© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

"The demonization of the radical right ill serves us when now, more than ever before, it is vitally important to know all we can about this esoteric milieu's nature and potentialities…by…demonizing the many, we cloak the few, and, however unwittingly, facilitate the existence of evil in the world." —From the Introduction by Jeffrey Kaplan White power groups are universally vilified and feared. But to better understand the threat they pose, scholars and activists must try to better understand their disturbing ideas (...) and practices. In this controversial volume, Jeffrey Kaplan brings to light the workings of white supremacy movements in the United States and Europe in the years since World War II. The first half of the Encyclopedia is made up of over 100 entries—many of them essay-length—describing the people, groups and themes that make up the radical racist right. Some of the entries are written by movement activists themselves, providing useful insider accounts. The second half contains original resources circulated within the movement, each prefaced and placed in scholarly context by the editor. These documents, although offending, are invaluable to researchers and often available nowhere else. Cross-references and an index make the information easily accessible. For scholars of race, religion, politics or social movements, the Encyclopedia of White Power is an essential resource. (shrink)

Within the context of structural theories this paper examines what health professionals say about their clinical service structures. We firstly trace various conceptual perspectives on clinical service structures, discussing multiple theoretical axes. These theories question whether clinical service structures represent either superficial or more profound changes in hospitals. We secondly explore which view is supported though a content analysis of the free text responses of 111 health professionals (44 doctors, 45 nurses and 22 allied health practitioners) about their clinical service (...) structures in a questionnaire survey in two large hospitals that had implemented clinical service structures three years previously. Commentaries unfavourable toward clinical service structures were made by 47.7% of staff, favourable by 24.3%, mixed (both favourable and unfavourable) by 17.1% and non-evaluative statements were made by 10.8%. The most frequent criticisms were inefficient organisation of change (27%), poor management (24.3%), lack of cooperation between staff (15.9%) and failure to empower health practitioners (13.5%). All professions made more negative than positive evaluations of their clinical service structures but the ratio was highest for doctors and lowest for allied health. Ranking of nurses' and allied health staffs' specific evaluations were similar but both differed significantly from doctors.' Unfavourable or negative comments predominated, and change appears more superficial and less profound than advocates of structural contributions hope. Four types of belief systems about clinical service structures are apparent. Some study participants are disposed toward the status quo; others toward restructuring; yet others are team oriented; and a final group is tribally oriented. The implication of this paper for managers is that more work is needed if clinical service structures are to realise the promise of more multi-disciplinarity and less fragmentation across professional groups. For scholars, the implication is that marrying different theoretical frames with empirical data can serve to produce fresh perspectives and perhaps new insights. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays exploring adaptive systems from many perspectives, ranging from computational applications to models of adaptation in living and social systems. The essays on computation discuss history, theory, applications, and possible threats of adaptive and evolving computations systems. The modeling chapters cover topics such as evolution in microbial populations, the evolution of cooperation, and how ideas about evolution relate to economics. The title Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems honors John Holland, whose 1975 (...) Book, Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems has become a classic text for many disciplines in which adaptation play a central role. The essays brought together here were originally written to honor John Holland, and span most of the different areas touched by his wide-ranging and influential research career. The authors include some of the most prominent scientists in the fields of artificial intelligence evolutionary computation, and complex adaptive systems. Taken together, these essays present a broad modern picture of current research on adaptation as it relates to computers, living systems, society, and their complex interactions. (shrink)

This book breaks new ground, departing from an emphasis on 'organisations' as social objects and moving towards a position of analysis which situates itself in the wider context of the late modernity. The contributors of this book acknowledge the impact of Robert Cooper on their own work and develop further his insistence that organisational analysis must be understood in terms of the rationalization of society as a whole.

This is a study of Aristotle's moral philosophy as it is contained in the Nicomachean Ethics. Hardie examines the difficulties of the text; presents a map of inescapable philosophical questions; and brings out the ambiguities and critical disagreements on some central topics, inclduing happiness, the soul, the ethical mean, and the initiation of action.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 88-112 [Access article in PDF] Milton's Aesthetics Of Eating Denise Gigante It is not a little curious that, with the exception of Ben Jonson (and he did not speak gravely about it so often), the poet in our own country who has written with the greatest gusto on the subject of eating is Milton. He omits none of the pleasures of the palate, great or small. (...) In his Latin poems, when young, he speaks of the pears and chestnuts which he used to roast at the fire with his friend Diodati. Junkets and other "country-messes" are not forgotten in his "Allegro." The simple Temptation in the Wilderness, "Command that these stones be made bread" (which was quite sufficient for a hunger that had fasted "forty days"), is turned, in Paradise Regained, with more poetry than propriety, into the set out of a great feast, containing every delicacy in and out of season. The very "names" of the viands, he says, were "exquisite." And in Paradise Lost, Eve is not only described as being skilful in paradisaical cookery ("tempering dulcet creams"), but the angel Raphael is invited to dinner, and helped by his entertainers to a series of tid-bits and contrasted relishes--Taste after taste, upheld with kindliest change. --Leigh Hunt, "Eating Songs" The title of an old play gives us a direct taste and surmise of its inwards, as the first lines of the Paradise Lost smack of the great Poem. --John Keats, "On 'Retribution, or the Chieftain's Daughter'" That Milton's Romantic readers should invoke the "taste" of his epic poetry suggests an awareness beyond the anecdotal. For as this essay will show, Milton complicates the category of physiological taste in such a manner as to form the ground for the possibility of aesthetic taste, which emerges as a distinct discourse in the early years of the eighteenth century. This is not to say that Milton is the only source for this dubious meaning-in-transition. But precisely how, prior to the interventions of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and the entire tradition of post-Miltonic theorists of taste, is one to read Adam's darkly sardonic postlapsarian remark: "Eve, now I see thou art exact of taste... And Palate call judicious" [PL IX.1017-20]? Critics have observed Milton's "ruthless and relentless pressure on 'taste,'" the fact that the word and its variants appear thirty times in Book IX of Paradise Lost alone [Ricks 69]. What I would like to suggest is that just as Milton is a seminal figure for the eighteenth-century aesthetic preoccupation with the sublime, 1 he is theoretically situated at the origins of the more generic thing called taste as well. [End Page 88]Of course Milton himself was aware of the epistemological implications of taste, whereby the Latin sapere can mean both "to taste" and "to know." 2 The fruit whose "mortal taste" was the source of all our woe did, after all, grow on the tree of knowledge, knowingly described by Satan as "precious of all Trees / In Paradise, of operation blest / To Sapience" [PL I.2, IX.795-97]. So too, when Adam calls Eve "exact of taste," he adds "of Sapience no small part" [PL IX.1018]. Throughout Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Milton plays with the epistemological connotation of taste, incorporating it even into the 1671 companion piece of the latter, Samson Agonistes, whose blind hero declares, "The way to know were not to see but taste" [1091]. At the time Milton was writing, however, taste was philosophically connected not only to knowledge and pleasure, but to morality as well. At the origins of the British empirical discourse of taste, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, inheriting this link between epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics, inquires: "Will it not be found... that what is beautiful is... true; and what is at once both beautiful and true is, of consequence, agreeable and good?" [2: 268-69]. For Milton as for Shaftesbury, the beautiful was the true was the good, and access to these ideals was bound up with the philosophic complexity... (shrink)

An old Arab proverb runs as follows: He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool; shun him. He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a child; teach him. He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep; wake him. But he who knows, and knows that he knows, is a sage; follow him.

Empirical ethics research is increasingly valued in bioethics and healthcare more generally, but there remain as yet under-researched areas such as pharmacy, despite the increasingly visible attempts by the profession to embrace additional roles beyond the supply of medicines. A descriptive and critical review of the extant empirical pharmacy ethics literature is provided here. A chronological change from quantitative to qualitative approaches is highlighted in this review, as well as differing theoretical approaches such as cognitive moral development and the four (...) principles of biomedical ethics. Research with pharmacy student cohorts is common, as is representation from American pharmacists. Many examples of ethical problems are identified, as well as commercial and legal influences on ethical understanding and decision making. In this paper, it is argued that as pharmacy seeks to develop additional roles with concomitant ethical responsibilities, a new prescription is needed for empirical ethics research in pharmacy—one that embraces an agenda of systematic research using a plurality of methodological and theoretical approaches to better explore this under-researched discipline. (shrink)

It is a surprising fact that moral philosophers have rarely examined the distinction between what I shall call ‘positive’ or ‘social’ morality on the one hand and ‘autonomous’ or ‘individual’ morality on the other. Accordingly, conceptual and moral issues of the greatest importance have been neglected. The distinction is, I take it, recognised by Hegel, when he contrasts Sittlichkeit with Moralität . However, the rival sides who give a conceptual or a moral preference to one concept over the other rarely (...) come to grips with one another, and the deep conflicts between them are concealed instead of being brought out into the open. Only in Burke's diatribe against Rousseau, Bradley's critique of Sidgwick , Hobhouse's crusade against Bosanquet , Prichard's attack on Green , Hart's criticism of Hare , and above all in Oakeshott's onslaught on Rationalism do we get a glimpse of one of the main issues of moral philosophy and of morality. For just as we have two concepts, so we have two moral conceptual schemes, each of which gives a central place to one concept at the expense of the other. Those who suppose that morality is or ought to be wholly or mainly a social concept may recommend submission to a tradition. Those, on the other hand, who suppose morality to be primarily an individual or independent concept will recommend independent decisions. I want in this paper, firstly, to explain the differences between the two concepts, secondly, to show that neither of them is conceptually illegitimate or degenerate, and lastly, to determine what place, if any, each ought to have in a rational morality. (shrink)

We discuss the development of cognitive neuroscience in terms of the tension between the greater sophistication in cognitive concepts and methods of the cognitive sciences and the increasing power of more standard biological approaches to understanding brain structure and function. There have been major technological developments in brain imaging and advances in simulation, but there have also been shifts in emphasis, with topics such as thinking, consciousness, and social cognition becoming fashionable within the brain sciences. The discipline has great promise (...) in terms of applications to mental health and education, provided it does not abandon the cognitive perspective and succumb to reductionism. (shrink)

Outlines the history of humanism from medieval times to the present discussing prominent philosophers from the past, and settles the rivalry between humanism and absolutism by arguing that both sides are guilty of a lack of humility. The author further maintains that there is a "doctrine of mystery" that draws upon the Buddhist conception of "emptiness" and the writings of Heidegger and that must be considered when discussing human beliefs and conduct.

Do UK community pharmacists encounter the high drama dilemmas of the medical ethics literature or is a 'morality of the mundane' more appropriate? This paper presents the findings of a qualitative study that asked a sample of UK pharmacists to describe their ethical issues and to establish whether these were ethical dilemmas as understood philosophically or ethical problems of a more legal or emotional nature. It emerged that although many pharmacists referred to 'dilemmas', these were often problems involving a conflict (...) between an ethical value and a legal or procedural issue and often arose in the routine minutiae of dispensing prescriptions and selling medicines. Such ethical problems remained of concern for pharmacists and the commercial environment, corporate pharmacy ownership and pharmacists' subordination to doctors, all precipitated ethical problems. Law and ethics appeared to be understood synonymously but this may reflect a modernity that increasingly brackets out ethical experiences by encouraging reliance upon law and procedure. (shrink)

Contemporary methods of computational cognitive modeling have recently been criticized by Addyman and French (2012) on the grounds that they have not kept up with developments in computer technology and human–computer interaction. They present a manifesto for change according to which, it is argued, modelers should devote more effort to making their models accessible, both to non-modelers (with an appropriate easy-to-use user interface) and modelers alike. We agree that models, like data, should be freely available according to the normal standards (...) of science, but caution against confusing implementations with specifications. Models may embody theories, but they generally also include implementation assumptions. Cognitive modeling methodology needs to be sensitive to this. We argue that specification, replication and experimentation are methodological approaches that can address this issue. (shrink)

Spirituality has been a part of nursing for many centuries and represents an essential value for people, including nurses and patients. Cumulative evidence points to the positive contribution of spiritually on health and wellbeing. However, there is little clarity about what spirituality means. The literature reveals that nurses have ascribed a diversity of interpretations to spirituality. However, no studies have investigated how registered nurses construct their understanding of spirituality using a critical discourse analysis approach. Therefore, the aim of this study (...) was to uncover how registered nurses construct their understanding of spirituality using a critical discourse analysis approach. Twenty registered nurses from a non‐denominational public hospital and a faith‐based private hospital were interviewed about their understanding of spirituality and practice of spiritual care. A critical discourse analysis approach was used in the examination of the interview texts to uncover underlying social and power features. Links were made between the linguistic features the registered nurses used in their interviews and the broader social context of the study. Three discourses emerged from the interview texts. These include constructing spirituality through personal religious beliefs discourse, holistic discourse and empathetic care discourse. The findings of this study have implications for nurse education and policy makers. (shrink)

Characterizations of philosophy abound. It is ‘the queen of the sciences’, a grand and sweeping metaphysical endeavour; or, less regally, it is a sort of deep anthropology or ‘descriptive metaphysics’, uncovering the general presuppositions or conceptual schemes that lurk beneath our words and thoughts. A different set of images portray philosophy as a type of therapy, or as a spiritual exercise, a way of life to be followed, or even as a special branch of poetry or politics. Then there is (...) a group of characterizations that include philosophy as linguistic analysis, as phenomenological description, as conceptual geography, or as genealogy in the sense proposed by Nietzsche and later taken up by Foucault. (shrink)

David E. Cooper Early in, while I was teaching in the United States, I received news of my appointment as a lecturer in the philosophy of education at the ...

Inborn errors of vitamin B12 (cobalamin) metabolism are associated with homocystinuria and methylmalonic aciduria, either alone or in combination. A number of these disorders have provided the first evidence for the existence of important steps in the transport or metabolism of cobalamin in eukaryotic cells. Eight complementation classes have been defined on the basis of somatic cell hybridization studies. Although the majority of patients present in infancy or early childhood, some are not diagnosed until adolescence or later. For some of (...) these disorders, prenatal diagnosis and therapy with cobalamin during pregnancy has been attempted. Although only males have been described with cblE disease, all of these disorders are presumed to be autosomal recessive in inheritance. The clinical and laboratory aspects of the different complementation classes (cblA–cblG) are reviewed here. (shrink)

‘Reactionary modernism’ is a term happily coined by the historian and sociologist Jeffrey Herf to refer to a current of German thought during the interwar years. It indicates the attempt to ‘reconcil[e] the antimodernist, romantic and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism’ with that ‘most obvious manifestation of means–ends rationality … modern technology’. Herf's paradigm examples of this current of thought are two best-selling writers of the period: Oswald Spengler, author of the massive domesday scenario The Decline of the West (...) in 1917 and, fifteen years later, of Man and Technics, and Ernst Jünger, the now centenarian chronicler of the war in which he was a much-decorated hero, whose main theoretical work was Der Arbeiter in 1932. The label is also applied by Herf to such intellectual luminaries as the legal theorist and apologist for the Third Reich, Carl Schmitt, and more contentiously Martin Heidegger. At a less elevated level, reactionary modernism also permeated the writings of countless, now forgotten engineers, who were inspired at once by the new technology, Nietzschean images of Promethean Übermenschen, and an ethos of völkisch nationalism. (shrink)

Background: Increasing interest in empirical ethics has enhanced understanding of healthcare professionals’ ethical problems and attendant decision-making. A four-stage decision-making model involving ethical attention, reasoning, intention and action offers further insights into how more than reasoning alone may contribute to decision-making.Aims: To explore how the four-stage model can increase understanding of decision-making in healthcare and describe the decision-making of an under-researched professional group.Methods: 23 purposively sampled UK community pharmacists were asked, in semi-structured interviews, to describe ethical problems in their work (...) and how they were resolved. Framework analysis of transcribed interviews utilised the four decision-making stages, together with constant comparative methods and deviant-case analysis.Results: Pharmacists were often inattentive and constructed problems in legal terms. Ethical reasoning was limited, but examples of appeals to consequences, the golden rule, religious faith and common-sense experience emerged. Ethical intention was compromised by frequent concern about legal prosecution. Ethical inaction was common, typified by pharmacists’ failure to report healthcare professionals’ bad practices, and ethical passivity emerged to describe these negative examples of the four decision-making stages. Pharmacists occasionally described more ethically active decision-making, but this often involved ethical uncertainty.Discussion: The four decision-making stages are a useful tool in considering how healthcare professionals try to resolve ethical problems in practice. They reveal processes often ignored in normative theories, and their recognition and the emergence of ethical passivity indicates the complexity of decision-making in practice. Ethical passivity may be deleterious to patients’ welfare, and concerns emerge about improving pharmacists’ ethical training and promoting ethical awareness and responsibility. (shrink)

In my 1993 IJPS paper it was suggested that postmodernist verdicts on ‘the death of philosophy’ relied on a rejection of any ‘substantive’ or ‘metaphysical’ notion of truth. The present paper relates these verdicts to Wittgenstein’s alleged ‘philosophical quietism’. In both cases, for example, there is a rejection of ‘depth’. Various characterisations of Wittgenstein’s position are questioned, including the idea that his quietism consists in showing the impossibility of sceptical challenges to our ‘hinge’ propositions and beliefs. It is then argued, (...) however, that recognition of the groundlessness of beliefs (and practices), far from curing ‘vertigo’ or ‘Angst’, is apt to inspire it. In a final section, I propose that the ‘metaphysical horror’ at the impossibility of articulating grounds for our beliefs can be allayed only by the thought that these answer to a reality that cannot be articulated and must therefore remain a mystery. One role for philosophy might be to cultivate a sense of this mystery and trace its implications for how we should live. (shrink)

In this paper I will argue that Aristotelian accounts of disease cannot provide us with an adequate descriptive account of our concept of disease. In other words, they fail to classify conditions as either diseases, or non-diseases, in a way that is consistent with commonplace intuitions. This being said, Aristotelian accounts of disease are not worthless. Aristotelian approaches cannot offer a decent descriptive account of our concept of disease, but they do offer resources for improving on the ways in which (...) we think about the harms that afflict human beings. While they cannot offer an account of ‘disease' they can offer an account of ‘harm'—and this it turns out, is ultimately of greater importance. (shrink)

We show that every nonzero $\Delta _{2}^{0}$ e-degree bounds a minimal pair. On the other hand, there exist $\Sigma _{2}^{0}$ e-degrees which bound no minimal pair.

In this paper we examine the potential of writing and performing poetry to empower young people from marginalized backgrounds to participate in the political life of their communities. Our method combines philosophical analysis with the design and implementation of a poetry workshop in Coventry. Drawing on Cavell’s notion of ‘acknowledgement’, we begin with a philosophical account of the pedagogy that informed the workshop’s design. We then explore how this account informed implementation of the workshop. Finally, we present the results. To (...) unpack the significance of our findings, we examine two poems performed by young people at the project’s concluding event. On empirical and philosophical grounds, we argue that writing and performing poetry can play a role in political education, for it opens space for what we call ‘the acknowledgment of voice.’. (shrink)

Race and Gender in the Classroom explores the paradoxes of education, race, and gender, as Laurie Cooper Stoll follows eighteen teachers carrying out their roles as educators in an era of “post-racial” and “post-gendered” politics.

A subtitle for this paper might have been ‘The ugly face ofVerstehen’, for it asks whether the theory ofVerstehenhas, to switch metaphors, ‘dirty hands’. By the theory ofVerstehen, I mean the constellation of concepts—life, experience, expression, interpretative understanding—which, according to Wilhelm Dilthey, are essential for the study of human affairs, thereby showing that ‘the methodology of the human studies[Geisteswissenschafteri]is … different from that of the physical sciences’ :1 for in the latter, these concepts have no similar place. Even critics of (...) Dilthey tend to agree that his heart, if not his head, was in the right place: thatVerstehenwas designed as an antidote to ‘dehumanizing’ attempts by positivists to reduce the categories used in explaining human behaviour to just those equally operative in the physical sciences. As Dilthey himself put it, ‘there is no real blood flowing in the veins’ of human beings as examined by the positivists and their precursors: they do not treat of ‘the whole man’. The idea ofVerstehen, it seems, is doubly humane: a humanizing approach to the humane studies. (shrink)

This paper defends the description of Buddhism—by Schopenhauer and many other nineteenth-century figures—as pessimistic. Pessimism, in the relevant sense, is a dark, negative judgment on the psychological, social, and moral condition of humankind and the prospects for its amelioration. After discussing texts in the Pali canon that provide prima facie support for the charge of pessimism, two familiar responses are considered. One emphasizes the positive aspects of the human condition recognized by the Buddha; the other emphasizes the prospect held out (...) by him for the cessation of dukkha. It is argued that neither response is persuasive—not least because of a failure to appreciate the gulf between ordinary “worldling” existence and that of the arahant or enlightened person. A final section discusses the description of the arahant as “transcending the world” and the human condition. If correct, this supports the charge of pessimism. This is because pessimism is a claim about the human condition, about our being-in-the-world, and cannot therefore be refuted by the prospect of a mode of being that transcends this condition. (shrink)

R. S. Peters has not only been the major philosopher of education in Britain during second half of the twentieth century, but by common consent, he has transformed the subject and brought it into the mainstream of contemporary philosophy. The ten essays in this book attest to his influence whether by critical examination of his ideas or by original treatment of topics in which has has inspired a new interest.