This paper looks at the issue of consent from children and whether the test of Gillick competency, applied in medical and healthcare practice, ought to extend to participation in research. It is argued that the relatively broad usage of the test of Gillick competency in the medical context should not be considered applicable for use in research. The question of who would and could determine Gillick competency in research raises further concerns relating to the training of the researcher to make (...) such a decision as well as to the obvious issue of the researcher’s personal interest in the project and possibility of benefiting from the outcome. These could affect the judgment of Gillick competency if the researcher is charged with making this decision. The above notwithstanding, there are two exceptional research situations in which Gillick competency might be legitimately applied: when the research is likely to generate significant advantages for the participants while exposing them to relatively minor risks, and when it is likely to generate great societal benefit, pose minimal risks for the participants and yet raise parental objection. In both cases, to ensure that autonomy is genuinely respected and to protect against personal interest, Gillick competency should be assessed by an individual who has no interest or involvement in the research. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay argues that science education can gain from close engagement with the history of science both in the training of prospective vocational scientists and in educating the broader public about the nature of science. First it shows how historicizing science in the classroom can improve the pedagogical experience of science students and might even help them turn into more effective professional practitioners of science. Then it examines how historians of science can support the scientific education of the general (...) public at a time when debates over “intelligent design” are raising major questions over the kind of science that ought to be available to children in their school curricula. It concludes by considering further work that might be undertaken to show how history of science could be of more general educational interest and utility, well beyond the closed academic domains in which historians of science typically operate. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This essay argues that science education can gain from close engagement with the history of science both in the training of prospective vocational scientists and in educating the broader public about the nature of science. First it shows how historicizing science in the classroom can improve the pedagogical experience of science students and might even help them turn into more effective professional practitioners of science. Then it examines how historians of science can support the scientific education of the general (...) public at a time when debates over “intelligent design” are raising major questions over the kind of science that ought to be available to children in their school curricula. It concludes by considering further work that might be undertaken to show how history of science could be of more general educational interest and utility, well beyond the closed academic domains in which historians of science typically operate. (shrink)

Context -- A Jew in Amsterdam -- Conflicts and communities -- Christian philosophy? -- A Bible gallery -- Religion and politics in the TTP -- Miracles, meaning, and moderation -- Christian pluralism -- Ethics reconsidered -- Providence, obedience, and love -- Spinoza and Christianity.

Im ersten Teil dieses Aufsatzes versuche ich, die fundamentalen Irrtiimer in der heutigen Leibnizliteratur, die zu einer fatalistischen Auslegung der Leibnizschen Theorie der Essentia geführt haben, aufzuspüren. Der zweite Teil enthält eine genauere Darstellung der Wesenslehre. Sie wird am Schluß gegen zwei zunachst plausibel erscheinende Einwände verteidigt.

Spinoza is supposed to have denied the existence of miracles. I argue that instead of denying them he offers his readers a way of understanding miracles within his own metaphysical system in which God and nature are identified. I then offer some historical conjectures as to why his view has been misunderstood so often and for so long.

In this paper I show that Arnauld defends a traditional Roman Catholic position on miracles, though he might have been expected to do otherwise. This oddity is explained by the fact that Arnauld, as spokesman for Port-Royal, was called upon to defend one of the most startling and best-documented miracles in history.

This chapter contains section titled: Pascal: The Life Afterlife of Pascal: His Influence.

Stuart Hampshire's Spinoza depicts Spinoza as having tried to free language from its intimate association with the imagination in order to enable it to convey the clear and distinct ideas of true philosophy. The inaccuracy and insufficiency of this account was pointed out by David Savan in an article in the Philosophical Review in 1958. Savan showed that concerns about language were more deeply and widely woven into Spinoza's thought than Hampshire had noticed; and he argued that, for Spinoza, understanding (...) occurs by a sort of simple mental perception, after we have weaned ourselves from our natural dependence on words and images. Savan's paper appeared in the heyday of linguistic analysis and was articulate... (shrink)

This erudite book is aimed more directly at specialists in theories of right and law, than at Leibniz scholars. Acknowledging a debt of inspiration to the remarkable historical work of André de Muralt, the author introduces in variable detail the legal philosophy of Suarez, Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Kant, with substantial forays into Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham. Leibniz fits into this study less as its raison d’être than as a piece in the puzzle, one local system of (...) thought amid the galaxy of the modern school of natural right. (shrink)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 20, Issue 2, Page 425-427, March 2012.

A paper which succeeds in being erudite, yet lively, and which tells an amusing tale without digressing from its theme, deserves great admiration. Such is Professor George's discussion of Kant and liberalism. He first points out briefly that in fact Kant exercised small influence on liberal thought in the nineteenth century. The bulk of his paper is devoted to the question of whether Kant was a liberal at all and to justifying his unconventional negative answer. In the course of so (...) doing he presents the diverting tale of the ingenuous young aristocrat who solicits Kant's opinion as to whether one's wife should be inoculated against the pox. But the diversion is pertinent. Kant's two answers to the question reveal two different ways in which the Kantian moral theory, sententiously expressed in the so-called “categorical imperative”, might be incompatible with liberal opinion. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue a position that has almost never been held: that Leibniz was a materialist. At the conclusion of my article, I consider whether the difficulty of reconciling Leibnizs idea of concluding that there is instead a Leibnizian idea of which does a better job.