For many species that reproduce sexually, how sex is expressed at different points across lifespan is highly contingent and dependent on various environmental factors. For example, in many species of fish, environmental cues can trigger a natural process of sex transition where a female transitions to male. For many species of turtle, incubation temperature influences the likelihood that turtle eggs will hatch males or females. What is the case for Homo sapiens? Is human sex expression influenced by contingent environmental factors (...) like we see in fish and turtles, with whom we share common ancestry and DNA? Our paper explores the current biological science of sex determination and how it applies to philosophical and theological accounts of the human person. We argue that while human sex determination is not susceptible to environmental cues to the same degree we see in other species, there is sufficient variability among the pathways of human sex development to complicate simplistic biological categories of male and female. (shrink)

Zu keiner Zeit hat Potsdam auf die europäische Kultur einen größeren Einfluss ausgeübt als im 18. Jahrhundert, als Friedrich der Große, der Philosophenkönig, den Absolutismus und die Aufklärung miteinander in Einklang zu bringen versuchte. Seit dem Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts setzte der Aufstieg des Bürgertums in Verbindung mit den neuen Ideen der Aufklärung das höfische Monopol immer stärker unter Druck. Friedrich der Große nahm die Herausforderung an und wollte als König und Bürger der Leserepublik, als Herrscher und Intellektueller, Macht und (...) Geist zueinander führen. Der Hof in Potsdam, die Residenz am Rande der Metropole, wurde zum Ort dieses komplexen und spannungsreichen Rollenspiels, in dem die alte Welt der ererbten Herren und die neue Welt der kritischen Bürger ihre Grenzen auslotete. Das geschah unter den Augen Europas. Denn Friedrich der Große hatte dem Experiment Potsdam von Anfang an einen europäischen Rahmen gegeben. In Potsdam traf sich und auf Potsdam blickte die aufgeklärte Intelligenz aus ganz Europa. Die deutschen Aufklärer betrachteten das Rollenspiel vor den Toren Berlins dagegen skeptischer, weil sie der kulturellen Konstellation misstrauten und der europäische Hof quer lag zum großen Ziel einer deutschen Nationalkultur, für die der Philosoph von Sans-Souci so wenig Sinn zeigte. (shrink)

Gangestad & Simpson make a major contribution by highlighting the importance of mate choice for good genes, the costs of alternative strategies, and tradeoffs inherent in human mating. By downplaying sex differences and ignoring the nongenetic adaptive benefits of short term mating, however, they undermine their goal of “strategic pluralism” by presenting a theory devoid of many documented complexities of human mating.

Critical care of neonatesThe recently published report of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Critical care decisions in fetal and neonatal medicine, is a valuable contribution to the discussion of decision making in the critical care of neonates. Drawing upon medical evidence, the working party highlights the many practical difficulties arising in neonatal care and by setting out clearly the nature of the ethical and other issues arising in this area of medicine, and their relationship with neonatal development, the resulting report (...) has the potential to lead both to improved practice and to better informed communication between doctors and families when they face difficult decisions about how best to treat very premature babies. Based on medical evidence, the working party sets out guidelines on decision-making about the resuscitation of babies born before the gestational age of 25 weeks and 6 days, dividing this period into four chronological periods: before 21 weeks and 6 days when resuscitation should normally only take place within the context of a research project; between 22 weeks and 23 weeks when resuscitation should not normally be carried out unless the parents request it; at 23 or 24 weeks when parental views should take precedence; and, after 24 weeks when resuscitation should be the norm unless not in the child’s best interests.There are several practical ethical difficulties with this aspect of the advice. To what extent, for example, does the paediatric assessment of the child, intended to play a role in decision-making about the appropriateness of resuscitation, itself depend on the initiation of resuscitation? To what extent is it reasonable and humane to expect parents to take full responsibility for making decisions about resuscitation between 23 and 24 weeks? On what grounds is it acceptable to attempt to resuscitate a baby <21 weeks and 6 …. (shrink)

The dire implications of navigating the overwhelming whiteness of the education system for Black women is foregrounded by the author’s autoethnography about her educational journey and experiences....

Two facets of diagnostic reasoning related to scientific thinking are recognizing the difference between confounded and unconfounded evidence and selecting appropriate interventions that could provide learners the evidence necessary to make an appropriate causal conclusion. The present study investigates both these abilities in 3- to 6-year-old children. We found both competence and developmental progress in the capacity to recognize that evidence is confounded. Similarly, children performed above chance in some tasks testing for the selection of a controlled test of a (...) hypothesis. However, these capacities were unrelated, suggesting that preschoolers’ nascent understanding of the control-of-variables strategy may not be driven by a metacognitive understanding that confounded evidence does not support a unique causal conclusion, and requires further investigation. (shrink)

This is a review and discussion of Ask Vest Christiansen’s book Gym Culture, Identity and Performance-Enhancing Drugs: Tracing a Typology of Steroid Use. As indicated by the title, the book...

This is a review and discussion of Ask Vest Christiansen’s book Gym Culture, Identity and Performance-Enhancing Drugs: Tracing a Typology of Steroid Use. As indicated by the title, the book...

The writings of Stanley Cavell and Jacques Derrida share many points of intersection. One of these is their mutual interest in Shakespeare’s Hamlet; another is their assessments of J.L. Austin’s philosophy, and his concept of performativity. In this paper, we demonstrate that Cavell’s and Derrida’s respective essays on Hamlet offer a surprising insight into their views on Austin’s notion of performativity. Since Hamlet abounds with oaths and promises, testimonies and bearing witness, what is surprising is not that these philosophers should (...) have identified this theme but rather how they respond to it. We show that Derrida’s writings on Hamlet repeatedly draw and depend on the idea of performativity, amounting to a rapprochement with Austin’s concept; and we also show that Cavell questions the effectiveness of performatives in the play, in ways that sometimes resemble Derrida’s invocation of spectrality in the play. (shrink)

Mental health among students is one of the major concerns amidst the pandemic. Employing a correlational design, this study investigates the relationship between emotional intelligence and mental health among 152 senior high school students. Based on the statistical analysis, the r coefficient of 0.82 indicates a high positive correlation between the variables. The p-value of 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision to reject the null hypothesis. Hence, a significant relationship exists between emotional intelligence and mental health (...) among senior high school. Implications were discussed in the study. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.4 (2002) 599-617 [Access article in PDF] Thinking Geometrically in Pierre-Daniel Huet's Demonstratio evangelica (1679) April G. Shelford Sometime after 1679, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721) indulged an author's vanity by comparing his Demonstratio evangelica with works whose authors are far better known today. He recorded his judgments on a scrap of paper. 1First, he contrasted the Demonstratio to Antoine Arnauld's Les nouveaux élémens (...) de géometrie (1664). While Arnauld had assumed that all the principles of geometry were true and all geometrical demonstrations certain, and had considered religious questions not amenable to methodical demonstration, Huet noted, "I made clear the contrary by proving religion through a methodical sequence of propositions similar to those one finds in geometry." For Arnauld religious belief fell into the class of things better proven through a series of mutually reinforcing propositions than through proofs modeled on geometry; Huet had actually accomplished the latter. Arnauld did not require geometric proofs in religious works; Huet wrote the Demonstratio "to satisfy those who do." Indeed, Arnauld forbade such proofs, "but I permitted them... and I proposed something to satisfy those who do [demand them]."Huet then considered Blaise Pascal's Pensées (1670). Pascal had also rejected demonstration in proving religious truths, Huet noted, opting instead for "moral proofs, which are directed more to the heart than to the mind. In other words he desired to work harder at moving and disposing the heart than at convincing and persuading the intellect." Apparently, "M. Pascal did not believe that one could prove the truth of the Christian religion by geometric proofs; much less that he had any hope of doing so." [End Page 599]Huet's jottings precisely situate the Demonstratio evangelica (1679)between the claims of Cartesian rationalism and Pascal's fideism and religion of the heart, inviting us to take another look at an imperfectly understood work. Scholarly treatment of the Demonstratio has generally been cursory or partial because it has been considered less for its own merits than for how it fits into larger research agendas. 2 Some scholars have offered important insights but either do not develop them or do not consider the Demonstratio in a sufficiently broad context. 3 A consensus on the Demonstratio's general thrust thus masks puzzling questions. Everyone acknowledges, for example, that Huet's apologetic responded to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670). Like other Christian apologists, he had to maintain "the Mosaic authorship" that was "the supposed guarantee of the truth of the text," 4 devoting "long chapters to the authenticity of the books of the Old Testament." 5 Yet Huet began the Demonstratio with an assault on geometrical knowledge and an epistemological discussion—an odd place to begin refuting the Tractatus. 6 Why? The question deserves a good answer, as Huet was a scholar of international reputation, and his contemporaries judged the Demonstratio an important work. 7More important for us, the evolution of the Demonstratio superbly reflects a vanished intellectual world and scholarly culture and in fact records change [End Page 600] in that world over four decades. Its genesis was the rash promise of a young man inspired by the possibilities of geometry and aspiring to recognition in the Republic of Letters, but before fulfilling that promise Huet developed a lively interest in such diverse fields as biblical criticism and natural philosophy, and he would apply the insights gained there in his apologetic. 8 A central question confronting Huet and his contemporaries was how to achieve certainty in matters religious, historical, and scientific. 9 The Demonstratio reveals Huet's conclusion that certainty in all three was profoundly interrelated. Finally, he composed the Demonstratio during the 1670s, having grasped with much alarm the consequences of the spread of Cartesianism. Thus, the Demonstratio is an intellectual biography not just of the author but of an era.Of course, Huet had to contend with Spinoza's challenge to Mosaic authorship, which fatally undermined the historical certainty of the Bible, but he also wrote... (shrink)

Update on donation of bodily material in the UKIn March 2010, the Human Tissue Authority announced that the first pooled kidney transplants, each involving three living donors and three recipients, had been performed in the UK. 1 While the vast majority of living donor transplants take place between people who are genetically related or are otherwise emotionally close, the Human Tissue Act 2004 introduced greater flexibility, permitting, for example, altruistic, paired and pooled donation. The HTA commented that these types of (...) donation represent one in three of all kidney transplants in the UK. Under the system of paired and pooled donation, in which someone needs a donor organ and has a friend or relative willing to donate, but the two are not compatible with each other, they can pair up with one or more other incompatible donor and recipient pairs in an organ exchange. In paired donation, donor A gives an organ to recipient B and donor B gives to recipient A; in pooled donation, more than two donor–recipient pairs take part in an organ exchange, coordinated by the HTA . Under the human tissue legislation, all cases of paired and pooled donation need to be considered by an independent assessor and approved by a panel of at least three members of the HTA, to ensure that all parties fully understand the risks involved and the donors are not under any pressure to donate.The first pooled transplant took place late in 2009, and was followed shortly afterwards by a second. Several paired living kidney transplants, involving two couples, had already taken place, however, with 16 such transplants going ahead between 1 April 2008 and 31 March 2009. Also in March 2010, a …. (shrink)

Merab Konstantinovich [Mamardashvili] met with me immediately, as soon as I requested it, although he forewarned me that he could only dimly remember much of that distant past in which I was most interested. But evidently that past still perturbed him as well, since he agreed to speak with me even though he had not yet completely recovered from his illness, and hence his voice was feeble, at times subsiding to a whisper; he would pronounce his words indistinctly, constantly sticking (...) one onto another; on top of that, for technical reasons the dictaphone was situated a bit away from him. It was therefore very difficult to transcribe the text, and I raised many questions with the idea of asking Merab Konstantinovich about them at our next meeting and clearing up some things. But alas, there was no next meeting … Hence I am permitting myself now to publish only some of the most clearly enunciated fragments of my conversation with him, one of the four "forefathers" of the Moscow Methodological Circle, whose name for us, today's participants (and hence neophytes) in the methodological movement, is enveloped by legends handed down by word of mouth. I kept my questions to a minimum. Mamardashvili's reminiscences, arguments, and reflections will seem contentious to many. But no matter, one can dispute points of substance even with those who have passed on. (shrink)

It is a familiar story that on April 5, 56 B.C., Cicero made a motion in the Senate concerning Caesar's Campanian land law, and that this action of his was one of the reasons for the conference of Luca. Query: What were the terms of the motion?

AimThe aim of this study was to determine the presence of depressive symptoms and understand the potential factors associated with these symptoms among physicians in Bangladesh during the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsA cross-sectional study using an online survey was conducted in between April 21 and May 10, 2020, among physicians living in Bangladesh. Participants completed a series of demographic questions, COVID-19-related questions, and the Patient Health Questionnaire-9. Descriptive statistics, test statistics were performed to explore the association between physicians’ experience of depression (...) symptoms and other study variables. Stepwise binary logistic regression was followed while conducting the multivariable analysis.ResultA total of 390 physicians completed the survey. Of them, 283 were found to be experiencing depressive symptoms. Predictors which were significantly associated with depressive symptoms were gender, the presence of sleep disturbance, being highly exposed to media coverage about the pandemic, and fear around COVID-19 infection, being assaulted/humiliated by regulatory forces and by the general public, while traveling to and from the hospital and treating patients during the countrywide lockdown.ConclusionThe findings of this study demonstrate that there is a high prevalence of depressive symptom among physicians especially among female physicians in Bangladesh during the COVID-19 pandemic. Immediate, adequate and effective interventions addressing gender specific needs are required amid this ongoing crisis and beyond. (shrink)

Legislation that authorises controversial organ procurement strategies but ignores respect for autonomy is flawed in principle and predictably unworkable in practiceThe UK Human Tissue Act 2004,1 designed to regulate all activity involving human tissue, organs, or bodies, was introduced in the House of Commons in December 2003, received Royal Assent on 15 November 2004,2 and has been partially implemented by Commencement Orders from April 2005. The new act, which repeals and replaces the Human Tissue Act 1961, the Anatomy Act (...) 1984, and the Human Organ Transplants Act 1989, has its origins in events of serious public concern, namely the retained organs scandals at Bristol Royal Infirmary3 and the Royal Liverpool Childrens’ Hospital.4 The act is correspondingly dominated by regulation of postmortem examinations and retention of human tissue, with consistent emphasis on the need for fully informed consent. Compliance with these requirements is now mandatory with the threat of up to three years’ imprisonment and/or fines for any deviation.The impact of the original proposals within the bill on research and the clinical practice of pathology have been carefully considered and documented,5 with subsequent amendments to ameliorate professional concerns.6 The act, however, also carries significant implications for medical practice in areas where donor recruitment for transplantation can take place, and representations on these aspects during readings of the bill7 have produced neither clarification, justification, nor amendment within the final legislation.Section 43 will make it lawful for hospital authorities “to take steps for the purpose of preserving the part for use for transplantation and to retain the body for that purpose”. The original explanatory notes for the bill8 while it proceeded through parliament implied that such action, prior to consent to transplantation being sought, was then lawful, clause 44 as section 43 …. (shrink)

n April, 2014 I organized an International Workshop on East-West Approaches to the Nature of Mind, Consciousness and Self, in the beautiful grounds of Dartington Hall, in Devon, England to explore the edges of current understanding of ordinary and extra-ordinary conscious experience. Although Consciousness Studies is now a flourishing area of investigation, ordinary and extra-ordinary human experiences do not fit comfortably into the prevailing materialist-reductionist paradigm, suggesting the need to explore non-reductionist approaches in an open, but nevertheless rigorous way. (...) Consciousness has, of course, also been studied in the East over the millennia, but there are major cultural differences in the ways mind, consciousness and self are conceptualized and investigated in the East and in the West, making it difficult to integrate Eastern with Western ways of thought. This provided the purpose for the workshop—to gather together an invited selection of some of the best current thinkers and researchers in this cross-disciplinary area to present their work, along with a group of discussants that included equally senior, mid-career and more junior researchers from different traditions (both Eastern and Western), to explore the issues in depth, with the aim of moving closer to a more integrated, inclusive worldview. The progression of the workshop over four days broadly followed four themes: 1) how to obtain knowledge additional to that provided by the usual third-person methods of science through subjective ways of knowing and by focusing close attention on the details of ordinary experience 2) the range and significance of extraordinary experiences 3) the potentially transformative effects on the knower of engaging in such explorations, and 4) some integrative ways of thinking about what is revealed by such investigations. (shrink)

Background: Increasing resistance of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to ciprofloxacin in ICU/burn units has created a problem in the treatment of infections caused by this microorganism. -/- Methods: Fifty P. aeruginosa strains were isolated from burn patients hospitalized in the Kerman Hospital during May 1999-April 2000 and were tested for in-vitro sensitivity to different antibiotics by disc diffusion breakpoint assay. The isolates were subjected to minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) test by agar dilution method. Existence of the plasmids was also investigated in (...) the isolates. -/- Results: Thirty-four patients infected with ciprofloxacin strains showed MIC of 8 mg/ml [p<0.001]. Sixteen patients were infected with sensitive strains exhibiting MIC range of 0.0125-0.125 ± 0.033 mg/ml. The isolates were also also resistant to other antibiotics [p<0.001]. Plasmid isolation and agarose gel electrophoresis (0.7%) revealed three plasmid bands in strains 8 and 16, and one band in strain 35. -/- Conclusion: The emergence of ciprofloxacin resistance of P. aeruginosa in burn patients is alarming since this antibiotic has only recently been introduced onto the market in Iran. One important observation was that some isolates exhibited cross resistance to other antibiotics. Furthermore, some strains were carriers of plasmids which might have acted as the potential source of acquired resistance in the hospital setting. -/- . (shrink)

“You Have Seen Their Faces”: Gisèle Freund, Walter Benjamin and Margaret Bourke-White as Headhunters of the Thirties -/- Abstract This paper concentrates on one work by each of three authors: Walter Benjamin’s Deutsche Menschen (Germans), an anthology of twenty-five 18th and 19th century German personal letters; Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces; and Gisèle Freund’s collection of photographic portraits of writers and artists, compiled between 1936 and 1939. The purpose of this paper is to compare the (...) politics of representation of these three figures and to examine the challenge they addressed to the dominant iconography of the 1930s. At the heart of each one’s work was a desire to bring about a shift in contemporary cultural politics by reimagining the body politic. Benjamin’s and Freund’s aim was to displace the monumentalizing, distancing, ‘heroic’ forms of fascist art and writing. They construct and project an intimate, or ‘domestic’ image of humanism as a form of social practice, past and present. Bourke-White’s aim was to bring to visibility an America concealed beneath the glossy homogenized images of white American advertising. All three authors aligned themselves with a documentary tradition that believed that representation should function as a constructed record of the traces of lived experience. Driven by a need to expose the other side’s deliberate falsifications of experience, they saw their own constructed fictions as ways of ‘documenting,’ and then perhaps transforming, an experiential world of ‘facts,’ bodies, and ‘truths.’ -/- Working Paper 3:15 European Society and Culture Research Group. Center for German and European Studies, University of California at Berkeley. April 1994 37pp. -/- M. Kay Flavell Critical Theory, University of California at Davis . (shrink)

It is claimed by the future like ours anti-abortion argument that since killing adult humans is wrong because it deprives them of a future of value and the fetus has a future of value, killing fetuses is wrong in the same way that killing adult human beings is wrong. In The morality of abortion and the deprivation of futures (this journal, April 2000) I argued that the persuasive power of this argument rests upon an equivocation on the term “future (...) of value”. If the expression means “a potential future of value” then the moral claim is implausible because people do not in general have rights to what they need to fulfill their potential; if the expression means “self-represented future of value” then the argument fails because the fetus does not represent its future. Under no interpretation is the argument sound. In Deprivations, futures and the wrongness of killing (this journal, December 2001) Donald Marquis, author of the future like ours argument, responds at length to this objection. In the present essay the focus of the debate shifts to the proper interpretation of the right not to be killed. Donald Marquis argues that this liberty right entails the welfare right to the means necessary to sustain life; I argue that the right not to be killed does not entail unlimited welfare rights. On Marquis's view, the right not to be killed confers upon the fetus the right to whatever it takes to sustain life; on the view I defend, the right not to be killed does not confer upon the fetus or anyone else the right to another person's body. On Marquis's view, abortion is almost never permissible; on my view abortion is almost always permissible. (shrink)

The coronavirus outbreak has led to abrupt changes in people’s daily lives as many state governments have restricted individuals’ movements in order to slow the spread of the virus. We conducted a natural experiment in the United States of America in April 2020, in which we compare responses from states with “stay-at-home orders” and no such orders. We surveyed 458 participants and examined the effects of these government-imposed restrictions on social, mental, physical, and financial well-being as well as the (...) mediating role of resilience. Structural equation modeling reveals that resilience buffers stay-at-home orders’ potential side-effects on well-being. Specifically, individuals living in states with stay-at-home orders report lower functional well-being than individuals living in states without such orders, which negatively relates to resilience. Resilience in turn is associated with higher social, mental, physical, and financial well-being. Thus, resilience can be seen as an effective means of buffering stay-at-home orders’ potential negative effects on the components of well-being. Our results indicate the central role of resilience, which is crucial in dampening the effects of stay-at-home orders on well-being. Following our results, governments and policymakers should focus their efforts on strengthening individuals’ resilience, which is a key predictor of social, mental, financial, and physical well-being. (shrink)

The Human Tissue Act 2004 is designed to regulate the storage and use of organs and tissues from the living, and the removal, storage and use of the same material from the deceased. It repeals much criticized legislation, including the Human Tissue Act 1961, and establishes a Human Tissue Authority to ensure compliance with the Act via a licensing and monitoring regime. When the Act comes into force, probably in April 2006, it will be a criminal offence not to (...) comply with certain provisions of the Act, and a new offence of DNA 'theft' will be introduced. Importantly, the Act places consent at the centre of the system, both from the living and from or on behalf of the deceased. (shrink)

It is generally accepted among Marxists that the laws of materialist dialectics represent a great, scientifically significant achievement for human knowledge, and that they develop as cognition advances. It is also generally accepted that, under new conditions - for example, in a fundamentally new phase in the development of human society such as is presented by socialism - the objective laws of dialectics acquire distinctive new characteristics, are altered, modified. But is it proper to speak of change or evolution of (...) the laws of objective dialectics? Two different viewpoints on this matter were clearly present at the USSR Symposium in April 1965. (shrink)

Background During the first wave of the new coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the sudden increase in hospitalised patients put medical facilities in southern Switzerland under severe pressure. During this time, bachelor’s degree programs in nursing, physiotherapy and occupational therapy were disrupted, and students in their second year were displaced. Students experienced the continuous reorganisation of their traineeship as healthcare facilities adapted to a climate of uncertainty. Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate the degree of moral distress and the (...) ethical issues most often encountered by physiotherapy, nursing and occupational therapy students enrolled in a traineeship during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in southern Switzerland. Participants and research context The sample consisted of 102 participants, and the response rate was 81.6%. Research design Based on a pragmatic approach, a mixed-method with a convergent design was adopted. Data were collected between 30 April 2020 and 14 May 2020, via a survey administered to all occupational therapy, physiotherapy and nursing students in their fourth semester. Ethical considerations Given that no vulnerable persons were involved, the Ethics Committee of Southern Switzerland waived authorisation. However, all measures were put into place to protect participants by guaranteeing their anonymity and confidentiality. Results and discussion The data analysis showed that the main source for moral distress was ‘poor teamwork’ and that the moral issues encountered most often by students were related to the appropriateness of care and working conditions, with a clear reference to students’ own safety and that of their loved ones; the other concerns reported included the loss of learning opportunities and the perceived lack of technical knowledge and skills. Conclusions This survey offers a faithful overview of physiotherapy, nursing and occupational therapy students’ experience during the first pandemic wave. This study also identifies some key recommendations for healthcare professions’ education. (shrink)

The revolutionary restructuring of the whole of the life of our society, which got under way in the country after the April 1985 Plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU, is inseparably bound up with a consolidation of the moral foundations of socialist society and the Soviet mode of life. A profound intellectual conviction, the greatest political and moral responsibility for the fate of the country, and an unwavering observance of the Leninist ethics of Bolshevism are the demands (...) now being placed on all Soviet people, but with special urgency on Party members. A concern for the moral purity and honesty of Communists is the prime duty of a Party organization. The Party calls for a most merciless struggle against accommodators, careerists, and opportunists, and against protectionism, family favoritism, nepotism, and promotion of workers on the basis of hometownism and personal loyalty. Party organizations must apply the full rigor of the requirements of the Party statutes to those who compromise the name of Party member and Soviet leader by violating Party duty, the commission of crimes of office, greed, economic featherbedding, and moral dereliction. (shrink)

Ever so often in the UK, there is a flurry of activity around the information requirements of donor-conceived individuals. In April 2013, it was the launch of a report from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics that brought the issue back to public consciousness.1Since 1991, information about treatment with donor gametes or embryos has been collected by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Since then, over 35 000 donor-conceived individuals have been born through treatment in licensed clinics. Medical information and (...) information about donors’ appearance are collected by clinics, and donors are encouraged to put together a ‘pen portrait’ giving information about themselves for any resulting children. One focus of the new report is on improving the quality and quantity of information available about donors.Traditionally, gamete and embryo donations were practised on an anonymous basis, so that those born as a result of such donation may receive only non-identifying information about the donor when they reach the age of 18. This changed in 2005 when donor anonymity was removed so that anyone donating after that time could be identified to individuals born as a result of the treatment. Those who have donated in the past are also able to reregister as identifiable donors. Much concern was expressed at the time that this would exacerbate the shortage of donors although the Nuffield Council on Bioethics reports that, 8 years on, those clinics that actively recruit donors appear to be successful in finding sufficient donors. The report recommends that the option of anonymous donation should not be reintroduced.A big issue of debate in the UK has been, and continues to be, whether parents should tell their …. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Readymades, Monochromes, Etc.:Nominalism and the Paradox of ModernismJ. M. Bernstein (bio)If Schopenhauer's thesis of art as an image of the world once over bears a kernel of truth, then it does so only insofar as this second world is composed out of elements that have been transposed out of the empirical world in accord with Jewish descriptions of the messianic order as an order just like the habitual order (...) but changed in the slightest degree.—T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic TheoryAdorno's philosophy as a whole, and his aesthetic theory in particular, is irrevocably bound to the tradition and achievements of high modernism. Although Adorno himself did not recognize American Abstract Expression as the apotheosis of high modernism in painting, that judgment now hardly seems contentious.1 And that raises a problem: it is the problem of R. Mutt, again, the problem of the porcelain urinal called Fountain, which was refused admittance to the Society of Independent Artists' Exhibition in April 1917 in spite of the Society's proclaimed democratic slogan "No jury, no prizes"—the work whose life or after-life begins with the beautiful photograph of it by Stieglitz set against the background of Marsden Hartley's The Warriors and that appeared shortly thereafter in the new avant-garde journal The Blind Man. Whatever the immediate repercussions of Fountain, there can be little doubt that much of what is most vital in art in the second half of this century is unthinkable without it; Duchamp's readymade offers an exemplary alternative to the tradition of high modernist painting that has continued to be generative. For a modernist like Adorno, for whom authentic art is that which best rises to the demands and necessities of artistic materials, for whom internal consistency and rigor would appear to be everything, for whom, finally, aesthetic form is the "objective organization within each artwork of what appears as bindingly eloquent" [AT 143; emphasis mine], Duchamp's gesture of simply naming or claiming artistic status for an ordinary bathroom fixture must be anathema. In this respect, Adorno's aesthetic theory would seem to be in the same predicament as Clement Greenberg's modernism: inextricably bound to a tradition that history has left behind. And while the option of refuting the claim of Fountain is certainly possible, and should not be too quickly suppressed (there is something in the claim that will forever be skeptically self-defeating), nonetheless there does appear to be an exemplariness to Fountain that exceeds the narrow provocation of Duchamp's nominalist gesture; something in the readymade, in fact, seems (art historically? aesthetically? conceptually?) irresistible. If so, then modernist [End Page 83] formalism must either find a way of accommodating the readymade without departing from its internal logic or find its claim to our attention forfeited.After laying out the bold outlines of Adorno's formalism, the remainder of this essay will seek to uncover an account of the readymade in the context of what I will eventually call "the paradox of modernism" in order to locate in what way the readymade can be accommodated to a defense of Adorno's late modernism. For the purposes of this argument, I am going to assume that the best overall defense of Duchamp's gesture, which makes it foundational for the understanding of modern art, is that offered by Thierry de Duve in his Kant after Duchamp. My elaboration of Adorno's late modernism will hence proceed, in part, through a charting of some of the fault lines in de Duve's Duchamp. My contention shall be that the generativity of Fountain as readymade not only belongs within modernism, but is only intelligible within a wholly modernist and formalist frame of reference.Adorno's Formalism and the Material MotiveAdorno opens the section of Aesthetic Theory entitled "Coherence and Meaning" with the drastic sounding thesis that "Although artworks are neither conceptual nor judgmental, they are logical" [AT 136]. He continues:In them nothing would be enigmatic if their immanent logicality did not accommodate discursive thought, which criteria they nevertheless regularly disappoint. They most resemble the form of a syllogism and its prototype in empirical thought. That in the temporal... (shrink)

The metaphor drug model of money slights the possibility that money may literally tap into and exploit brain systems underlying motivational systems, and it also ignores growing evidence on the common neural substrates of behavioral and “physiological” addictions. Additionally, many objects other than money can gain such drug-like properties. The treatment of play in the evolutionary explanation for the unique role of money in people ignores key conceptual and empirical issues. (Published Online April 5 2006).

We argued in our joint article that the facilitated consensus model of clinical ethics consultation is incomplete because it does not address the problem of what we have called “unsettled cases.” Sabrina Derrington and April Dworetz, Mark Aulisio, and Al Jonsen have each usefully challenged our claims and conclusions. In this brief article we respond to some of their arguments.

David Hume , a member of the well-known Border family of Home, was born on April 26, 1711. After a period of preparatory training he matriculated at Edinburgh College in 1723, although he may have entered earlier. His course during this period is obscure; according to his own statement the curriculum was mainly literary; on leaving College he records that his interests lay predominantly in this direction, and, being left to his own choice, he was able to indulge his (...) inclinations. An attempt to train him for a legal career ended in failure; and he continued to live at his ancestral home of Ninewells, to the west of Berwick, for some years, devoting himself. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 2, Page 151-162, April 2022. In today’s online data-driven world, people constantly shed data and deposit digital footprints. When individuals access health services, governments and health providers collect and store large volumes of health information about people that can later be retrieved, linked and analysed for research purposes. This can lead to new discoveries in medicine and healthcare. In addition, when securely stored and de-identified, the privacy risks are minimal and manageable. In many jurisdictions, (...) ethics committees routinely waive the requirement for researchers to obtain consent from data subjects before using and linking these datasets in an effort to balance respect for individuals with research efficiency. In this paper, I explore the ethical justification for using routinely collected health data for research without consent. I conclude that, not only is this morally justified but also that data subjects have a moral obligation to contribute their data to such research, which would obviate the need for ethics committees to consider consent waivers. In justifying this argument, I look to the duty of easy rescue, distributive justice and draw analogies with vaccination ethics. (shrink)

International workshop ‘Modality in the language of children and adults‘ took place in Saint-Petersburg on April 13-15, 2016 and was organized by Institute for Linguistic Studies RAS and Saint Petersburg State University. A wide range of problems was discussed at the workshop, including questions of acquisition of modal meanings and means of their expression, as well as problems of modality in the languages of the world, also in a typological perspective. The international workshop hosted scientists from Austria, Finland, Germany, (...) Israel, Norway, South Korea, Sweden, as well as from different Russian cities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Richard H. Popkin 1923-2005Harry M. Bracken and Richard A. WatsonRichard H. Popkin, founding editor of the journal of the History of Philosophy, died on April 14, 2005. He was 81 years old and had continued his research and writing to the last moment before he entered the hospital on march 21st with extreme respiratory difficulties.Popkin's The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (1960) revolutionized the study and (...) understanding of early modern philosophy. Popkin entered the minds and world of thinkers from Erasmus to Descartes in a way few other scholars had done, and he showed how the development of philosophy and science was far from an easy series of steps from success to success. Instead, philosophers and scientists pursued a dozen lines from the scepticism of Sextus Empiricus through religious belief, atheism, numerology, astrology, alchemy, eschatology, magic, and millenarianism—a maelstrom of ideas out of which emerged the major figures and ideas of Modern philosophy and science. Dick once explained that actually he lived in the 17th century, and certainly he knew as many of those thinkers and their thoughts as did many people who actually lived at that time. Of course Popkin did not originate the notion of exploring the history of philosophy in the context of its times, but he made that approach central today. It led him not only through the Early Modern period, but also from medieval jewish philosophy to a critical analysis of the Kennedy assassination.Popkin received his PhD at Columbia University, and in his career he taught at the universities of Connecticut, Iowa, California (San Diego and Los Angeles), Washington University in St. Louis, and Harvey Mudd College. He served as the first editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and as president of JHP, Inc. For many years, and was active in its operation for over four decades, having attended the annual meeting of the Board of Directors a little over a month before he died. After retirement, he lived in close association with the Clark Library in Los Angeles. He was well known to scholars and librarians throughout the world. Whatever library he visited, he was likely to find some obscure or hidden document that would either clear up some mystery, or give rise to a new problem. His memory was extraordinary. During his final years when he was virtually blind, he would sift through his mind, send assistants off to look for something that had to be in this or that library and write papers in his head for later dictation. Besides his memory, indispensable throughout his lifetime he had Julie, his co-worker and wife of 60 years, without whom, the Popkin we knew could not have existed.These few paragraphs are meant to be neither an obituary nor an adequate memorial. We were Dick's first two PhDs, and we were barely five years his junior. He treated us from the beginning as colleagues and he became a lifelong friend. He changed our lives, as he did the lives of many other aspiring scholars. We miss him.Copyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

From the Amazon.com description: On 5–6 April 1991, there was a conference on Kant at Florida State University; this volume collects the (revised versions of the) papers presented on that occasion. The occasion was, give or take a few months, the 90th birthday of Professor (Emeritus) William H. Werkmeister. Werkie (as all his friends call him) himself gave the final paper at this conference. Hence the inclusion of a paper by Werkie in a volume honoring him. Although he is (...) primarily known for his expertise in the field of Kantian philosophy, Werkie’s published scholarship has spanned a wide range of subjects for more than fifty years: his first book, A Philosophy of Science, appeared in 1940. (shrink)

The idea that the world, not only of man but also of nature, was subject to a continuous process of change has taken strong root since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1859, Charles Darwin demonstrated that these changes were the result of immutable, eternal laws - although everything was subject to change, it was only in accordance with these laws. from the second half of the nineteenth century down to the First World War, this vision of change and (...) determination was interpreted in many different ways, both pessimistically and optimistically. It is striking that a fear of degeneration often went hand in hand with a belief in an upward evolutionary process and was not confined to any particular political spectrum. This volume, number XIV in the series, contains the papers presented at a workshop on the reception and interpretation of the theory of evolution, organised by the editors in April 2003. It covers the many, often irreconcilable faces, of the theory of evolution concerning not only the concrete substantive interpretation but also the many different fields of late nineteenth century thought by concentrating on cultural life in the broadest sense - political, social, scientific and artistic, both literature and the visual arts. This volume illustrates the versatility of the concept of evolution, and of degeneration as well, with the emphasis on the Netherlands. It not only presents the contradictions and many-sidedness of the post-Darwinian world, but also the continuity with the world before 1860. Moreover, it reveals one clear co-ordinating theme, namely that the theory of evolution was used as justification for many different ideologies and practices. (shrink)