: Originally presented during Ethic Rounds at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, this commentary on the case of a patient treated for life-threatening cancer explores the responsibilities of health care providers when addressing the patient's desire to adopt a child.

This is an important volume for rounding out our understanding of the origins and dimensions of the logical empiricist project. While the existence of a Berlin wing of logical empiricism—personified principally in Hans Reichenbach and Carl G. Hempel—has been well known, in the recent reappraisal literature the spotlight has been firmly on the Vienna Circle. [...] The essays give an expansive sense of the German-Berlin context of the work of not only Reichenbach and Hempel but also their philosophical colleagues Kurt (...) Grelling, Walter Dubislav, and Paul Oppenheim, their philosophical mentors and influences including Leonard Nelson and the Friesian School and Ernst Cassirer, their scientific and mathematical influences including Albert Einstein, David Hilbert, and Bertrand Russell, as well as their scientific colleagues such as Kurt Lewin and Wolfgang Köhler. (shrink)

COVID-19 has been called “a disaster for feminism” for numerous reasons. In this short piece, we make sense of this claim, drawing on intersectional feminism to understand why an analysis that considers gender alone is inadequate to address both the risks and consequences of COVID-19.

It was an afternoon in the early stages of the pandemic when Lisa Richardson and I ran into each other at the hospital coffee line. Standing six feet apart and decked out in masks, scrub caps, and face shields, we were almost unrecognizable to one another and to ourselves. The pandemic was of course top of mind, but our conversation quickly turned to what was being articulated about the pandemic and why it was being heralded as a "disaster for (...) feminism". As Audre Lorde reminds us, "There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives," and we were beginning to see how many issues intersected in the pandemic moment. The United Nations was calling... (shrink)

For several terms at Cambridge in 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein lectured on the philosophical foundations of mathematics. A lecture class taught by Wittgenstein, however, hardly resembled a lecture. He sat on a chair in the middle of the room, with some of the class sitting in chairs, some on the floor. He never used notes. He paused frequently, sometimes for several minutes, while he puzzled out a problem. He often asked his listeners questions and reacted to their replies. Many meetings were (...) largely conversation. These lectures were attended by, among others, D. A. T. Gasking, J. N. Findlay, Stephen Toulmin, Alan Turing, G. H. von Wright, R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies. Notes taken by these last four are the basis for the thirty-one lectures in this book. The lectures covered such topics as the nature of mathematics, the distinctions between mathematical and everyday languages, the truth of mathematical propositions, consistency and contradiction in formal systems, the logicism of Frege and Russell, Platonism, identity, negation, and necessary truth. The mathematical examples used are nearly always elementary. (shrink)

This dual methods study explored one social studies teacher education program as it attempted to incorporate a cycle of practice-based teacher education into a methods course for the purpose of democratizing the teacher education experience. In addition to detailing the pedagogical decisions of the course instructor, researchers followed two social studies teacher candidates into their student teaching experience. Findings suggested that promoting social studies practice through a pedagogy of enactment is not enough. Rather, mentor teachers, course instructors, and teacher candidates (...) need to be aligned pedagogically as to the purposes and practices of social studies education. (shrink)

I examine whether it is possible for content relevant to a computer''s behavior to be carried without an explicit internal representation. I consider three approaches. First, an example of a chess playing computer carrying emergent content is offered from Dennett. Next I examine Cummins response to this example. Cummins says Dennett''s computer executes a rule which is inexplicitly represented. Cummins describes a process wherein a computer interprets explicit rules in its program, implements them to form a chess-playing device, then this (...) device executes the rules in a way that exhibits them inexplicitly. Though this approach is intriguing, I argue that the chess-playing device cannot exist as imagined. The processes of interpretation and implementation produce explicit representations of the content claimed to be inexplicit. Finally, the Chinese Room argument is examined and shown not to save the notion of inexplicit information. This means the strategy of attributing inexplicit content to a computer which is executing a rule, fails. (shrink)

Most literature on the ethics of global warming focuses on the obligations of industrialized states to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases and to help poor countries do likewise. These books are no exception, arguing that the issue is a matter of international justice and equity.

As I put down my copy of The Making of Men and take up Volumes III and IV of Philosophy in Process, the period of the diary when Weiss was writing the book, I wondered whether the longer work showed more awareness of human weakness and disability. The philosophic program calls for the overcoming of bias and achievement of neutrality. Has Weiss ever admitted that men are sometimes born tired, suffer weaknesses, yield to the temptation of aiming low rather than (...) high, fail to put out much effort in capturing "the free energy" that Weiss ascribes to us all? If Weiss doesn't correct his account of human life that is too much based on his own great strengths, then the philosophy must be criticized as one-sided. Even if he has swept aside laziness as subhuman, much as a good teacher encourages students by expecting the superhuman and ignoring the subhuman, this practical encouragement cannot fully excuse theoretical failure in adequacy. For surely we who know Weiss know that he is not merely a performing artist who sometimes takes the classroom as a stage, but rather is a coach who knows how to bring the best performance out of his team of intellectual athletes. Most coaches expect to win every game and have a philosophy that never anticipates or prepares for failure. Is that why Weiss found himself so much at home in the world of Sport? (shrink)

The world is in the early stages of what will be the greatest health crisis since the advent of modern medical technologies. Millions of people—particularly people in many of the world's poor countries—are infected with HIV. The vast majority of these people will go without modern medical intervention or substantial treatment, and will rapidly develop AIDS. The extent of this problem presents profound moral and ethical questions for the world's wealthy people and countries, for it is they who are most (...) able to assist the poor in managing and reversing this human tragedy. (shrink)

Johnson and Stricker published an opinion piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics presenting their perspective on the 2008 agreement between the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) and the Connecticut Attorney General with regard to the 2006 IDSA treatment guideline for Lyme disease. Their writings indicate that these authors hold unconventional views of a relatively common tick-transmitted bacterial infection caused by the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that their opinions would clash with the IDSA's (...) evidence-based guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease. Their allegations of conflict of interest against the IDSA resemble those made against the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2000, which were found to be baseless. It is the responsibility of all physicians and medical scientists to stand up to antiscientific, baseless and unethical attacks on those who support an evidence-based approach to caring for patients. (shrink)

The role of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) in neurotransmission is well known. But long before synapses are formed in vertebrates, AChE is expressed in young postmitotic neuroblasts that are about to extend the first long tracts. AChE histochemistry can thus be used to map primary steps of brain differentiation. Preceding an possibly inducing AChE in avian brains, the closely related butyrylcholinesterase (BChE) spatially fore-shadows AChE-positive cell areas and the course of their axons. In particular, before spinal motor axons grow, their corresponding rostral (...) sclerotomes and myotomes express BChE, and both their neuronal source and myotomal target cells express AChE. Since axon growth has been found inhibited by acetylcholine, it is postulated that both cholinetsreases can attract neurite growth cones by neutralizing the inhibitor. Thus, the early expression of both cholinesterases that is at least partially independent from classical cholinergic synaptogenesis, sheds new light on the developmental and medical significance of these enzymes. (shrink)

Climate change diplomacy is routinely characterized by preoccupation with narrow and short-term perceived national interests rather than the pressing need to mitigate global warming and respond agg...

Climate change diplomacy is routinely characterized by preoccupation with narrow and short-term perceived national interests rather than the pressing need to mitigate global warming and respond agg...

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

Since of much of modern discourse, extending from cognitivism to connectionism to deconstructivism, has been greatly inclined to look at reality in relation to processes where the personal factor plays little if any causal role, the pursuit of wisdom today has become primarily identified with the logos or the pursuit of a rational account of reality and the rule governing principles behind it. Although there is not space enough to traverse all that is involved here, it will be argued in (...) this paper that the secrets of wisdom will never be revealed if its nature is limited to a singular description of just one function of thought. What is needed if the love of wisdom is to be regained is a more dynamic and symmetrical account—one that considers the reconstructive e nature and generative e capabilities of the human mind as well as the flexibility and complexity of thought; one that realizes that the end stages of logos are only the by-product of insight obtained from more personal and emotionally charged meaning; and one that takes seriously the role of mythos in the thinking process. (shrink)

The present trend towards an atheoretical statistical method of psychiatric classification has prompted many psychiatrists to conceive of "mental disorder", or for that matter any other psychopathological designation, as an indexical cluster of properties and events more than a distinct psychological impairment. By employing different combinations of inclusion and exclusion criteria, the current American Psychiatric Association's scheme (called DSM-III) hopes to avoid the over-selectivity of more metaphysical systems and thereby provide the clinician with a flexible means of dealing with a (...) wide diversity of cases. In the hope of redirecting future inquiry, the paper will argue: (1) that this recent trend might appear to be clinically beneficial, but in point of fact it is riddled by unsound theoretical conclusions which leave the field without a deeply reaching base for understanding and treating mental disorder, and (2) that, a fortiori, "mental disorder" is best conceived as not a cluster of properties and events, nor a metaphorical reaction to a breakdown in social interpersonal relations, but as a deeply laid condition characterized by the absence of an imaginally integrated system. (shrink)

One of the most common and frustrating experiences for philosophy instructors is teaching students who have not read the assigned text prior to coming to class. This chapter proposes three specific strategies, supported by the literature on student learning, that encourages and enables students to read and understand assigned texts. Each strategy activates students’ prior knowledge, sets a purpose to read and uses novelty to engage students’ attention. Evidence from experience with these strategies is provided to further support their effectiveness. (...) The chapter concludes with examples of how strategies can be presented to students and templates that instructors can use to create their own strategies for use in any class or assigned text. (shrink)