The way information and communication technology (ICT) develops can promote or hinder the democratic potential of this critical societal infrastructure. Concerns about the role standards development organizations (SDOs) play in this context predate the “digital age” but are reemerging amid substantial changes in the institutional landscape of standardization. This article explores the increasingly critical link between the institutional design of SDOs and the democratic design of ICT. We review some principles of democracy in terms of the design of technology, apply (...) these to standardization, and discuss the role public policy may play here, while distinguishing between input and output legitimacy. (shrink)

The way information and communication technology (ICT) develops can promote or hinder the democratic potential of this critical societal infrastructure. Concerns about the role standards development organizations (SDOs) play in this context predate the “digital age” but are reemerging amid substantial changes in the institutional landscape of standardization. This article explores the increasingly critical link between the institutional design of SDOs and the democratic design of ICT. We review some principles of democracy in terms of the design of technology, apply (...) these to standardization, and discuss the role public policy may play here, while distinguishing between input and output legitimacy. (shrink)

To the student of the recent history of theological ideas in the West, it sometimes seems as though, of all the ‘new’ subjects that have been intro duced into theological discussion during the last hundred or so years, only two have proved to be of permanent significance. One is, of course, biblical criticism, and the other, the subject which in my University is still called ‘comparative religion’—the dispassionate study of the religions of the world as phenomena in their own right.

Here is a thoroughly updated edition of a classic in palliative medicine. Two new chapters have been added to the 1991 edition, along with a new preface summarizing where progress has been made and where it has not in the area of pain management. This book addresses the timely issue of doctor-patient relationships arguing that the patient, not the disease, should be the central focus of medicine. Included are a number of compelling patient narratives. Praise for the first edition "Well (...) written. . .should be read by everyone in medical practice or considering a career in medicine."---JAMA. "Memorable passages, important ideas, and critical analysis. This is a book that clinicians and educators should read."---New England Journal of Medicine. (shrink)

" Dr. Cassell discusses the world of the sick, the healing connection and healer's battle, the role of omnipotence in the healer's art, illness and disease, and ...

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is currently reserved predominantly for bridging patients to a different destination therapy, but the use of ECMO as a destination therapy itself (ECMO-DT...

Medicine and ethics alike must learn properly to attend to suffering. We can never truly experience another's distress. We can, however, learn to recognize the particular purposes, values, and aesthetic responses that shape the sense of self whose integrity is threatened by pain, disease, and the mischances of life.

Although written primarily for medical research, the Belmont principles have permeated clinical medicine as well. In fact, they are part of a broad cultural shift that has dramatically reworked the relationship between doctor and patient. In the early 1950s, medicine was about making the patient better and maintaining optimism when the patient could not get better. By the 1990s, medicine was about the treatment of specific physiological systems, as directed by the patient, but as limited by the society's concern for (...) justice. (shrink)

Like the broom in “The Sorcerer's Apprentice,” technologies take on a life of their own. To bring them under control, doctors must learn to tolerate ambiguity, resist the lure of the immediate, cease fearing uncertainty, and rechannel their response to wonder.

The theory and practice of history and its relevance to the modern world, by Britains greatest radical historian.

Loss aversion can occur in riskless and risky choices. We present novel evidence on both in a non-student sample (660 randomly selected customers of a car manufacturer). We measure loss aversion in riskless choice in endowment effect experiments within and between subjects and find similar levels of average loss aversion in both. The subjects of the within study also participate in a simple lottery choice task which arguably measures loss aversion in risky choices. We find substantial heterogeneity in both measures (...) of loss aversion. Loss aversion in riskless choice and loss aversion in risky choice are strongly positively correlated, but on average riskless loss aversion is higher than risky loss aversion. We find that in both choice tasks, loss aversion increases in age, income, and wealth, and decreases in education. Our results provide novel supportive input to the debate about the reality of loss aversion. (shrink)

William Lawrence Tower’s work on the evolution of the Colorado Potato Beetle (_Leptinotarsa decemlineata_), documenting the environmental induction of mutation and speciation, made him a leading figure in experimental genetics during the first decade of the 20th century. His research program served as a model for other experimental evolution studies seeking to demonstrate the environmental modification of inheritance. Tower enjoyed the support of influential figures in the field, despite well-known problems that plagued Tower’s earlier academic career. The validity of his (...) genetic work, and other findings reported by Tower, were later challenged. The Tower affair illustrates how questionable and possibly fraudulent scientific practices can be tolerated to explore certain experimental directions and theoretical frameworks, particularly at the frontier of expanding disciplines. When needed, those explorations can be forestalled or extinguished by exploiting conspicuous vulnerabilities of rogue practitioners. In Tower’s case, both unrefuted allegations of scientific misconduct and personal problems dissolved his institutional support, leading to a swift ouster from academic science. Tower’s downfall discredited soft inheritance and neo-Lamarckian conceptions in the field of experimental genetics, facilitating the discipline’s embrace of a hard inheritance model that featured a hereditary material resistant to environmental modification. (shrink)

Let X be an infinite set and let and denote the propositions “every filter on X can be extended to an ultrafilter” and “X has a free ultrafilter”, respectively. We denote by the Stone space of the Boolean algebra of all subsets of X. We show: For every well‐ordered cardinal number ℵ, (ℵ) iff (2ℵ). iff “ is a continuous image of ” iff “ has a free open ultrafilter ” iff “every countably infinite subset of has a limit point”. (...) implies “every open filter on extends to an open ultrafilter” implies “has an open ultrafilter” implies It is relatively consistent with that (ω) holds, whereas (ω) fails. In particular, none of the statements given in (2) implies (ω). (shrink)

Patients with a life-threatening illness can be confronted with various types of loneliness, one of which is existential loneliness (EL). Since the experience of EL is extremely disruptive, the issue of EL is relevant for the practice of end-of-life care. Still, the literature on EL has generated little discussion and empirical substantiation and has never been systematically reviewed. In order to systematically review the literature, we (1) identified the existential loneliness literature; (2) established an organising framework for the review; (3) (...) conducted a conceptual analysis of existential loneliness; and (4) discussed its relevance for end-of-life care. We found that the EL concept is profoundly unclear. Distinguishing between three dimensions of EL—as a condition, as an experience, and as a process of inner growth—leads to some conceptual clarification. Analysis of these dimensions on the basis of their respective key notions—everpresent, feeling, defence; death, awareness, difficult communication; and inner growth, giving meaning, authenticity—further clarifies the concept. Although none of the key notions are unambiguous, they may function as a starting point for the development of care strategies on EL at the end of life. (shrink)

Within the epistemology of the sciences, conventionalism has been the subject of regular criticism for over six decades. Critics such as W. V. Quine and Morton White, and more recently Nathan Salmon (1992), and Paul Boghossian (1996), have attacked even the most basic tenet of conventionalism, namely its claim that the truth of certain statements is fixed not by stipulation-independent facts, but by the conventions governing the meaning of those statements and their constituents.

The cell division and differentiation events that occur during the development of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans are nearly identical between different individuals, a feature that distinguishes this organism from larger and more complex metazoans, such as humans and Drosophila. In view of this discrepancy, it might be expected that the regulation of cell growth, division and differentiation in C. elegans would involve mechanisms separate from those utilized in larger animals. However, the results of recent genetic, molecular and cellular studies indicate (...) that C. elegans employs an arsenal of developmental regulatory mechanisms quite similar to those wielded by its arthropod and vertebrate relatives. Thus, the nematode system is providing both novel and complementary insights into the general problem of how growth and patterning events are integrated in development. This review offers a general perspective on the regulation of cell division and growth in C. elegans, emphasizing recent studies of these crucial aspects of development. BioEssays 24:38–53, 2002. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Tractatus carefully distinguished the concept all from\nthe notion of a truth-function, and thereby from the quantifiers.\nI argue that Wittgenstein's rationale for this distinction is lost\nunless propositional functions are understood within the context\nof his picture theory of the proposition. Using a model Tractatus\nlanguage, I show how there are two distinct forms of generality implicit\nin quantified Tractatus propositions. Although the explanation given\nin the Tractatus for this distinction is ultimately flawed, the distinction\nitself is a genuine one, and the forms of generality that (...) Wittgenstein\nindicated can be seen in the quantified sentences of contemporary\nlogic. (shrink)

Two papers on global morality and ethics—by David Loye and Solomon H. Katz—are hereby placed into an evolutionary context. Simply stated though no less true, ethical evolution will likely be the next great evolutionary leap forward into the future—if humankind is to have a future.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.3 (2003) 225-226 [Access article in PDF] Travelers in the Land of Sickness Eric J. Cassell THE PROBLEM OF knowing another person and the world in which that person lives, particularly someone with major mental illness, is addressed in this interesting and rich essay. The number of different metaphors and concepts Potter employs to describe the task of crossing into and then understanding the (...) thoughts, emotions, symptoms, constraints, context, and perspectives of another testifies to the difficulties involved.Yet, as I read the essay, it was not clear what the clinician world traveler, moral tourist, empathizer (and other categories) is supposed to do on the journey to another person. Why do we reach out to the sick person? What is it that we want to know or do that makes this trip necessary? Potter is primarily concerned with mental illness—the examples she cites are patients with schizophrenia—while my experience has in the main been with persons with physical illness, but for the moment, the differences are less important than the central lesson. The illness that the patient presents—the experience of the symptoms, the impairments, disability, and disruptions of the emotional and social existence that happen because of the disease result from an amalgam of the disease process with the specific nature of the sick person. There is no disease in pure form; there is no disease in abstract for clinicians. There is only this sick person. She correctly quotes me, because of all this, as pointing out the importance of integrating knowledge of this particular patient with the abstract knowledge of disease to understand the illness as it is expressed in this person. All to form a basis for the treatment of the patient and especially to help relieve suffering because suffering is always personal, particular, and individual. (It is important in thinking about this topic to remember that most serious diseases, psychiatric and otherwise, are chronic and take place over significant lived time. The acute schizophrenic symptoms or the acute infectious diseases, as dramatic as they are, distract attention from the importance of the place of the sick person.)In physical disease, our long (and continuing) history of separating human beings from nature and the body, and the importance medicine places on objectivity and the objective, have made the inevitable personalization of the disease and symptoms virtually invisible. After ages of explaining psychiatric diseases as the alienation of the person, and a long psychoanalytic period of finding their origins in the person, in the last 30 years these diseases have become increasingly objectified. The place of the person has been diminished as psychiatry has entered the DSM, neurotransmitter, and effective psychotropic drug era. For both physical and mental disease, however, and whatever the current ideology, the nature of person is crucial in determining the onset, diagnosis, course, treatment, and outcome of each illness. It is in order to have an impact on these crucial aspects of sickness that clinicians must come to know their patients to the degree possible. [End Page 225]But there is something more. Nancy Potter quotes a woman with schizophrenia as saying, "All that was my former self has crumbled and fallen together and a creature has emerged of whom I know nothing. She is a stranger to me... She is not real—she is not I... She is I—and because I still have myself on my hands, even if I am a maniac, I must deal with me somehow." (Potter, 2003, p. 215)Must she deal with this crazy self alone? Is that not what her doctors and caregivers are for? But how can they take care of her, protect her, keep what is left intact, and sustain her until she is (hopefully) better without knowing who she is? She makes clear in those few phrases that inside her there is a person with a past, a family, a world, a culture, a role(s) in life, relationships, a body, dreams for the future, things she does, and all the other things that make up a person. It is in... (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Thinking Clearly About Death. By Jay F. Rosenberg.

The fundamental problems of a philosophy of science emerge as a set of antinomies: relativism-Absolutism, Subjectivity-Objectivity, And theory-Practice. Each one of these antinomies is overcome in dialectical philosophy. Science is a dialectical process and requires a dialectical philosophy. But unlike the hegelian dialectic which is initiated by only internal limitations, The dialectic of science is also generated by the external intervention of nature. Science is then necessarily a historical process. Therefore, A scientist is true to science and acts ethically "as (...) a scientist" only if he acts to secure the historical possibility of science in the future. Science is ethically complete when it creates only itself. (shrink)

Scheler subjects Husserl’s categorial intuition to a critique, which calls into question the very methodological procedure of phenomenology. Scheler’s divergence from Husserl with respect to whether sensory or categorial contents furnish the foundation of the act of intuition leads into a more significant divergence with respect to whether phenomenology should, primarily, be considered a form of science to which a specific methodology applies. Philosophical methods, according to Scheler, must presuppose, and not distract from, important preconditions of knowledge that pertain more (...) to the philosopher than to logical procedure. Accordingly, the phenomenological attitude serves as a foundation for, and is not the result of, the phenomenological method. (shrink)

When addressing the burdens borne by victims of police wrongdoing, we often overlook moral harms in focusing on the physical and psychological harms that they suffer. These moral harms undermine the moral status of the victim, her ability to consistently pursue the values she endorses, and her character. Victimhood is a morally significant social role. Victimhood imposes normative standards that measure the moral or political status of victim. Conforming to these standards affects our assessment of the conduct of the victim (...) and her moral standing. Considering the victims’ role provides important insights into contemporary practices of policing in the United States. The physical and verbal acts of the police often force race-based degradation upon racially subordinated groups. There is often no morally good way out of racially discriminatory encounters when the choice is to degrade oneself or suffer violence or even death. Worse, how we respond to the threat of police violence morally undermines our relationships with those we would keep safe from police violence. (shrink)

It is well known that Max Scheler framed his ethics in opposition to Kant’s “formalistic” ethical framework. However, it is a lesser-known fact that Scheler offered a critique of the ancient Greek moral vision. Although this critique was less developed than the one of Kant, the critique of the ancients was no less significant. First explicated in 1912 in Ressentiment, its central theme is reprised in nearly all of Scheler’s main texts even up until his death. Scheler’s contention is with (...) what he calls the “love of goodness,” which he also happens to think Aristotle’s ethics represents. This paper will primarily examine the love of goodness, first, as one side of the “categorial form” of "Pharisaism"—that is, as it represents a “moral illusion”—then as the other side—namely, as it corresponds to “epistemological error." Finally, I consider the specific moral context in light of where it naturally leads Scheler: to the principle of solidarity. (shrink)

The Prudence of Love focuses upon the intersection of philosophical, theological, and psychological issues related to love. Eric Silverman defends an account of love derived from the views of Thomas Aquinas and argues that love provides numerous psychological and relational benefits that increase the lover's happiness. Furthermore, he argues that love is beneficial according to all major contemporary accounts of happiness.