Current thinking and research on consciousness and the brain.

How does talk work, and can we engage the public in a dialogue about the scientific study of talk? This article presents a history, critical evaluation and empirical illustration of the public science of talk. We chart the public ethos of conversation analysis that treats talk as an inherently public phenomenon and its transcribed recordings as public data. We examine the inherent contradictions that conversation analysis is simultaneously obscure yet highly cited; it studies an object that people understand intuitively, yet (...) routinely produces counter-intuitive findings about talk. We describe a novel methodology for engaging the public in a science exhibition event and show how our ‘conversational rollercoaster’ used live recording, transcription and public-led analysis to address the challenge of demonstrating how talk can become an informative object of scientific research. We conclude by encouraging researchers not only to engage in a public dialogue but also to find ways to actively engage people in taking a scientific approach to talk as a pervasive, structural feature of their everyday lives. (shrink)

A careful reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics focusing on his treatment of politics reveals a multifaceted discipline with political science, legislation, practice and ethics. These aspects of the discipline bear clear resemblance to the multiple conceptions of nursing. The potential that nursing is a multifaceted discipline, with nursing science as just one facet challenges the author's own conception of nursing as a practical science. Aristotle's discussion would seem to argue that nursing science is nursing, but nursing is more. Nursing is (...) also ethical practice, or art, and legislative for health. The multifaceted discipline of politics is united by the end, the common good, a just community that makes human happiness possible. Reasoning in this way, nursing is unified by its end, health of individuals and communities. Since nursing is not unique in having health as its end, this discussion ends with the question of where its uniqueness lies, i.e. within the activities or the personal presence of its practitioners. This discussion also contains some of the contemporary ethical and legislative challenges with which nursing is confronted. (shrink)

Christianity has understood the environment as a gift to nurture and steward, a book of divine revelation disclosing the divine mind, a wild garden in need of cultivation and betterment, and as a resource for the creation of a new Eden. This Cambridge Companion details how Christianity, one of the world's most important religions, has shaped one of the existential issues of our age, the environment. Engaging with contemporary issues, including gender, traditional knowledge, and enchantment, it brings together the work (...) of international scholars on the subject of Christianity and the Environment from a diversity of fields. Together, their work offers a comprehensive guide to the complex relationship between Christianity and the environment that moves beyond disciplinary boundaries. To do this, the volume explains the key concepts concerning Christianity and the environment, outlines the historical development of this relationship from antiquity to the present, and explores important contemporary issues. (shrink)

The legal framework governing claims of medical negligence is extensively documented within South African (SA) jurisprudence, with a predominant focus on the liability of medical practitioners. In contrast, the liability of pharmacists has received comparatively scant attention. This issue was recently highlighted by a case in which a woman from the Western Cape initiated legal action against Clicks, a leading health, beauty and wellness retailer and SA’s largest retail pharmacy chain, alleging that the provision of incorrect medication nearly cost her (...) life. At the time of writing, the case has yet to advance to trial. This article explores the legal and ethical dimensions of medical negligence attributed to pharmacists within the context of their professional duties. Additionally, it investigates how similar cases are adjudicated in foreign jurisdictions, with a specific focus on the US. (shrink)

Michael Allen's latest work on the profoundly influential Florentine thinker of the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino, will be welcomed by philosophers, literary scholars, and historians of the Renaissance, as well as by classicists. Ficino was responsible for inaugurating, shaping, and disseminating the wide-ranging philosophico-cultural movement known as Renaissance Platonism, and his views on the _Sophist_, which he saw as Plato's preeminent ontological dialogue, are of signal interest. This dialogue also served Ficino as a vehicle for exploring a number of other (...) humanist, philosophical, and magical preoccupations, including the theme of man the artist and creator. (shrink)

Reasoning under uncertainty, that is, making judgements with only partial knowledge, is a major theme in artificial intelligence. Professor Paris provides here an introduction to the mathematical foundations of the subject. It is suited for readers with some knowledge of undergraduate mathematics but is otherwise self-contained, collecting together the key results on the subject, and formalising within a unified framework the main contemporary approaches and assumptions. The author has concentrated on giving clear mathematical formulations, analyses, justifications and consequences of the (...) main theories about uncertain reasoning, so the book can serve as a textbook for beginners or as a starting point for further basic research into the subject. It will be welcomed by graduate students and research workers in logic, philosophy, and computer science as a textbook for beginners, a starting point for further basic research into the subject, and not least, an account of how mathematics and artificial intelligence can complement and enrich each other. (shrink)

J. B. Schneewind's "The Invention of Autonomy" has been hailed as a major interpretation of modern moral thought. Schneewind's narrative, however, elides several serious interpretive issues, particularly in the transition from late medieval to early modern thought. This results in potentially distorted accounts of Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, and G. W. Leibniz. Since these thinkers play a crucial role in Schneewind's argument, uncertainty over their work calls into question at least some of Schneewind's larger agenda for the history of ethics.

Within the context of general relativity, the Heraclitus asymmetry property requires that no distinct pair of spacetime events have the same local structure Manchak and Barrett (2023). Here, we explore Heraclitus-maximal worlds – those which are “as large as they can be” with respect to the Heraclitus property. Using Zorn’s lemma, we prove that such worlds exist and highlight a number of their properties. If attention is restricted to Heraclitus-maximal worlds, we show senses in which observers have the epistemic resources (...) to know which world they inhabit. (shrink)

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