Verbal autopsy presents the opportunity to understand the disease burden in many low-income countries where vital registration systems are underdeveloped and most deaths occur in the community. Advances in technology have led to the development of software that can provide probable cause of death information in real time, and research considering the ethical implications of these advances is necessary to inform policy. Our research explores these ethical issues in rural Nepal using a public health ethics framework. We considered the burdens (...) and benefits of VA and giving cause of death information to families of the deceased through qualitative research with VA interviewers, community members, national policy stakeholders and international academics. Burdens can be experienced differently, and it is important to balance the emotional burden of VA with utilization of the data to inform planning and increased access to health services. The training, support and supervision of VA interviewers should be prioritized if VA is taken to scale. Initial and ongoing community engagement is recommended in addition to engaging ethical, legal, health and policy personnel in developing protocols and systems. Integrating rigorous research while cautiously moving forward is recommended to ensure systems and responses to concerns are relevant to contexts. (shrink)

To forgive a person for a wrong he has done has often been valued as morally good and as indicative of a benevolent and merciful character. But while forgiveness has been recognized as valuable its nature as a moral response has largely been ignored by modern moral philosophers who work outside the confines of a religious context. 1 Where it has been discussed, forgiveness has been thought particularly difficult to define, and some have thought the forgiving response paradoxical or even (...) impossible. I shall discuss some of these difficulties and suggest firstly that the value of forgiveness lies in the fact that it essentially requires a recognition of the wrongdoer's responsibility for his action, and secondly that forgiveness typically involves an effort on the part of the one wronged: a conscious attempt to improve oneself in relation to the wrongdoer. (shrink)

The evil-god challenge holds that theism is highly symmetrical to the evil-god hypothesis and thus it is not more reasonable to accept one rather than the other. But, since it is not reasonable to accept the evil-god hypothesis, it is not reasonable to accept theism. This article will primarily focus on defending the challenge from two recent objections which hold that it follows from the nature of moral motivation that theism is intrinsically much more likely to be true than the (...) evil-god hypothesis. However, I will also argue that there is a different intrinsic asymmetry between the hypotheses which favours theism. (shrink)

_A powerful treatise that demonstrates the existence of altruism in nature, with surprising implications for human society_ Does altruism exist? Or is human nature entirely selfish? In this eloquent and accessible book, famed biologist David Sloan Wilson provides new answers to this age-old question based on the latest developments in evolutionary science. From an evolutionary viewpoint, Wilson argues, altruism is inextricably linked to the functional organization of groups. “Groups that work” undeniably exist in nature and human society, although (...) special conditions are required for their evolution. Humans are one of the most groupish species on earth, in some ways comparable to social insect colonies and multi-cellular organisms. The case that altruism evolves in all social species is surprisingly simple to make. Yet the implications for human society are far from obvious. Some of the most venerable criteria for defining altruism aren’t worth caring much about, any more than we care much whether we are paid by cash or check. Altruism defined in terms of thoughts and feelings is notably absent from religion, even though altruism defined in terms of action is notably present. The economic case for selfishness can be decisively rejected. The quality of everyday life depends critically on people who overtly care about the welfare of others. Yet, like any other adaptation, altruism can have pathological manifestations. Wilson concludes by showing how a social theory that goes beyond altruism by focusing on group function can help to improve the human condition. (shrink)

More companies are understanding the benefits of designing work to enhance, rather than minimise, the contributions of their employees within human-centred systems. To do this, they require their supportive subsystems (such as training, job, and team design, performance measurement and information) to provide people with the ability, motivation and opportunity to become increasingly involved. Opportunity for involvement will require different communication interfaces, providing data and background information both personally and at the work site or process. In the past few years, (...) the media available for visualisation and communication have become much more numerous and have much greater capabilities. This paper examines the information requirements of certain features of modern manufacturing enterprises—local control, skills, knowledge and training, function allocation and team communications. It then assesses the utility of three broad types of information display—Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), Multimedia/Closed-circuit Television (CCTV) and Virtual Environments (VEs)—for shopfloor systems. (shrink)

This study of the metaphysics of G. W. Leibniz gives a clear picture of his philosophical development within the general scheme of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. Catherine Wilson examines the shifts in Leibniz's thinking as he confronted the major philosophical problems of his era. Beginning with his interest in artificial languages and calculi for proof and discovery, the author proceeds to an examination of Leibniz's early theories of matter and motion, to the phenomenalistic turn in his theory of substance and (...) his subsequent de-emphasis of logical determinism, and finally to his doctrines of harmony and optimization. Specific attention is given to Leibniz's understanding of Descartes and his successors, Malebranche and Spinoza, and the English philosophers Newton, Cudworth, and Locke. Wilson analyzes Leibniz's complex response to the new mechanical philosophy, his discontent with the foundations on which it rested, and his return to the past to locate the resources for reconstructing it. She argues that the continuum-problem is the key to an understanding not only of Leibniz's monadology but also of his views on the substantiality of the self and the impossibility of external causal influence. A final chapter considers the problem of Leibniz-reception in the post-Kantian era, and the difficulty of coming to terms with a metaphysics that is not only philosophically "critical" but, at the same time, "compensatory.". (shrink)

El objetivo de la formación doctoral es la generación y difusión de nuevo conocimiento, sin embargo, no es claro cómo los programas de doctorado en Colombia se relacionan con este tipo de producción académica. A partir de ello, en el presente estudio se presenta el panorama general de la producción académica a través de las instituciones de educación superior colombianas que ofertan programas de formación doctoral en psicología. La producción académica se obtuvo de la base de datos Scopus en una (...) muestra de 13 universidades. Tras una búsqueda inicial, se encontraron 1345 documentos, con los cuales se realizó un análisis de los indicadores de productividad y de las redes de colaboración al interior de la disciplina en el país. Posteriormente, esta información se contrastó con la información nacional registrada en el sistema de Currículum Vitae Latinoamericano y del Caribe de 193 profesores asociados a las universidades que ofertan los programas de doctorado. Al comparar la producción académica nacional e internacional, se encontró una mayor correlación entre la dirección de tesis de posgrado y la publicación en revistas nacionales. Por lo tanto, se puede afirmar que el impacto de la formación doctoral en la generación de nuevo conocimiento es relativo y tiene un alcance limitado, siendo principalmente las revistas nacionales el medio de difusión de este conocimiento. Se recomienda evaluar el impacto de los productos asociados a la formación posgradual y la visibilidad internacional, con énfasis en las revistas indexadas en bases de datos internacionales. (shrink)

The term embodiment identifies a theory that meaning and semantics cannot be captured by abstract, logical systems, but are dependent on an agent’s experience derived from being situated in an environment. This theory has recently received a great deal of support in the cognitive science literature and is having significant impact in artificial intelligence. Memetics refers to the theory that knowledge and ideas can evolve more or less independently of their human-agent substrates. While humans provide the medium for this evolution, (...) memetics holds that ideas can be developed without human comprehension or deliberate interference. Both theories have profound implications for the study of language—its potential use by machines, its acquisition by children and of particular relevance to this special issue, its evolution. This article links the theory of memetics to the established literature on semantic space, then examines the extent to which these memetic mechanisms might account for language independently of embodiment. It then seeks to explain the evolution of language through uniquely human cognitive capacities which facilitate memetic evolution. (shrink)

John Wilson; Does Equality (of Opportunity) Make Sense in Education?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 25, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 27–32, https://.

Nearly all writers on morality, including philosophers, have had something to sellóif only a partisan picture of what morality is. In this book the author sets out to examine and clarify the nature of morality from a strictly neutral standpoint and what kinds of virtues are required to do well in morality. As against those who associate morality primarily with action and will-power, he sees it more Platonically, as a matter of mental health and the ability to love. These notions (...) are explored with philosophical rigor and a proper regard for ordinary language, beginning with the meaning of "moral," considering the question of why we should care for others, and concluding with an account of the importance of love and personal relationships. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics and Time:Lévinas Between Kant and HusserlJoanna Hodge (bio)This article stems from the conviction that the source of the bloody barbarism of National Socialism lies not in some contingent anomaly within human reasoning, nor in some accidental ideological misunderstanding. This article expresses the conviction that this source stems from the essential possibility of elemental evil into which we can be led by logic and against which Western philosophy had (...) not sufficiently insured itself. This possibility is inscribed within the ontology of a being concerned with being—a being, to use the Heideggerian expression, "which in its own being is concerned with that being." Such a possibility still threatens the subject correlative with being as gathering together and as dominating, that famous subject of transcendental idealism that before all else wishes to be free and thinks itself free. We must ask ourselves if liberalism is all we need to achieve the authentic dignity for the human subject. Does the subject ever arrive at the human condition prior to assuming responsibility for the other in the act of election that raises him up to this height? This election comes from a god—or God—who beholds him in the face of the other, the neighbour, the original "site" of the Revelation.—Emmanuel Lévinas, 28 March 1990, introduction to "Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism" (1934)1IntroductionThe intent of this essay is to establish the relevance of various divergent workings of time for an understanding of the difficulties distinctive of moral dilemmas and ethical doubt. It will introduce the thinking of Lévinas (1905-96) to bring into focus the differences entailed in addressing ethical contexts from various perspectives of time, whether in terms of past experience, present contingencies, or considerations of the future. It turns out to be necessary to distinguish between various conceptions of the future as well, in order to grasp the different construals of constraints on moral deliberation. A contrast may be drawn between the individualism and the collectivism, [End Page 107] respectively, of Nietzsche's and Heidegger's visions of the future;1 and between the religious determinacies of Lévinas's invocation of futurity and Derrida's more ascetic, formally indicative recasting of Lévinas's à-dieu.2 It is also the case that distinct conceptions of the past impose significant constraints on what human beings can hope to achieve in their moral efficacy. There is an important difference between the Greco-pagan past, invoked by Nietzsche and Heidegger, and the divine time of creation invoked in the opening pages of Genesis, which is the source of Lévinas's notion of an immemorial time, and which is subjected to deconstructive reading by Jacques Derrida in "The Animal Which Therefore I Am, to Be Continued" [see Derrida, "L'animal autobiographique"].I shall introduce a reading of the second part of Kant's treatise The Conflict of the Faculties (1798) [139-71], on the contest between philosophy and law, to suggest that for ethics, by contrast to concerns with aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology, a consideration of conceptions of futurity is especially pressing. This provides a context for responding to Lévinas's early article "Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism" (1934), to which Lévinas wrote an introduction, including my opening citation, some sixty years later.3 Lévinas is not simply engaging with the problem of evil, in relation to the now well-known moral deficiencies of Heidegger's fundamental ontology.4 He is also warning, more generally, against delusions arising from theoretical abstraction, in both absolute idealism and, indeed, in a Nietzschean ethics. His own writings, from Time and the Other (1947) on, suggest that the deficiency arises from oversimplifications [End Page 108] in the thinking of time. Taking this as a clue, the main tasks of this essay are to show that the broadly historical notion of time, which appears oriented toward the past, requires a complementary reflection on futurity, if the ethical significance of different ways of relating to the past is to emerge; and, in relation to that futurity, to show that the broadly teleological, future-directed notions of self-formation, deliberation, and genesis require supplementation... (shrink)

Key ideas discussed in this guide include: art and aesthetics fun and free time nature and reason things, thoughts and being right This Routledge Critical ...

Introduction: The man who drank the hemlock -- Socrates' philosophy -- Politics and society -- Plato and others : who created the death of Socrates? -- 'A Greek chatterbox' : the death of Socrates in the Roman Empire -- Pain and revelation : the death of Socrates and the death of Jesus -- The apotheosis of philosophy : from enlightenment to revolution -- Talk, truth, totalitarianism : the problem of Socrates in modern times.

Manifesting the special intelligence of a literary critic of original gifts, Culture and Anarchy is still a living classic. It is addressed to the flexible and the disinterested, to those who are not committed to the findings of their particular discipline, and it assumes in its reader a critical intelligence that will begin its work with the reader himself. Arnold employs a delicate and stringent irony in an examination of the society of his time: a rapidly expanding industrial society, just (...) beginning to accustom itself to the changes in its institutions that the pace of its own development called for. Coming virtually at the end of the decade and immediately prior to W. E. Forster's Education Act, Culture and Anarchy phrases with a particular cogency the problems that find their centre in the questions: what kind of life do we think individuals in mass societies should be assisted to lead? How may we best ensure that the quality of their living is not impoverished? Arnold applies himself to the detail of his time: to the case of Mr Smith 'who feared he would come to poverty and be eternally lost', to the Reform agitation, to the commercial values that working people were encouraged to respect, and to the limitations of even the best Rationalist intelligence. The degree of local reference is therefore high, but John Dover Wilson's introduction and notes to this edition supply valuable assistance to a reader fresh to the period. (shrink)

Medical tourism describes a new pattern of movement of people for medical care, particularly from wealthier to poorer countries. Using the example of Thailand, where annually a million non-Thai patients seek medical treatment, this article provides a critical analysis of the political economic contexts for this medical migration. Drawing on urban geography and heterodox economics, the article considers medical tourism as an interaction of bodily, national, and global scales shaped by processes of globalization. This approach provides a thick context for (...) the transnational care of bodies while proposing that the bodily scale also has a role in reformulating the scale of the nation. (shrink)

This essay examines the connection between the concept of autonomy and the concept of an ideal, moral self in Kant’s practical philosophy. Its central thesis is that self-legislation does not rest on the capacity to exempt oneself from nature’s causal network. Instead, it rests on the practical capacity for identification with what Kant calls an individual’s “moral personality.” A person’s ability to identify with this morally ideal version of himself gives shape to his will, enabling him to decide how to (...) act on the basis of reasons that do not stem from desires or inclinations. It thus makes possible a form of volition that is autonomous rather than heteronomous. (shrink)

This piece uses a feminist approach to explore various aspects of ‘commodification’ in the lives and work of those teaching and researching in UK universities, and in particular its gender dimensions. After setting a historical context for the radical transformation of UK universities during the 1980s, it considers how this transformation was experienced by academics in terms of alienation, anxiety and accountability. Key features of that experience are loss of autonomy and control to the external power of competition and managerialism, (...) insecurity and casualization in employment, and exposure to increasing judgemental scrutiny. For women academics job insecurity and discrimination continue to be disproportionately important, although some of the challenges to old established academic convention and practice have opened up real possibilities to progress more pro-women agendas. In the future they will confront quite depressing developments in the reconstruction of academic identities and labour, but have the legacy of the gains/insights of feminist analysis and politics over the last twenty years with which to do so. (shrink)

The extensive philosophical literature devoted to "reduction to basic quantities" and "supervenience" generally trades upon a tacit looseness with respect to basic logical issues. Specifically, working physics commonly traffics in quantities pegged to different length scales whose interrelationships conceal a good deal of logical and structural complexity. So let us begin with a somewhat pedantic warning about the subtleties of scale dependent location attributions. Let us presume — and this is an assumption we shall want to revisit later — that (...) we are operating within a standard form of classical physics whose "basic entities" are point masses that act upon one another through action-at-a-distance central forces. (shrink)

Drawing on Protestant scholasticism, Puritan "precisionism," and virtue ethics, "Virtue Reformed" offers a comprehensive rereading of the ethical position of ...

Contrary to what Jeanne Moyer asserts, Kant does not have a normative dualism going in his works on teleological judgment and these can be used to develop a more woman friendly view of human nature.

John Wilson; Relativism and Teaching, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 20, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 89–96, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1986.

This article concerns the curriculum of computer literacy (CL). A strong sense of technical necessity informs the design of the CL curriculum, and as a result, instruction is inadequate at best and dehumanizing at worst. CL curriculum and instruction are informed by a sense of technical determinism and a particular form of masculinity. This article draws mainly from the sociology of education, supplemented by personal observation. The article has two implications. First, to reduce the failure and frustration that many feel (...) as they attempt to become computer literate, greater attention ought to be given in CL curriculum design to the concept of learning as enculturation and to cognitive context. Second, to counter the sense of necessity that leads designers and others to ignore culture and context, the formal CL curriculum must give serious attention to the social construction of educational technology/technique, especially the in fluence of gender. (shrink)