Nicholas of Cusa.--The academic scholar.--Leonardo da Vinci.--Sir Thomas More.--Machiavelli.--Erasmus, Luther, and Dürer.--Michelangelo.--Copernicus.--Montaigne.--Paracelsus, Kepler, and Boehme.--Galileo.--Hakluyt.--Giordano Bruno.--Recommended further reading (p. 277-281).

"Contents: " "Man Without Letters." Newton, the Enigma. Paolo Toscanelli and His Friends. Alessandro Volta. Galileo Today. Necessity, Contingency, and Natural Law. Prologue to Parmenides. Galileo and Oppenheimer. The Role of Art in the Scientific Renaissance. The Italian Novel Today--A Note on Realism. The Seventeenth-Century Legacy: Our Mirror of Being. Philolaos in Limbo, Or: What Happened to the Pythagoreans? Paralipomena of the Future. Vico and Descartes. Eudodux and Plato: A Study in Chronology. "Scientific Rationalism." Einstein (pour le decennal de sa (...) mort). Les Grandes Doctrines Cosmologiques. De Bruno a Leibnitz. Postface a Galilee; Les Suites de l'Affaire. La Storia da Riscrivere. Fato Antico--Fato Moderno. Salvemini. Il Rovescio della Medaglia. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer ärztliche Umgang mit Opiaten und Sedativa bei Patienten am Lebensende kann ethische Fragen aufwerfen. Entsprechende Entscheidungen blieben bisher in aller Regel der ärztlichen Berufskunst und -pflicht überantwortet. Heute aber gerät dieser Bereich zunehmend auch in den Blickwinkel des Rechts. Ausdruck davon sind Bestrebungen, die indirekte Sterbehilfe, allenfalls auch die terminale Sedierung gesetzlich zu regeln. Ausgehend von einer Ist-Analyse der ärztlichen Praxis sowie von bereits bestehenden Regulierungen untersucht diese Arbeit die Konsequenzen derartiger Bestrebungen. Es zeigt sich, dass der Versuch, die (...) Thematik der indirekten Sterbehilfe für sich allein, also unter Vermeidung einer Regelung der direkt aktiven Sterbehilfe, zu behandeln, zu großen Schwierigkeiten führen würde. Ernüchternd sind aber auch die Erfahrungen aus den Niederlanden, derartige Fragen im Rahmen eines umfassenden Sterbehilfegesetzes anzugehen. Insgesamt ist somit zu befürchten, dass der Versuch einer detaillierten gesetzlichen Regelung dieses Bereiches mehr neue Grauzonen und Unsicherheiten schafft, als er zu beseitigen vermag. (shrink)

Machine Learning (ML) is on the rise in medicine, promising improved diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic clinical tools. While these technological innovations are bound to transform health care, they also bring new ethical concerns to the forefront. One particularly elusive challenge regards discriminatory algorithmic judgements based on biases inherent in the training data. A common line of reasoning distinguishes between justified differential treatments that mirror true disparities between socially salient groups, and unjustified biases which do not, leading to misdiagnosis and erroneous (...) treatment. In the curation of training data this strategy runs into severe problems though, since distinguishing between the two can be next to impossible. We thus plead for a pragmatist dealing with algorithmic bias in healthcare environments. By recurring to a recent reformulation of William James’s pragmatist understanding of truth, we recommend that, instead of aiming at a supposedly objective truth, outcome-based therapeutic usefulness should serve as the guiding principle for assessing ML applications in medicine. (shrink)

O texto Imortalidade e Eternidade: um diálogo em torno da vida ativa privilegia três categorias: a memória, a narração e a imortalidade. Categorias que destacam a ação no mundo. A imortalidade se impõe como aquilo que está sendo perpetuado no tempo pela memória e pela narração. A noção que teria de ser superada, nesse contexto, é a noção de eternidade, tendo em vista que a mesma lança fora dos negócios humanos toda e qualquer ação. Com isso objetiva-se demonstrar a distinção (...) entre vida ativa e vida contemplativa. Para tanto, apoiamos nossa argumentação no pensamento de Hannah Arendt. Elegemos como Metodologia a pesquisa bibliográfica de caráter exegético. (shrink)

Ao tratar da obediência e banalidade do mal em Hannah Arendt, ensejamos discutir o estatuto da obediência e colocar essa em exame via reflexão. Desse modo, entendemos que a obediência sem reflexão pode ser um contra valor capaz de promover o mal. Nessa direção, a resistência pela reflexão e pela ação podem servir de barreiras para obstar esse mal. Elegemos a figura do pária rebelde como paradigma exemplar de resistência pelo que chamamos de uma desobediência ética que se ocupa da (...) responsabilidade pelo mundo. Escolhemos como metodologia a exegese textual já consagrada nos estudos de filosofia. (shrink)

Ao discorremos sobre o pertencimento ao mundo e a questão dos refugiados em Hannah Arendt, buscamos trazer a lume uma discussão enfrentada pela autora no século passado, mas que se torna atual, haja vista a conjuntura mundial hodierna. Nosso problema focou a seguinte questão: é possível um mundo sem acolhimento dos seres humanos e de suas relações? Ao nos indagarmos sobre isto, enfrentamos o papel do direito internacional frente à questão, sobretudo, no que concerne à tensão entre direitos humanos e (...) soberania. Para Hannah Arendt, ocorreu uma flagrante incapacidade dos direitos humanos e, do direito, como lei para proteger e resguardar os apátridas e os refugiados. Neste contexto, as categorias de mundo e de refugiado emergem como categorias analíticas para compreendermos a ideia de pertencimento. Ainda nessa esteira, buscamos esclarecer o conceito de mundo em Hannah Arendt para melhor construção de nossa argumentação. Elegemos como metodologia a exegese textual, já consagrada nos estudos filosóficos. Destacamos como corpus central de nossa discussão a obra Escritos judaicos e, em especial, os textos Nós os refugiados e A Condição Humana. (shrink)

Later life is often seen as a time of losses. Through the death of loved ones and the dwindling of bodily capacities, older people are increasingly confronted with their own mortality. As losses accrue across different domains, they form a unique existential vantage point. We aim to shed light on this understudied dimension of later life by analysing older people’s everyday practices of sense-making. Drawing on the findings of a qualitative interview study (_n_=16, aged 65-93), we identify three distinct practices (...) by which older people make sense of death and bereavement: timing, communing, and missing. We conceptualise these practices as “farewell ceremonies,” a term we borrow from Simone de Beauvoir. The “farewell ceremony” describes a period of incremental goodbyes, which characterised the last ten years of Jean-Paul Sartre as well as the death process of Beauvoir’s mother Françoise. Beauvoir captures these farewell ceremonies in her memoirs _Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre_ and _A Very Easy Death_, which frame our philosophical reflection on practices of timing, communing, and missing. Bringing together Beauvoir’s literary and philosophical work with our empirical findings, we propose an integrated view on death and bereavement in later life that centres the intertwining perspectives of self and other. (shrink)

We examined the relation between home literacy environment (HLE) and early literacy development in a sample of children learning four alphabetic orthographies varying in orthographic consistency (English, Dutch, German, and Greek). Seven hundred and fourteen children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and tested on emergent literacy skills (vocabulary, letter knowledge, and phonological awareness) at the beginning of Grade 1 and on word reading fluency and spelling at the end of Grade 1, the beginning of Grade 2, and (...) the end of Grade 2. Their parents responded to a questionnaire assessing HLE [parent teaching (PT), shared book reading (SBR), access to literacy resources (ALR)] at the beginning of Grade 1. Results showed first that PT was associated with letter knowledge or phonological awareness in Dutch and Greek, while ALR was associated with emergent literacy skills in all languages. SBR did not predict any cognitive or early literacy skills in any language. Second, PT and ALR had indirect effects on literacy outcomes via different emergent literacy skills in all languages. These findings suggest that not all HLE components are equally important for emergent literacy skills, reading fluency, and spelling. No specific trend in the role of orthographic consistency in the aforementioned relations emerged, which suggests that other factors may account for the observed differences across languages when children start receiving formal reading instruction in Grade 1. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.