This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In this article we describe our approach to understanding wrongdoing in medical research and practice, which involves the statistical analysis of coded data from a large set of published cases. We focus on understanding the environmental factors that predict the kind and the severity of wrongdoing in medicine. Through review of empirical and theoretical literature, consultation with experts, the application of criminological theory, and ongoing analysis of our first 60 cases, we hypothesize that 10 contextual features of the medical environment (...) (including financial rewards, oversight failures, and patients belonging to vulnerable groups) may contribute to professional wrongdoing. We define each variable, examine data supporting our hypothesis, and present a brief case synopsis from our study that illustrates the potential influence of the variable. Finally, we discuss limitations of the resulting framework and directions for future research. (shrink)

The importance of _naturalization_—the establishment of species introduced into foreign places—to the early development of Darwin’s theory of evolution deserves historical attention. Introduced and invasive European species presented Darwin with interpretive challenges during his service as naturalist on the HMS _Beagle_. Species naturalization and invasive species strained the geologist Charles Lyell’s creationist view of the organic world, a view which Darwin adopted during the voyage of the _Beagle_ but came to question afterward. I suggest that these phenomena primed Darwin to (...) question the “stability of species.” I then examine the role of introduced and invasive species in Darwin’s early theorizing and negotiation with Lyell’s ideas, recorded in his post-voyage “transmutation notebooks.” Therein, the subject was an inflection point in his contention with Lyell’s views and moreover, his theorizing on invasive species occasioned some of his earliest inklings of natural selection. Finally, I examine how naturalization was crucial to Lyell’s own eventual conversion to evolutionism. I conclude with brief reflections on the implications of this narrative for our understanding of Darwin’s reasoning, his intellectual relationship to Lyell, and the historical context that shaped his theory. (shrink)

Does traditional Christianity involve paradoxical doctrines, that is, doctrines that present the appearance (at least) of logical inconsistency? If so, what is the nature of these paradoxes and why do they arise? What is the relationship between "paradox" and "mystery" in theological theorizing? And what are the implications for the rationality, or otherwise, of orthodox Christian beliefs? In Paradox in Christian Theology, James Anderson argues that the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation, as derived from Scripture and (...) formulated in the ecumenical creeds, are indeed paradoxical. But this conclusion, he contends, need not imply that Christians who believe these doctrines are irrational in doing so. In support of this claim, Anderson develops and defends a model of understanding paradoxical Christian doctrines according to which the presence of such doctrines is unsurprising and adherence to paradoxical doctrines cannot be considered as a serious intellectual obstacle to belief in Christianity. The case presented in this book has significant implications for the practice of systematic theology, biblical exegesis, and Christian apologetics. (shrink)

Written from a post-modern perspective, this article makes use of the concepts of obligation, subject position, line of action, discursive form, sentient agent, exchange, mediating technology, intentionality, improvisational performance, and communicative routines to produce an overarching theory of communication and its processes. The work of the article is to develop the linkages among these concepts and founds this analysis in ethnographic research. It concludes that the process of communication occurs inside a nexus of obligation from relational subject positions within some (...) line of action regularly involving a discursive form. It is enacted by two or more sentient agents performing an exchange often utilizing a mediating technology under the intentionality of an improvisationalperformance of a pre-existing communicative routine. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham came to know Jacques-Pierre Brissot when he was in London between midwinter 1782–3 and summer 1784. They shared some opinions: Brissot indeed saw Bentham to some extent as his mentor. There was never complete accord, however; and Brissot's increasingly radical political views were not at that stage shared by Bentham. In any case, their ways parted with Bentham's prolonged sojourn with his brother in Russia between 1785 and 1788. It was revolution in France that brought renewed contact, though (...) no further personal encounters. By the winter of 1788–9 Bentham was writing, with France in mind, an increasingly elaborate work on parliamentary procedure; and by the spring Brissot was (much more expeditiously) writing and publishing his account of the subject. One element in that work dealt with an issue on which Bentham vigorously opposed Brissot; for it included a strongly argued case for a declaration of rights – something Bentham had already attacked in 1776. He renewed that attack in a letter to Brissot in the late summer of 1789. By the autumn, however, writing to Brissot again, he raised a subject on which the two could sympathise – the importance of asserting popular sovereignty in the new French constitution. That sovereignty, Bentham insisted, must extend to the administration of justice – royal authority must be rigourously excluded from control of the judiciary. The judicial establishment in France was to be Bentham's predominant concern between the winter of 1789–90 and the following summer, and he now had assistance, especially from Etienne Dumont, in translating and publicizing his work. Brissot was probably – though there is no direct evidence – aware of these efforts. In the autumn Bentham's principal concern was the promotion in France of his scheme for a model prison – the Panopticon. That cause was helped by the cordial reception in the National Assembly of his judicial reform proposals. By then he was again in touch with Brissot, whose support he now sought for the Panopticon project – at first with some success. No progress was made in 1793, however, as Brissot's revolutionary career reached first its apogee and then its disastrous end. Many years later, as Bentham's life drew to a close, Brissot's Mémoires served to remind him of their uneasy partnership in the years of revolution. (shrink)

This book combines approaches from science, literary theory, and philosophy to examine the canon of Stephen King’s fiction from a Darwinist hermeneutic perspective in one critical study.

This study evaluates the ontological and ethical premises and presuppositions of three abortion theorists: Germain Grisez, Eike-Henner W. Kluge, and Michael Tooley. ;Grisez's argument that human embryos and fetuses are moral persons because moral rights are derived from moral value, and the full moral value of human adults who are moral persons is implicit in the living genetic mechanism of all human beings, is criticized on the basis of the tension in Aristotle's doctrine between the notion of essence as an (...) internal causitive principle, and as a set of observable qualities considered to be definitive of the nature of a living thing. However, David Wiggins' use of the semantical theory of natural kind terms of Hilary Putnam is suggested as a possible resolution. ;Kluge's argument that rational beings are moral persons because rational awareness has an absolute and intrinsic value, and that mature fetuses are moral persons because their neurological systems have become sufficiently complex to provide the present capability for rational awareness is criticized because he fails to show that mature fetuses do have such a present capability, and because his discussion of the relationship of potential being to actual being of living things wrongly presupposes that human gestation is analogous to the making of an artifact. ;Tooley's contrary argument that the right to life is not derivable from moral value but must, itself, be something violable, and that there is a conceptual connection between its violation and one's desire to continue to live, excludes fetuses and neonates because they lack the mental capability to desire to continue to live. Tooley's analysis is criticized as incomplete, and his argument as presupposing the existence of an essentially mentalistic self. ;The final chapter is a synthesis which considers the ontology of the development of personality or self, including the theories of Descartes, Locke and Wiggins. The conclusion is reached that theories which claim that a moral person "comes to be" as a fundamentally different kind of being at some point after conception, due to either morphological changes or the development of personality or self, entail dual principles of identity and, hence, are in danger of unintelligibility. (shrink)

Summary The career of Jacques-Pierre Brissot (1754–1793) featured two phases, separated dramatically by the Revolution of 1789. Before the revolutionary crisis and the subsequent political struggle that was to cost him his life, Brissot was an avocet who never practised but sought instead a career as a writer—and indeed as a philosophe, seeing himself as an ally of Diderot. The improbability of such an alliance was not lessened by his early and continuing alliance with Linguet. Before embarking in1778 on what (...) would be a prolific career as a published author, Brissot had written the manuscript on which attention is focused here. This is an uncompleted ‘Plan Raisoné’ for a comprehensive sceptical critique of all systematic claims to certainty in knowledge. There is an evident though problematic relationship here with Brissot's 1782 De la vérité, but it is also clear that the influence of Rousseau and Brissot's increasingly radical political outlook must have entailed a widening divergence from the scepticism he had previously extolled—the ‘Pyrrhonism’ that would protect sensible readers against dogmatic absurdity. Death on the scaffold proclaimed certainty, not doubt. (shrink)

Institutional Review Board decisions hinge on the availability and interpretation of information. This is demonstrated by the following well-known historical example. In 2001, 24-year-old Ellen Roche died from respiratory distress and organ failure as a result of her participation in a study at Johns Hopkins Asthma and Allergy Center. The non-therapeutic physiological study, “Mechanisms of Deep Inspiration-Induced Airway Relaxation,” was designed to examine airway hyperresponsiveness in healthy individuals in order to better understand the pathophysiology of asthma. Participants inhaled hexamethonium, a (...) chemical ganglionic blocker that was not FDA-approved for use as specified in the experimental protocol. Risks of inhaling hexamethonium, including lung damage, had been reported in the 1950s and ‘60s. An investigation conducted after Roche's death determined that the study's principal investigator had failed to adequately search the medical literature; the protocol submitted for IRB review cited articles indexed in online literature databases that went back only as far as the 1970s. (shrink)

In 1958 William L. Langer, in a well-known presidential address to the American Historical Association, declared the informed use of psychoanalytic depth psychology as "the next assignment" for professional historians. _Psychoanalysis and History_, volume 31 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_, examines the degree to which Langer's directive has been realized in the intervening 45 years. Section I makes the case for psychobiography in the lives of historical figures and exemplifies this perspective with analytically informed studies of the art of Wassily (...) Kandinsky; the films of Stanley Kubrick; and the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler. Section II reviews Freud's own psychohistorical contributions and then considers the relevance to historical inquiry of the more recent perspectives of Winnicott, Kernberg, and Kohut. Section III explores an intriguing tributary of psychobiographical inquiry: the impact of the biographer's own subjectivity on his or her work. Section IV turns to a topic of perennial interest: the psychobiographical study of American presidents. Section V turns to the special challenges of applying psychoanalysis to topics of religious history and includes topical studies of religious figures as disparate as the 15th century Asian Drukpa Kunley and Osama bin Laden. Section VI focuses on the recent extension of psychohistorical inquiry to groups of people and to cultural phenomena more generally: an investigation of the youth movement in pre-Nazi Germany; consideration of how societies, no less than individuals, reenact and work through traumas over time; and an outline of the role of analysis in constructing a depth-psychological "social psychology" of use to historians. These papers, no less than those that precede them, are compelling testimony to the claim with which editors James William Anderson and Jerome A. Winer begin the volume, to wit, that "Psychoanalysis would seem to be a resource indispensable to the study of history.". (shrink)

This essay charts a conceptual history of “planetary health,” which holds that population health and the continuity of human civilization depend on the integrity—the health—of the Earth’s life-support systems. It seeks to identify settler colonial and imperial genealogies of this distinctly ecological approach to human population health and flourishing, an assemblage of systems theory and planetary thinking as well as developments in environmental sciences and theories of sustainable development. Planetary health may be seen as a “third wave” of disease ecology, (...) an emergent resource for more complex, naturalistic, and scaled-up modeling in epidemiology—the latest installment in the search for multifactorial, relational, and integrated explanations of patterns of disease. The approach required a new planetary imaginary—emerging from a series of Earth-encompassing crises, such as global heating—which enlarged and systematized ecological configurations of human health and illness. In tracing and critically situating this conceptual history, the authors offer a partial perspective on what may yet become planetary health, drawing attention to some other conceptual routes that may be taken. (shrink)

Pharmaceutical companies can dramatically improve their understanding of how certain drugs work by having access to data from prospective research participants and those enrolled in clinical trials. Yet can data legitimately be used in ways that these individuals have not specifically authorized? In some cases it is ethically acceptable to share data with pharmaceutical companies even if there was no specific consent to do so by appealing to the principles of beneficence and respect for persons. These principles require us to (...) look not just at how well the process and documentation of consent conform to regulatory requirements, but also at how well they minimize harm and maximize benefit for research participants and future beneficiaries of the research. (shrink)

Highly creative and interactive, this apologetics resource helps readers identify and evaluate 21 different worldviews through engaging yes-or-no questions and easy-to-understand descriptions. Appendices include answers to common questions and suggestions for further reading.

John Fleming , later professor in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, made his combative contribution to natural history between 1812 and 1832. As an Edinburgh student he had followed Robert Jameson's ‘Wernerian’ lead. His earliest publications, from 1813, expressed what was to be a lifelong hostility to the work of James Hutton. Yet his own thinking moved increasingly towards a ‘uniformitarian’ as opposed to a ‘catastrophist’ view of earth history. His Philosophy of Zoology embodied criticism of Cuvier. More dramatically, he became (...) embroiled in controversy with Buckland and later with Conybeare. By then the ‘uniformitarian’ hypothesis had been adopted by Lyell, with whom Fleming was in close touch from the mid-1820s. Fleming may have had some grounds for feeling that his priority in advocating uniformitarianism was later overlooked. His History of British Animals included a preface in which he elaborated his earlier hypothesis as to ‘revolutions … in the animal kingdom’ correlated with six geological epochs. Tension had then developed in Fleming's relationship with Jameson, and the early 1830s found him in a mood of increasing frustration. Reconciliation with Buckland and approval by Sedgwick still left ‘the Zoological Ishmael’ feeling that his advancement in the scientific world was blocked, perhaps permanently. In historical perspective Fleming may be seen as a minor but not insubstantial figure in the scientific landscape of the early nineteenth century. (shrink)

It is conjectured that a suitably modified Bondi-type expansion of the gravitational field in the radiation zone is a rapidly convergent series. It is also conjectured that the source behavior in the inner zone is insensitive to the initial conditions imposed on the gravitational field in solving the initial-value problem in this zone. Consequences of these conjectures for the problem of relating source motion to the Bondi news function are discussed.

The principle of clinical equipoise requires that, aside from certain exceptional cases, second generation treatments ought to be tested against standard therapy. In violation of this principle, placebo-controlled trials (PCTs) continue to be used extensively in the development and licensure of second-generation treatments. This practice is typically justified by appeal to methodological arguments that purport to demonstrate that active-controlled trials (ACTs) are methodologically flawed. Foremost among these arguments is the so called assay sensitivity argument. In this paper, I take a (...) closer look at this argument. Following Duhem, I argue that all trials, placebo-controlled or not, rely on external information for their meaningful interpretation. Pending non-circular empirical evidence that we can trust the findings of PCTs to a greater degree than the findings of ACTs, I conclude that the assay sensitivity argument fails to demonstrate that placebo-controlled trials are preferable, methodologically or otherwise, to active-controlled trials. Contrary to the intentions of its authors, the fundamental lesson taught by the assay sensitivity argument is Duhemian: the validity of all clinical trials depends on external information. (shrink)

In Paradox in Christian Theology I argued that the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation are paradoxical—that is, they appear to involve implicit contradictions—yet Christians can still be rational in affirming and believing those doctrines. Dale Tuggy has characterized my theory of theological paradox as a form of “positive mysterianism” and argues that the theory “faces steep epistemic problems, and is at best a temporarily reasonable but ultimately unsustainable stance.” After summarizing my proposed model for the rational affirmation (...) of theological paradox and considering whether my proposal is indeed a form of “positive mysterianism” as Tuggy defines the term, I address the two main criticisms raised in Tuggy’s paper: first, that the doctrine of divine incomprehensibility cannot bear the weight required by my defense of paradox; and second, that my proposed model is afflicted with epistemic instability. I conclude that Tuggy has failed to show that a mysterian stance with respect to paradoxical Christian doctrines is in principle unreasonable, unnatural, or unsustainable. (shrink)

Leo Strauss was a political philosopher who died in 1973 but came to prominent attention around the beginning of the war in Iraq. Charges began emerging that architects of the war had studied with, or been influenced by, Strauss' works. This volume explores these works.

Sir Isaac Newton, writing in Latin, defined his celebrated laws of motion verbally. When the laws of motion are read as relating to his arithmetic and his calculus, division by zero is undefined so his physics fails at mathematical singularities. The situation is unchanged in modern real arithmetic and real calculus: division by zero is undefined so both Newtonian Physics and its modern developments fail at mathematical singularities. However, when Newton’s text is read as relating to transreal arithmetic and transreal (...) calculus, division by zero is defined and we show that the resulting Transreal Newtonian Physics does operate at mathematical singularities. We hold out the hope that the whole of modern physics may be similarly extended. We use the new physics to predict a convection current at the singularity in a black hole and suggest experiments in astronomy and high energy physics that might confirm or rebut our predictions. Thus our exegesis of Newton’s text extends mathematical physics and may, in future, extend experimental physics. (shrink)

David Reiter has recently argued that presuppositionalist apologists who champion the transcendental argument for God’s existence (TAG) face a dilemma: depending on what conclusion the argument is supposed to establish, either TAG is inadequate to deliver that conclusion or else TAG is superfluous (thus bringing into question claims about its importance and distinctiveness as a theistic argument). By way of reply, I contend that several plausible lines of response are available to the proponent of TAG in the face of this (...) purported dilemma. I hope thereby to advance scholarly discussion of TAG by clarifying its structure, content, and goal. (shrink)