Stephen R. L. Clark

The notion that metaphorical statements are strictly false suggests that all statements, even those that seemed ‘literal’, are false, as none can ‘literally’ reflect reality. Statements about what we perceive or could perceive rely on evoking sensory images of such ‘visibles’, even though we have no direct access to what others, may perceive. In addition to what is visible, we must also deal with ‘invisibilia’ (both the fantasms that respectable moderns now reject and the realities that lie beyond or before all sentient experience). Talking about such distant or long-ago realities must always be ‘metaphorical’, as they cannot have any of the merely ‘subjective’ properties of experience, nor do they explain those latter properties. Is there some way of confirming the brute conviction that there is a ‘real and intelligible world’, and that we can find it out or describe it ‘literally’? May ‘Reason’ be a route to understanding? But this too is an illusion: we seem never in practice to escape contradictions and had perhaps better turn again to consider the worlds of experience to which we are confined. What we experience is conditioned by our imagination: whether that metaphorical imagination points beyond experience remains uncertain.

Words have determinable sense only within a complex of unstated assumptions, and all interpretation must therefore go beyond the given material. This book addresses what is man's place in the Aristotelian world. It also describes man's abilities and prospects in managing his life, and considers how far Aristotle's treatment of time and history licenses the sort of dynamic interpretation of his doctrines that have been given. The ontological model that explains much of Aristotle's conclusions and methods is one of life-worlds, in which the material universe of scientific myth is no more than an abstraction from lived reality, not its transcendent ground.

Biotechnology is the art of manipulating living forms as though they were machines. We have been manipulating, and transforming, living forms since we adopted pastoralist ways-by breeding, domestication, training-but it is only recently that anyone has supposed that we could alter outward forms or behaviour by interfering with the inner mechanisms, the mechanical, biochemical and genetic processes that sustain outward shapes and motions. In the past we could do little more than select parents with desirable characteristics in the hope that they would engender what we wanted, and-once the offspring were there-punish or cajole them to do what we wanted. Biotechnology offers the hope that we could achieve a more secure result by altering the biochemical base on which the characters we desire are founded. It is not clear whether, once the possibility is realized, we could retain our present conceptions of human life. If we could engineer saints, heroes, savants, slaves or psychopaths to order, would any of us be human any more?2.

415 The Origin, Persistence, and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, by Henry H. Bauer - Mikel Aickin 419 The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Arthur M. Diamond, Jr. 422 Thinking about Go¨ del and Turing: Essays on Complexity, 1970–2007, by Gregory J. Chaitin - Edward Ordman 428 Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, by Robert L. Park - Steven B. Krivit 434 Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor, by Roy W. Spencer - Joel M. Kauffman 436 Origin of Inertia: Extended Mach’s Principle and Cosmological Consequences, by Amitabha Ghosh - Thomas E. Phipps, Jr. 438 Muses, Madmen, and Prophets, by Daniel B. Smith - John Smythies 441 The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness, by Jeff Warren - Imants Baruss 442 The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine, by Robert Bobrow - Michael Schmicker 443 The Trial of God, by John Smythies - Stephen R. L. Clark.

Many religious people are alarmed about features of the current age - violence in the media, a pervasive hedonism, a marginalization of religion, and widespread abortion. These concerns influence politics, but just as there should be a separation between church and state, so should there be a balance between religious commitments and secular arguments calling for social reforms. Robert Audi offers a principle of secular rationale, which does not exclude religious grounds for action but which rules out restricting freedom except on grounds that any rational citizen would accept. The book describes the essential commitments of free democracy, explains how religious and secular moral considerations can be integrated to facilitate co-operation in a world of religious pluralism, and proposes ideals of civic virtue that express the mutual respect on which democracy depends. Audi offers a balanced and sophisticated treatment of the relations between religion and politics in a modern, secular society.