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Nearly everyone agrees that physical pain is bad. Indeed, if anything merits the status of a platitude in our everyday thinking about value, the idea that pain is bad surely does. Equally, it seems clearly true that emotional suffering – despair, loneliness, grief, disappointment, guilt, shame, lovesickness, and the like – are all bad as well. We are strongly inclined to pity and feel sorry for those who suffer emotionally in these ways; we are motivated, at least some of the time, to do what we can to alleviate their suffering. Given this, it might seem curious that pain and suffering are so integral to sport – whether one is a participant or a spectator. There’s nothing particularly puzzling about pain and suffering that is inadvertently related to sport – as when an athlete injures her hamstring and has to miss her chance at Olympic glory, or when supporters face the misery of getting up at 6am because an away game has been scheduled to start at noon. But there does seem to be something curious about the extent to which pain and suffering are voluntarily embraced by participants and spectators, as the quotation from Nick Hornby aptly illustrates. Why do people willingly engage in something that brings about so much suffering? In this paper, I’ll attempt to answer this question.

Neural systems process information. This platitude contains an interesting ambiguity between multiple senses of the term “information.” According to a popular thought, the ambiguity is best resolved by reserving semantic concepts of information for the explication of neural activity at a high level of organization, and quantitative concepts of information for the explication of neural activity at a low level of organization. This article articulates the justification behind this view, and concludes that it is an oversimplification. An analysis of the meaning of claims about Shannon information rates in the spiking activity of neurons is then developed. On the basis of that analysis, it is shown that quantitative conceptions of information are more intertwined with semantic concepts than they seem to be, and, partially for that reason, are also more philosophically interesting.

The field of metaethics, the branch of moral philosophy that examines the nature and status of morality, is rich in theoretical diversity. Nonetheless, a majority of professional philosophers embrace a subset of theories that affirm the existence of objective moral facts. I suggest that this may be related to the very method that philosophers use to construct metaethical theories. This method involves analyzing how ordinary people think and argue about morality. Analysis of ordinary moral discourse is meant to reveal common platitudes (or truisms) about the nature of morality itself, including the platitude that morality trades in objective moral facts. But do philosophers investigate ordinary moral discourse in any systematic way? How do they arrive at such platitudes? On what grounds are they justified? In this paper, I critically examine these questions and argue that a) any such platitudes need to be investigated systematically through empirical research and b) philosophers ought to be engaged in this research themselves.

This is the second of a six chapters of the penultimate draft of a book titled Public Debt: An Illusion of Democratic Political Economy. This essay explores just who it is that supplies the macro guidance that is envisioned in the various macro theories. The answer to this question is of great significance for the political economy of public debt and fiscal policy. Where the two extreme points of answer regarding this question are some macro czar as an analytical convenience and “the people” as a democratic platitude, this essay takes a Machiavellian-inspired tack whereby the few dominate the many.

An important platitude about prudential rationality is that I should not refuse to sacrifice a smaller amount of present welfare for the sake of larger future benefits. I ought, in other words, to treat my present and future as of equal prudential significance. The demands of prudence are less clear, however, when it comes to one’s past selves. In this paper, I argue that past benefits are possible in (at least) two ways, and that this fact cannot be easily accommodated by traditional approaches to prudential rationality. Against univocal accounts of prudential rationality, I hold that the possibility of past benefits suggests that a bias toward the present and future is defensible when it comes to some welfare goods, but that prudential reasons are temporally neutral between when it comes to the success or failure of one’s long-term projects.

Derek Parfit’s argument against the platitude that identity is what matters in survival does not work given his intended reading of the platitude, namely, that what matters in survival to some future time is being identical with someone who is alive at that time. I develop Parfit’s argument so that it works against the platitude on the intended reading.

This critical notice provides an overview of Harry Frankfurt’s On Inequality and assesses whether Frankfurt is right to argue that equality is merely formal and empty. I counter-argue that egalitarianism, properly tweaked and circumscribed, can be defended against Frankfurt’s repudiation. After surveying the main arguments in Frankfurt’s book, I argue that whatever plausibility the ‘doctrine of sufficiency’ defended by Frankfurt may have, it does not strike a fatal blow against egalitarianism. There is nothing in egalitarianism that forbids acceptance of the moral platitude expressed in sufficientarianism's positive thesis, (viz., it is morally important that everyone have enough). Nor is there anything in egalitarianism as such that makes it impossible to recognize the banal truth that there are many important things besides equality, and that many dimensions of human affairs are improperly appraised from a relational or comparative point of view. The fact that a relational or comparative point of view is sometimes out of place, however, surely does not mean that it always is. I conclude with the suggestion that egalitarianism is most compelling when it is understood as a normative conception of social relations (rather than, as Frankfurt seems to assume throughout his book, a thesis about the equal distribution of something) and thus presides over precisely those aspects of human affairs for which that relational or comparative point of view is germane.

To say that the island of Madura has been relatively neglected and understudied over the long term by scholars, foreign and domestic alike, is a platitude: aside from a couple of well-intentioned e...

This paper begins with the oft-repeated claim that having (religious) faith involves trust in God. Taking this platitude seriously requires at least two philosophical tasks. First, one must address the relevant notion of “trust” guiding the platitude. I offer a sketch of epistemic trust: arguing that epistemic trust involves several components: acceptance, communication, dependence, and confidence. The first duo concerns the epistemic element of epistemic trust and the second part delimit the fiducial aspect to epistemic trust. Second, one must also examine what differentiates faith qua trust. I argue that we should not distinguish faith from trust merely by believing religious propositions but by the attitudes they express. In particular, the attitude of faith is more deeply entrenched and central to one’s noetic structure than trust simpliciter. The paper ends by arguing that the account proposed insofar as it accommodates and explains certain “faith desiderata”. We can thus give content to the “faith is a kind of trust” platitude with a model of trust on hand while showing how that model confirms and explains important features of faith.

Rational thinkers respect their evidence. Properly understood, that is a platitude. But how can one respect one's evidence unless one knows what it is? So must not rational thinkers know what their evidence is?

It is a platitude that morality is normative, but a substantive and interesting question whether morality is normative in a robust and important way; and although it is often assumed that morality is indeed robustly normative, that view is by no means uncontroversial, and a compelling argument for it is conspicuously lacking. In this paper, I provide such an argument. I argue, based on plausible claims about the relationship between moral wrongs and moral criticizability, and the relationship between criticizability and normative reasons, that moral facts necessarily confer normative reasons upon moral agents.

Ortega's Meditations On Technology displays a number of rhetorical strategies, especiallythe functions of platitude, paradox and dissociation. This article analyses the relations between rhet-oric and the theme of Ortega's essay. RESUMEN Meditacion de la tecnica abunda en recursos retoricos entre los que sobresalen la perogrullada, la paradoja y la disociacion. El presente ensayo indaga en la relacion entre retorica y tematica en el texto orteguiano.

One thing nearly all epistemologists agree upon is that Gettier cases are decisive counterexamples to the tripartite analysis of knowledge; whatever else is true of knowledge, it is not merely belief that is both justified and true. They now agree that knowledge is not justified true belief because this is consistent with there being too much luck present in the cases, and that knowledge excludes such luck. This is to endorse what has become known as the ‘anti-luck platitude’. But what if generations of philosophers have been mistaken about this, blinded at least partially by a deeply entrenched professional bias? There has been another, albeit minority, response to Gettier: to deny that the cases are counterexamples at all. Stephen Hetherington, a principal and vocal proponent of this view, advances what he calls the ‘Knowing Luckily Proposal’. If Hetherington is correct, this would call for a major re-evaluation and re-orientation of post-Gettier analytic epistemology, since much of it assumes the anti-...

It is a platitude among decision theorists that agents should choose their actions so as to maximize expected value. But exactly how to define expected value is contentious. Evidential decision theory (henceforth EDT), causal decision theory (henceforth CDT), and a theory proposed by Ralph Wedgwood that this essay will call benchmark theory (BT) all advise agents to maximize different types of expected value. Consequently, their verdicts sometimes conflict. In certain famous cases of conflict—medical Newcomb problems—CDT and BT seem to get things right, while EDT seems to get things wrong. In other cases of conflict, including some recent examples suggested by Andy Egan, EDT and BT seem to get things right, while CDT seems to get things wrong. In still other cases, EDT and CDT seems to get things right, while BT gets things wrong.It's no accident, this essay claims, that all three decision theories are subject to counterexamples. Decision rules can be reinterpreted as voting rules, where the voters are the agent's possible future selves. The problematic examples have the structure of voting paradoxes. Just as voting paradoxes show that no voting rule can do everything we want, decision-theoretic paradoxes show that no decision rule can do everything we want. Luckily, the so-called “tickle defense” establishes that EDT, CDT, and BT will do everything we want in a wide range of situations. Most decision situations, this essay argues, are analogues of voting situations in which the voters unanimously adopt the same set of preferences. In such situations, all plausible voting rules and all plausible decision rules agree.

Anti-luck epistemology is an approach to analyzing knowledge that takes as a starting point the widely-held assumption that knowledge must exclude luck. Call this the anti-luck platitude. As Duncan Pritchard (2005) has suggested, there are three stages constituent of anti-luck epistemology, each which specifies a different philosophical requirement: these stages call for us to first give an account of luck; second, specify the sense in which knowledge is incompatible with luck; and finally, show what conditions must be satisfied in order to block the kind of luck with which knowledge was argued to be incompatible. What I’ll show here is that the modal account of luck offers a plausible story at the first stage and leads naturally to equally plausible lines to take at the second and third stages, at which a safety condition on knowledge is squarely motivated. There are, however, recent challenges—advanced by Jonathan Kvanvig (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77: 272–281, 2008); Kelly Becker (2007); and Jennifer Lackey (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86(2):255–267, 2008), among others—to the plausibility of the safety-based anti-luck project I’ve sketched here at each of its three stages of development. Once I’ve made precise the challenges, I’ll show why none implies that we abandon the commitments of the safety-based anti-luck project at any of its stages. What we should conclude, then, is that a safety-condition on knowledge is motivated by independently defensible accounts of (1) what luck is; and (2) just how knowledge should be thought incompatible with it.

By defining both depictive and linguistic representation as kinds of symbol system, Nelson Goodman attempts to undermine the platitude that, whereas linguistic representation is mediated by convention, depiction is mediated by resemblance. I argue that Goodman is right to draw a strong analogy between the two kinds of representation, but wrong to draw the counterintuitive conclusion that depiction is not mediated by resemblance.

The EU has increasingly committed itself to fusing security and development. Developmental approaches to security are routinely seen as integral to the EU’s distinctive foreign policy identity. This paper finds, however, that much work remains to be done to implement this commitment. Few in the EU would doubt that development and security go hand in hand, but differences abound over what this implies for the allocation of finite resources and the nature of diplomatic engagements. CEPS Working Documents are intended to give an indication of work being conducted within CEPS research programmes and to stimulate reactions from other experts in the field. Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed are attributable only to the author in a personal capacity and not to any institution with which he is associated.

It has been claimed that “the central problem of relativism is one of giving it a coherent formulation, making the doctrine more than the platitude that differently situated people may judge differ ...

The romance between Botho and Lene in this novel is founded on a ‘lover's discourse’ (Roland Barthes), that is to say an escape from the description of human behaviour in conventional and impoverishing categories. However, the lovers’ view of each other as ‘special’ and ‘indefinable’ is undermined by other characters, who consciously and unconsciously reintegrate them and their experiences into the readily intelligible template of an officer's premarital affair with a lower-class girl. It is this, and not social pressures per se, that destroys their love. Moreover, Botho himself unwittingly introduces this platitude into his relationship with Lene, thereby destroying it from within. Indeed his initial attraction to her, which he claims is founded on her ‘difference’, is in fact based on seeing in her the artlessness of a simple, unspoilt girl – a stereotype not borne out by Lene's conduct and in any case false to the basis of their intimacy in the non-defining lover's discourse. After his break with Lene and return to the world of platitude, Botho comes to share its desire to reintegrate those who see themselves as living outside its confines, as can be seen from his treatment of his friend Rexin.

Duncan Pritchard (2007: 277) rightly observes that ‘[i]t is a platitude in epistemology to say that knowledge excludes luck’. On the reading relevant to present purposes, this epistemological anti-luck platitude is a generalization intended to capture widespread intuitive reactions to Gettier Cases: cases similar to those Gettier (1963) employed to show that justified true belief doesn’t suffice for knowledge.1 The pertinent reading of the anti-luck platitude is the one that Dancy (1985: 134) expresses in the following passage: This was just the point of the Gettier counterexamples; nothing in the tripartite definition [of knowledge as epistemically justified true belief] excluded knowledge by luck.

This study deals with two increasingly important aspects of international relations : first, the interpretation of the North-South dynamic of the international System and second, the significance of détente in the Euro-Arabo-African mini-triangle. In his discussion of the first problematic, the author suggests it would be useful to take an interdependence approach towards the analysis of North-South relations, implying that the international system is hexagonal as regards both structure and process and that non-alignment is becoming a sixth pole of influence in the system. More specifically, and taking as a starting point the « depolarization » of the détente process, the author argues that the security objectives of the West European, Arab and African political Systems are in fact interdependent. This interdependence is to be found above all in their interest in diluting the East-West conflict and instituting a policy of détente, the purpose of which is all the more significant for being internal - i.e. the stabilization, legitimization and integration of these political Systems. Since the effects of such a policy will be felt only gradually, these countries find they have a common interest in a complementary strategy whereby the East-West conflict is segmented and intersected by the North-South conflict (intra-alliance, even). The aim of the study is to show that, in the theory of international relations, greater attention should be paid to the motivations and strategies of actors in the South and their impact on the international system in the economic problem areas as well as the political and strategic ones. Because the properties of political reality differ from those of physical reality, the properties of political regularities also differ from those of physical regularises. The regularities we discover are soft. They are soft because they are outcomes of processes that exhibit plastic rather than cast-iron control. They are imbedded in history and involve recurrent « passings-through » of large numbers of human memories, learning processes, human goal seeking impulses, and choices among alternatives. They decay quickly because of the memory, creative searching, and learning that underlie them. Indeed social science itself may contribute to this decay, since learning increasingly include not only learning from experience, but from scientific research itself. Gabriel A. ALMOND et Stephan J. GENCO, « Clouds, Clocks, and the Study of Politics », World Politics, vol. XXIX, n° 4, juillet 1977, pp. 493-494. Ithas become a platitude that the whole world is now interdependent... Yet what a tremendous platitude it is /... If this platitude is unalterably true, its implications must profoundly affect the conditions of human life for the future ; it must transform all our thinking about social organization ; it must modify all our programmes and policies. Clearly we ought to be thinking seriously about it, and asking ourselves what it involves. A. MuiR, The Interdependent World and lts Problems, Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1973, p. 1.

In the middle of the 18th century, if novels are par excellence women's novels, they often expose their "misfortunes" ; apart from a few figures of libertines characterized by their ignominy, it is almost a platitude to say that women's liberty has no more place than their happiness. In this perspective L'Education du marquis de *** ou les Mémoires de la comtesse de Zurlac (1753) by Mme de Puisieux (1720-1798) can but attract one's attention. Judged to be a mediocre novel by Etienne Servais (Le Genre romanesque en France depuis cla Nouvelle Héloïse jusqu'aux approches de la Révolution, 1922), considered less severely by Robert Mauzi, it refuses to compel its heroine to choose between the only two ways apparently open to the virtuous woman in most 18th -century fiction : death or a sentimental retreat. Refusing the austere ethics of La Princesse de Clèves which is unsurprising in view of its author, a friend of Diderot, it offers a positive dimension to women's fate., Vanoflen Laurence. Réécrire l'histoire de la femme. Un roman de Mme de Puisieux. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°36, 2004. Femmes des Lumières. pp. 223-236.

Today it is a platitude in aesthetics that appreciable litterature is supposed to be innovative and non-conform to the existing aesthetic noms. In his essay, Mr Giulani attempts to comprehend how the literature of French Classicism managed to prosper and maintain its fertility following aesthetic of convenance, that is, a system which exludes all kinds of resistence to established norms and principles.

Critique de la solution rationaliste apportee par M. Smith au probleme moral qui consiste a reconcilier trois theses: 1) celle de l'objectivite, 2) celle de l'exigence pratique, 3) celle de la psychologie humeenne. Rejetant le presuppose selon lequel ce que nous avons raison de faire est ce que nous desirions faire si nous etions completement rationnels (C. Korsgaard), l'A. montre que le rationalisme moral de Smith ne permet pas d'etablir la verite de l'exigence pratique, ni de resoudre le fameux probleme moral qui repose sur une mauvaise conception de la croyance et de la rationalite

It is a platitude that a political ideology is an organized set of ethical beliefs that authorize the political commitment of a group of people. This article addresses the question: how is the distinctive ideologic of such an organization of ethical ideas related to the political decisions of adherents? The suggestion made is that the distinctive psychological reaction of a group of people to economic and social change plays an important part in making a particular form of ideologic formative of their view of the future. The scope of the article is not restricted to English reactions to the advent of industrial modernity, but the universality of its argument, as to the persuasive function of the ideologics investigated, is primarily illustrated by examples drawn from the works of English ideologues.

A cause is something which ensures that its effect is no coincidence. This remark is a platitude but it is one which finds no place in the most popular philosophical analyses of causation. And if we assume that (a) coincidences have no causal explanation and (b) causation just is causal explanation, then we must deny that a coincidence has a cause. But it is not mere common sense and my adherence to (a) and (b) which leads me to deny causes to coincidences. Any adequate theory of causation must enable us to distinguish the causally efficacious properties of objects from their causally inefficacious properties. I shall argue that current theories fail in this regard and they fail because they allow that coincidences have causes. To avoid their difficulties, we must adopt the Aristotelian view that nothing can bring about a coincidence.' In the first section of the paper, I say something in support of (a) and (b). In the second section, I try to reformulate the traditional analysis of causation so as to enable it to distinguish causal from constitutive relations. The third section introduces two counterexamples to the traditional theory which do not involve relations of constitution and criticises a number of attempts to deal with these examples. The final section suggests that we deal with them by denying causes to coincidences.

It has become something of a platitude to say that sharp, continuous increases in prices are one of the most serious economic problems of our time. Indeed, the problem is so great, we are told, that unless it is brought under control inflation will destroy the very fabric of the ‘Western’, ‘industrial’ or ‘civilized’ society — the exact scale of the ‘destruction’ depending on the author’s capacity (or predilection) for taking a ‘cosmic’ view of such momentous happenings.

National economies have become far more integrated and interdependent than they were only thirty years ago. Over the last two decades, the term ‘global’ began to be used in various phrases (e.g., ‘the global economy’ or ‘the global marketplace,’ and on the cultural front, Marshall MacLuhan coined the phrase ‘the global village’ back in the 1960s). Globalization itself became the fashionable platitude of the 1990s. Indeed, globalization is treated either as a convenient catchword alluding to a myriad of discrete changes or, as an explanatory concept, it is shorthand for a new theory of capitalistic development at the eve of the new millennium. It is either trite or mythical.

Analisaremos a comédia O caminho da porta, de Machado de Assis, a partir da proposição de Cecília Loyola, para quem o teatro machadiano nos oferece aparatos realistas — como os cenários e o prosaísmo das situações que motivam o enredo — mas retira-lhes a estabilidade da estrutura nuclear, que substitui por outra, múltipla e movediça. Um exemplo dessa retirada de estabilidade seria a proposta machadiana de um raisonneur deliberadamente desacreditado, que significa um afastamento considerável em relação à estrutura realista., We will analyze the comedy O caminho da porta, by Machado de Assis, from the perspective of Cecilia Loyola, for whom the author’s dramatic productions offer us realistic apparatuses — like the scenarios and the platitude that motivates the plot — but withdraw their stability, replacing the nuclear structure by an different one, multiple and slippery. An example of this new structure would be Machado’s use of the raisonneur, character that, in this play, is deliberately discredited, which means a considerable dismissal in relation to the realist structure.

“Seeing is believing,” they say. This hoary bromide suggests a common belief in the importance of perception-especially visual perception-in the acquisition of knowledge. This is not just a platitude about how we form beliefs about the world, beliefs which might be true or false. It is rather a sort of folk testimony to the importance of visual evidence in confirming, as well as acquiring, hypotheses, conjectures or beliefs. Of course sometimes things are not as they seem. Visual illusion, hallucination, tromp l’oeil and other “tricks of the eye” are well familiar, but typically are not taken to suggest anything like a sort of general skepticism about visual perception. Such problems are seen more as pointing to boundary conditions for the fidelity of direct visual perception than as counter-examples to it.

By starting from uncontroversial commonplaces or platitudes philosophers may arrive at a profound disagreement over fundamental issues. In his criticism of psychologism Frege makes the innocuous point that being true is different from being taken to be true. Neither error nor discovery would be conceivable otherwise.’ Davidson makes the same point by claiming that the notion of belief involves the notion of objective truth.2But Dummett has claimed that Frege is “the very archetype of a realist” and takes his remark as an “affirmation of his realist stance”3while Davidson has been considered to be an idealist who, by starting from Convention T and expanding the notion of translation to that of “translation into a language we know” — a small, but significant expansion! — identifies what can be true with what we can understand.4Thus, the disagreement between a realist and an idealist doesn’t exclude that they accept the same platitude. Where does the disagreement come from? It may be that it is due rather to the use philosophers make of the platitudes than to the platitudes themselves.

Skeptics are made, not born. One is driven to skepticism from some non-skeptical place of origin. One may be carried by different routes, but one must be carried by some route or other. Both one’s starting point and one’s destination lie within the rather vague boundaries of what may be called common sense. The skeptic, despite appearances, does not deny common opinion. On the contrary, he abandons one platitude for the sake of others., He appeals not to arcane considerations, hidden details, but to familiar intuitions. These lead him perhaps to reject something important but, from this point of view, to do so only for the sake of the larger edifice.

Last year a colleague of mine looked after a couple having their first baby. She offered a total package of care and continuity from diagnosis of pregnancy through to discharge to the health visitor. Her client, Sarah, wanted the on-going support of a midwife she knew and trusted. She was ambivalent about being pregnant as it wasn't planned and she was committed to her career. Her first reactions were to say she wanted an elective epidural in labour, not to breastfeed and to return to work as soon as possible. Her feelings of ambivalence were overlain with a predisposition to anxiety and depression, episodes of which she had experienced in the past requiring short doses of medication.

Consider the platitude, ‘all people are basically (i.e. emotionally) the same’. How would we know? Observing people in a culture very different from our own, it would seem that we have to presuppose some such universality, just in order to understand them, but then we beg the very thesis in question. This essay considers one case study of other people's emotions, a study of Eskimos in Jean L. Briggs's Never in Anger. The problems surrounding the method of ‘empathy’ are discussed and an alternative methodology suggested for cross‐cultural observation of emotions which are not subject to these problems.

The "platitude" principle of semantics (PPS) pronounces that the meaning of the whole is a function of the meaning of its parts. By "whole" it means a whole sentence. By "its parts" it means its words, the expressions made out of these words, and the structure, all of which are the proper con? stituents ofthat whole,1 "the meaning of a sentence". A sentence can have more than one meaning, and so of course can its components. But each meaning is a function from the meanings of each of the components to a meaning of the whole. To most this principle seems a sort of platitude, if not utter triviality. However, it can only be trivial in that it seems obvious, not for lack of interesting implications. My aim in this study is not to challenge the soundness of the PPS but rather to remove the air of obvious? ness it has. If it is true, I shall argue, it is true only after taming and being tamed by counter-examples and alternatives. Following Dana Scott,2 the reasons I shall amass against the PPS are of two related kinds

The argument of a recent article is examined regarding the alleged reasons why American sociologists have adopted their present concepts and methods. The assumption that the methods and concepts of social science, unlike those of physical science, must be modified to suit current political upheavals is shown to be historically false. The platitude that "science has been conditioned by history" obscures the fact that science is itself a major part of history and has fundamentally conditioned historical development. Science is a more basic "cultural system" than any of the current politico-economic ideologies.

THAT the freedom of the press is the liberty of the people has been said so often that it has become a platitude. Nobody has questioned it in theory, and now we are seeing the culmination of three centuries of experience, since Milton enunciated the doctrine in the Areopagitica, which demonstrate it in practice. The first liberty the dictator curtails is that of the press. This is true whether the dictatorship is avowed or covert, and whether it is political, economic, social, or religious. He who can determine what the people shall not know can shape them by other devices to his purpose. We live at this moment in a world in

It is indeed for me a great honor to be called upon to present the introductory paper at this symposium. I regret that I cannot appear personally. In my view, the purpose of this introduction is not to lecture on new techniques of residue analysis, which will be treated anyway in special papers. Furthermore, it would be tantamount to nothing more than a platitude if I were to point out to this group that the problems and techniques of residue analysis cannot be properly dealt with in thirty minutes. Comprehensive reports have recently been published which give a better presentation of this subject: in English by Gunther (1962), in German by ourselves (Frehse and Niessen 1963), and in French by Lemoan (1962).

S i R t~ R I C A s I~ B Y recently said: "The writer on education rides on the horns of a dilemma; on the one hand he cannot avoid platitudes because there is nothing new to be said; on the other hand he cannot avoid platitudes because the lessons they teach have not yet been learnt, and they still need to be repeated." Such a platitude is the statement: The primary responsibilities of a clinical depar tment are teaching, research, and the provision of medical care of quality worth emulating. Training for academic careers as investigators, clinicians, and teachers will be discussed on the basis of experiences in privately and state supported medical schools, in a community hospital of high aims, in university and governmentally supported hospitals, and in government and faculty committees. Observations were not systematically recorded and, thus, do not meet criteria for validation of narrative data? Furthermore, differing community needs to which medical schools must respond will affect the degree of relevance of the opinions expressed. No

IT has become a platitude to say that modern science has provided man with unlimited power over Nature; but if Nature includes man, the platitude is false. Slums, unemployment, starvation, and wars bear ample witness to this. We may be able to devise the most cunning calculating machines, we may conquer the sea, the air, and the road at incredible speeds, we may flash messages around the globe, probe the atom, and span the outermost confines of space, we may multiply our productivity a thousand-fold, but we have not yet conquered the simple problem of distributing the produce of the earth among its inhabitants. Has the world population multiplied so enormously that, even with the immensely increased productivity that science has provided, we inhabitants of the globe cannot supply our needs, or are we merely still unscientific fools who-have not yet considered the first step towards a rational view of world supply and distribution? The fact is, of course, that we are still so steeped in historical and racial prejudices that we have not yet a glimmering of the historical and racial prejudices we have to overthrow before we can examine this question with scientific detachment. The Time-Journey of Dr. Barton: an Engineering and Sociological Forecast based on Present Possibilities. Edited By John Hodgson. Pp. viii 4 + 89 + 16 plates. (Egginton, Beds.: John Hodgson, 1929). 3s. 10d.

A MONG a vast array of safe assertions, safest of all are wide generalizations concerning the abiding qualities of a nation or a people. While historical principles which seem universally applicable invite deserved suspicion, yet any rule not too good to be true gathers strength by surviving the exceptions which "prove" it. We should have no fears, for instance, that a lack of contradictory testimony will ever compel us to abandon our ancient belief that the English are a pragmatic race, with an innate propensity for compromise and a congenital aversion to clear thinkingthat they prefer always to muddle through with muddled logic. To this good platitude a host of convenient exceptions clamor for attention, and of these the conduct of Englishmen in the early and middle seventeenth century is surely the most gratifying. Up and down the land were men with utopias in their brains and the voice of God in their ears. What

From the time it was first exhibited about 1900, some thirty years after it was painted, no picture of Degas's has been more universally admired than the Interieur now in the Henry P. McIlhenny Collection (Fig. 1).1 Georges Grappe, the first critic to discuss it, was convinced it was the artist's most important work, “parmi ces chefs-d'œuvre, le chef-d'œuvre,” and alone would assure his fame: “Tous les pastels et toutes les toiles pourraient ětre engloutis par un cataclysme; si elle demeurait, elle imposerait son nom a I'admiration et a l'avenir.”2 Arsene Alexandre, another early critic, went even further to declare it the most important work of any modern artist: “Il n'est pas dans toute la peinture moderne de page plus saisissante, plus austere et d'une plus haute morale, aupres de laquelle les Confessions de J.-J. Rousseau ne sont que platitude declamatoire.”3 For all that, however, it remains the most puzzling of Degas's major works, a picture full of mystery and one still shrouded in mystery as far a...