Despite the importance of human blood to clinical practice and research, hematology and blood transfusion data remain scattered throughout a range of disparate sources. This lack of systematization concerning the use and definition of terms poses problems for physicians and biomedical professionals. We are introducing here the Blood Ontology, an ongoing initiative designed to serve as a controlled vocabulary for use in organizing information about blood. The paper describes the scope of the Blood Ontology, its stage of development and some (...) of its anticipated uses. (shrink)

With prevalent life issues—stress, addictions, loneliness, health, and violence, to name a few—as its point of departure, Challenges and Pleasures sets out to explain the various roles values and ethics can play for us. It proceeds by demonstrating how the quality of our lives and living morally are inextricably bound. As part of this explanatory process, the text investigates the nature of values and an ethical life.

The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent experiences (feelings of interest, engagement, and fulfillment), or on the objective conditions of their life (e.g., their effects on others). Studies 1a–b found that laypeople think subjective and objective factors contribute independently to the meaningfulness of a person’s life. Studies 2a–b (...) found that positive mental states are thought to make a life more meaningful, even if derived from senseless activities (e.g., hand-copying the dictionary). Studies 3a–b found that agents engaged in morally bad activities are not thought to have meaningful lives, even if they feel fulfilled. In short, both an agents’ subjective mental states and objective impact on the world affect how meaningful their lives appear. (shrink)

Chronic and current epistemological controversies, with particular attention to the development of pragmatist/historicist/constructivist reconceptions of knowledge and science in the 20th century and the scandalized responses to them by defenders of more traditional rationalist/objectivist/realist conceptions. Individual chapters deal with complex and confused relations among epistemic skepticism, relativism, and constructivist epistemology ; 20th-century "postmodern" relativism and anti-relativism; Ludwik Fleck and constructivist views of truth, science, and knowledge; attacks on and disavowals of constructivism and/or relativism by established and feminist philosophers; the Science (...) Wars and fraught relations between the humanities and the sciences; the problematic claims of Evolutionary Psychology; and chronic problems and contemporary views of animal-human relations. (shrink)

Evolutionary models consider hunting and food sharing to be milestones that paved the way from primate to human societies. Because fossil evidence is scarce, hominoid primates serve as referential models to assess our common ancestors’ capacity in terms of communal use of resources, food sharing, and other forms of cooperation. Whereas chimpanzees form male-male bonds exhibiting resource-defense polygyny with intolerance and aggression toward nonresidents, bonobos form male-female and female-female bonds resulting in relaxed relations with neighboring groups. Here we report the (...) first known case of meat sharing between members of two bonobo communities, revealing a new dimension of social tolerance in this species. This observation testifies to the behavioral plasticity that exists in the two Pan species and contributes to scenarios concerning the traits of the last common ancestor of Pan and Homo. It also contributes to the discussion of physiological triggers of in-group/out-group behavior and allows reconsideration of the emergence of social norms in prehuman societies. (shrink)

Considerable ethics-related focus has been directed to the pharmaceutical industry’s relationship with physicians, in part because physicians have the only profession able to prescribe much of what the industry manufactures. In Alberta, however, pharmacists have recently been permitted to modify physician prescriptions for a patient and even to prescribe without physician involvement. This paper will examine how this change in responsibilities could change pharmacists’ relationships with the industry.

The term ‘parenthetical’ is applied to an almost unlimited range of linguistic phenomena, which share but one common feature, namely their being used parenthetically. Parenthetic use is mostly described in terms of embedding an expression into some host sentence. Actually, however, it is anything but clear what it means for an expression to be used parenthetically, from both a syntactic and a semantic point of view.Given that in most, if not all, cases the alleged host sentence can be considered syntactically (...) and semantically complete in itself, it needs to be asked what kind of information the parenthetical contributes to the overall structure. Another issue to be addressed concerns the nature of the relation between parenthetical and host and the question what is it that holds them together.Trying to figure out the basic function of parentheticals, the present paper proposes a semiotic analysis of parenthetically used expressions. This semiotic analysis is not intended to replace linguistic approaches, but is meant to elaborate on why parentheticals are so hard to capture linguistically. Taking a dynamic conception of signs and sign processes as starting point, parentheticals are argued to render explicit the inherent dialogicity of signs and utterances. This inherent dialogicity is hardly ever taken into consideration in linguistic analyses, which take the two-dimensional linearity of language as granted. (shrink)

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--Tèubingen, 2012 under the title: Weisheit der Befreiung im Dialog: engagierter Buddhismus und Befreiungstheologie im Vergleich ihrer wirtschaftsethischen Perspektiven und praktisch-theologischen Konsequenzen.

This moralising essay indicates some specific, negative phenomena of our everyday life, which remain characteristic to the moral crisis of contemporary democratic systems. “Immodesty and baseness”, traced by the author, seem to be located somewhere on the cross-roads of an ethical and aesthetic valuation. There is something “disgusting” in the more and more ruthless violation of the right of privacy by media just to satisfy plebeian curiosity. There is something disgusting in the cynicism of the politicians: their statements, poses, behaviour (...) don’t harm anybody in direct way and don’t openly break the moral rules, but in fact they impair a human dignity. (shrink)

The organ donor shortfall in the UK has prompted calls to introduce legislation to allow for presumed consent: if there is no explicit objection to donation of an organ, consent should be presumed. The current debate has not taken in account accepted meanings of presumption in law and science and the consequences for rights of ownership that would arise should presumed consent become law. In addition, arguments revolve around the rights of the competent autonomous adult but do not always consider (...) the more serious implications for children or the disabled. (shrink)

We developed a technique to examine the effects of emotional content and context on verbal memory. Two sets of sentences were devised: in the first, each sentence was emotionally arousing due to the inclusion of an emotional “target” word. In the second set, “targets” were replaced with well-matched neutral words. Subjects read aloud a selection of emotional and neutral sentences, and were then surprised with memory tasks after a range of time delays. Emotional target words were remembered significantly better than (...) neutral words in all experiments. Recognition of emotional words was relatively stable despite increasing delays between encoding and recognition testing, in contrast to memory for neutral words, which decayed over time. Memory for neutral non-target words was enhanced when words had been presented in an emotional context. The results confirm the phenomenon of emotional enhancement of memory at short and long delays and suggest that emotional context may be encoded independently of word meaning. (shrink)

Science undermines the certitude of non‐naturalistic answers to the question of whether human life has meaning. I explore whether evolution can provide a naturalistic basis for existential meaning. Using the work of philosopher Daniel Dennett and scientist Ursula Goodenough, I argue that evolution is the locus of the possibility of meaning because it has produced intentionality, the matrix of consciousness. I conclude that the question of the meaning of human life is an existentialist one: existential meaning is a product of (...) the individual and collective tasks human beings undertake. (shrink)

Com a filosofia de Simone Weil, este artigo propõe discutir a perspectiva filosófica da atenção. Para tal, argumenta que a condição da atenção demanda e sustenta um estado de graça que, ao dispor à consciência o sentimento de participação na beleza da natureza, vincula ser e mundo. Debate, a partir da perspectiva weiliana, um princípio intermediador entre a contemplação das formas da natureza, a afeição ao sagrado e o engajamento com a alteridade como condição da atenção. Busca-se inferir que a (...) familiarização da consciência às instâncias fundamentais do ser é capaz de fazer frente aos sequestros atencionais do presente e recuperar um estado de graça suficiente a desembrutecer a vida. O objetivo está em tecer a crítica ao mundo moderno a partir da afirmação de uma atenção que, diferente das técnicas de focalização instrumentalizadas, demanda a confiança na experiência capaz de vincular o sentir, o pensar e o agir na defesa ético-política do amor ao mundo. (shrink)

Prenatal screening and testing are preference‐based health care options. They are offered so that pregnant women and their partners can learn genetic information about the developing fetus. In this literature review, I summarize studies of women’s and their partners’ psychological responses to prenatal testing and screening. These studies investigate the experiences of pregnant women, largely in the United States, who have access to health care services. Although the results indicate that these women are receptive to prenatal testing and screening and (...) seem to have limited negative psychological consequences, pregnant women without access to these services are not represented and may have different experiences. With that caveat in mind, based on the evidence, women generally do well psychologically as they manage the options that arise for them in the prenatal context. (shrink)

The contrast between man's amazing ability to manipulate his world and his pitiful incompetence in managing his own affairs is now as commonplace as it is tragic. It is by rigorous devotion to scientific method that we have made our conquests over the material environment; it is obvious that this method is not normally applied to the field of relations of human beings, individual and collective. These are conducted in a quite different way, governed by a medley of primitive impulses (...) set in a framework of a traditional morality that varies from place to place and age to age. In these matters science plays little part; yet more than a century has passed since Auguste Comte said that the rational reform of society must be brought about by the application of scientific method to social problems. It is, therefore, the first purpose of this essay to ask how far social problems might be tackled by the methods of science. (shrink)

Zsfassung in engl. Sprache u.d.T.: On responsibility adequate to the possibilities.

The paper addresses charges of risk and loss aversion as well as of irrationality directed against the precautionary principle, by providing an epistemic analysis of its specific role in the safety law system. In particular, I contend that: 1) risk aversion is not a form of irrational or biased behaviour; 2) both risk and loss aversion regard the form of the utility function, whereas PP rather regards the information on which to base the decision; 3) thus PP has formally nothing (...) to do with risk or loss aversion but rather with risk awareness; 4) PP removes a fictional construct in the legal system, according to which any hazard should be ignored and denied until it is scientifically proven; 5) the quandary originates in the tension between current methods of evidence evaluation, and the logic underlying PP which demands for a probabilistic epistemology. (shrink)

As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of decentralized clinical trials, trials conducted in whole or in part at locations other than traditional clinical trial sites, significantly increased. While these trials have the potential advantage of access, participant centricity, convenience, lower costs, and efficiency, they also raise a number of important ethical and practical concerns. Here we focus on a number of those concerns, including participant safety, privacy and confidentiality, remote consent, digital access and proficiency, and trial oversight. (...) Awareness of these ethical complexities will help foster the development of processes and cooperative solutions to promote safe, ethical trials going forward, optimized to decrease burden and increase access for all participants. (shrink)

This book investigates the turning point that occurred in the middle of nineteenth-century France when utopia shifted from its literary ambitions to a social-scientific concept aimed at laying the grounds for a better, fairer society. By using passions as the central focus, the author's aim is to circumscribe what he calls the utopian "afterlife" that characterizes fin de siècle France and evolved as dystopia later on in the twentieth century. Indeed, the scope of the book runs through a corpus representing (...) the nineteenth century from Romanticism to fin de siècle literature. The introduction exposes very thoroughly the contextual emergence of utopias in nineteenth-century France and seeks to position them within... (shrink)

In this paper we shall give a characterization of D-algebras in terms of lattice ordered abelian groups. To make this paper self-contained we shall recall some notations from [4]. The symbols !; ^; _; serve as implication, conjunction, disjunction, and negation, respectively. By D we mean a set of connectives from the list above containing the implication connective !. By a D-formula we mean a formula built up in a usual way from an innite set of the propositional variables and (...) connectives from D. (shrink)

Atmosphären zeichnen sich gleichermaßen durch ihre Profanität und ihre Wirkmächtigkeit aus. Wo immer man hinsieht, sind Atmosphären ein bestimmendes, vielleicht sogar das wichtigste Element im menschlichen Leben. Das Ziel des Sammelbandes besteht darin, die Bedeutung der Atmosphären im Gefühlsraum theoretisch und praktisch zu verdeutlichen und das Phänomen der Atmosphären in seinen vielfältigen Facetten, etwa in der Architektur, Kunst, Medizin, Psychiatrie, in der Pädagogik, in der Altenpflege, in Beruf und Privatleben, zu beleuchten.

ArgumentBiological drawings of newly described or revised species are expected to represent the type specimen with greatest possible accuracy. In taxonomic practice, illustrations assume the function of mobile representatives of relatively immobile specimens. In other words, such illustrations serve as “immutable mobiles” in the Latourian sense. However, the significance of drawing in the context of first descriptions goes far beyond that of illustration in the conventional sense. Not only does it synthesize the verbal catalogue of the type's morphological characteristics: it (...) also enables the examination of these traits. The efficacy of drawing is thus closely related to its power to direct and redirect observation; it is inextricably bound up with the act of making a drawing. Although the invariance of the “immutable mobiles” is a key virtue of the logistics of “paperwork,” the recovery of graphic knowledge requires a much stronger dynamic activity – a process of sequential processing that brings out differences by translating the phenomenon under examination into various modes of graphic representation. (shrink)