This study provides current data on key questions about retraction of scientific articles. Findings confirm that the rate of retractions remains low but is increasing. The most commonly cited reason for retraction was research error or inability to reproduce results; the rate from research misconduct is an underestimate, since some retractions necessitated by research misconduct were reported as being due to inability to reproduce. Retraction by parties other than authors is increasing, especially for research misconduct. Although retractions are on average (...) occurring sooner after publication than in the past, citation analysis shows that they are not being recognised by subsequent users of the work. Findings suggest that editors and institutional officials are taking more responsibility for correcting the scientific record but that reasons published in the retraction notice are not always reliable. More aggressive means of notification to the scientific community appear to be necessary. (shrink)

In the modal literature various notions of completeness have been studied for normal modal logics. Four of these are defined here, viz. (plain) completeness, first-order completeness, canonicity and possession of the finite model property — and their connections are studied. Up to one important exception, all possible inclusion relations are either proved or disproved. Hopefully, this helps to establish some order in the jungle of concepts concerning modal logics. In the course of the exposition, the interesting properties of first-order definability (...) and preservation under ultrafilter extensions are introduced and studied as well. (shrink)

Avez-vous remarqué que dans le monde tout ce qui compte va par quatre? La musique : timbre, harmonie, rythme et mélodie. Le repérage : altitude, latitude, longitude et datation. Les quatre aspects de la cause: pour quoi, avec quoi, par quoi et selon quoi? Les forces de la nature : interactions faible, forte, électromagnétique et gravitationnelle... Les vingt-quatre particules élémentaires qui constituent la matière une famille de six leptons associée à trois familles de quarks. Et aussi la logique d'un discours (...) nuancé : oui, non, oui et non, ni oui ni non. Pourquoi quatre est-il partout? La notion de quaternité apporte une réponse à la fois simple et surprenante à cette question. A partir d'exemples tirés de l'expérience humaine, les auteurs en dégagent les aspects structurels et s'en servent pour approfondir le sens des mathématiques et de divers autres domaines liés à la genèse de la connaissance. Il s'agit d'une nouvelle épistémologie, fondée sur un modèle logique qui complète celui d'Aristote. (shrink)

Roman Catholic moral theology follows a centuries-old tradition of moral reflection. Contemporary Roman Catholic moral theory applies these traditional arguments to the realm of medical ethics, including the issues of active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Unavoidable moral limits on licit medical intervention sometimes require that the moral duty to treat, cede to the duty to cease treatment when measures become more harmful than beneficial to the patient. This does not reduce the need for the compassionate use of palliative care in (...) response to suffering. However, it does mean that rather than being excessively committed to maintaining mere biological human life, or actively seeking death, that we learn a sober realism about the limits of human life. Catholic moral analysis examines an act objectively, both in its relation to the agent and as a material event in the world. This allows both the virtuous or vicious intentions of the agent and the effects of the action to be included in its moral evaluation. Thus, Catholic moral analysis is both quasi-deontological and quasi-consequentialist. Objectively, active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, as acts of deliberate killing, are seen as repugnant, in that they fail to incarnate a benign inner intention or to form an agent in virtue. Catholic moral theology is extremely skeptical that an act of intending death directly can be consonant with a sincere compassion for the dying, suffering person and views it as a direct negation of the precious gift of human life. (shrink)

Much ink has been spilt in consideration of the once pervasive reliance on military metaphors to depict the relationships between science and religion in the nineteenth century. This has resulted in historically sensitive treatments of secularization; and the realization that the relationship between science and religion was not a bloody war between intellectual nation states, but a protracted divorce of former partners. Moreover, historians of science have been encouraged to throw off the yoke of the internalism–externalism debate, and to explore (...) the cultural boundaries that impinged upon practitioners of a natural knowledge of the world. Within the historiography of nineteenth-century science, this has resulted in many new perspectives on science and natural knowledge in relation to cultural control and authority. (shrink)

The most important events of the immediately preceding period--1945-1954--were attempts at general readings of Descartes' thought by Jean Laporte, Fernand Alquié, and Martial Guéroult. In Le Rationalisme de Descartes Laporte struck sharply at stereotype by insisting that Descartes was not a rationalist. Deftly exploiting such issues as the soul-body union, the knowledge of the infinite and the faith-reason relationship, he draws the conclusion that "... if it were necessary to characterize Descartes' philosophy by one name, the name which would fit (...) it best, all paradox aside, would be empiricism, radical and integral empiricism." The readings of both Alquié and Gueroult are carefully attuned to the development in Descartes' thought. In La Découverte Métaphysique de l'Homme chez Descartes, the former maintains that this development is dominated by the progressive discovery of the meaning of man. Guéroult takes a remark from the Discourse on Method as key to the unfolding of Descartes' thought. The "long chains of reasons, so simple and easy, which geome- tricians use to arrive at their most difficult demonstrations..." are the central inspiration of Descartes selon l'Ordre des Raisons. Cartesianism, it is maintained, developed primarily by deductive movement along these chains. (shrink)