The arrival of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) in 1999 was greeted with suspicion by many clinicians who regarded it as the beginning of an era of overt health care rationing. From a cardiological perspective, this has not proved to be the case. The guidelines issued on implantable defibrillators, intracoronary stents, and glyco-protein (GP) IIb/IIIa inhibitors have been l...

After centuries of obscurity, the study of the virtues is now one of the most prominent methodologies in ethics. Proponents of this so-called ‘aretaic turn’ differ substantially in the details of their respective proposals, but they tend to see a renewed focus on ethical virtues as a fresh source of insight into problems which have deadlocked more familiar approaches, such as Kantianism or util...

It is widely recognised that the history of art reveals the contemporary attitudes of societies and artists to changing patterns of social and sexual behaviour. This collection of artistic creations shows that representations of syphilis in art, over more than five centuries, are consistent with this view. The first quarter century of the morbus gallicus in Europe, starting in 1493, coincided w...

Acknowledgments Nobody can write a thesis without help form others, and it is usually impossible to express one's gratitude for this immense amount of help. The least I can do is to devote the rst pages of my thesis to all these wonderful people, and thank them all for their precious support and individual help. I want to mention some people explicitly, even knowing that my list must be inclomp...

In a recent study Dugatkin & Wilson (1992) tested for cognitive abilities in bluegill sunfish. They found that when a focal fish was allowed to forage with different companions, it was able to remember with which ones it had had greatest success and to use this information in future interactions. Moreover, fish seemed to prefer to associate with familiar conspecifics over unfamiliar ones. A num...

SCOTLAND has produced at least three medical men who can take their place beside the great Renaissance figures in versatility and breadth of learning. The late seventeenth century was adorned by Sir Robert Sibbald, the eminent physician, historian, geographer and naturalist. In the nineteenth century, Sir James Simpson excelled in a bewildering variety of activities ranging from archaeology to ...

The Dutch Paradox. History and Memory of the Holocaust in the Netherlands Prof.dr. Ido de Haan, Political History, Department of History and Art History, University of Utrecht. Email: [email protected] In this paper I present an outline for a book on the Dutch paradox in the history of the Holocaust. On the one hand, the Netherlands developed a reputation of tolerance and liberality, in particular...

Largely overshadowed by the renown of his colleagues Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer’s contributions to Frankfurt School are often downplayed as those mere director Institute for Social Research lesser coauthor Dialectic Enlightenment. Despite occupying this position marginality within corpus Critical Theory, work stands a significant sustained attempt de...

Buddhist scholars like Kenneth Ch’en thought that filial piety was a special feature of Chinese Buddhism. Later, John Strong employed “popular Buddhist stories” to show that filial piety was also important in Indian Buddhism, but he asserted that it was “a Buddhist compromise with the Brāhmanical ethics of filiality operating at the popular level.” On the other hand, Gregory Schopen, who mainly...

Several Indian Mahāyāna texts express an ethical perspective that has many features in common with Western forms of universalist consequentialism. Śāntideva, in particular, endorses a strong version of agent-neutrality, claims that compassionate agents should violate Buddhist moral commitments when doing so would produce good results, praises radical altruism, uses a critique of the self to sup...