This paper analyses the relationship between religion and the field of medicine and health care in light of other recent studies. Generally, religion and spirituality have a positive impact on disease. For patients diagnosed with malignancies and chronic diseases, religion is an important dimension of healing. From ancient times, God has been considered an inspiration for the physician's knowledge and healing resources. Some authors have proposed a brief history of spiritual and religious states that the doctor can apply to his (...) patient. Religiosity and spirituality allow patients to receive better social support and to benefit greatly from resources provided by religious organizations (cultural activities, jobs, and health care counseling). The two terms "religion" and "spirituality" have different meanings but are always in connection. Many studies emphasize that people with greater religiosity and spirituality have a lower prevalence of depression and suicide, better quality of life, and greater survival. Additionally the article discusses the complementary health care benefits of religious fasting. Caloric and protein restrictions promoted by religious fasting were associated with improvement in control or prophylaxis of many diseases and with longevity. (shrink)

Generation and Corruption II is concerned with Aristotle's theory of the elements, their reciprocal transformations and the cause of their perpetual generation and corruption. These matters are essential to Aristotle's picture of the world, making themselves felt throughout his natural science, including those portions of it that concern living things. What is more, the very inquiry Aristotle pursues in this text, with its focus on definition, generality, and causation, throws important light on his philosophy of science more generally. This volume (...) contains eleven new essays, one for each of the chapters of this Aristotelian text, plus a general introduction and an English translation of the Greek text. It gives substantial attention to an important and neglected text, and highlights its relevance to other topics of current and enduring interest. (shrink)

Secrecy and ethics are often seen as opposing forces within organizations. Secret work is viewed as unethical, as it excludes others from knowing and is associated with self-interested behavior. We contend that this view does not account for the dynamic inherent to secrecy and to the fact that ethics is embedded in social relations. This paper suggests an alternative view. We consider secrecy as a social process which allows employees to maintain their ethics when faced with managerial policies that affect (...) the quality of their work. Building on an in-depth case study of a team of journalists who worked in secret after their managers decided to prioritize the interests of shareholders and advertising firms, we show how these journalists managed to maintain collective ethics through secrecy and to do their work according to their own moral principles. This paper offers two primary contributions. First, we show a mutually beneficial relationship between ethics and secrecy in organizations, wherein secrecy helps maintaining ethics in everyday work. Second, the paper shows how secrecy can lead to ethical resistance, via a transformation of the power relationship with managers. (shrink)

Patients who have an oncological disease and are in palliative care belong to a group that is often characterized as highly vulnerable, and their participation in clinical trials poses a number of ethical problems. This study is cross-sectional and analytic. In all, 82% of those who took part consider it ethical to conduct research with patients in palliative care, either to help other patients in the future, in the hope of gaining some improvement or due to confidence in the physician-researcher. (...) The wide acceptance to participate in these research studies shows the potential benefits appear to exceed the merely therapeutic ones. Altruism, hoping to improve or the perception of continuing to "fight" the disease are aspects to bear in mind when evaluating respect for the autonomy of the persons involved. (shrink)

A sociedade está passando por uma época de mudanças significativas em todos os níveis. A Igreja que está nesse contexto histórico também vive um momento importante de mudança. A escolha recente do Cardeal Bergoglio para se tonar papa, a escolha do nome papal "Francisco", as atitudes práticas e os discursos deste Papa indicam este caminho de mudança. Esta proposta se insere no contexto de uma sociedade marcada pelo consumo desenfreado, pela idolatria ao dinheiro e, como ele mesmo afirma, por uma (...) "globalização exclusiva" de modo especial das classes mais pobres. Por isso, propõe uma globalização da esperança que visa a superar a globalização da exclusão e do pessimismo diante dessa realidade social. Essa esperança de mudança tem os seus protagonistas principais: os humildes, pobres e excluídos. Por isso, para acentuar esta nova proposta do pontificado, tomarei como referência um discurso que Francisco fez para os movimentos sociais da Bolívia em sua visita pastoral àquele país, visto que a tônica do discurso foi marcada pela palavra "mudança". (shrink)

The situation of mixed marriages is presented today in a whole new way. That’s because in recent decades relations between the churches have changed so revolutionarily. The always greater contact between its members provide more and more occasions for these marriages to happen. Aware of this situation the churches sought throughout history solutions in order to solve this problem. Before they closed in their own communities and sought to prevent or prohibit such marriages to happen. So it is true that (...) the code of Canon Law of 1917 showed total distrust in these marriages. But social, economic changes and the new urban settings caused these barriers to be broken. Thus, the greater contact between people became inevitable and allowed an increase in the number of these marriages. As a result the standards about mixed marriages have become more flexible. Besides, marriage is natural right of all. In the Catholic Church this flexibility made itself specifically from the Second Vatican Council, which recognized the value of the other communities in the mystery of salvation. The conclusions of the Council had its influence felt on the promulgation of the 1983 code. However, the Church continues advising against mixed marriages. This is because they still offer danger to the faith of the couple, to the education of the children and to own holiness that the experience of marriage requires. But for couples who have lived in this marriage she seeks to safeguard by its own unit. (shrink)

This is the inaugural volume of the Plato Dialogue Project: it offers the first collective study of the Philebus - a high point of philosophical ethics, containing some of Plato's most sophisticated discussions of human happiness. The contributors work through the text, discussing pleasure, knowledge, philosophical method, and the human good.

In this paper, I review and compare major literature on goals in argumentation scholarship, aiming to answer the question of how to take the different goals of arguers into account when analysing and evaluating public political arguments. On the basis of the review, I suggest to differentiate between the different goals along two important distinctions: first, distinguish between goals which are intrinsic to argumentation and goals which are extrinsic to it and second distinguish between goals of the act of arguing (...) and goals of argumentative interactions. Furthermore, I propose to analyse public political arguments as multi-purposive activity types and reconstruct the argumentative exchanges as a series of simultaneous discussions. This enables us to examine public political arguments from a perspective in which the intrinsic goals of argumentation are in principle instrumental for the achievement of the socio-political purposes of argumentation, and consequently, it makes our assessment of the argumentative quality of the argument also indicative of the quality of the socio-political processes to which the arguments contribute. (shrink)

Given a supercompact cardinal κ and a regular cardinal Λ < κ, we describe a type of forcing such that in the generic extension the cofinality of κ is Λ, there is a very good scale at κ, a bad scale at κ, and SCH at κ fails. When creating our model we have great freedom in assigning the value of 2κ, and so we can make SCH hold or fail arbitrarily badly.

We show that given ω many supercompact cardinals, there is a generic extension in which there are no Aronszajn trees at ℵω+1. This is an improvement of the large cardinal assumptions. The previous hypothesis was a huge cardinal and ω many supercompact cardinals above it, in Magidor—Shelah [7].

Given a regular cardinal λ and λ many supercompact cardinals, we describe a type of forcing such that in the generic extension there is a cardinal κ with cofinality λ, the Singular Cardinal Hypothesis at κ fails, and the tree property holds at κ+.

We show that given ù many supercompact cardinals, there is a generic extension in which the tree property holds at ℵ ω²+1 and the SCH fails at ℵ ω².

We construct a model in which the singular cardinal hypothesis fails at ℵωℵω. We use characterizations of genericity to show the existence of a projection between different Prikry type forcings.

In today’s ‘networked’ public sphere, arguers are faced with countless controversies roaming out there. Knowing what is at stake at any point in time, and keeping under control the contribution one’s arguments make to the different interrelated issues requires careful craft Keeping in touch with Pragma-Dialectics. In honor of Frans H. van Eemeren. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2011). In this paper, I explore the difficulty of determining what is at stake at any moment of the argumentative situation and explore the challenge (...) that that creates for examining the strategic shape of arguments. I argue that a meaningful examination of networked argumentative encounters requires that the boundaries of an encounter remain ‘fluid. In dealing with the fluid boundaries, I suggest to identify “argumentative associates” and “standing standpoints”. (shrink)

Of all the Romanian thinkers, Constantin Noica was almost exclusively attracted to Lucian Blaga. In most of his writings, whenever he felt the imperious need to prove his ideas, he turned to the philosopher of "luciferic knowl- edge". Thus, Noica offered solutions for the understanding of the expression "strengthen the mystery through the ecstatic intellect'. Also, if Lucian Blaga buit a metaphysic of genius, Constantin Noica particularized the idea of genius, taking Eminescu as an example, regarding him as "the complete (...) man of the Romanian culture". (shrink)

We introduce two versions of proof systems dealing with systems of inequalities: Positivstellensatz refutations and Positivstellensatz calculus. For both systems we prove the lower bounds on degrees and lengths of derivations for the example due to Lazard, Mora and Philippon. These bounds are sharp, as well as they are for the Nullstellensatz refutations and for the polynomial calculus. The bounds demonstrate a gap between the Null- and Positivstellensatz refutations on one hand, and the polynomial calculus and Positivstellensatz calculus on the (...) other. (shrink)

Crítica reformista e innovación sustantiva. Alcance y límites de los modelos normativos de deliberación para el análisis del presupuesto participativo de Porto Alegre.

Este ensayo reflexiona sobre la relación entre sociedad compleja y ciencias sociales. Entendemos que la pregunta por los límites epistemológicos de la investigación social es la pregunta por el papel de la investigación social en el marco de la sociedad compleja. En esta formulación hay por lo m..

We use set-theoretic tools to make a model-theoretic contribution. In particular, we construct a single \-sentence \ that codes Kurepa trees to prove the following statements: The spectrum of \ is consistently equal to \ and also consistently equal to \\), where \ is weakly inaccessible.The amalgamation spectrum of \ is consistently equal to \ and \\), where again \ is weakly inaccessible. This is the first example of an \-sentence whose spectrum and amalgamation spectrum are consistently both right-open and (...) right-closed. It also provides a positive answer to a question in Souldatos :533–551, 2014).Consistently, \ has maximal models in finite, countable, and uncountable many cardinalities. This complements the examples given in Baldwin et al. :545–565, 2016) and Baldwin and Souldatos :444–452, 2019) of sentences with maximal models in countably many cardinalities.Consistently, \ and there exists an \-sentence with models in \, but no models in \. This relates to a conjecture by Shelah that if \, then any \-sentence with a model of size \ also has a model of size \. Our result proves that \ can not be replaced by \, even if \. (shrink)

Yi-Ping Ong's The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy is a highly innovative book. It teases out from essays by Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir an existentialist poetics of the novel, which then inspires thoughtful readings of freedom and self-consciousness, situated worldhood, and unfinished works of art in nineteenth-century novels. At every step, Ong carefully articulates the insights that set her study apart from established ways of understanding the novel as form, the legacy (...) of existentialism, and the generative potential of literary form for philosophy. This book will likely delight and intrigue in equal measure. The argument is bold, the scholarship... (shrink)

There is a deep tension between logical and probabilistic norms of belief. This article illustrates the normative force that is associated with these frameworks by showing how rather unrestricted belief bases can be improved by undergoing logical and probabilistic reflection. It is argued that probabilistic reasoning accounts for the reliability of the conclusions one can draw from the beliefs. Most importantly, reliability commands us to care for the increasing uncertainty of conjunctions of beliefs. Deductive logic captures the agent's commitment towards (...) all conclusions of her beliefs. In other words, it seems that commitment forces the agent to believe conclusions, which reliability tells her to view with scepticism. This conflict is resolved by arguing that commitment merely forces the agent to find the logical conclusions of her beliefs acceptable, not necessarily to believe them. This demands consistency but no deductive closure. Furthermore, it is shown that by restoring consistency, a straightforward connection between high subjective probability and full belief is undermined. Finally, the article delineates how this approach deals with the lottery paradox and the preface paradox. (shrink)

Conceptual spaces are a frequently applied framework for representing concepts. One of its central aims is to find criteria for what makes a concept natural. A prominent demand is that natural concepts cover convex regions in conceptual spaces. The first aim of this paper is to analyse the convexity thesis and the arguments that have been advanced in its favour or against it. Based on this, I argue that most supporting arguments focus on single-domain concepts (e.g., colours, smells, shapes). Unfortunately, (...) these concepts are not the primary examples of natural concepts. Building on this observation, the second aim of the paper is to develop criteria for natural multi-domain concepts. The representation of such concepts has two main aspects: features that are associated with the concept and the probabilistic correlation pattern which the concept captures. Conceptual spaces, together with probabilistic considerations, provide a helpful framework to approach these aspects. With respect to feature representation, the existence of characteristic features (i.e., that apples have a specific taste) is essential. Moreover, natural concepts capture peaks of a probabilistic distribution over complex spaces. They carve up nature at its joints, that is, at areas with no or low probabilistic density. This last aspect is shown to be closely related to the convexity demand. (shrink)

According to an interpretation that has dominated the literature, the traditional interpretation as I call it, the recollection argument aims at establishing the thesis that our learning in this life consists in recollecting knowledge the soul acquired before being born into a body, or thesis R, by using the thesis that there exist forms, thesis F, as a premise. These entities, the forms, are incorporeal, immutable, and transcendent in the sense that they exist separately from material perceptibles, which in turn (...) are related to them through participation and by being caused by them in some sense. But the properties of transcendence, immutability and incorporeality are sufficient to signal forms, and so the thesis that there exist forms claims that there exists entities with at least these three properties. In the first section of this paper, I argue that strong textual and more general exegetical reasons suggest that the traditional interpretation is mistaken. Furthermore, this interpretation, as I argue in the second section, fails to credit Plato with a proper argument for recollection. In section III, I present an alternative account of the argument for R in the "Phaedo". At the same time I defend a more general interpretation according to which the metaphysical doctrine Plato offers in the "Phaedo" represents a natural continuation of the philosophical position that stands at the centre of the dialectical conversations we find in the shorter Socratic dialogues. (shrink)

Prior researches have highlighted challenges and variations arising from the requirements of research ethics committees and ethics governance systems across diverse research fields. This emphasizes the need to investigate how universities convey and implement research ethical practices. Research ethics plays a pivotal role in guiding the integration of ethical principles throughout all stages of research starting from its inception and planning to its completion and the dissemination of results. These practices encompass a range of considerations, reviews, guidelines, and processes aimed (...) at safeguarding the rights, dignity, health, safety, and privacy of research participants. Using the content analysis technique, this paper aims to analyse research ethical practices information on universities’ websites from three developed countries and developing countries respectively using the isomorphism conception. The findings suggest that the coercive, normative, and mimetic isomorphic pressures explain the research ethics governance practices. The ethical practices information was disclosed more on university websites of the developed countries. Suggestions to improve the university’s research ethics governance system for the post-COVID-19 era were provided in the paper. (shrink)

In this paper I shed light on the multi-purposive nature of debates in the European Parliament. As a case in point, I examine a debate on immigration in the wake of a migratory crisis in the Italian island of Lampedusa in early 2011. I analyze the points of view argued for by MEPs, aiming at identifying the different institutional goals that are typically pursued and characterizing the ways in which these goals shape the argumentative exchanges. The link between the multiple (...) goals communicators have and the discourse choices they make can be assumed on the basis of previous research. In line with the pragma-dialectical view of argumentative discourse taking place in the context of more or less institutionalized argumentative activity types, institutional goals are understood as those goals that can be attributed to arguers on the basis of the type of activity in which they are engaged. In identifying the institutional goals, I follow Craig and consider not only goals which are intentional, formal, and directly responsible for a certain discourse choice, but also goals which are functional, strategic, and only indirectly responsible for discourse choices. The analysis shows that the MEPs pursued three kinds of goals: goals that are 1) assigned to them by the occasion of the debate; 2) related to the powers of Parliament; and 3) associated with the different identities they assume in Parliament. While the pursuit of the occasion-related and powers-related goals gave rise to multiple simultaneous discussions, the pursuit of the identity-related goals guided the MEPs’ choices and formulations in these discussions. (shrink)

As the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and state violence against Black Americans dominated our national landscape in the spring of 2020, many in medicine, nursing, and public health made renewed calls...