In the last five years, a number of U.S. companies have either moved their locus of incorporation to countries with more favorable tax laws, or announced such moves. Given this trend toward “inversions”, and the polemics that have accompanied it, we offer two ways in which the ethics of such a move can be evaluated. We provide multinational executives with two applications of ethics to inversion: Kant’s deontological theory and the consequentialist perspective of utilitarianism.

Exposure of man to chemical agents can occur intentionally, as in the treatment of disease, or inadvertently because the environment contains a wide range of synthetic or naturally occurring chemicals. The alkylating agents are a diverse group of compounds (Fig. 1) and comprise a good example of such xenobiotics, since much is known about their occurrence, and their biological effects include carcinogenicity, mutagenicity, toxicity and teratogenicity.Exposure to potentially carcinogenic alkylating agents such as nitrosamines may occur occupationally, from cigarette smoke, from (...) certain foodstuffs and even endogenously through the ingestion of the appropriate precursor chemicals.1 At the other extreme, the cytotoxic effects of agents such as the chloroethylating nitrosamides or mustards have been exploited in the design of certain antitumour drugs.2 The effectiveness of antitumour agents and the other, mostly adverse, biological effects of alkylating agents have been ascribed to their ability to damage cellular macromolecules, in particular DNA. This review concentrates on investigations carried out over the past two years on the role of DNA damage in carcinogenesis, but we shall see how recent advances in this area of research have also led to a better understanding of the mechanisms of the cytotoxic effects of alkylating antitumour agents. (shrink)

This work aims to clarify the nature of the philosophy of education, intending to indicate both the limits and the uses of philosophical criticism of educational aims and concepts. It is based upon the fact that education is a subject full of unexamined presumptions.

John Dewey argued that democracy is a way of life. Over the course of a professional career which lasted nearly seven decades, Dewey developed a comprehensive social philosophy which had as its central purpose to engage in the project of realizing democracy as a way of life. This dissertation examines John Dewey's democratic theory as found in his four major political works and myriad occasional addresses during the period between the world wars. Dewey argued that capitalism, and particularly the pecuniary (...) culture of capitalism, represented a challenge to realizing democracy in America. The context of industrial capitalism during the depression era represented a challenge to liberalism, both in thought and practice. This dissertation examines Dewey's call for a reconstruction of liberalism in order to realize democracy. I argue that his mature political writings are best understood as an attempt to reconcile this fourfold matrix which included the material context of industrial capitalism, the institutional context of liberal political institutions, the intellectual context of liberal political thought, and the normative vision of realizing democracy as a way of life. (shrink)

In this paper the border is evaluated as a fold of power relations in which sovereign capacity and competence is marshalled alongside strategies of control, surveillance, and risk management to constitute, what we call, a zone of frontier government. We advance the argument that the border is a site for both negative and positive power, for insertion and subtraction, and that the assemblage of surveillance and compliance regimes are "run" not so much in the furtherance of a precautionary or pre-emptive (...) end-state, but as intermediate values that are sufficiently malleable by an invigorated sovereign, expressed in the residue of discretion in and between the many border agencies. Our analysis is based on extensive policy and program documents, as well as twenty-five interviews with officials in various agencies engaged in the US-Canada and, particularly, the Windsor-Detroit corridor. Normal 0 false false false EN-CA X-NONE X-NONE. (shrink)

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

Justifying involuntary psychiatric treatment on the basis of a judgment that a person lacks capacity is usually expressed in terms of a person’s ability to make a decision about his or her health and treatment. Typically, this relates to the ability to refuse treatment. Exactly what “capacity” means, however, and how one determines when another individual lacks capacity, or lacks sufficient capacity, in this context is particularly controversial, with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities insisting (...) that involuntary treatment be abandoned altogether and capacity tests avoided.Capacity is a concept that has multiple meanings and applications across different disciplines and... (shrink)

As good a definition as any of a _philosophical_ conundrum is a problem all of whose possible solutions are unsatisfactory. The problem of understanding the springs of action for morally responsible agents is commonly recognized to be such a problem. The origin, nature, and explanation of freely-willed actions puzzle us today as they did the ancients Greeks, and for much the same reasons. However, one can carry this ‘perennial-puzzle’ sentiment too far. The unsatisfactory nature of philosophical theories is a more (...) or less matter, and some of them have admitted of improvement over time. This, at any rate, is what we self-selecting metaphysicians tend to suppose, and I will pursue that high calling by suggesting a few improvements to a theory of metaphysical freedom, or freedom of the will. (shrink)

The original essays in this volume, while written from diverse perspectives, share the common aim of building a constructive dialogue between two currents in philosophy that seem not readily allied: Wittgenstein, who urges us to bring our words back home to their ordinary uses, recognizing that it is our agreements in judgments and forms of life that ground intelligibility; and feminist theory, whose task is to articulate a radical critique of what we say, to disrupt precisely those taken-for-granted agreements in (...) judgments and forms of life. Wittgenstein and feminist theorists are alike, however, in being unwilling or unable to "make sense" in the terms of the traditions from which they come, needing to rely on other means—including telling stories about everyday life—to change our ideas of what sense is and of what it is to make it. For both, appeal to grounding is problematic, but the presumed groundedness of particular judgments remains an unavoidable feature of discourse and, as such, in need of understanding. For feminist theory, Wittgenstein suggests responses to the immobilizing tugs between modernist modes of theorizing and postmodern challenges to them. For Wittgenstein, feminist theory suggests responses to those who would turn him into the "normal" philosopher he dreaded becoming, one who offers perhaps unorthodox solutions to recognizable philosophical problems. In addition to an introductory essay by Naomi Scheman, the volume’s twenty chapters are grouped in sections titled "The Subject of Philosophy and the Philosophical Subject," "Wittgensteinian Feminist Philosophy: Contrasting Visions," "Drawing Boundaries: Categories and Kinds," "Being Human: Agents and Subjects," and "Feminism’s Allies: New Players, New Games." These essays give us ways of understanding Wittgenstein and feminist theory that make the alliance a mutually fruitful one, even as they bring to their readings of Wittgenstein an explicitly historical and political perspective that is, at best, implicit in his work. The recent salutary turn in philosophy toward taking history seriously has shown how the apparently timeless problems of supposedly generic subjects arose out of historically specific circumstances. These essays shed light on the task of feminist theorists—along with postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists—to "rotate the axis of our examination" around whatever "real need[s]" might emerge through the struggles of modernity’s Others. Contributors are Nancy E. Baker, Nalini Bhushan, Jane Braaten, Judith Bradford, Sandra W. Churchill, Daniel Cohen, Tim Craker, Alice Crary, Susan Hekman, Cressida J. Heyes, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Christine M. Koggel, Bruce Krajewski, Wendy Lynne Lee, Hilda Lindemann Nelson, Deborah Orr, Rupert Read, Phyllis Rooney, and Janet Farrell Smith. (shrink)

Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves is a rhetorically powerful but philosophically unconvincing attempt to show that a deterministic and ontologically reductionist, but epistemologically pluralist, outlook may peacefully coexist with a robust acceptance of human freedom and moral responsibility. The key to understanding the harmony rests in recognizing that freedom is not a metaphysical or physical condition but is instead a product of deeply embedded social practices. I argue that Dennett's project rests on an unargued and implausible deflationary stance toward basic (...) metaphysics. (shrink)

In an era of digital revolution, artificial intelligence, big data and augmented reality, technology has shifted from being a tool of communication to a primary medium of experience and sociality. Some of the most basic human capacities are increasingly being outsourced to machines and we increasingly experience and interpret the world through digital interfaces, with machines becoming ever more ‘social’ beings. Social interaction and human perception are being reshaped in unprecedented ways. This book explores this technologisation of the social and (...) the attendant penetration of permanent liminality into those aspects of the lifeworld where individuals had previously sought some kind of stability and meaning. Through a historical and anthropological examination of this phenomenon, it problematises the underlying logic of limitless technological expansion and our increasing inability to imagine either ourselves or our world in other than technological terms. Drawing on a variety of concepts from political anthropology, including liminality, the trickster, imitation, schismogenesis, participation, and the void, it interrogates the contemporary technological revolution in a manner that will be of interest to sociologists, social and anthropological theorists and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in the digital transformation of social life. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction: The Technologisation of the Social: A 21st-Century Megamachine? Paul O’Connor -/- 1. Communication as Theatricalisation: Self-Presentation in the Digital Age Arpad Szakolczai -/- 2. Parasites of the Social: Digital Disruptions of the Labour Market Tom Boland -/- 3. Possessed by Technology: The Metastasis of Absence Agnes Horvath -/- 4. Technologisation of the Social: Symbiosis, Parasitism, or Predation? Daniel Gati -/- 5. J'accuse Zéro: The Technology of Zero and the Making of a Personal Void Ray Griffin -/- 6. Digital Affordances and the Liminal Stephen Turner -/- 7. The Smart Womb: Digital Technologies and the Maze of Trickster Politics Marius Ion Benta -/- 8. Brave New Industry? The Dark Side of Dematerialisation and Industry 4.0 Thomas S.J. Smith -/- 9. ‘What Have You Caught?’: Nannycams and Hidden Cameras as Normalised Surveillance of the Intimate Janos Mark Szakolczai -/- 10. Coercive Visibility: Discipline in the Digital Public Arena Paul O’Connor -/- Conclusion: Is There a Way Out of the Technologisation of the Social? Marius Ion Benta. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 29, Number 2, November 2003, pp. 267-282 Skepticism and Philo's Atheistic Preference DAVID O'CONNOR [H]owever consistent the world may be... with the idea of... a very powerful, wise, and benevolent Deity... it can never afford us an inference concerning his existence. The consistence is not absolutely denied, only the inference.1 The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great (...) vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children. (DNR, 211) The true conclusion is, that the original source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these principles, and has no more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy. (DNR, 212) There may four hypotheses be framed concerning the first causes of the universe: that they are endowed with perfect goodness, that they have perfect malice, that they are opposite and have both goodness and malice, that they have neither goodness nor malice.... The fourth... seems by far the most probable. (DNR, 212) David O'Connor is Professor of Philosophy, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey 07079. e-mail: [email protected] 268 David O'Connor What I have said concerning natural evil will apply to moral, with little or no variation; and we have no more reason to infer, that the rectitude of the supreme Being resembles human rectitude than that his benevolence resembles the human. Nay, it will be thought, that we have still greater cause to exclude from him moral sentiments, such as we feel them; since moral evil, in the opinion of many, is much more predominant above moral good than natural evil above natural good. (DNR, 212) Thus Philo in part 11 of Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. I In the first of these passages, Philo is denying that the existence of "a very powerful, wise, and benevolent Deity" can justifiably be inferred from the facts of good and evil present to our experience. But power, wisdom, and benevolence are essential qualities of the God of traditional theism, thus Philo is here denying that the existence of such a being can justifiably be inferred from the empirical evidence of good and evil. The other passages show us Philo going further than this, indeed all the way to what seems to be a preference for moral atheism. The term is J. C. A. Gaskin's, and he defines it thus: "[moral atheism] will be [the position of] anyone who denies the existence of any god having moral attributes."2 In the second and third passages specifically, this prima facie preference is absolute ("[t]he whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature... without discernment" and "the original source of all things is entirely indifferent," respectively), while it is relative and more cautiously expressed in the fourth passage. And the fifth passage says at least as much as the first and perhaps as much as the second and third. Yet Philo very early in the book declares himself a skeptic on such metaphysical topics as "the origin of worlds" (DNR, 132), "the existence and properties of spirits" (DNR, 135), "the powers and operations of one universal spirit, existing without beginning and without end; omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, infinite" (DNR, 135). The principal reason he gives is the "weakness, blindness, and narrow limits of human reason... even in subjects of common life and practice" (DNR, 131). Considering these limits, surely it is very likely that "we have... got quite beyond the reach of our faculties" (DNR, 135) if and when we turn to such metaphysical topics as those he just listed. On these matters, which "run wide of common life... [t]he mind must remain in suspense... and it is that very suspense or balance, which is the triumph of skepticism" (DNR, 135-6). Hume Studies Philo's Atheistic Preference 269 While the first of the passages I quoted in the beginning clearly squares with this skeptical outlook, and so does at least part of the fifth, it would seem that the rest of the quoted material does not... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews Catherine Osborne. Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and the Presocratics. London: Duckworth, 1987. Pp. viii + 383. NP. A quick look at Kirk, Raven, and Schofield's standard The PresocraticPhilosophers(Cambridge University Press, 1983) or Barnes's recent Early GreekPhilosophy (Penguin, 1987) reveals a clear distinction between (a) direct quotations (ipsissima verba) of the Presocratics and (b) testimonia (doxographic or otherwise) about their thought. This bifurcation into original (...) fragments and testimonia is called into question by Osborne in her book. For Osborne, the standard procedure of identifying fragments within a larger context and then interpreting the fragments without reference to that context is to be put aside "in favour of reading the text of the Presocratics as embedded texts within the context of the interpretations they were selected to illustrate" (183). This new methodology is not offered by Osborne as applicable across the board, for all the Presocratics. It is a nonstarter for, say, Parmenides, for whom we have (obvious) verbatim quotation in Simplicius (and consequently no need to take into account the Simplician context). But in the case of some other Presocratics we are not on such secure grounds. Or so Osborne thinks, and the book illustrates her hermeneutical principles with reference to Heraclitus and Empedocles as their thought is embedded in the text of Hippolytus of Rome's Refutation of All Heresies. Osborne's strategy proceeds in two distinct stages: (1) She first offers us a couple of examples of Hippolytus's interpretive skills, both of which, in different ways, reveal him as a pretty reliable (if biased) and interesting philosophical and textual exegete. In this regard she presents Hippolytus's discussion of Aristotle's doctrine of substance in the Categoriesand Metaphysics Z (in the context of Hippolytus's refutation of the heretic Basileides) and, secondly, his reworking of Irenaeus's life of Simon Magus, the reputed founder of gnosticism. Aristotle is a particularly good test case because we can, of course, check Hippolytus's report against the original. Having done so, Osborne is led to conclude that "little of interest can be derived from the limited amount of material that is quoted directly from Aristotle" (183; cf. also 66). Nonetheless, for Osborne comparison with Aristotle's text reveals Hippolytus as not bereft of philosophical acumen, even though his interpretation is colored by the particular polemics in which he is engaged. In sum, then, Osborne understands Hippolytus as an intelligent (if biased) interpreter of Aristotle and not a particularly good source for ipsissimaverba. (2) On the basis of these conclusions about Hippolytus as a source for Aristotle's metaphysical theory and for the life of Simon Magus, Osborne turns to Hippolytus's discussion of Heraclitus and Empedocles (in the context of his refutations of the [ll9] 120 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28"1 JANUARY ~99 o heretics Noetus and Marcion). Her goal is to urge a new nonfragment-based methodology for the study of the Presocratics, grounded in the conclusions she has just reached about Hippolytus as an interpreter of Aristotle and Irenaeus. The major obstacle which she faces in validating such a methodology is that in the cases of Heraclitus and Empedocles we have no original text by which to judge Hippolytus's reliability or interpretive skills. In lieu of such original texts all that Osborne has at her disposal is her own conclusion just reached about Hippolytus as a generally reliable (if biased) interpreter of Aristotle and Irenaeus. But just here is the major problem with Osborne 's proposed methodology: granting for the sake of argument that Hippolytus is a pretty good interpreter of Aristotle and Irenaeus, this does not entail that he is a reliable exegete of anyone else. He might be, he might not. We don't know and, more importantly, we have no way of finding out. Osborne assumes that Hippolytus had a greater knowledge of the relevant texts than we do (67, 185), and thus interpreted the Presocratics on this basis. He might have, he might not. In any event, Osborne's assumption is a case of special pleading. Equally plausible is that Hippolytus possessed no more of Heraclitus or Empedocles than we do and, consequendy, had... (shrink)

The last 20 years have seen the development of a new form of therapy, compassion focused therapy. Although CFT has a growing evidence base, there have been few studies of CFT outside of an Anglo-European cultural context. In this paper, we ask: Might a CFT-based approach be of value for Indigenous Australians? If so, what kind of cultural adaptations might be needed? We report the findings from a pilot study of an arts-based compassion skills training group, in which usual CFT (...) group processes were significantly adapted to meet the needs of Indigenous Australians. At face value, CFT appeared to be a promising approach to enhancing the social and emotional wellbeing of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. However, despite initial consultations with Indigenous health professionals, the first attempts to offer a more conventional group-based CFT to Indigenous clients were largely unsuccessful. Following a review and advice from two Indigenous clients, we combined elements of CFT with visual arts to develop a new approach, “arts-based compassion skills training”. This paper reports an evaluation of this pilot ABCST group. The group had 6 × 4 h sessions of ABCST, facilitated by two psychologists and two artists. There were 10 participants, who attended between 2 and 6 sessions: five were clients, five were health professionals. Between 1 and 3 months later, six of the participants were interviewed. Qualitative analysis of interview data identified that two key processes—creating a positive group atmosphere and channeling compassion skills training through the medium of visual arts—led to four positive outcomes for participants: planting the seeds of new understandings, embodying the skills of compassion, strengthening relationships with others, and evolving a more self-compassionate relationship. We suggest that the preliminary results are sufficiently encouraging to warrant further development of ABCST in Indigenous communities. (shrink)