The emergence of new obstetrical and neonatal technologies, as well as more aggressive clinical management, has significantly improved the survival of extremely low birth weight infants. This development has heightened concerns about the limits of viability. ELBW infants, weighing less than 1,000 grams and no larger than the palm of one's hand, are often described as of late twentieth century technology. Improved survivability of ELBW infants has provided opportunities for long-term follow-up. Information on their physical and emotional development contributes to (...) developing standards of practice regarding their care. (shrink)

The theories of inclusive fitness and multilevel selection provide alternative perspectives on social evolution. The question of whether these perspectives are of equal generality remains a divisive issue. In an analysis based on the Price equation, Queller argued (by means of a principle he called the separation condition) that the two approaches are subject to the same limitations, arising from their fundamentally quantitative-genetical character. Recently, van Veelen et al. have challenged Queller’s results, using this as the basis for a broader (...) critique of the Price equation, the separation condition, and the very notion of inclusive fitness. Here we show that the van Veelen et al. model, when analyzed in the way Queller intended, confirms rather than refutes his original conclusions. We thereby confirm (i) that Queller’s separation condition remains a legitimate theoretical principle and (ii) that the standard inclusive fitness and multilevel approaches are indeed subject to the same limitations. (shrink)

In the first Critique, Kant claims to refute Moses Mendelssohn’s argument for the immortality of the soul. But some commentators, following Bennett (1974), have identified an apparent problem in the exchange: Mendelssohn appears to have overlooked the possibility that the “leap” between existence and non-existence might be a boundary or limit point in a continuous series, and Kant appears not to have exploited the lacuna, but to have instead offered an irrelevant criticism. Here, we argue that even if these commentators (...) are correct, an argument against the leap-as-limit possibility is implicit in claims that Mendelssohn accepts. Moreover, Kant’s criticism of Mendelssohn adapts naturally into a response to this argument, though Mendelssohn endorses further claims which enable him to address this Kantian response. To illustrate the philosophical issues in play, we conclude by noting the affinity between the Mendelssohnian argument we develop and several prominent arguments in contemporary metaphysics: David Lewis’s argument from vagueness for unrestricted composition, Ted Sider’s argument from vagueness for perdurantism, and Peter Unger’s argument from the problem of the many for substance dualism. In short, we argue that the philosophical issues involved in the Mendelssohn-Kant exchange are much richer than previous commentators have believed, and that there is a Mendelssohnian argument for the immortality of the soul (or anyway, the permanence of simples) that does not suffer from any obvious flaw. (shrink)

In June 1993, conjoined twins Amy and Angela Lakeberg became the focus of national attention. They shared a complex six‐chambered heart and one liver; only one could survive separation surgery, and even her chances were slim. The medical challenge was great and the ethical challenges were even greater.

A review of Richard E. Lee, Knowledge Matters: The Structures of Knowledge and the Crisis of the Modern World System.

This article is the lead piece in a special report that presents the results of a bioethical investigation into chimeric research, which involves the insertion of human cells into nonhuman animals and nonhuman animal embryos, including into their brains. Rapid scientific developments in this field may advance knowledge and could lead to new therapies for humans. They also reveal the conceptual, ethical, and procedural limitations of existing ethics guidance for human‐nonhuman chimeric research. Led by bioethics researchers working closely with an (...) interdisciplinary work group, the investigation focused on generating conceptual clarity and identifying improvements to governance approaches, with the goal of helping scholars, funders, scientists, institutional leaders, and oversight bodies (embryonic stem cell research oversight [ESCRO] committees and institutional animal care and use committees [IACUCs]) deliver principled and trustworthy oversight of this area of science. The article, which focuses on human‐nonhuman animal chimeric research that is stem cell based, identifies key ethical issues in and offers ten recommendations regarding the ethics and oversight of this research. Turning from bioethics’ previous focus on human‐centered questions about the ethics of “humanization” and this research's potential impact on concepts like human dignity, this article emphasizes the importance of nonhuman animal welfare concerns in chimeric research and argues for less‐siloed governance and oversight and more‐comprehensive public communication. (shrink)

This paper presents Integrated Information Theory (IIT) 4.0. IIT aims to account for the properties of experience in physical (operational) terms. It identifies the essential properties of experience (axioms), infers the necessary and sufficient properties that its substrate must satisfy (postulates), and expresses them in mathematical terms. In principle, the postulates can be applied to any system of units in a state to determine whether it is conscious, to what degree, and in what way. IIT offers a parsimonious explanation of (...) empirical evidence, makes testable predictions, and permits inferences and extrapolations. IIT 4.0 incorporates several developments of the past ten years, including a more accurate translation of axioms into postulates and mathematical expressions, the introduction of a unique measure of intrinsic information that is consistent with the postulates, and an explicit assessment of causal relations. By fully unfolding a system's irreducible cause-effect power, the distinctions and relations specified by a substrate can account for the quality of experience. (shrink)

How do our engagements with fictions and other products of the imagination compare to our experiences of the real world? Are the feelings we have about a novel's characters modelled on our thoughts about actual people? If it is wrong to feel pleasure over certain situations in real life, can it nonetheless be right to take pleasure in analogous scenarios represented in a fantasy or film? Should the desires we have for what goes on in a make-believe story cohere with (...) what we want to happen in the actual world? In Apt Imaginings, Jonathan Gilmore develops a new framework to pursue these questions, marshalling a wide range of research in aesthetics, the science of the emotions, moral philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and film and literary theory. Gilmore argues that, while there is a substantial empirical continuity in our feelings across art and life, the norms that govern the appropriateness of those responses across the divide are discontinuous. In this view, the evaluative criteria that determine the fit, correctness, or rationality of our emotions and desires for what is internal to a fiction can be contrary to those that govern our affective attitudes toward analogous things in the real world. In short, it can be right to embrace within a story what one would condemn in real life. The theory Gilmore defends in this volume helps to explain our complex and sometimes conflicted attitudes toward works of the imagination; challenges the popular view that fictions serve to refine our moral sensibilities; and exposes a kind of autonomy of the imagination that can render our responses to art immune to standard real-world epistemic, practical, and affective kinds of criticism. (shrink)

In our recent article, together with more than 60 of our colleagues, we outlined a proposal for drug policy reform consisting of four specific yet interrelated strategies: (1) de jure decriminalization of all psychoactive substances currently deemed illicit for personal use or possession (so-called “recreational” drugs), accompanied by harm reduction policies and initiatives akin to the Portugal model; (2) expunging criminal convictions for nonviolent offenses pertaining to the use or possession of small quantities of such drugs (and releasing those serving (...) time for these offenses), while delivering retroactive ameliorative relief; (3) the ultimate legalization and careful regulation of currently illicit drugs; and (4) the delivery of a new “Marshall Plan” focused on community-building initiatives, expanded harm reduction programs, and social and health care support efforts (Earp et al. 2021). We were gratified to see so many thoughtful commentaries on our proposal, and we respond to them in part in this reply. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Current State of Vico ScholarshipDavid L. MarshallGiambattista Vico is one of those chameleon figures in the history of ideas who is so intellectually rich that he can be constantly reinvented. It is indicative of the rich ambiguity of his thought that two of the most prominent intellectual historians working today should have come to opposite conclusions about his relationship to the master-category of eighteenth-century intellectual history: for Mark (...) Lilla, Vico was a Counter-Enlightenment thinker; for Jonathan Israel, he was a figure in the Radical Enlightenment.1 Vico’s fungibility gives reason for pause. Someone who can be folded into all manner of intellectual projects may be suspect. But Vico is more colonizing than colonized and, thus, the diversity of his receptions is evidence of creativity, and not merely malleability. The only way to deal with Vico is to dive into the multiplicity of plausible interpretations and find in them the makings of a new line of inquiry. Vico’s moment of flourishing in the Anglophone world came initially in the 1960s and 1970s, but if the diversity and quality of receptions in the last five years is anything to go by then we can say that Vico remains—especially in Italian, French, and German— an intellectual historical provocateur.This review essay surveys such literature and makes a single recurring observation: the various specifications of Vico’s place in intellectual history come into alignment as dimensions of what one might term Vico’s reinvention of rhetoric. As a professor of rhetoric in a culture that possessed—for [End Page 141] the most part—very weak oratorical institutions, Vico found himself in a particularly paradoxical situation. Recent research on Vico suggests that this paradox worked itself out in Vico’s thought in a number of highly interesting ways. First, Vico constitutes an opportunity for intellectual historians of the scientific revolution by offering a simultaneously rhetorical and pragmatic gloss of the early modern logic of experiment. Second, for intellectual historians of religion, Vico constitutes a study in how early moderns could examine the rhetorical functioning of theological vocabularies without necessarily committing themselves to the independent existence of the referents of those vocabularies. Third, for intellectual historians of Enlightenment, Vico confirms that encyclopedism was not a merely French practice in the eighteenth century and that the kind of omnicompetence implicit in encyclopedic multidisciplinarity had roots in rhetorical criticism. Fourth, intellectual historians of Counter-Enlightenment cannot easily fold Vico into their narratives, in part because his legal works (which have been read as a call for cultural retrenchment in response to early modern skepticism) are in fact an account of how Greek rhetoric found its analogue in Roman jurisprudence. Fifth, for historians of the idea of language, Vico demonstrates that there were powerful alternatives in early modernity to the dominant contractualist account of the origin of language (offered by Hobbes, Locke, and others) that were rhetorical and yet did not emphasize the priority of speech over writing.When it appeared in 1961, Nicola Badaloni’s Introduzione a G.B. Vico was the most sophisticated attempt to locate Vico in the Neapolitan philosophical tradition. In many ways, it remains the best attempt at contextualizing a thinker who is notoriously difficult to situate among his contemporaries. John Robertson’s recent Case for the Enlightenment has many virtues (not least its revealing supposition that Vico ought to be read alongside Hume), but as an attempt at contextualization Robertson’s work is not as rich as Badaloni’s.2 In particular, Badaloni did a great deal to reconstruct the history of natural philosophical inquiry at Naples in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Badaloni’s description, Naples was a place in which a strong culture of natural philosophical investigation set the foundation for concepts such as experimentalism and pantheism. Furthermore, Badaloni argued that, although such concepts originated in natural philosophy, they cross-pollinated with ideas prominent in the Neapolitan schools of jurisprudence—particularly probabilism. In the [End Page 142] broadest terms, Badaloni argued that Vico’s intellectual project was an examination of the pantheistic principle that Jovis omnia plena (“all things are made of Jove”) in the domains of law, poetry, and history... (shrink)

Keith Thomas: Gerald Edward Aylmer, 1926-2000 Adrian Hollis: William Spencer Barrett, 1914-2001 Bruce Williams: Charles Frederick Carter, 1919-2002 Malcolm Mackintosh: John Erickson, 1929-2002 J. H .R. Davis: Raymond William Firth, 1901-2002 F. M. L. Thompson: Hrothgar John Habakkuk, 1915-2002 A. W. Price: Richard Mervyn Hare, 1919-2002 Hugh Lloyd-Jones: Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, 1921-2003 Michael Lapidge and Peter Matthews: Vivien Anne Law, 1954-2002 Ann Moss: John Lough, 1913-2000 Terence Cave: Ian Dalrymple McFarlane, 1915-2002 Ludwig Paul: David Neil MacKenzie, 1926-2001 Peter Birks: John (...) Kieran Barry Moylan Nicholas, 1919-2002 Jonathan Shepard: Dimitri Dimitrievich Obolensky, 1918-2001 David Cannadine: John Harold Plumb, 1911-2001 Daniel Waley: Nicolai Rubinstein, 1911-2002 Ian Wood: John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, 1916-1985 R. G. M. Nisbet: William Smith Watt, 1913-2002 G. W. Bernard: Richard Bruce Wernham, 1906-1999. (shrink)

Risk-weighted expected utility theory is motivated by small-world problems like the Allais paradox, but it is a grand-world theory by nature. And, at the grand-world level, its ability to handle the Allais paradox is dubious. The REU model described in Risk and Rationality turns out to be risk-seeking rather than risk-averse on one natural way of formulating the Allais gambles in the grand-world context. This result illustrates a general problem with the case for REU theory, we argue. There is a (...) tension between the small-world thinking marshaled against standard expected utility theory, and the grand-world thinking inherent to the risk-weighted alternative. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 278-294 [Access article in PDF] Homer's Human Animal: Ritual Combat in the Iliad Jonathan Gottschall I Freud called Darwin's revelation of man's animality a blow to human narcissism on par with Copernicus's finding that Earth is not the center of the solar system. While Darwin hinted at our bestiality in the Origin of Species, in later publications he conveyed the disturbing and fantastic (...) news that our ancestors were, as he playfully wrote in private notebooks, "monkey men." 1 Adam and Eve were not lovingly molded from the clay; they were the rude grandchildren of a "hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World." 2 Darwin's news was greeted by his contemporaries with a range of responses, from hooting derision to holy indignation, to resigned acceptance. Yet his hypothesis has been amply verified by the work of geneticists, primatologists, biologists, archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and others. Nowadays we are not too chagrined to hear that we share a common ancestor with the other apes; it is orthodox evolutionary theory.But perhaps we give Darwin rather too much credit for this discovery. Surely he deserves esteem for deciphering the mechanism of evolution in natural selection, for helping demonstrate our kinship with other primates, and for providing subsequent scientists a head start for their research. He also deserves the less technical distinctions of giving human self-regard a terrific bloody nose and of helping to sire the modern existential crisis. But while Darwin may be responsible for giving scientific credibility to the notion that humans do not stand aloof from the rest of the animal kingdom, he was far from the first to come to this realization. [End Page 278]The artists of every age and the builders of mythology have come, with wondrous unity of conception, to similar conclusions. In fact, the world's earliest known pictorial art conveys this message. The hundreds of paintings and etchings adorning the walls of the Chauvet Cave in France, though over thirty thousand years old, include depictions of human-animal compounds, including a figure that is half-human and half-bison. 3 This ancient suggestion that the human and animal realms overlap is likewise indicated in the common mythological figure of the human-animal hybrid. As Dorothy Dinnerstein says: "Myth images of half-human beasts like the mermaid and the Minotaur express an old, fundamental, very slowly clarifying communal insight: that our species' nature is internally inconsistent; that our continuities with, and our differences from, the earth's other animals are mysterious and profound." 4 So Darwin did not invent the concept of the human animal. Rather, he marshaled the evidence and developed the theoretical model that established scientific credence for an ancient belief.The Ancient Greeks were particularly fascinated by hybrids blending human and animal morphology. Their mythology abounds with queer, conflicted, compound creatures. And so does their literature. Their first and greatest poet, Homer, was characteristically Greek in his attention to half-human creatures. The sirens, the centaurs, the minotaur, the chimera, Scylla, "Ox-eyed" Hera, and "Owl-eyed" Athena are all present or alluded to in his work. All of these figures symbolically insinuate that beasts dwell under every human skin.But Homer's suggestions of human animality do not cease with these compound creatures. In the Iliad, he presses this theme with depictions of warriors who are, physically, fully human. Homer suggests, however, that their dispositions and behavior patterns are, often, fully brutish. For Homer, the human animal is the most incongruous crossbreed of all: he is queer, conflicted, inconsistent, godlike, and brute. It is the "in-betweenness" of the human animal that makes him tragic. His soul would gravitate toward the empyrean, but his body roots him steadfastly in the blood and filth of animal life. The father Zeus, perhaps recognizing this, says: "In truth there is nothing more wretched on earth than man, of all things that breathe and move." 5The Iliad suggests human animality in a variety of ways. First, we are aligned with... (shrink)

Jonathan Swift is best known as a satirist, a poet, and a polemicist, but he was also a historian and his historical vision played a prominent role in his thinking and in his writings. (Marshall 2015) This chapter explains how the experience of ‘loss’ affected Swift’s historical vision. Swift was a loser in many respects. Born Irish, Swift aspired to achieve professional success as a clergyman in the Church of England and as a politician in the service of (...) the Tory party. For the last four years of Queen Anne’s reign, Swift enjoyed privileged access to the machinations of Robert Harley’s ‘great’ ministry. Swift’s service to the crown was not rewarded with preferment but rather with exile back to Ireland. In his later life, Swift would reinvent himself as an Irish patriot and he would continue to work on revising his History of the Four Last Years of the Queen (written 1712-13; published 1758). (shrink)

In this paper1 I shall present not just the conscience of Huckleberry Finn but two others as well. One of them is the conscience of Heinrich Himmler. He became a Nazi in 1923; he served drably and quietly, but well, and was rewarded with increasing responsibility and power. At the peak of his career he held many offices and commands, of which the most powerful was that of leader of the S.S. - the principal police force of the Nazi regime. (...) In this capacity, Himmler commanded the whole concentration-camp system, and was responsible for the execution of the so-called ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’. It is important for my purposes that this piece of social engineering should be thought of not abstractly but in concrete terms of Jewish families being marched to what they think are bath-houses, to the accompaniment of loud-speaker renditions of extracts from The Merry Widow and Tales of Hoffman, there to be choked to death by poisonous gases. Altogether, Himmler succeeded in murdering about four and a half million of them, as well as several million gentiles, mainly Poles and Russians. The other conscience to be discussed is that of the Calvinist theologian and philosopher Jonathan Edwards. He lived in the first half of the eighteenth century, and has a good claim to be considered America’s first serious and considerable philosophical thinker. He was for many years a widely-renowned preacher and Congregationalist minister in New England; in 1748 a dispute with his congregation led him to resign (he couldn’t accept their view that unbelievers should be admitted to the Lord’s Supper in the hope that it would convert them); for some years after that he worked as a missionary, preaching to Indians through an interpreter;, then in 1758 he accepted the presidency of what is now Princeton University, and within two months died from a smallpox inoculation. Along the way he wrote some first-rate philosophy: his book attacking the notion of free will is still sometimes read.. (shrink)

Various as these are, they have enough in common for them all to count as events, and in recent years philosophers have turned their attention to this..

1. IntroductionA popular view in metaphysics is that which propositions are true depends upon how the world is . In more evocative language, truth requires ground. This thought then gets used to do some serious work. As Sider has it, ‘[t]he point of … the principle that truth supervenes on being is to rule out dubious ontologies’. Here, I argue that ‘dubious’ ontologies are theoretically virtuous.

Here, I defend the view that there is no sensible way to pin a truth-maker objection on presentism. First, I suggest that if we adopt truth-maker maximalism then the presentist can requisition appropriate ontological resources with impunity. Second, if we deny maximalism, then the presentist can sensibly restrict the truth-maker principle in order to avoid the demand for truth-makers for talk about the non-present.

The knowledge norm of assertion is mainly in competition with a high probability or rational credibility norm. The argument for the knowledge norm that I offer turns on cases in which a hearer responds to a speaker's assertion by asserting another sentence that would lower the probability of the speaker's assertion, were its probability less than one. In cases like this, though with qualifications, is the hearer's contribution a challenge to the speaker's assertion or complementary to it? My answer is (...) the latter, and that only the knowledge norm yields that answer.The cases that I rely on follow from an elementary probability relation, though one that is inconsistent with the still influential relevance criterion for confirmation and evidence . Assume, for illustrative purposes, that p is in your belief corpus, as a consequence of your believing ∨ ∨ . 1 You learn that ∼ & ∼ , which would lessen the probability of p, were its probability less than one, 2 since it eliminates two rows of the truth-table in which p holds. What conclusion do you reach about p?Rather than withdrawing p, you acquire the belief that p & ∼ s & ∼ r, even though Formula where pr would be the subjective or epistemic probability of p on a probabilistic view of the knowledge norm before learning ∼ & ∼ . Instead of withdrawal …. (shrink)

The Introduction discusses determinables and similarity spaces and ties together the contributions to Color Ontology and Color Science.

Jonathan Walkan challenges cognitive science's dominant model of mental representation and proposes a novel, well-devised alternative. The traditional view in the cognitive sciences uses a linguistic model of mental representation. That logic-based model of cognition informs and constrains both the classical tradition of artificial intelligence and modeling in the connectionist tradition. It falls short, however, when confronted by the frame problem---the lack of a principled way to determine which features of a representation must be updated when new information becomes (...) available. So far, proposed alternatives, including the imagistic model, have not resolved the problem. Waskan proposes the Intrinsic Cognitive Models hypothesis, according to which representational states can be concpetualized as the cognitive equivalent of scale models.Waskan argues further that the proposal that humans harbor and manipulate cognitive counterparts to scale models offers the only viable explanation for what most clearly differentiates humans from other creatures: the capacity to engage in truth-preserving manipulation of representations. The ICM hypothesis, he claims, can be distinguished from sentence-based accounts of truth preservation in a way that is fully compatible with what is known about the brain. (shrink)

Leading scholars debate politically progressive perspectives on bioethics and the implications for society, politics, and science in the twenty-first century.

The last two decades have witnessed a crescendo of allegations that clinical translation is rife with waste and inefficiency. Patient advocates argue that excessively demanding regulations delay access to life‐saving drugs, research funders claim that too much basic science languishes in academic laboratories, journal editors allege that biased reporting squanders public investment in biomedical research, and drug companies (and their critics) argue that far too much is expended in pharmaceutical development.But how should stakeholders evaluate the efficiency of translation and proposed (...) reforms to drug development? Effective reforms require an accurate model of the systems they aspire to improve—their components, their proper functions, and their pathologies. However, there is currently no explicit and well‐developed model of translation for evaluating such criticisms.In what follows, we offer an explicit model of clinical translation. Many discussions of clinical translation and its pathologies presume that its main output is tangible: new drugs, vaccines, devices, and diagnostics. We disagree. We argue that the principal output of clinical translation is information—in particular, information about the coordinated set of materials, practices, and constraints needed to safely unlock the therapeutic or preventive activities of drugs, biologics, and diagnostics. To develop this information calls for a process far different from a simple linear progression of clinical trials; it requires exploratory sampling of many different elements in this set. Our model points to some limitations and liabilities of influential proposals for reforming research. It also reveals some underrecognized opportunities for improving the efficiency of clinical translation. (shrink)

The propagation of errors in physics research is studied, with particular attention being paid to the effectiveness of the erratum in avoiding error propagation. We study the citation history of 17 physics papers which have significant errata associated with them. It would appear that the existence of an erratum does not significantly decrease the frequency with which a paper is cited and in most cases the erratum isnot cited along with the original paper. The authors comment on implications for the (...) responsibilities of authors. (shrink)

Experimental manipulations are a key means to establish causal relationships in microbiology. However, challenges remain to establish the applicability of such experiments beyond the precise conditions in which they were conducted. Ecological information can help address these challenges by describing the extent to which an experimentally-determined mechanism can explain the natural phenomenon that it is purported to cause.

Federal policies on human subjects research have performed a near‐about face. In the 1970s, policies were motivated chiefly by a belief that subjects needed protection from the harms and risks of research. Now the driving concern is that patients, and the populations they represent, need access to the benefits of research.

abstract The most well‐known liberal‐egalitarian defence of cultural rights, provided by Will Kymlicka, presents culture as a primary good, and thus a resource that ought to be distributed according to some fair egalitarian criteria. Kymlicka relies on the intuition that inequalities between persons that are the result of brute luck rather than personal choice are unjust in making the case for various multicultural rights. This article makes two main claims. First, the standard luck egalitarian intuition on which Kymlicka's argument relies (...) cannot justify what he calls ‘polyethnic rights,’ in particular cultural and religious exemptions from generally applicable laws. Second, I argue that such exemptions are justifiable by appealing to the public value of fair equality of opportunity, properly construed. (shrink)

A survey was conducted of a subset of the physics community in order to gain insight into attitudes towards integrating ethics into the physics curriculum. The results indicated significant support among some groups for such an integration yet also revealed significant barriers to this process. Respondents were also asked to suggest topics which should be covered under the heading of ethical issues in physics. The great variety of results indicates both that there are many issues worth investigating and that many (...) in the physics community have given a great deal of thought to these issues. (shrink)

This article makes four claims. First, that the analytic/Continental split in political theory stems from an unarticulated disagreement about human nature, with analytics believing we have an innate set of mostly compatible moral and political inclinations, and Continentals seeing such things as alterable products of historical contingency. Second, that we would do better to talk of Continental-political-theory versus Rawlsian-political-philosophy, given that the former avoids arguments over principles, whilst the latter leaves genuine analytic philosophy behind. Third, that Continentals suffer from a (...) lack of such arguments, even by their own lights, whilst Rawlsians suffer from inconsistencies within the thought-patterns on which their principles depend. Fourth, that there is an alternative method – ‘normative behaviourism’ – that at least tries to move beyond the problems of both approaches, whilst sharing an idea of ‘praxis’ with the first, and an idea of deriving-principles-from-existing-judgements with the second. (shrink)

Many commentators have expressed concern that large investments in biomedical research over the past two decades have not been translated effectively into clinical applications. In its Critical Path Report, the Food and Drug Administration characterized the problem as a “technological disconnect between discovery and the product development process,” and documented that the number of investigational new drugs submitted to the agency had declined “significantly” since 2000. Along a similar vein, another study found that only five of 101 basic science studies (...) showing significant therapeutic promise were successfully translated into clinical applications.This perceived translational lag is stimulating a shift toward human testing of study interventions earlier in the drug development process. One indication of this trend is a recent guidance encouraging sponsors to pursue human “exploratory” studies before embarking on phase I trials. (shrink)

Jonathan Bennett's analysis of the second half of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant concerns himself with topics such as substance, the nature of the self, the cosmos, freedom and the existence of God, continues to be an engaging and accessible exploration of Kant's major work. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Karl Ameriks, illuminating its enduring importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this influential work has been revived (...) for a new generation of readers. (shrink)

Jonathan Dancy; I *—The Presidential Address: Why there is really No Such Thing as the Theory of Motivation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95.

The Food and Drug Administration and the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products recently issued documents encouraging sponsors to consider microdose testing before launching Phase I trials, and many commentators predict that such methodologies will be applied more routinely in drug development. However, exploratory testing has provoked several ethical criticisms. Skeptics question the value and validity of microdose trials, and whether they present a reasonable balance of risks and benefits for subjects. Another major criticism is that such studies (...) serve mainly commercial ends. The present article explores these and other ethical concerns for studies conducted in the oncology setting. It concludes that microdosing is not inconsistent with prevailing practices in Phase I research, and that in principle, such studies could strengthen the ethical basis for Phase I trials by providing them better evidentiary justification. (shrink)