Proponents of moral enhancement present this biotechnology as a viable solution to social and political problems. The projected imperative to enhance ourselves morally is a direct response to our p...

Surveying this large field with more amplitude and exactitude than anything else on offer, this book will be important for scholars of the humanities and specialists.

Over the past thirty years, academic dialogues on the relationships between the sciences and religions have flourished, albeit primarily within Judeo-Christian historical, theological and philosophical contexts. Can a Hindu tradition be brought into this dialogue? The Bhagavata Purana is one of the most well-known sacred texts of India, and biology, Darwinism in particular, has become one of the most spirited areas of the science and religion dialogue in academia, as well as in the popular media. This thesis examines the possibility, (...) scope and foundational topics involved in a dialogue between Vaisnava-Hindu theology as found in the Bhāgavata, and the theoretical, philosophical and theological issues surrounding contemporary biology. To examine the possibility and scope of a Bhāgavata-science dialogue, I focus on the theological, ontological, epistemological and teleological presuppositions that each tradition bring to the study of nature, outlining the similarities and differences in their approaches. I establish the grounds for further discussion through a comparative analysis of terms such as "consciousness," "knowledge" and "goal of knowledge" as they appear in the Bhagavata and noteworthy Darwinian texts. My argument is that although prima facie the two traditions appear different in their philosophical, scientific and theological approaches, there are a number of areas of common interest and parallels, especially in their epistemologies and teleologies. In the case of genuine differences, such as their views on the ontology of consciousness, I demonstrate the possibility of reconciliation. Clarifying the conceptual differences, establishing parallels and demonstrating areas of common interests opens the possibility and widens the scope for further dialogue. (shrink)

The purpose of this survey was to gather individual’s attitudes and feelings towards privacy and the selling of data. A total (N) of 1,107 people responded to the survey. -/- Across continents, age, gender, and levels of education, people overwhelmingly think privacy is important. An impressive 82% of respondents deem privacy extremely or very important, and only 1% deem privacy unimportant. Similarly, 88% of participants either agree or strongly agree with the statement that ‘violations to the right to privacy are (...) one of the most important dangers that citizens face in the digital age.’ The great majority of respondents (92%) report having experienced at least one privacy breach. -/- People’s first concern when losing privacy is the possibility that their personal data might be used to steal money from them. Interestingly, in second place in the ranking of concerns, people report being concerned about privacy because ‘Privacy is a good in itself, above and beyond the consequences it may have.’ -/- People tend to feel that they cannot trust companies and institutions to protect their privacy and use their personal data in responsible ways. The majority of people believe that governments should not be allowed to collect everyone’s personal data. Privacy is thought to be a right that should not have to be paid for. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 57, Issue 1, Page 141-160, March 2022.

In The life of Richard Owen by his grandson there is an inference to the effect that Owen had objected to his name being used to authorize various statements that Whewell was drafting in opposition to the Vestiges. The inference is drawn from letters that Whewell wrote to Owen on 13 and 15 February 1845. Corroboration of this would corne from a letter of Owen to Whewell, dated 14 February 1845, if extant. Among the Whewell papers at Trinity College, Cambridge, (...) there are several letters from Owen to Whewell, none of which bears that date. There is one, however, dated 14 February 1844 which, on doser inspection, turns out to be the missing link in their correspondance. The evidence for the misdating is not merely that the letter falls naturally into a later sequence. The conclusion is inescapable because Owen refers to an ‘opinion which I have always entertained, and still do strongly, on the subject of a refutation of “Vestiges”’. Since the first edition of Chambers's book did not appear until October 1844, the letter must belong to the following year. My object in this paper is to examine the implications of this letter for a reconstruction of Owen's attitude to that book which Adam Sedgwick could so detest for, among many things, its ‘gross views of physiology’. (shrink)

Summary The object of this study is to analyse certain aspects of the debate between David Brewster and William Whewell concerning the probability of extra-terrestrial life, in order to illustrate the nature, constitution and condition of natural theology in the decades immediately preceding the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's Origin of species. The argument is directed against a stylised picture of natural theology which has been drawn from a backward projection of the Darwinian antithesis between natural selection and certain (...) forms of the design argument. Contrary to the popular image of natural theology as an essentially static, autonomous and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, the paper underlines the existence of a fundamental divergence of strategies within natural theology, a divergence that, in the case of Brewster and Whewell, can be correlated with the religious cultures to which they most closely belonged. The fact that, in the plurality of worlds debate, their respective positions became mutually exclusive suggests that the fragmented and disordered state of natural theology, only too apparent before the Darwinian impact, was occasioned as much by the ulterior problem of rationalising the excessive space of the astronomers and the excessive time of the geologists as it was by any principle of the uniformity of nature in the biological sphere. The argument is substantiated with particular reference to the breakdown in communication as Brewster and Whewell developed conflicting strategies to expose the ?development hypothesis? that had appeared in Vestiges. Their altercation also reveals a certain conflict of status concerning the conclusions of astronomy and geology which, in turn, suggests that tensions between the physical and life sciences were not peculiar to the period following the publication of Darwin's theory. (shrink)

This paper presents the relationship between pedagogical content knowledge and political/ideological clarity as a framework for understanding the nuanced interpretations and applications of critical social studies pedagogy and practice. Using a qualitative case study research design, this study explores the decision-making process of two novice social studies teachers as they decide if and how to utilize critical historical inquiry within their classrooms. Findings indicate that teachers’ use of critical historical inquiry is informed by their subject area consciousness and political and (...) ideological clarity which is cultivated through personal, schooling, and communal experiences. However, we also find that a teacher's pedagogy is significantly strengthened when political and ideological clarity are coupled with pedagogical content knowledge to ensure a more developed enactment of critical historical inquiry is reached within the social studies classroom. (shrink)

Abstract The primary purpose of this essay is to review Nidhal Guessoum's Islam's Quantum Question from a perspective outside Muslim tradition. Having outlined the main contours and contentions of the book, general issues are raised concerning the reconciliation of religious belief with the sciences. Comparisons are drawn between the resources available to Christian and Muslim cultures for achieving reconciliation, with particular reference to scriptural exegesis and natural theology. Speculative questions are then raised concerning possible differences between the Christian and Islamic (...) experience and whether these may shed any light on the facilitation in Europe of an enduring scientific movement. (shrink)

Children conceived in order to donate biological material to save the life of an already existing child are known as 'saviour siblings'. The primary reasons that have been offered against the practice are: (i) creating a saviour sibling has negative impacts on the created child and (ii) creating a saviour child represents a wrongful procreative motivation of the parents. In this paper we examine to what extent the creation of saviour siblings actually presents a special case in procreative ethics. Although (...) we do not deny that there is a unique feature present in the saviour sibling case—namely, that the child was created to save their sibling’s life, we argue that the distinctive feature of being a saviour sibling does not make the procreative act wrong. Our claim is that the features that would make the creation of a particular saviour sibling (im)permissible are the same features that would make the creation of any child (im)permissible. Our conclusion is that saviour siblings—in relation to the reasons for the (im)permissibility of their creation—are not a special case for procreative ethics. (shrink)

Responding to Mark Harris, I reflect on his tantalizing question whether the provision of naturalistic explanations for biblical miracles renders the narratives more, or less, credible. I address his “reversal,” in which professional scientists now feature among defenders of a literalistic reading, while professional biblical scholars are often skeptical. I suggest this underlines the ambivalence of scientific naturalism from the standpoint of Christian theology. Historical examples are adduced to show that, until the mid‐nineteenth century, naturalistic and theistic explanations were commonly (...) regarded as complementary. Accordingly, the primacy often accorded to scientific progress in accounts of secularization is questionable. Two concluding questions are raised. If a methodological naturalism inheres in biblical scholarship, as in the sciences, how do biblical scholars decide whether the historical trajectories they construct for the composition of biblical texts are destructive or affirmative of faith? Second, when the miracle is the Resurrection of the dead Christ, does not the scientific impossibility of this foundational event remain sacrosanct? (shrink)

We use a reverse Easton forcing iteration to obtain a universe with a definable well-order, while preserving the GCH and proper classes of a variety of very large cardinals. This is achieved by coding using the principle ◊ $_{k^ - }^* $ at a proper class of cardinals k. By choosing the cardinals at which coding occurs sufficiently sparsely, we are able to lift the embeddings witnessing the large cardinal properties without having to meet any non-trivial master conditions.

Perception solves computationally demanding problems at lightning fast speed. It recovers sophisticated representations of the world from degraded inputs, often in a matter of milliseconds. Any theory of perception must be able to explain how this is possible; in other words, it must be able to explain perception's computational tractability. One of the few attempts to move toward such an explanation has been the information encapsulation hypothesis, which posits that perception can be fast because it keeps computational costs low by (...) forgoing access to information stored in cognition. I argue that we have no compelling reason to believe that encapsulation explains (or even contributes to an explanation of) perceptual tractability, and much reason to doubt it. This is because there exist much deeper computational challenges for perception than information access, and these threaten to make the costs of access irrelevant. If this is right, it undermines a core computational motivation for encapsulation and sends us back to the drawing board for explanations of perceptual tractability. (shrink)

This paper describes student outcomes from participating in a week-long out-of-school action civics program designed to increase students’ civic and political competence and engagement. Using analysis from four years of survey data, this paper presents findings related to changes in students’ civic competence as a result of participating in the program, including findings related to both first time and repeat campers. Data revealed that participants experienced gains in half of the civic competence construct variables, with first-time campers experiencing significant gains (...) in five of the civic competence construct variables. Data analysis suggests that iEngage, an action civics summer experience, was effective in increasing elements of students’ civic competence, including their ability to get people to care about a problem, organize and run a meeting, write an opinion letter or contact a media outlet to express their views, and contact an elected official or community leader to address an issue. (shrink)

. The object is to examine strategies commonly used to heighten a sense of the sacred in nature. It is argued that moves designed to reinforce a concept of Providence have been the very ones to release new opportunities for secular readings. Several case studies reveal this fluidity across a sacred‐secular divide. The irony whereby sacred readings of nature would graduate into the secular is also shown to operate in reverse as anti‐providentialist strategies invited their own refutation. The analysis is (...) used to support the claim that the sciences have put fewer constraints on religious belief than is generally assumed. (shrink)

Introduction THOMAS C. HELLER AND DAVID E. WELLBERY A he essays that follow originated in a conference entitled "Reconstructing Individualism," held at ...

Vopěnka’s Principle is a natural large cardinal axiom that has recently found applications in category theory and algebraic topology. We show that Vopěnka’s Principle and Vopěnka cardinals are relatively consistent with a broad range of other principles known to be independent of standard (ZFC) set theory, such as the Generalised Continuum Hypothesis, and the existence of a definable well-order on the universe of all sets. We achieve this by showing that they are indestructible under a broad class of forcing constructions, (...) specifically, reverse Easton iterations of increasingly directed closed partial orders. (shrink)

Proclaiming Louis Pasteur as the “Founder of Stereochemistry”, the distinguished Scottish chemist, Crum Brown, addressing a late nineteenth-century audience of Edinburgh savants, drew attention—as Pasteur had incessantly done—to the intimate relationship between living organisms and the optical activity of compounds sustaining them. It seemed to Crum Brown “that we must go very much further down in the scale of animate existence than Buridan's ass, before we come to a being incapable of giving practical expression to a distinct preference for one (...) of two objects differing only in being one to the right and the other to the left”. Crum Brown's lecture must have been entertaining, but it was also motivated by a serious desire to do justice to a particular assertion of Pasteur—an assertion which had, moreover, been misunderstood and dismissed by no less a chemical genius than Wilhelm Ostwald. Writing at a time when the majority of his colleagues were stressing the resemblances between inorganic and organic compounds, Pasteur had insisted that he “could not point out the existence of any more profound distinction between the products formed under the influence of life and all others” than that “artificial products have … no molecular asymmetry”. Pasteur was obliged to concede that the chemist might produce enantiomorphic pairs of isomers, but without resorting to a manual separation of crystals he was powerless to imitate Nature's performance, powerless to fabricate by chemical means a separate optical isomer, divorced from its partner. Now it was not only Crum Brown who felt that chemists had brushed aside this proposition of Pasteur. In his 1898 Presidential Address to the chemical section of the British Association, Professor F. R. Japp also complained that the possible vitalistic implications of Pasteur's distinction between natural and artificial products had been misapprehended or tacitly ignored. (shrink)

It seems self-evident that people prefer painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for hedonic goods, this preference is absolute (Sullivan, 2018). Yet very little is known about the extent to which people demonstrate explicit preferences regarding the temporal location of hedonic experiences, about the developmental trajectory of such preferences, and about whether such preferences are impervious to differences in the quantity of envisaged past and future (...) pain or pleasure. We find consistent evidence that, all else being equal, adults and children aged 7 and over prefer pleasure to lie in the future and pain in the past and believe that other people will too. They also predict that other people will be happier when pleasure is in the future rather than the past but sadder when pain is the future rather than the past. Younger children have the same temporal preferences as adults for their own painful experiences, but prefer their pleasure to lie in the past, and do not predict that others’ levels of happiness or sadness vary dependent on whether experiences lie in the past or the future. However, from the age of 7, temporal preferences were typically abandoned at the earliest opportunity when the quantity of past pain or pleasure was greater than the quantity located in the future. Past-future preferences for hedonic goods emerge early developmentally but are surprisingly flexible. (shrink)

Management practitioners and scholars have worked diligently to identify methods for ethical decision making in international contexts. In this paper we offer sixheuristic questions to help corporate managers resolve cross-cultural ethical conflicts involving questionable business practices in a host country. Our aim is to provide practical guidance for discussion within a firm on whether or not to do business the firm’s way, the host’s way or refrain from doing business there (the highway).

In her recent paper ‘The Epistemology of Propaganda’ Rachel McKinnon discusses what she refers to as ‘TERF propaganda’. We take issue with three points in her paper. The first is her rejection of the claim that ‘TERF’ is a misogynistic slur. The second is the examples she presents as commitments of so-called ‘TERFs’, in order to establish that radical (and gender critical) feminists rely on a flawed ideology. The third is her claim that standpoint epistemology can be used to establish (...) that such feminists are wrong to worry about a threat of male violence in relation to trans women. In Section 1 we argue that ‘TERF’ is not a merely descriptive term; that to the extent that McKinnon offers considerations in support of the claim that ‘TERF’ is not a slur, these considerations fail; and that ‘TERF’ is a slur according to several prominent accounts in the contemporary literature. In Section 2, we argue that McKinnon misrepresents the position of gender critical feminists, and in doing so fails to establish the claim that the ideology behind these positions is flawed. In Section 3 we argue that McKinnon’s criticism of Stanley fails, and one implication of this is that those she characterizes as ‘positively privileged’ cannot rely on the standpoint-relative knowledge of those she characterizes as ‘negatively privileged’. We also emphasize in this section McKinnon’s failure to understand and account for multiple axes of oppression, of which the cis/trans axis is only one. (shrink)

The 18th-century French political theorist the Baron de Montesquieu described honour as the ‘principle’ – or animating force – of a well-functioning monarchy, which he thought the appropriate regime type for an economically unequal society extended over a broad territory. Existing literature often presents this honour in terms of lofty ambition, the desire for preference and distinction, a spring for political agency or a spur to the most admirable kind of conduct in public life and the performance of great deeds. (...) Perhaps so. But it also seems to involve quite a bit of what the contemporary philosopher Aaron James calls ‘being an asshole’, and the article will explore what happens to Montesquieu’s political theory of monarchy – which is foundational for an understanding of modern politics – when we reverse the usual perspective and consider it through the lens of the arsehole aristocracy. (shrink)

We present a new partial order for directly forcing morasses to exist that enjoys a significant homogeneity property. We then use this forcing in a reverse Easton iteration to obtain an extension universe with morasses at every regular uncountable cardinal, while preserving all n-superstrong , hyperstrong and 1-extendible cardinals. In the latter case, a preliminary forcing to make the GCH hold is required. Our forcing yields morasses that satisfy an extra property related to the homogeneity of the partial order; we (...) refer to them as mangroves and prove that their existence is equivalent to the existence of morasses. Finally, we exhibit a partial order that forces universal morasses to exist at every regular uncountable cardinal, and use this to show that universal morasses are consistent with n-superstrong, hyperstrong, and 1-extendible cardinals. This all contributes to the second author’s outer model programme, the aim of which is to show that L-like principles can hold in outer models which nevertheless contain large cardinals. (shrink)

S B Brooke-Norris; Is School Enough? A Critique of Langford’s Idea of Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 227–.

Justice in production is concerned with ensuring the benefits and burdens of work are distributed in a way that is reflective of persons' status as moral equals. While a variety of accounts of productive justice have been offered, insufficient attention has been paid to the distribution of work's benefits and burdens in the future. In this article, after granting for the sake of argument forecasts of widespread future technological unemployment, we consider the implications this has for egalitarian requirements of productive (...) justice. We argue that in relation to all the benefits affiliated with work, other than undertaking social contribution, the technological replacement of work is unproblematic as these benefits could in principle be attained elsewhere. But because social contribution uniquely corresponds to work (when work is understood as more than a paid job), the normative assessment of technological unemployment will turn on the value that theories of justice give to contributive activity. We then argue that despite technological replacement being plainly beneficial insofar as it relieves persons from the burdens of work, such as dangerous work or drudgery, because the nature of care work makes it less susceptible to technological replacement, egalitarian concern will require the burdens of care work to be shared equally between individuals. (shrink)

As the British Society for the History of Science's president during its fiftieth year, it gives me the greatest pleasure to introduce this anniversary issue of the Journal. For some readers there will be a special poignancy in recalling the vision and energy of the Society's founding fathers who, believing that the history of science had a strategic role to play both as a humanizing force and as an integral part of the culture of science, turned their belief into action. (...) Many justifications have been and will continue to be given for the importance of our subject. Prominent among them when the Society was launched in 1947 was that the history of science would underpin claims for the inherent progressiveness and universality of scientific knowledge. In his presidential address, delivered in May 1948, the Society's first president, Charles Singer, also drew a parallel between the humanism of the Renaissance and a new humanism represented by the cultural possibilities of this history of science: both had had ‘small beginnings in a disturbed world’. (shrink)