Sarch understands human actions to be ontologically rich and so descriptively broad.1 He provides a careful account of how this is so and of the ensuing implications for posited and normative culpa...

Intention is at the heart of criminal law. If it is not the mens rea requirement found most often in offences, it is still the standard against which other grades of fault tend relatively to be judged. It has generated much controversy, as the crucial question, “Did the defendant intend X?” is resistant to clear answers. This paper argues that intention-questions are difficult because intention is not the thing law takes it to be: Importantly, contrary to law's assumptions, it is (...) neither a state of mind nor is it connected in an exclusive manner to the reasons for which we act. (shrink)

Law as a Claim-Maker: A review of Stefano Bertea, The Normative Claim of Law.

An investigation of criminal attempts unearths some of the most fundamental, intriguing and perplexing questions about criminal law and its place in human action. When does attempting begin? What is the relationship between attempting and intending? Do we always attempt the possible and, if so, possible to whom? Does attempting involve action and does action involve attempting? Is my attempt fixed by me or can another perspective reveal what it is? How 'much' action is needed for an attempt, how 'much' (...) intention is needed and can these matters be decided categorically? Bebhinn Donnelly-Lazarov's answers to these questions will interest criminal law theorists, philosophers and lawyers or law reformers, who encounter the mixed practical and philosophical phenomenon of attempting. Inspired by G. E. M. Anscombe's philosophy, Part I examines attempting generally and its relationship with intention, action subjectivity, and possibility. From the conclusions reached, Part II proposes a specific theory of criminal attempts. (shrink)

Jurisprudential debate about the grounds of law often focuses on the status of morality. Given the undoubted fact of judicial engagement with morality in legal reasoning, the key question is whether morality legitimately counts as a ground of law. This article seeks to challenge the special status accorded to morality in debates about the grounds of law. The claim I seek to advance is that very often judicial engagement with morality is not different in kind to judicial engagement with other (...) diverse objects of legal reasoning. What the comparison tends to show is that instances of “moral reasoning” in law do not obviously challenge our account of the grounds of law. Rather these instances can be viewed as central case examples of legal reasoning. Conventional grounds of law are left untouched. (shrink)

This article is concerned with understanding continuity and stability in teaching, and their significance. It looks particularly at the work of Anthony Giddens on structure and agency, that of Martin Heidegger on the limits of discursive and theoretical analysis, and the communitarian strand within ethics. It applies this discussion to understandings of teachers’ work in the context especially of policy and agendas for change, arguing that continuity and the notion of a community of practitioners is critical to maintaining the distinctive (...) ethical quality of teaching. (shrink)

This article is concerned with understanding continuity and stability in teaching, and their significance. It looks particularly at the work of Anthony Giddens on structure and agency, that of Martin Heidegger on the limits of discursive and theoretical analysis, and the communitarian strand within ethics. It applies this discussion to understandings of teachers’ work in the context especially of policy and agendas for change, arguing that continuity and the notion of a community of practitioners is critical to maintaining the distinctive (...) ethical quality of teaching. (shrink)

The relationship between students and higher education is seen to have become increasingly transactional. We approach the study of the student–HE relationship in a novel way, by focusing on students’ behaviour post-university, rather than on student narratives. Conceptually, the article builds on multidimensional views of student engagement and the differentiation between psychological transactional contracts – where students who achieve better academic results are more likely to donate – and relational contracts – where students donate more following engagement in social experiences. (...) Making use of longitudinal data on donation behaviour from over 50,000 alumni from an English university over two decades, we find that while students who get better degree outcomes are more likely to donate, the association between participation in social experiences and donations is much stronger. This questions prevalent transactional models of HE and underlines the limitations of purely consumerist views of the relation between students and higher education institutions, even in the marketized UK context. (shrink)

What should authorities establish as the job of ethics committees and review boards? Two answers are: review of proposals for consistency with the duly established and applicable code and review of proposals for ethical acceptability. The present paper argues that these two jobs come apart in principle and in practice. On grounds of practicality, publicity and separation of powers, it argues that the relevant authorities do better to establish code-consistency review and not ethics-consistency review. It also rebuts bad code and (...) independence arguments for the opposite view. It then argues that authorities at present variously specify both code-consistency and ethics-consistency jobs, but most are also unclear on this issue. The paper then argues that they should reform the job of review boards and ethics committees, by clearly establishing code-consistency review and disestablishing ethics-consistency review, and through related reform of the basic orientation, focus, name, and expertise profile of these bodies and their actions. (shrink)

Canada has recently published a new Clinical Practice Guideline on the diagnosis and management of brain death. It states that consent is not necessary to carry out the interventions required to make the diagnosis. A supporting article not only sets out the arguments for this but also contends that ‘UK laws similarly carve out an exception, excusing clinicians from a prima facie duty to get consent’. This is supplemented by the claim that recent court decisions in the UK similarly confirm (...) that consent is not required, referencing two judgements inBattersbee. We disagree with the authors’ interpretation of the law on consent in the UK and argue that there is nothing inBattersbeeto support the conclusion that consent to testing is not necessary. Where there is a disagreement about testing for brain death in the UK, court authorisation is required. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) will drastically change the healthcare system. Radiology is one speciality that is most affected as AI algorithms are increasingly used in diagnostic imaging. AI‐enhanced health technologies will, inter alia, increase workflow efficiency, improve diagnostic accuracy, reduce healthcare‐related costs, and help alleviate medical personnel shortages in under‐resourced settings. However, the development of AI‐enhanced technologies in healthcare is fraught with legal, ethical, and human rights concerns. Currently, the use of AI in South African healthcare is not governed by sui (...) generis legislation or ethical guidance focused exclusively and specifically on AI, although various provisions and principles from law and ethics find application. This article outlines these normative principles and explains their relationship with the extant legal obligations and regulatory framework as applied to the use of AI in radiology services in South Africa. The article concludes with three key recommendations for radiology practitioners using AI in South Africa. These are the need for: vigilant monitoring of AI use in practice, reforms to the liability framework, and appropriate guidance from local regulators and the Health Professions Council of South Africa on the ethical use of AI. (shrink)

This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, and partition-of. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in particular their behavior with respect to time – is critical (...) for formal ontology. We provide examples to support this thesis from the domain of biomedicine. (shrink)

This article outlines the features and application of a set of model curriculum materials that utilize eco-democratic principles and humanities-based content to cultivate critical analysis of the cultural foundations of socio-environmental problems. We first describe the goals and components of the materials, then discuss results of their use in two different types of classrooms: an undergraduate humanities seminar at a mid-sized four-year college, and a developmental writing course at a community college.

The prime number theorem, established by Hadamard and de la Vallée Poussin independently in 1896, asserts that the density of primes in the positive integers is asymptotic to 1/ln x. Whereas their proofs made serious use of the methods of complex analysis, elementary proofs were provided by Selberg and Erdos in 1948. We describe a formally verified version of Selberg's proof, obtained using the Isabelle proof assistant.

We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes and the enduring entities that participate therein. For this purpose we introduce the notion a directly depicting ontology. Directly depicting ontologies are based on relatively simple languages and fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent two complementary perspectives on reality and employ distinct though compatible systems of categories. A SNAP (snapshot) ontology comprehends enduring entities such as (...) organisms, geographic features, or qualities as they exist at some given moment of time. A SPAN ontology comprehends perduring entities such as processes and their parts and aggregates as they unfold themselves through some temporal interval. We give an axiomatic account of the theory of directly depicting ontologies and of the core parts of the metaontological fragment within which they are embedded. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on three issues intertwined in current debates between endurantists and perdurantists—(i) the dimension of persisting objects, (ii) whether persisting objects have timeless, or only time-relative, parts, and (iii) whether persisting objects have proper temporal parts. I argue that one standard endurantist position on the first issue is compatible with standard perdurantist positions on parthood and temporal parts. I further argue that different accounts of persistence depend on the claims about objects' dimensions and not on the (...) auxiliary claims about parthood and temporal parts. (shrink)

In R. Holte and A. Howe (eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07).

This paper interrogates and reclaims clown practices in children’s rehabilitation as ‘foolish.’ Attempts to legitimize and ‘take seriously’ clown practices in the health sciences frame the work of clowns as secondary to the ‘real’ work of medical professionals and diminish the ways clowns support emotional vulnerability and bravery with a willingness to fail and be ridiculous as fundamental to their work. Narrow conceptualizations of clown practices in hospitals as only happy and funny overlook the ways clowns also routinely engage with (...) sadness, despair, discomfort and many other ways of being and doing. Our exploration of clown practices as foolish exposes the ways children’s rehabilitation upholds particular neoliberal models of success and invites a re-centring of rehabilitation and health care research and practice towards relationship building, supporting meaningful projects and a continued nurturing of aesthetic and pleasurable ways of being-in-the-world in the present moment as valuable unto themselves. (shrink)

The idea of a data transfer agreement (DTA) template for the South African (SA) research community is receiving increasing attention. Whiledeveloping such a DTA template is certainly a worthwhile project, questions regarding the project’s practical execution should be addressed,including how to best operationalise the envisioned DTA template, and the content of the envisioned DTA template. It is proposed that anempowerment approach be followed in operationalising the envisioned DTA template, which is contrasted with the regulatory approachfollowed with the material transfer agreement (...) that the Minister of Health promulgated in 2018. While the regulatory approach would entailgovernment making the use of the envisioned DTA template compulsory regardless of the quality of such a template, the empowermentapproach, by contrast, entails a focus on developing a high-quality, professionally drafted DTA template for the SA research community andmaking the use thereof a matter of own choice. Regarding the content of the envisioned DTA template, four hot-button content provisionsare analysed, and it is argued that SA research institutions and researchers should be empowered to: (i) have clarity and legal certaintyregarding their ownership of data, where relevant; (ii) be able to commercialise their research findings without unnecessary contractualconstraints; (iii) avoid falling into the trap of unlawful benefit sharing with research participants; and (iv) be aware that their legal role asresponsible parties, where relevant, cannot be contracted out via a DTA. (shrink)

Mereological principles are sometimes used to support general claims about the structure and arrangement of objects in the world. I focus initially on one such mereological principle, the weak supplementation principle (WSP). It is not obvious that (WSP) is prescribed by ordinary thinking about parthood. Further, (WSP) is not needed for a fairly strong formal characterization of the part–whole relation. For these reasons, some arguments relying on (WSP) might be countered by simply denying (WSP). I argue more generally that there (...) is no reason to assume that one core mereology functions as a common basis for all plausible metaphysical theories. (shrink)

It is often assumed that indeterminacy in mereological relations—in particular, indeterminacy in which collections of objects have fusions—leads immediately to indeterminacy in what objects there are in the world. This assumption is generally taken as a reason for rejecting mereological vagueness. The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between mereological vagueness and existential vagueness. I hope to show that the connection between the two forms of vagueness is not nearly so clear-cut as has been supposed.

In her interesting paper on cross-jurisdictional legal approaches to brain death, Ariane Lewis considers whether informed consent is required for DNC testing in the UK, and proposes that it is not...

Non-symmetric relations like loves or between can apply to the same relata in non-equivalent ways. For example, loves may apply to Abelard and Eloise either by Abelard’s loving Eloise or by Eloise’s loving Abelard. On the standard account of relations, different applications of a relation to fixed relata are distinguished by the direction in which the relation applies to the relata. But neither Directionalism nor its most popular rival, Positionalism, offer accounts of differential application that generalize to relations of arbitrary (...) symmetry structure. Here, I develop an alternative account, Relative Positionalism, which distinguishes different applications of a relation to fixed relata in terms of the ways in which the relata are characterized relative to one another. In presenting and defending Relative Positionalism, this paper covers some of the same ground as my [2016], but avoids the latter’s algebraic approach and focuses on interpretative issues—in particular, how to make sense of relative property instantiation—that were not addressed in the earlier paper. (shrink)

1.1 Some examples of rule induction on permutations . . . . . . . 6 1.2 Ways of making new permutations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.3 Further results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1.4 Removing elements . . . . . . . . . . (...) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.. (shrink)

The AI and Society discourse has previously drawn attention to the ways that digital systems embody the values of the technology development community from which they emerge through the development and deployment process. Research shows how this effect leads to a particular treatment of gender in computer systems development, a treatment which lags far behind the rich understanding of gender that social studies scholarship reveals and people across society experience. Many people do not relate to the narrow binary gender options (...) of male or female, and many people express their gender identity in much richer ways than the sex/gender binary female/woman and male/man Boolean terms will allow. We ask: are “born-digital” gendered datasets in digital systems experienced as marginalising by those who express their identity beyond the male/female binary? Case Study: Ireland. To answer this universal question, this paper presents the findings of an empirical case study of people in Ireland with diverse gender identities and expressions, and their experiences with public data systems and new technologies. In spite of great social changes in Ireland which have led to constitutional change in favour of LGBTQI + people, born-digital systems were experienced by respondents as embodying socio-cultural values which were no longer accepted in society at large. For many of the respondents, digital technologies routinely marginalise them in all kinds of ways. These systems keep alive violence and oppression long after civil rights have been enshrined in constitutional law. This study is just one example of the way assumptions about digital are disengaged from society-at-large. It is a call to arms to all who are passionate about socially-responsible technology. (shrink)

The theory of granular partitions is designed to capture in a formal framework important aspects of the selective character of common-sense views of reality. It comprehends not merely the ways in which we can view reality by conceiving its objects as gathered together not merely into sets, but also into wholes of various kinds, partitioned into parts at various levels of granularity. We here represent granular partitions as triples consisting of a rooted tree structure as first component, a domain satisfying (...) the axioms of Extensional Mereology as second component, and a mapping (called ’projection’) of the first into the second as a third component. We define ordering relations among granular partitions the resulting structures are called partition frames. We then introduce an axiomatic theory which sentences are interpreted in partition frames. (shrink)

The reality of current clinical practice in the UK is that where a patient’s family refuses to agree to testing for brain stem death (BD), such cases will ultimately end up in court. This situation is true of both adults and children and reinforced by recent legal cases. While recourse to the courts might be regrettable in such tragic cases, if public trust in the medical diagnosis of BD is to be maintained all aspects of the process must be conducted (...) in a way that is transparent and open to scrutiny. This is not an ‘ineffective expenditure’ of resources, but an essential element of a human rights-compliant legal system. (shrink)

This paper is an adventure of ideas. More specifically, it is a continuation of the adventure of ideas concerning the relations between creativity and logic at the level of being one finds in the work of Whitehead and his interpreters/inheritors. The “argument” of the paper, such as it is, is that ontological creativity may be fruitfully described by two logical functions, one exploding the movement from possibility to actuality, and the other from actuality to possibility. The paper explores both functions, (...) or “senses,” as fruitful ways of understanding ontological creativity, especially within processual thought. The two senses of creativity, the paper also argues, ought to be understood as primitive and inexorably “together.”. (shrink)