Reply to a commentary by Felicitas Holzer and Ignacio Mastroleoon “Models of Consent to Return of Incidental Findings in Genomic Research.”.

An Enquiry into the Nature of Liberation: Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s Paramokṣanirāsakārikāvṛtti, a Commentary on Sadyojyotiḥ’s Refutation of Twenty Conceptions of the Liberated State. Edited and translated by Alex Watson, Dominic Goodall, and S. L. P. Anjaneya Sarma. Collection Indologie, vol. 122. Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry, École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2013. Pp. 508. €38.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the BuddhaA. J. NicholsonRoger-Pol Droit. The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha. Translated by David Streight and Pamela Vohnson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 263.Roger-Pol Droit's recently translated study, The Cult of Nothingness: The Philosophers and the Buddha, is not a book about Buddhism per se. Rather, it is a rich and theoretically (...) sophisticated overview of the reception of Buddhism in Europe that deserves shelf space alongside Wilhelm Halbfass' India and Europe and Raymond Schwab's The Oriental Renaissance. But while some of the figures Droit covers may be familiar from these other studies in the history of orientalism, Droit's book has its own unique narrative thread. Specifically, Droit wishes to examine the once widespread notion that Buddhism is a nihilistic religion, a religion that worships nothingness. His central thesis is that this conception of a nihilistic religion really wasn't about Buddhism at all, but "that Europe... was speaking only of herself." Droit sees in the cult of nothingness the subconscious expression of a crisis of foundations among nineteenth-century European intellectuals, as well as a "hidden laboratory for the theoretical development of European nihilism."Along the way to illustrating this thesis, Droit leads a masterful and extremely entertaining tour of the opinions of early Buddhologists and Eastward-looking philosophers, some of whom have seldom been documented elsewhere. He also provides an enormous bibliography of European writings on Buddhism from 1638 to 1890. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Buddha was often identified as one of many gods belonging to an inchoate and primitive world of mythical concordances. Thus, George Stanley Farber wrote in 1816 that "the primeval Buddha... is the same as Vishnu, or Shiva, or Osiris." Writers in this genre were especially fond of identifying the Buddha with the god Mercury. The sole reason, it seems, was simple linguistic confusion-the word for the planet Mercury in Sanskrit is budha, one letter short of buddha. Furthermore, the preeminent Indologist Sir William Jones posited the identity of the Norse god Woden and Buddha; this was later taken up by A. W. Schlegel in his Indische Bibliothek, and eventually influenced the publication of such unforgettable titles as Holmboe's Traces du Buddhisme en Norvège avant l'introduction du Christianisme. Jones elsewhere hinted that the Buddha might have been of Ethiopian, rather than Indian origin, and this set off another wave of speculation. To reconcile theories of a primordial god named Buddha with new evidence that the Buddha had been a man who had lived at a relatively recent date, for a short time a theory of two Buddhas emerged, first suggested by Antione Augustin Giorgi, and later taken up by Jones himself.Droit sees Hegel as the single figure most responsible for establishing the link between Buddhism and nothingness that endured in the nineteenth-century philosophical imagination. Droit painstakingly charts Hegel's changing attitudes toward Buddhism over the course of his lectures from 1822 to 1831. In spite of, or perhaps because of, Hegel's familiarity with all of the most recent secondary works on Buddhism, he had great difficulty in integrating Buddhism into his philosophical grand [End Page 577] narrative. But his most enduring interpretation of Buddhism came in 1827, when he asserted that for Buddhism, "Saintliness consists in man uniting himself with God, with nothingness, with the absolute in this destruction, in this silence.... Man must make himself nothing." Hegel did not get this idea from his contemporaries, but from an earlier stratum of writing on Buddhism, that of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries. After this portrayal of Buddhism became prevalent in European philosophical circles, an extraordinary debate developed. The notion of a religion that worships nothingness was so contrary to common sense that it threatened the Enlightenment conviction that there existed a single, universal human nature. Jules Barthélmy Saint-Hilaire summed it up quite clearly: "In the presence of a phenomenon so curious and so deplorable... one might ask... if, in those climates where life is so horrific and nothingness is worshiped instead of God, human nature is... (shrink)

I would like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to colleagues whose suggestions have been essential: Karl S. Bottigheimer, Pierre H. Boulle, L. Perry Curtis, Arnold Esch, Marjorie M. Farrar, John R. Gillis, James Joll, Richard F. Kuisel, Alan Lawson, Philip T. Nicholson, James J. Sheehan, Robert Young.

In Wrong Medicine, Lawrence J. Schneiderman, M.D., and Nancy S. Jecker, Ph.D., address issues that have occupied the media and the courts since the time of Karen Ann Quinlan. The authors examine the ethics of cases in which medical treatment is offered--or mandated--even if a patient lacks the capacity to appreciate its benefit or if the treatment will still leave a patient totally dependent on intensive medical care. In exploring these timely issues Schneiderman and Jecker reexamine the doctor-patient relationship and (...) call for a restoration of common sense and reality to what we expect from medicine. They discuss economic, historical, and demographic factors that affect medical care and offer clear definitions of what constitutes futile medical treatment. And they address such topics as the limits on unwanted treatment, the shift from the "Age of Physician Paternalism" to the "Age of Patient Autonomy," health care rationing, and the adoption of new ethical standards. (shrink)

Health care services increasingly face patient populations with high levels of ethnic and cultural diversity. Cultures are associated with distinctive ways of life; concepts of personhood; value systems; and visions of the good that affect illness experience, help seeking, and clinical decision-making. Cultural differences may impede access to health care, accurate diagnosis, and effective treatment. The clinical encounter, therefore, must recognize relevant cultural differences, negotiate common ground in terms of problem definition and potential solutions, accommodate differences that are associated with (...) good clinical outcomes, and manage irresolvable differences. Clinical attention to and respect for cultural difference (a) can provide experiences of recognition that increase trust in and commitment to the institutions of the larger society, (b) can help sustain a cultural community through recognition of its distinct language, knowledge, values, and healing practices, and (c) to the extent that it is institutionalized, can contribute to building a pluralistic civil society. (shrink)

Recent policy developments in the area of livestock husbandry have suggested that, from the perspective of optimizing animal welfare, new animal husbandry systems should be developed that provide opportunities for livestock animals to be raised in environments where they are permitted to engage in “natural behavior.” It is not known whether consumers regard animal husbandry issues as important, and whether they differentiate between animal husbandry and other animal welfare issues. The responsibility for the development of such systems is allocated jointly (...) between farmers, regulators, different actors in the food chain, and consumers. This research focuses on understanding consumer attitudes and preferences regarding the development and introduction of such systems, to ensure that they are acceptable to consumers as well as producers, regulators, and scientists. Consumer perceptions of animal welfare and animal husbandry practices were evaluated using quantitative consumer survey, which focused on two animal husbandry issues – farmed pigs and farmed fish. Following pilot work, 1000 representative Dutch consumers were sampled about their attitudes to either pig or fish husbandry. The results indicated that consumers think about animal welfare in terms of two broad categories related to their health and living environment, but do not think about welfare issues at a more detailed level. Greater concern was expressed about the welfare of pigs compared to fish. Consumer trust in labeling also emerged as an important issue, since consumers need to trust different food chain actors with responsibility for promoting animal welfare, and are reluctant to consider the details of animal husbandry systems. As a consequence, a transparent, enforceable, and traceable monitoring system for animal welfare friendly products is likely to be important for consumers. (shrink)

Recent policy developments in the area of livestock husbandry have suggested that, from the perspective of optimizing animal welfare, new animal husbandry systems should be developed that provide opportunities for livestock animals to be raised in environments where they are permitted to engage in “natural behavior.” It is not known whether consumers regard animal husbandry issues as important, and whether they differentiate between animal husbandry and other animal welfare issues. The responsibility for the development of such systems is allocated jointly (...) between farmers, regulators, different actors in the food chain, and consumers. This research focuses on understanding consumer attitudes and preferences regarding the development and introduction of such systems, to ensure that they are acceptable to consumers as well as producers, regulators, and scientists. Consumer perceptions of animal welfare and animal husbandry practices were evaluated using quantitative consumer survey, which focused on two animal husbandry issues – farmed pigs and farmed fish. Following pilot work, 1000 representative Dutch consumers were sampled about their attitudes to either pig or fish husbandry. The results indicated that consumers think about animal welfare in terms of two broad categories related to their health and living environment, but do not think about welfare issues at a more detailed level. Greater concern was expressed about the welfare of pigs compared to fish. Consumer trust in labeling also emerged as an important issue, since consumers need to trust different food chain actors with responsibility for promoting animal welfare, and are reluctant to consider the details of animal husbandry systems. As a consequence, a transparent, enforceable, and traceable monitoring system for animal welfare friendly products is likely to be important for consumers. (shrink)

Background Informed consent is an integral component of good medical practice. Many researchers have investigated measures to improve the quality of informed consent, but it is not clear which techniques work best and why. To address this problem, we propose developing a core outcome set to evaluate interventions designed to improve the consent process for surgery in adult patients with capacity. Part of this process involves reviewing existing research that has reported what is important to patients and doctors in the (...) informed consent process. Methods This qualitative synthesis comprises four phases: identification of published papers and determining their relevance; appraisal of the quality of the papers; identification and summary of the key findings from each paper while determining the definitiveness of each finding against the primary data; comparison of key themes between papers such that findings are linked across studies. Results Searches of bibliographic databases returned 11,073 titles. Of these, 16 studies met the inclusion criteria. Studies were published between 1996 and 2016 and included a total of 367 patients and 74 health care providers. Thirteen studies collected data using in-depth interviews and constant comparison was the most common means of qualitative analysis. A total of 94 findings were extracted from the primary papers and divided into 17 categories and ultimately 6 synthesised findings related to: patient characteristics, knowledge, communication, the model patient, trust and decision making. Conclusions This qualitative meta-aggregation is the first to examine the issue of informed consent for surgery. It has revealed several outcomes deemed important to capture by patients and clinicians when evaluating the quality of a consent process. Some of these outcomes have not been examined previously in research comparing methods for informed consent. This review is an important step in the development of a COS to evaluate interventions designed to improve the consent process for surgery. Registration The study protocol was registered on the international prospective register for systematic reviews. (shrink)

An alternative notion of an existential quantifier on four-valued Łukasiewicz algebras is introduced. The class of four-valued Łukasiewicz algebras endowed with this existential quantifier determines a variety which is denoted by \. It is shown that the alternative existential quantifier is interdefinable with the standard existential quantifier on a four-valued Łukasiewicz algebra. Some connections between the new existential quantifier and the existential quantifiers defined on bounded distributive lattices and Boolean algebras are given. Finally, a completeness theorem for the monadic four-valued (...) Łukasiewicz predicate calculus corresponding to the dual of the alternative existential quantifier is proven. (shrink)

The literature on public perceptions of, and attitudes towards, nanotechnology used in the agrifood sector is reviewed. Research into consumer perceptions and attitudes has focused on general applications of nanotechnology, rather than within the agrifood sector. Perceptions of risk and benefit associated with different applications of nanotechnology, including agrifood applications, shape consumer attitudes, and acceptance, together with ethical concerns related to environmental impact or animal welfare. Attitudes are currently moderately positive across all areas of application. The occurrence of a negative (...) or positive incident in the agri-food sector may crystallise consumer views regarding acceptance or rejection of nanotechnology products. •Acceptance of agrifood nanotechnology based on perceptions of risk, benefit and ethics.•Attitudes towards nanotechnology in general are currently moderately positive.•Occurrence of a major nanotechnology-related "event" may crystallise consumer attitude. (shrink)