Owen, Gwilym Ellis Lane (1922–82)

Author(s):  
John M. Cooper

G.E.L. Owen led the reorientation in ancient philosophy that began in the 1950s in Britain and North America. He approached the texts with a profound knowledge of classical scholarship, but also as an analytic philosopher, understanding them as conceptual investigations of live philosophical interest. Concerned primarily with the logic of argumentation, philosophy of science and metaphysics, he wrote influential articles on Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. Equally important were his classes at Oxford (1953–66), at Harvard (1966–73) and finally at Cambridge, in which he constantly developed and tested his ideas and methods.

2009 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian S. Robinson ◽  
Jennifer C. Ort ◽  
William A. Eldridge ◽  
Adrian L. Burke ◽  
Bertrand G. Pelletier

Large social aggregations are among the most highly organized events associated with mobile hunter-gatherers. The Bull Brook Paleoindian site in Ipswich, Massachusetts provides the strongest case for large-scale Paleoindian aggregation in North America, with 36 discrete concentrations of artifacts arranged in a large circle. Avocational archaeologists who salvaged the site in the 1950s interpreted it as a single occupation. Professionals first rejected and then revived this hypothesis, but the site remained insufficiently analyzed to evaluate. New research supports the single occupation hypothesis with a fully reconstructed site plan and the first complete analysis of artifact distributions. Clear spatial structure of activities within the ring-shaped site plan provides a window on social contexts that are also visible in smaller Paleoindian settlements.


2020 ◽  
pp. 2018-2026
Author(s):  
Stuart Umpleby ◽  
Xiao-hui Wu ◽  
Elise Hughes

Interest in cybernetics declined in North America from the mid 1970s to 2010, as measured by the number of journal articles by North American authors, but increased in Europe and Asia. Since 2010 the number of books on cybernetics in English has increased significantly. Whereas the social science disciplines create descriptions based on either ideas, groups, events or variables, cybernetics provides a multi-disciplinary theory of social change that uses all four types of descriptions. Cyberneticians use models with three structures – regulation, self-organization and reflexivity. These models can be used to describe any systemic problem. Furthermore, cybernetics adds a third approach to philosophy of science. In addition to a normative or a sociological approach to knowledge, cybernetics adds a biological approach. One implication of the biological approach is additional emphasis on ethics.


2005 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 159-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
JM Conly ◽  
BL Johnston

At the beginning of the 20th century, illnesses caused by infectious agents ranked among the most common causes of death in North America and, indeed, worldwide. By the middle of the century, dramatic advances in the diagnosis, management and prevention of infectious diseases had occurred, and hopes were raised that many infectious diseases would be eliminated by the end of the 20th century. Much of this success in the management of infectious diseases was related to a continuous new armamentarium of antibiotics. The discovery of penicillin by Fleming in 1928 followed by the discovery and clinical use of sulphonamides in the 1930s heralded the age of modern antibiotherapy (1,2). Penicillin came into widespread use during the early 1940s. By the 1950s, the 'golden era' of antibiotic development and use was well underway, and multiple new classes of antibiotics were introduced over the next two decades (Table 1) (3).


Classics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ebrey

Plato’s Phaedo is set on the last day of Socrates’ life, ending with his moving death scene. The dialogue is one of Plato’s literary masterpieces, with classic discussions of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the value of the philosophical life. It is typically considered one of Plato’s middle-period dialogues due to its contrast between forms and sensible things, defense of the immortality of the soul, interest in natural science, and engagement with Pythagorean ideas. The primary interlocutors are Socrates, Simmias, and Cebes. Early in the dialogue, Socrates suggests that the poet Evenus should follow him in death. This shocks Simmias, leading Socrates first to defend the claim that a philosopher’s soul would be better separated from its body, and then the claim that the soul is immortal. Socrates’ four arguments for the immortality of the soul rely on considerations about the nature of change, causation, and the contrast between forms and sensible things. The two parts of the Phaedo that have received the most scholarship since the 1950s—among the most scholarship on any topic in ancient philosophy—are Socrates’ second argument for immortality, the Recollection Argument, which discusses central issues in Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology, and the so-called Autobiographical Section, which discusses Socrates’ earlier interest in natural science, the method of hypothesis, and his approach to providing causes. The dialogue ends with a long myth followed by Socrates’ death scene. For more on Plato, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in Classics article “Plato.”


Author(s):  
Steven Noll

The institution or asylum in North America was established as a mechanism for confining, controlling, and containing groups of individuals classified and labeled as mentally ill or intellectually disabled and defined as deviant, defective, or delinquent. These congregate facilities, established both for the protection of the individuals housed there and for the simultaneous protection of society from those same people, developed into massive structures designed to accommodate thousands of residents/patients/inmates. The rationale behind the rapid rise of the institution throughout the nineteenth and into the mid-twentieth centuries paralleled the growth of modern medicine and psychiatry. By the 1950s, institutions housed hundreds of thousands of individuals. Yet by the start of the twenty-first century, the institutional model had been intellectually discredited, and these facilities had been all but abandoned. This rather astounding demise mirrored broader social, scientific, and medical trends.


Author(s):  
Danna A. Levin Rojo

This chapter provides an overview of research produced since the 1950s on Indian allies who actively shaped the successive borderlands north of Mexico-Tenochtitlan after 1521, as well as an in-depth discussion of sixteenth-century instances based on primary sources. The emphasis is placed on Otomí allies in the sixteenth-century conquest of central Mexico and the area that came to be known as the Gran Chichimeca; Nahuas and Purépechas who went to the Tierra Nueva of Cíbola under the command of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado (1540–1542), and the many groups of different ethnic origins who took part in the Mixtón war (1541–1542) and the conquest of Nueva Vizcaya in the early 1560s. The Indians’ mixed motivations to get involved in conquest and colonizing campaigns alongside Spanish individuals, besides the privileges and material benefits they obtained and the threats of Spanish authorities and encomenderos—or the desire to escape Spanish oppression—were also determined by local and regional articulations of native politics that predated the arrival of Europeans. Therefore, their participation as conquerors must be understood as integral to a complex realignment process rather than as a mere reaction to colonial imposition.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Wayne Hall

Abstract Background Advocates of the therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs have argued that a promising approach to treatment was prematurely abandoned in the 1960s primarily because of Richard Nixon's ‘War on Drugs’. This paper (1) briefly describes research in the 1950s and 1960s in North America on the use of LSD to treat alcohol dependence, anxiety in terminal illness, and anxiety and depression; and (2) discusses the factors that led to its abandonment. Method An analysis of historical scholarship on psychedelic research in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s in North America. Results Research on psychedelic drugs in psychiatry was abandoned for a number of reasons that acted in concert. A major factor was that clinical research on psychedelic drugs was caught up in the tighter regulation of pharmaceutical research after the Thalidomide disaster in 1963. Psychedelic drugs also presented special challenges for randomised, placebo-controlled clinical trials in the 1970s that were not as positive as the claims made by their advocates in the 1950s and 1960s. Clinical research became more difficult after 1965 when Sandoz ceased providing psychedelic drugs for research and their nonmedical use was prohibited in 1970. Conclusions The demise of psychedelic drug research was not solely due to the ‘War on Drugs’. It was hastened by tighter regulation of pharmaceutical research, the failure of controlled clinical trials to live up to the claims of psychedelic advocates, and the pharmaceutical industry's lack of interest in funding clinical trials.


Author(s):  
Christof Rapp

Is it reasonable to expect that the occupation with history of philosophy contributes to our contemporary philosophical debate? The scholarship on ancient philosophy seems to be a paradigm case for the discussion of this kind of question. In the 1950s and 1960s, philosophers and scholars such as John L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, G.E.L. Owen, John Ackrill and Gregory Vlastos initiated a new style of scholarship that was influenced by analytic philosophy. This analytic style of ancient philosophy scholarship encouraged philosophers to take arguments presented by Plato or Aristotle more seriously and to import ancient ideas into contemporary debates. It was objected that analytic scholars tend to be thematically narrow and to neglect the historical context. By sketching the development of the first two generations of analytic scholarship this chapter tries to show that analytic scholarship need not be anachronistic and that the gain of this method outweighs possible excesses.


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