Alienation and Connection addresses social constructs that perpetuate alienation through suffering. The contributors discuss how alienation through suffering in a variety of contexts can be transformed into connection and reconnection: human relationship with the environment, economic and social systems that disconnect and reconnect, cultural constructs that divide or can heal, encountered difference that brings opportunity, and various manifestations of personal pain that can be survived and even overcome.

This article argues for a rediscovery of a theology of work in South Africa that is based on the Protestant notion of calling and vocation. Such a view has the primary intention of emphasising obedience and faithfulness to God rather than self-fulfilment or achievement as the intentions of work. Such an approach can empower and equip the church and individual Christians for effective and faithful living in all spheres of life – both private and public. The article shows that the (...) influences of theological dualism, an unbalanced view of the clergy as primary agents of ministry and mission, and a structures-centred view of ministry and mission detracted from the importance of the church’s ministry in numerous spheres of society. A consequence of this was the introduction of a subtle dualism between faith and work. In response to this, the article considers how the church could become an agent of mission and transformation in the world of work. The conclusion of this article is that the South African church could benefit from revisiting and rediscovering a theology of work that is based on the Protestant emphasis of calling and vocation in the public sphere.Contribution: While this article engages the traditional protestant theological notions of calling and vocation, it argues that reconsidering these notions in relation to the contemporary world of work can renew a theology of work and ministry for South African churches to serve their members in achieving God’s will in society. (shrink)

Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative - and hence unanalyzable - whereas the everyday process of verifying discoveries is sober and more suited to analysis. Yet this fascinating exploration of how scientific work proceeds argues that however sudden the moment of discovery may seem, the discovery process can be described and modeled. Using the methods and concepts of contemporary information-processing psychology (or cognitive science) the authors develop a series of artificial-intelligence programs that can simulate the human thought (...) processes used to discover scientific laws. The programs - BACON, DALTON, GLAUBER, and STAHL - are all largely data-driven, that is, when presented with series of chemical or physical measurements they search for uniformities and linking elements, generating and checking hypotheses and creating new concepts as they go along. "Scientific Discovery examines the nature of scientific research and reviews the arguments for and against a normative theory of discovery; describes the evolution of the BACON programs, which discover quantitative empirical laws and invent new concepts; presents programs that discover laws in qualitative and quantitative data; and ties the results together, suggesting how a combined and extended program might find research problems, invent new instruments, and invent appropriate problem representations. Numerous prominent historical examples of discoveries from physics and chemistry are used as tests for the programs and anchor the discussion concretely in the history of science. Pat Langley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine.Herbert Simon is a Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Computer Science, and Philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University. Gary L. Bradshaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Jan M. Zytkow is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Wichita State University. (shrink)

Part I: The 'explanatory gap'. 1. Why take morality to be objective? -- 2. The gap opens: evolution and our capacity for moral knowledge -- Part II: Secular responses. 3. Alternatives to realism: Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard -- 4. Procedures and reasons: Tim Scanlon and Christine Korsgaard -- 5. Natural goodness: Philippa Foot's moral objectivism -- 6. Natural goodness and 'second nature': John McDowell and David Wiggin -- Part III: Theism. 7. From goodness to God: closing the explanatory gap (...) -- 8. Purpose without theism? Axiarchism and Neoplatonism. (shrink)

It is argued that reliance on the testimony of others cannot be viewed as reliance on a kind of evidence. Speech being essentially voluntary, the speaker cannot see his own choice of words as evidence of their truth, and so cannot honestly offer them to others as such. Rather, in taking responsibility for the truth of what he says, the speaker offers a guarantee or assurance of its truth, and in believing him the hearer accepts this assurance. I argue that, (...) contrary to appearances, this account is compatible with the hearer acquiring knowledge, and in fact throws interesting light on the idea of knowledge. -/- . (shrink)

This a general account of the school of Mo-tzu, its social basis as a movement of craftsmen, its isolated place in the Chinese tradition, and the nature of its later contributions to logic, ethics, and science. It assesses the relation of Mohist thinking to the structure of the Chinese language, and grapples with the textual dynamics of later Mohist writings, particularly in regard to grammar and style, technical terminology, the use and significance of stock examples, and overall organization. Includes edited (...) and annotated Chinese text with an English translation and commentary, a glossary, and a photographic reproduction of the unemended text from the Taoist Patrology. (shrink)

Growing interest in Pacific issues has meant a surge in Pacific research across the globe. Sadly, some research on Pacific people has been done without Pacific knowledge, wisdom and culture. As Pacific researchers, we understand the importance of outputs that interweave our ancestral and cultural wisdom, whilst centring and privileging our people’s narratives. Through the birth of our Moanaroa Pacific Research group, we explore the importance of a research collective which decolonises and re indigenises research as we know it.

Despite its central position in the history of European and Christian thought on the protection of human dignity, the virtue of mercy is currently a problematic and under-developed concept in business ethics, compared to related ideas of care, compassion or philanthropy. The aim of this article is to argue for its revival as a core principle of ethical business practice. The article is conceptual in method. An overview is provided of the scope of contemporary business ethics research on related topics (...) and clarifies some of the similarities and differences between mercy and popular terms, such as compassion and prosocial behaviour. The question is then explored as to why mercy has so little traction in business ethics. Some of the history of the idea of mercy in European and Anglophone philosophy is discussed, from Anselm and Aquinas to the present day, showing how discourse on mercy came to be split into a wider concept of the prevention and alleviation of suffering (_misericordia_) and a narrower one of clemency or leniency. Aquinas’s wide concept of the virtue of _misericordia_ is developed as the basis for a principle of mercy, which is applicable directly to corporations. The practical implications of this for standards of corporate behaviour towards employees and other stakeholders are then considered through the introduction of a ‘vulnerability grid’. The grid offers a critical contrast to other analysis tools, such as stakeholder power-interest matrices. Cases drawn from empirical studies are used to illustrate application of the grid and to challenge some common assumptions of stakeholder theory. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Preface; Introduction Angus Dawson; Part I. Concepts: 1. Resetting the parameters: public health as the foundation for public health ethics Angus Dawson; 2. Health, disease and the goal of public health Bengt Brülde; 3. Selective reproduction, eugenics and public health Stephen Wilkinson; 4. Risk and precaution Stephen John; Part II. Issues: 5. Smoking, health and ethics Richard Ashcroft; 6. Infectious disease control Marcel Verweij; 7. Population screening Ainsley Newson; 8. Vaccination ethics Angus Dawson; (...) 9. Environment, ethics and public health: the climate change dilemma Anthony Kessel and Carolyn Stephens; 10. Public health research ethics: is non-exploitation the new principle for population-based research ethics? John McMillan; 11. Equity and population health: toward a broader bioethics agenda Norman Daniels; 12. Health inequities James Wilson; Index. (shrink)

In these twelve papers notable ethicists use the resources of ethical theory to illuminate important theoretical and practical topics, including the nature of public health, notions of community, population bioethics, the legitimate role of law, the use of cost-effectiveness as a methodology, vaccinations, and the nature of infectious disease.

This original, contemporary synthesis between phenomenology and Marx’s late work begins from Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology to chart a new program for Socratic phenomenology in the current confrontation between planetary technology and place-based Indigeneity.

Canonical extension has proven to be a powerful tool in algebraic study of propositional logics. In this paper we describe a generalisation of the theory of canonical extension to the setting of first order logic. We define a notion of canonical extension for coherent categories. These are the categorical analogues of distributive lattices and they provide categorical semantics for coherent logic, the fragment of first order logic in the connectives ∧, ∨, 0, 1 and ∃. We describe a universal property (...) of our construction and show that it generalises the existing notion of canonical extension for distributive lattices. Our new construction for coherent categories has led us to an alternative description of the topos of types, introduced by Makkai in [22]. This allows us to give new and transparent proofs of some properties of the action of the topos of types construction on morphisms. Furthermore, we prove a new result relating, for a coherent category C, its topos of types to its category of models. (shrink)

To consider Pierre Duhem’s conception of natural classification as the aim of physical theory, along with his instrumentalist view on its nature, sets up an inconsistency in his philosophy of science which has not yet been solved. This paper argues that to solve it we have to take Duhem on his own terms and that a solution can only be found by interpreting his philosophy as an articulated system which necessarily involves the following connections: 1. The association of natural classification (...) to the thesis of historical continuity as an essential condition to the possibility of assigning a goal to the evolution of physical theory, 2. The connection of Pascal’s esprit de finesse to Duhem’s conception of analogy as a heuristic criterion to the conception of hypotheses that are able to lead physical theory to an end that aims to approach the real structure of the world. (shrink)

Contributions to this study are drawn both from health professionals engaged in genetic counselling and from observers and critics with backgrounds in law, philosophy, biology, and the social sciences. This diversity will enable health professonals to examine their activities with a fresh eye, and will help the observer-critic to understand the ethical problems that arise in genetic counselling practice, rather than in imaginary encounters. Most examinations of the ethical issues raised by genetics are concerned in a broad sense with the (...) application of new technology to human reproduction. This volume focuses on genetic counselling and screening as such, providing valuable insights for the health professional, social scientist, philosopher, lawyer, and bioethicist. (shrink)

Aristotle’s notion of substance and its relation to his investigation of the question of being qua being in the Metaphysics is one of the most important, enduring, and intriguing problems in scholarship focused on Aristotle and the tradition of metaphysics. This article explores some of the more recent developments in this area of scholarship, especially the trend toward more dynamic interpretations of Aristotle’s conception of substance, as a way of renewing the question of what Aristotle really means by being. On (...) this basis, the article reinterprets Aristotle’s investigation of substance as the primary sense of being in the Metaphysics. It argues that there are two primary ways substance may be considered; with respect to the principles of intelligibility of substance and with regard to the causal framework of the real unity and determinacy of substance. The primary principles of the intelligibility of substance, it is argued, are end and fulfilment (telos and entelechy). The causal framework of the real unity and determinacy of substances, on the other hand, can be understood via the notion of act and activity (energeia). (shrink)

Background:The debate over the ethical implications of care robots has raised a range of concerns, including the possibility that such technologies could disrupt caregiving as a core human moral activity. At the same time, academics in information ethics have argued that we should extend our ideas of moral agency and rights to include intelligent machines.Research objectives:This article explores issues of the moral status and limitations of machines in the context of care.Design:A conceptual argument is developed, through a four-part scheme derived (...) from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. No empirical data are used.Ethical consideration:No primary data were gathered for this study. Secondary sources and authorship have been acknowledged throughout.Findings / discussion:Certain kinds of social experience, including the narrative unity of a life, and the giving and receiving of care, are essential for moral development. Machines, no matter how advanced, cannot participate in such experiences in key respects, and thus cannot develop as practical reasoners.Conclusion:It follows that they cannot be moral agents and that they cannot care. There are, it seems, no such things as care robots. In view of the institutional power of tech companies and commissioning bodies, care practitioners need to take more of a lead in developing new assistive technologies which are appropriate to their practice. (shrink)

Interest in credit ratings agencies and their role in financial markets is at an all-time high. Concerns about a lack of transparency concerning process, conflicts of interest, and limited competition are frequently discussed by politicians, regulators and other commentators. These issues we term the credit ratings agency trinity of solicitude. We shed some light on this trinity by considering the unique relationship that exists between corporate borrowers and the CRAs they engage to rate their securities. The exchange relationships literature is (...) used to create a model where commitment plays a central role. Technical qualities, relationship qualities and dependence are theorised as antecedents of commitment, which is described by two constructs of affective commitment and calculative commitment. The issuer’s intention to remain with the CRA, their loyalty, is the consequence of commitment. The model is operationalized by means of a survey questionnaire administered to issuers of corporate debt in the United Kingdom. As expected, perceptions of the quality of the relationship and affective commitment play an important role in CRA-issuer relations. However, contrary to expectations, the technical quality of the rating and issuer dependence on the CRA play little role in determining commitment and continuance. The implications of these findings are discussed along with areas for future research. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that transnational as well as national political demands and expectations on the educational field are contributing to produce four ideological-based educational leadership discourses in the literature. In order to conceptualize these discourses, we turn to the work of Schmidt and Zizek. On that basis we identify four dominant educational leadership discourses: a personhood-based discourse, a profession-based discourse, a standard-based discourse, and a resource-based discourse. These discourses have—as we will show—various consequences for the way we think (...) and talk about education and educational leadership in our age. Using examples that stem from a project about educational leadership in Danish upper secondary school, we will illustrate how educational leaders’ beings and doings are ‘regulated’ by these discourses, which place them in a tension field where different and conflicting fantasies seem to be played out. Then, we will discuss how these fantasies can be challenged and how we can think and speak more intellectually about education and educational leadership. By using the term intellectual we are referring to educational leaders’ ability as human beings to critically reflect on their contemporary doings and beings within and beyond the existing social order. Hopefully this can help them to establish new ways for discussing not only what educational leadership is and should be about, but also what it could be about. (shrink)

In order to improve our understanding of the components that reflect functionally important processes during reward anticipation and consumption, we used principle components analyses (PCA) to separate and quantify averaged ERP data obtained from each stage of a modified monetary incentive delay (MID) task. Although a small number of recent ERP studies have reported that reward and loss cues potentiate ERPs during anticipation, action preparation, and consummatory stages of reward processing, these findings are inconsistent due to temporal and spatial overlap (...) between the relevant electrophysiological components. Our results show three components following cue presentation are sensitive to incentive cues (N1, P3a, P3b). In contrast to previous research, reward‐related enhancement occurred only in the P3b, with earlier components more sensitive to break‐even and loss cues. During feedback anticipation, we observed a lateralized centroparietal negativity that was sensitive to response hand but not cue type. We also show that use of PCA on ERPs reflecting reward consumption successfully separates the reward positivity from the independently modulated feedback‐P3. Last, we observe for the first time a new reward consumption component: a late negativity distributed over the left frontal pole. This component appears to be sensitive to response hand, especially in the context of monetary gain. These results illustrate that the time course and sensitivities of electrophysiological activity that follows incentive cues do not follow a simple heuristic in which reward incentive cues produce enhanced activity at all stages and substages. (shrink)

BackgroundThe overwhelming scarcity of organs within renal transplantation forces researchers and transplantation teams to seek new ways to increase efficacy. One of the possibilities is the use of personalized medicine, an approach based on quantifiable and scientific factors that determine the global immunological risk of rejection for each patient. Although this approach can improve the efficacy of transplantations, it also poses a number of ethical questions.MethodsThe qualitative research involved 22 semi-structured interviews with nephrologists involved in renal transplantation, with the goal (...) of determining the professionals' views about calculating the global immunological risk and the attendant ethical issues.ResultsThe results demonstrate a general acceptance of this approach amongst the participants in the study. Knowledge of each patient's immunological risk could improve treatment and the post-graft follow-up. On the other hand, the possibility that patients might be excluded from transplantation poses a significant ethical issue. This approach is not seen as something entirely new, given the fact that medicine is increasingly scientific and evidence-based. Although renal transplantation incorporates scientific data, these physicians believe that there should always be a place for clinical judgment and the physician-patient relationship.ConclusionsThe participants see the benefits of including the calculation of the global immunological risk within transplantation. Such data, being more precise and rigorous, could be of help in their clinical work. However, in spite of the use of such scientific data, a place must be retained for the clinical judgment that allows a physician to make decisions based on medical data, professional expertise and knowledge of the patient. To act in the best interests of the patient is key to whether the calculation of the global immunological risk is employed. (shrink)

With technological advances in reproduction no longer confined to the laboratory or involving only the isolated individual, women and men are increasingly resorting to a variety of technologies unheard of a few decades ago to assist them in becoming parents. The public at large, and feminists as a group, are confused and divided over how to view these technologies and over what positions to take on the moral and legal dilemmas they give rise to. Farquhar argues that two perspectives have (...) tended to dominate feminist discussions of these issues. She labels these: "fundamental feminism" and "market liberalism." By linking a theoterical approach with a practical set of issues, Farquhar's The Other Machine provides a rigorous analysis of contemporary feminist debates. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that bioethics is in crisis and that it will not have a future unless it begins to embrace a more Socratic approach to its leading assumptions. The absence of a critical and sceptical spirit has resulted in little more than a dominant ideology. I focus on three key issues. First, that too often bioethics collapses into medical ethics. Second, that medical ethics itself is beset by a lack of self-reflection that I characterize here as a (...) commitment to three dogmas. Third, I offer a more positive perspective by suggesting how bioethics may benefit from looking towards public health ethics as a new source of inspiration and direction. (shrink)

The resent paper reviews three phases in the literature on cognition and colour, and also Luria's (1976) observations of the effects that literacy and/or schooling have on colour naming and colour categorization. It is argued that Luria's own interpretation of his findings is partiafly flawed by inconsistency, and by ethnocentric presuppositions concerning mediation and abstraction. A revised interpretation is proposed that draws on Gibson's (1950, 1966) contrast between direct and indirect perceptions. It is suggested that language usage and cultural practices (...) come to exert a joint effect upon the experience of colour by selectively directing attention towards or away from the various perceptible aspects of coloured objects. (shrink)

Since Freud's earliest psychoanalytic theorisation around the beginning of the twentieth-century, the concept of the unconscious has exerted an enormous influence upon psychoanalysis and psychology, literary, critical and social theory. Yet prior to Freud, the concept of the unconscious already possessed a complex genealogy in nineteenth-century German philosophy and literature, beginning with the aftermath of Kant's Critical Philosophy and the origins of German Idealism, and extending into the discourses of Romanticism and beyond. Despite the many key thinkers who contributed to (...) the Germanic discourses on the unconscious, the English speaking world remains comparatively unaware of this heritage and its influence upon the origins of psychoanalysis. Bringing together a collection of experts in the fields of German Studies, Continental Philosophy, the History and Philosophy of Science, and the History of Psychoanalysis, this volume examines the various theorisations, representations and transformations undergone by the concept of the unconscious in nineteenth-century German thought"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The spliceosome is a large RNA‐protein complex that catalyses the removal of introns from nuclear pre‐mRNA. A wide range of biochemical and genetical studies shows that the spliceosome comprises three major RNA‐protein subunits, the U1, U2 and [U4/U6.U5] small nuclear ribonucleoprotein particles (snRNPs), and an additional group of non‐snRNP protein splicing factors. Rapid progress is being made in unravelling the interactions which take place between these factors during the splicing reaction. The emerging picture of the spliceosome reveals a highly dynamic (...) structure that assembles on pre‐mRNA transcripts in a stepwise pathway and is organised, at least in part, by complex RNA base‐pairing interactions between the small nuclear RNAs (snRNAs) and the intron substrate. Many of these interactions can be detected both in mammalian and yeast spliceosomes, suggesting that the basic splicing mechanism is an ancient one that has been highly conserved during evolution. (shrink)

The application of semiotics in trade mark law is an interdisciplinary endeavour in its infancy. The author traces its genesis in recent years and situates it within the context of general theoretical approaches, in particular of an interdisciplinary kind, appearing in the trade mark law literature in the past. The purposes for which such theories are applied, and questions of methodology arising from this, are examined. In particular, it is observed that semiotic theory has, by and large, been used for (...) the purpose of debating legal policy in trade mark law (especially in the United States), and that this has given rise to argument about the extent to which semiotic theory can exert any normative force of its own upon the law. This article offers a different perspective. It is sought to demonstrate the usefulness of theoretical semiotics in solving trade mark law questions in practice. The author emphasises that this involves no threat to orthodox legal problem-solving methodology (whatever one may think of the orthodoxy), and in particular does not require the normative use of semiotic theory. Taking as a starting point the concept of ‹trade mark use’, and having regard to trade mark law and literature in Europe, the United States and Australia, the author proceeds to demonstrate the proposed approach by reference to some current problems in trade mark infringement. (shrink)

Fire safety expertise was in great demand following the Grenfell Tower fire in London in June 2017. The government established a review of building regulations and an expert panel to inform its responses to Grenfell, and many other relevant organisations also formed their own expert panels. However, expert knowledge in fire safety is a highly contested domain, with knowledge claims based on differing sources. Fire fighters can claim expertise based on their experience of fighting fires, scientists and science-based engineers can (...) claim expertise from experimentation, and those who create and enact regulations can claim expertise in what can termed ’codespeak’—the language of regulation. Although distanced from fundamental empirical experience of fire, codespeak is powerful because of its relative clarity and certainty, and legal status. Building users also bring their own form of ‘local’ expertise—they have first-hand experience of the practicalities of the solutions wrought by the other experts. Policy-makers thus face many competing forms of expert advice on fire safety, and their ability to judge what is most relevant in any particular case rests on the existence of a sufficient range and depth of in-house government expertise. (shrink)

For the purpose of this article, "hermeneutics" means the theory of interpretation, i.e. the theory of achieving an understanding of texts, utterances, and so on (it does not mean a certain twentieth-century philosophical movement). Hermeneutics in this sense has a long history, reaching back at least as far as ancient Greece. However, new focus was brought to bear on it in the modern period, in the wake of the Reformation with its displacement of responsibility for interpreting the Bible from the (...) Church to individual Christians generally. This new focus on hermeneutics occurred especially in Germany.1.. (shrink)

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It is shown that, according to NF, many of the assertions of ordinal arithmetic involving the T-function which is peculiar to NF turn out to be equivalent to the truth-in-certain-permutation-models of assertions which have perfectly sensible ZF-style meanings, such as: the existence of wellfounded sets of great size or rank, or the nonexistence of small counterexamples to the wellfoundedness of ∈. Everything here holds also for NFU if the permutations are taken to fix all urelemente.