In Practicing Safe Sects F. LeRon Shults provides scientific and philosophical resources for having “the talk” about religious reproduction: where do gods come from – and what are the costs of bearing them in our culturally pluralistic, ecologically fragile environment?

The highly sophisticated techniques of modern engineering are normally conceived of in practical terms. Corresponding to the instrumental function of technology, they are designed to direct the forces of nature according to human purposes. Yet, as soon as the realm of mere skills is exceeded, the intended useful results can only be achieved through planned and preconceived action processes involving the deliberately considered application of well designed tools and devices. This is to say that in all complex cases theoretical reasoning (...) becomes an indispensable means to accomplish the pragmatic technological aims. Hence the abstracting from the actual concrete function of technology opens the way to concentrate attention on the general conceptual framework involved. If this approach is adopted the relevant knowledge and the procedures applied clearly exhibit a logic of their own. This point of view leads to a methodological and even an epistemological analysis of the theoretical structure and the specific methods of procedure characteristic of modern technology. Investigations of this kind, that can be described as belonging to an ana lytical philosophy of technology, form the topic of this anthology. The type of research in question here is closely akin to that of the philosophy of science. But it is an astonishing fact that the commonly accepted and carefully investigated philosophy of science has not yet found its counterpart in an established philosophy of technology. (shrink)

BackgroundThis paper highlights the issues that one of the 90 Italian Research Ethics Committees (RECs) might encounter during the approval phase of a clinical trial to identify corrective and preventive actions for promoting a more efficient review process and ensuring review quality. Publications on the subject from Italy and the rest of Europe are limited; encouraging constructive debate can improve RECs’ service to the subject of the clinical trial.MethodsWe retrospectively reviewed a cohort of 822 clinical trial protocols, initially reviewed by (...) REC, from June 2014 to December 2018. Data collected for each protocol were type of trial, sample size, use of placebo, number and kind of revisions requested by the REC before approval, and time taken for approval. Data for each protocol were collected by a trained clinical research assistant using the REC’s files and electronic archives.ResultsAlmost 45% of the reviewed studies (374/822) required clarifications, significant changes to the documentation, or minor changes before final approval.ConclusionsPreventive measures are needed to reduce the number of requested corrections and thus also the time required for approval, while maintaining review quality. All critical points and proposals presented in this paper require harmonization through updates to European regulations, as regulatory harmonization produces better compliance with rules and reduces the number of changes required before the trials’ final approval. Such updates include the development of standardized formats for informed consent, the verification of any evidence in favor of using off-label treatments over placebo as comparators, using multidisciplinary staff in clinical trials with children and adolescents, improving the legal definition of RECs to assign responsibilities and ensure independence, and providing guidance for RECs to engage clinical research assistants in internal audits. (shrink)

I Introduction: Philosophy and Social Science Men "know," but they no longer are so certain that their knowledge will not be rearranged. ...

El artículo enfoca los problemas de convivencia en las ciudades latinoamericanas, marcadas por procesos de urbanización sin articulación, regidos por lógicas de poder y caracterizados por la falta de equilibrio y equidad. Se exploran las posibilidades de pasar de territorios de supervivencia, con relaciones sociales de dominio y violencia, a espacios de comunicación y a lugares de sentido, a través de prácticas, políticas y estrategias de convivencia.The article focuses on the problems of living in Latin American cities, marked by urbanization (...) processes without articulation, governed by logics of power and characterized by a lack of balance and fairness. It explores the possibilities to move from territories of survival, with social relationships of domination and violence, to communicative spaces and places of meaning through practices, policies and strategies of coexistence. (shrink)

In response to distant suffering, global civil society is being consumed by a generalized witnessing fever that converts public spaces into veritable machines for the production of testimonial discourses and evidence. However, bearing witness itself has tended to be treated as an exercise in truth-telling, a juridical outcome, a psychic phenomenon or a moral prescription. By contrast, this article conceives of bearing witness as a transnational mode of ethico-political labour, an arduous working-through produced out of the struggles of groups and (...) persons who engage in testimonial tasks in order to confront corresponding perils produced by instances of situational or structural violence; it is the work of witnessing, the normative and political substance generated through the performance of patterns of social action, which matters. Using Celan's allegory of the poem as a message in a bottle, I consider bearing witness as a web of cosmopolitan testimonial practices structured around five dialectically related tasks and perils: giving voice to mass suffering against silence (what if the message is never sent or does not reach land?); interpretation against incomprehension (what if it is written in a language that is undecipherable?); the cultivation of empathy against indifference (what if, after being read, it is discarded?); remembrance against forgetting (what if it is distorted or erased over time?); and prevention against repetition (what if it does not help to avert other forms of suffering?). (shrink)

In this paper I wish to argue for a view that, despite its traditional standing, has not yet in any detail been defended. The view is briefly that in the Republic, at the point where Plato is engaged in contrasting the true philosopher with the “lover of sights and sounds”, he characterises sensible particulars — referred to as “the many” — as being bearers of opposite properties in so radical a manner that they can be said neither to be nor (...) not to be: they lie somewhere between being and utter non-being.There are two related reasons why this traditional view should now be closely scrutinised. The first is that, whatever the outcome, the passage of the Republic in question — 475a-480a — is quite crucial to our understanding of the development of Plato's thought about sensible particulars. The second’ is that it has been suggested recently, and ably argued, that Plato is not in fact talking about particulars at all; rather about types or sorts of particulars. (shrink)