This research aims to identify the ethical issues perceived by intensive care nurses in their everyday practice. It also aims to understand why these situations were considered an ethical issue and what interventions/strategies have been or are expected to be developed so as to minimize them. Data were collected using a semi-structured interview with 15 nurses working at polyvalent intensive care units in 4 Portuguese hospitals, who were selected by the homogenization of multiple samples. The qualitative content analysis identified end-of-life (...) decisions, privacy, interaction, team work, and health-care access as emerging ethical issues. Personal, team, and institutional aspects emerge as reasons behind the experience of these issues. Personal and team resources are used in and for solving these issues. Moral development and training are the most significant strategies. (shrink)

This paper studies general numerical networks with support and attack. Our starting point is argumentation networks with the Caminada labelling of three values 1=in, 0=out and ½=undecided. This is generalised to arbitrary values in [01], which enables us to compare with other numerical networks such as predator?prey ecological networks, flow networks, logical modal networks and more. This new point of view allows us to see the place of argumentation networks in the overall landscape of networks and import and export ideas (...) to and from argumentation networks. We make a special effort to make clear how general concepts in general networks relate to the special case of argumentation networks. We pay special attention to the handling of loops and to the special features of numerical support. We find surprising connections with the Dempster?Shafer rule and with the cross-ratio in projective geometry. This paper is an expansion of our 2005 paper and so we also consider higher level features such as numerical attacks on attacks, and propagation of numerical values.We conclude with a brief view of temporal numerical argumentation and with a detailed comparison with related papers published since 2005. (shrink)

This paper argues that the foundations of our knowledge are the bed-rock certainties of ordinary life, what may be called the Moorean truths. Beyond that are the well-established results within the empirical sciences, and whatever has been proved in the rational sciences of mathematics and logic. Otherwise there is only belief, which may be more or less rational. A moral drawn from this is that dogmatism should be moderated on all sides.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Classics and Complexity in Walden’s “Spring” M. D. USHER In 1843, two years before Henry Thoreau built his cabin at Walden Pond, the Fitchburg Railroad laid down tracks through the woods near the Pond for its line connecting Boston to Fitchburg. The original Fitchburg Line, at 54 miles long, was, until 2010, the longest run in the present -day MBTA Commuter Rail system. And it is one of (...) the oldest railways in New England. By 1900, fortunes swelled and the Fitchburg’s Hoosac Tunnel Line took passengers and goods westward toward Chicago. The Lake Champlain Route connected Boston to points north like Burlington, Vermont. (See Figure 1.) arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 Figure 1 (left): Advertisement for the Hoosac Tunnel Route in The New England Magazine (Vol. 21, Issue 6, February, 1900). Figure 2 (right): Herbert Wendell Gleason. The Fitchburg Railroad and Walden Pond in winter, Concord, Mass., March 24, 1920. Courtesy Concord Free Public Library. The Railroad was literally a fixture in Thoreau’s landscape. Its tracks pass remarkably close to Walden Pond (Figure 2), and the Fitchburg Line—both its reality and the specter of it—is practically a character in his writing: “I usually go to the village along its causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link,” Thoreau writes in “Sounds,” a chapter of Walden that contains what must be one of the most picturesque odes (or laments) to rail travel and commerce in all of American literature: The engine’s whistle, Thoreau complains, pierces the still silence of his idyllic retreat like a screaming hawk circling a farmer’s field, its billows of steam an ominous harbinger of “this travelling demi-god, this cloud-compeller.”1 Thoreau’s frequent, customary walks into Concord along the railroad tracks took him through a heavily excavated stretch of the line known as the Deep Cut, to which he returned again and again each year in early spring, even after leaving the cabin, to observe and to record his observations. The leaf-shaped sand flows and trickling surface erosion caused by melting frost in the banks of the Deep Cut are elaborately described in Thoreau’s chapter in Walden entitled “Spring,” what Laurence Buell calls the “high point of Thoreau’s epic.”2 And yet, in spite of the universal acclaim of this passage as a literary tour de force, it has not received the full attention it deserves. What warrants fresh consideration first and foremost is “Spring”’s deep-rootedness in classical sources. Many classical influences, allusions, and a good deal of etymological word play have gone so far unnoticed. The chapter is also important because it describes, by intimation, what contemporary scientists now call emergence. Emergent phenomena are properties or behaviors that arise in systems as a result of complex, dynamic interactions amongst constituent parts, including changes to a system brought about by human interventions3—not only, e.g., climate change and wildfires, but also traffic patterns and terrorist networks; kidney function in the body; the rings of Saturn. As he tries to capture the essence of the 114 classics and complexity in WALDEN’s “spring” Deep Cut and interpret its significance, Thoreau adumbrates this concept, but also grapples ingeniously with broader issues of perennial concern—the relationship of Nature to Culture, for example, of Wilderness to Civilization, of Science to the Humanities—making “Spring” not only a probing work of eco-criticism and environmental philosophy, but of scientific reflection and poetic experiment as well. In short, Thoreau’s “Spring” is that rare work of classical reception that transmits both literary and scientific insight. Perhaps at this point, in lieu of accolades, it is best to let Thoreau start speaking for himself. What I offer in the following pages is a commentary on the Deep Cut passage from “Spring.” Classical references and aspects of systems theory will be explained and contextualized as they emerge, as it were, from Thoreau’s text. The whole chapter corresponds to pages 289–308 in Cramer’s edition of Walden—26 paragraphs all told, of which only the relevant ones are printed and annotated here. (Transitions and extraneous material are briefly summarized, as needed, in paraphrase... (shrink)

Totality states of affairs (Russell's 'general facts') are defended against Martin's criticisms. Although higher-order, they are not 'abstract in Quine's sense. If space-time is the whole of being, and if it can be seen as a vast conjunction of states of affairs, then the state of affairs that this is the totality of lower-order states of affairs is not additional to, but completes, space-times. If totality states of affairs are admitted, then there seems no need for any further negative states (...) of affairs additional to totality states of affairs. (shrink)

The Greeks and Romans have been charged with destroying the ecosystems within which they lived. In this book, however, M. D. Usher argues rather that we can find in their lives and thought the origin of modern ideas about systems and sustainability, important topics for humans today and in the future. With chapters running the gamut of Greek and Roman experience – from the Presocratics and Plato to Roman agronomy and the Benedictine Rule – Plato's Pigs brings together unlikely bedfellows, (...) both ancient and modern, to reveal surprising connections. Lively prose and liberal use of anecdotal detail, including an afterword about the author's own experiments with sustainable living on his sheep farm in Vermont, add a strong authorial voice. In short, this is a unique, first-of-its-kind book that is sure to be of interest to anyone working in Classics, environmental studies, philosophy, ecology, or the history of ideas. (shrink)

This work presents some basic results on a theory of translations between logics and a short revision about Łukasiewicz's logics. Then, it is shown, using facts about algebraic semantics, that there is a conservative translation from every finite Łukasiewicz's logic into classical logic. However, this is not a constructive result.

A particular thing is nothing but a bundle (a collection) of all its properties. Other than these properties (including spatial, temporal properties), there is nothing. [Space and time, being physical properties, are among the things that have to be constructed as bundles of universals.].

The traditional “realist” conception of physics, according to which human concepts, laws and theories can grasp the essence of a reality in our absence , seems incompatible with quantum formalism and it most fruitful interpretation. The proof rests on the violation by quantum mechanical formalism of some fundamental principles of the classical ontology. We discuss if the conception behind Einstein’s idea of a reality in our absence, could be still maintained and at which price. We conclude that quantum mechanical formalism (...) is not formulated on those terms, leaving for a separated paper the discussion about the terms in which it could be formulated and the onto-epistemological implications it might have. (shrink)

The traditional Dung networks depict arguments as atomic and study the relationships of attack between them. This can be generalised in two ways. One is to consider various forms of attack, support, feedback, etc. Another is to add content to nodes and put there not just atomic arguments but more structure, e.g. proofs in some logic or simply just formulas from a richer language. This paper offers to use temporal and modal language formulas to represent arguments in the nodes of (...) a network. The suitable semantics for such networks is Kripke semantics. We also introduce a new key concept of usability of an argument. This is the beginning of a continuing research for adding contents to the nodes of an argumentation network. This research will allow us to address notions like ?what does it exactly mean for a node to attack another? or ?what does it mean for a network to be consistent? or ?can we give proper proof rules to manipulate networks?, and more. (shrink)