This paper examines the US Atomic Energy Commission’s radioisotope distribution program, established in 1946, which employed the uranium piles built for the wartime bomb project to produce specific radioisotopes for use in scientific investigation and medical therapy. As soon as the program was announced, requests from researchers began pouring into the Commission’s office. During the first year of the program alone over 1000 radioisotope shipments were sent out. The numerous requests that came from scientists outside the United States, however, sparked (...) a political debate about whether the Commission should or even could export radioisotopes. This controversy manifested the tension between the aims of the Marshall Plan and growing US national security concerns after World War II. Proponents of international circulation of radioisotopes emphasized the political and scientific value of collaborating with European scientists, especially biomedical researchers. In the end, radioisotopes were shipped from the Commission’s Oak Ridge facility to many laboratories in England and continental Europe, where they were used in biochemical research on animals, plants, and microbes. However, the issue of radioisotope export continued to draw political fire in the United States, even after the establishment of national atomic energy facilities elsewhere. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As doctoral students from New Zealand and Australia, advised by supervision teams with a diversity of critical realist experience from limited to none, we came independently to the 2018 Critical Realism conference – primed to seek increased understanding, confidence, motivation, and reassurance. We certainly found these things from the pre-conference, presentations, and individuals within the critical realist community. We also found each other, and a virtual writing group was born. This article is a description of what we did, why, (...) and the outcomes we experienced over the final two years completing our theses. It identifies the structures, contexts, motivations, and mechanisms from which our emotional, critical realist and writing-related outcomes emerged. We outline the roles of serendipitous timing, culture, different disciplinary approaches, administrative structures, and types of interactions on the social learning we developed. We anchor our discussion in recent theoretical literature about the role of writing groups in doctoral education. (shrink)

In their response to ‘Public interest in health data research: laying out the conceptual groundwork’, Grewal and Newson critique us for inattention to the law and putting forward an impracticably broad conceptual understanding of public interest. While we agree more work is needed to generate a workable framework for Institutional Review Boards/Research Ethics Committees, we would contend that this should be grounded on a broad conception of public interest. This broadness facilitates regulatory agility, and is already reflected by some current (...) frameworks such as that found in the guidelines approved under Australia’s Privacy Act. It remains unclear which elements of our broad account Grewal and Newson would reject, or indeed where the substantive disagreement with our position lies. (shrink)

When the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed by the US Congress in 1976, its advocates pointed to new generation of genotoxicity tests as a way to systematically screen chemicals for carcinogenicity. However, in the end, TSCA did not require any new testing of commercial chemicals, including these rapid laboratory screens. In addition, although the Environmental Protection Agency was to make public data about the health effects of industrial chemicals, companies routinely used the agency’s obligation to protect confidential business information (...) to prevent such disclosures. This paper traces the contested history of TSCA and its provisions for testing, from the circulation of the first draft bill in the Nixon administration through the debates over its implementation, which stretched into the Reagan administration. The paucity of publicly available health and environmental data concerning chemicals, I argue, was a by-product of the law and its execution, leading to a situation of institutionalized ignorance, the underside of regulatory knowledge. (shrink)

In the wake of Brexit and Trump, the debate surrounding post-truth fills the newspapers and is at the center of the public debate. Democratic institutions and the rule of law have always been constructed and legitimized by discourses of truth. And so the issue of "post-truth" or "fake truth" can be regarded as a contemporary degeneration of that legitimacy. But what, precisely, is post-truth from a theoretical point of view? Can it actually change perceptions of law, of institutions and political (...) power? And can it affect our understanding of society and social relations? What are its ideological premises? What are the technical conditions that foster it? And most importantly, does it have anything to teach lovers of the truth? Pursuing an interdisciplinary perspective, this book gathers both well-known and newer scholars from a range of subject areas, to engage in a philosophical interrogation of the relationship between truth and law. (shrink)

Locke’s theory of consciousness is often appropriated as a forerunner of present-day Higher-Order Perception (HOP) theories, but not much is said about it beyond that. We offer an interpretation of Locke’s account of consciousness that portrays it as crucially different from current-day HOP theory, both in detail and in spirit. In this paper, it is argued that there are good historical and philosophical reasons to attribute to Locke the view not that conscious states are accompanied by higher-order perceptions, but rather (...) that conscious states constitute perceptions of themselves. (shrink)

We can observe a connection between some serious environmental problems caused by the overexploitation of environmental resources and the particular conceptions of property rights that are claimed to hold with regard to these resources. In this paper, I investigate whether Kant’s conception of property rights might constitute a basis for justifying property regimes that would overcome some of these environmental problems. Kant’s argument for the right to property, put forward in his Doctrine of right, is complex. In Section 2, I (...) attempt an interpretation. Section 3 works out the defining characteristics of the conception of property rights that Kant’s argument establishes and investigates their implications for determining property regimes in environmental resources. Kant proposes a minimalist notion of the right to property as a triadic relation between persons with regard to an object, justified only on the condition that it is universalizable in the given circumstances. I argue that this notion offers a promising account for determining property relations with regard to environmental resources. By way of illustration, in Section 4, I focus on an example of Kantian property rights in one type of environmental resource: the marine fisheries. (shrink)

Presents an interpretation of David Hume's account of what a 'cause' is. This book emphasises on the connections between Hume's theories of cause, space and time, morals, and aesthetics.

My chapter aims to advance the debate on a problem often raised by philosophers who are skeptical of implied narrators in movies. This is the concern that positing such elusive narrators gives rise to absurd imaginings (Gaut 2004: 242; Carroll 2006: 179-180). -/- Friends of the implied cinematic narrator reply that the questions critics raise about the workings of the implied cinematic narrator are "silly ones" to ask. -/- I examine how the "absurd imaginings" problem arises for all the central (...) arguments for the elusive cinematic narrator and discuss why the questions critics pose about this narrator are legitimate ones to ask. (shrink)

(2010). Response to Open Peer Commentaries on “How to Do Research Fairly in an Unjust World”. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 10, No. 6, pp. W4-W6.

ABSTRACT Rosalind Franklin is best known for her informative X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA that provided vital clues for James Watson and Francis Crick's double-stranded helical model. Her scientific career did not end when she left the DNA work at King's College, however. In 1953 Franklin moved to J. D. Bernal's crystallography laboratory at Birkbeck College, where she shifted her focus to the three-dimensional structure of viruses, obtaining diffraction patterns of Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) of unprecedented detail and clarity. During (...) the next five years, while making significant headway on the structural determination of TMV, Franklin maintained an active correspondence with both Watson and Crick, who were also studying aspects of virus structure. Developments in TMV research during the 1950s illustrate the connections in the emerging field of molecular biology between structural studies of nucleic acids and of proteins and viruses. They also reveal how the protagonists of the “race for the double helix” continued to interact personally and professionally during the years when Watson and Crick's model for the double-helical structure of DNA was debated and confirmed. (shrink)

Chez Aristophane, le public est impliqué dans le jeu comique, grâce à la disposition physique de l’espace théâtral. Il est raisonnable de penser que les femmes faisaient partie du public. Ce travail analyse les vv. 42 ss. de Lysistrata, où il semble que Cléonice s’adresse aux femmes assises dans la cavea.

This paper focuses on the debate over two central claims regarding cinematic narration: the claim that there are implicit cinematic narrators and the thesis that when we watch movies, we imagine seeing the events and characters in the film fiction. I examine what a consideration of the indeterminate nature of fictional narration, that is, what is specified by the fiction about how we come to imagine the story events, can contribute to the debate on these issues. It is argued that (...) consideration of fictional indeterminacy can be used to show that positing an implicit cinematic narrator is not only unnecessary, but is also incompatible with appreciating the film fiction. While the opposite result is reached regarding the claim about imagined seeing: considerations of indeterminacy suggest that we can suppose, without absurdities, that audiences at the movies sometimes engage in imagined seeing. (shrink)

In queste pagine è delineata la vicenda esistenziale e intellettuale di Edith Stein. Donna straordinaria, è stata capace di racchiudere nella sua persona molte "possibili" vite. Le ha realizzate come ebrea e cattolica, fenomenologa e filosofa cristiana, docente e monaca carmelitana, agnostica e santa. Si tratta di un processo vitale dagli apparenti salti qualitativi, i quali si volgono all'ascolto di un medesimo nucleo identitario. Questa viva "formazione di sé" ha condotto Edith Stein a una "donazione di sé", culminata nell'Olocausto. Il (...) Diario di Edith si sovrappone ai pensieri di Angela Ales Bello, in veste di narratrice d'eccezione. Con la sentita partecipazione della narratrice, e insieme mantenendo il distacco critico della studiosa, viene scoperta la storia di un'anima. Le emozioni e le conquiste intellettuali trovano una sintesi grazie al peculiare approccio ai "fenomeni" che Edith Stein aveva appreso alla scuola di Edmund Husserl, di Tommaso d'Aquino e di Teresa D'Avila. Sintesi mirabile di pensatori che "si danno la mano" al di là dello spazio e del tempo--Front flap. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 468-486, September 2022.

Between 1920 and 1940, increasing proportions of urban Italian and Jewish women gave birth under the supervision of doctors in clinics and hospitals and limited the number of children they bore. We examine the role of women's informal conversation in accounting for the differences between Jewish and Italian women in the timing of these social changes. Women in both groups drew on relatives, friends, and neighbors for information and social support, but differences in the composition of Italian and Jewish networks (...) were relevant for the timing of change in these reproductive behaviors. (shrink)

Presenting legal and philosophical essays on money, this book explores the conditions according to which an object like a piece of paper, or an electronic signal, has come to be seen as having a value. Money plays a crucial role in the regulation of social relationships and their normative determination. It is thus integral to the very nature of the "social," and the question of how society is kept together by a network of agreements, conventions, exchanges, and codes. All of (...) which must be traced down. The technologies of money discussed here by Searle, Ferraris, and Condello show how we conceive the category of the social at the intersection of individual and collective intentionality, documentality, and materiality. All of these dimensions, as the introduction to this volume demonstrates, are of vital importance for legal theory and for a whole set of legal concepts that are crucial in reflections on the relationship between law, philosophy, and society. (shrink)

This article is a review of the latest edition of the Encyclopedia of Russian Philosophy, the result of the work of a team of Russian specialists in philosophy and human sciences, edited by M. A. Maslin, professor of History of Russian Philosophy at Moscow University. However, it is also intended to be an assessment of the conditions that legitimate the denomination ‘Russian philosophy’, and a reflection on the character and orientations of Russian thought, especially in the period before and after (...) the Revolution of 1917. (shrink)

This study examined how the level of meat consumption was related to two psychological factors, selfishness and animal-oriented empathy, and three motivations related to animal, health, and environmental issues. A sample of Australian adults between 18 and 80 (N = 497) was surveyed online via the Zoho Survey platform. Structural equation modelling was applied to the data, and the resulting models revealed that higher selfishness and lower empathy were associated with higher meat consumption for males but there was no association (...) between psychological factors and meat consumption for females. All three motivations were associated with both higher empathy and selfishness for males. For females, higher empathy was associated with higher health and animal motivations, while higher selfishness was associated with higher environmental motivation. Lastly, none of the three motivations were related to meat consumption for either gender. Thus, the results only partially supported the hypotheses that selfishness and empathy would influence meat consumption and motivations. Nevertheless, this study contributes to research on personality factors in relation to meat consumption and the link between masculinity and meat consumption. (shrink)

Il mio scopo in questo articolo è mettere d'accordo l'analisi sulle questioni antropologiche e metafisiche di E. Husserl ed E. Stein. Per realizzare questo compito è necessario spiegare il significato del metodo fenomenologico, prima di tutto in Husserl e poi in E. Stein, mettendo in luce la novità del suo approccio della conoscenza dell'essere umano, del mondo e di Dio. Il saggio è suddiviso in quattro parti; due sono dedicate all'investigazione dell'essere umano di Husserl e Stein e due allo sviluppo (...) dei loro temi metafisici. Leggendo il primo topico scopriamo una significante connessione tra i due pensatori; leggendo il secondo, notiamo che è possibile trovare un approccio metafisico della realtà persino in Husserl ed um originale sviluppo dei temi nell'analisi della Stein, collegandoli con la filosofia e la teologia medievale. (shrink)