Graeme Laurie stepped down from the Chair in Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. This edited collection pays tribute to his extraordinary contributions to the field. Graeme has often spoken about the importance of 'legacy' in academic work and has forged a remarkable intellectual legacy of his own, notably through his work on genetic privacy, human tissue and information governance, and on the regulatory salience of the concept of liminality. The essays in this volume animate the (...) concept of legacy as lens of analysis for the study and practice of medical jurisprudence. In this light, legacy reveals characteristics of both benefit and burden, as both an encumbrance to and facilitator of the development of law, policy and regulation. Overall, the contributions reconcile the ideas of legacy and responsiveness and show that both dimensions are critical to achieve and sustain the health of medical jurisprudence itself as a dynamic, interdisciplinary and policy-engaged field of thinking. (shrink)

Drawing on newspaper articles, ad campaigns, declassified government archives, and old movies, Ken Hollings shows the culture of postwar America and its dream of limitless technological and human development.

We study generalized quantifiers on finite structures.With every function : we associate a quantifier Q by letting Q x say there are at least (n) elementsx satisfying , where n is the sizeof the universe. This is the general form ofwhat is known as a monotone quantifier of type .We study so called polyadic liftsof such quantifiers. The particular lifts we considerare Ramseyfication, branching and resumption.In each case we get exact criteria fordefinability of the lift in terms of simpler quantifiers.

How should we make choices when we know so little about our futures? L. A. Paul argues that we must view life decisions as choices to make discoveries about the nature of experience. Her account of transformative experience holds that part of the value of living authentically is to experience our lives and preferences in whatever ways they evolve.

I argue for a property mereology and for mereological bundle theory. I then apply this theory to the one over many problem (universals) and puzzles concerning persistence and material constitution.

Eine marktparadigmatische Wettbewerbsorientierung – symptomatisch die Exzellenzinitiative – hat die deutsche Hochschullandschaft radikal verändert und das Legitimationserfordernis gegenüber der Bürgerschaft verschärft. Hier setzt das Buch an und liefert eine dezidiert normative Fundierung für die legitime Gestaltung von Politik in der Demokratie im Hinblick auf die praktische Fruchtbarmachung für die deutsche Hochschulpolitik. Die Autorin bedient sich der legitimatorischen Ansätze von John Rawls im Sinne einer allgemeinen rationalen Zustimmungsfähigkeit und von John Dewey im Rahmen einer praktizierten sozialen Kooperation. Dewey wird weniger als (...) Gegenspieler zu Rawls, sondern als eine – pragmatistische – Komplettierung der Rawls‘schen Legitimationstheorie hinsichtlich der sozialen Praxis verstanden. Die abstrakten, politik-philosophischen Erörterungen werden dann im Hinblick auf ihre praktischen Implikationen für die Hochschulpolitik konkretisiert. Ein kooperatives, vertrauensvolles Zusammenwirken von gestärkter wissenschaftlicher und politischer Verantwortung sieht die Autorin als Weg hin zu einer lebendigen zivilgesellschaftlichen Öffentlichkeit und illustriert dies am Beispiel Wissenschaftsregionen. Die Arbeit verdeutlicht eine der bedeutenden Stärken der politischen Philosophie: theoretische Entwürfe für praktische Legitimationsaufgaben fruchtbar zu machen. (shrink)

First paragraph: The 'Beyond' of the theologians," to which Josef Mitterer alluded in a footnote in his 1988 essay "Farewell to the truth," can be understood as an offer of ultimate self-perception -- albeit with a high conflict potential.

This essay engages the work of Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero and her concept of the narratable self. Her relational humanism, rooted in our exposure to others, offers an ontology of uniqueness whose critique of abstraction, masculinism, and identity politics still resonates today where the meaning of a unique “you” is negotiated in embodied exchanges that may offer care or wounds. Cavarero develops an altruistic ethics that cultivates this humanism. I argue that her work should be extended to better capture (...) the political purchase of the narratable self that interacts dynamically and often ambiguously with the “we” of collective politics. Putting her work into conversation with the nineteenth‐century abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth, I suggest that Cavarero's work illuminates Truth as a philosopher of the narratable self. Moreover, Truth's work extends Cavarero's concerns with exposure that may do violence or offer care by making explicit the challenges of narration in the context of inequality, especially in terms of race and class. Exposure as an ontological and phenomenological condition then needs to take account of a broader publicity of textual, individual, and collective exposure to others to develop the critical, ethical, and political purchase it offers. (shrink)

The right not to know is a contested matter. This can be because the inversion of the normal framing of entitlement to information about one's own health is thought to be illogical and inconsistent with self-authorship and/or because the very idea of claiming a right not to know information is an inappropriate appeal to the discourse of rights that places impossible responsibilities on others. Notwithstanding, there has been a sustained increase in this kind of appeal in recent years fueled in (...) large part by the rise and rise of the importance of personal autonomy in health care ethics, and by domestic and international health law. The right not to know has been acknowledged in at least two important international legal instruments. For example, the UNESCO Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, Article 5c provides: “The right of every individual to decide whether or not to be informed of the results of genetic examination and the resulting consequences should be respected.”. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the New Genetics raises complex social problems, particularly those of privacy. This book offers ethical and legal perspectives on the questions of a right to know and not to know genetic information from the standpoint of individuals, their relatives, employers, insurers and the state. Graeme Laurie provides a unique definition of privacy, including a concept of property rights in the person, and argues for stronger legal protection of privacy in the shadow of developments in human genetics. (...) He challenges the role and the limits of established principles in medical law and ethics, including respect for patient autonomy and confidentiality. This book will interest lawyers, philosophers and doctors concerned both with genetic information and issues of privacy; it will also interest genetic counsellors, researchers, and policy makers worldwide for its practical stance on dilemmas in modern genetic medicine. (shrink)

Autocommunication, communication with oneself, may become distinct from communication with an “other” both in form and function. Autocommunication has a special role in the development of thinking in small children, as differentiation of speech for oneself, known as “private speech,” from communication for social purposes entails the child’s organization of her or his own cognition and behavior with the aid of symbols. Recent studies have suggested that speech distinctly for the child him or herself is particularly observable during what is (...) called “crib speech” and thus it appears to support already early language acquisition. The purpose and functions of crib speech in child development have been topics of interest until recently, but they are still debated. In autocommunication, instead of transfer of signs from one mind to another as when in communication with an “other,” there is transfer of signs from one state of mind to another, as in the case of recalling something with the help of signs. Next to this mnemonic type autocommunication, Juri Lotman was interested in the type in which textual devices within a text guide the communicative interpretation in relation to the text itself, particularly characteristic to poetry. The paper provides a semiotic analysis of crib speech in terms of Lotman’s concept of autocommunication explaining its particular appearance both in form and content, as well as what initiates and inspires it for the small child and why does it bring such joy. From the point of view of semiotics, crib speech presents as an exceptionally rich phenomenon. In addition to being small children’s language practice, crib speech appears as language play, if not poetry, serving as a modelling system for enacting and representing the world as it appears for the small child. (shrink)

Backround Education in ethics and professionalism should reflect the realities medical students encounter in the hospital and clinic. Method We performed content analyses on Case Observation and Assessments (COAs) written by third-year medical students about ethical and professional issues encountered during their internal medicine and paediatrics clinical clerkships. Results A cohort of 141 third-year medical students wrote 272 COAs. Content analyses identified 35 subcategories of ethical and professional issues within 7 major domains: decisions regarding treatment (31.4%), communication (21.4%), professional duties (...) (18.4%), justice (9.8%), student-specific issues (5.4%), quality of care (3.8%), and miscellaneous (9.8%). Conclusions Students encountered a wide variety of ethical and professional issues that can be used to guide pre-clinical and clinical education. Comparison of our findings with results from similar studies suggests that the wording of an assignment (specifying “ethical” issues, “professional” issues, or both) may influence the kinds of issues students identify in their experience-based clinical narratives. (shrink)

Fix a cardinal κ. We can ask the question: what kind of a logic L is needed to characterize all models of cardinality κ up to isomorphism by their L-theories? In other words: for which logics L it is true that if any models A and B of cardinality κ satisfy the same L-theory then they are isomorphic?It is always possible to characterize models of cardinality κ by their Lκ+,κ+-theories, but we are interested in finding a “small” logic L, i.e., (...) the sentences of L are hereditarily of smaller cardinality than κ. For any cardinal κ it is independent of ZFC whether any such small definable logic L exists. If it exists it can be second order logic for κ=ω and fourth order logic or certain infinitary second order logic Lκ,ω source for uncountable κ. All models of cardinality κ can always be characterized by their theories in a small logic with generalized quantifiers, but the logic may be not definable in the language of set theory. Our work continues and extends the work of Ajtai [Miklos Ajtai, Isomorphism and higher order equivalence, Ann. Math. Logic 16 181–203]. (shrink)

We consider the investigation of the embedding of semigroups in groups, a problem which spans the early-twentieth-century development of abstract algebra. Although this is a simple problem to state, it has proved rather harder to solve, and its apparent simplicity caused some of its would-be solvers to go awry. We begin with the analogous problem for rings, as dealt with by Ernst Steinitz, B. L. van der Waerden and Øystein Ore. After disposing of A. K. Sushkevich’s erroneous contribution in this (...) area, we present A. I. Maltsev’s example of a cancellative semigroup which may not be embedded in a group, which showed for the first time that such an embedding is not possible in general. We then look at the various conditions that were derived for such an embedding to take place: the sufficient conditions of Paul Dubreil and others, and the necessary and sufficient conditions obtained by A. I. Maltsev, Vlastimil Pták and Joachim Lambek. We conclude with some comments on the place of this problem within the theory of semigroups, and also within abstract algebra more generally. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis commentary examines the relationship between genetics and Jewish identity. It focuses especially on the use of Y‐chromosome testing to map the genealogies of the Lemba in southern Africa.

Discussion of uses of biomedical data often proceeds on the assumption that the data are generated and shared solely or largely within the health sector. However, this assumption must be challenged because increasingly large amounts of health and well-being data are being gathered and deployed in cross-sectoral contexts such as social media and through the internet of things and wearable devices. Cross-sectoral sharing of data thus refers to the generation, use and linkage of biomedical data beyond the health sector. This (...) paper considers the challenges that arise from this phenomenon. If we are to benefit fully, it is important to consider which ethical values are at stake and to reflect on ways to resolve emerging ethical issues across ecosystems where values, laws and cultures might be quite distinct. In considering such issues, this paper applies the deliberative balancing approach of the Ethics Framework for Big Data in Health and Research to the domain of cross-sectoral big data. Please refer to that article for more information on how this framework is to be used, including a full explanation of the key values involved and the balancing approach used in the case study at the end. (shrink)

Mirror-touch synaesthesia is a condition where observing touch to another’s body induces a subjective tactile sensation on the synaesthetes body. The present study explores which characteristics of the inducing stimulus modulate the synaesthetic touch experience. Fourteen mirror-touch synaesthetes watched videos depicting a touch event while indicating whether the video induced a tactile sensation, on which side of their body they felt this sensation and the intensity of the experienced sensation. Results indicate that the synaesthetes experience stronger tactile sensations when observing (...) touch to real bodies, whereas observing touch to dummy bodies, pictures of bodies and disconnected dummy body parts elicited weaker sensations. These results suggest that mirror-touch synaesthesia is not entirely bottom-up driven, but top-down information, such as knowledge about real and dummy body parts, also modulate the intensity of the experience. (shrink)

An examination is made of the proposal that in the deep structure, noun phrases are associated with a referential index. The purpose of this proposal was not so much to account for the meaning of sentences but to augment the notion of noun phrase identity which was needed for the structural description of certain deletion transformations. This paper attempts to study how and if such markers could be used in semantics. The outcome of that kind of study will ultimately decide (...) what the future of indices will be. (Author). (shrink)

Phenomenal character is the what-it's-likeness of subjective experience. I develop an ontology of phenomenal feel as process. My being in some phenomenal state R is the process of my instantiating R’s neurological correlate. The ontology explains why we have asymmetric epistemic access to phenomenal characters: the ontological ground for the subjective or first-personal stance is different from the ontological ground for the objective or third-personal stance. I end by situating my account in debates about physicalism.

This chapter contains sections titled: Belonging and genealogical bonds Beholdenness and reciprocal relations Respect, or the wish‐to‐be‐appreciated Knowledge, inherent value, and landkeeping.

Figuring prominently in their decisions regarding which theories to pursue are scientists' appeals to the promise or lack of promise of those theories. Yet philosophy of science has had little to say about how one is to assess theory promise. This essay identifies several indices that might be consulted to determine whether or not a theory is promising and worthy of pursuit. Various historical examples of appeals to such indices are introduced.

The concept of a generalized quantifier of a given similarity type was defined in [12]. Our main result says that on finite structures different similarity types give rise to different classes of generalized quantifiers. More exactly, for every similarity type t there is a generalized quantifier of type t which is not definable in the extension of first order logic by all generalized quantifiers of type smaller than t. This was proved for unary similarity types by Per Lindström [17] with (...) a counting argument. We extend his method to arbitrary similarity types. (shrink)

Dr Andorno and I have corresponded for some time on the question of a right not to know information. I enjoyed reading his paper and I am struck by the degree of agreement that we share. We both agree—for example, that unsolicited knowledge can be a burden which can significantly compromise an individual’s psychological integrity. We both share a desire to respect individual self determination. Also we each consider it reasonable for individuals to choose not to receive potentially harmful information. (...) I have already made these arguments, and more, elsewhere,1 but my starting point has not been autonomy, as advocated by Andorno, but rather privacy. In essence, my argument is that individuals enjoy, and are entitled to enjoy, a measure of psychological privacy which can be invaded by unwarranted disclosures of information.The reason that I prefer privacy to autonomy is not because I have any wish to “deny people the right to self determination”2 but rather because I perceive deficiencies in the autonomy model. Indeed, my approach and that of Andorno are not mutually exclusive; it is simply that my approach is broader and encompasses some of the harder cases which an autonomy based approach cannot help us to resolve. Thus, most of the substance of Andorno’s approach is subsumed within my model. I have—for example, no disagreement whatsoever with the view that if you have an indication that an individual would not wish to know then this wish should be respected. One might even establish novel means of discerning individuals’ wishes by establishing a register to record advance refusals, as Andorno …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 13-31 [Access article in PDF] A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Computer Art Holle Humphries Before the computer is accepted unquestioningly as a legitimate artistic medium, some of the challenging aesthetic and philosophical issues raised by [computer art] must be solved. The most haunting questions concern the impact of the technology on the artist, the creative process, and the nature of (...) art. 1How might we lead students in an exploration of the philosophical issues regarding art created with a computer? The most important step is first to guide them in exploring ontological concepts and questions asked about the nature of art and computer art, before investigating related issues of epistemology, value, and criticism. Students need to understand the nature of their art tool and medium of choice. Therefore, it becomes a matter of concern to discover that when discussing and writing about computer art, students sometimes use such terms interchangeably as "computer art" and "computer-generated art," when they are not synonymous, and talk about "virtual reality" as though engaging in any activity that involves a computer constitutes experiencing one. It is clear that this problem arises because many have not paused to examine the nature of computer art within the context of the process and product of art, and the subtle nuances regarding what might distinguish each from other human enterprise. To help clarify their thinking, we might use the foundation of art theory and the strategy of philosophical inquiry, implemented by adopting questioning strategies, to guide students through an exploration of the ontological nature of computer art. This can begin by launching the question: "What is the nature of art — or computer art?" Philosophy of Art: "What is the Nature of Art?" Many philosophers have attempted to describe or define the nature of art formulated in a theory of art. A theory of art attempts to specify where the essence of art is thought to reside, or what exactly art's essence is. [End Page 13]The imitation theory, initiated in the 5th century B.C. by Plato, held that to be a work of art, an object must mirror reality. 2 As this theory placed the essence of art in the objective properties of the art work itself, we consider the imitation theory to be object-centered or objective in nature. Similarly, with his formalist theory of art, Clive Bell claimed that the essence of art lies in the object — within the structural design properties of a work of art. To qualify as a work of art, an object must exhibit significant form. Significant form consists of certain formal properties such as the art elements of lines and color combined in a particular way according to art principles, all used to create certain forms and relations of forms. 3The expression theories of art shifted attention to the artist and audience and thus are considered subject centered, or subjective, bound up in notions of the experience of creation by the artist and/or the response of the audience. Benedetto Croce asserted that a work of art resides in the mind of the artist. An artist must experience an intuition, and it is this mental process that constitutes art, not the object which the artist might create thereafter. 4 Robin Collingwood claimed that art is an exploration, clarification, and expression of an artist's emotion, made clear to an audience through a medium. 5 Leo Tolstoy believed that art should be a vehicle by which the emotion experienced by the artist at the time of creation is transmitted to an audience, so that the audience can experience that emotion as well. 6Morris Weitz asserted that none of these theories capture an essence of art because they are either too broad, too narrow, or else are circular. He claimed that the concept of art cannot be limited to one essence delimited in a definition. Weitz suggested that we must instead look at what theories of art have to say is important about art so that we know what to... (shrink)

To practice medicine and ethics, physicians need wisdom and integrity to integrate scientific knowledge, patient preferences, their own moral commitments, and society's expectations. This work of integration requires a physician to pursue certain goals of care, determine moral priorities, and understand that conscience or integrity require harmony among a person's beliefs, values, reasoning, actions, and identity. But the moral and religious pluralism of contemporary society makes this integration challenging and uncertain. How physicians treat patients will depend on the particular beliefs (...) and values they and other health professionals bring to each instance of shared decision making. This book offers a framework for practical wisdom in medicine that addresses the need for integrity in the life of each health professional. In doing so, it acknowledges the challenge of moral pluralism and the need for moral dialogue and humility as professionals fulfil their obligations to patients, themselves, and society. (shrink)