_Shusterman’s Somaesthetics_ is a wide-ranging collection of penetrating essays by twelve scholars examining in rich detail the many dimensions of philosopher Richard Shusterman’s pragmatism and somaesthetics, complemented by his own chapter of responses to these scholars.

Despite increased calls for hospital ethics committees to serve as default decision-makers about life-sustaining treatment for unrepresented patients who lack decision-making capacity or a surrogate decision-maker and whose wishes regarding medical care are not known, little is known about how committees currently function in these cases. This was a retrospective cohort study of all ethics committee consultations involving decision-making about LST for unrepresented patients at a large academic hospital from 2007 to 2013. There were 310 ethics committee consultations, twenty-five of (...) which involved unrepresented patients. In thirteen cases, the ethics consultants evaluated a possible substitute decision-maker identified by social workers and/or case managers. In the remaining cases, the ethics consultants worked with the medical team to contact previous healthcare professionals to provide substituted judgement, found prior advance care planning documents, or identified the patient’s best interest as the decision-making standard. In the majority of cases, the final decision was to limit or withdraw LST or to change code status to Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate. Substitute decision-makers who had been evaluated through the ethics consultation process and who made the final decision alone were more likely to continue LST than cases in which physicians made the final decision. In our centre, the primary role of ethics consultants in decision-making for unrepresented patients is to identify appropriate decision-making standards. In the absence of other data suggesting that ethics committees, as currently constituted, are ready to serve as substitute decision-makers for unrepresented patients, caution is necessary before designating these committees as default decision-makers. (shrink)

We describe the ongoing citations to biomedical articles affected by scientific misconduct, and characterize the papers that cite these affected articles. The citations to 102 articles named in official findings of scientific misconduct during the period of 1993 and 2001 were identified through the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database. Using a stratified random sampling strategy, we performed a content analysis of 603 of the 5,393 citing papers to identify indications of awareness that the cited articles affected by (...) scientific misconduct had validity issues, and to examine how the citing papers referred to the affected articles. Fewer than 5% of citing papers indicated any awareness that the cited article was retracted or named in a finding of misconduct. We also tested the hypothesis that affected articles would have fewer citations than a comparison sample; this was not supported. Most articles affected by misconduct were published in basic science journals, and we found little cause for concern that such articles may have affected clinical equipoise or clinical care. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe published research articles that were named in official findings of scientific misconduct and to investigate compliance with the administrative actions contained in these reports for corrections and retractions, as represented in PubMed. Between 1993 and 2001, 102 articles were named in either the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts (“Findings of Scientific Misconduct”) or the U.S. Office of Research Integrity annual reports as needing retraction or correction. In 2002, 98 of (...) the 102 articles were indexed in PubMed. Eighty-five of these 98 articles had indexed corrections: 47 were retracted; 26 had an erratum; 12 had a correction described in the “comment” field. Thirteen had no correction, but 10 were linked to the NIH Guide “Findings of Scientific Misconduct”, leaving only 3 articles with no indication of any sort of problem. As of May 2005, there were 5,393 citations to the 102 articles, with a median of 26 citations per article (range 0–592). Researchers should be alert to “Comments” linked to the NIH Guide as these are open access, and the “Findings of Scientific Misconduct’ reports are often more informative than the statements about the retraction or correction found in the journals. (shrink)

Citizens have two mutually exclusive options: they can exile, or even execute, a god among men, or they can submit to superhuman monarchy. Aristotle thinks any state would choose the former, but finds the latter option superior and argues the citizenry should submit to the superhuman monarch because that is precisely what ideal citizens would do if such a being appeared in their society. This problem appears in great cinema and nowhere more powerfully than in J. J. Abrams's Star Trek (...) and Star Trek Into Darkness with the character of James T. Kirk. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes a man he calls the megalopsychos, the great‐souled man or proud man. Aristotle defines the two solutions to the problem of greatness, exile or monarchic rule, as mutually exclusive, but Kirk is able to progress from exile on Delta Vega to the captain's chair, the former seeming necessary for the latter. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “A Holdover from the Cylon Wars” The Resurrection Ship The Limit on Cylon Intelligence “The Cylons Send No One” “The Shape of Things to Come” Notes.

David McClean’s book Richard Rorty, Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism is an excellent contribution to Rorty scholarship and pragmatism in general. The book begins with a masterful reconstruction of the tradition of American philosophy from Emerson and Thoreau to Peirce and James and Dewey, culminating in Rorty. This beginning, from the Preface entitled “Rorty’s ‘Violence of Direction’” to Chapter 1 entitled “From Pragmatism to Rortyism” occupies almost the first third, and seems to establish a three-part structure, of the book. The second part (...) of the book, also very well done, critically engages Rorty’s pragmatist cosmopolitanism, finding the outlines... (shrink)

"The premise of the Jewish attitude toward illness is that living is sacred, that good health enables us to live a fully religious life, and that disease is an evil. Any effective therapy is permitted, even if it conflicts with Jewish law. To bring about healing is a responsibility not only of the person who is ill and of the professional caregivers, but also of the loved ones, and of the larger circle of family, friends, and community." "Illness and Health (...) in the Jewish Tradition is an anthology of traditional and modern Jewish writings that highlights these basic principles."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Throughout the animal kingdom, p53 genes function to restrain mobile elements and recent observations indicate that transposons become derepressed in human cancers. Together, these emerging lines of evidence suggest that cancers driven by p53 mutations could represent “transpospoathies,” i.e. disease states linked to eruptions of mobile elements. The transposopathy hypothesis predicts that p53 acts through conserved mechanisms to contain transposon movement, and in this way, prevents tumor formation. How transposon eruptions provoke neoplasias is not well understood but, from a broader (...) perspective, this hypothesis also provides an attractive framework to explore unrestrained mobile elements as inciters of late‐onset idiopathic disease.Also see the video abstract here. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's early works criticize the development of modern democratic institutions as creating a surveillance society, which functions to control bodies by making them feel watched and monitored full time. His later works attempt to recover private space by exploring subversive techniques of the body and language. Following Foucault, pragmatists like Richard Shusterman and Richard Rorty have also developed very rich approaches to this project, extending it deeper into the literary and somatic dimensions of self-stylizing. Yet, for a debate centered (...) on the re-creation of the vision of the self, these discussions have yet to fully engage—even while they set the conditions for this engagement with—issues of posthuman technologies, such as AI, robotics, and genetic engineering. These certainly will constitute the primary engine of public institutional surveillance in the years to come. With this surveillance, the two spheres of private self-fashioning and public institutions will continue to evolve in relation to one another. As they do so, democratic society will change considerably. Perhaps Rorty's own normative and linguistic ideal of conversational maintenance may provide something of a democratic limit case on any future posthuman self-fashioning. (shrink)