The European project European and Latin American Systems of Ethics Regulation of Biomedical Research Project (EULABOR) has carried out the first comparative analysis of ethics regulation systems for biomedical research in seven countries in Europe and Latin America, evaluating their roles in the protection of human subjects. We developed a conceptual and methodological framework defining ‘ethics regulation system for biomedical research’ as a set of actors, institutions, codes and laws involved in overseeing the ethics of biomedical research on humans. This (...) framework allowed us to develop comprehensive national reports by conducting semi-structured interviews to key informants. These reports were summarised and analysed in a comparative analysis. The study showed that the regulatory framework for clinical research in these countries differ in scope. It showed that despite the different political contexts, actors involved and motivations for creating the regulation, in most of the studied countries it was the government who took the lead in setting up the system. The study also showed that Europe and Latin America are similar regarding national bodies and research ethics committees, but the Brazilian system has strong and noteworthy specificities. (shrink)

Louis Frédéric Ancillon was a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Belles Lettres whose imagined dialogue between Berkeley and Hume was read to the Academy in 1796 and published in 1799. It is important as an indicator of the reception of Hume and Berkeley in francophone philosophical circles in late eighteenth-century Prussia. Our introduction is followed by an English translation with notes.

In an increasingly global landscape, NFP initiatives including those addressing animal protection, are increasingly operating cross-borders. Doing so without respect, local engagement, and a thorough understanding of the issues of concern is fraught with danger, and potentially wasteful of resources. To this purpose, we sought to understand attitudes to the importance of 13 major world social issues in relation to animal protection by surveying 3433 students from at least 103 universities across 12 nations. The emergence of a ‘nature trifecta’ was (...) suggested, with animal and environmental protection and sustainable development recurring as the most highly rated in importance across all countries, with these issues also consistently rating amongst the highest in each individual country. It is concluded that significant differences exist between attributed importance of world issues by nation, pointing towards the benefit of tailoring NFP initiatives by country and region. It is also suggested that nation, or more specifically, sociopolitical and cultural region, is a vitally important demographic for consideration in social development. (shrink)

This review is mainly expository. At one place, Following a suggestion of carnap's, It is suggested that advances in brain physiology might enable us to revive the notion of conventional truth.

ExcerptIn what follows, I would like to investigate the character of traditional Christian ritual, not as a full or comprehensive interpretation, but as a single step in that direction, inspired by recent archaeological excavations in southeastern Turkey and elsewhere that imply the primacy of ritual over material and economic factors in the development of society.1 The implications of these findings suggest that both anthropology and philosophy might focus on ritual as a key to the human. Yet if archaeological remains possess (...) the virtue of keys to the primordial, they also suffer from ineradicable obscurity that the absence of decipherable inscription…. (shrink)

There is a strong need to connect agricultural research to social movements and community-based food system reform efforts. Participatory research methods are a powerful tool, increasingly used to give voice to communities overlooked by academia or marginalized in the broader food system. Plant breeding, as a field of research and practice, is uniquely well-suited to participatory project designs, since the basic process of observing and selecting plants for desirable traits is accessible to participants without formal plant breeding training. The challenge (...) for plant breeders engaged in participatory research is to consider not only how their work incorporates farmer input in developing new varieties, but also how it interacts with broader questions of food sovereignty, food justice, diversity and democratization in the food system. This article examines these issues in the context of the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative, a participatory variety evaluation and breeding project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (shrink)

In this article, I present a critical literature study of the theoretical approach of practical theologians in South Africa to our discipline, in honour of Yolanda Dreyer on her 60th birthday. Some of my colleagues' approaches at the universities of Stellenbosch, Free State, Pretoria, Unisa and NWU are discussed. All of them work with practical theological hermeneutics. The basic hermeneutic approach of Daniël Louw is widened with an integrated approach by Richard R. Osmer in which practical theology as a hermeneutic (...) discipline also includes the empirical aspect which the action theory approach has contributed to the discussion. After discussing Louw's basic hermeneutic approach, all the other colleagues who basically accepted Osmer's approach in their publications are discussed. Important and new ground is being broken by contemporary colleagues, including research in public practical theology, without neglecting the focus on Christian congregations, and new work is being done at the grass roots level of African issues in our country. (shrink)

Excluding only pure nominalists and "imagists" he includes in the classical theory "almost everyone who lived before the second decade of the twentieth century." This of course covers most of the other general types of theory found in the epistemology textbooks: that concepts are in the mind, that they are also in the thing, and finally that they are fundamentally prior to the thing. These types may be exemplified by Locke, Aristotle, and Plato, respectively. The controversy between these three schools (...) Price feels can for his purposes be regarded as a "domestic difference within the classical tradition." His subsidiary discussions of these differences he confines almost entirely to the first two. The Platonic theory he handles very lightly and gingerly; "it is a sufficiently difficult task in these days to convince people that there is any sense in talking of universals at all, even in the mild and moderate Aristotelian way". (shrink)

Rights have two properties which prima facie appear to be inconsistent. The first is that they are conditional in the sense that one some occasions it is always justifiable for someone to act in a way which appears to be inconsistent with someone else's rights, such as when the defence of necessity applies. The second is that rights are indefeasible in the sense that they are not subject to being defeated our outweighed by utilitarian or policy considerations. If we view (...) rules and the rights which they establish as being subject to a ceteris paribus clause, the form of which generates out the exceptions, the conditionality of rights becomes reconcilable with their nondefeasibility. Such a view of rules and rights would entail that the goals of the law and their orderings be considered as a part of the law. When so viewed, propositions about goals and their orderings become legitimate premises for legal reasoning, furnishing solutions to hard cases in the law of torts, without resort to balancing of interests or judicial discretion. (shrink)