© 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)

Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote that "the people reign over the American political world like God over the universe," unwittingly casting democracy as the political instantiation of the death of God. According to Jeffrey W. Robbins, Tocqueville's assessment remains an apt observation of modern democratic power, which does not rest with a sovereign authority but operates as a diffuse social force. By linking radical democratic theory to a contemporary fascination with political theology, Robbins envisions the modern experience of democracy (...) as a social, cultural, and political force transforming the nature of sovereign power and political authority. Robbins joins his work with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's radical conception of "network power," as well as Sheldon Wolin's notion of "fugitive democracy," to fashion a political theology that captures modern democracy's social and cultural torment. This approach has profound implications not only for the nature of contemporary religious belief and practice but also for the reconceptualization of the proper relationship between religion and politics. Challenging the modern, liberal, and secular assumption of a neutral public space, Robbins conceives of a postsecular politics for contemporary society that inextricably links religion to the political. While effectively recasting the tradition of radical theology as a political theology, this book also develops a comprehensive critique of the political theology bequeathed by Carl Schmitt. It marks an original and visionary achievement by the scholar the _Journal of the American Academy of Religion_ hailed "one of the best commentators on religion and postmodernism.". (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Why do some physicians continue to treat patients who are clearly dying or persistently unconscious, while others consider medical intervention to be futile past a certain point? No doubt, medical decisions vary in part because clinical information is often ambiguous in individual cases and because it may support more than one reasonable interpretation of a patient's chances for survival or improvement if a particular treatment is administered. Also, cases vary considerably to the extent that a patient's or a family member's (...) preferences for treatment are communicated, understood, and implemented. But, beyond these contingencies, patients at the end of life may receive more, less, or different treatment because physicians themselves are social actors, individuals who bring to bear on their clinical decisions a variety of personal attitudes, values, concerns, and interests. Legal defensiveness, religious vitalism, authoritarianism, intolerance of ambiguity, and other traits may influence physicians’ behavior, but each may be concealed under the rubric of what is “medically indicated” or “medically appropriate.”. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider an argument for the claim that any satisfactory epistemology of mathematics will violate core tenets of naturalism, i.e. that mathematics cannot be naturalized. I find little reason for optimism that the argument can be effectively answered.

Penelope Maddy advances a purportedly naturalistic account of mathematical methodology which might be taken to answer the question 'What justifies axioms of set theory?' I argue that her account fails both to adequately answer this question and to be naturalistic. Further, the way in which it fails to answer the question deprives it of an analog to one of the chief attractions of naturalism. Naturalism is attractive to naturalists and nonnaturalists alike because it explains the reliability of scientific practice. Maddy's (...) account, on the other hand, appears to be unable to similarly explain the reliability of mathematical practice without violating one of its central tenets. (shrink)

Scientists’ identities and social locations influence their work, but the content of scientific work can also influence scientists. Theory from feminist science studies, autoethnographic accounts, interviews, and experiments indicate that the substance of scientific research can have profound effects on how scientists are treated by colleagues and their sense of belonging in science. I bring together these disparate literatures under the framework of professional cultures. Drawing on the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Web of Science, I use computational social (...) science tools to argue that the way scientists write about sex in their research influences the future gender ratio of PhDs awarded across 53 subfields of the life sciences over a span of 47 years. Specifically, I show that a critical paradigm of “feminist biology” that seeks to de-essentialize sex and gender corresponds to increases in women’s graduation rates, whereas “sex difference” research—sometimes called “neurosexism” because of its emphasis on essential, categorical differences—corresponds to decreases in women’s graduation rates in most fields. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 47, Issue 2, Page 208-254, Spring 2019.

Kenneth Burke: A Dialogue of Motives employs the philosophy of ethics of Emmanuel Levinas to develop a uniquely dramatistic philosophy of ethics. Jeffrey Murray analyzes Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives and offers the notion of "a dialogue of motives" as a completion of Burke's proposed trilogy and as a supplement to Burke's own tools for rhetorical criticism.

In this article, we describe four theoretical and methodological problems that have impeded implicit attitude research and the popular understanding of its findings. The problems all revolve around assumptions made about the relationships among measures, constructs, cognitive processes, and features of processing. These assumptions have confused our understandings of exactly what we are measuring, the processes that produce implicit evaluations, the meaning of differences in implicit evaluations across people and contexts, the meaning of changes in implicit evaluations in response to (...) intervention, and how implicit evaluations predict behavior. We describe formal modeling as one means to address these problems, and provide illustrative examples. Clarifying these issues has important implications for our understanding of who has particular implicit evaluations and why, when those evaluations are likely to be particularly problematic, how we might best try to change them, and what interventions are best suited to minimize the effects of implicit evaluations on behavior. (shrink)

Should governments pay ransoms to terrorist organisations that unjustly kidnap their citizens? The United Kingdom and the United States refuse to negotiate with terrorist groups that kidnap and threaten to kill their people. In contrast, continental European countries, such as France and Germany, have regularly paid ransoms to rescue hostages. Who is right? This debate has raged in the public domain in recent years, but no sustained attempt has been made to subject the matter to philosophical scrutiny. This article explores (...) this issue, focusing on the case of ransom payments to terrorist organisations. It contends that the state's duty to protect its citizens from murder grounds a defeasible obligation to pay ransoms. It considers the objection that a policy of paying ransoms endangers citizens abroad by increasing the likelihood of future kidnappings, and it explains why this objection is not sufficiently weighty. It then identifies a more powerful objection: namely, that a state's payment of ransoms makes the state complicit in the serious injustices that its ransom payments fund. It concludes that unless states can offset their contributions to such injustices, paying ransoms is wrong. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher has argued against the apriority of mathematical knowledge in a number of places. His arguments rely on a conception of mathematical knowledge as embedded in a historical tradition and the claim that this sort of embedding compromises apriority. In this paper, I argue that tradition dependence of mathematical knowledge does not compromise its apriority. I further identify the factors which appear to lead Kitcher to argue as he does.

Chinese export painters learned and adapted the medium of photography by grafting the new technology onto traditional artistic conventions - employing both brush and shutter. The essays in this volume shed light on the birth of a medium.

Duncan Pritchard has argued that his basis-relative anti-luck construal of a safety condition on knowing avoids the problem with necessary truths that safety conditions are often thought to have, viz., that beliefs the contents of which are necessarily true are trivially safe. He has further argued that adding an ability condition to truth, belief, and his anti-luck safety conditions yields an adequate account of knowledge. In this paper, we argue that not only does Pritchard’s anti-luck safety condition have a problem (...) with necessary truths, adding an ability condition is of no help. Indeed, the same sort of case that precipitates Pritchard’s introduction of an ability condition shows the inadequacy of his completed anti-luck account of knowledge. Moreover, reconstruing safety as an anti-risk condition as Pritchard has recently done does not fix the problem we’ve identified. We conclude by entertaining a radical suggestion to the effect that the failures of safety-based accounts of modal knowledge are due to failures of doxastic success rather than failures to satisfy an anti-luck (or anti-risk) condition. Accepting this radical suggestion makes available the view that there is, after all, no special problem between safety and necessary truths. (shrink)

Geary proposes a sociobiological hypothesis of how sex differences in math and spatial skills might have jointly arisen. His distinction between primary and secondary math skills is noteworthy, and in some ways analogous to the closed versus open systems postulated to exist for language. In this commentary issues concerning how genes might affect complex cognitive skills, the interpretation of heritability estimates, and prior research abilites are discussed.

Why do some physicians continue to treat patients who are clearly dying or persistently unconscious, while others consider medical intervention to be futile past a certain point? No doubt, medical decisions vary in part because clinical information is often ambiguous in individual cases and because it may support more than one reasonable interpretation of a patient's chances for survival or improvement if a particular treatment is administered. Also, cases vary considerably to the extent that a patient's or a family member's (...) preferences for treatment are communicated, understood, and implemented. But, beyond these contingencies, patients at the end of life may receive more, less, or different treatment because physicians themselves are social actors, individuals who bring to bear on their clinical decisions a variety of personal attitudes, values, concerns, and interests. Legal defensiveness, religious vitalism, authoritarianism, intolerance of ambiguity, and other traits may influence physicians’ behavior, but each may be concealed under the rubric of what is “medically indicated” or “medically appropriate.”. (shrink)

This study examines the importance of economies of scale in measuring the concentration-profits relationship. Firms are grouped into industries facilitating within industry analyses. Replacement cost disclosures are utilized to evaluate any price change bias resulting from the use of traditional accounting statements. This study produces no indication of economies of scale in high or low concentration industries. In medium concentration industries there is a weak tendency for larger firms to have higher returns. This result cannot, however, be attributed to scale (...) economies. Observed replacement cost price adjustments are not randomly distributed across firms. (shrink)

Introduction: The ontological condition -- The problem of philosophical theology -- Interlude 1, on political boundaries and profit: The path of theology : a study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- The path of phenomenology : a study of Edmund Husserl -- Interlude 2, on translations: Phenomenology turned theology -- Interlude 3, on bibliolatry: Otherwise than overcoming -- Postlude: on the feminine and ontotheology.

This paper argues that Philip Kitcher's epistemology of mathematics, codified in his Naturalistic Constructivism, is not naturalistic on Kitcher's own conception of naturalism. Kitcher's conception of naturalism is committed to (i) explaining the correctness of belief-regulating norms and (ii) a realist notion of truth. Naturalistic Constructivism is unable to simultaneously meet both of these commitments.

Why, exactly, should we punish children who commit crimes more leniently than adults who commit the same offenses? Gideon Yaffe thinks it is because they cannot vote, and so the strength of their reasons to obey the law is weaker than if they could. They are thus less culpable when they disobey. This argument invites an obvious objection: why not simply enfranchise children, thereby granting them legal reasons that are the same strength as enfranchised adults, and so permitting similarly severe (...) punishment? Yaffe answers this question by arguing that child enfranchisement would objectionably undermine the values of political equality and self-government. This article explores some serious doubts about these arguments. It closes by questioning Yaffe’s reliance on a retributivist theory of punishment, contending that, once we reject retributivism in favor of more humane and productive alternatives, the thesis that child criminals deserve a break—which Yaffe assumes to be undeniably correct—becomes less plausible. (shrink)

_Confronting American Labor_ traces the development of the American left, from the Depression era through the Cold War, by examining four representative intellectuals who grappled with the difficult question of labor’s role in society. Since the time of Marx, leftists have raised over and over the question of how an intelligentsia might participate in a movement carried out by the working class. Their modus operandi was to champion those who suffered injustice at the hands of the powerful. From the late (...) nineteenth through much of the twentieth century, this meant a focus on the industrial worker. The Great Depression was a time of remarkable consensus among leftist intellectuals, who often interpreted worker militancy as the harbinger of impending radical change. While most Americans waited out the crisis, listening to the assurances of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Marxian left was convinced that the crisis was systemic. Intellectuals who came of age during the Depression developed the view that the labor movement in America was to be the organizing base for a proletariat. Moreover, many came from working-class backgrounds that contributed to their support of labor. World War II and the resultant economic recovery shattered this coherence on the left. How did radicals opposed to capitalism deal with a labor movement that was very successful in terms of membership and power but clearly capitalist in its orientation? Coker describes the marked ambivalence and confusion of the intellectual left in the postwar years—a period of frustration brought on by a misreading of labor militancy during the 1930s and an unsuccessful search for a radical proletarian movement. The result was a politically and intellectually weakened left for decades to come. C_onfronting American Labor_ examines four individuals who represent a cross section of postwar radicalism. Each came of age on the socialist left, expecting that an anticapitalist movement would emerge from the ranks of labor. Seymour Martin Lipset and C. Wright Mills were professional sociologists. Sidney Lens spent his early life working within the labor movement before becoming a political commentator for a variety of leftist magazines and journals in the postwar era. Historian Herbert Gutman helped to create a “new labor history” that reflected broader transformations within the intellectual left. In tracing their various approaches to the problem of labor, C_onfronting American Labor_ explores the diverse nature of the postwar left. This important work will be of value to anyone interested in labor, class, and American thought. (shrink)

The proposal that the criminal justice system should focus on rehabilitation – rather than retribution, deterrence, or expressive denunciation – is among the least popular ideas in legal philosophy. Foremost among rehabilitation’s alleged weaknesses is that it views criminals as blameless patients to be treated, rather than culpable moral agents to be held accountable. This article offers a new interpretation of the rehabilitative approach that is immune to this objection and that furnishes the moral foundation that this approach has lacked. (...) The view rests on the principle that moral agents owe it to one another to maintain the dependability of their moral capacities. Agents who culpably commit criminal wrongs, however, betray an unacceptable degree of moral unreliability. Punishment, on this theory, consists in the enforcement of the duties that offenders have to reduce their own likelihood of recidivism. (shrink)

We argue that the dual-system approach and, particularly, the default-interventionist framework favored by De Neys unnecessarily constrains process models, limiting their range of application. In turn, the accommodations De Neys makes for these constraints raise questions of parsimony and falsifiability. We conclude that the extent to which processes possess features of system 1 versus system 2 must be tested empirically.

Claude Welch, the distinguished historian of nineteenth‐century religious thought, once declared that Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘may be seen as the real turning point into the theology of the nineteenth century’ and that he ‘was as important for British and American thought as were Schleiermacher and Hegel’.2 Still, Coleridge remains largely marginalized in the annals of church history and theology despite his unwavering prominence throughout much of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that Coleridge's posthumously published (...) Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit , with its rejection of the verbal infallibility of Scripture and elevation of the importance of the individual in rightly discerning the truths of the Christian faith, has often been misread as an attestation of the primacy of the individual subject over the biblical text. It has been treated alternately as a document that signals the emergence of German higher criticism in England,3 a Romantic appeal to the fundamental importance of the subjective in religion,4 and an early form of reader‐oriented literary criticism.5 In this article I suggest that the attention devoted to Coleridge's denial of the verbal inspiration of Scripture, epitomized by the phrase that biblical inspiration is constituted by ‘whatever finds me’, has overshadowed his equally significant attention to the authority of church tradition in that same document. More specifically, rather than arguing for subjectivism in biblical interpretation, Coleridge equally emphasizes the objective sources of revelation expressed in Scripture and the church traditions handed over from the apostles. Rather than proposing a model of biblical inspiration that is wholly individualistic, Coleridge maintains a vision of Christianity that affirms the vitality of both the authority of the church and that of the believer. Thus, Coleridge's theological contribution to religious history is not that of an aberrant, absent‐minded poet, but rather that of a central participant engaged in an ongoing and pivotal debate in the history of England: the relationship between Scripture and church traditions.In order to draw out this important, though neglected, strand of thought in those ‘Letters on the Scriptures’, the name by which the Confessions is sometimes identified,6 I begin by briefly clarifying the nature of the idea of tradition both in relation to Coleridge and English theology in the nineteenth century. I then summarize the argument of the Confessions as a whole and turn more particularly to those sections of the Confessions that suggest the role Coleridge assigns to church tradition in relation to Scripture. Finally, after assessing the authority of the church in relationship to the divine Word, I turn to Coleridge's earlier works and his notes on the Works of William Chillingworth in order to demonstrate that his views on the respective authority of both the individual and the church were consistently held since near the time of his conversion to Trinitarian Christianity. I conclude that Coleridge's conception of the relationship between Scripture and church traditions calls for a reevaluation of his place in the history of religious thought in England. (shrink)

Delve into the intriguing world of bioethics with a twist, where each ethical dilemma is introduced with a dramatic moral mystery story. Far from the usual medical case studies, these tales are crafted not just to educate but to captivate. This innovative resource presents sixty riveting topics designed to educate and captivate medical healthcare students and practitioners. Each issue focuses on high-yield content crucial for boards, licensing exams, and continuing medical education for students and practitioners. The book is an essential (...) reference for clinical practice, ethics consultations. (shrink)

In this chapter, I consider some problems with naturalizing mathematics. More specifically, I consider how the two leading kinds of approach to naturalizing mathematics, to wit, Quinean indispensability‐based approaches and Maddy's Second Philosophical approach, seem to run afoul of constraints that any satisfactory naturalistic mathematics must meet. I then suggest that the failure of these kinds of approach to meet the relevant constraints indicates a general problem with naturalistic mathematics meeting these constraints, and thus with the project of naturalizing mathematics (...) itself. (shrink)