"The largest Ebola outbreak to date—first detected in December 2013 and still ongoing as of April 2015—has cast new light on the shortfalls of international public health systems.1 As in previous health crises, scrutiny has reemerged over the pharmaceutical industry’s ability and willingness to innovate new medicines for underserved disease areas. The public debate has intensified following revelations that promising drug candidates to treat Ebola had gone undeveloped despite compelling preclinical results.2 This lack of development is especially troubling because it (...) occurred after a recently implemented U.S. incentive scheme—the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) tropical disease priority review voucher program—designed to counteract exactly this problem. Taking Ebola as a case in point, it is useful to examine the short history and ongoing refinement of this voucher program, since it represents one of the most significant legislative efforts to systematically address the relative absence of com- mercial rewards for drugs targeting tropical diseases. This analysis evaluates the voucher program’s effectiveness for both stimulating private sector innovation and achieving positive health impacts among populations most severely burdened by tropical diseases. It then proposes specific recommendations for how law- makers can improve the program’s legislation to better achieve these objectives. ". (shrink)

The sixth decade of this century may be considered a period of dynamic development of the Soviet ethics. In contrast with the post-revolutionary period, the ethics does not limit itself to a normative reflection, but starts also extensive studies in the theory of ethics. According to the authors of the present article, there are all reasons to believe that the marxist ethics will become a scientific discipline in a full sense of the word. The purpose of the article is not (...) to discuss all problems involved in the contemporary Soviet ethics, but above all to outline main problems and trends of its development. The authors distinguish following aspects of the ethical investigations: philosophical, sociological, social-psychological, axiological, pedagogical, historical, gnoseological, logical, and metaethical. Together with a critical evaluation of solutions of certain problems, they criticize some abstractive and ahistorical, in their opinion, approach to ethics which has been manifested above all in works of Y. A. Milner-Irinin and P. M. Egides. (shrink)

There is a touch of foolhardiness in the attempts to establish a precise identification for the great majority of birds mentioned by the authors of classical antiquity. Only a small minority of the ancient references and descriptions contains features which are indisputably diagnostic, while a probably not much bigger minority of the Mediterranean avifauna possesses characteristics of appearance, behaviour, or voice that would have enabled an ordinary Greek or Roman immediately to distinguish a member of one species from absolutely all (...) others, using the sole aids of his eyes, ears, and the largely inaccurate medley of lore handed down from one generation to the next. Thus any modern attempt to pin down the identity of this or that bird in an ancient author is fraught with many dangers and difficulties which must be recognized at the outset. (shrink)

Since its publication in 1965, Brian Barry's seminal work has occupied an important role in the revival of Anglo-American political philosophy. A number of ideas and terms in it have become part of the standard vocabulary, such as the distinction between "ideal-regarding" and "want-regarding" principles and the division of principles into aggregative and distributive. The book provided the first precise analysis of the concept of political values having trade-off relations and its analysis of the notion of the public interest has (...) also been significant. (shrink)

Fetal pain has long been a contentious issue, in large part because fetal pain is often cited as a reason to restrict access to termination of pregnancy or abortion. We have divergent views regarding the morality of abortion, but have come together to address the evidence for fetal pain. Most reports on the possibility of fetal pain have focused on developmental neuroscience. Reports often suggest that the cortex and intact thalamocortical tracts are necessary for pain experience. Given that the cortex (...) only becomes functional and the tracts only develop after 24 weeks, many reports rule out fetal pain until the final trimester. Here, more recent evidence calling into question the necessity of the cortex for pain and demonstrating functional thalamic connectivity into the subplate is used to argue that the neuroscience cannot definitively rule out fetal pain before 24 weeks. We consider the possibility that the mere experience of pain, without the capacity for self reflection, is morally significant. We believe that fetal pain does not have to be equivalent to a mature adult human experience to matter morally, and so fetal pain might be considered as part of a humane approach to abortion. (shrink)

It is a truism to say that the study of ornithology has made great advances in the last fifty years, and that important problems affecting the classification of certain species and their distribution have been brought much closer to solution. Classical scholars, however, still tend to rely on the identifications of ancient Greek bird-names made by a few standard works such as D'Arcy Thompson's A Glossary of Greek Birds2 or O. Keller's Die antike Tierwelt , apparently unaware that much of (...) the ornithological information given there is now badly out of date, if not sheerly inaccurate. This brief paper aims protreptically to take four bird-names out of the Peripatetic corpus on natural history: and and to produce more precise identifications in the light of modern ornithological studies. (shrink)

From these words of Athenaeus, the majority of scholars have come to the Dnclusion that the Asotodidaskalos was not, despite what Sotion says, composed by Alexis, but is a forgery; and some even go so far as to attribute the forgery to Sotion himself. Yet nowhere do they support their views with sufficient rguments; nowhere has the question, in the light of all the evidence, both sternal and internal, been fully considered. Meineke has indeed given clear reasons for his belief (...) that the play as not written by Alexis, in objecting to three usages in the cited fragment as unattic ; but these objections are not all justifiable, as Kock has lown in the case of , or together inclusive enough to make us reject the fragment out of hand. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Gentile's philosophy merits the attention of every serious thinker, for it presents the doctrine that reality is spiritual in a more uncompromising form than is to be found elsewhere, and claims to solve on this principle all the great problems that have beset the history of metaphysic. His own name for it is Absolute or Actual Idealism . For Gentile, nothing is real but the Spirit, and by the Spirit he means the pure act of self-conscious thinking. “The subject that (...) conceives itself in conceiving All is the reality itself.” In the act of conscious thinking, the Spirit is present in its entirety as subject ; generating therein by its own creative spontaneity a world of objects, and resolving the products of this act of objectification into the womb that gave them birth. In this immanent dialectic–pure subject , pure object , subject-object –lies the rhythmic life-history of the Spirit. “Our doctrine,” writes Gentile, “is the theory of the Spirit as act which posits its object in a multiplicity of objects, resolving their multiplicity and objectivity in the unity of the subject itself.” For such a doctrine, transcendence is the enemy, the Goliath whom Gentile has gone forth to slay. He confronts us, on almost every page of his writings, with an ineluctable dilemma. Either a philosophy of sheer immanence, or reality is unknowable. (shrink)

The two basic forms of action distinguished in the preceding articles, viz., moral action, where praxis is for praxis sake, and action for a good, where praxis is for the sake of theôria, are found in close relationship to one another in human life. The part they play is rather that of abstract moments in a practical process than that of self-contained and isolable bits of conduct. No philosopher is likely to discount the importance of thus analysing the concrete into (...) its factors before he rectifies the abstraction by showing how they co-operate in actual experience. In any individual biography we can find acts and courses of action in which duty is the dominant motive, and others in which the dominant motive is desire of good. Similarly, when we compare different biographies with one another, some exemplify most strikingly the struggle for righteousness against unruly passion, others the spontaneous aspiration of the soul to attain the goal of its desire. But neither the moral law nor the summum bonum wields an exclusive sovereignty. St. Paul and Luther, in their warfare against carnal desire, drew strength from the ideal vision; nor were St. Bernard or Spinoza, for all their absorption upon union with the divine, strangers to the call of moral obligation. In the lives of ordinary men, the types of conduct are, perhaps, more evenly balanced; yet here also the distinction is discernible. Moreover, it is easy to see how, despite their intrinsic difference, they come to be associated and “by just exchange” to effect a mutual enrichment. (shrink)