As part of a multifactorial approach to address weak incentives for innovative antimicrobial drug development, market entry rewards are an emerging solution. Recently, the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy released the Priority Antimicrobial Value and Entry Award proposal, which combines a MER with payment reforms, transitioning from volume-based to “value-based” payments for antimicrobials. Here, the PAVE Award and similar MERs are reviewed, focusing on further refinement and avenues for implementation.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Light that Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of the Natural Law by Stephen BrockAngel Perez-LopezThe Light that Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of the Natural Law by Stephen Brock (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2020), xv + 277 pp.How does the natural law fit the definition of law? Opinions clash among different interpreters of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Stephen Brock's book provides both a magisterial and (...) a definitive answer to this question.Like fine wine, this book has been fermenting and maturing for almost thirty years. Originally a doctoral dissertation, this recently published work has been rewritten, and to a certain extent, reworked by the author with respect to some of its content.Without disregard for nuances, the first chapter introduces the reader to four different groups of Aquinas's interpreters. The first two groups question the full legal character of the natural law in its dependence to the eternal law. The third one questions its naturalness. The fourth group, instead, upholds both the divine origin of the natural law's full legality in its dependence on the eternal law, as well as its natural character.Brock places Dom Odo Lottin, Wolfgang Kluxen, Germain Grisez, and John Finnis in the first group. They maintain that the natural law is a law only in a qualified sense and that it does not entirely fulfill the definition of law. The natural law would provide an intrinsic morality. It should be treated independently from the eternal law. The second group is composed by authors such as Frederick Copleston, Alan Donagan, or Gregory Stevens. Similar to the first group, they argue that the natural law is an autonomous self-standing law, legislated by human reason. Thus, it should be treated independently from the eternal law, except to point out its ultimate origin.The author who exemplifies the third position is Ernest Fortin. Reacting against Finnis, Fortin's position jeopardizes the natural character of the natural law. In his view, the legal force of the first principles of practical reason is not fully actualized until one recognizes the divine institution sanctioning them. [End Page 981]All the authors of the fourth group uphold that the natural law is fully a law on account of its divine origin and that it is also entirely natural insofar as it is naturally known by human reason. Herein Brock places commentators of Saint Thomas such as Francisco Suarez, Dominic Farrell, Lawrence Dewan, and himself. He also includes in this last group other philosophers such as G. E. M. Anscombe and Peter Geach. In the course of his whole study, Brock shows how Aquinas's true position differs from the other members of this group. Special attention is given to the differences between Aquinas's true mind and the interpretations offered by Suarez, Farrell, and, to a certain degree, even by Dewan. In order to better appreciate the depth of this process, I have found it very helpful to read Farrell's The Natural Law According to Aquinas and Suarez in conjunction with Brock's work.The second chapter targets the natural law's legal character in its dependence to the eternal law. It proves that Thomas provides a strict definition of the natural law when he says that it is nothing but a participation of the eternal law in the rational creature. This chapter opens with a historical study concerning the influence of the Summa Fratri Alexandri in the Summa theologiae (ST). Aquinas's understanding of the dependence of the natural law on the eternal law turns out to be more systematic and refined. It is based on a fuller comprehension and development of what law is (the ratio legis).The remainder of the second chapter consists in a superb commentary regarding ST, I-II, q. 91, a. 2, on whether something existing in man is fit to be called a natural law. Promulgation is the element of the definition of law that specifies the different kinds of laws. Hence, the natural law is differentiated from the others by its natural promulgation, namely, by the act through which the order of the eternal law (already instituted by God... (shrink)

Recreative Minds develops a philosophical theory of imagination that draws upon the latest work in psychology. This theory illuminates the use of imagination in coming to terms with art, its role in enabling us to live as social beings, and the psychological consequences of disordered imagination. The authors offer a lucid exploration of a fascinating subject.

Tesis doctoral presentada en el departament de Lògica Història i Filosofia de la Ciencia de la Universitat de Barcelona per optar al títol de Doctor en Filosofia.

Chris Frith has argued that a loss of the sense of agency is central to schizophrenia. This suggests a connection between hallucinations and delusions on the one hand, and the misidentification of the subject’s imaginings as perceptions and beliefs on the other. In particular, understanding the mechanisms that underlie imagination may help us to explain the puzzling phenomena of thought insertion and withdrawal. Frith sometimes states his argument in terms of a loss of metarepresentational capacity in schizophrenia. I argue that (...) this formulation is unhelpful. (shrink)

Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor explores the German philosopher's response to the intellectual debates sparked by the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. By examining the abundance of biological metaphors in Nietzsche's writings, Gregory Moore questions his recent reputation as an eminently subversive and (post) modern thinker, and shows how deeply Nietzsche was immersed in late nineteenth-century debates on evolution, degeneration and race. The first part of the book provides a detailed study and new interpretation of Nietzsche's much disputed (...) relationship to Darwinism. Uniquely, Moore also considers the importance of Nietzsche's evolutionary perspective for the development of his moral and aesthetic philosophy. The second part analyzes key themes of Nietzsche's cultural criticism - his attack on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, his diagnosis of the nihilistic crisis afflicting modernity and his anti-Wagnerian polemics - against the background of fin-de-siècle fears about the imminent biological collapse of Western civilization. (shrink)

What can we learn from fiction? I argue that we can learn about the consequences of a certain course of action by projecting ourselves, in imagination, into the situation of the fiction's characters.

Coherentism maintains that coherent beliefs are more likely to be true than incoherent beliefs, and that coherent evidence provides more confirmation of a hypothesis when the evidence is made coherent by the explanation provided by that hypothesis. Although probabilistic models of credence ought to be well-suited to justifying such claims, negative results from Bayesian epistemology have suggested otherwise. In this essay we argue that the connection between coherence and confirmation should be understood as a relation mediated by the causal relationships (...) among the evidence and a hypothesis, and we offer a framework for doing so by fitting together probabilistic models of coherence, confirmation, and causation. We show that the causal structure among the evidence and hypothesis is sometimes enough to determine whether the coherence of the evidence boosts confirmation of the hypothesis, makes no difference to it, or even reduces it. We also show that, ceteris paribus, it is not the coherence of the evidence that boosts confirmation, but rather the ratio of the coherence of the evidence to the coherence of the evidence conditional on a hypothesis. (shrink)

Simulation Theory says we need not rely exclusively on prepositional knowledge of other minds in order to explain the actions of others. Seeking to know what you will do, I imagine myself in your situation, and see what decision I come up with. I argue that this conception of simulation naturally generalizes: various bits of our mental machine can be run‘off‐line’, fulfilling functions other than those they were made for. In particular, I suggest that visual imagery results when the visual (...) system is run off‐line. I briefly review the empirical evidence and consider the philosophical implications, particularly concerning the mode of mental representation in imagery. (shrink)

Successful psychopaths, defined as individuals in the general population who nevertheless possess some degree of psychopathic traits, are receiving increasing amounts of empirical attention. To date, little is known about such individuals, specifically with regard to how they respond to ethical dilemmas in business contexts. This study investigated this relationship, proposing a mediated model in which the positive relationship between psychopathy and unethical decision-making is explained through the process of moral disengagement, defined as a cognitive orientation that facilitates unethical choice. (...) The results of the study supported this model, and implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

‘Irony,’ says Quintilian, is that figure of speech or trope ‘in which something contrary to what is said is to be understood’ . His formula has stood the test of time. It passes intact into Dr Johnson's dictionary . It survives virtually intact in ours:Irony is the use of words to express something other than, and especially the opposite of, [their] literal meaning.

So much has been written on this vexed issue, that one hesitates to reopen it. Yet one has no other choice when one finds scholars accepting as generally agreed a view which rests on altogether insufficient evidence. I propose, therefore, to examine the main grounds on which recent authorities interpret the disorderly motion of Tm 30a, 52d–53b, and 69b as a mythical symbol. They are four: I. That the Timaios is a myth; II. The testimony of the Academy; III. That (...) motion could not antecede the creation of time; IV. That motion could not antecede the creation of soul. (shrink)

A careful reading of the initial posing of the issue to be debated with Protagoras and of its subsequent restatement when the debate resumes after a break will show that Socrates employs three distinct formulae, only the first of which answers at all closely to the term "Unity of the Virtues" which has been commonly used in the scholarly literature as a label for the position which Socrates upholds in the debate. The other two formulae, perfectly distinguishable from the first, (...) I shall call the "Similarity" and "Biconditionality" Theses. I shall discuss the three Theses seriatim. But let me emphasize from the start that they are not treated in the text as logically disjoint tenets, but as successive moments in the elucidation of a single doctrine. That is how Protagoras himself understands them. At no point does he try to drive a wedge between them or play off one against another. He accepts them as complementary expressions of a theory which he rejects and combats as a whole. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

In recent discussions on contextualism and relativism, some have suggested that audience-sensitivity motivates a content relativist version of radical relativism, according to which a sentence as said at a context can have different contents with respect to the different perspectives from where it is assessed. The first aim of this note is to illustrate how this is not so. According to Egan himself, the phenomenon motivates at least refinement of the characteristic moderate contention that features of a single context determine (...) the appropriate truth-value of the sentence. The second aim of this note is to explore how this may not be so. (shrink)

Yetta Howard's queer-radical monograph Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground presents in its four chapters and conclusion a critical discussion of queer radicality in underground art productions. The chapters engage with Slava Tsukerman's camp cult movie Liquid Sky, Sapphire's poetry, Roberta Gregory's and Erika Lopez's comics, A. L. Steiner and Narcissister's collaborative art installation Winter/Spring Collection, and New Queer Cinema's High Art. In this volume, Howard unearths a spectrum of aesthetic pleasure derived from survival and self-destruction, (...) to tragic romance and kink intimacies. In all the material that Howard chooses for her discussions, “ugliness” enacts a powerful, political premise, which makes this book not only a captivating manifesto of queer punk aesthetics but also a thoughtful exploration of the importance of subcultural, queer-feminist politics antagonizing the norms of mainstream LGBT inclusion politics and homonormative pink-washing tendencies. Ultimately, as the key term of this volume, “ugliness” unfolds in the chapters, specifically in the analogy of three textual elements: as the “disagreeable and pejorative traits” conventionally attributed to queerness (2); a critique of the abjection and stigmatization of all bodies outside of the Western norms of white, able-bodied, cis masculinity (2); and third, as the angry, creative, punk, and anti-aesthetic textual practices of subcultural queer life (2). (shrink)

In this article I address Schiller’s first response in his Kallias Briefe or Concerning the Beautiful, Letters to Gottfried Körner to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful in the first part of the Critique of Judgment. My main intention in the paper is to investigate Schiller’s emphasis on the notion of resistance (Widerstand) in his reading of Kant’s concept of beauty, and to ask how does this relate to Schiller’s own approach to aesthetics as an ethico-political realm. I am particularly interested (...) in the turn, in Schiller’s case, from Kant’s critique of aesthetics to the idea of aesthetics as critique. (shrink)

Physics matters less than we once thought to the making of Mendel. But it matters more than we tend to recognize to the making of Mendelism. This paper charts the variety of ways in which diverse kinds of physics impinged upon the Galtonian tradition which formed Mendelism’s matrix. The work of three Galtonians in particular is considered: Francis Galton himself, W. F. R. Weldon and William Bateson. One aim is to suggest that tracking influence from physics can bring into focus (...) important but now little-remembered flexibilities in the Galtonian tradition. Another is to show by example why generalizations about what happens when ‘physics’ meets ‘biology’ require caution. Even for a single research tradition in Britain in the decades around 1900, these categories were large, containing multitudes. (shrink)

W. V. Quine was the most important naturalistic philosopher of the twentieth century and a major impetus for the recent resurgence of the view that empirical science is our best avenue to knowledge. His views, however, have not been well understood. Critics charge that Quine’s naturalized epistemology is circular and that it cannot be normative. Yet, such criticisms stem from a cluster of fundamental traditional assumptions regarding language, theory, and the knowing subject – the very presuppositions that Quine is at (...) pains to reject. Through investigation of Quine’s views regarding language, knowledge, and reality, the author offers a new interpretation of Quine’s naturalism. The naturalism/antinaturalism debate can be advanced only by acknowledging and critiquing the substantial theoretical commitments implicit in the traditional view. Gregory argues that the responses to the circularity and non-normativity objections do just that. His analysis further reveals that Quine’s departure from the tradition penetrates the conception of the knowing subject, and he thus offers a new and engaging defence of Quine’s naturalism. (shrink)

In the recent literature on contextualism and relativism, one often finds disputes as to which kind of consideration would be relevant for positing a feature of a context as a parameter in the ‘‘circumstance of evaluation’: via the presence of an operator in the language which shifts that feature (Stanley) or by being a feature of a context with respect to which the truth of ‘‘propositions’’ expressed in the context is relative (McFarlane). This kind of dispute arises from two different (...) independent roles that elements in ‘‘circumstances of evaluation’’ are sometimes assumed to have. I distinguish indices from points of evaluation, and motivate its significance in the debate. (shrink)

This paper proposes to reflect self-critically on an ongoing research project entitled “Grammars of listening,” which started as a philosophical approach to the question of listening at the site of trauma and the challenges this kind of listening poses to our conceptions of memory and history, and has recently shifted to asking about the possible limitations to such a reflection when confronted with a decolonial perspective on temporality. I start by presenting a conceptual background for my inquiry, and asking what (...) kind of listening is required when trauma is considered as a colonizing form of violence – that is, when its effects are not only understood as an assault on life but on the conditions of production of sense that make life legible. Following the kind of challenges that such an understanding of trauma poses to the responsibility to listen to its testimony, the paper moves on to propose that only a decolonial approach to listening can truly do justice to the task of rendering testimonies of traumatic violence audible. By decolonizing the frameworks that organize and determine colonial and colonizing distributions of sense, I propose that grammars of lo inaudito understood as decolonial grammars contribute to resisting and disorganizing the criteria for legibility and audibility that colonizing forms of violence not only institute but constantly actualize in their attempt to perpetuate their silencing power.1. (shrink)

In his groundbreaking book, Against Coherence (2005), Erik Olsson presents an ingenious impossibility theorem that appears to show that there is no informative relationship between probabilistic measures of coherence and higher likelihood of truth. Although Olsson's result provides an important insight into probabilistic models of epistemological coherence, the scope of his negative result is more limited than generally appreciated. The key issue is the role conditional independence conditions play within the witness testimony model Olsson uses to establish his result. Olsson (...) maintains that his witness model yields charitable ceteris paribus conditions for any theory of probabilistic coherence. Not so. In fact, Olsson's model, like Bayesian witness models in general, selects a peculiar class of models that are in no way representative of the range of options available to coherence theorists. Recent positive results suggest that there is a way to develop a formal theory of coherence after all. Further, although Bayesian witness models are not conducive to the truth, they are conducive to reliability. (shrink)

What are things like the Supreme Court? Gabriel Uzquiano has defended that they are groups, entities which are somehow composed of members (at certain times) but which, unlike sets (or pluralities), allow for fluctuation in membership. The main alternative holds that 'the Supreme Court' refers (at any time) to the set (or plurality) of their members (at the time). Uzquiano motivates his view by posing a metaphysical puzzle for this reductive alternative. I argue that a parallel reasoning would also find (...) a corresponding 'puzzle' in the case of singular terms like 'The Chief Supreme Court Justice'. (shrink)

History and the modern sciences are characterized by what is sometimes called a methodological naturalism that disregards talk of divine agency. Some religious thinkers argue that this reflects a dogmatic materialism: a non-negotiable and a priori commitment to a materialist metaphysics. In response to this charge, I make a sharp distinction between procedural requirements and metaphysical commitments. The procedural requirement of history and the sciences—that proposed explanations appeal to publicly-accessible bodies of evidence—is non-negotiable, but has no metaphysical implications. The metaphysical (...) commitment is naturalistic, but is both a posteriori and provisional, arising from the fact that for more than 400 years no proposed theistic explanation has been shown capable of meeting the procedural requirement. I argue that there is nothing to prevent religious thinkers from seeking to overturn this metaphysically naturalistic stance. But in order to do so they would need to show that their proposed theistic explanations are the best available explanations of a range of phenomena. Until this has been done, the metaphysical naturalism of history and the sciences remains defensible. (shrink)

I assess the claim that metarepresentation is a key notion in understanding the nature and development of our capacity to engage in pretence. I argue that the metarepresentational programme is unhelpful in explaining how pretence operates and, in particular, how agents distinguish pretence from belief. I sketch an alternative approach to the relations between pretending and believing. This depends on a distinction between pretending and pretence, and upon the claim that pretence stands to pretending as truth stands to belief.

The addition of "actually" operators to modal languages allows us to capture important inferential behaviours which cannot be adequately captured in logics formulated in simpler languages. Previous work on modal logics containing "actually" operators has concentrated entirely upon extensions of KT5 and has employed a particular modeltheoretic treatment of them. This paper proves completeness and decidability results for a range of normal and nonnormal but quasi-normal propositional modal logics containing "actually" operators, the weakest of which are conservative extensions of K, (...) using a novel generalisation of the standard semantics. (shrink)

Motor imagery typically involves an experience as of moving a body part. Recent studies reveal close parallels between the constraints on motor imagery and those on actual motor performance. How are these parallels to be explained? We advance a simulative theory of motor imagery, modeled on the idea that we predict and explain the decisions of others by simulating their decision-making processes. By proposing that motor imagery is essentially off-line motor action, we explain the tendency of motor imagery to mimic (...) motor performance. We close by arguing that a simulative theory of motor imagery gives (modest) support to and illumination of the simulative theory of decision-prediction. (shrink)

What kinds of psychological states motivate us? Beliefs and desires are the obvious candidates. But some aspects of our behaviour suggest another idea. I have in mind the view that imagination can sometimes constitute motivation.

Aims to improve an understanding of the theoretical issues in response to the influence of fiction. Four things in narrative unreliability; Relation between narration in literary fictions and film; Comprehension of narrative essentially a matter of intentional inference; Fictions misdescribed; Asymmetry between literature and film; Ambiguity and unreliability; Implied author and narrator.