Background South Africa is likely to be the first country in the world to host an adolescent HIV vaccine trial. Adolescents may be enrolled in late 2007. In the development and review of adolescent HIV vaccine trial protocols there are many complexities to consider, and much work to be done if these important trials are to become a reality. Discussion This article sets out essential requirements for the lawful conduct of adolescent research in South Africa including compliance with consent requirements, (...) child protection laws, and processes for the ethical and regulatory approval of research. Summary This article outlines likely complexities for researchers and research ethics committees, including determining that trial interventions meet current risk standards for child research. Explicit recommendations are made for role-players in other jurisdictions who may also be planning such trials. This article concludes with concrete steps for implementing these important trials in South Africa and other jurisdictions, including planning for consent processes; delineating privacy rights; compiling information necessary for ethics committees to assess risks to child participants; training trial site staff to recognize when disclosures trig mandatory reporting response; networking among relevant ethics commitees; and lobbying the National Regulatory Authority for guidance. (shrink)
A theorem on the extendability of certain subsets of a Boolean algebra to ultrafilters which preserve countably many infinite meets (generalizing Rasiowa-Sikorski) is used to pinpoint the mechanism of the Barwise proof in a way which bypasses the set theoretical elaborations.
Technology assessment (TA) is generally classified as problem-oriented and thus transdisciplinary research. This is due to the fact that the aim of TA is to work out solutions for problems outside science in order to offer advice to its addressees, namely those working in politics and science and members of society in general. In this paper, we propose that the problem-oriented approach also be used as the basis for the decision regarding when a TA should be conducted in a particular (...) situation, and which TA should be used. As a first step to this end, a broad rangeâalmost like a kind of coarse radarâand large number of topics or problem sketches are created, which then serve as a basis for a discursive process of negotiation, during which topics are to be carried over into a detailed problem analysis ( fine radar ). These detailed problem analyses, which are important for transdisciplinary research, represent in themselves small research projects (pre-projects). They provide, in addition, some initial indications for a methodologically promising project design. The methodological approach described here is currently being tested in a procedure in which TA topics are being monitored for the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF). (shrink)
Theodore Levitt criticizes John Kenneth Galbraith's view of advertising as artificial want creation, contending that its selling focus on the product fails to appreciate the marketing focus on the consumer. But Levitt himself not only ends up endorsing selling; he fails to confront the fact that the marketing to our most pervasive needs that he advocates really represents a sophisticated form of selling. He avoids facing this by the fiction that marketing is concerned only with the material level of (...) existence, and absolves marketing of serious involvement in the level of meaning through the relativization of all meanings as personal preferences. The irony is that this itself reflects a particular view of meaning, a modern commercial one, so that it is this vision of life that LevittÕs marketing is really SELLING. (shrink)
Dans un fragment de son commentaire perdu sur les Catégories d’Aristote, adressé à Gédalios et transmis par Simplicius dans son propre Commentaire surles Catégories, Porphyre évoque la distinction, à première vue énigmatique, entre les termes techniques grecs huparxis et hupostasis. On avance dans laprésente contribution que des passages tirés d’une source inattendue – le De Incarnatione du moine Théodore de Raithu (VIᵉ-VIIᵉ siècle) – peuvent illuminerle sens de ce texte porphyrien. Ce résultat fournit l’occasion de quelques réflexions sur l’influence de (...) Porphyre sur la pensée patristique. (shrink)
As a die-hard supernaturalist, someone "at two with nature" (Woody Allen) who would be at one with God, the author has mixed feelings about Theodore Nunez's defense of "naturalism." Unlike neopragmatists, the author is not troubled by Nunez's general realism about value; he takes exception not to Nunez's theoretical account of truth, but to his specific axiology. He does not share Nunez's confidence that "projective nature" can provide reliable moral inspiration, suggesting instead that such inspiration can arise only from (...) trust in the holiness of God. (shrink)
Faith, Reason, and Revelation in the Thought of Theodore Beza investigates the direction of religious epistemology under a chief architect of Calvinism (1519-1605). Mallinson contends that Beza consolidated his tradition by balancing the subjective and objective aspects of faith and knowledge. Making use of new editions of Beza's class notes and correspondence, and examining the theological ideas found in Beza's long-neglected New Testament annotations, this study clarifies the thought of Calvin's successor. The nature of Protestant scholasticism and the relationship (...) between faith and philosophy are observed in context, rather than from the anachronistic perspectives of modern schools that seek to establish their own continuity with Calvinism. (shrink)
In his works for a few decades since the 1960s, Theodore Roszak, professor of California State University, has made an emphatic call to rethink all the fundamental objectives and values of the techno-scientific civilization and consumer society. His name became famous when he published his book “The Making of a Counterculture. Reflections on the Technotronic Society and Its Youthful Opposition” (New York, 1968), supporting the oppositional movement of the young Americans which he named counterculture. Theodore Roszak came to (...) the conclusion that the consumer society did not bring happiness to all people, that it could rapidly bring mankind to an environmental disaster, and that it is a blind alley in terms of social development. (shrink)
Four-Dimensionalism is a thorough, lively and forceful defence of the claim that “necessarily, every spatiotemporal object has a temporal part at every moment at which it exists” (59). The standard four-dimensionalist view is perdurance theory, according to which everyday things like boats are temporally extended. But Sider rejects perdurance theory, nicely disparaging it as the “worm view”, and he argues for the “stage view” version of fourdimensionalism instead. According to the stage view, everyday things like boats are instantaneous, and claims (...) about the history of the Anstruther lifeboat are made true or false by the boat’s past counterparts. Sider reserves the term “four-dimensionalism” for these two views of persistence; he also defends a tenseless B-theory of time. The book develops, extends and systematises work which Sider has published over the last few years, and it makes a compelling and readable whole. I am sympathetic with many of the conclusions, but I will take issue with some of the arguments. (shrink)
On October 16, 1859, John Brown led an unsuccessful raid on the Harpers Ferry Armory. He planned to seize the cache of weapons in order to arm local slaves, to march south, and to deplete Virginia of the slaves who supported its economy. While it failed to realize this objective, the raid succeeded in driving a wedge between the Union and the Confederate States. The rift that Brown helped create grew into the gaping wound of the Civil War.Four years later, (...) Abraham Lincoln surveyed the site of the most gruesome aspect of that wound: Soldier's Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His Gettysburg Address signaled a turn in the war and a turn in the Union's favor. It is remembered as a significant step in the project .. (shrink)
Metaphysics is definitely back on the agenda of contemporary philosophy. It is a metaphysics in the full traditional sense, seeking to provide the means to gain knowledge that covers being as a whole, not just parts of it (such as the metaphysics of mind, the metaphysics of values, etc.). Oxford University Press published three books in 2011 and 2012 each of which spells out that ambition. The present review sums up the main topics covered in these books and offers some (...) comments. (shrink)
