Leemon McHenry

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.

Nicholas Maxwell's provocative and highly-original philosophy of science urges a revolution in academic inquiry affecting all branches of learning, so that the single-minded pursuit of knowledge is replaced with the aim of helping people realize what is of value in life and make progress toward a more civilized world. This volume of essays from an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars engages Maxwell in critical evaluation and celebrates his contribution to philosophy spanning forty years. Several of the contributors, like Maxwell, took their inspiration from Sir Karl Popper’s philosophy of science and were connected to the department he created at the London School of Economics. In the introductory chapter, Maxwell provides an overview of his thought and then defends his views against objections in a concluding essay.

The current situation in medicine has been described as a crisis of credibility, as the profit motive of industry has taken control of clinical trials and the dissemination of data. Pharmaceutical companies maintain a stranglehold over the content of medical journals in three ways: (1) by ghostwriting articles that bias the results of clinical trials, (2) by the sheer economic power they exert on journals due to the purchase of drug advertisements and journal reprints, and (3) by the threat of legal action against those researchers who seek to correct the misrepresentation of study results. This paper argues that Karl Popper's critical rationalism provides a corrective to the failure of academic freedom in biomedical research.

T. L. S. Sprigge produced an eclectic yet highly original system of metaphysics and ethics, a synthesis of panpsychism, absolute idealism, and utilitarianism, at a time in which orthodox analytical philosophy could only view this system as an anachronism of the nineteenth century. His critics claim that his philosophy has only historical interest to a small group of specialists in the relatively dormant tradition of British Idealism, that an attempt to defend his view of consciousness is a hopeless nonstarter, and that his Spinozistic monism can have no relevance in our intellectual culture.1 Yet others have defended Sprigge as the "most independent of thinkers within the field of metaphysics" and salute him as "a ..

Sergio Sismondo argues that pharmaceutical industry-sponsored research and ghostwriting produce genuine knowledge and science (albeit commercial science) not different from established medical science. In this essay I critically evaluate Sismondo' view and conclude that the commercial medical science that has created the ghostwriting industry is a corruption of science and not merely science done in a new corporate mode. Serious harm to patients has resulted from misrepresented commercial biomedical research.

Selective reporting is prevalent in the medical literature, particularly in industry-sponsored research. In this paper, we expose selective reporting that is not evident without access to internal company documents. The published report of study 329 of paroxetine in adolescents sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline claims that “paroxetine is generally well tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents”. By contrast, documents obtained during litigation reveal that study 329 was negative for efficacy on all 8 protocol specified outcomes and positive for harm.