In Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (2007) and an earlier article in this journal, "Defending Abortion Philosophically"(2006), Francis Beckwith argues that fetuses are, from conception, prima facie wrong to kill. His arguments are based on what he calls a "metaphysics of the human person" known as "The Substance View." I argue that Beckwith’s metaphysics does not support his abortion ethic: Moral, not metaphysical, claims that are part of this Substance View are the foundation of the (...) argument, and Beckwith inadequately defends these moral claims. Thus, Beckwith’s arguments do not provide strong support for what he calls the "pro-life" view of abortion. (shrink)

BackgroundTo determine whether the public and scientists consider common arguments in support of animal research convincing.MethodsAfter validation, the survey was sent to samples of public, Amazon Mechanical Turk, a Canadian city festival and children’s hospital), medical students, and scientists. We presented questions about common arguments to justify the moral permissibility of AR. Responses were compared using Chi-square with Bonferonni correction.ResultsThere were 1220 public [SSI, n = 586; AMT, n = 439; Festival, n = 195; Hospital n = 107], 194/331 medical (...) student, and 19/319 scientist [too few to report] responses. Most public respondents were <45 years, had some College/University education, and had never done AR. Most public and medical student respondents considered ‘benefits arguments’ sufficient to justify AR; however, most acknowledged that counterarguments suggesting alternative research methods may be available, or that it is unclear why the same ‘benefits arguments’ do not apply to using humans in research, significantly weakened ‘benefits arguments’. Almost all were not convinced of the moral permissibility of AR by ‘characteristics of non-human-animals arguments’, including that non-human-animals are not sentient, or are property. Most were not convinced of the moral permissibility of AR by ‘human exceptionalism’ arguments, including that humans have more advanced mental abilities, are of a special ‘kind’, can enter social contracts, or face a ‘lifeboat situation’. Counterarguments explained much of this, including that not all humans have these more advanced abilities [‘argument from species overlap’], and that the notion of ‘kind’ is arbitrary [e.g., why are we not of the ‘kind’ ‘sentient-animal’ or ‘subject-of-a-life’?]. Medical students were more supportive of AR at the end of the survey.ConclusionsResponses suggest that support for AR may not be based on cogent philosophical rationales, and more open debate is warranted. (shrink)

J. F. C. Harrison has written that ‘for each age there is a new view of Mr Owen’, which is proof of the fertility and continuing relevance of his ideas. Not just in Britain and America but today around the world anti-poverty campaigners, birth-controllers, collectivists, communitarians, co-operators, ecologists, educationalists, environmentalists, feminists, humanitarians, internationalists, paternalistic capitalists, secularists, campaigners for social justice, trade unionists, urban planners, utopians, welfare reformers can all find something to admire and inspire in the treasure trove that is (...) the thought and actions of Robert Owen. Owen was a creative genius of global significance, a radical writer and activist of international reputation and reach who has inspired those seeking to change human society for the better. The contributors to this volume include not only many of the recognized experts on the life, work and legacy of Owen, but also work from younger scholars or scholars coming to the field afresh. The volume presents the most recent and original research on Owen. Owen notoriously (and impressively) dabbled in many spheres, and this is reflected in the its breadth of content. The unifying themes are Owen’s profile in his own time, and the relevance of his ideas for the generations that followed. His importance for educational and social philosophy, for political economy and for the political theory of socialism are all discussed, as are his contribution as a philanthropic employer, his political activities and the specificities of his historical context. (shrink)

Exclusionary defeat is Joseph Raz’s proposal for understanding the more complex, layered structure of practical reasoning. Exclusionary reasons are widely appealed to in legal theory and consistently arise in many other areas of philosophy. They have also been subject to a variety of challenges. I propose a new account of exclusionary reasons based on their justificatory role, rejecting Raz’s motivational account and especially contrasting exclusion with undercutting defeat. I explain the appeal and coherence of exclusionary reasons by appeal to commonsense (...) value pluralism and the intermediate space of public policies, social roles, and organizations. We often want our choices to have a certain character or instantiate a certain value and in order to do so, that choice can only be based on a restricted set of reasons. Exclusion explains how pro tanto practical reasons can be disqualified from counting towards a choice of a particular kind without being outweighed or undercut. (shrink)

Upon doing something generous for someone with whom you are close, some kind of reciprocity may be appropriate. But it often seems wrong to actually request reciprocity. This chapter explores the wrongness in making these requests, and why they can nevertheless appear appropriate. After considering several explanations for the wrongness at issue (involving, e.g. distinguishing oughts from obligation, the suberogatory, imperfect duties, and gift-giving norms), a novel proposal is advanced. The requests are disrespectful; they express that their agent insufficiently trusts (...) the hearer to recognize their own reasons to reciprocate, and the close relationship between them morally requires this kind of trust. This proposal is articulated and situated in the recent discussion of the normativity of requests. The chapter concludes by explaining how these requests may appear appropriate. Agents in these relationships often have standing to make requests, though the standing is lacking in these particular cases. (shrink)

We argue that the appraisal of models in social epistemology requires conceiving of them as argumentative devices, taking into account the argumentative context and adopting a family-of-models perspective. We draw up such an account and show how it makes it easier to see the value and limits of the use of models in social epistemology. To illustrate our points, we document and explicate the argumentative role of epistemic landscape models in social epistemology and highlight their limitations. We also claim that (...) our account could be fruitfully used in appraising other models in philosophy and science. (shrink)

The use of sound to systematically communicate data has been with us for a long time, and has received considerable research, albeit in a broad range of distinct fields of inquiry. Sonification is uniquely capable of conveying series and patterns, trends and outliers…and effortlessly carries affect and emotion related to those data. And sound-either by itself or in conjunction with visual, tactile, or even olfactory representations-can make data exploration more compelling and more accessible to a broader range of individuals. Nevertheless, (...) sonification and auditory displays still occupy only a sliver of popular mindshare: most people have never thought about using non-speech sound in this manner, even though they are certainly very familiar with other intentional uses of sound to convey status, notifications, and warnings. This article provides a brief history of sonification, introduces terms, quickly surveys a range of examples, and discusses the past, present, and as-yet unrealized future promise of using sound to expand the way we can communicate about data, broaden the use of auditory displays in society, and make science more engaging and more accessible. (shrink)

Computer simulation and thought experiments seem to produce knowledge about the world without intervening in the world. This has called for a comparison between the two methods. However, Chandrasekharan et al. argue that the nature of contemporary science is too complex for using TEs. They suggest CS as the tool for contemporary sciences and conclude that it will replace TEs. In this paper, by discussing a few TEs from the history of science, I show that the replacement thesis about TE (...) is a failure. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section discusses the arguments of Chandrasekharan et al. and demonstrates the three distinct aspects of the replacement thesis. The second section examines the argument against TE and shows that they are inadequate to prove the withering of TE from science. The third section discusses Albert Einstein’s Magnet and Conductor TE and demonstrates that replacing such TE with CS yield no advantage. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

단국대 학생들의 교책과목으로 집필된 책.단국대학교의 역사와 한민족의 가치관,미래부터 교육과 인간화까지 전체 15장에 엮었다.

This article represents the author’s reflections on the book by Karl Sigmund “Exact Thinking in Demented Times. The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science” and the fate of the Vienna Circle. Sigmund paints a vivid portrait of the Vienna Circle against the background of the difficult historical period in which its members lived and worked. The Vienna Circle established the tradition of liberating consciousness and science from metaphysics. But the participants of the Vienna Circle and (...) their entourage did not manage to get rid of the humanistic issues, despite the declaration of strict scientific character. The author of the article draws attention to the internal contradiction between strict scientific topics and the existential-humanistic perception of this topic by the Vienna Circle’s authors and their likeminded people, and by Sigmund himself. The author concludes that it was thanks to this contradiction the Vienna Circle became not only a stage in the development of philosophical science, but also had a broad cultural influence on art, politics, architecture, museums, etc. The historical and philosophical tradition connects the activities of the Vienna Circle with the beginning of the divergence between the philosophical scientific and humanistic traditions in the understanding of philosophy, and the controversy between R. Carnap and M. Heidegger is an important point in this process. But Sigmund’s book gives the impression that this is not the divergence strictly scientific and humanistic traditions, but the difference between two humanistic traditions, one of them tends to express its thoughts strictly analytically. (shrink)

Although Sibawayh dealt with it in a scattered manner under different headings there have been different views on na't (adjective), which is gene-rally included in the tawabi group in Arabic syntax, and there have been debates around these views. Na't, which is categorized as a proper adjective and qualifies the meaning of man'ut (mawsuf), has different characteristics from the sentence elements that indicate the subject. Nahiv scholars have mostly divided na't into two parts: real and causal na't, and they have (...) formulated certain rules for these two parts in accordance with the structure of the Arabic language. Since na't and man'ut are accepted as nouns, the i'rab of na't is subject to men'ut. However, some examples in the Qur'an and some expressions used by the Arabs caused objections to the i'rab of na't being the same as men'ut. It is observed that these objected examples are the cases where men'ut is known and the exceptional cases of madih, zam and jarri jivar. It is also obligatory for the na't to conform to the man'ut in terms of ma'rifiyyah, nekiriyyah, custom and gender. While Sibawayh (d. 180/796) considered it qabh (ugly) for non-propositional words to be na't, scholars such as Ibn Hisham (d. 218/833), Ibn al-Ḥajib (d. 646/1249), and Abd ar-Rahman Jami (d. 898/1492) accepted that na't could be either propositional or non-propositional and cited many examples of na't in the case of non-propositional words. Scholars such as Ibn Jinni (d. 392/1002) and Ibn al-Hajib gave an explanation of the causative na't without naming it, scholars such as Ebu’l-Bekā al-Ukbari (d. 616/1219) analyzed the subject under the title of causative adjective or causative na't, and Halid b. Abdullah al-Azhari discussed it under the title of al-wasf al-majazi. The subject of our study is to examine the handling of na't, which is one of the sentence elements in the Arabic language, in the works written on the field, its parts, the dimension that affects the meaning and the controversial aspects. The aim of the research is to examine the rules that Sibawayh deals with in his al-Kitâb on na'ta and the objections of later Arab linguists to these rules, and to contribute to the field by revealing different views on the subject. (shrink)

The federal government is funding a sea change in health care by investing in interventions targeting social determinants of health, which are significant contributors to illness and health inequity. This funding power has encouraged states, professional and accreditation organizations, health care entities, and providers to focus heavily on social determinants. We examine how this shift in focus affects clinical practice in the fields of oncology and emergency medicine, and highlight potential areas of reform.

This paper makes an attempt to examine the various facets of human values in the background of the widely shared popular beliefs about erosion of values. A random sample of elite opinions on the nature of decline of values brings out the difficulties involved in identifying values for social analysis. Values are an integral part of the religious, spiritual and governmental spheres of social behaviour within a culture. It is argued that the problem of erosion of values is shared across (...) cultures and has existed throughout the history of human society. It is suggested that material and spiritual values follow a dialectical process of coexistence and conflict. The current wave of concern over degeneration of values is explained in relation to the unprecedented complexity of today's global society and the socio-economic challenges posed by this complexity for the individual and the society at various levels. This discussion is followed by a brief review of the recent contributions of social sciences to the concept of values and their decline in modern society. Finally, some thoughts are expressed, from a sociologist's vantage point, regarding the multi-dimensional problem of values in the emerging global culture. (shrink)

Phonetic study of the sound "h" especially as it relates to Mongolian languages.

Background : researchers and sponsors increasingly confront the issue of whether participants in a clinical trial should have post-trial access (PTA) to the trial drug. Legislation and guidelines are inconsistent, ambiguous or silent about many aspects of PTA. Recent research highlights the potential importance of systematic reviews (SRs) of reason-based literatures in informing decision-making in medicine, medical research and health policy. Purpose: to systematically review reasons why drug trial participants should, or need not be ensured PTA to the trial drug (...) and the uses of such reasons. Data sources: databases in science/medicine, law and ethics, thesis databases, bibliographies, research ethics books and included publications’ notes/bibliographies. Publication selection: a publication was included if it included a reason as above. See article for detailed inclusion conditions. Data extraction and analysis: two reviewers extracted and analyzed data on publications and reasons. Results: of 2060 publications identified, 75 were included. These mentioned reasons based on morality, legality, interests/incentives, or practicality, comprising 36 broad (235 narrow) types of reason. None of the included publications, which included informal reviews and reports by official bodies, mentioned more than 22 broad (59 narrow) types. For many reasons, publications differed about the reason’s interpretation, implications and/or persuasiveness. Publications differed also regarding costs, feasibility and legality of PTA. Limitations: reason types could be applied differently. The quality of reasons was not measured. Conclusion: this review captured a greater variety of reasons and of their uses than any included publication. Decisions based on informal reviews or sub-sets of literature are likely to be biased. Research is needed on PTA ethics, costs, feasibility and legality and on assessing the quality of reason-based literature. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to investigate ethical problems caused by teachers accepting gifts in schools. The viewpoints of teachers, administrators, and parents who were involved in the process of gift giving at schools in Turkey were recorded. To facilitate a deeper investigation of ethical problems caused by gift culture in schools, qualitative research methods were used in the study. Data collected through interviews with the participants were analyzed using content analysis techniques largely based on inductive reasoning. The (...) results of the study revealed that gifts affected teachers’ objectivity and prevented them from treating students equally. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize the pairing of irreducible thickness with the traditional view of evaluation which says evaluation is a matter of encoding good or bad in some way. To do this, I first explicate the determination view, which holds that irreducibly thick concepts are to thin concepts as determinates are to determinables. I then show that, even if the determination view did establish irreducible thickness, it would not have proven that the evaluative is well understood as being an (...) instance of the determination relation; in order to do that, the determination view needs to show how the evaluative fit a general analysis of the determination relation. However, when the determination view attempts to fill in the analysis, we get implausible results—so implausible, I claim, that we should see the results as a reductio to the view. To generalize the criticism to any view like the determination view, I show that the same results ensue when we model the evaluative on mereology. Finally, I diagnose the general failure by claiming that the evaluative domain, as conceived by the defender of irreducible thickness, just does not have the structure to secure the tight connection between thick and thin concepts while also carving up our conceptual economy in a plausible way. (shrink)