Following other contributions about the MAX accidents to this journal, this paper explores the role of betrayal and moral injury in safety engineering related to the U.S. federal regulator’s role in approving the Boeing 737MAX—a plane involved in two crashes that together killed 346 people. It discusses the tension between humility and hubris when engineers are faced with complex systems that create ambiguity, uncertain judgements, and equivocal test results from unstructured situations. It considers the relationship between moral injury, principled outrage (...) and rebuke when the technology ends up involved in disasters. It examines the corporate backdrop against which calls for enhanced employee voice are typically made, and argues that when engineers need to rely on various protections and moral inducements to ‘speak up,’ then the ethical essence of engineering—skepticism, testing, checking, and questioning—has already failed. (shrink)

The modern presidency emerged not from an effort to escape constitutional propriety, as Tulis argues, but, rather, to emancipate presidents from the localized political parties of the nineteenth century, which had come to be viewed as sites of provincial and corrupt forms of popular rule. As the troubled tenure of George W. Bush suggests, contemporary presidents are torn between the public expectation that they stand apart from party politics and act as the chief executive of the administrative state; and their (...) role as party leaders, which links them to political allies in Congress and loyalists in the electorate. In its contribution to the development of a “new” national programmatic party system, the Bush administration reveals the potential for a novel, disturbing meld of party and administration, in which presidents seek to exploit the powers of the modern executive office for partisan gain. (shrink)

The nature and aim of science, by E. Nagel.--Truth and provability, by L. Henkin.--Completeness, by L. Henkin.--Computability, by S. C. Kleene.--Necessary truth, by W. V. Quine.--What is a scientific theory? By P. Suppes.--Science and simplicity, by N. Goodman.--Scientific explanation, by C. G. Hempel.--Observation and interpretation, by N. R. Hanson.--Probability and confirmation, by H. Putnam.--Utility and acceptance of hypotheses, by I. Levi.--Space and time, by A. Grünbaum.--Problems of microphysics, by P. Feyerabend.--Aspects of explanation in biological theory, by M. Beckner.--Psychologism and methodological (...) individualism, by S. Morgenbesser.--Science, fact, and value, by M. Scriven.--The justification of induction, by M. Black. (shrink)

In this brilliant work, first published in 1936, Sydney Hook seeks to resolve one of the classic problems of European intellectual history: how the political radicalism and philosophical materialism of Karl Marx issued from the mystical and conservative intellectual system of G.W.F. Hegel. This edition contains a forward by Christopher Phelps discussing Hook's career and the significance of "From Hegel to Marx" in the history of ideas.

Professor [H.W.] Sheldon's critique of contemporary naturalism as professed in the volume Naturalism and the Human Spirit consists of one central "accusation": naturalism is materialism pure and simple. This charge is supported by his further claim that since the scientific method naturalists espouse for acquiring reliable knowledge of nature is incapable of yielding knowledge of the mental or spiritual "nature" for the naturalist is definitionally limited to "physical nature." He therefore concludes that instead of being a philosophy which can settle (...) age-old conflicts between materialism and idealism, naturalism is no more than a partisan standpoint, and contributes no new philosophical synthesis. ... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics ed. by Daniel W. GrahamPhillip Sidney HorkyDaniel W. Graham, ed. and trans. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics. Parts 1 and 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xvii + 1020 pp. Cloth, $180; paper, $99.It has been nearly 30 years since (...) Malcolm Schofield revised and updated the first edition of the venerable translation of fragments of the Presocratic philosophers by J. E. Raven and G. S. Kirk, originally compiled in 1957 in the wake of the sixth and final edition of Diels-Kranz’s (DK) Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin 1951–52). And in the time since Kirk-Raven-Schofield’s second edition of The Presocratic Philosophers (KRS), in 1983, several translations of selected portions of the collected fragments of early Greek philosophy into English have appeared: Jonathan Barnes’ Early Greek Philosophy (London 1987), drawn from his revised edition of The Presocratic Philosophers (London 1982), Robin Waterfield’s The First Philosophers (Oxford 2000), and Richard McKirahan’s Philosophy Before Socrates (Indianapolis, Ind. 2011). Students of Presocratic philosophy and the early intellectual history of Greece have profited immensely from the contributions made by KRS, Barnes, Waterfield, and McKirahan. Yet none of these volumes, despite their intellectual courage, philosophical acumen, and deep learning, could provide what Diels and Kranz had given German audiences in the middle of the twentieth century: a bilingual translation of the complete fragments of and selected testimonia concerning those important intellectual antecedents of Plato (including the Sophists).On the eve of Professor Schofield’s retirement, then, Daniel W. Graham has produced a two-volume translation and commentary on the complete fragments and selected testimonies of the “major Presocratics.” It should be mentioned that this is not an easy or even enviable project. Presocratic studies has undergone a renaissance of sorts since the last edition of KRS in 1983, and new critical editions and translations into English of individual figures (J. Lesher’s Xenophanes of Colophon [Toronto 1992]; C. A. Huffman’s editions of Philolaus of Croton [Cambridge 1993] and Archytas of Tarentum [Cambridge 2005]; the editions of Anaxagoras by P. Curd [Toronto 2007] and D. Sider [Sankt Augustin 2005]; C. C. W. Taylor’s The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus [Toronto 1999]; G. J. Pendrick’s Antiphon the Sophist [Cambridge 2002]); new editions of papyrus discoveries (A. Martin and O. Primavesi’s L’Empédocle de Strasbourg [Berlin 1999], incorporated into B. Inwood’s The Poem of Empedocles [Toronto 2001] and the long-awaited “official” text of The Derveni Papyrus by T. Kouremenos, G. Parássoglou, and K. Tsantsanoglou [Firenze 2006]); and major critical studies [End Page 149] of Presocratic philosophers and/or philosophy (too numerous to name here) have significantly modified the landscape of the study of early Greek philosophy. In the midst of this renaissance, one has seen the critical approaches used to evaluate Presocratic thought develop into a perfect storm, with a barrage of new approaches concerning historiography, interpretation, reception, and contextualization, now considered legitimate in the assessment and evaluation of those thorny and often obscure fragments of the early Greek speculators. Presocratic studies has become contested ground, and the idea of producing a two-volume set that might update, stabilize, and make DK accessible for an English-reading audience, despite the protestations of the few (xiii), must be considered nothing less than wholly welcome. Given his demonstrated comprehension of the field of Presocratic studies at large—he has produced two broad-ranging monographs, edited several general volumes, and offered many article-length contributions on early Greek philosophy—Graham would seem to be the perfect choice for the job.What remains to be seen, then, is whether the volumes as we have them rise to the challenge of the project. The results, I think, are mixed. I will first discuss those aspects of The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy that seem more successful and testify to the value that such a collection offers to educators and students alike. Then I will examine some areas where the volumes do not quite reach the heights promised by the... (shrink)

Stem cell policy in the United States is an amalgam of federal and state policies. The scientific development of human pluripotent embryonic stem cells triggered a contentious national stem cell policy debate during the administration of President George W. Bush. The Bush “compromise” that allowed federal funding to study only a very limited number of ESC derived cell lines did not satisfy either the researchers or the patient advocates who saw great medical potential being stifled. Neither more restrictive legislation nor (...) expansion of federal funding proved politically possible and the federal impasse opened the door for a variety of state-based experiments. In 2004, California became the largest and most influential state venture into stem cell research by passing “Prop 71,” a voter initiative that created a new stem cell agency and funded it with $3 billion. Several states followed suit with similar programs to protect the right of investigators to do stem cell research and in some cases to invest state funding in such projects. Other states devised legislation to restrict stem cell research and in five states, criminal penalties were included. Thus, the US stem cell policy is a patchwork of multiple, often conflicting, state and federal policies. (shrink)

_Confronting American Labor_ traces the development of the American left, from the Depression era through the Cold War, by examining four representative intellectuals who grappled with the difficult question of labor’s role in society. Since the time of Marx, leftists have raised over and over the question of how an intelligentsia might participate in a movement carried out by the working class. Their modus operandi was to champion those who suffered injustice at the hands of the powerful. From the late (...) nineteenth through much of the twentieth century, this meant a focus on the industrial worker. The Great Depression was a time of remarkable consensus among leftist intellectuals, who often interpreted worker militancy as the harbinger of impending radical change. While most Americans waited out the crisis, listening to the assurances of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Marxian left was convinced that the crisis was systemic. Intellectuals who came of age during the Depression developed the view that the labor movement in America was to be the organizing base for a proletariat. Moreover, many came from working-class backgrounds that contributed to their support of labor. World War II and the resultant economic recovery shattered this coherence on the left. How did radicals opposed to capitalism deal with a labor movement that was very successful in terms of membership and power but clearly capitalist in its orientation? Coker describes the marked ambivalence and confusion of the intellectual left in the postwar years—a period of frustration brought on by a misreading of labor militancy during the 1930s and an unsuccessful search for a radical proletarian movement. The result was a politically and intellectually weakened left for decades to come. C_onfronting American Labor_ examines four individuals who represent a cross section of postwar radicalism. Each came of age on the socialist left, expecting that an anticapitalist movement would emerge from the ranks of labor. Seymour Martin Lipset and C. Wright Mills were professional sociologists. Sidney Lens spent his early life working within the labor movement before becoming a political commentator for a variety of leftist magazines and journals in the postwar era. Historian Herbert Gutman helped to create a “new labor history” that reflected broader transformations within the intellectual left. In tracing their various approaches to the problem of labor, C_onfronting American Labor_ explores the diverse nature of the postwar left. This important work will be of value to anyone interested in labor, class, and American thought. (shrink)

In Two Minds is a practical casebook of problem solving in psychiatric ethics. Written in a lively and accessible style, it builds on a series of detailed case histories to illustrate the central place of ethical reasoning as a key competency for clinical work and research in psychiatry. Topics include risk, dangerousness and confidentiality; judgements of responsibility; involuntary treatment and mental health legislation; consent to genetic screening; dual role issues in child and adolescent psychiatry; needs assessment; cross-cultural and gender issues; (...) rational and irrational suicide; shared decision making in multi-agency teams, and the growing role of the user's voice in psychiatry. Key ethical concepts are carefully introduced and explained. The text is richly supported by detailed guides for further reading. There are separate chapters on teaching psychiatric ethics, including a sample seminar, and on writing a research ethics application. Each case history and discussion is followed by a critical commentary from a practitioner with relevant experience. Jim Birley adds a comparative international perspective on psychiatric ethics. Cartoons by Johnny Cowee provide punchy counterpoint! In Two Minds is the sister volume to the third edition of Sidney, Paul Chodoff and Steven Green's highly successful Psychiatric Ethics. In providing a bridge between theory and practice, it will be essential reading for everyone concerned with improving standards in mental health care. (shrink)