After centuries of neglect, the ethics of food are back with a vengeance. Justice for food workers and small farmers has joined the rising tide of concern over the impact of industrial agriculture on food animals and the broader environment, all while a global epidemic of obesity-related diseases threatens to overwhelm modern health systems. An emerging worldwide social movement has turned to local and organic foods, and struggles to exploit widespread concern over the next wave of genetic engineering or nanotechnologies (...) applied to food. Paul B. Thompson's book applies the rigor of philosophy to key topics in the first comprehensive study explore interconnections hidden deep within this welter of issues. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of experience working closely with farmers, agricultural researchers and food system activists, he explores the eclipse of food ethics during the rise of nutritional science, and examines the reasons for its sudden re-emergence in the era of diet-based disease. Thompson discusses social injustice in the food systems of developed economies and shows how we have missed the key insights for understanding food ethics in the developing world. His discussions of animal production and the environmental impact of agriculture break new ground where most philosophers would least expect it. By emphasizing the integration of these issues, Thompson not only brings a comprehensive philosophical approach to moral issues in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food -- he introduces a fresh way to think about practical ethics that will have implications in other areas of applied philosophy. (shrink)

In the Evolution of Culture. The idea of cultural mentalities first arose in European anthropology's confrontation with global primitive cultures. During the early twentieth century's period of confident imperialism, the European nations articulated their confrontation with non-literate cultures in a poetic imagining of the 'primitive' as a Romantic 'Other'. As psychology developed in Europe to explore the unconscious as well as madness, a new ethnology also sought to enter into the mind of the primitive as an exotic place where logic (...) and reason did not rule. (shrink)

The global #MeToo movement has precipitated a reckoning with gendered, sexual, and other forms of harassment and bullying in higher education. In academia, harassment is rooted in the history of re...

-Vitality and mechanism. -The cosmic motor power. -Atom and spirit. -Purpose in nature. -Law and Providence. -Good the final goal. -Fate or choice. -Our self-made world. -Partners in world-making. -Search the deep things.

While current literature on examination and testing mostly engages with the objectivity of exams and their procedural logic, this article is concerned with the ‘ethical dimension’ of examination: Examinations provoke a particular relation to oneself, possibly self-transformation. The praxis of examination entails self-confrontation in the light of the uncertainty regarding that which is expected of the self. Referring to an example taken from the field of early education, four ‘figures' – positional difference, exposition, identification, and representation – are used in (...) a heuristic manner to elaborate on the ethical dimension in examination. The aim of the paper is to view ‘examination’ from a theoretical point of view focusing on practices, on the one hand, and to analyze the ethical norms and expectations that the self is addressed with in the field of early education, on the other. (shrink)

The Edinburgh Medical Group Research Project is unique in Britain. Part of its function is to experiment with teaching medical ethics both inside and outside of the Medical School. The papers which follow have been written by two full-time reseach fellows working with the Project and two of the professional advisers, one nursing and one medical. Together they give a picture of the wide scope of exerimental teaching taking place in Edinburgh and present some preliminary results from these experiments.

Neurodegenerative diseases are becoming increasingly common as life expectancy increases. Recent years have seen tremendous progress in the identification of genes that cause these diseases. While mutations have been found and cellular processes defined that are altered in the disease state, the identification of treatments and cures has proven more elusive. The process of finding drugs and therapies to treat human diseases can be slow, expensive and frustrating. Can model organisms such as Drosophila speed the process of finding cures and (...) treatments for human neurodegenerative diseases? We pose three questions, (1) can one mimic the essential features of human diseases in an organism like Drosophila, (2) can one cure a model organisms of human disease and (3) will these efforts accelerate the identification of useful therapies for testing in mice and ultimately humans? Here we focus on the use of Drosophila to identify potential treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's and we discuss how well these therapies translate into mammalian systems. BioEssays 26:485–496, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Two issues have been central within political philosophy in the last decade or so. The first is the debate over 'the politics of distribution versus the politics of recognition,' which is usually associated with the work of Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser. The second is discussion of the phenomenon known as globalization, focusing on the notions of cosmopolitanism and global justice. This book explores the relationship between these two issues. It considers not only the global dimension of the politics of (...) recognition, but also how recognition theory can provide new insights into our understanding of problems of global justice, especially those of a non-distributive nature. A number of the contributors consider the relevance of Hegel's theory of recognition for our understanding of these issues. (shrink)

Bilingualism has been identified as a potential cognitive factor linked to delayed onset of dementia as well as boosting executive functions in healthy individuals. However, more recently, this claim has been called into question following several failed replications. It remains unclear whether these contradictory findings reflect how bilingualism is defined between studies, or methodological limitations when measuring the bilingual effect. One key issue is that despite the claims that bilingualism yields general protection to cognitive processes, studies reporting putative bilingual differences (...) are often focused on domain specific experimental paradigms. This study chose a broader approach, by considering the consequences of bilingualism on a wide range of cognitive functions within individuals. We utilised 19 measures of different cognitive functions commonly associated with bilingual effects, to form a “cognitive profile” for 215 non-clinical participants. We recruited Welsh speakers, who as a group of bilinguals were highly homogeneous, as means of isolating the bilingualism criterion. We sought to determine if such analyses would independently classify bilingual/monolingual participant groups based on emergent patterns driven by collected cognitive profiles, such that population differences would emerge. Multiple predictive models were trained to independently recognise the cognitive profiles of bilinguals, older adults and higher education attainment. Despite managing to successfully classify cognitive profiles based on age and education, the model failed to differentiate between bilingual and monolingual cognitive ability at a rate greater than that of chance. Repeated modelling using alternative definitions of bilingualism, and just the older adults, yielded similar results. In all cases then, using our “bottom–up” analytical approach, there was no evidence that bilingualism as a variable indicated differential cognitive performance – as a consequence, we conclude that bilinguals are not cognitively different from their monolingual counterparts, even in older demographics. We suggest that studies that have reported a bilingual advantage could well have confounded other key variables that may be driving reported advantages. We recommend that future research refine the machine learning methods used in this study to further investigate the complex relationship between bilingualism and cognition. (shrink)

My colleague, Professor W. M. Lindsay, invites, or challenges, me to reply to his note on ‘Ciris’ ; I can but take him at his word.Professor Lindsay seeks to identify the two birds Haliaetus and Ciris, and finds the task an easy one; he identifies Ciris with a Tern confidently and categorically. We learn ‘from Gallus' epyllium … that it was a sea-bird with red legs, so rapid in flight that it always evaded the swoop of the sea-eagle. What can (...) this be but a tern?’. (shrink)

These essays develop a Marxist response to and approach to aspects of the recent economic past in the United Kingdom. They reflect issues and controversies that have arisen within economic policy debate and the economic theory associated with the debate, highlighting the problematic nature of economic policy in the period since the mid-1970s. The book, first published in 1986, develops a line of argument organized around issues of ‘calculation’, thus challenging the orthodox Marxist framework and presenting a neo-Marxist analysis.