A Short Letter by Humboldt to Jefferson

At the tail end of his monumental trip of exploration and scientific discovery through Latin America from 1799 to 1804, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt visited President Thomas Jefferson in Washington. United by their common interests in the Enlightenment, they began a correspondence that endured until 1825. This contribution discusses a letter of 1811 by Humboldt to the former president, hitherto unpublished in English. Aside from closing a gap in their correspondence, the letter, although short, offers an illuminating insight into Humboldt’s personal, political, and scientific networks, which included such figures as Abbé José Correia da Serra and Joel Barlow, who were involved in his simple request for tobacco and seeds

Exploring an Unknown Gold Mine: U.S. Government Documents on National Security

The September 11, 2001 Al Qaida terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and Pentagon brutally taught Americans that our status as the world’s sole superpower does not immunize us against military attack. These attacks resulted in a partial loss in public access to government information as some federal agencies withdrew from their web sites material they regarded as sensitive for national security reasons

Testimonial kinds: The source factor

In this article, I argue that the nature of testimony necessitates that we distinguish between testimonies that are based on the informant's sense perception, inference, or on a longer testimonial chain. I further argue that this distinction has epistemic significance, in that it helps us better understand how reliable certain classes of testimonies are and how reliable certain individuals are, based upon the epistemic source that their testimony is ultimately grounded in. I begin the article, in Section 1, by drawing attention to the existence of several different terms for testimony found within the Islamic philosophical tradition. In Section 2, I argue that the essential difference between these terms has to do with the epistemic source that grounds the speaker’s testimony. In Section 3, I move on to explicate how this distinction helps us better understand the reliability of testimony and how it impacts our evaluation of the reliability of different speakers in different contexts. In Section 4, I use this distinction to challenge the necessary condition of speaker competency. Finally, in Section 5, I use the distinction to undermine the belief-transmission view in the epistemology of testimon

Pioneers of Modern Geography: Translations Pertaining to German Geographers of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

This collection of English translations samples the writings and/or critiques thereon of six important German geographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: those of August Meitzen, Eduard Hahn, Otto Schliiter, Alfred Hettner, Siegfried Passarge, and Karl Sapper. Each of these scholars influenced in various ways the course of modem geographical thinking and instruction in German universities, and their methodologies were also adopted in part by professional geographers in other European countries and in the United States. Four of them—Hahn, Schliiter, Hettner and Passarge— were students of Ferdinand von Richthofen, often considered the “father” of professional geography in Germany. In their writings, most of the men considered herein dealt mainly with the substance and methodology of human geography, but two, Passarge and Sapper, having received formal training in geology, considered problems in physical geography, although both treated various aspects of anthropogeography and ethnography. In the same vein, some of the human geographers of this group, namely Hettner and Schliiter, occasionally wrote on physical geography and emphasized that subject in their teaching. Writings of other leading German geographers of the time period here considered might well have been included; for example Friedrich Ratzel, whose first volume of his Anthropogeographie (1882) dealt in part with the influence of nature on mankind, and led directly to the ideas of one of his American students, Ellen Churchill Semple, who was instrumental in establishing the dogma of environmental determinism among geographers in the United States during the early part of this century. (from Introduction