The review system on research with human participants in the Netherlands is characterised as a decentralised controlled and integrated peer review system. It consists of an independent governmental body, the Central Committee on Research Involving Human Subjects (or Central Committee), which regulates the review of research proposals by accredited Medical Research Ethics Committees (MRECs). The legal basis was founded in 1999 with the Medical Research Involving Human Subjects Act. The review system is a decentralised arrangement since most research proposal are (...) reviewed by the 30 accredited MRECs in the country. It is a controlled system in which the Central Committee is responsible for the accreditation and oversight of the MRECs and can make legally binding directives for these committees. The assessment of research proposals is an integrated peer review process in which all documents of the research file are reviewed by experts in one committee only. A small number of research proposals are assessed by the Central Committee and not by accredited MRECs. These proposals are on specific research categories such as gene therapy, cell therapy and embryo research. The review of research with surplus human embryos is regulated separately in the Embryos Act. The Central Committee provides support to the accredited MRECs and to researchers and sponsors. It is currently developing an internet portal to reduce the bureaucracy and make the review process more efficient and transparent. The Central Committee stimulates confidence on medical research in society by providing a public trial registry with core data on reviewed research proposals. (shrink)

This article provides an introduction to what the Old Testament has to say regarding displacement and displaced people – refugees, migrants and the marginalized members of society. It surveys the instructions regarding the correct attitude and protective actions owed to ‘the stranger’ found in the Old Testament Law and it points to the divine preference to side with the suffering and the vulnerable evident in the Old Testament Prophets. Although not an exhaustive treatment of Old Testament passages tackling this topic, (...) the discussion helps make clear the fact that God is particularly concerned with justice and care for the disadvantaged members of the society, including aliens, refugees and migrants. The conclusion of the article calls the readers to consider some of the missiological-ethical implications of such concern in our contexts today. (shrink)

This collection, in the genre of a Festschrift presented in honor of Elizabeth G. Salmon by her colleagues at Fordham University, comprises twelve scholarly essays of uniform excellence, all of them original to this volume. They range rather broadly over the whole history of Western man’s grappling with the question of God—from Plato’s hesitancy to give ultimacy to the Forms to Dewey’s discerning a role for God in the search for human meaning. In between is Avicenna’s understanding of intellect, Descartes’ (...) Cogito, Hegel’s critique of Kant, Marcel’s intuition of being as mystery, the Transcendental Thomists: Rahner’s and Lonergan’s metaphysics of spirit and Maréchal’s argument for God, and Peirce’s neglected argument from Erkenntnislehre as instinct more basic than reasoning. Unification comes from the fact that these are all exercises in the philosophy of God, an activity viewed here as retaining a certain contiguity with theology and religious history. No one school of philosophical thought serves to unify the essays; nearly all are represented, with the exception of any explicit use of Process Thought or of the new natural theology believed to be deriving from Analytical Philosophy, beyond Flew and MacIntyre. (shrink)

> Wealthy nations must do much more, much faster. The United Nations General Assembly in September 2021 will bring countries together at a critical time for marshalling collective action to tackle the global environmental crisis. They will meet again at the biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, and the climate conference 26) in Glasgow, UK. Ahead of these pivotal meetings, we—the editors of health journals worldwide—call for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of nature (...) and protect health. Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades.1 The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5°C above the preindustrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.2 3 Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with COVID-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions. Reflecting the severity of the moment, this editorial appears in health journals across the world. We are united in recognising that only fundamental and equitable changes to societies will reverse our current trajectory. The risks to health of increases above 1.5°C are now well established.2 Indeed, no temperature rise is ‘safe’. In the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among people aged over 65 has increased by more than 50%.4 Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.5 6 Harms disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including children, older populations, ethnic minorities, poorer communities and those with underlying health problems.2 4 Global heating is also contributing to the decline in …. (shrink)

What is the value of an early diagnosis of dementia in the absence of effective treatment? There has been a lively scholarly debate over this question, but until now patients have not played a large role in it. Our study supplements biomedical research into innovative diagnostics with an exlporation of its meanings and values according to patients. Based on seven focusgroups with patients and their care-givers, we conclude that stakeholders evaluate early diagnostics with respect to whether and how they expect (...) it to empower their capacity to care. They value it, for instance, with respect to whether it explains experienced complaints, allows to start a process of psychological acceptance and social adaptation to the expected degeneration, contributes to dealing with anxieties, informs adequately about when to start preparing for the end of life, informs the planning of a request for euthanasia, or allows society to deal with a growing amount of dementia patients. Our study suggests that information about disease is considered ‘harmful’ or ‘premature’ when recipients feel unable to act on that information in their care. The results of this research offers input to further ethical research. It invites to adopt a care perspective in evaluation and to seek ways to prevent the ‘harm’ that such diagnostic methods can bring about. (shrink)

This lecture is divided, roughly, into three parts. First, there is a general and perhaps rather simple-minded discussion of what are the ‘facts’ that social anthropologists study; is there anything special about these ‘facts’ which makes them different from other kinds of facts? It will be useful to start with the common-sense distinction between two kinds or, better, aspects of social facts; first—though neither is analytically prior to the other—and putting it very crudely, ‘what people do’, the aspect of social (...) interaction, and second, ‘what—and how—people think’, the conceptual, classifying, cognitive component of human culture. Now in reality, of course , these two aspects are inextricably intertwined. But it is essential to distinguish them analytically, because each aspect gives rise to quite different kinds of problems of understanding for the social anthropologist. We shall see that the problem of how to be ‘objective’, and so to avoid ethnographic error, arises in both contexts, but in rather different forms in each. (shrink)

My object in this paper is to suggest a few reflections on some themes in Bentham's work which others as well as I have noted, without perhaps developing them as fully as might with advantage be done. There will be nothing like full development in the limited compass of what is said here, but what is said may at least indicate possible directions for further exploration. The greater part of the paper will be concerned with the notion of natural authority; (...) but I want to begin by taking a broader, though no doubt rather superficial, view of the role in Bentham's thinking of the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’. (shrink)

The object of this article is to examine, with the work of Jeremy Bentham as the principal example, one strand in the complex pattern of European social theory during the second half of the eighteenth century. This was of course the period not only of the American and French revolutions, but of the culmination of the movements of thought constituting what we know as the Enlightenment. Like all great historical episodes, the Enlightenment was both the fulfilment of long-established processes and (...) the inauguration of new processes of which the fulfilment lay in the future. Thus the seminal ideas of seventeenth-century rationalism realized and perhaps exhausted their potentialities in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The ideas with which this article is concerned, however—conveniently grouped and labelled as the ideas of utilitarianism—only began to achieve systematic development in these later decades of the eighteenth century. Within that period—during the first half and more of Bentham's long life—attempts to apply those ideas to the solution of social problems met largely with failure and frustration. Yet unrealized potentialities remained, the realization of which was reserved for a time when the world of the philosophes no longer existed. The movements for social and political reform which have played so large a part in modern history since the French Revolution may be judged in widely differing ways; but whatever the verdict, these movements surely cannot be understood without due consideration of that part of their origins which lies in eighteenth-century utilitarianism. (shrink)

This imposing textbook bears the subtitle, "Readings in Metaphysics from Classical Philosophy to Existentialism," and appears to be uniquely designed for courses in metaphysics as taught in predominantly Catholic colleges and universities, although the selections reflect a distinct catholicity of concerns. In fact, when Bertrand Russell, A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap get wind that some of their most polemical and positivistic pieces have been reprinted in a book of metaphysics, they are likely to reflect that Ecumenism has gone too (...) far. Their inclusion is justified, however, by the introductory assertion that "There is such a thing as antimetaphysical metaphysics, and empiricism specializes in this theory." But whatever the merits of this statement, the open-minded inclusion in this volume of spokesmen for "the opposition" is certainly to be applauded—the more so since this section contains a long and perceptive introduction by Jerzy Wojciechowski. Other sections of the book display classical and Christian thought on knowledge, being, God, potency and act; the dialectical tradition ; American pragmatism and naturalism ; and existentialism and phenomenology as represented by Heidegger, Sartre, Tillich, Marcel, Berdyaev and Buber. In addition to the generally good introductions to each of the five sections, the editors have provided glossaries of philosophical terms, lists of topics for discussions and term papers, and usually well-chosen "recommended readings."—H. P. K. (shrink)

By the death, last summer, of Jack Robson, the world of utilitarian studies and a wider world of scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic lost one of their most distinguished figures. It would not be appropriate here, even if it were possible now, to attempt a full and measured assessment of his work. Writing only a few months after the news of his death, while the sense of loss is still so sharp for all his many friends, two things (...) are possible. Something can and should be said to acknowledge and celebrate Robson's achievement as a scholar; and to this can be added some personal recollections of one whose human qualities were as outstanding as his scholarship. (shrink)

The full range of Bentham's engagement with Blackstone's view of law is beyond the scope of a single article. Yet it is important to recognize at the outset, even in a more restricted enquiry into the matter, that the engagement, begun when Bentham, not quite sixteen years of age, started to attend Blackstone's Oxford lectures, was indeed a lifelong affair. Whatever Bentham had in mind when, at the age of eighty, in 1828, he began to write a work entitled ‘A (...) familar view of Blackstone: or say Blackstone familiarized’, the manuscripts at least suffice to prove that ‘Our Author’ was still in the forefront of his mind at that octogenarian but still indefatigably active stage of his career. Every aspect of Bentham's multifarious intellectual activity over the intervening decades had been touched in some measure by his response to Blackstone's ideas. It still seems true to say what was said a dozen years ago: It would be an exaggeration to say that Bentham elaborated his own conception of law by way of a constant and conscious dialectic with the views of Blackstone. But it would be an exaggeration for which the evidence would afford some excuse. (shrink)

According to familiar accounts, Rousseau held that humans are actuated by two distinct kinds of self love: amour de soi, a benign concern for one's self-preservation and well-being; and amour-propre, a malign concern to stand above other people, delighting in their despite. I argue that although amour-propre can (and often does) assume this malign form, this is not intrinsic to its character. The first and best rank among men that amour-propre directs us to claim for ourselves is that of occupying (...) 'man's estate'. This does not require, indeed it precludes, subjection of others. Amour-propre does not need suppression or circumscription if we are to live good lives; it rather requires direction to its proper end, not a delusive one. (shrink)

Reason and quest for revelation, by P. Tillich.--On the ontological mystery, by G. Marcel.--The problem of non-objectifying thinking and speaking, by M. Heidegger.--The problem of natural theology, by J. Macquarrie.--Metaphysical rebellion, by A. Camus.--Psychoanalysis and religion by E. Fromm.--Why I am not a Christian, by B. Russell.--The quest for being, by S. Hook.--The sacred and the profane; a dialectical understanding of Christianity, by T. J. J. Altizer.--Three strata of meaning in religious discourse by C. Hartshorne.--The theological task, by J. (...) B. Cobb.--Theology and objectivity, by S. A. Ogden.--Can faith validate God-talk? by K. Nielsen.--The logic of God, by J. Wisdom.--Mapping the logic of models in science and theology, by F. Ferré.--On understanding mystery, by I. T. Ramsey.--Teilhard de Chardin; a philosophy of precession, by E. R. Baltazar.--The nature of apologetics, by H. Bouillard.--Metaphysics as horizon, by B. Lonergan.--Deciding whether to believe, by M. Novak. (shrink)

La vie et les oeuvres de J. H. Newman ont suscité de nombreux et importants travaux. L'étude de l'homme lui-même a servi de thème à plusieurs ouvrages ; on a cherché à discerner dans son tempérament la raison de l'originalité de son œuvre ou de l'étendue de son influence ; ailleurs on nous a fait connaitre l'historien, le philosophe, le théologien, mais de tous ces Newman divers, l'éducateur est resté le plus ignoré. Cette constatation fut le point de départ de (...) la présente étude. Or l'éducation, cette activité privilégiée, a si bien été le centre même de la vie de Newman, qu'à elle nous devons non seulement un de ses chefs-d'œuvre les plus achevés, (malheureusement trop peu connu de ceux qui se réclament du Newman du Développement ou de l'Assentiment, voire de celui de l'Apologia), mais presque toutes ses œuvres. Il n'a que bien rarement, peut-être jamais, écrit pour écrire ; il a écrit pour enseigner, et à son âme d'éducateur est dû le caractère particulier de son oeuvre. (shrink)

In several accounts of what models are and how they function a specific view dominates. This view contains the following characteristics. First, there is a clear-cut distinction between theories, models and data and secondly, empirical assessment takes place after the model is built. This view in which discovery and justification are disconnected is not in accordance with several practices of mathematical business-cycle model building. What these practices show is that models have to meet implicit criteria of adequacy, such as satisfying (...) theoretical, mathematical and statistical requirements, and be useful for policy. In order to be adequate, models have to integrate enough items to satisfy such criteria. These items include besides theoretical notions, policy views, mathematisations of the cycle and metaphors also empirical data and facts. So, the main thesis of this chapter is that the context of discovery is the successful integration of those items that satisfy the criteria of adequacy. Because certain items are empirical data and facts, justification can be built-in. (shrink)