This paper seeks to understand the treatment effect of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs on opioid prescription rates. Using county-level panel data on all opioid prescriptions in the U.S. between 2006 and 2015, we investigate whether state interventions like PDMPs have heterogeneous treatment effects at the sub-state level, based on regional and temporal variations in policy design, extent of urbanization, race, and income. Our models comprehensively control for a set of county and time fixed effects, countyspecific and time-varying demographic controls, potentially (...) endogenous time-series trends in prescription rates, and other state-level opioid interventions such as Naloxone Access and Good Samaritan laws, Medicaid expansion, and the provision of Methadone Assistance Treatment. We find that PDMPs are only effective in reducing prescription rates if they obligate doctors to check for patients' history prior to filling out a prescription, but the frequency at which a state requires its PDMP to be updated is irrelevant to its effectiveness. Moreover, the significant treatment effects of PDMPs are almost exclusively driven by urban and predominantly white counties, with the relatively more affluent regions showing greater responsiveness than their less affluent counterparts. (shrink)

This article examines India’s response to the global soil health crisis. A longstanding centre of agricultural production and innovation, India has recently launched an ambitious soil health programme. The country’s Soil Health Card (SHC) Scheme intervenes in farm-scale decisions about efficient fertiliser use, envisioning farmers as managers and soil as a substrate for production. India is also home to one of the world’s largest alternative agriculture movements: natural farming. This puts farmer expertise at the centre of soil fertility and attends (...) to the wider ecological health of soils. Despite emerging as a mode of resistance to dominant agricultural systems, natural farming is now being delivered in increasingly bureaucratic ways by India’s state governments. This article offers Himachal Pradesh as a case study in how the soil is governed, drawing on 38 semi-structured interviews with scientists, agricultural officers, non-governmental organisation leaders, and activists. Rather than assess approaches to soil health according to their ecological bottom line, we examine the differing forms of knowledge, expertise and ‘truth’ in the SHC and Natural Farming approaches. Our analysis reveals discontinuities in how farmers are imagined, as well as continuities in how quasi-spiritual language combines in a bionationalist project, positing assumptions about the correct arrangement of life in nationalist terms. We point to a shift toward hybrid and pick-and-mix approaches to soil health, as farmers and their organisers are increasingly invested with the capacities to combine multiple options. We see a fracturing of expertise and the opening up of epistemic pluralism in responses to the soil fertility crisis. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation interventions are novel devices being investigated for the management of severe treatment-resistant psychiatric illnesses. These interventions require the invasive implantation of high-frequency neurostimulatory probes intracranially aiming to provide symptom relief in treatment-resistant disorders including obsessive-compulsive disorder and anorexia nervosa. In the scientific literature, these neurostimulatory interventions are commonly described as reversible and to be used as a last resort option for psychiatric patients. However, the ‘last resort’ status of these interventions is rarely expanded upon. Contrastingly, usages of (...) DBS devices for neurological symptoms have paved the way for established safety and efficacy standards when used earlier in a disease’s timeline. As DBS treatments for these neurological diseases progress to have earlier indications, there is a parallel ethical concern that early implementation may one day become prescribed for psychiatric illnesses. The purpose of this article is to build off contemporary understandings of reversible neurostimulatory interventions to examine and provide clarifications on the ‘last resort’ status of DBS to better address its ethically charged use in psychiatric neurosurgery. To do this, evaluative differences between DBS treatments will be discussed to demonstrate how patient autonomy would be a paramount guiding principle when one day implementing these devices at various points along a psychiatric disease’s timeline. In presenting the clarification of ‘last resort’ status, the ethical tensions of early DBS interventions will be better understood to assist in providing psychiatric patients with more quality of life years in line with their values. (shrink)

This book studies the work of John Stuart Mill in order to answer the question: what is political theory? Looking at what political theorists have written about this subject leads to the conclusion that they have different ways of defining political theory, resulting in different readings of political theory. In defense of this argument, Reading Mill includes three different readings of the works of John Stuart Mill and identifies a fourth type of political theorist unlikely to read Mill. When it (...) comes to the question with which the book began, the only answer is that political theory is not one but four possible practices. This means that there are four different ways of reading a political theorist and reading political theory. The book calls for political theorists to recognize the value of their different ways of understanding political theory and, as a result, to tolerate their differences where they cannot celebrate them. (shrink)

Sober and Wilson's enthusiasm for a multi-level perspective in evolutionary biology leads to conceptualizations which appropriate all sources of bio-altruistic traits as products of ‘group’ selection. The key biological issue is whether genes enhancing one sub-population's viability in competition with others can thrive, despite inducing some members to lose fitness in intra-group terms. The case for such selection amongst primates remains unproven. Flexible social loyalties required prior evolution of subjective self-definition and self-identification with others. But normative readiness for truly group-serving (...) sacrifices of ego-interests presupposes entitative conceptions of in-groups as collective social units -- only made possible with the emergence of human symbolic language. (shrink)

I offer a way to reflect on and taxonomise the vices of the mind. This is the idea of capital vices, an idea that has, historically, been mainly confined to moral and spiritual character traits, but is able to play a role in vice epistemology—or so I propose.

Bringing together important writings not easily available elsewhere, this volume provides a convenient and stimulating overview of recent work in the philosophy of science. The contributors include Paul Feyerabend, Ian Hacking, T.S. Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Laurens Laudan, Karl Popper, Hilary Putnam, and Dudley Shapere. In addition, Hacking provides an introductory essay and a selective bibliography.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

In the canonical view of the corporation, management is the agent of the owners of the corporation-the stockholders-and, as such, has a fiduciary duty to manage the corporation in their best interests. Most business ethicists condemn this arrangement as morally indefensible because it fails to respect the right of other corporate constituencies or “stakeholders” to self-deterrnination. By contrast, the modern agency theory of the firm provides a defense of this arrangement on the grounds that it is the result of stakeholders’ (...) right to self-determination. This paper uses the exarnple of managers’ fiduciary duty to stockholders to argue that different normative judgrnents often mask empirical disagreements. (shrink)

This book examines a series of common metaphors in the works of Derrida and the Sufism of Muhyddin Ibn 'Arabi, considered to be of the most influential figures in Islamic thought. The author addresses the significant absence of attention on the relationship between Islam and Derrida and also provides a deconstructive perspective on Ibn 'Arabi.

Alan Hazen has claimed that Buridan’s theory of truth does not escape semantic paradox.In this paper, I claim that Buridan's theory is untouched by Hazen's case.My solution to Hazen's paradox requires the recognition of the exceptionability of what I shall call T-Elimination, namely, the principle that from a statement that such and such is true, we may deduce such and such. The exceptions are explained by reference to the role of what I shall call the meta-content of a locution, that (...) is, that information conveyed by any locution that tells us what sort of a locution it is intended to be. The exceptionability of T-Elimination turns out to be shared by other well-accepted principles of deduction also—and for the same reasons. (shrink)

The idea that claims about the physical world might be arrived through a priori reasoning has a long history in physics. But it is clear that empiricist notions of the nature of science, and in particular the empirical nature of physics, have held sway in this century. Yet, in the idea of thought experiments in science, we might find the survival of earlier a priori reasoning to the truth of claims about the physical world. This paper challenges the notion that (...) science can be understood as a purely empirical endeavor and points out what reforms would be necessary for teaching the image of science to our young. (shrink)

A nationally representative survey of 2000 American adults shows broad support for prohibiting gun-possession on private land without the landowner's explicit permission. Many states have laws which permit concealed weapon carry unless explicitly prohibited by the landowner, but our survey suggests statistically-significant majorities would prefer “no carry” defaults with regard to homeowners, employers, and retailers. While respondents who are Republican, male, or gun owners are more likely to support “carry” defaults, we find that the majoritarian rejection of “carry” defaults does (...) not tend to vary by region or state. However, our survey does find majority support for a default right to possess guns in rented property and on an employer's parking lot. Respondents across all contexts also report substantial ignorance or misinformation about the law. Landowners who don't know or mistakenly believe that concealed carry is, by default, prohibited on their land may be less able to protect themselves by explicitly prohibiting such third-party possession. (shrink)

Rather than providing a list of "how-tos" and "must dos," this volume is premised on the understanding that by learning more about the current conditions under which teachers and other educators work and learn, it is possible to understand, ...

We show that the variety of weakly representable relation algebras is neither canonical nor closed under Monk completions.

This paper focusses on John Toland's influentialHypatia(1720), an account of the neo-Platonist philosopher and mathematician murdered in ancient Alexandria; it also considers segments of hisLetters to Serena(1704), and suggests various conjunctions between the two texts which confirm Toland's genuine and sustained feminist commitment. As I try to establish, Toland's concern is as much about contemporaneous events as it is about ‘disinterested’ history: by promoting Hypatia as the representative of philosophy in its perennial struggle with superstition and priestcraft, Toland is able (...) to underscore the wider case for an inclusive and capacious conception of ‘enlightenment’. (shrink)