Over the past two years, debate about the use of data taken from Nazi concentration camp experiments has intensified. Many survivors of the Holocaust have been particularly offended at the publication of hypothermia or other data. This article argues against the use of unethically obtained data, and considers the debate from the perspective of the rights of Holocaust victims.

S. G. Williams; VIII*—Belief, Desire, and the Praxis of Reasoning, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 90, Issue 1, 1 June 1990, Pages 119–142, http.

Volume 9 of the Routledge History of Philosophy surveys ten key topics in the philosophy of science, logic and mathematics in the twentieth century. Each of the essays is written by one of the world's leading experts in that field. Among the topics covered are the philosophy of logic, of mathematics and of Gottlob Frege; Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus ; a survey of logical positivism; the philosophy of physics and of science; probability theory, cybernetics and an essay on the mechanist/vitalist debates. (...) The volume also contains a helpful chronology to the major scientific and philosophical events in the twentieth century. It also provides an extensive glossary of technical terms in the notes on major figures in these fields. (shrink)

The sequencing of the human genome and decreasing costs of sequencing technology have led to the notion of ‘personalized medicine’. This has been taken by some authors to indicate that personalized medicine will provide individualized treatments solely based on one’s DNA sequence. We argue this is overly optimistic and misconstrues the notion of personalization. Such interpretations fail to account for economic, policy and structural constraints on the delivery of healthcare. Furthermore, notions of individualization based on genomic data potentially take us (...) down the road of genetic reductionism obscuring the role of environmental factors in disease and ill health. We propose that one should see personalized medicine as a way of using personal genomic information to stratify individuals into subpopulations and suggest that personalized medicine be seen within a broader idea of personalized healthcare, reflecting healthcare that integrates personal genomic data into cultural, environmental and personal contexts. (shrink)

quam dolor hie umquam spatio euanescere possit,leniat aut odium tempus et hora meum.Here “spatio” means “lapse of time” : it is illustrated by A. A. II. 113forma bonum fragile est, quantumque accedit ad annos,fit minor et spatio carpitur ipsa suo.As regards the whole couplet, besides at this place, it is found also after line 40 in all the MSS. except the Galeanus Vaticanus and Phillipps MS. There, though it fits in with the context, it is not required: here it is (...) indispensable. It should therefore be omitted from the text after line 40, where its presence is due to that species of interpolation which consisted in the insertion of other portions of a writer's work kindred in meaning, on which see Mr. Hall's Companion to Classical Texts, p. 198. (shrink)

Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was a leading proponent of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. The essays in this volume provide a window into Cassirer’s discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence—that our entire emotional and intellectual life is configured and formed through the originary expressive power of word and image, that it is in and through the symbolic cultural systems of language, art, myth, religion, science, and technology that human life realizes itself and attains not only its form, (...) its visibility, but also its reality. Thought and being are set in opposition and united in genuine correspondence by the symbolic strife between them that Cassirer calls _Auseinandersetzung,_ which determines the ethical relationship of the self to the other. (shrink)

Karen Spärck Jones produced over 200 publications, including nine books, in her long research career. She received many awards and honours, including the Association for Computing Machinery Salton Award in 1988; the American Society for Information Science and Technology Award of Merit in 2002; and the joint Association for Computing Machinery and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Allen Newell Award in 2007. Karen also worked hard to try to improve the position of women in computing and to attract (...) more women to the discipline. She was a founder member of the ‘women@cl’ network based at the Computer Laboratory and was always unstinting with her time when women students and researchers asked her advice. (shrink)

This new translation of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences _ _makes Ernst Cassirer’s classic study, long out of print, available to English readers. A German Jew living in exile at the beginning of the Second World War, Cassirer wrote this book—one of his clearest and most concise—in response to the crises besetting his era. It represented to him a rethinking and completion of his magnum opus _The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. _S. G. Lofts’s translation stays close to the original (...) German and accurately reflects the echoes of the philosophical debates of Cassirer’s day. In the book’s five linked studies, Cassirer considers the intellectual structure of the disciplines we commonly refer to as the humanities. He defines and justifies the basic philosophical perspective of the philosophy of symbolic forms, and he contributes a wealth of ideas to continuing debates about culture and what is unique in human nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:FEYERABEND'S EPISTEMOLOGY AND BRECHTS THEORY OF THE DRAMA by S. G. Couvalis In his early paper, "On the Improvement of the Sciences and the Arts," Feyerabend argues that, just as rival hypotheses show the shortcomings of entrenched scientific hypotheses, so theatre which presents hypotheses contrary to common beliefs about human beings shows the shortcomings of these beliefs. It develops understanding of human relations more effectively than intellectual debate because (...) it is a more complex medium whose elements can "represent the contrary hypotheses at the same time."1 He takes Brecht to be the first theorist of such a theatre. I shall argue that Brecht's epistemology is similar to Feyerabend's early epistemology and that his dramatic theory is a consequence of it.2 1 shall also argue, however, that Feyerabend is wrong in saying that Brechtian theatre presents contrary hypotheses at the same time, because plays, like descriptions, are theory-laden and Brecht, in any case, intends to show on stage that tragedies have social origins and not to present contrary hypotheses about human beings. According to Brecht, most people improperly assume that human behavior and social relations follow fixed patterns inherent in nature because they have been unable to compare the human behavior they know with that in other societies. They take what they experience to be typically human. Moreover, they interpret their social world as they have been taught: "A child, living in a world of old men... knows the run of things before he can walk."3 Feyerabend brings out the effect of such training very vividly: "The teaching procedures both shape the 'appearance,' or 'phenomenon' and establish a firm connection with words, so that finally the phenomena seem to speak for themselves...."4 Because these interpretations of the social world which children are taught are descriptive, explanatory, and prescriptive, they are more 117 118Philosophy and Literature complex and more dangerous than the interpretations of physical objects they are taught. For example, children learn different evaluations of precisely the same behavior in males and females through being taught how to describe it. In being taught to describe certain behavior as "manly" they are taught both that it arises from a male's nature and that it is laudable behavior for boys but not for girls. "Manly" behavior in a woman is not "confident" or "forthright," but "aggressive" or "pushy." In order to stop us from regarding traditional behavior patterns and social relations as unchangeable, and to enable us to question our descriptions of them, Brecht argues that the dramatist must cause us to cease to regard such patterns and social relations as familiar givens that can only be described in one way. To achieve this, he must not structure his plays on the Aristotelian model. The Aristotelian model makes audiences incapable of criticizing the dramatic message, imparts the view that the sources of tragedy lie in an inexplicable human essence, and presents social rules as if they were unquestionable natural laws. Instead, he should structure his plays to induce in audiences a scientific attitude to social relations and patterns of behavior. Like Feyerabend, Brecht realizes that a scientific attitude is not displayed by collecting descriptions of experience without considering whether the interpretations contained in the descriptions are correct. In Galileo, his view of those who mechanically describe experience in traditional terms is shown in Galileo's replies to the Aristotelian arguments of Andrea. When Andrea argues, "I can see that the sun's not in the same place in the evening and morning. So it can't stand still. It just can't," Galileo replies, "You 'W! What do you see? You see nothing at all. You're just gaping. Gaping isn't seeing." He then demonstrates to Andrea that the apparent motions of objects need not be their real motions because an apparent motion can be caused in more than one way. 5 Brecht shows that the central question for the scientist is not "How shall I collect descriptions of appearances?" but "What is it that I really perceive and how is it caused?" He argues elsewhere that "there's a vast difference between experiment and experience" because experiments are set up to test... (shrink)

sirAt a recent health authority meeting Professor Stacey, the NHSE Head of Research Ethics, was quoted as stating that for multicentre trials rapid responses were required ….

Power has been studied in various guises in both the social cognition and the reasoning literatures. In this paper, three experiments are reported in which this factor was investigated in the domain of deontic thinking. Power of source of deontic statements was varied within several scenarios, and participants judged the degree to which they thought an injunction would be carried out. In the first experiment, permission statements were used, and it was found that, as predicted, power was positively related to (...) degree of endorsement of deontic conclusions across scenarios. In the second experiment, these findings were generalised across three further deontic domains (threat, warning, and promise) and two different syntactic forms (conjunctive and disjunctive). In the third experiment, the hypothesis that power effects were mediated by subjective judgements of conditional probability was investigated and confirmed. It is argued that these results favour theories that give a general role to probabilistic factors, rather than those based on domain-specific schemas. (shrink)