McCoy and colleagues (2023) offer a reflective framework for data ethics and governance with several historical bioethics principles as a foundation. Their framework is one among a plethora of othe...

The course Science, Technology, and Society is taken by about 500 engineering students each year at Bilkent University, Ankara. Aiming to complement the highly technical engineering programs, it deals with the ethical, social, cultural, political, economic, legal, environment and sustainability, health and safety, reliability dimensions of science, technology, and engineering in a multidisciplinary fashion. The teaching philosophy and experiences of the instructor are reviewed. Community research projects have been an important feature of the course. Analysis of teaching style based on (...) a multi-dimensional model is given. Results of outcome measurements performed for ABET assessment are provided. Challenges and solutions related to teaching a large class are discussed. (shrink)

Introduction -- Part I: Growth, inquiry, and unity -- Problems with inquiry -- Aesthetic inquiry -- Inquiry, inquiry, inquiry -- Why unification? -- Part II: The metaphysics of unity -- The quest for being QUA being -- Time and individuality -- The Humpty-Dumpty intuition -- The mystical.

When viewing the picture of a beautiful sunset, how many of us realize that, while we admire it as a work of art, we have just taken the very first step toward pornography? And that both the beauty in the sunset and the senses that recognize such beauty are very likely to be anti-art? Making a radical departure from the conventional wisdom on art and beauty, ART, BEAUTY, AND PORNOGRAPHY presents the startling thesis that things of beauty are not only (...) unrelated to art but often responsible for pornography. How is this possible? In this controversial work, Huer argues that beauty pleases the senses, which demand to be pleased with each new stimulation. In a society whose members put a premium on pleasurable things, it is natural that the visual medium occupies a commanding position among forms of cultural expression. In the process of competing to please the human eye, American society (the most graphic and visual civilization to date) concentrates on objects and events that please consumers and, by doing so, sell products. Much of this sense-pleasing business takes place in the name of art. But those senses pleased by what is beautiful are the same senses that receive gratification from the pornographic. Art has no place in this process. Based on these arguments, Huer makes a strong case for re-orienting the purpose of art. Drawing on historical experience in the West, he defines art as a statement about life: pain, wisdom, and happiness embodied in the life process. The artist is a teacher of life, the artwork his philosophy, and the art public the beneficiaries of his teaching. Neither beauty nor sensory pleasure, therefore, has anything to do with art. This important volume is, above all, a critique of contemporary American culture directed most especially to society's confusion about art, beauty, and pornography, and its willingness to allow business to assert dominion over artistic impulse. ART, BEAUTY, AND PORNOGRAPHY is a searing commentary on the follies of our time as well as an inspired defense of high art and the creative spirit. (shrink)

In the last decades, Systems Biology (including cancer research) has been driven by technology, statistical modelling and bioinformatics. In this paper we try to bring biological and philosophical thinking back. We thus aim at making diferent traditions of thought compatible: (a) causality in epidemiology and in philosophical theorizing—notably, the “sufcient-component-cause framework” and the “mark transmission” approach; (b) new acquisitions about disease pathogenesis, e.g. the “branched model” in cancer, and the role of biomarkers in this process; (c) the burgeoning of omics (...) research, with a large number of “signals” and of associations that need to be interpreted. In the paper we summarize frst the current views on carcinogenesis, and then explore the relevance of current philosophical interpretations of “cancer causes”. We try to ofer a unifying framework to incorporate biomarkers and omic data into causal models, referring to a position called “evidential pluralism”. According to this view, causal reasoning is based on both “evidence of diference-making” (e.g. associations) and on “evidence of underlying biological mechanisms”. We conceptualize the way scientists detect and trace signals in terms of information transmission, which is a generalization of the mark transmission theory developed by philosopher Wesley Salmon. Our approach is capable of helping us conceptualize how heterogeneous factors such as micro and macro-biological and psycho-social—are causally linked. This is important not only to understand cancer etiology, but also to design public health policies that target the right causal factors at the macro-level. (shrink)

This book examines the past, present, and future states of time-travel research, and also looks at the bizarre anomalies of time itself.

This chapter gives a brief overview of the composition of the volume and explains why it is important to undertake a detailed scholarly analysis and comparison of the following ethico-legal regimes of surrogacy and egg donation: the permissive-unregulated but transitory regime of India; the permissive regime of Israel, although highly regulated by professional, medical and religious norms, and the extremely restrictive regime of Germany, being legally permeable for particular forms of cross-border reproductive practice despite the non-permissive national law. It uses (...) an interdisciplinary lens to examine how the ethical, social, legal and cultural issues are interwoven in each regime. Moreover, we highlight the importance of a comparative analysis to understand how local developments cannot be isolated from each other, but deeply influence each other through transnational markets, modern media and the transfer of knowledge, people and body parts. (shrink)

*Tackles the Thomistic debate surrounding the inherent good and evil of human actions*.

Memory is not a unitary phenomenon. Even among the group of long-term individual memory representations (known in the literature as declarative memory) there seems to be a distinction between two kinds of memory: memory of personally experienced events (episodic memory) and memory of facts or knowledge about the world (semantic memory). Although this distinction seems very intuitive, it is not so clear in which characteristic or set of interrelated characteristics lies the difference. In this article, I present the different criteria (...) proposed in the philosophical and scientific literature in order to account for this distinction: (1) the vehicle of representation; (2) the grammar of the verb “to remember”; (3) the cause of the memory; (4) the memory content; and (5) the phenomenology of memory representations. Whereas some criteria seem more plausible than others, I show that all of them are problematic and none of them really fulfill their aim. I then briefly outline a different criterion, the affective criterion, which seems a promising line of research to try to understand the grounds of this distinction. (shrink)

This classroom exercise uses the movie Jojo Rabbit to teach students Kohlberg’s three levels and six stages of moral development. This is a helpful way to teach the concept of moral development because it helps students to visualize the nature of each of the stages and how one might move through them. It is appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate classes in management principles, ethics, organizational behavior, and leadership. The exercise can be completed in a 60 or 90 minute class. (...) Student feedback is very positive. (shrink)

Focuses on the enduring side of philosophical positions from the viewpoints of theology, science, literature, and social and political philosophy. Emphasizes the conflict and continuity of human values.

Assuming that a nihilist reading of Gorgias’ thought is to be ruled out, the issue of ‘not being’ remains one of the thorniest in his philosophy; indeed, it is fair to conclude that Gorgias is deeply concerned with ‘not being’. But what, after all, is Gorgias’ ‘not being’? This paper aims to answer this crucial question, by taking into consideration Gorgias’ main texts. Each of them provides a serious – although not always explicit – account of ‘not being’. Overall, the (...) aim is to show that Gorgias’ account of ‘not being’ is not concerned with ‘non-existence’ at all. It is deeply concerned, however, with falsehood and language. The paper will, therefore, be structured as follows: in part 1, the Treatise and specifically the the first section of the Particular Proof will be addressed and its ‘linguistic’ conception of ‘not-being’ fully exploited; in part 2, the Apology of Palamedes will be taken into account, in order to enucleate its ‘not-being-as-falsehood’ argument; the results from part 1 and part 2 will allow us, in part 3, to provide an analysis of the Encomium of Helen which points at its underlying conception of ‘not-being’. (shrink)

Joseph Déjacque was a sailor a mere nineteen years of age when he heard for the first time the gentle, “feminine” tone of anarchy: The voice was not of a woman; it was an odd officer’s soft words, not even “four words,”1 which did not command anything but instead permitted the things to be done and the sailors to do things their own way. Anarchy is not the absence of orders; it is the absence of butch command. And this absence, (...) gently maneuvered, produces “harmony”. This efficient and enthusiastic maneuver of anarchy was to be discovered by the young Parisian proletarian Joseph Déjacque far away from his native Faubourg Saint-Antoine, amid “the Oriental seas,” aboard a frigate of war, in 1841. It.. (shrink)

The Sistine Madonna and the chorus of the unborn : Raphael and Nelly Sachs -- The human soul and the cosmos : life before conception -- From spiritual to earthly community : entering earthly existence -- Appendix : Rudolf Steiner : the transition from cosmic to earthly existence in the development of the human being.

This primer on authentic education explores how mind and heart can work together in the learning process. Moving beyond the bankruptcy of our current model of education, Parker Palmer finds the soul of education through a lifelong cultivation of the wisdom each of us possesses and can share to benefit others.

The "Text" and the "Commentary" mentioned in the title of this essay are, respectively, the "Kitāb al-Manāẓir", or "Optics", of al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham, composed in the first half of the fifth/eleventh century, and the "Tanqīḥ al-Manāẓir li-dhawī l-abṣār wa l-baṣā'ir", written by Abū l-Ḥasan (or al-Ḥasan) Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī in the second half of the seventh/thirteenth century. It is known that, so far, only the first five of the seven "maqālāt"/Books that make up the Arabic text of IH's "Optics" have (...) been published, and that the "Tanqīḥ" was published in two volumes. I shall be concerned with certain episodes in the lives of these two works, my aim being to shed light on their transmission within the Islamic Arabic and Persian worlds. -/- . (shrink)