The Proceedings of the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control is based on a two-part conceptual framework composed of public health and legal perspectives. The public health perspective comprises the six target areas and intervention settings that are the focus of the obesity prevention and control efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.This paper presents the legal perspective. Legal preparedness in public health is the underpinning of the framework for the four “assessment” papers and (...) the four “action” papers that are integral to the application of public health law to any particular health issue. In addition, this paper gives real-world grounding to the legal framework through examples that illustrate the four core elements of legal preparedness in public health that are at work in obesity prevention and control. (shrink)

This book's thirty essays explore philosophically the nature and morality of sexual perversion, cybersex, masturbation, homosexuality, contraception, same-sex marriage, promiscuity, pedophilia, date rape, sexual objectification, teacher-student relationships, pornography, and prostitution. Authors include Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Alan Goldman, John Finnis, Sallie Tisdale, Robin West, Alan Wertheimer, John Corvino, Cheshire Calhoun, Jerome Neu, and Alan Soble, among others. A valuable resource for sex researchers as well as undergraduate courses in the philosophy of sex.

The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes offers a new interpretation of Thomas Hobbes's response to the English Revolution. By focusing on his religious thought, it debunks the standard view of him as a royalist, and recovers his sympathies with the religious projects of the 1640s and 1650s. This reinterpretation culminates with an exploration of Hobbes's surprising sympathies with Oliver Cromwell and his supporters. By placing Thomas Hobbes within fresh contexts, Professor Collins offers a new angle of vision (...) on the religious significance of the English Revolution itself. (shrink)

Paul Collins travels the globe piecing together the missing body and soul of one of our most enigmatic founding fathers: Thomas Paine. A typical book about an American founding father doesn’t start at a gay piano bar and end in a sewage ditch. But then, Tom Paine isn’t your typical founding father. A firebrand rebel and a radical on the run, Paine alone claims a key role in the development of three modern democracies. In death, his story turns (...) truly bizarre. Shunned as an infidel by every church, he had to be interred in an open field on a New York farm. Ten years later, a former enemy converting to Paine’s cause dug up the bones and carried them back to Britain, where he planned to build a mausoleum in Paine’s honor. But he never got around to it. So what happened to the body of this founding father? Well, it got lost. Paine’s missing bones, like saint’s relics, have been scattered for two centuries, and their travels are the trail of radical democracy itself. Paul Collins combines wry, present-day travelogue with an odyssey down the forgotten paths of history as he searches for the remains of Tom Paine and finds them hidden in, among other places, a Paris hotel, underneath a London tailor's stool, and inside a roadside statue in New York. Along the way he crosses paths with everyone from Walt Whitman and Charles Darwin to sex reformers and hellfire ministers—not to mention a suicidal gunman, a Ferrari dealer, and berserk feral monkeys. In the end, Collins’s search for Paine’s body instead finds the soul of democracy—for it is the story of how Paine’s struggles have lived on through his eccentric and idealistic followers. (shrink)

A. P. Martinich's The Two Gods of Leviathan appeared in 1992, and J. R. Collins's The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes in 2005. Martinich offered a revisionist interpretation of Thomas Hobbes's religious commitments. He rebuked the conventional view that Hobbes was an atheist and placed him within particular traditions of reformed Christian theology. Collins's book strongly differed from these conclusions, and reasserted Hobbes's hostility to traditional Christianity as part of a general contextualization of his writings within the (...) period of the English Revolution. The following exchange between Martinich and Collins was first aired in 2007 as a debate at the Southwestern Political Science Association's Annual Conference. (shrink)

Technological innovations such as next generation sequencing and DNA hybridisation enrichment have resulted in multi‐fold increases in both the quantity of ancient DNA sequence data and the time depth for DNA retrieval. To date, over 30 ancient genomes have been sequenced, moving from 0.7× coverage (mammoth) in 2008 to more than 50× coverage (Neanderthal) in 2014. Studies of rapid evolutionary changes, such as the evolution and spread of pathogens and the genetic responses of hosts, or the genetics of domestication and (...) climatic adaptation, are developing swiftly and the importance of palaeogenomics for investigating evolutionary processes during the last million years is likely to increase considerably. However, these new datasets require new methods of data processing and analysis, as well as conceptual changes in interpreting the results. In this review we highlight important areas of future technical and conceptual progress and discuss research topics in the rapidly growing field of palaeogenomics. -/- . (shrink)

When Leviathan appeared as the third version of Thomas Hobbes' s civil science, it was notable in several respects: its rhetorical strategies, its political implications, and its appeal to an anglophone audience. There has been much scholarly attention paid to Hobbes's religious writing, but little specifically to his use of the phrase the “Christian Commonwealth.” Hobbes's first invocation of the notion of the Christian Commonwealth was found in his early Elements of Law. Hobbes's main concern was to secure the (...) “obedience to public authority” of Christians living in Christian polities, and the “Christian Commonwealth” found in the Elements was primarily distinguished from non‐Christian polities. The Christian Commonwealth of Leviathan was an absolute political entity achievable wherever a sovereign state espoused Hobbes's minimal theology. Bramhall's objection to Hobbes's pluralistic and minimal understanding of Christian polities, shorn of all clerical authority, would persist in high church and particularly Catholic ecclesiology. (shrink)

This chapter examines one of the more neglected aspects of Hobbes’s body of written work: his efforts at ecclesiastical history. It argues that ecclesiastical history became an increasingly important intellectual pursuit for Hobbes as his career advanced. This development partly reflected the growing dominance of religious questions in his mature thought, but historical criticism also offered Hobbes a rhetorical mode that potentially allowed him to encode theological and ecclesiological views that he could not openly express after 1660. Ecclesiastical history thus (...) permitted Hobbes to advance his political assault on clerical power, and his philosophical deconstruction of Trinitarian orthodoxy, in conditions of censorship. The narrative shape of Hobbes’s ecclesiastical history borrowed much from Protestant historiography, but its substance moved in different directions, toward Enlightenment patterns of thought. (shrink)

For nearly half a century, Quentin Skinner has been the world's foremost interpreter of Thomas Hobbes. When the contextualist mode of intellectual history now known as the “Cambridge School” was first asserting itself in the 1960s, the life and writings of John Locke were the primary topic for pioneers such as Peter Laslett and John Dunn. At that time, Hobbes was still the plaything of philosophers and political scientists, virtually all of whom wrote in an ahistorical, textual-analytic manner. Hobbes (...) had not been the subject of serious contextual research for decades, since the foundational writings of Ferdinand Tönnies. For Skinner, he was thus an ideal subject, providing a space for original research on a major figure, and an occasion for some polemically charged methodological manifestos. Both of these purposes animated his 1965 article “History and Ideology in the English Revolution,” and his 1966 article “The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought”. The latter of these remains to this day one of the most widely cited scholarly articles in the fifty-year run of Cambridge's Historical Journal. Among other results of these early efforts was the scholarly controversy during which Howard Warrender chided Skinner for having reduced the “classic texts in political philosophy” to mere “tracts for the times”. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke sit together in the canon of political thought but are rarely treated in common historical accounts. This book narrates their intertwined careers during the Restoration period, when the two men found themselves in close proximity and entangled in many of the same political conflicts. Bringing new source material to bear, In the Shadow of Leviathan establishes the influence of Hobbesian thought over Locke, particularly in relation to the preeminent question of religious toleration. Excavating Hobbes's (...) now forgotten case for a prudent, politique toleration gifted by sovereign power, Jeffrey R. Collins argues that modern, liberal thinking about toleration was transformed by Locke's gradual emancipation from this Hobbesian mode of thought. This book investigates those landmark events - the civil war, Restoration, the popish plot, the Revolution of 1688 - which eventually forced Locke to confront the limits of politique toleration, and to devise an account of religious freedom as an inalienable right. (shrink)

Undoubtedly, American Thomists owe a major share of their confident historical outlook to the writings of Professor Gilson whose latest work is formally concerned with the relative merits of Thomism and other important systems. This is not a new preoccupation with him, since a whole series of earlier books testify to his abiding interest in this problem. But he has now made a fresh exploration of the entire territory in the light of his revised view of the mind of St. (...) Thomas. During the war years, Gilson prepared a new edition of his pioneer study, Le Thomisme, in which the existential character of Thomistic wisdom is placed in high relief. St. Thomas regards God as the supreme and self-subsistent act of existing and the creative source of finite beings, whose highest act is also that of existing. This has a definite effect upon Thomistic metaphysics, since it involves a conception of being as something more than essence or nature. Both essence and existence are constitutive principles of being, and hence the science of being must be directed as well to the existential act. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Foundation of Ethical Theory in the ClinicJohn Collins Harvey (bio)William Osler has had a very profound and lasting effect on American medical education and medical practice. He set the pattern, still followed today, for the clinical training of medical students at the patient’s bedside and in the clinical laboratory. In such settings Osler was able to demonstrate to his pupils the principles, ethics, and standards of medical (...) practice that he espoused and thought fundamental to the profession of medicine. His monumental text book, The Principles and Practice of Medicine, first published in 1892, transformed the medical profession and remained a standard text for more than four decades (Leon 1995, p. 13). Renowned medical historians, such as Pedro Laín Entralgo, Henry Sigerist, and Richard Shyrock, recognize him as the greatest clinician that North America has ever produced.Osler, who had observed bedside teaching in his post-graduate studies, recognized that this method had much to offer in the instruction of medical students. Opportunity to introduce this method of teaching into the medical school curriculum came in 1888 when he was called to serve as Professor of Medicine and Physician-in-Chief at the newly established Johns Hopkins Medical School and Hospital. Bedside teaching proved to be very successful especially in demonstrating to students the standards and ethics of medical practice that he espoused.Osler’s teaching method was immediately adopted by many of the university medical schools in the United States, including Harvard, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford, all of whom appreciated the success of the Hopkins medical educational experiment. Graduates of the Hopkins Medical School quickly became a major source of faculty in medical schools in the United States. Many of Osler’s immediate pupils became outstanding clinicians and leaders in American academic medicine and served as faculty members at Hopkins or in established or newly founded schools. Osler’s disciples taught students in the wards the “art” of medicine according to his principles, ethics, and standards. The second and third generation faculty members, who were trained by Osler’s immediate pupils, continue to this day to teach the “art” by employing this method of teaching. Consequently, the practice of medicine in the United States continues to be influenced by the ethics held by Osler. To find [End Page 343] the theories behind Osler’s teaching, we must look at Osler’s background, education, and writings.The Religio Medici: Background For Osler’S Medical EthicsOsler received a very solid traditional classical education at the small, excellent Anglican secondary school in Weston, Ontario run by the Reverend James Johnson, with whom Osler developed a life long friendship. Johnson’s avocation was natural science. He first aroused Osler’s interest in nature and science. Osler was taught Scripture well at Weston. He committed much of the Bible to memory and often quoted it in his speeches. He also studied both Greek and Latin, and was exposed to the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and other classical authors, particularly the stoics.While a student at Weston, Osler first came to know Sir Thomas Browne’s remarkable text Religio Medici (The Religion of the Physician), which was to become a lifelong favorite. In his first address as the new Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford in 1905, which was given to the Guy’s Hospital Physical Society, he vigorously recommended the Religio Medici to the students.The Religio is a deeply reflective personal inquiry into the paradoxical nature of one man as a microcosm of all men (Browne 1940, pp. 40, 53–54, 61–62). Browne participated in the Baconian program for the advancement of knowledge and the rise of “science.” As a defense of the physician’s faith, the Religio shows how neatly the scientist and the Christian united in the single figure of the inspired reader of God’s two books, nature and Scripture, can defend an attitude that is both scientific and yet reverent. The central theme in the first and much longer part of the Religio is the relation between faith and reason. The second part of the Religio is about charity: Man’s love of God and his neighbors, commanded as... (shrink)

This anthology offers a fresh approach to the ethics of business, casting a critical eye on entrenched assumptions and practices. It includes central works from such thinkers as John Locke, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, and Thomas Piketty, while also introducing new voices on a range of pressing practical topics, including racial discrimination in the workplace, factory farming, climate change, affirmative action, and whistleblowing. A truly applied anthology, this book encourages students to see the real-world applications of the (...) theories at issue and to examine the consequences of business as usual. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE THE SEARCH FOR GOD He who separates the study of philosophy from holy religion errs no less than the man who would separate the pursuit of ...

Scholars of religion and science have generated remarkable scholarship in recent years in their explorations of love. Exactly how scholars involved in this budding field believe that love and science should relate and/or be integrated varies greatly. What they share in common is the belief that issues of love are of paramount importance and that the various scientific disciplines—whether natural, social, or religious—must be brought to bear upon how best to understand love. I briefly introduce the emergence of the love‐and‐science (...) research program and note that scholars have not done well defining what they mean by love. I suggest that the present surge in love scholarship will fail to produce the positive results that it otherwise might if love is not defined well. I provide and defend a definition of love adequate for those doing love‐and‐science research: To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote well‐being. To explain better what this simple definition entails, I explore its three main phrases. Love is said to have many forms, but agape is the form to which the love‐and‐science literature most commonly refers. I comment briefly on the debates about how to best understand agape, noting sixteen different definitions proposed by major scholars. I identify weaknesses in many of them and then offer what I argue is a more adequate definition of agape as intentional response to promote well‐being when confronted by that which generates ill‐being. In short, agape repays evil with good. While research on love and science requires much more than adequate definitions, I believe that the definitions I proffer can prove useful in furthering the love‐and‐science research program. (shrink)

Depue & Collins's general idea of a functional relationship between DA activity and extraversion is an important step toward an integrative biological model of personality. However, focusing primarily on incentive motivation and variations in VTA DA activity as basic behavioral and biological components underlying extraversion appears too limited. Existing data suggest that responsivity to changes in DA activity is higher in introverts than in extraverts. This may reflect a general, extraversion- related characteristic of the entire dopaminergic network in the (...) brain. (shrink)

Catholic natural law has had a long and evolving interest in bioethics. Thomas Aquinas left natural law a legacy of great flexibility in evaluating goods within a whole life. He also bequeathed to the Church the basis for an abolutism on sexual issues. Modern reproductive medicine and a deeper understanding of human freedom have reopened these issues. The Vatican has developed new, holistic arguments to proscribe reproductive interventions, but critics remain unconvinced that marital relationships and goods have been adequately (...) evaluated. The resolution of this debate will require further experience and reflection. Keywords: Thomas Aquinas, freedom, natural law, reproductive ethics CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Ethical Challenges to Business as Usual offers a fresh approach to the ethics of business, casting a critical eye on entrenched assumptions and practices. It includes central works from such thinkers as John Locke, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Naomi Klein, and Thomas Piketty, while also introducing new voices on a range of pressing practical topics including racial discrimination in the workplace, factory farming, climate change, affirmative action, and whistleblowing. A truly applied anthology, this book encourages students to see the (...) real-world applications of the theories at issue and to examine the consequences of business as usual. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References and Further Reading.

Book review of Harry Collins book 'Are we all scientific experts now?'.

Anthony Collins is known mostly as an eighteenth-century freethinker who contributed to ideas of rational religion and religious toleration, as a close friend of John Locke, and as a necessitarian and materialist who held a significant correspondence with Samuel Clarke. Yet, his political philosophy has rarely received serious attention, and he remains a neglected figure in the history of political thought. This article attempts to recover Collins as a philosopher who developed a complex political theory, by focusing on (...) his conceptions of liberty and authority. It shows that he conceptualised liberty, and liberty of thought in particular, both as non-interference and non-domination, namely, an absence of censorship as well as an absence of continuous tyranny over the minds of humankind. Then, it shows that Collins also developed a thorough idea of civil authority, according to which even religious liberties may depend in some cases on the discretion of the civil sovereign. Finally, this article suggests that Collins’s multi-layered theory continued to develop after his lifetime, and that he therefore had a prominent place in eighteenth-century debates of liberty and authority. (shrink)