We all categorize ourselves. You might think of yourself as a student, or as a painter, or as being good with numbers, or as being civic-minded. These labels we use to categorize ourselves have a huge effect on how we make our decisions–when faced with the choice of doing X vs. doing Y, whether I think of myself as someone’s who’s civic-minded and whether someone who’s civic-minded would do X can both play a huge role in influencing whether I decide (...) to do X. What does all that have to do with freedom? Our guest this month thinks that freedom just is the ability to affect, shape, or even create these sorts of labels, before then applying them to yourself. It isn’t as though anyone invents every label they apply to themselves; plenty of them are handed down to us from popular culture and other sources. But Mariam Thalos thinks that if you’re living freely, you are playing at least some creative role in fashioning your own self-conception. (shrink)

This book demonstrates how and why vitalism—the idea that life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism—matters now. Vitalism resists closure and reductionism in the life sciences while simultaneously addressing the object of life itself. The aim of this collection is to consider the questions that vitalism makes it possible to ask: questions about the role and status of life across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities and questions about contingency, indeterminacy, relationality and change. All have special importance now, (...) as the concepts of complexity, artificial life and artificial intelligence, information theory, and cybernetics become increasingly significant in more and more fields of activity. (shrink)

Background Little is known about communication between patients, families, and healthcare providers regarding ethical concerns that patients and families experience in the course of illness and medical care. To address this gap in the literature, we surveyed patients and family members to learn about their ethical concerns and the extent to which they discussed them with their healthcare providers. Methods We surveyed adult, English-speaking patients and family members receiving inpatient care in five hospitals in the Washington DC-Baltimore metropolitan area from (...) July 2017 to March 2020. Descriptive statistics were used to determine the frequency, comfortableness, and helpfulness of discussions regarding ethical concerns experienced when sick or receiving medical care. Univariable and multivariable stepwise logistic regression models were used to identify associations between healthcare provider and respondent characteristics and attitudes and (1) the likelihood of speaking to a healthcare provider about their ethical concern and (2) their level of comfort during these discussions. Results Of 468 respondents who experienced ethical issues, 299 (64%) reported discussing the situation with a member of their healthcare team; 74% (197/265) of respondents who had such a discussion found the discussion comfortable, and 77% (176/230) of respondents found the discussion helpful. To make discussions more comfortable and helpful, respondents proposed suggestions in open-ended responses involving (1) content and quality of communication; (2) positive healthcare provider qualities such as empathy, open-mindedness, knowledge, honesty, and trustworthiness; and (3) other contextual factors including having adequate time and available resources. Conclusions Patients and families often have ethical concerns that they discuss with clinicians, and they want clinicians to be routinely receptive and attentive to such discussions. (shrink)

This article considers the grounds on which distinctions are drawn between the identities of gender, sexuality, `race' and class and explores the implications of these distinctions in relation to different kinds of identity politics and, in particular, to the politics implied by Judith Butler's theory of performativity. I argue that what is often taken to be the key site of much queer theory and activism - that is, the reappropriation of signifiers of difference - is problematic in the light of (...) a close analysis of subjectivities which are informed by `race', gender and class. More specifically, it may be that struggles which are frequently linked to issues of visibility are problematic in the context of subjectivities - class subjectivities - that are both enabled and constrained by a particular, and a particularly uneasy, relation to recognition and representation. (shrink)

This article aims to show that fundamentality is construed differently in the two most prominent strategies of analysis we find in physical science and engineering today: (1) atomistic, reductive analysis and (2) Systems analysis. Correspondingly, atomism is the conception according to which the simplest (smallest) indivisible entity of a certain kind is most fundamental; while systemism, as will be articulated here, is the conception according to which the bonds that structure wholes are most fundamental, and scale and/or constituting entities are (...) of no significance whatsoever for fundamentality. Accordingly, atomists maintain that the basic entities—the atoms—are fundamental, and together with the “external” interactions among them, are sufficient for illuminating all the features and behaviors of the wholes they constitute; whereas systemists proclaim that it is instead structural qualities of systems, that flow from internal relations among their constituents and translate directly into behaviors, that are fundamental, and by themselves largely (if not entirely) sufficient for illuminating the features and behaviors of the wholes thereby structured. Systemism, as will be argued, is consistent with the nonexistence of a fundamental “level” of nondecomposable entities, just as it is consistent with the existence of such a level. Still, systemism is a conception of the fundamental in quite different, but still ontological terms. Systemism can serve the special sciences—the social sciences especially—better than the conception of fundamentality in terms of atoms. Systemism is, in fact, a conception of fundamentality that has rather different uses—and importantly, different resonances. This conception of fundamentality makes contact with questions pertaining to natural kinds and their situation in the metaphysics of the special sciences—their situation within an order of autonomous sciences. The controversy over fundamentality is evident in the social sciences too, albeit somewhat imperfectly, in the terms of debate between methodological individualists and functionalists/holists. This article will thus clarify the difference between systemism and holism. (shrink)

This essay offers a motivational conception of solidarity that can be employed across the entire range of sciences and humanities, while also filling a gap in the motivational spectrum conceived by decision theorists and economists—and expanding the two-part division between altruistic and selfish motivations into a tripartite analysis that suggests a spectrum instead. According to the present proposal, solidarity is a condition of action-readiness on behalf of a group or its interests. The proposal will admit of measuring the extent to (...) which Prisoner’s Dilemmas are overcome in real life via acts of solidarity. (shrink)

Ghosn, Mariam; Ford, Norman The adult stem cells are capable of self-renewal and are responsible for replenishing cells throughout an individual's lifetime, residing not only at embryonic stage but also in children and adults. The latest advancements and updates in adult stem cell technology demonstrate that it might be possible to generate stem cells for therapeutic uses without the creation or destruction of human embryos.

The twin conceptions of (1) natural law as causal structure and (2) explanation as passage from phenomenon to cause, are two sides of a certain philosophical coin, to which I shall offer an alternative – Humean – currency. The Humean alternative yokes together a version of the regularity conception of law and a conception of explanation as passage from one regularity, to another which has it as an instance but of which it is not itself an instance. I will show (...) that the regularity conception of law is the basis of a distinguished branch of physical mechanics; thus the Humean conception of law, like its better-loved rival, enjoys the support of a venerated tradition in mechanical theory – in fact, that strand which culminates in quantum theory. I shall also offer an account of explanatory asymmetry, a natural companion to the Humean conception of explanation as passage from one regularity to another of greater scope, as an alternative to van Fraassen’s unsatisfactory account. My account of asymmetry is just as free of reliance on context as it is free of reliance on cause. I shall thus proclaim that explanatory asymmetry is at once a reality deserving of philosophical treatment – one not to be given over to the care of psychology or linguistics – and at the same time susceptible of an account worthy of Hume. (shrink)

In this paper we show how a student can learn the basics of the system databases using (W3school CSS) which was built as intelligent tutoring educational system by using the authoring tool called (ITSB). The learning material contains CSS and HTML. We divided the material in a group of lessons for novice learner which combines relational system and lessons in the process of learning. The student can learn using example of CSS, and types of CSS color. Furthermore, the intelligent tutoring (...) system supports not only lessons; but exercises of different difficult levels for each lesson. When a student finish successfully the first difficulty level in a lesson, the student is allowed to move to the next difficulty level of the exercises of the lesson. (shrink)

Cet article esquisse les angles morts d’une histoire, celle de la qualification du savoir au xix e siècle, à partir de l’apparition conjointe du néologisme épistémologie et du syntagme philosophie des sciences. Au-delà des déterminations linguistiques et institutionnelles, il s’efforce de cerner la logique de leur assise commune, en un siècle qui consolida à la fois le rôle central de l’histoire et celui de la recherche d’un statut propre à la pensée. Ainsi, il espère suppléer aux confusions dues à l’impact (...) de la circulation des idées (traductions, traditions et réceptions) et souhaite exposer le lieu d’une profusion conceptuelle, en s’attachant à rendre compte de l’unité d’habitudes générées par l’héritage d’une époque. (shrink)

Memorisation of the Qur’ān occupies a central position in Muslim conception of religious education. The awareness of preserving the Qur’ān through memorisation is becoming prevalent and is still continued in these modern days in many educational institutions in many parts of the Muslim countries. This article examines different methods of Qur’ānic memorization being practiced in Malaysia. Similarities and uniqueness of those methods will be presented. The evaluation of those Qur’ānic memorisation techniques brings to the foreground the educative value of memorisation (...) as a learning tool and the implications memorisation methods have in enhancing an individual’s learning performance. (shrink)

The traditional philosophical questions around human freedom are to do with how to square freedom for human organisms with increasingly scientific understandings of the universe itself. At the beginning of Western philosophical consciousness, Plato, unlike later philosophers eligible of the label rationalist, maintained that there are obstacles to free and rational agency, owing in no small measure to pressures exerted by the human psyche from what later were referred to as biological drives and drives for social status. In subsequent eras, (...) these obstacles came under the heading of “weakness of will”—a conception shared widely in popular and traditional culture. Today the realities of addiction, social stresses, forces of habit, culture, social position, and group identity, together with psychological findings about cognitive biases, have come to dominate the landscape of empirically-based obstacles to agency. Can the image of the human being under the microscope of contemporary science, including cognitive and social science, be reconciled with the “manifest image” of human beings as sources of their individual behaviors (and held responsible accordingly), particularly if the scientific image is best construed in terms of governance by laws of nature? (The phrases manifest image and scientific image were coined by the twentieth-century American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, see Sellars 1962.) How is it possible to square the idea of laws of nature with the manifest image in which humans exercise free agency as they play their various parts in the drama that is life? Does the manifest image thus square better with a theistic image of the world, as both seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes and eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant seem to have thought, and by contrast the scientific image square better with atheism? A deterministic universe, such as was proposed during the Enlightenment, was early on thought to pose a threat to the idea of human freedom. (It does not pose the same threat to the idea of a sovereign creator, however, because the notion of a creator of the universe already puts the entity who qualifies for the office outside the regime of those laws, ahead of them both in time and in ontological status.) One traditional answer to the threat has been the notion of compatibilism— which simply asserts that freedom and determinism are not incompatible. The devil, of course, has been in the details of explaining how this can be so, and many schools of thought on the matter exist. It is worthwhile noting that there are enormously compelling reasons, from the quantum regime so well described by quantum theory, to reject determinism: the laws governing the universe are simply not fully deterministic. This, of course, vitiates the need to confront the threat as originally posed. However, the trouble, if one follows along this line of thought, is to make sense of the nature of freedom in a world governed partly by deterministic laws and partly by nondeterministic ones that admit of an element of chance. Is such a world itself any more compatible with the idea of human freedom? In this section we grapple with the question of human freedom, what it could mean, and whether it is best accepted in the context of a form of theism. We find that theism has no more resources for addressing these difficulties than atheism does. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has emphasized the contributions of the great Maliki jurist Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī to Islamic legal thought. However, al-Qarāfī’s compilation of legal maxims and distinctions, al-Furūq, has not yet been studied, nor has the collection of his teacher, the prominent Shafiʿi jurist Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām, known as al-Qawāʿid al-kubrā. Furthermore, the original thought of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām and his formative influence on al-Qarāfī have been understated. This article compares their two works to demonstrate that al-Qarāfī based his collection in (...) large part on Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s al-Qawāʿid and it examines the techniques that al-Qarāfī used, which included reordering, refining, and supplementing borrowed maxims, and anonymizing references to his teacher. Most salient, however, is al-Qarāfī’s “Malikization” of maxims, which entailed replacing Shafiʿi doctrines and authorities with their Maliki counterparts and deploying maxims to defend Maliki doctrines. The article concludes by explaining al-Qarāfī’s authorial choices in light of his Maliki affiliation and the politics between the legal schools in Mamluk Cairo. (shrink)

The recently reported cases of coerced sterilisation of women at a privately operated immigration detention facility in the USA are egregious in their disregard for human dignity and professional ethics, but sadly not surprising. These abuses represent a continuation of efforts to control the reproductive capacity of women, fueled by racist and xenophobic motives. Physicians helped create and legitimise the pseudoscientific framework for the eugenics movement, which would implement forceful sterilisation as its tool of choice to eliminate undesirable traits that (...) were thought to be biologically inherited and predominant among racial and ethnic minorities. Although state-endorsed forcible sterilisation programs have ended, incarcerated women have remained particularly vulnerable to sterilisation abuse. The intersectional vulnerabilities of racism, xenophobia and carcerality must be addressed to prevent such abuses from recurring. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

A venerable tradition in the metaphysics of science commends ontological reduction: the practice of analysis of theoretical entities into further and further proper parts, with the understanding that the original entity is nothing but the sum of these. This tradition implicitly subscribes to the principle that all the real action of the universe (also referred to as its "causation") happens at the smallest scales-at the scale of microphysics. A vast majority of metaphysicians and philosophers of science, covering a wide swath (...) of the spectrum from reductionists to emergentists, defend this principle. It provides one pillar of the most prominent theory of science, to the effect that the sciences are organized in a hierarchy, according to the scales of measurement occupied by the phenomena they study. On this view, the fundamentality of a science is reckoned inversely to its position on that scale. This venerable tradition has been justly and vigorously countered-in physics, most notably: it is countered in quantum theory, in theories of radiation and superconduction, and most spectacularly in renormalization theories of the structure of matter. But these counters-and the profound revisions they prompt-lie just below the philosophical radar. This book illuminates these counters to the tradition principle, in order to assemble them in support of a vaster (and at its core Aristotelian) philosophical vision of sciences that are not organized within a hierarchy. In so doing, the book articulates the principle that the universe is active at absolutely all scales of measurement. This vision, as the book shows, is warranted by philosophical treatment of cardinal issues in the philosophy of science: fundamentality, causation, scientific innovation, dependence and independence, and the proprieties of explanation. (shrink)

Practitioners of science treat evidence as a separate and objective body of materials that is independent of, and possibly also prior to, all of theorizing. Philosophers of science, by contrast, are increasingly wary of the role of theory in testing and measurement contexts, and hence have problematized the notion of evidence as prior or independent, even in the context of measurement. This paper argues that there is an important sense in which empirical certification of a quantity, via measurement, is indeed (...) prior to theorizing, albeit not necessarily in order of time. The case for this priority distinguishes between the certification of the measurability of a given quantity, as a quantity appropriately measured on a specified scale, and the epistemic warrant due to an assignment of a specific magnitude to that quantity on a given occasion. The result is an account of the certification of a measurable quantity, independent of any theory in which that quantity features. The effect is to render certification of quantities theory-neutral. The aim of the essay is thus to bolster and re-establish a more nuanced empiricist view, via building a case for quantity certification as the epistemic basis (i.e., foundation) of the scientific enterprise. (shrink)

The present paper aims to explore the medieval philosopher Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī’s (d. pre- 560 AH/1164-5) position concerning the problem of divine foreknowledge and human free will and argues Abū al-Barakāt to have considered the argument for compatibility between divine foreknowledge and human free will to be invalid. One can defend either divine foreknowledge or human free will; no other solution is available. By examining his accounts on this issue through the logic and metaphysics of his book al-Muʿtabar fi-l-ḥikma, Abū (...) al-Barakāt defense of human free will shall become evident. (shrink)

The radical probabilist counsels the prudent never to put away uncertainty, and hence always to balance judgment with probabilities of various sizes. Against this counsel I shall advise in favor of the practice of full belief — at least for some occasions. This advice rests on the fact that it is sometimes in a person's interests to accept certain propositions as a means of bringing it about that others recognize oneself as having accepted those propositions. With the pragmatists, therefore, I (...) shall reject the view that belief formation must in every instance be a truth-directed affair. Unlike the pragmatists, however, I shall conclude that the enterprise of belief formation is not directed exclusively, or even primarily, at attaining knowledge. In other words, pursuit of that which it profits to believe, on the one hand, and pursuit of knowledge on the other, are distinct enterprises, which overlap (when they do) only accidentally. (shrink)

This book explores philosophical ethics in Arabo-Islamic thought.

Dynamical-systems analysis is nowadays ubiquitous. From engineering (its point of origin and natural home) to physiology, and from psychology to ecology, it enjoys surprisingly wide application. Sometimes the analysis rings decisively false—as, for example, when adopted in certain treatments of historical narrative; other times it is provocative and controversial, as when applied to the phenomena of mind and cognition. Dynamical systems analysis (or “Systems” with a capital “S,” as I shall sometimes refer to it) is simply a tool of analysis. (...) It mobilizes the language and mathematical technology of differential equations, and brings into play the distinctive concepts of equilibrium and attractor, as well as gain, coupling and neighborhood, that are not obviously proprietary property of any particular domain of objects or regime in the world. It is the ecumenical language of engineers, universal in scope. Still, Systems, as a mode of analysis, itself stands in need of clarification. Once that clarity has been attained, one can then ask: are there limitations or bounds on proper application of Systems analysis, that are themselves premised upon considerations internal to the analysis itself? This is one of several questions to which the present essay is devoted. Before it can be attempted, however, we shall require some groundwork that clarifies the mode of analysis that is Systems—the family of analyses to which it belongs. This will begin to bring out (among other things) the precise difference of subject matter between biology and physics. And the ecumenicality of Systems analysis is bound to have its own distinctive commitments, as we shall see. Practitioners attuned to the signal characteristics of Systems analysis—characteristics that set it apart—proclaim its many advantages. (shrink)

I shall endeavor to show that every physical theory since Newton explains without drawing attention to causes–that, in other words, physical theories as physical theories aspire to explain under an ideal quite distinct from that of causal explanation. If I am right, then even if sometimes the explanations achieved by a physical theory are not in violation of the standard of causal explanation, this is purely an accident. For physical theories, as I will show, do not, as such, aim at (...) accommodating the goals or aspirations of causal explanation. This will serve as the founding insight for a new theory of explanation, which will itself serve as the cornerstone of a new theory of scientific method. (shrink)

This article addresses the serotonin hypothesis of depression, as it was formulated in clinical and laboratory experiments during the 1950s. In the first instance I argue that the `challenge' posed by patients' subjectivities in clinical investigations into the potentially anti-depressant drug iproniazid was not solely due to the tensions generated by the subject/object dichotomy, but to an excess that exceeds the properties of the objects of the experiment, as well as its requirements and conditions. I then suggest that the serotonin (...) hypothesis too is possessed of an excess, and that this can be understood in terms of a real (actual and virtual) existence in duration. By exploiting the notions of the event and of duration, I offer an under-standing of the hypothesis that pertains not to reduction, reproducibility and sameness, but to differentiation, innovation and creation. (shrink)

Ghosn, Mariam Predictive genetic testing Part 2 will examine the issues and ethical aspects that must be considered when adolescents below the age of majority make a request to undergo predictive genetic testing for Huntington's disease.

Ghosn, Mariam A seven-year $1 million dollar study conducted by Dr. M. Soffritti found that significant trend of increasing lymphoma and leukaemia incidence in female rats fed aspartame with a significant increase in the number of female rats affected at dosages of 20 mg/kg per day and upward, thus questioning aspartame's safety. However, the European Food Safety Authority's (EFSA's) Scientific Panel on Food Additives, Flavourings, Processing Aids and Materials in Contact with Food (AFC) argued that there was not enough (...) evidence to conclude that aspartame causes an increased incidence of lymphomas and leukaemias, also arguing that the increase in the number of rats affected with lymphomas and leukaemias could be due to chronic respiratory infections of the rats used in the study. (shrink)

İşbu makale Ebü’l-Berekât el-Bağdâdî’nin (ö. 560/ 1164-65’ten önce) ilâhî önbilgi ve insanın özgür iradesi sorununa dair konumunu tetkik etme amacındadır. Metin, Ebü’l-Berekât’ın ilâhî önbilgi ve insanın özgür iradesinin bağdaşması argümanın geçerli olmadığını düşündüğünü iddia ediyor. Bir kişi ya ilâhî önbilgiyi ya da insanın özgür iradesini savunabilir, başka bir çözüm yoktur. Kitâbu’l-Mu‘teber fi’l-hikme adlı kitabının mantık ve metafizik bölümleri içerisindeki bu meseleye dair açıklamalarını inceleyerek, Ebü’l- Berekât’ın ikinci alternatifi seçtiği belirgin kılınacaktır.

I shall introduce the units of decision problem in the theory of decision, which as I shall explain is a sibling to the units of selection problem in evolutionary theory. And I shall present an argument to the effect that, contrary to Bayesian wisdom on the subject, undertaking decision in group settings violates no precepts of rationality.

Using C. Wright Mills' book The Sociological Imagination as a touchstone for its discussion, this article addresses the relations between the sociological problem, relevance and experience as they are and could potentially be understood within sociology. Beginning with the historical relation between sociology, science and literature — a relation which has been productively but differently complicated by poststructuralist and postconstructivist theories — this article asks: to what extent does the empirical offer a referent for the sociological problem? To what is (...) sociology obliged to be relevant? Arguing for the continued relevance of relevance, particularly in the light of recent reforms in higher education in the UK and the USA, the article explores how the sociological problem might be transformed — and perhaps, more importantly, might be transformative — if the basic commitments of a research project were not to historical social structures but to virtual structures. (shrink)

This article addresses the relations between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (and those characteristics associated with ‘the natural’ and ‘the cultural’) in the context of the debates about Prozac. Following Marilyn Strathern, I focus specifically on the contested issue of enablement - that is, on what Prozac does or does not enable, and on the relation between enablement and enhancement, normality and pathology. I argue that the implications of the model of the brain that accompanies explanations of Prozac are such that commentators (...) are obliged to address not only the nature of normality but also the nature of nature itself. Through a close analysis of these debates, I suggest that critiques of Prozac should be understood not as objections to reductionism - to a biology that closes things down - but rather to one that opens things up: that opens up the relations between nature, culture, biology and the individual, relations that are now cross-cut and thrown about by artificiality. Objections to Prozac, then, might be characterized as an attempt to put these concepts back into their ‘proper’ positions, to re-establish the relationality between them. In conclusion, I argue that the biology put forward by proponents of psychopharmacology, regardless of the desirability of the latter, challenges not only the frequent assumptions that are made about the claims of materialist science, but also some of the terms and concepts that are commonly deployed in the social sciences. (shrink)

This paper documents a wide range of nonreductive scientific treatments of phenomena in the domain of physics. These treatments strongly resist characterization as explanations of macrobehavior exclusively in terms of behavior of microconstituents. For they are treatments in which macroquantities are cast in the role of genuine and irreducible degrees of freedom. One is driven into reductionism when one is not cultivated to possess an array of distinctions rich enough to let things be what they are. In contrast, making the (...) decisive distinction has an illuminating and liberating effect because it lets the concrete occurrence stand forth for what it is. We understand it not in terms of a decipherment, but on its own terms. –Robert Sokolowski (“Making Distinctions”, 1992). (shrink)

Ghosn, Mariam Huntington's disease (HD) is an inherited disorder. Sufferers usually develop symptoms in midlife between the ages of 30 and 50 years. HD causes neurodegeneration resulting in the progressive development of physical, cognitive and emotional symptoms. The impact on sufferers worsens over time with the final stage of the disease resulting in the need for professional assistance in a long-term care facility. More rarely HD develops in children and young adults, with less than 5% of HD sufferers being (...) affected by Juvenile HD. This article considers the ethical aspects of such testing. (shrink)

Ghosn, Mariam The causes of obesity are complex. Both our attitudes and lifestyles will need to change in order to successfully address this issue.

In the context of the question of the extent to which science studies is able to mount an adequate critique of contemporary developments in science and technology, and in view of the proliferating interest in ethics across the social sciences, this article has two aims. Firstly to address some of the implications for ethics of Bruno Latour's, and to a lesser extent Alfred North Whitehead’s, conceptions of reality, both of which have a bearing on the long-standing dichotomy between facts and (...) values. Drawing on Whitehead's work, it also, secondly, seeks to make a positive argument for ethics and to ask again, in the light of this discussion, where the ethical dimensions of Latour's work might be located. Towards the end of the article, I suggest that Latour's concept of exteriority obliges him to pursue a politics of reality which is the special providence of ‘moralists’, rather than a politics of virtual reality in which all entities, human and non-human, are engaged. (shrink)

This essay argues that, in place of the present hit-and-miss system of specialist advisement (a system of scientific experts performing case-by-case studies at numerous regulatory agencies, the US Office of Technology Assessment, for example), we require a corps of professional public servants for the dissemination of credible, learned, relevant and useful information pertaining to the issues of the day. This is necessary because scientists as a group are poorly prepared for the task of advising (as contrasted with the quite different (...) task of conducting research in their subject area), and, more importantly, because governments cannot ask scientists to provide that information without also incentivizing third parties (albeit unintentionally) to compromise the institution of science itself. This corps must also be poised to perform such aggregations of opinion (or arbitrations between conflicting opinions and interests) when requests are duly submitted by both governmental and citizen bodies. The product of this corps will be a dynamic, massively cross-referential, virtual document that I shall refer to as the Citizenpedia. This essay is devoted to justifying the government subsidy of such a document, as well as to evaluating the best role for scientists in a democracy. It will contrast the Citizenpedia proposal with practices that have been tried: (1) governmental agencies and (2) citizen panels. Most importantly, it is devoted to showing that a world in which the Citizenpedia advises governments is substantially different from one in which either citizens or “experts” do, just as it is substantially different from a world (our own) in which the media plays the largest role in educating the public on science policy matters. (shrink)

The German philosopher, writer, and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) has played a key role in the transformation and development of education in Prussia and beyond its borders. If time is change and can be measured as progress towards social transformation, then time serves some concrete utility transposed in the field of education. For the purpose of social transformation and development of education, Humboldt has used various strategies, among which ethics or morals had a certain impact on education. Despite the (...) importance of this aspect, the ethical understanding of the philosopher has not been researched deeply yet. The following paper analyses this question according to Humboldt’s writings and shows its relevance for education. The aim of this research is to reveal insights that have the potential to serve the development of education even now. (shrink)

Social sciences face a well-known problem, which is an instance of a general problem faced as well by psychological and biological sciences: the problem of establishing their legitimate existence alongside physics. This, as will become clear, is a problem in metaphysics. I will show how a new account of structural explanations, put forward by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, which is designed to solve this metaphysical problem with social sciences in mind, fails to treat the problem in any importantly new (...) way. Then I will propose a more modest approach, and show how it does not deserve the criticism directed at a prototype by Jackson and Pettit. (shrink)

This essay explores the process and issues related to community collaborative research that involves Native Americans generally, and specifically examines the Navajo Nation’s efforts to regulate research within its jurisdiction. Researchers need to account for both the experience of Native Americans and their own preconceptions about Native Americans when conducting research about Native Americans. The Navajo Nation institutionalized an approach to protecting members of the nation when it took over Institutional Review Board (IRB) responsibilities from the US Indian Health Service (...) (IHS) in 1996. While written regulations for the Navajo Nation IRB are not dissimilar, and in some ways are less detailed than those of the IHS IRB, in practice the Navajo Nation allows less flexibility. Primary examples of this include not allowing expedited review and requiring prepublication review of all manuscripts. Because of its broad mandate, the Navajo Nation IRB may also require review of some projects that would not normally be subject to IRB approval, including investigative journalism and secondary research about Navajo People that does not involve direct data collection from human subjects. (shrink)

In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the philosophical theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory that employs tools of phenomenology, rather than a theory that locates itself in relation to canonical positions regarding the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of (...) social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent’s conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic—it is the logic of fit between one’s aspirations and one’s circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one’s self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one’s life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a social one. (shrink)