Rare copy number variants have a prominent role in the aetiology of schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. Substantial risk for schizophrenia is conferred by large CNVs at several loci, including microdeletions at 1q21.1, 3q29, 15q13.3 and 22q11.2 and microduplication at 16p11.2. However, these CNVs collectively account for a small fraction of cases, and the relevant genes and neurobiological mechanisms are not well understood. Here we performed a large two-stage genome-wide scan of rare CNVs and report the significant association of copy (...) number gains at chromosome 7q36.3 with schizophrenia. Microduplications with variable breakpoints occurred within a 362-kilobase region and were detected in 29 of 8,290 patients versus 2 of 7,431 controls in the combined sample. All duplications overlapped or were located within 89 kilobases upstream of the vasoactive intestinal peptide receptor gene VIPR2. VIPR2 transcription and cyclic-AMP signalling were significantly increased in cultured lymphocytes from patients with microduplications of 7q36.3. These findings implicate altered vasoactive intestinal peptide signalling in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia and indicate the VPAC2 receptor as a potential target for the development of new antipsychotic drugs. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Morris explicates a concept of culture which is both descriptive and normative. Throughout he is concerned with showing that there are objective criteria for evaluating cultures and distinguishing "authentic" from "spurious" aspects. Both the tone and doctrine of the "functionalism" elaborated are reminiscent of Dewey's approach. One wishes that the complex issues involved in justifying standards of criticism had been analyzed with greater care and precision.--W. L. M.

In Alabaster v. Barclays Bank plc and Secretary of State for Social Security (No. 2: [2005] E.W.C.A Civ. 508, [2005] I.R.L.R. 576.) Michelle Alabaster won a grand total of £204.53 (plus £65.86 interest) after eight years of litigation, which included two visits to the Court of Appeal and one to the European Court of Justice. This marathon resulted from the sex discrimination which Alabaster had alleged in relation to the calculation of her Statutory Maternity Pay (S.M.P.) whilst she was pregnant (...) 10 years earlier. The technicalities of the statutory schemes involved should not be allowed to disguise the important principle which finally emerges in the Court of Appeal and which underlines one of the longstanding criticisms of the equality legislation, namely the requirement that a woman must compare herself with a man in order to establish unlawful sex discrimination. (shrink)

MORRIS: But come back to that other kind of fiction, in which the author himself is involved with his works, not merely in writing something for other people but in writing what seems to be necessary to his conscious existence, to his sense of well-being. For such a writer, when he finished with something he finishes with it; he is not left with continuations that he can go on knitting until he runs out of yarn. This conceit reflects my (...) own experience as a writer, relying on the sap that keeps rising, the force that drives the flower, as Dylan Thomas put it. It is plantlike. We put it in the sun and when it doesn't grow, we take it and put it in another room. I don't think of repotting the plant. The plant must make its own way. BOOTH: I like the organic metaphor, but I keep wanting to come back to particular cases to see how you actually work, in literal detail. Even the organic novelist obviously still has the matter of collecting notes, starting a novel, having it fail to go. Let me put a simple question, and move out from there. How many actual novels, whether they ever reach fruition or not, do you have "growing" at a given time? MORRIS: You don't mean simultaneously? BOOTH: I mean actual notes that exist in some kind of manuscript form, starts on a novel, something you are actually working on. MORRIS: It is so unusual for me to have more than one or two things in mind at once that I don't find this a fruitful question. Wright Morris's work as a novelist, essayist, and photographer is examined by prominent critics in Conversations with Wright Morris; the collection, edited by Robert E. Knoll, was published in the spring of 1977 by the University of Nebraska Press. "The Writing of Organic Fiction" is a chapter in that book. Wayne C. Booth's other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" ,"Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" , "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist" , “'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" , "Notes and Exchanges" , "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" ,"Ten Literal 'Theses" , and, with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979". (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays in honor of Radoslav A. Tsanoff, Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Rice University for forty years. Besides a tribute to Tsanoff written by J. S. Fulton, there are ten essays written by distinguished philosophers, each considering a topic in his field of interest. Virgil Aldrich discusses the importance of language in an essay entitled "Self-Consciousness." An examination of the new in art and an attempt to explicate its value and rationale is (...) presented by Van Meter Ames; illustrative material is drawn from such sources as contemporary film, pop art and chance music. In "Social Science and Social Norms" Clifford Barrett discusses the relevance of facts and norms in systematic considerations of social scientists. C. P. Snow's concept of two cultures is examined by A. Cornelius Benjamin in "Philosophy and the Cultures." Other essays presented are "Philosophy and Common Sense" by George Boas, "Conscience and Conscientiousness" by A. Campbell Garnett, "Criteria for Ideas of God" by C. Hartshorne, and "Sovereignty and the Idea of Republic" by C. W. Hendel. Charles Morris examines the common themes of the pragmatic movement, discussing such fields as epistemology, axiology and cosmology, and such philosophers as Peirce, Dewey, Mead and Lewis. In the concluding essay G. R. Morrow discusses Plato's views about a God and the many gods of the Greek pantheon. This book is a loose collection of papers, lacking any single theme or determinate relation between the essays presented; each essay, however, is competently handled and is interesting in its own right.—E. M. (shrink)

Introduction, by G. Holton.--Three eighteenth-century social philosophers: scientific influences on their thought, by H. Guerlac.--Science and the human comedy: Voltaire, by H. Brown.--The seventeenth-century legacy: our mirror of being, by G. de Santillana.--Contemporary science and the contemporary world view, by P. Frank.--The growth of science and the structure of culture, by R. Oppenheimer.--The Freudian conception of man and the continuity of nature, by J. S. Bruner.--Quo vadis, by P. W. Bridgman.--Prospects for a new synthesis: science and the humanities as complementary (...) activities, by C. Morris.--A humanist looks at science, by H. M. Jones. (shrink)

Precision Medicine has become a common label for data-intensive and patient-driven biomedical research. Its intended future is reflected in endeavours such as the Precision Medicine Initiative in the USA. This article addresses the question whether it is possible to discern a new ‘medical cosmology’ in Precision Medicine, a concept that was developed by Nicholas Jewson to describe comprehensive transformations involving various dimensions of biomedical knowledge and practice, such as vocabularies, the roles of patients and physicians and the conceptualisation of disease. (...) Subsequently, I will elaborate my assessment of the features of Precision Medicine with the help of Michel Foucault, by exploring how precision medicine involves a transformation along three axes: the axis of biomedical knowledge, of biomedical power and of the patient as a self. Patients are encouraged to become the managers of their own health status, while the medical domain is reframed as a data-sharing community, characterised by changing power relationships between providers and patients, producers and consumers. While the emerging Precision Medicine cosmology may surpass existing knowledge frameworks; it obscures previous traditions and reduces research-subjects to mere data. This in turn, means that the individual is both subjected to the neoliberal demand to share personal information, and at the same time has acquired the positive ‘right’ to become a member of the data-sharing community. The subject has to constantly negotiate the meaning of his or her data, which can either enable self-expression, or function as a commanding Superego. (shrink)

Featuring sixty-seven classic and contemporary selections, Questions of Life and Death: Readings in Practical Ethics is ideal for courses in contemporary moral problems, applied ethics, and introduction to ethics. In contrast with other moral problems anthologies, it deals exclusively with current moral issues concerning life and death, the ethics of killing, and the ethics of saving lives. By focusing on these specific questions--rather than on an unrelated profusion of moral problems--this volume offers a theoretically unified presentation that enables students to (...) see how their conclusions regarding one moral issue can affect their positions on other debates. (shrink)

After presenting a variety of arguments in support of the idea that ordinary names are indexical, I respond to John Perry's recent arguments against the indexicality of names. I conclude by indicating some connections between the theory of names defended here and Wittgenstein's observations on naming, and suggest that the latter may have been misconstrued in the literature.

Moral foundations research suggests that liberals care about moral values related to individual rights such as harm and fairness, while conservatives care about those foundations in addition to caring more about group rights such as loyalty, authority, and purity. However, the question remains about how conservatives and liberals differ in relation to group-level moral principles. We used two versions of the moral foundations questionnaire with the target group being either abstract or specific ingroups or outgroups. Across three studies, we observed (...) that liberals showed more endorsement of Individualizing foundations with an outgroup target, while conservatives showed more endorsement of Binding foundations with an ingroup target. This general pattern was found when the framed, target-group was abstract and when target groups were specified about a general British-ingroup and an immigrant-outgroup. In Studies 2 and 3, both Individualizing-Ingroup Preference and Binding-Ingroup Preference scores predicted more Attitude Bias and more Negative Attitude Bias toward immigrants, more Implicit Bias, and more Perceived Threat from immigrants. We also demonstrated that increasing liberalism was associated with less Attitude Bias and less Negative Bias toward immigrants, less Implicit Bias, and less Perceived Threat from immigrants. Outgroup-individualizing foundations and Ingroup-Binding foundations showed different patterns of mediation of these effects. (shrink)

Prison work creates ethical challenges for which a training program was initiated for Dutch prison staff to foster their Moral Craftsmanship (MCS). The concept of MCS is not yet defined and operationalized in literature. This explorative study aims to 1) define MCS, 2) identify conceptual elements of MCS, and 3) develop a measurement tool for MCS. A document and literature study provided input for the definition and selection of conceptual elements related within DCIA policy documents, identifying three conceptual levels of (...) MCS: individual (cognition, attitude, and actions), team, and leadership. This first MCSQ consists of seventy-one items distributed across the domains: values and norms, judgment and reasoning, consultation, implementation, looking back, interactions, and leadership. We tested its usability via ‘think-aloud interviews.’ Validation of the current version of the MCS-Questionnaire and consensus among experts about what to include or exclude in the concept of MCS are needed for further development. (shrink)

After presenting a variety of arguments in support of the idea that ordinary names are indexical, I respond to John Perry's recent arguments against the indexicality of names. I conclude by indicating some connections between the theory of names defended here and Wittgenstein's observations on naming, and suggest that the latter may have been misconstrued in the literature.

In Fiction, Truth and Literature, Lamarque and Olsen argue that if a critic claims or attempts to prove that the outlook of a work of literature is true or false, he is not engaging in literary or aesthetic appreciation. This paper argues against this position by adducing cases where literary critics discuss the truth or falsity of a work’s view, when their opinions are obviously relevant to the work’s aesthetic assessment. The paper considers in detail the way factual errors damage (...) a work’s aesthetic standing, and shows that Lamarque and Olsen’s alternative account of the role of propositional truths in literature only looks plausible because it considers a restricted range of examples. Finally, it considers the role intention, date and genre play in discussions of the aesthetic damage done by literal falsehood. (shrink)

In this volume a group of distinguished moral and social thinkers address the urgent problem of terrorism. The essays define terrorism, discuss whether the assessment of terrorist violence should be based on its consequences, and explore what means may be used to combat those who use violence without justification. Among other questions raised by the volume are: what does it mean for a people to be innocent of the acts of their government? Might there not be some justification in terrorists (...) targeting certain victims but not others? Might terrorist acts be attributed to groups or to states? (shrink)

This book addresses critical issues in normative ethical theory. Every such theory must contain not only a theory of motivation but also a theory of value, and the link that is often forged between what is valuable and what would be right is human welfare or well-being. This topic is a subject of considerable controversy in contemporary ethics, not least because of the current reconsideration of utilitarianism. Indeed, there is as much disagreement about the nature of value and its relationship (...) to welfare and morality, as there is about the substantive content of normative ethical theories. The essays in this collection, all written by a distinguished team of moral philosophers, provide an overview, analysis and an attempted resolution of those controversies. They constitute a rigorous account of the relationships among value, welfare and morality. (shrink)

The concept of supererogation is an act that it is right to do but not wrong not to do. The moral trinity of the deontic logic excludes such acts from moral theory. A moral theory that is based on duty or obligation unqualified seems inevitably to make all good acts obligations, whether construed from a teleological or deontological point of view. If supererogation is a moral fact, no moral theory can survive without acknowledging it. One way to distinguish supererogation from (...) obligation that is not arbitrary is to draw the line of obligation at death and dismemberment. Such a limit to obligation is often implicit in moral theory. Inclusive obligation requires us all to be heroes all of the time. The moral limit to obligation is one of Hobbes's teachings. Though it is seldom noted in contemporary political and moral theory, it is, for example, implied in Rawls's definition of ‘supererogation.’ In this definition it is said that heroic supererogation would be a duty but for the high cost associated with it. This cost is the risk of life and limb;.it distinguishes supererogation from both benevolence and obligation.A supererogation is a good act with a high cost. The goodness of the act, however determined, must be proportionate to the cost to the agent. If life is risked, life or something deemed no less valuable must be gained. The intention to effect such important goods for others is sufficient for an act to be supererogatory even if it fails.If moral reality is inevitably vague, complex, and incomplete, then it is no surprise that moral theory is that way, too. The challenge is that moral theory be no more vague, complex, and incomplete than necessary and in ways justified by the nature of moral reality. A science, Aristotle advised, can be no more precise than its subject matter permits. (shrink)

An attitude which hopes to derive aesthetic pleasure from an object is often thought to be in tension with an attitude which hopes to derive knowledge from it. The current article argues that this alleged conflict only makes sense when the aesthetic attitude and knowledge are construed unnaturally narrowly, and that when both are correctly understood there is no tension between them. To do this, the article first proposes a broad and satisfying account of the aesthetic attitude, and then considers (...) and rejects twelve reasons for thinking that deriving knowledge from something is incompatible with maintaining an aesthetic attitude towards it. Two main conclusions are drawn. 1) That the representational arts are often in a good position to communicate non-propositional knowledge about human beings. 2) That while our desire to obtain pleasure from a work's manifest properties, and our desire to obtain knowledge from it, are not the same motive, the formal similarities between them are sufficiently impressive to warrant both being seen as elements of the aesthetic attitude. (shrink)

The influence of Goethe on Wittgenstein is just beginning to be appreciated. Hacker and Baker, Westphal, Monk, and Haller have all drawn attention to significant affinities between the two men's work, and the number of explicit citations of Goethe in Wittgenstein's texts supports the idea that we are not dealing simply with a matter of deeplying similarities of aim and method, but of direct and major influence. These scholarly developments are encouraging because they help to place Wittgenstein's work within an (...) important tradition of German letters which goes far beyond his contemporaries and immediate forebears in Vienna; and they show that Wittgenstein's profound interest in literature and music is ceasing to be merely a matter of biographical anecdote, and is being used to illuminate some of the most central areas of his work. (shrink)