Suivant le fil directeur du temps, cet ouvrage met au jour la manière dont l'admiration est devenue un problème philosophique central à l'âge classique et examine les différentes conceptions dont elle fait l'objet chez les principaux penseurs de la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle.

Cet article examine la question de l’attention dans son rapport à l’admiration, dont le traitement fait apparaître de profondes divergences entre les Passions de l’âme et l’ Éthique. Dans Les Passions de l’âme, Descartes propose une genèse passionnelle de l’attention, dont la destination gnoséologique est assurée par un acte de la volonté qui transcende les perceptions de l’âme. À l’inverse, dans l’ Éthique, la connaissance ne dépend pas de l’exercice d’une faculté autonome, elle est immanente à l’ordre des idées, ce (...) à quoi l’admiration fait irréductiblement obstacle. La critique spinoziste de l’admiration s’accompagne alors d’une refonte du statut de l’attention et repose sur la critique de la partition cartésienne des facultés de l’âme. Nous montrerons néanmoins que l’attention a une fonction positive sous la forme d’une présence à soi de l’esprit qui veille à l’enchaînement en lui des idées vraies. (shrink)

The Bellum ciuile has been the subject of three major editions in the past thirty years, attributable to D.R. Shackleton Bailey, R. Badalì and G. Luck. The existence of these three works highlights the resurgence of sustained interest surrounding Lucan as of the 1970s, with the publication of two significant works, Lucan: An Introduction by F. Ahl and the collective volume of Entretiens à la fondation Hardt, yet it also demonstrates the difficulty in establishing the text of the Pharsalia.

Probing semantic relations Exploration and identification in specialized texts Alain Auger and Caroline Barrière In recent years, several scientific ...

In vitro fertilisation (IVF) daily practice reveals that couples are willing to take greater risks than doctors if there is a higher chance of pregnancy. Arising from this is a frequently addressed issue regarding the embryo transfer strategy: single or double embryo transfer? The dilemma is faced by patients, as well as physicians, who are caught between the possibility of no pregnancies at all and facing the prospect of iatrogenic twin gestation. How could the couple's preferences concerning how many children (...) they would like be taken into account in determining the number of embryos transferred? How should the physician exercise his medical responsibility towards his patients and the unborn child? An effective approach could be to enhance a couple’s autonomy by advocating a medical beneficence that incorporates patients’ values. This can be achieved through a case-by-case approach in a deliberative process of decision-making which includes real patient-centred communication. (shrink)

I argue that the best explanation of the multiplicity of available frameworks for treating any given philosophical topic is that philosophy currently (though not insuperably) lacks fixed standards; I then go on to identify three barriers to philosophical progress associated with our present epistemic situation. First is that the lack of fixed standards encourages what I call “intra‐disciplinary siloing,” and associated dialectical and argumentative failings; second is that the lack of fixed standards makes room for sociological factors (including elite (...) influence and disciplinary inertia) to be determinative of which philosophical frameworks are embraced; third is that the lack of fixed standards encourages (implicit and/or explicit) bias. I close by offering some suggestions about how to move beyond these barriers, even in the absence of fixed standards. (shrink)

Barriers is Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 13.

A barrier to entailment exists if you can't get conclusions of a certain kind from premises of another. One of the most famous barriers in philosophy is Hume's Law, which says that you can't get normative conclusions from descriptive premises, or in slogan form: you can't get an ought from an is. This barrier is highly controversial, and many famous counterexamples were proposed in the last century. But there are other barriers which function almost as philosophical platitudes: no (...) Universal conclusions from Particular premises, no Future conclusions from premises about the Past, and no claims that attribute Necessity from premises that merely tell us how things happen to be in the Actual world. Barriers to Entailment proposes a unified logical account of five barriers that have played important roles in philosophy, in the process showing how to diagnose proposed counterexamples and arguing that the case for Hume's Law is as strong as that for the platitudinous barriers. -/- The first two parts of the book employ techniques from formal logic, but present them in an accessible way, suitable for any reader with some background in first-order model theory (of the kind that might be taught in a first class in logic). Gillian Russell introduces tense, modal, indexical, and deontic formal logics, but always avoids unneeded complexity. Each barrier is connected to broader philosophical topics: universality, time, necessity, context-sensitivity, and normativity. Russell brings out under-recognised connections between the domains and lays the groundwork for further work at the intersections. -/- The last part of the book transposes the formal work to informal barrier theses in the philosophy of language, in the process doing new work on the concept of logical consequence, and providing new responses to proposed informal counterexamples to Hume's Law which employ hard-to-formalise tools from natural language, such as speech acts and thick normative expressions. (shrink)

The formulation and proof of Hume’s Law and several related inference barrier theses.

Contemporary realities of global population movement increasingly bring to the fore the challenge of quality and equitable health provision across language barriers. While this linguistic challenge is not unique to immigration contexts and is likewise shared by health systems responding to the needs of aboriginal peoples and other historical linguistic minorities, the expanding multilingual landscape of receiving societies renders this challenge even more critical, owing to limited or even non‐existing familiarity of modern and often monolingual health systems with the (...) particular needs of new linguistic minorities. The centrality of language to health beliefs, attitudes, practices, cultural scripts, and conceptual frameworks emphasizes its pivotal role in the healthcare process, and consequently in the adverse effects of treatment that is language‐insensitive and unaware. Such an attitude on the part of medical authorities risks considerable epistemic injustice in the form of a (mis)judgement of patients’ intelligence, credibility, and rationality based on the language that they speak and the manner in which they speak it, consequently impacting the quality and equity of care provided. This danger, I argue, may be effectively countered by fostering among the participants in the healthcare process a sense of epistemic humility through greater metalinguistic awareness. Outlining a range of operative steps that can be used to facilitate this. I argue that the reality of language barriers in the healthcare process, while not entirely eliminable, may nevertheless be successfully addressed, in order to mitigate the challenge of quality and equitable healthcare provision in multilingual societies. (shrink)

Implication barrier theses deny that one can derive sentences of one type from sentences of another. Hume’s Law is an implication barrier thesis; it denies that one can derive an ‘ought’ (a normative sentence) from an ‘is’ (a descriptive sentence). Though Hume’s Law is controversial, some barrier theses are philosophical platitudes; in his Lectures on Logical Atomism, Bertrand Russell claims: You can never arrive at a general proposition by inference particular propositions alone. You will always have to have at least (...) one general proposition in your premises. (Russell, 1918, p. 206) We will refer to this claim—that one cannot derive general sentences from particular sentences—as Russell’s Law.1 A third barrier thesis claims that one cannot derive sentences about the future from sentences about the past or present. Hume’s endorsement of this barrier thesis is well-known: all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past . . . if there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible, therefore, that any argument from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance. (Hume, EHU 4.21/37) We will refer to this barrier thesis as Hume’s Second Law. A fourth barrier thesis says that one cannot derive a necessary sentence from one about the actual world and we will refer to this last thesis Kant’s Law. Such implication barrier theses present a problem. (shrink)

Achieving the global benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) will require international cooperation on many areas of governance and ethical standards, while allowing for diverse cultural perspectives and priorities. There are many barriers to achieving this at present, including mistrust between cultures, and more practical challenges of coordinating across different locations. This paper focuses particularly on barriers to cooperation between Europe and North America on the one hand and East Asia on the other, as regions which currently have an (...) outsized impact on the development of AI ethics and governance. We suggest that there is reason to be optimistic about achieving greater cross-cultural cooperation on AI ethics and governance. We argue that misunderstandings between cultures and regions play a more important role in undermining cross-cultural trust, relative to fundamental disagreements, than is often supposed. Even where fundamental differences exist, these may not necessarily prevent productive cross-cultural cooperation, for two reasons: (1) cooperation does not require achieving agreement on principles and standards for all areas of AI; and (2) it is sometimes possible to reach agreement on practical issues despite disagreement on more abstract values or principles. We believe that academia has a key role to play in promoting cross-cultural cooperation on AI ethics and governance, by building greater mutual understanding, and clarifying where different forms of agreement will be both necessary and possible. We make a number of recommendations for practical steps and initiatives, including translation and multilingual publication of key documents, researcher exchange programmes, and development of research agendas on cross-cultural topics. (shrink)

Clinical ethics committees have recently been established in nearly all Norwegian hospital trusts. One important task for these committees is clinical ethics consultations. This qualitative study explores significant barriers confronting the ethics committees in providing such consultation services. The interviews with the committees indicate that there is a substantial need for clinical ethics support services and, in general, the committee members expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for the committee work. They also reported, however, that tendencies to evade moral (...) disagreement, conflict, and ‘outsiders’ are common in the hospitals. Sometimes even the committees comply with some of these tendencies. The committees agree that there is a need to improve their routines and procedures, clarify the committees' profile and field of responsibility, to make the committees well‐known, to secure adequate operating conditions, and to develop organizational integration and support. Various strategies to meet these challenges on a local, regional or national level are also explored in this paper. (shrink)

Hospitals in many countries have had clinical ethics committees for over 20 years. Despite this, there has been little research to evaluate these committees and growing evidence that they are underutilized. To address this gap, we investigated the question ‘What are the barriers and facilitators nurses and physicians perceive in consulting their hospital ethics committee?’ Thirty-four nurses, 10 nurse managers and 31 physicians working at four Canadian hospitals were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide as part of a larger (...) investigation. We used content analysis of the interview data related to barriers and facilitators to use of hospital ethics committees to identify nine categories of barriers and nine categories of facilitators. These categories as well as their subcategories are discussed and those specific to nurses or physicians are identified. The need to increase health professionals' use of clinical ethics committees through reducing barriers and maximizing facilitators is discussed. (shrink)

The National Health Service (NHS) was the first healthcare system globally to declare ambitions to become net carbon zero. To achieve this, a shift away from metered-dose inhalers which contain powerful greenhouse gases is necessary. Many patients can use dry powder inhalers which do not contain greenhouse gases and are equally effective at managing respiratory disease. This paper discusses the ethical issues that arise as the NHS attempts to mitigate climate change. Two ethical issues that pose a barrier to moving (...) away from metered-dose inhalers are considered: patients who decline an inhaler with a smaller carbon footprint and increased cost. I argue that while a patient is not morally justified in refusing a more environmentally sustainable inhaler due to the expected harms, a doctor may still prescribe a metered-dose inhaler if they believe that switching without consent might undermine trust or substantially worsen the patient’s health. Turning to cost, I argue that the imperative to combat climate change means the NHS should accept small increased financial costs for lower carbon inhalers, even though this provides no additional direct benefit for the patient. I then go on to consider the implications of the preceding analysis for policy and practice. I argue for a policy that minimises the impact of inhalers on the climate by advocating for a principle of environmental prescribing and explore decision-making in practice. While the arguments here pertain primarily to inhalers, the discussion has broader implications for debates around healthcare’s responsibility to be environmentally sustainable. (shrink)

AimsThis study aimed to investigate barriers in the observation of professional ethics during clinical care from a nursing viewpoint. Also, it examined the association between these barriers and nurse demographic variables.MethodsA descriptive-analytic design was carried out on 207 nurses working in selected hospitals within an urban area of Iran in 2019. Data were collected using a standard questionnaire containing 33 questions that measured barriers to observation of professional ethics. The questionnaire measures three domains of management, environment and (...) individual care.ResultsIn the management dimension, the most important barrier preventing observation of professional ethics was the shortage of personnel. For the environmental dimension, biological changes due to working on the nightshift, and for the individual care dimension, a lack of time were the most important barriers preventing observation of clinical ethics. Findings additionally highlighted a significantly inverse association between barriers to observing professional ethics and the male gender, participating in the ethics workshop and high work-level experiences.ConclusionsIt is suggested that nursing managers in hospitals correct and remove obstacles with careful planning and emphasis on principles and standards of care including environmental and managerial factors and training professional ethics to nurses. (shrink)

I argue that the present (if not insuperable) lack of fixed standards in philosophy is associated with three barriers to philosophical progress, pertaining to intra-disciplinary siloing, sociological rather than philosophical determinants of philosophical attention, and the encouraging of bias.

In spite of its success, Neo-Darwinism is faced with major conceptual barriers to further progress, deriving directly from its metaphysical foundations. Most importantly, neo-Darwinism fails to recognize a fundamental cause of evolutionary change, “niche construction”. This failure restricts the generality of evolutionary theory, and introduces inaccuracies. It also hinders the integration of evolutionary biology with neighbouring disciplines, including ecosystem ecology, developmental biology, and the human sciences. Ecology is forced to become a divided discipline, developmental biology is stubbornly difficult to (...) reconcile with evolutionary theory, and the majority of biologists and social scientists are still unhappy with evolutionary accounts of human behaviour. The incorporation of niche construction as both a cause and a product of evolution removes these disciplinary boundaries while greatly generalizing the explanatory power of evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Industry over the last ten years has been characterized by a high level of digital transformation, affecting all layers of production and all areas of the economy. One of the key trends in the digitalization of industry is the digital twin – a system that combines a physical object, its digital model, and a continuous link between the two. However, the integration of such a complex technological solution is fraught with a number of barriers that arise in one way (...) or another in the way of technology users. The authors of the article analyzed 100 examples of digital twin use in industry according to 7 criteria, among which the scope of technology application, the most problematic stage of its integration, key technological, organizational, ecosystem and economic barriers, as well as recommendations on overcoming these barriers, which have been applied or are in the process of application, were highlighted. The article contains a layer of statistical data and infographics that confirm the key conclusions about the main barriers to the integration of digital twins, among which the lack of devices and equipment with the necessary capacity, the lack of existing strategies for the technology implementation, the lack of standards for industry regulation and high initial investment are the main ones. Each block of barriers is accompanied by real examples (cases) of use of digital twin in the domestic and foreign industry, among which there are such companies as KamAZ, UEC-Klimov, Tesla, Volvo, Norske Shell and others. (shrink)

My project is to explain why the question ‘How does it feel to be a white problem?’ cannot be answered in the fluttering grammar of white talk. The whiteness of white talk lies not only in its having emerged from white mouths, but also in its evasiveness—in its attempt to suppress fear and anxiety, and its consequential [if unintended] reinscription and legitimation of racist oppression. I White talk is designed, indeed scripted, for the purposes of evading, rejecting, and remaining ignorant (...) about the injustices that flow from whiteness and its attendant privileges. I want to suggest a new point of entry—a way to flip the script, so to speak. -/- I begin with some observations about the basic advantages and disadvantages of using white talk as a route into the white problem. My account develops an expanded version of Alice MacIntyre’s definition of white talk that is attentive to the racialized bodily scripts that accompany white talk. I argue that white talk persists because it has an enduring and powerful moral, ontological, and epistemic pay off for white folks. I explore each payoff with an eye towards clarifying how white talk functions to maintain the illusion that we are invulnerable beings. Next, I pause to reply to the popular objection that this particular critique of white talk silences white people in conversations on race. If we cannot address the question ‘how does it feel to be a white problem’ in the fluttering grammar of white talk, then how shall we begin? In closing, I suggest that we might reduce fluttering by replacing white talk with a discourse of vulnerability, where vulnerability is defined not as weakness, but as a condition for potential. I offer some brief guidelines for how we might start this conversation. (shrink)

Background Speaking up to safeguard patients is a crucial ethical and moral obligation for nurses, but it is also a difficult and potentially dangerous component of nursing work. Health advocacy is gaining impetus in the medical literature, despite being hampered by barriers resulting in many nurses in Ghana remaining mute when faced with advocacy-required situations. We explored situations that thwart nurses from performing their health advocacy role. Research question What would cause nurses to take no action when they witness (...) situations that require them to act as health advocates for their clients or communities? Research Design An inductive, descriptive qualitative design was used to collect and analyse data on barriers that prevent nurses from practising their health advocacy role in Ghana. Individual one-on-one in-depth interviews were conducted using a semi-structured interview guide. The data were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Participants and research context Twenty-four professional nurses and midwives registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council were recruited from three regional hospitals in Ghana. These public hospitals were chosen from the upper, middle and coastal regions. Ethical considerations The UKZN Ethics Review Committee in South Africa and the GHS Ethics Review Committee in Ghana both gave their approval for this study. Findings Intrapersonal barriers, interpersonal barriers, and structural barriers emerged as major obstacles that nurses experience when performing their health advocacy role. Conclusions Barriers to health advocacy have undermined nurses' ability to function as health advocates and are preventing them from utilising their health advocacy position in nursing practise. Giving nursing students positive role models in the classroom and in the clinic can help them become more effective health advocates. (shrink)

This paper presents results from the analysis of business school dean responses to a survey designed to determine how sustainability, including sustainable business practices and climate change content, is being incorporated into business school curriculum. Information is also gathered on how schools and colleges of business are preparing instructors to incorporate sustainability-related content into their courses, the preferred programmatic approaches for offering content to students, and the barriers that impede modification of current curriculum to incorporate sustainability. It concludes with (...) a discussion of research that colleges and schools of business might conduct as part of their strategy to better understand how to bring their curriculum into alignment with new student demands for these topics. Background information on higher education commitment to sustainability is provided. (shrink)

This paper presents results from the analysis of business school dean responses to a survey designed to determine how sustainability, including sustainable business practices and climate change content, is being incorporated into business school curriculum. Information is also gathered on how schools and colleges of business are preparing instructors to incorporate sustainability-related content into their courses, the preferred programmatic approaches for offering content to students, and the barriers that impede modification of current curriculum to incorporate sustainability. It concludes with (...) a discussion of research that colleges and schools of business might conduct as part of their strategy to better understand how to bring their curriculum into alignment with new student demands for these topics. Background information on higher education commitment to sustainability is provided. (shrink)

Background:Emergency care providers are frequently faces with situations in which they have to make decisions quickly in stressful situations. They face barriers to ethical decision-making and recognizing and finding solutions to these barriers helps them to make ethical decision.Objectives:The purpose of this study was to identify barriers of ethical decision-making in Iranian Emergency Medical Service personnel.Methods:In this qualitative research, the participants (n = 15) were selected using the purposive sampling method, and the data were collected by deep (...) and semi-structured interviews. Finally, the data are analyzed using the content analysis approach.Ethical considerations:Permission to conduct the study was obtained from the Ethics Committee of the Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences. The objectives of the study were explained to the participants and written consent was received from them. Also, participants were assured that necessary measures were taken to protect their anonymity and confidentiality.Findings:The results of the analysis are classified in five main categories. It encompasses the following areas: perception of situation, patient-related factors, input and output imbalance, uncoordinated health system, and paradoxes.Conclusion:Emergency Medical Service personnel make ethical decisions every day. It is important that prehospital personnel know how to manage those decisions properly so that clients’ moral rights are respected. Hence, by identifying the dimensions and obstacles of ethical decision-making in Emergency Medical Service personnel, it is possible to enhance the moral judgment and ethical accountability of the personnel and develop the strategies necessary for ethical decision-making in them. (shrink)

Although ever-increasing numbers of women in the United States have been choosing small-business ownership in an apparent attempt to escape their well-documented inequality in the labor market, in this country, small businesses owned by women tend to be less successful than those owned by men. This article brings together the scattered pieces of data available in order to shed light on women's inability to gain greater parity with men in the small-business arena in the United States. Analysis suggests that U.S. (...) women's influx into small capitalism results from their movement into expanding, but highly competitive, industrial niches that are relatively unattractive to men. The authors find that these woman-owned businesses are concentrated within traditionally female-typed fields with lower average business receipts than male-typed fields. Moreover, even within the same industrial subcategories, women owners achieve less economic success than men owners. Although some of the immediate barriers faced by U.S. women in the small-business arena-such as lack of access to capital and government contracts-differ from those that confront women employees, the underlying causes are similar. The authors' discussion suggests that women in the United States carry their labor market disadvantage with them to the small-business sphere, where it is compounded by new manifestations of the same institutional barriers. (shrink)

Approaches to self‐management traditionally focus upon individual capacity to make behavioural change. In this paper, we use Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and capital to demonstrate the impact of structural inequalities upon chronic illness self‐management through exploring findings from 28 semi‐structured interviews conducted with people from a lower socioeconomic region of Adelaide, South Australia who have type 2 diabetes. The data suggests that access to capital is a significant barrier to type 2 diabetes self‐management. While many participants described having sufficient cultural (...) capital to access and assess health information, they often lacked economic capital and social capital in the form of support networks who promote health. Participants were often involved in social networks in which activities which are contrary to self‐management have symbolic value. As a consequence, they entered relationships with health professionals at a disadvantage. We conclude that structural barriers to self‐management arising from habitus resulting in the performance of health behaviours rooted in cultural and class background and limited access to capital in the form of economic resources, social networks, health knowledge and prestige may have a negative impact on capacity for type 2 diabetes self‐management. (shrink)

Breaking Barriers is a collection of invited contributions by distinguished philosophers, scientists, and religious thinkers of East and West in honor of Professor Ramakrishna Puligandla. The twenty-three essays in this volume may be divided into four groups: Philosophy of Advaita, Buddhism, Indian Philosophy and Physics, and Asian and Comparative Thought. Contributors have written on topics such as the phenomenology of consciousness, science and religion, and comparative philosophy and religion. The volume is designed to stimulate the interest of students, professors, (...) and all those who wish to explore new knowledge. In this volume, the creative thought of leading thinkers from principal universities in India and elsewhere transcends words without insight, barren arguments, and all limiting paradigms. Breaking Barriers thus represents a multi-disciplinary approach informed by cross-cultural philosophical vision. Modern physics and classical Indian philosophy exist here in unity. (shrink)

There is a substantial shortage of organs available for transplantation in Bangladesh. This has resulted in the commodification of organs. This study analyzes the religious, cultural, and legal barriers to organ donation in Bangladesh. It is based on the examination of available literature and primary sources i.e. religious decrees and opinions of religious leaders of faith traditions, and the Bangladesh Organ Donation Act, 1999. The literature was retrieved from databases, such as PubMed, BioMed, and Google Scholar using the key (...) words: organ donation in Islam, organ donation in Bangladesh, organ donation and religions. The study found that although many Islamic scholars accept organ donation, both living and cadaveric, under some conditions, some Bangladeshi Muslim clerics oppose donation. They argue that organ retrieval violates the sanctity of the human body and retrieval of organs may harm a living donor or lead to death, and organ donation may encourage the commercialization of body parts. Both commercialization and harming oneself are considered sins. Thus, the divergent views of Muslim clerics are a major barrier to organ donation among the Bangladeshi Muslims. Cultural and social factors also have a negative impact. Most people desire to be buried with their bodies intact. Although the Bangladesh government promulgated the Bangladesh Organ Donation Act, 1999, and amended it in 2018, it restricted donors and recipients to members of the extended family, which also reduced the donor pool. This study argues that the Muslim Orthodox clerics’ stand against organ donation and other cultural and legal issues are the major obstacles to organ donation in Bangladesh. (shrink)

The classic thirteenth-century collection of Zen koans with one of the most accessible commentaries to date, from a Chinese Zen teacher. For more than eight centuries the Gateless Barrier has been studied by Zen (or Chan) practitioners in order to bring about meditative realizations about the nature of ultimate reality. Compiled by Chan Master Wumen Huikai in the thirteenth century, the Gateless Barrier (Chinese: Wumen guan; Japanese: Mumonkan) is a collection of forty-eight koans--stories of the sayings and actions of Chan (...) Masters in which they freely and directly express their enlightened experience. This fresh English translation by Guo Gu--the first from a Chinese Chan teacher--is one of the most accessible to date, and his commentary brings new life to these classic teachings. (shrink)

Resolution of quarrels arising from conflicting sacred values, as in the Middle East, may require concessions that acknowledge the opposition's core concerns.

When people speak about “communication barriers”, what they usually think about are such things as the limitations set by human nature itself, or the constraints that are inherent in the tools we use for communicating. As an example of the first, consider the limited range of the naked human voice; for the second, we may think of the limitations imposed by such primitive communicative devices as the bonfire, the heliograph, or an old-fashioned megaphone.Our contribution draws attention to the fact (...) that, despite enormous advances on the technological side of human communication (such as demonstrated by the existence and use of computers as communication devices), there still are some barriers to be removed as far as the human side is concerned. We call these barriers the “stumble-blocks of the mind”. Their existence is demonstrated by the study of two case stories, which show that understanding the communicative implications of computerizing information is more important than increased emphasis on ever fancier and more expensive hardware products.The next question has to do with the reasons for these “stumbling blocks” to occur. Current communicative and linguistic theoretical findings are used in an effort to explain and solve the communicative dilemmas that are encountered in the organization of our communication, among others in the area of human-computer interface. In particular, the notion of “privacy” in speech acting is suggested as an overlooked aspect, and the notion of “information transfer” is replaced by that of “creating mental activity”.Finally, some conclusions are drawn, and a number of practical applications are offered. (shrink)

In the current career landscape and labor market, career transitions have become a critical aspect of career development and are significant for Human Resource Development research and practice. Our research examines the type of support used during different career transitions and who can provide that support to women in career transition. We investigated four types of social support—emotional, appraisal, informational, and instrumental—and their roles in five types of career transitions: school-to-work transition, upward mobility transition, transition to a new profession, transition (...) to entrepreneurship, career re-entry transition, and transition to retirement. We analyzed 80 journal articles using directed content analysis, cross-tabulation, and nonparametric statistical tests. Instrumental support appears to be the most commonly documented type of social support in this career transition literature. Appraisal support was consistently documented least for each type of career transition. Our results may highlight the importance of personal connections and internal resources in successful career transitions for women. Based on our findings, we offer a model of women's social support network for career transitions and advocate for expanded networks of social support for women anticipating and during career transitions. The results of our study contain insights for how women can be supported in transitioning to the next career experience. We conclude with suggestions for future research. (shrink)

This paper presents results from the analysis of business school dean responses to a survey designed to determine how sustainability, including sustainable business practices and climate change content, is being incorporated into business school curriculum. Information is also gathered on how schools and colleges of business are preparing instructors to incorporate sustainability-related content into their courses, the preferred programmatic approaches for offering content to students, and the barriers that impede modification of current curriculum to incorporate sustainability. It concludes with (...) a discussion of research that colleges and schools of business might conduct as part of their strategy to better understand how to bring their curriculum into alignment with new student demands for these topics. Background information on higher education commitment to sustainability is provided. (shrink)

The ethical recruitment of participants with neurological disorders in clinical research requires obtaining initial and ongoing informed consent. The purpose of this study is to characterize barriers faced by research personnel in obtaining informed consent from research participants with neurological disorders and to identify strategies applied by researchers to overcome those barriers. This study was designed as a web-based survey of US researchers with an optional follow-up interview. A subset of participants who completed the survey were selected using (...) a stratified purposeful sampling strategy and invited to participate in an in-depth qualitative interview by phone or video conference. Data were analyzed using a mixed methods approach, including content analysis of survey responses and thematic analysis of interview responses. Over 1 year, 113 survey responses were received from US research personnel directly involved in obtaining informed consent from participants in neurological research. Frequently identified barriers to informed consent included: cognitive and communication impairments (e.g. aphasia), unrealistic expectations of research participants, mistrust of medical research, time constraints, literacy barriers, lack of available social support, and practical or resource-related constraints. Strategies to enhance informed consent included: involving close others to support participant understanding of study-related information, collaborating with more experienced research personnel to facilitate training in obtaining informed consent, encouraging participants to review consent forms in advance of consent discussions, and using printed materials and visual references. Beyond conveying study-related information, researchers included in this study endorsed ethical responsibilities to support deliberation necessary to informed consent in the context of misconceptions about research, unrealistic expectations, limited understanding, mistrust, and/or pressure from close others. Findings highlight the importance of training researchers involved in obtaining informed consent in neurological research to address disease-specific challenges and to support the decision-making processes of potential research participants and their close others. (shrink)

I was quite excited when I first read Restall and Russell’s (2010) paper. For two reasons. First, because the paper provides rigorous formulations and formal proofs of implication barrier theses, namely “theses [which] deny that one can derive sentences of one type from sentences of another”. Second (and primarily), because the paper proves a general theorem, the Barrier Construction Theorem, which unifies implication barrier theses concerning four topics: generality, necessity, time, and normativity. After thinking about the paper, I am satisfied (...) with its treatment of the first three topics, namely generality, necessity, and time. But I am not satisfied with its treatment of normativity, so my comments are exclusively on that topic. (shrink)

Pratt and de Vries1 pose an important and uncomfortable question to all stakeholders in the global bioethics space. If global bioethics as they define it is ‘the ethics of public health and healthcare problems that are characterised by a global level effect or that require action beyond individual countries, and the ethics of research related to such problems’, one would expect justice and inclusivity to be among the ethical priorities. Yet, Pratt and de Vries carefully demonstrate how different forms of (...) epistemic injustice and coloniality are embedded in the structure, generation of knowledge and praxis of global bioethics. They do this by unpicking three layers at which coloniality and epistemic injustice operate; knowledge-producer, knowledge-applied and knowledge-solicited. The authors also offer a three-pronged incremental approach to how individual and institutional actors in global bioethics can contribute to epistemic justice in the field. Pratt and de Vries present their work as ‘a first step towards reorienting the field’ of global health bioethics away from epistemic injustice. Indeed, theirs is a mapping, problem statement and recommendations piece …. (shrink)

Topology change is discussed as a barrier penetration process and illustrated by explicit calculations in Witten's Kaluza-Klein bubble geometry. Initial values are given for other bubble geometries, including ones with negative total mass.

Ethical oversight of clinical research is one of the primary means of ensuring that human subjects are protected from the natural bias of researchers and research institutions in favor of experimentation. At a minimum, effective oversight should ensure that risks are minimized and reasonable in relation to anticipated benefits, protect vulnerable subjects from potential coercion or undue influence, ensure full and informed consent, and promote the equitable distribution of the risks and benefits of research. Because these assessments often involve value (...) judgments for which there are no agreed-upon objective standards, we rely on deliberative procedures thought to have the greatest likelihood of producing the right or best outcomes. Concerns about the potential for improperly functioning IRBs to waste scarce human and institutional resources and impede biomedical progress have motivated a surge in empirical research assessing their procedures and outcomes. Yet within this literature, there has been minimal attention paid to the social scientific evidence regarding how individuals and deliberating groups make decisions, nor how those data might inform IRB practice. This essay seeks to fill that gap, locating recent empirical data on IRB composition and process within the context of data regarding what I call “deliberative pathologies,” or instances when deliberation fails to live up to one or more aspect of the deliberative ideal because of systematic biases in the ways participants interact. The paper goes on to make evidence-based recommendations to reduce the vulnerability of IRB deliberations to the kinds of pathologies discussed and indicate directions for future research. (shrink)

Barriers to mental health interventions globally remain a health concern; however, these are more prominent in low- and middle-income countries. The barriers to accessibility include stigmatization, financial strain, acceptability, poor awareness, and sociocultural and religious influences. Exploring the barriers to the utilization of mental health services might contribute to mitigating them. Hence, this research aims to investigate these barriers to mental health service utilization in depth at the Kabutare District Hospital of the Southern Province of Rwanda. (...) The qualitative approach was adopted with a cross-sectional study design. The participants were patients with mental illnesses seeking mental health services at the hospital. Ten interviews were conducted in the local language, recorded, and transcribed verbatim and translated by the researchers. Thematic analysis was applied to analyze the data collected. The results revealed that the most common barriers are fear of stigmatization, lack of awareness of mental health services, sociocultural scarcity, scarcity of financial support, and lack of geographical accessibility, which limit the patients to utilize mental health services. Furthermore, it was revealed that rural gossip networks and social visibility within the communities compounded the stigma and social exclusion for patients with mental health conditions. Stigmatization should be reduced among the community members for increasing their empathy. Then, the awareness of mental disorders needs to be improved. Further research in Rwanda on the factors associated with low compliance to mental health services with greater focus on the community level is recommended. (shrink)

An important part of the explanatory role of concepts is that they enable us to combine a wide variety of objects, properties and relations in thought, with contents spanning diverse domains. I discuss an argument that appears to show that paradigmatic non-linguistic representational formats are unsuited to play this role, and thus conceptual representation could not occur in these formats. I show that this argument fails, because it overlooks the possibility of individual concepts being shared between a number of special (...) purpose representational systems. Demonstrating this requires defending the possibility of cross-format redeployment of concepts. (shrink)

Civil wars vary greatly in their duration. This book argues that conflicts are longer when they involve more actors who can block agreement and identifies specific problems that arise in multi-party bargaining. Quantitative analysis of over 200 civil wars since World War II reveals that conflicts with more of these actors last much longer than those with fewer. Detailed comparison of negotiations in Rwanda and Burundi demonstrates that multi-party negotiations present additional barriers to peace not found in two party (...) conflicts. In addition, conflicts with more veto players produce more casualties, are more likely to involve genocide and are followed by shorter periods of peace. Because they present many barriers to peace, the international community has a poor track record of resolving multi-party conflicts. David Cunningham shows that resolution is possible in these wars if peace processes are designed to address the barriers that emerge in multi-party conflicts. (shrink)