If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the health system worldwide. The organ and tissue donation and transplantation (OTDT) system is no exception and has had to face ethical challenges related to the pandemic, such as risks of infection and resource allocation. In this setting, many Canadian transplant programs halted their activities during the first wave of the pandemic.MethodTo inform future ethical guidelines related to the COVID-19 pandemic or other public health emergencies of international concern, we conducted a (...) literature review to summarize the ethical issues.ResultsThis literature review identified three categories of ethical challenges. The first one describes the general ethical issues and challenges reported by OTDT organizations and transplantation programs, such as risks of COVID-19 transmission and infection to transplant recipients and healthcare professionals during the transplant process, risk of patient waitlist mortality or further resource strain where transplant procedures have been delayed or halted, and resource allocation. The second category describes ethical challenges related to informed consent in the context of uncertainty and virtual consent. Finally, the third category describes ethical issues related to organ allocation, such as social considerations in selecting transplant candidates.ConclusionThis literature review highlights the salient ethical issues related to OTDT during the current COVID-19 pandemic. As medical and scientific knowledge about COVID-19 increases, the uncertainties related to this disease will decrease and the associated ethical issues will continue to evolve. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

Corcoran’s 27 entries in the 1999 second edition of Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge UP]. -/- ancestral, axiomatic method, borderline case, categoricity, Church (Alonzo), conditional, convention T, converse (outer and inner), corresponding conditional, degenerate case, domain, De Morgan, ellipsis, laws of thought, limiting case, logical form, logical subject, material adequacy, mathematical analysis, omega, proof by recursion, recursive function theory, scheme, scope, Tarski (Alfred), tautology, universe of discourse. -/- The entire work is available online free at more than (...) one website. Paste the whole URL. http://archive.org/stream/RobertiAudi_The.Cambridge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy/Robert.Audi_The.Cambrid ge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy -/- The 2015 third edition will be available soon. Before you think of buying it read some reviews on Amazon and read reviews of its competition: For example, my review of the 2008 Oxford Companion to Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Logic,29:3,291-292. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01445340701300429 -/- Some of the entries have already been found to be flawed. For example, Tarski’s expression ‘materially adequate’ was misinterpreted in at least one article and it was misused in another where ‘materially correct’ should have been used. The discussion provides an opportunity to bring more flaws to light. -/- Acknowledgements: Each of these entries was presented at meetings of The Buffalo Logic Dictionary Project sponsored by The Buffalo Logic Colloquium. The members of the colloquium read drafts before the meetings and were generous with corrections, objections, and suggestions. Usually one 90-minute meeting was devoted to one entry although in some cases, for example, “axiomatic method”, took more than one meeting. Moreover, about half of the entries are rewrites of similarly named entries in the 1995 first edition. Besides the help received from people in Buffalo, help from elsewhere was received by email. We gratefully acknowledge the following: José Miguel Sagüillo, John Zeis, Stewart Shapiro, Davis Plache, Joseph Ernst, Richard Hull, Concha Martinez, Laura Arcila, James Gasser, Barry Smith, Randall Dipert, Stanley Ziewacz, Gerald Rising, Leonard Jacuzzo, George Boger, William Demopolous, David Hitchcock, John Dawson, Daniel Halpern, William Lawvere, John Kearns, Ky Herreid, Nicolas Goodman, William Parry, Charles Lambros, Harvey Friedman, George Weaver, Hughes Leblanc, James Munz, Herbert Bohnert, Robert Tragesser, David Levin, Sriram Nambiar, and others. -/- . (shrink)

Anyone interested in the relationship between culture and the intellectual life, has no doubt turned to the works of Christopher Dawson. This collection of ten essays from a recent conference at Oxford acts as an excellent commentary on Dawson’s main academic concerns: recovering history as a philosophical-theological category, and the reintegration of the disciplines so as to provide future generations with an understanding of culture in the truest sense of the term. As John Morrill points out in (...) his introductory essay, Dawson’s “passionate commitment to metahistory and his proclamation of the deeply moral purpose of the historian” —although out of favor in some academic circles—marks his as a unique voice in the search for truth. Dawson’s daughter, Christina Scott, offers the reader some otherwise inaccessible insights into her father’s life, especially regarding his early interest in Augustine’s De civitate Dei and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Aidan Nichols, OP provides a bigger picture. His essay, “Christopher Dawson’s Catholic Setting,” highlights the “theology of culture” affecting all parts of English life during the earlier part of this century: the literature, art, architecture, and philosophy that brought “a Catholic sensibility to bear on cultural life”. The Chelsea set, a vibrantly orthodox Catholic salon to which Dawson belonged, centered their thought around the Neo-Thomism of Gilson and Maritain, the literature of Fumet and Julian Green, as well as the social thought of Emmanuel Mounier. (shrink)

The Hungarian émigré Imre Lakatos earned a worldwide reputation through the influential philosophy of science debates involving Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Sir Karl Popper. In _Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason_ John Kadvany shows that embedded in Lakatos’s English-language work is a remarkable historical philosophy rooted in his Hungarian past. Below the surface of his life as an Anglo-American philosopher of science and mathematics, Lakatos covertly introduced novel transformations of Hegelian and Marxist ideas about historiography, skepticism, criticism, (...) and rationality. Lakatos escaped Hungary following the failed 1956 Revolution. Before then, he had been an influential Communist intellectual and was imprisoned for years by the Stalinist regime. He also wrote a lost doctoral thesis in the philosophy of science and participated in what was criminal behavior in all but a legal sense. Kadvany argues that this intellectual and political past animates Lakatos’s English-language philosophy, and that, whether intended or not, Lakatos integrated a penetrating vision of Hegelian ideas with rigorous analysis of mathematical proofs and controversial histories of science. Including new applications of Lakatos’s ideas to the histories of mathematical logic and economics and providing lucid exegesis of many of Hegel’s basic ideas, _Imre Lakatos and the Guises of Reason_ is an exciting reconstruction of ideas and episodes from the history of philosophy, science, mathematics, and modern political history. (shrink)

As initially envisioned, Gödel's Collected Works were to include transcriptions of material from his mathematical workbooks. In the end that material, as well as some other manuscript items from Gödel's Nachlass, had to be left out. This note describes some of the unpublished items in the Nachlass that are likely to attract the notice of scholars and surveys the extent of shorthand transcription efforts undertaken hitherto. Some examples of sources outside Gödel's Nachlass that may be of interest to Gödel scholars (...) are also indicated. (shrink)

Openness and transparency are becoming hallmarks of responsible data practice in science and governance. Concerns about data falsification, erroneous analysis, and misleading presentation of research results have recently strengthened the call for new procedures that ensure public accountability for data-driven decisions. Though we generally count ourselves in favor of increased transparency in data practice, this Commentary highlights a caveat. We suggest that legislative efforts that invoke the language of data transparency can sometimes function as “Trojan Horses” through which other political (...) goals are pursued. Framing these maneuvers in the language of transparency can be strategic, because approaches that emphasize open access to data carry tremendous appeal, particularly in current political and technological contexts. We illustrate our argument through two examples of pro-transparency policy efforts, one historical and one current: industry-backed “sound science” initiatives in the 1990s, and contemporary legislative efforts to open environmental data to public inspection. Rules that exist mainly to impede science-based policy processes weaponize the concept of data transparency. The discussion illustrates that, much as Big Data itself requires critical assessment, the processes and principles that attend it—like transparency—also carry political valence, and, as such, warrant careful analysis. (shrink)

The republic -- Knowledge -- Reality -- Dialectic -- Value -- Causality and change -- Politics, art and the fate of the soul.

Although Ramachandra Guha has demonstrated the importance of cross-cultural dialogue on environmental issues and has much to tell us about the problems of wildemess preservation in the Third World, I argue that Guha is partly wrong in claiming that deep ecology equates environmental protection with wilderness protection and simply wrong in calling wilderness protection untenable or incorrect as aglobal strategy for environmental protection. Moreover, I argue that the deep ecology distinction between anthropocentrism and biocentrism is useful in dealing with the (...) two major problems which Guha identifies as undermining the health of the planetoverconsumption and militarism. Although it is true that preservation of wildemess will not be successful unless human social dynamics are taken into consideration, nevertheless, a biocentrism which integrates critical social theory can provide the basis for an ethic that undercuts the environmental degradation from overconsumption and militarism more effectively than a human-centered system. (shrink)

Claims that a man-made global warming catastrophe is imminent have two major aspects: the scientific support offered for the claims, and the political proposals brought forth in response to the claims. The central questions are whether non-scientists should accept the claims themselves as true, and whether they should support the political proposals attached to them. Predictions of a coming disaster are shown to be a-historical in both the long term and the short term, to involve shifting predictions that are contrary (...) to evidence, and to be opposed by many scientists. The political proposals to alleviate this alleged problemare shown to offer no alternative to fossil fuels, and to portend a major economic decline and permanent losses of liberty. The anthropogenic global warming claims are largely motivated not by science, but by a desire for socialist intervention on a national and a global scale. Neither the claims to an impending climate catastrophe nor the political proposals attached to those claims should be accepted. (shrink)

Close attention to the meanings of certain sentences--Counterfactual-Identity sentences--Reveals that no theory in which proper names are simple designators can be a complete and correct semantics of english. An account of connotation is outlined according to which connotation varies with the linguistic environment and with the context of utterance: this accounts for the fact that no proper name is synonymous with a cluster of descriptions.

This provocative book addresses one of the central and most controversial branches of Western thought: the philosophy of origin. In light of recent poststructuralist principles such as alterity, diffe;rance , and dissemination, the philosophy of origin seems to exemplify the repressive, reactionary tendencies of much of the Western philosophical tradition. John Pizer aims to overturn this recent antipathy to the philosophy of origin. He ably summarizes poststructuralist critiques of that earlier philosophical tradition, then turns to five German thinkers (Nietzsche, (...) Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Heidegger, and Adorno) who developed philosophies of origin that effectively anticipate and counter poststructuralist attacks. These are thinkers who, in one way or another, influenced recent generations of poststructuralist thinkers. Pizer argues, however, that rather than do away with the notion of origin altogether (as in the works of the most thoroughgoing poststructuralists), these philosophers developed theories in which origin is always “multiple and plurivalent.” In the writings of these seminal German thinkers, “origin” becomes “origins,” and “authentic origins” are “inherently plural and divergent.” A valuable, engrossing account of a wide range of thinkers and their complex relations, Pizer’s book recovers the notion of origin for an intellectual world that has come to value multiplicity, openness, and diversity. (shrink)

The essays in this volume reflect the wide-ranging interests of John D. North, distinguished historian of science and philosophy.

THE HUMAN RACE IS ON THE VERY OF SUICIDE! Unless man chooses to fight for his continued evolution he is doomed to extinction as a species. In The Moral Society, John David Garcia presents a revolutionary ethical theory much in the spirit of Spinoza and Teilhard de Chardin.The concept of ethics is made operational and developed on a purely rational basis without sentimentality or ideology. The Moral Society unifies ethics, art, science, technology, evolution and souci-political action and shows (...) that through ethical development man can achieve far more than advocates of supernatural utopias ever imagined.A rational alternative to death is presented in the form of a comprehensive political and social program. Every significant contemporary issue is analyzed—nuclear annihilation, environmental pollution, overpopulation, genetic decay, racism, educational inadequacies, the role of women, bureaucratic stagnation, etc. No compromise is made with popular prejudice.John David Garcia shows that evolution and ethics are intertwined. The Moral Society is a lucidly written work of science and philosophy. The conclusions are far-reaching and this may be the final call to action to all those who value humanity. (shrink)

Although Ramachandra Guha has demonstrated the importance of cross-cultural dialogue on environmental issues and has much to tell us about the problems of wildemess preservation in the Third World, I argue that Guha is partly wrong in claiming that deep ecology equates environmental protection with wilderness protection and simply wrong in calling wilderness protection untenable or incorrect as aglobal strategy for environmental protection. Moreover, I argue that the deep ecology distinction between anthropocentrism and biocentrism is useful in dealing with the (...) two major problems which Guha identifies as undermining the health of the planetoverconsumption and militarism. Although it is true that preservation of wildemess will not be successful unless human social dynamics are taken into consideration, nevertheless, a biocentrism which integrates critical social theory can provide the basis for an ethic that undercuts the environmental degradation from overconsumption and militarism more effectively than a human-centered system. (shrink)

The ancient lawgiver Solon of Athens left norms of proper conduct that carry important ethical implications for all manner of human affairs, including commercial activities and the pursuit of wealth. In his extant poetry, he emphasizes the strong connections between individual virtue and its consequences in the social and political sphere. In considering the proper means of obtaining material wealth, he describes multiple ways to earn a living and connects them to proper intellectual and ethical dispositions through a concept of (...) justice. This focus on virtue establishes a long-range ethics that is based on a principle of justice, demands rational intellectual activity, and carries implications for everyone’s self-interest. Solon’s concern for matters of virtue, the proper means of attaining wealth, and the need for long-range awareness of consequences offers a valuable point of historical focus for our own examinations of business ethics today. (shrink)

This chapter talks about Ayn Rand's distinctive view of the philosophical roots and meaning of the events of her time ‐ especially the events of the 1960s and 1970s when she was most active as a commentator on current events. It begins with a section on Rand's political writings and activism in the 1930s and (especially) 1940s, which is followed by Rand's essays that provide a broad philosophical and historical context for the issues facing the world. While the third section (...) deals with antitrust and censorship which according to Rand were as the most pressing issues, the fourth discusses the Kennedy administration. The fifth section analyzes the brokering deals between pressure groups by the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Then, Rand's writings focus on the unprincipled nature of American foreign policy, especially during the “Cold War”. Her writings also cover the civil rights, feminist, New Left and Libertarianism movements. (shrink)

Dialectic is a method of investigation which has enjoyed a long history and has been invoked and involved in a great variety of intellectual causes. Aristotle was one of the first thinkers to develop a full theory of dialectic, and his account has remained one of the most influential and philosophically substantial. Dr Evans here offers a systematic account of Aristotle's theory. He explores how dialectic is related to other forms of enquiry, both scientific and philosophical, and demonstrates the central (...) part which dialectic occupies in Aristotle's thought; he establishes the importance and originality of the Topics in which this theory is developed, and contrasts Aristotle's account with those of Plato and the Academy. This book will be of interest to philosophers and historians of ideas as well as to specialists in Greek philosophy. All quotations are translated into English and there is a glossary of key Greek terms. (shrink)

When we go back-by means of the epoché of the world, following Michel Henry-towards the originary “how” of all manifestation, we stumble once and again upon the phenomenological situation of the body. The body is, then that originary hinge by means of which I manifest world in a continuous resistance. It will be, as well, within my own body where I am always aware of oneself, according to my own affection. Thus, the material condition of the body will be that (...) of my internal body, or subjective body-as Henry initially read in Maine de Biran-or that of my flesh, as Henry himself would later say. Bearing all this in mind, the intermediate situation of one’s own affection, of this body of mine, with regard to the world and the videor, turns out to be an appropriate medium to attempt a preliminary study of the problematic situation of the internal time of affection. For this purpose, we shall revise the analysis offered by Michel Henry in Material Phenomenology and in Incarnation, indicating possible aporias, as well as alternatives to these last ones.Cuando, siguiendo a Michel Henry, retrocedemos en una epoché hacia el “cómo” originario de toda manifestación, tropezamos una y otra vez con la situación fenomenológica del cuerpo. El cuerpo es, pues, esta bisagra originaria a través de la cual yo manifiesto el mundo en continua resistencia. También será dentro del propio cuerpo donde uno será siempre autoconsciente, de acuerdo con la propia afección. Por eso, la condición material del cuerpo será la de mi cuerpo interior o cuerpo subjetivo, de acuerdo con la lectura inicial que Henry hace de Maine de Biran; o de mi carne, como dirá el mismo Henry más tarde. Teniendo en cuenta todo ello, la situación intermedia, situación de la afección propia y la de mi cuerpo en relación con el mundo y el videor, resulta ser un medio apropiado para emprender un estudio preliminar de la problemática situación del tiempo interno de la afección. Para ello, revisaremos el análisis que Michel Henry ofrece en Material Phenomenology y en Incarnation, indicando las posibles aporías, así como posibles alternativas. (shrink)