In most U.S. jurisdictions, clinicians providing informal “curbside” consults are protected from medical malpractice liability due to the absence of a doctor-patient relationship. A recent Minnesota Supreme Court case, Warren v. Dinter, offers the opportunity to reassess whether the majority rule is truly serving the best interests of patients.

Die Reedition der von den Verfassern nunmehr Excerpta Vaticana et Laurentiana genannt wird, findet ihre Begründung darin, dass der Erstherausgeber, der berühmt Rechtshistoriker Contardo Ferrini offenbar auf eine Kollationierung beider Codices verzichtet hat und im Übrigen, aus welchen Gründen auch immer, bei der Edition selbst nicht unwesentliche Versehen verschuldet hat. Der Codex Vaticanus Palatinus ist wohl in der ersten Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts entstanden, der Codex Laurentianus 80.6 in der ersten Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts. Grundsätzlich sind die Verfasser der Meinung, (...) die mit zahlreichen plausiblen Argumenten vorgetragen wird, dass der Schreiber des Codex Laurentianus 80.6, ein gewisser Stephanus of Medea, als Vorlage den heutigen Codex Vaticanus Gr. 19 vor sich liegen hatte, und als intelligenter Kopist verschiedene Emendationen vorgenommen hat. Eine große Mehrheit der Fragmente der Excerpta Vaticana et Laurentiana von 1–193 muss einem Juristen Anatolius zugeschrieben werden. Jene Person, die sie zusammengestellt hat, muss ein altes Manuskript mit der Summa Codicis des Anatolius verwendet haben. In dieser Summa waren die Termini technici immer noch in lateinischer Sprache verfasst. Zur Selektion der Texte führen die Verfasser an, dass überdurchschnittlich großes Interesse dem Strafrecht und dem Familienrecht gewidmet ist, während etwa Eigentumserwerb, Erbrecht und große Teile des Obligationenrechtes kaum Behandlung finden. Die Exzerpierung der Summa Codicis muss aus diesem Grunde von jemand vorgenommen worden sein, der eine besondere Affinität gerade zu diesen Bereichen des Rechtes hatte. Nach diesen grundsätzlichen und grundlegenden Ausführungen, die ich allesamt nicht nur begrüße, sondern voll mittragen möchte, widmen sich die Verfasser kurz aber prägnant der Person des Anatolius (24–30). Ein Anatolius wird zusammen mit sieben anderen Antecessores in der Constitutio Omne genannt, sowie in der Constitutio Tanta vom 16. Dezember 533 als einer der vier Professoren, denen die Kompilation der Digesten anvertraut worden war. Er bekleidete die Funktion eines Magister Officiorum und wurde aus diesem Grunde als Vir Illustris bezeichnet. Anatolius entstammte einer Juristenfamilie aus Beirut und lehrte dort selbst als Professor. Zachariae von Lingenthal (Griechische Bearbeitung des Codex 70) und Van der Waal (Comentar 111) hatten die Ansicht vertreten, dass es zwei Anatoli gegeben habe: Der eine Mitglied der justinianischen Kompilation, der andere der Autor des Codex-Kommentares. Dem gegenüber vertreten die Autoren die Ansicht, dass Anatolius ein einziger gewesen sei, der, nachdem er maßgeblich an der Kompilation in Konstantinopel mitgearbeitet hatte, etwa zwischen 530 und 533 als Lehrer nach Beirut zurückgekehrt sei, um dort an einer der prestigeträchtigsten Universitäten des Reiches die neue juristische Studienordnung durchzusetzen und ruhmreich zu begründen. Der Kommentar des Codex diente dazu, einen grundsätzlichen lateinischen Text griechischen Studenten zu verdeutlichen, und zwar ausgehend von einer reinen Übersetzung bis zu einem juristischen Kommentar. Die Autoren lösen die Quellenproblematik derart, dass sie davon ausgehen, dass Anatolius das Buch 4 seines Kommentares noch in Konstantinopel vollendet und mit dem 8. Buch des Kommentares in Beirut wieder begonnen hat. Die klare und deutliche Argumentationsweise der Autoren, unpolemisch aber doch tiefgreifend, sollte in Zukunft übernommen werden. (shrink)

The importance of communities in strengthening the ethics of international collaborative research is increasingly highlighted, but there has been much debate about the meaning of the term ‘community’ and its specific normative contribution. We argue that ‘community’ is a contingent concept that plays an important normative role in research through the existence of morally significant interplay between notions of community and individuality. We draw on experience of community engagement in rural Kenya to illustrate two aspects of this interplay: (i) that (...) taking individual informed consent seriously involves understanding and addressing the influence of communities in which individuals’ lives are embedded; (ii) that individual participation can generate risks and benefits for communities as part of the wider implications of research. We further argue that the contingent nature of a community means that defining boundaries is generally a normative process itself, with ethical implications. Community engagement supports the enactment of normative roles; building mutual understanding and trust between researchers and community members have been important goals in Kilifi, requiring a broad range of approaches. Ethical dilemmas are continuously generated as part of these engagement activities, including the risks of perverse outcomes related to existing social relations in communities and conditions of ‘half knowing’ intrinsic to processes of developing new understandings. (shrink)

In his 1951 Gibbs Memorial Lecture, Kurt Gödel put forth his famous disjunction that either the power of the mind outstrips that of any machine or there are absolutely unsolvable problems. The view that there are no absolutely unsolvable problems is optimism, the view that there are such problems is pessimism. In his 1995—and, revised in 2013—Verificationism Then and Now, Per Martin-Löf presents an illustrative argument for a constructivist form of optimism. In response to that argument, Solomon Feferman points out (...) that Martin-Löf’s reasoning relies upon constructive understandings of key philosophical notions. In the vein of Feferman’s analysis, one might be object to Martin-Löf’s argument for either its reliance upon constructivist considerations, or for its appeal to non-unproblematically mathematical premises. We argue that both of these responses fall short. On one hand, to be critical of Martin-Löf’s reasoning for its constructiveness is to reject what would otherwise be a scientific advance on the basis of the assumption of constructivism’s falsehood or implausibility, which is of course uncharitable at best. On the other hand, to object to the argument for its use of non-unproblematically mathematical premises is to assume that there is some philosophically neutral mathematics, which is implausible. Martin-Löf’s argument relies upon his third law, the claim that from the impossibility of a proof of a proposition we can construct a proof of its negation. We close with a discussion of some ways in which this claim can be criticized from the constructive point of view. Specifically, we contend that Martin-Löf’s third law is incompatible with what has been called “Poincaré’s Principle of Epistemic Conservation”, the thesis that genuine increase in mathematical knowledge requires subject-specific insight. (shrink)

A large team of well-known Soviet scholars is currently preparing a new textbook in philosophy. We thought it might be useful to acquaint the broad philosophical public with the ideas that guided the authors in writing the textbook, and have included its table of contents, preface, and conclusion. We also, together with the team of authors, are hoping for readers' responses. The book will be published shortly by Politizdat Publishers.

An interview with Anthony Freeman, in which one of the original authors of ‘The Science of Art’ [JCS, 6, No. 6/7, 1999] responds to to ongoing commentary.

It is argued that it is a misinterpretation of frege to construe his talk of the bedeutungen of sentences and of predicates in an ontologically innocent way.

Since James defined emotion as consciousness of bodily reactions and Cannon and others detailed the nature of these reactions, there has been an increasing tendency among behaviorists to equate emotions with visceral reactions and to neglect some of the genetic and adaptive aspects of emotion which had been discussed by Darwin.

The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 A states that the maternal mortality ratio has to be reduced to three-quarters between 1990 and 2015. The target for India is a maternal mortality ratio of 109/100,000 live births. The Janani Suraksha Yojna (JSY) (Maternal Protection Scheme) is a centrally sponsored conditional cash transfer scheme to promote institutional deliveries and thus ensure safe delivery and reduce maternal mortality. The JSY scheme and its various evaluations were reviewed. The Tannahill’s ethical framework was applied to (...) the JSY and analyzed. Evaluations have shown that the JSY has significantly increased institutional deliveries. The public health system is not fully geared up for delivering good quality maternal health services. Thus encouraging women to go to them violates the principle of doing good. There are several barriers for availing the scheme. Procuring the certificates to meet eligibility can be difficult. The women do not have power over the cash incentive. There are large inequities in access to the JSY scheme based on socioeconomic status, caste and education. The accountability mechanisms for the scheme are weak at the grassroots level. Without an overall improvement in health system and awareness among women, the JSY cannot be said to empower the women in a sustainable way. In order, that the increases in institutional deliveries due to JSY are more than just a Hawthorne effect, which is a change in behavior just due to the fact that the population is being closely observed and intervened, there is a need to bridge the ethical gaps in the program to make it an empowering, sustainable, accountable and just one. (shrink)

A novel method for ECG signal outlier processing based on autoencoder neural networks is presented in the article. Typically, heartbeats with serious waveform distortions are treated as outliers and are skipped from the authentication pipeline. The main idea of the paper is to correct these waveform distortions rather them in order to provide the system with better statistical base. During the experiments, the optimum autoencoder architecture was selected. An open Physionet ECGID database was used to verify the proposed method. The (...) results of the studies were compared with previous studies that considered the correction of anomalies based on a statistical approach. On the one hand, the autoencoder shows slightly lower accuracy than the statistical method, but it greatly simplifies the construction of biometric identification systems, since it does not require precise tuning of hyperparameters. (shrink)

We prove that in IST, Nelson's internal set theory, the Uniqueness and Collection principles, hold for all (including external) formulas. A corollary of the Collection theorem shows that in IST there are no definable mappings of a set X onto a set Y of greater (not equal) cardinality unless both sets are finite and #(Y) ≤ n #(X) for some standard n. Proofs are based on a rather general technique which may be applied to other nonstandard structures. In particular we (...) prove that in a nonstandard model of PA, Peano arithmetic, every hyperinteger uniquely definable by a formula of the PA language extended by the predicate of standardness, can be defined also by a pure PA formula. (shrink)

LetEO be the elementary ontology of Leniewski formalized as in Iwanu [1], and letLS be the monadic second-order calculus of predicates. In this paper we give an example of a recursive function , defined on the formulas of the language ofEO with values in the set of formulas of the language of LS, such that EO A iff LS (A) for each formulaA.

Case-based, multidisciplinary seminars provided a vehicle for clinicians, philosophers and students to debate current problems in medical ethics in a manner which ensured maximum learning and interest for all participants. Prior training in philosophical medical ethics was an essential prerequisite, giving students the knowledge and skills to take part in the discussions at an appropriate level of sophistication.

Here we outline a simple method of using two mirrors which allows one to stand outside oneself. This method demonstrates that registration of vision with touch and proprioception is crucial for the perception of the corporeal self. Our method may also allow the disassociation of taste from touch, proprioception, and movement.

These further readings on the subject are selected and suggested by the editors of this issue and are published here with kind permissons of the owners of the respective copyrights.

The policy adopted by the Twenty-fifth Congress of the CPSU on raising the quality of work and the effectiveness of social production means that work must be more highly organized and disciplined and that initiative and creative searching must be fostered. "The country sets as its goal enlargement of the real opportunities for citizens to apply their creative powers, abilities, and gifts and for comprehensive development of the individual.".

Nadezhnostʹ matematicheskogo dokazatelʹstva -- Nadezhnostʹ logicheskikh norm -- Ontologicheskoe obosnovanie matematiki -- Sistemnoe obosnovanie matematiki.