Originally published: c2000. With new pref. An award-winning biologist argues that the intersection of scientific creativity and religious insight is a prerequisite for the emergence of a more humane medical science.

Are there parallels between the "moment of insight" in science and the emergence of the "unknowable" in religious faith? Where does scientific insight come from? Award-winning biologist Robert Pollack argues that an alliance between religious faith and science is not necessarily an argument in favor of irrationality: the two can inform each other's visions of the world. Pollack begins by reflecting on the large questions of meaning and purpose--and the difficulty of finding either in the orderly world (...) described by the data of science. He considers the obligation to find meaning and purpose despite natural selection's claim to be a complete explanation of our presence as a species--a claim that calls upon neither natural intention, nor design, nor Designer. Next, the book focuses on matters of free will, from the choice of a scientist to accept evidence, to the choice of a religious person to accept a revelation, to a patient's loss of free will in medical treatment. Here Pollack addresses questions of ethics and offers a provocative comparison of two difficult texts whose contents remain incompletely understood: the DNA "text" of the human genome and the Hebrew record of Jewish written and oral law. In closing, Pollack considers the promise of genetic medicine in enabling us to glimpse our own future and offers a reconsideration of the possible utility of the so-called placebo effect in curing illness. Whether refuting a DNA-based biological model of Judaism or discussing the Darwinian concept of the species, Pollack, under the banner of free inquiry, presents a genuine, vital, and well-argued assay of the intersection of science and religion. (shrink)

In THE MISSING MOMENT a distinguished molecular biologist explores the nature of time and argues for a radical rethinking of how time affects our sense of self, our mortality, and the future of science and medicine. Only in the past few years have we learned enough about the brain for this remarkable book to be written. We know now that our brains continually filter the present through memories and emotions of the past. In fact, strictly speaking, we live in the (...) past: since it takes the brain a second to process perceptions, what we think is the present actually happened a second ago. We also know where and how the unconscious operates and how painful memories are repressed; repression is not a psychological defect but an evolutionary necessity for our species. All thought, even the most rational, is permeated with unconscious feelings, fears, and emotions. Scientists, like the rest of us, make choices for reasons they don't understand. Thus the direction of scientific research is driven by private demons, not public needs. We can see this in medical science, where doctors develop the tools to diagnose genetic diseases they cannot cure, bringing pain rather than comfort to patients. Today science can do more good than ever before, and it can also do more harm. The time has come for scientists and others to abandon the notion that there is any such thing as the disinterested pursuit of truth. Instead, they must strive for a therapeutic self-awareness of their unconscious agendas and work for larger goals than personal immortality. (shrink)

The authors describe the ethical considerations underlying the inclusion of mental health services into a prioritized health care system. The Oregon Health Plan is a process for defining and delivering basic health services to an entire state. As the plan was developed, the mental health community needed to decide whether or not to participate in the process and, if so, how. Lengthy discussions among mental health consumers, family members, and providers led to a strategy that emphasized the integration of mental (...) health and chemical dependency services into a comprehensive and universal health care program. This approach appears to have achieved relative parity for mental health. (shrink)

De beroemde Australische kunstcriticus Robert Hughes verdedigt het onschatbare in de kunst tegen commercie, hype en marketing. In deze Nexus-lezing van 2009 ontmaskert hij nietsontziend hedendaagse iconen als Damien Hirst, Jackson Pollack en Andy Warhol, en verguist hij een markt die de prijzen van kunstwerken tot absurde hoogten doen stijgen. Daartegenover stelt hij datgene wat kunst echt waardevol maakt: de vakmanschap, intensiteit en subtiliteit van waarlijk grote kunstenaars als Vermeer, Rembrandt en Goya.

Decision-makers increasingly invoke equity to motivate, design, implement, and evaluate strategies for managing flood risks. But there is no objective definition of equity. This pluralistic setting calls for transparency about underlying values, but this practice is uncommon. Here, we review how equity is measured by surveying peer-reviewed publications that explicitly state an interest in equity in the context of flood-risk management. We develop a simple taxonomy for how transparent measurements can be defined. We map reviewed measurements to this taxonomy. Finally, (...) we offer guidance on how the pursuit of a clear and consistent quantitative evidence base about equity can become more widespread in flood-risk research and beyond. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 47 Heft: 1 Seiten: 369-378.

Clinicians, operating within complex systems, make mistakes, as people do in every human endeavor, and when they do, patients are sometimes harmed. One important question is how we as clinicians can find resolution in the wake of an error. The published literature has divided errors into those caused by “systems” and by “individuals.” But whereas both “systems” and “individual” approaches are important in understanding the cause of an error, neither alone can fully lead to resolution once an error has occurred. (...) Instead, both are necessary to understand, resolve, and prevent errors. (shrink)

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

It would seem, on the surface, logical that entrepreneurs would treat stakeholders with honesty and respect. However, this is not always the case—at times, entrepreneurs lie to stakeholders in order to take a step closer to achieving legitimacy. It is these legitimacy lies that are the focus of the current work. Overall, while we know that legitimacy lies are told, we know very little about the psychological processes at work that may make it more likely for someone to tell a (...) legitimacy lie. Thus, we theorize about the pressure to pursue legitimacy, the situational and individual factors that affect this pursuit, as well as how this context can lead to moral disengagement and the telling of legitimacy lies. Our theorizing advances the existing literature and provides a dynamic framework by which future research can delve more deeply into the nuanced context that breeds the escalation of legitimacy lies. (shrink)

This is a paradigmatic work of contemporary philosophy.

This article seeks to explain the variable implementation of gender mainstreaming as a `policy frame' over time and across various international organisations (I.O.s). In the years since the U.N. Fourth World Women's Conference in Beijing (1995),mainstreaming has been endorsed and adopted by a wide range of international organisations, and we compare the adoption and implementation of mainstreaming in four specific I.O.s: the World Bank, the United Nations Development Programme, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the European Union. (...) The rhetorical acceptance of mainstreaming by various international organisations, however, obscures considerable variation in both the timing and the nature of the mainstreaming process within and among organisations. This variation, in turn, can be explained in terms of the categories of political opportunity, mobilising structures and strategic framing, which have been put forward by social movement theorists. (shrink)

Robert Hanna presents a fresh view of the Kantian and analytic traditions that have dominated continental European and Anglo-American philosophy over the last two centuries, and of the connections between them. But this is not just a study in the history of philosophy, for out of this emerges Hanna's original approach to two much-contested theories that remain at the heart of contemporary philosophy. Hanna puts forward a new 'cognitive-semantic' interpretation of transcendental idealism, and a vigorous defense of Kant's theory (...) of analytic and synthetic necessary truth, making this compelling reading for all who are interested in these fundamental philosophical issues. (shrink)

Classical American pragmatism: the pragmatist -- Enlightenment-and its problematic semantics -- Analyzing pragmatism: pragmatics and pragmatisms -- A Kantian rationalist pragmatism: pragmatism -- Inferentialism, and modality in Sellars's arguments against -- Empiricism -- Linguistic pragmatism and pragmatism about norms: an arc of -- Thought from Rorty's eliminative materialism to his pragmatism -- Vocabularies of pragmatism: synthesizing naturalism and -- Historicism -- Towards an analytic pragmatism: meaning-use analysis -- Pragmatism, expressivism, and anti-representationalism: -- Local and global possibilities.

A sourcebook for developing and facilitating collaborative groups capable of continuously adapting to anticipate the evolving learning needs of students. Based on a theoretical foundation of schools as complex systems in which linear management models are no longer sufficient.

This paper contributes to the foundations of a theory of rational choice for artificial agents in dynamic environments. Our work is developed within a theoretical framework, originally due to Bratman, that models resource-bounded agents as operating against the background of some current set of intentions, which helps to frame their subsequent reasoning. In contrast to the standard theory of rational choice, where options are evaluated in isolation, we therefore provide an analysis of situations in which the options presented to an (...) agent are evaluated against a background context provided by the agent’s current plans—commitments to future activities, which may themselves be only partially specified. The interactions between the new options and the background context can complicate the task of evaluating the option, rendering it either more or less desirable in context than it would have been in isolation.  2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

State health departments are at the core of the United States public health infrastructure. Surveillance to monitor trends in disease and injury; the development, coordination, and delivery of services; and public education are some of the core functions health department employees oversee every day. As such, agencies and their employees are well positioned to inform policy decisions that affect the public’s health. However, little is known about the role of health department staff — a sizeable proportion of the public health (...) workforce — as advocates for public health policies, independent of their agency roles. Anecdotally, some health department employees with whom we have spoken expressed reluctance to engage in policy advocacy for fear of violating little known or understood agency or state rules. (shrink)

The Affordable Care Act is an essential first step toward making health insurance more affordable for lower and moderate income Americans. It has accomplished historic reductions in the proportion of Americans who are uninsured. The number of Americans reporting delaying medical care for financial reasons has declined by approximately one-third since 2010. Medicaid expansions, in particular, have significantly reduced financial burdens and accompanying anxieties experienced by low-income Americans in states that have embraced this opportunity. Consistent with these finding, one recent (...) analysis of credit report data finds that Medicaid expansion was associated with between a $600 and $1000 decline in collection balances among individuals who gained coverage. Notwithstanding these gains, premiums and cost-sharing are still too high for many Americans. And cost-sharing has continued to edge higher for the majority of Americans who have coverage through employer-based plans. Measures to address these challenges must build on the ACA to provide greater protection to millions of Americans and to address continued dissatisfaction with our health care financing system among middle-income Americans. (shrink)

Develops a theory of culture based on a metaphysics that elaborates on the Platonic and Confucian traditions. In Metaphysics of Goodness, Robert Cummings Neville extends Alfred North Whitehead’s project of cultural studies, which was based on a new metaphysics that Whitehead developed in Adventures of Ideas. Neville’s focus is value or goodness in many modes. The metaphysics treated in this book derive from the Platonic and Confucian traditions, with significant modifications of Whitehead, Peirce, Dewey, Confucius, Xunzi, and Zhou Dunyi. (...) Part one develops a theory of form based on a metaphysics of harmony. Part two elaborates a theory of art based on a metaphysics of beauty. Part three sketches a theory of personhood based on a metaphysics of obligation. Part four discusses civilization in a systematic way based on a metaphysics of flourishing. Throughout the book, Neville elaborates a theory of interpretation that is inspired by Peirce, Dewey, and Xunzi but is not limited to their ideas. While the reasoning of the book is concise, it employs methodologies from many kinds of philosophy, art criticism, ethics, and cultural studies, and sees philosophy as needing to learn from all these disciplines. “Neville’s work is informed by a lifelong engagement with the most important philosophers in history, including Plato, Aristotle, Whitehead, and Dewey. Here, he offers an important argument that there is beauty not only in how people see the world, but also in the world itself.” — Kevin Schilbrack, Appalachian State University. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper is a preliminary attempt to better understand the concept of legitimacy in stakeholder theory. The normative component of stakeholder theory plays a central role in the concept of legitimacy. Though the elaboration of legitimacy contained herein applies generally to all “normative cores” this paper relies on Phillips’s principle of stakeholder fairness and therefore begins with a brief description of this work. This is followed by a discussion of the importance of legitimacy to stakeholder theory as well as the (...) general ambiguity of the term. A distinction is then drawn between normative and derivative legitimacy. Reference to this distinction helps distinguish between a relationship with the organization based on direct moral obligation and one based on the power to help or harm the organization. It is concluded that stakeholders who retain the ability to affect the organization arelegitimate(derivatively), but that this legitimacy is derived from the moral obligation owed other (normative) stakeholders and that the two sorts of legitimacy are importantly different from one another. An example of the normative/derivative distinction at work in managerial decision making is elaborated upon and managerial and research implications are then suggested. (shrink)

Abstract:Should the responsibilities of business managers be understood independently of the social circumstances and “market forces” that surround them, or (in accord with empiricism and the social sciences) are agents and their choices shaped by their circumstances, free only insofar as they act in accordance with antecedently established dispositions, their “character”? Virtue ethics, of which I consider myself a proponent, shares with empiricism this emphasis on character as well as an affinity with the social sciences. But recent criticisms of both (...) empiricist and virtue ethical accounts of character deny even this apparent compromise between agency and environment. Here is an account of character that emphasizes dynamic interaction both in the formation and in the interplay between personal agency and responsibility on the one hand and social pressures and the environment on the other. (shrink)

The literature on theoretical reason has been dominated by epistemological concerns, treatments of practical reason by ethical concerns. This book overcomes the limitations of dealing with each separately. It sets out a comprehensive theory of rationality applicable to both practical and theoretical reason. In both domains, Audi explains how experience grounds rationality, delineates the structure of central elements, and attacks the egocentric conception of rationality. He establishes the rationality of altruism and thereby supports major moral principles. The concluding part describes (...) the pluralism and relativity his conception of rationality accommodates and, taking the unified account of theoretical and practical rationality in that light, constructs a theory of global rationality--the overall rationality of persons. Rich in narrative examples, intriguing analogies, and intuitively appealing arguments, this beautifully crafted book will spur advances in ethics and epistemology as well in philosophy of mind and action and the theory of rationality itself. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.