Many countries currently invest in technologies and data infrastructures to foster precision medicine (PM), which is hoped to better tailor disease treatment and prevention to individual patients. But who can expect to benefit from PM? The answer depends not only on scientific developments but also on the willingness to address the problem of structural injustice. One important step is to confront the problem of underrepresentation of certain populations in PM cohorts via improved research inclusivity. Yet, we argue that the perspective (...) needs to be broadened because the (in)equitable effects of PM are also strongly contingent on wider structural factors and prioritization of healthcare strategies and resources. When (and before) implementing PM, it is crucial to attend to how the organisation of healthcare systems influences who will benefit, as well as whether PM may present challenges for a solidaristic sharing of costs and risks. We discuss these issues through a comparative lens of healthcare models and PM-initiatives in the United States, Austria, and Denmark. The analysis draws attention to how PM hinges on—and simultaneously affects—access to healthcare services, public trust in data handling, and prioritization of healthcare resources. Finally, we provide suggestions for how to mitigate foreseeable negative effects. (shrink)

Genomic research results and incidental findings with health implications for a research participant are of potential interest not only to the participant, but also to the participant's family. Yet investigators lack guidance on return of results to relatives, including after the participant's death. In this paper, a national working group offers consensus analysis and recommendations, including an ethical framework to guide investigators in managing this challenging issue, before and after the participant's death.

Returning genomic research results to family members raises complex questions. Genomic research on life-limiting conditions such as cancer, and research involving storage and reanalysis of data and specimens long into the future, makes these questions pressing. This author group, funded by an NIH grant, published consensus recommendations presenting a framework. This follow-up paper offers concrete guidance and tools for implementation. The group collected and analyzed relevant documents and guidance, including tools from the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium. The authors then (...) negotiated a consensus toolkit of processes and documents. That toolkit offers sample consent and notification documents plus decision flow-charts to address return of results to family of living and deceased participants, in adult and pediatric research. Core concerns are eliciting participant preferences on sharing results with family and on choice of a representative to make decisions about sharing after participant death. (shrink)

"Advocates of the evolutionary analogy claim that mechanisms governing scientific change are analogous to those at work in organic evolution - above all, natural selection. By referring to the works of the most influential proponents of evolutionary analogies (Toulmin, Campbell, Hull and, most notably, Kuhn) the authors discuss whether and to what extent their use of the analogy is appropriate. A careful and often illuminating perusal of the theoretical scope of the terms employed, as well as of the varying contexts (...) within which the analogy is appealed to in contemporary debates, leads to the conclusion that such general theories of selective processes are either too sketchy or eventually not persuasive, if not altogether based on flawed views of evolutionary biology. By clarifying what is at stake, the analysis carried out in the book sheds new light on one of the dominant theories of scientific progress. It also invites criticism, of course - but that is the very fuel of philosophical confrontation." - Stefano Gattei, IMT Institute for Advanced Studies, Lucca "This book presents a serious challenge to those, like David Hull, who seek to model scientific change as an evolutionary process. The authors point out that although there are similarities between the processes of scientific change and organic evolution, the dissimilarities present formidable difficulties to construing the relation as anything more than a weak analogy. Their argument employs what they call a 'type hierarchical' approach that promises to be a powerful tool for the classification of similarities between theories in all fields." - Michael Bradie, Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University "This is a most interesting discussion of the analogy between biological and scientific change. Particularly commendable is the close attention paid to the thinking of the late David Hull and his pathbreaking work on this issue." - Michael Ruse, History and Philosophy of Science, Florida State University. (shrink)

Z propozycją rekalibracji etyki i zastąpienia jej neuroetyką wystąpiła Patricia S. Churchland. Churchland twierdzi, że im bardziej rozumiemy szczegóły funkcjonowania naszego systemu nerwowego, tym bardziej jesteśmy przekonani co do tego, że przyjmowane przez nas standardy moralnego działania są uwarunkowane neurobiologicznie. Od roku 2002 termin „neuroetyka” funkcjonuje jako nazwa nowej subdyscypliny etyki. Wymienia się w niej dwa zasadnicze działy: etykę neuronauki i neuronaukę etyki. Pierwszy dotyczy zasadniczo moralnych problemów związanych z zastosowaniem osiągnięć neuronauk, przedmiotem drugiego: neuronauki etyki, jest wpływ, jaki wiedza (...) z zakresu neuronauk ma na nasze rozumienie etyki. Artykuł jest krytyczną prezentacją nowej subdyscypliny etycznej i próbą pokazania, że jakkolwiek neurobiologiczne procesy mają wpływ na nasze działanie, to nie decydują o jego moralnym wymiarze. (shrink)

[Anne:] “I can't, I'm in the depths of despair. Can you eat when you are in the depths of despair?”“I've never been in the depths of despair, so I can't say,” said Marilla.“Weren't you? Well did you ever try to imagine you were in the depths of despair?”” No, I didn't.”“Then I don't think you can understand what it's like. It's a very uncomfortable feeling indeed. When you try to eat a lump comes right up in your throat and you (...) can't swallow anything, not even if it was a chocolate caramel.”—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables.Emotion, as a “suprarational” property, transcends rationality in that it can be thought of as a group, contextual rather than as a solely individual trait, and thus is a higher order property, as the above quote suggests. This proposal arises from a metatheoretical analysis of models available to broach questions of emotion. I use metatheoretical in the sense of both the context of theory production and the theory of theory. From the first arose the idea that emotion, through the use of irrationality, has surfaced as a working equivalent to inexplicability or rational relativity, and can be modelled more adequately as suprarational, with a unique nature in its own right. The latter led me to propose that the concept of emotion as contextual, a higher order group level property, is possible and tentatively profitable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Moments of Beating Addiction and Inscription in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”Barbara Claire Freeman (bio)My title, which alludes to the collection of autobiographical essays authored by Virginia Woolf and entitled Moments of Being, implies that being and beating are co-constitutive and that exploring their interdependence may shed light upon the logic that binds the one to the other. In particular, I want to examine the ways (...) in which Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past”—it is the longest essay in the collection and presumably incomplete, since Woolf wrote the last entry shortly before killing herself in 1941—sets up a complex relationship between beating, writing, and compulsion. For the text in which the phrase “moment of being” first occurs also reveals that the activity of writing, to which Woolf was addicted, has the symbolic valence of beating and functions at the level of language in the same ways that beating functions on the body. I will begin to unpack this perhaps obscure equation by focusing upon the relationship between being and beating in the experiences that define Woolf’s “moments of being.” 1In the opening pages of “A Sketch,” Woolf describes the routine, eminently forgettable aspects of daily life as “a kind of nondescript cotton wool”; the phrase is her “private shorthand” for the general and diffuse “moments of non-being” that predominate in daily life and in which, by contrast, “moments of being” are “embedded” [70]. “Every day,” Woolf notes, “includes much more non-being than being”; and although “the real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being” [70], Woolf believes that “behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern” [72] and that her vocation as a writer is to discover and communicate it.Though occasionally “moments of being” produce the experience of rapture or ecstasy, an aspect of beating I will presently explore, most frequently they name moments that entail negation and self-shattering. “Moments of being” are moments of extreme violence that “remain interesting” [78] not because they lead to self-transcendence or discovery, but because they provoke a sense of utter helplessness and paralysis. With one exception, Woolf’s “moments” involve memories of being beaten up by life: “a sudden violent shock” occurs “when something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life” [71]. Woolf’s submission to her brother Thoby’s beating remains in her memory as inaugural:The first: I was fighting with Thoby on the lawn. We were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me. I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness. It was as if I became aware of [End Page 65] something terrible; and of my own powerlessness. I slunk off alone, feeling horribly depressed.[71]The shock of a beating occasions Woolf’s knowledge that rupture may function as a form of revelation; its reception initiates a drive to repeat in words the impact and imprint of the blows she has received. Being beaten not only provides her with a paradigm of being, but institutes a reciprocal and necessary relationship between beating and writing in which the one elicits and engenders the other. 2Another “moment” recounts the experience of being “dragged down, hopelessly, into some pit of absolute despair from which I could not escape” upon hearing about the suicide of a family friend, a certain Mr. Valpy:I overheard my father or mother say that Mr. Valpy had killed himself. The next thing I remember is being in the garden at night and walking on the path by the apple tree. It seemed to me that the apple tree was connected with the horror of Mr. Valpy’s suicide. I could not pass it. I stood there looking at the grey-green creases of the bark—it was a moonlit night—in a trance of horror.... My body seemed paralysed.[71]As Woolf’s body received her brother’s blows, her consciousness receives the shock of overhearing news of a suicide. The memory of Mr... (shrink)

In this paper, we explore some characteristics of the Information Superhighway and the World Wide Web metaphors in the light of the current developments in information technology. We propose that these characteristics constitute a form of conceptual slippage (often in the form of ‘lexical leakage’), which helps us detect and predict the tacit impact that the currently available information delivery systems are having on human cognition. We argue that the particular language associated with these systems evolves as a direct result (...) of human cognitive adaptation to the demands, resources, and constraints of highly technological environments. It reflects a growing alienation of the users of computerized systems from the physical aspects of the natural environment in which the disseminated information was originally grounded. We believe that a careful investigation of the pragmatic phenomena which are operative when the information media jargon is used is appropriate to the aims of Cognitive Technology. The role of metaphor as a vehicle for self-expression, as mediated by criteria of relevance, is discussed from this perspective. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 164-176, January 2022.

'A brilliant, utterly persuasive argument for genuine democracy in our own country...The proposals...are bound to be inspiring to anyone who takes politics, in the largest sense of the word, seriously.'-Barbara Ehrenreich.

Natural environments have a restorative effect from mental/attentional fatigue, prevent stress, and help to revitalize psychological and physical resources. These benefits are crucial for promoting active aging, which is particularly relevant given the phenomenon of population aging in recent decades. To be considered restorative, green spaces have to meet specific requirements in ecological and psychological terms that can be assessed through Post-Occupancy Evaluation, a multimethod approach commonly used by environmental psychologists and landscape architects after construction to evaluate the design (...) outcomes from the users’ perspective. Generally, POEs consist of surveys and/or interviews accompanied by more or less structured observations of onsite users’ behavior. Despite this, various practical constraints can prevent physical access to the renovated area. Exploiting digital tools for such an assessment can be a crucial support in such circumstances. The current study presents the visual POE of a restorative garden for older adults in Milan, Italy. We developed a web application, that includes the exp-EIA© patented method, which allows participants to virtually explore a visual simulation of the environment and provide their feedback. We identified 3 representative viewpoints in the redeveloped garden differing from each other for the functions and the design principles that inspired the transformation. For each point of view, we created 360° Virtual Reality photographs, that can be navigated by looking around, i.e., panning, from the standing point of each view. In connection to each virtual scene, a survey was conducted. The focus was the psychological experience related to each viewpoint, assessed with two psychometric scales investigating the constructs of emotions and restoration ; such information is integrated with behavioral aspects, including the main activities prefigured by participants and their visual exploration of the VR photography. The results of the virtual exploration show that the garden is perceived as restorative, with a more intense effect in a spot purposely designed. The emotions experienced in the garden are positive and a mild level of arousal is observed. The behavioral dimension is characterized by predominantly contemplative activities and contact with nature. A cartographic representation of the psychological and behavioral data is developed, to support the maintenance of the garden. (shrink)

The phrase "natural kind term" has come into the linguistic and philosophical literature in connection with well-known work of Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1970, 1975a). I use that phrase here in the sense it has acquired from those and subseqnent works on related topics. This is not the transparent sense of the phrase. That is, if I am right in what follows there are words for kinds of things existing in nature which are not natural kind terms in the current (...) sense - e.g. planet, woman, and weed. I use the term "nondescriptional", following Salmon (1981), to mean "lacking a Fregean sense", where a Fregean sense is taken to be a property or group of properties semantically associated with an expression which determines its denotation. I hope that the term "nondescriptional" will be clarified in subsequent discussion, but perhaps a few words about it and its opposite, "descriptional", would be useful here. These terms (as Salmon notes (p.15, n. 11)) should be taken as technical terms. The idea is that descriptional words, of which bachelor is the overwhelmingly favorite example, express a semantic content, or sense, which is what mediates their denotation. Entities fall in their denotation in virtue of possessing the property or properties expressed as their sense. (It is not necessary, however, that this sense be as easily paraphrasable with descriptive synonyms as it is typically held to be in the case of bachelor, or even that it be paraphrasable at all.) In the case of nondescriptional words there is no Fregean sense to mediate the link between word and object. Hence such terms are described by what Salmon, following Kaplan, calls "the theory of direct reference". What it is that does associate such terms with their denotations is another question which will be touched on briefly at the end. I have several aims in this paper. The first is to defend a conservative position on nondescriptionality. I will argue that relatively few natural language words have this property. My other aims are primarily clarificatory. Among the issues I would like to clarify are those connected with the determination of this property and flae explanation of why it exists, its relationship with other properties such as rigid designation and essentiality, and its significance for lexical semantics. The organization of the paper is as follows. The first section identifies the position taken here on the question of which expressions are nondescriptional and provides a general defense of it. The second section is a critical examination of criteria associated with nondescriptionality. In the third section provide further defense for the conservative position, and in the fourth section we turn to related issues in lexical semantics. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck's best selling Risk Society established risk on the sociological agenda. It brought together a wide range of issues centering on environmental, health and personal risk, provided a rallying ground for researchers and activists in a variety of social movements and acted as a reference point for state and local policies in risk management. The Risk Society and Beyond charts the progress of Beck's ideas and traces their evolution. It demonstrates why the issues raised by Beck reverberate widely throughout (...) social theory and covers the new risks that Beck did not foresee, associated with the emergence of new technologies, genetic and cybernetic. The book is unique because it offers both an introduction to the main arguments in Risk Society and develops a range of critical discussions of aspects of this and other works of Beck. (shrink)

Szabó follows Heim in viewing familiarity, rather than uniqueness, as the essence of the definite article, but attempts to derive both familiarity and uniqueness implications pragmatically, assigning a single semantic interpretation to both the definite and indefinite articles. I argue that if there is no semantic distinction between the articles, then there is no way to derive these differences between them pragmatically.

The first two seasons of Russian Doll ambitiously take on a number of topics in the Philosophy of Time. In particular, it addresses the metaphysics of time loops and time travel. The metaphysics of time are notoriously thorny and complicated, and Russian Doll provides a treatment of those issues that both does justice to their complexity as well as attempts to provide solutions to some of those issues (or at minimum, in some cases, hints at possible solutions). As is the (...) case with most enduring philosophical topics, the discussion does not happen in a philosophical vacuum. Just as a discussion of the nature of knowledge naturally leads to a discussion of the nature of truth, and so forth, discussions in the metaphysics of time naturally lead to discussions of the ethics of time travel, the nature of the universe, the nature of the reality, God, relativism, the nature of paradoxes, consciousness, and, perhaps most importantly, existential questions about how one should live. This chapter will provide a general account of the way these philosophical issues are presented in Russian Doll with an eye toward (1) explicating the ways in which the various characters in Russian Doll conceive of the issues, (2) making it clear what their responses to the issues are (in those instances in which responses are provided), and (3) where appropriate, evaluating those responses for philosophical consistency, accuracy, and plausibility. (shrink)

Dummett's output has been prolific and highly influential, but not always as accessible as it deserves to be. This book sets out to rectify this situation.

In articles such as “Speech Acts without Propositions?” (2006), Marina Sbisà advocates a “strong” conception of speech acts as means by which speakers modify their own and others’ deontic statuses, including their rights, obligations, and commitments. On this basis Sbisà challenges an influential approach to speech acts as typically if not universally possessing propositional contents. Sbisà argues that such an approach leads to viewing speech acts as primarily aimed at communicating propositional attitudes rather than carrying out socially and normatively significant (...) action. For this reason she advocates eschewing propositions from speech act theory’s conceptual toolkit; she also proposes a liberalization of the distinction between illocutionary force and semantic content, which are widely thought to be mutually exclusive. In this chapter we examine Sbisà’s reasoning and argue that while it does justify denying propositional attitudes a central role in communication, it does not justify dispensing with propositions or other contents in our theorizing about speech acts. In addition, we endorse Sbisà’s proposal for liberalizing the force/content distinction, and show a variety of ways in which force indicators may also possess semantic content. (shrink)

Cherche à mettre en évidence les principes théoriques qui peuvent être au fondement de toute recherche ou réflexion en sociologie de la musique.

This is a new edition of T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics (1883), a classic of modern philosophy, in which Green sets out his perfectionist ethical theory. In addition to the text of the Prolegomena itself, this new edition provides an introductory essay, a bibliographical essay, and an index. Brink's extended editorial introduction examines the context, themes, and significance of Green's work and will be of special interest to readers working on the history of ethics, ethical theory, (...) political philosophy, and nineteenth century philosophy. (shrink)

Cette introduction explique la perception, reconnue par Husserl sous le titre de "donation par esquisses". Il s'agit d'opérer une réduction radicale qui va de la critique du néant au monde comme a priori de tout apparaître. A ce monde correspond un sujet dont le sens d'être fait problème puisqu'il est à la fois un moment du monde et en rapport avec la totalité comme telle.

This book presents the most important problems of reference and considers their solution. It presupposes no technical knowledge, presents analyses from first principles, illustrates every stage with examples, and is written with verve and clarity. This is the ideal introduction to reference for students of linguistics and philosophy of language.

This book considers the context of the colonial policies of Britain, Locke's contribution to them, and the importance of these ideas in his theory of property. It also reconsiders the debate about John Locke's influence in America. The book argues that Locke's theory of property must be understood in connection with the philosopher's political concerns, as part of his endeavour to justify the colonialist policies of Lord Shaftesbury's cabinet, with which he was personally associated. The author maintains that traditional scholarship (...) has failed to do justice to Locke by ignoring the implications of contemporary British imperial policy for the interpretation of his political thought. (shrink)

This paper investigates Slovak migrants’ use of new media to build social capital. It draws on data from a pilot study with 36 Slovaks living in the UK, and on content analysis of the main Facebook page for Czechs and Slovaks in the UK. The data suggest that Facebook is used for sharing emotions rather than to build a community and share practical information. While Facebook and Skype are used to maintain preexisting strong ties in the country of origin, face-to-face (...) contact and mobile phones are used to maintain ties within the UK. However, social media do not seem to facilitate the formation of weak ties prior to migration, with face-to-face contact being dominant upon arrival. Transnational migration experience forms a separate dimension within the participants’ identity, independent from social capital. The data are discussed in relation to findings from previous studies about Slovak migrants in the Republic of Ireland. (shrink)

Making room for character -- Pluralism and the community of moral judgment -- A cosmopolitan kingdom of ends --Responsibility and moral competence --Can virtue be taught?: the problem of new moral facts -- Training to autonomy: Kant and the question of moral education -- Bootstrapping -- Rethinking Kant's hedonism -- The scope of moral requirement -- The will and its objects -- Obligatory ends -- Moral improvisation -- Contingency in obligation.

Anerkannt zu werden, ist nicht nur ein menschliches Grundbedurfnis, sondern vermittelt ebenfalls das Gefuhl, in einen sozialen Kontext integriert zu sein.