Applies ancient wisdom to modern life with Taoist exercises designed to identify and strengthen the balance between the demands of society and one's true desires.

The Dispossessed has been described by political thinker Andre Gorz as 'The most striking description I know of the seductions—and snares—of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society.' To date, however, the radical social, cultural, and political ramifications of Le Guin's multiple award-winning novel remain woefully under explored. Editors Laurence Davis and Peter Stillman right this state of affairs in the first ever collection of original essays devoted to Le Guin's novel. Among the topics covered in this wide-ranging, (...) international and interdisciplinary collection are the anarchist, ecological, post-consumerist, temporal, revolutionary, and open-ended utopian politics of The Dispossessed. The book concludes with an essay by Le Guin written specially for this volume, in which she reassesses the novel in light of the development of her own thinking over the past 30 years. (shrink)

American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) recently provided two recommendations about predictive genetic testing of children. The Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium's Pediatrics Working Group compared these recommendations, focusing on operational and ethical issues specific to decision making for children. Content analysis of the statements addresses two issues: (1) how these recommendations characterize and analyze locus of decision making, as well as the risks and benefits of testing, and (2) whether the guidelines conflict or (...) come to different but compatible conclusions because they consider different testing scenarios. These statements differ in ethically significant ways. AAP/ACMG analyzes risks and benefits using best interests of the child and recommends that, absent ameliorative interventions available during childhood, clinicians should generally decline to order testing. Parents authorize focused tests. ACMG analyzes risks and benefits using the interests of the child and other family members and recommends that sequencing results be examined for additional variants that can lead to ameliorative interventions, regardless of age, which laboratories should report to clinicians who should contextualize the results. Parents must accept additional analysis. The ethical arguments in these statements appear to be in tension with each other. (shrink)

Some of the authors of the essays on Chinese philosophers prefer the pin yin system of romanization for Chinese names and words, while others prefer the Wade‐Giles system. Given that both systems are in wide use today, important names and words are given in both their pin yin and Wade‐Giles formulations. The author's preference is printed first, followed by the alternative romanization within brackets.

In vertebrates it is often found that if one considers a group of genes clustered on a certain chromosome, then the homologues of those genes often form another cluster on a different chromosome. There are four explanations, not necessarily mutually exclusive, to explain how such homologous clusters appeared. Homologous clusters are expected at a low probability even if genes are distributed at random. The duplication of a subset of the genome might create homologous clusters, as would a duplication of the (...) entire genome. Alternatively, it may be adaptive for certain combinations of genes to cluster, although clearly the genes must have duplicated prior to rearrangement into clusters. Molecular phylogenetics provides a means to examine the origins of homologous clusters, although it is difficult to discriminate between the different explanations using current data. However, with more extensive sequencing and mapping of vertebrate genomes, especially those of the early diverging chordates, it should soon become possible to resolve the origins of homologous clusters. BioEssays 21:697–703, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

It is widely held that intuitive dualism—an implicit default mode of thought that takes minds to be separable from bodies and capable of independent existence—is a human universal. Among the findings taken to support universal intuitive dualism is a pattern of evidence in which “psychological” traits (knowledge, desires) are judged more likely to continue after death than bodily or “biological” traits (perceptual, physiological, and bodily states). Here, we present cross-cultural evidence from six study populations, including non-Western societies with diverse belief (...) systems, that shows that while this pattern exists, the overall pattern of responses nonetheless does not support intuitive dualism in afterlife beliefs. Most responses of most participants across all cultures tested were not dualist. While our sample is in no way intended to capture the full range of human societies and afterlife beliefs, it captures a far broader range of cultures than in any prior study, and thus puts the case for afterlife beliefs as evidence for universal intuitive dualism to a strong test. Based on these findings, we suggest that while dualist thinking is a possible mode of thought enabled by evolved human psychology, such thinking does not constitute a default mode of thought. Rather, our data support what we will call intuitive materialism—the view that the underlying intuitive systems for reasoning about minds and death produce as a default judgment that mental states cease to exist with bodily death. (shrink)

Laurence G. Thompson Chinese Religion in Western Languages. A Comprehensive and Classified Bibliography of Publications in English, French and German through 1980. The Association for Asian Studies Monograph No. XLI, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson 1985. xlix + 302pp. $19.95.

Genetics is in a postgenomic era, and this article illustrates this epistemological evolution using the debate between developmental criticism and traditional biometric genetics about gene × environment interaction. Quantitative geneticists are blamed for failing to respect the complexity of development; as a response, they claim a defensive position, called isolationist pluralism, which supports the idea that studying development is not their problem. But postgenomics seems to have accepted and integrated some developmental criticisms and the isolationist perspective has been challenged during (...) the last few years. The developmental and quantitative traditions actually represent two different levels of analysis, but biometrics has also a clear developmental explanatory potential as it suggests statistically the existence of mechanical causes. Both traditions work together to go ever further in the knowledge of the phenomena being studied. Postgenomic pluralism, instead of being isolationist, may be considered pragmatic. (shrink)

The human genome is not a uniform structure but, instead, is a mosaic of bands. Some of these bands can be seen by the eye. Stained with Giemsa and viewed under the microscope each human chromosome has a prototypical pattern of light and dark bands (G and R bands respectively). Other bands are not so easily viewed. The human genome is, for example, a mosaic of isochores, blocks of DNA within which the proportion of the bases G and C at (...) silent sites (introns, third positions in codons, intergene spacer) is fairly uniform. Recent work by Matassi and colleagues(1) has revealed what might be a new and unexpected banding pattern. They have found that the genes which are close together on the chromosome have similar rates of evolution. BioEssays 22:105–107, 2000. ©2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

This essay provide an overview of debates about the method of political philosophy that have recently gripped the field, focusing on the relationship of theory to practice. These debates can be usefully organized using two oppositions that together carve the field into three broad families of views. Call “practicalism” the view that the theory of justice exists to guide political action. Call “utopianism” the view that reflection on the idea of a just society plays an important role in the theory (...) of justice. Call the view that combines the two positions, “utopian practicalism”. On this view, reflection on the nature of a just society has an important role to play in guiding action. There would appear to be two ways to depart from this position: by rejecting the view's utopianism or its practicalism. So we find in the literature three broad camps: utopian practicalists, anti‐utopians, and anti‐practicalists. This essay provide an opinionated overview the ongoing debates between these three broad positions. It touches on the recent cases against practicalism by G.A. Cohen and David Estlund, the comparativist methodologies advocated by anti‐utopians such as Amartya Sen and Gerry Gaus, and systems failure approaches of Elizabeth Anderson and David Wiens. It also considers the recent development of novel utopian practicalist perspectives in the work of theorists including Erik Wright, Tommie Shelby, Lea Ypi, Pablo Gilabert, and Ben Laurence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Laying Medicine Open: Understanding Major Turning Points in the History of Medical EthicsLaurence B. McCullough (bio)AbstractAt different times during its history medicine has been laid open to accountability for its scientific and moral quality. This phenomenon of laying medicine open has sometimes resulted in major turning points in the history medical ethics. In this paper, I examine two examples of when the laying open of medicine has generated such (...) turning points: eighteenth-century British medicine and late twentieth-century American medicine. In the eighteenth century, the Scottish physician-philosopher, John Gregory (1724–1773), concerned with the unscientific, entrepreneurial, self-interested nature of then current medical practice, laid medicine open to accountability using the tools of ethics and philosophy of medicine. In the process, Gregory wrote the first professional ethics of medicine in the English-language literature, based on the physician’s fiduciary responsibility to the patient. In the late twentieth century, the managed practice of medicine has laid medicine open to accountability for its scientific quality and economic cost. This current laying open of medicine creates the challenge of developing medical ethics and bioethics for population-based medical science and practice.Reading the Histories of Medicine, Bioethics, and Medical EthicsThere are many ways in which to read the history of medi-cine and therefore of medical ethics and bioethics. For example, the history of medicine can be usefully understood in terms of successive advances or revolutions in biomedical science and its clinical applications, with medical ethics understood as a moral response to scientific and technological change. On this reading, which has been common in the history of bioethics for the past three decades, moral response is required to address scientific and technological changes that are unprecedented and therefore threaten to outstrip society’s moral capacities [End Page 7] to understand and manage those changes well. Much recent work on the ethical, legal, and social issues raised by the genome project appeals to this reading. The history of medicine can also be read in social terms, with medicine understood as a major social institution shaped by various factors, not limited to science. In this perspective, medicine and society are understood in terms of a complex and dynamic synergy. Bioethics and medical ethics become part of this synergy and are to be explained—perhaps even explained away—by social historical factors. There are, of course, other ways to read the history of medicine and therefore of bio-ethics and medical ethics—e.g., in terms of key figures and movements that are thought to have shaped developments in crucial ways.I want to suggest another way to read these histories, namely, the successive laying open of medicine to accountability that sometimes results in key turning points in the development of medical ethics and bioethics. On this reading, ethics is understood as an intellectual and practical discipline that makes medicine as a social institution and its practitioners, physicians, morally accountable for their clinical judgment, decision making, and behavior. This differs from Robert Veatch’s (1981) reading of the history of medical ethics either as particular—informed by intellectual, moral, and experiential resources thought to be available only to physicians—or universal—informed by intellectual, moral, and experiential resources generally available in the culture (present and past). Veatch sees medical ethics as open when it is universal and closed, and unacceptable, when it is particular. I read the history of medical ethics as always universal and medicine as a social institution and practice as sometimes closed—i.e, not accountable for its scientific and moral integrity—and sometimes as open, accountable for such integrity. When medicine is “laid open,” medical ethics itself is sometimes transformed. The same may well be the case for the other health care professions. The histories of medical ethics and bioethics, therefore, can be usefully read as responses to the laying open of medicine and the health care professions generally at various times in their histories. In what follows, I examine two important examples of laying medicine open that create key turning points in the history of medical ethics—Scottish medicine from the eighteenth century and American medicine from the end of the twentieth century.The... (shrink)

This paper examines today's received scientific medical model with respect to its ability to satisfy two conditions: (1) its explanatory adequacy relative to the full range of findings in the medical literature, including those indicating a correlation between psychosocial variables and disease susceptibility; and (2) the fit between its physicalist patient and disease concepts and what today's basic sciences, so-called sciences of complexity, tell us about the way matter, notably complex systems (e.g. patients), behave and the nature of scientific explanation. (...) I conclude that the received (biomedical) model falls short on both counts and to satisfy these conditions is to articulate a formal successor model. This successor must be guided by premises consistent with the findings and methods of today's basic sciences on which an applied science like medicine depends for its validity. Additionally, the successor model must be able to explain (and predict) the full range of clinical findings, both those that its predecessors explains and at least some of those that it does not. The aim of the paper is to identify such a model. (shrink)

The Language of Thought Hypothesis is often taken to have the fatal flaw that it generates an explanatory regress. The language of thought is invoked to explain certain features of natural language (e.g., that it is learned, understood, and is meaningful), but, according to the regress argument, the language of thought itself has these same features and hence no explanatory progress has been made. We argue that such arguments rely on the tacit assumption that the entire motivation for the language (...) of thought consists in explaining the explanandum that allegedly generates the regress. But this tacit assumption is simply false. The Language of Thought Hypothesis is a cogent view and one with considerable explanatory advantages. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bioethics in the Twenty-First Century: Why We Should Pay Attention to Eighteenth-Century Medical EthicsLaurence B. McCullough (bio)Those of us who work in the field of bioethics tend to think that, because the word “bioethics” is new, so too the field is new in all respects, but we are not the first to do bioethics. John Gregory (1724–1773) did bioethics just as we do it, at least two centuries before (...) we thought to do it (Gregory 1772). He deployed philosophical methods as sophisticated as our own. Indeed, Gregory took up the very best moral philosophy available to thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, namely, David Hume’s moral philosophy and its core concept of sympathy. Gregory also responded in a conceptually powerful and clinically applicable way to the problems of his time, just as we do. I want here to outline Gregory’s accomplishment and to identify some aspects of its importance for bioethics in the twenty-first century.Gregory’s “Problem List”Gregory wrote his medical ethics as a response to the then current state of medicine in Britain. We now follow Gregory in our writing of bioethics and clinical ethics in response to the problems of our time. A great deal that we now take for granted did not then exist. 1There was not, as there is now, any uniform pathway into medicine. Nor did there exist universal licensure. The Royal Colleges did attempt to assert, but failed to achieve, monopoly control of medical practice. The concepts of health and disease were themselves contested and therefore competed for their success in the market place. There was a marked oversupply of practitioners who competed fiercely—very fiercely indeed—in the medical market place for their concepts of health and disease, their treatments, and therefore their livelihoods. Patients had their own concepts of health and disease, engaged in “self-physicking” or self-care, and often traded physician’s prescriptions.Medicine exhibited little scientific discipline in its accounts of disease and in determining the efficacy of treatments, a fact that Gregory (1743) laments as a [End Page 329] medical student. There was no marked improvement when he began to give his medical ethics lectures nearly a quarter of a century later. Treatments failed as often, perhaps more often, than they succeeded in benefiting patients. The sick usually sought out the help of a physician after trying self-physicking.Physicians, Gregory taught, could not hope to control human biology, though they could aim to manage its processes well. When nature underresponds to disease the physician should assist her processes; when nature overresponds, the physician should tamp down nature’s responses, to lessen their “violence”—in both cases always attentive to the limits of medicine’s capacities in treating disease.Physicians attended the well-to-do sick at home, and the sick person summoned and dismissed physicians, surgeons, or apothecaries at will. A physician therefore might find himself—no women had yet been admitted to the ranks of university-trained physicians—summoned before, after, or simultaneously with a competitor, with his concepts and diagnosis and treatment put to the acid test. In this setting, there existed only a patient-physician relationship, not a physician-patient relationship.Physicians left off the care of dying patients, a practice that was made a matter of duty by Friederich Hoffmann (1749). One would suffer punishing economic consequences if one had a high mortality rate. Better, then, to label the patient incurable, withdraw, and turn matters over to clergy. Gregory attacks this practice as intellectual fraud and calls for the physician to continue to attend the dying. Indeed, he says, “It is as much the business of a physician to alleviate pain, and to smooth the avenues of death, when unavoidable, as to cure diseases” (Gregory 1772, p. 35). He does not explicitly address what we now call physician-assisted suicide; neither does he condemn it, and he is quick to condemn some things—e.g., sexual abuse of female patients or “sporting” with patients in the Royal Infirmary by using experiments as the first line of treatment.The Royal Infirmary was established to care for the deserving, working poor, who received free care... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Past and Future of Utopian StudiesLaurence Davis (bio)This critical forum on “The Past and Future of Utopian Studies” originated as a roundtable discussion at the conference, “Opening Utopia: New Directions in Utopian Studies,” held at the University of Brighton in July 2022. The title of the conference reflected a determination on the part of the program coordination team—Patricia McManus (University of Brighton), Laurence Davis (University College Cork), (...) Siân Adiseshiah (Loughborough University), Antonis Balasopoulos (University of Cyprus), Tom Moylan (University of Limerick), Michael G. Kelly (University of Limerick), Emrah Atasoy (Cappadocia University), and Ross Sparkes (University of Brighton)—to make the conference an inclusive and potentially radically transformative event, one that would challenge entrenched orthodoxies in the field of utopian studies and help scholars and activists chart new directions in utopian scholarship and practice.This transformative ethos was reflected in the collaboratively produced conference call for papers, which stipulated that the event was dedicated to an exploration of radical utopian thinking and revolutionary praxis. The conference, we emphasized, was intended to create a welcoming and broadly [End Page 478] inclusive space where participants could explore the role of utopian thinking, imagination, and practice in addressing some of the fundamental challenges of our times. Towards this end we appended to the call a section, entitled “USS and Utopia Beyond the University,” in which we noted that our aim was to design a program that would center work intended to blur or break the well-policed and expensive borders between the university and the communities within which universities sit. We proposed, and indeed later fulfilled the promise, to work with local activists in Brighton to establish some in-person and remote-access events that would highlight and explore radical hope as it is present in the politics of migrant solidarity, co-housing initiatives, and anarchist and queer groups and spaces. We also explicitly invited contributions from those working outside the formal limits of academia or who were inside academic spaces pushing out. The enthusiastic response to the call for papers exceeded all expectations, and the resulting conference program was exceptionally varied and promising and indeed suggestive of many possible new directions in utopian studies. What follows in this special section of Utopian Studies is a product of one very lively five-person conference panel that I co-organized with Antonis Balasopoulos (University of Cyprus).The chief impetus for the transformation from conference panel to special journal section was an email invitation from the then-editor of Utopian Studies, who had attended the session and who subsequently invited us to revise and elaborate the talks for publication in the journal. Interestingly, the journal editor suggested that the contributions might provide answers to two questions: first, “where do you see the value of utopian studies in our dark times?” and second, “how can utopia and utopianism inspire activism and political changes?”In response, and speaking in my capacity as the panel chair and prospective editor of the special section, I noted that while it would be fascinating to see the contributors address questions of the value of utopian studies in our dark times, and specifically how utopia and utopianism might inspire activism and political change, such a remit would not get to the heart of what was distinctive about either our panel or the Brighton conference as a whole. The Brighton conference was dedicated specifically to an exploration of radical utopian thinking and revolutionary practice. And its title, “Opening Utopia: New Directions in Utopian Studies” suggested that utopia can be a catalyst for transformative change only if the study of utopia(s) is itself open, or “opened,” to radical influences. In our panel we explored both the past and some possible futures of utopian studies and considered “new [End Page 479] directions” that might facilitate more radical utopian thinking and revolutionary practice. While all of the contributors celebrated utopia’s transformative potential, they also criticized aspects of the field of utopian studies that arguably have limited that transformative potential, including its “blind spots” in relation to the “organizational imaginary” (Balasopoulos), its own privileged “whiteness” and colonial prerogatives (Edwards), its Anglo-American focus and tendency to overlook significant social movements outside... (shrink)

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show a protracted period of inconsistent use of tense/agreement morphemes. The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether this inconsistent use could be attributed to the children's misinterpretations of particular syntactic structures in the input. In Study 1, preschool-aged children with SLI and typically developing peers heard sentences containing novel verbs preceded by auxiliarywasor sentences in which the novel verb formed part of a nonfinite subject-verb sequence within a larger syntactic structure (e.g.We saw (...) the dog relling). The children were then tested on their use of the novel verbs in contexts that obligated use of auxiliaryis. The children with SLI were less accurate than their peers and more likely to produce the novel verb withoutisif the verb had been heard in a nonfinite subject-verb sequence. In Study 2, children with SLI and typically developing peers were tested on their comprehension of sentences such asThe cow sees the horse eating. The children with SLI were less accurate than their peers and were disproportionately influenced by the nonfinite subject-verb clause at the end of the sentence. We interpret these findings within the framework of construction learning. (shrink)

Feigl is concerned with the problem of how one sublanguage supplants another, e.g., how the language of quantum mechanics may be said to supplant that of classical physics. As a preliminary to tackling the problem, it has first to be generalized. Thus, in order to indicate how one language might supplant another, the line of a general theory of truth has to be traced. Among the conditions that such a theory has to satisfy is that its truth criteria must permit (...) us to evaluate current consensus judgments in science as true, on a par with the truth of our everyday ‘factual’ or ‘noninferential’ judgments. (shrink)

This essay examines arguments for and against the proposition that Artificial Intelligence (AI) research makes an important contribution to the understanding of the human mind. A number of recent articles have seemed to question the value of Al ideas in specific domains (e.g., language. mental imagery, problem solving). In the present paper, it is argued that the real disagreement concerns the form of a scientific psychology. The critics of Artificial Intelligence believe that many acceptable psychological theories exist and the important (...) task of the scientist is to show that certain of these theories are true. They criticize AI research because it has not produced theories whose adequacy can be tested by empirical research. The supporters of AI research believe that no adequate psychological theories exist. They claim that the important task is to develop adequate theories and until such theories have been constructed, it is pointless to worry about empirical tests.A number of major arguments attacking and defending AI research are examined in order to illustrate that the real issue is methodological. It is concluded that the present debate is counterproductive since both sides assume that the methodological premise of the other side is wrong without attempting to refute it. A more constructive debate would address directly the more fundamental question of what methods offer the greatest promise of solving the major problems of psychology. (shrink)

This paper is a critique of Norman Malcolm's claim that things that do not have the human form (e.g. trees, tables, computers) cannot' understand' or 'think' because they cannot point at, reach for, go to, look at, fetch or get something.

This is the third volume of a three-volume set on The Innate Mind. The extent to which cognitive structures, processes, and contents are innate is one of the central questions concerning the nature of the mind, with important implications for debates throughout the human sciences. By bringing together the top nativist scholars in philosophy, psychology, and allied disciplines these volumes provide a comprehensive assessment of nativist thought and a definitive reference point for future nativist inquiry. The Innate Mind: Volume 3: (...) Foundations and the Future, concerns a variety of foundational issues, as well as questions about the direction of future nativist research. It addresses such questions as: What is innateness? Is it a confused notion? What is at stake in debates between nativists and empiricists? What is the relationship between genes and innateness? How do innate structures and learned information interact to produce adult forms of cognition, e.g. about number, and how does such learning take place? What innate abilities underlie the creative aspect of language use, and of creative cognition generally? What are the innate foundations of human motivation, and of human moral cognition? In the course of their discussions, many of the contributors pose the question : Where next for nativist research? Together, these three volumes provide the most intensive and richly cross-disciplinary investigation of nativism ever undertaken. They point the way toward a synthesis of nativist work that promises to provide a powerful picture of our minds and their place in the natural order. (shrink)

Disorders of consciousness and the self are at the forefront of schizophrenia symptomatology. Patients are impaired in feeling themselves as the authors of their thoughts and actions. In addition, their flow of consciousness is disrupted, and thought fragmentation has been suggested to be involved in the patients’ difficulties in feeling as being one unique, unchanging self across time. Both impairments are related to self disorders, and both have been investigated at the experimental level. Here we review evidence that both mechanisms (...) of motor control and the temporal structure of signal processing are impaired in schizophrenia patients. Based on this review, we propose that the sequencing of action and perception plays a key role in the patients’ impairments. Furthermore, the millisecond time scale of the disorders, as well as the impaired sequencing, highlights the cooperation between brain networks including the cerebellum, as proposed by Andreasen (1999). We examine this possibility in the light of recent knowledge on the anatomical and physiological properties of the cerebellum, its role in timing, and its involvement in known physiological impairments in patients with schizophrenia, e.g., resting states and brain dynamics. A disruption in communication between networks involving the cerebellum, related to known impairments in dopamine, glutamate and GABA transmission, may help to better explain why patients experience reduced attunement with the external world and possibly with themselves. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage dédié à trois pionnières américaines de l’histoire de la médecine et de l’histoire des femmes, Caroline Walker Bynum, Joan Cadden et Nancy G. Siraisi, est la traduction française du dernier ouvrage, paru à New York en 2006, de Katharine Park, professeur d’histoire des sciences et de women’s studies à Harvard. K. Park est célèbre entre autres pour son ouvrage sur les médecins et la médecine à Florence au début de la Renaissance. Tout en continuant de privilégier l’étude de (...) la prati... (shrink)