As the gap between the need for and supply of human organs continues to widen, the aim of securing additional sources of these “gifts of the body” has become a seemingly overriding moral imperative, one that could—and some argue, should—override the widespread ban on organ markets. As a medical practice, organ transplantation entails the inherent risk that one human being, a donor, will become little more than a means to the end of healing for another human being and that (...) he or she will come to have a purely instrumental value. With the establishment of organ markets, not only will the harms of instrumentalization be a reality—the ends of medicine will be further compromised and confused. (shrink)

Etienne Gilson once remarked that if philosophers cannot agree about the nature or meaning of being, they will in all likelihood agree about very little else. This observation is certainly applicable to Professor Webster’s putative "dialogue" with Anglo-American philosophy on the problem of being, rational thought and natural theology. He contends that a genuinely fundamental interpretation of scientism, logicism or linguisticism necessitates a philosophical strategy based on unity as a transcendental which is accessible to logic. This initial confrontation leads (...) to another involving being as a radical transcendental. The author claims that whether we regard What is being? as the most primordial of questions, or as a meaningless phrase, or as a Scheinproblem, modern philosophical developments, antimetaphysical and metaphysical alike, provide the solution to that question in spite of themselves. He thinks that the various different forms of contemporary analytical philosophy represent a renewal of the radical Cartesian demand for univocity. Yet for him being is least of all univocal; rather it is analogous in a nonmathematical sense. His orientation is Thomistic and the book is basically an attempt "to show the functioning of being, univocity and analogy as they inevitably appear against the background of the dominant trends in Anglo-American philosophy." After outlining some general approaches to the respective problems of being, realism, and truth, he devotes almost two thirds of the volume to an analysis of the consequences of exclusive univocity and the logic of being. The remainder of the book turns to a philosophical consideration of the human being and some additional but rather peripheral matters. Webster writes with fervor on behalf of the inevitability of metaphysics, but his valuable insights are somewhat vitiated by the haphazard character of his overall presentation.—C. F. B. (shrink)

This technical and sophisticated book has a misleading title. In only 140 pages it has chapters entitled: Truth Functions, Sentence Logic, Model Theory, Predicate Logic, Recursive Functions, Formalized Arithmetic, Free-Variable Arithmetic, and Axiomatic Set Theory. Goodstein says little about, let alone studies, the historical development of any of these topics. The history consists of a few references to some of the individuals who have played a role in the development of the field; but not always to the major figures. (...) For instance, his chapter on model theory contains no discussion of the development of classical model theory. Only Herbrand is noted as a developer of model theory. However, even if these eight studies in mathematical logic do not tell much about the development of the topics, they still have considerable value. The first chapter on truth functions and the seventh on free-variable arithmetic are the most intriguing because they contain more of what is not usually presented in logic books. The first two chapters on sentential logic are not the standard textbook treatment. This really is a book for other working logicians and mathematicians. Quickly, Goodstein moves into treating truth functions for any number of truth values as functions in modulo arithmetic and investigates the topic of finding Sheffer functions, viz., a function from which all others for a given number of truth values can be obtained. In the second chapter, he is soon presenting Intuitionistic sentential logic and has some remarks about sentential logics between Intuitionistic logic and classical logic. He also presents sequent calculi. Since the first two chapters contain only 36 pages, this suggests that the book would be suitable as a text only for advanced and sophisticated students. (shrink)

Narrative analysis is well established as a means of examining the subjective experience of those who suffer chronic illness and cancer. In a study of perceptions of the outcomes of treatment of cancer of the colon, we have been struck by the consistency with which patients record three particular observations of their subjective experience: the immediate impact of the cancer diagnosis and a persisting identification as a cancer patient, regardless of the time since treatment and of the presence or absence (...) of persistent or recurrent disease; a state of variable alienation from social familiars, expressed as an inability to communicate the nature of the experience of the illness, its diagnosis and treatment; and a persistent sense of boundedness, an awareness of limits to space, empowerment and available time. These subjectivities were experienced in varying degree by all patients in our study. Individual responses to these experiences were complex and variable. The experiences are best understood under the rubric of a category we call “liminality”. We believe that all cancer patients enter and experience liminality as a process which begins with the first manifestations of their malignancy. An initial acute phase of liminality is marked by disorientation, a sense of loss and of loss of control, and a sense of uncertainty. An adaptive, enduring phase of suspended liminality supervenes, in which each patient constructs and reconstructs meaning for their experience by means of narrative. This phase persists, probably for the rest of the cancer patient’s life. The experience of liminality is firmly grounded in the changing and experiencing body that houses both the disease and the self. Insights into the nature of the experience can be gained from the Existentialist philosophers and from the history of attitudes to death. Understanding liminality helps us to understand what it is that patients with cancer seek from the system to which they turn for help. Its explication should therefore be important for those who provide health care, those who educate health care workers and those concerned to study and use outcomes as administrative and policy making instruments. (shrink)

High-dose chemotherapy and autologous stem cell transplantation is used to treat some advanced malignancies. It is a traumatic procedure, with a high complication rate and significant mortality. ASCT patients and their carers draw on many sources of information as they seek to understand the procedure and its consequences. Some seek information from beyond orthodox medicine. Alternative beliefs and practices may conflict with conventional understanding of the theory and practice of ASCT, and ‘contested understandings’ might interfere with patient adherence to the (...) strict and demanding protocols required for successful ASCT.The present study, conducted in Sydney, Australia, examines narrative-style interviews with 10 sequentially recruited ASCT patients and nine of their carers conducted at the time of transplant and three months later. Transcripts were read for instances of mention of alternative advice, and for instances of contested understanding of information relevant to the transplant.Patients and carer pairs expressed closely concordant views about alternative advice. Five pairs were consulting alternative practitioners. Contested understanding was expressed in four domains—understandings of the transplant itself and its underlying theory, of the relationship between the components of the ‘transplant’, of the nature and role of stem cells, and of beliefs about bodily function and life-style. Contested understandings of the transplant treatment were expressed as predominantly personal interpretations of orthodox informationPatients and carers seemed to recognise that alternative and conventional systems were discordant, yet they were able to separate the two, and adhere to each practice without prejudicing their medical treatment. A single case of late, post-transplant repudiation of Western medicine is discussed to emphasise some of the possible determinants of dissonance when it does occur. (shrink)

Discourse communities are groups of people who share common ideologies, and common ways of speaking about things. They can be sharply or loosely defined. We are each members of multiple discourse communities. Discourse can colonize the members of discourse communities, taking over domains of thought by means of ideology. The development of new discourse communities can serve positive ends, but discourse communities create risks as well. In our own work on the narratives of people with interests in health care, for (...) example, we find that patients speak of their illness experiences as victims of circumstance; policy makers construct adverse experiences and challenges as opportunities to be taken; health care workers speak from a mixed perspective, seeing themselves as both victims and opportunists depending on context. To be trapped within the discourse of a particular community is to put at risk the ability to communicate across discourses. Membership of a discourse community can impair the habit of critique, and deny opportunities for heteroglossic discourse. Privileging critique as a mode of discourse perhaps might define the ethical community, suggesting that ethical community may be an antidote to the constraining effects of conventional discourse community. (shrink)

Background: Expanded newborn screening generates incidental results, notably carrier results. Yet newborn screening programmes typically restrict parental choice regarding receipt of this non-health serving genetic information. Healthcare providers play a key role in educating families or caring for screened infants and have strong beliefs about the management of incidental results. Methods: To inform policy on disclosure of infant sickle cell disorder (SCD) carrier results, a mixed-methods study of healthcare providers was conducted in Ontario, Canada, to understand attitudes regarding result management (...) using a cross-sectional survey (N = 1615) and semistructured interviews (N = 42). Results: Agreement to reasons favouring disclosure of SCD carrier results was high (65.1%–92.7%) and to reasons opposing disclosure was low (4.1%–18.1%). Genetics professionals expressed less support for arguments favouring disclosure (35.3%–78.8%), and more agreement with arguments opposing disclosure (15.7%–51.9%). A slim majority of genetics professionals (51.9%) agreed that a reason to avoid disclosure was the importance of allowing the child to decide to receive results. Qualitatively, there was a perceived “duty” to disclose, that if the clinician possessed the information, the clinician could not withhold it. Discussion: While a majority of respondents perceived a duty to disclose the incidental results of newborn screening, the policy implications of these attitudes are not obvious. In particular, policy must balance descriptive ethics (ie, what providers believe) and normative ethics (ie, what duty-based principles oblige), address dissenting opinion and consider the relevance of moral principles grounded in clinical obligations for public health initiatives. (shrink)

Illness narratives from patients with colorectal cancer commonly record patterns of change in social relationships that follow the diagnosis and treatment of the condition. We believe that these changes are best explained as a process of facework, which reflects losses of face on the part of the patient, and which assists in the creation of new faces that convey new senses of identity. Facework is familiar in the work by E. Goffman (1955) and has been extensively reworked since his time. (...) There is considerable agreement that face is a pervasive and universal constituent of all social interaction, and that it expresses the subject's view of the way he or she would like to be considered by others in interactions. Ho's concept of multiple faces negotiated dynamically according to social context is particularly useful in understanding the purpose and techniques of facework (D. Y.-F. Ho, 1994). We propose a model of face that uses dignity as the face-expression of personal attributes and acquisitions, and honor as the face-expression of systemic capabilities and attainments. This model can be used to examine individual variations in response and adaptation to colon cancer and its treatment, and it provides a useful means of teaching health care workers about the experience of illness. (shrink)

The effect of uniform lighting on face identity processing is little understood, despite its potential influence on our ability to recognize faces. Here, we investigated how changes in uniform lighting level affected face identification performance during face memory tests. Observers were tasked with learning a series of faces, followed by a memory test where observers judged whether the faces presented were studied before or novel. Face stimuli were presented under uniform bright or dim illuminations, and lighting across the face (...) learning and the memory test sessions could be the same or different. This led to four experimental conditions: Bright/Dim ; Bright/Bright; Dim/Bright; and Dim/Dim. Our results revealed that incongruent lighting levels across sessions significantly reduced sensitivity to faces and introduced conservative biases compared to congruent lighting levels. No significant differences in performance were detected between the congruent lighting conditions and between the incongruent lighting conditions. Thus, incongruent lighting deteriorated performance in face identification. These findings implied that the level of uniform lighting should be considered in an illumination-specific face representation and potential applications such as eyewitness testimony. (shrink)

Avoiding whinges from various and potentially conflicting stakeholders is a major challenge for sustainable development and for the identification of sustainability scenarios or policies for biodiversity and ecosystem services. It turns out that independently complying with whinge thresholds and constraints of these stakeholders is not sufficient because dynamic ecological-economic interactions and uncertainties occur. Thus more demanding no whinge standards are needed. In this paper, we first argue that these new boundaries can be endogenously exhibited with the mathematical concepts of viability (...) kernel and viable controls. Second, it is shown how these no whinge kernels have components, such as harvesting of resources, that should remain within safe corridor while some other components, in particular biodiversity, have only lower conservation limits. Thus, using radar charts, we show how this no whinge kernels can take the shape of a tree that we name viability tree. These trees of viability capture the idea that the unbounded renewal potential of biodiversity combined with a bounded use of the different ecosystem services are crucial ingredients for the sustainability of socio-ecosystems and the design of no whinge policies reconciling the different stakeholders involved. (shrink)

During the last twelvemonth we have been engaged in finally preparing for press the first volume of our text of Livy in the Bibliotheca Classica Oxoniensis, and we now desire to submit beforehand to the judgement of scholars some of the chief alterations in the current text that we have been led to adopt. It will be seen that some proportion of them consist of little more than a defence of the MS tradition; and where we have proposed changes (...) of our own, we have, we believe, rigorously confined ourselves not merely to such suggestions as can be readily reconciled with the reading of at least one good manuscript, but to such as provide in each case a tenable explanation of the origin of all the variants in all the MSS that we have consulted. In several difficult places we have become persuaded that corruption has arisen through slight and accountable dislocations of order, and in a still larger number from the incorporation of marginal or interlinear glosses not differing in character from those which still appear in great numbers in all the MSS of the 9th to the 12th centuries, but which have not forced their way into the text. A typical example will be found in our note on V. 2. 8. (shrink)

Many people who have never read the works of Nietzsche possess some vague notion of what he taught. For them the philosophy of Nietzsche is represented by a few floating ideas—“Superman,” “Will to Power,” and even perhaps “blond beast.” Others again have learnt a little more about Nietzsche and perhaps read something of what he actually said; yet the net result is an impression of a passionate and destructive thinker, who launched his attacks on this side and on that, (...) without any regard for consistency. For them there can be no philosophy of Nietzsche: they know that he often wrote in the form of aphorism and they picture his thought in general as a series of detached utterances, many of which are mutually exclusive. It may then be of use to some, if we attempt to set forth the guiding inspiration and leading ideas of Nietzsche, for when these have been grasped, it will be seen that it is by no means absurd to speak of a philosophy of Nietzsche. It may well be impossible to reconcile all his utterances, at least so far as the words are concerned—though Nietzsche is of course not the only philosopher who betrays inconsistency in his thought—but it should be remembered that Nietzsche was not given to standing still: his thought developed. Moreover, he often spoke in an exaggerated form, so that some of the apparent inconsistencies may be ascribed to over-emphasis. In any case, even granting the presence of irreconcilable inconsistencies in his thought, Nietzsche's various theories not only may, but must, be seen as a whole, if they are seen in the light of his guiding ideas and inspiration. (shrink)

In this commentary we suggest that Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) parasite-stress theory of social behaviors and attitudes can be extended to mating behaviors and preferences. We discuss evidence from prior correlational and experimental studies that support this claim. We also reanalyze data from two of those studies using F&T's new parasite stress measures.

Stakeholder theory is widely recognized as a management theory, yet very little research has considered its implications for individual managerial decision-making. In the two studies reported here, we used stakeholder theory to examine managerial decisions about balancing stakeholder interests. Results of Study 1 suggest that indivisible resources and unequal levels of stakeholder saliency constrain managers’ efforts to balance stakeholder interests. Resource divisibility also influenced whether managers used a within-decision or an across-decision approach to balance stakeholder interests. In Study 2 (...) we examined instrumental and normative implications of these two approaches. We conclude by considering the contributions of this research. (shrink)

Moral case deliberation (MCD) is a form of clinical ethics support in which the ethicist as facilitator aims at supporting professionals with a structured moral inquiry into their moral issues from practice. Cases often affect clients, however, their inclusion in MCD is not common. Client participation often raises questions concerning conditions for equal collaboration and good dialogue. Despite these questions, there is little empirical research regarding client participation in clinical ethics support in general and in MCD in particular. This (...) article aims at describing the experiences and processes of two MCD groups with client participation in a mental healthcare institution. A responsive evaluation was conducted examining stakeholders’ issues concerning client participation. Findings demonstrate that participation initially creates uneasiness. As routine builds up and client participants meet certain criteria, both clients and professionals start thinking beyond ‘us-them’ distinctions, and become more equal partners in dialogue. Still, sentiments of distrust and feelings of not being safe may reoccur. Client participation in MCD thus requires continuous reflection and alertness on relational dynamics and the quality of and conditions for dialogue. Participation puts the essentials of MCD (i.e., dialogue) to the test. Yet, the methodology and features of MCD offer an appropriate platform to introduce client participation in healthcare institutions. (shrink)

Miles Little is an Australian surgeon, poet, and philosopher whose published work spans diverse topics in surgery, medicine, philosophy, and bioethics. In 1974 he co-authored a survey that included an analysis of interviews conducted with amputees. This was his first foray into qualitative research. Twenty years later he established a research centre at the University of Sydney that initiated a programme of qualitative research in cancer medicine. For twenty years after that, the centre acted as a hub for research (...) that applied qualitative methods from the social sciences to study the experiences of people who endure illness and onerous treatments and to reveal their evaluations of what medicine does to and for them. This essay explains why Little turned to qualitative research instead of pursuing two other research paradigms that were better established in the 1990s, namely, evidence-based medicine and quality-of-life research. It also notes a development in qualitative research methods that Little’s legacy helps to explain, one which can augment the symbolic power of socially marginalized individuals and groups. With reference to a current controversy in surgery, I argue that Little’s survey of amputees models a laudable response to criticism, and in this respect, it is still relevant today. (shrink)

Research on the division of cognitive labor has found that adults and children as young as age 5 are able to find appropriate experts for different causal systems. However, little work has explored how children and adults decide when to seek out expert knowledge in the first place. We propose that children and adults rely on “mechanism metadata,” information about mechanism information. We argue that mechanism metadata is relatively consistent across individuals exposed to similar amounts of mechanism information, and (...) it is applicable to a wide range of causal systems. In three experiments, we show that adults and children as young as 5 years of age have a consistent sense of the causal complexity of different causal systems, and that this sense of complexity is related to decisions about when to seek expert knowledge, but over development there is a shift in focus from procedural information to internal mechanism information. (shrink)

BackgroundECMO is a particularly scarce resource during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its allocation involves ethical considerations that may be different to usual times. There is limited pre-pandemic literature on the ethical factors that ECMO physicians consider during ECMO allocation. During the pandemic, there has been relatively little professional guidance specifically relating to ethics and ECMO allocation; although there has been active ethical debate about allocation of other critical care resources. We report the results of a small international exploratory survey of (...) ECMO clinicians’ views on different patient factors in ECMO decision-making prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We then outline current ethical decision procedures and recommendations for rationing life-sustaining treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic, and examine the extent to which current guidelines for ECMO allocation (and reported practice) adhere to these ethical guidelines and recommendations.MethodsAn online survey was performed with responses recorded between mid May and mid August 2020. Participants (n = 48) were sourced from the ECMOCard study group—an international group of experts (n = 120) taking part in a prospective international study of ECMO and intensive care for patients during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey compared the extent to which certain ethical factors involved in ECMO resource allocation were considered prior to and during the pandemic.ResultsWhen initiating ECMO during the pandemic, compared to usual times, participants reported giving more ethical weight to the benefit of ECMO to other patients not yet admitted as opposed to those already receiving ECMO, (p < 0.001). If a full unit were referred a good candidate for ECMO, participants were more likely during the pandemic to consider discontinuing ECMO from a current patient with low chance of survival (53% during pandemic vs. 33% prior p = 0.002). If the clinical team recommends that ECMO should cease, but family do not agree, the majority of participants indicated that they would continue treatment, both in usual circumstances (67%) and during the pandemic (56%).ConclusionsWe found differences during the COVID-19 pandemic in prioritisation of several ethical factors in the context of ECMO allocation. The ethical principles prioritised by survey participants were largely consistent with ECMO allocation guidelines, current ethical decision procedures and recommendations for allocation of life-sustaining treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all (...) sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand. (shrink)

Patients fit with cochlear implants commonly indicate at the time of device fitting and for some time after, that the speech signal sounds abnormal. A high pitch or timbre is one component of the abnormal percept. In this project, our aim was to determine whether a number of years of CI use reduced perceived upshifts in frequency spectrum and/or voice fundamental frequency. The participants were five individuals who were deaf in one ear and who had normal hearing in the other (...) ear. The deafened ears had been implanted with a 18.5 mm electrode array which resulted in signal input frequencies being directed to locations in the spiral ganglion that were between one and two octaves higher than the input frequencies. The patients judged the similarity of a clean signal presented to their implanted ear and candidate, implant-like, signals presented to their normal-hearing ear. Matches to implant sound quality were obtained, on average, at 8 months after device activation and at 35 months after activation. At Time 1, the matches to CI sound quality were characterized, most generally, by upshifts in the frequency spectrum and in voice pitch. At Time 2, for four of the five patients, frequency spectrum values remained elevated. For all five patients F0 values remained elevated. Overall, the data offer little support for the proposition that, for patients fit with shorter electrode arrays, cortical plasticity nudges the cortical representation of the CI voice toward more normal, or less upshifted, frequency values between 8 and 35 months after device activation. Cortical plasticity may be limited when there are large differences between frequencies in the input signal and the locations in the SG stimulated by those frequencies. (shrink)

In the book The Insect Societies, Wilson proposed categories of sociality that were presented as a landmark unification of terminology in the study of social behavior. Since then, many new behavioral patterns have been described, but they could not be fitted into any of the available categories, undermining the consensus around that well-established classification. New general classifications tried to circumvent the limitations shown by Wilson’s categorization, but with little success. Among the proposals, some maintain the form of discrete categorization, (...) while others advance a quantitative model to characterize sociality. These proposals have failed to clarify the use of the categories of sociality, and none of them has become widely accepted or overcome the problems faced by the classification of social behaviors. Here we explore whether an analysis of types of concepts proposed by Carnap can help to move forward in this discussion. His distinction between qualitative concepts and quantitative concepts is used here as an epistemological basis for analyzing the development of the proposed conceptual changes and classifications of sociality. Recently, social behavior has come to be considered a complex phenomenon, and quantitative concepts could bring a lot of informative data to understanding its development and perhaps its evolution. We conclude that a new metric of sociality should be built, using characteristics that are nonarbitrary, evolutionarily meaningful, and amenable to comparing all social animals. Finally, we advocate for an integrative view of social complexity based on individuals’ interactions as a useful metric of sociality. This approach still needs further development. (shrink)

Obtaining prospective written consent from women to participate in trials when they are experiencing an obstetric emergency is challenging. Alternative consent pathways, such as gaining verbal consent at enrolment followed, later, by obtaining written consent, have been advocated by some clinicians and bioethicists but have received little empirical attention. We explored women’s and staff views about the consent procedures used during the internal pilot of a trial, where the protocol permitted staff to gain verbal consent at recruitment. Interviews with (...) staff and participating women. Data were analysed thematically and interviews were cross-compared to identify differences and similarities in participants’ views about the consent procedures used. Women and some staff highlighted benefits to obtaining verbal consent at trial enrolment, including expediting recruitment and reducing the burden on those left exhausted by their births. However, most staff with direct responsibility for taking consent expressed extreme reluctance to proceed with enrolment until they had obtained written consent, despite being comfortable using verbal procedures in their clinical practice. To account for this resistance, staff drew a strong distinction between research and clinical care and suggested that a higher level of consent was needed when recruiting into trials. In doing so, staff emphasised the need to engage women in reflexive decision-making and highlighted the role that completing the consent form could play in enabling and evidencing this process. While most staff cited their ethical responsibilities to women, they also voiced concerns that the absence of a signed consent form at recruitment could expose them to greater risk of litigation were an individual to experience a complication during the trial. Inexperience of recruiting into peripartum trials and limited availability of staff trained to take consent also reinforced preferences for obtaining written consent at recruitment. While alternative consent pathways have an important role to play in advancing emergency medicine research, and may be appreciated by potential recruits, they may give rise to unintended ethical and logistical challenges for staff. Staff would benefit from training and support to increase their confidence and willingness to recruit into trials using alternative consent pathways. This qualitative research was undertaken as part of the GOT-IT Trial. Date of registration 26/03/2014. (shrink)

In the beginning was the word, or grunt, or groan, or signal of some sort. This, however, hardly qualifies as an information revolution, at least in any standard technological sense. Nature is replete with meaningful signs, and we must imagine that our early ancestors noticed natural patterns that helped to determine when to sow and when to reap, which animal tracks to follow, what to eat, and so forth. Spoken words at first must have been meaningful in some similar sense. (...) But in time the word became flesh (corpus) and dwelt among us, as "inscription" (literally, to put into writing) inaugurated the dawn of human history. This did not happen instantly. One place to enter the story is with clay tokens to represent trade transactions that in time became accounting tablets and, then, the world's first literature (Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta, The Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.) and codes of law (The Codes of Ur-Nammu, Lipit-Ishtar, Hammurabi, and so forth.) This event happened around the north shore of the Persian Gulf sometime in the 4th millennium BCE and was enshrouded in mystery as the role of the scribe trained in the art of inscribing and deciphering signs belonged to the priest (Deibert 1997). With the sanction of religion, writing gave birth to "civility" (literally, life in the city) and defined the line between "history" and "pre-history," the latter being a term designating everything that happened before. There is little doubt that the invention of writing was significant and that it deserves recognition as the first revolution in the history of information. Life as we live it today would have been impossible otherwise. Innovations in writing technologies happened with significant effects, but at various points in the history of information, changes in technology were so dramatic that they reshaped the course of human history in radical ways. The revolution in printing is well-studied; the invention of the printing press and movable type (c.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comme Elle Respire:Memory of Breath, Breath of MemoryFrédérique Berthet (bio)Translated by David F. Bell (bio)La poésie est un système de respiration, c'est fait pour mieux respirer.[Poetry is a respiration system, it's made for breathing better.]—Erri De Luca- Stop!- What?- I can hear you breathing!...- Stop!- Breathing?- Yes!—Paul Thomas AndersonLittle paper-fish cutouts have been placed on the ground, on the carpet.We're in the reassuring '70s stylishness of a doctor's office. (...) The carpet is soft and glistens like in interior decoration magazines, it's with it, in. We couldn't care less about what Dyson vacuum cleaners and "purifiers" boast they can eliminate several decades later: acarids, those microscopic domestic arthropods, human parasites (notably), and airborne vectors of infectious disease (colds, coughs, respiratory distress). No, in the spring of 1975, innocently and self-satisfyingly, the urbane doctor flaunts the opulent carpet with curly pile in his luxury apartment with its state-of-the-art waiting room.In this grand interior of a medical office, a man in a white coat plies his important trade. For example, that day a little girl is re-learning how to breathe. One might think that exhaling and inhaling is learned for life—je t'aime comme je respire, elle parle comme elle respire, il ment comme il respire1—from the very first cry at birth. But in fact, sometimes in life breathing gets stuck between the nasal cavity and the bronchial tubes, between the respiratory tract and the lungs. Progressively, imperceptibly, the organism is short of air, a malicious infection spreads and impairs [End Page 92] alveolar diffusion to the point of respiratory exhaustion: Is it serious, doctor? We must act quickly, very quickly. How to liquify what stopped up the system one day to the point of blocking it—the doctors know what to do.This doctor undertook long, arduous and learned studies. He knows functionally how a living being breathes, how a child lives organically. He can also re-teach the little girl what she no longer knows how to do: inhale, exhale using the full volume of the thoracic cage, regulating the ventilatory flow, solidifying the invisible membranes. In the child's family, everyone knows (and knows how to do) important things, but no one undertook extensive studies, much less studies of the aerial exchanges in the human body. This special knowledge possessed by the doctor (unless special means something else unspoken that would explain why this specific doctor was chosen rather than any other) surrounds him with a padding of respect that creates (and the little girl feels this) a sort of protective continuum between him and the walls within which he sees her, where he practices his kind of calm and slow urbane medicine. It's far from the formidable hospital she has just left, with its spherical apparatus next to the bed aspirating the red and yellow pleural liquid, the "treatment room" where the surgeon, the "butcher" as the nurses call him among themselves, manipulated the drain without anesthesia, with no regard for the child's suffering. The doctor, and his place in the elevated tower, even though they are not to be confused, make for a cozy reception space in which one is comfortable, even in passing.This doctor—who is, in truth, a massage-physiotherapist—is located in a designer high-rise building with a façade decorated by white, pointed features that manifest a will toward an architectural act. On the ground floor, the entrance hall is finished in dark-veined, clear brown marble, and the entry threshold between the exterior and interior is marked by large transparent glass panes that must be manipulated with care. The entrance hall has an intimidating sonority and a useless cold nudity from which one escapes in an elevator where one is surrounded by mirrors and gold buttons and in which one speeds upward silently toward floors, clouds.The designer high-rise is located at the outskirts, the outskirts of a city of recent Olympic stature, where several years earlier Olympic athletes were welcomed and trained to increase their respiratory capacity and... (shrink)

English summary: Schelling's Die Weltalter was frequently announced as ready for publication, but little of the book was ever written. Schelling planned Die Weltalter as a volume in three parts, describing the past, present, and future of the world; however, he began only the first part, rewriting it several times and at last keeping it unpublished. The other two parts were left only in planning. French text.French description: « Commencé seulement les Ages du monde ». Cette note que Schelling (...) consigne dans son Tagebuch à la date du 27 décembre 1810 donne le coup d'envoi d'un des projets les plus grandioses qu'un philosophe se soit proposé, retracer sur la base de concepts philosophiques les étapes de la vie divine et de la création. S'il est vrai, comme le disait Novalis, que « vouloir écrire une Bible est un penchant à la folie que tout homme doit avoir pour être complet », cette grande fresque cosmique et théologique représente la tentative la plus magistrale qu'ait menée l'idéalisme allemand pour rendre compte de la totalité de la manifestation divine et en proposer une présentation effective et complète. Or, dans la dernière version de l'ouvrage, celle-là même que Schelling fit introduire dans ses Sammtliche Werke et dont nous donnons ici une nouvelle traduction dans la continuité de celle des brouillons de 1811 et 1813, le récit et la construction spéculative cherchent encore à atteindre un point d'équilibre. Un double effort pour implanter la succession au coeur même de l'Absolu tout en équilibrant en Dieu les rapports de l'idéal et du réel prépare l'avènement d'une philosophie historique sans ue l'on débouche jamais tout à fait sur une hétérogénéité radicale de l'être et du penser. Ainsi, à travers cette description du passé le plus archaïque, Schelling met pour la première fois effectivement la philosophie en possession de ce qu'elle recherche depuis toujours : « la science, c'est-à-dire l'histoire ». (shrink)

The October 2016 publication of the 2015 convegno on Peter of John Olivi begins with a fine survey of Provence and Languedoc in Olivi's time. J. Chiffoleau, with C. Lenoble, supplies the reader with much detail and some summary, along with abundant reference, on Olivi's home turf. In the come and go of life religious and lay, Olivi saw to critical support for business while trying to stabilize Franciscan life. He did very well by both. Chiffoleau finishes his pages on (...) Olivi's days by suggesting that Olivi had better to do around Narbonne than in Paris.Tiziana Suarez-Nani offers thoughts and examples of Peter Olivi's "spiritual philosophy". That he offers Aristotle little esteem we know; that Olivi... (shrink)

In his note [5] Hausner states a simple combinatorial principle, namely: $$(H)\left\{ {\begin{array}{*{20}c} {if f is a function a non - empty finite set \sigma into itself, p a} \\ {prime, f^p = i_\sigma and \sigma _0 the set of fixed points of f, then } \\ {\left| \sigma \right| \equiv \left| {\sigma _0 } \right|(mod p).} \\\end{array}} \right.$$ .He then shows how this principle can be used to prove:Fermat's little theorem,Cauchy's theorem for finite groups,Lucas' theorem for binomial numbers.Letε=(0,1, (...) ...),ℱ 1−1 the family of all one-to-one functions from a subset ofε intoε andℳ 1−1 the family of all p.r. (i.e., partial recursive) one-to-one functions from a subset ofε intoε. A subsetα of ε is finite, ifα is not equivalent to a proper subset under a function inℱ 1−1. The setα is calledisolated, if it is not equivalent to a proper subset under a function inℳ 1−1. An isolated set can also be defined as a subset ofε which has no infinite r.e. (i.e., recursively enumerable) subset. While every finite set is isolated, there are $c = 2^{\aleph _0 }$ infinite sets which are isolated; these sets are calledimmune. It is the purpose of this paper to generalize (H) to a principle (H*) for isolated sets and to show how (H*) can be used to prove generalizations of Fermat's little theorem and Cauchy's theorem for finite groups. We have been unable to generalize Lucas' theorem in a similar manner. (shrink)

Epistemological foundationalism can be generally characterized as the thesis that in order for there to be any genuine knowledge at all, there must be some self-authenticating instances of knowledge which epistemically ground the whole edifice. This position can be seen to involve three distinct claims: there are self-authenticating, noninferential pieces of knowledge; these privileged instances can be infallibly recognized as such so as to be able to function in grounding other knowledge claims; and without some such instances functioning in this (...) way, knowledge would have no foundation and skepticism would ensue. Although adherents of this ideal run the gamut from Aristotle to Husserl, it is usually identified with the epistemological problematic introduced by Descartes and Locke. The particular formulations of this general ideal differ to the extent that the self-authenticating instances are recognized as being sense-data, phenomenological essences, or intellectual principles. (shrink)

Corporate governance is increasingly becoming an issue of global concern, not least because we are more and more living in a corporate world that transcends international boundaries. The main purpose and motivation of this study is to determine how the international community should motivate businesses in fostering exemplary corporate governance, therefore eliminating obstacles to ethically exemplary behavior. The empirical approach utilized here has been applied to 161 businesses, both listed and over-the-counter (OTC) companies, with the results indicating that ethical considerations, (...) corporate governance and organizational performance are inextricably linked and, to an extent, demonstrably proportional. This study also indicates a major finding that family management is a significant mediating variable of the ethical considerations of corporate governance and organizational performance. Finally, this study has developed an operational model of ethical considerations of corporate governance as a consultancy aid for businesses that wish to implement and/or boost their performance in respect to corporate governance. (shrink)

One hopes from the philosophy of education a general theory of the curriculum together with a deductively related batch of specific theories for designing each portion of a curriculum. This anthology of nineteen reprints sheds little light on the general problem, but it does gather under one roof a handy collection of articles relevant to an understanding of some of the problems of specific curriculum decision-making. The authors are concerned with the intellectual content of the curriculum, which they reasonably (...) divide into the general disciplines of the formal sciences, the physical and natural sciences, history and the social sciences, literature and the arts, and philosophy. Within each discipline we get a string of philosophical discussions of the structure and methodology of that discipline. Thus, within one volume we have a bit of the philosophy of logic and mathematics--e.g., a paper on necessary truth, a paper on foundations; a bit of the philosophy of science--e.g., Ernest Nagel's "Teleological Explanation and Teleological Systems"; a bit of aesthetics; a bit of metaphilosophy--e.g., Friedrich Waismann's "How I See Philosophy"; and so on. But this by itself can only give us a philosophy of the intellectual disciplines. It cannot by itself provide us with a philosophy of the curriculum. The authors do provide us with two papers on the curriculum, including a very stimulating piece by G. C. Fields--"The Teaching of Philosophy." One could hope for more. Sadly there are few such papers to choose from.--J. F. (shrink)