The Unknowable, arguably the greatest Russian philosophical work of the 20th century, was the culmination of S. L. Frank's intellectual and spiritual development, the boldest and most imaginative of all his writings, containing a synthesis of epistemology, ontology, social philosophy, religious philosophy, and personal spiritual experience.

It is widely accepted now that a patient's right to refuse treatment extends to circumstances in which the exercise of that right may lead to the patient's death. However, it is also often effectively assumed, without argument, that this implies a patient's right to request another agent to intervene so as to bring about his or her death, in a way which would render that agent guilty of murder in the absence of such a request. But the right to refuse (...) treatment can, logically, have no such implication, and the mistaken supposition that it does conflates a right to die with a right to be killed. Confusion over this issue is brought out by an examination of conflicting opinion concerning the permissible termination of ventilation for mentally competent patients. A wider lesson may be drawn regarding the need for the ethical assessment of new forms of life-sustaining medical technology. (shrink)

S. L. Hurley; VIII*—Kant on Spontaneity and the Myth of the Giving, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 137–164, htt.

This paper suggests that the imbrication of user-friendly software and the posthuman has increasingly been revealed as an intrinsically arborescent relationship, one premised upon the striation of personal information through different forms of software media and allowing for unprecedented avenues of control and subjective manipulation. My analysis begins with a conceptualisation of user-friendliness, tracing its development as the majoritarian style of software design. In assessing the effects of this process of subjective imbrication with arborescent software technology, it is suggested that (...) one effect of the pathological asignification of instrumentality in the representation of software is the genesis of a topological space which allows for a capacity for control over the subjective becoming of others through control over digitally mediated perception. To illustrate this point, the revelations concerning Cambridge Analytica's use of targeted advertisements on Facebook to affect voting preferences during the 2016 American presidential election are examined as an example of the quotidian domination which is characteristic of the subjective condition of arbormosis. This analysis can be applied to issues of gender, technology, and modes of subjective control. (shrink)

BACKGROUND -/- The need for detailed description and modeling of cells drives the continuous generation of large and diverse datasets. Unfortunately, there exists no systematic and comprehensive way to organize these datasets and their information. CELDA (Cell: Expression, Localization, Development, Anatomy) is a novel ontology for the association of primary experimental data and derived knowledge to various types of cells of organisms. -/- RESULTS -/- CELDA is a structure that can help to categorize cell types based on species, anatomical localization, (...) subcellular structures, developmental stages and origin. It targets cells in vitro as well as in vivo. Instead of developing a novel ontology from scratch, we carefully designed CELDA in such a way that existing ontologies were integrated as much as possible, and only minimal extensions were performed to cover those classes and areas not present in any existing model. Currently, ten existing ontologies and models are linked to CELDA through the top-level ontology BioTop. Together with 15.439 newly created classes, CELDA contains more than 196.000 classes and 233.670 relationship axioms. CELDA is primarily used as a representational framework for modeling, analyzing and comparing cells within and across species in CellFinder, a web based data repository on cells (http://cellfinder.org). -/- CONCLUSIONS -/- CELDA can semantically link diverse types of information about cell types. It has been integrated within the research platform CellFinder, where it exemplarily relates cell types from liver and kidney during development on the one hand and anatomical locations in humans on the other, integrating information on all spatial and temporal stages. CELDA is available from the CellFinder website: http://cellfinder.org/about/ontology. (shrink)

Uses epistemic logic to clarify a number of possible interpretations of the principle, 'if you know you can't be wrong' and the deceptively similar principle 'if you may be wrong you don't know.' shows that on all plausible interpretation sceptical arguments beg the question at issue.

Many studies have documented gender differences in attitudes toward and experiences with science. Compared to men, for example, women are less likely to study science and to pursue careers in science-related fields. Given these findings, should we expect gender differences in support for scientific involvement in U.S. environmental policy? This study empirically examines the relationship of gender to attitudes toward science and preferred roles of scientists in environmental policy among various environmental policy participants. Data collected in 2006 and 2007 from (...) national surveys of four different groups involved in environmental policy and management suggest that social context, including education and occupation, shapes the way that gender matters. Specifically, we find that gender is less important among scientists and managers than among interest groups and the general population regarding attitudes toward science and views about preferred roles of scientists in environmental decision making. (shrink)

The number of people who survive critical illness is increasing. In parallel, a growing body of literature reveals a broad range of side-effects following intensive care treatment. Today, more attention is needed to improve the quality of survival. Based on nine individual stories of illness experiences given by participants in two focus groups and one individual interview, this paper elaborates how former critically ill patients craft and recraft their personal stories throughout their illness trajectory. The analysis was conducted from a (...) phenomenological perspective and led to the meaning structure; a quest to find oneself after critical illness. In this structure, illness represented a breakdown of the participants’ lives, forcing them to develop a new understanding of themselves. Despite acute illness, they felt safe in hospital. Coming home, however, meant a constant balancing between health and illness, and being either in or out of control. To gain a deeper understanding of the participants’ narratives of survival, the meaning structure was developed from a phenomenological life world perspective, Heidegger’s concept of homelikeness and Arthur Frank’s typologies of illness narratives. In conclusion listening to and acknowledging the patients’ lived experiences of critical illness may support the patient efforts to establish the newly defined self and hence be vital for recovery. Phenomenology is one approach facilitating care tailored to the patients’ lived experience of critical illness and its aftermaths. (shrink)

Objective: To identify factors that predict physicians’ intent to comply with the American Medical Association’s ethical guidelines on gifts from the pharmaceutical industry.Methods: A survey was designed and mailed in June 2004 to a random sample of 850 physicians in Florida, USA, excluding physicians with inactive licences, incomplete addresses, addresses in other states and pretest participants. Factor analysis extracted six factors: attitude towards following the guidelines, subjective norms , facilitating conditions , profession-specific precedents , individual-specific precedents and intent. Multivariate regression (...) modelling was conducted.Results: Surveys were received from 213 physicians representing all specialties, with a net response rate of 25.5%. 62% of respondents were aware of the guidelines; 50% had read them. 48% thought that following the guidelines would increase physicians’ credibility and professional image; 68% agreed that it was important to do so. Intent to comply was positively associated with attitude, subjective norms, facilitators and sponsorship of continuing medical education events, while individual-specific precedents had a negative relationship with intent to comply. Predictors of intent were attitude, subjective norms, the interaction term , sponsorship of CME events and individual-specific precedents.Conclusions: Physicians are more likely to follow the AMA guidelines if they have positive attitudes towards the guidelines, greater subjective norms, fewer expectations of CME sponsorship and fewer individual-specific precedents. Physicians believing that important individuals or organisations expect them to comply with the guidelines are more likely to express intent, despite having fewer beliefs that positive outcomes would result through compliance. (shrink)

. This paper examines the association between long-term compensation and corporate social responsibility for 90 publicly traded Canadian firms. Social responsibility is considered to include concerns for social factors and the environment, 564-578; Kane, E. J., 341-359). Long-term compensation attempts to focus executives efforts on optimizing the longer term, which should direct their attention to factors traditionally associated with socially responsible executives. As hypothesized, we found a significant relationship between the long-term compensation and total CSR weakness as well as the (...) product/environmental weakness dimension of CSR. In addition, we found a marginally significant relationship between long-term compensation and total corporate responsibility. Our findings are that executives long-term compensation is associated with a firms environmental actions, and that firms that utilize long-term compensation are more likely to mitigate product/environment weaknesses than those that do not. Implications for practice and research are discussed. (shrink)

Part I: Consciousness and the metaphysics of experience. Orientations. What I believe. The privacy of experience. Final causes. The importance of subjectivity : an inaugural lecture. Is consciousness mysterious? Consciousness. The distinctiveness of American philosophy. The world of description and the world of acquaintance -- Part II: The metaphysics of time and the absolute. The unreality of time. Ideal immortality. Russell and Bradley on relations. The self and its world in Bradley and Husserl. Absolute idealism. Pantheism -- Part III: Ethics, (...) animal rights, and the environment. The greatest happiness principle. Is the esse of intrinsic value percipi? Pleasure, pain and value. Metaphysics, physicalism, and animal rights. Vivisection, morals, medicine : commentary from an antivivisectionist philosopher. Non-human rights : an idealist perspective. Are there intrinsic values in nature? An idealist's prayer for the world. (shrink)

We consider language models for the Lambek calculus that allow empty antecedents and enrich them with constants for the empty language and for the language containing only the empty word. No complete calculi are known with respect to these semantics, and in this paper we consider several trivalent systems that arise as fragments of these models? logics.