This book provides a comprehensive guide to the conceptual methodological, and epistemological problems of biology, and treats in depth the major developments in molecular biology and evolutionary theory that have transformed both biology and its philosophy in recent decades. At the same time the work is a sustained argument for a particular philosophy of biology that unifies disparate issues and offers a framework for expectations about the future directions of the life sciences. The argument explores differences between autonomist and anti-autonomist (...) views of biology. The result is a vindication of reductionism, but one that is unexpectedly hollow. For it leaves the exponents of the autonomy of biology from physical science with as much as their view of biology really requires - and rather more than the reductionist might comfortably concede. Professor Rosenberg shows how the problems of the philosophy of biology are interconnected and how their solutions are interdependent, However, this book focuses more on the direct concerns of biologists, rather than the traditional agenda of philosophers' problems about biology. This departure from earlier books on the subject results both in greater understanding and relevance of the philosophy of science to biology as a whole. (shrink)

Renormalization group (RG) methods are an established strategy to explain how it is possible that microscopically different systems exhibit virtually the same macro behavior when undergoing phase-transitions. I argue – in agreement with Robert Batterman – that RG explanations are non-causal explanations. However, Batterman misidentifies the reason why RG explanations are non-causal: it is not the case that an explanation is non- causal if it ignores causal details. I propose an alternative argument, according to which RG explanations are non-causal explanations (...) because their explanatory power is due to the application mathematical operations, which do not serve the purpose of representing causal relations. (shrink)

I begin my analysis of consent by agreeing with Professor Hurd that consent functions as a “moral transformative” by altering the obligations and permissions that determine the Tightness of others' actions. I further agree with her that consent is intimately related to the capacity for autonomous action; one who cannot alter others' obligations through consent is not fully autonomous. I cannot improve on her elaboration of these points.

When doing metaphysics, it is frequently convenient and sometimes essential to rely upon various notions of fundamentality when articulating the problems, positions, and arguments at issue. But what it is, exactly, the relevant notions are supposed to track remains obscure. The goal of this dissertation is to develop and defend a theory about the metaphysics of fundamentality; by doing so, I clarify and vindicate the roles that notions of fundamentality play in metaphysics. At the theory’s core are two notions particularly (...) prevalent in metaphysical inquiry: something’s being ‘derived’ from or holding ‘wholly in virtue of’ something else (the notion of grounding), and something’s being ‘reducible’ to or ‘non-circularly definable’ in terms of something else (the notion of reductive analysis). -/- I begin by arguing that the notion of grounding ought to serve as a foundation for understanding the metaphysics of fundamentality more generally (“Grounding the Metaphysics of Fundamentality”). I then propose a novel account of reductive analysis that retains the traditional insight that a reductive analysis purports to describe the constituents of a property or fact and depict how they are structured together (“On What Consists in What”). I then argue that even though the two notions are distinct, facts about grounding can be understood wholly and without circularity in terms of a certain pattern of facts about reductive analysis (“Getting Grounded”). I conclude the dissertation by challenging a widespread assumption in both the literature on the metaphysics of fundamentality and in first-order disputes about what grounds what, according to which a fact is necessitated by the facts that ground it (“Against Grounding Necessitarianism”). (shrink)

Is life a purely physical process? What is human nature? Which of our traits is essential to us? In this volume, Daniel McShea and Alex Rosenberg – a biologist and a philosopher, respectively – join forces to create a new gateway to the philosophy of biology; making the major issues accessible and relevant to biologists and philosophers alike. Exploring concepts such as supervenience; the controversies about genocentrism and genetic determinism; and the debate about major transitions central to contemporary thinking about (...) macroevolution; the authors lay out the broad terms in which we should assess the impact of biology on human capacities, social institutions and ethical values. (shrink)

This paper reviews the actual and potential use of social media in emergency, disaster and crisis situations. This is a field that has generated intense interest. It is characterised by a burgeoning but small and very recent literature. In the emergencies field, social media (blogs, messaging, sites such as Facebook, wikis and so on) are used in seven different ways: listening to public debate, monitoring situations, extending emergency response and management, crowd-sourcing and collaborative development, creating social cohesion, furthering causes (including (...) charitable donation) and enhancing research. Appreciation of the positive side of social media is balanced by their potential for negative developments, such as disseminating rumours, undermining authority and promoting terrorist acts. This leads to an examination of the ethics of social media usage in crisis situations. Despite some clearly identifiable risks, for example regarding the violation of privacy, it appears that public consensus on ethics will tend to override unscrupulous attempts to subvert the media. Moreover, social media are a robust means of exposing corruption and malpractice. In synthesis, the widespread adoption and use of social media by members of the public throughout the world heralds a new age in which it is imperative that emergency managers adapt their working practices to the challenge and potential of this development. At the same time, they must heed the ethical warnings and ensure that social media are not abused or misused when crises and emergencies occur. (shrink)

To understand the future of informed consent, we should pay attention to two ethical-legal sources in addition to the revised Common Rule. Physicians acting as investigators and patients serving as research subjects bring to that relationship a long history regarding consent to treatment, and everyone dealing with research ethics needs to be aware of the Nuremberg Code and other human-rights documents. These three streams make separate and distinctly different contributions to informed consent doctrine.

The range and types of performance metrics has recently proliferated in academic settings, with bibliometric indicators being particularly visible examples. One field that has traditionally been hospitable towards such indicators is biomedicine. Here the relative merits of bibliometrics are widely discussed, with debates often portraying them as heroes or villains. Despite a plethora of controversies, one of the most widely used indicators in this field is said to be the Journal Impact Factor. In this article we argue that much of (...) the current debates around researchers’ uses of the JIF in biomedicine can be classed as ‘folk theories’: explanatory accounts told among a community that seldom get systematically checked. Such accounts rarely disclose how knowledge production itself becomes more-or-less consolidated around the JIF. Using ethnographic materials from different research sites in Dutch University Medical Centers, this article sheds new empirical and theoretical light on how performance metrics variously shape biomedical research on the ‘shop floor.’ Our detailed analysis underscores a need for further research into the constitutive effects of evaluative metrics. (shrink)

Doxastic dualists acknowledge both outright beliefs and credences, and they maintain that neither state is reducible to the other. This gives rise to the ‘Bayesian Challenge’, which is to explain why we need beliefs if we have credences already. On a popular dualist response to the Bayesian Challenge, we need beliefs to simplify our reasoning. I argue that this response fails because credences perform this simplifying function at least as well as beliefs do.

This book presents a concise introduction to the epistemology and methodology of the Austrian School of economics as defended by Ludwig von Mises. The author provides an innovative interpretation of Mises’ arguments in favour of the a priori truth of praxeology, the received view of which contributed to the academic marginalisation of the Austrian School. The study puts forward a unique argument that Mises – perhaps unintentionally – defends a form of conventionalism. Chapters in the book include detailed discussions of (...) individualism, historicism, epistemological positions, and essentialism. The author goes on to discuss Mises’ justification of the fundamental axiom and proposes a conventionalist interpretation. By presenting praxeology as a conventionalist research programme, the author aims to reinvigorate the interaction between the Austrian School, mainstream economics, and the philosophy of science. This comprehensive reconstruction is suitable for economists interested in the history and philosophy of their discipline, as well as for philosophers of science. (shrink)

John Rawls argues that it is possible to describe a suitably defined initial situation from which to form reliable judgements about justice. In this initial situation, rational persons are deprived of information that is . It is rational, Rawls argues, for persons choosing principles of justice from this standpoint to be guided by the maximin rule. Critics, however, argue that (i) the maximin rule is not the appropriate decision rule for Rawls's choice position; (ii) the maximin argument relies upon an (...) imprecise account of the satisfactory minimum to be secured under the maximin rule; or that (iii) Rawls relies upon unrealistic assumptions about diminishing marginal value. These critics, I will suggest, argue from a number of assumptions that are confused or false. The satisfactory minimum that choosers in the original position seek to achieve is not a minimum level of primary goods, nor is the satisfactory minimum sought under the maximin rule supplied by the difference principle. I will argue that the maximin argument is more robust than has generally been recognized and that this argument performs a number of important functions in clarifying the nature and implications of Rawls's argument for justice as fairness. (shrink)

The history and use of the acronym ‘BCS’ (named after Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer) in the science of superconductivity is traced and analysed. It is shown that a number of different theories are labelled ‘BCS’. The confusion in the application of the term ‘BCS’ is shown to be common because the term ‘theory’ itself is not precisely defined in physics. Recommendations are given to physics readers and students on how to distinguish between various theories referred to as ‘BCS’. Contributions from (...) scientists in different laboratories to the creation and formation of the superconductivity theory are indicated. (shrink)

The mentioning of error-possibilities makes us less likely to ascribe knowledge. This paper offers a novel psychological account of this data. The account appeals to “subadditivity,” a well-known psychological tendency to judge possibilities as more likely when they are disjunctively described.

One of the immediate eukaryotic cellular responses to DNA breakage is the covalent post‐translational modification of nuclear proteins with poly(ADP‐ribose) from NAD+ as precursor, mostly catalysed by poly(ADP‐ribose) polymerase‐1 (PARP‐1). Recently several other polypeptides have been shown to catalyse poly(ADP‐ribose) formation. Poly(ADP‐ribosyl)ation is involved in a variety of physiological and pathophysiological phenomena. Physiological functions include its participation in DNA‐base excision repair, DNA‐damage signalling, regulation of genomic stability, and regulation of transcription and proteasomal function, supporting the previously observed correlation of cellular (...) poly(ADP‐ribosyl)ation capacity with mammalian life. The pathophysiology effects are mediated through PARP‐1 overactivity, which can cause cell suicide by NAD+ depletion. It is apparent that the latter effect underlies the pathogenesis of a wide range of disease states including type‐1 diabetes, ischaemic infarcts in various organs, and septic or haemorrhagic shock. Therefore pharmacological modulation of poly(ADP‐ribosyl)ation may prove to be an exciting option for various highly prevalent, disabling and even lethal diseases. BioEssays 23:795–806, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

As the USA contends with another surge in COVID-19 cases, hospitals may soon need to answer the unresolved question of who lives and dies when ventilator demand exceeds supply. Although most triage policies in the USA have seemingly converged on the use of clinical need and benefit as primary criteria for prioritisation, significant differences exist between institutions in how to assign priority to patients with identical medical prognoses: the so-called ‘tie-breaker’ situations. In particular, one’s status as a frontline healthcare worker (...) has been a proposed criterion for prioritisation in the event of a tie. This article outlines two major grounds for reconsidering HCW prioritisation. The first recognises trust as an indispensable element of clinical care and mistrust as a hindrance to any public health strategy against the virus, thus raising concerns about the outward appearance of favouritism. The second considers the ways in which proponents of HCW prioritisation deviate from the very ‘ethics frameworks’ that often preface triage policies and serve to guide resource allocation—a rhetorical strategy that may undermine the very ethical foundations on which triage policies stand. By appealing to trust and consistency, we re-examine existing arguments in favour of HCW prioritisation and provide a more tenable justification for adjudicating on tie-breaker events during crisis standards of care. (shrink)

Context Informed consent is crucial in daily clinical practice and research in medicine and psychiatry. A recent neuroethical investigation explored the psychological factors that are crucial in determining whether or not subjects give consent. While cognitive functions have been shown to play a central role, the impact of empathy and emotions on subjects' decisions in informed consent remains unclear. Objective To evaluate the impact of empathy and emotions on subjects' decision in informed consent in an exploratory study. Design Decisional capacity (...) and informed consent to a subsequent imaging study were evaluated with the MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool for Clinical Research (MacCAT-CR). Empathy and emotion recognition were measured with the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) and the Florida Affect Battery (FAB). Setting Psychiatric subjects were recruited from a general psychiatric hospital and a forensic state hospital. Patients A mixed group of 98 healthy men and forensic and non-forensic psychiatric subjects were investigated. Results Both empathy (MET) and emotion recognition (FAB) correlated with MacCAT-CR scores. Higher cognitive empathy and good emotion recognition (compared with low empathy and emotion recognition) were associated with increased decisional capacity and higher rates of refusal to give informed consent. Conclusions This study shows an empirical relationship between decision-making and informed consent, on the one hand, and emotions and empathy on the other. While this study is exploratory and preliminary, the findings of a relationship between informed consent, emotions and empathy raise important neuroethical questions with regard to an emotional-social concept of informed consent and potential clinical implications for testing informed consent. (shrink)

In the United States, patients have a clear right to determine what is done to them by doctors. Starting in the early 20th century, multiple court cases paved the way for our current understanding...

I owe you a dinner invitation, you owe ten years on your mortgage, and the government owes billions. We speak confidently about these cases of debt, but is that concept clear in its meaning? This book aims to clarify the concept of debt so we can find better answers to important moral and political questions. This book seeks to accomplish two things. The first is to clarify the concept of debt by examining how the word is used in language. The (...) second is to develop a general, principled account of how debts generate genuine obligations. This allows us to avoid settling each case by a bare appeal to moral intuitions, which is what we seem to currently do. It requires a close examination of many institutions, e.g. money, contract law, profit-driven finance, government fiscal operations, and central banking. To properly understand the moral and political nature of debt, we must understand how these institutions have worked, how they do work, and how they might be made to work. There have been many excellent anthropological and sociological studies of debt and its related institutions. Philosophy can contribute to the emerging discussion and help us to keep our language precise and to identify the implicit principles contained in our intuitions. (shrink)

Writing a captivating book about a bureaucrat and his statistical modelling techniques is impossible? Erwin Dekker’s biography of Jan Tinbergen proves otherwise. As he has done before, Dekker tells the history of economic thought and methodology as part and parcel of general intellectual and cultural history. Nevertheless, he never downplays or neglects the analysis of inner-scientific problem situations. Drawing on rich archival material and conversations with Tinbergen’s family, students, and colleagues, Dekker vividly introduces us to an extraordinary personality and career. (...) Tinbergen of course was so much more than a Dutch bureaucrat and Nobel Prize winning econometrician. He became a key figure in transforming the discipline of economics. Perhaps even more sweeping – and reaching far beyond academia – is Tinbergen’s re-invention of the role played by economists in the modern nation state and in the international community. Ultimately, he spearheaded a shift in the public notion of how malleable “the economy” is by conscious policy efforts – or so Dekker convincingly exhibits and critically discusses. Anybody reflecting on the proper role of scientific experts in democratic societies, may want to pick up Dekker’s entertaining and thought-provoking study. (shrink)

Doch was das Spiel in der Ästhetik soll, so die These dieses Buches, klärt sich erst unter voller Berücksichtigung der praktizistischen Tendenz in Kants Ansatz.

The article responds to an overlooked objection put by Allen Buchanan to John Rawls’s theory of justice: that implementing the Difference Principle over time may require gross and frequent disruptions of people’s framing and execution of long-term plans. Having strengthened Buchanan’s objection to resolve significant weaknesses in his main counterexample, I argue that the best response to this objection draws on the concept of the rule of law, specifically, the legal doctrine of legitimate expectations, which can be found in English, (...) French, and European Union administrative law. I also explore the suitability of incorporating this doctrine into Justice as Fairness given its absence in United States constitutional and administrative law. Finally, I turn to consider the question of what the government owes to agents in whom legitimate expectations are induced and then frustrated. Here I introduce the Precept of Administrative Liability. (shrink)

Mainstream economics has been accused of excessive mathematization, whereas the rejection of mathematical and other formal methods is often cited as a crucial trait of Austrian economics. Based on a systematic discussion of potential benefits and drawbacks of formalization, this paper corroborates legitimate concerns that predominant types of mathematization induce a shift of attention away from the key concepts of Austrian economics. Taking this shift to the extreme, predominant modes of mathematization tend to accompany a detachment from ‘reality’ incompatible with (...) Austrian pleas for realisticness. Contrary to popular prejudice however, the most prominent representatives of the Austrian School including Carl Menger, Ludwig Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Israel Kirzner, and Peter Boettke neither provide a justification for a wholesale rejection of formalization nor actually reject it. Adequate formalization can serve as a remedy for lacking logical and semantic rigor in standard mathematical economics as well as in murky verbal chains of reasoning. (shrink)

This book provides an accessible, critical introduction to the three main approaches that dominated work in the philosophy of mathematics during the twentieth century: logicism, intuitionism and formalism.

Consider the following three-step dialectics. (1) Even if God (consistently) commanded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong. Therefore Divine Command Metaethics (DCM) is false. (2) No: for it is impossible for God to command torture of the innocent. (3) Even if it is impossible, there is a non-trivially true per impossibile counterfactual that even if God (consistently) com­manded torture of the innocent, it would still be wrong, and this counterfac­tual is incompatible with DCM. I shall argue that (...) the last step of this dialectics is flawed because it would rule out every substantive metaethical theory. (shrink)

This article examines the critique of deliberative democracy leveled by William Connolly. Drawing on both recent findings in cognitive science as well on Gilles Deleuze's cosmological pluralism, Connolly argues that deliberative democracy, and the contemporary left more generally, is guilty of intellectualism for overlooking the embodied, visceral register of political judgment. Going back to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, this article reconstructs the working assumptions of Connolly's critique and argues that it unwittingly leads to an indefensible embrace of manipulation. (...) Against his micropolitics of visceral manipulation, I propose an alternative route for realizing Connolly's politics of agonistic negotiation in the form of a critical theory of the public sphere. (shrink)

Scotland has played an immense role in European high culture through the centuries, and among its cultural links none have been greater than those with France. This book shows that the links with France stretch back deep into the Middle Ages, and continue without a break into the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment.

ABSTRACT Individual responsibility is now very much on the political agenda. Even those who believe that its importance has been exaggerated by the political right — either because the appropriate conditions for assigning responsibility to individuals are rarely satisfied or because not enough is done to protect individuals from the more harmful consequences of their past choices and gambles — accept that individual responsibility is at least one of the values against which a society and its institutions ought to be (...) evaluated. One might be forgiven for assuming, then, that we know exactly why individual responsibility is important. The truth is otherwise. Surprisingly little philosophical work has been undertaken to analyse and separate out the different rationales that might be in play. Several possible reasons are examined here including: utility, the social bases of self‐respect, autonomy, human flourishing and fairness. However, once we adopt a pluralistic view of the value of individual responsibility we open up the possibility of value conflict, which conflict can make it harder to arrive at definitive prescriptions about which social policies best advance our concerns for individual responsibility. It is nevertheless possible to draw at least some conclusions about which policies we should favour. One important conclusion is that sometimes it is better not to hold individuals responsible for their past choices by denying them aid now, so that they might be better able to assume individual responsibility at a later date. (shrink)

This article discusses Xenophanes' “cloud astro-physics”. It analyses and explains all heavenly and meteorological phenomena in terms of clouds. It provides a view of this newer Xenophanes, who is now being recognized as an important philosopher-scientist in his own right and a crucial figure in the development of critical thought about human knowledge and its objects in the next generation of Presocratic thinkers. Xenophanes' account has been preserved in Aëtius, the doxographic compendium reconstructed by Hermann Diels late in the nineteenth (...) century mainly from two sources that show extensive parallelism: pseudo-Plutarch Placita Philosophorum or Epitome of Physical Opinions ; and Ioannes Stobaeus' Eclogae Physicae or Physical Extracts. In the Stobaeus version, which is also the one printed in the standard edition of the Pre-socratics. (shrink)

Despite the ever-changing field of artificial intelligence (AI) and its preponderance of pre-print articles, Cohen offers a timely, nuanced, and self-aware overview of ChatGPT and the world of Larg...

This paper reconsiders the event in International Relations (IR) through the writings of Hannah Arendt. The event has for too long been neglected in IR; international events are overwhelmingly conceived as mere happenings that have meaning only within the process and temporal structure of the theory from which they are understood, and as holding no or only limited meaning in and of themselves. In her work on political theory and her reflections on totalitarianism, however, Arendt elaborates a rich view of (...) the event and its relationship to history, one that offers an alternative way of thinking about international relations. Arendt urges us to remain open to the possibility, however difficult, of conceiving of the event as meaningful outside of the processes within which our established mode of thoughts would have us subsume it. This requires on the part of the historian a commitment to judgement, to a recognition of the importance of imagination and impartiality that gives meaning to the event for others. In explicating Arendt's complex notion of the genuine political event, the paper aims not merely to demonstrate the intrinsic interest of this conception of the event to her thought, but to add to the small but growing number of works in IR that have found fruitful new avenues of thought in Arendt's various writings, and also to recent discussions on the proper relationship between history and IR theory. (shrink)

There has been a great deal of philosophical discussion about using people, using people intentionally, using people as a means to some end, and using people merely as a means to some end. In this paper, I defend the following claim about using people: NOT ALWAYS WRONG: using people—even merely as a means—is not always morally objectionable. Having defended that claim, I suggest that the following claim is also correct: NO ONE FEATURE: when it is morally objectionable to use people, (...) this is for many different kinds of reasons—there is no one wrong-making feature that every morally objectionable using has in common. After discussing these claims, I use them to present and motivate what I call the “precaution” theory of norms against using people. I conclude by considering a few cases from the criminal law context—cases that are naturally described as using people—to assess the moral appropriateness of this kind of use in these cases, and to demonstrate how the theory applies to the real world. (shrink)

We prove the following Main Theorem: $ZF + AD + V = L(R) \Rightarrow DC$ . As a corollary we have that $\operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD + DC)$ . Combined with the result of Woodin that $\operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD) \Rightarrow \operatorname{Con}(ZF + AD + \neg AC^\omega)$ it follows that DC (as well as AC ω ) is independent relative to ZF + AD. It is finally shown (jointly with H. Woodin) that ZF + AD + ¬ DC (...) R , where DC R is DC restricted to reals, implies the consistency of ZF + AD + DC, in fact implies R # (i.e. the sharp of L(R)) exists. (shrink)

While it is a point of agreement in contemporary republican political theory that property ownership is closely connected to freedom as non-domination, surprisingly little work has been done to elucidate the nature of this connection or the constraints on property regimes that might be required as a result. In this paper, I provide a systematic model of the boundaries within which republican property systems must sit and explore some of the wider implications that thinking of property in these terms may (...) have for republicans. The boundaries I focus on relate to the distribution of property and the application of types of property claims over particular kinds of goods. I develop this model from those elements of non-domination most directly related to the operation of a property regime: (a) economic independence, (b) limiting material inequalities, and (c) the promotion of common goods. The limits that emerge from this analysis support intuitive judgments that animate much republican discussion of property distribution. My account diverges from much orthodox republican theory, though, in challenging the primacy of private property rights in the realization of economic independence. The value of property on republican terms can be realized without private ownership of the means of production. (shrink)