Many countries have adopted new triage recommendations for use in the event that intensive care beds become scarce during the COVID‐19 pandemic. In addition to establishing the exact criteria regarding whether treatment for a newly arriving patient shows a sufficient likelihood of success, it is also necessary to ask whether patients already undergoing treatment whose prospects are low should be moved into palliative care if new patients with better prospects arrive. This question has led to divergent ethical guidelines. This paper (...) explores the distinction between withholding and withdrawing medical treatment during times of scarcity. As a first central point, the paper argues that a revival of the ethical distinction between doing and allowing would have a revisionary impact on cases of voluntary treatment withdrawal. A second systematic focus lies in the concern that withdrawal due to scarcity might be considered a physical transgression and therefore more problematic than not treating someone in the first place. In light of the persistent disagreement, especially concerning the second issue, the paper concludes with two pragmatic proposals for how to handle the ethical uncertainty: (1) triage protocols should explicitly require that intensive care attempts are designed as time‐limited trials based on specified treatment goals, and this intent should be documented very clearly at the beginning of each treatment; and (2) lower survival prospects can be accepted for treatments that have already begun, compared with the respective triage rules for the initial access of patients to intensive care. (shrink)

The temporal granularity of consciousness may be far less fine than the real-time information processing mechanisms that underlie our sensitivity to small temporal differences. It is suggested that conscious time perception, like space perception, is subject to errors that belie a unitary underlying representation. E. R. Clay's concept of the “specious present,” an extended moment represented in consciousness, is suggested as an alternative to the more common notion of instantaneous experience that underlies much reasoning based on the “ (...) class='Hi'>time of arrival” in consciousness. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWeaving between anecdote, memoir and ‘empty time’, this fictional conversation with the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich, stages another genre of philosophy that would be, like her polyphonic style of documentary writing, not heroic as much as intimate. Set in Athens, while reaching towards Siberia, the conversation moves between the wartime 1940s and the late 2010s, gently broaching taboos of philosophical discourse: confession, ‘personal life’, memoir, love, family relations, doubt, fear, audience, and the (...) time and place of writing, to arrive at a bare space of philosophical address, where nothing much happens except time passing. At once classically philosophical in its search for a form of life truthful to the Heraclitean dictum to search oneself, and to Rousseauvian and Cartesian gestures of meditation and reverie, the essay also offers a language for thinking the textures and movements of thought – its quiet choreography. (shrink)

The issue of the time of intrinsic value focuses on the time during which a state has a level of intrinsic value. This is distinct from the time that desert makes a state of affairs good or bad (time of desert) and the time that statements about desert are true or false (time of the desert statement). To arrive at this conclusion, I assumed that intrinsic value is a function of desert-adjusted well-being. Both desert (...) and well-being should be understood as contemporaneous properties that occur at a particular moment in time. Hence, the time of intrinsic value is a point in time since the relevant property occurs at a point, albeit one that refers to the past. This result is significant because it relates to the dual-ledger account of intrinsic value. On one version of this account, desert is treated as similar to credits and well-being as similar to debits. It thus presents a tidy and intuitively appealing account of intrinsic value at a time and across times and persons. (shrink)

To improve the intelligence of urban and rural buses, it is necessary to realize the accurate prediction of bus arrival time. This paper first introduced urban and rural buses. Then, the arrival time prediction was divided into two parts: road travel time and stop time, and they were predicted by the support vector regression method and k-nearest neighbor (KNN) method. A section of a bus route in Pingdingshan city of Henan province was taken as (...) an example for analysis. The results showed that the method designed in this study had better accuracy, and the result was closer to the actual value, with a maximum error of 84 s, a minimum error of 10 s, an average error of 42.5 s, and an average relative error of 5.74%, which could meet the needs of passengers. The results verify the reliability of the designed method in predicting the arrival time of urban and rural buses, which can be popularized and applied in practice. (shrink)

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 428-433, September 2022.

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 428-433, September 2022.

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

The central character of Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film Arrival, Dr. Louise Banks, is a linguist tasked with deciphering a logographic alien language in time to avert a seemingly impending global war. I argue that the alien heptapods' logographs exemplify the understanding of language advanced by Jacques Derrida in seminal texts such as Of Grammatology, while also engaging some of the themes concerning time and gift-giving that he develops in later, more explicitly political works. Derrida argues that written (...) signifiers, rather than being a mere vehicle for representing speech, confer their own, supplemental meaning onto communication. Furthermore, he emphasizes that writing is not bound by the same linear temporality as spoken utterances, inasmuch as it is inscribed in a format which allows it to be revisited repeatedly. The significance of this disruption of linear temporality becomes clear in Derrida's later works such as Specters of Marx and On Cosmopolitanism, where he describes such disruption as a necessary condition for the type of political change he believes is needed in the world. The ability to experience time in a nonlinear fashion allows Banks to prevent the looming war, in an illustration of the connection that Derrida draws between time, violence, and politics. However, it also puts humanity in the heptapods' debt, thus exemplifying the paradox of genuine gift-giving that Derrida claims is impossible. Despite the complex ethical questions it invokes, however, the unique nature of the gift in Arrival signals that this gift might be a genuinely altruistic offering after all. (shrink)

Objective To compare the perspectives of medical students in the preclinical and clinical phases of medical training on the issue of rationing scarce medical resources in times of crisis. Methods Questionnaire-based cross-sectional study. Results A total of 201 participants took part in the study, with 100 participants in the preclinical phase group, and 101 in the clinical phase group. A multivariable analysis found that just 14.9% (n = 34) of the clinical phase students were willing to give a short-supplied blood (...) unit to the first-arrived patient to the emergency department when more patients are expected compared to 63.9% in the preclinical group (n = 62) ( p < 0.001, OR = 0.75 95% CI: 0.029−0.192). Seventy-four percent (n = 74) of the clinical phase students were found to be willing to remove a patient from a respirator to allocate it to an ill child compared to 35.7% (n = 35) in the preclinical phase group ( p < 0.001, OR = 4.168 95% CI: 1.931−8.998). Of the clinical phase group, 46.6% (n = 41) were willing to allocate a short supplied flu medicine to a patient with poor prognosis compared to 57.7% (n = 56) in the preclinical phase group ( p = 0.04, OR = 0.457 95% CI: 0.216−0.966). Conclusion Clinical exposure during training may affect the way medical students make ethical decisions, independent of age, sex, as well as marital and parental status. (shrink)

The remarkable lectures that Hegel gave in Berlin in the 1820s generated an exciting intellectual atmosphere which lasted for decades. From the 1830s, many students flocked to Berlin to study with people who had studied with Hegel, and both his original students, such as Feuerbach and Bauer, and later arrivals including Kierkegaard, Engels, Bakunin, and Marx, evolved into leading nineteenth-century thinkers. Jon Stewart's panoramic study of Hegel's deep influence upon the nineteenth century in turn reveals what that century contributed to (...) the wider history of philosophy. It shows how Hegel's notions of 'alienation' and 'recognition' became the central motifs for the era's thinking; how these concepts spilled over into other fields – like religion, politics, literature, and drama; and how they created a cultural phenomenon so rich and pervasive that it can truly be called 'Hegel's century.' This book is required reading for historians of ideas as well as of philosophy. (shrink)

BackgroundThe Authors have laid out an analysis of Italian COVID-19 confirmed data and fatality rates, pointing out how a dearth of health care resources in northern regions has resulted in hard, ethically challenging decisions in terms of granting patient access to intensive care units (ICU).Main textHaving to make such decisions certainly entails substantial difficulties, and that has led many health care professional to seek ethical guidance. The Italian Society of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care (SIAARTI) has attempted to meet (...) that growing need by a set of recommendations, applying “clinical soundness” as a beacon standard; that approach tends to prioritize patients with higher life expectancy, which could be characterized as a “moderately utilitarian” approach. Yet, such a selection has engendered daunting ethical quandaries. The authors believe it can only be warranted and acceptable if rooted in a transparent decision-making process and verifiable, reviewed criteria. Moreover, the authors have stressed how clinical experimentation in a pandemic setting is a subtext of great interest from an ethical perspective. In Italy, no drug therapy and trials were undertaken for COVID-19 patients for a rather long period of time. When the epidemic was already circulating, an intervention proved necessary on the system of administrative procedures, aimed at expediting the authorization and validation of protocols, then bogged down by bureaucracy. A new system has since been instituted by a government decree that was signed about one month after the first Covid-19 case was officially recorded in the country. Such a swift implementation, which took just a few weeks, is noteworthy and proves that clinical trials can be initiated in a timely fashion, even with a pandemic unfolding. The concerted, action of supportive care and RCTs is the only way to attain effective forms of treatments for COVID-19 and any other future outbreak.ConclusionsThe authors have arrived at the conclusion that the most effective and ethically sound response on the part of any national health care system would be to adequately reconfigure its organizational mechanisms, by making clinical trials and all related administrative procedures consistent with the current state of emergency. (shrink)

The papers in this volume reflect much of the current unease of a world that perceives itself once more at the edge of chaos. The authors present different vistas of that experience and their inherent dialectic, expressed in numerous and ceaseless conflicts between ordering and disordering processes. They can be read as comments on the ongoing processes that lead toward greater complexity.

The aim of this paper is to compare two authors: Hans Kelsen and Leo Strauss. More specifically, it will compare Kelsen’s “What is Justice?”—his Farewell Lecture given at Berkeley in 1952—and Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History—one of the main works on political philosophy published in twentieth century America. Both are key texts dealing with the same subject, justice. Although the two texts were written around the same time by authors who shared a similar history, they seem to defend (...) radically opposed points of view. However, despite and beyond their otherwise real differences, the two texts articulate the same important idea: if one wants to think about political issues, one has to address the question of justice. This chapter will attempt to illustrate through a comparison of these two texts the importance of addressing the question of justice, especially in our modern democracies. (shrink)

During a divisive political time, it is critical that social studies teachers, teacher educators, and scholars commit to justice, equity, inclusivity, and diversity when teaching, engaging, and learning with emerged bilingual (EB) students. This study examines how late arrival EB students and their teachers conceptualize social studies, citizenship, and civic education through a framework of culturally and linguistically relevant citizenship education (CLRCE). The findings in this study extend the original CLRCE framework by drawing from multiple sites of pedagogical (...) ideas and action to support late arrival EB students inside and outside of the social studies classroom. This study offers examples for how to implement CLRCE in communities experiencing similar demographic shifts as well as in schools who are interested in centering the cultural, linguistic, and civic experiences of their students. Specifically, this study reveals pedagogical examples and sites of critical citizenship that center EB students’ ideas, experiences, assets, and actions in civic society and in the social studies classroom, offering ways to rethink and reimagine civics education. (shrink)

Although now forgotten, Paul Nagel was one of the most notorious seventeenth?century critics of orthodox Lutheranism. His Prognosticon Astrologo?Cabalisticum (1618) and Stellae Prodigiosae (1619), in which he sketched a complex astrological?prophetic system, were followed by numerous books and pamphlets over the next five years in which he predicted the arrival of the Last Judgement in 1666. Although the failure of his prophecies for 1624 led to a collapse of interest in his prognostications, he turns out to have been a (...) key figure in early seventeenth?century Protestantism. How he strayed from his original orthodox position is the subject of this essay. (shrink)

Organizations have long struggled to find ways to reduce the occurrence of unethical behaviors by employees. Unfortunately, time theft, a common and costly form of ethical misconduct at work, has been understudied by ethics researchers. In order to remedy this gap in the literature, we used the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to investigate the antecedents of time theft, which includes behaviors such as arriving later to or leaving earlier from work than scheduled, taking additional or longer breaks (...) than is acceptable, and on-the-job daydreaming. We surveyed 135 employed undergraduate business students regarding the TPB variables at Time 1. Two months later, participants reported the frequency they engaged in time theft since Time 1. Results indicate that behavioral, normative, and control beliefs significantly predicted attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, respectively. Attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control, in turn, were significantly related to time theft intentions, which predicted later enactment of time theft. Thus, employers can decrease time theft by primarily focusing on altering employees’ attitudes toward time theft, followed by reducing social pressures to engage in it, and lastly, by implementing organizational practices that make it difficult to commit time theft. (shrink)

When addressing the notion of proper time in the theory of relativity, it is usually taken for granted that the time read by an accelerated clock is given by the Minkowski proper time. However, there are authors like Harvey Brown that consider necessary an extra assumption to arrive at this result, the so-called clock hypothesis. In opposition to Brown, Richard TW Arthur takes the clock hypothesis to be already implicit in the theory. In this paper I will (...) present a view different from these authors by taking into account Einstein’s notion of natural clock and showing its relevance to the debate. (shrink)

El pasaje de la Física ha llevado a postular un concepto de tiempo determinado por las condiciones perceptivas de la psyche. Se muestra cómo las condiciones de percepción son un punto de partida en la investigación: lo que es primero y más cercano a los sentidos y más conocido para los seres humanos. El punto de llegada es la conexión necesaria entre la existencia del tiempo y la del cambio. La percepción del cambio de los durmientes de Cerdeña permite determinar (...) los elementos que componen la experiencia del tiempo y proceder a determinar aquellos que componen la existencia de este. Passage 218b21-219a of Aristotle's Physics has led to the formulation of a concept of time that is determined by the perceptual conditions of the psyche. The paper shows that the conditions for perception, that which is prior, closer to the senses, and better known by human beings, are just the starting point for the investigation. The point of arrival is the necessary connection between the existence of time and change. The perception of change in the case of the sleeping Sardinian heroes makes it possible to determine those elements involved in the experience of time and, subsequently, those that make up the existence of the same. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the implications of the increasing social and sociable uses of new, mobile internet associated technologies for online learning. In particular I focus on tablet computers as at the vanguard of this shift. Drawing on discourses of technobiophilia and phatic communion, the propositions explored in this paper are that: that internet associated technologies have been shaped by and reflect the ways in which humans engage with objects and each other in the physical world, that of particular (...) significance for MIATs are frequent small scale social interactions between users, and that a more detailed consideration of these affordances would enhance online learning. I develop this account by considering the potential role of relationships for supporting the development of socially cohesive learning groups and the enhancement of online learning. In particular I focus on the need for partiality within a learning group and mechanisms for managing conflict. I conclude by offering two broad principles for a more sociable online learning experience. (shrink)

This paper concerns the issue of the continual arrival of irregular immigrants in Malta and the problems that ensue. The view generally held is that we need to respond to the needs of irregular immigrants by providing services. However, with reference to some of Jacques Derrida's ideas, I argue in this paper that the other /immigrant is not there for us to respond to by creating services to cater for her needs. Through the presence of the irregular immigrant, we (...) are made to question who we are, and are faced with our own vulnerability. We become 'other' to ourselves. This paper uses Derrida's ideas of tensions, trembling, borders and limited and unlimited hospitality, to lay the way for some suggestions of how the education of children can be influenced. In a time when educational discourse rotates around performativity, this paper suggests that space should be made in education for astonishment, surprise and enigmatic experience. (shrink)

With a large number of forcibly displaced people seeking safety, the EU is facing a challenge in maintaining solidarity. Europe has seen millions of asylum seekers crossing European borders, the largest number of asylum seekers since the second world war. Endemic diseases and often failing health systems in their countries of origin, and arduous conditions during transit, raise questions around how to meet the health needs of this vulnerable population on arrival in terms of screening, vaccination, and access to (...) timely and appropriate statutory health services. This paper explores the potential role of the principle of reciprocity, defined as the disposition ‘to return good in proportion to the good we receive, and to make reparations for the harm we have done’, as a mid-level principle in infectious disease screening policies. More than half of the European countries implemented screening programmes for newly arrived asylum seekers. Screening may serve to avoid potential infectious disease risks in the receiving countries as well as help identify health needs of asylum seekers. But screening may infringe upon basic rights of those screened, thus creating an ethical dilemma. The use of the principle of reciprocity can contribute to the identification of potential improvements for current screening programmes and emphasizes the importance of certain rights into guidelines for screening. It may create a two way moral obligation, upon asylum seekers to actively participate in the programme, and upon authorities to reciprocate the asylum seekers’ participation and the benefits for the control of public health. The authors argue that the reciprocity principle leads to a stronger ethical justification of screening programmes and help achieve a balance between justifiable rights claims of the host population and the asylum seekers. The principle deserves a further and more thorough exploration of its potential use in the field of screening, migration and infectious diseases. (shrink)

Science fiction is often held up as a particularly philosophical genre. For, beyond actualising mind-experiment-like fantasies, science fiction films also commonly toy with speculative ideas, or else engineer encounters with the strange and unknown. Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is a contemporary science fiction film that does exactly this, by introducing Lovecraft-esque tentacular aliens whose arrival on Earth heralds in a novel, but ultimately paralysing, inhuman perspective on the nature of time and reality. This article shows how this cerebral (...) film invites viewers to confront a counterintuitive model of time that at once recalls and reposes what Gilles Deleuze called a “third synthesis” of time, and that which J. M. E. McTaggart named the a-temporal “C series” of “unreal” time. We finally suggest that Arrival's a-temporal conception of the future as having already happened can function as a key to understanding the fate of humanity as a whole as we pass from the anthropocene, in which humans have... (shrink)

This book is a treatise on time and on background independence in physics. It first considers how time is conceived of in each accepted paradigm of physics: Newtonian, special relativity, quantum mechanics (QM) and general relativity (GR). Substantial differences are moreover uncovered between what is meant by time in QM and in GR. These differences jointly source the Problem of Time: Nine interlinked facets which arise upon attempting concurrent treatment of the QM and GR paradigms, as (...) is required in particular for a background independent theory of quantum gravity. A sizeable proportion of current quantum gravity programs - e.g. geometrodynamical and loop quantum gravity approaches to quantum GR, quantum cosmology, supergravity and M-theory - are background independent in this sense. This book's foundational topic is thus furthermore of practical relevance in the ongoing development of quantum gravity programs. This book shows moreover that eight of the nine facets of the Problem of Time already occur upon entertaining background independence in classical (rather than quantum) physics. By this development, and interpreting shape theory as modelling background independence, this book further establishes background independence as a field of study. Background independent mechanics, as well as minisuperspace (spatially homogeneous) models of GR and perturbations thereabout are used to illustrate these points. As hitherto formulated, the different facets of the Problem of Time greatly interfere with each others' attempted resolutions. This book explains how, none the less, a local resolution of the Problem of Time can be arrived at after various reconceptualizations of the facets and reformulations of their mathematical implementation. Self-contained appendices on mathematical methods for basic and foundational quantum gravity are included. Finally, this book outlines how supergravity is refreshingly different from GR as a realization of background independence, and what background independence entails at the topological level and beyond. (shrink)

This article engages with both queer theories of temporality and new materialist theories of kinship in order to analyse the reproductive politics of Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival. It does so in order to speculate on what happens to the concept of reproductive choice when time is in a loop. Arrival uses time travel to disrupt the linearity of reproduction by allowing its protagonist, Louise, to see that a future child will die an early, horrible death, (...) yet still having her choose to become pregnant. It is my contention that this narrative decision untethers reproduction from futurity in ways that might be productive for rethinking the heteronormative futurism at the heart of contemporary reproductive politics. (shrink)

In his dialogue the Timaeus, Plato recognized two aspects of time, the past and the future, but not the present. In contrast, Aristotle's analysis of time in the Physics took its orientation from the 'now'. It is the latter path that Husserl follows with his conception of the 'original impression' (Urimpression). However, in certain parts of Husserl's Bernau Manuscripts, the present loses significance because of a novel interpretation of protention. This development, which revitalizes Plato's understanding of time, (...) is furthered in Heidegger's late lecture Time and Being: the present can be understood on the basis of the 'withdrawal' which determines the mutual relation between the arrival as authentic future and the having-been as authentic past. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to elaborate two distinctive but interconnected modes of temporalization through common points in the work of Jaques Derrida and Jaques Lacan, namely the Subalternated and the Dislocated time. The explication of the different form of time structure reveals time as relational phenomena, which is constituted by the non-relation between the subject and the Other. The process of subjectivization as the formalization of the Real, or as the work of mourning, excludes traumatic (...) present and opens the space for free flow of the Subalternated time, which is marked by linearity, identitarian thought, subordination, causality ect. The present is, therefore, marked by ontologization of the posthumous remains, canonized, excluded and deprived of any subversive potential. But despite this eternal requiem, something remains between the future and the past, non-present in its spectral subsistence which disrupts smooth stream of the Subalternated narrativity, announcing arrival, return and temporarily inexhaustible artificiality of novelty in the form of the Dislocated time. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the problem of time in the thought of Bergson, showing how the evolution of the concept of duration is conducive to new developments in the philosophy of intuition. Duration, which in the Essay connotes the experience of a non-measurable lived experience, while in Matter and Memory it assumes rhythms of different intensities to justify the relationship between perception and memory, as well as in Creative Evolution is judged as the fabric of reality itself, in Duration and (...) Simultaneity it is posited not only as a criterion to discern what is real and what is artificial, but also to justify the measurement of reality, that is to say, to restore the point of contact between time as duration and space, that seemed previously compromised by the loss of ontological consistency of extension as the dimension of the body. In this paper, then, Bergson, also by virtue of a controversial, detailed comparison with the theory of relativity, finally arrives to support the hypothesis of a single temporal dimension, curved and dynamic, where space comes to be outlined as the abstract tangent of time. It is at this level, then, that it becomes possible to examine the emergence of the concepts within the meanders of intuition as concepts imbued with meaning: here is the primary source of that continuous “added” element of new nuclei of creativity that characterizes the very logic of Bergsonian living where what, as ideal relationship, is time, as a real relationship, becomes life, i.e., the continuous opening of a register in which time is inscribed, becoming incarnate thus in the very nature of every organism. (shrink)

In this paper I defend two conclusions: that time travel journeys to the past are not undertaken freely and, more generally, that nobody is free between the earliest arrival time and the latest departure time of a time travel journey to the past. Time travel to the past destroys freedom on a global scale.