I shall attempt something rash in this paper. I shall draw your attention to some past and current work on perception by psychologists and others. I shall concentrate on work in vision and hearing. This outline will occupy the first part of my lecture. I shall then go on, in the second part, to suggest that this scientific work has certain philosophical implications. This whole attempt is a bit rash for obvious reasons. It is not easy to outline fairly and (...) accurately past and current work in any branch of science. I am very liable, therefore, to do an injustice to the efforts of psychologists and others in this field. What makes matters more difficult for me is that I also have to show that this work is of philosophical interest. What has led me to embark on this perilous enterprise is a hunch I have developed in recent years. I have the hunch that philosophers who are interested in perception would do well to pay rather more attention than they have been wont to do in the past to the work and discourse coming out of the scientific laboratory and similar places. (shrink)

B. A. Farrell; XIII*—Temporal Precedence, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 73, Issue 1, 1 June 1973, Pages 193–216, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.

Book reviewed in this article:F.H. Bradley, Collected Works Volumes 1–5.

As guidelines for neonatal resuscitation evolve from a growing evidence base, clinicians must ensure that practice is closely aligned with the available evidence, based on methodologically sound and ethically conducted research. This paper reviews ethical, legal and risk-management issues arising during the design of a quality-assurance project to make video recordings of neonatal resuscitations after high-risk deliveries. The issues, which affect patients, researchers, staff and the hospital at large, include the following: 1) Informed consent for research involving emergency procedures is (...) often not possible, for lack of time to provide sufficient information. The mental capacity of the subject or parent may be compromised by the impending emergency, and freedom of choice is threatened by the time pressure to consent. 2) Video recording of the inevitable medical errors raises issues of whether participating staff may be identifiable and accountable, affecting their willingness to participate in such research. The approach to staff participation and identification is reviewed. 3) The use of video data for education threatens the privacy of research subjects. The ethics of maintaining privacy is balanced with the ethics of using the data to improve practice of resuscitation. 4) The research subjects (patients, or the staff whose performance is being monitored) must be defined. 5) There are legal and ethical aspects of management and ownership of data. 6) The role of the Human Research Ethics Committee in protecting the research subject and possibly the medicolegal interests of the hospital is discussed. This paper reviews the literature and discusses the issues. (shrink)

The enormous destructive power of present stocks of nuclear weapons poses the greatest threat to public health in human history. Technical changes in weapons design are leading to an increased emphasis on the ability to fight a nuclear war, eroding the concept of deterrence based on mutually assured destruction and increasing the risk of nuclear war. Medical planning and civil defence preparations for nuclear war have recently been increased in several countries although there is little evidence that they will be (...) of significant value in the aftermath of a nuclear conflict. These developments have raised new ethical dilemmas for those in health professions. If there is any risk of use of weapons of mass destruction, then support for deterrence with these weapons as a policy for national or global security appears to be incompatible with basic principles of medical ethics and international law. The primary medical responsibility under such circumstances is to participate in attempts to prevent nuclear war. (shrink)

To describe the content of practice guidelines on euthanasia and assisted suicide (EAS) and to compare differences between settings and guidelines developed before or after enactment of the euthanasia law in 2002 by means of a content analysis. Most guidelines stated that the attending physician is responsible for the decision to grant or refuse an EAS request. Due care criteria were described in the majority of guidelines, but aspects relevant for assessing these criteria were not always described. Half of the (...) guidelines described the role of the nurse in the performance of euthanasia. Compared with hospital guidelines, nursing home guidelines were more often stricter than the law in excluding patients with dementia (30% vs 4%) and incompetent patients (25% vs 4%). As from 2002, the guidelines were less strict in categorically excluding patients groups (32% vs 64%) and in particular incompetent patients (10% vs 29%). Healthcare institutions should accurately state the boundaries of the law, also when they prefer to set stricter boundaries for their own institution. Only then can guidelines provide adequate support for physicians and nurses in the difficult EAS decision-making process. (shrink)

Anyone who has ever worked with a variety \ of algebras with a reduct in the variety of bounded distributive lattices will know a restricted Priestley duality when they meet one—but until now there has been no abstract definition. Here we provide one. After deriving some basic properties of a restricted Priestley dual category \ of such a variety, we give a characterisation, in terms of \, of finitely generated discriminator subvarieties of \. As an application of our characterisation, we (...) give a new proof of Sankappanavar’s characterisation of finitely generated discriminator varieties of distributive double p-algebras. A substantial portion of the paper is devoted to the application of our results to Cornish algebras. A Cornish algebra is a bounded distributive lattice equipped with a family of unary operations each of which is either an endomorphism or a dual endomorphism of the bounded lattice. They are a natural generalisation of Ockham algebras, which have been extensively studied. We give an external necessary-and-sufficient condition and an easily applied, completely internal, sufficient condition for a finite set of finite Cornish algebras to share a common ternary discriminator term and so generate a discriminator variety. Our results give a characterisation of discriminator varieties of Ockham algebras as a special case, thereby yielding Davey, Nguyen and Pitkethly’s characterisation of quasi-primal Ockham algebras. (shrink)

In reply to Wierzbicka's advocacy of semantic primitives we argue that talk of the semantic primitives repeats the fallacies addressed in the target article at a higher level. In reply to Malcolm's plea for a Wittgensteinian grammar of colour words, we argue that he uses words like “we” and “us” too easily, falling into the trap of “silly relativism.” In reply to McManus's science of word counts, we reiterate the nineteenth-century criticism that this method is based on an illegitimate application (...) of seemingly rigorous statistical methods. (shrink)

This new edition of Introduction to Lattices and Order presents a radical reorganization and updating, though its primary aim is unchanged. The explosive development of theoretical computer science in recent years has, in particular, influenced the book's evolution: a fresh treatment of fixpoints testifies to this and Galois connections now feature prominently. An early presentation of concept analysis gives both a concrete foundation for the subsequent theory of complete lattices and a glimpse of a methodology for data analysis that is (...) of commercial value in social science. Classroom experience has led to numerous pedagogical improvements and many new exercises have been added. As before, exposure to elementary abstract algebra and the notation of set theory are the only prerequisites, making the book suitable for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students. It will also be a valuable resource for anyone who meets ordered structures. (shrink)