Plato famously characterized philosophy as practice for dying and death; contemporary philosophers in bioethics have produced a vast literature on the quest for a good death. Yet there is a relativ...

Although mainstream research institutions and health care organisations are now starting to acknowledge the important contribution of qualitative research, there are still many obstacles to obtaining funding. Consequently, at all points along the continuum of obtaining funds, enrolling participants and conducting the research, qualitative researchers will benefit from being able to refer to, or reference, a body of empirical knowledge that addresses ethical issues raised by those who have responsibility for decision-making about the implementation of research proposals. This article has (...) been written with this strategy in mind. One such ethical issue is a concern about the impact on participants of being involved in qualitative studies when they are in a vulnerable state from a distressing life experience. This article provides empirical data that describes the benefits associated with qualitative research process for parents enrolled in a longitudinal study looking at the issues associated with the diagnosis and treatment for paediatric haematological malignancies. The empirical findings affirm the significant beneficial contribution that qualitative research can make to the lives of those coping with an extremely challenging health care situation. (shrink)

It has been said that our ability to identify and describe consciousness is like that of a fish describing water. Since a fish has always been immersed in water it cannot provide an accurate description. It stands to reason then that those who have experienced alternative states of consciousness have unique insight into the nature of consciousness. The historic use of imagery, music, poetry and other creative forms to describe as well as communicate not only emotion, not only intellectual data, (...) but also states of consciousness – states of ‘being’ is well documented. Celtic poetry, Greek mythology, African ritual rhythms and contemporary creative works can be viewed as notational systems that encapsulate states of consciousness and could be investigated as such. As our creative instruments become more sophisticated our ability to express states of consciousness does as well and as a natural extension of this creative process, the artists’ exploration of consciousness equally intensifies and expands. As the Surrealists explored sub-consciousness, what areas of consciousness does contemporary creativity explore? (shrink)

The prime purpose of this paper is, first, to restore to discourse-bound occasion sentences their rightful central place in semantics and secondly, taking these as the basic propositional elements in the logical analysis of language, to contribute to the development of an adequate logic of occasion sentences and a mathematical (Boolean) foundation for such a logic, thus preparing the ground for more adequate semantic, logical and mathematical foundations of the study of natural language. Some of the insights elaborated in this (...) paper have appeared in the literature over the past thirty years, and a number of new developments have resulted from them. The present paper aims at providing an integrated conceptual basis for this new development in semantics. In Section 1 it is argued that the reduction by translation of occasion sentences to eternal sentences, as proposed by Russell and Quine, is semantically and thus logically inadequate. Natural language is a system of occasion sentences, eternal sentences being merely boundary cases. The logic has fewer tasks than is standardly assumed, as it excludes semantic calculi, which depend crucially on information supplied by cognition and context and thus belong to cognitive psychology rather than to logic. For sentences to express a proposition and thus be interpretable and informative, they must first be properly anchored in context. A proposition has a truth value when it is, moreover, properly keyed in the world, i.e. is about a situation in the world. Section 2 deals with the logical properties of natural language. It argues that presuppositional phenomena require trivalence and presents the trivalent logic ${\rm PPC}_{3}$ , with two kinds of falsity and two negations. It introduces the notion of Σ-space for a sentence A (or / A /, the set of situations in which A is true) as the basis of logical model theory, and the notion of / ${\bf P}^{A}$ / (the Σ-space of the presuppositions of A), functioning as a 'private' subuniverse for / A /. The trivalent Kleene calculus is reinterpreted as a logical account of vagueness, rather than of presupposition. ${\rm PPC}_{3}$ and the Kleene calculus are refinements of standard bivalent logic and can be combined into one logical system. In Section 3 the adequacy of ${\rm PPC}_{3}$ as a truth-functional model of presupposition is considered more closely and given a Boolean foundation. In a noncompositional extended Boolean algebra, three operators are defined: $1_{a}$ for the conjoined presuppositions of a, ã for the complement of a within $1_{a}$ , and â for the complement of $1_{a}$ within Boolean 1. The logical properties of this extended Boolean algebra are axiomatically defined and proved for all possible models. Proofs are provided of the consistency and the completeness of the system. Section 4 is a provisional exploration of the possibility of using the results obtained for a new discourse-dependent account of the logic of modalities in natural language. The overall result is a modified and refined logical and model-theoretic machinery, which takes into account both the discourse-dependency of natural language sentences and the necessity of selecting a key in the world before a truth value can be assigned. (shrink)

The message of the present article is, first, that, besides and below the strictly linguistic aspects of communication through language, of which speakers are in principle fully aware, a great deal of knowledge not carried in virtue of the system of the language in question but rather transmitted by the form of the intended message, is imparted to listeners or readers, without either being in the least aware of this happening. For example, listeners quickly register the social status, regional origin (...) or emotional attitude of speakers and they react to those kinds of ‘paralinguistic’ information, mostly totally unawares. When speaker and listener have a positive attitude with regard to each other, the reaction consists, among other things, in mutual alignment or accommodation of pronunciation features, lexical selections and style of speaking. When the mutual attitude is negative, the opposite happens: speakers accentuate their differences. Then, when this happens not between individual interlocutors but between groups of speakers, such accommodation or divergence phenomena may lead to language change. The main theoretical question raised, but not answered, in this article is how and at what point forms of behaviour, including linguistic behaviour, achieve the status of being ‘standard’ or ‘accepted’ in any given community and what it means to say that they are ‘standard’ or ‘accepted’. It is argued that frequency of occurrence is not the main explanatory factor, and that a causal explanation is to be sought rather in the, often unconscious, attitudes of individuals, in particular their desire or need to be integrated members of a community or social group, thus ensuring their safety and asserting their group identity. The question thus belongs to the province of social psychology. Qualms about analyses of this kind being ‘unscientific’ dissipate when it is realized that consciousness phenomena are part of the real world and must therefore be considered to be valid objects of scientific theory formation. Like so many other ill-understood elements in scientific theories, consciousness, though itself unexplained, can be given a place in causal chains of events. (shrink)

Introduction -- 1. The settling of a language -- 2. The Whorf hypothesis -- 3. Relativism or a universal theory? -- 4. What does language have to do with logic and mathematics? -- 5. A test bed for grammatical theories -- 6. The Chomsky hierarchy in perpsective -- 7. Reflexivity and identity in language and cognition -- 8. The generalized logic hierarchy and its cognitive implications -- 9. The intensionalization of extensions.

Because health care professions exist to provide a good for society, ethical questions are inherently part of them. Such professions and their members can be assessed based on how effective they are in developing knowledge and enacting practices that further the health and well‐being of individuals and society. The complexity of contemporary health care environments makes it important to prepare clinicians who can anticipate, recognize, and address problems that arise in practice or that prevent a profession from fulfilling its service (...) goals and obligations. Different health care professions have evolved distinct perspectives about appropriate goals for, and the purposes of, their clinicians, even when the goal of improving health and well‐being for society is shared across professions. While medicine and nursing goals are shared in principle, they differ in the particulars. Given the centrality to nursing of ethical questions, the profession has a collective responsibility to help clinicians at all levels of practice become ethically savvy and to reinforce their moral agency as needed. Both knowledge of nursing ethics and knowledge of the interdisciplinary field of bioethics are critical to nursing work. (shrink)

SUMMARYThe present study paints the intellectual environment in which Ferdinand de Saussure developed his ideas about language and linguistics during the fin de siècle. It sketches his dissatisfaction with that environment to the extent that it touched on linguistics, and shows the new course he was trying to steer on the basis of ideas that seemed to open new and exciting perspectives, even though they were still vaguely defined. As Saussure himself was extremely reticent about his sources and intellectual pedigree, (...) his stance in the lively European cultural context in which he lived can only be established through textual critique and conjecture. On this basis, it is concluded that Saussure, though relatively uninformed about its historical roots, essentially aimed at integrating the rationalist tradition current in the sciences in his day into a new, ‘scientific’ general theory of language. In this, he was heavily indebted to a few predecessors, such as the French philosopher-psychologist Victor Egger, and particularly to the French psychologist, historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine, who was a major cultural influence in nineteenth-century France, though now largely forgotten. The present study thus supports Hans Aarsleff's analysis, where, for the first time, Taine's influence is emphasised, and rejects John Joseph's contention that Taine had no influence and that, instead, Saussure was influenced mainly by the romanticist Adolphe Pictet. Saussure abhorred Pictet's method of etymologising, which predated the Young Grammarian school, central to Saussure's linguistic education. The issue has implications for the positioning of Saussure in the history of linguistics. Is he part of the non-analytical, romanticist and experience-based European strand of thought that is found in art and postmodernist philosophy and is sometimes called structuralism, or is he a representative of the short-lived European branch of specifically linguistic structuralism, which was rationalist in outlook, more science-oriented and more formalist, but lost out to American structuralism? The latter seems to be the case, though phenomenology, postmodernism and art have lately claimed Saussure as an icon. (shrink)

This paper examines the extent to which parents have absorbed New Right ideas about education and acted accordingly. What emerges is that their commitment to the rhetoric of school choice is strong. However, concepts such as the market and competition are viewed less favourably. An important theme here is the avoidance by parents of any collective agenda in discussing education policy, a factor that may thwart those who attempt to predict their responses to government policy for schools.

Medical ethics has traditionally been governed by two guiding, but sometimes conflicting, principlesthe Substituted Judgment Standard shows our concern for autonomy, whereas the Best Interest Standard shows our commitment to benevolence. Both standards are vulnerable to criticisms. Further, the principles can seem to offer conflicting prescriptions for action. The criticisms and conflict figure prominently in discussion of advance directive decisionmaking and Alzheimer's disease. After laying out each of the current standards and its problems, with Alzheimer's issues as my central concern, (...) I offer a new standard that avoids the problems while honoring our concerns for both autonomy and benevolence. (shrink)

This article describes an artwork in progress; a digital video of synchronized visual patterns based in part on rhythmic practices that are said to reliably lead to a shifted state of consciousness. The artwork is being developed to further understand the correlation of rhythm and consciousness. The investigation is based on a comparative study of the following practices: ‘The Art of Memory’ and Raymon Llull’s thirteenth-century diagrammatic mnemonics, the Lucid Dreaming exercises developed at Stanford University and the African Yoruba rhythms (...) of ritualized possession. Throughout history, states of extreme lucidity, whether described as ‘ah-ha’ moments or life-transforming epiphanies, have been described with striking consistently and with such frequency that, rather than extraordinary, they seem to be fundamental to the human condition. The paradoxical state of lucid dreaming has been scientifically identified at Stanford University as a state of wakeful awareness that occurs during REM sleep, while dreaming. We might anticipate in the near future, the identification of a wakeful state of lucidity, a state as distinct from normal wakeful awareness as the state of dreaming. Those who have experienced altered states of consciousness can lend unique perspective and insight into the nature of consciousness. Analysis of practices that lead to such states add further insight. From running, to rhythmic breathing, to the circular movement of pilgrims at Mecca, to circular mosh pits, rhythmic activity is prevalent among practices that are said to lead to a shifted state of consciousness. The research suggests that in addition to rhythm itself, the relationship between rhythms is a significant factor corresponding to shifted states of consciousness. The digital video artwork discussed in this article might be thought of as a visualization of such rhythmic sequencing, and its development a creative method of inquiry. (shrink)

Many areas of contemporary art and culture in the United States and Europe can be shown to have a direct lineage to the rich history of the Western Mystery Traditions, rooted in ancient esoteric and magical philosophies of Greece and Egypt. Video mash-ups and audio sampling have inherited the cut-up methods of Beat poets and artists, who in turn were influenced by the Surrealists and their contemporaries. Early twentieth-century artists such as Austin O. Spare drew upon magickal practices derived directly (...) from renaissance practitioners such as John Dee’s use of The Key of Solomon and Giordano Bruno’s Art of Memory. Methods of employing graphical imagery for the purpose of accessing insight or influence from alternate realms continue to draw upon Gnostic and Hermetic philosophies of ancient Greece and Egyptian antiquity. We can easily see the persistent influence of these ancient beliefs and practices in the contemporary use of logos and symbols of popular culture as well as in contemporary art and music. (shrink)

The Aristotelian, non-relativistic notion of truth as correspondence with and dependency on actual states of affairs is in principle maintained, but refined and even modified in several different directions. The principal reason for maintaining it is empirical: it seems to reflect the way in which humans deal with the notion "truth" naively or pretheoretically, in ordinary life situations. It is shown that the Kantian crisis in epistemology does not affect this notion, since what is at issue is truth-conditions, not actual (...) truth-values. This great crisis in epistemology does, however, reinforce the requirement that logic, as a vehicle of preservation of assumed truth, be entirely and fundamentally independent of contingent states of affairs. This requirement made it imperative that traditional logic be replaced with a logic of absolute applicability, no matter whether there is or is not an outside world, or, if there is one, how it is or happens to be. The Aristotelian Principle of the Excluded Third is given up, not in favour of truth-value gaps for sentences with reference failure, but rather in favour of three truth-values: truth, minimal falsity , and radical falsity . Truth-value gaps do not occur with sentences that are well-integrated in discourse and context This analysis is linked up with a well-defined trivalent logic. It moreover requires the assumption of entities that are defined by thought processes but do not exist in reality. It is further shown that truth-conditions are not always expressible in autonomously verifiable or falsifiable terms. Many lexical meanings depend, for a complete statement of the associated truth-conditions, on variable cognitive input whose content depends on what is known in general terms, or prototypically, about the things referred to in the discourse at hand. Examples are the whole possessive complex , gradable adjectives, or epistemic modals. This fact does not invalidate the notion of truth as correspondence, but it does shed a new light on how sentences acquire their truth-values. Finally, truth is seen als correspondence not so much with whatever one may assume the world to be in its barest or brütest form, down to its very basics, as with the phenomenal world, that is, the world as it presents itself to human perception and interpretation, with all the projections and reifications that go with it. (shrink)

There is a growing trend in Australia to require lawyers to certify reasonable prospects of success for the cases they bring and defend. New South Wales has led the way with the Legal Profession Act 2004 (NSW) Pt 3.2 Division 10 requiring legal practitioners to certify reasonable prospects of success in all claims for damages. The requirement places a significant onus on lawyers to make a judgment about the merits of a case before it is begun, yet the common law (...) has long provided mechanisms to ensure that cases without prospects of success do not go to trial. This article considers Australian legislative provisions requiring lawyers to certify reasonable prospects of success of cases. It examines the application of the NSW legislation by the courts highlighting the difficulties of interpretation of what constitute 'reasonable prospects of success' and the application of the legislation in the context of the dynamic litigation process. It is argued that these legislated obligations on lawyers will have a detrimental effect on access to justice by denying parties, in particular plaintiffs, the opportunity to have their cases properly and fully determined in the courts. This article examines common law mechanisms for dissuading cases without prospects and argues that the general law is an effective system for ensuring that cases without prospects of success are not maintained. The Australian experience is instructive for consideration of optimal reform packages for the administration of justice and to evaluate the role of any litigation lawyer within the judicial and court process. (shrink)

Advances in life-sustaining medical technology as applied to neonatal cases frequently present ethical concerns with a strong emotional component. Neonates delivered in the gestation period of approximately 23held hostagemoral distress” regarding aggressive courses of treatment for some patients. Some of this distress results from a feeling of powerlessness regarding treatment decisions, coupled with a high intensity of hands-on contact with the patients and family. Lack of authority coupled with high responsibility may itself be a recipe for a different kind of (...) futility. (shrink)

Issues surrounding the inclusion of transgender and intersex athletes in the women’s category in sport have spurred vigorous, and sometimes vicious, debate. The loudest voices on one edge of the de...

The 2024 Paris Olympic Games generated spirited, often misguided and ill-informed, discussion regarding regulations governing the eligibility of athletes with differences of sex development (DSD)....