Healing Makes Our Hearts Happy: Spirituality and Cultural Transformation among the Kalaharilu/'hoansi Richard Katz Megan Biesele and Verna St Denis Rochester Vermont: Inner Traditions, 1997. 214pp. $29.95.

Arsenic and phosphorus are group 15 elements with similar chemical properties. Is it possible that arsenate could replace phosphate in some of the chemicals that are required for life? Phosphate esters are ubiquitous in biomolecules and are essential for life, from the sugar phosphates of intermediary metabolism to ATP to phospholipids to the phosphate backbone of DNA and RNA. Some enzymes that form phosphate esters catalyze the formation of arsenate esters. Arsenate esters hydrolyze very rapidly in aqueous solution, which makes (...) it improbable that phosphorous could be completely replaced with arsenic to support life. Studies of bacterial growth at high arsenic:phosphorus ratios demonstrate that relatively high arsenic concentrations can be tolerated, and that arsenic can become involved in vital functions in the cell, though likely much less efficiently than phosphorus. Recently Wolfe‐Simon et al. 1 reported the isolation of a microorganism that they maintain uses arsenic in place of phosphorus for growth. Here, we examine and evaluate their data and conclusions. (shrink)

Leonid Martynov and Boris Slutsky began to write during Stalin's reign and were aware of the contemporary official pressure to make literature more broadly accessible as well as of the highly experimental, and thus more difficult, poetry that had come into vogue during the years leading up to the Bolshevik revolution. Martynov's response was to create verse marked by ambiguity; he employs the graphic layout and internal rhyme to avoid predictability and easy interpretation, especially in a poem's opening lines. Slutsky, (...) in contrast, often lacks the sense of rhythmic order that usually emerges in Martynov's poems. He may disrupt the rhythm unexpectedly or vary it so frequently that no overarching pattern appears. Both, whether by unsettling the rhythm or complicating its perception, manage to recall the freer and more experimental artistic milieu of the early twentieth century. (shrink)

Ethnopsychology is the study of native theories and understandings of emotions, of illness and curing, and of self and personality. In teaching this subject I use techniques such as dramas and experiential exercises to aid in expanding students'cognitive, visceral, and political consciousness of the world's indigenous psychologies.

First published in 1987. Towards the end of the twentieth century there was a resurgence of thinking about politics, economics and society referred to variously as the 'New Right', the radical right, neo-conservatism, economic liberalism or libertarianism. Although the New Right is not a single coherent movement it represented a clear alternative to the prevailing social-democratic consensus and had had considerable influence on government policy in both America and Britain. This book presents an introductory survey of the New Right worldwide. (...) It examines the varieties of free-market and 'monetarist' economic thought and introduces the reader to the public-choice critique of public policy. In political philosophy the book analyses American and British conservative thought and compares conservatism with neo-liberalism. The author pays particular attention to the New Right's analysis of constitutionalism and its critique of the dominance of 'politics' over 'economics' during the high-point of the consensus period. The author assesses the success which the different schools of the New Right have had in influencing public opinion and in the formation of government policy. He does not argue for or against the New Right but presents a dispassionate survey from which the reader can draw his or her own conclusions. (shrink)

Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, processes, operational statuses, and associated persons, organizations, or nations. The Space Object Ontology provides a consensus-based realist framework (...) for formulating such characterizations in a computable fashion. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in the Space Object Ontology and stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space domain awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators. This paper presents the core of the Space Object Ontology, discusses its advantages over other approaches to space object classification, and demonstrates its ability to combine diverse sets of data from multiple sources within an expandable framework. Finally, we show how the ontology provides benefits for enhancing and maintaining longterm space domain awareness. (shrink)

This review emphasizes the worldwide and U.S. evolving population demographics and the need for the dental profession to exercise its professional and ethical duty to expand its traditional patient base to provide needed services.

A critical survey of the major philosophical arguments that have been used to justify the institutions and policies of contemporary welfare states considers the claims of rights theory, egalitarianism, and citizenship and communitarian doctrines. It finds that these arguments are both internally confused and inconsistent with conventional welfare policies. It is argued that the welfare state itself has serious ambiguities: it claims to cater for the needy, as part of its ?public good?; obligations, yet in practice it delivers a range (...) of private goods, e.g., health, housing, education and pensions, often irrespective of need. Yet classical liberal theories of state welfare, which favor simple cash payments, are flawed in theory and potentially costly in practice, while neocon?servative theories, by imposing ?values?; on welfare recipients, undermine liberal pluralism. The author concludes that welfare philosophy should be concerned with two neglected areas: the possibility that welfare be provided outside the familiar market and state categories, and the construction of constitutional rules to prevent the middle?class ?capture?; of existing welfare states. (shrink)

This book is a survey of the most important developments in Austrian philosophy in its classical period from the 1870s to the Anschluss in 1938. Thus it is intended as a contribution to the history of philosophy. But I hope that it will be seen also as a contribution to philosophy in its own right as an attempt to philosophize in the spirit of those, above all Roderick Chisholm, Rudolf Haller, Kevin Mulligan and Peter Simons, who have done so much (...) to demonstrate the continued fertility of the ideas and methods of the Austrian philosophers in our own day. For some time now, historians of philosophy have been gradually coming to terms with the idea that post-Kantian philosophy in the German-speaking world ought properly to be divided into two distinct traditions which we might refer to as the German and Austrian traditions, respectively. The main line of the first consists in a list of personages beginning with Kant, Fichte, Hegel and Schelling and ending with Heidegger, Adorno and Bloch. The main line of the second may be picked out similarly by means of a list beginning with Bolzano, Mach and Meinong, and ending with Wittgenstein, Neurath and Popper. As should be clear, it is the Austrian tradition that has contributed most to the contemporary mainstream of philosophical thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world. For while there are of course German thinkers who have made crucial contributions to the development of exact or analytic philosophy, such thinkers were outsiders when seen from the perspective of native German philosophical culture, and in fact a number of them found their philosophical home precisely in Vienna. When, in contrast, we examine the influence of the Austrian line, we encounter a whole series of familiar and unfamiliar links to the characteristic concerns of more recent philosophy of the analytic sort. As Michael Dummett points out in his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, the newly fashionable habit of referring to analytic philosophy as "Anglo-American" is in this light a "grave historical distortion". If, he says, we take into account the historical context in which analytic philosophy developed, then such philosophy "could at least as well be called "Anglo-Austrian" (1988, p. 7). Much valuable scholarly work has been done on the thinking of Husserl and Wittgenstein, Mach and the Vienna Circle. The central axis of Austrian philosophy, however, which as I hope to show in what follows is constituted by the work of Brentano and his school, is still rather poorly understood. Work on Meinong or Twardowski by contemporary philosophers still standardly rests upon simplified and often confused renderings of a few favoured theses taken out of context. Little attention is paid to original sources, and little effort is devoted to establishing what the problems were by which the Austrian philosophers in general were exercised -- in spite of the fact that many of these same problems have once more become important as a result of the contemporary burgeoning of interest on the part of philosophers in problems in the field of cognitive science. (shrink)

This month’s APA Blog Substack Newsletter extends a discussion with Barry Smith, who is a Distinguished Julian Park Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Biomedical Informatics, and Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo. He is also Director of the National Center for Ontological Research and a lead developer of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), an international standard top-level ontology (ISO/IEC 21838-2) used by over 700 ontology development groups across the world. Barry’s work led to the formation (...) in 2005 of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry, a set of resources designed to support information-driven research in biology and biomedicine. He also contributes to ontology projects in the military and security domains and is one of the founders of the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF), whose goal is to advance interoperability of information systems in the industrial domain. Now he and his University at Buffalo (UB) colleague and Co-Director of the National Center for Ontological Research John Beverley lead what one might call the academic arm of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community Working Group (DIOWG), in which the principles of the OBO Foundry are being applied in the defense and security domains. (shrink)

Discusses Anglo-American capitalism, exemplified by the commercial and financial systems of Wall Street and the City of London and including the ethics of the stock market, the morality of takeovers, and the problem of business and the environment.

The computational genomics community has come increasingly to rely on the methodology of creating annotations of scientific literature using terms from controlled structured vocabularies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). We here address the question of what such annotations signify and of how they are created by working biologists. Our goal is to promote a better understanding of how the results of experiments are captured in annotations in the hope that this will lead to better representations of biological reality through (...) both the annotation process and ontology development, and in more informed use of the GO resources by experimental scientists. (shrink)

We take as our starting point a thesis to the effect that, at least for true judgments of many varieties, there are parts of reality which make such judgments are true. We argue that two distinct components are involved in this truthmaker relation. On the one hand is the relation of necessitation, which holds between an object x and a judgment p when the existence of x entails the truth of p. On the other hand is the dual notion of (...) projection, which holds between a judgment p and an object x when the truth of p entails the existence of x. A truthmaker for a judgment p is then a necessitator for p which satisfies the further constraint that it is part of p’s projection. We offer a formal theory of the truthmaker relation thus defined, exploiting ontological tools of basic mereology and the theory of dependence. We then apply the theory to a range of problems connected with generic expressions, ellipsis, vagueness, and indexical and perceptual judgments. (shrink)

In 1890 Christian von Ehrenfels published his classic paper "Über 'Gestaltqualitäten'", the first systematic investigation of the philosophy and psychology of Gestalt. Ehrenfels thereby issued an important challenge to the psychological atomism that was still predominant in his day. His paper not only exerted a powerful influence on the philosophy of the Meinong school, it also marked the beginning of the Gestalt tradition in psychology, later associated with the work of Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka in Berlin. Includes papers by C. (...) Von Ehrenfels, Kurt Grelling and Paul Oppenheim and contributions by K. Mulligan, P.M. Simons and Barry Smith. (shrink)

The appeal of materialism lies precisely in this, in its claim to be natural metaphysics within the bounds of science. That a doctrine which promises to gratify our ambition (to know the noumenal) and our caution (not to be unscientific) should have great appeal is hardly something to be wondered at. (Putnam (1983), p.210) Materialism says that all facts, in particular all mental facts, obtain in virtue of the spatio- temporal distribution, and properties, of matter. It was, as Putnam says, (...) “metaphysics within the bounds of science”, but only so long as science was thought to say that the world is made out of matter.1 In this century physicists have learned that there is more in the world than matter and, in any case, matter isn’t quite what it seemed to be. For this reason many philosophers who think that metaphysics should be informed by science advocate physicalism in place of materialism. Physicalism claims that all facts obtain in virtue of the distribution of the fundamental entities and properties –whatever they turn out to be- of completed fundamental physics. Later I will discuss a more precise formulation. But not all contemporary philosophers embrace physicalism. Some- and though a minority not a small or un-influential one- think that physicalism is rather the metaphysics for an unjustified scientism; i.e. it is scientistic metaphysics. Those among them that think that physicalism can be clearly formulated think that it characterizes a. (shrink)

This paper describes and critically reflects on a participatory policy process which resulted in a government decision not to introduce genetically modified cotton in farmers’ fields in Mali. In January 2006, 45 Malian farmers gathered in Sikasso to deliberate on GM cotton and the future of farming in Mali. As an invited policy space convened by the government of Sikasso region, this first-time farmers' jury was unique in West Africa. It was known as l’ECID—Espace Citoyen d’Interpellation Démocratique —and it had (...) an unprecedented impact on the region. In this Deliberative and Inclusive Process, the ECID combined the citizens’ jury method with indigenous methods for debate and dialogue, including the traditional African palaver. The ECID brought together male and female producers representing every district in the Sikasso region of southern Mali, specialist witnesses from various continents and a panel of independent observers, as well as resource persons and members of the national and international press and media. As an experiment in deliberative democracy, the ECID of Sikasso aimed to give men and women farmers the opportunity to share knowledge on the benefits and risks of GM cotton, and make policy recommendations on the future of GM technology in Malian agriculture. Designed as a bottom-up and participatory process, the ECID’s outcomes significantly changed national policy on the release of GM technology and have had an enduring influence in Mali. In this paper, we describe our positionality as action researchers and co-organisers of the ECID. We explain the methodology used for the ECID of Sikasso and critically reflect on the safeguards that were put in place to ensure a balanced and trustworthy deliberative process. The ECID and its key outcomes are discussed in the context of the political economy of GM cotton in West Africa. Last, we briefly highlight the relevance of the ECID for current international debates on racism in the theory and practice deliberative democracy; the production of post-normal transdisciplinary knowledge for technology risk-assessments; and the politics of knowledge in participatory policy-making for food and agriculture. (shrink)

We are developing the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND) to provide a framework to enable representation of aspects of neurological diseases that are relevant to their treatment and study. ND is a representational tool that addresses the need for unambiguous annotation, storage, and retrieval of data associated with the treatment and study of neurological diseases. ND is being developed in compliance with the Open Biomedical Ontology Foundry principles and builds upon the paradigm established by the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS) (...) for the representation of entities in the domain of disease and medical practice. Initial applications of ND will include the annotation and analysis of large data sets and patient records for Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and stroke. (shrink)

It will be the thesis of this paper that there are among our mental acts some which fall into the category of real material relations. That is: some acts are necessarily such as to involve a plurality of objects as their relata or fundamenta. Suppose Bruno walks into his study and sees a cat. To describe the seeing, here, as a relation, is to affirm that it serves somehow to tie Bruno to the cat. Bruno's act of seeing, unlike his (...) feeling depressed, his putative thinking-about-Santa-Claus or his musing, abstractedly, about the tallest spy, has at least two fundamenta: it is, as a matter of necessity, dependent for its existence upon both Bruno himself and the cat that he sees. This idea will naturally raise echoes of Russell's doctrine of knowledge by acquaintance. 'I am acquainted with an object', Russell tells us, 'when I have a direct cognitive relation to that object, i. e. when I am directly aware of the object itself' (1918, p. 209). And indeed a distinction in many ways like that between acquaintance and description will find a place within the theory here projected, but there are crucial differences. (shrink)

This project investigates critical issues and events related to Trek Therapeutics experience as a public benefit corporation. We will present and discuss how Trek differentiates itself in an industry where the attention is on high prices supporting high investor returns. Trek’s benefit corporation status helped it garner favorable attention in some respects, but has also presented challenges, particularly when it comes to attracting new capital.

We take as our starting point a thesis to the effect that, at least for true judgments of many varieties, there are parts of reality which make such judgments are true. We argue that two distinct components are involved in this truthmaker relation. On the one hand is the relation of necessitation, which holds between an object x and a judgment p when the existence of x entails the truth of p. On the other hand is the dual notion of (...) projection, which holds between a judgment p and an object x when the truth of p entails the existence of x. A truthmaker for a judgment p is then a necessitator for p which satisfies the further constraint that it is part of p’s projection. We offer a formal theory of the truthmaker relation thus defined, exploiting ontological tools of basic mereology and the theory of dependence. We then apply the theory to a range of problems connected with generic expressions, ellipsis, vagueness, and indexical and perceptual judgments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 733 The Giving and Taking of Life: Essays Ethical. By JAMES TUNSTEAD BURTCHAELL. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. xiv + 304 pp. $29.95. One looks forward to the writings of James Burtchaell not only because his judgments are almost always on the side of the angels hut also because his mastery of the English language often enables him to say in a few (...) words what writers of lesser skill say in volumes. This is a collection of previously-published essays on a wide range of topics including contraception, abortion, the use of biotechnology in human reproduction, the use of fetal tissue in medical therapy, law in a pluralist society, liberation theology, the morality of terrorism and the relationship of religion to politics. In its own way, this hook poses well the moral questions of how we and " nature " are to relate to the newly emerging generation of technology. Because the articles are so diverse, it is not possible to give a detailed account or critique of each of them, and rather than doing that I will focus attention only on the issue of ethics and the newly emerging technology which will have a profound impact on not only our personal lives, hut also our society and politics. And to an even greater extent, newly emerging technological developments will have an enormous impact on the way in which our race regenerates and orients itself in the future. On a case-by-case basis, Burtchaell raises these issues with great force and clarity, even though his understanding of nature and technology is not entirely clear. He suggests that nature is far more subtle and vital than we commonly assume and that it has its own ways of fighting hack against our technological assaults against it. Our attempts to control and manipulate nature through technological means provide nature with an opportunity to protect itself hy striking hack at us in ways previously unimagined. Using technology to bend nature to our will is much like the Australian Aborigine who vainly tried to throw away his boomerang! What is most striking about this hook is the contradictory way in which Burtchaell employs the concept of nature to determine the morality of certain enterprises. This contradiction is seen most clearly hy comparing his assessments of artificial contraception and technological transmission of human life. The contrast is so sharp that the issue of the foundations of his thought can he called into question. When one compares his favorable assessment of artificial contraception to his critical evaluation of technological reproduction of human life, one wonders if there is an underlying principle guiding his moral deliberations or whether it is merely his intuitions, likes and dislikes (strongly 734 BOOK REVIEWS colored and shaped by his cultural setting) that determine his evaluations. In "'Human Life' and Human Love", Burtchaell vigorously criticizes the substance, form and arguments of the encyclical Humanae Vitae. For him, the great flaw in this encyclical was the weight it gave to the distinction between natural and artificial contraception and the absolute condemnation visited upon the latter. Seeing little difference between more natural methods of contraception like natural family planning and the use of the pill, Burtchaell argues that artificial contraception should have been given some kind of moral permissibility by Pope Paul VI (P. 99). But it is not clear why he gives limited support to artificial birth control after one reads his harsh criticisms of it: But the venture of technology overshot its original goals in several unforeseen ways. America now has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in what we like to call the developed world. The incidence of sexual prom· iscuity, venereal disease, abortion, marital collapse, fatherless children, child abuse and abandonment, wanton breeding by the thriftless (and dusky) poor is probably higher than at any time in our national history. The founders [Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes] did concede that their program might not immediately achieve its desired results. But that was because of the lack, in their time, of an ' ideal ' contraceptive. Its development was to be expected from further assiduous scientific research. Seventy years and much assiduous research later, the same message is still... (shrink)

When national borders in the modern sense first began to be established in early modern Europe, non-contiguous and perforated nations were a commonplace. According to the conception of the shapes of nations that is currently preferred, however, nations must conform to the topological model of circularity; their borders must guarantee contiguity and simple connectedness, and such borders must as far as possible conform to existing topographical features on the ground. The striving to conform to this model can be seen at (...) work today in Quebec and in Ireland, it underpins much of the rhetoric of the P.L.O., and was certainly to some degree involved as a motivating factor in much of the ethnic cleansing which took place in Bosnia in recent times. The question to be addressed in what follows is: to what extent could inter-group disputes be more peacefully resolved, and ethnic cleansing avoided, if political leaders, diplomats and others involved in the resolution of such disputes could be brought to accept weaker geometrical constraints on the shapes of nations? A number of associated questions then present themselves: What sorts of administrative and logistical problems have been encountered by existing non contiguous nations and by perforated nations, and by other nations deviating in different ways from the received geometrical ideal? To what degree is the desire for continuity and simple connectedness a rational desire, and to what degree does it rest on species of political rhetoric which might be countered by, for example, philosophical argument? These and a series of related questions will form the subject- matter of the present essay. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:FEEDING THE COMATOSE AND THE COMMON GOOD IN THE CATHOLIC TRADITION ROBERT BARRY, O.P. University of Illinois Ohampaign-Urbana, IlUnoi8 AA RECENT convention :sponsored by the Catholic Health Associaition in Boston, Laurence J. O'Connell, vice-president for ethics and theology, ma.de the following comments: I am concerned that some of those who are legitimately alarmed by the potential abuses associated with the public policy that authorizes the withholding and withdrawing (...) of mechanical means of nutrition and hydration are sometimes publicly misrepresenting the Catholic moral tradition. In other words, in their well-intentioned and perfectly legitimate efforts to avoid the slippery-slope-that is, the wrongful withholding or withdrawing of nutrition or hydration from vulnerable dasses of patients-those advocates are placing the Roman Catholic moral tradition itself on the slippery slope. It is mistaken to say it is the church's teaching that we may never withhold or withdraw artificial nutrition and hydration. It is mistaken to uncritically refer to the removal of medically engineered nutrition in all cases as starvation-that is, the willful withholding of nutrition as morally obligatory. It is mistaken to say that the ethical standards of a single Catholic hospital are necessarily coextensive with the ethical standards of the Catholic Church. Just because an individual Catholic facility, for whatever reason, uniformly refuses to allow the withholding or withdrawing of technological feeding, does not mean that the Church itself disallows such withholdings or withdrawals.1 It is not clear how the Catholic moral tradition can be put on the " slippery slope " by opposing certain forms of with1 "Church and State Overlap in Ethical Debate", American Medicai News. February 27, 1987. p. I. 1 ROBERT BARRY, O.P. drawal of feeding from specific classes of patients. Dr. O'Connell has misrepresented the thought of most of those who oppose the recent American Medical Association's new opinion which holds that artificially administered nutrition and fluids can be removed from terminally ill patients, even when they are not imminently dying.2 There are no Catholic moralists who claim that it is always and everywhere morally wrong to withhold or withdraw feeding from patients. However, there are a number of moralists as well as bishops who now hold it to be wrong to withhold or withdraw feeding in those cases where the withholding or withdrawal becomes the fundamental and underlying cause of death. O'Connell is p11obably correct in saying that the policies of one hospital do not necessarily deteJ1IDine the moral doctrines of the universal Church, but neither does one national organization such as the Catholic Health Association with only a loose affiliation with the magisterial hierarchy of the Church necessarily do this either. The debate over the provision of,aissisted feeding is a debate over whether iit is morally legitimate ito withdraw feeding so 1tihat.t:he primary and fundamental reason why the person dies is that withdrawal. It is a debate over whether those with a certain " quality of life " can be permitted to be killed by omission. It is a debate over whether feeding provided by routine nursing measures that can significantly sustain the life is a medical treatment that should he governed by the criteria governing other treatments, or whether it is an 2 "Withholding or Withdrawing Life Prolonging :Medical Treatment" adopted by the Council on Ethical and Judicial.Affairs of the.Amercian Medical.Association on March 15, 1987, In its pertinent parts, it stated: The social commitment of the physician is to sustain life and relieve suffering. Where the performance of one duty conflicts with the other, the choice of the patient, or his family or legal representative if the·patient to act in his own behalf, should prevail. Life prolonging medical treatment includes medication and artificially or technologically supplied respiration, nutrition or hydration. In treating a terminally ill or irreversibly comatose patient, the physician should determine whether the benefits of treatment outweigh its burdens..At all times, the dignity of the patient should be maintained.•. FEEDING THE COMATOSE 8 aspect of normal care, like protection from exposure or hygienic care, that is to be accorded to all patients. In this piece, I wish to review the thoughts of some... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PHARAOH'S.MAGICIANS: THE ETHICS AND EFFICA:CY OF HUMAN FETAiL TISSUE TRANSPLANTS ROBERT BARRY, O.P. Program for the Study of Religion University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana DARREL KESLER Department of Animal Sciences University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. IN RECENT YEARS increasing attention ha;s been given to v:rurious types of scientific riese,arch involving the human fetus. In the 1970s, :a tremendous amount of concern was expres1 sed IJ.'egiaroing the fetus,a;.s a rSU!bject of (...) e~erimenrtation. In this debate, the announced " research impeiiat:i:ve " was pos,ed against other moral imperativ;es.1 Following much soctiet :JaJl drebarte, protootlive meiaisumeis 1 WeIDe il!dopited 1by oompireihensive regiutatiions in 1975 estaiblishiing protections foT a number of research sUibjects. These regulrutions protect the fetus from non-beneficiail experimentation. that iworuild pose more than minima;l risk rto the fetus. Current debates in science and ethics now swirl arlOiund a new topic regarding human '.fetal life: the fetus as a sourrce of tissue for triansplaintation into other persons ais run e~erimental thempy. It is an issue that is rapidly moving torward the same Jevel of" research imperative" as did the earlier debate on the 1 See Paul Ramsey, The Ethics of Fetal Research (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975): "Today one often hears statements like' Fetal Research must be done,' or 'It would be immoral not to do this research'" (P. xv). The validity of such opinions and utterances entirely depends on a netbenefits ethics, and the validity of that moral universe has been called increasingly into question in recent years. 575 576 ROBERT BARRY, O.P. AND DARREL KESLER ~etus as subject. Recently,,a new level of intensity was added to this deharte rby the imposition of an indefinite moratorium on federal support for research on transplantrution experiments inv;olving human.fetirul tissue and other!humans. 1Thls " :indefinite moratorium " w1as a result of a process that 1 began with research p110posaJs considered rby the National In- 'stituites of Health (NIH) in October 1987. In Marich 1988 a momtorium wa;g plaioed on the r:eseareh, and an 1advisory panel was summoned to consider the ethical issues involved. This panel presented 1a cveoommendation for the procedures. However, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Ruman Se1wfoes (HHS), Dr. Louis Sullivan, decided against the research proposal on etmcal grounds. His decision w:as with the 'concU'l'Tenoe of the Assistant Secretary :£m.· Health of HHS, Dr. James Mason, who has Tespons~bility for the NIH. Secretary SulliV1an's decision was oommumcarted to the Acting Director of the NIH, Dr. William Raub, in Nov,ember 1989. A :firestorm of criticism erupted from,rudv;ocates of this research, including the Council of Judicial and Ethical Affairs of tihe American Medical Association, which 5.n June 1989 called for an end to the:ban.2 In this article, we wish to question both the science and the ethics of the rproposed fotal tissue transplantation therapy. We!Will 1support the £edeml funding moratorium and surggest new pmtections for the fetuses (whether po,ssibly living or de2 " Medical Applications of Fetal Tissue Transplantation", JAMA, Vol. 263, No. 4, January 26, 1990, 'PP· 565-570. There has been a.great deal of public debate, not only in the U.S. but also in Europe over whether human embryo research should be supported with public funds. Many Catholic countries in Europe have prohibited such research, while a number of other nations have allowed it. Dickson, D., "Europe Split on Embyro Research", Science, Vol. 242, November 21, 1988, pp. 1117-1118. The most interesting controversy is in West Germany where there is a strong movement to prohibit it because many there believe such an experimentation requires judgments that there are certain forms of human life that do not deserve to survive. Ibid., p. 1117. Many Germans regard these sorts of judgments as too close to those made by Nazis, and there is strong sentiment to prohibit such research altogether. Ibid. HUMAN FETAL TISSUE TRANSPLANTS 577 oea:sed) of elective a.bortfons. We will also describe new reseaooh directions in t~apy.for the diseases in which it is claimed that fetal... (shrink)

We have begun work on two separate but related ontologies for the study of neurological diseases. The first, the Neurological Disease Ontology (ND), is intended to provide a set of controlled, logically connected classes to describe the range of neurological diseases and their associated signs and symptoms, assessments, diagnoses, and interventions that are encountered in the course of clinical practice. ND is built as an extension of the Ontology for General Medical Sciences — a high-level candidate OBO Foundry ontology that (...) provides a set of general classes that can be used to describe general aspects of medical science. ND is being built with classes utilizing both textual and axiomatized definitions that describe and formalize the relations between instances of other classes within the ontology itself as well as to external ontologies such as the Gene Ontology, Cell Ontology, Protein Ontology, and Chemical Entities of Biological Interest. In addition, references to similar or associated terms in external ontologies, vocabularies and terminologies are included when possible. Initial work on ND is focused on the areas of Alzheimer’s and other diseases associated with dementia, multiple sclerosis, and stroke and cerebrovascular disease. Extensions to additional groups of neurological diseases are planned. The second ontology, the Neuro-Psychological Testing Ontology (NPT), is intended to provide a set of classes for the annotation of neuropsychological testing data. The intention of this ontology is to allow for the integration of results from a variety of neuropsychological tests that assay similar measures of cognitive functioning. Neuro-psychological testing is an important component in developing the clinical picture used in the diagnosis of patients with a range of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis, and following stroke or traumatic brain injury. NPT is being developed as an extension to the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations. (shrink)

A brief description of the goal and main lines of argument of The Quest for Reality, in reply to the responses of Paul Boghossian and Alex Byrne.

The paper relates classical treatments of physics and metaphysics to contemporary work on common sense in the field of artificial intelligence (J. Hobbs, P. Hayes, et al.). It defends the universality (and truth) of certain basic principles of common-sense physics and shows why these basic principles must leave certain issues undetermined.

Frankena, W. K. Morality and moral philosophy.--Soltis, J. F. Men, machines and morality.--Chazan, B. I. The moral situation.--Phenix, P. H. Ethics and the will of God.--Moore, G. E. The indefinability of good.--Morgenbesser, S. Approaches to ethical objectivity.--Sartre, J. P. Existentialism and ethics.--Hare, R. M. Decisions of principle.--Singer, M. G. Moral rules and principles.--Hare, R. M. Adolescents into adults.--Wilson, J. Assessing the morally educated person.--Kohlberg, L. The child as a moral philosopher.--Frankena, W. K. Toward a philosophy of moral education.--Archambault, R. D. (...) Criteria for success in moral instruction.--Raths, L., Harmin, M., and Simon, S. Teaching for value clarity.--Bibliography (p. 188-192). (shrink)

*Introduction by Joseph R. Strayer\n(ix-x) Not that Bloch was the greatest French historian of his generation, though he would certainly rank high in any list. Not even that he was the most widely read—others excelled in that art of combining exact knowledge with readability which has distinguished French scholarship for many years. Others have talked about the narrowness of purely political history, the evils of excessive specialization, and the unreality of the conventional periodization of history—without ever leaving their own limited (...) fields. Bloch not only said that history was a whole, that no period and no topic could be understood except in relation to other periods and topics, but he constantly taught [p.x] and wrote in accordance with this belief. …He worked constantly for a “wider, more human history,” for a history which described how and why people live and work together. He saw life as a whole, as a complicated interplay of ideals and realities, of conscious innovation and unconscious conservation. … Throughout the two volumes he sought, above everything else, to understand and explain the state of mind and the habits of life which could produce and support feudal organization.\n(32-33) It is very like the illusion of certain old etymologiests who thought they had said all when they set down the oldest known meaning of a word opposite its present sense, having shown… As if the main problem were not to understand how and why the transition had taken place. As if, above all, the meaning of any word were influenced more by its own past than by the contemporary state of the vocabulary which, in its turn, is determined by the social conditions of the moment. [Y: think about this when I give the meanings of sirhak]\n(64-65) …every historical research supposes that the inquiry has a direction at the very first step. In the beginning, there must be the guiding spirit. Mere passive observation, even supposing such a thing were possible, has never contributed anything productive to any science. \n(71) Every historical book worthy of the name oought to include a chapter, or if one prefers, a series of paragraphs inserted at turning points in the development, which might almost entitled: “How can I know what I am about to say?” I am persuaded that even the lay reader would experience an actual intellectual pleasure in examining these “confessions.”. (shrink)

The Neurological Disease Ontology (ND) is being developed to provide a comprehensive framework for the representation of neurological diseases (Diehl et al., 2013). ND utilizes the model established by the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS) for the representation of entities in medicine and disease (Scheuermann et al., 2009). The goal of ND is to include information for each disease concerning its molecular, genetic, and environmental origins, the processes involved in its etiology and realization, as well as its clinical presentation (...) including signs and symptoms. (shrink)