The twenty‐six‐year‐old patient requested a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction because of an extensive family history of cancer. She reported that she had developed melanoma at twenty‐five; that her mother, sister, aunts, and a cousin all had breast cancer; that a cousin had ovarian cancer at nineteen; and that a brother was treated for esophageal cancer at fifteen. The treating team was skeptical about this history, and they could find no documentation of the patient's reported melanoma. The surgeon wrote the (...) patient's primary care physician, explaining that he had seen the patient and planned to proceed with the bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction. The primary care physician responded that he was unable to substantiate several of the patient's claims; some of his colleagues believed the family history to be fabricated. Trying to make sense of the discrepancies, the genetic counselor called a counselor colleague who had met with this patient. The colleague suggested that the in‐house genetic counselor “google” the patient. The search revealed two Facebook pages linked to the patient. In one, apparently a personal profile, the patient stated that in addition to battling stage four melanoma, she had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. She provided a link to a site where she solicited donations to attend a summit for young cancer patients. The other Facebook page featured numerous pictures of her with a bald head, as though she has been through chemotherapy. The genetic counselor showed the Facebook pages to the surgeon, who then decided not to operate. Should health care professionals “google” their patients? (shrink)

This paper poses the question, “what are providers’ obligations to patients who lie?” This question is explored through the lens of a specific case: a 26–year–old woman who requests prophylactic bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction reports a significant and dramatic family history, but does not want to undergo genetic testing. Using a conversational–style discussion, the case is explored by a breast surgeon, genetic counselor/medical geneticist, clinical psychologist, chair of a hospital ethics committee and director of a clinical ethics consultation service.

With its practical, hands-on approach to legal ethics, the third edition of LEGAL ETHICS is designed to ensure that readers have a solid grasp of the ethical rules that apply in the legal setting. Comprehensive yet easy to understand, this engaging book provides a thorough and substantive analysis of the major principles that affect how the practice of law is regulated. Filled with real-life examples of lawyer and non-lawyer instances of misconduct, current and classic case law, and discussions of famous (...) (and infamous) people, this straightforward book brings the material to life and demonstrates how courts interpret and apply ethical rules to lawyers and their non-lawyer employees. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

Doctrine of the distant tzaddik: mysticism, ethic, and politics -- Self-image and the Father-figure: Rabbi Nachman of Breslov on repairing the souls of the dead -- Two tzsddikim, Two women in labor, and one salvation: reading gender in Hasidic story -- 'Outside of the natural order': Temrel, the female Hasid -- Hasidic women: beyond egalitarianist discourse -- The Hasidic story: a call of narrative religiosity -- The Yamima method as a contemporary- Hasidic- female movement.

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a successful challenge to the heritage of Cartesian dualism. This converges with the reaction against Cartesian thought (...) within science itself. Descartes divided the universe between res cogitans, thinking substances, and res extensa, the mechanical world. The latter won with Newton and we have, in most of objective science since, literally lost our mind, hence our humanity. Despite Darwin, biologists remain children of Newton, and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow lawful entailment of the evolution of the biosphere. This dream is no longer tenable. We now have to recognize that science and scientists are within and part of the world we are striving to comprehend, as proponents of endophysics have argued, and that physics, biology and mathematics have to be reconceived accordingly. Interpreting quantum mechanics from this perspective is shown to both illuminate conscious experience and reveal new paths for its further development. In biology we must now justify the use of the word “function”. As we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we cannot mathematize the detailed becoming of the biosphere, nor write differential equations for functional variables we do not know ahead of time, nor integrate those equations, so no laws “entail” evolution. The dream of a grand theory fails. In place of entailing laws, a post-entailing law explanatory framework is proposed in which Actuals arise in evolution that constitute new boundary conditions that are enabling constraints that create new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities for further evolution, in which new Actuals arise, in a persistent becoming. Evolution flows into a typically unprestatable succession of Adjacent Possibles. Given the concept of function, the concept of functional closure of an organism making a living in its world, becomes central. Implications for patterns in evolution include historical reconstruction, and statistical laws such as the distribution of extinction events, or species per genus, and the use of formal cause, not efficient cause, laws. (shrink)

This collection of chapters, from an international group of theologians and scripture scholars, engages the hermeneutical insights of Bernard Lonergan and those influenced by him to both advance theoretical discussions concerning the interpretation of Christian Scripture and to demonstrate the usefulness of such hermeneutical insights through applied readings of specific biblical texts.

Open peer commentary on the article “Body Awareness to Recognize Feelings: The Exploration of a Musical Emotional Experience” by Alejandra Vásquez-Rosati. Upshot: The enactment view echoes the deeper biology and chemistry of emotion. Music resonates innately because emotional evaluation is the evolutionary grandfather of all senses.

While interest in Kant's philosophy has increased in recent years, very little of it has focused on his theory of science. This book gives a general account of that theory, of its motives and implications, and of the way it brought forth a new conception of the nature of philosophical thought. To reconstruct Kant's theory of science, the author identifies unifying themes of his philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of physics, both undergirded by his distinctive logical doctrines, and shows how (...) they come together to form a relatively consistent system of ideas. A new analysis of the structure of central arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Prolegomena draws on recent developments in logic and the philosophy of science. Professor Brittan's unified account of the philosophies of mathematics and physics explores the nature of Kant's commitment to Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics as well as providing an integrated reading of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Contemporary ideas help both to illuminate Kant's position and to show how that position, in turn, illuminates contemporary problems in the philosophy of science. Originally published in 1978. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason was written late in his career. It presents a theory of 'radical evil' in human nature, touches on the issue of divine grace, develops a Christology, and takes a seemingly strong interest in the issue of scriptural interpretation. The essays in this Critical Guide explore the reasons why this is so, and offer careful and illuminating interpretations of the themes of the work. The relationship of Kant's Religion to his other writings is (...) discussed in ways that underscore the importance of this work for the entire critical philosophy, and provide a broad perspective on his moral thought; connections are also drawn between religion, history, and politics in Kant's later thinking. Together the essays offer a rich exploration of the work which will be of great interest to those involved in Kant studies and the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Embryos start out as tiny globes, on which many important events occur, including cell divisions, shape changes and changes of neighbors, waves of contraction and expansion, motion of cell sheets, extension of filopodia, shearing of cell connections, and differentiation and morphogenesis of tissues such as skin and brain. I propose to build a robotic microscope that would enable a new way to look at embryos: Google Embryo. This is akin to sending a space probe to Jupiter and its moons, sending (...) back spectacular new visions of their complexity, activity, and beauty. (shrink)

What if you're not who you think you are? What if you don't really know the people closest to you? And what if your most deeply-held beliefs turn out to be. wrong? In Stop Being Reasonable, philosopher Eleanor Gordon-Smith tells gripping true stories that show the limits of human reason. Susie realises her husband harbours a terrible secret, Dylan leaves the cult he's been raised in since birth, Alex discovers he can no longer return to his former identity after (...) impersonating someone else on reality TV. All of them radically alter their beliefs about the things that matter most. What makes them change course? What does this say about our own beliefs? And, in an increasingly divided world, what does it teach us about how we might change the minds of others? Stop Being Reasonable is a mind-changing exploration of the murky place where philosophy and real life meet. (shrink)

This chapter is intended to provide the reader with a brief biographical overview of Adorno's life and thought, with an emphasis on the key turning points in his career. It discusses his childhood, his education in Frankfurt, his musical studies, his emigration first to Oxford and then to the United States, his return to Germany after World War Two, his tenure as professor at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt and his prominence as a public intellectual, and his confrontation with students. Together (...) with biographical details the chapter also offers a simple overview of Adorno's major concerns as a philosopher. (shrink)

Stuart Kauffman here presents a brilliant new paradigm for evolutionary biology, one that extends the basic concepts of Darwinian evolution to accommodate recent findings and perspectives from the fields of biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics. The book drives to the heart of the exciting debate on the origins of life and maintenance of order in complex biological systems. It focuses on the concept of self-organization: the spontaneous emergence of order widely observed throughout nature. Kauffman here argues that self-organization (...) plays an important role in the emergence of life itself and may play as fundamental a role in shaping life's subsequent evolution as does the Darwinian process of natural selection. Yet until now no systematic effort has been made to incorporate the concept of self-organization into evolutionary theory. The construction requirements which permit complex systems to adapt remain poorly understood, as is the extent to which selection itself can yield systems able to adapt more successfully. This book explores these themes. It shows how complex systems, contrary to expectations, can spontaneously exhibit stunning degrees of order, and how this order, in turn, is essential for understanding the emergence and development of life on Earth. Topics include the new biotechnology of applied molecular evolution, with its important implications for developing new drugs and vaccines; the balance between order and chaos observed in many naturally occurring systems; new insights concerning the predictive power of statistical mechanics in biology; and other major issues. Indeed, the approaches investigated here may prove to be the new center around which biologicalscience itself will evolve. The work is written for all those interested in the cutting edge of research in the life sciences. (shrink)

This essay examines Adorno's notoriously puzzling concept of metaphysical experience with special attention to Adorno's remarks on the concept in his 1965 lecture‐course, “Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems.” The essay argues that the concept of metaphysical experience is best understood in the light of Adorno's philosophical critique of metaphysics in the traditional sense. It was Adorno's view that in the age of modern catastrophe, the category of traditional metaphysics (as theorized chiefly by Aristotle, Plato, and Empedocles) could no longer retain its (...) validity, and the notion of “experience” itself was withering away. Adorno concluded that metaphysics in the modern era would have to be reconceived as a category of loss that reflected the damage that had been done to human life. “Metaphysical experience” attached itself especially to special places or childhood memories, even while such privileged experiences also reflected the disappointment and imperfection that marks all experiences today. (shrink)

This chapter is intended to provide the reader with a brief biographical overview of Adorno's life and thought, with an emphasis on the key turning points in his career. It discusses his childhood, his education in Frankfurt, his musical studies, his emigration first to Oxford and then to the United States, his return to Germany after the Second World War, his tenure as professor at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt and his prominence as a public intellectual, and his confrontation with students. (...) Together with biographical details the chapter also offers a simple overview of Adorno's major concerns as a philosopher. (shrink)

In the article ‘Equality and Desert,’ Shelly Kagan rejects the principle of equality as an arbiter of distributive justice. He claims instead that all of our intuitions about distributive justice that are thought to support some principle of equality can be captured under the principle of desert. I argue that Kagan's claim fails because, in cashing out his notion of desert, Kagan makes tacit appeal to the principle of equality.

RésuméPlusieurs pensent qu'on devrait comprendre la personne qui fait le mal plutôt que la condamner. Le present article suggère que les écrits de Sartre seraient en désaccord avec une telle approche. Lorsqu'on combat le mal, selon ce qu'indiquent ces écrits, il n'y a aucun besoin, si l'on sait qu'une personne fait le mal, d'essayer de la comprendre. La distinction de Sartre entre comprendre une personne et savoir quelque chose est présentée en détail, à partir surtout de ses écrits de fiction (...) et de sa biographie de Gustave Flaubert. En exploitant cette distinction, on arrive à la conclusion qu'il est superflu d'essayer de comprendre la personne quifait le mal. Lorsque nous savons qu'une personne fait le mal, nous devons la combattre, directement et avec force. (shrink)

THE CONCEPTS OF ASYMMETRY and optical activity, although introduced fairly late into inorganic chemistry, have played venerable and central roles in organic chemistry. Modern organic chemistry is usually considered to commence with Friedrich Wohler's synthesis of urea in 1828, and Jean Baptiste Biot's discovery of optical activity in 1812 antedates the very genesis of this field. Moreover, Joseph Achille Le Bel and Jacobus Henricusvan't Hoff's concept of the tetrahedral carbon atom, which constitutes the foundation of stereochemistry, was proposed a century (...) ago (1874), primarily in order to explain the optical isomerism investigated by Louis Pasteur and others. It is to Alfred Werner, the founder of coordination chemistry, however, that we owe the introduction of the concept of optical activity into coordination chemistry, together with its experimental proof. ' The purpose of this paper is to examine and speculate upon the circumstances of Werner's discovery of optically active coordination compounds, to trace its antecedents in earlier work, and to assess its impact upon the future course of inorganic stereochemistry. (shrink)

The notion of economic violence has long been recognized in the work of Johan Galtung and others. The work of Thomas Pogge and the field of global justice have addressed the impact of economic disparities between the Global North and the Global South, and their impact on human well-being, and social and economic development more broadly. Patents, publication in scholarly journals, academic collaborations, access to academic journals, and so forth do not on their face seem to be closely tied to (...) indicators of human well-being. However, disparities in knowledge production, including access to academic resources and publication venues, are tied directly or indirectly to infrastructure, food security, health and mortality rates, employment, and gender equity. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The School in the Garden Prehistory and the Rise of Cities The Locus Amoenus and the Origins of Agriculture Diogenes of Oinoanda and the Future Epicurean Golden Age Notes.

The unmatched technological achievements in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, computer science, and related fields over the last few decades can be considered a success story. The technological sophistication has been so groundbreaking in various types of applications that many experts believe that we will see, at some point or another, the emergence of general AI (AGI) and, eventually, superintelligence. This book examines the impact of AI on human rights by focusing on potential risks and human rights legislation and proposes creating (...) a Universal Convention for the Rights of AI Systems (AI Convention). (shrink)

Peter van Inwagen has been for decades one of the leading ontologists in the world, and reading Being makes it easy to see a reason why this is so. He insists o.

The edited volume _Future Law, Ethics, and Smart Technologies_ is a comprehensive interdisciplinary textbook for students, particularly law students, who want to become familiar with the complex issues at the intersection of law, ethics, and smart technologies.

Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece represents the first comprehensive study of the role of sound and hearing in the ancient Greek world. While our modern western culture is almost an entirely visual one, hearing and sound were central to ancient Greeks. The fifteen chapters of this edited volume explore "hearing" as being philosophically significant across numerous texts and figures in ancient Greek philosophy. Through close analysis of the philosophy of such figures as Heraclitus, Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, and (...) Aristotle, Hearing, Sound, and Auditory in Ancient Greece presents new and unique research from philosophers and classicists that aims to redirect us to the ways in which sound, hearing, music, listening, voice, and even silence shaped and reflected the worldview of ancient Greece. (shrink)

Science and the humanities share the same kit of working tools, called the world's literature. While the author of this article deals mainly with the scientific and mathematical literature, the reader probably gravitates towards some other branches, but such distinctions were hardly made in the Middle Ages. The American philosopher, Wallace Stevens, in his book The Necessary Angel remarks that at the time of Aristotle, the Greek language had no word to signify literature. The reason is surely that literature had (...) long since been too universal an element in Greece to require a name. We have no name for the smell of air. This all-pervading power of literature is apparent already two generations before Aristotle, when Socrates made his defence against leading the youth of Athens towards atheism. Plato's Apology tells us how Socrates taunted his accuser: “Have you such a low opinion of the judges, that you fancy them so illiterate as not to know these doctrines are found in the books of Anaxagoras which are full of them? And so, my word, the youth are said to be taught them by Socrates, when they can be bought in the book-market for one drachma at most…” (a coin today worth 1.4 pence!). (shrink)

The rhetoric of the social model of disability is presented, and its basic claims are critiqued. Proponents of the social model use the distinction between impairment and disability to reduce disabilities to a single social dimension—social oppression. They downplay the role of biological and mental conditions in the lives of disabled people. Consequences of denying biological and mental realities involving disabilities are discussed. People will benefit most by recognizing both the biological and the social dimensions of disabilities.

A fascinating exploration of the very essence of life itself sheds new light on the order and evolution in complex life systems and defines and explains autonomous agents and work within the contexts of thermodynamics and information theory, setting the stage for a dramatic technological revolution. 50,000 first printing.

At Home in the Universe presents and extends the intellectual core ofKauffman's earlier book The Origins of Order (OUP 1993) for any intelligentgeneral reader can understand and appreciate. The reader is very effectivelyinvited into Kauffman's vision and thought processes, in one of the moreexhilarating and important books of popular science.

Spätestens mit dem Aufkommen der modernen Naturwissenschaften im 19. Jahrhundert wird die Rolle der Metaphysik für die naturwissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung in Frage gestellt. Bereits Kant identifiziert die Schwächen einer Metaphysik, die in ihren wesentlichen Begriffen allein dem aristotelischen Vorbild treu geblieben ist. Das heißt aber nicht, dass bewährte traditionelle metaphysische Begriffe völlig aufgegeben werden müssen. Gerade in den modernen Naturwissenschaften gibt es Fragen, die aus der einzelnen Wissenschaft heraus nicht beantwortet werden können, ohne begriffliche Anleihen bei traditionellen metaphysischen Konzepten zu nehmen. (...) Anhand der metaphysischen und naturphilosophischen Konzeptionen Kants und Whiteheads untersucht Gordon Seitz den von Whitehead behaupteten Gegensatz zwischen Prozess- und Transzendentalphilosophie im Hinblick auf die Idee einer Einheit der Natur und unter Berücksichtigung moderner naturwissenschaftlicher Theorien. (shrink)

The paper will explore a key tension between eternity and temporality that comes to the fore in the seeming contradiction between freedom of the human will and divine foreknowledge of future contingents. It will be claimed that Duns Scotus’s adaptation of Thomas Aquinas’s view reduces the tension between a human being’s freedom and divine foreknowledge of future contingents to the question of how to conflate the now of eternity and our experience of the instantaneous now. Scotus’s account of the matter (...) is unfortunately not satisfying and it is the purpose of this paper to develop this insight further in a speculative manner. In order to make such co-nowness possible, it will be asked how the eternal and the temporal can co-cause together. This problem will be tackled through a development of Scotus’s doctrine of the will taken elsewhere, in order to examine how the divine and the human wills can occur together. It will be claimed that such co-willing produces a co-nowness of the eternal and the instantaneous ‘nows’ which generates a logical temporal movement. (shrink)

Over 50% of the world population will develop a psychiatric disorder in their lifetime. 1 In the realm of psychiatric treatment, two primary modalities have been established: pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Yet, pharmacological interventions often take precedence as the initial treatment choice despite their comparable outcomes, severe side effects and disputed evidence of their efficacy. This preference for medication foregrounds a vital re-examination of what it means to be invasive in medical treatments, namely in psychiatric care. De Marco _et al_ challenge (...) the standard account of invasiveness, presenting considerations that transcend the traditional criteria of physical intrusion. 2 Through case studies centred on treatments for schizophrenia and depression, we aim to (1) reinforce De Marco _et al_’s challenge to the standard account of invasiveness and (2) extend the dialogue to the moral imperative of redefining mental invasiveness. Our aims are to broaden the definition of mental invasiveness, aligning... (shrink)

The authors examine the internal and external motivating factors behind the actions of the House Committee on Ethics members by looking at the procedural efficiency of the Committee on Ethics (or lack thereof), as a natural consequence of the committee members' implicit public policy actions.

Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phe- notypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evo- lution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law entailed dynamics. Our considerations depend upon dis- cussing the variability of the very ”contexts of life”: the in- teractions between organisms, biological niches and ecosys- tems. These are ever changing, intrinsically indeterminate and even unprestatable: we do not know ahead of (...) time the ”niches” which constitute the boundary conditions on selec- tion. More generally, by the mathematical unprestatability of the ”phase space”, no laws of mo- tion can be formulated for evolution. We call this radical emergence, from life to life. The purpose of this paper is the integration of variation and diversity in a sound concep- tual frame and situate unpredictability at a novel theoretical level, that of the very phase space. Our argument will be carried on in close comparisons with physics and the mathematical constructions of phase spaces in that discipline. The role of symmetries as invariant preserving transformations will allow us to under- stand the nature of physical phase spaces and to stress the differences required for a sound biological theoretizing. In this frame, we discuss the novel notion of ”enablement”. Life lives in a web of enablement and radical emergence. This will restrict causal analyses to differential cases. Mutations or other causal differ- ences will allow us to stress that ”non conservation princi- ples” are at the core of evolution, in contrast to physical dynamics, largely based on conservation principles as sym- metries. Critical transitions, the main locus of symmetry changes in physics, will be discussed, and lead to ”extended criticality” as a conceptual frame for a better understanding of the living state of matter. (shrink)

Readers of Theodor Adorno often have understood him as a "totalizing negativist." If it truly is the case that Adorno saw modern society as a realm of complete falsehood, however, his own social theory is unintelligible. In A Precarious Happiness, Peter E. Gordon aims to redeem Adorno from this negativist interpretation by showing that it arises from a basic misunderstanding of his work. Pushing against entrenched interpretations, Gordon argues that Adorno's philosophy is animated by a deep attachment to (...) a concept of happiness or human flourishing, and it is only by virtue of that normative standard that Adorno judges the world a catastrophic failure. Through a comprehensive reading of Adorno's work, A Precarious Happiness shows that in an imperfect world, the available standards of our flourishing are also imperfect. Looking beyond Adorno, Gordon suggests that the practice of social criticism, even if it is directed toward exposing what is "false," cannot succeed without appealing to an unrealized notion of what would be right. (shrink)