Institutional review boards distinguish health care quality improvement and health care quality improvement research based primarily on the rigor of the methods used and the purported generalizability of the knowledge gained. Neither of these criteria holds up upon scrutiny. Rather, this apparently false dichotomy may foster under-protection of participants in QI projects and over-protection of participants within QIR.

Looks at how history affects contemporary life, discusses the individual's role in history, and describes the author's efforts to popularize history.

This festschrift collects a number of insightful essays by a group of accomplished Christian scholars, all of who have either worked with or studied under Hendrik Hart during his 35-year tenure as Senior Member in Systematic Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies, Toronto, Canada.

Background: Expanded newborn screening generates incidental results, notably carrier results. Yet newborn screening programmes typically restrict parental choice regarding receipt of this non-health serving genetic information. Healthcare providers play a key role in educating families or caring for screened infants and have strong beliefs about the management of incidental results. Methods: To inform policy on disclosure of infant sickle cell disorder (SCD) carrier results, a mixed-methods study of healthcare providers was conducted in Ontario, Canada, to understand attitudes regarding result management (...) using a cross-sectional survey (N = 1615) and semistructured interviews (N = 42). Results: Agreement to reasons favouring disclosure of SCD carrier results was high (65.1%–92.7%) and to reasons opposing disclosure was low (4.1%–18.1%). Genetics professionals expressed less support for arguments favouring disclosure (35.3%–78.8%), and more agreement with arguments opposing disclosure (15.7%–51.9%). A slim majority of genetics professionals (51.9%) agreed that a reason to avoid disclosure was the importance of allowing the child to decide to receive results. Qualitatively, there was a perceived “duty” to disclose, that if the clinician possessed the information, the clinician could not withhold it. Discussion: While a majority of respondents perceived a duty to disclose the incidental results of newborn screening, the policy implications of these attitudes are not obvious. In particular, policy must balance descriptive ethics (ie, what providers believe) and normative ethics (ie, what duty-based principles oblige), address dissenting opinion and consider the relevance of moral principles grounded in clinical obligations for public health initiatives. (shrink)

This book is an introductory logic text of moderate difficulty which contains added topics not usually found in an introductory book. The book has two parts--basic logic and advanced logic. The basic logic contains propositional logic through conditional proofs, syllogistic logic, the fundamentals of set theory and their application to both syllogistic and non-syllogistic inferences along with the use of Venn and Carroll diagrams, and concludes with predicate logic using the rules for Universal Instantiation, Existential Instantiation, Universal Generalization, and (...) Existential Generalization. The part on advanced logic begins by extending the predicate logic to identity, descriptions, and relations. A presentation of modal logic includes C. I. Lewis' modal systems S3, S4, and S5; modal logic with quantification; epistemic, doxastic, and deontic modalities; and mixed modalities. A chapter on the logic of ordinary language considers analytic statements, empty expressions, and equivalence and implication in ordinary language. The author also discusses "tools of analysis" such as definition, the theory of meaning, probability theory, and scientific inference. Each chapter concludes with a section entitled "Philosophical Applications" or "Philosophical Difficulties." One of these sections contains the author's version of Hartshorne's modal proof of Anselm's ontological argument. Answers are provided for the even-numbered exercises.--T. G. N. (shrink)

Dans une lettre adressée à Bertrand Russell, le 17 mai 1905, Hugh MacColl raconte avoir abandonné l’étude de la logique après 1884, pendant près de treize ans, et explique que ce fut la lecture de l’ouvrage de Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic (1896), qui ralluma le vieux feu qu’il croyait éteint. Dès lors, il publie de nombreux articles contenant certaines de ses innovations majeures en logique. L’objet de cet article est de discuter la familiarité de MacColl et son appréciation du (...) travail de Carroll, et de comprendre comment cela l’amena à réinvestir le domaine de la logique. Rien n’indique que les deux hommes se soient jamais rencontrés ou aient échangé une correspondance personnelle. Cependant, MacColl recensa dans le journal The Athenaeum plusieurs ouvrages de Carroll, essentiellement en géométrie et en logique. Souvent, Carroll répondait aux critiques de MacColl dans les éditions suivantes de ses ouvrages. Une discussion de ces sources fournit des éclaircissements intéressants sur les investigations mathématiques et logiques de MacColl et Carroll. (shrink)

Dans une lettre adressée à Bertrand Russell, le 17 mai 1905, Hugh MacColl raconte avoir abandonné l’étude de la logique après 1884, pendant près de treize ans, et explique que ce fut la lecture de l’ouvrage de Lewis Carroll, Symbolic Logic (1896), qui ralluma le vieux feu qu’il croyait éteint. Dès lors, il publie de nombreux articles contenant certaines de ses innovations majeures en logique. L’objet de cet article est de discuter la familiarité de MacColl et son appréciation du (...) travail de Carroll, et de comprendre comment cela l’amena à réinvestir le domaine de la logique. Rien n’indique que les deux hommes se soient jamais rencontrés ou aient échangé une correspondance personnelle. Cependant, MacColl recensa dans le journal The Athenaeum plusieurs ouvrages de Carroll, essentiellement en géométrie et en logique. Souvent, Carroll répondait aux critiques de MacColl dans les éditions suivantes de ses ouvrages. Une discussion de ces sources fournit des éclaircissements intéressants sur les investigations mathématiques et logiques de MacColl et Carroll. (shrink)

Some Carrollian posthumous manuscripts reveal, in addition to his famous ‘logical diagrams’, two mysterious ‘logical charts’. The first chart, a strange network making out of fourteen logical sentences a large 2D ‘triangle’ containing three smaller ones, has been shown equivalent—modulo the rediscovery of a fourth smaller triangle implicit in Carroll's global picture—to a 3D tetrahedron, the four triangular faces of which are the 3+1 Carrollian complex triangles. As it happens, such an until now very mysterious 3D logical shape—slightly deformed—has (...) been rediscovered, independently from Carroll and much later, by a logician , a mathematician and a linguist studying the geometry of the ‘opposition relations’, that is, the mathematical generalisations of the ‘logical square’. We show that inside what is called equivalently ‘n-opposition theory’, ‘oppositional geometry’ or ‘logical geometry’, Carroll's first chart corresponds exactly, duly reshap.. (shrink)

RésuméCet article démontre qu'un exemple cité par Ernest Adams pour montrer que l'implication matérielle n'est pas l'interprétation correcte de la sémantique de la conjonction de subordination si, n'est rien d'autre qu'un corollaire d'une observation d'jà faite par Lewis Carroll, il y a cent ans, dans l'exposition de son paradoxe du salon de coiffure.

Many psychological scientists and behavioral neuroscientists affirm that “emotion” influences thinking, decision-making, actions, social relationships, well-being, and physical and mental health. Yet there is no consensus on a definition of the word “emotion,” and the present data suggest that it cannot be defined as a unitary concept. Theorists and researchers attribute quite different yet heuristic meanings to “emotion.” They show considerable agreement about emotion activation, functions, and regulation. The central goal of this article is to alert researchers, students, and other (...) consumers of “emotion” research to the multiple meanings or aspects that distinguished scientists attribute to ”emotion,” increase appreciation of its interesting and challenging complexity, and sharpen perspectives on “emotion” and the associated body of literature that is of critical significance to science and society. (shrink)

Graduate-level textbook in general relativity.

_The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature_ is an in-depth examination of literature through a philosophical lens, written by distinguished figures across the major divisions of philosophy. Its 40 newly-commissioned essays are divided into six sections: historical foundations what is literature? aesthetics & appreciation meaning & interpretation metaphysics & epistemology ethics & political theory _The Companion_ opens with a comprehensive historical overview of the philosophy of literature, including chapters on the study’s ancient origins up to the 18 th -20 th (...) centuries. The second part defines literature and its different categories. The third part covers the aesthetics of literature. The fourth and fifth sections discuss the meaning and consequences of philosophical interpretation of literature, as well as epistemological and metaphysical issues such as literary cognitivism and imaginative resistance. The sixth section contextualizes the place of philosophy of literature in the "real world" with essays on topics such as morality, politics, race and gender. Fully indexed, with helpful further reading sections at the end of each chapter, this Companion is an ideal starting point for those coming to philosophy of literature for the first time as well as a valuable reference for readers more familiar with the subject. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an increasing amount of studies of the history of the term “religion” and how it figures in conceptions of “the secular” and of cultural differences generally. A recurrent theme in these studies is that “religion” carries associations with Protestant Christianity and thus is not as universal a category as it might appear. The aim of this paper is to explore some resources in Wittgenstein’s philosophy to obtain greater clarity about the contexts of ascription of religion-status to (...) various phenomena and thus to gain perspective on claims made by scholars who investigate the genealogy of the term. While there is good reason to be circumspect about uncritical use of the term “religion” (no less in philosophizing about religions or conducting interreligious dialogue), I argue that instead of abandoning the term or proffering a critical theory of religion, investigation of ascriptions of religion will help philosophers to perceive more clearly the social dynamics that have led to some- one or thing being called religious and thus avoid equivocations that could obstruct the ends of philosophical inquiry or dialogue. (shrink)

It is commonplace in discussions of modern cosmology to assert that the early universe began in a special state. Conventionally, cosmologists characterize this fine-tuning in terms of the horizon and flatness problems. I argue that the fine-tuning is real, but these problems aren't the best way to think about it: causal disconnection of separated regions isn't the real problem, and flatness isn't a problem at all. Fine-tuning is better understood in terms of a measure on the space of trajectories: given (...) reasonable conditions in the late universe, the fraction of cosmological histories that were smooth at early times is incredibly tiny. This discussion helps clarify what is required by a complete theory of cosmological initial conditions. (shrink)

This article suggests a way to circumvent some of the problems that follow from the lack of consensus on a definition of emotion (Izard, 2010; Kleinginna & Kleinginna, 1981) and emotion regulation (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004) by adopting a conceptual framework based on discrete emotions theory and focusing on specific emotions. Discrete emotions theories assume that neural, affective, and cognitive processes differ across specific emotions and that each emotion has particular motivational and regulatory functions. Thus, efforts at regulation should (...) target the specific dysregulated emotions. The positive effects of emotion regulation are more likely to be optimized when they result from or lead to emotion utilization—the constructive use of the energy of emotion arousal. Effective processes for regulation differ for basic emotions and emotion schemas. This article identifies neural systems that facilitate emotion experiences and emotion regulation processes. It considers the implications of the developmental change from basic emotions to emotion schemas, and also briefly discusses the effects of interventions on changes in emotion knowledge, emotion regulation, and social and emotional competence. (shrink)

Proceedings of a conference held in Sept. 2009 in London, England.

Numbers. Natural numbers -- Integers -- Real numbers -- Irrational and transcendental numbers -- Funny numbers. Zero -- e : the unnatural natural number -- [Phi] : the golden ratio -- i : the imaginary number -- Writing numbers. Roman numerals -- Egyptian fractions -- Continued fractions -- Logic. Mr. Spock is not logical -- Proofs, truth, and trees : oh my! -- Programming with logic -- Temporal reasoning -- Sets. Cantor's diagonalization : infinity isn't just infinity -- Axiomatic set (...) theory : keep the good, dump the bad -- Models : using sets as the LEGOs of the math world -- Transfinite numbers : counting and ordering infinite sets -- Group theory : finding symmetries with sets -- Mechanical math. Finite state machines : simplicity goes far -- The turing machine -- Pathology and the heart of computing -- Calculus : no, not that calculus- [lambda] calculus -- Numbers, booleans, and recursion -- Types, types, types : modeling [lambda] calculus -- The halting problem. (shrink)

For Pleasure argues that aesthetic pleasure and formal experimentalism hold the twinned capacity to maintain a global racial order and also to undo it.

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes.

We argued in a recent issue of this journal that if abortion is restricted,1 then there are parallel obligations for parents to donate body parts to their children. The strength of this obligation to donate is proportional to the strength of the abortion restrictions. If abortion is never permissible, then a parent must always donate any organ if they are a match. If abortion is sometimes permissible and sometimes not, then organ donation is sometimes obligatory and sometimes not. Our argument (...) was based on the following ideas: (a) that a fetus has full moral status, (b) that parents have special obligations to their offspring, fetus or not, and (c) that this special obligation is to protect them. The result is the conclusion that abortion restrictivists cannot also consistently deny that organ donation should be compulsory. (shrink)

In this essay, I am concerned with the representation of groups in popular culture. My interest has to do with the politics of representing people. The couplet beauty/nonbeauty (or, more specifically, beauty/ugliness) frequently figures importantly in the representation of groups, including most notably, for my purposes, ethnic and racial minorities. This couplet can be politically significant because beauty is often associated in our culture with moral goodness. . . . Thus, beauty and non beauty can serve as a basis for (...) political rhetoric. . . . If one concept of human beauty (which is connected to ideas of goodness) sees beauty as the instantiation or near approximation of the concept human being, then the related idea of human ugliness (which is connected with ideas of moral degradation) is rooted in problematic exemplifications of the concept of the human. These "problematic exemplifications" can take many forms. The two that will preoccupy me in this essay are the imperfect exemplifications of the human found in the popular genres of horror and humor. (shrink)

Noel Carroll, film scholar and philosopher, offers the first serious look at the aesthetics of horror. In this book he discusses the nature and narrative structures of the genre, dealing with horror as a "transmedia" phenomenon. A fan and serious student of the horror genre, Carroll brings to bear his comprehensive knowledge of obscure and forgotten works, as well as of the horror masterpieces. Working from a philosophical perspective, he tries to account for how people can find pleasure (...) in having their wits scared out of them. What, after all, are those "paradoxes of the heart" that make us want to be horrified? (shrink)