Recent work has defended “Euclidean” theories of set size, in which Cantor’s Principle (two sets have equally many elements if and only if there is a one-to-one correspondence between them) is abandoned in favor of the Part-Whole Principle (if A is a proper subset of B then A is smaller than B). It has also been suggested that Gödel’s argument for the unique correctness of Cantor’s Principle is inadequate. Here we see from simple examples, not that Euclidean theories of set (...) size are wrong, but that they must be either very weak and narrow or largely arbitrary and misleading. (shrink)

This volume aims to contextualize the development and reception of Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological idealism by placing him in dialogue with his most important interlocutors – his mentors, peers, and students. Husserl’s “turn” to idealism and the ensuing reaction to Ideas I resulted in a schism between the early members of the phenomenological movement. The division between the realist and the transcendental phenomenologists is often portrayed as a sharp one, with the realists naively and dogmatically rejecting all of Husserl’s written work after (...) the Logical Investigations. However, this understanding of the trajectory of the phenomenological movement ignores the extensive and intricate contours of the idealism-realism debate. In addition to helping us better interpret Husserl’s attempts to defend his idealism, reconsidering the idealism-realism debate elucidates the relationship and differences between Husserl's phenomenology and the broader landscape of early 20th century German philosophy, particularly the Munich phenomenologists and the Neo-Kantians. The contributions to this volume reconsider many of the early interpretations and critiques of Husserl, inviting readers to assess the merits of the arguments put forward by his critics while also shedding new light on their so-called “misunderstandings” of his idealism. This text should be of interest to researchers working in the history of phenomenology and Husserlian studies. (shrink)

Religions often operate as comprehensive worldviews, attempting to answer the deepest existential questions that human beings can ask: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going after I die? How should I live? Often ethical systems are embedded and justified within these broader narratives. Inevitably, the clinical ethics consultant will encounter and engage with religiously based ethical systems. In this issue, the authors reflect seriously and deeply on the implications of such engagement.

This paper focuses on the most common state policy responses to the opioid crisis, dividing them into six broad categories. Within each category we highlight the rationale behind the group of policies within it, discuss the details and support for individual policies, and explore the research base behind them. The objective is to better understand the most prevalent state responses to the opioid crisis.

Clear and careful thinking is an indispensable aid in the pursuit of answers to the difficult ethical question faced by clinicians, patients, and families. In this issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy devoted to issues in clinical ethics, the authors engage in this enterprise by reflecting on morally good medical decision making, conscientious objection, presumed consent in organ donation, the permissibility of surrogate decision making, and the failure of legislative limits on the scope of euthanasia in Belgium.

Should those who work on ethics welcome or resist moves to open access publishing? This paper analyses arguments in favour and against the increasing requirement for open access publishing and considers their implications for bioethics research. In the context of biomedical science, major funders are increasingly mandating open access as a condition of funding and such moves are also common in other disciplines. Whilst there has been some debate about the implications of open-access for the social sciences and humanities, there (...) has been little if any discussion about the implications of open access for ethics. This is surprising given both the central role of public reason and critique in ethics and the fact that many of the arguments made for and against open access have been couched in moral terms. In what follows I argue that those who work in ethics have a strong interest in supporting moves towards more open publishing approaches which have the potential both to inform and promote richer and more diverse forms of public deliberation and to be enriched by them. The importance of public deliberation in practical and applied ethics suggests that ethicists have a particular interest in the promotion of diverse and experimental forms of publication and debate and in supporting new, more creative and more participatory approaches to publication. (shrink)

This paper argues against considering incidental fndings as potential benefts of research when assessing the social value of proposed research, determining the appropriateness of a study's risk/beneft ratio, and identifying and disclosing the risks and benefts of participation during informed consent. The possibility of generating IFs should be disclosed during informed consent as neither a risk nor beneft, but as a possible outcome collateral to participation. Whether specifc IFs will be disclosed when identifed is a separate question whose answer is (...) material to determining whether IFs constitute a risk or a potential indirect beneft of participation. Finally, three types of IF should be distinguished and treated diferently during informed consent: those that will be routinely generated , those that can reasonably be characterized in terms of their nature and frequency of generation , and those of unpredictable nature and frequency that can be characterized only in general terms. Research protocols should provide a rationale for sharing or not sharing IFs of these three types with participants. Regulatory review of such plans should not, however, be confused with regarding IFs as potential benefts when assessing the study's risk/beneft ratio or merit. (shrink)

Sylvia Wynter, novelist, dramatist, cultural critic, and philosopher, has called for a new poetics that “will have to take as its referent subject, that of the concrete individual human subject”. By “referent subject” Wynter means a shared sense, poetic in nature, that can nevertheless exclude many who are also expected to live it. Man, Wynter argues, as a referent subject first appeared in the Italian Renaissance. As Walter Mignolo has argued, this way of representing an individual is made visual in (...) Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a man of perfect... (shrink)

It is well known that when resolution occurs in the stichic iambics and trochaics of tragedy word-end is not found between the two shorts so produced: w or, more accurately, that the first short of resolution must not be the last syllable of a polysyllabic word. Moreover, the syllables in resolution most often form part of the same word as the following short or anceps, e.g.: Ion 1143.

Can the view that medical science is more important than the individual properly persuade recruitment to trials? This paper considers the nature and interests of the person and their relationships to the concepts of science and society; and analyses a conception of value used to balance the interests of science and research subjects. The implications of arguments opposing the primacy of the individual are set out to indicate their implausibility; while the primacy principle is described to show its necessity in (...) any moral society. Finally, the importance of fully informed consent to participate is explained with the requirement that the individual human life provide the criteria of moral value for human life. (shrink)

The possibility of generating incidental findings — in both research and clinical contexts — has long been regarded as a risk of these enterprises. Should incidental findings in research also be regarded as potential benefits? At first glance, it would seem they ought to be. After all, in particular circumstances or given a particular set of values, any piece of information can be beneficial. Therefore, it may seem incoherent or unduly paternalistic to regard IFs only as risks. Moreover, developments in (...) science and technology increasingly transform what was once of uncertain meaning and dubious value into information that is likely to have clear meaning and potential personal value, if not obvious clinical utility. For these reasons, it would seem that in the future, IFs should be treated as potential benefits in the design and regulation of research. (shrink)

In this response article, we challenge a core assumption that lies at the centre of a round table discussion regarding the Pharmacogenetics to Avoid Loss of Hearing trial. The round table regards a genetic test for a variant that increases the risk of deafness if a carrier is given the antibiotic gentamicin. The idea is that rapid testing can identify neonates at risk, providing an opportunity to prevent giving an antibiotic that might cause deafness. We challenge the assumption that a (...) positive test unequivocally guides antibiotic choice because, aside from the risk of deafness, all antibiotics for neonatal sepsis are equivalent. We argue that this assumption is faulty and has particularly troubling moral consequences. We claim that giving an alternative to gentamicin is potentially providing inferior treatment and thereby may increase the risk of death. Parents and doctors are faced with a terrible choice as a result of positive point-of-care testing : give gold-standard treatment and risk deafness or give second line care and risk death. While we do not indicate an answer to this choice, what we do argue is that such a deep and difficult choice is one that may make parents wish genetic testing was never undertaken, and therefore, contra some authors in the round table, provides a reason to gain specific consent for POCT. (shrink)

In their paper ’Too much medicine: not enough trust?' Zoë Fritz and Richard Holton explore the connection between trust and overtreatment and overinvestigation. Whilst their paper is insightful, here I argue that much more could be made of a doctor’s trust and how this exacerbates overtreatment and overinvestigation. By taking Fritz and Holton’s view of trust as having ‘our best interests at heart’ as my starting point, I argue that doctor’s do not always trust that patients or the system has (...) their interests at heart and so use overtreatment and overinvestigation to protect themselves. I also point to the tensions created by a lack of trust on the doctor’s part as a focal point for much needed sustained ethical analysis. (shrink)

The behavior of some systems is non-computable in a precise new sense. One infamous problem is that of the stability of the solar system: Given the initial positions and velocities of several mutually gravitating bodies, will any eventually collide or be thrown off to infinity? Many have made vague suggestions that this and similar problems are undecidable: no finite procedure can reliably determine whether a given configuration will eventually prove unstable. But taken in the most natural way, this is trivial. (...) The state of a system corresponds to a point in a continuous space, and virtually no set of points in space is strictly decidable. A new, more pragmatic concept is therefore introduced: a set is decidable up to measure zero (d.m.z.) if there is a procedure to decide whether a point is in that set and it only fails on some points that form a set of zero volume. This is motivated by the intuitive correspondence between volume and probability: we can ignore a zero-volume set of states because the state of an arbitrary system almost certainly will not fall in that set. D.m.z. is also closer to the intuition of decidability than other notions in the literature, which are either less strict or apply only to special sets, like closed sets. Certain complicated sets are not d.m.z., most remarkably including the set of known stable orbits for planetary systems (the KAM tori). This suggests that the stability problem is indeed undecidable in the precise sense of d.m.z. Carefully extending decidability concepts from idealized models to actual systems, we see that even deterministic aspects of physical behavior can be undecidable in a clear and significant sense. (shrink)

This paper investigates what “free-range” eggs are available for sale in supermarkets in Australia, what “free-range” means on product labelling, and what alternative “free-range” offers to cage production. The paper concludes that most of the “free-range” eggs currently available in supermarkets do not address animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and public health concerns but, rather, seek to drive down consumer expectations of what these issues mean by balancing them against commercial interests. This suits both supermarkets and egg producers because it does (...) not challenge dominant industrial-scale egg production and the profits associated with it. A serious approach to free-range would confront these arrangements, and this means it may be impossible to truthfully label many of the “free-range” eggs currently available in the dominant supermarkets as free-range. (shrink)

The most common definitions of popular culture suffer from a presentist bias and cannot be applied to pre-industrial and pre-capitalist societies. A survey reveals serious conceptual difficulties as well. We may, however, gain insight in two ways. 1) By moving from a Marxist model to a more Weberian approach . 2) By looking to Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” and Danto’s and Dickie’s “Institutional Theory of Art,” and defining popular culture as “unauthorized culture.”.

The role of the REC is to aim for a fair and effective trial protocol and to provide to potential trial subjects sufficient information to allow them to make a rational decision on whether to participate in it or not. The members are medical specialists and members of the public together fitted to these tasks. In his paper ‘Illegality in the research protocol: the duty of research ethics committees under the 2001 Clinical Trials Directive’ Roy-Toole has made a number of (...) suggestions on how to improve the function of the RECs, but he has not given persuasive evidence to show that the RECs themselves are the most effective bodies to implement possible legal requirements to improve medical research. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the REC and its political context to clarify the process of ethical review. The examples initially considered are taken from a Research Ethics Review editorial to develop the social explanation of the membership and function of a research ethics committee. It is suggested that the management and administration of medical matters are not always best understood solely in medical terms. The conclusion of the paper is that the larger political relationships determine the membership and function of (...) the research ethics committee. The REC is defined as the political mechanism for formally socializing medical research and its lay members as similarly socializing the REC. (shrink)

Excerpt from Talks on Wrote This In The discussion of the doctrine of Concentration presented in this book is the outcome of work done in the Cook County Normal School. In 1883 I resigned my position as one of the Supervisors of the Boston schools in order to come into closer range and con tact with children's minds. The work done in Quincy was a slight beginning of something far better. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of (...) rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Society and social structures play an important role in the formation and evaluation of concepts and practices in clinical ethics. This is evident in the ways the authors in this issue explore a wide range of arguments and concepts in clinical ethics including moral distress and conscience based practice, phenomenological interview techniques and gender dysphoria, continuous deep sedation (CDS) at the end of life, the notion of patient expertise, ethically permissible medical billing practices, the notion of selfhood and patient centered (...) care in dementia patients, and the definition of minimal risk as used in research regulations. (shrink)

: From 1902 onward, Peirce viewed esthetics, ethics, and logic as "normative sciences," interconnected spheres of philosophical inquiry that constitute his main work in value theory. The normative sciences provide the basis for a theoretical investigation of questions of value detached from practical interests. Because the normative sciences maintain Peirce's well-known insistence on realism, they set his pragmaticism apart from the more "nominalistic" pragmatism of James and Dewey. The paper aims to clarify Peirce's idea of the normative sciences, to show (...) how his realism applies in the sphere of value, and to explore his views on the proper relation between theory and practice. The concluding section suggests examples of how we might understand Peirce's rich and innovative concept of normative esthetics.Resumo: De 1902 em diante, Peirce considerava a estética, a ética e a lógica como "ciências normativas", esferas interconexas de inquirição filosófica que constituem seu principal trabalho em teoria do valor. As ciências normativas fornecem a base para uma investigação teorética de questões sobre valor independentes de interesses práticos. Porque as ciências normativas mantém a notória insistência de Peirce no realismo, elas colocam seu pragmaticismo à parte do pragmatismo mais "nominalista" de James e Dewey. O artigo almeja esclarecer a idéia de Peirce das ciências normativas, mostrar como seu realismo se aplica à esfera do valor, e explorar suas visões da própria relação entre ciência e prática. A seção concludente sugere exemplos de como podemos entender o rico e inovador conceito peirciano de estética normativa. (shrink)

The materials consist of a co-authored, peer-reviewed book, a co-authored, peer-reviewed book chapter, 30 single authored peer-reviewed journal papers, and 15 co-authored peer-reviewed journal papers, of which I was the lead author on 8 papers. There are 32 papers from Australasian journals, at least two of which are also regarded as international. 22 papers are published in international journals. The co-authored book was favourably described in his foreword by Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia. The refereed chapter (...) is contained in an issue of the Australian Legal Monographs series. The papers constitute a body of work in Australasian and international contexts in a field which is relatively new to academic achievement, broadly understood as philosophy of medicine, medical ethics and health law. The journals in which the papers are published include two of the most highly regarded bioethics journals in the world, Australia’s leading medical journal, the two leading world medical education journals, Australia’s leading journal for health and medical law, and the Torts Law Journal, an Australian journal which is recognized as one of the world’s leading journals in the field of tort law. (shrink)