This article discusses the disability insurance industry in order to provide context regarding the potential impact of genetic testing on disability insurance. It describes disability income insurance, exploring both the protection it offers and its main contract provisions. It goes on to describe the private insurance market and the differences between group and individual insurance, and concludes with implications of genetic testing with respect to the private disability insurance market.

This article may be of significant interest to those who may want to reconsider Aristotelian principles in the light of the philosophy of science---i. e., the Aristotelian Thomistic philosophy of sensation as harmonizable with recent findings in the physics/chemistry/physiology of sensation, especially in correlation with research in colorimetry and spectrophotometry. Primarily metaphysical and epistemological in orientation, this paper makes a case for “methodological realism”---viz., how evidence may be grasped, judged, and interpreted in a way that recognizes extemal sense objects to (...) be criteria for verifying statements made about these objects. Amongst the matters and/or problems, considered philosophically, historically, and scientifically, in the course of the article, are: the kinds of sensible qualities discoverable by us; the problem of “immediate” sensation; an analysis of the intemal process of sensation, investigated in conjunction with insights from Aquinas and today’s science; objective/subjective aspects of sensation; causality in sensation; sceptical positions regarding sensation; the problem of sense error; a critique of Descartes’s assumptions about sensation; a sumrnary of conclusions, based on this examination. (shrink)

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) was active during the Renaissance, developing adventurous ideas even while serving as a churchman. The religious issues with which he engaged - spiritual, apocalyptic and institutional - were to play out in the Reformation. These essays reflect the interests of Cusanus but also those of Gerald Christianson, who has studied church history, the Renaissance and the Reformation. The book places Nicholas into his times but also looks at his later reception. The first part addresses institutional (...) issues, including Schism, conciliarism, indulgences and the possibility of dialogue with Muslims. The second treats theological and philosophical themes, including nominalism, time, faith, religious metaphor, and prediction of the end times. (shrink)

In Testo Junkie, Preciado briefly introduces the figure of the ‘techno-Barbie’. Contrasted with his own Testogel-fuelled pornographic experiments, the possibilities of oestrogen or progesterone seem somewhat uncharitably foreclosed upon. Though Preciado draws our attention to the gendered politics of chemical enhancement and hormonal justice, it begs the question: where do we draw the line between experimentation and chemical domination? We engage with the figure of the techno-Barbie to explore our own experiments with hormones and gendered agency in the boundaries of (...) advanced biocapitalism. Drawing on a range of allied texts, we explore the ambivalences of our own hormonal experimentation. What kinds of hormonal experiments are allowed to be cast as such? In response to this all-encompassing theory of domination, we ask: how might the techno-Barbie speak back? (shrink)

Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) was one of the most original thinkers of the Renaissance. This collection examines, from several viewpoints, his speculative thought and reviews his ideas on dialogue with non- Christians in the light of his theories. The articles originated in papers presented at several conferences sponsored by the American Cusanus Society, 1981-1988. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

The paper by Susan M. Wolf and Jeffrey P. Kahn published in this issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics notes that we are members of the Working Group on Genetic Testing in Disability Insurance and that the members of the Working Group do not necessarily subscribe to its recommendations. Although we agree with some of Wolf and Kahn's recommendations, we do not agree with recommendations 1, 3, 4, and 5 for individual disability insurance and recommendations 1, 2, (...) and 3 for group disability insurance. We use this paper to delineate our areas of disagreement, but we do not discuss areas such as employment law as they are not our areas of expertise.First, understanding our roles on the Working Group is important. As members, we provided technical expertise on disability insurance. Our input to the Working Group represents our individual opinions. (shrink)

Despite the declarations of international documents on minority language rights, provision is patchy for supporting minority languages in the UK, where since the 1980s governments have deliberately or unwittingly greatly raised the profile and comparative standing of English. The partial exception to this trend has been the treatment of indigenous/regional minority languages, stimulated by policies of devolution intended to revive or create a sense of national identity, and to redress perceived historic linguistic injustices. In a multicultural state or region these (...) apparently reasonable goals appear to conflict with current views of citizenship that argue for inclusiveness and equal treatment for all under the law. In particular, the question arises why indigenous minority languages should receive official support and funding that is denied to speakers of minority ethnic languages. In this article, I examine various justifications offered for this, including higher population levels, the geographical concentration of indigenous speakers, the long historical ties between regional language and culture, and the notion of promotional rights. I attempt to show each argument lacks force and ignores the fact of natural language change. I argue for an approach to indigenous languages that weights support and funding according to a range of factors including the number of minority speakers, their perceived need and the benefits that would flow from funding. Support from the local community and private sources could also be encouraged. (shrink)

As members of the Working Group on Genetic Testing in Disability Insurance, the authors of this alternative opinion describe their areas of disagreement with some of the conclusions in the paper written by Susan M. Wolf and Jeffrey P. Kahn.

The extremely well-known holiday television special Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is deconstructed to expose an underlying philosophical paradigm towards people, especially children, with disabilities that is mechanistic and utilitarian. This paradigm includes a static and over-determined view of any disability a person may have, and can be erroneously supported by a philosophy of “radical freedom.” Examples of this philosophy of disability as applied to the K-12 realm of special education are also provided, showing how the lessons learned from the (...) children’s movie are mirrored in the static conceptualization of the notion of disability in the general society and educational system. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus by Allen VerheyMandy Rodgers-GatesThe Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus By Allen Verhey GRAND RAPIDS: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS, 2011. 423 PP. $30.00When Allen Verhey, my former adviser, learned that I would be writing this review, he warned me (with characteristic modesty) that I ought to be careful to critique something about his book, or people might become suspicious. It (...) seems fitting now that this piece is being published after his death, which gives me permission to praise the book without reserve.Over the last few decades, the topic of death and dying has garnered renewed interest among Christian ethicists, and Verhey has been at the center of these conversations. Such conversations have brought into focus the reality that death is not merely the cessation of a life lived well (the “true” subject of ethics) but also that “dying well” is a legitimate subject within ethics. Dying offers unique opportunities for practicing virtues and for loving God, self, and neighbor, and care for the dying and grieving represents an important test of the faithfulness of Christian communities.After beginning with his own assessment of death in the modern West—acknowledging the benefits and triumphs of medicine, along with the pitfalls of medicalized death and the failure of the Church to resist medicalization—Verhey moves to the heart of his book: a retrieval of the Ars Moriendi tradition. Verhey engages a fifteenth-century abridged manual on the art of dying that appeared within the wider genre, one accompanied by wood-block prints (whose images appear alongside Verhey’s text). Placing the little book within its historical context, Verhey describes the view of death presented in it, a “commendacion” of death. He then moves on to the Ars Moriendi’s presentation of temptations faced by the dying person (“Moriens”), the virtues required, and questions, instructions, and prayers for the dying. Along the way, Verhey offers some of his own analysis; but he reserves the bulk of his critique and reformulations for the third section of his book, “Toward a contemporary Ars Moriendi.”Verhey’s articulation of a contemporary Ars Moriendi begins with a “commendacion” of life, in contrast to the medieval commendation of death. He demonstrates how the lens of Jesus’s resurrection serves to illuminate a proper Christian view of death: life is a good—though not the ultimate good—and death and suffering per se ought not to be considered good. At the same time, we need not fear death. Death and suffering are not the greatest evils, and [End Page 191] sometimes they must be risked or accepted “for the sake of God’s cause in the world” (215). Taking its cue from the Ars Moriendi tradition of remembering Jesus, the next chapter traces some of the details of the Passion narratives, including the seven final words of Jesus, and comments on these as they pertain to a modern context of dying. This remembering is then brought to bear on a contemporary retelling of the virtues necessary for dying well—again, relying upon and yet transforming the earlier tradition in nuanced ways. Verhey’s final section, on Christian communities’ care for the dying, includes sustained reflection on the practices of those communities and the resources they offer, focusing particularly on prayer. It offers critiques and additions—for example, recognizing the value of increased silence at funerals, “instead of rushing to fill the silence of death with our words” (348).Verhey’s engagement with the Ars Moriendi literature offers a creative and exemplary use of tradition for a contemporary concern. Our age—one that often refuses to face death—is brought into conversation with another era, when people took their dying seriously. At the same time, Verhey is free with his critique of the tradition and the need to reshape it, primarily on theological grounds. The strength of this book, like all his work, lies in its attention to scripture and its theological nuance and depth. At the same time, he knew and understood people, and that knowledge and pastoral concern are evident throughout. Ultimately, he accomplishes what he expresses in the introduction: “I hope... (shrink)

One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism over the past several years has been the ascendancy of the colonial paradigm. In conjunction with this new turn, Frantz Fanon has now been reinstated as a global theorist, and not simply by those engaged in Third World or subaltern studies. In a recent collection centered on British romanticism, Jerome McGann opens a discussion of William Blake and Ezra Pound with an extended invocation of Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open (...) an attack on Stephen Greenblatt’s reading of the Henriad and the interdisciplinary practices of the new historicism. And Fanon, and published interpretations of Fanon, have become regularly cited in the rereading of the Renaissance that have emerged from places like Sussex, Essex, and Birmingham.1My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of Fanon. By focusing on successive appropriations of this figure, as both totem and text, I think we can chart out an itinerary through contemporary colonial discourse theory. I want to stress, then, that my ambitions here are extremely limited: what follows may be a prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not even begin that task itself.2 1. See Jerome McGann, “The Third World of Criticism,” in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, ed. Marjorie Levinson et al., pp. 85-107, and Donald Pease, “Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge: Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New Historicism,” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac.2. A properly contextualized reading of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the text to which I most frequently recur, should situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question Juive, Dominique O. Mannoni’s Psychologie de la colonisation, Germaine Guex’s La Névrose d’abandon, as well as many lesser known works. But this is only to begin to sketch out the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey, which received an American Book Award. (shrink)

A rational reconstruction of the role of moral values in diagnostic reasoning is undertaken. In the context of a case study it is shown how value and ethical considerations come into play in the complex course of making diagnostic and therapeutic decisions.

This article discusses the disability insurance industry in order to provide context regarding the potential impact of genetic testing on disability insurance. It describes disability income insurance, exploring both the protection it offers and its main contract provisions. It goes on to describe the private insurance market and the differences between group and individual insurance, and concludes with implications of genetic testing with respect to the private disability insurance market. The individual disability income insurance market is theoretically of great interest (...) as a matter of public policy since there is potential for unfair discrimination through genetic testing although this remains very unlikely as a matter of practice, however.It is more likely that a person will become disabled than die before age 65. The loss of income during a disability can be quite devastating. In contrast to the high risk and high impact of disability are the realities of the disability market. (shrink)

Bringsjord and Licato provide a general meta-argument that cyberwarfare is so different from traditional kinetic warfare that no argument from analogy can allow the just war theory of Augustine and Aquinas to be pulled over from traditional warfare to cyberwarfare. I believe that this meta-argument is sound and that it applies not just to cyberwarfare: in particular, on my reading of the meta-argument, argument from analogy has never been adequate to allow JWT to be applied to the kind of warfare (...) that we are familiar with now. (shrink)

In this paper I apply an old problem of Quine's (the inscrutability of reference in translation) to a new style of theory about mental content (causal/nomological/informational accounts of meaning) and conclude that no "naturalization" of content of the sort currently popular can solve Quine's "gavagai" enigma. I show how failure to solve the problem leads to absurd conclusions not about one's own mental life, but about the non-mental world. I discuss various ways of attempting to remedy the accounts so as (...) to avoid the problem and explain why each attempt at solving the problem would take the information theorists further from their self-assigned task of "naturalizing" semantics. (shrink)

This article may be of significant interest to those who may want to reconsider Aristotelian principles in the light of the philosophy of science---i. e., the Aristotelian Thomistic philosophy of sensation as harmonizable with recent findings in the physics/chemistry/physiology of sensation, especially in correlation with research in colorimetry and spectrophotometry. Primarily metaphysical and epistemological in orientation, this paper makes a case for “methodological realism”---viz., how evidence may be grasped, judged, and interpreted in a way that recognizes extemal sense objects to (...) be criteria for verifying statements made about these objects. Amongst the matters and/or problems, considered philosophically, historically, and scientifically, in the course of the article, are: the kinds of sensible qualities discoverable by us; the problem of “immediate” sensation; an analysis of the intemal process of sensation, investigated in conjunction with insights from Aquinas and today’s science; objective/subjective aspects of sensation; causality in sensation; sceptical positions regarding sensation; the problem of sense error; a critique of Descartes’s assumptions about sensation; a sumrnary of conclusions, based on this examination. (shrink)