I want to begin this paper by recalling a once-lively school of English political and legal thinking which has fallen undeservedly into neglect. I refer to the pluralists, notably the lawyer F. W. Maitland, the religious scholar J. N. Figgis, and, early in their careers, the political theorists Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole. All were influenced by the writings of the German legal scholar Otto von Gierke, which Maitland as editor and translator had first introduced into England. The (...) pluralists' concerns were at once political and legal; virtually alone among English writers in this century until the 1970s, their work avoided the barrenness that comes of treating political theory and jurisprudence as unrelated enterprises. I shall describe the problems that preoccupied them and some of their resultant theories, and also the way in which specifically legal doctrine was both a target of their criticism and an important element in their thinking. (shrink)

Junior researchers can be abused and bullied by unscrupulous senior collaborators. This article describes the profile of a type of serial abuser, the White Bull, who uses his academic seniority to distort authorship credit and who disguises his parasitism with carefully premeditated deception. Further research into the personality traits of such perpetrators is warranted.

Context The attitudes of medical professionals towards physician assisted dying have been widely discussed. Less explored is the level of agreement among physicians on the possibility of ‘rational suicide’—a considered suicide act made by a sound mind and a precondition of assisted dying legislation. Objective To assess attitudes towards rational suicide in a representative sample of senior doctors in England and Wales. Methods A postal survey was conducted of 1000 consultants and general practitioners randomly selected from a commercially available database. (...) The main outcome of interest was level of agreement with a statement about rational suicide. Results The corrected participation rate was 50%; 363 questionnaires were analysed. Overall 72% of doctors agreed with the possibility of rational suicide, 17% disagreed, and 11% were neutral. Doctors who identified themselves as being more religious were more likely to disagree. Some doctors who disagreed with legalisation of physician assisted suicide nevertheless agreed with the concept of rational suicide. Conclusions Most senior doctors in England and Wales feel that rational suicide is possible. There was no association with specialty. Strong religious belief was associated with disagreement, although levels of agreement were still high in people reporting the strongest religious belief. Most doctors who were opposed to physician assisted suicide believed that rational suicide was possible, suggesting that some medical opposition is best explained by other factors such as concerns of assessment and protection of vulnerable patients. (shrink)

Written from the perspective of philosophy of liberation, this essay holds that the reform of basic human relationships and their cultural instantiation(s) is central to all serious societal change. The essay analyzes naive, mythological, and critical consciousness. It examines how these modes of consciousness are embodied in the health delivery system and then describes areas where practitioners and patients of critical consciousness might work for greater humanization of health care.

A new formulation involving fulfillment of all the Kolmogorov axioms is suggested for acomplete probability theory. This proves to be not a purely mathematical discipline. Probability theory deals with abstract objects—images of various classes of concrete objects—whereas experimental statistics deals with concrete objects alone. Both have to be taken into account. Quantum physics and classical statistical physics prove to be different aspects ofone probabilistic physics. The connection of quantum mechanics with classical statistical mechanics is examined and the origin of the (...) Schrödinger equation is elucidated. Attention is given to the true meaning of the wave-corpuscle duality, and the incompleteness of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is explained. (shrink)

Recognition that the Principle of Respect for Autonomy fails to work in family-centric societies such as Singapore has recently led to the promotion of relational autonomy as a suitable framework within which to place healthcare decision making. However, empirical data, relating to patient and family opinions and the practices of healthcare professionals in Confucian-inspired Singapore, demonstrate clear limitations on the ability of a relational autonomy framework to provide the anticipated compromise between prevailing family decision-making norms and adopted Western led atomistic (...) concepts of autonomy. Evidence suggests that despite a growing infusion of Western influence, there is still little to indicate any major shift to individual decision making, particularly in light of the way society and healthcare are structured. Similarly, the lack of employing a shared decision-making model and data that discredit the notion that the complex psychosocial and cultural factors that affect the decision making may be considered “content neutral” not only prevents the application of relational autonomy but questions the viability of the values behind the Principle of Respect for Autonomy. Taking into account local data and drawing upon a wider concept of personhood that extends beyond prevailing family-centric ideals along with the complex interests that are focused upon the preservation of the unique nature of personhood that arises from the Ring Theory of Personhood, we propose and “operationalize” the employing of an authoritative welfare-based approach, within the confines of best interest decision making, to better meet the current care needs within Singapore. (shrink)

The emergence of macroscopic variables can be effected through coarse graining. Despite practical and fundamental benefits conveyed by this partitioning of state space, the apparently subjective nature of the selection of coarse grains has been considered problematic. We provide objective selection methods, deriving from the existence of relatively slow dynamical time scales. Using a framework for nonequilibrium statistical mechanics developed by us, we show the emergence of both spatial variables and order parameters. Although significant objective criteria are introduced in the (...) coarse graining, we do not provide a unique prescription. Most significantly, the grains, and by implication entropy, are only defined modulo a characteristic time scale of observation. (shrink)

Some problems relating to the probabilistic description of a free particle and of a charged particle moving in an electromagnetic field are discussed. A critical analysis of the Klein-Gordon equation and of the Dirac equation is given. It is also shown that there is no connection between commutativity of operators for physical quantities and the existence of their joint probability. It is demonstrated that the Heisenberg uncertainty relation is not universal and explained why this is so. A universal uncertainty relation (...) for canonically conjugate coordinates and momenta is suggested. (shrink)

General regularities related toLagrangian andHamiltonian equations are revealed. Probability distributions for functions ofHamiltonian random variables are considered. It is shown that all probability distributions of this kind are fully determined by the probability distributions for the random variables satisfying the corresponding Lagrangian equations. Some formulas related tocanonically conjugate operators are given. The similarity of these formulas to those related to Hamiltonian random variables is demonstrated. The “quantum approach” to the treatment of Hamiltonian random variables is discussed, and the origin of (...) some peculiarities related to this approach is elucidated; it is explained, in particular, why it is impossible to form the joint probability density for canonically conjugate random variables when using this approach. The peculiarities revealed prove to be common for any objects possessing Hamiltonian random variables, irrespective of the nature of the objects, and coincide, therefore, with those in quantum mechanics. The existence of joint probability distributions for canonically conjugate random variables in the general case is demonstrated through the calculation of the corresponding joint mathematical expectations in an illustrative example. This proves, in particular, that joint probability distributions for canonically conjugate coordinates and momenta exist indeed in the case of mechanical microsystems. The results obtained prove once again that the pecularities of quantum mechanics are not related to the specificity of the measurements of physical quantities for microsystems. (shrink)

Objectives: Medical decision support and other intelligent applications in the life sciences depend on increasing amounts of digital information. Knowledge bases as well as formal ontologies are being used to organize biomedical knowledge and data. However, these two kinds of artefacts are not always clearly distinguished. Whereas the popular RDF(S) standard provides an intuitive triple-based representation, it is semantically weak. Description logics based ontology languages like OWL-DL carry a clear-cut semantics, but they are computationally expensive, and they are often misinterpreted (...) to encode all kinds of statements, including those which are not ontological. Method: We distinguish four kinds of statements needed to comprehensively represent domain knowledge: universal statements, terminological statements, statements about particulars and contingent statements. We argue that the task of formal ontologies is solely to represent universal statements, while the non-ontological kinds of statements can nevertheless be connected with ontological representations. To illustrate these four types of representations, we use a running example from parasitology. Results: We finally formulate recommendations for semantically adequate ontologies that can efficiently be used as a stable framework for more context-dependent biomedical knowledge representation and reasoning applications like clinical decision support systems. (shrink)

The Past Masters Søren Kierkegaard : Samlede Vårker database is based on the third edition of Kierkegaard's complete works in Danish, and has been edited by Professor Alistair McKinnon of McGill University.

In this article it is argued that it is impossible to give a reductive analysis of knowledge, given that knowledge is an "epistemic" concept with these marks: (1) like necessity, it is only partially truth-functional; and, (2) unlike necessity, it includes an "intentional" component (belief) which is completely non-truth-functional. a reductive analysis would have to contain at least one extensional component, one intentional component, and none that is itself epistemic. but any plausible analysis then turns out either to be non-reductive, (...) e.g., causal, or else falls prey to "gettier" counterexamples. my positive suggestion is that we eschew reductive analyses of epistemic concepts in favor of non-reductive analyses. (shrink)

I argue that sentences ascribing beliefs to non-human animals have the same logical form as sentences of the "perceives that" variety. Pace D.M. Armstrong, I argue that animal belief sentences can be referentially opaque, just as perception sentences containing a propositional clause are. In both cases, referential opacity requires our assuming that the animal believer and the human perceiver has each identified the object of the belief or perception.

BACKGROUND -/- The need for detailed description and modeling of cells drives the continuous generation of large and diverse datasets. Unfortunately, there exists no systematic and comprehensive way to organize these datasets and their information. CELDA (Cell: Expression, Localization, Development, Anatomy) is a novel ontology for the association of primary experimental data and derived knowledge to various types of cells of organisms. -/- RESULTS -/- CELDA is a structure that can help to categorize cell types based on species, anatomical localization, (...) subcellular structures, developmental stages and origin. It targets cells in vitro as well as in vivo. Instead of developing a novel ontology from scratch, we carefully designed CELDA in such a way that existing ontologies were integrated as much as possible, and only minimal extensions were performed to cover those classes and areas not present in any existing model. Currently, ten existing ontologies and models are linked to CELDA through the top-level ontology BioTop. Together with 15.439 newly created classes, CELDA contains more than 196.000 classes and 233.670 relationship axioms. CELDA is primarily used as a representational framework for modeling, analyzing and comparing cells within and across species in CellFinder, a web based data repository on cells (http://cellfinder.org). -/- CONCLUSIONS -/- CELDA can semantically link diverse types of information about cell types. It has been integrated within the research platform CellFinder, where it exemplarily relates cell types from liver and kidney during development on the one hand and anatomical locations in humans on the other, integrating information on all spatial and temporal stages. CELDA is available from the CellFinder website: http://cellfinder.org/about/ontology. (shrink)

Study on the concept of manas in Indic philosophy.

Labioplasty is a surgical procedure performed to alter the size and shape of the labia minora. The reasons for women requesting this procedure remain largely unknown and recently girls and young women under the age of 18 years have been requesting this type of surgery. This paper examines the ethical acceptability of performing this procedure on under 18s. We will first discuss whether labioplasty can be considered to be a therapeutic technique. We will claim that, while it is difficult to (...) offer a definitive definition of what constitutes a therapeutic technique, in our view labioplasty cannot be considered as such. This conclusion has relevance for the ethical acceptability of the procedure, its legal status in regard to the Female Genital Mutilation Act and the debates over who can give consent for it. It will be concluded that in our current state of knowledge, the benefits of labioplasty are far from clear, whereas the harms are demonstrable and therefore this procedure should not be offered to those aged under 18 years. (shrink)

It has been more than sixty years since R. D. Collison Black published his Economic Thought and the Irish Question, a book which ever since has been widely regarded as a classic in the history of e...