This book traces the intellectual revolution initiated by Thales in the sixth century BC to its culmination in the metaphysics of Parmenides.

Popper proposes a technical concept of 'verisimilitude' as a test of the progressiveness of scientific theories. The paper attempts to show its uselessness and inapplicability on mathematical and practical grounds, As well as raising doubts about the value of any such attempt to give a mechanical test of scientific progress.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 42 Heft: 1 Seiten: 298-298.

Religion is a phenomenon of the spiritual life of mankind, its world-view basis, which regulates the daily life and behavior of man, and also allows communication with the "supernatural" through the rites.The overwhelming majority of definitions of the religious phenomenon relies mainly on two categories of religious studies: "supernatural" and "faith." For example, religion is defined as: "a spiritual phenomenon, which expresses not only the belief in the existence of a supernatural Beginning, which is the source of existence of all (...) existing, but also acts as a means of communicating with him, entering into his world.". (shrink)

Context Physicians are regularly confronted with research that is funded or presented by industry. Objective To assess whether physicians discount for conflicts of interest when weighing evidence for prescribing a new drug. Design and setting Participants were presented with an abstract from a single clinical trial finding positive results for a fictitious new drug. Physicians were randomly assigned one version of a hypothetical scenario, which varied on conflict of interest: ‘presenter conflict’, ‘researcher conflict’ and ‘no conflict’. Participants 515 randomly selected (...) Fellows in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' Collaborative Ambulatory Research Network; 253 surveys (49%) were returned. Main object measures The self-reported likelihood that physicians would prescribe the new drug as a first-line therapy. Results Physicians do not significantly discount for conflicts of interest in their self-reported likelihood of prescribing the new drug after reading the single abstract and scenario. However, when asked explicitly to compare conflict and no conflict, 69% report that they would discount for researcher conflict and 57% report that they would discount for presenter conflict. When asked to guess how favourable the results of this study were towards the new drug, compared with the other trials published so far, their perceptions were not significantly influenced by conflict of interest information. Conclusion While physicians believe that they should discount the value of information from conflicted sources, they did not do so in the absence of a direct comparison between two studies. This brings into question the effectiveness of merely disclosing the funding sources of published studies. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “The Banathy Conversation Methodology” by Gordon Dyer, Jed Jones, Gordon Rowland & Silvia Zweifel. Upshot: This commentary will address the implicit and explicit connections between Banathy’s Conversation Methodology, which is the heart of the process used at the IFSR Conversations held every two years in Austria, and constructivist theories in application.

The Fourth Edition of this bestselling, highly regarded book has been fully revised to incorporate changes in law and clinical guidance making a vital impact on patient management, encompassing: The Equalities Act 2010 which provides a right of older people to treatment without discrimination ; Case law on withdrawing nutrition and hydration ; Updated guidance on resuscitation from the Resuscitation Council, the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing ; The redefining of good medical practice by the General (...) Medical Council ; The abolition of the Liverpool Care Pathway with an updated guidance on end of life care and advance care planning. Expanded throughout, this new edition also integrates two entirely new chapters covering testamentary capacity and role of the physician, and religious beliefs and end of life issues. Its practical, reflective and informative approach continue to make it essential reading for all health professionals, particularly trainees, involved in making difficult decisions in the care of older persons. It is also highly recommended for undergraduate medical students. (shrink)

The faults of logical empiricist accounts of metascientific discourse are examined through a study of the modifications Carnap makes to his version of the program over four decades. As empiricists acquiesced on the distinction between theory and observation, Carnap attempted to retain and insulate an equally suspect sharp distinction between the theoretic and the pragmatic. Carnap's later philosophy was understood as a modification of the program in the direction of pragmatism. But neither the key notion of "external questions" nor an (...) instrumentalist understanding of "pragmatic utility" are genuinely compatible with pragmatism. This underlines the need to clarify what is unique to pragmatic views of cognitive evaluation and normative discourse as they affect scientific reasoning. I conclude by suggesting how pragmatic conceptions of metascientific discourse can work to correct misconceptions about norm generation and governance that are shared in logicist and historicist accounts. (shrink)

A Finslerian extension of general relativity is examined with particular emphasis on the Finslerian generalization of the equation of motion in a gravitational field. The construction of a gravitational Lagrangian density by substituting the osculating Riemannian metric tensor in the Einstein density is studied. Attention is drawn to an interesting possibility for developing the theory of test bodies against the Finslerian background.

The analysis of a previous paper (see Ref. 1), in which the possibility of a Finslerian generalization of the equations of motion of gravitational field sources was demonstrated, is extended by developing the Finslerian generalization of the gravitational field equations on the basis of the complete contractionK = K lj lj of the Finslerian curvature tensorK l j hk (x, y). The relevant Lagrangian is constructed by the replacement of the directional variabley i inK by a vector fieldy i (x), (...) so that the notion of osculation may be regarded as the key concept on which the approach is based. The introduction of the auxiliary vector fieldy i (x) is shown to be of physical significance, for the field equations refer not only to the proper field variables but also to a special coordinate system associated withy i (x) through the Clebsch representation of the latter. The status of the conservation laws proves to be similar to that in the theory of the Yang-Mills field. By choosing a special Finslerian metric function we elucidate in detail the structure of the field equations in the static case. (shrink)

An early work of Marcel's, mainly expository, written because he held that a contemporary philosopher cannot reflect on questions of time and eternity and of the nature of the individual without close scrutiny of Royce's solution. Marcel develops Royce's conception of absolute idealism from the analysis of certain perennial problems of epistemology. The problematic approach lends cogency to a lucid exposition.--R. G. S.

The article focuses on the concept of the state in the works of the German sociologist M. Weber and his contemporary, the anarchist G. Landauer. Specifically, it is commonly thought that Weber has a unique interpretation of the state, its nature, and inalienable characteristics. This Weberian approach did not fit into any of the traditions that existed at that time in Germany (for example, represented by H. Kelsen, G. Jellinek, and O. von Gierke). However, the author of the article tries (...) to demonstrate that three main Weberian aspects of the state — 1) the monopoly on legitimate physical violence, 2) the relationship of domination, which is accompanied by a minimum desire to obey, and 3) the chance for the regular reproducibility of these relationships — are consonant with Landauer’s concept of the state. This discovered conceptual affinity allows one to look at Weber’s sociology from new angles, without being impacted by the personal beliefs of the German scientist, who very critically treated anarchism as a socio-political movement. In the final section of the paper, the author discusses the modern project of “anarchist sociology”, which also uses Weberian methodology. The paper argues that “anarchist sociology” might be a promising social science with ts unique vision of several key sociological topics, such as domination, power, or social inequality. (shrink)