This book provides the reader with a detailed and captivating account of the story where, for the first time, physicists ventured into proposing a new force of nature beyond the four known ones - the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces, and gravitation - based entirely on the reanalysis of existing experimental data. Back in 1986, Ephraim Fischbach, Sam Aronson, Carrick Talmadge and their collaborators proposed a modification of Newton's Law of universal gravitation. Underlying this proposal were three tantalizing pieces (...) of evidence: 1) an energy dependence of the CP (particle-antiparticle and reflection symmetry) parameters, 2) differences between the measurements of G, the universal gravitational constant, in laboratories and in mineshafts, and 3) a reanalysis of the Eötvos experiment, which had previously been used to show that the gravitational mass of an object and its inertia mass were equal to approximately one part in a billion. The reanalysis revealed that, contrary to Galileo's position, the force of gravity was in fact very slightly different for different substances. The resulting Fifth Force hypothesis included this composition dependence and also added a small distance dependence to the inverse-square gravitational force. Over the next four years numerous experiments were performed to test the hypothesis. By 1990 there was overwhelming evidence that the Fifth Force, as initially proposed, did not exist. This book discusses how the Fifth Force hypothesis came to be proposed and how it went on to become a showcase of discovery, pursuit and justification in modern physics, prior to its demise. In this new and significantly expanded edition, the material from the first edition is complemented by two essays, one containing Fischbach's personal reminiscences of the proposal, and a second on the ongoing history and impact of the Fifth Force hypothesis from 1990 to the present. <. (shrink)

In _No Easy Answers_, Allan Franklin offers an accurate picture of science to both a general reader and to scholars in the humanities and social sciences who may not have any background in physics. Through the examination of nontechnical case studies, he illustrates the various roles that experiment plays in science. He uses examples of unquestioned success, such as the discoveries of the electron and of three types of neutrino, as well as studies that were dead ends, wrong turns, (...) or just plain mistakes, such as the “fifth force,” a proposed modification of Newton's law of gravity. Franklin argues that science is a reasonable enterprise that provides us with knowledge of the natural world based on valid experimental evidence and reasoned and critical discussion, and he makes clear that it behooves all of us to understand how it works. (shrink)

In 1986 Ephraim Fischbach, Sam Aronson, and Carrick Talmadge proposed a modification of Newton’s law of universal gravitation. This modification changed the gravitational potential from V = −Gm1m2∕r to V = [1 + αe−r∕λ] where α, the strength of the interaction, was approximately one percent and the range of the force λ was approximately 100 meters. This additional term was known as the Fifth Force. This suggestion was based on tantalizing evidence provided by a reanalysis of the Eötvös experiment, (...) an early test of the equivalence principle, a difference between the measured value of G, the gravitational constant, as determined by laboratory measurements and those performed in mineshafts, and a small energy dependence in the CP-violating parameters in K0-meson decay. The two initial measurements of the Fifth Force disagreed. One supported its existence and the other did not. How this discrepancy was resolved and the subsequent history of experiments on the Fifth Force will be discussed. By 1990 the consensus was that such a Fifth Force did not exist. Despite that judgment, work continued, and the more recent history of the Fifth Force is also discussed. The consensus remains that there is no Fifth Force. (shrink)

Experiments often disagree. How then can scientific knowledge be based on experimental evidence? In this paper I will examine four episodes from the history of recent physics: the suggestion of a Fifth Force, a modification of Newton’s law of gravitation; early attempts to detect gravitational radiation ; the claim that a 17-keV neutrino exists; and experiments on atomic-parity violation and on the scattering of polarized electrons and their relation to the Weinberg-Salam unified theory of electroweak interactions. In each of (...) these episodes discordant results were reported, and a consensus was later reached that one result—or set of results—was incorrect. I will examine the process of reaching that consensus. I will show that the decision was reached by reasoned discussion based on epistemological and methodological criteria. It then follows that we may use experimental evidence as the basis of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

The Scientific Revolution was far from the anti-Aristotelian movement traditionally pictured. Its applied mathematics pursued by new means the Aristotelian ideal of science as knowledge by insight into necessary causes. Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbits from the inverse square law of gravity is a central example.

The Scientific Revolution was far from the anti-Aristotelian movement traditionally pictured. Its applied mathematics pursued by new means the Aristotelian ideal of science as knowledge by insight into necessary causes. Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbits from the inverse square law of gravity is a central example.

Contrary to the views expressed in many introductory physics textbooks, Henry Cavendish did not measure G, the gravitational constant contained in Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation, F = G m1m2/r2. As the title of his paper states, Cavendish conducted “Experiments to Determine the Density of the Earth (1798).” As discussed below, one can use that measurement to determine G, but that was not Cavendish’s intent. In fact, the determination of G was not done until the latter part of the (...) nineteenth century. (shrink)

Newton’s Opticks was in no way directed at artists, but the great prestige of its author, as well as its proposal of possible principles of color-harmony, and its establishment of the circle as the most graphic format for illustrating color-relationships, ensured the book a place in the repertory of coloristic art-theory from the eighteenth century until the present day. And, although it was implicit rather than explicit in the Opticks, the idea of complementarity continued to fascinate painters well into (...) the twentieth century. But in painting, the long-standing focus on chiaroscuro as the essential basis of pictorial structure inhibited the acceptance of the notion that colors are inherent in light alone; and Newton’s theory failed to make much headway against the traditional Aristotelianism, which was revived most eloquently by Goethe at the close of the eighteenth century. It was only two centuries later, in the new light-based art of holography, that the Opticks again became a text to conjure with. (shrink)

This is a contribution to the philosophy of experimental work, engaging with questions posed by Hacking, Franklin, Pickering, Schaffer and Collins. It focuses on the dynamics of experimentation and offers a detailed argument that one finds no "regress" of the kind posited by Collins. In particular, we reanalyze the celebrated series of experimental investigations by Newton on optical phenomena, taking into account Schaffer's partial reconstruction, and we show how it must be supplemented to obtain a more complete picture.

When it became uncool to speak of beauty with respect to pieces of art, physicists started claiming that their results are beautiful. They say, for example, that a theory's beauty speaks in favour of its truth, and that they strive to perform beautiful experiments. What does that mean? The notion cannot be defined. (It cannot be defined in the arts either). Therefore, I elucidate it with examples of optical experimentation. Desaguliers' white synthesis, for example, is more beautiful than Newton's, (...) and the many colourful syntheses done by Viennese painter Ingo Nussbaumer exemplify even greater beauty. Here are some criteria (which, of course, do not implement a decision procedure concerning beauty in experiments): cleanliness, simplicity, intellectual clarity, symmetry. Similar criteria are relevant to our aesthetical judgements about some pieces of music. So we can assume that our notion of beauty conserning art is related to the one conserning scientific experiments. (shrink)

This paper sketches a causal account of scientific explanation designed to sustain the judgment that high-level, detail-sparse explanations—particularly those offered in biology—can be at least as explanatorily valuable as lower-level counterparts. The motivating idea is that complete explanations maximize causal economy: they cite those aspects of an event’s causal run-up that offer the biggest-bang-for-your-buck, by costing less (in virtue of being abstract) and delivering more (in virtue making the event stable or robust).

In view of the limitations of classical, free, and modal logics to deal with fictional names, we develop in this paper a four-valued logical framework that we see as a promising strategy for modeling contexts of reasoning in which those names occur. Specifically, we propose to evaluate statements in terms of factual and fictional truth values in such a way that, say, declaring ‘Socrates is a man’ to be true does not come down to the same thing as declaring ‘Sherlock (...) Holmes is a man’ to be so. As a result, our framework is capable of representing reasoning involving fictional characters that avoids evaluating statements according to the same semantic standards. The framework encompasses two logics that differ according to alternative ways one may interpret the relationships among the factual and fictional truth values. (shrink)

"Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and striking (...) insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is _simply the best introduction to the subject now available_."_ —Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of _The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters_ Contents:_ Chronology, Introduction _Chapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697_ _Idols, or false notions: _Francis Bacon, _The New Instrument_ _I think, therefore I am: _René Descartes, Discourse on Method _God, or Nature: _Baruch Spinoza, _Ethics_ _The system of the world: _Isaac Newton, _Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy_ _He searched for truth throughout his life: _Pierre Bayle, _Historical and Critical Dictionary_ _Chapter Two - _The Learned Maid: 1638–1740 _A face raised toward heaven:_ Anna Maria van Schurman, _Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman_ _The worlds I have made:_ Margaret Cavendish, _The Blazing World_ _A finer sort of cattle:_ Bathsua Makin, _An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen_ _I warn you of the world:_ Madame de Maintenon, _Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr_, and _Instruction: On the World_ _The daybreak of your reason:_ Émilie Du Châtelet, _Fundamentals of Physics_ _Chapter Three - _A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695 _The chief criterion of the True Church:_ John Locke, _Letter on Toleration_ _Freedom from any superior power on earth:_ John Locke, _Second Treatise on Civil Government_ _A white paper, with nothing written on it:_ John Locke, _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ _Let your rules be as few as possible:_ John Locke, _Some Thoughts Concerning Education_ _From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life:_ John Locke, _The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures_ _Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784_ _In the wilderness, they are reborn:_ Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_ _Without these Names, nothing can be known,_ Carl Linnaeus, _System of Nature_ _All the clouds at last are lifted:_ Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, _The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind_ _A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge:_ Jean le Rond d’Alembert, _Preliminary Discourse_ _Dare to know! :_ Immanuel Kant, _What Is Enlightenment?_ _Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779_ _The narrow limits of human understanding:_ David Hume, _Anof a Book Lately Published_ _The soul is but an empty word:_ Julien Offray de La Mettrie, _Man a Machine_ _All is reduced to sensation:_ Claude Adrien Helvétius, _On the Mind_ _An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods:_ Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, _Common Sense_ _Let each believe that his own ring is real:_ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, _Nathan the Wise_ _Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764_ _This is the country of sects:_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Letters_ _Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes:_ Voltaire, _The Culture and Spirit of Nations_ _The best of all possible worlds:_ Voltaire, _Candide_ _Are we not all children of the same God?:_ Voltaire, _Treatise on Tolerance_ _If a book displeases you, refute it! :_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Dictionary_ _Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776_ _Things must be so ordered that power checks power,_ Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, _The Spirit of the Laws_ _Complete freedom of trade must be ensured:_ François Quesnay, _General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom_ _The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare_ Beccaria, _On Crimes and Punishments_ _There is no peace in the absence of justice:_ Adam Ferguson, _An Essay on the History of Civil Society_ _Led by an invisible hand:_ Adam Smith, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ _Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785_ _Thus died this great man:_ Aphra Behn, _Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave_ _Not one sins the less for not being Christian: _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, _Embassy Letters_ _Do you not restore to them their liberty?:_ Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, _Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies_ _Some things which are rather interesting:_ Captain James Cook, _Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World_ _The inner genius of my being:_ Johann Gottfried von Herder, _Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind_ _Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782_ _The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: _Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality_ _The supreme direction of the General Will:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract _Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps,_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Julie, or the New Heloise_ _Build a fence around your child’s soul:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Emile, or On Education_ _This man will be myself:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Confessions_ _Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792_ _No higher design than to get her a husband:_ Mary Astell, _Reflections on Marriage_ _The days of my bondage begin:_ Anna Stanisławska, _Orphan Girl_ _A dying victim dragged to the altar:_ Denis Diderot, _The Nun_ _Created to be the toy of man:_ Mary Wollstonecraft, _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ _Man, are you capable of being just?:_ Olympe de Gouges, _Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen_ _Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792_ _I took upon me to assert my freedom:_ Benjamin Franklin, _Autobiography_ _Freedom has been hunted round the globe:_ Thomas Paine, _Common Sense_ _Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights:_ Thomas Jefferson and Others, _Declaration of Independence_ _A safeguard against faction and insurrection:_ James Madison, _Federalist No. 10_ _An end to government by force and fraud:_ Thomas Paine, _The Rights of Man_ _Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794_ _A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn:_ Edmund Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ _The future destiny of the human species:_ Nicolas de Condorcet, _A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind_ Texts and Studies, Index. 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A basic question of medical ethics is whether the norms governing medical practice should be understood as the application of principles and rules of the common morality to medicine or whether some of these norms are internal or proper to medicine. In this article we describe and defend an evolutionary perspective on the internal morality of medicine that is defined in terms of the goals of clinical medicine and a set of duties that constrain medical practice in pursuit of these (...) goals. This perspective is developed by means of a critical examination of the essentialist conception of the internal morality of medicine advocated by Edmund Pellegrino and the critique of internal morality approaches by Robert Veatch and Tom Beauchamp. (shrink)

Probabilistic inference from frequencies, such as "Most Quakers are pacifists; Nixon is a Quaker, so probably Nixon is a pacifist" suffer from the problem that an individual is typically a member of many "reference classes" (such as Quakers, Republicans, Californians, etc) in which the frequency of the target attribute varies. How to choose the best class or combine the information? The article argues that the problem can be solved by the feature selection methods used in contemporary Big Data science: the (...) correct reference class is that determined by the features relevant to the target, and relevance is measured by correlation (that is, a feature is relevant if it makes a difference to the frequency of the target). (shrink)

Broadly construed, moral sentimentalism is the position that human emotions or sentiments play a crucial role in our best normative or descriptive accounts of moral value or judgments thereof. In this paper, I introduce and sketch a defense of a new form of moral sentimentalism I call “Transcendental Sentimentalism”. According to transcendental sentimentalism, having a sentimental response to an object is a necessary condition of the possibility of a subject counting as having non-inferential evaluative knowledge about that object. In unpacking (...) each component of this position, I argue that it is both distinct from and more explanatorily attractive than the other approaches to explaining the relationship between emotion and moral thought, including what Kauppinen (2014, forthcoming) calls epistemological sentimentalism and explanatory sentimentalism. I conclude by offering a sketch of what I take to be the most promising strategy for demonstrating the truth of transcendental sentimentalism, suggesting an original form of transcendental argument. If successful, this form of argument would establish transcendental sentimentalism by demonstrating that not having a sentimental response to x disqualifies (in the normative sense) a person from counting as having non-inferential evaluative knowledge of x. (shrink)

The Man Who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe (1946) by Glenn Clark is a work of biography and philosophy, exploring the life and ideas of the versatile artist, writer, and philosopher Walter Russell. New Thought writer and professor Glenn Clark (b. 1882, d. 1956) was a fervent believer in the power of prayer and the Light of God to reveal the secrets of the universe. As he explains in Chapter One: We Go Seeking, he had been searching "...for a (...) man who has discovered the universal law which lies back of the Sermon on the Mount, and who consciously uses that law with full awareness of its meaning, and full obedience to its principles." He believed that he had found that man in Walter Russell. Walter Russell (b. 1871, d. 1963) was a man who seemed preternaturally adept at everything he wished to try. After being removed from school at the age of nine and sent to work at a dry goods store, he worked a number of low-paying jobs. But he had "absolute faith...that anything can come to one who trusts to the unlimited help of the Universal Intelligence that is within so long as one works within the law and always gives more to others than they expect, and does it cheerfully and courteously." Throughout his life, he found success as a musician, painter, sculptor, writer, ice skater, philosopher, and lecturer. He was commissioned to sculpt a 28-figure Mark Twain Memorial just a few years after he began sculpting. And in 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked him to sculpt the Four Freedoms Monument. He designed several buildings in New York City and invented the cooperative ownership model (aka the co-op). And most of these pursuits were undertaken with no formal education. By the time Clark met with Russell, he had achieved success in his artistic, literary, architectural, physical, and even scientific pursuits. So when Clark was searching for a man who knew the secrets of the universe and was referred to Russell on more than one occasion, he knew that he had to meet him. Large portions of the book, particularly in the chapters We Meet the Man, We Meet the Man of Action, and The Five Laws of Success, are presented as an interview with Russell, giving us insight into his beliefs straight from the source. "Every successful man or great genius has three particular qualities in common," he says. "The most conspicuous of these is that they all produce a prodigious amount of work. The second is that they never know fatigue. And the third is that their minds grow more brilliant as they grow older, instead of less brilliant. Great men's lives begin at forty, where the mediocre man's life ends. The genius remains an ever-flowing fountain of creative achievement until the very last breath he draws." At the heart of Russell's philosophy is a belief that every man "has consummate genius within him. Some appear to have it more than others only because they are aware of it more than others are, and the awareness or unawareness of it is what makes each one of them into masters or holds them down to mediocrity..." To know that we have genius inside of us, and to have absolute faith in our inner voice and in the Universe, is to unlock that genius. Through the story of Russell's brilliant life and his Five Personal Laws of Success (humility, reverence, inspiration, deep purpose, and joy), the reader gets a plain-language example of genius-in-action. He demonstrated his great energy, lack of fatigue, and "ever-flowing fountain" of genius throughout his long life, maintaining his creativity until his death in 1963 at the age of 92. (shrink)

The mathematical nature of modern science is an outcome of a contingent historical process, whose most critical stages occurred in the seventeenth century. ‘The mathematization of nature’ (Koyré 1957 , From the closed world to the infinite universe , 5) is commonly hailed as the great achievement of the ‘scientific revolution’, but for the agents affecting this development it was not a clear insight into the structure of the universe or into the proper way of studying it. Rather, it was (...) a deliberate project of great intellectual promise, but fraught with excruciating technical challenges and unsettling epistemological conundrums. These required a radical change in the relations between mathematics, order and physical phenomena and the development of new practices of tracing and analyzing motion. This essay presents a series of discrete moments in this process. For mediaeval and Renaissance philosophers, mathematicians and painters, physical motion was the paradigm of change, hence of disorder, and ipso facto available to mathematical analysis only as idealized abstraction. Kepler and Galileo boldly reverted the traditional presumptions: for them, mathematical harmonies were embedded in creation; motion was the carrier of order; and the objects of mathematics were mathematical curves drawn by nature itself. Mathematics could thus be assigned an explanatory role in natural philosophy, capturing a new metaphysical entity: pure motion. Successive generations of natural philosophers from Descartes to Huygens and Hooke gradually relegated the need to legitimize the application of mathematics to natural phenomena and the blurring of natural and artificial this application relied on. Newton finally erased the distinction between nature’s and artificial mathematics altogether, equating all of geometry with mechanical practice. (shrink)

O fundamento da supraconstitucionalidade para Kelsen é a lógica jurídica; para Kant é a liberdade política, o desafio de um Estado global deve ser analisado a partir da perspectiva crítica da lógica kelseniana, reconduzindo o Direito Internacional a bases de legitimidade que não reduzam validade a legitimidade, o que passa pelo respeito aos direitos humanos pelos Estados.

Kierkegaard famously declared that life is lived forwards but understood backwards. The retrospective look at one's career necessarily takes the form of a narrative reconstruction. Our lives are messier than the stories we tell about them.I first took up serious study of philosophy as a sophomore at Columbia College in 1967. The extensive core curriculum at Columbia exposes all students to a sampling of classic texts in philosophy. Some inkling of a more than passing interest in philosophy, which I can't (...) now recall, must have induced me take an elective course devoted to that subject. It was taught in the old-fashioned way of detailed examination of classic texts—the way that I believe it is best to learn about... (shrink)

2. Thesis 2 I accept insofar as it asserts the relation of possibility to actuality to be a fundamental aspect of things. This relation is sui generis.

Now, it seems to me that there is much philosophy written today that does not justify our recognizing such relativism as characteristic of recent thought. In fact, however dominant this way of thinking may appear in other fields, a freshly oriented concern for an absolute may be detected in twentieth-century philosophy. Such concern is for an absolute within rather than behind or above our experience--if you will, for a finite absolute. For such a philosophy, the absolute has not so much (...) "fallen" as settled down, "down to earth" so to speak, where it enters our daily experience. Thus the one of Parmenides whose presence pulverized our common sense is no longer with us, nor are we likely to revive it, but we do hear of an absolute reality present in our conscious lives. Witness Sartre's insistence upon the "absolute character of free involvement" or choice, in contrast with his dismissal of the l'être en soi et pour soi as an impossible ideal. The cogito of Descartes, rather than his perfect being, appears as the historical archetype of our absolute. Thus today the metaphysician is often more concerned with what we way call the quality of man than with the more traditional efforts to discuss cosmic horizons, even though a traditional concern for an authentic reality continues to inspire his work. (shrink)

When Thomas Jefferson placed 'the pursuit of happiness' along with life and liberty in The Declaration of Independence he was most likely referring to Aristotle's concept of happiness, or eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is not about good feelings but rather the fulfilment of human potentials. Fulfilment is made possible by virtue; the moderation of desire and emotion by reason. The Psychology of Happiness was the first book to bring together psychological, philosophical, and physiological theory and research in support of Aristotle's view. It (...) examines the similarity between Aristotle's concept of virtue and modern cognitive theories of emotion. It discusses the discovery of human potentials, the development of virtue and its neurological basis, the mistaken idea that fulfilment is selfish, and several other issues related to the pursuit of a good human life. (shrink)

The imperviousness of mathematical truth to anti-objectivist attacks has always heartened those who defend objectivism in other areas, such as ethics. It is argued that the parallel between mathematics and ethics is close and does support objectivist theories of ethics. The parallel depends on the foundational role of equality in both disciplines. Despite obvious differences in their subject matter, mathematics and ethics share a status as pure forms of knowledge, distinct from empirical sciences. A pure understanding of principles is possible (...) because of the simplicity of the notion of equality, despite the different origins of our understanding of equality of objects in general and of the equality of the ethical worth of persons. (shrink)

_Business Ethics and the Natural Environment_ examines the present status of relations between corporate enterprise and the natural environment in the world today. •Discusses such questions as: What obligations does a corporation have toward the environment? To respect entities unprotected by law? To care about future generations? •Argues that environmentally-friendly business practices yield dividends exceeding expectations, and that the competitive firm of the 21st century will follow “green” standards •Provides a background in ethics, a survey of business ethics, an account (...) of environmental philosophy, an overview of environmental legal issues, and an account of the problems associated with globalization. (shrink)

The term therapeutic misconception was coined by Paul Appelbaum and his colleagues to describe the tendency of patients enrolled in clinical trials to confuse research participation with the personal clinical attention characteristic of medical care. It has not been recognized that an analogous therapeutic misconception pervades ethical thinking about clinical research with patient-subjects. Investigators and bioethicists often judge the ethics of clinical research based on ethical standards appropriate to the physician-patient relationship in therapeutic medicine. This ethical approach to clinical research (...) constitutes a misconception because it fails to appreciate the ethically significant differences between clinical research and clinical care.In this article I argue that the assumption that the ethical principles governing the practice of therapeutic medicine should also apply to clinical research with patient- subjects produces incoherence in research ethics and erroneous guidance concerning certain controversial research designs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Matter and Spirit in the Age of Animal MagnetismEric G. WilsonDuring the Romantic period, writers on both sides of the Atlantic explored the sleepwalker as a merger of holiness and horror. Emerging when scientific thinkers for the first time were connecting spirit to electricity and magnetism, the somnambulist became to certain Romantics a disclosure of the difficulty of harmonizing unseen and seen, agency and necessity. This problem prominently arose (...) in Anton Mesmer's late eighteenth-century experiments in animal magnetism, in which the sleepwalker proved a paradox: an opaque revelation of transparent currents and an unconscious vehicle of sophisticated thought. Romantics such as Coleridge embraced the somnambulist as an embodiment of these troubles involved in relating motion and meaning. Coleridge and those who responded to him saw in the hypnotized human this sobering possibility: the invisible requires the visible to make itself manifest while the visible needs the invisible to become significant. 1 This is sublime and sinister: to elevate a material form to spiritual power is transcendence; to sink the boundless into a body is grotesque.Here I explore the philosophical implications of animal magnetism, the place of the sleepwalker in the history of ideas, and the role of the hypnotized human in Romantic writers, especially Coleridge. I also meditate on relationships between matter and spirit, machine and human, word and thing. Along the way, I place the history of ideas and the works of Romantic writers in mutually illuminating dialogues. The literary texts shed fresh light on philosophical problems while the ideas reveal hidden literary elements.The somnambulistic trance had been around long before Mesmer's magnetic sleeps. For centuries, shamans had used auto-hypnosis to sound [End Page 329] their souls and other-hypnosis to cure their tribe-members' ailments. However, somnambulism could not become a scientific phenomenon until Europeans in laboratories began to study electricity and magnetism. In the early modern period, Paracelsus argued that a vital fluid courses through the cosmos. The human being draws this flow like a magnet attracts force. When the body pulls to itself evil effluvia, it falls ill. To return patients to health, Paracelsus placed magnets on painful areas. He hoped to extract the unwanted current and return it to the cosmic swirl. 2 In "magnetizing" spirit, Paracelsus opened a door for empirical inquiry into the invisible world. In 1600, William Gilbert claimed that magnets correspond to the earth: both are animated by universal attraction and repulsion. 3 By the end of the seventeenth-century, Newton proposed that things are impelled by a force that draws and repels. Newton's theory of gravity inspired natural philosophers of the next centuries to search for a principle of which the magnet and the spark are manifestations. 4During the second half of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, natural philosophers explored electricity and magnetism with unprecedented precision. In 1752, Benjamin Franklin revealed the mystery of lightning and perhaps the spark of life. 5 Inspired by Franklin, F. C. Oetinger, J. L. Fricker, and Prokop Divisch developed a theology of electricity, based on the belief that God is the electrical current. 6 Later in the century, Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta debated over whether the galvanic flow might be the origin and principle of life itself. 7 A few years before Franklin harvested lightning, John Michell argued that the magnetic force is not constrained to lodestones but is possibly pervasive. Some years later, Franz Aepinus suggested that magnetism and electricity manifest a deep energy. Soon after, C. A. de Coulomb discovered the mathematical law by which electrical and magnetic forces operate (Whittaker, pp. 50–59).These findings led to the breakthroughs of the nineteenth century. 8 In 1807, Humphry Davy hypothesized that chemical elements interact through electromagnetic affinity or repulsion. 9 In 1820, H. C. Oersted demonstrated the correspondence between electricity and magnetism. The same year, A. M. Ampere formulated the laws by which electrical and magnetic currents interact (Whittaker, pp. 81–86). Michael Faraday in 1831 revealed electromagnetic induction and thus inaugurated a second Copernican revolution: he showed that matter is not solid and discrete but a field of electromagnetic energy. 10 The dreams of [End... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 181-196 [Access article in PDF] Bookmarks What is Genius? Denis Dutton There's a school of thought which holds that there's nothing much of interest that can be said about genius. The root idea is older than Kant, but it was well summarized by him: genius is a natural endowment, deep, strange, and mysterious, at least with respect to putative explanations. Schubert can get up (...) in the morning and before lunch knock off five songs that captivate us hundreds of years later. There's no way for us to account for this, and we ought not to expect, Kant claims, that genius can explain itself either: Schubert doesn't have a clue how he does it.Yet trying to figure out how creative geniuses do it remains a permanent source of fascination, most of it fairly naïve. When the ingénue reporter is sent out by the City Editor to interview the famous, crusty old novelist, the first question is normally, "Where do you get your ideas?" Of course, if the novelist knew that, he'd not be likely to blab it in the press. Kant's point is that he cannot really know; no one can. Monroe Beardsley relays a story about Picasso, who claimed to suffer from "an indigestion of greenness" from walking in the woods on a summer's day: "I must empty this sensation into a picture," Picasso said. "Green dominates it. The painter paints as if in urgent need to discharge himself of his sensations and his visions." Beardsley observes that green indigestion could have been even more plausibly used to "explain" a red painting ("I needed an antidote to all that green"), or a pen-and-ink drawing ("I needed to get away from color"), or anything else. There is in this a general point about why we are so often disappointed by interviews with artists. The artist can do; the artist can't explain how. [End Page 181]It does not follow, however, that nothing of interest can be learned, at least at a descriptive level, about genius. Dean Keith Simonton has spent most of a career looking at the subject as a psychologist, and his Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (Oxford University Press, $27.50) ties together much of his research and that of others in a way that extends thinking on genius far beyond armchair meditations or mere platitudes. At the heart of Simonton's project are two very different ideas: first, he argues that evolution and processes of natural selection provide illuminating models to explain the existence and operation of creative genius in the sciences and the arts. Second, he propounds a rather more dubious thesis, that the process of natural selection itself is an adequate model for understanding genius at work, that the history of human ideas demonstrates a kind of secondary evolution. To these hypotheses, Simonton adds a further Darwinian overlay: he returns repeatedly to the personality and biography of Charles Darwin himself as the paradigm of a life of creative genius. While this has the advantage of anchoring the discussion, giving it a kind of ostinato ground, it diverts Simonton from the manifestations of genius, especially artistic genius, which do not resemble Darwin's personal example.Creative genius is defined by Simonton as the capacity to originate scientific discoveries, artistic works, technical inventions, or engage in political leadership, in a manner that achieves what is conventionally termed eminence. The eminent person creates, discovers, or invents something that passes the test of time and, like the similar test devised by Hume to mark out artistic greatness, appeals to cultures beyond that of the original act of creation. It is not hard for the philosophically trained reader to devise counter-examples to Simonton's general theses, but the value of his book does not require a rigorous definition at the outset. Whatever genius is, and however we might dispute it, there is no doubting that Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Newton, and Einstein count as creative geniuses in Simonton's sense. High raw IQ is frequently associated with genius... (shrink)

The paper concerns the science of colors (die Farbenlehre) on which among others J.W. Goethe and W. Ostwald were focused. The first part of this essay describes the science of colors in the period from antiquity to late Renaissance. In the pre-scientific phase it was intervened with philosophical speculations as well with symbolism of magic, religions and customs. Since Newton’s time there are distinguished the colors of light and the colors of objects. J.W. Goethe’s Farbenlehre, discussed in the second (...) part, connects empirical studies and metaphysical vision of the light and colors. W. Ostwald, a distinguished chemist and philosopher-energetist, attempted to construct measurable Farbenlehre. He is a creator of a strict colors’ taxonomy, but his soul of artist (he was also a painter) “crept into” his study of colors. The discussion of Ostwald’s deliberations is contained in the third part of the paper. (shrink)

According to reductionists about agency, an agent’s bringing something about is reducible to states and events involving the agent bringing something about. Many have worried that reductionism cannot accommodate robust forms of agency, such as self-determination. One common reductionist answer to this worry contends that self-determining agents are identified with certain states and events, and so these states and events causing a decision counts as the agent’s self-determining the decision. In this paper I discuss J. David Velleman’s identification reductionist theory, (...) according to which an agent is identified with his desire to make most sense of himself. I develop two constraints that an adequate identification reductionist theory must satisfy and show that Velleman’s theory cannot satisfy both. In particular, I argue that Velleman’s account founders on cases of self-determined self-transformation. (shrink)