In the Spring of 1944, an informal discussion took place in Cambridge between Mr. R. S. Whipple, Professor Allan Ferguson and Mr. F. H. C. Butler, concerning the formation of a national Society for the History of Science. This is the opening sentence of the inaugural issue of the Bulletin of the British Society for the History of Science, the Society's first official publication. Butler himself was the author of this outline account of the subsequent approach to the Royal Society, (...) the parallel moves to establish a National Committee of the International Academy of the History of Science, the formation of a provisional committee to prepare a draft constitution for a national society, and the proceedings of the first Annual General Meeting in May 1947. Whipple had been in Cambridge to discuss his offer to present his collection of old scientific instruments to the University and the possible foundation of a new museum, and Butler, as Secretary of the History of Science Committee in Cambridge, was the chief mover in both this development and an initiative coupled with it to establish a department of the history of science. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to highlight ways in which institutional policymakers tend to insufficiently conceptualise their role as ethics practitioners. We use the case of blood product recall notification as a means of raising questions about the way in which, as we have observed it, discourse for those who make institutional ethics policies is constrained by routine balancing of simplified principles to the exclusion of reflexive practices—those that turn ethics reasoning back on itself. The latter allows ethics practitioners (...) with comparatively little formal training to take ownership of traditional parameters, which define their discussions and ultimately ought to make them more insightful when doing ethics. Thus, in the midst of calls for more training to increase the competency of ethics committees, we suggest that an additional problem of how these lay ethicists conceive of their roles also needs to be addressed. (shrink)

If the priest is always a sign of transcendence in some form or other, what is his function in the academic community for which he labors?

The use of the temporal augment in narrative we have found to be purely scansional. Scansional, too, is the use of the syllabic, though this has a grammatical restriction which is of some interest; indeed, next to the maintenance of type öρovδΕ, it is the most vital fact for the whole question. The unaugmented aorist is not felt as an inflection which has been docked of its first syllable; quite the reverse, the augmented tense is treated as a compound. For (...) example, é normally stands second in its clause; and so, if the syllabic augment was still consciously regarded as what it really is—viz. an adverb in composition—we should expect to see a great unwillingness to place Be after a tense thus augmented. Our expectation is fully borne out by the text; in the whole narrative of the Iliad there are only sixteen sure examples of é standing after the syllabically augmented aorist. (shrink)

Concern for the rapidly growing scale and intensity of the human exploitation of the environment, in particular the alienation of natural ecosystems, but also resource exhaustion, pollution, and congestion, leads one to wonder about the short time. horizons allowed for in decision making. Time preference is dictated by the rate of interest, allowing in practice a horizon often not exceeding several decades. I argue that this is unsatisfactory. Some minimal social rate of discount should not be enforced. Instead, it is (...) more feasible to set absolute environmental standards, thereby introducing quantity constraints on our decision making, within which time preference can be permitted to find its own level. This acknowledges that the myopia of human vision may not be a flaw but rather a biological design which has served us weIl in evolution. It may, therefore, be better to change the rules by introducing self-imposed collective constraints than to try to change the shortsightedness of people in their day-to-day grass-roots decision making. (shrink)