Background: The process of obtaining informed consent continues to be a contentious issue in clinical and public health research carried out in resource-limited settings. We sought to evaluate this process among human research participants in randomly selected active research studies approved by the School of Medicine Research and Ethics Committee at the College of Health Sciences, Makerere University. Methods: Data were collected using semi-structured interviewer-administered questionnaires on clinic days after initial or repeat informed consent procedures for the respective clinical studies (...) had been administered to each study participant. Results: Of the 600 participants interviewed, two thirds (64.2 %, 385/600) were female. Overall mean age of study participants was 37.6 (SD = 7.7) years. Amongst all participants, less than a tenth (5.9 %, 35/598) reported that they were not given enough information before making a decision to participate. A similar proportion (5.7 %, 34/597) reported that they had not signed a consent form prior to making a decision to participate in the study. A third (33.7 %, 201/596) of the participants were not aware that they could, at any time, voluntarily withdraw participation from these studies. Participants in clinical trials were 50 % less likely than those in observational studies [clinical trial vs. observational; (odds ratio, OR = 0.5; 95 % CI: 0.35-0.78)] to perceive that refusal to participate in the parent research project would affect their regular medical care. Conclusions: Most of the participants signed informed consent forms and a vast majority felt that they received enough information before deciding to participate. On the contrary, several were not aware that they could voluntarily withdraw their participation. Participants in observational studies were more likely than those in clinical trials to perceive that refusal to participate in the parent study would affect their regular medical care. (shrink)

Aristotle's De Anima is the first systematic philosophical account of the soul, which serves to explain the functioning of all mortal living things. In his commentary, Ronald Polansky argues that the work is far more structured and systematic than previously supposed. He contends that Aristotle seeks a comprehensive understanding of the soul and its faculties. By closely tracing the unfolding of the many-layered argumentation and the way Aristotle fits his inquiry meticulously within his scheme of the sciences, Polansky answers (...) questions relating to the general definition of soul and the treatment of each of the soul's principal capacities: nutrition, sense perception, phantasia, intellect, and locomotion. The commentary sheds light on every section of the De Anima and the work as a unit. It offers a challenge to earlier and current interpretations of the relevance and meaning of Aristotle's highly influential treatise. (shrink)

We are causing species to go extinct at extraordinary rates, altering existing species in unprecedented ways and creating entirely new species. More than ever before, we require an ethic of species to guide our interactions with them. In this book, Ronald L. Sandler examines the value of species and the ethical significance of species boundaries and discusses what these mean for species preservation in the light of global climate change, species engineering and human enhancement. He argues that species possess (...) several varieties of value, but they are not sacred. It is sometimes permissible to alter species, let them go extinct and invent new ones. Philosophically rigorous, accessible and illustrated with examples drawn from contemporary science, this book will be of interest to students of philosophy, bioethics, environmental ethics and conservation biology. (shrink)

In Dangerous Minds, Ronald Beiner traces the deeper philosophical roots of such far-right ideologues as Richard Spencer, Aleksandr Dugin, and Steve Bannon, to the writings of Nietzsche and Heidegger—and specifically to the aspects of their thought that express revulsion for the liberal-democratic view of life.

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

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

Focuses on Deleuze's style, his conception of the self, and his understanding of philosophy's relationship to the arts.

Using the emerging technology of large-scale textual analysis, this study examines the use of the term ‘customer satisfaction’ and its variants in the annual reports issued by publicly traded U.S. corporations and filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as Form 10-K. We document the frequency of the term’s occurrence in 10-Ks over the 1995–2013 period and the differences in usage across industries. We then relate the term’s usage in 10-Ks to subsequent scores from the American Customer Satisfaction Index to (...) determine whether management’s discussion of customer satisfaction in financial disclosures is credible. The commitment of management to shareholders versus, more broadly, stakeholders is a central question in business ethics, and the integrity of management communication is a fundamental construct in the American Marketing Association’s Statement of Ethics. We document a complex relation between management’s discussion of customer satisfaction and subsequently reported satisfaction. We find that the general use of customer satisfaction in 10-K documents is negatively correlated with subsequent ACSI scores. However, for retail firms, when the phrase is located near words indicating measurement or monitoring of the phenomenon, the empirical relation is reversed and becomes positive. (shrink)

What is political philosophy? Ronald Beiner makes the case that it is centrally defined by supremely ambitious reflection on the ends of life. We pursue this reflection by exposing ourselves to, and participating in, a perennial dialogue among epic theorists who articulate grand visions of what constitutes the authentic good for human beings. Who are these epic theorists, and what are their strengths and weaknesses? Beiner selects a dozen leading candidates: Arendt, Oakeshott, Strauss, Löwith, Voegelin, Weil, Gadamer, Habermas, Foucault, (...) MacIntyre, Rawls, and Rorty. In each case, he shows both why the political philosophies continue to be intellectually compelling and why they are problematic or can be challenged in various ways. In this sense, Political Philosophy attempts to draw up a balance sheet for political philosophy in the twentieth century, by identifying a canon of towering contributions and reviewing the extent to which they fulfil their intellectual aspirations. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive introduction to Deleuze's work on literature. It provides thorough treatments of Deleuze's early book on Proust and his seminal volume on Kafka and minor literature. Deleuze on Literature situates those studies and many other scattered writings within a general project that extends throughout Deleuze's career-that of conceiving of literature as a form of health and the writer as a cultural physician.

In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari attribute to Leibniz and Raymond Ruyer a vitalism of ‘a force that is but does not act’. This is a judicious characterisation of Leibniz's vitalism, but not Ruyer's. In The Fold, Deleuze presents Ruyer as a disciple of Leibniz, but if Leibniz's monads have no doors or windows, Ruyer's are nothing but doors and windows, nothing but liaisons actively forming themselves. For Ruyer, there is only one force, a consciousness-force, matter-form in sustained, non-localisable (...) self-formation. In Deleuze's reading of Leibniz's concept of the vinculum substantiale, Deleuze comes close to presenting a notion of force like that of Ruyer's, in that the vinculum inextricably interfolds monads and bodies, but ultimately the separation of the forces of monads from those of bodies prevails in a fashion incompatible with Ruyer's conception of force. Deleuze and Guattari make use of Ruyer's understanding of consciousness and the brain as the auto-overflight of an absolute surface in their concluding remarks on philosophy and the arts in What Is Philosophy?, but they depart from Ruyer in their characterisation of the relation of force to those two domains, ultimately because they reject Ruyer's advocacy of a universal, goal-directed finalism. (shrink)

The esophageal obturator airway is a device used throughout the United States to facilitate artificial respiration of critically ill patients who are not hospitalized. Its use is restricted to persons who are over 15 years old because obturators for children are not available. A protocol submitted to an institutional review board intended to develop EOAs suitable for use in children. The investigators proposed to perform preliminary testing of these devices on children who had sustained irreversible loss of brain function. In (...) its review of this protocol, the IRB had to confront several vexing questions. (shrink)

These reflections on faith, reason and certainty have the purpose of engaging again, if not anew, the fundamental intellectual elements of western civilization.

Book reviewed in this article: Drawing the Line: Life, Death, and Ethical Choices in an American Hospital. By Samuel Gorovitz.

The election of Donald Trump has exposed American society’s profound crisis of hope. By 2016 a generation of shrinking employment, rising inequality, the attack on public education, and the shredding of the social safety net, had set the stage for stunning insurgencies at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Against this dire background, Ronald Aronson offers an answer. He argues for a unique conception of social hope, one with the power for understanding and acting upon the present situation. Hope, (...) he argues, is far more than a mood or feeling—it is the very basis of social will and political action. It is this kind of hope that Aronson sees brewing in the supporters of Bernie Sanders, who advocated the tough-minded and inspired disposition to act collectively to make the world more equal, more democratic, more peaceful, and more just. And it was directly contrasted by Trump’s supporters who showed a cynical and nostalgic faith in an authoritarian strongman replete with bigotry and misogyny. Beneath today’s crisis Aronson examines our heartbreaking story: a century of catastrophic violence and the bewildering ambiguity of progress—all of which have contributed to the evaporation of social hope. As he shows, we are now in a time when hope is increasingly privatized, when—despite all the ways we are connected to each other—we are desperately alone, struggling to weather the maelstrom around us, demoralized by the cynicism that permeates our culture and politics, and burdened with finding personal solutions to social problems. Yet, Aronson argues, even at a time when false hopes are rife, social hope still persists. Carefully exploring what we mean when we say we “hope” and teasing hope apart from its dangerously misconstrued sibling, “progress,” he locates seeds of real change. He argues that always underlying our experience—even if we completely ignore it—is the fact of our social belonging, and that this can be reactivated into a powerful collective force, an active we. He looks to various political movements, from the massive collective force of environmentalists to the movements around Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, as powerful examples of socially energized, politically determined, and actionably engaged forms of hope. Even in this age of Donald Trump, the result is an illuminating and inspiring call that anyone can clearly hear: we can still create a better future for everyone, but only if we resist false hopes and act together. (shrink)

Ronald Ashby; XVII—David Pole, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 77, Issue 1, 1 June 1977, Pages 271–272, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/77.

Of all the memorable, and influential, passages of the Phänomenologie des Geistes none are more famous or enjoyed greater attention than those sections devoted to the master-slave dialectic. It would seem almost inconceivable then that anything would be left to say concerning Hegel's martial struggle, the sheer number of illustrious scholars who have commented on this text bearing ample testimony to the probable redundancy of further comment. However, in actual fact, this is not the case. Indeed, it is probable that (...) Hegel is addressing and utilising not a theory of recognition but rather two quite distinct concepts of recognition. The appropriate passages are of course the master-slave section itself and the rather oblique references to the »confession« of one consciousness to another at the end of chapter six. Commentators have generally been in agreement that the master-slave section marks the beginning of Hegel's theory of recognition; that is, that the continuation of the treatment of recognition in chapter six marks a further development of the concept formulated in chapter four - a further development seemingly promised by Hegel himself - »With this, we already have before us the notion of spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what spirit is«. However the preceding is interpreted, the reader is surely right to recognize that something has been »won«, the triumphalist language being repeated in the following »[it is] in the Notion of Spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning-point, where it leaves behind the colourful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present«. However, this triumph may have been misunderstood. The theory of recognition referred to in the master-slave dialectic may have been a »turning-point«, a new beginning, but it was a new beginning that was soon realised to be a dead-end. The following will attempt to demonstrate that there is a quite radical discontinuity at the heart of the concept of recognition itself, a discontinuity that can be traced to its origins in the Fichtean system itself. For the master-slave dialectic is »Fichte's wake« - it is at once a celebration and a mourning for the first concept of recognition, the unworkability of which heralded a truly new beginning. That is, the concept of recognition outlined in the Einige Vorlesungen uber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten. The second concept of recognition, that of the Grundlage des Naturrechts cannot be reckoned a further development or emendation of the first concept, its quite peculiar status, and philosophical importance as a »spiritual concept«, precluding any such treatment. The latter concept may mark the birth of Hegelian or speculative idealism itself. It is the contention of the following that understanding this quite radical discontinuity will fashion a better understanding of the connection between transcendental and speculative philosophy, the point of transition or sublation. (shrink)

Kenny, A. Descartes on the will.--McRae, R. Innate ideas.--McRae, R. Descartes' definition of thought.--Gombay, A. Cogito ergo sum: inference or argument?--Ashworth, E. J. Descartes' theory of clear and distinct ideas.--Alexander, R. E. The problem of metaphysical doubt and its removal.--Tweyman, S. The reliability of reason.--Percival, W. K. On the non-existence of Cartesian linguistics.

Political theorist Wendy Brown has argued recently that contemporary neoliberalism, with its relentless obsession on the economy, has all but undone the tenets of democracy. This book suggests one way of thinking out of the current moment, and it does so by looking to a perhaps unlikely figure: Niccolo Machiavelli. Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr. argues that if we imitate Machiavelli's interpretive method in reading The Prince and Discourses of Livy, we can find in them solutions to the neoliberal problems (...) Brown warns about. (shrink)

In this landmark volume of contemporary communication theory, Ronald C. Arnett applies the metaphor of dialogic confession—which enables historical moments to be addressed from a confessed standpoint and through a communicative lens—to the works of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who pointed to an era of postmodern difference with his notion of "a world come of age." Arnett’s interpretations of Bonhoeffer’s life and scholarship in contention with Nazi dominance offer implications for a dialogic confession that engages the complexity of postmodern (...) narrative contention. Rooted in classical theory, the field of communication ethics is abstract and arguably outmoded. In _Dialogic Confession: Bonhoeffer’s Rhetoric of Responsibility, _Arnett locates cross-cultural and comparative anchors that not only bring legitimacy and relevance to the field but also develop a conceptual framework that will advance and inspire future scholarship. (shrink)

This essay presents a theoretical construct upon which to base a working - "pragmatic" - definition of the History of Present Illness (HPI). The major thesis of this essay is that analysis of both the logic of hypothesis formation and literary narrative - especially detective stories - facilitates understanding of the diagnostic process. The essay examines three elements necessary to a successful development of a patient's HPI: the logic of hypothesis formation, based upon the work of the philosopher-logician, Charles Sanders (...) Peirce; the organization of knowledge in relation to structures of narrative; and the feedback necessary to the successful physician-interviewer. It concludes with a systematic description of the design of hypothesis formation within diagnoses. (shrink)

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