© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

Steve Awodey and Audrej Bauer. Sheaf Toposes for Realizability.

With this paper, from the perspective of ethics at the workplace, we problematize the taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in the use of artistic freedom in creative processes. Drawing on the notion of inequality regimes (e.g. Acker, 2006) and using empirical material from a performing arts organization in Sweden, we explore how the assumptions of artistic freedom facilitate and legitimize the emergence of inequality regimes in invisible and subtle manners. Our findings indicate that non-reflexive interpretations of the concept of artistic freedom result (...) in ethical dilemmas that impact the organization's pursuits of equality work. The aesthetic ethics oriented around the notion of ‘art for the sake of art’ tends to camouflage the centralization of aesthetic authority in processes where formal hierarchical structures are missing. Consequently, asymmetrical power relations between the Directors, actors, and producers are legitimized. Ethics of quality of art and that of the social ideal of equality have been constructed as dichotomic notions indicating that aesthetic ethics of art can only be preserved at the expense of social objectives of equality. We argue that the current interpretative practices of ‘artistic freedom’ in some cultural organizations add little value of ethics to the freedom of expressing artistic opinions and in achieving the social ideal of equality but lead to the emergence of inequality regimes in the artistic work processes. (shrink)

When thinking about the harms of drug addiction, there is a tendency to focus on the harms of drug consumption. But not all harms associated with drug addiction are caused by drug consumption. There is at least another dimension of harm worth considering: what I call the linguistic harm of drug addiction. Starting with an analysis of ‘drug addict’ as it appears in the media, I argue that ‘drug addict’ is inconsistently applied to people with drug addiction and that this (...) inconsistency reveals two important features of the term. First, being called a ‘drug addict’ is worse than being described as ‘having a drug problem’. Second, being called a drug addict exacerbates the challenges experienced by people with drug addiction. Referencing the ‘addict’ narrative, I detail how calling someone a drug addict can add to the marginalization of people with drug addiction and argue that to eliminate the linguistic harm of drug addiction, we ought to reduce it first. Using the analysis of ‘drug addict’ from the first half of the paper, I propose a novel harm reduction strategy that benefits people with drug addiction but calls on people who do not use drugs. (shrink)

Image factorizations in regular categories are stable under pullbacks, so they model a natural modal operator in dependent type theory. This unary type constructor [A] has turned up previously in a syntactic form as a way of erasing computational content, and formalizing a notion of proof irrelevance. Indeed, semantically, the notion of a support is sometimes used as surrogate proposition asserting inhabitation of an indexed family. We give rules for bracket types in dependent type theory and provide complete semantics using (...) regular categories. We show that dependent type theory with the unit type, strong extensional equality types, strong dependent sums, and bracket types is the internal type theory of regular categories, in the same way that the usual dependent type theory with dependent sums and products is the internal type theory of locally Cartesian closed categories. We also show how to interpret first-order logic in type theory with brackets, and we make use of the translation to compare type theory with logic. Specifically, we show that the propositions-as-types interpretation is complete with respect to a certain fragment of intuitionistic first-order logic, in the sense that a formula from the fragment is derivable in intuitionistic first-order logic if, and only if, its interpretation in dependent type theory is inhabited. As a consequence, a modified double-negation translation into type theory (without bracket types) is complete, in the same sense, for all of classical first-order logic. (shrink)

Los procesos educativos deben asumir de modo expreso, reflexiva y críticamente nuestros ethos originarios (histórica, filosófica y antropológicamente hablando), las condiciones de marginalidad y exclusión de la mayoría de la población mundial, y la de nuestro país dentro de la planificación del desarrollo global. Y deben, desde esta reflexión, asumir el progreso científico y tecnológico que se transfiere y realiza, en los diferentes países como en las universidades, teniendo como fin la satisfacción de nuestras necesidades integrales, y no la inserción (...) de la dominación cultural y la explotación económica. En este libro, el método analéctico está tomado, no como receta mágica, sino como instrumento de análisis, intervención y transformación de la subjetividad y de la realidad. No está abordado como una esencia que pueda totalizarse, de allí la mayor inquietud de desplegarlo en las demás dimensiones teórico-prácticas, ya que en ese mismo despliegue se hace posible la articulación transformadora con la realidad socio-histórica en sus distintas facetas. Carlos Francisco Bauer es Profesor de Filosofía, Profesor de Historia, Licenciado en Filosofía y Doctor en Filosofía por la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. También es Profesor en la Universidad Federal de Integración Latinoamericana, en Brasil. Allí, aborda las materias Ética y Ciencia e Introducción al Pensamiento Científico desde la perspectiva descolonizadora. En 2011, obtuvo el Primer Premio en el VIII Concurso Internacional de Ensayo "Pensar a Contracorriente", La Habana 2011. En 2012, en el marco de la Jornada de trabajo por la Paz y el medio ambiente de La Habana, convocada por Fidel Castro, el Profesor Bauer participó del conversatorio que dio origen al libro Fidel Castro con los intelectuales, que fue publicado ese mismo año por la Editorial José Martí y presentado desde Casa de las Américas en simultáneo para varias capitales del mundo. PROMETEO LIBROS ARGENTINA Este libro contiene el desarrollo de los siguientes temas, entre otros: - Punto de partida: desmitificación, afirmación del nosotros y vosotros - Crítica a la modernidad como totalidad subjetiva desde la meta-física de la alteridad - Levinas o el "otro" para una exterioridad - Hacia una analogía arquitectónica - Deconstrucción del sistema hegemónico - Hacia un proyecto de liberación cultural - Camino hacia una política latinoamericana - El giro o viraje marxista. ¡Marx a la vista! - Retomando el planteo inicial camino hacia la política - Eurocentrismo: ¿un artificio sin límite? - Primer Manifiesto de la Filosofía de la Liberación Con este libro usted tendrá un interesante análisis. ¡Adquiera ya este libro y aproveche esta interesante lectura! TAGS: filosofía, colonización, Latinoamérica, política, Sudamerica, eurocentrismo, soberanía. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary work is intractable because the search for knowledge in different fields entails different interests, and thereby different values too; and the different possibilities of knowledge about different subjects also lead to different epistemologies. Thus differ ences among practitioners of the various disciplines are pervasive and aptly described as cultural ones, and interdisciplinary work requires transcending unconscious habits of thought. The more those unconscious habits are explicated and the more we under stand how the disparate characteristics of the various intellectual (...) cultures are related to the necessarily different interests, values, and epistemologies, the more feasible becomes the goal of transcending thought habits. Two sorts of interdisciplinary effort seem to have been successful: specific, delimited problems have been solved by teams in what is actually multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary work, and new disciplines have sprung up at the intersections of existing ones. STS fits neither of those patterns. Can it nevertheless be viable? (shrink)

Some critiques of cybermedicine claim that it is problematic because it fails to create physician–patient relationships. But, electronically mediated encounters do create such relationships. The issue is the nature and quality of those relationships and whether they are conducive to good patient care and meet the ethical ideals and standards of medicine. In this paper, I argue that effective communication and compassion are, in most cases, necessary for the establishment of trusting and morally appropriate physician–patient relationships. The creation of these (...) relationships requires patients and physicians to take psychological and emotional risks and to make commitments to each other. The problem is that by altering the form and content of verbal and non-verbal behaviors and by limiting the kinds of interactions that can take place, cybermedicine makes risk-free interactions easier and more commonplace and retards the development of physician compassion and patient trust. In doing so, cybermedicine encourages morally inappropriate physician–patient relationships. I argue that Merleau-Ponty''s notion of embodiment and Kierkegaard''s criticisms of disinterested reflection help us to understand how cybermedicine can undermine patient health and well being and why it should be seen as a possible threat to the moral integrity of physician–patient relationships. (shrink)

"Atom," "byte" and "gene" are metonymies for techno-scientific developments of the 20th century: nuclear power, computing and genetic engineering. Resistance continues to challenge these developments in public opinion. This book traces historical debates over atoms, bytes and genes which raised controversy with consequences, and argues that public opinion is a factor of the development of modern techno-science. The level and scope of public controversy is an index of resistance, examined here with a "pain analogy" which shows that just as pain (...) impacts movement, resistance impacts techno-scientific mobilization: it signals that something is wrong, and this requires attention, elaboration and a response to the challenge. This analysis shows how different fields of enquiry deal with the resistance of social-psychological mentalities in the face of industrial, scientific and political activities inspired by projected futures. (shrink)

Western stereotypes often characterize gender relations in Muslim-majority societies as uniformly traditional and patriarchal. Underlying this imagery is a unidimensional understanding of gender ideology as moving along a single traditional-to-egalitarian continuum. In this study, we interrogate these assumptions by exploring variability across and within Middle Eastern, North African, and South Asian (MENASA) societies in beliefs related to two regionally salient gender principles: women’s chastity and marital patriarchy. Data from a new online survey of Muslim Facebook users show substantial heterogeneity across (...) and within six MENASA societies in support for these principles. These data also reveal a multidimensional structure, in that societies show different configurations of chastity and marital patriarchy beliefs, and each of these gender principles is influenced by respondents’ religious beliefs and gender status in different ways. Although religious absolutism predicts agreement with both gender principles, piety is associated with support for chastity but not for marital patriarchy. Results also show a clear gender divide in attitudes toward hierarchy in marriage but not with respect to chastity. Findings complicate broad-brush depictions of patriarchy in the region and corroborate previous research on the multidimensionality of gender beliefs and the multifaceted attitudinal influences of gender and religious beliefs. (shrink)

This book offers the first comparative account of the changes and stabilities of public perceptions of science within the US, France, China, Japan, and across Europe over the past few decades. The contributors address the influence of cultural factors; the question of science and religion and its influence on particular developments (e.g. stem cell research); and the demarcation of science from non-science as well as issues including the incommensurability versus cognitive polyphasia and the cognitive (in)tolerance of different systems of knowledge.

Background: The ability to save the life of an extremely premature baby has increased substantially over the last decade. This survival, however, can be associated with unfavourable outcomes for both baby and family. Questions are now being asked about quality of life for survivors of extreme prematurity. Quality of life is rightly deemed to be an important consideration in high technology neonatal care; yet, it is notoriously difficult to determine or predict. How does one define and operationalise what is considered (...) to be in the best interest of a surviving extremely premature baby, especially when the full extent of the outcomes might not be known for several years? Research question: The research investigates the caregiving dilemmas often faced by neonatal nurses when caring for extremely premature babies. This article explores the issues arising for neonatal nurses when they considered the philosophical and ethical questions about quality of life in babies ≤24 weeks gestation. Participants: Data were collected via a questionnaire to Australian neonatal nurses and semi-structured interviews with 24 neonatal nurses in New South Wales, Australia. Ethical considerations: Ethical processes and procedures have been adhered to by the researchers. Findings: A qualitative approach was used to analyse the data. The theme ‘difficult choices’ was generated which comprised three sub-themes: ‘damaged through survival’, ‘the importance of the brain’ and ‘families are important’. The results show that neonatal nurses believed that quality of life was an important consideration; yet they experienced significant inner conflict and uncertainty when asked to define or suggest specific elements of quality of life, or to suggest how it might be determined. It was even more difficult for the nurses to say when an extremely premature baby’s life possessed quality. Their previous clinical and personal experiences led the nurses to believe that the quality of the family’s life was important, and possibly more so than the quality of life of the surviving baby. This finding contrasts markedly with much of the existing literature in this field. Conclusion: Quality of life for extremely premature babies was an important consideration for neonatal nurses; however, they experienced difficulty deciding how to operationalise such considerations in their everyday clinical practice. (shrink)

Despite the advances wrought in recent years by recuperative readings of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir's views on motherhood and mothering remain under‐appropriated when it comes to both feminist metaphysics and feminist political priorities. In our radically anti‐essentialist era, we are inclined take for granted that gender is a social construct, potentially oppressive when it's understood as a biological given but potentially liberating when its fundamental arbitrariness and infinite malleability are appreciated. Though Beauvoir is in no way a gender (...) essentialist, in the current theoretical atmosphere her insistence on the importance of physiology is more critical than ever. Under conditions in which women are told everywhere they turn that they are to gauge their worth as human beings according to the way their bodies look and work (with special emphasis on thinness and fertility), Beauvoir's reasons for emphasizing the fraught nature of pregnancy and motherhood can help us understand our continuing confusion over what it means to be a woman. (shrink)

Rendell and Whitehead note the necessary, complementary relationship between field and laboratory studies in other species, but conclude their article by de-emphasizing the role of laboratory findings in cetacean research. The ambiguity in field studies of cetaceans should argue for greater reliance on the laboratory, which has provided much of the available research supporting the hypothesis of cetacean culture.

Jonathan Livengood and Justin Sytsma have published a series of studies on “Actual Causation and Compositionality,” in which they investigate causal attributions of laypeople. We use one of their vignettes to follow up on their research. Our findings cast doubt on their conclusion that ordinary causal attributions tend to violate the compositionality constraint if one looks at cases in which someone is responsible for an effect by way of an intermediary that does not share in the responsibility.

Philippe Descola has become one of the most important anthropologists working today, and _Beyond Nature and Culture_ has been a major influence in European intellectual life since its French publication in 2005. Here, finally, it is brought to English-language readers. At its heart is a question central to both anthropology and philosophy: what is the relationship between nature and culture? Culture—as a collective human making, of art, language, and so forth—is often seen as essentially different from nature, which is portrayed (...) as a collective of the nonhuman world, of plants, animals, geology, and natural forces. Descola shows this essential difference to be, however, not only a specifically Western notion, but also a very recent one. Drawing on ethnographic examples from around the world and theoretical understandings from cognitive science, structural analysis, and phenomenology, he formulates a sophisticated new framework, the “four ontologies”— animism, totemism, naturalism, and analogism—to account for all the ways we relate ourselves to nature. By thinking beyond nature and culture as a simple dichotomy, Descola offers nothing short of a fundamental reformulation by which anthropologists and philosophers can see the world afresh. (shrink)

foreword by Pierre Vidal-Naquet The acclaimed French classicist Marcel Detienne's first book traces the odyssey of "truth," aletheia, from mytho-religious concept to philosophical thought in archaic Greece. Detienne begins by examining how truth in Greek literature first emerges as an enigma. He then looks at the movement from a religious to a secular thinking about truth in the speech of the sophists and orators. His study culminates with an original interpretation of Parmenides' poem on Being.

In this strikingly original contribution to our understanding of Chinese philosophy, Françle;ois Julien, a French sinologist whose work has not yet appeared in English uses the Chinese concept of shi - meaning disposition or circumstance, power or potential - as a touchstone to explore Chinese culture and to uncover the intricate and coherent structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking.A Hegelian prejudice still haunts studies of ancient Chinese civilization: Chinese thought, never able to evolve beyond a cosmological point of view, with (...) an indifference to any notion of telos, sought to interpret reality solely on the basis of itself. In this groundbreaking study, prejudices toward the simplicity and "naiveté" of Chinese thought, Hegelian and otherwise, are dismantled one by one to reveal the intricate and coherent structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking and representing reality.Jullien begins with a single Chinese term, shi, whose very ambivalence and disconcerting polysemy, on the one hand, and simple efficacy, on the other, defy the order of a concept. Yet shi insinuates itself into the ordering and conditioning of reality in all its manifold and complex representations. Because shi neither gave rise to any coherent, general analysis nor figured as one of the major concepts among Chinese thinkers, Jullien follows its appearance from one field to another: from military strategy to politics; from the aesthetics of calligraphy and painting to the theory of literature; and from reflection on history to "first philosophy."At the point where these various domains intersect, a fundamental intuition assumed self-evident for centuries emerges, namely, that reality - every kind of reality - may be perceived as a particular deployment or arrangement of things to be relied upon and worked to one's advantage. Art or wisdom, as conceived by the Chinese, lies in strategically exploiting the propensity that emanates from this particular configuration of reality. (shrink)

The relatively new movement of Experimental Philosophy applies different systematic experimental methods to further illuminate classical philosophical issues. This book brings together experts from the field to give the reader a compact yet extensive overview, offering a ready at hand introduction to the state of the art.

Immer wieder hat sich Theodor Fontane in Briefen und Biografien, Rezensionen und Essays zu zeitgenössischen Autoren geäussert und sein Verständnis von Realismus in Auseinandersetzung mit einzelnen Werken - etwa von Willibald Alexis, Gustav Freytag oder Friedrich Spielhagen - entwickelt. Das Spezifikum seiner eigenen Texte lässt sich nicht zuletzt durch Vergleiche mit der Prosa von Adalbert Stifter und Gottfried Keller, Theodor Storm und Wilhelm Raabe profilieren. Im Verhältnis zu ihrer Art, Figuren zu entwerfen oder Dialoge zu gestalten, gewinnt seine Erzählweise, gewinnt (...) seine Kunst, die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit aufzuzeigen und anhand von Konflikten durchzuspielen, Kontur. Das Buch reflektiert in acht Porträts, einer Einleitung und Hinweisen zu Fontanes Poetik sein Verhältnis zu den deutschsprachigen Realisten des 19. Jahrhunderts. Allen gemeinsam ist, dass sie Literatur als Medium der Gesellschaftskritik verstanden haben. (shrink)