Since Plato, most philosophers have drawn a sharp line between reason and emotion, assuming that emotions interfere with rationality and have nothing to contribute to good reasoning. In his dialogue the Phaedrus, Plato compared the rational part of the soul to a charioteer who must control his steeds, which correspond to the emotional parts of the soul (Plato 1961, p. 499). Today, scientists are often taken as the paragons of rationality, and scientific thought is generally assumed to be independent of (...) emotional thinking. (shrink)

Several cases which have been considered by the courts in recent years have highlighted the legal dilemmas facing doctors whose decisions result in the ending of a patient's life. This paper considers the case of Dr Cox, who was convicted of attempting to murder one of his patients, and explores the roles of motive, diminished responsibility and consent in cases of "mercy killing". The Cox decision is compared to that of Tony Bland and Janet Johnstone, in which the patients were (...) in a persistent vegetative state. In all three cases, the doctors believed that their patients' quality of life was so poor that their continued existence was of no benefit to them, and decided that their lives should not be unduly prolonged, yet the doctor who was prosecuted was the one whose dying patient had requested that her death be hastened. The paper examines the law's seemingly contradictory approaches to such cases. (shrink)

Background: According to the Declaration of Helsinki, patients who take part in a clinical trial must be adequately informed about the trial's aims, methods, expected benefits, and potential risks. The declaration does not, however, elaborate on what “adequately informed” might amount to, in practice. Medical researchers and Local Research Ethics Committees attempt to ensure that the information which potential participants are given is pitched at an appropriate level, but few studies have considered whether the patients who take part in such (...) trials feel they have been given adequate information, or whether they feel able to understand that information.Objectives: To explore trial participants' views on the amount of information provided, and of their own understanding of that information.Design: Structured interviews of patients participating in clinical trials for the treatment of chronic medical condition.Findings: Patients generally felt they were given an appropriate amount of information, and that they were able to understand all or most of it. They felt they were given adequate time to ask questions before agreeing to take part. In comparison with treatment given outwith the research setting, patients generally felt they received more information when participating in a clinical trial.Conclusions: Researchers sometimes complain that patients are given too much information during clinical trials, and have limited understanding of that information. The present study shows that this perception is not necessarily shared by patients. More research is needed in this area, particularly to gauge whether patient understanding is indeed accurate. (shrink)

In recent times, a previously unchallenged and longstanding communis opinio concerning the extant manuscript tradition of Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica has been shattered by Prof. W.-W. Ehlers in his revelation that the fifteenth-century Laurentianus plut. 39.38, L, written by the Florentine scholar, Niccolò Niccoli, is independent of the much exalted oldest witness, Vaticanus Latinus 3277, V, copied in Fulda in the second quarter of the ninth century. With equally silent subservience to the hazardous and now discredited principle, vetustissimus et optimus, second (...) place in the tradition had commonly been given to a manuscript of similar age to that of V, namely S, discovered in 1416 at the monastery of St. Gall by three humanist scholars, Poggio Bracciolini, Cencio Rustici and Bartolomeo da Montepulciano, and subsequently lost, except through reconstruction from six extant fifteenth-century apographa, each instantly recognizable from the fact that they contain only 1.1–4.317. Between V and S, however, as Ehlers and others before him have argued, a common exemplar, a, must be deduced to exist. (shrink)

The geometrical structures implicit in the de Broglie waves associated with a relativistic charged scalar quantum mechanical particle in an external field are analyzed by employing the ray concept of the causal interpretation. It is shown how an osculating Finslerian metric tensor, a torsion tensor, and a tetrad field define respectively the strain, the dislocation density, and the Burgers vector in the “natural state” of the wave, which is a non-Riemannian space of distant parallelism. A quantum torque determined by the (...) quantum potential is introduced and the example of a screw dislocated wave is discussed. (shrink)

Pease ad loc.: ‘Roman writers often use axis… in a figurative sense… for the caelum as a whole, and in our passage, while the force is applied by Atlas to the axis of the sphere, yet the whole sphere is apparently in mind, as the phrase stellis ardentibus aptum indicates.’ It is lexicographical commonplace that axis is used, especially in the poets, as a synonym for the sky, yet the oddity of the synecdoche by which a scientific, or pseudoscientific, term (...) for the axis of the universe is transferred to mean the heavens in general has been little commented on; unanalytic recognition of the semantic fact is the norm . I believe that a more precise account of this transference can be given, and in particular I will argue that Virgilian usage in the Aeneid is central to the history of this process. (shrink)

One of the gains to be reckoned from the study of nomenclature in the sepulchral inscriptions of the early empire is the gradual abandonment of attempts to distinguish between slave and freeborn on the basis of personal name or cognomen alone, especially when this is of Latin derivation. Nevertheless, one still finds personal cognomina in undated inscriptions adduced as sole evidence for the origin or status of individuals below senatorial rank. Thus in a standard work on freedmen in the early (...) empire, recently reprinted, names such as Agilis, Amandus, Auctus, Communis, Donatus, Faustus, Felix, etc., are said to be commonly servile, but others such as Aquila, Bassus, Capito, Cams, Celer, Crescens, etc., are taken as ingenuous. The criteria used in making such a distinction are subjective and arbitrary and the statistics based on them are largely valueless. It is the purpose of this note to consider briefly on this question the evidence of the personal nomenclature of the Imperial slaves and freedmen. In this group, the Familia Caesaris, no problem of status arises, and the fact that the majority of their inscriptions can be dated, at least approximately, makes it possible to trace the chronological development of the use of cognomina ingenua by one important group of servile origin from the first to the early third century A.D. Moreover, such a development is useful evidence for change in the social structure of the early empire. (shrink)

We have examined only a few of the basic questions about causal inference that result from Reichenbach's two principles. We have not considered what happens when the probability distribution is a mixture of distributions from different causal structures, or how unmeasured common causes can be detected, or what inferences can reliably be drawn about causal relations among unmeasured variables, or the exact advantages that experimental control offers. A good deal is known about these questions, and there is a good deal (...) more to find out. (shrink)

Bioethics has become a field of new challenges for Ibero-America and the Caribbean. A seeming uniformity in the region hides a rich heterogeneous society. A brief survey of bioethical developments in different Ibero- American countries is provided as well as the bioethical problems and approaches peculiar to the region. Some of the unique features of bioethics in this region, it is suggested, could infuse new life into the U.S. and European bioethics discussion. Finally, a bibliography of Ibero-American bioethics literature is (...) provided for North American and European readers. (shrink)

In support of a recent conjecture by Nielsen (1999), we prove that the phenomena of ‘incomparable entanglement’— whereby, neither member of a pair of pure entangled states can be transformed into the other via local operations and classical communication (LOCC)—is a generic feature when the states at issue live in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space.  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The Bell–Kochen–Specker theorem shows that, in any Hilbert space of dimension of at least 3, it is impossible to assign noncontextual definite values to all observables in such a way that the quantum-mechanical predictions are reproduced. This leaves open the issue of what subsets of observables may be assigned definite values. Clifton has shown that, for a system of at least two continuous degrees of freedom, it is not possible to assign simultaneous noncontextual values to two coordinates and their conjugate (...) momenta. In this Letter, it is shown that, for a system of a single continuous degree of freedom, it is not possible to assign noncontextual values to the coordinate and its conjugate momenta that satisfy a continuity assumption herein called the ‘ -Product Rule’.  2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

India has produced several drafts of data policies. In this work, they are referred to [1] JBNSCR 2018, [2] DPDPR 2018, [3] NSAI 2018, [4] RAITF 2018, [5] PDPB 2019, [6] PRAI 2021, [7] JPCR 2021, [8] IDAUP 2022, [9] IDABNUP 2022. All of them consider Artificial Intelligence (AI) a social problem solver at the societal level, let alone an incentive for economic growth. However, these policy drafts warn of the social disruptions caused by algorithms and encourage the careful use (...) of computational technologies in various social contexts. Hence, the emerging data society and its implications in India's social contexts demand immense social science attention, which needs to be improved in the policy drafts, primarily because they are creations of industry stakeholders, technocrats, bureaucrats, and experts from tech schools. In the larger social milieu of digital infrastructure emerging, the fundamental question is whether India's national philosophy envisioned in the Indian constitution is reflected in the policy papers. The paper enquires whether the national data policy upholds the core values dispersed through the philosophy of the Indian constitution, which, among other things, is not confined only to inclusion, diversity, rights, liberty, justice and equality. By focusing on constitutional values, the paper seeks to offer a broader and more critical understanding of India's approach to AI policy by bringing together analyses of a wide array of policy documents available in the public realm. (shrink)

This book delves into esoteric knowledge, describing the structure of the universe (Brahmanda or Cosmic Egg) as a series of astral biospheres. These biospheres, or lokas, are linked to spiritual consciousness and degrees of divine bliss (Ananda). Advanced spiritual figures, such as Rishis and Mahatmas, can navigate these realms and help others evolve. The article presents a detailed comparison between “Puranic Hinduism” and “Sanatana Dharma”, specifically addressing their differences in cosmogenesis and spiritual evolution. The difference between the cosmogenesis of Puranic (...) Hinduism and Sanatana Dharma is that while the former is founded on the concept of Trimurti as taught by the Puranas, the latter is a Manu-centric and Guru-centric spiritual system. This has a lot of significance concerning the rituals and the social order they have produced. Here, the Cosmic Purusha is identifiable with Manu, not with Trimurti or the God of Abrahamic religions, because of their different spiritual status in the cosmological hierarchy. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Introduction A (re)Defmition of what Human Gene Therapy is About Neurological Gene Therapy Ethics and Gene Therapy Acknowledgments Notes.

This paper is a contribution to the study of equality-free logic, that is, first-order logic without equality. We mainly devote ourselves to the study of algebraic characterizations of its relation of elementary equivalence by providing some Keisler-Shelah type ultrapower theorems and an Ehrenfeucht-Fraïssé type theorem. We also give characterizations of elementary classes in equality-free logic. As a by-product we characterize the sentences that are logically equivalent to an equality-free one.