Cultural Consultation is a clinical process that emerged from anthropological critiques of mental healthcare. It includes attention to therapeutic communication, research observations and research methods that capture cultural practices and narratives in mental healthcare. This essay describes the work of a Cultural Consultation Service (ToCCS) that improves service user outcomes by offering cultural consultation to mental health practitioners. The setting is a psychiatric service with complex and challenging work located in an ethnically diverse inner city urban area. Following a period (...) of 18 months of cultural consultation, we gather the dominant narratives that emerged during our evaluation of our service. Results: These narratives highlight how culture is conceptualized and acted upon in the day-to-day practices of individual health and social care professionals, specialist psychiatric teams and in care systems. The findings reveal common narratives and themes about culture, ethnicity, race and their perceived place and meaningfulness in clinical care. These narratives express underlying assumptions and covert rules for managing, and sometimes negating, dilemmas and difficulties when considering “culture” in the presentation and expression of mental distress. The narratives reveal an overall “culture of understanding cultural issues” and specific “cultures of care”. These emerged as necessary foci of intervention to improve service user outcomes. Conclusion: Understanding the cultures of care showed that clinical and managerial over-structuring of care prioritises organisational proficiency, but it leads to inflexibility. Consequently, the care provided is less personalised and less accommodating of cultural issues, therefore, professionals are unable to see or consider cultural influences in recovery. (shrink)

Here, we briefly review the notion of observational indistinguishability within the context of classical general relativity. We settle a conjecture given by Malament (1977) concerning the subject and then strengthen the result considerably. The upshot is this: There seems to be a robust sense in which the global structure of every cosmological model is underdetermined.

It has increasingly been recognised that units of biological classification cannot be identified with the units of evolution. After briefly defending the necessity of this distinction I argue, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, that species should be treated as the fundamental units of classification and not, therefore, as units of evolution. This perspective fits well with the increasing tendency to reject the search for a monistic basis of classification and embrace a pluralistic and pragmatic account of the species category. It (...) also provides a diagnosis of the paradoxical but popular idea that species are individuals: Species are not individuals, but the units of evolution are. (shrink)

In this second part of our two-part paper we review and analyse attempts since 1950 to use information theoretic notions to exorcise Maxwell’s Demon. We argue through a simple dilemma that these attempted exorcisms are ineffective, whether they follow Szilard in seeking a compensating entropy cost in information acquisition or Landauer in seeking that cost in memory erasure. In so far as the Demon is a thermodynamic system already governed by the Second Law, no further supposition about information and entropy (...) is needed to save the Second Law. In so far as the Demon fails to be such a system, no supposition about the entropy cost of information acquisition and processing can save the Second Law from the Demon. (shrink)

Landauer’s principle is the loosely formulated notion that the erasure of n bits of information must always incur a cost of k ln n in thermodynamic entropy. It can be formulated as a precise result in statistical mechanics, but for a restricted class of erasure processes that use a thermodynamically irreversible phase space expansion, which is the real origin of the law’s entropy cost and whose necessity has not been demonstrated. General arguments that purport to establish the unconditional validity of (...) the law fail. They turn out to depend on the illicit formation of a canonical ensemble from memory devices holding random data. To exorcise Maxwell’s demon one must show that all candidate devices—the ordinary and the extraordinary—must fail to reverse the second law of thermodynamics. The theorizing surrounding Landauer’s principle is too fragile and too tied to a few specific examples to support such general exorcism. Charles Bennett’s recent extension of Landauer’s principle to the merging of computational paths fails for the same reasons as trouble the original principle. (shrink)

I seek to reply to the thoughtful and challenging papers by Helen Steward, Saul Smilansky, and John Perry. Steward argues that agency itself requires access to alternative possibilities; I attempt to motivate my denial of this view. I believe that her view here is no more plausible than the view (which she rejects) that it is unfair to hold someone morally responsible, unless he has genuine access to alternative possibilities. Smilansky contends that compatibilism is morally shallow, and that we (...) can see this from the “ultimate perspective.” In reply, I explore the nature of “zooming” arguments, and I contend that even from a somewhat more detached perspective, important features that distinguish us from mere animals can be discerned (even in a causally deterministic universe). Finally, I seek to address Perry’s defense of classical compatibilism. My main objection to his form of compatbilism is that agents must be construed as having a certain kind of “baggage”—even on his own account. (shrink)

Prior Analytics by the Greek philosopher Aristotle and Laws of Thought by the English mathematician George Boole are the two most important surviving original logical works from before the advent of modern logic. This article has a single goal: to compare Aristotle's system with the system that Boole constructed over twenty-two centuries later intending to extend and perfect what Aristotle had started. This comparison merits an article itself. Accordingly, this article does not discuss many other historically and philosophically important aspects (...) of Boole's book, e.g. his confused attempt to apply differential calculus to logic, his misguided effort to make his system of ‘class logic’ serve as a kind of ‘truth-functional logic’, his now almost forgotten foray into probability theory, or his blindness to the fact that a truth-functional combination of equations that follows from a given truth-functional combination of equations need not follow truth-functionally. One of the main conclusions is that Boole's contribution widened logic and changed its nature to such an extent that he fully deserves to share with Aristotle the status of being a founding figure in logic. By setting forth in clear and systematic fashion the basic methods for establishing validity and for establishing invalidity, Aristotle became the founder of logic as formal epistemology. By making the first unmistakable steps toward opening logic to the study of ‘laws of thought’—tautologies and laws such as excluded middle and non-contradiction—Boole became the founder of logic as formal ontology.… using mathematical methods … has led to more knowledge about logic in one century than had been obtained from the death of Aristotle up to … when Boole's masterpiece was published.Paul Rosenbloom 1950. (shrink)

Why was the road to EMBL 'more difficult than anticipated', as Francois Jacob put it? The standard account, advanced by scientists, is that it was because molecular biology did not require big, complex and expensive equipment like high-energy physics. European governments therefore lacked the incentive to pool their efforts and to build together a supranational laboratory 'modeled on CERN'. This account is one-sided. It overlooks the fact that many scientists themselves were less than enthusiastic about building a European molecular biology (...) laboratory in the early 1960s. Taking John Kendrew and Conrad Waddington as representative of two different and opposing views on how best to promote molecular biology in Europe at this time, I argue that a supranational laboratory project could only come to fruition once the field had been entrenched in national institutional niches (or after determined efforts to do so had failed). Until that time, the usual fear that a European laboratory would drain essential human and financial resources away from incipient or planned programmes in universities and national research centres dominated the horizons of most molecular biologists in Europe. Hence their preference to first establish EMBO to coordinate existing activities and only later to set up a supranational laboratory. (shrink)

Except for a few brief periods, Einstein was uninterested in analysing the nature of the spacetime singularities that appeared in solutions to his gravitational field equations for general relativity. The existence of such monstrosities reinforced his conviction that general relativity was an incomplete theory which would be superseded by a singularity-free unified field theory. Nevertheless, on a number of occasions between 1916 and the end of his life, Einstein was forced to confront singularities. His reactions show a strange asymmetry: he (...) tended to be more disturbed by merely apparent singularities and less disturbed by real singularities. Einstein had strong a priori ideas about what results a correct physical theory should deliver. In the process of searching through theoretical possibilities, he tended to push aside technical problems and jump over essential difficulties. Sometimes this method of working produced brilliant new ideas—such as the Einstein–Rosen bridge—and sometimes it lead him to miss important implications of his theory of gravity—such as gravitational collapse. (shrink)

In this article I explore the underlying political philosophy of public bioethics by comparing it to technocratic authority, particularly the technocratic authority claimed by economists in Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s. I find that public bioethics - at least in the dominant forms - is implicitly designed for and tries to use technocratic authority. I examine how this type of bioethics emerged and has continued. I finish by arguing that, as claims to technocratic authority go, bioethics is in an (...) incredibly weak position, which partly explains why it has never gained the degree of public legitimacy that other technocracies have gained. I conclude by arguing for a "technocracy-lite" orientation for public bioethics. (shrink)

In this paper I begin by arguing that there are significant intellectual and normative continuities between pre-Victorian hereditarianism and later Victorian eugenical ideologies. Notions of mental heredity and of the dangers of transmitting hereditary ‘taints’ were already serious concerns among medical practitioners and laymen in the early nineteenth century. I then show how the Victorian period witnessed an increasing tendency for these traditional concerns about hereditary transmission and the integrity of bloodlines to be projected onto the level of national health. (...) Tracing the gradual emergence of eugenical thought, I also highlight some of the more fundamental social, political and intellectual factors that promoted this predilection for extrapolating from the individual lineage to the nation and race. In doing so I argue that fully fledged eugenical thought was always unlikely to emerge prior to the early Victorian period. However, I am also able to show that Francis Galton's 1865 eugenical proposals were far from innovative and that identifying him as the ‘father’ of the eugenics movement is highly misleading. (shrink)

The origins of oxidative phosphorylation, initially known as aerobic phosphorylation, grew out of three research areas of muscle metabolism, creatine phosphorylation, aerobic metabolism of lactic acid in muscle, and studies on the nature and role of adenosine triphosphate . Much of this work centred round the laboratory of Otto Meyerhof, and most of those contributing to the study of aerobic phosphorylation were influenced by that laboratory: particularly Lipmann and also Ochoa. The work of Engelhardt on ATP levels in blood also (...) appears to have been influenced by the studies of Meyerhof’s laboratory. However, with the work of Kalckar, influenced by Lipmann, biochemists began to realise the potential importance of the process. This was confirmed and extended by Belitzer and Ochoa and the theoretical contribution of Lipmann. Thus it is not easy to identify a single point that marked the initiation of studies in this field.The early work was based on the use of tissue homogenates and cells but ultimately this approach limited research possibilities. The development of techniques based on mitochondria opened up new possibilities and brought this first phase of the study of oxidative phorphorylation to a close. (shrink)

Members of the New Academy presented their sceptical position as the culmination of a progressive development in the history of philosophy, which began when certain Presocratics started to reflect on the epistemic status of their theoretical claims concerning the natures of things. The Academics' dogmatic opponents accused them of misrepresenting the early philosophers in an illegitimate attempt to claim respectable precedents for their dangerous position. The ensuing debate over the extent to which some form of scepticism might properly be attributed (...) to the Presocratics is reflected in various passages in Cicero's "Academica." In this essay, we try to get clearer about the precise nature of the Academics' historical claim and their view of the general lesson to be learned from reflection on the history of philosophy down to their own time. The Academics saw the Presocratics as providing some kind of support for the thesis that things are non-cognitive, or, more specifically, that neither the senses nor reason furnishes a criterion of truth. As this view is susceptible to both 'dialectical' and non-dialectical readings, we consider the prospects for each. We also examine the evidence for the varied functions both of the Academics' specific appeals to individual Presocratics and of their collections of the Presocratics' divergent opinions. What emerges is a better understanding of why the Academics were concerned with claiming the Presocratics as sceptical ancestors and of the precise manner in which they advanced this claim. (shrink)

In his book Why Not Socialism?, G.A. Cohen described several kinds of inequality that would be acceptable under socialism, yet nonetheless harmful to community. I describe another kind of inequality with this property, deriving from the legitimate transmission of preferences and values from parents to children. In the same book, Cohen proposes that the designing of a socialist allocation mechanism is a key problem for socialist theory. I maintain this is less of a problem than he believes. Finally, some thoughts (...) on the “law of motion of socialist ethos” are offered. (shrink)

French surrealist author Raymond Roussel’s novel Locus solus depicted a brain-in-a-vat apparatus in which the head of the revolutionary orator Georges Danton was reanimated and made to speak. This scene of mechanically-produced language echoes Roussel’s own method of quasi-mechanical literary production as presented in How I wrote certain of my books. Roussel’s work participates in a wider fascination in modern French thought with the fragile connection, or violent disjuncture, between the body and mind. This paper discusses a number of instances (...) in which bodiless and reanimated heads played a central role in reflections on knowledge, art, and individuality. Roussel’s works offer a sidelong commentary on the notion of explanation in the sciences and the cult of reason in a technocratic society. (shrink)

ArgumentEvolutionary psychologists argue that because humans are biological creatures, cultural explanationsmustinclude biology. They thus offer to unify the natural and social sciences. Evolutionary psychologists rely on a specific history of cultural anthropology, particularly the work of Alfred Kroeber to make this point. A close examination of the history of cultural anthropology reveals that Kroeber acknowledged that humans were biological and culture had a biological foundation; however, he argued that we should treat culture as autonomous because that would bring benefits to (...) the biological sciences as well as the human sciences. Hence, the historical caricature of his work by evolutionary psychology fails. The paper concludes that cultural anthropologists were successful in creating their discipline, at least in part, because they argued by pragmatic definition. Evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, offers an essentialist definition of “culture” and thus offers a much less promising vision of interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

Theories that seek to explain the status of psychological states experienced in fictional contexts either claim that those states are special propositional attitudes specific to fictional contexts (make-believe attitudes), or else define them as normal propositional attitudes by stretching the concept of a propositional attitude to include ‘objectless’ states that do not imply constraints such as truth or satisfaction. I argue that the first theory is either vacuous or false, and that the second, by defining the reality of the states (...) in question only nominally, risks having a result similar to the first. Then I put forward an explanation of how propositional attitudes function in fictional contexts which meets the following requirements: (i) does not postulate the existence of attitudes specific to or definitive of fictionality; (ii) does not imply that we transgress our knowledge of the ontological claims of fictions for some attitudes (for example, fear) but not others (belief); (iii) explains how we can adopt normal propositional attitudes towards fictions; (iv) allows explanation of how attitudes adopted during fictional response connect or are relevant to our broader systems of belief and volition. (shrink)

This paper explores the history of a unique assemblage of researchers in the geodetic and allied sciences organised at Ohio State University (OSU) in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. From about 1950 to 1970, the OSU geodetic sciences group was the most significant group of geodetic researchers in the world. Funded almost entirely by military and intelligence agencies, they pioneered the technologies, organised the research initiatives, ordered the data sets, and trained the generation of geodesists who eventually (...) created the Cold War Figure of the Earth to both prosecute and prevent global nuclear war. They devised elaborate mechanisms to pursue in secrecy and isolation research that had hitherto been performed collaboratively and globally. They invented methods to maintain professional associations and protocols, both to distribute-and disguise-the fruits of their geodetic research. In accomplishing this, their work also undermined the basic hypothesis of isostasy that had been foundational to geodesy for the previous century.Fundamental progress in the geosciences and military and intelligence directives were inextricably linked during the Cold War, although the extent of their convergence has been masked by the security protocols organised to disguise it. With the declassification of key programmes underway, it is now both possible and necessary to substantially revise the history of Cold War-era geosciences and their associated technologies. (shrink)

Some bioethicists are concerned about other bioethicists being paid by corporations. These concerns make sense if you have a particular view about what the most important role of a bioethicist should be. If you believe that a bioethicist should be a moral critic, attempting to expose wrongdoing, then being paid by corporations might compromise this role. It’s plausible to suppose that this can be a role for bioethicists but it’s unreasonable to insist that all bioethicists should be moral critics.

The main goal of this paper is to argue against Karl Rogers's attacks on realism in physics. Rogers argues that electrons do not exist independently of the relevant socio-technological process, but I show that such an assumption would make our best scientific theories incomprehensible. While the paper supports Rogers's attempts to refute positivism, it demonstrates that his own position is positivistic, and it corrects his overemphasis on the roles of technology and the experimenter. Rogers assumes that the founders of modern (...) science were simply mechanists, but I show how they were actually Platonic realists. Contrary to Rogers, realist faith in the fundamental unifying power of the laws of physics is shown to be reasonable, and any denial of this belief would imply that science is impossible. (shrink)

There are two main groups of essays in this volume. The first centres on Locke's theories of religion and their relation to contemporary scientific thought and the work of Descartes, Leibniz and Hume. The second group explores the relation between biology and physiology, and the science of man.

Will enable the ordinary person to discover his or her own unique life myth and live it from moment to moment.

The principle of "organism"—of intrinsic and dynamic unity—and the existence of "organized bodies"—of living things—in the physical world represented crucial preoccupations for philosophers of nature and experimental naturalists across the eighteenth century. How to make sense of these in a manner consistent with a unified scientific understanding of the physical world became the inevitable challenge that accompanied these recognitions. In just this theoretical enterprise, Leibniz emerges to historical scrutiny as an indispensable and pervasive influence. Thus, we are very fortunate to (...) have the body of scholarship that François Duchesneau has devoted to this topic over the course of his illustrious career. In this... (shrink)

Double effect reasoning is central to Catholic moral theology. It is the principle which enables it to maintain absolute moral standards while effectively handling morally difficult choices which entail bringing about some evil as well as the good. DER has been focused on the way in which it applies to human agents and their relation to bringing about evil as well as the good. According to DER, only the good can be brought about intentionally; evil can only be brought about (...) as the side effect of the good. It will be argued that DER also applies to God’s choices. It is our best resource for understanding God’s relation to evil in the world He creates. (shrink)

I told the workers they had to be prepared for the tortures of success. Success in our business, the trade union business, means getting workers to middle-class status. You succeed and Huelga is just going to be an exciting recollection. The guy who carried a banner in 1966—well, in five years you're going to have a hard time getting him to a union meeting: Revolutions become institutions, that's a truism of our business.