Charles Carlini interviews Nathan Salmón about the philosophical work of his mentor and friend, the late Saul Kripke, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th Century.

Larmore aims to recover three forms of moral complexity that have often been neglected by moral and political philosophers. First, he argues that virtue is not simply the conscientious adherence to principle. Rather, the exercise of virtue apply. He argues - and this is the second pattern of complexity - that recognizing the value of constitutive ties with shared forms of life does not undermine the liberal ideal of political neutrality toward differing ideals of the good life. Finally Larmore agrues (...) for what he calls the heterogeneity of morality. Moral thinking need not be exclusively deontological or consequentialist, and we should recognize that the ultimate sources of moral value are diverse. The arguments presented here do not attack the possibility of moral theory. But in addressing some of the central issues of moral and political thinking today thay attempt to restore to that thinking greater flexibility and a necessary sensitivity to our common experience. (shrink)

What is political philosophy’s relation to moral philosophy? Does it simply form part of moral philosophy, focusing on the proper application of certain moral truths to political reality? Or must it instead form a more autonomous discipline, drawing its bearings from the specifically political problem of determining the bounds of legitimate coercion? In this essay I work out an answer to these questions by examining both some of the classical views on the nature of political philosophy and, more particularly, some (...) recently published writings by Bernard Williams and G.A. Cohen. (shrink)

Reprint, in paper covers, of the Columbia U. Press edition of 1990. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Although for the last 50 years, ethicists dealing with human experimentation have focused primarily on the need to protect individual research subjects and vulnerable groups, biomedical research, especially in genetics, now requires the establishment of standards for the protection of communities. We have developed such a strategy, based on five steps. (i) Identification of community characteristics relevant to the biomedical research setting, (ii) delineation of a typology of different types of communities using these characteristics, (iii) determination of the range of (...) possible community protections, (iv) creation of connections between particular protections and one or more community characteristics necessary for its implementation, and (v) synthesis of community characteristics and possible protections to define protections appropriate for each type of community. Depending on the particular community, consent and consultation, consultation alone, or no added protections may be required for research. (shrink)

The institutional review board is the social-oversight mechanism charged with protecting research subjects. Performing this task competently requires that the IRB scrutinize informed-consent procedures, the balance of risks and potential benefits, and subject-selection procedures in research protocols. Unfortunately, it may be said that IRBs are spending too much time editing informed-consent forms and too little time analyzing the risks and potential benefits posed by research. This time mismanagement is clearly reflected in the research ethics literature. A review of articles published (...) between 1979 and 1990 in IRB: A Review of Human Subjects Research, for example, reveals a large number of articles on informed consent and confidentiality and considerably fewer on the assessment of risks and potential harms, study design, and subject-selection procedures. (shrink)

Proponents of the view that social structures are ontologically distinct from the people in whose actions they are immanent have assumed that structures can stand in causal relations to individual practices. Were causality to be no more than Humean concomitance correlations between structure and practices would be unproblematic. But two prominent advocates of the ontological account of structures, Bhaskar and Giddens, have also espoused a powers theory of causality. According to that theory causation is brought about by the activity of (...) particulars, in the social psychological case, individuals of some sort. Consistence would demand that structure be those individuals. But neither Giddens nor Bhaskar wish to reify structure to the extent that would fit it for a role as a powerful particular. If only human beings can be powerful particulars in these contexts, the only way that structures can be real must be as properties of conversational interactions. Human action is social just in so far as people direct themselves to engage well in joint activities with others. (shrink)

Abstract:Therapeutic misconception (TM)—when clinical research participants fail to adequately grasp the difference between participating in a clinical trial and receiving ordinary clinical care—has long been recognized as a significant problem in consent to clinical trials. We suggest that TM does not primarily reflect inadequate disclosure or participants’ incompetence. Instead, TM arises from divergent primary cognitive frames. The researchers’ frame places the clinical trial in the context of scientific designs for assessing intervention efficacy. In contrast, most participants have a cognitive frame (...) that is personal and focused primarily on their medical problems. To illustrate this, we draw on interview material from both clinical researchers and participants in clinical trials. We suggest that reducing TM requires encouraging subjects to adjust their frame, not just add information to their existing frame. What is necessary is ascientific reframingof participation in a clinical trial. (shrink)

The issue of the protection of communities in clinical research first arose 10 years ago in studies conducted in technologically developing countries by scientists from technologically developed nations. The question was, which ethical standards ought to apply, those of the Western investigators or local standards?

Liberalism is a distinctively modern political conception. Only in modern times do we find, as the object of both systematic reflection and widespread allegiance and institutionalization, the idea that the principles of political association, being coercive, should be justifiable to all whom they are to bind. And so only here do we find the idea that these principles should rest, so far as possible, on a core, minimal morality which reasonable people can share, given their expectably divergent religious convictions and (...) conceptions of the meaning of life. No longer does it seem evident—as it did, let us say, before the seventeenth century—that the aim of political association must be to bring man into harmony with God's purposes or to serve some comprehensive vision of the good life. The causes of this transformation are various, and not all of them lie at the level of moral principle. But a change in moral consciousness has certainly been one of the factors involved. As Hegel observed, modern culture is inherently a reflective one: notions of principle are essential to our self-understanding and thus to the stability of the social forms in which we participate. Modern culture has no room for a dichotomy between “in principle” and “in practice.” It is worth determining, then, what new moral conceptions have been responsible for the emergence of modern liberalism. Not only will we thereby better understand how we have become who we are, we will also have a surer grasp of the principles that sustain our political life. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that cancer onset and progression represent a type of reversion to an ancestral quasi‐unicellular phenotype. This general concept has been refined into the atavistic model of cancer that attempts to provide a quantitative analysis and testable predictions based on genomic data. Over the past decade, support for the multicellular‐to‐unicellular reversion predicted by the atavism model has come from phylostratigraphy. Here, we propose that cancer onset and progression involve more than a one‐off multicellular‐to‐unicellular reversion, and are (...) better described as a series of reversionary transitions. We make new predictions based on the chronology of the unicellular‐eukaryote‐to‐multicellular‐eukaryote transition. We also make new predictions based on three other evolutionary transitions that occurred in our lineage: eukaryogenesis, oxidative phosphorylation and the transition to adaptive immunity. We propose several modifications to current phylostratigraphy to improve age resolution to test these predictions. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/3unEu5JYJrQ. (shrink)

Over time, the corporate food economy has led to the increased separation of people from the sources of their food and nutrition. This paper explores the opportunity for grassroots, food-based organizations, as part of larger food justice movements, to act as valuable sites for countering the tendency to identify and value a person only as a consumer and to serve as places for actively learning democratic citizenship. Using The Stop Community Food Centre’s urban agriculture program as a case in point, (...) the paper describes how participation can be a powerful site for transformative adult learning. Through participation in this Toronto-based, community organization, people were able to develop strong civic virtues and critical perspectives. These, in turn, allowed them to influence policy makers; to increase their level of political efficacy, knowledge, and skill; and to directly challenge anti-democratic forces of control. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Place and the "Spatial Turn" in Geography and in HistoryCharles W. J. WithersI. IntroductionA few years ago, British Telecom ran a newspaper advertisement in the British press about the benefits—and consequences—of advances in communications technology. Featuring a remote settlement in the north-west Highlands of Scotland, and with the clear implication that such "out-of-the-way places" were now connected to the wider world (as if they had not been before), the (...) advert proclaimed "Geography is History." What the advert signalled to as the "end" of geography in the sense of the social gradients associated with space and distance is what is known, variously, as "time-space convergence" and "time-space distanciation."1 The terms embrace not just the "collapse" of geographical space given technical advances (in travel time and in communications—consequences of what Castells calls "the information age" and "the network society"2), but also the idea that the modern world has become [End Page 637] more homogenized. One place is now much the same as another. Further, given the likelihood of such technical and cultural changes continuing into the future, geographical distinctiveness, evident in the particularity of place, would be a thing of the past: geography would indeed be history. There is, of course, much evidence to the contrary: that, in the face of "globalisation," questions of locality, sense of place and of identity in place matter now more than ever. Even, then, as Francis Fukuyama cautioned against the "death" of liberal democratic politics as The End of History,3 geography—that is, geography understood as questions to do with place, and questions to do with where you are in the world as part of questions about how you are and who you are in the world—has had considerably heightened significance and for some places and people more than others.4These notions of place—as a particular location, and the character or sense of place—are only part of the meanings associated with place in geographical and in historical work. Like space, its regular epistemic dancing partner in geographical ubiquity and metaphysical imprecision, place is a widespread yet complex term. What follows is historiographical in focus and, of necessity, partial in range. I offer a historiographical survey of the term place, principally but not alone within recent work in geography. In more detail, and with reference to one of the strong senses in which place is used, namely that of locale, "the local," or localness, I trace here the connections between place, space, and the idea of the local as evident in recent work in history and in geography, especially within the history and the geography of science. Particular attention is paid in this context to the distinctive features of what we may think of as the "spatial turn" in the history of science by looking at the idea of place and space in recent work in Enlightenment studies. My argument is three-fold. Notions of place and space, much debated by geographers, have been as central a concern for intellectual historians and historians of science as for philosophers and others, but they have been differently expressed. There is, I shall argue, value in looking at these different views in order to understand that whilst place is a commonplace term it is not agreed upon: working with imprecision has been both opportunity and restriction. In relation to work within the history of science and in Enlightenment studies, consideration of the so-called "spatial turn," of place [End Page 638] as social practice and of placing as a process in accounting for the uneven movement of ideas over space and time may help provide some precision and strengthen connections between geography and history.II. Place (In Geography): A Partial HistoriographyPlace is one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography. It is also one of the most problematic.5 Place, or small-scale regional space, features as a subdivision within the Classical tripartite division of cosmography (the earth in relation to other planetary bodies), geography (the earth as a whole) and chorography (parts of the earth or regional geography). So, too, does the distinction between chorography and chronology as... (shrink)

The Belmont Report’s distinction between research and the practice of accepted therapy has led various authors to suggest that these purportedly distinct activities should be governed by different ethical principles. We consider some of the ethical consequences of attempts to separate the two and conclude that separation fails along ontological, ethical, and epistemological dimensions. Clinical practice and clinical research, as with yin and yang, can be thought of as complementary forces interacting to form a dynamic system in which the whole (...) exceeds the sum of its parts. Just as effective clinical practice cannot exist without clinical research, meaningful clinical research requires the context of clinical practice. We defend this thesis by triangulation, that is, by outlining how multiple investigators have reached this conclusion on the basis of varied theoretical and applied approaches. More confidence can be placed in a result if different methods/viewpoints have led to that result. (shrink)

As genetic research increasingly focuses on communities, there have been calls for extending research protections to them. We critically examine guidelines developed to protect aboriginal communities and consider their applicability to other communities. These guidelines are based on a model of researcher-community partnership and span the phases of a research project, from protocol development to publication. The complete list of 23 protections may apply to those few non-aboriginal communities, such as the Amish, that are highly cohesive. Although some protections may (...) be applicable to less-cohesive communities, such as Ashkenazi Jews, analysis suggests substantial problems in extending these guidelines in toto beyond the aboriginal communities for which they were developed. (shrink)

I distinguish between ‘substantival’ and ‘functional’ forms of vitalism in the eighteenth century. Substantival vitalism presupposes the existence of a (substantive) vital force which either plays a causal role in the natural world as studied scientifically, or remains an immaterial, extra-causal entity. Functional vitalism tends to operate ‘post facto’, from the existence of living bodies to the search for explanatory models that will account for their uniquely ‘vital’ properties better than fully mechanistic models can. I discuss representative figures of the (...) Montpellier school (Bordeu, Ménuret, Fouquet) as functional rather than substantival vitalists, and suggest an additional point regarding the reprisal of vitalism(s) in the 20th century, from Driesch to Canguilhem: that in addition to the substantival and functional varieties, we encounter a third species of vitalism, which I term ‘attitudinal’, as it argues for vitalism as a kind of attitude. (shrink)

This book presents and analyzes the most important arguments in the history of Western philosophy's skeptical tradition. It demonstrates that, although powerful, these arguments are quite limited and fail to prove their core assertion that knowledge is beyond our reach. Argues that skepticism is mistaken and that knowledge is possible Dissects the problems of realism and the philosophical doubts about the accuracy of the senses Explores the ancient argument against a criterion of knowledge, Descartes' skeptical arguments, and skeptical arguments applied (...) to inductive inference and self-knowledge Uses Moore's proof of an external world and the reliabilist conception of knowledge to illustrate that the traditional skeptical arguments fail to meet their mark. (shrink)

Intended for the first course in logic, The Power of Logic (POL) is written with the conviction that logic is the most important course that college students take. POL preserves the balance between informal and formal logic. Layman;s direct and accessible writing style, along with his plentiful examples, imaginative exercises, and POL;s accompanying Logic Tutor make this the best text for logic classes today.day.

Implicit bias results from living in a society structured by race. Tamar Gendler has drawn attention to several epistemic costs of implicit bias and concludes that paying some costs is unavoidable. In this paper, we reconstruct Gendler’s argument and argue that the epistemic costs she highlights can be avoided. Though epistemic agents encode discriminatory information from the environment, not all encoded information is activated. Agents can construct local epistemic environments that do not activate biasing representations, effectively avoiding the consequences of (...) activation. We conclude that changing our local environments provides a way to avoid paying implicit bias’s epistemic costs. (shrink)

This paper tackles the problem of the nature of the space of perception. Based both on philosophical arguments and on results obtained from original experimental situations, it attempts to show how space is constituted concretely, before any distinction between the “inner” and the “outer” can be made. It thus sheds light on the presuppositions of the well-known debate between internalism and externalism in the philosophy of mind; it argues in favor of the latter position, but with arguments that are foundationally (...) antecedent to this debate. We call the position we defend enactive externalism. It is based on experimental settings which, in virtue of their minimalism, make it possible both to defend a sensori-motor/enactive theory of perception; and, especially, to inquire into the origin of the space of perception, showing how it is concretely enacted before the controversy between internalism and externalism can even take place. (shrink)

Embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended theorists do not typically focus on the ontological frameworks in which they develop their theories. One exception is 4E theories that embrace New Mechanism. In this paper, we endorse the New Mechanist’s general turn to ontology, but argue that their ontology is not the best on the market for 4E theories. Instead, we advocate for a different ontology: causal powers realism. Causal powers realism posits that psychological manifestations are the product of mental powers, and that (...) mental powers are empirically-discoverable features of individuals that account for the causal work those individuals do. We contend that causal powers realism provides a unifying framework for the central commitments of 4E theories, as well as additional resources for theorizing in a 4E framework. And while New Mechanism offers some of these resources as well, we argue that causal powers realism is ultimately the better of the two. (shrink)

When philosophers undertake to say what it is that makes life worth living, they generally display a procrustean habit of thought which the practice of philosophy itself does much to encourage. As a result, they arrive at an image of the human good that is far more controversial than they suspect. The canonical view among philosophers ancient and modern has been, in essence, that the life lived well is the life lived in accord with a rational plan. To me this (...) conception of the human good seems manifestly wrong. The idea that life should be the object of a plan is false to the human condition. It misses the important truth which Proust, by contrast, discerned and made into one of the organizing themes of his great meditation on disappointment and revelation, A la recherche du temps perdu : The happiness that life affords is less often the good we have reason to pursue than the good that befalls us unexpectedly. (shrink)

There often appears to be a striking correspondence between mythic stories and aspects of reality. We will examine the processes of creative imagination within a neurobiological frame and suggest a theory that may explain the functions of myth in relation to the hidden aspects of reality. Myth is peppered with archetypal entities and interactions that operate to reveal hidden processes in reality that are relative to the human condition. The imagery in myths in a sense “sustains the true.” That is, (...) mythopoetic imagery keeps the interpretive process in experience closer to the actual nature of reality than the rational faculties operating alone are able to do. Indeed, whereas rationalizing can easily lead us awry, genuine myth rarely does. Explanations of events offered by cultures around the world are frequently couched in terms of mythic themes and events. An important function of myth is to provide a “field of tropes” that in‐forms the lived experience of people. This paper focuses especially on those aspects of myth that represent facets of the quantum universe and give us clues as to the relationship between consciousness, symbolism, and reality. (shrink)

ALTHOUGH I shall be attempting to examine the function of judgment, or what Aristotle called φρόνησις, in moral deliberation, I shall begin by discussing some previous opinions about what kind of importance examples have in moral experience. This strategy is only apparently circuitous. The role which one assigns to examples is symptomatic of the conception one has of judgment in moral decision-making, because the use of examples forms one way in which judgment is exercised. Indirectly, then, I shall be trying (...) to rehabilitate the significance of examples in moral deliberation. But the chief aim of this paper will be to determine both what is the function of judgment in moral deliberation and how we are to understand the activity of exercising it. (shrink)

Biogenetic structural theory takes an entrainment view of the nature of consciousness. Human consciousness is a function of the brain and is mediated by networks of living neural cells that develop from initial, neurognostic models of self and world. Models interact or "entrain" as a constantly changing field of experience. The entire population of neural models that may potentially entrain within the field of consciousness is called the "cognized environment.” The organization of the network of cells (the "conscious network") mediating (...) consciousness operates according to a circadian cycle. Recurrent phases of consciousness are cognized and labelled. Transformations between phases of consciousness are often ritually controlled by society in order to control experiences that are in turn interpreted in terms of the society's cosmology. Recent developments in the biogenetic structural study of consciousness are summarized, including studies of transpersonal experiences, the development of consciousness in early life, and the advantages of neurophenomenology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 295 A study of Heidegger faces serious difficulties, for Heidegger is a difficult philosopher to comprehend. It is all too easy to fall into an oracular mode of presentation and to become obscure in that needless way of which one suspects Heidegger himself on many occasions. Seidel avoids these dangers admirably. His is a clear and careful, reasoned and unassuming account of Heidegger's views concerning the pre-socratics (...) and the historical fate of Being. His book should be a help to the scholar of Heidegger's thought and a stimulating, though perplexing, introduction to his philosophy. If it fails in the ways I have mentioned, it succeeds in many more ways than I have had the space to mention. It is a positive contribution to the literature concerning Iteidegger. STEPI-IEI~"A. ERICKSOR" Pomona College FiIosofia dell'arte. By Nicola Petruzzellis. Terza edizione riveduta ed accresciuta. (Napoli, Libreira Scientifica Editrice, 1964. I6~ pp. 642.) E' una terza edizione ma in cui l'ampiezza delle aggiunte ~ tale da far sl che non si possa parlare di un rifacimento soltanto perch~ i criter~ fondamentali dell'indagine tentata dall'autore (ed integrata dal felice volume su L'estetica dell'idealismo) sono rimasti gli stessi. Ma quello che prima era soltanto un motivo tematico s'~ sviluppato in una vogorosa e posscnte sinfonia, specie se ci si riferisce al panorama dell'estetica contemporanea, che, con ampiezza di vedute e spregiudicata freschezza d'informazione---integrando e continuando le note storie dell'estetica e della critica dello Zimmermann, dello Schlaser, del Bosanquet, del Croce e del Wellek--il Petruzzellis traccia all'inizio del libro "I1 panorama dell'estetica contemporanea, col quale si apre il volume---avverte--non vuol essere un'esposizione manualistica, e tanto meno un repertorio bibliografico pifl o meno completo, ma uno strumento d'indagine.... e vuo|e altresl fornire all'attento lettore le ragioni storiche e critiche deUe posizioni conclusive alle quali siamo pervenuti e dei consensi e dissensi in esse impliciti" (p. 6). II quadro ~ davvero completo, non solo in riferiment~ all'Italia, ch~ l'autore felicemente riassume e criticamente definisce, rendendo giustizia alle legittime esigenze di ognuno, le ricerche estetiche de Croce e Gentile, di Carlini e di Guzzo, di Stefanini e di Aliotta, di Rensi e di Baratono, di Carbonara e di Della Volpe. Il Petruzzellis 6 e~uriente anche circa le analisi sottili (che si ricoUegano all'esttismo ed al moralismo di SSren Kirkegaard) condotte intorno all'arte da Martin Heidegger e da Karl Jaspers, da Gabriel Marcel e da Jean Paul Sartre, mentre acutamente illustra quelle--ispirate ad un esistenzialismo positivo--di Nicola Abbagnano. Meno note le concezioni estetiche di Nicolai Hartmann e quelle fenomenologiche del Banff, del Morpurgo Tagliabue e del Dufrenne, sicch~ si deve dar atto al Petruzzellis della benemerenza d'averle minutamente illustrate, cosl come ha fatto con il problematicismo estetico di Ugo Spirito e del suo discepolo Armando Plebe. Sottilissima ~ poi l'analisi dei riflessi sulla filosofia dell'arte di correnti speculative ehe oggi (forse ~ effetto di moda) occupano, dal neoempirismo al marxismo, il palcoscenico culturale. Ms se tall correnti si agitano e si dimenano con notevole fracas~o in altri campi, penetrano solo furtivamente nel giardino delle Muse. Percib c'~ voluta tutta la paziente intelligenza del Petruzzellis per presentarci le riflessioni sull'arte (assai poco divulgatc specie in Italia) di John Dewey, di I. A. Richards, di Charles Morris, di B. C. Heyl, di Ernest Cassirer, di Susanne K. Langer e di GySrgy Luke. Quest'ultimo, in veritY, a differenza dei precedenti (mi riferisco sempre al solo lato estetico), ~ alquanto famoso, peraltro in effetti mal noto, ch~ la sua fortuna, dovuta prevalentemente a contingenti motivi politici, fa sl ch'egli sia pi~ citato che effettivamente letto. Un posto particolare in questo gran quadro il Petruzzellis assegna poi alle indagini semantiche di Guido Calogero e soprattuito a quelle penetranti ed acutissime di Antonino 296 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Pagliaro, mentre sviscera con intelletto d'amore il contributo estetico arrecato da grandi contemporanei ispiratisi alla Scolastica quali Maritain, Petit e Gilson. Quest'adesione alle loro vibrazioni spirituali ci svela il profondo motivo animatore di questa: Filosofia d;ell'arte che scritta "nel momento pi... (shrink)

Novices sometimes misidentify authorities and end up endorsing false beliefs as a result. In this paper, I suggest that this phenomenon is at least sometimes the result of culturally evolved mechanisms functioning in faulty epistemic contexts. I identify three background conditions which, when satisfied, enable expert-identifying mechanisms to function properly. When any one of them fails, that increases the likelihood of identifying a non-authority as authoritative. Consequently, novices can end up deferring to merely apparent authorities without having failed in any (...) epistemic obligations. (shrink)

In this essay, we defend the design of the Salk polio vaccine trial and try to put some limits on the role schemata should play in designing clinical research studies. Our presentation is structured as a response to de Freitas and Pietrobon who identified the CONSORT statement as a schema that would have, had it existed at the time, ruled out the design of the Salk polio vaccine trial of 1954 in favor of a completely randomized controlled clinical trial. We (...) argue that large-scale public health interventions often require evidence beyond simple efficacy, the limit of what an RCT can provide, and that the design actually adopted for the Salk trial represented a reasonable—albeit imperfect—compromise. This is of more than historical interest in that many contemporary studies are of the scale and scope to require a more pragmatic, rather than explanatory, approach to study design. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a view about machine autonomy grounded in the theoretical frameworks of 4E cognition and PF Strawson’s reactive attitudes. I begin with critical discussion of White, and conclude that his view is strongly committed to functionalism as it has developed in mainstream analytic philosophy since the 1950s. After suggesting that there is good reason to resist this view by appeal to developments in 4E cognition, I propose an alternative view of machine autonomy. Namely, machines count as (...) autonomous when we members of the moral community adopt reactive attitudes in response to their actions. I distinguish this view from White’s and suggest assets and liabilities of this approach. (shrink)

In the atavistic model of cancer progression, tumor cell dedifferentiation is interpreted as a reversion to phylogenetically earlier capabilities. The more recently evolved capabilities are compromised first during cancer progression. This suggests a therapeutic strategy for targeting cancer: design challenges to cancer that can only be met by the recently evolved capabilities no longer functional in cancer cells. We describe several examples of this target‐the‐weakness strategy. Our most detailed example involves the immune system. The absence of adaptive immunity in immunosuppressed (...) tumor environments is an irreversible weakness of cancer that can be exploited by creating a challenge that only the presence of adaptive immunity can meet. This leaves tumor cells more vulnerable than healthy tissue to pathogenic attack. Such a target‐the‐weakness therapeutic strategy has broad applications, and contrasts with current therapies that target the main strength of cancer: cell proliferation. (shrink)

Ample evidence from various quarters indicates that the perceptual-cognitive competence of the pre- and perinatal human being is significantly greater than was once thought. Some of the evidence of this emerging picture of early competence is reviewed, and its importance both as evidence of the biogenetic structural concept of “neurognosis” and for a theory of enculturation is discussed. The literature of pre- and perinatal psychology, especially that of developmental neuropsychology, psychobiology, and social psychophysiology, is incorporated, and some of the implications (...) of these data for a theory of enculturation are suggested. (shrink)

Sartre as guide -- Bad faith and sincerity -- The example of Stendhal -- Reflection and being like another -- Being natural -- The ubiquity of convention -- Being like another -- Authenticity and the democratic age -- Mimetism and equality -- Being oneself amid conventions -- Authenticity and the nature of the self -- Foundations of a theory of cognitive reflection -- Psychological interpretation -- The structure of cognitive self-reflection -- The self in cognitive reflection -- Representing and reasoning (...) -- A critique of autonomy -- Obligations and avowals -- A defense of first-person authority -- The persistence of the cartesian model -- The key to the mystery -- A final problem -- Ways of being oneself -- The domain of authenticity -- The instability of practical reflection -- Authenticity and conversion -- How to be virtuous -- The ends of reflection -- Reflection and its problems -- The self and time -- The importance of unexpected goods -- Socrates' mistake -- The limits of prudence -- Wisdom. (shrink)

In this paper, I delineate two major problems facing reliabilist approaches in epistemology. I argue that Alvin Goodman's (1986) position fails to solve either problem. I then suggest an alternative reliabilist approach that ties truth-ratio assessments to particular, well-specified cognitive tasks. I claim that a well-specified cognitive task is an empirical hypothesis about a system that involves the specification of input and output types and nomic correlations (including statistical correlations) that underlie the system's performance. On my approach, one characterizes processes (...) by reference to the system's dispositions across the situations consistent with the task. Characterization is best understood as revealing a strategy or a set of strategies for generating outputs from inputs relying on certain nomic correlations associated with the task. (shrink)

Uses interviews with one hundred twenty-five leading male executives to determine how companies can be managed both profitably and ethically.

The existing EELS literature has usefully identified the scope of ethical issues posed by pharmacogenetic and pharmacogenomic research. The time has come for in-depth examination of particular ethical issues. The involvement of racial and ethnic communities in pharmacogenetic and pharmacogenomic research is contentious precisely because it touches upon the science and politics of studying racial and ethnic difference. To date, the ethics literature has not seriously taken account of the fact that such research impinges upon the interests of communities, and (...) that taking such interests seriously requires that we both protect and empower communities in research. We propose a framework that rests upon the recognition that communities are heterogeneous human associations and differing policies are appropriate for differing communities. Community consent and consultation and community consultation alone are neither appropriate nor required for all pharmacogenetic and pharmacogenomic research. Rather, application of these policy protections must take into account particulars of both planned research and the communities involved. (shrink)