The paper considers the recently published British Medical Association Guidance on ethical issues arising in relation to rationing of treatment during the COVID-19 Pandemic. It considers whether it...

The paper considers whether the British Government could make receiving a COVID-19 vaccine effectively legally mandatory. After considering the position in English law, it considers the ethical pos...

When a judgment begins ‘counsel made some bold submissions’, this is usually a sign the judge found the argument unconvincing. Dr Martin – Tutor and Fellow in Constitutional and Human Rights Law at...

Human languages, such as French, Cantonese or American Sign Language, are socio- cultural entities. Knowledge of them (`competence') is acquired by exposure to the ap- propriate environment. Languages are maintained and transmitted by acts of speaking and writing; and this is also the means by which languages evolve. The utterances of one generation are processed by their children to form mental grammars, which in some sense summarize, or generalize over, the children's linguistic experiences. These grammars are the basis for the (...) production of a new avalanche of utterances to which the next generation in its turn is subjected. (This picture is simplified, of course, as generations overlap.) Languages inhabit two distinct and separate modes of existence, which have been called (by Chomsky, 1986) `E-Language' and `I-Language'. E-language is the external observable behaviour --- utterances and inscriptions and manifestations of their meanings. E-language is regarded by some as so chaotic and subject to the vicissitudes of everyday human life as to be a poor candidate for systematic study. (E-Language corresponds to what Chomsky, in earlier terminology, called `performance'.) Out of this blooming buzzing confusion the individual child distils an order internal to the mind; the child constructs a coherent systematic set of rules mapping meanings onto forms. This set of rules is the child's I-Language (where `I' is for `internal'). No two individuals' I-Languages have to be the same, although those of people living in the same community will overlap very significantly. But there will usually be at least some slight difference between the I-language features prevalent in one generation and those prevalent in the next. This is the stuff of language evolution, in the sense of the historical development of individual languages, such as Swedish, Navaho or Zulu. (shrink)

Neural correlates exist for a basic component of logical formulae, PREDICATE(x). Vision and audition research in primates and humans shows two independent neural pathways; one locates objects in body-centered space, the other attributes properties, such as colour, to objects. In vision these are the dorsal and ventral pathways. In audition, similarly separable “where” and “what” pathways exist. PREDICATE(x) is a schematic representation of the brain's integration of the two processes of delivery by the senses of the location of an arbitrary (...) referent object, mapped in parietal cortex, and analysis of the properties of the referent by perceptual subsystems. The brain computes actions using a few “deictic” variables pointing to objects. Parallels exist between such nonlinguistic variables and linguistic deictic devices. Indexicality and reference have linguistic and nonlinguistic (e.g., visual) versions, sharing the concept of attention. The individual variables of logical formulae are interpreted as corresponding to these mental variables. In computing action, the deictic variables are linked with “semantic” information about the objects, corresponding to logical predicates. Mental scene descriptions are necessary for practical tasks of primates, and preexist language phylogenetically. The type of scene descriptions used by nonhuman primates would be reused for more complex cognitive, ultimately linguistic, purposes. The provision by the brain's sensory/perceptual systems of about four variables for temporary assignment to objects, and the separate processes of perceptual categorization of the objects so identified, constitute a pre-adaptive platform on which an early system for the linguistic description of scenes developed. Key Words: argument; attention; deictic; dorsal; logic; neural; object; predicate; reference; ventral. (shrink)

Let κ denote a regular uncountable cardinal and NS the normal ideal of nonstationary subsets of κ. Our results concern the well-known open question whether NS fails to be κ + -saturated, i.e., are there κ + stationary subsets of κ with pairwise intersections nonstationary? Our first observation is: Theorem. NS is κ + -saturated iff for every normal ideal J on κ there is a stationary set $A \subseteq \kappa$ such that $J = NS \mid A = \{X \subseteq (...) \kappa:X \cap A \in NS\}$ . Turning our attention to large cardinals, we extend the usual (weak) Mahlo hierarchy to define "greatly Mahlo" cardinals and obtain the following: Theorem. If κ is greatly Mahlo then NS is not κ + -saturated. Theorem. If κ is ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable (e.g., weakly compact), ethereal (e.g., subtle), or carries a κ-saturated ideal, then κ is greatly Mahlo. Moreover, there is a stationary set of greatly Mahlo cardinals below any ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable cardinal. These methods apply to other normal ideals as well; e.g., the subtle ideal on an ineffable cardinal κ is not κ + -saturated. (shrink)

The Alexandrian emphasis on smallness, elegance, and slightness at the expense of grand themes in major poetic genres was not preciosity for its own sake: although the poetry was written by and for scholars, it had much larger sources than the bibliothecal context in which it was composed. Since the time of the classical poets, much had changed. Earlier Greek poetry was an intimate part of the life of the city-state, written for its religious occasions and performed by its citizens. (...) But eh conquests of Alexander had altered the structure and the boundaries of the Greek world to an astonishing degree. Alexandria, the center of the poetic culture of the new age, was a city that had not even existed at the time of Euripides; it was in Egypt, not in Greece, and was a huge, polyglot community. As immigrants immersed in a new, impersonal, and bureaucratic society, the poets not unreasonably sought out what was small, intimate, and personal in their verses. The heroes of early Greek poetry are larger than life; those of Alexandrian poetry are life-size. They are human, like us; they have a childhood and an old age; they are afraid or in love or caught in a rainstorm. It was simply one way of reducing the world to more manageable dimensions. At the same time, the new world of Alexandria needed a new poetry. To continue writing epics about a mythology that seemed very far away was senseless; it was impossible to recapture either the style or the immediacy of Homer, lyric poetry, or Attic tragedy. The scholar-poets of Alexandria admired the literature of classical Greece; for them Homer was incomparable and inimitable, to be studied—but not to be copied. Far better, then, to find a new voice on a more manageable scale: instead of oral epic, erudite epyllion; instead of lyric, epigram; instead of tragedy, mime. The poets of an urban and unheroic world might long for but could never re-create the grandeur of the past. James E. G. Zetzel is associate professor of classics at Princeton University and editor of the Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity and, with Anthony T. Grafton and Glenn W. Most, has translated Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum. (shrink)

The contribution of this work is a classification of corporate social action underlying the Social Ratings Data compiled by Kinder Lydenburg Domini Analytics, Inc. We compare extant typologies of corporate social action to the results of our exploratory factor analysis. Our findings indicate four distinct latent constructs that bear resemblance to concepts discussed in prior literature. Akey finding of our research is that positive and negative social action are both empirically and conceptually distinct constructs and should not be combined in (...) future research. Additionally, we recommend that some prior research results be reconsidered to determine whether these newly derived measures might clarify some previous findings. (shrink)

We study the I-ultrafilters on ω, where I is a collection of subsets of a set X, usually R or ω 1 . The I-ultrafilters usually contain the P-points, often as a small proper subset. We study relations between I-ultrafilters for various I, and closure of I-ultrafilters under ultrafilter sums. We consider, but do not settle, the question whether I-ultrafilters always exist.

Several canonical partition theorems are obtained, including a simultaneous generalization of Neumer's lemma and the Erdos-Rado theorem. The canonical partition relation for infinite cardinals is completely determined, answering a question of Erdos and Rado. Counterexamples are given showing that in several ways these results cannot be improved.

Should mental health insurance cover only disorders found in DSM‐IV, or should it be extended to treatment for ordinary shyness, unhappiness, and other responses to life's hard knocks?

In a recent symposium on Descartes' ontological argument, Norman Malcolm has restated a rather ingenious version of St Anse1m's ontological argument. 1 The purpose of the present paper is to assess the merits of this particular version of the ontological argument.

While the prevalence of opioid use disorder among pregnant women has multiplied in the United States in the last decade, buprenorphine treatment for peripartum women with OUD has been administered to reduce risks of repeated cycles of craving and withdrawal. However, the maternal behavior and bonding in mothers with OUD may be altered as the underlying maternal behavior neurocircuit is opioid sensitive. In the regulation of rodent maternal behaviors such as licking and grooming, a series of opioid-sensitive brain regions are (...) functionally connected, including the ventral pallidum. In humans, these brain regions, interact with the supplementary motor area to regulate maternal behaviors and are functionally dysregulated by opioids. It is unclear how these brain regions respond to the emotions of their child for mothers receiving BT. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging pilot study in 22 mothers within the first postpartum year, including six mothers receiving BT and 16 non-OUD mothers as a comparison group, we devised a child face mirroring task in fMRI settings to assess maternal responses to pictures of facial expressions of own child and an unknown child in an empathic mirroring condition and a non-mirroring observation condition. In each condition, faces of neutral, ambiguous, distressed, and joyful expressions of each child were repeatedly displayed in a random order. The response of SMA during empathic mirroring vs. non-mirroring of own child was reduced among BT/OUD vs. CG. Within MBN, the left VP, critical for parental sensitivity, had a similar deficit. This study outlines potential mechanisms for investigating the risks of deficits in the neural responses to actual maternal sensitivity and parenting behavior in mothers with OUD, and potential targets for interventions that reduce stress and augment maternal behavior and child outcome. (shrink)

Jeremy Bentham was an ardent secularist convinced that society could be sustained without the support of religious institutions or beliefs. This is writ large in the commonly neglected books on religion he wrote and published during the last twenty-five years of his life. However his earliest writings on the subject date from the 1770s, when as a young man he first embarked on his calling as a legal theorist and social reformer. From that time on, religion was never far from (...) the centre of his thoughts. In Secular Utilitarianism, James Crimmins illustrates the nature, extent, and depth of Jeremy Bentham's concern with religion, from his Oxford days of first doubts to the middle years of quiet unbelief, and finally, the zealous atheism and secularism of his later life. Dr Crimmins provides an interpretation of Bentham's thought in which his religious views, hitherto of little interest to Bentham scholars, are shown to be integral: on the one hand intimately associated with the metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological principles which gave shape to his system as a whole, and on the other central to the development of his entirely secular view of society. (shrink)

James E. Bruce explores the relationship between morality and God’s free choices in the thought of Francis Turretin. The first book-length treatment of Turretin’s natural law theory, Rights in the Law provides an important theological backdrop to Early Modern moral and political philosophy. Turretin affirms Thomas Aquinas’s approach to the natural law, calling it the common opinion of the Reformed orthodox, but he develops it, too, by introducing a threefold scheme of right —divine, natural, and positive—to explain how change (...) within the law is possible. For example, God can change the specific day for Sabbath observance from Saturday to Sunday—from positive right—without changing the natural law precept that finite creatures ought to rest. Yet even with respect to the natural law God is still free. God can make a world in which there is no such thing as murder: he can choose not to make a world that contains such a thing as man. What God cannot do is make a murderable man. So God’s free choices determine the natural law insofar as the natural law is constituted by the nature of the things that God has chosen to create. (shrink)

We explore approximate categoricity in the context of distortion systems, introduced in our previous paper (Hanson in Math Logic Q 69(4):482–507, 2023), which are a mild generalization of perturbation systems, introduced by Yaacov (J Math Logic 08(02):225–249, 2008). We extend Ben Yaacov’s Ryll-Nardzewski style characterization of separably approximately categorical theories from the context of perturbation systems to that of distortion systems. We also make progress towards an analog of Morley’s theorem for inseparable approximate categoricity, showing that if there is some (...) uncountable cardinal $$\kappa $$ such that every model of size $$\kappa $$ is ‘approximately saturated,’ in the appropriate sense, then the same is true for all uncountable cardinalities. Finally we present some examples of these phenomena and highlight an apparent interaction between ordinary separable categoricity and inseparable approximate categoricity. (shrink)

This paper discusses global corporate citizenship in the twenty-first century. The primary focus is on the responsibility of managementeducators to foster among students an understanding of the causes and consequences of business activitiy that creates organizationalwealth, including the role of stakeholders. The modern corporation is a stakeholder enterprise: stakeholders enable the business to create wealth and require that it distribute wealth appropriately. The stakeholder enterprise model, which has been so economically successful, also implies corporate citizenship responsibilities. The Clarkson Principles are (...) discussed as a means through which educators and managers can better understand and address the challenges of corporate citizenship in the modern world. (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that it is not possible to determine the nature of epistemic justification apart from scientific psychological investigation. I call this view the strong thesis of methodological psychologism. Two sub-theses provide the primary support for this claim. The first sub-thesis is that no account of epistemic justification is correct which requires for the possession of at least one justified belief a psychological capacity which humans do not have. That is, the correct account of epistemic (...) justification must be psychologically realistic. The second sub-thesis is that it is not possible to determine whether an account of epistemic justification is psychologically realistic apart from scientific psychological investigation. After defending these subtheses, I point out some interesting consequences of the overall thesis which present a challenge to traditional epistemology. (shrink)

The recent discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs) in unicellular eukaryotes, including miRNAs known previously only from animals or plants, implies that miRNAs have a deep evolutionary history among eukaryotes. This contrasts with the prevailing view that miRNAs evolved convergently in animals and plants. We re‐evaluate the evidence and find that none of the 73 plant and animal miRNAs described from protists meet the required criteria for miRNA annotation and, by implication, animals and plants did not acquire any of their respective miRNA (...) genes from the crown ancestor of eukaryotes. Furthermore, of the 159 novel miRNAs previously identified among the seven species of unicellular protists examined, only 28 from the algae Ectocarpus and Chlamydomonas, meet the criteria for miRNA annotation. Therefore, at present only five groups of eukaryotes are known to possess miRNAs, indicating that miRNAs have evolved independently within eukaryotes through exaptation of their shared inherited RNAi machinery. (shrink)