The large numbers of children working in developing countries continue to provoke calls for an end to such employment. However, many reformers argue that efforts should focus on ending the exploitation of children rather than depriving them of all opportunities to work. This posture reflects recognition of the multiplicity of needs children have and the diversity of situations in which they work. Unfortunately, research typically neglects these complexities and fails to distinguish between types of labor market jobs, dismisses household chores (...) as irrelevant, and conceptualizes children’s needs largely in terms of the education they require for successful careers. Based on data collected in schools in Franca, Brazil, where children often combine school with work in the shoe industry, this study first examined the implications of labor market jobs and household work for their health, life satisfaction, and education. Analyses suggested that both forms of work negatively affected children’s welfare, but the effects of household work were more extensive, especially for girls. The second part focused on children with labor market jobs and examined how facets of their jobs as well as their after-work household duties affected their welfare. A lack of discretion on the job undermined the health of both boys and girls, higher pay adversely affected boys’ education, and housework had detrimental effects on all indicators of girls’ welfare. This paper discusses the implications of these findings for further research and suggests the needs for attention to different forms of work activities within families. It concludes with suggestions for multinationals sourcing in developing areas that go beyond the usual calls for ridding their facilities and supply networks of child workers. (shrink)

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)

Activating the ERK pathway (extracellular signal‐regulated kinase pathway) has proven beneficial in several models of Huntington's disease (HD), and drugs that are protective in HD models have recently been found to activate ERK. Thus, the ERK cascade may be a potential target for therapeutic intervention in this currently untreatable disorder. HD is caused by an expanded polyglutamine repeat in the huntingtin (Htt) protein that actuates a diverse set of pathogenic mechanisms. In response to mutant Htt, ERK is activated and directs (...) a protective transcriptional response and inhibits caspase activation. Paradoxically, Htt also interferes with several signaling events of the ERK pathway. Mutant Htt compromises the ERK‐dependent transcriptional response to corticostriatal BDNF signaling. Mutant Htt also hinders glutamate uptake from the synaptic cleft by down‐regulating ERK‐dependent expression of glutamate transporters, leaving cells vulnerable to excitotoxicity. Some of this cellular complexity can be capitalized on to achieve selective activation of ERK, which can be protective. (shrink)

This article provides an introduction to a special issue of Body & Society that explores the surveillance--embodiment nexus. It accentuates both the prevalence and consequence of bodies being increasingly converted into ‘objects of information’ by surveillance technologies and systems. We begin by regarding the normalcy of body monitoring in contemporary life, illustrating how a plurality of biometric scanners operate to intermediate the physical surfaces and subjective depths of bodies in accordance with various concerns. We focus on everyday experiences of bodily (...) intermediation by surveillant dispositifs, and consider the broader political, epistemological, and ontological significance of these processes. We then point to the substantive intersections and divergences existing between body and surveillance studies. We conclude with an overview of the five articles appearing in this special issue. We describe how each contribution creates a template for imagining what a body is, and what a body might become, in a culture defined by proliferating data sharing behaviours, systems of codification, and practices of intermediation. (shrink)

Howard Brody expresses concern that citing the “two cases that put futility on the map,” namely Helga Wanglie and Baby K, may be providing ammunition to the opponents of the concept of medical futility. He in fact joins well-known opponents of the concept of medical futility in arguing that it is one thing for the physician to say whether a particular intervention will promote an identified goal, quite another to say whether a goal is worth pursuing. In the latter instance, (...) physicians are laying themselves open “to the criticism of taking on basic value judgments that are more appropriately left to patients and their surrogates.” Brody states that in both the Wanglie and Baby K cases, the “basic value judgments” had to do with the worthiness of maintaining unconscious life via medical technology. He classifies this as “a question of professional integrity—but not a question of futility,” adding that “more than semantics hinges on this distinction.” The “more than semantics” factor is a pragmatic, even political one. Failure to make this distinction renders physicians “that much more suspect and less trustworthy in the public debate.”. (shrink)

In the summer of 1979, a group of experts on law, medicine, and ethics assembled in Siracusa, Sicily, under the auspices of the International Commission of Jurists and the International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Science, to draft guidelines on the rights of persons with mental illness. Sitting across the table from me was a quiet, proud man of distinctive intelligence, William J. Curran, Frances Glessner Lee Professor of Legal Medicine at Harvard University. Professor Curran was one of the (...) principal drafters of those guidelines. Many years later in 1991, after several subsequent re-drafts by United Nations Rapporteur Erica-Irene Daes, the text was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly as the Principles for the Protection of Persons with Mental Illness and for the Improvement of Mental Health Care. This was the kind of remarkable achievement in the field of law and medicine that Professor Curran repeated throughout his distinguished career. (shrink)

How is it that sounds from the mouth or marks on a page—which by themselves are nothing like things or events in the world—can be world-disclosive in an automatic manner? In this fascinating and important book, Lawrence J. Hatab presents a new vocabulary for Heidegger’s early phenomenology of being-in-the-world and applies it to the question of language. He takes language to be a mode of dwelling, in which there is an immediate, direct disclosure of meanings, and sketches an extensive (...) picture of proto-phenomenology, how it revises the posture of philosophy, and how this posture applies to the nature of language. Representational theories are not rejected but subordinated to a presentational account of immediate disclosure in concrete embodied life. The book critically addresses standard theories of language, such that typical questions in the philosophy of language are revised in a manner that avoids binary separations of language and world, speech and cognition, theory and practise, realism and idealism, internalism and externalism. (shrink)

This book explores what anyone interested in ethics can draw from Heidegger's thinking. Heidegger argues for the radical finitude of being. But finitude is not only an ontological matter; it is also located in ethical life. Moral matters are responses to finite limit-conditions, and ethics itself is finite in its modes of disclosure, appropriation, and performance. With Heidegger's help, Lawrence Hatab argues that ethics should be understood as the contingent engagement of basic practical questions, such as how should human (...) beings live? (shrink)

Jnanasrimitra (975-1025) was regarded by both Buddhists and non-Buddhists as the most important Indian philosopher of his generation. His theory of exclusion combined a philosophy of language with a theory of conceptual content to explore the nature of words and thought. Jnanasrimitra's theory informed much of the work accomplished at Vikramasila, a monastic and educational complex instrumental to the growth of Buddhism. His ideas were also passionately debated among successive Hindu and Jain philosophers. This volume marks the first English translation (...) of Jnanasrimitra's Monograph on Exclusion, a careful, critical investigation into language, perception, and conceptual awareness. Featuring the rival arguments of Buddhist and Hindu intellectuals, among other thinkers, the Monograph reflects more than half a millennium of competing claims while providing an invaluable introduction to a crucial philosopher. Lawrence J. McCrea and Parimal G. Patil familiarize the reader with the author, themes, and topics of the text and situate Jnanasrimitra's findings within his larger intellectual milieu. Their clear, accessible, and accurate translation proves the influence of Jnanasrimitra on the foundations of Buddhist and Indian philosophy. (shrink)

I critically explore various forms of the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis. Many considerations, including the complexity of representational content and the systematicity of language understanding, support the view that some, but not all, of our mental representations occur in a language. I examine several arguments concerning sententialism and the propositional attitudes, Fodor's arguments concerning infant and animal thought, and Fodor's argument for radical concept nativism and show that none of these considerations require us to postulate a LOT that is (...) innate or otherwise distinct from spoken languages. Instead, I suggest that we maintain the more conservative hypothesis, supported by introspection, that some of our thoughts occur in the languages that we speak. (shrink)

Lawrence J. Dennis’s intellectual biography of John L. Childs, a leading figure in twentieth-century American educational philosophy between 1930 and 1960, traces Childs’s influence not only on education but also on midcentury politics, economics, and social issues. A disciple of John Dewey and an associate of William Heard Kilpatrick, George S. Counts, Boyd Bode, and other key figures in modern American education, Childs laid the philosophic basis for social reconstruction and became an important contributor to and interpreter of pragmatism (...) as a philosophy of education. Dennis describes how the Christian beliefs so central to Childs as a youth led him as a young man into a decade of YMCA missionary work in China. When he returned to the United States, Childs studied with John Dewey, later coauthoring two chapters of a book with him. Though Childs became a recognized expert on Dewey’s educational theory, he eventually became more of a reconstructionist than his mentor. Dennis carefully recounts Childs’s long association with Dewey as well as his political activities in the American Labor Party, the Liberal Party, and the American Federation of Teachers. He likewise traces the debate about metaphysics, democracy, and indoctrination that ensued among the foremost pragmatists of the day. (shrink)

ABSTRACT By means of the high ratings that they awarded to subprime mortgage‐backed bonds, the three major rating agencies—Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch—played a central role in the current financial crisis. Without these ratings, it is doubtful that subprime mortgages would have been issued in such huge amounts, since a major reason for the subprime lending boom was investor demand for high‐rated bonds—much of it generated by regulations that made such bonds mandatory for large institutional investors. And it is (...) even less likely that such bonds would have become concentrated on the balance sheets of the banks, for which they were rewarded by capital regulations that tilted toward high‐rated securities. Why, then, were the agencies excessively optimistic in their ratings of subprime mortgage‐backed securities? A combination of their fee structure, the complexity of the bonds that they were rating, insufficient historical data, some carelessness, and market pressures proved to be a potent brew. This combination was enabled, however, by seven decades of financial regulation that, beginning in the 1930s, had conferred the force of law upon these agencies' judgments about the creditworthiness of bonds and that, since 1975, had protected the three agencies from competition. (shrink)

In this book, Lawrence Hatab provides an accessible and provocative exploration of one of the best-known and still most puzzling aspects of Nietzsche's thought: eternal recurrence, the claim that life endlessly repeats itself identically in every detail. Hatab argues that eternal recurrence can and should be read literally, in just the way Nietzsche described it in the texts. The book offers a readable treatment of most of the core topics in Nietzsche's philosophy, all discussed in the light of the (...) consummating effect of eternal recurrence. Although Nietzsche called eternal recurrence his most fundamental idea, most interpreters have found it problematic or needful of redescription in other terms. For this reason, Hatab's book is an important and challenging contribution to Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

Both John Henry Newman and Vincent Gasser offered influential interpretations of the First Vatican Council’s teaching on infallibility. In contrast to many of theircontemporaries, Gasser and Newman placed papal infallibility alongside episcopal infallibility and the infallibility of the Catholic faithful. After exploring the views of Gasser and Newman, this essay compares their views to the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on infallibility in Lumen Gentium and concludes that even though Lumen Gentium cited Gasser, its theology is closer to Newman’s.

A referral was made to our Cardiac Transplant Program for a patient who was in the New Jersey Prison System. The Medical Director of the New Jersey Department of Corrections called regarding a 39-year-old inmate who was being treated in a New Jersey hospital that has a unit for prisoners from a nearby cor- rectional facility. The referring physician described the patient to our Medical Director of heart transplantation as a “murderer” who had been incarcerated since 1987 and sentenced to (...) prison for 30 years without eligibility for parole before completion of his 30-year sentence. The patient was being treated in the CCU of the facility and according to preliminary studies, was suffering from a possible dilated cardiomyopathy. There was evidence of a prior cerebrovascular accident (etiology unknown) with a dense hemiplegia of the left side. The patient was alert but unable to care for himself. There were a number of specific tests necessary to evaluate the patient's candidacy for heart transplantation before actually placing him-on a waiting list. However, the transplant director was uncertain about having the patient brought to our facility for further testing and called some members of the Transplant Selection Committee team to discuss the case. (shrink)

It probably should not be surprising, in this time of soaring medical costs and proliferating technology, that an intense debate has arisen over the concept of medical futility. Should doctors be doing all the things they are doing? In particular, should they be attempting treatments that have little likelihood of achieving the goals of medicine? What are the goals of medicine? Can we agree when medical treatment fails to achieve such goals? What should the physician do and not do under (...) such circumstances? Exploring these issues has forced us to revisit the doctor-patient relationship and the relationship of the medical profession to society in a most fundamental way. Medical futility has both a quantitative and qualitative component. I maintain that medical futility is the unacceptable likelihood of achieving an effect that the patient has the capacity to appreciate as a benefit. Both emphasized terms are important. A patient is neither a collection of organs nor merely an individual with desires. Rather, a patient (from the word to suffer ) is a person who seeks the healing (meaning to make whole ) powers of the physician. The relationship between the two is central to the healing process and the goals of medicine. Medicine today has the capacity to achieve a multitude of effects, raising and lowering blood pressure, speeding, slowing, and even removing and replacing the heart, to name but a minuscule few. But none of these effects is a benefit unless the patient has at the very least the capacity to appreciate it. Sadly, in the futility debate wherein some critics have failed or refused to define medical futility an important area of medicine has in large part been neglected, not only in treatment decisions at the bedside, but in public discussions—comfort care—the physician’s obligation to alleviate suffering, enhance well being and support the dignity of the patient in the last few days of life. (shrink)

Fodor has argued that, because concept acquisition relies on the use of concepts already possessed by the learner, all concepts that cannot be definitionally reduced are innate. Since very few reductive definitions are available, it appears that most concepts are innate. After noting the reasons why we find such radical concept nativism implausible, I explicate Fodor's argument, showing that anyone who is committed to mentalistic explanation should take it seriously. Three attempts at avoiding the conclusion are examined and found to (...) be unsuccessful. I then present an alternative way around Fodor's nativism; I maintain that concepts at a given level of explanation can be semantically primitive, yet at least partially acquired if some of the conditions at a lower level of explanation that are responsible for the concept's presence are themselves acquired. (shrink)