The COVID-19 pandemic generated overflow of healthcare systems in several countries. As the ethical debates focused on prioritisation for access to care with scarce medical resources, numerous recommendations were created. Late 2021, the emergence of the Omicron variant whose transmissibility was identified but whose vaccine sensitivity was still unknown, reactivated debates. Fears of the need to prioritise patients arose, particularly in France. Especially, a debate began about the role of vaccination status in the prioritisation strategy. The Ethics Committee (EC) of (...) the University Hospital of Bordeaux (UHB), France, identified prioritisation criteria in the literature (some recommended, such as being a healthcare worker (HCW) or having consented to research, while others were discouraged, such as age with a threshold effect or vaccination status). A survey was sent within the institution in January 2022 to explore frontline physicians' adherence to these prioritisation criteria. The decision making conditions were also surveyed. In 15 days, 78/165 (47.3%) frontline physicians responded, and more widely 1286/12946 (9.9%) professionals. A majority of frontline physicians were opposed to prioritising HCWs (54/75, 72%) and even more opposed to participating in research (69/76, 89.6%). Conversely, the results were very balanced for non-recommended criteria (respectively 39/77, 50.7% and 34/69 49.3% in favour for age with a threshold effect and for vaccination status). Decisions were considered to be multi-professional and multi-disciplinary for 65/76, 85.5% and 53/77, 68.8% of frontline physicians. Responders expressed opposition to extending decision-making to representatives of patients, civil society or HCWs not involved in care. Prioritisation recommendations in case of scarce medical resources were not necessarily approved by the frontline physicians, or by the other HCWs. This questions the way ethical recommendations should be communicated and discussed at a local scale, but it also questions these recommendations themselves. The article also reports the experience of seeking HCWs opinions on a sensitive ethical debate in a period of crisis. (shrink)

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)

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 ...

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)

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.

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

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)

This syllabus was submitted to the Rhodes College Office of Academic Affairs by the course instructor.

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)

We believe that the task goal in voluntary movements provides meaning to existing information sources in the environment and determines, in a dynamic way, the use and relative importance of these different sources. This task-centered meaning bridges the apparent controversy between what information is available in principle (i.e., specification), and what information is perceived.

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)

Partant du débat qui oppose les orientations sémiologique et esthétique, l'auteur propose une troisième voie qui, comme les deux autres, vise à rendre compte de la perception esthétique du film, mais, au lieu de s'enfermer dans l'antinomie discours-figure, ou représentation-visibilité, problématise le fait de " l'impossible à représenter " dans sa confrontation avec le langage et le visible. Ce projet peut être considéré, selon l'auteur, comme une poétique, en un sens plus radical que la notion traditionnelle ou son prolongement chez (...) les formalistes russes, étant donné le thème de " l'articulation des signifiants à l'impossible " - une poétique qui procède de la crise de la représentation dans certains films (Duras) et trouve ses principaux instruments dans la psychanalyse. La première partie du livre explore deux propositions majeures de poétique, comme étude du discours et comme approche du sensible, puis les met à l'épreuve du cinéma de Duras, avant d'utiliser les conclusions de cette partie pour instaurer un débat épistémologique autour de la théorie psychanalytique du sujet divisé, laquelle permet d'accéder à la problématique centrale du livre : la rencontre avec le réel comme impossible. Cette perspective renvoie aux travaux de Jacques Lacan sur lesquels l'auteur se fonde pour introduire sa contribution la plus personnelle : le projet d'une nouvelle poétique du cinéma. (shrink)

La valeur du concept a donné lieu à de grandes controverses dans la philosophie et la théologie modernes. Alors qu'il déplace l'accent interne du concept au jugement pour parvenir à l'être, Rahner ne désire pas pour autant déprécier le concept. Une tension existe cependant dans sa pensée : tandis qu'il cherche à maintenir le mouvement dynamique de l'intellect qui transcende toute réalité dans sa marche vers l'infini, il entend bien éviter la complète relativisation du concept. L'article étudie la pensée de (...) Rahner sur le concept à travers son œuvre. (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)