- How can anthropology improve our understanding of the interrelationship between nature and culture? - What can anthropology contribute to practical debates which depend on particular definitions of nature, such as that concerning sustainable development? Humankind has evolved over several million years by living in and utilizing 'nature' and by assimilating it into 'culture'. Indeed, the technological and cultural advancement of the species has been widely acknowledged to rest upon human domination and control of nature. Yet, by the 1960s, the (...) idea of culture in confrontation with nature was being challenged by science, philosophy and the environmental movement. Anthropology is increasingly concerned with such issues as they become more urgent for humankind as a whole. This important book reviews the current state of the concepts of 'nature' we use, both as scientific devices and ideological constructs, and is organised around three themes: - nature as a cultural construction; - the cultural management of the environment; and - relations between plants, animals and humans. (shrink)

Introduction It is increasingly considered important that people make an autonomous and informed decision concerning colorectal cancer screening. However, the realisation of autonomy within the concept of informed decision-making might be interpreted too narrowly. Additionally, relatively little is known about what the eligible population believes to be a 'good' screening decision. Therefore, we aimed to explore how the concepts of autonomous and informed decision-making relate to how the eligible CRC screening population makes their decision and when they believe to have (...) made a 'good' screening decision. Methods We conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with the eligible CRC screening population. The general topics discussed concerned how people made their CRC screening decision, how they experienced making this decision and when they considered they had made a 'good' decision. Results Most interviewees viewed a 'good' CRC screening decision as one based on both reasoning and feeling/intuition, and that is made freely. However, many CRC screening non-participants experienced a certain social pressure to participate. All CRC screening non-participants viewed making an informed decision as essential. This appeared to be the case to a lesser extent for CRC screening participants. For most, experiences and values were involved in their decision-making. Conclusion Our sample of the eligible CRC screening population viewed aspects related to the concepts of autonomous and informed decision-making as important for making a 'good' CRC screening decision. However, in particular the existence of a social norm may be affecting a true autonomous decision-making process. Additionally, the present concept of informed decision-making with its strong emphasis on making a fully informed and well-considered decision does not appear to be entirely reflective of the process in practice. More efforts could be made to attune to the diverse values and factors that are involved in deciding about CRC screening participation. (shrink)

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

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 11.1 (2001) 113 [Access article in PDF] Letters Rats, Mice, and Birds and the Animal Welfare Act Madam:In the September 2000 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, I argued for the inclusion of laboratory rats, mice, and birds under provisions of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA). This act sets humane standards for animals used in biomedical experimentation, but these three species are (...) excluded despite the fact that they comprise 90 percent of all animals used. Recent actions have been taken on this issue that temporarily maintain the status quo of exclusion.On 25 September 2000, a legal suit brought by the Alternatives Research Development Fund was settled out of court when the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed that the AWA enforcement regulations should be extended to rats, mice, and birds. This was a significant victory heralded by the animal protection movement and some sections of the scientific community. Federal Court Judge Ellen S. Huvelle dismissed motions by pro-animal research groups to block this agreement.But the tide soon turned. On 11 October, a last-minute amendment to the USDA appropriations bill submitted by the Senate Appropriations Committee chair Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) precluded the department from spending any funds in the coming fiscal year to effect this change. This amendment had been drafted by the National Association for Biomedical Research and passed to the University of Mississippi to be forwarded to Cochran. This now congressionally approved amendment postponed for a year any action to implement the legal agreement. USDA plans to initiate the formal rule-making process for rats, mice, and birds by 1 October 2001. F. Barbara Orlans Senior Research Fellow Kennedy Institute of Ethics Georgetown University Washington, DC... (shrink)

R F Dearden; Theory and Practice in Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 17–29, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-.

R F Dearden; Education and Politics, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 149–156, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.198.

This volume critically and constructively discusses philosophical questions which have particular bearing on the formulation of educational aims. The book is divided into three major parts: the first deals with the nature of education, and discusses the various general aims, such as 'mental health', 'socialization' and 'creativity' which have been thought to characterize it; the second section is concerned with the nature of reason and its relationship to feeling, will and action; finally the development of different aspects of reason in (...) an educational context is considered. (shrink)

It has come to be expected that collections issued by the Royal Institute of Philosophy will contain work that has quality or is otherwise interesting. This volume runs true to form and presents plenty of both. It gives the proceedings of the conference arranged by the Institute at Exeter in 1973, consisting of five symposia together with Chairman's remarks of about eight pages or so for each symposium, and in three cases postscripts by the first speaker. The contributors and topics (...) are: R. F. Dearden and Elizabeth Telfer on ‘Autonomy as an Educational Ideal’ with R. M. Hare as Chairman; R. K. Elliott and Glenn Langford on ‘Education and the Development of the Understanding’ with Paul Hirst as Chairman; David Cooper and Timothy O'Hagan on ‘Quality and Equality in Education’ with R. F. Atkinson as Chairman; Mary Warnock and Richard Norman on ‘The Neutral Teacher’ with Alan Montefiore as Chairman; Stuart Brown and A. Phillips Griffiths on ‘Academic Freedom’ with R. S. Peters as Chairman. (shrink)

Jung was intrigued from early in his career with coincidences, especially those surprising juxtapositions that scientific rationality could not adequately explain. He discussed these ideas with Albert Einstein before World War I, but first used the term "synchronicity" in a 1930 lecture, in reference to the unusual psychological insights generated from consulting the I Ching. A long correspondence and friendship with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli stimulated a final, mature statement of Jung's thinking on synchronicity, originally published in 1952 (...) and reproduced here. Together with a wealth of historical and contemporary material, this essay describes an astrological experiment Jung conducted to test his theory. Synchronicity reveals the full extent of Jung's research into a wide range of psychic phenomena. This paperback edition of Jung's classic work includes a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani, Philemon Professor of Jung History at University College London. (shrink)

We introduce a linear analogue of Läuchli's semantics for intuitionistic logic. In fact, our result is a strengthening of Läuchli's work to the level of proofs, rather than provability. This is obtained by considering continuous actions of the additive group of integers on a category of topological vector spaces. The semantics, based on functorial polymorphism, consists of dinatural transformations which are equivariant with respect to all such actions. Such dinatural transformations are called uniform. To any sequent in Multiplicative Linear Logic (...) , we associate a vector space of“diadditive” uniform transformations. We then show that this space is generated by denotations of cut-free proofs of the sequent in the theory MLL + MIX. Thus we obtain a full completeness theorem in the sense of Abramsky and Jagadeesan, although our result differs from theirs in the use of dinatural transformations.As corollaries, we show that these dinatural transformations compose, and obtain a conservativity result: diadditive dinatural transformations which are uniform with respect to actions of the additive group of integers are also uniform with respect to the actions of arbitrary cocommutative Hopf algebras. Finally, we discuss several possible extensions of this work to noncommutative logic.It is well known that the intuitionistic version of Läuchli's semantics is a special case of the theory of logical relations, due to Plotkin and Statman. Thus, our work can also be viewed as a first step towards developing a theory of logical relations for linear logic and concurrency. (shrink)

R F Dearden; Freedom and the Development of Autonomy: a reply to Victor Quinn, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 18, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 271–27.

R F Deaden; In Defence of Children's Enquiry, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 11, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 170–175, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467.

Mixed results regarding the role of gender in moral reasoning prompted an investigation of an alternative characteristic that may be more influential in the process: sex role orientation. We present an empirical assessment of the relationship between an individual’s moral reasoning level and his/her sex role orientation, gender, and several academic factors. Our results indicate that sex role orientation is not related to moral reasoning level. Gender is related to moral reasoning in our study, women reasoning at higher levels than (...) men. We found a positive relationship between education and moral reasoning level, and moral reasoning levels differed across academic institutions. Our results also show business students have lower moral reasoning levels than students in other fields, although this result did not reach statistical significance. (shrink)

Reading the Republic without reference to the less familiar Laws can lead to a distorted view of Plato's political theory. In the Republic the philosopher describes his ideal city; in his last and longest work he deals with the more detailed considerations involved in setting up a second-best 'practical utopia.' The relative neglect of the Laws has stemmed largely from the obscurity of its style and the apparent chaos of its organization so that, although good translations now exist, students of (...) philosophy and political science still find the text inaccessible. This first full-length philosophical introduction to the Laws will therefore prove invaluable. The opening chapters describe the general character of the dialogue and set it in the context of Plato's political philosophy as a whole. Each of the remaining chapters deals with a single topic, ranging over material scattered through the text and so drawing together the threads of the argument in a stimulating and readily comprehensible way. Those topics include education, punishment, responsibility, religion, virtue and pleasure as well as political matters and law itself. Throughout, the author encourages the reader to think critically about Plato's ideas and to see their relevance to present-day philosophical debate. No knowledge of Greek is required and only a limited background in philosophy. Although aimed primarily at students, the book will also be of interest to more advanced readers since it provides for the first time a philosophical, as opposed to linguistic or historical, commentary on the Laws in English. (shrink)