Fieldworkers (FWs) are community members employed by research teams to support access to participants, address language barriers, and advise on culturally appropriate research conduct. The critical role that FWs play in studies, and the range of practical and ethical dilemmas associated with their involvement, is increasingly recognised. In this paper, we draw on qualitative observation and interview data collected alongside a six month basic science study which involved a team of FWs regularly visiting 47 participating households in their homes. The (...) qualitative study documented how relationships between field workers and research participants were initiated, developed and evolved over the course of the study, the shifting dilemmas FWs faced and how they handled them. Even in this one case study, we see how the complex and evolving relationships between fieldworkers and study participants had important implications for consent processes, access to benefits and mutual understanding and trust. While the precise issues that FWs face are likely to depend on the type of research and the context in which that research is being conducted, we argue that appropriate support for field workers is a key requirement to strengthen ethical research practice and for the long term sustainability of research programmes. (shrink)

Benefit sharing in health research has been the focus of international debates for many years, particularly in developing countries. Whilst increasing attention is being given to frameworks that can guide researchers to determine levels of benefits to participants, there is little empirical research from developing countries on the practical application of these frameworks, including in situations of extreme poverty and vulnerability. In addition, the voices of those who often negotiate and face issues related to benefits in practice - frontline researchers (...) and fieldworkers - are rarely included in these debates. Against this background, this paper reports on experiences of negotiating research participation and benefits as described by fieldworkers, research participants and researchers in two community based studies. (shrink)

Key ethical issues arise in association with the conduct of stem cell research by research institutions in the United States. These ethical issues, summarized in detail, receive no adequate translation into federal laws or regulations, also described in this article. U.S. Federal policy takes a passive approach to these ethical issues, translating them simply into limitations on taxpayer funding, and foregoes scientific and ethical leadership while protecting intellectual property interests through a laissez faire approach to stem cell patents and licenses. (...) Those patents and licenses, far from being scientifically and ethically neutral in effect, virtually prohibit commercially sponsored research that could otherwise be a realistic alternative to the federal funding gap. The lack of federal funding and related data-sharing principles, combined with the effect of U.S. patent policy, the lack of key agency guidance, and the proliferation of divergent state laws arising from the lack of Federal leadership, significantly impede ethical stem cell research in the United States, without coherently supporting any consensus ethical vision. Research institutions must themselves implement steps, described in the article, to integrate addressing ethical review with the many legal compliance issues U.S. federal and state laws create. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE THE UNITY AND RUPTURE OF EXISTENCE The germ for Heidegger's quest to appropriate the entire Western tradition is given through a work which sets ...

Living on the threshold of a new age, we squabble among ourselves to acquire or retain the privileges of bygone times. We cast about for innovating ways to satisfy obsolete values. We manage individual crises while heading toward collective catastrophes. We contemplate changing almost anything on this earth but ourselves. (Laszlo, 1978, p. 3) If a society is to continue to evolve, its evolution has to be manifested in a total transformative change. Its existing state has to be transcendent. A (...) new creative surge has to generate a new image of the future. (Banathy, 2000, p. 149, italics in original). (shrink)

Government policy aims at a 'seamless web' of learning provision. This is exemplified in a local Learning and Skills Council supported by work on widening participation to higher education (HE) in another London sub-region. The emerging system described is comprehended as a whole from 'Foundation Learning' in compulsory schooling to post-compulsory 'Lifelong Learning' in further, higher and continuing education and training thereafter.

Lucas Swaine?s respectful manner of engaging with theocrats is at odds with the more heavy-handed arguments he gives to those who would reject his position. Furthermore, it is not clear that Swaine?s case can reach theocrats whose self-conceptions do not fit within the liberal idiom.

In this paper we provide a formal description of what it means to be in a local or partial information-state. Starting from the notion of locality in a relational structure, we define so-called adaptive gen- erated submodels. The latter are then shown to yield an adaptive logic wherein the derivability of Pφ is naturally interpreted as a core property of being in a state in which one holds the information that φ.

Philosophy's only celebration of photography's 150th, the long-neglected philosophical job of clarification: drawing basic distinctions and defining basic conceptions, including photographic depiction, photographic detection, 'photograph of', 'documentary'. More than a lexicon, it explains why photography is important, by historically characterizing it through its uses for depiction, detection, reproduction, all of which have shaped the modern world. By consideration of it as 'mechanical', the paper explains photography's differences from practices with which it shares these functions. Happy birthday, photography.

Of silence, paradoxically, one can only speak. By virtue of the alliance that unites reason and language, the capacity to name and to address indeed obeys a certain desire to restrain excessive communication. Laughter, tears and silence are part of the expressive world: however, they attest to the impossible pitfall of words in the socializing function that we accord them. Of extreme sociality, of meaning that exceeds the bearable, the suitability and the commerce of ideas, the only thing that rises (...) to the surface of the perceptible is that emotional logic whose significations shatter every criterion of certitude and of truth on the real. Confronted with three forms of experience of the unspeakable, we ordinarily allow ourselves to lend credit to the spontaneity of the first two (laughter and tears), while the symbolic dimension of silence seems to derive from an invisible orchestration, from a rather simple calculation or from a more elaborate strategy. This difference in nature is essential, and no one would dream of equating what “can” not be said with what “should” not be said. Silence exists as a sort of constraint, interiorized at various levels of the personality, and thereby more social than psychological. Even the involuntary silence of the unknowing person can be codified: as a disciplined avowal or the politeness of the humble who neither tolerates nor imagines any escape from his embarrassment. If speech is born in the abandon of a burst of expressivity, in hilarity or in sobs, it expires in a law, no less severe than the one which endows phrases with semantic coherence. Such a rule thus manifests a universal character socially more affirmed than the multiple syntaxes that organize each linguistic patrimony. That muteness can also be subject to a particular form of apprenticeship shows how each process of socialization determines the price of the communicable and assigns a value to the unformulated. Without pretending to offer a strict typology of this phenomenon, I will distinguish five classes that are capable of comprising its collective aspects. (shrink)

Education-business partnership in the United Kingdom has a long history. The promotion of links between the partners at all levels and in all sectors of the economy has become a service industry in its own right. In 1991, the UK government established a regional network of Education-Business Partnerships (EBPs) in an attempt to coordinate these activities. Education-business links embrace curriculum enrichment for students at all levels of education; professional development for teachers, lecturers, and business employees; and institutional development and mutual (...) benefits arising from collaboration between educational institutions, business, and the wider community. The authors review the development of education-business links in the United Kingdom and raise a number of issues about definition and purpose. They discuss the difficulties of establishing an educational framework for industrial, commercial, and business enterprises and the economic and technological processes which operate within them. (shrink)

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume inaugurates the publication of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls from the main collection discovered in Cave 4 at Qumran. It contains ten biblical manuscripts from Genesis to Deuteronomy and Job. Six are written in the ancient Palaeo-Hebrew script and four are in Greek. There are also five hitherto unknown compositions. The Hebrew texts antedate by a millennium what had previously been the earliest surviving biblical codices in the original language, and they document the pluriform nature of the ancient (...) biblical textual tradition before the text became standardized. The most extensive and significant manuscript, 4QpaleoExodm, exhibits the expanded textual tradition that formed the basis for the Samaritan Pentateuch and illumines the historical and theological relationship between the Jews and the Samaritans. Fragments of an unidentified Greek text mention Moses, Pharaoh, and Egypt, suggesting some development of the Exodus theme, and further witnessing to the rich religious literature to which Rabbinic Judaism and nascent Christianity were heirs. An index of all the biblical manuscripts from Qumran Cave 4 and their distribution in other Discoveries in the Judaean Desert volumes is provided, and there are also forty pages of plates from the manuscripts. (shrink)

Most philosophers who have expressed a view about whether forgiveness is compatible with forgivers’ continuing to punish, or support the punishment of, people who have wronged them hold that forgiveness is compatible with punishing or favouring punishment of wrongdoers. I argue that whether forgiveness entails forbearing punishment depends on which of two senses of forgiveness is operative. On the first, sentiment-based sense of forgiveness as consisting essentially in a change of heart on the part of a victim, a victim can, (...) I submit, forgive while continuing to punish or to support the punishment of a person who has wronged her. On the second sense of forgiveness as consisting in debt remission whether or not accompanied by a change of heart, the state’s remission of the entirety of criminal offenders’ punishment qualifies as forgiveness and, moreover, the state could not forgive offenders in this sense while continuing to punish them. (shrink)

The publication of the fifteenth volume of Leibniz’ “General Political and Historical Correspondence,” covering the period January to September 1698, does not revolutionize our view of Leibniz’ practical philosophy. But it does throw valuable light on his moral, political, jurisprudential and religious thought in general, and on two extremely important works in particular: the Novissima Sinica, which Leibniz had published in 1697 and was about to revise and re-publish in 1699, and the Unvorgreiffliches Bedencken, which he began in 1698 with (...) his friend the Lutheran Abbot Gerhard Molanus as part of his irenical project of healing the “schism” between Evangelicals and the Reformed. For Leibniz’ moral-political thought it is the letters concerning these two works—and there are many of them in “Correspondence Vol. 15”—which matter most, even if other letters, to be mentioned briefly at the end of this review, throw further light on additional Leibnizian practical concerns. (shrink)

There is controversy in the Catholic medical ethics community surrounding assisted nutrition and hydration (ANH). Recently, the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services were amended to make ANH “obligatory.” The persistent vegetative state is cited specifically in the document, and the sentence following its mention states that ANH is “optional” when it cannot be expected to “prolong life” or when it would be “excessively burdensome.” For patients suffering from other medical conditions, such as dementia and frailty, ANH (...) may be excessively burdensome and may not prolong life. For these patients, ANH may be of no real benefit and may even have significant morbidity and mortality. Competent individuals with these conditions can ethically elect to forgo ANH. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.3 (Autumn 2010): 481–488. (shrink)

In this contribution we examine the various amoral types of reasoning that have long predominated in the history of tolerance. In doing this we also hope to show that these amoral notions of tolerance are always far removed from, and in conflict with, the idea of freedom of religion as a moral and political right. In conclusion we show that when the liberal notion of freedom as a personal and moral right predominates, then the notion of tolerance loses some of (...) its meaning. (shrink)