When ethics committees are consulted about patients who have or need court-appointed guardians, they lack empirical evidence about several common issues, including the relationship between guardianship and prolonged, potentially medically unnecessary hospitalizations for patients. To provide information about this issue, we conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses using a retrospective cohort from Veterans Healthcare Administration. To examine the relationship between guardianship appointment and hospital length of stay, we first compared 116 persons hospitalized prior to guardianship appointment to a comparison group (n (...) = 348) 3:1 matched for age, diagnosis, date of admission, and comorbidity. We then compared 91 persons hospitalized in the year following guardianship appointment to a second matched comparison group (n = 273). Mean length of stay was 30.75 days (SD = 46.70) amongst those admitted prior to guardianship, which was higher than the comparison group (M = 7.74, SD = 9.71, F = 20.75, p. (shrink)

A is for Alice and astronomers arguing about acceleration -- B is for Bernard's body-exchange machine -- C is for the Catholic cannibal -- D is for Maxwell's demon -- E is for evolution (and an embarrassing problem with it) -- F is for the forms lost forever to the prisoners of the cave -- G is for Galileo's gravitational balls -- H is for Hume's shades -- I is for the identity of indiscernibles -- J is for Henri Poincaré (...) and alternative geometries -- K is for the Kritik and Kant's kind of thought experiments -- L is for Lucretius' spear -- M is for Mach's motionless chain -- N is for Newton's bucket -- O is for Olbers' paradox -- P is for Parfit's person -- Q is for the questions raised by thought experiments quotidiennes -- R is for the rule-ruled room -- S is for Salvatius' ship, sailing along its own space-time line -- T is for the time-travelling twins -- U is for the universe, and Einstein's attempts to understand it -- V is for the vexed case of the violinist -- W is for Wittgenstein's beetle -- X is for xenophanes and thinking by examples -- Y is for counterfactuals and a backwards approach to history -- Z is for Zeno and the mysteries of infinity. (shrink)

Ces deux ouvrages tentent de présenter l'évolution du concept de l'utopie. L'ouvrage de Claude Cohen-Safir voudrait recenser les noms des penseurs européens et américains qu'elle considère comme importants dans la trajectoire des idées utopiques outre Atlantique. On trouve mention, dans ce livre, d'utopistes présents dans l'ouvrage dirigé par Michèle Riot-Sarcey qui s'intéresse davantage aux questions de définition et de méthodologie. Le but de chaque auteur dans ce collectif est aussi...

Presents a unique view of the current state of development of bioethics in Latin America.

Last year's meetings of the leaders of the party and government with groups of creative artists caused a stir in the field of esthetics, placed in the foreground discussion of questions concerning the theory of the realistic image, and led to an examination of the experience accumulated in the party's struggle for socialist realism. In recent years, as a consequence of the spread of mathematical methods of research into the social sciences and even into creative work, old doubts with respect (...) to the specific significance of the creative image in art have again arisen. For several years now, efforts have been made in esthetics to emphasize, as distinctive features of art, other factors in artistic creativity, more accessible to study by the techniques of the natural sciences. (shrink)

The concept of alienation has taken firm root in the field of esthetics. One cannot say that its content is identical in everything one reads. Nonetheless, employment of this concept is always for the purpose, so to speak, of "clarification." It is often employed on the assumption that its use permits one to make clear whatever may be incomprehensible in the form and content of a work of art. It has become customary to have recourse to the concept of alienation (...) in esthetic analysis of modern foreign works of literature and art. As an example, we may cite the international discussion around the work of Franz Kafka, many participants in which hold that Kafka is a "product of alienation," "a prisoner of alienation," and that his work either expresses "his self-alienation" or involves depiction of the "consequences of alienation.". (shrink)

Polyclonal antibodies raised against the human erythrocyte nucleoside transporter were used to investigate the distribution of the nucleoside transporters in the placenta. Immunoblots of brush-border membranes isolated from the human syncytiotrophoblast revealed a cross-reactive species that co-migrated with the erythrocyte nucleoside transporter as a broad band of apparent M 55,000. In contrast, no labelling was detected in basal membranes containing a similar number of equilibrative nucleoside transporters as assessed by nitrobenzylthioinosine -binding. The absence of cross-reactive epitopes in basal membranes and (...) their presence in brush-border membranes was confirmed by confocal immunofluorescence microscopy. The results suggest that at least two isoforms of the NBMPR-sensitive nucleoside transporter are present in the human placenta. The lumenal surfaces of fetal capillaries, small placental vessels and umbilical vein ware also strongly labelled by the antibody, a finding that suggests that the high fetal-placental adenosine uptake previously reported is due to endothelial transporters. (shrink)

Joachim Schulte’s introduction provides a distinctive and masterful account of the full range of Wittgenstein’s thought. It is concise but not compressed, substantive but not overloaded with developmental or technical detail, informed by the latest scholarship but not pedantic. Beginners will find it accessible and seasoned students of Wittgenstein will appreciate it for the illuminating overview it provides.

European animal disease policy seems to find its justification in a “harm to other” principle. Limiting the freedom of animal keepers—e.g., by culling their animals—is justified by the aim to prevent harm, i.e., the spreading of the disease. The picture, however, is more complicated. Both during the control of outbreaks and in the prevention of notifiable, animal diseases the government is confronted with conflicting claims of stakeholders who anticipate running a risk to be harmed by each other, and who ask (...) for government intervention. In this paper, we first argue that in a policy that aims to prevent animal diseases, the focus shifts from limiting “harm” to weighing conflicting claims with respect to “risks of harm.” Therefore, we claim that the harm principle is no longer a sufficient justification for governmental intervention in animal disease prevention. A policy that has to deal with and distribute conflicting risks of harm needs additional value assumptions that guide this process of assessment and distribution. We show that currently, policies are based on assumptions that are mainly economic considerations. In order to show the limitations of these considerations, we use the interests and position of keepers of backyard animals as an example. Based on the problems they faced during and after the recent outbreaks, we defend the thesis that in order to develop a sustainable animal disease policy other than economic assumptions need to be taken into account. (shrink)

Possible distributive justice frameworks for providing health care by general practitioners are discussed. The ethical considerations before and after the recent changes to the British National Health Service are contrasted, with particular emphasis on a possible ethical divide that has been produced between fund-holding and non-fund-holding general practitioners. It is argued that general practitioners in non-fund-holding practices can continue as ethical advocates for their patients and distribute health care within an egalitarian framework. However, those in fund-holding practices may now be (...) seen as interest advocates and may have to practise utilitarian distributive justice. Patient groups may be needed to ensure that these general practitioners are seen to act justly in the distribution of the health care resources for which they are now responsible. (shrink)

This article introduces a new scale to measure executive servant leadership, situating the need for this scale within the context of ethical leadership and its impacts on followers, organizations and the greater society. The literature on servant leadership is reviewed and servant leadership is compared to other concepts that share dimensions of ethical leadership (e.g., transformational, authentic, and spiritual leadership). Next, the Executive Servant Leadership Scale (ESLS) is introduced, and its contributions and limitations discussed. We conclude with an agenda for (...) future research, describing ways the measure can be used to test hypotheses about organizational moral climate, ethical organizational culture, corporate responsibility, and institutional theory. (shrink)