The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 3, Page 428-429, June 2012.

Medical tourism is a practice, whereby individuals travel across national borders with the intention of receiving medical care. Medical tourists are motivated to travel abroad by a number of factors, including the affordability of care abroad, access to treatments not available at home, and wait times for care at home. In this article, we share the findings of interviews conducted with 32 Canadian medical tourists with the aim of developing a better understanding of medical tourism, the ethical issues it raises (...) for public health within Canada and other source countries for medical tourists, and to identify research gaps and policy responses to this practice. While patient and academic perspectives overlap in several regards, we suggest areas in which academic consideration of the ethical issues raised by medical tourism can be informed by patient perspectives. (shrink)

Background: Medical tourism involves patients travelling internationally to receive medical services. This practice raises a range of ethical issues, including potential harms to the patient's home and destination country and risks to the patient's own health. Medical tourists often engage the services of a facilitator who may book travel and accommodation and link the patient with a hospital abroad. Facilitators have the potential to exacerbate or mitigate the ethical concerns associated with medical tourism, but their roles are poorly understood. -/- (...) Methods: 12 facilitators were interviewed from 10 Canadian medical tourism companies. -/- Results: Three themes were identified: facilitators' roles towards the patient, health system and medical tourism industry. Facilitators' roles towards the patient were typically described in terms of advocacy and the provision of information, but limited by facilitators' legal liability. Facilitators felt they played a positive role in the lives of their patients and the Canadian health system and served as catalysts for reform, although they noted an adversarial relationship with some Canadian physicians. Many facilitators described personally visiting medical tourism sites and forming personal relationships with surgeons abroad, but noted the need for greater regulation of their industry. -/- Conclusion: Facilitators play a substantial and evolving role in the practice of medical tourism and may be entering a period of professionalisation. Because of the key role of facilitators in determining the effects of medical tourism on patients and public health, this paper recommends a planned conversation between medical tourism stakeholders to define and shape facilitators' roles. (shrink)

Socrates' last words are a microcosm of the riddle his character poses to the philosophical reader. Are they sincere or ironic? Do they represent an afterthought prompted by a belated sense of familial responsibility or a death–bed epiphany? Are we to determine their reference in relation to the surface logic of the Phaedo or take them as the sign of a concealed discursive depth? In what follows, I will argue that the answer to these questions depends upon acknowledgement and clarification (...) of the pedagogical challenge Socrates faces in conversation with Simmias and Cebes. What I have to say is prompted, in large measure, by Glenn Mosts recent article which both undertakes substantial analysis of the riddles treatment by the tradition and develops a plausible solution. I do not accept this solution. But the struggle to articulate my misgivings about his argument was indispensible to the development of my own. In view of this, it seems prudent to begin with a brief summary of the position he takes. (shrink)

Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform is an invaluable resource for policymakers, faculty, students, and anyone interested in how decisions made about the education system ultimately affect the quality of education, educational access, and social justice.

In his most recent collection of papers, J. Baird Callicott has continued to advance a communitarian environmental ethic inspired by the mid–century “land ethic” writings of Aldo Leopold. One subject of concern is a dilemma. Either: the position is open to a charge of “eco–fascism” because it holds that only one maximal community fundamentally matters and interests of smaller communities and individuals can be swamped by a fundamental concern with the whole. Or: it is a “paper tiger” because it says (...) that many communities fundamentally matter, but offers no advice about how we are settle prima–facie conflicts of obligations tied to our various communities. Callicott now offers two new second–order priority principles designed to steer the communitarian position through the dilemma. I outline the relevant parts of his new position. However, I argue that one of the principles ends up offering no coherent advice over the priority of the very communities that inspire interest in the position of Leopold. Callicott proposes that the more intimate and venerable of our communities should have priority, but these elements can come apart in the relevant cases. (shrink)

Defenses of realist reductionism may involve petitio principii by a tacit and inadvertent reintroduction of naïve realism through continued supposition of stimulus and sensory fields' conflation. The legitimate meaningfulness of identity statements involving scientific discoveries is examined, as are their illicit or gratuitous expressions. While experimental psychological data has a role to play in refutation of direct realism, we should not underestimate the ingenuity of its proponents' extenuations , hence the need for emphasizing the logic of perceptual processes for conclusive (...) refutation of philosophic realism. A further instance of Paul Churchland's misinterpretation of psychophysical correspondence as intertheoretic identification is given, concerning Edwin Land's retinex theory of color vision. (shrink)

This paper focuses on perception and surveys the scientific evidence that the theory of direct realism adopted by most contemporary philosophers is incorrect. This evidence is provided by experiments on the spatial and temporal "filling-in" of percepts. It also examines the myth of the projection of sensations. The conclusion is that we do not perceive the world as it actually is, but as the brain computes it most probably to be.

These comments are concerned to show that direct realism about perception is quite compatible with the physical and neuroscientific story. Use is made of D.M. Armstrong's account of perception as coming to believe by means of the senses. What we come to believe about is the bird on the gatepost, say. So the account is direct realist. But it is obviously compatible with the scientific story which explains how the coming to believe comes about. We can also identify beliefs with (...) brain states. (shrink)

Several scholars and many religiously conservative thinkers have recently charged that Hitler’s ideas about race and racial struggle derived from the theories of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), either directly or through intermediate sources. So, for example, the historian Richard Weikart, in his book From Darwin to Hitler , maintains: “No matter how crooked the road was from Darwin to Hitler, clearly Darwinism and eugenics smoothed the path for Nazi ideology, especially for the Nazi stress on expansion, war, racial struggle, and racial (...) extermination.” In a subsequent book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Weikart argues that Darwin’s “evolutionary ethics drove him [Hitler] to engage in behavior that the rest of us consider abominable.” Other critics have also attempted to forge a strong link between Darwin’s theory and Hitler’s biological notions. In the 2008 film “Expelled,” a documentary defense of Intelligent Design, the Princeton trained philosopher David Berlinski, in conversation with Weikart, confidently asserts: “If you open Mein Kampf and read it, especially if you can read it in German, the correspondence between Darwinian ideas and Nazi ideas just leaps from the page.” John Gray, former professor at the London School of Economics, does allow that Hitler’s Darwinism was “vulgar.” Hannah Arendt also appears to have endorsed the connection when she declared: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.” Put “Darwin” and “Hitler” in a search engine and several million hits will be returned, most from religiously and politically conservative websites, articles, and books. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the ethical-political dilemma in Kant’s work, sometimes expressed through the metaphor of the “crooked wood of humanity.” Kant separates external and internal freedom and the types of legislation each form of freedom requires (coercive and noncoercive). Yet, he also argues that corrupt political institutions adversely affect individual ethical development, and, reciprocally, corrupt inner dispositions of a populace adversely affect the establishment of just political institutions. I argue that a major way in which Kant addresses this vicious circle (...) is through ethical institutions, that is, noncoercive public resources for articulating and disseminating the principles of the moral law. I discuss the idea of an ethico-civil society or ethical community formulated in the Religion as an ideal model for ethical institutions mediating the ethical and the legal-political in a noncoercive, progressive manner. (shrink)

John Anthony Crook, a Fellow of the British Academy, was a distinguished ancient historian with a special interest in Roman history and law. Among historians, his knowledge and understanding of Roman law was unequalled. Crook's academic career was spent for the most part in the University of Cambridge, and at St John's College. He entered the college as an undergraduate in 1939, and served as a Fellow from 1951 until his death on September 7, 2007. Within the Faculty (...) of Classics he rose to be Professor of ancient history in 1979. Crook was born in Balham, London, the only child of a bandsman in the Grenadier Guards. In his book Law and Life of Rome, he gave a brilliant demonstration of how legal sources might be made accessible and used constructively for social history. In the late 1970s, Crook joined forces with J. G. Wolf to produce an edition of the Murecine Tablets, to which they had been drawn independently. (shrink)

This essay seeks to examine the history of the intellectual comradeship between J.L. Talmon and the philosopher, political thinker, and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). The scholarly dialog between the two began in 1947, continued until Talmon's death in 1980, and is well documented in their private correspondence. I argue that there were two levels to this dialog: First, both Berlin and Talmon took part in the Totalitarianism discourse, which was colored by Popperian terminology, and thus I claim that (...) their ideas should be examined as part of the Cold-War political discourse. The second level stemmed from their similar East-European origin, their mutual Jewish identity, and their attitude towards the Zionist movement. At times the two levels of discourse conjoined commensurably, but in other cases the juxtaposition of the two created conceptual tensions. Examining Berlin and Talmon's thought from this dual perspective, I argue, can shed new light on the inner conflicts and conceptual tensions that each of them had to face. In particular, I claim that both thinkers tried to integrate their Anglophile liberal heritage with their support of National movements in general, and the Jewish National movement in particular. Nevertheless, the different approaches of Talmon and Berlin present two concepts of liberal Nationalism: While Talmon assumed that Zionism solved the Jewish individual's dilemmas by making Jews members of a commune attached to soil; Berlin sought to preserve the individual in an inviolable sphere and thus was more ambivalent in his attitude towards the state of Israel. In conclusion, I offer to see Talmon as a classic Zionist liberal and Berlin as a supporter of what I call “Diaspora Zionism”, an approach, which would later provide the grounds for Berlin's celebrated pluralism. (shrink)

Listening comprehension input is necessary for language learning and acculturation. One approach to developing listening comprehension skills is through exposure to massive amounts of naturally occurring spoken language input. But exposure to this input is not enough; learners also need to make the comprehension corpus meaningful to their learning experience.

Desiring Whiteness provides a compelling new interpretation of how we understand race. Race is often seen to be a social construction. Nevertheless, we continue to deploy race thinking in our everyday life as a way of telling people apart visually. How do subjects become raced? Is it common sense to read bodies as racially marked? Employing Lacan's theories of the subject and sexual difference, Seshadri-Crooks explores how the discourse of race parallels that of sexual difference in making racial identity a (...) fundamental component of our thinking. Through close readings of literary and film texts, Seshardi-Crooks also investigates whether race is a system of difference equally determined by Whiteness. She argues that it is in relation to Whiteness that systems of racial classification are organized, endowing it with a power to shape human difference. (shrink)

Medical tourists, persons that travel across international borders with the intention to access non-emergency medical care, may not be adequately informed of safety and ethical concerns related to the practice of medical tourism. Researchers indicate that the sources of information frequently used by medical tourists during their decision-making process may be biased and/or lack comprehensive information regarding individual safety and treatment outcomes, as well as potential impacts of the medical tourism industry on third parties. This paper explores the feedback from (...) former Canadian medical tourists regarding the use of an information sheet to address this knowledge gap and raise awareness of the safety and ethical concerns related to medical tourism. (shrink)