Nanomedicine is yielding new and improved treatments and diagnostics for a range of diseases and disorders. Nanomedicine applications incorporate materials and components with nanoscale dimensions where novel physiochemical properties emerge as a result of size-dependent phenomena and high surface-to-mass ratio. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics are a subset of nanomedicine products that enter the human body. These include drugs, biological products, implantable medical devices, and combination products that are designed to function in the body in ways unachievable at larger scales. (...) Nanotherapeutics andin vivonanodiagnostics incorporate materials that are engineered at the nanoscale to express novel properties that are medicinally useful. These nanomedicine applications can also contain nanomaterials that are biologically active, producing interactions that depend on biological triggers. Examples include nanoscale formulations of insoluble drugs to improve bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, drugs encapsulated in hollow nanoparticles with the ability to target and cross cellular and tissue membranes and to release their payload at a specific time or location, imaging agents that demonstrate novel optical properties to aid in locating micrometastases, and antimicrobial and drug-eluting components or coatings of implantable medical devices such as stents. (shrink)

This article discusses the role of nature in the theological system of New England minister Samuel Willard. I focus specifically on his account of theological anthropology, the relationship of nature and grace, and the moral law, and show how each relates to his views on civil government and civil law. Willard affirmed the natural law, natural religion, and natural worship, and he acknowledged and respected pagan civic virtue and grounded civil order and social relations in nature. Willard’s theological articulations are (...) substantively the same as those found among the ‘Reformed orthodox’ theologians of 17th century Europe, which provides evidence for the thesis that Reformed orthodoxy was a transatlantic movement. His reliance on nature also corrects scholarship on the New England Puritans, which often assumes that they rejected the Christian natural law tradition. (shrink)

Few concepts are as central to understanding the modern world as borders, and the now-thriving field of border studies has already produced a substantial literature analyzing their legal, ideological, geographical, and historical aspects. Such studies have hardly exhausted the subject’s conceptual fertility, however, as this pioneering collection on the aesthetics of borders demonstrates. Organized around six key ideas—ecology, imaginary, in/visibility, palimpsest, sovereignty and waiting—the interlocking essays collected here provide theoretical starting points for an aesthetic understanding of borders, developed in detail (...) through interdisciplinary analyses of literature, audio-visual borderscapes, historical and contemporary ecologies, political culture, and migration. (shrink)

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding ...

Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform is an invaluable resource for policymakers, faculty, students, and anyone interested in how decisions made about the education system ultimately affect the quality of education, educational access, and social justice.

Stephen Mulhall has distinguished himself as one of the most rigorous and constructive contemporary thinkers on European philosophy and its complicated relationship to Christian theology. A prominent locus of that relationship in his work is the Christian doctrine of original sin, and its criticism but also structural recapitulation in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and others. This article begins with an overview of relevant themes and their development in Mulhall's writings. I then offer an account of the internal (...) tensions Mulhall identifies in Heidegger et al's ambivalent contestation of original sin, and of his own response. The centre of this response is a reconfiguration of the character of the divine, and of human participation in that divine, as radical self-abnegation. I conclude with an appreciative critique of Mulhall's proposal as insufficiently responsive to the eschatological framework within which original sin has its doctrinal and ontological place in Thomist thought. (shrink)

In this short essay I reflect on Stephen Gaukroger’s enterprise especially as presented in the four-volume study on science and the shaping of modernity, and ask if it is a version of historical epistemology. Because the Gaukrogerian project is (deliberately?) ambiguous when it comes to choosing between the safe neutrality of the study of science, and the more committed versions of a ‘political epistemology’ in which, to paraphrase Shapin and Schaffer, questions of knowledge and questions of social order turn (...) out to be one and the same. (shrink)

This review essay examines Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism, focusing on his presentation of his book as a work of Christian political theory. His claims regarding national will and agency are analyzed, and problems with them are traced to his political theology and his methodological assumptions about Christian political theory. In place of those assumptions, Kuyper’s idea of architectonic critique is recommended as a more fruitful approach to Christian political theory in the Reformed tradition.

I am honored that Jim Griffin, Joseph Raz, and Susan Wolf, all of whose work I greatly admire, have thought my ideas on welfare and care worth engaging, and I am very grateful to them for doing so. Each has raised searching and difficult questions. Rather than attempting to respond to them seriatim, I propose to discuss the issues under three broad headings: questions about the concept of welfare, questions about care or sympathetic concern, and the question of whether (...) welfare claims have agent-relative or agent-neutral normative force. These issues are, of course, interconnected, but it may nonetheless be helpful to divide them up in these ways. (shrink)

In his book Welfare and Rational Care, Stephen Darwall proposes to give an account of human welfare. Or rather, he offers two accounts, a metaethical and a normative account. The two accounts, he suggests, are somewhat supportive of each other though they are logically independent.

Do people who cause themselves to be ill (e.g. by smoking) forfeit some of their rights to healthcare? This paper examines one argument for the view that they do, the restoration argument. It goes as follows. Smokers need more health‐resources than non‐smokers. Given limited budgets, we must choose between treating everyone equally (according to need) or reducing smokers' entitlements. If we choose the former, non‐smokers will be harmed by others' smoking, because there will be less resources available for them than (...) if no‐one smoked. This is unfair: why should non‐smokers suffer because of others' unhealthy lifestyle choices? We should therefore choose the latter and reduce smokers' entitlements. This paper criticises the restoration argument on the following grounds. In order to avoid generating unpalatable conclusions elsewhere, it must be combined with a principle according to which activities which are sufficiently ‘socially valuable’ (e.g. parenting) are immune from restoration claims. This however means that what was supposed to be one of the argument's most attractive features, its compatibility with ‘liberal neutrality’ with respect to the value of different lifestyles, doesn't really exist. Hence, the restoration argument is nowhere near as attractive as it at first appears to be. (shrink)

School choice has lately risen to the top of the list of potential solutions to America's educational problems, particularly for the poor and the most disadvantaged members of society. Indeed, in the last few years several states have held referendums on the use of vouchers in private and parochial schools, and more recently, the Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of a scholarship program that uses vouchers issued to parents. While there has been much debate over the empirical and methodological aspects (...) of school choice policies, discussions related to the effects such policies may have on the nation's moral economy and civil society have been few and far between. School Choice, a collection of essays by leading philosophers, historians, legal scholars, and theologians, redresses this situation by addressing the moral and normative side of school choice.The twelve essays, commissioned for a conference on school choice that took place at Boston College in 2001, are organized into four sections that consider the relationship of school choice to equality, moral pluralism, institutional ecology, and constitutionality. Each section consists of three essays followed by a critical response. The contributors are Patrick McKinley Brennan, Charles L. Glenn, Amy Gutmann, David Hollenbach, S. J., Meira Levinson, Sanford Levinson, Stephen Macedo, John T. McGreevy, Martha Minow, Richard J. Mouw, Joseph O'Keefe, S. J., Michael J. Perry, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Rosemary C. Salomone, Joseph P. Viteritti, Paul J. Weithman, and Alan Wolfe. (shrink)

Much has been written about Bernard Williams' remarks (1981) regarding the (imagined) man faced with the choice of saving either a drowning stranger or his drowning wife. For Williams, the man's justification for saving his wife ought not to be any kind of practical syllogism, but simply, "because she is my wife." Susan Wolf claims (2012) that the standard response to Williams', which she dubs the Standard View, has been inadequate. Wolf then considers and rejects a potential response (...) to the Standard View—what she calls the "virtuous attention" view. Such a view, Wolf argues, is merely a variation of the Standard View. In this paper, I argue that the virtuous attention view is not a variation of the Standard View. While Wolf’s reading of Williams is correct, I argue that a developed version of the virtuous attention view can actually provide support for Wolf's reading of Williams. (shrink)

Charlie Croker, a self-made real estate tycoon, ex-Georgia Tech football star, horseback rider, quail-hunter, snakecatcher, and good old boy from Baker county Georgia, is the protagonist in Tom Wolfe’s latest novel, the deliciously provocative A Man in Full (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998).  In this article I examine the evolving conception of manhood in Wolfe’s novel.  Two different models of manliness will be delineated and compared. The first model—represented by Charlie Croker—gradually weakens and is replaced by the (...) second model—represented by Conrad Hensley. My aim is to show how Stoicism serves to critique the first model and articulate the second.  Stoicism, I argue, provides the deliverance of both Hensley and his convert Croker, while at the same time transforming the conception of manliness explored in A Man in Full. (shrink)

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, USA, conducted a species status assessment for a petition to list the Alexander Archipelago wolf (Canis lupus ligoni) under the Endangered Species Act in 2020-2022. This federal undertaking could not be adequately prepared without including the knowledge of Indigenous People who have a deep cultural connection with the subspecies. Our objective is to communicate the authoritative expertise and voice of the Indigenous People who partnered on the project by demonstrating how (...) their knowledge contributed to the species status assessment. The Indigenous knowledge applied in the assessment is the cultural and intellectual property of those who have shared it. We employed rapid appraisal research to expeditiously develop a preliminary and qualitative understanding of Indigenous People's cultural and ecological knowledge of Alexander Archipelago wolves. We used semi-directed interviewing and inductive coding from grounded theory for text analysis. Indigenous knowledge contributed to the agency's understanding of the Alexander Archipelago wolf in Southeast Alaska and helped the agency with their classification decision. Indigenous research partners explained the rich cultural significance and position of wolves in Tlingit society and described human–wolf relationships and ecological interactions. The agency used a single-species assessment approach based in species ecology and conservation biology, whereas the Indigenous wolf experts applied a multi-species, community ecology approach based in a sociocultural context of balance and respect. The Indigenous wolf experts successfully addressed knowledge gaps identified by the agency. The partners were challenged by a short regulatory timeframe that did not allow for comprehensive study of Indigenous knowledge and constrained review and feedback by Indigenous experts. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service learned that its assessment framework was not designed to account for an Indigenous worldview. To level the playing field, the agency and Indigenous experts should discuss how to co-develop an assessment framework that equitably applies both perspectives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dr. Jacques L. and Martin Hide-a-Guerre: The Subject of New HistoricismStephen Bretzius (bio)Joel Fineman. The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. [SW]Stephen Greenblatt. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1990.Stephen Greenblatt. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.The word ‘theory’ stems from (...) the Greek verb theorein. The noun belonging to it is theoria. Peculiar to these words is a lofty and mysterious meaning. The verb theorein grew out of the coalescing of two root words, thea and horao. Thea (cf. theater) is the outward look, the aspect, in which something shows itself.... The second root word in theorein, horao, means: to look at something attentively, to look it over, to view it closely. Thus it follows that theorein is thean horan, to look attentively on the outward appearance wherein what presences becomes visible and, through such sight—seeing—to linger with it.—Martin Heidegger, “Science and Reflection”Hamlet: ‘Sblood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out. A flourish.Guildenstern: There are the players.—Hamlet 2.2.366–681In setting forth Shakespeare’s unique role within an important institutional appropriation of the early modern theater by the postmodern university, together with a corresponding postmodern theory already shaping the early modern theater, a highly stylized early play like Romeo and Juliet is a good place to begin. For here, and from the beginning, the play unfolds outside (and therefore inside) the “deconstructed” binarisms characteristic of a certain poststructural literary theory generally—womb-tomb, light-dark, female-male, Capulet-Montague, waking-sleeping, all-nothing, lark-nightingale, love-hate, late-early, vice-virtue, poison-remedy, mercy-murder, wedding-funeral, dove-raven, fiend-angel, wolf-lamb, miss-mend, stand-stir, haste-destiny, and so on. 1 Here the nonbinary language [End Page 73] of the theater anticipates the “unlimited semiosis” of postmodern literary and cultural theory precisely by extending that nonbinary language to the opposition theater-theory, which the play also undermines. To cite only one particularly central example, literary criticism’s ongoing concerns with the cultural and ritualistic origins of tragedy are not just explored but explained—theorized—by the play’s self-conscious identification of Juliet as both “dove” (“So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows” [1.5.48]) and “lamb” (“Juliet! Fast, I warrant her, she. / Why, lamb! Why, lady!” [4.5.1–2]). The theatrical experience of the play’s “poor sacrifices” [5.3.318] is further related to the Catholic mass, out of which Shakespeare’s own tragic theater significantly evolves, by “Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen” [1.3.17] (Lammas [hlammas] hlaf ‘loaf, bread,’ maesse ‘mass’) and “God’s bread, it makes me mad!” [3.5.176]. 2 Redoubling this Christian context for sacrifice, a seasonal parallel in the myth of Persephone stolen away by Pluto shows through “Death lies on her like an untimely frost / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field” [4.5.28–29] and “O son, the night before thy wedding-day / Hath Death lain with thy wife” [35–36]. Within the same ongoing theorization of the play’s own theater, the “pomegranate tree” in Juliet’s “It was the nightingale, and not the lark... / Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree” [3.5.2–4] further joins Juliet to Persephone, Lady Capulet to Ceres, and “love-devouring death” [2.6.7] to Hades.From the play to the theory, then, influential critiques of performative discourse and its ritualistic origins in postsubjective (post-Lacanian) sacrifice are generated not only by the postmodern university, but also, in Romeo and Juliet, by the early modern theater. For the play, and not simply the theory, is already about the play—and autobiographical, from Montague’s “Away from light steals home my heavy son, / And private in his chamber pens himself” [1.1.137–38] through Juliet’s “Was ever book containing such vile matter / So fairly bound” [3.2.83–84] to Romeo’s frantic “get me ink and paper... (shrink)

Steven Macedo's Diversity and Distrust is an effort to apply an unapologetically "transformative" version of liberalism to questions of public education (eschewing any supposedly liberal "neutrality). His candor is refreshing, but this review argues that his effort to defend his transformative liberal views (and the general thrust of American judicial efforts to deal with public education, for the most part) ultimately fails.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 689 Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?: Domestic Violence in The Shining At first glance, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining seems to be a straightforward Gothic horror film. It starts with the Torrance family— Jack, Wendy, and Danny—moving from their Boulder, Colorado, apartment into the Overlook Hotel, where Jack (Jack Nicholson) has (...) accepted a job as the winter caretaker. By the film’s climax, an axe-wielding Jack says to his terrified wife and son (Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd), through the door to the bathroom where they are hiding, “Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in. Not by the hair on your chinny chin chin? Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house in!”1 Jack assumes the role of the Big Bad Wolf, the nightmarish, predatory beast of fairy tales. These lines, along with Nicholson’s exaggerated performance as a crazed killer, parody the Gothic horror genre and slasher films and even children ’s fairy tales in what is, at its core, a story about domestic violence. In both Kubrick’s film and Stephen King’s 1977 novel, from which the film was adapted, the Gothic genre becomes a vehicle for a serious tale about violence within the family. The “discovery” of child abuse in the 1960s, “the creation of the wife-beating problem” in the 1970s, and 1. The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick (1980; Warner Home Video, 2007), DVD. The line is from the fairytale of The Three Little Pigs. Geoffrey Cocks discusses the sources and ramifications of the fairytale in The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2004), 33–38. 690 Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck the feminist movement allowed viewers to perceive domestic violence with a new level of understanding.2 It is my contention that The Shining comments on domestic violence in a way that has been mostly overlooked by critics. While most analyses of both the novel and the film have come from literary and cinema studies perspectives, I offer a sociological approach focused on the profound effect of changing social mores on cultural production. I draw also on feminist and queer theorizing of audience identification, gender, and erotic pleasure in horror films to explain the significant contributions made by King, Kubrick, Duvall, and screenwriter Diane Johnson to the film’s intervention in US public discourse about domestic violence.3 The first scholar who argued that Kubrick’s film is essentially a domestic abuse narrative was James Hala, who based his analysis on a close reading of critical reviews of the film and a discussion of the performances, with no reference to its social, political, or historical context.4 But it is important to note that both the novel and the film came at the end of a decade when the recognition of domestic violence as a social problem was still relatively new. Sociologists and the medical and legal professions did not take “wife beating” seriously until the mid-1970s, when the women’s movement brought public attention to spousal abuse.5 2. Kathleen J. Tierney, “The Battered Women Movement and the Creation of the Wife Beating Problem,” Social Problems 29, no. 3 (1982): 207–20; Stephen J. Pfohl, “The ‘Discovery’ of Child Abuse,” Social Problems 24, no. 3 (1977): 310–23. 3. The theoretical works that I have drawn on most heavily are Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and David Greven, Representations of Femininity in American Genre Cinema: The Woman’s Film, Film Noir, and Modern Horror (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 4. James Hala, “Kubrick’s The Shining: The Specters and the Critics,” in The Shining Reader, ed. Anthony Magistrale (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1990), 203–16. 5. In 1976, a national survey reported that “at least 1.8 million American women are severely beaten in their own homes every year.” Murray A. Straus, et al., Behind Closed Doors: Violence in the American Family, as cited in “‘The Burning Bed’: TV... (shrink)

My thanks to Anik Waldow and Charles Wolfe for their work in producing a volume celebrating our late dear friend Stephen Gaukroger (1950-2023): The Shaping of the Sciences: Essays in Honour of Stephen Gaukroger, edited by Charles Wolfe and Anik Waldow (Springer, 2024). This is my contribution, pp. 187-195 / ISBN: 978-3-031-76036-5 / eBook ISBN 978-3-031-76037-2.

This long-awaited work by prominent Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn integrates a twenty-year research program on the nature of high-level vision and mental ...

What are ethical judgments about? And what is their relation to practice? How can ethical judgment aspire to objectivity? The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in metaethics, placing questions such as these about the nature and status of ethical judgment at the very center of contemporary moral philosophy. Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches is a unique anthology which collects important recent work, much of which is not easily available elsewhere, on core metaethical issues. Reinvigorated (...) naturalist moral realism and the various versions of moral realism, as well as irrealist, expressivist, and neo-Kantian constructivist theories are all represented in this fine collection, constituting a rich array of approaches to contemporary moral philosophy's most fundamental debates. An extensive introduction by Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton is also included, making this volume the most comprehensive and up-to-date work of its kind. Moral Discourse is ideally suited for use in courses in contemporary ethics, ethical theory, and metaethics. (shrink)

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox is a controversial discourse, rich with facts and observations gathered by one of the most erudite minds of our ...

Our current intellectual system provides us with a far more complete and accurate understanding of nature and ourselves than was available in any previous society. This gain in understanding has arisen from two sources: the use of the 'scientific method', and the breaking up of our intellectual enterprise into increasingly narrower disciplines and research programmes. However, we have failed to keep these narrow specialities connected to the intellectual enterprise as a whole. The author demonstrates that this causes a number of (...) difficulties. We have no viewpoint from which we can understand the relationships between the disciplines and lack a forum for adjudicating situations where different disciplines give conflicting answers to the same problem. We seriously underestimate the differences in methodology and in the nature of principles in the various branches of science. This provocative and wide-ranging book provides a detailed analysis and possible solutions for dealing with this problem. (shrink)

Kant and Mysticism interprets Kant’s early criticism of Swedenborg’s mysticism as the fountainhead of the Critical philosophy. Kantian Critique revolutionizes not only traditional metaphysics, but also our understanding of mysticism: Critical mysticism is a unitive experience that impels us to lay bare all human pretensions to reason’s light.

In this book, Phillips gives an overview of the contribution of Nyaya--the classical Indian school that defends an externalist position about knowledge as well as an internalist position about justification. Nyaya literature extends almost two thousand years and comprises hundreds of texts, and in this book, Phillips presents a useful overview of the under-studied system of thought. For the philosopher rather than the scholar of Sanskrit, the book makes a whole range of Nyaya positions and arguments accessible to students of (...) epistemology who are unfamiliar with classical Indian systems. (shrink)

How did we come to have a scientific culture -- one in which cognitive values are shaped around scientific ones? Stephen Gaukroger presents a rich and fascinating investigation of the development of intellectual culture in early modern Europe, a period in which understandings of the natural realm began to fragment.

Since the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, Anglophone epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word ‘know’ and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge. Even today, many epistemologists, including contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists are concerned with the truth conditions of “S knows that p,” or the proposition it expresses. In all of this literature, the method of cases is used, where a situation is described in English, and then philosophers judge whether it is true that (...) S knows that p, or whether saying “S knows that p” is false, deviant, etc. in that situation. However, English is just one of over 6000 languages spoken around the world, and is the native language of less than 6% of the world’s population. When Western epistemology first emerged, in ancient Greece, English did not even exist. So why should we think that facts about the English word “know,” the concept it expresses, or subtle semantic properties of “S knows that p” have important implications for epistemology? Are the properties of the English word “know” and the English sentence ‘S knows that p’ shared by their translations in most or all languages? If that turned out to be true, it would be a remarkable fact that cries out for an explanation. But if it turned out to be false, what are the implications for epistemology? Should epistemologists study knowledge attributions in languages other than English with the same diligence they have shown for the study of English knowledge attributions? If not, why not? In what ways do the concepts expressed by ‘know’ and its counterparts in different languages differ? And what should epistemologists make of all this? (shrink)

The philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1771-1831) is now recognized to be one of the most important modern thinkers. His influence is to be found in Marx's conception of historical dialectic, Kierkegaard's existentialism, Dewey's pragmatism and Gadamer's hermeneutics and Derrida's deconstruction. Until now, however, it has been difficult for the non-specialist to find a reasonably comprehensive introduction to this important, yet at times almost impenetrable philosopher. With this book Stephen Houlgate offers just such an introduction. His book is written in an (...) accessible style and covers a range of topics: the philosophy of history, logic and phenomenology, political philosophy, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. In the course of the book the author relates Hegel's ideas to those of many other thinkers, including Luther, Descartes, Kant and Thomas Kuhn. (shrink)

Harry Collins is a science studies scholar no other description fits without qualification who has contributed enormously to the discussion of tacit knowledge. Collins says that he is providing an account for the ontologically bashful, meaning, presumably, that it does not carry the burdens of Durkheim's notion of the collective consciousness. Polanyi says that 'a wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable'. Collins wants to translate this into 'strings must be interpreted before they are meaningful'. Somatic limits are the source of the (...) mystery element of tacit knowledge. In fact, machines can be programmed to do the things it involves, although they will do it in a different way. In Social Cartesianism, the individual is not the unit of analysis: the individual merely shares the collectivity's knowledge. Collins point in these contexts is that functional substitutability implies nothing about similarity in underlying causal structure. (shrink)

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The experience of having to suffer debilitating pain is far too common in the United States, and many patients continue to be inadequately treated by their doctors. Although many physicians freely admit that their pain management practices may have been somewhat lacking, many more express concern that the prescribing of heightened levels of opioid analgesics may result in closer regulatory scrutiny, criminal investigation, or even criminal prosecution.Although several researchers have examined the regulatory environment and the threat of sanction or harm (...) it poses to physicians and patients, few have examined the likelihood of investigation or prosecution stemming from the aggressive use of opioids in physician-directed pain management. Accordingly, in an effort to assess whether the fear of prosecution is realistic and, if so, what factors contribute to its likelihood, we surveyed chief prosecutors in four states about their knowledge, opinions, and attitudes concerning opioids and the prosecution of physicians stemming from the treatment of patients who were either terminally ill or suffering from chronic noncancer pain. (shrink)