Isidore Etymologiae Vol. II. Books XI-XX.

Stem cells derived from pluripotent cells offer the hope of new treatments for diseases for which current therapy is inadequate. Clinical trials are essential in developing effective and safe stem cell therapies and fulfilling this promise. However, such clinical trials raise ethical issues that are more complex than those raised in clinical trials using drugs, cord blood stem cells, or adult stem cells. Several clinical trials are now being carried out with stem cells derived from pluripotent cells, and many more (...) can be expected in light of the rapid scientific progress in the field.Degenerative neurological diseases are desirable targets for stem cell clinical trials. The FDA has approved Phase 1 clinical trials of neural stem cell transplantation for Batten Disease, Pelizaeus-Merzbacher Disease, and spinal cord injury. In Parkinson Disease, stem cell transplantation could correct the primary pathophysiological defect — inadequate levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Current treatment is unsatisfactory in late-stage PD. (shrink)

Web 2.0 innovations may enhance informed patient decision-making, but also raise ethical concerns about inaccurate or misleading information, damage to the doctor-patient relationship, privacy and confidentiality, and health disparities. To increase the benefits and decrease the risks of these innovations, we recommend steps to help patients assess the quality of health information on the Internet; promote constructive doctor-patient communication about new information technologies; and set standards for privacy and data security in patient-controlled health records and for point-of-service advertising.

A letter to The Times of London, May 9, 1992 protesting the Cambridge University proposal to award an honorary degree to M. Jacques Derrida.

Life is short, and it can be sweet. Contemplating death is looking into a mirror that allows us to see these simple facts clearly, as if for the first time. We have every reason to believe that we have but one life to live--and no good reasons to believe otherwise--and death marks the termination of each life. Examining this reality opens doors to understanding ourselves, each other, connection, love, and life itself in an entirely new way. Life in Light of (...) Death is a short exploration on the sweetness available to every person and the importance of the opportunity that living is. By looking at life as reflected by death, we can see what really matters and how best to live. (shrink)

Gellia, of noble lineage, swore she would marry no one lower than a peer, but ultimately flung herself away on—whom? Nupsisti, Gellia, cistifero, say the two best families of MSS.; nupsisti, Gellia, cistibero says the third.

Narrative inquiry in a nursing practicum One approach to creating research‐based nursing education is to think and write narratively about the daily life of a BScN program student and her teacher in diverse settings and over time. Gail, as a nurse‐teacher, and Faith, as a nursing student and now Public Health Nurse, reconstruct their teaching–learning experiences in an integrated practicum in maternal–child health services as a narrative inquiry. After presenting this reconstruction of experience at a conference on maternal scholarship, further (...) inquiry into their experiences shows how narrative inquiry matters to construction of nursing praxis and to life‐long learning as a nurse. Teaching–learning relationships are seen as a template for a student's connections to people experiencing nursing care and to other clinicians. Construction of stories to live by that take into account becoming a nurse, constructing knowledge and enacting caring–healing nursing practices is illuminated through narrative inquiry. (shrink)

In the Teubner edition, just published, I had to reduce the apparatus criticus to the smallest possible dimensions. All conjectures that were merely probable and not fairly certain had to be excluded. Some of them that are new may find a place here. There is only one MS. of Festus′ epitome of Verrius. It is now at Naples, and is said to have been found in Illyria. Dr. E. A. Loew, the leading authority on Italian script, tells us that it (...) was written at Rome towards the end of the eleventh century. It must have been rescued from a fire; for the outer edges of all the pages are burned away, so that the greater part of the outer of the two columns on each page has been lost. The chief task for editors is to fill up by conjecture these gaps in the outer columns. Scaliger won immortal fame in this work, although many of his conjectures merely followed out a suggestion of his predecessor, Augustini. Ursini and Miiller were of service in adapting to the conditions of space the stop-gaps of Scaliger, and both of them, chiefly Miiller, added excellent conjectures of their own. The conjectural supplements, printed in italics in Müller's edition, have often, especially in German students′ dissertations, been treated as if they were actually part of the text. The Hungarian editor, Emil Thewrewk, who first provided satisfactory manuscript material for Paulus′ epitome of Festus, in order to prevent this error, took the extreme course of omitting these supplements in his edition; although many of them are made absolutely certain by the words of Paulus. I have taken a middle course between Miiller and Thewrewk and have admitted the certain and the probable supplements, leaving blanks elsewhere. The supplements are printed within angular brackets, the merely probable supplements being in italic type. (shrink)

The narrow limits of the apparatus criticus in the new Clarendon Press edition have excluded these suggestions, which may find a place here:I xxix, 4 Quaedam etiam facta sunt ex nominum deriuatione, ut a prudentia ‘prudens ’; quaedam etiam ex uocibus, ut a garrulitate ‘garrulus.’ Although garrulus is the traditional reading, the derivation elsewhere of garrulus from graculus, ‘a jackdaw,’ suggests that we may read here ut a garrulitate ‘graulus.’ For the jackdaw's name in Late Latin developed from gragulus to (...) graulus. (shrink)

All five elements live within you, and experiences like heartache, anxiety, and procrastination are signs that one of them is out of balance. This beginner-friendly book introduces you to each of the elements--Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal--and shows you how to use them to improve your mental, emotional, and spiritual health. In Our Element weaves together Eastern medicine, Western psychology, Indigenous traditions, and African ancestral principles of spirituality. With a practical approach that incorporates journal prompts, flower essences, yoga poses, (...) and music, Lindsay Fauntleroy teaches you how to tap into the five elements for a balanced and empowered life that aligns with your soul's calling. (shrink)

All health care systems face problems of justice and efficiency related to setting priorities for allocating a limited pool of resources to a population. Because many of the central issues are the same in all systems, the United States and other countries can learn from the successes and failures of countries that have explicitly addressed the question of health care priorities. We review explicit priority setting efforts in Norway, Sweden, Israel, the Netherlands, Denmark, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the (...) state of Oregon in the US. The approaches used can be divided into those centered on outlining principles versus those that define practices. In order to establish the main lessons from their experiences we consider the process each country used, criteria to judge the success of these efforts, which approaches seem to have met these criteria, and using their successes and failures as a guide, how to proceed in setting priorities. We demonstrate that there is little evidence that establishment of a values framework for priority setting has had any effect on health policy, nor is there evidence that priority setting exercises have led to the envisaged ideal of an open and participatory public involvement in decision making. (shrink)

In this paper I articulate a view of doxastic control that helps defend the legitimacy of our practice of blaming people for their beliefs. I distinguish between three types of doxastic control: intention-based, reason-based, and influence-based. First I argue that, although we lack direct intention-based control over our beliefs, such control is not necessary for legitimate doxastic blame. Second, I suggest that we distinguish two types of reason-responsiveness: sensitivity to reasons and appreciation of reasons. I argue that while both capacities (...) are necessary for satisfying the control condition, neither is sufficient. Finally, I defend an influence-based view of doxastic control according to which we have the capacity to execute intentions to engage in reflection that causally influences our beliefs in positive epistemic ways. This capacity is both necessary and sufficient for satisfying the control condition for legitimate doxastic blame. I end by defending the view from two objections: that reflection is not necessary for meeting the control condition, and that it is not sufficient. (shrink)

: There is a concern that genetic engineering will exacerbate existing social divisions and inequalities, especially if only the wealthy can afford genetic enhancements. Accordingly, many argue that justice requires the imposition of constraints on genetic engineering. However, it would be unwise to decide at this time what limits should be imposed in the future. Decision makers currently lack both the theoretical tools and the factual foundation for making sound judgments about the requirements of justice in a genetically transformed society. (...) Moreover, focusing on the uncertain inequities of the future may result in failure to give priority to more pressing inequities of the present. Especially in a country that recently has enacted tax legislation that will widen existing wealth disparities, concern about the distant threat of a genetic aristocracy appears misplaced. (shrink)

This is a review essay of Lagasnerie, Judge and Punish and Fassin, The Will to Punish. It explores the way that these two books challenge conventional thinking about the relationship between crime and punishment.

Some philosophers argue that friendship can normatively require us to have certain beliefs about our friends that epistemic norms would prohibit. On this view, we ought to exhibit some degree of doxastic partiality toward our friends, by having certain generally favorable beliefs and doxastic dispositions that concern our friends that we would not have concerning relevantly similar non-friends. Can friendship genuinely make these normative demands on our beliefs, in ways that would conflict with what we epistemically ought to believe? On (...) a widely influential evidentialist approach to thinking about epistemic norms, friendship cannot normatively require things of our beliefs, because friendship cannot generate reasons for belief. And this is due, in part, to the alleged fact that we are incapable of forming beliefs directly in response to, or on the basis of, non-epistemic reasons. In this paper, I argue that this evidentialist response to alleged cases of conflict between friendship and epistemic norms fails. Instead, I argue that friendship cannot generate reasons for belief due to an underappreciated feature of friendship: that being a good friend constitutively involves forming attitudes about one’s friends that are appropriately responsive to the features that one’s friends have that appear to warrant those attitudes. I argue that this feature of friendship helps explain why friendship cannot give us reasons to have beliefs that are doxastically partial. (shrink)

What is it to suspend judgment about whether p? Much of the recent work on the nature and normative profile of suspending judgment aims to analyze it as a kind of doxastic attitude. On some of these accounts, suspending judgment about whether p partly consists in taking up a certain higher-order belief about one's deficient epistemic position with respect to whether p. On others, suspending judgment about whether p consists in taking up a sui generis attitude, one that takes the (...) question of whether p? as its content. In this paper, I defend an account on which suspending judgment about whether p is not a matter of taking up a doxastic attitude, but rather a way of intentionally omitting to judge whether p. I then close with a discussion of how an account like mine, which sees suspending judgment as fundamentally practical, rather than doxastic, can accommodate what appear to be distinctively epistemic reasons to suspend judgment. (shrink)

Explaining how something is possible is a familiar and epistemically important achievement in both science and ordinary life. But a satisfactory general account of how-possibly explanation has not yet been given. A crucial desideratum for a successful account is that it must differentiate a demonstration that something is possible from an explanation of how it is possible. In this paper, I offer an account of how-possibly explanation that fully captures this distinction. I motivate my account using two cases, one from (...) ordinary life and one from ornithology. On my account, a how-possibly explanation is a greater achievement than a mere description of how a state of affairs might possibly obtain. In addition to being a potential explanation of why some state of affairs actually obtains, a how-possibly explanation must involve the relief of an imaginative frustration on the part of its recipient. When a recipient’s imaginative frustration is relieved, she does not just know that the state of affairs in question is possible, but is also able to imagine how it could possibly obtain. (shrink)

A bridge between semipopular works for the general reader and technical treatises written for specialists, this excellent work discusses the foundational ideas and background of modern physics. It is not a text on theoretical physics, but a discussion of the methods of physic description and construction of theory. As such, it is especially valuable for the physicist with a background in elementary calculus who is interested in the ideas which give meaning to the data and tools of modern physics.

In recent years, several prominent biologists have pointed to the relatively new field of evolutionary developmental biology (EvoDevo) as evidence of an Extended Synthesis in evolutionary biology. More particularly, these biologists claim that theoretical and empirical EvoDevo research is extending the Modern Synthesis framework of evolutionary theory through investigation of evolutionarily important concepts that are not part of the framework developed during the 20th century. To describe the current changes in evolutionary biology as an Extended Synthesis, however, is incorrect. Through (...) review of Extended Synthesis arguments and analysis of the same biological concepts used to support these arguments, I argue that the foundation of the Modern Synthesis framework, theoretical population genetics, faces significant, perhaps insurmountable challenges from the concepts highlighted by EvoDevo research. As the foundation of the Modern Synthesis framework will require considerable remodeling—if possible—in light of the concepts emphasized by EvoDevo, it is incorrect to describe the ongoing changes in evolutionary biology as an Extended Synthesis. (shrink)

The relatively new field of evolutionary developmental biology continues to attract considerable attention from biologists, philosophers, and historians, in part, because work in this field demonstrates that important changes are underway within biology. Though studies of development and evolution were closely connected during the 19th century, continued work in genetics fostered a general split between the two during the first decades of the twentieth century (e.g., Allen 1978; Gilbert 1978; Mayr and Provine 1980; Gilbert, Opitz and..

In this paper, I solve a puzzle generated by three conflicting claims about the relationship between faith, belief, and control: according to the Identity Thesis, faith is a type of belief, and according to Fideistic Voluntarism, we sometimes have control over whether or not we have faith, but according to Doxastic Involuntarism, we never have control over what we believe. To solve the puzzle, I argue that the Identity Thesis is true, but that either Fideistic Voluntarism or Doxastic Voluntarism is (...) false, depending on how we understand "control." I distinguish two notions of control: direct intention-based control and indirect reflective control. I argue that though we have direct intention-based control over neither belief nor faith, we have indirect reflective control over each of them. Moreover, indirect reflective control helps explain how we can be held accountable for each. (shrink)

In recent years, several prominent biologists have pointed to the relatively new field of evolutionary developmental biology as evidence of an Extended Synthesis in evolutionary biology. More particularly, these biologists claim that theoretical and empirical EvoDevo research is extending the Modern Synthesis framework of evolutionary theory through investigation of evolutionarily important concepts that are not part of the framework developed during the 20th century. To describe the current changes in evolutionary biology as an Extended Synthesis, however, is incorrect. Through review (...) of Extended Synthesis arguments and analysis of the same biological concepts used to support these arguments, I argue that the foundation of the Modern Synthesis framework, theoretical population genetics, faces significant, perhaps insurmountable challenges from the concepts highlighted by EvoDevo research. As the foundation of the Modern Synthesis framework will require considerable remodeling—if possible—in light of the concepts emphasized by EvoDevo, it is incorrect to describe the ongoing changes in evolutionary biology as an Extended Synthesis. (shrink)

Despite the evidence showing the promise of HIV treatment as prevention (TasP) in reducing HIV incidence, a variety of ethical questions surrounding the implementation and “scaling up” of TasP have been articulated by a variety of stakeholders including scientists, community activists and government officials. Given the high profile and potential promise of TasP in combatting the global HIV epidemic, an explicit and transparent research priority-setting process is critical to inform ongoing ethical discussions pertaining to TasP.

In June 2012, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his plans for a ban on the sale of sugary beverages in containers larger than 16 ounces. Shortly thereafter, the Center for Consumer Freedom took out a full-page ad in the New York Times featuring Bloomberg photo-shopped into a matronly dress with the tag line “New Yorkers need a Mayor, not a Nanny.” On television, the CATO Institute's Michael Cannon declared, “This is the most ridiculous sort of nanny state-ism; [i]t’s (...) none of the mayor's business how much soda people are drinking.” And in newspapers around the country, editorial pages featured headlines such as “Gulp! Yet Another Intrusion of the Nanny State.” Just like that, the public debate about this measure became focused on government overreach, while the public health problem of obesity faded into the background. (shrink)

Technological developments have resulted in tremendous increases in the volume and diversity of the data and information that must be processed in the course of biomedical and clinical research and practice. Researchers are at the same time under ever greater pressure to share data and to take steps to ensure that data resources are interoperable. The use of ontologies to annotate data has proven successful in supporting these goals and in providing new possibilities for the automated processing of data and (...) information. In this chapter, we describe different types of vocabulary resources and emphasize those features of formal ontologies that make them most useful for computational applications. We describe current uses of ontologies and discuss future goals for ontology-based computing, focusing on its use in the field of infectious diseases. We review the largest and most widely used vocabulary resources relevant to the study of infectious diseases and conclude with a description of the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) suite of interoperable ontology modules that together cover the entire infectious disease domain. (shrink)