The “therapeutic misconception” describes a process whereby research volunteers misinterpret the intentions of researchers and the nature of clinical research. This misinterpretation leads research volunteers to falsely attribute a therapeutic potential to clinical research, and compromises informed decision making, therefore compromising the ethical integrity of a clinical experiment. We review recent evidence from the neurobiology of social cognition to provide a novel framework for thinking about the therapeutic misconception. We argue that the neurobiology of social cognition should be considered in (...) any ethical analysis of how people make decisions about participating in clinical trials. The neurobiology of social cognition also suggests how the complicated dynamics of the doctor-patient relationship may unavoidably interfere with the process of obtaining informed consent. Following this argument we suggest new ways to prevent or at least mitigate the therapeutic misconception. (shrink)

The Clitophon, a dialogue generally ascribed to Plato, is significant for focusing on Socrates' role as an exhorter of other people to engage in philosophy. It was almost certainly intended to bear closely on Plato's Republic and is a fascinating specimen of the philosophical protreptic, an important genre very fashionable at the time. This 1999 volume is a critical edition of this dialogue, in which Professor Slings provides a text based on an examination of all relevant manuscripts and accompanies it (...) with a translation. His extensive introduction studies philosophical exhortation in the classical era, and tries to account for Plato's dialogues in general as a special type of exhortation. The Clitophon is seen as a defence of the Platonic dialogue. The commentary elucidates the Greek and discusses many passages where the meaning is not entirely clear. (shrink)

Human-eyelid conditioning was the principal source of information on Pavlovian conditioning, especially human, in the 1950s and 1960s, but it suffered a sharp decline in productivity, beginning in the late 1960s. The present article treats the decline as a case study with potential implications concerning the survival contingencies of research specialties. We make use of questionnaire data from eyelid-conditioning researchers and examine a variety of publication, topic-of-investigation, and institutional data to identify the major factors in the decline of human-eyelid conditioning.

Tara Smith's book on Rand's ethics is reviewed by Stephen Hicks for *Philosophy in Review.*.

Contributed articles presented at the First International Conference on "Buddhism and National Cultures", held at Delhi in 1984.

Groundless existence is a unique examination of the implicit phenomenological and existential foundations of Schmitt's political philosophy.

The discovery of selective associability of cues in classical conditioning has often been treated as an embarrassment to Pavlov, because he has been represented as a proponent of the "equivalence of associability of cues." According to that doctrine, except for the influence of differences in stimulus intensity, all environmental stimuli are equally susceptible to becoming conditioned stimuli if they are arranged in a suitable time-relation to any effective unconditioned stimulus . The current paper asks whether Pavlov explicitly made such a (...) claim and, if not, whether he could have endorsed equivalence of associability. Scientific controversy, the role that "the classics" play in scientific specialties, and the emblematic standing of the founding figures of a discipline or specialty constitute a framework for discussion of Pavlov's stand on the equivalence of associability. (shrink)

In 1931 the mathematical logician Kurt Godel published a revolutionary paper that challenged certain basic assumptions underpinning mathematics and logic. A colleague of Albert Einstein, his theorem proved that mathematics was partly based on propositions not provable within the mathematical system and had radical implications that have echoed throughout many fields. A gripping combination of science and accessibility, Godel’s Proof by Nagel and Newman is for both mathematicians and the idly curious, offering those with a taste for logic and philosophy (...) the chance to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. (shrink)

A successful attempt to bring all of Freud's discussions of the concepts of repression and defense into systematic form. Madison also argues that there is an observational language which corresponds to- Freud's theoretical language; by translating these concepts into observational terms, we can bring Freudian psychology "up to date."--S. R.

Frank Arntzenius has recently suggested that we should reject the standard view that the instantaneous state in classical mechanics consists of both the position and the velocity. In his view, the velocity as ordinarily defined-as the derivative of position with respect to time-cannot be genuinely instantaneous, and, thus, it should be excluded from the instantaneous state. After reviewing Bertrand Russell's traditional objections to the notion of an instantaneous velocity and suggesting that Russell's concerns can be effectively answered, I argue that (...) Arntzenius' attempt to show that the standard definition of velocity fails to yield an instantaneous property is not compelling either. Although I review several suggestions that Arntzenius makes against the existence of instantaneous velocity, much of his case rests upon an intuition, which has also appeared in the work of David Albert, about what is required of genuine instantaneous states. I argue in part that there is no reason to accept this intuition, and, thus, no reason to revise standard physical practice when it comes to the classical, instantaneous state. (shrink)