The ability to differentiate between what is just and what is unjust may be considered as the precondition to demand one's own rights. Starting from this point, this research was carried out to describe the level of awareness of patients concerning their rights. The main hypothesis was: the higher the socioeconomic and cultural level of patients, the higher is their awareness of their rights. This research was conducted in one of the state hospitals in Turkey in 1998. It is a (...) descriptive study carried out on 128 inpatients in medical and surgical wards. The data were collected by a questionnaire, which included questions on the rights of patients and gave sample cases. The sample cases were designed by referring to the World Health Organization Declaration on the Promotion of Patients' Rights in Europe. Only 23% of the participants were able to recognize patient rights, while 32% could not; the majority (45%) were undecided in recognizing patient rights. The awareness scores were statistically significantly different for educational level categories (F = 5.84; p<0.001). A continuously declining trend was observed for patient rights awareness scores from the highest educational level to the lowest. This partly proves the hypothesis of the research. However, the awareness scores were not significantly different for the other background variables (p>0.05). Most strikingly, 38% of the patients had no idea about their diagnosis and 63% of those who had undergone surgery did not know why they had had the operation. (shrink)

Western societies today are coming unmoored in the face of an earth-shaking ethical and cultural paradigm shift. At its core is the question of what it means to be human and how we are meant to live. The old answers are no longer accepted; a dizzying array of options are offered in their stead. Underpinning this smorgasbord of lifestyles is a thicket of unquestioned assumptions, such as the separation of gender from biological sex, which not so long ago would have (...) been universally rejected as radical notions. In the spring of 2019, a group of Orthodox Christian scholars drawn from a wide variety of academic disciplines met together to offer responses to the moral crisis our generation faces, elaborating upon its various forms and facilitating a fuller understanding of some of its theological and philosophical foundations. In doing so they offer support to all those who question the claims that are so forcefully insisted upon today--a clarity that will aid them in standing up and resisting trends that have already shown to be the cause of great suffering and unhappiness. (shrink)

Foundations of Dialectical Psychology is a compilation of the writings of Klaus F. Riegel on dialectical psychology. The book presents chapters discussing such topics as the dialectics of human development; history of dialectical psychology; temporal organization of dialogues; and the analysis of the concept of crisis and its underlying philosophical model and ideology. Psychologists and students will find the book invaluable.

The current interest in Kant in the North American debate on criminal punishment arise from a deceptive hope: Kant seems as a sort of “antidote” useful to mitigate the results of correctional and merely intimidatory practice. Both the two current interpretations of his philosophy, for their typical post-modern statement, are yet improper and unproductive. Both Kant as a pioneer of so-called “limiting retributivism” and Kant theorist of “pure retributivism”, “purged” of the extreme application of the logic of jus talionis, do (...) offer us an “antidote” that is ineffective against the justified malaise which is rampant amongst the ranks of utilitarians on the other side of the Atlantic. Rather than a genuine medicine, it seems to be a sweetener, designed perhaps to make the unconscionable logic of power more acceptable, but certainly not to limit it. (shrink)

Se analizan los dilemas morales asociados a la muerte, para reflexionar sobre los interrogantes que surgen al calificarla como un hecho banal desde la perspectiva de quien muere. Se estudian, además, las consecuencias éticas y jurídicas de reconocer autonomía moral a quienes deciden, en circunstanci..

In a lengthy article E. Scerri and J. Worrall put forward the case for a novel ‘accommodationist’ version of the events surrounding the development of Mendeleef's Periodic Table 1869–1899. However these authors lay undue stress on the fact that President of the Royal Society of London Spottiswoode made absolutely no mention of Mendeleef's famous predictions in the Davy Medal eulogy in 1883 and undue stress on the fact that Cleve's classic 1879 Scandium paper contained an acknowledgement of Mendeleef's prior prediction (...) of eka-boron.They also fail to analyse in any detail the so-called ‘rare earth problem’ which, in the opinion of this author, causes problems for their account but not for a predictivist account. (shrink)

As opposed to overdemanding principles which ask individuals to sacrifice too much, there are overpermissive principles which ask individuals to sacrifice too little. Determining the extent to which one should sacrifice often comes with the need of understanding what is of moral significance. By analysing different readings of moral significance, and singling out one specific interpretation of moral significance which links moral significance to gaining or losing a considerable amount of welfare, I demonstrate that one of the well-known principles of (...) Peter Singer, the Weaker Principle of Sacrifice, is overpermissive as it exempts deliberately cultivated morally significant lavish pursuits from the domain of sacrifice. Overpermissiveness not only renders moral principles unreasonably broad but also causes burdens to be distributed unjustifiably in a comparative sense, where some parties are assigned a moral obligation whereas others are not. (shrink)

This article explores some of the ways in which the conceptual apparatus of A Thousand Plateaus, and especially its machinic metaphysics, can be connected to recent developments in computer modelling and social simulation, which provide new tools for thinking that are becoming increasingly popular among philosophers and social scientists. Conversely, the successful deployment of these tools provides warrant for the flat ontology articulated in A Thousand Plateaus and therefore contributes to the ‘reversal of Platonism’ for which Deleuze had called in (...) his earlier works, such as Logic of Sense. The first major section offers a brief exposition of some key concepts in A Thousand Plateaus in order to set the stage for the second and third major sections, which argue that the fabrication of a metaphysics of immanence can be accelerated by connecting its conceptual apparatus more explicitly to insights derived from philosophical analyses of computational modelling and simulation and the social scientific use of ‘assemblage theory’. The article concludes with a summary of the argument and a brief consideration of some of the potential ethical and political implications of this interdisciplinary engagement. (shrink)