OBJECTIVES: To investigate the need for hospital clinical ethics committees by studying the frequency with which ethical dilemmas arose, the perceived adequacy of the process of their resolution, and the teaching and training of staff in medical ethics. DESIGN: Interviews with individuals and three multidisciplinary teams; questionnaire to randomly selected individuals. SETTING: Two major London children's hospitals. RESULTS: Ethical dilemmas arose frequently but were resolved in a relatively unstructured fashion. Ethical concerns included: the validity of consent for investigations and treatment; (...) lack of children's involvement in consent; initiation of heroic or futile treatments; resource allocation. Staff expressed the need for a forum which would provide consultation on ethical issues, develop guidelines for good ethical practice, undertake teaching and training, and provide ethical reflection outside the acute clinical setting. CONCLUSION: Multidisciplinary, accountable and audited clinical ethics committees with predominantly advisory, practice development and educational roles could provide a valuable contribution to UK clinical practice and perhaps in other countries that have not developed hospital clinical ethics committees. (shrink)

Background: Although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve high diagnostic accuracy for detecting Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, they are not yet applied in clinical routine. One important reason for this is a lack of model comprehensibility. Recently developed visualization methods for deriving CNN relevance maps may help to fill this gap as they allow the visualization of key input image features that drive the decision of the model. We investigated whether models with higher accuracy (...) also rely more on discriminative brain regions predefined by prior knowledge. Methods: We trained a CNN for the detection of AD in N = 663 T1-weighted MRI scans of patients with dementia and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and verified the accuracy of the models via cross-validation and in three independent samples including in total N = 1655 cases. We evaluated the association of relevance scores and hippocampus volume to validate the clinical utility of this approach. To improve model comprehensibility, we implemented an interactive visualization of 3D CNN relevance maps, thereby allowing intuitive model inspection. Results: Across the three independent datasets, group separation showed high accuracy for AD dementia versus controls (AUC ≥ 0.91) and moderate accuracy for amnestic MCI versus controls (AUC ≈ 0.74). Relevance maps indicated that hippocampal atrophy was considered the most informative factor for AD detection, with additional contributions from atrophy in other cortical and subcortical regions. Relevance scores within the hippocampus were highly correlated with hippocampal volumes (Pearson’s r ≈ −0.86, p < 0.001). Conclusion: The relevance maps highlighted atrophy in regions that we had hypothesized a priori. This strengthens the comprehensibility of the CNN models, which were trained in a purely data-driven manner based on the scans and diagnosis labels. The high hippocampus relevance scores as well as the high performance achieved in independent samples support the validity of the CNN models in the detection of AD-related MRI abnormalities. The presented data-driven and hypothesis-free CNN modeling approach might provide a useful tool to automatically derive discriminative features for complex diagnostic tasks where clear clinical criteria are still missing, for instance for the differential diagnosis between various types of dementia. (shrink)

Excerpt from Rechtsphilosophie Fast samtliche Anhanger absoluter rechtsphilosophischer Wertprinzipien im neunzehnten Jahrhundert so z. B. Stahl, Trendelenburg, Lasson haben den Empirismus auf sich wirken lassen und eine Versohnung der Spekulation mit der positiven Rechtswissenschaft zum mindesten angestrebt. In neuester Zeit hat vor allem Stammler die Einordnung des Rechts in absolute Zweckzusammenhange mit der Ansicht zu vereinigen gewusst, dass die formale Gesetzmassigkeit oder gegenstandliche Richtig keit lediglich einen Massstab fur oder eine unbedingte Anforde rung an das Recht, ein Ziel fur den (...) Gesetzgeber, nicht aber eine ausserlich verbindliche Norm fur das Zusammenleben der Menschen bedeuten kann. So erfullt die kritische Wertspekulation die Forderung Bergbohms, Philosophie des positiven Rechts zu sein. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)

La lecture néokantienne de Platon est souvent reléguée au rang de simple curiosité historique dont l’intérêt ne dépasserait pas le cercle étroit des spécialistes de ce courant. C’est particulièrement regrettable, car elle offre un exemple remarquable de réappropriation philosophique philologiquement informée d’un penseur majeur du passé. Si l’histoire de la philosophie doit avoir, par-delà son intérêt antiquaire tout à fait légitime, une véritable pertinence pour la philosophie en train de se...

Neokantismes: la marque du pluriel indique d'emblee que le mot d'ordre des annees 1865 Retour a Kant! regroupe differentes ecoles. Les auteurs dont les textes inedits en francais se trouvent ici rassembles et traduits, appartiennent en effet soit a l'ecole de Marbourg (H. Cohen, P. Natorp et E. Cassirer) soit a l'ecole de Bade (W. Windelband, H. Rickert, E. Lask, J. Cohn). Le point commun du neokantisme logique des premiers et du neokantisme axiologique des seconds consiste en une volonte (...) d'asseoir le positivisme sur un fondement philosophique respectueux de l'attitude phenomenologique. Kant apparut donc a tous ces penseurs comme science rigoureuse a condition toutefois de ne considerer le sujet transcendantal que comme une fonction logique de la pensee qui elabore la forme et le contenu de la connaissance. A condition egalement de ne pas limiter l'entreprise critique a la physique, mais de l'etendre au fondement de toutes les sciences de l'esprit. (shrink)

Placide Tempels’ Bantu Philosophy has largely been met with hostility from African philosophers. Whilst Tempels intended to show that the Bantu were not only capable of thinking, but also that they had a distinct and coherent philosophy of their own, his project seems to have achieved exactly the opposite. Temples’ project sought to expose the racism of thinkers such as Lucien Levy-Bruhl, thereby raising the African to the same status as the Westerner. However, his efforts have been rejected for a (...) number of reasons ranging from the view that it is a theory of magic, freely generalized to the Bantu, to the accusation that his project fails to speak on behalf of the oppressed Bantu and furthermore, that he is overly obsessed with finding the African difference at the cost of reason. In this paper, I seek to argue that a neglected critique of Tempels is one that has to do with the basis of his philosophical racialism. I seek to show that at the root of Bantu Philosophy is racialism grounded in the same assumptions as those made by Levy-Bruhl. I seek to argue that the categories that Tempels creates for Bantu thought do not simply seek to articulate a genuine difference from Western categories. The Bantu categories are coined as inferior, incoherent, inarticulate, illogical, and mystified. I argue that it is for reasons of philosophical racialism that Tempels urges his Western audience to overthrow their logical and articulable systems if they ever want to understand the Bantu system of thought. (shrink)

Maḥmūd, Zakī Najīb; 1905- ; philosophy; criticism and interpretation.

We interpret the concept of determinism for a classical system as the requirement that the solution to the Cauchy problem for the equations of motion governing this system be unique. This requirement is generally believed to hold for all autonomous classical systems. Our analysis of classical electrodynamics in a world with one temporal and one spatial dimension provides counterexamples of this belief. Given the initial conditions of a particular type, the Cauchy problem may have an infinite set of solutions. Therefore, (...) random behavior of closed classical systems is indeed possible. With this finding, we give a qualitative explanation of how classical strings can split. We propose a modified path integral formulation of classical mechanics to include indeterministic systems. (shrink)

Storrs McCall claims to have a novel solution to the age-old problem of the incompatibility of free will and God's omniscience. His solution is based on the thesis of the supervenience of truth on being. I argue that this thesis plays no role in solving the ancient conundrum.

Open peer commentary on the article “Sensorimotor Direct Realism: How We Enact Our World” by Michael Beaton. Upshot: This commentary is broadly sympathetic to the claims made in the target article. I start by questioning whether we can have direct access to an external reality in such a way that our experience is not intrinsically private. I then suggest that the argument for direct realism presented here is inconclusive with regard to whether external objects play a causal or a constitutive (...) role. (shrink)

Instead, this book employs a philosophy oriented towards the relationship between self and other. The book gives a critical discussion of religion, the Enlightenment and Romanticism.