These days paradoxes seem to be all around us, constantly produced under the impetus of new technologies but tending to dissolve no less quickly at the instigation of these same technologies. Everything that was considered durable (concepts, organizations, ideas) tends to shift towards immediacy, as if long-term memory can and must become instantaneous memory. New technologies, especially the various networks and mobile telephones, fit less and less into established frames of reference. They go so far as to break with the (...) very notion of a frame, and thus place us in a movement of continuous and chaotic knowledge that the author has dubbed rheomorphism. The Web is increasingly oriented towards interaction among users, and the creation of rudimentary social networks that can provide content that makes good use of the network effects, with or without real visual and interactive rendering of web pages. In this sense, current websites act more as points of presence, or Web portals centred on the user rather than on traditional websites that were more or less static pages of data. (shrink)

Review of works on philosophy written by Mongolian authors, dealing with Western (European) scholars.

本书从道德信仰与现时代的关系切入,分析道德信仰的本质、确立与演变、功能及其道德信仰与道德的重建等。.

BACKGROUND: Little is known about how hospitalized patients share decisions with physicians. METHODS: We conducted an observational study of patient-doctor communication on an inpatient medicine service among 18 hospitalized patients and 9 physicians. A research assistant (RA) approached newly hospitalized patients and their physicians before morning rounds and obtained consent. The RA audio recorded morning rounds, and then separately interviewed both patient and physician. Coding was done using integrated analysis. RESULTS: Most patients were white (61%) and half were female. Most (...) physicians were male (66%) and of Southeast Asian descent (66%). All physicians explained the plan of care to the patients; most believed that their patient understood. However, many patients did not. Physicians rarely asked the patient for their opinion. In all those cases, the decision had been made previously by the doctors. No decisions were made with the patient. Patients sometimes disagreed. CONCLUSIONS: Shared decision-making may not be the norm in hospital care. Although physicians do explain treatment plans, many hospitalized patients do not understand enough to share in decisions. When patients do assert their opinion, it can result in conflict. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Some hospitalized patients are interested in discussing treatment. Improving hospital communication can foster patient autonomy. (shrink)

A variety of crucial and still most relevant ideas about nothingness or emptiness have gained profound philosophical prominence in the history and development of a number of South and East Asian traditions--including in Buddhism, Daoism, Neo-Confucianism, Hinduism, Korean philosophy, and the Japanese Kyoto School. These traditions share the insight that in order to explain both the great mysteries and mundane facts about our experience, ideas of "nothingness" must play a primary role. This collection of essays brings together the work of (...) twenty of the world's prominent scholars of Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Neo-Confucian, Japanese and Korean thought to illuminate fascinating philosophical conceptualizations of "nothingness" in both classical and modern Asian traditions. The unique collection offers new work from accomplished scholars and provides a coherent, panoramic view of the most significant ways that "nothingness" plays crucial roles in Asian philosophy. It includes both traditional and contemporary formulations, sometimes putting Asian traditions into dialogue with one another and sometimes with classical and modern Western thought. The result is a book of immense value for students and researchers in Asian and comparative philosophy. (shrink)

As the aging population, including frail older people, continues to grow in Mainland China, quality of life and end-of-life care for frail older people has attracted much attention. Advance care planning is an effective way to improve end-of-life care for people with advanced diseases, and it is widely used in developed countries; however, it is a new concept in Mainland China. The effects of advance care planning and its acceptability in Mainland China are uncertain because of its culture-sensitive characteristics. The (...) objective of this article is to discuss the serious social issue of caring for frail older people and illustrate the possibility of implementing advance care planning in nursing homes in Mainland China through a review of relevant literature, which will focus on legislation, healthcare system engagement, public engagement, and cultural issues. Recommendations to promote and implement advance care planning include choosing nursing homes as a proper setting, establishing an ethical climate, and enhancing public awareness. (shrink)

Background: Frailty is a natural consequence of the aging process. With the increasing aging population in Mainland China, the quality of life and end-of-life care for frail older people need to be taken into consideration. Advance Care Planning has also been used worldwide in long-term facilities, hospitals and communities to improve the quality of end-of-life care, increase patient and family satisfaction, and reduce healthcare costs and hospital admissions in Western countries. However, it has not been practiced in China. Research objective: (...) This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a modified Advance Care Planning intervention in certainty of end-of-life care, preferences for end-of-life care, quality of life concerns, and healthcare utilization among frail older people. Research design: This study used a quasi-experimental design, with a single-blind, control group, pretest and repeated posttest approach. Participants and research context: A convenience sample of 74 participates met the eligibility criteria in each nursing home. A total of 148 frail older people were recruited in two nursing homes in Zhejiang Province, China. Ethical considerations: The study received ethical approval from the Clinical Research Ethics Committee, the Faculty of Medicine, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong, CREC Ref. No: 2016.059. Findings: The results indicated the Advance Care Planning programme was effective at increasing autonomy in decision making on end-of-life care issues, decreasing decision-making conflicts over end-of-life care issues, and increasing their expression about end-of-life care. Discussion: This study promoted the participants’ autonomy and broke through the inherent custom of avoiding talking about death in China. Conclusion: The modified Advance Care Planning intervention is effective and recommended to support the frail older people in their end-of-life care decision in Chinese society. (shrink)

The question that this paper tries to answer is Q: “Can good academic bioethics be done without commitment to moral theory?” It is argued that the answer to Q is an unequivocal “Yes” for most of what we could call “critical bioethics,” that is, the kind of bioethics work that primarily criticizes positions or arguments already in the literature or put forward by policymakers. The answer is also “Yes” for much of empirical bioethics. The second part of the paper then (...) provides an analysis of Q in relation to “constructive bioethics,” that is, bioethics work aimed at providing an argument for a particular position. In this part, it is argued that a number of the approaches or methods used that initially look like they involve no commitment to moral theory, nevertheless, involve such a commitment. This is shown to be the case for reflective equilibrium, mid-level theory, the use of theory fragments, and argument by analogy. (shrink)

Despite unprecedented medical advancements and the near eradi­cation of many serious diseases, there are growing epidemics of preventable illness brought about in part by the overemphasis on individual autonomy and the neglect of obligations to others. Insofar as these diseases develop because of individual choice, this permissiveness hampers the moral analysis of growing epidemics like childhood obesity. While society has contributed to its rapid progression, childhood obesity finds its origins in lifestyle choices implemented at home. Consequently, parents have an unparalleled (...) duty to prevent and correct obesity and unhealthy lifestyles in their children. Failure to do so undoubtedly violates a parent’s duty and suggests medical neglect. However, our current understanding of medical neglect is too narrow to be applicable to chronic, preventable illnesses. Relevant principles of tort law may broaden our understanding of neglect to better reflect the nature of parental and societal liability in preventable illnesses. (shrink)

Since the Middle Ages, Augustine and the wealth of his writings have had an enormous impact on Western philosophical thinking. His approach to time and memory, which he sets out in his eleventh book of the Confessions, is one of the most important sources for research about the philosophy of time. Augustine describes time as a permanent movement in which the future passes unceasingly through an unrelated present into the past. Only the very present moment exists, but this present moment (...) is infinitely short. If the past is no more, the future is not yet, and the present is indivisibly brief, memoria becomes the determining factor of human consciousness. Augustine’s theory of memory and time reveals an epistemological connection with the functioning of human consciousness. Since his understanding of time and memory is already of great relevance in many interdisciplinary approaches, it can also become important to the philosophy of music education. Revisiting Augustine’s concept of memoria can give us new impetus on questions about aesthetic education, cancel culture, and utopian thinking. (shrink)

This article discusses the methodological challenges posed for psychological research on whiteness at the intersection between race and gender in Germany. Much of the current research in the social science field in Germany focuses on violent expressions of racism or Fremdenfeindlichkeit and represents a collective immunization against the knowledge about the history and the historicity of whiteness as a history of seizure. Such approaches are motivated by fear and uncertainty. The author takes this uncertainty not only as a starting point (...) for an investigation into the heavily veiled history of whiteness, but also as a method in itself. (shrink)

Les sciences sociales chinoises sont largement ignorées du monde occidental dans un moment où les savoirs scientifiques circulent le long de nouveaux axes épistémologiques en contexte globalisé. La pensée occidentale s’ouvre à la pensée chinoise, de nouveaux horizons apparaissent dans un contexte de globalisation culturelle où il est impossible d’ignorer la Chine continentale. Les sciences sociales en Chine ont été reconstruites depuis 1979 en rendant compte de vraies spécificités liées à une...

Susan Estrich, Real Rape Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987, 160 pp.

Fruto de una convergencia de motivos e intereses procedentes de diversas disciplinas, los estudios sobre la argumentación han adquirido sus propias señas de identidad como conocimiento, análisis y evaluación del discurso argumentativo a través de sus dimensiones o proyecciones lógica, dialéctica, retórica y socio-institucional. La presente obra trata de reunir, precisar y articular las nociones básicas y los conceptos determinantes de los desarrollos que hoy tienen lugar en ese campo. Este Compendio de lógica, argumentación y retórica se ofrece como una (...) obra de referencia, una herramienta de trabajo y un estímulo para los estudiantes de —y los interesados o los preocupados por— la argumentación, tanto en el plano internacional como, primordialmente, en el medio cultural hispánico e hispanoamericano. No existía hasta ahora una publicación de estas características, a pesar de su necesidad tanto desde el punto de vista didáctico, y en atención a intereses prácticos, como desde el punto de vista teórico. Su elaboración ha ocupado a 59 autores, especialistas y estudiosos de diversos medios académicos y nacionalidades, en la confección de las 176 entradas de las que consta. (shrink)

The existence and uniqueness of a maximum point for a continuous real—valued function on a metric space are investigated constructively. In particular, it is shown, in the spirit of reverse mathematics, that a natural unique existence theorem is equivalent to the fan theorem.

本书围绕四大主题展开:以天人之际为真奠立终极依据,以人性善恶为其提供德性凭借,以内圣外王描摹政治思想,以德主刑辅作为制度精神。从而,在伦理政治理论上,形成了一个完整体系的雏形。.

Dini's theorem says that compactness of the domain, a metric space, ensures the uniform convergence of every simply convergent monotone sequence of real-valued continuous functions whose limit is continuous. By showing that Dini's theorem is equivalent to Brouwer's fan theorem for detachable bars, we provide Dini's theorem with a classification in the recently established constructive reverse mathematics propagated by Ishihara. As a complement, Dini's theorem is proved to be equivalent to the analogue of the fan theorem, weak König's lemma, in (...) the original classical setting of reverse mathematics started by Friedman and Simpson. (shrink)

It is to an over-all situation based upon the complex play of political, social, economic and scientific factors, along with technological and mass media factors unique to our own era, that we owe the general trend toward multi-pluri-inter-trans-disciplinary questions so generally prevalent in our world today.

For thousands of years communication has functioned principally by means of linguistic and iconic messages. In the first case linguistic symbols serve as intermediaries; in the second, images or, more broadly, representations. In order to be transmitted, linguistic and/or iconic symbols need to be re-produced, re-presented, vocally, through writing, painting, sculpture or any other means of re-production. But re-production requires a space that, through use of an appropriate material, serves as its medium; forms to occupy it; rules to control it, (...) and a certain stability. In other words representation is impossible without a certain fixity of the message that alone can ensure its duration, whether short or long being unimportant, but which it needs precisely in order to function as a message. (shrink)

In the history of philosophy as well as in most recent discussions, empathy is held to be a key concept that enables a basic understanding of the other while at the same time acting as the foundation of our moral emotionality. In this paper I want to show why empathy is the wrong candidate for both of these tasks. If we understand empathy as projection, i.e. a process of imaginary self-transposition, we are bound to presuppose a fully established interpersonal sphere. (...) If we consider empathy as synonymous with compassion it is highly questionable if we ever reach the other person in his or her otherness. Max Scheler and other early phenomenologists offer very fruitful approaches to both problems without resorting to empathy. I will present some of their thoughts and focus especially on Scheler’s claim about the connection between the experience of the real other and the intentionality of compassion. (shrink)

All societies are made up of members who have a certain number of things in common, by virtue of which they understand, identify and communicate with each other, on the one hand, and establish differences with members of other societies on the other. Among the most important of these things is language.In this regard, let us recall two examples raised by Ferdinand de Saussure. The first: “Language is both a social product of the faculty of speech and an ensemble of (...) necessary conventions adopted by the social body to allow for the exercise of this faculty in each individual.” The second: “Speech, distinct from language, is on the contrary an individual act of intelligence and will … by which the speaking subject uses the code of language to express his personal thought.”. (shrink)

A riddle or a joke? I regret having made light of both myself and the reader. However, the concept of complexity has been explored with such intensity and pedantry, has been analyzed from so many points of view – the mathematical, linguistic, physical, chemical, political, psychological, sociological, physiological, algorithmic, logical, religious, and metaphysical – that nothing, not even the title of this piece, can escape it. Indeed the situation has reached the point where we grow misty-eyed over the very thought (...) of the discrete charms of yesterday's simplicity. Sometimes we dream that complexity itself, after having given us so much, muses – now that its task is fulfilled – of flying up miraculously into the sky, like the Virgin Mother (the Assumption); or ourselves wish to experience – for those spirits who prefer to keep their feet on the ground(!) – the “dissolution” with which entropy begins. Isn't it true that certain words, marked by the spirit of their age, are themselves in fact carried away by the spirit of the age? (shrink)

Avec la précarisation des sociétés salariales se sont développées les économies non-marchandes et non-monétaires mais aussi des économies informelles et de survie. L'espace public apparaît alors fragmenté par des inégalités et des injustices là où les individus et les groupes se mobilisent pour l'accès à une « place » et aux biens moraux. Mais en même temps l'espace public contient des espaces intermédiaires où des résistances collectives au processus de précarisation salariale et la lutte pour la reconnaissance produisent des micro-organisations (...) sociales qui naissent de l'agencement, voire la superposition de formes économiques marchandes et non-marchandes liées à une économie solidaire.Growing precarity within wage-based societies has led to the advent of parallel economies that are neither mercantile nor money-based, as well as informal economies and economies of subsistance. The public sphere thus appears to be fractured by inequalities and injustices, given the mobilising of individuals and groups in the struggle for a "place" and access to moral goods. Yet at the same time, we can find intermediate spaces in the public sphere in which collective forms of resistance to the increasing precarity of wage-based existences and the struggle for recognition have led to the emergence of social micro-organisations borne of the coexistence or even interpenetration of market and non-market economic forms related to an economy of solidarity. (shrink)

La société chinoise aujourd’hui peut être définie comme produisant différentes formes de compressed modernities où se contractent et s’entrelacent des temporalités historiques, sociales, politiques, économiques, mais aussi individuelles et collectives. Nous introduisons ici la notion de temporalité « contractée » qui favorise la superposition, l’intensification et la multiplication de risques sociaux, économiques, écologiques et sanitaires. Temporalités et espaces s’agencent en Chine de manière flagrante dans la production de mobilités, migrations et circulations très intenses aujourd’hui. La conquête de soi apparaît comme (...) une question d’intensité liée à l’accélération des temporalités sociales et économiques objectives et subjectives ; se construit alors la figure d’un Individu compressé dans la société chinoise. Les temporalités collectives favorisent des micromobilisations où s’ouvrent des micro-arènes publiques et où se construit, en contexte autoritaire, de la démocratie « par le bas ». (shrink)

Face à la question des modes de distribution inégalitaire de l’honneur social et de la lutte pour la reconnaissance chez des populations objets de mépris social, le « savoir-être avec » l’Autre est devenu pour le sociologue un enjeu scientifique, méthodologique et épistémologique important. Est proposée ici une ethnographie de la reconnaissance où l’Autre est regardé et reconnu avec son expérience, sa compétence, et son identité plurielle, fluctuante, réversible, inscrit dans une diversité de mondes sociaux organisée par des processus culturels (...) producteurs de hiérarchies et d’inégalités.When faced with unequal forms of distribution of social honour and with the struggle for recognition among populations subject to social contempt, knowing how to be with the Other has become a major methodological and epistemological scientific issue. Here, we are proposing an ethnography of recognition, in which the Other is regarded and recognized with his experience, his competence, and his fluctuating, reversible and varied identity, anchored in a diversity of social worlds organized on the basis of structural processes which produce hierarchy and inequalities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Non-Cartesian Psychotherapeutic Framework: Radical Pragmatism as an AlternativeLouis S. Berger (bio)AbstractPostmodern criticism has identified important impoverishments that necessarily follow from the use of Cartesian frameworks. This criticism is reviewed and its implications for psychotherapy are explored in a psychoanalytic context. The ubiquitous presence of Cartesianism (equivalently, representationism) in psychoanalytic frameworks—even in some that are considered postmodern—is demonstrated and criticized. The postmodern convergence on praxis as a (...) desirable alternative to Cartesianism is reported, and its relevance for psychoanalysis is considered. The severe conceptual difficulties entailed in formulating such an alternative are discussed, as are those difficulties that would be encountered were psychoanalysis to attempt the shift from explanatory mental science to praxis. The principal psychoanalytic problematics explored are: the paradoxical relationships between theory and therapeutic technique; the therapeutic action; and validation of clinical practices. Initial, nontraditional suggestions for addressing these problems are offered.Keywordspsychoanalysis, therapeutic action, representation, state space, praxis, hermeneutics, Descartes, Heidegger, Wittgenstein“But the inability to bring one’s subject under conceptual control, fixing it propositionally, is not the end of thinking; on the contrary, it were better to say that the breakdown of concepts and the failure of words is an opening that takes us out of the realm where representation and calculation are all that matter to thinking.... [T]his is what happens in the Socratic dialogue where the negativity in which one ends up at a loss for words is at the same time that which sets thinking free.”Bruns 1989, 9“To evolve theory as though our methods and processes of study were essentially the same, or could be the same, as those of other sciences, or could be disregarded when it comes to theory, implies a view of reality that is no longer tenable, least of all in that ambiguous area which we call psychic reality. Nevertheless, all of us are still more or less captives of an erroneous understanding of objectivity and objective reality....”Loewald 1970, 45 [End Page 169]CartesianismCartesianism still underlies and dominates much of today’s thought. It is the label for a network of interrelated ideas and themes:the ontological duality of mind and body; the subjective individualism implicit in the ultimate appeal to direct personal verification; the method of universal doubt which was supposed to lead us to indubitable truths; the doctrine that language and signs are an external disguise for thought; the doctrine that vagueness is unreal and that the philosophic endeavor is one of knowing clearly and distinctly a completely determinate reality; and most fundamentally, the doctrine that we can break out of the miasma of our language or system of signs and have direct intuitive knowledge of objects. (Bernstein 1971, 5–6)[The Cartesian assumptions] constitute a picture of science and the world somewhat as follows: there is an external world which can in principle be exhaustively described in scientific language. The scientist, as both observer and language-user, can capture the external facts of the world in propositions that are true if they correspond to the facts and false if they do not. Science is ideally a linguistic system in which true propositions are in one-to-one relation to facts, including facts that are not directly observed because they involve hidden entities or properties, or past events or far distant events. These hidden events are described in theories, and theories can be inferred from observation, that is, the hidden explanatory mechanism of the world can be discovered from what is open to observation. Man as scientist is regarded as standing apart from the world and able to experiment and theorize about it objectively and dispassionately.(Hesse 1980, vii)Hesse goes on to say that “almost every assumption underlying this account has been subjected to damaging criticism,” a view echoed by others: “Most contemporary philosophers have been in revolt against the Cartesian framework” (Bernstein 1971, 5); “A rejection of the Cartesian view is a central theme for both of the giants of twentieth-century philosophy, Heidegger and Wittgenstein” (Sass 1992, 444n 77); and “The notion of alternative conceptual frameworks has been a commonplace of our culture since Hegel” (Rorty 1982, 3).These criticisms arise... (shrink)

While rules and exemplars are usually viewed as opposites, this paper argues that they form end points of the same distribution. By representing both rules and exemplars as (partial) trees, we can take into account the fluid middle ground between the two extremes. This insight is the starting point for a new theory of language learning that is based on the following idea: If a language learner does not know which phrase‐structure trees should be assigned to initial sentences, s/he allows (...) (implicitly) for all possible trees and lets linguistic experience decide which is the “best” tree for each sentence. The best tree is obtained by maximizing “structural analogy” between a sentence and previous sentences, which is formalized by the most probable shortest combination of subtrees from all trees of previous sentences. Corpus‐based experiments with this model on the Penn Treebank and the Childes database indicate that it can learn both exemplar‐based and rule‐based aspects of language, ranging from phrasal verbs to auxiliary fronting. By having learned the syntactic structures of sentences, we have also learned the grammar implicit in these structures, which can in turn be used to produce new sentences. We show that our model mimicks children’s language development from item‐based constructions to abstract constructions, and that the model can simulate some of the errors made by children in producing complex questions. (shrink)

Faith music has existed with the emergence of belief since the archaic period and has been a tool in showing devotion to the sacred in almost all beliefs. Music is sometimes used individually, sometimes together with collective rituals, sometimes only with human voices, sometimes only with instruments and sometimes with musical accompaniment, in order to spread the belief, convey religious information and reinforce the teachings, purify, communicate with the spirits and present their devotion to them. In the study, the hymn (...) "Ya Hannân Ya Mennan", which was performed in the tarawih prayers during Ramadan for centuries and constituted the ancient tradition of a city, was evaluated ethnomusicologically within the ethnology of faith music. The hymn "Ya Hannân", which is a type of Ramadan hymns, has settled in the memory of the people and created a culture as the public hymn used in mosque music during Ramadan in the city. It is so embedded in the cultural codes of the divine city that it is seen as a part of the tarawih prayer for some people, especially children, who have not left the province. When people who grew up with this culture go to the tarawih prayer outside of Sivas, they expect to listen to the hymn "Ya Hannân" in their sense of belonging when the hymns begin. It also concerns the discipline of sociology of religion because of the hymn that costs the whole city. (shrink)

One obvious result of DNA exonerations has been the enactment of legislation regulating postconviction DNA testing. But the impact on our criminal justice system goes beyond formal statutory change. The DNA exonerations are changing attitudes towards the death penalty, are focusing attention on how forensic laboratories operate, and are leading to the stricter scrutiny of forensic science.

Airway mucin secretion is important pathophysiologically and as a model of polarized epithelial regulated exocytosis. We find the trafficking protein, SNAP23, selectively expressed in secretory cells compared with ciliated and basal cells of airway epithelium by immunohistochemistry and FACS, suggesting that SNAP23 functions in regulated but not constitutive epithelial secretion. Heterozygous SNAP23 deletant mutant mice show spontaneous accumulation of intracellular mucin, indicating a defect in baseline secretion. However mucins are released from perfused tracheas of mutant and wild-type mice at the (...) same rate, suggesting that increased intracellular stores balance reduced release efficiency to yield a fully compensated baseline steady state. In contrast, acute stimulated release of intracellular mucin from mutant mice is impaired whether measured by a static imaging assay 5 min after exposure to the secretagogue ATP or by kinetic analysis of mucins released from perfused tracheas during the first 10 min of ATP exposure. Together, these data indicate that increased intracellular stores cannot fully compensate for the defect in release efficiency during intense stimulation. The lungs of mutant mice develop normally and clear bacteria and instilled polystyrene beads comparable to WT mice, consistent with these functions depending on baseline secretion that is fully compensated. (shrink)

Stephen J. Schulhofer, Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and the Failure of Law Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, xii + 284 pp.

For decades Japan and the Federal Republic of Germany have gone to extraordinary lengths to cultivate as low a profile as possible on defense and national security policy matters. However, since the Gulf War, the Federal Republic has come under growing pressure from its allies to assume a greater international security role. Slowly, reluctantly it has acceded to these demands, albeit at the expense of considerable internal angst and turmoil. At the same time, German decision makers have sought to preserve (...) as much as possible the old approach to security policy. Consequently, the long-standing German norms eschewing the use of military force have been gradually displaced, although not wholly replaced, by norms of multilateralism. Rather than a dramatic break with the past, the Federal Republic's actions in Kosovo and Afghanistan can be seen as the culmination of a series of incremental steps that had begun a decade ago. (shrink)