Interrogating the concepts of allegiance and identity in a globalised world involves renewing our understanding of membership and participation within and beyond the nation-state. Allegiance can be used to define a singular national identity and common connection to a nation-state. In a global context, however, we need more dynamic conceptions to understand the importance of maintaining diversity and building allegiance with others outside borders. Understanding how allegiance and identity are being reconfigured today provides valuable insights into important contemporary debates around (...) citizenship. This book reveals how public and international law understand allegiance and identity. Each involves viewing the nation-state as fundamental to concepts of allegiance and identity, but they also see the world slightly differently. With contributions from philosophers, political scientists and social psychologists, the result is a thorough appraisal of allegiance and identity in a range of socio-legal contexts. (shrink)

We address the need for a model by considering two competing theories regarding the origin of life: (i) the Metabolism First theory, and (ii) the RNA World theory. We discuss two interrelated points, namely: (i) Models are valuable tools for understanding both the processes and intricacies of origin-of-life issues, and (ii) Insights from models also help us to evaluate the core objection to origin-of-life theories, called “the inefficiency objection”, which is commonly raised by proponents of both the Metabolism First theory (...) and the RNA World theory against each other. We use Simpson’s Paradox (SP) as a tool for challenging this objection. We will use models in various senses, ranging from taking them as representations of reality to treating them as theories/accounts that provide heuristics for probing reality. In this paper, we will frequently use models and theories interchangeably. Additionally, we investigate Conway’s Game of Life and contrast it with our SP-based approach to emergence-of-life issues. Finally, we discuss some of the consequences of our view. A scientific model is testable in three senses: (i) a logical sense, (ii) a nomological sense, and (iii) a current technological sense. The SP-based model is testable in the first two senses but it is not feasible to test it using current technology. (shrink)

The cognition and information theoretic sciences have now been in existence for the better part of a century. In that time, their varied disciplines have undergone extensive maturation, honing their methods, constitutions, and evaluation techniques in the pursuit of academic rigor, while not losing sight of the practical influences that have served as their almost universal cornerstone. Meanwhile, this period has also been marked by increasing disparity and gradual distancing of the philosophical underpinnings upon which each field is founded, adding (...) strain to interdisciplinary collaborative efforts. This article presents an overview of select information-science-related cognition disciplines, and shows how the nascent Philosophy of Information can be adopted as a means of unifying these philosophical foundations in an empirically sound manner, without sacrificing general applicability. In addition, it demonstrates how PI is already rooted in the philosophies or epistemological views of several of the cognition disciplines, implicitly or otherwise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christ's Human Nature and the Cry from the Cross:St. Thomas Aquinas on Psalm 22:2Philip Nolan O.P.Christ's cry from the Cross quoting Psalm 22 (Mark 15:34; Matt 27:46) has become a central focus for contemporary Christological debates.1 A number of modern thinkers have read this verse as expressing in Christ an experience of dereliction incompatible with traditional positions concerning divine impassibility Christ's beatific knowledge, and Trinitarian relations.2 Thomas (...) Joseph White has recently offered an insightful Thomistic critique of these interpretations: [End Page 1219]The final cry of Christ on the cross cannot be interpreted as a cry of either despair or of spiritual separation from God. By contrast, it must be understood theologically as a prayer of desire related to Christ's abandonment to the Father and his hope to introduce humanity into the eschatological gift of redemption.3In his work, White is concerned to engage with modern Christological themes using principles derived from the Thomistic tradition. For this reason, he articulates a rather original alternative to modern theologies of dereliction—especially those marked by divine kenoticism and Luther's theology of the Cross. In offering a view inspired by Thomistic principles, White presents his own creative retrieval of Aquinas's ideas concerning the cry from the Cross.At times, however, White's argument leaves somewhat obscure the literal meaning of the words of that cry: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"4 For example, in pushing back against radical interpretations [End Page 1220] of dereliction, he shifts the language of "abandonment" from God's abandonment of Christ to Christ's abandonment to the Father. My argument in this article is that the textual commentaries on Psalm 225 by Augustine and Aquinas—material that White does not consider specifically—can provide an alternate and somewhat complementary Thomistic approach to the one White proposes, and one more soundly based on Aquinas's texts themselves.6 Christ's cry is a quote from this psalm, and Aquinas's commentary on Ps 22:27 develops the Augustinian interpretation of this verse in order to give greater emphasis to Christ's human nature. This emphasis helps to explain, in a classical way, what it can mean that Christ is abandoned. Thus, Aquinas's exegesis bolsters the orthodox response to contemporary revisionist theologians by providing a clear literal understanding of this contested biblical passage without applying an experience of damnation to Christ or denying classical positions concerning divine impassibility, Christ's beatific knowledge, and the nature of Trinitarian relations.To make this argument, I will first look at the rich tradition of reflection on the Christological meaning of the Psalms, and Psalm 22 in particular, inherited by Thomas. This tradition includes a series of psalm commentaries, conciliar documents, and a variety of other theological works. In this tradition, I argue, we see two primary interpretative approaches. The first is what I will call the Augustinian approach, which insists that Christ is speaking on the Cross for sinners and in the voice of sinners. The second interpretation places more weight on Christ's own voice and insists that he is speaking in a real way for himself—Christ in some way truly is abandoned by God. These interpretations need not and should not be read as contradictory. In fact, all the authorities I examine insist on the first approach. Differences emerge, however, in how they coordinate the latter interpretation with the former. I will discuss Thomas's synthesis of these interpretations, a synthesis that he grounds in the reality of Christ's human nature. Finally, I will suggest [End Page 1221] how a close reading of Thomas's mature treatment of Ps 22:2 supplements contemporary Thomist responses to modern Christological concerns and misguided interpretations of Christ's cry on the Cross.Thomas's Sources for Reading Psalm 22:2Thomas's primary source for understanding Ps 22:2 is Scripture itself Both Mark and Matthew report that Christ spoke the words of this psalm from the Cross, a fact which necessitates for Thomas a Christological interpretation of the psalm.8 Augustine links Ps 22:2 with passages in... (shrink)

Prompted by the development of the Theory of Challenge and Threat States in Athletes (Jones et al, 2009), recent years has witnessed a considerable increase in research examining challenge and threat in sport. This manuscript provides a critical review of the literature examining challenge and threat in sport, tracing its historical development and some of the current empirical ambiguities. In an attempt to reconcile some of these ambiguities, and utilising neurobiological evidence associated with approach- and avoidance-motivation (cf. Elliot & Covington, (...) 2001), this paper draws upon the Evaluative Space Model (ESM: Cacioppo et al., 1997) and considers the implications for understanding challenge and threat in sport. For example, rather than see challenge and threat as opposite ends of a single bipolar continuum, the ESM implies that individuals could be (1) challenged, (2) threatened, (3) challenged and threatened, or (4) neither challenged or threatened by a particular stimulus. From this perspective it could be argued that the appraisal of some sport situations as both challenging and threatening could be advantageous, whereas the current literature seems to imply that the appraisal of stress as a threat is maladaptive for performance. In drawing upon the ESM, we outline the Evaluative Space Approach to Challenge and Threat and provide several testable hypotheses for advancing understanding of challenge and threat (in sport). We also outline a number of cardiovascular and experiential measures that can be used to examine these hypotheses. In sum, this paper provides a significant theoretical, empirical and practical contribution to our understanding of challenge and threat (in sport). (shrink)

This paper describes and defends the view that minimal chemical life essentially involves the chemical integration of three chemical functionalities: containment, metabolism, and program (Rasmussen et al. in Protocells: bridging nonliving and living matter, 2009a ). This view is illustrated and explained with the help of CMP and Rasmussen diagrams (Rasmussen et al. In: Rasmussen et al. (eds.) in Protocells: bridging nonliving and living matter, 71–100, 2009b ), both of which represent the key chemical functional dependencies among containment, metabolism, and (...) program. The CMP model of minimal chemical life gains some support from the broad view of life as open-ended evolution, which I have defended elsewhere (Bedau in The philosophy of artificial life, 1996 ; Bedau in Artificial Life, 4:125–140, 1998 ). Further support comes from the natural way the CMP model resolves the puzzle about whether life is a matter of degree. (shrink)

Dasein and being-in-the-world -- The world -- The structure of being-in-the-world, pt. 1: Disposedness and moods -- The structure of being-in-the-world, pt. 2: Understanding and interpretation -- Everydayness and the 'one' -- Death and authenticity -- Truth and art -- Language -- Technology -- Our mortal dwelling with things.

This book includes ten essays that trace the notion of unconcealment as it develops from Heidegger's early writings to his later work, shaping his philosophy of truth, language and history. 'Unconcealment' is the idea that what entities are depends on the conditions that allow them to manifest themselves. This concept, central to Heidegger's work, also applies to worlds in a dual sense: first, a condition of entities manifesting themselves is the existence of a world; and second, worlds themselves are disclosed. (...) The unconcealment or disclosure of a world is the most important historical event, and Heidegger believes there have been a number of quite distinct worlds that have emerged and disappeared in history. Heidegger's thought as a whole can profitably be seen as working out the implications of the original understanding of unconcealment. (shrink)

Over the history of the study of visual perception there has been great success at discovering countless visual illusions. There has been less success in organizing the overwhelming variety of illusions into empirical generalizations (much less explaining them all via a unifying theory). Here, this article shows that it is possible to systematically organize more than 50 kinds of illusion into a 7 × 4 matrix of 28 classes. In particular, this article demonstrates that (1) smaller sizes, (2) slower speeds, (...) (3) greater luminance contrast, (4) farther distance, (5) lower eccentricity, (6) greater proximity to the vanishing point, and (7) greater proximity to the focus of expansion all tend to have similar perceptual effects, namely, to (A) increase perceived size, (B) increase perceived speed, (C) decrease perceived luminance contrast, and (D) decrease perceived distance. The detection of these empirical regularities was motivated by a hypothesis, called “perceiving the present,” that the visual system possesses mechanisms for compensating neural delay during forward motion. This article shows how this hypothesis predicts the empirical regularity. (shrink)

Malevolence and cruelty are commonly attributed to a failure of moral reasoning or a lack of moral imagination. We present the contrasting viewpoint – immorality as an active, creative, or resourceful act. More specifically, we develop the concept of "immoral imagination" (Jacobs, 1991) and explore how it can enter into Rest's (1986) four processes of decision making: sensitivity, judgment, intention, and implementation. The literature on revenge and workplace deviance illustrates these processes.

The Rationality Principle says that people act adequately to their situation, but does not specify how they must act in order to do so. Situational Analysis uses the Rationality Principle, together with a model of the social situation, to explain actions in the past. Unlike Rational Choice Theory, Situational Analysis does not try to predict or influence actions in the future. Popper regarded the Rationality Principle as false, but thought that we should use it nonetheless. This poses a problem for (...) understanding his views about conjecture and refutation. Popper, however, thought that all scientific models are false, and that whether or not we should reject a model depends on the problem that we are trying to solve. (shrink)

How should we understand religion, and what place should it hold, in an age in which metaphysics has come into disrepute? The metaphysical assumptions which supported traditional theologies are no longer widely accepted, but it is not clear how this 'end of metaphysics' should be understood, nor what implications it ought to have for our understanding of religion. At the same time there is renewed interest in the sacred and the divine in disciplines as varied as philosophy, psychology, literature, history, (...) anthropology, and cultural studies. In this volume, leading philosophers in the United States and Europe address the decline of metaphysics and the space which this decline has opened for non-theological understandings of religion. The contributors include Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Jean-Luc Marion, Gianni Vattimo, Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Pippin, John Caputo, Adriaan Peperzak, Leora Batnitzky, and Mark Wrathall. (shrink)

Huston Smith has argued that the universal source of wholeness, which he refers to as the primordial tradition, is essential to a meaningful life. Indeed embracing this tradition is, said Smith, an act of rejoining the human race. Our current forms of organized religion offer us ritualized expressions of this tradition, yet often fail to provide us with transpersonal growth; it is this transpersonal growth that reconnects us with the source of religion. This essay differentiates mainstream religion from a way (...) that we can begin to construct a physical theory of the primordial tradition–a necessary first step toward reclaiming the source of religion. (shrink)

This paper develops a modification of the notion of incommensurable worlds upon which Dreyfus and Spinosa base their robust realism. In particular, I argue that we cannot make sense of a conception of incommensurability according to which incommensurable worlds entail cognitively incompatible claims. Instead, as Dreyfus and Spinosa sometimes suggest, incommensurable worlds should be understood as being practically incompatible, meaning that the inhabitants of one world cannot, given their practices for dealing with some things, engage in practices central to the (...) other world. Practical incompatibility grounds a defensible account of incommensurability while securing a necessary step in Dreyfus and Spinosa's argument for robust realism. At the same time, it shows how their idea of incommensurability is immune to the sorts of objections Donald Davidson makes to the idea of a plurality of conceptual schemes, without at the same time refuting Davidson's argument. Finally, an appreciation of the failings of cognitive accounts of incommensurability demonstrates that Dreyfus and Spinosa are not entitled to deny that all true descriptions of the universe are compatible. (shrink)

For fifty years Hubert Dreyfus has done pioneering work which brings phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. This is a selection of his most influential essays, developing his critique of the representational model of the mind in analytical philosophy of mind and mainstream cognitive science.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 20-37 [Access article in PDF] Aesthetic Teaching Mark A. Pike I think aesthetic teaching is the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely aesthetic — if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram — it becomes the most offensive of all teaching.1George Eliot asserts that "the (...) highest of all teaching" which "deals with life in its highest complexity" is essentially aesthetic in character for it has features of the "picture" or work of art rather than the more straightforwardly instructional "diagram." Yet, George Eliot not only ascribes greatest worth to teaching that is aesthetic but considers teaching that is merely diagrammatic to be "the most offensive of all teaching." Evidently, there are similarities between pictures and diagrams but essential features present in the former are conspicuously absent from the latter. The current obsession with effectiveness in teaching and repeated attempts to reduce that which should be aesthetic and inspired to the wholly rational, diagrammatic and instrumental make George Eliot's views remarkably pertinent. Consequently, features of aesthetic teaching will be explored in this essay. In doing so it will be suggested that Martin Heidegger's ontology (theory of existence) offers a philosophical foundation for conceiving teaching in the arts as a form of engagement with students which is unreservedly aesthetic in character. As such, Heidegger provides us with a valuable position from which to counter forces that militate against the aesthetic in our schools and also provokes us to eschew all that is diagrammatic in our approach to that which is rightly aesthetic. Teaching: Drawing the Diagram or Painting the Picture? Teaching is currently being construed, in both the United Kingdom and the United States, as a technology with which to get something done or as a [End Page 20] vehicle which "delivers" a subject in an efficient or effective manner, or even as a science where the analytical approach is the method for problem solving. Even as I write, I find myself part of a proposed "delivery team" for literature education. It appears that this is the sort of language policy makers in a rational economy like to hear. Any dissenting voices, those subscribing to a view of teaching as an art itself, are considered dangerous as they jeopardize progress in our brave new world. For example, in their introduction to Effective Teaching — Evidence and Practice, Daniel Muijs and David Reynolds articulate the view that construing teaching as an art rather than a technology may be responsible for the lack of excellent teachers in our schools.2 In marked contrast to George Eliot, they suggest "the view that teaching is an 'art,' not a science" results in attention being devoted to "personal factors and qualities" which are "often idiosyncratic and difficult to influence by educational policies."3 Further, they suggest that the placing of education within the humanities tradition — is clearly wrong and probably condemns societies where it is prevalent to having only those small number of excellent teachers who inherit the "art," rather than the larger number who could acquire the applied science of a teaching methodology.4It is difficult to conceive of a position further removed from George Eliot's ideal of aesthetic teaching. There are, of course, a number of problems with reducing teaching to a technology, or an applied science, as Muijs and Reynolds prefer to call it. Such argument betrays the assumption that the world can be known in a rational, analytical and scientific way. The concomitant of this view is the misguided belief that teaching about such a world can be precisely planned, implemented and assessed. Elliot Eisner is surely more accurate when he explains that "teaching is a form of human action in which many of the ends achieved are emergent" and that these ends are often "found in the course of interaction with students rather than preconceived."5 Clearly, allowing "for the creation of ends in process" necessitates "a model of teaching akin to other arts."6 This is more... (shrink)

Abstract:Moral imagination is a reasoning process thought to counter the organizational factors that corrupt ethical judgment. We describe the psychology of moral imagination as composed of the four decision processes identified by Rest (1986), i.e., moral sensitivity, moral judgment, moral intention, and moral behavior. We examine each process in depth, distilling extant psychological research and indicating organizational implications. The conclusion offers suggestions for future research.The majority of men are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others—terribly objective sometimes—but the real (...) task is in fact to be objective toward one’s self and subjective toward all others. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Phenomenology Existentialism The Organization of the Book.

Researchers increasingly rely on large data sets of health information, often linked with biological specimens. In recent years, the argument has been made that obtaining informed consent for conducting records-based research is unduly burdensome and results in ?consent bias.? As a type of selection bias, consent bias is said to exist when the group giving researchers access to their data differs from the group denying access. Therefore, to promote socially beneficial research, it is argued that consent should be unnecessary. After (...) analyzing the biostatistics evidence and bioethics arguments, the article concludes that (1) claims about the amount of consent bias are overstated; (2) commonly used statistical methods usually can account for consent bias; and (3) any residual effects of consent bias are below an acceptable level of imprecision and constitute a reasonable social cost for conducting ethically responsible research. (shrink)

Individual differences in ethical ideology are believed to play a key role in ethical decision making. Forsyths (1980) Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) is designed to measure ethical ideology along two dimensions, relativism and idealism. This study extends the work of Forsyth by examining the construct validity of the EPQ. Confirmatory factor analyses conducted with independent samples indicated three factors – idealism, relativism, and veracity – account for the relationships among EPQ items. In order to provide further evidence of the instruments (...) nomological and convergent validity, correlations among the EPQ subscales, dogmatism, empathy, and individual differences in the use of moral rationales were examined. The relationship between EPQ measures of idealism and moral judgments demonstrated modest predictive validity, but the appreciably weaker influence of relativism and the emergence of a veracity factor raise questions about the utility of the EPQ typology. (shrink)

Boehl Chair of Law and Medicine and Director of the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law, University of Louisville School of Medicine, 501 East Broadway # 310, Louisville, Kentucky 40202, USA. Tel.: 502 852 4980; Fax: 502 852 4963; Email: mark.rothstein{at}louisville.edu ' + u + '@' + d + ' '//--> Abstract In his article in this issue, Daniel Goldberg advocates a broad definition of public health and expressly rejects the narrow definition of public health I proposed in (...) a 2002 article. Goldberg asserts that public health should include all of the root causes of ill health in populations. Such a definition, however, would include within public health war, famine, crime, illiteracy and numerous other conditions on which public health professionals and agencies lack the resources, expertise and public support to act. The appropriate definition explicitly recognizes that public health is a legal term of art referring to specifically authorized activities by public officials to protect, promote and improve population health. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

On October 6, 2015, in Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner, the European Court of Justice, the European Union's highest court, held that the fifteen-year-old Safe Harbor Framework Agreement with the United States was invalid. Under the agreement, about forty-five hundred American companies each year self-certified to the U.S. Department of Commerce that they were in compliance with the essential privacy protections of the European Union, and therefore it was permissible for entities in the European Union to send personal data to (...) these American companies. According to the court, because some American companies were making the personal data of E.U. citizens available to U.S. government agencies, such as the National Security Agency, the fundamental privacy interests of E.U. citizens were not being protected. As a result of this court decision there has been considerable speculation about what, if any, effect the case has on international collaboration in health research, in particular, the sharing of personal data by E.U. researchers with their U.S. colleagues. (shrink)

Mobile devices with health apps, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, crowd-sourced information, and other data sources have enabled research by new classes of researchers. Independent researchers, citizen scientists, patient-directed researchers, self-experimenters, and others are not covered by federal research regulations because they are not recipients of federal financial assistance or conducting research in anticipation of a submission to the FDA for approval of a new drug or medical device. This article addresses the difficult policy challenge of promoting the welfare and interests of (...) research participants, as well as the public, in the absence of regulatory requirements and without discouraging independent, innovative scientific inquiry. The article recommends a series of measures, including education, consultation, transparency, self-governance, and regulation to strike the appropriate balance. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom and many published histories of “Green Chemistry” describe its start as being a result of governmental and/or regulatory actions at the US Environmental Protection Agency during the early 1990’s. But there were many Real World industrial examples of environmentally friendly commercial processes in the oil and commodity chemicals industries for decades prior to the 1990s. Some early examples of commercial “Green Chemistry” are briefly described in this article. The Boots/Hoechst Celanese Ibuprofen process was one of the earliest multiple-award-winning (...) examples of industrial “Green Chemistry” in the fine chemical/pharmaceutical industry. The author, who conceived the BHC Ibuprofen synthetic strategy in 1984, reveals and documents that the BHC Ibuprofen process was not primarily a result of governmental or regulatory mandates, or environmentalist or political motivations. The BHC ibuprofen process, and probably many other early industrial “green” inventions, evolved from, and their development and commercialization motivated and guided by, a long prior industrial culture of both scientific and technical evolution. The invention and commercialization of these early industrial commercialized processes, and the BHC Ibuprofen process were also guided by both competitive and economic market needs, personal human motivations, and a low waste culture of “Quality” and “Continuous Improvement” that the commodity chemical industry internally promoted in the 1980’s. The author comments on some perceptions of the status of Green Chemistry now, and directions it should consider going in the future. The author recommends that young Green Chemists and/or Green Engineers reconsider “Quality” approaches in order to genuinely lead Society toward a Greener future. (shrink)

The basic bimodal systemK/K can be interpreted as an analysis of the logic of ability developed in [1]. Where in [1] we would express the claimI can bring it about that P using the formula, with its non-normal operator, we will now use the formula. Here is a normal alethic possibilitation operator.is a normal necessitation operator, but it is independent of, and not subject to an alethic interpretation. Rather, is interpreted to meanI bring it about that P. The result is (...) a simplification and clarification of a combined logic of ability and action like that in [2], but employing only normal operators.A number of extensions of the basic systemK/K are constructed, first by strengthening the two normal sublogics independently and then by linking the two sublogics via axiom schemata involving both operators. The result is a series of increasingly strong systems which more and more adequately fulfill our expectations for a satisfactory logic of action and ability. (shrink)

It was a happy surprise when, overcoming partisan divisions and interest‐group lobbying, Congress enacted the No Surprises Act, which bans unfair out‐of‐network “balance billing.” Although this is only a modest legislative victory, key efforts by the health policy community made a real difference in a time of legislative gridlock.

This paper is an indirect critique of the practice of American liberal education. I show that the liberal, integrative model that American colleges and universities have adopted, with one key exception, is essentially an approach to education proposed some 2400 years ago by Stoic philosophers. To this end, I focus on a critical sketch of the Stoic model of education—chiefly through the works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius—that is distinguishable by these features: education as self‐knowing, the need of logic and (...) critical thinking for informed decision‐making, learning as preparation for life, and knowledge for integration in private, local, and global affairs. Such a critical sketch may not only help institutions instantiate their own similar aims more effectively, but also help them assess those aims with apposite normative force, which today they lack. (shrink)

The Companion begins with a section-by-section overview of Being and Time and a chapter reviewing the genesis of this seminal work. The final chapter situates Being and Time in the context of Heidegger's later work.

Laws in the 20 jurisdictions studied for this project display many similar approaches to protecting privacy in biobank research. Although few have enacted biobank-specific legislation, many countries address biobanking within other laws. All provide for some oversight mechanisms for biobank research, even though the nature of that oversight varies between jurisdictions. Most have some sort of controlled access system in place for research with biobank specimens. While broad consent models facilitate biobanking, countries without national or federated biobanks have been slow (...) to adopt broad consent. International guidelines have facilitated sharing and generally take a proportional risk approach, but many countries have provisions guiding international sharing and a few even limit international sharing. Although privacy laws may not prohibit international collaborations, the multi-prong approach to privacy unique to each jurisdiction can complicate international sharing. These symposium issues can serve as a resource for explaining the sometimes intricate privacy laws in each studied jurisdiction, outlining the key issues with regards to privacy and biobanking, and serving to describe a framework for the process of harmonization of privacy laws. (shrink)

Professor Weil’s thesis seems largely correct with respect to the United States, whose law on religious establishment I regularly teach. Funding is central to American debates over religious establishment. The fight over religious establishments in Virginia, which inspired both James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” and Thomas Jefferson’s “An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom,” was over whether persons could be forced to pay taxes to support religious instruction. Financial concerns were at the root of church-state debates in the (...) nineteenth century, when Protestants repeatedly rebuffed Catholics who wanted funding for Catholic private schools. Many state constitutions still have what are known as mini-Blaine Amendments that forbid public funding for religious institutions. Whether proponents of a strong separation between church and state in the United States are fighting the same battles as proponents of a strong separation of church and state in France is nevertheless problematic. The French revolutionaries had to subordinate a reactionary church. The American revolutionaries merely had to negotiate peace treaties among the different sects that supported the Declaration of Independence. Separation of church and state in the United States is best conceptualized as a division of labor among liberal institutions rather than a means for purging anti-liberal religion from the liberal public sphere. (shrink)

Artificial life uses computer models to study the essential nature of the characteristic processes of complex adaptive systems proceses such as self-organization, adaptation, and evolution. Work in the field is guided by the working hypothesis that simple computer models can capture the essential nature of these processes. This hypothesis is illustrated by recent results with a simple population of computational agents whose sensorimotor functionality undergo open-ended adaptive evolution. These might illuminate three aspects of complex adaptive systems in general: punctuated equilibrium (...) dynamics of diversity, a transition separating genetic order and disorder, and a law of adaptive evolutionary activity. (shrink)

This article is an extended commentary inspired by Alan Drengson's paper “Shifting Paradigms: From Technocrat to Planetary Person” (Drengson 2011). In this article Susan Greenwood and I echo Drengson's criticism that Euro-American science is incomplete, having committed what Thomas Roberts calls “The Singlestate Fallacy: the erroneous assumption that all worthwhile abilities reside in our normal, awake mindbody state” (Roberts 2006:105). This singlestate fallacy is vividly portrayed in Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, whose critique of Euro-American science is revisited in this article. (...) Alternatively, Greenwood and I suggest that what is needed is a multimodel framework “that allows for in-depth analysis of the different modes of consciousness.” Roberts refers to this alternative attitude toward science as the Multistate Paradigm. An awareness of the transformational character of shamanism is also explored in this article as a means to overcome the oppositions between the technocratic and person planetary perspective, and their related gender associations. (shrink)

A central thesis of biocentrism is that all living things have intrinsic value. But when conflicts arise between the interests of humans and other organisms, this claim often has counterintuitive consequences. It would be wrong, for example, to swat pesky flies. Some biocentrists have responded by positing a taxonomy of interests in which human interests justifiably supersede those of other living things. I express doubts about whether this maneuver can succeed, and suggest that even if it does, it then commits (...) biocentrists to the claim that it is wrong not to harm living things, when doing so is necessary to advance nonbasic human interests, a position which runs counter to the biocentric attitude of respect for nature. As a result, biocentrists must adopt either a highly counterintuitive position or one that is contrary to their general outlook. I show that the introduction of the supererogatory may resolve not only this biocentric dilemma but other quandaries in environmental ethics. (shrink)

For centuries philosophers have wrestled with the dichotomy between individual freedom on the one hand and collective solidarity on the other. Yet today there is a growing realization that this template is fundamentally flawed. In this book, Mark Young embraces and advocates a more holistic concept of freedom; one which is not merely defined negatively but which positively provides the preconditions for individuals to actively exercise their autonomy and to flourish as human beings in the process. Young posits the (...) idea of 'freedom in community' and traces its origin back to Aristotle. Taking as his premise that humans are deeply social beings who live their lives intricately interwoven with each other, he examines what type of political community is relevant for us in this post-Classical, post-Enlightenment and, indeed, post-Existential world. Identifying the failure of traditional 'statist' models of politics, Young instead argues for a civil society: a globally interlinked and free set of liberal communities as the best context for nourishing human flourishing. In this way we can achieve a proper setting for Eudaimonia in a modern sense. (shrink)