The purpose of the research was to study Finnish people's attitudes towards biomedical research and whether the research sponsor makes a difference to those attitudes. A survey questionnaire was sent to a random sample of 25-64 years old. Respondents had a positive attitude towards biomedical research and there were only small variations by population group. When asked whether one's own clinical blood samples could be used in scientific biomedical research, 84 per cent of the respondents would allow it. The most (...) important reasons for giving routinely collected samples to a biobank were altruistic. Attitudes were strongly dependent on the sponsor of the research. Domestic research was looked at more positively than international research. Whether research was made by a public or private actor had less impact. The results suggest that people want to be research participants to help such research of their own free will, and to choose whom they help. This has an impact on the way participants are informed, on the criteria used by ethics committees and other research regulators, and also on transparency and access to research results. (shrink)

Adaptive phenotypic plasticity allows organisms to cope with environmental variability, and yet, despite its adaptive significance, phenotypic plasticity is neither ubiquitous nor infinite. In this review, we merge developmental and population genetic perspectives to explore costs and limits on the evolution of plasticity. Specifically, we focus on the role of modularity in developmental genetic networks as a mechanism underlying phenotypic plasticity, and apply to it lessons learned from population genetic theory on the interplay between relaxed selection and mutation accumulation. We (...) argue that the environmental specificity of gene expression and the associated reduction in pleiotropic constraints drive a fundamental tradeoff between the range of plasticity that can be accommodated and mutation accumulation in alternative developmental networks. This tradeoff has broad implications for understanding the origin and maintenance of plasticity and may contribute to a better understanding of the role of plasticity in the origin, diversification, and loss of phenotypic diversity. (shrink)

This volume asks how and why the concept of nature has changed its meaning in modernity and whether a rearticulation of premodern ideas about nature is possible. Building on the work of Voegelin, Strauss, Lonergan, Finnis, and others, the book compares and contrasts classical, medieval, and modern conceptions of nature.

Modern thought is sometimes presented as introducing a “turn to the subject” absent from ancient and medieval thought, although the schools of thought associated with Bernard Lonergan, Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and the new natural law theory often find subjectivity already operative in the older forms. In this volume, sixteen leading scholars examine the turn to the subject in modern philosophy and consider its historical antecedents in ancient and medieval thought.

In this essay I argue that Thomas Aquinas is not as naively optimistic about the noetic effects of sin as is often portrayed by standard neo-Calvinist objections. Still, his metaphysics of the human person requires some development to better explain the mind’s impairment by sin, a development made possible by the work of Bernard Lonergan and the resulting Lonergan/Aquinas (L/A) model of the noetic effects of sin.

A critical evaluation of Deane-Peter Baker’s use of Charles Taylor to overcome perceived inadequacies in Reformed epistemology. Baker claims that a successful response to the de jure objection must provide motivation for the unbeliever to seriously consider the truth of Christianity, but this very test is undone by Taylor’s A Secular Age.

Consumer involvement in clinical research is an essential component of a comprehensive response during emergent health challenges. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the moderation of research policies and regulation to facilitate research may raise ethical issues. Meaningful, diverse consumer involvement can help to identify practical approaches to prioritize, design, and conduct rapidly developed clinical research amid current events. Consumer involvement might also elucidate the acceptability of flexible ethics review approaches that aim to protect participants whilst being sensitive to the challenging context (...) in which research is taking place. This article describes the main ethical challenges arising from pandemic research and how involving consumers and the community could enable resolution of such issues. (shrink)

In the Snell-Maehler edition of Bacchylides there is a very comprehensive bibliography, listing almost 300 items concerned with Bacchylides poems. It is significant that 80 per cent of these were written in the first twenty years following Kenyon's publication of the Bacchylides papyri in 1897. Of the articles which have appeared since the First World War, many are concerned with more recent papyrus discoveries and a few are stylistic discussions. For most of the poems dealt with in the pioneering (...) days of Bacchylidean scholarship certain readings of the text and interpretations of it have become canonical. This article aims to show in just one poem, XVII, a few instances in which the accepted interpretations should be re-examined. In some cases new interpretations are offered, but in others older views have been resurrected and bolstered by further argument. (shrink)

European thought begins with the Greeks. Scientific and philosophic thinking--the pursuit of truth and the grasping of unchanging principles of life--is a historical development, an achievement; and, as Bruno Snell writes in The Discovery of the Mind, nothing less than a revolution. The Greeks did not take mental resources already at their disposal and merely map out new subjects for discussion and investigation. In poetry, drama, and philosophy they in fact discovered the human mind. The stages in man's gradual (...) understanding of himself are revealed in the course of ancient literature from Homer to Virgil. A rational view of the nature of man slowly established itself in the creations of epic and lyric poetry, tragedy and literary criticism, pre-Socratic thought, and early Greek ethics all the way to the discovery of humanitas and the spiritual landscape of Virgil's Arcadia. The Discovery of the Mind is a landmark work in tracing this evolution of consciousness--one of the distinguishing characteristics of the history of man. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Ned Block argues that the higher-order (HO) approach to explaining consciousness is ‘defunct’ because a prominent objection (the ‘misrepresentation objection’) exposes the view as ‘incoherent’. What’s more, a response to this objection that I’ve offered elsewhere (Weisberg 2010) fails because it ‘amounts to abusing the notion of what-it’s-like-ness’ (xxx).1 In this response, I wish to plead guilty as charged. Indeed, I will continue herein to abuse Block’s notion of what-it’s-like-ness. After doing so, I will argue that the HO approach accounts (...) for the sense of what-it’s-like-ness that matters in a theory of consciousness. I will also argue that the only incoherence present in the HO theory is that generated by embracing Block’s controversial notion of what-it’s-like-ness, something no theorist of any stripe ought to do. Block is famous for (among other things) having introduced the notion of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ into contemporary philosophy of mind (Block 1995). This term is widely employed in the philosophical literature and it even appears in the empirical literature. But wide-speared usage has brought about divergent interpretations of the term. We can distinguish a ‘moderate’ and a ‘zealous’ reading of ‘phenomenal consciousness’. On the moderate reading, ‘phenomenal consciousness’ just means ‘experience’. Many people have embraced this sense of the term and use it to roughly pick out conscious experience involving sensory quality (states like conscious visual experiences or conscious pains, for example).2 On the zealous reading, however, phenomenal consciousness is held to be ‘distinct from any cognitive, intentional, or functional property’ (Block 1995: 234). That is, any explanation of phenomenal consciousness in exclusively cognitive, intentional, or functional terms will fail to capture, without remainder, what is really distinctive about phenomenal consciousness. Block, of course, is fully clear about embracing the zealous reading; indeed, his initial introduction of the notion is in those terms. The same ambiguity occurs with the much-used (and abused) idea of ‘what-it’s-like-ness’.. (shrink)

Telling a patient that the outcome of his illness is not good, or even hopeless, requires sensitivity and the ability to communicate with him in the setting of a hospital which is an unnatural environment divorced from family and friends. It is a task which must be taught and learned by doctors and nurses.