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Exploration of immune systems in prokaryotes, such as restriction‐modification or CRISPR‐Cas, shows that both innate and adaptive systems possess programmed cell death (PCD) potential. The key outstanding question is how the immune systems sense and “predict” infection outcomes to “decide” whether to fight the pathogen or induce PCD. There is a striking parallel between this life‐or‐death decision faced by the cell and the decision by temperate viruses to protect or kill their hosts, epitomized by the lysis‐lysogeny switch of bacteriophage Lambda. (...) Immune systems and temperate phages sense the same molecular inputs, primarily, DNA damage, that determine whether the cell lives or dies. Because temperate (pro)phages are themselves components of prokaryotic genomes, their shared “interests” with the hosts result in coregulation of the lysis‐lysogeny switch and immune systems that jointly provide the cell with the decision machinery to probe and predict infection outcomes, answering the life‐or‐death question. (shrink)

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I defend the extremist position that the fundamental ontology of the world consists of a vector in Hilbert space evolving according to the Schrödinger equation. The laws of physics are determined solely by the energy eigenspectrum of the Hamiltonian. The structure of our observed world, including space and fields living within it, should arise as a higher-level emergent description. I sketch how this might come about, although much work remains to be done.

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I discuss "Poetic Naturalism" -- there is only one world, the natural world, but there are many ways of talking about it -- both as a general concept, and how it accounts for our actual world. I talk about emergence, fundamental physics, entropy and complexity, the origins of life and consciousness, and moral constructivism.

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How was the world generated and how does matter continue to be ordered so that the world can continue functioning? Questions like these have existed as long as humanity has been capable of rational thought. In antiquity, Plato's Timaeus introduced the concept of the Demiurge, or Craftsman-god, to answer them. This lucid and wide-ranging book argues that the concept of the Demiurge was highly influential on the many discussions operating in Middle Platonist, Gnostic, Hermetic and Christian contexts in the first (...) three centuries AD. It explores key metaphysical problems such as the origin of evil, the relationship between matter and the First Principle and the deployment of ever-increasing numbers of secondary deities to insulate the First Principle from the sensible world. It also focuses on the decreasing importance of demiurgy in Neoplatonism, with its postulation of procession and return. (shrink)

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Embodying Asian/American Sexualities is an accessible reader designed for use in undergraduate and graduate American studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and performance studies classes as well as for a general public interested in related issues. It contains both overviews of the field and scholarly interventions into a range of topics, including history, literature, performance, and sociology.

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Introduction to the third special edition on the Foundations of Mind: Foundations of Mind: Hommage to Walter Freeman III.

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This paper offers an unorthodox appraisal of empirical research bearing on the question of the low representation of women in philosophy. It contends that fashionable views in the profession concerning implicit bias and stereotype threat are weakly supported, that philosophers often fail to report the empirical work responsibly, and that the standards for evidence are set very low—so long as you take a certain viewpoint.

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Neal’s latest book uses Howard Thurman as a window through which to view concepts that shaped black thought in the Modern Era of the African-American Freedom Struggle. Thurman’s grasp of black culture and religious ideas during the period of enslavement allowed him to produce a body of work grounded in the musings and traditions of his ancestors.

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Emotional hardcore and other music genres featuring screamed vocals are puzzling for the appreciator. The typical fan attaches appreciative value to musical screams of emotional pain, all the while acknowledging it would be inappropriate to hold similar attitudes towards their sonically similar everyday counterpart: actual human screaming. Call this the screamed vocals problem. To solve the problem, I argue we must attend to the anti-sublimating aims that get expressed in the emotional hardcore vocalist’s choice to scream the lyrics. Screamed vocals (...) help us see the value in rejecting (a) restrictive social norms of emotional expressiveness and (b) restrictive artistic norms about how one ought to express or represent pain in art—namely that if one is going to do so, one must ensure the pain has been ‘beautified’. In developing this second point, I argue that emotional hardcore is well-suited (although not individually so) for putting pressure on longstanding views in the history of aesthetics about the formal relationship between art and human pain. (shrink)

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This remarkable collection explores the legacy of Wittgenstein's work in contemporary American philosophy. The contributors (including several celebrated philosophers) take a variety of approaches to Wittgenstein; they discuss such topics as rule-following, realism about mathematics, the method of the Tractatus, the relation between style and content in Wittgenstein, and his distinction between sense and nonsense. Wittgenstein also is discussed in relation to subsequent philosophers such as Quine and Kripke.

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Philosophy of epidemiology has recently emerged as a distinct branch of philosophy. The field will surely benefit from pluralism, reflected in the broad range of topics and perspectives in this special issue. Here, I argue that a healthy pluralistic field of philosophy of epidemiology has social responsibilities that require the field as a whole to engage actively with research on social determinants of health and health disparities. Practicing epidemiologists and the broader community of public health scientists have gradually acknowledged that (...) much of their attention ought to be paid to these, i.e. inequitable between-population health variations that largely reflect the world’s inequitable distribution of resources and social conditions. The paper illustrates how and why health disparities and social determinants of health, through no ill will, become de facto secondary concerns in Alex Broadbent’s field-defining Philosophy of Epidemiology, showing the ease with which these topics can be incidentally sidelined. As means for philosophy of epidemiology to meet its social responsibility obligations, I suggest philosophy of epidemiology expand its attention to two particular lines research. First, the paper discusses Geoffrey Rose’s concept of “causes of incidence”—causes of disparities between populations—and argues for the importance of engaging with these causes. Second, the paper argues for the value of engaging with Bruce Link and Jo Phelan’s “fundamental causes” model of how flexible social resources serve as buffers from harms, generating a plethora of shifting and locally-contingent health effects. (shrink)

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Considering the organization’s ethical context as a framework to investigate workplace phenomena, this field study of military reserve personnel examines the relationships among perceptions of psychosocial group variables, such as cohesiveness, helping behavior and peer leadership, employee job attitudes, and the likelihood of individuals’ withholding on-the-job effort, a form of organizational misbehavior. Hypotheses were tested with a sample of 290 individuals using structural equation modeling, and support for negative relationships between perceptions of positive group context and withholding effort by individual (...) employees was found. In addition, individual effort-performance expectancy and individual job satisfaction were negatively related to withholding effort. The findings provide evidence that individual perceptions of positive group context play a key role in the presence of misbehavior at work. The results indicate that positive group context might be an important element of ethical climate that should be managed to temper occurrence of such adverse work behavior. (shrink)

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This volume explores various themes at the intersection of archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical issues. Showcasing this heterogeneity, its scope ranges from the method of analogical inference to the evolution of the human mind; from conceptual issues in assessing the health of past populations to the ethics of cultural heritage tourism. It probes the archaeological record for evidence of numeracy, curiosity and creativity, and social complexity. Its contributors comprise an interdisciplinary cluster (...) of philosophers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, from a variety of career stages, of whom many are leading experts in their fields. Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. (shrink)

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Northrop Frye once remarked that when art reaches a certain level of intensity it begins to speak about itself. Karsten Harries, in his excellent new book, provokes in the reader an image of the Bavarian rococo church having reached this degree of self-consciousness, to the extent that it calls into question not only its own special limits, but those of all sacred art. In Harries's words, the Bavarian rococo church is "no longer able to take seriously the pathos and rhetoric (...) of the baroque, yet refuses to give them up; so it plays with them." Harries's argument centers around three axes: first, the conflation of painting, architecture, and ornament into a single art form; second, the change in and thematization of the viewer's perspective resulting from this conflation; third, the encroachment of the aesthetic upon the sacramental, an encroachment which follows from this new emphasis on the viewer's perspective. Thus, Harries's claim: the very principles of the Bavarian rococo church lead to its own disintegration at the hands of an "aesthetic attitude," according to which "a work of art is governed by the demands of its own aesthetic perfection.". (shrink)

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The phenomenal overflow thesis states that the content of phenomenally conscious mental states can exceed our capacities of cognitive access. Much of the philosophical and scientific debate about the phenomenal overflow thesis has been focused on vision, attention, and verbal report. My view is that we feel things in our bodies that we don’t always process with the resources of cognitive access. Thinking about the question of phenomenal overflow from the perspective of embodied affect rather than the content of visual (...) experience is the novel contribution of this paper. I argue that we have reason to think that hydranencephalic children are phenomenally conscious but incapable of cognitive access. Further, I claim that we should interpret the reactive behavior of these subjects in terms of a kind of access to content that is distinct from cognitive access, I call this novel form of access ‘affective access.’. (shrink)

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This collection brings together the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the rich tradition of American pragmatist thought, taking seriously the commitment to pluralism at the heart of both. Contributors explore in novel ways Deleuze’s explicit references to pragmatism, and examine the philosophical significance of a number of points at which Deleuze’s philosophy converges with, or diverges from, the work of leading pragmatists. The papers of the first part of the volume take as their focus Deleuze’s philosophical relationship to classical pragmatism (...) and the work of Peirce, James and Dewey. Particular areas of focus include theories of signs, metaphysics, perspectivism, experience, the transcendental and democracy. The papers comprising the second half of the volume are concerned with developing critical encounters between Deleuze’s work and the work of contemporary pragmatists such as Rorty, Brandom, Price, Shusterman and others. Issues addressed include antirepresentationalism, constructivism, politics, objectivity, naturalism, affect, human finitude and the nature and value of philosophy itself. With contributions by internationally recognized specialists in both poststructuralist and pragmatist thought, the collection is certain to enrich Deleuze scholarship, enliven discussion in pragmatist circles, and contribute in significant ways to contemporary philosophical debate. (shrink)

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Successful marketing efforts and professional sales encounters often depend on consumer involvement in the purchase decision process itself, which in turn may impact firm performance. Despite the importance of consumer involvement, research has yet to fully explain the relationship between consumer personality characteristics and the nature of consumer purchase involvement. This study explores the degree to which consumer perception of salesperson ethical treatment helps explain the relationship between consumer personality characteristics and nature of involvement. Data were collected from a large (...) sample of working adults placed in two scenario-based positive professional sales encounters featuring an important purchase decision. The results indicated that adult consumers’ personality characteristics functioned through judgment of salesperson ethical treatment to affect the nature of purchase involvement. Specifically, consumer judgment of salesperson ethical treatment fully mediated a positive relationship between internal locus of control and cognitive involvement. By comparison, consumer judgment of a salesperson ethical treatment partially mediated the positive relationship between emotional awareness and cognitive involvement. The above findings were similar for informational and relational salesperson customer-orientated scenarios. Key implications for selling professionals and sales organizations are discussed, such as augmenting consumers’ self-assessments to increase their perceptions of salesperson ethics and purchase involvement. The limitations and recommendations for future research are also presented. (shrink)

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This paper examines the roles that self-knowledge and reflection play in Schopenhauer’s view of agency. Focusing in particular on the discussion of the acquired character, his cognitive theory of motivation, and the idea of intellectual freedom, I argue that we find two conceptions of rational agency in Schopenhauer. The ‘minimal’ conception sees rational agency primarily as a kind of reflective motivation, whereas the ‘maximal’ or ‘robust’ conception sees rational agency as involving a kind of reflective self-organization. Furthermore, I argue that (...) rational self-organization and acquired character go hand-in-hand: it is only in virtue of achieving the latter that one achieves the former. Although some worry that the discussion of acquired character does not sit well with Schopenhauer’s broader determinist theory of action, the reading offered here aims to demonstrate that the two are reconcilable. (shrink)

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Curiously, while the efficacy of the arts for the development of multicultural understandings has long been theorized, empirical studies of this effect have been lacking. This essay recounts our combined empirical and philosophical study of this issue. We explicate the philosophical considerations that shaped the development of the arts course we studied, which was grounded in rather traditional humanist educational thought, informed by Deweyan considerations for pedagogy and multiculturalism. We also provide an overview of the course and of the study (...) design: the ways in which the course worked to teach aesthetic theory through a combination of popular and canonical works, and the ways in which it sought to instill a sense of cross-cultural appreciation and solidarity among students through the inclusion of art from different cultures and generations. We then share our research findings and our return to the realm of philosophy to interpret them. Our postcolonial analysis incorporates emerging discussions of the arts as a tool for resistance and dialogue within the system of public education, and revisit and reconsider the very concept of education for pluralistic democracy. This approach problematizes traditional conceptions of pluralism, in which an attempt is made to dissolve difference in a common understanding, and instead advocates that works from among the contemporary popular arts and works drawn from the artistic “canon” alike must be considered and employed for their instrumental value to the educational process—especially for their ability to prompt an intersubjectivity that is accompanied by a heightened awareness of difference. (shrink)

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Reichenbach's 'principle of the common cause' is a foundational assumption of some important recent contributions to quantitative social science methodology but no similar principle appears in econometrics. Reiss (2005) has argued that the principle is necessary for instrumental variables methods in econometrics, and Pearl (2009) builds a framework using it that he proposes as a means of resolving an important methodological dispute among econometricians. We aim to show, through analysis of the main problem instrumental variables methods are used to resolve, (...) that the relationship of the principle to econometric methods is more nuanced than implied by previous work, but nevertheless may make a valuable contribution to the coherence and validity of existing methods. (shrink)

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This paper approaches the ‘Drexler-Smalley’ debate on nanotechnology from a neglected angle – the common denominator of ‘the frontier’ as a metaphor for scientific exploration. For Bensaude-Vincent, the debate exemplifies the clash of ‘two cultures’ – the ‘artificialist’ and biomimetic’ schools. For us, the portrayal of nanosphere as ‘new frontier’ stymies the prospect of genuine inter-cultural debate on the direction of molecular engineering. Drawing on Brandon, the‘dominium’ impulse of European imperialism is contrasted to the ‘communitas’ tradition of Native America. Proposing (...) a single label – hybridist – for both schools, we juxtapose to this approach the holistic disposition of indigenous North American science. (shrink)

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[1] In _What Computers Can't Do_ (1972), Hubert Dreyfus identified several basic assumptions about the nature of human knowledge which grounded contemporary research in cognitive science. Contemporary artificial intelligence, he argued, relied on an unjustified belief that the mind functions like a digital computer using symbolic manipulations ("the psychological assumption") (Dreyfus 1992: 163ff), or at least that computer programs could be understood as formalizing human thought ("the epistemological assumption") (Dreyfus 1992: 189). In addition, the project depended upon an assumption about (...) the data about the human world which we employ in thought - namely, that it consists of discrete, determinate, and explicit pieces which can be processed heuristically ("the ontological assumption") (Dreyfus 1992: 206). (shrink)

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RÉSUMÉ: Je me demande ici si les conceptions pragmatiques de la vérité peuvent être réconciliées avec les intuitions ordinaires quant à la portée de la bivalence. Je soutiens que les pragmatistes sont conduits à accepter une distinction du genre «type/occurrence» entre les formes d’une investigation et ses instanciations particulières, sous peine de banaliser leur vérificationnisme. Néanmoins, même la conception révisée que j’examine échoue à sauver les approches épistémiques de la vérité de certaines conséquences peu plausibles.

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The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in literature on decolonisation of knowledge. The impression often given in recent literature is of wholesale neglect of the concerns of the decolonisation literature in what might be called ‘Western thought’ of preceding decades. This paper argues that Feyerabend was a notable figure within Western epistemic communities who expressed positions analogous to those of proponents of decolonisation. The first section presents the most striking contributions from Feyerabend’s work that, I suggest, bear on (...) questions of decolonisation. Four specific issues are identified based on those: the curriculum and the role of universities; the inspirational role of student protests; the concept of ‘epistemicide’; and, indigenous knowledge systems. The second section suggests a range of limitations of, and weaknesses in, Feyerabend’s analysis: no substantive engagement with history or literature on decolonisation; implicitly accepting the Сclaimed inherent association of science, rationalism and various forms of modernity with Western countries and cultures; the (rhetorical) construction of an unnecessary binary choice between science and traditional knowledge systems; underplaying agency through a form of othering; creating an unnecessarily stark binary of Western science and non-Western indigenous knowledge; and, as a consequence of all these, providing no substantive analysis of how science might be integrated with other knowledge systems and cultures. The concluding section provides a brief summary and identifies areas for future work. (shrink)

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Whether economics warrants public trust depends on the extent to which assertions by economists can be deemed credible. Three examples from microeconomics are examined to assess how the discipline performs in this regard. First, a purely theoretical argument with broad conceptual implications: a quasi-evolutionary argument for rational choice based on the notion of money pumps. Second, a modelling-related claim with significant social implications: economists’ objection to minimum wages based on a simple supply-demand model. Third, methodological choices with implications for all (...) empirical work in microeconomics: the recent proclamation of a ‘credibility revolution’ in applied microeconomics through the use of experimental and quasi-experimental methods. These are assessed against proposed criteria for credibility: epistemic validity, epistemic reliability, and epistemic reflexivity. On the basis of the performance of the discipline against these criteria on the examples considered, I conclude that public distrust of economics and economists can be well-founded. (shrink)

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This paper introduces a Special Issue of Topoi entitled "Archaeology and philosophy".

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Spatial aspects of words are associated with their canonical locations in the real world. Yet little research has tested whether spatial associations denoted in language comprehension generalize to their corresponding images. We directly tested the spatial aspects of mental imagery in picture and word processing (Experiment 1). We also tested whether spatial representations of motion words produce similar perceptual-interference effects as demonstrated by object words (Experiment 2). Findings revealed that words denoting an upward spatial location produced slower responses to targets (...) appearing at the top of the display, whereas words denoting a downward spatial location produced slower responses to targets appearing at the bottom of the display. Perceptual-interference effects did not obtain for pictures or for words lacking a spatial relation. These findings provide greater empirical support for the perceptual-symbols system theory (Barsalou, 1999, 2008). (shrink)

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The article reflects upon the observational practices and methods developed by the early exponents of ethology committed to naturalistic field study and explores how their approaches and techniques influenced a wider field of popular natural-history filmmaking and photography. In doing so, my focus is upon three aspects of ethological field studies: the socio-technical devices used by ethologists to bring birds closer to them, the distinctive observational and representational practices which they forged, and the analogies they used to codify behaviour. This (...) assemblage of elements included hides or screens from which to watch wild birds without disturbing them, optics to extend human vision, pens and paper to sketch and fix patterns of behaviour, watches to record timings, photography to capture action and freeze movement, and illustration and photographs to visualize behaviour. Carried through natural-history networks, the practices, methods and theories of ethologists like Huxley and Tinbergen influenced popular natural-history filmmaking and photography more broadly from the 1940s, driving a behavioural turn in these cultural practices. This popularization of the ‘ethological eye’ was further facilitated by the convergence of socio-technical devices, forms of observation and dramatization in the work of the early exponents of naturalistic field studies of birds and the popular filmmakers. (shrink)

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Recent work has deployed the logic of jury theorems to assert that crowd-sourced peer review is superior to traditional peer review. That argument is shown to fail by counterexample: in a model of scientific communities with incumbents that favour work consistent with their own, the probability of genuinely revolutionary ideas being published tends to zero as the size of the “jury” increases. A related problem is that the fundamental purpose of peer review in the context of intellectual inquiry and progress (...) is given inadequate consideration. Remedying that calls into question the appropriateness of the jury theorem logic. The broader argument made for crowd-sourced peer review suffers from problems on three additional dimensions. First, it does not clearly establish what the problems are with traditional peer review that need to be resolved. Second, its appeals to diversity are suspect, contradicted by the counterexample, and arguably inadmissible because they find no expression in the formal model used. Finally, the assertion that these matters can be resolved by empirical evidence from implementation of alternative systems is premised on questionable epistemic assumptions that are neither stated nor defended. The conclusion drawn is that no case has been established for the implementation of crowd-sourced peer review, and claims made in that regard evince a concerning epistemic gap between the soundness of their arguments and the strength of their proposals. (shrink)

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Reluctance to endorse mask wearing to slow transmission of SARS-Cov-2 has been rationalized by the failure of randomized control trials (RCTs) to provide supportive evidence. In contrast, a mechanism-based approach suggests that mask wearing should be expected to reduce transmission: so that contrary evidence from RCTs likely reflects the need to focus policy attention on addressing interacting or mediating factors that offset the basic positive effect. The differing conclusions that result from these two approaches reflect the limitations of RCT-based approaches (...) that are compounded in scenarios, such as pandemics, where urgent decisions are required with limited evidence. (shrink)

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Abelard’s most famous spokesman for the ancient and abiding moral and religious worth of the Law of Moses is probably the character of the Jew, inventedfor one of two fictional dialogues in the Collationes. The equally fictive Philosopher, a rationalist theist who gets the last word in his exchange with the Jew, condemns the Law as a useless addition to the natural law, a threat to genuine morality with a highly dubious claim to divine origin. The Philosopher’s condemnation, however, does (...) not go unanswered. Abelard himself, writing in his own voice in two major treatments of the Law , defends the ancient worth of the Law as a revolution in moral understanding and a potential guarantor of salvation. The Law is just and rational, he argues, in every one of its precepts, even when interpreted according to the letter. As such, the letter of the Law has been and ought to be retained in Christianity: its moral precepts are binding everywhere and always; its non-moral precepts are binding, when, in the changing circumstances of the Church, they are found to be useful and not conducive to scandal. (shrink)

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Use of symbols, the key to the biosemiotics field as to many others, required bigger brains which implied a promissory note for greater energy consumption; symbols are obviously expensive. A score years before the current estimate of 18–20% for the human brain’s metabolic demand on the organism, it was known that neural tissue is metabolically dear. This paper first discusses two evolutionary responses to this demand, on both of which there is some consensus. The first, assigning care of altricial infants (...) with burgeoning brains (and in human infants the metabolic demand peaks at 65% of the total) to “allomothers” is not unique to humans. The second, using relatively small neurons as primates do, risks misfires past a certain minimal value. Moreover, in apparent paradox, there is an increasing consensus that large “Von Economo” neurons are critical for communication. This paper’s main contribution is the discussion of two further evolutionary tricks. The first is the use of self-similarity in the cortex, both in structure and process, to allow the cortex readily—and in energetic terms, parsimoniously—to shift between states in a high-dimensional space. This leads to discussion of the kind of formalism appropriate to model these shifts, a formalism which—it is tentatively suggested—may do double duty for the modeling of symbolic thought. The second trick is the superimposition on the background “white noise” of neural firing of EEG-detected waves like gamma. The paper describes a method, using the Hilbert transform, of calculating the dips in energy consumption as the brain is transitioned by gamma waves. It is hypothesized that consciousness may be a spandrel, the incidental result of a neurodynamic imperative that the brain enter a maximally sensitive (in sensory terms) “zero power” state a few times a second. If that is the case, then there are obvious benefits for health in meditation, which can be viewed as a state of consciousness extended over time by limiting afferent stimuli. (shrink)

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Health research ethics training programmes are being developed and implemented globally, often with a goal of increasing local capacity to assure ethical conduct in health-related research. Yet what it means for there to be sufficient HRE capacity is not well-defined, and there is currently no consensus on outcomes that HRE training programmes should collectively intend to achieve. Without defining the expected outcomes, meaningful evaluation of individual participants and programmes is challenging. In this article, we briefly describe the evolution of formal (...) education in HRE, articulate the need for a framework to define outcomes for HRE training programmes, and provide guidance for developing HRE competency frameworks that define outcomes suited to their contexts. We detail critical questions for developing HRE competency frameworks using a six-step process: define the purposes, intended uses and scope of the framework; describe the context in which practice occurs; gather data using a variety of methods to inform the competency framework; translate the data into competencies that can be used in educational programmes; report on the competency development process and results and evaluate and update the competency framework. We suggest that competency frameworks should be feasible to develop using this process, and such efforts promise to contribute to programmatic advancement. (shrink)

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters, and: The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen BuddhismEricSean NelsonOpening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters. By Steven Heine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 200 pp.The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism. Edited by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 322 pp.The Zen koan is mysterious to many and its significance (...) remains disputed by scholars. Is it a challenging therapeutic device, to be left behind like a raft after crossing the river, or a self-transparent statement of the liberated mind? Is it a logic-defying paradox or does it have its own performative rationality? Is it a spontaneous and often irreverent oral expression or a complex and staged literary form understandable within its context? Is it a narrative with multiple levels of meaning or something that potentially interrupts the work of meaning, narrative coherence, and conventional understanding?Although paradoxical and even shocking language occurs in other traditions, these two provocative volumes illustrate the uniqueness, significance, and interpretive difficulty of one of Zen's primary practices. Both works are valuable contributions to understanding the context, development, and meaning of the koan from its origins and growth in T'ang and Sung China to later Japanese developments.Steven Heine's Opening a Mountain: Kōans of the Zen Masters includes translations of sixty koan cases, selected traditional commentary, and his account of each case. This rich work gathers significant koans about Zen's encounter with its "other" from a variety of koan collections compiled in Sung China and Kamakura Japan.The volume is organized around the theme of "opening a mountain." Masters opened up mountains for Zen by confronting and converting local spirits, hermits, and other forces that would prevent or endanger its practice. It refers more broadly to the confrontation and contest between Zen masters and figures representing supernatural forces, indigenous and popular religiosity, and rival forms of practice such as that of the isolated hermit without vows and outside the Buddhist community.The koans are presented and discussed in five sections concerning: (1) supernatural mountain landscapes; (2) irregular rivals such as hermits, wizards, and dangerous women; (3) supernatural experiences in which bodhisattvas, demons, and magical animals are encountered in dreams and visions; (4) the use of symbols of authority and transmission such as the flywhisk; and (5) experiences of confession, repentance, self-mutilation, death, and the afterlife.Heine argues that emphasizing the ritual, symbolic, and cultural dimensions of the koan complements understanding it as using paradoxical language to free one from the reification of language through aporia and double-binds. He insightfully shows through his translations and discussions the often ignored mythological and religious dimension of many koans. Even when koans use mythic or supernatural elements ironically, it is still in reference to such a context of belief. Since the outcomes [End Page 284] of these confrontations between Zen iconoclasm and irregular practices and unconventional beings are often uncertain, the koan embodies these tensions between supernaturalism and iconoclasm, ritual and meditative clarity, devotion and enlightenment. Zen masters are not always unambiguously victorious in their confrontations and competition with popular religion in these stories of opening mountains and taming and converting spirits, shamans, hermits, unconventional and rival women (such as the "Zen grannies" and the nuns of cases 23-26), and other irregular practitioners and dangerous forces.Zen iconoclasm is best exemplified by Lin-chi (J.:Rinzai), known for his advice to kill the Buddha and the patriarchs, who forbade travel to Mount Wu-t'ai, where popular devotional Buddhists believed Mañjus´rī appeared (see cases 13-15). Lin-chi's Mañjus´rī cannot be seen on sacred mountains but is manifested in your own activity. However, even some koans involving Lin-chi focus on his ambiguous success in dealing with P'u-hua (cases 16, 57), an irregular practitioner attributed with magical powers. Despite such warnings, the bodhisattva of compassion's sacred mountain continued to appeal to ordinary Buddhists and even Zen practitioners. In these koans, Zen is not simply demythologizing. It is playing a dangerous game of ironic ambiguity and... (shrink)

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The widespread emergence of innumerable technologies within health care has complicated the choices facing caregivers and their patients. The escalation of knowledge and technical innovation has been accompanied by an erosion of moral and ethical consensus among health providers that is reflected in the abandonment of the Hippocratic Oath as the immutable bedrock of medical ethics. Ethical conflicts arise when the values of health professionals collide with the expressed wishes of patients or the dictates of regulatory bodies and administrators. Increasing (...) attempts by groups outside of the medical profession to limit freedom of conscience for health providers has raised concern and consternation among some health professionals. The personal and professional impact of health professionals surrendering freedom of conscience and participating in actions they deem malevolent or unethical has not been adequately studied and may not be inconsequential when considering the recognized impact of other circumstances of coerced complicity. We argue that the distinction between the two ways that freedom of conscience is exercised (avoiding a perceived evil and seeking a perceived good) provides a rational basis for a principled limitation of this fundamental freedom. (shrink)

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The ethics of biobanking is one of the most controversial issues in current bioethics and public health debates. For some, biobanks offer the possibility of unprecedented advances which will revolutionise research and improve the health of future generations. For others they are worrying repositories of personal information and tissue which will be used without sufficient respect for those from whom they came. Wherever one stands on this spectrum, from an ethics perspective biobanks are revolutionary. Traditional ethical safeguards of informed consent (...) and confidentiality, for example, simply don’t work for the governance of biobanks and as a result new ethical structures are required. Thus it is not too great a claim to say that biobanks require a rethinking of our ethical assumptions and frameworks which we have applied generally to other issues in ethics. This paper maps the key challenges and controversies of biobanking ethics; it considers; informed consent (its problems in biobanking and possibilities of participants’ withdrawal), broad consent, the problems of confidentiality, ownership, property and comercialisation issues, feedback to participants and the ethics of re-contact. (shrink)

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One of the goals of examining Hegel's aesthetics, Stephen Bungay points out in his admirably lucid introduction to this topic, is to redeem aesthetics from what Roger Scruton has deemed its "continuing intellectual disaster." For Bungay, what is so compelling about Hegel's aesthetics in this regard is its attempt "to give the determination of beauty and of art in speculative terms," thereby restoring a concern for the philosophical in art, without diminishing the immediacy or "determinateness" of particular arts and artworks. (...) The result: a panoramic depiction of art history as the self-realization of "the concept of art." It is to Bungay's credit that he does not reduce what is problematic in Hegel's project in order to reveal what is provocative. (shrink)

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Emmanuel Levinas has been Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne and the director of the Ecole Normale Israelite Orientale. Through such works as "Totality and Infinity" and "Otherwise than Being", he has exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy, providing inspiration for Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot and Irigaray. "The Levinas Reader" collects, often for the first time in English, essays by Levinas encompassing every aspect of his thought: the early phenomenological studies written under the guidance and inspiration of Husserl and (...) Heidegger; the fully developed ethical critique of such totalizing philosophies; the pioneering texts on the moral dimension to aesthetics; the rich and subtle readings of the Talmud which are an exemplary model of an ethical, transcendental philosophy at work; the admirable meditations on current political issues.Sean Hand's introduction gives a complete overview of Levinas's work and situates each chapter within his general contribution to phenomenology, aesthetics, religion, politics and, above all, ethics. Each essay has been prefaced with a brief introduction presenting the basic issues and the necessary background, and suggesting ways to study the text further. (shrink)

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