Papers presented at an annual inter-disciplinary seminar held to facilitate the 60th birthday of Kalarikkal Poulose Aleaz, b. 1947, theologist from Kerala, India during 20-21 September 2007.

Statʹi, razmyshlenii︠a︡, ocherki -- Pisʹma v redakt︠s︡ii -- Perepiska s chlenami Soi︠u︡za svobodomysli︠a︡shchikh -- Pisʹma k M.I. Barskoĭ -- Perepiska mezhdu K.P. Krizhanovskim i I.G. Khusidom -- Iz materialov dela K.P. Krizhanovskogo.

As part of a larger research study, we present model language for disclosing financial interests in clinical research to potential research participants, and we describe the empirical basis and theoretical assumptions used in developing the language. The empirical process for creating appropriate disclosure language resulted in a generic disclosure statement for cases in which no risk to participants’ welfare or the scientific integrity of the research is expected, and nine more specific disclosure statements for cases in which some risk is (...) expected. The disclosure statements are not meant to be canonical, but were instead designed to reflect the typical situations in which disclosure of financial interest might be considered by an institutional review board or conflict of interest committee. Individual institutions could modify key phrases to suit their purposes, and others could use the language in future empirical work on informed consent to better refine the options for disclosing financial interests in clinical research. (shrink)

The ethical treatment of cancer patientsparticipating in clinical trials requiresthat patients are well-informed about thepotential benefits and risks associated withparticipation. When patients enrolled in phaseI clinical trials report that their chance ofbenefit is very high, this is often taken as evidence of a failure of the informed consent process. We argue, however, that some simple themes from the philosophy of language may make such a conclusion less certain. First, the patient may receive conflicting statements from multiple speakers about the expected (...) outcome of the trial. Patients may be reporting the message they like best. Second, there is a potential problem of multivocality. Expressions of uncertainty of the frequency type can be confused with expressionsof uncertainty of the belief type. Patients may be informed using frequency-type statements and respond using belief-type statements. Third, each speech episode involving the investigator and the patient regarding outcomes may subservemultiple speech acts, some of which may beindirect. For example, a patient reporting ahigh expected benefit may be reporting a beliefabout the future, reassuring family members,and/or attempting to improve his or her outcome by apublic assertion of optimism. These sources oflinguistic confusion should be considered injudging whether the patient's reported expectation isgrounds for a bioethical concern that there hasbeen a failure in the informed consent process. (shrink)

Children’s exposure to the marketing of energy-dense nutrient-poor (EDNP) foods is a public health concern and marketing investment is known to be shifting to non-broadcast media, such as the Internet. This paper examines the perceptions of parents and children on ethical aspects of food marketing to which children are exposed. The research used qualitative methods with parent-child (aged between 8–13 years), from South Australia. Thirteen parent-child pairs participated in this research. Ethical concerns raised by parents and children included, the marketing (...) of EDNP foods, pester power and family conflict and the use of powerful techniques via the Internet. Their views on rights and responsibilities represented a complex mixture of idealistic and pragmatic positions. They appeared to be caught within the tensions of problematizing unhealthy food marketing to children, both as a social problem and as an individual problem. Their dilemmas are not dissimilar to the broader policy debate in Australia on the matter of food marketing to children. The stale-mate on statutory regulations to protect children from exposure to EDNP food marketing could be advanced by stronger use of ethical arguments to protect children from harmful exploitation and to protect parents from forces that undermine their authority. (shrink)

Illustrates Aristotle's use of a vast number of terms by quoting, for each term, from one to almost forty passages ranging from a brief sentence to a paragraph. References to the loci of the passages in the Bekker edition are given. The book also includes an introduction of 162 pp. by Theodore E. James, consisting of brief summaries of Aristotle's works.--K. P. F.

An attempt to come to grips with the problem of how we acquire new concepts or how we develop new theories. Mr. Schon builds his theory on the basis of the idea that we do deal with new situations, or with old situations in new ways, and that we can do so only in terms of "old" theories—concepts which apply literally to other situations. He argues that we do so by "displacing" such concepts, using them as metaphors or projective models (...) for the new situation. This displacement both yields new concepts and conserves old assumptions uncritically. Mr. Schon devotes much attention to the role and nature of the metaphorical use of concepts, yet he fails to develop an explicit theory of their literal use.—K. P. F. (shrink)

In this essay, a Jewish thinker argues that the world as depicted by science forms a single system: each part is related to all because all are related to a single knower; this single system constitutes a whole which has priority over its parts because it conditions or delimits their behavior. This totality is the unchanging source of all processes, all making actual what had been merely possible. This totality Kohn attempts to define as God, and, taking it for granted (...) that science depicts the universe as undergoing continuous evolution on the whole and within its parts, he attempts to show how such evolution reveals, in the human perspective, that God is creativity. He distinguishes three "levels of being" produced in the course of the cosmic evolution--inorganic matter, sensitivity, conscience--but denies that the arising of any one of these phases involves the super-addition of something new to the preceding ones. He argues that this notion of God answers all religious requirements, and concludes with a warning and a plea regarding the possibility of future evolution in the light of man's ability to exercise conscious control over events.--K. P. F. (shrink)

This edition is apparently a facsimile reproduction of Andrew Motte's translation of 1729, but no acknowledgment is given. It contains a brief biographical introduction by Alfred Del Vecchio. It omits Newton's prefaces and that of Cotes to the second edition, the latter being of value to those interested in the conflict between Newton's views and those of Descartes. Neither index nor table of contents are provided. In short, a not very helpful edition.—K. P. F.

Though its title suggests a mere orderly exposition of philosophical theses, this book actually presents a series of arguments in step by step development for a frankly Thomistic system of metaphysics. Starting with an acceptance of the "critical attitude" in philosophy, Peters argues that we can find the epistemological ground of "the science of what transcends experience" in our experience of the "to be" of finite beings. He then proceeds to develop the traditional topics of Thomistic metaphysics. In large measure, (...) the arguments advance dialectically by critical consideration of various anti-metaphysical positions. Some of the major premisses of crucial arguments could be questioned by non-Thomists, but the challenges made are provocative.—K. P. F. (shrink)

This volume includes the Sigma XI-RESA National Lectures, 1961; the Sigma XI-Phi Beta Kappa Lecture, 1961; the RESA Proctor Prize Lecture, 1960; and a special Sigma XI Diamond Jubilee presidential article. The latter three are non-technical articles on such topics as trends in and growth of science in this decade, and the interrelations of science and government. The other articles discuss recent experimental and theoretical results in such areas as climatology, magnetic interaction of atomic nuclei, the effects of solar disturbances (...) on terrestrial magnetism, human genetics and evolution, the biophysics of chemoreceptors, astrophysics and cosmogony, and the physics of the plasma state of matter.--K. P. F. (shrink)

Designed to acquaint students who already possess some knowledge of Thomism with modern, non-Thomistic systems of philosophy, this textbook examines the ways in which various modern philosophers have dealt with the problems of the nature and limits of knowledge and presents for comparison the Thomistic solutions to these problems. There are brief selections from the writings of major proponents of the positions considered. The interpretive expositions attempt to be sympathetic and, in view of the amount of abridgement and simplification required (...) by the nature of the text, involve few unhappy omissions or distortions.--K. P. F. (shrink)

This provocative, if sketchy, essay develops the theme that, although thought and reality are ultimately distinct, both are elements of one and the same reality--"a communion of living and interacting forces." The presentation recognizes a dialectical character to reality, in the form of opposing thrusts and tendencies, and a plurality of foci of demands to be met, all operating through and partially constituting history. It fails, however, to explicate the movement in the dialectic of reality and to explore the possibility (...) and value of dialectic as a cognitive process.--K. P. F. (shrink)

The cultural modernity neoplasm, which may be called ‘open cultural and educational space‘, is described. The characteristics of this phenomenon, their importance in modern pedagogy in the mainstream open the immanent education. The comparison is made with the selected criteria of commune collecting as brightest phenomenon of practice pedagogy of general care by I. P. Ivanov. The conclusions are made not only full compliance but also a significant expansion of selected characteristics subjectivity to the side of nurturing personality.

Introduction of deep neural networks to the machine translation research ameliorated conventional machine translation systems in multiple ways, specifically in terms of translation quality. The ability of deep neural networks to learn a sensible representation of words is one of the major reasons for this improvement. Despite machine translation using deep neural architecture is showing state-of-the-art results in translating European languages, we cannot directly apply these algorithms in Indian languages mainly because of two reasons: unavailability of the good corpus and (...) Indian languages are morphologically rich. In this paper, we propose a neural machine translation (NMT) system for four language pairs: English–Malayalam, English–Hindi, English–Tamil, and English–Punjabi. We also collected sentences from different sources and cleaned them to make four parallel corpora for each of the language pairs, and then used them to model the translation system. The encoder network in the NMT architecture was designed with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and bi-directional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN). Evaluation of the obtained models was performed both automatically and manually. For automatic evaluation, the bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score was used, and for manual evaluation, three metrics such as adequacy, fluency, and overall ranking were used. Analysis of the results showed the presence of lengthy sentences in English–Malayalam, and the English–Hindi corpus affected the translation. Attention mechanism was employed with a view to addressing the problem of translating lengthy sentences (sentences contain more than 50 words), and the system was able to perceive long-term contexts in the sentences. (shrink)

A new model for the aether is suggested according to which it is a superfluid state of fermion and antifermion pairs, describable by a macroscopic wave function. The vacuum state of this superfluid pervades the entire universe and may account for the missing matter. The visible matter in the universe appears as excitations from the underlying superfluid vacuum.

The superfluid state of fermion-antifermion fields developed in our previous papers is generalized to include higher orbital and spin states. In addition to single-particle excitations, the system is capable of having real and virtual bound or quasibound composite excitations which are akin to bosons of spinJ P equal to0 −, 1−, 2+, etc. These pseudoscalar, vector, and tensor bosons can be massive or massless and provide the vehicles for strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational interactions. The concept that the basic (unmanifest) (...) fermion-antifermion interaction can lead to a multiplicity of manifest interactions seems to provide a basis for a unified field theory. (shrink)