When this work was first published in 1960, it immediately filled a void in Kantian scholarship. It was the first study entirely devoted to Kant's _Critique of Practical Reason_ and by far the most substantial commentary on it ever written. This landmark in Western philosophical literature remains an indispensable aid to a complete understanding of Kant's philosophy for students and scholars alike. This _Critique_ is the only writing in which Kant weaves his thoughts on practical reason into a unified argument. (...) Lewis White Beck offers a classic examination of this argument and expertly places it in the context of Kant's philosophy and of the moral philosophy of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

The concept of selecting for a disability, and deafness in particular, has triggered a controversial and sometimes acrimonious debate between key stakeholders. Previous studies have concentrated on the views of the deaf and hard of hearing, health professionals and ethicists towards reproductive selection for deafness. This study, however, is the first of its kind examining the views of hearing children of deaf adults towards preimplantation genetic diagnosis and prenatal diagnosis to select for or against deafness. Hearing children of deaf adults (...) straddle both the deaf and hearing worlds, and this dual perspective makes them ideally placed to add to the academic discourse concerning the use of genetic selection for or against deafness. The study incorporated two complementary stages, using initial, semistructured interviews with key informants as a means to guide the subsequent development of an electronic survey, completed anonymously by 66 individuals. The participants shared many of the same views as deaf individuals in the D/deaf community. The similarities extended to their opinions regarding deafness not being a disability, their ambivalence towards having hearing or deaf children and their general disapproval of the use of genetic technologies to select either for or against deafness. (shrink)

Variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease is a fatal, transmissible, neurodegenerative disorder for which there is currently no effective treatment. vCJD arose from the zoonotic spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathy. There is now compelling evidence for human to human transmission through blood transfusions from presymptomatic carriers and experts are warning that the real epidemic may be yet to come. Imperatives exist for the development of reliable, non-invasive presymptomatic diagnostic tests. Research into such tests is well advanced. In this article the ethical implications of (...) the availability of these tests are elaborated and comparisons drawn with predictive genetic testing for Huntington’s disease and screening for HIV. Paramount to considerations is the issue of whom to test, weighing up respect for personal autonomy against obligations to benefit and protect society. A paradigm is proposed similar to that used for HIV screening but with unique features: compulsory testing of all blood/organ donors and individuals undergoing surgery or invasive procedures who have a significant risk of disease transmission. (shrink)

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all (...) sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand. (shrink)

Athenaeus preserves an intriguing description by the otherwise unknown writerMoschion of a giant grain-ship, the Syracusia, built by Hiero II of Syracuse in thelater third century B.C.1 The account is extremely circumstantial. Besides a fulldescription of the ship's layout, Moschion gives such details as the name of thearchitect , the size of the construction-force , the construction time , details of the launching arrangements devised byArchimedes, and even the procedure for judging crimes committed on board.

Athenaeus preserves an intriguing description by the otherwise unknown writerMoschion of a giant grain-ship, the Syracusia, built by Hiero II of Syracuse in thelater third century B.C.1 The account is extremely circumstantial. Besides a fulldescription of the ship's layout, Moschion gives such details as the name of thearchitect, the size of the construction-force, the construction time, details of the launching arrangements devised byArchimedes, and even the procedure for judging crimes committed on board.

The present theory leads to a set of subjective weights such that the utility of an uncertain alternative (gamble) is partitioned into three terms involving those weights—a conventional subjectively weighted utility function over pure consequences, a subjectively weighted value function over events, and a subjectively weighted function of the subjective weights. Under several assumptions, this becomes one of several standard utility representations, plus a weighted value function over events, plus an entropy term of the weights. In the finitely additive case, (...) the latter is the Shannon entropy; in all other cases it is entropy of degree not 1. The primary mathematical tool is the theory of inset entropy. (shrink)

Data from various settings suggest that there is an upper limit of about four on the number of individuals who can interact in spontaneous conversation. This limit appears to be a consequence of the mechanisms of speech production and detection. There appear to be no differences between men and women in this respect, other than those introduced by women’s lighter voices.

The exogenous cycles and population dynamics of the community at Penrith, Cumbria, England, have been studied (1557-1812) using aggregative analysis, family reconstitution and time series analysis. This community was living under marginal conditions for the first 200 years and the evidence presented is of a homeostatic regime where famine, malnutrition and epidemic disease acted to regulate the balance between resources and population size. This provides an ideal historic population for an investigation of the direct and indirect effects of malnutrition. Throughout (...) the period studied, a short wavelength oscillation in grain prices was apparently the major external factor that drove exogenous cycles in mortality, birth rate, and migration. In particular, the different responses of children to variations in food supply are emphasised; fluctuations in poor nutrition correlated significantly with the variations in mortality rates for infants (probably indirectly during pregnancy and directly during the first year of life) and for young children (via susceptibility to lethal infectious diseases). Migratory movements contributed to the maintenance of homeostasis in the population dynamics. A medium wavelength cycle in low winter temperatures was associated with a rise in adult mortality which, in turn, promoted an influx of migrants into this saturated habitat. A model incorporating these interacting associations between vital events and exogenous cycles is presented: grain prices were an important density-dependent factor and constituted the major component of the negative feedback of this population and drove the exogenous, short wavelength mortality cycles. Cycles of births and immigration provide a positive feedback for the build-up of susceptibles and the initiation of smallpox epidemics and increased population size. (shrink)

Empirical evidence from both utility and psychophysical experiments suggests that people respond quite differently—perhaps discontinuously—to stimulus pairs when one consequence or signal is set to `zero.' Such stimuli are called unitary. The author's earlier theories assumed otherwise. In particular, the key property of segregation relating gambles and joint receipts (or presentations) involves unitary stimuli. Also, the representation of unitary stimuli was assumed to be separable (i.e., multiplicative). The theories developed here do not invoke separability. Four general cases based on two (...) distinctions are explored. The first distinction is between commutative joint receipts, which are relevant to utility, and the non-commutative ones, which are relevant to psychophysics. The second distinction concerns how stimuli of the form (x, C; y) and the operation of joint receipt are linked: by segregation, which mixes stimuli and unitary ones, and by distributivity, which does not involve any unitary stimuli. A class of representations more general than rank-dependent utility (RDU) is found in which monotonic functions of increments U(x)-U(y), where U is an order preseving representation of gambles, and joint receipt play a role. This form and its natural generalization to gambles with n > 2 consequences, which is also axiomatized, appear to encompass models of configural weights and decision affect. When joint receipts are not commutative, somewhat similar representations of stimuli arise, and joint receipts are shown to have a conjoint additive representation and in some cases a constant bias independent of signal intensity is predicted. (shrink)

In 1885, during initial discussions of J. C. Maxwell's celebrated thermodynamic demon, Whiting (1) observed that the demon-like velocity selection of molecules can occur in a gravitationally bound gas. Recently, a gravitational Maxwell demon has been proposed which makes use of this observation [D. P. Sheehan, J. Glick, and J. D. Means, Found. Phys. 30, 1227 (2000)]. Here we report on numerical simulations that detail its microscopic phase space structure. Results verify the previously hypothesized mechanism of its paradoxical behavior. This (...) system appears to be the only example of a fully classical mechanical Maxwell demon that has not been resolved in favor of the second law of thermodynamics. (shrink)

In 1885, during initial discussions of J. C. Maxwell's celebrated thermodynamic demon, Whiting(1) observed that the demon-like velocity selection of molecules can occur in a gravitationally bound gas. Recently, a gravitational Maxwell demon has been proposed which makes use of this observation [D. P. Sheehan, J. Glick, and J. D. Means, Found. Phys. 30, 1227 (2000)]. Here we report on numerical simulations that detail its microscopic phase space structure. Results verify the previously hypothesized mechanism of its paradoxical behavior. This system (...) appears to be the only example of a fully classical mechanical Maxwell demon that has not been resolved in favor of the second law of thermodynamics. (shrink)

The argument of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the Critique of Pure Reason is the deepest and most far-reaching in philosophy. In his new book, Robert Howell interprets main themes of the Deduction using ideas from contemporary philosophy and intensional logic, thereby providing a keener grasp of Kant's many subtleties than has hitherto been available. No other work pursues Kant's argument through every twist and turn with the careful, logically detailed attention maintained here. Surprising new accounts of apperception, (...) the concept of an object, the logical functions of thought, the role of the Metaphysical Deduction, and Kant's relations to his Aristotelian-Cartesian background are developed. Howell makes a precise contribution to the discussion of most of the disputed issues in the history of Deduction interpretation. Controversial in its conclusions, this book demands the attention of all who take seriously the task of understanding Kant's work and evaluating it dispassionately. (shrink)

Trope theory is a leading metaphysical theory in analytic ontology. One of its classic statements is found in the work of Donald C. Williams who argued that tropes qua abstract particulars are the very alphabet of being. The concept of an abstract particular has been repeatedly attacked in the literature. Opponents and proponents of trope theory alike have levelled their criticisms at the abstractness of tropes and the associated act of abstraction. In this paper I defend the concept of a (...) trope qua abstract particular by rejecting arguments that purport to show that tropes should not be understood as abstract and by arguing that the abstractness of tropes plays an indispensable role in one of our more promising trope-theoretic analyses of universals and of concrete objects. (shrink)

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in 2018 to harmonize data privacy and security laws across the European Union (EU). It applies to any organization collecting personal data in the EU. To date, service-level consent has been used as a proportionate approach for clinical trials, which implement low-risk, routine, service-wide interventions for which individual consent is considered inappropriate. In the context of public health research, GDPR now requires that individuals have the option to choose whether their data may (...) be used for research, which presents a challenge when consent has been given by the clinical service and not by individual service users. We report here on development of a pragmatic opt-out solution to this consent paradox in the context of a partner notification intervention trial in sexual health clinics in the UK. Our approach supports the individual’s right to withhold their data from trial analysis while routinely offering the same care to all patients. (shrink)

A hippocampal patient is described who shows preserved item recognition and simple recognition-based recollection but impaired recall and associative recognition. These data and other evidence suggest that contrary to Aggleton & Brown's target article, Papez circuit damage impairs only complex item-item-context recollection. A patient with perirhinal cortex damage and a delayed global memory deficit, apparently inconsistent with A&B's framework, is also described.