Public health aims to provide universal safety and progressive opportunities to populations to realise their highest level of health through prevention of disease, its progression or transmission. Screening asymptomatic individuals to detect early unapparent conditions is an important public health intervention strategy. It may be designed to be compulsory or voluntary depending on the epidemiological characteristics of the disease. Integrated screening, including for both syphilis and cancer of the cervix, is a core component of the national reproductive health program in (...) Kenya. Screening for syphilis is compulsory while it is voluntary for cervical cancer. Participants’ perspectives of either form of screening approach provide the necessary contextual information that clarifies mundane community concerns. (shrink)

Despite their vulnerability, adolescents are often excluded from health research due to ethical concerns about research with minors, especially in low-income regions like Sub-Saharan Africa. We enrolled adolescent girls aged 15–17 years and caregivers of girls of the same age. Using a 25-question Comprehension Score Sheet, we applied a quantitative approach to compare the comprehension of informed consent of 33 adolescent girls and 41 caregivers of adolescent girls aged 15–17 years. The assessments were audio-recorded and reviewed for quality check. The (...) results showed that adolescent girls were significantly better than caregivers in comprehending informed consent information overall and specifically on study procedures, voluntarism and study purpose. This suggests that adolescents can understand informed consent information at the same level as or better than caregivers who are entrusted with providing permission for adolescents to participate in research. (shrink)

I contend that Jews, Christians, and Muslims who seek peace should not be reluctant to acknowledge the existence of their sometimes profound disagreements, or to affirm the truth of their own beliefs and practices. Since this places me at odds with John Hick, I analyze his views, granting the strengths of his critical realism and arguing that his revisionist-pluralist theory of religion has significant limitations for interreligious dialogue. Since the veridical-pluralist alternative I propose facilitates rather than stifles disagreement, I examine (...) three different conceptions of dialogue that acknowledge the importance of disputes among those searching for truth. I also discuss three virtues--honesty, empathy, and humility--whose cultivation would make us less likely to fail in our search for truth and the peace that is its sign and fruit. (shrink)

This paper examines mortality by cause of death in a rural area of Machakos district in Kenya. The cause-of-death data collected between 1975 and 1978 were likely to be of fairly good quality. The number of deaths was higher among infants and children. Infectious diseases and diseases of the respiratory system were the leading causes of death among children below 5 years of age. Next in prominence were the causes ascribed to congenital anomalies and perinatal conditions.Among adolescents and young adults, (...) injury and poisoning, together with tuberculosis and other infectious and parasitic diseases, were the leading causes of death. Degenerative diseases, especially diseases of the circulatory system and neoplasms and respiratory illness, were responsible for the majority of deaths among the older population. (shrink)

This three-volume history of England from before the Roman conquest through to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The text was published in book form in the same period, although each volume was post-dated to the following year. Dickens dedicated the work to his own children, intending it to be a stepping stone to more substantial histories. The volumes were popular with readers for decades, and were (...) used in British schools well into the twentieth century. Dickens employs his signature style to bring events and personalities to life, making use of vivid similes, unabashedly partisan language and direct speech, as well as the occasional moral lesson. Volume 3 covers the period from Henry VII through to the fall of James II, with a short chapter on events between 1688 and the accession of Queen Victoria. (shrink)

One of the main features of the contemporary environmental crisis is that no one has a clear picture of what is taking place. Environmental problems are real enough but they bring home the inadequacy of our knowledge. How does the natural world relate to the social world? Why do we continue to have such a poor understanding? How can ecological knowledge be made to relate to our understanding of human society? Reconstructing Nature argues that the division of labor is a (...) key but neglected factor underlying people's inability to adequately understand and relate to the natural world. The argument extends Marx's theory of alienation to account for inadequate knowledge and therefore inadequate concern for nature. Using recent developments in "critical realist" philosophy, the book aims to find ways of reorganizing knowledge in the light of ecological consciousness. It also corrects the emphasis of much environmental literature by focusing on production rather than consumption. (shrink)

It may be most convenient to respond to Dr Andreae’s points in turn. Unless the claim that a child should determine its own genetic characteristics before it is conceived or born is intended to be flippant, it is logically incoherent. Conception is a decision that only a prospective parent can make. The editorial argument is that denial of choice of sex contributes to preventable maternal mortality and morbidity, particularly in developing countries. ….

This article consists in an autobiographical meditation on the Whiteheadian concepts of "linger" and "lure" as they relate to the past and future, respectively. It also examines the important experience of the presence of presence.

Constructive empiricism is not just a view regarding the aim of science; it is also a view regarding the epistemological framework in which one should debate the aim of science. This is the focus of this book -- not with scientific truth, but with how one should argue about scientific truth.

Prohibition on sex selection may well be unnecessary and oppressive as well as posing risks to women’s lives The urge to select children’s sex is not new. The Babylonian Talmud, a Jewish text completed towards the end of the fifth century of the Christian era, advises couples on means to favour the birth of either a male or a female child.1 The development of amniocentesis alerted the public in the mid-1970s to the scientific potential for prenatal determination of fetal sex,2 (...) and progressive decriminalisation of abortion afforded choice about continuation of pregnancy. The more recent emergence of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) obviates resort to abortion, and improved techniques of sperm sorting and diagnosis permit creation of zygotes that will ensure the sex of a future child. Growth of biomedical means to select the sex of future children has been accompanied by fear that such means will be employed to favour births of sons, and so perpetuate devaluation of girl children and women’s inferior family and social status. A reaction to this fear has been the demand for legal and medical professional prohibition of sex selection techniques. For instance, the Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine3 provides in article 14 that: The use of techniques of medically assisted procreation shall not be allowed for the purpose of choosing a future child’s sex, except where serious hereditary sex-related disease is to be avoided. Legislation has been enacted in a number of countries, and proposed in others, to prohibit sex selection on non-medical grounds, such as the Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, 1994 in India. In Canada, for instance, government draft legislation introduced in May 2002 proposes to make it a crime for any person, for the purpose of creating a human …. (shrink)

The article examines Charles Hartshorne's claim that all events and values are given an "objective immortality" by being preserved in God's perfect memory. God's memory guarantees the meaningfulness of a fixed past, even when the past leaves no present trace on anything else. The article questions the physical basis of such a perfect memory in the structure of the universe, especially as entropy erodes the basis of information. Further, recent theories of memory, such as Gerald Edelman's, hold that memory changes (...) with each act of remembering. The analogy from human memory is therefore faulty. Hartshorne's view is stronger as eschatological metaphor than as sober ontology. (shrink)

Alarm over the prospect that prenatal diagnostic techniques, which permit identification of fetal sex and facilitate abortion of healthy but unwanted female fetuses has led some to urge their outright prohibition. This article argues against that response. Prenatal diagnosis permits timely action to preserve and enhance the life and health of fetuses otherwise endangered, and, by offering assurance of fetal normality, may often encourage continuation of pregnancies otherwise vulnerable to termination. Further, conditions in some societies may sometimes render excusable the (...) inclination to abort certain healthy female fetuses. In places where abortion for fetal sex alone is recognised as unethical, however, medical licensing authorities already possess the power to discipline, for professional misconduct, physicians who prescribe or perform prenatal diagnosis purely to identify fetal sex, or those who disclose fetal sex when that is unrelated to the fetus's medical condition. (shrink)

James Ladyman ([2000]) argues that constructive empiricism is untenable because it cannot adequately account for modal statements about observability. In this paper, I attempt to resist Ladyman's conclusion, arguing that the constructive empiricist can grant his modal discourse objective, theory-independent truth-conditions, yet without compromising his empiricism.

There is a natural objection to the epistemic coherence of Bas van Fraassen’s use of a distinction between the observable and unobservable in his constructive empiricism, an objection that has been raised with particular clarity by Alan Musgrave. We outline Musgrave’s objection, and then consider how one might interpret and evaluate van Fraassen’s response. According to the constructive empiricist, observability for us is measured with respect to the epistemic limits of human beings qua measuring devices, limitations ‘which will be described (...) in detail in the final physics and biology’ (van Fraassen 1980: 17). In order for the constructive empiricist to determine what counts as observable, he will have to appeal to our best scientific theories of light, human physiology, and so forth. To put the same point in a slightly more abstract way, in order to draw a distinction between observable and unobservable entities, the constructive empiricist needs to use his best scientific theory of observability – call it T* – to tell him the identity of the observable entities. This raises an interesting difficulty. Constructive empiricism is the view that ‘science aims to give us theories that are empirically adequate; and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate’ (van Fraassen 1980:12). When he accepts a theory, the constructive empiricist only believes the statements of his scientific theories that are about observable entities. Thus, in order to know which statements of a scientific theory to believe, the constructive empiricist needs to know which statements of that theory are about observable entities. In particular then, the constructive empiricist only believes the statements of his theory of observability T* that are about observable entities. Therefore, in order to know which statements of T* he can believe, the constructive empiricist needs to know which statements of T* are about observable entities. However, it is T* that tells the constructive empiricist what counts as an observable entity: the constructive empiricist therefore needs to use T* to tell him which statements of T* he can believe. The fact that the distinction drawn by T* must also apply to itself is not an immediate cause for alarm.. (shrink)

This article explores the ontological status of trees from a Whiteheadian panexperientialist viewpoint; it also explores how our relationship with trees affects who we are as human beings.

Constructive empiricism - as formulated by Bas van Fraassen - makes no epistemological claims about the nature of science. Rather, it is a view about the aim of science, to be situated within van Fraassen's broader voluntarist epistemology. Yet while this epistemically minimalist framework may have various advantages in defending the epistemic relevance of constructive empiricism, I show how it also has various disadvantages in maintaining its internal coherence.

Recent literature in the scientific realism debate has been concerned with a particular species of statistical fallacy concerning base-rates, and the worry that no matter how predictively successful our contemporary scientific theories may be, this will tell us absolutely nothing about the likelihood of their truth if our overall sample space contains enough empirically adequate theories that are nevertheless false. In response, both realists and anti-realists have switched their focus from general arguments concerning the reliability and historical track-records of our (...) scientific methodology, to a series of specific arguments and case-studies concerning our reasons to believe individual scientific theories to be true. Such a development however sits in tension with the usual understanding of the scientific realism debate as offering a second-order assessment of our first-order scientific practices, and threatens to undermine the possibility of a distinctive philosophical debate over the approximate truth of our scientific theories. I illustrate this concern with three recent attempts to offer a more localised understanding of the scientific realism debate—due to Stathis Psillos, Juha Saatsi, and Kyle Stanford—and argue that none of these alternatives offer a satisfactory response to the problem. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore Rosen’s ‘transcendental’ objection to constructive empiricism—the argument that in order to be a constructive empiricist, one must be ontologically committed to just the sort of abstract, mathematical objects constructive empiricism seems committed to denying. In particular, I assess Bueno’s ‘partial structures’ response to Rosen, and argue that such a strategy cannot succeed, on the grounds that it cannot provide an adequate metalogic for our scientific discourse. I conclude by arguing that this result provides some interesting (...) consequences in general for anti-realist programmes in the philosophy of science.Keywords: Constructive empiricism; Mathematical fictionalism; Partial structures; Modality. (shrink)

In this journal, Peter Lipton and I discussed Musgrave's objection that the constructive empiricist cannot consistently maintain his own distinction between the observable and the unobservable, and van Fraassen's initial reply. We considered several possible interpretations of van Fraassen, and expressed misgivings about each. Muller and van Fraassen have consequently clarified the official constructive empiricist response to Musgrave, although some issues still remain.According to Muller and van Fraassen, Musgrave's objection assumes that constructive empiricism is to be understood in line with (...) a syntactic account of our scientific theories – whereby a theory consists of a set of sentences formulated in some suitable language – whereas constructive empiricism has always been wedded to an explicitly semantic account of our scientific theories, which understands a scientific theory in terms of a class of models. Once this oversight is amended, the objection is seen to be toothless. As Muller and van Fraassen write: " Indeed, the only proper response, and the one that turns the table on Musgrave and his followers, is to argue that his incoherence argument does not work in the context of the semantic view as here elaborated, while the bad consequence he draws is an inevitable corollary to the older view within which he presents it. "The force of Musgrave's objection therefore turns on nothing more than implicitly saddling the constructive empiricist with an independently problematic account of what a scientific theory is.This move should cause some surprise however, for Musgrave's objection – albeit usually presented in conjunction with an explicitly syntactic construal of our scientific theories – is in fact quite neutral between these competing accounts. As Musgrave originally put it, in order for the constructive empiricist to draw his distinction between observable and unobservable …. (shrink)

This three-volume history of England from before the Roman conquest through to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The text was published in book form in the same period, although each volume was post-dated to the following year. Dickens dedicated the work to his own children, intending it to be a stepping stone to more substantial histories. The volumes were popular with readers for decades, and were (...) used in British schools well into the twentieth century. Dickens employs his signature style to bring events and personalities to life, making use of vivid similes, unabashedly partisan language and direct speech, as well as the occasional moral lesson. Volume 1 covers the period from the campaigns of Julius Caesar up to the close of the reign of the 'miserable brute' King John. (shrink)

This three-volume history of England from before the Roman conquest through to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The text was published in book form in the same period, although each volume was post-dated to the following year. Dickens dedicated the work to his own children, intending it to be a stepping stone to more substantial histories. The volumes were popular with readers for decades, and were (...) used in British schools well into the twentieth century. Dickens employs his signature style to bring events and personalities to life, making use of vivid similes, unabashedly partisan language and direct speech, as well as the occasional moral lesson. Volume 2 covers the period from the reign of Henry III through to the death in 1485 of the 'usurper and murderer' Richard III. (shrink)

This book features two old philosophical friends engaged in lively personal and intellectual conversations. Wary of any dogmatism, their dialogues explore the Big Bang and the joy of grandchildren, value theory and terrorism, God and art, metaphor and meaning, while assessing the thought of Robert S. Hartman, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, H. Richard Niebuhr, and others.

The social sciences have paid little sustained attention to society’s relations with the universe. This paper attempts to redress this failure, arguing that human beings have been increasingly alienated from the cosmos. This estrangement is a product of three closely related processes. These are the division between mental and manual labour in master–slave societies, the strengthening of abstraction due to the market, and the tendency of human beings to dichotomize a world they do not understand or experience as threatening. Alienation (...) from the cosmos is a dominant feature of all master–slave societies but it has been made an ingrained, all-pervasive feature of capitalism. Contemporary liberation theology, pre-figured by movements such as the peasant revolts of the fifteenth century and the Diggers of the seventeenth century, have attempted to resist this alienation, making new ‘heavens on earth’. Alternative cosmologies are also being made by scientists that describe the cosmos in forms that can be recognized by lay people. Critical realism, by revealing the links between dominant classes, infantilized cosmologies and human subjectivities, aids the emergence of these contestations and alternatives. (shrink)

This three-volume history of England from before the Roman conquest through to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The text was published in book form in the same period, although each volume was post-dated to the following year. Dickens dedicated the work to his own children, intending it to be a stepping stone to more substantial histories. The volumes were popular with readers for decades, and were (...) used in British schools well into the twentieth century. Dickens employs his signature style to bring events and personalities to life, making use of vivid similes, unabashedly partisan language and direct speech, as well as the occasional moral lesson. Volume 1 covers the period up to 1216. Volume 2 continues from Henry III to Richard III. Volume 3 traces events from Henry VII's accession to James II's fall. (shrink)

As part of his wider critique of the credibility of miraculous testimony, Hume also offers a rather curious argument as to the mutual detriment of conflicting testimony for the miracles of contrary religious worldviews. Scholarship on this aspect of Hume’s reasoning has debated whether or not the considerations are to be understood as essentially probabilistic, and as to whether or not a probabilistic interpretation of the argument is logically valid. The consensus would appear to offer a positive answer to the (...) first question and a negative answer to the second. In this paper I expose a deeper fallacy in Hume’s reasoning that undermines both probabilistic and non-probabilistic readings. My critique is closely based upon analogous considerations in the philosophy of science, and the equally intriguing issue as to the epistemological relevance of conflicting scientific theories throughout the history of science. (shrink)

I seek in this paper to explore what might be meant by “the presence of God.” The sense of God’s presence, which never disappeared from the lives of many people, seems to be emerging quietly in the work of serious thinkers. Sometimes other terms, such as “spirit” or even “face,” hint at the issue. In later sections, I discuss the relevance of this issue to the thought of Alfred North Whitehead and others influenced by him. Finally, I discuss the reality (...) of trauma in human life and its implications for Whiteheadian thought and thought about the presence of God.I explore the sense we have ofpresence, something different from mind or body or objects or consciousness. We become aware of our own presence in the world and the unique and irreplaceable sense we have of our own presence. We become aware that sometimes we are more intensely present to other people than is normally the case. Then we begin to sense occasions when the other person becomes more intensely present to us. Some people search for a cosmic presence, hoping perhaps that we are not ultimately alone. (shrink)

This three-volume history of England from before the Roman conquest through to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was originally serialised in Charles Dickens' magazine Household Words between 1851 and 1853. The text was published in book form in the same period, although each volume was post-dated to the following year. Dickens dedicated the work to his own children, intending it to be a stepping stone to more substantial histories. The volumes were popular with readers for decades, and were (...) used in British schools well into the twentieth century. Dickens employs his signature style to bring events and personalities to life, making use of vivid similes, unabashedly partisan language and direct speech, as well as the occasional moral lesson. Volume 1 covers the period from the campaigns of Julius Caesar up to the close of the reign of the 'miserable brute' King John. (shrink)

The transforming growth factors beta are a family of peptides which are involved in the regulation of cell growth and differentiation. It has been suggested that the loss of sensitivity to growth inhibition by endogenous TGF‐β may contribute to the process of carcinogenesis in epithelial systems. However, many breast cancer cells remain sensitive to the growth inhibitory effects of these peptides, suggesting that the local induction of TGF‐β could provide a pharmacological approach to chemoprevention. Triphenylethylene anti‐oestrogens, synthetic progestins and retinoids (...) all offer potential as chemopreventative agents. A common feature of their mechanism of action is the ability to locally increase the production of the transforming growth factors beta. (shrink)

This article studies the proposal of the twentieth-century anticaste scholar and writer Iyothee Thass of a millennial anticaste communitas (community) in creative opposition to caste immunitas (immunity). It argues that Thass’s casteless community makes an appeal as it withdraws from caste and Brahminism by differentiating itself from enclosure. Thass’s works sought to conceive and construct a community against caste in the vernacular both in the global and local context by way of a highly scholarly as well as creative engagement with (...) Buddhism and the Tamil literary archive. In the colonial and nationalist context of the nineteenth century in the Indian subcontinent, his interpretative imaginaire of the history of India—Indhira Dhesa Sarithiram—was a pedagogy that establishes a belonging to world community and, at the same time, to one’s own vernacular communities. (shrink)

Carnap's mature philosophy of science is an attempt to dissolve the scientific realism debate altogether as a philosophical pseudo-question. His argument depends upon a logico-semantic thesis regarding the structure of a scientific theory, and more importantly, a meta-ontological thesis regarding the explication of existence claims. The latter commits Carnap to a distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, which was allegedly refuted by Quine. The contemporary philosophy of science has therefore sought to distance itself from logico-semantic considerations, and has pursued (...) the scientific realism debate as an essentially epistemological thesis. I show however that one of the most prominent positions in this recent debate—van Fraassen's constructive empiricism—not only ends up in very close proximity to Carnap's attempted dissolution, but even provides the resources for extending and refining his programme. Rather than a historical footnote, Carnap's mature philosophy of science offers a live-option in the current debate. (shrink)