My colleague, Professor W. M. Lindsay, invites, or challenges, me to reply to his note on ‘Ciris’ ; I can but take him at his word. Professor Lindsay seeks to identify the two birds Haliaetus and Ciris, and finds the task an easy one; he identifies Ciris with a Tern confidently and categorically. We learn ‘from Gallus' epyllium … that it was a sea-bird with red legs, so rapid in flight that it always evaded the swoop of the sea-eagle. What (...) can this be but a tern?’. (shrink)

My colleague, Professor W. M. Lindsay, invites, or challenges, me to reply to his note on ‘Ciris’ ; I can but take him at his word.Professor Lindsay seeks to identify the two birds Haliaetus and Ciris, and finds the task an easy one; he identifies Ciris with a Tern confidently and categorically. We learn ‘from Gallus' epyllium … that it was a sea-bird with red legs, so rapid in flight that it always evaded the swoop of the sea-eagle. What can (...) this be but a tern?’. (shrink)

Ethics support staff help others to deal with moral challenges. However, they themselves can also experience moral challenges such as issues regarding (breaching) confidentiality when practicing ethics support. Currently there is no insight in these confidentiality issues and also no professional guidance for dealing with them. To gain insight into moral challenges related to Moral Case Deliberation (MCD), we studied a) beliefs and experiences of MCD facilitators regarding breaching confidentiality, b) considerations for (not) breaching confidentiality, and c) needs for an (...) ethics support tool. Data collection consisted of qualitative research methods: six semi-structured interviews; analyses of a) two recorded MCD sessions, and b) a focus group with MCD facilitators. Findings: MCD facilitators mention different conceptions and interpretations of confidentiality and various moral challenges. Questions concerning confidentiality ultimately cause reflections on roles and responsibilities of facilitators. Needs for ethics support vary from seeking advice to procedural and sometimes normative guidance for MCD facilitators. Education for MCD facilitators should focus on developing a concrete tool that stimulates awareness and reflection(skills). (shrink)

Philosophy of science is the organized expression of a growing intent among philosophers and scientists to clarify, perhaps unify, the programs, methods and results of the disciplines of philosophy and of science. The examination of fundamental concepts and presuppositions in the light of the positive results of science, systematic doubt of the positive results, and a thorough-going analysis and critique of logic and of language, are typical projects for this joint effort. It is not necessary to be committed to a (...) belief that science and philosophy are or should be one, or else that “never the twain shall meet.” If anything, there is to be expected a wholesome regard for the value of established science in furnishing a foil for philosophy and a check on its old extravagances. This does not mean that even the best-established science may not be subject to most devastating criticism by analysis of its foundations. In fact, despairing of the philosophy of the schools, science has done it largely for itself. The theories of gravitation, atomicity, electro-magnetism, evolution, relativity and quanta have all arisen through drastic revisions of complacent fundamental “truths.”. (shrink)

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held, in Murrey v. United States ), that claims for a physician's failure to obtain a patient's informed consent are not barred by the Federal Tort Claims Act as a species of misrepresentation. The court further held that the claim was not barred by the failure to include the issue of informed consent in the administrative claim. This decision reduces the burden on plaintiffs to state every cognizable claim consistent with (...) the facts in an administrative proceeding; the failure to do so would prevent them from raising the claim in court.The patient, Thomas Murrey, a sixty-eight-year-old U.S. veteran, sought treatment at a Veteran's Administration hospital in North Chicago, Illinois. VA doctors diagnosed him with prostate cancer, and advised him to undergo surgery to remove his entire prostate. (shrink)

Organic chemists have been able to develop a robust, theoretical understanding of the phenomena they study; however, the primary theoretical devices employed in this field are not mathematical equations or laws, as is the case in most other physical sciences. Instead it is diagrams, and in particular structural formulas and potential energy diagrams, that carry the explanatory weight in the discipline. To understand how this is so, it is necessary to investigate both the nature of the diagrams employed in organic (...) chemistry and how these diagrams are used in the explanations of the discipline. I will begin this paper by characterizing some of the major ways that structural formulas used in organic chemistry. Next I will present a model of the explanations in organic chemistry and describe how both structural formulas and potential energy diagrams contribute to these explanations. This will be followed by several examples that support my abstract account of the role of diagrams in the explanations of organic chemistry. In particular, I will consider both the appeal to ‘hyperconjugation’ in the explanation of alkene stability and how the idea of ‘ring strain’ was developed to explain the relative stability of cyclic compounds. (shrink)

The death of Jesse Gelsinger in 1999 during a gene therapy trial raised many questions about the ethical review of medical research. Here, the author argues that the principle of justice is interpreted too narrowly and receives insufficient emphasis and that what we permit in terms of bodily invasion affects the value we place on individuals. Medical research is a societally supported activity. As such, the author contends that justice requires that invasive medical research demonstrates sufficiently compelling societal benefit. Many (...) consider this societal benefit to be self evident. However, medical research is a complex activity; it yields new treatments but also creates financial rewards and affects health resource allocation. As research evolves into a multibillion pound, multinational enterprise, justice requires a much broader analysis of societal benefit. Without such evaluation we risk undermining the value of bodily integrity and of research participants. (shrink)

In Italy, at the end of the tenth century, a pedant named Regulus who had a copy of the De Verborum Significatu, wishing to read Plautus, took the opportunity of an illness to appeal to certain prelates whose church-library contained a MS. of the comedian. Through their stupidity he received not Plautus, but Plato, i.e. Chalcidius' translation of the Timaeus. Disappointed, but not deterred, he wrote the following letter on the fly-leaf and returned the MS., hoping that by much repetition (...) he might hammer into their dull heads the difference between PL-AU-TUS and PL-A-TO and yet save them from chagrin and resentment : Differentia est qua differunt singula: in Timeo Platonis legitur ANIMA-M post ANIMA-L non perire: in Plauto legitur CANCRUM imitaris, item aeneis COCULIS excocta est mihi omnis misericordia. (shrink)

This essay has two aims: to affirm the significance of private banking in fourthcentury B.C. Athens, and to propose a model of its role in the economy. Such a project is desirable because there has been a tendency since the publication of Finley's The Ancient Economy to minimalize the significance of banking in ancient Greece. Banking is seen as a ‘fringe activity’ largely carried out by such ‘outsiders’ as metics and ex-slaves.Consequently historians have frequently overlooked the value of banking as (...) a tool for understanding the Greek economy. (shrink)