For people to contribute to discourse, they must do more than utter the right sentence at the right time. The basic requirement is that they add to their common ground in an orderly way. To do this, we argue, they try to establish for each utterance the mutual belief that the addressees have understood what the speaker meant well enough for current purposes. This is accomplished by the collective actions of the current contributor and his or her partners, and these (...) result in units of conversation called contributions. We present a model of contributions and show how it accounts for a variety of features of everyday conversations. (shrink)

As the usual regulatory framework did not fit well during the last Ebola outbreak, innovative thinking still needed. In the absence of an outbreak, randomised controlled trials of clinical efficacy in humans cannot be done, while during an outbreak such trials will continue to face significant practical, philosophical, and ethical challenges. This article argues that researchers should also test the safety and effectiveness of novel vaccines in wild apes by employing a pluralistic approach to evidence. There are three reasons to (...) test vaccines in wild populations of apes: i) protect apes; ii) reduce Ebola transmission from wild animals to humans; and iii) accelerate vaccine development and licensing for humans. Data obtained from studies of vaccines among wild apes and chimpanzees may even be considered sufficient for licensing new vaccines for humans. This strategy will serve to benefit both wild apes and humans. (shrink)

Outpatient services are increasingly recognised as an important component of health care provision and may be improved through the application of modern management techniques. We have performed a time and role audit of consultation and waiting times in two medical clinics using different queuing systems: namely, a serial processing clinic where patients wait in a single queue and a quasi-parallel processing clinic where patients are directed to the shortest queue to maintain clinic flow. Data collected were used to construct a (...) computer simulation of patient flows in clinic. Assessment of patient satisfaction in the clinic process was determined using a self-administered questionnaire. Mean waiting time was shorter in the quasi-parallel processing clinic: 26 (SD 17) minutes compared with 36(24) minutes in the serial processing clinic. In the serial processing clinic 61% of patients waited more than 30 minutes compared with 41% in the quasi-parallel processing clinic. In the serial processing clinic 8% of 142 patients surveyed complained of the time spent waiting. The computer simulation we produced was able to determine waiting times with different clinic structures. The simulation showed that reductions in waiting time up to 30% might be achieved by changing our serial processing clinic to a quasi-parallel processing one. Performance of medical outpatient clinics can be improved by examining and changing clinic management. Computer simulation of outpatient clinics offers a means of assessing the impact of such changes on waiting time in clinic and on waiting lists. (shrink)

Why should the work of the ancient and the medievals, so far as it relates to nature, still be of interest and an inspiration to us now? The contributions to this enlightening volume explore and uncover contemporary scholarship's debt to the classical and medieval past. Thinking About the Environment synthesizes religious thought and environmental theory to trace a trajectory from Mesopotamian mythology and classical and Hellenistic Greek, through classical Latin writers, to medieval Christian views of the natural world and our (...) relationship with it. The work also offers medieval Arabic and Jewish views on humanity's inseparability from nature. The volume concludes with a study of the breakdown between science and value in contemporary ecological thought. Thinking About the Environment will be a invaluable source book for those seeking to address environmental ethics from a historical perspective. (shrink)

BackgroundThe ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines are widely endorsed but compliance is limited. We sought to determine whether journal-requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist improves full compliance with the guidelines.MethodsIn a randomised controlled trial, manuscripts reporting in vivo animal research submitted to PLOS ONE (March–June 2015) were randomly allocated to either requested completion of an ARRIVE checklist or current standard practice. Authors, academic editors, and peer reviewers were blinded to group allocation. Trained reviewers performed outcome adjudication (...) in duplicate by assessing manuscripts against an operationalised version of the ARRIVE guidelines that consists 108 items. Our primary outcome was the between-group differences in the proportion of manuscripts meeting all ARRIVE guideline checklist subitems.ResultsWe randomised 1689 manuscripts (control: n = 844, intervention: n = 845), of which 1269 were sent for peer review and 762 (control: n = 340; intervention: n = 332) accepted for publication. No manuscript in either group achieved full compliance with the ARRIVE checklist. Details of animal husbandry (ARRIVE subitem 9b) was the only subitem to show improvements in reporting, with the proportion of compliant manuscripts rising from 52.1 to 74.1% (X2 = 34.0, df = 1, p = 2.1 × 10−7) in the control and intervention groups, respectively.ConclusionsThese results suggest that altering the editorial process to include requests for a completed ARRIVE checklist is not enough to improve compliance with the ARRIVE guidelines. Other approaches, such as more stringent editorial policies or a targeted approach on key quality items, may promote improvements in reporting. (shrink)

Samantha Matherne has written an excellent, timely introduction to the thought of Ernst Cassirer, the brilliant polymath who was the last representative of the “Marburg school” of neo-Kantianism, and who is well-known for wrangling a wide range of cultural phenomena into a system of “symbolic forms.” Despite Cassirer’s recent rise in prominence in the English-speaking philosophical world, there is only one other single-volume survey of his thought in English, Edward Skidelsky’s Ernst Cassirer. Matherne’s book has the merit of helping (...) to shore up this scholarly gap, and of providing a clear and succinct presentation of the philosophical system that... (shrink)

Clarke and Beck suggest that the ratio processing system may be a component of the approximate number system, which they suggest represents rational numbers. We argue that available evidence is inconsistent with their account and advocate for a two-systems view. This implies that there may be many access points for numerical cognition – and that privileging the ANS may be a mistake.

In the famous Correspondence with Clarke, which took place during the last year of Leibniz's life, Leibniz advanced several arguments purporting to refute the absolute theory of space and time that was held by Newton and his followers. The main aim of this book is to reassess Leibniz's attack on the Newtonian theory in so far as he relied on the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. The theological side of the controversy is not ignored but isolated and discussed (...) in the last three chapters, which deal with problems connected with the notions of omnipotence and omniscience. (shrink)

Jonathan Edwards identified the central act of faith as ‘the cordial consent of beings to Being in general’, which is to say to God. That equation, of Being, Truth and God, is rarely taken seriously in analytical circles. My argument will be that this is to neglect the real context of a great deal of past philosophy, particularly the very Cartesian arguments from which so many undergraduate courses begin. All too many students issue from such courses immunized against enthusiasm, in (...) the conceit that they have answers to all the old conundrums, which were in any case no more than verbal trickery. ‘By uttering the right words but failing to use them in propria persona, philosophy induces a kind of soporific amnesia bewitching us into forgetting our God-given task. That task is, of course, to do what Socrates did and to live as he lived'. Burrell's words are not wholly fair to academic philosophers, nor to the Lady Philosophy. Plenty of philosophers really mind about the truth, and want to be Socratic in pursuit of it. But the danger is a real one. If all that matters is debunking past philosophers, how does that differ from the repeated refutation of the Chaldaean Oracles or the Prophecies of Nostradamus? A pretty enough pastime for the young, but hardly serious business for adults. ‘If the history of philosophy is a process of ‘salvaging’ what you yourself have already thought, then why bother?’. (shrink)

Scholarship of the last half century has transformed approaches to paganism and Christianity in the late Roman world. Much as the paradigm of late antiquity has replaced traditional narratives of ‘decline and fall’, expounded systematically in the eighteenth century by Edward Gibbon, so recent scholarship has also challenged older narratives of pagan / Christian conflict, particularly heroic narratives of the resistance mounted by Rome’s ‘last pagans’. This article locates a crucial—although often neglected—prehistory and parallel to these debates in the (...) world of early modern humanist scholarship. It examines how fourth-century Roman pagan authors—especially Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and Ammianus Marcellinus—were read by printers, editors and philologists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a world before Gibbonian decline and fall, humanist scholars navigated both religious conflicts and literary canon wars to articulate a robust vision of late antiquity avant la lettre, although for reasons very different from those which have motivated twentieth- and twenty-first-century revisionists. Even as some of their colleagues dismissed late pagan texts on the grounds of deficient Latinity or deficient Christianity (or both), the early modern scholars who embraced this expansive vision of the ancient canon ended up highlighting the ambiguities of late antique religion—especially the grey area between the ‘pagan’ and the ‘Christian’. (shrink)

The usual version of the genetic argument for panpsychism is not difficult to refute. The version is based on the principle of biological continuity according to which the various species differ in degree rather than in kind. It is then asserted that if there is some point in the evolution of life out of inanimate matter, or of higher out of lower life, such that before this point minds did not exist while thereafter they do exist, then the principle of (...) continuity is violated. The argument, as Paul Edwards points out, is based on the Scholastic principle that a cause must contain its effect in actuality, since otherwise it could not communicate the effect and thus could not operate as its cause. Just as what causes a body to heat up must itself be hot, so what causes human minds to come into existence must already possess mentality. Ultimately, the inanimate world of, say, six billion years ago caused human minds to come into existence. Therefore, the constituents of even the so-called “inanimate world” are psychic. Yet Edwards’ refutation of this particular argument is unassailable. The argument fails, first, because the Scholastic principle on which it is based is highly dubious. But it fails even granting this principle. The emergence of high-level minds from low-level minds would create just as great a problem as an original emergence of the mental from the nonmental. There would still be the problem of how an entity with given capacities and characteristics could be caused by entities without those capacities and characteristics. And, finally, if we grant the emergence of high-level from low-level minds, it is not clear why the mental itself may not emerge from the nonmental. (shrink)

Many bioethical arguments rely implicitly on the assumption that the concept of “human part” is one on which everyone must agree, because it is unambiguous. But various parties interpret this “unambiguous” term in incompatible ways, leading to contention. This article is an informal presentation of a topomereological system on whose preferred interpretation several distinct but related meanings of “human part” can be isolated: part of a human body, part of the completion of a human body, and part of a human (...) being. A case is analyzed (the first total artificial heart (TAH) implantation), demonstrating in the process much of the apparatus of the system. By means of a casuistic methodology, the analysis is translated into recommendations for the ethical conduct of future TAH research. The more general conclusion, however, is that formal methods may provide useful tools for clarifying thought processes and organizing arguments in debates over bioethical issues. (shrink)

Once the province of film and media scholars, today the moving image is of broad concern to historians of art and architecture and designers of everything from websites to cities. As museums and galleries devote increasing space to video installations which no longer presuppose a fixed viewer, urban space becomes envisioned and planned through "fly throughs," and technologies such as GPS add data to the experience of travel, moving images have captured the attention of geographers and scholars across the humanities (...) and social sciences. Their practice of "mobility studies" is remaking how we understand a contemporary world in relentless motion. Media theorist and historian Anne Friedberg (1952-2009) was among the first practitioners of visual studies to theorize the experience of vision in motion. Although widely influential beyond her own discipline, Friedberg's work has never been the subject of an extended study. The Moving Eye: Film, Television, Architecture, Visual Art and the Modern gathers together essays by renowned thinkers in media studies, art history, architecture, and museum studies to consider the rich implications of her work for understanding film and video, new media, visual art, architecture, exhibition design, urban space, and virtual reality. Ranging from early cinema, to works by Le Corbusier, Sergei Eisenstein, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Pierre Huyghe, to theories of the image in motion informed by psychoanalysis, theories of the public sphere, and animal studies, each of the nine essays in the book advances the lines of inquiry commenced by Friedberg. (shrink)

Scientists, both modern and contemporary, commonly try to discern patterns in nature. They also frequently use arguments by analogy to construct an understanding of the natural mechanisms responsible for producing such patterns. For Robert Boyle, the famous clock at Strasbourg provided a perfect paradigm for understanding the connection between these two scientific activities. Unfortunately, it also posed a serious threat to his realistic pretensions. All sorts of internal mechanisms could produce precisely the same movements across the face of a clock. (...) Given God's immense creative capacities, Boyle realized that standard epistemological constraints could never ensure, not even to the least degree of probability, that scientific theories about the unobservable mechanisms of nature were descriptively accurate. Like most moderns, he fortified his epistemology theologically in order to retain his realistic stance. John Locke, however, took counsel from Ecclesiastes to repudiate Boyle's realism, while Samuel Clarke mobilized biblical images to dismiss the clockwork paradigm altogether.A contemporary review of this modern controversy reveals that there is still much to learn from the clock at Strasbourg. Among other things, the realism/antirealism issue is of central importance to understanding today's science, Nancey Murphy's protests notwithstanding. Moreover, the kind of realistic stance that is essential, not only to the truth but to the very intelligibility of certain types of scientific explanation, demands more than the critical realism of Ian Barbour. To be taken seriously, the models used in such contexts must be taken literally. (shrink)

The principal aim of this chapter is to document and describe the ‘dominant philosophy’ of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: the doctrine that man was made in the image of God. Examining writings by thinkers such as Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, Newton, Clarke, and Berkeley, Craig finds that they were all committed to some version of the Similarity Thesis. Its cognitive branch, the ‘Insight Ideal’, manifests itself in the view that our logical and mathematical knowledge and (...) our knowledge of our own mental states possesses a certainty that even God cannot surpass, as well as in the, then widespread, view that we live in a world that is, in principle, fully intelligible to us. The link between the human and the divine mind is usually thought to be provided by the faculty of reason, but the Similarity Thesis has also taken the form that the human mind is in fact a part of the divine intellect. It connects with the prevalence of a contemplative or scientific ethic in which the pursuit of knowledge appears as a good in itself. Moreover, there is a version of the Image of God doctrine focusing on agency and finding expression in the view of, for example, Descartes that, at its best, the human will is as free as a will could possibly be. (shrink)

This article argues against Bowman Clarke's attempt to eliminate futurity from the God of Process.

Emily Thomas’s book explores conceptions of space and time among various British early modern philosophers, with special emphasis placed on More, Barrow, Newton, Locke, and Clarke. One of the work’s strengths is its treatment of a number of neglected thinkers, such as John Jackson and Edmund Law, in addition to Clarke. Despite its title, the book treats issues in the metaphysics of space as much as it does time, and Thomas provides an engaging tour of a host of (...) current debates in these fields. On the whole, Thomas’s book contains a number of productive discussions, and it could prove a catalyst for further investigations into early modern spatiotemporal metaphysics. Unfortunately, the book also advances many... (shrink)