Background International collaborators face challenges in the design and implementation of ethical biomedical research. Evaluating community understanding of research and processes like informed consent may enable researchers to better protect research participants in a particular setting; however, there exist few studies examining community perspectives in health research, particularly in resource-limited settings, or strategies for engaging the community in research processes. Our goal was to inform ethical research practice in a biomedical research setting in western Kenya and similar resource-limited settings. Methods (...) We sought to use mabaraza , traditional East African community assemblies, in a qualitative study to understand community perspectives on biomedical research and informed consent within a collaborative, multinational research network in western Kenya. Analyses included manual, progressive coding of transcripts from mabaraza to identify emerging central concepts. Results Our findings from two mabaraza with 108 community members revealed that, while participants understood some principles of biomedical research, they emphasized perceived benefits from participation in research over potential risks. Many community members equated health research with HIV testing or care, which may be explained in part by the setting of this particular study. In addition to valuing informed consent as understanding and accepting a role in research activities, participants endorsed an increased role for the community in making decisions about research participation, especially in the case of children, through a process of community consent. Conclusions Our study suggests that international biomedical research must account for community understanding of research and informed consent, particularly when involving children. Moreover, traditional community forums, such as mabaraza in East Africa, can be used effectively to gather these data and may serve as a forum to further engage communities in community consent and other aspects of research. (shrink)

We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a "collective afterlife" in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler maintains that this assumption plays a surprising - indeed astonishing - role in our lives.

Body and World is the definitive edition of a book that shouldnow take its place as a major contribution to contemporary existentialphenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Martin Heidegger and MauriceMerleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical natureand experience are united in our bodily action. His account allows himto preserve the authority of experience while avoiding the tendencytoward idealism that threatens both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.Todes emphasizes the complex structure of the human body ;front/back asymmetry, the need to balance in (...) a gravitational field, and so forth ;and the role that structure plays in producing the spatiotemporal field of experience and in making possible objective knowledge of the objects in it. He shows that perception involves nonconceptual, but nonetheless objective forms of judgment. One can think of Body and World as fleshing out Merleau-Ponty's project while presciently relating it to the current interest in embodiment, not only in philosophy but also in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and anthropology. Todes's work opens new ways of thinking about problems such as the relation of perception to thought and the possibility of knowing an independent reality ;problems that have occupied philosophers since Kant and still concern analytic and continental philosophy. (shrink)

Samuel J. Kerstein develops a new, broadly Kantian account of the ethical issues that arise when a person treats another merely as a means. He explores how Kantian principles on the dignity of persons shed light on pressing issues in modern bioethics, including the distribution of scarce medical resources and the regulation of markets in organs.

Samuel Clarke was by far the most gifted and influential Newtonian philosopher of his generation, and A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, which constituted the 1704 Boyle Lectures, was one of the most important works of the first half of the eighteenth century, generating a great deal of controversy about the relation between space and God, the nature of divine necessary existence, the adequacy of the Cosmological Argument, agent causation, and the immateriality of the soul. Together (...) with the other texts presented in this edition, it also provides the best introduction to Clarke's philosophical views, which, in addition to their intrinsic interest, are historically important for the light they shed both on the philosophical positions within the Newtonian circle and on the exchange between Clarke and Leibniz, the most famous philosophical controversy of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Samuel Pufendorf is one of the most important moral and political philosophers of the seventeenth century. His theory, which builds on Grotius and Hobbes, was immediately recognized as a classic and taken up by writers as diverse as Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Smith. Over the past twenty years there has been a renaissance of Pufendorf scholarship. On the Duty of Man and Citizen is Pufendorf's own epitome of his monumental On the Law of Nature and of Nations, and it (...) served as a basic text in European universities throughout the Enlightenment. This edition has a lucid and historically sensitive translation by Michael Silverthorne, the first since the early twentieth century. James Tully's introduction sets the text in its context, summarizes the main arguments, surveys recent literature on Pufendorf, and shows how Pufendorf transformed natural law theory into an independent discipline of juristic political philosophy that dominated reflection on politics until Kant. (shrink)

Samuel R. Buss and Aleksandar Ignjatović. Unprovability of Consistency Statements in Fragments of Bounded Arithmetic.

Predictivism is the view that successful predictions of “novel” evidence carry more confirmational weight than accommodations of already known evidence. Novelty, in this context, has traditionally been conceived of as temporal novelty. However temporal predictivism has been criticized for lacking a rationale: why should the time order of theory and evidence matter? Instead, it has been proposed, novelty should be construed in terms of use-novelty, according to which evidence is novel if it was not used in the construction of a (...) theory. Only if evidence is use-novel can it fully support the theory entailing it. As I point out in this paper, the writings of the most influential proponent of use-novelty contain a weaker and a stronger version of use-novelty. However both versions, I argue, are problematic. With regard to the appraisal of Mendeleev’ periodic table, the most contentious historical case in the predictivism debate, I argue that temporal predictivism is indeed supported, although in ways not previously appreciated. On the basis of this case, I argue for a form of so-called symptomatic predictivism according to which temporally novel predictions carry more confirmational weight only insofar as they reveal the theory’s presumed coherence of facts as real. (shrink)

Let T be a first-order theory. A T-normal Kripke structure is one in which every world is a classical model of T. This paper gives a characterization of the intuitionistic theory T of sentences intuitionistically valid in all T-normal Kripke structures and proves the corresponding soundness and completeness theorems. For Peano arithmetic , the theory PA is a proper subtheory of Heyting arithmetic , so HA is complete but not sound for PA-normal Kripke structures.

The bounded arithmetic theory S2 is finitely axiomatized if and only if the polynomial hierarchy provably collapses. If T2i equals S2i + 1 then T2i is equal to S2 and proves that the polynomial time hierarchy collapses to ∑i + 3p, and, in fact, to the Boolean hierarchy over ∑i + 2p and to ∑i + 1p/poly.

John Locke’s views on the nature of freedom of action and freedom of will have played an influential role in the philosophy of action and in moral psychology. Locke offers distinctive accounts of action and forbearance, of will and willing, of voluntary (as opposed to involuntary) actions and forbearances, and of freedom (as opposed to necessity). These positions lead him to dismiss the traditional question of free will as absurd, but also raise new questions, such as whether we are (or (...) can be) free in respect of willing and whether we are free to will what we will, questions to which he gives divergent answers. Locke also discusses the (much misunderstood) question of what determines the will, providing one answer to it at one time, and then changing his mind upon consideration of some constructive criticism proposed by his friend, William Molyneux. In conjunction with this change of mind, Locke introduces a new doctrine (concerning the ability to suspend the fulfillment of one’s desires) that has caused much consternation among his interpreters, in part because it threatens incoherence. As we will see, Locke’s initial views do suffer from clear difficulties that are remedied by his later change of mind, all without introducing incoherence. (shrink)

The interview transcribed in this article was conducted with Thierry Ardouin, a great witness and actor in the history of training engineering in France. Through the evocation of his journey and his reflections, the aim here is to give an account of a singular journey, but also of the timely grasping of ingenium as a dynamic of analysis and action in the field of education and training science. “With our feet on the ground and our head in the stars” is (...) the approach he proposes to us, in order to link this history to the current and future perspectives of a reflection that is still under construction on training engineering, driven by an ethical vigilance with regard to world movements. (shrink)

Sketches a view of the relationship between the interests of the individual and the demands of morality, a view according to which morality and self‐interest stand in a relation of potential congruence. In adopting this view, Scheffler rejects two extreme positions, one that sees morality and self‐interest as ultimately coinciding and another that sees them as diametrically opposed. The complete exposition of Scheffler's view is left for subsequent chapters, but in this introduction he proposes that a proper treatment of the (...) relationship between morality and self‐interest, which must address morality's authority, content, scope, and deliberative role. Scheffler also situates his view in relation to the debate between defenders of contemporary moral theories, such as Kantian and utilitarian outlooks, and critics who claim that these positions neglect important ethical notions, such as virtue. Though he notes certain affinities between his view and the views of the critics, Scheffler denies that the defects in modern moral thought warrant its repudiation in favor of an ethics of virtue. (shrink)

Partial consistency statements can be expressed as polynomial-size propositional formulas. Frege proof systems have polynomial-size partial self-consistency proofs. Frege proof systems have polynomial-size proofs of partial consistency of extended Frege proof systems if and only if Frege proof systems polynomially simulate extended Frege proof systems. We give a new proof of Reckhow's theorem that any two Frege proof systems p-simulate each other. The proofs depend on polynomial size propositional formulas defining the truth of propositional formulas. These are already known to (...) exist since the Boolean formula value problem is in alternating logarithmic time; this paper presents a proof of this fact based on a construction which is somewhat simpler than the prior proofs of Buss and of Buss-Cook- Gupta-Ramachandran. (shrink)

I argue that the paradoxes attributed to the Megarians, namely the Liar, the Sorites, presupposition ("Have you stopped beating your father,") and failure of substitution of co-referential terms in psychological verbs ("The Electra") were intended to be reasons to accept Parmenides view that non-being is an incoherent notion and that there is exactly One Being. That is, Eubulides and others were akin to Zeno, in indirectly supporting Parmenidean monism.

The paper proves refined feasibility properties for the disjunction property of intuitionistic propositional logic. We prove that it is possible to eliminate all cuts from an intuitionistic proof, propositional or first-order, without increasing the Horn closure of the proof. We obtain a polynomial time, interactive, realizability algorithm for propositional intuitionistic proofs. The feasibility of the disjunction property is proved for sequents containing Harrop formulas. Under hardness assumptions for NP and for factoring, it is shown that the intuitionistic propositional calculus does (...) not always have polynomial size proofs and that the classical propositional calculus provides a superpolynomial speedup over the intuitionistic propositional calculus. The disjunction property for intuitionistic propositional logic is proved to be P-hard by a reduction to the circuit value problem. (shrink)

Samuel Sandmel's book: Philo of Alexandria: An Introduction, is a basic introductory, supplementing his own teacher' Goodenough: 'An Introduction to Philo Judaeus, ' and foundation to more recent works on Philo.

This chapter contains sections titled: What Are Fundamental Principles of Justice? Justice, Human Needs and Moral Capacities The Social Role of a Conception of Justice Justice and the Human Good Methodological Remarks Notes.

Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers on the nature of desert and justice, their relations with each other and with other values.

Three traditions have influenced the idea of the state in India – the Hindu Rajah, the Islamic View and the European Secular State. From biblical and theological considerations, Christians must reject the totalism and ego-centrism of modern states and work for greater accountability and decentralised decision-making.

O artigo enfoca o individualismo metodológico de Jon Elster e suas análises a respeito dos pré-compromissos constitucionais. O problema do trabalho diz respeito as possibilidade e limites da opção metodológica do autor para este debate no contexto dos regimes políticos democráticos. Para tanto, o texto analisa revisões feitas pelo próprio autor no decorrer da sua obra, como também objeções e críticas desenvolvidas a partir do referencial da Teoria Democrática contemporânea.

When man emerged from the millions of years of evolution in the Early and Late Stone-ages he had shed his ape-like characters; he was erect, large-brained, and he had become an agriculturist and a craftsman. He must have wondered—as we wonder still—at the sun, the moon and the stars, the land and the sea, the thunder and lightning, at his own birth, and growth and death. Endowed with intuition and reason, and with curiosity, he must have concluded— as we conclude—that (...) all this did not explain itself. There must have existed, and still exist, Something Else, that he could not perceive and did not understand. Endowed also with imagination, he peopled the earth and the sky with spirits—gods and demigods, ghosts and fairies, demons and angels. There followed beliefs in direct communication from this other world, through dream or trance, ecstasy or intuition; sometimes an individual assurance of personal contact and inspiration. So religion came to be: in the form, first of animism, then of mythology, finally of monotheism. (shrink)

Samuel C. Wheeler, III; The Extension of Deconstruction, The Monist, Volume 69, Issue 1, 1 January 1986, Pages 3–21, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist19866913.

In the 17th century, there was a lively debate in the intellectual circles with which Locke was familiar, revolving around the question whether the human mind is furnished with innate ideas. Although a few scholars declared that there is no good reason to believe, and good reason not to believe, in the existence of innate ideas, the vast majority took for granted that God, in his infinite goodness and wisdom, has inscribed in human minds innate principles that constitute the foundation (...) of knowledge, as well in practical as in theoretical matters. It was in opposition to the latter group, which included Descartes, leading Anglican divines, and the Cambridge Platonists, that Locke directed his attack upon innate ideas in the first book of the Essay.1 In the minds of those who weighed in on one side or the other, the importance of the controversy related to epistemological, moral, and religious doctrines. At the epistemological level, innatists (or, as I will also call them, nativists) held that all knowledge of the natural and supernatural world available to humans is based on fundamental “speculative” axioms, theoretical principles that neither require nor are capable of proof. These principles, such as the causal principle – that nothing comes from nothing – or the principle of non-contradiction – that nothing can both be and not be at the same time, were taken to be both universal and necessary, and hence impossible to derive from experience. To the mind of an innatist, if these principles are not based on experience and are not (as chimerical ideas were thought to be) constructed out.. (shrink)

Presents an account and technical assessment of Marx's economic analysis in Capital, with particular reference to the transformation and the surplus-value doctrine, the reproduction schemes, the falling real-wage and profit rates, and the trade cycle. The focus is on criticisms that Marx himself might have been expected to face in his day and age. In addition, it offers a chronological study of the evolution of that analysis from the early 1840s through three 'drafts': documents of the late 1840s, the Grundrisse (...) of 1857–1858, and the Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863. It also provides three studies in application, focusing on Marx's 'evolutionary' orientation in his evaluation of the transition to communism and his rejection of 'egalitarianism' under both capitalist and communist regimes; his evolving perspective on the role of the industrial 'entrepreneur'; and his evolving appreciation of the prospects for welfare reform within capitalism. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Principle of Synthetic Unity in Berkeley and Kant This little volume was prepared as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Michigan. By the advice of Dr. John Dewey I have undertaken to interpret the Metaphysical Notes of Berkeley's Commonplace Book, and as far as possible discover the Principle of Unity which occasionally manifests itself in Berkeley's works and which formed a basis for a Treatise on the Will which Berkeley contemplated (...) but never produced. I wish to express my indebtedness to Dr. Dewey for his assistance in the selection of collateral reading and for his suggestions in the development of the thesis. No literature could be secured bearing upon the interpretation of the Notes, hence the Notes have been classified and such as bear upon the theme under discussion have been used. Often the phraseology has been preserved but where that could not be done the thought has been expressed in phraseology as nearly Berkeleian as the author could select so as to preserve the unity that runs through the Notes. This principle of unity found in Berkely has been compared and contrasted with the Unity of Kant. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Autant dans la Somme Théologique que dans le De Veritate, Thomas d’Aquin développe une théorie de la foi religieuse au sein de laquelle la volonté occupe un rôle central. Ceci soulève la question exégétique de savoir si Thomas d’Aquin va jusqu’à endosser un volontarisme doxastique, c’est-à-dire la thèse selon laquelle il est possible de former certaines croyances volontairement. Dans cet article, je soulève quelques difficultés propres aux lectures de l’Aquinate qui ne lui attribuent pas un volontarisme doxastique. J’explique ensuite la (...) forme spécifique que prend ce volontarisme chez Thomas d’Aquin, ainsi que la raison pour laquelle cette thèse est essentielle à sa conception de la foi religieuse. (shrink)

Justifying intellectual property on the basis of labour is an understandably popular strategy, but there is a tension in basing some intellectual property claims on labour that has gone largely unnoticed in treatments of the subject: many forms of innovation cause people to lose their jobs, which seriously hampers the ability of those who lose work to productively use their own labour. This article shows that even under Lockean and other labour‐based justifications of intellectual property rights those who claim property (...) rights to innovations of this type have special obligations to compensate those who lose work because of their inventions. By examining the problem that such innovations create, I hope to contribute to larger debates about automation and the job losses it often brings. Lockean and other labour‐based theories of intellectual property are generally taken to secure strong, noninstrumental rights to intellectual property if they are successful. So, if even these theories imply that those who profit from the innovations driving automation have special obligations to those left jobless by it, that is strong evidence that they do in fact have such obligations. (shrink)