9 Quotes by Peter Adamson

Our ability to move ahead has waned. Overcoming the most difficult cancers with higher doses is not likely to succeed anymore.

For many children current therapies are curative. But the price they pay in long-term side effects is far too high.

Al-Ghazali is the most important philosophical theologian of classical Islam, and Moderation in Belief is among his most important works. It sets out al-Ghazali's Ash?arite theology with unusual clarity and provides important background for such well-known works as his autobiographical Deliverance from Error and his attack on Avicenna in The Incoherence of the Philosophers. This first English-language translation, with notes that bring out the argumentation and background of the work, is thus very much to be welcomed.

Adamson feels that drug developers are unreasonably concerned about rare events. The reality is children tolerate phase I therapy new agents being tested to find the best dosage and possible side-effects as well as or better than adults, ... Once the initial studies are done that is, phase I trials in adults study should begin in children.

God didn’t create man in His image, rather we create God in our image.

Whereas Socrates would walk up to people in the marketplace and harass them by asking them to define virtue, Pythagoras and his young students in Croton supposedly observed a code of silence, to prevent their secret teachings from being divulged to the uninitiated.

An amusing anti-astrological argument was offered by the early Academic skeptic Carneades: if time of birth determined one’s fate, then everyone who dies in a huge battle must have been born at the same time.

Xenophon’s Socrates appeals to the political interests of his audience in making this point: he says that choosing an ignorant man to be the leader of a city would be like choosing an ignorant man as one’s doctor. We don’t let untrained men experiment on our bodies, and neither should we let men without knowledge experiment on the body politic.

Heraclitus, though, more or less wrote in fragments. His body of work is not unlike that of a comedian from the 1950s: it consists mostly of one-liners.