This study explores ethnic variations in animal companion attachment among 133 students enrolled in a school of veterinary medicine. The 57 White and 76 African American participants completed surveys that included background information, several questions about their animal companions, and a pet attachment questionnaire .White students had significantly higher PAQ scores than did African American students . White students also had significantly more pets and more kinds of pets and were more likely to allow pets to sleep on their beds (...) . Although keeping pets is a universal cultural phenomenon, how that attachment is expressed may vary from culture-to-culture. This study explores possible explanations and implications for these variations. (shrink)

The purpose of this research was to document the alleged underrepresentation of African Americans employed in U.S. nonhuman animal welfare organizations. A telephone survey of 32 animal welfare organizations yielded responses from 13 with 1,584 employees. Almost all organizations were reluctant to respond. Of the 13 organizations responding, 62% had no African American employees. African Americans made up 4% of the total number of employees with only 0.8% at the top levels . African Americans never made up more than 7% (...) of the employees in their respective organization. This paper discusses a model of, and resources for, successful diversity building in nonprofit organizations. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and define self psychology and its concepts so that they can be applied toward a new understanding of the human-nonhuman animal bond. The paper utilizes selected literature from both self psychology and the human-animal bond fields. The paper contains four primary conclusions: 1. Self psychology provides a unique model for understanding the depth and meaning of human-animal relationships; 2. Companion animals and humans can be equally important in their selfobject roles; 3. Self (...) psychology can offer a model for understanding individual differences in attachment to companion animals; and 4. A future direction includes finding ways to assess self psychology constructs in order to measure the depth and function of the selfobject relationship. (shrink)

We have previously found that attention to internal somatic sensations during a heart beat perception task increases the misperception of external touch on a somatic signal detection task , during which healthy participants erroneously report feeling near-threshold vibrations presented to their fingertip in the absence of a stimulus. However, it has been suggested that mindful interoceptive attention should result in more accurate somatic perception, due to its non-evaluative and controlled nature. To investigate this possibility, 62 participants completed the SSDT before (...) and after a period of brief body-scan mindfulness meditation training, or a control intervention . The meditation intervention reduced tactile misperception and increased sensitivity during the SSDT. This finding suggests that the perceptual effects of interoceptive attention depend on its particular nature, and raises the possibility that body-scan meditation could reduce the misperception of physical symptoms in individuals with medically unexplained symptoms. (shrink)

This is a unique, groundbreaking study in the history of philosophy, combining leading men and women philosophers across 2600 years of Western philosophy, covering key foundational topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Introductory essays, primary source readings, and commentaries comprise each chapter to offer a rich and accessible introduction to and evaluation of these vital philosophical contributions. A helpful appendix canvasses an extraordinary number of women philosophers throughout history for further discovery and study.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose life spanned most of the nineteenth century, is widely regarded as one of the greatest sages in the history of American thought. Among educated American citizenry, Emerson is probably the most commonly read indigenous philosopher—and for good reason. Emerson presents a vision of human beings and their place in the universe which gives meaning and stature to the human condition. His profound, even religious, optimism, gives structure and import to even the smallest and (...) apparently least significant of human activities. The inspirational quality of Emerson's, prose, his willingness to travel far and wide to lecture, his ability to help people transcend the difficulties of the times, all led to his very great national as well as international significance. (shrink)

As this writer reads him, Emerson's thinking falls into three loose and broad categories. He held soul to be divine, that intuition or divine spark within every man, whereby every man is capable of infinite growth. He regarded Nature as the lengthened shadow of God cast upon human sense, a kind of incarnation of some Divine Power here on earth. And he believed Deity ever near to man, and every soul possessed of access to Deity, not continuously, but at (...) least in moments of exaltation. This triple structure--the primacy of the soul, the immediacy of Nature, and Divine Immanence--might be called the skeleton framework of his message. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Irreplaceable Cannot Be ReplacedEllen HarveyThe Irreplaceable Cannot Be Replaced, Ellen Harvey, 2008. Photographs: Jan Baracz.People in New Orleans were invited to submit images or descriptions of irreplaceable places, people, or things lost to Hurricane Katrina. Eleven submissions were chosen at random and the artist painted 16” x 20” oil paintings based on those submissions. All thirty texts that were submitted were framed and exhibited along with the (...) paintings at the Contemporary Arts Center/New Orleans as part of the exhibition Something from Nothing, curated by Dan Cameron. Texts without a painting were accompanied by a framed black panel. At the end of the exhibition, all of the paintings and the framed texts were given away to the participants.Ellen Harvey was born in the United Kingdom and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited extensively in the US and internationally and was most recently included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions include Private Collections at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, The Museum of Failure at Luxe Gallery, New York, Beautiful/Ugly at Magnus Müller in Berlin, Bad Mirror at Galerie Gebruder Lehmann in Dresden, Mirror at the Pennsylvania Academy, and A Whitney for the Whitney at Philip Morris at the Whitney Museum at Altria. She took part in the Whitney Independent Study Program and the PS1 Studio Program. Recent awards include a Pennies from Heaven Grant, a Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Grant, a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, a Palm Beach County Cultural Council Grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She has completed projects for both the New York and Chicago Transit Authorities, most recently including a mosaic for the new Metro-North Yankee Stadium Station. The New York Beautification Project was published by Gregory Miller in 2005, and Ellen Harvey: Mirror was published by the Pennsylvania Academy in 2006. Click for larger view View full resolutionI am 87 years old living in a trailer on our property in New Orleans.We had 5 ft of water, which remained in the house 6 weeks creating mold to the ceiling.We lost everything. When I read Chris Rose’s column (he’s my favorite columnist in the whole world) it brought to mind my mother’s two dining room chairs that had been around as long as I can remember. I had them restored in about 1976 by Senior Citizens in classes of the “Peoples Program” sponsored by the nuns on Mirabean Ave. The wood was polished and varnished with a light brown stain and the seats were re-caned. I was born in 1920 so the chairs could be 75 years old. Anyway I can imagine you will have many interesting subjects to choose from but I’m submitting mine hoping I’ll be one of the very fortunate ones selected.I am terrible at drawing but will give you as complete a description as I can.I loved those chairs and enjoyed them for extra seating on holidays and at parties and they were conversation pieces.Alice Delaney[End Page 2] Click for larger view View full resolutionThere are so many “washed away” treasures, that the memorialization of even just one will be everlastingly meaningful to the community.I am submitting photographs of porcelain dolls, which I had crafted prior to the disaster. The dolls shown were created from commercial molds and were ready to go to a “new home.” Needless to say these dolls were submerged under water for at least two weeks. I call them my “children of the flood” but have not had the courage to disassemble them. I was able to rescue some doll parts and am in the process of cleaning, sorting and sanitizing them for future assembly.If I am ever able to get back to my very rewarding hobby, which was helpful in supplementing my retirement income, I will have to replace my electronic kiln and most of my doll making supplies. Many of the molds that were destroyed are no longer available. However, I will keep the memories dear, I have been fortunate enough to replace my sewing machines and some of the fabric used for clothing and doll... (shrink)

The practical difficulties that trouble any effort to discuss “pluralism” in American literary studies can be glimpsed in the following exchange. In a 1980 interview in the Literary Review of Edinburgh, Ken Newton put this question to Derrida:It might be argued that deconstruction inevitably leads to pluralist interpretation and ultimately to the view that any interpretation is as good as any other. Do you believe this and how do you select some interpretations as being better than others?Derrida replied:I am not (...) a pluralist and I would never say that every interpretation is equal but I do not select. The interpretations select themselves. I am a Nietzschean in that sense. You know that Nietzsche insisted on the fact that the principle of differentiation was in itself selective. The eternal return of the same was not repetition, it was a selection of the more powerful forces. So I would say that some are more powerful than others. The hierarchy is between forces and not between true and false.1­­The irony of Newton’s identification of pluralism with the very interpretive irresponsibility that it accuses others—Derrida foremost among them—of embracing is certainly not lost on those critics who call themselves pluralists; it comes as no surprise to them that Derrida declines to join their company. Nevertheless, the breezy gloss of pluralism as “the view that any interpretation is as good as any other” is bound to seem plausible to the large numbers of readers for whom the word denotes a generalized tolerance the refusal of dogmatism. That Derrida should be called upon to dissociate himself from pluralism is in fact symptomatic of the profound confusion surrounding the term. At present, the pervasiveness of such loose talk compels pluralists to defend themselves regularly against this kind of misinterpretation. Thus, the colloquial reading of pluralism that construes it as mere relativism, the absence of principled constraints, is frequently acknowledged, if only to be rejected. Even Bruch Erlich must emphasize that pluralism does not want “a totally free critical market, for that involves the proliferation of a hundred flowers, what Booth dismissively terms ‘chaotic warfare.’ ”2 1. James Kearn and Ken Newton, “An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” Literary Review 14 , p.21.2. Bruce Erlich, “Amphibolies: On the Critical Self-Contradictions of ‘Pluralism,’ ” this volume, p. 527; all further references to this essay will be included in the text. Ellen Rooney teaches English and women’s studies at Brown University. She is currently at work on a study entitled Seductive Reasoning: Pluralism and the Problematic of General Persuasion. (shrink)

Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861) and Robert Browning (1812-1889) first fell in love through letters, which they began to write to each other in 1845 (Figures 1 and 2). Their growing relationship, slowly progressing from letter to first encounter and eventual secret marriage in 1846, is documented in two volumes of letters, with a plot that unfolds as warmly and compellingly as the best page-turner invented by a novelist. Both were master wordsmiths, so the beauty of their letters is no (...) surprise. But one reason Barrett Browning was such a prolific correspondent is that she spent much of her life housebound, due to an illness whose nature was never truly explained when she was alive and that has been .. (shrink)

Here is the final volume of Norman O. Brown's trilogy on civilization and its discontents, on humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature. Following on his famous books _Life Against Death_ and _Love's Body_, this collection of eleven essays brings Brown's thinking up to 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Brown writes that "the prophetic tradition is an attempt to give direction to the social (...) structure precipitated by the urban revolution; to resolve its inherent contradictions; to put an end to its injustice, inequality, anomie, the state of war... that has been its history from start to finish." Affiliating himself with prophets from Muhammad to Blake and Emerson, Brown offers further meditations on what's wrong with Western civilization and what we might do about it. Thus the duality in his title: crisis and the hope for change. In pieces both poetic and philosophical, Brown's attention ranges over Greek mythology, Islam, Spinoza, and _Finnegan's Wake_. The collection includes an autobiographical essay musing on Brown's own intellectual development. The final piece, "Dionysus in 1990," draws on Freud and the work of Georges Bataille to link the recent changes in the world's economies with mankind's primordial drive to accumulation, waste, and death. (shrink)

Arid Waters is a photographic response to the growing crisis of water scarcity, which exists because our culture thinks of water as a commodity, or an abstract legal right, rather than the most basic physical source of life. The Water in the West Project began as a collaborative effort designed to present an artistic response to water as a social issue. Photography historian Ellen Manchester and the photographers - Mark Klett, Terry Evans, Laurie Brown, Peter Goin, Robert Dawson, (...) Martin Stupich, Gregory Conniff, and Wanda Hammerbeck - address the question: How can photography contribute to the urgent public debate over water use and allocation? Project members prepared an exhibition of their work, defining it as a laboratory and emphasizing the process of working through ideas. Contact prints and numerous work prints were displayed on the walls of the Sheppard Fine Art Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno, and simultaneously the Nevada Humanities Committee sponsored a conference entitled "Water in the Arid West." Participants included historians, writers, ranchers, politicians, lawyers, students, and community members. Arid Waters documents the evolution of the Water in the West Project from its inception as a group collaboration to the foundation of an archive. Ellen Manchester, codirector of the Water in the West Project, has written an informative introduction that provides a historical perspective for the collaboration. Including 59 photographs from the eight photographers, Arid Waters is a testimony to the role photography has played in western history. (shrink)

In this special issue of _difference_s, leading feminist theorists acknowledge Derrida’s contribution to feminist theory, discuss the crucial place of difference in both Derridian deconstruction and feminist theory, and reflect on the ethical, professional, and epistemological implications of Derrida’s thought for the discipline of women’s studies. In bringing together major feminist critics whose work has been touched by the writings of Derrida, this issue both pays tribute to and reflects upon Derrida’s ideas. Among the essayists included, Jane Gallop considers Derrida’s (...) writings on Levinas; Judith Butler reads Derrida’s final interview in _Le Monde_ in 2004; Elizabeth Grosz signals Derrida as a rare philosopher for whom sexual difference was crucial; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explores the figure of the mother’s child in Derrida, focusing on the critique of reproductive heteronormativity and the question of agency in feminism; and Joan Wallach Scott argues for the importance of critique in the academy. The issue also includes an edited transcription of a vibrant discussion between feminist theorists and Derrida called “Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida,” which took place at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women in 1984. _Contributors_. Fran Bartkowski, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, Susan Bernstein, Judith Butler, Pheng Cheah, Drucilla Cornell, Jane Gallop, Elizabeth Grosz, Peggy Kamuf, Christie McDonald, Joan Wallach Scott, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (shrink)

Christians have traditionally conceived of the moral life as an imitation of Christ, whereby followers enter into fellowship with God. The American Transcendentalists can be understood as extending rather than dispensing with this legacy. For Emerson, a person cultivates virtues by imitating those she loves and admires. Ultimately, however, the virtues enable her to innovate on received models, to excel by pressing beyond exemplars. Emerson's famous line, “imitation is suicide,” is not a contradiction but a fulfillment of the (...) imitation of Christ, understood in his terms. In his own time, John Brown was the public figure who, for Emerson, most nearly exemplified this innovative imitation of Christ. An examination of exemplarity, of this artful union of imitation and innovation in moral and spiritual formation, sheds light on how modern agents can cultivate the virtues needed to be at home in the modern world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Self-Culture in Emerson’s Schellingian Solution to FateNicholas L. Guardiano (bio)Professor of English literature, President of Yale University, and Commissioner of Major League Baseball, Angelo Bartlett Giamatti (1938–1989), delighted in saying that Emerson “is as sweet as barbed wire.”1 Giamatti understood the full range of Emerson’s thought, which spans the highs and lows of the human condition. Writings such as “Experience,” “Illusions,” “The Tragic,” and “Fate” demonstrate (...) the transcending of Emerson’s transcendentalism beyond any soft Romanticism or naïve idealism. They consistently assert the reality of antagonistic forces pervading human experience and nature. “The Tragic” opens with the lines: “He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity” (CW 10:334).2 “Fate” similarly insists: “We cannot trifle with this reality [of fate], this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts” (CW 6:11; my emphasis). Emerson was made intimately aware of the House of Pain by his own personal hardships. To name only a few, there was the death of his first wife Ellen at age 19 from tuberculosis, a rheumatic eye disease that left Emerson nearly blind for months, the terrible loss of his five-year old son Waldo to scarlet fever, the untimely deaths of his two brothers Charles and Edward in their 20s, a fire that partially destroyed the Emerson family home, and the inexorable mental decline into aphasia afflicting Emerson in his final years. Emerson further bore sympathetic witness to the hardships of his friends, family, and community. In addition, he lived through the national crisis of the American Civil War, and was a committed abolitionist willing to face head on the real evils of slavery. These experiences and others were a discipline in the tragic [End Page 28] constitution of the world. Furthermore, they provided hints on how to make one’s way through it.3In this essay, I aim to do some justice to Emerson’s mature transcendentalism by examining his metaphysical-ethical co-principles of fate and freedom, or necessity and power. These co-principles are the central topic of the essay “Fate,” which appeared as the opening chapter of the book The Conduct of Life (1860). There, Emerson somewhat paradoxically admits both principles as opposing forces, and attempts to show their compatibility using a Schellingian dialectic. After presenting Emerson’s understanding of fate and an interpretation of his metaphysical solution to it, I follow up on the primary ethical concern that opens the essay and book, namely “How shall I live?” (CW 6:1). To that end, I attempt to flesh out the ethical character of a life that embraces fate in terms of an Emersonian project of self-culture. My methodological approach throughout evolves progressively from the interpretation to the expansion of Emerson’s ideas. Its first section examines his philosophy as an offshoot of the world-historical line of thought extending from Plato to the Neoplatonists, Eriugena, Spinoza, Goethe, and Schelling, among others. Later philosophers, scientists, and artists who took inspiration from Emerson’s transcendentalism, including Charles Peirce, the Hudson River School painters, Wallace Stevens, and Loren Eiseley, follow the same intellectual trajectory.4 Further taking up the torch, my second section creatively amplifies Emerson’s insights for an ethics of self-culture, and in this way argues for the truth of his Schellingian form of freedom.I. The Problem and Its SolutionFor Emerson, fate is real. It consists in the “immovable limitations” and necessary “laws of the world” (CW 6:2). These limits or laws occur in the conduct of life not so much as theoretical abstractions or remote chains of efficient [End Page 29] causality but as impositions on our will, both from within and without. On the one hand, we are confronted by the rough and tumble of nature, the outside environment in which we live. Serious in Emerson’s nineteenth century and remaining so today are... (shrink)

Ralph Waldo Emerson's thinking about art has never been at the forefront of either the philosophy of art or discussions of Emerson's own thought, in part perhaps because of doubts about the depth of his understanding of art. Percy Brown, for example, described Emerson's aesthetic sense as "deficient" and his aesthetic background as "somewhat limited," and claimed that Emerson "dwelt on abstract ideas rather than on the forms of art and its methods of expression."1But although (...) Emerson was no John Ruskin or Clement Greenberg, he was one of the great orators and prose stylists of his day and a poet who could write "strong, wholly memorable poems that say what has never been said before and that no poet has said better... (shrink)

Der Aufsatz rekonstruiert die Entwicklung von Ralph Waldo Emersons Denken als Teil einer philosophischen Lebenskunst, deren mehrfache Anpassung und Veränderung sich jeweils als Reaktion auf einschneidende Verlusterfahrungen verstehen lässt. Der Tod seiner ersten Ehefrau Ellen Tucker sowie das plötzliche Dahinscheiden seines Sohnes Waldo sind nicht nur biographisch-existenziell prägend, sondern diese Ereignisse markieren zugleich bedeutende Wendepunkte innerhalb von Emersons philosophischem Schaffen. Von der christlich-protestantischen Tradition einer Selbstkultivierung nach Maßgabe einer imitatio christi über die Zurückweisung epistemischer und metaphysischer Gewissheitsansprüche und eine (...) experimentierfreudige pragmatische Weltanschauung führt der gedankliche Weg Emersons schließlich zu einer intensiven Beschäftigung mit der tragischen Dimension einer Welt ohne Gewissheiten und Sinngarantien. Am Ende dieser Entwicklung steht die Einsicht in die Flüchtigkeit und Vergänglichkeit alles Seienden, die sich mit einer Haltung lebensbejahender und heiterer Gelassenheit verbindet. (shrink)

Emerson once referred to Swedenborg as “one of the missouriums and mastodons of literature.” These terms could with far more truth and less banality be applied to St. Augustine. His thought is overwhelming, as is the amount of literature he has generated. A wealth of studies has been published in the past half-century, some of exceptional value such as those of Peter Brown, John O’Meara, Jean Pepin, and Eugene Portalie.

At the time of writing the COVID-19 pandemic was entering its ninth month, with nearly 800 000 recorded fatalities and 22 million infections in 188 countries and territories.1 In previous ethics briefings2 we raised concerns about the possibility that demand for life-sustaining treatment would overwhelm supply, with a consequent requirement for health professionals to make challenging triage decisions. Fortunately, to date, these have largely not been realised, although there is a possibility that countries in which containment measures have been less-successful, (...) such as South Africa, may still be required to triage.3 Despite the successful ‘flattening of the curve’ in many countries, there is a wide consensus that we remain firmly within the pandemic. Enormous practical challenges remain. It is unclear whether the pandemic will ultimately take the form of two or more successive waves, or whether the patchwork of global responses will lead to a sustained slow ‘burn’ with sporadic flare-ups.4 Areas of uncertainty include whether infection confers some immunity, how long any such immunity might last, whether effective vaccines can be developed and if seasonal temperature fluctuations alter the spread of the virus. The pandemic will also be fundamentally shaped by the decisions that governments make and the extent to which their diktats are complied with by citizens. With the – possibly temporary – retreat of urgent clinical ethics issues, such as triage, opportunities have arisen to reflect on some of the ethical questions that underlie and structure the demanding policy decisions that governments are wrestling with. One of the early questions was how to balance the complex constellation of costs and benefits associated with lockdown. Countries that …. (shrink)

The Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 represents a significant development in UK law. It extends the offence of incitement to racial hatred set out in the Public Order Act 1986 to make it also an offence to stir up hatred against persons on religious grounds. As the most celebrated liberal thinker of the nineteenth century, J.S. Mill might be expected to offer some lessons about the possible dangers of this sort of legislation. A Millian response to the 2006 Act (...) is developed here by first applying Mill’s famous defence of free speech to the Lords amendments to the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill 2005 and then by looking at potential cases in which even freedom of expression loses its immunity when this is necessary to prevent harm to others. Three versions of the harm‐prevention justification for liberty‐limiting restrictions are assessed and it is argued that the most promising version is the claim that it may be permissible to punish incitement to racial and religious hatred not so much because it is itself a kind of harm but by virtue of the acts of discrimination, violence and injustice that are more likely to occur within a climate of hatred. Ultimately, however, this rationale must be weighed against what is, for Mill, the special value of free speech and may in the end justify intervention in only the most acute cases. (shrink)

The strong word and stance issue only from a strict will, a will that dares the error of reading all of reality as a text, and all prior texts as openings for its own totalizing and unique interpretations. Strong poets present themselves as looking for truth in the world, searching in reality and in tradition, but such a stance, as Nietzsche said, remains under the mastery of desire, of instinctual drives. So, in effect, the strong poet wants pleasure and not (...) truth; he wants what Nietzsche named as "the belief in truth and the pleasurable effects of this belief." No strong poet can admit that Nietzsche was accurate in this insight, and no critic need fear that any strong poet will accept and so be hurt by demystification. The concern of this book, as of my earlier studies in poetic misprision, is only with strong poets, which in this series of chapters is exemplified by the major sequence of High Romantic British and American poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens, but also throughout by two of the strongest poets in the European Romantic tradition: Nietzsche and Freud. By "poet" I therefore do not mean only verse-writer, as the instance of Emerson also should make clear. Harold Bloom is DeVane Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. This article is the first chapter of his new book, Poetry and Repression, to be published by the Yale University Press. The book completes a tetralogy, of which the earlier volumes are The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, and Kabbalah and Criticism. See also: "Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again" by Jerome J. McGann in Vol. 2, No. 3; "The Poet as Elaborator: Analytical Psychology as a Critical Paradigm" by David D. Cooper in Vol. 6, No. 1. (shrink)

There is strong theoretical support for a relationship between various characteristics of religiousness and attitudes towards business ethics. This paper examines three frequently- studied dimensions of religiousness (fundamentalism, conservatism, and intrinsic religiousness) and their ability to predict students' willingness to behave unethically. Because prior research indicated a possible relationship between the religious affiliation of an institution and its members' ethical orientation, we studied students at universities with three different types of religious affiliation: evangelical, Catholic, and none.Results of the study lend (...) support to a negative relationship between the above-mentioned dimensions of religiousness and willingness to behave unethically. In addition, students at the Evangelical university were far less willing to engage in unethical behavior than were students at either the Catholic or the unaffiliated institutions. (shrink)

There is sufficient evidence that intellectual property rights are corrupting medical research. One could respond to this from a moral or from an epistemic point of view. I take the latter route. Often in the sciences factual discoveries lead to new methodological norms. Medical research is an example. Surprisingly, the methodological change required will involve political change. Instead of new regulations aimed at controlling the problem, the outright socialization of research seems called for, for the sake of better science. I (...) appeal to an analogy between socialized medicine and socialized research. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5R 2M8, Canada; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

One of the widespread confusions concerning the history of the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment has to do with the initial explanation of this celebrated null result due independently to FitzGerald and Lorentz. In neither case was a strict, longitudinal length contraction hypothesis invoked, as is commonly supposed. Lorentz postulated, particularly in 1895, any one of a certain family of possible deformation effects for rigid bodies in motion, including purely transverse alteration, and expansion as well as contraction; FitzGerald may well have had (...) the same family in mind. A careful analysis of the Michelson-Morley experiment (which reveals a number of serious inadequacies in many text-book treatments) indeed shows that strict contraction is not required. (shrink)

We count apples and divide a cake so that each guest gets an equal piece; we weigh galaxies and use Hilbert spaces to make amazingly accurate predictions about spectral lines. It would seem that we have no difficulty in applying mathematics to the world; yet the role of mathematics in its various applications is surprisingly elusive. Eugene Wigner has gone so far as to say that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious (...) and that there is no rational explanation for it” (1960, p. 223). The issue is not much discussed under the heading “applied mathematics,” yet it is pivotal to several philosophical debates. In recent years three rather general questions have been central: (1) Just how does mathematics “hook onto” the world? This is the main concern of a rather technical branch of philosophy of science known as measurement theory (see measurement). (2) Are some of the objects referred to in various theories merely mathematical objects, or do they have some other status? This problem often comes up in the philosophy of the special sciences. For example, do space‐time and the quantum state exist in their own right, separate from their mathematical representations; or are they nothing but mathematical entities? (3) Is mathematics essential for science? Following Hartry Field's work, this has become a focal point in the debate between realists and nominalists in the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

In December, the National Data Guardian 1 for health and care in England, Dame Fiona Caldicott, published the outcomes of a public consultation about the Caldicott Principles and the role of Caldicott Guardians.1 The Caldicott Principles are good practice guidelines which have been used by health and social care organisations in the UK since 1997 to ensure that people’s data are kept safe and used in an ethical way.2 The role of the Caldicott Guardian is well-established in the UK. Caldicott (...) Guardians are senior people which support the upholding of the Caldicott Principles within organisations. In response to views expressed during the consultation the NDG has added an eighth Caldicott Principle to the existing seven and will use her statutory powers to issue guidance about the appointment of Caldicott Guardians for health and adult social care organisations. The new eighth Caldicott Principle is: ‘Inform patients and service users about how their confidential information is used’. It provides that: > A range of steps should be taken to ensure no surprises for patients and service users, so they can have clear expectations about how and why their confidential information is used, and what choices they have about this. These steps will vary depending on the use: as a minimum, this should include providing accessible, relevant and appropriate information - in some cases, greater engagement will be required. The NDG explains that the introduction of the new principle was prompted by consideration of the role that the legal concept of ‘reasonable expectations’ should play in shaping the circumstances under which health and care data may be legitimately shared. The NDG does not envisage that this principle will establish reasonable expectations as a legal basis in its own right …. (shrink)

This paper examines changing conceptions of honour and masculinity during the Colombian Wars of Independence in the early 19th century. It explores the position of the foreign women who accompanied British and Irish expeditions to join the war against Spanish rule, and shows how colonial, imperial and republican conceptions of masculinity were affected by the role that women played in these volunteer expeditions and in the wars in general. The paper considers women's experiences during war and peace, and examines their (...) experiences in the light of changing conceptions of masculinity at home, in the British empire and in Hispanic America in the early nineteenth century. The social mobility of the Wars of Independence shifted the ground on which these concepts rested for all groups involved. The participation of foreign women alongside male adventurers was a further ingredient in this disorientating period. (shrink)

In the current literature, discussions of cognitive penetrability focus largely either on interpreting empirical evidence in ways that is relevant to the question of modularity :343–391, 1999; Wu Philos Stud 165:647–669, 2012; Macpherson Philos Phenomenol Res, 84:24–62, 2012) or in offering epistemological considerations regarding which properties are represented in perception :519–540, 2009, Noûs 46:201–222, 2011; Prinz Perceptual experience, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 434–460, 2006). In contrast to these debates, in this paper, I explore conceptual issues regarding how we ought (...) to understand the “cognitive” side of cognitive penetrability. I argue that it is only on its most narrow construal that a full-fledged defense of cognitive impenetrability has been forwarded. Specifically, I argue that the defenders of modularity have tacitly identified cognitive states with propositional states, and have thus only defended the idea that early perceptual systems are immune to the impacts of propositional knowledge. My aim then is to raise doubts about the identification of cognitive states with propositional ones. In particular, by focusing on skill, I will broaden the conceptual space for a greater number of states to have the potential to impact perceptual processing in a way that would constitute a genuine instance of cognitive penetrability. (shrink)

Antievolution arguments of Christian and Hindu creationists often critique Darwin's metaphor of the geological record as an ill‐preserved book of life, while highlighting the problem of anomalous fossils. For instance, Bible‐based young‐Earth creationists point to anomalous humanlike prints alongside authenticated dinosaur tracks to argue for the creation of all life some few thousand years ago. But Vedic‐based ancient‐hominid creationists view the same sort of evidence as indicating the existence of all species, including the hominids, billions of years ago. I examine (...) the roots of this Hindu Vedic creationism and its recent elaboration among scientifically minded members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). Similarities in the methods and rhetorical strategies of the two creationist groups are considered, as well as the underlying motives that have brought together such otherwise disparate religious worldviews. (shrink)