Leemon McHenry

This essay examines the effects of commercialization on education with particular focus on corporatization of academic research. This trend results from a business model of education, which I identify as profit-based inquiry. I contrast profit-based inquiry with Nicholas Maxwell's conception of wisdom-based inquiry and conclude that the business model fails to achieve enduring value and results in a promotional or ideological emphasis rather than one that stresses the importance of critical rationalism. In order to make my case for this failure, I focus attention on the current state of commercialization in research of medicines.

In this Festschrift honoring the work of Timothy L. S. Sprigge, Sprigge summarizes his philosophy (a synthesis of absolute idealism, panpsychism, and utilitarianism), defends his position against criticism raised by philosophers in the preceding chapters of this volume, and offers in an addendum a proof for the existence of the Absolute, namely, a final and all-embracing Consciousness akin in many ways to Spinoza’s God. This defense of his philosophy consists mainly of responses to various points of criticism raised about his view of time, the relation between his metaphysics and ethics, panpsychism, the Absolute, and animal rights.

Scientific and ethical misconduct has increased at an alarming rate as a result of the privatization of knowledge. What began as an effort to stimulate entrepreneurship and increase discovery in biomedical research by strengthening the ties between industry and academics has led to an erosion of confidence in the reporting of research results. Inherent tensions between profit-directed inquiry and knowledge-directed inquiry are instantiated in psychopharmacology, especially in the co-option of academic activity to corporate objectives. The effects of these tensions are visible in research agendas, publication practices, postgraduate education, academic-industry partnerships and product promotion.

In this case study from litigation, we show how ghostwriting of clinical trial results can contribute to the manipulation of data to favor the study medication. Study 329 for paroxetine pediatric use was negative for efficacy and positive for harm. Yet the ghostwritten publication from this study concluded that paroxetine provided evidence of efficacy and safety and continues to be influential. Despite the role of named authors in revisions of the manuscript, the sponsor company remained in control of the message.

This article presents an overlooked case of research misconduct and violations of basic principles of medical and business ethics. When Bayer’s Cutter Laboratories realized that their blood products, Factor VIII and IX or antihemophiliac factor (AHF), were contaminated with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the financial investment in the product was considered too high to destroy the inventory. Cutter misrepresented the results of its own research and sold the contaminated AHF to overseas markets in Asia and Latin America without the precaution of heat treating the product recommended for eliminating the risk. As a consequence, hemophiliacs who infused the HIV-contaminated Factor VIII and IX tested positive for HIV and developed AIDS

In this case study from litigation, I examine the origin of Monsanto-sponsored articles published in toxicology journals and the lay media that were designed to create doubt in critical evaluations of the herbicide, glyphosate. The role of ghostwriting and the use of third-party academics in the corporate defense of glyhphosate reveal that this practice extends beyond the corruption of medical journals and persists in spite of efforts to enforce transparency in industry manipulation of the scientific literature.

In his magnum opus, Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead claims a special affinity to Oxford philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley. McHenry clarifies exactly how much of Whitehead's metaphysics is influenced by and accords with the main principles of Bradley's absolute idealism. He argues that many of Whitehead's doctrines cannot be understood without an adequate understanding of Bradley, in terms of both affinities and contrasts. He evaluates the arguments between them and explores several important connections with William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, and Charles Hartshorne

While Whitehead and Russell’s collaboration on the foundations of mathematics ended with the publication of Principia Mathematica, both philosophers separately developed a philosophy of physics in the 1920s that was based on the revolutionary advances in modern physics. This essay explores the affinities and contrasts in Whitehead and Russell’s event ontology as a metaphysical foundation of physics and demonstrates the influence of Whitehead’s method of extensive abstraction on Russell’s metaphysics and epistemology.

In this monograph, I argue that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a more adequate basis for achieving a unification of physical theory than a traditional substance metaphysics. I investigate the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on the development of the ontology of events and compare Whitehead’s theory to his contemporaries, C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, as well as another key proponent of this theory, W. V. Quine. In this manner, I defend the naturalized and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.

Ghostwriting for medical journals has become a major, but largely invisible, factor contributing to the problem of credibility in academic medicine. In this paper I argue that the pharmaceutical marketing objectives and use of medical communication firms in the production of ghostwritten articles constitute a new form of sophistry. After identifying three distinct types of medical ghostwriting, I survey the known cases of ghostwriting in the literature and explain the harm done to academic medicine and to patients. Finally, I outline steps to address the problem and restore the integrity of the medical literature

The idea that prescribing physicians should be guided by the most reliable scientific evidence seems obvious, but the actual methodology of evidence-based medicine was only introduced in the early 1990s by an international group of clinicians and researchers led by Gordon Guyatt. Since then it has provided a new paradigm for the scientific foundation of medicine and has influenced other disciplines outside of medicine, for example, evidence-based psychotherapy, science and government. The novel concept of evidence-based medicine is based on hierarchies of evidence from opinions of respected authorities, mechanistic reasoning, and reports of expert committees at the bottom to...

In this chapter I provide an elementary exposition of the development of Whitehead's view of objectivity and his theory of extension, with particular focus on explaining how macroscopic objects of ordinary perception and the whole structure of space-time arise out of the units of his ontology, namely, the actual occasions. I also review the scholarship on Whitehead's view of extension and discuss the major problems that arise in connection with the theory in his magnum opus, Process and Reality.

For the past forty years, Timothy Sprigge has been a major player on the British philosophical scene contributing to discussions as diverse as consciousness, the ontology of time, personal identity, animal rights, punishment, censorship and wider issues in metaphysics, ethics and the history of philosophy. He is, however, less well known for his own highly original system of metaphysics and ethics—a synthesis of absolute idealism, panpsychism and utilitarianism. This system was constructed against the current of the dominant linguistic and analytical trends in Britain. While working within an intellectual milieu largely hostile to his views, he attempted to provide color to what seemed to him a rather sterile and narrow orthodoxy. In his magnum opus, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism, he says that his manner of doing philosophy attempts to arrive at answers to the “deep ontological questions about the concrete nature of reality” instead of viewing philosophy as a self-contained intellectual game. Guy Stock says of Sprigge that he “has, in a contemporary context, a fair claim to be the most independent of thinkers within the field of metaphysics.”

Timothy Sprigge advanced an original synthesis of panpsychism and absolute idealism. He argued that consciousness is an irreducible, subjective reality that is only grasped by an introspective, phenomenological approach and constructed his ontology from what is revealed in the phenomenology. In defending the unique place of metaphysics in the pursuit of truth, he claimed that scientific investigation can never discover the essence of consciousness since it can only provide descriptions of structure and function in what we normally think of as physical existence. In this paper I present a critical evaluation of Sprigge's view focusing in particular on his conception of the nature of scientific inquiry vis-à-vis the ambitious project of his metaphysics. I argue that a naturalistic metaphysics provides a more adequate approach to the relation between science and metaphysics

Recent developments in cosmology and particle physics have led to speculation that our universe is merely one of a multitude of universes. While this notion, the multiverse hypothesis, is highly contested as legitimate science, it has nonetheless struck many physicists as a necessary consequence of the effort to construct a final, unified theory. In Process and Reality (1929), his magnum opus, Alfred North Whitehead advanced a cosmology as part of his general metaphysics of process. Part of this project involved a theory of cosmic epochs which bears a remarkable affinity to current cosmological speculation. This paper demonstrates how the basic framework of a multiverse theory is already present in Whitehead’s cosmology and defends the necessity of speculation in the quest for an explanatory description.