If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

We report on the deliberations of an interdisciplinary group of experts in science, law, and philosophy who convened to discuss novel ethical and policy challenges in stem cell research. In this report we discuss the ethical and policy implications of safety concerns in the transition from basic laboratory research to clinical applications of cell-based therapies derived from stem cells. Although many features of this transition from lab to clinic are common to other therapies, three aspects of stem cell biology pose (...) unique challenges. First, tension regarding the use of human embryos may complicate the scientific development of safe and effective cell lines. Second, because human stem cells were not developed in the laboratory until 1998, few safety questions relating to human applications have been addressed in animal research. Third, preclinical and clinical testing of biologic agents, particularly those as inherently complex as mammalian cells, present formidable challenges, such as the need to develop suitable standardized assays and the difficulty of selecting appropriate patient populations for early phase trials. We recommend that scientists, policy makers, and the public discuss these issues responsibly, and further, that a national advisory committee to oversee human trials of cell therapies be established. **NB we did not reccommend a NAC, we think it might be appropriate**. (shrink)

Breaking Bad, hailed by Stephen King, Chuck Klosterman, and many others as the best of all TV dramas, tells the story of a man whose life changes because of the medical death sentence of an advanced cancer diagnosis. The show depicts his metamorphosis from inoffensive chemistry teacher to feared drug lord and remorseless killer. Driven at first by the desire to save his family from destitution, he risks losing his family altogether because of his new life of crime. In (...) defiance of the tradition that viewers demand a TV character who never changes, Breaking Bad is all about the process of change, with each scene carrying forward the morphing of Walter White into the terrible Heisenberg. Can a person be transformed as the result of a few key life choices? Does everyone have the potential to be a ruthless criminal? How will we respond to the knowledge that we will be dead in six months? Is human life subject to laws as remorseless as chemical equations? When does injustice validate brutal retaliation? Why are drug addicts unsuitable for operating the illegal drug business? How can TV viewers remain loyal to a series where the hero becomes the villain? Does Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty rule our destinies? In Breaking Bad and Philosophy, a hand-picked squad of professional thinkers investigate the crimes of Walter White, showing how this story relates to the major themes of philosophy and the major life decisions facing all of us. (shrink)

`On the Marxist Imaginary...' is an excerpt from a larger work that uses the history of Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-67) to examine the role of the problem of praxis in Cornelius Castoriadis's more political writings. The present article examines the schema his revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie developed between 1952 and 1956 to link working-class experience, autonomous strikes, and possibilities for revolution and socialism.

Does "nature" still exist? Common wisdom now acknowledges the malleability of nature, the complex reality that circumscribes and constitutes the human. Weather patterns, topographical contours, animal populations, and even our own genetic composition--all of which previously marked the boundary of human agency--now appear subject to our intervention. Some thinkers have suggested that nature has disappeared entirely and that we have entered a postnatural era; others note that nature is an ineradicable context for life. Christian theology, in particular, finds itself in (...) an awkward position. Its Western traditions have long relied upon a static "nature" to express the dynamism of "grace," making nature a foundational category within theology itself. This means that any theological inquiry into the changing face of nature must be reflexive and radically interdisciplinary. This book brings leading natural and social scientists into conversation with prominent Christian theologians and ethicists to wrestle collectively with difficult questions. Is nature undergoing fundamental change? What role does nature play in theological ethics? How might ethical deliberation proceed "without nature" in the future? What does the religious drive to transform human nature have to do with the technological quest to transcend human limits? Would the end of nature make grace less comprehensible? (shrink)

Although most of us know that human beings cannot and should not be replaced by computers, we have great difficulties saying why this is so. This paradox is largely the result of institutionalizing several fundamental misconceptions as to the nature of both trustworthy objective and moral knowledge. Unless we transcend this paradox, we run the increasing risks of becoming very good at counting without being able to say what is worth counting and why. The degree to which this is occurring (...) is the degree to which the computer revolution is already over — and the degree to which we human beings have lost. (shrink)

Farm to School (FTS) programs are increasingly popular as methods to teach students about food, nutrition, and agriculture by connecting students with the sources of the food that they eat. They may also provide opportunity for farmers seeking to diversify market channels. Food service buyers in FTS programs often choose to procure food for school meals directly from farmers. The distribution practices required for such direct procurement often bring significant transaction costs for both school food service professionals and farmers. Analysis (...) of data from a survey of Vermont farmers who sell directly to school food services explores farmers’ motivations and distribution practices in these partnerships. A two-step cluster analysis procedure characterizes farmers’ motivations along a continuum between market-based and socially embedded values. Further bivariate analysis shows that farmers who are motivated most by market-based values are significantly associated with distribution practices that facilitate sales to school food services. Implications for technical assistance to facilitate these sales are discussed. (shrink)

This book contains remarkable photographs taken on the ‘lost’ fifth floor of Lewis’s by photographer Stephen King. They capture the remarkable history and former glory.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Allan Gibbard is one of the most significant contributors to philosophy over the last five decades. Gibbard's work covers an impressive number of subfields within philosophy, including ethics, philosophy of language, decision theory, epistemology, and metaphysics. It also engages with, and makes significant contributions to, work from the natural and social sciences. This volume is not a collection of artifacts from past decades of philosophy. Instead, it is a collection of essays that (...) each make a significant contribution to contemporary work in philosophy. This reflects the fact that Gibbard's work has not only had a massive influence on past discussion in philosophy but also continues to influence new directions of philosophical research. With contributions from: Sara Aronowitz, Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, David Braddon-Mitchell, Nate Charlow, Stephen Darwall, Jamie Dreier, Billy Dunaway, Melissa Fusco, Sona Ghosh, Allan Gibbard, Bill Harper, Paul Horwich, Zoë Johnson King, Tristram McPherson, Howard Nye, Lauren Olin, Caleb Perl, David Plunkett, Peter Railton, Connie Rosati, Mark Schroeder, Alex Silk, Daniel J. Singer, Brian Skyrms, and Seth Yalcin. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:F. R. Leavis (Modern Cultural Theorists)Stephen OgdenF. R. Leavis (Modern Cultural Theorists), by Anne Samson; x & 196 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992, $45.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.If it is an overstatement to say that the waves of change currently disturbing the teaching of English in universities originated from the splash made by F. R. Leavis at Cambridge beginning in 1933, Anne Samson’s account of the theorist’s (...) influence scarcely admits it. Her chapter titles—“Leavis and the Growth of English Studies,” “English as a University Subject,” “Literary ‘Theory’ and Constituting the Canon”—indicate not only the range of issues connected with F. R. Leavis’s name but also his significant involvement in their genesis.Samson’s book portrays Leavis as the efficient cause in the establishment of university English as a critical, or more accurately a diagnostic, enterprise. At an early professional cost (he was denied faculty appointment at Cambridge for five years), Leavis helped cut English curricula free from philology, languages, and classical studies; a responsibility Samson partially excuses by connecting Leavis’s motivating principles back through Matthew Arnold to Dickens and Carlyle and even to one “Reverend H. J. Rose, a leading figure in the founding of King’s College, London... declaring in a sermon delivered in 1826 that literature teaches ‘the wisdom of men better and wiser than ourselves’ and prepares for the ‘examination of those moral and intellectual truths which are not only the worthiest exercise of our reason, but most concern our future destiny’” (p. 12).This moralism Samson sees as the central and redeeming principle in Leavis’s system. Specifically, she identifies the Condition of England debate—over the state of culture and economics in a “‘technologico-Benthamite world’” (p. 63)—as the key to Leavis’s literary criticism, his influential journal Scrutiny, and his wide-ranging reform endeavors. “Literature mattered to Leavis because he believed it to be the means, above all others, of combating the ills of a mechanised, constantly changing world and of restoring the heritage of those dispossessed by the machine” (p. 3).Professionally asserting the primacy of criticism over scholarship, then in his writings making no distinction between the literary and the social, Leavis ultimately refused any separation between literature and life. Samson carefully [End Page 360] traces this development in Leavis’s general theory in order to bring out its easily-overlooked implication for the social position of a literary academic. She quotes this crucial passage from Leavis: “The critic... is as much concerned with the health of the mind as any doctor with the health of the body. To set up as a critic is to set up as a judge of values... For the arts are inevitably and quite apart from any intentions of the artist an appraisal of existence” (pp. 15–16). No longer a mere scholar, or the type of irrelevant empiric Leavis so hated in the person of C. P. Snow, the Leavisite theorist is the grand physician diagnosing all society’s ills. Literary artists and their writings, so far from forming the most important part of literature, become perfectly irrelevant—“quite apart”—with the medicocritic prescribing universally “of existence.”Samson’s treatment of Leavis is analytical, though enjoyably and consistently biographical. For instance, her final, and largest, chapter shows the moralist model of the literary critic (the “judge of values”) in action by detailing the history of Leavis’s complete reversal of estimation between T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. Leavis originally gave Eliot “hero-worship” (p. 162) and dismissed Lawrence as “mechanical” (p. 157). But concurrent with Eliot’s progress to Anglo-Catholicism, Leavis’s moral judgments overturned and, true to type, he increasingly censured Eliot’s writings by diagnosing problems in the man, while he grew to idolize Lawrence; ironically for “rescuing life from... inner mechanisation” (p. 169).Such inconstancy, here expressed in every word, Samson sees as an historical mark of character which places Leavis among the “Great Men of Ideas” (p. 172).Stephen OgdenSimon Fraser UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

A common complaint among those involved in teaching the educational foundations is the reluctance of many trainee teachers to engage in issues of educational theory. This is particularly apparent with those trainees who are more concerned with managing classrooms of children than grappling with what are often abstract and difficult ideas. This paper considers the current use of educational stories as a pedagogical strategy in teacher training, and a story that has been used in this way is presented. It is (...) argued that teachers of the educational foundations disciplines can, via stories, appeal to the opposing tensions and schemata in students’ own minds, and this engagement can be enhanced when students are confronted with broader educational debates, perspectives and proposals. Stories provide abstract concepts with a necessary tension, they suggest a way of entering the theoretical via the concrete and they show students the personal relevance of certain debates, which may have previously appeared remote and obscure. The end result is that students are challenged to make decisions about matters of fundamental importance such as the kinds of teachers they will be and about the ethical commitment they will make to teaching. (shrink)

For anyone concerned about students’ moral development, academic dishonesty presents a pervasive problem but also a promising possibility. The present paper describes the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of process-oriented, four-component model approach to promoting students’ “moral functioning” related to academic integrity, and the research project currently underway that is providing Web-based professional development to teachers for using the model in their high school classrooms. In doing so, we hope to develop a scalable approach that offers teachers an opportunity to be (...) the primary agents of change in transforming the problem of academic dishonesty into a possibility for positive youth development. (shrink)

"Responding to the growing epidemic of academic dishonesty, this authoritative text lays the groundwork for a positive school makeover. This guide--which culled research from six high schools in Connecticut that indicated that more than 90 percent of students participate in some form of cheating during the average school year--provides teachers, school administrators, and parents with a toolkit of resources and strategies needed to engender a culture of scholastic honesty. With reproducible handouts and instruction on establishing an Academic Integrity Committee, this (...) unique resource provides a plan and policies that support a climate of honesty and hard work. A CD-ROM with copies of each handout and additional references is also included"-- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

When a human being comes into existence is crucial in bioethics. Conceptionism is the view that a human being comes into existence at conception. The twinning argument is an influential objection to this view. All versions of the twinning argument rely on a metaphysics of material objects, namely, endurantism. Given this, a strategy for defending conceptionism against the twinning argument is to deny endurantism and adopt an alternative metaphysics of material objects. A version of this strategy which has been debated (...) in this journal is to adopt perdurantism, or the ‘multiple occupancy view’, on which monozygotic twins share the zygote region as a temporal part. We present a novel version of this strategy: conceptionists can evade the twinning argument by adopting an exdurantist metaphysics of material objects. We suggest reasons for thinking that this is a plausible and, indeed, preferable way for conceptionists to avoid the twinning argument. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger are arguably the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Their work not only reshaped the philosophical landscape, but also left its mark on other disciplines, including political science, theology, anthropology, ecology, mathematics, cultural studies, literary theory, and architecture. Both sought to challenge the assumptions governing the traditions they inherited, to question the very terms in which philosophy’s problems had been posed, and to open up new avenues of thought for thinkers of all stripes. (...) And despite considerable differences in style and in the traditions they inherited, the similarities between Wittgenstein and Heidegger are striking. Comparative work of these thinkers has only increased in recent decades, but no collection has yet explored the various ways in which Wittgenstein and Heidegger can be drawn into dialogue. As such, these essays stage genuine dialogues, with aspects of Wittgenstein’s elucidations answering or problematizing aspects of Heidegger’s, and vice versa. The result is a broad-ranging collection of essays that provides a series of openings and provocations that will serve as a reference point for future work that draws on the writings of these two philosophers. (shrink)

This chapter applies the parity principle in discussing “active externalism,” which claims that the mind need not be confined within either the brain or body. Consequently, how one brain or body interacts with other brains and bodies must be explored, together with the problems that may arise out of this interaction. This chapter is not concerned with beliefs and desires as mental states but whether they play a role in controlling behavior. It argues the notion that any course of action (...) considered part of the cognitive process going on inside the brain is still part of the cognitive process no matter where it is being implemented. Divided into two parts, this chapter first establishes some points of reference regarding language and cognition, and then proceeds to an attempt to connect the issues by directly discussing the parity principle. (shrink)

This is a biography of the works of Richard Price, 1723-1791, one of the leading radical intellectuals of the late-18th century. By profession a dissenting minister, he was also a mathematician, a political pamphleteer, particularly on the American and French Revolutions, and a moral philosopher.

A common complaint among those involved in teaching the educational foundations is the reluctance of many trainee teachers to engage in issues of educational theory. This is particularly apparent with those trainees who are more concerned with managing classrooms of children than grappling with what are often abstract and difficult ideas. This paper considers the current use of educational stories as a pedagogical strategy in teacher training, and a story that has been used in this way is presented. It is (...) argued that teachers of the educational foundations disciplines can, via stories, appeal to the opposing tensions and schemata in students’ own minds, and this engagement can be enhanced when students are confronted with broader educational debates, perspectives and proposals. Stories provide abstract concepts with a necessary tension, they suggest a way of entering the theoretical via the concrete and they show students the personal relevance of certain debates, which may have previously appeared remote and obscure. The end result is that students are challenged to make decisions about matters of fundamental importance such as the kinds of teachers they will be and about the ethical commitment they will make to teaching. (shrink)

OBJECTIVE: This paper addresses the question of the circumstances which lead clinicians to use legal coercion in the management of patients with severe anorexia nervosa, and explores similarities and differences between such formal coercion and other forms of 'strong persuasion' in patient management. METHOD: Logistic regression and other statistical analysis was undertaken on 75 first admissions for anorexia nervosa from a sample of 117 successive admissions to an eating disorder facility in New South Wales, Australia, where an eating disorder was (...) the primary diagnosis. Admissions with other primary diagnoses, such as bulimia nervosa (25 episodes), and entries with a co morbid diagnosis (e.g. depression or opiate overdose), were discarded, leaving 96 admissions by 75 individuals. RESULTS: Resort to measures of legal coercion into treatment was found to be associated with three main indicators: the patient's past history (number of previous admissions); the complexity of their condition (the number of other psychiatric co morbidities); and their current health risk (measured either by Body Mass Index or the risk of re-feeding syndrome). CONCLUSIONS: Our study is consistent with the few earlier studies about indicators for legal coercion in anorexia nervosa management, and suggests that clinicians use legal coercion very sparingly, distinguishing legal coercion from other forms of close clinical management of patients. (shrink)

Data Transfer Service (DTS) is an open-source project that is developing a document-centric message model for describing a bulk data transfer activity, with an accompanying set of loosely coupled and platform-independent components for brokering the transfer of data between a wide range of (potentially incompatible) storage resources as scheduled, fault-tolerant batch jobs. The architecture scales from small embedded deployments on a single computer to large distributed deployments through an expandable ‘worker-node pool’ controlled through message-orientated middleware. Data access and transfer efficiency (...) are maximized through the strategic placement of worker nodes at or between particular data sources/sinks. The design is inherently asynchronous, and, when third-party transfer is not available, it side-steps the bandwidth, concurrency and scalability limitations associated with buffering bytes directly through intermediary client applications. It aims to address geographical–topological deployment concerns by allowing service hosting to be either centralized (as part of a shared service) or confined to a single institution or domain. Established design patterns and open-source components are coupled with a proposal for a document-centric and open-standards-based messaging protocol. As part of the development of the message protocol, a bulk data copy activity document is proposed for the first time. (shrink)

The relationship between the social sciences and the cognitive sciences is underdeveloped and complicated, for reasons we will explain in this chapter, and the philosophical discussion of this relationship has the same properties. Many reasons for the lack of development relate to a traditional philosophical issue: explanation. The explanatory structure of cognitive science reasoning and argumentation is unusual and difcult to t into the traditional model of scientic explanation, though they do relate, in an odd way, to the traditional “reasons” (...) explanations discussed in the philosophy of social science, through the notion of “folk psychology.” The cognitive science explanations themselves, as they relate to traditional “social science” topics, involve additional problems. They depend on a strategy of reducing complexity by beginning with those aspects of mind that can be most readily simplied, such as perception and body movements. Therefore, traditional social science topics, such as social interaction, which cannot be readily simplied, are something of an afterthought. (shrink)

The rediscovery in the fifteenth century of Lucretius's De rerum natura was a challenge to received ideas. The poem offered a vision of the creation of the universe, the origins and goals of human life, and the formation of the state, all without reference to divine intervention. It has been hailed in Stephen Greenblatt's best-selling book, The Swerve, as the poem that invented modernity. But how modern did early modern readers want to become? From Lucretius' contemporary audience to the European (...) Enlightenment, this collection of essays offers a series of case studies which demonstrates the sophisticated ways in which some readers might relate the poem to received ideas, assimilating Lucretius to theories of natural law and even natural theology, while others were at once attracted to Lucretius's subversiveness and driven to dissociate themselves from him. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 8, Page 29-30, August 2011.

Strategic alliances are increasingly common, as many organizations look towards various partnering arrangements. This second edition of Strategies of Cooperation extends the first edition's clear and comprehensive survey of strategic alliances. Presenting different disciplinary perspectives and numerous examples from the corporate world. The text has been thoroughly revised and updated, taking account of new theoretical models, and its coverage of case studies has been extended. It will be ideal for business students and managers alike wishing to understand the challenges of (...) managing alliances. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

This is the ninth volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. Since its revival in the 1970s political philosophy has been a vibrant field in philosophy, one that intersects with jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory. OSPP aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in political philosophy and these closely related subfields.

We agree with Cramer et al.'s goal of the discovery of causal relationships, but we argue that the authors' characterization of latent variable models (as deployed for such purposes) overlooks a wealth of extant possibilities. We provide a preliminary analysis of their data, using existing algorithms for causal inference and for the specification of latent variable models.