Controversy and activism have long been linked to the subject of primate research. Even in the midst of raging ethical debates surrounding fertility treatments, genetically modified foods and stem-cell research, there has been no reduction in the campaigns of activists worldwide. Plying their trade of intimidation aimed at ending biomedical experimentation in all animals, they have succeeded in creating an environment where research institutions, often painted as guilty until proven innocent, have avoided addressing the issue for fear of becoming targets. (...) One area of intense debate is the use of primates in stroke research. Despite the fact that stroke kills more people each year than AIDS and malaria, and less than 5% of patients are candidates for current therapies, there is significant opposition to primate stroke research. A balanced examination of the ethics of primate stroke research is thus of broad interest to all areas of biomedical research. (shrink)

In a series of three experiments, we explored the nature of implicit representations in change blindness . Using 3 × 3 letter arrays, we asked subjects to locate changes in paired arrays separated by 80 ms ISIs, in which one, two or three letters of a row in the second array changed. In one testing version, a tone followed the second array, signaling a row for partial report . In the other version, no PR was required. After Ss reported whether (...) a change had been detected and the PR had been completed , they were asked to identify a degraded letter trigram that was either novel, or from a previously shown row . Our findings indicate that when CB occurs, both the pre-change and post-change stimulus information primes despite its unavailability to consciousness. Surprisingly, findings also indicate that when change detection occurs only the post-change information primes. (shrink)

Controversy and activism have long been linked to the subject of primate research. Even in the midst of raging ethical debates surrounding fertility treatments, genetically modified foods and stem-cell research, there has been no reduction in the campaigns of activists worldwide. Plying their trade of intimidation aimed at ending biomedical experimentation in all animals, they have succeeded in creating an environment where research institutions, often painted as guilty until proven innocent, have avoided addressing the issue for fear of becoming targets. (...) One area of intense debate is the use of primates in stroke research. Despite the fact that stroke kills more people each year than AIDS and malaria, and less than 5% of patients are candidates for current therapies, there is significant opposition to primate stroke research. A balanced examination of the ethics of primate stroke research is thus of broad interest to all areas of biomedical research. (shrink)

Attention is necessary for the conscious perception of any object. Objects not attended to are not seen. What is it that captures attention when we are engaged in some attention-absorbing task? Earlier research has shown that there are only a very few stimuli which have this power and therefore are reliably detected under these conditions . The two most reliable are the observer’s own name and a happy face icon which seem to capture attention by virtue of their meaning. Three (...) experiments are described which explore whether these stimuli are detected under conditions, heretofore unexamined, which either cause inattentional blindness or are associated with a perceptual failure associated with the limits of attention. The evidence obtained indicates that these stimuli have a unique capacity to capture and extend the limits of attention under conditions in which this has been deemed highly unlikely. (shrink)

In German Idealism and the Jew , Michael Mack uncovers the deep roots of anti-Semitism in the German philosophical tradition. While many have read German anti-Semitism as a reaction against Enlightenment philosophy, Mack instead contends that the redefinition of the Jews as irrational, oriental Others forms the very cornerstone of German idealism, including Kant's conception of universal reason. Offering the first analytical account of the connection between anti-Semitism and philosophy, Mack begins his exploration by showing how (...) the fundamental thinkers in the German idealist tradition--Kant, Hegel, and, through them, Feuerbach and Wagner--argued that the human world should perform and enact the promises held out by a conception of an otherworldly heaven. But their respective philosophies all ran aground on the belief that the worldly proved incapable of transforming itself into this otherworldly ideal. To reconcile this incommensurability, Mack argues, philosophers created a construction of Jews as symbolic of the "worldliness" that hindered the development of a body politic and that served as a foil to Kantian autonomy and rationality. In the second part, Mack examines how Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig, and Freud, among others, grappled with being both German and Jewish. Each thinker accepted the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, in varying degrees, while simultaneously critiquing anti-Semitism in order to develop the modern Jewish notion of what it meant to be enlightened--a concept that differed substantially from that of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner. By speaking the unspoken in German philosophy, this book profoundly reshapes our understanding of it. (shrink)

It is held that absolute poverty causes approximately one third of all human deaths, some 18 million annually, and blights billions of lives with hunger and disease. This book develops universalizable norms aimed at tackling absolute poverty and the complex and multilayered problems associated with it.

This comprehensive Handbook presents the major perspectives within philosophy and literary studies on the relations, overlaps and tensions between philosophy and literature. Drawing on recent work in philosophy and literature, literary theory, philosophical aesthetics, literature as philosophy and philosophy as literature, its twenty-nine chapters plus substantial Introduction and Afterword examine the ways in which philosophy and literature depend on each other and interact, while also contrasting with each other in that they necessarily exclude or incorporate each other. This book establishes (...) an enduring framework for structuring the broad themes defining the relations between philosophy and literature and organising the main topics in the field. Key Features • Structured in five parts addressing philosophy as literature, philosophy of literature, philosophical aesthetics, literary criticism and theory, and main areas of work within philosophy and literature • An Introduction setting out the main concerns of the field through discussion of the major themes along with the individual topics • An Afterword looking at the interactions between philosophy and literature through itself enacting philosophical and literary writing while examining the question of how they can be brought together The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Literature is an essential resource for scholars, researchers and advanced students in philosophy of literature, philosophy as literature, literary theory, literature as philosophy, and the philosophical aesthetics of literature. It is an ideal volume for researchers, advanced students and scholars in philosophy, literary studies, philosophy and literature, cultural studies, classical studies and other related fields. (shrink)

In _German Idealism and the Jew_, Michael Mack uncovers the deep roots of anti-Semitism in the German philosophical tradition. While many have read German anti-Semitism as a reaction against Enlightenment philosophy, Mack instead contends that the redefinition of the Jews as irrational, oriental Others forms the very cornerstone of German idealism, including Kant's conception of universal reason. Offering the first analytical account of the connection between anti-Semitism and philosophy, Mack begins his exploration by showing how the (...) fundamental thinkers in the German idealist tradition—Kant, Hegel, and, through them, Feuerbach and Wagner—argued that the human world should perform and enact the promises held out by a conception of an otherworldly heaven. But their respective philosophies all ran aground on the belief that the worldly proved incapable of transforming itself into this otherworldly ideal. To reconcile this incommensurability, Mack argues, philosophers created a construction of Jews as symbolic of the "worldliness" that hindered the development of a body politic and that served as a foil to Kantian autonomy and rationality. In the second part, Mack examines how Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Franz Rosenzweig, and Freud, among others, grappled with being both German and Jewish. Each thinker accepted the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, in varying degrees, while simultaneously critiquing anti-Semitism in order to develop the modern Jewish notion of what it meant to be enlightened—a concept that differed substantially from that of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Wagner. By speaking the unspoken in German philosophy, this book profoundly reshapes our understanding of it. (shrink)

Strangely enough, Kant still serves to represent not only “the good German” but also “the good European.” This state of affairs comes perhaps most clearly to the fore in Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power. Written in the wake of the Iraq War, this political essay aligns the U.S. administration's willingness to refer to military action with Hobbes, while contrasting it with a “postmodern” European policy, the alleged Kantianism of which is marked by a refusal to resort to force, preferring (...) instead a formal proceduralism in international relations. The difference between the United States and Europe thus comes down to.. (shrink)

This paper analyzes how 'Jewishness' functions as a scapegoat for the apparently unbridgeable gap between spirit and matter in Hegel's social and aesthetic theory. If Hegel accuses 'the Jews' and 'Judaism' of inhabiting a radical divide between the empirical and the spiritual - a divide that coincides with the one between body and body politic - he follows the trajectory of Kant's opposition between autonomy and heteronomy. Kant's notion of freedom describes reason's transcendence of the material world, but this state (...) of autonomy paradoxically depends on the heteronomous force of legal power that enforces a 'Mine and Yours' ownership and property distinction. In Kant's account 'Jewishness' embodies a social way of life founded on superstition (Aberglaube) that enacts the opposite of autonomy and is heteronomously bound to objects of empirical reality, whereas the 'Mine and Yours' ownership and property distinction of a Kantian civil society teaches the foregoing of material goods, if contact with them violates positive law. Developing Kant's idealism, Hegel accuses 'the Jews' of making immediate being absolute. By conflating 'Jewishness' and materialism, Hegel excludes 'the Jews' from his idealist conception of the body politic. Key Words: anti-Semitism • autonomy • body • culture • dialectics • German idealism • Hegel • heteronomy • immutability • Kant. (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary relevance of Spinoza today.

Against the backdrop of Walter Benjamin's famous essay, “Unpacking My Library”, this article, by the Librarian of the Warburg Institute, tells the story of the many times that the Warburg Library has been packed and unpacked. First it was the private collection of Aby Warburg, later a public institution, originally in Hamburg and then in London from 1933 to the present. This essay also explores the various ways in which books have been — and continue to be — acquired by (...) the Warburg Library, including publication, donation, recommendation, and purchase. Each of these methods is not only discussed but also examined in light of Benjamin's account of the acquisition of his own library. Moreover, Benjamin's view that collections lose their meaning when they cease to be personal is challenged by the example of the Warburg Library, which has been transformed from a private collection containing around 15,000 books in 1911 to a public institution today housing over 350,000 volumes, while still maintaining its unique character. (shrink)

Michael Mack joins a number of thinkers - including Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and Jonathan Israel - in the effort to locate Spinoza within an alternative current of modernity. Akin especially to Israel's portrait, Mack presents Spinoza as an enlightenment thinker who deepens and radicalises the major concepts associated with the modern age: equality, fraternity, and liberty. Distinguishing Mack's study from either Israel's sweeping history of ideas or the Marxist effort to produce an anomalous (...) thread in the history of philosophy is his alliance of Spinoza with Herder's philosophical anthropology, the literary productions of Goethe and Eliot, and the thought of Rosenzweig and Freud. Mack links these figures within a "spectral" constellation, not only because they together sketch an alternative to the dominant Kantian tradition, but also because they recognise and affirm the "undecidability" of the human condition. A spectre is between worlds, a disquieting figure of present absence, and thus blurs definitions, boundaries, and categories. Indebted significantly to feminist analyses of Spinoza (Gatens and Lloyd), Mack thematises Spinoza's influence on these thinkers primarily as a confounder of binary oppositions between mind/body, reason/passion, nature/culture, private/public, and self/other. The undecidability of frontiers and concepts that characterises this alter-tradition, according to Mack, yields a profound suspicion of hierarchies of any kind and a keen interest in narrative as "the constitutive fabric of politics, identity, society, religion, and the larger sphere of culture.". (shrink)

Marshall et al. (2024) raise questions regarding patient refusals of care. In this commentary we address refusals of care from the lens of patient autonomy and provide suggestions for patient cente...

I. Die Differenz von Gut und (Ge- )recht - Eine ethische Grundunterscheidung -- II. Konsequenzen für die moderne Ethik -- III. Vier philosophische Lösungsversuche zur Klärung der Differenz -- IV. Der Umgang christlicher Ethik mit dem Zusammenhang von Gut und Gerecht -- V. Paradigmatische Impulse für die christliche Ethik -- VI. Politische Gerechtigkeit und eine umfassende christliche Theorie des Guten.

Fodor and Lepore, in their recent book "Holism," maintain that if an inference from semantic anatomism to semantic holism is allowed, certain fairly deleterious consequences follow. In Section 1 Fodor and Lepore's terminology is construed and amended where necessary with the result that the aforementioned deleterious consequences are neither so apparent nor straightforward as they had suggested. In Section 2 their "Argument A" is considered in some detail. In Section 3 their "argument attributed to Quine" is examined at length and (...) a shorter and more perspicacious argument suggested which avoids their charge that the Quinean argument is guilty of an equivocation on the word 'statement'. (shrink)

In this paper I outline the PAIR account of joint attention as a perceptual-practical, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that to explain joint attention we need to leave the received understanding of propositions and propositional attitudes and the picture of content connected to it behind and embrace the notions of subject mode and position mode content. I also explore the relation between joint attention and communication.

ObjectivesThe end of life is an ethically challenging time requiring complex decision-making. This study describes ethical frameworks among physician trainees, explores how these frameworks manifest and relates these frameworks to experiences delivering end-of-life care.DesignWe conducted semistructured in-depth exploratory qualitative interviews with physician trainees about experiences of end-of-life care and moral distress. We analysed the interviews using thematic analysis.SettingAcademic teaching hospitals in the United States and United Kingdom.ParticipantsWe interviewed 30 physician trainees. We purposefully sampled across three domains we expected to be (...) associated with individual ethics in order to elicit a diversity of ethical and experiential perspectives.ResultsSome trainees subscribed to a best interest ethical framework, characterised by offering recommendations consistent with the patient’s goals and values, presenting only medically appropriate choices and supporting shared decision-making between the patient/family and medical team. Others endorsed an autonomy framework, characterised by presenting all technologically feasible choices, refraining from offering recommendations and prioritising the voice of patient/family as the decision-maker.ConclusionsThis study describes how physician trainees conceptualise their roles as being rooted in an autonomy or best interest framework. Physician trainees have limited clinical experience and decision-making autonomy and may have ethical frameworks that are dynamic and potentially highly influenced by experiences providing end-of-life care. A better understanding of how individual physicians’ ethical frameworks influences the care they give provides opportunities to improve patient communication and advance the role of shared decision-making to ensure goal-aligned end-of-life care. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 27-30, July 2012.

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)