Research using Controlled Human Infection Models is yet to be attempted in India. This study was conducted to understand the perceptions of the lay public and key opinion makers prior to the possible introduction of such studies in the country. 110 respondents from urban and rural Bangalore district were interviewed using qualitative research methods of Focus Group Discussions and In-depth Interviews. The data was analyzed using grounded theory. Safety was a key concern of the lay public, expressed in terms of (...) fear of death. The notion of infecting a healthy volunteer, the possibility of continued effects beyond the study duration and the likelihood of vulnerable populations volunteering solely for monetary benefit, were ethical concerns. Public good outcomes such as effective treatments, targeted vaccines and prevention of diseases was necessary justification for such studies. However, the comprehension of this benefit was not clear among non-medical, non-technical respondents and suggestions to seek alternatives to CHIMs repeatedly arose. There was a great deal of deflection—with each constituency feeling that people other than themselves may be ideally suited as participants. Risk takers, those without dependents, the more health and research literate, financially sound and those with an altruistic bent of mind emerged as possible CHIM volunteers. While widespread awareness and advocacy about CHIM is essential, listening to plural voices is the first step in public engagement in ethically contentious areas. Continued engagement and inclusive deliberative processes are required to redeem the mistrust of the public in research and rebuild faith in regulatory systems. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Martin Buber has always made it clear that his dialogic principle is not to be treated as an abstract conception but an ontological reality. But admittedly, in I And Thou he could only point to such reality and could not properly present it in discursive prose. However there are instances in the text where he strives to do the latter. One particular instance is where he elaborates the emergence of consciousness of “I”. Through this elaboration, what Buber has tried to (...) point at is the bringing forth of the primary word ‘I-It’ forming part of his dialogic principle, as it ‘emerges round about’ the perceptual consciousness realised in body as some sort of a ‘primitive function of knowledge’. However, this still amounts only to an abstract conception, and not to a description of ontological reality as Buber would have aspired for. Hence the thought: what if there exists an endeavour carried out independently of Buber’s work, nevertheless in the same spirit as Buber but without his notorious mixing up of philosophy and religion? There indeed has been such an Existential-phenomenological take on embodiment and perception by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as is laid out in his magnum opus Phenomenology of Perception. In the present paper we will explicate this interesting coincidence, thereby honouring Buber’s aspiration for ontological status to his dialogic principle, at the same time demonstrating how existentially resonating and ontologically converging the thought of these two great thinkers’ have been, though they had totally different intellectual pursuits and concerns. (shrink)

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)

The primary purpose of this book is to probe the "deep common sources" of Wittgenstein’s Investigations and Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics in his later philosophy of language. The question is whether Wittgenstein’s thought about mathematics can be presented sympathetically, and so defended from charges of superficiality or eccentricity which have often been levelled against it. There are other strands in this complex, simultaneously gripping and maddening work, including confrontations of varying extent with relevant doctrines of Dummett, Davidson, and (...) Quine, to cite the main cases. The character of Wittgenstein’s own thought was far from systematic, yet this does not seem to justify the virtual lack of systematic presentation of his defense by Wright. We can, nevertheless, pick out the main thrust of Wright’s case. The author takes his bearings by the quarrel within twentieth century philosophy of mathematics between platonism and intuitionism. Platonism may be briefly described as the view that, if p is a mathematical proposition, we know what would be the case if p were true, even if we can't show that p is true. For intuitionism, on the other hand, to know what would be the case if p were true, is impossible unless we can show that p is indeed true. (shrink)

This is the most interesting contemporary study of Aristotle’s syllogistic I have seen. The author combines a genuine insight into Aristotle’s way of thinking with a useful grasp of contemporary logical theory. He uses contemporary notions like compactness, completeness, consistency, and the like in such a way as genuinely to illuminate Aristotle’s thought, rather than to obfuscate it or to reduce classical patterns of reasoning to those of our day. In other words, he shows how Aristotle’s central doctrines are in (...) many cases anticipations of contemporary concepts, thereby establishing a continuity in logical theory which goes at least some steps toward mitigating the effects of historicism in the domain of the history of logic. His style is as lucid as the subject-matter permits. The book is accessible to anyone with a minimum knowledge of syllogistic and some of the central notions of present-day metamathematics. Not the least helpful feature of the book is its quiet correction of errors made by the author’s predecessors in the analytical tradition’s attempt to assimilate Aristotle into current technical procedures. (shrink)

The main thesis of this book is that Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is an exemplification of Newtonian physics, whereas the later philosophy exemplifies contemporary, relativistic physics. The reader may recall Wittgenstein’s insistence, during both major periods of his thought, upon the separation of philosophy from science. However, Bolton’s unstated premise is that Wittgenstein’s thought was unconsciously determined by two different conceptions of physics. Whatever one may think of this, it leaves a question unanswered. Since both periods of Wittgenstein’s thought follow the (...) development of relativistic physics, why was he initially influenced by Newtonian physics or its expression in modern philosophy? Was this a contingent error of the youthful Wittgenstein, or an expression of historical inevitability? We find no discussion of this difficult problem in Bolton’s book. Instead, he claims, and to some extent shows, that Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, crystallizes the axioms of modern philosophy, which is essentially Newtonian. At the historical level, this thesis is either wrong or uninformative. It is wrong because not all of modern philosophy can be explained on the basis of the peculiarities of modern or Newtonian physics. It is uninformative because to the extent that all modern philosophers took Newtonian physics for granted, the latter cannot account for the sharp differences between, say, John Locke and Hegel. Nevertheless, Bolton provides interesting and plausible reasons for regarding the Tractatus as an expression of that aspect of modern philosophy which may profitably be called "Newtonian." He fails to convince at least one reader that the repudiation of the Tractatus is a repudiation of modern philosophy for anyone other than Wittgenstein and his followers. On the other hand, once we discount, or even disregard, Bolton’s historical thesis, the more traditional virtues of his book come sharply into focus. Having recently reviewed the 686 page commentary by Baker and Hacker on the first third of the Investigations, as well as Wright’s 481 page essay on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics, the author of this note is in a good position to appreciate the economy and lucidity of Bolton’s summary analysis of the main points in the Tractatus. As an example of my disagreement with Bolton’s interpretation, I begin with a brief citation from p. 86. (shrink)

A careful discussion of the major logical and epistemological issues raised and solutions suggested by the original members and followers of the "Vienna Circle." The author shows the progressive elaboration of the positions of this school by its major figures and shows where opinions diverge within the movement. The discussion is amply documented with references to the standard literature. The book aims at reviving interest in the "scientific method of philosophising" in the German speaking world.--R. G. S.

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.

The main purpose of this book is to offer a comparative evaluation of the early works of Marx and Lukács, "these two most important texts of 'unorthodox' Marxism". Feenberg refers here to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts on the one hand, and History and Class Consciousness on the other. At a somewhat more general level, Feenberg writes in defense of, or more accurately in preparation for a new stage in, the philosophy of praxis. To proceed directly to his conclusion, Feenberg's (...) analyses culminate in the recommendation of a synthesis between Marx's concept of the internal relation between subject and object, or their participatory identity, and Lukács' mediation-theory of rationality, according to which reification is an intrinsic element at the dialectical level of reason, which is thus a mediation of nature on the one hand, and the subject-object relation on the other. In less complex terms, Feenberg recommends the development, from elements of Marxist and Lukácsian doctrines, of a "non-creationist concept of practice", i.e., one in which nature is not created by man, a concept that is also not pure objectivism, i.e., that prevents a complete identity of subject and object. Feenberg thus perceives the central problem in the early Marx and Lukács as one that links them more intimately with Absolute Idealism than his own analysis makes explicit. The "fundamental flaw in the philosophies of practice of Marx and Lukács" is, to put it as briefly and clearly as possible, that in these doctrines, man is still a creator-god. (shrink)

This complex and subtle book is difficult to summarize. The author intends it as a supplement to existing commentaries on Plato’s Meno, rather than as a straightforward commentary of his own. His approach to Plato builds upon that of Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, and the Tübingen School, but is not reducible to any of these and contains other influences as well, such as Heidegger. In addition to taking with minute seriousness the dramatic composition of the dialogue, Brague combines precise and (...) sensitive philological tools with a marked ontological interest. He reads the Platonic dialogue in a bipolar perspective. Dialogues are tests of friendship but at the same time, as "works" or literary texts rather than objects, they may have a sense in themselves. Brague cites Proust in this context, but one thinks also of Derrida. Consequently the dialogue has both an intrinsic order, corresponding to the rhythmic development of its theme, and also an allusive dimension or a lacuna suggested by the text, to be filled in by the reader. In a similar sense one may say that the theme of the Meno is bipolar. The first pole is the theme of the nature of the soul, hence of virtue, and more specifically, of Meno’s soul. Meno’s defective nature is the basis for a continuous "degradation" in the stages of the dialogue. Alternatively, it is the basis for Meno’s "anthropological" approach to virtue. The key to the Meno is that the Good is missing from the dialogue. This observation provides a transition to the second thematic pole. The structure of the dialogue reflects the stages of Plato’s esoteric teaching as presented by K. Gaiser : dialectic, geometry, politics. This raises a question for Brague, which he does not seem to me to answer : if this is the order of Plato’s secret system, how is the degraded presentation of the system, relative to Meno’s defective soul, isomorphic to the hierarchical structure of the system? Granting that politics is lower than dialectic, there must be a better and a worse presentation of politics. Brague’s approach entails that the degraded image of the structure nevertheless reveals the structure itself. But if the Good is absent from the image, how are we to infer that it is present in the structure? A similar problem suggests itself with respect to what Brague calls the key to the movement of the dialogue: the distinction between the limiting and the limited and correspondingly, "the powerlessness of the limit" in Meno’s case. In the last and longest section of the book, there are many fine analyses and illuminating insights, too many to do justice to here. One may call special attention to the connection between the episode of recollection and geometry on the one hand, and the duality of principles in Plato’s system. I also found unusually helpful Brague’s exposition of the "feminine" nature of Plato’s teaching of genesis, of the link between Plato’s use of anakineisthai and the dramatic device of a prologue, and the significance of katasëmainesthai in conjunction with the theme of "growing" and preserving virtuous youths. In sum: this is a book to be read carefully and slowly by every serious student of Plato. It is almost as difficult, and hence as controversial, as a Platonic dialogue. It is marked throughout, even when influenced by contemporary schools of thought, by a genuine interest in Plato’s manner of thinking and writing. This is not exactly a common property of contemporary books on Plato.—S.R. (shrink)