Does anybody really know what time it is? : From biological age to biological time.

During his celebrated 1922 debate with Bergson, Einstein famously proclaimed: "the time of the philosopher does not exist, there remains only a psychological time that differs from the physicist's." Einstein's dictum, I maintain, has been metabolized by the natural sciences, which typically presuppose, more or less explicitly, the existence of a single, univocal, temporal substratum, ultimately determined by physics. This reductionistic assumption pervades much biological and biomedical practice.

An ecological approach to modeling disability.

This article develops an analysis of disability according to which disabling conditions are properties of organisms embedded in sets of environments. We begin by presenting the three mainstream accounts of disability-the medical, social, and interactionist models-and rehearsing some known limitations. We argue that, because of their primary focus on etiology, all three models share, more or less implicitly, a problematic assumption.

Can there be science without philosophy?

Over the last few decades, philosophy has gained an increasingly bad reputation among working scientists. Prominent researchers have suggested, in various forms and degrees of mockery, that philosophy has little or nothing positive to contribute to science. This essay provides a response to these allegations.

Causality at the dawn of the 'omics' era in medicine and in nephrology.

Causality is a core concept in medicine. The quantitative determinacy characterizing today's biomedical science is unprecedented. The assessment of causal relations in human diseases is evolving, and it is therefore fundamental to keep up with the steady pace of theoretical and technological advancements.

There and up again: on the uses and misuses of neuroimaging in psychology.

The aim of this article is to discuss the conditions under which functional neuroimaging can contribute to the study of higher cognition. We begin by presenting two case studies--on moral and economic decision making--which will help us identify and examine one of the main ways in which neuroimaging can help advance the study of higher cognition. We agree with critics that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies seldom "refine" or "confirm" particular psychological hypotheses, or even provide details of the neural implementation of cognitive functions.

Ectopic breast cancer: case report and review of the literature.

Unlabelled: Ectopic breast tissue comes in two forms: supernumerary and aberrant. Despite morphologic differences, ectopic breast tissue presents characteristics analogous to orthotopic breast tissue in terms of function and, most importantly, pathologic degeneration. Data in the literature concerning its precise incidence, the probability of malignant degeneration, and its standardized management are scarce and controversial.

The importance of being elegant: a discussion of elegance in nephrology and biomedical science.

Elegance is pursued and appreciated in virtually all aspects of our lives, from fashion to visual and performing arts, from literature to architecture. While most of us praise the elegance and beauty of science when we see it, elegance is typically treated as something that need not concern our research and thus does not belong inside the laboratory. In this article, we provide an alternative perspective, according to which elegance is more than an accessory ornament of scientific theories.