Collaborating with Administrators and Students to Restructure Your Bioethics Course to Meet Best Practices in UDL and Trauma-informed Pedagogy

Courses in bioethics cover a number of sensitive topics, including the ethics of abortion, elective surgery, collegiate hookup culture, and assisted dying in persons with mental illness, among many others. This can be difficult for students managing these issues in their personal lives. One way to teach responsibly, while also not hurting anyone, is to offer choices in the assignment structure, not require attendance at every class session, and inform students early on about the course content. Faculty often conceive and employ these modifications without input from students or relevant campus professionals. In this session, I present the result of a faculty-administrator-student collaboration aimed at producing a more inclusive, but still rigorous and responsible, bioethics course, one that meets DEI, Title IX, and counseling center best practices. Our process was an efficient one that faculty members on other campuses might easily replicate

Collaborating with Administrators and Students to Restructure Your Bioethics Course to Meet Best Practices in UDL and Trauma-informed Pedagogy

Courses in bioethics cover a number of sensitive topics, including the ethics of abortion, elective surgery, collegiate hookup culture, and assisted dying in persons with mental illness, among many others. This can be difficult for students managing these issues in their personal lives. One way to teach responsibly, while also not hurting anyone, is to offer choices in the assignment structure, not require attendance at every class session, and inform students early on about the course content. Faculty often conceive and employ these modifications without input from students or relevant campus professionals. In this session, I present the result of a faculty-administrator-student collaboration aimed at producing a more inclusive, but still rigorous and responsible, bioethics course, one that meets DEI, Title IX, and counseling center best practices. Our process was an efficient one that faculty members on other campuses might easily replicate

Synthesis of hybrid anticancer agents based on kinase and histone deacetylase inhibitors

Fragments based on the VEGFR2i Semaxanib (SU5416, (vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2 inhibitor) and the HDACi (histone deacetylase inhibitor) SAHA (suberanilohydroxamic acid) have been merged to form a range of low molecular weight dual action hybrids. Vindication of this approach is provided by SAR, docking studies, in vitro cancer cell line and biochemical enzyme inhibition data as well as in vivo Xenopus data for the lead molecule (Z)-N1-(3-((1H-pyrrol-2-yl)methylene)-2-oxoindolin-5-yl)- N8-hydroxyoctanediamide 6

On the Very Idea of a Style of Reasoning

Although Ian Hacking’s meta-concept is frequently applied to historical cases, few theorists have questioned the very idea of a style of reasoning. Hacking himself considers Donald Davidson’s conceptual scheme argument to be the most formidable challenge to the style idea, but Hacking has set up a straw man in Davidson. Beyond Hacking’s own conclusion, that Davidson's narrow concern with meaning incommensurability does not apply to styles, which are not incommensurable in that way, there is the more obvious point that styles, which do not organize or fit the world, are not the kind of schemes with which Davidson is concerned. In fact, Hacking agrees with Davidson, in that both propose we can argue over a topic only when we employ the same style of reasoning (a suggestion which I contend is not necessarily the case). Hacking has a more serious problem, in that he cannot remain a Kantian without justifying his style idea with a transcendental argument. But this kind of argument is only available to those who support a univocal notion of reason, which the very idea of a style seems to outlaw. He has overlooked the challenges which arise out of Arthur Fine’s NOA. Hacking’s attention to historical detail and unwillingness to employ transcendental arguments in support of his view renders him immune to Fine’s arguments against inference to the best explanation. But the list of the necessary and sufficient criteria which identify styles of reasoning cannot prevent the proliferation of (bogus) styles. Moreover, Fine’s call for openness in inquiry shifts the burden of proof against Hacking and calls for him to prove: 1) that we cannot understand the history of science without the style meta-concept and 2) that whenever we encounter a mystery, our first order of business should be to stand back and uncover the style of reasoning which makes the predicament possible, instead of getting directly to the business of solving the problem. According to Fine, some puzzles just happen. And there is no guarantee that uncovering the style, which identifies the topic as a topic, will have anything to do with solving the mystery. Not only is there no such guarantee, but Hacking’s position, if it is to sidestep Davidson’s critique, actually requires that styles play only the minimal role of identifying topics. Styles must be fairly trivial. Fine thinks it is deeply unnatural to view science as entertainment. Philosophers are not to shine their lights on the action and watch it unfold. Rather, we are all to join the performance, thereby eliminating the artificial boundary between actor and audience which we mistakenly call upon to reinforce the notion that the raw material of science constrains our reflections about it

The Pragmatics of Explanation

The pragmatic theory of explanation (Van Fraassen, 1988) proposes that background knowledge constrains the explanatory process. Although this is a reasonable hypothesis and research has shown the importance of background knowledge when evaluating explanations, there has been no empirical study of how the background constrains the generation of explanations. In our study, participants viewed one of two sets of preliminary movie clips of some novel items engaged in a series of actions and then all were asked to explain the same final clip. Between conditions, we varied whether the events in the preliminary clips completed a system. In the systematic condition, a greater proportion of functional explanations were generated for the final clip compared to the non-systematic condition. Interestingly, despite the difference in the types of explanations generated, the participants showed high agreement in the evaluation of explanations provided by the experimenters