Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses an increasing threat to patient care and population health and there is a growing need for novel therapies to tackle AMR. Bacteriophage (phage) therapy is a re-emerging antimicrobial strategy with the potential to transform how bacterial infections are treated in patients and populations. Currently, in the UK, phages can be used as unlicensed medicinal products on a ‘named-patient’ basis. We make an ethical case for why it is crucially important for the UK to invest in Good (...) Manufacturing Practice (GMP) for both ongoing unlicensed and future licensed phage therapy. Access to phages produced to GMP (GMP phages) will ensure effective patient care and better outcomes as well as health systems benefits. The UK also has the potential to become a global leader in the timely and cost-efficient manufacturing and supply of a therapy that meets internationally recognised standards. (shrink)

Vendler’s :161–173, 1979) puzzle about imagination is that the sentences ‘Imagine swimming in that water’ and ‘Imagine yourself swimming in that water’ seem at once semantically different and semantically the same. They seem semantically different, since the first requires you to imagine ’from the inside’, while the second allows you to imagine ’from the outside.’ They seem semantically the same, since despite superficial dissimilarity, there is good reason to think that they are syntactically and lexically identical. This paper sets out (...) the puzzle and offers a novel solution. Our proposal is that, just as there is knowledge-wh, there is also imagining-wh and that the inside/outside distinction Vendler points to is properly understood as a distinction within imagining-wh. In particular, to imagine swimming from the inside is to imagine what it feels like to swim, while to imagine swimming from the outside is to imagine what it looks like to swim. We show that this proposal is well grounded in both the semantics and syntax of ‘imagine.’ We also argue it makes better sense than its rivals of the data Vendler found so puzzling. (shrink)

Background While there are many guidelines on how to make ethical decisions at the end of life, there is little evidence regarding the quality of this sort of ethical guidelines. Objectives First, this study aims to demonstrate the conceptual transferability of the Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation (AGREE) instrument for the quality assessment of ethical guidelines. Second, it aims to illustrate the status quo of the quality of guidelines on end-of-life decision-making by using the AGREE instrument in a (...) first practice test. Method The transferability of the AGREE instrument on the quality assessment of ethical guidelines is demonstrated by conceptual analysis. Guidelines on end-of-life decisions in medicine are identified through a systematic search in MEDLINE (from June 1999 to June 2009). The quality of all included guidelines was assessed with a slightly modified AGREE instrument. Results Of 103 guidelines identified, 34 were included as relevant. The majority of the guidelines analysed in this study were assessed as qualitatively insufficient in five out of six AGREE quality domains. A few guidelines demonstrated, however, that a high level of quality in accordance with the AGREE requirements is possible. Conclusion This review concludes that the quality of many ethical guidelines should and can be improved in all quality domains specified by the AGREE instrument. Furthermore, conceptual analysis indicates that a slightly modified AGREE instrument is transferable to the comprehensive evaluation of the quality of ethical guidelines. Nevertheless, future research is needed to improve the assessment of the presentation of the guidelines' normative basis. (shrink)

Originally published in 1936, this book presents the ancient Greek text of the paraphrases and quotations of Zeno's philosophical arguments, together with a facing-page English translation and editorial commentary. Detailed notes are incorporated throughout and a bibliography is also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Zeno and ancient philosophy.

The subject of the present inquiry is the approach-to-the-truth research, which started with the publication of Sir Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. In the decade before this publication, Popper fiercely attacked the ideas of Rudolf Carnap about confirmation and induction; and ten years later, in the famous tenth chapter of Conjectures he introduced his own ideas about scientific progress and verisimilitude. Abhorring inductivism for its apprecia tion of logical weakness rather than strength, Popper tried to show that fallibilism could serve (...) the purpose of approach to the truth. To substantiate this idea he formalized the common sense intuition about preferences, that is: B is to be preferred to A if B has more advantages andfewer drawbacks than A. In 1974, however, David Millerand Pavel Tichy proved that Popper's formal explication could not be used to compare false theories. Subsequently, many researchers proposed alternatives or tried to improve Popper's original definition. (shrink)

A model of spontaneous collapse of fermionic degrees of freedom in a quantum field is presented which has the advantages that it explicitly maintains energy conservation and gives results in agreement with an existing numerical method for calculating quantum state evolution, namely the quantum trajectories model.

This article suggests that Chomsky’s notorious ‘London’ argument against semantics looks much more plausible that it is usually interpreted as being when seen in the light of something apparently remote from its concerns, viz., David Lewis’s distinction between natural and non-natural properties.

"Deductivism" is the thesis that all logic is deductive. Stove lays out the arguments for the existence of non-deductive logic.

Most contributions to the current debate about the consideration and application of empirical information in ethics scholarship deal with epistemological issues such as the role and the meaning of empirical research in ethical reasoning. Despite the increased publication of empirical data in ethics literature we still lack systematic analyses and conceptual frameworks that would help us to understand the rarely discussed methodological and practical problems in appraising empirical research. This paper demonstrates the need for critical appraisal and its crucial methodological (...) role in the application of empirical information in ethical reasoning. Furthermore, it systematically examines the criteria and the appropriate appraisal of empirical research and the associated challenges by highlighting current problems in empirical ethics literature. These problems reveal the following challenges for a critical and responsible consideration of empirical information in ethical reasoning: (i) training in the basic skills of locating and communicating empirical data from the relevant studies; (ii) training in basic knowledge of how to critically appraise empirical (qualitative and quantitative) research and its results; (iii) determination of quality standards for empirical ethics research; (iv) adequate reporting of the methodology and results of empirical ethics research in scientific journals. (shrink)

Part of the work for this paper was done during the tenure of a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for financial support provided by the National Science Foundation, Grant #BNS-8011494, and for the assistance of the staff of the Center. I also want to thank David Bloor, Stephen Downes, David Hull and Andy Pickering for offering good advice and criticism, some of which I have heeded.

In [Ono 1987] H. Ono put the question about axiomatizing the intermediate predicate logicLFin characterized by the class of all finite Kripke frames. It was established in [ Skvortsov 1988] thatLFin is not recursively axiomatizable. One can easily show that for any finite posetM, the predicate logic characterized byM is recursively axiomatizable, and its axiomatization can be constructed effectively fromM. Namely, the set of formulas belonging to this logic is recursively enumerable, since it is embeddable in the two-sorted classical predicate (...) calculusCPC 2. Thus the logicLFin is II 2 0 -arithmetical.Here we give a more explicit II 2 0 -description ofLFin: it is presented as the intersection of a denumerable sequence of finitely axiomatizable Kripke-complete logics. Namely, we give an axiomatization of the logicLB n P m + characterized by the class of all posets of the finite height m and the finite branching n. A finite axiomatization of the predicate logicLP m + characterized by the class of all posets of the height m is known from [Yokota 1989]. We prove thatLB n P m + =,B n being the propositional axiom of the branching n. (shrink)

Both the concept of a Darwinian tree of life (TOL) and the possibility of its accurate reconstruction have been much criticized. Criticisms mostly revolve around the extensive occurrence of lateral gene transfer (LGT), instances of uptake of complete organisms to become organelles (with the associated subsequent gene transfer to the nucleus), as well as the implications of more subtle aspects of the biological species concept. Here we argue that none of these criticisms are sufficient to abandon the valuable TOL concept (...) and the biological realities it captures. Especially important is the need to conceptually distinguish between organismal trees and gene trees, which necessitates incorporating insights of widely occurring LGT into modern evolutionary theory. We demonstrate that all criticisms, while based on important new findings, do not invalidate the TOL. After considering the implications of these new insights, we find that the contours of evolution are best represented by a TOL. (shrink)

The foundation of the mathematical theory of probabilities is still a controversial subject. There are schools of insufficient reasoning and of cogent reasoning, of a priori determination and of frequency determination, of subjective and of objective probability. Two main difficulties exist. The first is the definition of equally like events. The second difficulty is the relation between the laws of causal natural science and the laws of statistical regularity. Is it really necessary to add to the laws of mechanics one (...) or more independent “laws of large numbers” to explain the regularities in dice throwing? In all these cases different answers exist, and the existence of a mathematical theory of probabilities remains a kind of miracle, as esoteric to the further domain of natural science as the resurrection of the dead. (shrink)

Previous work has shown that spontaneous collapse of Fock states of identical fermions can be modeled as arising from random Rabi oscillations between two states. In this paper, a mathematical formalism is presented to incorporate this into many-body quantum field theory. This formalism allows for nonlocal collapse in the context of a relativistic system. While there is no absolute time-ordering of events, this approach allows for a coherent narrative of the collapse process.

The EU Kids Online project aims to enhance knowledge of the experiences and practices of European children and their parents regarding online risks and safety. A crucial research effort by the EU Kids Online network has been a survey in 25 European countries which targeted approximately 1,000 children per country. This article applies a cross-cultural values filter to the data that were gathered on parental mediation and the Internet in this survey. Our intention is to test whether Geert Hofstede’s cross-national (...) research results about national cultural values also apply to the EU Kids Online data on parental mediation. This implies studying collectivism versus individualism, low versus high power distance, masculinity versus femininity and low versus high uncertainty avoidance. We test whether differences between nations on these four dimensions correlate with differences between countries in parental mediation of the Internet and we test which European countries form clusters. (shrink)