Rhetoric is widely regarded by both its detractors and advocates as a kind of antithesis to reason. In this book Thomas B. Farrell restores rhetoric as an art of practical reason and enlightened civic participation, grounding it in its classical tradition—particularly in the rhetoric of Aristotle. And, because prevailing modernist world views bear principal responsibility for the disparagement of rhetorical tradition, Farrell also offers a critique of the dominant currents of modern humanist thought. Farrell argues that (...) rhetoric is not antithetical to reason but is a manner of posing and answering questions that is distinct from the approaches of analytic and dialectical reason. He develops this position in a number of ways: through a series of bold reinterpretations of Aristotle's _Rhetoric_; through a detailed appraisal of traditional rhetorical concepts as seen in modern texts from the Army-McCarthy hearings to Edward Kennedy's memorial for his brother, Mario Cuomo's address on abortion, Betty Friedan's _Feminine Mystique_, and Vaclav Havel's inaugural address; and through a fresh appraisal of theories on the character of language and discourse found in contemporary philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, deconstructionism, Marxism, and especially in Habermas's critical theory of communicative action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Weight of Rhetoric: Studies in Cultural DeliriumThomas B. FarrellThere is something of this anachronistic doggedness in all importance, and to use it as a criterion of thought is to impose on thought a spellbound fixity, and a loss of self-reflection. The great themes are nothing other than primeval rumblings which cause the animal to pause and try to bring them forth once again. This does not mean that (...) the hierarchy of importance should be ignored. Just as its narrow- mindedness reflects that of the system, so it is saturated with all the latter’s force and stringency. Thought ought not, however, to repeat this hierarchy, but by completing, end it. The division of the world into important and unimportant matters, which has always served to neutralize the key phenomena of social injustice as mere exceptions, should be followed up to the point where it is convicted of its own untruth. The division which makes everything objects must itself become an object of thought, instead of guiding it. The large themes will then make their appearance, though hardly in the traditional “thematic” sense, but refractedly and eccentrically.—Theodor Adorno, Minima MoraliaBoy, you’re going to carry that weight, carry that weight a long time.—The Beatles [End Page 467]Preface: on Attachments—Flowers and the InfinitesimalThe number of adjustments it takes to make a square into a circle, the number of times any real number may be subdivided before reaching zero, the grainy inflections differentiating snowflakes, the differences among petals in a tulip—these are the sort of qualitative distinctions some of us might call minute and other cynical souls might consider trivial. But if the attachment of real human interest to objects of longing is any measure of worth, then they are far from insignificant.Imagine the following sequence of events. A young kid, fourteen or so, is out with some friends one summer evening and decides—on a whimsical adolescent impulse—to pick some tulips from a neighbor’s garden to leave at a girlfriend’s front porch. What follows?The neighbors, one of whom turns out to be a self-professed horticulturist and gardening aficionado, call the police and file a criminal complaint. The girlfriend’s parents give the alleged offender’s name to the same authorities. When the kid comes to the door of the neighbors to apologize, he is verbally threatened. When he writes a letter of contrition and remorse to the neighbors, they turn the letter over to the police as evidence. One day later, the neighbors angrily phone local school officials to complain of his behavior. Two days later, when two of the kid’s accomplices are summarily removed from eighth grade, taken to the police station, fingerprinted, and booked (without being informed of their rights), the parents reluctantly secure the services of an attorney (two attorneys, actually). When an outof- court settlement is finally agreed to, it is discovered that the city police have already passed the case on to the State’s Attorney’s Office. A criminal hearing will now need to be held in juvenile court. When the hearing is held, the charges are summarily dismissed. The cost? Several hundred dollars a tulip (with side effects including migraines, despondency, two trips to the emergency room, not to mention rather hefty attorneys’ fees).As the reader has probably surmised by now, this thinly disguised episode did not occur to Gregor Samsa but to someone near and dear to your author. It did not occur in Singapore but in Evanston, Illinois. All of us can probably recall occasions when things seemed to careen wildly out of control and apparently minor matters took on disproportionately inflated significance. We struggle to “make sense” of these episodes, for ourselves and others. In the above example, two allegories about magnitude surfaced. One, relayed to me by our grizzled Chicago attorney, addressed the question [End Page 468] of how to explain these events to our son. “Tell him,” he said, “that there are a lot of jerks in the world” (except he didn’t use the word “jerks”). A second allegory emerged rather belatedly. There was more than one nonrational attachment in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric in History as Theory and Praxis: A Blast from the PastThomas B. FarrellPhilosophies of history have fallen on hard times. Grand comic metanarratives were the first casualty, auguring ironically in the futility of their own pronouncements. Positive and negative teleologies were next to fall. But if finalized themes and Utopian schemes are not exactly in vogue, it remains the case that history—as systematic documentation and reminiscence about the (...) past—is and must be ongoing. This is transparently because things that matter continue to happen: with ideas, cultures, nature itself. And even if we never really learn from history, all other things being equal, history has shown that it is helpful to keep careful records. In an age that personalizes nearly everything, it is easy enough to recognize the familiar dissociation of act and accountability on a personal scale. What may appear as nothing more serious than petty truancy for a person may become amnesia, revisionism, and much worse when the zone of accountability is widened, the deeds are deepened, the stakes are increased. In each case, the argument is the same: identification through a sort of opaque empathy. In short, you had to be there.I intend this essay to be a meditation on some of the ways my amorphousarea of study, rhetorical theory, finds itself implicated with history, some possible avenues it may open for invention and judgment in history. Time permitting, I will also hazard a speculation on that great chimera [End Page 323] that dangles before fields of scholarship and historical projects alike: that of progress.Aristotle’s famous definition of rhetoric, “that its function is not to persuade but to see the available means of persuasion in each case” (1991, 35), begins my inquiry in a productively ambiguous way. For one thing, the definition locates the function of rhetoric directly within the sphere of human history, through the terms available and in each case. For unless we believe that means of persuasion are fixed and that cases are eternally recurring, what the rhetorician “sees” must vary with the times. A second note maybe in order here. For Aristotle’s term for seeing, theoresai, also happens to be the Greek root term for what we call “theory.” In its most fundamental sense, then, the ocular-centered aesthetic of Greek tradition gives us theory as a mode of “seeing.” I could add at this point that this “seeing” needs to be shared with others and that there are many ways of “seeing,” but this maybe a less-than-productive ambiguity, given my aims here.Instead, I wish to consider three distinct construals of what sort of practice rhetoric is, along with some implications of these construals for the place of rhetoric as theory and practice in human history. These three construals are rhetoric as productive art, rhetoric as constitutive art, and rhetoricas inventional art.We begin with the conception of rhetoric as productive art. Simply put, this means that rhetoric makes things, prototypically speeches. Such a conception, like the other two I will be discussing, has ebbed and flowed throughout the long history of rhetorical tradition. The Sophists, when not purporting to teach virtue, did profess their competence in instructing other show to create persuasive documents. Such a preoccupation also appears in rhetorics of belles lettres and elocution. Today it can be found in modern composition curricula and in the rather different world of the professional speechwriter.There have been very few attempts to link an exclusively productive art conception of rhetoric to Aristotle and still fewer successful attempts. To view the matter this way, one would need to think of the Rhetoric and the Poetics as essentially parallel documents (one makes poems; the other, speeches). One would also have to ignore a wealth of disconfirming evidence. Nonetheless, Alan G. Gross is able to write (in the aptly titled collection Rereading Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”), “‘What did Aristotle mean by rhetoric?’ At this juncture, I can do little more than reiterate my claim that rhetoric is a productive art, and only a productive art” (2000, 35). George Kennedy, the translator of our earlier passage, sees the matter rather differently: “What [End Page 324] kind of... (shrink)

This essay reintroduces Rhetoric as the principle art for giving emphasis and importance to contested matters; in other words, for making things matter. In a speculative reading of the Aristotelian rhetorical tradition, Aristotle's interpretations of magnitude, contengency and practical wisdom are critically examined from both an aesthetic and an ethical-political point of view. The concluding discussion attempts to apply these same concepts to a growing dilemma in the present age. The dilemma is that monumental changes in scale have all but (...) eroded the prospects for engaged encounters with contemporary contingency. It remains the challenge of rhetorical practice to reframe actions and events so that they and we may hold some hope for an engaged civic life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric, Reflection, and Emancipation: Farrell and Habermas on the Critical Studies of CommunicationG. Thomas GoodnightThere are moments in history that appear to be alive with emancipatory possibilities. Such were the years moving toward the end of the long twentieth century. In spring 1989, students protested the communist regime in China; the Tiananmen Square massacre initiated an episode of opposition and commenced China’s modern journey toward global reengagement. (...) Revolutions in Europe that autumn were more peaceful. On August 23 two million Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian citizens held hands and announced the Baltic Way as a departure from Soviet rule. Transitions rapidly followed in Hungary, Bulgaria, and East Germany, culminating in the Velvet Revolution where on November 17 student protests were beaten back by police in Prague only to be followed three days later by an assembly of 200,000 demanding the transfer of power from the Communist Party. On December 3, George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev jointly announced an imminent end to the fifty-year-old Cold War. During this time of hopeful transition, two scholars were at work refiguring the philosophical mission of the Frankfurt school, transforming critique from its early totalizing posture into the critical study of communication.Thomas B. Farrell and Jürgen Habermas were trained in different traditions but adjacent disciplines, communication and sociology. Their works [End Page 421] share a commitment to philosophical inquiry directed toward critique and understanding the cultural, social, and linguistic constitution of communication. As a rhetorician and as a philosopher, these scholars share an evident passion for scholarly argument and for engagement with the controversies of public culture. In different ways, both were at work during the portentous years of transition from the Cold War to new democracies and incipient globalization. Each constructed a guarded program of hope in the possibilities of communicative reflection and reasoning. In the post-World War II era, such a broad, positive vision took long to develop. After the brutal realities of the Holocaust became publicly known in the late 1940s, “the generous faith in rationality and the possibilities of human progress which underlay much of earlier historical thought seems discredited today” (Katznelson 2003, 2). The Enlightenment possibilities for reason had been invested in the technical efficiency of modern institutions that produced the capacity to kill systematically without constraints. Ira Katznelson points to a generation of scholars—including individuals at Chicago, Columbia, the New School, and others—who began in the 1950s to engage in a project that would “shade the Enlightenment’s philosophical anthropology, thicken its defenses against evil, deepen its capacity to reason, and restore” an Enlightenment more critical and less susceptible to co-optation by the excesses of nationalism, ideology, and evil (2003, 2). The work of Farrell and Habermas belongs to the extended post-Holocaust moment, where the possibilities of reflective reason in ethical and moral deliberations were set carefully on a road to personal and collective emancipation.Max Horkheimer saw in the modern, postwar welfare state little reason for optimism. Writing in 1946 at the beginning of the Cold War, he concluded: “Language has been reduced to just another tool in the gigantic apparatus of production in modern society” (1974, 22). “Salestalk” by “the surrogates of culture” creates an “illusory triumph of democratic progress that consumes the intellectual substance on which democracy has lived” (Horkheimer 1974, 31). Scientifically engineered propaganda renders public opinion as “a substitute for reason.” With such tools, the forces of barbarism are always waiting in the wings to seize power. Early on, Habermas shared these views. His thesis, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989a), tracks the opening possibilities of communicative reasoning in the liminal spaces of eighteenth-century coffeehouses where frank talk replaced hierarchically driven politeness, the development of these talks into the practices of deliberative democracy, and the decline of deliberative democracy with the union of the state and mass media in producing spectacles in [End Page 422] support of rituals of legitimation. Habermas broke with Horkheimer over the dissertation, however. A thesis of decline, by itself, leaves open only the route of totalizing critique. While never far from critique of institutional practices, Habermas spent his career in opening a positive... (shrink)

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1890 Edition.

15 Applying the theory in the practical world -- The theory's relationship to social systems and structure -- Explaining social power -- Implications for culture study -- Ontological implications in economic theory -- Rules and rule-making -- Ontological implications in moral philosophy -- 16 Conclusions and further research -- Significance for leadership and management -- Further research -- Closing thoughts -- References -- Index.

Plagiarism and other transgressions of the norms of academic integrity appear to be a persistent problem among upper secondary students. Numerous surveys have revealed high levels of infringement of what appear to be clearly stated rules. Less attention has been given to students’ understanding of academic integrity, and to the potential misconceptions and false beliefs that may make it difficult for them to comply with existing rules and handle complex real-life situations.In this paper we report findings from a survey of (...) European upper secondary students’ views on issues relating to academic integrity. We relate these findings to the students’ training about academic integrity, self-reported level of questionable behavior and country of study.A total of 1654 students at 51 institutions located in 6 European countries participated in the study. The participants generally believed they had a good understanding of the rules applying to them and knew how to behave in compliance with norms of academic integrity. The results indicate, however, that often, in practice, this belief was mistaken. Many students had an inadequate understanding of core elements of academic integrity. They were uncertain about how to act, and they struggled in the handling of complex situations that require context-sensitive judgement. While some differences between countries were identified, they were modest and exhibited no clear pattern. Our results also suggest that reducing students’ level of uncertainty and, to a lesser degree, improving their level of knowledge could lead them to engage less in certain types of questionable behaviours. Surprisingly, the effect of academic training is modest and ambiguous. The study also confirms that perception of peer behaviour has the strongest association with student engagement in questionable behaviours. Thus, academic integrity at the upper secondary level cannot be explained simply in terms of individual ethics or knowledge. (shrink)

This searching examination of the life and philosophy of the twentieth-century Indian intellectual Jarava Lal Mehta details, among other things, his engagement with the oeuvres of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jacques Derrida. It shows how Mehta’s sense of cross-cultural philosophy and religious thought were affected by these engagements, and maps the two key contributions Mehta made to the sum of human ideas. First, Mehta outlined what the author dubs a ‘postcolonial hermeneutics’ that uses the ‘ethnotrope’ of the pilgrim to (...) challenge the philosophical hermeneutic emphasis on supplementation and augmentation. For Mehta, the hermeneutic encounter ruptures, rather than supplements, the self. Secondly, Mehta extended this concept of hermeneutics to interrogate the Hindu tradition, arriving at the concept of the ‘negative messianic’. In contrast to Derrida's emphasis on the 'one to come', Mehta shows how the Hindu bhakti model represents the very opposite, that is, the 'withdrawn other,' identifying thereby the ethical pitfalls of deconstructivism's emphasis on the messianic tradition. This is the only full-length study in English of this high-profile Hindu philosopher. (shrink)

Innovation leads to new products, business models and even changes to socio-economic systems. However, it is important that innovation has the ‘right impacts’. Responsible innovation can help to achieve this; however, it is unclear how to introduce responsible innovation to real-world, competitive, industry settings. We explore this challenge in the context of sustainability orientated start-up enterprises, developing innovations within agriculture, food or energy. We develop a tool that provides innovators with a systematic way to identify socio-ethical issues. Using the concept (...) of experiential learning, we track the impact of the tool across 12 cases. For the tool to install responsible innovation, we propose that a full learning cycle must be completed. We find evidence that the tool can enable a full learning cycle and provide a method to identify socio-ethical factors. We contribute by articulating and operationalising an approach to introduce responsible innovation principles into real-world contexts. (shrink)

As an exploration of 'beautiful behavior' in theory and practice, this ground-breaking volume explores the incredible diversity and dynamism of Islam in Southeast Asia, both past and present. Amid the dazzling complexity of Islamic civilization, the concept of adab provides Muslims with a shared sense of sacred history, identity, and morality. In the context of Islamic ethics, adab defines the rules of personal and public etiquette: good manners, moral conduct, civility, humaneness, beautiful behavior. Spotlighting the interdisciplinary research of ten prominent (...) scholars, the book offers new perspectives on adab's multiple meanings and myriad applications for Muslim communities in Malaysia and Indonesia. The chapters examine a wide range of texts including the writings of key Muslim thinkers and contexts, focusing on the everyday experiences of lay Muslims. Drawing on a variety of theoretical and methodological lenses, the essays reveal how 'beautiful behavior' impacts local institutions, cultural practices, and religious imaginations via politics and law, spirituality and piety, ethics and experience. (shrink)

Human life expectancy has increased dramatically through improvements in public health, housing, nutrition and general living standards. Lifespan is now limited chiefly by intrinsic senescence and its associated frailty and diseases. Understanding the biological basis of the ageing process is a major scientific challenge that will require integration of molecular, cellular, genetic and physiological approaches. This article reviews progress that has been made to date, particularly with regard to the genetic contribution to senescence and longevity, and assesses the scale of (...) the task that remains. (shrink)

This chapter explores the concept and practice of responsible management of innovation. Responsible innovation is a key response to the grand challenges faced by society, helping to develop innovations with society in mind, and limit any unintended consequences. Responsible managers with influence over innovations need knowledge and understanding of how responsible innovation applies to their roles and how as individuals they can manage innovation responsibly. While the application of responsible innovation to these contexts faces a number of practical and conceptual (...) challenges, this chapter will focus on the contribution and potential of responsible management of innovation processes to provide economic and societal benefits. This chapter explores these issues through the perspective of individual managers, at the level of the organisation and finally at the level of the innovation system. (shrink)

Responsible innovation (RI), also termed Responsible Research and Innovation, has emerged due to increasing concern over how to integrate ethical and societal values into research and innovation policy and governance (Von Schomberg 2013), in response to questioning of the societal role of science as well as populist resurgence in some countries (Long and Blok 2017a). Within a RI approach, innovators must consider three dimensions of responsibility, including the dimensions of (1) ‘avoiding harm’ to people and the planet, (2) ‘doing good’ (...) through the offering of innovations that foster sustainable development, and (3) the development of facilitative global governance schemes (Voegtlin and Scherer 2017). (shrink)

Computer-facilitated self-service technologies have become ubiquitous in today’s consumer-focused world. Yet, few human–computer interactions elicit such dramatically polarizing emotional reactions from users as those involving SSTs. ATMs, pay-at-the-pump gas stations, and self-scanning retail registers tend to produce both passionate supporters and critics. While negative comments often center on unpleasant personal user experiences, the actual “abuse” related to such systems is really much deeper and more complex. SSTs carry with them a number of potentially insidious consequences, including the exploitation of consumers (...) as uncompensated temporary workers; the sacrifice of our inherent humanity to delegate both skills and cognition to electronic helpers; and the enabling of a new type of posthuman consumer identity, where each transaction is completed by a cyborg entity constructed of the human on one side and the electronic mechanism on the other. As a result, we may ultimately lose the boundary between the human and the machine. (shrink)

Computer-facilitated self-service technologies have become ubiquitous in today’s consumer-focused world. Yet, few human–computer interactions elicit such dramatically polarizing emotional reactions from users as those involving SSTs. ATMs, pay-at-the-pump gas stations, and self-scanning retail registers tend to produce both passionate supporters and critics. While negative comments often center on unpleasant personal user experiences, the actual “abuse” related to such systems is really much deeper and more complex. SSTs carry with them a number of potentially insidious consequences, including the exploitation of consumers (...) as uncompensated temporary workers; the sacrifice of our inherent humanity to delegate both skills and cognition to electronic helpers; and the enabling of a new type of posthuman consumer identity, where each transaction is completed by a cyborg entity constructed of the human on one side and the electronic mechanism on the other. As a result, we may ultimately lose the boundary between the human and the machine. (shrink)

Green New Deal policies are proposed to tackle the climate emergency. These policies focus on driving climate innovation through unprecedented financial policy levers. However, while the macro-level financing dynamics are clear, the influence of niche level dynamics of sustainable innovation financing remain unexplored within these policy settings. Through the context of the European Green Deal and a focus on the agri-tech start-up sector in the Netherlands, we identify factors likely to reduce the efficacy of these policies from an innovation management (...) perspective—such as project matching issues, socio-ethical factors or the characteristics of agri-food climate innovations. We go on to conceptualise that these challenges represent a range of asymmetries—from classic information asymmetries to less common value and objective asymmetries—between climate innovators and private investors and financers. Many remedies for asymmetries involve costs, likely to further inhibit the efficacy of the European Green Deal and similar policies. A partnering approach is proposed, where the non-financial resources of incumbent actors are harnessed and leveraged to enhance climate innovation performance. (shrink)

Abstract This article identifies the tropes of “maturity” and “immaturity” in the dialogue between religion and science. On both sides of the aisle, authors charge, either directly or indirectly, that their dissenting interlocutors are not mature enough to see the value of their respective positions. Such accusations have recently emerged in discussions pertaining to Hindu theology, Indology, and science. Those who dismiss the substance dualism of Hindu yoga, according to Jonathan B. Edelmann, evince immaturity. Appeals to Hindu yoga are yet (...) one more appeal to religious experience. Indeed, what we find in Edelmann's text is an appeal to appreciate the private, unverifiable—or falsifiable, for that matter—“insights” of Hindu yogis. Yogic experience is interminably steeped in motivated perception and confirmation bias. There is simply no good evidence or rational argument to take yogic claims seriously. Insofar as that is the case, Indology must achieve consilience with the natural and human sciences, remaining thereby reductive of such supernatural claims. (shrink)

Computer-facilitated self-service technologies have become ubiquitous in today’s consumer-focused world. Yet, few human–computer interactions elicit such dramatically polarizing emotional reactions from users as those involving SSTs. ATMs, pay-at-the-pump gas stations, and self-scanning retail registers tend to produce both passionate supporters and critics. While negative comments often center on unpleasant personal user experiences, the actual “abuse” related to such systems is really much deeper and more complex. SSTs carry with them a number of potentially insidious consequences, including the exploitation of consumers (...) as uncompensated temporary workers; the sacrifice of our inherent humanity to delegate both skills and cognition to electronic helpers; and the enabling of a new type of posthuman consumer identity, where each transaction is completed by a cyborg entity constructed of the human on one side and the electronic mechanism on the other. As a result, we may ultimately lose the boundary between the human and the machine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Death Perception:How Temporary Ventilator Disconnection Helped my Family Accept Brain Death and Donate OrgansThomas B. FreemanThe night of my nephew’s closed head injury in Boston, I was on call as a neurosurgeon at Tampa General Hospital. I was therefore not shocked at first when my telephone rang at four o’clock in the morning, but I soon understood the severity of the tragic news. The next half hour was a (...) blur of frantic phone calls and devastating decisions leading to surgery to remove a subdural hematoma from my nephew’s head, even though he was only two brain stem reflexes away from brain death.I thought that my experience as a neurosurgeon would somehow help me. However, when my sister–in–law asked me if this was just like the other tragic closed head injuries that I had seen in 26 years of practice, my answer was very simple: this was the only severe closed head injury I had ever seen—in my family. At this point, I was no longer a neurosurgeon. I was an uncle. My nephew’s closed head injury overwhelmed both his brain’s capacity to survive and my entire family’s ability to think rationally or objectively while grieving so intensely.It is in this context that we were asked to consider organ donation. The appeal for organ donation is one of altruism. My nephew’s parents agreed that organ donation would be an important way to honor their son’s life, allow him to make one final contribution to save the lives of several patients, and help to bring peace to the family.I will never forget, however, my niece’s distraught response. She is altruistic by nature, but was tremendously conflicted by the choice to donate her own brother’s organs. At this point, all discussions about organ donation stopped until we could understand the source of her conflict. Since she did not have legal authority regarding the final decision, some family members wondered if organ donation should be allowed if she could not come to terms with the choice. She felt isolated, because she was the only person in the room who was experiencing conflict. As a neurosurgeon, I have always advised other families in this situation that they may have more peace if they can make such decisions unanimously, regardless of who has the ultimate legal authority for decision–making. This helps bring healing to the family, eliminates disruption of family values and unity, and reduces possible feelings of guilt.I asked my niece what she was feeling. She stated something that I had never heard before as a neurosurgeon. She had listened to the words that her brother was brain dead, but she felt that he was somehow still alive, since he was breathing on a ventilator and his heart was beating. She felt powerless due to her inability to do anything more for [End Page 9] him. She also wanted to be there when her brother “died,” which she would recognize by the cessation of his heartbeat. She would not abandon her brother.I searched for a way to respect my niece’s wishes and her legitimate request, while preserving the ability to proceed with organ donation. Solving this conundrum proved to be a pivotal part of the beginning of both her mourning process and acceptance of his death.As an uncle, I experienced the clear dissociation that modern medicine creates between medical care and the natural human process of recognizing and accepting death. My family observed the subtle difference between a deep coma and brain death. They noticed that my nephew’s color had changed when his temperature dropped to 94o F before the heating blanket was placed. They perceived the decrease in muscle tone when he stopped breathing faster than the ventilator rate. Outside of that, there was no significant difference in his appearance when he was “alive” or “dead.”In spite of heroic measures and superlative surgical and medical care, his closed head injury progressed unremittingly until he became brain dead 36 hours later. The diagnosis of “brain death” was pronounced to the family. Accepting the death of someone who is... (shrink)

A recent report by Tyner et al.1 suggests that p53 is bad for longevity. Heterozygotic mice carrying a p53 mutation that apparently enhances the stability of the wild‐type protein showed shorter lifespans and faster ageing while also developing fewer tumours. This fits with the idea that cellular ageing is the price paid for better protection against unlimited proliferation of cancer cells. But other work shows that there is a strong positive association between DNA repair‐mediated protection against cancer and ageing. So (...) what are we to make of the new data with regard to overall understanding of the mechanisms of ageing? BioEssays 24:577–579, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Introduction Genetic Architecture of the Life Span Genetics of Longevity Genetics and the Future of Old Age Conclusion.

Byrne (2005) demonstrates that reasoning and imagination are logical and governed by the same processing principles. In extending those principles to other forms of imaginative functioning, however, problems arise. The meaning of is stretched, and the causal role of the principles is not well established. Nevertheless, consideration of the extent to which ordinary cognitive processes govern creative functioning is valuable.

Animal use in medical research is widely accepted on the basis that it may help to save human lives and improve their quality of life. Recently, however, objections have been made specifically to the use of animals in scientific investigation of human obesity. This paper discusses two arguments for the view that this form of animal use, unlike some other forms of animal-based medical research, cannot be defended. The first argument leans heavily on the notion that people themselves are responsible (...) for developing obesity and so-called ‘lifestyle’ diseases; the second involves the claim that animal studies of obesity's causes and therapies distract attention from preventive efforts. Drawing on both empirical data and moral reasoning, we argue that the relevant attributions of responsibility and claims about distraction are not plausible, and that, therefore, there is no reason to single out the use of animals in obesity research as especially problematic. (shrink)

I discuss the fusion of horizons as Gadamer’s alternative to both historicism and romanticism. The hermeneutical implicalions of this alternative are also summarized, together with a number of critical problems associated with it.

By titling his paper “Slowing the Slide Down the Slippery Slope of Medical Assistance in Dying: Mutual Learnings for Canada and the US,” Daryl Pullman, an esteemed medical ethicist, uses a rhetoric...