A scholarly edition of a work by David Hume. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

This collection of 11 studies provides a new discussion of Lucretius' History of the Human Mankind and of other topics (Lucretius' explanation of sleep, dreams and optical illusions) in relationship to other philosophical and scientific doctrines of Antiquity.

The Medication Event Monitoring System (MEMS) is a relatively new device designed to overcome some of the disadvantages of traditional adherence-measuring techniques. MEMS has also been found useful in tracking adherence behaviour without the need to visit patients frequently. In this study each patient was given a pre-filled, labelled MEMS bottle and cap. Patients were monitored for 24 weeks. For patients specifically studied, there were periods when drug levels may have been low and some exhibited erratic medication-taking behaviour. It is (...) concluded that MEMS can measure adherence behaviour objectively, and so might be used to improve prescribing decisions, identify drug wastage and improve carer support. Further research is needed before the routine use of electronic medication monitoring can be recommended. (shrink)

Bernasconi has famously remarked that Analytic Philosophy cannot possibly acknowledge the existence of a regional philosophy without relinquishing some of its pretensions to universality. Practitioners of PHILOSOPHY claim to be defining the universal horizon of humanity - a claim generating hegemonic structures. Either (it is claimed) African Philosophy is so similar to PHILOSOPHY that it effectively disappears into PHILOSOPHY, or it is so dissimilar that it ceases to be PHILOSOPHY. Either way the qualifier “African” has no content and no meaning. (...) Now, Eze follows Bernasconi in putting forward a similar theme. How does African Philosophy fit into the categories of Analytic Philosophy? Is a fit at all possible? The universalist pretensions of Analytic Philosophy decontextualises PHILOSOPHY, making a negative answer inevitable. (shrink)

This collection of 11 studies provides a new discussion of Lucretius' History of the Human Mankind and of other topics (Lucretius' explanation of sleep, dreams and optical illusions) in relationship to other philosophical and scientific doctrines of Antiquity.

Kwame Anthony Appiah has devoted much scholarly work to exploring the problems surrounding racial and cultural identities in the USA. He defends the position that such identities need not be centrally significant in the psyche of the subject, and that black demands for blacks to be recognised as having a black (race) identity, is symptomatic of black racism. Like other racisms, black racism has a tendency to go imperial, affecting the autonomy of the individual to decide which identity constructs she (...) is willing to endorse as her own. Appiah believes that free association, as the locus of social solidarities and the formation of individual and social identities, should be upheld as a counterweight to the imperialism of racisms in the USA. He believes, furthermore, that the cosmopolitan state best caters for free associations of this kind. In this article I offer a comprehensive view of Appiah's support for cosmopolitanism as the best answer to the problems of identity which race and culture generate in multicultural USA. (shrink)

This paper outlines how the law has defined art and addressed problems in aesthetics. The discussion shows how the law examines the physical, temporal, and perceptual characteristics of works of art and their manner of creation to determine which works will be legally recognized and protected. The paper also discusses differentiations between various kinds of creations, including art, ornament, design, and craft. Besides outlining how the law judges art, the paper assesses the limitations of legal incursions into aesthetics. The analysis (...) is primarily based on UK law. (shrink)

Rid and Wendler propose the development of a Patient Preference Predictor (PPP), an actuarial model for predicting incapacitated patient’s life-sustaining treatment preferences across a wide range of end-of-life scenarios. An actuarial approach to end-of-life decision making has enormous potential, but transferring the logic of actuarial prediction to end-of-life decision making raises several conceptual complexities and logistical problems that need further consideration. Actuarial models have proven effective in targeted prediction tasks, but no evidence supports their effectiveness in the kind of broad (...) spectrum prediction task that is the proposed goal of the PPP. We argue that a more focused approach, targeting specific medical conditions and generating treatment predictions based on the preferences of individuals with actual disease experience, is both more firmly grounded in past research and is a more prudent initial strategy for exploring the efficacy of actuarial prediction in end-of-life decision making. (shrink)

Historian James H. Jones published the first edition of Bad Blood, the definitive history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in 1981. Its clear-eyed examination of that research and its implications remains a bioethics classic, and the 30-year anniversary of its publication served as the impetus for the reexamination of research ethics that this symposium presents. Recent revelations about the United States Public Health Service study that infected mental patients and prisoners in Guatemala with syphilis in the late 1940s in order (...) to determine the efficacy of treatment represent only one of the many attestations to the persistence of ongoing, critical, and underaddressed issues in research ethics that Bad Blood first explored. Those issues include, but are not limited to: the complex and contested matters of the value of a given research question, the validity of the clinical trial designed to address it, and the priorities of science. (shrink)

Standard defences of preservationism, and of the intrinsic value of nature more generally, are vulnerable to at least three objections. The first of these comes from social constructivism, the second from the claim that it is incoherent to argue that nature is both 'other' and something with which we can feel unity, whilst the third links defences of nature to authoritarian objectivism and dangerously misanthropic normative dichotomies which set pure nature against impure humanity. I argue that all these objections may (...) be answered by recasting the relationship between man and nature into a tripartite spectrum of ontological form between nature and artifact, with the key question being the extent to which nature has been humanised in accordance with certain modes of strongly instrumental rationality, these in turn being defined by reference to the split between abstract reason and natural feeling which was exacerbated by specific elements in the Enlightenment period. This new model may grant normative force by linking external nature to a broader conception of human psychological wellbeing than that offered by the quantitatively orientated models of human rationality and agency. (shrink)

A numerical classification was performed on 69 elements with 54 chemicaland physicochemical properties. The elements fell into clusters in closeaccord with the electron shell s-, p- andd-blocks. The f-block elements were not included forlack of sufficiently complete data. The successive periods ofs- and p-block elements appeared in an ovalconfiguration, with d-block elements lying to one side. Morethan three axes were required to give good representation of thevariation, although the interpretation of the higher axes is difficult.Only 15 properties were scorable for (...) the noble gases, but despite thepaucity of properties reflecting chemical reactivity, analysis of the 69elements on these properties still showed the major features seen fromthe full set. (shrink)