Background: Nurse managers have the burden of experiencing frequent ethical issues related to both their managerial and nursing care duties, according to previous international studies. However, no such study was published in Malaysia. The purpose of this study was to explore nurse managers' experience with ethical issues in six government hospitals in Malaysia including learning about the way they dealt with the issues. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in August-September, 2010 involving 417 (69.2%) of total 603 nurse managers in (...) the six Malaysian government hospitals. Data were collected using three-part self-administered questionnaire. Part I was regarding participants' demographics. Part II was about the frequency and areas of management where ethical issues were experienced, and scoring of the importance of 11 pre-identified ethical issues. Part III asked how they dealt with ethical issues in general; ways to deal with the 11 pre-identified ethical issues, and perceived stress level. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, cross-tabulations and Pearson's Chi-square. Results: A total of 397 (95.2%) participants experienced ethical issues and 47.2% experienced them on weekly to daily basis. Experiencing ethical issues were not associated with areas of practice. Top area of management where ethical issues were encountered was "staff management", but "patient care" related ethical issues were rated as most important. Majority would "discuss with other nurses" in dealing generally with the issues. For pre-identified ethical issues regarding "patient care", "discuss with doctors" was preferred. Only 18.1% referred issues to "ethics committees" and 53.0% to the code of ethics. Conclusions: Nurse managers, regardless of their areas of practice, frequently experienced ethical issues. For dealing with these, team-approach needs to be emphasized. Proper understanding of the code of ethics is needed to provide basis for reasoning. (shrink)

Background Nurse managers have the burden of experiencing frequent ethical issues related to both their managerial and nursing care duties, according to previous international studies. However, no such study was published in Malaysia. The purpose of this study was to explore nurse managers' experience with ethical issues in six government hospitals in Malaysia including learning about the way they dealt with the issues. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted in August-September, 2010 involving 417 of total 603 nurse managers in the (...) six Malaysian government hospitals. Data were collected using three-part self-administered questionnaire. Part I was regarding participants' demographics. Part II was about the frequency and areas of management where ethical issues were experienced, and scoring of the importance of 11 pre-identified ethical issues. Part III asked how they dealt with ethical issues in general; ways to deal with the 11 pre-identified ethical issues, and perceived stress level. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, cross-tabulations and Pearson's Chi-square. Results A total of 397 participants experienced ethical issues and 47.2% experienced them on weekly to daily basis. Experiencing ethical issues were not associated with areas of practice. Top area of management where ethical issues were encountered was "staff management", but "patient care" related ethical issues were rated as most important. Majority would "discuss with other nurses" in dealing generally with the issues. For pre-identified ethical issues regarding "patient care", "discuss with doctors" was preferred. Only 18.1% referred issues to "ethics committees" and 53.0% to the code of ethics. Conclusions Nurse managers, regardless of their areas of practice, frequently experienced ethical issues. For dealing with these, team-approach needs to be emphasized. Proper understanding of the code of ethics is needed to provide basis for reasoning. (shrink)

This monograph is the first to analyze Julius Caesar Scaliger's Exotericae Exercitationes(1557). In order to make this late-Renaissance work accessible to modern readers, Kuni Sakamoto conducted a detailed textual analysis and revealed the basic tenets of Scaliger's philosophy.

This chapter, which describes the spatiality of conscious phenomena, such as colours and sounds, addresses James Gibson’s ecological approach to confirm and develop further the Husserlian phenomenological view of colours and sounds. The ecological approach to perception could be regarded as an attempt to undertake empirical research corresponding to the phenomenological insight of perception. In this context, in addition to the Husserlian concept of “adumbration” and the Gibsonian concept of “ecological optics,” the differentiation of various modes of colour appearances, which (...) David Katz explicated, is focused on, developed and applied further to the phenomena of sounds. On the basis of these discussions, the multi-dimensional character of colours and sounds are explicated, and traditional views on colours and sounds, which neglect this character, are criticized. The concept of multi-dimensionality discovers the remarkable diversity of the world of colours and sounds, which demonstrate the diversity and multiple dimensionality of the field of consciousness. (shrink)

清朝末から中華人民共和国建国までの世界的激動期、中国の知識人は儒教的世界観の更新に立ち会い、西洋の知と格闘した。社会進化論や立憲思想の衝撃はナショナリズムと革命思想に展開し、雑誌メディアには生命論から 民族論まで様々な論争と漫画表現が花開く。貴重な資料と最新の研究から読み解く労作。.

Human perception is often believed to function holistically, especially in the tradition of Gestalt psychology, involving a focused item and its surrounding. This holistic approach can allow us to explain something that is not directly experienced in our perception, meaning that the absence as well as the presence of something can have a significant impact on how we perceive the world. The way we perceive the presence is more or less the same cross-culturally, but the prominence of the absence, or (...) what is termed emptiness in this volume, varies considerably from one culture to another. The aim of this volume is to identify what emptiness is like and how different cultures incorporate this concept from various perspectives. It turns out that emptiness plays a key role in identifying socio-cultural diversity in a broader sense, including arts and languages. This volume consists of contributions from different fields covering a wide range of topics such as history, literary studies, mythology, film studies, architecture, linguistics, social-anthropology, ethnology and cognitive science. Due to the range covered in this volume, studies presented here are highly interdisciplinary, but all chapters deal with the sense of emptiness, which suggest that the underlying idea of the significance of emptiness is pervasive. Yet, this topic has not previously been systematically compared across different disciplines. It is hoped that this volume will offer a first overview of the pervasiveness and integration of disciplines concerning the sense of emptiness. (shrink)

Pierre Gassendi is widely known as a reviver of Epicurean atomism. But he was also regarded as an accomplished astronomer by his contemporaries. Along with the life-long observational pursuits, Gassendi developed his theories of the causes underlying celestial motions. In elaborating them, he absorbed seveal ideas coming from the astronomy of Johannes Kepler. Moreover, Gassendi went further to incorporate some theological principles from the Keplerian cosmology, especially the idea that God is a Geometer. The present paper thus explores Kepler's influence (...) on the philosophy of Gassendi in both astronomical and theological spheres. (shrink)

The project of the comprehensive reform of Japanese insolvency law started in October 1996. After many enactments and amendments, there are now two types of judicial proceedings for personal insolvencies in Japanese insolvency law. The first category is straight bankruptcy proceedings in which the debtor can be discharged; the other is special Civil Rehabilitation proceedings for individual debtors. In this Article, I will first give a brief overview of the special Civil Rehabilitation proceedings for individual debtors, including a short description (...) of two types of proceedings, and legislative issues. Then I will give a brief overview of major amendments of the Bankruptcy Law concerning individual bankruptcies, including amendments relating to the scope of exemption and discharge proceedings. (shrink)

This paper shows a role for emotion in rational choice. The key concept here is “time illusion”. The perception of the time spent on an activity is often different from the actual time spent, and depends on how enjoyable the activity is. Based on the conception that time illusion affects one’s evaluation of the opportunity cost of an activity, this paper integrates the concept into utility theory. Using this approach suggests that an activity that is perceived as less time intensive (...) is demanded more as the price of time increases. The presence of time illusion leads to a deviation from rational choice, namely, over- or under-consumption. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyze R. G. Collingwood’s maiden work in philosophy, Religion and Philosophy, in the light of the realism/idealism dispute in early twentieth-century British philosophy. Due to scholars’ narrow scopes of interests, this book has suffered divided and unsettled understandings in literature that find only either realist or idealist character in it. By contrast, I comprehensively examine various aspects of the work on which both readings rest in turn—his conception of history and metaphysics. Consequently, I find out that (...) Collingwood implicitly elaborates a series of negative doctrines attempting to overcome dualismspervading at both poles of the dispute, namely abstract/concrete, subject/object, and theory/action. Since this framework is to be more explicitly present in his subsequent philosophizing, I demonstrate that Religion and Philosophy was, against its underestimated status in literature, not mere juvenilia, but a substantialstarting-point for Collingwood’s philosophy constructively grounded in the contemporary debate. (shrink)

In spite of the evident centrality of philosophical 'realism' in Collingwood's autobiographical account of his own intellectual development, his critique of 'realism' has hardly been investigated as a central theme in his philosophy. Collingwood's arguments against contemporary 'realism' and his stated move beyond 'idealism' have mostly been treated as a minor question subordinate to other questions. By contrast, I have tried in this thesis to reconstruct Collingwood's philosophy as a critical development of the realism/idealism dispute of his day, focusing on (...) his less known early published and unpublished philosophical writings. This has enabled me to clarify his unique definition of 'realism' in terms of a dualistic framework, and understand his philosophy as an attempt to overcome such dualisms in the realms of philosophy. This approach ultimately highlighted the aim of Collingwood's reform of philosophy as the better understanding of the human mind and action. By employing the 'historical' and 'internal' method of analysis, I firstly illustrated how the idea of 'dualism' became an issue in the realism/idealism dispute as it emerged in early twentieth-century British philosophy. This was followed by a biographical sketch in which I demonstrated that Collingwood's educational background was perfectly equipped to refute the 'realist' philosophy in the dispute. Historically contextualising thus, I chronologically restored the formation of his critique of 'realism' as his attempts to synthesise dualisms in logic, ontology, epistemology, and ethics during the period between Religion and Philosophy and An Essay on Philosophical Method. Finally, I argued that Collingwood's critique of 'realism' crystallised in his notion of duty, which embodied his characterisation of philosophy as both 'normative' and 'descriptive'. Throughout, I presented a systematic and sustained picture of Collingwood's early philosophy, identifying and unfolding the fertile implications of his critique of 'realism' for his principal concern with the human mind and action. (shrink)

Words and phrases must be interpreted within the proper cultural and contemporary political and historical context. In particular, the language of politics is distinguished by the use of specific terms and phrases which often allude to other associated meanings. This means that caution must be exercised when interpreting the terms used not only within the context of the other language, but often also within its own linguistic context. The translator or commentator has to be familiar with the language code used (...) in the given environment and within the cultural biases of that particular society so that meanings are not lost and the often crucial connotations are not misinterpreted. Political rhetoric often employs words and language in a manipulative yet frequently subtle manner. This paper analyzes examples of shifts in language code by looking at a number of cases in Japan and their cultural construction where loss of integrity and backstage practices are at stake. (shrink)

There are many morphologically distinct membrane structures with different functions at the surface of epithelial cells. Among these, adherens junctions (AJ) and tight junctions (TJ) are responsible for the mechanical linkage of epithelial cells and epithelial barrier function, respectively. In the process of new cell–cell adhesion formation between two epithelial cells, such as after wounding, AJ form first and then TJ form on the apical side of AJ. This process is very complicated because AJ formation triggers drastic changes in the (...) organization of actin cytoskeleton, the activity of Rho family of small GTPases, and the lipid composition of the plasma membrane, all of which are required for subsequent TJ formation. In this review, the authors focus on the relationship between AJ and TJ as a representative example of specialization of plasma membrane regions and introduce recent findings on how AJ formation promotes the subsequent formation of TJ. (shrink)

In this article, we address the problem of how people understand predicative metaphors such as “The rumor flew through the office,” and argue that predicative metaphors are understood as indirect (or two-stage) categorizations. In the indirect categorization process, the verb (e.g., fly) of a predicative metaphor evokes an intermediate entity, which in turn evokes a metaphoric category of actions or states (e.g., “to spread rapidly and soon disappear”) to be attributed to the target noun (e.g., rumor), rather than directly evoking (...) a metaphoric category as argued by CitationGlucksberg's (2001) categorization theory. We test our argument using two experiments, namely, offline comprehension and online priming. The offline comprehension experiment showed that interpretation of predicative metaphors had greater overlap with words indirectly associated with the verb than those directly associated with the verb. The online priming experiment demonstrated that indirectly associated words were activated during predicative metaphor comprehension, but directly associated words were not. These results provide convergent evidence for our argument, and thus the psychological validity of two-stage categorization as a process of predicative metaphor comprehension was confirmed. (shrink)

One of the most important tasks of engineering ethics is to give engineers the tools required to act ethically to prevent possible disastrous accidents which could result from engineers’ decisions and actions. The space shuttle Challenger disaster is referred to as a typical case in almost every textbook. This case is seen as one from which engineers can learn important lessons, as it shows impressively how engineers should act as professionals, to prevent accidents. The Columbia disaster came seventeen years later (...) in 2003. According to the report of the Columbia accident investigation board, the main cause of the accident was not individual actions which violated certain safety rules but rather was to be found in the history and culture of NASA. A culture is seen as one which desensitizedmanagers and engineers to potential hazards as they dealt with problems of uncertainty. This view of the disaster is based on Dian Vaughan’s analysis of the Challenger disaster, where inherent organizational factors and culture within NASA had been highlighted as contributing to the disaster. Based on the insightful analysis of the Columbia report and the work of Diane Vaughan, we search for an alternative view of engineering ethics. We focus on the inherent uncertainty of engineers’ work with respect to hazard precaution. We discuss claims that the concept of professional responsibility, which plays a central role in orthodox engineering ethics, is too narrow and that we need a broader and more fundamental concept of responsibility. Responsibility which should be attributed to every person related to an organization and therefore given the range of responsible persons, governments, managers, engineers, etc. might be called “civic virtue”. Only on the basis of this broad concept of responsibility of civic virtue, we can find a possible way to prevent disasters and reduce the hazards that seem to be inseparable part of the use of complex technological systems. (shrink)

One of the most important tasks of engineering ethics is to give engineers the tools required to act ethically to prevent possible disastrous accidents which could result from engineers’ decisions and actions. The space shuttle Challenger disaster is referred to as a typical case in almost every textbook. This case is seen as one from which engineers can learn important lessons, as it shows impressively how engineers should act as professionals, to prevent accidents. The Columbia disaster came seventeen years later (...) in 2003. According to the report of the Columbia accident investigation board, the main cause of the accident was not individual actions which violated certain safety rules but rather was to be found in the history and culture of NASA. A culture is seen as one which desensitizedmanagers and engineers to potential hazards as they dealt with problems of uncertainty. This view of the disaster is based on Dian Vaughan’s analysis of the Challenger disaster, where inherent organizational factors and culture within NASA had been highlighted as contributing to the disaster. Based on the insightful analysis of the Columbia report and the work of Diane Vaughan, we search for an alternative view of engineering ethics. We focus on the inherent uncertainty of engineers’ work with respect to hazard precaution. We discuss claims that the concept of professional responsibility, which plays a central role in orthodox engineering ethics, is too narrow and that we need a broader and more fundamental concept of responsibility. Responsibility which should be attributed to every person related to an organization and therefore given the range of responsible persons, governments, managers, engineers, etc. might be called “civic virtue”. Only on the basis of this broad concept of responsibility of civic virtue, we can find a possible way to prevent disasters and reduce the hazards that seem to be inseparable part of the use of complex technological systems. (shrink)

There are few things in our lives we dislike or hate so strongly as pain. On the other hand, the symptoms of the patients suffered from so-called congenital analgesia teach us that if we are deprived of the ability to feel pain, our lives would be unbelievably miserable and disastrous. In this way, if we try to understand the meaning and the value of pain, it seems we immediately find a paradox. The paradoxical character of pain is reflected in philosophical (...) discussions between subjectivist’s and objectivist’s view of pain. In this paper, I try to show that the seemingly paradoxical character emerges because we are obsessed by groundless prejudice that the concept of pain must have one definite single meaning and that if phenomena of pain can be understood as multidimensional, the various characteristics of pain can be interpreted as various aspects of multi-dimensional pain experiences.Hay pocas cosas en nuestras vidas que nos desagraden u odiemos tan fuertemente como el dolor. Por otro lado, los síntomas de los pacientes que padecen la llamada analgesia congénita nos enseñan que, si nos privamos de la capacidad de sentir dolor, nuestras vidas serían increíblemente miserables y desastrosas. De esta manera, si tratamos de comprender el significado y el valor del dolor parece que encontramos inmediatamente una paradoja. El carácter paradójico del dolor se refleja en discusiones filosóficas entre la visión del dolor subjetivista y objetivista. En este trabajo, trato de mostrar que el carácter aparentemente paradójico surge porque estamos obsesionados por el prejuicio infundado de que el concepto de dolor debe tener un único significado definido; y que, si los fenómenos de dolor pueden entenderse como multidimensionales, las diversas características del dolor pueden ser interpretadas como varios aspectos de expe-riencias de dolor multidimensionales.Palabr. (shrink)

The accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, which occurred on the occasion of the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011, caused enormous damage to the political, social, cultural and natural environments in Japan and still continues to create problems.What can we learn from the case of Fukushima from the viewpoint of the philosophy of technology?First, I emphasize that technology is not considered a closed system constituted only of a technological factor in the narrow sense of the (...) term, but must be considered an open system related to and constituted of various factors, including social, cultural, and natural environmental factors. In this sense, technology is inherently multidimensional.Second, as there is no guarantee that multiple factors maintain a harmonious and stable unity under various circumstances, technology inevitably brings about unintended consequences. We must always consider the unmanageable and unpredictable character of technology, which can be characterized as the “otherness” character of technology and is to be considered a central problem of the philosophy and ethics of technology. (shrink)

Background: Advocacy is an important role of psychiatric nurses because their patients are ethically, socially, and legally vulnerable. This study of Japanese expert psychiatric nurses’ judgments of interventions for patient advocacy will show effective strategies for ethical nursing practice and their relationship with Japanese culture. Objectives: This article explores Japanese psychiatric nurses’ decision to intervene as a patient advocate and examine their ethical, cultural, and social implications. Research design: Using semi-structured interviews verbatim, themes of the problems that required interventions were (...) inductively summarized by a qualitative analysis and their contexts and nursing judgments were examined. Participants and research context: The participants were 21 nurses with 5 or more years of experience in psychiatric nursing. Ethical considerations: The research was approved by Institutional Review Board of research site and study facilities. The participants gave written informed consent. Findings: Analysis of 45 cases showed that nurses decided to intervene when surrounding people’s opinions impeded patients’ safety, healthcare professionals’ policies impeded patients’ decision-making, own violent behaviors impeded treatment and welfare services for patients, own or families’ low acceptance of illness impeded patients’ self-actualization, inappropriate treatment or care impeded patients’ liberty, and their families abused patients’ property. Discussion: To solve conflicts between patients and their surrounding people, the nurses sought reconciliation between them, which is in accordance with Japanese cultural norms respecting harmony. When necessary, however, they protected patients’ rights against cultural norms. Therefore, their judgments cannot be explained by cultural norms alone. Conclusion: The findings indicate that the nurses’ judgments were based on respect for patients’ rights apart from cultural norms, and they first sought solutions fitting the cultural norms before other solutions. This seems to be an ethical, effective strategy if advocates know the culture in depth. (shrink)

This chapter purports to give empirical feedback on impartial reasoning to justice by using online survey experiments. More precisely, the study focuses on whether and how the different conceptions of the veil of ignorance and John Rawls’s method of reflective equilibrium affect real people’s impartial reasoning to justice. The findings show that, while ordinary people support impartial reasoning to the difference principle (maximin), their endorsement of it echoes neither John Harsanyi’s nor Rawls’s reasoning. The results illuminate that findings in human (...) psychology, such as the principles of loss aversion and “perceived luckiness,” cannot be dismissed for denoting the relevant impartial reasoning to justice. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss uniform versions of some axioms of second order arithmetic in the context of higher order arithmetic. We prove that uniform versions of weak weak König's lemma WWKL and Σ01 separation are equivalent to over a suitable base theory of higher order arithmetic, where is the assertion that there exists Φ2 such that Φf1 = 0 if and only if ∃x0 for all f. We also prove that uniform versions of some well-known theorems are equivalent to (...) or the axiom of the existence of the Suslin operator. (shrink)