In Divine Providence, Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg describes how God works in our lives to turn us away from evil and toward him while still allow us to make our own choices. Swedenborg addresses a number of questions that challenge people of faith, such as why accidents and disasters happen, and why evil people seem to prosper while others suffer. This edition is a reprint of a 1963 translation by William F. Wunsch.

William F. May, a leading expert on medical ethics, here explores two of today's most crucial tests of the traditional covenant between physicians and patients--active euthanasia and health care reform.

The germ theory of disease famously brought a new notion of specificity into concepts of disease. At the same time, the work of Pasteur, Koch and their colleagues was developed during the same decades as Charles Darwin's theories of evolutionary biology challenged traditional notions of the essentialism of biological species. This essay examines some of the ways in which Darwin's work was invoked by British doctors seeking to explain clinical or epidemiological anomalies, in which infectious diseases did not appear to (...) breed true. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy of existence in the 20th century and beyond has been dominated by two central claims. One is that existence is instantiation. The other is that there are no modes of existence. This article attempts to refute both claims.

Evolutionary theory offers the possibility of building an epistemology that requires neither a theory of truth nor a definition of knowledge, thus bypassing some of the more notable difficulties with standard approaches to epistemology. Following a critique of one of the most popular approaches to thinking about cultural evolution I argue for a frequentist approach to evolutionary epistemology, and that cultural transmission should be understood as coordinated phenotypic variability within groups of closely related organisms. I construct a formal system which (...) allows the analysis of the evolution of networks of multiple interacting populations. Of particular epistemological interest is the relationship between genetic evolution and the evolution of cultural entities. The information-theoretic notion of "mutual information" is employed to quantify the transfer of information from the environment as it determines genetic fitnesses into the distribution of acquired traits Two simple models are constructed and analyzed. A two-level model of the navigation of a colony of bacteria demonstrates how selection on inherited traits affects the acquisition of information on the level of transient behavioral traits. A three-level model of bumblebee foraging shows how information about the environment is caught up in distributions of acquired foraging preferences--a bee-analog of human cognitive states. The Appendix contains an analytic proof of information gain under selection. (shrink)

We propose 4 equity-advancing operational improvements to eligibility and sign-up processes at mass vaccination sites: (1) preregistration using existing information, (2) eligibility rules that recognize the greater burden of COVID-19 in underserved neighborhoods, (3) appointment assignment that prioritizes those with disadvantage, and (4) socioculturally informed outreach to lottery selectees.

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is a form of life support for cardiac and/or pulmonary failure with unique ethical challenges compared to other forms of life support. Ethical challenges with ECMO exist when conventional standards of care apply, and are exacerbated during periods of absolute ECMO scarcity when “crisis standards of care” are instituted. When conventional standards of care apply, we propose that it is ethically permissible to withhold placing patients on ECMO for reasons of technical futility or when patients have (...) terminal, short-term prognoses that are untreatable by ECMO. Under crisis standards of care, it is ethically permissible to broaden exclusionary criteria to also withhold ECMO from patients who have a low likelihood of recovery, to maximize the overall number of lives saved. Unilateral withdrawal of ECMO against a patient’s preferences is unethical under conventional standards of care, but is ethical under crisis standards of care to increase access to ECMO to others in society. ECMO should only be rationed when true scarcity exists, and allocation protocols should be transparent to the public. When rationing must occur under crisis standards of care, it is imperative that oversight bodies assess for inequities in the allocation of ECMO and make frequent changes to improve any inequities. (shrink)

The ability to predict the actions of other agents is vital for joint action tasks. Recent theory suggests that action prediction relies on an emulator system that permits observers to use information about their own motor dynamics to predict the actions of other agents. If this is the case, then predictions for self-generated actions should be more accurate than predictions for other-generated actions. We tested this hypothesis by employing a self/other synchronization paradigm where prediction accuracy for recording of self-generated movements (...) was compared with prediction accuracy for other-generated movements. As expected, predictions were more accurate when the observer’s movement dynamics matched the movement dynamics of the recording. This is consistent with that idea that the observer’s movement dynamics influence the predictions they generate. (shrink)

Modern professionals wield considerable power by virtue of their knowledge. However, they also feel beleaguered by the constraints they face and the public disapproval they often experience. These pressures combine to diminish the professional's sense of public responsibility and convert him or her in self-perception to a careerist.

Charity is not only about giving to those in need, but in a broader sense about loving your neighbor and doing good things for other people without thought of reward. So wrote Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed that charity, along with faiths, was part of the foundation of spiritual practice. This work combines two of Swedenborg's unpublished manuscripts to form a practical, inspirational handbook for appying the principle of doing good to daily life.

The realization that prokaryotes naturally and frequently disperse genes across steep taxonomic boundaries via lateral gene transfer gave wings to the idea that eukaryotes might do the same. Eukaryotes do acquire genes from mitochondria and plastids and they do transfer genes during the process of secondary endosymbiosis, the spread of plastids via eukaryotic algal endosymbionts. From those observations it, however, does not follow that eukaryotes transfer genes either in the same ways as prokaryotes do, or to a quantitatively similar degree. (...) An important illustration of the difference is that eukaryotes do not exhibit pangenomes, though prokaryotes do. Eukaryotes reveal no detectable cumulative effects of LGT, though prokaryotes do. A critical analysis suggests that something is deeply amiss with eukaryote LGT theories. In prokaryotes, genes from the environment can enter the genome via lateral gene transfer. In eukaryote genetics, natural variation comes from within the genome, not from the environment. Yet many reports claim that eukaryotes undergo LGT just like prokaryotes. Such claims do not withstand scrutiny and are probably untrue. (shrink)

In this paper we provide a psychological account of the nature and development of explanation. We propose that an explanation is an account that provides a conceptual framework for a phenomenon that leads to a feeling of understanding in the reader/hearer. The explanatory conceptual framework goes beyond the original phenomenon, integrates diverse aspects of the world, and shows how the original phenomenon follows from the framework. We propose that explanations in everyday life are judged on the criteria of empirical accuracy, (...) scope, consistency, simplicity, and plausibility. We conclude that explanations in science are evaluated by the same criteria, plus those of precision, formalisms, and fruitfulness. We discuss several types of explanation that are used in everyday life – causal/mechanical, functional, and intentional. We present evidence to show that young children produce explanations that have the same essential form as those used by adults. We also provide evidence that children use the same evaluation criteria as adults, but may not apply those additional criteria for the evaluation of explanations that are used by scientists. (shrink)

This book shows that the connections between philosophy and religion, especially Christianity, are illegitimate ones. The history of religious thinking has been created by philosophical reasoning. Breaking the grip of this thinking on religious life has an impact on thinking about God as well.

Various laws and theories in the natural and social sciences are presented with a view to discerning the syntactic and semantic characteristics of many idealizations in science. Three different kinds of idealizations are discussed: ideal conditions, ideal cases, and idealized theories. An ideal condition is a formula in which state variables occur, whose existential closure is false, and for which there is another formula that can be constructed out of the original formula such that the existential closure of the new (...) formula is true. An ideal case is a statement which is logically equivalent to a universal conditional which has an ideal condition as its antecedent. And an idealized theory is a set of false universal conditional statements. Alternative syntactic and semantic analyses are viewed and criticized. (shrink)

Two authors with decades of experience promoting human rights argue that, as the world changes around us, rights hardly imaginable today will come into being. A rights revolution is under way. Today the range of nonhuman entities thought to deserve rights is exploding-not just animals but ecosystems and even robots. Changes in norms and circumstances require the expansion of rights: What new rights, for example, are needed if we understand gender to be nonbinary? Does living in a corrupt state violate (...) our rights? And emerging technologies demand that we think about old rights in new ways: When biotechnology is used to change genetic code, whose rights might be violated? What rights, if any, protect our privacy from the intrusions of sophisticated surveillance techniques? Drawing on their vast experience as human rights advocates, William Schulz and Sushma Raman challenge us to think hard about how rights evolve with changing circumstances, and what rights will look like ten, twenty, or fifty years from now. Against those who hold that rights are static and immutable, Schulz and Raman argue that rights must adapt to new realities or risk being consigned to irrelevance. To preserve and promote the good society-one that protects its members' dignity and fosters an environment in which people will want to live-we must at times rethink the meanings of familiar rights and consider the introduction of entirely new rights. Now is one of those times. The Coming Good Society details the many frontiers of rights today and the debates surrounding them. Schulz and Raman equip us with the tools to engage the present and future of rights so that we understand their importance and know where we stand. (shrink)

The question concerning the meaning of life is important, but it immediately confronts the present authors with insurmountable obstacles from a philosophical standpoint, as it would require us to define not only what we hold to be life, but what we hold to be meaning in addition, requiring us to do both in a properly researched context. We unconditionally surrender to that challenge. Instead, we offer a vernacular, armchair approach to life’s origin and meaning, with some layman’s thoughts on the (...) meaning of origins as viewed from the biologist’s standpoint. One can observe that biologists generally approach the concept of biological meaning in the context of evolution. This is the basis for the broad resonance behind Dobzhansky’s appraisal that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Biologists try to understand living things in the historical context of how they arose, without giving much thought to the definition of what life or living things are, which for a biologist is usually not an interesting question in the practical context of daily dealings with organisms. Do humans generally understand life’s meaning in the context of history? If we consider the problem of life’s origin, the question of what constitutes a living thing becomes somewhat more acute for the biologist, though not more answerable, because it is inescapable that there was a time when there were no organisms on Earth, followed by a time when there were, the latter time having persisted in continuity to the present. This raises the question of where, in that transition, chemicals on Earth became alive, requiring, in turn, a set of premises for how life arose in order to conceptualize the problem in relation to organisms we know today, including ourselves, which brings us to the point of this paper: In the same way that cultural narratives for origins always start with a setting, scientific narratives for origins also always start with a setting, a place on Earth or elsewhere where we can imagine what happened for the sake of structuring both the problem and the narrative for its solution. This raises the question of whether scientific origins settings convey meaning to humans in that they suggest to us from what kind of place and what kinds of chemicals we are descended, that is, to which inanimate things we are most closely related. (shrink)