The article analyzes the phenomenon of national self-determination in terms of evolution and functioning. The authors aim to determine the general characteristics and evolution of this phenomenon in both conceptual and applied versions. In the evolution’s context of national self-determination as a theoretical concept and a political and legal principle, several stages were identified and considered. According to the authors, each stage of the phenomenon’s evolution was inevitably accompanied by its qualitative transformations, both in political and legal terms. The first (...) stage (from the end of the XVIII c. till the First World War), according to the authors, is characterized by the emergence of the idea and the formation of the socio-political concept of national self-determination, and the applied aspect of the phenomenon of national self-determination is filled with concrete content based on the ever-expanding political practice of its application. The second stage (from the First World War and the post-war reconstruction) is characterized by the transformation of self-determination from a concept into a political principle. The authors associate the third stage of the evolution of the phenomenon of national self-determination (the period after the Second World War) with the development of international relations and the formation of a global bipolar system. National self-determination turned into a principle of positive international law and laid the foundations for the future political instability of the newly independent states. Finally, the last period (the early 90s to this day) is characterized by the search and crystallization of new approaches to the principle of national self-determination and the emergence of new theories, the authors of which are trying from a political and legal point of view to substantiate the legitimacy of an expansive interpretation of this principle. The analysis allowed us to conclude that the qualitative transformations of the principle of national self-determination presented in the article did not lead to the formation of the phenomenon of national self-determination as an integral, complete, and universally recognized international political and legal norm. (shrink)

Background Among the myriad voices advocating diverging ideas of what general practice ought to be, none seem to adequately capture its ethical core. There is a paucity of attempts to integrate moral theory with empirical accounts of the embodied moral knowledge of GPs in order to inform a general normative theory of good general practice. In this article, we present an empirically grounded model of the professional morality of GPs, and discuss its implications in relation to ethical theories to see (...) whether it might be sustainable as a general practice ethic. Methods We observed and interviewed sixteen GPs and GP residents working in health care centres in four Swedish regions between 2015–2017. In keeping with Straussian Grounded Theory, sampling was initially purposeful and later theoretically guided, and data generation, analysis and theoretical integration proceeded in parallel. The focal concept of this article was refined through multidimensional property supplementation. Results The voice of the profession is one of four concepts in our emerging theory that attempt to capture various motives that affect GPs’ everyday moral decisionmaking. It reflects how GPs appreciate the situation by passing three professional–moral judgments: Shall I see what is before me, or take a bird’s-eye view? Shall I intervene, or stay my hand? And do I need to speak up, or should I rather shut up? By thus framing the problem, the GP narrows down the range of considerations, allowing them to focus on its morally most pertinent aspects. This process is best understood as a way of heeding Løgstrup’s ethical demand. Refracted through the lens of the GP’s professional understanding of life, the ethical demand gives rise to specific moral imperatives that may stand in opposition to the express wishes of the other, social norms, or the GP’s self-interest. Conclusions The voice of the profession makes sense of how GPs frame problematic situations in moral terms. It is coherent enough to be sustainable as a general practice ethic, and might be helpful in explaining why ethical decisions that GPs intuitively understand as justified, but for which social support is lacking, can nevertheless be legitimate. (shrink)

Involving children in research studies requires obtaining parental permission. A school-based intervention to delay/prevent waterpipe use for 7th and 8th graders in Qatar was developed, and parental permission requested. Fifty three percent (2308/4314) of the parents returned permission forms; of those 19.5% of the total (840/4314) granted permission. This paper describes the challenges to obtaining parental permission. No research to date has described such challenges in the Arab world.

The structuralist approach, as developed by Balzer et al. (1987) in An Architectonic for Science (abbreviated as Architectonic in the following), should be combined with a holistic semantics. A significant, but widely neglected intuition about the empirical claim of a theory appears to be representable only within a holistic framework. This intuition may be called the promise of a theory. It consists of the claim that the theory will, at least in the future, be able to describe all phenomena of (...) (an interpreted version of) its T-non-theoretical conceptual frame. The argument will be outlined within the semantics developed by Holger Andreas on the basis of Carnap’s dual-level conception. (shrink)

The thoughts of apocalypse can either be intense and demanding, or lead to the risk of abandoning the present to a state of inertia and impotence. The apocalypse can be, in fact, the moment of the Last Judgment. In this case, justice is related to the revelation of truth. But the apocalypse can also be the revelation of the end of any truth, i.e. the revelation that the history doesn’t have any meaning, that the end is as endless as it (...) is hopeless. This article takes up “the apocalypse of Blanchot.” It shows that by thinking that the apocalypse has always already occurred, history is not what leads to an end, but is rather the responsibility to an endless end. In that sense, for Blanchot, history is not the redemption of contingency as eternity; rather, what must be historicized is the eternity of the end. (shrink)

The thoughts of apocalypse can either be intense and demanding, or lead to the risk of abandoning the present to a state of inertia and impotence. The apocalypse can be, in fact, the moment of the Last Judgment. In this case, justice is related to the revelation of truth. But the apocalypse can also be the revelation of the end of any truth, i.e. the revelation that the history doesn’t have any meaning, that the end is as endless as it (...) is hopeless. This article takes up “the apocalypse of Blanchot.” It shows that by thinking that the apocalypse has always already occurred, history is not what leads to an end, but is rather the responsibility to an endless end. In that sense, for Blanchot, history is not the redemption of contingency as eternity; rather, what must be historicized is the eternity of the end. (shrink)

« La solidarité est un verbe. » Ainsi la philosophe Sara Ahmed désigne-t-elle le travail de créer des ponts entre les luttes. La guerre en cours en Palestine, depuis les attentats terroristes du Hamas en octobre 2023 jusqu’aux représailles meurtrières et incessantes des Forces de Défense Israéliennes, a soulevé de nombreux gestes de solidarité transnationale : de la part des mouvements juifs pour la paix (Women Wage Peace, Standing Together, Tsedek!, Union juive pour la paix…), mais aussi de la part (...) de mouvements pour la justice sociale qui se sont efforcés de construire des solidarités précises, avec les Palestinien·nes comme avec les Israélien·nes qui résistent au colonialisme (des mouvements autochtones aux États-Unis à Black Lives Matter et aux mouvements queers en Europe et ailleurs). Quelles leçons tirer de ces solidarités décoloniales? (shrink)

Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) attempts to apprehend in high fidelity pristine inner experience (the naturally-occurring, directly-apprehended phenomena that fill our waking lives, including inner speaking, visual imagery, sensory awarenesses, etc.). Previous DES investigations had shown individual differences in the frequency of inner speaking ranging from nearly zero to nearly 100% of the time. In early 2020, the Internet was ablaze with comments expressing astonishment that constant internal monologue was not universal. We invited Lena, a university student who believed she (...) had constant internal monologue, to participate in a DES analog of a pre-registered study: We would announce, on the Internet, that we would conduct a fully transparent DES investigation and roll out videos of the DES interviews (and annotated transcripts) as they occurred in (almost) real-time, something like “reality TV about inner experience,” so that spectators could examine for themselves our characterizations of Lena and how we arrived at them. We describe here the procedure and its findings: Lena did _not_ have frequent internal monologue (contrary to her expectations); she _did_ have frequent visual imagery (to her surprise); and we speculated about the frequent presence of two simultaneous “centers of gravity” of her experience. The entire procedure is available for inspection. (shrink)

IntroductionSymptoms of schizophrenia are closely related to aberrant language comprehension and production. Macroscopic brain changes seen in some patients with schizophrenia are suspected to relate to impaired language production, but this is yet to be reliably characterized. Since heterogeneity in language dysfunctions, as well as brain structure, is suspected in schizophrenia, we aimed to first seek patient subgroups with different neurobiological signatures and then quantify linguistic indices that capture the symptoms of “negative formal thought disorder”.MethodsAtlas-based cortical thickness values of 66 (...) patients with first-episode psychosis and 36 healthy controls were analyzed with hierarchical clustering algorithms to produce neuroanatomical subtypes. We then examined the generated subtypes and investigated the quantitative differences in MRS-based glutamate levels [in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex ] as well as in three aspects of language production features: fluency, syntactic complexity, and lexical cohesion.ResultsTwo neuroanatomical subtypes among patients were observed, one with near-normal cortical thickness patterns while the other with widespread cortical thinning. Compared to the subgroup of patients with relatively normal cortical thickness patterns, the subgroup with widespread cortical thinning was older, with higher glutamate concentration in dACC and produced speech with reduced mean length of T-units and lower repeats of content words, despite being equally fluent.ConclusionWe characterized a patient subgroup with thinner cortex in first-episode psychosis. This subgroup, identifiable through macroscopic changes, is also distinguishable in terms of neurochemistry and language behavior. This study supports the hypothesis that glutamate-mediated cortical thinning may contribute to a phenotype that is detectable using the tools of computational linguistics in schizophrenia. (shrink)

The term “lean in” was popularized by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, via her #1 Best Seller encouraging women to defy their fears and dare to be leaders in their fields. She received criticism because although admitting to external barriers contributing to the gender gap in leadership, the scope of her book focused on the internal shortcomings of women. She asserted that women are hindered by barriers that exist within themselves, and provided practical tips, backed by research, to equip women with (...) strategies to proactively progress in the workplace instead of shying away. Sandberg is not the first to raise concern about gender inequality. Other women in history like Susan B. Anthony and Maggie Lena Walker also challenged lopsided gender roles through their words and actions. Using the critical biography methodology, this paper explores these women’s experiences, philosophies and contributions, reflects on Sandberg’s insight, and develops a framework, based on the theory of planned behavior as well as the ethical principles of utilitarianism and corporate social responsibility, that links internal factors, organizational external factors, and societal external factors to intentions to lean in and leaning in behavior. Thus, via critical biography, this paper examines both internal and external factors, showing how they are linked, and how they may impact leaning in intentions and behavior. The paper also discusses how leaning in may influence both individual and gender mobility for women, and ultimately, increased gender equality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Playing the Dummy:Maugham, Smartphones, and the End of EleganceEric BronsonIOn the Russian Trans-Siberian train from Vladivostok to Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), an American businessman won't stop talking for the entire ten-day journey. In his story, "A Chance Acquaintance," W. Somerset Maugham describes this 1917 meeting between Ashenden, a British character loosely based on himself, and the chatty American, named Harrington. The two passengers are blissfully unmoved by the revolution (...) unfolding all around them. Ashenden casually suggests the two of them try and find another pair to pass the time playing bridge. Harrington refuses. "It beats me how an intelligent man can waste his time card-playing," Harrington asserts, "and of all the unintellectual pursuits I have ever seen it seems to me that solitaire is the worst. It kills conversation. Man is a social animal and he exercises the highest part of his nature when he takes part in social intercourse."1 Ashenden doesn't understand the American's distaste for playing cards, especially bridge. "'There is a certain elegance in wasting time,' said Ashenden. … 'Besides,' he added with bitterness, 'you can still talk.'" [End Page 477]Like many of his fictional characters, Maugham enjoyed eloquent, "time-wasting" games like bridge. Unlike solitaire, bridge encourages social interaction. Once, when his confounded bridge partner confronted Maugham with evidence that his high-class opponents were cheating, Maugham was nonplussed. "They gave us double Martinis to start with," he noted, "a slap-up lunch with a particularly good bottle of white Burgundy and old brandy with our coffee."2 The dishonesty was irrelevant. For Maugham, a good bridge game, like the attendant conversation, should help temper one's moral outrage and skim over the unruly passions that so often plague our public and private lives. Elegance, for Maugham, meant presenting the appearance of calm and respectability, especially when such presentations conflicted with one's more turbulent emotions.In Maugham's short story "The Three Fat Women of Antibes," the women around the bridge table desperately try to keep up appearances, both physically and emotionally. When passionate arguments inevitably threaten to undo the air of genteel conversation, Lena, the newest addition to the table, states, "I think it's such a pity to quarrel over bridge. … After all, it's only a game."3 But while it might be true that bridge is "only a game," Maugham took games seriously. Parlor games like bridge were spaces to practice and perfect the social mores on which colonial hierarchies were solidified. In Maugham's England, the game of life required an elegant performance of the many roles the genteel class was expected to play. That performance was predicated on a relentless effort to keep up ordinary appearances by regulating emotional displays. As Maugham wrote in a 1944 article for Good Housekeeping, a good bridge game rewards people who are "truthful, clearheaded, and considerate," characteristics essential "for playing the more important game of life."4More than any other card game, bridge is built on conventions. Etiquette dictates how cards are shuffled, passed, and played. While there is always some room for surprise and risk, everyone around the table needs to know the bidding and playing conventions to ensure the best possible game. In every hand a silent partner, known as the dummy, lays their cards face up, thereby taking themself out of the action.The persistence of such conventions is a holdover from the game of whist, the predecessor of bridge. In an early-nineteenth-century story, "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," essayist Charles Lamb describes an elderly whist player who enjoys the elegant waste of time that such long card games encourage. While dances and parties help build social skills around untrustworthy passions, card games like whist, and later bridge, [End Page 478] were more like "a long meal; not like quadrille, a feast of snatches. One or two rubbers might co-extend in duration with an evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships." This kind of congeniality mattered to serious people like Mrs. Battle, people who "despised superficiality, and looked deeper than the colours of things."5The game of bridge... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Faulkner's Novels Past and PresentAndrew J. McKenna (bio)This article contains instances of the N-word. The Editor, Michigan State University Press, and Michigan State University do not condone the use of this word and only after careful consideration have we reprinted it. In this case, the word appears in the context of works by Faulkner.When I first came East I kept thinking You've got to remember to think of some (...) of them as coloured people not niggers, … I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, and leave them alone. That was when I realized that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.—Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury ([1929] 2019, 45)A black man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia.—W. E. B. Du Bois ([1940] 1992, 153)When William Faulkner memorably stated, "the past is not dead, it's not even past," he was not reaching out for a place in the world-historical pantheon of aphoristic wisdom; he wasn't thinking about culture and history in general. A person of his own time and place, he was thinking about his experience in his own homeland, the deep South of his native [End Page 39] Mississippi, with its cherished myth of a Lost Cause that ennobled the effort to tear our country apart over slavery, and that subsequently enabled Jim Crow legislation, spawned the KKK, and sanctioned a century of lynching and burning. There has been an uptick of attention to Faulkner owing to Carl Rollyson's recent two-volume biography (2020) and, especially for my purposes, Michael Gorra's The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War (2020), which focuses on the centrality of that cataclysm in his creative imagination and his historical vision.On more than one occasion Faulkner himself was emphatic in his own ambivalence toward "his native land," as in this self-description: "He was born of it and his bones will sleep in it; loving it even while hating some of it … the intolerance and injustice; the lynching of negroes not for the crimes they committed but because their skins were black" (in Blotner 2005, 354). Gorra (2020) argues that this very ambivalence is a generative resource for the author's greatest achievements, quoting Yeats's notorious dictum, "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry" (346). This can remind us of the notorious "crucible of doubt" out of which Dostoevsky allegedly forged his fiction. The Russian novelist is named (Blotner 2005, 718) as among seven of Faulkner's "masters" in the literary education of this omnivorous autodidact, with the others being Melville, Conrad, Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, and Cervantes. With Dostoevsky especially he shares an admixture of horror and benign good humor. On occasion Faulkner was classed as an author of Southern Gothic, a label also applied to Flannery O'Connor, who, with Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, counts among his greatest literary progeny. A more capacious designation might rank him with masters of the grotesque, as Mikhail Bakhtin has explored this anomalous category in his writings on Rabelais and Dostoevsky.Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) begins and ends on a humorous note, as we follow the quest of the guileless Lena Grove for the father of her unborn child. She has concluded from her "endless care of other children" in her brother's household, "'I reckon that's why I got one so quick myself'" (3); the novel closes with her newborn infant in her arms in her now aimless trek, marveling, "My, my. A body does get around: here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it's already Tennessee" (480).Lena's peregrinations bookend the story of Joe Christmas, so named because he was born on that day and who, we find later in the narrative, was snatched away by his religiously fanatical grandfather to be placed in an orphanage, then snatched away again to be placed... (shrink)

Transplantation is a medically successful and cost-effective way to treat people whose organs have failed--but not enough organs are available to meet demand. T. M. Wilkinson explores the major ethical problems raised by policies for acquiring organs. Key topics include the rights of the dead, the role of the family, and the sale of organs.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a developing technology. New generations of DBS technology are already in the pipeline, yet this particular fact has been largely ignored among ethicists interested in DBS. Focusing only on ethical concerns raised by the current DBS technology is, albeit necessary, not sufficient. Since current bioethical concerns raised by a specific technology could be quite different from the concerns it will raise a couple of years ahead, an ethical analysis should be sensitive to such alterations, or (...) it could end up with results that soon become dated. The goal of this analysis is to address these changing bioethical concerns, to think ahead on upcoming and future DBS concerns both in terms of a changing technology and changing moral attitudes. By employing the distinction between inherent and noninherent bioethical concerns we identify and make explicit the particular limits and potentials for change within each category, respectively, including how present and upcoming bioethical concerns regarding DBS emerge and become obsolete. Many of the currently identified ethical problems with DBS, such as stimulation-induced mania, are a result of suboptimal technology. These challenges could be addressed by technical advances, while for instance perceptions of an altered body image caused by the mere awareness of having an implant may not. Other concerns will not emerge until the technology has become sophisticated enough for new uses to be realized, such as concerns on DBS for enhancement purposes. As a part of the present analysis, concerns regarding authenticity are used as an example. (shrink)

Neuroscience cannot and should not be allowed to replace normative questions with scientific onesOver the past few years considerable attention has been paid to a variety of issues that are now placed collectively under the heading of “Neuroethics”. In both the academic and the popular press there have been discussions about the possibilities and problems offered by cognitive enhancement and neuroimaging as well as debate about the implications of these emerging “neurotechnologies” for morality and the law. This issue of the (...) journal contains eight papers that discuss a broad range of important topics in neuroethics, from cognitive enhancement and the moral status of animals and cyborgs, to the challenges of neurological consults in end of life cases. As these papers demonstrate, advances in neuroscience raise a number of important ethical questions, but can neuroscience help provide any answers?FACT AND VALUEAccording to the received philosophical wisdom, there is a fundamental distinction between fact and value—between how things are and how they ought to be. On the basis of this distinction one cannot draw normative conclusions from descriptive premises because there is nothing in the premises that would warrant such conclusions: from the fact that happiness is desired it does not follow that it ought to be. This received wisdom applies to neuroethics in the following way: whereas neuroscience might be able to identify the neurophysical correlates for evaluative notions such as preferences and attitudes,1,2 lying,3 and the distinction between in control and out of control behaviour,4 neuroscience cannot, in and by itself, provide the basis for their evaluation. The reason for this is that, in the absence of factors external to these neurophysical states, one neurophysical state is no better or worse than another—internal neurophysical states are logically …. (shrink)

Classical text on Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika philosophy; with Āloka Sanskrit commentary.

Critical edition with eight commentaries, on Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika philosophy.

Classical work on the basic concepts and terminology of Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika school in Hindu philosophy; includes Phakkikā commentary by Kṣamākalyāṇagaṇi, 18th cent.

Aphoristic work on Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika school of Hindu philosophy; includes Sanskrit commentary with Hindi translation.

Aphoristic work on Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika school of Hindu philosophy; includes two Sanskrit commentaries.

Discourses on the Bhagavadgītā, Bhakti, and Hindu ethics.

Contributed research papers on Indic philosophy.

Medical Ethics, to quote the authors, is intended as a practical introduction to the ethical questions doctors and other health professionals meet. The book is divided into three main sections, Foundations, Clinical ethics and Medicine and society; each section is further subdivided into topics dealt with in a single chapter. The first section deals very well with the basic background and theories of ethics and does not lay too much stress on the well established “four principles” (chs 1 and 2). (...) I have rarely read such a seamless introduction to the underlying principles of medical ethics and teachers would do well to read this. Later chapters in this …. (shrink)