Policies that require male-female sex comparisons in all areas of biomedical research conflict with the goal of improving health outcomes through context-sensitive individualization of medical care. Sex, like race, requires a rigorous, contextual approach in precision medicine. A “sex contextualist” approach to gender-inclusive medicine better aligns with this aim.

Background Care homes have been disproportionately affected during the COVID-19 pandemic. Practical challenges of enacting infection control measures in care home settings have been widely reported, but little is known about the ethical concerns of care home staff during the implementation of such measures.. Objectives To understand the ethical challenges perceived by care home staff during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research design An exploratory qualitative study. Participants and research context A purposive sample of 15 care home staff (...) in different roles and ranks in Hong Kong was recruited to take part in semi-structured interviews between June and August 2020. Ethical considerations Ethical approval for this study was obtained. Participation was voluntary and anonymous. Participants had the right to withdraw from the study at any time without reprisal. Findings Three themes were identified: unclear legitimacy regarding infection control measures, limited autonomy in choices over infection control measures and inevitable harms to residents’ well-being. While the participants expected that they would have legitimated power to implement infection control measures, they were resistant when their right to self-determination of testing and vaccination was infringed. They also felt trapped between ethical duties to protect care home residents from infection risk and the anticipated detrimental effects of infection control measures. Conclusions The findings of this study reveal tensions among the ethical obligations of care home staff in response to a public health emergency. They highlight the importance of strengthening ethical sensitivity and ethical leadership in identifying and resolving the challenges of pandemic responses. (shrink)

Based on the Competition Model, the current study investigated how cue availability and cue reliability as two important input factors influenced second language learners' cue learning of the English article construction. Written corpus data of university-level Chinese-L1 learners of English were sampled for a comparison of English majors and non-English majors who demonstrated two levels of L2 competence in English article usage. The path model analysis in structural equation modeling was utilized to investigate the relationship between the input factors and (...) L2 usage. The findings contribute novel and scarce empirical evidence that confirms a central claim of the Competition Model, i.e., the changing importance of cue availability and cue reliability in the frequency and accuracy of production. Cue availability was found to determine L2 production frequency regardless of level of L2 competence. Cue reliability was the input factor that differentiated competence levels. When learners stayed at a relatively lower L2 proficiency, cue reliability played an important role in influencing L2 frequency of usage rather than accuracy of usage. When learners developed increased exposure to and stronger competence in the target language, cue reliability played a significant role in determining learners' success of cue learning. The study is methodologically innovative and expands the empirical applicability of the Competition Model to the domain of second language production and construction learning. (shrink)

本书的重点是谈作者对波普尔的看法,主要包括对波普尔思想的理解和对波普尔思想的评论和批评两部分。.

In Studying Human Behavior, Helen E. Longino enters into the complexities of human behavioral research, a domain still dominated by the age-old debate of “nature versus nurture.” Rather than supporting one side or another or attempting..

Most people believe that it is sometimes morally permissible for a person to use force to defend herself or others against harm. In Defensive Killing, Helen Frowe offers a detailed exploration of when and why the use of such force is permissible. She begins by considering the use of force between individuals, investigating both the circumstances under which an attacker forfeits her right not to be harmed, and the distinct question of when it is all-things-considered permissible to use force (...) against an attacker. Frowe then extends this enquiry to war, defending the view that we should judge the ethics of killing in war by the moral rules that govern killing between individuals. She argues that this requires us to significantly revise our understanding of the moral status of non-combatants in war. Non-combatants who intentionally contribute to an unjust war forfeit their rights not to be harmed, such that they are morally liable to attack by combatants fighting a just war. (shrink)

I have been asked to consider two questions: How Christian ‘oughts’ are related to Christian ‘is-es’, and, What does Christianity take flourishing to be? The background to these questions is that Christian ethics have traditionally been taken, both by supporters and opponents, as au ethic of creature-hood, sometimes quite crudely conceived. It is a sketch, but by no means a caricature, of a great deal of standard Christian thinking, to depict it as answering the two questions as follows: God is (...) your Creator: therefore you ought to obey him. The end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever. (shrink)

Contains the author's responses to comments by the three named authors on her book, 'A Metaphysics for Freedom'.

This article examines the place of human and animal subjectivity in two autobiographically informed texts by Hélène Cixous. It takes her view on the word ‘human’ and the figure of Fips, the dog of the Cixous family, as a point of departure. By thinking through this figure, I argue, Cixous analyses the dehumanizing logic of colonialism and anti-Semitism in Algeria and develops her own response to such kinds of political evils, arguing for human relationality and animal corporeality. The article shows (...) that Cixous’ meeting with Fips creates a stigma that, belatedly, breaks through the barrier between herself and the dog; the reopening of the wound takes place in a poetical writing that reveals an intense ‘animal humanity’ formed by communal suffering, finiteness, and love. The lesson Cixous learns from the memory of Fips the dog is how to become ‘better human’. This becoming is also an assault on the false humanism of the colonial project and on racialized social exclusion. (shrink)

Helen Steward argues that determinism is incompatible with agency itself--not only the special human variety of agency, but also powers which can be accorded to animal agents. She offers a distinctive, non-dualistic version of libertarianism, rooted in a conception of what biological forms of organisation might make possible in the way of freedom.

Making a Difference presents fifteen original essays on causation and counterfactuals by an international team of experts. Collectively, they represent the state of the art on these topics. The essays in this volume are inspired by the life and work of Peter Menzies, who made a difference in the lives of students, colleagues, and friends. Topics covered include: the semantics of counterfactuals, agency theories of causation, the context-sensitivity of causal claims, structural equation models, mechanisms, mental causation, causal exclusion argument, free (...) will, and the consequence argument. (shrink)

James Tabery Helen Longino’s Studying Human Behavior is an overdue effort at a nonpartisan evaluation of the many scientific disciplines that study the nature and nurture of human behavior, arguing for the acceptance of the strengths and weaknesses of all approaches. After years of conflict, Longino makes the pluralist case for peaceful coexistence. Her analysis of the approaches raises the following question: how are we to understand the pluralistic relationship among the peacefully coexisting approaches? Longino is ironically rather unpluralistic (...) about her pluralism, forcing a choice between integrative pluralism and her preferred ineliminative pluralism. I hope to show that the analysis of approaches she offers actually accommodates a pluralism that is both integrative and ineliminative.Approaches to studying human behaviorPhilosophy of biology took shape as a discipline in the 1970s. This disciplinary formation over. (shrink)

The safety condition is supposed to be a necessary condition on knowledge which helps to eliminate epistemic luck. It has been argued that the condition should be globalized to a set of propositions rather than the target proposition believed to account for why not all beliefs in necessary truths are safe. A remaining issue is which propositions are relevant when evaluating whether the target belief is safe or not. In the literature, solutions have been proposed to determine the relevance of (...) propositions. This paper examines a case of luckily true belief—thus a case of ignorance—and a case of knowledge. It argues that no solution in the literature offers a correct verdict in either case. Therefore, the strategy to globalize safety remains unsatisfactory. (shrink)

In this captivating book, Helen Verran addresses precisely that question by looking at how science, mathematics, and logic come to life in Yoruba primary schools.

Helen Steward puts forward a radical critique of the foundations of contemporary philosophy of mind, arguing that it relies too heavily on insecure assumptions about the sorts of things there are in the mind--events, processes, and states. She offers a fresh investigation of these three categories, clarifying the distinctions between them, and argues that the category of state has been very widely and seriously misunderstood.

The fields of medical ethics, bioethics, and women's studies have experienced unprecedented growth in the last forty years. Along with the rapid pace of development in medicine and biology, and changes in social expectations, moral quandaries about the body and social practices involving it have multiplied. Philosophers are uniquely situated to attempt to clarify and resolves these questions. Yet the subdiscipline of bioethics still in large part reflects mainstream scholars' lack of interest in gender as a category of analysis. This (...) volume aims to show how a feminist perspective advances bioethics. The author uncover inconsistencies in traditional arguments and argue for the importance of hitherto ignored factors in decision-making. The essays include theory and very specific examples that demonstrate the glaring inadequacy of mainstream bioethics, where gender bias is still often to be found, along with general lack of attention to women's concerns. (shrink)

In The Value of the Humanities prize-winning critic Helen Small assesses the value of the Humanities, eloquently examining five historical arguments in defence of the Humanities.

[from the publisher's website] Questions about the existence and attributes of God form the subject matter of natural theology, which seeks to gain knowledge of the divine by relying on reason and experience of the world. Arguments in natural theology rely largely on intuitions and inferences that seem natural to us, occurring spontaneously—at the sight of a beautiful landscape, perhaps, or in wonderment at the complexity of the cosmos—even to a nonphilosopher. In this book, Helen De Cruz and Johan (...) De Smedt examine the cognitive origins of arguments in natural theology. They find that although natural theological arguments can be very sophisticated, they are rooted in everyday intuitions about purpose, causation, agency, and morality. Using evidence and theories from disciplines including the cognitive science of religion, evolutionary ethics, evolutionary aesthetics, and the cognitive science of testimony, they show that these intuitions emerge early in development and are a stable part of human cognition. -/- De Cruz and De Smedt analyze the cognitive underpinnings of five well-known arguments for the existence of God: the argument from design, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, the argument from beauty, and the argument from miracles. Finally, they consider whether the cognitive origins of these natural theological arguments should affect their rationality. (shrink)

Fetuses and their mothers (and other adults) share many objective interests. These include interests in disjunctive ways of achieving human well-being, including the formation and success of good projects such as particular friendships. Pursuing such good projects is in the individual’s interests and is what growing up is all about. Some interests are time-sensitive, and determining which interests apply at what stages in life requires asking which benefits are in some sense appropriate to the individual and still in his/her actual (...) or possible or even hypothetical future. Human individuals not only have interests in unconditional benefits to them, including the welfare of existing family members, but in conditional benefits to them, including the welfare of possible future family members. Even if not all interests apply to the individual at every stage, if an adult-type benefit is still in the (long-term) future, the young individual including the fetus has a stake in that benefit, conditional as the benefit may sometimes be. Fulfilment is enhanced by pursuit and conscious enjoyment of ‘human goods’, but as with adults, the stake in these remains strong even if psychological links with the long-term future in which this happens are tenuous or non-existent. (shrink)

This book uncovers and explores the constant tension between the historical and the transcendental that lies at the heart of Michel Foucault's work. In the process, it also assesses the philosophical foundations of his thought by examining his theoretical borrowings from Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, who each provided him with tools to critically rethink the status of the transcendental. Given Foucault's constant focus on the question of the possibility for knowledge, the author argues that his philosophical itinerary can be understood (...) as a series of attempts to historicize the transcendental. In so doing, he seeks to uncover a specific level that would identify these conditions without falling either into an excess of idealism or of materialism. The author concludes that, although this problem does unify Foucault's work and gives it its specifically philosophical dimension, none of the concepts successively provided manages to name these conditions without falling into the pitfalls that Foucault originally denounced as characteristic of the "anthropological sleep"--various forms of confusion between the historical and the transcendental. Although Foucault's work provides us with a highly illuminating analysis of the major problems of post-Kantian philosophies, ultimately it remains aporetic in that it also fails to overcome them. (shrink)

"Open Democracy envisions what true government by mass leadership could look like."—Nathan Heller, New Yorker How a new model of democracy that opens up power to ordinary citizens could strengthen inclusiveness, responsiveness, and accountability in modern societies To the ancient Greeks, democracy meant gathering in public and debating laws set by a randomly selected assembly of several hundred citizens. To the Icelandic Vikings, democracy meant meeting every summer in a field to discuss issues until consensus was reached. Our contemporary representative (...) democracies are very different. Modern parliaments are gated and guarded, and it seems as if only certain people—with the right suit, accent, wealth, and connections—are welcome. Diagnosing what is wrong with representative government and aiming to recover some of the lost openness of ancient democracies, Open Democracy presents a new paradigm of democracy in which power is genuinely accessible to ordinary citizens. Hélène Landemore favors the ideal of “representing and being represented in turn” over direct-democracy approaches. Supporting a fresh nonelectoral understanding of democratic representation, Landemore recommends centering political institutions around the “open mini-public”—a large, jury-like body of randomly selected citizens gathered to define laws and policies for the polity, in connection with the larger public. She also defends five institutional principles as the foundations of an open democracy: participatory rights, deliberation, the majoritarian principle, democratic representation, and transparency. Open Democracy demonstrates that placing ordinary citizens, rather than elites, at the heart of democratic power is not only the true meaning of a government of, by, and for the people, but also feasible and, today more than ever, urgently needed. (shrink)

A computer can come to understand natural language the same way Helen Keller did: by using “syntactic semantics”—a theory of how syntax can suffice for semantics, i.e., how semantics for natural language can be provided by means of computational symbol manipulation. This essay considers real-life approximations of Chinese Rooms, focusing on Helen Keller’s experiences growing up deaf and blind, locked in a sort of Chinese Room yet learning how to communicate with the outside world. Using the SNePS computational (...) knowledge-representation system, the essay analyzes Keller’s belief that learning that “everything has a name” was the key to her success, enabling her to “partition” her mental concepts into mental representations of: words, objects, and the naming relations between them. It next looks at Herbert Terrace’s theory of naming, which is akin to Keller’s, and which only humans are supposed to be capable of. The essay suggests that computers at least, and perhaps non-human primates, are also capable of this kind of naming. (shrink)

How We Fight: Ethics in War contains ten groundbreaking essays by some of the leading philosophers of war. The essays offer new perspectives on key debates including pacifism, punitive justifications for war, the distribution of risk between combatants and non-combatants, the structure of 'just war theory', and bases of individual liability in war.

Helen Macfarlane, revolutionary social critic, feminist and Hegelian philosopher was the first English translator of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engel's theCommunist Manifesto. Her original translation is included in this edition. Marx publicly admired her as a rare and original thinker and journalist. This book recreates her intellectual and political world at a key turning point in European history.

The paper considers and opposes the view that processes are best thought of as continuants, to be differentiated from events mainly by way of the fact that the latter, but not the former, are entities with temporal parts. The motivation for the investigation, though, is not so much the defeat of what is, in any case, a rather implausible claim, as the vindication of some of the ideas and intuitions that the claim is made in order to defend — and (...) the grounding of those ideas and intuitions in a more plausible metaphysics than is provided by the continuant view. It is argued that in addition to a distinction between events and processes there is room and need for a third category, that of the individual process, which can be illuminatingly compared with the idea of a substance. Individual processes indeed share important metaphysical features with substantial continuants, but they do not lack temporal parts. Instead, it is argued that individual processes share with substantial continuants an important property I call ‘modal robustness in virtue of form’. The paper explains what this property is, and further suggests that the category of individual process, thus understood, might be of considerable value to the philosophy of action. (shrink)

The Barnett Shale in the Fort Worth Basin is one of the most important resource plays in the USA. The total organic carbon and brittleness can help to characterize a resource play to assist in the search for sweet spots. Higher TOC or organic content are generally associated with hydrocarbon storage and with rocks that are ductile in nature. However, brittle rocks are more amenable to fracturing with the fractures faces more resistant to proppant embedment. Productive intervals within a resource (...) play should therefore contain a judicious mix of organics and mineralogy that lends to hydraulic fracturing. Identification of these intervals through core acquisition and laboratory-based petrophysical measurements can be accurate but expensive in comparison with wireline logging. We have estimated TOC from wireline logs using Passey’s method and attained a correlation of 60%. However, errors in the baseline interpretation can lead to inaccurate TOC. Using nonlinear regression with Passey’s TOC, normalized stratigraphic height, and acquired wireline logs, the correlation increased to 80%. This regression can be applied to uncored wells with logs to estimate TOC, and we used it as a ground truth in integrated analysis of seismic and well log data. The brittleness index is computed based on core Fourier transform infrared mineralogy using Wang and Gale’s formula. The correlation between core BI and estimated BI using elastic logs combined with wireline logs was 78%. However, this correlation decreases to 66% if the BI is estimated using only wireline logs. Therefore, the later serves as a less reliable proxy. We have correlated production to volumetric estimate of TOC and brittleness by computing distance-weighted averages in 120 horizontal wells. We have obtained a production correlation of 38% on blind wells, which was encouraging, suggesting that the geologic component in completions provides an important contribution to well success. (shrink)

El filósofo español José Ortega y Gasset y su traductora al alemán Helene Weyl intercambiaron correspondencia entre los años 1923 y 1946. José Ortega y Gasset y Helene Weyl formaron parte de dos grandes comunidades de intelectuales europeos: Ortega, representante de la filosofía académica en España y Helene Weyl, representante de una intelectualidad vivida más allá de cualquier corsé academicista. Su correspondencia documenta el desarrollo de dos grandes espíritus europeos así como la singular intersección de estos dos mundos y culturas (...) a través de un momento histórico difícil y turbulento del siglo XX. (shrink)

Entrepreneurs sometimes make unethical decisions that have devastating effects on their companies, stakeholders, and themselves. We suggest that insights into the origins of such actions can be acquired through attention to personal motives and their impact on moral disengagement—a cognitive process that deactivates moral self-regulation, thus enabling individuals to behave in ways inconsistent with their own values. We hypothesize that entrepreneurs’ motivation for financial gains is positively related to moral disengagement, while their motivation for self-realization is negatively related to this (...) process. Results obtained with a sample of founding entrepreneurs offered support for the first prediction, as well as support for the prediction that moral disengagement is positively related to the tendency to make unethical decisions. (shrink)

The Ethics of War and Peace is a lively introduction to one of the oldest but still most relevant ethical debates. Focusing on the philosophical questions surrounding the ethics of modern war, Helen Frowe presents contemporary just war theory in a stimulating and accessible way. This 2nd edition includes new material on weapons and technology, and humanitarian intervention, in addition to: theories of self-defence and national defence jus ad bellum, jus in bello and jus post bellum the moral status (...) of combatants the principle of non-combatant immunity and the nature of terrorism and the moral status of terrorists. Each chapter uses examples and concludes with a summary, discussion questions and suggestions for further reading to aid student engagement, learning and revision. The glossary has been expanded to cover the full range of relevant terminology. This is the ideal textbook for students of philosophy and politics approaching this important area for the first time. (shrink)

Seng Zhao and his collection of treatises, the Zhao lun, have enjoyed a particularly high reputation in the history of Chinese Buddhism. One of these treatises, The Immutability of Things, employs the Madhyamaka argumentative method of negating dualistic concepts to demonstrate that, while "immutability" and "mutability" coexist as the states of phenomenal things, neither possesses independent self-nature. More than a thousand years after this text was written, Zhencheng's intense criticism of it provoked fierce reactions among a host of (...) renowned scholar-monks. This paper explores Zhencheng's main points as well as the perspectives and motives of his principal adversaries in order to shed light on the nature of philosophical discourse during the late Ming dynasty. (shrink)

This paper argues that public statues of persons typically express a positive evaluative attitude towards the subject. It also argues that states have duties to repudiate their own historical wrongdoing, and to condemn other people’s serious wrongdoing. Both duties are incompatible with retaining public statues of people who perpetrated serious rights violations. Hence, a person’s being a serious rights violator is a sufficient condition for a state’s having a duty to remove a public statue of that person. I argue that (...) this applies no less in the case of the ‘morally ambiguous’ wrongdoer, who both accomplishes significant goods and perpetrates serious rights violations. The duty to remove a statue is a defeasible duty: like most duties, it can be defeated by lesser-evil considerations. If removing a statue would, for example, spark a violent riot that would risk unjust harm to lots of people, the duty to remove could be outweighed by the duty not to foreseeably cause unjust harm. This would provide a lesser-evil justification for keeping the statue. But it matters that the duty to remove is outweighed, rather than negated, by these consequences. Unlike when a duty is negated, one still owes something in cases of outweighing. And it especially matters that it is outweighed by the predicted consequences of wrongful behaviour by others. (shrink)

A kaleidoscopic portrait of Derrida's life and works through the prism of his Jewish heritage, by a leading feminist thinker and close personal friend. From the circumcision act to family relationships, through Derrida's works to those of Celan, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais, Cixous effortlessly merges biography and textual commentary in this playful portrait of the man, his works, and being Jewish.

_Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing_ is a poetic, insightful, and ultimately moving exploration of 'the strange science of writing.' In a magnetic, irresistible narrative, Cixous reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for 'great' writing: _The School of the Dead_--the notion that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; _The School of Dreams_--the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration and output; and _The School of Roots_--the importance of (...) depth in the 'nether realms' in all aspects of writing. Cixous's love of language and passion for the written word is evident on every page. Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky and, most of all, Kafka. (shrink)