The general perception of how innovative assisted reproductive technologies are introduced is through a carefully controlled series of experiments in an animal model, such as the mouse. Only after the technique has been proven can one consider confirmatory studies on mammals closely related to humans, such as rhesus monkeys or other nonhuman primates. With this background of a peer-reviewed body of well-established published data, there is sufficient foundation and rationale to propose a clinical investigation to a responsible human subjects institutional (...) review board. IRBs weigh the benefits and risks of the new methods to human subjects, and then consider the appropriate informed consent procedures for the particular case. Only after a large number of clinical studies are performed at multiple sites and are peer reviewed can the efficacy and safety of the innovative approach be clearly evaluated. At that time, the potential therapy can be responsibly offered to suitable beneficiaries. (shrink)

That’s Bill Calvin, whose brain is worthy of study in its own right. Technically, he’s a theoretical neurophysiologist and affiliate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington. But he’s also known as a scientist with a wide-ranging intellect and a prolific (and accessible) writer who constantly offers remarkable insights about the world around him. As I sat down to interview Calvin in his book-lined Seattle home last Fall, I recalled the comments of someone who (...) had come to GBN to hear Calvin speak. He said that he didn’t know—or care—what Calvin was going to talk about because everything that Bill Calvin said was not only interesting, but worth learning about. After more than three hours of conversation with Calvin, I couldn’t agree more. (shrink)

Abstract:Calvin Warren talks about Heidegger's influence on Afropessimism, and about the philosophical significance of the Harlem Renaissance.

Psychology's fascination with memory and its imperfections dates back further than we can remember. The first careful experimental studies of memory were published in 1885 by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, and tens of thousands of memory studies have been conducted since. What has been learned, and what might the future of memory be?

Neurobiologist William Calvin explores the human brain, positing that the neurons in the brain operate in an accelerated version of biological evolution, evolving ideas through random variations and selections, and supports his hypothesis with numerous ca.

Sketching a new portrait of the human self in this thought-provoking book, leading American philosopher Calvin O. Schrag challenges bleak deconstructionist and postmodernist views of the self as something ceaselessly changing, without origin or purpose. Discussing the self in new vocabulary, he depicts an action-oriented self defined by the ways in which it communicates. The self, says Schrag, is open to understanding through its discourse, its actions, its being with other selves, and its experience of transcendence. In his discussion, (...) Schrag responds critically to both modernists and postmodernists, avoiding what he calls the modernists' overdetermination of unity and identity and the postmodernists' self-enervating pluralism. He agrees with postmodernist attacks on both the classical theory of the self as a metaphysical substance and the modern epistemological construal of the self as transparent mind, yet he maintains that jettisoning the self as understood in these terms does not mean jettisoning it altogether. The self as subject is not dead, nor are the constitutive features of self-formation and self-understanding. In addressing the role of culture in the dynamics of self-formation, the author offers a critique of Max Weber's and Jürgen Habermas's view of modernity as a radical differentiation of three cultural spheres: science, morality, and art; he adds religion as a legitimate fourth cultural sphere. The overview of Schrag's philosophy that _The Self after Postmodernity_ provides will appeal to readers with an interest in literary criticism and religion as well as philosophy. (shrink)

In _Ontological Terror_ Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of (...) blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with non-Being—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in Being. (shrink)

Yet versatility is not always a virtue, and more of it is not always better. When the chimpanzees of Uganda arrive at a grove of fruit trees, they often discover that the efficient local..

In "The Cerebral Code," he has solidly embedded his ideas in experimental neurophysiology and neuropharmacology, deriving from his decades in the laboratory.

This book looks back at the simpler versions of mental life in apes, Neanderthals, and our ancestors, back before our burst of creativity started 50,000 years...

According to Finite Fine-grainedness (roughly), there is a finite sequence of intuitively small differences between any two welfare levels. The assumption of Finite Fine-grainedness is essential to Gustaf Arrhenius’s favored sixth impossibility theorem in population axiology and plays an important role in the spectrum argument for the (Negative) Repugnant Conclusion. I argue that Theravāda Buddhists will deny Finite Fine-grainedness and consider the space that doing so opens up—and fails to open up—in population axiology. I conclude with a lesson for population (...) axiology that generalizes beyond the Buddhist context: to plausibly deny Finite Fine-grainedness, we must locate a welfare good—such as the good of awakening (bodhi)—with some rather esoteric axiological properties. (shrink)

This is a book about the human sciences. However, it is not a treatise on scientific methodology nor is it a proposal for a unification of the human sciences through an integration of their findings within a general conceptual scheme.

The spatial misrepresentation objection (SMO) against the wave theory of sound argues that if sounds are compression waves, then our auditory experiences are massively illusory for not representing sounds as propagating in the medium. Thus, it claims that the wave theory should be rejected because it is unreasonable to accept such an error theory of hearing. This paper presents a metaphysics of compression waves to show that the wave theory correctly implies that we cannot hear sounds as propagating. Moreover, I (...) argue that the SMO is based on a mischaracterisation of the phenomenology of auditory experiences. A new conception of auditory perception is then proposed to explain how a sound source and its compression wave are both represented in the same auditory experience. Finally, I compare my view with some alternative theories of sound. Overall, it is found that the SMO is more of an objection against the traditional conception of hearing than a challenge to the wave theory of sound. (shrink)

[The Task of Philosophy for the New Millenium].

Investigates the rapid evolution of the ape brain into the hominid brain, and explains why understanding our evolutionary past can help us survive an uncertain future.

Contemporary or traditional? Blended or seeker? Pop or "classical"? Chorus or hymn? Combo or organ? Questions concerning music in worship abound these days. Is there a practical way to deal with these issues? In Music and Ministry: A Biblical Counterpoint, Calvin Johansson looks to God's Word for principles foundational to music ministry. Weaving together great scriptural truths, he establishes the need for a "directional balance" between pastoral contextualization and prophetic purity. In a time of facile musical accommodation of the (...) gospel to culture, Dr. Johansson suggests that a heightened concern for musical style and quality is in order-not for the sake of music, but for the sake of the gospel. (shrink)

This substantially revised and updated edition of Calvin Pinchin's balanced and lucid introductory guide to philosophy is organized around the key areas students will cover, including: Theory of Knowledge Ethics Social and Political Philosophy Philosophy of Religion Philosophy of Mind and--new for this edition--Philosophy of Science.

We consider how human subjects establish signaling conventions in the context of Lewis-Skyrms signaling games. These experiments involve games where there are precisely the right number of signal types to represent the states of nature, games where there are more signal types than states, and games where there are fewer signal types than states. The aim is to determine the conditions under which subjects are able to establish signaling conventions in such games and to identify a learning dynamics that approximates (...) how they succeed when they do. Our results suggest that human agents tend to use a win-stay/lose-shift with inertia dynamics to establish conventions in such games. We briefly consider the virtues and vices of this low-rationality dynamics. (shrink)

OpenAI’s Chat Generative Pre-training Transformer (ChatGPT), Google’s Bard and other generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies can greatly enhance the capability of healthcare profess...

. This work will be useful to all who wonder what to do about the largely negative results of postmodern thought.Ó ÑJoseph C. Flay The Resources of Rationality addresses the postmodernist assault on the claim of reason and develops a ...

a. Lessons from science and medicine b. Lessons from industrial revolutions c. How Deep Geothermal can replace coal. d. How to sink a lot of carbon quickly.

This chapter traces some of the ancient and medieval history of the debate about whether there are distinct and potentially conflicting true goods or genuine tension between the pursuit of self-interest and the pursuit of what has intrinsic value. Much modern moral theory posits that morally good agents are prepared to restrain the pursuit of even their enlightened self-interest when it conflicts with what is intrinsically good or is good for others. This puts Morality at odds with a long Ethical (...) tradition that is especially indebted to Aristotle and his followers and that proposes the ultimate aim of any rational agent to be that agent’s flourishing or happiness. The chapter concludes, pace Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, that while the view embedded in much modern moral theory reached its full development in the context of a theologically infused medieval tradition, which involved Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard and John Duns Scotus, its roots are earlier, and its metaphysical underpinnings are independent of that context. (shrink)

The ethical restatement of the “risk and crisis communication in public health emergency” (PHERCC) matrix by Spitale et al. (2024) is a step up from mainstream approaches like the Crisis and Emerge...