Intracranial cannulation of small animals

Special difficulties are encountered when attempting to provide intracranial cannulation of small animals that have floating or fragile skull bones. The technique described was developed for mice but seems applicable to other species. The cannula system is inexpensive and easy to use. A wound clip anchor seems superior to either skull screws or bonded acrylic, producing less damage to the brain and no necrosis of bone or tissue on the wound margin. Patency data up to 25 days is presented, and the system is as efficacious as other techniques.     

The Power of God

Much contemporary analytic philosophy understands the power of God as belonging to the same logical space as the power of human beings: a power of efficient causation taken to the maximum limit. This anthropomorphic picture is often explicated in terms of God’s capacity to bring about any logically possible state of affairs, so-called omnipotence. D.Z. Phillips criticized this position in his last book, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God. I defend Phillips’s argument against recent criticism by William Hasker, contending that the omnipotence thesis is either false or trivial. I trace the superficial plausibility of the thesis to a Cartesian understanding of personal agency, in the light of which God’s power over the whole material world is an inflated version of our more modest power over our own bodies: it is the power of immaterial souls to control material phenomena. This comparison is expressed to perfection in the work of Richard Swinburne, my main target. I argue that by making God a force among other possible forces, in-principle able to be resisted, however feebly, by contrary forces, this picture reduces the Creator to a creature.     

Moral Particularism Reconfigured

In one version, moral particularism says that morality has no need of principles. Jonathan Dancy has argued for this in his recently published Ethics Without Principles. For Dancy, the central issue is whether it is necessary for moral reasons to be codified in principles. He thinks not. This misses the point. Whether or not it needs to be or can be codified, moral agents should not follow rules, on pain of a bad‐faith rule‐fetishism. The authority of particular cases does not reside in any alleged failure of codifiability. It rests on the fact that moral agents cannot palm off responsibility for their actions on to experts or rules and that they must respond freshly to each case with an appropriate moral reaction: indignation, pity, remorse, etc. Ironically, this reconfiguration of the particularism issue follows from the proper appreciation of a passage from George Eliot, which Dancy cites as his own inspiration.     

Pettit on Consequentialism and Universalizability

Philip Pettit has argued that universalizability entails consequentialism. I criticise the argument for relying on a question-begging reading of the impartiality of universalization. A revised form of the argument can be constructed by relying on preference-satisfaction rationality, rather than on impartiality. But this revised argument succumbs to an ambiguity in the notion of a preference (or desire). I compare the revised argument to an earlier argument of Pettit’s for consequentialism that appealed to the theoretical virtue of simplicity, and I raise questions about the force of appeal to notions like simplicity and rationality in moral argument.     

Neuronal migration disorders

Neuronal migration disorders are a category of developmental brain disorders leading to cortical dysplasia. This group of disorders is characterized by defective movement of neurons from the place of origin along the lining of the lateral ventricle, to the eventual place of residence in the correct laminar position within the cerebral cortex. As a result of defective migration, affected individuals typically display mental retardation and epilepsy. Although patients with the more severe forms of these disorders often present during infancy, patients may present at any age from newborn to adulthood. The migration defect may be generalized or focal, and may be disturbed at any of several stages, leading to several distinct radiographical and clinical presentations. The human phenotypes suggests that there are at least four distinct and clinically-important steps in cortical neuronal migration, and the identification of the responsible genes suggests that multiple cellular processes are critical for correct neuronal positioning.