This book offers a reconstruction of the debate on non-Euclidean geometry in neo-Kantianism between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Kant famously characterized space and time as a priori forms of intuitions, which lie at the foundation of mathematical knowledge. The success of his philosophical account of space was due not least to the fact that Euclidean geometry was widely considered to be a model of certainty at his time. However, such (...) later scientific developments as non-Euclidean geometries and Einstein’s general theory of relativity called into question the certainty of Euclidean geometry and posed the problem of reconsidering space as an open question for empirical research. The transformation of the concept of space from a source of knowledge to an object of research can be traced back to a tradition, which includes such mathematicians as Carl Friedrich Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, Richard Dedekind, Felix Klein, and Henri Poincaré, and which finds one of its clearest expressions in Hermann von Helmholtz’s epistemological works. Although Helmholtz formulated compelling objections to Kant, the author reconsiders different strategies for a philosophical account of the same transformation from a neo-Kantian perspective, and especially Hermann Cohen’s account of the aprioricity of mathematics in terms of applicability and Ernst Cassirer’s reformulation of the a priori of space in terms of a system of hypotheses. This book is ideal for students, scholars and researchers who wish to broaden their knowledge of non-Euclidean geometry or neo-Kantianism. (shrink)

Randomised placebo-controlled trials (RPCTs) are the gold standard for evaluating novel treatments. However, this design is rarely used in the context of orthopaedic interventions where participants are assigned to a real or placebo surgery. The present study examines attitudes towards RPCTs for orthopaedic surgery among 687 orthopaedic surgeons across the USA. When presented with a vignette describing an RPCT for orthopaedic surgery, 52.3% of participants viewed it as ‘completely’ or ‘mostly’ unethical. Participants were also asked to rank-order the value of (...) five different types of evidence supporting the efficacy of a surgery, ranging from RPCT to an anecdotal report. Responses regarding RPCTs were polarised with 26.4% viewing it as theleastvaluable (even less valuable than an anecdote) and 35.7.% viewing it as themostvaluable. Where equipoise exists, if we want to subject orthopaedic surgeries to the highest standard of evidence (RPCTs) before they are implemented in clinical practice, it will be necessary to educate physicians on the value and ethics of placebo surgery control conditions. Otherwise, invasive procedures may be performed without any benefits beyond possible placebo effects. (shrink)

The first formal definition of randomness, seen as a property of sequences of events or experimental outcomes, dates back to Richard von Mises' work in the foundations of probability and statistics. The randomness notion introduced by von Mises is nowadays widely regarded as being too weak. This is, to a large extent, due to the work of Jean Ville, which is often described as having dealt the death blow to von Mises' approach, and which was integral to the development of (...) algorithmic randomness—the now-standard theory of randomness for elements of a probability space. The main goal of this article is to trace the history and provide an in-depth appraisal of two lesser-known, yet historically and methodologically notable proposals for how to modify von Mises' definition so as to avoid Ville's objection. The first proposal is due to Abraham Wald, while the second one is due to Claus-Peter Schnorr. We show that, once made precise in a natural way using computability theory, Wald's proposal constitutes a much more radical departure from von Mises' framework than intended. Schnorr's proposal, on the other hand, does provide a partial vindication of von Mises' approach: it demonstrates that it is possible to obtain a satisfactory randomness notion—indeed, a canonical algorithmic randomness notion—by characterizing randomness in terms of the invariance of limiting relative frequencies. More generally, we argue that Schnorr's proposal, together with a number of little-known related results, reveals that there is more continuity than typically acknowledged between von Mises' approach and algorithmic randomness. Even though von Mises' exclusive focus on limiting relative frequencies did not survive the passage to the theory of algorithmic randomness, another crucial aspect of his conception of randomness did endure; namely, the idea that randomness amounts to a certain type of stability or invariance under an appropriate class of transformations. (shrink)

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people (...) who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology. (shrink)

This article revisits a famous staple of the Vergilian tradition, Servius's heavily contested scholion on the actress Volumnia Cytheris's theatrical rendition of Vergil's sixth Eclogue. By shifting the focus of inquiry from the strictly historical question ‘ did it happen?’ it cuts through, identifies and disentangles a nexus of prejudices which have led to the devaluing of Servius's information. The sidelining or dismissal of this piece of evidence, I argue, has more to teach us about our own culturally entrenched and (...) discipline-inherited assumptions than about what could have happened in late Republican Rome. Scrutiny of the evidence on the stage re-mediation of high poetry suggests it is entirely plausible that Cytheris would have performed a theatricalized version of Vergil's masterpiece. Indeed at the very heart of the story lies the convergence between élite poetry and the world of professional stage artists. Moreover, Cytheris's possible performance of a repertoire that coincides with the mythological core of pantomime dancing in its artistic maturity opens pivotal questions concerning what Plutarch aptly calls the “full association and mutual entanglement” between the arts of poetry and dance. Taking Servius seriously gives us the impetus to explore more decisively dimensions of Roman life that have been messily sidelined as a result of the systematic privileging of “texts” in our surveys of Roman intellectual landscapes over the centuries. Even if Servius's extract turned out to be no more than a “myth”, an “anecdote”, as such narratives go, this is an incredibly helpful one, provided we are willing to press it into the service of larger inquiries regarding the “circulation” of cultural energy between élite and popular culture. (shrink)

It has sometimes been said that it is useless to try to prevent wars since man has an ineradicable combative instinct. The term instinct is very ambiguous in its application to humans, and it may be interesting to see what occurs amongst the insects, many of whose species show the highest development of instinctive behaviour.Many insect species are predatory, but if they depend on other distinct species, the relation is analogous to hunting or to a crude form of agriculture. Aggressive (...) behaviour to be comparable with war must concern the different members of one species. There are many laboratory experiments which illustrate the effects of competition when a population begins to exceed the capacity of its food supply. In Flour beetles, for instance, the adult beetles and the larvae eat any egg or pupae which they happen to meet in their ceaseless burrowing through the flour. There is thus a fixed population density at which eggs are eaten as fast as they are laid. In Grain weevils, the effect of crowding is to reduce the rate at which eggs are laid by the females who appear to suffer from overstimulation when crowded. Other effects, usually harmful, may be produced by the accumulation of the products of respiration or of digestion. Finally, if the food supply is too small, there will be death from starvation. If, for instance, too many blowfly eggs are added to a piece of meat, the flies produced will either be small, weak, and infertile or, if the excess has been too great, the larvae may all starve when half grown. Thus, a piece of meat which could have produced 100 normal flies may produce none at all if a tenfold excess of eggs is laid on it. (shrink)

Robert P. George, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, xvi + 241 pp.

This is an excellent article, probably the best there is in defence of prohibiting the sale of organs, and it deserves a much fuller discussion of detail than there is space for here.1 My concerns, however, are with generalities rather than detail. Although some such argument might justify prohibition of organ selling in particular places and at particular times, it is difficult to see how it could support the kind of general, universal policy currently accepted by most advocates of prohibition.Whenever (...) the subject of organ selling is discussed, it is useful to keep in mind the natural history of the debate. Prohibition was instituted by most governments and professional bodies just about as quickly as possible after it was discovered that payment for kidneys was going on, and was a direct response to feelings of moral outrage. It all happened without time for debate. It was only later, as challenges appeared, that justifications began to be produced; and when they did they followed a pattern long familiar to philosophers, and more recently recognised by moral psychologists, of determined efforts to find a justification for the initial intuition that organ selling must be wrong. New arguments kept appearing in the cause as earlier attempts were shown to fail, and many were so weak that they could not have seemed plausible unless their advocates had already been committed to their conclusion. This does not mean, of course, that a good justification could never be produced. It does, however, suggest a widespread feeling that organ selling must be intrinsically …. (shrink)

Informal arguments are integral to socioscientific discourse. However, even university students often struggle to judge the plausibility of arguments accurately. We investigated whether strategic reanalysis while reading, i.e., looking back and rereading parts of a text, predicts the likelihood of detecting and processing implausible arguments. In two experiments, participants’ eye movements were recorded while they read arguments embedded in an expository text. The text was presented passage by passage and participants judged the plausibility of each section in turn. The results (...) of Experiment 1 (N = 51) and preregistered Experiment 2 (N = 93) suggest that processing arguments containing argumentation fallacies are cognitively effortful, as indicated by eye movement measures of reanalysis of implausible arguments. The pattern of results supports the idea that successful detection and processing of implausible information is reflected in increased reanalysis of flawed arguments, corresponding to strategic processes of epistemic elaboration. Experiment 3 (N = 115) further examined whether plausibility judgements reflect reasoners’ perceived argument strength. Our results suggest that reasoners perceive arguments as plausible when they deem them both persuasive and free of argumentation fallacies. (shrink)

Who can divine the intentions of the human heart, the motives that guide behavior? Some of the reasons for our actions lie on the surface of consciousness, whereas others are more deeply embedded in the recesses of the mind. Recovering motives and intentions is a principal job of the historian. For without some attribution of mental attitudes, actions cannot be characterized and decisions assessed. The same overt behavior, after all, might be described as “mailing a letter” or “fomenting a revolution.” (...) The recovery of intentions is crucial for the historian’s narrative. (shrink)

Women who had had breast cancer and had been enrolled in a large genetic breast cancer epidemiological study were interviewed about their experience of participation in the study, their attitudes to the confidentiality of data, and the feedback of personal and general research results. Collection of family history information seemed more salient in indicating the genetic nature of the study than the enrolment information sheet. There were no concerns about confidentiality.While participants would have welcomed general feedback about the results of (...) the study and were critical that this had not been provided, the feedback of personal information proved complicated and, sometimes, difficult. It is suggested that individual feedback of genetic test information in epidemiological studies should be undertaken only when there are specific reasons. (shrink)

Logical psychologism is the position that logic is a special branch of psychology, that logical laws are descriptíons of experience to be arrived at through observation, and are a posteriori.The accepted arguments against logical psychologism are effective only when directed against this extreme version. However, the clauses in the above characterization are independent and ambiguous, and may be considered separately. This separation permits a reconsideration of less extreme attempts to tie logic to psychology, such as those defended by Mill and (...) Boole. It also provides the basis for a reexamination of the relationship between logic and psychology, and raises the possibility of a deeper investigation into the nature of logic itself. (shrink)

In a series of articles and in a recent book, What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor has objected to Darwin’s principle of natural selection on the grounds that it assumes nature has intentions.1 Despite the near universal rejection of Fodor’s argument by biologists and philosophers of biology (myself included),2 I now believe he was almost right. I will show this through a historical examination of a principle that Darwin thought as important as natural selection, his principle of divergence. The principle (...) was designed to explain a phenomenon obvious to any observer of nature, namely, that animals and plants form a hierarchy of clusters. Theodosius Dobzhansky made this the motivating observation of his great synthesizing work, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937): “the living world is not a single array of individuals in which any two variants are connected by a series of intergrades, but an array of more or less distinctly separate arrays, intermediates between which are absent or at least rare. . . Small.. (shrink)

There is extensive discussion of the ethical, social, economic and political issues associated with the use of technologies based on DNA techniques. Many of these debates are premised on the assumption that DNA, and the genetic information that may be derived from it, have unique features which raise new social and ethical issues. In this paper it is argued that several of the features associated with DNA which are sometimes regarded as unique are shared with other biological materials. Others owe (...) more to the cultural image of DNA and some of the metaphors used to discuss it in biology and in wider debates than to the biological properties of DNA. The paper discusses the concepts of genetic material and genetic information and the social construction of DNA in relation to forensic DNA databases, paternity testing and genetic testing for disease. The paper concludes by suggesting that there are seven areas where issues related to DNA and genetic information are at least relatively distinct. (shrink)

BACKGROUND Patients with chronic pain face significant barriers in finding clinicians to manage long-term opioid therapy (LTOT). For patients on LTOT, it is increasingly common to have them sign opioid treatment agreements (OTAs). OTAs enumerate the risks of opioids, as informed consent documents would, but also the requirements that patients must meet to receive LTOT. While there has been an ongoing scholarly discussion about the practical and ethical implications of OTA use in the abstract, little is known about how clinicians (...) use them and if OTAs themselves modify clinician prescribing practices. OBJECTIVE To determine how clinicians use OTAs and the potential impacts of OTAs on opioid prescribing. DESIGN We conducted qualitative analysis of four focus groups of clinicians from a large Midwestern academic medical center. Groups were organized according to self-identified prescribing patterns: two groups for clinicians who identified as prescribers of LTOT, and two who did not. PARTICIPANTS 17 clinicians from General Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, and Palliative Care were recruited using purposive, convenience sampling. APPROACH Discussions were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for themes using reflexive thematic analysis by a multidisciplinary team. KEY RESULTS Our analysis identified three main themes: (1) OTAs did not influence clinicians’ decisions whether to use LTOT generally but did shape clinical decision-making for individual patients; (2) clinicians feel OTAs intensify the power they have over patients, though this was not uniformly judged as harmful; (3) there is a potential misalignment between the intended purposes of OTAs and their implementation. CONCLUSION This study reveals a complicated relationship between OTAs and access to pain management. While OTAs seem not to impact the clinicians’ decisions about whether to use LTOT generally, they do sometimes influence prescribing decisions for individual patients. Clinicians shared complex views about OTAs’ purposes, which shows the need for more clarity about how OTAs could be used to promote shared decision-making, joint accountability, informed consent, and patient education. (shrink)

By exploring the strengths and weaknesses of a Marxist approach to economic development, this book presents a balanced treatment of development issues within the area of 'rational choice Marxism'.

Philosophers have taken some salutary exercise in recent years—notably in this journal—on the question of the rights of non-human animals and the obligations of human to non-human individuals and species. In so contentious an area there has been striking unanimity on two aspects. One of these is that, irrespective of the merits of the arguments on specific issues, this is a matter which is bound to affect the conduct of our lives. The other is that, other things being equal, it (...) is prima facie wrong to be cruel to animals. (shrink)

At least since the seventeenth century, the strange combination of epistemological certainty and ontological power that characterizes mathematics has made it a major focus of philosophical, social, and cultural negotiation. In the eighteenth century, all of these factors were at play as mathematical thinkers struggled to assimilate and extend the analysis they had inherited from the seventeenth century. A combination of educational convictions and historical assumptions supported a humanistic mathematics essentially defined by its flexibility and breadth. This mathematics was an (...) expression of l’esprit humain, which was unfolding in a progressive historical narrative. The French Revolution dramatically altered the historical and educational landscapes that had supported this eighteenth‐century approach, and within thirty years Augustin Louis Cauchy had radically reconceptualized and restructured mathematics to be rigorous rather than narrative. (shrink)

This book is the most comprehensive, integrated explanatory account yet published of the properties of question formations and their variation across languages. It makes an important contribution to the current debate over whether syntax should be understood derivationally, arguing that the best model of language is one in which sentences are constructed in a series of operations that precede or follow each other in time. The central problem it addresses is the nature of the difference between languages in which all (...) wh-words move overtly to a clause-initial position ; languages in which one wh-phrase moves per clause but all others remain in situ ; and languages in which there is no overt movement at all. Professor Richards focuses on the nature of syntactic movement in order to see what this reveals about the syntactic derivation. He considers the nature of interactions between movement operations and investigates the behaviour of multiple overt wh-movement, scrambling, cliticization, and object shift. His general conclusions about the relationship between movement and multiple specifiers follow straightforwardly from basic principles of Shortest Move and Shortest Attract. He develops a PF-imposed well-formedness condition on movement chains, which allows for the development of theories of anti-agreement, the that-trace effect, and the conditions on participial agreement in Romance, among other phenomena. He defends the claim that well-formed dependencies can improve the status of ill-formed dependencies created later in the derivation, illustrating the explanatory power, under certain structural conditions, of his Principle of Minimal Compliance. He uses data on the locality of wh-movement to argue that the Principle of Minimal Compliance is responsible for a number of the apparent distinctions between overt and covert movement. This book will interest syntacticians at graduate level and above as well as linguistic theorists concerned with the syntax-semantics interface. (shrink)

Workplace positivity expert Shola Richards (Making Work Work) explores a radical new concept for rethinking our personal, professional, and social lives: togetherness.

Ontological questions in biology have typically focused on the nature of species: what are species; how are they identified and individuated? There is an analogous, but much neglected concern: what are characters; how are they identified and individuated? Character individuation is significant because biological systematics relies on a parsimony principle to determine phylogeny and classify taxa, and the parsimony principle is usually interpreted to favor the phylogenetic hypothesis that requires the fewest changes in characters. But no character individuation principle identified (...) so far is adequate. For biological systematics we need a better way of conceiving characters. (shrink)

The lucid presentation makes the book an ideal introduction to both philosophy and Darwinism, as well as a substantive contribution to topics of intense current ...