This study examines Australian tax agents' perceptions of the ethical environment in which they practice, within the context of an income tax system based on self-assessment principles. The research identifies and ranks an inventory of ethical issues in terms of perceived frequency of occurrence and importance to Western Australian tax agents. In addition, the extent and influence of ethical concerns in the profession are evaluated.The study has determined that the most frequently cited ethical issue is the failure to make reasonable (...) enquiries where information or documentation provided by a client appears to be inaccurate or incomplete. The most important ethical problem is a failure to ensure confidentiality with regard to privileged client information. When the frequency of occurrence and importance means are compared, inadequate technical competence, failure to make reasonable enquiries/conduct research, continuing to act for a client where there is incorrect information, and conflicts in distinguishing between tax planning and tax avoidance emerge as the high frequency/high importance issues. Although acknowledging the potential for unethical actions in tax practice, Western Australian tax agents consider that they carry out their professional activities within an ethical environment. (shrink)

This book explores aspects of William H. Poteat’s philosophical anthropology, which proposes a post-critical alternative to the prevailing dualistic conception of the person and opens a path to recovery of the pre-reflective ontological ground of the person where our personhood can be recovered and re-appropriated.

Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium that causes the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea, demonstrates extensive antigenic heterogeneity in its surface components. The organism has the capacity to switch on and off the synthesis of different versions of components such as pili, outer membrane proteins, and lipopolysaccharide. Recent studies have shown that the gonococcus uses novel and complex mechanisms, of types not described previously, to store different versions of genetic information for surface proteins, and to regulate expression of those genes.

Background and objective: Code status discussions may fail to address patients’ treatment-related goals and their knowledge of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). This study aimed to investigate patients’ resuscitation preferences, knowledge of CPR and goals of care. Design, setting, patients and measurements: 135 adults were interviewed within 48 h of admission to a general medical service in an academic medical centre, querying code status preferences, knowledge about CPR and its outcome probabilities and goals of care. Medical records were reviewed for clinical information (...) and code status documentation. Results: 41 (30.4%) patients had discussed CPR with their doctor, 116 (85.9%) patients preferred full code status and 11 (8.1%) patients expressed code status preferences different from the code status documented in their medical record. When queried about seven possible goals of care, patients affirmed an average of 4.9 goals; their single most important goals were broadly distributed, ranging from being cured (n = 36; 26.7%) to being comfortable (n = 8; 5.9%). Patients’ mean estimate of survival to discharge after CPR was 60.4%. Most patients believed it was helpful to discuss goals of care (n = 95; 70.4%) and the chances of surviving inhospital CPR (n = 112; 83.0%). Some patients expressed a desire to change their code status after receiving information about survival following inhospital CPR (n = 11; 8.1%) or after discussing goals of care (n = 2; 1.5%). Conclusions: Doctors need to address patients’ knowledge about CPR and take steps to avoid discrepancies between treatment orders and patients’ preferences. Addressing CPR outcome probabilities and goals of care during code status discussions may improve patients’ knowledge and influence their preferences. (shrink)

Exploratory studies employing volunteer subjects are especially vulnerable to race and class bias. This article illustrates how inattention to race and class as critical dimensions in women's lives can produce biased research samples and lead to false conclusions. It analyzes the race and class background of 200 women who volunteered to participate in an in-depth study of Black and White professional, managerial, and administrative women. Despite a multiplicity of methods used to solicit subjects, White women raised in middle-class families who (...) worked in male-dominated occupations were the most likely to volunteer, and White women were more than twice as likely to respond to media solicitations or letters. To recruit most Black subjects and address their concerns about participation required more labor-intensive strategies involving personal contact. The article discusses reasons for differential volunteering and ways to integrate race and class into qualitative research on women. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 93-96 [Access article in PDF] Phenomenological Methods in Psychiatry:A Necessary First Step M. Gupta and L. Rex Kay Keywords: behavior, empathy, human science, methodology, natural science, phenomenology. WE ARE GRATEFUL to the journal for prviding the opportunity for exchange and discussion of some of the themes raised in our paper, "The impact of phenomenology on North American psychiatric assessment" and we are pleased (...) to be able to reply to the two excellent commentaries by McMillan and Morley. Both McMillan and Morley question the prospect of employing phenomenology and its methods in psychiatric assessment, and in psychiatric practice more generally. McMillan questions the utility of such a step, and Morley is pessimistic about its feasibility. We shall address each author's concerns in turn.Initially, let us restate the aims of our paper to contextualize our arguments and those made in the commentaries. First, we sought an understanding of what is meant by North American psychiatrists, working within the DSM framework, when they refer to the phenomenological approach to psychiatric assessment. To elucidate this meaning, we compared the contemporary North American usage to a small number of definitions of phenomenology, particularly those definitions that were, and are now, applied to clinical psychiatric work. Contrary to McMillan's suggestion, we did not intend to state definitively what should or should not count as phenomenological, but rather to compare North American psychiatric assessment to what typically has counted as phenomenological. Second, we sought to examine phenomenology's influence on North American psychiatric practice, particularly psychotherapy.Morley argues that such influences usually exemplify the inappropriate appending of phenomenology to psychiatric practice rather than true integration of different paradigms. Although we do not disagree with this general contention, we will argue that the deployment of phenomenological methods in psychiatric assessment is a necessary first step toward the kind of integration he proposes.McMillan makes two related but unintegrated points. First, he argues that objective, behavioral data are phenomenological, according to his broad definition of the term. Second, he proposes that, if the behavioral and the phenomenological are different, we are better off staying with the behavioral when it comes to psychiatric nosology. Let us consider these two points in succession.McMillan seeks to broaden Jasper's definition of phenomenology to include objective observations [End Page 93] as phenomenological. To this end, he distinguishes methods from aims. He summarizes Jasper's definition of phenomenology as "an empirical method for investigating 'individual psychic experience (p 55)" and claims that this is a statement of aim or objectives. He then urges us to "consider the merits of different phenomenological methodologies in terms of their success in achieving this objective" whether or not they utilize "all the methods" of phenomenology. This is much like saying that if we treat waving one's hand as a method for greeting someone, we are then free to treat the objective of the wave as one of greeting someone, and then say that anything that serves as a greeting is, by definition, a "wave." Whatever else McMillan's objective observations are, he has not convinced us that they are phenomenological, anymore than we are likely to convince you that a kiss on the lips is really just a wave.Nonetheless, it is worthwhile seeing what McMillan does with this argument. He tells us that we can "read the first-person experience from behavior in a fairly accurate and informative way." He uses the example of a father gazing at his young child and notes that it is not unreasonable to infer that he is experiencing loving and nurturing feelings. It is, indeed, not unreasonable to draw such an inference. But it is far more reasonable to infer that the father is experiencing a cacophony of feelings, including, but not limited to, love, concern, anxiety, pride, envy, hope, and sadness (Stern 1995, 18-58). If we are able to distinguish which of these feelings is dominant at any given moment—which we are—and if we are also able to track subtle shifts in such feelings... (shrink)

North American psychiatric literature describes the current method of psychiatric diagnostic assessment as "phenomenological"; however, it is unclear what phenomenology 1 means in this context. This paper investigates the meaning and impact of some of the major philosophical and psychiatric definitions of phenomenology on contemporary psychiatric assessment. Employing a comparative analysis of selected definitions of phenomenology, this paper argues that North American psychiatric assessment does not reflect any of these definitions of phenomenology. Instead, within the context of psychiatric assessment, phenomenology (...) has taken on an idiosyncratic, clinical meaning of signs and symptoms. However, this does not mean that phenomenology has had no impact on North American psychiatry. This paper contends that phenomenology has made contributions to psychiatry, particularly in the area of psychotherapy and especially in self-psychological psychotherapy. The importance of the concept of empathy within psychotherapy is evidence of the continuing influence of philosophical phenomenology on psychiatry. This paper concludes that phenomenology can provide an important complementary perspective to the dominant methods of North American psychiatric practice. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo further delineate risk and resilience factors contributing to trajectories of mental health symptoms experienced by college students through the pandemic.Participantsn = 183 college students.MethodsLinear mixed models examined time effects on depression and anxiety. Propensity-matched subgroups exhibiting “increased” versus “low and stable” depression symptoms from before to after the pandemic-onset were compared on pre-pandemic demographic and psychological factors and COVID-related experiences and coping strategies.ResultsStudents experienced worsening of mental health symptoms throughout the pandemic, particularly during Fall 2020 compared with Fall 2019. (...) The propensity-matched subgroup exhibiting relative resilience reported less alcohol use prior to the pandemic, greater use of active coping strategies, and less of an impact on their college progress.ConclusionsResults point to several potential targets of screening and intervention to decrease residual impacts of the pandemic. (shrink)

This book explores aspects of William H. Poteat's philosophical anthropology, which proposes a post-critical alternative to the prevailing dualistic conception of the person and opens a path to recovery of the pre-reflective ontological ground of the person where our personhood can be recovered and re-appropriated.

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare systemic inequities shaped by social determinants of health (SDoH). Public health agencies, legislators, health systems, and community organizations took notice, and there is currently unprecedented interest in identifying and implementing programs to address SDoH. This special issue focuses on the role of medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) in addressing SDoH and racial and social inequities, as well as the need to support these efforts with evidence-based research, data, and meaningful partnerships and funding.

This article seeks to consider the ways in which substitutes for religion have been found both through a discussion of the treatment of religion in the classical sociological theories of Weber; Durkheim and Marx and then the way in which in modern societies alternative sets of belief and practices which fulfi l the same function as religion have been developed in the Communist and the postCommunist and Western worlds.

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

Une oeuvre d'art n'existe pas en soi, toujours presentant la meme apparence et le meme sens a l'observateur. Si cela est vrai d'un tableau ou d'un poeme, combien plus encore de la musique qui doit etre lue puis interpretee pour etre seulement entendue? Pastichant Valery on pourrait ecrire : " C'est l'execution de la sonate qui est la sonate ". Quant a ce sens, relatif, imprecis, fuyant, nous faisons, en ces temps de retrouvailles avec la musique des XVIIe et XVIIIe (...) siecles, la significative experience de son inconstance. Comment interpreter cette musique? Comment la chanter? Comment la comprendre? " Son hieroglyphe est si leger et si fugitif... " ecrivait Diderot a Mademoiselle de la Chaux. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the coherency and reasonableness of legal restrictions against same-sex marriage. The population of focus is transgender individuals and their partners. Focusing on trans-marriage makes clear that the restriction of marriage to one man and one woman is misguided in that the law rests on the assumption that the categories of sex and gender comprise two disjoint, exhaustive, and unambiguous groupings. The primary argument here is not that the restrictions of same-sex marriage are harmful to certain transpersons who (...) participate in legal marriage, although they certainly are, but rather that this legal restriction fails to meet the minimum requirements of any reasonable law. This analysis compares the current marriage restriction and its reliance on the above mentioned false belief with judgments of the Race Classification Appeal Board of Apartheid era South Africa. I employ two actual cases and the legal philosophy of Lon L. Fuller in my argument. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:480 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY categories can be applied to the objects of moral distinctions. Nor, on the other hand, can moral distinctions be derived from causal reasoning, although naturally we can make causal inferences about moral distinctions. In the Humean account, moral distinctions must be impressions derived from a moral sense existing independently of any consideration of divine sanction. Hume, in effect, separates ethics from religion, though he admits (...) that the idea of a divine pattern of reward and punishment may reinforce moral behavior. I have tried to give a brief summary of the book's main points, and I will now turn to what is necessarily a rather random and selective criticism of the many features and arguments Capaldi pursues. My first and main criticism is that Capaldi has been too ambitious in trying to cover the whole range of Hume's thought in a fairly small book. He would be the last to deny the extent and profundity of Hume's thought, and his reader is therefore left rather breathless as he is led on a gallop from one mountain top to another. Secondly, while fully accepting the importance of Newton as an influence on Hume, I see no reason to insist on its exclusiveness. Brief mention is made of Bayle, but Hutcheson is cast aside while lesser but influential figures like Mandeville are scarcely mentioned. The reader should be warned as well that there is a scholarly view that considers Hume to have been deluded about the extent of his own Newtonianism" and plenty of respectable support for putting him in the sensationalist tradtion of Locke and Berkeley.s No doubt Newton is, above all others, the leading influence on Hume, but in ideas, as in affairs, fruitfulness often results from a plurality of relationships. Other faults in the book seem to result from taking everything Hume said as gospel. Thus Capaldi says if Hume is mistaken, he is only mistaken about facts because Hume claimed to be concerned only with them. This is bad question begging. Nor when Hume firmly commits himself to psychologism, is there any reason why we need not point out that giving psychological explanations for moral behavior, though considerably advanced by Hume, need not be the end nor even the beginning of our questions about ethics. A passing tribute might have been made to Kant and to other externalists who rejected Hume's approach. Smaller points can be made about particular passages: thus, in a rather muddled paragraph Hume emerges as the Copernicus rather than the Newton of the social sciences (a term that I think, despite Hume's pretensions, we should be careful of using in the context of eighteenth-century studies). I would not like to leave the reader with the impression that these remarks mean that I did not enjoy Capaldi's book. He has given us plenty to think about in his analysis, and he surely demonstrates that the old, rigidified exegesis of textbook Hume is dead and buried and that we are now in a much more exciting.world of Hume scholarship. MALCOLM JACK London Franr Hemsterhuis. By Heinz Moenkemeyer. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. Pp. 206. $9.95) This little-known eighteenth-century Dutch philosopher (1721-1790) wrote all his philosophical works, many of them dialogues, in French. No doubt he was hoping that the language 4See, for example, an opinion that Newton's influence was minimal in L. L. Laudan, "Thomas Reid and the Newtonian Turn of British Methodological Thought," in The Methodological Heritage of Newton (Oxford, 1970), p. 105. See Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London, 1961), p. 634, for the connection with Berkeley. On the influence of Hutcheson see T. E. Jessop, "The Misunderstood Hume," in Hume and the Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1974), p. 11. For a viewof Mandeville's influence on Hume see F. A. Hayek, "Dr. Bernard Mandeville," Proceedings of the British Academy LII (1966) : 139. BOOK REVIEWS 481 of Voltaire would help him reach a wider, more cultivated audience; but his use of French is also a sign that his works had been composed with the philosophical currents of the French Englightenment very much in mind, and that he wanted... (shrink)

Cannon, Tom, Corporate Responsibility, Financial Times, Pitman Publishing, 1992, pp. 265, Hardback £30.00, ISBN 0‐273‐03727‐7.

Larry Laudan has challenged the realist to come up with a program that submits realism to "those stringent empirical demands which the realist himself minimally insists on when appraising scientific theories." This paper shows how the realist can go about taking up Laudan on this challenge; and, in such a way that the realist hypothesis actually ends up being confirmed, by any empirical standards. In other words, it is shown that we can test for convergent realism, just as readily as (...) Laudan can test for a connection between theories that are controlled by the cannons of science and their subsequent reliability. (shrink)

In “A Confutation of Convergent Realism,” Larry Laudan presents the realist with these fascinating challenges:What,then,of realism itself as a ‘scientific’ hypothesis?…If realism has made some novel predictions or been subjected to carefully controlled tests, one does not learn about it from the literature of contemporary realism. (1981, p. 46.)He then goes on to say:No proponent of realism has sought to show that realism satisfies those stringent empirical demands which the realist himself minimally insists on when appraising scientific theories. (1981, p. (...) 46)Not only do I fully endorse what Laudan says in these passages, I think it is time to take him up on these challenges.Laudan’s position has been that scientific progress can be explained without having to appeal to verisimilitude. Instead, we explain the success of a scientific theory in terms of its subjugation to the cannons of experimental controls: those theories that have been put through proper testing during the course of their formulation are the ones that are most likely to be reliable. (1984, pp. 96-101). (shrink)

The charge of treason and the judgment of insanity have left questions that invariably intrude on an assessment of Pound’s life and work. Critics frequently adopt a strategy of separating the life and the work, but tactical review is often necessary. There is a lightness in Pound’s writing that speaks of a being detached from the concerns of the world. Yet with his economic theory of social credit, his political and racial views, as well as his concern for other writers, (...) he is of the world—in the world and part of it. He was decidedly not tied to geography. He had no region or period, and he was as comfortable in Confucian China as in Dante’s Florence or twentieth-century Rome. He could work anywhere. He wrote The Pisan Cantos while jailed in Italy. The Cantos were published while he was in a mental wart at St. Elizabeths, yet a court found that he could not understand the charges against him. Can such an impairment and such achievement occur at the same time? If you say no, then what of the treason? Did he feign madness to escape punishment? Could Pound have been convicted of treason?In this paper, I intend to examine what has been loosely referred to as “the trial of Ezra Pound” and to show that Pound’s case should have been brought to trial within one or two years after his commitment to St. Elizabeths because he had a reasonable chance of being found not guilty of treason; even if found guilty, the circumstances in mitigation of a long prison term would have been so evident that he would have likely spent considerably less time in prison than he spent locked up at the mental institution. I will do this, in part, by reviewing the similarities and differences between Pound’s case and three other treason cases that came to trial within the first years after World War II. The English case, Rex v. Joyce, was tried shortly after the close of the war and well before Pound’s competency hearing on 13 February 1945.3 The law applied in Joyce would have led Pound’s lawyer to seek some postponement of trial until the American courts decided whether to follow the English lead. The other two cases involve the Americans, Douglas Chandler and Robert Best, employees of German radio, who were indicted with Pound in 1943. 3. William Joyce was an American who came to be known as “Lord Haw Haw.” He was hanged at Wandsworth, England, 3 Jan. 1946. He was the best known of the “radio traitors.” He began his programs, “This is Jairmany calling,” and would then prophesy the destruction of English towns and cities. The name “Lord Haw Haw” was created by the English journalist, Jonah Barrington, to ridicule Joyce and to make him appear idiotic. Conrad L. Rushing is a Superior Court Judge in California and an occasional lecturer in law at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches a course in law and literature at the California Judges College and is a founder of the Sane Jose Poetry Center. (shrink)

In June 2012, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his plans for a ban on the sale of sugary beverages in containers larger than 16 ounces. Shortly thereafter, the Center for Consumer Freedom took out a full-page ad in the New York Times featuring Bloomberg photo-shopped into a matronly dress with the tag line “New Yorkers need a Mayor, not a Nanny.” On television, the CATO Institute's Michael Cannon declared, “This is the most ridiculous sort of nanny state-ism; (...) [i]t’s none of the mayor's business how much soda people are drinking.” And in newspapers around the country, editorial pages featured headlines such as “Gulp! Yet Another Intrusion of the Nanny State.” Just like that, the public debate about this measure became focused on government overreach, while the public health problem of obesity faded into the background. (shrink)

Nietzsche's influence upon European philosophy has been, and continues to be, profound. Indeed, recent years have seen Nietzsche scholarship become the battleground for debates over philosophical method between the analytic and continental traditions. This fresh introduction to Nietzsche's philosophical work provides students new to Nietzsche with an excellent framework for understanding the central concerns of his philosophical and cultural writings and why Nietzsche's ideas continue to spark controversy in philosophy and in allied disciplines. The book is divided into three parts. (...) In the first section "Nietzsche Against the Tradition", the author shows why Nietzsche rejects wholesale certain components of the Western philosophical and religious traditions and examines the implications of rejecting them. Those components are considered under the headings of morality, religion and nihilism. In the second part "Nietzsche and the Tradition", the author explores Nietzsche's ambivalent and sophisticated reflections on some of the central topics in the Western philosophical tradition. These include Nietzsche's criticisms of metaphysics, his analysis of truth and knowledge, and his reflections on the self and consciousness. In the final section "Nietzsche Beyond the Tradition", Welshon discusses some of the ways in which Nietzsche does, or is thought to, transcend the Western philosophical tradition with chapters on the will to power, politics and education, artistry and the flourishing life. The book provides readers with balanced, clear analysis and is ideally suited as a companion resource for students tackling Nietzsche's challenging prose style. (shrink)