If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

Guru to the World tells the story of Swami Vivekananda, the nineteenth-century Hindu ascetic who introduced the West to yoga and to a tolerant, scientifically minded universalist conception of religion. Ruth Harris explores the many legacies of Vivekananda's thought, including his impact on anticolonial movements and contemporary Hindu nationalism.

SummaryIn the early 1950s, Albert Schweitzer was a heroic figure, arguably second only to Albert Einstein in renown. Today, many have scarcely heard of him and know nothing of his work as a medical missionary in Equatorial Africa, or of his receipt of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize. Schweitzer's genius flourished when he felt he was able to operate between cultures. Convinced that he was uniquely able to mediate between opposites, whether it was between France and Germany, Jews and Christians, (...) or Western and Eastern spirituality, Schweitzer was a tantalising figure, hovering on the verge of what we would today call ‘cross-cultural’ dialogue. Here I will examine his intellectual and ethical trajectory, and explore how his reaction to Africa produced an early liberation that stalled due to his inability to engage deeply with Africans and their culture. As the decades passed, he was increasingly cut adrift both from Europe and from changing currents within Africa, and became strangely absorbed in Indian thought, creatively christianising the notion of ‘ahimsa’ (non-violence) to construct his ‘reverence for life’. In an attempt to create his ‘ethical personality’, he ultimately constructed a colony within a colony, his work frozen in formulations which had been novel prior to World War I. (shrink)

“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems (...) and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at the Marshall family home, often attending dinn...

The design of medical knowledge-based computer systems requires effective interdisciplinary communication for the development of a community sharing common goals and a common language for design. Over the past 9 years the Perinatal Research Group, an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, engineers and clinicians, have developed a prototype knowledge-based computer system to aid clinicians in the care of women in labour. The group were uncertain which approach to adopt to progress this system from a prototype to a useful clinical tool (...) to support decision making. A case study and activity theory analysis, of an existing clinical knowledge-based computer system in routine use, helped to resolve a number of communication and methodological issues that the design team encountered. Sharing of backgrounds and perspectives caused the design team to question previous assumptions and to explore alternative functions and roles for knowledge-based computer systems in maternity care. We are now undertaking a longitudinal case study and activity theory analysis of obstetric teams and women in labour to analyse the relationships between clinicians, patients and technology. This work will inform the development of our knowledge-based computer system to place the patient at the centre of the decision-making process. (shrink)

This collection of essays serves both as an introduction to Ruth Millikan’s much-discussed volume Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories and as an extension and application of Millikan’s central themes, especially in the philosophy of psychology. The title essay discusses meaning rationalism and argues that rationality is not in the head, indeed, that there is no legitimate interpretation under which logical possibility and necessity are known a priori. In other essays, Millikan clarifies her views on the nature of mental (...) representation, explores whether human thought is a product of natural selection, examines the nature of behavior as studied by the behavioral sciences, and discusses the issues of individualism in psychology, psychological explanation, indexicality in thought, what knowledge is, and the realism/antirealism debate. Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1 In Defense of Proper Functions 2 Propensities, Exaptations, and the Brain 3 Thoughts without Laws 4 Biosemantics 5 On Mentalese Orthography, Part 1 6 Compare and Contrast Dretske, Fodor, and Millikan on Teleosemantics 7 What Is Behavior? A Philosophical Essay on Ethology and Individualism in Psychology, Part 1 8 The Green Grass Growing All Around: A Philosophical Essay on Ethology and Individualism in Psychology, Part 2 9 Explanation in Biopsychology 10 Metaphysical Antirealism? 11 Truth Rules, Hoverflies, and the Kripke-Wittgenstein Paradox 12 Naturalist Reflections on Knowledge 13 The Myth of the Essential Indexical 14 White Queen Psychology; or, The Last Myth of the Given References Index. (shrink)

In ‘The Survival Lottery’ John Harris raises the following issue. Suppose it is possible for physicians to save the lives of two patients, Y and Z, otherwise doomed to die through no fault of their own, by taking the life of a third person, P, and using various of his organs appropriately for transplants. To provide a fair and impartial way of selecting the organ donor, a survival lottery is proposed for the society. This lottery randomly selects an organ (...) donor from the population at large. Harris, speaking from the point of view of Y and Z, defends the demand that such a lottery be established. What if anything is wrong with this scheme? (shrink)

This volume is a collection of essays by various contributors in honor of the late Laurence Berns, Richard Hammond Elliot Tutor Emeritus at St. John's College, Annapolis. The essays address the literary, political, theological, and philosophical themes of his life's work as a scholar, teacher, and constant companion of the "great books.".

In Portraits of American Philosophy, eight of America's most prominent philosophers offer autobiographical narratives that remind us that the life of a scholar is both a tale of personal struggle and an adventure in ideas.

This review essay discusses three recent books on the Green New Deal, written, respectively, by Naomi Klein, Jeremy Rifkin, and Kate Aronoff and a few other democratic socialists. It argues that the New Deal offers a better model of how to envision the change required for deep carbonization than the vision of war mobilization after Pearl Harbor since it emphasizes not only the need for massive introduction of green technology but also the importance of broad social change constituting (...) a just transition. The essay argues that the GND should be placed in a global context so that the adoption of the GND in the Global North would lead to much greater funding of green developments in the less industrialized countries of the Global South. (shrink)