Many high-risk medical devices earn US marketing approval based on limited premarket clinical evaluation that leaves important questions unanswered. Rigorous postmarket surveillance includes registries that actively collect and maintain information defined by individual patient exposures to particular devices. Several prominent registries for cardiovascular devices require enrolment as a condition of reimbursement for the implant procedure, without informed consent. In this article, we focus on whether these registries, separate from their legal requirements, have an ethical obligation to obtain informed consent from (...) enrolees, what is lost in not doing so, and the ways in which seeking and obtaining consent might strengthen postmarket surveillance in the USA. (shrink)

Recent studies challenge the classical view that the origin of animal life was primarily controlled by atmospheric oxygen levels. For example, some modern sponges, representing early‐branching animals, can live under 200 times less oxygen than currently present in the atmosphere – levels commonly thought to have been maintained prior to their origination. Furthermore, it is increasingly argued that the earliest animals, which likely lived in low oxygen environments, played an active role in constructing the well‐oxygenated conditions typical of the modern (...) oceans. Therefore, while oxygen is still relevant to understanding early animal evolution, the relationships between the two might be less straightforward than previously thought. (shrink)

Arguably, no historical thinker has had as varied and fractious a reception within modern Judaism as Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza (1632-77), the seventeenth-century philosopher, pioneering biblical critic, and Jewish heretic from Amsterdam. Revered in many circles as the patron saint of secular Jewishness, he has also been branded as the worst traitor to the Jewish people in modern times. Jewish philosophy has cast Spinoza as marking a turning point between the old and the new, as a radicalizer of the medieval tradition (...) and table setter for the modern. He has served as a perennial landmark and point of reference in the construction of modern Jewish identity. This volume brings together excerpts from central works in the Jewish response to Spinoza. True to the diversity of Spinoza's Jewish reception, it features a mix of genres, from philosophical criticism to historical fiction, from tributes to diary entries, providing the reader with a sense of the overall historical development of Spinoza's posthumous legacy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAdam Smith infused the expression ‘impartial spectator’ with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator, he can be deemed impartial only presumptively. Such presumptive impartiality as regards the incident does not of itself carry extensive implications about his intelligence, nor about his being aligned with benevolence towards any larger whole. We may posit, however, a being who is impartial and who holds (...) higher levels of intelligence and of benevolence, and then converse over what her sentiments would be about the matter under discussion. It is natural to conceive of a being who is unsurpassable in such qualities, who is morally supreme, and who naturally takes the definite article the without having been definitized by the writer. Signal passages, new to edition 6, suggest that Smith formulates the man within the breast as a representative of the always present and everywhere morally supreme impartial spectator. When Smith speaks of the man within the breast as ‘the supposed impartial spectator’, we interpret ‘supposed’ as sup-pos-ed, not sup-pos’d. (shrink)

Dealing with major issues in Jewish biomedical law, this book focuses upon the influence of morality, the rise of patient autonomy, and the role played by scientific progress in this area of Jewish Law. The book examines Jewish Law in comparison with canon, common, and modern Israeli law.

Pioneering biblical critic, theorist of democracy, and legendary conflater of God and nature, Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jews of Amsterdam in 1656 for his "horrible heresies" and "monstrous deeds." Yet, over the past three centuries, Spinoza's rupture with traditional Jewish beliefs and practices has elevated him to a prominent place in genealogies of Jewish modernity. The First Modern Jew provides a riveting look at how Spinoza went from being one of Judaism's most notorious outcasts (...) to one of its most celebrated, if still highly controversial, cultural icons, and a powerful and protean symbol of the first modern secular Jew. Ranging from Amsterdam to Palestine and back again to Europe, the book chronicles Spinoza's posthumous odyssey from marginalized heretic to hero, the exemplar of a whole host of Jewish identities, including cosmopolitan, nationalist, reformist, and rejectionist. Daniel Schwartz shows that in fashioning Spinoza into "the first modern Jew," generations of Jewish intellectuals -German liberals, East European maskilim, secular Zionists, and Yiddishists- have projected their own dilemmas of identity onto him, reshaping the Amsterdam thinker in their own image. The many afterlives of Spinoza are a kind of looking glass into the struggles of Jewish writers over where to draw the boundaries of Jewishness and whether a secular Jewish identity is indeed possible. Cumulatively, these afterlives offer a kaleidoscopic view of modern Jewish culture and a vivid history of an obsession with Spinoza that continues to this day."--Jacket. (shrink)

_An assessment and reevaluation of nihilism’s ascendency over metaphysics._.

Academic social scientists overwhelmingly vote Democratic, and the Democratic hegemony has increased significantly since 1970. Moreover, the policy preferences of a large sample of the members of the scholarly associations in anthropology, economics, history, legal and political philosophy, political science, and sociology generally bear out conjectures about the correspondence of partisan identification with left/right ideal types; although across the board, both Democratic and Republican academics favor government action more than the ideal types might suggest. Variations in policy views among Democrats (...) is smaller than among Republicans. Ideological diversity (as judged not only by voting behavior, but by policy views) is by far the greatest within economics. Social scientists who deviate from left‐wing views are as likely to be libertarian as conservative. (shrink)

Grabowski, a self-described Platonic realist, argues against the "standard interpretation" of Plato's Forms as abstract universals in favor of the view that they are concrete particulars. He explains that the mistaken standard interpretation arises from a deeply ingrained habit of reading Plato's texts through the hermeneutical lens of the universals. Universals undoubtedly play a major role in the history of philosophy, though they were not Plato's primary concern in elaborating a theory of the Forms. "It is not that the problem (...) of universals gives rise to the Forms, but that the Forms give rise to the problem of universals" .According to Grabowski, if it can be shown that Plato never expunged the "model of acquaintance" from his theory of knowledge, then, strange as it seems, we can reasonably believe that Plato posited, or should have posited, the Forms as concrete particulars similar to those that exist in the sensible world, albeit bereft of any of the latter's "ontological deficiencies" .Grabowski begins the task by constructing an argument for the "standard interpretation," only to show that this interpretation proves unpersuasive, if for no other reason than the paucity of evidence supporting it in Plato's texts. In chapter 2, Grabowski summarizes. (shrink)

Virtue ethics seems to be a promising moral theory for understanding and interpreting the development and behavior of artificial moral agents. Virtuous artificial agents would blur traditional distinctions between different sorts of moral machines and could make a claim to membership in the moral community. Accordingly, we investigate the “machine question” by studying whether virtue or vice can be attributed to artificial intelligence; that is, are people willing to judge machines as possessing moral character? An experiment describes situations where either (...) human or AI agents engage in virtuous or vicious behavior and experiment participants then judge their level of virtue or vice. The scenarios represent different virtue ethics domains of truth, justice, fear, wealth, and honor. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that moral attributions are weakened for AIs compared to humans, and the reasoning and explanations for the attributions are varied and more complex. On “relational” views of membership in the moral community, virtuous machines would indeed be included, even if they are indeed weakened. Hence, while our moral relationships with artificial agents may be of the same types, they may yet remain substantively different than our relationships to human beings. (shrink)

This study focuses upon two competing visions of wealth and work among Baptists in America and how these different visions have shaped Baptist business ethics. Russell H. Conwell reflected the Reformed tradition's inclination toward what came to be called the Protestant work ethic and its defense of capitalism. He contended that American capitalism presented an open door for any diligent worker to achieve deserved riches. Walter Rauschenbusch reflected the Anabaptist heritage in the stream of Baptist history. He challenged the dominant (...) ethos of the industrial revolution in America and its preference for the interests of management; he called instead for the protection of the worker from the monopolistic power of the capitalists. These two contrasting postures influenced the response of Baptists to the labor-management struggle. (shrink)

This reply to Oleg Domanov’s target paper is not concerned with the technicalities of the proposed approach. Rather, I discuss the fruitfulness of the underlying ideas in dealing with Quine’s famous “double vision” scenario, for which the approach is designed. I point out some key ingredients of Domanov’s proposal: (a) context dependence of propositional attitude ascription (and ascribability); (b) replacement of individuals with finer-grained entities for reference and quantification, such as Kaplan’s “vivid names”, Frege and Yalcin’s senses or Percus and (...) Sauerland’s concept generators; and (c) using the apparatus of cross-identification functions. I show that those ingredients were already present in a body of work preceding the target paper. On the other hand, there are known problems related to the fact that sometimes the choice of the pertinent mode of presentation depends on the choices associated with quantifiers higher in the syntactic tree. No account based on manipulations with the global context, such as Domanov’s in its current form, can handle them. (shrink)

We discuss how modified dual-task approaches may be used to verify the degree to which cognitive tasks are capacity demanding. We also delineate some of the complexities associated with the use of the “double easy-to-hard” paradigm for testing claim of Halford, Wilson & Phillips that hierarchical reasoning imposes processing demands equivalent to those of transitive reasoning.

Koriat & Goldsmith's distinction between the correspondence and storehouse metaphors is valuable for both memory theory and methodology. It is questionable, however, whether this distinction underlies the heated debate about so called “everyday memory” research. The distinction between experimental and naturalistic methodologies better characterizes this debate. I compare these distinctions and discuss how the methodological distinction, between experimental and naturalistic designs, could give rise to different theoretical approaches.

Thomas Schelling has described how each of us is made up of conflicting impulses. The art of managing these impulses Schelling dubs ?egonomics?. The idea of egonomic calamity underlies paternalism (or, breaking convention, what I call ?parentalism'). The paper argues for laissez?faire in matters egonomic. The rationalizations I give for this libertarian sentiment are old ones, such as accentuating the dignity of the individual and letting the individual learn from example and from his own experience. Also I note, as H. (...) L. Mencken did, that parentalist measures often have unhappy unintended consequences, sometimes are counter?productive, and rarely are borne of sincere good?will. (shrink)