Consent in medical practice is a process riddled with layers of complexities. To some extent, this is inevitable given that different medical conditions raise different sets of issues for doctors and patients. Informed consent and risk assessment are highly significant public health issues that have become even more prominent during the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this article we identity relevant factors for clinicians to consider when ensuring consent for solid organ transplantation. Consent to undergo solid organ transplantation is (...) more complex than most surgical and other clinical interventions because of the many factors involved, the complexity of the options and the need to balance competing risks. We first out the context in which consent is given by the patient. We then outline the legal principles pertaining to consent in medical practice as it applies in the UK and the implication of recent legal judgments. The third section highlights specific complexities of consent in organ transplantation and identifies relevant factors in determining consent for organ transplantation. The fourth section offers practical recommendations. We propose a novel ‘multi-factor approach’ to informed consent in transplantation which includes understanding risk, effective communication, and robust review processes. Whilst understanding risk and communication are a given, our suggestion is that including review processes into the consent process is essential. By this we specifically mean identifying and creating room for discretion in decision-making to better ensure that informed consent is given in practice. Discretion implies that health care professionals use their judgement to use the legal judgements as guidance rather than prescriptive. Discretion is further defined by identifying the relevant options and scope of clinical and personal factors in specified transplantation decisions. In particular, we also highlight the need to pay attention to the institutional dimension in the consent process. To that end, our recommendations identify a gap in the current approaches to consent. The identification of areas of discretion in decision-making processes is essential for determining when patients need to be involved. In other words, clinicians and healthcare professionals need to consider carefully when there is room for direction and where there is little or no room for exercising discretion. In sum, our proposed approach is a modest contribution to the on-going debate about consent in medicine. (shrink)

The regularization of chiral gauge theories is reviewed from the “overlap” point of riew. This is a brief and biased review containing no references.

Nous appelons «thèse des descriptions multiples» l'opinion qui veut qu'une seule et même action peut etre decrite de plusieurs façons différentes selon que Ton prend en considération ou non les différentes conséquences, plus ou moins lointaines, de cette action. Cette thèse joue chez certains penseurs un rôle essentiel dans la solution du problème de l'individuation des actions. Chez D. Davidson notamment, elle intervient de façon décisive dans la démonstration de sa fameuse thèse que toute action se réduit à des mouvements (...) corporels. Nous entendons montrer, premièrement, que la thèse des descriptions multiples, à supposer même qu'elle soit vraie, ne saurait remplir le rôle que lui assigne Davidson dans le contexte de l'individuation des actions; deuxièmement, que cette thèse est fondée en fait sur l'ignorance de certaines distinctions importantes concernant l'action et le langage de l'action. (shrink)

Translated by Anthony Bower With an Introduction by Oliver Todd 'A conscience with style' V.S. Pritchett The Rebel (1951) is Camus's 'attempt to understand the time I live in' and a brilliant essay on the nature of human revolt. Here he makes a daring critique of communism - how it had gone wrong behind the Iron Curtain and the resulting totalitarian regimes. And he questions two events held sacred by the left wing - the French Revolution of 1789 and the (...) Russian Revolution of 1917 - that had resulted, he believed, in the use of terrorism as a political instrument. In this towering intellectual document, Camus argues that hope for the future lies in revolt with revolution - a chance to achieve change without losing our freedom. 'The last French intellectual to take the side of humanity and talk its language... a figure of immense moral stature' Sunday Times Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. (shrink)

We develop a version of a direct perception account of emotion recognition on the basis of a metaphysical claim that emotions are individuated as patterns of characteristic features. On our account, emotion recognition relies on the same type of pattern recognition as is described for object recognition. The analogy allows us to distinguish two forms of directly perceiving emotions, namely perceiving an emotion in the absence of any top-down processes, and perceiving an emotion in a way that significantly involves some (...) top-down processes ; and, in addition, an inference-based evaluation of an emotion. Our model clarifies the epistemology of emotion recognition. (shrink)

Scott Sturgeon has recently challenged Pollock’s account of undercutting defeaters. The challenge involves three primary contentions: the account is both too strong and too weak, undercutting defeaters exercise their power to defeat only in conjunction with higher-order beliefs about the basis of the lower-order beliefs whose justification they target, and since rebutting defeaters exercise their power to defeat in isolation, rebutting and undercutting defeaters work in fundamentally different ways. My goal is to reject each of these contentions. I maintain that (...) Sturgeon fails to show that Pollock’s account of undercutting defeaters is either too strong or too weak, his own account of how undercutting defeaters exercise their power to defeat is both too strong and too weak, and his claim that rebutting and undercutting defeaters work in fundamentally different ways is mistaken. (shrink)

Um die heutige Welt zu begreifen, sollten wir uns nach Präsident Macron mit dem Werk?Das Kapital? von Marx beschäftigen. Tatsächlich stellt sich nach der Finanzkrise 2007/2008 und nach Karl Marx' 200. Geburtstag im Jahr 2018 die Frage, wie aktuell sein Werk auch oder vielleicht gerade heute noch ist. In diesem Fachbuch werden deshalb verschiedene Aspekte aus dem Leben und Werk von Karl Marx beleuchtet. Dabei verfolgen die Autoren, Forscher der Universität Rostock, einen interdisziplinären Ansatz und behandeln sowohl Marx' Religionskritik als (...) auch die Frage nach seinem politischen Denken. Thematisiert werden Marx' Interpretationen von Kapital und Geld sowie sein Kommunismusverständnis und sein Kapitalverstehen. War Karl Marx ein politischer Denker? Kann Karl Marx die Finanzkrise 2007/08 erklären und wenn ja, vielleicht sogar besser als der ökonomische Mainstream? Welchen Stellenwert kann seiner Philosophie und seiner Geld- und Kredittheorie beigemessen werden? Stimmen Kernaussagen seiner Kapitalismuskritik? In sechs Kapiteln, die auch unabhängig voneinander gelesen werden können, gehen die Autoren eingehend auf diese Fragen und Themen ein. (shrink)

The question “What are cognitive processes?” can be understood variously as meaning “What is the nature of cognitive processes?”, “Can we distinguish epistemically cognitive processes from physical and biochemical processes on the one hand, and from mental or conscious processes on the other?”, and “Can we establish a fruitful notion of cognitive process?” The present aim is to deliver a positive answer to the last question by developing criteria for what would count as a paradigmatic exemplar of a cognitive process, (...) and then to offer the comparator mechanism as a convincing paradigmatic example. Thus, the paper argues, given the current state of science, we can indeed establish a fruitful scientific notion of a cognitive process. Nevertheless, it is left open whether the example-based characterization ends up as merely highlighting a fruitful convention within the early-twentyfirst century interdisciplinary investigation of intelligent behaviour in humans, animals, and robots, or whether the examples determine a natural kind or a property cluster. (shrink)

What has moral theory to do with practical judgment? The practical ethicist can move by analogy from case to case, saying of most new cases, “Oh, I think I've been here before.” Theory, ascending to a broader view, can provide directions when the ethicist finds herself in unfamiliar territory.

This paper contains a careful derivation of principles of Interpretability Logic valid in extensions of I0+1.

In this paper, we characterize the strength of the predicative Frege hierarchy, , introduced by John Burgess in his book [J. Burgess, Fixing frege, in: Princeton Monographs in Philosophy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005]. We show that and are mutually interpretable. It follows that is mutually interpretable with Q. This fact was proved earlier by Mihai Ganea in [M. Ganea, Burgess’ PV is Robinson’s Q, The Journal of Symbolic Logic 72 619–624] using a different proof. Another consequence of the our (...) main result is that is mutually interpretable with Kalmar Arithmetic . The fact that interprets EA was proved earlier by Burgess. We provide a different proof. Each of the theories is finitely axiomatizable. Our main result implies that the whole hierarchy taken together, , is not finitely axiomatizable. What is more: no theory that is mutually locally interpretable with is finitely axiomatizable. (shrink)

For the last century, moral philosophy has stressed theory for the analysis of moral argument and concepts. In the last decade, interest in the ethical issues of health care has stimulated attention to cases and particular instances. This has revealed the gap between ethical theory and practice. This article reviews the history and method of casuistry which for many centuries provided an approach to practical ethics. Its strengths and weaknesses are noted and its potential for contemporary use explored.

I distinguish between two conceptually different kinds of physical space: a space of ordinary material bodies, which is the space of points at which I could imaginably place the tip of my finger, or the center of a billiard-ball, and a space of elementary physical determinables, which is the smallest space of points such that stipulating what is happening at each one of those points, at every time, amounts to an exhaustive physical history of the universe. In all classical physical (...) theories, these two spaces happen to coincide – and what we mean by calling a theory “classical”, and all we mean by calling a theory “classical”, is precisely that these two spaces coincide. But once the distinction between these two spaces in on the table, it becomes clear that there is no logical or conceptual reason why they must coincide – and it turns out that a very simple way of pulling them apart from one another gives us quantum mechanics. (shrink)

In this paper we study local induction w.r.t. Σ1‐formulas over the weak arithmetic. The local induction scheme, which was introduced in, says roughly this: for any virtual class that is progressive, i.e., is closed under zero and successor, and for any non‐empty virtual class that is definable by a Σ1‐formula without parameters, the intersection of and is non‐empty. In other words, we have, for all Σ1‐sentences S, that S implies, whenever is progressive. Since, in the weak context, we have (at (...) least) two definitions of Σ1, we obtain two minimal theories of local induction w.r.t. Σ1‐formulas, which we call Peano Corto and Peano Basso.In the paper we give careful definitions of Peano Corto and Peano Basso. We establish their naturalness both by giving a model theoretic characterization and by providing an equivalent formulation in terms of a sentential reflection scheme.The theories Peano Corto and Peano Basso occupy a salient place among the sequential theories on the boundary between weak and strong theories. They bring together a powerful collection of principles that is locally interpretable in. Moreover, they have an important role as examples of various phenomena in the metamathematics of arithmetical (and, more generally, sequential) theories. We illustrate this by studying their behavior w.r.t. interpretability, model interpretability and local interpretability. In many ways the theories are more like Peano arithmetic or Zermelo Fraenkel set theory, than like finitely axiomatized theories as Elementary Arithmetic, and. On the one hand, Peano Corto and Peano Basso are very weak: they are locally cut‐interpretable in. On the other hand, they behave as if they were strong: they are not contained in any consistent finitely axiomatized arithmetical theory, however strong. Moreover, they extend, the theory of parameter‐free Π1‐induction. (shrink)

Pierce challenges the argument that economic sanctions are always morally preferable to the use of military force. He argues that such sanctions inflict suffering and physical harm on noncombatants and that small-scale military operations are sometimes preferable.

The central result of this paper is the small‐is‐very‐small principle for restricted sequential theories. The principle says roughly that whenever the given theory shows that a definable property has a small witness, i.e., a witness in a sufficiently small definable cut, then it shows that the property has a very small witness: i.e., a witness below a given standard number. Which cuts are sufficiently small will depend on the complexity of the formula defining the property. We draw various consequences from (...) the central result. E.g., roughly speaking, (i) every restricted, recursively enumerable sequential theory has a finitely axiomatized extension that is conservative with respect to formulas of complexity ; (ii) every sequential model has, for any n, an extension that is elementary for formulas of complexity, in which the intersection of all definable cuts is the natural numbers; (iii) we have reflection for ‐sentences with sufficiently small witness in any consistent restricted theory U; (iv) suppose U is recursively enumerable and sequential. Suppose further that every recursively enumerable and sequential V that locally inteprets U, globally interprets U. Then, U is mutually globally interpretable with a finitely axiomatized sequential theory. The paper contains some careful groundwork developing partial satisfaction predicates in sequential theories for the complexity measure depth of quantifier alternations. (shrink)

Splitting livers allows two people (usually an adult and a child) to receive a liver transplant from one donated adult liver, but the risks to the adult recipient are greater than if they had received the equivalent whole liver. It has been suggested, therefore, that splitting livers harms adult recipients. Without liver splitting, however, there would be few livers available for children, and paediatric waiting time and waiting list mortality would significantly increase. In this paper, we argue that although splitting (...) livers makes adults worse off, this should be considered sub-optimal benefit rather than harm. We explore justifications for sub-optimally benefitting adults in this way and consider alternatives to the current approach. We argue that splitting livers masks the more fundamental problem of low paediatric donation rates and that increasing the number of paediatric donations would improve the situation for both adult and paediatric liver patients. (shrink)

Different groups, because they are perceived to pose different threats, elicit different prejudices. Collective action by disadvantaged groups can amplify the perception of specific threats, with predictable and potentially counterproductive consequences. It is important to carefully consider the threat-based psychology of prejudice before implementing any strategy intended to promote positive social change.