Selon Gilles-Gaston Granger, la différence entre la logique et les mathématiques est une différence de degré. De la logique des propositions aux mathématiques en passant par le calcul des prédicats et le reste des calculs logiques, la forme perd en pureté et le contenu gagne progressivement en épaisseur. Du degré zéro de l’opposition d’une forme à un contenu au niveau de la logique propositionnelle aux formes logico-mathématiques productrices de « contenus formels », le calcul s’enrichit en propriétés d’individuation au détriment (...) de ses propriétés méta-logiques. Granger ne prétend pas avoir fondé par là un véritable critère de logicité. Toujours est-il qu’il part d’un nombre de présupposés explicitement établis lui servant de point d’appui pour démarquer la logique des mathématiques. En revenant sur ces présupposés, nous voudrions montrer, comme l’a reconnu Pascal Engel précédemment, qu’ils ne sont pas exempts d’ambiguïtés, tant par leurs ramifications philosophiques que par les difficultés techniques qu’ils suscitent. Néanmoins, et à la différence d’Engel, nous n’irons pas jusqu’à dire que la conception grangérienne constitue, malgré ses ambiguïtés, un critère de logicité. (shrink)

Neuroethics is an emerging interdisciplinary field with unsettled boundaries. Many of the ethical issues within the purview of neuroethics could be described as resulting from the clash between the scientific perspective on concepts such as free will, personal identity, consciousness, etc., and the putatively commonsense conceptions of those terms. The assumption that undergirds the framing of the conflict between these two approaches is that advances in neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology can be used to explain phenomena covered by commonsense concepts and (...) in some cases undermine them entirely. This book is focused on the examination of the particular relationship between developments in neuroscience and commonsense moral concepts. Common sense, I argue, has been misinterpreted as a static, either foundational or degenerative, basis of our morality, when it is an ever shifting repository of theories from many domains. Within this discussion, I focus on the application of neuroscience to human beings, i.e., the ethics of neuroscience. But I also cover issues within the purview of the neuroscience of ethics, and attempt to address the infiltration of neuroscientific knowledge into everyday parlance and the impact of that on our commonsense morality and psychology. (shrink)

The Myners Review of the pension fund industry has started a debate on pension fund governance and the fund industry itself. This paper provides a review of pension fund trusteeship in the UK, its role, operating models and impact. It argues that deficiencies in the systems uncovered by the Myners Review stem from a tension between conflicting philosophies - that of trusteeship built on stakeholder principles but operating in shareholder markets.

To cause pain, it is not enough to deliver a dose of noxious stimulation. Pain requires the interaction of sensory processing, emotion, and cognition. In this paper, I focus on the role of cognition in the felt intensity of pain. I provide evidence for the cognitive modulation of pain. In particular, I show that attention and expectation can influence the experience of pain intensity. I also consider the mechanisms that underlie the cognitive effects on pain. I show that all the (...) proposed mechanisms of pain modulation affirm the view that cognition impacts the sensory and discriminative aspects of pain. I conclude that pain perception is a cognitively penetrated phenomenon. (shrink)

The web is being loaded daily with a huge volume of data, mainly unstructured textual data, which increases the need for information extraction and NLP systems significantly. Named-entity recognition task is a key step towards efficiently understanding text data and saving time and effort. Being a widely used language globally, English is taking over most of the research conducted in this field, especially in the biomedical domain. Unlike other languages, Arabic suffers from lack of resources. This work presents a BERT-based (...) model to identify biomedical named entities in the Arabic text data that investigates the effectiveness of pretraining a monolingual BERT model with a small-scale biomedical dataset on enhancing the model understanding of Arabic biomedical text. The model performance was compared with two state-of-the-art models, and it outperformed both models with 85% F1-score. (shrink)

Endorsing the view that commonsense conceptions are shaped by scientific claims provides an explanation for why microbiota-gut-brain research might become incorporated into commonsense notions of health. But scientific claims also shape notions of personal identity, which accounts for why they can become entrenched in common sense even after they have been refuted by science.

Although there is substantial literature examining the flow of foreign investments into various regions of the world, there is still a lack of research about joint ventures and foreign investment activities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). One objective of this paper is to remedy this neglect and extend previous empirical work by focusing on foreign investments in the MENA region. The second objective is to focus on non-traditional determinants that have tended to be overlooked or underestimated in (...) previous research. The increasing globalization has led to a reconfiguration of the ways in which multinationals pursue various types of foreign investments,and changed the motives for and the determinants of FDI. This has prompted some to suggest that non traditional determinants have become more important. In view of that, the paper will focus on factors such as governance, legal environment, and economic freedom and examine their impact on foreign investment activities in the MENA region. (shrink)

Unrepresented patients are individuals who lack decision makingcapacity and have no family or friends to make medical decisions for them. This population is growing in number in the United States, particularly within emergency and intensive care settings. While some bioethical discussion has taken place in response to the question of who ought to make decisions for these patients, the issue of how surrogate medical decisions ought to be made for this population remains unexplored. In this paper, we argue that standard (...) applications of surrogate decision making principles in health care are not well suited to many unrepresented patients with long-term mental health diagnosis. We argue that when applied to this population, the substituted judgment standard, designed to preserve patient preferences and values, may lead to the exclusion of their preferences. We argue further that the application of the best interest standard runs the risk of leading to harmful cases of overtreatment or undertreatment. We offer an alternative interpretation of the best interest principle that is better able to promote the well-being of unrepresented patients, especially for those who lack capacity because of mental disorders. This alternative is based on the practices and principles of harm reduction and includes three components: emphasis on considering the expressed preferences of unrepresented patients, a focus on reducing harm as well as the delivery of clinical benefits, and a recognition of the importance of promoting trust. (shrink)

There are currently two legally established criteria for death: the irreversible cessation of circulation and respiration and the irreversible cessation of neurologic function. Recently, there have been technological developments that could undermine the irreversibility requirement. In this paper, I focus both on whether death should be identified as an irreversible state and on the proper scope of irreversibility in the biological definition of death. In this paper, I tackle the distinction between the commonsense definition of death and the biological definition (...) of death to show that even the commonsense concept of death is specified by biological facts. Resting on this argument, I argue that any definition of death is a posteriori. Thus, irreversibility is part of any definition of death because the actual phenomenon of death is irreversible. In addition, I show that the proper domain of irreversibility in a definition of death is circumscribed by physical possibilities and that irreversibility in the definition of death refers to current possibilities for the reversal of relevant biological processes. I conclude that, despite recent technological advancements, death is still irreversible. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo examine body image perception and the associations of body dissatisfaction with socio-demographic and lifestyle factors among Saudi women attending fitness centers in Riyadh.MethodsSaudi females aged 16 years and older were recruited from 12 randomly selected fitness centers in Riyadh, using stratified clustered sampling technique. Height and weight were measured to calculate actual body mass index. A previously validated instrument was used to collect socio-demographic and lifestyle variables including physical activity, sedentary behaviors, sleep and dietary habits. Stunkard Figure Rating Scale (...) silhouettes were used to assess perceived and desired body shape.ResultsThe participants had a mean age of 29.2. The majority were not married, with no children and had college degrees. While 63% were overweight or obese, nearly 40% of women underestimated their perceived body shape. The majority of respondents were dissatisfied with their body shape including 68% of normal weight women. Females who had BD were significantly older, had higher BMI, reported more weight loss attempt and had expended less time in vigorous and total PA than those who were satisfied with their body shape. However, when adjusting for socio-demographic variables, logistic regression analysis revealed significant associations of BD with higher BMI, shorter membership duration of fitness club, and reduced dairy products and energy drinks consumption.ConclusionExcept for BMI and decreased dairy products and energy drinks consumption, many lifestyle behaviors did not associate with BD among Saudi females attending fitness centers. The findings can inform healthcare providers when intervention strategy is implicated for females with BD. Future studies should compare the associations of BD with lifestyle behaviors between males and females attending fitness centers and seeking weight loss. (shrink)

In 1959 two French neurologists, Pierre Mollaret and Maurice Goullon, coined the term coma dépassé to designate a state beyond coma. In this state, patients are not only permanently unconscious; they lack the endogenous drive to breathe, as well as brainstem reflexes, indicating that most of their brain has ceased to function. Although legally recognized in many countries as a criterion for death, brain death has not been universally accepted by bioethicists, by the medical community, or by the public. I (...) this paper, I defend brain death as a biological concept. I challenge two assumptions in the brain death literature that have shaped the debate and have stood in the way of an argument for brain death as biological. First, I challenge the dualism established in the debate between the body and the brain. Second, I contest the emphasis on consciousness, which prevents the inclusion of psychological phenomena into a biological criterion of death. I propose that the term organism should apply both to the functioning of the body and the brain. I argue that the cessation of the organism as a whole should take into account three elements of integrated function. Those three elements are: 1) the loss of integrated bodily function; 2) the loss of psychophysical integration required for processing of external stimuli and those required for behavior; and, 3) the loss of integrated psychological function, such as memory, learning, attention, and so forth. The loss of those three elements of integrated function is death. (shrink)

Neoliberal restructuring and the feminization of export-led industries are often associated with the disempowerment of women in the workplace. Surprisingly, this disempowerment was not the case with a public textile company in Mahalla, an industrial city north of Cairo. Between 2006 and 2008, workers organized wildcat strikes involving around 24,000 workers. In contrast to the strike waves of the 1980s, women were integral to organizing the strikes and assumed leadership roles in them. This article argues that even as Egypt adopted (...) structural adjustments in the 1990s that led to the decline of the historically leading sectors of textiles and yarn, exports of clothing increased. By the 2000s, the clothing sector was completely feminized and women in Mahalla were positioned in the most productive departments. This change empowered women by elevating their role and induced skeptical male colleagues to support women’s activism in the company and to build cross-gender solidarity. (shrink)

Health care providers are expected both to relieve pain and to provide anticipatory guidance regarding how much a procedure is going to hurt. Fulfilling those expectations is complicated by the cognitive modulation of pain perception. Warning people to expect pain or setting expectations for pain relief not only influences their subjective experience, but it also alters how nociceptive stimuli are processed throughout the sensory and discriminative pathways in the brain. In light of this, I reconsider the characterization of placebo analgesia (...) as pharmacologically inert and the use of it as deceptive. I show that placebo analgesia exploits the same physical mechanisms as proven analgesics and argue that it should be utilized to relieve pain. Additionally, I describe factors to help identify situations in which clinicians have the obligation to disclose the potential for pain coupled with ways of mitigating the risk of high-intensity pain by setting positive expectations. (shrink)

Making decisions for incapacitated patients has been a perennial problem in bioethics. Surrogate decision-makers are sometimes expected to use substituted judgment to make such decisions. Applying...

An illustrated study of the early twentieth-century transformation from Expressionism to Constructivism and beyond in the Central European arts. Central European Avant-Gardes presents the first interpretive overview of the complex webs of interaction among the artists and intellectuals of early twentieth-century Central Europe. The key stylistic transformation of the period was from Expressionism to Constructivism, as artists and writers, against a volatile background of war and revolution, saw the opportunity literally to construct a new world through their work. The borders (...) between the visual arts, photography, film, architecture, poetry, and typography were obliterated, as artists sought to transcend the forces of traditionalism to forge an elemental visual language that would overcome national and linguistic boundaries. Yet at the same time that these artists advocated pluralism and unity, their work engaged issues such as nationalism and tradition that still resonate in artistic circles today. The book, which accompanies a major exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and curated by Timothy Benson, assisted by Monika Krol, is arranged around events and situations rather than by linear, art historical categories. It features hundreds of color plates and reproductions of documents; discussions of movements from Artificialism to Zenitism; essays on figures, publications, and exhibitions; and shorter "city views" of Belgrade, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Cracow, Dessau, Ljubljana, £ódz, Poznañ, Prague, Vienna, Warsaw, Weimar, and Zagreb. (shrink)

The human microbiome is the bacteria, viruses, and fungi that cover our skin, line our intestines, and flourish in our body cavities. Work on the human microbiome is new, but it is quickly becoming a leading area of biomedical research. What scientists are learning about humans and our microbiomes could change medical practice by introducing new treatment modalities. This new knowledge redefines us as superorganisms comprised of the human body and the collection of microbes that inhabit it and reveals how (...) much we are a part of our environment. The understanding that microbes are not only beneficial but sometimes necessary for survival recasts our interaction with microbes from adversarial to neighborly. This volume explores some of the science that makes human microbiome research possible. It then considers ethical, legal, and social concerns raised by microbiome research. Chapters explore issues related to personal identity, property rights, and privacy. The authors reflect on how human microbiome research challenges reigning views on public health and research ethics. They also address the need for thoughtful policies and procedures to guide the use of the biobanked human samples required for advancing this new domain of research. In the course of these explorations, they introduce examples from the history of biomedical science and recent legal cases that shed light on the issues and inform the policy recommendations they offer at the end of each topic's discussion.This volume is the product of an NIH Human Microbiome Project grant. It represents three years of conversations focused on consensus formation by the twenty-seven members of the interdisciplinary Microbiome Working Group. (shrink)

The established two tracks of neuroenhancement, moral and cognitive enhancements, rest on the characterization of commonsense morality as a set of static psychological dispositions. In this paper, I challenge this way of describing commonsense morality. I draw a parallel between commonsense psychology and commonsense morality, and I propose that the right way to characterize commonsense morality is as an empirically evaluable theory, with a structure similar to a scientific theory. I argue further that psychological dispositions to react in certain ways (...) require the tacit endorsement of a commonsense moral theory. By adopting this view, I argue that the way to change our psychological dispositions is by changing the background theory that produces them. I conclude that when commonsense morality is construed as an empirically evaluable theory, the cleft between the abilities that support scientific progress and the abilities that promote moral progress closes and it becomes evident that the way to promote both types of advancements is through cognitive enhancement. (shrink)

Pogost motiv v rimski paliati so medgeneracijski konflikti. Medtem ko očetje največkrat poudarjajo konvencionalno moralo in kažejo varčnost, že kar skoporitost, se sinovi v njihovi odsotnosti radi predajajo razvratu: zapravljajo denar, popivajo in se spuščajo v razmerja s heterami, ponavadi ob pomoči kakega nabritega domačega sužnja. Ker vlada v komediji saturnalijski narobe svet, na koncu »zmagajo« sinovi in sužnji, ki so tudi glavni junaki teh komedij. Tu in tam pa Plavt sinovom položi na jezik besede, ki odstopajo od njihovega siceršnjega (...) ravnanja in jih prikažejo v odgovornejši luči. Njegova najrazvpitejša »moralistična« komedija je Trinovčevo (Trinummus), vendar zasledimo moralno navdahnjene vložke in značajske lastnosti tudi v drugi komediji s podobnim izhodiščem, ki deluje veliko bolj razposajeno: v Hišnem strahu (Mostellaria). Ob primerjavi mladih protagonistov v Plavtovih komedijah Hišni strah in Trinovčevo ugotovimo, da je komedija Trinovčevo občutno bolj moralistična od Hišnega strahu, vendar po drugi strani tudi v slednjem ni mogoče videti gole burke kot, denimo, v Oslih (Asinaria) istega avtorja. Če si v Oslih oba protagonista, oče in sin, ki se pehata za isto meretrix, pravzaprav zaslužita zgolj posmeh občinstva, imajo glavni junak Hišnega strahu, njegov prijatelj in ljubica več značajskih lastnosti, ki so jih morale prikupiti tudi kritikom Katonovega kova. (shrink)

Work purpose: to present and analyze pedagogical strategies and the communicational approach to definitions of bioethics, a mutual part of the bioethics contents being realized on the university studies of Dentistry, Organization, Planning and Management in Healthcare, and professional studies of Medical Radiology at the Medical School in Rijeka. Methods: the method of content analysis was used to research and present encyclopaedic and some authorial definitions of bioethics, with special emphasis on definitions of bioethics by authors – bioethicists from Croatia; (...) the method of pattern 1: included the curriculum of Medical Ethics and Bioethics and the Ethics of Healthcare, and researched standpoints of forty-five students educated in studies where bioethics courses are being realized. The pattern is specifically stratified because it: a) included students whose curriculum is being realized in shifts – intensive lectures in a duration of two weeks, and those whose lectures are being realized each week during one semester; b) different year of education . 2. The scale of assessment was used to research and obtain standpoints of students on the contents of the curriculum, methods of its performance, and the achieved level of communication among students and communication with the professor. Expected results: the presented method of work and results obtained by the scale of assessment should display the acceptability and successfulness of the presented pedagogicalmethodological means of work and point out to weaknesses and deficiencies, and finally conclude the extent to which the presented concept, and approaches to the actualization of the definitions of bioethics contribute to the realization of dialogue and communication in which students simultaneously experience the curriculum as necessary, useful, interesting, and one that may motivate them to think, exchange ideas and offer possible solutions. The scale of assessment should point out to different standpoints of students depending on the length of their study and commitment to a method of class realization. (shrink)

Ovaj članak specificira mjesto Hipokratove zakletve u programu bioetičkog obrazovanja na profesionalnim fakultetima gdje se obrazuju budući medicinski i zdravstveni radnici. Predstavljena konceptualizacija sadržaja i opisana metodologija rada pokazuje kako se sadržaji curriculuma, kojima dominiraju povijesne činjenice, aktualiziraju uporabom znanja što su ih studenti usvojili ranije, te problematiziraju aktivnim uključenjem studenata u prikupljanju nove informacije relevantne za sadržaj, a onda koriste usvojeno znanje kako bi riješili konkretni bioetički predmet ili problem. Ponuđena aktivnost studenata i nastavnika ima svrhu pokazati suradnički odnos (...) između njih, te komunikaciju u kojoj studenti i nastavnici međusobno preuzimaju zadatke u realizaciji sadržaja curriculuma. (shrink)

The entering of poetics into the field of anthropology, intimated by Nietzsche, introduced by Bachelard and Bataille and continued in the framework of poststructuralism has influenced the scope and the models of knowledge traditionally related to anthropology, by reexamining and changing them. This influence is researched through the analysis of several authors, discussing the political aspects of their writings at the same time. Their notions of polarity, discontinuity, suspension, transgression and dissemination make visible possible directions of transformation of anthropology. Uvodjenje (...) poetike u polje antropologije, koje se najavljuje kod Nietzschea, a ostvaruje kroz radove Bachelarda i Bataillea i nastavlja unutar post-strukturalizma, vodilo je preispitivanju granica te discipline, kao i primerenosti samih modela znanja koji se unutar nje podrazumevaju i na kojima je konstituisana. U tekstu je kroz pristupe vise autora pokazano kako se moze uspostaviti ili porusiti most izmedju racionalnog i iracionalnog u antropologiji i sa kakvim teorijskim i politickim implikacijama. (shrink)