Dinh, Hoa Trung At the forefront of the current debate on 'assisted death' is the autonomy argument. Advocates of assisted death often appeal to respect for autonomy as a trump card that can override all other considerations: the value of human life, the prohibition of killing in the medical tradition, and other social responsibilities. For Kant, who invented the concept of autonomy and regarded it as the manifestation of human dignity, the concept of killing oneself is rationally indefensible (...) and totally at odds with the exercise of autonomy. This article discusses the origin of respect for autonomy in health ethics, and provides a Kantian critique of physician-assisted death. (shrink)

Dinh, Hoa Trung Every war is sustained by a narrative that explains the conflict and the necessity of the use of force. A war narrative gives the assembly a common identity, a sense of solidarity, and a mandate for action. This paper examines the ethical significance of war narratives, with particular reference to the Vietnam War, and how war narratives can continue to foster enmity for decades after the fighting. The paper discusses two war narratives that played vital (...) roles in the Vietnam conflict: the Revolution narrative, and the Republic narrative. Drawing from the works of Jon Sobrino and Jurgen Moltmann, who identify the crucified Christ with the victims of violence, this paper demonstrates that the cross can offer a new vision for peaceful coexistence beyond war and animosity. (shrink)

In this paper, a proposed modified stochastic fractal search algorithm is applied to find the most appropriate site and size of capacitor banks for distribution systems with 33, 69, and 85 buses. Two single-objective functions are considered to be reduction of power loss and reduction of total cost of energy loss and capacitor investment while satisfying limit of capacitors, limit of conductor, and power balance of the systems. MSFS was developed by performing three new mechanisms including new diffusion mechanism and (...) two new update mechanisms on the conventional stochastic fractal search algorithm. As a result, MSFS can reduce 0.002%, 0.003%, and 0.18% of the total power loss from SFS for the three study systems. As compared to other methods, MSFS can reduce power loss from 0.07% to 3.98% for the first system, from 3.7% to 7.3% for the second system, and from 0.92% to 6.98% for the third system. For the reduction of total cost, the improvement level of the proposed method over SFS and two other methods is more significant. It is 0.03%, 1.22%, and 5.76% for the second system and 2.31%, 0.87%, and 3.77% for the third system. It is emphasized that the proposed method can find the global optimal solutions for all study cases while SFS was still implementing search process nearby or far away from the solutions. Furthermore, MSFS can converge to the best solutions much faster than these compared methods. Consequently, it can be concluded that the proposed method is very effective for finding the best location and size of added capacitors in distribution power systems. (shrink)

Hòa Hảo Buddhism belongs to that traditional lay and frugal buddhism encouraging practicing at home (tu tại gia) while being engaged with the world (nhập thế). It appeared in Southern Vietnam at the end of the 1930’s. Obviously, colonial contest and economic depression have played the part of a powerful catalyst in the spread by a young charismatic and reformist character of this millenarianism. Then, during three decades of postcolonial and cold wars (1945–1975), this New Religious movement hardly expressed its (...) Buddhist ethic of social statements in order to lend moral support and material protection to the local peasantry. Eventually, at the end of the war, this autonomous Buddhist community finally tried to morph again into a legal religion at a time when the Vietnamese Communist Party had to urgently impose a new sovereign socialist republic (1976). In other words, the new regime had to reunify the Nation and build a new secular state. In the southern part of the country, the replacement of a former liberal regime (Republic of Vietnam) by a socialist republic (called formerly a Democratic Republic in Northern Vietnam) completely changed the nature of the State-Church relations. Therefore, many religious groups’ agencies suffered a drastic blow as these groups were subordinated to the Patriotic Front and its mass organizations. Nevertheless, in 1991, the reorientation of the religious policy officially reaffirmed the religions’ social utility. Since then, new debates emerged to define the nature of the social actions of religious groups and then to delineate the legal sphere of their activities in this secular state. This essay intends to question how the two notions of being engaged with the world (nhập thế) and that of the secular state (nhà nước trung lập thế tục) interacted during these last decades. To tackle this pivotal issue, we focused on the specific implementation of Hòa Hảo social activism, from 1940’s until now, to underline how this activism evolved under different political regimes and how a new culture of social service has been promoted since the Hòa Hảo official church was recognized in 1999 and achieved years later. It questions more generally how religious groups can negotiate with the state for the emergence of a civil society or, at least, for the acceptance of their own tribute to the prosperity of the Nation. (shrink)

Nghiên cứu sự phát triển của Nho giáo từ thời kỳ Cổ đại đến khi học thuyết của Khổng Tử ra đời, giới thiệu những bộ sách, môn đồ, tư tưởng của Khổng Tử qua các thời kỳ phát triển của đất nước Trung Hoa. Giới thiệu quá trình phát triển của Nho giáo ở Việt Nam. Mỗi thời kỳ đều gắn với tên tuổi của các nhà Nho hoặc giáo phái lớn.

The experiential self in interaction with an object is not, as Richard Rorty emphasizes, an inherent attribute that exists before real interactions, nor is it an entity with fixed characteristics. What Rorty constantly highlights is that the interaction in forming the self must achieve self-awareness as an entity impacted, acknowledged, and evaluated by others. This line of interpretation leads to two important concepts regarding the self’s formation that need to be clarified: First, when an individual expands his/her ability to manage (...) space outside the reach of his/her physical person and visual perception, it is imperative that the individual is aware that he/she is controlling his/her own body. Second, the reciprocal effect from others cannot make the individual self-aware of his/her own existence as an independent entity if there is a lack of the other’s skepticism and questioning of the subject himself/herself. In this step of the self-experience process, the self’s attributes and its existence in relation to its surroundings are questioned. This article will focus on the explanation of the feasibility of perceiving the self as a form made up of biological premises and the awareness of the self as a living entity with contingent and flexible characteristics. (shrink)

Aims and Scope -/- The Vietnamese Social Sciences and Humanities at a Fork in the Road, utilizing an object-oriented structured database on the productivity of Vietnamese researchers, seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the development of Social Sciences and Humanities in Vietnam from 2008 to 2018. -/- Quan-Hoang Vuong (Ph.D., Université Libre de Bruxelles) is the director of Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research, Phenikaa University in Hanoi, Vietnam. He is chairman of the Vietnam chapter of the European Association of (...) Science Editors and serves in the NAFOSTED Scientific Council on Basic Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2019-2021). Dr. Vuong has published more than 120 academic articles, and book chapters in about 50 refereed journals and books by such publishers as Elsevier, Inderscience, Nature Publishing Group, Springer, Praeger, Wiley, World Scientific, etc. -/- Trung Tran is an Associate Professor of Mathematics Education and works at Vietnam Academy for Ethnic Minorities. He is a member of the Vietnam chapter of The European Association of Science Editors (EASE), a leader of the Vietnamese Science Editors (VSE) Team, and a chairman of Editor's Board of Journal of Ethnic Minorities Research (ISSN: 0866-773X). (shrink)

As a generation of ‘digital natives,’ secondary students who were born from 2002 to 2010 have various approaches to acquiring digital knowledge. Digital literacy and resilience are crucial for them to navigate the digital world as much as the real world; however, these remain under-researched subjects, especially in developing countries. In Vietnam, the education system has put considerable effort into teaching students these skills to promote quality education as part of the United Nations-defined Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4). This issue (...) has proven especially salient amid the COVID−19 pandemic lockdowns, which had obliged most schools to switch to online forms of teaching. This study, which utilizes a dataset of 1061 Vietnamese students taken from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s “Digital Kids Asia Pacific (DKAP)” project, employs Bayesian statistics to explore the relationship between the students’ background and their digital abilities. Results show that economic status and parents’ level of education are positively correlated with digital literacy. Students from urban schools have only a slightly higher level of digital literacy than their rural counterparts, suggesting that school location may not be a defining explanatory element in the variation of digital literacy and resilience among Vietnamese students. Students’ digital literacy and, especially resilience, also have associations with their gender. Moreover, as students are digitally literate, they are more likely to be digitally resilient. Following SDG4, i.e., Quality Education, it is advisable for schools, and especially parents, to seriously invest in creating a safe, educational environment to enhance digital literacy among students. (shrink)

An increasing number of arguments for causal pluralism invoke empirical psychological data. Different aspects of causal cognition—specifically, causal perception and causal inference—are thought to involve distinct cognitive processes and representations, and they thereby distinctively support transference and dependency theories of causation, respectively. We argue that this dualistic picture of causal concepts arises from methodological differences, rather than from an actual plurality of concepts. Hence, philosophical causal pluralism is not particularly supported by the empirical data. Serious engagement with cognitive science reveals (...) that the connection between psychological concepts of causation and philosophical notions is substantially more complicated than is traditionally presumed. (shrink)

Culture is the source of fostering the systems of philosophy, the philosophical ideologies/thoughts, and is the condition and material, the origin and condition for development of philosophy. A nation may have no its own system of philosophy, but cannot have no its own culture. Without its own culture, such nation cannot exist. Culture is the necessary conditions, requisites for existence of each nation in both aspects of the material and spiritual life. According to that meaning, culture is also the requisites (...) for the existence and development of the systems of philosophy. Different from the systems of scholarly philosophy in which the thinkers, scientists completely define and create the philosophies, the universals are commonly nameless, appear and exist in the different forms such as: folkverse, folk-speech, in the daily life, in architecture, etc... Cannot determine exactly the time of generating one certain universal, one specific philosophy. But can determine the author and the appearance time of one specific system of philosophy. Such philosophies, abundant and diverse universals have existed for a long time in the life of each national community, however they can exist only side by side, reflect the specific aspects, processes of the social life, but they cannot incorporate into a system of philosophy having an internal structure, a system of reasons/arguments. Their generalization level cannot be high and closely systematical like the systems of scholarly philosophy. The life reality of the nations shows the national cultures cannot be short of philosophies, universals because they are the orientations for their activities, communication and communication. The more and more a culture develops, the bigger and bigger quantity and depth of philosophies get. The farther and farther go towards the modernity, the bigger and bigger quantity, depth and polyhedral diversity of the entire philosophies become. The more and more go backward the ancient past, the smaller and smaller quantity, depth and polyhedral diversity of the entire philosophies become. The most important is that when the system of philosophies increases in both quantity and depth, the other factors in the national culture also develop in both width and depth according to the development orientation of system of philosophies, since how far philosophies develop and expand,they will pave the way, create the direction, form the patterns for actions, communication and activities in order to create new cultural value, new cultural environment, new cultural products. Another aspect in the relationship between culture and philosophy that relates to the philosophies in the national culture is the role of the philosophies for the systems of scholarly philosophy. Only a few nations have the systems of scholarly philosophy. The systems of philosophy are normally at the high argumentative level in comparison with the philosophies in the national culture. The systems of philosophy are also an important component of the national culture. Can say, the doctrines of the scholarly philosophy is the high-leveled crystallization at the high argumentative level presenting the world outlook and the outlook on life of the nation in that era which were refracted through the concrete philosophists’ prism. The philosophies in the national culture are the direct materials for forming the structure for all factors of the systems of scholarly philosophy. On another side, the philosophies can take part more or less by their contents of knowledge, way of thinking, and deduction... into the systems of philosophy in the form of archetype. On the other hand, many philosophies indirectly take part in the doctrines of the scholarly philosophy through influencing the philosophist’s thought, consciousness during the study process, throughthe life experience, through adopting the experiences of the other people, in order to take part into the system of the scholarly philosophy since such system appeared, formed, developed and was expressed to become the systematical argumentation. The national culture is the living environment of the systems of scholarly philosophy, is the place supplying food, drinking water, oxygen and sunlight to those systems of scholarly philosophy. Like fruit trees in the garden being planted in the national culture gardens, the fatter, the richer with appropriate temperature, humidity, light they are, the more they develop with the more fruit. The systems of scholarly philosophy are the products firstly of the national culture that were piled up, distilled and sublimed through talent of the awareness, meditation, skill and spirit combined with the other virtues of the philosophists who have created the systems of scholarly philosophy that were also sprouted, fostered in the national culture. Can say there is no national culture that developed to a certain degree, cannot have the systems of scholarly philosophy. Culture is the spiritual foundation of society, at the same times is the spiritual foundation of philosophy. Culture in the broad sense of the word is the foundation of the existence of the humankind, at the same time is the decisive foundation for the birth, existence, development and perdition of the systems of philosophy.Culture despite the broad sense of the word or the narrow meaning is regularly the motive force of the social development in general in which there is the development of philosophy. A nation without a developed culture cannot have the abundant, diverse philosophies, even cannot have the systems of philosophy. A nation may be enslaved for thousands years, but it has not lost, eliminated its own culture, then that nation can exist as an independent nation. The nations can borrow the systems of philosophy, but cannot borrow the philosophies, moreover cannot borrow the culture in general. That is the relative independence of philosophy with culture and the role of culture for philosophy. (shrink)

Hospital ethics committees have evolved as a response to complicated legal, ethical, and social dilemmas that accompany modern medicine. In the United States, their growth has been augmented by Joint Commission for the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations standards and the Patient Self-Determination Act. There appears to be an implicit presumption that all clinical ethics consultation practices are relatively similar. Finally, there is heightened awareness of the needs for quality standards and assessment of the outcomes of ethics consultations.

Jacques Rancière's theory of democracy shares a great deal with Derrida's. Both view democracy as founded on paradox, define it as the irruption of alterity and, most notably, explain the disjuncti...

This paper examines the roles of indexicals in explicating speakers’ intentions and constructing common ground in the context of a continuum with two extreme endpoints, the intracultural at one end, and the intercultural at the other, within the framework of the socio-cognitive approach proposed and developed by Kecskes and Kecskes and Zhang. Thirteen participants from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds were recruited to represent varying degrees on the intra- and intercultural continuum. They were divided into three groups: American English speakers, (...) speakers from Asian countries, and a group of speakers, each of whom represents linguistically and culturally different countries. Eight extracts were drawn from the data of up to three hours of recordings, including discussions on one topic, and retrospective interviews retrieving the speakers’ intentions for using deixis. The results reveal that the closer the interlocutors were towards the intercultural communicative context endpoint on the continuum, the more they employed four types of indexicals as common ground construction strategies. Those strategies included the explicit manifestation of intentions, clarification, and confirmation of referent identification in actual situational context, elicitation of information, disambiguation and explanation of similar salient specifics in their home culture in an effort to sustain cooperative communication. This study enhances our understanding of different functions of indexicals in interactions on the intra- and intercultural continuum, which resulted from different levels of context interpretation and common ground. (shrink)

The view of human in Confucian philosophy in Pre Qin Dynasty arose not only from the change in socio-economic conditions but also from the deterioration of social morality. Facing that situation, thipkers of this period began to study human to come up with solutions to help the rulers stabilize society. Despite the presence of past studies on the topicand views on people in Confucian philosophy during the Pre Qin period, there (xists gaps for further research. This study attempted to understand (...) through a document review and extensive in-depth research procedure the theoretical underpjnnings of the perspectives on the origin of man, on human nathře, on hụman rples and positions and on educating people in order to develop perfect people and maintain civil order in society. The methodology used was documehtation research and content analysis of the data collected. The document reséafch method was particularly helpful in investigating categorizing and analyzing physical sources, most commonly written documents in the social, public or dígital world. The study found out that the Confucianism represents a legitimate doctrine of the Pre Qin philosophy to build social stability social harmony and peace. The Confucianists of Pre Qin also advocated the need for a personal cultivation, cultivation of the body, family, country, and the whole world, and use it as the basis of the methodology for governing the country. Howeyer, for this purpose, the study recommends that people need to be educated to know the way to be human. (shrink)

Since the emergence of ̳new left‘, bottom up approach to history in the 1960s and 1970s, women‘s and gender history has become a rich field for historians. Ethnic and immigrant women‘s history, as part of this larger movement, has seen its own fair share of growth. This paper examines the emergence of racialized women‘s history in Canada and analyzes the increasingly inclusive and complex integration of this field through the works of notable authors in recent decades.

This paper examines the rise and fall of voluptuousness as a beauty ideal in mid- nineteenth century America. It argues that the rise and fall of the fuller figured woman can be traced to shifting economic, social, and medical beliefs that in turn, affected perceptions about fatness‟ relationship to class, morality, health, and beauty.

How do women's sexual interests change across their ovulatory cycles? This question is one of the most enduring within the human evolutionary behavioral sciences. Yet definitive, agreed-upon answers remain elusive. One empirical pattern appears to be robust: Women experience greater levels of sexual desire and interest when conceptive during their cycles. But this pattern is not straightforward or self-explanatory. We lay out multiple possible, broad explanations for it. Based on selectionist reasoning, we argue that the conditions that give rise to (...) sexual interests during conceptive and non-conceptive phases are likely to differ. Because conceptive and non-conceptive sex have distinct functions, the sexual interests during conceptive and non-conceptive phases are likely to have different strategic ends. We discuss provisional evidence consistent with this perspective. But the exact nature of women's dual sexuality, if it exists, remains unclear. Additional empirical research is needed. But perhaps more crucially, this topic demands additional theory that fruitfully guides and interprets future empirical research. (shrink)

This paper applies a proposed modified stochastic fractal search algorithm (MSFS) for dealing with all constraints of optimal reactive power dispatch (ORPD) and finding optimal solutions for three different cases including power loss optimization, voltage deviation optimization, and L-index optimization. The proposed MSFS method is newly constructed in the paper by modifying three new solution update mechanisms on standard stochastic fractal search algorithm (SSFS). The first modification is to keep only one formula and abandon one formula in the diffusion process (...) while the second modification and the third modification are used in the first update and the second update. In two updates of SSFS, solutions with low quality are updated with high probability while other solutions with high quality do not get chances to be updated. This manner results in the fact that some promising solutions around the high quality solutions can be missed. In order to tackle this restriction, the second modification of MSFS is to newly update the worst solutions in the first update and the best solutions in the second update. In the third modification, all existing formulas of SSFS in the two updates are abandoned and the same new proposed technique is used for updating such solutions in two updates. Compared to SSFS, the three modifications can bring advantages to MSFS such as using smaller number of produced solutions per iteration, spending shorter execution time, finding better optimal solutions, and owning more stable search ability. Furthermore, the proposed method also sees its effectiveness and robustness over SSFS by testing on IEEE 30-bus system and IEEE 118-bus system with three different single objectives for each system. The proposed method can find less minimum, average, and maximum for all the cases in addition to faster search speed. Besides, the proposed method is also compared to other methods such as PSO-based method group, GA-based method group, DE-based method group, and other recent methods. Result comparisons also indicate that the proposed method can be more efficient than almost all these methods with respect to less minimum and smaller values of control parameters. As a result, evaluation of the performance of the proposed method is that it should be used for seeking solutions of ORPD problem. (shrink)

Objective: Caloric vestibular stimulation has traditionally been used as a tool for neurological diagnosis. More recently, however, it has been applied to a range of phenomena within the cognitive neurosciences. Here, we provide an overview of such studies and review our work using CVS to investigate the neural mechanisms of a visual phenomenon - binocular rivalry. We outline the interhemispheric switch model of rivalry supported by this work and its extension to a metarivalry model of interocular-grouping phenomena. In addition, studies (...) showing a slow rate of binocular rivalry in bipolar disorder are discussed, and the relationship between this finding and the interhemispheric switch model is described. We also review the effects of CVS in various clinical contexts, explain how the technique is performed and discuss methodological issues in its application. (shrink)

A few weeks ago, a rural hospital administrator phoned with a question posed by his management team. “If you were going to give us some ethics resources,” he queried, “just exactly what would they...

This paper presents a novel improved firefly algorithm (IFA) to deal the problem of the optimal operation of thermal generating units (OOTGU) with the purpose of reducing the total electricity generation fuel cost. The proposed IFA is developed based on combining three improvements. The first is to be based on the radius between two solutions, the second is updated step size for each considered solution based on different new equations, and the third is to slightly modify a formula producing new (...) solutions by using normally distributed random numbers and canceling uniform random numbers of conventional firefly algorithm (FA). The effect of each proposed improvement on IFA is investigated by executing five benchmark functions and two different systems. The performance of IFA is investigated on six other study cases consisting of different types of objective function and complex level of constraints. The objective function considers single fuel with quadratic form and nonconvex form, and multifuels with the sum of several quadratic and nonconvex functions while a set of constraints taken into account are power loss, prohibited zone, ramp rate limit, spinning reserve, and all constraints in transmission power networks. The obtained results indicate the proposed improvements in terms of high optimal solution quality, stabilization of search ability, and fast convergence compared with FA. In addition, the comparisons with other methods also lead to a conclusion that the proposed method is a very promising optimization tool for systems with quadratic fuel cost function and with complicated constraints. (shrink)

This article is a review and critical evaluation of the New Testament expressions that speak about the faith of Jesus beginning with the much discussed pistis Iesou Christou 'faith of/in Jesus Christ'. It is divided into three parts: (1) statistics of the New Testament expressions regarding the faith of Jesus, (2) historico-exegetical considerations of pistis Iesou Christou as 'faith of Jesus Christ' or 'faith in Jesus Christ', and (3) other key phrases that imply the faith of Christ. This leads to (...) the concluding reflections that underline, among other points, the importance and relevance of recalling the biblical meaning of the term pistis as faith and faithfulness, so as to break the impasse in the debate over the New Testament evidence regarding the faith of Jesus. Precisely in this biblico-theological perspective it is preferable to speak not so much about the faith that Jesus had, as about the fact that, in his radical self-emptying, he has lived our faith (as one of us), so that through our living in faith we can participate in his faith.(Italian). Copyright of Miscellanea Francescana is the property of Pontificia Facolta Teologica S. Bonaventura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (shrink)