Patients in a vegetative state/ unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (VS/UWS) pose ethical dilemmas to those involved. Many conflicts occur between professionals and families of these patients. In the Netherlands physicians are supposed to withdraw life sustaining treatment once recovery is not to be expected. Yet these patients have shown to survive sometimes for decades. The role of the families is thought to be important. The aim of this study was to make an inventory of the professional perspective on conflicts in long-term (...) care of patients in VS/UWS. A qualitative study of transcripts on 2 Moral Deliberations (MD’s) in 2 cases of patients in VS/UWS in long-term care facilities. Six themes emerged: 1) Vision on VS/UWS; 2) Treatment and care plan; 3) Impact on relationships; 4) Feelings/attitude; 5) Communication; 6) Organizational aspects. These themes are related to professionals and to what families had expressed to the professionals. We found conflicts as well as contradictory feelings and thoughts to be a general feature in 4 of these themes, both in professionals and families. Conflicts were found in several actors: within families concerning all 6 themes, in nurse teams concerning the theme treatment and care plan, and between physicians concerning all 6 themes. Different visions, different expectations and hope on recovery, deviating goals and contradictory feelings/thoughts in families and professionals can lead to conflicts over a patient with VS/UWS. Key factors to prevent or solve such conflicts are a carefully established diagnosis, clarity upon visions, uniformity in treatment goals and plans, an open and empathic communication, expertise and understanding the importance of contradictory feelings/thoughts. Management should bridge conflicts and support their staff, by developing expertise, by creating stability and by facilitating medical ethical discourses. Shared compassion for the patient might be a key to gain trust and bridge the differences from non-shared to shared decision making. (shrink)

Pediatric oncology has a strong research culture. Most pediatric oncologists are investigators, involved in clinical care as well as research. As a result, a remarkable proportion of children with cancer enrolls in a trial during treatment. This paper discusses the ethical consequences of the unprecedented integration of research and care in pediatric oncology from the perspective of parents and physicians. An empirical ethical approach, combining (1) a narrative review of (primarily) qualitative studies on parents' and physicians' experiences of the pediatric (...) oncology research practice, and (2) comparison of these experiences with existing theoretical ethical concepts about (pediatric) research. The use of empirical evidence enriches these concepts by taking into account the peculiarities that ethical challenges pose in practice. Analysis of the 22 studies reviewed revealed that the integration of research and care has consequences for the informed consent process, the promotion of the child's best interests, and the role of the physician (doctor vs. scientist). True consent to research is difficult to achieve due to the complexity of research protocols, emotional stress and parents' dependency on their child's physician. Parents' role is to promote their child's best interests, also when they are asked to consider enrolling their child in a trial. Parents are almost never in equipoise on trial participation, which leaves them with the agonizing situation of wanting to do what is best for their child, while being fearful of making the wrong decision. Furthermore, a therapeutic misconception endangers correct assessment of participation, making parents inaccurately attribute therapeutic intent to research procedures. Physicians prefer the perspective of a therapist over a researcher. Consequently they may truly believe that in the research setting they promote the child's best interests, which maintains the existence of a therapeutic misconception between them and parents. Due to the integration of research and care, their different ethical perspectives become intertwined in the daily practice of pediatric oncology. Increasing awareness of what this means for the communication between parents and physicians is essential. Future research should focus on efforts that overcome the problems that the synchronicity of research and care evokes. (shrink)

This essay is a brief evaluation of Evert-Jan Viedder's study of conflict in the miracle stories in Matthew 8 and 9. His use of his own conflict model to interpret the conflict between Jesus and the leaders of Israel which is reflected in Matthew 8 and 9, and which at the same time serves as a transparency for the conflict between the community of Matthew and the Pharisees in the post-AD 70 period, is discussed critically in terms of his (...) epistemological perspectives and methodological procedures. (shrink)

Interpretation in science has gained little attention in the past because philosophers of science believed that interpretation belongs to the context of discovery or must be associated with meaning. But scientists often speak about interpretation when they report their findings. Elsewhere I have argue in favour of a pragmatic-rhetorical theory of explanation, and it is in light of this theory that I suggest we can understand interpretation in the natural sciences.

New computer systems of discovery create a research program for logic and philosophy of science. These systems consist of inference rules and control knowledge that guide the discovery process. Their paths of discovery are influenced by the available data and the discovery steps coincide with the justification of results. The discovery process can be described in terms of fundamental concepts of artificial intelligence such as heuristic search, and can also be interpreted in terms of logic. The traditional distinction that places (...) studies of scientific discovery outside the philosophy of science, in psychology, sociology, or history, is no longer valid in view of the existence of computer systems of discovery. It becomes both reasonable and attractive to study the schemes of discovery in the same way as the criteria of justification were studied: empirically as facts, and logically as norms. (shrink)

The ongoing legal and bioethics debates on consent requirements for collecting, storing, and utilizing human biological material for purposes of basic and applied research—that is, genomic research biobanking—have already managed to pass through three ostensibly dissimilar stages.

The paper discusses the regularity account of causation but finds it insufficient as a complete account of our notion of causality. The attractiveness of the regularity account is its attempt to understand causation in terms of empirically accessible features of the world. However, this account does not match our intuition that singular causality is prior in normal epistemic situations and that there is more to causation than mere succession. Apart from succession and regularity, the concept of causality also contains a (...) modal feature which allows us to engage in counterfactual discourses about singular causal events and to claim that a particular cause is both sufficient and necessary for its effect in the circumstances. However, we may directly observe singular causes, but the modal element is not something we can possibly observe. Rather, this element is something we add to our perception of succession. Thus, the paper suggests that the modal feature of causality is a mental construction which was originally formed by our knowledge of certain structural features of similar events in other situations. It stems not from what we actually observe but from what we have observed or may observe under different but relevant circumstances. So the concept of causation has partly an empirical content and partly a constructed one. (shrink)

Jan Zwicky - Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.4 670-671 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Jan Zwicky University of Victoria Susan G. Sterrett. Wittgenstein Flies a Kite: A Story of Models of Wings and Models of the World. New York: Pi Press, 2006. Pp. xxii + 329. Cloth, $26.95 Wittgenstein Flies a Kite focuses (...) on intellectual developments in philosophy, physics, aeronautics, and engineering in the years just prior to the First World War. Sterrett points out that certain thinkers were involved simultaneously in more than one of these fields, and argues for conceptual cross-pollination among them. In particular, she wishes to make a case for connections between the modeling of.. (shrink)

Despite its prominent role in cognitive psychology, its relevance for the research of consciousness, and some helpful clarification (e.g., Revonsuo 1999), the binding problem is still surrounded by considerable confusion. In this paper, I first give an informal but systematic overview on the diversity of forms the binding problem can assume, and then attempt to extract, on the basis of "working definitions" of various much-discussed types of binding, a common denominator. I propose that at the heart of the binding problem (...) lies the notion of representing an entity as having a certain property, and discuss several objections that could be raised against the proposed analysis, as well its usefulness and implications. (shrink)

According to a common opinion, the word ‘semantics’ , derived from the Greek word semantikos , appeared for the first time, at least in modern times, in the book Essai de semantique, science de significations by M. J. A. Bréal . However, Quine says in his lectures on Carnap:As used by C. S. Peirce, “semantic” is the study of the modes of denotation of signs: whether a sign denotes its object through causal or symptomatic connection, or through imagery, or through (...) arbitrary convention and so on. This sense of semantic, namely a theory of meaning, is used also in empirical philology: empirical semantic is the study of historical changes of meanings of words.1For Bréal, semantics was a branch of general linguistics. In particular, semantics was occupied with so-called lexical meaning and its changes through time. Thus, semantics in this sense belonged to what was called “the diachronic treatment of language”. This tradition is fairly alive in contemporary linguistic theory. Quine’s description of the word ‘semantic’ in Peirce corresponds, which Quine explicitly states, to its use in philology. However, some linguists ascribe a more theoretical role to lingustic semantics. Karl Bühler is an example. In his Sprachtheorie he says that a theory of semantic functions of language is a part of theory of language.2 This account is to be found also among philosophers. It is also rather obvious that Peirce did not limit his semantic only to empirical studies. Linguists also use the word ‘semasiology’ instead of ‘semantics’; Bühler proposed the term ‘sematology’ for a general theory of symbols. (shrink)

We generalize a well-known theorem binding the elementary equivalence relation on the level of PAC fields and the isomorphism type of their absolute Galois groups. Our results concern two cases: saturated PAC structures and nonsaturated PAC structures.

Western civilization is over. So begins Jan Zwicky’s trenchant exploration of the root of global cultural and ecological collapse: a way of thinking that is also linked to some of the West’s most noted achievements. The Renaissance merged imperial enterprise with Islamic algebra and recently recovered Greek mathematics to precipitate mechanized industry and resource extraction; these in turn made possible the growth of capitalism, the military-industrial complex, and Big Technology. Despite its self-image as objective, Zwicky argues, the West’s style of (...) thought is not politically neutral, but intensely anthropocentric. It has led those who adopt it to regard the more-than-human world as nothing more than timber licences and drilling sites, where value is not recognized unless it is monetized. Oblivious to context and blind to big-picture thinking, it analyzes, mechanizes, digitizes, and systematizes, while rejecting empathy and compassion as distorting influences. Lyric comprehension, in Zwicky’s view, offers an alternative to this way of thinking, and she provides a wide range of examples. Once upon a Time in the West documents how a narrow epistemological style has left Western thought blind to critical features of reality, and how the terrifying consequences of that blinkered vision are now beginning to unfold. (shrink)

Many philosophers accept derivative blameworthiness for ignorant conduct – the idea that the blameworthiness for one’s ignorance can ‘transfer’ to blameworthiness for one’s subsequent ignorant conduct. In this chapter we ask the question what it actually means that blameworthiness would transfer, and explore four distinct views and their merits. On views (I) and (II), one’s overall degree of blameworthiness is determined by factors relevant to one’s ignorance and/or one’s subsequent conduct, and transfer only involves an increase in scope. On views (...) (III) and (IV), one’s overall degree of blameworthiness is determined by factors relevant to one’s ignorance as well as one’s subsequent conduct, and transfer might not only entail an increase in scope, but also in degree. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 9, September 2022.

We extend stit logic by adding a spatial dimension. This enables us to distinguish between powers and opportunities of agents. Powers are agent-specific and do not depend on an agent’s location. Opportunities do depend on locations, and are the same for every agent. The central idea is to define the real possibility to see to the truth of a condition in space and time as the combination of the power and the opportunity to do so. The focus on agent-relative powers (...) and space-relative opportunities firmly roots effectivity of an autonomous choice making agent in a space–time picture. Our space–time view will be classically Newtonian, since we will assume relativistic phenomena do not play a role in agentive effectivity. We show how our semantics naturally distinguishes between different kinds of histories; histories that reflect real possibilities and histories that reflect counterfactual possibilities. Furthermore, we discuss how the spatial picture sheds light on conceptual problems plaguing the central stit property of ‘independence of agency’. At several points in the article we will emphasise and defend the differences with Belnap’s theory of agency in relativistic branching space–times. (shrink)

We define a first-order extension LK(CP) of the cutting planes proof system CP as the first-order sequent calculus LK whose atomic formulas are CP-inequalities ∑ i a i · x i ≥ b (x i 's variables, a i 's and b constants). We prove an interpolation theorem for LK(CP) yielding as a corollary a conditional lower bound for LK(CP)-proofs. For a subsystem R(CP) of LK(CP), essentially resolution working with clauses formed by CP- inequalities, we prove a monotone interpolation theorem (...) obtaining thus an unconditional lower bound (depending on the maximum size of coefficients in proofs and on the maximum number of CP-inequalities in clauses). We also give an interpolation theorem for polynomial calculus working with sparse polynomials. The proof relies on a universal interpolation theorem for semantic derivations [16, Theorem 5.1]. LK(CP) can be viewed as a two-sorted first-order theory of Z considered itself as a discretely ordered Z-module. One sort of variables are module elements, another sort are scalars. The quantification is allowed only over the former sort. We shall give a construction of a theory LK(M) for any discretely ordered module M (e.g., LK(Z) extends LK(CP)). The interpolation theorem generalizes to these theories obtained from discretely ordered Z-modules. We shall also discuss a connection to quantifier elimination for such theories. We formulate a communication complexity problem whose (suitable) solution would allow to improve the monotone interpolation theorem and the lower bound for R(CP). (shrink)

La recherche récente a régulièrement remis en cause la catégorie moderne de « lois sacrées » désignant des inscriptions grecques qui forment un ensemble mal défini. Cet article entend dépasser le corpus traditionnel des « lois sacrées » en présentant un projet de recueil alternatif de « Normes rituelles grecques » (CGRN pour l’acronyme anglais), qui s’appuie sur des critères plus sélectifs et sera publié en ligne.

This article provides a survey and analysis of recent research in the sociology of emotions. I address theoretical advances by discussing three theories that have been making some inroads into the study of emotions: identity theory, exchange theory, and justice theory. I also address substantive advances including an analysis of specific emotions and emotions as they relate to economic activity and labor. Finally, I discuss some innovative developments that show promise for future research in the area. Overall, the sociology of (...) emotions remains an active area of research; however, there is still work that needs to be done. Throughout this article, I suggest avenues for further research. (shrink)

As corporate social responsibility involves a voluntary business endeavour to address social and environmental issues beyond legal compliance, governments cannot fall back on hierarchical command-and-control policies to support it. As such, it is complementary with the increasing popularity of public policies known as New Governance policies, where the government is engaged in a horizontal inter-organizational network of societal actors and where public policy is both formed and executed by the interacting and voluntary efforts from a multitude of stakeholders. However, such (...) policies are known to generate substantive uncertainty about the content of CSR and its related issues, strategic uncertainty regarding the behavior of the actors involved and institutional uncertainty related to the interaction process involved in the institutional change. We explore New Governance policy instruments to address these uncertainties in the context CSR and discuss the experiences with these methods in the European Union. (shrink)

Biography of the Indian philosopher Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950.

This unusual introduction to political philosophy draws on its history and main theories_classic liberal, democratic, socialist, radical_with an eye to how each sees the place of the individual in the political order.

In this paper we present a dynamic assignment language which extends the dynamic predicate logic of Groenendijk and Stokhof [1991: 39–100] with assignment and with generalized quantifiers. The use of this dynamic assignment language for natural language analysis, along the lines of o.c. and [Barwise, 1987: 1–29], is demonstrated by examples. We show that our representation language permits us to treat a wide variety of donkey sentences: conditionals with a donkey pronoun in their consequent and quantified sentences with donkey pronouns (...) anywhere in the scope of the quantifier. It is also demonstrated that our account does not suffer from the so-called proportion problem.Discussions about the correctness or incorrectness of proposals for dynamic interpretation of language have been hampered in the past by the difficulty of seeing through the ramifications of the dynamic semantic clauses (phrased in terms of input-output behaviour) in non-trivial cases. To remedy this, we supplement the dynamic semantics of our representation language with an axiom system in the style of Hoare. While the representation languages of barwise and Groenendijk and Stokhof were not axiomatized, the rules we propose form a deduction system for the dynamic assignment language which is proved correct and complete with respect to the semantics. (shrink)

If neoliberal globalization was a regime of American economic unilateralism, has this been succeeded by or combined with political and military unilateralism? This discussion probes the emerging features of a hybrid formation of neoliberal empire; a mélange of political-military and economic unilateralism, an attempt to merge geopolitics with the aims and techniques of neoliberalism. This is examined in relation to government, privatization, trade, aid, marketing and the occupation of Iraq. A further question is what kind of wider strategy is taking (...) shape amid the turmoil of the new wars. (shrink)

Section 1 One of the big problems facing us is the need to plan for the betterment and improvement of society. In any status quo there are many unsatisfactory moments and experience shows that with changing conditions, even those elements of our communal structure that work well will often get out of step and become a problem. We need then to introduce devices both to alleviate present troubles and, if possible, to anticipate future ones. On the whole, it might appear (...) to the untutored eye that the matter is relatively simple. For instance, if we keep increasing prices of commodities without increasing incomes, and especially if we allow inflation to proceed unfettered as well, the situation will certainly deteriorate. What we need to. (shrink)