Provides comprehensive, yet concise coverage of the broad field of bioethics, dealing with the scientific, medical, social, religious, political and international concerns.

A dictionary definition of Bioethics is, 'the ethics, or moral principles and rules of conduct, of medical and biological research'. This book is an introductory text of just biological and not medical bioethics. It covers the ethics of experimentation, including genetic manipulation, in plants and animals; ethics and biodiversity, ethics and the environment. There is increasing interest in bioethics - both in academia and by the media and the general public. Awareness of bioethics is incorporated into Biological / Environmental Science (...) courses, plus the first dedicated modular courses on bioethics are starting up. * Includes case studies * Has questions for students * Chapters include environmental, animal, agricultural and reproductive ethics as well as a wide range of issues regarding genetic manipulation. (shrink)

An attempt to bring some of the major issues and debates in the philosophy of social research up-to-date. There is a new chapter on the philosophy of science, the conclusion has been rewritten and other chapters have been updated.

Recent accounts of the life of Protagoras differ widely from one another in their treatment of the ancient sources, and in the conclusions which they draw from them. A re-examination of the evidence, undertaken in 1949–50 as part of a study of the Prometheus trilogy, has convinced me that a new discussion is urgently needed if we are to place the earlier stages of the sophistic movement in the right context historically; and the purpose of this paper is to lay (...) at least a part of the foundation for such a discussion. Since the evidence for the life of Protagoras includes some allusions to his relations with Democritus, and there are some obvious affinities between the careers of Protagoras and Anaxagoras, I have added a short account of the relevant points in the biography of Democritus and a more detailed study of the evidence for the life of Anaxagoras. (shrink)

v. 1. Nicomachean ethics. Politics. The Athenian Constitution. Rhetoric. On Poetics.--v. 2. Logic.--v. 3. Physics. Metaphysics. On the soul. Short physical treaties.--v. 4. On the heavens. On generation and corruption. Meteorology. Biological treatises.

“Spinoza's Extended Substance: Cartesian and Leibnizian Reflections” This essay examines Woolhouse's interpretation of Spinoza's extended substance. According to that interpretation, the extended substance is a quasi‐Platonic form, and Spinoza's substance is not actually extended. This essay argues that the burden of defending such an interpretation is very great indeed, and requires that we read Spinoza's understanding of Descartes and Leibniz's understanding of Spinoza in unusual and awkward ways.

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Extant semantic theories for languages containing vague expressions violate intuition by delivering the same verdict on two principles of classical propositional logic: the law of noncontradiction and the law of excluded middle. Supervaluational treatments render both valid; many-Valued treatments, Neither. The core of this paper presents a natural deduction system, Sound and complete with respect to a 'mixed' semantics which validates the law of noncontradiction but not the law of excluded middle.

Whenever some form of beneficent killing--for example, voluntary euthanasia--is advocated, the proposal is greeted with a flood of slippery-slope arguments warning of the dangers of a Nazi-style slide into genocide. This paper is an attempt systematically to evaluate arguments of this kind. Although there are slippery-slope arguments that are sound and convincing, typical formulations of the Nazi-invoking argument are found to be seriously deficient both in logical rigour and in the social history and psychology required as a scholarly underpinning. As (...) an antidote, an attempt is made both to identify some of the likely causes of genocide and to isolate some of the more modest but legitimate fears that lie behind slippery-slope arguments of this kind. (shrink)

At least since the seminal work of the (US) National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research in the 1970s, a fundamental distinction between research and practice has underwritten both conceptual work in research ethics and regulations governing research involving human subjects. Notwithstanding its undoubted historical importance, I believe the distinction is problematic because it misrepresents clinical inquiry. In this essay, I aim to clarify the character of clinical inquiry by identifying crucial contextual constraints on (...) justification constitutive of clinical science. This analysis shows that, from an epistemological point of view, clinical research and clinical practice are not sharply distinct but intimately intertwined. This result is important in its own right—an enriched understanding of the epistemology of clinical research is valuable in and of itself. But this result is also important because it has profound implications for the ethics of human subjects research. (shrink)

I aim to show how and why some definitions can be benignly circular. According to Lloyd Humberstone, a definition that is analytically circular need not be inferentially circular and so might serve to illuminate the application-conditions for a concept. I begin by tidying up some problems with Humberstone's account. I then show that circular definitions of a kind commonly thought to be benign have inferentially circular truth-conditions and so are malign by Humberstone's test. But his test is too demanding. The (...) inferences we actually use to establish the applicability of, e.g., colour concepts are designed to establish warranted assertability and not truth. Understood thus, dispositional analyses are not inferentially circular. (shrink)

Although this note is prompted by the recent exchange between Gellner [2], [3] and Needham [4], I shall ignore the issues raised by Gellner's specification for an ideal language. I am concerned here only with Needham's statement that ‘biology is one matter and descent is quite another, of a different order’ which, it will be remembered, Gellner treats as Needham's first error. I write under a sense of obligation, for I discussed this matter with Gellner in 1955 while he was (...) preparing his first article and my arguments then were phrased similarly to those advanced by Needham. It appears that I did not make myself clear to Gellner and I shall try again. I do not wish to attack or defend either protagonist; each is quite able to look after himself. Therefore I propose neither to examine where they have misunderstood each other, nor to discuss the difference between kinship and descent, but simply to state the connexion, as I see it, between physical and social kinship. (shrink)