Focusing on Hegel’s engagement with Kant’s theoretical philosophy, the paper shows the merits of its characterisation as “completion”. The broader aim is to offer a fresh perspective on familiar historical arguments and on contemporary discussions of philosophical naturalism by examining the distinctive combination of idealism and naturalism that motivates the priority both authors accord to the topics of testability of philosophical claims and of the nature of the relation between philosophy and the natural science. Linking these topics is a question (...) about how the demands of unification—imposed internally, relative to conceptions of the proper conduct of philosophical enquiry—can accommodate realism, a key element in establishing disciplinary parity between philosophy and the natural sciences. The distance that ultimately marks Kant’s and Hegel’s answers to this question justifies the interpretative claim about completion, while the conceptual patterns exemplified in the posing of the question and in their shared assumptions about its philosophical importance justifies the reconstructive claim about “idealist naturalism”. (shrink)

The use of human subjects in research comes with lots of ethical challenges. The purpose of this review is to assess the various ethical issues that have been associated with biomedical research in Nigeria. This article also finds out the possible ways of improvement of this scenario. Pubmed/Medline, Google Scholar, JSTOR, and AJOL search were the possible search engine for literature from 2000 to 2020. Key words were used including, ethical issues, biomedical research and Nigeria. Of the 113 publications were (...) found., A total of 18(15.9%) articles fulfilled the study inclusion criteria and were included in this review. Twelve ethical issues were highlighted including Informed consent (12 studies), autonomy and voluntariness (8 studies), beneficence (8 studies), counseling (5 studies), compensation (4 studies), professional behavior and attitudes (2 studies), confidentiality (2 studies), social, cultural and religious practices (2 studies), scientific integrity (1 study), communitarianism (1 study), equity (1 study), and trust (1 study). We found that there are ethical issues in biomedical research in Nigeria of which informed consent is most widely studied. Also, participants had varying degree of understanding of their rights as research subjects. As a result, there is need to enhance the capacity of investigators to better understand these issues and also increase their explanatory skill to help participants achieve complete understanding of their various rights and process. (shrink)

Computational complexity is a discipline of computer science and mathematics which classifies computational problems depending on their inherent difficulty, i.e. categorizes algorithms according to their performance, and relates these classes to each other. P problems are a class of computational problems that can be solved in polynomial time using a deterministic Turing machine while solutions to NP problems can be verified in polynomial time, but we still do not know whether they can be solved in polynomial time as well. A (...) solution for the so-called NP-complete problems will also be a solution for any other such problems. Its artificial-intelligence analogue is the class of AI-complete problems, for which a complete mathematical formalization still does not exist. In this chapter we will focus on analysing computational classes to better understand possible formalizations of AI-complete problems, and to see whether a universal algorithm, such as a Turing test, could exist for all AI-complete problems. In order to better observe how modern computer science tries to deal with computational complexity issues, we present several different deep-learning strategies involving optimization methods to see that the inability to exactly solve a problem from a higher order computational class does not mean there is not a satisfactory solution using state-of-the-art machine-learning techniques. Such methods are compared to philosophical issues and psychological research regarding human abilities of solving analogous NP-complete problems, to fortify the claim that we do not need to have an exact and correct way of solving AI-complete problems to nevertheless possibly achieve the notion of strong AI. (shrink)

This paper investigates different modes of organizing for corporate social responsibility (CSR). Based on insights from organization theory, we theorize two ways to organize for CSR. “Complete” organization for CSR happens within businesses and depends on the availability of certain organizational elements (e.g., membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring, and sanctioning). By contrast, “partial” organization for CSR happens when organizers do not have direct access to all these organizational elements. We discuss partial organization for CSR by analyzing how standards and cross-sector (...) partnerships make selective use of organizational elements. We maintain that an important feature of the increasing institutionalization of CSR—not only within businesses but also among non-governmental, governmental, and professional actors—is the rise of partial forms of organization. We discuss the contributions to this Special Issue in the context of our theorization of complete/partial organization for CSR and outline avenues for further research. (shrink)

This study appeared in full in the last issue of Research Ethics Review (2007; 3 (2): 53). John Harris is investigating the effectiveness of a new regime for the treatment rheumatoid arthritis. His role involves asking patients to fill out a questionnaire that normally takes about 35 minutes to complete. The case study outlines three events: a patient whose eyesight is poor, another who cannot read and a receptionist who is discovered reading some of the completed questionnaires.

David Spurrett, David Papineau; A note on the completeness of ‘physics’, Analysis, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 January 1999, Pages 25–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/anal.

Well-known results due to David Makinson show that there are exactly two Post complete normal modal logics, that in both of them, the modal operator is truth-functional, and that every consistent normal modal logic can be extended to at least one of them. Lloyd Humberstone has recently shown that a natural analog of this result in congruential modal logics fails, by showing that not every congruential modal logic can be extended to one in which the modal operator is truth-functional. (...) As Humberstone notes, the issue of Post completeness in congruential modal logics is not well understood. The present article shows that in contrast to normal modal logics, the extent of the property of Post completeness among congruential modal logics depends on the background set of logics. Some basic results on the corresponding properties of Post completeness are established, in particular that although a congruential modal logic is Post complete among all modal logics if and only if its modality is truth-functional, there are continuum many modal logics Post complete among congruential modal logics. (shrink)

The paper addresses the issue of a relatively new institution of criminal procedural law in Latvia. The article is relevant due to the need for an effective mechanism for the objective possibility of realization of the right person for the completion of the criminal process in a reasonable time. Analysis of the European Court of Human Rights has allowed some conclusions that should be considered when investigating criminal cases.

Purpose: To examine the role of reductionism in the theoretical development of modern physics -- more specifically, in the quest for a complete unification of physical theory -- from the perspective of radical constructivism (RC). Approach: Some central features of the impact of RC on philosophy of physics are pointed out: its position of scientific relativism, with important implications for the validation of scientific propositions; and the notion of sharing constructed knowledge among individual knowers and its consequences for science (...) teaching. The issue of reductionism is then discussed with regard to (a) the hierarchical explanatory ordering of physical phenomena; (b) the idea of a "theory of everything" (TOE); and (c) some of its implications for the methodology and sociology of science. Findings: It is argued that the ontological status of the hierarchical structuring inherent in the sought-after TOE will depend on the individual knower's epistemic position concerning the notion of truth in science. In the relativist epistemology of RC, any true/false dichotomy of theories is without meaning. A hierarchical ordering is just one of many possible strategies that may be chosen for the construction of physical theories; and such a strategy may then be considered successful only to the extent that it yields a theory that is viable. Implications: The paper serves as an illustration of the impact of RC on the ongoing search in physics for a "final theory.". (shrink)

This paper is devoted to the completeness issue of RMLCI — the relative modal logic with composition and intersection— a restriction of the propositional dynamic logic with intersection. The trouble with RMLCI is that the operation of intersection is not modally definable. Using the notion of mosaics, we give a new proof of a theorem considered in a previous paper “Complete axiomatization of a relative modal logic with composition and intersection”. The theorem asserts that the proof theory of (...) RMLCI is complete for the standard Kripke semantics of RMLCI. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss two hybrid languages, ℒ and ℒ, and provide them with complete axiomatizations. Both languages combine features of modal and classical logic. Like modal languages, they contain modal operators and have a Kripke semantics. Unlike modal languages, in these systems it is possible to 'label' states by using A and ↓ to bind special state variables.This paper explores the consequences of hybridization for completeness. As we shall show, the challenge is to blend the modal idea (...) of canonical models with the classical idea of witnessed maximal consistent sets. The languages ℒ and ℒ provide us with two extreme examples of the issues involved. In the case of ℒ, we can combine these ideas relatively straightforwardly with the aid of analogs of the Barcan axioms coupled with a modal theory of labeling. In the case of ℒ, on the other hand, although we can still formulate a theory of labeling, the Barcan analogs are not valid. We show how to overcome this difficulty by using COV*, an infinite collection of additional rules of proof which has been used in a number of investigations of extended modal logic. (shrink)

(NOTE: This is a transcript of the class. FOR THE FULL PAPER, please click on "Maxson J. McDowell".) A complete transcript of an experiment performed within a class on dream interpretation. Knowing only the dreamers age and gender, we interpreted his dream from its text. Our interpretation included predictions about the dreamer's psychological issues, and about his defenses. It also identified a series of jokes within the dream which would tend to penetrate the dreamer's defenses. When we had finished (...) our 'blind' interpretation, the bringer of the dream gave us more information about the dreamer against which we tested the accuracy of our predictions. A paper on this experiment has been submitted for publication. A link to an AUDIO-RECORDING of this class is given on the first page of this transcript. (shrink)

How can we prove that some fragment of a given logic has the power to define precisely all structural properties that satisfy some characteristic semantic preservation condition? This issue is a fundamental one for classical model theory and applications in non-classical settings alike. While methods differ greatly, and while the classical methods can usually not be matched for instance in the setting of finite model theory, this note surveys some interesting commonality revolving around the use and availability of tractable (...) representatives in the relevant model classes. The construction of models in which simple invariants like partial types based on some weak fragment control all the relevant structural properties, may be seen at the heart of such questions. We highlight some constructions involving degrees of acyclicity and saturation that can be achieved in finite model constructions, and discuss their uses towards expressive completeness w.r.t. bisimulation based equivalences in hypergraphs and relational structures. The emphasis is on the combinatorial challenges in such more constructive approaches that work in non-classical settings and especially in finite model theory. One new result concerns expressive completeness w.r.t. guarded negation bisimulation, a back-and-forth equivalence involving local homomorphisms. (shrink)

Applied Natural Science: Environmental Issues and Global Perspectives will provide the reader with a complete insight into the natural-scientific pattern of the world, covering the most important historical stages of the development of various areas of science, methods of natural-scientific research, general scientific and philosophical concepts, and the fundamental laws of nature. The book analyzes the main scientific trends and developments of modern natural science and also discusses important aspects of environmental protection. Topics include: the problem of "the two (...) cultures": the mathematization of natural sciences and the informatization of society; the non-linear nature of the processes occurring in nature and society; application of the second law of thermodynamics to describe the development of biological systems; global problems of the biosphere; theory and practice of stable organic paramagnetic materials; polymers and the natural environment. Key features include: an interdisciplinary approach in considering scientific and technical problems; a discussion of general scientific trends in modern natural science, including globalization challenges in nature and society, the organic chemistry of stable paramagnetic materials, the fundamentals of the environmental chemistry of polymeric materials, etc.; a justification of applying classical (non-equilibrium) thermodynamics to studying the behavior of open (including biological) systems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Prelude to the Special Issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education on Children’s LiteratureEllen Handler Spitz, Guest Editor (bio)When Professor Pradeep A. Dhillon, editor of the Journal of Aesthetic Education, suggested to me one day that I might guest edit a special issue of the journal devoted to the topic of children’s literature, my initial reticence was toppled and my sense of resolve buoyed as I began (...) to fantasize with billowing excitement about just how this might be done. First, I dreamt up the image of guest editor as bountiful hostess—setting out delectable dishes in an elegantly appointed banquet before the readers of this journal. That metaphor faded, however, despite Maria Tatar’s eloquent reminder to us in these pages that gastronomy has frequently and salubriously been juxtaposed with reading. I could not help worrying (even though children vociferously protest the logic of this problem) that one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too. Therefore, switching to music, I began to imagine the editor as conductor of a highly select ensemble of musicians, all gifted with glorious well-seasoned voices. They might perform a concert (recorded for posterity, of course) of pieces aimed at an audience of those who care passionately about aesthetics, education, literature, and above all about children, and at those who, perhaps with tenderness, still recall their own childhood reading.But how to accomplish this in practical terms? Well, I reasoned, I would simply invite a group of distinguished senior scholars who, having achieved their reputations in related fields and having written on other subjects as well, have published highly significant works pertaining to children’s literature. Each person would contribute a composition in his or her own voice, and there would be complete freedom, carte blanche, no holds barred—the only constraint being page numbers. Would the results turn out to be harmony or cacophony? Well, I speculated, if each voice were finely tuned, resonant, and clear, whether treble or bass, forte or pianissimo, the outcome—although [End Page 1] unpredictable in terms of specifics—would, unquestionably, be musical. But that, dear reader, is ultimately for you to judge, for you have now heard precisely how this issue came into being and will, we hope, read on. Each author I asked responded to my call with alacrity and, in his or her original style and tone, made my task as conductor a perfect pleasure.We offer you a work in three parts. First, you will encounter two melodious and euphonious pieces, contributed respectively by Marina Warner (“Out of an Old Toy Chest”) and Maria Tatar (“From Bookworms to Enchanted Hunters: Why Children Read”). Here, the overarching themes of children’s play and make believe are set up, analyzed, and explored. Playing and reading are placed side by side, as well as reasons why children love to read and how they are variously exhorted, extolled, and even occasionally excoriated by adults for doing so.Our second movement consists of three apparently unrelated motifs, contributed in turn by Gareth Matthews (“Philosophical Adventures in the Lands of Oz and Ev”), Seth Lerer (“Style and the Mole: Domestic Aesthetics in The Wind in the Willows”), and myself (“Ethos in Steig’s and Sendak’s Picture Books: The Connected and the Lonely Child”). Actually, however, these essays are not unrelated, for each motif arises from a particular mode of interpretation grounded in turn in philosophy, in literary history and theory, and in psychology. The works considered are all by notable writers for children: L. Frank Baum, Kenneth Grahame, William Steig, and Maurice Sendak.For our grand finale, we offer two sonorous, seriously challenging contributions, one by Jack Zipes (“Why Fantasy Matters Too Much”) and the other by Eliza T. Dresang and Bowie Kotrla (“Radical Change Theory and Synergistic Reading for Digital Age Youth”). These works grapple with contemporary matters, with fantasy, with technology, and with “radical change” as these can be discerned in the literature, imagery, and general cultural lives of today’s and even, quite possibly, of tomorrow’s children. Gesturing toward the future even more strikingly, we conclude this work with a flourishing coda in the actual voice of a living child... (shrink)

Students of Hegel will soon have at their disposal a complete translation of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, "the only complete, matured, and authentic statement of Hegel's philosophical system", and the last of the four major works published by Hegel in his lifetime to be fully translated into English. Early next year, the Clarendon Press at Oxford will issue a translation of the second part of the Encyclopaedia, The Philosophy of Nature, by A.V. Miller, recent translator (...) of Hegel's Science of Logic. The translation includes the valuable Zusätze, and was supervised throughout by Professor J.N. Findlay of Yale, who has also written an Introduction for it. With it will also be published a new edition of the Philosophy of Mind, the third part of the Encyclopaedia. The text of the paragraphs is the familiar Wallace translation, but added to this volume are the Zusätze newly translated by Mr. Millet, and a new Introduction by Professor Findlay. When the present edition of the first part of the Encyclopaedia, usually referred to as "the Lesser Logic" has been exhausted, if will also be republished with some revisions and additions. Professor Findlay adds that all the proofs were done last June, and that if will appear "at a price that students will not find prohibitive". (shrink)

A common objection to the idea of public reason is that it cannot resolve fundamental political issues because it excludes too many moral considerations from the political domain. Following an important but often overlooked distinction drawn by Gerald Gaus, there are two ways to understand this objection. First, public reason is often said to be inconclusive because it fails to generate agreement on fundamental political issues. Second, and more radically, some critics have claimed that public reason is indeterminate because it (...) cannot provide any citizen with sufficient reason(s) for making important political decisions. Against the first of these objections, I argue that the purpose of public reason is not to end reasonable disagreement. Rather, it is to provide a suitable framework of values and principles within which citizens may resolve their moral and political differences. Against the second objection, I argue, first, that the indeterminacy of public reason is much less common than its inconclusiveness; and, second, that there are second-order decision-making strategies that may enable citizens to cope with cases of indeterminacy. The incompleteness of public reason, whether it takes the form of inconclusiveness or indeterminacy, is not a reason for citizens to abandon their commitment to public justification. (shrink)

Cooper (1983) pioneered underspecified scope representation in formal and computational semantics through his introduction of quantifier storage into Montague semantics as an alternative to the syntactic operation of quantifying-in. In this paper we address an important issue in the development of an adequate formal theory of underspecified semantics. The tension between expressive power and computational tractability poses an acute problem for any such theory. Ebert (2005) shows that any reasonable current treatment of underspecified semantic representation either suffers from expressive (...) incompleteness or produces a combinatorial explosion that is equivalent to generating the full set of possible scope readings in the course of disambiguation. In previous work we have presented an account of underspecified scope representations within Property Theory with Curry Typing (PTCT), an intensional first-order theory for natural language semantics. Here we show how filters applied to the underspecified-scope terms of PTCT permit both expressive completeness and the reduction of computational complexity in a significant class of non-worst case scenarios. (shrink)

John Morrison has argued that confidences are assigned in perceptual experience. For example, when you perceive a figure in the distance, your experience might assign a 55-percent confidence to the figure’s being Isaac. Morrison’s argument leans on the phenomenon of ‘completely trusting your experience’. I argue that Morrison presupposes a problematic ‘importation model’ of this familiar phenomenon, and propose a very different way of thinking about it. While the article’s official topic is whether confidences are assigned in perceptual experience, it (...) is also about two more general issues: how we can determine which properties are assigned in perceptual experience; and how we transition from perception to belief. (shrink)

In the past sixty years or so, a real forest of intuitionistic models for classical theories has grown. In this paper we will compare intuitionistic models of first order classical theories according to relevant issues, like completeness (w.r.t. first order classical provability), consistency, and relationship between a connective and its interpretation in a model. We briefly consider also intuitionistic models for classical ω-logic. All results included here, but a part of the proposition (a) below, are new. This work is, ideally, (...) a continuation of a paper by McCarty, who considered intuitionistic completeness mostly for first order intuitionistic logic. (shrink)

In the future, policies surrounding end-of-life decisions will be faced with the question of whether competent people in a completely locked-in state should be enabled to make end-of-life decisions via brain-computer interfaces (BCI). This article raises ethical issues with acting through BCIs in the context of these decisions, specifically self-administration requirements within assisted suicide policies. We argue that enabling patients to end their life even once they have entered completely locked-in state might, paradoxically, prolong and uphold their quality of life.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore artificial moral agency by reflecting upon the possibility of a Moral Turing Test and whether its lack of focus on interiority, i.e. its behaviouristic foundation, counts as an obstacle to establishing such a test to judge the performance of an Artificial Moral Agent. Subsequently, to investigate whether an MTT could serve as a useful framework for the understanding, designing and engineering of AMAs, we set out to address fundamental challenges within (...) the field of robot ethics regarding the formal representation of moral theories and standards. Here, typically three design approaches to AMAs are available: top-down theory-driven models and bottom-up approaches which set out to model moral behaviour by means of models for adaptive learning, such as neural networks, and finally, hybrid models, which involve components from both top-down and bottom-up approaches to the modelling of moral agency. With inspiration from Allen and Wallace as well as Prior, we elaborate on theoretically driven approaches to machine ethics by introducing deontic tense logic. Finally, within this framework, we explore the character of human interaction with a robot which has successfully passed an MTT. Design/methodology/approach – The ideas in this paper reflect preliminary theoretical considerations regarding the possibility of establishing a MTT based on the evaluation of moral behaviour, which focusses on moral reasoning regarding possible actions. The thoughts reflected fall within the field of normative ethics and apply deontic tense logic to discuss the possibilities and limitations of artificial moral agency. Findings – The authors stipulate a formalisation of logic of obligation, time and modality, which may serve as a candidate for implementing a system corresponding to an MTT in a restricted sense. Hence, the authors argue that to establish a present moral obligation, we need to be able to make a description of the actual situation and the relevant general moral rules. Such a description can never be complete, as the combination of exhaustive knowledge about both situations and rules would involve a God eye’s view, enabling one to know all there is to know and take everything relevant into consideration before making a perfect moral decision to act upon. Consequently, due to this frame problem, from an engineering point of view, we can only strive for designing a robot supposed to operate within a restricted domain and within a limited space-time region. Given such a setup, the robot has to be able to perform moral reasoning based on a formal description of the situation and any possible future developments. Although a system of this kind may be useful, it is clearly also limited to a particular context. It seems that it will always be possible to find special cases in which a given system does not pass the MTT. This calls for a new design of moral systems with trust-related components which will make it possible for the system to learn from experience. Originality/value – It is without doubt that in the near future we are going to be faced with advanced social robots with increasing autonomy, and our growing engagement with these robots calls for the exploration of ethical issues and stresses the importance of informing the process of engineering ethical robots. Our contribution can be seen as an early step in this direction. (shrink)

Ken Pledger devised a one-sorted approach to the incidence relation of plane geometries, using structures that also support models of propositional modal logic. He introduced a modal system 12g that is valid in one-sorted projective planes, proved that it has finitely many non-equivalent modalities, and identified all possible modality patterns of its extensions. One of these extensions 8f is valid in elliptic planes. These results were presented in his 1980 doctoral dissertation, which is reprinted in this issue of the (...) Australasian Journal of Logic. Here we show that 12g and 8f are strongly complete for validity in their intended one-sorted geometrical interpretations, and have the finite model property. The proofs apply standard technology of modal logic together with a step-by-step procedure introduced by Yde Venema for constructing two-sorted projective planes. (shrink)

The issue of existence - quiddity difference is one of the important issues that were put forward for the first time in Islamic philosophy without having any background in Greek philosophy. Aristotle's metaphysics which is the main source of the first philosophy contains only synonymous and verbal meaning ofexistence. The issue of existence - quiddity difference has no room in Aristotle's works. This issue was proposed first by Farabi and then was completed by Ibn sina. In Islamic (...) philosophy when it is proved that existence in the mind is neither identical with quiddity nor a part of it but differs with it and is excess of it, that is, when it is proved that existence occurs on quiddity, this question arises that how is their relation in the outside? Whether existence occurs on quiddity or existence and quiddity are identical in the external world? To this question the Islamic philosophers answer that existence and quiddity are identical in the outside and it isimpossible that they differ from each other in the external world. The importance of this issue is that it finally led to the origination of the doctrine of the principality of existence which is known as the culmination of Islamic philosophy. The main goal of this article is study this issue and its impact upon the origination of the doctrine of the principiality of existence. (shrink)

Reviews the book, The complete social scientist: A Kurt Lewin reader edited by Martin Gold . Although he is often acknowledged as one of the primary founders of American social psychology, and despite frequent citations in the literature, the actual ideas of Kurt Lewin seem to have been—more often than not—ignored or disregarded by most psychologists over the course of the last half century. Fortunately, there are a number of indications that this clearly unacceptable, decades-long neglect of Lewin is (...) being rectified. One such indication is this very thoughtfully and comprehensively assembled volume published by APA books and edited by Martin Gold. Offered as a companion volume to the also recently issued one-volume edition of two previous Lewin anthologies, Resolving Social Conflicts and Field Theory in Social Science, this anthology brings together fifteen additional articles that have been until now especially difficult for scholars to obtain. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Slightly modified version, as it appeared in Striegnitz, K. et al. Special Issue: The Language Sections of the ESSLLI-01 Student Session, Human Language Technology Theses. 2002.

Journal of Mathematical Logic, Volume 22, Issue 02, August 2022. We show that every definable nested family of closed and bounded subsets of a P-minimal field K has nonempty intersection. As an application we answer a question of Darnière and Halupczok showing that P-minimal fields satisfy the “extreme value property”: for every closed and bounded subset [math] and every interpretable continuous function [math] (where [math] denotes the value group), f(U) admits a maximal value. Two further corollaries are obtained as (...) a consequence of their work. The first one shows that every interpretable subset of [math] is already interpretable in the language of rings, answering a question of Cluckers and Halupczok. This implies in particular that every P-minimal field is polynomially bounded. The second one characterizes those P-minimal fields satisfying a classical cell preparation theorem as those having definable Skolem functions, generalizing a result of Mourgues. (shrink)

BackgroundAn increasing number of studies utilize intracranial electrophysiology in human subjects to advance basic neuroscience knowledge. However, the use of neurosurgical patients as human research subjects raises important ethical considerations, particularly regarding informed consent and undue influence, as well as subjects’ motivations for participation. Yet a thorough empirical examination of these issues in a participant population has been lacking. The present study therefore aimed to empirically investigate ethical concerns regarding informed consent and voluntariness in Parkinson’s disease patients undergoing deep brain (...) stimulator (DBS) placement who participated in an intraoperative neuroscience study.MethodsTwo semi-structured 30-minute interviews were conducted preoperatively and postoperatively via telephone. Interviews assessed participants’ motivations for participation in the parent intraoperative study, recall of information presented during the informed consent process, and participants’ postoperative reflections on the research study.ResultsTwenty-two participants (mean age = 60.9) completed preoperative interviews at a mean of 7.8 days following informed consent and a mean of 5.2 days prior to DBS surgery. Twenty participants completed postoperative interviews at a mean of 5 weeks following surgery. All participants cited altruism or advancing medical science as “very important” or “important” in their decision to participate in the study. Only 22.7% (n = 5) correctly recalled one of the two risks of the study. Correct recall of other aspects of the informed consent was poor (36.4% for study purpose; 50.0% for study protocol; 36.4% for study benefits). All correctly understood that the study would not confer a direct therapeutic benefit to them.ConclusionEven though research coordinators were properly trained and the informed consent was administered according to protocol, participants demonstrated poor retention of study information. While intraoperative studies that aim to advance neuroscience knowledge represent a unique opportunity to gain fundamental scientific knowledge, improved standards for the informed consent process can help facilitate their ethical implementation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In the last two decades it has become increasingly common to advocate for a complete ban on the sale of cigarettes. One reason in favor of such a ban is egalitarian: differences in the prevalence of smoking between socioeconomic groups go a long way in explaining health inequality, and a complete ban might be effective in reducing this inequality. However, a complete ban might also be objectionable on egalitarian grounds if issued with a discriminatory intent or if (...) it is selectively paternalistic. This article argues that a complete ban is likely to be guilty of both, especially when one of its aims is to reduce unequal rates of smoking between groups. A complete ban on the sale of cigarettes thus exhibits a curious feature: in aiming to reduce inequality it threatens to be inegalitarian. This is characteristic of a wider class of public health policies that deserves further attention by egalitarians. (shrink)

The international community's indifferent and double standard approach to resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh issue for 30 years forced Azerbaijan to restore its territorial integrity through military means and political negotiations on the battlefield during the Second Karabakh War, from September 27 to November 10, 2020. Although the 44-day Patriotic War ended with the victory of the Azerbaijani army under the leadership of the President of the Republic and Victorious Supreme Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev, armed clashes occasionally occurred along the borders of (...) Azerbaijan and Armenia. On September 19-20, 2023, as a result of successful localized anti-terrorism measures carried out by the Armed Forces of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the sovereignty of the Republic of Azerbaijan was fully restored. On October 15, President Ilham Aliyev raised the Flag of Azerbaijan in Agdara, Askeran, Khojavend, Khojaly, and Khankendi. On December 21, 2023, as part of the 1/8 finals of the Azerbaijan Cup, the football teams “Garabagh” from Agdam and “MOIK” from Baku met for the first time at the stadium in the Khankendi region, which had been liberated from occupation. The unity of the Karabakh-Army-People is the main source of our Victory. (shrink)

The issues treated in this book derive a certain degree of unification from their relation to the general theme of the completeness of scientific theories. Unfortunately, when a philosopher addresses himself to the question of the completeness of an empirical theory, it is far from clear at the outset just what the problem is. Schlegel, to be sure, explicates three different notions of completeness which may be relevant here: the logical, physical, and pragmatic aspects. By the first, Schlegel means the (...) usual set of issues having to do with the deductive and semantic structure of formal theories, the second refers to "the problems that are to be answered in terms of what is discovered by science about the natural world," and the third refers to "the factors in the completeness of science that seem to be chiefly dependent on the interests of scientists." As these formulations suggest, the level of logical and philosophical rigor is hardly commensurate with the kind of investigation one would expect. An early chapter deals with an epistemology of physics in which a class of entities called "constructs" plays the central role. Unfortunately, it is never clear whether constructs denote objects, properties, facts, sentences, or something else. On the other hand, the materials in this chapter are largely irrelevant to the subsequent discussion. Schlegel does an admirable job of scientific exegesis on the present state of quantum physics and cosmology. With regard to the former, he is an advocate of the "Copenhagen view," and he argues that a sort of natural limit of description and explanation has been reached. As to cosmology, Schlegel looks forward to a narrowing of the range of alternate theories as more data become available. In the chapter on purely formal questions a number of oversights seem to have been committed. The exposition of Gödel's incompleteness theorem is inaccurate in that it is not shown that provability can be defined intra-systematically. Schlegel's discussion of how the theorem might apply to scientific theories is suggestive, but also confusing. The chapter on infinity treats the continuum hypothesis as a proven fact, thus ignoring the very important questions raised by the work of Paul Cohen and others. Finally, and most distressingly, the Hebrew letter aleph is printed upside down at all of its occurrences.--H. P. K. (shrink)

Although very numerous ethical issues in the market of famous paintings are commented on, those aspects of auctions, Freedom of creation and preservation of cultural assets were picked up in this study to discuss, for the 3 aspect are the objects involved in legal problems, not to mention moral problems causing problems even between the nations. First, Auction related ethical issues include forgeries, appraisal and auctions. Forgeries include the coping or cribbing of the whole of an original Work, division of (...) an original work, completion of an incomplete original work and selling of work for education, etc. The appraisal distinguishing imitation from an original is conducted in 2 ways, one of which is to identify genuine and fake, and the other is price appraisal. However, our country is lack of appraisers and appraisal organizations, along with incomplete appraisal system and appraisal procedures. Appropriate appraisal distinguishing imitation from an original will enable transparent trade of famous paintings contributing to the revitalization of their market. Auction is contributing to the legalization of the trade in various great paintings heightening the public confidences for the great works of art. However, the participants in the trade through action are required high ethics not to use it as a means of tax evasion. Together with the rise in ethics of the people running art museum to preserve and exhibit the great works of art. The ethical issues relating to the freedom of creation include the production and censorship of licentious pictures and pornographies. Those who claim for the freedom of creation take a stand that the making of licentious pictures and pornographies should also be permitted acknowledging their artistic values, and making censorship unnecessary, for sexual amusements are also a part of human life. On the other hand, people on the opposite side insist that the freedom of creation need to be limited from the moral and educational views tightening the censorship. Some of the licentious pictures in the Chosen Dynasty hold artistic values and used for education purposes. However, the social conditions of today that stressing the merchantable quality of the famous paintings make them unfree from the issue of pornography censorship. The cultural assets related ethical issues are involved in thefts, plunders, returns, destructions and preservations of the cultural assets of great works of art. Such issues sometimes become the causes for diplomatic conflicts between the nations. What is important in this matter is our peoples' high ethics in culture. Nationwide and pan-national concerns for the movement of repatriating cultural assets of the great works of Art are required. The destructions of the famous paintings are done by artificially ways and natural disasters. Either way is in need of our ethics to prevent any destruction of cultural assets and strong sense of obligations of the people involved in cultural assets restoration. (shrink)

In visual science the term filling-inis used in different ways, which often leads to confusion. This target article presents a taxonomy of perceptual completion phenomena to organize and clarify theoretical and empirical discussion. Examples of boundary completion (illusory contours) and featural completion (color, brightness, motion, texture, and depth) are examined, and single-cell studies relevant to filling-in are reviewed and assessed. Filling-in issues must be understood in relation to theoretical issues about neuralignoring an absencejumping to a conclusionanalytic isomorphismCartesian materialism, a particular (...) neural stage that forms the immediate substrate of perceptual experience enactiveanimatesubpersonal” considerations about internal processing, but rather by considerations about the task of vision at the level of the animal or person interacting with the world. (shrink)

We raise an issue of circularity in the argument for the completeness of first-order logic. An analysis of the problem sheds light on the development of mathematics, and suggests other possible directions for foundational research.

Background People who are at elevated risk of suicide stand to benefit from internet-based interventions; however, research in this area is likely impacted by a range of ethical and practical challenges. The aim of this study was to examine the ethical issues and practical barriers associated with clinical studies of internet-based interventions for suicide prevention. Method This was a mixed-methods study involving two phases. First, a systematic search was conducted to identify studies evaluating internet-based interventions for people at risk of (...) suicide, and information pertaining to safety protocols and exclusion criteria was extracted. Second, investigators on the included studies were invited to complete an online survey comprising open-ended and forced-choice responses. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyse the data. Results The literature search identified 18 eligible studies, of which three excluded participants based on severity of suicide risk. Half of the 15 suicide researchers who participated in the survey had experienced problems obtaining ethics approval, and none had encountered adverse events attributed to their intervention. Survey respondents noted the difficulty of managing risk in online environments and the limitations associated with implementing safety protocols, although some also reported increased confidence resulting from the ethical review process. Respondents recommended researchers pursue a collaborative relationship with their research ethics committees. Conclusion There is a balance to be achieved between the need to minimise the risk of adverse events whilst also ensuring interventions are being validated on populations who may be most likely to use and benefit from them. Further research is required to obtain the views of research ethics committees and research participants on these issues. Dialogue between researchers and ethics committees is necessary to address the need to ensure safety while also advancing the timely development of effective interventions in this critical area. (shrink)

In this volume comprised of sixteen essays and rebuttals, author and professor of philosophy Susan Haack responds to her fellow philosophers and her critics on a wide range of topics that involve much more than the esoteric nature of contemporary philosophy. Instead, as is Haack's forte, she asserts her views on important current issues such as how scientists conduct their work, the ethics of affirmative action and the pitfalls of preferential hiring, and how the distorted reality the postmodern thinkers have (...) presented has corrupted legal thinking. Her charge is to bring clarity, precision, integrity, and most of all, practicality to her field of study. (shrink)

This research explored the ethical issues that nurses reported in the process of elaboration and further disclosure after an initial diagnosis of a terminal illness had been given. One hundred and six hospice nurses in Norway and Denmark completed a questionnaire containing 45 items of forced-choice and open-ended questions. This questionnaire was tested and used in three countries prior to this study; for this research it was tested on Danish and Norwegian nurses. All respondents supported the ethics of ongoing disclosure (...) to terminally ill patients based on ethical principles embedded in their country’s Patients’ Rights Acts. Truth, as an intrinsic value, proved foundational to patient autonomy, the most frequent ethical principle these nurses reported to justify their ethical position on information disclosure to terminally ill people. Telling the truth about a diagnosis was not the end of ethics in hospice care, but rather the beginning because what occurs ethically in dealing with prognosis issues became central to these hospice nurses, the patients and their families. Coupled with truth-telling, compassionate interaction and care become extensions of patients’ rights. (shrink)

For 170 years, Harriet Taylor Mill has been presented as a footnote in John Stuart Mill’s life. This volume gives her a separate voice. Readers may assess for themselves the importance and influence of her ideas on "women’s" issues such as marriage and divorce, education, domestic violence, and suffrage. And they will note the overlap of her ideas on ethics, religion, arts, and socialism, written in the 1830s, with her more famous husband’s works, published 25 years later.

The Philosophy of Gesture by Giovanni Maddalena is a multilayered volume: It is a "history of philosophy" book, endorsing a challenging anti-Kantian interpretation of Peirce and pragmatism. It is a "theoretical philosophy" book, dealing with classic issues—for example, the difference between synthetic and analytic, the definition of identity—and introducing a new concept, that of complete gesture. Finally, it is a book of "applied philosophy," pointing to a further application of the new concept of complete gesture to the fields (...) of pedagogy, morality, psychology, and literature.Dealing with all these three aspects in a single review would be impossible, maybe even unfair. Therefore, I will focus here mainly on the... (shrink)

The ethical issues associated with germline gene modification and embryo research are some of the most contentious in current international science policy debates. In this paper, we argue that new genetic techniques, such as CRISPR, demonstrate that there is an urgent need for China to develop its own regulatory and ethical framework governing new developments in genetic and embryo research. While China has in place a regulatory framework, it needs to be strengthened to include better compliance oversight and explicit criteria (...) for how different types of research should be reviewed by regulatory authorities. We also document a variety of opinions about the new technologies among the public, scholars, and policy makers. China needs to develop its own regulations in coordination with other countries; but it is unlikely that an international consensus will be achieved in this area, given the existing differences in regulations between countries. We should aim at harmonization, not necessarily complete consensus, and the perspective from China is vital when international norms are developed and harmonized. Chinese policy makers and researchers need to be aware of the international discussions, at the same time as the international community is aware of, and accommodates, Chinese positions on important policy options. (shrink)

In Morals and Medicine a leading Protestant theologian comes to grips with the problems of conscience raised by new advances in medical science and technology. They arise as issues at the start or making of a life, in preserving its health, and in facing its death. They are the problems of Everyman: some are new problems of conscience, such as artificial insemination; some are old problems in new dimensions, such as euthanasia. Modern medicine provides such a high degree of control (...) over health and vital processes that men must inevitably shoulder the burden of intelligent decision, and shoulder it as rationally as possible. Thus far, only Roman Catholic moralists have worked out a coherent ethics of medical care. Morals and Medicine is a new and independent analysis of the morals of life and death, striking out along the line of the values of personality rather than of mere physiological life itself. It offers a modern and at the same time Christian concept of right and wrong for all who are involved: the patient, the doctor and nurse, the pastor, and the family and friends. Originally published in 1954. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

A sample of 703 Spanish psychologists completed an online survey containing 114 behaviors related to professional practice in different areas. The aim of the study was to learn which professional behaviors create ethical dilemmas most often for psychologists and how they respond to these issues. Findings suggest that psychologists who have actually faced a particular dilemma are less strict on judging the inappropriateness of a possible ethical transgression than those psychologists who have not experienced it. Also, four clusters can be (...) identified according to the attitude of respondents toward the dilemmas, namely ?rejection,? ?aprioristic,? ?utilitarian,? and ?no conflict.? (shrink)

ABSTRACT Nanotechnologies are an expression of the human ability to control and manipulate matter on a very small scale. Their use will enable an even and constant monitoring of human organisms, in a new and perhaps less invasive way. Debates at all levels – national, European and international – have pointed out the common difficulty of giving a complete, clear definition of nanotechnologies. This is primarily due to the variety of their components, to the fact that there is not (...) just one technology but several. The most significant medical applications of nanotechnologies are in the diagnostic and the therapeutic fields, eg biosensors and molecular imaging, providing diagnosis and drug delivery with no invasive methods involved. Like any other emerging field, such technologies imply new possibilities for improving health but, on the other hand, they are still at an experimental stage and therefore should be implemented under rigorous safety testing before going on general release. For this purpose, the ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of nanotechnologies have been elaborated by study groups, in order to develop solutions before the results of the tests are diffused into medical practice. The aim of this paper is to define some of the ethical issues concerning biomedical applications and to evaluate whether there is a need for new or additional guidelines and regulations. (shrink)

Editorial for ‘One Christ—Many Witnesses: Marking the Completion of the Regnum Edinburgh Centenary Series’, a special issue to celebrate the Regnum Edinburgh Centenary Issue.

This article joins with others in the same issue to celebrate the career of Robert B. Zajonc who was a broad, as well as a deeply talented, psychologist. Beyond his well-known focus in social psychology, the work of Zajonc also involved, at one time or another, forays into nearly every other subfield of psychology. This article focuses specifically on his studies that extended into biopsychology, which deserve special highlighting in order to be recognized alongside his many major achievements in (...) emotion and related social topics. The biopsychological focus is offered here in the hope that all his diverse contributions be savored together when celebrating the complete psychology of Robert Zajonc. (shrink)