Social media applications such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have attained huge popularity, with more than three billion people and organizations predicted to have a social networking account by 2015. Social media offers a rapid avenue of communication with the public and has potential benefits for communicable disease control and surveillance. However, its application in everyday public health practice raises a number of important issues around confidentiality and autonomy. We report here a case from local level health protection where the (...) friend of an individual with meningococcal septicaemia used a social networking site to notify potential contacts. (shrink)

From the author: The task undertaken in this Dissertation is an analysis of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, culminating in a systematic investigation of his concept of ‘God’. This analysis seeks to emphasize that Hegel’s philosophy has a thorough religious dimension: for him, thought is not philosophical if it is not also religious; both religion and philosophy have a common object and share the same content, and both are concerned with the truth of the inherent unity of all things, even though (...) religion perceives it with a lesser clarity. This inherent unity is fundamental to Hegel’s concept of God as ‘absolute Spirit’; and, by engaging in a systematic investigation of this concept, the Dissertation endeavours to make a contribution to the debate regarding the compatibility of Hegel’s concept of ‘God’ with Christian theology. This final section of the Dissertation proceeds by investigating theism, atheism, pantheism and panentheism as possible descriptive titles for Hegel’s concept. In arguing that Hegel’s position is incompatible with all except the last, namely, panentheism, and in rejecting the view that Hegel has developed a doctrine so different that all religious content has been lost, the Dissertation highlights some important considerations for contemporary theistic theology. (shrink)

Heidegger contrasts meditative thinking, which allows detachment from beings, with calculative thinking, which maintains an instrumental and interested relationship with them. In his view, the principle of reason is the main tool for dominating available things. He also embeds the Medieval essence-existence duality within this framework of causality geared towards manipulating beings, judging that the religious notion of creation failed to distance this duality from Greek essentialism. Now, by appropriating the Islamic notion of creation ex nihilo, Avicenna places an ontological (...) indigence at the heart of the created world. He believes that a being necessary by something other than itself remains contingent in itself, even after being caused. Thus, knowledge of the cause doesn’t grant dominance over the thing but fosters detachment from contingent being, recognizing its dependence on an upstream otherness. Moreover, Meister Eckhart, who according to Heidegger perfectly illustrates meditative thought, is indebted precisely to this ontological poverty established by Avicenna. In addition to describing this possible objection from Avicenna to Heidegger, the more general aim of this study is to explore the possibility of an ethical and disinterested use of the principle of reason. (shrink)

Though many agree that we need to account for the role that social factors play in inquiry, developing a viable social epistemology has proved to be a difficult task. According to Longino, it is the processes that make inquiry possible that are aptly described as social, for they require a number of people to sustain them. These processes not only facilitate inquiry, but also ensure that the results of inquiry are more than mere subjective opinions, and thus deserve to be (...) called knowledge. In this paper, I explain Longino’s epistemology and defend it against criticisms recently raised by Kitcher, Schmitt and Solomon. Longino rightly recognizes that not all social factors have the same affect on inquiry. She also recommends that we reconceptualize ‘knowledge,’ distinguishing knowledge from opinion by reference to a social standard. (shrink)

Cowan's experimental techniques cannot constrain subject's recall of presented information to distinct independent chunks in short-term memory (STM). The encoding of associations in long-term memory contaminates recall of pure STM capacity. Even in task environments where the functional independence of chunks is convincingly demonstrated, individuals can increase the storage of independent chunks with deliberate practice – well above the magical number four.

Parents have an interest in sharing their values, beliefs and projects with their children. At the same time, children have an interest in being both capable of and free to develop their own values, beliefs, and projects. The interests of parents and children can conflict, and a great deal of attention has been given to how we ought to adjudicate this conflict with respect to child-rearing and education. This tension has been pushed further back in the parenting timeline by the (...) advancement of reproductive technology. In this paper, I argue that parents, both prospective and actual, are obligated to facilitate their children's coming to be independent agents. The decisions they make for their children must be conditioned on that end. Parents may transmit their own beliefs and values to their children if and when doing so is a condition of the child's coming to be an independent agent. For example, parents are permitted to choose their child's education--even a religious education--because doing so is necessary to give the child a practical starting point, but they are not permitted to indoctrinate their child. On this view, selecting for a trait can be inappropriate not because the trait is itself bad for the child, but because the parents' selection is an attempt to control what their future child will come to believe and care about. (shrink)

The "gang of four" — Wang Hung-wen, Chang Ch'un-ch'iao, Chiang Ch'ing and Yao Wen-yuan — have created great chaos by confusing the relations between ourselves and the enemy, obliterating the differences between the two kinds of contradiction, wrecking Chairman Mao's policy of uniting with, educating and reforming intellectuals, calling intellectuals the "stinking number nine," smothering the revolutionary initiative of the broad masses of intellectuals, and destroying the ranks of revolutionary intellectuals.