BackgroundPlagiarism is common and threatens the integrity of the scientific literature. However, its detection is time consuming and difficult, presenting challenges to editors and publishers who are entrusted with ensuring the integrity of published literature.MethodsIn this study, the extent of plagiarism in manuscripts submitted to a major specialty medical journal was documented. We manually curated submitted manuscripts and deemed an article contained plagiarism if one sentence had 80 % of the words copied from another published paper. Commercial plagiarism detection software (...) was utilized and its use was optimized.ResultsIn 400 consecutively submitted manuscripts, 17 % of submissions contained unacceptable levels of plagiarized material with 82 % of plagiarized manuscripts submitted from countries where English was not an official language. Using the most commonly employed commercial plagiarism detection software, sensitivity and specificity were studied with regard to the generated plagiarism score. The cutoff score maximizing both sensitivity and specificity was 15 % (sensitivity 84.8 % and specificity 80.5 %).ConclusionsPlagiarism was a common occurrence among manuscripts submitted for publication to a major American specialty medical journal and most manuscripts with plagiarized material were submitted from countries in which English was not an official language. The use of commercial plagiarism detection software can be optimized by selecting a cutoff score that reflects desired sensitivity and specificity. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

The shortage of organs for transplantation by its nature prompts ethical dilemmas. For example, although there is an imperative to save human life and reduce suffering by maximising the supply of vital organs, there is an equally important obligation to ensure that the process by which we increase the supply respects the rights of all stakeholders. In a relatively unexamined practice in the USA, organs are procured from unrepresented decedents without their express consent. Unrepresented decedents have no known healthcare wishes (...) or advance care planning document; they also lack a surrogate. The Revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (RUAGA) of 2006 sends a mixed message about the procurement of organs from this patient population and there are hospitals that authorise donation. In addition, in adopting the RUAGA, some states included provisions that clearly allow organ procurement from unrepresented decedents. An important unanswered question is whether this practice meets the canons of ethical permissibility. The current Brief Report presents two principled approaches to the topic as a way of highlighting some of the complexities involved. Concluding remarks offer suggestions for future research and discussion. (shrink)

In 2012, a U.S. Institute of Medicine report called for a different approach to health care: “Left unchanged, health care will continue to underperform; cause unnecessary harm; and strain national, state, and family budgets.” The answer, they suggested, would be a “continuously learning” health system. Ethicists and researchers urged the creation of “learning health organizations” that would integrate knowledge from patient‐care data to continuously improve the quality of care. Our experience with an ongoing research study on atrial fibrillation—a trial known (...) as IMPACT‐AFib—gave us some insight into one of the challenges that will have to be dealt with in creating these organizations. Although the proposed educational intervention study placed no restrictions on what providers and health plans could do, the oversight team argued that the ethical principle of beneficence did not allow the researchers to be “bystanders” in relation to a control group receiving suboptimal care. In response, the researchers designed a “workaround” that allowed the project to go forward. We believe the experience suggests that what we call “bystander ethics” will create challenges for the kinds of quality improvement research that LHOs are designed to do. (shrink)

Nanoethics seeks to examine the potential risks and rewards of applications of nanotechnology. This up-to-date anthology gives the reader an introduction to and basic foundation in nanotechnology and nanoethics, and then delves into near-, mid-, and far-term issues. Comprehensive and authoritative, it: -/- - Goes beyond the usual environmental, health, and safety (EHS) concerns to explore such topics as privacy, nanomedicine, human enhancement, global regulation, military, humanitarianism, education, artificial intelligence, space exploration, life extension, and more -/- -Features contributions from forty (...) preeminent experts from academia and industry worldwide, reflecting diverse perspectives -/- -Includes seminal works that influence nanoethics today -/- -Encourages an informed, proactive approach to nanoethics and advocates addressing new and emerging controversies before they impede progress or impact our welfare -/- This resource is designed to promote further investigations and a broad and balanced dialogue in nanoethics, dealing with critical issues that will affect the industry as well as society. While this will be a definitive reference for students, scientists in academia and industry, policymakers, and regulators, it's also a valuable resource for anyone who wants to understand the challenges, principles, and potential of nanotechnology. (shrink)

This paper presents the principal findings from a three-year research project funded by the US National Science Foundation on ethics of human enhancement technologies. To help untangle this ongoing debate, we have organized the discussion as a list of questions and answers, starting with background issues and moving to specific concerns, including: freedom & autonomy, health & safety, fairness & equity, societal disruption, and human dignity. Each question-and-answer pair is largely self-contained, allowing the reader to skip to those issues of (...) interest without affecting continuity. (shrink)

> The Japanese have a word which summarizes all the best in Japanese life, yet it has no explanation and cannot be translated. It is the word shibui, and the best approximation to its meaning is 'acerbic good taste'.—James A. Michener in Iberia The austere beauty of lacquerware, the wizened lines and thickened trunk of a 100-year-old bonsai, the veiled beauty of murky jade—what do all these have in common? These are the qualities of shibumi, a Japanese aesthetic defined (...) by the seven characteristics described by Dr Yanagi Soetsu1 in The Unknown Craftsman: simplicity, implicity, modesty, naturalness, everydayness, imperfection, silence. Derived from the root word shibui, literally meaning ‘bitter’, the antonym of amai, for sweet—the etymology of shibusa encapsulates the jolting acerbity of one inadvertently sinking her teeth into an unripe persimmon; paradoxically described as a moment of inward transcendence. Quite distinct from wabi-sabi—while pottery and stoneware may be embraced for organic lines reflecting naturalness and imperfections as an aesthetic; within the distillation of shibumi, beyond the asymmetrical and flawed, lies an appreciation of ‘beauty with inner implications’ that ‘allows depth of feeling to be visible through spare surface design thereby manifesting the invisible core that …. (shrink)

The Problem of Heavenly Freedom explores the tension between the concept of free will and the absence of sin in heaven, challenging traditional notions of moral freedom. This paper examines James Sennett’s solution, known as “proximate compatibilism,” which argues that heavenly freedom can coexist with a form of determinism based on the moral character developed through earthly choices. Sennett contends that true freedom does not require the potential for evil but instead reflects the ability to act in accordance with (...) one’s highest good. Building on Sennett’s framework, Timothy Pawl and Kevin Timpe offer an extension that incorporates libertarian freedom, suggesting that moral perfection enhances rather than diminishes free will by allowing individuals to choose among various good actions that reflect their alignment with divine goodness. The paper also addresses potential objections, such as the concern that this view undermines significant moral freedom and the role of divine grace, providing rebuttals that highlight the transformative power of character and the synergistic relationship between human choice and divine assistance. By redefining the nature of free will in the context of heavenly existence, this paper presents a compelling argument that true freedom is realized through the alignment of the will with moral perfection, offering a deeper understanding of human destiny and the ultimate purpose of spiritual growth. (shrink)

Thomas McNally’s “More than a feeling: Wittgenstein and William James on love and other emotions” is one of the very few studies on Wittgenstein on love. McNally claims that Wittgenstein does not have a unified account of emotions. In his opinion, Wittgenstein’s criterial view applies to simple emotions and simple kinds of love, but not to deep kinds of love. In this paper, I show that McNally’s interpretation contains a number of misunderstandings of Wittgenstein’s criterial view and his treatment (...) of emotions and of love. I offer an alternative interpretation, which corrects these misunderstandings. I show that Wittgenstein’s criterial view is applicable to all mental phenomena, including all kinds of love. (shrink)

Ethical Politics and Modern Society introduces and critically examines British idealist philosopher, Thomas Hill Green, his practical philosophy and its reception in China between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. As a response to the modernity issue in Great Britain, Green's philosophy, in particular his ethical politics, anticipated a practical solution to the individual alienation issue in modern society. Witnessing the resemblance between Green's ethical politics and classical Chinese ethical and political thought, some Chinese scholars became inclined (...) to take Green's thought as an intellectual approach to assimilate Western modernity. While Green and the Chinese scholars both intended to articulate an ethical conception of modern politics in response to the issue of modernity, their results were very different. In this book, James Jia-Hau Liu analyses why modern Chinese scholars introduced Green's philosophy to China and why the studies of Green's philosophy in China have since faded away. Modern Chinese scholars, such as Gao Yi-Han, Chin Yueh-Lin, Tang Jun-Yi, Chang Fo-Chuan and Yin Hai-Guang, are explored in greater detail. The contradictory standings towards modernity between Green and Chinese scholars illustrate how to understand the difference forms of modernity that can be embodied therein. Ethical Politics and Modern Society is a valuable resource to scholars of political philosophy, political theory, history of social and political thought, British Idealism and the work of Thomas Hill Green. (shrink)

This volume presents cutting-edge theory and research on emotions as constructed events rather than fixed, essential entities. It provides a thorough introduction to the assumptions, hypotheses, and scientific methods that embody psychological constructionist approaches. Leading scholars examine the neurobiological, cognitive/perceptual, and social processes that give rise to the experiences Western cultures call sadness, anger, fear, and so on. The book explores such compelling questions as how the brain creates emotional experiences, whether the "ingredients" of emotions also give rise to other (...) mental states, and how to define what is or is not an emotion. Introductory and concluding chapters by the editors identify key themes and controversies and compare psychological construction to other theories of emotion. (shrink)

It is unfortunate that Francis Y. Lin, in ‘Chomsky on the “ordinary language” view of language’ pays little attention to his own remark, ‘Chomsky’s criticisms make us realize that we should not be content with general and vague formulations of convention, ability, and so on. We must make such notions precise and provide details’ Lin speaks so imprecisely and provides so few details of notions on which he relies heavily, such as ‘general learning mechanism’ and ‘sentence frame’, that readers must (...) employ large amounts of guesswork to place even a halfway specific interpretation on his proposals and claims. (shrink)

Among the reasons that Whitehead is such an interesting philosopher is that his work resonates across philosophical traditions. This collection develops connections between Whiteheadian concepts and recent European thinkers. The purpose is not simply to compare, however, but, as editor Jeremy Fackenthal suggests, to develop a Whiteheadian thinking “in tandem” with European philosophers in order to create disruptions or “dislocations” in thought that can engender creative approaches to contemporary problems.One general feature of the book deserves mention at the outset, though (...) I will return to it later in the review: although phenomenology and hermeneutics are each represented in the volume, roughly half of the essays focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze (if we group these together with essays focused on “new materialism,” which is connected with Deleuze, the proportion is more like two-thirds). This will be no surprise, since Deleuze is the European philosopher who was most appreciative of Whitehead. And yet, the result is that the conversation with “continental philosophy” is highly selective.The book is organized into three parts, each comprised of three essays. In part 1, “Technological and Systematic Dislocations,” William S. Hamrick brings Whitehead into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of “the flesh” to suggest an ecological ontology capable of overcoming the instrumentalization of nature. Hamrick's strategy is to read Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty as contributing to an “ontological foundation” for a sustainable civilization (18). Bo Eberle writes about the “quantified self” suggested in new, wearable self-monitoring technologies. Drawing on Whitehead's notion of causal efficacy, Eberle argues that devices such as Fitbit give us access to bodily states that bypasses the standard ways we are aware of ourselves (i.e., through consciousness). He goes further to argue that, like all ways of knowing, wearable technologies are selective, and that the selection reflects the interests of the manufacturers and promotes a certain kind of subjectivity (in the case of Fitbit, a subjectivity that is oriented toward “getting your steps in”). Whitehead's epistemology thus enables the critic of wearable technologies to understand how contemporary experience and self-understanding is shaped not simply by recent technological mediations but by the material interests embedded in them. J.R. Hustwit and Carl Dyke take on what they call “activist” uses of Whitehead that naively (in their judgment) suggest that a non-relational substance metaphysics is to blame for most of our social ills. They employ the theory of complex adaptive systems in conversation with Whitehead and Antonio Gramsci to show that, in fact, achieving significant social change is far more difficult and even unpredictable than mere insertion of better ideas into public discourse. Dominant hegemonies have ways of adapting and absorbing attempts to undermine them. Here Hustwit and Dyke draw on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur to suggest that resistance to the dominant hegemony is nevertheless always possible because of the vagueness of discourse, allowing a plurality of competing interpretations and thus fractures in the dominant hegemony. However, even this kind of resistance is impossible to control and its effects incapable of being entirely predicted. To the essay's titular question, “Can Whitehead save the world?” the authors answer, “No.”In part 2, “Animal/Human Dislocations,” Jeremy Fackenthal draws on the new materialism of Rosi Braidotti (and Deleuze) along with Whitehead to argue for a “process-relational” nomadism that culminates in a “becoming-imperceptible.” His reading together of Whitehead and Braidotti creates the opportunity to recast the former's concept of objective immortality in such a way that it does not refer to death so much as to being diffused into a relational network. The satisfaction of an actual occasion may be taken as its translation into its effects among its relations. Fackenthal argues that this becoming-imperceptible makes possible a sustainable presence within a fragile network of life. Deena M. Lin uses Whitehead, Braidotti, and Judith Butler to lay out a vision of human life as precarious and deserving attention, care, and solidarity. She presses this vision as a direct moral assault on US (Trump's) policy toward Syrian refugees. Going further, she draws on Braidotti's posthuman account of zoe to argue for universal connection and solidarity with all life that should foster, as the title of her essay puts it, “Welcoming of Syrian Life.” Tano Posteraro offers an intriguing essay drawing on Jakob von Uexküll's account of animal experience. Posteraro argues that Uexküll's notion of an animal's Umwelt, shaped by its distinctive perceptual apparatus, needs to be supplemented by Whitehead's notion of prehension to account for the active dimension of animal perception. Rather than a passive registering of animal environments, Posteraro argues that the latter are constructed, and that concepts (or conceptual prehensions) should be understood as tools with which such environments are constructed.In part 3, “Time, the World, and Abstraction,” three essays probe ways that Whiteheadian and Deleuzian themes may resonate critically and constructively. Kris Klotz brings the thought of Whitehead and Deleuze together to inquire about how alternatives to present social forms are envisioned. He argues that, for Whitehead, every actual occasion involves a selection of some features of the past, and, further, that every selection is also an abstraction from the concrete welter of influences impinging on it. For Whitehead, then, to envision alternatives involves a critique of abstractions, a reinstatement of the concrete plurality of possibilities. This, for Whitehead, is what rationality does: it works at restoring the concrete, and, with it, a series of alternatives that have been eclipsed. To this Whiteheadian analysis, Klotz adds Deleuze and Guattari's critique of “opinion.” For Deleuze and Guattari, opinion is not an idiosyncrasy but a consensus to which differences of experience are subjected. Philosophy, for Deleuze and Guattari, must always struggle against opinion in order to bring alternatives to light. These conceptions of reason/philosophy, Klotz argues, represent useful ways to critique inequalities and other social wrongs that are embedded in the social forms that are routinely taken for granted. Elijah Prewitt-Davis uses a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, along with philosophical innovations of Foucault, Deleuze, and Whitehead, to offer a distinctive account of power. Prewitt-Davis calls attention to Deleuze's important book on Leibniz, The Fold, and to how Whitehead's concept of prehension lies at its center. The upshot is that power is not reduced to dominance but, instead, is at work wherever any occasion of experience persists amid the onslaught of the influence of other occasions. Power, as Deleuze wrote, is the capacity to be affected—and to decide how to constitute oneself anew. Keith Robinson offers a detailed account of Whitehead's epistemology along with a reading of Deleuze's analysis of temporality to suggest that there is a common trajectory that seeks to undermine what the title of the essay describes as the “Bifurcation of Nature” (i.e., the separation of natural phenomena and human experience) within the dominant Western philosophical tradition.There is much of value in the volume as a whole. Aside from staging what Spinoza might have called good encounters between Whitehead and a number of continental philosophers, enhancing the conceptual power of each, the contributors are able to make a case that these philosophical trajectories, when read together, have much to contribute to our understanding of and response to the pressing issues of the day. In addition, readers who are interested in the relationship between Whitehead and the new materialism will find this volume to be a helpful resource, stocked with fine examples of how to sharpen new materialist thinking with Whitehead and how to read contemporary contexts through these lenses. On the other hand, this book is not a handbook nor a comprehensive reference. The organizational logic behind its division into sections is murky and the amount of attention given to particular continental philosophers as opposed to others appears somewhat arbitrary: there are recent continental philosophers who get little to no attention at (Derrida, Malabou, Žižek, Agamben, Latour, Nancy, for example), several of whom might prove to be quite interesting to read “in tandem” with Whitehead. Perhaps that is just to say that there are many more essays to be written. (shrink)

The effort to revise the Declaration of Helsinki and the CIOMS Guidelines has sparked a sometimes vitriolic debate centering on the use of placebo controls.

As an essential companion to Plato's Apology and Crito, Socrates Against Athens provides valuable historical and cultural context to our understanding of the trial.

Papers from a series of conferences organized by the Esalen Institute Program on Revisioning Philosophy (a few of the 18 essays have been previously published) reflect one common theme--the need to out the envelope of contemporary ...

This history of Western philosophy is based upon two convictions: one is that this must be a subjective enterprise; the other is that its guiding aim should be to interpret the great diversity found among past philosophers as an understandable, connected, and progressive order. The author relates these philosophies to each other to discern a path through 2500 years of reflective thought as pointing toward a justifiable present position. Contents: Early Greek Philosophy; Plato; Aristotle; A Transition: The Stoics and Skeptics; (...) The Emergence of Faith; Saint Augustine; Saint Thomas Aquinas; Faith and the Re-Emergence of Reason; Descartes; Leibniz and Spinoza; The British Empiricists; Kant and Schopenhauer; Vico; Hegel; Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind; After Hegel; A Summary Conclusion and a Look Beyond; Index. (shrink)

Athens and Wittenberg explores how Luther and early Lutheranism did not neglect the classics of Greece and Rome, but continued to draw from the philosophy and poetry of antiquity in their quest to reform the church.

Gestures and speech are clearly synchronized in many ways. However, previous studies have shown that the semantic similarity between gestures and speech breaks down as people approach transitions in understanding. Explanations for these gesture–speech mismatches, which focus on gestures and speech expressing different cognitive strategies, have been criticized for disregarding gestures’ and speech's integration and synchronization. In the current study, we applied three different perspectives to investigate gesture–speech synchronization in an easy and a difficult task: temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and (...) complexity matching. Participants engaged in a simple cognitive task and were assigned to either an easy or a difficult condition. We automatically measured pointing gestures, and we coded participant's speech, to determine the temporal alignment and semantic similarity between gestures and speech. Multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis was used to determine the extent of complexity matching between gestures and speech. We found that task difficulty indeed influenced gesture–speech synchronization in all three domains. We thereby extended the phenomenon of gesture–speech mismatches to difficult tasks in general. Furthermore, we investigated how temporal alignment, semantic similarity, and complexity matching were related in each condition, and how they predicted participants’ task performance. Our study illustrates how combining multiple perspectives, originating from different research areas (i.e., coordination dynamics, complexity science, cognitive psychology), provides novel understanding about cognitive concepts in general and about gesture–speech synchronization and task difficulty in particular. (shrink)

In 1975 the Clarendon Press at Oxford published Peter Nidditch's edition of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding. In his Introduction Nidditch says that his edition “offers a text that is directly derived, without modernization, from the early published versions; it notes the provenance of all its adopted readings ; and it aims at recording all relevant differences between these versions”. As Nidditch goes on to acknowledge, the “relevant differences” were many, “requiring several thousand registrations both in the case (...) of material variants and in the case of formal variants ”. The textual history of Locke's Essay is extremely complicated. While there is no manuscript of the first edition of the book, there were four editions in Locke's lifetime, each new one containing extensive and significant revisions, as well as a posthumous edition published shortly after the author's death. There was a translation into French made with Locke's cooperation and published in 1700, and a Latin translation came out a year later. Nevertheless, Nidditch managed to record all the material variants in footnotes to the text, in a way that makes it fairly easy to track the changes that Locke made to successive editions of the book, and to locate points at which judgements had to be made as a critical text was established on the basis of the chosen copy text. Sometimes a critical edition succeeds in completely changing the way that a text is read. Peter Laslett's 1960 edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government is a good example. Nidditch's edition of the Essay did not have that kind of very dramatic effect on Locke scholarship. Rather, it made it possible for those without direct access to all the early editions to engage in careful, historically sensitive studies of Locke's account of human understanding. The result was a slow revolution in Locke studies that continues to shed new light on even the most familiar aspects of the Lockean philosophy. (shrink)

In eighteenth‐century Britain, there was more than one way of thinking about poverty. For some, poverty was an essentially moral problem. Another way of conceiving of poverty was in economic terms. In this article, however, I want to consider some eighteenth‐century versions of the idea that poverty might be a political issue. What I have in mind is the idea that a society containing a large proportion of very poor people might be, just for that reason, an unstable and disordered (...) society. I argue, first, that this idea is central to Smith's treatment of poverty in The Wealth of Nations. Then, after a brief account of how Paine and Godwin imagined the end of poverty, I describe the further development and refinement of Smithian lines of thought in Burke and Malthus. My conclusion is that Smith, Burke, and Malthus constitute evidence that present‐day ideas of social justice derive more from the nineteenth century and subsequent developments in moral and political thought than from the early modern period. (shrink)

Discourses between Ayōttitācar, 1845-1914 and Ma. Ciṅkāravēlu,1860-1946 on Buddhism. These were published in Tamilan̲, Tamil magazine, published between 1907-1914.

The practice of paying research subjects for participating inclinical trials has yet to receive an adequate moral analysis.Dickert and Grady argue for a wage payment model in whichresearch subjects are paid an hourly wage based on that ofunskilled laborers. If we accept this approach, what follows?Norms for just working conditions emerge from workplacelegislation and political theory. All workers, includingpaid research subjects under Dickert and Grady''s analysis,have a right to at least minimum wage, a standard work week,extra pay for overtime hours, (...) a safe workplace, no faultcompensation for work-related injury, and union organization.If we accept that paid research subjects are wage earners likeany other, then the implications for changes to current practiceare substantial. (shrink)

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the entire career of one of Britain's greatest men of letters. It sets in biographical and historical context all of Hume's works, from A Treatise of Human Nature to The History of England, bringing to light the major influences on the course of Hume's intellectual development, and paying careful attention to the differences between the wide variety of literary genres with which Hume experimented. The major events in Hume's life (...) are fully described, but the main focus is on Hume's intentions as a philosophical analyst of human nature, politics, commerce, English history, and religion. Careful attention is paid to Hume's intellectual relations with his contemporaries. The goal is to reveal Hume as a man intensely concerned with the realization of an ideal of open-minded, objective, rigorous, dispassionate dialogue about all the principal questions faced by his age. (shrink)

This article explores the idea that Core Affect provides the emotional quality to any conscious state. Core Affect is the neurophysiological state always accessible as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated, even if it is not always the focus of attention. Core Affect, alone or more typically combined with other psychological processes, is found in the experiences of feeling, mood and emotion, including the subjective experiences of fear, anger and other so-called basic emotions which are commonly thought to (...) be raw, primitive, and universal. (shrink)