This volume presents Rosenberg's previously published studies of the central elements and implications of Sellars' philosophy, along with three new essays that ...

In the past ten years, there has been growing interest in and concern about protecting the privacy of personal medical information. Insofar as medical records increasingly are stored electronically, and electronic information can be shared easily and widely, there have been legislative efforts as well as scholarly analyses calling for greater privacy protections to ensure that patients can feel safe disclosing personal information to their health-care providers. At the same time, the volume of biomedical research conducted in this country continues (...) to grow. The budget of the National Institutes of Health, for example, was $20,298 million in 2001, having more than doubled from a budget of $9,218 million 10 years before. This growing body of research includes increased efforts to use stored medical records as a source of data for health services, epidemiologic, and clinical studies. (shrink)

A collection of essays by Alexander Rosenberg, the distinguished philosopher of science. The essays cover three broad areas related to Darwinian thought and naturalism: the first deals with the solution of philosophical problems such as reductionism, the second with the development of social theories, and the third with the intersection of evolutionary biology with economics, political philosophy, and public policy. Specific papers deal with naturalistic epistemology, the limits of reductionism, the biological justification of ethics, the so-called 'trolley problem' in (...) moral philosophy, the political philosophy of biological endowments, and the Human Genome Project and its implications for policy. Rosenberg's important writings on a variety of issues are here organized into a coherent philosophical framework which promises to be a significant and controversial contribution to scholarship in many areas. (shrink)

The extension of quantum mechanics to a general functional space (“rigged Hilbert space”), which incorporates time-symmetry breaking, is applied to construct extract dynamical models of entropy production and entropy flow. They are illustrated by using a simple conservative Hamiltonian system for multilevel atoms coupled to a time-dependent external force. The external force destroys the monotonicity of the ℋ-function evolution. This leads to a model of the entropy flow that allows a steady nonequilibrium structure of the emitted field around the unstable (...) particles. (shrink)

The collection by Sparrow and Hutchinson gathers together philosophers and sociologists to discuss the ever fascinating yet surprisingly underplayed theme of habit: its history and place in the western philosophical tradition, from the ancients to the contemporary scene. A collection such as this has been long overdue, and surprisingly so, given the centrality of habits in our understanding and organization of ourselves and of the world. We human beings are in fact complex bundles of habits embodied in practices. Hence, our (...) limits and possibilities are at least partially governed by the way in which we habituate, dishabituate, and re-habituate ourselves. Although their presence is widely... (shrink)

Continuing control over the political and developmental policies of Amazonia has become perhaps the last best hope of the Brazilian military establishment, which has seen its principal raisons d'etre—the threats traditionally thought to be posed by foreign enemies and internal subversion—disappear in recent years. Alfred Stepan has clarified the unusually high level of "military prerogatives" exercised in the post-1985 Brazilian political system, which relate to a wider theoretical consideration of political and biological diversity and are linked both directly and analogously, (...) particularly in the Amazon region. In this regard, the direction of development policy in the greater Amazon region suggests the relevance of this military "policy prerogative" to the future of civil-military relations in Brazil, and the survival of one of the world's last great wildernesses. (shrink)

Brown famously held that in the field of public education, segregation has no place. But segregation was undefined. Was segregation constituted by mere racial classification, by the fact that the state had divided children into racial groups? Or did Brown condemn a caste system whose effect was to stigmatize black children. In Parents Involved v. Seattle Justice Roberts says segregation is about children not black children. This colorblind approach represents both a rewriting and appropriation of Brown in the service of (...) formalism. The Roberts court writes not only a new version of Brown but a new historical narrative about the meaning of segregation. The theme of this new story is formal equality - equality of opportunity only - as a universal ideal. This new story is woven entirely out of the language of Brown detached from all historical context. Conservatives have long canonized Brown. It has been a kind of second constitution for the second reconstruction. But how does this new story compare to the original understanding ?: Was this the evil that Brown denounced? By framing the issue in this way the paper seeks to make an end run around an impasse in our social and legal debate. Many progressive scholars have challenged the conservative conception of formal equality by suggesting alternative ways of thinking about it: anti-subordination models, a heightened call that equality should take issues of racial caste into account. But this external critique has stalled, perhaps in part because of the slippery indeterminacy of normative ideals. Segregation is far more determinate; it is something that has been concretized not only by the lived experience of black people, but by an earlier realist tradition on the part of the Warren court which saw it as it was. Retelling the two parts of this forgotten history we expose the disconnect between the Supreme Court's universalism and the actual meaning of segregation in context. Also, by focusing on the original understanding we seek a kind of internal critique showing how the politics of historical revision does not withstand the conservatives own interpretive approach. (shrink)

This paper presents an original use of Twitter to interpret and rewrite the poems of Francesco Petrarca's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta implemented within the Oregon Petrarch Open Book OPOB). This activity was partially inspired by the idea of Twitterature developed by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin; we believe with them that our digital time should develop new and more functional ways of addressing literary texts but at the same time we are convinced that the "burdensome duty of hours spent reading" cannot (...) be eliminated. On the contrary, the new ways of reading in the digital era as we envisage them are the result and consequence of broader and deeper reading activities. We conceived the project of writing 366 tweets, out of the 366 poems that make the last form of Petrarca’s Rvf, as the result of different philological activities, from reading the texts in the original language to consulting manuscripts, translations and intersemiotic renderings of the texts. Before writing the 140 characters that make one tweet we also elaborated paraphrases, summaries and keywords related to the individual poems. Students created the first version of the tweets during the 2011 UO seminar on Re-reading Petrarca’s Rvf in the Digtal Era. The second version was elaborated in the context of a seminar on the same topic during Winter 2014. This paper presents the two versions of the Twitter Edition of Petrarca's Rvf now available in the OPOB and focuses on the philology connected to the latest edition that provided an English translation of the original tweets written in Italian. The actual Italian and English 366 tweets are published in the Appendix to the article. (shrink)

The discussion of Darwinism's past--of what Charles Darwin wrote and thought--is crucial to an understanding of the history and philosophy of biology, but largely irrelevant to assessing its current warrant and its future prospects. In this paper the structure, and the credibility of the theory are defended against a variety of criticisms both of biologists and anti-Darwinians. It is argued that many features of the theory often treated as defects, like its generality and neutrality, its openness to realization at many (...) levels of organization, its lack of specific predictive content, and its anomalous relation to taxonomy, are in fact important strengths that any theory with the range and bearing of the theory of natural selection must have. These strengths are specifically related, in the latter portion of the paper, to the evolutionary discoveries we can expect from the revolutionary developments in molecular biology. (shrink)

The administrators of the human genome project were eager to stimulate public discussion, academic debate, legal and legislative deliberation of how individuals and institutions should respond to the revolution in genomics. Paramount among the issues whose discussion they encouraged are three obvious matters: The threat which access to our genetic information poses for heath insurance, employment, and social discrimination the nefarious consequences for scientific advance of turning basic scientific discoveries about genomes into private property The permissibility of prenatal genetic screening, (...) germline therapy, cloning and other in- vitro reproductive processes. It should not be surprising that there is a great deal of uniformity of views about most of the problems that come under these three headings. For they do not raise issues different in kind from those we faced in bioethics before the genomic revolution. Even starting from divergent moral theories, by and large people have come to broadly similar conclusions about which newly available choices are morally permissible and which are not. Our moral intuitions and articulated moral theory have stood us in good stead, providing substantial grounds for disapproving new genomically inspired examples of old practices–like eugenics, the paternalism of health-care experts, and the sacrifice of individual rights to.. (shrink)

Philosophy is by its nature systematic in intent. In Wilfrid Sellars’ words, it aims “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Philosophical systematicity is thus a matter of both scope and structure. The purview of a philosophical inquiry may encompass more or less of what is of rational concern to us, and such structure as its outcome has will constituted by the fundamental globalcommitments that inform (...) it—realism, nominalism, expressivism, naturalism, pragmatism, or the like. Lack of systematic vision arguably subverts philosophical reflection, but genuine systematicity turns out to be surprisingly difficult to achieve. I offer three brief case studies, which illustrate different, but significantly related, ways of failing to achieve it. (shrink)

1. From developmental molecular biology to neurogenomics 2. More than you wanted to know about short term and long term implicit memory 3. How are explicit memories stored? 4. How the brain recalls memories 5. Each explicit memory is just a lot of implicit memories 6. Is ‘knowledge how’ computable? 7. Computationalism and neuroscience..

This article works from 10th anniversary reporting on the Montréal massacre and its legacy, arguing that the public memory of the massacre, far from being settled, is charged with ambivalence. It is argued that such ambivalence is an effect of the limits of remembrance as a `strategic practice', which has circumscribed sustained encounters with the loss(es) of the massacre. Ambivalence is read in the article as both a limit and resource for feminists interested in re-opening the question of the massacre's (...) public memory for the next decade of memorial-activism. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. Largely overlooked, this archival material is significant because it suggests a subtle yet significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, (...) but rather, it emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism, encompassing the overlapping projects of Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism. Thus, it becomes clear that first wave feminism, including white women writers, played a key but brief role in the formation of the middle class nationalism that would later dominate Jamaica's transition to independence. During the first five years of publication of the Jamaica Times, women wrote a significant proportion of the short stories published. However, they became marginalized as black folk culture became the defining symbol of national authenticity. The marginalization of middle class women writers reflects a broader pattern. In adopting first wave feminism from Britain and the United States, Jamaican nationalists reproduced colonial race and class dynamics that established an unbridgeable divide between middle class women, who served as ‘ladies bountiful,’ and the usually darker-skinned compatriots to whom they ministered. This class division continued to limit feminist activism in Jamaica throughout the first and second waves. (shrink)

In Jay Rosenberg's lively and accessible introductory dialogue, four bright students explore a number of the central topics and problems of contemporary epistemology--skepticism and certainty, internalism and externalism, foundationalism and coherentism, and the nature and limits of justification. Their wide-ranging discussion highlights many of the vivid and imaginative thought-experiments that have shaped both classical and contemporary reflections on the scope and character of our knowledge of the world.

Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. As new blood filled our young patient's veins, her breathing became regular and her pulse full. She was so far gone I would not have expected her to recover consciousness for a day, if at all, but within an hour, she began to wake up. We removed the breathing tube a couple of hours later— no ventilator ever needed.As life-sustaining technology becomes more widely available in fortunate parts of the developing world, benefits (...) come with complications. The temptation is to focus on the thing—the ventilator itself—as the crucial element and press to buy more, mistaking the problem for one of resource scarcity only. But we need a culturally relevant ethical framework to guide the use and withdrawal of ventilators and similar life-sustaining tools. Resource scarcity is only part of the problem. Buying additional ventilators only defers allocation decisions and entirely fails to address end-of-life suffering. It is unsustainable in Rwanda; it is a dubious solution anywhere. The intangible need for an ethical framework hides beneath apparent scarcity and, when this need is not addressed and luck runs out, one salvageable patient can die for want of a ventilator that serves only to prolong the suffering of another. (shrink)

Jeremy Carrette is one of the most interesting contemporary scholars writing on James’s philosophy of religious experience. In the present volume the author expands and deepens the scope of his previous researches by investigating the epistemological and metaphysical dimensions of James’s work on religion. The resulting interpretation is an sophisticated and ambitious one: Carrette argues that most accounts of James’s writings on religion—and of his thought as a whole—have been vitiated by a “disciplinary closure” which conceals James’s unbroken effort to (...) “sustain a conversation across the disciplinary spaces of philosophy, psychology and the study of religion” . Contrary to this approach, Carrette claims how .. (shrink)