It is well known that the validity of Choice Principles is problematic in non-standard Set Theories which do not abide by the Limitation of Size Principle. In this paper we discuss the consistency of various Choice Principles with respect to the Generalized Positive Comprehension Principle . The Principle GPC allows to take as sets those classes which can be specified by Generalized Positive Formulae, e.g. the universe. In particular we give a complete characterization of which choice principles hold in Hyperuniverses. (...) Hyperuniverses are structures which arose independently in Non-well-founded Set Theory and in Mathematical Semantics of Concurrent Programming Languages and are hitherto the only existing models of GPC. Hyperuniverses are naturally endowed with a κ-compact uniform κ-topology and are uniformly isomorphic to their exponential space, i.e. the space of their closed subsets endowed with the Exponential Uniformity. (shrink)

In 404 Sparta stood supreme, militarily and politically master of Greece, in concord with Persia. By 362, the year at which Xenophon terminated his history on the sad note of ‘even greater confusion and uncertainty’, she was eclipsed militarily, never to win a great battle again; and so far from being master even of the Peloponnese that she would spend the rest of time struggling to recover her own ancestral domain of Messenia, no longer a world power, merely a local (...) wrangler. The reasons for all this which are to seek are of absorbing interest and prime importance for the history of Greece, but it is hard to resist the temptation to connect the change with the policies of Agesilaus whose reign virtually coincided with the period in question. He was king for forty-one years and over thirty of them well before the battle of Leuctra and he had influence in the state unequalled as far as we can tell by any other king. (shrink)

After briefly reviewing the standard set-theoretic resolutions of the Burali-Forti paradox, we examine how the paradox arises in set theory formalized with plural quantifiers. A significant choice emerges between the desirable unrestricted availability of ordinals to represent well-orderings and the sensibility of attempting to refer to ‘absolutely all ordinals’ or ‘absolutely all well-orderings’. This choice is obscured by standard set theories, which rely on type distinctions which are obliterated in the setting with plurals. Zermelo's attempt ( 1930 ) to (...) secure ordinal representability of arbitrary well-orderings through relativization of quantification to set-theoretic models is reviewed and found wanting. The natural modal-structural recasting provides, it is claimed, a good repair. (shrink)

These are the proceedings of the Workshop on Quantum Logic held in Erice (Sicily), December 2 - 9, 1979, at the Ettore Hajorana Centre for Scientific Culture. A conference of this sort was originally proposed by Giuliano Toraldo di Francia, who suggested the idea to Antonino Zichichi, and thus laid the foundation for the Workshop. To both of them we express our appreciation and thanks, also on behalf of the other participants, for having made this conference possible. There were approximately (...) fifty participants; their names and institutions are listed in the text. Quantum logic, which has now a history of some forty or more years, has seen remarkable growth during the sixties and seventies. The papers in the present volume presuppose, by and large, some acquaintance with the elements of the subject. These may be found in the well-known books by J.H. Jauch (Foundations of Quantum Hechanics; Reading, 1968), V.S. Varadarajan (Geometry of Quantum Theory: Princeton, 1968), and C. Piron (Foundations of Quantum Theory; New York, 1976). The initial program for the conference listed about twenty-five invited papers. But in the context of a very active and qualified attendance, other contributions were offered. This volume contains all of them. The program listed six main topics: I. Classification or different areas of quantum logic, and open problems. II. Comparison and unification of different approaches to quantum theories; problems of interpretation. III. Formal quantum logic; axiomatics. IV. Hodal interpretations of quantum logic. v vi FOREWORD V. Quantum set theory. (shrink)

Time was when the proofs of the existence of God formed an essential part of any self-respecting system of Philosophy. But for many years now this has ceased to be the case. It may be due to the gradual increase of the influence of Kant that the idea seems to have become accepted, tacitly, in the main, but none the less very widely, that proof or disproof of a belief such as this was hardly a fit subject for philosophical discussion (...) at all. At any rate, it is noteworthy how rarely the question is faced directly in the philosophical discussions of the last forty years or so. What we have had, much more frequently, is discussion about how the God of religion might be thought of and what sort of place He might have in reality as conceived in this or that philosophical system. And certainly discussions on these lines have done much to clarify our conception of the Divine, even if they have sometimes seemed to explain it only by explaining it away altogether, or at any rate to present us with the idea of something which, whatever it is, is certainly not the God of any religion. But of recent years I seem to detect a growing readiness to face the question as squarely as the old theologians, who propounded the first proofs of God's existence, did. (shrink)

Objectives—To study the value of taking an ethics history as a means of assessing patients' preferences for decision making and for their relatives' involvement.Design—Questionnaire administered by six junior doctors to 56 mentally competent patients, admitted into general and geriatric medical beds.Setting—A large district general hospital in the United Kingdom.Main measures—To establish whether patients were adequately informed about their illness and whether they minded the information being communicated to their relatives. To establish their preference regarding truthful disclosure and participation in decision (...) making with risk attached. To establish whether they wished to be involved in CPR decision making, and if not, who should make the decision. To establish whether they knew of living wills and whether they had any advance directives.Results—Twenty-four were inadequately informed of their illness.Forty-six said they would want to know were something serious to be found. Twenty-eight wanted to make their own decision if requiring risky treatment and 11 wanted family members involved. Thirty-one wanted to make a cardiopulmonary resuscitation decision and five of these decisions differed from those made by the doctors. Twenty-five preferred the doctors to decide. Eleven of the patients had heard of living wills but only one had executed such a will. Seven of the patients wished to provide advance directives. Three did not find the history taking helpful but none were discomforted.Conclusion—Taking an ethics history is a simple means of obtaining useful information about patients' preferences. (shrink)

There are some who would question the need to republish papers that have already appeared elsewhere. Walter Pauel once said that scholars should think in terms of books rather than research papers since the latter become lost in the literature. When he told me this year ago I was not entirely convinced. Surely the young scholar must publish papers to secure his academic position. In addition, throughout his career he attends conferences many of which will require the publication of his (...) papers in the resultant conference volumes. By their very nature such papers often discuss topics in greater detail than that scholar's subsequent books. In this case also the papers tend to become "lost" even when there exit extensive guides to the literature such as the Critical Bibliography published annually in Isis for historians of science. Many of my own papers over the past forty-five years have indeed appeared in such conference volumes as in journals. (shrink)

Georg Cantor's absolute infinity, the paradoxical Burali-Forti class Ω of all ordinals, is a monstrous non-entity for which being called a "class" is an undeserved dignity. This must be the ultimate vexation for mathematical philosophers who hold on to some residual sense of realism in set theory. By careful use of Ω, we can rescue Georg Cantor's 1899 "proof" sketch of the Well-Ordering Theorem––being generous, considering his declining health. We take the contrapositive of Cantor's suggestion and add Zermelo's choice (...) function. This results in a concise and uncomplicated proof of the Well-Ordering Theorem. (shrink)

To anyone who has been engaged in teaching and studying Plato, particularly the Republic , for the last thirty or forty years, one fact must stand out with special prominence. That is the remarkable increase during that period of the direct applicability of Plato's discussions to our own problems. Thirty-five years ago the concrete situations which Plato had in mind in these discussions, the general assumptions at the back of them, the possibilities for good or evil that he envisaged, would (...) all seem to the student of that time remote and almost unreal, and it required a considerable exercise of the imagination to discover that there were certain underlying ideas in them which had application to our own time. If we wanted contemporary illustrations of the rise of a tyrant we had to turn to some of the most backward States in South America. The idea of a completely planned society existed only in the minds of the writers of Utopias, to whom we were accustomed, sometimes, to say rather patronizingly that they had forgotten that constitutions, grow and are not made. We could study the criticisms of democracy as an intellectual exercise without any feeling that they might be one day applied in practice. How different is the situation now! Many of the possibilities are as near for us as they were to Plato. Many of the general ideas of Plato's day are as readily assumed by us as they were by him. Indeed the difficulty now is greater in trying to gain a sympathetic hearing for the ideas of thirty or forty years ago than for the ideas of the fourth century b.c. (shrink)

Time was when the proofs of the existence of God formed an essential part of any self-respecting system of Philosophy. But for many years now this has ceased to be the case. It may be due to the gradual increase of the influence of Kant that the idea seems to have become accepted, tacitly, in the main, but none the less very widely, that proof or disproof of a belief such as this was hardly a fit subject for philosophical discussion (...) at all. At any rate, it is noteworthy how rarely the question is faced directly in the philosophical discussions of the last forty years or so. What we have had, much more frequently, is discussion about how the God of religion might be thought of and what sort of place He might have in reality as conceived in this or that philosophical system. And certainly discussions on these lines have done much to clarify our conception of the Divine, even if they have sometimes seemed to explain it only by explaining it away altogether, or at any rate to present us with the idea of something which, whatever it is, is certainly not the God of any religion. But of recent years I seem to detect a growing readiness to face the question as squarely as the old theologians, whopropounded the first proofs of God's existence, did. (shrink)

Abstract.I join others who have expressed profound gratitude for the life and thought of Arthur Peacocke. I recall some high points in my interaction with him during a period of forty years as an intellectual companion and personal friend. Some similarities in our thinking about evolution, emergence, top‐down causality, and continuing creation are indicated. Four points of difference are then discussed: (1) Emergent monism or two‐aspect process events? (2) Panentheism or process theism? (3) Creation ex nihilo and/or continuing creation? (4) (...) Voluntary or necessary limitation of God's power? Even when we differed I have benefited immensely from our ongoing interaction. (shrink)

OBJECTIVES: To measure the preference regarding disclosure of a serious diagnosis, and its determinants, of the Lebanese public. DESIGN AND SETTING: Non-random sample survey of 400 persons interviewed in health care facilities in Beirut in 1995. RESULTS: Forty-two per cent of respondents generally preferred truth not to be disclosed directly to patients. Preference for disclosure was associated with younger age, better education and tendency to rapport-building with physicians. There were no meaningful associations between place of residence (urban/rural), level of religious (...) practice, or religious affiliation, and preference for disclosure. CONCLUSIONS: Under one plausible interpretation, this survey suggests that the expectation for concealment will decrease as the advantage of knowledge in better coping with disease is understood by an increasingly better educated public, and that the Lebanese public will increasingly come to expect direct and full disclosure of serious diagnoses. (shrink)

Forty years have now passed since the periodical Voprosy filosofii [Problems of Philosophy] was born. Its first issue was sent to the press on the last day of July 1947. By August, readers already had in their hands this issue of the new philosophical journal, the lack of which had been quite keenly felt throughout the country. The first issue took up 31.5 printer's sheets and marked the beginning of the production of the second Marxist philosophical periodical in the history (...) of our country. Earlier, between 1922 and 1943, the philosophical journal Pod znamenem marksizma [Under the Banner of Marxism] was published in the Soviet Union; under the difficult conditions of the war this journal in a sense shut itself down unnoticed: no one abolished it. (shrink)

To assess the effectiveness of Visual Thinking Strategies in medical education curricula, a pretest–posttest experimental study design was used to evaluate the impact of participating in VTS workshops on first-year medical students. A total of forty-one intervention and sixty comparative students completed the study which included the analysis of clinical images followed by a measurement of word count, length of time analyzing images, and quality of written observations of clinical images. VTS training increased the total number of words used to (...) describe clinical images, the time spent analyzing the images, and the number of clinically relevant observations. (shrink)

Originally conceived as a forty-page conclusion to Hacker’s twenty years of work on the monumental four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, this book “rapidly assumed a life of its own”. A major contribution to the history of analytic philosophy, this substantial volume delivers even more than the title promises. The eight chapters are best approached as a six-chapter book, itself some 220 pages long, on Wittgenstein’s contribution to twentieth-century philosophy, followed by a two-chapter, 120-page epilogue about how and why (...) his influence has waned. The first six chapters provide an encyclopedic summary of the fruits of Hacker’s research on Wittgenstein’s writing, an immensely learned account of British philosophy from the turn of the century to the 1970s, and a detailed account of Wittgenstein’s reception by Oxford, Cambridge, and the Vienna Circle. The book’s closing chapters, “Post-positivism in the United States and Quine’s Apostasy” and “The Decline of Analytic Philosophy,” polemically argue that Quine’s philosophy, and the post-Quinean naturalism prevalent in Anglo-American philosophy today, amount to such a decisive break with the analytic tradition, as Hacker conceives of it, that they should not be counted as “analytic.”. (shrink)

More than thirty-five years ago, a longitudinal study was established to research the health and well-being of older people living in an English city. Self and Meaning in the Lives of Older People provides a unique set of portraits of forty members of this group who were interviewed in depth from their later seventies onwards. Focusing on sense of self-esteem and, especially, of continued meaning in life following the loss of a spouse and onset of frailty, this book sensitively illustrates (...) these persons' efforts to maintain independence, to continue to have a sense of belonging and to contribute to the lives of others. It examines both the psychological and the social resources needed to flourish in later life and draws attention to this generation's ability to benefit from strong family support and from belonging to a faith community. In conclusion, it questions whether future generations will be as resilient. (shrink)

Physicians, registered nurses (RNs) and enrolled nurses (ENs) engaged in geriatric (n = 49) and surgical (n = 59) care at a large hospital in Sweden gave 180 accounts of morally difficult care episodes. In total, the ENs (n = 40) gave 78, the RNs (n = 38) 55 and the physicians (n = 30) 47 accounts; there were 83 from geriatric care and 97 from surgical care. Forty-nine participants were male, and 59 were female; there were no differences in (...) gender in the form and content of the moral reasoning disclosed in either morally difficult care episodes or in the complete interviews when coded as mainly narrative or propositional, or as showing a care or a justice orientation. The ENs showed a care orientation, while RNs and physicians, to an equal degree, showed both a justice and a care orientation. The ENs also used narrative reasoning more often than RNs and physicians. No differences were seen between the two health care specialties. (shrink)

The problems of perception feature centrally in work within what we now think of as different traditions of philosophy in the early part of the twentieth century, most notably in the sense-datum theories of early analytic philosophy together with the vigorous responses to them over the next forty years, but equally in the discussions of pre-reflective consciousness of the world characteristic of German and French phenomenologists. In the English-speaking world one might mark the beginning of the period with Russell’s The (...) Problems of Philosophy (Russell 1912) and its nemesis in Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia (Austin 1962 – published posthumously, but given originally as lectures at the end of our period in 1947). On the continent, a corresponding route takes us from Husserl’s Logical Investigations (Husserl 1900/1) to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.. (shrink)

This work is, in large part, a series of refutations; it is also the author's Ph.D. thesis. First to be refuted is Russell's vicious circle principle as a general remedy for the solution of the paradoxes. The author rejects the classification of paradoxes into syntactic and semantic, since in his view there are no purely syntactic paradoxes. The distinction in logic between the uninterpreted syntactical aspect of a system and the system when given a determinate interpretation is held to be (...) untenable. Tarski's distinction between object-language and meta-language and his concept of semantically closed language are considered irrelevant for the solution of the Liar paradox. The author claims that the usual versions of the Liar paradox have the same structure as the Barber paradox, viz., [S ↔ ~S]. The author solves the Liar paradox by pointing out that it does not have a proper reference. Cantor's diagonal argument for the indenumerability [[sic]] of the real numbers is labeled as unsatisfactory. Since the diagonal number is dependent upon the real numbers in the constructed list, the author claims that this makes the diagonal number to be of a different nature and status than the real numbers in the list; thus we have what the author calls the dependence fallacy. The author also refuses to accept Cantor's nested interval proof of the indenumerability [[sic]] of the real numbers. Within the proof, two infinite sequences are constructed, each of which converges to a limit. Because the proof does not give a "definite rule of convergence," the author is not satisfied that the infinite sequences converge. Also rejected is Cantor's theorem. Other paradoxes analyzed are the Berry, Richard, heterological, "Richardian", Russell, Cantor, and Burali-Forti paradoxes.--T. G. N. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:If the Buddha Is So Great, Why Are These People Christians?Grace G. BurfordSince I began to study Buddhism as a Swarthmore College undergraduate and recognized my worldview as Buddhist, I have been puzzled about Christians who care about the Buddha. Why would a Christian care about the Buddha? I don’t care a whit about Jesus, hence my difficulty in fathoming how a Christian could get all caught up in (...) the Buddha. To put it another way, especially when I was first “turned on” to Buddhism (it was, after all, the seventies), I had trouble understanding why people who had studied Buddhism extensively, and whom I respected as otherwise quite smart and sensible, seemed to be doggedly determined to stay Christians! All of my Buddhism teachers in the course of my undergraduate and graduate study (with the notable exception of Walpola Rahula) fell in this category, it seemed—though we never really discussed it. Why didn’t we discuss it? I did wonder about how they could dedicate their professional lives to—and be such effective teachers of—a tradition they did not believe in. If they were so taken by Buddhism, why did they hang on to Christianity? If they were Christians, why did they study and teach Buddhism? I guess I assumed it would be impertinent to pursue this question with my teachers and mentors; they were probably (justifiably) somewhat embarrassed by this backwards attachment to Christianity in the face of an obviously superior religion, Buddhism.Why was I so ready to pitch Christianity and take up Buddhism, and my Buddhism teachers were not? Unlike these mentors, by the time I began my study of Buddhism I had already rejected the Christianity in which I was raised. I don’t know why exactly I rejected Christianity so decisively; I had not experienced any trauma in Sunday school and had always loved the community my church provided. But during my junior year in high school I came to the point where I felt certain that I did not believe, nor had I ever really believed, a single word of the Christian creed I could recite so flawlessly. From that time until I discovered Buddhism, I made science-and-rationality my religion. In retrospect, I find it telling that the science I immersed myself in was astronomy—where there was plenty of room for mystery and wonder as I gazed two nights a week through Sproul Observatory’s powerful [End Page 129] twenty-four-inch refractor telescope into the night skies, in the coolest job a college student ever had. I will forever be an advocate of college course-distribution requirements, since it was these—and a friend who confided that “religion courses are not too bad”—that led me to take my first course from Donald Swearer. That same friend avers that I became a religion major because of my work at the telescope. Whatever the explanation, I felt fortunate to have run across Buddhism, to have found a mentor who could teach it so well, and to have discovered a religious path I could embrace enthusiastically. So why did my teacher hold back? Now there was a mystery.I have confessed before in the pages of this journal that my motives for participating in Buddhist-Christian dialogue and cross-religious discussions in general might seem ignoble, or at least not up to the usual expectations of this group. For some reason, my total abandonment of Christianity in my teen years has stuck (well into my forties, anyway). I honestly do not expect my predominantly Buddhist worldview to be enriched by learning more about Christianity. Nevertheless, I am fascinated with and continually enriched by other people and their religions. Despite my aversion to Christianity, I see that Christians are people, too. In fact, I am surrounded by Christians who, for better or worse, operate out of a Christian worldview. I am convinced we need each other, that we must work together to make the world a better place, especially in terms of the environmental crisis and social justice issues. So I am stuck with needing to understand Christians, especially the ones (such as the members of this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 39-41 [Access article in PDF] Wishing I Were Here:Postcards from My Religious Journey Grace G. Burford Prescott College Summer 1966, Bowling Green, Kentucky An energetic ten-year-old, sitting on a red-cushioned wooden pew in a Presbyterian church leans over to her mother to whisper, "Which is it? Are we supposed to be like little children, or leave behind our childish ways?" After church, her mother does (...) a reasonably good job at answering the question.Later, perhaps even later that day, this little girl has gleefully exchanged her dress and going-to-church shoes for a cotton shirt and shorts and blue Keds, and has escaped to her favorite spot in the woods behind her house. There she swings on vines in imitation of Tarzan and plays contentedly on her own for hours, feeling utterly at home.In this scene, we see that the little girl has discovered that she can best deal with a certain type of recurring physical pain by focusing her entire attention on her breath, as she silently repeats "breathing in, breathing out." Fall 1971, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania A group of eight or so teenagers attend their English literature class at an elite college-preparatory school for girls. Our hero, recently arrived, southern accent still quite in evidence, revels in real education; this a delightfully stark contrast to what she got from Kentucky public schools, then forty-ninth in the nation according to some poll or other—only Mississippi's were worse. In this particular class she finds herself defending Presbyterians against what she considers simply inaccurate descriptions of them by James Joyce. At the same time, she is waking up to the realization that she does not believe—and the suspicion that she never really has believed—the Christian doctrines she has been raised on. Indeed, she feels quite foolish for never having properly examined what exactly she had bought into when she participated in all those church activities. She can't recall ever actually believing in "God the Father, Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth," much less in "Jesus Christ, His only Son, Our Lord," and all the rest of it. [End Page 39] Spring 1975, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania Having thoroughly rejected religion—for she knows none other than the one she grew up with—our hero pursues study of astronomy, math, language, and music, quite intent on becoming a college professor of some subject or another. Somewhat annoyed that she must take two courses in the curricular area that includes religion, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, but encouraged by her friends' assertions that religion courses are "not too bad," she signs up for religion and science, figuring that at least half of it will be rational. At the same time, she takes a course on Asian religions. Sometime in the middle of a clear spring night we find her engaged in her part-time job, seated at the eyepiece end of a twenty-meter-long, twenty-four-inch refracting telescope, patiently keeping a star placed just so on the cross-hairs in the siting scope, making fine adjustments to the telescope's precise tracking while the light of stars collects on glass plates coated with very fast photographic emulsion. Between clicks of the shutter she ponders the curiously attractive ideas she is encountering in her religion courses this term. Spring 1983, Evanston, Illinois Our hero earns a Ph.D. in the history and literature of religions, with a focus on Buddhism and Hinduism, and heads for Washington, D.C., to become what she had always aspired to be—a college professor. Summer 1997, Interstate 40 Having experienced a denial of tenure, the challenges of part-time college teaching, training and freelance work in the field of copyediting, life as a wildlife-wielding teacher of auditoria full of elementary school children, an administrative job as second-in-command to a self-described megalomaniac, and the vagaries of teaching two hundred students a term—this lifelong seeker eagerly moves across the country to start a job teaching at an alternative, experiential learning-based... (shrink)

The Weltgeist is not in a hurry. It was Sir Henry Jones, I think, who in the heyday of British idealism remarked that we should be working for a long time in the shadow of Hegel. But then in two world wars Hegel’s countrymen showed themselves more foully barbarous than any human beings before them. Lord Vansittart in Black Record traced their sins back to the unflattering description of German tribes in Tacitus’ Germania. That was scarcely fair. No doubt the (...) history of Europe would have been happier had the Romans conquered and civilized Germany, but Black Record was wartime propaganda. The twice, if not thrice, repeated crime of Germany was not a persistence of original sin but a furiously accelerating tide of evil will which had hardly begun to flow seriously before 1870. By that time Hegel, who was nothing worse than a moderate conservative with a respect for Prussian efficiency and who saw most of his compatriots as rather sheepishly gemütlich, had been dead for forty odd years. But if Tacitus could be called on to testify against Germany it was not surprising that some of the world’s hatred should rub off and smear Hegel with blame for German brutishness. It must be admitted, too, that Germans, in whom the herd instinct is uniquely dominant, could easily blur the inner articulation of Hegel’s political theory and swamp the individual’s liberty in Staatspflicht - which is precisely what the German Hegelians did. (shrink)

Male provisioning ability may have evolved as a “good dad” indicator through sexual selection, whereas male creativity may have evolved partly as a “good genes” indicator. If so, women near peak fertility (midcycle) should prefer creativity over wealth, especially in short-term mating. Forty-one normally cycling women read vignettes describing creative but poor men vs. uncreative but rich men. Women’s estimated fertility predicted their short-term (but not long-term) preference for creativity over wealth, in both their desirability ratings of individual men (r=.40, (...) p<.01) and their forced-choice decisions between men (r=.46, p<.01). These preliminary results are consistent with the view that creativity evolved at least partly as a good genes indicator through mate choice. (shrink)

Volume 11 brings together all of Dewey's writings for 1918 and 1919. A Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions textual edition. Dewey's dominant theme in these pages is war and its after-math. In the Introduction, Oscar and Lilian Handlin discuss his philosophy within the historical context: The First World War slowly ground to its costly conclusion; and the immensely more difficult task of making peace got painfully under way. The armi-stice that some expected would permit a return to normalcy (...) opened instead upon a period of turbulence that agitated fur-ther a society already unsettled by preparations for battle and by debilitating conflict overseas. After spending the first half of 1918-19 on sabbatical from Columbia at the University of California, Dewey traveled to Japan and China, where he lectured, toured, and assessed in his essays the relationship between the two nations. From Peking he reported the student revolt known as the May Fourth Move-ment. The forty items in this volume also include an analysis of Thomas Hobbe's philosophy; an affectionate commemorative tribute to Theodore Roosevelt, our Teddy; the syllabus for Dewey's lectures at the Imperial University in Tokyo, which were later revised and published as Reconstruction in Philosophy; an exchange with former disciple Randolph Bourne about F. Mat-thias Alexander's Man's Supreme Inheritance; and, central to Dew-ey's creed, Philosophy and Democracy. His involvement in a study of the Polish-American community in Philadelphia--resulting in an article, two memoranda, and a lengthy report--is discussed in detail in the Introduction and in the Note on the Confidential Report ofConditions among the Poles in the United States. (shrink)

Physicians, registered nurses and enrolled nurses engaged in geriatric and surgical care at a large hospital in Sweden gave 180 accounts of morally difficult care episodes. In total, the ENs gave 78, the RNs 55 and the physicians 47 accounts; there were 83 from geriatric care and 97 from surgical care. Forty-nine participants were male, and 59 were female; there were no differences in gender in the form and content of the moral reasoning disclosed in either morally difficult care episodes (...) or in the complete interviews when coded as mainly narrative or propositional, or as showing a care or a justice orientation. The ENs showed a care orientation, while RNs and physicians, to an equal degree, showed both a justice and a care orientation. The ENs also used narrative reasoning more often than RNs and physicians. No differences were seen between the two health care specialties. (shrink)

In the last forty years the number of specialized publications on deliberative democracy has increased steadily. Yet, today, one of the greatest challenges we still face today is to deepen into the knowledge of our actual and singular deliberative cultures. In order to achieve this, it is necessary that we use theoretical and methodological approaches that enable us to capture the inherent complexity to the specific forms of deliberation that are present in as different areas as that of politics, economics, (...) law, science, urbanism or the Net. (shrink)

This extensive and generally useful anthology contains extracts from the writings of forty-seven Chinese philosophers, ranging from Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mo Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Mencius, and Hsun Tzu in ancient times to Sun Yat-sen, Hu Shih, Mao Tse-tung, and Fung Yu-lan in the twentieth century. Also included are passages from five books of the sayings of Buddha, on the ground, as stated by the editor, that Buddha "was the historic founder of a religion which profoundly influenced Chinese thinkers." The editor’s (...) introductions to the selections are clear and informative. Unfortunately, the proofreading and editing of the book seem to have been done less carefully than is desirable. For example, a reader sometimes cannot tell whether a particular footnote was written by the original author, by the translator, by the editor of the earlier collection from which the selection was culled for this collection, or by the editor of this collection. Dagobert Runes, not known to be a Chinese linguist, is listed as the translator of portions of the Tao Teh Ching included in the volume. Despite various flaws, however, the book is valuable for the breadth of its coverage.—W. G. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Renaissance Thought on the Celestial Hierarchy:The Decline of a Tradition?Feisal G. MohamedThe Dionysian arrangement of the angels was dismantled on the one hand because its author was increasingly regarded as a "counterfait," and on the other hand because Protestants upheld the Bible's supremacy over all the "vain babblings of idle men." In consequence, those who like Spenser celebrated the "trinall triplicities," look back upon a great past that had (...) provided a vision hallowed by time and graced by an impressive array of intellects.—C. A. Patrides1It has been some forty years now since C. A. Patrides first argued in these pages that English Renaissance views on the celestial hierarchy constitute "the decline of a tradition," an argument made so convincing by his encyclopedic articles on the subject that scholars have been content to accept it. Indeed there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that the tradition of the ninefold hierarchy of angels associated with the Pseudo-Dionysius suffered serious injury at the hands of the Renaissance and Reformation. Subjected to the scrutiny of Renaissance scholarship and in light of the rediscovery of several Neoplatonists, particularly Proclus, it became quite clear that the Corpus Dionysiacum had been written centuries later than its author pretended. In the mid-fifteenth century Lorenzo Valla argued that because the Areopagus was a legal rather than a philosophical assembly, because none of the Greek or Latin fathers make mention of Dionysius, and because the claim in the letter to Polycarp to have witnessed [End Page 559] in Heliopolis the solar eclipse at the moment of Christ's death is a clear fabrication, placement of the Corpus in the first century should be doubted.2 These suggestions went largely unnoticed until Desiderius Erasmus, returning from England (where William Grocyn had begun murmurs regarding the Areopagitic origin of the Corpus), discovered in Louvain a manuscript of Valla's commentary on the book of Acts and incorporated its conclusions in his influential annotations on the New Testament.3 The discovery of Dionysius's pseudonymity and Erasmus's suggestion that Dionysian ceremonies could no longer be connected to the apostolic church would damage permanently the now Pseudo-Areopagite's influence. In a classic case of complicity between Renaissance humanism and Reformation theology—both Protestant and Catholic, it must be stressed—the sixteenth century turned away from Dionysian thought in general and from The Celestial Hierarchy in particular. The interrogation of apostolic origin begun by prominent Catholic thinkers like Erasmus and Cardinal Cajetan was most convenient to reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, both of whom described the author of the Corpus as "Dionysius, whoever he was."4Such an open-and-shut presentation of sixteenth-century Dionysiana, however, ignores several factors. One of them is that Renaissance scholars were not the first to question the dating of the Corpus: Peter Abelard fueled general perception of his heretical tendencies by suggesting that Dionysius may not have been the Pauline convert mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles.5 Much more important, however, is the number of Renaissance scholars for whom Dionysius was a formative influence. Despite his stance on the authenticity of the Corpus, Lorenzo Valla describes Dionysius in the peroration to his Encomium Sancti Thomae Aquinatis as playing the flute in a celestial symphony before the throne of God.6 For Nicholas Cusanus, as F. Edward Cranz describes [End Page 560] it, "Dionysius is the most important Christian theologian with no runner-up who is even close."7 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola saw Dionysius's writings as following directly from the teachings of Paul.8 Marsilio Ficino employed Dionysius in his comments on angels in the Theologia Platonica, translated and commented on The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, and consistently endorsed first-century dating of the Corpus Dionysiacum.9 Ambrogio Traversari, who described Dionysius as "Apostoli disciplus," would also produce a fresh translation acceptable to humanist tastes in 1437, which would receive wide dissemination in the 1499 edition produced by Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples.10 Lefèvre saw the Corpus as apostolic in origin and authority and went so far as to endorse the traditional conflation of Dionysius with Saint... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Collective Violence, Sacrifice, and Conflict Resolution in the Works of Paul Claudel Christopher G. Flood University ofSurrey, England Claudel's career as a writer spanned almost seventy years, from the 1880s to the 1950s. The publication of his collected works now runs to twenty-nine large volumes, excluding his correspondence and diaries, so a brief overview of any particular dimension of his writing must necessarily be reductive. On the other hand, (...) Claudel's work lends itself particularly well to discussion in terms of the relationship between violence, sacrifice and religion. In a valuable study published more than twenty years ago under the title, Claudel et l'usurpateur, Jacques Petit drew attention to the recurrence in Claudel's plays, and in many of his non- fictional writings, of a narrative structure hinging on acts of usurpation and counter-usurpation. There is a pattern of conflictual rivalry, domination and coercion, whereby acts of aggression are ultimately legitimized, or in some sense excused, in the light of a positive outcome, providential necessity and/or reconciliation between usurper and victim. Claudel's world is indeed "a world of violence," as Petit puts it (79, ch. title).1 It is also a world ofreligion: after his return to the Catholic Church in 1890, all of Claudel's major dramatic works intermesh the process of usurpation with themes deriving from his religious beliefs, and the same is true of many of his non-fictional writings. My aim is not to reinvent the wheel by going back over all of the terrain mapped out by Petit. Nor do I intend to rework Petit's empirical model wholesale in the light of René Girard's anthropological model of mimetic desire and sacrificial violence, although there are obvious areas of convergence between them. However, I shall draw implicitly on both, in order to Translations throughout this paper are my own. 160Christopher G. Flood argue that the notion of sacrifice, which is central to the resolution of rivalries in Claudel's major plays, is transformed into an idiosyncratic conception of international conflict resolution in various non-fictional writings which emerge from his forty years of experience in his parallel career as a profes sional diplomat.2 1 shall start with a schematic discussion of certain features of the plays. The first point relates to Claudel's assumptions concerning the mechanisms involved in the outbreak of individual or collective violence. It needs to be emphasized that in his plays the path towards violence is always opened by a withdrawal or weakening of temporal and/or spiritual authority. This allows the crystallization, and the direct expression, of latent rivalries which eventually lead to an explosion of aggression. The causes of the violence invariably center on the fact that one individual or group is in possession of an object which is coveted by another individual or group. The question of whether Claudel himself appears to recognize a mimetic element in this pattern of behavior would be too complex, and too fraught with imponderables, to discuss here, but there are some indications that he does so. Whatever the case, in the absence of authority, rivalry and jealousy engender verbal, and usually physical conflict, culminating in usurpation of the desired object. Thus, for example, in Tête d'or, the elderly Emperor of the unnamed kingdom has neither the authority nor the resolution to defend his kingdom against external invasion, or against the man who saves the kingdom only to usurp the throne and murder the Emperor himself.3 Similarly, in the second version of La Ville, neither Besme, the positivistic scientist and plutocrat who has created the godless City, nor his brother Lambert, the former politician, has the will to maintain or defend the society against the tensions emerging within it. Thus, the City dissolves first into immobility, then revolution. Or again, in the family drama of La Jeune Fille Violaine (second version), the obsessional rage andjealousy ofMara towards her elder sister, Violaine, explodes into coercion, slander, and horrific violence when their father absents himself from the farm for an indefinite period, leaving Violaine to marry Jacques Hury: the fact that Hury loves Violaine, but does not love Mara, makes the latter all the... (shrink)

Background: Neurotypical young adults show task-based modulation and stability of their eye movements across tasks. This study aimed to determine whether persons with aphasia (PWA) modulate their eye movements and show stability across tasks similarly to control participants. Methods: Forty-eight PWA and age-matched control participants completed four eye-tracking tasks: scene search, scene memorization, text-reading, and pseudo-reading. Results: Main effects of task emerged for mean fixation duration, saccade amplitude, and standard deviations of each, demonstrating task-based modulation of eye movements. Group by (...) task interactions indicated that PWA produced shorter fixations relative to controls. This effect was most pronounced for scene memorization and for individuals who recently suffered a stroke. PWA produced longer fixations, shorter saccades, and less variable eye movements in reading tasks compared to controls. Three-way interactions of group, aphasia subtype, and task also emerged. Text-reading and scene memorization were particularly effective at distinguishing aphasia subtype. Persons with anomic aphasia showed a reduction in reading saccade amplitudes relative to their respective control group and other PWA. Persons with conduction/Wernicke’s aphasia produced shorter scene memorization fixations relative to controls or PWA of other subtypes, suggesting a memorization specific effect. Positive correlations across most tasks emerged for fixation duration and did not significantly differ between controls and PWA. Conclusions: PWA generally produced shorter fixations and smaller saccades relative to controls particularly in scene memorization and text-reading respectively. The effect was most pronounced recently after a stroke. Selectively in reading tasks, PWA produced longer fixations and shorter saccades relative to controls, consistent with reading difficulty. PWA showed task-based modulation of eye movements, though the pattern of results was somewhat abnormal relative to controls. All subtypes of PWA also demonstrated task-based modulation of eye movements. However, persons with anomic aphasia showed reduced modulation of saccade amplitude and smaller reading saccades, possibly to improve reading comprehension. Controls and PWA generally produced stabile fixation durations across tasks and did not differ in their relationship across tasks. Overall, these results suggest there is potential to differentiate among PWA with varying subtypes and from controls using eye movement measures of task-based modulation, especially reading and scene memorization tasks. (shrink)

The Weltgeist is not in a hurry. It was Sir Henry Jones, I think, who in the heyday of British idealism remarked that we should be working for a long time in the shadow of Hegel. But then in two world wars Hegel’s countrymen showed themselves more foully barbarous than any human beings before them. Lord Vansittart in Black Record traced their sins back to the unflattering description of German tribes in Tacitus’ Germania. That was scarcely fair. No doubt the (...) history of Europe would have been happier had the Romans conquered and civilized Germany, but Black Record was wartime propaganda. The twice, if not thrice, repeated crime of Germany was not a persistence of original sin but a furiously accelerating tide of evil will which had hardly begun to flow seriously before 1870. By that time Hegel, who was nothing worse than a moderate conservative with a respect for Prussian efficiency and who saw most of his compatriots as rather sheepishly gemütlich, had been dead for forty odd years. But if Tacitus could be called on to testify against Germany it was not surprising that some of the world’s hatred should rub off and smear Hegel with blame for German brutishness. It must be admitted, too, that Germans, in whom the herd instinct is uniquely dominant, could easily blur the inner articulation of Hegel’s political theory and swamp the individual’s liberty in Staatspflicht - which is precisely what the German Hegelians did. (shrink)

Under the sumptuous immensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.Increased interest in the experience of space in literature in recent decades has resulted in numerous commentaries on such topics as colonial space, geographical space, gendered space, liminal space, psychic space, and signifying space. (...) In fact, Con Coroneos suggests that Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation”1 considers as many as forty different types of space.2Conrad studies have not been silent during this... (shrink)

Objectives— To explore British community pharmacists' views on PAS , including professional responsibility, personal beliefs, changes in law and ethical guidance.Design— Postal questionnaireSetting— Great BritainSubjects— A random sample of 320 registered full-time community pharmacistsResults— The survey yielded a response rate of 56%. The results showed that 70% of pharmacists agreed that it was a patient's right to choose to die, with 57% and 45% agreeing that it was the patient's right to involve his/her doctor in the process and to use (...) prescription medicines, respectively. Forty-nine per cent said that they would knowingly dispense a prescription for use in PAS were it to be legalised and 54% believed it correct to refuse to dispense such a prescription. Although 53% believed it to be their right to know when they were being involved in PAS, 28% did not. Most pharmacists said that they would wish to see the inclusion of a practice protocol for PAS in the code of ethics of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain in the event of a change in the law on PAS. In addition, 89% would wish to see PAS included in the Conscience Clause of the CE-RPSGB. Males were found to be significantly less likely to favour PAS than females , as were those declaring an ethnic/religious background of consideration when dealing with ethical issues in practice compared with their counterparts .Conclusion— Pharmacists view their professional responsibility in PAS to be more obligatory than a physician's, in having to provide the means for PAS. It is worrying that a proportion of the respondents prefer to remain in ignorance of the true purpose of a prescription for PAS; a finding at odds with current developments within the pharmaceutical profession. A practice protocol for PAS and an extension of the conscience clause should be considered in the event of PAS becoming legal. Such measures would allow the efficient provision of the pharmaceutical service whilst at the same respecting the personal beliefs of those who object to cooperating in the ending of a life. (shrink)

Under the balmy Mediterranean skies of Santa Margherita Ligure on the beautiful Italian Riviera, forty Hegelian scholars from nine countries put their heads together on the theme “Hegel’s Philosophie des subjectiven Geistes” at the Conference of the Internationale Hegel-Vereinigung, May 24–27, 1973. Enjoying the generosity of the Italian Government and the official hospitality of the Municipality of Santa Margherita, the participants heard and discussed four papers by German scholars, two each by Italians and Americans, and one each by a Dutch (...) and a French scholar. Professor Valerio Verra of the University of Rome served as host, and Professor Dieter Henrich, President of the Internationale Hegel-Vereinigung, introduced the theme of the Conference and officiated the proceedings. Chairing individual sessions and participating in the discussions were such internationally known figures as Hans-Georg Gadamer of Germany, Eric Weil and Marcel Régnier of France, W. H. Walsh and Anthony Kenny of Great Britain, and Enrico de Negri of Italy. (shrink)

In the Mon. Ancyr. II. 2–11 Augustus makes four statements: He carried out a lectio senatus on three occasions. He held a census in his sixth consulship with Agrippa as his colleague, and completed the lustrum after an interval of forty-two years, the number of citizens registered being four millions and sixty-three thousand. He completed a second lustrum in 8 B.C. invested with the consular imperium and without a colleague, the number of citizens having increased by one hundred and seventy (...) thousand. He completed a third lustrum in 14 A.D. again invested with the consular imperium, but with Tiberius as his colleague, the number of citizens having again increased by seven hundred and four thousand. (shrink)

Taking regular walks when living with Parkinson’s disease has beneficial effects on movement and quality of life. Yet, patients usually show reduced physical activity compared to healthy older adults. Using auditory stimulation such as music can facilitate walking but patients vary significantly in their response. An individualized approach adapting musical tempo to patients’ gait cadence, and capitalizing on these individual differences, is likely to provide a rewarding experience, increasing motivation for walk-in PD. We aim to evaluate the observance, safety, tolerance, (...) usability, and enjoyment of a new smartphone application. It was coupled with wearable sensors and delivered individualized musical stimulation for gait auto-rehabilitation at home. Forty-five patients with PD underwent a 1-month, outdoor, uncontrolled gait rehabilitation program, using the BeatWalk application. The music tempo was being aligned in real-time to patients’ gait cadence in a way that could foster an increase up to +10% of their spontaneous cadence. Open-label evaluation was based on BeatWalk use measures, questionnaires, and a six-minute walk test. Patients used the application 78.8% of the prescribed duration and enjoyed it throughout the program. The application was considered “easy to use” by 75% of the patients. Pain, fatigue, and falls did not increase. Fear of falling decreased and quality of life improved. After the program, patients improved their gait parameters in the six-minute walk test without musical stimulation. BeatWalk is an easy to use, safe, and enjoyable musical application for individualized gait rehabilitation in PD. It increases “walk for exercise” duration thanks to high observance.Clinical Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT02647242. (shrink)

Through the analysis of forty ethical dilemmas drawn from real-life situations, _Ethics in Action_ guides the reader through a process of moral deliberation that leads to the resolution of a variety of moral dilemmas. Fosters critical thinking by evaluating the reasons people give to support their choices and actions Challenges the paradigm of moral relativism that often impedes efforts to resolve moral dilemmas Incorporates international perspectives often lacking in texts published for a U.S. audience.

It has been forty-four years since an important American philosopher, Ralph Barton Perry, gave two cheers for Puritans in Puritanism and Democracy. Obviously, since we have neglected the deepest heritage of American history and use "Puritan" only in the disparaging sense of "puritanical," Neville must reassure us that he is far from a stereotype. He has written a charmingly personal book. On the cover is the smiling Leonora, a daughter, in white neck piece, as in our pictures of the first (...) Thanksgiving, photographed by her sister Naomi. Bob's gifted artist wife Beth designed the cover of the book, and on the back we see the author enjoying the art of fencing. (shrink)

The dialectical method used in this work to clarify the issues and to render "an objective, impartial, and neutrally formulated report" is a model for analysis and is valuable in itself. Its application, in Book II, yields a well-documented presentation of almost all the important thinkers on freedom. First modes of possession and then modes of the self are viewed as characterizing this idea. The forty-page bibliography of works referred to or examined adds to the usefulness of the study and (...) indicates its scope.--R. D. G. (shrink)

ObjectiveCo-morbid insomnia and sleep apnea is a common and debilitating condition that is more difficult to treat compared to insomnia or sleep apnea-alone. Emerging evidence suggests that cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is effective in patients with COMISA, however, those with more severe sleep apnea and evidence of greater objective sleep disturbance may be less responsive to CBTi. Polysomnographic sleep study data has been used to predict treatment response to CBTi in patients with insomnia-alone, but not in patients with COMISA. (...) We used randomized controlled trial data to investigate polysomnographic predictors of insomnia improvement following CBTi, versus control in participants with COMISA.MethodsOne hundred and forty five participants with insomnia and sleep apnea [apnea-hypopnea index ≥ 15] were randomized to CBTi or no-treatment control. Mixed models were used to investigate the effect of pre-treatment AHI, sleep duration, and other traditional, and novel [quantitative electroencephalography ] polysomnographic predictors of between-group changes in Insomnia Severity Index scores from pre-treatment to post-treatment.ResultsCompared to control, CBTi was associated with greater ISI improvement among participants with; higher AHI, less wake after sleep onset, and less N3 sleep. No quantitative electroencephalographic, or other traditional polysomnographic variables predicted between-group ISI change.DiscussionAmong participants with COMISA, higher OSA severity predicted a greater treatment-response to CBTi, versus control. People with COMISA should be treated with CBTi, which is effective even in the presence of severe OSA and objective sleep disturbance. (shrink)

Aims: To describe individuals’ perceptions of the activities that take place within the cancer genetics clinic, the relationships between these activities and how these relationships are sustained. Design: Qualitative interview study. Participants: Forty individuals involved in carrying out cancer genetics research in either a clinical (n = 28) or research-only (n = 12) capacity in the UK. Findings: Interviewees perceive research and clinical practice in the subspecialty of cancer genetics as interdependent. The boundary between research and clinical practice is described (...) as vague or blurred, and this ambiguity is regarded as being sustained by a range of methodological, ethical and economic factors. The implications of these findings for the “therapeutic misconception” are explored. It is argued that while research participation is seen as having therapeutic benefit for individual patients, the interviewees are not labouring under any misconceptions about the relationship between research and clinical care. It is suggested that concepts such as the “therapeutic misconception” may have less relevance in highly technological specialities that are characterised by a developing evidence base. (shrink)

A total of 1918 loci, detected by the hybridization of 938 expressed sequence tag unigenes from 26 Triticeae cDNA libraries, were mapped to wheat homoeologous group 4 chromosomes using a set of deletion, ditelosomic, and nulli-tetrasomic lines. The 1918 EST loci were not distributed uniformly among the three group 4 chromosomes; 41, 28, and 31% mapped to chromosomes 4A, 4B, and 4D, respectively. This pattern is in contrast to the cumulative results of EST mapping in all homoeologous groups, as reported (...) elsewhere, that found the highest proportion of loci mapped to the B genome. Sixty-five percent of these 1918 loci mapped to the long arms of homoeologous group 4 chromosomes, while 35% mapped to the short arms. The distal regions of chromosome arms showed higher numbers of loci than the proximal regions, with the exception of 4DL. This study confirmed the complex structure of chromosome 4A that contains two reciprocal translocations and two inversions, previously identified. An additional inversion in the centromeric region of 4A was revealed. A consensus map for homoeologous group 4 was developed from 119 ESTs unique to group 4. Forty-nine percent of these ESTs were found to be homoologous to sequences on rice chromosome 3, 12% had matches with sequences on other rice chromosomes, and 39% had no matches with rice sequences at all. Limited homology was found between wheat ESTs on homoeologous group 4 and the Arabidopsis genome. Forty-two percent of the homoeologous group 4 ESTs could be classified into functional categories on the basis of blastX searches against all protein databases. (shrink)

In this article, we introduce the Special Issue, Value Sensitive Design: Charting the Next Decade, which arose from a week-long workshop hosted by Lorentz Center, Leiden, The Netherlands, November 14–18, 2016. Forty-one researchers and designers, ranging in seniority from doctoral students to full professors, from Australia, Europe, and North America, and representing a wide range of academic fields participated in the workshop. The first article in the special issue puts forward eight grand challenges for value sensitive design to help guide (...) and shape the field. It is followed by 16 articles consisting of value sensitive design nuggets—short pieces of writing on a new idea, method, challenge, application, or other concept that engages some aspect of value sensitive design. The nuggets are grouped into three clusters: theory, method, and applications. Taken together the grand challenges and nuggets point the way forward for value sensitive design into the next decade and beyond. (shrink)

BackgroundMany journals prohibit the use of declarative titles that state study findings, yet a few journals encourage or even require them. We compared the effects of a declarative versus a descriptive title on readers’ perceptions about the strength of evidence in a research abstract describing a randomized trial.MethodsStudy participants (medical or dental students or doctors attending lectures) read two abstracts describing studies of a fictitious treatment (Anticox) for a fictitious condition (Green’s syndrome). The first abstract (A1) described an uncontrolled, 10-patient, (...) case series, and the second (A2) described a randomized, placebo-controlled trial involving 48 patients. All participants rated identical A1 abstracts (with a descriptive title) to provide baseline ratings and thus reduce the effects of inter-individual variability. Participants were randomized so that half rated a version of A2 with a descriptive title and half with a declarative title. For each abstract, participants indicated their agreement with the statement “Anticox is an effective treatment for pain in Green’s syndrome” using 100 mm visual analogue scales (VAS) ranging from “disagree completely” to “agree completely.” VAS scores were measured by an investigator who was unaware of group allocation.ResultsOne hundred forty-four participants from four centres completed the study. There was no significant difference between the declarative and the descriptive title groups’ confidence in the study conclusions as expressed on VAS scales—in fact, the mean difference between A1 and A2 was smaller for the declarative title group than that for the descriptive title group (32.6 mm, SD 27.4 vs. 39.8 mm, SD 22.6, respectively, p = 0.09).ConclusionsWe found no evidence that the use of a declarative title affected readers’ perceptions about study conclusions. This suggests that editors’ fears that declarative titles might unduly influence readers’ judgements about study conclusions may be unfounded, at least in relation to reports of randomized trials. However, our study design had several limitations, and our findings may not be generalizable to other situations. (shrink)