With STEM education garnering an increasing share of educational budgets and press, humanities teachers should consider how to respond to the growing power of math and science. Should humanists rea...

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the (...) frequency of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

The _Physics_ is a foundational work of western philosophy, and the crucial one for understanding Aristotle's views on matter, form, essence, causation, movement, space, and time. This richly annotated, scrupulously accurate, and consistent translation makes it available to a contemporary English reader as no other does—in part because it fits together seamlessly with other closely associated works in the New Hackett Aristotle series, such as the _Metaphysics_, _De Anima_, and forthcoming _De Caelo_ and _On Coming to Be and Passing Away_. (...) Eventually the series will include all of Aristotle's works. Sequentially numbered endnotes provide the information most needed at each juncture, while a detailed Index of Terms indicates places where focused discussion of key notions occurs. An illuminating general Introduction describes the book that lies ahead, explaining what sort of work it is and what sorts of evidence it relies on. (shrink)

Is original sin compatible with evolution? Many today believe the answer is 'No'. Engaging Aquinas's revolutionary account of the doctrine, Daniel W. Houck argues that there is not necessarily a conflict between this Christian teaching and mainstream biology. He draws on neglected texts outside the Summa Theologiae to show that Aquinas focused on humanity's loss of friendship with God - not the corruption of nature. Aquinas's account is theologically attractive in its own right. Houck proposes, moreover, a new Thomist (...) view of original sin that is consonant with evolution. This account is developed in dialogue with biblical scholarship on Jewish hamartiology and salient modern thinkers, and it is systematically connected to debates over nature, grace, the desire for God, and justification. In addition, the book canvasses a number of neglected premodern approaches to original sin, including those of Anselm, Abelard, and Lombard. (shrink)

1 The Zero-Force Evolutionary Law 2 Randomness, Hierarchy, and Constraint 3 Diversity 4 Complexity 5 Evidence, Predictions, and Tests 6 Philosophical Foundations 7 Implications.

Are the properties of communicative acts grounded in the intentions with which they are performed, or in the conventions that govern them? The latest round in this debate has been sparked by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone (2015), who argue that much more of communication is conventional than we thought, and that the rest isn’t really communication after all, but merely the initiation of open-ended imaginative thought. I argue that although Lepore and Stone may be right about many of the (...) specific cases they discuss, their big-picture, conventionalist conclusions don’t follow. My argument focuses on four phenomena that present challenges to conventionalist accounts of communication: ambiguity, indirect communication, communication by wholly unconventional means, and convention acquisition. (shrink)

In a landmark essay, Andreas Matthias claimed that current developments in autonomous, artificially intelligent (AI) systems are creating a so-called responsibility gap, which is allegedly ever-widening and stands to undermine both the moral and legal frameworks of our society. But how severe is the threat posed by emerging technologies? In fact, a great number of authors have indicated that the fear is thoroughly instilled. The most pessimistic are calling for a drastic scaling-back or complete moratorium on AI systems, while the (...) optimists aim to show that the gap can be bridged nonetheless. Contrary to both camps, I argue against the prevailing assumption that there is a technology-based responsibility gap. I show how moral responsibility is a dynamic and flexible process, one that can effectively encompass emerging technological entities. (shrink)

"A compelling, insightful, and intimate portrait of William James as artist, philosopher, and psychologist, The Compromised Scientist explains James's emergence as a founding father of American experimental psychology. Unlike most books about James, this one emphasizes the fact that he had found a career as a painter and was not really a "buried" philosopher or psychologist. He was, in fact, an artist who was forced to compromise his urge to paint by developing a unique psychological language--the language of the "stream (...) of consciousness." Daniel W. Bjork offers an entirely new perspective on James by analyzing his famous diary as a record of his brilliant flight from art to psychology. In addition, Bjork explores the ways in which James's artistic orientation inevitably brought him into conflict with such other major psychological pioneers as Hugo Münsterberg, Edward Bradford Titchener, and James McKeen Cattell, all of whom dissented from James's psychological and professional outlook and, in particular, his enthusiastic crusade for the unconscious and psychic research. For them too, James was a "compromised scientist"--A man who had abandoned scientific standards. This indispensable study, complete with ample diary notations and illustrations, brings into new perspective the leading figure in American experimental psychology."--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Greek ethics is almost universally taken to be teleological and eudaimonistic. Socrates is understood to be the founder of Greek ethics and hence the figure who instituted the eudaimonistic teleological model. The author wishes to argue to the contrary that Socrates is best taken as a duty theorist or deontologist, for whom teleological considerations are irrelevant, or, more precisely, come in only tangentially. Taking as evidence of Socrates’ position Plato’s Socratic or early dialogues, he examines a moral deliberation Socrates makes (...) in the Crito, showing its commitment to duty over interest; and examine Socrates’ program of moral improvement as expressed in the Apology, in which moral goodness is said to take precedence over personal welfare. Finally, he undertakes to show how the views expressed in the Crito and Apology might fit into a larger theoretical framework in which virtue and duty have a value independent of happiness. (shrink)

Explaining the Cosmos is a major reinterpretation of Greek scientific thought before Socrates. Focusing on the scientific tradition of philosophy, Daniel Graham argues that Presocratic philosophy is not a mere patchwork of different schools and styles of thought. Rather, there is a discernible and unified Ionian tradition that dominates Presocratic debates. Graham rejects the common interpretation of the early Ionians as "material monists" and also the view of the later Ionians as desperately trying to save scientific philosophy from Parmenides' (...) criticisms. In Graham's view, Parmenides plays a constructive role in shaping the scientific debates of the fifth century BC. Accordingly, the history of Presocratic philosophy can be seen not as a series of dialectical failures, but rather as a series of theoretical advances that led to empirical discoveries. Indeed, the Ionian tradition can be seen as the origin of the scientific conception of the world that we still hold today. (shrink)

Digital twinning in medicine refers to the idea of simulating a person’s organs, muscles or perhaps their entire body, in order to arrive more effectively at accurate diagnoses, to make treatment recommendations that reflect chances of success and possible side-effects, and to better understand the long-term trajectory of an individual’s overall condition. Digital twins, in these ways, build on the recent movement toward personalised medicine,1 and they undoubtedly present us with exciting opportunities to advance our health. Of course, the opportunities (...) are accompanied by newfound challenges—a common refrain in discussions surrounding emerging technologies. In a recent article, Matthias Braun surveys numerous problems, including the precision of simulations, ownership and consent to the use of digital models, and issues of justice in assuring equitable access to novel medical systems.2 In particular, he places special emphasis on the notion of representation. According to Braun, proper representation naturally calls for correspondence—namely a precise model offering dynamic, real-time feedback as well as transparency, both for the patient and the practitioner, in terms of the data being employed. While technical challenges remain, these goals are quite clear and relatively uncontroversial. Where a host of questions arise, however, is in the discussion on the interaction between the represented persons and their simulations. Alongside questions regarding ownership of one’s digital twin, Braun raises the concern that ‘giving …. (shrink)

I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system’s role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence’s semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into a (...) detailed compositional-semantic theory based on the influential framework of Heim and Kratzer. This approach situates semantics within an independently motivated account of human cognitive architecture and reveals the semantics–pragmatics interface to be grounded in the underlying interface between modular and central systems. (shrink)

This 1997 work is a book-length treatment of the unique nature and development of Nietzsche's post-Zarathustran political philosophy. This later political philosophy is set in the context of the critique of modernity that Nietzsche advances in the years 1885–1888, in such texts as Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. In this light Nietzsche's own diagnosis of the ills of modernity is subject to the same (...) criticism that he himself levelled against previous philosophies; that it is an involuntary symptom of the age it represents. Nietzsche is seen to be aware of his own decadence and of his complicity with the very tendencies that he dissects and deplores. By relating the political philosophy, the critique of modernity and the theory of decadence Daniel Conway has written a powerful book about Nietzsche's own appreciation of the limitations of both his writing style and of his famous prophetic 'stance'. (shrink)

What is the role of communication technology and media in making American society more adaptive, equitable, and democratic? Analyzing the field of communication against an in-depth picture of American society, this provocative, wide-ranging text explores how communication enterprises are intrinsically linked to the establishment and maintenance of social power. Throughout the book, changes in communication capabilities are related to changes in wealth and income distribution, the structures of economic organizations, work and the professions, minorities, law and government, urbanization, popular culture, (...) and globalization. In an engaging narrative the author presents empirical evidence that suggests that popular beliefs about the democratic role of media and communications often are misguided. While we are in an information age, it is not an information revolution that can liberate society. Emphasizing new technologies and media in contemporary American society, Rossides shows how most forms of social communication throughout history—language, gestures, clothing, buildings and spaces, ships and railroads—have sustained social power. (shrink)

Our ability to locate moral responsibility is often thought to be a necessary condition for conducting morally permissible medical practice, engaging in a just war, and other high-stakes endeavors. Yet, with increasing reliance upon artificially intelligent systems, we may be facing a wideningresponsibility gap, which, some argue, cannot be bridged by traditional concepts of responsibility. How then, if at all, can we make use of crucial emerging technologies? According to Colin Allen and Wendell Wallach, the advent of so-called ‘artificial moral (...) agents’ (AMAs) is inevitable. Still, this notion may seem to push back the problem, leaving those who have an interest in developing autonomous technology with a dilemma. We may need to scale-back our efforts at deploying AMAs (or at least maintain human oversight); otherwise, we must rapidly and drastically update our moral and legal norms in a way that ensures responsibility for potentially avoidable harms. This paper invokes contemporary accounts of responsibility in order to show how artificially intelligent systems might be held responsible. Although many theorists are concerned enough to develop artificial conceptions ofagencyor to exploit our present inability to regulate valuable innovations, the proposal here highlights the importance of—and outlines a plausible foundation for—a workable notion ofartificial moral responsibility. (shrink)

How shall we understand apparently teleological systems? What explains their persistence and their plasticity? Here I argue that all seemingly goal-directed systems—e.g., a food-seeking organism, human-made devices like thermostats and torpedoes, biological development, human goal seeking, and the evolutionary process itself—share a common organization. Specifically, they consist of an entity that moves within a larger containing structure, one that directs its behavior in a general way without precisely determining it. If so, then teleology lies within the domain of the theory (...) of compositional hierarchies. (shrink)

In this study, Daniel W. Graham addresses two major problems in interpreting Aristotle. First, should we reconcile the apparent inconsistencies of the corpus by assuming an underlying unity of doctrine, or by positing a sequence of developing ideas? Secondly,what is the relation between the so-called logical works on the one hand and the physical-metaphysical treatises on the other? Although the problems appear to be unrelated, Graham finds that the key to the first lies in the second, and in doing (...) so provides the first major alternative to theunitarian approach since Jaeger's pioneering developmental study of 1923. (shrink)

The experience of ‘moral distress’ is an increasing focal point of contemporary medical and bioethics literature, yet it has received little attention in discussions intersecting with ethical theory. This is unfortunate, as it seems that the peculiar phenomenon may well help us to better understand a number of issues bearing both practical and theoretical significance. In this article, I provide a robust psychological profile of moral distress in order to shed a newfound light upon the longstanding problem of ‘dirty hands’. (...) I argue that moral distress offers evidence of the existence of dirty hands situations. By examining moral distress and its relationship to cases of dirty hands, it appears that few of us are completely immune to susceptibility to these sorts of troubling experiences. With this concern in mind, I provide various recommendations to help alleviate our morally distressing personal and professional lives. (shrink)

What would a Grand Unified Theory of big-scale evolution look like? Here is one answer. It would unify the various trends that have been documented and suspected, the features of life that have been said to increase over its history—body size, fitness, intelligence, versatility, evolvability, energy intensiveness, energy rate density, and complexity-in-the-sense-of-part-types, and complexity-in-the-sense-of-hierarchy. It would show us how these putative trends are related to each other, how they are all the product of some single simple principle or some small (...) set of principles. It would identify and connect all of the variables that are expected to increase over the long haul in evolution, perhaps in a single equation, or if not yet quantifiable, perhaps in a single breath.The obvious unifying candidate is fitness. Natural selection acts to adapt organisms to local circumstances, of course, but it might also act over the long term to produce adaptation on a bigger scale, to produce or .. (shrink)

Moral distress in healthcare has been an increasingly prevalent topic of discussion. Most authors characterize it as a negative phenomenon, while few have considered its potentially positive value. In this essay, I argue that moral distress can reveal and affirm some of our most important concerns as moral agents. Indeed, the experience of it under some circumstances appears to be partly constitutive of an honorable character and can allow for crucial moral maturation. The potentially positive value, then, is twofold; moral (...) distress carries both aretaic and instrumental value. Granted, this position is not without its caveats, but by making these clear, I provide a novel framework for policy recommendations regarding when, if ever, we should work to reduce moral distress. (shrink)

In Lying and Insincerity, Andreas Stokke argues that bald-faced lies are genuine lies, and that lies are always assertions. Since bald-faced lies seem not to be aimed at convincing addressees of their contents, Stokke concludes that assertions needn’t have this aim. This conflicts with a traditional version of intentionalism, originally due to Grice, on which asserting something is a matter of communicatively intending for one’s addressee to believe it. I argue that Stokke’s own account of bald-faced lies faces serious problems (...) and give several responses on behalf of intentionalism. Some bald-faced lies are best understood as irrational attempts to deceive. Others are best understood as indirect speech acts of various kinds. Still, others are best understood as conventional speech acts, which differ from communicative acts like assertion in the ways that they must be embedded in social institutions or practices. An overarching theme of this essay is that we should not make theoretical decisions about how to classify speech acts by consulting ordinary usage. (shrink)

Working in ZF+AD alone, we prove that every set of ordinals with cardinality at least Θ can be covered by a set of ordinals in HOD of K (ℝ) of the same cardinality, when there is no inner model with an ℝ-complete measurable cardinal. Here ℝ is the set of reals and Θ is the supremum of the ordinals which are the surjective image of ℝ.

A global pandemic on the scale of Covid-19 upsets all standard decision protocols. Pressure from politicians to "open up" the economy presumes that individuals grant credible trust to politicians and merchants eager to recover customers. The asymmetric concern for safety compounds normal heuristics. The Peircean pragmatic maxim reminds us that it is the perceived effects of a post-pandemic society and economy that will drive human volition in the aftermath of Covid-19. Opening up does not equal showing up.

Gilles Deleuze was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and Smith is widely recognized to be one of his most penetrating interpreters, as well as an important philosophical voice in his own right. Combining his most important pieces over the last fifteen years along with two new essays, this book is Smith 's definitive treatise on Deleuze. The essays are divided into four sections, which cover Deleuze's use of the history of philosophy, an overview of his philosophical (...) system, an analysis of several Deleuzian concepts, as well as an assessment of his position within contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

Medical errors are all too common. Ever since a report issued by the Institute of Medicine raised awareness of this unfortunate reality, an emerging theme has gained prominence in the literature on medical error. Fears of blame and punishment, it is often claimed, allow errors to remain undisclosed. Accordingly, modern healthcare must shift away from blame towards a culture of safety in order to effectively reduce the occurrence of error. Against this shift, I argue that it would serve the medical (...) community well to retain notions of individual responsibility and blame in healthcare settings. In particular, expressions of moral emotions—such as guilt, regret and remorse—appear to play an important role in the process of disclosing harmful errors to patients and families. While such self-blaming responses can have negative psychological effects on the individual practitioner, those who take the blame are in the best position to offer apologies and show that mistakes are being taken seriously, thereby allowing harmed patients and families to move forward in the wake of medical error. (shrink)