XLRI, in association with a few Tata Group companies, established the XLRI-JRD Tata Foundation in Business Ethics in 1991 to mark their long-standing commitment and contribution to business ethics in India. The foundation seeks to address this by publicly affirming the urgent need for ethics in business and the need to bring about a conducive culture in which it can thrive.

We discuss potential biorisks from large language models (LLMs). AI assistants based on LLMs such as ChatGPT have been shown to significantly reduce barriers to entry for actors wishing to synthesize dangerous, potentially novel pathogens and chemical weapons. The harms from deploying such bioagents could be further magnified by AI-assisted misinformation. We endorse several policy responses to these dangers, including prerelease evaluations of biomedical AIs by subject-matter experts, enhanced surveillance and lab screening procedures, restrictions on AI training data, and access (...) controls on biomedical AI. We conclude with a suggestion about future research directions in bioethics. (shrink)

Hicks' edition of the De Anima contains valuable commentary from Hicks as well as useful summaries of the views of earlier commentators.

Originally published in 1907, this book contains the ancient Greek text of Aristotle's De Anima, his treatise on the differing souls of living things. An English translation is provided on each facing page, and Hicks supplies a very detailed commentary on each line at the end of the book, as well as a summary of each section. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Greek philosophy and the history of classical scholarship.

We show there is only one consistent way to update a probability assignment, that given by Bayes's rule. The price of inconsistent updating is a loss of efficiency. The implications of this for the problem of induction are discussed.

Requests by patients or their families for treatment which the patient's physician considers to be "inappropriate" are becoming more frequent than refusals of treatment which the physician considers appropriate. Such requests are often based on the patient's religious beliefs about the attributes of God (sovereignty, omnipotence), the attributes of persons (sanctity of life), or the individual's personal relationship with God (communication, commands, etc). We present four such cases and discuss some of the basic religious tenets of the three Abrahamic faith (...) traditions as they relate to such requests. We suggest that religious reasons for requesting "inappropriate" treatment are "special" and deserve serious consideration. We offer guidance to assist clinicians and clinical ethicists as they attempt to resolve these conflicts, emphasising the importance of understanding the religious beliefs of the patient/surrogate and suggesting the assistance of a religious interpreter. We suggest open discussion with patients and families of both the clinical situation and the theological basis for these requests. We also suggest that clinicians use additional religious doctrines or principles from patients' own traditions to balance the reasons behind the requests. We conclude that most persistent requests for "inappropriate" treatment should be honoured. (shrink)

Initial responses to questionnaires used to assess participants' understanding of informed consent for malaria vaccine trials conducted in the United States and Mali were tallied. Total scores were analyzed by age, sex, literacy (if known), and location. Ninety-two percent (92%) of answers by United States participants and 85% of answers by Malian participants were correct. Questions more likely to be answered incorrectly in Mali related to risk, and to the type of vaccine. For adult participants, independent predictors of higher scores (...) were younger age and female sex in the United States, and male sex in Mali. Scores in the United States were higher than in Mali (P = 0.005). Despite this difference participants at both sites were well informed overall. Although interpretation must be qualified because questionnaires were not intended as research tools and were not standardized among sites, these results do not support concerns about systematic low understanding among research participants in developing versus developed countries. (shrink)

R D Smith; The Use of Memory, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 85–96, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1983.tb00018.

The issue of social welfare and individual responsibility has become a topic of international public debate in recent years as politicians around the world now question the legitimacy of state-funded welfare systems. David Schmidtz and Robert Goodin debate the ethical merits of individual versus collective responsibility for welfare. David Schmidtz argues that social welfare policy should prepare people for responsible adulthood rather than try to make that unnecessary. Robert Goodin argues against the individualization of welfare policy and expounds the virtues (...) of collective responsibility. (shrink)

The broad analysis made by Home and Watanabe of the development of physics in Australia during the period from 1914 to 1945 is generally accepted; however, details relating to the backgrounds of certain of these developments are questioned.

In this book, Anthony R. D'Augelli and Charlotte J. Patterson bring together top experts to offer a comprehensive overview of what we have discovered--and what we still need to learn--about lesbian, gay, and bisexual identities.

It is possible to retrieve viable sperm from a dying man or from a recently dead body. This sperm can be frozen for later use by his wife or partner to produce his genetic offspring. But the technical feasibility alone does not morally justify such an endeavour. Posthumous semen retrieval raises questions about consent, the respectful treatment of the dead body, and the welfare of the child to be.We present two cases, discuss these three issues, and conclude that such requests (...) should generally not be honoured unless there is convincing evidence that the dead man would want his widow to carry and bear his child. Even with consent, the welfare of the potential child must be considered. (shrink)

Three studies investigated implicit brand attitudes and their relation to explicit attitudes, prod- uct usage, and product differentiation. Implicit attitudes were measured using the Implicit As- sociation Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). Study 1 showed expected differ- ences in implicit attitudes between users of two leading yogurt brands, also revealing significant correlations between IAT-measured implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes. In Study 2, users of two fast food restaurants (McDonald’s and Milk Bar) showed implicit attitudi- nal preference for their (...) favorite restaurant. In Study 3, implicit attitudes of users of two soft drinks (Coca-Cola and Pepsi) predicted brand preference, product usage, and brand recognition in a blind taste test. A meta-analytic combination of the three studies showed that the use of IAT measures increased the prediction of behavior relative to explicit attitude measures alone. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:R. D. Ackerman BELIEVING IN A FICTION: WALLACE STEVENS AT THE LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGY The "ring of men" of "Sunday Morning" will chant their "devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / Naked among them, like a savage source" (CP, pp. 69-70).' Solar nakedness is deferred even as it is named. The problem for belief is the question of appearance and (...) representation. Things appear as and like.... The phenomenological return to things is also a turn to fiction, as Husserl understood: "If anyone loves a paradox, he can really say... that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology... is fiction. ' " The sun is divine, and it is not; it is both naked and clothed, savage and civilized, source (or end) and means. But such paradox is ultimately unsatisfying, and as we will see with Stevens, the need for belief—for an image or idea of totality—forces the issue of fiction and reality. The Stevens we will have in view is not the Stevens—as if there were such a creature. Our Stevens is the one most persuaded by promises such as those of phenomenology, the one most concerned with decreation (reduction) and fresh beginnings, with discovery and recognition, with imagination, the body, and the earth. This is the Stevens for whom the barrier of language presages at last not absence and difference but fictive recovery of presence and identity, the one for whom poetry represents a way of belief beyond mysticism even as it bodes mythic proximity. Finally, this is the Stevens who predominates throughout the prose (as well as in much of the poetry), who tries mightily to secure a belief while disencumbering himself of metaphysics—but alas, I think, with small success. Although Stevens's association of the problem of belief with the idea of fiction occurs in early poems such as "A High-Toned Old Christian 79 80Philosophy and Literature Woman" and "To the One of Fictive Music," his most intensive involvement with fiction as belief dates from the early 1940s and spans the period of his major essays and his last four volumes of poems. He recounts, for instance, a 1942 conversation with a student: "I said that I thought that we had reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognized that it was a fiction. The student said that that was an impossibility, that there was no such thing as believing in something that one knew was not true. It is obvious, however, that we are doing that all the time" (L, p. 430). What does it mean to believe in a fiction? That is my main subject here, as we seek out the limits of the phenomenological Stevens. His letters of this period are preoccupied with the problem of fictive belief: "If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else.... A good deal of my poetry recently has concerned an identity for that thing.... In one of the short poems that I have just sent to the harvard advocate, I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction. I think that the history of belief will show that it has always been in a fiction" (L, p. 370). The poem referred to, "Asides on the Oboe," begins: The prologues are over. It is a question now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. (CP, p. 250) Acknowledging that "in the long run, poetry would be the supreme fiction" (L, pp. 430-31), Stevens nonetheless singles out the nominative function of poetry as the essence of its claim to supremacy: "Poetry means not the language of poetry but the thing itself.... The subject matter is what comes to mind when one says of the month of August... 'Thou art not August, unless I make thee so'" (L, p. 377). The quoted line (also from "Asides") underscores the paradox that for Stevens the essence of fiction (the nontrue) is its capacity to nominate the true or the real. This... (shrink)

Thirteenth-century India saw a huge revival of religious devotion among the common folk, similar to the waves of religious fervor that swept over late medieval Europe. One of the pillars of this revival was the poet-saint Jnaneshwar, author of an exquisite commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. Like his contemporary Dante, Jnaneshwar was a poet of the vernacular, who wrote in Marathi, the language of ordinary villagers, rather than the Sanskrit of the brahmin orthodoxy. Over the centuries, the Jnaneshwari, as his (...) commentary is known, has become a scripture in its own right. Expanding the Gita’s seven hundred verses to approximately nine thousand, and using the images of ordinary life to explain its lofty teachings, Jnaneshwar fashioned from human language one of the most sublime visions of the Absolute that has ever been put into speech. The Jnaneshwari is one of the marvels of world literature. The greatest study of the Jnaneshwar is still this work by the philosopher R. D. Ranade, originally published in 1933. In addition to being a renowned scholar, Ranade was also a mystic and an initiated disciple, and he brings all these broad currents of the Indian tradition to his analysis of the Jnaneshwari. Readers who are sometimes intoxicated by the richness of Jnaneshwar’s imagery, will appreciate the way Ranade has here uncovered the work’s inner structure, and how he has briefly summarized its approach to the Gita’s great themes: action vs. renunciation; devotion and dharma; the form and the formless aspects of God; and the subject dearest to Jnaneshwar’s heart, the nature of the spiritual Master. This book also includes Ranade’s study of Jnaneshwar’s abhangas, his religious songs, as well as an analysis of his magnificent Amritanubhav, “The Nectar of Self-Awareness,” an inspired synthesis of Samkhya and Shaivism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.4 (2005) 325-329 [Access article in PDF] Psychoanalysis as Natural Philosophy R. D. Hinshelwood Keywords evolution, psychopathology, ethics, unconscious phantasy Andreas De Block has offered us a most fascinating paper. We do not have to agree with all his points to be profoundly stimulated by them. His core proposition is that Freud pathologizes ordinary psychology and personalities, as well as the abnormal. There has been (...) a perennial debate about whether, psychoanalytically speaking, there is a continuum from pathology to normality or if there is a discontinuity at some point between the two. Freud's famous quote—"much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness" (Breuer and Freud 1895, 305)—is ambiguous. Interestingly, De Block takes a hard stand on this; he not only assumes a continuum, but further he reads Freud as saying that all normality is neurotic. This is not a usual reading of Freud. De Block then expands this into a philosophical position. It is, he says, Freud's philosophy on the nature of mind.Freud himself was not interested in philosophy, and thought it largely irrelevant to psychoanalysis. In fact, he mused about the traffic being inevitably in the opposite direction—that philosophy might come to psychoanalysis. In discussing the work of a philosophically inclined analyst, he remarked, The decisive reason for the rejection of Putnam's proposals was the doubt as to which of the countless philosophical systems should be accepted, since they all seem to rest on an equally insecure basis.... It seemed more prudent to wait, and to discover whether a particular attitude towards life might be forced upon us with all the weight of necessity by analytical investigation itself. (Freud 1921, 270) Psychoanalysis, Freud thought, might be the very substance from which a philosophical system could emerge. De Block has followed that route; he has gone to Freud's writing to discovery a weltanshaung on which we might develop a philosophy of life. He has come back from his intellectual expedition with Freud's fascinating paper, published only in 1987 (discovered in 1983), "A Phylogenetic Phantasy." This was actually written in 1914, but Freud never published it and in fact destroyed his own copy of the draft. The paper has been called a "metabiology" (Gubrich-Simitis 1987), and deals with Freud's speculation on how a threatened species during the ice age developed certain biological and biopsychological traits1 necessary to survive the harsh environmental conditions. These traxits, which included the repression of libido, had significant side effects, namely, the pathologies arising from repression: the neuroses, perversions and psychoses. Moreover, today the environmental conditions no longer apply, so we are left with the side effects of traits that are no longer biologically useful. [End Page 325]So, De Block indicates at least the possibility of an evolutionary theory of the nature of mind. Even if Freud's Lamarckianism makes his particular speculative metabiology implausible, it is a way of thinking that suggests that a theory of mind can arise from biological understanding of its evolutionary development. However, De Block goes further. As a corollary, because Freud's view of the evolution of mind is to involve the evolutionary nature of psychopathology, then Freud's psychoanalysis can suggest an evolutionary psychiatry—that is to say, psychiatry can look for distant causes of mental disturbance in the vagaries of evolutionary influence.This way of approaching philosophy is interesting because it starts with the outcome of a scientific investigation of the human mind, just as Freud suggested in the passage quoted (Freud 1921, 270). The prospect is for a natural philosophy of mind, just as the physics of fundamental particles and the "big bang" prompt us toward a kind of natural ontology of the universe and its contents, arising from empirically tested facts.However, De Block is on rather uncertain ground with the evidence for his argument; he commits Freud to this biological speculation on the basis of a paper that Freud did not in fact publish and tore up.2 Even if Freud's reading of the evolutionary origins of man... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.4 (2005) 301-305 [Access article in PDF] The Beauty of Psychotherapy R. D. Hinshelwood Keywords awe, psychotherapy, representation, self-esteem The Enlightenment was devoted to clear uncontaminated reason; its success has given us the terrific achievements of science and technology. However, it has bequeathed problems too. Untrammeled reason has led to the devaluing and exclusion of emotions. Emotions are irrational—self-deception, akrasia, and so on. They were (...) a problem for the eighteenth-century philosopher Kant and right through to the modern therapist Aaron Beck. Callender rightly looks around the edges of rationalist thought to see what can be said about the emotional and subjective side of mankind. He argues that there is more to the human mind than cognition. Something has been left out. What can be found to fill the gap?Callender has searched for the missing link that might complete our view of human nature. And he came back with aesthetics. Meaning The Enlightenment failing is writ large for therapists who are confronted with people who feel things. So we need to ask what place the emotions have in understanding the nature of man? It is not a hypothetical question, but a very practical one for a therapist. Emotions, Callender says, and most people would agree with him, are what gives meaning to life, a sense of purpose in living, even an ill-defined or delusional purpose.He presents Kant's description of aesthetics. Aesthetic judgements have a number of features, the most enigmatic and perhaps profound is a "purposiveness without purpose." A work of art, say a portrait, may have a purpose insofar as it represents a person for his aggrandizement or for his descendents through many generations, but the aesthetic quality does not come from that purpose. The aesthetic purpose involves a different set of judgements. They are about the painting as a piece of art in itself. If it is possible to compare this kind of aesthetic judgement with a judgement of a person's life, then I find myself reminded of Wollheim's definition of a person: The simplest way of putting the matter, which is not to be taken as a metaphysical claim, is this: There are persons, they exist; persons lead lives; and as a result, in consequence—in consequence that is, of the way they do it—there are lives, of which those who lead them may, for instance, be proud, or feel ashamed. So there is a thing, and there is a process, and there is a product. (Wollheim 1984, 2) Although many things do not lead lives, we do. And our lives have a process and a product. Like an aesthetic product, our lives have a sense of emotional meaning, without it having a clear purpose.Aesthetic judgements are therefore of a particular and somewhat peculiar kind. They judges talent for producing "that for which no determinate [End Page 301] rules can be given," as the paper quotes Kant. Other kinds of judgements do have determinate rules. First are empirical judgements for getting practical things done; and moral judgements for assessing ethical good from bad. Aesthetic beauty does not have clear rules, although many systems of rules have been proposed starting with the rules of perspective as they were laid out by renaissance painters, through to systems of color, such as that proposed by Paul Klee, once color was correlated with electromagnetic wavelengths. However, artists have always kept one jump ahead and evaded imprisonment in codified rules. So too it is with leading a life, perhaps. The really creative life is not lead according to rules. The art of life is to live meaningfully without simply running along tramlines. Although moral conduct and the practicalities of life remain significant, perhaps leading a life implies simply a "flare for living." Representation Of these three kinds of judgements that a mind makes, two do have sets of rules. Only one based on rationality, empirical evidence, and reason. Reason judges what can be done and achieved in the real physical world. It is about pragmatics and the usefulness of action. Moral judgements, about what... (shrink)

Professor R. J. Getty has drawn attention to a tenth- or early eleventh-century manuscript of Statius’ Thebaid, hitherto examined only in Book I, namely Turonensis . Dr. Klotz, in his Teubner edition of 1908, gave citations from Book I, and wrote , ‘dolendum est sane de hoc codice primum tantum librum innotuisse, sed cum Roffensis libri maxime affinis accuratiorem notitiam haberemus, collatione quamvis -aegre careri posse nobis visum est.’ I have collated both T and Roffensis in full, and find firstly (...) that the citations of r by Klotz are far from accurate, especially in the last six books, and secondly that while it is indeed true thatT and r are very closely related, T is a much better representative than r of their common source. (shrink)

In Bester’s article (2018) challenging the use of the harm principle and advocating sole reliance on the use of a best interest standard (BIS) in pediatric decision-making, we believe that the auth...

(1982). Sex‐ and Age‐Related Differences in the Musical Behaviour, Interests and Attitudes Towards Music of 232 Secondary School Students. Educational Studies: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 131-139.

Savulescu maintains that our paper, which encourages clinicians to honour requests for "inappropriate treatment" is prejudicial to his atheistic beliefs, and therefore wrong. In this paper we clarify and expand on our ideas, and respond to his assertion that medicine, ethics and atheism are objective, rational and true, while religion is irrational and false.

In this paper I ask whether in Aristotle's metaphysical system the form of a non-living sensible substance, such as the form of this house, is or is not universal. I argue that his position as it stands is self-contradictory, and then try to give some account of the pressures that led to this central contradiction in Aristotle's metaphysical thought.

It has been alleged that Bayesian usage of prior probabilities allows one to obtain empirical statements on the basis of no evidence whatever. We examine this charge with reference to several examples from the literature, arguing, first, that the difference between probabilities based on weighty evidence and those based on little evidence can be drawn in terms of the variance of a distribution. Moreover, qua summaries of vague prior knowledge, prior distributions only transmit the empirical information therein contained and, therefore, (...) their consequences for long-run frequency behavior are "a priori" in at best a Pickwickian sense. (shrink)

A number of authors have drawn attention to the contributions to geology of Robert Hooke, and it has been pointed out that in several ways his ideas were more advanced than those of Steno, who is sometimes taken to be the founder of geology as a scientific discipline. Moreover, it has been argued that in a number of instances Hooke should receive the credit for ideas which are usually believed to have originated in the work of James Hutton. This recognition (...) of the significance of Hooke's work is regarded by the present writer as being well founded. But, by contrast, the relationship between Hooke's geological ideas and his views on the proper methods for conducting scientific enquiries has been largely overlooked, and his views on the methodology of science, as revealed in his Posthumous works, have received little discussion. Moreover, on one of the few occasions on which they were discussed, by William Whewell, they were belittled. Whewell regarded Hooke's methodological contribution as merely ‘an attempt to adapt the Novum organon to the age which succeeded its publication’, 5 and he implied that the ‘same imperfections’ were to be found in the writings of both Hooke and Bacon. The influence of Bacon is, to be sure, most obvious in Hooke's general philosophy. Nevertheless, it will be argued that Hooke had a much clearer idea than did Bacon of the importance of so-called ‘hypothetico-deductive’ methods in science, and that in many ways his methodological views represent a significant advance on those of Bacon. (shrink)