Different types of consent are used to obtain human biospecimens for future research. This variation has resulted in confusion regarding what research is permitted, inadvertent constraints on future research, and research proceeding without consent. The National Institutes of Health Clinical Center's Department of Bioethics held a workshop to consider the ethical acceptability of addressing these concerns by using broad consent for future research on stored biospecimens. Multiple bioethics scholars, who have written on these issues, discussed the reasons for consent, the (...) range of consent strategies, and gaps in our understanding, and concluded with a proposal for broad initial consent coupled with oversight and, when feasible, ongoing provision of information to donors. This article describes areas of agreement and areas that need more research and dialogue. Given recent proposed changes to the Common Rule, and new guidance regarding storing and sharing data and samples, this is an important and tim.. (shrink)

Hank Greely’s target article, “Human Brain Surrogates Research: The Onrushing Ethical Dilemma” reviews the manifold scientific and ethical questions surrounding models of human brains used i...

In October 2022, I had the privilege of joining Hank Greely on the opening panel of the annual International Neuroethics Society (INS) meeting in Montréal, Tiohtiá:ke, situated on the traditional t...

Direct-to-Consumer genomics has been a controversial topic for over a decade. Much work has been done on the legal issues it raises. This article asks a different question: What will DTC genomics and its legal issues look like in ten to twenty years? After discussing the five current uses of DTC genomics, it describes three current legal issues: medical uses, privacy of genomic information, and privacy in collection and analysis of human DNA. It then suggests that changes in human genomics (...) and how it is used will make the first of those DTC genomics legal issues less important in the future, but that the third will be increasingly significant. (shrink)

The authors examine the scientific possibility and the legal and ethical implications of using DNA forensic technology, through partial matches to DNA from crime scenes, to turn into suspects the relatives of people whose DNA profiles are in forensic databases.

Peter Hanks defends a new theory about the nature of propositional content, according to which the basic bearers of representational properties are particular mental or spoken actions. He explains the unity of propositions and provides new solutions to a long list of puzzles and problems in philosophy of language.

Human brain research is moving into a dilemma. The best way to understand how the human brain works is to study living human brains in living human beings, but ethical and legal standards make it d...

In the 1330s Roger Swyneshed formulated a solution to semantic paradoxes based on the distinction between correspondence with reality and self-falsification as truth-making factors. Since Swyneshed states that some valid inferences are not truth-preserving, his view implies the question of the general definition of validity which he does not address explicitly. Logical works attributed to Paul of Venice contain developments of Swyneshed's contextualist semantics substantially modified by the assumption that sentential meanings are objective propositional entities. The main goals of this (...) paper are to show the correlations between the ontological and logical developments of Swyneshed's semantics in the works of Paul of Venice and to outline a context-sensitive formal semantics that could serve as a model of this family of semantic theories. (shrink)

I have been involved with the current interest in de‐extinction since early 2012, nearly its beginning. I have given a lot of thought to the potential risks and benefits of de‐extinction. But only recently, after deep immersion in discussions around CRISPR‐Cas9, the hottest new tool in bioscience since polymerase chain reaction, have I thought about a more fundamental question: how, if at all, is de‐extinction special? Are “revived species” just another kind of genetically modified organism, raising essentially the same general (...) concerns? I answer, for the most part, yes. De‐extinction is not (very) special. New biotechnologies are giving humans even more power to change the biosphere but more directly, more quickly, and more utterly than ever before. De‐extinction is just one possible, and probably small, use of those technologies. Our attention, for the most part, should be on the bigger issues of regulating this power, rather than focusing specifically on their application to de‐extinction. (shrink)

Higher-order theories of consciousness come in many varieties, but all adopt the 'transitivity principle' as a central, explanatory premise. The transitivity principle states that a mental state of a subject is conscious if and only if the subject is aware of it. This higher-order awareness is realized in different ways in different forms of higher-order theory. I argue that empirical studies of metacognition have falsified the transitivity principle by showing that there can be awareness of a mental state without that (...) state's becoming conscious. I present two such studies in detail and argue that the measures they employ cannot be interpreted in a way that would make the results compatible with higher-order theory. Since all versions of the theory rely on the transitivity principle, this entails that all forms of higher-order theory are false. (shrink)

Geary suggests that implicit mathematical principles exist across human cultures and transcend sex differences. Is such knowledge present in animals as well, and is it sufficient to account for performance in all species, including our own? I attempt to trace the implications of Gearys target article for comparative psychology, questioning the exclusion of “subitizing” in describing human mathematical performance, and asking whether human researchers function as cultural agents with animals, elevating their implicit knowledge to secondary domains of numerical performance.

This chapter explores the questions “What policy tools do we have to deal with human biological enhancements?” as well as “What policy tools do we need?.” After discussing the policy tools available in the United States, it examines their adequacy in coping with human biological enhancements in two respects – how easy they would be to adopt and how easy they would be to enforce. In each category, three major issues raised by human biological enhancement are considered: safety, coercion, and (...) fairness. It looks first at the adoption of, then at the enforcement of, policy tools available in the United States to cope with three real problems raised by such enhancements. It concludes that some policy tools needed to deal with enhancement already exist but need to be better focused. New legislation is the most direct way for the federal government to implement policy, but it is rarely easy. (shrink)

The problem of logical omniscience breaks down to the problems of the closure of knowledge under implication and of the distribution of knowledge over implication. In late medieval scholasticism these two related issues were engaged in various genres, in particular in general analysis of validity, games of obligationes, solution to self-referential antinomies and semantics of terms. The present study analyses the corpus of fourteenth-century texts with some overreaches to the subsequent two centuries, attempting to cover representatives of both the “British” (...) and the “Continental” tradition. With some degree of simplification, this results in a range of four basic positions: 1. knowledge is closed under “analytic entailment” (Buridan), 2. knowledge distributes over implication (Heytesbury), 3. knowledge distributes over implication provided that its consequent’s truth is being taken into consideration (Peter of Mantua), 4. knowledge does not distribute overimplication (Wyclif). (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 55, Issue 4, pp 273 - 306 Jan Dullaert was a direct student of John Mair and a teacher of Gaspar Lax, Juan de Celaya, and Juan Luis Vives. His commentary on Aristotle’s _Peri Hermeneias_ addresses the foundations of propositional logic, including a detailed analysis of conditionals and the semantics of logical connectives. Dullaert’s propositional logic is limited to the immediate implications of the semantics of these connectives, i.e., their introduction and elimination rules. In the same context, (...) he discusses several alternative treatments of semantic paradoxes, paying most attention to the approaches derived from Martin Le Maistre and John Mair. (shrink)

The conference where this article was originally presented solicited recommendations for the “right questions” to ask regarding education and technology. The author of this article suggests that we already know what the right questions are for illuminating technology and its social meaning. What the author wants to know is why those questions in fact are not being asked more widely—why is widespread disinclination to enter explicit deliberation on the proper place of technology so resilient? Langdon Winner uses the term “technological (...) somnambulism” to describe the predominant stance toward technology in our culture, that “we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence” via the adoption of new technologies. The basic institutional and ideological forces shaping the development and use of technology are not mysterious. But, scrutiny of those forces remains limited to a relative handful of academics and activists. How can technological somnambulism be countered? (shrink)

Martin Le Maistre , also known as Martinus Magistri, was one of the nominalists at the university of Paris from the watershed between medieval and postmedieval scholasticism. This influential logician, moral philosopher and theologian wrote a repeatedly edited treatise on logical consequence Tractatus consequentiarum. The present paper focuses on this treatise where Le Maistre, influenced by late-medieval logicians, develops a theory of validity based upon postulating abstract compound entities as sentential meanings.

In this paper I defend an account of the nature of propositional content according to which the proposition expressed by a declarative sentence is a certain type of action a speaker performs in uttering that sentence. On this view, the semantic contents of proper names turn out to be types of reference acts. By carefully individuating these types, it is possible to provide new solutions to Frege’s puzzles about names in identity- and belief-sentences.

‚Freiheit‘ ist das Schlagwort der Aufklärung. In der Epoche der klassischen deutschen Philosophie versuchten Philosophen wie Kant und Hegel, den Begriff der Freiheit nicht nur im Bereich der praktischen, sondern auch der theoretischen Philosophie zum Einsatz zu bringen. Erkenntnis wird dabei als ein Prozess begrifflicher Selbstgesetzgebung verstanden. Heutzutage vertritt Robert Brandom eine solche Philosophie der ‚Freiheit des Begriffs‘ und sieht darin einen Verbündeten gegen Empirismus und reduktiven Naturalismus. Diese Sichtweise wurde damals jedoch von Jacobi und wird heute von Birgit Sandkaulen (...) in Frage gestellt. Sie kritisieren, dass eine solche Philosophie wirklicher ‚lebendiger Freiheit‘ nicht gerecht werden könne und sich daher am Ende selbst als Naturalismus erweise. Dieser Aufsatz bietet eine Lösung dieses Paradox an, indem er dafür argumentiert, dass begriffliche Freiheit erlebte Freiheit nicht ausschließt, sondern sie vielmehr voraussetzt, während erlebte Freiheit zum Zwecke ihrer eigenen Verteidigung gute Gründe dafür hat, auf begriffliche Freiheit zu setzen. (shrink)