The standard approach to treatment decision making for incapacitated patients often fails to provide treatment consistent with the patient’s preferences and values and places significant stress on surrogate decision makers. These shortcomings provide compelling reason to search for methods to improve current practice. Shared decision making between surrogates and clinicians has important advantages, but it does not provide a way to determine patients’ treatment preferences. Hence, shared decision making leaves families with the stressful challenge of identifying the patient’s preferred treatment (...) option. To address this concern, the present paper proposes to incorporate the use of a “Patient Preference Predictor” (PPP) into the shared decision-making process between surrogates and clinicians. A PPP would predict which treatment option a given incapacitated patient would most likely prefer, based on the individual’s characteristics and information on what treatment preferences are correlated with these characteristics. Use of a PPP is likely to increase the chances that incapacitated patients are treated consistent with their preferences and values and might reduce the stress and burden on their surrogates. Including a PPP in the shared decision-making process therefore has the potential to realize important ethical goals for making treatment decisions for incapacitated patients. The present paper justifies this approach on conceptual and normative grounds. (shrink)

Louveau, A., S. Shelah and B. Velikovi, Borel partitions of infinite subtrees of a perfect tree, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 63 271–281. We define a notion of type of a perfect tree and show that, for any given type τ, if the set of all subtrees of a given perfect tree T which have type τ is partitioned into two Borel classes then there is a perfect subtree S of T such that all subtrees of S of type (...) τ belong to the same class. This result simultaneously generalizes the partition theorems of Galvin-Prikry and Galvin-Blass. The key ingredient of the proof is the theorem of Halpern-Laüchli on partitions of products of perfect trees. (shrink)

Book Information Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge. By Jacques Bruschwig and Geoffrey, E. R. Lloyd. MA, Belnap Press. Cambridge. 2000. Pp. xv + 1024. Hardback, US$49.00.

Delo filosofii -- ch. 1. Spory evropeĭskoĭ kulʹtury. Ėpicheskiĭ iskhod. Otkrytie soznanii︠a︡. Drevnegrecheskai︠a︡ tragedii︠a︡ i filosofii︠a︡. Afiny i Ierusalim. Novat︠s︡ii︠a︡ Kopernika i kopernikanskai︠a︡ revoli︠u︡t︠s︡ii︠a︡ -- ch. 2. XX vek: k ontologii spornosti. Sofii︠a︡ i chert. Kant pered lit︠s︡om russkoĭ religioznoĭ metafiziki. O vtorom izmerenii myshlenii︠a︡: L. Shestov i filosofii︠a︡. Na poli︠a︡kh "I︠A︡ i Ty".

This study investigates professional tax practitioners' ethical judgments and behavioral intentions in cases involving client pressure to adopt aggressive reporting positions, an issue that has been identified as the most difficult ethical/moral problem facing public accounting practitioners. The multidimensional ethics scale (MES) was used to measure the extent to which a hypothetical behavior was consistent with five ethical philosophies (moral equity, contractualism, utilitarianism, relativism, and egoism). Responses from a sample of 67 tax professionals supported the existence of all dimensions of (...) the MES other than egoism. Regressions of ethical judgments and behavioral intentions on the MES dimensions indicate that ethical decision making is most heavily influenced by the moral equity dimension, followed by the contractualism dimension. In contrast, the utilitarianism and relativism dimensions were only related to ethical judgments and behavioral intentions in isolated instances. (shrink)

v. 1. Edinyĭ i︠a︡zyk chelovechestva. --.

On conduct of life and ethics of Islamic seminarians.

Hull et al. rightly point out the special character of selection as a causal mode, but ironically they seem to force selection back into traditional causal modes by decomposing it into replication, variation, and environmental interaction. Many processes are selective, and a taxonomy of a broad range of kinds of selection may be preferable to narrowing the applicability of the term.

Монография раскрывает идейно-смысловое содержание и исторический контекст функционирования философского дискурса, посвященного осмыслению феномена идеологии, представленного в политических текстах мыслителей 17 - начало 20 вв.

Appearing in the “Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam” as an undefined referent for the limits on freedom of expression in Islam, Shariah is still to be chased as an indefinable referent which restricts freedom of the expression in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran’s Press Law as well as Constitution unveil Shariah’s referent to be a person: the Jurist-Ruler around whom a cult of personality is legalized in terms of “Imamate” and around whom all the limits on freedom (...) of expression revolve. Interpretation of Shariah is not a solution but part of the problem in Iran. Such problem can be dealt in terms of three modes of self-expression which were invented by the Iranian Reformists to avoid self-censorship. The notion of master-signifier can be the key to unraveling the problem of self-referentiality in freedom of expression and its Reformist solution in Iran’s legal system. (shrink)

Traditionally the domain of scientists, the history of science became an independent field of inquiry only in the twentieth century and mostly after the Second World War. This process of emancipation was accompanied by a historiographical departure from previous, 'scientistic' practices, a transformation often attributed to influences from sociology, philosophy and history. Similarly, the liberal humanists who controlled the Cambridge History of Science Committee after 1945 emphasized that their contribution lay in the special expertise they, as trained historians, brought to (...) the venture. However, the scientists who had founded the Committee in the 1930s had already advocated a sophisticated contextual approach: innovation in the history of science thus clearly came also from within the ranks of scientists who practised in the field. Moreover, unlike their scientist predecessors on the Cambridge Committee, the liberal humanists supported a positivistic protocol that has since been criticized for its failure to properly contextualize early modern science. Lastly, while celebrating the rise of modern science as an international achievement, the liberal humanists also emphasized the peculiar Englishness of the phenomenon. In this respect, too, their outlook had much in common with the practices from which they attempted to distance their project. (shrink)

J'ai dit en ce livre l'essentiel de ma pensée, et je serais heureux de connattre ceux qui l'acceptent comme ceux qui, en s'y opposaml, la confirment sans le vouloir 2.

Russell’s distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description has been recently re-examined in frequently controversial epistemo-logical contributions. The present essay reflects upon the pertinent papers by D. F. Pears, J. Hintikka, R. Chisholm, W. Sellars, A. J. Ayer, and others, but is pri-marily founded on Russell’s significant formulations from his writings published between 1910 and 1918. By employing an auxiliary device of a late-Wittgen-steinian language game, I explore at first the situation in which human subject is “experiencing” and (...) naming particular objects and later the subject’s acquaintance with universals. The reconstruction of such situations shows that, contrary to Russell’s assumptions, even the “purest” acquaintance cannot function without knowledge by description, i.e. without sta-ting propositions about the object of acquaintance . Then the only “descriptionless” alternative would be a kind of intuitive knowledge of such objects which is difficult to reconcile with the position held by Russell in the 1910s. Whatever the consequences, this topic retains its fundamental epistemological significance. (shrink)