No discussion of academic freedom, research integrity, and patient safety could begin with a more disquieting pair of case studies than those of Nancy Olivieri and David Healy. The cumulative impact of the Olivieri and Healy affairs has caused serious self examination within the biomedical research community. The first part of the essay analyses these recent academic scandals. The two case studies are then placed in their historical context—that context being the transformation of the norms of science through increasingly close (...) ties between research universities and the corporate world. After a literature survey of the ways in which corporate sponsorship has biased the results of clinical drug trials, two different strategies to mitigate this problem are identified and assessed: a regulatory approach, which focuses on managing risks associated with industry funding of university research, and a more radical approach, the sequestration thesis, which counsels the outright elimination of corporate sponsorship. The reformist approach is criticised and the radical approach defended. (shrink)

Research in face recognition has largely been divided between those projects concerned with front‐end image processing and those projects concerned with memory for familiar people. These perceptual and cognitive programmes of research have proceeded in parallel, with only limited mutual influence. In this paper we present a model of human face recognition which combines both a perceptual and a cognitive component. The perceptual front‐end is based on principal components analysis of face images, and the cognitive back‐end is based on a (...) simple interactive activation and competition architecture. We demonstrate that this model has a much wider predictive range than either perceptual or cognitive models alone, and we show that this type of combination is necessary in order to analyse some important effects in human face recognition. In sum, the model takes varying images of “known” faces and delivers information about these people. (shrink)

Recent work has argued that there may be cases where no attitude – including withholding – is rationally permissible. In this paper, I consider two such epistemic dilemmas, John Turri’s Dilemma from Testimony and David Alexander’s Dilemma from Doubt. Turri presents a case where one’s only evidence rules out withholding (without warranting belief or disbelief). Alexander presents a case where higher order doubt means one must withhold judgment over whether withholding judgment is rational. In both cases, the authors conclude that (...) no doxastic attitude is warranted. In this paper, I argue against the possibility of these epistemic dilemmas. I argue that withholding cannot be irrational in either case. But meditating on the dilemmas gives us an important – and overlooked – insight into the nature of rational withholding. First, rational withholding is a function of evidence failing to sufficiently support belief or disbelief. As a result, withholding is not symmetrical to belief and disbelief. Second, there can be two distinct grounds for rational withholding. First, propositional withholding, which arises when our evidence does not support belief or disbelief in p. And second, doxastic withholding, which arises when we cannot determine whether our evidence supports belief or disbelief in p. Accepting two grounds of rational withholding licenses a kind of Weak Permissivism. But this Weak Permissivism should not be troubling to anyone. (shrink)

Watching other people play videogames —a.k.a. ‘spectator gaming’— is a widespread practice. Yet, it is considered by some as an inadequate form of engagement with games. In this paper, I show that the strongest objection to spectator gaming relies on the claim that some properties of videogames are better, if not exclusively, accessible to the player. After that, I propose two replies to this challenge. The first is that ‘secondary players’, i.e., individuals who indirectly take part in the game, can (...) access the relevant properties. The second reply is that even paradigmatic spectators may engage in simulated play, and therefore, access these properties as well. (shrink)

Open Compositionality: Towards a Methodology of Language offers a fresh view into human languages as supermodular, highly interactive cognitive capacities allowing for human unique thought and communication. It is a novel account of semantics as decision-making in tandem with the cognition first methodology.

We use Homer and Sun Tzu as a background to better understand and reformulate confrontation, anger and violence in medicine, contrasting an unproductive ‘love of war’ with a productive ‘art of war’ or ‘art of strategy’. At first glance, it is a paradox that the healing art is not pacific, but riddled with militaristic language and practices. On closer inspection, we find good reasons for this cultural paradox yet regret its presence. Drawing on insights from Homer's The Iliad and The (...) Odyssey, we argue for better understanding of confrontation, anger, bullying, intimidation and violence in medicine in order to change the culture. For example, equating medicine with war is not a given condition of medicine but a convenient metaphor with historical origins and a historical trajectory. Other, non-martial metaphors, such as medicine as collaboration, may be more appropriate in an age of team-based care. Taking lessons from Homer, we suggest three key ways in which cold-hearted confrontation and anger in medicine can be transformed into productive, warm-hearted engagement: the transformation of angry impulse into reflection, moral courage and empathy. Thinking with Homer can offer an aesthetically and morally charged alternative to the current body of literature on topics, such as anger in doctors, and how this may be ‘managed’, without recourse to an instrumental economy where emotions are viewed as commodities, and emotional responses can be ‘trained’ through communication skills courses. (shrink)

The overgeneration argument attempts to show that accepting second-order validity as a sound formal counterpart of logical truth has the unacceptable consequence that the Continuum Hypothesis is either a logical truth or a logical falsehood. The argument was presented and vigorously defended in John Etchemendy’s The Concept of Logical Consequence and it has many proponents to this day. Yet it is nothing but a seductive fallacy. I demonstrate this by considering five versions of the argument; as I show, each is (...) either unsound or lacks a troubling conclusion. (shrink)

Edited with New Translation by Richard McKirahan With a New Preface by Malcolm Schofield This book is a revised and expanded version of A.H. Coxon's full critical edition of the extant remains of Parmenides of Elea—the fifth-century B.C. philosopher by many considered "one of the greatest and most astonishing thinkers of all times." Coxon's presentation of the complete ancient evidence for Parmenides and his comprehensive examination of the fragments, unsurpassed to this day, have proven invaluable to our understanding of the (...) Eleatic since the book's first publication in 1986. This edition, edited by Richard McKirahan and with a new preface by Malcolm Schofield, is released on the 100th anniversary of Coxon's birth. This new edition for the first time includes English translations of the testimonia and of any Ancient Greek throughout the book, as well as an English/Greek glossary by Richard McKirahan, and revisions by the late author himself. The text consists of Coxon's collations of the relevant folios of manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus, Proclus and Simplicius and includes all extant fragments, a commentary, the testimonia, a complete list of sources, linguistic parallels from both earlier and later authors, and the fullest critical apparatus that has appeared since Diels’ _Poetarum Philosophorum Fragmenta _. The collection of testimonia includes the philosophical discussions of Parmenides by Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, most of which had been omitted by Diels. The introduction discusses the history of the text, the language and form of the poem, Parmenides’ use and understanding of the verb ‘to be’, his place in the history of earlier and later philosophy and the biographical tradition. In the commentary Coxon deals in detail with both the language and the subject matter of the poem and pays full attention to Parmenides’ account of the physical world. The appendix relates later Eleatic arguments to those of Parmenides. (shrink)

Contemporary psychiatry maintains the myth that it is value neutral by appeal to modern medical science for both its diagnostic categories and its therapeutic interventions, leaving the impression that it relies on reason—that is to say, reason divorced from tradition—to master human nature. Such a practice has a certain way of characterizing and defining humanity's lapses from acceptable human behavior—a lapse from human being. The modern practice of psychiatry applies a particular notion (largely influenced by Enlightenment ideals) of scientific instrumentation (...) to the human person in order to diagnose the ailment and manufacture a corresponding treatment in keeping with a hidden conception of human biological flourishing. This covert vision is an impoverished (and possibly dangerous) one. As much as the practice of psychiatry is constrained by the goals of the dominant moral tradition of our day, it becomes a tool (or technique) for achieving the transient and partial ends of modern individualism. Given this truncated view of human nature and human end, modern psychiatry fails to attend comprehensively to the unity of a life, missing altogether the essential relevance of character formation, and thereby forfeiting excellence in human flourishing. (shrink)

The dictionary shows philosophers at their best (and their worst), at their most perverse and their most elegant. Organised by philosopher, and indexed by thought, concept and phrase, it enables readers to discover who said what, and what was said by whom. Over 300 philosophers are represented, from Aristotle to Zeno, including Einstein, Aquinas, Sartre and De Beauvoir, and the quotations range from short cryptic phrases to longer statements. This Dictionary of Philosophical Quotations d will not change your life. It (...) will change your mind. (shrink)

No recent scholar has ever seriously maintained the genuineness of [Andokides] Oration IV, Against Alkibiades. Against it, one need cite no more than Blass, Attische Beredsamkeit , pp. 325–31; Jebb, Attic Orators , vol. i, pp. 133–9; an, pp. 191–210. The speech is quite ‘out of character’ for Andokides, who was certainly far too young ever to have been in danger of ostrakism as an alternative victim to Nikias or Alkibiades; and there is no reasonable doubt that its ‘dramatic date’ (...) is early in 415, and its ostensible speaker Phaiax, the clever young orator of Aristophanes' Knights , ambassador to Sicily in 422 and butt of Eupolis on divers occasions . These conclusions, however, leave open certain other material questions, especially that of the real date of the composition, on which in turn depends the question how far it can be legitimately used as an historical or biographical source. (shrink)

Habitat fragmentation produces isolated patches characterized by increased edge effects from an originally continuous habitat. The shapes of these patches often show a high degree of irregularity: their shapes deviate significantly from regular geometrical shapes such as rectangular and elliptical ones. In fractal theory, the geometry of patches created by a common landscape transformation process should be statistically similar, i.e. their fractal dimensions and their form factors should be equal. In this paper, we analyze 49 woodlot fragments (Pinus sylvestris L.) (...) in the Belgian Kempen region to study the direct relationship between a transformation process and the concomitant patch geometry. Although the fractal dimension of the woodlots is scattered (i.e. they are not statistically similar), the perimeter-area relation of the fragments is characterized by a single, ‘dimension-like’ exponent. This exponent suggests a certain shape homogeneity among the patches, which is confirmed by the absence of hierarchical levels associated with sharp increases of the fractal dimension at scale transitions. The interaction of different natural (soil factor, vegetation type) and anthropogenic (afforestation, urbanization) processes during patch development is assumed to have generated this feature. Comparison of the area and perimeter fractal dimension with an ecological index for habitat quality, the interior-to-edge ratio, shows that the fractal dimension is suitable for predicting interior habitat presence, which is more likely for patches with smooth perimeters and compact areas. The ratio of the area to the perimeter fractal dimension confirms this observation, with high values for high interior-to-edge ratios, characteristic for regularly shaped patches. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Constructing Constructivism” by Hugh Gash. Upshot: The concept of “constructivist teaching” seems unattainable for two reasons: a philosophical and an empirical one. Also, Hugh Gash’s survey is not so much about radical constructivism in education, but a review of different connected ideas labeled “constructivism” that have dominated the educational field.

The article is devoted to the criticism of the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx by the great political thinker of the 20 th century, Eric Voegelin (1901-1985). The article shows that Voegelin’s criticism of the Marxist doctrine consists of several successive stages. In his works of the late 1930s, he develops the idea of Marxism and communism, which grew up on its ideological basis, as one of the main “political religions” of the XX century. In the 1940s, when Voegelin was (...) living in exile in the United States, he continued to criticize the Marxism of Marx, but on a new theoretical basis, at the center of which was the concept of “gnosticism” as the essence of Western modernity. Since the 1950 s, Voegelin’s interest in the Marxism of Marx gradually faded away, and the Marxist doctrine itself is mostly mentioned as an example of one of the variants of “gnosticism” of the 20th-century politics. As a theoretical horizon of Voegelin’s criticism of the Marxian revolutionary idea, a brief reconstruction of the main propositions of his political theory as an experimental and critical science of the correct order of the soul and society is presented. Voegelin’s thesis that the rise of “gnosticism” is the essence of Western modernity is also analyzed in detail, since it serves as the central point of his interpretation of modern intellectual history. The article shows that the spiritual basis on which the development of the Marxian revolutionary idea took place was the revolt of the young Marx against God and his desire to eliminate the higher, transcendent and creative divine principle from the picture of the world of modern man. Voegelin's final conclusion, proposed by him in the framework of criticism of the Marxian revolutionary idea, is that the political success of Marxism in the XX century is one of the most significant symptoms of the spiritual decline of Western civilization. (shrink)

_ Practical Shape: A Theory of Practical Reasoning _, by DancyJonathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 185.

(No abstract is available for this citation).

I would like to begin with the role of philosophy in solving ecological problems, emphasizing two aspects of its role: the struggle against hostile ideology and the organizing and guiding of activity in the sphere of the development of science and the shaping of its problems. This role of Marxist-Leninist philosophy clearly appears in the complex interdisciplinary problem of the interaction between nature and society.

On fundamentals of Vedanta and science; a study.