The past decade has witnessed escalating legal and ethical challenges to the diagnosis of death by neurologic criteria. The legal tactic of demanding consent for the apnea test, if successful, can halt the DNC. However, US law is currently unsettled and inconsistent in this matter. Consent has been required in several trial cases in Montana and Kansas but not in Virginia and Nevada. In this paper, we analyze and evaluate the legal and ethical bases for requiring consent before apnea testing (...) and defend such a requirement by appealing to ethical and legal principles of informed consent and battery and the right to refuse medical treatment. We conclude by considering and rebutting two major objections to a consent requirement for apnea testing: a justice-based objection to allocate scarce resources fairly and a social utility objection that halting the diagnosis of brain death will reduce the number of organ donors. (shrink)

During his lifetime, Sir Ivor Jennings was well known as the author of several standard books on constitutional law. He acted as constitutional adviser to the governments of Ceylon and Pakistan and was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ceylon. This 1956 book followed in the tradition of his earlier The British Constitution and is a clear statement by an expert with a characteristically practical point of view. It is principally concerned with a practical problem: what constitution shall be given (...) to a new country about to govern itself for the first time? Published at a time when colonial empires were moving more or less peaceably towards self-government, it was based on a series of broadcast talks originally commissioned by the BBC in the belief that the experiences gained in Asia were in principle applicable to other countries approaching self-government. (shrink)

Please see I. A. Richards (ISBN: 0415217318) for details or email [email protected].

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

AMBIS is a complete identification system which includes (1) a highly reproducible electrophoresis unit; (2) a beta‐scanner with the ability to rapidly locate and measure beta particle emission data from a variety of isotopes and surfaces; and (3) an IBM computer with a massive data storage capacity for the emission data plus subsequent manipulation of that data. Hence it provides a rapid facility for (1) classification of all types of micro‐organisms, (2) examination of cells of multicellular plants and animals, (3) (...) routine determination of molecular weights of one or more proteins in a complex mixture, (4) quantification of single or mixed compounds in a band, (5) scanning and quantification of dot and other blots, immunodiffusion precipitates and probes, (6) direct counting of radioactive solutions from RIA, column fractions, etc., without the need of expensive scintillation fluids with their consequent hazards, (7) circumventing the need of much time‐consuming auto‐radiography, and (8) setting up databases plus exchange and transference of data between AMBIS systems in different locations via floppy disk, modem or other forms of rapid transmission. (shrink)

We have evolved to become who we are, at least in part, due to our general drive to create new things and ideas. When seeking to improve our creations, ideas, or situations, we systematically overlook opportunities to perform subtractive changes. For example, when tasked with giving feedback on an academic paper, reviewers will tend to suggest additional explanations and analyses rather than delete existing ones. Here, we show that this addition bias is systematically reflected in English language statistics along several (...) distinct dimensions. First, we show that words associated with an increase in quantity or number (e.g., add, addition, more, most) are more frequent than words associated with a decrease in quantity or number (e.g., subtract, subtraction, less, least). Second, we show that in binomial expressions, addition-related words are mentioned first, that is, add and subtract rather than subtract and add. Third, we show that the distributional semantics of verbs of change, such as to improve and to transform, overlap more with the distributional semantics of add/increase than subtract/decrease, which suggests that change verbs are implicitly biased toward addition. Fourth, addition-related words have more positive connotations than subtraction-related words. Fifth, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art large language models, such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-3), are also biased toward addition. We discuss the implications of our results for research on cognitive biases and decision-making. (shrink)

In his Sermo 150, Augustine argues that the desire to attain the vita beata has been the motivation for all types of philosophy, and that it is also the reason that people would give if asked why they became Christians; the quest is common to all human beings, whether good or evil. Appetitio...beatae vitae philosophis Christianisque communis est.The truth of Augustine’s claims is illustrated in a variety of Latin Christian works from the fourth century, which take up the traditional philosophical (...) theme of happiness and the summum bonum. Lactantius relates the highest good to the immortality of the soul, and calls upon his readers to find their destiny by devoting themselves to the worship of the true God; the worship of God is the greatest virtue, and it wins the blessedness of eternal reward. (shrink)

Thirty years after the demise of the Soviet bloc, there still persists a rhetoric of differentiation and a discursive polarisation between the Western and the non-Western educational thinking and practices. This rhetoric overshadows a potential similarity, or homogeneity, between the dominant and several marginalised contexts. Regional, local and personal variations are prematurely attributed to fundamental, if often poorly argued, cultural differences. We seek to introduce and to preliminarily summarise the existing understandings of refraction in education and social research. Sporadically used (...) but seldom defined, the refraction metaphor appears to feature: (a) a multiplicity of viewpoints as an incentive for social research, (b) non-relativistic, scientific progress as an end value for understanding social reality, (c) a balanced approach towards homogeneity and heterogeneity in social research, and (d) a substantially historical orientation towards analysing homogeneity and heterogeneity. Education in the former socialist European countries demonstrates how heterogeneity is rhetorically overstated and how variations can be more adequately addressed by analysing refractions. (shrink)

One result of this, in the present case, is Mr. Alston's failure to appreciate the distinction between the "Principle of Internal Relatedness," the "Principle of Mutual Immanence," and the "Doctrine of Relativity," which he treats as simply equivalent ; and it is upon this equivalence that his entire case rests.

IN the inquiry into this topic it is desirable at the outset to enter into some linguistic examination, for this will facilitate, not only the avoidance of possible confusions because of the diversity of senses in which the word "good" is used, but also the recognition of where exactly lie the philosophical issues with respect to the "good.".

This is an earlier version of a chapter from my book "Plato's Republic as a Philosophical Drama on Doing Well" (2014). The book analyses Plato’s Politeia (= Republic) as a philosophical drama in which the participants turn out to be models of various types of psychic constitution, and nothing is said by them which may be considered to be an opinion of Plato himself (with all that that entails for Platonism). The debate in Book I between Socrates and Thrasymachus serves (...) as a test case for the assumptions that the Socratic method involves searching for truth or examining the opinions of interlocutors and that Socrates is the mouthpiece of Plato. Socrates and Thrasymachus are usually assumed to be arguing about justice. In fact, they are going through the motions of an eristic debate, where the aim is not to discover the truth about the matter under discussion but to defeat the opponent by fair means or foul, but especially foul. The outrageous wordplay used by both men is not so obvious in translation, and in any case tends to be ignored or explained away by scholars who assume that Plato the philosopher was writing a philosophical treatise (an exposition of philosophical ideas) and not a philosophical drama (a presentation of philosophically interesting models, to be compared and contrasted by the reader). (shrink)

This essay is a contribution to the field of institutional studies in that it treats the State as a substantial phenomenon, composed of institutions that require analysis in their own right. Here, the focus is on the political form of African states from the 1960s to the 1980s. On the one hand, I will follow Bourdieu here in insisting that the study of government demands that we know something of the history of political thought (la pensée politique). This simple observation (...) is seldomly applied when it comes to politics in postcolonial Africa. On the other, I use Peter Wagner´s concept of modernity to show that struggles against colonialism and Imperialism and the pursuit of self-determination for African and Asian peoples are unambiguously struggles against domination and for autonomy. The emergence of Third World nationalism (and the Non-Aligned Movement) is an event, therefore, firmly in modernity. So too is the phenomenon of the One-party state in Africa. (shrink)

This paper will investigate patterns of historical periodisation with regard to public intellectual work. It will begin with a focus on educational studies and with a specific case study of the Centre for Applied Research in Education (CARE) at the University of East Anglia. The case study will highlight the roles of leading public intellectuals such as Lawrence Stenhouse and explore the genre of applied research. The notion of applied research in education explicitly sought to connect the project of public (...) education and social justice with research which was applied to these projects In this way, in an idealised form, the public intellectual and applied researcher would offer aid and sustenance, which would enhance and energise the overall project of public education for all By exploring a case study of an institution and the associated research genre I hope to elucidate the relationship between educational studies and the public intellectual and also to examine the changing prospects for such work over different historical periods. Part of the task is to delineate the changing ‘windows of opportunity’ for public intellectual work. And as we shall see, Brief Encounters are a reasonable characterisation of such patterns of possibility Using the case study as an entry point the paper goes on to discuss broader questions about public intellectuals’ prospects. These questions are embedded in the discussion of some of the work of Sandel on market societies, and Applebaum on changing patterns of democratic engagement. The paper concludes with a commentary on contemporary and future prospects for public intellectual engagement. (shrink)

Many instances of "horismos" in Aristotle's Topics and Alexander's commentary have been altered to "horos" in the transmission of the texts. Philological and philosophical reasons are provided to substantiate this claim and to explain the phenomenon.

The reasons for assuming an established orthodox Stoic school with scholarchs are considered and refuted. The traditional line of Stoics is a diadochic device to link Panaetius, and later, Posidonius, back to Zeno of Citium, using a chain of teachers and pupils. These Stoics were independent teachers sharing a general worldview but differing to a greater or lesser extent in the details.

Originally published in 1970, this volume provides a survey of the wide field of the development of education since 1800. The book is structured as follows: Part One: The General Development of Popular Education English Elementary Education, the Development of Primary Education, English Secondary Education Part Two: Specific Topics in Education Independent, Private and Public Schools, Technical and Technological Education, The Universities, Teacher Training, Further and Adult Education, The Youth Services Part Three: Educational Thinkers Johann Friedrich Herbart, Friedrich Froebel, Froebelianism (...) and Montessori, John Dewey. (shrink)

Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to. First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic (...) than words with abstract meanings. Moreover, iconicity is not distributed equally across sensory modalities: Auditory and tactile words tend to be more iconic than words denoting concepts related to taste, smell and sight. Last, we examined the relationship between iconicity and systematicity. We find that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, our results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English. (shrink)

Ivor Hunt; II—Value-Concepts and Conceptual Truth, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 23–44, https://doi.org/10.109.

It is toward this task that Mr. Nathaniel Lawrence has directed his effort in the work under review. "The present essay," he writes, "has a single goal: to provide a foundation from which Whitehead's Process and Reality can be profitably studied and sympathetically approached." The question of the correct or most fruitful approach to Process and Reality, Mr. Lawrence clearly appreciates, is a crucial one. This approach must be dependent upon what are the basic and essential problems and issues with (...) which the work is concerned. There are a number of rival views concerning this, none of which has yet been satisfactorily established. Mr. Lawrence's book is a detailed and scholarly exploration of the most plausible of these alternatives. The result--and this is one aspect of the considerable value of his work--is that we are now able to assess, far more effectively than formerly, the tenability of this particular view. (shrink)

There is a long tradition in Western philosophical theology of conceiving God as ‘a being’. It dates back to the Hellenistic period, more particularly to the conjunction of Greek philosophy and the Hebrew religion in Alexandria with Philo, and it became orthodox in the Christian tradition through Augustine. In our time most aspects of this religious tradition have been subjected to a salutary re-examination, but in this the concept of God as ‘a being’ has been relatively neglected. After such a (...) long acceptance of so fundamental a doctrine, it is liable largely to have sunk to the status of a presupposition, entailing a loss of intellectual awareness of what precisely it implies. Even where the Augustinian philosophical argument upon which this concept is based is recognized, as it has been in the long Neoplatonic tradition, it has come to appear as essentially self-evident and thus has not been subjected to fundamental critical examination. Significant of this is that even where the personalistic conception of God has been abandoned, e.g. by the idealist philosophy of the Absolute, the conception nevertheless persists of God as ‘a being’. (shrink)