We return here to the Spinozist ‘key’ to the two possible ‘explanations’ of the same reality. Both converge in the unity of the infinite substance, which we can conceive of but cannot access within the finite space-time of our existence. Moreover, this ontological unity of substance translates, as we have seen, into an epistemology of continuity within difference between the three kinds of knowledge. What we perceive through our senses alone, and which lies at the origin of our imagined knowledge, is not in itself a source of error. The imagination that makes us see the sun ‘at 200 feet’ is wrong only if it is not accompanied by scientific knowledge. The latter corrects the former but does not abolish it. On the contrary, the imagination can be the expression of a great virtue, that is, of a great power. Spinoza was witness to one of the first scientific explanations that corrected our common-sense perceptions, but he never denied the value of our ‘power of imagining’ (Ethics II, 17, Schol.).

We therefore need to understand that when Spinoza speaks of ‘explain¬ing the order of the whole of nature’ by one attribute alone, whether by extension or by thought, he is not speaking of an already existing exhaustive explanation, nor of one that will come to exist, other than in an infinite future, or as it exists eternally in the infinite intellect. Rather, he is speaking of a methodological principle that refuses to set a priori limits to the capaci¬ties of explanation, whether in terms of ideas or in terms of bodies, proper to our finite minds. As parts of the infinite intellect, the things that we know adequately by our mind are really known, such that of ‘things as they are in themselves, God is really the cause insofar as he consists of infinite attrib¬utes’, as Spinoza writes in the conclusion to Ethics II, 7.

‘TOTAL PAIN’

In 1964, Cicely Saunders (1918–2005), often cited as the founder of the modern hospice movement, introduced her idea of ‘total pain’, which communicates how a dying person's pain is a whole overwhelming experience – not only physical but also psychological, social and spiritual. Reacting to what she saw as a paternalistic denial of death in which dying patients were, to use her word, ‘deserted’ by their doctors (1958, p. 46), Saunders used ‘total pain’ to reframe the relationship between medical professionals and dying patients. The term summarises her whole-person, multidisciplinary approach combining regular pain relief and symptom management with pastoral care and companionship. At the same time, it communicates how terminal pain is conditioned by the context of the patient's whole life and the fact of its ending, an experience encapsulated in the words of one of Saunders's patients: ‘the pain began in my back, but now it seems that all of me is wrong’. ‘Total pain’ and the work of Saunders and her colleagues at St Christopher’s, the world's first research-led teaching hospice which was founded in south-east London in 1967, inspired the international modern hospice movement and led to the acknowledgement of palliative care as a medical specialty.

Although not as prominent as her near-contemporary Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (1926–2004), Saunders achieved minor celebrity as an important advocate for her cause through frequent public lectures (notably two influential tours of the United States in the early 1960s), occasional media interviews, and a wide range of publications including articles in medical, nursing and religious journals, contributions to textbooks on oncology and thanatology, and foundational edited or co-authored volumes in the field such as The Management of Terminal Disease (Saunders (ed.), 1978) or Living with Dying (Saunders and Baines, 1983).

The 156 investment projects of Soviet aid were chief among several post- World War II relief programmes that helped to restabilise China's industrial economy. Shenyang's Tiexi district, located conveniently close to Russia, became one of the central torchbearers for socialist-planned economic and industrial growth. The reform era's shift from a planned to a market economy, however, caused significant problems within the north-east. Still dependent on centralised planning, the industrial hub – and Tiexi more specifically – could not compete with the relative economic flexibility of southern and central districts. By the end of the 1990s many of Tiexi's factories had closed, causing both a sharp rise in unemployment and a general level of social decline within local communities reliant upon the industrial economy (Hu, 2012; Lu, 2010).

Wang Bing, a young film graduate from the Beijing Film Academy, arrived into this social milieu in 1999. With no definitive film project in mind, as well as few contacts within the district, Wang hired a small, portable digital video (DV) camera and, integrating with the local community, began to document the area's decline. Released in 2003, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks is composed of three chapters: Rust, Remnants and Rails.

Reading Spinoza's Ethics in light of contemporary biology may seem incongruous, given the three centuries that separate them. This is especially because Spinoza, unlike other classical philosophers of the same epoch such as Descartes, Pascal or Leibniz, made no notable contribution to the emerging modern sciences. Yet it turns out that his work makes a more relevant contribution to the philosophy of the sciences today than these and other more recent and even contemporary philosophers. In return, the current achievements of physics and biology, in particular of the cognitive neurosciences, make it possible to take a new look at certain notions specific to Spinoza's philosophy, such as the ‘small physics’, nature as cause of itself, the notion of matter, the essence of things, and various kinds of knowledge, all of which thereby take on a renewed significance.

For obvious reasons, Spinoza could not have envisaged what three hundred years later a science of living bodies, now called biology, would be. Yet he witnessed the scientific revolution and the emergence of the modern sciences as they discovered the mechanical causes in natural phenomena, eventually expressed in mathematical language.

Based on his ontology, Spinoza established the identity of extended matter and thought, and as a consequence the union of body and mind that follows for all things produced by nature. To pursue his project concerning more specifically the nature and origin of the human mind, Spinoza first needed to know ‘adequately the nature of our Body’, for which he formulated a ‘few premises concerning the nature of bodies’ in general.

I RUSHED to the study-door, tore aside the velvet hangings, and faced Heliobas and Prince Ivan Petroffsky. They held drawn weapons, which they lowered at my sudden entrance, and paused irresolutely.

“What are you doing?” I cried, addressing myself to Heliobas. “With the dead body of your sister in the house, you can fight! You, too!” and I looked reproachfully at Prince Ivan; “you also can desecrate the sanctity of death, and yet – you loved her!”

The Prince spoke not, but clenched his sword-hilt with a fiercer grasp, and glared wildly on his opponent. His eyes had a look of madness in them – his dress was much disordered – his hair wet with drops of rain – his face ghastly white, and his whole demeanour was that of a man distraught with grief and passion. But he uttered no word. Heliobas spoke; he was coldly calm, and balanced his sword lightly on his open hand, as if it were a toy.

“This gentleman,” he said with deliberate emphasis, “happened, on his way thither, to meet Dr. Morini who informed him of the fatal catastrophe which has caused my sister's death. Instead of respecting the sacredness of my solitude under the circumstances, he thrust himself rudely into my presence, and, before I could address him, struck me violently in the face, and accused me of being my sister's murderer. Such conduct can only meet with one reply. I gave him his choice of weapons: he chose swords. Our combat has just begun – we are anxious to resume it; therefore if you, mademoiselle, will have the goodness to retire – “

IN my heaven-uplifted dream, I thought I saw a circular spacious garden in which all the lovely landscapes of a superior world appeared to form themselves by swift degrees. The longer I looked at it, the more beautiful it became, and a little star shone above it like a sun. Trees and flowers sprang up under my gaze, and all stretched themselves towards me, as though for protection. Birds flew about and sang; some of them tried to get as near as possible to the little sun they saw; and other living creatures began to move about in the shadows of the groves, and on the fresh green grass. All the wonderful workings of Nature, as known to us in the world, took place over again in this garden, which seemed somehow to belong to me; and I watched everything with a certain satisfaction and delight. Then the idea came to me that the place would be fairer if there were either men or angels to inhabit it; and quick as light a whisper came to me:

“Create!”

And I thought in my dream that by the mere desire of my being, expressed in waves of electric warmth that floated downwards from me to the earth I possessed, my garden was suddenly filled with men, women, and children, each of whom had a small portion of myself in them, inasmuch as it was I who made them move and talk and occupy themselves in all manner of amusements. Many of them knelt down to me and prayed, and offered thanksgivings for having been created; but some of them went instead to the little star, which they called a sun, and thanked that, and prayed to that instead.

5.1 Introduction

This chapter sets out the findings of a review of the wrap contracts used by DTC companies that provide testing for health purposes.1 This takes the form of a descriptive comparative document analysis of these contracts. It provides an outline of the typical terms likely to be included in a DTC contract and a discussion of terms which are likely to be deemed unfair and unenforceable under UK law. In this chapter it will be argued that several terms commonly included in DTC contracts are likely to be deemed to be unfair terms under UK law and consequently unenforceable. Given the frequency of use of these terms it is suggested that the best means of enhancing protection for consumers in this context in the short-term is for the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) to begin to take pre-emptive action and work with the industry to discontinue the use of such terms. Specifically, the following terms are likely to be deemed to be unfair or fail to meet transparency requirements:

• 1. clauses allowing for unilateral variation of the contract

• 2. clauses disclaiming liability for fitness for purpose or for personal injury caused by the company's negligence 3. clauses limiting scope of purpose

• 4. clauses purporting to bind the consumer to resolve any disputes in another jurisdiction

• 5. consent clauses

This chapter will also provide a brief overview of contract and consumer protection law, as it relates to DTC contracts. In so doing it will make reference to the applicable UK legislation, namely the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (CRA) and the work of the CMA. As it will always be difficult for an individual consumer to pursue litigation against a large company, if certain terms currently included in these contracts seem likely to be deemed as unfair, it is desirable that the CMA works with the industry to prevent the use of such terms.

4.1 Introduction

The nature of the DTC industry as providers of genetic tests means that privacy and data protection law have relevance to industry governance. As with many other digital service providers, security is also a significant issue here. At present, the European Union is undergoing a time of transition with the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).1 Although the UK is also undergoing a broader period of transition with Brexit, the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA18) transposes the GDPR into the UK's national law. As DTC companies collect genetic data, as well as other types of personal data, which they often use in ongoing research, companies should be complying with the GDPR and applicable data protection law in EU Member States and also other countries that have similar law.

This chapter provides a broad overview of privacy, data protection and security issues raised by DTC services. The aim here is to provide an introduction to a complex area and provide some suggestions for how industry practices and governance could be improved. In the context of privacy policies and notices, it is important to recognise that these documents are often linked with wrap contracts on DTC websites. This is often done through incorporation of terms by reference and for an individual to understand their legal rights in this context, they should really be reading all of these documents. This is problematic, as a number of studies have demonstrated in relation to privacy policies and contracts more generally that consumers are not reading these.

Two or more currents flowing into or through each other create a turbulent crosscurrent, more powerful than its contributory flows and irreducible to them. Time and again, modern European thought cre¬ates and exploits crosscurrents in thinking, remaking itself as it flows through, across and against discourses as diverse as mathematics and film, sociology and biology, theology, literature and politics. The work of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Bernard Stiegler and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others, participates in this fundamental remaking. In each case disciplines and discursive formations are engaged, not with the aim of performing a predeter¬mined mode of analysis yielding a ‘philosophy of x’, but through encounters in which thought itself can be transformed. Furthermore, these fundamental transformations do not merely seek to account for singular events in different sites of discursive or artistic production but rather to engage human existence and society as such, and as a whole. The cross-disciplinarity of this thought is therefore neither a fashion nor a prosthesis; it is simply part of what ‘thought’ means in this tradition.

Crosscurrents begins from the twin convictions that this remaking is integral to the legacy and potency of European thought, and that the future of thought in this tradition must defend and develop this legacy in the teeth of an academy that separates and controls the currents that flow within and through it. With this in view, the series provides an exceptional site for bold, original and opinion-changing monographs that actively engage European thought in this fundamentally cross-disciplinary manner, riding existing crosscurrents and creating new ones.

In the 1950s, I was a medical student with an interest in philosophy, which I had decided to study in parallel, albeit without having the time to regularly take university philosophy classes. After reading some of Plato's dialogues, which seemed to me an obligatory starting point, I asked for advice from a friend who happened to have devoted her life to teaching philosophy. After teaching preparatory classes for many years, Dina Dreyfus was at the time the national education inspector, and I was sometimes fortunate enough to speak with her. She encouraged me as a future physician and biologist to take up philosophy and even offered to facilitate an informal study group, whose aim was to build awareness among scientists of the history of philosophy and its implications for the philosophy of the contemporary sciences. This group was never formed, though I continued to benefit from her advice. I thus studied, as best as I could, some great thinkers.

Then one day, when I naively asked the question ‘What use does philos¬ophy serve?’, Dreyfus answered me in a reproving but friendly tone: ‘My dear Henri, it is we who are in the service of philosophy’. I nodded without really understanding, so she gave the following description: ‘There is a royal road of philosophy, made up of the great authors since Plato, Aristotle and up to modern philosophy as inaugurated by Kant's Critique, by way of classics such as Descartes, Leibniz …’.