Shipley presents the first modern commentary on Plutarch's Life of Agesilaos together with the full Greek text and a bibliography. Plutarch's biographies have long been valued for their literary, philosophic, and historiographic content, and the Life of Agesilaos, king of Sparta for forty years after the Peloponnesian war, has special interest as an introduction to Greek history, society, and culture in the fourth century, a critical period that has received little attention in comparison with the fifth century in Athens. (...) Internal problems in Sparta followed the accession of Agesilaos: failures of hierarchical cohesion, unrest among social and subject groups, and division between aggressive and moderate foreign policies. Plato and Aristotle, Ephoros, Xenophon, Diodoros, and Nepos contributed variously to the knowledge and understanding of the period, and Plutarch created from their evidence -- and other sources -- an independent, penetrating, and balanced account of the character of those in power, and of Sparta, at their best and in decline. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell’s work in philosophy of science has been identified as a progenitor of structuralism in contemporary philosophy. It is often unclear, however, how the philosophical problems facing contemporary structuralist programmes relate to the problems of philosophy as Russell saw them. We contend that Russell has been mistakenly identified as an epistemic structural realist. The goal of this essay is to clarify the relationship between Russell’s programme and contemporary structuralist projects. In doing so, we hope to display the motivation for (...) a broad, truly Russellian structuralist project in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

"By combining recent advances in the physical sciences with some of the novel ideas, techniques, and data of modern biology, this book attempts to achieve a new and different kind of evolutionary synthesis. I found it to be challenging, fascinating, infuriating, and provocative, but certainly not dull."--James H, Brown, University of New Mexico "This book is unquestionably mandatory reading not only for every living biologist but for generations of biologists to come."--Jack P. Hailman, Animal Behaviour , review of the first (...) edition "An important contribution to modern evolutionary thinking. It fortifies the place of Evolutionary Theory among the other well-established natural laws."--R.Gessink, TAXON. (shrink)

Automatic moving object detection and tracking is very important task in video surveillance applications. In the present work the well known background subtraction model and use of Gaussian Mixture Models have been used to implement a robust automated single object tracking system. In this implementation, background subtraction on subtracting consecutive frame-by-frame basis for moving object detection is done. Once the object has been detected it is tracked by employing an efficient GMM technique. After successful completion of tracking, moving object recognition (...) of those objects using well known Principal Component Analysis, which is used for extracting features and Manhattan based distance metric is used for subsequent classification purpose. The system is capable of handling entry and exit of an object. Such a tracking system is cost effective and can be used as an automated video conferencing system and also has applications like human tracking, vehicles monitoring, and event recognition for video surveillance. The proposed algorithm was tested on standard database on complex environments and the results were satisfactory. (shrink)

Loneliness in medicine is a serious problem not just for patients, for whom illness is intrinsically isolating, but also for physicians in the contemporary condition of medicine. We explore this problem by investigating the ideal physician-patient relationship, whose analogy with friendship has held enduring normative appeal. Drawing from Talbot Brewer and Nir Ben-Moshe, we argue that this appeal lies in a dynamic form of companionship incompatible with static models of friendship-like physician-patient relationships: a mutual refinement of embodied virtue that draws (...) both persons together. The ideal physician-patient relationship has a dialectical character that fosters each member's improvement of phenomenologically recognizing and embodying moral virtues. A key component of this dynamic is a commitment to the common goal of the patient's health, realized through joint interactivities and conversations over time. The physician's presence to the patient's suffering—understood best as an alienating phenomenological condition for the patient—orients and discloses possibilities for virtuous caregiving by structuring the meanings of the goals, conversations, and joint narrative constitutive of their relationship. Presence to suffering, paradoxically, is perhaps an important prerequisite for this dynamic partnership. These activities dialectically build an interpretive horizon of understanding through which moral goods and character refinement—in and for the other—may become revealed for both persons in their shared being-in-the-world. This analysis of suffering, mood, and revealing of (possible) moral goods has implications for addressing the modern problem of loneliness for patients and physicians, who are increasingly inhibited from building flourishing relationships with each other. (shrink)

This article examines the meaning and role of conscience in the political theology of John Calvin. It argues that the focus in Calvin scholarship on whether conscience makes political order possible without the aid of scripture is misplaced. Although Calvin views conscience as a providential gift that restrains evil to some degree, he puts forth this claim only as part of his defence of God's right to punish all humans eternally. Conscience, that is, renders humans 'inexcusable' before God. Thus, to (...) ask whether conscience makes political order possible in and of itself is to ask a question with which Calvin does not concern himself. Doing so obscures the real significance of conscience for Calvin's political theory: conscience as the starting point for the construction of a Christian polity. The torments of conscience prompt individuals to seek relief, driving them to Christ for salvation and forgiveness of their sins. This, in turn, leads them to submit willingly to the 'external aids' or 'outward helps' of the church and civil government in order to live just and virtuous lives. (shrink)

Ethical guidelines for conducting clinical trials have historically been based on a perceived therapeutic obligation to treat and benefit the patient-participants. The origins of this ethical framework can be traced to the Hippocratic oath originally written to guide doctors in caring for their patients, where the overriding moral obligation of doctors is strictly to do what is best for the individual patient, irrespective of other social considerations. In contrast, although medicine focuses on the health of the person, public health is (...) concerned with the health of the entire population, and thus, public health ethics is founded on the societal responsibility to protect and promote the health of the population as a whole. From a public health perspective, research ethics should be guided by giving due consideration to the risks and benefits to society in addition to the individual research participants. On the basis of a duty to protect the population as a whole, a fiduciary obligation to realise the social value of the research and the moral responsibility to distribute the benefits and burdens of research fairly across society, how a public health perspective on research ethics results in fundamental re-assessments of the proper course of action for two salient topical issues in research ethics is shown: stopping trials early for reasons of efficacy and the conduct of research on less expensive yet less effective interventions. (shrink)

Currently, an emphasis is being placed on the integration of ethical issues into the business curriculum. This paper investigates the viability of using student group interaction to induce an upward movement in the stages of moral development as advanced by Kohlberg. The results of a classroom experiment using graduate business law students suggest that formulating groups that mix stages of moral development can provide a robust environment for upward movement. In addition, the results suggest strategies for formulating effective groups, based (...) upon entry levels as measured by the Defining Issues Test. (shrink)

Offers a comprehensive nonmathematical treatment regarding the design and analysis of experiments, focusing on basic concepts rather than calculation of technical details. Much of the discussion is in terms of examples drawn from numerous fields of applications. Subjects include the justification and practical difficulties of randomization, various factors occurring in factorial experiments, selecting the size of an experiments, different purposes for which observations may be made and much more.

Some would argue that the more promising areas of business ethics research are "sensitive." In such areas, it would be expected that subjects, if inclined to respond at all, would be guarded in their responses, or respond inaccurately. We provide an introduction to an empirical approach -- the unmatched block count (UCT) -- for collecting these potentially sensitive data which provides absolute anonymity and confidentiality to subjects and "legal immunity" to the researcher. Interestingly, under UCT protocol researchers could not divulge (...) subjects' responses even if they were inclined to do so. Beyond that, UCTs provide complete disclosure to subjects and there is no deception. (shrink)

D. R. Bell; XI—Imperatives and the Will, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 66, Issue 1, 1 June 1966, Pages 129–148, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristo.

In this paper I contend that the 'superfluity' of triangles is only apparent; all those specified are indeed required for the smallest sub-units, so long as the symmetry of the final body to be constructed is taken into account at earlier stages.

Shortages of new therapeutics to treat coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have forced clinicians, public health officials, and health systems to grapple with difficult questions about how to fairly allocate potentially life-saving treatments when there are not enough for all patients in need (1). Shortages have occurred with remdesivir, tocilizumab, monoclonal antibodies, and the oral antiviral Paxlovid (2) -/- Ensuring equitable allocation is especially important in light of the disproportionate burden experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic by disadvantaged groups, including Black, Hispanic/Latino and (...) Indigenous communities, individuals with certain disabilities, and low-income persons. However, many health systems have resorted to first-come, first-served approaches to allocation, which tend to disadvantage individuals with barriers in access to care (3). There is mounting evidence of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in access to medications for COVID-19 (4, 5). -/- One potential method to promote equitable allocation is to use a weighted lottery, which is an allocation strategy that gives all eligible patients a chance to receive the scarce treatment while also allowing the assignment of higher or lower chances according to other ethical considerations (6). We sought to assess the feasibility of implementing a weighted lottery to allocate scarce COVID-19 medications in a large U.S. health system and to determine whether the weighted lottery promotes equitable allocation. (shrink)

(1979). My Case Stands: the sociology of education and the training of teachers—a reply to Culley & Demaine. Educational Studies: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 191-194.