Delivering high quality genomics-informed care to patients requires accurate test results whose clinical implications are understood. While other actors, including state agencies, professional organizations, and clinicians, are involved, this article focuses on the extent to which the federal agencies that play the most prominent roles — the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services enforcing CLIA and the FDA — effectively ensure that these elements are met and concludes by suggesting possible ways to improve their oversight of genomic testing.

Playtime in urban cities has become an indoor activity for children due to limited access to natural outdoor environments. This product of urbanization makes the case for the introduction of biophilic design. However, playrooms are often neglected as a possibility in designing a natural space indoors. Interior designers and other specialists lack a reliable tool to identify and incorporate biophilic features into the design of these indoor environments in urban settings. The Biophilic Interior Design Matrix (BID-M) developed by McGee and (...) Marshall-Baker quantifies 52 of Kellert’s biophilic design attributes to assess their presence and absence within interior spaces. We expanded its use by testing the matrix in a new type of space, urban playrooms, and coded images of 45 children’s playrooms within Manhattan residential buildings in New York City, including assessing a larger sample and reliability rate compared to McGee and Marshall-Baker’s research. Inter-rater reliability of the overall design matrix and individual matrix items was measured with percent agreement and free-marginal multirater kappa. Reliability testing showed overall good reliability of the overall design matrix. Several matrix items had low reliability between raters. Our findings show that the BID-M needs to be modified to better assess urban interior spaces for children. (shrink)

In this seminal study, Barbara Galli explores Rosenzweig's statement that his notes to Halevi's poems exemplify a practical application of the philosophic ...

The mutual interaction and interdependence of race, class, and gender create profound political dilemmas for feminist activists. How can we create coherent, inclusive political movements when the very oppressions we seek to dismantle also divide us internally? This article seeks answers to this question by exploring the history of the Southeast Women's Employment Coalition, which throughout the 1980s sought to unify working-class women in the South across the divide of race. The article concludes that gender is insufficient to effect political (...) unity among racially diverse women, but that a “politics of solidarity,” based on an appreciation of the intersections of race, gender, and class, is possible. (shrink)

Confidentiality is a cornerstone of the physician-patient relationship. Breaches of confidentiality in the context of genetic testing are of particular concern for a number of reasons. First, genetic testing reveals information not only about a particular patient, but also about his or her family members. Second,genetic testing can label healthy people as “at risk,” subjecting them to possible stigmatization or discrimination by third parties. Third, as genetic testing becomes more widespread and is incorporated into primary care, breaches of confidentiality might (...) inadvertently occur more frequently because primary care providers may not be trained to understand the uniqueness of genetic information. Until now, genetic services have been provided primarily by medical geneticists and genetic counselors. However, with the proliferation of new genetic presymptomatic and carrier tests, primary care physicians are going to become increasingly involved in genetic testing. Currently, little is known about physicians’ attitudes toward disclosure of confidential genetic information to third parties. (shrink)

Although ethics consultation is offered as a clinical service in most hospitals in the United States, few valid and practical tools are available to evaluate, ensure, and improve ethics consultation quality. The quality of ethics consultation is important because poor quality ethics consultation can result in ethically inappropriate outcomes for patients, other stakeholders, or the health care system. To promote accountability for the quality of ethics consultation, we developed the Ethics Consultation Quality Assessment Tool. ECQAT enables raters to assess the (...) quality of ethics consultations based on the written record. Through rigorous development and preliminary testing, we identified key elements of a quality ethics consultation, established scoring criteria, developed training guidelines, and designed a holistic assessment process. This article describes the development of the ECQAT,.. (shrink)

Confidentiality is a cornerstone of the physician-patient relationship. Breaches of confidentiality in the context of genetic testing are of particular concern for a number of reasons. First, genetic testing reveals information not only about a particular patient, but also about his or her family members. Second,genetic testing can label healthy people as “at risk,” subjecting them to possible stigmatization or discrimination by third parties. Third, as genetic testing becomes more widespread and is incorporated into primary care, breaches of confidentiality might (...) inadvertently occur more frequently because primary care providers may not be trained to understand the uniqueness of genetic information. Until now, genetic services have been provided primarily by medical geneticists and genetic counselors. However, with the proliferation of new genetic presymptomatic and carrier tests, primary care physicians are going to become increasingly involved in genetic testing. Currently, little is known about physicians’ attitudes toward disclosure of confidential genetic information to third parties. (shrink)

No consensus yet exists on how to handle incidental fnd-ings in human subjects research. Yet empirical studies document IFs in a wide range of research studies, where IFs are fndings beyond the aims of the study that are of potential health or reproductive importance to the individual research participant. This paper reports recommendations of a two-year project group funded by NIH to study how to manage IFs in genetic and genomic research, as well as imaging research. We conclude that researchers (...) have an obligation to address the possibility of discovering IFs in their protocol and communications with the IRB, and in their consent forms and communications with research participants. Researchers should establish a pathway for handling IFs and communicate that to the IRB and research participants. We recommend a pathway and categorize IFs into those that must be disclosed to research participants, those that may be disclosed, and those that should not be disclosed. (shrink)

The authors of this article are previous or current members of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs (CECA) Committee, a standing committee of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH). The committee is composed of seasoned healthcare ethics consultants (HCECs), and it is charged with developing and disseminating education materials for HCECs and ethics committees. The purpose of this article is to describe the educational research and development processes behind our teaching materials, which culminated in a case studies book called (...) A Case-Based Study Guide for Addressing Patient-Centered Ethical Issues in Health Care (hereafter, the Study Guide). In this article, we also enumerate how the Study Guide could be used in teaching and learning, and we identify areas that are ripe for future work. (shrink)

Barbara Jordan (1936–1996), a formidable politician, won election to the Texas Senate (1966) and to the US Congress (1972). She became one of the most celebrated African‐American politicians of the twentieth century, acclaimed both by white and black. Jordan was a voluntarist, viewing individuals as able to change the world through their own actions. She was committed to the American dream of inclusion, and also to the importance of positive ties to elites; to coping with the ‘world as it (...) is’, to the futility of confrontation, and also to changing and influencing the attitudes of men at the top. Jordan opposed civil disobedience, nonviolent or not. Yet she admired symbols of defiance like Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali. A highly public figure, she was also exceptionally self‐repressed. Critics likened her to the conservative Booker Washington, yet she was a staunch defender of voting rights and a radical integrationist. (shrink)

The crystal δ‐endotoxins of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) are a family of insecticidal proteins which have been known for some time to kill insects by lysing their gut epithelial cells, but the precise molecular mechanism of toxicity has remained elusive. The recent publication of the crystal structure of a Bt δ‐endotoxin has made it possible for us to model the molecular events that occur as the toxin binds to its receptor and inserts into the membrane to form a pore. Using our (...) knowledge of insect gut physiology, we can also predict the effect on the insect of the formation of a toxic pore. We present a new model to explain the events that occur in the insect gut during toxin action. (shrink)

Diverse legal and regulatory measures are used internationally to control the information provided during pharmaceutical sales visits. Little is known about the comparative effectiveness of these measures however. We analyzed the perceptions of regulators, pharmaceutical industry officials, health professionals, and consumer respondents concerning these approaches in Canada, France, and the United States using an empirical realist interests-based approach. Interviews focused on the aims and effectiveness of regulation, barriers and enablers to regulation and suggestions for improvement. An alignment was found in (...) North America regulator and industry respondents' satisfaction with the status quo and their view that further intervention is unfeasible and unnecessary. Health professionals generally expressed a lack of confidence in the impact of regulations on sales visit information while consumer advocates voiced their disappointment in both regulators and health professionals for their failure to counteract the influence of pharmaceutical marketing. Regulator and industry respondents in France differed from their North American counterparts in their willingness to increase and diversify the scope of regulatory interventions. As the first international comparison of regulatory experiences in this sector, the findings highlight the universal need for more focused and inclusive discussions among groups about how to tailor regulations to achieve public health goals. (shrink)

This essay develops its idiosyncrasy by concentrating primarily on the trend of body hacking. The practitioners, self-defined as body hackers, self-made cyborgs or grinders, work in different ways to develop functional and physiological modifications through the contributions of technology. Their goal is to develop by themselves an empirically man-technique fusion. These dynamic “scientific” subcultures are producing astonishing innovations. From pocket-sized kits that sample human DNA, microchip implants that keep tabs on our internal organs, blood sugar levels or moods, and even (...) 3D printers that produce tailored hip replacements, the technical innovations of the body hacking trend are beginning to filter into mainstream use, and the repertoire increases every day. These physical transformations with intersecting techniques actively challenge long-held normative beliefs about what bodies do, what they should look like and how they should behave. They provide an alternative discourse on man’s correlation with the world and its biocenosis. Sculpting oneself has become an existential data. Medical technoscience crystallizes the effectiveness of new powers over the organism. Scientific temptation to recreate and enhance the human according to its normative principles has brought up experimental practices that have become the edge of a radical activism operating in the core of western societies, which will be the theme of this paper. (shrink)

Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination Ruth H. Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800 Barbara Taylor entitles her new book Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. The imagination in question is Wollstonecraft's, but, like Wollstonecraft, Taylor is interested in the imagination more generally, both the problems that the imagination gets women into and the ways in which the feminist imagination can get women out of those problems and help them imagine a more just and (...) equitable future. Ruth H. Bloch's aim in Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800, the newly published collection of her essays, is somewhat more modest. Although her chief objective is to analyze the transformation in American views about women, gender, the family, and religion in the era of the American Revolution, she also offers case studies in the use of a culturalist approach to feminist history. Although there are important differences in approach and subject matter between these two books, their similarities and areas of overlap—not the least of which is that their authors are two of the best feminist intellectual historians at work today—make it instructive to review them together. (shrink)

At 30 years' distance, it is safe to say that Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia has achieved the status of a classic. It is not only the central text for all contemporary academic discussions of libertarianism; with Rawls's A Theory of Justice, it arguably frames the landscape of academic political philosophy in second half of 20th century. Many factors, obviously account for the prominence of the book. This paper considers one: the book's use of rhetoric to charm and disarm its (...) readers, simultaneously establishing Nozick's credibility with readers, turning them on his ideological opponents, and helping his argument over some of its more serious substantive difficulties. Footnotesa I am grateful to Joe Bankman, Tom Grey, Pam Karlan, Ellen Frankel Paul, Seana Shiffrin, and Bob Weisberg for their very helpful comments on previous drafts of this essay. I am also grateful to my fellow contributors to this volume and to the participants in the Berkeley GALA and the UCLA Law and Philosophy Workshop, at which earlier versions of this essay were presented. All errors and indiscretions are mine alone. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 11.1 (2001) 113 [Access article in PDF] Letters Rats, Mice, and Birds and the Animal Welfare Act Madam:In the September 2000 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, I argued for the inclusion of laboratory rats, mice, and birds under provisions of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA). This act sets humane standards for animals used in biomedical experimentation, but these three species are (...) excluded despite the fact that they comprise 90 percent of all animals used. Recent actions have been taken on this issue that temporarily maintain the status quo of exclusion.On 25 September 2000, a legal suit brought by the Alternatives Research Development Fund was settled out of court when the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed that the AWA enforcement regulations should be extended to rats, mice, and birds. This was a significant victory heralded by the animal protection movement and some sections of the scientific community. Federal Court Judge Ellen S. Huvelle dismissed motions by pro-animal research groups to block this agreement.But the tide soon turned. On 11 October, a last-minute amendment to the USDA appropriations bill submitted by the Senate Appropriations Committee chair Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) precluded the department from spending any funds in the coming fiscal year to effect this change. This amendment had been drafted by the National Association for Biomedical Research and passed to the University of Mississippi to be forwarded to Cochran. This now congressionally approved amendment postponed for a year any action to implement the legal agreement. USDA plans to initiate the formal rule-making process for rats, mice, and birds by 1 October 2001. F. Barbara Orlans Senior Research Fellow Kennedy Institute of Ethics Georgetown University Washington, DC... (shrink)

The book provides a series of approaches to the ancient question of whether and how God is a matter of "experience," or, alternately, to what extent the notion of experience can be true to itself if it does not include God. On the one hand, it seems impossible to experience God: the deity does not offer Himself to sense experience. On the other hand, there have been mystics who have claimed to have encountered God. The essays in this collection seek (...) to explore the topic again, drawing insights from phenomenology, theology, literature, and feminism. Throughout, this stimulating collection maintains a strong connection with concrete rather than abstract approaches to God. The contributors: Michael F. Andrews, Jeffrey Bloechl, John D. Caputo, Kristine Culp, Kevin Hart, Kevin L. Hughes, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Crystal Lucky, Renee McKenzie, Kim Paffenroth, Michael Purcell, Michael J. Scanlon, O.S.A., James K. A. Smith. (shrink)

Governmental and non-governmentalagencies worldwide have devoted considerablefinancial, technical, and organizational efforts toconstruct or rehabilitate irrigation infrastructure inthe last three decades. Although rural povertyalleviation was often one of their aims, evidenceshows that rights to irrigated land and water wererarely vested in poor men, and even less in poorwomen. In spite of the strong role of irrigationagencies in vesting rights to irrigated land and waterin some people and not in others, the importance ofagencies‘ targeting practices is still ignored.This article disentangles how public (...) irrigationagencies either included or excluded women and mensmallholders as right holders to irrigated land andwater. This is done on the basis of significant casestudies from Africa, Asia, and Latin America thatpoint in both positive and negative directions. Thegeneral conclusions are the following. Rights toirrigated land are related to the site-selection andphysical design of land-bound irrigationinfrastructure. These rights are vested in the pooreither by implementing a localized land reform or bydirectly selecting poor people‘s land forimprovement. Among all potential land users in aselected site, water rights have to be defined. Thepoor are included as title holders if water rights arevested in land users rather than land owners, and inboth women and men, rather than in male householdheads. A common condition to get water rights is thatone has to participate in construction investments.Agencies need, firstly, to open up this condition forthe poor, also for women, and, secondly, ensure thatpoor people‘s investments are linked to rights.Parallel to vesting land and water rights, externalagencies influence the composition of the local forumsin which decisions on land and water rights arerefined, endorsed, and implemented, and they influencethe order in which project activities are planned andundertaken. Early inclusion of the poor in theseforums and crystallization of expropriation andallocation criteria and procedures before constructionstarts are pivotal for poverty alleviation. (shrink)

The problem, of man falls into a category of problems of human knowledge that are both ‘eternal’ and ever new. Countless legends, myths, philosophical systems, religious doctrines, scientific conceptions and fantastic visions have been the fruit of man's ungovernable desire to know himself, to know his essence, his purpose in the world, his fate, his future. Not to mention the ingenious hypotheses and Utopian fantasms, scientific truths and galling mistakes, bold projects and cowardly superstitions handed on by human civilization in (...) its Indefatigable search for the ‘magic crystal’ which would at last reveal man's true nature. All periods have made their contribution In this everlasting quest and all have relied on the few parcels of truth gleaned by humanity at earlier stages of development. Our times, the most dramatic and revolutionary of all, are by no means an exception and can be distinguished from the rest only by the exceptional acuity and urgency of the problem. (shrink)

When reflecting on the nature of skilled action, it is easy to fall into familiar dichotomies such that one construes the flexibility and intelligence of skill at the level of intentional states while characterizing the automatic motor processes that constitute motor skill execution as learned but fixed, invariant, bottom-up, brute-causal responses. In this essay, I will argue that this picture of skilled, automatic, motor processes is overly simplistic. Specifically, I will argue that an adequate account of the learned motor routines (...) that constitute embodied skills cannot be given in a purely bottom-up, brute-causal fashion. Rather, motor control is intelligent all the way down. To establish this, I will first review two recent accounts of skill, Stanley and Krakauer (Front Hum Neurosci, 2013. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.0050) and Papineau (R Inst Philos Suppl 73:175–196, 2013), which characterize the automatic motor control responsible for the fine-grained movements constitutive of motor skill as brute, low-level phenomena. I will then isolate five key features that should apply to skilled motor control, if these accounts are correct. Together, the accounts posit that motor control is: (1) ballistic, (2) invariant, (3) independent of general action trajectories, (4) Insensitive to semantic content, and (5) independent of personal-level intentions. In the final section of this paper, I will appeal to optimal control theory for empirical evidence to challenge the commitment to skilled action as qualified by the above features. (shrink)

The broaden‐and‐build theory (CitationFredrickson, 1998, Citation2001) hypothesises that positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought‐action repertoires. Two experiments with 104 college students tested these hypotheses. In each, participants viewed a film that elicited (a) amusement, (b) contentment, (c) neutrality, (d) anger, or (e) anxiety. Scope of attention was assessed using a global‐local visual processing task (Experiment 1) and thought‐action repertoires were assessed using a Twenty Statements Test (Experiment 2). Compared to a neutral state, positive emotions broadened the scope (...) of attention in Experiment 1 and thought‐action repertoires in Experiment 2. In Experiment 2, negative emotions, relative to a neutral state, narrowed thought‐action repertoires. Implications for promoting emotional well‐being and physical health are discussed. (shrink)

Some health care organizations allow physicians to withhold cardiopulmonary resuscitation from a patient, despite patient or surrogate requests that it be provided, when they believe it will be more harmful than beneficial. Such cases usually involve patients with terminal diagnoses whose medical teams argue that aggressive treatments are medically inappropriate or likely to be harmful. Although there is state-to-state variability and a considerable judicial gray area about the conditions and mechanisms for refusals to perform CPR, medical teams typically follow a (...) set of clearly defined procedures for these decisions. The procedures are based on the principle of nonmaleficence and typically include consultation with hospital ethics committees, reflecting the guidelines of relevant professional associations. Ethical debates about when CPR can and should be limited tend to rely more on discussions of theory, principles, and case studies than systematic empirical study of the situations in which such limitations are applied. Sociologists of bioethics call for empirical study, arguing that what ethicists and health professionals believe they are doing when they draft policies or invoke principles does not always mirror what is happening on the ground. In this article, we begin the task of modeling the empirical analyses sociologists call for, focusing on a cohort at Massachusetts General Hospital. We inductively analyzed ethics committee notes and medical records of nineteen patients whose surrogates did not accept the decision to withhold CPR. (shrink)

Nanotechnology will allegedly have a revolutionary impact in a wide range of fields, but has also created novel concerns about health, safety and the environment (HSE). Nanotechnology regulation has nevertheless lagged behind nanotechnology development. In 2004 the International Organization for Standardization established a technical committee for producing nanotechnology standards for terminology, measurements, HSE issues and product specifications. These standards are meant to play a role in nanotechnology development, as well as in national and international nanotechnology regulation, and will therefore have (...) consequences for consumers, workers and the environment. This paper gives an overview of the work in the technical committee on nanotechnology and discusses some challenges with regard to legitimacy in such work. The paper focuses particularly on stakeholder involvement and the potential problems of scientific robustness when standardising in such early stages of the scientific development. The intention of the paper is to raise some important issues rather than to draw strong conclusions. However, the paper will be concluded with some suggestions for improving legitimacy in the TC 229 and a call for increased public awareness about standardisation in the field of nanotechnology. (shrink)

I argue for the usefulness of the evolutionary kind of biological individual.

_Retrieving Political Emotion _engages the reader in an excursion through our ancient Greek heritage to recover a concept of emotion useful for enriching political philosophy today. Focusing on _thumos_, Barbara Koziak reveals misinterpretations of the concept that have hampered recognition of its possibilities for normative theory. Then, drawing especially on Aristotle's construal of it as a general capacity for emotion and relating this to contemporary multidisciplinary work on emotion, she reformulates _thumos_ to provide a more adequate theory of political (...) emotion, as an antidote to the modern fixation on rational self-interest as the key to explaining political behavior. The book proceeds by recounting the way _thumos_ is used in Homer's _Iliad_ and Plato's _Republic_ and then showing how, while borrowing from both, Aristotle went substantially beyond them. From the _Nicomachean Ethics and Politics_ we can see the activity of _thumos_—how a person with good _thumos_ acts and through which institutions. Through the _Poetics_ we observe the characteristic disposition of _thumos_—what patterns and objects typify a person's emotional capacity in the best regime. Her reconstructed Aristotelian theory of political emotion allows Koziak in the concluding chapter to show how it can help us better understand political behavior today, as manifested in recent congressional debates on welfare reform, and through constructive engagement with feminist thinking on the "ethics of care" lead political theory to pay more attention to the importance of passions in political life. (shrink)

The ethical matrix approach was developed by Prof Ben Mepham and his colleagues at the University of Nottingham in the early 1990s. Since then the approach has received increasing attention and has been used by several researchers in different projects related to assessing ethical impacts of different food production technologies and other policy options of societal concern. The ethical matrix is sometimes understood simply as a checklist of ethical concerns, but might also be seen as a guide to coming to (...) conclusions on moral questions. The problem I discuss in this paper relates to how using the ethical matrix method as a decision guide can be combined with respecting pluralism. The aim of the paper is to suggest a framework making it possible to – at the same time – enhance public justification of judgments and respect pluralism. I argue that pluralism is fundamental to the ethical matrix approach; I distinguish between intuitionist principled pluralism and societal value pluralism; and I show how both kinds of pluralism imply restrictions on how conclusions can be made. No substantive moral decision principles can be allowed. Still, I argue, decision principles of a more epistemological or procedural character can be acceptable even within pluralism. The pragmatist principle of inquiry is defended as an account of moral problem solving compatible with both principled pluralism and value pluralism. When an ethical matrix is used within such a participatory inquiry process substantive conclusions can be drawn. (shrink)

Building on agency and resource-based view theories, this study investigates the level of environmental disclosure (ED) practices of family versus non-family firms and explores the moderating role of board gender diversity. We test our hypotheses on a 3-year (2018–2020) panel data sample comprising 324 observations of Italian small- and medium-sized enterprises traded on the Euronext Growth Milan. Findings show that, compared to non-family firms, companies with a family firm status are characterized by lower levels of ED. Gender diversity on the (...) board, however, moderates this relationship, reducing this gap, to the extent that the family firm status is associated with higher ED when the number of women directors is high enough to constitute a critical mass. We consequently contribute to the studies on family business, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

In this article, I revisit Landau and Jackendoff's () paper, “What and where in spatial language and spatial cognition,” proposing a friendly amendment and reformulation. The original paper emphasized the distinct geometries that are engaged when objects are represented as members of object kinds, versus when they are represented as figure and ground in spatial expressions. We provided empirical and theoretical arguments for the link between these distinct representations in spatial language and their accompanying nonlinguistic neural representations, emphasizing the “what” (...) and “where” systems of the visual system. In the present paper, I propose a second division of labor between two classes of spatial prepositions in English that appear to be quite distinct. One class includes prepositions such as in and on, whose core meanings engage force-dynamic, functional relationships between objects, with geometry only a marginal player. The second class includes prepositions such as above/below and right/left, whose core meanings engage geometry, with force-dynamic relationships a passing or irrelevant variable. The insight that objects’ force-dynamic relationships matter to spatial terms’ uses is not new; but thinking of these terms as a distinct set within spatial language has theoretical and empirical consequences that are new. I propose three such consequences, rooted in the fact that geometric knowledge is highly constrained and early-emerging in life, while force-dynamic knowledge of objects and their interactions is relatively unconstrained and needs to be learned piecemeal over a lengthy timeline. First, the two classes will engage different learning problems, with different developmental trajectories for both first and second language learners; second, the classes will naturally lead to different degrees of cross-linguistic variation; and third, they may be rooted in different neural representations. (shrink)

We investigate the complexity of isomorphisms of computable structures on cones in the Turing degrees. We show that, on a cone, every structure has a strong degree of categoricity, and that degree of categoricity is${\rm{\Delta }}_\alpha ^0 $-complete for someα. To prove this, we extend Montalbán’sη-system framework to deal with limit ordinals in a more general way. We also show that, for any fixed computable structure, there is an ordinalαand a cone in the Turing degrees such that the exact complexity (...) of computing an isomorphism between the given structure and another copy${\cal B}$in the cone is a c.e. degree in${\rm{\Delta }}_\alpha ^0\left$. In each of our theorems the cone in question is clearly described in the beginning of the proof, so it is easy to see how the theorems can be viewed as general theorems with certain effectiveness conditions. (shrink)

The nonconsequentialist revival in tort theory has focused almost exclusively on one issue: showing that the rules governing compensation for acts reflect corrective justice rather than welfarist norms. The literature either is silent on what makes an act wrongful in the first place or suggests criteria that seem indistinguishable from some version of cost/benefit analysis. As a result, cost/benefit analysis is currently the only game in town for determining appropriate standards of conduct for socially useful but risky acts. This is (...) no small omission, and the failure of nonconsequentialists to acknowledge it or cure it can be traced to a number of recurring problems in the nonconsequentialist tort literature. Chief among them is the tendency to conflate prohibition and compensation, and to treat imposition of risk and imposition of harm as if they were distinct forms of conduct rather than the same conduct viewed from different temporal perspectives. (shrink)

Barbara Stafford is a pioneering art historian whose research has long helped to bridge the divide between the humanities and cognitive sciences. In _A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field_, she marshals a distinguished group of thinkers to forge a ground-breaking dialogue between the emerging brain sciences, the liberal arts, and social sciences. Stafford’s book examines meaning and mental function from this dual experimental perspective. The wide-ranging essays included here—from Frank Echenhofer’s foray into shamanist hallucinogenic visions to David Bashwiner’s (...) analysis of emotion and danceability—develop a common language for implementing programmatic and institutional change. Demonstrating how formerly divided fields are converging around shared issues, _A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field _maps a high-level, crossdisciplinary adventure from one of our leading figures in visual studies. (shrink)

This collection of essays provides a reassessment of the question of sexual difference, taking into account important shifts in feminist thought, post-humanist theories, and queer studies. The contributors offer new and refreshing insights into the complex question of sexual difference from a post-feminist perspective, and how it is reformulated in various related areas of study, such as ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, biology, technology, and mass-media.

The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings provides definitive anthology of early Christian texts, from c.100 to 650 CE. Its six volumes reflect the cultural, intellectual and linguistic diversity of early Christianity and are organized thematically on the topics of God, practice, Christ, community, reading and creation. The series expands the pool of source material to include not only Greek and Latin writings, but also Syriac and Coptic texts. Additionally, the series rejects a theologically normative view by juxtaposing texts that (...) were important in antiquity but later deemed 'heretical', with orthodox texts. The translations are accompanied by introductions, notes, suggestions for further reading and scriptural indices. The second volume is focused on the topic of practice, including texts on education, advice, forming communities and instructing congregations. It will be an invaluable resource for students, academic researchers in early Christian studies, history of Christianity, theology, religious studies and late antique Roman history. (shrink)