Genomic research results and incidental findings with health implications for a research participant are of potential interest not only to the participant, but also to the participant's family. Yet investigators lack guidance on return of results to relatives, including after the participant's death. In this paper, a national working group offers consensus analysis and recommendations, including an ethical framework to guide investigators in managing this challenging issue, before and after the participant's death.

Research on self-agency emphasizes the importance of a comparing mechanism, which scans for a match between anticipated and actual outcomes, in the subjective experience of doing.This study explored the “feeling of doing” in individuals with checking symptoms by examining the mechanism involved in the experienced agency for outcomes that matched expectations. This mechanism was explored using a task in which the subliminal priming of potential action-effects generally enhances people’s feeling of causing these effects when they occur, due to the unconscious (...) perception of a match between primed and observed outcomes. The main result revealed a negative relationship between checking and self-agency for observed outcomes that were primed prior to actions. This suggests that checking individuals fail to grasp the correspondence between actual outcomes of their actions and expected ones. We discuss the possible role of undermined self-agency in checking phenomena and its relationship with cognitive dysfunction. (shrink)

Context: Distributed language and interactivity are central members of a set of concepts that are rapidly developing into rigorous, exciting additions to 4E cognitive science. Because they share certain assumptions and methodological commitments with enactivism, the two have sometimes been confused; additionally, while enactivism is a well-developed paradigm, interactivity has relied more on methodological development and on a set of focal examples. Problem: The goal of this article is to clarify the core conceptual commitments of both interactivity-based and enactive approaches (...) to cognitive science by contrasting the two and highlighting their differences in assumptions, focus, and explanatory strategies. Method: We begin with the shared commitments of interactivity and enactivism - e.g., antirepresentationalism, naturalism, interdisciplinarity, the importance of biology, etc. We then give an overview of several important varieties of enactivism, including sensorimotor and anti-representationalist enactivism, and then walk through the history of the “core” varieties, taking care to contrast Maturana’s approach with that of Varela and the current researchers following in Varela’s footsteps. We then describe the differences between this latter group and interactivity-based approaches to cognitive science. Results: We argue that enactivism’s core concepts are explanatorily inadequate in two ways. First, they mis-portray the organization of many living systems, which are not operationally closed. Second, they fail to realize that most epistemic activity depends on engagement with non-local resources. Both problems can be dealt with by adopting an interactivity-based perspective, in which agency and cognition are fundamentally distributed and involve integration of non-local resources into the local coupling of organism and environment. Implications: The article’s primary goal is theoretical clarification and exposition; its primary implication is that enactive concepts need to be modified or extended in some way in order to explain fully many aspects of cognition and directed biological activity. Or, read another way, the article’s primary implication is that interactivity already provides a rich set of concepts for doing just that, which, while closely allied with enactivism in several ways, are not enactivist concepts. Constructivist content: The article consists entirely of a comparison between two constructivist fields of theory. Key Words: Interactivity, enactivism, distributed language, radical embodied cognitive science, ecological psychology, autonomy. (shrink)

Tuberculosis is caused by bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis. In this study, a mathematical model of tuberculosis is analyzed. The numerical behaviour of the considered model is analyzed including basic reproduction number and stability. We applied three numerical techniques to this model, i.e., nonstandard finite difference scheme, Runge–Kutta method of order 4, and forward Euler scheme. NSFD scheme preserves all the essential properties of the model. Acquired results corroborate that NSFD scheme converges for each step size. While the other two schemes failed (...) to preserve some properties of the model such as positivity and convergence. A graphical comparison presented in this study confirms the numerical stability of the NSFD technique shown here is maintained over a large area. (shrink)

While there are many points of opposition between the political philosophies of Marx and Kant, the two can greatly benefit from one another in various ways. Bringing the ideas of Marx and Kant together offers a promising way forward for each view. Most significantly, a powerful critique of capitalism can be developed from their combined thought: Kant’s political philosophy offers a robust idea of freedom to ground this critique, while Marx provides the nuanced understanding of social and political power structures (...) under capitalism that allows this idea of freedom to be properly applied. (shrink)

This paper proposes a Cournot game organized by three competing firms adopting bounded rationality. According to the marginal profit in the past time step, each firm tries to update its production using local knowledge. In this game, a firm’s preference is represented by a utility function that is derived from a constant elasticity of substitution production function. The game is modeled by a 3-dimensional discrete dynamical system. The equilibria of the system are numerically studied to detect their complex characteristics due (...) to difficulty to get an explicit form for those equilibria. For the proposed utility function, some cases with different value parameters are considered. Numerical simulations are used to provide an experimental evidence for the complex behavior of the evolution of the system. The obtained results show that the system loses its stability due to different types of bifurcations. (shrink)

It is proposed to expand the structure of the intelligent information system with an addition of knowledge-oriented decision support subsystem. The description of an intellectual workplace is given. Based on this, the main procedures of the subsystem are proposed: the creation of a knowledge base and the search for appropriate responses to a given action. The structure and stages of creating a knowledge base based on the analysis of rules set in natural language are described. The advantages of this approach (...) in comparison with the common approaches based on neural networks are substantiated. (shrink)

Background: Doctor–patient sexual relationship is considered to be unfair because the first party would be abusing the second party’s vulnerability. The prohibition of this relationship is noted in the Hippocratic oath. Currently, a reprise of the use of oaths in medical schools can be observed.Aim: To determine whether the prohibition has been maintained and how its expression has varied in the oaths during different periods.Methods: 50 oaths were studied: 13 ancient–medieval and 37 modern–contemporary. Of the 50 texts, 19 were versions (...) of the original oaths. The oaths that pointed out the prohibited doctor–patient relationship referred to any sexual aspect or included paragraphs that began as the Hippocratic oath does were noted.Results: Of the 24 texts that expressed the prohibition, 8 were ancient–medieval and 16 were modern–contemporary. Some expressly call it Hippocratic oath, many use general terminology and others describe it in association with other commitments .Conclusions: The clause on the prohibition of the doctor–patient sexual relationship in Hippocratic oath was included to be for legal, economic and social reasons at the time. That the clause is found mostly in the ancient–medieval oaths can be attributed to the influence of the original. This commitment is generalised and associated with others by contemporary formulas. Currently, sexual relationships are the subject of legal and ethical analysis and their inclusion in the oaths is being debated. (shrink)

Context The attitudes of medical professionals towards physician assisted dying have been widely discussed. Less explored is the level of agreement among physicians on the possibility of ‘rational suicide’—a considered suicide act made by a sound mind and a precondition of assisted dying legislation. Objective To assess attitudes towards rational suicide in a representative sample of senior doctors in England and Wales. Methods A postal survey was conducted of 1000 consultants and general practitioners randomly selected from a commercially available database. (...) The main outcome of interest was level of agreement with a statement about rational suicide. Results The corrected participation rate was 50%; 363 questionnaires were analysed. Overall 72% of doctors agreed with the possibility of rational suicide, 17% disagreed, and 11% were neutral. Doctors who identified themselves as being more religious were more likely to disagree. Some doctors who disagreed with legalisation of physician assisted suicide nevertheless agreed with the concept of rational suicide. Conclusions Most senior doctors in England and Wales feel that rational suicide is possible. There was no association with specialty. Strong religious belief was associated with disagreement, although levels of agreement were still high in people reporting the strongest religious belief. Most doctors who were opposed to physician assisted suicide believed that rational suicide was possible, suggesting that some medical opposition is best explained by other factors such as concerns of assessment and protection of vulnerable patients. (shrink)

В монографии рассматриваются интерпретативные стратегии деконструкции, их историко-философские истоки, а также их значение для постметафизического мышления. Для научных работников, студентов и аспирантов.

Abstract:The present paper focuses on the linkage between two academic paradigms in the enquiry into business ethics: normative philosophy and empirical social sciences. The paper first reviews existing research pertaining to a normative-empirical dialogue. Further empirical data on the relationship between various standards of morality are discussed in relation to the normative frameworks of ethics. Lastly, future directions for such a dialogue in business ethics are suggested.

During the past few years considerable debate has arisen within academic journals with respect to the use of smart drugs or cognitive enhancement pharmaceuticals. The following paper seeks to examine the foundations of this cognitive enhancement debate using the example of methylphenidate use among college students. The argument taken is that much of the enhancement debate rests upon inflated assumptions about the ability of such drugs to enhance and over-estimations of either the size of the current market for such drugs (...) or the rise in popularity as drugs for enhancing cognitive abilities. This article provides an overview of the empirical evidence that methylphenidate has the ability to significantly improve cognitive abilities in healthy individuals, and examines whether the presumed uptake of the drug is either as socially significant as implied or growing to the extent that it requires urgent regulatory attention. In addition, it reviews the evidence of side-effects for the use of methylphenidate which may be an influential factor in whether an individual decides to use such drugs. The primary conclusions are that neither drug efficacy, nor the benefit-to-risk balance, nor indicators of current or growing demand provide sufficient evidence that methylphenidate is a suitable example of a cognitive enhancer with mass appeal. In light of these empirically based conclusions, the article discusses why methylphenidate might have become seen as a smart drug or cognitive enhancer. (shrink)

Sacrifice haunts the Phaedo. In this article, I argue that the mise-en-scène of the death scene of the Phaedo, as well as other sacrificial elements in the background of the dialogue, creates a nexus that positively integrates the birth, philosophical practice, and death of Socrates into the ritualized rhythm of the life of the city of Athens. A close reading of the death scene presented as a synopsis with Walter Burkert’s well-known analysis of Greek sacrifice reveals convergences and divergences between (...) the Phaedo and Greek sacrificial practice. Socrates appears as a willing victim who accepts the city’s sacrificial practice while remaining on his own terms. (shrink)

The history of philosophy must identify in each system the determining motifs, the genuine crystallizations present throughout the entire system, and separate them from proofs, justifications, and dialogues, from their presentations by philosophers, to the degree that the latter were conscious of them. It must separate the silently advancing mole of genuine philosophical knowledge from the wordy, exoteric, phenomenological, multiformed consciousness of the subject, that consciousness which is the receptacle and motivating force of these reasonings.