Interdisciplinary studies has grown significantly in the last 25 years. The reductionisms of secular modernism and postmodem relativism present an opportunity for an approach to interdisciplinary faith-learning integration that provides a unifying basis for research addressing major challenges. An approach developed at Oxford Graduate School offers promise for interdisciplinary studies comprehensive enough to bridge the three cultures of the natural, social, and humane sciences in the service of bettering the world. The Learning... to Change the World methodology proceeds through seven (...) stages: problem clarification, literature review, faith-learning integration, interdisciplinary research, contextualization, ethical/social leadership, and lifelong learning evaluation. Grounded in a Creation-Fall-Redemption-Consummation metaphysical worldview, it assumes a critical realist epistemology to engage real-world challenges. The process accommodates multiple research methods and aims for a redemptive-ethical transformation of social problems. (shrink)

Respected Catholic ethicists have recently defended the use of salpingostomy and methotrexate in the management of ectopic pregnancies.This article examines the arguments for the revised assessments to determine whether there are sound reasons to believe that these two methods do not constitute the direct and immediate killing of innocent human beings. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.1 (Spring 2011): 65–82.

The existing literature in medical ethics does not serve the practical needs of medical students and trainees very well. Medical students or junior doctors often have their own set of ethical concerns and the dilemmas that arise are generally beyond their direct control. The editors have addressed the gap in the literature by compiling a series of case studies from around the world and inviting an international team of leading ethicists and clinicians to comment on them. This volume includes over (...) 80 actual cases that cover the range of possible problems a medical trainee may encounter on the ward. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

Books reviewed:John Barton, Joel and Obadiah: A Commentary John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, Volume III: Companions and CompetitorsWilliam E. Arnal, Jesus and the Village Scribes: Galilean Conflicts and the Setting of QRichard A. Horsley, Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark's GospelMaurice Casey, Aramaic Sources of Mark's GospelPhilip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its WayChristopher M. Tuckett, Christology and the New Testament: Jesus and His Earliest FollowersMarkus Bockmuehl, The Cambridge Companion to JesusShelly (...) Matthews, First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Judaism and ChristianityStephen J. Davis, The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women's Piety in Late AntiquityJ. Nimmo Smith, A Christian's Guide to Greek Culture. The Pseudo‐Nonnus Commentaries on Sermons 4, 5, 39 and 43 by Gregory of Nazianzus: Introduction, Translation and Notes.David Thomas, Early Moslem Polemic Against Christianity: Abu Isa al‐Warraq's ‘Against the Incarnation’Thomas O'Loughlin, Celtic Theology: Humanity, World and God in Early Irish WritingsCaroline M. Baron and Jenny Stratford, The Church and Learning in Later Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of R. B. Dobson Owen Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent Benson Bobrick, The Making of the English BiblePeter Marhall and Alec Ryrie, The Beginnings of English ProtestantismRobert Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England. Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540–1640Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation EnglandNicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c.1530–1700John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689William Gibson, The Church of England 1688–1832: Unity and AccordWarwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth CenturiesJames M. Byrne, God: Thoughts in an Age of Uncertainty Michael Palmer, The Question of God: An Introduction and SourcebookMichel René Barnes, The Power of God: ΔYNAMIΣ in Gregory of Nyssa's Trinitarian TheologyThomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on VirtueStanley M. Hauerwas, Wilderness Wanderings: Probing Twentieth‐Century Theology and PhilosophyDavid Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and ApocalypseJohn Sullivan, Catholic Education: Distinctive and InclusiveGeorge Dennis O'Brien, The Idea of a Catholic UniversityGunnar Skirbekk and Nils Gilje, A History of Western ThoughtEllen Wagner, Essays on Plato's PsychologyAnthony Kenny, Aquinas on BeingJame Daly, Deals and Ideals: Two Concepts of EnlightenmentManfred Kuehn, Kant: A BiographyP. Travis Kroeker and Bruce K. Ward, Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to ModernityStephen Mulhall, Inheritance and Originality: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, KierkegaardDavid Braybrooke, Natural Law ModernizedMaría Pía Lara, Rethinking EvilW. W. Meisner, Freud and PsychoanalysisJennifer Jackson, Truth, Trust and MedicineJeremy Sugarman and Daniel P. Sulmasy, Methods in Medical EthicsH. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. and Mark J. Cherry, Allocating Scarce Medical Resources: Roman Catholic PerspectivesMaura A. Ryan, The Ethics and Economics of Assisted Reproduction: The Cost of LongingMichael Walsh, Dictionary of Christian Biography. (shrink)

We consider extensions of Peano arithmetic suitable for doing some of nonstandard analysis, in which there is a predicate N(x) for an elementary initial segment, along with axiom schemes approximating ω 1 -saturation. We prove that such systems have the same proof-theoretic strength as their natural analogues in second order arithmetic. We close by presenting an even stronger extension of Peano arithmetic, which is equivalent to ZF for arithmetic statements.

The organism is one of the fundamental concepts of biology and has been at the center of many discussions about biological individuality, yet what exactly it is can be confusing. The definition that we find generally useful is that an organism is a unit in which all the subunits have evolved to be highly cooperative, with very little conflict. We focus on how often organisms evolve from two or more formerly independent organisms. Two canonical transitions of this type—replicators clustered in (...) cells and endosymbiotic organelles within host cells—demonstrate the reality of this kind of evolutionary transition and suggest conditions that can favor it. These conditions include co-transmission of the partners across generations and rules that strongly regulate and limit conflict, such as a fair meiosis. Recently, much attention has been given to associations of animals with microbes involved in their nutrition. These range from tight endosymbiotic associations like those between aphids and Buchnera bacteria, to the complex communities in animal intestines. Here, starting with a reflection about identity through time, we consider the distinctions between these kinds of animal–bacteria interactions and describe the criteria by which a few can be considered jointly organismal but most cannot. (shrink)

William James is frequently considered one of America's most important philosophers, as well as a foundational thinker for the study of religion. Despite his reputation as the founder of pragmatism, he is rarely considered a serious philosopher or religious thinker. In this new interpretation David Lamberth argues that James's major contribution was to develop a systematic metaphysics of experience integrally related to his developing pluralistic and social religious ideas. Lamberth systematically interprets James's radically empiricist world-view and argues for an (...) early dating for his commitment to the metaphysics of radical empiricism. He offers a close reading of Varieties of Religious Experience; and concludes by connecting James's ideas about experience, pluralism and truth to current debates in philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology, suggesting James's functional, experiential metaphysics as a conceptual aid in bridging the social and interpretive with the immediate and concrete while avoiding naive realism. (shrink)

In this paper we consider some axiomatic systems of set theory related to the system NF (New Foundations) of Quine. In particular we discuss the possible relations of cardinality between a finite set x and its subset class SC(x) = {y | y ∩ x} and also between x and its unit set class USC(x) = {{y} | y ε x}. Specker [5] has shown that in NF the cardinal of a finite set x can never be the same as (...) the cardinal of SC(x). (shrink)

There are several branches of ethics. Clinical ethics, the one closest to medical decisionmaking, can be seen as a branch of medicine itself. In this view, clinical ethics is a unitary hermeneutics. Its rule is a guideline for unifying other theories of ethics in conjunction with the clinical context. Put another way, clinical ethics interprets the clinical situation in light of a balance of other values that, while guiding the decisionmaking process, also contributes to the very weighting of those values. (...) The case itself originates ideas, not only about which value ought to predominate in its resolution, but also provides the origin of clinical rules that can be used in other cases. These are interpretive rules. Some examples of these rules are presented as well. (shrink)

Objective Ethical standards state research participation must be voluntary and free of coercion and undue influence, but what if a third party appears to engage in research-relevant coercion, without the researchers’ knowledge? This case study describes this type of situation and its resolution. Methods We are engaged in a randomized clinical trial evaluating pedestrian safety with 7- and 8- years old. Depending on children's rate of learning, families receive up to $1275 for their time. We recently learned a third-party “talent (...) agency,” a firm placing children in modeling and acting jobs, was referring families to our research with the expectation that families would share 20% of study reimbursements. Results We sensed clear impropriety, but identified no ethical violations on our part as researchers. Once paid a study reimbursement, participants can spend funds how they wish. We were concerned, however, that the third-party was exploitatively coercing families to participate. Conclusions We pursued four avenues to resolve the issue. First, we documented the situation to our university Institutional Review Board. Second, we contacted the talent agency and requested they stop referring families to our research. They agreed. Third, we retained children engaged in our study who were referred from the talent agency; removing them partway through the clinical trial could impact study results. In doing so, we explained that we were unaware of the talent agency referral and that they were not obligated by us to offer a portion of the study reimbursement to the talent agency. Last, we asked newly enrolled families about their referral source. (shrink)

Applying general and statistical knowledge to individuals is difficult either on epidemiological or epistemological grounds. This paper examines these difficulties from the perspective of computer registers of epidemiological data.

In the Politics, Aristotle recognizes participation in law courts as an essential element in citizenship, yet there has been relatively little scholarship on how he sees this participation being realized. References to law courts are sprinkled widely through the Politics, Rhetoric, and Ethics, as well as the Athenaiôn politeia, where their importance is revealed most clearly. Ernest Barker took great pride in the English administration of law: if he had returned to write a more thorough treatment of Aristotle's political thought, (...) he might well have focused on the courts. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study of the development of civility in Chinese societies. Although some social scientists and political philosophers have discussed civility, none has defined it as an analytical tool to systematically measure attitudes and behavior, and few have applied it to a non-Western society. By comparing the development of civility in mainland China and Taiwan, Civility and Its Development: The Experiences of China and Taiwan analyzes the social conditions needed for civility to become established in a society. (...) Schak argues that the attempts to impose civility top-down from the state are ineffective. Civility appeared in Taiwan only after state efforts to impose it ceased at the end of the 1980s when Taiwan began to democratize, and the PRC government civility campaigns have so far had only limited success. The book concludes with an examination of various differences between Taiwan and the PRC relevant to Taiwan’s having become a society with civility while the PRC still encounters difficulties in doing so. The essential factor in developing civility in Taiwan, Schak contends, was its evolution from a place composed of myriad small, inward-looking communities to a society in which everyone shares a strong identity and civic consciousness, and people consider others as fellow members, not anonymous strangers. “This book represents the most thorough review of what social scientists once called ‘the civilizing process’ in Chinese society. David C. Schak builds on the earlier studies on this issue and goes well beyond the established literature.” —James Watson, Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Harvard University “This is a topic that people talk about all the time, and David C. Schak draws a lot of material together in a systematic and comprehensive way that can stimulate important discussions beyond the academy.” —Thomas Gold, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley. (shrink)

The search for a universal theory of reading is misguided. Instead, theories should articulate general principles of neural computation that interact with language-specific learning environments to explain the full diversity of observed reading-related phenomena across the world's languages.

In this paper I address three problems posed by modern medical technology regarding comatose dying patients. The first is that physicians sometimes hide behind the tests for whole-brain death rather than make the necessary human decision. The second is that the tests themselves betray a metaphysical judgment about death that may be ontologically faulty. The third is that discretion used by physicians and patients and/or family in deciding to cease treatment when the whole-brain death criteria may not be met are (...) sometimes open to challenge. In each of these problems I find that the operative concept of death relates to life itself. This point is expanded by examining the uses of the word death in our language and culture. From these I formulate an initial ontology of death. In it, death is described through a relationship with life, rather than as an absence of life, of consciousness, awareness, or sensation. This ontology then leads to a proposal for an ethics of discretion about the discontinuation of treatment for comatose patients. (shrink)

Considerable debate has occurred about the proper role of philosophers when offering ethics consultations. Some argue that only physicians or clinical experienced personnel should offer ethics consultations in the clinical setting. Others argue still further that philosophers are ill-equipped to offer such advice, since to do so rests on no social warrant, and violates the abstract and neutral nature of the discipline itself.I argue that philosophers not only can offer such consultations but ought to. To be a bystander when one's (...) discipline does offer insights and methods of value discernment is pusillanimous. But this position requires a view of clinical medical ethics as one that arises out of the clinical practice of medicine, and not just from an application of general ethical principles to the practice of medicine. I conclude with some skills that trained philosophers can bring to the consultation service, and note that all consultations are in the form of recommendations that the patient, family, and physician are still free to accept or reject. Philosophers in the clinical setting do not make decisions. (shrink)

Unlike some psychiatric illnesses, criminal lifestyles are not reproductive dead ends and may represent frequency-dependent adaptations. Sociopaths may gain reproductively from their greater relative to nonsociopaths. This mating-effort construct should be assessed directly in future studies of sociopathy. Collaboration between biologically oriented and environmentally oriented researchers is needed to investigate the biosocial basis of sociopathy.

Several strands of contemporary cognitive science and its philosophy have emerged in recent decades that emphasize the role of action in cognition, resting their explanations on the embodiment of cognitive agents, and their embedding in richly structured environments. Despite their growing influence, many foundational questions remain unresolved or underexplored for this cluster of proposals, especially questions of how they can be extended beyond straightforwardly visuomotor cognitive capacities, and what constraints the commitment of embodiment places on the ontology of explanations. This (...) special issue aims to contribute to these foundational debates by drawing on important precursors to embodied cognition in mid-twentieth century gestalt psychology, its immediate successor ecological psychology, and their dialectical counterpart, phenomenology. Gestalt psychologists and phenomenologists wrestled with many of the same foundational questions that still haunt us today, in a manner that seems refreshing in hindsight, and poised to contribute constructively to contemporary debate. Looking back on this history reveals deep commonalities across competing embodied approaches, exposing fundamental tensions that remain unresolved, but also paving the way to a more ecumenical and conciliatory embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

We (Patterson & Plaut, 2009) argued that cognitive neuropsychology has had a limited impact on cognitive science due to a nearly exclusive reliance on (a) single‐case studies, (b) dissociations in cognitive performance, and (c) shallow, box‐and‐arrow theorizing, and we advocated adopting a case‐series methodology, considering associations as well as dissociations, and employing explicit computational modeling in studying “how the brain does its cognitive business.” In reply, Coltheart (2010) claims that our concern is misplaced because cognitive neuropsychology is concerned only with (...) studying the mind, in terms of its “functional architecture,” without regard to how this is implemented in the brain. In this response, we do not dispute his characterization of cognitive neuropsychology as it has typically been practiced over the last 40 years, but we suggest that our understanding of brain structure and function has advanced to the point where studying the mind without regard to the brain is unwise and perpetuates the field’s isolation. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Balancing Act: The New Medical Ethics of Medicine's New Economics. By E. Haavi Morreim.

One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.

Ten years of educational reform have not brought dramatic improvements. In Ideology and Educational Reform, David Paris traces the underlying ideological problems that make genuine reform difficult. These include different and often conflicting beliefs concerning the proper role of public education as well as the public's natural ambivalence about schools as government agencies.Paris describes three major themes in public education—common school, human capital, and clientelism. He critically evaluates current policies and proposed reforms associated with each of these topics, including (...) moral education, the school-economy relationship, school choice, and the delivery of social services. Paris proposes better ways for dealing with ideological problems in school practice, and he suggests appropriate directions for policy reform. (shrink)

In their target article, Millum and Bromwich situate their article against a backdrop of well-documented empirical research demonstrating that many participants have variable and often poor...