In contemporary debates on euthanasia, physician assisted suicide and withholding and withdrawing life prolonging treatments, besides commonly used reasons, which are based on presumption of freedom and avoidance of pain, there is also an idea of a duty to die. Given that individuals are also members of society, and that they have families and loved ones, it is necessary to discuss cases when illness causes severe burdens for lives of loved ones. We consider that patient’s just assessment of duty to (...) die can be legitimate candidate for justification of procedure of acceleration of death, taken care of necessary conditions of justified social support for patients and necessary aliment from family and society. In this paper we examine main features of duty to die thesis, extract objections, and offer guidelines for continued discussion. We also want to express the importance of establishing social circumstances and preconditions for protecting the individuals.U suvremenim raspravama o eutanaziji i liječnički potpomognutom samoubojstvu, te odustajanju od tretmana, osim uobičajenih razloga koji se temelje na slobodi i izbjegavanju patnje osobe koja traži ubrzavanje smrti, postoji i teza o dužnosti umiranja. S obzirom na to da je pojedinac ujedno i član zajednice, odnosno da ima obitelj i voljene, nužno je raspraviti o slučajevima kada bolest izaziva značajne teškoće za život njegovih bližnjih. Smatramo kako i pacijentova pravedna prosudba o dužnosti umiranja može biti legitiman kandidat za opravdanje postupaka ubrzavanja smrti, uz nužne preduvjete pravedne društvene podrške pacijentu i dužne skrbi od strane obitelji i društva. U ovom tekstu razlažemo osnovne značajke teze o dužnosti umiranja, izdvajamo prigovore i dajemo smjernice za nastavak rasprave te izražavamo važnost ustanovljavanja društvenih okolnosti i preduvjete za zaštitu pojedinaca. (shrink)

This paper is about the notions of the artistic, aesthetic, cognitive and moral value of art and their interconnectedness. The main concern is to try to advocate the cognitivist claim about the artistic value of artworks’ contribution to the advance of knowledge, as well as for the relevance of the moral dimension for artistic value. This is a discussion of the intersection of the debate about moral and aesthetic value. The central part of the paper is focused on a debate (...) with Peter Lamarque. The problem of immoral art-works and their cognitive value is discussed at the end of this paper in order to show that they are counterexamples of the thesis of artistic relevance of the moral dimension. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.

Human languages vary in terms of which meanings they lexicalize, but this variation is constrained. It has been argued that languages are under two competing pressures: the pressure to be simple (e.g., to have a small lexicon) and to allow for informative (i.e., precise) communication, and that which meanings get lexicalized may be explained by languages finding a good way to trade off between these two pressures. However, in certain semantic domains, languages can reach very high levels of informativeness even (...) if they lexicalize very few meanings in that domain. This is due to productive morphosyntax and compositional semantics, which may allow for construction of meanings which are not lexicalized. Consider the semantic domain of natural numbers: many languages lexicalize few natural number meanings as monomorphemic expressions, but can precisely convey very many natural number meanings using morphosyntactically complex numerals. In such semantic domains, lexicon size is not in direct competition with informativeness. What explains which meanings are lexicalized in such semantic domains? We will propose that in such cases, languages need to solve a different kind of trade‐off problem: the trade‐off between the pressure to lexicalize as few meanings as possible (i.e, to minimize lexicon size) and the pressure to produce as morphosyntactically simple utterances as possible (i.e, to minimize average morphosyntactic complexity of utterances). To support this claim, we will present a case study of 128 natural languages' numeral systems, and show computationally that they achieve a near‐optimal trade‐off between lexicon size and average morphosyntactic complexity of numerals. This study in conjunction with previous work on communicative efficiency suggests that languages' lexicons are shaped by a trade‐off between not two but three pressures: be simple, be informative, and minimize average morphosyntactic complexity of utterances. (shrink)

Political discourse is primarily identified as political action, the discourse of deliberating which course of action to follow in accordance with specific political goals. A pragmatic analysis of various sub-genres of political discourse can identify the preference for particular speech acts. The first aim of this paper is to analyze commissive and expressive illocutionary acts in political speeches, as indicators of personal involvement of political speakers, notorious for vagueness and avoiding commitment. A corpus of Serbian, American and British political speeches (...) that address the issue of economic standard of living has been examined to identify commissive illocutionary acts as indicators of politicians’ explicit commitment to a chosen course of action, and expressive illocutionary acts as indicators of politicians’ explicit attitudes to their own or other politicians’ chosen practices. The analysis classifies subtypes of commissives and expressives in the corpus and identifies illocutionary force indicating devices that constitute them in English and in Serbian, after which the resulting classifications are compared and contrasted. The research results are aimed at explaining the hypothesis that a specific use/lack of commissives and expressives can be the politician’s strategy for adding credibility to their speeches, and in that way, swaying public opinion to serve the politician’s interest; conversely, establishing the relation between the use/lack of these illocutionary acts and the politician’s commitment to actions can be a method for exposing the politician’s lack of credibility and accountability. (shrink)

Purpose– The medical advances and historical fluctuations in the demographics are contributing to the rise of the average age. These changes are increasing the pressure to organize adequate care to a growing number of individuals. As a way to provide efficient and cost-effective care, eHealth systems are gaining importance. However, this trend is creating new ethical concerns. Major issues are privacy and patients’ control over their data. To deploy these systems on a large scale, they need to offer strict privacy (...) protection. Even though many research proposals focus on eHealth systems and related ethical requirements, there is an evident lack of practical solutions for protecting users’ personal information. The purpose of this study is to explore the ethical considerations related to these systems and extract the privacy requirements. This paper also aims to put forth a system design which ensures appropriate privacy protection.Design/methodology/approach– This paper investigates the existing work in the area of eHealth systems and the related ethical considerations, which establish privacy as one of the main requirements. It lists the ethical requirements and data protection standards that a system needs to fulfil and uses them as a guideline for creating the proposed design.Findings– Even though privacy is considered to be a paramount aspect of the eHealth systems, the existing proposals do not tackle this issue from the outset of the design. Consequently, introducing privacy at the final stages of the system deployment imposes significant limitations and the provided data protection is not always to the standards expected by the users.Originality/value– This paper motivates the need for addressing ethical concerns in the eHealth domain with special focus on establishing strict privacy protection. It lists the privacy requirements and offers practical solutions for developing a privacy-friendly system and takes the approach of privacy-by-design. Additionally, the proposed design is evaluated against ethical principles as proposed in the existing literature. The aim is to show that technological advances can be used to improve quality and efficiency of care, while the usually raised concerns can be avoided. (shrink)

BARBARA HERMAN, MORALITY AS RATIONALITY: A STUDY OF KANT’SETHICS, ROUTLEDGE, ABINGDON AND NEW YORK, 2016.Milica Smajević.

Zusammenfassung Die Forschungs- und Regulierungsebene bei datenintensiver Forschung in der Medizin liegen auseinander. Ein heterogenes Feld aus regulierenden Institutionen mit regional ungleichen Regelungen, sowohl hinsichtlich der Dichte als auch der Restriktivität von Regelungen, steht einer globalen Entwicklung der Technologien entgegen. Trotz oder gerade wegen mangelnder global-gültiger Regulierungen können auch unverbindliche oder nur bedingt verbindliche normative Vorgaben der Orientierung dienen. Doch wie soll eine solche normative Regulierung angesichts datenintensiver Forschung in der Medizin ausgestaltet werden und woran soll sie sich orientieren? Die (...) Frage, wie konkret und detailliert man eine solche Forschung regulieren sollte, lässt sich nur im Einzelfall für bestimmte Situationen und Institutionen beantworten. Ob dabei neue Normen oder Gewichtungen von Normen vorgenommen werden sollen, oder ob die Normen und deren Gewichtung weiterhin bestehen bleiben sollen, lässt sich nur mit Verweis auf starke normative Argumente beantworten. An zwingenden Argumenten für neue Normen angesichts der datenintensiven medizinischen Forschung mangelt es bisher. Dennoch ist eine Umsetzungsarbeit von Normen, egal ob neue oder alte, und deren Anwendung auf eine neue Methode oder Technologie allemal zu erbringen. Es bedarf daher – wie schon bisher – beider: sowohl etablierter und transparent kommunizierter Normen als auch des unabhängigen Urteils zur Anwendung dieser Normen. Angesichts der besonderen Eignung für diese Aufgabe sollten auch weiterhin Ethik-Kommissionen als prozedurale Instanz bei der Bewilligung von datenintensiver Forschung in der Medizin gefordert und befähigt werden, die als unabhängige Institution ein Urteil im Einzelfall anhand vorgegebener Normen fällen. Nichtsdestotrotz können sich die veränderten Praktiken datenintensiver Forschungsprojekte auch in neuen Anforderungen an Ethik-Kommissionen niederschlagen, denen mit Reformen der Arbeitsweise begegnet werden sollte. (shrink)

Clanak se bavi konceptualnim razjasnjenjem razlike izmedju idealne i neidealne teorije. Analiza je radjena na osnovu teorije koju je Rols prezentovao u svojim knjigama?Teorija pravde? i?Pravo naroda?. Clanak ukazuje na znacaj idealne teorije, ali istovremeno i na to da je u razliku izmedju idealne i neidealne potrebno uneti dalja odredjenja. Clanak uvodi distinkciju na normativno i deskriptivno u idealnu, tj. neidealnu teoriju. Kroz ovu cetvorostruku distinkciju lakse je utvrditi funkciju svake od teorija i razdeliti polja delovanja izmedju filozofa, pravnika i (...) politicara. (shrink)

This volume presents the theory of culture of the Russian‑born German Jewish social philosopher David Koigen (1879-1933). Heir to Hermann Cohen's neo‑Kantian interpretation of Judaism, he transforms the religion of reason into an ethical Intimitätsreligion. He draws upon a great variety of intellectual currents, among them, Max Scheler's philosophy of values, the historical sociology of Max Weber, the sociology of religion of Émile Durkheim, Ernst Troeltsch and Georg Simmel and American pragmatism. Influenced by his personal experience of marginality in German (...) academia yet the same time unconstrained by the dictates of the German Jewish discourse, Koigen shapes these theoretical strands into an original argument which unfolds along two trajectories: theodicy of culture and ethos. Distinguished from ethics, ethos identifies the non-formal factors that foster a group's sense of collective identity as it adapts to continuous change. From a Jewish perspective, ethos is grounded in the biblical covenant as the paradigm of a social contract and corporate liability. Although the normative content of the covenantal ethos is subject to gradual secularization, its metaphysical and existential assumptions, Koigen argues, continue to inform Jewish self-understanding. The concept of ethos identifies the dialectic of tradition as it shapes Jewish religious consciousness, and, in turn, is shaped by the evolving cultural and axiological sensibilities. In consonance, Jewish identity cannot be reduced to ethnicity or a purely secular culture. Urban develops these fragmentary and inchoate theories into a sociology of religious knowledge and suggests to read Koigen not just as a Jewish sociologist but as the first sociologist of Judaism who proposes to overcome the dogmatic anti-metaphysical stance of European sociology. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new classification algorithm for the partitioning of a conceptual space. All the algorithms which have been used until now have mostly been based on the theory of Voronoi diagrams. This paper proposes an approach based on potential theory, with the criteria for measuring similarities between objects in the conceptual space being based on the Newtonian potential function. The notion of a fuzzy prototype, which generalizes the previous definition of a prototype, is introduced. Furthermore, the necessary conditions (...) that a natural concept must meet are discussed. Instead of convexity, as proposed by Gärdenfors, the notion of geodesically convex sets is used. Thus, if a concept corresponds to a set which is geodesically convex, it is a natural concept. This definition applies, for example, if the conceptual space is an Euclidean space. As a by-product of the construction of the algorithm, an extension of the conceptual space to d-dimensional Riemannian manifolds is obtained. (shrink)

Just as burnout is manifested through changes in behavioural and communication patterns, it is important to examine whether certain aspects of communication can affect student burnout development. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relationship between communication and academic burnout. To achieve this, the study proposes an integrated model examining the effects of three communication dimensions – support from academic staff, support from colleagues, and participation in decision-making – on four different dimensions of academic burnout, as well as students’ overall (...) burnout. The model is tested using structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis. High coefficients of determination regarding particular burnout dimensions validate the strength of the proposed model. The results show that support from academic staff and support from fellow students significantly and negatively influence academic burnout, and might be instrumental in its reduction. Unexpectedly, participation in decision-making is shown to be positively related to academic burnout. (shrink)

Despite downsides, it must, on balance, be good to reduce prejudice. Despite upsides, collective action can also have destructive outcomes. Improving intergroup relations requires multiple levels of analysis involving a broader approach to prejudice reduction, awareness of potential conflict escalation, development of intergroup understanding, and promotion of a wider human rights perspective.

In post-independence India secularism was almost taken for granted as a defining feature of the women?s movement with its rejection of the public expression of religious and caste identities. However, already by the 1980s, the assumption that gender could be used as a unifying factor was challenged, revealing that women from different social and religious backgrounds understand and sometime use their identities in ways that are not driven necessarily by some ideology, but by more immediate concerns and even opportunism. This (...) realization opened up a debate about new strategies to tackle women?s activism, especially in light of aggressive political activism of some women associated with right-wing parties in India, which has clearly shattered the perception, held by some, of women as inherently peace-loving, whose gender identity would override their caste and religious belonging. (shrink)

It is often argued that Kant’s understanding of the right to revolution is contradictory. On the one hand, he expresses enthusiasm for the French Revolution and the ideas on which it rests, while on the other, he openly denies the existence of a legal right to revolution. This paper aims to make Kant’s position plausible by showing that he does not deny the right to revolution in all states, but only in those that fulfill the purpose for which they were (...) created, which is to protect the rights and freedoms of all citizens. (shrink)

This volume contains papers presented at the Poznań Reasoning Week multi-conference held in Poznań in September 11-15, 2018. PRW aims at bringing together experts whose research offers a broad range of perspectives on systematic analyses of reasoning processes and their formal modelling. The 2018 edition consisted of three conferences, which addressed the following topics: (i) games in reasoning research, (ii) the interplay of logic and cognition, and (iii) refutation systems. The papers collected in this volume address all these topics.

This full-scaled monograph, rich in factographic material, concerns Nārāyaṇa Guru, a founder of a powerful socio-religious movement in Kerala. He wrote in three languages, drawing on three different literary conventions. The world of this complex philosophic-religious literature is brought closer to the reader with rare deft and dexterity by the Author who not only retrieves for us the original circumstances, language and poetic metre of each work but also supplies histories of their reception. Thanks to numerous glosses, comments and elucidations (...) supplied by the Author, we can much better understand how Nārāyaṇa's mystical universe creatively relates to the Tamil OEaiva Siddhānta and to Kerala's variety of Vedānta tradition. Prof. Cezary Galewicz. (shrink)

In his early interpretation and representation of the oral teachings of the Hasidic masters, Martin Buber engaged in issues pertinent to the critique of language (Sprachkritik,) of the fin-de-siècle. Associated pre-eminently with Fritz Mauthner and his circle, the critique of language (Sprachkritik) questioned the epistemological status of language, wedded as it is to the divisive Erfahrungswelt. By drawing attention to ecstatic speech, which paradoxically gives expression to the experience (Erlebnis) of the ineffable unity of existence, Buber adumbrates a solution to (...) the cognitive limitations of language. Refracted through Lebensphilosophie, he distinguishes between language as bound to Erfahrung and speech as nurtured by Erlebnis. Whereas language is propelled by conceptual and propositional forms of cognition, speech, principally sustained by metaphors evoked by an experience of the noumenal. Through an examination of his interpretive translation of a well-known Hasidic parable, this article explores how he amplifies this distinction by means of a semantic transformation of the key mystical metaphor of 'ahizat ' enayim (lit. seizing the eyes). Discerning the hermeneutical layers of Buber's rendition of the parable, we argue that his own ambiguous propositional casting of the metaphor entraps him into the very problem he sought to overcome. /// O presente artigo tem como ponto de partida o facto de que na interpretação e representação que dos mestres do Hasidismo fez logo na primeira fase da sua actividade como intelectual, Martin Buber assumiu como próprias questões especialmente pertinentes para uma crítica da linguagem (Sprachkritik) típica da época fin-de-siècle. Associada de modo particular a Fritz Mauthner e ao seu círculo, a Sprachkritik interrogava-se sobretudo acerca do estatuto epistemológico da linguagem, conectada como ela estava com uma Erfahrungswelt que era, desde logo, fonte de divisão. Nesse sentido, a autora do artigo defende que ao chamar a atenção para o discurso ecstático, o qual de modo paradoxal dá expressão à experiência (Erlebnis,) da unidade inefável da existência, Martin Buber pretende fazer vir ao de cima uma solução para o problema das limitações cognitivas da linguagem. Com efeito, mediante recurso à Lebensphilosophie, Buber distingue entre linguagem enquanto ligada à Erfahrung e discurso enquanto que propriamente alimentado pela Erlebnis. Ou seja, Buber reconhece que a linguagem esta animada por formas conceptuais e proposicionais de cognição, ao passo que o discurso aparece sobretudo sustentado por metáforas evocadas por uma experiência do noumenal Em suma, ao focar a sua atenção numa análise da tradução interpretativa que Buber faz de uma bem conhecida parábola Hasídica, o presente artigo explora de que modo o pensador judeu amplifica esta distinção mediante uma transformação semântica da principal metáfora mística do 'ahizaí 'enayim, ou seja, literalmente, da confiscação dos olhos. Tudo isso de modo a discernir os estratos hermenêuticos da interpretação buberiana da parábola, acabando a autora por mostrar de que modo Martin Buber ao dar uma forma propo-sicional ambígua à metáfora acabou por se encerrar no exacto problema que, desde logo, tinha procurado ultrapassar. (shrink)

Der Band versammelt grundlegende Studien zur Klassik- und Psychoanalyse-Rezeption Edith Steins. Texte, Kommentare und Dokumente erläutern die Denkarbeit der Karmelitin, aber auch ihren Literaturbrief von 1932. Ohne die hier aufgezeigten Fundamente ist weder der Karmel- noch der Wissenschaftsweg Edith Steins angemessen verständlich.

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the recurring concepts emerging in a transnational social-media arena focusing on Brexit in the period immediately after the June 2016 referendum. It mainly focuse...

Um das Ansehen von medizinischen Forschern ist es in der westlichen Welt nicht überall gut bestellt. In den 1990er-Jahren gelangte das Thema »Medizinischer Forschungsbetrug« erstmals in den USA in das öffentliche Bewusstsein. Eine Debatte um begünstigende Strukturen und denkbare Kontrollinstrumente zur Eindämmung von Missbrauch entbrannte – in Deutschland blieb ein solcher Diskurs bis zur Jahrhundertwende zunächst aus. Der Band nimmt wissenschaftlich arbeitende Ärzte, die ethischen Anforderungen, denen sie sich ausgesetzt sehen, und das System, in dem sie arbeiten, in den Fokus. (...) Stella Elaine Urbans Analyse von Betrugsfällen deckt wissenschaftsimmanente und individuelle Fallstricke auf, die unredliche Forschung begünstigen. Es zeigt sich, dass die wissenschaftliche Integrität unterstützt und geschützt werden muss, um das Vertrauen in die Medizin wiederherzustellen. (shrink)

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)