What is animal welfare? Why has it proved so difficult to find a definition that everyone can agree on? This concise and accessible guide is for anyone who is interested in animals and who has wondered how we can assess their welfare scientifically. It defines animal welfare as 'health and animals having what they want', a definition that can be easily understood by scientists and non-scientists alike, expresses in simple words what underlies many existing definitions, and shows what evidence we (...) need to collect to improve animal welfare in practice. Above all, it puts the animal's own point of view at the heart of an assessment of its welfare. But, can we really understand what animals want? A consistent theme running through the book is that not only is it possible to establish what animals want, but that this information is vital in helping us to make sense of the long and often confusing list of welfare measures that are now in use such as 'stress' and 'feel good hormones', expressive sounds and gestures, natural behaviour, cognitive bias, and stereotypies. Defining welfare as 'health and what animals want' allows us to distinguish between measures that are simply what an animal does when it is alert, aroused, or active and those measures that genuinely allow us to distinguish between situations the animals themselves see as positive or negative. Sentience (conscious feelings of pleasure, pain, and suffering) is for many people the essence of what is meant by welfare, but studying consciousness is notoriously difficult, particularly in non-human species. These difficulties are discussed in the context of our current - and as yet incomplete - knowledge of human and animal consciousness. Finally, the book highlights some key ideas in the relationship between animal welfare science and animal ethics and shows how closely the well-being of humans is linked to that of other animals. The Science of Animal Welfare is an ideal companion for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in animal behaviour and welfare, as well as for professional researchers, practitioners and animal welfare consultants. At the same time, it is easily understandable to non-scientists and anyone without prior knowledge but with an interest in animals and the rapidly evolving science of animal welfare. (shrink)

It's a truism to say that politicians lie. They twist the truth, exaggerate and spin. But blatant lying has now become the norm, led by Donald Trump and carried on by Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison. Combine this with an all-out assault on the truth in public debate along with the biggest communications revolution since the printing press, and you have a disaster in real time: a sea of fake news, hyper-partisanship and polarisation. No society or democracy can function without (...) trust, and the consequences of this profound shift are clear. The first step to a remedy is in understanding both the liars and the environments in which they lie. Lies and Falsehoods does exactly that, in this account of how we found ourselves in this fractured post-truth world, and how we might get out. (shrink)

Current debates in science and technology studies emphasize that the bio-economy—or, the articulation of capitalism and biotechnology—is built on notions of commodity production, commodification, and materiality, emphasizing that it is possible to derive value from body parts, molecular and cellular tissues, biological processes, and so on. What is missing from these perspectives, however, is consideration of the political-economic actors, knowledges, and practices involved in the creation and management of value. As part of a rethinking of value in the bio-economy, this (...) article analyzes three key political-economic processes: financialization, capitalization, and assetization. In doing so, it argues that value is managed as part of a series of valuation practices, it is not inherent in biological materialities. (shrink)

A Companion to Hermeneutics is a collection of original essays from leading international scholars that provide a definitive historical and critical compendium of philosophical hermeneutics. Offers a definitive historical, systematic, and critical compendium of hermeneutics Represents state-of-the-art thinking on the major themes, topics, concepts and figures of the hermeneutic tradition in philosophy and those who have influenced hermeneutic thought, including Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Foucault, Habermas, and Rorty Explores the art and theory of interpretation as it intersects (...) with a number of philosophical and inter-disciplinary areas, including humanism, theology, literature, politics, education and law Features contributions from an international cast of leading and upcoming scholars, who offer historically informed, philosophically comprehensive, and critically astute contributions in their individual fields of expertise Written to be accessible to interested non-specialists, as well asprofessional philosophers. (shrink)

MacIntyre is a major defender of the resurgence of the Aristotelian approach in ethical and political theory. He considers Aristotelianism not only a feasible, but also an intellectually superior alternative to most contemporary dominant ideologies, and to liberalism in particular. There is, however, an important and instructive modification to his view of what is admissible from Aristotle that should be accounted for. The paper traces MacIntyre’s search for a defensible restatement of the Aristotelian ethics and examines in particular his changing (...) attitude to metaphysics as the basis for ethics within his project. Different stages of the development to his proposed Aristotelian alternative are analyzed and evaluated. The paper tries to show that despite the fact that MacIntyre initially repudiated Aristotle’s metaphysical biology, nevertheless his account has always been (implicitly or explicitly) metaphysical. (shrink)

In a world increasingly concerned with the human species and its future, Marian Stamp Dawkins argues that we need to rethink some of the fundamental questions regarding animal welfare. How are we justified in projecting human emotions on to animals? What kind of mental lives do they have? What can science tell us about their quality of life?

"More than any other public figure of the eighteenth century, Tom Paine strikes our times like a trumpet blast from a distant world." So begins John Keane's magnificent and award-winning (the Fraunces Tavern Book Award) biography of one of democracy's greatest champions. Among friends and enemies alike, Paine earned a reputation as a notorious pamphleteer, one of the greatest political figures of his day, and the author of three best-selling books, Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age (...) of Reason. Setting his compelling narrative against a vivid social backdrop of prerevolutionary America and the French Revolution, John Keane melds together the public and the shadowy private sides of Paine's life in a remarkable piece of scholarship. This is the definitive biography of a man whose life and work profoundly shaped the modern age. "Provide[s] an engaging perspective on England, America, and France in the tumultuous years of the late eighteenth century." -- Pauline Maier, The New York Times Book Review "It is hard to imagine this magnificent biography ever being superceded.... It is a stylish, splendidly erudite work." -- Terry Eagleton, The Guardian. (shrink)

This book covers the theory of our moral behavior that seems to meander throughout the history of ideas and that led eventually to scientific explanation of human moral behavior with various interpretations of the natural moral law.

Contemporary, technoscientific capitalism is characterized by the configuration of a range of “things” as assets or capitalized property. Accumulation strategies have changed as a result of this assetization process. Rather than entrepreneurial strategies based on commodity production, technoscientific capitalism is increasingly underpinned by rentiership or the appropriation of value through ownership and control rights, monopoly conditions, and regulatory or market devices and practices. While rentiership is often presented as a negative phenomenon in both neoclassical and Marxist political economy literatures—and much (...) in between—in this paper, I conceptualize rentiership as a technoeconomic practice and process framed by insights from science and technology studies. So, rather than a problematic “side effect” of capitalism, the concept of rentiership enables us to understand how different forms of value extraction constitute, and are constituted by, different forms of technoscience. This allows STS to contribute a distinctive analytical approach to ongoing debates in political economy about economic rents and rent-seeking. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn 2001, Julian Savulescu wrote an article entitled ‘Procreative Beneficence: Why We Should Select the Best Children’, in which he argued for the genetic selection of intelligence in children. That article contributes to a debate on whether genetic research on intelligence should be undertaken at all and, if so, should intelligence selection be available to potential parents. As such, the question of intelligence selection relates to wider issues concerning the genetic determination of behavioural traits, i.e. alcoholism. This article is designed (...) as an engagement in the intelligence selection debate using an analysis of Savulescu's arguments to raise a series of problematic issues in relation to the ethics of parental selection of intelligence. These problematic issues relate to wider assumptions that are made in order to put forward intelligence selection as a viable ethical option. Such assumptions are more generic in character, but still relate to Savulescu's article, concerning issues of genetic determinism, private allocation and inequality, and, finally, individual versus aggregate justice. The conclusion focuses on what the implications are for the question of agency, especially if intelligence selection is allowed. (shrink)

This short essay presents the case for a renewed research agenda in STS focused on the political economy of technoscience. This research agenda is based on the claim that STS needs to take account of contemporary economic and financial processes and how they shape and are shaped by technoscience. This necessitates understanding how these processes might impact on science, technology and innovation, rather than turning an STS gaze on the economy.

In 1976, I met John Bell several times in CERN and we talked about a possible violation of optical theorem, purity tests, EPR paradox, Bell’s inequalities and their violation. In this review, I resume our discussions, and explain how they were related to my earlier research. I also reproduce handwritten notes, which I gave to Bell during our first meeting and a handwritten letter he sent to me in 1982. We have never met again, but I have continued to discuss (...) BI-CHSH inequalities and their violation in several papers. The research stimulated by Bell’s papers and experiments performed to check his inequalities led to several important applications of quantum entanglement in quantum information and quantum technologies. Unfortunately, it led also to extraordinary metaphysical claims and speculations which in our opinion John Bell would not endorse today. BI-CHSH inequalities are violated in physics and in cognitive science, but it neither proved the completeness of quantum mechanics nor its nonlocality. Quantum computing advantage is not due to some magical instantaneous influences between distant physical systems. Therefore one has to be _cautious in drawing-far-reaching philosophical conclusions from Bell’s inequalities_. The true resource for quantum computing is contextuality and not nonlocality. (shrink)

Science is a force for good in the world--at least usually. But sometimes, when obsession gets the better of scientists, they twist a noble pursuit into something sinister. Under this spell, knowledge isn't everything, it's the only thing--no matter the cost. Bestselling author Sam Kean tells the true story of what happens when unfettered ambition pushes otherwise rational men and women to cross the line in the name of science, trampling ethical boundaries and often committing crimes in the process. The (...) Icepick Surgeon masterfully guides the reader across two thousand years of history, beginning with Cleopatra's dark deeds in ancient Egypt. The book reveals the origins of much of modern science in the transatlantic slave trade of the 1700s, as well as Thomas Edison's mercenary support of the electric chair and the warped logic of the spies who infiltrated the Manhattan Project. But the sins of science aren't all safely buried in the past. Many of them, Kean reminds us, still affect us today. We can draw direct lines from the medical abuses of Tuskegee and Nazi Germany to current vaccine hesitancy, and connect icepick lobotomies from the 1950s to the contemporary failings of mental-health care. Kean even takes us into the future, when advanced computers and genetic engineering could unleash whole new sways to do one another wrong. Unflinching, and exhilarating to the last page, The Icepick Surgeon fuses the drama of scientific discovery with the illicit thrill of a true-crime tale. With his trademark wit and precision, Kean shows that, while science has done more good than harm in the world, rogue scientists do exist, and when we sacrifice morals for progress, we often end up with neither. (shrink)

Gdy kartkuje się tę książkę, to od razu rzuca się w oczy mieszanie treści biblijnych z szeregiem pojęć matematycznej i fizycznej natury. Gdy zaś próbuje się ją podczytywać, wtedy z kolei natrafia się na język filozoficzny. Mamy łączenie radykalnie odmiennych porządków sensu. Z jednej strony staje filozoficzna interpretacja pierwszych dziesięciu zdań Biblii, z drugiej szczególny opis kilku obiektów matematycznych i fizycznych. Pierwszym wrażeniem jest doznanie nieprzystawalności. Co jedno może mieć wspólnego z drugim? Oryginalność zestawienia jest uzasadniona celem prezentowanych rozważań. Najogólniej, (...) chodzi tu o możliwie odpowiedzialną, metodycznie kontrolowaną, racjonalną próbę interpretacji początku Biblii za pomocą pojęć filozoficznych, a następnie o odświeżenie wybranych symboli z początku Genesis za pomocą zmetaforyzowanych pojęć matematycznych i fizycznych. (shrink)

When we talk about ideology and new genetics we tend to think of concepts like geneticisation and genetic essentialism, which present genetics and biology in deterministic terms. However, the aim of this article is to consider how a particular economic ideology - neoliberalism - has affected the bioeconomy rather than assuming that it is the inherent qualities of biotechnology that determine market value. In order to do this, the paper focuses on the discourses and practices of economic competitiveness that pervade (...) biotechnology policy-making in the UK, Europe and the USA. Finally it will consider how the manufacture of scarcity - in order to produce the bioeconomy - has led to a problematic focus on a specific innovation paradigm that may prove detrimental to the development and distribution of new biotechnologies. (shrink)

Marian Hobson's work has made a seminal contribution to our understanding of the European Enlightenment, and of Diderot and Rousseau in particular. This book presents her most important articles in a single volume, translated into English for the first time. Hobson's distinctive approach is to take a given text or problématique and position it within its intellectual, historical and polemical context. From close analysis of the underlying conceptual structures of literary texts, she offers a unique insight into the vibrant (...) networks of people and ideas at work throughout Europe, and across disciplinary boundaries as diverse as literature and mathematics, medicine and music. In their translations of Hobson's essays, Kate Tunstall and Caroline Warman present the primary sources in both the original eighteenth-century French and modern English, making the detail of these debates accessible to everyone, from the specialist to the student, whatever their academic discipline or interest. (shrink)

The law of excluded middle is usually considered as intrinsically connected with the realistic standpoint and incompatible with the idealistic position. This is just what Ajdukiewicz claims in his critique of transcendental idealism. The analysis of Ajdukiewicz's argumentation raises the problem of validity of the law of excluded middle for vague (or incomplete) languages. The problem is being solved by differentiating between the logical (or ontological) and the metalogical (or semantical) law of excluded middle: in contrast to the former, the (...) latter is claimed to be invalid for the languages in question, without thereby embracing the idealist position. (shrink)

This book explores how changes that occurred around 1989 shaped the study of the social sciences, and scrutinizes the impact of the paradigm of neoliberalism in different disciplinary fields. The contributors examine the ways in which capitalism has transmuted into a seemingly unquestionable, triumphant framework that globally articulates economics with epistemology and social ontology. The volume also investigates how new narratives of capitalism are being developed by social scientists in order to better understand capitalism's ramifications in various domains of knowledge. (...) At its heart, Beyond Neoliberalism seeks to unpack and disaggregate neoliberalism, and to take readers beyond the analytical limitations that a traditional framework of neoliberalism entails. (shrink)

Der Titel stellt die alte Pilatusfrage «Was ist Wahrheit?» im Zeitalter interdisziplinärer Umbrüche aus heutiger Sicht neu. Dazu wird die Wahrheit in der Ästhetik, Ethik, im Gewissen, in Technik und Hermeneutik neu reflektiert. Der Bogen spannt sich über klassische Begriffe bis zu den soziologischen Deformationen der Wahrheit durch den Pluralismus. Die Globalisierung der heutigen Informationsgesellschaft über PC und Internet brachte die Wahrheit aus der «Mode». Dazu wird ein Paradigmenwechsel vorgeschlagen, der auf Zusammenhängen zwischen apriorischen Erkenntnissen, unentscheidbaren Aussagen und dem Mysterium (...) beruht. Letztlich wird die Frage nach der «Wahrheit des Seins» als ihr transzendentales Spezifikum gestellt. Das objektive Maß der Wahrheit berührt neu die Klarheit der Wahrheit des Seins gegenüber der Widersprüchlichkeit des Irrtums. Titel und Thematik sind ein wissenschaftlich kompatibler Beitrag im Dialog zwischen Vernunft und Glaube als interdisziplinäre neue Antwort auf die alte Pilatusfrage. (shrink)

In the mid 1960s two artists associated with Fluxus, Milan Knk and Ken Friedman, began corresponding about the possibilities for conceptual and material exchange through the new media, or intermedia, of actions and correspondence art. To make connections across the geographic and political barrier between Eastern Europe and the West, they used flexible media within a distributive cognitive network to communicate about living and working counter to conformity and inertia in both places. Their use of intermedia reveals a pattern of (...) international information exchange that distinguishes contemporary art and experience from the modern. (shrink)