This article reviews four areas of pediatric research in which we have identified questionable levels of allowable risk, exceeding those foreseen by the Commission. They are the following: the categorization of increasingly risky interventions as minimal risk in a variety of protocols; the increasing number of applications for federal panel review of research not otherwise approvable because of higher projected risk levels; research on asymptomatic at risk children; and the inclusion of children and adolescents in placebo-controlled trials for participants of (...) all ages without performing subgroup analysis. While embracing the imperative to include children in research is an encouraging step towards providing the pediatric population with effective medical care and finally eradicating the therapeutic orphan, we must ensure that this research does not become overly permissive. (shrink)

In this article, Ms. Krieger explores the controversy concerning pregnancy disability leave presented by the case of California Federal Savings v. Guerra in light of Thomas Kuhn's model of scientific paradigm change and Carol Gilligan's theory regarding sex differences in moral reasoning. She argues that the controversy reflects a period of paradigm crisis in equality jurisprudence, brought about in part by the recent inclusion of greater numbers of women into the jurisprudential community.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Michelet and Social Romanticism: Religion, Revolution, NatureArthur MitzmanIn 1851, shortly before his second and definitive suspension from his teaching at the Collège de France, Jules Michelet told a young friend of his dissatisfaction with the meager political impact of the Republican professors of the time: “Our present propaganda... has resembled strongly that which might be made by a man enclosed in a crystal glass. He finds his voice (...) to be resounding and very strong: that’s because it breaks against the inner surface. But those who are outside, the men of the people, hear nothing.” 1Michelet had become painfully aware of how little his voice had been heard outside the crystal in June 1848, when barricade-builders outside his house on the Rue des Postes responded to his son-in-law’s appeal not to expose the dwelling of the great historian to artillery fire by asking, “Who is Michelet?” 2 This occurred two years after the publication of Le Peuple and only months after the appearance of his celebration of the commoners’ festivals of federation in 1790, both texts being landmarks in the social romantic anticipation of 1848. In fact it was the 1848 Revolution itself that had diminished the resonance of Michelet’s ideas, by polarizing the country in a way that made it impervious to his message of social harmony.Before 1848, Michelet was a central figure in the intellectual disaffection that delegitimized the July Monarchy. His work in the 1840s had shifted from the historical erudition of his many-volumed Histoire de France to contemporary polemics against the clergy and the government: attacks on the Jesuits and the Church 3 swiftly broadened to a conflict with the intellectual and political establishment of the period. In Le Peuple (1846), Michelet combined an analysis of the profound social divisions within the French nation with a remarkable sketch of the relation between civilization and nature, a Rousseauian appeal to the natural qualities of the common people and an [End Page 659] invocation of the genius of the future, who would be gifted with “the two sexes of the spirit.”Le Peuple was the first of a series of works on nature, women, and the common people, those three “others” of nineteenth-century high culture, that have throughout this century fascinated cultural historians. In the historiographical tradition, its author has been celebrated by those who viewed him as their predecessor in the broadening of history-writing to include culture and mentalities, such as Lucien Febvre and Jacques Le Goff, and denigrated by those, like Pieter Geyl, who have been outraged by his nationalistic pathos and his blatant subjectivity. 4 I shall suggest in this essay that all of these aspects of Michelet’s work are rooted in his significance in the 1840s as a social romantic, the contemporary and friend of George Sand, Lamennais, Pierre Leroux, and others.For apart from what Michelet has come to mean, as totem or as scarecrow, to the scholarship of the twentieth century, he was enmeshed in the ideological conflicts of his own time. Without an understanding of those conflicts, an important perspective on his place in the history of ideas will be missing, a perspective which, moreover, may shed some light on the broader historical significance of the social romanticism he represented. For example, the “ideological” Michelet was best known in his own time as an anti-clerical. 5 Indeed, his version of the Romantic évangile éternel, which he developed in the 1840s, takes a privileged place among the efforts of intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century to work out new religious conceptions to replace a moribund Catholicism. 6 Yet the principal framework of his polemical activity was not the Church but the liberal academic establishment, with which he was at war from his 1843 lectures on the Jesuits to his dismissal from his official functions at the beginning of the Second Empire.Michelet and the July Monarchy: From Liberalism to Social RomanticismSeen from the standpoint of the early years of his career, roughly 1825 to 1835, Michelet would seem an improbable candidate for any kind of romanticism. Given his impoverished, artisan background as well... (shrink)

Katrina Karkazis, Fixing sex: Intersex, medical authority, and lived experience, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008, reviewed by Ellen K. Feder Elizabeth Reis, Bodies in doubt: An American history of intersex, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, reviewed by Ellen K. Feder.

This book offers original readings of classic and contemporary black texts, highlighting the pain of racism and love-based strategies of antiracist resistance. Kathy Glass gives sustained attention to the impact of racist affect on the black body and how black women writers deploy emotional states to move readers to progressive political action.

This paper provides a new approach to inference to the best explanation based on a new coherence measure for comparing how well hypotheses explain the evidence. It addresses a number of criticisms of the use of probabilistic measures in this context by Clark Glymour, including limitations of earlier work on IBE. Computer experiments are used to show that the new approach finds the truth with a high degree of accuracy in hypothesis selection tasks and that in some cases its accuracy (...) is greater than hypothesis selection based on maximizing posterior probability. Hence, by overcoming some of the problems with the previous approach, this work provides a more adequate defence of IBE and suggests that IBE not only tracks truth but also has practical advantages over the previous approach. Applications of the new approach to parameter estimation and model selection are also explored. (shrink)

I propose a qualitative Bayesian account of explanatory goodness that is analogous to the Bayesian account of incremental confirmation. This is achieved by means of a complexity criterion according to which an explanation h is good if the reduction in the complexity of the explanandum e brought about by h (the explanatory gain) is greater than the additional complexity introduced by h in the context of e (the explanatory cost). To illustrate the account, I apply it in the context of (...) ad hoc hypotheses. (shrink)

How good is an explanation and when is one explanation better than another? In this paper, I address these questions by exploring probabilistic measures of explanatory power in order to defend a particular Bayesian account of explanatory goodness. Critical to this discussion is a distinction between weak and strong measures of explanatory power due to Good (Br J Philos Sci 19:123–143, 1968). In particular, I argue that if one is interested in the overall goodness of an explanation, an appropriate balance (...) needs to be struck between the weak explanatory power and the complexity of a hypothesis. In light of this, I provide a new defence of a strong measure proposed by Good by providing new derivations of it, comparing it with other measures and exploring its connection with information, confirmation and explanatory virtues. Furthermore, Good really presented a family of strong measures, whereas I draw on a complexity criterion that favours a specific measure and hence provides a more precise way to quantify explanatory goodness. (shrink)

The voluntary and informed consent of subjects has been the central focus of concern in research reviews, overshadowing the importance of all other considerations. The Nuremberg Code, with its rights-based protection of the subject's autonomy above all else, made it difficult to justify research with no intended benefit when subjects are incompetent to make a valid informed choice to participate. Subsequent codes providing for research with incompetent subjects followed the lead of Nuremberg, substituting the informed authorization of a proxy for (...) the informed consent of the subject. (shrink)

This article examines the relation between paranoia and political philosophy. It suggests that internal psychological conflict affects political reality through the force of belief systems and explains that belief derives from the complex interplay between the structuralization of the inner self, its affective and developmental foundations, and what the external world produces as data and sensation. It also contends that both realms of experience, the psychological internal and the political external, infuse each other and each depends on the other.

Meaning seems to shift from context to context; how do we know when someone says "grab a chair" that an ottoman or orange crate will do, but when someone says "let's buy a chair," they won't? In Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers, Kronenfeld offers a theory that explains both the usefulness of language's variability of reference and the mechanisms which enable us to understand each other in spite of the variability. Kronenfeld's theory, rooted in the tradition of ethnoscience (or cognitive (...) anthropology), accomplishes three things. First, it distinguishes prototypic referents from extended referents. Second, it describes the various bases of semantic extensions. Finally it details how we use the situational context of usage, the linguistic context of opposition and inclusion, and the conceptual context of knowledge about the world to interpret communicative events. (shrink)

J C Glass, W Johnson; Lakatosian Methodology and the Practical Implementation of a Liberal Notion of Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 25, I.

The ArgumentThe last two plates of Aby Warburg's unpublished picture-atlasMnemosyne, which is thought today to be among Warburg's most innovative contributions to the study of art history, are here analyzed in detail. These plates were assembled in the summer before his death in 1929; they reflect experiences of the time he spent in Rome during 1928 and 1929 and are here understood as Warburg's attempt to visualize his theory of the symbol.TheBilderatlaswas to have a two-fold function: Warburg planned it to (...) be a summary of his life's work; he also wanted its plates to reflect his theory of pictures and images. I argue here that particularly plate 79 is indeed an attempt tovisualizethe theoretical foundation of Warburg's view of the representational function of pictures. It refers to the origin of the power of images in sacrificial rituals and to the limits of this power. Warburg singles out the Eucharist and the doctrine of transsubstantiation to illustrate the role of the symbol in rituals.With this emphasis on ritual as a necessary complement for the functioning of the symbol, Warburg reaffirms his theory of the image to include the social act. This inclusion can be shown to be motivated by contemporary political concerns. (shrink)

The topic of synthetic life has long been a subject for science fiction writers, philosophers, and even scientists. With the announcement in 2010 by renowned biologist J. Craig Venter that he and a team of scientists from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) had created a bacterial cell with chemically synthesized genome, discussions of synthetic life were no longer just conjecture.Humans had assembled nonliving components to make a living cell (Gibson et al. 2010). I was one of the leaders of (...) that endeavor, and this article will be a first-person account of how we made our cell, along with my conjectures about what will come next in the new fields of synthetic biology and synthetic genomics.Scanning electron .. (shrink)

The first-ever compilation of articles that highlights the intersection of Derridean and feminist theories--a work that represents the extensive and diverse response feminist theorists have had to Derrida, particularly to the issues of gender, identity, and the construction of the subject.

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

This paper considers an application of work on probabilistic measures of coherence to inference to the best explanation. Rather than considering information reported from different sources, as is usually the case when discussing coherence measures, the approach adopted here is to use a coherence measure to rank competing explanations in terms of their coherence with a piece of evidence. By adopting such an approach IBE can be made more precise and so a major objection to this mode of reasoning can (...) be addressed. Advantages of the coherence - based approach are pointed out by comparing it with several other ways to characterize ‘ best explanation ’ and showing that it takes into account their insights while overcoming some of their problems. The consequences of adopting this approach for IBE are discussed in the context of recent discussions about the relationship between IBE and Bayesianism. (shrink)

Some authors argue that the ethics of medical care and the ethics of research differ, and that it is a mistake to conflate the two. They propose “that medical research and medical treatment are two distinct forms of activities, governed by different ethical principles.” This raises the question of whether physicians who are also clinical investigators may separate their role as physician from that of researcher when they are involved in clinical trials, thereby avoiding the obligations required in the physician-patient (...) relationship. Miller and Brody suggest that medical training is to blame for what they believe is the physicians’ tendency to confound the obligations of research and practice. “Physician-investigators, after all, went to medical school” they explain. They believe that considering research with patients outside the ethical framework of the physician-patient relationship may be “difficult and threatening” to physicians who have “psychological needs” to consider the ethical obligations flowing from their relationship with their patients. (shrink)

This paper discusses archaeological, historical, and contemporary ethnographic evidence for the use of the San Pedro cactus in northern Peru as a vehicle for traveling between worlds and for imparting the “vista” (magical sight) necessary for shamanic healers to divine the cause of their patients' ailments. Using iconographic, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic evidence for the uninterrupted use of this sacred plant as a means of access to the Divine and as a tool for healing, it describes the relationship between San Pedro, (...) ancestor worship, water/fertility cults and also the common symbolic associations between San Pedro and wind-spirits. It closes by suggesting that the more than 2000 year time-depth of using this plant as a means for accessing the realms of Spirit and as a tool for healing should serve to challenge the unfortunate tendency in the contemporary United States to consider this plant as a “recreational drug.”. (shrink)

This volume reaches beyond the controversy surrounding the teaching and learning of evolution in the United States, specifically in regard to the culture, politics, and beliefs found in the Southeast. The editors argue that despite a deep history of conflict in the region surrounding evolution, there is a wealth of evolution research taking place—from biodiversity in species to cultural evolution and human development. In fact, scientists, educators, and researchers from around the United States have found their niche in the South, (...) where biodiversity is high, culture runs deep, and the pace is just a little bit slower. (shrink)

For Levinas, the moment of real meaning is in the relation sustained with alterity. This relation is difficult or impossible to characterize philosophically, however, because to render it in comprehensive or objective terms would reduce the relation to one of comprehension and make it commensurate with the ego. Thus philosophy has an ambivalent status with respect to transcendence and ethics; but Levinas is convinced of the essentially transcendent or ethical meaning of Judaic practice: Talmudic exegesis, but also Jewish ritual and (...) the keeping of the sabbath; and these elements are included within a conception of Jewish educational practices. Thus to what extent transcendent meaning can be discussed in philosophical terms and evinced in philosophical work —or rather, to what extent transcendent meaning is possible at all—may be clarified by a sketch of Levinas’ broad approach to Jewish practice, particularly in terms of education. This essay shows how Jewish education is essential for transcendence and ethics for Levinas. Reference is made to several untranslated texts that Levinas published for intellectual but nonacademic French-Jewish journals, in which he explains his own pedagogical vocation. This offers an invaluable perspective on his philosophical and Judaic writings; and above all it gives an indication of his vision of the quotidian and life-long educational practices through which ethics and the transcendent relation between human beings are possible. Finally it raises the question of whether a secular or philosophical education could offer this as well. (shrink)

Even as feminist analyses have contributed in important ways to discussions of how gender is raced and race is gendered, there has been little in the way of comparative analysis of the specific mechanisms that are at work in the production of each. Feder argues that in Michel Foucault's analytics of power we find tools to understand the reproduction of whiteness as a complex interaction of distinctive expressions of power associated with these categories of difference.

Published to commemorate the centennial of the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species," this volume brings together several important essays on the history of the idea of evolution. Included are discussions of Maupertuis, Buffon, Diderot, Kant, Herder, Lamarck, and Schopenhauer by such leading scholars as Arthur O. Lovejoy, Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, C. C. Gillispie, Francis C. Haber, and Jane Oppenheimer.

How should we understand the categorical distinction Aristotle draws between praxis and poesis? If this distinction gains its meaning only in a specific social and cultural context, what does this tell us about another famous Aristotelian distinction, namely, the distinction he draws between two types of justice: corrective and distributive? In particular, what is the orienting role of this distinction (and what should we make of this) in accounts of justice based on Kantian right and accounts based on Rawls’ principles (...) of justice? (shrink)