Galen Strawson: Things That Bother Me. Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc.

Three Quite Different Things That Matter to Me

I am somewhat abashed to say, right at the start of this piece, that I don’t think of myself as a cell biologist—any more than as a geneticist or biochemist. One of the great glories of our field is that it is bursting the dam and flooding the plains. Cell biologists investigate not just the cell but also the whole organism and its ecosystem, and peer, with revelation, at individual molecules. ...

Give me FREEDOM or...

Set Me Free , Give Me Degrees of Freedom

Computers and electronic products in general put heavy constraints on human-product interaction. These products demand people to adapt to their way of functioning instead of the other way around. In this paper we try to offer methods to free man from these constraints. To this aim we analyse the existing situation, and point to an approach we use in product design where man as a whole is taken ...

Things my mother never taught me.

"I've heard some things that scare me". Responding with empathy to parents' fears of vaccinations.

The Lancet's 1998 publication of "Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children" by Andrew Wakefield, et. al., positing a causal relationship between MMR vaccine and autism in children, set off a media storm and galvanized the anti-vaccine movement. In this paper, centuries-old fears of vaccination and the history of autism as a medic...