BackgroundInnovations in technology have contributed to rapid changes in the way that modern biomedical research is carried out. Researchers are increasingly required to endorse adaptive and flexible approaches to accommodate these innovations and comply with ethical, legal and regulatory requirements. This paper explores how Dynamic Consent may provide solutions to address challenges encountered when researchers invite individuals to participate in research and follow them up over time in a continuously changing environment.MethodsAn interdisciplinary workshop jointly organised by the University of Oxford (...) and the COST Action CHIP ME gathered clinicians, researchers, ethicists, lawyers, research participants and patient representatives to discuss experiences of using Dynamic Consent, and how such use may facilitate the conduct of specific research tasks. The data collected during the workshop were analysed using a content analysis approach.ResultsDynamic Consent can provide practical, sustainable and future-proof solutions to challenges related to participant recruitment, the attainment of informed consent, participant retention and consent management, and may bring economic efficiencies.ConclusionsDynamic Consent offers opportunities for ongoing communication between researchers and research participants that can positively impact research. Dynamic Consent supports inter-sector, cross-border approaches and large scale data-sharing. Whilst it is relatively easy to set up and maintain, its implementation will require that researchers re-consider their relationship with research participants and adopt new procedures. (shrink)

In Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics and related works, the notion of a proposition plays an important role; it is by analyzing propositions, showing what kinds of constituents they have, that Russell arrives at his core logical concepts. At this time, his conception of proposition contains both a conventional and an unconventional part. The former is the view that propositions are the ultimate truth-bearers; the latter is the view that the constituents of propositions are “worldly” entities. In the latter (...) respect, Russellian propositions are akin to states-of-affairs on some robust understanding of these entities. The idea of Russellian propositions is well known, at least in outline. Not so well known is his treatment of truth, which nevertheless grows directly out of this notion of proposition. For the early Russell, the import of truth is primarily metaphysical, rather than semantic; reversing the usual direction of explanation, he holds that truth is explanatory of what is the case rather than vice versa. That is, what properties a thing has and what relations it bears to other things is determined, metaphysically speaking, by there being a suitable array of true and false propositions. In the present paper, this doctrine is examined for its content and motivation. To show that it plays a genuine role in Russell’s early metaphysics and logic, I examine its consequences for the possibility of truth-definitions and the problem of the unity of the proposition. I shall draw a few somewhat tentative conclusions about where Russell stood vis-à-vis his metaphysics of propositions, suggesting a possible source of dissatisfaction that may have played a role in his eventual rejection of his early notion of proposition. (shrink)

Logic as Universal Science offers a detailed reconstruction of the underlying philosophy in The Principles of Mathematics showing how Russell sought to deliver a death blow to the dominant Kantian view that formal logic is a concise and dry science and unable to enlarge our understanding.

Personalized medicine aims to tailor disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to individuals on the basis of their genes, lifestyle and environments. Patient and interest organizations may potentially play an important role in the realization of PM. This paper investigates the views and perspectives on PM of a variety of PIOs. Semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted among leading representatives of 13 PIOs located in Europe and North-America. The data collected were analysed using a conventional content analysis approach. The PIO representatives supported (...) the realization of PM but feared that many financial, structural and organizational challenges may delay its realization. They encouraged strategies to modernize drug licencing mechanisms, develop research and data sharing infrastructures, and educate patients and health care professionals in PM. Notably, they emphasized the importance of developing PM in an equitable way and taking into consideration the patients’ needs, values and personal situation. Despite varying levels of awareness regarding PM, the PIO representatives expressed willingness to engage in the PM agenda and recommended that PIOs work closely with policy-makers to design PM in a way that truly addresses the needs and concerns of patients. PIOs have the potential to become central drivers of the PM agenda. Collaborations should be further developed between PIOs, researchers, drug developers and health care authorities. (shrink)

In this book, fourteen international authors across various fields analyze the concept of chiasm and its role in human perception and experience, discussing the work of major philosophers like Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze, and adapting their ideas to cultural analysis.

In Bertrand Russell’s "The Principles of Mathematics" and related works, the notion of a proposition plays an important role; it is by analyzing propositions,showing what kinds of constituents they have, that Russell arrives at his core logical concepts. At this time, his conception of proposition contains both a conventional and an unconventional part. The former is the view that propositions are the ultimate truth-bearers; the latter is the view that the constituents of propositions are “worldly” entities. In the latter respect, (...) Russellian propositions are akin to states-of-affairs on some robust understanding of these entities. The idea of Russellian propositions is well known, at least in outline. Not so well known is his treatment of truth, which nevertheless grows directly out of this notion of proposition. For the early Russell, the import of truth is primarily metaphysical, rather than semantic; reversing the usual direction of explanation, he holds that truth is explanatory of what is the case rather than vice versa. That is, what properties a thing has and what relations it bears to other things is determined, metaphysically speaking, by there being a suitable array of true and false propositions. In the present paper, this doctrine is examined for its content and motivation. To show that it plays a genuine role in Russell’s early metaphysics and logic, I examine its consequences for (1) the possibility of truth-definitions and (2) the problem of the unity of the proposition. I shall draw a few somewhat tentative conclusions about where Russell stood vis-à-vis his metaphysics of propositions, suggesting a possible source of dissatisfaction that may have played a role in his eventual rejection of his early notion of proposition. (shrink)

It has been suggested that both performance and academic well-being play a role in adolescent students’ educational attainment and school dropout. In this study, we therefore examined, first, what kinds of academic well-being (i.e., school burnout, schoolwork engagement, and mathematics self-concept) and mathematics performance profiles can be identified among lower secondary school students ( N grade 7 = 583, N grade 9 = 497); second, how stable these profiles are across one school year during the seventh and ninth grades; and, (...) third, how students with different academic well-being and mathematics performance profiles differ with respect to their educational aspirations. By means of latent profile analyses, three groups of students in seventh grade: thriving (34%), average (51%), and negative academic well-being (15%) and four groups of students in ninth grade: thriving (25%), average (50%), negative academic well-being (18%), and low-performing (7%) with distinct well-being and mathematics performance profiles were identified. Configural frequency analyses revealed that the profiles were relatively stable across one school year; 60% of the students displayed identical profiles over time. The thriving students reported the highest educational aspirations compared to the other groups. In addition, the low-performing students in the ninth grade had the lowest educational aspirations just before the transition to upper secondary school. Practical implications as well as directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Finland is internationally known as one of the leading centers of twentieth century analytic philosophy. This volume offers for the first time an overall survey of the Finnish analytic school. The rise of this trend is illustrated by original articles of Edward Westermarck, Eino Kaila, Georg Henrik von Wright, and Jaakko Hintikka. Contributions of Finnish philosophers are then systematically discussed in the fields of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, history of philosophy, ethics and social philosophy. Metaphilosophical reflections on (...) the nature of philosophy are highlighted by the Finnish dialogue between analytic philosophy, phenomenology, pragmatism, and critical theory. (shrink)

We examine recent evolution in corporate responsibility in the forest industry, an important natural-resource-based industry which is under rapid internationalisation and structural change under challenging financial pressures. We address two recent trends in corporate communication: corporate disclosure, that is the adoption of consistent external reporting standards [namely the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) ], and the growing awareness of engagement with and impact on local communities through philanthropy, generation of prosperity, communication and the social impact of core activities. This study uses (...) a comparative qualitative case approach to forest industry multinational enterprises (MNEs) based on a combination of secondary (reporting, company newsletters and other documentation) and interview data. Three large-scale multinational forest industry firms, all pursuing different strategies in terms of internationalisation and geographical and product diversification, were chosen for the study: Stora Enso, SCA and Sappi Ltd. Our results show that the overall quality of sustainability reporting has improved in these companies from 2005 to 2009 with the adoption of GRI. However, based on our fourfold categorisation of social impact, the core social impact indicator in GRI (SO1) has been interpreted very differently in these MNEs, and the adoption of GRI has not actually much improved the comparability of the reports or transparency of practices. (shrink)

We examine recent evolution in corporate responsibility in the forest industry, an important natural‐resource‐based industry which is under rapid internationalisation and structural change under challenging financial pressures. We address two recent trends in corporate communication: corporate disclosure, that is the adoption of consistent external reporting standards [namely the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) ], and the growing awareness of engagement with and impact on local communities through philanthropy, generation of prosperity, communication and the social impact of core activities. This study uses (...) a comparative qualitative case approach to forest industry multinational enterprises (MNEs) based on a combination of secondary (reporting, company newsletters and other documentation) and interview data. Three large‐scale multinational forest industry firms, all pursuing different strategies in terms of internationalisation and geographical and product diversification, were chosen for the study: Stora Enso, SCA and Sappi Ltd. Our results show that the overall quality of sustainability reporting has improved in these companies from 2005 to 2009 with the adoption of GRI. However, based on our fourfold categorisation of social impact, the core social impact indicator in GRI (SO1) has been interpreted very differently in these MNEs, and the adoption of GRI has not actually much improved the comparability of the reports or transparency of practices. (shrink)

This study presents original evidence that abstract and concrete concepts are organized and represented differently in the mind, based on analyses of thousands of concepts in publicly available data sets and computational resources. First, we show that abstract and concrete concepts have differing patterns of association with other concepts. Second, we test recent hypotheses that abstract concepts are organized according to association, whereas concrete concepts are organized according to (semantic) similarity. Third, we present evidence suggesting that concrete representations are more (...) strongly feature-based than abstract concepts. We argue that degree of feature-based structure may fundamentally determine concreteness, and we discuss implications for cognitive and computational models of meaning. (shrink)

This paper attempts to bridge business ethics to corporate social responsibility including the social and environmental dimensions. The objective of the paper is to suggest a conceptual methodology with which ethics of corporate environmental management tools can be considered. The method includes two stages that are required for a shift away from the current dominant unsustainable paradigm and toward a more sustainable paradigm. The first stage is paradigmatic, metaphoric and normative. The second stage is a practical stage, which in turn, (...) is analytic, descriptive and positive. The method is applied to common industrial metabolism tools of ecological footprints (EF), environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) and industrial ecology (IE). The application shows that all three tools can be used in business ethics, in particular, when the first stage of the method is applied to their use. (shrink)

The key stakeholders of the Finnish engineering education collaborated during 2006–09 to reform the system of education, to face the challenges of the changing business environment and to create a national strategy for the Finnish engineering education. The work process was carried out using participatory work methods. Impacts of sustainable development (SD) on engineering education were analysed in one of the subprojects. In addition to participatory workshops, the core part of the work on SD consisted of a research with more (...) than 60 interviews and an extensive literature survey. This paper discusses the results of the research and the work process of the Collaboration Group in the subproject of SD. It is suggested that enhancing systematic dialogue among key stakeholders using participatory work methods is crucial in increasing motivation and commitment in incorporating SD in engineering education. Development of the context of learning is essential for improving skills of engineering graduates in some of the key abilities related to SD: systemic- and life-cycle thinking, ethical understanding, collaborative learning and critical reflection skills. This requires changing of the educational paradigm from teacher-centred to learner-centred applying problem- and project-oriented active learning methods. (shrink)

Since its publication in 1967, van Heijenoort’s paper, “Logic as Calculus and Logic as Language” has become a classic in the historiography of modern logic. According to van Heijenoort, the contrast between the two conceptions of logic provides the key to many philosophical issues underlying the entire classical period of modern logic, the period from Frege’s Begriffsschrift (1879) to the work of Herbrand, Gödel and Tarski in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The present paper is a critical reflection on (...) some aspects of van Heijenoort’s thesis. I concentrate on the case of Frege and Russell and the claim that their philosophies of logic are marked through and through by acceptance of the universalist conception of logic, which is an integral part of the view of logic as language. Using the so-called “Logocentric Predicament” (Henry M. Sheffer) as an illustration, I shall argue that the universalist conception does not have the consequences drawn from it by the van Heijenoort tradition. The crucial element here is that we draw a distinction between logic as a universal science and logic as a theory. According to both Frege and Russell, logic is first and foremost a universal science, which is concerned with the principles governing inferential transitions between propositions; but this in no way excludes the possibility of studying logic also as a theory, i.e., as an explicit formulation of (some) of these principles. Some aspects of this distinction will be discussed. (shrink)