BackgroundThe landscape of clinical research has evolved over the past decade. With technological advances, the practice of using electronic informed consent (eIC) has emerged. However, a number of challenges hinder the successful and widespread deployment of eIC in clinical research. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the views of various stakeholders on the potential advantages and challenges of eIC.MethodsSemi-structured interviews were conducted with 39 participants from 5 stakeholder groups from across 11 European countries. The stakeholder groups included physicians, patient organization representatives, (...) regulator representatives, ethics committee members, and pharmaceutical industry representatives, and all were involved in clinical research. Interviews were analyzed using the framework method.ResultsInterviewees identified that a powerful feature of eIC is its personalized approach as it may increase participant empowerment. However, they identified several ethical and practical challenges, such as ensuring research participants are not overloaded with information and offering the same options to research participants who would prefer a paper-based informed consent rather than eIC. According to the interviewees, eIC has the potential to establish efficient long-term interactions between the research participants and the research team in order to keep the participants informed during and after the study. Interviewees emphasized that a personal interaction with the research team is of utmost importance and this cannot be replaced by an electronic platform. In addition, interviewees across the stakeholder groups supported the idea of having a harmonized eIC approach across the European Member States.ConclusionsInterviewees reported a range of design and implementation challenges which needs to be overcome to foster innovation in informing research participants and obtaining their consent electronically. It was considered important that the implementation of eIC runs alongside the face-to-face contact between research participants and the research team. Moreover, interviewees expect that eIC could offer the opportunity to enable a personalized approach and to strengthen continuous communication over time. If successfully implemented, eIC may facilitate the engagement of research participants in clinical research. (shrink)

The Concussion in Sport Group guidelines have successfully brought the attention of brain injuries to the global medical and sport research communities, and has significantly impacted brain injury-related practices and rules of international sport. Despite being the global repository of state-of-the-art science, diagnostic tools and guides to clinical practice, the ensuing consensus statements remain the object of ethical and sociocultural criticism. The purpose of this paper is to bring to bear a broad range of multidisciplinary challenges to the processes and (...) products of sport-related concussion movement. We identify lacunae in scientific research and clinical guidance in relation to age, disability, gender and race. We also identify, through multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary analysis, a range of ethical problems resulting from conflicts of interest, processes of attributing expertise in sport-related concussion, unjustifiably narrow methodological control and insufficient athlete engagement in research and policy development. We argue that the sport and exercise medicine community need to augment the existing research and practice foci to understand these problems more holistically and, in turn, provide guidance and recommendations that help sport clinicians better care for brain-injured athletes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 25 (2005) 9-14 [Access article in PDF] Religious Identity and Openness in a Pluralistic World David W. Chappell Soka University Guiding Issues How do I understand my own identity as a religious person in light of the fact that I am open to the validity of the beliefs held by other traditions?Has my understanding of my own religious tradition been transformed, purified, and enriched by the (...) ways in which I have come to understand the other traditions?Have I been changed by the dialogue, or do I remain the same? What difference has the dialogue made in my life, personally or theologically?How would I respond to this topic from the point of view that I am a religious person engaged in a specific area of expertise (environment, philosophy, etc.)? Thesis The increased mobility and diversity of relationships in the contemporary world has often made religious identity a complex issue, hardening it for some people and diffusing it for others. But in either case, I wish to challenge the view that highlights beliefs as a key to defining identity and instead propose that many other factors might be more important, and that in religious life identity is a secondary issue. Being Christian I was born, baptized, and raised in the Christian tradition. My father was a United Church of Canada minister and I became a United Church of Canada minister, while my mother was a Baptist and my brother became a Baptist minister. Religious values were important in my upbringing and throughout my adult life. While I have maintained a concern for ultimate values, however, my own beliefs have undergone radical changes. I am sure that many in the Christian community would say that I am no longer a Christian, but I have never taken that view and have never taken the step to renounce my ordination as a Christian minister. Instead, I question the assumption that beliefs are the best way to define a religious life or religious identity. [End Page 9]In 1961 I had the good fortune to go to McGill University to study with Wilfred Smith, and from him I have learned not to focus on the "beliefs" of others—namely, intellectual constructs—but on the "faith" of others as much more encompassing and important. Some religious communities—like the Jain and the Confucian—do not care about one's beliefs, only about one's practice, both ritually and morally. Wilfred Smith called it orthopraxy, rather than orthodoxy, and it provides an alternative means of marking religious identity.Why should I feel bound by the efforts of Emperor Constantine when he convened a church council in 325 CE to define Christian identity or by subsequent efforts of church institutions to do the same? Today, my Christian identity is nurtured and expressed by a constellation of moral values and cosmic trust, of faith and actions, that are connected to the early Jesus movement, especially as articulated by John Dominic Crossan. Living as we do in the modern era, we have very different beliefs about history and cosmology from these early Christians, as John Robinson discussed forty years ago in his book Honest to God. My affection for Christian church life and the early Jesus movement involves other factors than the concerns of those who formed Christian creeds. The Trinitarian doctrine makes sense as a conglomeration made from the conceptualization of several historical experiences important in the early Christian community, but the Trinitarian concept does not clarify or enhance my contemporary experience.In spite of the Trinitarian formulation, I still honor and value the powerful and enduring influence of my Christian upbringing. As a result, I have not renounced the name "Christian" or my ordination as a Christian minister, even though I have grown increasingly away from them. I am still the second son of Lynsin and Mary Chappell. Even though my parents may seem to be dead and gone, they are still alive for me. I treasure them and I still live my life in their embrace, as well as in the embrace of the fellowship of... (shrink)

Fifty years ago the philosopher Wilfred Sellars identified two images of “man”, which he called respectively the “manifest image” and the “scientific image”; and he considered whether and how these two images could be reconciled. In this paper, I will very briefly look at the distinction drawn by Sellars and at his suggestions for reconciliation of these images. I will suggest that a broad distinction as suggested by Sellars can indeed usefully be drawn, but that the distinction can be (...) more helpfully characterised than it was by Sellars. I will argue that there are more ways of reconciling the two images than those proposed by Sellars. And I will elaborate on what I think are the most promising lines along which the reconciliation could take place. (shrink)

Those who know Millikan only for her teleosemantics will find the themes in this book new. And those who think of Millikan as primarily concerned with empirical questions of biology and psychology may be surprised by her range of influences. The book features figures like Wilfred Sellars, P. F. Strawson and Gareth Evans as prominently as any more recent naturalist thinkers.

Wilfred Sieg and Mark Ravaglia. David Hilbert and Paul Bernays, Grundlagen der Mathematik I and II: A Landmark.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:TOWARDS A 'MATERIALIST' CRITIQUE OF 'RELIGIOUS PLURALISM': A POLEMICAL EXAMINATION OF THE DISCOURSE OF JOHN lliCK AND WILFRED CANTWELL SMITH KENNETH SURIN Duke University Durham, North Oarolina HE FACT THAT thinkers of such different theologia.I persuasions as David Tracy and John Hick regard hemsel¥es as 'religious' and (or) 'theological pluralists ' serves to indicate that ' pluralism ' must itself be irreducibly 'plural.' In this paper I (...) shall confine my attentions to the version of ' pluralism ' advertised in the writings of John Hick and, to a lesser extent, in those of Wilfred Cantwell Smith. I am proposing, in other words, to make the assumption that what Hick and Cantwell Smith say, and assume tacitly, about 'pluralism ' will apply, mutatis mutandis, to other versions or manifestations of 'pluralism' which have features in common with the position espoused hy Hick and Cantwell Smith. I should perhaps conclude this prefatory section of my paper by saying that the thrust of my argument will :be polemical, an admission which will probably not excuse the aggressive tone of some of my remarks. John Hick has written movingly about the 'spiritual pilgrimage ' (his term) which.brought him to the kind of Christian self-understanding that came to he articulated in his 'Copernican theology of world religions,' a self-understanding in which a ' Christ-centered' picture of the universe of faiths has givcen 1way to one that is ' God-centered.' 1 It is Hick's con1 For Hick's account of his 'spiritual pilgrimage,' see God Has Many Names (London: Macmilla.n, 1980), pp. 1-5; and the essay 'Three Contro655 656 KENNETH SURIN tention that the diversity of l"eligious and cultural traditions necessitates '... a paradigm shift from a Christianity-centered or Jesus-centered to a God-centered model of the universe of faiths.' 2 In making this ' paradigm shift,' ' one... sees the great world religions as different human responses to the One divine Reality, embodying different perceptions which have been formed in diffe:vent historical and cultural circumstances.' 3 Given Hick's espousal of the autobiographical mode when prefacing his many presentations of the third ' Copernican revnlution,' it could plausibly be al"gued that these presentations are perhaps best seen as a kind of narrative, in this case a secondary narrative-one constituting an abstract second -order discourse-whose typical and primary function in this instance is that of a theological 'sense-making.' Hick's theology, we are suggesting, is a ' sense-making ' narrative which ranges over the more immediately personal, first-order narratives recounting his decisive encounter with the cultural and religious realities that prevailed in Birmingham when he went to live there a couple of decades ago. The themes, categories, al"guments, etc., of Hick's 'philosophy of world religions ' can thus,be said to constitute him as a narrative character, in this case a character who of course features in his own narratives. Now the emergence of narrative characters reversies ' which introduces his recently-published collection Tke Problem of Religious Pluralism (London: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 1-15..A similar 'Godcenteredness ' is evinced in Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Tke Meaning and End of Religion: A Revolutionary Approaak to tke Great Religious Traditions (London: SPCK, 1978), pp. 170-92. Note especially the remark which concludes the chapter titled "Faith": 'The traditions evolve. Men's faith varies. God endures ' (p. 192). The subtitle to this book is somewhat misleading, because there is nothing recognizably 'revolutionary' about it. Cantwell Smith's work is a tepid liberal corrective to the 'exclusionary' discourse sponsored by certain strands of Christianity and the hegemonic 'Western' culture in which these strands are socially legitimated. 2 God Has Many Names, p. 6. s Loa. ait..A similar emphasis on religious traditions as 'historical constructs ' is to be found in Cantwell Smith, Tke Meaning and Iilnd of Religion, pp. 154ff. RELIGIOUS PLURALISM 657 quires historical and social preconditions, and my purpose in this paper will be to conduct an examination of the particular historical and social preconditions that have to he assumed if the ' religious pluralist' in general, and John Hick in particular, are to emerge as narrative cha.racters.4 In his 'Author's Introduction' (1920) to the 'Collected Essays on the Sociology of... (shrink)

The main point of this article is that more credence should be given in teacher education to performative dimensions of teaching. I agree with David Carr that the requisite capabilities are probably best learned in actual schools. I employ Turnbull’s conception of performativity, which speaks of tacit cultural learning. Following Wilfred Carr I go back to Aristotle, and to debate between Gadamer and Habermas, before arriving at the view that expert teaching practice should be in the spirit of (...) phronesis. The article then proposes that school-university collaboration should be the standard motif of teacher preparation, the context within which the spirit of phronesis can be realized and modeled. (shrink)

This volume presents articles on epistemology and the theory of perception and introduces readers to the various problems that face a successful theory of perceptual knowledge. The contributors include Robert Nozick, Alvin Goldman, H.P. Grice, David Lewis, P.F. Strawson, Frank Jackson, David Armstrong, Fred Dretske, Roderick Firth, Wilfred Sellars, Paul Snowdon, and John McDowell.

In the past four years, a small but intense debate has transpired on the margins of mainstream scholarship in the discipline of Philosophy, particularly within the sub-field of American pragmatism. While most philosophical pragmatists dedicate their attention to questions concerning how ideas improve experience (or the theory-practice continuum), those participating in this exchange have shown greater concern for an issue that is, at its core, a theoretical matter: Does the theory of experience espoused by the classic American philosopher John Dewey (...) succumb to what contemporary analytic philosophers—for instance, Wilfred Sellars, Donald Davidson and John McDowell—call the Myth of the Given? One commentator, Scott Aikin, claims that Dewey relied on non-inferential and non-conceptual content or givens as perceptual inputs for cognitive experience. The upshot of Aikin’s objection is that these experiential givens constitute a proxy epistemological foundation for the beliefs that flow from inquiry—a position clearly in conflict with Dewey’s commitment to anti-foundationalism. The objection assumes a slightly different form in the hands of another scholar of American pragmatism, Colin Koopman. Gregory Pappas and David Hildebrand respond to Koopman’s version of the objection. The goals of this essay are to clarify the objection, highlight the stakes in the debate, identify misunderstandings of Dewey’s experiential metaphysics on both sides, and determine why the experiential givenism objection merits serious philosophical scrutiny in the future. (shrink)

David Keyt presents a clear and accurate new translation of the the fifth and sixth books of Aristotle's Politics, together with a philosophical and historical commentary. The Politics is a key document in Western political thought; it raises and discusses many political issues, theoretical and practical, which are still widely debated today. The major topics of these two books are equality, democracy, tyranny, revolution, and reform.

David Houston Jones builds a bridge between practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example performance and installation art, as well as photography. Contemporary work in these areas responds both to forensic evidence, including crime scene photography, and to some of the assumptions underpinning its consumption. It asks how we look, and in whose name, foregrounding and scrutinising the enduring presence of voyeurism in visual (...) media and instituting new forms of ethical engagement. Such work responds to the object-oriented culture associated with the forensic and offers a reassessment of the relationship of human voice and material evidence. It displays an enduring debt to the discursive model of testimony which has so far been insufficiently recognised, and which forms the basis for a new ethical understanding of the forensic. Jones's analysis brings this methodology to bear upon a strand of contemporary visual activity which has the power to significantly redefine our understandings of the production, analysis and deployment of evidence. Artists examined include Forensic Architecture, Simon Norfolk, Melanie Pullen, Angela Strassheim, John Gerrard, Julian Charrière, Trevor Paglen, Laura Poitras and Sophie Ristelhueber. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, literary studies, modern languages, photography and critical theory. (shrink)

In the most radical rereading of the opening chapters of Genesis since the Zohar, David Kishik reveals the post-secular and post-human implications of an ancient text that is part of our cultural DNA.

In Science, Order and Creativity, David Bohm and F. David Peat argue that science has lost its way in recent years and needs to go beyond a narrow and fragmented view of nature and embrace a wider holistic view that restores the importance of creativity and communication for all humanity - not just scientists. The result of a close collaboration by one of the 20th century's greatest physicists and thinkers, David Bohm, with leading science writer F. (...) class='Hi'>David Peat, provides a rare combination of profound reflection and clear exposition that can be appreciated by anyone concerned with science and its importance in our lives. This new edition includes a new preface and an extended additional chapter by Peat which draws upon further discussions with David Bohm before the latter's death in 1992. A fascinating diagnosis and considered proposal for a cure for science's ills, it is also very accessible entry point to the work of David Bohm. Bohm and Peat contend that science has lost its bearings in the last century in favour of a narrow, abstracted, fragmented approach to nature and reality. Tracing the history of science, Bohm and Peat offer intriguing new insights into how scientific theories come into being, how to eliminate blocks of creativity and how science can lead to a deeper understanding of society, the human condition and the human mind itself. (shrink)

Among the many instruments devised by students of mathematical sciences in ancient Greece, the monochord provides one of the best opportunities to examine the methodologies of those who employed it in their investigations. Consisting of a single string which could be divided at measured points by means of movable bridges, it was used to demonstrate theorems about the arithmetical relationships between pitched sounds in music. This book traces the history of the monochord and its multiple uses down to Ptolemy, bringing (...) together all the relevant evidence in one comprehensive study. By comparing the monochord with a number of other ancient scientific instruments and their uses, David Creese shows how the investigation of music in ancient Greece not only shares in the patterns of demonstrative and argumentative instrument use common to other sciences, but also goes beyond them in offering the possibility of a rigorous empiricism unparalleled in Greek science. (shrink)

The orphaned son of an Anglican clergyman, David Hartley was originally destined for holy orders. Declining to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, he turned to medicine and science yet remained a religious believer. This, his most significant work, provides a rigorous analysis of human nature, blending philosophy, psychology and theology. First published in two volumes in 1749, Observations on Man is notable for being based on the doctrine of the association of ideas. It greatly influenced scientists, theologians, social reformers (...) and poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who named his eldest son after Hartley, had his portrait painted while holding a copy. In Volume 1, Hartley utilises Newtonian science in his observations. He presents a theory of 'vibrations', explaining how the elements of the nerves and brain interact as a result of stimulation, creating 'associations' and emotions. (shrink)

In Paradise Wild, David Oates addresses this and many other provocative questions as he explores the persistent myth of Eden from several different angles. As a lifelong mountaineer and reader of nature literature, as a scholar, as a descendant of naturalist William Bartram, and as a gay ex-Baptist who took to the mountains to test his masculinity, Oates has thought deeply about how nature and culture interact in our lives and about the contemporary debate over wilderness and environment. Paradise (...) Wild brings all these elements together in a lively, genre-hopping book that will move readers emotionally and intellectually, at the same time that it contributes to the ongoing debate in scholarly and environmental circles over the meaning of "nature" and "wilderness." Paradise Wild tells stories, explores major scholarship and literature of nature, and analyzes how the misapplied myth of Eden has mired Americans in a hopeless "Paradise Lost" mentality that belies the true, ever-present wildness in our lives. Oates argues that mourning for a lost paradise is a dead end that cannot help us combat the real damage we're doing to ourselves and the rest of the world. He proposes a healthy re-mythologizing of the Eden story as a way of celebrating "wildness" -- the Eden in each moment and in each cell, that cannot be lost. His book is about welcoming that wildness into the midst of daily life. This bold and original work will appeal to general readers as well as to scholars and students with an interest in environmental literature and philosophy, nature writing, cultural studies, and queer studies. (shrink)

What is the cultural value of illegal works that violate the copyrights of popular fiction? Why do they persist despite clear and stringent intellectual property laws? Drawing on the disciplines of new media, law, and literary studies, Illegal Literature suggests that extralegal works such as fan fiction are critical to a system that spurs the evolution of culture. Reconsidering voices relegated to the cultural periphery, David S. Roh shows how infrastructure--in the form of legal policy and network distribution--slows or (...) accelerates the rate of change. He analyzes the relationship between intellectual property rights and American literature in two recent copyright disputes. And, in comparing American fan fiction and Japanese dojinshi, he illustrates how infrastructure and legal climates detract from or encourage fledgling creativity. Illegal Literature fills a crucial gap between the scholarly and the popular by closely examining several modes of marginalized cultural production. Roh makes the case for protecting an environment conducive to literary heresy, the articulation of an accretive rather than solitary authorial genius, and the idea that letting go rather than holding on is important to a generative creative process. In a media ecology inundated by unauthorized materials, Illegal Literature argues that the proliferation of unsanctioned texts may actually benefit literary and cultural development. (shrink)

Citizens in the contemporary world have become alienated from politics because they conceive of it as an instrumental activity. David Antonini argues that Hannah Arendt's thought can help us recover meaningful political experience: a distinct experience of politics in which citizens can speak and act together.

The material reprinted in this two-volume set, first published in 1989, covers the first eighty-five years in responses to George Berkeley’s writings. David Berman identifies several key waves of eighteenth-century criticism surrounding Berkeley’s philosophies, ranging from hostile and discounted, to valued and defended. The first volume includes an account of the life of Berkeley by J. Murray and key responses from 1711 to 1748, whilst the second volume covers the years between 1745 and 1796. This fascinating reissue illustrates the (...) breadth and diversity of the early reaction to Berkeley’s philosophies, and will help students and academics form a clear image of both Berkeley’s work and his reputation through the eyes of his contemporaries. (shrink)

An edition of the recently discovered notebook used in the seventeenth-century by John Wallis to teach language to the 'deaf mute' Alexander Popham, who could not inherit unless he could speak - one of the most famous cases in the history of deaf education. David Cram and Jaap Maat place the work in its personal, social, and scientific contexts.

Widely regarded as the founder of the Islamic philosophical tradition, and as the single greatest philosophical authority after Aristotle by his successors in the medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian communities, Alfarabi was a leading figure in the fields of Aristotelian logic and Platonic political science. The first complete English translation of his commentary on Aristotle's Topics, Alfarabi's Book of Dialectic, or Kitāb al-Jadal, is presented here in a deeply researched edition based on the most complete Arabic manuscript sources. David (...) M. DiPasquale argues that Alfarabi's understanding of the Socratic art of dialectic is the key prism through which to grasp his recovery of an authentic tradition of Greek science on the verge of extinction. He also suggests that the Book of Dialectic is unique to the extent to which it unites Alfarabi's logical and political writings, opening up novel ways of interpreting Alfarabi's influence. (shrink)

Why does agency-the capacity to make choices and to act in the world-matter to us? Why is it meaningful that our intentions have effects in the world, that they reflect our sense of identity, that they embody what we value? David Kyuman Kim addresses these crucial questions by uncovering the political, moral, philosophical, and religious dimensions of human agency. Through a critical engagement with the work of theorists such as Judith Butler, Charles Taylor, and Stanley Cavell, Kim argues that (...) late modern and postmodern agency is found most effectively at work in what he calls "projects of regenerating agency" or critical and strategic responses to loss. Agency as melancholic freedom begins and endures, Kim maintains, through the moral and psychic losses associated with a broad range of experiences, including the moral identities shaped by secularized modernity and the multifold forms of alienation experienced by those who suffer the indignities of racial, gender, class, and sexuality discrimination and oppression. Kim calls for renewing the sense of urgency in our political and moral engagements by seeing agency as a vocation, where the aspiration for self-transformation and the human need for hope are fundamental concerns. (shrink)

In this uniquely and timely collection, David LaRocca offers us a thoughtful reminder that the very possibility and urgent task of thinking, of our acting and judging, ethics and politics, rests upon a willing exposure to an aspect of our everyday and ordinary experience that is hard to grasp and eludes most, perhaps all, epistemic criteria. Metaphysicians, mystics, and moral perfectionists of all stripes have called this 'the transcendental', thus risking the fatal misunderstanding that this means only 'the transcendent', (...) leading to the dualist assumption that we are citizens of two separate (earthly and heavenly) cities or (phenomenal and noumenal) worlds. Yet the truth is far more simple, if much harder to accept and then also live by. We are what we are, here and now. Yet we're not, therefore, irrevocably bound by what thus is said 'to be' -- much less by the proverbial powers that will always be -- in what we can still further imagine and aim or hope for, against the odds, as it were. In this brilliantly edited and introduced anthology, LaRocca presents us with the broadest selection of authors, philosophers, visionaries, and artists, who have expressed this simple, difficult truth and freedom in the most profound and varied ways."--Hent de Vries's review, p. [i]. (shrink)

Wars have played a momentous role in shaping the course of human history. The ever-present specter of conflict has made it an enduring topic of interest in popular culture, and many movies, from Hollywood blockbusters to independent films, have sought to show the complexities and horrors of war on-screen. In The Philosophy of War Films, David LaRocca compiles a series of essays by prominent scholars that examine the impact of representing war in film and the influence that cinematic images (...) of battle have on human consciousness, belief, and action. The contributors explore a variety of topics, including the aesthetics of war as portrayed on-screen, the effect war has on personal identity, and the ethical problems presented by war. Drawing upon analyses of iconic and critically acclaimed war films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line (1998), Rescue Dawn (2006), Restrepo (2010), and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), this volume's examination of the genre creates new ways of thinking about the philosophy of war. A fascinating look at the manner in which combat and its aftermath are depicted cinematically, The Philosophy of War Films is a timely and engaging read for any philosopher, filmmaker, reader, or viewer who desires a deeper understanding of war and its representation in popular culture. (shrink)

Milan, David An atheist and his christian friend are engaged in cordial conversation. The latter is taken aback and is rather indignant when his atheist friend declaims, 'On this question of the existence of god I believe that our respective positions are much closer than you imagine'. The Christian's firm riposte is that, by definition, such a harmony of viewpoints is impossible. Unfazed, his non-believing friend offers a thoughtful defence of his claim. He begins, 'You know that, since time (...) immemorial, humankind has taken unto itself all manner of gods, and that almost all of these tribal deities have long since vanished into obscurity.'. (shrink)

Is something true because we believe it to be so or because it is true? How can a culturally bound community achieve scientific knowledge when values, attitudes, and desires shape its beliefs? In this book an eminent philosopher considers various schools of thought on the nature of truth. David Weissman argues that truth exists in the correspondence between statement and fact: what can be said about our world can be measured against a reality that has a character and existence (...) independent of any property we ascribe to it. Weissman begins by evaluating the transcendental paradigm of Kant that has exercised enormous influence in the development of Western thought over the past two hundred years. He develops his critique of the Kantian model, in which value judgments underlie the perception or construction of truth, asserting that it is seriously flawed because it renders a determination of truth impossible. Weissman examines various value-driven perspectives on truth developed by such philosophers as Foucault, Derrida, and Rorty, for whom truth is only the set of affirmations, principles, and procedures sanctioned by power and value. However, says Weissman, truth is the required adjunct to desire. Knowing who we are, where we have been, and the consequences of what we have done is the essential preparation for choosing what to do next. We must respect the integrity of a world we have not made and find our way within it with the help of attitudes and desires that have been informed by truth. (shrink)

Classical Arabic Begging Poetry and Šakwā, 8th–12th Centuries. By Nefeli Papoutsakis. Arabische Studien, vol. 14. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017. Pp. viii + 254. €58.

According to Donald Davidson and other philosophers who wish to avoid what Sellars called the Myth of the Given (like Brandom and Rorty), the relation between the deliverances of our senses and our conceptual capacities is not foundational (justificatory), but merely causal. In Mind and World, John McDowell criticizes Davidson for this view and maintains that this kind of coherentism makes it impossible to understand the intentionality of thought and language. However, many critics have complained that they cannot find an (...) argument for this claim in Mind and World. This paper (in German) aims to reconstruct such an argument out of McDowellian materials laid out in a series of critical articles devoted to Brandom's version of the coherentist picture. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Introduction How it Works Sources of Error and Uncertainty DNA Typing Results as Legal Evidence The Legal Reception of DNA Typing DNA Typing and the Judicial Assessment of Scientific Evidence Social Impact: Criminal Investigation and Adjudication Conclusion Notes.