We all categorize ourselves. You might think of yourself as a student, or as a painter, or as being good with numbers, or as being civic-minded. These labels we use to categorize ourselves have a huge effect on how we make our decisions–when faced with the choice of doing X vs. doing Y, whether I think of myself as someone’s who’s civic-minded and whether someone who’s civic-minded would do X can both play a huge role in influencing whether I decide (...) to do X. What does all that have to do with freedom? Our guest this month thinks that freedom just is the ability to affect, shape, or even create these sorts of labels, before then applying them to yourself. It isn’t as though anyone invents every label they apply to themselves; plenty of them are handed down to us from popular culture and other sources. But Mariam Thalos thinks that if you’re living freely, you are playing at least some creative role in fashioning your own self-conception. (shrink)

Background Little is known about communication between patients, families, and healthcare providers regarding ethical concerns that patients and families experience in the course of illness and medical care. To address this gap in the literature, we surveyed patients and family members to learn about their ethical concerns and the extent to which they discussed them with their healthcare providers. Methods We surveyed adult, English-speaking patients and family members receiving inpatient care in five hospitals in the Washington DC-Baltimore metropolitan area from (...) July 2017 to March 2020. Descriptive statistics were used to determine the frequency, comfortableness, and helpfulness of discussions regarding ethical concerns experienced when sick or receiving medical care. Univariable and multivariable stepwise logistic regression models were used to identify associations between healthcare provider and respondent characteristics and attitudes and (1) the likelihood of speaking to a healthcare provider about their ethical concern and (2) their level of comfort during these discussions. Results Of 468 respondents who experienced ethical issues, 299 (64%) reported discussing the situation with a member of their healthcare team; 74% (197/265) of respondents who had such a discussion found the discussion comfortable, and 77% (176/230) of respondents found the discussion helpful. To make discussions more comfortable and helpful, respondents proposed suggestions in open-ended responses involving (1) content and quality of communication; (2) positive healthcare provider qualities such as empathy, open-mindedness, knowledge, honesty, and trustworthiness; and (3) other contextual factors including having adequate time and available resources. Conclusions Patients and families often have ethical concerns that they discuss with clinicians, and they want clinicians to be routinely receptive and attentive to such discussions. (shrink)

In this paper we show how a student can learn the basics of the system databases using (W3school CSS) which was built as intelligent tutoring educational system by using the authoring tool called (ITSB). The learning material contains CSS and HTML. We divided the material in a group of lessons for novice learner which combines relational system and lessons in the process of learning. The student can learn using example of CSS, and types of CSS color. Furthermore, the intelligent tutoring (...) system supports not only lessons; but exercises of different difficult levels for each lesson. When a student finish successfully the first difficulty level in a lesson, the student is allowed to move to the next difficulty level of the exercises of the lesson. (shrink)

Memorisation of the Qur’ān occupies a central position in Muslim conception of religious education. The awareness of preserving the Qur’ān through memorisation is becoming prevalent and is still continued in these modern days in many educational institutions in many parts of the Muslim countries. This article examines different methods of Qur’ānic memorization being practiced in Malaysia. Similarities and uniqueness of those methods will be presented. The evaluation of those Qur’ānic memorisation techniques brings to the foreground the educative value of memorisation (...) as a learning tool and the implications memorisation methods have in enhancing an individual’s learning performance. (shrink)

This article explores representations of the artist Willem de Kooning who, during the last few years of his creative life, produced a large number of paintings at the same time as he was thought to be suffering from Alzheimer's disease. My focus is on the way that these representations mobilize themes which Jane Goodall identifies as belonging to a discourse of anxiety. In a bid to suggest that the artist is uniquely positioned to adapt to the progression of the disease, (...) commentators betray a particular concern with the relation between will and intuition. This relation is negotiated, first, by privileging the hand of the artist as a body part possessed of a brain and a will of its own and, second, by drawing on neurological explanations of the nervous system which have the effect of removing `will' from the sphere of voluntarism. Although these representations go some way to refigure conventional notions of artistic identity and creative processes, the reliance on neurology supports an elitism which justifies the exclusion of certain figures (the insane, the naive, the computer) not just from the subject-position `artist', but also from the category `human'. (shrink)

The traditional philosophical questions around human freedom are to do with how to square freedom for human organisms with increasingly scientific understandings of the universe itself. At the beginning of Western philosophical consciousness, Plato, unlike later philosophers eligible of the label rationalist, maintained that there are obstacles to free and rational agency, owing in no small measure to pressures exerted by the human psyche from what later were referred to as biological drives and drives for social status. In subsequent eras, (...) these obstacles came under the heading of “weakness of will”—a conception shared widely in popular and traditional culture. Today the realities of addiction, social stresses, forces of habit, culture, social position, and group identity, together with psychological findings about cognitive biases, have come to dominate the landscape of empirically-based obstacles to agency. Can the image of the human being under the microscope of contemporary science, including cognitive and social science, be reconciled with the “manifest image” of human beings as sources of their individual behaviors (and held responsible accordingly), particularly if the scientific image is best construed in terms of governance by laws of nature? (The phrases manifest image and scientific image were coined by the twentieth-century American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, see Sellars 1962.) How is it possible to square the idea of laws of nature with the manifest image in which humans exercise free agency as they play their various parts in the drama that is life? Does the manifest image thus square better with a theistic image of the world, as both seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes and eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant seem to have thought, and by contrast the scientific image square better with atheism? A deterministic universe, such as was proposed during the Enlightenment, was early on thought to pose a threat to the idea of human freedom. (It does not pose the same threat to the idea of a sovereign creator, however, because the notion of a creator of the universe already puts the entity who qualifies for the office outside the regime of those laws, ahead of them both in time and in ontological status.) One traditional answer to the threat has been the notion of compatibilism— which simply asserts that freedom and determinism are not incompatible. The devil, of course, has been in the details of explaining how this can be so, and many schools of thought on the matter exist. It is worthwhile noting that there are enormously compelling reasons, from the quantum regime so well described by quantum theory, to reject determinism: the laws governing the universe are simply not fully deterministic. This, of course, vitiates the need to confront the threat as originally posed. However, the trouble, if one follows along this line of thought, is to make sense of the nature of freedom in a world governed partly by deterministic laws and partly by nondeterministic ones that admit of an element of chance. Is such a world itself any more compatible with the idea of human freedom? In this section we grapple with the question of human freedom, what it could mean, and whether it is best accepted in the context of a form of theism. We find that theism has no more resources for addressing these difficulties than atheism does. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has emphasized the contributions of the great Maliki jurist Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī to Islamic legal thought. However, al-Qarāfī’s compilation of legal maxims and distinctions, al-Furūq, has not yet been studied, nor has the collection of his teacher, the prominent Shafiʿi jurist Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām, known as al-Qawāʿid al-kubrā. Furthermore, the original thought of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām and his formative influence on al-Qarāfī have been understated. This article compares their two works to demonstrate that al-Qarāfī based his collection in (...) large part on Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s al-Qawāʿid and it examines the techniques that al-Qarāfī used, which included reordering, refining, and supplementing borrowed maxims, and anonymizing references to his teacher. Most salient, however, is al-Qarāfī’s “Malikization” of maxims, which entailed replacing Shafiʿi doctrines and authorities with their Maliki counterparts and deploying maxims to defend Maliki doctrines. The article concludes by explaining al-Qarāfī’s authorial choices in light of his Maliki affiliation and the politics between the legal schools in Mamluk Cairo. (shrink)

Ghosn, Mariam Predictive genetic testing Part 2 will examine the issues and ethical aspects that must be considered when adolescents below the age of majority make a request to undergo predictive genetic testing for Huntington's disease.

Ghosn, Mariam A seven-year $1 million dollar study conducted by Dr. M. Soffritti found that significant trend of increasing lymphoma and leukaemia incidence in female rats fed aspartame with a significant increase in the number of female rats affected at dosages of 20 mg/kg per day and upward, thus questioning aspartame's safety. However, the European Food Safety Authority's (EFSA's) Scientific Panel on Food Additives, Flavourings, Processing Aids and Materials in Contact with Food (AFC) argued that there was not enough (...) evidence to conclude that aspartame causes an increased incidence of lymphomas and leukaemias, also arguing that the increase in the number of rats affected with lymphomas and leukaemias could be due to chronic respiratory infections of the rats used in the study. (shrink)

Chipman, Meagher, and Barwise (2024) propose a public health ethics framework to assess current medical interpretation policies and provide guidelines for healthcare providers to meet their respons...

The present paper aims to explore the medieval philosopher Abū al-Barakāt al-Baghdādī’s (d. pre- 560 AH/1164-5) position concerning the problem of divine foreknowledge and human free will and argues Abū al-Barakāt to have considered the argument for compatibility between divine foreknowledge and human free will to be invalid. One can defend either divine foreknowledge or human free will; no other solution is available. By examining his accounts on this issue through the logic and metaphysics of his book al-Muʿtabar fi-l-ḥikma, Abū (...) al-Barakāt defense of human free will shall become evident. (shrink)

The authors explore how the multi-media artist Farniyaz Zaker uses words to establish connections between different kinds of materials in her work, and how her work makes words material. Zaker’s conception of dress as ‘microcosmic dwelling places’ enables the authors to think about veiling practices, Islams and gender not only in relation to the familiar domains of state, piety, subjectivity, consumption, capitalism, public and private (for instance), but also with regard to some less self-evidently relevant contexts. Light, architecture and cinema, (...) as well as walls, windows, curtains, coffins, tents and screens, are among them. It is by way of these multiple refractions that the authors are able to return to those debates that conceive of Islamic veiling in terms of embodied, material practices and to support and develop further reasons for an understanding of that most exceptionally charged piece of material, the veil, as more than a sign of …. (shrink)

The radical probabilist counsels the prudent never to put away uncertainty, and hence always to balance judgment with probabilities of various sizes. Against this counsel I shall advise in favor of the practice of full belief — at least for some occasions. This advice rests on the fact that it is sometimes in a person's interests to accept certain propositions as a means of bringing it about that others recognize oneself as having accepted those propositions. With the pragmatists, therefore, I (...) shall reject the view that belief formation must in every instance be a truth-directed affair. Unlike the pragmatists, however, I shall conclude that the enterprise of belief formation is not directed exclusively, or even primarily, at attaining knowledge. In other words, pursuit of that which it profits to believe, on the one hand, and pursuit of knowledge on the other, are distinct enterprises, which overlap (when they do) only accidentally. (shrink)

Utility theories—both Expected Utility (EU) and non-Expected Utility (non-EU) theories—offer numericalized representations of classical principles meant for the regulation of choice under conditions of risk—a type of formal representation that reduces the representation of risk to a single number. I shall refer to these as risk-numericalizing theories of decision. I shall argue that risk-numericalizing theories (referring both to the representations and to the underlying axioms that render numericalization possible) are not satisfactory answers to the question: “How do I take the (...) (best) means to my ends?” In other words, they are inadequate or incomplete as instrumental theories. They are inadequate because they are poor answers to the question of what it is for an option to be instrumental towards an end. To say it another way, they do not offer a sufficiently rich account of what it is for something to be a means (an instrument) toward an end. (shrink)

The subfield of philosophy that treats fundamental questions pertaining to science. The philosophy of science explores the fundamental principles, purposes, methodologies, implications, and reliability of the human enterprise known as science. It seeks to describe our best understanding of the universe, at all scales, as well as to engage with the question of how we can—as fallible organisms—reliably come to possess such knowledge. How can it be possible for us to arrive at theories that describe the world as it really (...) is, seeing as how our efforts to model it are based on the qualities and features available to human perception and experience, as limited and biased as we know these can be? (shrink)

Ghosn, Mariam Huntington's disease (HD) is an inherited disorder. Sufferers usually develop symptoms in midlife between the ages of 30 and 50 years. HD causes neurodegeneration resulting in the progressive development of physical, cognitive and emotional symptoms. The impact on sufferers worsens over time with the final stage of the disease resulting in the need for professional assistance in a long-term care facility. More rarely HD develops in children and young adults, with less than 5% of HD sufferers being (...) affected by Juvenile HD. This article considers the ethical aspects of such testing. (shrink)

Ghosn, Mariam The causes of obesity are complex. Both our attitudes and lifestyles will need to change in order to successfully address this issue.

Ghosn, Mariam; Ford, Norman The adult stem cells are capable of self-renewal and are responsible for replenishing cells throughout an individual's lifetime, residing not only at embryonic stage but also in children and adults. The latest advancements and updates in adult stem cell technology demonstrate that it might be possible to generate stem cells for therapeutic uses without the creation or destruction of human embryos.

This book explores philosophical ethics in Arabo-Islamic thought.

İşbu makale Ebü’l-Berekât el-Bağdâdî’nin (ö. 560/ 1164-65’ten önce) ilâhî önbilgi ve insanın özgür iradesi sorununa dair konumunu tetkik etme amacındadır. Metin, Ebü’l-Berekât’ın ilâhî önbilgi ve insanın özgür iradesinin bağdaşması argümanın geçerli olmadığını düşündüğünü iddia ediyor. Bir kişi ya ilâhî önbilgiyi ya da insanın özgür iradesini savunabilir, başka bir çözüm yoktur. Kitâbu’l-Mu‘teber fi’l-hikme adlı kitabının mantık ve metafizik bölümleri içerisindeki bu meseleye dair açıklamalarını inceleyerek, Ebü’l- Berekât’ın ikinci alternatifi seçtiği belirgin kılınacaktır.

This book demonstrates how and why vitalism—the idea that life cannot be explained by the principles of mechanism—matters now. Vitalism resists closure and reductionism in the life sciences while simultaneously addressing the object of life itself. The aim of this collection is to consider the questions that vitalism makes it possible to ask: questions about the role and status of life across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities and questions about contingency, indeterminacy, relationality and change. All have special importance now, (...) as the concepts of complexity, artificial life and artificial intelligence, information theory, and cybernetics become increasingly significant in more and more fields of activity. (shrink)

The introduction to this special issue addresses the production of intimacy in the labour of research. It explores the sensory, emotional and affective relations which form an integral, if often invisible, part of the process through which researchers engage with, produce, understand and translate `research'. The article argues that these processes inform the making of knowledge, shape power relations and enable or constrain the practical negotiation of ethical problems. These issues are not, however, often foregrounded in debates on methods or (...) methodology and are frequently erased from researchers' own accounts of their work. The article explores some of the possible reasons for this, which include institutional and cultural conventions of academic practice, the historical legacies with which disciplines often struggle, and the difficult issues and decisions that individual researchers face as they try to negotiate the relations between scholarly research and personal relationships across time, and between scholarly research and, for example, creativity, fiction, or sensationalism. The article concludes with a review of the main themes in the special issue, focusing in particular on the ways in which the contributors use the concept of intimacy to challenge the boundaries between creativity and analysis; spatial and temporal proximity and distance; freedom and censorship; subjects and objects. (shrink)

This paper is situated in the context of feminist poststructuralist debates around identity. In it, I argue that anti-essentialist accounts of identity, while they may displace, or at least call into question, the foundations of subjectivity, are no less likely to invoke a series of presuppositions with respect to the self than those who seek to maintain them in some form. In particular, these presuppositions often cohere around the materiality of the body. And yet, paradoxically, this accent on materiality refers (...) to a very particular kind of body - one that seems to have very little relation to the biological body. Using psychopharmacology as an example, I suggest that the Gilles Deleuze's ethology offers one way through which both to engage seriously with the 'biological' body while at the same time resisting either an essentialist or biological determinist position. (shrink)

Cet article esquisse les angles morts d’une histoire, celle de la qualification du savoir au xix e siècle, à partir de l’apparition conjointe du néologisme épistémologie et du syntagme philosophie des sciences. Au-delà des déterminations linguistiques et institutionnelles, il s’efforce de cerner la logique de leur assise commune, en un siècle qui consolida à la fois le rôle central de l’histoire et celui de la recherche d’un statut propre à la pensée. Ainsi, il espère suppléer aux confusions dues à l’impact (...) de la circulation des idées (traductions, traditions et réceptions) et souhaite exposer le lieu d’une profusion conceptuelle, en s’attachant à rendre compte de l’unité d’habitudes générées par l’héritage d’une époque. (shrink)

The recently reported cases of coerced sterilisation of women at a privately operated immigration detention facility in the USA are egregious in their disregard for human dignity and professional ethics, but sadly not surprising. These abuses represent a continuation of efforts to control the reproductive capacity of women, fueled by racist and xenophobic motives. Physicians helped create and legitimise the pseudoscientific framework for the eugenics movement, which would implement forceful sterilisation as its tool of choice to eliminate undesirable traits that (...) were thought to be biologically inherited and predominant among racial and ethnic minorities. Although state-endorsed forcible sterilisation programs have ended, incarcerated women have remained particularly vulnerable to sterilisation abuse. The intersectional vulnerabilities of racism, xenophobia and carcerality must be addressed to prevent such abuses from recurring. There are no data in this work. (shrink)

The paper examines the public justifications regarding the contentious pledge of the Uniform Civil Code versus Personal Laws in India, from its historical evolution to the deliberative processes followed in the transition from pledge to policy. Using a Habermasian framework of deliberative democracy, the study empirically maps the public reasons provided by various stakeholders, including political parties, religious organizations, and civil society groups, spanning the period from 1947 to 2023. The findings reveal diverse arguments for and against the UCC, mostly (...) anchored in shared constitutional values. While proponents emphasize national integration and gender equality, opponents advocate for cultural diversity and religious freedom. The contentious nature of the pledge highlights the broader ideological conflicts and the necessity for consensus-building through public deliberation to achieve democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

This essay identifies foundational questions, all metaphysical in character, which must be answered before the enterprise of epistemology proper can begin to prosper, and in the process draws attention to fundamental conflicts between the demands of epistemology and the demands of prudence. It concludes that knowledge is not, as such, a directive of prudence, and thus that the enterprise of knowledge does not fall under the category of what is practically required.

There is a certain tangle of philosophical questions around which much philosophy, especially in our time, has circled, to the point where now there is something that deserves to be called a holding pattern around these issues: What are causes? How do they compare with reasons? What is Reason, with a capital R? How does it participate in the production of intentions that lead to action, particularly in arenas rife with uncertainty? Where do formal systems of symbols come into all (...) of this? And how - if at all - can formal methods be harnessed to serve science and public policy, through guiding belief formation and decision-making? Henry Kyburg, Jr., has himself circled around this tangle of questions, at least once or twice. And so in his honor, and in the no-nonsense spirit of empiricism that marks his work as the work of a scientist, I'd like to sketch a way to cut through some of the Gordian knots at the center of this tangle. The theme will be that natural science has much of value to offer that has been willfully neglected by philosophers. This by itself is nowise surprising, as philosophy, particularly in the most exclusive parts of the academy, has suffered from an excessive transcendentalism - a theme to which I will return in this piece periodically. Now Kyburg has not been guilty of contributing to the causes for the decline of philosophy. He has, instead, been courageously working out the implications of his convictions regarding the virtues of vigorous formal systems, contributing to the advancement of empiricist methodologies, and generously supporting the causes of realism. In emulation of that courage, I offer this essay in the service of bold and vigorous formal systems, realism and - most emphatically - empiricism. (shrink)

In his magnum opus, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (first published in German in 1934, English translation, 1959), Karl Popper make two fundamental philosophical moves. First, he relocates the center of gravity of the philosophical treatment of science around what he calls the problem of demarcation. This is the problem of distinguishing between science, on the one hand, and everything else on the other. (By contrast, his contemporaries of the Vienna Circle, whose positivism would prove the most influential brand of (...) empiricism of the day, located the center of gravity around the problem of linguistic meaning, and use a criterion according to which a statement is meaningful to the extent that one can identify verification conditions for it.) Popper excludes from science such things as logic, metaphysics, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Marx’s theory of history. Second, Popper propounds the doctrine of falsification, which handles the problem of demarcation, as well as answers David Hume’s shattering attack on science as the premier form of knowledge centuries before. The arguments he mounts for falsification would function also as an attack on any account of the scientific enterprise that, like positivism, adheres to the idea that science progresses logically from instances (given in observation or experience) to the high-order generalizations characteristic of mature scientific theory. In this small space I shall undertake neither to illuminate the nuances of Popper’s position, nor to trace the (numerous) lines of criticism that have accumulated against it some seventy years later. I shall busy myself instead with tracing a trajectory of thought on the subject of scientific reasoning and its relation to individual decision-making, reflecting on Popper’s contribution and on how his legacy might be further enlarged. (shrink)

This article addresses the relations between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (and those characteristics associated with ‘the natural’ and ‘the cultural’) in the context of the debates about Prozac. Following Marilyn Strathern, I focus specifically on the contested issue of enablement - that is, on what Prozac does or does not enable, and on the relation between enablement and enhancement, normality and pathology. I argue that the implications of the model of the brain that accompanies explanations of Prozac are such that commentators (...) are obliged to address not only the nature of normality but also the nature of nature itself. Through a close analysis of these debates, I suggest that critiques of Prozac should be understood not as objections to reductionism - to a biology that closes things down - but rather to one that opens things up: that opens up the relations between nature, culture, biology and the individual, relations that are now cross-cut and thrown about by artificiality. Objections to Prozac, then, might be characterized as an attempt to put these concepts back into their ‘proper’ positions, to re-establish the relationality between them. In conclusion, I argue that the biology put forward by proponents of psychopharmacology, regardless of the desirability of the latter, challenges not only the frequent assumptions that are made about the claims of materialist science, but also some of the terms and concepts that are commonly deployed in the social sciences. (shrink)

Using C. Wright Mills' book The Sociological Imagination as a touchstone for its discussion, this article addresses the relations between the sociological problem, relevance and experience as they are and could potentially be understood within sociology. Beginning with the historical relation between sociology, science and literature — a relation which has been productively but differently complicated by poststructuralist and postconstructivist theories — this article asks: to what extent does the empirical offer a referent for the sociological problem? To what is (...) sociology obliged to be relevant? Arguing for the continued relevance of relevance, particularly in the light of recent reforms in higher education in the UK and the USA, the article explores how the sociological problem might be transformed — and perhaps, more importantly, might be transformative — if the basic commitments of a research project were not to historical social structures but to virtual structures. (shrink)

The German philosopher, writer, and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) has played a key role in the transformation and development of education in Prussia and beyond its borders. If time is change and can be measured as progress towards social transformation, then time serves some concrete utility transposed in the field of education. For the purpose of social transformation and development of education, Humboldt has used various strategies, among which ethics or morals had a certain impact on education. Despite the (...) importance of this aspect, the ethical understanding of the philosopher has not been researched deeply yet. The following paper analyses this question according to Humboldt’s writings and shows its relevance for education. The aim of this research is to reveal insights that have the potential to serve the development of education even now. (shrink)

This manuscript reviews recent evidence supporting the utility of telomeres and mitochondrial DNA copy number (mtDNAcn) in detecting the biological impacts of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and outlines mechanisms that may mediate the connection between early stress and poor physical and mental health. Critical to interrupting the health sequelae of ACEs such as abuse, neglect, and neighborhood disorder, is the discovery of biomarkers of risk and resilience. The molecular markers of chronic stress exposure, telomere length and mtDNAcn, represent critical biological (...) links between ACEs and poor health outcomes. We examine how telomeres and mtDNAcn may exacerbate health disparities and contribute to the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Finally, we explore how these molecular markers of early stress exposure may help define the role of resilience and develop effective interventions to moderate ACE health risk impact. (shrink)

A venerable tradition in the metaphysics of science commends ontological reduction: the practice of analysis of theoretical entities into further and further proper parts, with the understanding that the original entity is nothing but the sum of these. This tradition implicitly subscribes to the principle that all the real action of the universe (also referred to as its "causation") happens at the smallest scales-at the scale of microphysics. A vast majority of metaphysicians and philosophers of science, covering a wide swath (...) of the spectrum from reductionists to emergentists, defend this principle. It provides one pillar of the most prominent theory of science, to the effect that the sciences are organized in a hierarchy, according to the scales of measurement occupied by the phenomena they study. On this view, the fundamentality of a science is reckoned inversely to its position on that scale. This venerable tradition has been justly and vigorously countered-in physics, most notably: it is countered in quantum theory, in theories of radiation and superconduction, and most spectacularly in renormalization theories of the structure of matter. But these counters-and the profound revisions they prompt-lie just below the philosophical radar. This book illuminates these counters to the tradition principle, in order to assemble them in support of a vaster (and at its core Aristotelian) philosophical vision of sciences that are not organized within a hierarchy. In so doing, the book articulates the principle that the universe is active at absolutely all scales of measurement. This vision, as the book shows, is warranted by philosophical treatment of cardinal issues in the philosophy of science: fundamentality, causation, scientific innovation, dependence and independence, and the proprieties of explanation. (shrink)

In the context of the question of the extent to which science studies is able to mount an adequate critique of contemporary developments in science and technology, and in view of the proliferating interest in ethics across the social sciences, this article has two aims. Firstly to address some of the implications for ethics of Bruno Latour's, and to a lesser extent Alfred North Whitehead’s, conceptions of reality, both of which have a bearing on the long-standing dichotomy between facts and (...) values. Drawing on Whitehead's work, it also, secondly, seeks to make a positive argument for ethics and to ask again, in the light of this discussion, where the ethical dimensions of Latour's work might be located. Towards the end of the article, I suggest that Latour's concept of exteriority obliges him to pursue a politics of reality which is the special providence of ‘moralists’, rather than a politics of virtual reality in which all entities, human and non-human, are engaged. (shrink)

Background:Africa is increasingly becoming an important region for health research, mainly due to its heavy burden of disease, socioeconomic challenges, and inadequate health facilities. Regulatory...

This essay explores the process and issues related to community collaborative research that involves Native Americans generally, and specifically examines the Navajo Nation’s efforts to regulate research within its jurisdiction. Researchers need to account for both the experience of Native Americans and their own preconceptions about Native Americans when conducting research about Native Americans. The Navajo Nation institutionalized an approach to protecting members of the nation when it took over Institutional Review Board (IRB) responsibilities from the US Indian Health Service (...) (IHS) in 1996. While written regulations for the Navajo Nation IRB are not dissimilar, and in some ways are less detailed than those of the IHS IRB, in practice the Navajo Nation allows less flexibility. Primary examples of this include not allowing expedited review and requiring prepublication review of all manuscripts. Because of its broad mandate, the Navajo Nation IRB may also require review of some projects that would not normally be subject to IRB approval, including investigative journalism and secondary research about Navajo People that does not involve direct data collection from human subjects. (shrink)

This article considers the grounds on which distinctions are drawn between the identities of gender, sexuality, `race' and class and explores the implications of these distinctions in relation to different kinds of identity politics and, in particular, to the politics implied by Judith Butler's theory of performativity. I argue that what is often taken to be the key site of much queer theory and activism - that is, the reappropriation of signifiers of difference - is problematic in the light of (...) a close analysis of subjectivities which are informed by `race', gender and class. More specifically, it may be that struggles which are frequently linked to issues of visibility are problematic in the context of subjectivities - class subjectivities - that are both enabled and constrained by a particular, and a particularly uneasy, relation to recognition and representation. (shrink)

In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the philosophical theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory that employs tools of phenomenology, rather than a theory that locates itself in relation to canonical positions regarding the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of (...) social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent’s conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic—it is the logic of fit between one’s aspirations and one’s circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one’s self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one’s life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a social one. (shrink)