This letter responds to the essay “Language Matters: The Semantics and Politics of ‘Assisted Dying,’” by Anna M. Elsner, Charlotte E. Frank, Marc Keller, Jordan O. McCullough, and Vanessa Rampton, in the September‐October 2024 issue of the Hastings Center Report.

Background There is continued need for enhanced medical ethics education across the United States. In an effort to guide medical ethics education reform, we report the first interprofessional survey of a cohort of graduate medical, nursing and allied health professional students that examined perceived student need for more formalized medical ethics education and assessed preferences for teaching methods in a graduate level medical ethics curriculum. Methods In January 2018, following the successful implementation of a peer-led, grassroots medical ethics curriculum, student (...) leaders under faculty guidance conducted a cross-sectional survey with 562 of 1357 responses received among students enrolled in the School of Medicine, College of Nursing, Doctor of Physical Therapy and BS/ MD Professional Scholars programs at The Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. An in person or web-based questionnaire was designed to measure perceived need for a more in-depth medical ethics curriculum. Results The majority of respondents were female, white and mid-20s in age. Almost half of respondents reported no prior medical ethics exposure or training in their previous educational experience, while 60% of students across all degree programs reported an interest in more medical ethics education and 92% noted that an understanding of medical ethics was important to their future career. Over a quarter of students were interested in pursuing graduate-level training in medical ethics, with case-based discussions, small group peer settings and ethics guest lectures being the most desired teaching methods. Conclusions The future physician, nursing and physical therapist workforce in our medical community demonstrated an unmet need and strong interest for more formal medical ethics education within their current coursework. Grassroots student-driven curricular development and leadership in medical ethics can positively impact medical education. Subsequent integration of interprofessional training in medical ethics may serve as a vital curricular approach to improving the training of ethically competent healthcare professionals and overcoming the current hierarchical clinical silos. (shrink)

There is a compassion crisis in healthcare negatively impacting patient outcomes. Little is known about the relationship of love as a motivating factor in healthcare. Our research exploring physician and nurse perspectives on what it means to love their patients elucidated substantive themes. Here we report findings from an exploratory follow-up qualitative study exploring patient perspectives on what it means to be loved by the healthcare team. Through convenience sampling, we conducted 21 structured interviews of patients exiting a family medicine (...) clinic. Nineteen of 21 patients unreservedly thought healthcare professionals should love their patients. Common themes emerged, which included being caring, trustworthy, empathetic, compassionate, conscientious, and a concern for the patient’s well-being. The characteristics and actions that reflect love were remarkably consistent with physician and nurse descriptions in our prior study. The nature of love described by patients, physicians and nurses could serve as a basis for high quality, compassionate, ethically sound healthcare. (shrink)

The business of cognitive therapy is to transform meanings. What better way to achieve this than through a metaphor? Metaphors straddle two different domains at once, providing a conceptual bridge from a problematic interpretation to a fresh new perspective that can cast one's experiences in a new light. Even the simplest metaphor can be used again and again with different clients, yet still achieve the desired effect. This book is the first to show just how metaphors can be used productively (...) in CBT as an integral part of the treatment. It describes the use of metaphors for a wide range of problems, including anxiety and depression, and provides countless examples of metaphors that have been used by others in CBT. It brings together in one place hundreds of metaphors that experienced therapists have used to great success. It will be a valuable sourcebook for all cognitive behaviour therapists, as well as those training in CBT. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Vagaries and Vicissitudes of WarRichard W Sams III remember standing in the kitchen of our home on Camp Pendleton—a United States Marine Corps base in Southern California—listening to National Public Radio (NPR) and doing dishes in the fall of 2002. President Bush announced to the world that he was considering a pre-emptive invasion of Iraq on the pretext of Saddam Hussein harboring weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Three (...) months later, as a Navy Family Physician, I deployed with a surgical company in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Reflecting on the situation with a like-minded close friend, I was not sure— would this be a just war? A necessary war? In my mind, it did not rise to the level of conscientious objection, yet the rightness of invading another country with all the anticipated death and destruction was not clear.En route to Kuwait, we laid over in Spain. While fixed to a TV in a holding area, I watched the Secretary of State make a case to the United Nations (UN) and the world that removing Hussein from power would protect us from mobile anthrax labs that could kill tens of thousands. I thought to myself, Either he is absolutely right, and we are protecting our country and the rest of the free world, or he is terribly mistaken and we are embarking on a disaster.As we trained, prepared, and waited in our tents to invade, we listened to the news on “Voice of America” with a hand crank radio. Thousands of citizens from nations around the world protested. Pope John Paul II, a man well acquainted with the tragedy of war, even spoke out about the planned invasion. “War is not inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity.” He admonished our leaders that war needed to be the very last option. As a man of faith, I was troubled by his resolute, thoughtful opposition to the crusade I was embarking on. As the day of the invasion approached, scud missiles flew over our camp and we scurried into bunkers, day and night, with our gas masks donned to protect us from possible WMD attacks. In March, with the announcement of a “shock and awe” missile attack on Hussein’s palace, the invasion commenced.Within a day of flying by helicopter into enemy territory to set up a surgical company, the fog of war set in. A series of mass casualties streamed in from nearby Nasiriya. We received dozens of injured enemy combatants and American soldiers. Most troubling were the civilians. An entire extended family fleeing for their lives stumbled into an Iraqi minefield meant for us: a mother dead, the men with shrapnel wounds, and an aunt lost both of her legs. Then there was the little boy. By doctrine, our leaders reassured us we would not care for children. Yet, out of instinct, the field corpsmen scooped up all injured, including children, and [End Page 170] brought them to us. The five-year-old’s legs were blown to bits. We had no pediatric supplies. The anesthesiologist heroically intubated the child’s tiny airway with a urinary catheter and placed an adult IV. The surgeons corrected the wounds the best they could. Hours later, in futility, we performed chest compressions on his tiny mangled body.A day later, the worst sandstorm in a decade struck the area. We struggled to keep the patient-filled tents erect. A Marine appeared on the scene out of the darkness (you could not see beyond your nose in the storm) exclaiming we were going to condition one—lock and load our weapons due to an imminent threat. As healthcare professionals, Geneva Conventions dictated we were to use weapons only in self-defense. We chambered our 9-millimeter pistols to defend our patients and ourselves while Marines formed a defensive perimeter. I thought to myself, Great I’m gonna be shot up and die during a freaking sandstorm in Iraq. Hours later, we were told to stand down. The threat was not from approaching enemy combatants but from shepherds running from the crossfire. I had a small nervous breakdown, sleep deprived and under duress... (shrink)

La mort assistée par un prestataire est en passe de devenir l’une des principales causes de décès au Canada depuis l’adoption de la loi sur l’aide médicale à mourir (AMM) en 2016. Ce qui devait être exceptionnel est devenu courant; certains demandent qu’on s’y attende. De plus en plus de patients atteints de maladies chroniques non terminales sont euthanasiés. Le personnel de santé approuve et propose désormais des MAiD aux patients vulnérables qui sont dépressifs, handicapés, atteints d’une maladie chronique ou (...) appauvris. Cet article présente une justification du point de vue de la loi morale transcendante, traditionnellement appelée loi naturelle, pour expliquer pourquoi le Canada a maintenant le régime d’euthanasie le plus libéral au monde. L’acte d’euthanasie exige que le prestataire mette délibérément fin à la vie du patient en lui administrant une substance mortelle. Cette pratique est contraire à la loi morale transcendante : ne pas tuer. Dès lors qu’une culture rejette délibérément cette loi fondamentale et adopte une éthique utilitaire dépourvue de tout principe, à l’exception de la notion d’autonomie, il est inévitable que cette pratique entraîne une ambiguïté et une incertitude éthique. Au fur et à mesure que la pratique persiste et devient la norme, l’aveuglement moral se développe et conduit à des abus flagrants sur les êtres humains. Je présente un diagramme éthique, la courbe de dissociation morale, qui illustre la raison des tendances observées au Canada. Le système de santé canadien doit réaffirmer les principes de l’éthique hippocratique et la dignité inhérente de ses patients. Les professionnels de la santé doivent donner la priorité aux soins palliatifs de haute qualité, empreints de compassion, et dire « non » à l’idée de mettre délibérément fin à la vie de patients souffrants. Ce faisant, la clarté morale sera retrouvée et les plus vulnérables de la société seront protégés. (shrink)

This paper seeks to differentiate negative properties from positive properties, with the aim of providing the groundwork for further discussion about whether there is anything that corresponds to either of these notions. We differentiate negative and positive properties in terms of their functional role, before drawing out the metaphysical implications of proceeding in this fashion. We show that if the difference between negative and positive properties tabled here is correct, then negative properties are metaphysically contentious entities, entities that many philosophers (...) will be unwilling to countenance. (shrink)

There is a compassion crisis in healthcare negatively impacting patient outcomes. Little is known about the relationship of love as a motivating factor in healthcare. Our research exploring physician and nurse perspectives on what it means to love their patients elucidated substantive themes. Here we report findings from an exploratory follow-up qualitative study exploring patient perspectives on what it means to be loved by the healthcare team. Through convenience sampling, we conducted 21 structured interviews of patients exiting a family medicine (...) clinic. Nineteen of 21 patients unreservedly thought healthcare professionals should love their patients. Common themes emerged, which included being caring, trustworthy, empathetic, compassionate, conscientious, and demonstrating concern for the patient's well-being. The characteristics and actions that reflect love were remarkably consistent with those mentioned by physicians and nurses in our prior study. The nature of love described by patients, physicians and nurses could serve as a basis for high quality, compassionate, ethically sound healthcare. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Full Collection of Personal NarrativesZohar Lederman, Ola Ziara, Rachel Coghlan, Oksana Sulaieva, Anna Shcherbakova, Oleksandr Dudin, Vladyslava Kachkovska, Iryna Dudchenko, Anna Kovchun, Lyudmyla Prystupa, Yuliya Nogovitsyna, Ghaiath Hussein, Kathryn Fausch, P. P. Kyaw, Ayesha Ahmad, Richard W Sams II, Handreen Mohammed Saeed, Artem Riga, Ryan C. Maves, Elizabeth Dotsenko, Irina Deyneka, Eva V. Regel, and Vita Voloshchuk• An Unsettling Affair• How We Keep Caring While Walking Through Our Pain• (...) Adjusting Laboratory Practices to the Challenges of Wartime• Why We Stay• A Semi-Personal Story from a Ukrainian NGO Professional (or a Semi-Professional Story from a Ukrainian Person) Living through the War• When Ethics Survives Where People Do Not: A Story From Darfur• Burma’s Healthcare Under Fire: My Experience as an Exiled Medical Professional• When a Conflict Collapses on a Child: An (Aborted) Medical Evacuation of a Hazara Toddler During the Kabul Airport Blast and the Taliban Takeover• The Vagaries and Vicissitudes of War• Providing Care to a Potential Aggressor: An Ethical Dilemma• One Surgeon’s Experience During Armed Conflict in Ukraine• The Limits of Our Obligations• A Liberating Breath• Soldiers of the Invisible Front: How Ukrainian Therapists Are Fighting for the Mental Health of the Nation Under Fire• Stories of Families with Chronically Ill Pediatric Patients during the War in UkraineCopyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Elementary Recursive Nonstandard Analysis, in short ERNA, is a constructive system of nonstandard analysis with a PRA consistency proof, proposed around 1995 by Patrick Suppes and Richard Sommer. Recently, the author showed the consistency of ERNA with several transfer principles and proved results of nonstandard analysis in the resulting theories (see [12] and [13]). Here, we show that Weak König's lemma (WKL) and many of its equivalent formulations over RCA₀ from Reverse Mathematics (see [21] and [22]) can be 'pushed down' (...) into the weak theory ERNA, while preserving the equivalences, but at the price of replacing equality with equality 'up to infinitesimals'. It turns out that ERNA plays the role of RCA₀ and that transfer for universal formulas corresponds to WKL. (shrink)

Elementary Recursive Nonstandard Analysis, in short ERNA, is a constructive system of nonstandard analysis with a PRA consistency proof, proposed in around 1995 by Patrick Suppes and Richard Sommer. It is based on an earlier system developed by Rolando Chuaqui and Patrick Suppes. Here, we discuss the inherent problems and limitations of the classical nonstandard framework and propose a much-needed refinement of ERNA, called , in the spirit of Karel Hrbacek’s stratified set theory. We study the metamathematics of and its (...) extensions. In particular, we consider several transfer principles, both classical and ‘stratified’, which turn out to be related. Finally, we show that the resulting theory allows for a truly general, elegant and elementary treatment of basic analysis. (shrink)

New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, energetically say, No! Many others, including some believers, insist that faith is utterly beyond reasoned ...

Elementary Recursive Nonstandard Analysis, in short ERNA, is a constructive system of nonstandard analysis proposed around 1995 by Patrick Suppes and Richard Sommer, who also proved its consistency inside PRA. It is based on an earlier system developed by Rolando Chuaqui and Patrick Suppes, of which Michal Rössler and Emil Jeřábek have recently proposed a weakened version. We add a Π₁-transfer principle to ERNA and prove the consistency of the extended theory inside PRA. In this extension of ERNA a σ₁-supremum (...) principle 'up-to-infinitesimals', and some well-known calculus results for sequences are deduced. Finally, we prove that transfer is 'too strong' for finitism by reconsidering Rössler and Jeřábek's conclusions. (shrink)

In a market place crowded with practical rhetoric books what educational value could a challenging work such as Kenneth Burke’s A Rhetoric of Motives possibly have? Burke knows but doesn’t use the terminology of the classical art and rather than analysing the persuasive rhetoric of well-known speeches to equip us with strategies, he weaves his way around literary texts, teasing out meanings that their authors something intended, sometimes did not. Yet, despite such difficulties, A Rhetoric of Motives is a practical (...) rhetoric book. It is just that its process of explication teaches us to think well. This essay tries to explain Burke’s rethinking of the purpose and contents of a traditional teaching tool—the rhetorical handbook—and defends the value of literary-rhetorical reading that aims to ‘equip’ citizens to think openly. (shrink)

Mitochondrial function and biogenesis depend on the transport of a large variety of proteins, ions, and metabolites across the two surrounding membranes. While several specific transporters are present in the inner membrane, transport processes across the outer membrane are less understood. Recent studies reveal that the number of outer membrane channels and their transport mechanisms are more diverse than originally thought. Four protein‐conducting channels promote transport of distinct sets of precursor proteins across and into the outer membrane. The voltage‐dependent anion (...) channel (VDAC) forms the major channel for small hydrophilic molecules. In addition, three channels with yet unknown substrate specificity exist in the outer membrane. In this review, we outline the emerging functional diversity, selectivity, and regulation of mitochondrial outer membrane channels. The presence of several channel‐forming proteins challenges the traditional view that the outer membrane forms an unspecific size‐exclusion filter for the flux of small hydrophilic molecules. (shrink)

Title: Lessons of the Spanish RevolutionPublisher: Freedom PressAuthor: Vernon RichardsTitle: The Anarchist CollectivesPublisher: Black Rose BooksAuthor: Sam Dolgoff Title: The Spanish Anarchists 1868-1936Publisher: HarperCollinsISBN: 0060906073Author: Murray Bookchin.

In recent years, a series of bestselling atheist manifestos by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens has thrust the topic of the rationality of religion into the public discourse. Christian moderates of an intellectual bent and even some agnostics and atheists have taken umbrage and lashed back. In this paper I defend the New Atheists against three common charges: that their critiques of religion commit basic logical fallacies (such as straw man, false dichotomy, or hasty generalization), that their own (...) atheism is just as “faith-based” as the religious beliefs they criticize, and that their expressed disrespect for religious belief is immoral. (shrink)

Contemporary theories of civic education frequently appeal to an ideal of mutual respect in the context of ethical, ethical and religious disagreement. This paper critically examines two recently popular criticisms of this ideal. The first, coming from a postmodern direction, charges that the ideal is hypocritical in its effort to be maximally impartial and fair. The second, which I associate with such 'new atheists' as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, argues that notions of mutual respect pose a threat to such (...) basic goals of education as the cultivation of critical thinking. (shrink)

Richard Shusterman suggested that Maurice Merleau-Ponty neglected “‘lived somaesthetic reflection,’ that is, concrete but representational and reflective body consciousness.” While unsure about this assessment of Merleau-Ponty, lived somaesthetic reflection, or what the late Sam Mallin called “body phenomenology”—understood as a meditation on the body reflecting on both itself and the world—is my starting point. Another is John Dewey’s bodily theory of perception, augmented somewhat by Merleau-Ponty. -/- With these starting points, I spent roughly 20 hours with St. Benedict Restores Life (...) to a Young Monk (c. 1360), a work of tempera and gold leaf on panel, by Giovanni Del Biondo, active in Italy from 1356 to 1398, on display in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s permanent collection. Following Dewey’s suggestion that “[t]he eye ... is only the channel through which a total response takes place,” meaning that motor, emotional, intellectual and non-visual perceptual capacities become active when we encounter paintings, I describe how the work engaged a range of bodily modalities; and how reflecting on these, in turn, supplied phenomenal articulations of life negating, preserving and enhancing forces important in the culture that produced it, and famously discussed by Friedrich Nietzsche. By virtue of the approach adopted, I also demonstrate Dewey’s belief that intimate engagement with art entails a total coordination of one’s capacities around the artwork, while simultaneously reinforcing Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about perception and how we can find phenomenal articulations of concepts such as the Nietzschean ones just mentioned. While focusing on Del Biondo’s painting, my main purpose is to engage in body phenomenology practices, and to show, in the words of Shusterman, how “[w]e might sharpen our appreciation of art through more attention to our somaesthetic feelings involved in perceiving art” and indeed the world. (shrink)

The lucid presentation makes the book an ideal introduction to both philosophy and Darwinism, as well as a substantive contribution to topics of intense current ...

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people (...) who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology. (shrink)

Although the universal human rights paradigm has been problematic for women and indigenous peoples, both groups have made advances by framing their demands within a human rights perspective. Indigenous women, however, have frequently found themselves marginalized by women’s movements and indigenous movements alike, particularly when they make demands for rights as indigenous women—not just as members of one group or the other. This article takes the case of Mapuche women in Chile to examine the politics of gender and human rights (...) for indigenous women. Their efforts to articulate their concerns, vis-à-vis Mapuche men, nonindigenous women, and the state, have entailed assertions of their own version of women’s rights, one that responds specifically to their reality as Mapuche women. (shrink)

New atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, generally speaking, are committed to two main beliefs. The first is scientism, which is the view that only science can give us complete and reliable knowledge of reality. The second is metaphysical naturalism, which is the view that no supernatural entities exist. In this article the author focuses on the metaphysical naturalism that new atheists and other naturalists accept, with the goal of answering the following question: Can metaphysical naturalism provide an (...) adequate foundation for objective moral values? He argues that the answer is “no” and he discusses several serious problems inherent in a naturalistic account of the foundation of morality. (shrink)

This is an excellent article, probably the best there is in defence of prohibiting the sale of organs, and it deserves a much fuller discussion of detail than there is space for here.1 My concerns, however, are with generalities rather than detail. Although some such argument might justify prohibition of organ selling in particular places and at particular times, it is difficult to see how it could support the kind of general, universal policy currently accepted by most advocates of prohibition.Whenever (...) the subject of organ selling is discussed, it is useful to keep in mind the natural history of the debate. Prohibition was instituted by most governments and professional bodies just about as quickly as possible after it was discovered that payment for kidneys was going on, and was a direct response to feelings of moral outrage. It all happened without time for debate. It was only later, as challenges appeared, that justifications began to be produced; and when they did they followed a pattern long familiar to philosophers, and more recently recognised by moral psychologists, of determined efforts to find a justification for the initial intuition that organ selling must be wrong. New arguments kept appearing in the cause as earlier attempts were shown to fail, and many were so weak that they could not have seemed plausible unless their advocates had already been committed to their conclusion. This does not mean, of course, that a good justification could never be produced. It does, however, suggest a widespread feeling that organ selling must be intrinsically …. (shrink)

In 2004, Sam Harris published The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason which became a major bestseller. This marked the first of a series of series of bestsellers that took a harder line against religion than has been the custom among secularists: Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris (2006), The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (2006), God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science (...) Shows That God Goes Not Exist by Victor J. Stenger (2007), and God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christoper Hitchens. (shrink)

The consciousness of the hosts is a major theme in Westworld, and for good reason. Hosts are not philosophical zombies. The hosts act like they have feelings, like they suffer and fear, like they enjoy the yellow, pink, and blue tones of a beautiful sunset. This chapter examines the analogs of memory, perception, and emotion in hosts. Hosts have a very troubling relationship to memory. Although using a different visual style would denote unique host experience, using the same visual style (...) to depict both human and host experience is not a strong indicator that the hosts are conscious, or that they have similar experiences to humans. Host perception, memory, and emotions all seem different from human, but the cinematic medium does not grant us immediate access to host experience, and neither the testimony of the creators, nor the hosts is totally reliable. (shrink)

Contrary to Block's assertion, “identity-crowding” does not provide an interesting instance of object-seeing without object-attention. The successful judgments and unusual phenomenology of identity-crowding are better explained by unconscious perception and non-perceptual phenomenology associated with cognitive states. In identity-crowding, as in other cases of crowding, subjects see jumbled textures and cannot individuate the items contributing to those textures in the absence of attention. Block presents an attenuated sense in which identity-crowded items are seen, but this is irrelevant to the debate about (...) phenomenal experience of an object in the absence of object-attention. Finally, even unconscious object perception in identity-crowding likely involves an attention-like selective process. (shrink)

Background: Despite procedural innovations and increasing numbers of uterus transplant attempts worldwide, the perspectives of uterus transplant (UTx) trial participants are lacking. Methods: We conducted a mixed-methods study with women with absolute uterine factor infertility (AUFI). Participants included women who had previously contacted the Cleveland Clinic regarding the Uterine Transplant Trial and met the initial eligibility criteria for participation. In-depth interviews were conducted in conjunction with FertiQoL, a validated and widely used tool to measure the impact of infertility on the (...) quality of life of infertility patients. Results: All (n = 19) rated their overall health as good; some experienced grief and social isolation. AUFI is a life-framing experience that influences acceptance by family, partners, peers, and one’s self. UTx is a means to gain control of reproductive autonomy. UTx allows family-building and the ability to play an active role in prenatal health and well-being. Establishing and maintaining a supportive relationship is a key issue of AUFI and when considering UTx. Risks of UTx are perceived relative to risks to self/child/family posed by adoption/surrogacy. Participants had no overall preference regarding living or deceased donor. Conclusions: The ways in which women with AUFI conceptualize this condition in their lives and choices around UTx and participating in a study of the procedure are multifaceted and textured. These perspectives are critical to understanding its ethical, legal, and social implications. (shrink)

Please see I. A. Richards (ISBN: 0415217318) for details or email [email protected].

In recent decades, the governance of food safety, food quality, on-farm environmental management and animal welfare has been shifting from the realm of ‘the government’ to that of the private sector. Corporate entities, especially the large supermarkets, have responded to neoliberal forms of governance and the resultant ‘hollowed-out’ state by instituting private standards for food, backed by processes of certification and policed through systems of third party auditing. Today’s food regime is one in which supermarkets impose ‘private standards’ along the (...) food supply chain to ensure compliance with a range of food safety goals—often above and beyond those prescribed by government. By examining regulatory governance in Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom we highlight emerging trajectories of food governance. We argue that the imposition of the new private forms of monitoring and compliance continue the project of agricultural restructuring that began with government support for structural adjustment schemes in agriculture and that these are most evident in the UK and Australia where neoliberalism is an entrenched philosophy. However, despite Norway’s identity as a social democracy, we also identify neoliberal ‘creep’ into the system of food governance. Small-scale producers in all three nations are finding themselves increasingly subject to governance through private, market-based mechanisms that, to varying degrees, are dominated by major supermarket chains. The result is agricultural restructuring not through the traditional avenues of elected governments, but via non-elected market operatives. (shrink)

Global fatalities related to COVID-19 are expected to be high in 2020–2021. Developing and delivering a vaccine may be the most likely way to end the pandemic. If it were possible to shorten this development time by weeks or months, this may have a significant effect on reducing deaths. Phase II and phase III trials could take less long to conduct if they used human challenge methods—that is, deliberately infecting participants with COVID-19 following inoculation. This article analyses arguments for and (...) against such methods and provides suggested broad guidelines for regulators, researchers and ethics committees when considering these matters. It concludes that it may be possible to maintain current ethical standards yet still permit human challenge trials in a context where delay is critical. The implications are that regulators and researchers need to work together now to design robust but short trials and streamline ethics approval processes so that they are in place when applications for trials are made. (shrink)

There is long-standing disagreement among systematists about how to divide biodiversity into species. Over twenty different species concepts are used to group organisms, according to criteria as diverse as morphological or molecular similarity, interbreeding and genealogical relationships. This, combined with the implications of evolutionary biology, raises the worry that either there is no single kind of species, or that species are not real. This book surveys the history of thinking about species from Aristotle to modern systematics in order to understand (...) the origin of the problem, and advocates a solution based on the idea of the division of conceptual labor, whereby species concepts function in different ways - theoretically and operationally. It also considers related topics such as individuality and the metaphysics of evolution, and how scientific terms get their meaning. This important addition to the current debate will be essential for philosophers and historians of science, and for biologists. (shrink)

This article revisits a famous staple of the Vergilian tradition, Servius's heavily contested scholion on the actress Volumnia Cytheris's theatrical rendition of Vergil's sixth Eclogue. By shifting the focus of inquiry from the strictly historical question ‘ did it happen?’ it cuts through, identifies and disentangles a nexus of prejudices which have led to the devaluing of Servius's information. The sidelining or dismissal of this piece of evidence, I argue, has more to teach us about our own culturally entrenched and (...) discipline-inherited assumptions than about what could have happened in late Republican Rome. Scrutiny of the evidence on the stage re-mediation of high poetry suggests it is entirely plausible that Cytheris would have performed a theatricalized version of Vergil's masterpiece. Indeed at the very heart of the story lies the convergence between élite poetry and the world of professional stage artists. Moreover, Cytheris's possible performance of a repertoire that coincides with the mythological core of pantomime dancing in its artistic maturity opens pivotal questions concerning what Plutarch aptly calls the “full association and mutual entanglement” between the arts of poetry and dance. Taking Servius seriously gives us the impetus to explore more decisively dimensions of Roman life that have been messily sidelined as a result of the systematic privileging of “texts” in our surveys of Roman intellectual landscapes over the centuries. Even if Servius's extract turned out to be no more than a “myth”, an “anecdote”, as such narratives go, this is an incredibly helpful one, provided we are willing to press it into the service of larger inquiries regarding the “circulation” of cultural energy between élite and popular culture. (shrink)