As the expansion of the Internet and the digital formatting of all kinds of creative works move us further into the information age, intellectual property issues have become paramount. Computer programs costing thousands of research dollars are now copied in an instant. People who would recoil at the thought of stealing cars, computers, or VCRs regularly steal software or copy their favorite music from a friend's CD. Since the Web has no national boundaries, these issues are international concerns. The contributors-philosophers, (...) legal theorists, and business scholars, among others-address questions such as: Can abstract ideas be owned? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare to the violation of physical property rights? Can computer software and other digital information be protected? And how should legal systems accommodate the ownership of intellectual property in an information age? Intellectual Property is a lively examination of these and other issues, and an invaluable resource for librarians, lawyers, businesspeople, and scholars. (shrink)

ABSTRACT There is limited guidance about whether and how to provide psychological assessment results to research participants. This paper considers several ethical challenges associated with offering individual research results in psychological assessment research. Additionally, the process used to return individual results within a study examining neurodevelopmental effects of anesthesia exposure in children and adolescents is described. Almost all participants requested to know if results were concerning; however, only around a third of those with concerning findings sought additional feedback. Ongoing research (...) and guidance are necessary to establish evidence-based practices and manage challenges that may emerge when disclosing such results. (shrink)

These lines conclude the speech of Pompey to Cornelia when she met him on the shore of Lesbos after the disaster of Pharsalia. This speech Mr. Heitland in his excellent Introduction to Haskins' Lucan has stigmatised as ‘abominable’.1 So far as the bulk of the speech is concerned a plea may perhaps be urged in mitigation of this judgment. Cornelia has completely broken down at the sight of her unfortunate husband, and his first object should be to restore her to (...) herself. For this purpose, as all, not excluding Lucan, know, a tone of sharp chiding would be most effectual, and we learn from the sequel that it succeeded : ‘uocibus his correpta uiri uix aegra leuauit | membra solo’ . For the crude brutality of the statement in the last four words there is however no excuse. But happily it is not to be charged to Pompey or to Lucan, but to the editions. We should punctuate. (shrink)

This chapter deals with a crucial component of our position, the presumption that there are objective grounds for preferring one thing to another within the various cultural institutions we deal with, that there are better or worse symphonies, soufflés and theories of the atom. The task of showing this is more urgent for some institutions than others. While philosophers can doubt anything, most people are persuaded of the objectivity of our efforts to comprehend the physical world and to weigh, count (...) and measure accurately in many areas of human activity. Again, when we are faced with a choice among functional objects or processes, most people will admit that we can ground a preference for a knife or an exercise routine on objectively established facts: sharpness, or measurable increase in strength. Here, certainly, various conflicting desiderata may enter and make actual decisions more difficult — the sharpest knife may also be the most expensive; we may need to worry about its safety features; it may be ugly; and so on. But many will doubt that our judgements of comparative worth for non-functional objects such as paintings or sonatas can claim a similarly objective basis. We shall, therefore, concentrate our efforts on the most doubted areas, but will begin with the less contentious, where we think it is useful to draw attention to the genuine problems some philosophers have stressed, to show in fact that what we believe to be popular unconcern deserves to be somewhat ruffled. (shrink)

Many medical ethicists accept the thesis that there is no moral difference between withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining therapy. In this paper, we offer an interesting counterexample which shows that this thesis is not always true. Withholding is distinguished from withdrawing by the simple fact that therapy must have already been initiated in order to speak coherently about withdrawal. Provided that there is a genuine need and that therapy is biomedically effective, the historical fact that therapy has been initiated entails a (...) claim to continue therapy that cannot be attributed to patients who have not yet received therapy. This intrinsic difference between withholding and withdrawing therapy is of moral importance. In many instances, patients will waive this claim. But when one considers withdrawing therapy from one patient to help another in a setting of scarce resources, this intrinsic moral difference comes into sharp focus. In an era of shrinking medical resources, this difference cannot be ignored. (shrink)

The use of coercive measures in the care for the addicted has changed over the past 20 years. Laws that have adopted the “dangerousness” criterion in order to secure patients’ rights to non-intervention are increasingly subjected to critique as many authors plead for wider dangerousness criteria. One of the most salient moral issues at stake is whether addicts who are at risk of causing danger to themselves should be involuntarily admitted and/or treated. In this article, it is argued that the (...) dilemma between coercion on the one hand and abandonment on the other cannot be analysed without differentiated perspectives on the key notions that are used in these debates. The ambiguity these notions carry within care practice indicates that the conflict between the prevention of danger and respect for autonomy is not as sharp as the legal systems seem to imply. Some coercive measures need not be interpreted as an infringement of autonomy—rather, they should be interpreted as a way to provide good care. (shrink)

Recently, Rueger and Sharp (1996) and Koperski (1998) have been concerned to show that certain procedural accounts of model confirmation are compromised by non-linear dynamics. We suggest that the issues raised are better approached by considering whether chaotic data analysis methods allow for reliable inference from data. We provide a framework and an example of this approach.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 407 [Access article in PDF] Reply By Margaret J. Osler and Richard A. Watson In his comments on our historiographical Notes in the October 2002 issue of JHP, A. P. Martinich misrepresents our position by erroneously claiming that we presume a sharp dichotomy between the analytic history of philosophy and the historical history of philosophy. Neither of us accepts such (...) a premise. Once that misreading is eliminated there are few disagreements between each of us and Martinich.We agree that any meaningful history of philosophy must be both philosophically sophisticated and historically grounded. History without philosophy would be nothing but chronicle; history of philosophy without historical context would describe a series of moves, but explain nothing. A desideratum of both history and philosophy is careful reading, exposition, and analysis of texts.... (shrink)

It is generally believed that the uncertainty relation Δq Δp≥1/2ħ, where Δq and Δp are standard deviations, is the precise mathematical expression of the uncertainty principle for position and momentum in quantum mechanics. We show that actually it is not possible to derive from this relation two central claims of the uncertainty principle, namely, the impossibility of an arbitrarily sharp specification of both position and momentum (as in the single-slit diffraction experiment), and the impossibility of the determination of the (...) path of a particle in an interference experiment (such as the double-slit experiment).The failure of the uncertainty relation to produce these results is not a question of the interpretation of the formalism; it is a mathematical fact which follows from general considerations about the widths of wave functions.To express the uncertainty principle, one must distinguish two aspects of the spread of a wave function: its extent and its fine structure. We define the overall widthW Ψ and the mean peak width wψ of a general wave function ψ and show that the productW Ψ w φ is bounded from below if φ is the Fourier transform of ψ. It is shown that this relation expresses the uncertainty principle as it is used in the single- and double-slit experiments. (shrink)

In this article, cognitivism is understood as the view that the engine of human (individual and collective) action is the intentional, dispositional, or other mental capacities of the brain or the mind. Cognitivism has been criticized for considering the essence of human action to reside in its alleged source in mental processes at the expense of the social surroundings of the action, criticism that has often been inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy. This article explores the logical extent of the (...) critique of cognitivism, arguing that by positing collectively shared knowledge of criteria as the engine of human action many such critiques themselves display latent cognitivism. (shrink)

Rapid advances in the domain of science and technology are having an unprecedented effect upon the provision of higher education in universities throughout the world, the pace of change often being so fast as to make planning for the development of the “classroom of the future” an extremely difficult task. The Mobile Multimedia University (MMU) project, a collaborative action between four leading UK based research facilities, has been established to investigate these issues. Included amongst its aims is the use of (...) novel research methodologies to determine the factors which will influence the shape and form of future education provision, and thus the distribution of knowledge to society, such as mobility, telecommunications and multimedia services. This paper describes the use of a Delphi survey in predicting the technological trends and innovations which will affect university education in the near future. It describes the theory underpinning the Delphi method, illustrating this with examples of how such a technique has been successfully used in the past. It then details the specific application of the Delphi approach within the current MMU research project, detailing the preliminary results and discussing the implications of these findings for the future of universities and other institutes of higher education. (shrink)

1. Introduction. It is an amazing thing that, unlike pebbles, clouds and stars, the smallest building stones of Nature—the electrons, the protons and the neutrons—are all completely uniform. There seems to be a necessity in Nature for systems of a very special form, and one can wonder now what kind of necessity this is. I believe that this can only be a mathematical necessity, that consequently the principle of Nature is a mathematical one. How else could Nature obey the mathematical (...) laws of physics if it were not because of her own principle? It can be argued that these mathematical laws, like Newtonian mechanics, the classical theory of electromagnetism and the quantum theory of the electron are all some form of beginner's luck, and that continued investigation will reveal Nature as more and more mysterious and irrational. If that were true, one might as well give up the pursuit of physics completely! But on one hand modern physics has discovered what we believe to be the elementary particles of the material world, and on the other hand it comes out that at least a part of these elementary forms obey mathematic laws to a very high degree of accuracy. (shrink)

In a range of human sciences, the human relationship to nature has often been viewed as driven fundamentally by religious, philosophical, political, and scientific ideas as well as values and norms about nature. As others have argued before, the emphasis on ideas and values faces serious problems in heeding the structural, socioeconomic quality of the human relationship to nature and thereby the deeply problematic structural character of the human environmental burden. At the same time, alleviating the structural environmental burden generated (...) by global industrial market society represents arguably the single most challenging task in addressing environmental problems. Critically explicating the tendency of our intellectual culture to produce ideological and psychologistic explanations of human ecologically consequential action, and human action more generally, can clarify the notion of the cultural causes of environmental problems and the character of the human collective causing them. Only a structuralist point of view can accommodate the diversity of our positions and perspectives toward nature in the global context in which environmental problems are caused. (shrink)

This collection applies the characterisations of children and childhood made in Deleuze and Guattari's work to concerns that have shaped our idea of the child. Bringing together established and new voices, the authors consider aspects of children's lives such as time, language, gender, affect, religion, atmosphere and schooling.

Abstract:This paper addresses the current debate in environmental ethics regarding the notion of wilderness. It has been argued by J. Baird Callicott and Michael Nelson, William Cronon, and others that our current idea of wilderness is deeply flawed, especially insofar as it draws a sharp dichotomy between us and the rest of nature. This paper first explores what it means (and what it does not) to say that “wilderness” is a constructed concept. It then describes some of the key (...) objections and solutions proposed in order to argue that the best approach to understanding the concept and place of wilderness is to embrace a pluralistic approach. This proposal would allow for mutually inconsistent and incommensurable ideas to co-exist without succumbing to the pitfalls of an anything-goes relativism. (shrink)