Many of the same fundamental principles and regulations that govern civilian biomedical research also apply to research conducted by the US Military. Despite these similarities, the conduct of research by the US Military has additional requirements designed to preserve service members’ informed consent rights, ethical standards and information that may be deemed classified. Furthermore, there are also additional rules and regulations associated with potential research to be done in a combat setting. Before conducting battlefield research, many unique circumstances must be (...) considered to include: (1) the current legal and regulatory requirements for advanced informed consent (2) the tactical situations, and the ability to adequately document in the “austere” environment (3) the need to provide improved drugs and devices for combat casualty care and (4) the special nature of the superior-subordinate relationship. This paper discusses historical background, regulatory oversight, ethical implications and release of information as it pertains to research conducted by the US Military. (shrink)

The aim of UK-REACH (“The United Kingdom Research study into Ethnicity And COVID-19 outcomes in Healthcare workers”) is to understand if, how, and why healthcare workers (HCWs) in the United Kingdom (UK) from ethnic minority groups are at increased risk of poor outcomes from COVID-19. In this article, we present findings from the ethical and legal stream of the study, which undertook qualitative research seeking to understand and address legal, ethical, and social acceptability issues around data protection, privacy, and information (...) governance associated with the linkage of HCWs’ registration data and healthcare data. We interviewed 22 key opinion leaders in healthcare and health research from across the UK in two-to-one semi-structured interviews. Transcripts were coded using qualitative thematic analysis. Participants told us that a significant aspect of Big Data research in public health is varying drivers of mistrust—of the research itself, research staff and funders, and broader concerns of mistrust within participant communities, particularly in the context of COVID-19 and those situated in more marginalised community settings. However, despite the challenges, participants also identified ways in which legally compliant and ethically informed approaches to research can be crafted to mitigate or overcome mistrust and establish greater confidence in Big Data public health research. Overall, our research indicates that a “Big Data Ethics by Design” approach to research in this area can help assure (1) that meaningful community and participant engagement is taking place and that extant challenges are addressed, and (2) that any new challenges or hitherto unknown unknowns can be rapidly and properly considered to ensure potential (but material) harms are identified and minimised where necessary. Our findings indicate such an approach, in turn, will help drive better scientific breakthroughs that translate into medical innovations and effective public health interventions, which benefit the publics studied, including those who are often marginalised in research. (shrink)

Robert Pippin's new book, The Culmination, examines Heidegger's reading and critique of Kant and Hegel. Since Pippin is perhaps best known as one of the most influential contemporary advocates for the importance of engaging with the difficult work of Hegel in particular, it will no doubt surprise quite a few of his readers that, on some fundamental points, the book concludes that “Heidegger is right” (p. xi). In the present piece, I explore some intriguing issues that Pippin's book raises. (...) Although the disagreement between his principal parties is obviously central to his discussion, my main focus is on a possible point of important agreement that that discussion also opens up, in light of which Heidegger might be fruitfully interpreted as pursuing a variant of a Kantian/Hegelian project, though this will also lead me to make a number of critical points about Pippin's reading of Heidegger: although there are grounds for thinking that Pippin's Heidegger does subscribe to such a project, some of the considerations that Pippin advances in arguing that “Heidegger is right” sit uncomfortably—it seems to me—with that project. (shrink)

Trisokkas raises two objections to my defence of Heidegger's claim against Hegel. Heidegger's claim is that Hegel had dogmatically assumed the priority of ‘logic’ in any inquiry into the meaning of being, thus inheriting the metaphysical tradition's dual assumptions that what must be said to matter most of all in our attempt understand our place in the world and a possible reconciliation with the world is the knowability of being. Everything else can only matter if the world is first of (...) all available as knowable. The claim is not that Hegel cannot develop a ‘science of logic’ or, to use Hegelian shorthand, that Being cannot be understood as Concept. The issue is the status of the Logic, what significance it has in our attempt to understand ourselves and the meaning of being in general. Ultimately Hegel counts as the culmination of the metaphysical tradition because he believes, citing Aristotle, that ‘nous rules the world’, that everything is primordially available to us as rationally available, explicable. This means that even the meaning of the being of human history, sociality, religion and art is as expressions of reason, even as modes of rationality. Trisokkas objects that it is question-begging to saddle Hegel with a question that he is not, in the Science of Logic at least, attempting to answer. He puts this by saying that Hegel is simply not addressing the question of the status or significance of the Logic, that he has not ‘chosen’ to raise any question about what matters to human beings or to Hegel himself, but has chosen an inquiry into being. (‘Mattering is irrelevant at the beginning of Hegel's Logic.’ ‘All being is taken to be, is simply being.’) According to Trisokkas the Logic is simply an inquiry into being's possible determinacy. Trisokkas's second objection is a classic Hegelian objection, the one he himself raised against Schelling. He alleges that any philosophical understanding, even of the nondiscursive sources of meaningfulness, must itself be discursive in some way, as in Heidegger's own analysis or as in my book, and he cites this as evidence against the priority, at least for philosophy, of a nondiscursive attunement to significances. Mattering is a concept and our account of its significance must remain conceptual, not itself ‘poetic’. (shrink)

Robert John Ackermann deals decisively with the problem of relativism that has plagued post-empiricist philosophy of science. Recognizing that theory and data are mediated by data domains (bordered data sets produced by scientific instruments), he argues that the use of instruments breaks the dependency of observation on theory and thus creates a reasoned basis for scientific objectivity. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished (...) backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Latin Literature. A HistoryRichard F. ThomasGian Biagio Conte. Latin Literature. A History. Translated by Joseph B. Solodow. Revised by Don Fowler and Glenn W. Most. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. xxxiii 1 827 pp. $65.00.The work under review is a translation of Gian Biagio Conte’s 1987 book Letteratura latina; Manuale storico dalle origini alla fine dell’ impero, a book whose title page acknowledged the (...) collaboration of Alessandro Barchiesi, Emanuele Narducci, Giovanni Polara, Giuliano Ranucci, and Gianpiero Rosati. In the translation these scholars have been moved into C.’s “Acknowledgements,” making room for the new group on the title page, as given above. Of these, Don Fowler provided a bibliography and “in a sense has helped to direct the whole editorial enterprise,” while Glenn Most (like Solodow, one of C.’s English translators), rewrote sections on reception. Elaine Fantham introduces the work with an encomiastic “blurb” and general appreciation of the scholarship of C. C.’s own preface adds to the “gang of five” original collaborators a new group of three (Mario Labate, Alessandro Schiesaro, Rolando Ferri) who “have freely given me the support of their attentive and considerate criticism.” One recent reviewer talks of “the thorough control of the material by the single mind of the original author” (Robert P. Sonkowsky, The Key Reporter 61.3 [1996] 13), as does another for whom “the book is the production of a single mind” (J. Griffin, “The Long Latin Line,” review in New York Review of Books [Oct. 6, 1994] 43); it therefore seems only right to register my dissent from such a judgment.Much in Latin studies right now seems to involve a pack mentality: teams toil away for their grex, writing encomiastic and disingenuously uncritical reviews, or footnotes acknowledging the help of other teammates, attending conferences, organizing group-solidifying essay collections, even new series and manifestoes promising a “New Latin”—a term that seems to have no particular theoretical or intellectual content, nor a purpose other than to appeal vaguely for some sort of postmodernist approval. Barbara F. McManus’ summary of a paper on the uses of e-mail for mobilizing interest groups, delivered at a conference on computers and the classics by the very editor of the book under review, Don Fowler (“The Scroll and the Screen: Computers and Classical Literary Criticism”), gives a clear account of procedure and techniques in use:Electronic communication allows small groups with strongly related interests to form, cohere, and influence the larger disciplinary community; because such groups start with fundamental agreement on intellectual frameworks and approaches, they can develop ideas rapidly and in depth.(2/8/97 )What happens when other, less organized and more individual, insights fail to coincide with the “fundamental agreement” of the “group,” and how, we might wonder, will such individualism hold up in the face of this mission to “influence the larger disciplinary community”? [End Page 471]Be all this as it may and whatever the realities of authorship, the achievement of Gian Biagio Conte’s volume is a signal one. Latin Literature is a work of considerable value, a work which I have already used with success in teaching the history of Latin literature. Whatever the state of its authorship, I would now move to a review of some of its merits, which are considerable, and in which C. himself is obviously a participant throughout. The book begins with the origins of Latin literature and extends to Bede and the national literatures that were to transmit Latin literature into the vernaculars, that would in turn connect the essential themes and fundamental concerns of classical Latin literature to the cognate and evolving experiences of later antiquity and the middle ages. The original authors worked to a formulaic scheme: generally “Life,” “Works,” some treatment of cultural/political/social context, “Literary Success” (for the Italian “Fortuna”—I would have preferred “Reception”), and bibliography. This latter, again by Fowler, is developed from the Italian version and is generally made more international, often with the result that it sits somewhat uneasily with the original articles, which are largely unchanged, and whose authors presumably made... (shrink)

When a new, brain-based definition of death was proposed fifty years ago, no one realized that the issue would remain unresolved for so long. Recently, six new controversies have added to the debate: whether there is a right to refuse apnea testing, which set of criteria should be chosen to measure the death of the brain, how the problem of erroneous testing should be handled, whether any of the current criteria sets accurately measures the death of the brain, whether standard (...) criteria include measurements of all brain functions, and how minorities who reject whole-brain-based definitions should be accommodated. These controversies leave little hope of consensus on how to define death for social and public policy purposes. Rather, there is persistent disagreement among proponents of three major groups of definitions of death: whole-brain, cardiocirculatory or somatic, and higher-brain. Given the persistence and reasonableness of each of these groups of definitions, public policy should permit individuals and their valid surrogates to choose among them. (shrink)

How do movies evoke and express ethical ideas? What role does our emotional involvement play in this process? What makes the aesthetic power of cinema ethically significant? Cinematic Ethics: _Exploring Ethical Experience through Film_ addresses these questions by examining the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience with the power to provoke emotional understanding and philosophical thinking. In a clear and engaging style, Robert Sinnerbrink examines the key philosophical approaches to ethics in contemporary film theory and philosophy (...) using detailed case studies of cinematic ethics across different genres, styles, and filmic traditions. Written in a lucid and lively style that will engage both specialist and non-specialist readers, this book is ideal for use in the academic study of philosophy and film. Key features include annotated suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter and a filmography of movies useful for teaching and researching cinematic ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminism and Classics:Framing the Research AgendaBarbara K. GoldA landmark conference on "Feminism and Classics: Framing the Research Agenda" was held at Princeton University on November 7-10, 1996; the coorganizers were Janet M. Martin (Princeton University) and Judith P. Hallett (University of Maryland). This conference is the second in a series of more-or-less triennial meetings devoted to feminist research in various areas of classical studies. The first of these conferences (...) ("Feminism and Classics I") was held at the University of Cincinnati in 1992 and was codirected by Kathryn J. Gutzwiller and Ann N. Michelini (both of the University of Cincinnati; for a review of this conference see Clara Hardy and Kirk Ormand, BMCR 4.2 [1993] 135-41).The goals of the Princeton conference were several:mdash To address the evidential deficiencies of the traditional classical literary canon-by examining new kinds of sources and evidence, particularly nonliterary texts and material culture; and by giving increased attention to the ancient Near East and Africa (especially Egypt) as well as to post-classical Greek and Latin texts;mdash To address the methodological inadequacies of traditional historical and philological approaches-by applying the new literary and textual criticism and theory to the traditional classical literary canon as well as to nonliterary and postclassical texts; by adopting comparative approaches to the study of ancient sexuality and gender; and by considering women (in addition to men) as agents in the transmission of the classical tradition;mdash To clarify, illuminate, and evaluate the relations between classical scholarship and the politics of social change-by defining the actual and potential relations among feminist studies, gender studies, and women's studies, and the relation of classical studies to each; by examining the variety of relations that feminist and other scholarship can have to the politics of social change; and by addressing the role of theory in feminist scholarship in classics.The conference was divided into four plenary sessions, each one devoted to a core area of feminist scholarly research in classics: The Historical Recovery of Ancient Women (Speakers: Shelby Brown, UCLA [End Page 328] and Alan Shapiro, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; Discussants: Barry S. Strauss, Cornell University and Sandra R. Joshel, New England Conservatory of Music); Women and the Classical Tradition (Speakers: Joan M. Ferrante, Columbia University and Shelley P. Haley, Hamilton College; Discussants: Diana Robin, University of New Mexico and Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland); Feminist Literary Studies and the Construction of Sexuality and Gender in the Ancient World (Speakers: David Konstan, Brown University and Barbara K. Gold, Hamilton College; Discussants: Ellen Oliensis, Yale University and Ruth Webb, Princeton University); Feminism and Classics in the Next Century: Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, Women's Studies (Speakers: Peter W. Rose, Miami University of Ohio and Nancy F. Partner, McGill University; Discussants: Sarah B. Pomeroy, Hunter College and CUNY and Amy Richlin, University of Southern California).In addition to the four plenary sessions, there was a rich variety of discussion and presentation in other formats: opening and closing roundtables (including, in addition to some of the speakers and organizers, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Hamilton College, Barbara M. McManus, College of New Rochelle, Bella Zweig, University of Arizona, Kathryn J. Gutzwiller, and Ann N. Michelini, both of the University of Cincinnati); the keynote address by Ernestine Friedl, Duke University; and sixteen interactive workshops, which followed up on the topics of the plenary sessions. These covered topics as broad as "Reading Gender in Epigraphical Text and Context" (Susan Guettel Cole), "The Classical World in Twentieth-Century Historical Fiction by Women" (Sheila Murnaghan and Deborah H. Roberts), "Feminist Theory/Queer Theory" (Kirk Ormand and Rabinowitz), "Politics, Pedagogy, and the Future of Gender Studies" (Mary Whitlock Blundell, Jeffrey S. Carnes, and John T. Kirby), and "Feminist Anthropology and Feminist Work in Classics" (Deborah Lyons).The conference was one of several events celebrating the 250th anniversary of Princeton University. In certain respects it carried on the work of the 1917 Princeton conference organized by Dean Andrew Fleming West. Entitled "Value of the Classics," the 1917 conference was also in its own way interdisciplinary, documenting the impact of classics on such fields as medicine, law, economics, sociology, and public... (shrink)

Bender, Robert Review of: Income inequality, equality of opportunity and intergenerational mobility, by Miles Corak, Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn University, 2013, 32 pages.

Bender, Robert Review of: Run, spot, run: The ethics of keeping pets, by Jessica Pierce, Uni of Chicago Press, 2016, 264 pages.

Bender, Robert The USA constitution does not have a clause requiring any separation of church and state and until 1948 there were no Supreme Court rulings to ensure that this was seen as a basic constitutional principle. Then in 1945 Vashti McCollum, a 33-year-old part-time squaredancing teacher from Champaign, Illinois, initiated a legal action that changed all that.

_Minds and Bodies_ is a clear introduction to the mind-body problem. It requires no prior philosophical knowledge and is ideally suited to newcomers to philosophy and philosophy of mind. Robert Wilkinson carefully introduces the fundamental components of the philosophy of mind: Descartes's dualist account of mind and body; monist views including eliminativism; computer science and artificial intelligence. Each chapter is linked to a reading from key thinkers in the field, from Descartes to Paul Churchland.

THE fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is another of the projects undertaken by philosophers Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. Hutchins chaired the Board of Editors, while Adler served as director of planning. This latest edition has the distinction of being the largest single private publishing venture in history, involving a thirty-two million dollar investment, over fifteen years of effort, and many thousands of consultants and contributors. This essay will attempt to assess philosophy’s share in so massive an (...) undertaking. (shrink)

How are the properties of computer programs proved? We discuss three approaches in this article: inductive invariants, functional semantics, and explicit semantics. Because the first approach has received by far the most attention, it has produced the most impressive results to date. However, the field is now moving away from the inductive invariant approach.

As a beginning, consider the perennial ethical and legal problem of freedom versus determinism. But now put this in the context of the relation of expert testimony to criminal law. As psychiatry and social science develop greater explanatory power, we seem destined to an extension of the defense of irresistible impulse to any criminal action. A legal psychology which talks about "a corrupt will" will run the risk of being dismissed as an "unscientific anachronism," and jurisprudence will be replaced by (...) sociology. (shrink)