Children, because of age-related reasons, are a vulnerable population, and protecting their health is a social, scientific and emotional priority. The increased susceptibility of children and fetuses to environmental agents has been widely discussed by the scientific community. Children may experience different levels of chemical exposure than adults, and their sensitivity to chemical toxicities may be increased or decreased in comparison with adults. Such considerations also apply to unborn and newborn children. Therefore, research on children is necessary in both clinical (...) and environmental fields, to provide age-specific relevant data regarding the efficacy and safety of medical treatments, and regarding the assessment of risk from unintended environmental exposure. In this context, the stakeholders are many, including children and their parents, physicians and public health researchers, and the society as a whole, with its ethical, regulatory, administrative and political components. The important ethical issues are information of participants and consent to participate. Follow-up and protection of data should be discussed in the context of biobanks, where children obtain individual rights when they become adults. It is important to realise that there are highly variable practices within European countries, which may have, in the past, led to differences in practical aspects of research in children. A number of recommendations are provided for research with children and environmental health. Environmental research with children should be scientifically justified, with sound research questions and valid study protocols of sufficient statistical power, ensuring the autonomy of the child and his/her family at the time of the study and later in life, if data and samples are used for follow-up studies. When children are enrolled, we recommend a consent dyad, including parental informed consent and the child’s assent and/or informed consent from older minors. For evaluation of the studies including children, a paediatrician should always be involved in the research ethics committee. (shrink)

Children, because of age-related reasons, are a vulnerable population, and protecting their health is a social, scientific and emotional priority. The increased susceptibility of children and fetuses to environmental agents has been widely discussed by the scientific community. Children may experience different levels of chemical exposure than adults, and their sensitivity to chemical toxicities may be increased or decreased in comparison with adults. Such considerations also apply to unborn and newborn children. Therefore, research on children is necessary in both clinical (...) and environmental fields, to provide age-specific relevant data regarding the efficacy and safety of medical treatments, and regarding the assessment of risk from unintended environmental exposure. In this context, the stakeholders are many, including children and their parents, physicians and public health researchers, and the society as a whole, with its ethical, regulatory, administrative and political components. The important ethical issues are information of participants and consent to participate. Follow-up and protection of data should be discussed in the context of biobanks, where children obtain individual rights when they become adults. It is important to realise that there are highly variable practices within European countries, which may have, in the past, led to differences in practical aspects of research in children. A number of recommendations are provided for research with children and environmental health. Environmental research with children should be scientifically justified, with sound research questions and valid study protocols of sufficient statistical power, ensuring the autonomy of the child and his/her family at the time of the study and later in life, if data and samples are used for follow-up studies. When children are enrolled, we recommend a consent dyad, including parental informed consent and the child’s assent and/or informed consent from older minors. For evaluation of the studies including children, a paediatrician should always be involved in the research ethics committee. (shrink)

A historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy.

Putative counterexamples to the Principle of Identity of Indiscernibles (PII) are notoriously inconclusive. I establish ground rules for debate in this area, offer a new response to such counterexamples for friends of the PII, but then argue that no response is entirely satisfactory. Finally, I undermine some positive arguments for PII.

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

Philosophy has much to offer psychiatry, not least regarding ethical issues, but also issues regarding the mind, identity, values, and volition. This has become only more important as we have witnessed the growth and power of the pharmaceutical industry, accompanied by developments in the neurosciences. However, too few practising psychiatrists are familiar with the literature in this area. -/- The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry offers the most comprehensive reference resource for this area ever published. It assembles challenging and (...) insightful contributions from key philosophers and others to the interactive fields of philosophy and psychiatry. Each contributions is original, stimulating, thorough, and clearly and engagingly written - with no potentially significant philosophical stone left unturned. Broad in scope, the book includes coverage of several areas of philosophy, including philosophy of mind, science, and ethics. For philosophers and psychiatrists, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry is a landmark publication in the field - one that will be of value to both students and researchers in this rapidly growing area. (shrink)

DaB fUr die Entwicklung der Phanomenologie Husserls nicht zuletzt auch,wissenschaftstheoretische' Motive ausschlaggebend waren, ist hinreichend bekannt. Umso mehr verwundert es, daB die Husserl-Rezeption sich diese Motive nur selten zueigen gemacht hat. Zwar sind in einer Reihe von Einzel­ wissenschaften, wie in der Literaturwissenschaft, der Sozialwissenschaft und besonders auch der Psychologie, phanomenologische Motive wirksam gewor­ den. Versuche einer ausdriicklichen wissenschaftskritischen Anwendung der Husserlschen Philosophie auf einzelwissenschaftliehe Theorien jedoch, wie sie z.B. Alfred Schiitz in seinem friihen Werk zur phanomenologischen Grundlegung der "verstehenden (...) Soziologie"l ansatzweise unternommen hat, sind rar. Freilich ging auch Husserl hier nieht eben mit gutem Beispiel voran. Auch er selbst hat seine wissenschaftstheoretische Programmatik nirgends einer ernsthaften Bewahrungsprobe unterzogen. Die vorliegende Untersuchung will diese Frage einer wissenschaftstheore­ tischen Anwendbarkeit der transzendentalen Phiinomenologie paradigmatisch im Hinblick auf die Problemstellungen der Geschiehtswissenschaft iiberprii­ fen. Was also kann die Phanomenologie fUr die Historik leisten? DaB sieh fiir eine solche Absieht gerade die geschichtstheoretischen Perspektiven in Hus­ serls Werk anbieten, hat vor allem zwei Griinde. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

Practical deliberation often involves conditional judgements about what will (likely) happen if certain alternatives are pursued. It is widely assumed that the conditionals useful in deliberation are counterfactual or subjunctive conditionals. Against this, I argue that the conditionals of deliberation are indicatives. Key to the argument is an account of the relation between 'straightforward' future-directed conditionals like ' If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby' and * "w e r e ' ' e d F (...) D C s like ' If the house were not to be painted, it would soon look quite shabby': an account on which both of these types of FDCs are grouped with the indicatives for semantic treatment and on which, while conditionals of both types are properly used in means/ends deliberations, those of the ' were'ed-up variety are especially well suited for that purpose. (shrink)

In the traditional form of canonical quantization, certain field components (not having “conjugate” momenta) must be regarded as noncanonical. This long-known distinction enters modern gauge theories, when they are canonically quantized as by Kugo and Ojima. We avoid that peculiarity by not using any conjugate “momenta” at all. In our formulation, canonical quantization can be related to Feynman's path integral.

Mitos ve Logos kavramları Antik Yunan uygarlığında söz kavramına karşılık gelen sözcükleri karşılamak için kullanılmıştır. Felsefe tarihinin başlangıcı için yapılan tanımlamalarda ise mitos kavramının yerine logos kavramının tercih edilmesi iki kavram arasında bir farklılığı ortaya koymak için yapılmaktadır. Bu ayrımın nedeni ise mitos’un daha çok dinsel içerikle anılması logos’un ise içerisinde bir tür akılsallık barındırması şeklindeki yorumlarda kendini göstermektedir. Ancak söz konusu ayrımın ilk doğa filozofu/ilk felsefeci olarak nitelendirilen Thales için geçerli olup olmadığı geçmişte olduğu gibi günümüzde de halen tartışılmaktadır. (...) Felsefe tarihi yazımlarında ilk sıraya konan Thales’in anılan kavramları gerçekten farklı şekilde yorumlayıp yorumlamadığı bizce de tartışmaya açık bir husustur. Bu açıdan bakıldığında Thales, söz konusu kavramları iki farklı problemler alanı olarak mı görmüştür? Onun düşüncelerinde kendinden önceki mitolojik mirasın izleri bulunabilir mi? O, katışıksız bir rasyonel midir, yoksa henüz felsefenin yeni filizlendiği bir toplumda bir ara basamağı mı temsil etmektedir? Bu makalenin içerisinde tartışacağımız bu sorular, felsefe tarihinin başlangıcına ilişkin kavramsal arka planın ne olduğu hakkında bize katkı sağlayacaktır. (shrink)

Aggregating individuals’ consistent attitudes might produce inconsistent collective attitudes. Some groups therefore need the capacity to form attitudes that are irreducible to those of their members. Such groups, group-agent realists argue, are agents in control of their own attitude formation. In this paper, however, I show how group-agent realism overlooks the important fact that groups consist of strategically interacting agents. Only by eliminating group agency from our social explanations can we see how individuals vote strategically to gain control of their (...) groups and produce collective attitudes we cannot make sense of if we treat groups as agents. (shrink)

'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is a survey that attempts to describe a hypothetic philosophy--the avant-garde pseudo-science imagined by Alfred Jarry. 'Pataphysics is a supplement to metaphysics, accenting it, then replacing it, in order to create a philosophic alternative, whose discipline can study cases, not of conception, but of exception: variance , alliance , and deviance . 'Pataphysics synthesizes the romantic schism between a literal, scientized discourse and a figural, poeticized discourse, and my thesis suggests that this revision (...) of the signifier "science" by 'pataphysics is symptomatic of a postmodern transition in science from a paradigm of absolutism to a paralogy of relativism. Structured as a descriptive explication, which emphasizes a theoretical perspective, this survey is divided into five chapters: the first chapter recounts the history of the conflict between science and poetry ; the second chapter examines the avant-garde pseudo-science of 'pataphysics itself ; and finally, the last three chapters discuss the influence of 'pataphysics upon the poetics of its subsequent successors . While my thesis focuses upon theories of textual poetics rather than poetry itself , my thesis does nevertheless strive to be as conceptually encyclopedic as 'pataphysics itself: instead of normalizing 'pataphysics within one theoretical perspective, this survey alludes intermittently to 'pataphysical enterprises that constitute exceptions to such a genealogy of Jarryites. What is at stake is the status of poetry in a world of science. How might poetry reclaim its own viable truth? How might science benefit from its own poetic irony? For the postmodern condition, such questions have already opened up a novel space for speculative imagination; hence, this survey presents itself as a kind of primer for a future of possible research. (shrink)

In this short but meaty book, Peter Unger questions the objective answers that have been given to central problems in philosophy. As Unger hypothesizes, many of these problems are unanswerable, including the problems of knowledge and scepticism, the problems of free will, and problems of causation and explanation. In each case, he argues, we arrive at one answer only relative to an assumption about the meaning of key terms, terms like "know" and like "cause," even while we arrive at an (...) opposite answer relative to quite different assumptions, but equally arbitrary assumptions, about what the key terms mean. (shrink)

This section concerns the question of how best to understand the scientific status of mental health care in general and psychiatry in particular. On the assumption that psychiatry is based, in part at least, on natural science, what is the nature or the general shape of that science? Some of the chapters aim at shedding light on component parts of a scientific world view: causation, explanation, natural kinds, models of medicine, etc. Others concern potentially fruitful scientific approaches to mental health (...) care, drawing on brain imaging results, phenomenology, enactivism and what can be learnt from debate of the status of psychoanalysis. One overall lesson is that twenty-first-century psychiatry needs twenty-first-century philosophy of science. (shrink)

This Section examines several moral dilemmas and epistemological aporias in clinical practice and shows how clinicians can benefit from the introduction of philosophical methods and discourse. The authors develop these issues having in mind emblematic mental disorders and typical clinical situations. One important claim shared by the Authors is that a great effort has been made to ground psychiatry on evidence-based science, and to tie it to our growing understanding of the human brain. This is obviously an exceedingly important project, (...) but it would be a mistake to assume that the central questions of psychiatry can be completely resolved through scientific inquiry. Science offers guidance for clinical practice only in light of our concepts and normative judgments. (shrink)

In the editorial introduction the stage is set for the chapters in the section by a brief discussion of the relationship between the disciplines of philosophy and psychiatry. Then each chapter briefly is summarized or highlighted.

In this introduction to the Section II, the thrust of the component chapters is described. An important strand in the philosophy of psychiatry since its beginnings has been sociopolitical critiques: criticism which aims to improve and humanize psychiatric practice and mental health systems. From this standpoint, the introduction provides an overview of this tradition, including considerations of "postpsychiatry," value commitments in psychiatry, the recovery movement, racism and sexism in the field, and technology.

A cross-disciplinary discussion of the basis of interpersonal relating is of interest to philosophers and psychiatrists for several reasons. The development of successful clinical practice may depend, at least partly, on having an accurate understanding of the basic character of unimpaired interpersonal relating because such understanding can shed light on the nature and source of its disturbed forms. How we think about the basis of "mind-minding" competencies influences how we think about the prognosis and possible treatment of dysfunctional interpersonal relating. (...) Another reason is that philosophical frameworks influence the way we think about and evaluate possible psychiatric disorders and philosophical discussions may be of direct practical importance to psychiatry given that different theories suggest different potential ways of devising therapies. (shrink)

The editorial introduction sets the stage for the chapter by identifying the roles that concepts and categories play not just in the field of mental health medicine but in the human mind itself. Then, each chapter is summarized or highlighted.

Following on from Section IV on summoning concepts, this section of the Handbook presents theoretically informed descriptions of psychopathologies. The topics of the chapters range from anxiety, depression, and body image disorders, through emotion and affective disorders, to delusion, thought insertion, and the fragmentation of consciousness. These phenomena call, not only for assessment and diagnosis, but also for understanding on the part of both the engaged clinician and the philosophical commentator. They also provide case studies for general philosophical questions about (...) different levels of description and conceptualisation and the relationships between them, and about the contributions to psychological understanding that are made by phenomenology, clinical expert knowledge, and the sciences of the mind. (shrink)