David Koepsell

John R. Searle’s 1995 publication The Construction of Social Reality is the foundation of this collection of scholarly papers examining Searle's philosophical theories. Searle’s book sets out to reconstruct the ontology of the social sciences through an analysis of linguistic practices in the context of his celebrated work on intentionality. His book provided a stimulating account of institutional facts such as money and marriage and how they are created and replicated in everyday social life. The authors in this collection provide a critical appraisal of these and other ideas presented in Searle’s original publication. The editors' introduction clearly outlines the main issues in the debate and provides a useful introduction to Searle's contributions to social science.

Breaking Bad, hailed by Stephen King, Chuck Klosterman, and many others as the best of all TV dramas, tells the story of a man whose life changes because of the medical death sentence of an advanced cancer diagnosis. The show depicts his metamorphosis from inoffensive chemistry teacher to feared drug lord and remorseless killer. Driven at first by the desire to save his family from destitution, he risks losing his family altogether because of his new life of crime. In defiance of the tradition that viewers demand a TV character who never changes, Breaking Bad is all about the process of change, with each scene carrying forward the morphing of Walter White into the terrible Heisenberg. Can a person be transformed as the result of a few key life choices? Does everyone have the potential to be a ruthless criminal? How will we respond to the knowledge that we will be dead in six months? Is human life subject to laws as remorseless as chemical equations? When does injustice validate brutal retaliation? Why are drug addicts unsuitable for operating the illegal drug business? How can TV viewers remain loyal to a series where the hero becomes the villain? Does Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty rule our destinies? In Breaking Bad and Philosophy, a hand-picked squad of professional thinkers investigate the crimes of Walter White, showing how this story relates to the major themes of philosophy and the major life decisions facing all of us.

Currently, under the law of intellectual property, IP owners may exclude from use or production substances and processes that we would ordinarily consider to be products of nature. This has helped companies monopolize disease genes, and thus diagnostic testing for those diseases, and “biosimilar” products, pharmaceutical materials that mimic biological materials. Extending the current paradigm to the world of synthetic biology and nanotechnology will create further injustices in the delivery of health care to billions of people around the world. As such, I advocate heading this trend off at the pass. Scientists ought to conduct basic research into the building blocks of biology and matter in the open, publishing their results, releasing knowledge into the public domain upstream so that beneficial innovation can be produced without fear of downstream litigation, and so that what ought to remain in the public domain as a matter of right (products of nature) does not become unjustly monopolized.

Peter Hare and Edward Madden's collaborative book Evil and the Concept of God (968) has become a staple in literature about the problem of evil and remains frequently cited by supporters and critics alike. The major concepts of the work arose out of earlier papers in which they first began to formulate their arguments about the problem of evil. Their article "Evil and Unlimited Power" embodies many of their arguments against quasi-theist attempts to resolve the problem of evil.1 Assembled from these and other papers, their compendium frames a thorough synthesis of the long history of debate regarding the problem of evil, and contributes their own exhaustive, point-by-point attack on modern defenders of three main ..

For the past half-century, issues relating to the ethical conduct of human research have focused largely on the domain of medical, and more recently social–psychological research. The modern regime of applied ethics, emerging as it has from the Nuremberg trials and certain other historical antecedents, applies the key principles of: autonomy, respect for persons, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice to human beings who enter trials of experimental drugs and devices :168–175, 2001). Institutions such as Institutional Review Boards and Ethics Committees oversee most governmentally-funded medical research around the world, in more than a hundred nations that are signers of the Declaration of Helsinki. Increasingly, research outside of medicine has been recognized to pose potential risks to human subjects of experiments. Ethics committees now operate in the US, Canada, the U.K. and Australia to oversee all governmental-funded research, and in other jurisdictions, the range of research covered by such committees is expanding. Social science, anthropology, and other fields are falling under more clear directives to conduct a formal ethical review for basic research involving human participants. The legal and institutional response for protecting human subjects in the course of developing non-medical technologies, engineering, and design is currently vague, but some universities are establishing ethics committees to oversee their human subjects research even where the experiments involved are non-medical and not technically covered by the Declaration of Helsinki. In The Netherlands, as in most of Europe, Asia, Latin America, or Africa, no laws mandate an ethical review of non-medical research. Yet, nearly 2 years ago we launched a pilot ethics committee at our technical university and began soliciting our colleagues to submit their studies for review. In the past year, we have become officially recognized as a human subjects ethics committee for our university and we are beginning the process of requiring all studies using human subjects to apply for our approval. In this article, we consider some of the special problems relating to protecting human participants in a technology context, and discuss some of our experiences and insights about reviewing human subjects research at a technical university, concluding: that not less than in medical studies, human participants used in technology research benefit from ethical committees’ reviews, practical requirements for publications, grants, and avoiding legal liability are also served by such committees, and ethics committees in such contexts have many similarities to, but certain other special foci than medical ethics committees. We believe that this experience, and these observations, are helpful for those seeking to establish such committees in technology research contexts, and for framing the particular issues that may arise in such contexts for the benefit of researchers, and nascent committees seeking to establish their own procedures.

Much of the discussion regarding nanotechnology centers around perceived and prosphesied harms and risks. While there are real risks that could emerge from futuristic nanotechnology, there are other current risks involved with its development, not involving physical harms, that could prevent its full promise from being realized. Transitional forms of the technology, involving “microfab,” or localized, sometimes desk-top, manufacture, pose a good opportunity for case study. How can we develop legal and regulatory institutions, specifically centered around the problems of intellectual property, that both stimulate innovation, and make the best possible use of what will eventually be a market in “types” rather than “tokens”? This paper argues that this is the most critical, current issues facing nanotechnology, and suggests a manner to approach it.

The emergence of the new information economy hascomplicated jurisdictional issues in commerce andcrime. Many of these difficulties are simplyextensions of problems that arose due to other media.Telephones and fax machines had already complicatedjurists'' determinations of applicable laws. Evenbefore the Internet, contracts were often negotiatedwithout any face-to-face contact – entirely bytelephone and fax. Where is such a contractnegotiated? The answer to this question is critical toany litigation that may arise over such contracts. Thelaws of contract are often quite different from onejurisdiction to the next.The Internet has brought with it new forms ofcommunication which make determining the loci of actseven more complicated. Where are contracts negotiatedwhen they are negotiated in cyberspace? Business isbeing conducted in chat rooms, on web sites, andthrough e-mail. Each of these is technically distinctfrom telephones and fax machines. More importantly,these tools seem ontologically different, in varyingdegrees, from traditional methods of communication.The question is, are these ontological differencessufficient to warrant new legal notions ofjurisdiction in cyberspace?Only a thorough ontological analysis of the parts ofcyberspace and acts ``in'''' it can reveal the answers tothe legal questions posed by this new medium.Traditional legal analyses have relied, in part, on acrude legal ontology. That is, courts have grappledwith notions of the topology and mereology of theworld and legal objects when considering questions ofjurisdiction. There is a simpler, theoretically soundmethod for determining legal jurisdiction which isbased upon the notion of ``purposeful direction,'''' andwhich treats computer-mediated transactions as justanother form of communication. I will explore thatmethod below.