The opening sentence of Christopher Meyers’ Target Article is “Lying to one’s patient is wrong”. The author continues, “This truism is one that bioethicists have heartedly endorsed fo...

Among the distinguished intellectuals of sixteenth-century Italy was Antonio Brucioli, renowned for participating in the gatherings in the garden of the Rucellai in Florence during the second decade of the sixteenth century. Since Delio Cantimori’s fundamental article and Giorgio Spini’s fundamental monograph, Brucioli’s Dialogi have been valued for the insight they afford into the discussions of the Rucellai group. Twice in the Dialogi Brucioli offers a revealing discussion of music. The references reflect intellectual traditions of great significance and longevity and (...) afford valuable insight into the late-Renaissance reception of such venerable doctrines. (shrink)

To paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from his Through the Looking Glass, “The time has come to talk of many things.” Not as the Walrus did in the nursery rhyme, “of sho...

This paper examines and critiques the ethical issues in postmortem sperm retrieval and the use of postmortem sperm to create new life. The article was occasioned by the recent request of the parents of a West Point cadet who died in a skiing accident at the Academy to retrieve and use his sperm to honor his memory and perpetuate the family name. The request occasioned national media attention. A trial court judge in New York in a two-page order authorized both (...) the retrieval and use of the postmortem sperm. (shrink)

It took nearly two thousand years for society to recognize the Hippocratic insistence that “the doctor knows best”1 was an inadequate approach to medical decisionmaking. Today, patient-centered medicine has come to understand that the individual patient has a significant role in the decisionmaking process.2.

The opinion of Mr. Justice Francis of the English High Court which denied the parents of Charlie Gard, who had been born with an extremely rare mutation of a genetic disease, the right to take their child to the United States for a proposed experimental treatment occasioned world wide attention including that of the Pope, President Trump, and the US Congress. The case raise anew a debate as old as the foundation of Western medicine on who should decide and on (...) what standard when there is a conflict between a family and the treating physicians over a possible treatment. This paper will explore the different approaches of the British and American courts on the issue and the various proposals from that of John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice to a processed-based approach for resolving such disputes. As carefully crafted as the opinion of Mr Justice Nicholas Francis in the Gard case proved to be, it left commentators unsatisfied. A widespread criticism, captured in an article by Michael Dougherty in The National Review was for the state to ‘get out of the way of the parents trying to act in the best interests of the child’.1 Although he conceded the parents could be adding to the suffering of the child by taking Charlie to America for an experimental therapy and agreed that such a choice ‘may be the wrong decision,’ in Dougherty’s view, it should still be ‘their decision’. Dougherty’s stand was the popular response to the question of ‘Who should decide?’ It fails, however, to propose any rationale for the decision. It provided no norms, no standards and no guidelines for the parents. Their motive could equally well be indifference to the suffering of the child as concern for his well-being. Furthermore, even good, loving parents may make …. (shrink)

The lateralized ERP N2pc component has been shown to be an effective marker of attentional object selection when elicited in a visual search task, specifically reflecting the selection of a target item among distractors. Moreover, when targets are known in advance, the visual search process is guided by representations of target features held in working memory at the time of search, thus guiding attention to objects with target-matching features. Previous studies have shown that manipulating working memory availability via concurrent tasks (...) or within task manipulations influences visual search performance and the N2pc. Other studies have indicated that visual vs. spatial working memory manipulations have differential contributions to visual search. To investigate this the current study assesses participants' visual and spatial working memory ability independent of the visual search task to determine whether such individual differences in working memory affect task performance and the N2pc. Participants completed a visual search task to elicit the N2pc and separate visual working memory and spatial working memory assessments. Greater SPWM, but not VWM, ability is correlated with and predicts higher visual search accuracy and greater N2pc amplitudes. Neither VWM nor SPWM was related to N2pc latency. These results provide additional support to prior behavioral and neural visual search findings that spatial WM availability, whether as an ability of the participant's processing system or based on task demands, plays an important role in efficient visual search. (shrink)

The children were nestled all snug in their beds.While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.Clement Moore's cherished ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas captures the hopes, dreams and visions...

Volume 19, Issue 12, December 2019, Page 49-51.

Objective: To determine whether the marks in the third year Objective Structured Clinical Examination were affected by the collusion reported by the students themselves on an electronic discussion board.Design: A review of the student discussion, examiners’ feedback and a comparison of the marks obtained on the 2 days of the OSCE.Participants: 255 third year medical students.Setting: An OSCE consisting of 15 stations, administered on three sites over 2 days at a UK medical school.Results: 40 students contributed to the discussion on (...) the electronic discussion board. The main points raised were perceived inequity between students who did, or did not, have prior knowledge of the station content, and the lack of honesty and professionalism of their peers. Most contributors claimed to have received, or knew of others receiving, prior knowledge, but none confessed to passing on information. No significant difference was observed in the overall mark for the OSCE on day 1 ) and day 2 ). On day 2, marks were considerably greater for four stations and markedly lower for three stations. It was not obvious why collusion should affect these station marks. A clear indication of the effects of collusion could only be obtained from a single subsection of an individual station where 82 students on day 2 incorrectly gave the diagnosis from day 1.Conclusion: Marks do not provide a sound inference of student collusion in an OSCE and may mask the aspects of professional development of students. (shrink)

One enduring legacy of the twentieth century will be the slow, certain transformation of the world from insular civilizations to interactive societies enmeshed in global systems of electronic communication, economics, and politics. Financial news from Thailand or Brazil is often more important globally than political events in the old centers of power. Some bemoan the uncertainty and flux of all this. However, the mutual definition of the world’s societies presents an extraordinary opportunity to humanize a situation that all too quickly (...) could degenerate into a Weberian ‘iron cage’ of truly global proportions. What contribution can the world’s great philosophical traditions make toward humanity’s common task of civilizing the rise of globalization? Here the ancient concept of paideia walks upon the stage of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

One enduring legacy of the twentieth century will be the slow, certain transformation of the world from insular civilizations to interactive societies enmeshed in global systems of electronic communication, economics, and politics. Financial news from Thailand or Brazil is often more important globally than political events in the old centers of power. Some bemoan the uncertainty and flux of all this. However, the mutual definition of the world’s societies presents an extraordinary opportunity to humanize a situation that all too quickly (...) could degenerate into a Weberian ‘iron cage’ of truly global proportions. What contribution can the world’s great philosophical traditions make toward humanity’s common task of civilizing the rise of globalization? Here the ancient concept of paideia walks upon the stage of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

One enduring legacy of the twentieth century will be the slow, certain transformation of the world from insular civilizations to interactive societies enmeshed in global systems of electronic communication, economics, and politics. Financial news from Thailand or Brazil is often more important globally than political events in the old centers of power. Some bemoan the uncertainty and flux of all this. However, the mutual definition of the world’s societies presents an extraordinary opportunity to humanize a situation that all too quickly (...) could degenerate into a Weberian ‘iron cage’ of truly global proportions. What contribution can the world’s great philosophical traditions make toward humanity’s common task of civilizing the rise of globalization? Here the ancient concept of paideia walks upon the stage of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The healthcare industry generates significant waste and carbon emissions that negatively impact the environment. Intensive care units are a major contributor to the production of waste, due t...

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 147-150.

This book introduces Robert Corrington’s “ecstatic naturalism,” a new perspective in understanding “sacred” nature and naturalism, and explores what can be done with this philosophical thought. This is an excellent resource for scholars of Continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and American pragmatism.

Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters (...) survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience, and our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world. (shrink)

We prove a number of consistency results complementary to the ZFC results from our paper [J. Cummings, M. Foreman, M. Magidor, Canonical structure in the universe of set theory: part one, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 129 211–243]. We produce examples of non-tightly stationary mutually stationary sequences, sequences of cardinals on which every sequence of sets is mutually stationary, and mutually stationary sequences not concentrating on a fixed cofinality. We also give an alternative proof for the consistency of (...) the existence of stationarily many non-good points, show that diagonal Prikry forcing preserves certain stationary reflection properties, and study the relationship between some simultaneous reflection principles. Finally we show that the least cardinal where square fails can be the least inaccessible, and show that weak square is incompatible in a strong sense with generic supercompactness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Location of CultureJuniper EllisThe Location of Culture, by Homi K. Bhabha; 285 pp. New York: Routledge, 1994, $49.95.This book assembles several of Homi Bhabha’s most significant essays, allowing for an examination of his contribution to contemporary literary theory. As a self-described postcolonial critic, often compared with Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak, Bhabha is perhaps most well-known for his theory of cultural hybridity, which he develops in “Signs (...) Taken For Wonders” and several other essays included in this collection. Bhabha argues that hybridity results from various forms of colonization, which lead to cultural collisions and interchanges. In the attempt to assert colonial power in order to create anglicized subjects, “[t]he trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different—a mutation, a hybrid” (p. 111). This hybrid trace contradicts both the attempt to fix and control indigenous cultures and the illusion of cultural isolation or purity. His project thus adapts poststructuralist challenges to stable or fixed identities, attempting to “rename” postmodernism from a postcolonial perspective (p. 175), and allowing sustained attention to the ways in which race, gender, community, and nationality converge. One of his major contributions to theories of cultural production and identity is that he examines these various intersections closely, and avoids simply listing them or elevating one aspect of his analysis over others.Eight of the twelve chapters in this volume have been published previously, though some contain significant revisions. Throughout, Bhabha provides a nonteleological series of readings from the Enlightenment to the present. He draws most often upon psychoanalytic approaches, with particular attention to Frantz Fanon, in his focus upon documents from British missionaries and colonial administrators in India, and upon such writers as Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Joseph Conrad, and E. M. Forster. Paraphrasing his arguments risks simplifying them, and also requires translating some of his frequent neologisms. Though Bhabha’s narrative is at times opaque, at their best these terms convey a new framework for describing cultures and their productions. Bhabha emphasizes what he describes as culture’s “in-between,” for instance, the interstitial spaces within and among individuals and cultures, which do not maintain a single position but form identities in an on-going process.One of Bhabha’s significant stances is his defense of the ways theory may be transformative. Rather than viewing theory as only an élite Occidental production or as apolitical, in Chapter One, “The Commitment to Theory,” he suggests that politics work with and through theory and that theory and politics cannot be separated. He endeavors to establish a “committed theoretical perspective,” accounting for postcolonial positions, while evading “the politics of polarities” that deny hybrid cultures and histories (p. 21, 39). The entire collection expands upon these claims, and three essays in particular—“Sly [End Page 196] Civility,” “Signs Taken for Wonders,” and “Articulating the Archaic”—develop the most extended discussions of agency on the part of the colonized, suggesting that culture’s “in-between” can be employed in ways that reveal contradictions within narratives that would uphold a linear, progressive model of Western history and civilization.In this way, his discussion of contact between cultures revises the narrative of progress or modernity, associated particularly with the Enlightenment. Bhabha reads the atrocities that were knowingly committed and sanctioned in the colonies as the “contramodernity” that belies traditional arguments about increasing civility and development of modernity. “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern” and “By Bread Alone,” in particular, confront teleological versions of history with a recognition of the colonial involvement and complicity of modernity.His argument can be extended to evaluate divergent movements within modernity and postmodernity and to revise the major models of both by revealing their stakes in colonial practices. Bhabha’s work suggests that the process of making modernity and the past is continual and partial, and that political action (which would include writing theory, in his argument), can be effective if not total. The pleasure of his work, as well as its difficulty, lies in his refusal to simplify cultures or endorse easy assumptions.Juniper EllisVanderbilt UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Indoleamine 2,3‐dioxygenase (IDO) is the rate‐limiting enzyme in conversion of tryptophan to kynurenines, feeding de novo nicotinamide synthesis. IDO orchestrates materno‐foetal tolerance, increasing human reproductive fitness. IDO mediates immune suppression through depletion of tryptophan required by T lymphocytes and other mechanisms. IDO is expressed by alternatively activated macrophages, suspected to play a key role in tuberculosis (TB) pathogenesis. Unlike its human host, Mycobacterium tuberculosis can synthesize tryptophan, suggesting possible benefit to the host from infection with the microbe. Intriguingly, nicotinamide analogues (...) are used to treat TB. In reviewing this field, it is postulated that flux through the nicotinamide synthesis pathway reflects switching between aerobic glycolysis and oxidative phosphorylation in M. tuberculosis‐infected macrophages. The evolutionary cause of such shifts may be ancient mitochondrial behavior related to reproductive fitness. Evolutionary perspectives on the IDO pathway may elucidate why, after centuries of co‐existence with the Tubercle bacillus, humans still remain susceptible to TB disease. (shrink)

Mastery imagery has been shown to be associated with more positive cognitive and emotional responses to stress, but research is yet to investigate the influence of mastery imagery ability on imagery’s effectiveness in regulating responses to acute stress, such as competition. Furthermore, little research has examined imagery’s effectiveness in response to actual competition. This study examined (a), whether mastery imagery ability was associated with stress response changes to a competitive stress task, a car racing computer game, following an imagery intervention, (...) and (b), the effects of different guided imagery content on pre-task cognitive and emotional responses. In Session 1, 78 participants (M age = 20.03 years, SD = 1.28) completed ratings of pre-task anxiety intensity and direction, confidence, and perceived control. Imagery ability was also assessed before completing the task. In Session 2, participants were randomly allocated to an imagery condition (positive mastery, negative mastery, relaxation) or control group (no imagery) before completing the task and outcome measures again. For the negative mastery group, greater positive mastery imagery ability was associated with greater perceived control and perceiving anxiety as more facilitative. Furthermore, mastery imagery ability moderated the relationship between anxiety intensity and direction. Altogether, results suggest that positive mastery imagery ability may act as a potential buffer against the effects of negative images. (shrink)