William L. McBride

Heroin and morphine binding with human serum proteins and red blood cells

Summary Equilibrium dialysis experiments were performed to determine the binding properties of heroin and morphine to major blood constituents. The serum proteins studied showed little binding with heroin-14C or morphine-14C. However, the addition of cold heroin to the system increased the observed uptake of the radioactive substance with serum, RBC, ghosts, and washed RBC. These changes in binding may be due to mechanical affinity of the molecules: 14C-labeled plus nonradioactive in vitro. Conjugation may alter this pattern in vivo. Free heroin and morphine probably float unbound in the blood before further metabolism in other tissues.

The Concept of Justice in Marx, Engels, and Others

The concept of justice has always been among the foremost concepts of concern to political theorists. So it was at the beginning with Plato, whose Republic is a ten-book-long effort at defining justice in the state and in the individual. So it is as Western civilization, at least in the narrowly geographical sense of the term, enters into its period of decline, as John Rawlss A Theory ofJustice and the many articles parasitic upon that flawed but monumental work dominate the attention of American political theorists. For those of us who find Plato compelling but fundamentally wrong, and Rawls charming and admirable but anachronistic and abstract, Karl Marx is the most obvious theorist to whom to look for clarification. Surely, one is moved to suspect, there must be much wisdom about the concept of justice in those obsessively voluminous writings, published and unpublished, that Marx bequeathed to the twentieth century. Marx was thoroughly versed in the writings of classical politics, and was thus aware of the place that justice occupied in them; he knew his Hobbes, at least to some extent, and he was therefore aware of what we today would call the extreme legal positivist position on the subject. He also had some familiarity, at least second-hand, with Immanuel Kants legal philosophy, in which justice is again the key term. Unfortunately for us, a perusal of Marxs writings yields practically nothing that might satisfy these expectations. Perhaps a sophisticated scanning device might some day be employed to ferret out all the instances in which the word Gerechtigkeit appears in his works. I am. confident that the yield would be amazingly impoverished-much smaller than the results of a similar analysis of practically any popular journalistic columnist of whom one could think. Marx wrote extensively about innumerable topics of interest to political theorists, even though he does, it is true, regard the whole domain of politics as somehow dependent upon that of economics and upon historical, material conditions. Therefore, it seems reasonable to speculate, it must have involved a considerable effort to keep his references to justice so sparse.

On introducing phenomenology: An evaluation of some texts

In the fall of 1960, my first semester of graduate work in the United States, I spent an inordinate amount of time preparing a term paper for one of my courses, that on epistemology. The instructor was an eminent philosopher, long since retired, who was known to have little sympathy for either of the two broad principal currents of contemporary philosophy--namely, the amalgam of linguistic analysis and logical positivism that dominated Anglo-American thinking, and the converging existentialist and phenomenological movements that prevailed in Continental Europe; this mans tolerance both for unclarity and for unexplicated technical jargon was exceedingly low. I had decided to produce, as my project, a sympathetic synopsis of the thought of Edmund Husserl, which I took to be preeminently epistemological in its concerns. At the time, the enterprise was not an especially easy one. I had already read a great deal of Sartre, some Merleau-Ponty, a little Heidegger, plus a bit of Polin and other less well-known figures. The previous spring I had attended a course given by Canon Raymond Vancourt of the Facult~s Catholiques of Lille; at Vaneourts urging, I had prepared a report, for the seminar, on Marvin Farbers dense but still valuable paraphrase (in English) of Husserls early work, entitled The Foundation of Phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and the Quest for a Rigorous Science of Philosophy (I 943). I had also obtained some further sense, although (as was obvious even at the time) an unreliable one, of the development of the phenomenological movement from reading two of Vancourts own very religiously oriented books, now nearly forgotten, La Philosophie et sa structure: philosophie et phbnombnologie and La Phbnomknologie et lafoi. I knew enough, then, to recognize Husserls tremendous importance and the fact that he was seminal with respect to some of the great continental philosophers of the next generation who were then still in their primes, but I had received little guidance as to details. In those days, the corpus of philosophical works in English offered very little such guidance indeed. A glance at the Husserl bibliography in Herbert Spiegelbergs magisterial two-volume study, The Phenomenological

Science, Psychology, and Human Values in the Context of Dewey’s Critique of Marx

This paper began as a piece of historical research concerning some of the principal themes of Dewey’s critique of Marx. I thought that it would be interesting, since Dewey viewed the world so much in evolutionary terms, to pick out several such critical references over a long span of time. The period that I chose, after reconsidering the chronology of Dewey’s writings, was roughly four decades, beginning in 1898 and ending in 1939; five texts, published at intervals of approximately a decade, presented themselves as especially useful for my purposes. Accordingly, I shall devote the first half of this paper to reproducing what I take to be some of the main points of these Deweyan allusions to Marx and Marxism.

Is a Rational Politics a Real Possibility

It is important to question the assumption, practically universal in works on political theory, that both political theory and politics are rational. In various articles Hwa Yol and Petee Jung have insisted on a broad conception of political rationality, influenced by both Eastern and Western traditions—that of phenomenology being especially prominent. In an article about voluntary association that Hwa Yol Jung reprinted in an anthology that he edited, I attacked oversimplified views of rationality, notably the equation of the latter with what voluntary agents with adequate knowledge would ideally agree upon. It is evident that the meaning of “rationality” varies greatly among individuals, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that, by almost any measure of rationality, the human race as a collective has repeatedly acted irrationally on a grand scale over its comparatively brief history. Some examples of this are offered, concluding with the civil wars and NATO intervention in former Yugoslavia and the long-standing United States atomic policy of “Mutually Assured Destruction.” But perhaps the most threatening of all human irrationality, for the long run, is the destruction of our ecosystem, in opposition to which Hwa Yol and Petee Jung have proposed an attitude of “ecopiety.” While pessimism about the future of the human race seems strongly justified, the very pervasiveness of irrationality in politics suggests that anything is possible—even, perhaps, the ultimate triumph of ecopiety.

Existentialism, Cultural Politics of

Since the origin of the word “existentialism” was no single individual or book, any attempt to define it rigorously would be doomed to failure. But we can begin to delineate its contours by conceiving of it as a revolt against very formal, abstract philosophical thinking (“essentialism”) and toward a prioritizing of lived experience. The title of an early study of existentialism by a French scholar, Jean Wahl, well expresses this spirit: Vers le Concret (Toward the Concrete). For most if not all of those to whom the “existentialist” label has been given, ethical issues, the question of how to live, have been of enormous importance. And for most of them, though in very diverse ways, this practical focus has had important implications, not so much for politics in the narrow sense, but for what may be called cultural politics. Keywords: contingency; freedom; humanism

The End of Liberal Democracy as We Have Known It

This paper takes aim at contemporary conceptions of liberal democracy and the accompanying loss of faith with liberal democratic theory which may be observed. There exist problems with procedure, outcomes, and the decline of universality in the face of liberal nationalism which only serve to reinforce boundaries. The clearest cases of these problems have arisen in the United States over the past few years, and especially since the events of September 11, 2001.

The Global Role of US Philosophy

This essay focuses on the danger of complicity. American philosophers, given their country’s hegemonic position, exert global influence; what form should it take? Comparison is made with the situation of France when it still controlled Algeria. French philosophers, until near the time of Algerian independence, generally accepted and sometimes profited from this extremely unjust situation. An important exception was Sartre, particularly in his Preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. It is argued that elements of complicity with American global dominance, some of the more unjust aspects of which are listed, are to be found in such widely read philosophers as Rawls and Rorty. It is suggested that a rethinking of the problem of evil, in its political and not just its religious aspects, is in order. Finally, a broader view of what ‘American philosophy’ means, including, for instance, the voices of African American and Native American philosophers, is urged.

Sexual Harassment, Seduction, and Mutual Respect: An Attempt at Sorting it Out

My choice to prepare a paper on this topic, a paper that is, as my sub-title implies, very tentative, has its source in several events, conversations, and readings, a few of which I shall first recount. First of all, as is evident, there has been a great deal more public discussion of sexual harassment during the 1990’s than in the past. This is in part the result of new laws and of some efforts at stricter enforcement of laws, but of course these developments themselves are a function of changing social behaviors; I shall not devote much attention to legal issues in this paper. I first became aware of the new era into which we were entering when I attended a talk, perhaps ten years ago, given by Linda Pratt, who was then incoming vice-president and later became national president of the American Association of University Professors, in which she recounted an incident of which she had become aware. A male teacher of voice at a Midwestern institution had, in the course of giving instruction concerning the correct way to breathe when singing, touched the ribs of a male student, who then proceeded to bring a charge of sexual harassment against the teacher. The latter, widely and probably accurately considered to be gay, and long held in low esteem by the school administration, was offered the choice of either resigning quietly or enduring an extended public hearing in which he would undoubtedly have been subjected to great ridicule and unfavorable publicity. He resigned, losing his livelihood and benefits.

The Marxian Vision of a (Better) Possible Future: End of a Grand Illusion?

What do we mean by ‘illusion’? Complementarily, what is disillusionment? Like Augustine concerning time, many of us may believe that we know the answers to these questions - until we start examining them more carefully. Then we become aware that the belief itself was illusory.