Considered one of the most important works of modern philosophy, Critique of Pure Reason offers a profound exploration of the nature of knowledge and perception. In this English-language translation by JMD Meiklejohn, Immanuel Kant's seminal work is made accessible to a wider audience. Illuminating and challenging, this book is an essential resource for anyone interested in the history of philosophy and the nature of human thought. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part (...) of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This bibliographical study involved first the exploitation of four data-banks: Medline, CNRS, Bioethics and AIDS, with the following key words (in conjunction with AIDS): ethics, human rights, confidentiality, legislation, jurisprudence. A total of 412 references were listed between 1983 and the end of 1987. Examination of the quantitative increase of articles over these years shows that, while references to AIDS and/or HIV infection--referred to as 'AIDS' for brevity--increased by about one third per year, the number of papers treating ethical problems (...) linked to AIDS doubled each year. This increase makes it clear that these problems are important and pressing, that they are evolving rapidly and can be given no easy solution. After reading and analysis of accessible articles in readily comprehensible languages, the different themes can be classified in two categories: 1: Measures intended to protect society (starting with the most coercive); quarantine and isolation; discriminatory measures concerning specific groups; non-respect of the confidential nature of medical information; application of the penal code; screening; obligatory declaration and registration; testing of blood given by donors; vaccination and medical innovations, therapeutic assays; information, education. 2. Measures intended to protect the individual: fundamental rights of the patient: his/her right to confidentiality, to information and to treatment; civil rights: civil liberty, right to education, right to work, etc...; rights of the healthy individual: right of those in contact with the patients, safety of hospital staff, of those receiving blood-transfusions, etc... The legislation adopted in the various countries and the main opinions to be found in these articles are listed and analysed, and for each particular theme it is possible to refer to a list of the 232 most important articles. While the debate seems to concentrate on the conflict between the right of society to protect itself against the spread of infection and the 'civil' rights of the infected minorities, our conclusion tends to reduce this antagonism, showing that, particularly as far as the confidential nature of medical information is concerned, measures intended to protect the individual also protect society. (shrink)

In recent years, we have seen a new concern with ethics training for research and development professionals. Although ethics training has become more common, the effectiveness of the training being provided is open to question. In the present effort, a new ethics training course was developed that stresses the importance of the strategies people apply to make sense of ethical problems. The effectiveness of this training was assessed in a sample of 59 doctoral students working in the biological and social (...) sciences using a pre–post design with follow-up and a series of ethical decision-making measures serving as the outcome variable. Results showed not only that this training led to sizable gains in ethical decision making but also that these gains were maintained over time. The implications of these findings for ethics training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

M. I. Finley in his Politics in the Ancient World , 92–6 has recently cast doubt on the extent to which religious phenomena were taken seriously in ancient times. We believe that in stressing the reasons for scepticism he has overlooked much positive evidence for the impact of religious scruples on political behaviour and that in generalising he has undervalued the differences in this respect between ancient societies. The significance of some of this positive evidence is admittedly uncertain since in (...) civilian life scruples might be easy to observe without great suffering. The acid test is in time of war, so that is the concern of our present enquiry. That attitudes varied can be shown only by comparing societies. We have here limited our discussion to three for which the evidence is well preserved: the world of the Greek city before Alexander the Great, Rome before Constantine, and the Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman period. Elucidation of the reasons for their distinct attitudes would reveal much about each of these societies and its religious practices and conceptions, but there will be space here only to show that considerable variety did indeed exist. Most ancient peoples assumed that their gods approved of war; the pacifism of some pre-Constantinian Christians was exceptional. Nor did such rules in combat as were observed necessarily have a religious foundation. Ancient like modern scruples were often based on moral and humanitarian grounds, as in the treatment of corpses and civilians; the gods, as the guardians of general morality, might be involved in such matters, but only at a remove. (shrink)

We propose a naturalistic version of the “guesser–knower” paradigm in which the experimental subject has an opportunity to choose which individual to follow to a hidden food source. This design allows nonhumans to display the attribution of knowledge to another conspecific, rather than a human, in a naturalistic context (finding food), and it is readily adapted to different species.

The number of discriminable colours is often assumed to be of the order of several million but the extent of detectable chromatic diversity present in individual natural scenes is an open question. Here, the aim was to estimate the number of discriminable colours seen in natural scenes. Hyperspectral data were obtained from a set of natural scenes over the range 400 - 720 nm at 10 nm intervals (Nascimento et al, 2002 Journal of the Optical Society of America A 19 (...) 1484 - 1490) and the representation of each scene in CIELAB space computed for all pixels of the image. The number of discriminable colours was estimated by counting the number of unit volumes in the three-dimensional volume defined by the scene when represented in CIELAB space. We found that the number of discriminable colours estimated in a scene could vary by an order of magnitude from scene to scene, but rarely exceeded 105, indicating a limited chromatic diversity. (shrink)

Prospective follow-up studies have shown that even though some children outgrow the disorder, a childhood diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is clearly a risk factor for a broad range of adverse outcomes, with extremes including drug abuse and juvenile delinquency. This article considers the use of several spectrum concepts and some neuroethical issues. It provides a list of criterion symptoms with a threshold set for the number of symptoms required for categorical diagnoses of disorders. It gives a brief review (...) of some brain imaging and pharmacological treatment studies of ADHD to set the stage for a consideration of brain-specific issues related to neuroethics. Studies using reaction time tasks of cognitive control, response inhibition, and conflict have identified interindividual variance in task performance as one of the most prominent aspects of cognitive deficits related to ADHD. (shrink)

Loop regions in proteins have traditionally been described as ‘random coil’, although they are known to adopt well‐defined conformations in most globular proteins. In this contribution we summarize the results of detailed analysis of the structures and sequences of these loop regions in proteins of known three‐dimensional structure. We also describe how these results can be used as an aid to protein design, modification and modelling.

It is impossible to deduce the properties of a strongly emergent whole from a complete knowledge of the properties of its constituents, according to C. D. Broad, when those constituents are isolated from the whole or when they are constituents of other wholes. Elanor Taylor proposes the Collapse Problem. Macro-level property p supposedly emerges when its micro-level components combine in relation r. However, each component has the property that it can combine with the others in r to produce p. Broad’s (...) nondeducibility criterion is not met. This article argues that the amount of information required for r is physically impossible. Strong Emergence does not collapse. But the Collapse Problem does. Belief in Strong Emergence is strongly warranted. Strong Emergence occurs whenever it is physically impossible to deduce how components, in a specific relation, would combine to produce a whole with p. Almost always, that is impossible. Strong Emergence is ubiquitous. Word counts. (shrink)

A notion of resource-bounded Baire category is developed for the class PC[0,1] of all polynomial-time computable real-valued functions on the unit interval. The meager subsets of PC[0,1] are characterized in terms of resource-bounded Banach-Mazur games. This characterization is used to prove that, in the sense of Baire category, almost every function in PC[0,1] is nowhere differentiable. This is a complexity-theoretic extension of the analogous classical result that Banach proved for the class C[0, 1] in 1931.

Introduction Stored human samples and the establishment of biobanks are increasing in the world. Along with this there are the questions of ethics that arise such as the correct method of obtaining informed consent for research on stored samples and the policies involved in collaborative research using collected samples. This study is an attempt to evaluate the researchers, academics and policy makers' views on these ethical aspects. Methods This was an anonymised study involving a Sri Lankan population of researchers, ethics (...) committee members, and policy makers. A self administered questionnaire was utilised as the study instrument. The questionnaire captured four major areas of interest: demographic characteristics of respondents, their attitudes on informed consent policy, their opinion on rights of collaborating researchers, their attitudes on dealing with international differences in regulatory frameworks. Results The study included 55 responders with 40/55 agreeing that donors should receive the option of giving informed consent for future research, with 31/55 considering multiple- type consent options most appropriate. Regarding the issue of shared samples in collaborative research majority agreed that source country ethics review committee approval was necessary 53/55. Conclusion The study concludes that sample donors should be given the option of giving advance consent to unspecified future research provided that future research is approved by an ethics committee. In collaborative research, it is necessary to involve ethics committees from donor countries in the research approval process. (shrink)

Moreau sketches here with enthusiasm the large features of Aquinas’s epistemology. He is not, as he makes clear, a Thomist either by training or by avowal. The book is not, then, a specialist’s monograph or dogmatic treatise. It is Moreau’s attempt to hear what Aquinas will say to the great questions. The attempt is largely successful in attending to Aquinas’s remarks, though it does not catch their ambiguities.

Drawing from Goffman’s original observations on stigma and the consequences of interactions between the stigmatized and supportive or stigmatizing audiences, we conduct a 20-year review of the diverse literature on stigma to revisit the collective nature of stigmatization processes. We find that studies on stigma’s origins, responses, processes, and outcomes have diverged from Goffman’s relational view of stigma as they have overlooked important relational mechanisms explaining the processes of (de)stigmatization. We draw from those conclusions to justify the need to study (...) stigma as a collective phenomenon. We develop a relational perspective on stigma based on understanding how attributes are stigmatized (or not) by audiences in their interactions. We argue that to advance stigma research, it is necessary to build on Goffman’s theory to include the stigmatizers (i.e., the normal) and supporters (i.e., the wise); how they create, sustain, or remove stigma; and how they relate to the stigmatized (i.e., the targets). Accordingly, we provide a research agenda on stigma as a collective phenomenon that theorizes a relational perspective, proposes a typology of how audiences relate to stigmatization, and identifies patterns of relations between audiences. We thus offer a missing piece to existing accounts of stigma by focusing on the key role of audiences (i.e., stigmatizers or supporters of the stigmatized) rather than on the targets of stigma (i.e., the own). (shrink)

This book is of little interest except to those tracing back the neo-scholastic sources of such figures as Maréchal, Coreth, Rahner, et al. The introductory essay by G. Isaye, supposedly designed to give a summary description of Scheurer's method, is a masterpiece of obscure writing even for those acquainted with neoscholastic jargon. The rest of the volume consists of twelve very desultory essays by Scheurer. In these essays Scheurer struggles to pour the philosophy of the ego à la Kant and (...) his successors into scholastic molds. This synthesis is done in the name of the transcendental method, but what results is historically dubious and philosophically tortured. Though ambiguities abound, Scheurer was ahead of most of his scholastic contemporaries in that he tried to come to grips with Kant and to see in Kant someone more than the malin genie of modern philosophy. Unfortunately, the editor does not date Scheurer's essays and one, therefore, cannot determine whether Scheurer first influenced Maréchal or vice-versa--D. J. M. B. (shrink)