Geleneksel bir bakış açısıyla İsrailoğullarının Tevrat’taki ilk kadın peygamberi olan Miryam, Harun ve Musa’nın kız kardeşi olup Mısır’dan çıkışın önemli figürlerinden biridir. Ancak eleştirel ve farklı bakış açısından Miryam ile ilgili kutsal kitap ve midraşlardaki anlatılara bakıldığında onun üç farklı portreye sahip olduğu görülmektedir. İlk portre, sepet içinde suya bırakılan Musa’yı uzaktan seyreden ve ismi belirtilmeyen abladır. İkinci tasvirde o, Mısır’dan çıkış esnasında Harun’un kız kardeşi peygamber Miryam olarak betimlenmektedir. Bu tasvir daha yakından incelendiğinde Mısır’dan çıkışta dilinde ezgisi, elinde tefi (...) ile dans ederek İsrailoğullarına liderlik eden Miryam’ın, peygamber olmaktan ziyade Mısır’dan izler taşıyan rahibe olmaya daha yakın durduğu görülmektedir. Nitekim Miryam’ı bir rahibe olarak görmek Cüzzamlı Miryam kıssasını daha anlaşılır kıldığı gibi onun fiziki kusurla cezalandırılması Mısır’daki bir rahibenin görevden uzaklaştırılmasıyla uyumluluk arz etmektedir. Rabbani literatür başta olmak üzere Yahudi geleneğinin Miryam algısı ise ona üçüncü bir portre kazandırmaktadır. Midraş literatürün Miryam portresi, ölümünden hemen önce Tevrat’ın ondan aldığı saygınlığı iade çerçevesinde olup, onu diğer önemli anneler arasında görmek üzerine kuruludur. (shrink)

With his philosophy of transcendence, Karl Jaspers is considered one of the few great metaphysicians of the 20th century. This study is devoted to the roots of his transcendental thinking in the philosophy of Plotinus (c. 204–270). It demonstrates the constitutive role that reference to the philosophia perennis played for Jaspers, as well as his early and intensive engagement with the founder of Neoplatonism, who for Jaspers was ‘the metaphysician par excellence’. His connection with Plotinus opens up fascinating new perspectives (...) on Jaspers’ concept of existential self-emergence as an ascent to the One, and on his henological philosophy of reason and his speculative paradoxical thinking about God. (shrink)

This paper argues that a certain type of self-referential sentence falsifies the widespread assumption that a declarative sentence's meaning is identical to its truth condition. It then argues that this problem cannot be assimilated to certain other problems that the assumption in question is independently known to face.

This paper is a qualitative empirical study of the perceptions of web editors and moderators about reader comments. Drawing from the insights provided by nineteen in-depth interviews with newsroom staff, we contend that reader comments have so far made little impact on the practices of traditional journalism in Turkey and that their promise to foster more constructive online public deliberation is largely unfulfilled. Reader comments continue to be an underestimated and neglected feature of online news. Online journalists’ perceptions of reader (...) comments are not based on any solid information of their readers but on their own personal observation and experiences. Moreover, freedom of expression in reader comments in mainstream newspapers is very limited due to legal and political pressures and prevalent self-censorship. Online journalists define politics and sports as the main categories that receive the highest number of comments most of the time. They also observe in reader comments the manifestation of a current political polarization in Turkey and point out the existence of majority pressure and a spiral of silence in relation to the Kurdish issue. (shrink)

Advance directives are not a part of the healthcare service in Turkey. This may be related with the fact that paternalism is common among the healthcare professionals in the country, and patients are not yet integrated in the decision‐making process adequately.However, starting from the enactment of the Regulation of Patient Rights in 1998, this situation started to change. While the paternalist tradition still appears to be strong in Turkey, the Ministry of Health has been taking concrete measures in the recent (...) years to ensure that patient rights are implemented in healthcare practice. Therefore, Turkey now seems to be in a transitional period where a move towards a more patient‐autonomy centred approach is being supported by the regulatory authorities, as well as the academic circles and the public at large. In the light of this background, this paper aims to examine the potential benefits of advance directives, particularly with regard to their possible effect in the clinical decision‐making process of Turkey's context. It will be argued that advance directives, if correctly understood and implemented in the right settings, may be beneficial, particularly for improving communication between patients and healthcare professionals and for implementing of the right to refuse treatment. (shrink)

This paper explores expatriates’ ethical evaluations of and responses to guanxi in China through the lens of integrative social contracts theory. We conducted in-depth interviews with 14 expatriate managers who had spent, on average, 6.5 years working and living in China. Based on the content analysis of these interviews, we identified two different uses of guanxi: defensive and competitive. In general, the respondents found defensive guanxi moral in the Chinese context, while they considered competitive guanxi immoral. Based on our findings, (...) we identified fair competition as the substantive hypernorm that governed most respondents’ ethical evaluations of guanxi. The study has implications for all scholars who seek to utilize integrative social contracts theory to study the relationship between informal networks and corruption in developing countries. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has argued that, unless the speech act of assertion were supposed to be governed by his so-called Knowledge Rule, one could not explain why sentences of the form "A and I do not know that A" are unassertable. This paper advances three objections against that argument, of which the first two aim to show that, even assuming that Williamson's explanandum has been properly circumscribed, his explanation would not be correct, and the third aims to show that his explanandum (...) has not been properly circumscribed. (shrink)

This article aims to examine critically the ‘cultural incompatibility’ argument, which asserts that disclosure of cancer-related information to patients is incompatible with Turkey’s cultural context. For this purpose, a brief overview of the approach to truth-telling in Turkey will first be provided, followed by the claims of two different Turkish authors on the issue and a critical analysis of their approach. It will be contended that this argument has actually been formulated with paternalistic concerns and it may be playing an (...) important role in shaping the approach of Turkish health care professionals to the issue. The article will then examine, in the light of study findings and case reports from Turkey, the concept of patient autonomy as it applies to truth-telling issues. It will be concluded that truth-telling can be compatible with Turkey’s cultural context, provided that health care professionals place more emphasis on good communication with their patients. (shrink)

Advance directives are not a part of the healthcare service in Turkey. This may be related with the fact that paternalism is common among the healthcare professionals in the country, and patients are not yet integrated in the decision-making process adequately. However, starting from the enactment of the Regulation of Patient Rights in 1998, this situation started to change. While the paternalist tradition still appears to be strong in Turkey, the Ministry of Health has been taking concrete measures in the (...) recent years to ensure that patient rights are implemented in healthcare practice. Therefore, Turkey now seems to be in a transitional period where a move towards a more patient-autonomy centred approach is being supported by the regulatory authorities, as well as the academic circles and the public at large. In the light of this background, this paper aims to examine the potential benefits of advance directives, particularly with regard to their possible effect in the clinical decision-making process of Turkey's context. It will be argued that advance directives, if correctly understood and implemented in the right settings, may be beneficial, particularly for improving communication between patients and healthcare professionals and for implementing of the right to refuse treatment. (shrink)

An anti-dispositionalist interpretation of grammatical knowledge would maintain that such knowledge exists whether or not it can be behaviourally manifested; a dispositionalist interpretation, on the other hand, would identify that knowledge with the in principle possibility of certain behavioural manifestations. The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary case for the dispositionalist interpretation by accomplishing two complementary tasks: first, rejecting a prominent argument against the dispositionalist interpretation; second, advancing an original argument against the anti-dispositionalist interpretation. Both tasks involve (...) rebuttals of certain key theses associated with Chomskyan grammatical metatheory, and therefore, provide new opportunities for assessing its viability. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper the following theorem is proved regarding groups of finite Morley rank which are perfect central extensions of quasisimple algebraic groups.Theorem1.Let G be a perfect group of finite Morley rank and let C0be a definable central subgroup of G such that G/C0is a universal linear algebraic group over an algebraically closed field; that is G is a perfect central extension of finite Morley rank of a universal linear algebraic group. Then C0= 1.Contrary to an impression which exists in (...) some circles, the center of the universal extension of a simple algebraic group, as an abstract group, is not finite in general. Thus the finite Morley rank assumption cannot be omitted.Corollary1.Let G be a perfect group of finite Morley rank such that G/Z(G) is a quasisimple algebraic group. Then G is an algebraic group. In particular, Z(G) is finite([4],Section27.5).An understanding of central extensions of quasisimple linear algebraic groups which are groups of finite Morley rank is necessary for the classification oftamesimpleK*-groupsof finite Morley rank, which constitutes an approach to the Cherlin-Zil’ber conjecture. For this reason the theorem above and its corollary were proven in [1] (Theorems 4.1 and 4.2) under the assumption oftameness, which simplifies the argument considerably. The result of the present paper shows that this assumption can be dropped. The main line of argument is parallel to that in [1]; the absence of the tameness assumption will be countered by a model-theoretic result and results fromK-theory. The model-theoretic result places limitations on definability in stable fields, and may possibly be relevant to eliminating certain other uses of tameness. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION[|]This paper has been planned as a critical response to Murat Civaner's article entitled 'Medical Ethics arguments should be concordant with scientific knowledge and certain values', published in the Autumn 2015 issue of Turkish Journal of Bioethics. It also aims to provide an evaluation of the way the authoritarian discourse manifests itself in ethical arguments.[¤]METHODS[|]For this purpose, the paper first presents the views of Orhan Hançerlioğlu on Karl Marx and Karl Popper and treats these views as a written example of (...) such authoritarian discourse, which is essentially a problematic attitude that results from an inability to acknowledge the value-laden aspects of a given perspective. [¤]RESULTS[|]In order to show that problems in Hançerlioğlu's approach is also present in Civaner's arguments, several examples where the author did not recognize the value-laden aspects and the subjective nature of information are provided. The paper then examines the recent claim by Celal Şengör, who asserted that force feeding of feces to individuals do not qualify as torture. Based on the presentation and the justification of this reductionist claim, it is emphasized that the relationship between information and values is much more complicated than those presented by Civaner. Civaner's claim, which asserts that the concept of conscience should have no place in medical ethics arguments, is also evaluated on this basis and the dangers of excluding the moral agent in ethical evaluation are underlined. In addition, the relationship of the paternalist tradition with the perspective which I refer to as the 'macro axis' is examined. Last but not least, the paper deals with the concept of 'ethics of ethics' by using examples from national and international ethics literature and emphasizes the reason why it is important for the ethicist to become aware of her own scheme of values. [¤]DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION[|]The paper concludes that contrary to what Civaner has asserted, it is not possible to exclude subjective aspects from ethical argumentation and that such an appraoch will inevitably have an authoritarian quality. For this reason, the need for other approaches for revealing, rather than repressing or ignoring, the subjective aspects of ethical inquiry is underlined.[¤]. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to investigate students’ conceptions about proof in mathematics and mathematics teaching. A five‐point Likert‐type questionnaire was administered in order to gather data. The sample of the study included 33 first‐year secondary school mathematics students . The data collected were analysed and interpreted using the methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The results have revealed that the students think that mathematical proof has an important place in mathematics and mathematics education. The students’ studying methods for (...) exams based on imitative reasoning which can be described as a type of reasoning built on copying proof, for example, by looking at a textbook or course notes proof or through remembering a proof algorithm. Moreover, they addressed to the differences between mathematics taught in high school and university as the main cause of their difficulties in proof and proving. (shrink)

This article offers a critical inquiry of contemporary neural network models as an instance of machine learning, from an interdisciplinary perspective of AI studies and performativity. It shows the limits on the architecture of these network systems due to the misemployment of ‘natural’ performance, and it offers ‘context’ as a variable from a performative approach, instead of a constant. The article begins with a brief review of machine learning-based natural language processing systems and continues with a concentration on the relevant (...) model of recurrent neural networks, which is applied in most commercial research such as Facebook AI Research. It demonstrates that the logic of performativity is not brought into account in all recurrent nets, which is an integral part of human performance and languaging, and it argues that recurrent network models, in particular, fail to grasp human performativity. This logic works similarly to the theory of performativity articulated by Jacques Derrida in his critique of John L. Austin’s concept of the performative. Applying Jacques Derrida’s work on performativity, and linguistic traces as spatially organized entities that allow for this notion of performance, the article argues that recurrent nets fall into the trap of taking ‘context’ as a constant, of treating human performance as a ‘natural’ fix to be encoded, instead of performative. Lastly, the article applies its proposal more concretely to the case of Facebook AI Research’s Alice and Bob. (shrink)

Causal knowledge unquestionably provides useful means to describe, explain and predict both natural and daily phenomena. This article addresses whether causality as such may not be ontologically primary and looks for an alternative fundamental mechanism encapsulating the information load of the causal framework. A probabilistic process view of reality asserting the struggle of natural forces is considered along with lines quoted from Nietzsche’s posthumously published notebooks and published work. Examples from scientific discoveries, in particular neurosciences, echoing his ontology are provided. (...) Furthermore, I propose a basic number game algorithm to illustrate and model the struggle of forces leading to causal inferences for an external observer. Nietzschean dynamic ontology involving the ceaseless struggle of will-to-power units accords with the emergentist approach to causation, which has been principally employed by the scientists working under the fields of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics and complex dynamical systems. (shrink)

We consider a new fragment of first-order logic with two variables. This logic is defined over interval structures. It constitutes unary predicates, a binary predicate and a function symbol. Considering such a fragment of first-order logic is motivated by defining a general framework for event-based interval temporal logics. In this paper, we present a sound, complete and terminating decision procedure for this logic. We show that the logic is decidable, and provide a NEXPTIME complexity bound for satisfiability. This result shows (...) that even a simple decidable fragment of first-order logic has NEXPTIME complexity. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethico-legal problems regarding the right to refuse treatment in Turkey's healthcare system. We discuss these problems in the light of a recent case that was directly reported to us. We first summarise the experience of a chronically dependent patient (as recounted by her daughter) and her family during their efforts to refuse treatment and receive palliative care only. This is followed by a summary of the legal framework governing the limits of the right to refuse treatment (...) in Turkey. With the help of this background information on the legal framework, we re-examine the ethico-legal aspects of the case and explain the underlying reasons for the problems the family and the patient experienced. Finally, we conclude that Turkey's legal framework relating to the right to refuse treatment needs to be clarified and amended in accordance with international conventions and fundamental human rights. (shrink)

Foundations of Speech Act Theoryoffers a timely, thorough and, above all, compelling examination of the complexities of illocutionary acts, performatives, and their phenomenological basis. Savas Tsohatzidis has collected an impressive range of international scholars on the subject. Clearly demonstrating the relevance of speech act theory to semantic theory, the collection further interrogates the inability of pragmatic theories of illocution to properly locate such speech acts within the logic of phenomenology and intersubjectivity.

ABSTRACTEvaluative conditioning procedures change people’s evaluations of stimuli that are paired with pleasant or unpleasant items. To test whether influence awareness allows people to resist such...

As we know, the Fifteenth World Congress of Philosophy has as its general theme problems of science, technology, and man. Any aspect of this all-encompassing theme produces many questions. Our task is to single out certain important aspects in it.

Understanding dental ethics as a field separate from its much better known counterpart, medical ethics, is a relatively new, but necessary approach in bioethics. This need is particularly felt in dental education and establishing a curriculum specifically for dental ethics is a challenging task. Although certain topics such as informed consent and patient rights can be considered to be of equal importance in both fields, a number of ethical issues in dental practice are only remotely—if at all—relevant for medical practice. (...) Therefore, any sound approach to education in dental ethics has to recognise the unique aspects of dental practice in order to meet the needs of dental students and prepare them for the ethical challenges they may face during their professional practice. With this goal in mind, this paper examines the approach of the authors to dental ethics education and proposes a system to organise the topics of biomedical ethics for dental education. While the authors' perspective is based on their experience in Turkey, the proposed system of classification is not a rigid one; it is open to interpretation in other contexts with different social, cultural and professional expectations. Therefore, the paper also aims to inspire discussion on the development of an ideal dental ethics curriculum at an international level. (shrink)