Many bodily sensations are connected quite closely with specific actions: itches with scratching, for example, and hunger with eating. Indeed, these connections have the feel of conceptual connections. With the exception of D. M. Armstrong, philosophers have largely neglected this aspect of bodily sensations. In this paper, I propose a theory of bodily sensations that explains these connections. The theory ascribes intentional content to bodily sensations but not, strictly speaking, representational content. Rather, the content of these sensations is an imperative: (...) in the case of itches, 'Scratch!' The view avoids non-intentional qualia and hence accords with what could be called, generalizing Lycan slightly, the 'hegemony of intentionality'. (shrink)

The standard adaptationist explanation of the presence of a sensory mechanism in an organism--that it detects properties useful to the organism--cannot be given for color vision. This is because colors do not exist. After arguing for this latter claim, I consider, but reject, nonadaptationist explanations. I conclude by proposing an explanation of how color vision could have adaptive value even though it does not detect properties in the environment.

The emergence of private authority has become a feature of the post-Cold War world. The contributors to this volume examine the implications of this erosion of the power of the state for global governance. They analyse actors as diverse as financial institutions, multinational corporations, religious terrorists and organised criminals. The themes of the book relate directly to debates concerning globalization and the role of international law, and will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, politics, sociology and (...) law. (shrink)

This paper reports laboratory data for games that are played only once. These games span the standard categories: static and dynamic games with complete and incomplete information. For each game, the treasure is a treatment in which behavior conforms nicely to predictions of the Nash equilibrium or relevant refinement. In each case, however, a change in the payoff structure produces a large inconsistency between theoretical predictions and observed behavior. These contradictions are generally consistent with simple intuition based on the interaction (...) of payoff asymmetries and noisy introspection about others’ decisions. (shrink)

Delivering high quality genomics-informed care to patients requires accurate test results whose clinical implications are understood. While other actors, including state agencies, professional organizations, and clinicians, are involved, this article focuses on the extent to which the federal agencies that play the most prominent roles — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services enforcing CLIA and the FDA — effectively ensure that these elements are met and concludes by suggesting possible ways to improve their oversight of genomic testing.

Nanomedicine is yielding new and improved treatments and diagnostics for a range of diseases and disorders. Nanomedicine applications incorporate materials and components with nanoscale dimensions where novel physiochemical properties emerge as a result of size-dependent phenomena and high surface-to-mass ratio. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics are a subset of nanomedicine products that enter the human body. These include drugs, biological products, implantable medical devices, and combination products that are designed to function in the body in ways unachievable at larger scales. (...) Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics incorporate materials that are engineered at the nanoscale to express novel properties that are medicinally useful. These nanomedicine applications can also contain nanomaterials that are biologically active, producing interactions that depend on biological triggers. Examples include nanoscale formulations of insoluble drugs to improve bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, drugs encapsulated in hollow nanoparticles with the ability to target and cross cellular and tissue membranes and to release their payload at a specific time or location, imaging agents that demonstrate novel optical properties to aid in locating micrometastases, and antimicrobial and drug-eluting components or coatings of implantable medical devices such as stents. (shrink)

The standard adaptationist explanation of the presence of a sensory mechanism in an organism--that it detects properties useful to the organism--cannot be given for color vision. This is because colors do not exist. After arguing for this latter claim, I consider, but reject, nonadaptationist explanations. I conclude by proposing an explanation of how color vision could have adaptive value even though it does not detect properties in the environment.

This article evaluates the oversight of drugs and medical devices by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration using an integration of public policy, law, and bioethics approaches and employing multiple assessment criteria, including economic, social, safety, and technological. Criteria assessment and expert elicitation are combined with existing literature, case law, and regulations in an integrative historical case studies approach. We then use our findings as a tool to explore possibilities for effective oversight and regulatory mechanisms for nanobiotechnology. Section I describes (...) oversight mechanisms for human drugs and medical devices and presents current nanotechnology products. Section II describes the results of expert elicitation research. Section III highlights key criteria and relates them to the literature and larger debate. We conclude with broad lessons for the oversight of nanobiotechnology informed by Sections I-III in order to provide useful analysis from multiple disciplines and perspectives to guide discussions regarding appropriate FDA oversight. (shrink)

The United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights engenders important state commitments to respect, fulfill, and protect a broad range of socio-economic rights. In 2010, a milestone was reached when the UN General Assembly recognized the human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation. However, water plays an important role in realizing other human rights such as the right to food and livelihoods, and in realizing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. (...) These broader water-related rights have been recognized but have not yet been operationalized. This paper unravels these broader water-related rights in a more holistic interpretation of existing international human rights law. By focusing on an emerging approach to water services provision—known as ‘domestic-plus’ services—the paper argues how this approach operationalizes a comprehensive range of socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas. Domestic-plus services provide water for domestic and productive uses around homesteads, which challenges the widespread practice in the public sector of planning and designing water infrastructure for a single-use. Evidence is presented to show that people in rural communities are already using their water supplies planned for domestic uses to support a wide range of productive activities. Domestic-plus services recognize and plan for these multiple-uses, while respecting the priority for clean and safe drinking water. The paper concludes that domestic-plus services operationalize the obligation to progressively fulfill a comprehensive range of indivisible socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas. (shrink)

This review addresses the current and future potential of nanomedicine, and its ethical considerations within the comprehensive framework of the four dimensions of medical ethics: Beneficence, Non-Maleficence, Respect, and Justice. From this perspective, the ethical considerations for nanomedicine are not novel, but have been addressed by precedents throughout the history of medicine. While these ethical challenges are not unique to nanomedicine, some require additional consideration, given the envisioned pervasive impact of nanomedicine on society.

While the definitions employed by different governmental agencies and scientific societies differ somewhat, the term “nanotechnology” is generally understood to refer to the manufacturing, characterization, and use of man-made devices with dimensions on the order of 1-100 nanometers. Devices that comprise a fundamental functional element that is nanotechnological are also frequently comprised within nanotechnology, as are manufactured objects with dimensions less than one micrometer. The differences in definition lead to occasional paradoxes, such as the fact that the most widely used (...) nanodrug is labeled a “nanopharmaceutical” by governments of European countries, Canada, and Australia, but it is not a nanotechnology for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It is also common in scientific domains to restrict the term “nanotechnology” to objects that possess special, “emerging” properties that only arise because of their nanoscale dimension. (shrink)

This article evaluates the oversight of drugs and medical devices by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration using an integration of public policy, law, and bioethics approaches and employing multiple assessment criteria, including economic, social, safety, and technological. Throughout, assessments employing both the multiple criteria and a method of expert elicitation are combined with the existing literature, case law, and regulations providing an integrative historical case study approach. The goal is to provide useful information from multiple disciplines and perspectives to (...) guide discussions regarding appropriate oversight frameworks for nanobiotechnology applications under the FDA’s purview. (shrink)

: This essay provides a critical analysis of rape prevention since the 1980s. I argue that we must challenge rape prevention's habitual reinforcement of the notion that fear is a woman's best line of defense. I suggest changes that must be made in the anti-rape movement if we are to move past fear. Ultimately, I raise the question of what, if not vague threats and scare tactics, constitutes prevention.

Can the physicalist consistently hold that representational content is all there is to sensory experience and yet that two perceivers could have inverted phenomenal spectra? Yes, if he holds that the phenomenal properties the inverts experience are dummy properties, not instantiated in the physical objects being perceived nor in the perceivers.

This essay provides a critical analysis of rape prevention since the 1980s. I argue that we must challenge rape prevention's habitual reinforcement of the notion that fear is a woman's best line of defense. I suggest changes that must be made in the anti-rape movement if we are to move past fear. Ultimately, I raise the question of what, if not vague threats and scare tactics, constitutes prevention.

On his deathbed, Wittgenstein is reported to have said, upon hearing that his friends were coming for a visit, “Tell them I've had a wonderful life.” Malcolm found this puzzling, given that Wittgenstein seemed to be fiercely unhappy. I find my way into these words against the backdrop of the Hollywood film It's a Wonderful Life and Wittgenstein's famous remark, to wit, “Man has to awaken to wonder . . . Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.” (...) Along the way I discuss Plato's praise of wonder, Nietzsche's attack on science, and Kierkegaard's remark about finding the sublime in the pedestrian. I conclude that Wittgenstein did have a wonderful life insofar as he was fully awake to wonder, what I call the wonder of our words. (shrink)

Currently, the common theoretical models of "preferred" decision-making relationships do not correspond well with clinical experience. This interview study of congestive heart failure (CHF) patients documents the variety of patient preferences for decision-making, and the necessity for attention to family involvement. In addition, these findings illustrate the confusion as to the designation of surrogate decision-makers and physicians in charge. We conclude that no single model of physician-patient decision-making should be preferred, and that physicians should first ask patients how they want (...) medical information and decision-making to be handled. (shrink)

In virtue of what does a representational state have the content it does? Several philosophers have recently proposed that a representational state gets its content from its biological function. After explaining the sense of biological function used in these views, I criticise the proposal. I argue that biological function only determines representational content up to extensional equivalence. I maintain that this holds even if biological function is defined in terms of an intensional notion like Sober's "selection for".

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The ‘learning community’ is an important theme within the move to an information age. This article argues that the empowering elements of such communities are fundamental to higher education. However, a better understanding of what they entail is required by teachers. The author reflects upon current thinking about collaborative learning and communities of practice, and highlights how userinvolvement in curriculum design and delivery can promote fuller engagement with the learning process. The findings of a three-year Higher Education Funding Council for (...) England-funded initiative to implement and evaluate online teaching/learning in humanities and arts departments are analysed in order to illustrate the possibilities for learning and teaching innovation that learning communities can offer. (shrink)

First published in 1981 this unique study discusses the evolution of Plato's thought through the actual developments in Athenian democracy, the book also demonstrates Plato's continuing responses to changes in political theory and argues for a new understanding of Plato's goals for the state and his ultimate concern for the moral well-being of the citizens.

Starting from Søren Kierkegaard's insight that fully accepting the human condition requires one to live with the persistent temptation to escape from it, Ronald Hall finds similar concerns reflected in the work of two modern-day philosophers, Stanley Cavell and Martha Nussbaum, who equally find in a philosophy of love and marriage the key to understanding how humans may achieve happiness in the acceptance of their humanity. All three thinkers follow a "logic of paradox" in showing how success in the human (...) quest to be human depends crucially on the struggle humans experience with the ever-present opportunities to pursue alternative paths. What Kierkegaard called "living existentially" can be achieved only after confronting and refusing the possibilities of living in "aesthetic," "ethical," or even "religious" denial of one's true humanity. By creating this dialogue between the nineteenth-century Danish thinker and two eminent twentieth-century philosophers, Hall reveals the continuing relevance of Kierkegaard's thought to our own age and its cogency as an interpretation of the human predicament. (shrink)

In two recent studies we have examined the prose rhythms in the clausulae of late imperial Latin authors. We found two clausular systems to be prevalent, the cursus and the cursus mixtus. The cursus involves the use of accentual rhythms and consists of three basic cadences: planus, tardus, and velox. The cursus mixtus has been defined by modern scholars as a type of prose rhythm in which the clausula is structured along both accentual and metrical lines, that is by the (...) combination of one of the three forms of the cursus with one of the standard metrical forms derived from Cicero's system — cretic-spondee, dicretic, cretic-tribrach, or ditrochee. (shrink)