In the Platonic work Alcibiades I, a divinely guided Socrates adopts the guise of a lover in order to divert Alcibiades from an unthinking political career. The contributors to this carefully focussed volume cover aspects of the background to the work; its arguments and the philosophical issues it raises; its relationship to other Platonic texts, and its subsequent history up to the time of the Neoplatonists. Despite its ancient prominence, the authorship of Alcibiades I is still unsettled; the essays and (...) two appendices, one historical and one stylometric, come together to suggest answers to this tantalising question. (shrink)

The fruits of knowledge—such as books, data, and ideas—tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit. Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history (...) of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period’s monumental shifts in culture and learning. (shrink)

Lefèvre’s invaluable book takes as its subject the burgeoning of ‘technological’ literature from the 1400s to the late eighteenth century, and its instantiation in six textual corpuses: architectur...

Examines the relationship between making objects and knowing nature in Europe from the mid-15th to mid-19th centuries.

This paper has two parts. In the first, I try to show that Russell's arguments against the thesis of Kant's first antinomy are unsatisfactory; in the second, I argue that the Universe, if transcendentally real, must be finite in both space and time.

The objective of this study is to evaluate if use of a patient decision aid, when choosing between a repeat cesarean or a trial of labor after a cesarean, reduces medical liability exposure. The authors conclude that use of a PDA conferred liability protection when potential jurors were presented with a hypothetical malpractice claim against an obstetrician following a TOLAC.

We conducted focus groups with 47 potential jurors who were presented with diferent scenarios in a hypothetical malpractice case involving failure to order a PSA test. Better documentation that a patient made an informed decision to decline a PSA test appeared to provide more medical-legal protection for physicians, especially with the use of a decision aid.

Screening for prostate cancer with the prostate-specific antigen blood test is controversial, as evidence to date has not demonstrated such screening does more good than harm. While the potential benefit of PSA screening on reducing prostate cancer mortality has not been documented in randomized trials, many risks of PSA screening have been well documented. These risks include a substantially higher risk of a prostate cancer diagnosis over a screenee’s lifetime, false-positive and false-negative test results, possible complications from biopsies done in (...) response to suspicious test results, and substantial risks of side effects from subsequent prostate cancer treatments. Nevertheless, PSA screening is widespread in the United States, and many physicians in a national survey reported supporting routine PSA screening as well as getting PSA tests themselves, despite the lack of evidence. (shrink)

What are historians doing in the laboratory? Looking back over six years of collaborative work, researchers of the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University discuss their experience with hands‐on reconstruction as a historical method. This work engages practical forms of knowledge—from pigment‐making to metal casting—recorded in the BnF Ms. Fr. 640, an anonymous French manuscript compiled in the later sixteenth century. Bodily encounters with materials and processes of the past offer insights into the material and mental worlds of early (...) modern artists and artisans, and train the eye in the interpretation of historical objects. At the same time, reconstruction contributes to the interpretation of the text: it is only by attempting to implement the instructions of practical or recipe literature that these texts can be understood as vehicles of emergent knowledge that only fully manifests itself in the doing. Overall, our approach to reconstruction mirrors that of the anonymous author‐practitioner, who explored a wide range of techniques through experimenting and writing. (shrink)

This volume contains an array of essays that reflect, and reflect upon, the recent revival of scholarly interest in the self and consciousness. Various relevant issues are addressed in conceptually challenging ways, such as how consciousness and different forms of self-relevant experience develop in infancy and childhood and are related to the acquisition of skill; the role of the self in social development; the phenomenology of being conscious and its metapsychological implications; and the cultural foundations of conceptualizations of consciousness. Written (...) by notable scholars in several areas of psychology, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and anthropology, the essays are of interest to readers from a variety of disciplines concerned with central, substantive questions in contemporary social science, and the humanities. (shrink)

What are the processes, from conception to adulthood, that enable a single cell to grow into a sentient adult? The processes that occur along the way are so complex that any attempt to understand development necessitates a multi-disciplinary approach, integrating data from cognitive studies, computational work, and neuroimaging - an approach till now seldom taken in the study of child development. Neuroconstructivism is a major new 2 volume publication that seeks to redress this balance, presenting an integrative new framework for (...) considering development. In the first volume, the authors review up-to-to date findings from neurobiology, brain imaging, child development, computer and robotic modelling to consider why children's thinking develops the way it does. They propose a new synthesis of development that is based on 5 key principles found to operate at many levels of descriptions. They use these principles to explain what causes a number of key developmental phenomena, including infants' interacting with objects, early social cognitive interactions, and the causes of dyslexia. The "neuroconstructivist" framework also shows how developmental disorders do not arise from selective damage to normal cognitive systems, but instead arise from developmental processes that operate under atypical constraints. How these principles work is illustrated in several case studies ranging from perceptual to social and reading development. Finally, the authors use neuroimaging, behavioural analyses, computational simulations and robotic models to provide a way of understanding the mechanisms and processes that cause development to occur. Computer and robotic models provide concrete tools for investigating the processes and mechanisms involved in learning and development. Volume 2 illustrates the principles of 'Neuroconstructivist' development, with contributions from 9 different labs across the world. Each of the contributions illustrates how models play a central role in understanding development. The models presented include standard connectionist neural network models as well as multi-agent models. Also included are robotic models emphasizing the need to take embodiment and brain-system interactions seriously. A model of Autism and one of Specific Language Impairment also illustrate how atypical development can be understood in terms of the typical processes of development but operating under restricted conditions. This volume complements Volume 1 by providing concrete examples of how the 'Neuroconstructivist' principles can be grounded within a diverse range of domains, thereby shaping the research agenda in those domains. (shrink)

Endothelial cells line the inside of all blood vessels, forming a structurally and functionally heterogenous population of cells. Their complexity and diversity has long been recognized, yet very little is known about the molecules and regulatory mechanisms that mediate the heterogeneity of different endothelial cell populations. The constitutive organ‐ and microenvironment‐specific phenotype of endothelial cells controls internal body compartmentation, regulating the trafficking of circulating cells to distinct vascular beds. In contrast, surface molecules associated with the activated cytokine‐inducible endothelial phenotype play (...) a critical role in pathological conditions including inflammation, tumor angiogenesis, and wound healing. Differentiation of the endothelial cell phenotypes appears to follow similar mechanisms to the differentiation of hematopoietic cells, with the exception that endothelial cells maintain transdifferentiating competence. The present review offers a scheme of endothelial cell differentially expressed endothelial cell molecules as targets for directed therapeutic intervention. (shrink)

Conscientious objections (CO) can be disruptive in a variety of ways and may disadvantage patients and colleagues who must step-in to assume care. Nevertheless, nurses have a right and responsibility to object to participation in interventions that would seriously harm their sense of integrity. This is an ethical problem of balancing risks and responsibilities related to patient care. Here we explore the problem and propose a nonlinear framework for exploring the authenticity of a claim of CO from the perspective of (...) the nurse and of those who must evaluate such claims. We synthesized the framework using Rest’s Four Component Model of moral reasoning along with tenets of the International Council of Nursing’s (ICN) Code of Ethics for Nurses and insights from relevant ethics and nursing ethics literature. The resulting framework facilitates evaluating potential consequences of a given CO for all involved. We propose that the framework can also serve as an aid for nurse educators as they prepare students for practice. Gaining clarity about the sense in which the concept of conscience provides a defensible foundation for objecting to legally, or otherwise ethically, permissible actions, in any given case is critical to arriving at an ethical and reasonable plan of action. (shrink)

African women farmers have an urgent need for adequate agricultural extension information. Training extension agents in gender related issues should have high priority, considering that the majority of farmers are women and have different roles, resources, constraints, and responsibilities from men. This paper examines the extent to which these issues are incorporated into the curriculum of the two Malawian institutions of agricultural education that train extensionists. It also considers the degree to which they are recruiting women officers into fields other (...) than home economics. Administrators and lecturers at both institutions express a desire to integrate gender matters into the curriculum and to recruit more females into agricultural extension; yet both fall far short in meeting these goals. The conclusion provides recommendations on how African institutions of higher learning that train extension personnel might better accomplish these goals and suggests that African MOAs need to employ more women in agricultural research, extension, training, and policy-making positions. (shrink)

In their recent book, Is Inequality Bad for Our Health?, Daniels, Kennedy, and Kawachi claim that to “act justly in health policy, we must have knowledge about the causal pathways through which socioeconomic (and other) inequalities work to produce differential health outcomes.” One of the central problems with this approach is its dependency on “knowledge about the causal pathways.” A widely held belief is that the randomized clinical trial (RCT) is, and ought to be the “gold standard” of evaluating the (...) causal efficacy of interventions. However, often the only data available are non-experimental, observational data. For such data, the necessary randomization is missing. Because the randomization is missing, it seems to follow that it is not possible to make epistemically warranted claims about the causal pathways. Although we are not sanguine about the difficulty in using observational data to make warranted causal claims, we are not as pessimistic as those who believe that the only warranted causal claims are claims based on data from (idealized) RCTs. We argue that careful, thoughtful study design, informed by expert knowledge, that incorporates propensity score matching methods in conjunction with instrumental variable analyses, provides the possibility of warranted causal claims using observational data. (shrink)