Cancer

Is cancer one or many? If many, how many diseases is cancer, exactly? I argue that this question makes a false assumption; there is no single “natural” classificatory scheme for cancer. Rather, there are many ways to classify cancers, which serve different predictive and explanatory goals. I consider two philosophers’ views concerning whether cancer is a natural kind, that of Khalidi, who argues that cancer is the closest any scientific kind comes to a homeostatic property cluster kind, and that of Lange, whose conclusion is the opposite of Khalidi’s; he argues that cancer is at best a “kludge” and that advances in molecular subtyping of cancer hail the “end of diseases” as natural kinds. I consider several alternative accounts of natural or “scientific” kinds, the “simple causal view,” the “stable property cluster” view, and “scientific kinds,” and argue that the diverse aims of cancer research require us to embrace a much more pluralistic view.

Śāntideva’s Impartialist Ethics

Of all the Buddhist teachers whose writings have come down to us, only Śāntideva has yet been shown to have engaged in sustained, general theoretical reflection about ethics. Śāntideva offers a radical critique of the rationality of most emotions, similar in some ways to that of the Stoics. His overall view has important similarities with utilitarianism; and he offers philosophical arguments for a distinctively utilitarian form of impartiality. Śāntideva quotes scriptures that make hyperbolic and implausible claims about the relative value of different practices; it may be possible to interpret these passages in terms of the lexical priority of some values over others. He also tells us that the various Buddhist virtues reinforce and sustain each other. These claims could be used to construct a homeostatic cluster view of well-being.

A star cluster view of the life of massive galaxies

We present an overview of recent findings on the kinematics, age, and metallicity of globular cluster systems in nearby giant elliptical galaxies and their implications for understanding how giant elliptical galaxies formed and evolved.