Current debates about “Darwinizing culture” have typically focused on the validity of memetics. In this article we argue that meme-like inheritance is not a necessary requirement for descent with modification. We suggest that an alternative and more productive way of Darwinizing culture can be found in the application of phylogenetic methods. We review recent work on cultural phylogenetics and outline six fundamental questions that can be answered using the power and precision of quantitative phylogenetic methods. However, cultural evolution, like biological (...) evolution, is often far from treelike. We discuss the problems reticulate evolution can cause for phylogenetic analyses and suggest ways in which these problems can be overcome. Our solutions involve a combination of new methods for the study of cultural evolution , and the triangulation of different lines of historical evidence. Throughout we emphasize that most debates about cultural phylogenies can only be settled by empirical research rather than armchair speculation. (shrink)

The aim of UK-REACH (“The United Kingdom Research study into Ethnicity And COVID-19 outcomes in Healthcare workers”) is to understand if, how, and why healthcare workers (HCWs) in the United Kingdom (UK) from ethnic minority groups are at increased risk of poor outcomes from COVID-19. In this article, we present findings from the ethical and legal stream of the study, which undertook qualitative research seeking to understand and address legal, ethical, and social acceptability issues around data protection, privacy, and information (...) governance associated with the linkage of HCWs’ registration data and healthcare data. We interviewed 22 key opinion leaders in healthcare and health research from across the UK in two-to-one semi-structured interviews. Transcripts were coded using qualitative thematic analysis. Participants told us that a significant aspect of Big Data research in public health is varying drivers of mistrust—of the research itself, research staff and funders, and broader concerns of mistrust within participant communities, particularly in the context of COVID-19 and those situated in more marginalised community settings. However, despite the challenges, participants also identified ways in which legally compliant and ethically informed approaches to research can be crafted to mitigate or overcome mistrust and establish greater confidence in Big Data public health research. Overall, our research indicates that a “Big Data Ethics by Design” approach to research in this area can help assure (1) that meaningful community and participant engagement is taking place and that extant challenges are addressed, and (2) that any new challenges or hitherto unknown unknowns can be rapidly and properly considered to ensure potential (but material) harms are identified and minimised where necessary. Our findings indicate such an approach, in turn, will help drive better scientific breakthroughs that translate into medical innovations and effective public health interventions, which benefit the publics studied, including those who are often marginalised in research. (shrink)

Psychopathy is associated with a deficit in affective processes and might be reflected in the inability to extract the emotional content of a stimulus. Across two experiments, we measured the interference effect from emotional images that were irrelevant to the processing of simultaneous target stimuli and examined if this interference was moderated by psychometrically defined traits of psychopathy. In Experiment 1, we showed this emotional distraction effect was reduced as a function of psychopathic traits related to cold-heartedness and occurred for (...) both positively- and negatively-valenced images. Experiment 2 attempted to test the automaticity of the effects by presenting the emotional stimuli briefly so that the emotion was difficult to report. Again, high visibility images produced strong effects that were moderated by the cold-heatedness/meanness traits of psychopathy, but the low-visibility images did not evoke the emotional distractor effect. Our results strongly support the notion that psychopathic traits related to cold-heartedness/meanness are associated with an inability to automatically process the emotional content of images. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The New Health Care For Profit: Doctors and Hospitals in a Competitive Environment. Edited by Bradford H. Gray The Healing Mission and the Business Ethic. By Robert M. Cunningham The Medical Industrial Complex. By Stanley Wohl.

...this work covers a great deal of philosophical ground, and it does so in a competent, workmanlike fashion which should be comprehensible even to a student in a lower level undergraduate introductory course.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:76. A REFUTATION OF HUME'S THEORY OF CAUSALITY1 Given Hume's conceptions of space and time, which I take to be fundamental to his theory of causality, it is not always possible to meet all of those conditions definitive of the cause-effect relation, i.e., those "general rules, by which we may know when" objects really 2 are "causes or effects to each other" (T. 173). To show this, it will (...) be necessary, first, to give a very brief exposition of Hume's conceptions of space and time, with regard chiefly to their implications for the nature of motion. Then, after briefly summarizing his views on the nature of the cause-effect relation, I shall proceed immediately to my objection. It should be noted first, however, that, if one instance of a cause-effect relation can be found to which Hume's analysis will not apply, that, presumably, would be sufficient to refute his theory. I shall not here repeat all of Hume's arguments for the indivisibility of space and time. Suffice it to say, he takes it to be fairly obvious that each must consist of a finite number of indivisible points or moments, each of which is distinct, and therefore separate, from every other, and, in the case of time, none of which ever "co-exist." Only one of his arguments for the indivisibility of space need concern us here. The argument is brief: The infinite divisibility of space implies that of time, as is evident from the nature of motion. If the latter, therefore, be impossible, the former must be equally so. (T. 31) The argument here seems, roughly, to be this: the motion of an object can be described only by giving its positions at various times (the nature of motion). If, therefore, an object, such as a ball moving along a line AB, can be assigned an infinite number of positions taken between A and B (the infinite divisibility of space), 77. the time taken to traverse AB must also be infinite, i.e., must consist of an infinite number of instants. But the finite time taken to traverse the distance AB is not infinitely divisible; therefore, neither is the line AB. This argument, of course, relies upon the assumption that, in traversing the line AB, the ball will occupy each of the points (whether finite or infinite) of which it consists. The argument can also be turned around so as to derive the finite divisibility of time from that of space. Here, too, it must be assumed that the ball occupies each of those instants which constitute the time taken to traverse the line AB. It thus seems clear that, on Hume's view, the ball's motion can be neither more nor less divisible than the space and time it takes to move. x In its motion from A to B, then, the ball will occupy first one, then another of the points lying between A and B until finally it has occupied them all and has moved from A to B. But, in saying that it will occupy first one and then another, we are saying nothing more than that it successively occupies a series of points, and, insofar as its occupation of these different points is successive, it takes time. We are in a position, then, to define motion (at least motion along a straight line) as "the successive occupation of adjacent, linearly ordered points or places." Now, this is very different from the usual conception of motion. The ball's motion between any two adjacent points is not a moving from one to the other. It is simply its being in the one place at one instant and its being in the other place at the next. It is not a continuous motion, but the occupation of discrete places at different times. It is, as it were, a series of instantaneous leaps. This interpretation, if it is accurate, may also serve to account for Hume's ill-understood propensity for 78. referring to cause and effect as objects rather than as events. Events must, on Hume's view of time at least, be essentially static. Unlike those... (shrink)

Berkeley held space to be relational. On the other hand, He took extension to be composed of absolute minima. This paper offers an analysis of berkeley's views on the nature of minimum visibles and space and related notions, E.G., Distance, Extension, And figure. The difficulties in his theory are clearest in the analysis of figure where it is argued that minima can have neither figure nor extension and that, Contrary to berkeley's view, Extension and figure cannot be composed of such (...) minima. The paper concludes by arguing that the "esse est percipi" doctrine is false, Since it entails that there are minimum visibles and that distances be specifiable in terms of minimum visible distances. (shrink)

For years a debate has raged within the various literatures of philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology over whether, and to what degree, the concepts that characterize psychopathology are social constructions that reflect cultural values. While the majority position among philosophers has been normativist, i.e., that the conception of a mental disorder is value-laden, a vocal and cogent minority have argued that psychopathology results from malfunctions that can be described by terminology that is objective and scientific. Scientists and clinicians have tended to (...) endorse the objectivist position, with some notable exceptions. (shrink)

Male and female participants were instructed to produce an altered response pattern on an Implicit Association Test measure of gender identity by slowing performance in trials requiring the same response to stimuli designating own gender and self. Participants’ faking success was found to be predictable by a measure of slowing relative to unfaked performances. This combined task slowing (CTS) indicator was then applied in reanalyses of three experiments from other laboratories, two involving instructed faking and one involving possibly motivated faking. (...) Across all studies involving instructed faking, CTS correctly classified 75% of intentionally faking participants. Using the CTS index to adjust faked Implicit Association Test scores increased the correlation of CTS-adjusted measures with known group membership, relative to unadjusted (i.e., faked) measures. (shrink)

Is time travel just a confusing plot device deployed by science fiction authors and Hollywood filmmakers to amaze and amuse? Or might empirical data prompt a scientific hypothesis of time travel? Structured on a fascinating dialogue involving  ...

_A moving meditation on recent geopolitical crises, viewed through the lens of ancient and modern tragedy__ “Spare, elegant and poignant.... If there is a single contemporary book that should be pressed into the hands of those who decide issues of war and peace, this is it.”—John Gray, _New Statesman_ “It is tragic that Robert D. Kaplan’s luminous _The Tragic Mind_ is so urgently needed.”—George F. Will_ Some books emerge from a lifetime of hard-won knowledge. Robert D. Kaplan (...) has learned, from a career spent reporting on wars, revolutions, and international politics in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, that the essence of geopolitics is tragedy. In _The Tragic Mind_, he employs the works of ancient Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, German philosophers, and the modern classics to explore the central subjects of international politics: order, disorder, rebellion, ambition, loyalty to family and state, violence, and the mistakes of power. The great dilemmas of international politics, he argues, are not posed by good versus evil—a clear and easy choice—but by contests of good versus good, where the choices are often searing, incompatible, and fraught with consequences. A deeply learned and deeply felt meditation on the importance of lived experience in conducting international relations, this is a book for everyone who wants a profound understanding of the tragic politics of our time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Joanne Cutting-Gray HANNAH ARENDT'S RAHEL VARNHAGEN Hannah Arendt fled Nazi Germany in 1933, a year she called the end of Jewish history. She was 27 years old at the time and carried with her a manuscript that was later to become the peculiar biography of an eighteenth-century German-Jewish "pariah," Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833). The Life of a fewish Woman, subtitle of the biography by Arendt, distills the largely unpublished (...) Varnhagen correspondence and marks the impact of that life upon German-Jewish history.1 Published more than "half a lifetime" later in 1957, it assays the politics of form in a highly unusual manner. By expunging all detail in order to analyze Varnhagen's introspection, Arendt implicitly questions selfhood as the form for identity and as the appropriate form for biography. She reveals that seeking to preserve the self determines the blank dumbness of an unnarratable life. Rahel Levin (Antonie Friederike Robert) Varnhagen, or simply "Rahel " as Arendt calls her, lived a life as complicated as her many names. The tortured relation she had to her identity, her insatiable preoccupation with self, reflects an effort to eradicate herJewishness by baptism and marriage and becomes a paradigm of a story about a woman lost to a sense of others and herself. Neither rich, cultivated, nor beautiful, Rahel lived her unhappiness fervently, with an ecstasy that made her appear to others as startlingly original. This helps to explain how she came to preside over the most important intellectual salon in Germany during the late eighteenth century. Princes, intellectuals, and artists flocked to her attic apartment, attracted by the impenetrable spectacle of her despair. Rahel's intensity pulled others into her orbit—including, one-hundred years later, the intense and self-absorbed Arendt at the beginning Philosophy and Literature, © 1991, 15: 229-245 230Philosophy and Literature of her university education.2 Each woman suffered the private failure of a love affair complicated by the broader, historical issue of racial identity that connected their lives. Prewar Nazi Germany taught Arendt what Varnhagen learned during the period of German-Jewish assimilation in the nineteenth century—"one does not escape Jewishness."3 It is no wonder that, in analogous moments of personal and civic upheaval, Rahel Varnhagen and Hannah Arendt "corresponded," the one by writing letters about her life, the other by giving that life to a world. Like Arendt, Varnhagen was unclassifiably exotic, an unattached, Jewish female seemingly without a history, aligned with no one and nothing. If"Jewishness" meant letting life "rain upon" her, Rahel Varnhagen let it strike her "like a storm without an umbrella." And like Arendt, she refused to hide the traits and talents of her personality under cover of morality and convention. Her letters are not self-congratulatory, for she never wittingly chose notoriety. Indeed, she spent much of her life trying to escape the stigma ofJewishness that marked her destiny. Notwithstanding the milieu of nineteenth-century German romanticism that drew the biographer toward her subject, various events surrounding the text make more compelling narratives than Varnhagen 's life: how the manuscript survived World War II, Arendt's emigration to the United States, and, especially, the public and private influence of Martin Heidegger.4 At the age of 18 (1925), Arendt had discovered Varnhagen during her brief love-affair with the 35-year-old philosophy professor at the University of Marburg. Though Heidegger would later call Arendt the "passion of his life" and inspiration for his work—he was writing Being and Time during that period—his brush with Nazism precipitated their breach. Since the Heidegger-Arendt correspondence remains closed, much about their youthful relationship and life-long intellectual affair remains a mystery open only to speculation. From Arendt's biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, we know that Varnhagen's story became a consolation to her in her sorrow, a means ofgiving significance to the ambiguities of a private relationship as it was caught up in public history.5 Certainly Heidegger's retreat from political events for the sake of thinking was as strong an influence on Arendt's political development as was Varnhagen's retreat from her Jewish destiny. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to expect... (shrink)

Controversy persists over the ethics of compensating research participants and providing posttrial benefits to communities in developing countries. Little is known about residents' views on these subjects. In this study, interviews about compensation and posttrial benefits from a hypothetical HIV vaccine trial were conducted in Uganda’s Rakai District. Most respondents said researchers owed the community posttrial benefits and research compensation, but opinions differed as to what these should be. Debates about posttrial benefits and compensation rarely include residents' views like these, (...) but future ones should. (shrink)

In Two Faces of Liberalism, John Gray pursues the dual agenda of condemning familiar liberal theories for perpetuating the failed “Enlightenment project,” and promoting his own version of anti‐Enlightenment liberalism, which he calls “modus vivendi.” However, Gray's critical apparatus is insufficient to capture accurately the highly influential “political” liberalism of John Rawls. Moreover, Gray's modus vivendi faces serious challenges raised by Rawls concerning stability. In order to respond to the Rawlsian objections, Gray would have to reinstate (...) the aspirations and principles characteristic of Enlightenment theories of liberalism. (shrink)

_Liberalisms_, a work first published in 1989, provides a coherent and comprehensive analytical guide to liberal thinking over the past century and considers the dominance of liberal thought in Anglo-American political philosophy over the past 20 years. John Gray assesses the work of all the major liberal political philosophers including J. S. Mill, Herbert Spencer, Karl Popper, F. A Hayek, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and explores their mutual connections and differences.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:51. HOW NOT TO REFUTE HUME'S THEORY OF CAUSALITY: A REPLY TO GRAY Mr. Robert Gray's alleged refutation of Hume's theory of causality does not strike me as being in reality conclusive. The essential element in his alleged refutation, if I have understood it correctly, is that when two billiard balls strike one another and stop - a paradigm of cause and effect - the striking (...) and the stopping constitute one event as opposed to two. They occupy, as a result, one and the same time, a state of affairs inconsistent with the Humean view that the cause immediately precedes the effect. But, surely, they would, if they are the same event, occupy by parity of reasoning one and the same position. For Hume's theory of space and time, as Gray describes it, implies that there is a one-to-one mapping between positions and times. If, therefore, their being the same event implies that they occupy one and the same time, it would also imply that they occupy one and the same position. And if they occupy the same position, they are not spatially contiguous, a state of affairs inconsistent with the Humean view that the cause is spatially contiguous to the effect. A Humean solution in both cases seems clear. It is to allow that the striking and stopping of the billiard balls are the same event and to seek its cause in their moving towards one another, i.e. to seek it in billiard ball A's being at A, and billiard ball B's being at B,, where both A, and B, are spatially contiguous with and immediately precede the striking and stopping of the respective billiard balls B and A. Gray resists this solution, but only because he is implicitly committed to the anti-Humean view that one and the same event can occupy two different positions at one and the same time. As a result, where A designates the 52. position where billiard ball A strikes billiard ball B and stops it and B designates the position where billiard ball B strikes billiard ball A and stops it - this being simply a re-descriptiön in Gray's view of what happens in the single event of two billiard balls striking one another and stopping - he holds that A is different from B. If A is different from B, then by relocating the cause of billiard ball A's stopping at B, we have sacrificed the spatial contiguity of cause and effect. For B will intervene between position B,, that of the cause, and A, that of the effect. And the same will hold with obvious adjustments when we relocate the cause of billiard ball B's stopping at A,. Fortunately, however, Hume need only reply that A is one and the same as B. Indeed, if he is to be consistent with his theory of space and time, this must be his reply. This reply, moreover, is necessary to Hume's explanation of how the reciprocal striking of billiard ball A and billiard ball B can exist in the first place. Such a phenomenon requires a point of contact, a point common to a part of both billiard balls. This point of contact, it should be clear, is provided by the point designated by both A and B. Robert A. Imlay University of Toronto "A Refutation of Hume's Theory of Causality," Hume Studies, Vol. II (1976), pp. 76-85.... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:51. HOW NOT TO REFUTE HUME'S THEORY OF CAUSALITY: A REPLY TO GRAY Mr. Robert Gray's alleged refutation of Hume's theory of causality does not strike me as being in reality conclusive. The essential element in his alleged refutation, if I have understood it correctly, is that when two billiard balls strike one another and stop - a paradigm of cause and effect - the striking (...) and the stopping constitute one event as opposed to two. They occupy, as a result, one and the same time, a state of affairs inconsistent with the Humean view that the cause immediately precedes the effect. But, surely, they would, if they are the same event, occupy by parity of reasoning one and the same position. For Hume's theory of space and time, as Gray describes it, implies that there is a one-to-one mapping between positions and times. If, therefore, their being the same event implies that they occupy one and the same time, it would also imply that they occupy one and the same position. And if they occupy the same position, they are not spatially contiguous, a state of affairs inconsistent with the Humean view that the cause is spatially contiguous to the effect. A Humean solution in both cases seems clear. It is to allow that the striking and stopping of the billiard balls are the same event and to seek its cause in their moving towards one another, i.e. to seek it in billiard ball A's being at A, and billiard ball B's being at B,, where both A, and B, are spatially contiguous with and immediately precede the striking and stopping of the respective billiard balls B and A. Gray resists this solution, but only because he is implicitly committed to the anti-Humean view that one and the same event can occupy two different positions at one and the same time. As a result, where A designates the 52. position where billiard ball A strikes billiard ball B and stops it and B designates the position where billiard ball B strikes billiard ball A and stops it - this being simply a re-descriptiön in Gray's view of what happens in the single event of two billiard balls striking one another and stopping - he holds that A is different from B. If A is different from B, then by relocating the cause of billiard ball A's stopping at B, we have sacrificed the spatial contiguity of cause and effect. For B will intervene between position B,, that of the cause, and A, that of the effect. And the same will hold with obvious adjustments when we relocate the cause of billiard ball B's stopping at A,. Fortunately, however, Hume need only reply that A is one and the same as B. Indeed, if he is to be consistent with his theory of space and time, this must be his reply. This reply, moreover, is necessary to Hume's explanation of how the reciprocal striking of billiard ball A and billiard ball B can exist in the first place. Such a phenomenon requires a point of contact, a point common to a part of both billiard balls. This point of contact, it should be clear, is provided by the point designated by both A and B. Robert A. Imlay University of Toronto "A Refutation of Hume's Theory of Causality," Hume Studies, Vol. II (1976), pp. 76-85.... (shrink)

A great deal of interest and excitement surround the interface between the philosophy of biology and the philosophy of psychology, yet the area is neither well defined nor well represented in mainstream philosophical publications. This book is perhaps the first to open a dialogue between the two disciplines. Its aim is to broaden the traditional subject matter of the philosophy of biology while informing the philosophy of psychology of relevant biological constraints and insights.The book is organized around six themes: functions (...) and teleology, evolutionary psychology, innateness, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and parallels between philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind. Throughout, one finds overlapping areas of study, larger philosophical implications, and even larger conceptual ties. Woven through these connections are shared concerns about the status of semantics, scientific law, evolution and adaptation, and cognition in general. Contributors André Ariew, Mark A. Bedau, David J. Buller, Paul Sheldon Davies, Stephen M. Downes, Charbel Niño El-Hani, Owen Flanagan, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Todd Grantham, Valerie Gray Hardcastle, Gary Hatfield, Daniel W. McShea, Karen Neander, Shaun Nichols, Antonio Marcos Pereira, Tom Polger, Lawrence A. Shapiro, Kim Sterelny, Robert A. Wilson, William C. Wimsatt. (shrink)

In this paper, the author engages William Galston's recent attempt to revive the Berlinian project of developing a comprehensive theory of liberalism from value pluralist premises. The author's argument maintains that, despite Galston's attempts, the value pluralist in fact has no resources with which to recommend a liberal political order over a variety of illiberal regimes, and that, further, Galston's own justificatory strategy is indistinguishable from the later Rawls's noncomprehensive, ‘political' liberalism. Although the argument engages the work of Berlin and (...) Galston in particular, the primary aim is to preserve the intuition, common to Rawls, Brian Barry, Ronald Dworkin, and John Gray, that value pluralism is inconsistent with comprehensive liberalism. (shrink)

Developments over the past four decades have secured Immanuel Kant’s status as being for contemporary philosophers what the sea was for Swinburne: the great, gray mother of us all. And Kant mattered as much for the classical American pragmatists as he does for us today. But we look back at that sepia-toned age across an extended period during which Anglophone philosophy largely wrote Kant out of its canon. The founding ideology of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, articulating the rationale (...) and fighting faith for the rising tide of analytic philosophy, was forged in a recoil from the perceived defects of a British idealism inspired by Hegel. Mindful of the massive debt evidently and self-avowedly owed by Hegel to Kant, and putting aside neo-Kantian readings of Kant as an empiricist philosopher of science that cast him in a light they would have found more favorable, Russell and Moore diagnosed the idealist rot as having set in already with Kant. For them, and for many of their followers down through the years, the progressive current in philosophy should be seen to have run directly from Locke, Leibniz, and Hume, to Mill and Frege, without any dangerous diversion into the oxbow of German idealism. (shrink)

I saw a poster the other day that said: “Living. It’s the only thing worth dying for.” Now, I’m not sure what that means really—in fact, I think it is an advertisement for a clothing company—but it brings up an interesting issue or cluster of issues. Are there things worth dying for? Or, and I know this is a very different question, are there things worth killing for? This is the question which we are going to talk about this week (...) and next. Of course, we’ll be talking about it on an international scale, but I think its answer hinges in important ways on the individual scale. We’ll come back to this point and we can get at it in more detail in the question period if you like. (shrink)

Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey has suggested that one of the reasons we as a society invest so little in research on combating aging is because we are in an intellectual trance. We think the effort will be futile: aging is immutable, so why try? A healthy skepticism can be a good thing but it is a major mistake to bet against the irresistible force of inexorable technological progress. Over the next few decades, nanotechnology will come to play a pivotal role (...) in the solution to the problem of human aging. Medical nanorobotics, if it can be made to work, can unquestionably offer convenient solutions to all known causes of age-related damage and most likely can also successfully address any new causes of senescence that remain undiscovered today. (shrink)

Robert Wilson (1994) maintains that many interesting and fundamental aspects of psychology are non-individualistic because large chunks of psychology depend upon organisms being deeply embedded in some environment. I disagree and present one version of narrow content that allows enough reference to the environment to meet any wide challenge. I argue that most psychologists are already this sort of narrow content theorist and that these narrow content explanations of psychological phenomena meet Wilson's criteria for being a good explanation better (...) than any wide explanation of the same event. (shrink)

Robert Wilson (1994) maintains that many interesting and fundamental aspects of psychology are non-individualistic because large chunks of psychology depend upon organisms being deeply embedded in some environment. I disagree and present one version of narrow content that allows enough reference to the environment to meet any wide challenge. I argue that most psychologists are already this sort of narrow content theorist and that these narrow content explanations of psychological phenomena meet Wilson's criteria for being a good explanation better (...) than any wide explanation of the same event. (shrink)