This article presents standards for setting up and educating institutional ethics committees (IECs). These standards are based on experiences in the Netherlands, where IECs have been established in a large number of health care institutions. Though the IEC has become a generally accepted institution within Dutch health care, there are concerns over its effectiveness regarding the improving of the moral quality of clinical decision making. Health care practitioners and members of IECs too, experience a gap between the IEC and the (...) reality of the clinical environment. At this moment, there is interest in developing programmes which educate practitioners in moral issues and how to deal with them, using the method of a structured debate on the ward. The IEC will not be made obsolete by this development, but can play a guiding role in the implementation of such programmes. Current concerns are the lack of patient representation in the Dutch IEC, and the loss of contact with the local community of health care practitioners because of the merger of hospitals into bodies similar to UK National Health Service (NHS) trusts. (shrink)

BackgroundAn ethics reflection group is one of a number of ethics support services developed to better handle ethical challenges in healthcare. The aim of this article is to evaluate the significance of ERGs in psychiatric and general hospital departments in Denmark.MethodsThis is a qualitative action research study, including systematic text condensation of 28 individual interviews and 4 focus groups with clinicians, ethics facilitators and ward managers. Short written descriptions of the ethical challenges presented in the ERGs also informed the (...) analysis of significance.ResultsA recurring ethical challenge for clinicians, in a total of 63 cases described and assessed in 3 ethical reflection groups, is to strike a balance between respect for patient autonomy, paternalistic responsibility, professional responsibilities and institutional values. Both in psychiatric and general hospital departments, the study participants report a positive impact of ERG, which can be divided into three categories: 1) Significance for patients, 2) Significance for clinicians, and 3) Significance for ward managers. In wards characterized by short-time patient admissions, the cases assessed were retrospective and the beneficiaries of improved dialogue mainly future patients rather than the patients discussed in the specific ethical challenge presented. In wards with longer admissions, the patients concerned also benefitted from the dialogue in the ERG.ConclusionThis study indicates a positive significance and impact of ERGs; constituting an interdisciplinary learning resource for clinicians, creating significance for themselves, the ward managers and the organization. By introducing specific examples, this study indicates that ERGs have significance for the patients discussed in the specific ethical challenge, but mostly indirectly through learning among clinicians and development of clinical practice. More research is needed to further investigate the impact of ERGs seen from the perspectives of patients and relatives. (shrink)

Caring for older persons is both rewarding and consuming. Work with older people in Finland has been shown to be more burdensome than in the other Nordic countries. The aim of this study was to try out a Finnish version of the Stress of Conscience Questionnaire (SCQ) and explore stress of conscience in staff caring for older persons in Finland. The data were collected from the nursing staff (n = 350) working with older people in health centre wards, municipal and (...) private nursing homes, and municipal and private dementia care units in Finland. It emerged clearly from the results that Finnish nursing staff mostly felt that they did not have enough time to provide good care to patients, and this gave them a troubled conscience. They also felt that the demanding work taxed their energy, a consequence being that they could not give their own families and loved ones the attention they would have liked. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Lived Experience and Cognitive Science Reappraising Enactivism’s Jonasian Turn” by Mario Villalobos & Dave Ward. Upshot: I shall not address directly the article on which I am supposed to comment, and that I find very interesting, but I shall make four commentaries on the general subject of the confusion of domains in our reflection on biological and cultural phenomena.

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

This article sheds new light on late-19th-century debates about the organization of knowledge through its emphasis on German orientalism and comparative linguistics. Centering on Friedrich Carl Andreas’ (1846–1930) controversial reconstruction of the Avestan language and its sacred literary corpus, I highlight a shift from the history of texts to an engagement with ‘living’ language in the decades around 1900. Andreas is shown to have inherited aspects of two schools, which collectively defined the landscape of 19th-century philological research – one traditional (...) and the other comparative. The long-standing struggle between these schools demonstrates that ‘the humanities’ were no monolithic foil to the rise of natural sciences during the second half of the 19thcentury. Instead, I argue that alternative conceptual frameworks were cultivated within German philology – concepts that were taken up in broader disciplinary debates, though they were not narrowly the products of them. (shrink)

The existence of consciousness in animals may have been overlooked. Continuity in consciousness between humans and animals is predicted by evolutionary theory. However, there are specific methodological difficulties associated with investigating such a phenomenon: it cannot be directly measured; animals, unlike humans, cannot directly tell us about their conscious experience; experiments which have made comparisons to human consciousness cannot detect consciousness of a different form; application of the law of parsimony in science has traditionally led to the conclusion that it (...) does not exist. (shrink)

Beginning with an overview of Galileo's earliest work on free fall, the paper examines the relationship between experiment and theory in his study of motion in the period immediately before and after 1604. The possible role of experiment is assessed in relation to the manuscript evidence and by means of reconstructed experiments.

The time taken to react voluntarily to a stimulus is far longer than can be accounted for by ordinary processes of nerve conduction and synaptic delay, and varies unpredictably from trial to trial. Though random, the distribution of reaction times usually follows a relatively simple law, which in turn can be explained by the LATER model, in which a decision signal, representing belief in the existence of the target, rises in response to incoming sensory evidence from an initial value to (...) a criterion level at which action is initiated. But the rate of rise fluctuates randomly from trial, to an extent that cannot be explained by sensory noise at the input. These conclusions, confirmed by recording from neurons in the frontal eye fields, suggest that the randomness of reaction time is due to a deliberate, gratuitous, neural process which confers certain biological advantages as well as having implications for general ideas about the nature of ‘free will'. (shrink)

Bernard Nieuwentijt ist in der Mathematikgeschichte bekannt als Kritiker der Leibnizschen Differentialrechnung. Im Gegensatz zu dem, was häufig angenommen wird, war die Kritik an Leibniz' Methode kein Hauptanliegen Nieuwentijts. Das Ziel seines bedeutendsten mathematischen Werks, Analysis infinitorum , war die Systematisierung und logische Deduzierung der ihm bekannten Infinitesimalmethoden, besonders derer von den Engländern wie Barrow, Wallis u. a. Das Werk Leibnizens war ihm anfangs völlig unbekannt. In dem System, das Nieuwentijt selbständig entwarf, rechnete er nicht mit Infinitesimalen höheren Grades: ihre (...) Existenz hielt er für unmöglich. Dies brachte ihn zur Kritik der Leibnizschen Methode, als er später auf dessen Werk stieß. Später aber erkannte er die Unhaltbarkeit seiner Kritik, wie klar wird aus seinem posthumen Werk Gronden van zekerheid . Der Aufsatz gibt überdies zur Fundierung dieser Thesen einen sehr kurzen Überblick über Nieuwentijts mathematische Arbeiten und eine Besprechung neuerer Interpretationen. (shrink)

Summary One aim of this paper is to provide an assessment of the recent attempts to interpret the development of Galileo's theory of motion in the late Paduan period 1604?1610. In addition to this a new interpretation of this process of development is advanced. This interpretation is the first that proves able to provide a full account of all the features on folio 152r of volume 72 of the Galilean manuscripts which has been claimed to be of crucial significance. The (...) major feature of the interpretation is that it is the first to account for the relationship between Galileo's theoretical and experimental work in the period 1604?1610. (shrink)

Recent study of Galileo's surviving manuscript notes on motion has revealed that by 1609 he had developed the major part of his theory of projectile motion. During the period of these theoretical advances Galileo was engaged in important related experimental investigations; this has become clear from the study of folios 114r and 116v of the manuscript on motion. This paper provides an interpretation of a manuscript not previously discussed—folio 81r. The analysis provided indicates that it is evidence of an important (...) early experiment of the series in which Galileo studied the projectile trajectory. The reconstruction of the experiment concerned reveals relationships with the enquiries suggested by folio 114r and 116v and indicates that Galileo examined the form of projectile trajectories with some care. (shrink)

Plato was born around 2,500 years ago. He lived in a small city-state in Greece and busied himself with the problems of his fellow Greeks, a people living in scattered cities around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In all he tried to do for the Greeks he failed. Why, then, should people in the modern world bother to read what he had to say? Does it make sense to go to a Greek thinker for advice on the problems of (...) an age so different from his own? To anyone who has questioned the relevance of Plato to the modern world Richard Crossman’s lively book provides a brilliant reply. The problems facing Plato’s world bear striking parallels to ours today, the author maintains, so who better to turn to than Plato, the most objective and most ruthless observer of the failures of Greek society. Crossman’s engaging text provides both an informed introduction to Greek ideas and an original and controversial view of Plato himself. (shrink)