Essays discuss the history, philosophy, methodology, and practices of holistic medicine.

This commentary presents a self-assessment inventory that will allow readers to determine their own attitude toward the base rate fallacy and its literature. The inventory is scientifically valid but not Medicare/Medicaid reimbursable.

SummaryMore than enough people are still trying to define art. I wonder: Why do that? There don't seem to be any good reasons for doing it. I examine three of these reasons: that our concept of art is abasicconcept, that a definition will have practical value, and that a definition would be interesting from a theoretic point of view.

Extraterrestrial Altruism examines a basic assumption of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI): that extraterrestrials will be transmitting messages to us for our benefit. This question of whether extraterrestrials will be altruistic has become increasingly important in recent years as SETI scientists have begun contemplating transmissions from Earth to make contact. Technological civilizations that transmit signals for the benefit of others, but with no immediate gain for themselves, certainly seem to be altruistic. But does this make biological sense? Should we (...) expect altruism to evolve throughout the cosmos, or is this only wishful thinking? Is it dangerous to send messages to other worlds, as Stephen Hawking has suggested, or might humankind benefit from an exchange with intelligence elsewhere in the galaxy? Would extraterrestrial societies be based on different ethical principles, or would we see commonalities with Earthly notions of morality? Extraterrestrial Altruism explores these and related questions about the motivations of civilizations beyond Earth, providing new insights that are critical for SETI. Chapters are authored by leading scholars from diverse disciplines—anthropology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, computer science, cosmology, engineering, history of science, law, philosophy, psychology, public policy, and sociology. The book is carefully edited by Douglas Vakoch, Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute and professor of clinical psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. The Foreword is by Frank Drake. This interdisciplinary book will benefit everybody trying to understand whether evolution and ethics are unique to Earth, or whether they are built into the fabric of the universe. (shrink)

We provide a retrospective of 25 years of the International Conference on AI and Law, which was first held in 1987. Fifty papers have been selected from the thirteen conferences and each of them is described in a short subsection individually written by one of the 24 authors. These subsections attempt to place the paper discussed in the context of the development of AI and Law, while often offering some personal reactions and reflections. As a whole, the subsections build into (...) a history of the last quarter century of the field, and provide some insights into where it has come from, where it is now, and where it might go. (shrink)

One of the challenging problems in large scale cyber-argumentation platforms is that users often engage and focus only on a few issues and leave other issues under-discussed and under-acknowledged. This kind of non-uniform participation obstructs the argumentation analysis models to retrieve collective intelligence from the underlying discussion. To resolve this problem, we developed an innovative opinion prediction model for a multi-issue cyber-argumentation environment. Our model predicts users’ opinions on the non-participated issues from similar users’ opinions on related issues using intelligent (...) argumentation techniques and a collaborative filtering method. Based on our detailed experimental results on an empirical dataset collected using our cyber-argumentation platform, our model is 21.7% more accurate, handles data sparsity better than other popular opinion prediction methods. Our model can also predict opinions on multiple issues simultaneously with reasonable accuracy. Contrary to existing opinion prediction models, which only predict whether a user agrees on an issue, our model predicts how much a user agrees on the issue. To our knowledge, this is the first research to attempt multi-issue opinion prediction with the partial agreement in the cyber-argumentation platform. With additional data on non-participated issues, our opinion prediction model can help the collective intelligence analysis models to analyze social phenomena more effectively and accurately in the cyber argumentation platform. (shrink)

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Smartphones with Global Positioning System (GPS) apps offer simple and accurate tools to collect data on human mobility. However, their associated ethical challenges remain to be assessed. We used the Emanuel framework to assess the ethical concerns of using smartphone GPS to record mobility patterns of young adults in rural South Africa for a larger study on mobility and HIV risk (Sesikhona). We conducted four focus groups (FGDs) with individuals eligible for the Sesikhona study. FGD data were coded using the (...) Emanuel framework. Participants perceived use of smartphone GPS to study human mobility and HIV risk as valuable. They raised concerns about invasion of privacy and confidentiality. Also mentioned were risk/benefit ratio, informed consent and ongoing respect. Concerns expressed provided a useful evidence-base for the development of a guide to inform future participants about ethical issues arising in the use of GPS technology to track mobility and health-related issues. (shrink)

This paper was presented at the University of Illinois in the northern Spring of 1961. Its title is slightly misleading, as it deals more with influences on Wittgenstein than any particular influences he had on others. In particular, it points to an interesting indirect influence the philosophy of C.S. Peirce on Wittgenstein’s later thought – an of inflluence that came about as a result of the many philosophical interactions between Wittgenstein and Frank Ramsey, who was much impressed by Peirce’s (...) work. -/- The paper provides a sympathetic outline of the development of Wittgenstein’s thought, discussing such central topics as the general nature of language, proofs, and rule following. It concludes with a clear exposition of Wittgenstein’s “private language argument”. (Tim Oakley, March 2019). (shrink)

Erich Frank is chiefly known for two works. In Plato und die sogenannten Pythagoreer, 1923, Frank published the results of research to determine who the Pythagoreans actually were and what part they played in Plato's conception of nature. In 1945 he published Philosophical Understanding and Religious Truth. It had been the hope of his friends that Frank would present a more comprehensive and systematic exposition of his thought. Frank's sudden death in 1948 put an end to (...) this hope. In Knowledge, Will and Belief Ludwig Edelstein has collected together twenty of Frank's papers and has appended an account of Frank's life and work. Until 1939 Frank was professor at Marburg. After that he was attached to universities in the United States. Half of the papers in this collection are in English, the others are in German. Readers in the English speaking world will find Frank's German quite readable. Half of the papers have not hitherto been published; of those which have been, many are hidden in unfamiliar journals. (shrink)

This article examines the neoaristotelian theories of Martha Nussbaum and Douglas Rasmussen/douglas Den Uyl. Both sides give a similar account of good human living, which emphasizes the significance of individual autonomy. But they disagree sharply on the political institutions necessary to promote human flourishing; Nussbaum formulates a,social democratic' position; Rasmussen/den Uyl hold a,liberal‘ standpoint. The article explores both lines of reasoning. It is shown that neither Nussbaum nor Rasmussen/den Uyl present conclusive arguments for their political position.

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are widespread ways by which people make sense of unsettling or disturbing cultural events. Belief in CTs is often connected to problematic consequences, such as decreased engagement with conventional political action or even political extremism, so understanding the psychological and social qualities of CTs belief is important. CTs have often been understood to be “monological”, displaying the tendency for belief in one conspiracy theory to be correlated with belief in (many) others. Explanations of monologicality invoke a nomothetical (...) or “closed” mindset whereby mutually supporting beliefs based on mistrust of official explanations are used to interpret public events as conspiracies, independent of the facts about those events (which they may ignore or deny). But research on monologicality offers little discussion of the content of monological beliefs and reasoning from the standpoint of the CT believers. This is due in part to the “access problem” (Wood & Douglas, 2015): CT believers are averse to being researched because they often distrust researchers and what they appear to represent. We used several strategies to address the access problem, and investigated the symbolic resources underlying CTs by reconstructing a conspiracy worldview - a set of beliefs held by CT believers about important dimensions of ontology, epistemology, and human agency. To do this, we analysed media documents, conducted field observation, and engaged in semi-structured interviews,. We describe six main dimensions of a conspiracy worldview: Views of the nature of reality, the self, the outgroup, the ingroup, action, and the future. We also describe a typology of five types of CT believers, which vary according to their positions on each of these dimensions. Our findings converge with prior explorations of CT beliefs but also revealed novel aspects: A sense of community among CT believers, a highly differentiated representation of the outgroup, a personal journey of conversion, variegated kinds of political action, and optimistic belief in future change. These findings are at odds with the typical image of monological CT believers as paranoid, cynical, anomic and irrational. For many, the CT worldview may rather constitute the ideological underpinning of a nascent pre-figurative social movement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 602-603 [Access article in PDF] Paul B. Thompson and Thomas C. Hilde, editors. The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism. The Vanderbilt Library of American Philosophy. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Pp. ix + 342. Cloth, $39.95. If "racial memory" is a viable concept, then the enduring paradigm of human productivity is agriculture, whose seventy-century dominion Western industry and urbanization have eclipsed only (...) within the last two hundred years. The fifteen essays collected here explore America's distinctive form of agrarianism: where individualism, democracy, and a seemingly endless frontier transcended European quarrels over "commons" versus "containment." These values also helped forge our indigenous philosophy—pragmatism—and it is the confluence of these two distinctive American forms that intrigues each of these authors.The essays fall roughly into three groups: 1) historical queries whose connection to pragmatism is marginal, 2) expositions of the agrarian roots of pragmatism, and 3) estimates of the influence of classical pragmatism on the recent rise of neoagrarianism. The first category offers sparkling essays by Charles Taliaferro, James Campbell, Paul B. Thompson, Robert S. Corrington, and Douglas R. Anderson. Together these scholars sketch a history from colonial times to the mid-twentieth century—from Jefferson's "noble agrarian" to the agony of reconstruction, which hastened the split between Northern transcendentalists and Southern romantics. There are some surprises: Franklin outshines even Jefferson with his balanced vision of self-improvement and community weal, and Jefferson's correspondent Crèvecoueur emerges as a visionary who foresaw farming as a wholesome and integrated way of life a century before Emerson and Thoreau. Thomas C. Hilde finds an engagingly pragmatic notion of community in Josiah Royce, and Richard E. Hart discovers Dewey's sense of concrete experience in the novels of John Steinbeck. The contributions of neglected figures such as Francois Quesnay, Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Brewster, and A Whitney Griswold are also recovered.Turning to the second group, though obviously an irresistible title the notion that classical pragmatism is robustly "rooted" in agrarianism is slightly disingenuous. Peirce and James have no direct ties to agrarianism. And though Dewey's themes of innovation, social intelligence, community, and a conception of experience broadly inclusive of organisms and environments reflect obvious affinities, they do not show that pragmatism grew directly from or is a variant of agrarianism. Happily, the pieces on Dewey contributed by Larry A. Hickman and Armen Marsoobian harbor no such illusions, [End Page 602] and Dewey is specifically disassociated from the claim that agriculture is a privileged form of experience.The third, and perhaps most significant, aim of the volume is to bring pragmatic insights into the recent groundswell toward neoagrarianism. Where traditional agrarianism was polarized between the domination of nature and its romantic beatification, the movement pioneered by Wendell Berry in the 1970s portrays the farmer as a nurturer whose goal is to seek an optimal harmony in the health of the land, the family, the community, and the country. In this James A. Montmarquet finds a Deweyan respect for an encompassing "situation," a unity of fact and value in stark opposition to the "corporate" mentality of specialization and success measured in economic gain alone. For Jeffrey Burkhardt, land grant universities must renew their original commitment to the family farm by distancing themselves from the forces of positivism and scientism—the technocrats and bio-chemical engineers who have imperiled both the land and the communities who depend upon it. Neither Montmarquette nor Burkhardt are looking for handouts, or for a return to the "idyllic" life of the one-horse plow. They emphasize moral training and a combination of practices designed to support the sustainability of the smaller farm in a competitive marketplace.One author compares the mention of agrarianism in philosophical discourse to committing a rude act in public. Clearly, however, mere "respectability" is not enough. If the contributors to this volume are correct, agrarianism is a lantern that may illuminate our ongoing search for wholeness and integrity. Frank X. Ryan Kent State University... (shrink)