scholarly journals TIME THROUGH TIME: ITS EVOLUTION THROUGH WESTERN PHILOSOPHY IN SEVEN IDEAS

Think ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (58) ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Emily Thomas

ABSTRACTWhat is time? Just like everything else in the world, our understanding of time has changed continually over time. This article tracks this question through the history of Western philosophy and looks at major answers from the likes of Aristotle, Kant, and McTaggart.

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Stocker

Nuclear weapon free zones (NWFZs) were an important development in the history of nuclear nonproliferation efforts. From 1957 through 1968, when the Treaty of Tlatelolco was signed, the United States struggled to develop a policy toward NWFZs in response to efforts around the world to create these zones, including in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Many within the U.S. government initially rejected the idea of NWFZs, viewing them as a threat to U.S. nuclear strategy. However, over time, a preponderance of officials came to see the zones as advantageous, at least in certain areas of the world, particularly Latin America. Still, U.S. policy pertaining to this issue remained conservative and reactive, reflecting the generally higher priority given to security policy than to nuclear nonproliferation.


Author(s):  
Martin Eisner

This study uses the material transmission history of Dante’s innovative first book, the Vita nuova (New Life), to intervene in recent debates about literary history, reconceiving the relationship between the work and its reception, and investigating how different material manifestations and transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations participate in the work. Just as Dante frames his collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, so later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their own interpretations of it. Traveling from Boccaccio’s Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson’s Cambridge, Rossetti’s London, Nerval’s Paris, Mandelstam’s Russia, De Campos’s Brazil, and Pamuk’s Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante’s strange poetic forms continue to challenge readers. In contrast to a conventional reception history’s chronological march, each chapter analyzes how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante’s love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman, while highlighting Dante’s concern with the future, as he experiments with new ways to keep Beatrice alive for later readers. Deploying numerous illustrations to show the entanglement of the work’s poetic form and its material survival, Dante’s New Life of the Book offers a fresh reading of Dante’s innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work’s survival in the world.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaas Berkel ◽  
Guus Termeer

The University of Groningen has been an international university since its foundation in 1614. The first professors formed a rich international community, and many students came from outside the Netherlands, especially from areas now belonging to Germany. Internationalization, a popular slogan nowadays, is therefore nothing new, but its meaning has changed over time. How did the University of Groningen grow from a provincial institution established for religious reasons into a top-100 university with 36,000 students, of whom 25% come from abroad and almost half of the academic staff is of foreign descent? What is the identity of this four-century-old university that is still strongly anchored in the northern part of the Netherlands but that also has a mind that is open to the world? The history of the university, as told by Klaas van Berkel and Guus Termeer, ends with a short paragraph on the impact of the corona crisis.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 289-309
Author(s):  
Max Schaefer ◽  

This paper seeks to address whether human life harbours the possibility of a gratuitous or non-reciprocal form of trust. To address this issue, I take up Descartes’ account of the cogito as the essence of all appearing. With his interpretation of Descartes’ account of the cogito as an immanent and affective mode of appearing, I maintain that Henry provides the transcendental foundation for a non-reciprocal form of trust, which the history of Western philosophy has largely covered over by forgetting this aspect of Descartes’ thought. I demonstrate that Heidegger’s reading of Descartes serves as a pre-eminent example of this. Because Heidegger overlooks Descartes’ insight into the essence of appearing, and reduces this essence to the finite transcendence of the world, I maintain that Heidegger reduces trust to reciprocal relations of understanding between beings of shared contexts of significance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (162) ◽  
pp. 210081
Author(s):  
Andrew Kouri ◽  
Ronald J. Dandurand ◽  
Omar S. Usmani ◽  
Chung-Wai Chow

175 years have elapsed since John Hutchinson introduced the world to his version of an apparatus that had been in development for nearly two centuries, the spirometer. Though he was not the first to build a device that sought to measure breathing and quantify the impact of disease and occupation on lung function, Hutchison coined the terms spirometer and vital capacity that are still in use today, securing his place in medical history. As Hutchinson envisioned, spirometry would become crucial to our growing knowledge of respiratory pathophysiology, from Tiffeneau and Pinelli's work on forced expiratory volumes, to Fry and Hyatt's description of the flow–volume curve. In the 20th century, standardization of spirometry further broadened its reach and prognostic potential. Today, spirometry is recognized as essential to respiratory disease diagnosis, management and research. However, controversy exists in some of its applications, uptake in primary care remains sub-optimal and there are concerns related to the way in which race is factored into interpretation. Moving forward, these failings must be addressed, and innovations like Internet-enabled portable spirometers may present novel opportunities. We must also consider the physiologic and practical limitations inherent to spirometry and further investigate complementary technologies such as respiratory oscillometry and other emerging technologies that assess lung function. Through an exploration of the storied history of spirometry, we can better contextualize its current landscape and appreciate the trends that have repeatedly arisen over time. This may help to improve our current use of spirometry and may allow us to anticipate the obstacles confronting emerging pulmonary function technologies.


Author(s):  
Joseph E. Kasten

The development of vaccines has been one of the most important medical and pharmacological breakthroughs in the history of the world. Besides saving untold lives, they have enabled the human race to live and thrive in conditions thought far too dangerous only a few centuries ago. In recent times, the development of the COVID-19 vaccine has captured the world’s attention as the primary tool to defeat the current pandemic. The tools used to develop these vaccines have changed dramatically over time, with the use of big data technologies becoming standard in many instances. This study performs a structured literature review centered on the development, distribution, and evaluation of vaccines and the role played by big data tools such as data analytics, datamining, and machine learning. Through this review, the paper identifies where these technologies have made important contributions and in what areas further research is likely to be useful.


Author(s):  
Hans J. Ottosson ◽  
Thomas A. Naylor ◽  
Oliver K. Johnson ◽  
Christopher A. Mattson

Abstract Accessing clean water is a persistent, and life threatening, challenge for millions of people in the world. Mechanical hand pumps have a long history of helping people access clean ground water for drinking and daily use. Among the most ubiquitous are the India Mark II and III pump systems, for which there are more than 4,000,000 installed across the world. These are estimated to serve between 600M and 1B people. All pumps degrade in performance over time, requiring service; many do not receive it causing pumps to become dysfunctional. The purpose of this paper is to establish a baseline for nitrile seal performance of India Mark II hand pump systems. Understanding off-the-shelf performance and using it as a baseline is an important step toward understanding degradation of performance over time, which is the focus of a much larger study to understand — mechanically and socially — how hand pumps perform, degrade, and ultimately meet human needs. In this paper, 110 off-the-shelf nitrile seals that were purchased in Uganda were tested and the following was characterized: (i) geometric variation, (ii) material variation, (iii) leak performance, and (iv) correlation between these. The seal leak performance was found to be very robust to variations in geometry and material at zero cycles. This important baseline supports our future work to understand how and to what degree seals become sensitive to geometric and material degradation during use.


Author(s):  
Glenda MacNaughton

Early childhood is the period of childhood between birth and eight years of age. While the provision of targeted educational and care programs to meet the specific and particular needs of children in their early childhood years has a long history in many countries, there is considerable contemporary debate about what the nature of those programs should be and how they are best funded and evaluated. In this bibliography there is a brief overview of the history of early childhood education and care internationally, pointing to the differences in philosophies and practices that have grown over time in different parts of the world. However, the prime focus is on contemporary influences and debates in policies and their intents, and curriculum philosophies and practices in the provision of education and care for children in their early childhood years. With increasing investment in such education and care, there is increasing debate in several disciplines about how best to conceptualize and build practices that address children’s developing capacities at this age, to ensure that their rights are acknowledged and enacted, and to take account of issues of equity and fairness that shape the lives of young children. These concerns are linked with an increasing interest in the relationships between parents and early childhood institutions and spaces, how early childhood institutions and informal settings connect with the formal years of schooling, and how specific policies that address the needs and capacities of children in their early childhood years are produced that are relevant in diverse contexts, especially in non-Western contexts.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Thomas Hidya Tjaya

Abstrak: Dalam pengantar pada karyanya Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty praktis mengidentikkan filsafat dengan fenomenologi sebagai usaha untuk mempelajari kembali bagaimana cara melihat dunia. Dalam upaya tersebut ia mengajak pembaca, mengikuti slogan khas fenomenologi Husserl, untuk kembali ke permulaan atau bendabenda itu sendiri. Yang menarik adalah bahwa permulaan yang dianalisis oleh Merleau-Ponty justru tubuh manusia, sebuah dimensi yang cenderung dipandang rendah dalam sejarah filsafat Barat. Ia tidak sendirian dalam hal ini, mengingat dalam fenomenologinya Levinas juga menekankan sensibilitas sebagai locus etika. Menurut penulis, gerakan fenomenologi menuju hal yang sensibel (the sensible) ini tidaklah mengubah hakikat filsafat sebagai usaha untuk mencari asal mula realitas. Realitas yang tersingkap dalam orientasi demikian justru menjadi lebih integral dan komprehensif daripada apa yang selama ini dikenal dalam sejarah filsafat dan sains. Meskipun demikian, orientasi pada pengalaman konkret manusia untuk menggali dasar realitas secara potensial menimbulkan masalah bagi fenomenologi itu sendiri yang selalu ingin kembali ke permulaan. Kata-kata Kunci: Fenomenologi, asal mula, permulaan, ada-dalam-dunia, sains. Abstract: In the Preface to his work Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty virtually identifies philosophy with phenomenology as a way of relearning to see the world. For this purpose he invites the reader, following the catchphrase in Husserl’s phenomenology, to return to the beginning or the things themselves. What is interesting is that the beginning that Merleau-Ponty analyzes is the human body, which belongs to a dimension that tends to be despised in the history of Western philosophy. He is not alone in this type of investigation, as Levinas also emphasizes sensibility as the locus of ethics. The author argues that the phenomenological movement towards the sensible does not alter the nature of philosophy as an attempt to seek for the nature of reality. The reality as disclosed in this analysis can be more integral and comprehensive than what is usually presented in the history of philosophy and science. The orientation towards the concrete dimension of human life in search for the foundation of reality, however, may cause a problem for phenomenology itself insofar as it always tries to return to the beginning. Keywords: Phenomenology, origin, beginning, being-in-the-world, science.


Author(s):  
Frederick Beiser

Because Romanticism has many meanings which vary according to time and place, it is best to examine the movement in a specific culture and period. Of all the phases of Romanticism, early German Romanticism is of special importance in the history of Western philosophy. The early German Romantics – Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich von Hardenberg, Schleiermacher and Schelling – developed influential ideas in the fields of metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics and politics. The aim of their movement was essentially social and political: to overcome the alienation and disenchantment created by modernity, and to restore unity with oneself, others and nature. In accord with this aim, the Romantics advocated an ethics of love and self-realization, in opposition to hedonism and the Kantian ethic of duty. They championed an ideal of community against the competitive egoism of modern society; and, finally, they developed an organic concept of nature against the mechanistic worldview of Cartesian physics. Romantic ethics, politics and aesthetics should all be seen in the light of their essential cultural goal: to cure humanity of homesickness and to make people feel at home in the world again.


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