life of devotion, and they were structured to promote methodical, repeated reading. The Whole Duty of Man was carefully divided into 17 partitions: “One whereof being read every Lords Day the Whole may be read over [End Page 273] Thrice in the Year.”2 It is little wonder that such books were valued so highly as gifts for confirmation candidates, the young, and the deserving poor.3 Despite their apparently innocuous, pious content, such manuals were not politically inert. They were written and endorsed by senior clergymen in the restored Church of England; it has been proven almost beyond doubt that the author of The Whole Duty of Man was the clergyman Richard Allestree, an active royalist during the 1640s and 1650s, who was elevated to the position of Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford in 1663.4 More controversial publications written by Conformist clergy argued explicitly that the piety espoused in The Whole Duty of Man ought to be emulated in thanksgiving for the miraculous return of the Stuart monarchy and episcopal government in 1660. Words from a sermon delivered to the congregation of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on the Sunday following the coronation of Charles II suggest the preacher’s indebtedness to such manuals and the ideals of “holy living” that inspired them: “For the whole Duty of a Christian doth consist in two things; first (by way of privation) in casting off the works of Darkness, in denying ungodliness and worldly lusts; next (by way of Acquisition) in putting on the armour of light; Living soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world. Tit. 2. 12.”5 As another passage in this sermon makes clear, pious living was to be central to the new political settlement, which would consist of the king and his bishops (“untill our Bishops receive their Right, though we are glad to have our King, we may rationally fear we shall not hold him”), working in harmony to correct the deleterious effects of the previous rebellion and “tyranny.”6 In arguments such as this, “religious and political duty … became indistinguishable (just as religious dissent became indistinguishable from sedition): good Christians are loyal subjects.”7 The ideological concerns of the piety manuals themselves, however, are harder to pin down. They do consider loyalty to the magistrate to be crucially important, but not solely so: it was only one part of the “holy living” phenomenon, and to focus on it reduces such works to the status of mere Conformist propaganda. [End Page 274] Indeed, the number of popular Nonconformist imitations of these ostensibly Anglican piety manuals is testimony to the breadth and depth of their reception in Restoration England.8 Paradise Regained also participates in this context of politicized piety, exploring the concept in both form and thought.9 In the poem, Jesus acts in accordance with a notion of pious living that is bound up with his burgeoning awareness of his messianic vocation. Milton’s Jesus declares the cessation of all oracles with the statement that God has sent “his spirit of truth henceforth to dwell / In pious hearts, an inward oracle / To all truth requisite for men to know.”10...

The Est-hetics of Esthetics: Pedagogy as a Science of Life

The Est-hetics of educating is not a new “special field” in philosophy, but an attempt to move away from the pedagogic experience of art towards a philosophy of experience that surpasses the limitations of a paideia entirely centred on the tenet of what man ought to be. The study of the concept of beauty, from the kalokagatia of the ancient Greeks, to the crisis of esthetic formalism in the 20th century, help us to understand that, to make pedagogy a science of life, it is necessary to move away from the discon- nect between form and content and think again about the dialectic between critical thinking and that awareness of reality and beauty which is as much a part of our daily life as breathing.

“A Is A”: Spider-Man, Ayn Rand, and What Man Ought to Be

In 1979, writer Tom DeFalco was paired with artist and cocreator of Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, to work on an issue ofMachine Man, one of the many superheroes populating the universe of Marvel Comics. Instead of the usual introduction and business chatter, Ditko challenged DeFalco during a first conversation: “Are you Tom? What gives you the right to write about heroes?” (Tucker 2012). By the time of this exchange, Ditko had not only (co-) created and continued numerous superhero stories, ranging from Captain Atom to Dr. Strange or the Hulk, but he had also dedicated a lot of thought to the question as to what composed true heroism. In the 1960s, he had already found answers in a place not uncommon for that time, namely, in the novels of a Russian immigrant whose work should serve, in her own words, as “the projection of an ideal man” (Rand 1943, ix; 1975, 162; 2005, 230): Ayn Rand (1905–1982).

¿Cómo puede un pagano vencer al mundo? Observaciones sobre los Tres discursos edificantes de 1843

Los Discursos Edificantes de 1843 buscan la esencia del hombre y del actuar mismo, y están dirigidos al hombre perfecto, no al esteta ni al ético. El hombre debe perder al mundo, “lo mejor”, su todo, para ganar a Dios y a sí mismo, aunque en este movimiento pierda algo de sí. El hombre, como relación que se relaciona con sí mismo, encuentra la verdad en el amor, lo único que permanece, y por medio de él se relaciona con el mundo y lo gana. El pagano no puede ganar el mundo porque la verdad del hombre se alcanza en lo religioso y el amor se manifiesta como fe, lo único trascendente, la autodeterminación del sujeto, verdadero actuar libre. El amor se identifica con la fe y se gana al mundo con el amor perfecto, que es permanencia y repetición, pues así es como el individuo crea su propio objeto y a sí mismo como eterno en el espíritu mediante el “yo permanezco” del amante. El saber de todas esto deja de ser un saber para convertirse en acción. La verdad es la interioridad.

“Danger: men not working.” Constructing citizenship with contingent labor in the Federal Theatre's Living Newspapers

Try to remember all you've seen here. Remember that every man … ought to have the right to work and eat. Every man ought to have a right to think things out for himself.– Hallie Flangan and Margaret Ellen Clifford, Can You Hear Their Voices? (1931)I don't know why I still hang on the idea that unemployed actors get just as hungry as anybody else.– Harry Hopkins, Works Progress Association Supervisor (1934)Theater critics and historians have done valuable work to canonize the scripts of Depression-era Living Newspapers. Yet little scholarly attention has been paid to the modes of contingent and affective labor that structured daily life for the Federal Theatre employees responsible for writing and staging those texts. This study examines a unique moment in American theater history in which discursive tropes of uncertainty helped to frame the dramatic arts as symbols of a patriotic work ethic and the American democratic ideal. An investigation of the classed and gendered labor discourses of New Deal Federal Theatre Project administrators from 1935–9 reveals the creative strategies that they used to cope with their own professional and economic precarity. Although Federal Theatre employees encountered these demands within the framework of government sponsorship, their responses to such pressures resonate with patterns in industry, non-profit, and academic settings in the twenty-first century. Producing affect, reviewing performance, re-framing goals, and justifying expenses are all part of today's late-capitalist rubric of professional contingency, just as they were under the Works Progress Administration.

Asteriusza z Amazji i Nila z Ancyry interpretacja przypowieści o bogaczu i Łazarzu (Łk 16,19-31)

The article presents the interpretation of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Lk 16,19-31), made by Asterius of Amasea and Nilus of Ancyra. Both authors represent the background of the ancient Church of the east at the turn of the 4th and 5th centuries. The exegesis presented is of a pastoral nature. The history of Lazarus and the rich man subserved both Church Fathers to edify the rich Christians of the necessity to share their goods with the poor. Mercy shown in this way will be repaid in eternal life. A rich man ought to do as much good as he can in this life, as the time is short. Forms of aid to those in need proposed by Asterius and Nilus were not to disturb the existing social order but merely to sensitize to the needs of others. The teaching presented in the commentary in question is within the strand of the social doctrine of the Church Fathers.

The Man Who Was Thursday : Chesterton's Duel with the Fin de Siècle

In former days heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was kingdoms of world and police and judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him. armies with their cruel security, kings with their cold faces, decorous processes of State, reasonable processes of law--all these like sheep had gone astray. man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man; he was a church. He was centre of universe; it was round him that stars swung. All tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says, with a conscious laugh, suppose I am very heretical, and looks round for applause. word heresy not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. word orthodoxy not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox. G.K. CHESTERTON, HERETICS History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES CHAPTER X OF Man Who Was Thursday: Nightmare (1907) is titled The Duel. It features hero, Gabriel Syme, in exhausting swordplay with impossibly unharmed Marquis de Saint Eustache--a literal duel that reflects many figurative ones that occur throughout novel. Chesterton had many quarrels with his time (only such a man could title one of his books What's Wrong with World) and enjoyed dueling over any issue that came to light in pages of Daily News or from pens of friendly adversaries such as H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. And while issues that Chesterton debated were numerous and filled pages of Illustrated London News for thirty years, of his work can be read as an argument for importance of what C.S. Lewis would, almost forty years after publication of Thursday, call the Tao: the sole source of all value judgments (1) that informs all major world religions--the doctrine of objective value, belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others are really false. (2) Chesterton, with uncharacteristic brevity, used label (3) for this same idea, resisting, quite consciously, splitting apart of reason and emotion, mind and body, spirit and matter, which had occurred unconsciously in so many of his contemporaries. (4) To Chesterton, what proved truth of general theories was their very generality, a shared belief that what are commonly called Judeo-Christian ethics are the best root of energy and ethics, (5) and belief that not all questions of value are relative or solely functions of time and space. In Orthodoxy, published a year after Thursday, Chesterton characterizes his era--which he feared was moving toward increasingly relativistic values--with remark, A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about truth; this has been exactly reversed. (6) Chesterton's great and extended duel against what he viewed as (at best) a wooden-headed and (at worst) a pernicious moral entropy was fought in pages of his novels, short stories, verse, essays, and apologia; his greatest foes were not figures such as Shaw and Wells, whose values ran counter to Chesterton's own, but those who denied importance of such intellectual contests in first place. Chesterton spent much of his life reacting against certainties, and uncertainties, of his age. …

Brothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia (review)

Reviewed by: Brothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia Kevin Butterfield (bio) Brothers of a Vow: Secret Fraternal Orders and the Transformation of White Male Culture in Antebellum Virginia. By Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. Pp. 181. Cloth, $39.95.) Brothers of a Vow is a tightly written and thought-provoking book about the men who became Odd Fellows, Freemasons, and Sons of Temperance in antebellum Virginia. In five short chapters, Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch manages—by means of thorough research, incisive engagement with the latest scholarship, and persuasive explanations of causes and effects—to make the case that fraternal organizations allowed working- and middle-class men to come together and to assert a wholly new kind of masculine respectability and white male civic brotherhood. She argues, persuasively, that the language of brotherly love and male equality so ubiquitous in the fraternal orders held great appeal for men seeking to navigate the uncertainties of a society increasingly divided by economic interest and party allegiance. Moral integrity, not economic success or social prominence, was the marker of a worthy member. And that standard for membership allowed men in Virginia, whether propertied slaveholders or not, to construct and to lay claim to a new standard of southern white manhood and male independence. Pflugrad-Jackisch rests much of her argument on Amy Greenberg's description of two distinct and competing varieties of masculinity in antebellum America: martial manhood, with its emphasis on honor and violence; and restrained manhood, with a market-friendly stress on trustworthiness, temperance, and self-discipline.1 Brothers of a Vow reveals how fraternity and ritual could serve as means to embrace the latter while minimizing class divisions that were painfully present in the cities of Virginia. Indeed, the elaborate rituals themselves played an important role here. Pflugrad-Jackisch rightly contends that the fraternal signs and symbols allowed men to distinguish those of good character from the unworthy. A member's attention to the increasingly complex and lengthy rituals of [End Page 534] the Masons, Odd Fellows, and the relatively new Sons of Temperance were "part of a larger performance that indicated the quality of his character and reinforced the 'familial' bonds of the lodge" (61). Adherence to tightly scripted behavior within the lodge could evince a man's self-discipline out of doors. And the ability to keep those rituals secret could prove his reliability. The content of antebellum rituals in Brothers of a Vow, however, is given relatively short shrift. Rituals were useful as "an effective means of policing white male conduct" (75), but Pflugrad-Jackisch does not ascribe to them much larger significance. This is at times a real strength to her study: She is able to see through the regalia, pomp, and secrecy to locate a desire among mid-nineteenth-century Virginia men to find a medium through which they could cultivate white male solidarity and help manage the stresses of an increasingly market-driven society. But the men themselves gave the letter and spirit of the rituals more significance than does the author, and on one occasion her emphasis leads her astray. When she notes that an aspiring Mason was rejected for having only one leg, "presumably because it interfered with his ability to support himself" (80), she misses an opportunity to explore ways in which the content of the ritual had real meaning, not just utility, for the participants. For the actual reason the man was rejected dates back to the beginnings of modern Freemasonry in England (and lingers to this day in many Masonic jurisdictions), specifically, the prohibition on any applicant who did not "have his right Limbs as a Man ought to have."2 The reason was ideational rather than practical, having to do with the ideal image of a man and with his ability to perform the requisite motions of initiation and recognition. Attempts to understand what drew men to the lodge should give more weight to the rites and rules that they set out for themselves. There is much more in this short volume, for the joiners in Brothers of a Vow were doing something besides simply...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Re-Creation of Masculinity

In her 1903 study The Home: Its Work and Influence , Gilman considers the effect of the concept "the home" on both men and women. She explores how established norms and traditions inform society's views of the abilities and appropriate behaviors for each sex. As Gilman points out, beliefs about what a man ought to do have a direct effect on what a woman is allowed to do: changes to established practice are regarded as threats to the social roles of "man" or "woman." She sums up the argument by saying that "man considers any effort of the woman to support herself as a reflection on him" ( Home 290). Gilman was aware of the need to include men in her proposals for improving society, in order to achieve lasting reform. Thus, to gain the sympathy of her male readers, Gilman shows that a working wife is not the threat traditional opinion held, but rather a comfort to her husband. Having asserted this in works such as The Home , Gilman deliberately adjusts her short stories to her political writing and her audience, offering role models for both sexes and creating stories in which women become powerful for their own sake, though their empowerment often benefits a man. The stories discussed here, "Her Housekeeper" and "The Cottagette", both published in 1910, approach the topic of Gilman's belief, as stated in The Home , that a woman should work not just to gain independence or to share the financial expenses of the home (which should remain the responsibility of the man of the house) but also to create a happy atmosphere within her home and thus become a positive influence on her husband and as well as any children she may have. However, Gilman was not only recreating femininity, by providing fictional examples of cultural evolution in United States homes. By including men in this development, and creating male characters who actively want their wives to continue with their artistic work after marriage, she was also presenting methods of recreating masculinity without undermining men's sense of security.

Quantifying the limits of HANPP and carbon emissions which prolong total species well-being

Anthropogenic climate and land-use change are leading to irreversible losses of global biodiversity, upon which ecosystem functioning depends. Since total species' well-being depends on ecosystem goods and services, man must determine how much net primary productivity (NPP) may be appropriated and carbon emitted so as to not adversely impact this and future generations. In 2005, man ought to have only appropriated 9.72 Pg C of NPP, representing a factor 2.50, or 59.93%, reduction in human-appropriated NPP in that year. Concurrently, the carbon cycle would have been balanced with a factor 1.26, or 20.84%, reduction from 7.60 Gt C/year to 5.70 Gt C/year, representing a return to the 1986 levels. This limit is in keeping with the category III stabilization scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change. Projecting population growth to 2030 and its associated basic food requirements, the maximum HANPP remains at 9.74 ± 0.02 Pg C/year. This time-invariant HANPP may only provide for the current global population of 6.51 billion equitably at the current average consumption of 1.49 t C per capita, calling into question the sustainability of developing countries striving for high-consuming country levels of 5.85 t C per capita and its impacts on equitable resource distribution.

Walking toward a convergence in aging research

Men ought to know that from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations… And by the same organ we become mad and delirious, and fears and terrors assail us, some by night, and some by day, and dreams and untimely wanderings, and cares that are not suitable, and ignorance of present circumstances, desuetude, and unskilfulness. All these things we endure from the brain, when it is not healthy… —Hippocrates, On the Sacred Disease The brain is responsible for providing everything from the basic involuntary physiological events that allow one to breathe and live, to the conscious actions and thoughts that dictate the very essence of mankind. As such, the preservation of brain function as individuals age is not only crucial to support the ability to live but also the ability to maintain their individuality. Aging is an inevitable process that everyone faces and one that has captivated people's minds since the beginning of our existence. Promises of life extension and immortality have been marketed from alchemists to charlatans and continue to flood popular media even today. The apparent desire to beat the ravages of age often outweighs rigorous thought, and that very popular obsession has sometimes diluted the seriousness of the field. That said, understanding the aging nervous system is a field that has attracted some of the brightest and best clinicians as well as basic scientists whose intellectual ideas and scholarly research bear on the field in an effort to reach an understanding of the fundamental mechanistic events underlying aging. Healthy lifestyles, medical advances in the 20th century, and the coming of age of baby boomers have brought out the reality of living longer, and uncovered the challenges that an aging population brings to human lives, health systems, and communities. In the 21st century, the number of individuals reaching 65 years of age is increasing exponentially. The number has increased 20-fold in the last century such that the spectrum of diseases that affect the population has changed and “aging” itself has become a prevalent condition. Understanding the causes of such age-related problems and the ways in which these problems can be most effectively treated or prevented is a challenge faced by us as a society, a challenge demanding to be addressed in a scientifically rigorous fashion. Over time, numerous theories on aging have been proposed. However, the fundamental link that unites these theories toward a cohesive understanding of aging is still lacking. The dissection of genetics versus environment and the way in which the genetics and the environment interact to affect development and maturation and demise is a pending subject for the research community. Pressing questions that need to be addressed are those concerning mechanisms associated with brain aging vulnerability, and the way in which selective neuronal populations become susceptible to disease as people age. Also, what makes certain individuals maintain incredible mental vitality and lucidity throughout life, and why others lose the essence of their individuality is key to understanding the fundamental layout of not only aging, but also the brain itself. Unfortunately, understanding normal healthy brain function is in its infancy, and while advances in all research disciplines spanning areas as diverse as studying aging genetics in invertebrate or vertebrate models such as zebrafish, or functional neuroimaging in the human aged brain are promising, more often than not understanding the complexity of brain physiology is diminished by reductionist approaches. Such crudeness is only exacerbated by attempts to understand abnormal physiology and pathology. To date, aging neurosciences research is divided across disciplines. The study of age-related molecular switches driving cellular processes from stem cells to mature neurons is, to some extent, studied separately from how the switches are genetically determined, or the process in which environmental factors such as stress, sex-specific events such as menopause, nutrition or even climate affect the blueprints. In addition, the functional manifestations of aging encompassing cognitive, motor, and emotional age-related changes are often studied as separate entities. The challenge, therefore, is to unite the fields into closer approximation to allow a constructive input and open synergetic dialogue between these closely related research entities. Last scene of all that ends this strange, eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion. I am sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. —William Shakespeare, As You Like It

The sign universe, Summum Bonum, self-control, and the normative sciences in a Peircean perspective or man ought to contribute to the growth in the concrete reasonableness

According to Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) the universe is perfused with signs. There is an objective sign-logic at work in the universe which constitutes a growth of concrete reasonableness. However, this process is not value neutral but the Summum Bonum. Man is now cabable of a high degree of self control and can cultivate his habits of feeling, action, and thought in accordance with the ideal. A theory of these efforts of cultivation fall within Peirce's three normative sciences — aesthetics, ethics, and logic. Even though Peirce never did formulate a fully coherent normative theory, there lies in his work an important sketch in understanding the ideal and how it should be followed, and in connection to this a model for rational behaviour including self-control.

<i>The Victorians and Germany</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Victorians and Germany Michael Ledger-Lomas (bio) John R. Davis , The Victorians and Germany (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 419 pages, illustrated, paperback, £45 (ISBN 978-3-03911-065-0) DOI: 10.3366/E1355550208000210. 'It is of Prussia that I write, but it is of England that I think!' Edward Bulwer's exclamation, which concludes his review of Prussian education in England and the English (1833), might serve John Davis as an epitome of The Victorians and Germany. In it he argues that the interest shown by the Victorians in Germany was uniquely intense and motivated by a desire to reform their own society. His book is offered primarily as a synthesis of existing research on the manifold forms this interest took, which 'only injects new and original research where it is felt that it is needed' (19). Interlinked chapters examine interest in and borrowings from German literature, religion, historical scholarship, art and music, education and social policy. After a lively chapter on travel, Davis examines British reactions to German unification, ending his book with a cursory assessment of relations between the Victorians and Imperial Germany. Indeed, despite its title, the book mainly concentrates on patterns of cultural exchange in the mid-nineteenth century, bookended by assessments of their roots in the long eighteenth century and survival into a new context of economic and strategic rivalry. [End Page 147] The Victorians and Germany has considerable virtues as a survey of the 'German idea'. It goes some way to fulfil its aim of drawing connections between previously unrelated fields of research, showing how impressions of German mysticism formed, say, by reading German poetry could spill over into assessments of German theology (384). Davis draws perceptive parallels between the enthusiasm for Nazarene art and German music (237) and rightly draws attention to cultural fixers like the Prussian ambassador Bunsen, who was simultaneously active as a diplomat, patron of the arts, ecclesiastical politician and controversial philologist. Davis has some interesting reflections on the persistence of interest in Germany. He sees the Victorians as a people in thrall to 'modernisation' who were intent on importing the 'goods' – a doctrine of history, artistic styles, or whatever – which could help them harmonise economic and social rationalisation with the spiritual and the ideal (22–3). The goods in demand changed over time too, from fantasy to facts. Romantic infatuation with the land that harboured the last enchantments of the Middle Ages mutated into envious appreciation of hard scientific and industrial achievement (98). Davis has a keen eye for detail, noticing everything from Victorian queasiness at the German predilection for smoking and social kissing (327–8) to Dickens's lampoons on the bluff opponents of German schooling, who consider that the 'man ought to be knocked down who ruminates' (279). Yet this book is ultimately neither sophisticated or daring enough in its analysis of an extremely important and complex phenomenon. Its chief failing is methodological. When examining the interaction between Victorian Britain and other cultures, it is doubtful whether it is either valid or profitable to speak of the 'Victorian mind' (9). As previous historians of Anglo-German intercultural transfer have rightly emphasised, it is tempting but overly simplistic to think of this process as a natural flow of information from one homogenous national culture to another, or to berate those who opposed that flow for ignorance or misunderstanding.1 One must rather concentrate on the British networks that formulated perceptions and transferred information about other countries and ask what domestic objectives they followed in doing so. When they either held up ideas or institutions as liable to improve, or conversely as repugnant to, national character, they were not so much voicing an existing consensus about what Victorian Britain was as attempting to reshape it through loaded comparison with or borrowing from other countries. To his credit, Davis recognises the importance of this approach. Although he often resorts to a simplistic model of cultural osmosis, [End Page 148] in which German ideas are 'soaked up' by Britain (192) or in which 'Victorians were ready to drink in the new ideas and methods being produced by the Germans' (161), he also wants to concentrate our attention on...