Postmortem research on the brains of American tackle football players has revealed the presence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma. Repeated concussion is a risk factor for CTE, raising ethical concerns about the long-term effects of concussion on athletes at risk for football-related concussion. Of equal concern is that youth athletes are at increased risk for lasting neurocognitive and developmental deficits that can result in behavioral disturbances and diminished academic performance. In this (...) article, we consider evidence of the effects of concussion in youth athletes, and discuss ethical duties to youth athletes and how these duties might be satisfied, given the intrinsic risks of football. Finally, we evaluate potential strategies for reducing concussions in junior football, and recommend the optimal strategy for reducing brain injury to an acceptable level while still making available the benefits of football participation for youth athletes. (shrink)

Concussion and Mild Traumatic Brain Injury affect millions of people worldwide. mTBI has been called the “signature injury” of the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, affecting thousands of active duty service men and women, and veterans. Sport-related concussion represents a significant public health problem, with elite and professional athletes, and millions of youth and amateur athletes worldwide suffering concussions annually. These brain injuries have received scant attention from neuroethicists, and the focus of this special issue is on defining the (...) ethical considerations and developing and elucidating the neuroethical contributions to the discussion about concussion and mTBI. (shrink)

Among the casualties of the rush to relativism is a central tenet of classical thought: that great works of literature are great in and of themselves and not because of the needs and values of their time. This “canon-based view,” supply taken for granted by Johnson, Arnold, Pope, and Eliot, has long since been shown the door by views ranging from Marxism to today’s cultural studies. These views hold that the great works become great because of the values and (...) concerns of their own times, and they remain effectual, if they do, because of the ways they speak to their times’ concerns. There are no transhistorical values and concerns, though of course there is a past to culture and its works continue their indirect .. (shrink)

The SIMS model offers an embodied perspective to cognition and behaviour that can be applied to organizational studies. This model enriches behavioural and brain research conducted by social scientists on emotional work (also known as emotional labour) by including the key role played by body-related aspects in interpersonal exchanges. Nevertheless, one could also study a more vocal aspect to smiling as illustrated by the development of strategies in organizations. We propose to gather face-to-face and voice-to-voice interactions in an embodied perspective (...) taking into account Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) theory of conceptual metaphors. (shrink)

While the origin and development of the just war tradition until the early modern period blended concerns, ideas, and practices from the moral, legal, political, and military spheres, from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth it largely disappeared as a conscious source of moral reflection about war and its restraint. Beginning in the 1960s, however, American theologian Paul Ramsey initiated a recovery of just war thinking in a series of writings applying the principles of discrimination and proportionality, ideas he traced (...) both to Augustinian theology and to natural law, to the debate over nuclear weapons and later to the Vietnam War. Ramsey's work directly engaged both theological and policy debate over military force, initiating lines of reflection that have since developed further and become increasingly institutionalized. This brief essay examines the nature of Ramsey's just war thought and its influence over the last 40 years. (shrink)

The philosophical assumptions that organize moral sociology as practical philosophy are the outcome of a secular quest to investigate the principles, norms and values behind the constitution of society. As a protracted response to the whole utilitarian-atomistic-individualistic tradition that systematically deemphasizes the constitutive role that morality plays in the structuration of self and society, the sociological tradition has continued, by its own means, the tradition of moral and practical philosophy in theoretically informed empirical research of social practices. Going back to (...) classic moral philosophy, I want to show in this article how social theory is involved in the quest for ‘the good life with and for the others in just institutions’ (Ricoeur). (shrink)

SummaryThe Gainj of highland Papua New Guinea do not use contraception but have a total fertility rate of only 4·3 live births per woman, one of the lowest ever recorded in a natural fertility setting. From an analysis of cross-sectional demographic and endocrinological data, the causes of low reproductive output have been identified in women of this population as: late menarche and marriage, a long interval between marriage and first birth, a high probability of widowhood at later reproductive ages, low (...) effective fecundability and prolonged lactational amenorrhoea. These are combined with near-universal marriage, a low prevalence of primary sterility and a pattern of onset of secondary sterility similar to that found in other populations. Of all the factors limiting fertility, by far the most important are those involved in birth spacing, especially lactational amenorrhoea. (shrink)

This paper is a critique of Kenneth Arrow's thesis concerning the logical impossibility of a constitution. I argue that one of the premises of Arrow's proof, that of the transitivity of indifference, is untenable. Several concepts of preference are introduced and counter-instances are offered to the transitivity of indifference defined along the standard lines in terms of these concepts. Alternate analyses of indifference in terms of preference are considered, and it is shown that these do not serve Arrow's purposes either. (...) Finally, it is argued that in the single special case in which indifference could plausibly be held to be transitive, Arrow's thesis is innocuous. (shrink)

(2005). Between Critique And Metaphysics. Angelaki: Vol. 10, continental philosophy and the sciences the french tradition issue editor: andrew aitken, pp. 39-57.

In a conflict between two people, one person wants one thing and the other wants something else and they think they can't both have what they want. Suppose that what they want can only be the outcome of some joint action. Adam must do either y or z and Eve either y ' or z ' – here y -and- y ' would be one joint action, y -and- z ' would be another, and so on. Adam wants the outcome (...) of his doing z while Eve is doing y '. Eve wants the outcome of her doing z ' while Adam is doing y. Each thinks that these outcomes can't both be had. (shrink)

We resolve a useful formulation of the question how a statistician can coherently incorporate the information in a consulted expert’s probability assessment for an event into a personal posterior probability assertion. Using a framework that recognises the total information available as composed of units available only to each of them along with units available to both, we show: that a sufficient statistic for all the information available to both the expert and the statistician is the product of their odds ratios (...) in favour of the event; that the geometric mean of their two probabilities specifies a contour of pairs of assertions in the unit-square that yield the same posterior probability; that the information-combining function is parameterised by an unknown probability for the event conditioned only on the unspecified information common to both the statistician and the expert; and that an assessable mixing distribution over this unspecified probability allows an integrable mixture distribution to represent a computable posterior probability. The exact results allow the identification of the subclass of coherent probabilities that are externally Bayesian operators. This subclass is equivalent to the class of combining functions that honour the principles of uniformity and compromise. (shrink)

The study of human origins is a kaleidoscopic field, a multitude of objects, reflections, and disciplines a swirl in an ever-changing tumult. The extreme diversity of the elements of information that are indispensable to this field of study (teeth, bones, apes, genes, ancient objects, present-day objects, biomechanical factors, cultural constructions …) appears all by itself to be enough to consign any attempt at synthesis to the realm of the Utopian. It hardly seems reasonable to expect the disparate sciences that fuel (...) the field (paleoanthropology, archaeology, molecular biology, physics, psychology, and others) and the contradictory conceptions of scientific activity that they defend (human sciences, natural sciences, experimental sciences, exact sciences) to be joined with any regularity. As for formulating an overall problematics of the interdependent phenomena encountered in the field, one would have to be more than optimistic to entertain such dreams. And yet this is exactly the program that prehistory and paleoanthropology are laboring to construct tinder the label “the study of the origins of man,” an expression that includes both diachronic processes (human evolution) and activities or behaviors from particular moments, elements that are exceedingly difficult to compare given the separation of their geographic and temporal contexts. (shrink)

In his article “The Megarian and Aristotelian Concept of Possibility”, Nicolai Hartmann attempts to revive an interpretation of the conception of possibility of the Megarians that stood in opposition to the Aristotelian conception of possibility and thus in opposition to the Aristotelian conception of modality in general. In this introduction, I undertake to situate Hartmann’s article in its historical context. Did Hartmann come to adopt this thesis through his study of ancient Greek philosophy? Or did he already have a predilection (...) for the Megarian conception of possibility prior to this? If so, how did this predilection come about? Was there an influence from his friend Vasily Sesemann, who published an article discussing the Megarians the previous year? Or were both Hartmann and Sesemann influenced early on by their mutual Russian teacher Nikolai Lossky, or even by a general tendency pervading Russian thought—itself grounded in the fatalism typical of the Russian collective unconscious—as we find it expressed in the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, Lev Tolstoy, and other Russian thinkers? (shrink)

L’utilisation de méthodes informatiques dans la conception pré-clinique de molécules thérapeutiques s’est développée à partir de 1970 dans le cadre d’une stratégie dite de « rational drug design ». Une analyse de cette approche est d’abord développée. Deux contextualisations de ces pratiques sont ensuite proposées. Certains résultats de l’historiographie des médicaments permettent, premièrement, de préciser la doctrine particulière du médicament à laquelle cette stratégie se rattache. Deuxièmement, puisque la rationalité déclarée de cette dernière s’appuie sur des outils scientifiques développés en (...) (bio)chimie, une analyse de leur statut épistémologique est conduite en étudiant leur émergence. Ceci permet de comprendre les spécificités que la rationalité véhiculée par ces outils computationnels comporte (représentation de la matière particulière dont la validité est uniquement pragmatique, emploi d’un grand nombre de données empiriques, réalisation d’estimations et approximations, diffusion de ces dernières sous forme de programmes informatiques). Nous soulignons l’importance de l’ordinateur dans la standardisation de ces méthodes. (shrink)

Roger Garaudy, the Hellenic tradition, and imaginative space.--Kazantzakis' making of God.--Existentialism and language.--The argument of water.--Literature as ikonic language.--Literature and morality.

Résumé — Le but de cet article est de montrer que le cœur de la pensée de Simone Weil réside moins dans une philosophie de la nécessité comme telle que dans une philosophie de la rencontre de la nécessité et de l’âme humaine, et de ses effets, du malheur à l’amour, en passant par la vérité. Présente d’emblée, cette pensée connaît cependant deux étapes, comme si l’accent passait de la nécessité à ses effets, étapes que l’on étudie à travers deux (...) textes précis commentés comme les classiques qu’ils devraient être dans la philosophie du XXe siècle en France. C’est aussi par là que Simone Weil rejoint les principaux de ses contemporains, parmi lesquels Camus et Cavaillès, et ainsi le cœur du moment de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, en philosophie comme ailleurs.— This paper intends to show how the core of Simone Weil’s thought is to be found less in a philosophy of necessity as such, than in a philosophy of the encounter between necessity and human soul, and the effects of that encounter, from woe to love, and including truth. However constant, this thought evolves through a difference of accent, as if the stress went from necessity to its effect ; this difference is here studied through the reading of two major writings, which deserve to be considered as XXth Century philosophical classics. It is also through this central thought that Simone Weil meets with such major contemporary philosophical figures as Camus and Cavaillès, and thus with what should be called the moment of the Second World War, in philosophy as elsewhere. (shrink)