Background In earlier work, we found important selection biases when we tried to obtain consent for participation in a national stroke registry. Recognizing that not all registries will be exempt from requiring consent for participation, we examine here in greater depth the reasons for the poor accrual of patients from a systems perspective with a view to obtaining as representative sample as possible. Methods We determined the percent of eligible patients who were approached to participate and, among those approached, the (...) percent who actually consented to participate. In addition we examined the reasons why people were not approached or did not consent and the variation across sites in the percent of patients approached and consented. We also considered site variation in restrictions on the accrual and data collection process imposed by either the local research ethics board or the hospital. Results Seventy percent of stroke patients were approached, with wide variations in approach rates across sites (from: 41% to 86%), and considerable inter-site variation in hospital policies governing patient accrual. Chief reasons for not approaching were discharge or death before being approached for consent. Seventeen percent of those approached refused to participate (range: 5% to 75%). Finally, 11% of those approached did not participate due to language or communication difficulties. Conclusion We found wide variation in approach and agree rates across sites that were accounted for, in part, by different approaches to accrual and idiosyncratic policies of the hospitals. This wide variation in approach and agree rates raises important challenges for research ethics boards and data protection authorities in determining when to waive consent requirements, when to press for increased quality control, when to permit local adaptation of the consent process, and when to permit alternatives to individual express consent. We offer several suggestions for those registries that require consent for participation. (shrink)

This book explores the epistemology and the methodology of political knowledge and social inquiry. What can we know, and how do we know? Friedrich V. Kratochwil and Ted Hopf question all foundational claims of inquiry and envisage science as a self-reflective practice. Brian Pollins and Fred Chernoff accept their arguments to some degree and explore the implications for logical positivism. David A. Waldner, Jack Levy, and Andrew Lawrence address the purpose and methods of research. They debate the role of explanation (...) versus prediction, the relationship of theory to evidence, and their implications for the Democratic Peace research program. A concluding chapter by Mark Lichbach offers a pluralistic reformulation of neopositivism. An alternative conclusion by Steven Bernstein, Richard Ned Lebow, Janice Gross Stein and Steven Weber contends that social science should be modeled on medicine and reformulated as a set of case-based diagnostic tools. The distinguishing feature of the book is the inclusion of authors who represent different approaches to social science and their willingness to engage with one another in a constructive debate. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper strengthens Bhaskar’s case for the possibility of naturalism. Building on Bhaskar’s A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism, and on more recent contributions by Douglas Porpora, it traces the evolution of Bhaskar’s concept of 'intransitive' and follows his suggestion to treat social structure as an intransitive generative mechanism analogous to the generative mechanisms of the natural sciences. It is suggested, building on Porpora, that the constitutive rules of the market are usefully regarded as generating an (...) intransitive 'basic social structure.' That this same intransitive object is reasonably regarded as continuing to exist and act under different descriptions is illustrated by citing how different scholars have approached it with different concepts and vocabularies. It expands on Bhaskar’s first example of an intransitive object of social science, the mass unemployment that provided a ‘motor’ for Keynes, and on Porpora’s examples of the causal powers of social structures. (shrink)

Global fatalities related to COVID-19 are expected to be high in 2020–2021. Developing and delivering a vaccine may be the most likely way to end the pandemic. If it were possible to shorten this development time by weeks or months, this may have a significant effect on reducing deaths. Phase II and phase III trials could take less long to conduct if they used human challenge methods—that is, deliberately infecting participants with COVID-19 following inoculation. This article analyses arguments for and (...) against such methods and provides suggested broad guidelines for regulators, researchers and ethics committees when considering these matters. It concludes that it may be possible to maintain current ethical standards yet still permit human challenge trials in a context where delay is critical. The implications are that regulators and researchers need to work together now to design robust but short trials and streamline ethics approval processes so that they are in place when applications for trials are made. (shrink)

This is an excellent article, probably the best there is in defence of prohibiting the sale of organs, and it deserves a much fuller discussion of detail than there is space for here.1 My concerns, however, are with generalities rather than detail. Although some such argument might justify prohibition of organ selling in particular places and at particular times, it is difficult to see how it could support the kind of general, universal policy currently accepted by most advocates of prohibition.Whenever (...) the subject of organ selling is discussed, it is useful to keep in mind the natural history of the debate. Prohibition was instituted by most governments and professional bodies just about as quickly as possible after it was discovered that payment for kidneys was going on, and was a direct response to feelings of moral outrage. It all happened without time for debate. It was only later, as challenges appeared, that justifications began to be produced; and when they did they followed a pattern long familiar to philosophers, and more recently recognised by moral psychologists, of determined efforts to find a justification for the initial intuition that organ selling must be wrong. New arguments kept appearing in the cause as earlier attempts were shown to fail, and many were so weak that they could not have seemed plausible unless their advocates had already been committed to their conclusion. This does not mean, of course, that a good justification could never be produced. It does, however, suggest a widespread feeling that organ selling must be intrinsically …. (shrink)

The Ethics of Parenthood argues for original views about the right to raise one's biological children, about paternalism, about reacting differently to bad behavior because the wrongdoer is "only a child," about what raising a child requires, and about the obligations that parents and children have after the children are grown.

Andrew Sayer and Dave Elder-Vass are both advocates of ‘moral economy’. To this end, Elder-Vass offers a theory of appropriative practices that enables us to evaluate the enormous variety of forms...

Quite early in the construction of his theory, Darwin realized that he had to explain the distinctive features of the human animal to forestall the return of the Creator. For most British intellectuals, what distinguished man from animals was not reason, an operation in which faint sensory images followed the rules of association, but moral judgment. Thus, shortly after he first formulated the principle of natural selection in the fall of 1838, Darwin began a decades-long struggle to bring human moral (...) judgment under his advancing theory. The fruition of that work came in Descent of Man, where two long chapters are devoted to an evolutionary understanding of moral behavior in man and its antecedents in animals. Since that time, numerous efforts have been made by biologists, psychologists, and philosophers to fol-. (shrink)

Issues surrounding organ transplantation are hotly and publicly debated: for it raises unique ethical questions regarding the rights and responsibilities of donors. Leading moral philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards provides a sharp analysis, dissecting the commonly raised arguments concerning organ procurement from the living and the dead.

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people (...) who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology. (shrink)

Please see I. A. Richards (ISBN: 0415217318) for details or email [email protected].

The author explores how dichotomous representations of women and Indians came into play in Chilean print media representations of Mapuche women from 1997 to 2003, at the height of conflicts between the Mapuche people, the state, and elites in southern Chile. The author finds there were three competing representations of Mapuche women, which reproduce assumptions not just about them but about the people as a whole. Together, they accentuate, and simultaneously complicate, dichotomous views of Indians and women. These media portrayals (...) are significant because they reflect and reinforce the central principles of neoliberal multiculturalism—the prevailing form of governance in contemporary Latin America—which promotes diversity while perpetuating the marginalization of indigenous peoples and many of their rights. This analysis of images in print media contributes to understandings of how race and gender ideologies continue to inform debates over national belonging in contemporary Latin America. (shrink)

Everyday artistic creativity is downplayed in our schools, our lives, our culture. Yet here is an essential language of our lives, opening us to important ways of knowing, truth, beauty, and means for creative coping, as individuals and as cultures. Views of John Dewey and Suzanne Langer are each considered. A devaluation of artistic creativity may also reflect unacknowledged biases related to emotional "versus" intellectual knowing, gender stereotyping, science "versus" art, individualism "versus" interdependence, false stereotypes of creative "unhealth," and eminent (...) "versus" everyday creativity. Addressing these holds promise for our personal well-being and development, and our greater health as cultures. (shrink)

It is intuitively wrongful to deceive people into forming a false belief. It is especially intuitively wrongful to deceive people into forming the false belief that you are their friend. Despite these intuitions, this article argues that in a surprising number of cases, deceiving people into believing you are their friend is not only permitted, but required. The article uses this result to make some important revisions and suggestions for the emergent social rights literature: (i) it shows that social rights (...) are feasible in a wider range of cases than previously thought, and (ii) it casts doubt on whether grounding such rights on the impersonal value of genuine intimate relationships is their most fruitful grounding. (shrink)

The consciousness of the hosts is a major theme in Westworld, and for good reason. Hosts are not philosophical zombies. The hosts act like they have feelings, like they suffer and fear, like they enjoy the yellow, pink, and blue tones of a beautiful sunset. This chapter examines the analogs of memory, perception, and emotion in hosts. Hosts have a very troubling relationship to memory. Although using a different visual style would denote unique host experience, using the same visual style (...) to depict both human and host experience is not a strong indicator that the hosts are conscious, or that they have similar experiences to humans. Host perception, memory, and emotions all seem different from human, but the cinematic medium does not grant us immediate access to host experience, and neither the testimony of the creators, nor the hosts is totally reliable. (shrink)

It has sometimes been said that it is useless to try to prevent wars since man has an ineradicable combative instinct. The term instinct is very ambiguous in its application to humans, and it may be interesting to see what occurs amongst the insects, many of whose species show the highest development of instinctive behaviour.Many insect species are predatory, but if they depend on other distinct species, the relation is analogous to hunting or to a crude form of agriculture. Aggressive (...) behaviour to be comparable with war must concern the different members of one species. There are many laboratory experiments which illustrate the effects of competition when a population begins to exceed the capacity of its food supply. In Flour beetles, for instance, the adult beetles and the larvae eat any egg or pupae which they happen to meet in their ceaseless burrowing through the flour. There is thus a fixed population density at which eggs are eaten as fast as they are laid. In Grain weevils, the effect of crowding is to reduce the rate at which eggs are laid by the females who appear to suffer from overstimulation when crowded. Other effects, usually harmful, may be produced by the accumulation of the products of respiration or of digestion. Finally, if the food supply is too small, there will be death from starvation. If, for instance, too many blowfly eggs are added to a piece of meat, the flies produced will either be small, weak, and infertile or, if the excess has been too great, the larvae may all starve when half grown. Thus, a piece of meat which could have produced 100 normal flies may produce none at all if a tenfold excess of eggs is laid on it. (shrink)

Several scholars and many religiously conservative thinkers have recently charged that Hitler’s ideas about race and racial struggle derived from the theories of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), either directly or through intermediate sources. So, for example, the historian Richard Weikart, in his book From Darwin to Hitler , maintains: “No matter how crooked the road was from Darwin to Hitler, clearly Darwinism and eugenics smoothed the path for Nazi ideology, especially for the Nazi stress on expansion, war, racial struggle, and racial (...) extermination.” In a subsequent book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Weikart argues that Darwin’s “evolutionary ethics drove him [Hitler] to engage in behavior that the rest of us consider abominable.” Other critics have also attempted to forge a strong link between Darwin’s theory and Hitler’s biological notions. In the 2008 film “Expelled,” a documentary defense of Intelligent Design, the Princeton trained philosopher David Berlinski, in conversation with Weikart, confidently asserts: “If you open Mein Kampf and read it, especially if you can read it in German, the correspondence between Darwinian ideas and Nazi ideas just leaps from the page.” John Gray, former professor at the London School of Economics, does allow that Hitler’s Darwinism was “vulgar.” Hannah Arendt also appears to have endorsed the connection when she declared: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.” Put “Darwin” and “Hitler” in a search engine and several million hits will be returned, most from religiously and politically conservative websites, articles, and books. (shrink)

Our image of Darwin is hardly that of a German metaphysician. By reason of his intellectual tradition—that of British empiricism—and psychological disposition, he was a man of apparently more stolid character, one who could be excited by beetles and earthworms but not, we assume, by abstruse philosophy. Yet Darwin constructed a theory of evolution whose conceptual grammar expresses and depends on a certain kind of metaphysics. During his youthful period as a romantic adventurer, he sailed to exotic lands and returned (...) to construct a theory that attacked the citadels of orthodoxy. In the long process of theory construction, he explored difficult philosophical questions—for instance, the nature of reason and the mind-body problem. Moreover, he founded that theory.. (shrink)

In recent times it has seemed to many people as if the unifying impact of mass forms of popular culture has been overshadowed by the postmodernism of cultural pluralism, identity politics, niche marketing and lifestyle diversity. Using insights from psychoanalysis, this new book suggests that powerful forces may still be at work extending and deepening their hold on popular experience through the unifying forms of modern culture. The practices and aesthetic codes of popular culture provide ways of confronting and managing (...) the basic psychic tensions and anxieties of modern life, appealing globally across the deep divides of class, gender and ethnicity. In a series of extended illustrations, Barry Richards explores the emotional underpinnings of the rise of football as the 'people's game', the appeal of the motor car and other consumer goods, the strategies of advertising, the cultural predominance of pop music, and popular images of the countryside. While each phenomenon has a range of meanings of its own, the illustrations reveal the common positive side of these cultural forms, which serve as vehicles for psychological integration. At the core of this book is the idea that the pleasures of popular culture are at their strongest and best when they confirm our sense of belonging in the social order. Despite the constraint and disappointment inevitably involved in this, the reconciliation with authority which it brings is vital for the containment of the anxieties with which we all struggle. Disciplines of Delight reveals how psychoanalytic thinking can add to social understanding and is an original contribution to current debates on the nature of contemporary society. (shrink)

Logical psychologism is the position that logic is a special branch of psychology, that logical laws are descriptíons of experience to be arrived at through observation, and are a posteriori.The accepted arguments against logical psychologism are effective only when directed against this extreme version. However, the clauses in the above characterization are independent and ambiguous, and may be considered separately. This separation permits a reconsideration of less extreme attempts to tie logic to psychology, such as those defended by Mill and (...) Boole. It also provides the basis for a reexamination of the relationship between logic and psychology, and raises the possibility of a deeper investigation into the nature of logic itself. (shrink)

Although the universal human rights paradigm has been problematic for women and indigenous peoples, both groups have made advances by framing their demands within a human rights perspective. Indigenous women, however, have frequently found themselves marginalized by women’s movements and indigenous movements alike, particularly when they make demands for rights as indigenous women—not just as members of one group or the other. This article takes the case of Mapuche women in Chile to examine the politics of gender and human rights (...) for indigenous women. Their efforts to articulate their concerns, vis-à-vis Mapuche men, nonindigenous women, and the state, have entailed assertions of their own version of women’s rights, one that responds specifically to their reality as Mapuche women. (shrink)

Arguments are advanced that a theory of possible worlds cannot be a theory of meaning for modal statements, And lewis's version of the theory in his "counterfactuals" is used as a particular stalking-Horse. (a) 'possible world', Though used referentially, Is defined in a way that makes it non-Referential, And moreover, The theory does not supply or validate proposals for criteria that individuate worlds; hence the theory seems incomprehensible. (b) the theory yields no useable account of truth-Conditions for modal statements. (c) (...) a conceptualist version of the theory cannot overcome these problems. (d) lewis's similarity theory of possible worlds as a semantics for counterfactuals sustains in many cases (including one he cites) intuitively untrue counterfactuals and rejects many intuitively correct ones. (shrink)

This book brings together eleven case studies of inductive risk-the chance that scientific inference is incorrect-that range over a wide variety of scientific contexts and fields. The chapters are designed to illustrate the pervasiveness of inductive risk, assist scientists and policymakers in responding to it, and productively move theoretical discussions of the topic forward.

This essay can be called, if you will, an exercise in choosing which words to use when in our contemporary context. I hope to add something useful to the work being done by Pierre Macherey (Machere...

Who can divine the intentions of the human heart, the motives that guide behavior? Some of the reasons for our actions lie on the surface of consciousness, whereas others are more deeply embedded in the recesses of the mind. Recovering motives and intentions is a principal job of the historian. For without some attribution of mental attitudes, actions cannot be characterized and decisions assessed. The same overt behavior, after all, might be described as “mailing a letter” or “fomenting a revolution.” (...) The recovery of intentions is crucial for the historian’s narrative. (shrink)

Just before Ernst Haeckel’s death in 1919, historians began piling on the faggots for a splendid auto-da-fé. Though more people prior to the Great War learned of Darwin’s theory through his efforts than through any other source, including Darwin himself, Haeckel has been accused of not preaching orthodox Darwinian doctrine. In 1916, E. S. Russell, judged Haeckel's principal theoretical work, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, as "representative not so much of Darwinian as of pre-Darwinian thought."1 Both Stephen Jay Gould and Peter (...) Bowler endorse this evaluation, and see as an index of Haeckel’s heterodox deviation his use of the biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.2 Michael Ruse, without much analysis, simply proclaims that “Haeckel and friends were not true Darwinians.”3 These historians locate the problem in Haeckel’s inclinations toward Naturphilosophie and in his adoption of the kind of Romantic attitudes characterizing the earlier biology of Goethe. These charges of heresy assume, of course, that Darwin’s own theory harbors no taint of Romanticism and that it consequently remains innocent of the doctrine of recapitulation. I think both assumptions quite. (shrink)

Can unattended objects by seen? Ned Block has claimed they can on the basis of “identity-crowding.” This paper summarizes the ensuing debate with particular emphasis on the role of unconscious perception. Although unconscious perception plays an important role, it cannot support conscious object-seeing in identity-crowding. Nevertheless, unconscious perception assists in making successful judgments about unseen objects. Further, compelling conceptual evidence against seeing unattended objects places the burden of proof on Block. I argue that countability is necessary for seeing objects and (...) sufficient for attention to them; thus, no unattended objects are seen. (shrink)

What role does love--of cinema, of cinema studies, of teaching and learning--play in teaching film? For the Love of Cinema brings together a wide range of film scholars to explore the relationship between cinephilia and pedagogy. All of them ask whether cine-love can inform the serious study of cinema. Chapter by chapter, writers approach this question from various perspectives: some draw on aspects of students' love of cinema as a starting point for rethinking familiar films or generating new kinds of (...) analyses about the medium itself; others reflect on how their own cinephilia informs the way they teach cinema; and still others offer new ways of writing with a love of cinema in the age of new media. Together, they form a collection that is as much a guide for teaching cinephilia as it is an energetic dialogue about the ways that cinephilia and pedagogy enliven and rejuvenate one another. (shrink)