Hexa-Sabbath. Foreign Matter and Vital Substances, Experts and the Critical Consumer in the FRG during the 1950s and 1960sIn the late Fifties and early Sixties the regulation of food additives represented a remarkable turning point in German consumer politics, establishing a debate about decision making and policy advice, altering the discourse of purity and contamination, and inaugurating a new political actor, the organized critical consumer. The amendment of the Food Law in December 1958 functioned as a negotiation process between representatives (...) of science, industry and the state, which was institutionalized in the Senate Commissions of the German Research Foundation. While these Commissions for preservatives, foreign matter and colorants worked behind closed doors, a public discourse about the “toxic condition” of modern life and the negative role of the pharmaceutical and chemical industry gained strength.The debate about the admission of hexamethylenetetramine (hexa) took part at a crucial moment. Hexa was used as a preservative in the fish industry. But its anti microbial effectiveness was caused by the decomposition of hexa to formaldehyde. Despite the commission’s verdict against hexa, the lobbying activities of the industry granted it a reprieve. In the media, the case of hexa was seen as a touchstone for the capacity of negotiated decision making and the ability of rational scientists to resist the demands of industry. Finally, in 1963 it was the new political actor of the organized critical consumer, heir and successor to the housewife federations as well as to “purists” advocating life reform, who, supported by the media, enforced the prohibition of hexa as a preservative. (shrink)

This is a significantly expanded edition of one of the greatest works of modern political theory. Sheldon Wolin's Politics and Vision inspired and instructed two generations of political theorists after its appearance in 1960. This new edition retains intact the original ten chapters about political thinkers from Plato to Mill, and adds seven chapters about theorists from Marx and Nietzsche to Rawls and the postmodernists. The new chapters, which show how thinkers have grappled with the immense possibilities and dangers (...) of modern power, are themselves a major theoretical statement. They culminate in Wolin's remarkable argument that the United States has invented a new political form, "inverted totalitarianism," in which economic rather than political power is dangerously dominant. In this new edition, the book that helped to define political theory in the late twentieth century should energize, enlighten, and provoke generations of scholars to come. Wolin originally wrote Politics and Vision to challenge the idea that political analysis should consist simply of the neutral observation of objective reality. He argues that political thinkers must also rely on creative vision. Wolin shows that great theorists have been driven to shape politics to some vision of the Good that lies outside the existing political order. As he tells it, the history of theory is thus, in part, the story of changing assumptions about the Good. In the new chapters, Wolin displays all the energy and flair, the command of detail and of grand historical developments, that he brought to this story forty years ago. This is a work of immense talent and intense thought, an intellectual achievement that will endure. (shrink)

Abstract152 S., zahlreiche Abb., € 25,00. ISBN 978-3-7030-0830-6.

From the early years of the Common Era to 1700, Indian intellectuals explored with unparalleled subtlety the place of emotion in art. Their investigations led to the deconstruction of art's formal structures and broader inquiries into the pleasure of tragic tales. _Rasa_, or taste, was the word they chose to describe art's aesthetics, and their passionate effort to pin down these phenomena became its own remarkable act of creation. This book is the first in any language to follow the evolution (...) of rasa from its origins in dramaturgical thought--a concept for the stage--to its flourishing in literary thought--a concept for the page. _Reader on Rasa_ incorporates primary texts by every significant thinker of classical Indian aesthetics, many never translated before. The arrangement of the selections captures the intellectual dynamism that has powered this debate for centuries. Headnotes explain the meaning and significance of each text, a comprehensive introduction summarizes major threads in intellectual-historical terms, and critical endnotes and an extensive bibliography add further depth to the selections. The Sanskrit theory of emotion in art is one of the most sophisticated in the ancient world, a precursor of the work being done today by critics and philosophers of aesthetics. This volume's conceptual detail, historical precision, and clarity will appeal to any scholar interested in a full portrait of global intellectual development. __Reader on Rasa___ is the inaugural book in the Historical Sourcebooks in Classical Indian Thought series, edited by Sheldon Pollock. These text-based books guide readers through the most important forms of classical Indian thought, from epistemology, rhetoric, and hermeneutics to astral science, yoga, and medicine. Each volume provides fresh translations of key works, headnotes to contextualize selections, a comprehensive analysis of major lines of development within the discipline, and exegetical and text-critical endnotes, as well as a bibliography. Designed for comparativists and interested general readers, Historical Sourcebooks is also a great resource for advanced scholars seeking authoritative commentary on challenging works._. (shrink)

Bohmian mechanics, which is also called the de Broglie-Bohm theory, the pilot-wave model, and the causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, is a version of quantum theory discovered by Louis de Broglie in 1927 and rediscovered by David Bohm in 1952. It is the simplest example of what is often called a hidden variables interpretation of quantum mechanics. In Bohmian mechanics a system of particles is described in part by its wave function, evolving, as usual, according to Schrödinger's equation. However, the (...) wave function provides only a partial description of the system. This description is completed by the specification of the actual positions of the particles. The latter evolve according to the.. (shrink)

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Boltzmann explained how irreversible macroscopic laws, in particular the second law of thermodynamics, originate in the time-reversible laws of microscopic physics. Boltzmann’s analysis, the essence of which I shall review here, is basically correct. The most famous criticisms of Boltzmann’s later work on the subject have little merit. Most twentieth century innovations – such as the identification of the state of a physical system with a probability distribution on its phase space, (...) of its thermodynamic entropy with the Gibbs entropy of , and the invocation of the notions of ergodicity and mixing for the justification of the foundations of statistical mechanics – are thoroughly misguided. (shrink)

Bohmian mechanics is arguably the most naively obvious embedding imaginable of Schr¨ odinger’s equation into a completely coherent physical theory. It describes a world in which particles move in a highly non-Newtonian sort of way, one which may at first appear to have little to do with the spectrum of predictions of quantum mechanics. It turns out, however, that as a consequence of the defining dynamical equations of Bohmian mechanics, when a system has wave function ψ its configuration is typically (...) random, with probability density ρ given by |ψ|2, the quantum equilibrium distribution. It also turns out that the entire quantum formalism, operators as observables and all the rest, naturally emerges in Bohmian mechanics from the analysis of “measurements.” This analysis reveals the status of operators as observables in the description of quantum phenomena, and facilitates a clear view of the range of applicability of the usual quantum mechanical formulas. (shrink)

Bohmian trajectories have been used for various purposes, including the numerical simulation of the time-dependent Schr¨ odinger equation and the visualization of time-dependent wave functions. We review the purpose they were invented for: to serve as the foundation of quantum mechanics, i.e., to explain quantum mechanics in terms of a theory that is free of paradoxes and allows an understanding that is as clear as that of classical mechanics. Indeed, they succeed in serving that purpose in the context of a (...) theory known as Bohmian mechanics, to which this article is an introduction. (shrink)

We consider an isolated, macroscopic quantum system. Let H be a microcanonical “energy shell,” i.e., a subspace of the system’s Hilbert space spanned by the (finitely) many energy eigenstates with energies between E and E + δE. The thermal equilibrium macro-state at energy E corresponds to a subspace Heq of H such that dim Heq/ dim H is close to 1. We say that a system with state vector ψ H is in thermal equilibrium if ψ is “close” to Heq. (...) We show that for “typical” Hamiltonians with given eigenvalues, all initial state vectors ψ0 evolve in such a way that ψt is in thermal equilibrium for most times t. This result is closely related to von Neumann’s quantum ergodic theorem of 1929. (shrink)

In [3] John S. Bell proposed how to associate particle trajectories with a lattice quantum field theory, yielding what can be regarded as a |Ψ|2-distributed Markov process on the appropriate configuration space. A similar process can be defined in the continuum, for more or less any regularized quantum field theory; such processes we call Bell-type quantum field theories. We describe methods for explicitly constructing these processes. These concern, in addition to the definition of the Markov processes, the efficient calculation of (...) jump rates, how to obtain the process from the processes corresponding to the free and interaction Hamiltonian alone, and how to obtain the free process from the free Hamiltonian or, alternatively, from the one-particle process by a construction analogous to “second quantization.” As an example, we consider the process for a second quantized Dirac field in an external electromagnetic field. (shrink)

Ninety-five freshmen each recruited three peers to play a "group bidding game," an N-person prisoner’s dilemma in which anyone could win movie tickets depending on their scores in the game. Prior to playing, all participants completed a measure of prosocial value orientation. Replicating and extending earlier findings (Sheldon and McGregor 2000), our results show that prosocial participants were at a disadvantage within groups. Despite this vulnerability, prosocial participants did no worse overall than asocial participants because a counteracting group-level advantage (...) arose for prosocials, who tended to be concentrated in groups. Implications of this assortative process for the egoism/altruism debate, and for hierarchical selection theory, are discussed. (shrink)

We discuss the content and significance of John von Neumann’s quantum ergodic theorem (QET) of 1929, a strong result arising from the mere mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. The QET is a precise formulation of what we call normal typicality, i.e., the statement that, for typical large systems, every initial wave function ψ0 from an energy shell is “normal”: it evolves in such a way that |ψt ψt| is, for most t, macroscopically equivalent to the micro-canonical density matrix. The QET (...) has been mostly forgotten after it was criticized as a dynamically vacuous statement in several papers in the 1950s. However, we point out that this criticism does not apply to the actual QET, a correct statement of which does not appear in these papers, but to a different (indeed weaker) statement. Furthermore, we formulate a stronger statement of normal typicality, based on the observation that the bound on the deviations from the average specified by von Neumann is unnecessarily coarse and a much tighter (and more relevant) bound actually follows from his proof. (shrink)

We consider the possibility that all particles in the world are fundamentally identical, i.e., belong to the same species. Different masses, charges, spins, flavors, or colors then merely correspond to different quantum states of the same particle, just as spin-up and spin-down do. The implications of this viewpoint can be best appreciated within Bohmian mechanics, a precise formulation of quantum mechanics with particle trajectories. The implementation of this viewpoint in such a theory leads to trajectories different from those of the (...) usual formulation, and thus to a version of Bohmian mechanics that is inequivalent to, though arguably empirically indistinguishable from, the usual one. The mathematical core of this viewpoint is however rather independent of the detailed dynamical scheme Bohmian mechanics provides, and it amounts to the assertion that the configuration space for N particles, even N “distinguishable particles,” is the set of all N -point subsets of physical 3-space. (shrink)

The social science approach to risk has matured over the past two decades, with distinct paradigms developing in disciplines such as anthropology, economics, geography, psychology, and sociology. Social Theories of Risk traces the intellectual origins and histories of twelve of the established and emerging paradigms from the perspective of their principal proponents. Each contributor examines the underlying assumptions of his or her paradigm, the foundational issue it seeks to address, and likely future directions of research. Taken together, these essays illustrate (...) that the principal achievement of social sciences has been to broaden the debate about risk beyond the narrow, technical considerations of engineers and the physical and life sciences. The authors conclude that expert knowledge is not value-free, that public perceptions of and attitudes toward risks vary according to a wide range of social, psychological, and cultural variables, and that public opposition to particular risks cannot be assuaged by technical fixes. The essays reveal the circuitous paths that lead people to the study of risk, highlight how these paths have crossed and discuss some of the seminal influences on individuals and the field in general. Social Theories of Risk presents a broad, retrospective view of the state of the theory in the social sciences, written by many who have been on the cutting edge of risk research since its early days. The book includes both established and novel perspectives that address the theoretical foundations of the field and reflect what we know about risk as a psychological, social, and cultural phenomenon. The collection of papers not only informs us of the tributary ideas that spawned the social studies of risk, but also how the field has matured. The biographical flavor of the essays provides fascinating reading for established members of the field, and a valuable entree for newcomers. It is an ideal college text for courses in the history of science, environmental policy, and science, technology, and society, as well as the burgeoning array of more specialized courses in risk assessment and management. (shrink)

The renewed interest in the foundations of quantum statistical mechanics in recent years has led us to study John von Neumann’s 1929 article on the quantum ergodic theorem. We have found this almost forgotten article, which until now has been available only in German, to be a treasure chest, and to be much misunderstood. In it, von Neumann studied the long-time behavior of macroscopic quantum systems. While one of the two theorems announced in his title, the one he calls the (...) “quantum H-theorem,” is actually a much weaker statement than Boltzmann’s classical H-theorem, the other theorem, which he calls the “quantum ergodic theorem,” is a beautiful and very non-trivial result. It expresses a fact we call “normal typicality” and can be summarized as follows: For a “typical” finite family of commuting macroscopic observables, every initial wave function ψ0 from a micro-canonical energy shell so evolves that for most times t in the long run, the joint probability distribution of these observables obtained from ψ is close to.. (shrink)

The frame problem was originally a problem for Artificial Intelligence, but philosophers have interpreted it as an epistemological problem for human cognition. As a result of this reinterpretation, however, specifying the frame problem has become a difficult task. To get a better idea of what the frame problem is, how it gives rise to more general problems of relevance, and how deep these problems run, I expound six guises of the frame problem. I then assess some proposed heuristic solutions to (...) the frame problem; I show that these proposals misunderstand, and fail to address, an important aspect of the frame problem. Finally, I argue that though human cognition does not solve the frame problem in its epistemological guise, human cognition avoids some of the epistemological worries. (shrink)

Commentators have often held that aristotle's general doctrine of change commits him to a persisting material substrate for every change, And to an indeterminate material substrate (prime matter) for elemental transformation. I argue that though aristotle accepts a common matter for the four elements, Both these claims are false.

Slippery slope‐, taboo‐breaking‐ or Nazi‐analogy‐arguments are common, but not uncontroversial examples of the complex relationship between bioethics and the various ways of using historical arguments in these debates. In our analysis we examine first the relationship between bioethics and medical history both as separate disciplines and as argumentative practices. Secondly, we then analyse six common types of historical arguments in bioethics (slippery slope‐, analogy‐, continuity‐, knockout/taboo‐, ethical progress‐ and accomplice‐arguments), some as arguments within the academic debate of bioethics, others as (...) arguments within political and public debates over bioethical issues. We conclude by suggesting to bioethicists to better understand historical arguments as socially and culturally embedded practices of critical reflection of power, medical and government paternalism and possible future scenarios. More interdisciplinarity between ethicists and medical historians is needed to appropriately rationalize and understand the different legacies. (shrink)

In Bohmian mechanics the distribution |ψ|2 is regarded as the equilibrium distribution. We consider its uniqueness, finding that it is the unique equivariant distribution that is also a local functional of the wave function ψ.

By using tissue typing in conjunction with preimplantation genetic diagnosis doctors are able to pick a human embryo for implantation which, if all goes well, will become a “saviour sibling”, a brother or sister capable of donating life-saving tissue to an existing child.This paper addresses the question of whether this form of selection should be banned and concludes that it should not. Three main prohibitionist arguments are considered and found wanting: the claim that saviour siblings would be treated as commodities; (...) a slippery slope argument, which suggests that this practice will lead to the creation of so-called “designer babies”; and a child welfare argument, according to which saviour siblings will be physically and/or psychologically harmed. (shrink)

Conway and Kochen have presented a “free will theorem” [4, 6] which they claim shows that “if indeed we humans have free will, then [so do] elementary particles.” In a more precise fashion, they claim it shows that for certain quantum experiments in which the experimenters can choose between several options, no deterministic or stochastic model can account for the observed outcomes without violating a condition “MIN” motivated by relativistic symmetry. We point out that for stochastic models this conclusion is (...) not correct, while for deterministic models it is not new. In the way the free will theorem is formulated and proved, it only concerns deterministic models. But Conway and Kochen have argued [4, 5, 6, 7] that “randomness can’t help,” meaning that stochastic models are excluded as well if we insist on the conditions “SPIN”, “TWIN”, and “MIN”. We point out a mistake in their argument. Namely, the theorem is of the form deterministic model with SPIN & TWIN & MIN ⇒ contradiction , (1) and in order to derive the further claim, which is of the form stochastic model with SPIN & TWIN & MIN ⇒ contradiction , (2) Conway and Kochen propose a method for converting any stochastic model into a deterministic one [4]. (shrink)

The Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber (GRW) theory of spontaneous wave function collapse is known to provide a quantum theory without observers, in fact two different ones by using either the matter density ontology (GRWm) or the flash ontology (GRWf). Both theories are known to make predictions different from those of quantum mechanics, but the difference is so small that no decisive experiment can as yet be performed. While some testable deviations from quantum mechanics have long been known, we provide here something that has (...) until now been missing: a formalism that succinctly summarizes the empirical predictions of GRWm and GRWf. We call it the GRW formalism. Its structure is similar to that of the quantum formalism but involves different operators. In other words, we establish the validity of a general algorithm for directly computing the testable predictions of GRWm and GRWf. We further show that some well-defined quantities cannot be measured in a GRWm or GRWf world. (shrink)

The United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) waiting list was designed as a just and equitable system through which the limited number of organs is allocated to the millions of Americans in need of a transplant. People have trusted the system because of the belief that everyone on the list has an equal opportunity to receive an organ and also that allocation is blind to matters of financial standing, celebrity or political power. Recent events have revealed that certain practices and (...) policies have the potential to be exploited. The policies addressed in this paper enable those on the list with the proper resources to gain an advantage over other less fortunate members, creating a system that benefits not the individual most in medical need, but the one with the best resources. These policies are not only unethical but threaten the balance and success of the entire UNOS system. This paper proposes one possible solution, which seeks to balance the concepts of justice and utility. (shrink)

We present a quantum model for the motion of N point particles, implying nonlocal (i.e., superluminal) influences of external fields on the trajectories, that is nonetheless fully relativistic. In contrast to other models that have been proposed, this one involves no additional space-time structure as would be provided by a (possibly dynamical) foliation of space-time. This is achieved through the interplay of opposite microcausal and macrocausal (i.e., thermodynamic) arrows of time. PACS numbers 03.65.Ud; 03.65.Ta; 03.30.+p..

This study examines the extent to which scientific and biomedical journals have adopted conflict of interest (COI) policies for authors, and whether the adoption and content of such policies leads to the publishing of authors’ financial interest disclosure statements by such journals. In particular, it reports the results of a survey of journal editors about their practices regarding COI disclosures. About 16 percent of 1396 highly ranked scientific and biomedical journals had COI policies in effect during 1997. Less than 1 (...) percent of the articles published during that year in the journals with COI policies contained any disclosures of author personal financial interests while nearly 66 percent of the journals had zero disclosures of author personal financial interests. Nearly three fourths of journal editors surveyed usually publish author disclosure statements suggesting that low rates of personal financial disclosures are either a result of low rates of author financial interest in the subject matter of their publications or poor compliance by authors to the journals’ COI policies. (shrink)

We derive for Bohmian mechanics topological factors for quantum systems with a multiply-connected configuration space Q. These include nonabelian factors corresponding to what we call holonomy-twisted representations of the fundamental group of Q. We employ wave functions on the universal covering space of Q. As a byproduct of our analysis, we obtain an explanation, within the framework of Bohmian mechanics, of the fact that the wave function of a system of identical particles is either symmetric or anti-symmetric.

Many discussions of Kant’s picture of monads in his early Physical Monadology highlight the similarities between the view in it and Roger Joseph Boscovich’s view. Though I find this comparison interesting, I argue in this paper that Kant shows significant strands of having a fundamentally non-Boscovichian view in this work. Moreover, I trace the various strands that, I believe, pushed Kant to think about things in a non-Boscovichian way.

In the UK, female genital mutilation is unlawful, not only when performed on minors, but also when performed on adult women. The aim of our paper is to examine several arguments which have been advanced in support of this ban and to assess whether they are sufficient to justify banning female genital mutilation for competent, consenting women. We proceed by comparing female genital mutilation, which is banned, with cosmetic surgery, towards which the law has taken a very permissive stance. We (...) then examine the main arguments for the prohibition of the former, assessing in each case both (a) whether the argument succeeds in justifying the ban and, if so, (b) whether a parallel argument would not also support a ban on the latter. We focus on the following arguments. Female genital mutilation should be unlawful because: (1) no woman could validly consent to it; (2) it is an oppressive and sexist practice; (3) it involves the intentional infliction of injury; (4) it causes offence. Our view is that arguments (3) and (4) are unsound and that, although arguments (1) and (2) may be sound, they support not only a ban on female genital mutilation, but also one on (some types of) costmetic surgery. Hence, we conclude that the present legal situation in the UK is ethically unsustainable in one of the following ways. Either the ban on female genital mutilation is unjustified because arguments (1) and (2) are not in fact successful; or the law's permissive attitude towards cosmetic surgery is unjustified because arguments (1) and (2) are in fact successful and apply equally to female genital mutilation and (certain forms of) cosmetic surgery. The people of the countries where female genital mutilation is practised resent references to ‘barbaric practices imposed on women by male‐dominated primitive societies’, especially when they look at the Western world and see women undergoing their own feminization rites intended to increase sexual desirability: medically dangerous forms of cosmetic plastic surgery, for instance …. (shrink)