The preparation of samples for gene diagnosis is time‐consuming, labor‐intensive and costly. These problems can be overcome by dissolving a biological source in a strong solution of a chaotropic salt, then filtering the solution through an immobilizing membrane. Conditions exist for causing the selective immobilization of either DNA or mRNA. The resultant membrane is immediately ready for reaction with labeled gene probes.

After decades of marginalization in the secularized twentieth-century academy, moral education has enjoyed a recent resurgence in American higher education, with the establishment of more than 100 ethics centers and programs on campuses across the country. Yet the idea that the university has a civic responsibility to teach its undergraduate students ethics and morality has been met with skepticism, suspicion, and even outright rejection from both inside and outside the academy. In this collection, renowned scholars of philosophy, politics, and religion (...) debate the role of ethics in the university, investigating whether universities should proactively cultivate morality and ethics, what teaching ethics entails, and what moral education should accomplish. The essays quickly open up to broader questions regarding the very purpose of a university education in modern society. Editors Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben survey the history of ethics in higher education, then engage with provocative recent writings by Stanley Fish in which he argues that universities should not be involved in moral education. Stanley Hauerwas responds, offering a theological perspective on the university’s purpose. Contributors look at the place of politics in moral education; suggest that increasingly diverse, multicultural student bodies are resources for the teaching of ethics; and show how the debate over civic education in public grade-schools provides valuable lessons for higher education. Others reflect on the virtues and character traits that a moral education should foster in students—such as honesty, tolerance, and integrity—and the ways that ethical training formally and informally happens on campuses today, from the classroom to the basketball court. _Debating Moral Education_ is a critical contribution to the ongoing discussion of the role and evolution of ethics education in the modern liberal arts university. _Contributors_. Lawrence Blum, Romand Coles, J. Peter Euben, Stanley Fish, Michael Allen Gillespie, Ruth W. Grant, Stanley Hauerwas, David A. Hoekema, Elizabeth Kiss, Patchen Markell, Susan Jane McWilliams, Wilson Carey McWilliams, J. Donald Moon, James Bernard Murphy, Noah Pickus, Julie A. Reuben, George Shulman, Elizabeth V. Spelman. (shrink)

Much of the sustained attention on pandemic preparedness has focused on the ethical justification for plans for the “crisis” phase of a surge when, despite augmentation efforts, the demand for life...

The authors use empirical research into the environmental practices of 31 manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to show that ‚business performance’ and ‚regulation’ considerations drive behaviour. They suggest that this is inevitable, given the market-based decision-making frames that permeate and dominate the industry in which manufacturing SMEs operate. Since the environment is a pillar of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the findings have important implications for CSR policy, which promotes voluntary actions predicated on a business case. It is argued that (...) this approach will not alter the behaviour of manufacturing SMEs significantly because CSR practice will be regarded as an optional and costly ‚extra’ affecting core business activity. Consequently, the use and development of existing regulatory structures, providing minimum standards for many activities covered by CSR, remains the most effective means through which the behaviour of manufacturing SMEs will be changed in the short to medium-term. Another feature of the paper is the distinction made between ‚business performance’ and the ‚business case’ argument. Business performance emphasises cost reductions and efficiency whereas the business case accentuates the benefits to shareholders of good practices as their firms become more attractive to stakeholders and society. Manufacturing SMEs␣try to improve business performance because of the pressures placed on them by market-dominated decision-making frames. These frames do not encourage manufacturing SMEs to undertake voluntary actions for the benefit of wider stakeholders and society. (shrink)

In the decade that followed 1972, the journal _boundary 2_ consistently published many of the most distinguished and most influential statements of an emerging literary postmodernism. Recognizing postmodernism as a dominant force in culture, particularly in the literary and narrative imagination, the journal appeared when literary critical study in the United States was in a period of theory-induced ferment. The fundamental relations between postmodernism and poststructuralism were being initially examined and the effort to formulate a critical sense of the postmodern (...) was underway. In this volume, Paul A. Bové, the current editor of _boundary 2_, has gathered many of those foundational essays and, as such, has assembled a basic text in the history of postmodernism. Essays by noted cultural and literary theorists join with Bové’s contemporary preface to represent the important and unique moment in recent intellectual history when postmodernism was no longer seen primarily as an architectural term, had not yet come to describe the wide range of culture it does now, but was finding power and place in the literary realm. These essays show that the history of postmodernism and its attendant critical theories are both more complex and more deeply bound with literary criticism than often is acknowledged today. _Early Postmodernism_ demonstrates not only the significance of these literary studies, but also the role played by literary critical postmodernism in making possible newer forms of critical and cultural studies. _Contributors_. Barry Alpert, Charles Altieri, David Antin, Harold Bloom, Paul A. Bové, Hélène Cixous, Gerald Gillespie, Ihab Hassan, Joseph N. Riddel, William, V. Spanos, Catharine R. Stimpson, Cornel West. (shrink)

I develop an account of naturalness in physics which demonstrates that naturalness assumptions are not restricted to narrow cases in high-energy physics but are a ubiquitous part of how interlevel relations are derived in physics. After exploring how and to what extent we might justify such assumptions on methodological grounds or through appeal to speculative future physics, I consider the apparent failure of naturalness in cosmology and in the Standard Model. I argue that any such naturalness failure threatens to undermine (...) the entire structure of our understanding of intertheoretic reduction, and so risks a much larger crisis in physics than is sometimes suggested; I briefly review some currently-popular strategies that might avoid that crisis. (shrink)

I develop an account of how mathematized theories in physics represent physical systems, in response to the frequent claim that any such account must presuppose a non-mathematized, and usually linguistic, description of the system represented. The account I develop contains a circularity, in that representation is a mathematical relation between the models of a theory and the system as represented by some other model --- but I argue that this circularity is not vicious, in any case refers in linguistic accounts (...) of meaning and representation, and is simply a consequence of the fact that we have no unmediated, representation-independent access to the world. (shrink)

The important recent book by Schurz ( 2019 ) appreciates that the no-free-lunch theorems (NFL) have major implications for the problem of (meta) induction. Here I review the NFL theorems, emphasizing that they do not only concern the case where there is a uniform prior—they prove that there are “as many priors” (loosely speaking) for which any induction algorithm _A_ out-generalizes some induction algorithm _B_ as vice-versa. Importantly though, in addition to the NFL theorems, there are many _free lunch_ theorems. (...) In particular, the NFL theorems can only be used to compare the expected performance of an induction algorithm _A_, considered in isolation, with the expected performance of an induction algorithm _B_, considered in isolation. There is a rich set of free lunches which instead concern the statistical _correlations_ among the generalization errors of induction algorithms. As I describe, the meta-induction algorithms that Schurz advocates as a “solution to Hume’s problem” are simply examples of such a free lunch based on correlations among the generalization errors of induction algorithms. I end by pointing out that the prior that Schurz advocates, which is uniform over bit frequencies rather than bit patterns, is contradicted by thousands of experiments in statistical physics and by the great success of the maximum entropy procedure in inductive inference. (shrink)

Moral Rights and Their Grounds offers a novel theory of rights based on two distinct views. The first--the value view of rights--argues that for a person to have a right is to be valuable in a certain way, or to have a value property. This special type of value is in turn identified by the reasons that others have for treating the right holder in certain ways, and that correlate with the value in question. David Alm then argues that (...) the familiar agency view of rights should be replaced with a different version according to which persons' rights, and thus at least in part their value, are based on their actions rather than their mere agency. This view, which Alm calls exercise-based rights, retains some of the most valuable features of the agency view while also defending it against common objections concerning right loss. This book presents a unique conception of exercise-based rights that will be of keen interest to ethicists, legal philosophers, and political philosophers interested in rights theory. (shrink)

In this paper I defend epistemic circularity by arguing that the “No Self-Support” principle (NSS) is false. This principle, ultimately due to Fumerton ( 1995 ), states that one cannot acquire a justified belief in the reliability of a source of belief by trusting that very source. I argue that NSS has the skeptical consequence that the trustworthiness of all of our sources ultimately depends upon the trustworthiness of certain fundamental sources – sources that we cannot justifiably believe to be (...) reliable. This is a problem, I claim, because if the trustworthiness of all of our sources depends upon sources that we should not believe to be reliable, then a reflective individual should not trust any of his sources at all. The hidden cost of rejecting epistemic circularity is thus the unacceptable skeptical thesis that reflective individuals like you and I have no justified beliefs whatsoever. (shrink)

I distinguish between two conceptually different kinds of physical space: a space of ordinary material bodies, which is the space of points at which I could imaginably place the tip of my finger, or the center of a billiard-ball, and a space of elementary physical determinables, which is the smallest space of points such that stipulating what is happening at each one of those points, at every time, amounts to an exhaustive physical history of the universe. In all classical physical (...) theories, these two spaces happen to coincide – and what we mean by calling a theory “classical”, and all we mean by calling a theory “classical”, is precisely that these two spaces coincide. But once the distinction between these two spaces in on the table, it becomes clear that there is no logical or conceptual reason why they must coincide – and it turns out that a very simple way of pulling them apart from one another gives us quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Inferential Internalists accept the Principle of Inferential Justification (PIJ), according to which one has justification for believing P on the basis of E only if one has justification for believing that E makes probable P. Richard Fumerton has defended PIJ by appeal to examples, and recently Adam Leite has argued that this principle is supported by considerations regarding the nature of responsible belief. In this paper, I defend a form of externalism against both arguments. This form of externalism recognizes what (...) I call the phenomenon of reflective defeat: if one is justified in not believing that E makes probable P, then this defeats whatever justification one has for believing P upon the basis of E. I argue that this modified version of externalism has the virtue of accommodating the intuitions that motivate internalism, without the cost of the vicious regress that makes internalism so unattractive. (shrink)

When patients are admitted to the hospital, they are generally expected to remain in or within close proximity to their assigned rooms in order to promote their safety and appropriate medical care. Although there are circumstances when patients may safely leave their hospital room or floor, guidance within the medical literature for the management of patient movement within the hospital are lacking. Excessive restrictions on patient movement may be seen as overly paternalistic, while lax requirements may interfere with high quality (...) care, patient safety and efficient hospital practice. As a result, guidance in the form of institutional policy is warranted. Such policy development should take into consideration the potential clinical, legal, and ethical concerns in balancing the competing values of patients’ preferences and respect for autonomy, while ensuring high quality, safe, and efficacious medical care. This paper will provide a framework for hospitals to create institution-specific patient movement policies that are fair, systematic, and transparent. (shrink)

Tippett is often cast as a composer with a strong visionary streak, but what does that mean for a twentieth-century artist? In this multi-faceted study, David Clarke explores Tippett's complex creative imagination - its dialogue between a romantic's aspirations to the ideal and absolute, and a modernist's sceptical realism. He shows how the musical formations of works such as The Midsummer Marriage, King Priam, and The Vision of Saint Augustine resonate with the aesthetic and theoretical ideas of key figures (...) in modern Western culture - some known to have been influential to the composer, others not usually associated with him. Analyses of late works such as the Triple Concerto and Byzantium also speculate on Tippett's sexuality as a critical element in his creative and political consciousness. (shrink)

The public forum has been connected to the functioning of democracy, expressive freedom, and the media's role in society. While the public forum's legal contours have been examined, the ethical foundation of the public forum has not. Relying on archival research, this article argues that ideas about the public forum can be traced to the pragmatism of Grenville Clark, who influenced ideas about the public forum through his work on the American Bar Association's Bill of Rights Committee.

In this paper, I consider the question of whether crime victims can be said to have a moral right to see their victimizers punished that could explain why they often feel wronged or cheated when the state fails to punish offenders. In the first part, I explain what I mean by a “right to punishment” and what it is for such a right to “explain” the frustrated crime victim’s reaction. In the second part, I distinguish such a right from a (...) Lockean-style right to punish, which is also shown incapable of providing the needed explanation. In the third part I argue that it is difficult to identify any benefit such that the right to punishment could plausibly be understood as a right to that benefit. I discuss two main candidates here: the vaguely Hegelian idea that punishment is itself some sort of restitution for the wrong done to the victim; and the idea, due to Victor Tadros, that punishment is a form of compensation for wrongdoing by contributing indirectly to protecting victims from future harm. In the final section, I suggest instead that the frustrated crime victim’s reaction, when justified, is best explained, not by the violation of any right to punishment, but rather by the state’s failure to treat the victim as an equal. (shrink)

According to the self-defense view, the moral justification of punishment is derived from the moral justification of an earlier threat of punishment for an offense. According to the forfeiture view, criminals can justly be punished because they have forfeited certain rights in virtue of their crimes. The paper defends three theses about these two views. (1) The self-defense view is false because the right to threaten retaliation is not independent of the right to carry out that threat. (2) A more (...) plausible account of the right to threaten says instead that the right to retaliate is primary to the right to threaten, and that the former right in turn arises because aggressors forfeit the right not to suffer retaliation. (3) The ?fair warning thesis,? according to which just punishment must be preceded by a threat, is less plausible than first appearances suggest and is therefore no serious obstacle to the view of threats described above. (shrink)

_The Gift of Death_, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book _Given Time_ about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s _Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History _and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, _The Gift of Death_ resonates with (...) much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation. This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s _Literature in Secret_. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s _Letter to His Father_ and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty. “An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion... [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—_Booklist_, on the first edition. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize the standard argument for deontological egalitarianism, understood as the thesis that there is a moral claim to have an equal share of well-being or whatever other good counts. That argument is based on the idea that equals should be treated equally. I connect the debate over egalitarianism with that over comparative justice. A common theme is a general skepticism against comparative claims. I argue (i) that there can be no claim to equality based simply on (...) the fact of equal worth as that fact itself does not have any value for the supposed claim holder; and (ii) intuitions that suggest otherwise can be explained away without appealing to comparative claims. (shrink)

O autor reexamina a crítica de Derrida à fenomenologia de Husserl de forma a mostrar como a sua coerência estrutural emerge não tanto de uma redução a uma doutrina particular, mas antes das exigências de uma concepção unitária, especificamente impostas pelas determinações epistemológicas e metafísicas da presença. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Desconstrução. Derrida. Fenomenologia. Husserl. Presença. Significado. ABSTRACT – The author reexamines Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenology, so as to show how its structural coherency arises not so much from the reduction to (...) a particular doctrine, but rather from the demands of a unitary conception, specifically from the demands imposed by the epistemological and metaphysical determinations of presence. KEY WORDS – Deconstruction. Derrida. Husserl. Meaning. Phenomenology. Presence. (shrink)

Terry Eagleton is the foremost Marxist cultural theorist of our time. In the first book-length study of this highly influential figure, David Alderson provides detailed discussions of Eagleton's Marxism and his engagements with postmodernism, as well as an evaluation of his interventions in Irish Studies. Each of the chapters in this important intervention in current theoretical debates offers accessible contextualization of the key issues and provides detailed analyses of Eagleton's literary criticism. Alderson shows that the complex relations between nature, (...) culture and ideology, body, subjectivity and authority are at the heart of Eagleton's ethical and political concerns. He goes on to demonstrate that these relations inform the theorist's critical examinations of such literary works as Wuthering Heights and The Merchant of Venice, and his treatment of W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde. (shrink)

We introduce a framework that can be used to model both mathematics and human reasoning about mathematics. This framework involves stochastic mathematical systems (SMSs), which are stochastic processes that generate pairs of questions and associated answers (with no explicit referents). We use the SMS framework to define normative conditions for mathematical reasoning, by defining a “calibration” relation between a pair of SMSs. The first SMS is the human reasoner, and the second is an “oracle” SMS that can be interpreted as (...) deciding whether the question–answer pairs of the reasoner SMS are valid. To ground thinking, we understand the answers to questions given by this oracle to be the answers that would be given by an SMS representing the entire mathematical community in the infinite long run of the process of asking and answering questions. We then introduce a slight extension of SMSs to allow us to model both the physical universe and human reasoning about the physical universe. We then define a slightly different calibration relation appropriate for the case of scientific reasoning. In this case the first SMS represents a human scientist predicting the outcome of future experiments, while the second SMS represents the physical universe in which the scientist is embedded, with the question–answer pairs of that SMS being specifications of the experiments that will occur and the outcome of those experiments, respectively. Next we derive conditions justifying two important patterns of inference in both mathematical and scientific reasoning: (i) the practice of increasing one’s degree of belief in a claim as one observes increasingly many lines of evidence for that claim, and (ii) abduction, the practice of inferring a claim’s probability of being correct from its explanatory power with respect to some other claim that is already taken to hold for independent reasons. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss, on behalf of the materialist, a consideration against the modal or conceivability argument against materialism which was first voiced in the third lecture of Naming and Necessity. This consideration is based on intertheoretic identities, statements in which both terms flanking the identity sign are theoretical. I argue that the defender of the conceivability argument has trouble to account for the appearance of contingency in those types of necessary identities. In fact, intertheoretic identities pose a formidable (...) dilemma for the defender of the modal argument and actually force the antimaterialist to say more about the semantics of theoretical terms than is implicit in standard discussions of the argument. I myself consider several options in this regard, the upshot being, however, that none of the alternative semantics for theoretical terms available to the antimaterialist is good enough to achieve the twofold aim which her modal argument requires, namely, to account for the a posteriori necessity of identities of this sort and, at the same time, to preserve her antimaterialist argument. Finally, in the last part of the paper, I argue that my defense of materialism can withstand some worries coming from David Chalmers’ recent views on a priori scrutability. (shrink)

"Cet ouvrage propose de souligner le passage de l’être à la lettre en mettant l’accent sur la rupture avec l’ontologie. Il décrit le mouvement allant de l’un à l’autre dans une sorte de « séparation liante » (AHN, p. 185) qui n’implique guère de reniement – ni d’un côté ni de l’autre. Il ne propose pas de synthèse, mais une autre distribution d’accents. Dans un premier temps, l’auteur s’interroge : cette façon de penser conduit-elle Levinas « hors du champ de (...) la philosophie »? Puis il met Levinas « à l’épreuve de l’autre », en le confrontant – toujours à partir de la perspective judaïque – à des auteurs tel que Rosenzweig sur les questions de l’éducation, Meschonnic sur la modalité du sacré, Blanchot sur l’être Juif, Janicaud au sujet du tournant théologique qu’il aurait imprimé à la phénoménologie, ou encore Benny Lévy sur l’attachement marqué de Levinas au « grec », à savoir à la philosophie. Toutefois, l’originalité de l’ouvrage réside dans la comparaison à des auteurs beaucoup moins connus dans notre espace européen : à Leibovitz pour lequel le judaïsme est une « religion revendicative », assignant l’humain aux commandements ; à Israël Salanter – fondateur du Moussar à Kovno, en Lituanie ; au rav Soloveitchik sur la question de la halakha. Mais aussi à un penseur étonnant et tonique, Daniel Epstein qui nous a livré, en hébreu, une présentation magistrale, précise et en nuances."-- page 4 de couverture. (shrink)

Jean Gayon’s encounters with American evolutionary biologists and philosophers of biology affected his project of justifying the Darwinian research tradition. He challenged entrenched views about evolution in France by showing how the population-genetic theory of natural selectionSelection removed conceptual blockages that had thwarted the Darwinian research tradition. He taught his American colleagues how important French physiological genetics was to the DarwinismDarwinism of the modern evolutionary synthesis and, with Richard BurianBurian, Richard, stressed the compatibility of the Synthesis with postwar French molecular (...) geneticsMolecular genetics. His seamless integration of history and philosophy of biology helped create an international learned society in which historians and philosophers of biology work together (ISSHSPB). (shrink)