First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Every student of the early history of mankind, and their numbers have greatly increased of recent years, must be well acquainted with the recent conflict between the advocates of diffusion in interpreting the origins and world-wide manifestations of civilization and those of independent development, or, in more exact terms, of the spontaneous generation of cultures. To an unbiassed observer of the evidence, it must also be a matter of astonishment that the ethnologists of the latter school have for so long (...) refused to admit a distribution of ideas, beliefs and customs which are not only of proved historical but daily and common occurrence. It is impossible to enter a library or a club, or to walk down Regent Street and look into the shop windows, without realizing that world-diffusion is the very stuff of civilized existence. It is impossible to travel the remoter regions of the globe to-day without being constantly reminded of London, Leeds and Manchester. Nobody, again,would dream of controverting the known phenomena of the spread of great religions, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, from a single original centre. The school of independent development of cultures not merely ignores or twists to its own purposes a gigantic mass of evidence bearing upon the subject in dispute and capable of being interpreted in only one way; it displays a singular disregardof common sense and human nature. The innate conservatism of humanity, its readiness to live on the. (shrink)

This volume breaks new ground in the study of how national culture, disciplinary tradition, epistemological choice, and political expediency affect the construction of collective memory and, then, how historians work with—and sometimes against—those constructions. Essays focus on a variety of commemorative rites, ranging from the quincentennial of Copernicus to the centennials of Pasteur, Darwin, and Planck; from the tercentenary of Harvard to the half centennial of Los Alamos; from the centennial of evolutionary theory to anniversaries of research schools in molecular (...) biology. Contributors include Clark A. Elliott, Owen Gingerich, Dieter Hoffmann, Dominque Pestre, Robert W. Seidel, and V. Betty Smocovitis. (shrink)

In these essays, we are concerned with virtue in journalism and the media but are mindful of the tension between the commercial foundations of publishing and broadcasting, on the one hand, and journalism's democratic obligations on the other. Adam outlines, first, a moral vision of journalism focusing on individualistic concepts of authorship and craft. Next, Craft attempts to bridge individual and organizational concerns by examining the obligations of organizations to the individuals working within them. Finally, Cohen discusses the importance of (...) resisting the powerful corporate logic that pervades the news media in the United States and calls on journalists to be courageous. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous weaknesses in pandemic preparedness and response, including underfunding, inadequate surveillance, and inequitable distribution of countermeasures. To overcome these weaknesses for future pandemics, WHO released a zero draft of a pandemic treaty in February, 2023, and subsequently a revised bureau's text in May, 2023. COVID-19 made clear that pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response reflect choices and value judgements. These decisions are therefore not a purely scientific or technical exercise, but are fundamentally grounded in ethics. The latest (...) treaty draft reflects these ethical considerations by including a section entitled Guiding Principles and Approaches. Most of these principles are ethical—they establish core values that undergird the treaty. Unfortunately, the treaty draft's set of principles are numerous, overlapping, and show inadequate coherence and consistency. We propose two improvements to this section of the draft pandemic treaty. First, key guiding ethical principles should be clearer and more precise than they currently are. Second, the link between ethical principles and policy implementation should be clearly established and define boundaries on acceptable interpretation, ensuring that signatories abide by these principles. (shrink)

How can we take history seriously as real and relevant? Despite the hazards of politically dangerous or misleading accounts of the past, we live our lives in a great network of cooperation with other actors; past, present, and future. We study and reflect on the past as a way of exercising a responsibility for shared action. In each of the chapters of Full History Smith poses a key question about history as a concern for conscious participants in the sharing (...) of action, starting with “What Is Historical Meaningfulness?” and ending with “How Can History Have an Aim?” Constructing new models of historical meaning while engaging critically with perspectives offered by Ranke, Dilthey, Rickert, Heidegger, Eliade, Sartre, Foucault, and Arendt, Smith develops a philosophical account of thinking about history that moves beyond postmodernist skepticism. Full History seeks to expand the cast of significant actors, establishing an inclusive version of the historical that recognizes large-scale cumulative actions but also encourages critical revision and expansion of any paradigm of shared action. (shrink)

To the French critics who originally labelled certain films noir it seemed that a class of Hollywood products had gone darker during the war years – as though a dark filter had been placed over the lens. Films were not designed or marketed as noir, and retrospectively noir's status as a genre is still unsettled. Yet there is widespread interest today in experiencing diverse films as noir, and even in using a Noir Filter in Instagram and video games. Pursuing the (...) filter clue, the noir experience can be thought of as subjection to a dark filtering of narrative. Image filtering styles can help to resolve not only the puzzle of noir's quasi-genre status but also an issue of general interest in aesthetic experience. The use of image filters makes a distinctively powerful contribution to the experience of a work or genre, or to the cultural dominance of an aesthetic regime, due to the unobtrusive formative role it plays in the economy of experience. (shrink)

Efficiency as quantified and promoted by cost-effectiveness analysis sometimes conflicts with equity and other ethical values, such as the “rule of rescue” or rights-based ethical values. We describe the utilitarian foundations of cost-effectiveness analysis and compare it with alternative ethical principles. We find that while fallible, utilitarianism is usually superior to the alternatives. This is primarily because efficiency – the maximization of health benefits under a budget constraint – is itself an important ethical value. Other ethical frames may be irrelevant, (...) incompatible with each other, or have unacceptable implications. When alternatives to efficiency are considered for precedence, we propose that it is critical to quantify the trade-offs, in particular, the lost health benefits associated with divergence from strict efficiency criteria. Using an example from HIV prevention in a high-prevalence African country, we show that favoring a rights-based decision could result in 92–118 added HIV infections per $100,000 of spending, compared to one based on cost-effectiveness. (shrink)

Efficiency as quantified and promoted by cost-effectiveness analysis sometimes conflicts with equity and other ethical values, such as the “rule of rescue” or rights-based ethical values. We describe the utilitarian foundations of cost-effectiveness analysis and compare it with alternative ethical principles. We find that while fallible, utilitarianism is usually superior to the alternatives. This is primarily because efficiency – the maximization of health benefits under a budget constraint – is itself an important ethical value. Other ethical frames may be irrelevant, (...) incompatible with each other, or have unacceptable implications. When alternatives to efficiency are considered for precedence, we propose that it is critical to quantify the trade-offs, in particular, the lost health benefits associated with divergence from strict efficiency criteria. Using an example from HIV prevention in a high-prevalence African country, we show that favoring a rights-based decision could result in 92–118 added HIV infections per $100,000 of spending, compared to one based on cost-effectiveness. (shrink)

Objective: To develop an approach for seeking informed consent to examine tissues retained from a previous study of sudden infant death syndrome as part of a study on asthma, and to document responses and participation rate.Design: Pilot open-ended approach to 10 volunteer SIDS parents, followed by staged approach to seek consent from the target SIDS families for the asthma study.Participants: Parents of SIDS infants known to SIDS and Kids Victoria and parents of SIDS infants from the 1991–2 SIDS in Victoria (...) case–control study.Main outcomes: Qualitative responses of the piloted parents and study parents, and participation rates.Results: The pilot group responses were used to refine the written material to be provided. Of the 72 families for which contact details were available, 45 gave verbal consent for contact by the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine regarding the asthma study, three refused and 24 did not respond to two letters. Thirty-three completed consent forms, all positive for participation in the asthma study, giving a positive response rate of 73% .Conclusions: The use of postmortem tissue for research is acceptable to the next of kin when an approach is sensitive to their concerns and needs and is made by experienced counsellors from a familiar organisation. Despite the painful memories evoked by the approach of the research group, the acceptance rate among those who could be contacted was high. (shrink)

Explores the basic forms of responsibility that we willingly assume and the collaborative fulfillment that we find in each.

Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex is the first book to examine how nonhuman animals are used in war and the military. Animals and War contributes significantly to the fields of social justice, animal rights, and anti-war/peace activist communities. This book also will be read by peace, conflict, social justice, and critical animal studies scholars, students, and practitioners.

Evolving the Mind has two main themes: how ideas about the mind evolved in science; and how the mind itself evolved in nature. The mind came into physical science when it was realised, first, that it is the activity of a physical object, a brain, which makes a mind; and secondly, that our theories of nature are largely mental constructions, artificial extensions of an inner model of the world which we inherited from our distant ancestors. From both of these perspectives, (...) consciousness is the great enigma. If consciousness evolved, however, it is in some sense a material thing whatever else may be said of it. Physics, chemistry, molecular biology, brain function and evolutionary biology - almost the whole of science - is involved, and there can be no expert in all these fields. So the style of the book is simple, almost conversational. The excitement is that we seem to be close to a scientific theory of consciousness. (shrink)

In this chapter we extend earlier work (Vinuesa et al., Nat Commun 11, 2020) on the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations (UN) for the 2030 Agenda. The present contribution focuses on three SDGs related to healthy and sustainable societies, i.e., SDG 3 (on good health), SDG 11 (on sustainable cities), and SDG 13 (on climate action). This chapter extends the previous study within those three goals and goes (...) beyond the 2030 targets. These SDGs are selected because they are closely related to the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic and also to crises like climate change, which constitute important challenges to our society. (shrink)

Plato's Republic has proven to be of astounding influence and importance. Justly celebrated as Plato's central text, it brings together all of his prior works, unifying them into a comprehensive vision that is at once theological, philosophical, political and moral. The essays in this volume provide a picture of the most interesting aspects of the Republic, and address questions that continue to puzzle and provoke, such as: Does Plato succeed in his argument that the life of justice is the most (...) attractive one? Is his tripartite analysis of the soul coherent and plausible? Why does Plato seem to have to force his philosopher-guardians to rule when they know this is something that they ought to do? What is the point of the strange and complicated closing Myth of Er? This volume will be essential to those looking for thoughtful and detailed excursions into the problems posed by Plato's text and ideas. (shrink)