Wisdom is peculiarly abstract, ineffable, and yet perennial. It is also temporal, stretching forwards as well is backwards in time. Wisdom is often treated as the outcome of life experience, reflection, discipline, and equanimity. Capturing the Ineffable aims to establish wisdom as an area if inquiry within anthropology and an analytic account of wisdom and its role and focus in anthropology. In addition to developing theories for an anthropology (and excavation) of wisdom, this volume argues collectively that anthropology is especially (...) well suited to engage in questioning what it is that is called wisdom, and how wisdom, as a concept, and an enacted activity, functions in metaphysical and interpersonal experiences, values, and judgements. The contributors include many key US and UK thinkers. (shrink)

Yoga has come to be an icon of Indian culture and civilization, and it is widely regarded as being timeless and unchanging. Based on extensive ethnographic research and an analysis of both ancient and modern texts, Yoga in Modern India challenges this popular view by examining the history of yoga, focusing on its emergence in modern India and its dramatically changing form and significance in the twentieth century. Joseph Alter argues that yoga's transformation into a popular activity idolized (...) for its health value is based on modern ideas about science and medicine. Alter centers his analysis on an interpretation of the seminal work of Swami Kuvalayananda, one of the chief architects of the Yoga Renaissance in the early twentieth century. From this point of orientation he explores current interpretations of yoga and considers how practitioners of yogic medicine and fitness combine the ideas of biology, physiology, and anatomy with those of metaphysics, transcendence, and magical power. The first serious ethnographic history of modern yoga in India, this fluently written book is must reading not only for students and scholars but also practitioners who seek a deeper understanding of how yoga developed over time into the exceedingly popular phenomenon it is today. (shrink)

Nationalism can be closely associated with powerful feelings about the relationship among cultural heritage, identity and embodied experience. Almost by definition this relationship is expressed in terms of continuity, distinctiveness and the purity of tradition, to an extent that nationalistic sentiments can be said to be ‘visceral.’ Contrasting the way in which the body is implicated in nature cure and Ayurveda, two forms of medicine closely linked to nationalism in India, this article presents an analytical perspective on the embodiment of (...) viscerality to provide a more nuanced understanding of how these experiences blur distinctions of cultural continuity and how an ecology of the body shapes the cultural politics of tradition in India. (shrink)

An anthropological perspective on biosemiosis raises important questions about sociality, ecology and communication in contexts that encompass many different forms of life. As such, these questions are important for understanding the problem of religion in relation to social theory, as well as understanding our collective, biosocial animal history and the development of human culture, as an articulation of power, on an evolutionary time scale. The argument presented here is that biosemiotics provides a framework for extending Talal Asad’s genealogical critique of (...) religion to culture more broadly, providing an important perspective on power in relation to communication and in relation to the ‘supernatural’ attributes of language in a multi-species environment of signs and sign relationships. (shrink)

Born into a poor, Muslim family at the end of the 19th century, Gama became World Champion wrestler by defeating the reigning Polish champion in London in 1910. By focusing on the life of Gama, the heroic representations of Gama that appear in the Hindi language literature, and the transformations in wrestling regimens that have occurred over the past several centuries, I locate the discourse and practice of wrestling within a context of intersecting concerns with nationalism, class identity and embodied (...) consciousness. To articulate the way in which subaltern identity is embodied in relation to nationalist ideas about masculine fitness, and in relation to the state as a political institution, I provide an analytic interpretation of the heroic body that focuses on themes of nervousness and obsession. (shrink)

Until approximately twenty years ago, advances in the study of human genetics had little influence on the practice of medicine. In the 1980s, this changed dramatically with the mapping of the altered genes that cause cystic fibrosis and Huntington disease. In just a few years, these discoveries led to DNA-based tests that enabled clinicians to determine whether prospective parents were carriers of CF or whether an individual carried the Huntington gene and, as a result, would almost certainly develop the disease.Observers (...) interested in the social and economic implications of genetic technology realized that such genetic tests could be used by insurance companies to predict which insurance applicants were likely to become ill or even die from these diseases. (shrink)

Until approximately twenty years ago, advances in the study of human genetics had little influence on the practice of medicine. In the 1980s, this changed dramatically with the mapping of the altered genes that cause cystic fibrosis and Huntington disease. In just a few years, these discoveries led to DNA-based tests that enabled clinicians to determine whether prospective parents were carriers of CF or whether an individual carried the Huntington gene and, as a result, would almost certainly develop the disease.Observers (...) interested in the social and economic implications of genetic technology realized that such genetic tests could be used by insurance companies to predict which insurance applicants were likely to become ill or even die from these diseases. (shrink)

This is the second paper in a two-part series describing subject and family perspectives from the CENTURY-S (CENtral Thalamic Deep Brain Stimulation for the Treatment of Traumatic Brain InjURY-Safety) first-in-human invasive neurological device trial to achieve cognitive restoration in moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (msTBI). To participate, subjects were independently assessed to formally establish decision-making capacity to provide voluntary informed consent. Here, we report on post-operative interviews conducted after a successful trial of thalamic stimulation. All five msTBI subjects met (...) a pre-selected primary endpoint of at least a 10% improvement in completion time on Trail-Making-Test Part B, a marker of executive function. We describe narrative responses of subjects and family members, refracted against that success. Interviews following surgery and the stimulation trial revealed the challenge of adaptation to improvements in cognitive function and emotional regulation as well as altered (and restored) relationships and family dynamics. These improvements exposed barriers to social reintegration made relevant by recoveries once thought inconceivable. The study’s success sparked concerns about post-trial access to implanted devices, financing of device maintenance, battery replacement, and on-going care. Most subjects and families identified the need for supportive counseling to adapt to the new trajectory of their lives. (shrink)

This new Companion to Aquinas features entirely new chapters written by internationally recognized experts in the field. It shows the power of Aquinas's philosophical thought and transmits the worldview which he inherited, developed, altered, and argued for, while at the same time revealing to contemporary philosophers the strong connections which there are between Aquinas's interests and views and their own. Its five sections cover the life and works of Aquinas; his metaphysics, including his understanding of the ultimate foundations of reality; (...) his metaethics and ethics, including his virtue ethics; his account of human nature; his theory of the afterlife; his epistemology and his theory of the intellectual virtues; his view of the nature of free will and the relation of grace to free will; and finally some key components of his philosophical theology, including the incarnation and atonement, Christology, and the nature of original sin. (shrink)

Society is broken. We can design our way to a better one. In our increasingly interconnected world, self-interest and social-interest are rapidly becoming indistinguishable. If the oceans die, if society fractures, or if global warming spirals out of control, personal success becomes meaningless. But our broken system incentivizes behavior that only makes these problems worse. If true human rights progress is to be achieved today, it is time we dig deeper-rethinking the very foundation of our social system. In this engaging, (...) important work, Peter Joseph, founder of the world's largest grassroots social movement in the world-The Zeitgeist Movement-draws from economics, history, philosophy, and modern public-health research to present a bold case for rethinking activism in the 21st century. The conventional wisdom views poverty, social oppression, and the growing loss of public health as unfortunate and immutable side effects of our way of life. The New Human Rights Movement argues that these outcomes are, in fact, contrived-only natural to our outdated economic system. Social activists can never succeed in dramatically improving human life on this planet until they understand the structural reasons these problems exist. Arguing against the long-standing narrative of universal scarcity and other pervasive, legitimizing myths that defend the current state of affairs, The New Human Rights Movement ultimately presents the case for an updated economic approach. Joseph explores the potential of this grand social shift and how we can design our way to a post-scarcity world-a world where poverty doesn't exist and the human family has become truly sustainable. The New Human Rights Movement reveals the critical importance of a unified activism in this direction, through understanding and working to alter the inherent injustice of our current social system. This book not only warns against what is in store if we continue to ignore our broken society but also reveals the positive future possible if we succeed. Will you join the movement? (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The tendency to test outcomes that are predicted by our current theory (the confirmation bias) is one of the best-known biases of human decision making. We prove that the confirmation bias is an optimal strategy for testing hypotheses when those hypotheses are deterministic, each making a single prediction about the next event in a sequence. Our proof applies for two normative standards commonly used for evaluating hypothesis testing: maximizing expected information gain and maximizing the probability of falsifying the current hypothesis. (...) This analysis rests on two assumptions: (a) that people predict the next event in a sequence in a way that is consistent with Bayesian inference; and (b) when testing hypotheses, people test the hypothesis to which they assign highest posterior probability. We present four behavioral experiments that support these assumptions, showing that a simple Bayesian model can capture people's predictions about numerical sequences (Experiments 1 and 2), and that we can alter the hypotheses that people choose to test by manipulating the prior probability of those hypotheses (Experiments 3 and 4). (shrink)

People often choose intuitive rather than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. The authors suggest that these intuitive biases arise because intuitions often spring to mind with subjective ease, and the subjective ease leads people to hold their intuitions with high confidence. An investigation of predictions against point spreads found that people predicted intuitive options more often than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. Critically, though, this effect was largely determined by people's confidence in their intuitions. Across naturalistic, expert, and laboratory samples, against personally (...) determined point spreads, and even when intuitive confidence was manipulated by altering irrelevant aspects of the decision context, the authors found that decreasing intuitive confidence reduced or eliminated intuitive biases. These findings indicate that intuitive biases are not inevitable but rather predictably determined by contextual variables that affect intuitive confidence. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics has come under criticism for his treatment of the other. Generally these critiques charge that Gadamer fails to give the other due consideration and instead collapses her into a non-challenging conversational partner of the interpreter or listener. Robert Bernasconi, in his “‘You Don’t Know What I’m Talking About’: Alterity and the Hermeneutic Ideal” and “‘Y’All Don’t Hear Me Now’: On Lorenzo Simpson’s The Unfinished Project,” charges that the hermeneutic model of conversation is unable to respect the (...) alterity of an other that wishes to issue a truly radical critique of the conversation. Against this characterization I contend that Gadamer’s account of the other does indeed provide for an other that is neither assimilated nor prevented from announcing a thorough challenge, so long as the comparison that Gadamer draws between the hermeneutic task of reading a text and the relationship between the listener and the other is taken to its full extent. (shrink)

In his critical response to our skeptical inquiry, “Does Culture Evolve?” , W. G. Runciman affirms that “Culture Does Evolve.” However, we find nothing in his essay that convinces us to alter our initial position. And we must confess that in composing an answer to Runciman, our first temptation was simply to urge those interested to read our original article—both as a basis for evaluating Runciman’s attempted refutation of it and as a framework for reading this essay, which addresses (...) in greater detail issues we have already raised. Runciman views the “selectionist paradigm” as a “scientific” “puzzle-solving device” now validated by an “expanding literature” that has successfully modeled social and cultural change as “evolutionary.” All paradigms, however, including scientific ones, give rise to self-validating “normal science.” The real issue, accordingly, is not whether explanations can be successfully manufactured on the basis of paradigmatic assumptions, but whether the paradigmatic assumptions are appropriate to the object of analysis. The selectionist paradigm requires the reduction of society and culture to inheritance systems that consist of randomly varying, individual units, some of which are selected, and some not; and with society and culture thus reduced to inheritance systems, history can be reduced to “evolution.” But these reductions, which are required by the selectionist paradigm, exclude much that is essential to a satisfactory historical explanation—particularly the systemic properties of society and culture and the combination of systemic logic and contingency. Now as before, therefore, we conclude that while historical phenomena can always be modeled selectionistically, selectionist explanations do no work, nor do they contribute anything new except a misleading vocabulary that anesthetizes history. (shrink)

The Native American Church is examined as an illustrative example in the political anthropology of consciousness. Specific attention is paid to the Supreme Court's ignoring of accepted research on this tradition and its sacrament, Peyote, in the case of Employment Division of Oregon v. Smith. An anthropological reaction to the Smith decision is constructed, focusing on ethnographic findings regarding Peyote that contradict the Supreme Court's ethnocentric assumptions. This paper argues that Peyote's Schedule I status is not supported by the ethnographic (...) findings. Peyote, as used in the Native American Church, is recognized as safe and therapeutic. It is also argued that the Supreme Court's rationale for denying Peyotist religious freedom is not supported by the ethnographic findings nor by legal precedent. Not only is the Native American's right to use Peyote a matter of freedom of religion, it also involves other rights such as the right to raise one's children in one's own culture and the right to be treated using a culturally relevant therapeutic modality. (shrink)

Whitehead’s cosmology centers on the self-creation of actual occasions that perish as they come to be, but somehow do combine to constitute societies that are persistent agents and/or patients. “Instance Ontology” developed by D.W. Mertz concerns unification of relata into facts of relatedness by specific intensions. These two conceptual systems are similar in that they both avoid the substance-property distinction: they differ in their understanding of how basic units combine to constitute complex unities. “Process Structural Realism” (PSR) draws from both (...) of these approaches in developing an account of how combinations of processes may produce ontologically significant coherences. When a group of processes achieves such closure that a set of states recurs continually, the effects of that coherence differ from what would occur in the absence of that closure. Such altered effectiveness is an attribute of the system as a whole, and would have consequences. This indicates that the network of processes, as a unit, has ontological significance. The closed network of processes, together with the conditions that prevail, constitute the form of definiteness of the coherence. That form continues to obtain as long as the coherence persists. Constituents contribute to, rather than share, that characteristic. Aspects of some recent research in systems biology, microeconomics, and social psychology illustrate the application of PSR. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:92 A NOTE ON SMITH'S TERM "NATURALISM" The reader of contemporary Hume literature may feel exasperated when reading recent authors. A conspicuous example is A.J. Ayer (Hume, 1982; see index, Art, Natural beliefs), who declares they endorse Kemp Smith's view of Hume's "naturalism" without sufficiently clarifying what they — or Smith — might exactly mean by this term. Charles W. Hendel, in the 1963 edition of his 1924 Studies (...) in the Philosophy of David Hume, adds eight pages of a new preface and thirty-one pages of a review of Hume scholarship between 1925 and 1962, and he speaks at great length there of his life-long friendship and cooperation with Norman Kemp Smith and appreciation of his work. He says (p. xlviii), "There is a disposition today to assimilate Hume's thought to naturalism as understood in the contemporary sense." He does not say what this "contemporary sense" is, and the statement just quoted seems to have served as the seal of approval and the legitimation of this questionable practice. Hendel's new, 1963, material mentions Smith's discussion of Hume's "naturalism" — but refers only to Smith's early work, "The Naturalism of Hume," Mind, 14, 1905, 149-173 and 335-347, not to Smith's famous The Philosophy of David Hume of 1941, even though he deems that work "of great consequence for Hume scholarship" (p. xxxviii) and a "masterwork" (p. xxxix). The early work (1905) of Smith is already mentioned by Hendel in the body of the 1924 work (p. 361), although there, clearly, the word "naturalism," whatever its meaning is, and however contemporary then, is not necessarily the "contemporary sense" of 1962. The work which clearly (if implicitly) distinguishes between the traditional sense and Smith's 1905 sense of "naturalism" is John Laird's Hume's 93 Philosophy of Human Nature, 1932, 1967. We find there a discussion of Hume's naturalism (beginning of Chapter II), as well as of Hume's "Naturalism" (Chapter VI, fifth and fourth paragraphs from the end), with reference to Smith's 1905 work. Now, the traditional sense of "naturalism" is straightforward and seems to have been instituted by Pierre Bayle to designate the view of the world as devoid of all supernatural intervention, the view of the world as "disenchanted," to use the equivalent term accredited to Max Weber. Clearly, all Epicureans and neoEpicureans, Hume included, were naturalists in this sense. This is not the sense in which Smith uses it in his 1905 essay, "The Naturalism of Hume." The first part of this essay opposes T. H. Green's traditional reading of Hume as a philosopher who streamlined the ideas of Locke and Berkeley and proposes to replace it with the view of Hume's view as "naturalism." "Hume's... naturalistic view of reason," we are told (p. 158), "is a new theory of belief": Humean belief, on Smith's new reading, "is not caused by knowledge but precedes it, and as it is not caused by knowledge it is not destroyed by doubt" (p. 165). Smith declared his reading quite revolutionary, yet it may be endorsed without rejecting Green's reading. Smith does not even attempt to re-interpret in detail the passages which prima facie conform to Green's reading. The second part of his essay is the application of his revolutionary reading to psychology and to ethics. Smith devotes the preface of his The Philosophy of David Hume (1941) to a revision of his 1905 study. It seems he did not alter his attitude towards the first part but only to the second: he thought the starting point of Hume's study was his concern not for "naturalism" but for "moral philosophy, or the science of human nature" (opening words of Hume's Inquiry, cf. Hendel, op. cit., p. xlvi). This statement has to do 94 with emphasis, not with the meanings of terms or with ascriptions of views (and it is erroneous, or at least limited; but this is another matter). This is not to deny that Hume was a naturalist in Bayle's sense, as everyone today agrees. Most philosophers today share this naturalism with Hume. "His attitude and way of... (shrink)

This article considers the roles played by brain images (e.g., from PET scans) in mass media as experienced by people suffering from mental illness, and as used by scientists and activist groups in demonstrating a biological basis for mental illness. Examining the rhetorical presentation of images in magazines and books, the article describes the persuasive power that brain images have in altering the understanding people have of their own body—their objective self. Analyzing first-person accounts of encounters with brain images, it (...) argues that people come to understand themselves as having neurotransmitter imbalances that are the cause of their illnesses via received facts and images of the brain, but that this understanding is incomplete and in tension with the sense that they are their brain. The article concludes by querying the emergence of a pharmaceutical self, in which one experiences one's brain as if on drugs, as a new form of objective self-fashioning. (shrink)

The experimental (apparent) space-time transformations connect coordinates altered by length contraction and clock retardation. When clocks are synchronized by means of light signals (Einstein–Poincaré procedure) or by slow clock transport, the experimental space-time. transformations assume the mathematical form of the “Extended space-time transformations”.(4) These reduce to the Lorentz–Poincaré transformations when one of the frames they connect is the fundamental inertial frame. If the synchronization procedure were perfect, the experimental space-time transformations would assume the form of Selleri’s inertial transformations.(5) The real (...) space-time transformations are those which are disclosed when the systematic measurement distortions are corrected. (shrink)

Originally published in 1983, _Reflections on Self Psychology_ records the development of a powerful initiative to alter psychoanalytic theory and practice, and an evaluative questioning of this initiative. It presents a dialogue that developed at the Boston Symposium of 1980 between vigorous proponents of self psychology, equally energetic critics, and many participants between these polar positions. This book attempts to capture within its pages not only the content of what was presented, explored, and evaluated in Boston, but also a (...) sense of the people, about 1,000 strong, who exchanged their ideas on and off the podium – and the remarkable spirit of open inquiry that invigorated these proceedings. The book, as was the meeting, is organized to explore four subjects: the development of the self: infant research; the implications of self psychology for psychoanalytic practice; self psychology and psychotherapy; and the implications of self psychology for psychoanalytic theory. The final section of the book is devoted to an essay by Heinz Kohut that provides an integrated response to the issues and criticisms raised in the course of the symposium. This essay while based on extemporaneous responses by Kohut during different phases of the meeting, is, in its written version, a cohesive, carefully revised, and edited statement prepared in the mellowing period following the meeting and before Kohut’s untimely death. (shrink)

Originally published in 1983 _Reflections on Self Psychology_ records the development of a powerful initiative to alter psychoanalytic theory and practice, and an evaluative questioning of this initiative. It presents a dialogue that developed at the Boston Symposium of 1980 between vigorous proponents of self psychology, equally energetic critics, and many participants between these polar positions. This book attempts to capture within its pages not only the content of what was presented, explored, and evaluated in Boston, but also a (...) sense of the people, about 1,000 strong, who exchanged their ideas on and off the podium – and the remarkable spirit of open inquiry that invigorated these proceedings. The book, as was the meeting, is organized to explore four subjects: the development of the self: infant research; the implications of self psychology for psychoanalytic practice; self psychology and psychotherapy; and the implications of self psychology for psychoanalytic theory. The final section of the book is devoted to an essay by Heinz Kohut that provides an integrated response to the issues and criticisms raised in the course of the symposium. This essay while based on extemporaneous responses by Kohut during different phases of the meeting, is, in its written version, a cohesive, carefully revised, and edited statement prepared in the mellowing period following the meeting and before Kohut’s untimely death. (shrink)

The concept of mental disease has broadened considerably in the last few years. Many mental states that were not previously considered problematic now fall under the category of disease. The most notable example is anxiety. Anxiety disorders are the most prevalently treated mental disease. The current social and psychiatric authorities emphasize the negativity of the affective state and recommend methods by which the state can be avoided. The problem with these approaches is that they do not recognize the functional role (...) of anxiety in the life of the individual. Anxiety is a stimulus for growth and individuation, but this growth can only occur when the anxiety-provoking situation is altered for the better. The theories of Søren Kierkegaard, Ernest Schachtel, and Kurt Goldstein will be called upon to support the theory that anxiety is inherent in personal growth. It is ultimately argued that eliminating anxiety creates static individuals in a static society and is harmful to both individual and social progress. (shrink)

Amid the ongoing debate over the proper interpretation of Aristotle's theory of sense perception in the "De Anima," Steven Everson has recently presented a well-documented and ambitious treatment of the issue, arguing in favor of Richard Sorabji's controversial position that sense organs literally take on the qualities of their proper objects. Against the interpretation of M. F. Burnyeat, Everson and others make a compelling case the Aristotelian account of sensation requires some physical process to occur in sense organs. A detailed (...) examination of the interpretation by Everson and Sorabji of Aristotle's theory, however, shows that their reading cannot be the correct one, since it involves many textual and philosophical difficulties. Their interpretation, for instance, would require abandoning Aristotle's requirement that only a transparent substance is suitable matter for an eye. Likewise, their understanding of the Aristotle's doctrine of sensation as the reception of form without matter in "DA 2.12" cannot be reconciled with other texts of his from "On Generation and Corruption." An analysis of these texts, as well as "DA 2.7" and "De Sensu 6" on the roles of light and the transparent medium in vision, show that, for Aristotle, the physical processes which sense organs undergo are not standard qualitative changes (i.e. alterations), but activities or the actualizations of potencies in the material constituents of living animal bodies. (shrink)

On September 17, 1994, Karl Popper died at the age of 92.He was described as the official opposition of the “ Vienna Circle”, the philosophical club which in the inter-war period was glamorous and which espoused the then popular doctrine of logical positivism, so-called. His relations with that club were friendly-hostile, to use the term with which he liked to characterize the relations between scientific researchers. He is the last of that generation (unless it is Carl G. Hempel, who, however, (...) sees himself as too young to belong there). The public aspect of Popper’s friendly-hostile relations with his Viennese peers was unfortunately more hostile than friendly. Somehow, philosophers have managed to keep the accounts open for too long. The end of the era is the time to close accounts so as to be able to go on with the job at hand, since the intermingling of personal affairs with objective knowledge is unhealthy. Yet most of the leading heirs of the “ Vienna Circle” still coast around the issues raised by Popper, and so they can neither overlook him nor quote him correctly. If past evidence is reliable here, then this will alter just about now. Is it? (shrink)

BackgroundBioethics and law distinguish between the practices of "physician-assisted death" and "allowing the patient to die."DiscussionAdvances in biotechnology have allowed medical devices to be used as destination therapy that are designed for the permanent support of cardiac function and/or respiration after irreversible loss of these spontaneous vital functions. For permanent support of cardiac function, single ventricle or biventricular mechanical assist devices and total artificial hearts are implanted in the body. Mechanical ventilators extrinsic to the body are used for permanent support (...) of respiration. Clinical studies have shown that destination therapy with ventricular assist devices improves patient survival compared to medical management, but at the cost of a substantial alteration in end-of-life trajectories. The moral and legal assessment of the appropriateness and permissibility of complying with a patient's request to electively discontinue destination therapy in a life-terminating act in non-futile situations has generated controversy. Some argue that complying with this request is ethically justified because patients have the right to request withdrawal of unwanted treatment and be allowed to die of preexisting disease. Other commentators reject the argument that acceding to an elective request for death by discontinuing destination therapy is 'allowing a patient to die' because of serious flaws in interpreting the intention, causation, and moral responsibility of the ensuing death.SummaryDestination therapy with cardiac and/or ventilatory medical devices replaces native physiological functions and successfully treats a preexisting disease. We posit that discontinuing cardiac and/or ventilatory support at the request of a patient or surrogate can be viewed as allowing the patient to die if--and only if--concurrent lethal pathophysiological conditions are present that are unrelated to those functions already supported by medical devices in destination therapy. In all other cases, compliance with a patient's request constitutes physician-assisted death because of the pathophysiology induced by the turning off of these medical devices, as well as the intention, causation, and moral responsibility of the ensuing death. The distinction between allowing the patient to die and physician-assisted death is pivotal to the moral and legal status of elective requests for death by discontinuing destination cardiac and/or ventilatory medical devices in patients who are not imminently dying. This distinction also represents essential information that must be disclosed to patients and surrogates in advance of consent to this type of therapy. (shrink)

In God of Empowering Love: A History and Reconception of the Theodicy Conundrum, David Polk proposes that the power of God should be understood as love that empowers rather than overpowers and that the process-relational metaphysics of Whitehead, Hartshorne, and subsequent Whiteheadian thinkers justifies this conception of God’s power as empowering love. I argue instead that, while Polk’s thesis cannot, strictly speaking, be philosophically justified within the conventional parameters of Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme, the latter could be modestly altered so as (...) to justify divine power as empowering love. In what follows, I lay out my argument for a systems-oriented approach to the God-world relationship in which God as Trinity is both the transcendent origin and ultimate goal of the cosmic process. (shrink)

This paper describes one possible origin point for fraudulent behavior within the American pharmaceutical industry. We argue that during the late nineteenth century therapeutic reformers sought to promote both laboratory science and increasingly systematized forms of clinical experiment as a new basis for therapeutic knowledge. This process was intertwined with a transformation in the ethical framework in which medical science took place, one in which monopoly status was replaced by clinical utility as the primary arbiter of pharmaceutical legitimacy. This new (...) framework fundamentally altered the set of epistemic virtues—a phrase we draw from the philosophical field of virtue epistemology—considered necessary to conduct reliable scientific inquiry regarding drugs. In doing so, it also made possible new forms of fraud in which newly emergent epistemic virtues were violated. To make this argument, we focus on the efforts of Francis E. Stewart and George S. Davis of Parke, Davis & Company. Therapeutic reformers within the pharmaceutical industry, such as Stewart and Davis, were an important part of the broader normative and epistemic transformation we describe in that they sought to promote laboratory science and systematized clinical trials toward the twin goals of improving pharmaceutical science and promoting their own commercial interests. Yet, as we suggest, Parke, Davis & Company also serves as an example of a company that violated the very norms that Stewart and Davis helped introduce. We thus seek to describe one possible origin point for the widespread fraudulent practices that now characterize the pharmaceutical industry. We also seek to describe an origin point for why we conceptualize such practices as fraudulent in the first place. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The period of government‐sponsored research and development, involving military and industrial intervention in academic life, especially in the USA, was brief and yet its characteristics were declared universal by two historians of science there, Derek J. de Solla Price and Thomas S. Kuhn, who justified coercion and boredom in research work organized hierarchically. The reform of work movement is now attempting to introduce ideas in the opposite direction. Clearly, the institutions of big science should be interested in the improvement (...) of the quality of research done on their premises and in the changes in world situation which might greatly change the agenda of research. To that end research into the general character of big science is very advisable and may be instigated either by large research institutions or by some of their umbrella organizations which may create incentives and alter the character of big science radically to everybody's advantage. (shrink)

The human “environment of evolutionary adaptedness” can only be inferred indirectly. In contrast, the behavior of some nonhuman animals can be compared among “natural” and various altered environments. As an example, male immigration tactics in unprovisioned versus provisioned macaque (Macaca) populations are compared using Tooby and Cosmides’s (1992) framework for evolutionary functional analysis. In unprovisioned populations, social groups contain few males, and immigrant male takeovers of alpha rank occur frequently. In provisioned populations, groups contain many males, and males almost invariably (...) enter social groups at very low rank and rise in rank only as more dominant males emigrate or die. Male conformity to the “seniority rule” is hypothesized to represent the behavioral output of an evolved decision-making algorithm (psychological mechanism) that takes into account (1) the net payoff of each rank in the dominance hierarchy and (2) the power of male group size as a predictor of the likelihood of successful immigrant takeover. (shrink)

Similarity is a philosophically much-maligned concept. Bertrand Russell claimed that its ineliminability forces on us the admission of at least one universal, thereby undermining nominalism. But even if things must be supposed to be similar if our language functions publicly by way of using finitely many terms repeatedly for purposes of designation, reference, and predication, Russell’s insistence has as such no bearing at all on the epistemological questions of sorting the actual similarities among things and of fixing the grounds on (...) which we may be sure that they are what they are alleged to be. It need not even affect nominalism. Speculation about universals oscillates between the metaphysical and the epistemological. No one doubts that things must be similar in some respect if natural languages behave as they do. But the concession is thought to be a vacuous one precisely because the respect required need never be specified in that admission. On the other hand, it is characteristically said to be epistemologically superfluous because to say that a set of things are similar in respect R is just to say that they are R’s, and to know that—so the argument goes—is to out-flank the original need to inquire whether they are merely similar, thereby restoring the viability of nominalism. This, briefly, is Nelson Goodman’s strategy laid out compellingly in The Structure of Appearance and collected, with explicitly greater scope as far as his own work is concerned but not essentially altered, in a comparatively recent paper. Of course, the legitimacy of terming a set of things R’s, predicatively, invites us to consider whether, on some theory, things really are such. This, the problem of realism, signifies that however vacuous the admission of similarity may be, the putative finding that a set of things are R’s threatens to be epistemically arbitrary unless we have a reasonable theory regarding the validity of so construing them. On Goodman’s account, realism concerns a system’s admitting or not admitting “non-particulars as individuals”—which is to say, Goodman views the issue neutrally as between platonism and nominalism. On that view, “an individual is particular if and only if it is exhaustively divisible into unrepeatable complexes; while an individual is universal if and only if it contains no unrepeatable complex.” The denial of platonism is the denial that there are nonindividuals, not nonparticulars. Alternatively put, “universality is … a matter of multiplicity of instances.” And “repeatability” occurs if a complex “occurs with some two individuals of one category. A color, for example, is repeated if it occurs at two places, even at the same time; and a time is repeated if two qualia of some one kind occur at that time.” Qualia, then, colors for instance, are complexes. (shrink)

Background Bioethics and law distinguish between the practices of "physician-assisted death" and "allowing the patient to die." Discussion Advances in biotechnology have allowed medical devices to be used as destination therapy that are designed for the permanent support of cardiac function and/or respiration after irreversible loss of these spontaneous vital functions. For permanent support of cardiac function, single ventricle or biventricular mechanical assist devices and total artificial hearts are implanted in the body. Mechanical ventilators extrinsic to the body are used (...) for permanent support of respiration. Clinical studies have shown that destination therapy with ventricular assist devices improves patient survival compared to medical management, but at the cost of a substantial alteration in end-of-life trajectories. The moral and legal assessment of the appropriateness and permissibility of complying with a patient's request to electively discontinue destination therapy in a life-terminating act in non-futile situations has generated controversy. Some argue that complying with this request is ethically justified because patients have the right to request withdrawal of unwanted treatment and be allowed to die of preexisting disease. Other commentators reject the argument that acceding to an elective request for death by discontinuing destination therapy is 'allowing a patient to die' because of serious flaws in interpreting the intention, causation, and moral responsibility of the ensuing death. Summary Destination therapy with cardiac and/or ventilatory medical devices replaces native physiological functions and successfully treats a preexisting disease. We posit that discontinuing cardiac and/or ventilatory support at the request of a patient or surrogate can be viewed as allowing the patient to die if--and only if--concurrent lethal pathophysiological conditions are present that are unrelated to those functions already supported by medical devices in destination therapy. In all other cases, compliance with a patient's request constitutes physician-assisted death because of the pathophysiology induced by the turning off of these medical devices, as well as the intention, causation, and moral responsibility of the ensuing death. The distinction between allowing the patient to die and physician-assisted death is pivotal to the moral and legal status of elective requests for death by discontinuing destination cardiac and/or ventilatory medical devices in patients who are not imminently dying. This distinction also represents essential information that must be disclosed to patients and surrogates in advance of consent to this type of therapy. (shrink)

Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base’s phonology, whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it. The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in (...) the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that don’t resemble existing nouns, and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names, they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns, replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as “regular” or “irregular”; different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory.. (shrink)

While most people agree that September 11, 2001, witnessed a terribly important series of events, opinions about the meaning of these events diverge sharply. This book searches for sense in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Consisting of fourteen essays written by leading philosophers, most of which have been specially commissioned for this volume, it offers a philosophical reflection on the implications of 9/11. The contributors engage with a broad range of issues associated with the causes and consequences (...) of 9/11, including American imperialism, anti-Americanism, Bush’s ‘War on Terror’, the idea of pre-emptive war, and the role of the media. They consider how 9/11 has altered the terms and categories of philosophical debate, looking at changes in the conception of moral and political reasoning, rationality and responsibility, and the repercussions for justice, human rights and international law. (shrink)

What must the United States do to remain the global superpower and stop alienating the rest of the world? The author of the bestselling "The Paradox of American Power" has one clear answer: soft power.

In two recent papers Perez Laraudogoitia has described a variety of supertasks involving elastic collisions in Newtonian systems containing a denumerably infinite set of particles. He maintains that these various supertasks give examples of systems in which energy is not conserved, particles at rest begin to move spontaneously, particles disappear from a system, and particles are created ex nihilo. An analysis of these supertasks suggests that they involve systems that do not satisfy the mathematical conditions required of Newtonian systems at (...) the time the supertask is due to be completed, or else they rely on the application of the time-reversal transformation to states which are not well-defined. Consequently, it is unjustified to conclude that the paradoxical results are arising from within the framework of Newtonian mechanics. In the last part of this article, we discuss various aspects of the physics of these supertasks. (shrink)

A version of nonstandard analysis, Internal Set Theory, has been used to provide a resolution of Zeno's paradoxes of motion. This resolution is inadequate because the application of Internal Set Theory to the paradoxes requires a model of the world that is not in accordance with either experience or intuition. A model of standard mathematics in which the ordinary real numbers are defined in terms of rational intervals does provide a formalism for understanding the paradoxes. This model suggests that in (...) discussing motion, only intervals, rather than instants, of time are meaningful. The approach presented here reconciles resolutions of the paradoxes based on considering a finite number of acts with those based on analysis of the full infinite set Zeno seems to require. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the classical and quantum mechanics of performing an infinite number of acts in a finite time. (shrink)

The author of Governance in a Globalizing World probes the limits of American power, offering a compelling argument for the world's lone superpower to forge cooperative relationships with nations around the world.

In dynamic epistemic logic and other fields, it is natural to consider relativization as an operator taking sentences to sentences. When using the ideas and methods of dynamic logic, one would like to iterate operators. This leads to iterated relativization. We are also concerned with the transitive closure operation, due to its connection to common knowledge. We show that for three fragments of the logic of iterated relativization and transitive closure, the satisfiability problems are fi1 11–complete. Two of these fragments (...) do not include transitive closure. We also show that the question of whether a sentence in these fragments has a finite (tree) model is fi0 01–complete. These results go via reduction to problems concerning domino systems. (shrink)

It is time for a new paper about open questions in the currently very active area of randomness and computability. Ambos-Spies and Kučera presented such a paper in 1999 [1]. All the question in it have been solved, except for one: is KL-randomness different from Martin-Löf randomness? This question is discussed in Section 6.Not all the questions are necessarily hard—some simply have not been tried seriously. When we think a question is a major one, and therefore likely to be hard, (...) we indicate this by the symbol ▶, the criterion being that it is of considerable interest and has been tried by a number of researchers. Some questions are close contenders here; these are marked by ▷. With few exceptions, the questions are precise. They mostly have a yes/no answer. However, there are often more general questions of an intuitive or even philosophical nature behind. We give an outline, indicating the more general questions.All sets will be sets of natural numbers, unless otherwise stated. These sets are identified with infinite strings over {0, 1}. Other terms used in the literature are sequence and real. (shrink)

"[A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness] represents, I believe, a very important beginning of a deservingly serious effort to make the whole ...

We call A weakly low for K if there is a c such that $K^A(\sigma)\geq K(\sigma)-c$ for infinitely many σ; in other words, there are infinitely many strings that A does not help compress. We prove that A is weakly low for K if and only if Chaitin's Ω is A-random. This has consequences in the K-degrees and the low for K (i.e., low for random) degrees. Furthermore, we prove that the initial segment prefix-free complexity of 2-random reals is infinitely (...) often maximal. This had previously been proved for plain Kolmogorov complexity. (shrink)