This study presents findings from an ontological and contextual determination of the concept of dignity. The study had a caritative and caring science perspective and a hermeneutical design. The aim of this study was to increase caring science knowledge of dignity and to gain a determination of dignity as a concept. Eriksson’s model for conceptual determination is made up of five part-studies. The ontological and contextual determination indicates that dignity can be understood as absolute dignity, the spiritual dimension characterized by (...) responsibility, freedom, duty, and service, and relative dignity, characterized by the bodily, external aesthetic dimension and the psychical, inner ethical dimension. Dignity exists in human beings both as absolute and relative dignity. (shrink)

Recent research on moral decision-making has suggested that many common moral judgments are based on immediate intuitions. However, some individuals arrive at highly counterintuitive utilitarian conclusions about when it is permissible to harm other individuals. Such utilitarian judgments have been attributed to effortful reasoning that has overcome our natural emotional aversion to harming others. Recent studies, however, suggest that such utilitarian judgments might also result from a decreased aversion to harming others, due to a deficit in empathic concern and social (...) emotion. The present study investigated the neural basis of such indifference to harming using functional neuroimaging during engagement in moral dilemmas. A tendency to counterintuitive utilitarian judgment was associated both with ‘psychoticism’, a trait associated with a lack of empathic concern and antisocial tendencies, and with ‘need for cognition’, a trait reflecting preference for effortful cognition. Importantly, only psychoticism was also negatively correlated with activation in the subgenual cingulate cortex (SCC), a brain area implicated in empathic concern and social emotions such as guilt, during counterintuitive utilitarian judgments. Our findings suggest that when individuals reach highly counterintuitive utilitarian conclusions, this need not reflect greater engagement in explicit moral deliberation. It may rather reflect a lack of empathic concern, and diminished aversion to harming others. (shrink)

BackgroundEverybody has the right to decide whether to receive specific medical treatment or not and to provide their free, prior and informed consent to do so. As dementia progresses, people with Alzheimer’s dementia (PwAD) can lose their capacity to provide informed consent to complex medical treatment. When the capacity to consent is lost, the autonomy of the affected person can only be guaranteed when an interpretable and valid advance directive exists. Advance directives are not yet common in Germany, and their (...) validity is often questionable. Once the dementia diagnosis has been made, it is assumed to be too late to write an advance directive. One approach used to support the completion of advance directives is ‘Respecting Choices’®—an internationally recognised, evidence-based model of Advance Care Planning (ACP), which, until now, has not been evaluated for the target group of PwAD. This study’s aims include (a) to investigate the proportion of valid advance directives in a memory clinic population of persons with suspected AD, (b) to determine the predictors of valid advance directives, and (c) to examine whether the offer of ACP can increase the proportion of valid advance directives in PwAD.MethodWe intend to recruit at leastN = 250 participants from two memory clinics in 50 consecutive weeks. Of these, the first 25 weeks constitute the baseline phase (no offer of ACP), the following 25 weeks constitute the intervention phase (offer of ACP). The existence and validity of an advance directive will be assessed twice (before and after the memory clinic appointment). Moreover, potential predictors of valid advance directives are assessed.DiscussionThe results of this study will enhance the development of consent procedures for advance directives of PwAD based on the ACP/Respecting Choices (R) approach. Therefore, this project contributes towards increasing the autonomy and inclusion of PwAD and the widespread acceptance of valid advance directives in PwAD.Trial RegistrationDRKS, DRKS00026691, registered 15th of October 2021,https://www.drks.de/drks_web/navigate.do?navigationId=trial.HTML&TRIAL_ID=DRKS00026691. (shrink)

Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...

Background Scientific and technological advancements in mapping and understanding the interrelated pathways through which biological and environmental exposures affect disease development create new possibilities for detecting disease risk factors. Early detection of such risk factors may help prevent disease onset or moderate the disease course, thereby decreasing associated disease burden, morbidity, and mortality. However, the ethical implications of screening for disease risk factors are unclear and the current literature provides a fragmented and case-by-case picture. Methods To identify key ethical considerations (...) arising from the early detection of disease risk factors, we performed a systematic scoping review. The Scopus, Embase, and Philosopher’s Index databases were searched for peer-reviewed, academic records, which were included if they were written in English or Dutch and concerned the ethics of (1) early detection of (2) disease risk factors for (3) disease caused by environmental factors or gene-environment interactions. All records were reviewed independently by at least two researchers. Results After screening 2034 titles and abstracts, and 112 full papers, 55 articles were included in the thematic synthesis of the results. We identified eight common ethical themes: (1) Reliability and uncertainty in early detection, (2) autonomy, (3) privacy, (4) beneficence and non-maleficence, (5) downstream burdens on others, (6) responsibility, (7) justice, and (8) medicalization and conceptual disruption. We identified several gaps in the literature, including a relative scarcity of research on ethical considerations associated with environmental preventive health interventions, a dearth of practical suggestions on how to address expressed concerns about overestimating health capacities, and a lack of insights into preventing undue attribution of health responsibility to individuals. Conclusions The ethical concerns arising with the early detection of risk factors are often interrelated and complex. Comprehensive ethical analyses are needed that are better embedded in normative frameworks and also assess and weigh the expected benefits of early risk factor detection. Such research is necessary for developing and implementing responsible and fair preventive health policies. (shrink)

Gene‐editing research is a complex science and foreign in most communities including Botswana. Adopting a qualitative deliberative framework with 109 participants from 7 selected ethnic communities in Botswana, we explored the perceptions of local communities on cultural values, norms, and beliefs that may motivate or deter likely participation in the use of gene‐editing related research. What emerged as the ethnic community's motivators for research participation include the potential for gene‐editing technologies to promote access to individualized medications, and the possibility of (...) protecting family members from genetic related diseases. Deterrents for research participation include cultural values such as implications of lineage for chieftainship, trust, fear or anxiety, uncertainty, and sensitivity on the use of gene‐editing. Findings of our study have implications for continuous engagement with local communities to explore potential ways of addressing cultural sensitivities that can further deter their participation in future gene‐editing related research. (shrink)

Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles sets out to rewrite history in that it corrects the distorted colonial vision by creating symbols for a new national identity—dealing with self-consciousness, loss of self-identity, and search for identity in coming to terms with the wreckage of war and independence. In Snakepit, Isegawa returns to his native Uganda haunted by greed and megalomania, a period when Idi Amin's dictatorship turned men in power into agents of deception, extortion, and murder. This article critically analyzes the “postcolonial“ (...) imagery in Snakepit as forms of resistance in the aftermath of colonialism and in the story “The Return of Shadow” in Viviane Sassen's collection of photographs Flamboya, and so challenge the way Western eyes have perceived the African continent. Snakepit and Flamboya thus both function as tools with which Africa's collective identity is redefined, the former coping with Uganda's post-European struggle for independence and fight against African corruption, the latter shedding light on the “darkness” Africa has been associated with by casting a post-European shadow on the image of Africa. (shrink)

In Lewin et al. 359–386) the authors proved that certain systems of annotated logics are algebraizable in the sense of Block and Rigozzi 396). Later in Lewin et al. the study of the associated quasi-varieties of annotated algebras is initiated. In this paper we continue the study of the these classes of algebras, in particular, we report some recent results about the free annotated algebras.

The gene regulation function (GRF) provides an operational description of a promoter behavior as a function of the concentration of one of its transcriptional regulators. Behind this apparently trivial definition lies a central concept in biological control: the GRF provides the input/output relationship of each edge in a transcriptional network, independently from the molecular interactions involved. Here we discuss how existing methods allow direct measurement of the GRF, and how several trade‐offs between scalability and accuracy have hindered its application to (...) relatively large networks. We discuss the theoretical and technical requirements for obtaining the GRF. Based on these requirements, we introduce a simplified and easily scalable method that is able to capture the significant parameters of the GRF. The GRF is able to predict the behavior of a simple genetic circuit, illustrating how addressing the quantitative nature of gene regulation substantially increases our comprehension on the mechanisms of gene control. (shrink)

The study of anarchism as a philosophical, political, and social movement has burgeoned both in the academy and in the global activist community in recent years. Taking advantage of this boom in anarchist scholarship, Nathan J. Jun and Shane Wahl have compiled twenty-six cutting-edge essays on this timely topic in New Perspectives on Anarchism.

In dieser Schrift begründet Dante die Priorität der Volks- und Muttersprache vor der lateinischen Gelehrtensprache und fordert eine italienische Hochsprache. Er untermauert seine Ausführungen durch eine anthropologische Erörterung der menschlichen Sprachfähigkeit. Dank einer originellen Interpretation des biblischen Mythos vom Turmbau von Babel legt er eine vernünftig begründete Neubewertung der Vielfalt und der historischen Entwicklung der Sprachen vor. Das Problem der Sprache stellt sich im Denken Dantes in zweifacher Weise: als Problem der Sprache der Philosophie und unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Philosophie (...) der Sprache. In "De vulgari eloquentia" bietet Dante ein ganzes Arsenal metaphysischer Paradigmen auf, um der sprachlichen Verständigung der Menschen eine unvordenkliche Dignität zu geben. Er stellt die gesamte Philosophie in den Dienst des Menschen als sprechendes Wesen. Auch wenn Dante die Doppelbestimmung der Sprache als sinnliches Zeichen, das den Gedanken des einen Menschen einem andern zu vermitteln fähig ist, von der Tradition übernimmt, setzt er andere Akzente. Die Sprache der Menschen ist nicht nur eine im Vergleich zur Transparenz der reinen Geister unvollkommenere Form der Kommunikation, sondern sie wird positiv als die dem Menschen gänzlich angemessene und entsprechende Form der Kommunikation interpretiert: Das Sprechen ist der "herausragende Akt des menschlichen Geschlechts". Mit dem Erscheinen von "De vulgari eloquentia" liegt die vierbändige Ausgabe der Philosophischen Werke Dante Alighieris vollständig vor. Bislang erschienen Bd. 1: Das Schreiben an Cangrande (PhB 463) Bd. 2: Disputation über das Wasser und die Erde (PhB 464) Bd. 4: Das Gastmahl I-IV (PhB 466a-d). (shrink)

This book offers a major reassessment of Peter Abelard's modal logic and theory of modalities, presenting them as far more uniform and consistent than was until now recognized. Irene Binini offers new ways of connecting Abelard's modal views with other parts of his logic, semantics, metaphysics and theology. Further, the work also provides a comprehensive study of the logical context in which Abelard's theories originated and developed, by presenting fresh evidence about many 11th- and 12th-century sources that are still (...) unpublished. This analysis sheds new light on the relations between Abelard and ancient authors such as Aristotle, Boethius, and Priscian, as well as between Abelard and his contemporaries, such as Anselm of Canterbury, William of Champeaux, Joscelin of Soissons, and Alberic of Paris. (shrink)

To prevent and reduce the transmission of the coronavirus to vulnerable populations, the World Health Organization recommended the restriction of visitors to nursing homes. It was recognised that such restrictions could have profound impact on residents and their families. Nonetheless, these measures were strictly imposed over a prolonged period in many countries; impeding families from remaining involved in their relatives’ care and diluting the meaningful connections for residents with society. It is timely to explore the impact of public health measures (...) on people living in nursing homes from an ethical perspective. In order to foreground the ethical dimensions of the implications of visitor restrictions in nursing homes, we compiled an ethical case that reflects some recent experiences of nursing homes residents and their families, in the Irish Republic. We describe a series of events encountered by a woman and her family during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 and we deploy an ethical decision-making tool to guide and structure our analysis. Our case analysis draws attention to ethical principles that are relevant to explicating the ethical duties and obligations that arise in relation to the interests, well-being, and safety of residents and their families, as well as nursing home staff and the wider community during a pandemic. These include the right of autonomy, trust, minimising harm, and proportionality. We conclude that a number of different strategies should be adopted by nursing homes and relevant regulatory bodies. This includes honest, regular communication between the nursing home staff, the resident and their family. Central to communications is the resident’s wishes, their current clinical status and the all-important wider public health obligations. National strategies include mass vaccination, the timely provision of guidance documents and interventions from regulatory bodies that are patient-centred, adaptable, and cost effective. (shrink)

Known throughout East Asia as Mengzi, or "Master Meng," Mencius was a Chinese philosopher of the late Zhou dynasty, an instrumental figure in the spread of the Confucian tradition, and a brilliant illuminator of its ideas. Mencius was active during the Warring States Period, in which competing powers sought to control the declining Zhou empire. Like Confucius, Mencius journeyed to one feudal court after another, searching for a proper lord who could put his teachings into practice. Only a leader who (...) possessed the moral qualities of a true king could unify China, Mencius believed, and in his defense of Zhou rule and Confucian philosophy, he developed an innovative and highly nuanced approach to understanding politics, self-cultivation, and human nature, profoundly influencing the course of Confucian thought and East Asian culture. _Mencius_ is a record of the philosopher's conversations with warring lords, disciples, and adversaries of the Way, as well as a collection of pronouncements on government, human nature, and a variety of other philosophical and political subjects. Mencius is largely concerned with the motivations of human actors and their capacity for mutual respect. He builds on the Confucian idea of _ren_, or humaneness, and places it alongside the complementary principle of _yi_, or rightness, advancing a complex notion of what is right for certain individuals as they perform distinct roles in specific situations. Consequently, Mencius's impact was felt not only in the thought of the intellectual and social elite but also in the value and belief systems of all Chinese people. (shrink)

This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them-the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain-both attempt to (...) think through and thus revisualize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how "feminism as critique" can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both. (shrink)

Recent attempts to explain why modesty should be considered a virtue have failed. A more adequate account is that modesty involves understanding how far one's accomplishments ought to be taken as definitive of one's value. Modest people communicate this self-understanding through behaviour motivated by the desire to ensure that their accomplishments do not cause pain to others. This virtuous mode of self-awareness involves recognizing that one is both defined by social standards of success and irreducible to these assessments. Modest agents (...) do not think themselves ‘better’ than others, but recognize that they rank higher on the particular social standard in question. They thus both avoid causing pain and serve as exemplars of virtuous self-responsibility. (shrink)

The concept of sustainability was developed in response to stakeholder demands. One of the key mechanisms for engaging stakeholders is sustainability disclosure, often in the form of a report. Yet, how reporting is used to engage stakeholders is understudied. Using resource dependence and stakeholder theories, we investigate how companies within the same industry address different dependencies on stakeholders for economic, natural environment, and social resources and thus engage stakeholders accordingly. To achieve this objective, we conducted our research using qualitative research (...) methods. Our findings suggest that the resource dependencies on different stakeholders lead to development of different stakeholder relationships and thus appropriate resources within the company to execute engagement strategies that are informing, responding, or involving. Our research explains why diversity exists in sustainability disclosure by studying how it is used to engage stakeholders. We find that five sustainability reporting characteristics are associated with the company’s stakeholder engagement strategy: directness of communication, clarity of stakeholder identity, deliberateness of collecting feedback, broadness of stakeholder inclusiveness, and utilization of stakeholder engagement for learning. Our study develops the literature by providing insight into companies’ choices of stakeholder engagement strategy thus explaining diversity in sustainability reporting based on the characteristics and relationships with specific stakeholders. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 405-414 [Access article in PDF] Nihilism in Seamus Heaney Irene Gilsenan Nordin I WISH TO BEGIN WITH THE WORDS of Nietzsche's madman as he makes his famous appearance, running into the crowded marketplace in the bright morning with his lit lantern in his hand, crying out his proclamation of the death of God: "'Where has God gone?' he [cries]. 'I shall tell you. (...) We have killed him—you and I. We are all his murderers.'" He calls out in despair to the bemused and indifferent crowd his rhetorical questions: How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? 1These words of the madman express the abyss of despair experienced on the realization that God is dead, the state of desolation which articulates what Nietzsche himself understood to be the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment. But these words of despair sum up more than that; they sum up the underlying problems of Nietzsche's age, and indeed our age: the basic mistrust of all previously held systems of value; the collapse of all ordering principle; and the erosion of the authority of tradition. In other words, reason has revealed the inadequacy of tradition, and has itself lost the ability to provide us with [End Page 405] any reliable means of evaluation—since any such evaluation must be based on the very principles which are themselves under attack.This stark realization of the absence of all sense of meaning in values previously held to be true leads to the condition that Nietzsche calls "nihilism," (Latin nihil, "nothing"), the condition that he considered to be the central problem of Modernity. This condition, Nietzsche believed, is brought about by the realization of three factors: first, the loss of faith in what he calls a "'meaning' in all events," a loss which contributes to an experience of aimlessness; second, the realization that there is no inherent pattern to the world or to history that can lend universal coherence; and third, the loss of faith in the existence of a stable world of being which can be evaluated according to steadfast, enduring principles. The rejection of these three categories, which Nietzsche terms "aim," "unity," and "being," leads to an experience of a world that appears "valueless," in other words, the experience of nihilism. 2Nietzsche, whose thought was considered by Heidegger to be the "final thought of Western metaphysics," 3 is seen as a heralding voice of postmodernism. 4 In this respect, Nietzsche's "death of God" can be seen to be about the death of modernist philosophical presuppositions, the death of the logocentric metaphysics of presence. But, parallel with the notion of crisis that Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God expresses and the ensuing critique of "metanarratives" which his thought has helped to give rise to, 5 Nietzsche's declaration of crisis can also be seen as a statement of faith. His interpretation of the problems of our age, while on the one hand "negatively" proclaiming the death of God and denying the possibility of shared meaning—or in Lyotard's terms "the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable" (p. 81), can, on the other hand, be viewed in a more "positive" light. The term "nihilism" itself, as Nietzsche has shown us, is ambiguous, comprising both the concepts of what he termed "active nihilism" and "passive nihilism," which involves a complex interplay between the dual forces of affirmation and negation (WP, p. 22).As the Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, points out, the most general distinction between these forces can be seen in terms of "strength of spirit," where nihilism is considered as both "a sign (Zeichen) of the strengthened power... (shrink)

This paper explores some of the strategies used for translating the Old Testament from Hebrew into Chinese and its subsequent reception and interpretation. Special attention will be devoted to the Ten Commandments and important personalities like Abraham or Moses. According to their reception, they were endowed with characteristics valued in Chinese history and culture. The introduction of science seemingly contradicted the questions of Creation. Since Creation and the scientific perceptions of the universe were interconnected, those people dealing with Scriptural translation (...) had to exercise special ingenuity to resolve the contradictions. (shrink)

This study examines the relationships between a company''s emphasis on discretionary social responsibility, environment, and firm performance. It tests the proposition that environmental munificence and dynamism moderate the relationship between discretionary social responsibility and financial performance. Social responsibility was measured with a three-item scale in a sample of 62 firms using a questionnaire. Environmental munificence and dynamism were measured using archival sources as was financial performance (return on assets and return on sales). The results of moderated regression analyses and subgroup (...) analyses found a significant moderating effect of environment on the social responsibility-firm performance relationship. Discretionary social responsibility contributes to firm performance in environments that are dynamic and munificent. (shrink)

According to Aristotle, the most characteristic activity of friendship is “living together” [to suzên]. This paper seeks to understand living together in the light of his famous, foundational claim that humans are social by nature. Based on an interpretation of Nicomachean Ethics 9.9, I explain our need for friends in terms of a more fundamental human need to appreciate one's life as a whole. I then argue that friendship is built into the very structure of human life itself such that (...) human living is living together. (shrink)

Modern investigators of cognition ask about the conditions under which faculties occur rather than about their existence. This tendency, combined with the axiom of parsimony, emphasizes a paradigm shift in the fundamental principles of economic thought in science, mimicking evolutionary conceptualizations. The Ruchkin model of memory-related brain activity replaces less economic models. From interdisciplinary approaches, proceduralist models for other memory-related processes analogously support this model.

Comparisons have frequently been made between the works of Dante and Milton, more often than not by critics with a definite predilection one or the other poet. The author of this systematic comparison has approached the task without partisanship, but with a warm admiration for both poets. It is her contention that, although Dante was generally out of favor during the seventeenth century, even in Italy, Milton had read the Divina Commedia sympathetically and with care by the time he came (...) to write Paradise Lost. In substantiation Professor Samuel cites many parallel uses of language, imagery, theme, and method, while also taking note of divergences. Source materials are given in the appendixes, including Milton's references to Dante and a list of previously published comparisons. (shrink)

The proliferation of religious heritage seems to flow self-evidently from the processes of de-churching and secularization taking place in many European societies. Although having become redundant or outdated, certain religious buildings, objects or practices may be revalued as religious heritage. This selective setting apart of religious places or practices considered ‘redundant’ as heritage – a value-adding process – involves a form of sacralization. Such processual perspective helps religious heritage to be seen as not just ‘existing’, but, like all heritage, as (...) made. Importantly, the sacredness of religious heritage diverges from the sacredness of religion. With multiple sacralites attributed to it, religious heritage may speak to much larger and diverse audiences as global, national or cultural heritage. (shrink)