The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic has shed more light on the difficulty of making health care decisions integrating scientific knowledge and values associated to life and death issues, human suffering, quality of life, economic losses, liberty of movement, etc. But the difficulties related to health care decisions and the use of innovative drugs or technologies are not new, and many countries have created agencies that have the mandate to evaluate new technologies in health care. Health Technological Assessment (HTA) reports’ aim is (...) to guide the decision makers in these difficult matters. There are two ethical components in HTA. The first is the report’s presentation of an ethical evaluation of the technology. The second is the value-ladenness of the HTA decision-making process itself. When implicit value judgments are not elicited, the justification of the final decision cannot be transparent. The present paper aims to identify and elicit the implicit value-judgments related to each step of the HTA process. This research is grounded on an applied ethics decision-making paradigm based on the role of value judgments in the decision-making process. The first part discusses two different approaches to values and value judgments in HTA. In the second part, citations mentioning value judgments extracted from a systematic review on the integration of ethics into HTA were categorized to elicit the value judgments and their criteria for each different HTA decision-making steps. The results show that there are 18 decision-making steps in the HTA process where 23 implicit value-judgments can be recognized. The range of these value judgments encompasses the whole HTA process: from the initial request, the presenting of the principal issues, to the final report’s dissemination. Since stakeholders need to understand which value judgments the conclusion of a report relies on, eliciting the implicit value judgments in the HTA decision-making process should yield more transparency. (shrink)

Research on the effects of perceptual manipulations on recognition memory has suggested that recollection is selectively influenced by task-relevant information and familiarity can be considered perceptually specific. The present experiment tested divergent assumptions that perceptual features can influence conscious object recollection via verbal code despite being task-irrelevant and that perceptual features do not influence object familiarity if study is verbal-conceptual. At study, subjects named objects and their presentation colour; this was followed by an old/new object recognition test. Event-related potentials showed (...) that a study-test manipulation of colour impacted selectively on the ERP effect associated with recollection, while a size manipulation showed no effect. It is concluded that verbal predicates generated at study are potent episodic memory agents that modulate recollection even if the recovered feature information is task-irrelevant and commonly found perceptual match effects on familiarity critically depend on perceptual processing at study. (shrink)

Jeffery Aubin ,Marie Chantal ,Dianne Cole ,Julio Chaves ,Cathelyne Duchesne ,Christel Freu ,Steve Johnston ,Brice Jones ,Amaury Levillayer ,Stéphanie Machabée ,Paul-Hubert Poirier ,Philippe Therrien ,Jonathan von Kodar ,Martin Voyer ,Jennifer Wees ,Eric Crégheur.

Nous voulons mieux comprendre les lois circonscrivant le rôle social de l’Évaluation des technologies en santé (ETS) et les raisons empêchant l’inclusion de l’éthique en ETS. Nous avons ciblé un débat qui est au coeur du rôle perçu du droit réglementaire dans le développement de technologies en santé : l’opposition entre les enjeux environnementaux, sécuritaires et sanitaires (EHSI) et les enjeux éthiques, légaux et sociaux (ELSI), issus de la gouvernance technologique. La collecte de données est basée sur une revue de (...) la littérature issue de travaux antérieurs, et sur une analyse de cas où trois agences d’ETS ont été sélectionnées en utilisant différentes catégories d’obligation légale selon leur degré de force contraignante. La revue de littérature a révélé cinq thèmes relatifs au rôle social de l’ETS et une distinction entre le rôle/utilisation du droit dur et du droit souple dans le droit réglementaire, permettant ainsi de comprendre comment les agences ont utilisé le droit pour intégrer (ou non) l’éthique en ETS. Les deux approches ont démontré que le débat, EHSI/ELSI observé initialement dans la gouvernance et l’évaluation de technologies est reproduit en ETS. La principale tendance confirmée par ces analyses est la présence d’un pacte entre la science et le droit réglementaire. La demande sociale d’intégrer les ELSI, particulièrement l’évaluation éthique en ETS, n’est pas prise en compte par le droit réglementaire traditionnel régissant l’ETS et doit plutôt être considérée par le droit souple. Les difficultés d’intégration de l’éthique en ETS démontrent la nécessité de repenser la gouvernance juridique de l’ETS. (shrink)

The integration of ethical analysis in Health Technology Assessment (HTA) has proven difficult to implement even though it is explicitly recognized as an important component of such assessments in HTA literature. When compared to the standardized scientific method for systematic reviews in HTA, the diversity of ethical analysis has been characterized as a fundamental barrier to the integration of ethics. The present paper aims to identify the theoretical and practical differences between the approaches underpinning ethical analysis in HTA and clarify (...) the reasons for such diversity. Our systematic review of HTA literature pertaining to the barriers to the integration of ethics in HTA identified nine ethical approaches: Principlism, Casuistry, Coherence Analysis, Wide Reflective Equilibrium, Axiology, the Socratic approach, the Triangular model, Constructive Technology Assessment and Social Shaping of Technology. Citations pertaining to each approach were extracted and categorized according to three constitutive components of ethical argumentation established in a previous research evaluating nanotechnologies: i) the disciplinary foundation that grounds the validity of the ethical evaluation, ii) the characteristics of such evaluation, iii) the operational process involved in applying it to a particular case (i.e., its practical reasoning). This comparison shows that, 1) the difference between these approaches rests primarily on their disciplinary foundation (rooted in philosophy, philosophy/theology, or sociology), 2) their complexity can be observed in the distinct characteristics of ethical evaluation deriving from their differing disciplinary foundation, and 3) although four different types of operationalization procedure were identified, little information was available in regards to the practical reasoning associated with these approaches. (shrink)

"Dieses Buch entstand in der Zusammenarbeit des Projekts 'Humanismus in der Epoche der Globalisierung: ein interkultureller Dialog 'uber Menschheit, Kultur und Werte' (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen) und des Sonderforschungsbereichs 626 der Freien Universit'at Berlin ''Asthetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der K'unste'"--T.p. verso, Bd. 1.

John McDowell and Hubert L. Dreyfus are philosophers of world renown, whose work has decisively shaped the fields of analytic philosophy and phenomenology respectively. Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate opens with their debate over one of the most important and controversial subjects of philosophy: is human experience pervaded by conceptual rationality, or does experience mark the limits of reason? Is all intelligibility rational, or is there a form of intelligibility at work in our skilful bodily rapport with (...) the world that eludes our intellectual capacities? McDowell and Dreyfus provide a fascinating insight into some fundamental differences between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, as well as areas where they may have something in common. Fifteen specially commissioned chapters by distinguished international contributors enrich the debate inaugurated by McDowell and Dreyfus, taking it in a number of different and important directions. Fundamental philosophical problems discussed include: the embodied mind, subjectivity and self-consciousness, intentionality, rationality, practical skills, human agency, and the history of philosophy from Kant to Hegel to Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty. With the addition of these outstanding contributions, Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World is essential reading for students and scholars of analytic philosophy and phenomenology. (shrink)

Der von W. SELB (S.) und H. KAUFHOLD (K.) unter dem Titel „Das Syrisch-Römische Rechtsbuch“ (SRRB) edierte Text hat seit dem Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts zunächst in Form von kleinen Fragmenten in verschiedenen orientalischen Sprachen Spuren in der europäischen rechtsgeschichtlichen Forschung hinterlassen. Erst mit der Entdeckung einer syrischen Handschrift im Britischen Museum durch J. P. N. Land 1858 ist das Werk in einem wesentlichen Textzeugen bekannt und seitdem durch weitere Funde ergänzt, ins Lateinische und moderne Sprachen übersetzt und juristisch kommentiert (...) worden. Dennoch hat es bislang keine auf allen (syrischen) Handschriften beruhende kritische Edition erfahren. Die Autoren machen dies im ersten Kapitel (Bd.1, 27–42) verständlich, indem sie die Irrungen und Wirrungen der Wissenschaftsgeschichte des Textes darlegen. In diesem ersten Kapitel werden die Grundfragen, welche sich mit dem Text und seinem Verständnis verbinden, in offener und klarer Sprache formuliert. Das SRRB ist demnach eine einheitliche Sammlung von Erklärungen zu juristischen Texten zumeist normativen Charakters (Kaiserinstitutionen, leges) oder seltener von Juristenschriften (z. B. Paulussentenzen) aus verschiedenen Zeiten, die als „interpretatio“ um das Jahr 474 n. Chr. in griechischer Sprache entstanden ist (I, 46). Diese Erkenntnis, die S. im Kern schon in seiner Habilitationsschrift thesenhaft formuliert hat, wird durch die gegenwärtige Schrift erhärtet. Sie bildet die Grundlage für jede weitere Beschäftigung mit der Quelle. Richtungsweisend sind ebenfalls die nunmehr angestellten Überlegungen zum Verfasser des SRRB. In einer Handschrift (R III) wird ein Ambrosius confessor als Autor benannt. Diese Notiz deutete die Forschung bislang als Hinweis auf den Kirchenvater Ambrosius von Mailand, der freilich als Autor eines juristischen Werkes mit prononciert östlicher Verbreitung schwerlich in Frage kommt. Dennoch haben die Autoren die handschriftliche Notiz nicht als völlig aus der Luft gegriffen betrachtet. (shrink)

We assume that acting ethically is a skill. We then use a phenomenological description of five stages of skill acquisition to argue that an ethics based on principles corresponds to a beginner’s reliance on rules and so is developmentally inferior to an ethics based on expert response that claims that, after long experience, the ethical expert learns to respond appropriately to each unique situation. The skills model thus supports an ethics of situated involvement such as that of Aristotle, John Dewey, (...) and Carol Gilligan against the detached, rationalist ethics of Kant, John Rawls, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

Some breeding technology applications are claimed to improve animal welfare: this includes potential applications of genomics and genome editing to improve animals’ resistance to environmental stress, to genetically alter features which in current practice are changed invasively, or to reduce animals’ capacity for suffering. Such applications challenge how breeding technologies are evaluated, which paradigmatically proceeds from a welfare perspective. Whether animal welfare will indeed improve may be unanswerable until proposed applications have been developed and tested sufficiently and until agreement is (...) reached on how to conceptualize animal welfare. Moreover, even if breeding technologies do improve animal welfare, they might be objected to on other ethical grounds. Ethical perspectives on earlier animal biotechnologies are relevant for today’s breeding technologies and their proposed applications, but may need reinterpretation. The current paper applies the concept of telos, which previously figured mainly in debates on classical genetic engineering, to genomic selection and genome editing aimed at improving animal welfare. It critiques current accounts of telos and offers an alternative conceptualization that applies to recently proposed applications of breeding technologies. This account rejects both removing the desire to pursue characteristic activities and altering animal bodies in ways that compromise their ability to perform such activities, but conditionally allows increasing robustness against environmental stress. Our account of telos enriches ethical debate on these breeding technology applications by insisting on the connection between the good life, an animal’s constitution, and its activities, thus countering reductive conceptions of welfare. (shrink)

The urgency of the research topic lies in the author's search for the elimination of environmental and other threats to the existence of mankind. The population of Homo Sapiens increases quantitatively, intensify the rate of degradation of the natural environment and accelerates the movement to the total Collapse. Scientists in the world create only "appeals" and “warnings” of danger, but even the UN decision and three environmental forums 1992, 2002 and 2012 do not indicate real means of salvation. The purpose (...) of the study is a critical analysis of the works of scientists of the world and their environmental projects and plans. The objectives of the study are to offer a real way of saving humanity through the replacement of industrial technologies with environmentally safe nootechnologies, the development and use of the noosciences. The methodology of the study is based on the authors' foundations of the basis of many new exact and humanitarian noosciences - noophilosophy, nooecology, noohistory, noosociology, noocognitiology, and others. We use the noointegral, systemic and noohistorical methods within the framework of a promising principle of global evolutionism with transdisciplinary approaches. The result of the study is unquestionable evidence that in the flow of nanotechnologies since 2000 ecologically safe appears, which we propose to call "wise" - neotechnologies. Their number is small and the number is growing slowly, but the trends of world science evidenced by the inevitability of the victory of nootechnologies and elimination of all industrial technologies. The main result of the study is the list of noosciences and nootechnologies, which are "terms from the future". They form the Nooglossary for which we received the copyright certificate - a legal document of our author's priority. The conclusion is that humanity will be saved not by the "third industrial revolution" by J. Rifkin and not by the "fourth" K. Schwab or “smart-activity”, but by the development of the nooosciences and the massive use of environmentally safe nootechnologies. Nooera has already begun, but humanity does not notice it yet. The first nootechnologies exist, but they are still too small. We have created the Nooglossary to accelerate the progression of noofuture. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für Religionswissenschaft Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 1 Seiten: 1-2.

Index to the Mahaniddesa. L. S. Cousins. Pali Text Society, Oxford 1995. £13. ISBN 0-86013-310-9.

Edmund Husserl gave his famous London Lectures (in German) in June 1922 where he says his purpose is to explain “transcendental sociological [intersubjective] phenomenology having reference to a manifest multiplicity of conscious subjects communicating with one another”. This effective definitionof semiotic phenomenology as Communicology was reported in English (1923) by Charles K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in the first book on the topic titled The Meaning of Meaning. This groundwork was in full development by 1939 with the first detailed (...) use of Husserl’s phenomenology to explicate human communication, i.e., the publication of Wilbur Marshal Urban’s Language and Reality. My paper addresses Urban’s use of Husserl’s philosophy toboth explicate the phenomenological method and to explore the constitutive elements of human communication and culture. Urban makes use of the workon language and culture by his famous colleagues at Yale University (USA): Edward Sapir (the linguist), Benjamin Lee Whorf (Sapir’s graduate student),and Ernst Cassirer. My own teacher at the University of New Mexico (USA) was Hubert Griggs Alexander, a doctoral student under Urban and a classmateof Whorf. The interdisciplinary focus on Culture and Communicology by Professors Cassirer, Sapir, Urban, and their doctoral students, Alexander and Whorf are collectively known as the “Yale School of Communicology.” Typical empirical examples of theoretical points are provided in the footnotes. (shrink)