The facilitation of tight regulatory frameworks necessary to ensure that new drugs are safe and effective have yet to be effectively applied within the paediatric population. Utilization of unlicensed and off-label drugs in children results in a variety of problems ranging from inefficacy, adverse reactions and in some cases death. This ethically questionable behaviour has led the European government to legally force pharmaceutical companies to propose paediatric applications and carry out clinical studies at early stages of drug development. The new (...) European Paediatric Regulation implemented in 2007 opens a new era of paediatric drug development and will offer the opportunity to vastly improve children's health. However, this brighter outlook for the paediatric community might encourage potentially unethical behaviour in a pharmaceutical industry that finds itself in economically unstable times. The article records the gradual evolution of the US Paediatric Exclusivity Plan and the underlying principle of the newly introduced European Paediatric Regulation. It discusses some of the potential drawbacks and detrimental consequences of implementing the new European regulation, and the prospects of avoiding these by critically evaluating the difficulties experienced by the US. (shrink)

Many people think of empathy as a powerful force for good within society and as a crucial component of moral cognition. Recently, prominent theorists in psychology and philosophy have challenged this viewpoint and mounted a case against empathy. The most compelling versions of this case rely heavily on empirical evidence from psychology and neuroscience. They contend that the inherent partiality and parochialism of empathy undermines its potential to serve moral ends. This paper argues that the argument against empathy overreaches; it (...) makes an unwarranted inference from descriptive evidence about our empathic capacities to normative claims about the proper role of empathy in culture, society, and ethics. The paper concludes with suggestions about how to use insights from the empirical literature to build a more nuanced and contextually sensitive account of the role of empathy in our ethical lives. (shrink)

ABSTRACTQuestions about how empathy should be conceptualized have long been a preoccupation of the field of empathy research. There are numerous definitions of empathy that have been proposed and that often overlap with other concepts such as sympathy and compassion. This makes communication between research groups or across disciplines difficult. Many researchers seem to see the diversity of definitions as a problem rather than a form of benign pluralism. Within this debate about conceptualization, researchers sometimes suggest that more neuroscientific evidence (...) will make the problem go away – that uncovering the processes underlying empathy will thereby also sort out conceptual difficulties. In this paper, I challenge this assumption by examining how neuroscientists studying empathy use concepts in practice – both in the development of their measures and in the interpretation of their data. I argue that this neuroscientific literature demonstrates that continuity and stability comes from the use of cert... (shrink)

This paper argues that enthusiasm for empathy has grown to the point at which empathy has taken on the status of an “ideal” in modern medicine. We need to pause and scrutinize this ideal before moving forward with empathy training programs for medical students. Taking empathy as an ideal obscures the distinction between the multiple aims that calls for empathy seek to achieve. While these aims may work together, they also come apart and yield different recommendations about the sort of (...) behavior physicians should cultivate in a given situation. I begin by demonstrating how enthusiasm for empathy has increased dramatically. I then specify precisely what I mean in calling empathy an “ideal.” I then describe some dangers associated with taking empathy to be an ideal unreflectively. I discuss the merits of works that provide conceptualizations of empathy that are specifically tailored for the medical domain and conclude that although these works move discussions about empathy in medical care forward, they could do more to foreground the goals and aims underlying calls for increased empathy. I provide specific suggestions as to how exactly we might foreground these goals and aims to further avoid conceptual confusion about empathy in medical education. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have offered several definitions of mechanism, most of which have biological or neuroscientific roots. In this paper, I consider whether these definitions apply equally well to cognitive science. I examine this question by looking at the case of statistical learning, which has been called a domain-general learning mechanism in the cognitive scientific literature. I argue that statistical learning does not constitute a mechanism in the philosophical sense of the term. This conclusion points to significant limitations in the (...) scope of the mechanist philosophy when it comes to accounting for explanation in cognitive science. (shrink)

Network theory is necessary for the realization of cognitive representations and resulting empirical observations of social groups. We propose that the triadic primitives denoting individual roles are multilayer, with positive and negative relations feeding into cost–benefit calculations. Through this, we advance a computational theory that generalizes to different scales and to contexts where conflict is not present.

En la Sentencia 18 Por!rio se inspira en un pasaje plotiniano de En. III 6 [26] 4, 41-52, donde trata precisamente sobre la sensación, pero introduciendo dos innovaciones relevantes: 1) la noción de ser vivo, donde Plotino menciona solo la parte pasiva del alma y la materia – lo que constituye una manera de insistir en la relación íntima que se da entre el alma y el cuerpo en el compuesto–; y 2) las nociones de “armonía no separada” y de (...) “armonía separada”, donde Plotino alude solo a una armonía que hace vibrar ella misma las cuerdas y que dicta su regla al músico. La armonía separada puede intensi!carse con la relación armónica que existe en sí, independiente del instrumento y de la interpretación musical. Asimismo, para trazar un paralelismo entre la armonía de la lira y el estado de inherencia del alma, Jámblico se re!ere a la concepción plotiniano-por!riana del ser vivo: el animal es el cuerpo que posee una naturaleza particular y que ha sido vivificada no por el alma, sino por una especie de derivado del alma que denomina “huella” o “luz” del alma, por lo que el alma misma no se une al cuerpo. (shrink)

En la Sentencia 18 Por!rio se inspira en un pasaje plotiniano de En. III 6 [26] 4, 41-52, donde trata precisamente sobre la sensación, pero introduciendo dos innovaciones relevantes: 1) la noción de ser vivo, donde Plotino menciona solo la parte pasiva del alma y la materia – lo que constituye una manera de insistir en la relación íntima que se da entre el alma y el cuerpo en el compuesto–; y 2) las nociones de “armonía no separada” y de (...) “armonía separada”, donde Plotino alude solo a una armonía que hace vibrar ella misma las cuerdas y que dicta su regla al músico. La armonía separada puede intensi!carse con la relación armónica que existe en sí, independiente del instrumento y de la interpretación musical. Asimismo, para trazar un paralelismo entre la armonía de la lira y el estado de inherencia del alma, Jámblico se re!ere a la concepción plotiniano-por!riana del ser vivo: el animal es el cuerpo que posee una naturaleza particular y que ha sido vivificada no por el alma, sino por una especie de derivado del alma que denomina “huella” o “luz” del alma, por lo que el alma misma no se une al cuerpo. (shrink)