bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hypotheses, Probability, and Waves
Authors: Achinstein Peter
Published: November 2023

The so-called method of hypothesis consists of deriving consequences from an hypothesis, and if the consequences are observed to be true, concluding that the hypothesis is true or at least probable. Mill rejects this as a method for establishing either the truth or the probability of hypotheses, on the grounds that conflicting hypotheses are possible from which the same true consequences can be derived; unless such alternatives can be excluded, nothing can be inferred about the truth or probability of any hypothesis being considered.
The Only Game in Town
Authors: Achinstein Peter
Published: November 2023

The most frequent criticism of the method of hypothesis, or hypothetico-deductivism, is the “possibility of competitors” argument. You propose an hypothesis that entails known observational phenomena and successfully predicts new ones. Because of this you claim support for your hypothesis. If a range of different phenomena is derived (what Whewell, for example, calls consilience-see Essay 4), you may indeed claim high probability for your hypothesis. Now a criticism of this procedure-one typically voiced by champions of induction such as Newton and Mill-is this. There may be competing hypotheses that entail the very same phenomena. If such competitors exist, you cannot claim substantial probability for your favorite hypothesis.
Theory, Experiment, and Cathode Rays
Authors: Achinstein Peter
Published: November 2023

In October 1897 J. J. Thomson published a famous paper on cathode rays in which he reports a series of experiments that, he argues, confirm the theory that cathode rays are negatively charged particles rather than ether waves. Prior to Thomson’s experiments various facts about cathode rays were known by physicists.
The Trial of Curiosity
Authors: Posnock Ross
Published: November 2023

This study integrates literary and biographical criticism with social and cultural theory to make a major advance in our understanding of the life of two of America's most luminous intellectual figures. The central premise is that to contextualize the novelist inevitably involves assessing his relationship with his elder brother, William, and the study reveals how the psychological and cultural components of the Henry/William relation reciprocally interact. Posnock provides a new way to think about the relation of the brothers to each other and to their larger cultural moment: the challenge and trauma of early twentieth-century modernity.
Reading Zarathustra
Authors: Higgins Kathleen
Published: November 2023

Thus Spoke Zarathustra was recommended to me when I was a high school senior, and I asked a fellow teenager who was reading it what the book was like. “Nietzsche’s kind of like a perverted Kahlil Gibran,” she told me. And when I perused the book for myself, I saw what she meant. Zarathustra was a prophet, and his sermons, although filled with blasphemous precepts, were pretentiously biblical in tone. I was annoyed even before I finished the prologue. The surreal plot seemed more theater of the absurd than philosophy, and I was appalled when Zarathustra tossed off his famous “God is dead” as a mere subordinate clause. (“Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not yet heard anything of this, that God is dead!”1) Interesting as some of Zarathustra’s comments were, he was too smug for me. I lasted only somewhere into part I. Setting the book aside, I did not reopen it for nearly a year.
Waking Giants
Authors: Schneidau Herbert N
Published: November 2023

Schneidau's concern is with the way in which Modernism, named for its avant-garde propaganda, reveals itself to be dominated by a keen awareness, usually joyous, of the possibilities of the past recurring in the present. He argues that this idea represents a significant nexus in Modernism, an illuminating connection that explains some otherwise puzzling relationships.
Non-Mendelian Genetics in Humans
Authors: Ostrer Harry
Published: November 2023

When rediscovered at the turn of the century, Mendel's laws were found to be applicable to humans, but from the beginning they were fraught with problems. Sex-linked traits and linked genes defied Mendel's rules. Later, other exceptions were found, including sporadic cases, non-penetrance, variable expressivity, and preferential parental transmission. In this book, Harry Ostrer observes that some of these problems can be explained by incomplete ascertainment, typing errors and modifying genes. He then goes on to systematically explore the evidence for a number of newer genetic processes that were not foreseen by Mendel and his intellectual heirs, examining the molecular basis for these processes and their effects on transmission and phenotype. He shows that these non-Mendelian processes--gonadal and somatic mosaicism, sex-linked inheritance, mitochondrial transmission, genomic imprinting, accelerated rates of mutation, and viral infection--resolve many of the exceptions to Mendelian inheritance. He also provides a complete review of Mendelian genetics, as well as an overview of the structure and functions of genes, chromosomes, and their products. Thus the book presents a holistic view of human genetics. In the last chapter, Ostrer grapples with the possibilities for identifying new genetic processes, and with genetic determinism--the view that a person's phenotype is fully subject to his or her genetic constitution. He contends that despite the large number of genetic combinations, phenotypes cannot be predicted precisely, even with sufficient computing power. Genetic processes are frequently modified by environmental exposure or they may be random or stochastic in their occurrence. Hence, there are innate limits to genetic determinism. Although prediction of phenotype based on genotype will improve in the future as all of the human genes are identified, such predictions will always remain imprecise.
The Short, Happy Life of Commercial Surrogacy
Authors: Annas George J
Published: November 2023

Law has become part of popular culture, and this is probably good.1 The People ‘s Court brings Judge Joseph P. Wapner into our homes five days a week to decide disputes between real people. L.A. Law, properly described as one part L.A. and one part law, has been said to have had “a beneficial influence on popular conceptions of law and legal ethics.” To sustain audiences, L.A. Law has had to ignore the more than 95 percent tedium of a typical law practice and concentrate instead on the spectacularly controversial cases that make the national press, such as “medical ethics” issues involving the termination of life support, a psychiatrist ‘s duty to warn others of his patient ‘s dangerousness, and forcing a terminally ill pregnant woman to have a cesarean section. One can argue persuasively that all of these cases were dealt with ineptly from a legal perspective, but they were presented in an entertaining manner, and entertainment is what television is all about.
Death and the Magic Machine: Consent to the Artificial Heart
Authors: Annas George J
Published: November 2023

Artificial heart implants represent the most public and publicized human experiments in the history of the world, and as such can be used to illustrate generic legal and ethical issues in human experimentation.1 In Solzhenitsyn ‘s Cancer Ward, Oleg Kostoglotov is confronted by his doctor, Ludmilla Afanasyevna. The doctor wants to use an experimental hormone treatment, but the patient refuses. Psychiatrist Jay Katz argues in his Silent World of Doctor and Patient that what makes conversation impossible between them is the patient ‘s undisclosed intention of leaving the hospital to treat himself with “a secret medicine, a mandrake root from Issyk Kul.” Oleg could not trust the doctor with this information because the doctor would disagree and make the treatment decision for him regardless of his wishes, because the doctor believed “doctors are entitled to that right....
Rationing Medical Care
Authors: Annas George J
Published: November 2023

rris Wofford summed up the feelings of many Americans in his successful 1991 senatorial campaign when he said: “If criminals have a right to a lawyer, I think working Americans should have the right to a doctor.” Our health care system is sick and more than tinkering is required to fix it. Although we spend more money as both a percentage of gross national product and per capita on medical care than any other country in the world, we continue to have a nonsystem. Almost 40 million citizens, one-third of them children, are completely uninsured and are effectively rationed right out of the system. This inequity is no longer socially or ethically tolerable. Almost 90 percent of Americans agree that our health care system needs “fundamental change”; when compared to countries like Canada and En gland, our system has been accurately described as the most expensive, least well-liked, least equitable, and perhaps least efficient system of health care delivery in the world. It is wasteful, technologically-driven, death-denying, legalistic, and individualistic. The three major issues are how to control cost, maintain quality, and improve access. The policy problem we have consistently refused to ac knowledge is that all three of these issues must be dealt with simultaneously.
Sophistry About Conventions
Authors: Nussbaum Martha C
Published: November 2023

The sophists are once again among us. Like Socrates, we need a “true rhetoric.” That is, we need a form of discourse about literature that concerns itself with real things of serious human importance and that reveres, in so doing, the recently despised notions of truth, objectivity, even of validity in argument, clarity in definition. For if we are talking about real things, it does matter, and matter deeply, whether we say this or that, since human life, much though we may regret the fact, is not simply a matter of free play and unconstrained making. And if it matters, it is worth taking the pains to do years of undramatic, possibly tedious, rigorous work to get it right.
Population Growth, Mortality, and the Fishing Process
Authors: Quinn II Terrance J , Deriso Richard B
Published: November 2023

Population dynamics is the study of how and why a population changes. Quantitative population dynamics is the mathematical and statistical representation of a population and its changes. To understand the dynamics of a population, principles of biological life history need to be represented by coherent mathematical and statistical expressions. We use two common mathematical principles to represent change of a population: difference equations (Goldberg 1958) and differential equations (Braun 1983). In a difference equation, time is viewed as an ordinal index at discrete points. In a differential equation, time is used as a continuous variable. In this section, we consider simple models for population size based on minimal biological complexity.
Delay-Difference Models
Authors: Quinn II Terrance J , Deriso Richard B
Published: November 2023

The class of delay-difference models represents a middle ground between simple, but biologically unrealistic, production models and complicated vector-based age-specific population models. They differ fundamentally from production models in chapter 2 in that delay-difference models explicitly contain the age-structured dynamics of a population, including the lag between spawning and recruitment. The reduction in complexity over formal vector-based models is possible because of simplifying assumptions about the dynamics of the population. A series of delay-difference models of increasing complexity is described in this chapter. We begin with models for which individual size or age does not affect survival or fecundity of adult individuals (i.e., individuals at least r years of age), such as discussed by Allen (1963), Clark (1976b), Deriso (1978, 1980, 1985a), Schnute (1985), and Bergh and Getz (1988).
Variations in Population Size
Authors: Temkin Larry S
Published: November 2023

The issue of whether inequality is affected by a society’s size has received little attention-in part, because debates regarding the “ideal” size of populations have focused on broadly utilitarian concerns and, in part, because the issue is one about which most have (implicitly) agreed. Nevertheless, the issue is complicated and will be resolved, if at all, only with careful deliberation.
Introduction
Authors: Haldane John , Wright Crispin
Published: November 2023

In the last twenty-five or so years, analytical philosophy has revived many of the traditional metaphysical concerns which, during its first half century, it found reason to bury. During this renaissance no cluster of issues has loomed larger than those very general questions concerning the relationship of mind and world which are debated by realism, of various stripes, and its various forms of opponent. The essays published here cover a wide conspectus of the issues about realism which have been of greatest concern in recent discussion.
Realism and Scepticism
Authors: Williams Michael
Published: November 2023

It is a longstanding philosophical opinion that metaphysical realism is an essential ingredient in the case for scepticism. However, as I see things, the source of scepticism lies in realist commitments of another sort entirely, commitments carried by a doctrine I call ‘epistemological realism’. This is what I want to explain.
Understanding Scepticism
Authors: Craig Edward
Published: November 2023

To be asked to write about Realism and Scepticism is rather like being given the classic military order to go and do something somewhere: a great deal is left to one’s initiative. Recent work on realism and anti-realism has brought to the limelight a number of doctrines, in some cases closely related, in others less closely. But it has had little tendency to hone the word ‘realism’ itself down to a sharp semantic point. As for scepticism, it is true that one continually hears philosophers speak of ‘the sceptic’ in ways which suggest that they take those words to identify some view precise enough for conclusive discussion. If so, they make an assumption which does not so much define scepticism as deserve it.
Can Societies Be Choosers?
Authors: Copp David
Published: November 2023

Society-centered theory commits me to the thesis that societies can be choosers, that societies are capable in principle of making choices that can be assessed for rationality. Many will see this idea as the height of philosophical folly. They will charge it with various sins, including holism, anthropomorphism, and the fallacy of composition. Yet, as I will argue, the idea that a society can make a choice does not have any worrisome metaphysical commitments.

I divide the issue in two. First, is it possible in principle for a society to make a choice? Second, can societal choices be assessed for rationality? I begin with a preliminary discussion of societal preferences and choices. I propose a theory about the conditions under which a society would actually make a choice or have a preference. I argue that the metaphysical implications of these notions are very modest. I then discuss certain typical objections and argue that the notion of societal choice can escape them. I also claim that it can escape any skepticism that might be engendered by Kenneth Arrow’s famous impossibility argument. Near the end of the chapter, I discuss the rational assessment of societal choices.
Relativism, Realism, and Reasons
Authors: Copp David
Published: November 2023

In this chapter I deal with a number of technical points that arise from the combination of the society-centered theory with the standard-based theory of moral judgment. These include points in the philosophical theory of normative language and judgment, metaphysical issues, issues in moral epistemology, issues in moral psychology, and questions about reasons to be moral. I will also address objections to the overall shape of the theory.
The Collective Principle of Benefice
Authors: Murphy Liam B
Published: November 2023

I have said that the collective principle of beneficence is a plausible principle of beneficence. at least relative to the alternatives of the optimizing and limited principles of beneficence and no principle of beneficence at all (charity). This claim is important uot just because one of our aims is precisely to find a plausible principle of beneficence. but also because its truth would lend significant support to our other main claim-that the apparent absurdity of the optimizing principle is due to its violation of the compliance condition. Having presented all I have to say about the plausibility of the compliance condition as a more or less abstract idea. I try in this chapter to make good the claim that the collective principle is a plausible concrete moral principle that could guide people’s behavior.
Political Changes and Educational Reforms in Baden, 1815-1848
Authors: Tuchman Arleen Marcia
Published: November 2023

In the 1830s the Baden parliament instituted reforms that increased government control over the educational system, thereby redefining the relationship between state, schools, and society. These measures were part of a larger attempt to alter the social and economic structure of tµe state. The elected representatives sitting in Baden’s Vormarz; parliament were only too well aware of the changes in manufacture, trade, and transportation that had been transforming European society since the turn of the century. Whether they turned their gaze to England, looked across their borders to Switzerland and the Alsace region, or focused on other more industrialized German regions, such as Saxony or the western parts of Prussia, they noticed the comparative backwardness of their own economy. All around them they saw signs of change: improvements in waterways and the canal system, the beginning of railroad construction, and the spread and modernization of the iron and spinning industries. Their dream was for Baden to be able to keep pace with these developments, and they believed that by following others in lifting restrictions on the economy they would best be able to achieve this goal.1
“Matters not fit to be mentioned”: fielding’s The female husband
Authors: Castle Terry
Published: November 2023

Befitting the festive, dangerous nature of its subject-sexual impersonation-Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband has assumed a paradoxical place in English literary history. This small pamphlet, published anonymously in 1746, is the fictionalized report of the “Surprising History” of Mary Hamilton, alias “George,” a female transvestite arrested and tried in that year at Wells for marrying another woman while in disguise. Fielding knew of the case through newspaper stories and-biographers suggest-wrote his own half-pious, half-prurient account for quick cash. As one might expect, given such scandalous content, the work sold out immediately and had to be reprinted. But again as one might expect, though Fielding’s authorship has been acknowledged since the turn of this century, the pamphlet itself has been decorously ignored. Early on, Cross mentioned it as one of Fielding’s “trifles,” but did not describe its subject. F. Homes Dudden in turn called it a “mere piece of hackwork” and implied it was unworthy of its author. Pat Rogers is more charitable, but still treats The Female Husband only briefly, as a “sensational potboiler.” Until very recently a guarded 1959 article by Sheridan Baker-concerned mainly with the stylistic attribution of the piece to Fielding-remained the longest critical discussion in print.1 Like its phantasmagoric, impudent heroine, The Female Husband has existed, it seems,
Spectral Politics: Apparition Belief and the Romantic Imagination
Authors: Castle Terry
Published: November 2023

Why do we no longer believe in ghosts? In his nostalgic celebration The Book of Dreams and Ghosts (1897), Andrew Lang blamed the skeptical eighteenth century: “the cock-sure common-sense of the years from 1650 to 1850, or so, regarded everyone who had an experience of a hallucination as a dupe, a lunatic, or a liar.” Enlightenment thinking-to put it bluntly-made spirits obsolete. Keith Thomas takes up a similar theme in Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), but develops it rather more ingeniously. Men and women of the eighteenth century “stopped seeing ghosts,” he asserts, not so much because ghosts came to seem “intellectually impossible” (though this was certainly the case) but because ghosts gradually lost their “social relevance.”3 In traditional English society, he suggests, the belief in apparitions performed a powerful community function. The idea that spirits of the dead might come back to haunt murderers, locate stolen objects, enforce the terms of legacies, expose adulterers, and so on, functioned as a kind of implicit social control-a restraint on aggression and a “useful sanction for social norms.”
Living the Jazz Life
Authors: Stokes W Royal
Published: November 2023

W. Royal Stokes' The Jazz Scene (OUP-USA 1991) was highly praised as an oral history of jazz, which, said famous jazz writer Stanley Dance, "put together a kind of mosaic that effectively illustrated the whole subject in a novel and informative way." His new collection, Jazz Profiles, follows the same successful model, but deals with jazz oral history in some significantly different ways. Stokes' interviews strongly focus on how the different musicians got involved with jazz when young and how their careers developed from an early age. This presents a wonderful range of perspectives on what makes jazz musicians. In the book, too, a number of prominent women musicians discuss their jazz careers and describe the obstacles they had to overcome and the problems of being a woman in the jazz world. They include three prominent jazz singers: DeeDee Bridgwater, Shirley Howe, and Diane Kral. Women instrumentalists - especially those performing on such "suspect" jazz instruments as harp (Dorothy Ashley) and violin (Regina Carter) - have had an even more difficult career path. The interviews in the book break down into a series of jazz-related subjects - jazz families, early jazz pioneers, saxophonists and pianists and string players, singers, jazz composers, jazz musicians beyond the US, blues players, and comics - the last being discussions with Steve Adler and Bill Cosby about their intense involvement with jazz. In their accounts of their careers, these musicians provide great insight not only into their own careers but into the nature of jazz itself and how it has attracted and sustained its players. The subjects cover the entire history of jazz - from its early days, in the 1920s and before, to the present, for Stokes is particularly good at eliciting stories from promising young musicians who are just building their careers now. But the book presents a broad perspective of jazz in all its aspects and of the talented people who have made it successful.
The Untranslatability of A-Sentences by Tenseless Token-Reflexive Sentences
Authors: Smith Quentin
Published: November 2023

In this section I first explain the old and new token-reflexive theories of A-sentences and then show that the new theory reduces, on pain of self-contradiction, to the old theory. This reduction will simplify my argument in the remaining sections of this chapter, which will need be directed only against the old token-reflexive theory. The old token-reflexive theory of A-sentences is usually regarded as originating in 1947 with Hans Reichenbach’s Elements of Symbolic Logic.
Absolute Presentness and the Special Theory of Relativity
Authors: Smith Quentin
Published: November 2023

7.1 The Special Theory of Relativity

Presentism implies that every state of affairs is of a form such as Presentness-inheresin-such-and-such or Presentness-inheres-and-always-will-inhere-in-such-and-such. This implies that states of affairs are not of such form as Presentness-inheres-insuch-and-such-relativity-to-a-reference-frame-R or Presentness-inheres-and-alwayswill-inhere-in-such-and-such-relativity-to-a-reference-frame-R. In other words, presentism entails that presentness inheres in events absolutely, not relatively to a reference frame. The presentness of events is an absolute presentness. Using the metaphor of a “tide of becoming,” we may say that presentism is the theory that there is a single, universewide “absolute tide of becoming,” instead of many criss-crossing tides of becoming, one for each reference frame.
Introduction to the Amazon
Authors: Henderson Andrew
Published: November 2023

There are various ways to define and delimit the Amazon in order to convey it as a natural, biogeographic region. Within Brazil it is sometimes defined as Amazonia Legal (Legal Amazon; see Mahar, 1989), but this is a political and economic entity that not only excludes the Amazon regions of adjacent countries, but also includes large areas of non-Amazon vegetation in the south. The watershed of the Amazon river and its tributaries is a better definition, but this excludes large areas of Amazon rain forest in the Guianas and Venezuela that are drained by other rivers, and again includes non-Amazon vegetation in the south. I have therefore followed the floristic criteria of Daly and Prance (1989) and defined the area, henceforth referred to as the Amazon region, as the extent of the lowland rain forest, roughly corresponding to Humboldt’s hylaea(a term that has come to mean the lowland rain forest, adapted by Humboldt from the Greek word hyle,meaning “forest”). This is a phytogeographic definition, and in the distribution maps used here the area is delimited by the dotted line. The western margin is the 500 m contour of the Andes, and the eastern margin is the Atlantic Ocean. As pointed out by Daly and Prance, however, the northern and southern limits of the lowland rain forest are difficult to define, for several reasons. All along the periphery of the region there are transitions to other vegetation types, and the boundaries between these are not always clear. In Colombia, I use the Rio Meta as northern boundary rather than the Rio Guaviare, in order to include the gallery forests of Vichada. Ducke and Black (1953) noted: “The only natural limits of Amazonia are the Atlantic and the Andes; on the north and south extremes the rain forest is gradually replaced by the flora of the neighboring countries.” The Amazon region thus includes, from the northeast, all of French Guiana, Surinam, and Guyana; southern Venezuela; southeastern Colombia; eastern Ecuador; eastern Peru; northeastern Bolivia; and all of northern Brazil (Figure 1.1). This is an enormous area of over 6.5 million km
The ldeality of Time
Authors: Van Cleve James
Published: November 2023

Against this theory, which admits the empirical reality of time, but denies its absolute and transcendental reality, I have heard men of intelligence so unanimously voicing an objection, that I must suppose it to occur spontaneously to every reader to whom this way of thinking is unfamiliar.
The ldeality of Matter
Authors: Van Cleve James
Published: November 2023

The First and Second Antinomies, together known as the Mathematical Antinomies, are advanced by Kant as a reductio ad absurdum of transcendental realism and thereby a proof of his own transcendental idealism. The First Antinomy is concerned with the extent of the world in space and time; the Second, with the composition of matter. In this chapter I focus on the Second Antinomy, though much of what I say applies to the First Antinomy as well. In chapter 13 I say something explicitly about the First Antinomy and the structure of the Antinomies generally.
Noumena and Things in Themselves
Authors: Van Cleve James
Published: November 2023

For Kant, things in themselves are things that exist independent of human cognition; they do not depend on human beings either for their existence or for their being the way they are. Appearances, on the other hand, are things that exist only in being apprehended, and they do owe at least some of their features to the character of our cognitive apparatus.
Is There Such a Thing As Certainty?
Authors: Stroll Avrum
Published: November 2023

Under the heading “Shaking Us Up” there appeared in the Los Angeles Times of June 18, 1988 the following editorial: Among the many surprises that the 20th century has produced is the discovery that there is no certainty-not even in mathematics. From the time of the ancient Greeks until 1931 it had been assumed that mathematics, a purely logical system based on self-evident axioms, was as solid as anything could be. Mathematics was taken as the epitome of thought and as a model for what thinking should be. At the turn of this century the great number theorist David Hilbert declared, “In mathematics there is no ignorabimus We must know, we will know.”
Ownership and the Structure of the Economy
Authors: Christman John
Published: November 2023

I have established that to own something is a complex phenomenon, but not so complex as to be meaningless. I now tum to the economic ramifications of ownership, in particular, the relation between liberal ownership and free economic markets. I will specify more precisely the conditions of liberal ownership, though the general idea was spelled out in the last chapter. Given what was said there, one might think it obvious, as many assume implicitly, that there is a simple and close relation between liberal ownership and competitive markets for goods. But as one begins to consider the analytical conditions of markets—perfectly competitive and otherwise—it becomes clear that this relation is actually quite complex. Indeed, it turns out that liberal ownership is neither necessary nor sufficient for competitive markets, and that they give rise to one another only when fairly robust (and contentious) assumptions are made about both the environment and individual motivations.
Toward an Egalitarian Theory of Ownership
Authors: Christman John
Published: November 2023

I hope to have accomplished, to some extent, the dual tasks of rejecting the liberal conception of ownership and of suggesting an alternative picture. I now show the usefulness of this alternative model of ownership more directly, specifically, how it makes a contribution to the development of egalitarian principles of social and economic justice. The entire task of working out an acceptable egalitarian theory would include, of course, providing a blueprint for the legal and economic institutions of a society. This cannot be done here, and certainly not by me. All I can contribute to this project is a discussion of ways that the control ownership/income ownership distinction should be utilized in the development of such a picture of society.
Reflections on mr. Cowleys words
Authors: Wilson Carol Shiner
Published: November 2023

For diffrent tongs our Babell folly tell, And Cloaths shew forth the cause for which we fell. But to return; I march’d up to the gate, Which opens to the virgins Room of state, Before this gate, were two large banners spread On which heavn’s conquest were imbrodered, For which those maids their due thanksgiving paid.
Faith Seeking Understanding
Authors: Westphal Merold
Published: November 2023

During my senior year m high school my English teacher decided, I know not why, that I should read Plato’s Republic. She set it up as a special project for me, which I attacked with vigor but without much success. Lacking someone to help me see what was going on in the text, I easily worked my way through its minefields without triggering any explosions of insight. My seduction by philosophy did not begin with love at first sight.
The Ethics of Biomedical Research
Authors: Brody Baruch A
Published: November 2023

This book analyses the major issues of research ethics through a careful review of the treatment in official policies on research ethics developed throughout the world (especially North America, Western Europe, and the Pacific Rim). Among the issues covered are animal research, research on human subjects, epidemiological research, genetic research, reproductive research, research on vulnerable subjects, clinical trials, drug approval and the reserch process, and research on women and minorities. Brody also evaluates the content and the methods of developing these policies in light of his philosophical position of pluralistic casuistry. This is the only book that analyses all the major issues in research ethics. It is the only book which deals with these issues from an international perspective rather than just a US perspective. Major official policies from important research-intensive countries are reprinted in the appendix (close to 200 plates of otherwise difficult material).
Philosophical Reflections
Authors: Brody Baruch A
Published: November 2023

In the last nine chapters, we have analyzed a wide variety of official policies from many different sources on a very large number of questions relating to the ethics of research. There can be no doubt that the development of official policies on research ethics has become a major effort throughout the research intensive regions of the world.
Williams: One Thought Too Many
Authors: Nagel Thomas
Published: November 2023

Over the past decade Bernard Williams has attacked the objectivity of ethics with mounting intensity. He denies that ethics can tell us the truth about what to do and how to live by discovering principles that are revealed when we regard our lives and our societies not from a subjective or individual standpoint but from a detached, impartial one. Such a standpoint would be the analogue in the domain of choice and action of the objectivity pursued in science by detachment from each individual’s perception of the world. Scientific detachment enables us to form a conception of how the world is in itself, rather than how it looks from here—or even how it generally appears to creatures like us.
MacIntyre versus the Enlightenment
Authors: Nagel Thomas
Published: November 2023

Every human endeavor has a history, and those engaged in it are faced with the question of how to relate their present engagement to that history, including its eventual comprehension of the present. Excessive historical self-consciousness can be crippling, but some measure of it is unavoidable, and its problems are especially acute in the field of ethics. In thinking about questions of right and wrong, any reflective person knows perfectly well that his conception of the issues, of the relevant arguments, of the place of the burden of proof, is strongly influenced by the moral climate that surrounds him. Yet he cannot simply accept this without qualm, in the way he can accept the influence of a linguistic culture on the sense of grammar, usage, and style that guides the choice of his words. We want to write and speak well within the language of our place and time, but there is no right language. By contrast, merely to act well by the standards of some morality is not enough: one would have to be very morally lazy to be unconcerned with the possibility that the prevailing morality of one’s culture had something fundamentally wrong with it.
Monte Carlo and Molecular Dynamics Simulations in Polymer Science
Authors: Binder Kurt
Published: November 2023

Written by leading experts from around the world, Monte Carlo and Molecular Dynamics Simulations in Polymer Science comprehensively reviews the latest simulation techniques for macromolecular materials. Focusing in particular on numerous new techniques, the book offers authoritative introductions to solutions of neutral polymers and polyelectrolytes; dynamics of polymer melts, rubbers and gels, and glassy materials; thermodynamics of polymer mixing and mesophase formation, and polymers confined at interfaces and grafted to walls. Throughout, contributors offer practical advice on how to overcome the unique challenges posed by the large size and slow relaxation of polymer coils. Students and researchers in polymer chemistry, polymer physics, chemical engineering, and materials and computational science will all benefit from the cogent, step-by-step introductions contained in this important new book.
Basic Thermodynamic Quantities
Authors: Savage Michael J
Published: November 2023

The purpose of this chapter is to present a simple treatment of some of the basic thermodynamic concepts involved in plant physiology, and especially those relating to water potential and its measurement. The concepts will be briefly applied to plant water potential and to water potential measurement techniques.
Growth Substances
Authors: Cleland Robert E
Published: November 2023

Terms used to describe plant growth substances have been used in widely divergent ways. As a result, there has been little attempt to standardize the definitions. The definitions presented here are based, as far as possible, on the most common usage at present. Some terms, such as abscisic acid and ethylene, are not defined here, as they refer to a single compound.
Responsibilities and Principles: Reflections on the Sources of Moral Dilemmas
Authors: Mason H E
Published: November 2023

Moral conflict has long been prominent in the attempts of philosophers to understand morality. It was recognized by Plato, celebrated by Hegel, and, more recently, taken as a commonplace by a variety of non-cognitivist moral theorists. Moral dilemmas are no more than a special case of moral conflict, but they are of particular interest because they exhibit the possibility of conflict within the moral consciousness of a single individual. It is one thing for a person to recognize that others might fundamentally disagree with his moral stands, quite another to experience apparently irresolvable conflicts in his own mind. In recent years, philosophers have given a good bit of attention to moral dilemmas. Taking dilemmas as standing in the way of a well-conceived and practically useful moral philosophy, they have wondered how a genuine dilemma could be possible. In this paper I will take another tack. Taking dilemmas as a fundamental fact of moral life, I will ask what their possibility can teach us about that form of life. I will give special attention to some of the varying circumstances in which they arise, and the form they take in those circumstances. I will in light of those reflections offer several general speculations about the concept of morality assumed in much of the controversy over the possibility of moral dilemmas.
On Being an Editor and Becoming a Critic
Authors: Kammen Michael
Published: November 2023

Early in 1919 a friend found Seldes a job writing editorials for Collier’s shortly before the Crowell publishing firm took over that weekly magazine from the Whitney family. At Collier’s hemet Finley Peter Dunne, who came to the office once a week to drop off the latest folk wisdom of Mr. Dooley. Writing his memoirs in the mid-1960s, Seldes believed that “the Crowell people kept me on, reluctantly, as a symbol of continuity, perhaps, with the old regime; I am sure they would have fired me shortly—but the offer from The Dial intervened and I was saved.” He referred to the pre-eminent journal of literature and art published in the United States during the 1920s.
“I Am by Now Accustomed to Flashbacks”
Authors: Kammen Michael
Published: November 2023

In 1956, soon after Fred Allen died, Clifton Fadiman devoted one of his “Conversation” programs on NBC radio to a discussion he had recorded (but never previously played) in which he and Seldes interviewed Allen, a comedian they both very much admired. At one point in the program Fadiman turned to Seldes and asked him whether he would live his life differently if he had the opportunity. “You’ve done half a dozen things,” Fadiman noted. “Do you regret having done any of them in the sense that you feel you’ve wasted your time and would rather have filled your time with some other kind of work?” Later in the broadcast Seldes remarked that many immigrants had come to the United States saying, “I will take a chance and I will start again”; but Seldes did not yearn for a different career—only for wiser financial management.
Recuperating Agents: Narrative Contracts, Emancipatory Readers, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Authors: Kaplan Carla
Published: November 2023

In this often-noted concluding line, Harriet Jacobs’s narrator, Linda Brent, rejects the marriage contract and, more generally, the conventions regulating women’s lives and literature. By opposing freedom and marriage she undermines the nineteenth-century ideology of marriage as woman’s “sacred absolute,” the means of her personal fulfillment and the proper end of her life. By suggesting, moreover, that freedom does not have the “usual” meaning for black slave women that it has for free white women, she challenges us to think about freedom and agency as specific and contextual, not as abstract and universal, to think about freedom, as she puts it, “not in the usual way.”

But what would it mean for us to think about freedom or agency “not in the usual way”? Brent’s “freedom” at the end of the narrative is complex and ambiguous. Although “free”—“as free from the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north” (201)—she remains unfulfilled. “The dream of my life is not yet realized,” she writes (201). “I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble” (201).
Prey-Predator Interactions
Authors: Zahavi Amotz Avishag
Published: November 2023

Babblers move around their territory during the day, looking for food on the ground among the desert trees and bushes. One of the group often perches on a treetop, acting as sentinel. When the sentinel, or any other babbler, sees a bird of prey, or raptor, in the distance, it emits a loud “bark.” Upon hearing such barks, babblers often raise their heads and scan the sky. If the raptor is far away and does not pose any immediate danger to the feeding group, they go on searching for food. But when an abrupt, frightened bark indicates imminent danger, the birds, including the sentinel, immediately jump for cover. Often, however, precisely after such a fright, the entire group goes up to the top of the tree in which they have taken shelter and joins the sentinel in barking and calling loudly. In most studies of animal behavior such vocalizations are classified as warning calls, issued by animals to others of their species. That idea has a certain superficial plausibility. But years of observation raised so many puzzling questions that we finally dared ask ourselves whether the calls were indeed meant as warnings. The barks ring out before the raptor has had any chance to notice the group or pose any danger to it.
Vocalizations
Authors: Zahavi Amotz Avishag
Published: November 2023

Many animals make decisions based on information they get from the vocalizations of others-their mates, their collaborators, their rivals, members of other species. What is it that leads individuals to trust information they get from others’ voices? And why isn’t vocalization used to mislead hearers? It would seem easy to cheat by vocalization; yet observations and studies show that calls usually convey reliably the intentions of the callers. Dog and cat owners can often predict their pets’ behavior by listening to them, and we don’t know of any case in which a dog tried to mislead by using its voice.
Theorizing Communication
Authors: Schiller Dan
Published: November 2023

This is the first book to offer a detailed intellectual history of communication study over the last century. Schiller looks at the relationship between early communication theory and contextualizing social and economic changes, and finds that the evolving dualism between intellectual and manual labour became deeply embedded in the work of theorists, even into our own time. Close attention is paid to leading thinkers in the field, including John Dewey, C. Wright Mills, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and Daniel Bell.
Bioethics As a Discourse
Authors: Jonsen Albert R
Published: November 2023

Bioethics does not belong to the bioethicists who worry about its disciplinary status. From its beginnings, bioethics has gotten people talking. It is public discourse carried on by many people in many settings. We opened the history of American bioethics with a walk through a decade of conferences in which savants exposed their problems of conscience about the new biology and medicine. We stopped in at the founding of two centers at which the conversations of those conferences were perennialized. We listened as government panels debated about how to convert those conversations into public policy and regulations. The early bioethicists called for wide public discussion about the ethical goals of medicine and science, and that discussion has taken place.
Confidentiality in Surgical Practice
Authors: Marshall Mary Faith , Iii C D Smith
Published: November 2023

A famous actor was recently admitted to a university teaching hospital following a tragic and traumatic accident. Once the injury was surgically stabilized, the patient was transferred to the surgical intensive care unit in serious condition. From the outset, it was clear that the patient would undergo a lengthy hospitalization. The actor’s popularity and the dramatic nature of the injury fostered immediate worldwide attention. Concern for the patient’s privacy was focused both externally, on the news media, and internally, on medical center personnel. The medical center’s public relations offlce galvanized itself for an intense and protracted relationship with the news media. Disclosure of information would be guided by the preferences of the patient and family. The patient’s surgeon would be the sole spokesperson for the medical center. The patient was assigned an alias in keeping with medical center procedure for protecting the privacy of well-known patients. Acknowledging that even this safeguard may not guarantee the privacy of the electronic medical record, hospital administrators activated their recently purchased security audit system. They registered every instance of electronic access to the patient’s electronic record. Each person who accessed the record subsequently received a letter from the medical center’s chief administrator asking for a rationale for that person’s ‘‘need to know’’ information about the patient. Most instances of access were legitimate. Some were not. Clearly, medical center staff and faculty had pried into the patient’s
Emergency Patients: Serious Moral Choices with Limited Time, Information, and Patient Participation
Authors: Mattox Kenneth L , Engelhardt H Tristram
Published: November 2023

Emergency surgical patients are those who appear to require immediate or nearly immediate intervention to save life, limb, or major health interests. A traditional assumption in surgical practice has been that emergency surgical patients should be provided rapid management at whatever level of intervention the surgeon reasonably thinks is required to preserve their lives or protect them from a serious compromise to their prior health status. This assumption is based on three further considerations: (1) the general life-preserving orientation of medicine, (2) the belief that most patients would want their lives and health protected when they are in emergency situations in which there also is no time for an adequate consent process, and (3) reductions in mortality and the protection of significant health interests are generally worth the risk of compromises to health or quality of life that may result from aggressive surgical management. The actual moral content of these assumptions can only be fleshed out in particular communities within particular societies and will under different circumstances have different expressions in law and policy. This chapter explores these assumptions, selecting moral themes generally salient in American health care law, public policy, and medical ethics.