The emergence of nanotechnology, and specifically nanobiotechnology, raises major oversight challenges. In the United States, government, industry, and researchers are debating what oversight approaches are most appropriate. Among the federal agencies already embroiled in discussion of oversight approaches are the Food and Drug Administration , Environmental Protection Agency , Department of Agriculture , Occupational Safety and Health Administration , and National Institutes of Health . All can learn from assessment of the successes and failures of past oversight efforts aimed (...) at emerging technologies. This article reports on work funded by the National Science Foundation aimed at learning the lessons of past oversight efforts. The article offers insights that emerge from comparing five oversight case studies that examine oversight of genetically engineered organisms in the food supply, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, chemicals in the workplace, and gene therapy. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, the authors present a new way of evaluating oversight. (shrink)

This article evaluates the oversight of drugs and medical devices by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration using an integration of public policy, law, and bioethics approaches and employing multiple assessment criteria, including economic, social, safety, and technological. Criteria assessment and expert elicitation are combined with existing literature, case law, and regulations in an integrative historical case studies approach. We then use our findings as a tool to explore possibilities for effective oversight and regulatory mechanisms for nanobiotechnology. Section I describes (...) oversight mechanisms for human drugs and medical devices and presents current nanotechnology products. Section II describes the results of expert elicitation research. Section III highlights key criteria and relates them to the literature and larger debate. We conclude with broad lessons for the oversight of nanobiotechnology informed by Sections I-III in order to provide useful analysis from multiple disciplines and perspectives to guide discussions regarding appropriate FDA oversight. (shrink)

This article evaluates the oversight of drugs and medical devices by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration using an integration of public policy, law, and bioethics approaches and employing multiple assessment criteria, including economic, social, safety, and technological. Throughout, assessments employing both the multiple criteria and a method of expert elicitation are combined with the existing literature, case law, and regulations providing an integrative historical case study approach. The goal is to provide useful information from multiple disciplines and perspectives (...) to guide discussions regarding appropriate oversight frameworks for nanobiotechnology applications under the FDA’s purview. (shrink)

Technology has outpaced the capacity of researchers performing research on human participants to interpret all data generated and handle those data responsibly. This poses a critical challenge to existing rules governing human subjects research. The technologies used in research to generate images, scans, and data can now produce so much information that there is significant potential for incidental findings, findings generated in the course of research but beyond the aims of the study. Neuroimaging scans may visualize the entire brain and (...) even the entire head; computed tomography colonography research may visualize the entire torso, from the base of the lungs to the pubis; genetics studies may reveal “extra” and sometimes unwanted information about the family, such as misattributed paternity and undisclosed adoption; and genomic microarray research increasingly involves whole-genome analysis revealing an individual’s complete genotype, with enormous potential for uncovering unexpected information about an individual’s genetics and risks of developing future conditions. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. Genre-wise the article is a form of publication of analytical conclusions resulting from researching religious symbolism within the movie. The material for interpretation was derived from mass media, in particular cinematography. The article describes religious symbolism within the movie "Barbie" (2023). It is made apparent that the wide array of religious symbols in modern cinema requires a new approach. M e t h o d s. Issues with defining (...) religious symbolism in cinema have inspired a search of appropriate methods and research methodology. The article utilizes analytical approach based on religious symbolism found in the artistic source material – in this case a movie. R e s u l t s. With that considered the goal of the scientific research was to track down instances of religious symbolism in "Barbie" movie; such was confirmed to be abundant within otherwise mundane work. Barbieland symbolises paradise withiin the movie's fictional universe: it's a perfect place with no diseases or suffering, populated by perfect people ignorant of sorrow, problems, and worries. Naturally, the exile from paradise is a theme that is also predent. C o n c l u s i o n s. Brief research concludes that the "Barbie" movie features disguised religious symbolism – a common trope for many works within modern cinema. (shrink)

Behind every Utopia there is always a territory, but a territory that “is not here”, a territory removed from immediate reality in space or in time. In time, when the Utopia invokes the past of an Age of Gold or a Paradise Lost “illo tempore,” but also when there is a gamble with the hope of a better world to be organized in the future. These are “ideal times” or “longed-for times,” past or future of which philosophers, writers (...) or political men speak. (shrink)

In this thoughtful and literate study, Schwehn argues that Max Weber and several of his contemporaries led higher education astray by stressing research--the making and transmitting of knowledge--at the expense of shaping moral character. Schwehn sees an urgent need for a change in orientation and calls for a "spiritually grounded education in and for thoughtfulness." The reforms he endorses would replace individualistic behavior, the "doing my own work" syndrome derived from the Enlightenment, with a communitarian ethic grounded in Judeo-Christian (...) spirituality. Schwehn critiques philosophies of higher education he considers misguided, from Weber and Henry Adams to Derek Bok, Allan Bloom, and William G. Perry Jr. He draws out valid insights, always showing the theological underpinnings of the so-called secular thinkers. He emphasizes the importance of community, drawing on both the secular communitarian theory of Richard Rorty and that of the Christian theorist Parker Palmer. Finally, he outlines his own prescription for a classroom-centered spiritual community of scholars. Schwehn's study will interest all those concerned with higher education in America today: faculty, students, parents, alumni, administrators, trustees, and foundation officers. (shrink)

This article relates two forms of political and cultural marginality and emancipation to a third one, which, in traditional patriarchal cultures, is the embodiment of marginality par excellence: that of the female self. It explores their similar positioning in the spatial and temporal economy of power relations in a detailed analysis of Irina Grigorescu Pana's novel Melbourne Sundays, a fictionallyrical account of the Romanian author's 11-year exile in Australia, read as a narrative counterpart of her critical approach to (...) class='Hi'>exile in The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature. These two works describe an experience happening at the intersection between the author's national background – that of Romania – and the postcolonial one of her country of adoption – Australia – as they become relevant from her personal and professional experience as a woman writer. Exile is thus reflected in language, being spatially constructed by means of metaphors such as book, theatre, carnival, garden, which are also relevant for the process of identity formation. The argument mainly relies on Kristeva's theories, an approach motivated by Pana's own choice of the Kristevan discourse of love/hate in relation to the theme of exile in her fictional and critical works, since, as she remarks, exiles and lovers share a marginal, though at the same time essential, position in postcolonial cultures. (shrink)

Through a reading of the Syrian Marxist Yasin al-Hafiz’s (1930–1978) autobiographical preface, the essay investigates the changing coordinates of political critique in the Arab world in the aftermath of the defeat of 1967. The autobiography, as the essay argues, draws the contours of the figure of an ‘internal exile’, an exile from history into time, which characterizes the experience of a generation of disillusioned radicals. After presenting the interplay of history and time in al-Hafiz’s text, the essay (...) reflects on the historiographical sensibility needed for a revisiting of this past, a revisiting called for by the present disillusionment from the Arab revolutions. A tragic posture provides a different take on this past, the essay concludes, one that requires coming to terms with the notion of inheritance. (shrink)

In the article, the scenario-moulding is evaluated through the linguistic and conceptual accessibility of the future and the moral challenges of doing and allowing harm to the future participants of the practical discourses rooted in the present-centered scenarios. The viability of the scenarios is suggested to be defined by the alienation from the present and past imaginative contexts, as well as by overcoming the projections of humanity exclusiveness through inversible forecasting with the shift from human power to vulnerability (...) as the key issue in scenario-making. The eccentric approach to the future makes it possible to review both intergenerational and intragenerational perspectives of the future through the chronological distance and yet-inexistent subjects’ expectations and needs simulation. Taking to account the impact of the past, present and future otherness implies the three-dimensional assessment model involving metaphorical evaluation of the past-rooted patterns as paradise lost, illusions of the accessible futures as paradise found, and refusal of the futurized present expectations for the yetunknown imaginative future contexts as paradise conceptually postponed. The approach can find its practical application in tailoring and evaluating migration solutions and scenarios. (shrink)

Not long ago, two friends - Jean Baudrillard and Enrique Valiente Noailles -the one having come from Buenos Aires, the other from nowhere, met in Paris. They had a long discussion without any precise aim. It was, rather, a way of rubbing up against metaphysics without risk of contagion. They called it Exiles from Dialogue as a mirrored homage to Bertolt Brecht and shortly afterwards they parted company and went their separate ways." "In this remarkable new book (...) based on this gnomic meeting, Baudrillard and Noailles range over the entirety of philosophy and thought underpinning Baudrillard's unique work, from In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983) to his recent writings on 9/11. Philosophically, the book takes in its breadth Heraclitus to Wittgenstein by way of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzche. Its literary sources are diverse: Gracian and Saul Bellow, Holderlin and Stanislaw Lec; and the theories of Fukuyama, Barthes and Kristeva are weighed, considered and analysed."--Jacket. (shrink)

This book presents a study of twelfth-century humanism seen as an all-embracing discourse in which the human and the divine interact on equal terms. The book focuses on a number of twelfth-century intellectuals, especially Thierry of Chartres, Peter Abelard, William of Conches, Bernard Silvestris, and Alan of Lille. Defining characteristic of their texts is the fact that God, nature and humanity enter into a trialogue of sorts involving many disparate subjects and aiming to bring out the archetypal relatedness of all (...) kinds of knowledge with respect to human nature. As the authors studied here engage the divine and the universe in a joint conversation, the book ultimately concentrates on trying both to understand its appeal and to explain its subsequent demise. (shrink)

In this thoughtful and literate study, Schwehn argues that Max Weber and several of his contemporaries led higher education astray by stressing research--the making and transmitting of knowledge--at the expense of shaping moral character. Schwehn sees an urgent need for a change in orientation and calls for a "spiritually grounded education in and for thoughtfulness." The reforms he endorses would replace individualistic behavior, the "doing my own work" syndrome derived from the Enlightenment, with a communitarian ethic grounded in Judeo-Christian (...) spirituality. Schwehn critiques philosophies of higher education he considers misguided, from Weber and Henry Adams to Derek Bok, Allan Bloom, and William G. Perry Jr. He draws out valid insights, always showing the theological underpinnings of the so-called secular thinkers. He emphasizes the importance of community, drawing on both the secular communitarian theory of Richard Rorty and that of the Christian theorist Parker Palmer. Finally, he outlines his own prescription for a classroom-centered spiritual community of scholars. Schwehn's study will interest all those concerned with higher education in America today: faculty, students, parents, alumni, administrators, trustees, and foundation officers. (shrink)

Abrasive, harsh, uncompromising, blunt, uncomfortable. Lyrical, haunting, evocative, pleasure-full, drenching, soaring. All of this, all at once, now, not later. No postponing, no deferring to an endlessly deferred not yet, not yet, not yet.

Global competition has made thetraditional sugarcane and pineapple industriesincreasingly non-viable in Hawaii. One initiative torevive the agricultural sector calls for diversifyinginto non-traditional export crops that gains highervalue by attaching the paradise identity such as freshpineapples, macadamia nuts, or tropical flowers.Drawing from cases of pineapples and macadamia nuts,this paper examines how Hawaii's foodstuffs were ableto capture a premium value of place-association due tothe social construction of Hawaii as a place. Anexpansion of the niche markets, however, has allowedthe symbolic meaning (...) of these products to beappropriated and reconstituted by global interests.Without confronting the fundamental problemsassociated with land and labor relations in Hawaii,Hawaii producers are caught in a niche-markettreadmill. They continuously seek new potentials forhigh-value crops, but are unable to maintain controlbeyond their inventive stage. (shrink)

Judith Shklar was a formative political thinker whose oeuvre defies traditional labels, and whose legacy is subtle but substantial. Her work emerged, as one observer has pointed out, between the "end of ideology" discussions of the 1950s and the early 1990s discussion of the "end of history." Shklar contributed significantly to American political thought by arguing for a new, more skeptical and stripped-down version of liberalism that intends to bring political theory and real-life experiences closer together. This book is the (...) first to comprehensively explore how Shklar's ideas emerged, how her political theory developed, and the impact and legacy she left behind."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

“Adam was hurled into Hindustan. In this land there is a mountain called Serandib, and it is reported that there is no higher mountain in all the universe. Adam landed on this mountain.” The subject of Serendib plays an important role in both the geographical and travel literature of the Arabs. Serendib, or Sarandib, is the transcription of the Singhalese name Sinhaladîpa, which means “island of the descendants of lions” (singha, “lions,” in Singhaly). Already, in the Middle Ages, in the (...) year 949, Arab merchants, who were well acquainted with the island of Ceylon, set up a branch in Colombo. The natural beauty and wealth of the island so touched the imagination of Arab voyagers that it appeared in the sixth voyage of Sinbad the Sailor, and it was also believed that Adam lived on the island after having been driven from Paradise: “The island of Serendib is located directly under the equinoctial line…. Men fish for pearls along its banks and at the mouths of its rivers, and some of its valleys are rich in diamonds. As an act of faith I myself took a trip to the mountain, to the very spot where Adam was banished after being exiled from Paradise. I even climbed to its summit.”This excerpt, from The Thousand and One Nights, well summarizes the feelings of those Arab merchants whose accounts of their travels, in large measure, contributed to the spread of myths and legends about Ceylon. (shrink)

The tendency of classical politics to embed the individual in universal and transcendental patterns of action followed in part from the recognition of the futility of unpredictable action oriented to the individual's transient personal future. By contrast, F. A. Hayek argues for liberalism and the rule of law because it is instrumental to the achievement of human ends. Michael Oakeshott, however, claims that freedom is a value in itself, and that liberalism should emphasize moral autonomy because the moral life (...) is public and not oriented to external ends. The moral life intimates a form of self‐sufficiency in action, and self‐sufficient action is timeless in the sense of being indifferent to either the past or the future. Oakeshott returns liberalism to the problems of classical politics without recourse to the dictatorial imposition of a single substantive good. (shrink)

The Philosophy of War and Exile argues that our current paradigms for thinking about the ethics of war - just war theory - and the suffering of war - PTSD theory - judge war without a proper understanding of war. By continuing the investigations of J. Glenn Gray into the meaning of how war is experienced by combatants we can find an alternative understanding of not only war, but of peace, culminating in a new theory of responsibility centered around (...) embodiment and mortality rather than praise and blame. This conception of responsibility will in turn allow us to not only ask new questions about torture, unmanned warfare, and the treatment of veterans, but also to ask new questions about what it means for noncombatants to experience as home what combatants experience as exile. (shrink)

Our era is profoundly marked by the phenomenon of exile and it has become increasingly urgent to rethink the concept and our stance towards it. Permeated with references to the stranger, the other and exteriority, the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas signifies towards a positive understanding of exile. This article distills from Levinas' philosophy a wisdom of exile, for the first time shedding a positive light on the condition itself.

An examination of the intertwined lives and writings of a group of prominent twentieth-century Jewish thinkers who experienced exile and migration Exile, Statelessness, and Migration explores the intertwined lives, careers, and writings of a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals during the mid-twentieth century—in particular, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Hirschman, and Judith Shklar, as well as Hans Kelsen, Emmanuel Levinas, Gershom Scholem, and Leo Strauss. Informed by their Jewish identity and experiences of being outsiders, (...) these thinkers produced one of the most brilliant and effervescent intellectual movements of modernity. Political philosopher Seyla Benhabib’s starting point is that these thinkers faced migration, statelessness, and exile because of their Jewish origins, even if they did not take positions on specifically Jewish issues personally. The sense of belonging and not belonging, of being “eternally half-other,” led them to confront essential questions: What does it mean for the individual to be an equal citizen and to wish to retain one’s ethnic, cultural, and religious differences, or perhaps even to rid oneself of these differences altogether in modernity? Benhabib isolates four themes in their works: dilemmas of belonging and difference; exile, political voice, and loyalty; legality and legitimacy; and pluralism and the problem of judgment. Surveying the work of influential intellectuals, Exile, Statelessness, and Migration recovers the valuable plurality of their Jewish voices and develops their universal insights in the face of the crises of this new century. (shrink)

Naturalism in twentieth century philosophy is founded on the rejection of ‘first philosophy’, as can be seen in Quine’s rejection of what he calls ‘cosmic exile’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology falls within the scope of what naturalism rejects, but I argue that the opposition between phenomenology and naturalism is less straightforward than it appears. This is so not because transcendental phenomenology does not involve a problematic form of exile, but because naturalism, in its recoil from transcendental philosophy, creates (...) a new form of exile, what I call in the paper ‘exile from within’. These different forms of exile are the result of shared epistemological aspirations, which, if set aside, leave open the possibility of phenomenology without exile. In the conclusion of the paper, I appeal to Merleau-Ponty as an example of what phenomenology without epistemology might look like. (shrink)

This article chronicles the correspondence between Theodosius Dobzhansky and his colleagues in the USSR in the years following his arrival in the United States on what was to have been a one-year fellowship working in the laboratory of T.H. Morgan at Columbia University. These letters chronicle a period during which Dobzhansky not only realized the enormous potential of Drosophila genetics for unlocking the secrets of evolution, but also that con­tinuing this research would require finding a way to remain in the (...) United States longer than either the Soviet Academy of Sciences, or the Rockefeller Foundation, would allow. Dobzhansky’s exchanges during this period with mentors such as Yuri Filipchenko and Nikolai Vavilov, as well as fellow students and colleagues such as Nikolai Medvedev, highlight the precarious game Dobzhansky played as he attempted to appear eager to return to his homeland, while secretly maneuvering to delay it. By the time it was over Filipchenko would die an early death of meningitis and Vavilov—who had originally been urging Dobzhansky to return and contribute to development of genetics in Russia—would now advise him to remain in the USA. Dobzhansky was nearly forced to return to the USSR after a routine trip to Canada to renew his visa, an outcome that would surely have resulted in imprisonment or worse. In the end he was allowed to stay, however Dobzhansky’s defection was so resented by the Soviet regime that even decades later he would remain an “un-person” in his homeland, whose name and contributions were never officially acknowledged during his lifetime, and his attempts at reconciliation were rejected. (shrink)

Dans la Genèse, l’exil abrahamique, paradigme d’un mouvement qui constitue le premier pas de la réalisation de l’homme, est caractérisé par une séparation et une mise en route. C’est le début du temps historique. L’Exode fait le récit d’un exil collectif sous la houlette de Moïse : la sortie d’Égypte, le séjour dans le désert, avant d’atteindre la Terre promise. Ce séjour dans le désert est le temps d’initiation des Hébreux à la vie sociale. D’un assemblage de tribus, les Hébreux (...) deviennent un peuple, avec des lois et une justice, métaphore de la transformation potentielle par l’analyse. (shrink)

Iranian women were extremely active during the revolution of 1979. They were or became active within various political organizations and fought for democracy and freedom. The focus of this paper is on the activities of a group of Iranian women leftists within Marxist organizations in Iran and their experiences in exile. These political activists had to leave Iran when it became a crime to be a Marxist. During their activities in Iran, their Marxist convictions limited the ways in which (...) they dealt with issues such as gender, sexuality, and women’s rights. However the fact that they became so active made them potentially aware of their rights as women. It was later when this potential knowledge became manifest. These women who initially underestimated women’s questions and suppressed their womanhood in the framework of Marxist ideology, became strong advocates of women’s rights and serious contributors in the women’s movement when they were in exile. (shrink)

Review of Timothy Brennan (2021) Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said. London: Bloomsbury.

Charts the flight of some of this century's most important thinkers from Nazi Germany to the United States. Jay explores the theories of The Frankfurt School -- among them, the work of Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse -- as well, such as George Lichtheim, Hannah Arendt, and Henry Pachter.

Return from Exile: A Theory of Possibility challenges the modern understanding of possibility, which dates back to Leibniz and sees possibility as evasion, as irrelevant to the actual world. It offers an alternative account where reality is literally constituted of multiple possibilities.

History from Loss challenges the common thought that 'history is written by the winners' and explores how history makers in different times and places across the globe have written histories from loss, even when this has come at the threat to their own safety. A distinguished group of historians from around the globe offer an introduction to different history-makers' lives and ideas, and important extracts from their works which highlight various meanings of loss: from physical (...) ailments to social ostracism, exile to imprisonment, and from dispossession to potential execution. Throughout the volume consideration of the information 'bubbles' of different times and places helps to show how information has been weaponised to cause harm. In this way, the text helps to put current debates about the biases and weaponization of platforms such as social media into global and historical perspective. In combination, the chapters build a picture of history from loss which is global, sustained, and anything but a simple mirror of history made by victors. The volume also includes an Introduction and Afterword which draw out the key meanings of history from loss, and which offer ideas for further exploration. History from Loss provides an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and general readers who wish to put current debates on bias, the politicization of history, and threats to history makers into global and historical perspective. (shrink)

Seyla Benhabib’s Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin is a complex and remarkable book that defies easy categorization. While the titl...

In this paper we discuss how Australian feminism has contributed to a better understanding of women’s economic position within Australian society. Through this analysis we seek to shed some light on the current implementation of the ‘women in business’ policy in Australia. We trace the development of this position from the early beginnings of unionism and wage centralisation through to the social change movements of the 1960s and 1970s. We then examine how the neo-liberal turn of the 1990s manifested (...) itself in a move from a focus on numerical representation of women, through Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action policies and initiatives, to one that concentrated on an individualist approach to women in business. We conclude that feminism has had its most significant impact at the level of public policy. However, recent epistemological turns in Australian feminism appear to have resulted in less attention being paid to materialist concerns, and furthermore have not been able to resolve the sameness/difference divide that continues to haunt feminist philosophy. (shrink)

Science and Humanism in UNESCO's Approach to Globalization studies the influence of scientific humanism on the emergence and development of UNESCO's original approach to globalization. It also studies the role that UNESCO tried to play in the international system through the promotion of its own specific account of globalization.

Purpose: The problem of entering a “mainstream” is analyzed by looking at the problem of recursive splitting in the use of constructivism, illustrating this problem with the special case of personal construct psychology. Problem: In this opinion article I outline a number of issues intrinsic to radical constructivism, and also to other less radical forms of constructivism, which tend to lead its users in the opposite direction to any detectable “mainstream,” indeed leading them steadily away from any unifying flow (...) that might eventually leak into a mainstream. Method: By analyzing the “constructivist field” with regard to a series of “miss-takes” easily made by those approaching the radical constructivist outlook, and also with regard to an intrinsic tendency towards idiosyncratic individualism, I want to show the deepening degree of fragmentizing and splitting that I regard as endemic to the constructivist epistemology. I also describe how the metaphoric power of the term “constructivism” has been lost and has now become a dead metaphor, and I use the “gyres” metaphor of W. B. Yeats to describe the impending chaos and dissolution of the constructivisms. Implications: I make six main suggestions as to how this state of events might possibly be slowed down or even recovered from, thus avoiding ongoing deterioration and its self-disintegrating conclusion. (shrink)