Hospital ethics committees (HECs) traditionally focus on clinical ethics but are increasingly recognized for their potential role in addressing organizational ethics, particularly in the allocation of charity care resources. This commentary explores the expanded role of HECs in charity care allocation, emphasizing the core ethical principles of justice, transparency, and accountability. We discuss the need for HECs to develop expertise in organizational ethics, differentiate between emergency and chronic resource allocation, and apply value-based insurance design principles to set service boundaries. By (...) adopting an egalitarian approach to justice, HECs can help reduce health disparities and ensure equitable access to charity care. Enhanced transparency and accountability through clear criteria, regular audits, and public reporting are also vital. This paper underscores the importance of integrating these ethical principles into healthcare resource allocation to promote health equity and maintain the financial sustainability of healthcare institutions. (shrink)

The growth activity of an organ (variable y) is defined simultaneously by the instantaneous absolute ratedy/dt and its variationd 2y/dt2. The use of these two descriptors allows a sigmoidal (i.e. continuous and non periodical, as observed for the logistic function) growth curve to be discretized into a series of 5 growth states or phases which are delimited by the following singular values: max, Vmax (=0), max, adult stage. The (V, ) plot, termedgrowth trajectory, visualizes, e.g. in the case of Richards-Nelder's (...) generalized logistics, the unequal duration of these phases and allows the dissymmetry property of the growth function to be characterized precisely.At a more integrated organization level, such anorganic series (e. g. the set of the leaves borne by a same branch), the above concepts allow two kinds of analyses to be carried out: (i) in thekinetic approach, the growth trajectory of the series can characterizes, under certain conditions, the emergence of a new property: theoccurrence of growth activity rhythms which are independent of meristem dormancy processes; (ii) thedemographic approach shows thegrowth structure of the phytomer population (a particular form of age structure) and the associated dimensional structure (plant partition into zones or regions in relation to the growth state of the various phytomers). (shrink)

L'analyse d'une cinétique de croissance y est conduite à partir du modèle logistique généralisé de Richards-Nelder. On distingue 2 types de processus dits mono- et multi-logistique. Dans le cas mono-logistique, le phénomène est correctement décrit par une seule fonction logistique. La cinétique de croissance est alors caractérisée par lea propriétés de chacune des phases G 1 à G 4, délimitées par les points singuliers Γmax, V max et Γmin. On appelle structure de croissance la contribution relative de ces différentes phases (...) à l'expression de la croissance totale. Cette distribution temporelle de l'activité de croissance est une représentation discrétisée de la trajectoire y 0 → y max. On appelle processus multi-logistique toute cinétique de croissance correspondant à une somme de 2 ou plusieurs logistiques généralisées. II existe alors un plus grand nombre de points singuliers et donc un plus grand nombre de phases G i que dans le cas monologistique. La structure de croissance définit avec précision la cinetique du phénomène, ainsi que l'importance relative des différentes composantes logistiques au cours du temps. Une application en est donnée avec le grandissement des cellules pleuridiophores de l'Algue Antithamnion plumula. L'allongement de ces cellules est toujours de type bi-logistique. Les caractéristiques de la structure de croissance permettent une discrimination nette du sporophyte et des gametophytes mâle et femelle. Tandis que la composante 1 est pen différente, la composante 2 varie fortement selon la ploïdie du thalle. En revanche, il y a pen de différences entre les deux gamétophytes. Cette notion de structure de croissance est ainsi susceptible d'apporter des résultats originaux. Audelà de cet example, cette approche est proposée comme une méthode de caractérisation simple mais précise de toute cinétique de croissance basée sur lea variations temporelles de l'activité de croissance [couple ]. (shrink)

This photodocumentary reveals the second city through the stories and black-and-white images of its inhabitants.

That India once had a sustained ‘dialogue’ with Scottish Philosophy is not gener- ally known, or that the exchange occurred in the medium of Sanskrit, not English. The essay explores an important cross-cultural encounter in the colonial context of mid 19th-century Benares where two Scots, John Muir and James Ballantyne, served as principals of a Sanskrit college established by the East India Company. Educated toward the end of the Scottish Enlightenment, they endeavoured to translate such distinctive concepts of ‘Scotch Metaphysics’ (...) as Externalism into Indian philosophical categories. The ensuing ‘dialogue’ with Brahmin interlocutors shows that the prob- lems they faced were less terminological than conceptual, having to do with contras- tive ways of understanding ‘mind’ and ‘man’. Between the two Scots, there were also signifi cant differences, although both had gone to India as Scottish Calvinists. While Muir remained largely impervious to Indian infl uence, Ballantyne was profoundly changed, becoming, in effect, a ‘Vedantic Calvinist’. (shrink)

"Younker delves into and illustrates every aspect of Putman's life: how he works, what he does to relax, how he interacts with family and friends. He shows how Putman fished, divulging some of the secrets of the professional fisherman. Examining this fisherman's life - as well as the lives of his relatives and friends - Younker demonstrates Putman's skill as colorful storyteller with a rich vocabulary. Putman proved forthright when expressing his views about life, river lore, and the changing ecology."--Jacket.

(2005). Reflections on the Appointment of Dr. Edmund Pellegrino to the President's Council on Bioethics. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 5, No. 6, pp. W8-W9. doi: 10.1080/15265160500388640.

Studies the politics of Heidegger in terms of "thrownness" or "existential contingency". Attempts to think through Heidegger's philosophy in a manner that parallels his own dialogue with other key western thinkers.

Case law retrieval is the task of locating truly relevant legal cases given an input query case. Unlike information retrieval for general texts, this task is more complex with two phases (legal case retrieval and legal case entailment) and much harder due to a number of reasons. First, both the query and candidate cases are long documents consisting of several paragraphs. This makes it difficult to model with representation learning that usually has restriction on input length. Second, the concept of (...) relevancy in this domain is defined based on the legal relation that goes beyond the lexical or topical relevance. This is a real challenge because normal text matching will not work. Third, building a large and accurate legal case dataset requires a lot of effort and expertise. This is obviously an obstacle to creating enough data for training deep retrieval models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called supporting model that can deal with both phases. The underlying idea is the case–case supporting relation and the paragraph–paragraph as well as the decision-paragraph matching strategy. In addition, we propose a method to automatically create a large weak-labeling dataset to overcome the lack of data. The experiments showed that our solution has achieved the state-of-the-art results for both case retrieval and case entailment phases. (shrink)

This 1984 book describes the development of thought, both of Keynes and others, culminating in the publication in 1936 of Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. As one of Keynes' close collaborators - from December 1929, when the writing of the Treatise was nearing its completion - Richard Khan provides a uniquely insightful analysis of these events. The author starts with a brief survey of the contributions influential in forming Keynes' early ideas, and moves on to explore (...) the significance of the Quantity Theory of Money, and traces the development of Keynes' attitude towards the theory through his published books. Subsequent lectures are devoted to Keynes' Treatise on Money, and to his more popular writings as an economic adviser which marked the transition from the thinking in the Treatise to that in the General Theory which the author critically examines. The final lecture records the author's memory of his personal relationship with Keynes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PORTIA'S SUITORS by Richard Kuhns and Barbara Tovey I am always inclined to believe that Shakespeare has more allusions to particular facts and persons than his readers commonly suppose. —Samuel Johnson, "Merchant of Venice," Notes on Shakespeare's Plays. 66f\ver-name them," Portia says to Nerissa, "and as thou namest V^/them, I will describe them, and according to my description level at my affection." This passage in TL· Merchant of (...) Venice (Act I, Scene ii), where Portia describes her suitors, presents certain problems.1 To our knowledge interpreters have not addressed them. In the first place, the lengthy description ofthe discarded suitors serves no apparent function. The suitors play no role whatsoever in the subsequent development of the drama, and the protracted account of their failings retards rather than advances the action of the play. To be sure, Shakespeare wanted die audience to be aware that Portia had many suitors of high rank and from many different countries, but it was scarcely necessary for him to go to such lengths to make the point. In the second place, the denigration of the previous suitors in this scene does not accord with the account ofthem given by Bassanio when talking to Antonio in the first act: Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth, For the four winds blow in from every coast Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks 325 326Philosophy and Literature Hang on her temples like a golden fleece, Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchos' strond, And many Jasons come in quest of her. (Li. 167-72) The suitors as described by Portia hardly deserve to be called "renowned," or to be referred to as "Jasons." The belittling of his competitors in this scene also has the undesirable effect of trivializing Bassanio 's achievement in Act III. Thirdly, there is something decidedly odd about the sort of failings attributed to the suitors by Portia. Had he so wished, Shakespeare could have utilized this passage to present a sort of catalogue of human frailties. One suitor might have been a representative of pride, another of avarice, another of envy, etc. But Shakespeare does nothing of the sort. With the exception of the German, who is a drunkard, the defects of the suitors can hardly be considered major vices. The Neapolitan Prince talks too much about his horse, the County Palatine frowns excessively, the French lord is an imitator of the others, the English baron is "oddly suited," and so on. Yet Shakespeare dwells at considerable length upon these more or less trivial failings. Now it may be suggested that Shakespeare, who is certainly deeply interested in national differences of character and behavior, may have inserted this discussion of the suitors into the play in order to provide himself with an opportunity for analysis of idiosyncratic national traits. The answer to this objection is simple. The characteristics ascribed to the suitors do not represent genuine or interesting national differences any more than they stand for major human vices. Is it true, as under this hypothesis Shakespeare would seem to be suggesting, that Neapolitans are fonder of horses than most other folk? Or that Frenchmen are particularly prone to imitating others? Or that Germans are uniquely predisposed to alcoholism? If not, we must admit that the discussion of the discarded suitors represents a puzzling and as yet unexplained digression. Commenting upon this scene, Samuel Johnson made a suggestion that we think merits serious consideration. Might it be the case that the suitors represent actual persons, whose descriptions give clues to their real identities? It is our suggestion that the six suitors make up a company of the most gifted, influential, and to Shakespeare—we suspect—the most interesting writers of the tradition in which he worked. These are the writers from whom he derived inspiration and plots. The question may Richard Kuhns and Barbara Tovey327 well be raised, as to why, if this is so, the suitors are depicted in such derogatory terms. We suggest that one very potent way in which to express the deepest gratitude and admiration is by means of a loving insult. This technique ofexpressing affection and indebtedness to one's literary mentors... (shrink)

According to Hebrews, the Son of God appeared to "break the power of him who holds the power of death--that is, the devil--and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death." What does it mean to be enslaved, all our lives, to the fear of death? And why is this fear described as "the power of the devil"? And most importantly, how are we--as individuals and as faith communities--to be set free from this (...) slavery to death?In another creative interdisciplinary fusion, Richard Beck blends Eastern Orthodox perspectives, biblical text, existential psychology, and contemporary theology to describe our slavery to the fear of death, a slavery rooted in the basic anxieties of self-preservation and the neurotic anxieties at the root of our self-esteem. Driven by anxiety--enslaved to the fear of death--we are revealed to be morally and spiritually vulnerable as "the sting of death is sin." Beck argues that in the face of this predicament, resurrection is experienced as liberation from the slavery of death in the martyrological, eccentric, cruciform, and communal capacity to overcome fear in living fully and sacrificially for others. (shrink)

Pluralism in Theory and Practice not only brings McKeon to the attention of contemporary philosophers and students; it also puts his theories into practice. Some of the essays explicate aspects of McKeon's thought or situate him in the context of American intellectual and practical engagement. Others take the concerns he raised as starting points for inquiries into urgent contemporary problems, or, in some cases, for reexamining McKeon's work as fertile ground for shaping the direction of new investigation.

This provocative book explores the difficulties surrounding the attempt to understand the relationship between literary and political discourse. It examines the initial formulation of these difficulties in Georgian Britain, and traces them through the cultural debates of the Victorian men of letters to the critical ideologies of the twentieth-century literary academy. Richard Bourke offers an incisive critique of the way in which the idea of Culture has been used as a means of resolving the failure to establish an adequate (...) theory of politics in the wake of the French Revolution. (shrink)

'Insight' is not a very popular word in psychology or biology. Popular terms-like "intelligence", "planning", "complexity" or "cognitive"- have a habit of sprawling out to include everyone's favourite interpretation, and end up with such vague meanings that each new writer has to redefine them for use. Insight remains in everyday usage: as a down-to-earth, lay term for a deep, shrewd or discerning kind of understanding. Insight is a good thing to have, so it's important to find out how it evolved, (...) and that's what this book is about. Coming 20 years after publication of Richard Byrne's seminal book The Thinking Ape, Evolving Insight develops a new theory of the evolutionary origins of human abilities to understand the world of objects and other people. Defining mental representation and computation as 'insight', it reviews the evidence for insight in the cognition of animals. (shrink)

Since literary historian Robert Bone published his seminal essay ‘Richard Wright and the Chicago Renaissance’ in 1986, scholars have created new cartographies of previously unexplored terrain in American cultural history. The earliest studies focused on literature, but more recently attention has turned to other disciplines, including visual arts. Recent publication of The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (2011) by Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage promises to decisively broaden scholarly understandings of the scope (...) and significance of Chicago-centred cultural production during the Great Depression and post-war years. Of particular relevance to contemporary studies of new media art is the manner in which then-emergent ideas and practices – centring on racialized subject matter, elite and mass audiences, traditional and new mediums of expression, private vs public sponsorship, and passive vs active reception of art objects – converged to create new paradigms and possibilities for visual artists to reshape consciousness in a period of institutional collapse and change. Chicago’s New Negro artists of the 1930s and 1940s, like their counterparts in 1920s Harlem, sought to reframe perceptions of African American life, to re-present the black subject as something other than an object of contempt or amusement beneath the privileged gaze of the white viewer. Just as these artists sought to revise perceptions of racial reality, examination of the wide range of actual images they created and the mediums and styles they explored revises reductive notions about creative expression in this period, which often portray a mere subordination of art to propaganda and an embrace of representational aesthetics and simplistic narratives in a fruitless detour in the evolution from modernism to postmodernism. On the contrary, Andrew Hemingway notes the range of stylistic experiment and characterizes so-called ‘social art’ as ‘a hybrid and unstable mode [which] had to carry the imperative to be an art equal in formal achievement to both the great art of the past and the modern tradition … [and] to suggest a political orientation without becoming overt revolutionary propaganda’ (2002).New media theorist Oliver Grau observes thatIn many quarters, virtual reality is viewed as a totally new phenomenon… but it did not make its first appearance with the technical invention of computer-aided virtual realities. On the contrary, virtual reality forms part of the core of the relationship of humans to images… grounded in art traditions that have receivedscant attention up to now.(2004)In the midst of another period of change, of transformed and transforming ideas and practices in the arts, we have much to learn from the attempts of Chicago’s New (Media) Negro artists to create ‘art for the people’, to immerse broad audiences in such accessible media as mural painting, photography and graphic arts. (shrink)

Musical genius, polemicist, explosive personality-that was the nineteenth-century German composer Richard Wagner, who paid as much attention to his reputation as to his genius. Often maddening, and sometimes called mad, Wagner wrote with the same intensity that characterized his music. The letters and essays collected in Judaism in Music and Other Essays were published during the 1850s and 1860s, the period when he was chiefly occupied with the creation of The Ring of the Nibelung. Highlighting this collection is the (...) notorious 1850 article "Judaism in Music, " which caused such a firestorm that nearly twenty years later Wagner published an unapologetic appendix. Other prose pieces include "On the Performing of Tannhauser, " written while he was in political exile; "On Musical Criticism, " an appeal for a more vital approach to art undivorced from life; and "Music of the Future." This volume concludes with letters to friends about the intent and performance of his great operas; estimations of Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Gluck, Berlioz, and others; and suggestions for the reform of opera houses in Vienna, Paris, and Zurich. The Bison Book edition includes the full text of volume 3 of William Ashton Ellis's 1894 translation commissioned by the London Wagner Society. (shrink)

Mit diesem Buch führt Richard Egger in das komplexe Thema Ethik ein: in die Theorie der Menschlichkeit. Er richtet sich damit an Menschen, die Verantwortung für andere tragen – sei es als Vorgesetzte, als Ärztin oder Wissenschaftler, Mutter oder Vater, Lehrer oder in vielen anderen Rollen. Anhand von Beispielen aus unterschiedlichen Lebensbereichen zeigt Egger auf, welche Rolle Vernunft und Gefühl, aber auch unsere Gerechtigkeitsvorstellung für ethisches Handeln spielen. Sein Fazit: Menschlich handeln kann nur, wer einen Sinn für Fairness und (...) Gleichwertigkeit, persönliche Verpflichtung und moralische Integrität entwickelt. Eine solche Haltung durchdringt den ganzen Menschen und macht Verantwortungsträger erst zu wirklichen Leadern.Egger stützt sich dabei auf die Fragen und Argumente, Regeln und Instrumente aus der Geschichte der Ethik, aber auch auf seine langjährige Erfahrung als Berater von Menschen. Der Autor schreibt philosophisch fundiert und gleichzeitig fesselnd und verständlich. Der Inhalt Die Welt: Warum wir Ethik brauchen Regeln: Wie Ethik funktioniert Sie: Was Ethik aus Ihnen macht Natur: Wie Ethik sich ins Ganze fügt. (shrink)

The style of Wittgenstein's writing in his Philosophical Investigations seems quite peculiar to many readers, and is in many way unlike any other style of writing in the history of philosophy. In Philosophical Health, Richard Gilmore argues that Wittgenstein's ultimate goal in the "Investigations" is to restore us to a condition of philosophical health. The traditional methods and styles of doing philosophy, Gilmore suggests, led to a strange kind of philosophical sickness. Philosophical health is a condition that does not (...) repudiate the philosophical search or philosophical wonder, but does free us from a kind of sickness that results from looking in the wrong places for the wrong kinds of answers. According to Gilmore, Wittgenstein thought that to do philosophy in the right way we have to pay careful attention to the way we speak and think about things in our everyday lives. Philosophical Health is an original and thought-provoking look at Wittgenstein's later philosophy. (shrink)

Second, let me offer an apology for not having a handout for this talk. I do have a website that contains most of my talks and published papers, as well as various other ravings collected over thirty-plus years of ruminating, and you are each welcome to visit it and acquire for your own reading pleasure or other legitimate purposes (such as composing refutations of my foolish views) such copies as you may require. Just don’t steal my ideas and misrepresent them (...) as your own! The address is http://www.richard-t-hull.com. This paper should be posted there within the month. (shrink)

Fictional names have specific, cognitively relevant features, putting them in a category apart from the category of ordinary names. I argue that we should focus on the name or name form itself and refrain from looking for an assignment procedure and an assigned referent. I also argue that we should reject the idea that sentences containing fictional names express singular propositions. These suggestions have important consequences for the intuition that ‘Sherlock Holmes exists’ is either true or false, and they put (...) our intuitions concerning fictional names into perspective. If Millianism is the view that names only have a referent only as their semantic value, then my proposal on fictional names is not Millian in nature. (shrink)

Humpty-Dumpty affirmait que les mots signifiaient exactement ce qu'il lui plaisait qu'ils signifient, «ni plus, ni moins». Il a parfois des défenseurs chez les chercheurs qui se sont penchés sur le problème de la non-littéralité. On peut cependant affirmer qu'ur locuteur, s'il utilise non littéralement des expressions qui ont ure signification conventionnelle, ne peut en changer à volonté la signification pour leur faire signifier exactement ce qu'il a l'intention de signifier. Par exemple, quelqu'un qui fait une métaphore ne peut changer (...) la signification des expressions qu'il utilise. C'est la thèse que je défendrai au cours des prochaines pages. On verra aussi quelles intentions devrait avoir un locuteur qui signifierait non littéralement quelque chose. (shrink)

Contemporary fiscal theorizing largely assimilates the activities of government to that of some choosing agent. This paper explores an alternative approach where government is assimilated to an emergent process of complex interaction, as a form of complex adaptive system. Within this alternative vision, governments are treated not as objects of intervention into a market economy but as arenas of organized participation within it. While recent developments in computational modeling are starting to provide tools for probing such a vision, the roots (...) of that vision can be traced back to the spontaneous order theorists of the 18th century. After sketching some contours of this alternative vision, the remainder of the paper explores some possible implications of this change in vision for mapping the relationship among taxation, prosperity, and justice. (shrink)

Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation is an intensely polemical attack on many recent expositions of sensory representation in Descartes, and a defense of De Rosa’s own Descriptive-Causal Account of Sensory Representation. For Descartes, she says, there are two kinds of ideas, sensible and intelligible, both of which have presentational and referential content. The presentational content of sensible ideas consists of touches, tastes, sounds, odors, and colored visual images that are obscure and confused, in that there is nothing like (...) these sensible ideas in the material world. The presentational content of intelligible ideas, on the other hand, is clear and distinct, in that it consists of geometric representations of material bodies that do exist in the world outside the mind. Thus, whenever one has a clear and distinct intelligible perception of a material body that exists outside the mind, one also has at the same time an obscure and confused sensible image of that body as hard, sweet, squeaky, odiferous, and colored. Nothing like these sensible images actually exists in bodies. De Rosa says that the role of sensible imagery is to individuate and differentiate material bodies from one another, which would be difficult to do for. (shrink)

This unorthodox volume of related literary-philosophical essays is sure to ruffle a few feathers by making merry with the styles of philosophy fashionable today, and in each of the last four decades. Beginning with a strictly formalistic treatment of the relationship of perfection of form to truth of content in literature, Watson (author of the widely reviewed work, The Philosopher's Diet) comes full circle to a concluding essay in which the content of life is unraveled as a pig's meaningless "tale." (...) In between, the reader is taken on a Cook's Tour of hopping and skipping, meaning, seducing, dying, and dreaming in such alluring essays as "The Seducer and the Seduced," "Ape Dreams," and "A Pig's Tail." The chapters focus on one or more fundamental arguments so dear to philosophers of many stripes, but are written with an attention to style not found in conventional philosophy. Writing in a discipline for which a robust sense of humor applied to the pursuit of "serious" philosophy is apt to mean professional oblivion, Watson aims his wittiest salvos at the Dogmatic and Edifying Intent of popular philosophical objectives. He highlights the stylistic conceits and ambiguity that often turn quite ordinary statements into ponderous pendantics. Are these pieces parodies or not? Does Watson really hold the positions he sets forth, or is he making lighthearted fun? Yes! The Philosopher's Joke will amuse and delight, frustrate and annoy, but above all, it will make readers think. (shrink)