The terms 'sustainability' and 'sustainable development' have become established in the popular vernacular in the 25 years or so since the publication of the report of the Brundtland Commission. Often, 'sustainability' is thought to represent some long-term goal and 'sustainable development' a means or process by which to achieve it. Two fundamental and conflicting philosophical positions underlying these terms are identified. In particular, the commonly held notion that sustainable development can be a pathway to sustainability is challenged, and the expedient (...) view that both terms ultimately serve holistic development is questioned. Furthermore, it is argued that perpetuating the unclear and misleading distinction between the two positions will limit the development of efficacious policy, as it will not resonate with the broadest possible gamut of beliefs and value systems. (shrink)

BackgroundThe role of consent for research use of health information is contentious. Most discussion has focused on when project-specific consent may be waived but, recently, a broader range of consent options has been entertained, including broad opt-in for multiple studies with restrictions and notification with opt-out. We sought to elicit public values in this matter and to work toward an agreement about a common approach to consent for use of personal information for health research through deliberative public dialogues.MethodsWe conducted seven (...) day-long public dialogues, involving 98 participants across Canada. Immediately before and after each dialogue, participants completed a fixed-response questionnaire rating individuals' support for 3 approaches to consent in the abstract and their consent choices for 5 health research scenarios using personal information. They also rated how confident different safeguards made them feel that their information was being used responsibly.ResultsBroad opt-in consent for use of personal information garnered the greatest support in the abstract. When presented with specific research scenarios, no one approach to consent predominated. When profit was introduced into the scenarios, consent choices shifted toward greater control over use. Despite lively and constructive dialogues, and considerable shifting in opinion at the individual level, at the end of the day, there was no substantive aggregate movement in opinion. Personal controls were among the most commonly cited approaches to improving people's confidence in the responsible use of their information for research.ConclusionBecause no one approach to consent satisfied even a simple majority of dialogue participants and the importance placed on personal controls, a mechanism should be developed for documenting consent choice for different types of research, including ways for individuals to check who has accessed their medical record for purposes other than clinical care. This could be done, for example, through a web-based patient portal to their electronic health record. Researchers and policy makers should continue to engage the public to promote greater public understanding of the research process and to look for feasible alternatives to existing approaches to project-specific consent for observational research. (shrink)

BackgroundStigma refers to a distinguishing personal trait that is perceived as or actually is physically, socially, or psychologically disadvantageous. Little is known about the opinion of those who have more or less stigmatizing health conditions regarding the need for consent for use of their personal information for health research.MethodsWe surveyed the opinions of people 18 years and older with seven health conditions. Participants were drawn from: physicians' offices and clinics in southern Ontario; and from a cross-Canada marketing panel of individuals (...) with the target health conditions. For each of five research scenarios presented, respondents chose one of five consent choices: (1) no need for me to know; (2) notice with opt-out; (3) broad opt-in; (4) project-specific permission; and (5) this information should not be used. Consent choices were regressed onto: demographics; health condition; and attitude measures of privacy, disclosure concern, and the benefits of health research. We conducted focus groups to discuss possible reasons for observed consent choices.ResultsWe observed substantial variation in the control that people wish to have over use of their personal information for research. However, consent choice profiles were similar across health conditions, possibly due to sampling bias. Research involving profit or requiring linkage of health information with income, education, or occupation were associated with more restrictive consent choices. People were more willing to link their health information with biological samples than with information about their income, occupation, or education.ConclusionsThe heterogeneity in consent choices suggests individuals should be offered some choice in use of their information for different types of health research, even if limited to selectively opting-out. Some of the implementation challenges could be designed into the interoperable electronic health record. However, many questions remain, including how best to capture the opinions of those who are more privacy sensitive. (shrink)

Five faculty members in the College of Business at Northern Illinois University received a grant from the James S. Kemper Foundation to integrate ethics into the graduate business curriculum. This was the second phase of a comprehensive program to integrate ethics into the business curriculum. Each faculty member taught a required course in the MBA program. The faculty members represented each of the five functional departments in the College of Business.This paper describes the ethics content, materials, and approaches that were (...) used to cover ethics by each of the five faculty members. Hopefully, this description will help other faculty and universities integrate ethics more effectively into the business curriculum. (shrink)

A companion to Charles Darwin's notebooks, 1836-1844 (Cornell U. Pr., 1987). Because Darwin was in the process of formulating his arguments, entries on a single topic might appear in several series of notes at any number of places in various manuscripts. This concordance gathers these citations toge.

Book reviewed in this article: Becoming Psychiatrists. By Donald Light Men Who Control Women's Health: The Miseducation of Obstetrician‐Gynecologists. By Diana Scully.

This is a review of CONDITIONALS: FROM PHILOSOPHY TO COMPUTER SCIENCE, edited by Crocco G., del Cerro L. Fariñas, and Herzig A., Studies in logic and computation, no. 5, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1995.

The essentialism story is a version of the history of biological classification that was fabricated between 1953 and 1968 by Ernst Mayr, who combined contributions from Arthur Cain and David Hull with his own grudge against Plato. It portrays pre-Darwinian taxonomists as caught in the grip of an ancient philosophy called essentialism, from which they were not released until Charles Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species. Mayr's motive was to promote the Modern Synthesis in opposition to the typology of idealist (...) morphologists; demonizing Plato served this end. Arthur Cain's picture of Linnaeus as a follower of 'Aristotelian' (scholastic) logic was woven into the story, along with David Hull's application of Karl Popper's term, 'essentialism', which Mayr accepted in 1968 as a synonym for what he had called 'typological thinking'. Although Mayr also pointed out the importance of empiricism in the history of taxonomy, the essentialism story still dominates the secondary literature. The history of the first telling of the essentialism story exposes its scant basis in fact. (shrink)

Thomas Henry Huxley and Charles Darwin discovered in 1857 that they had a fundamental disagreement about biological classification. Darwin believed that the natural system should express genealogy while Huxley insisted that classification must stand on its own basis, independent of evolution. Darwin used human races as a model for his view. This private and long-forgotten dispute exposes important divisions within Victorian biology. Huxley, trained in physiology and anatomy, was a professional biologist while Darwin was a gentleman naturalist. Huxley agreed (...) with John Stuart Mill's rejection of William Whewell's sympathy for Linnaeus. The naturalists William Sharp Macleay, Hugh Strickland, and George Waterhouse worked to distinguish two kinds of relationship, affinity and analogy. Darwin believed that his theory could explain the difference. Richard Owen introduced the distinction between homology and analogy to anatomists, but the word homology did not enter Darwin's vocabulary until 1848, when he used the morphological concept of archetype in his work on Cirripedia. Huxley dropped the word archetype when Richard Owen linked it to Plato's ideal forms, replacing it with common plan. When Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species that the word plan gives no explanation, he may have had Huxley in mind. Darwin's preposterous story in the Origin about a bear giving birth to a kangaroo, which he dropped in the second edition, was in fact aimed at Huxley. (shrink)

Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

The following are some of the entries received in the contest presented in our March, 1960 issue. The starred essays were judged as winners and were awarded $25.00 prizes.

Species that died without leaving descendants Darwin called ‘utterly extinct’. They far outnumber the ancestors of all living things, so they resemble the dark matter of modern cosmology, which far outweighs visible matter. He realized in 1837 that their absence is what creates the groups in a natural classification. In his Notebook B he combined the idea that species multiply with the idea that ancestors' relatives must mostly be extinct. The fossil Megatherium was utterly extinct. The iconic branching ‘I think’ (...) diagram shows extinction causing the origin of genera by eliminating intermediate species. Darwin’s concept of taxonomic ranks, starting with the genus, was informed by his interaction with taxonomists. Based on his familiarity with demography, Darwin reasoned that the survival of transitional forms was unlikely, which helped him decide to focus at the species level. When drafting his theory in the 1840s, he left out these speculative ideas, but they emerged again in the 1850s when he realized his theory needed a cause for branches to diverge. His ecological answer worked at the species level, but his Principle of Divergence was unconvincing at higher taxonomic levels. In the Origin, Darwin repeatedly insisted on the importance of utter extinction. (shrink)

The work argues that engaging Africa's cultural and epistemic resources as social imaginaries, and not as metaphysical or ontological “essences,” could help practitioners of African philosophy overcome the cluster of shortcomings and undesirable features associated with “ethnophilosophy.” A number of points are outlined to buttress this claim. First, the framework of social imaginaries does not operate with the false assumption that Africa's cultural forms and epistemic resources are static and immutable. Second, this framework does not lend itself to sweeping generalizations (...) about Africa or large swathes of it. Third, the framework of social imaginaries remedies ethnophilosophy's problem of collectivism. Fourth, unlike ethnophilosophy, it does not romanticize and canonize a supposedly “idyllic” African past, which militates against a realistic and forward‐looking philosophizing. Finally, with the framework of social imaginaries, Africa's indigenous cultural and epistemic resources become amenable to being engaged with critical philosophical rigor. This not only enhances their potential for cross‐cultural philosophical conversation but also enhances their usefulness for addressing current sociopolitical issues affecting Africa. The discussion in this paper somewhat touches upon the question of method in African philosophy, using the ethnophilosophy problem to navigate the vast gamut of issues involved. (shrink)

Forty-five years ago, while still an undergraduate student at Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Terrence Deacon produced as his honours thesis a programmatic manifesto for re-situating the semiotic logic of Charles Sanders Peirce “out of the realm of philosophy and [revealing instead] its necessary association with the information sciences and its close parallels with current systems theories”. Deacon’s project, then and now, has been to show how, within the context of naturally occurring physical processes, Peirce’s essential (...) insight regarding a “mode of being which consists in the fact that future facts of secondness will take on a determinate general character” can be, and is continuously, manifested in living systems. Considering this explication to be the “hard problem of biosemiotics”, I therefore read the current target article as a progress report, and an extremely encouraging one, of Deacon’s ongoing efforts to develop a “proof of principle” model for the naturalistic origin and biologically instantiated logic of this ‘causalis in futuro’ mediation process unique to living systems. (shrink)

The cultural logic contained within Emile Durkheim's work, specifically categories he puts forth in Suicide, creates the ground for Horrible Workers. This book is constructed to allow its readers to study the cases of Max Stirner, Arthur Rimbaud, Robert Johnson, and the Charles Manson Circle independently of one another or in a comparative fashion. Each case demonstrates in what ways particular social experiences lead to what have been perceived as unique forms of cultural expression.

Charles Hartshorne: Dipolar Theism From the beginning to the end of his career Charles Hartshorne maintained that the idea that “God is love” was his guiding intuition in philosophy. This “intuition” presupposes both that there is a divine reality and that that reality answers to some positive description of being a loving God. This article … Continue reading Hartshorne, Charles : Dipolar Theism →.

Charles Hartshorne: Neoclassical Metaphysics Charles Hartshorne was an intrepid defender of the claims of metaphysics in a century characterized by its anti-metaphysical genius. While many influential voices were explaining what speculative philosophy could not accomplish or even proclaiming an end to it, Hartshorne was trying to show what speculative philosophy could accomplish. Metaphysics, he … Continue reading Hartshorne, Charles: Neoclassical Metaphysics →.

This article revisits Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency in the age of Trump, discussing the debates to which it originally responded, its core thesis and empirical evidence, as well as its impact on political science in the last three decades. The article’s second half turns to a recent critique of Tulis’s thesis by Ann C. Pluta, which manifests many of the misunderstandings that have persisted since The Rhetorical Presidency’s original publication. Habits of thought revealed in Pluta’s misunderstandings, I argue, are (...) emblematic of the political culture that is amenable to the simplistic yet politically effective appeals characteristic of rhetorical presidents like Donald Trump. Elements of the broader political-science world that are on display in Pluta’s article are symptomatic of political pathologies sustained and aggravated by the culture of the polity that political scientists inhabit and purport to study—the culture of the rhetorical presidency. (shrink)

In a lucid and comprehensive study, Professor Viney presents an excellent critical analysis of Hartshorne's thought about God.

Four years after the death of Charles Darwin, his research associate, George Romanes, invoked a mysterious process—“physiological selection”—that could often have secured reproductive isolation independently of, and prior to, natural selection, so leading to an origin of species. This postulate of two sequential selection modes can now be regarded as leading to modern “chromosomal,” as opposed to “genic,” speciation theories. Romanes’ abstractions—which confounded many, but not all, of his contemporaries—equate with divergences in parental DNA sequences that impede meiotic pairing (...) in their hybrid offspring, so rendering that offspring sterile. Unlike Darwin, Romanes saw hybrid sterility as a parental, rather than offspring, phenotype that would, within a species, reproductively isolate certain parents from each other while not impeding their crossing with other parents. This group selection would have empowered natural selection to act more advantageously than in its absence. Given suitable conditions, there could then be divergence from one species into two. The present essay introduces Romanes’ “Physiological Selection; an Additional Suggestion on the Origin of Species” 19:337–411; available as supplementary material in the online version of this essay) for the journal’s “Classics in Biological Theory” collection. (shrink)

This important new study of theological method comes at the culmination of the author's distinguished career as both a scholar and creative thinker in philosophy and theology. It makes an important, groundbreaking and programmatic contribution to contemporary thinking about theological method. It derives its creativity in no small measure by grounding theological method in the American pragmatic tradition: most notably in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder and guiding genius of American pragmatic philosophy; John Dewey, the articulate (...) proponent of pragmatic instrumentalism; and George Herbert Mead, the founder of social psychology.Its roots in the pragmatic tradition endow this theory of .. (shrink)