Industrial drug design methodology has undergone remarkable changes in the recent history. Up to the 1970s, the screening of large numbers of randomly selected substances in biological test system was often a crucial step in the development of novel drugs. From the early 1980s, such ‘blind’ screening was increasingly rejected by many pharmaceutical researchers and gave way to ‘rational drug design’, a method that grounds the design of new drugs on a detailed mechanistic understanding of the drug action. Surprisingly, however, (...) the chance-based method of random screening returned to center stage of industrial drug development in the 1990s in the form of ‘high-throughput screening’ (HTS). I will argue in this paper that this to-and-fro in the prominence of random screening comes with fundamental changes in the epistemic significance of chance experiments in pharmaceutical development. While up to the 1970s, random screening used to be chosen as an empirical search strategy primarily because suffi- cient knowledge of the mechanistic basis of drug action was lacking, it has turned with high-throughput screening into an experimental method that employs chance variation and testing to illuminate this mechanistic basis. As a consequence, research into the underlying mechanisms of drug action and the development of new drugs have become closely integrated. The rise of HTS therefore not only shows how chance experiments have assumed a new epistemic role in drug development. It also allows for a detailed study of the much debated emergence of a new relationship between scientific understanding and the development of technological artifacts. (shrink)

Believing is not much like premeditated intentional action, but neither is it completely reflexive. If we had no more control over believing than we have over our automatic reflexes, it would be hard to make sense of the idea of epistemic virtues. There is, after all, no excellence of the eye blink or the knee jerk. If there are epistemic virtues, then our degree of voluntary control over believing must lie somewhere between the extremes of what we experience with passive (...) reflexes and intentional actions. Believing is not the only human activity that lies between these extremes. A number of behaviors and bodily processes do. Using some of these as a model, I will give an account of the nature of our voluntary control over believing and argue that it is necessary to ground the conviction that epistemic virtues do make sense. (shrink)

Issues of nature conservation, and socio-cultural movement called ecologism, are vivid becouse o f it’s many controvertions and actual validity in terms o f sustainable development. This paper presents contemporary motives o f preserving the nature, scientific ways of it’s realization, and chosen issues o f so called „ecological spirituality”. Reflection on the abilities and perils of science and spirituality, with reference to philosophy and practical conservation activity, will be led. Finally, there will be an attemption to answer the question (...) about relation between nature preservation, science and ecological spirituality, and to define the spiritual condition and trends in contemporary ecologism. (shrink)

L'anthropologie sud-africaine a historiquement été divisée en deux écoles: l'une, associée aux universités de langue afrikaans, appuyait l'apartheid; l'autre, associée aux universités anglophones, s'opposait à la ségrégation et à la discrimination raciale. L'anthropologie afrikaner se focalisait sur la culture, la tradition et l'ethnicité, tandis que l'école rivale voulait étudier l'Afrique du Sud comme une société unique, en transformation rapide. Cette opposition, qui a parfois été exagérée, a été la plus marquée dans la période de renforcement de l'apartheid, dans les années (...) soixante et soixante-dix, mais il y a toujours eu un débat considérable sur les objets mêmes des recherches en anthropologie, en particulier sur la nature des groupes «raciaux» et «tribaux» en Afrique du Sud. Ces problèmes, fondamentaux d'un point de vue politique, ont forcé les anthropologues à se confronter aux grandes questions posées par les politiques gouvernementales. Cet article retrace l'histoire de ces débats sur la classification des populations en Afrique du Sud. (shrink)

This teaching resource introduces undergraduate students to Chapter 2 of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism. John Stuart Mill was an English philosopher and well-known proponent of utilitarianism. This chapter is Mill's attempt to answer 'What is good?' and the implications of our answer for determining which actions are morally right. Mill thinks that, ultimately, happiness is the only thing that is good, and right actions are those which maximise happiness. In providing his answer, he considers and replies to several objections, including (...) that this account is 'worthy of swine', and that it is impossible to always be certain which actions will produce the most happiness over the long-term. This piece introduces summarises the main arguments and guides readers through the chapter, outlining the key concepts and exploring the wider implications of Mill's version of utilitarianism. (shrink)

_How not to be a hypocrite: _the indispensable guide to school choice that morally perplexed parents have been waiting for. Many of us believe in social justice and equality of opportunity - but we also want the best for our kids. How can we square our political principles with our special concern for our own children? This marvellous book takes us through the moral minefield that is school choice today. Does a commitment to social justice mean you have to send (...) your children to the local comprehensive - regardless of its academic results? Is it hypocritical to disapprove of private schools and yet send your child to one? Some parents feel guilty but shouldn't. Others should feel guilty but don't. Read _How Not to be a Hypocrite_, then answer the questionnaire, and work out where you stand on this crucial issue. (shrink)

Politicians invoke grand ideas: social justice, democracy, liberty, equality, community. But what do these ideas really mean? How can politicians across the political spectrum appeal to the same values? This new edition of Adam Swift's highly readable introduction to political philosophy answers these important questions, and includes new material on global justice, feminism, and method in political theory, as well as updated guides to further reading. This lively and accessible book is ideal for students, but it also brings the (...) insights of the world's leading political philosophers to a wide general audience. Using plenty of examples, it equips readers to think for themselves about the ideas that shape political life. Democracy works best when both politicians and voters move beyond rhetoric to think clearly and carefully about the political principles that should govern their society. But clear thinking is difficult in an age when established orthodoxies have fallen by the wayside. Bringing political philosophy out of the ivory tower and within the reach of all, this book provides us with tools to cut through the complexities of modern politics. In so doing, it makes a valuable contribution to the democratic process and this new edition will continue to be essential reading for students of political philosophy and theory. (shrink)

The clinical concept of projective identification encompasses both unconscious fantasies of putting aspects of oneself into another person, as well as interpersonal processes aimed at evoking a corresponding response in another person, all for purposes of defensive evacuation, control and/or communication.1 In thinking about this complex situation, we need to consider its interpersonal dimensions as well as the intrapsychic processes that take place in each party. Louise Braddock's paper is thought provoking, far-reaching, and important in its use of concepts from (...) analytic philosophy to attempt to bring clarity on both fronts. Her account makes use of two crucial philosophical notions... (shrink)

This article develops a media philosophical framework for addressing the intersection of epigenetics and complex dynamical systems in theoretical biology. In particular, it argues that the theoretical humanities need to think critically about the computability of epigenomic regulation, as well as speculatively about the possibility of an epigenomics beyond complexity. The fact that such a conceptual framework does not exist suggests not only a failure to engage with the mathematics of complexity, but also a failure to engage with its history. (...) Both epigenetics and the application of complex dynamical systems to biology originate in the mid-twentieth-century work of Conrad Hal Waddington. The article demonstrates how this genealogy of epigenetic complexity reveals the need for a speculative conception of epigenomic mediation beyond mathematical complexity. Using Whitehead’s philosophy as a conceptual anchor, the “epimedial landscape” serves as a first pass at a media philosophical revision of the complex dynamical systems view of the epigenetic landscape. (shrink)

Legal theorists standardly hold that stability is one of eight necessary conditions for legal guidance. We lack an adequate explanation, however, of why, exactly, stability is necessary in order that law possess the capacity to guide behavior. Standard explanations, which rely on a claim about reasonable expectations, fail to connect the concepts of stability and legal guidance. In this paper, I argue that, according to the leading conception of legal guidance, stability is, in fact, not necessary in order for law (...) to possess the capacity to guide. In response, I provide an alternative conception of legal guidance, and argue that stability is a necessary attribute if we assume this conception of guidance. More generally, the paper sets out an abstract framework in which claims that this or that property is necessary for legal guidance can be assessed. (shrink)

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1898 Edition.

Within the discourse surrounding mind-body interaction, mental causation is intimately associated with non-reductive physicalism. However, such a theory holds two opposing views: that all causal properties and relations can be explicated by physics and that special sciences have an explanatory role. Jaegwon Kim attempts to deconstruct this problematic contradiction by arguing that it is untenable for non-reductive physicalists to explain human behavior by appeal to mental properties. In combination, Kim’s critique of mental causation and the phenomenal concept strategy serves as (...) an effectual response to the anti-physicalist stance enclosed within the Knowledge Argument and the Zombie Thought Experiment. (shrink)

SummaryThe problem of conquests and territorial expansion, including their interpretation, evaluation, and legitimisation, has been crucial for European national historiographies. Consequently, attempts by the Holy Roman emperors, particularly of the Saxon and Hohenstaufen dynasties, to control Italy and Burgundy were hotly debated among nineteenth-century German historians, while Poland's union with Lithuania, and the annexation of the vast territories of the east which followed, was a central topic for Polish historians of the time. Modern historians of historiography in both countries have (...) carefully analysed these narratives, emphasising their ideological and political contexts, such as their involvement in the Grossdeutsch versus Kleindeutsch controversy and the controversy between the so-called Cracow and Warsaw historical schools. In this paper I propose a comparative analysis of these two discourses which dealt with analogical issues and, as I demonstrate, developed with a parallel dynamic. Such an analysis, I argue, allows an escape from the paradigm of national exceptionalism, and the discovery of what was typical or, perhaps, constitutive of the discourse on territorial expansion of the time, instead of focusing on the uniqueness of the national context. This analysis embraces the conceptualisation, argumentation, and rhetoric of those nineteenth-century German and Polish historians discussing the expansion of the medieval Holy Empire and early-modern Poland. Moreover, it locates their interpretations within an international context of a broader Western historiographical tradition, involving issues of domination, cultural transfer, and colonialism. Finally, it examines the parallel mechanism of searching for, advocating, and perpetuating the idea of uniqueness of national history. (shrink)

The system approach to the miracle is based on the conviction that the complex issues, requiring the interdisciplinary approach, should be captured in a system way. Thus, the problem of miracle, because of its interdisciplinary character, should be captured in a systemic way, because such approach enables the more adequate and comprehensive presentation of these issues. The system approach towards the epistemology of miracle is the attempt of the more adequate presentation of the relationship between the scientific-natural research and theological (...) stage of recognizing the miracle. Because of using systemic categories, it is possible to present the common foundations (environment) of the system of scientific-natural knowledge and the system of theological interpretation, which can be described as the rationality of knowledge. The result of adopting the systemic epistemology of miracle is noticing the relations between the scientific-natural research and theological interpretation in their system complexity. Determining these relations leads to the more general conclusion that the natural sciences and theology as separate and autonomous systems of gaining the knowledge of reality do not have to be treated as the competing but rather as the complementary ones, with their methodological diversity and limitations in mind. (shrink)

"[An] important essay by a philosopher who more convincingly than any other I can think of demonstrates the continuing significance of his vocation in the life of our culture."—Karsten Harries, _The New York Times Book Review_ With _The Presence of Myth_, Kolakowski demonstrates that no matter how hard man strives for purely rational thought, there has always been-and always will be-a reservoir of mythical images that lend "being" and "consciousness" a specifically human meaning. "Kolakowski undertakes a philosophy of culture which (...) extends to all realms of human intercourse—intellectual, artistic, scientific, and emotional.... [His] book has real significance for today, and may well become a classic in the philosophy of culture."—_Anglican Theological Review_. (shrink)

This article offers an explanation for the proposed moral asymmetry between non‐responsible threats and innocent bystanders. Some argue that a non‐responsible threat – a person who threatens another through no fault or choice – is required to bear a greater burden to avert the threat than a bystander. I argue that previous attempts to explain this asymmetry are either incorrect or incomplete, since they either implausibly suggest that agents who do not benefit from their bodily resources, or whose bodily resources (...) primarily benefit third parties, are liable to greater costs than a bystander, or fail to accommodate such cases. Instead, the asymmetry (when it exists) is explained either by virtue of the fact that the non‐responsible threat has a beneficiary status with respect to the threatening object, or possesses distribution‐limiting entitlements over the threatening object. (shrink)

[Barbara Grabowska, Samotny egoista czy odpowiedzialny obywatel].

According to a common view, the activity of justifying is epistemologically irrelevant: being justified in believing as one does never requires the ability to justify one’s belief. This view runs into trouble regarding the epistemic basing relation, the relation between a person’s belief and the reasons for which the person holds it. The view must appeal to basing relations as part of its account of what it is for a person to be justified in believing as she does, but the (...) view prevents basing relations from doing the needed work. In place of the common view, I propose an account of basing relations which links them to the person’s commitments and hence to her justificatory activity. If this proposal is correct, then positive justificatory status, too, will be conceptually linked to the ability to succeed in the activity of justifying. (shrink)

Drug development regularly has to deal with complex circumstances on two levels: the local level of pharmacological intervention on specific target proteins, and the systems level of the effects of pharmacological intervention on the organism. Different development strategies in the recent history of early drug development can be understood as competing attempts at coming to grips with these multi-level complexities. Both rational drug design and high-throughput screening concentrate on the local level, while traditional empirical search strategies as well as recent (...) systems biology approaches focus on the systems level. The analysis of these strategies reveals serious obstacles to integrating the study of interventive and systems complexity in a systematic, methodical way. Due to some fairly general properties of biological networks and the available options for pharmaceutical intervention, drug development is captured in an obstinate methodological dilemma. It is argued that at least in typical cases, drug development therefore remains dependent on coincidence, serendipity or plain luck to bridge the gap between development methodology and actual therapeutic success. (shrink)