Online research in philosophy

: Advances in medical technology now permit children who need ventilator assistance to live at home rather than in hospitals or institutions. What does this ventilator-dependent life mean to children and their families? The impetus for this essay comes from a study of the moral experience of 12 Canadian families—parents, ventilator-dependent child, and well siblings. These families express great love for their children, take on enormous responsibilities for care, live with uncertainty, and attempt to create "normal" home environments. Nevertheless, they experience social isolation, sometimes even from their extended families and health care providers. Their lives are constrained in many ways. The challenges faced by parents of technology-dependent children raise questions of justice within society and within families.

We show that it is not possible to construct a Fraenkel-Mostowski model in which the axiom of choice for well-ordered families of sets and the axiom of choice for sets are both true, but the axiom of choice is false.

Many experts in moral education agree that the potential for empathy, a key moral emotion, is innate. However, it is also evident that this potential needs to be developed if children are to acquire crucial moral qualities such as honesty, concern for others and a sense of fairness. Our central claim is that important structural changes in both families and schools may be necessary for the development of empathy and, hence, the fostering of these moral virtues. Since many families and schools are far from ideal, both are likely to need help from the other and each can compensate to some extent for the other's failings. However, unless families become more sex-egalitarian, and schools become more multicultural in their student and faculty populations as well as their curricula, both lack components necessary for their success as moral educators. If such changes occur, the resulting dynamic between families and schools may be ideal for the healthy moral development of citizens.

We consider the existence of coherent families of finite-to-one functions on countable subsets of an uncountable cardinal κ. The existence of such families for κ implies the existence of a winning 2-tactic for player TWO in the countable-finite game on κ. We prove that coherent families exist on κ = ωn, where n ∈ ω, and that they consistently exist for every cardinal κ. We also prove that iterations of Axiom A forcings with countable supports are Axiom A.

Girls learn the lesson of cognitive deference most clearly, perhaps, growing up in patriarchal families. Taught to discount their own judgments and to depend on those of the family's dominant men, they lose self-trust and cannot take themselves seriously as moral deliberators. I argue that through the telling of counterstories, which undermine normative stories of oppression, it is sometimes possible for women to reclaim these families as places where they have cognitive authority.

In this paper we study families of resource aware logics that explore resource restriction on rules; in particular, we study the use of controlled cut-rule and introduce three families of parameterised logics that arise from different ways of controlling the use of cut. We start with a formulation of classical logic in which cut is non-eliminable and then impose restrictions on the use of cut. Three Cut-and-Pay families of logics are presented, and it is shown that each family provides an approximation process for full propositional classical logic when the control over the use of cut is progressively weakened. A sound and complete semantics is given for each component of each of the three families of approximated logics. One of these families is shown to possess the uniform substitution property, a new result for approximated reasoning. A tableau based decision procedure is presented for each element of the approximation families and the complexity of each decision procedure is studied. We show that there are families in which every component logic can be decided polynomially.

Medicine and families, two venerable institutions crucial to human well-being, are in crisis. The medical profession, struggling to control and equitably distribute care, finds itself compromised by its own success; families are shattered by divorce, violence and confusion about their own nature. What has gone unnoticed is the way these two powerful and pervasive spheres contribute to each other's loss of direction. The Patient in the Family diagnoses the ways in which the worlds of home and hospital misunderstand each other. The authors explore how medicine, through its new reproductive technologies, is altering the structure of families, how families can participate more fully in medical decision-making, and how to understand the impact on families when medical advances extend life but not vitality . This book takes an unprecedented perspective on both institutions. Innovative and vivid, their stories tell the tales of families interacting with the medical establishment.