Allowing persons to make an informed choice about their participation in research is a pre-eminent ethical and legal requirement. Almost universally, this requirement has been addressed through the provision of written patient information sheets and consent forms. Researchers and others have raised concerns about the extent to which such forms—particularly given their frequent lengthiness and complexity—provide participants with the tools and knowledge necessary for autonomous decision-making. Concerns are especially pronounced for certain participant groups, such as persons with low literacy and (...) Indigenous persons. Multimedia strategies have the potential to usefully supplement current consent practices in Australia; however, information is needed about the need for supplementary consent practices, along with drivers for and barriers against adoption. This study initiates the required evidence base through an audit of informed consent practices for medical research in the Australian state of Tasmania to assess the need for, and current uptake of, supplementary consent strategies. Drivers for and barriers against adoption of multimedia consent practices were explored in detail through interviews with key stakeholders, including researchers, HREC chairs and members, and research participants, including Indigenous participants. (shrink)

In articulating the protection-inclusion dilemma, Friesen et al. (2023) identify an important issue facing institutional review boards (IRBs) and elucidate historical factors contributing to its de...

Genomics is increasingly becoming an integral component of health research and clinical care. The perceived difficulties associated with genetic research involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people mean that they have largely been excluded as research participants. This limits the applicability of research findings for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients. Emergent use of genomic technologies and personalised medicine therefore risk contributing to an increase in existing health disparities unless urgent action is taken. To allow the potential benefits of genomics (...) to be more equitably distributed, and minimise potential harms, we recommend five actions: ensure diversity of participants by implementing appropriate protocols at the study design stage; target diseases that disproportionately affect disadvantaged groups; prioritise capacity building to promote Indigenous leadership across research professions; develop resources for consenting patients or participants from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds; and integrate awareness of issues relating to Indigenous people into the governance structures, formal reviews, data collection protocols and analytical pipelines of health services and research projects. (shrink)

At a book event in March last year—one year into the pandemic and four months after mass immunization programs began—Goldenberg voiced her concerns about the timing of her book's launch into the world. This anxiety is echoed in the preface of the book itself, where she notes that the emergence of a global pandemic as she completed five years of work threatened to introduce a whole new set of issues that might fundamentally alter the book's arguments. Goldenberg's concern is understandable: (...) since the publication of her book, it is undeniable that public trust in vaccines and the experts who advocate for them have been constant topics of debate.This engagingly... (shrink)

Hawe et al. raise concerns about Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) taking a risk-averse and litigation-sensitive approach to ethical review of research proposals. HRECs are tasked with reviewing proposals for compliance with the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research for the purpose of promoting the welfare of participants. While these guidelines intentionally include a significant degree of discretion in HREC decision making, there is also evidence that HRECs sometimes request changes that go beyond the guidance provided by the (...) National Statement. When HRECs request changes outside their remit, inconsistencies between individual HRECs become more common, contributing to delays in ethical review and reducing the quality of HREC decision making. Improvements to the HREC regulatory system are needed to promote transparency and accountability. (shrink)

This Chapter provides a short undergraduate introduction to ethical and philosophical complexities surrounding the law’s attempt (or lack thereof) to regulate artificial intelligence. -/- Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom proposed a simple thought experiment known as the paperclip maximizer. What would happen if a machine (the “PCM”) were given the sole goal of manufacturing as many paperclips as possible? It might learn how to transact money, source metal, or even build factories. The machine might also eventually realize that humans pose a (...) threat. Humans could turn the machine off at any point, and then it wouldn’t be able to make as many paperclips as possible! Taken to the logical extreme, the result is quite grim—the PCM might even start using humans as raw material for paperclips. -/- The predicament only deepens once we realize that Bostrom’s thought experiment overlooks a key player. The PCM and algorithms like it do not arise spontaneously (at least, not yet). Most likely, some corporation—say, Office Corp.—designed, owns, and runs the PCM. The more paperclips the PCM manufactures, the more profits Office Corp. makes, even if that entails converting some humans (but preferably not customers!) into raw materials. Less dramatically, Office Corp. may also make more money when PCM engages in other socially sub-optimal behaviors that would otherwise violate the law, like money laundering, sourcing materials from endangered habitats, manipulating the market for steel, or colluding with competitors over prices. The consequences are predictable and dire. If Office Corp. isn’t held responsible, it will not stop with the PCM. Office Corp. would have every incentive to develop more maximizers—say for papers, pencils, and protractors. -/- This chapter issues a challenge for tech ethicists, social ontologists, and legal theorists: How can the law help mitigate algorithmic harms without overly compromising the potential that AI has to make us all healthier, wealthier, and wiser? The answer is far from straightforward. (shrink)

Acidity, generated in hypoxia or hypermetabolic states, perturbs homeostasis and is a feature of solid tumors. That acid peripherally disperses lysosomes is a three‐decade‐old observation, yet one little understood or appreciated. However, recent work has recognized the inhibitory impact this spatial redistribution has on mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1), a key regulator of metabolism. This finding argues for a paradigm shift in localization of mTORC1 activator Ras homolog enriched in brain (RHEB), a conclusion several others have now independently (...) reached. Thus, mTORC1, known to sense amino acids, mitogens, and energy to restrict biosynthesis to times of adequate resources, also senses pH and, via dampened mTOR‐governed synthesis of clock proteins, regulates the circadian clock to achieve concerted responses to metabolic stress. While this may allow cancer to endure metabolic deprivation, immune cell mTOR signaling likewise exhibits pH sensitivity, suggesting that suppression of antitumor immune function by solid tumor acidity may additionally fuel cancers, an obstacle potentially reversible through therapeutic pH manipulation. (shrink)

According to many accounts of faith—where faith is thought of as something psychological, e.g., an attitude, state, or trait—one cannot have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. According to other accounts of faith, one can have faith without belief of the relevant propositions. Call the first sort of account doxasticism since it insists that faith requires belief; call the second nondoxasticism since it allows faith without belief. The New Testament may seem to favor doxasticism over nondoxasticism. For it may (...) seem that, according to the NT authors, one can have faith in God, as providential, or faith that Jesus is the Messiah, or be a person of Christian faith, and the like only if one believes the relevant propositions. In this essay, I propose to assess this tension, as it pertains to the Gospel of Mark. The upshot of my assessment is that, while it may well appear that, according to Mark, one can have faith only if one believes the relevant propositions, appearances are deceiving. Mark said no such thing. Rather, what Mark said—by way of story—about faith fits nondoxasticism at least as well as doxasticism, arguably better. More importantly, the account of faith that emerges from Mark is that faith consists in resilience in the face of challenges to living in light of the overall positive stance to the object of faith, where that stance consists in certain conative, cognitive, and behavioral-dispositional elements. (shrink)

The complexity and inefficiency of the U.S. health care system complicates the distribution of life-saving medical technologies. When the public health is at stake, however, there are alternatives. The proposal for a national PrEP program published in this issue of the Journal applies some of the lessons of the national COVID vaccine campaign to HIV prevention. In doing so, it draws on other examples of public health approaches to the financing of medical technology, from vaccines for children to hepatitis C (...) treatment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective by William C. Mattison IIIRebekah EklundThe Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective William C. Mattison III NEW YORK: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2017. 290 pp. £75.00Undergirding this book is a principle from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: the "analogy of faith" or "the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves" (241). the (...) "truths of faith" under consideration are Matthew's sermon on the Mount (sM) and the virtue ethics of thomas aquinas. Mattison aims to restore the sM to a more prominent place in Catholic moral theology by demonstrating the convergence between the teachings of the sM and thomistic virtue ethics.In this endeavor, the book largely succeeds, even if it occasionally over-reaches—that is, the sM is always shown to be in perfect harmony with thomas's teachings on virtue ethics, in which some readers might see points of tension. For example, Mattison uses thomistic action theory to argue that the beatitudes (Mt 5:3–12) and the sM's concluding exhortations (Mt 7:13–29) both demonstrate an "intrinsic relationship" between action and eternal reward; that is, the "qualifying condition" (e.g., meekness) is itself constitutive of happiness and is thus an activity that continues in eternal life (22–25, 209, 221). Purity of heart works well in this framework, but Mattison struggles to make mourning fit. the thomistic lens determines the sense of the text: Whatever mourning is, it is an activity that must persist in heaven, limiting the options for interpretation.Mattison also aligns the seven virtues—faith, hope, love, prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude—with the seven beatitudes (following augustine's reduction of the beatitudes from eight to seven), with the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer, and with sections of the sM as a whole. these latter, broad pairings are not always easy to find. Mattison matches the beatitudes with the virtue of faith, and the six antitheses with the virtues of temperance and fortitude. the virtue of love pairs with Matthew 6:1–6, 16–18 (teachings on prayer, alms-giving, and fasting, sans the Lord's Prayer); prudence, with Matthew 6:19–34 (worry and money); justice, with Matthew 7:1–12 (judging, asking, the golden rule); and hope, with Matthew 7:13–29 (concluding warnings and exhortations).similarly, a virtue is assigned to each beatitude (47) and to each petition of the Lord's Prayer (252). In the case of the Lord's Prayer, Mattison insists on a particular order of the virtues, following aquinas's ordering (but reversing [End Page 207] temperance and fortitude). But he does not use the same order of virtues for the Beatitudes or for the broader alignments with the whole SM (the orders are completely different for all three lists), raising the question of why Aquinas's order matters for one set but not for the others.Mattison's alignments show both his indebtedness to patristic and medieval tradition and his innovation. Medieval commentators commonly matched sets of sevens (Beatitudes, virtues, vices, gifts of the Spirit), but (rather remarkably) none of them ever appears to have understood the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer as requests for the seven virtues, as Mattison does. Likewise, Mattison's alignment of the Beatitudes with the virtues follows the practice but not the substance of previous lists; his pairings match neither Ambrose's nor Aquinas's. I would have found a discussion of the differences helpful.The question is whether Mattison's alignments are fruitful or merely forced, and here readers may find the results to be mixed. Some are illuminating, such as the vice of presumption in relation to Matthew 7:21–23; others, such as the alignment of the six antitheses with the seven sacraments, "appear a bit of a 'stretch,'" as even Mattison admits (110).Overall, scholars and graduate students interested in Thomistic virtue ethics, and in the relationship between scripture and Catholic moral theology, will find much food for thought here.Rebekah EklundLoyola University MarylandCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The Agent-Causal Theory of Action claims that an event counts as an action when, and only when, it is caused by an agent. The central difference between the Causal Theory of Action (CTA) and the Agent-Causal view comes down to a disagreement about what sort of item (or items) occupies the left-hand position in the causal relation. For CTA, the left-hand position is occupied by mental items within the agent, typically construed in terms of mental events (e.g., belief/desire pairs or (...) intentions). For the agent-causal theory, it is the agent herself (that is, a substance) which does the causing. Agent-causal theorists generally concede that some intentional actions involve causal relations that are best understood in eventcausal terms. Such intentional actions are "nonbasic," meaning that the agent does them by doing something else. But for any "basic" intentional action—behavior that, according to the agent-causal theorist, is caused directly by the agent—there is a causal relation between the agent, on the one hand, and the action, on the other, which is (i) primitive (not permitting of analysis) and (ii) irreducible to any other relation (including, importantly, the event-causal relation). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Deception and Sacrifice in Aeneid 2.1–249Rebekah M. SmithIt is striking how often in Book 2 death seems to have sacrificial overtones. Not only does Laocoon die at an altar in the act of sacrificing, but even the simile introduced to illustrate his cries keeps within the same framework of reference... and before all this the motif of human sacrifice forms the ominous basis of Sinon’s lying tale.—E. L. Harrison (...) (1990)Sacrifice as a theme in the Aeneid takes many forms, one of which is human death cast as or described in language that suggests the ritual religious killing of a sacrificial victim. Harrison is perceptive in associating the death of Laocoon, the simile that describes his cries, and the motif of human sacrifice in Sinon’s story. 1 The lying tale with which Sinon deceives the Trojans in book 2 narrates the only actual sacrifice in the Aeneid wherein the intended victim is a human being, and Laocoon’s death at the altar while performing a sacrifice to Neptune is famously an ironic complement to Sinon’s alleged escape from death at a Greek altar.It is my purpose here to press farther in considering the two together, Sinon’s lying tale and Laocoon’s death. The many ironies and reversals of expectation in the passage have been extensively discussed, including trickery and sacrifice as dominant themes and Laocoon’s death as in a sense a completion of Sinon’s lying tale. But a closer look at precisely how the theme of sacrifice runs through the passage will show that Virgil shaped the Sinon-Laocoon episode to be a story of the systematic perversion of religious sacrifice—a perversion, furthermore, that turns at every stage on the perversion of human knowledge. Nowhere is the goal, execution, or outcome of ritual sacrifice what it ought to be, and while sacrifice is prompted by unholy human ends and turned into a violent portent by the gods, human awareness throughout the episode is both prominently at issue and helplessly deceived. I suggest [End Page 503] that in his version of the Sinon and Laocoon episode of book 2, Virgil deepened and complicated the themes of deception and sacrifice by methods that vary from literary modeling to simple contrast of events, entwining them at many levels from beginning to end in a progression. They all culminate in an articulation of the dark and utter hopelessness in the fall of Troy.Girard, Bandera, and HardieScholarship on the Sinon and Laocoon episode has generally dealt with Virgil’s use of his sources, the efficacy of Sinon’s deception, and the overall dramatic power and irony of the episode. 2 Sacrifice as a theme has been treated as one element among many. Linking the image of the twin serpents with the theme of deceit and destruction, Putnam called Laocoon the first symbolic sacrificial victim in the destruction of the city. Manuwald has drawn attention to the heightened elements of sacrifice in Sinon’s story, mainly the Trojan Horse figured as votum and the role of Calchas, arguing that these serve to strengthen the force of Sinon’s deception. Block’s thesis that Virgil forces a double consciousness on his reader includes comment on the ironic juxtaposition of the Greeks’ need for a parting sacrifice and Laocoon’s death. Hardie does likewise in identifying Lucretian echoes of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia. 3 [End Page 504]An important development has been the use of René Girard’s theory of “sacrificial crisis” in interpretation of the Aeneid as a whole and of specific episodes. Bandera (1981) identifies the Sinon and Laocoon episodes as being Girardian “sacrifice gone wrong,” thus (1) beginning an escalating series of violent deaths that leads to that of Turnus and (2) making the element of deceit in Virgil’s rendering part of a Girardian trickery inherent in the act of sacrifice. Because I argue specifically that the deception of human knowledge in Aeneid 2 is of a different kind, I must briefly address Bandera’s study and the theory he applies. My remarks are confined to Girard’s early work Violence and the Sacred ([1972] 1977), on which Bandera... (shrink)

Few figures of the Middle Ages command the attention of so many modern disciplines as Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253). Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science are all areas which his life and thought continue to have significance and to inspire re-interpretation. Accompanied by a series of original commentaries, this new edition of Grosseteste's work, with English translation, draws together the perspectives of modern scientists and medieval specialists. Volume I of a six volume series, Knowing and Speaking presents two of the earliest (...) of Grosseteste's works, the treatises On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds. These are accompanied by a significant Middle English treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts whose anonymous fifteenth-century author translated and excerpted passages from Grosseteste's treatises in a re-imagining of their structure and function.0Each work is treated separately within the volume, which is constructed in three parts. On the Liberal Arts sets Grosseteste's thoughts on the arts subjects and emphasises moral concerns about the purpose of learning. On the Generation of Sounds builds on the theories and statements of On the Liberal Arts in connection to the production of sound, elaborating the earlier position, relating the generation of sounds to human vocal and speech production. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that the more individuals view observable entities as animate, the more those entities are associated with having psychological and physiological experiences. This study examined the relationship between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for concepts of unobservable scientific (i.e., germ) and religious (i.e., God) entities. This study further explored how children's conceptions vary according to the social learning opportunities (i.e., discourse, rituals) parents reportedly create. Parent–child dyads with young children from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds participated. Three (...) central findings emerged. First, children readily associated God with psychobiological characteristics but did not do so to the same extent for germs. Second, children applied more psychobiological properties to both entity types when they believed that the entity was animate. Third, engaging in rituals and discourse with parents was indirectly related to children's concepts of God but not related to their concepts of germs. Overall, this study presented support for a connection between children's animistic and anthropomorphic reasoning for unobservable entities, and an indirect effect of cultural input on this reasoning. The implications of these findings will be discussed. (shrink)

This exploratory study assessed the use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine hemodynamic response patterns during sentence processing. Four groups of participants: monolingual English children, bilingual Chinese-English children, bilingual Chinese-English adults and monolingual English adults were given an agent selection syntactic processing task. Bilingual child participants were classified as simultaneous or sequential bilinguals to examine the impact of first language, age of second-language acquisition (AoL2A), and the length of second language experience on behavioral performance and cortical activation. Participants (...) were asked to select the agent of four types of sentences: subject-verb-object (SVO), passive (PAS), subject-extracted relative clause (SR), and object-extracted relative clause (OR) adopted from the “Whatdunit” task by Montgomery et al. (2016). Semantic cues were removed by using inanimate nouns for agents and patients, which constrained participants to make decisions based on syntactic knowledge. Behavioral results showed greater accuracy for canonical SVO and SR sentence types than for noncanonical OR and PAS sentence types, which aligns with prior studies. Neuroimaging results revealed greater hemodynamic responses to relative clauses (i.e., SR and OR sentences) than to simple sentences (SVO and PAS), especially for Chinese-English bilinguals suggesting first-language transfer influencing sentence processing in English. The effects AoL2A and the length of second language experience showed no significant differences between simultaneous and sequential bilinguals or between bilingual adults and children for identifying the correct agent in each sentence. However, neuroimaging results demonstrated greater hemodynamic responses in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) in simultaneous bilinguals compared to sequential bilinguals and greater hemodynamic responses in left and right DLPFC and left IPL among bilingual adults. Different behavioral and neural hemodynamic response patterns afford new insights into the effects of syntactic knowledge on sentence processing. (shrink)

Studies examining the ways in which the training of engineers and scientists shapes their research strategies and scientific identities.

A moving cultural biography of abolitionist martyr John Brown, by one of the most important African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century. In the history of slavery and its legacy, John Brown looms large as a hero whose deeds partly precipitated the Civil War. As Frederick Douglass wrote: "When John Brown stretched forth his arm... the clash of arms was at hand." DuBois's biography brings Brown stirringly to life and is a neglected classic.

À l'école d'Édith Stein -- À la recherche du geste intérieur -- Révéler la presence -- Anthropologie phénoménologique et théorie de l'éducation dans l'oeuvre d'Édith Stein (Résumé).

Dubbed “Nietzsche without his hammer” by literary critic James Wood, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran is known as much for his profound pessimism and fatalistic approach as for the lyrical, raging prose with which he communicates them. Unlike many of his other works, such as On the Heights of Despair and Tears and Saints, The New Gods eschews his usual aphoristic approach in favor of more extensive and analytic essays. Returning to many of Cioran’s favorite themes, The New Gods (...) explores humanity’s attachment to gods, death, fear, and infirmity, in essays that vary widely in form and approach. In “Paleontology” Cioran describes a visit to a museum, finding the relatively pedestrian destination rife with decay, death, and human weakness. In another chapter, Cioran explores suicide in shorter, impressionistic bursts, while “The Demiurge” is a shambolic exploration of man’s relationship with good, evil, and God. All the while, The New Gods reaffirms Cioran’s belief in “lucid despair,” and his own signature mixture of pessimism and skepticism in language that never fails to be a pleasure. Perhaps his prose itself is an argument against Cioran’s near-nihilism: there is beauty in his books. (shrink)

ACESSO À JUSTIÇA: DELINEAMENTOS GERAIS E ANÁLISE NO PROJETO DE NOVO CÓDIGO PROCESSUAL CIVIL.

A szabadság dilemmái -- A megrendült öntudat mítoszai -- Irás az éthoszról.

_Zettel, _ an en face bilingual edition, collects fragments from Wittgenstein's work between 1929 and 1948 on issues of the mind, mathematics, and language.

Throughout the long history of Classic Maya hieroglyphs, a logosyllabic writing system used from the late first millennium BCE through the mid-second millennium CE in southern Mesoamerica, the most commonly recorded phonetic value was the syllable u (/ʔu/). With over a dozen different u hieroglyphs, Classic Maya scribes had more options for recording /ʔu/ than any other syllable or logograph. Cognitive approaches to writing systems typically attribute graphemic variation (i.e., alternation between signs with equivalent linguistic value) to semantic differences like (...) animacy or to non-linguistic factors like identity. Distribution of Classic Maya u hieroglyphs, however, suggests that morphosyntactic context influenced which grapheme scribes wrote and when. This case suggests that scribal knowledge of Classic Maya hieroglyphs included ideas about writing's relationship to language. It also highlights the cognitive relevance of morphosyntax for a writing system's users as they differentiate among graphic signs with identical linguistic denotation. (shrink)

RESUMO Neste trabalho, proponho uma leitura de aspectos discursivos do curta-metragem de ficção Recife frio, de Kleber Mendonça Filho, com o objetivo de refletir sobre como a hibridização de gêneros na obra, decorrente da presença de gêneros intercalados no filme, cria sentidos e provoca determinada postura na interlocução com os espectadores. Para tanto, discuto alguns conceitos-chave da teoria bakhtiniana, descrevo momentos específicos do curta-metragem e proponho análises pontuais de determinadas cenas ou sequências. A forma de diálogo com o corpus segue (...) os pressupostos da poética sociológica que perpassa as discussões empreendidas por Bakhtin e pelos demais pesquisadores do Círculo. As reflexões apresentadas apontam para um jogo de cena entre ficção e realidade, que, no curta, são acionados pela presença de elementos que podem ser associados ao gênero documentário. ABSTRACT This paper proposes a reading of discursive aspects in Recife Frio, a short film by Kleber Mendonça Filho. It aims at reflecting on how genre hybridization, which results from the presence of incorporated genres, creates meanings and provokes certain attitudes in the interaction between film and spectators. To do so, I discuss some key concepts of Bakhtinian theory, describe specific moments of the short film, and finally conduct a pointed analysis of specific scenes or sequences. This form of dialogue with the corpus follows the assumptions of the sociological poetics that traverse the discussions done by Bakhtin and the other researchers of the Circle. These reflections point to a play between fiction and reality, which in the film is triggered by the presence of elements that may be associated to the documentary genre. (shrink)

Professor Gombrich's last book and first narrative work in over 20 years.