These suggestions for the betterment and elucidation of the text of the De Beneficiis are additional to those already published in the Classical Quarterly in January, 1934. They are based on a conviction much deepened since that time that Buck1 is right when he says: N allein, und zwar ohne seine Ueberarbeitungen von späteren Händen, darf die Grundlage des Textes von de beneficiis bilden. Préchac3, the latest critical editor in this field, substantially confirms Buck's sweeping conclusion by an independent survey (...) of the evidence. The readings designated in the Teubner text3 as N2 and N3 are themselves conjectures, not readings drawn from independent sources of testimony, and as conjectures they must be judged. Gertz4 had long before discerned the truth even if he seemed somewhat cavalier in his attitude toward other manuscripts than N. (shrink)

The scope and length of this anthology make it one of the best recent introductions to Continental thought for the English-speaking reader. Despite the editor's efforts to compass a century and a half of European thought under the somewhat inflated title of a "search for being," each of the fourteen contributors is allowed enough space to show that no single problem or quest concretely typifies European philosophical activity in our time. If one overlooks the dramatic cutting and pasting required by (...) the attempt to give an existential flavor to the thinkers, one finds the merit of the book to be precisely the inclusion of authors whose interests are in important respects quite divergent from those of the existentialists. There are new, long translations from Schelling, Ravaisson, Lachelier, Simmel, Husserl, and Heidegger. There is a selected bibliography.--W. H. C. (shrink)

Applied Christian Ethics addresses selected themes in Christian social ethics. Part one shows the roots of contributors in the realist school; part two focuses on different levels of the significance of economics for social justice; and part three deals with both existential experience and government policy in war and peace issues.

The recent discussions about alternative sources of human embryonic stem cells , while stirring new interest in the developmental potential of the various abnormal embryos or constructs proposed as such sources, also raise questions about the potential of the derived embryonic stem cells. The data on the developmental potential of embryonic stem cells that seem relevant for ethical considerations and aspects of patentability are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the meaning of “totipotency, omnipotency and pluripotency” as illustrated by a (...) comparison of the developmental potential of three-dimensional clusters of blastomeres , embryonic stem cells, somatic or stem cells or other somatic cells. This paper focuses on embryoid bodies and on direct cloning by tetraploid complementation. Usage and patenting of these cells cannot be considered to be ethically sound as long as totipotency and tetraploid complementability of embryonic stem cells are not excluded for the specific cell line in question. Testing this poses an ethical problem in itself and needs to be discussed in the future. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Nietzsche's shifting views on democracy in the period 1870–86 with reference to his enduring preoccupation with tyrannical concentrations of power and the conviction that radical pluralism offers the only effective form of resistance. As long as he identifies democracy with pluralism , he sympathizes with it as a site of resistance and emancipation. From around 1880 on, however, Nietzsche increasingly links it with tyranny, in the form of popular sovereignty, and with the promotion of uniformity, to (...) the exclusion of genuine pluralism. Democracy's emancipatory claims are reinterpreted as "misarchism," or hatred of authority, and Nietzsche looks to the "exceptional beings" excluded by democracy for sources of resistance to the "autonomous herd" and "mob rule." Against elitist readings of this move, it is argued that Nietzsche opposes the domination of the herd type under democracy from a standpoint in human diversity and a generic concern with the future of humankind. Exceptional individuals are conceived in pluralistic, agonal terms, as a community of legislators engaged in a process of transvaluation that serves the interests not of one or a few but of all of us: "the self-overcoming of the human.". (shrink)

The significance of the dating of Enmann's Kaisergeschichte in the controversy which has long surrounded the Historia Augusta is common knowledge to all scholars who have more than a nodding acquaintance with the period. Enmann himself concluded that the KG ended with or shortly after Diocletian's accession. This was a necessary hypothesis for Enmann in 1884 because the H.A. had clearly used the KG and the self-proclaimed authorship and dating of the former were generally accepted. None the less in (...) Enmann's opinion the resemblances between Victor and Eutropius continued into the sole reign of Constantius II down to the Battle of Strasbourg in 357 and Enmann was compelled to ascribe this to a ‘continuation’ of the KG. (shrink)

Since P. Thielscher, in Philologus, 1907, pp. 117, 128, supplies us with information about the Manilian MS. Palatinus 1711 , the importance of which he himself does not seem to comprehend, I should like to point out what an interesting MS. this is. ‘It is to be suspected,’ says Thielscher, ‘that it offers interpolated readings.’ It is not a matter of ‘suspicion’ at all. If Thielscher did not know it for himself, he could have learnt from Scaliger , from Bentley, (...) from Jacob, that the readings of P long ago received sufficient publicity to enable scholars to assign it to the ‘ interpolated’ class of MSS. The Variae Lectiones of Junius is mostly occupied with the readings of P, and tells us all about P that we need know, save what Thielscher has himself added. From Thielscher we for the first time learn that P belonged to ‘Johannes Archiepiscopus Strigoniensis,’ and that it contains this subscription: ‘legi et emendaui cum magistro Galeotto 1469.’ Now just as Thielscher seems to know nothing of Junius, so he seems to have no idea who Johannes Strigoniensis is, though the reference to Galeotto and the year 1469 should at once have told him. If he had troubled to look at Schmitt's Archiepiscopi he would have found that, while Schmitth enumerates no less than six archbishops of Gran who bore the name John, yet the only one of them who fits the date 1469 is John IV. And John IV. is a famous person, being none other than that leader of the Hungarian Renaissance whom we commonly call Vitezius. (shrink)

A good edition of the Catalepton has long been wanted: and Birt's recently Published ‘Erklärung,’ despite some obvious defects, may fairly be regarded as good book. It is at any rate fresh, interesting, and stimulating. The text is the whole, though not always, sensible. The commentary is full without being too full. But, more valuable still, both commentary and introduction constantly bring home to one the probability that nearly all the poems in this collection are genuinely Vergilian— ‘Jugendverse und (...) Heimatpoesie Vergils.’ No editor before Birt has brought before us so clearly the environment out of which these poems came. (shrink)

This volume illustrates the central importance of diversity of human values throughout healthcare. The readings are organized around the main stages of the clinical encounter from the patient's perspective. They run from staying well and 'first contact' through to either recovery or to long-term illness, death and dying.

In the past two decades, reinforcement learning has become a popular framework for understanding brain function. A key component of RL models, prediction error, has been associated with neural signals throughout the brain, including subcortical nuclei, primary sensory cortices, and prefrontal cortex. Depending on the location in which activity is observed, the functional interpretation of prediction error may change: Prediction errors may reflect a discrepancy in the anticipated and actual value of reward, a signal indicating the salience or novelty of (...) a stimulus, and many other interpretations. Anterior cingulate cortex has long been recognized as a region involved in processing behavioral error, and recent computational models of the region have expanded this interpretation to include a more general role for the region in predicting likely events, broadly construed, and signaling deviations between expected and observed events. Ongoing modeling work investigating the interaction between ACC and additional regions involved in cognitive control suggests an even broader role for cingulate in computing a hierarchically structured surprise signal critical for learning models of the environment. The result is a predictive coding model of the frontal lobes, suggesting that predictive coding may be a unifying computational principle across the neocortex. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that cancer onset and progression represent a type of reversion to an ancestral quasi‐unicellular phenotype. This general concept has been refined into the atavistic model of cancer that attempts to provide a quantitative analysis and testable predictions based on genomic data. Over the past decade, support for the multicellular‐to‐unicellular reversion predicted by the atavism model has come from phylostratigraphy. Here, we propose that cancer onset and progression involve more than a one‐off multicellular‐to‐unicellular reversion, and (...) are better described as a series of reversionary transitions. We make new predictions based on the chronology of the unicellular‐eukaryote‐to‐multicellular‐eukaryote transition. We also make new predictions based on three other evolutionary transitions that occurred in our lineage: eukaryogenesis, oxidative phosphorylation and the transition to adaptive immunity. We propose several modifications to current phylostratigraphy to improve age resolution to test these predictions. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/3unEu5JYJrQ. (shrink)

This interview study investigates the short- and long-term implications of incidental findings detected through brain imaging on research participants’ lives and their surroundings. For this study, nine participants of the Rotterdam Scan Study with an incidental finding were approached and interviewed. When examining research participants’ narratives on the impact of the disclosure of incidental findings, the authors identified five sets of tensions with regard to motivations for and expectations of research participation, preferences regarding disclosure, short- and long-term impacts (...) and impacts on self and others. The paper shows: that the impact of incidental findings may be greater than participants at first let on; incidental findings can have significant effects on participants’ social environment; and participants may not feel prepared for disclosure even if incidental findings have been discussed during the informed consent process. The authors call for investigators to be aware of research participants’ experiences and these short- and long-term impacts when designing suitable courses of action for the detection and management of incidental findings in research settings. (shrink)

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and the (...) Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

The recent high-profile financial difficulties of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, the largest HMO in Massachusetts and consistently rated as one of the top ten HMOs in the nation, shed light on many problems common to health insurers throughout the country. This article explores those difficulties in the context of the short but complicated history of Harvard Pilgrim, and its regulatory and competitive environments. The state legislation which made a receivership proceeding possible for Harvard Pilgrim offered some protection for subscribers, but (...) failed to provide the means for achieving a long term solution. The statute merely presented a method for staving off immediate collapse by temporarily protecting the plan from dissolution, and forcing the plan's contracting providers to continue delivering care even if owed money by the plan. The article concludes by drawing lessons for understanding and ideally avoiding similar managed care nearfatalities in the future. (shrink)

The recent high-profile financial difficulties of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, the largest HMO in Massachusetts and consistently rated as one of the top ten HMOs in the nation, shed light on many problems common to health insurers throughout the country. This article explores those difficulties in the context of the short but complicated history of Harvard Pilgrim, and its regulatory and competitive environments. The state legislation which made a receivership proceeding possible for Harvard Pilgrim offered some protection for subscribers, but (...) failed to provide the means for achieving a long term solution. The statute merely presented a method for staving off immediate collapse by temporarily protecting the plan from dissolution, and forcing the plan's contracting providers to continue delivering care even if owed money by the plan. The article concludes by drawing lessons for understanding and ideally avoiding similar managed care nearfatalities in the future. (shrink)

Too many patients are injured in the course of care. Clinicians may mistakenly cause new harm to a patient or fail to take established steps to improve the presenting condition. Medical institutions within which they work may lack mechanisms to reduce errors or prevent them from harming patients. Many, perhaps even most, injuries are preventable, probably numbering in the hundreds of thousands a year for hospital care alone. Long ignored by medical practitioners and health-care payers and little appreciated by (...) the public, the problem of medical injury is finally receiving high-level policy attention. Much credit goes to the Institute of Medicine for its landmark report of November 1999, which marshaled the evidence about medical injuries and highlighted new approaches to systematic improvement of safety within systems of care. (shrink)

Too many patients are injured in the course of care. Clinicians may mistakenly cause new harm to a patient or fail to take established steps to improve the presenting condition. Medical institutions within which they work may lack mechanisms to reduce errors or prevent them from harming patients. Many, perhaps even most, injuries are preventable, probably numbering in the hundreds of thousands a year for hospital care alone. Long ignored by medical practitioners and health-care payers and little appreciated by (...) the public, the problem of medical injury is finally receiving high-level policy attention. Much credit goes to the Institute of Medicine for its landmark report of November 1999, which marshaled the evidence about medical injuries and highlighted new approaches to systematic improvement of safety within systems of care. (shrink)

Frege: Philosophy of Language has been heralded as Michael Dummett's long-awaited magnum opus on Frege. Actually, however, as the author himself tells us, it is only the first of a two-volume series devoted to Frege's philosophy of language and his philosophy of mathematics respectively.The book itself has been long in preparation, the writing of it having been interrupted for several years. This fact could not help but leave some marks on the organization and content of the various chapters. (...) Still, all in all, it presents a remarkably interesting and provocative whole. It is topical, rather than purely genetic in approach, dealing with various fundamental features of Frege's philosophy of language in some 19 chapters; e.g., with his sense-reference distinction, his theory of assertions, his conception of the nature and place of truth-values, propositions and thoughts, his views on quantification and identity, the nature of proper names, his polemic about explicit vs. implicit definitions, his theory of incomplete expressions, and the like. However, the historical needs of the reader are also well-served. (shrink)

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.

The Dutch law states that a physician may perform euthanasia according to a written advance euthanasia directive when a patient is incompetent as long as all legal criteria of due care are met. This may also hold for patients with advanced dementia. We investigated the differing opinions of physicians and members of the general public on the acceptability of euthanasia in patients with advanced dementia.

A total of 1918 loci, detected by the hybridization of 938 expressed sequence tag unigenes from 26 Triticeae cDNA libraries, were mapped to wheat homoeologous group 4 chromosomes using a set of deletion, ditelosomic, and nulli-tetrasomic lines. The 1918 EST loci were not distributed uniformly among the three group 4 chromosomes; 41, 28, and 31% mapped to chromosomes 4A, 4B, and 4D, respectively. This pattern is in contrast to the cumulative results of EST mapping in all homoeologous groups, as reported (...) elsewhere, that found the highest proportion of loci mapped to the B genome. Sixty-five percent of these 1918 loci mapped to the long arms of homoeologous group 4 chromosomes, while 35% mapped to the short arms. The distal regions of chromosome arms showed higher numbers of loci than the proximal regions, with the exception of 4DL. This study confirmed the complex structure of chromosome 4A that contains two reciprocal translocations and two inversions, previously identified. An additional inversion in the centromeric region of 4A was revealed. A consensus map for homoeologous group 4 was developed from 119 ESTs unique to group 4. Forty-nine percent of these ESTs were found to be homoologous to sequences on rice chromosome 3, 12% had matches with sequences on other rice chromosomes, and 39% had no matches with rice sequences at all. Limited homology was found between wheat ESTs on homoeologous group 4 and the Arabidopsis genome. Forty-two percent of the homoeologous group 4 ESTs could be classified into functional categories on the basis of blastX searches against all protein databases. (shrink)

The complex hexaploid wheat genome offers many challenges for genomics research. Expressed sequence tags facilitate the analysis of gene-coding regions and provide a rich source of molecular markers for mapping and comparison with model organisms. The objectives of this study were to construct a high-density EST chromosome bin map of wheat homoeologous group 2 chromosomes to determine the distribution of ESTs, construct a consensus map of group 2 ESTs, investigate synteny, examine patterns of duplication, and assess the colinearity with rice (...) of ESTs assigned to the group 2 consensus bin map. A total of 2600 loci generated from 1110 ESTs were mapped to group 2 chromosomes by Southern hybridization onto wheat aneuploid chromosome and deletion stocks. A consensus map was constructed of 552 ESTs mapping to more than one group 2 chromosome. Regions of high gene density in distal bins and low gene density in proximal bins were found. Two interstitial gene-rich islands flanked by relatively gene-poor regions on both the short and long arms and having good synteny with rice were discovered. The map locations of two ESTs indicated the possible presence of a small pericentric inversion on chromosome 2B. Wheat chromosome group 2 was shown to share syntenous blocks with rice chromosomes 4 and 7. (shrink)

The geometro-stochastic quantization of a gauge theory for extended objects based on the (4, 1)-de Sitter group is used for the description of quantized matter in interaction with gravitation. In this context a Hilbert bundle ℋ over curved space-time B is introduced, possessing the standard fiber ℋ $_{\bar \eta }^{(\rho )} $ , being a resolution kernel Hilbert space (with resolution generator $\tilde \eta $ and generalized coherent state basis) carrying a spin-zero phase space representation of G=SO(4, 1) belonging to (...) the principal series of unitary irreducible representations determined by the parameter ρ. The bundle ℋ, associated to the de Sitter frame bundle P(B, G), provides a geometric arena with built-in fundamental length parameter R (taken to be of the order of 10−13 cm characterizing hadron physics) yielding, in the presence of gravitation, a quantum kinematical framework for the geometro-stochastic description of spinless matter described in terms of generalized quantum mechanical wave functions, Ψ x ρ (ξ, ζ), defined on #x210B;. By going over to a nonlinear realization of the de Sitter group with the help of a section ξ(x) on the soldered bundle E, associated to P, with homogeneous fiber V′4⋍G/H, one is able to recover gravitation in a de Sitter gauge invariant manner as a gauge theory related to the Lorentz subgroup H of G. ξ(x) plays the dual role of a symmetry-reducing and an extension field. After introducing covariant bilinear source currents in the fields Ψ x ρ (ξ, ζ) and their adjoints determined by G-invariant integration over the local fibers in ℋ, a quantum fiber dynamical (QFD) framework is set up for the dynamics at small distances in B determining the geometric quantities beyond the classical metric of Einstein's theory through a set of current-curvature field equations representing the source equations for axial vector torsion and the de Sitter boost contributions to the bundle connection (the latter defining the soldering forms of the Cartan connection in P(B, G) in the nonlinear gauge). The presented bundle framework yields a theory for quantized material objects in interaction with gravitation, the long-range metrical part of which remains classical. (shrink)

A recent debate over the causal foundations of evolutionary theory pits those who believe that natural selection causally explains long-term, adaptive population change against those who do not. In this paper, I argue that this debate – far from being an invention of several articles in 2002 – dates from our very first engagements with evolution as a quantified, statistical science. Further, when we analyze that history, we see that a pivotal figure in the early use of statistical methodology (...) in evolutionary theory, W.F.R. Weldon, changes his mind about precisely the central claim at issue. I close by drawing some morals which I think the case can offer for the contemporary debate going forward. (shrink)