Leemon McHenry

As theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking speculated on the prospects for a complete, unified theory in his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, he appeared to embrace both scientific realism and instrumentalism. Since these two views in the philosophy of science are inconsistent, over the course of the next twenty-two years, Hawking modified his views until he arrived at his model-dependent realism, but he never resolved the inconsistency completely. In this paper I explain the inconsistency, respond to Hawking’s criticism of philosophers of science and examine the key problems for a unified theory of physics.

Dorothy Emmet studied with Alfred North Whitehead at Radcliffe College in 1929 and wrote the first commentary on Whitehead's metaphysics, Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism (1932) . The encounter with Whitehead so impressed her about the importance of central questions about the nature of things that when she returned to England she wrote, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, (1945) against the grain of anti-metaphysical methods dominant in the mid-twentieth century, and later numerous other works on ontology and causation, The Effectiveness of Causes, (1986) and The Passage of Nature (1992). Emmet also made contributions to moral, social and political philosophy. In The Moral Prism, (1979) for example, she focused her attention on the complexity of individual moral decisions and addressed the question of how reliable moral judgements could be made given the diversity of moral theories.

The geneticist C. H. Waddington found in A. N. Whitehead’s metaphysics the power of generalization that produced the basic principles of process, creativity and choice, all of which provided a theoretical framework and informed the direction of his scientific research on the development and evolution of organisms. In this paper I begin by examining the flaws in a purely mechanistic and materialistic philosophy, show how Whitehead’s concept of organism addresses these flaws and finally explore Whitehead’s influence on Waddington. Both Whitehead and Waddington’s views suggest a revolutionary change of paradigm in theoretical biology.

The specific type of irrationality known as akrasia or weakness of the will has been a subject of vigorous debate ever since Plato in his Protagoras had Socrates defend the thesis that "no one willingly does wrong." Against Socrates and many contemporary thinkers on the subject, Mele attempts to vindicate akrasia as a genuine possibility. As he explores the theoretical labyrinth, his view emerges as rich in philosophic insight and experimental data from psychological research, the latter of which he uses effectively in showing the way out of a number of paradoxes.

In this chapter the author explains the influence of F. H. Bradley on Alfred North Whitehead's metaphysics, focusing specifically on the nature of experience and the arguments between these two philosophers regarding the reality of relations. In reaction to materialism, both Whitehead and Bradley viewed experience as the solution to an incoherent and untenable conception of reality. The doctrine that replaces inert matter is panpsychism or panexperientalism. Where the two philosophers disagreed was on the interpretation of experience as individuated into a plurality of individuals and relations. Bradley argued relations are contradictory and cannot characterize reality, i.e., monism, whereas Whitehead argued relations are essential in characterizing reality as an asymmetrical temporal process, i.e., pluralism.

In Whitehead’s refutation of Hume, he attempted to show that the direct evidence for causation, or the lack thereof, is dependent upon the manner in which perceptual experience is analyzed. He argued that Hume’s view depends on a presupposition of psychological atomism at the center of his view of perception. Whitehead effectively argues that many philosophers, in their analysis of perception, have ignored perception in the mode of causal efficacy by concentrating on those distinct impressions mainly revealed through our visual perception. The obvious result is that they have attempted to analyze perception solely in terms of presentational immediacy and have had a continuous problem with regard to causal relations. Hume inverted the relationship by making the experience of causal efficacy dependent upon presentational immediacy. Presentational immediacy unveils the world at an instant, and, if taken in itself, will not reveal any intrinsic connection with the past or future. But by neglecting the whole antecedent world that grows continuously into the present, Hume missed the concrete sequence of causal relatedness.

Peterson’s The Organic Life is a history of the development of the theoretical biology of organicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its focus on a group of polymaths who defined the organic philosophy against the status quo is still very much alive today as theorists debate the extent to which the dominant biological paradigm of mechanism, as advanced in the Modern Synthesis, is sufficient to all biological explanation. If science is to be empirical it cannot ignore the large body of evidence of what makes an organism an organism.

In this paper, I examine some of the most important theories of modern physics that support the notion that events are the basic ontological units of reality. The two main themes of this paper include: (1) physical evidence in support of an ontology of events, and (2) the increasing unification of physical theory until we arrive at the current state of two highly successful theories that are presently disunified within the search for a comprehensive, unified theory. With the revolutionary developments in physics at the end of the nineteenth century, the mechanistic materialism of Newtonian physics began to break down and the ancient trinity of space, time and matter has been gradually replaced by the notion of the energy field. Physicists and philosophers who have held an event ontology specifically for its compatibility with electromagnetism, relativity theory and quantum mechanics include: Albert Einstein, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, C. D. Broad, W. V. Quine, John Bell, Henry Stapp, and Milič Čapek among many others. For these theorists, events are the most fundamental entities of physical reality in contrast to the Aristotelian tradition which contends that events are secondary or dependent on physical substance.

C .H. Waddington was one of the founders of the Theoretical Biology Club at Cambridge in the 1930s whose members advanced a philosophy of biology, “organicism,” that would offer an alternative to the reductionism of mechanistic materialism and the obscurity of vitalism in coming to terms with the dynamic, interdependent, and purposeful character of life. This view was embraced in one form or another by E. S. Russell, John Scott Haldane, C. Lloyd Morgan, Lawrence J. Henderson, C. D. Broad, and Alfred North Whitehead. Waddington, in particular, was devoted to the integration of genetics, development, and evolution within the context of theoretical biology. This article explains the influence of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism on C. H. Waddington's work.

Biomedical ethics requires that clinical trial participants be accurately informed of the potential risks associated with investigational medical products. We found that the vaccine manufacturer Merck made false statements to the trial participants about the safety of Gardasil in its Future II HPV vaccine trial in Denmark. The clinical study protocol specified that safety testing was one of the trial’s primary objectives, but the recruitment brochure given to trial participants stated this was not the case, as allegedly the vaccine had already been proven safe in previous trials. The advertising material for the trial and the informed consent forms stated that the comparator was saline or an inactive substance, when, in fact, it contained Merck’s proprietary aluminum adjuvant which is highly immunogenic. Several trial participants experienced long-term disabling symptoms during the trial, also some randomized to the adjuvant “placebo” control group. In all cases, their serious adverse events were dismissed as unrelated to the study treatment by Merck’s clinical investigators. We demonstrate that Merck’s published statements about the safety of their proprietary aluminum adjuvant is contradicted by the research evidence. The use of adjuvants as “placebos” in vaccine clinical trials is unethical as it makes it difficult to discover serious vaccine harms.

ABSTRACT:Analytic philosophers have criticized A. N. Whitehead's metaphysics for being obscure, yet several such philosophers have espoused positions in metaphysics and philosophy of mind that were advanced by Whitehead in the 1920s. In this paper, we evaluate the merits and demerits of these criticisms by Bertrand Russell, W. V. Quine, Karl Popper, and others and then demonstrate the affinities and contrasts in the positions advanced by Galen Strawson, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel, and Whitehead regarding so-called ‘analytic panexperientialism’.

The advent of evidence-based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, mostly conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents into the public domain has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry-sponsored clinical trials are manipulated and misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence-based medicine is an illusion.

Corporate interests corrupt clinical trials, physicians and universities, undermining the foundation of evidence-based medicine. Philosopher Leemon McHenry and psychiatrist Jon Jureidini argue that the principles underlying Popper’s philosophy of science can protect clinical research from corporate malfeasance in a capitalist economy. Evidence-based medicine was a paradigm shift that is often praised as one of the greatest achievements of medicine in the twentieth century. This radical change in medical practice is based on epistemological hierarchies of evidence, from opinions of respected authorities, mechanistic reasoning and reports of expert committees at the bottom to various levels of observational studies and finally to randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials at the apex. Randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials, recognized as the gold standard of clinical experimentation, generally maintain their position in the hierarchies because when well-designed and well-conducted, they provide a basis for assessing harms and benefits, and help deter extravagant claims of efficacy and safety.