Given current constraints on universal treatment campaigns, recent advances in public health prevention initiatives have revitalized efforts to stem the tide of HIV transmission. Yet, despite a growing imperative for prevention—supported by the promise of behavioral, structural and biomedical approaches to lower the incidence of HIV—human rights frameworks remain limited in addressing collective prevention policy through global health governance. Assessing the evolution of rights-based approaches to global HIV/AIDS policy, this review finds that human rights have shifted from collective public health (...) to individual treatment access. While the advent of the HIV/AIDS pandemic gave meaning to rights in framing global health policy, the application of rights in treatment access litigation came at the expense of public health prevention efforts. Where the human rights framework remains limited to individual rights enforced against a state duty bearer, such rights have faced constrained application in framing population-level policy to realize the public good of HIV prevention. Concluding that human rights frameworks must be developed to reflect the complementarity of individual treatment and collective prevention, this article conceptualizes collective rights to public health, structuring collective combination prevention to alleviate limitations on individual rights frameworks and frame rights-based global HIV/AIDS policy to assure research expansion, prevention access and health system integration. (shrink)

Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into critical domains such as healthcare holds immense promise. Nevertheless, significant challenges must be addressed to avoid harm, promote the well-being of individuals and societies, and ensure ethically sound and socially just technology development. Innovative approaches like Embedded Ethics, which refers to integrating ethics and social science into technology development based on interdisciplinary collaboration, are emerging to address issues of bias, transparency, misrepresentation, and more. This paper aims to develop this approach further to enable future projects (...) to effectively deploy it. Based on the practical experience of using ethics and social science methodology in interdisciplinary AI-related healthcare consortia, this paper presents several methods that have proven helpful for embedding ethical and social science analysis and inquiry. They include (1) stakeholder analyses, (2) literature reviews, (3) ethnographic approaches, (4) peer-to-peer interviews, (5) focus groups, (6) interviews with affected groups and external stakeholders, (7) bias analyses, (8) workshops, and (9) interdisciplinary results dissemination. We believe that applying Embedded Ethics offers a pathway to stimulate reflexivity, proactively anticipate social and ethical concerns, and foster interdisciplinary inquiry into such concerns at every stage of technology development. This approach can help shape responsible, inclusive, and ethically aware technology innovation in healthcare and beyond. (shrink)

Aim: Patients with advanced cancer need information about end-of-life treatment options in order to make informed decisions. Clinicians vary in the frequency with which they initiate these discussions.Patients and methods: As part of a long-term longitudinal study, patients with an expected 2-year survival of less than 50% who had advanced gastrointestinal or lung cancer or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis were interviewed. Each patient’s medical record was reviewed at enrollment and at 3 months for evidence of the discussion of patient wishes concerning (...) ventilator support, artificial nutrition and hydration , resuscitation and hospice care. A Kaplan–Meier analysis was also performed and 2-year survival calculated.Results: 60 cancer and 32 ALS patients were enrolled. ALS patients were more likely than cancer patients to have evidence of discussion about their wishes for ventilator support , ANH , DNR and hospice care . At 6 months, 91% of ALS patients were alive compared with 62% of cancer patients; at 2 years, 63% of ALS patients were alive compared with 23% of cancer patients .Conclusions: Cancer patients were less likely than ALS patients to have had documented advanced care planning discussions despite worse survival. This may reflect perceptions that ALS has a more predictable course, that advanced cancer has a greater number of treatment options, or differing views about hope. Nevertheless, cancer patients may be less adequately prepared for end-of-life decision-making. (shrink)

v. 1. Philosophie. Rechtsphilosophie -- v. 2-4. Volkenrecht -- v. 5-6. Rechtsgeschiedenis. Burgerlijk recht. Procesrecht. Octrooirecht. Studie.

Le système des sciences ne peut être globale qu'à la condition d'incorporer non seulement les sciences fondamentales mais aussi les sciences techniques et appliquées. Pour expliquer cette incorporation nous proposons de tenir compte non Seulement du moment objectif mais aussi du moment subject. En répondant aux questions: qu'est-ce qu'on étudie?, comment on étudie? pour quel but on étudie? nous découvrons l'accroissement de la proportion du moment subjectif ce qui permets à dresser un système globale des sciences.

The many conflicting views that have given rise to the contemporary crisis in religious thought can be traced to certain figures who have played a major role in the shaping of present-day thinking. An exploration of the ideas of these philosopher-theologians, from Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard to Barth, Tillich, Maritain, Berdyaev, Buber, and such lesser figures as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harvey Cox, Thomas Altizer, and Richard Rubenstein, has been the chief objective of the author of this work. His survey of modern and (...) contemporary religious thinking, which he conducted within a predominantly Protestant framework, has convinced him that a common theme runs through the writings of the men examined by him: the problem of God is inseparable from the problem of modern man. "In the minds of theologians," the author asserts, "the loss of certainty about God is at base a loss of a sense of ultimacy which gives depth and purpose to everyday living.... And so, in responding to the loss of ultimacy, modern theology has reintroduced the question of man himself: his life and death, his experiences of tragedy, joy, guilt, acceptance, loss, and love." While pointing to the radical differences among theologians in their explanations of man's loss of faith, Idinopulos suggests that the theological options offered by such men as Barth, Tillich, Maritain, Berdyaev, and Buber are of paramount importance for the understanding of today's religious thinking. In his final chapter, the author makes a critical appraisal of the chief representatives of "secular theology," such as Bonhoeffer, Cox, and Altizer; and analyzes Rubenstein's peculiar theory of Holy Nothingness, or "Sacred Void out of which we came and to which we return." The author's analysis makes clear the extreme confusion, and even outright absurdity, into which men have been led by the self-styled "Theologians in a World Come of Age," which is the title of the chapter. The volume closes with a selected bibliography for each of the authors discussed and a comprehensive index.--B. M. B. (shrink)

This latest in attempts to collect statements from living American philosophers presents thoughts and interests of those writing in the "middle decades," the fifty years from 1920 to 1970. The editor has restricted himself to America’s senior philosophers asking each to reflect on "the things that matter most," or "to share the motifs in their work and to present concerns about their world". Although some influential elders are missing from this collection, an interesting variety of viewpoints and styles of American (...) philosophizing are represented. Especially interesting are the reflections of Brand Blanshard, Edwin Burtt, Herbert Feigl, Charles Hartshorne, Stephen Pepper, Roy Wood Sellars, and Herbert Spiegelberg. Blanshard traces his development from the influences upon him of Bradley, and describes his own rationalist ethics and humanist religion. Herbert Feigl in an even more autobiographical vein relates how he came under the important influence of Moritz Schlick and to be a member of the Vienna Circle. Also included in his article is a summary of his views on the issues of induction, scientific explanation, the mind-body problem, determinism, and some matters of practical philosophy. Pepper explains how he originated the idea of world hypotheses, and how he believes these hypotheses themselves originate and function, and Spiegelberg sketches an intriguing "ethics for fellows in the fate of existence." In his essay Hartshorne mixes comments on pragmatism, idealism, and the "linguistic turn," with explanations of his own "neoclassical metaphysics."—B.M. (shrink)

Nissen draws on Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, and also uses quotations from four others of Dewey's books, mostly in the section on truth. The monograph is an unrelenting attack on Dewey's theories, following the lead of Bertrand Russell's criticisms in Schilpp's The Philosophy of John Dewey. Nissen takes key terms of the theories, renders each into a form which he finds clearer, and comparing this form with other statements from Dewey, judges the results Dewey achieves to be incorrect, trivial, (...) or absurd.--M. B. M. (shrink)

The author briskly gives the principles of criticism which he will follow in examining Kant's theory of time, and the distinctions between absolute time, psychological time, and the duration of events and processes which must be made in order to deal with the time theories of Kant and his great predecessors Newton and Leibniz and their defenders. Al-Azm then follows Kant's writings from 1747 through his brief conversion to the Newtonian "receptacle" theory, through the critical period. He considers the Dissertation (...) of 1770, at least in so far as it deals with space and time, to belong to the latter. The principles of criticism are especially relevant to Al-Azm's interpretation of Kant's time doctrine in the critical period. He holds that we must carefully bear in mind Kant's alternation of analytic and synthetic methods, and their dialectic interplay. If we do so, we can explain away the "patchwork" theory of Kemp Smith and others, as the obscurities and apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes which are resolvable in the light of the roles played for Kant by the approaches he employs. Within the first Critique, the teachings on time in the Aesthetic and the Analytic constitute a "genuine dialectic of a highly complex order." Thus, Kant's final position should be sought in the progressive modifications of the preliminary position. Al-Azm regards the Aesthetic as offering merely provisional statements on the subject of time, reached by a process of analysis, at an early dialectical stage, and offering a starting point for a fresh stage in analysis which aims "at the unveiling of the synthetic processes of the understanding." This is accomplished in the Analytic. In a last section, on the first Antinomy, the author considers Strawson's essay, The Bounds of Sense, published in 1966, and cites passages which he feels defend Kant's theory of time, seen in its relation to the critical philosophy, as successfully against Strawson's interpretation as against the claims of its Leibnizian and Newtonian rivals.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Sellars offers a twentieth-century American Hylas as the adversary to Philonous, the spokesman of the idealist position in Berkeley's Three Dialogues. Hylas is still a materialist, but espouses an evolutionary or "emergent" materialism. He challenges Philonous' assumption that matter is inert, and incapable of giving rise to novelties such as consciousness or life itself. Since Sellars finds Berkeley to be entirely logical in his argument, he tends his hand to the theory of perception. Sellars' Hylas finds Berkeley's analysis of mediate (...) and immediate perception to be inadequate with respect to the complex operation of perceiving. He suggests "direct perception which is mediated by information." Although mediated, direct perception differs from Berkeley's 'mediate perception', as it is not inferred from sensations which were perceived first. It differs from Berkeley's 'immediate perception' in not identifying perceiving with awareness of sensation. In a short epilogue the author looks back on sixty years of American philosophy, concluding that it deviates from the European in having "a certain explanatory openness."--M. B. M. (shrink)

Selections from Hume's major writings are grouped under the headings: Reason and Experience, Reason and Sentiment, and Reason and Religion. There is also a short conclusion entitled "Skepticism." A Treatise on Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals are from the 1962 and 1947 translations by André Leroy. The Dialogues on Natural Religion were translated in 1912 by Maxime David. Part I gives Hume's account of impressions, ideas, and their relations. Also (...) covered are the crucial arguments on causality from the Treatise and the Enquiry Concerning Understanding--including the role of experience of constant conjunction and the role of instinct in our construction and use of the notion of causality. Part II contains the famous statement from the Treatise that moral matters are "more rightly felt than judged of" and a treatment of the natural and artificial virtues. Considering its central place in recent ethics, the English-speaking reader would miss the familiar lines remarking the passage from "is" to "ought." Part III and the Conclusion are drawn entirely from the Dialogues on Natural Religion.--M. B. M. (shrink)

This volume collects fifteen essays written for popular readership during a span of thirty-five years. The title essay, two on mysticism, and one on the status of belief in the survival of the soul are basically metaphysical. There are three on values, and four essays on philosophy and science. Two themes, the purposeless universe and the problems of moral materialism, recur in various relations throughout most of the essays. The reader may be puzzled by what appears as an explicit denial (...) of connection between the essays. In "Man Against Darkness," the scientific revolution is described as a change of beliefs: in exchange for belief in a cosmic plan, the belief-setting of the ancient religions of East and West and of the Christian religion which superseded them in European civilization, science substitutes the belief that the universe is meaningless. In other essays Stace urges his readers to come to grips with life in the post-religious world. He asks what the role of the philosopher can be when "not moral self-control but the doctor, the psychiatrist, the educationalist must save us from doing evil." In "Why Do We Fail?", considering the charge of materialism leveled at America, he agrees with Plato that the love of luxury leads to war. It is taking "materialism" as the notion that everything, even our thoughts, is really composed of atoms, that permits Stace to say: "putting things of the body higher on the list than things of the spirit has nothing to do with any such scientific or metaphysical hypothesis." Drawing on his familiarity with Eastern culture as well as philosophical sources, he shows that men's plans are efficacious, and thus, that scientific explanation in materialistic terms, rather than teleological ones, does not logically require moral materialism. Man can still create value and purpose in the post-religious world. The other four essays include one on poetry, one on "The Snobbishness of the Learned" and two on political subjects.--M. B. M. (shrink)

This volume contains reports on work sessions sponsored by MIT. Participants include distinguished neuroscientists and specialists in communications and psychology from North and South America and Europe. Of particular interest to philosophers are reports on the biology of drives and on neural coding. In the former, evidence is presented to show that the same unfamiliar stimulus may elicit either curiosity or fear behavior in members of the same species, and that fear responses, for example, may be elicited either by discrepancy (...) with a neuronal model, or by concordance with one. Moreover, there is evidence that these responses may be acquired independently of experience of those stimulus conditions. The authors suggest that generalizations cannot be made on the basis of a single behavior type paradigm, like feeding behavior, for example. The report on neural coding reviews work on such questions as: What counts as a code in the context of a nervous system? What modes of representations are theoretically plausible? Are there rules about the kinds of codes and the domains in time and space where they are used? It is now held that the nervous system uses neither an infinity of codes nor just a few, but many. In both work sessions the definition of key terms poses an important, and unsolved problem.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Volume Three of the selected works of Unamuno, this is the first of nine projected volumes to appear. It contains the long personal exegesis of Cervantes' Don Quixote, and a group of sixteen essays, several of which also take the Knight as their point of departure. There are essays which are explicitly on the subject of philosophy; a memoir of Ángel Ganivet as philosopher, and musings on why Spain never has had a philosopher. The conclusion reached is that the Spaniard (...) is antimetaphysical; the Spanish soul strives not for a concept of the universe, but for a sense of life. Unamuno finds it suitable, appropriate, and inevitable that the philosophy of Spain must be searched out in the only places in which it can be found, in fictional deeds and carved religious images. Idealism will not be metaphysical idealism, but ethical and practical idealism. Unamuno celebrates the pattern of the antirational, individualistic, anarchistic, action-centered Spanish philosophy of life, in which the seeds of existentialism seem so clearly visible. The book is physically and stylistically appealing, with a very full index, and bibliographical, explanatory, and poetic-linguistic notes, all very scholarly and full.--M. B. M. (shrink)

This text is designed to introduce undergraduates to metaphysics, but the authors suggest that with supplementary readings, it can be adapted for higher level courses as well. As a method aiming at both academic objectivity and personal engagement, the authors confront the students with the problems of metaphysics as formulated by Heidegger, Marcel, and Camus, and then, accompanied by these contemporary spokesmen, set their readers to the task of historical "retrieve" of the problems and convictions of ages past. There are (...) three chapters and a long appendix. The first chapter identifies metaphysics as "man's search for the meaning of being," stressing that meaning will include both descriptive and evaluative elements. It deals with the role of freedom in human life and in the origin of metaphysics. The existentialist position contributes these points: the rejection of the simplistic dichotomizing of reality into subject and object, the incorporation of affective, nonintellectual elements into metaphysics, and a use of elements from phenomenology successfully blended with a sense of historicity and dialogue in man's achieving of truth. The second chapter, drawing on Heidegger, poses metaphysics' double problem, the search for a unifying value, and speculation about the nature of being. For the former we are offered an answer in terms of communicable personality, inviting one to authenticity through spiritual love. Chapter three brings in Marcel, beginning with his distinction between the notion of "problem" and the notion of "mystery." The problem approach has three characteristics: the model of the relationship between investigator and data is that of subject and object; the influence of the investigator is minimized and his role reduced to passive observer and annotator; the problem is to be overcome. A "mystery" on the other hand, "is a problem which encroaches upon its own data, invading them... and thereby transcending itself." Since metaphysics falls within the scope of mystery, no problem-solving technique would be appropriate. The authors recommend instead Marcel's reflective philosophizing, to which the remainder of the text is devoted. The appendix consists of excerpts from Jowett's Platonic dialogues, and sets of questions of two kinds: the first aims at eliciting accurate understanding and stimulating critical reflection on the thought of Plato. The second set gives an example of the process of reflective philosophizing.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Morality is often defined in opposition to the natural "instincts," or as a tool to keep those instincts in check. New findings in neuroscience, social psychology, animal behaviour, and anthropology have brought us back to the original Darwinian position that moral behaviour is continuous with the social behavior of animals, and most likely evolved to enhance the cooperativeness of society. In this view, morality is part of human nature rather than its opposite. This interdisciplinary volume debates the origin and working (...) of human morality within the context of science as well as religion and philosophy. Experts from widely different backgrounds speculate how morality may have evolved, how it develops in the child, and what science can tell us about its working and origin. They also discuss how to deal with the age-old facts-versus-values debate, also known as the naturalistic fallacy. The implications of this exchange are enormous, as they may transform cherished views on if and why we are the only moral species. (shrink)

In confronting the insalubrious ramifications of globalization, human rights scholars and activists have argued for greater national and international responsibility pursuant to the human right to health. Codified seminally in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the right to health proclaims that states bear an obligation to realize the “highest attainable standard” of health for all. However, in pressing for the highest attainable standard for each individual, the right to health has been ineffective in (...) compelling states to address burgeoning inequalities in underlying determinants of health, focusing on individual medical treatments at the expense of public health systems. This article contends that the paradigm of individual health, focused on a right to individual medical care, is incapable of responding to health inequities in a globalized world and thereby hampers efforts to operationalize health rights through public health systems. While the right to health has evolved in international discourse over time, this evolution of the individual right to health cannot address the harmful societal ramifications of economic globalization. Rather than relying solely upon an individual right to medical care, envisioning a collective right to public health – a right applied at the societal level to address underlying determinants of health – would alleviate many of the injurious health inequities of globalization. (shrink)

The vitality of Peirce's ideas has recently stimulated the writing of several books and articles. This is not strictly a revival, but rather the first systematic presentation to the philosophic public of what Peirce hoped was an architectonic philosophy. While some commentators find Peirce's work to consist merely of brilliant fragments of an ultimate failure, Potter believes that Peirce "has achieved a partial synthesis with gaps and inconsistencies, some of which at least can be remedied." In this book Potter distinguishes (...) for study five aspects of Peirce's philosophy, and some of their relations to one another and to the whole Peirce had in mind. The aspects considered are the categories: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which can be very roughly characterized as potentiality, actuality, and necessity, or mediating law; the normative sciences of logic, ethics, and esthetics; pragmatism, of which the exposition in the 1870's was only the as yet unconnected beginning; synechism, the cosmology which Peirce thought proved pragmatism; and the Scotistic realism which Peirce felt to be essential to any authentic pragmatism. Peirce's divisions of philosophy correspond to his categories--phenomenology to Firstness and normative science to Secondness. Metaphysics, corresponding to Thirdness, attempts to comprehend the reality of the data of phenomenology and their interpretation by normative sciences. Although in no sense polemical, this careful study contains replies to most standard criticisms of the pragmatic theories of meaning and truth in its explication of the relation of pragmatism to the rest of Peirce's philosophy. In his second section Potter deals with synechism, the principle of continuity, and law, including a strong chapter on "Law as Living Power." The final section treats Peirce's accommodation of continuity and Darwinian evolutionary theory. If growth and development are fundamental throughout the cosmos, Peirce saw that we must admit real chance and its important implications for questions of determinism and mind. Potter makes a close study of Peirce which he shares with the reader, giving insights, and also a glimpse of the process which leads up to them. The concentration on norms and ideals, perhaps less familiar aspects of Peirce's philosophy, may encourage wider investigation of his writings by those who considered him only as a logician or the founder of pragmatism. This is a superior study, and an addition to the scholarly literature on one of America's major thinkers.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Richard Popkin gives the frame into which the topics of the colloquium fit: Cartesian skepticism about our knowledge of the existence of the self and the external world. Robert Fogelin sketches a prescriptive model for human action, using classical and contemporary ideas on the grammar of act descriptions. Following these individual papers, there are three symposia, consisting of a paper, comments, and author's reply. In the first, with Philip Hugly as commentator, Fred Dretske attempts to undercut skeptical attack on the (...) validity of ordinary perceptual claims. He holds that an epistemic perceptual report conveys two items: a description, and a justification of the increment in knowledge which is the crux of each particular claim. The second symposiast is Roderick Chisholm, writing with historical fluency and analytic skill on the loose and strict senses of identity. In his comments, S. Shoemaker offers a "special concern" criterion for personal identity. In the third symposium, Jaakko Hintikka argues that the logic of perceptual terms is modal, in the extended sense that most of the words used to express propositional attitudes, words like 'knows', 'believes', 'strives', serve as modal operators. Romane Clark is Hintikka's commentator. Again, the comments seem genuinely helpful in clarifying or emphasizing the issues for the reader. Hintikka tells us that he finds that traditional problems in perception are closely related to difficulties logicians have met as they try to understand the interplay between modal notions and the basic logical concepts of identity and existence. His comment expresses the sense of discovery and promise which pervades these papers. It strikes one that this Colloquium achieved a felicitous combination of high-level technique and creative scholarship.--M. B. M. (shrink)