Objectives: to assess physicians’ and patients’ views in Saudi Arabia towards involving the patient versus the family in the process of diagnosis disclosure and decision-making, and to compare them with views from the USA and Japan.Design: A self-completion questionnaire was translated to Arabic and validated.Participants: Physicians from different specialties and ranks and patients in a hospital or attending outpatient clinics from 6 different regions in KSA.Results: In the case of a patient with incurable cancer, 67% of doctors and 51% of (...) patients indicated that they would inform the patient in preference to the family of the diagnosis . Assuming the family already knew, 56% of doctors and 49% of patients would tell the patient even if family objected . However, in the case of HIV infection, 59% of physicians and 81% of patients would inform the family about HIV status without the patient’s consent . With regards to withholding ventilatory support, about 50% of doctors and over 60% of patients supported the use of mechanical ventilation in a patient with advanced cancer, regardless of the wishes of the patient or the family. Finally, the majority of doctors and patients were against assisted suicide.Conclusions: Although there was more recognition for a patient’s autonomy amongst physicians, most patients preferred a family centred model of care. Views towards information disclosure were midway between those of the USA and Japan. Distinctively, however, decisions regarding life prolonging therapy and assisted suicide were not influenced to a great extent by wishes of the patient or family, but more likely by religious beliefs. (shrink)

Signals to the brain from the flows of energy around the body, varied primarily by declining amounts of food energy in the stomach, can explain the pattern of meals in the laboratory rat, the differences between dark and light phases, and the development of obesity ion the rat wioth VMH lesions but normal sating.

We maximally extend the quantum‐mechanical results of Muller and Saunders ( 2008 ) establishing the ‘weak discernibility’ of an arbitrary number of similar fermions in finite‐dimensional Hilbert spaces. This confutes the currently dominant view that ( A ) the quantum‐mechanical description of similar particles conflicts with Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII); and that ( B ) the only way to save PII is by adopting some heavy metaphysical notion such as Scotusian haecceitas or Adamsian primitive thisness. We (...) take sides with Muller and Saunders ( 2008 ) against this currently dominant view, which has been expounded and defended by many. *Received July 2008; revised May 2009. †To contact the authors, please write to: F. A. Muller, Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Burg. Oudlaan 50, H5–16, 3062 PA Rotterdam, The Netherlands; e‐mail: [email protected] , and Institute for the History and Foundations of Science, Utrecht University, Budapestlaan 6, IGG–3.08, 3584 CD Utrecht, The Netherlands; e‐mail: [email protected] . M. P. Seevinck, Institute for the History and Foundations of Science, Utrecht University, Budapestlaan 6, IGG–3.08, 3584 CD Utrecht, The Netherlands; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Primordial emotions are the subjective element of the instincts which are the genetically programmed behaviour patterns which contrive homeostasis. They include thirst, hunger for air, hunger for food, pain and hunger for specific minerals etc.There are two constituents of a primordial emotion—the specific sensation which when severe may be imperious, and the compelling intention for gratification by a consummatory act. They may dominate the stream of consciousness, and can have plenipotentiary power over behaviour.It is hypothesized that early in animal evolution (...) complex reflex mechanisms in the basal brain subserving homeostatic responses, in concert with elements of the reticular activating system subserving arousal, melded functionally with regions embodied in the progressive rostral development of the telencephalon. This included the emergent limbic and paralimbic areas, and the insula. This phylogenetically ancient organization subserved the origin of consciousness as the primordial emotion, which signalled that the organisms existence was immediately threatened. Neuroimaging confirms major activations in regions of the basal brain during primordial emotions in humans. The behaviour of decorticate humans and animals is discussed in relation to the possible existence of primitive awareness.Neuroimaging of the primordial emotions reveals that rapid gratification of intention by a consummatory act such as ingestion causes precipitate decline of both the initiating sensation and the intention. There is contemporaneous rapid disappearance of particular regions of brain activation which suggests they may be part of the jointly sufficient and severally necessary activations and deactivations which correlate with consciousness [Crick, F. & Koch, C. . A framework for consciousness. NatureNeuroscience,6, 119–126]. (shrink)

A collection of 24 out of the 35 papers presented at the Fourth Scandinavian Logic Symposium and First Soviet-Finnish Logic Conference, which took place simultaneously in Finland in 1976. Topics covered are proof theory, set theory, model theory, recursion theory, infinitary languages, generalized quantifiers, truthlikeness, natural language, and "philosophical logic." There is a paper by George Kreisel which discusses an intriguing distinction between the theory of proofs and general proof theory, the latter being the study of the allegedly definitional or (...) essential property of proofs, the former being the study of structural features such as length of proofs and of relations between proofs and other things. There is a paper by Hintikka in which he applies his "game-theoretical semantics" developed elsewhere to quantifiers in natural languages, e.g., the analysis of sentences like "some novel by every novelist is mentioned by every critic". I found the most interesting paper to be the one by Bengt Hansson, which studies the nature of paradoxes by articulating an analogy with mathematical equations, the crucial property about the latter being that they do not always have solutions. Almost all papers are highly technical and thus aimed at experts of the specialties mentioned in the book’s title.—M.A.F. (shrink)

Ethics for Enemies comprises three original philosophical essays on torture, terrorism, and war. F. M. Kamm deploys ethical theory in her challenging new treatments of these most controversial practical issues. First she considers the nature of torture and the various occasions on which it could occur, in order to determine why it might be wrong to torture a wrongdoer held captive, even if this were necessary to save his victims. In the second essay she considers what makes terrorism wrong--whether it (...) is the intention to harm civilians, rather than harm to them being 'collateral damage,' or something else--and whether terrorism is always wrong. The third essay discusses whether having a right reason, in the sense of a right intention, is necessary in order for a war to be just. Kamm then examines ways in which the harms of war can be proportional to the achievement of the just cause and other goods that war can bring about, so as to make the declaration of war permissible. (shrink)

t. 1. Drevniĭ mir Srednie veka -- t. 2. Srednevekovyĭ Vostok. Evropa XV-XVII vekov -- t. 3. Evropa i Amerika -- t. 4. Vtorai︠a︡ polovina XIX veka.

After a chapter which is an introduction to and summary of the rest of the book, chapter 2 begins by criticizing various attempts to do away with theories, such as the Reichenbach-Salmon conception of theoretical truth in terms of observational consequences, and the Ramsey strategy of replacing first-order theoretical sentences by second-order nontheoretical ones; it then argues against hypothetico-deductivist theories of confirmation on the grounds that they are unable to handle the relevance of evidence to theory, whether or not other (...) formal constraints or even nonformal ones such as simplicity and explanatory power are added to those theories; it ends with an exposition of the Reichenbach-Carnap conventionalist thesis that the confirmation of hypotheses with evidence presupposes analytic principles connecting hypothetical and empirical concepts. Chapter 3 criticizes Bayesian theories of confirmation on such grounds as that the a priori arguments for Bayesian restrictions on beliefs are insufficient; that the Bayesian explanations of notions like variety of evidence, ad hocness, and simplicity are inadequate; and that they cannot account, without drastic revisions, for the relevance of evidence to theory, especially old evidence to new theory. Chapter 4 is an unsympathetic account of historically oriented philosophies of science; Lakatos’s notion of progressive research programs and Laudan’s theory of problem-solving effectiveness are found to be insufficiently precise and dubbed examples of "new fuzziness", while the Sneed-Stegmüller dynamics of theories is regarded as "a paradigm of misplaced rigor" ; and all three are criticized as unable to explicate the concept of evidential relevance. Chapter 5 is a formal and informal elaboration of the basic idea in Glymour’s account of theory and evidence, namely that confirmation or support is a three-term relation among evidence, hypothesis, and theory, so that evidence confirms an hypothesis only relative to a theory, and such that evidence e confirms hypothesis h relative to T if T with e implies, but T without e does not imply, an instance of h, and T with e does not imply a comparable hypothesis h’ different from h; the most interesting part of this chapter is a series of discussions showing how such an idea makes sense of the "methodological truisms" that it is possible selectively to test certain parts of a theory but not others, that a theory is supported better by a greater variety of evidence, that redundant or physically meaningless quantities are an undesirable feature of theories, that there are no inviolable rules, that a "white shoe" does not confirm "all ravens are black," that a theory is more useful and better supported than the set of its observational consequences, and that the hypothetico-deductive method often works. Since Glymour claims no originality for the conception of this general account, but only for its description, he plausibly thinks it necessary to apply it to some important historical cases of actual science; he does so in the next chapter by discussing at some length the structure and merits of Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomy, of Newton’s universal gravitation, of nineteenth century atomism, of Freud’s Rat Man, and of general relativity. For example, he argues convincingly that Copernicanism was better supported by the evidence available even before the telescope because it alone, and not the Ptolemaic theory, can determine some planetary properties which are presupposed by both theories, can test and confirm some common hypotheses, and can be confirmed in an essential rather than incidental manner; and though Glymour admits that the Copernicans tended to argue in terms of explanatory rather than confirmatory superiority, he sketches an interesting account of the relation between explanation and confirmation which strengthens his case. He also analyzes the text at the beginning of book 3 of Newton’s Principia and compiles a reconstruction of the intricate details of the inferential structure of the argument to universal gravitation; his impressive reconstruction clearly shows that Newton’s method is neither the inductivist one he himself thought he was following, nor the one attributed to him by Pierre Duhem, but rather one in accordance with Glymour’s so-called "bootstrap strategy" of repeatedly using the evidence from Kepler’s second and third laws, from lunar data, and from falling bodies, together with the theory consisting of the second and third laws of motion, to arrive at increasingly general instances of the principle of universal gravitation. Glymour’s account of arguments for and against the atomic theory from Thomson to Cannizzaro is his longest historical example, but he himself admits that this illustration of the bootstrap strategy is "certainly not the neatest", and rather "diffuse, and perhaps disconnected". Chapter 7 is a detailed application of the same principles to the technique known among social scientists as "causal modeling"; since such "causal models" are essentially systems of algebraic equations, Glymour’s account shows indirectly that the bootstrap strategy is applicable to any scientific theory presented as a set of algebraic equations; this, of course is not surprising, since the formal considerations with which Glymour begins the exposition of his theory in chapter 5 involve systems of algebraic equations. Chapter 8 is an attempt to apply Glymour’s theory of evidence to the very common scientific practice of curve-fitting, where one measures values of two or more quantities and then infers a functional relationship; Glymour argues that simpler polynomials are preferred because they are tested more frequently and more severely by the data and because they are more informative; but then he criticizes his own explanation and concludes that "the bootstrap procedures of chapter 5 do not seem to help the problem much more than a whit" ; this is admirably honest, but if one wants an additional logical or methodological rationale, then one would perhaps have to go to the meta-level and say that Glymour is here testing his own theory, and he is more interested in a further illustration of the bootstrap methodology even with a failed test, than he is to claim universal or exclusive validity for it. In chapter 9 Glymour uses his bootstrap theory of confirmation to criticize geometrical conventionalism; he considers the alternative theories of space or space-time proposed by conventionalists to show the radical undetermination of geometries by evidence, for example, a non-Euclidean geometry with no universal force instead of Newtonian gravitation with Euclidean geometry; he argues that such alternatives are simply not as well tested as the originals and that their equivalence to the originals is questionable. The last chapter is a brief discussion of further problems worthy of future investigation. (shrink)

A collection of eighteen papers, all but three previously published, the earliest in 1952 and the latest in 1973. Johnstone’s views are well known among metaphilosophers and philosophers of rhetoric, but they deserve wider dissemination because of their greater relevance indicated below.

This is a textbook on reasoning but deserves attention because of its pedagogical novelty, because it provides the foundations for a valuable approach to logic, and because of the philosophical nature of the theory of reasoning.

These two books jointly constitute volume 13 of the University of Western Ontario Series in the Philosophy of Science and consist of papers resulting from a workshop held at that university in the spring of 1975. Contributors to the first volume include such notables as Richard C. Jeffrey, Isaac Levi, and R. Duncan Luce. As an introduction to the papers, the editors’ preface is a statement of the goals of the original conference distributed to the invited participants. Twelve of the (...) eighteen papers in the first volume, and five out of nine in the second, deal with technical topics in decision theory and thus call for consideration by experts. This is so even though decision theory is broadly conceived by the editors to include the theory of games, of rational acceptance or rational belief, of value dynamics, and of individual decision-making. One of their main aims is "to explore the view that the concept of rationality [derivable from game theory] has both explanatory and normative force, that both dimensions of this concept can be theoretically integrated, that the explanatory force has far-reaching applications in all social scientific disciplines, and that the normative theories must become empirically controlled by the results of the explanatory theory". (shrink)

The history of natural philosophy is something of a no-man’s land between the history of philosophy on one side and the history of science on the other. This situation derives in part from the fact that natural philosophy itself is unpopular among both philosophers and scientists. Nevertheless, the historiographical situation is rather lamentable since the sharp science/ philosophy distinction did not emerge until relatively recent historical times and since the historical sensibility requires one to respect the beliefs of the historical (...) agents. The present book—a translation from the 1968 La philosophie naturelle de Galilée—is to be welcomed insofar as it helps to correct this lamentable situation. It does so by means of a long discussion of the Aristotelian and medieval doctrines of motion which concludes that Aristotle, the medievals, and Galileo can all be seen to be trying to solve the same basic problem in natural philosophy. It would be difficult, after Clavelin’s book, to maintain, for example, that Aristotle’s problem was the philosophical or metaphysical problem of motion, whereas Galileo’s was the scientific problem. There is a continuity of the basic problem, as regards motion, from Aristotle to Galileo which is not to be confused either with a continuity of particular subsidiary problems or with a continuity of solutions. Clavelin is at pains to point out and emphasize the originality of Galileo’s contribution, as stemming from the novelty of his particular subsidiary problems and of his solutions. In fact, the reason that Clavelin himself gives for beginning the book with a long discussion of the pre-Galilean doctrines of motion is that he wants better to explain and justify that originality. (shrink)

This is a diligent and competent account of Popper’s philosophy of natural science primarily, and secondarily of his philosophy of the social sciences. There are discussions of such topics as the anti-positivistic origin of Popper’s views, his interpretation of probability, his theory of corroboration, his critique of Carnap, his elaboration of indeterminism, and his interpretation of quantum theory. In a chapter dealing with subjectivism, Ackermann develops Popperian arguments against the views of Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn and gives an insightful (...) elaboration of Popper’s evolutionary epistemology. (shrink)

This is an excellent introductory account of Socrates’s life and thought. The most valuable aspect of the book is that his experiences and ideas are integrated in such a way that his ideas are always shown to arise in the context of some concrete event of his life. Of course, in the case of Socrates, it is not difficult to display such synthesis of what may be called theory and practice: in fact, what the present author gives us is an (...) original translation of selected parts of 13 of the most Socratic of Plato’s dialogues, interspersed with a running commentary designed to give relevant information, to make necessary clarifications, and to convey her own interpretations. Nevertheless, it is always good to be reminded that such was the essential characteristic of the philosophy of "the father of Western philosophy." The book is beautified by 12 original drawings by Joseph Sheppard representing various faces and scenes discussed in the text; these drawings, besides making the book a pleasant and interesting work of art, bring additional life to discussions in the text, though their content and form alone would have been more than sufficient in bringing Socrates to life. There is also an introduction by George N. Shuster discussing the relevance and value of Socrates for contemporary culture. (shrink)

This is a volume in the so-called "Modern Masters" series, which deals with an eclectic group including such figures as Einstein, Freud, Gandhi, Chomsky, and Che Guevara. The book is a general, introductory account of Popper’s philosophy and as such useful. For though one may not agree that Popper is a "figure of world importance" and "the greatest living philosopher of science", it is true that Popper’s philosophy is important enough to deserve more attention and discussion that it has so (...) far received; and this applies both at the level of technical philosophy and of general culture. (shrink)

Protection of study participants is an integral function of the Institutional Review Board. Recently, great efforts were dedicated to enhance investigators’ awareness of ethical principles in conducting human research and to implement reviewing committees’ standards in Jordan to ensure the transparency, versatility, and responsibility in handling human subjects research in the country. The aim of the current study is to evaluate the awareness and attitudes of healthcare investigators in Jordan towards the structure and importance of IRBs. A questionnaire was distributed (...) to 200 investigators and graduate students from the Jordan University of Science and Technology. The majority of the responses indicated positive knowledge towards core ethics guidelines and the importance of IRBs. This includes beneficence, confidentiality, informed consent, and treating participants with respect. In addition, the majority of participants agreed on the importance of the IRB for ensuring the rights, safety, and well-being of the research subjects. Moreover, the majority of participants agreed that the IRB members should be trained on ethics regulations in conducting research and declare any conflict of interest with the investigators. On the other hand, about 30% of participants believed that being reviewed by the IRB would delay research and make it more difficult for the researcher. Jordanian investigators have good awareness of and knowledge about research ethics and the importance of IRBs, though more education is needed. (shrink)

The constantly accelerating progress of contemporary natural science is indissolubly associated with the development and use of mathematics and with the processes of mathematical modeling of the phenomena of nature. The essence of this diverse and highly fertile interaction of mathematics and natural science and the dialectics of this interaction can only be disclosed through analysis of the nature of theoretical notions in general. Today, above all in the ranks of materialistically minded researchers, it is generally accepted that theory possesses (...) a value of its own. Contrary to positivist concepts of the nature of our knowledge, the meaning and significance of theory do not consist merely of the recording of experimental data, their classification and notation in abbreviated form. The meaning of theory is considerably more significant and is revealed, above all, in its explanatory and predictive functions. Contemporary theoretical knowledge is quite advanced and comprises a highly complex system, relatively self-contained and capable of internal development. Mathematics is the most interesting and distinctive phenomenon in the system of theoretical knowledge, in the system of science in general. It is in its dialectical development that the internal force and dynamics of the development of theory, in the very broadest sense of that word, find expression. Paul Lafargue tells us that Karl Marx held that "science only attains perfection when it succeeds in making use of mathematics" . In many fields of research the formulation of new ideas and concepts rests upon mathematics, its concepts and notions, and "is suggested" by the latter. "Mathematics," writes F. Dyson, "is the main source of the notions and principles out of which new theories are created" . The basic significance of mathematics to theory has been noted by outstanding thinkers over the course of the entire history of development of science. Today the expressive phrase, "the mathematization of knowledge," has come into general currency as a description of the principal direction of growth of theoretical notions in natural science. However, with respect to the growth of modern theoretical physics in general, the statement that it develops primarily by the method of the mathematical hypothesis has general validity. For example, the principal findings and discoveries of quantum theory and particle physics, starting from the corpuscularwave dualism and terminating with the omega minus hyperon and hypothetical quarks, were obtained or made "at the tip of a mathematician's pen.". (shrink)