A leader in the modern commentary on ethics and philosophy, Mary Warnock casts a critical eye over her life and times.

Fundamental principles : the nature of the dispute -- Types of euthanasia -- Psychiatric assisted suicide -- Neonates -- Incompetent adults -- Human life is sacred -- The slippery slope -- Medical views -- Four methods of easing death and their effect on doctors -- Looking further ahead.

How is hope to be found amid the ethical and political dilemmas of modern life? Writer and philosopher Mary Zournazi brought her questions to some of the most thoughtful intellectuals at work today. She discusses "joyful revolt" with Julia Kristeva, the idea of "the rest of the world" with Gayatri Spivak, the "art of living" with Michel Serres, the "carnival of the senses" with Michael Taussig, the relation of hope to passion and to politics with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto (...) Laclau. A dozen stimulating minds weigh in with their visions of a better social and political order. The result is a collaboration - of writing, of thinking, and of politics - that demonstrates more clearly than any single-authored project could how ideas encountering one another can produce the vision needed for social change. (shrink)

This chapter first distinguishes between originality and creativity. True originality is rare, whether in art, science, or LEGO, because to be truly original means to have done something that no one has ever done before, and that no one could have anticipated. Most LEGO creations will not meet that condition, for with the exception of serious hobbyists who undertake massive builds, most players who make original creations are making creations that are commonplace. Painting or remolding or placing stickers on the (...) bricks counts against the spirit of LEGO creation. The chapter then discusses The LEGO Movie embodies the paradox that presents three conflicting models of creative LEGO play, illustrated by the Master Builders, Finn's father, and Emmet. The movie's creators were deliberately playing around with conflicting popular conceptions of creativity: creativity as madness, creativity as thinking outside the box, and creativity as vision. (shrink)

This selection consists of extracts from writings of women concerned solely with the pursuit of abstract ideas, historically contextualized. The texts, for the most part, reflect issues widely debated in their contemporary societies. Extracts from lesser-known writers are also included, providing a diversity of arguments spanning four centuries and including some notable contemporary philosophers.

Language use can be viewed as a form of joint activity that requires the coordination of meaning between individuals. Because the linguistic signal is notoriously ambiguous, interlocutors need to draw upon additional sources of information to resolve ambiguity and achieve shared understanding. One way individuals can achieve coordination is by using inferences about the interlocutor’s intentions and mental states to adapt their behavior. However, such an inferential process can be demanding in terms of both time and cognitive resources. Here, we (...) suggest that interaction provides interlocutors with many cues that can support coordination of meaning, even when they are neither produced intentionally for that purpose nor interpreted as signaling speakers’ intention. In many circumstances, interlocutors can take advantage of these cues to adapt their behavior in ways that promote coordination, bypassing the need to resort to deliberative inferential processes. (shrink)

Nature and Mortality is a challenging look at some of the major public issues of our time through the eyes of one of our most influential and probing liberal humanists. It is a frank account on where we stand today on such controversial matters as human embryology, genetic engineering, euthanasia and abortion. Warnock's views may seem like a red rag to a bull to some, but her contribution to the debate is always stimulating. Enlivened by autobiographical anecdote and some delicious (...) side-swipes, Nature and Mortality is Mary Warnock at her most perceptive, wise and entertaining. (shrink)

The works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) ranged from the early _Thoughts on the Education of Daughters_ to _The Female Reader_, a selection of texts for girls, and included two novels. But her reputation is founded on _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ of 1792. This treatise is the first great document of feminism—and is now accepted as a core text in western tradition. It is not widely known that the germ of Wollstonecraft’s great work came out of an (...) earlier and much shorter vindication—A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in the context of the issues raised by the French Revolution. This edition, which follows the model of other Broadview Editions in including a range of materials that help the reader to see the work in the context of its era out of which it emerged, is arranged chronologically, opening with Wollstonecraft’s “other vindication.” It also includes a wide range of other documents in appendices, as well as a comprehensive and authoritative introduction, chronology, and full index. (shrink)

In the study of natural language quantification, much recent attention has been devoted to the investigation of verification procedures associated with the proportional quantifier most. The aim of these studies is to go beyond the traditional characterization of the semantics of most, which is confined to explicating its truth-functional and presuppositional content as well as its combinatorial properties, as these aspects underdetermine the correct analysis of most. The present paper contributes to this effort by presenting new experimental evidence in support (...) of a decompositional analysis of most according to which it is a superlative construction built from a gradable predicate many or much and the superlative operator -est. Our evidence comes in the form of verification profiles for sentences like Most of the dots are blue which, we argue, reflect the existence of a superlative reading of most. This notably contrasts with Lidz et al.’s results. To reconcile the two sets of data, we argue, it is necessary to take important differences in task demands into account, which impose limits on the conclusions that can be drawn from these studies. (shrink)

The unity of aesthetic and teleological judgment, the third and earlier Critiques, is based on Kant′s discovery of a “heuristic method” for applying judgments regarding sense phenomena to abstract thought, a “second attention” which enables an “idea of the whole”. Synthetic judgment, basis for cognition and human action, depends on efficacy of non-empirical insights: the transcendental standpoint, “regulative” ideas, consciousness of “ought” and the reality of freedom, universality of natural mechanism, the principle of “fortuitous” purposiveness. The activity of reflective judgment (...) in the encounter with the beautiful, sublime, living, and two paradigmatic types of explanation, inspired by Spinoza′s distinction of extensio and cogitatio, permit Kant to bridge the gap between freedom and necessity, theoretical knowledge and morality. (shrink)

All religion and much philosophy has been concerned with the contrast between the ephemeral and the eternal. Human beings have always sought ways to overcome time, and to prove that death is not the end. This book consists then in an exploration of certain closely related ideas: personal identity, time, history and our commitment to the future, and the role of imagination in life.

As newer interdisciplinary fields gain momentum, long-forgotten works are excavated from the literary canon and reevaluated under the lens of ecocriticism. Traditionally, fictional animal characters were seen as merely symbolic, comical, or trivial. Yet times and attitudes have changed, as evidenced by the growing impetus of animal welfare campaigns, posthumanism, and critical animal studies. Few fictional works dealing with laboratory experiments offer a subjective account of the victims’ agonizing experience. This article will examine Mark Twain’s A Dog’s Tale and Richard (...) Adams’s The Plague Dogs, depicting vivisection from the nonhuman perspective. (shrink)

The photo essay that comprises Elephant House bears mournful testimony to the severely restricted lives of the world’s largest terrestrial mammals at the Oregon Zoo, as well as similar “educational” institutions throughout the United States and the world. While purporting to remain neutral regarding the ethics of keeping pachyderms in captivity, ethno-photographer Dick Blau and author-historian Nigel Rothfels’s provocative book could easily arouse angry or disconsolate reactions in many readers. Rather than focusing on the pachyderms themselves, Elephant House takes a (...) more anthropocentric stance, pinpointing the intertwined relationships between these magnificent animals and the humans who strive to keep them as mentally stimulated and healthy as possible, albeit in a hopelessly confined and unnatural environment. (shrink)

Animals are ubiquitous in literature across all ages and cultures, but their actual presence has seldom been taken seriously, and scholarly endeavors often dismiss them. In Writing for Animals: New Perspectives for Writers and Instructors to Educate and Inspire, 13 fiction writers explore techniques used by themselves and other celebrated authors to make nonhuman worlds more comprehensible to readers, thus instilling us with greater sensitivity. This book bears testimony to the mounting awareness that animals have been treated badly for eons (...) both in real life and in literature, and that the written word has the unique capability for finally “giving animals the voices they deserve.”. (shrink)

Introduction: Falls are the leading cause of fatal and nonfatal injuries among older adults. Studies showed that older adults can reduce the risk of falls after participation in an unexpected perturbation-based balance training, a relatively novel approach that challenged reactive balance control. This study aims to investigate the effect of the practice schedule on reactive balance function and its transfer to proactive balance function. Our primary hypothesis is that improvements in reactive balance control following block PBBT will be not inferior (...) to the improvements following random PBBT.Methods and Analysis: This is a double-blind randomized controlled trial. Fifty community-dwelling older adults will be recruited and randomly allocated to a random PBBT group or a block PBBT group. The random PBBT group will receive eight training sessions over 4 weeks that include unexpected machine-induced perturbations of balance during hands-free treadmill walking. The block PBBT group will be trained by the same perturbation treadmill system, but only one direction will be trained in each training session, and the direction of the external perturbations will be announced. Both PBBT groups will receive a similar perturbation intensity during training, the same training period, and the same concurrent cognitive tasks during training. The generalization and transfer of learning effects will be measured by assessing the reactive and proactive balance control during standing and walking before and after 1 month of PBBT, for example, step and multiple steps and fall thresholds, Berg balance test, and fear of falls. The dependent variable will be rank transformed prior to conducting the analysis of covariance to allow for nonparametric analysis.Discussion: This research will explore which of the balance retraining paradigms is more effective to improve reactive balance and proactive balance control in older adults over 1 month. The research will address key issues concerning balance retraining: older adults’ neuromotor capacities to optimize training responses and their applicability to real-life challenges.Clinical Trial Registration: Helsinki research ethics approval has been received. (shrink)

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) mechanistic account of dialogue assumes that linguistic alignment between interlocutors takes place automatically, without using cognitive resources. However, even the most basic processes of speech perception depend on resource use. The lack of invariant mapping between input patterns and interpretations in dialogue, as in speech perception, may require controlled, rather than automatic, processing.

The present article focuses on the case of the 2012 hunger-strike of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. We analyze the ethical dilemma involved in the way the Israeli medical community reacted to these hunger-strikes and the question of force feeding within the context of the fundamental dual-loyalty structure inherent in the Israeli Prison Services—system. We argue that the liberal perspective that focuses the discussion on the dilemma between the principle of individual autonomy and the sanctity of life tends to be (...) oblivious to the asymmetrical relation of power that characterizes the prison system and to the socio-political context in which hunger-strikes take place. Emphasizing hunger-strikes as political acts implies that health practitioners’ conducts cannot be analyzed only through the prism of clinical medical ethics. It requires a public health ethics’ approach, an approach that understands health in the context of the complex relationship between society, state, organizations, communities and individuals. The authors are both academics and volunteers in Physicians for Human Rights—Israel thus our analysis is based both on sociological and public health ethics principles and on the continuous work and advocacy for the right to health of prisoners. (shrink)

Scientific culture in Europe and the refugee generation -- Germany and Weimar Berlin as the City of Science -- Origins of a social perspective: doing physical chemistry in Weimar Berlin -- Chemical dynamics and social dynamics in Berlin and Manchester -- Liberalism and the economic foundations of the "Republic of Science" -- Scientific freedom and the social functions of science -- Political foundations of the philosophies of science of Popper, Kuhn, and Polanyi -- Personal knowledge: argument, audiences, and sociological engagement (...) -- Epilogue: SSK, scientific constructivism, and the paradoxical legacy of Polanyi and the 1930s generation. (shrink)

‘Contract cheating’ has recently emerged as a form of academic dishonesty. It involves students contracting out their coursework to writers in order to submit the purchased assignments as their own work, usually via the internet. This form of cheating involves epistemic and ethical problems that are continuous with older forms of cheating, but which it also casts in a new form. It is a concern to educators because it is very difficult to detect, because it is arguably more fraudulent than (...) some other forms of plagiarism, and because it appears to be connected to a range of systemic problems within modern higher education. This paper provides an overview of the information and literature thus far available on the topic, including its definition, the problems it involves, its causal factors, and the ways in which educators might respond. We argue that while contract cheating is a concern, some of the suggested responses are themselves problematic, and that best practice responses to the issue should avoid moral panic and remain focussed on supporting honest students and good academic practice. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine recent critiques of the debate about defining disease, which claim that its use of conceptual analysis embeds the problematic assumption that the concept is classically structured. These critiques suggest, instead, developing plural stipulative definitions. Although we substantially agree with these critiques, we resist their implication that no general definition of “disease” is possible. We offer an alternative, inductive argument that disease cannot be classically defined and that the best explanation for this is that the concept (...) is structured as a cluster. We further argue that we do not need to reject the possibility of defining the general concept “disease” to legitimate developing stipulative definitions of disease that are relative to particular purposes. A cluster definition of disease is compatible with contextually motivated definitions, which may be considered précisifications of the more general cluster concept. (shrink)

Recently, concerns have been raised about the phenomenon of ‘overdiagnosis’, the diagnosis of a condition that is not causing harm, and will not come to cause harm. Along with practical, ethical, and scientific questions, overdiagnosis raises questions about our concept of disease. In this paper, we analyse overdiagnosis as an epistemic problem and show how it challenges many existing accounts of disease. In particular, it raises ques- tions about conceptual links drawn between disease and dysfunction, harm, and risk. We argue (...) that ‘disease’ should be considered a vague concept with a non-classical structure. On this view, overdiagnosed cases are ‘borderline’ cases of disease, falling in the zone between cases that are clearly disease, and cases that are clearly not disease. We then develop a pre ́cising definition of disease designed to provide practical help in preventing and limiting overdiagnosis. We argue that for this purpose, we can define disease as dysfunction that has a significant risk of causing severe harm to the patient. (shrink)

Bathos - remarque -- Pt. 1. Le champ de bataille -- Pt. 2. Kant et ses juges -- Pt. 3. Traité de bathologie.

Personalised medicine has been discussed as a medical paradigm shift that will improve health while reducing inefficiency and waste. At the same time, it raises new practical, regulatory, and ethical challenges. In this paper, we examine PM strategies epistemologically in order to develop capacities to address these challenges, focusing on a recently proposed strategy for developing patient-specific models from induced pluripotent stem cells so as to make individualised treatment predictions. We compare this strategy to two main PM strategies—stratified medicine and (...) computational models. Drawing on epistemological work in the philosophy of medicine, we explain why these two methods, while powerful, are neither truly personalised nor, epistemologically speaking, novel strategies. Both are forms of correlational black box. We then argue that the iPSC models would count as a new kind of black box. They would not rely entirely on mechanistic knowledge, and they would utilise correlational evidence in a different way from other strategies—a way that would enable personalised predictions. In arguing that the iPSC models would present a novel method of gaining evidence for clinical practice, we provide an epistemic analysis that can help to inform the practical, regulatory, and ethical challenges of developing an iPSC system. (shrink)

Recently, concerns have been raised about the phenomenon of 'overdiagnosis', the diagnosis of a condition that is not causing harm, and will not come to cause harm. Along with practical, ethical, and scientific questions, overdiagnosis raises questions about our concept of disease. In this paper, we analyse overdiagnosis as an epistemic problem and show how it challenges many existing accounts of disease. In particular, it raises questions about conceptual links drawn between disease and dysfunction, harm, and risk. We argue that (...) "disease" should be considered a vague concept with a nonclassical structure. On this view, overdiagnosed cases are 'borderline' cases of disease, falling in the zone between cases that are clearly disease, and cases that are clearly not disease. We then develop a précising definition of disease designed to provide practical help in preventing and limiting overdiagnosis. We argue that for this purpose, we can define disease as dysfunction that has a significant risk of causing severe harm to the patient. (shrink)