What is a person? This fundamental question is a perennial concern of philosophers and theologians. But, Christian Smith here argues, it also lies at the center of the social scientist’s quest to interpret and explain social life. In this ambitious book, Smith presents a new model for social theory that does justice to the best of our humanistic visions of people, life, and society. Finding much current thinking on personhood to be confusing or misleading, Smith finds inspiration in critical realism (...) and personalism. Drawing on these ideas, he constructs a theory of personhood that forges a middle path between the extremes of positivist science and relativism. Smith then builds on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and William Sewell to demonstrate the importance of personhood to our understanding of social structures. From there he broadens his scope to consider how we can know what is good in personal and social life and what sociology can tell us about human rights and dignity. Innovative, critical, and constructive,_ What Is a Person?_ offers an inspiring vision of a social science committed to pursuing causal explanations, interpretive understanding, and general knowledge in the service of truth and the moral good. (shrink)

This paper presents a systematic account of ethical issues actualised in different areas, as well as at different levels and stages of health care, by introducing organisational and other procedures that embody a shift towards person centred care and shared decision-making (PCC/SDM). The analysis builds on general ethical theory and earlier work on aspects of PCC/SDM relevant from an ethics perspective. This account leads up to a number of theoretical as well as empirical and practice oriented issues that, in view (...) of broad advancements towards PCC/SDM, need to be considered by health care ethics researchers. Given a PCC/SDM-based reorientation of health care practice, such ethics research is essential from a quality assurance perspective. (shrink)

Aging is an integral part of human existence. The problem of aging addresses the most fundamental coordinates of our lives but also the ones of the phenomenological method: time, embodiment, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and even the social norms that grow into the very notion of aging as such. In my article, I delineate a phenomenological analysis of aging and show how such an analysis connects with the debate concerning personal identity: I claim that aging is not merely a physical process, (...) but is far more significantly also a spiritual one as the process of aging consists in our awareness of and conscious relation to our aging. This spiritual process takes place on an individual and on a social level, whereas the latter is the more primordial layer of this experience. This complicates the question of personal identity since it will raise the question in two ways, namely who I am for myself and who I am for the others, and in a further step how the latter experience shapes the former. However, we can state that aging is neither only physical nor only spiritual. It concerns my bodily processes as it concerns the complex reflexive structure that relates my former self with my present and even future self. (shrink)

What justifies holding the person that we are today morally responsible for something we did a year ago? And why are we justified in showing prudential concern for the future welfare of the person we will be a year from now? These questions cannot be systematically pursued without addressing the problem of personal identity. This essay considers whether Buddhist Reductionism, a philosophical project grounded on the idea that persons reduce to a set of bodily, sensory, perceptual, dispositional, and conscious elements, (...) provides support for Parfit’s psychological criterion for personal identity. It examines the role that self-consciousness plays in mediating both self-concern and concern for others, and offers an argument for how reductionism about substantive or enduring selves may be reconciled with the seemingly irreducible character of self-consciousness. (shrink)

‘Researcher identity’ affects global health research in profound and complex ways. Anthropologists in particular have led the way in portraying the multiple, and sometimes tension-generating, identities that researchers ascribe to themselves, or have ascribed to them, in their places of research. However, the central importance of researcher identity in the ethical conduct of global health research has yet to be fully appreciated. The capacity of researchers to respond effectively to the ethical tensions surrounding their identities is hampered by lack of (...) conceptual clarity, as to the nature and scope of the issues involved. This paper strives to provide some clarification of these ethical tensions by considering researcher identity from the perspective of (1) Guillemin and Heggen's (2009) key distinction between procedural ethics and ethics in practice, and (2) our own distinction between perceptions of identity that are either symmetrical or asymmetrical, with the potential to shift research relationships toward greater or lesser ethical harmony. Discussion of these concepts is supported with ethnographic examples from relevant literature and from our own (United States (US) Government-funded) research in South Africa. A preliminary set of recommendations is provided in an effort to equip researchers with a greater sense of organization and control over the ethics of researcher identity. The paper concludes that the complex construction of researcher identity needs to be central among the ethical concerns of global health researchers, and that the conceptual tools discussed in the paper are a useful starting point for better organizing and acting on these ethical concerns. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Bonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social ThoughtCharles W. ChristianBonhoeffer and King: Their Legacies and Import for Christian Social Thought Edited by Willis Jenkins and Jennifer M. McBride Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. 304 pp. $25.00Countless books have been written about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr., assessing their individual leadership in the areas of social justice and theology in the twentieth century. Relatively few (...) works have brought these two individuals together in comparative analysis. This book, edited by Willis [End Page 216] Jenkins (assistant professor of social ethics at Yale Divinity School) and Jennifer M. McBride (visiting lecturer at Candler Divinity School), seeks to do that; it brings together a wide array of scholars in the fields of ethics, theology, pastoral ministry, political theory, African American studies, and feminist theology.As McBride points out in her introduction, the “significant differences in their historic, sociopolitical contexts” can present challenges in comparing the work of these two men and in seeking to contemporize them (8). However, the thought and life of both martyrs “demand[s] action”; in other words, the “thought” of both Bonhoeffer and King remains incomplete without “courageous, constructive, redemptive social engagement” (3). It is in this spirit that the book unfolds.The book is divided into four parts. The first four chapters compose part 1 (titled “Critical Distance”), which takes a broader look at the legacies, key concepts, and limitations or critiques of the thought of Bonhoeffer and King. For example, the second chapter by Stephen R. Haynes (“King and Bonhoeffer as Protestant Saints”) reminds us of the perils of the larger-than-life legacies of both these individuals. When noteworthy persons become personalities or cultural heroes, key aspects of their legacies can be minimized or overlooked. This is particularly important in contemporary American settings where politicians and commentators tend to reduce the legacies of both Bonhoeffer and King to fit their own political agendas.Part 2 pays specific attention to the influence of Bonhoeffer and King on matters related to social justice, such as poverty, racism, and violence. Among the notable contributions in this section is the chapter by Craig J. Slane that deals with the “unexpected turn toward violence” (112) for Bonhoeffer during his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler during World War II. Part 3 looks at the ways in which the lives and teaching (and especially preaching, in King’s life in particular) of Bonhoeffer and King are instruments of social redemption. In addition to noting the influence of Niebuhr’s emphasis on social sin and social redemption on King’s preaching and leadership, it points out that both Bonhoeffer and King were deeply influenced by the economic and social upheavals of their time; their preaching, teaching, and writing sought to address, in concrete ways, the racial, economic, and political realities of their contexts. In part 4, “Peacemaking,” four authors highlight the contributions King and Bonhoeffer have made to peacemaking and the influence these contributions continue to have. They discuss both men’s commitment to nonviolence and pacifism and the particular challenges this commitment created for them (especially for Bonhoeffer, given his participation in a plot to overthrow Hitler).The essays in this book do not present these two martyrs as unblemished. The book contains rich discussions that honestly assess their personal struggles [End Page 217] of conscience as well as their contextual struggles with such issues as the role of women. Furthermore, the reader will find a solid introduction to the lives and thought of both men while at the same time sitting in on a diverse conversation about how their influential interpretations of the Christian faith can continue to be fleshed out. May this kind of conversation (and action) continue!Charles W. ChristianMount Vernon Nazarene UniversityCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss a seemingly straightforward argument against physicalism which, despite being implicit in much of the philosophical debate about consciousness, has not received the attention it deserves (compared to other, better-known “epistemic”, “modal”, and “conceivability” arguments). This is the argument from the non-supervenience of the first-personal (and indexical) facts on the third-personal (and non-indexical) ones. This non-supervenience, together with the assumption that the physical facts (as conventionally understood) are third-personal, entails that some facts – (...) namely, first-personal, phenomenal ones – do not supervene on the physical facts. Unlike other arguments against physicalism, the first-personal argument, if successful, refutes not only physicalism but also other third-personal metaphysical pictures, including standard versions of dualism. (shrink)

Here I respond to four critics of my book, What Is a Person?, seeking to find areas of common ground and crucial disagreement. Most importantly, I explore the question of whether all human knowledge is conceptually mediated, acknowledging that, no, indeed, there are likely forms of experiential knowledge that are purely and directly acquired without conceptual mediation.

Drawing on the spiral of silence theory and heuristic information processing, we contend that individuals use likes as sources for assessing public opinion. We further argue that individuals may even adapt their personal opinions to the tenor reflected in those cues. The assumptions were tested using data from an experiment involving 501 participants, who encountered media items on two issues with or without likes. The findings show that respondents inferred public opinion from the media bias if it was supported by (...) likes, however, only in cases of high levels of fear of social isolation. Respondents further adapted their personal opinion to the media bias if it was supported by likes. (shrink)

Legal theorists have proposed several theories to justify statutes of limitations in the criminal law, but none of these normative theories is generally accepted. This chapter investigates the related descriptive question as to whether ordinary people have the intuition that legal punishment becomes less appropriate as time passes from the date of the offense and, if they do, what factors play a role in these intuitions. Five studies demonstrate that there is an intuitive statute of limitations on both legal punishment (...) and moral criticism, and that these intuitions arise, in part, from judgments about changes in psychological connectedness over time. (shrink)

El propósito de esta investigación radica en determinar el rol unificador entre estado de naturaleza y Estado civil de la representación desarrollado en el capítulo XVI del Leviatán. La representación es un momento de transición entre estado natural y Estado civil: donde lo simbólico toma el lugar de la racionalidad práctica y se sedimenta como lo real para los hombres. Es por la capacidad de crear personas artificiales que los hombres pueden atribuir libremente predicados a cosas que no los tienen (...) realmente y, además de donar su cuerpo físico, pueden crear la persona del Estado, el Leviatán; asumir la soberanía y la sujeción y recrear la subjetividad humana políticamente. (shrink)

Der Begriff der Identit t von Personen spielt sowohl in unserem Alltag als auch in zahlreichen Kontexten der praktischen Philosophie eine zentrale Rolle. Worin besteht personale Identit t aber? Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit wird daf r argumentiert, dass reduktionistische Theorien keine befriedigende Antwort auf diese Frage geben k nnen, weil sie den Standpunkt der ersten Person nicht angemessen ber cksichtigen. Ausgehend von der Debatte um den Status des Wissens, das wir von unseren eigenen mentalen Zust nden haben, wird daf (...) r argumentiert, dass Personen, die diesen Standpunkt einnehmen, in einen aktiven Prozess der rationalen Ausbildung und Revision von mentalen Zust nden eintreten. Im Hinblick auf das Verh ltnis zu unserer eigenen diachronen Existenz bedeutet das Einnehmen dieses Standpunkts, dass wir uns um eine verst ndliche Vorstellung unseres Lebens bem hen und auf diese Weise an unserer normativen Identit t arbeiten. Der Begriff der normativen Identit t setzt aber eine nicht-reduktionistische Antwort auf die metaphysische Frage nach personaler Identit t voraus. (shrink)

Are companies, churches, and states genuine agents? Or are they just collections of individuals that give a misleading impression of unity? This question is important, since the answer dictates how we should explain the behaviour of these entities and whether we should treat them as responsible and accountable on the model of individual agents. Group Agency offers a new approach to that question and is relevant, therefore, to a range of fields from philosophy to law, politics, and the social sciences. (...) Christian List and Philip Pettit argue that there really are group or corporate agents, over and above the individual agents who compose them, and that a proper approach to the social sciences, law, morality, and politics must take account of this fact. Unlike some earlier defences of group agency, their account is entirely unmysterious in character and, despite not being technically difficult, is grounded in cutting-edge work in social choice theory, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

This article proposes a model for the project of integrating the field of clinical psychology with Catholic intellectual tradition. “Integration” here is understood as the project by which psychology’s understanding of the human person is illuminated and perfected by drawing on anthropological knowledge from outside psychology, specifically from Catholic philosophy and divine revelation. The article sets forth a definition of integration in the form of six principles. Ratherthan formulating the principles as descriptive premises, they are formulated as habits of mind, (...) intellectual qualities that one possesses, and when possessed, capacitate one to do Christian scholarly integration. The model is flexible enough to be adapted for use in integrating other social sciences, as well as, to some degree, the hard sciences. (shrink)

This book marks the beginning of a new phase in the philosophical investigation of classical and contemporary accounts of the self: canonical boundaries have been crossed and doctrinal justification abandoned in favor of a cosmopolitan ideal of syncretic, theoretically perspicuous, and historically informed systematic reflection. That such reflection bears on so central a concept as the self is only fitting given its implications for a broad range of questions concerning agency, the mind-body problem, and self-knowledge that are now pursued across (...) a number of disciplines, including philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. But Ganeri is not simply interested in bringing the wealth of Indian speculations on the self to bear on contemporary discussions, in the hope of supplying a much-needed corrective lens, fill in some important lacunae, or bring another voice to the table. Rather, the goal is to think with these classical Indian thinkers (of which, no less than 21 are debated at length .. (shrink)

Given that all Buddhists give universal scope to the no-self view, accounts of personal identity in Buddhism cannot rest on egological conceptions of self-consciousness. Without a conception of consciousness as the property, function, or dimension of an enduring subject or self, how, then, do mental states acquire their first-personal character? What it is that in virtue of which mental states exhibit a basic or minimal sense of self? These questions are at the heart of a long debate about the nature (...) and character of consciousness and self-consciousness. This paper traces the genealogy of key concepts of consciousness and personal identity in Buddhism, their role in articulating specific accounts of self-knowledge, and their relevance to contemporary debates in phenomenology and philosophy of mind about the relation between consciousness and self-consciousness. (shrink)

The main ideas in this paper can be summarized in the following three points. (1) Openness, indeterminacy, and exemplarity are elements of both Kant's aesthetics and Wittgenstein's notion of language games. (2) These elements are essential to what makes a person. They are necessary in processes of decision-making and in the development of a person. (3) Such aspects were in the center of discussion during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, especially in the tradition of the so-called Bildungsroman. Unfortunately, (...) they tend to be forgotten nowadays. (shrink)

Hegel’s Philosophy of Law deals in theLaw section of the categories: person, property and contract. Research critically reconstructs this theory from a Marxist perspective. In the concept of person, first of all, the singular will is reduced to a solipsist will unrelated to intersubjectivity. Then, the concept of Hegelian property bases the private appropriation of property as the externalization of the singular will. This legal property guarantees the maintenance and reproduction of private property, that is, it will guarantee the private (...) accumulation of capital, Marx will say. Anyway, the theory of the contract would link the autonomy of the contracting wills, however, it is a mere appearance, because, in fact, the owners’ wills are under the domination of the capitalist market, as it is explained in Marx’s Capital. The theoretical deficit of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law in general is that the legal concepts of person and property correspond to the abstract will. Hegel describes the juridical description of the legal system of the modern state as the development of free will that legitimizes the asymmetry of civil society in its socioeconomic inequalities. (shrink)

In “Vindicating the Normativity of Rationality,” Nicholas Southwood proposes that rational requirements are best understood as demands of one’s “first-personal standpoint.” Southwood argues that this view can “explain the normativity or reason-giving force” of rationality by showing that they “are the kinds of thing that are, by their very nature, normative.” We argue that the proposal fails on three counts: First, we explain why demands of one’s first-personal standpoint cannot be both reason-giving and resemble requirements of rationality. Second, the proposal (...) runs headlong into the now familiar “bootstrapping” objection that helped illuminate the need to vindicate the normativity of rationality in the first place. Lastly, even if Southwood is right—the demands of rationality just are the demands or our first-personal standpoints—the explanation as to why our standpoints generate reasons will entail that we sometimes have no reason at all to be rational. (shrink)

This paper addresses the seemingly insurmountable challenges the problem of personal identity raises for the prospect of radical human enhancement and synthetic consciousness. It argues that conceptions of personal identity rooted in psychological continuity akin to those proposed by Parfit and the Buddha may not provide the sort of grounding that many transhumanists chasing the dream of life extension think that they do if they rest upon ontologies that assume an incompatibility between identity and change. It also suggests that process (...) ontologies that take change to be primary, such as those that align with contemporary systems biology, offer a better way out of the personal identity dilemma. But the solution in this case, which regards biological organisms as processes rather than things, may constrain the possibility of biologically inspired superintelligent aliens (BISAs), which Schneider (following Bostrom 2014) posits as possibly the most common form of (extraterrestrial) superintelligence in the universe. (shrink)

Jonardon Ganeri’s The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance is a trailblazing study in cross-cultural philosophy of mind. Its liberal conception of naturalism makes room for a rich analytic taxonomy of conceptions of personal identity that go well beyond the standard models of Cartesianism, Physicalism, and Reductionism. But this naturalistically respectable model of the self must contend with the fact that the findings of the cognitive sciences are also compatible with ontological antirealism about the self. And while the book (...) opens new avenues for systematic reflection that thoroughly engages the historical material, its solutions to the problem of personal identity and the problem of self-knowledge often shortcut descriptive accounts that take agency and self-awareness to be constituted by their proprietary phenomenology. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: Bis zu welchem Grad ist eine mit dem Lebens- und Gesundheitsschutz begründete Einschränkung von Grundrechten und des gesellschaftlichen Lebens, wie bei der gegenwärtigen Covid-19-Pandemie, aus ethischer und rechtsphilosophischer Sicht legitim? Ethik und Recht und nicht die Medizin sind es, die in diesen Fragen letztlich den normativen Orientierungsrahmen geben müssen – was nicht ausschließt, dass auch medizinische Argumente bei der Deliberation eine wichtige Rolle spielen. Es stellen sich deshalb Fragen nach diesem normativen Orientierungsrahmen und danach, wie die Berufung auf das (...) „Recht auf Leben und körperliche Unversehrtheit“ und eine davon abgeleitete staatliche Aufgabe des Lebensschutzes gegenüber diesem einzuordnen sind. Hierfür ist zunächst auf die Begriffe der „Person“ und der „Menschenwürde“ einzugehen, wobei ich mich insbesondere an Kant orientiere. Es stellen sich hierbei Fragen sowohl nach dem Recht als auch nach dem Verhältnis der menschlichen Person zur Natur bzw. zum Leben. Hier ist dann über Kants Dualismus hinaus zu einer in zweifacher Hinsicht stärker „integrativen“ Perspektive überzugehen, die den Menschen als personal-leibliche Einheit bzw. als personales Naturwesen begreift und auch methodisch eine Vielfalt relevanter Perspektiven einbezieht und von der her sich auch Konsequenzen für das Verhältnis zu Viren und für den Begriff der Gesundheit ergeben. Die hiermit angesprochenen naturphilosophischen und anthropologischen Aspekte sind dennoch zugleich vor dem Hintergrund Kants normativ einzubinden. Als absoluter Selbstzweck können dabei nicht das Leben und die Gesundheit gelten, sondern nur die menschliche Würde. Vor diesem Hintergrund betrachte ich einige zentrale Argumente der gesellschaftlichen und juristischen Debatten, die im Zuge des ersten Lockdowns im Frühjahr 2020 geführt wurden, speziell zum Verhältnis von Würde und Leben und zur Verhältnismäßigkeitsprüfung in Bezug auf die Einschränkung von Grundrechten. Dass es hierbei eines differen-zierten Umgangs mit verschiedenen Gruppen von Betroffenen bedarf, zeige ich an den Beispielen von Senior:innen in Pflegeheimen sowie Kindern und Jugendlichen. Als Ergebnis halte ich fest: Der Schutz des Lebens ist der Würde des Einzelnen im Zweifel unterzuordnen; es bedarf einer integrativen Perspektive und eines differenzierten Vorgehens, das verschiedene Personengruppen auch hinsichtlich ihrer jeweiligen besonderen Situation entsprechend berücksichtigt. (shrink)

This article argues that standard models of person-centred care (PCC) and shared decision making (SDM) rely on simplistic, often unrealistic assumptions of patient capacities that entail that PCC/SDM might have detrimental effects in many applications. We suggest a complementary PCC/SDM approach to ensure that patients are able to execute rational decisions taken jointly with care professionals when performing self-care. Illustrated by concrete examples from a study of adolescent diabetes care, we suggest a combination of moral and psychological considerations to support (...) the claim that standard PCC/SDM threatens to systematically undermine its own goals. This threat is due to a tension between the ethical requirements of SDM in ideal circumstances and more long-term needs actualized by the context of self-care handled by patients with limited capacities for taking responsibility and adhere to their own rational decisions. To improve this situation, we suggest a counseling, self-care, adherence approach to PCC/SDM, where more attention is given to how treatment goals are internalized by patients, how patients perceive choice situations, and what emotional feedback patients are given. This focus may involve less of a concentration on autonomous and rational clinical decision making otherwise stressed in standard PCC/SDM advocacy. (shrink)

The goal of this chapter is to offer the first detailed critical assessments of the CAPS model from a philosophical perspective. I will argue for the following claim: using technical language, the CAPS model re-describes and finds supporting evidence for basic platitudes of commonsense folk psychology.

Exactly when Philosophy of Psychiatry started as a subfield of Philosophy is hard to say. There are several different estimates of how old psychiatry itself is, from one hundred to three hundred years, and of course there has been discussion and treatment of mental illness for at least a couple of thousand years. A host of issues which could count as belonging to the field have been discussed just within the last hundred years. For instance, a large literature on the (...) philosophy of psychoanalysis dates back to the beginning of the century, and in the last thirty years there has been discussion of amnesia and multiple personality in the philosophy of mind, bioethical debate about involuntary hospitalization and the ability of the mentally ill to give informed consent to drug trials, and recent continental philosophy has shown much interest in madness, civilization, capitalism and schizophrenia. However, I suggest that Philosophy of Psychiatry reached a sense of itself as a separate field only in the 1990s. In this time, it has gained its own association, journal, and a book series with a prestigious press. I refer to the American Association for Philosophy and Psychiatry, the associated journal, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, and the MIT Press series, Philosophical Psychopathology: Disorders of Mind, edited by Owen Flanagan and George Graham. Jennifer Radden's Divided Minds and Successive Selves is the first book in that series. (shrink)

Cognitive models that represent individuals provide many benefits for understanding the full range of human behavior. One way in which individual differences emerge is through differences in knowledge. In dynamic situations, where decisions are made from experience, models built upon a theory of experiential choice (instance-based learning theory; IBLT) can provide accurate predictions of individual human learning and adaptivity to changing environments. Here, we demonstrate how an instance-based learning (IBL) cognitive model, implemented in a cognitive architecture (Adaptive Control of Thought–Rational), (...) can be used to model an individual's decisions in a cybersecurity defense task, accounting for both population average and individual variances. The same IBL model structure with identical architectural parameters generates the full range of human behavior through stochastic memory retrieval processes operating over and contributing to unique experiences. Recurrence quantification analyses allow us to look beyond average behavior between and within individuals to sequential patterns of trial-to-trial behavior. We show how model-tracing and knowledge-tracing techniques can be used to align the model to an individual in real time to drive adaptive and personalized signaling algorithms for a cybersecurity defense system. We also present a method for introspecting into the cognitive model to gain further insight into the cognitive salience of features factored into individual decisions. The combination of techniques provides a blueprint for personalized modeling of individuals. We discuss the results and implications of this adaptive and personalized method for cybersecurity defense and more generally for intelligent artifacts tailored to individual differences in domains such as human–machine teaming. (shrink)

Expertise is often ascribed to persons who are considered exceptionally competent in a particular subject matter. In contrast to this traditional approach, the present paper introduces a contextual understanding of expertise ascriptions. More precisely, this paper introduces two different kinds of contextuality by advancing and advocating the thesis that expertise ascriptions are true if and only if their content within their context of use is true against standards in the context of assessment. This means that expertise ascriptions have indexical content (...) and are also assessment-sensitive. On this basis, a definition of expertise will be developed which outlines a series of conditions for what it takes to be an expert. (shrink)

Positive effects of person-environment fit on job satisfaction and persistence are well documented. However, little is known about the consequences of person-vocation fit for vocational education and training. Using data from the German National Educational Panel Study, we examine the influence of selected P-V fit indicators on training satisfaction and premature contract termination for 4,097 trainees in VET. We find that most P-V incongruences do not lead to negative consequences. Training satisfaction is not affected by interest congruence and skill congruence. (...) However, moderate overeducation enhances training satisfaction. For PCT, there is a general effect of undereducation; undereducation increases the probability of PCT independent of educational qualification for the occupation. PCT is not affected by skill congruence and only for Realistic interests, congruence with the vocational environment reduces PCT probability. (shrink)

The idea that there is such a thing as a human right to health has become pervasive. It has not only been acknowledged by a variety of international law documents and thus entered the political realm but is also defended in academic circles. Yet, despite its prominence the human right to health remains something of a mystery - especially with respect to its philosophical underpinnings. Addressing this unfortunate and intellectually dangerous insufficiency, this book critically assesses the stipulation that health is (...) a human right which - as international law holds - derives from the inherent dignity of the human person. Scrutinising the concepts underlying this stipulation, it shall conclude that such right cannot be upheld from a philosophical perspective. (shrink)

Best known for his groundbreaking and influential work in Buddhist philosophy, Mark Siderits is the pioneer of “fusion” or “confluence philosophy", a boldly systematic approach to doing philosophy premised on the idea that rational reconstruction of positions in one tradition in light of another can sometimes help address perennial problems and often lead to new and valuable insights. -/- Exemplifying the many virtues of the confluence approach, this collection of essays covers all core areas of Buddhist philosophy, as well as (...) topics and disputes in contemporary Western philosophy relevant to its study. They consider in particular the ways in which questions concerning personal identity figure in debates about agency, cognition, causality, ontological foundations, foundational truths, and moral cultivation. Most of these essays engage Siderits’ work directly, building on his pathbreaking ideas and interpretations. Many deal with issues that have become a common staple in philosophical engagements with traditions outside the West. Their variety and breadth bear testimony to the legacy of Siderits’ impact in shaping the contemporary conversation in Buddhist philosophy and its reverberations in mainstream philosophy, giving readers a clear sense of the remarkable scope of his work. (shrink)

The practice and development of modern medicine requires large amounts of data, particularly in the domain of cancer. The future of personalized medicine lies neither with “genomic medicine” nor with “precision medicine”, but with “data medicine”. The establishment of this DM has required far-reaching changes, to establish four essential elements connecting patients and doctors: biobanks, databases, bioinformatic platforms and genomic platforms. The “transformation” of scientific research areas, such as genetics, bioinformatics and biostatistics, into clinical specialties has generated a new vision (...) of care. Molecular tumor boards are one response to these changes and are now providing better access to next-generation sequencing and new cancer treatments to patients with inoperable or metastatic cancers, and those for whom the usual treatment has failed. However, MTB face a crucial ethical challenge: maintaining and improving the trust of patients, clinicians, researchers and industry in academic medical centers supported by private or public funding rather than providing genetic data directly to private companies. We believe that, in this era of DM, appropriate modern digital communication networks will be required to maintain this trust and to improve the organization and effectiveness of the system. There is, therefore, a need to reconsider the form and content of informed consent documents at all academic medical centers and to introduce dynamic and electronic informed consent. (shrink)

This paper sketches a new and somewhat heterodox metaphysical theory of consciousness: the “many-worlds theory”. It drops the assumption that all conscious subjects’ experiences are features of one and the same world and instead associates different subjects with different “first-personally centred worlds”. We can think of these as distinct “first-personal realizers” of a shared “third-personal world”, where the latter is supervenient, in a sense to be explained. This is combined with a form of modal realism, according to which different subjects’ (...) first-personally centred worlds are all real, though only one of them is present for each subject. The theory offers a novel way of capturing the irreducibly subjective nature of conscious experience without lapsing into solipsism. The paper also looks at some scientific theories of consciousness, such as integrated information theory, through the proposed lens and reconsiders the hard problem of consciousness. (shrink)