Las corrientes filosóficas de inspiración cartesiana tarde o temprano tienen que afrontar el solipsismo como un resultado al menos plausible de su desarrollo. La Fenomenología no podía evitar la misma suerte. Después de un rápido panorama en lo tocante a la fenomenología husserliana y el solipsismo, pasamos a exponer críticamente el texto de las Meditaciones cartesianas de Husserl, específicamente la quinta. Intentaremos señalar la insuficiencia de la exposición husserliana a la hora de superar, desde sus propias bases, la amenaza del (...) solipsismo. (shrink)

We provide an empirical investigation of leadership characteristics and social justice issues in the context of financial literacy service-learning. Using a unique dataset of student self-ratings, we find that students experience statistically significant increases in 8 of the 10 leadership dimensions and 7 of the 7 social justice issues examined in this study. Leadership dimensions include: persuasion, building community, “commitment to the growth of people,” stewardship, empathy, awareness, foresight, and listening. Interest in social justice issues include: dignity of the human (...) person, community and the common good, rights and responsibilities, option for the poor, dignity of work, solidarity, and care for God’s creation. The statistically significant increases in these dimensions following the completion of the service-learning suggest positive effects on students’ self-perception of leadership qualities and interests in social justice issues: business school students sense improvement in nurturing growth of employees and colleagues, commitment to serving the need of others, understanding and empathizing with others, ethics, ability to foresee the likely outcome of a situation, and listening intently to others. As a consequence of the financial literacy service-learning, we believe that business students become more prepared toward becoming ethical leaders and citizens with compassion to serve the world for the well-being of all people, rich and poor alike. (shrink)

Background Informed consent is an integral component of good medical practice. Many researchers have investigated measures to improve the quality of informed consent, but it is not clear which techniques work best and why. To address this problem, we propose developing a core outcome set to evaluate interventions designed to improve the consent process for surgery in adult patients with capacity. Part of this process involves reviewing existing research that has reported what is important to patients and doctors in the (...) informed consent process. Methods This qualitative synthesis comprises four phases: identification of published papers and determining their relevance; appraisal of the quality of the papers; identification and summary of the key findings from each paper while determining the definitiveness of each finding against the primary data; comparison of key themes between papers such that findings are linked across studies. Results Searches of bibliographic databases returned 11,073 titles. Of these, 16 studies met the inclusion criteria. Studies were published between 1996 and 2016 and included a total of 367 patients and 74 health care providers. Thirteen studies collected data using in-depth interviews and constant comparison was the most common means of qualitative analysis. A total of 94 findings were extracted from the primary papers and divided into 17 categories and ultimately 6 synthesised findings related to: patient characteristics, knowledge, communication, the model patient, trust and decision making. Conclusions This qualitative meta-aggregation is the first to examine the issue of informed consent for surgery. It has revealed several outcomes deemed important to capture by patients and clinicians when evaluating the quality of a consent process. Some of these outcomes have not been examined previously in research comparing methods for informed consent. This review is an important step in the development of a COS to evaluate interventions designed to improve the consent process for surgery. Registration The study protocol was registered on the international prospective register for systematic reviews. (shrink)

But beyond doubt also, the primacy that Plato gives to the imitation of, or participation in the Ideas, apparently substantially existing, is the main reason why critics have refused to recognize or consider possible any mode of conceptual immanence in the mind of the Demiurge or whomever they regard as the Platonic God. Text on text could be cited to exemplify the role of the Ideas as archetypes. Yet it seems rather strange that Plato should conceive of two simultaneous objects (...) of imitation, the Supreme Being and the Ideas. Despite the plurality of Ideas, however, some critics have recognized a centripetal tendency in the dialogues toward the primacy of the Good, or the One, or the Beautiful, or Being, over subordinate Ideas. Was there possibly some similar tendency toward unity of some sort between the Supreme Intellect and the Intelligibles, his archetypes, which in the Timaeus are the ideal Living Exemplar of the cosmos? (shrink)

After a period during which the theological categories of sin and forgiveness were ignored or trivialized, presently these notions are being rediscovered. What could their impact be on bioethics, either in the narrow sense of medical ethics, or in the more encompassing sense of the ethics of the life sciences? This essay begins with describing the processes of transcending and ethitization, which gave rise to the biblical notion of sin. It portrays the theological foundation of sin in terms of a (...) twofold refusal of proper relations to God and other humans. Through the practise of confession in the face of God (coram deo), sin is placed into a horizon of hope for forgiveness and reconciliation. The heuristic and hermeneutical significance of these categories results from their introducing a “surplus value,” which transcends biological and ethical considerations. This additional dimension is illustrated in view of care (cura) for the injured, and in view of individual as well as collective willingness to forgive. (shrink)

Purcell proposes “a small step in the direction of expanding the notion of persons in communion, as a hermeneutic constant for understanding universal humanity in history”. The human-person-as-communional is his heuristic device for exploring both humanity as a communion of persons, and the drama of humanity “as the unfolding and contraction of human persons in social and historical communion and excommunication with one another and their transcendent personal source”.

The freedom, in Latin libertas, is the object of philosophical reflection since Plato. Yet as the determined philosophical direction it took the form of the „liberalism” on the turning point of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, represented by two philosophers: Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Among contemporary scholars Isaiah Berlin is standing out. From his point of view the philosophical problem of the freedom should be examined in two aspects: the negative freedom i.e. the attribute of not hindered (...) freedom in making choices and the positive freedom as opportunity of being the master of one’s own fate. The author of the article, after critical demonstrating the conception of liberalism, sketches the theory of freedom from the position of Christian ethics. As a starting point he takes the conception of man as a person whose rational activities take on the form of twofold freedom of choice. In the psychological aspect, this freedom assumes the ambivalent form of doing good or evil, however in the moral aspect it turns out to be freedom put in order by the hierarchy of objective moral values. In this meaning the freedom also organizes the whole free man's activity and becomes creative strength of his moral personal perfection. It also defines the crucial sense of Christian philosophical science of truth about freedom. (shrink)

The model theoretic `back and forth' construction of isomorphisms and automorphisms is based on the proof by Cantor that the theory of dense linear orderings without endpoints is ℵ 0 -categorical. However, Cantor's method is slightly different and for many other structures it yields an injection which is not surjective. The purpose here is to examine Cantor's method (here called `going forth') and to determine when it works and when it fails. Partial answers to this question are found, extending those (...) earlier given by Cameron. We also give fuller characterisations of when forth suffices for model theoretic classes such as structures containing Jordan sets for the automorphism group, and ℵ 0 -categorical ω-stable structures. The work is based on the author's Ph.D. thesis. (shrink)

Nanotechnology-enabled cosmetic products have been accessible in the market for the last 30 years. More than 250 products have been commercialized in the global market potentially exposing two billion people. These products are present in all formulations including creams, powders, lotions, and sprays. These involve contact with all body especially skin and mucosae; other tissues like airways and gastrointestinal tract can be reached by accidental exposure. Due to the size, NCPs exhibit an increased surface area volume ratio and biodistribution that (...) potentially augments their reactivity compared with bulk materials, which raises concerns for consumer’s safety. Consumers are attracted by the novel properties and functions of nano-enabled products but expose to technologies where no legal frameworks have been implemented to prevent potential side effects. Here, we review the current gaps between the commercialization process of NCPs and the regulatory frameworks to assess these products in USA, Europe, Japan, and Latin America prior and after commercialization. We identify the requirements for a proper assessment of the potential hazard of nanomaterials in cosmetics considering the nanomaterial properties. (shrink)

Cora Diamond has recently criticised as mere legend the interpretation of a quip of Ramsey's, contained in the epigraph below, which takes him to be objecting to or rejecting Wittgenstein's Tractarian distinction between saying and showing. Whilst I agree with Diamond's discussion of the legend, I argue that her interpretation of the quip has little evidential support, and runs foul of a criticism sometimes made against intuitionism. Rather than seeing Ramsey as making a claim about the nature of propositions, as (...) Diamond does, we should understand him as making a claim about the grammar of the logical connectives. Such a view coheres with the extant evidence of the nature of Wittgenstein's and Ramsey's 1929 philosophical encounters. It is also compatible with attributing to Ramsey a recognition of Wittgenstein's distinction and with denying that criticising it is the lesson of the quip. (shrink)

Gaston Fessard employs Hegel’s dialectical logic to clarify how St. Ignatius’s _Spiritual Exercises_ envisage and prepare the decisions and choices between contrasting options or major turning points in spiritual life, in moments of what Ignatius would call _Election_.

Cicero's praise of Caesar in thePro Marcelloof September 46b.c.e.has been much discussed for its sincerity or otherwise. Here I would like to point out some unobserved literary colour which may make some contribution to the argument, namely Cicero's subtle evocation of Hercules in describing the achievements of the victorious Caesar. Such an analogy is not unlikely in the context of Roman military image-making: Sulla in 78b.c.e.and Crassus and Pompey in 70b.c.e.had earlier encouraged connections with Hercules in analogous victorious contexts, and (...) similar comparisons are later made between the foreign conquests of Augustus and those of Hercules in both Virgil and Horace. (shrink)

There are good reasons for envisioning a global discourse about God, premised necessarily agreed upon perfections considered to be by definition proper to God, and for thinking through the implications of our understanding of God for morality. Philosophically, it makes sense to hold that claims about omnipotence, omniscience, and other superlative perfections are indeed maximal, and define “God” wherever the terminology of divine persons is taken up. Religiously too, it makes sense to assert that a deity possessed of perfections is (...) not just the deity of one’s own tribe or religion, but also the deity of the whole world, whether acknowledged as such or not. This essay delves into the larger set of rich complexities by three moves. First, I look into a single extended historical case of the extension of the discourse about God beyond the Christian West, the discourse on God proffered by Western Jesuit missionaries in India from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Second, I place next to that Jesuit learning the instance of a famed Hindu theologian’s discourse on God, God’s perfections, and their moral implications. Third, I briefly step back and assess the dangers and fruitful prospects inherent in thinking about God and morality in an interreligious context. (shrink)

This book is a detailed study of how, according to Thomas Aquinas and his works, God’s Holy Spirit is continuously at work in and through human moral activity.

In the academic year 1920-1921 at the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger gave a series of extraordinary lectures on the phenomenological significance of the religious thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine. The publication of these lectures in 1995 settled a long disputed question, the decisive role played by Christian theology in the development of Heidegger’s philosophy. The lectures present a special challenge to readers of Heidegger and theology alike. Experimenting with language and drawing upon a wide range of now (...) obscure authors, Heidegger is finding his way to Being and Time through the labyrinth of his Catholic past and his increasing fascination with Protestant theology. A Companion to Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religious Life is written by an international team of Heidegger specialists. (shrink)