The article analyses williams' attempt (in chapter 7 of "descartes: the project of pure enquiry", Penguin 1978) to defend the reasoning of descartes' "third meditation" against the charge of circularity. It is contended not only that this attempt fails, But that its failure is rooted in williams' own correct account of descartes' philosophical purposes in the "meditations".

In a recent re-assessment of the medical aspects of the Plague of Athens which is, to date, the most scholarly and comprehensive, Poole and Holladay have emphasized the tendency of many infectious diseases markedly to decline in virulence over decades and centuries and, sometimes, significantly to change their clinical manifestations. In the light of modern medicine they consider four possibilities: The Plague was a disease which still exists today. This they regard as improbable, It still exists in some remote place (...) or places unknown to medical science. This is discussed and dismissed, It became extinct, It was caused by an agent which nowadays causes a significantly different clinical syndrome. They conclude as follows: ‘The truth, we suggest, almost certainly lies in possibility or . But we can see no way of choosing between them. On either view the question: “What was the Athenian Plague?” is in principle unanswerable if the questioner is wanting to attach to the Plagsie the name of some modern disease or diseases’. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of qualitative research for studying the ethics of care, bringing to light the lived experience of health care recipients, together with the importance of methods that allow reconstruction of the processes underlying this lived experience. Lived experiences of families being approached for organ donation, parents facing the imminent death of their child and patients being treated using stem cell transplantation are used to illustrate how ethical principles are differentiated, modified or (...) contradicted by the narrative context of persons concerned. The integration of empirical data into ethics will help caregivers in their ethical decision making and may enrich care ethics as a narrative and interpretative field. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of qualitative research for studying the ethics of care, bringing to light the lived experience of health care recipients, together with the importance of methods that allow reconstruction of the processes underlying this lived experience. Lived experiences of families being approached for organ donation, parents facing the imminent death of their child and patients being treated using stem cell transplantation are used to illustrate how ethical principles are differentiated, modified or (...) contradicted by the narrative context of persons concerned. The integration of empirical data into ethics will help caregivers in their ethical decision making and may enrich care ethics as a narrative and interpretative field. (shrink)

There are three outstanding events in the internal history of Sparta during the sixth century. First, there is the constitutional settlement denning the functions of the Crown, the Senate, and the Assembly: this is now generally admitted to have taken place about 600 B.C. Secondly, there is the increase in the importance of the ephorate, a pseudo-democratic development associated with the ephor Chilon and the year 556. Thirdly, there is the decline in Spartan material culture; this process begins shortly after (...) the turn of the century with the abandonment of gold and ivory work, and culminates shortly after the middle of the century in an almost total collapse of artistic and cultural standards. (shrink)

'Updating Bertrand Russell for the 21st century... a cerebrally enjoyable survey, written with great clarity and touches of wit... The non-western section throws up some fascinating revelations' Sunday Times The story of philosophy is an epic tale: an exploration of the ideas, views and teachings of some of the most creative minds known to humanity. But since the long-popular classic Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, first published in 1945, there has been no comprehensive and entertaining, single-volume history of this (...) great intellectual journey. With his characteristic clarity and elegance A. C. Grayling takes the reader from the world-views and moralities before the age of the Buddha, Confucius and Socrates, through Christianity's dominance of the European mind to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and on to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre, and philosophy today. And, since the story of philosophy is incomplete without mention of the great philosophical traditions of India, China and the Persian-Arabic world, he gives a comparative survey of them too. Intelligible for students and eye-opening for philosophy readers, he covers epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, logic, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, political philosophy and the history of debates in these areas of enquiry, through the ideas of the celebrated philosophers as well as less well-known influential thinkers. He also asks what we have learnt from this body of thought, and what progress is still to be made. The first authoritative and accessible single-volume history of philosophy for decades, remarkable for its range and clarity, this is a landmark work. (shrink)

Exploring history pertinent to evolutionary developmental biology (hereafter, Evo-devo) is an exciting prospect given its current status as a cutting-edge field of research. The first and obvious question concerns where to begin searching for materials and sources. Since this new discipline adopts a moniker that intentionally juxtaposes ‘evolution’ and development’, individuals, disciplines, and institutional contexts relevant to the history of evolutionary studies and investigations of ontogeny prompt themselves. Each of these topics has received attention from historians and thus there is (...) both primary and secondary material from which to draw. For example, many historians have documented the historical trajectories of genetics and embryology, their split, and various relations (or lack thereof), especially in the first three decades of the 20th century. (shrink)

In a world with limited resources, allocation of resources to certain individuals and conditions inevitably means fewer resources allocated to other individuals and conditions. Should a patient's personal responsibility be relevant to decisions regarding allocation? In this project we combine the normative and the descriptive, conducting an empirical bioethical examination of how both Norwegian and British doctors think about principles of responsibility in allocating scarce healthcare resources. A large proportion of doctors in both countries supported including responsibility for illness in (...) prioritization decisions. This finding was more prominent in zero‐sum scenarios where allocation to one patient means that another patient is denied treatment. There was most support for incorporating prospective responsibility (through patient contracts), and low support for integrating responsibility into co‐payments (i.e. through requiring responsible patients to pay part of the costs of treatment). Finally, some behaviours were considered more appropriate grounds for deprioritization (smoking, alcohol, drug use)—potentially because of the certainty of impact and direct link to ill health. In zero‐sum situations, prognosis also influenced prioritization (but did not outweigh responsibility). Ethical implications are discussed. We argue that the role that responsibility constructs appear to play in doctors' decisions indicates a needs for more nuanced—and clear—policy. Such policy should account for the distinctions we draw between responsibility‐sensitive and prognostic justifications for deprioritization. (shrink)

The larval arms of echinoid plutei are used for locomotion and feeding. They are composed of internal calcite skeletal rods covered by an ectoderm layer bearing a ciliary band. Skeletogenesis includes an autonomous molecular differentiation program in primary mesenchyme cells (PMCs), initiated when PMCs leave the vegetal plate for the blastocoel, and a patterning of the differentiated skeletal units that requires molecular cues from the overlaying ectoderm. The arms represent a larval feature that arose in the echinoid lineage during the (...) Paleozoic and offers a subject for the study of gene co-option in the evolution of novel larval features. We isolated new molecular markers in two closely related but differently developing species, Heliocidaris tuberculata and Heliocidaris erythrogramma. We report the expression of a larval arm-associated ectoderm gene tetraspanin, as well as two new PMC markers, advillin and carbonic anhydrase. Tetraspanin localizes to the animal half of blastula stage H. tuberculata and then undergoes a restriction into the putative oral ectoderm and future location of the postoral arms, where it continues to be expressed at the leading edge of both the postoral and anterolateral arms. In H. erythrogramma, its expression initiates in the animal half of blastulae and expands over the entire ectoderm from gastrulation onward. Advillin and carbonic anhydrase are upregulated in the PMCs postgastrulation and localized to the leading edge of the growing larval arms of H. tuberculata but do not exhibit coordinated expression in H. erythrogramma larvae. The tight spatiotemporal regulation of these genes in H. tuberculata along with other ontogenetic and phylogenetic evidence suggest that pluteus arms are novel larval organs, distinguishable from the processes of skeletogenesis per se. The dissociation of expression control in H. erythrogramma suggest that coordinate gene expression in H. tuberculata evolved as part of the evolution of pluteus arms, and is not required for larval or adult development. (shrink)

The Compactness Theorem The compactness theorem is a fundamental theorem for the model theory of classical propositional and first-order logic. As well as having importance in several areas of mathematics, such as algebra and combinatorics, it also helps to pinpoint the strength of these logics, which are the standard ones used in mathematics and arguably … Continue reading Compactness Theorem →.

A sketchy account of an orthodox Protestant doctrine of religious authority.--A. C. P.

Recognizing that contemporary attacks upon theology question the intelligibility rather than the truth of theological propositions, the author begins with comments upon the discussion between A. G. N. Flew, R. M. Hare, Basil Mitchell and others in New Essays in Philosophical Theology. After pointing out that contemporary objections to theological discourse are far from conclusive, he suggests that problems arising with respect to such discourse are to be resolved by a return to a theory of knowledge which holds that intellection (...) is intuitive as well as merely discursive. This suggestion raises problems of its own; yet the book is clear, often illuminating, and a genuine contribution to the philosophy of religion.--A. C. P. (shrink)