In this article, it is hypothesized that a fundamental chemical reactivity exists between some non‐lipid constituents of cellular membranes and ester‐based lipids, the significance of which is not generally recognized. Many peptides and smaller organic molecules have now been shown to undergo lipidation reactions in model membranes in circumstances where direct reaction with the lipid is the only viable route for acyl transfer. Crucially, drugs like propranolol are lipidated in vivo with product profiles that are comparable to those produced in (...) vitro. Some compounds have also been found to promote lipid hydrolysis. Drugs with high lytic activity in vivo tend to have higher toxicity in vitro. Deacylases and lipases are proposed as key enzymes that protect cells against the effects of intrinsic lipidation. The toxic effects of intrinsic lipidation are hypothesized to include a route by which nucleation can occur during the formation of amyloid fibrils. (shrink)

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

Thinking with images -- Aesthetics without theory -- The Baroque and Bacon's popes -- Chance meeting with Duane Michals -- Étant donnés, Marcel Duchamp -- Le Mépris or Contempt, a film by Jean-Luc Godard.

Recent policy debates in the US over access to mental health care have raised several philosophically complex ethical and conceptual issues. The defeat of mental health parity legislation in the US Congress has brought new urgency and relevance to theoretical and empirical investigations into the nature of mental illness and its relation to other forms of sickness and disability. Manifold, nebulous, and often competing conceptions of mental illness make the creation of coherent public policy exceedingly difficult. Referencing a variety of (...) approaches to ethical reflection on health care, and drawing from the empirical literature on therapeutic efficacy and economic efficiency, we argue that differential rationing, ‘disparity,’ is unjustifiable. (shrink)

Although Aristotle does not explicitly address persistence, his account of persisting may be derived from a careful consideration of his account of change. On my interpretation, he supposes that motions are mereological unities of their potential temporal parts – I dub such mereological unities ‘lasting’. Aristotle’s persisting things, too, are lasting, I argue. Lasting things are unlike enduring things in that they have temporal parts; and unlike perduring things in that their temporal parts are not actual, but rather are potential. (...) Lasting, that is Aristotle’s persisting, is thus a distinctive alternative to enduring and perduring. I assess this alternative showing it to be attractive. (shrink)

Creating Public Value in Practice: Advancing the Common Good in a Multi-Sector, Shared-Power, No-One-Wholly-in-Charge World brings together a stellar cast of thinkers to explore issues of public and cross-sector decision-making within a framework of democratic civic engagement. It offers an integrative approach to understanding and applying the concepts of creating public value, public values, and the public sphere. It presents a framework and language for opening a constructive conversation on what governments, businesses, nonprofits, and citizens can achieve in a democracy (...) that honors a broad range of public values. Public officials, scholars, and citizens alike are engaged in an intense debate about the proper purpose, role, and size of government. In the midst of this debate is a growing concern that important public values are ignored by government reform efforts. This book explores the different definitions of public value and approaches to public value creation, discernment, measurement, and assessment. The text helps clarify the issues and demonstrates how the meaning of public value is intimately related to how it is theorized, operationalized, and measured. The book examines the many alternatives for recognizing, measuring, and assessing public value and addresses the pros and cons of each approach. The result is a contribution to the ongoing dialogue about the virtues and limitations of a focus on the public sphere, public values, and how to create public value in the context of developing and implementing policies, programs, projects, and plans that ideally boost confidence in public institutions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:275 DAVID HUME AND THE CONCEPT OF VOLITION Introduction The following two papers, though separately authored, belong together, not only because we, the authors, shared our views during the writing, but also because they are excerpts from a single story we are interested in telling. This is the story of a particular insight into the conceptual structure of human volition — the will. The insight is that volition — (...) or, more precisely, intention — is (or presupposes) a kind of knowledge, practical knowledge. Our larger goal is to show how this insight was developed from the time of Aristotle into the Middle Ages, and then fell into obscurity in modern philosophy until quite recently. This insight became especially clear in the writings of Thomas Aquinas. The epistemological development which obscured it was most powerfully furthered by David Hume. The recovery of the insight was initially the work of the later Wittgenstein. The first paper deals with Aquinas; the second with Wittgenstein; and both with Hume.... (shrink)

In numerous works, Alvin Plantinga argues that classical foundationalism is a failed theory of knowledge because of its self-referential incoherence. Plantinga's argument, however, fails to demonstrate that classical foundationalism is self-refuting. To bring this to light, I will review the form of Plantinga's argument in comparison with other examples of self-refutation. Upon closer inspection, it will be clear that classical foundationalism is not self-refuting, as Plantinga claims. Furthermore, I will expose another flaw in Plantinga's argument against classical foundationalism, which shows (...) at best that Plantinga's argument cannot be reconstructed to demonstrate that classical foundationalism is improbable. While Plantinga's argument may highlight a challenge for classical foundationalism, his argument does not establish the falsity ofclassical foundationalism, nor does it offer any other overriding reason to reject it. Thus, Plantinga's criticisms of classical foundationalism by themselves are not sufficient to rule out the theory's viability. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 26 (3) 2007: pp. 245-251. (shrink)

This Article invites Professor Henry Veatch to consider some of Finnis' previous work. Finnis asserts that his work presents "serious questions" for those who interpret Aristotle and Acquinas in the way the Veatch does and invites Veatch to respond.

_Essays on Politics and Society_ brings together the most significant writings on the topic by the acclaimed Victorian historian, social critic, and essayist Thomas Carlyle. This volume includes some of his most well-known and influential pieces, such as "Characteristics" and "Chartism." In keeping with the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, these essays are accompanied by a thorough historical introduction to the material, extensive notes providing historical and cultural context while expanding on references and allusions, (...) and a textual apparatus that carefully details and explains the editorial decisions made in reconciling the editions of each essay. (shrink)

At the end of Being and Nothingness, Sartre defines the spirit of seriousness in the following way: “The spirit of seriousness has two characteristics: it considers values as transcendent givens independent of human subjectivity, and it transfers the quality of ‘desirable’ from the ontological structure of things to their simple material constitution.” My aim in this paper is to show how Sartre is susceptible to a tu quoque in terms of how he describes the threataspect of the world of objects. (...) That is, in works such as Nausea, Sartre appears to regard the world of objects as inherently threatening, and thus he has transferred the quality of threatening from the ontological structure of things to their simple material constitution. (shrink)

The main sources here are Hume, Husserl, and De Finetti. The problem is how phenomenological investigation has to do with partial or probabilistic judgment. Behavioristic, frequentist and subjectivistic views are briefly surveyed. A variant of Hume's account of the probability of chances is developed with the help of De Finetti's concept of exchangeability. The question of transcendental elements in or behind partial judgment is considered in the light of understanding disagreement and error in partial judgment.

The interpretation of the calculus of probability as a logic of partial belief has at least two advantages: it makes the assignment of probabilities plausible in cases where classical frequentist interpretations must find such assignments meaningless, and it gives a clear meaning to partial belief and to consistency of partial belief.

In this paper I try to defend three claims: first, that there is a requirement to aid and a correlative right to be aided; second, that the conditions under which this right applies can be precisely stated and given a convincing contractualist rationale; and third, that the existence of this right has no relevance for the justifiability of social welfare programs.

This article explores the loss of the Louisiana wetlands from an eco-psychology viewpoint. The causes of the deterioration of Louisiana's coastal wetlands include direct ones such as the building of canals, pipelines, and levee systems, and more importantly, humanity's disconnection from the voices of nature and the wilderness. This article takes the reader to the dying edge of a continent, and invites the reader to adopt a new vision of our place within the world.

This paper explains and criticizes the definition of corruption used by the U.S. Supreme Court in its campaign finance decisions and proposes components of a new definition to be applied by the Court. The paper also offers a preliminary assessment of the impact of the Citizens United v. FEC decision of 2010, and suggests that much of the analysis to date has been inaccurate or superficial. Further, given the Court’s expansive analysis and application of the First Amendment to corporate political (...) activities in its latest decisions, the paper also suggests alternative checks on corporate political power related to shareholder activism and corporate governance. (shrink)

When President Donald Trump honored radio host Rush Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the State of the Union Address in 2020, nearly everyone knew why this was happening. A rad...

Building a framework of laws around acts of war or aggression is not easy, especially in the world of international relations, where anarchy characterizes the fundamental nature of world affairs. W...

Literature on the teaching of ethics points to the need for realistic business problems in which students deal with ethical dilemmas. This paper presents the results of an experiment in which students take on the role of a Brand Manager who must decide on the level of support to allocate to four distinct business problems. The problems were presented as business problems including realistic profit and cost considerations, rather than being posed as "ethics cases". Students were able to select from (...) a range of product support levels for each problem. The experiment isolated the factor effects which included level of realism, degree of competition, company situation in terms of fault and profit level, and problem type relative to damage and visibility. Company fault was the most important factor in determining the level of product support allocations. Allocations generally increased when there was an increase in profit level from low to medium. However, there was no additional increase in allocations above the medium profit level. The paper concludes with suggestions on how the results can be used as a springboard for discussion of the integration of ethical considerations in managerial decision making. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1938, is based upon the Muirhead lectures on political philosophy delivered in the University of Birmingham in January and February of 1938. This title was intended to be of interest to students and scientific workers in the belief that Marxism will prove valuable to them in their scientific work, as well as to a wider audience.

A discussion of the human side of science, originally published in 1981.

Jacob (history, New School for Social Research) proposes that the science of the 17th and 18th centuries was eventually accepted because it was made compatible with larger political and economic interests. A celebration of the recently concluded 33 volume edition of the Collected works of John Stuart Mill, produced over a period of nearly 30 years, the last 20 under the guiding genius (and hand) of general editor Robson. Following a tributary history of the project itself, essays cover Mill's (...) career as a thinker and as a bureaucrat and public servant, exploring the effects of the various milieu--domestic, political, administrative, religious, and cultural--in which he moved. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

So, on 22 July 1865, under the title ‘Philosophy and Punch’, did England's premier comic weekly greet the election of J. S. Mill as MP for Westminster. Mill held his seat for only one term, until the general election of 1868, when his Whig-Liberal colleague Robert Wellesley Grosvenor was re-elected, but Mill was replaced by the loser in 1865, the Conservative W. H. Smith, Jr., who, though he never went to sea, became the ruler of the Queen's navy. The reasons (...) for that reversal have engaged the attention of many, including Mill himself; I should like to introduce into the discussion material from an ignored source, the comic weeklies, which took a continued and close look at Mill's behaviour during his parliamentary years. While this evidence generally does not disconfirm earlier judgments—including my own— it does more than merely add to the induction. First, it shows how different political stances led journals to focus on different aspects of Mill's parliamentary career, and to adopt different rhetorical strategies in portraying him in picture and word. Second, it demonstrates how the hardening of party allegiances during the parliament of 1865–68, which accelerated in the preparatory campaigns for the general election of 1868, affected Mill adversely. Third, it suggests strongly that it was not his ‘crotchets’ or ‘whims’, especially women's suffrage and proportional representation, that damaged his chances for re-election, but his advocacy of causes unpopular with the majority of Liberals as well as with Conservatives. (shrink)

In this 1976 volume, Professor Ziman paints a broad picture of science, and of its relations to the world in general. He sets the scene by the historical development of scientific research as a profession, the growth of scientific technologies out of the useful arts, the sources of invention and technical innovation, and the advent of Big Science. He then discusses the economics of research and development, the connections between science and war, the nature of science policy and the moral (...) dilemmas of social responsibility in science. Each topic is introduced by reference to easily understandable particular examples, with a large number of illustrations chosen to bring out the concreteness and reality of science as a human activity. Professor Ziman gives a chapter-by-chapter list of suggested topics for oral and written discussion, intended to provoke critical, sceptical attitudes to simplified solutions to real issues, and comments briefly on relevant books and other sources. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to give a coherent account of the different perspectives on science and technology that are normally studied under various disciplinary heads such as philosophy of science, sociology of science and science policy. It is intended for students embarking on courses in these subjects and assumes no special knowledge of any science. It is written in a direct and simple style, and technical language is introduced very sparingly. As various perspectives are sketched out in this (...) book, the reader moves towards a consistent conception of contemporary science as a rapidly changing social institution that has already grown out of its traditional forms and plays a central role in society at large. It will appeal to students in a wide range of scientific disciplines and complement well Professor Ziman's earlier books. (shrink)