The modern history of experimentation with human beings is notable for its ethical lacunae. In 1865, in his great work, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, Dr. Claude Bernard, the French physician who first established the use of the scientific method in medicine, echoed the earlier injunctions of physician-moralist Moses Maimonides in counseling his fellow physicians not to treat their patients solely as a means of advancing knowledge. Yet such cautions had no apparent effect on the physicians who, (...) at the end of the 19th century, studied the transmission of venereal diseases by intentionally infecting poor and institutionalized people without their knowledge, much less their consent. In response... (shrink)

Henry Knowles Beecher, an icon of human research ethics, and Timothy Francis Leary, a guru of the counterculture, are bound together in history by the synthetic hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide. Beecher was a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who received five battle stars, was inducted into the Legion of Merit, held the first endowed chair in his discipline, wrote at least three path-breaking papers, and is honored by two prestigious ethics awards in his name. Leary was a (...) West Point dropout who was obliged to leave a research assistant professorship, was convicted of violating the Marihuana Tax Act, was sentenced to 20 years in prison and broke out with the... (shrink)

Five decades ago, Henry Knowles Beecher, a renowned professor of research anesthesiology, sought to solve a problem created by modern medicine. The solution proposed by Beecher and his colleagues on the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death proved very influential.1 Indeed, other contemporaneous medical developments magnified its significance yet also made the solution it offered somewhat problematic. As we mark this fiftieth anniversary, at a time when concerns (...) about the conceptual model on which its recommendations rested are being voiced by critics from medicine as well as philosophy, it is worthwhile to view the committee's report in relation to the problem that prompted its existence as well as the one to which it was quickly applied. (shrink)

Prompted by a 2019 essay by Jonathan Moreno in the Hastings Center Report, the Center's board of directors undertook a careful examination of the name of its preeiminent award, the Henry Knowles Beecher Award, which has been given to twenty‐nine individuals who have made lifetime contributions to bioethics. citing new research that revealed that Beecher's earlier experimentation on drugs had involved nonconsenting adults, Moreno urged the Center to reevaluate honoring Beecher through this award. After reviewing (...) the relevant published evidence and holding extensive discussions, the board decided to rename the award. We also took the opportunity to reframe the award to emphasize quality of scholarship and impact on thinking, practice, and policy rather than lifetime achievement. The new name—the Founders’ Award of The Hastings Center—reflects our desire to honor not only the Center's cofounders, Daniel Callahan and Willard Gaylin, but also others who helped found the field of bioethics. With great pride, the Center has announced that Patricia King of the Georgetown University Law Center is the 2021 recipient of the Founders’ Award. A distinguished civil rights lawyer, King was instrumental in ensuring justice as one of the three principles of The Belmont Report. (shrink)

Fifty years ago, Henry Knowles Beecher published his essay on clinical research ethics in the New England Journal of Medicine. The culmination of more than a decade and a half’s rumination and reflection on the use of patients and “captive populations” in research, Beecher’s 1966 article understandably casts a large shadow in American bioethics. In 1976, the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences established the Henry Knowles Beecher Award for Contributions to (...) Ethics and the Life Sciences and named the Harvard professor as the first recipient of the Award. “It is unusual for a researcher,” Daniel Callahan explained, on behalf of the Board of Directors of the... (shrink)

Henry K. Beecher’s famous 1966 article on ethically problematic medical research was a pivot point. It came at the end of two decades of soul-searching among researchers and philosophers. It ushered in an era of legislation and regulation to address the complex issues that had been extensively discussed by Beecher and others. That soul-searching began with the Nuremberg trials and the disturbing recognition of how far the Nazi doctors had strayed from professional ethical norms. It led, eventually, (...) to the creation of the system of oversight that we have today.During these years, there were heated arguments about what sort of research ought or ought not to be permitted and with what sort of oversight. Often... (shrink)

The doctrine of informed consent, borrowed from the law of torts, cannot be readily transplanted into therapeutic settings. The broader, as yet unrealized, idea of informed consent, which suggests that parties must make decisions jointly, should guide interactions between physicians and patients or investigators and subjects.

Henry Beecher was a distinguished professor of anesthesia and clinical investigator at Harvard Medical School. He became an iconic figure in bioethics, best known for his 1966 article describing 22 examples of unethical clinical research. This is one of the most frequently cited articles on ethics in the medical literature. Indeed, it may be seen as marking a watershed in the moral climate of medical research. In his history of bioethics, Albert Jonsen characterized Beecher as one of (...) the “stars in the bioethical firmament”. Daniel Callahan, founder of the Hastings Center, explained Beecher’s impact in a 1991 interview:“I think the role of Henry Beecher was very important in the mid 60s when he blew the... (shrink)

When I arrived at Harvard as an incoming graduate student in the fall of 1964, I soon received a telephone call from a gentleman who introduced himself as Henry Beecher. I was in the process of shifting my graduate studies from research neuropharmacology to the study of ethics. Robert Featherstone, the head of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco, where I had been studying, was a specialist in anesthesiology and knew (...) class='Hi'>Henry Beecher, who was also working in anesthesiology, well. He had contacted Beecher, alerting him to the fact that a new graduate student was arriving and that it appeared that the two of us had much in common. The phone call from Beecher... (shrink)

In 1962, Harvard professor of anesthesiology Henry Beecher wrote to Senator Estes Kefauver about certain additions to the federal Food and Drug Act then being considered. According to The Antibiotic Era, the Maryland congressman Samuel Friedel had introduced language that would require informed consent in clinical research. Beecher joined a number of other distinguished medical scientists warning that such a requirement would “cripple” American medical research. A year before, Beecher had protested the U.S. Army's inclusion of (...) the Nuremberg Code in its contracts. Beecher's commitment to a medical ethics of virtue rather than one of oversight suggests that he was a far more interesting person than the cardboard cutout so often vaguely referenced in bioethics as an icon of the rights of human subjects. His thinking about research ethics was rooted in his post‐World War II laboratory work with LSD. (shrink)

To be both a clinician and a scientist—what is usually called a clinician scientist or clinical investigator—is easy neither from an ethical nor from a methodological standpoint. On the one hand, it requires care, cure of the patients, and good ethical practice. On the other, excellent skills in experimental design and data analysis are necessary. In addition, the correct choice of a disease as a model to be studied is very often hampered by the obvious ethical constraints of working with (...) human beings, thus limiting the experimental armamentarium in the hands of the clinician scientist. Yet, Henry Beecher succeeded in both. He was an excellent clinician and scientist and put forward ideas and concepts that today... (shrink)

The article presents and analyzes different approaches of U.S. bioethicists in comprehending the Nazi medical crimes after 1945. The account is divided into two sections: one dealing with discussions on research ethics and the Nuremberg Code up until the 1970s and the other ranging from the 1970s to the present and highlighting bioethics' engagement with Nazi analogies. The portrayal of different bioethical scholars, institutions, and documents—most notably Henry K. Beecher, Jay Katz, the Belmont Report, the Hastings Center, Arthur (...) L. Caplan, and Robert M. Veatch—provides a nuanced interpretation of the motives that bioethicists held and the strategies that they applied to establish an understanding of the Nazi medical crimes and their relation to contemporary bioethical issues. In this, the different approaches shared a common goal: To integrate the Nazi medical crimes into an ethical framework by means of selective acknowledgments and representation of their history. (shrink)

The pain-assessment literature often claims that pain is subjective. However, the meaning and implications of this claim are left to the reader’s imagination. This paper attempts to make sense of the claim and its problems from the history and philosophy of science perspective. It examines the work of Henry Beecher, the first person to operationalize “pain” in terms of subjective measurements. First, I reconstruct Beecher’s operationalization of “pain.” Next, I argue this operationalization fails. Third, I salvage (...) class='Hi'>Beecher’s insights by repositioning them in an intersubjective account. Finally, I connect these insights to current pain-assessment approaches, showing that they enrich each other. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive and unique text and reference in medical ethics. By far the most inclusive set of primary documents and articles in the field ever published, it contains over 100 selections. Virtually all pieces appear in their entirety, and a significant number would be difficult to obtain elsewhere. The volume draws upon the literature of history, medicine, philosophical and religious ethics, economics, and sociology. A wide range of topics and issues are covered, such as law and medicine, (...) truth-telling by the physician, research, population policy, genetics, abortion, dying, and individual rights in medical care. The selections span the centuries, beginning with material from the works of Hippocrates, continuing through Thomas Percival, John Stuart Mill, and Claude Bernard, down to modern commentators like Henry K. Beecher, Walsh McDermott, David L. Bazelon, Paul Freund, H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Paul Ramsey, Richard McCormick, Rashi Fein, and Bernard Barber. The text has eight major divisions, beginning with sections on the ethical dimensions of the physician-patient relationship in history; the moral bases of medical ethics; and regulation, compulsion, and protection of the consumer in clinical medicine and public health. Each of these sections includes key essays that appear for the first time. All of the book's major divisions contain primary documents: codes such as the Hippocratic Oath, Medieval Law for the Regulation of Medicine, and the first as well as the most recent code of the American Medical Association; court decisions, including those on Karen Quinlan and on abortion in the United States and West Germany; government documents such as the statement of the National Commission on the Protection of Human Subjects, the Tuskegee Syphilis Report, the British Parliamentary debate on euthanasia, and the Council of Europe on rights of the sick and dying; and various published guidelines such as the Harvard Medical School brain death criteria, the American Hospital Association on patient's rights, and Pope Pius XII on the prolongation of life. Cases that illustrate moral dilemmas are provided for discussion purposes. Each section is preceded by a succinct editor's introduction. The documents and essays are of practical value for practitioners and students in medicine, law, ethics, and counselling, and for individual patients and groups concerned with medical care. Through encompassing divergent viewpoints, the essays and primary documents were selected to encourage humane practices and deepen understanding of the multiple traditions that shaped and do shape the development of medicine. (shrink)

On June 16, 1966, the New England Journal of Medicine published “Ethics and Clinical Research” by Henry K. Beecher. Beecher’s account of 22 examples of unethical contemporary clinical research shook up the medical profession and helped pave the way for U.S. federal regulation of research involving human subjects. Five decades later, in this issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, we pay tribute to the lasting significance of this whistle-blowing article and to the remarkable contributions of (...) class='Hi'>Henry Beecher. Beecher was a pioneer in anesthesiology as an academic discipline and in research on pain and the placebo effect. He was an early and influential champion of randomized placebo-controlled... (shrink)

Dr. Henry Beecher, a renowned Harvard Medical School anesthesiologist, sent shock waves through the medical research community and the lay press when he described 22 examples of “unethical or questionably ethical studies” by reputable researchers at major institutions in his now well-known 1966 New England Journal of Medicine article. Beecher concluded this exposé by noting: “The ethical approach to experimentation in man has several components: two are more important than the others, the first being informed consent.... Secondly, (...) there is the more reliable safeguard provided by the presence of an intelligent, informed, conscientious, compassionate, responsible investigator”. Beecher’s... (shrink)

At its inception, “brain death” was proposed not as a coherent concept but as a useful one. The 1968 Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death gave no reason that “irreversible coma” should be death itself, but simply asserted that the time had come for it to be declared so. Subsequent writings by chairman Henry Beecher made clear that, to him at least, death was essentially a social construct, and society (...) could define it however it pleased. The first widely endorsed attempt at a philosophical justification appeared thirteen years later, with a report from the President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research and a seminal paper by James Bernat, Charles Culver, and Bernard Gert, which introduced the insightful tripartite scheme of concept, criterion, and tests for death. Their paper proposed that the correct concept of death is the “permanent cessation of functioning of the organism as a whole,” which tenuously remains the mainstream concept to this day. In this essay, I focus on this mainstream concept, arguing that equating brain death with death involves several levels of incoherence: between concept and criterion, between criterion and tests, between tests and concept, and between all of these and actual brain death praxis. (shrink)

Until recently, the medical community assumed that placebos required either concealment in randomized controlled trials or deception in clinical practice to elicit placebo effects. Henry Beecher emphasized this orthodoxy, when he stated that placebo pills only work "as long as it is not detected as a placebo by the subject or the observer" and therefore, patients "believe it [is a drug] and consequently the expected results occurs". The time was ripe for such ideas: Norman Vincent Peale's The Power (...) of Positive Thinking was already in its fourth year on the bestseller list when Beecher published his landmark paper. As time went on, the use of placebo pills became trapped in an... (shrink)

When The Ad Hoc Committee of Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death began meeting in 1967, I was a graduate student, with committee member Ralph Potter and committee chair Henry Beecher as my mentors. The question of when to stop life support on a severely compromised patient was not clearly differentiated from the question of when someone was dead. A serious clinical problem arose when physicians realized that a patient's condition was hopeless but life (...) support perpetuated body function. Thus, the committee stated that its first purpose was to deal with the burdens on patients and families as well as on hospitals and on patients needing hospital beds occupied by comatose patients. They intuited the strategy of “defining” these patients as dead, thus legitimating treatment stoppage. They noted that this would also serve a second purpose. Although the dead donor rule had not yet been clearly articulated, they claimed that defining patients as dead would also address controversy over obtaining organs for transplant.My mentors’ discussions related to my interest in the intersection between questions primarily of medical fact (When has a human brain irreversibly ceased functioning?) and nonmedical questions of social policy (Should we treat individuals with dead brains and beating hearts as dead humans?). It quickly became clear that most committee members did not appreciate the interplay of these questions. (shrink)

The routine practice of clinical research involving patient-subjects without informed consent prior to 1966 unquestionably was unethical. Does it follow that all clinical research involving competent adult patient-subjects is unethical without informed consent?In his landmark 1966 paper, Henry Beecher noted that of the 50 example studies he had originally compiled in preparation for that paper, only two even mentioned consent, and he observed further that mention of consent is “meaningless unless one knows how fully the patient was informed”. (...) Some of the studies in Beecher’s paper, such as one comparing sulfadiazine with no treatment to assess the complications of streptococcal pharyngitis (when the... (shrink)

Do children have a theory of mind? If they do, at what age is it acquired? What is the content of the theory, and how does it differ from that of adults? The Child's Theory of Mind integrates the diverse strands of this rapidly expanding field of study. It charts children's knowledge about a fundamental topic - the mind - and characterizes that developing knowledge as a coherent commonsense theory, strongly advancing the understanding of everyday theories as well as the (...) commonsense theory of mind. Wellman presents evidence that children as young as age three do possess a commonsense theory of mind - that they grasp the distinction between mental constructs and physical entities and that they have an understanding of the relationship between individuals' mental states and their overt actions. He delves in detail into questions about the nature of adults' commonsense theories of mind and about the nature of commonsense theories. Wellman then examines the content of the three-year-old's theory of mind, the nature of children's notions of mind before age three, the changes in the theory during subsequent development from ages three to six, and the young child's conception of mind in comparison with those of older children and adults. Henry M. Wellman is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Center for Human Growth and Development at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. (shrink)

The Iliad and Beowulf provide rich sources of historical information. The novels of Henry Fielding and Henry James may be instructive in the art of moral living. Some go further and argue that Emile Zola and Harriet Beecher Stowe played a part in ameliorating the lives of those existing in harsh circumstances. However, as Derek Attridge argues in this outstanding and acclaimed book, none of these capacities is distinctive of literature. What is the singularity of literature? Do (...) the terms "literature" and "the literary" refer to actual entities found in cultures at certain times, or are they merely expressions characteristic of such cultures? Attridge argues that this resistance to definition and reduction is not a dead end, but a crucial starting point from which to explore anew the power and practices of Western art. Derek Attridge provides a rich new vocabulary for literature, rethinking such terms as "invention," "singularity," "otherness," "alterity," "performance" and "form." He returns literature to the realm of ethics, and argues for the ethical importance of literature, demonstrating how a new understanding of the literary might be put to work in a "responsible," creative mode of reading. The Singularity of Literature is not only a major contribution to the theory of literature, but also a celebration of the extraordinary pleasure of the literary, for reader, writer, student or critic. This Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by the author. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Research Ethics after World War II: The Insular Culture of BiomedicineAllan M. Brandt (bio) and Lara Freidenfelds (bio)Human subjects research in the United States has only recently emerged as an important area of historical investigation. Over the last quarter century, scholars have begun the process of grounding within an historical context both the complex relationship between researchers and subjects and the processes by which biomedical knowledge is produced. Their (...) studies examine topics ranging from the impact of the anti-vivisectionist movement on human experimentation in the early twentieth century (Lederer 1995) to the development of the discipline of bioethics in the 1960s and 1970s (Rothman 1991) and the emergence of the legal concept of informed consent for human research (Katz, Glass, and Capron 1972). Many of the discussions focus on isolated incidents of scandal, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Jones 1993; Brandt 1978) and the Willowbrook School hepatitis study (Rothman and Rothman 1984). In doing so, they attempt to explain how such clearly unethical research could have been initiated and what consequences have resulted from public knowledge of such research.Nonetheless, the broader historical contexts and implications of human subjects research have yet to be fully delineated. This project will be of crucial importance, not only for historians, but also for those concerned with research policy and medical ethics. The historical examination of human subjects research will provide further insight into the details of research methods, the construction of protocols, and the historically specific interest in certain diseases. In addition, scholars will better understand the relationships of power and authority between researcher and subject, as well as the social and scientific mechanisms for the production of new biomedical knowledge. The process of enlisting research subjects illuminates the significance of class, gender, ethnicity, and race in science, in biomedicine, and in society. The fact that, historically, much research has employed research subjects from vulnerable populations, who participated in coercive contexts, has exposed powerful social assumptions embedded in the research enterprise. [End Page 239]The revelation of new documents indicating past abuses has sparked much of the investigation into human subjects research and the recent investigation of human radiation experiments during the Cold War era. One of the most important achievements of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was the uncovering of thousands of documents, a remarkable mine of archival data, that had been previously inaccessible to researchers. Jonathan Moreno and Susan Lederer’s article on the history of Cold War research ethics in this issue of the Kennedy Institute ofEthics Journal represents the first attempt since the publication of the Committee’s Final Report to analyze the Committee’s findings in a serious historical context.Historical accounts of the emergence of bioethics traditionally have left a great void in their discussions of human experimentation, generally ignoring the period between the writing of the Nuremberg Code in 1947 and the publication of Henry Beecher’s 1966 New England Journal ofMedicine article condemning systematic, unethical practices in human experimentation (Rothman 1991). The period from 1946 to 1966, however, was a time of vigorous research characterized by a fragmented community of medical researchers who applied inconsistent ethical standards and employed highly variable research practices. Both military and civilian medical researchers were intensely interested in radiation and thus conducted human subjects research along those lines, including examinations of the effects of plutonium injections and of total body irradiation, the use of trace radioisotopes to study various body processes, and observations of the effects of radiation intentionally released into the environment. The U.S. Government sponsored several thousand such studies (ACHRE 1995 [GPO, pp. 227–31; Oxford, pp. 135–38]), some of which were conducted on hospital patients, institutionalized children, military personnel, and prisoners. The Cold War scientific culture that produced this research must be examined from an historical ethical perspective.A central aspect of the culture of biomedical science after World War II was its insularity. Increasingly high standards of admission and challenging training had come to ensure that only a select group of individuals was admitted to the professions of medicine and research science. In this culture of experts, trustworthiness and ethical judgment were considered to be dependent upon expertise... (shrink)

The Metaphysical Society was founded in 1869 at the instigation of James Knowles (editor of the Contemporary Review and then of the Nineteenth Century) with a view to "collect, arrange, and diffuse Knowledge (whether objective or subjective) of mental and moral phenomena" (first resolution of the Society in April 1869). The Society was a private club which gathered together a latter-day clerisy. Building on the tradition of the Cambridge Apostles, they elected talented members from across the Victorian intellectual spectrum: (...) Bishops, one Cardinal, philosophers, men of science, literary figures, and politicians. The Society included in its 62 members prominent figures such as T. H. Huxley, William Gladstone, Walter Bagehot, Henry Edward Manning, John Ruskin and Alfred Lord Tennyson. The papers they produced are key primary sources which shed new light on the ideas of their authors on the burning subjects of the day, ranging from the existence and personality of God to the nature of conscience or the existence of the soul. They are a legacy of a period when intellectuals were wondering how, and what, to believe in a time of social change, spiritual crisis, and scientific progress. The dissolution of the Society in 1880 did not diminish the value of the papers: they illustrate a tradition of private, open discussion among famous men of the most widely varying views; they offer detailed insight into the evolution of the relationships between different schools of Victorian scientific and religious thought; and they bring to light heretofore under-represented points of conflict and harmony. All 95 papers are included, accompanied by introductions and scholarly notes that set each paper into their proper context. (shrink)

A cuarenta años del inicio del fecundo diálogo entre las ciencias de la vida y los estudios humanísticos, que el nacimiento de la bioética ha hecho posible, se advierte la necesidad de evaluar algunos a,spectos -entre los cuales las posibilidades futuras de la bioética, y también su origen- desde un punto de vista particular: el del outsider. Se trata de aceptar el reto, para nuestra identidad moral, de trasladar la atención del estudio de casos particulares, del punto de vista del (...) insidel~ al estudio de problemas en los extremos de la disciplina. El outsider intelectual desafra a la bioética convencional, examinando los eventos reprobables de nuestro tiempo, permitiendo de este modo valorar, a veces repensándolas y refórmulándolas, las responsabilidades de nuestras disciplinas normativas. Un ejemplo en este sentido es dado por un profesor de anestesia de la Universidad de Harvard: Henry Beecher que saliendo de la fr'ontera de la profesión médica se interesó por la condición de vulnerabilidad de los sujetos de experimentación denunciando. (shrink)

Bringing together evolutionary biology, psychology, and philosophy, Henry Plotkin presents a new science of knowledge, one that traces an unbreakable link between instinct and our ability to know.

Introduction -- Ethics and politics -- Ethical judgments -- Pleasure and desire -- Free will -- Ethical principles and methods -- Egoism and self-love -- Chapter viii-intuitionism -- Good -- Book II: Egoism -- The principle and method of egoism -- Empirical hedonism -- Empirical hedonism (continued) -- Objective hedonism and common sense -- Happiness and duty -- Deductive hedonism -- Book III: Intuitionism -- Intuitionism -- Virtue and duty -- The intellectual virtues -- Benevolence -- Justice -- Laws and (...) promises -- Classification of duties. truth -- Other social duties and virtues -- Self-regarding virtues -- Courage, humility, etc. -- Review of the morality of common sense -- Motives or springs of action as subjects of moral judgment -- Philosophical intuitionism -- Ultimate good -- Book IV: Utilitarianism -- The meaning of utilitarianism -- The proof of utilitarianism -- The relation of utilitarianism to the morality of common sense -- The method of utilitarianism -- The method of utilitarianism (continued) -- Concluding chapter: The mutual relations of the three methods. (shrink)

cognitive, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological studies of both memory and consciousness. Before proceeding further, some discussion of terminology is necessary. It comes as no surprise to state that "consciousness" is one of the ...

Since 1992, Border Crossings has show cased Henry A. Giroux's extraordinary range as a thinker by bringing together a series of essays that refigure the relationship between post-modernism, feminism, cultural studies and critical pedagogy. With discussions of topics including the struggle over academic canon, the role of popular culture in the curriculum and the cultural war the New Right has waged on schools, Giroux identified the most pressing issues facing critical educators at the turn of the century. In this (...) revised edition, Giroux reflects on the limits and possibilities of border crossings in the 21st century. "Borders" in our post 9/11 world have not been collapsing, he argues, but vigorously rebuilt. In order to have a truly critically engaged citizenry the challenges of these new "borders"- such as the increased militarization of public spaces, the rise of neo-liberalism, and the war in Iraq- must play a vital role in any debate on school and pedagogy. (shrink)

The Metaphysical Society was founded in 1869 at the instigation of James Knowles (editor of the Contemporary Review and then of the Nineteenth Century) with a view to 'collect, arrange, and diffuse Knowledge (whether objective or subjective) of mental and moral phenomena' (first resolution of the society in April 1869). The Society was a private dining and debate club that gathered together a latter-day clerisy. Building on the tradition of the Cambridge Apostles, they elected talented members from across the (...) Victorian intellectual spectrum: Bishops, one Cardinal, philosophers, men of science, literary figures, and politicians. The Society included in its 62 members prominent figures such as T. H. Huxley, William Gladstone, Walter Bagehot, Henry Edward Manning, John Ruskin, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. (shrink)

In the United States of America, the years from 1880 to 1915 were a period of rapid urbanization, combined in some areas with intense industrialization. This paper explores the creation in cities of the new industrial heartland of new institutions of higher learning. The case studies chosen illustrate varying responses to local needs for scientific and technical expertise, and illuminate how new concepts of higher education in the United States helped to shape the emergent connection between science and industry.

Modernity is founded on the belief that the world we build is a human invention, not a part of nature. The ecological consequences of this idea have been catastrophic. We have laid waste to natural ecosystems, replacing them with fundamentally unsustainable human designs. With time running out to address the environmental crises we have caused, our best path forward is to turn to nature for guidance. In this book, Henry Dicks explores the philosophical significance of a revolutionary approach to (...) sustainable innovation: biomimicry. The term describes the application and adaptation of strategies found in nature to the development of artificial products and systems, such as passive cooling techniques modeled on termite mounds or solar cells modeled on leaves. Dicks argues that biomimicry, typically seen as just a design strategy, can also serve as the basis for a new environmental philosophy that radically alters how we understand and relate to the natural world. By showing how we can imitate, emulate, and learn from nature, biomimicry points us toward a genuinely sustainable way of inhabiting the earth. Rooted in philosophy, The Biomimicry Revolution has profound implications spanning the natural sciences, design, architecture, sustainability studies, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities. It presents a sweeping reconception of what philosophy can be and offers a powerful new vision of terrestrial existence. (shrink)

Researchers do not owe their subjects the same level of care that physicians owe patients, but they owe more than merely what the research protocol stipulates. In keeping with the dynamics of the relationship between researcher and subject, they have limited but substantive fiduciary obligations.

This book is both a critique of the concept of the rights-holding, free, autonomous individual and attendant ideology dominant in the contemporary West, and an account of an alternative view, that of the role-bearing, interrelated responsible person of classical Confucianism, suitably modified for addressing the manifold problems of today.

Few if any philosophical schools have championed family values as persistently as the early Confucians, and a great deal can be learned by attending to what they had to say on the subject. In the Confucian tradition, human morality and the personal realization it inspires are grounded in the cultivation of family feeling. One may even go so far as to say that, for China, family reverence was a necessary condition for developing any of the other human qualities of excellence. (...) On the basis of the present translation of the Xiaojing (Classic of Family Reverence) and supplemental passages found in other early philosophical writings, Professors Rosemont and Ames articulate a specifically Confucian conception of "role ethics" that, in its emphasis on a relational conception of the person, is markedly different from most early and contemporary dominant Western moral theories. This Confucian role ethics takes as its inspiration the perceived necessity of family feeling as the entry point in the development of moral competence and as a guide to the religious life as well. In the lengthy introduction, two senior scholars offer their perspective on the historical, philosophical, and religious dimensions of the Xiaojing. Together with this introduction, a lexicon of key terms presents a context for the Xiaojing and provides guidelines for interpreting the text historically in China as well as suggesting its contemporary significance for all societies. The inclusion of the Chinese text adds yet another dimension to this important study. The Chinese Classic of Family Reverence is sure to appeal to specialists of comparative and Chinese philosophy and to all readers interested in the enduring importance of the family. (shrink)

So considered, Hume is viewed as a naturalist, whose project in the first three parts of the first book of the Treatise is to provide an account of the ...

The notion that it is useful to specify norms progressively in order to resolve doubts about what to do, which I developed initially in a 1990 article, has been only partly assimilated by the bioethics literature. The thought is not just that it is helpful to work with relatively specific norms. It is more than that: specification can replace deductive subsumption and balancing. Here I argue against two versions of reliance on balancing that are prominent in recent bioethical discussions. Without (...) meaning to address the substance or the overall merits of either view I criticize, I attack Gert, Culver and Clouser's implicit reliance on some overall dimension of balancing as a basis of resolving conflicts among norms and Beauchamp and Childress's residual acceptance of 'justified balancing'. The former authors' description of resolving conflicts depends upon a type of value commensurability that (as they otherwise seem to admit) does not obtain, while the latter authors' role for justified balancing would be better served by continued specification. (shrink)

This landmark book is now reissued in a new edition that has been vastly rewritten and updated to respond to recent Kantian literature. It includes a new discussion of the Third Analogy, a greatly expanded discussion of Kant’s _Paralogisms, _and entirely new chapters dealing with Kant’s theory of reason, his treatment of theology, and the important Appendix to the Dialectic. _Praise for the earlier edition: _ “Probably the most comprehensive and substantial study of the Critique of Pure Reason written by (...) any American philosopher.... This is a splendid book.”—Lewis White Beck “This masterful study... will most certainly join the canon of required reading for future interpreters of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Superbly organized and lucidly written.”—Garrett Green, _Journal of Religion_. (shrink)