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Lessons for Philosophers and Scientists from Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown
By Charles Foster Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate has issued proceedings, complaining that Enola Holmes, a recently released film about Sherlock Holmes’ sister, portrays the great detective as too emotional. Sherlock Holmes was famously suspicious of emotions. 1 ‘ [L]ove is an emotional thing’, he icily observed, ‘and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true
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PRESS RELEASE: Racial Justice Requires Ending Drug War, Say Leading Bioethicists
PRESS RELEASE: Free all non-violent criminals jailed on minor drug offences, say experts Non-violent offenders serving time for drug use or possession should be freed immediately and their convictions erased, according to research published in the peer-reviewed The American Journal of Bioethics. More than 60 international experts including world-leading bioethicists, psychologists and drug experts have
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This Machine Kills Viruses
Written by Stephen Rainey If we had a machine that could eradicate coronavirus at the press of a button, there would likely be a queue to do the honours. Rather than having such a device, we have a science-policy interface, and a general context of democratic legitimacy. This isn’t a push-button, but a complex of
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Even Though Mass Testing For COVID Isn’t Always Accurate, It Could Still Be Useful – Here’s Why
By Jonathan Pugh This article was originally published here by the Conversation, on 22nd Dec 2020 The mass testing of asymptomatic people for COVID-19 in the UK was thrown into question by a recent study. In a pilot in Liverpool, over half the cases weren’t picked up, leading some to question whether using tests that perform
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Selectively Saving Christmas?
Written by Ben Davies and Gabriel De Marco The UK governments in Westminster and the devolved nations (Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) have made a recent about-turn regarding Christmas. Where there were previously plans to relax Covid-related restrictions for five days, they will now be relaxed for only Christmas itself, and not at all in
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Dementia, Pagal, or Neurocognitive Disorder: What Is In a Name?
By Doug McConnell A recent BBC news story has drawn attention to the fact that there isn’t a word for “dementia” in many South Asian languages and some South Asian people living in the UK still use the stigmatising Punjabi word “pagal”, meaning “crazy” or “mad”. The news story implicitly assumes that the word
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Climbing the Pension Mountain: A Review of Michael Otsuka’s 2020 Uehiro Centre Lecture Series
Written by Professor Larry Locke (University of Mary Hardin-Baylor and LCC International University) On three successive Tuesdays last November, Michael Otsuka of the London School of Economics delivered the annual Uehiro Centre Lecture Series. The Series, entitled “How to Pool Risk Across Generations”, focused on the ethics of pension reform. Otsuka attacked the real-world problem
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In Defence of Pretentiousness
Written by Neil Levy In Paul Brok’s book Into the Silent Land, the English neuropsychologist tells the story of Michael. Following a head injury, Michael is disinhibited. When he first returned from rehab, he lived on a diet of fish fingers and Led Zeppelin. Michael experiences the change as a return to authenticity. “He’d always
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Could vaccine requirements for entering pubs be wrong, while closing pubs altogether is OK?
By Tom Douglas Suppose that, before you could enter a pub, you had to produce a ‘vaccine passport’ showing that you had been vaccinated against the new coronavirus. Vaccine requirements like this are controversial. In the UK, the government has been keen to deny that it is even considering their use. This is in some