This article explores the influence of Stoicism and religion on Adam Smith. While other commentators have argued either that the main influence on Smith was Stoicism or that it was religion, the two influences have not been explicitly linked. In this article I attempt to make such a link, arguing that Smith can be seen as belonging to the strand of Christian Stoicism chiefly associated with his teacher, Francis Hutcheson. Finally, some comments are made about the implications of this interpretation (...) for current understanding of the work of Adam Smith. (shrink)

Rid and Wendler propose the development of a Patient Preference Predictor (PPP), an actuarial model for predicting incapacitated patient’s life-sustaining treatment preferences across a wide range of end-of-life scenarios. An actuarial approach to end-of-life decision making has enormous potential, but transferring the logic of actuarial prediction to end-of-life decision making raises several conceptual complexities and logistical problems that need further consideration. Actuarial models have proven effective in targeted prediction tasks, but no evidence supports their effectiveness in the kind of broad (...) spectrum prediction task that is the proposed goal of the PPP. We argue that a more focused approach, targeting specific medical conditions and generating treatment predictions based on the preferences of individuals with actual disease experience, is both more firmly grounded in past research and is a more prudent initial strategy for exploring the efficacy of actuarial prediction in end-of-life decision making. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of a work by David Hume. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

Medical ethics has been described as a thread woven into the fabric of the Nottingham curriculum. There exist a wide variety of relevant learning experiences, occurring at intervals throughout each of the five years of the course. The introduction of the students to clinical method from the start creates the need for early consideration of ethical aspects of professional behaviour and this in turn stimulates spontaneous discussion and inquiry amongst the students. The school has chosen to rely on having a (...) sufficient number of medical teachers from various disciplines willing to discuss in all the necessary detail their own clinical decisions. (shrink)

"The aim of this series is to bring together important recent writings in major areas of philosophical inquiry, selected from a variety of sources, mostly periodicals, which may not be conveniently available to the university student or the general reader. The editor of each volume contributes an introductory essay on the items chosen and on the questions with which they deal. A selective bibliography is appended as a guide to further reading."- Publisher.

(1) It remains to be seen if in the field of Psychiatry just as in that of Psychology the verbal output of a subject can be submitted to verification. Many statements of a highly emotional character being merely symptoms of certain dispositions have no direct communicative sense at all.(2) It being one of the characteristics of the mentally ill to loose contact and exchange of ideas with other people, the question naturally suggests itself if this symptom may be at the (...) bottom of the phenomenon of these persons taking refuge in logical and ideological terminologies, their talk being a kind of verbal autism. (shrink)

A construction is described of a cartesian closed category A with exactly two elements out of a C-monoid such that can be recovered from A without reference to the construction.

Our inability to feel what others feel makes it difficult to understand how they think. Because moral intuitions organize political attitudes, moral empathy gaps can exacerbate political conflict (and other kinds of conflict as well) by contributing to the perception that people who do not share our moral opinions are unintelligent and/or have malevolent intentions.

Transplantation continues to push the frontiers of medicine into domains that summon forth troublesome ethical questions. Looming on the frontier today is human facial transplantation. We develop criteria that, we maintain, must be satisfied in order to ethically undertake this as-yet-untried transplant procedure. We draw on the criteria advanced by Dr. Francis Moore in the late 1980s for introducing innovative procedures in transplant surgery. In addition to these we also insist that human face transplantation must meet all the ethical requirements (...) usually applied to health care research. We summarize the achievements of transplant surgery to date, focusing in particular on the safety and efficacy of immunosuppressive medications. We also emphasize the importance of risk/benefit assessments that take into account the physical, aesthetic, psychological, and social dimensions of facial disfiguration, reconstruction, and transplantation. Finally, we maintain that the time has come to move facial transplantation research into the clinical phase. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore in the light of recent scientific discoveries, coupled with a return to biblical orthodoxy, the question of the Fall, and the apparent intergenerational conditions of original sin. This is the human condition – East of Eden. Invoking Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection from random mutation as a means of repudiating the existence of original sin can no longer be sustained, scientifically; the biology of horizontal gene transfer, transgenerational epigenetics, accelerated evolution (...) and biological plasticity has rendered Darwinism grounded in a Naturalistic methodology an inadequate explanation. If humanity is ‘born this way’ – mired in sin – have we condemned ourselves and our children to this status? How does this affect the relationship between biology and free will, between a form of predestination and decision-making? Therefore, this paper is towards an understanding of the ontology of the original, or first, sin, and is a biblical and scientific exploration of postlapsarian humanity's self-willed state, ‘East of Eden.’. (shrink)

This paper outlines how the law has defined art and addressed problems in aesthetics. The discussion shows how the law examines the physical, temporal, and perceptual characteristics of works of art and their manner of creation to determine which works will be legally recognized and protected. The paper also discusses differentiations between various kinds of creations, including art, ornament, design, and craft. Besides outlining how the law judges art, the paper assesses the limitations of legal incursions into aesthetics. The analysis (...) is primarily based on UK law. (shrink)

Innovation is necessary to deal with challenges that climate change brings for agriculture, such as droughts, floods, pests and pathogens that enter new climatic regions, and challenges relating to the labour force. There is a dominant narrative that science and technology are the locus of innovation, and that the solutions developed can change systems. Indeed, history shows how the Green Revolution started a massive change in practices worldwide and gave science and technology the main role. Innovation, however, also happens outside (...) universities or industry research. Particularly in agriculture, it happens in the field through farmers’ experimentation. This opens up the idea of who is an innovator, and it is crucial to tackling climate challenges to agriculture. In this paper, we investigate the role of curiosity as a virtue of innovators. Instead of looking at systems of innovation, or at innovations themselves, we add to the growing scholarship on virtues of innovators. Among those virtues, curiosity is prominent. We argue that different contexts require different forms of the innovator virtues, and we conceptually investigate how such virtues ought to be cultivated in order to contribute to solving 21st century challenges for agriculture. (shrink)