Many religious people are alarmed about features of the current age - violence in the media, a pervasive hedonism, a marginalization of religion, and widespread abortion. These concerns influence politics, but just as there should be a separation between church and state, so should there be a balance between religious commitments and secular arguments calling for social reforms. Robert Audi offers a principle of secular rationale, which does not exclude religious grounds for action but which rules out restricting freedom except (...) on grounds that any rational citizen would accept. The book describes the essential commitments of free democracy, explains how religious and secular moral considerations can be integrated to facilitate co-operation in a world of religious pluralism, and proposes ideals of civic virtue that express the mutual respect on which democracy depends. Audi offers a balanced and sophisticated treatment of the relations between religion and politics in a modern, secular society. (shrink)

Uses epistemic logic to clarify a number of possible interpretations of the principle, 'if you know you can't be wrong' and the deceptively similar principle 'if you may be wrong you don't know.' shows that on all plausible interpretation sceptical arguments beg the question at issue.

This text, serving as an introduction to Aristotelian, symbolic, inductive, and practical logic, presents the techniques of these approaches to logic, some of the philosophical problems of logic, and some of the attempts to solve philosophical problems by means of various logical techniques. It discusses the problem of universals and null classes; briefly introduces the theory of types; and presents Lukasiewicz's formalization of Aristotelian syllogistic logic as an example of a formal system. Classical logic and propositional logic are carefully and (...) fully presented. The text, however, is weak in its presentation of quantificational logic. After a correct, but brief and very inadequate introduction to quantificational logic, the readers are referred to Quine, Methods of Logic, or to Copi, Symbolic Logic, for a more adequate development. The chapter on inductive logic discusses the uses and dangers of generalizations and introduces the probability calculus; the chapter on informal logic discusses criteria of rationality and presents the usual informal fallacies. There are problems and exercises after many of the sections, and answers in the back of the book.—R. L. S. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problems of introducing the SMART-education technology in the training and development of personnel of hotel complexes and business activities in the field of hotel business. The methodological and organizational bases for the application of SMART-education in staff training were identified; the leading qualitative features and development trends of this type of entrepreneurial educational activity were outlined. The principles of SMART-education of staff in the field of hotel business and its applied features in the service (...) sector were developed. A model of SMART- education of hotel complex staff was developed based on solving case problems and practical mastering of professional content. (shrink)

This text, serving as an introduction to Aristotelian, symbolic, inductive, and practical logic, presents the techniques of these approaches to logic, some of the philosophical problems of logic, and some of the attempts to solve philosophical problems by means of various logical techniques. It discusses the problem of universals and null classes; briefly introduces the theory of types; and presents Lukasiewicz's formalization of Aristotelian syllogistic logic as an example of a formal system. Classical logic and propositional logic are carefully and (...) fully presented. The text, however, is weak in its presentation of quantificational logic. After a correct, but brief and very inadequate introduction to quantificational logic, the readers are referred to Quine, Methods of Logic, or to Copi, Symbolic Logic, for a more adequate development. The chapter on inductive logic discusses the uses and dangers of generalizations and introduces the probability calculus; the chapter on informal logic discusses criteria of rationality and presents the usual informal fallacies. There are problems and exercises after many of the sections, and answers in the back of the book.—R. L. S. (shrink)

Explains the intersubjective nature of the self and the function of role taking in the development of the personal level of intersubjectivity out of primordial, pre-personal sociality or corporeal intersubjectivity of the lived body. Pragmatic philosophy of George Herbert Mead; Existential-phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Fundamental and pervasive rapport; More.

The expository material in this book is ninety-nine pages long and covers very sketchily the philosophy of language, classical logic, symbolic logic, informal fallacies, the philosophy of science, and probability theory. To supplement the text material, the authors have included 142 pages of exercises, which may be removed from the book by tearing along the perforations. The authors have deliberately written a brief text so that the instructor "will be left free to elaborate according to his own judgment as his (...) classroom situation warrants." Eight pages are devoted to quantificational logic. The high price of this paperback text does not seem to be warranted by either the brief expository material, the removable pages of exercises, or the uniqueness of this approach.—R. L. S. (shrink)

Background: Physicians sometimes are asked by co-workers for prescriptions to deal with their medical problems. These “hallway” requests typically occur outside a formal doctor-patient relationship. There are professional guidelines on serving as physician for family members and friends, but no guidelines address writing prescriptions for co-workers. The frequency of these requests and the factors physicians consider in responding to them have not been examined.Objectives: To obtain data on the frequency of these requests and physicians’ attitudes and practices in responding to (...) them, and to explore the ethical considerations in writing prescriptions for co-workers.Design: A survey was administered to all physician faculty and residents in an academic department of internal medicine. The questions included whether the respondent had ever been asked for a prescription by a co-worker and how often the respondent had received such requests and written such prescriptions in the previous three months. Respondents also were asked to rate how likely they would be to write such a prescription in 15 hypothetical scenarios.Results: Of the 113 respondents who completed surveys, 68 percent reported having been asked for a prescription by a co-worker. Among those who had ever been asked, 59 percent had been asked one or more times during the previous three months and 88 percent had ever written such a prescription. Also, 88 percent of all respondents stated they were “very likely” or “likely” to write the prescription in one or more of the hypothetical scenarios.Conclusions: Most physicians in our sample had been asked for prescriptions by co-workers, and most had written such prescriptions. Many respondents indicated a willingness to write such prescriptions in a variety of scenarios, despite the absence of a formal doctor-patient relationship. Further discussion of the ethical considerations in writing prescriptions for co-workers is needed. (shrink)

The ethics review system of research is now well-established, at least in the developed world, although there are many differences in how countries view it and go about managing it. The UK specifically is now seeking to revise its system by speeding up the process of ethics approval but only for some studies. It is proposed that only those studies which pose “no material ethical issues” should be “fast-tracked”. However, it is unclear what this means, who should decide and what (...) should be included in this category. In this paper, we go some way towards answering these questions. While we are certain that the debate is only just beginning, we are equally certain that it will continue to run long after the system has been reformed. To stimulate this conversation and to inform a pilot project of the new system directly, we review two candidates to help give some substance to the notion of “material” ethical issues. Firstly, material could mean a certain type or degree of risk. Second, material could mean how physically invasive the research is. We conclude that there is still much work to be done on making the system of governing health and social care consistent and practicable. (shrink)

Interest in the retrieval of organs from non-heart-beating cadaver donors has been rekindled by the success of transplantation of solid organs and the insufficient supply of donor organs currently obtained from heart-beating cadaver donors. There are currently two retrieval techniques being evaluated, the in situ cold perfusion approach and the controlled death approach. Both, however, raise ethical concerns. Reanimation is a new method which has been used successfully in animals. We believe this new approach overcomes the ethical objections raised to (...) these other methods. (shrink)

The proposition that a decreasing sequence of ordinals necessarily terminates has been given a new, and perhaps unexpected, importance by the rôle which it plays in Gentzen's proof of the freedom from contradiction of the “reine Zahlentheorie.” Gödel's construction of non-demonstrable propositions and the establishment of the impossibility of a proof of freedom from contradiction, within the framework of a certain type of formal system, showed that a proof of freedom from contradiction could be found only by transcending the axioms (...) and proof processes of that formal system. Gentzen's proof succeeds by utilisingtransfinite inductionto prove that certain sequences of reduction processes, enumerated by ordinals less than ε (the first ordinal to satisfy ε = ὡ) are finite. Were it possible to provethe restricted ordinal theorem, that a descending sequence of ordinals, less thanε, is finite, in Gentzen's “reine Zahlentheorie,” then it would be possible to determine a contradiction in that number system. In his paper, Gentzen proves the theorem of transfinite induction, which he requires, by an intuitive argument. There is also a method of reducing transfinite induction, for ordinals less than ε, to a number-theoretic principle given by Hilbert and Bernays, and a similar method by Ackermann. None of these proofs of transfinite induction isfinitist. (shrink)