Acceptance of elderly or marginal health individuals as kidney donors is debated, with practices varying between centres. Transplant recipients, live kidney donors and health-care professionals caring for patients with renal failure were surveyed regarding their views on live donor kidney transplantation (LDKT) of marginal health (diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis, obesity, etc.) and elderly donors. Participants were recruited within a tertiary renal and transplant centre and invited to participate in focus groups and structured interviews. They also completed an anonymous questionnaire. Of 464 (...) participants who completed the questionnaire (36% health-care professionals and 64% patients), 49% and 64%, respectively, stated that marginal and elderly donors should be accepted for LDKT. In the structured interviews, emphasis was given to presenting to donor, recipient and their respective families a calculated risk regarding the effect that either a nephrectomy or transplant has on long-term quality of life. Participants stated that an independent third party in addition to the transplant team should discuss involved risks. Issues of ‘how desperate’ the recipient's situation is should also be considered. Health-care professionals stated that regardless of the strength of will of an individual to donate a kidney (despite age, health problems or personal risk), they should always have the right to say ‘no’ if performing a specific LDKT was against their professional and ethical values. About half of those surveyed considered that marginal health and elderly donors were acceptable for LDKT. Emphasis was given to the explanation to donors and recipients of the risks involved in such transplantation. (shrink)

In the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, we created and implemented from November 2020 to February 2021 a monthly educational pilot program of philosophical management of stress based on Science, Humanism and Epicurean Pragmatism, which was offered to employees of 26 municipalities in the Prefecture of Attica, Greece. The program named “Philosophical Distress Management Operation System” (Philo.Di.M.O.S.) is novel and unique in its kind, as it combines a certain Greek philosophical tradition (Epicurean) that concurs with modern scientific knowledge. The (...) program was designed to be implemented in a period of crisis; therefore, it used a fast-paced, easy to learn and practice philosophical approach to stress management, based on cognitive psychotherapy. The philosophical approach to stress management has the advantage that it can be offered to most people, regardless of age and educational level. The pilot program was effective in achieving its objectives, shown by statistical comparisons of the trainees’ responses to anonymous questionnaires before and after the month-long training. The successful Philo.Di.M.O.S. program, thus, based on a solid scientific and philosophical basis, offers a paradigm of stress management during crises and could be useful in Greece and internationally. (shrink)

Reportedly ever since Pythagoras, but possibly much earlier, humans have been concerned about the way non human animals (henceforward “animals” for convenience) should be treated. By late antiquity all main traditions with regard to this issue had already been established and consolidated, and were only slightly modified during the centuries that followed. Until the nineteenth century philosophers tended to focus primarily on the ontological status of animals, to wit on whether – and to what degree – animals are actually rational (...) beings; accordingly they allowed – or denied – them some kind of moral standing. This modus operandi was for the first time seriously questioned by Jeremy Bentham, who put the issue on a different track. If the question, as Bentham suggested, is not if animals can think or speak, but if they can suffer1, then it seems plausible that moral agents ought to abstain from inflicting unnecessary suffering on animals; in other words, humans might have at least one – even limited – moral duty towards animals. And if this, in turn, is true, then animals should arguably be allowed the commensurate moral right, namely the right not to be inflicted unnecessary pain. Then, if animals possess this right, they could probably possess others, as well. This is how grosso modo the issue of animal rights became a pivotal part of the discussion concerning animal ethics. Bentham himself, of course, wouldn’t have gone that far; to him even the idea of human rights sounded like “simple… rhetorical nonsense upon stilts”.2 It was mostly due to his views, however, that the debate was moved from the way things actually are to the way things should ideally be – thus merging into what, in my view, should always have been: one primarily concerning ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article probes Jonathan Israel’s theory about ‘Radical Enlightenment’ inaugurating political modernity by way of explicating the thought of Joseph Priestley. In Israel’s view, despite the inconsistencies plaguing Socinian thought, Priestley, a monist, emerged as an ardent supporter of religious toleration and democratic republicanism. This article seeks to restore the fundamental coherence of Priestley’s theological and metaphysical views, arguing that they were produced as parts of a system founded on the simultaneous adherence to providentialism and necessitarianism. Prized as a prerequisite (...) of the unfolding of the divine plan, the unobstructed expression of religious opinions was the centre of the conception of civil society and civil liberty that Priestley articulated based on these premises and his forays into politics aimed to secure its permanence. A comparison of Priestley’s stance on the issue of manhood suffrage with that of Richard Price reveals not the materialist Priestley, but Price, a dualist, as an advocate of democratization and casts into doubt the applicability of Israel’s scheme in the case of England. The article closes with some suggestions towards reappraising the relationship between Enlightenment and modernity. (shrink)

Ever since the debate concerning euthanasia was ignited, the distinction between active and passive euthanasia – or, letting die and killing – has been marked as one of its key issues. In this paper I will argue that a) the borderline between act and omission is an altogether blurry one, and it gets even vaguer when it comes to euthanasia, b) there is no morally significant difference between active and passive euthanasia, and c) if there is any, it seems to (...) favor active instead of passive euthanasia. Therefore, while the distinction between active and passive euthanasia might be meaningful in terms of description, if it is considered to be endowed with moral weight and used on purpose of justifying one type of euthanasia instead of the other, it becomes morally problematic and misleading. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

The debate concerning abortion abounds in miraculous narratives. Judith Jarvis Thomson has contrived the most celebrated set among related ones, to wit the “violinist analogy,” the “Good Samaritan” narrative, and the “Henry Fonda” allegory, by virtue of which, she intends, on the one hand, to argue that women’s right to autonomy outweighs the alleged fetus’s right to life, and on the other, to prove that no positive moral duties can be derived towards other persons alone from the fact that a (...) moral agent is ascribed certain rights. What this short paper endeavors to prove is that Thomson’s argumentation by analogy is a weak one, since neither the number nor the relevance of similarities invoked is adequate or satisfactory, while crucial parameters concerning the morality of abortion are being totally overlooked. (shrink)

We show that certain classes of modules have universal models with respect to pure embeddings: Let R be a ring, T a first‐order theory with an infinite model extending the theory of R‐modules and (where ⩽pp stands for “pure submodule”). Assume has the joint embedding and amalgamation properties. If or, then has a universal model of cardinality λ. As a special case, we get a recent result of Shelah [28, 1.2] concerning the existence of universal reduced torsion‐free abelian groups with (...) respect to pure embeddings.We begin the study of limit models for classes of R‐modules with joint embedding and amalgamation. We show that limit models with chains of long cofinality are pure‐injective and we characterize limit models with chains of countable cofinality. This can be used to answer [18, Question 4.25].As this paper is aimed at model theorists and algebraists an effort was made to provide the background for both. (shrink)

This study examines the possible common characteristics between human and non-human consciousness. It mainly addresses animal consciousness and, to a certain extent, intelligent AI. It provides an overview of the main theories regarding consciousness, more specifically those of neuroscience and cognitive science, and also their materialistic base at a neuroanatomical and neurophysiological level, emphasizing the role the prefrontal cortex plays, both in humans and animals. Then, it considers particular aspects of consciousness, such as emotion, and presents the three broad traditions (...) considering human emotions, which are emotions as feelings, evaluations, and judgments, as well as studies on animal emotions. Then, it continues with the proposed models of metacognition and memory to deepen the analysis regarding common characteristics of human and non-human consciousness. It also touches on the platform theory, which may bridge human, animal, and AI consciousness, although this theory is under consideration. It ends with references to animals’ social behavior, their interactions with humans, their possible ontogenic proximity as expressed in biolinguistics, and the findings of computational ethology, which help to establish models of mental human disorders. The study concludes that findings support proximities between humans and animals, consciousness at the level of neurophysiology, and emotion and metacognition. Contrary to animals and AI, human consciousness is more complicated and far from cybernetic and computational models since it is linked with various kinds of malleability, reconsolidation, neural plasticity, different conceptions of emotions, and certain mental pathologies. (shrink)

Fisher [10] and Baur [6] showed independently in the seventies that if T is a complete first-order theory extending the theory of modules, then the class of models of T with pure embeddings is stable. In [25, 2.12], it is asked if the same is true for any abstract elementary class $(K, \leq _p)$ such that K is a class of modules and $\leq _p$ is the pure submodule relation. In this paper we give some instances where this is true:Theorem.Assume (...) R is an associative ring with unity. Let $(K, \leq _p)$ be an AEC such that $K \subseteq R\text {-Mod}$ and K is closed under finite direct sums, then: •If K is closed under pure-injective envelopes, then $\mathbf {K}$ is $\lambda $ -stable for every $\lambda \geq \operatorname {LS}(\mathbf {K})$ such that $\lambda ^{|R| + \aleph _0}= \lambda $.•If K is closed under pure submodules and pure epimorphic images, then $\mathbf {K}$ is $\lambda $ -stable for every $\lambda $ such that $\lambda ^{|R| + \aleph _0}= \lambda $.•Assume R is Von Neumann regular. If $\mathbf {K}$ is closed under submodules and has arbitrarily large models, then $\mathbf {K}$ is $\lambda $ -stable for every $\lambda $ such that $\lambda ^{|R| + \aleph _0}= \lambda $.As an application of these results we give new characterizations of noetherian rings, pure-semisimple rings, Dedekind domains, and fields via superstability. Moreover, we show how these results can be used to show a link between being good in the stability hierarchy and being good in the axiomatizability hierarchy.Another application is the existence of universal models with respect to pure embeddings in several classes of modules. Among them, the class of flat modules and the class of $\mathfrak {s}$ -torsion modules. (shrink)

It is proposed that the rhetoric of the discourse on science and Buddhism exhibits an often non-deliberate predisposition to establish and perpetuate a kind of compartmentalization which consigns both science and Buddhism to two different and irrelevant to each other realms in the minds of the wider, general, and non-scientifically involved Western Buddhist population. This emerges non-deliberately, for the purpose of avoiding any essential influence between the two subjects, despite the sincerely expressed aims of the proponents of science— Buddhism complementarity (...) to avoid that separation. However, this paper will also argue for the importance of the continuation of science—Buddhism collaboration as this provides evidential instances of actually practicing the Buddhist emphatic belief in the importance of not separating the pursuit of knowledge from the aim of understanding, producing, and maintaining happiness. Indeed, it is the epistemological incompatibility between the two disciplines, and the compartmentalization effectuated by the notion of complementarity between them, that makes the Buddhist emphasis on attaching the aim of happiness to scientific pursuit all the more real, persuasive and potentially imitable. (shrink)

Le dualisme de Braïlas (1812–1884) qui fut l’unique partisan de Victor Cousin (1792–1867) à avoir, après lui, constitué un système philosophique complet, est un dualisme modéré, du fait qu’en premier lieu, entre la matière et l’esprit, tout un groupe d’activités de la conscience humaine y est censé s’interpoler; qu’en deuxième lieu, le dogmatisme rationaliste braïlien est fondé sur une correspondance rigoureuse entre l’ordre universel et l’ordre rationnel, qui n’est guère dérangé que par l’intuition d’un ordre supérieur et plus parfait, conçu (...) et reproduit par l’imagination, grâce à des processus créationnels; et qu’en troisième lieu, la philosophie braïlienne, quant à ses caractères dominants, s’avère, surtout du point de vue épistémologique, non pas une application servile, mais, par contre, une considération critique des thèses de l’éclectisme cousinien. (shrink)

We introduce the notion of a w-good \-frame which is a weakening of Shelah’s notion of a good \-frame. Existence of a w-good \-frame implies existence of a model of size \. Tameness and amalgamation imply extension of a w-good \-frame to larger models. As an application we show:Theorem 0.1. Suppose\. If \ = \mathbb {I} = 1 \le \mathbb {I} < 2^{\lambda ^{++}}\)and\is\\)-tame, then\.The proof presented clarifies some of the details of the main theorem of Shelah and avoids using (...) the heavy set-theoretic machinery of Shelah by replacing it with tameness. (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

From Dawn till Dusk embraces the conceptual challenges often associated with Bioethics by taking the reader on a journey that embodies the circle of life and what it means to be human. The beginning and the end of life have always been an impossible riddle to humans. Bioethics does not aspire to unveil utter truths regarding the purpose of our existence; on the contrary, its task is to settle controversial issues that arise within this finite, very fragile and vulnerable life, (...) yet a life we still have to live. This book discusses thorny ethical issues that transcend time and are related to the dawn and the dusk of life: abortion and infanticide, genetic engineering, human reproductive cloning, the fear of death, rational suicide, and the right to die. The book's highest aspiration, though, is to both provide the reader with an opportunity to see the world from different perspectives and to showcase the irresistible charms of bioethical debates. (shrink)

This article explores how Plato, in his “metaphysical” dialogues, sees the specific properties of motion (and especially of motion in music), which lend themselves to adaptation for the purposes of maintaining or restoring the health of the soul. Plato explores the property of regular or rhythmic motion in particular. The attention has been drawn to the analogy between the calming effect of music, at the human level, and the Demiurge’s achievement in willing the world into existence. The focus of the (...) article lays on the Laws, in which the principle of musical motion plays a central role in resolution of the contradictions between material and spiritual, natural and physiological, medical and educative. (shrink)

The relation of Isocrates and Aristotle has mostly been defined by scholars as a competition or rivalry between them in a debate over the ends of rhetorical education. This essay investigates Isocrates-quotations in the Rhetoric of Aristotle and calls for a re-evaluation of the relation of Aristotle to Isocrates and to Demosthenes. Aristotle studied thoroughly the Isocratic speeches (especially Helena, Evagoras, Panegyricus, De pace, Antidosis, Philippus) and Isocrates is the only of the canon of ten Attic orators, who is quoted (...) regularly in the Rhetoric. For textual criticism the quotations of Aristotle should be used with caution, as Aristotle often quoted from memory, but his readings must not be excluded a priori. Aristotle recognizes the leading role of Isocrates as a master of literary prose in the development of rhetoric, particularly the epideictic speech. In Aristotle and the earlier Peripatetics Isocrates, who exerts influence on the ethos of the reader, has a prominent position, unlike Demosthenes, who is characterized by his ability to arouse emotions. In this judgement political reasons (promacedonian - antimacedonian) are also visible. (shrink)

Introduction -- General clarification of philosophical-scientific concepts -- Science and philosophy -- The analytic and synthetic methods -- The knowledge myth -- Observation and justification -- The soul as mystery -- The knowledge myth in psychology -- Conclusion -- Psychological experience -- Reality in science and philosophy -- Reality of psychological experience -- Conclusion -- Toward a science of the soul -- Verification -- Psychology and the body -- Psychology and the mind -- Psychology and the soul -- Conclusion -- (...) Meaning in psychological experience -- Observation -- Interpretation and formulation -- Conclusion -- Addenda : excerpts from notebooks and letters. (shrink)

We study Martsinkovsky–Russell torsion modules with pure embeddings as an abstract elementary class. We give a model-theoretic characterization of the pure-injective and the Σ-pure-injective modules relative to the class of torsion modules assuming that the torsion submodule is a pure submodule. Our characterization of relative Σ-pure-injective modules extends the classical characterization of Gruson and Jenson as well as Zimmermann. We study the limit models of the class and determine when the class is superstable assuming that the torsion submodule is a (...) pure submodule. As a corollary, we show that the class of torsion abelian groups with pure embeddings is strictly stable (i.e., stable not superstable). (shrink)

The current study aims to explain the fundamentals of religious pluralism in Wittgenstein later philosophy and Gadamer philosophical hermeneutics, specifically regarding culture. It, then, proposes the approach more suitable for the Islamic context. Having fulfilled such an objective, pluralism, concerning religious rituals, becomes accepted and cultural and religious interaction is realized without any relativism conclusion. Wittgenstein’s pluralism results in pure relativism. That is to say, in order to understand the rules of the language game and life style he mentions, one (...) needs to be placed inside. However, it is a dialectical model that Gadamer philosophical hermeneutics leads to. Dialogue gives opportunity to cultural interaction and convergence, developing the religious culture. The latter is of more proximity to Islamic resources such as the Quran, proposing a religious culture transcending cultural, historical, and social limitations. All in all, the two significant features of Gadamer’s which Wittgenstein ignores are first, the interaction of religious pluralism encouraging the development of religious culture and second, reciprocal relation between culture and religion based on hermeneutics circle. (shrink)

Theoretical ethics includes both metaethics (the meaning of moral terms) and normative ethics (ethical theories and principles). Practical ethics involves making decisions about every day real ethical problems, like decisions about euthanasia, what we should eat, climate change, treatment of animals, and how we should live. It utilizes ethical theories, like utilitarianism and Kantianism, and principles, but more broadly a process of reflective equilibrium and consistency to decide how to act and be.

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

The lives and labour of migrants are increasingly shaped by political precarity and rightlessness in an unevenly globalized world. We argue that ‘undesirableness’ rather than mobility is constitutive of the ‘migrant’ position. Besides underscoring the asymmetrical power relations that define the position of the ‘migrant’ vis-à-vis the receiving state and society, an optic of ‘undesirableness’ also foregrounds the governmental techniques deployed to produce the figure of the ‘migrant’. We suggest that the framing of migrants as ‘unwanted’ is pivotal to the (...) European non-entrée regime, which parallels cultural exclusion through an Orientalization of the discourse on migration. The immutable cultural alterity of the ‘migrant’ is thus presumed to pose a perennial threat to Western ‘liberal’ values. Two assumptions undergird this narrative of the ‘undesirable’ migrant as the quintessential ‘Other’ of the European Self: cultural determination of behaviour in migrant communities, and incompatibility of ‘migrant cultures’ with those of ‘host’ societies. (shrink)