Contemporary understanding of the mechanisms of disease increasingly points to examples of “genetic diseases” with an infectious component and of “infectious diseases” with a genetic component. Such blurred boundaries generate ethical, legal, and social issues and highlight historical contexts that must be examined when incorporating host genomic information into the prevention, outbreak control, and treatment of infectious diseases.

Introduces teens to the benefits of working with and caring for animals, and includes personal experiences of teens who have become involved with animals in a ...

Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

[Anne:] “I can't, I'm in the depths of despair. Can you eat when you are in the depths of despair?”“I've never been in the depths of despair, so I can't say,” said Marilla.“Weren't you? Well did you ever try to imagine you were in the depths of despair?”” No, I didn't.”“Then I don't think you can understand what it's like. It's a very uncomfortable feeling indeed. When you try to eat a lump comes right up in your throat and you (...) can't swallow anything, not even if it was a chocolate caramel.”—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables.Emotion, as a “suprarational” property, transcends rationality in that it can be thought of as a group, contextual rather than as a solely individual trait, and thus is a higher order property, as the above quote suggests. This proposal arises from a metatheoretical analysis of models available to broach questions of emotion. I use metatheoretical in the sense of both the context of theory production and the theory of theory. From the first arose the idea that emotion, through the use of irrationality, has surfaced as a working equivalent to inexplicability or rational relativity, and can be modelled more adequately as suprarational, with a unique nature in its own right. The latter led me to propose that the concept of emotion as contextual, a higher order group level property, is possible and tentatively profitable. (shrink)

In early modern medicine, both green sickness and hysteria were understood to be gendered diseases, diseases of women. Green sickness, a disease of young women, was considered so serious that John Graunt, the father of English statistics, thought that in his time dozens of women died of it in London every year. One of the symptoms of hysteria was that women fell unconscious. The force of etymology and medical tradition was so strong that in one instance the gender (...) of the patient seems to have been changed by the recorder to make the case fit medical theory. (shrink)

A common reductionist assumption is that macro-scale behaviors can be described "bottom-up" if only sufficient details about lower-scale processes are available. The view that an "ideal" or "fundamental" physics would be sufficient to explain all macro-scale phenomena has been met with criticism from philosophers of biology. Specifically, scholars have pointed to the impossibility of deducing biological explanations from physical ones, and to the irreducible nature of distinctively biological processes such as gene regulation and evolution. This paper takes a step back (...) in asking whether bottom-up modeling is feasible even when modeling simple physical systems across scales. By comparing examples of multi-scale modeling in physics and biology, we argue that the “tyranny of scales” problem presents a challenge to reductive explanations in both physics and biology. The problem refers to the scale-dependency of physical and biological behaviors that forces researchers to combine different models relying on different scale-specific mathematical strategies and boundary conditions. Analyzing the ways in which different models are combined in multi-scale modeling also has implications for the relation between physics and biology. Contrary to the assumption that physical science approaches provide reductive explanations in biology, we exemplify how inputs from physics often reveal the importance of macro-scale models and explanations. We illustrate this through an examination of the role of biomechanics modeling in developmental biology. In such contexts, the relation between models at different scales and from different disciplines is neither reductive nor completely autonomous, but interdependent. (shrink)

At head of title: The Johns Hopkins University. Institute for the Study of Law.

Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge takes the reader on tour of the nature, value, and limits of self-knowledge. Mitchell S. Green calls on classical sources like Plato and Descartes, 20th-century thinkers like Freud, recent developments in neuroscience and experimental psychology, and even Buddhist philosophy to explore topics at the heart of who we are. The result is an unvarnished look at both the achievements and drawbacks of the many attempts to better know one's own self. Key (...) topics in this volume include: Knowledge - what it means to know, the link between wisdom and knowledge, and the value of living an "examined life" Personal identity - questions of dualism, bodily continuity, and personhood The unconscious - including the kind posited by psychoanalysis as well as the form proposed by recent research on the so-called adaptive unconscious Free will - if we have it, and the recent arguments from neuroscience challenging it Self-misleading - the ways we willfully deceive ourselves, and how this relates to empathy, peer disagreement, implicit bias, and intellectual humility Experimental psychology - considerations on the automaticity of emotion and other cognitive processes, and how they shape us This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free 'Know Thyself' MOOC created through collaboration of the University of Connecticut's Project on Humility and Conviction in Public Life, and the University of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre, and hosted on the Coursera platform. The book is also suitable as a text for interdisciplinary courses in the philosophy of mind or self-knowledge, and is highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating topic. (shrink)

In Plato’s Symposium Eryximachus provides a metaphysical theory based on the attraction of basic elements which he applies to a variety of domains, including music. In the text of his speech there is a variation in the manuscripts at 187d2 between two readings, “μέλεσί τε καὶ μέτροις” and “μέλεσί τε καὶ ῥυθμοῖς”. Though the former is almost universally followed, I argue that the latter is the correct reading, based on three sources of evidence: (1) the manuscript tradition, (2) Plato’s style (...) and diction, and (3) the logic of the passage. In all three cases ῥυθμοῖς is the preferable reading. (shrink)

Poor Eliza -- Pax Americana : the case of Show boat -- National brands, national body : Imitation of life -- Uncle Sam needs a wife : citizenship and denegation -- Remembering love, forgetting everything else : Now, voyager -- "It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes" : femininity, formalism, and Dorothy Parker -- The compulsion to repeat femininity : Landscape for a good woman and The life and loves of a she-devil.

In this paper I explore the connection between Catharine Macaulay’s views on freedom of the will and her promotion of the cause of political liberty and show that the position she develops has its origins in Locke’s philosophy. I argue for the existence of a distinctive ‘Lockean’ conception of political liberty, which is grounded in an account of moral agency, and which does not fit very well into contemporary characterizations of negative, republican, or positive liberty. I demonstrate that this concept (...) of political liberty was widely disseminated during the eighteenth century and can be found in the writing of many of Macaulay’s female contemporaries, both in Great Britain and on the Continent. Recognizing this ‘Lockean’ conception of political liberty is important for understanding the connection between the idea of enlightenment and radical movements promoting political reform. Furthermore, acknowledging its widespread influence throws doubt on Jonathan Israel’s recent attempt to overthrow standard histories—according to which Locke’s rational religion is foundational for radical politics during the period—as well as Israel’s attempt to replace such standard histories with an account that locates the impetus for political reform in metaphysical monism and religious skepticism. (shrink)

Previous research has established that goal tracking emerges early in the first year of life and rapidly becomes increasingly sophisticated. However, it has not yet been shown whether young children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time. The current study investigates this by probing young children’s ability to differentiate between goal directed actions that have been halted because the goal was interrupted, and because the goal was abandoned. To test whether children are sensitive to this distinction, we (...) manipulated the experimenter’s reason for not completing a goal-directed action - his initial goal is either interrupted by an obstacle, or it is abandoned in favour of an alternative. We measure whether children’s helping behaviour is sensitive to the experimenter’s reason for not completing his goal-directed action by recording whether they complete the experimenter’s initial goal or the alternative goal. The results showed that children helped complete the experimenter’s initial goal significantly more often after this goal had been interrupted than after it had been abandoned. These results support the hypothesis that children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time by the age of two, and specifically that they differentiate between abandoned and interrupted goals. (shrink)

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Virginia and at Texas A&M University. I thank audiences at both institutions for their insightful comments. Special thanks to John Williams for his illuminating comments on an earlier draft. Research for this paper was supported in part by a Summer Grant from the Vice Provost for Research and Public Service at the University of Virginia. That support is here gratefully acknowledged.

In this article, we posit that a cross-scale perspective is valuable for studies of organizational resilience. Existing research in our field primarily focuses on the resilience of organizations, that is, the factors that enhance or detract from an organization’s viability in the face of threat. While this organization level focus makes important contributions to theory, organizational resilience is also intrinsically dependent upon the resilience of broader social-ecological systems in which the firm is embedded. Moreover, long-term organizational resilience cannot be well (...) managed without an understanding of the feedback effects across nested systems. For instance, a narrow focus on optimizing organizational resilience from one firm’s perspective may come at the expense of social-ecological functioning and ultimately undermine managers’ efforts at long-term organizational survival. We suggest that insights from natural science may help organizational scholars to examine cross-scale resilience and conceptualize organizational actions within and across temporal and spatial dynamics. We develop propositions taking a complex adaptive systems perspective to identify issues related to focal scale, slow variables and feedback, and diversity and redundancy. We illustrate our theoretical argument using an example of Unilever and palm oil production in Borneo. (shrink)

The “practice turn” in philosophy of science has strengthened the connections between philosophy and scientific practice. Apart from reinvigorating philosophy of science, this also increases the relevance of philosophical research for science, society, and science education. In this paper, we reflect on our extensive experience with teaching mandatory philosophy of science courses to science students from a range of programs at University of Copenhagen. We highlight some of the lessons we have learned in making philosophy of science “fit for teaching” (...) outside of philosophy circles by taking selected cases from the students’ own field as the starting point. We argue for adapting philosophy of science teaching to particular audiences of science students, and discuss the benefits of drawing on research within science education to inform curriculum and course design. This involves reconsidering teaching resources, assumptions about students, intended learning outcomes, and teaching formats. We also argue that to make philosophy of science relevant and engaging to science students, it is important to consider their potential career trajectories. By anticipating future contexts and situations in which methodological, conceptual, and ethical questions could be relevant, philosophy of science can demonstrate its value in the education of science students. (shrink)

This is the first book to take a comprehensive look at white collar criminal offenses from the perspective of moral and legal theory. Focussing on the way in which key white collar crimes such as fraud, perjury, false statements, obstruction of justice, bribery, extortion, blackmail, insider trading, tax evasion, and regulatory and intellectual property offenses are shaped and informed by a range of familiar, but nevertheless powerful, moral norms.

Patient-derived xenografts are currently promoted as new translational models in precision oncology. PDXs are immunodeficient mice with human tumors that are used as surrogate models to represent specific types of cancer. By accounting for the genetic heterogeneity of cancer tumors, PDXs are hoped to provide more clinically relevant results in preclinical research. Further, in the function of so-called “mouse avatars”, PDXs are hoped to allow for patient-specific drug testing in real-time. This paper examines the circulation of knowledge and bodily material (...) across the species boundary of human and personalized mouse model, historically as well as in contemporary practices. PDXs raise interesting questions about the relation between animal model and human patient, and about the capacity of hybrid or interspecies models to close existing translational gaps. We highlight that the translational potential of PDXs not only depends on representational matching of model and target, but also on temporal alignment between model development and practical uses. Aside from the importance of ensuring temporal stability of human tumors in a murine body, the mouse avatar concept rests on the possibility of aligning the temporal horizons of the clinic and the lab. We examine strategies to address temporal challenges, including cryopreservation and biobanking, as well as attempts to speed up translation through modification and use of faster developing organisms. We discuss how featured model virtues change with precision oncology, and contend that temporality is a model feature that deserves more philosophical attention. (shrink)

Perceptual constancy has played a significant role in philosophy of perception. It figures in debates about direct realism, color ontology, and the minimal conditions for perceptual representation. Despite this, there is no general consensus about what constancy is. I argue that an adequate account of constancy must distinguish it from three distinct phenomena: mere sensory stability through proximal change, perceptual categorization of a distal dimension, and stability through irrelevant proximal change. Standard characterizations of constancy fall short in one or more (...) of these respects. I develop an account of constancy that overcomes these problems. The account has two parts: an analysis of constancy mechanisms, and an analysis of the conditions under which a constancy capacity is exercised. I then employ this account to evaluate whether constancy is a necessary condition for perceptual representation, as some have conjectured. I argue that explanatory practice in perceptual psychology fails to support this view. Rather, it fits better with the weaker principle that representation requires specific tracking of a distal dimension. (shrink)

Due to the variation, contingency and complexity of living systems, biology is often taken to be a science without fundamental theories, laws or general principles. I revisit this question in light of the quest for design principles in systems biology and show that different views can be reconciled if we distinguish between different types of generality. The philosophical literature has primarily focused on generality of specific models or explanations, or on the heuristic role of abstraction. This paper takes a different (...) approach in emphasizing a theory-constituting role of general principles. Design principles signify general dependency-relations between structures and functions, given a set of formally defined constraints. I contend that design principles increase our understanding of living systems by relating specific models to general types. The categorization of types is based on a delineation of the scope of biological possibilities, which serves to identify and define the generic features of classes of systems. To characterize the basis for general principles through generic abstraction and reasoning about possibility spaces, I coin the term constraint-based generality. I show that constraint-based generality is distinct from other types of generality in biology, and argue that general principles play a unifying role that does not entail theory reduction. (shrink)

T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics is a classic of modern philosophy. It begins with Green's idealist attack on empiricist metaphysics and epistemology and develops a perfectionist ethical theory that aims to bring together the best elements in the ancient and modern traditions, and that provides the moral foundations for Green's own distinctive brand of liberalism. David Brink's new edition will restore this great work to prominence, after two decades in which it has been hard to obtain. (...) The present edition uses the text of the fifth edition, accompanied by a new introductory essay, bibliographical essay, and index. Translations are provided for Green's quotations from other languages. Of particular importance is the editor's extended introductory essay, which situates the Prolegomena in its intellectual context, sympathetically but critically engages its main themes, and explains Green's enduring significance for the history of philosophy and contemporary ethical theory. Students and scholars of the history of ethics, ethical theory, political philosophy, and nineteenth century philosophy will find this new edition an invaluable resource. (shrink)

The disappearance of Catharine Macaulay’s eighteenth-century defense of the doctrines that justified the seventeeth-century republican parliament, has served to obscure an important strand of enlightenment faith, that was active in the lead up to the American and French Revolutions, and that also played a significant role in the history of feminism. This faith was made up of two intertwined strands, ‘Christian eudaimonism’ and ‘rational altruism’. Dominant contemporary accounts of the origins of republicanism and democratic theory during the eighteenth-century have excluded (...) serious consideration of Macaulay’s writing. Bringing her works into the mix, both poses difficulties for certain genealogies of the political thought of the period, and tends to favour a once popular view, which emphasized the centrality of Locke. Nevertheless, the Locke whose influence is found in Macaulay’s writing is not the possessive individualist, or rational egoist, that he and other liberals have been represented as being, but rather a rational altruist, whose political philosophy is grounded in natural law and harks back to Milton. This same philosophy provides the philosophical foundations for Wollstonecraft’s two most significant political texts, the Vindication of the Rights of Men and Vindcation of the Rights of Woman. (shrink)

According to many forms of Externalism now popular in the Philosophy of Mind, the contents of our thoughts depend in part upon our physical or social milieu.1 These forms of Externalism leave unchallenged the thesis that the ~non-factive! attitudes we bear towards these contents are independent of physical or social milieu. This paper challenges that thesis. It is argued here that publicly forwarding a content as a supposition for the sake of argument is, under conditions not themselves guaranteeing the existence (...) of that state, sufficient for occupancy of the intentional state of supposing that content. Because a saying may literally create an intentional state, whether one is in such a state does not depend solely upon how things are within one’s skin. Rather, even leaving content fixed, the attitude borne toward that content depends in part upon what norms are in force in one’s milieu. (shrink)

Proponents of the emerging field of P4 medicine argue that computational integration and analysis of patient-specific “big data” will revolutionize our health care systems, in particular primary care-based disease prevention. While many ambitions remain visionary, steps to personalize medicine are already taken via personalized genomics, mobile health technologies and pilot projects. An important aim of P4 medicine is to enable disease prevention among healthy persons through detection of risk factors. In this paper, we examine the current status of P4 medicine (...) in light of historical and current challenges to predictive and preventive medicine, including overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Moreover, we ask whether it is likely that in silico integration of patient-specific data will be able to better deal such challenges and to turn risk predictions into disease-preventive actions in a wider social context. Given the lack of evidence that P4 medicine can tip the balance between benefits and harms in preventive medicine, we raise concerns about the current promotion of P4 medicine as a solution to the current challenges in public health. (shrink)

Concerns with the use of engineering approaches in biology have recently been raised. I examine two related challenges to biological research that I call the synchronic and diachronic underdetermination problem. The former refers to challenges associated with the inference of design principles underlying system capacities when the synchronic relations between lower-level processes and higher-level systems capacities are degenerate. The diachronic underdetermination problem regards the problem of reverse engineering a system where the non-linear relations between system capacities and lower-level mechanisms are (...) changing over time. Braun and Marom argue that recent insights to biological complexity leave the aim of reverse engineering hopeless - in principle as well as in practice. While I support their call for systemic approaches to capture the dynamic nature of living systems, I take issue with the conflation of reverse engineering with naïve reductionism. I clarify how the notion of design principles can be more broadly conceived and argue that reverse engineering is compatible with a dynamic view of organisms. It may even help to facilitate an integrated account that bridges the gap between mechanistic and systems approaches. (shrink)

Research on corporate philanthropy typically focuses on organization-external pressures and aggregated donation behavior. Hence, our understanding of the organization-internal structures that determine whether a given organization will respond philanthropically to a specific human need remains underdeveloped. We explicate an attention-based framework in which specific dimensions of organization-level attention focus interact to predict philanthropic responses to an emergent human need. Exploring the response of Fortune Global 500 firms to the 2004 South Asian tsunami, we find that management attention focused on people (...) inside the organization interacts with both attention for places and attention for practices to predict the likelihood of charitable donations. Our research thus extends beyond the prevailing institutional perspective by highlighting the role of attention focus in corporate responsiveness to emergent societal issues. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

Imagine that our world were such that the entities, properties, laws, and relations of fundamental physics did not determine what goes on at the mental level; imagine that duplicating our fundamental physics would fail to duplicate the pleasures, feelings of joy, and experiences of wonder that we know and love; in other words, imagine that the mental realm did not supervene on the physical realm. Would our world, then, be a world in which physicalism is false? A good number of (...) philosophers who ponder such issues—perhaps all philosophers who have hitherto pondered such issues—answer “yes.” The purpose of this paper is to suggest that, despite what physicalists say, they don’t think so, either. What is it that they really think? What is the actual doctrine of physicalism? I conclude withan attempt to uncover that as well. (shrink)

We discuss the typography of the notation used by Gottlob Frege in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik.

Rather than being in inherent conflict with religion or operating on planes that do not intersect, the cognitive science of religion (CSR) can be used to renovate a religious understanding of the world. CSR allows one to reshape the perspectives of Aquinas and Calvin on the natural knowledge of God. The Christian tradition affirms that all human beings have available to them some knowledge of God. This claim has empirical import and thus invites scientific investigation and clarification. A CSR-inspired lens (...) allows one’s theological reflections to move from paradigms that focus on the cognitive reach of a domain-general power of human thought to a paradigm focused on different ways of relating to another person. The case study of the natural knowledge of God presented here models a productive way of relating CSR and religious perspectives from within a faith tradition. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish normative and descriptive reasons for attempting to construct a logic for belief sentences, and argue that because the interpretation of the content of an attribution of belief is context sensitive and ambiguous, no simple logic is adequate.

This book combines contributions from many authors who examine a wide range of subjects ranging from overall theoretical considerations to detailed regional ...

Individuals vary in perceptual accuracy when categorising facial expressions, yet it is unclear how these individual differences in non-clinical population are related to cognitive processing stages at facial information acquisition and interpretation. We tested 104 healthy adults in a facial expression categorisation task, and correlated their categorisation accuracy with face-viewing gaze allocation and personal traits assessed with Autism Quotient, anxiety inventory and Self-Monitoring Scale. The gaze allocation had limited but emotion-specific impact on categorising expressions. Specifically, longer gaze at the eyes (...) and nose regions were coupled with more accurate categorisation of disgust and sad expressions, respectively. Regarding trait measurements, higher autistic score was coupled with better recognition of sad but worse recognition of anger expressions, and contributed to categorisation bias towards sad expressions; whereas higher anxiety level was associated with greater categorisation accuracy across all expressions and with increased tendency of gazing at the nose region. It seems that both anxiety and autistic-like traits were associated with individual variation in expression categorisation, but this association is not necessarily mediated by variation in gaze allocation at expression-specific local facial regions. The results suggest that both facial information acquisition and interpretation capabilities contribute to individual differences in expression categorisation within non-clinical populations. (shrink)