The COVID-19 pandemic revealed numerous weaknesses in pandemic preparedness and response, including underfunding, inadequate surveillance, and inequitable distribution of countermeasures. To overcome these weaknesses for future pandemics, WHO released a zero draft of a pandemic treaty in February, 2023, and subsequently a revised bureau's text in May, 2023. COVID-19 made clear that pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response reflect choices and value judgements. These decisions are therefore not a purely scientific or technical exercise, but are fundamentally grounded in ethics. The latest (...) treaty draft reflects these ethical considerations by including a section entitled Guiding Principles and Approaches. Most of these principles are ethical—they establish core values that undergird the treaty. Unfortunately, the treaty draft's set of principles are numerous, overlapping, and show inadequate coherence and consistency. We propose two improvements to this section of the draft pandemic treaty. First, key guiding ethical principles should be clearer and more precise than they currently are. Second, the link between ethical principles and policy implementation should be clearly established and define boundaries on acceptable interpretation, ensuring that signatories abide by these principles. (shrink)

A highly original reading of Immanuel Kant that demonstrates his interest in the social realm of human interaction.

Containing selected papers on the fundamentals and applications of Complexity Science, this multi-disciplinary book presents new approaches for resolving complex issues that cannot be resolved using conventional mathematical or software models. Complex Systems problems can occur in a variety of areas such as physical sciences and engineering, the economy, the environment, humanities and social and political sciences. Complexity Science problems, the science of open systems consisting of large numbers of diverse components engaged in rich interaction, can occur in a variety (...) of areas such as physical sciences and engineering, the economy, the environment, humanities and social and political sciences. The global behaviour of these systems emerges from the interaction of constituent components and is unpredictable but not random. The key attribute of Complex Systems is the ability to self-organise and adapt to unpredictable changes in their environment. (shrink)

A leading figure in neuroaesthetics makes the case that aesthetic experience can be meaningfully measured by the tools of neuroscience.

G.E. Moore, more than either Bertrand Russell or Ludwig Wittgenstein, was chiefly responsible for the rise of the analytic method in twentieth-century philosophy. This selection of his writings shows Moore at his very best. The classic essays are crucial to major philosophical debates that still resonate today. Amongst those included are: * A Defense of Common Sense * Certainty * Sense-Data * External and Internal Relations * Hume's Theory Explained * Is Existence a Predicate? * Proof of an External World (...) In addition, this collection also contains the key early papers in which Moore signals his break with idealism, and three important previously unpublished papers from his later work which illustrate his relationship with Wittgenstein. (shrink)

A model for the ideal state includes discussions of the nature and application of justice, the role of the philosopher in society, the goals of education, and the effects of art upon character.

This essay challenges the widely accepted principle that a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. The author considers situations in which there are sufficient conditions for a certain choice or action to be performed by someone, So that it is impossible for the person to choose or to do otherwise, But in which these conditions do not in any way bring it about that the person chooses or acts as he (...) does. In such situations the person may well be morally responsible for what he chooses or does despite his inability to choose or to do otherwise. Finally the author considers certain suggestions for revising the principle he rejects or for replacing it with a principle of an altogether different kind. (shrink)

There is growing interest in the use of neurointerventions to reduce the risk that criminal offenders will reoffend. Commentators have raised several ethical concerns regarding this practice. One prominent concern is that, when imposed without the offender’s valid consent, neurointerventions might infringe offenders’ right to bodily integrity. While it is commonly held that we possess a moral right to bodily integrity, the extent to which this right would protect against such neurointerventions is as-yet unclear. In this paper, we will assess (...) whether, why, and how severely three forms of neurointervention might infringe the right to bodily integrity. We show that the severity of the infringement of the right to bodily integrity differs across different forms of neurointervention. Moreover, we argue that mental and behavioral effects of neurointerventions could in some cases be relevant to determining the severity of infringements of the right to bodily integrity. (shrink)

Modern science faces a series of problems that undermine confidence in its reliability. To solve these problems, we must reflect on what makes science work and what leads it astray. This book is about Science, its strengths and weaknesses. The papers that scientists write form a vast resource of evidence and theory that is doubling about every ten years, along with the number of scientists. The size of this resource makes it hard for it to be used effectively by scientists, (...) and along with this are growing concerns about its integrity and reliability. This book looks at the scientific method, as currently applied and as understood philosophically by scientists, the social structure of science, and the structure of scientific communication through journals. It includes case studies of controversies, and looks at how fields develop over time. (shrink)

This paper looks at what David Kaplan's work on indexicals can teach us about logic and the philosophy of logic, and also what Kaplan's logic (i.e. the Logic of Demonstratives) can teach us about indexicals. The lessons are i) that logical consequence is not necessary truth-preservation, ii) that that the linguistic doctrine of necessary truth (also called conventionalism about modality) fails, and iii) that there is a kind of barrier to entailment between non-context-sensitive and context-sensitive claims.

Foucault’s remarks concerning psychoanalysis are ambivalent and even prima facie contra-dictory, at times lauding Freud and Lacan as anti-humanists, at others being severely criti-cal of their imbrication within psychiatric power. This has allowed a profusion of interpretations of his position, between so-called ‘Freudo-Foucauldians’ at one extreme and Foucauldians who condemn psychoanalysis as such at the other. In this article, I begin by surveying Foucault’s biographical and theoretical relationship to psychoanalysis and the sec-ondary scholarship on this relationship to date. I pay (...) particular attention to the discussion of the relationship in feminist scholarship and queer theory, and that by psychoanalytic thinkers, as well as attending to the particular focus in the secondary literature on Fou-cault’s late work and his relationship to the figure of Jacques Lacan. I conclude that Fou-cault’s attitude to psychoanalysis varies with context, and that some of his criticisms of psychoanalysis in part reflect an ignorance of the variety of psychoanalytic thought, partic-ularly in its Lacanian form. I thus argue that Foucault sometimes tended to overestimate the extent of the incompatibility of his approach with psychoanalytic ones and that there is ultimately no serious incompatibility there. Rather, psychoanalysis represents a substantively different mode of inquiry to Foucault’s work, which is neither straightforwardly ex-clusive nor inclusive of psychoanalytic insights. (shrink)

This is a sequel to the author's The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle Ages. The period of the reformation saw immense changes of approach to the study of the Bible, which in turn brought huge consequences. This book, seeking to show the direction of endeavour of such study in the last medieval centuries, examines the theory of exegesis, practical interpretation, popular Bible study and preaching, and looks especially at the areas of logic and language in which (...) the scholars of the period had considerable expertise. The condemnation of the scholastics has tended to sink with them a proper recognition of what they achieved. In looking forward to the reformation, Dr Evans demonstrates a greater continuity of attitude than has often been allowed and describes how the enquiries of later medieval scholars opened out into the explorations of the sixteenth century made by Protestant and Roman Catholic thinkers alike. (shrink)

It is my view that one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person's will. Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have certain desires and motives. They are capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call "first-order desires" or "desires of the (...) first order," which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for reflective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires. (shrink)

Книга адресована любителям истории, а также всем, кто считает, что истории является главным богатством как отдельным народов, так и всего человечества.

Адресовано курсантам и слушателям образовательных учреждений, учебных центров, центров дополнительной подготовки, курсов повышения квалификации системы МВД Российской Федерации.

A long-standing theme in discussion of perception and thought has been that our primary cognitive contact with individual objects and events in the world derives from our perceptual contact with them. When I look at a duck in front of me, I am not merely presented with the fact that there is at least one duck in the area, rather I seem to be presented withthisthing (as one might put it from my perspective) in front of me, which looks to (...) me to be a duck. Furthermore, such a perception would seem to put me in a position not merely to make the existential judgment that there is some duck or other present, but rather to make a singular, demonstrative judgment, that that is a duck. My grounds for an existential judgment in this case derives from my apprehension of the demonstrative thought and not vice versa. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article explores the relationship between rhetoric and violence by running this pairing through a corresponding couplet: rhetoric and race. Arguing for a common substrate between these two pairs of terms—coloniality—this article proposes that rhetorics of "nonviolence" are better understood as rhetorics of anti-violence.

Toward theory a homuncular of believing For years and years, philosophers took thoughts and beliefs to be modifications of incorporeal Cartesian egos. ...

Organisms that share the capability of storing information about experiences in the past have an actively generated background resource on which they can compare and evaluate more recent experiences in order to quickly or even better react than in previous situations. This is an essential competence for all reaction and adaptation purposes of living organisms. Such memory/learning skills can be found from akaryotes up to unicellular eukaryotes, fungi, animals and plants, although until recently, it had been mentioned only as a (...) capability of higher animals. With the rise of epigenetics, the context-dependent marking of experiences at both the phenotype and the genotype level is an essential perspective to understand memory and learning in all organisms. Both memory and learning depend on a variety of successful communication processes within the whole organism. (shrink)

Boldly focusing on sexuality as a crucial definer of social order, Being and Symptom argues that there is an "M theory" -- a master theory of theories -- not only in Quantum Physics, but also in Continental Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Sociology, disclosing how the ontological structure of the "fantastic four" ingredients of metaphysics (potentiality, impotentiality, actuality, completion) has recurred through time. Öğüt also seeks to turn Thomas Hobbes's political philosophy into a social theory within the fields of sexuality and sovereignty (...) and to locate parallels among Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Agamben, Nash, Derrida, Girard, Kristeva, and Žižek, with a special emphasis on how Žižek has adapted Lacanian psychoanalysis into social theory. Öğüt conveys a highly original analysis of the unconscious of our social (sexual) relations, subjectivities, and politics. (shrink)