In vitro fertilization (IVF) involves making embryos outside of the human body, which has spurred debate about the status of the embryo, embryo research and donation. We explore couples’ perceptions about embryos and their thoughts and acceptability about various disposition decisions in Norway. Based on an ethnographic study including interviews and observations in an IVF clinic, we show that couples do not perceive their pre-implantation IVF embryos to be human lives; rather, they consider successful implantation the start of life. We (...) suggest that this response indicates a change in the perception of the human embryo or the fertilised egg fromincipient life—a viewpoint that was dominant in the discussions of embryo research in the 1980s and 1990s. We also show how this view of the pre-implantation embryo elucidates why donating embryos to research appears acceptable but donating to other infertile couples seems rather difficult. Before transfer to a woman’s uterus, the embryo exists in a liminality; it is not yet human life but a living cell with potential for both researchandpregnancy. When an embryo is implanted and pregnancy is confirmed, human life activates; the embryo becomes potential kin, influencing couples’ struggles with donating embryos to other couples. (shrink)

What is property? Not so long ago, at least in the western legal tradition, answering this question might have been possible by adverting to a very small number of resources – perhaps as few as the...

The “family rule” paper by Dr Foreman proposes a way of resolving the present uncertainty about medical law on children's consent and refusal. This commentary reviews how doctors' decisions are already well protected by English law and respected by the courts. The “family rule” appears to be likely only to complicate the already diffuse law on parental consent, and to weaken further the competent minor's position in cases of uncertainty and disagreement. It leaves the difficult questions about defining and assessing (...) children's competence unanswered. This commentary suggests that these questions would be better resolved through professionally determined standards of good practice that respect children and parents, rather than through rules or laws. (shrink)

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

An edition of the letters of Erasmus, regarded as one of the greatest humanist writers. All 12 volumes of this work have been reissued, complete with their scholarly apparatus of commentary and notes, as well as plates.

Phenomenology and experimental psychology have been largely interested in the same thing when it comes to attention. By building on the work of Aron Gurwitsch, especially his ideas of attention and restructuration, this paper attempts to articulate common ground in psychology and phenomenology of attention through discussion of a new way to think about multistability in some phenomena. What psychology views as an attentionality-intentionality phenomenon, phenomenology views as an intentionality-attentionality phenomenon. The proposal is that an awareness of this restructuring of (...) attentionality and intentionality can benefit both approaches to attention. After reviewing Husserl’s position on attentionality and intentionality, this paper examines multistable phenomena, redefines the attentional transformation called restructuring, discusses disciplinary perspectives on attention and gives an example using common ground. (shrink)

Let P be any one of the following combinatorial properties: weak P-pointness, weak (semi-) Q-pointness, weak (semi-)selectivity, ω-closedness. We deal with the following two questions: (1) What is the least cardinal κ such that there exists an ideal with κ many generators that does not have the property P? (2) Can one extend every ideal with the property P to a prime ideal with the property P?

The article compares the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change in terms of natural characteristics of the crisis triggers as well as of socio-political responses.

Among the principal successors to Alexander the Great, Lysimachus is probably the one that has suffered most by neglect in the scanty literary sources at our disposal. His wars with the Getae and their king Dromichaetes are among the few events in his long career which have received more than a casual notice in the historical tradition; no wonder that they have been examined repeatedly both in the context of Lysimachus' political biography and of the history of the region and (...) its Thracian population, the Getae. However, many aspects of the circumstances remain obscure and dubious, and their discussion has more than once ended with the expression of hope that one day new archaeological finds might permit the solution of some of the associated riddles. The recent archaeological discoveries near Sveshtari in north-eastern Bulgaria seem now to warrant a re-examination of these problems. (shrink)