Marshall et al. (2024) identify a potential ethical conflict between the principles of beneficence and respect for patient autonomy when patients refuse to remain in an emergency department (ED) fo...

The question whether God prevails or not is a vital one for many disciplines that are taught in colleges and universities, as well as for each academician personally and intellectually. In addressing this issue, Our Teleological Economic World takes a pathfinding approach by demonstrating at a scholarly level, that economic science joins physical science in affirming an Intelligent Design of the universe. Throughout the manuscript, extending from classical to advanced microeconomic and macroeconomic analyses, the authors establish correlative correspondences with those (...) of physical science. (shrink)

Potential ethical issues can arise during the process of epidemiological classification. For example, unnatural infant deaths are classified as accidental deaths or homicides. Societal sensitivity to the physical abuse and neglect of children has increased over recent decades. This enhanced sensitivity could impact reported infant homicide rates. Infant homicide and accident mortality rates in boys and girls in the USA from 1940 to 2005 were analysed. In 1940, infant accident mortality rates were over 20 times greater than infant homicide rates (...) in both boys and girls. After about 1980, when the ratio of infant accident mortality rates to infant homicide rates decreased to less than five, and the sum of infant accident and homicide rates became relatively constant, further decreases in infant accident mortality rates were associated with increases in reported infant homicide rates. These findings suggest that the dramatic decline of accidental infant mortality and recent increased societal sensitivity to child abuse may be related to the increased infant homicide rates observed in the USA since 1980 rather than an actual increase in societal violence directed against infants. Ethical consequences of epidemiological classification, involving the principles of beneficence, non-maleficence and justice, are suggested by observed patterns in infant accidental deaths and homicides in the USA from 1940 to 2005. (shrink)

The political prophecy ascribed to John of Bridlington consists of twenty-nine poems, each about twenty to thirty lines long in rhyming hexameters; in four manuscripts it is accompanied by a prose commentary, which explains the cryptic codes and interprets the prophecies.1 The Commentary is “signed” in a cryptogram “Ergom,” that is, John Ergom , an Austin friar of the priory at York. Recent scholarly opinion has generally held that the attribution to John of Bridlington, John Thwenge, is a late fiction, (...) as contemporaries would not attribute a “prophecy” to someone who had manifestly witnessed the events that he claimed to foretell; and that Ergom himself was the author of both the Prophecy and the Commentary. Only Paul Meyvaert has dissented from the second view, arguing that Ergom did not make use of the attribution to “Robert the Scribe,” which was attached to the poem in its earliest version; Meyvaert also notes that Ergom's version of the Prophecy lacked verses found in other manuscripts and that Ergom did not have the command of vocabulary shown by the original author. The most recent investigator, Michael J. Curley, has presented both sides of the argument judiciously; in favor of Ergom's authorship he draws attention to the commentator's interpretative skill, which, he argues, could only have come from an author's knowledge of the meaning of the poem. (shrink)

This defense of my essay on Vitoria and Suárez argues that my use of the term “religious war” is based on religious authority at least as much as religious cause, and that Davis’s decision to discuss only Vitoria limits his ability to come to terms with my thesis. To Davis’s argument that for Vitoria war was justified against the Indians only as a necessity of simple justice and to protect the innocent, I argue that his disjunction between simple justice and (...) religious cause is a false one that fails to come to term with the church’s primary reason for approaching Indians, with the Thomistic understanding of the relation between nature and grace and between reason and revelation, and with the distinction between what justice requires in relation to the church and Christians and what it requires for others. I explain finally that my claim is not that the Catholic political rulers readily responded to papal calls for war except when it was in their interest, but that papal war was central to the normative just‐war tradition of the church in canon law and among major theologians like Vitoria and Suárez. (shrink)

Dewey's conception of inquiry is often criticized for misdescribing the complexities of life that outstrip the reach of intelligence. This article argues that we can ascertain his subtle account of inquiry if we read it as a transformation of Aristotle's categories of knowledge: episteme, phronesis, and techne. For Dewey, inquiry is the process by which practical as well as theoretical knowledge emerges. He thus extends the contingency Aristotle attributes to ethical and political life to all domains of action. Knowledge claims (...) become experimental, the result of which makes them revisable in the context of experience. As a result, when we say a person (e.g., scientist, craftsman, or citizen) displays practical wisdom we are reading their judgments within a complex horizon, whose success as judgments require alertness and discernment of salient features in response to an uncertain environment. Contrary to his critics, he seeks to make us attuned to the world's inescapable, and sometimes, tragic complexity. (shrink)

The program of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, formulated primarily by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, calls for relating conceptual change to structural transformations of government, society, and economy in German-speaking Europe. J. G. A. Pocock, of Cambridge, identified the range of alternative and competing political discourses available to early modern writers, while Quentin Skinner, also of Cambridge, treated political theories in terms of those historical contexts and linguistic conventions which both facilitate and circumscribe legitimations of political arrangements, and he (...) described such theories as intentional speech acts. Despite the differences in the German and Anglophone modes of treating political language, however, there are no major obstacles in bringing them together. The GG could profit from Pocock's technique of analysis and comparison in identifying early modern political languages, and the issues raised by Skinner about political thought and theorizing as forms of linguistic action, as well as the effect of general linguistic conventions upon available modes of legitimating political arrangements. The Anglophone mode might profit from considering the GG's non-reductive use of social history in conjunction with that of concepts, and from the GG's systematic use of contemporary sources of language and linguistic definitions. (shrink)

Henüz çok az çalışılmış veba risaleleri on dördüncü yüzyılın ortasındaki Kara Ölüm kıyametinden sonra yüzyıllarca tekrarlayan salgınlarla Batı Avrasya’yı kasıp kavuran kültürel dönüşümlere tanıklık eder. Bu türe Osmanlı katkıları, emperyal-bilimsel erken modernitenin ortaya çıkışını izlememize olanak sağlaması açısından örneklik teşkil eder. Bu makale bilinen en kapsamlı ve yenilikçi İslami veba risalesini, Taşköprîzâde Ahmed’in (ö.1561) Risâletü’ş-Şifâ’sını sunmaktadır. Bu eserde ünlü Osmanlı hezarfeni, hem dinî hem rasyonel argümanlar takdim ederek okült bilimin vebayı önlemede ve tedavi etmede en deneysel yöntem olduğuna dair çok (...) güçlü bir argüman oluşturur. Bu amaçla, eserin teorik ilk yarısını tevekkülü tesebbübe veya kör inancı “bilimsel yöntem”e tercih eden kaderci âlimlerin ve sûfîlerin eleştirisine ayırır; uygulamaya dair olan ikinci yarı ise yaşadığı dönemin tıbbi olarak en etkili bilimsel disiplini olduğunu düşündüğü, genel olarak Batı erken modernitesinin “kozmolojik tahayyül”ünü kapsayan, dünyanın pek çok düşünür ve fail tarafından matematiksel ve dolayısıyla sihirli bir şekilde izlenebilen bir metin olarak görüldüğü Yeni Pisagorcu bir bilim olan harfîliğe (ilm-i hurûf) ayrılmıştır. Okült bilimden hoşnutsuzluğumuza rağmen, Taşköprîzâde burada bir başka erken modern deneyimci olarak adlandırılmalıdır. (shrink)

This entry contains the German text of Reinhart Koselleck's response to the papers given at the meeting in December, 1992 at the German Historical Institute, Washington to commemorate the completion of the lexicon, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Published in English translation, Koselleck's Offene Fragen an die >Geschichtlichen Grundbegriffe<, presented inter alia, the first major confrontation between German Begriffsgeschichte, as practiced by Koselleck, and J.G.A. Pocock, speaking for the Cambridge School dominant in the English-speaking world, Koselleck's German text is accompanied by a Note (...) summarizing his reply to the critique by Pocock, who invoked arguments previously made by Quentin Skinner. Also included are the views on Begriffsgeschichte now held by Skinner and Pocock twenty years later. (shrink)

odel-L¨ ob computability logic. In order to make things relatively self-contained, I sketch the essential ideas of GL, and discuss the significance of its fixpoint theorem. Then I give the algorithm embodied in the program in a little more detail. It should be emphasized that nothing new is presented here — all the theory and methodology are due to others. The main interest is, in a sense, psychological. The approach taken here has been declared in the literature, more than once, (...) to be of theoretical interest only, being too unwieldly in practice. Experimentation shows this is not so provided formulas are not too complicated. A copy of the program can be obtained by ftp from venus.gc.cuny.edu. It is in the subdirectory “/pub/fitting,” under the name “glfixpt.pro.” Log on as “anonymous” and use your full e-mail address as password. If there are difficulties with ftp, send e-mail to the author at mlfl[email protected]. The Prolog code is standard, and should run under any implementation, though minor modifications may be necessary for some systems. These modifications are described in the last section, and also in the program itself. (shrink)

There is an error in the completeness proof for the {λ, =} part of FOIL-K. The error occurs in Section 4, in the text following the proof of Corollary 4.7, and concerns the definition of the interpretation I on relation symbols. Before this point in the paper, for each object variable v an equivalence class v has been defined, and for each intension variable f a function f has been defined. Then the following definition is given for a relation symbol (...) P : v1, v2, . . . , f1, f2, . . . ∈ I(P )(Γ) just in case there are w1, w2, . . . in d(Γ) with wi ∈ vi such that P (w1, w2, . . . , f1, f2, . . .) ∈ Γ. It was pointed out by Torben Brauner that we could have f1 and g1 being the same function, but also have P (w1, w2, . . . , f1, f2, . . .) ∈ Γ without having P (w1, w2, . . . , g1, f2, . . .) ∈ Γ. Our solution is to modify the definition of the model, rather artificially, so that if f and g are the same function, then f and g are syntactically the same intension variable. This is done as follows. First, arbitrarily choose some object variable w, and its corresponding equivalence class w. For each intension variable f we define a disambiguation world ˆ. (shrink)

First-order modal logic, in the usual formulations, is not suf- ficiently expressive, and as a consequence problems like Frege’s morning star/evening star puzzle arise. The introduction of predicate abstraction machinery provides a natural extension in which such difficulties can be addressed. But this machinery can also be thought of as part of a move to a full higher-order modal logic. In this paper we present a sketch of just such a higher-order modal logic: its formal semantics, and a proof procedure (...) using tableaus. Naturally the tableau rules are not complete, but they are with respect to a Henkinization of the “true” semantics. We demonstrate the use of the tableau rules by proving one of the theorems involved in G¨ odel’s ontological argument, one of the rare instances in the literature where higher-order modal constructs have appeared. A fuller treatment of the material presented here is in preparation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.2 (2002) 155-157 [Access article in PDF] Dispensing With the Dynamic Conscious J. Melvin Woody FREUD'S THEORY OF UNCONSCIOUS mental processes depends upon an extremely narrow conception of consciousness. O'Brien and Jureidini rightly focus attention on the limitations of that conception and argue that it is time to dispense with the resultant conception of the unconscious. Of course, scientists often give narrower, technical meanings (...) to ordinary words like matter and space, but in the midst of all the recently revived psychological and philosophical debates about the nature and existence of consciousness, the persistence of Freud's way of distinguishing the two can only breed confusion. Attempts to shore up or defend the dynamic unconscious of psychoanalytic theory by appeal to discussions of unconscious rules and processes in cognitive psychology attests to the potential for confusion thus spawned. In an early issue of this journal, James Phillips and I charted the differences between the neurophysiologic, cognitive, and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious (1995). Like O'Brien and Jureidini, we concluded that the evidence of a cognitive unconscious does not support the postulation of a dynamic unconscious. O'Brien and Jureidini go further in arguing that the two are incompatible. Elsewhere, I have argued that the Freudian unconscious is a hermeneutic myth, the result of a misunderstanding of the nature of interpretation (2003). Because I am in substantial agreement with them and already on record with arguments convergent with theirs on both these fronts, I will focus here on the source of confusion in the dynamic conception of consciousness and on their illuminating exploration of its limitations.Toward the end of his 1915 essay, "The Unconscious," Freud explains that the difference between conscious and unconscious thought hinges on the role of language: What we could permissibly call the conscious idea of the object can now be split up into the idea of the word (verbal idea) and the idea of the thing (concrete idea)... It strikes us all at once that now we know what is the difference between a conscious and an unconscious idea. The two are not, as we supposed, different records of the same content situate in different parts of the mind, nor yet different functional states of cathexis in the same part; but the conscious idea comprises the concrete idea plus the verbal idea corresponding to it, whilst the unconscious idea is that of the thing alone.... Now too, we are in a position to state precisely what it is that repression denies to the rejected idea in the transference neuroses—namely, translation of the idea into words which are to remain attached to the object. The idea which is not put into words or the mental act which has not received hyper-cathexis then remains in the unconscious in a state of repression. (pp. 201-202) This restriction of consciousness to verbal thought processes is not simply an innocent stipulative definition. It has perniciously misleading implications. For one thing, as Antonio Damasio points out in The Feeling of What Happens, it means that all other animals are unconscious for want of any language. Damasio recalls that when he asked what produces consciousness while he was a medical student, [End Page 155] Curiously, I always got the same answer; language did it. I was told that creatures without language were limited to their uncognizant existence but not we fortunate humans because language made us know... The answer sounded too easy, far too simple for something which I then imagined unconquerably complex, and also quite implausible, given what I saw when I went to the zoo. (Damasio 1999, 107) As Damasio notes, the trouble with explaining consciousness as a function of language is not just that it denies awareness of experience to all other animals, thus perpetuating the Cartesian view of animals as automatons, but that for all its complexities, language is far too simple to encompass the full complex range of conscious experience. O'Brien and Jureidini do well to highlight how much of our conscious experience never finds linguistic expression, indeed, how much experience seems to... (shrink)

This paper concerns “human symbolic output,” or strings of characters produced by humans in our various symbolic systems; e.g., sentences in a natural language, mathematical propositions, and so on. One can form a set that consists of all of the strings of characters that have been produced by at least one human up to any given moment in human history. We argue that at any particular moment in human history, even at moments in the distant future, this set is finite. (...) But then, given fundamental results in recursion theory, the set will also be recursive, recursively enumerable, axiomatizable, and could be the output of a Turing machine. We then argue that it is impossible to produce a string of symbols that humans could possibly produce but no Turing machine could. Moreover, we show that any given string of symbols that we could produce could also be the output of a Turing machine. Our arguments have implications for Hilbert’s sixth problem and the possibility of axiomatizing particular sciences, they undermine at least two distinct arguments against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, and they entail that expert systems that are the equals of human experts are possible, and so at least one of the goals of Artificial Intelligence can be realized, at least in principle. (shrink)

Using a cross‐modal semantic priming paradigm, both experiments of the present study investigated the link between the mental representations of iconic gestures and words. Two groups of the participants performed a primed lexical decision task where they had to discriminate between visually presented words and nonwords (e.g., flirp). Word targets (e.g., bird) were preceded by video clips depicting either semantically related (e.g., pair of hands flapping) or semantically unrelated (e.g., drawing a square with both hands) gestures. The duration of gestures (...) was on average 3,500 ms in Experiment 1 but only 1,000 ms in Experiment 2. Significant priming effects were observed in both experiments, with faster response latencies for related gesture–word pairs than unrelated pairs. These results are consistent with the idea of interactions between the gestural and lexical representational systems, such that mere exposure to iconic gestures facilitates the recognition of semantically related words. (shrink)

Using a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, both experiments of the present study investigated the link between the mental representations of iconic gestures and words. Two groups of the participants performed a primed lexical decision task where they had to discriminate between visually presented words and nonwords (e.g., flirp). Word targets (e.g., bird) were preceded by video clips depicting either semantically related (e.g., pair of hands flapping) or semantically unrelated (e.g., drawing a square with both hands) gestures. The duration of gestures (...) was on average 3,500 ms in Experiment 1 but only 1,000 ms in Experiment 2. Significant priming effects were observed in both experiments, with faster response latencies for related gesture–word pairs than unrelated pairs. These results are consistent with the idea of interactions between the gestural and lexical representational systems, such that mere exposure to iconic gestures facilitates the recognition of semantically related words. (shrink)

Reflecting Alan Robinson's fundamental contribution to computational logic, this book brings together seminal papers in inference, equality theories, and logic programming. It is an exceptional collection that ranges from surveys of major areas to new results in more specialized topics. Alan Robinson is currently the University Professor at Syracuse University. Jean-Louis Lassez is a Research Scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Gordon Plotkin is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Contents: Inference. Subsumption, A Sometimes (...) Undervalued Procedure, Larry Wos, Ross Overbeek, and Ewing Lusk. The Markgraf Karl Refutation Procedure, Hans Jurgen Ohlbach and Jorg H. Siekmann. Modal Logic Should Say More than it Does, Melvin Fitting. Interactive Proof Presentation, W. W. Bledsoe. Intelligent Backtracking Revisited, Maurice Bruynooghe. A Science of Reasoning, Alan Bundy. Inductive Inference of Theories from Facts, Ehud Y. Shapiro. Equality. Solving Equations in Abstract Algebras: A Rule-based Survey of Unification, Jean-Pierre Jouannaud and Claude Kirchner. Disunification: A Survey, Hubert Comon. A Case Study of the Completion Procedure: Proving Ring Commutativity Problems, Deepak Kapur and Hantao Zhang. Computations in Regular Rewriting Systems I and II, Girard Huet and JeanJacques Levy. Unification and ML Type Reconstruction, Paris Kanellakis, Harry Mairson, and John Mitchell. Automatic Dimensional Analysis, Mitchell Wand. Logic Programming. Logic Programming Schemes and Their Implementations, Keith Clark. A Near-Horn Prolog for Compilation, Donald Loveland and David Reed. Unfold/Fold Transformations of Logic Programs, P. A. Gardner and J. C. Shepherdson. An Algebraic Representation of Logic Program Computations, Andrea Corradini and Ugo Montanari. Theory of Disjunctive Logic Programs, Jack Minker, Arcot Rajasekar, and Jorge Lobo. Bottom-Up Evaluation of Logic Programs, Jeffrey Naughton and Raghu Ramakrishnan. Absys, the First Logic Programming Language: A View of the Inevitability of Logic Programming, E. W. Elcock. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 76 - 97 This article presents an account of those works, related to conceptual history and historiographical issues, written by the American historian of political thought Melvin Richter. The attention is primarily directed toward the reception of the German historiographical style called “_Begriffsgeschichte_”, and especially on its reception among Anglophone scholars. Therefore, the main objective of the article is to throw light on Richter’s understanding of _Begriffsgeschichte_, and to sum up his efforts (...) to put in contact Koselleck’s “history of concepts” with the works of authors such as Quentin Skinner and John G. A. Pocock, who are associated with the so-called “_Cambridge school contextualists_”. Thus, the aim is to point out their direct thought about _Begriffsgeschichte_, and consequently, to see how they’ve reacted to Richter’s proposals concerning the possibility of adopting that “history of concepts” as the frame for future historical researches. By doing so, and relying mainly on the extensive contributions appeared on the pages of the specialized periodicals, this article highlights some of the principal reactions to the theoretical and practical implications of “conceptual history”; in particular as they are emerging in the midst of what is indeed a recent and still ongoing international debate. Furthermore, the article tries to compare Koselleck’s _Begriffsgeschichte_ with some works of “analytical bibliography”. It is also interesting to note that these bibliographical studies are associated with Cambridge University as well as the historical researches of Skinner and Pocock. (shrink)

Decision making and choices are frequent themes in medical ethics. Game theory is based upon modelled decision making. Game theory, and associated logic traps, may have relevance to the clinical practice of medicine and medical ethics. The “prisoner’s dilemma” is one logic trap from game theory in which “rational” decision making on the part of participating individuals can lead to “suboptimal” situations. An example of such a situation involving brain death is presented and discussed from the perspective of the prisoner’s (...) dilemma. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Foundations For Flow:A Philosophical Model For Studio InstructionKrista RiggsThe need for a new approach to studio instruction becomes evident when the current state of the profession and the effects of typical teaching methods are considered. In a profession with relatively little demand for a large supply of candidates for professional employment, realistically very few undergraduate music performance majors will achieve success as either orchestral players or as soloists. Extreme (...) competitiveness and the political hierarchy common in a typical music studio setting can squelch creativity and hinder a student's possibility to attain optimal experience in performance. Such an environment can pose a threat to a student's self-image and motivation, possibly becoming detrimental to the success of the student in any chosen occupation, whether ultimately within music or outside the profession.1As Roland Persson notes, studio teachers are generally hired primarily for their performance accomplishments and place in the historic lineage of their instrument's pedagogy without much regard for previous training in educational theories.2 With a lack of training in instructional methods or developmental theories, college music teachers tend to conduct lessons in the manner in which they were taught. Thus, little attention may be paid to individual differences or developmental issues.3 Studio instruction has also traditionally been approached [End Page 175] in a maestro-like, authoritarian manner with one-directional commands given as law from master teacher to seemingly subordinate students. Such a manner of teaching may contradict the tendency of creative individuals to show more deviant traits of critical and independent thought, possibly hindering the student's potential for artistic growth.4Many music students tend to gain much of their concept of self-worth based on how they perceive their musical ability to be assessed by their studio instructor.5 A dependency for approval can lead to the pursuit of unachievable perfection that can be detrimental to the emotional development and self-confidence of the student.6 A common focus on a final product in instruction rather than on the creative process of personal and artistic growth can also contribute to the detrimental setting of unrealistic goals and resulting lack of self-esteem in the student. Evaluation of artistically, intellectually, and emotionally developing students against an unattainable perceived aesthetic ideal or in comparison to other students of differing strengths and levels of development can hinder motivation while increasing anxiety, extreme competition, and negative emotional response in the learning experience.7 In a more personalized curriculum that centers on individual strengths and weaknesses through a mentoring approach, each student may be guided to develop the intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual faculties leading to optimal experience. From creative flow and the peak experiences of self-actualization comes intrinsic motivation for students to pursue creativity as a way of life, with further motivation to find moments for artistic expression and personal satisfaction in all aspects of their being.8A new model concerned with the development of the "whole" student as an individual can serve as a philosophical supplement to studio instructors who may not have received much training in developmental issues, educational theories, or related facets of the psychology of learning and performance. Although each aspect of the model can be considered separately, the potential of guiding a student toward the attainment of optimal experience is increased when all aspects are considered according to strengths and weaknesses present in the individual student. Incorporating the theories and ideas in studio instruction may help enhance a student's artistic and personal development while also strengthening a healthy mentoring relationship between teacher and student. While the model presents aspects of psychology alongside developmental and educational theories, the focus remains as a philosophical synthesis of diverse ideas into a unified system with flow at the center. Rather than aiming to deconstruct or refute opposing theories, the model synthesizes supporting ideas. As Estelle Jorgensen notes, the purpose of a synthesis-oriented or "synoptic" model is not so much to argue or refute contrasting views as it is to build upon the supporting theories and ideas of other writers. The "body of thought" serves an explanatory purpose [End Page 176] of the "clarification of terms and exposition... (shrink)