At the turn of the 21st century, a collection of donors created the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to spark a “new” Green Revolution on the African continent. Since its inception, AGRA’s mission has revolved around a series of interventions designed around the idea of making agriculture a “business.” In this paper, I ask how AGRA puts such discourses into practice with a particular focus in Ghana. To do so, I draw on a television show produced by (...) AGRA called Kuapa, organizational literature, and to a lesser extent, interviews, to assess how AGRA materializes its goals in Ghana. Ultimately, I argue that a focus on discourse not only provides insight into how AGRA conceptualizes agricultural transformation, but also how AGRA pursues agronomic, political, and social changes in the countries in which it intervenes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe recent increase in research and commercialization of genetically modified crops in Africa has resulted in considerable and understandable interest from farmers, scholars, and practitioners. However, messy situations are often hard to critically engage in from afar, and the recent article published by Braimah et al. [. Debated agronomy: Public discourse and the future of biotechnology policy in Ghana. Global Bioethics. doi:10.1080/11287462.2016.1261604] presents certain claims that further obfuscate – rather than clarify – an already complex landscape. In this commentary I (...) first seek to clarify particular details of the Ghanaian “GMO” story with particular focus on certain actors and their stances. Next, I highlight some methodological shortcomings of Debated Agronomy and correct certain dubious quotations and claims. Finally, I suggest a more ethnographically and discourse-focused methodology to gain much needed insight into how Ghanaia... (shrink)

The theory of visual perception that Irvin Rock develops and supports in this book with numerous original experiments, views perception as the outcome of a process of unconscious inference, problem solving, and the building of structural descriptions of the external world.

Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.

Government accountability is generally accepted to be an essential feature of modern democratic society; while others might turn a blind eye to corruption and wrongdoing, those who value accountability would instead shine a bright light on it. In this context, it is common to hear claims of accountability 'deficit' and 'overload'. Despite the frequency of references to these concepts, their precise content remains undeveloped. This book offers an explanation, as well as a framework for future exploration, of these concepts. It (...) highlights the difficulty of defining a benchmark that might be used to measure the amount of accountability in a particular situation, and also the challenge of mapping out accountability mechanisms as a system. While difficult, if accountability is indeed a foundational concept underpinning our system of government, there is merit in meeting these challenges head-on. (shrink)

The Sera Jey Monastery, reestablished near Mysore, India, houses 5,000 Buddhist monks living in exile -- including survivors of the destruction of the Tibetan monastery in 1959. Sheila Rock's moving portraits are a celebration of the everyday simplicity and subtle beauty of the ascetic life. More than a hundred duotone photographs document the compassionate expressions, emotional openness, and aura of serenity inspired by lives of renunciation and seclusion. A percentage of the royalties from this book go to the Sera (...) Jhe Health Care Committee in aid of various humanitarian projects. (shrink)

This paper explores the financial reporting scandals of the past decade and the resulting U.S. legislative attempts to impose ethical behavior and control the incidence of new reporting problems via the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. We begin with a brief historical perspective followed by assertions of ethical consequences of legislation with discussions of key recent corporate scandals, the motives for the frauds, and the consequences. Ethics related provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are discussed with the potential impact of the legislation on the (...) likelihood of similar future frauds and accompanying prognosis for future corporate ethical behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Five More MinutesKristen Carey RockFive more minutes. How many times have you said the phrase, "I need just five more minutes"—perhaps to finish a note, clean up the kitchen, or read the kids a bedtime story? It is a seemingly insignificant amount of time. But what if you knew that these five minutes were the last five minutes you would spend conscious on this earth? The last five minutes (...) you would spend with your parents and your young children before you would receive a sedative and be transported down to the operating room, where you would be removed from life support and then donate your organs? In a hoarse rasp through his tracheostomy, he kept whispering, "Please. Just five more minutes."This is the reality that I walked into one Friday morning in 2021 as I took over the ICU service at my hospital. I am an ICU doctor at a busy academic center in the northeast and was on the frontlines of our COVID response, including the care of patients who required ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation)—the last resort for treating patients suffering from severe lung disease.I did not have the privilege of meeting this patient until the morning of his death, but I knew he had been in the hospital for close to three months due to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) due to COVID-19. On the spectrum of COVID symptoms, this problem is the worst of the worst, and it left his lungs in tatters—so much so that he had relied on an ECMO machine to perform the functions of his lungs for many weeks in hopes that he would either recover or become eligible for a lung transplant. During this time, many hundreds of doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners and respiratory therapists had gotten to know him quite well. They met his father, former wife, and his four school-aged children. They learned of his service to our country as a member of the Air Force and his subsequent devotion to his community as a religious leader and beacon in his community. As he recovered to the point where he was able to be awake and interactive with a tracheostomy, allowing him to mouth words, they also got to know him as a kind and gentle man with a fierce will to live and devotion to his family.Yet, after many weeks of ups and downs, progress and setbacks, it became clear that he could not survive without the help of his ECMO machine. Though it is possible for someone to survive for many months on ECMO, like most forms of life support, it is a bridge rather than a destination therapy. More complicated and invasive than other forms of life support, it is resource-intense and fraught with medical complications. And one day, came the heartbreaking news that due to too many blood transfusions during his illness, he would not be able to receive a lung transplant. He and his care team realized this meant there was no path forward. It came as little surprise to those who knew him that when he realized that he could not live independent of machines or outside the walls of an intensive care unit, his final act would be to help others. He would give others the opportunity for the organ transplant that he so cruelly could not receive.And so, the date and time were set. The transplant teams from other hospitals began to arrive. His final morning on earth would be spent with his family, except for a last trip outside to see the sunshine. With masterful coordination, his ICU room was recreated on the roof atop our helipad. As an army of caregivers attended to his tubes, pumps, and machines, he was able to feel the warmth of the spring wind as the Air Force sent an honor guard of fighter jets to pay their final respects. I watched him smile as the planes flew overhead, unsure if he could see or just hear them. Even though someone had the foresight to place a pair of sunglasses on his face, he still grimaced at the sunlight after months of artificial... (shrink)

William Pennel Rock argues with Center fellows about the roles of love and reason in the dialogue.

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 18 Heft: 2 Seiten: 153-166.

Although Kant is often considered the philosopher who ended the reign of metaphysical dogmatism, the situation is not quite so clear. On the one hand, this analysis must bear in mind that Kant himself had a great interest in metaphysics, insofar as it was not dogmatic – Kant himself considered his Critique to be just a reform of metaphysics. On the other hand, the Critique of Pure Reason itself is a result of certain metaphysical-dogmatic preliminary decisions. In order to show (...) how one-sided the idea is that Kant simply did away with metaphysics, I will draw attention to the metaphysical presuppositions that shape the Critique of Pure Reason. The first thinker who attempted to explicate the metaphysical basis of the Critique was Kant’s friend and colleague Johann Georg Hamann. With Hamann’s guidance I will argue that even his Critique of Pure Reason was based on metaphysical presuppositions and that such an influence by metaphysical preliminary decisions is inevitable – even for such a sharp critic of metaphysical dogmatism as Kant. At the same time this text provides an introduction to Hamann’s thought, a thinker ahead of his times. (shrink)

Explores what we know about God from the words of the Bible and from the world around us.

This essay describes the complexities, challenges, and pleasures of translating from German into English a charming fantasy about the world of molecules, published in 1882 by the chemist and historian Hermann Kopp (1817–1892).

This paper investigates the correlation of Thinking, as understood by Martin Heidegger, and his concept of Thing.

In this paper, I will describe how Brentano was able to integrate descriptive philosophy and logical analysis fruitfully by pointing out Brentano’s concept of philosophy as a rigorous science. First I will clarify how Brentano attempted to turn philosophy into a rigorous descriptive science by applying scientific methods to philosophical questions. After spelling out the implications of such a descriptive understanding of philosophy, I will contrast this descriptive view of philosophy with a semantic-analytic understanding of philosophy as proposed by Frege. (...) After having thus set the stage I will argue that the current separation of philosophy into the seemingly antithetical strands of phenomenology and analytic philosophy may be seen as a consequence of how the term ‘rigorous science’ in ‘philosophy as a rigorous science’ is interpreted: Does a rigorous science grasp its object with as much exactitude as possible? Or is a science rigorous when its theories are expressed unambiguously, and their implications are drawn with precision? In the course of this investigation I will also point out how Brentano’s integrative use of descriptive philosophy and analysis can provide a suitable starting point for an equally successful integration of these methods in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Based on a creative use of the phenomenological method, we argue that a close examination of the temporality of objects reveals the future as genuinely open. Without aiming to decide the matter of phenomenological realism, we suggest that this method can be used to investigate the mode of being of objects in their own temporality. By bracketing the anticipatory structure of experience, one can get a sense of objects’ temporality as independent of consciousness. This contributes to the current Realism versus (...) Idealism debates, but it does so without taking sides. The starting point is neither an analysis of pure consciousness, nor attempts to describe objects in-themselves, but the idea that things can be phenomenologically grasped through the difference between their temporality and our own. By being methodically “open to the future,” one can become aware of the sui generis temporality of objects as different from the temporality shaped by our anticipation. (shrink)

In this contribution, I will argue for an ontological understanding of time as temporality. This, however, implies that in a certain sense being is temporality, by which I mean that on an ontological level temporality is nothing but the process of change, i.e. the dynamic aspect of being in its becoming, changing, and perishing, and that concrete beings are not merely in time, but they are temporal. This leads to the conclusion that actual time is the process of change that (...) becoming beings are, as well as the conclusion that reality is fundamentally temporal as argued by process metaphysicians like Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Gilles Deleuze. The investigation begins with first establishing the methodological difficulties involved in thinking temporality as an ontological feature. In a second step, dynamic ontologies are introduced as the conceptual background best suited to think ontological temporality and their difference to event-ontologies is explained. Finally, the distinction between temporality and linear time is clarified. This introduction of temporality ends with some arguments for the existence of temporality that are inspired by Aristotle’s famous investigations into the nature of time. After having thus introduced temporality as an ontological feature and argued for the existence and relevance of it, its implications for our understanding of the dimensions of time and especially for anticipation are discussed. (shrink)

This article attempts a contextual study of the origin and early development of August Kekulé's theory of aromatic compounds. The terminus a quo is essentially August Hofmann's coining of the modern chemical denotation of ‘aromatic’ in 1855; the terminus ad quem is the first full codification of Kekulé's theory in the sixth fascicle of his Lehrbuch der organischen Chemie, published in the summer of 1866. Kekulé's theory is viewed in context with the earlier and concurrent experimental work of such chemists (...) as Hermann Kolbe, Friedrich Beilstein, Rudolph Fittig, and Hugo Müller. The reception of the theory is briefly examined. Attention is paid to the role of Kekulé's molecular models and of his celebrated dream anecdote of the snake that seizes its own tail. The episode is used as a case study for the continuity of scientific progress, and to illustrate the close reciprocal interactions of hypothesis and experiment in the evolution of a scientific theory. (shrink)

One Health is a novel paradigm that recognizes that human and non-human animal health is interlinked through our shared environment. Increasingly prominent in public health responses to zoonoses, OH differs from traditional approaches to animal-borne infectious risks, because it also aims to promote the health of animals and ecological systems. Despite the widespread adoption of OH, culling remains a key component of institutional responses to the risks of zoonoses. Using the threats posed by highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses to human (...) and animal health, economic activity and food security as a case exemplar, we explore whether culling and other standard control measures for animal-borne infectious disease might be justified as part of OH approaches. Our central premise is that OH requires us to reformulate ‘health’ as universal good that is best shared across species boundaries such that human health and well-being are contingent upon identifying and meeting the relevant sets of human and non-human interests and shared dependencies. Our purpose is to further nascent discussions about the ethical dimensions of OH and begin to describe the principles around which a public health agenda that truly seeks to co-promote human and non-human health could potentially begin to be implemented. (shrink)

Within the field of medical ethics, discussions related to public health have mainly concentrated on issues that are closely tied to research and practice involving technologies and professional services, including vaccination, screening, and insurance coverage. Broader determinants of population health have received less attention, although this situation is rapidly changing. Against this backdrop, our specific contribution to the literature on ethics and law vis-à-vis promoting population health is to open up the ubiquitous presence of pets within cities and towns for (...) further discussion. An expanding body of research suggests that pet animals are deeply relevant to people’s health (negatively and positively). Pet bylaws adopted by town and city councils have largely escaped notice, yet they are meaningful to consider in relation to everyday practices, social norms, and cultural values, and thus in relation to population health. Nevertheless, not least because they pivot on defining pets as private property belonging to individual people, pet bylaws raise emotionally charged ethical issues that have yet to be tackled in any of the health research on pet ownership. The literature in moral philosophy on animals is vast, and we do not claim to advance this field here. Rather, we pragmatically seek to reconcile philosophical objections to pet ownership with both animal welfare and public health. In doing so, we foreground theorizations of personhood and property from sociocultural anthropology. (shrink)

Some recent philosophers of science have argued that chemistry in the nineteenth century “largely lacked theoretical foundations, and showed little progress in supplying such foundations” until around 1900, or even later. In particular, nineteenth-century atomic theory, it is said, “played no useful part” in the crowning achievement of nineteenth-century chemistry, the powerful subdiscipline of organic chemistry. This paper offers a contrary view. The idea that chemistry only gained useful theoretical foundations when it began to merge with physics, it will be (...) argued, is based on an implicit conception of scientific theory that is too narrow, and too exclusively oriented to the science of physics. A broader understanding of scientific theory, and one that is more appropriate to the science of chemistry, reveals the essential part that theory played in the development of chemistry in the nineteenth century. It also offers implications for our understanding of the nature of chemical theory today. (shrink)