This study’s objective was to understand Colombian adolescents’ experiences and preferences regarding access to sexual and reproductive health services (SRHS), either alone or accompanied. A mixed-method approach was used, involving a survey of 812 participants aged eleven to twenty-four years old and forty-five semi-structured interviews with participants aged fourteen to twenty-three. Previous research shows that adolescents prefer privacy when accessing SRHS and often do not want their parents involved. Such findings align with the longstanding tendency to frame the ethical principle (...) of autonomy as based on independence in decision-making. However, the present study shows that such a conceptualization and application of autonomy does not adequately explain Colombian adolescent participants’ preferences regarding access to SRHS. Participants shared a variety of preferences to access SRHS, with the majority of participants attaching great importance to having their parents involved, to varying degrees. What emerges is a more complex and non-homogenous conceptualization of autonomy that is not inherently grounded in independence from parental involvement in access to care. We thus argue that when developing policies involving adolescents, policymakers and health professionals should adopt a nuanced “relational autonomy” approach to better respect the myriad of preferences that Colombian (and other) adolescents may have regarding their access to SRHS. (shrink)

This paper explores some key discrepancies between two sets of normative requirements applicable to the research use of personal data and human biological materials: the data protection regime which follows the application of the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, and the Declaration of Helsinki, CIOMS guidelines and other research ethics regulations. One source of this controversy is that the GDPR requires consent to process personal data to be clear, concise, specific and granular, freely given and revocable and therefore has (...) challenged the concept of ‘broad consent’, which has been widely applied in the context of biobanking. Another source of controversy is the interplay between regulations of research ethics and protection of personal data related to the secondary use of personal data and biological materials. In this case, the GDPR ‘research condition’ provides an alternative to re-consent for the use of previously collected personal data and biological materials. Although the mentioned controversies have been raised in the legal literature, they have not been explicitly addressed from the research ethics perspective. Should consent be regarded as a priority legal basis for personal data processing in health data research? Can broad consent still be a suitable legal ground for biobanking? What should be the role of research ethics provisions that differ from the GDPR standards, and what should be the role and function of research ethics committees in the changing environment of health data research? These are the ongoing controversies to be explored in the paper. (shrink)

Semantic Scholar extracted view of "Animal Welfare and Rights: V. Zoos and Zoological Parks" by J. Dunlap et al.

The double slit experiment for a massive scalar particle is described using intuitionistic logic with quantum real numbers as the numerical values of the particle's position and momentum. The model assigns physical reality to single quantum particles. Its truth values are given open subsets of state space interpreted as the ontological conditions of a particle. Each condition determines quantum real number values for all the particle's attributes. Questions, unanswerable in the standard theories, concerning the behaviour of single particles in the (...) experiment are answered. (shrink)

The verb “to conjure” is a complex one, for it includes in its standard definition a great range of possible actions or operations, not all of them equivalent, or even compatible. In its most common usage, “to conjure” means to perform an act of magic or to invoke a supernatural force, by casting a spell, say, or performing a particular ritual or rite. But “to conjure” is also to influence, to beg, to command or constrain, to charm, to bewitch, to (...) move or convey, to imagine, to visualize, to call to mind, or to remember. —Rachael DeLue 2012, para 1. When we create with our Brown hands, feminine energy, and full spirits, we conjure. To exist, survive, and thrive in these bodies is a continuous act of conjuring. Our walks conjure. Our smiles conjure. Our tears conjure. Our laughs conjure. Our words conjure. Our artworks are conjurings. We, a Black/Filipina-American woman, a Dominican-American, and a Black-American woman, are guided by our solidarity with one another and all other Black and Brown female identifying persons whose raced and gendered subjectivities exist both inside and outside of colonization, white supremacy, and patriarchy. We bring to life our colored imaginations and curiosities, and share them with the world. We are united by our need for safety, autonomy as beings, dissolution of trauma, and desire to ask, “What would happen if I…?” Imaginative, curious Women of Color (WoC) founded the underground railroad, guided captured Africans and Tainos to the mountains, ignited the Civil Rights Movement, organized laborers and immigrants, birthed the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, conceived the #MeToo Movement, and so much more. Like our kindred counterparts, we have an unrelenting urge to examine, question, wonder, desire, speak to, lead, be curious, and “conjure.” As practicing artists and art educators, our critical arts-based practices are grounded in intersectional feminisms like Womanism, Black Feminist Theory, and Chicana Feminist Theory, which allow us to do these very things. (shrink)

While there has been an increase of Black women faculty in higher education institutions, the academy writ large continues to exploit, discriminate, and uphold institutionalized gendered racism through its policies and practices. Black women have navigated, negotiated, and learned how to thrive from their respective standpoint and epistemologies, traversing the academy in ways that counter typical narratives of success and advancement. This edited volume bridges together foundational and contemporary intergenerational, interdisciplinary voices to elucidate Black feminist epistemologies and praxis. Chapters highlight (...) relevant research, methodologies, and theoretical or conceptual frameworks; share experiences as doctoral students, current faculty, and academic administrators; and offer lessons learned and strategies to influence systemic and institutional change for, with, and alongside Black women. (shrink)

1. The Commentariolum Petitionis is not in the Codex Mediceus of Cicero's correspondence with his brother Quintus, but it appears at the end of the letters to Quintus in the other manuscripts. It starts in the normal manner of a letter and is, or purports to be, a collection of tips on canvassing set in the particular context of M. Cicero's consular candidature in 64: a composition of his brother Quintus. It is printed as no. 12 in Tyrrell and Purser's (...) collection of Cicero's Letters. (shrink)

F. H. George is Professor of Cybernetics at Brunel University in England. His book comprises eight chapters originally developed as lectures for a non-specialist audience. He points out the position of computer science among the sciences, explains its aims, procedures, and achievements to date, and speculates on its long-term implications for science in particular and society in general. Among the topics discussed are biological simulation and organ replacement, automated education, and the new philosophy of science. Each chapter concludes with a (...) brief summary. George's treatment of the technical details of his speciality is both illuminating and readable, thus serving as an excellent primer on one of the new technology's most important components. His wider forays into philosophy, economics, sociology, and religion are less happy, however; and unfortunately they take up a large part of the text. In general, they reveal that George identifies the methods of human advancement with the methods of the natural sciences in an equation whose rigidity would make even B. F. Skinner blush. Yet, the reader cannot claim that he was not forewarned; for in the introduction, D. J. Stewart, Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association, suggests that the current "swing of interest among young people away from the physical and biological sciences and towards the behavioural and social sciences... represents a symptom of disillusionment with science and technology and an attempted escape into irrationality."--J. M. V. (shrink)

This volume consists of seven contributions to a symposium held in 1970 to commemorate the centennial of Saint John's University. Carlo Giacon and Bernard Cohen explicate the relationship of philosophy and modern science. Joseph Owens and John E. Smith treat the question of God as it is posed in philosophy today. Richard McKeon interrelates humanism, civility, and culture; while Vernon Bourke evaluates humanism as a possible basis for moral philosophy. Finally, Paul Ramsey offers some pithy comments on the present trend (...) which abhors man's irreverence for the non-human environment but waxes enthusiastic over the prospect of man's limitless self-modification. Though these papers are brief, for the most part they are extensively footnoted; and thus they provide a handy survey of current thinking on the indicated issues.--J. M. V. (shrink)

In this, his first book, originally published in 1926, Henry Nelson Wieman sets forth a view on the relationship of religious experience and scientific method which in substance he has maintained ever since. According to Wieman, our knowledge of the concrete world consists of immediate sensuous experience as interpreted through some set of concepts. Religious experience is the richest form of immediate sensuous experience. It is our awareness of God, who is as much an object of experience as are tree (...) and hill and stone. And scientific method is the systematic procedure by which the conceptual network for interpreting immediate sensuous experience is clarified and corrected, with the experience-concept compound thus becoming "science." Religious experience, therefore, receives its most adequate interpretation in science; while science, in turn, receives its most stimulating input from religious experience. In principle, the highest of the individual sciences is theology; in fact, however, the very complexity of religious experience and the difficulty of distinguishing it clearly from other types of immediate sensuous experience have prevented more than merely minimal progress in achieving a truly scientific theology. On the whole our ideas about God are marked by confusion and controversy, therefore, despite the fact that some of these notions probably are true. Wieman’s book serves as an excellent example of the liberal thought which dominated much of theology and philosophy-of-religion during the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. The religious thinker with a liberal perspective conceives his primary challenge as developing a scientifically acceptable interpretation of religious experience, taking that experience itself as being obvious and almost universally recognized. One need not be particularly well read to know that current judgments regarding the obviousness of religious experience are hardly so sanguine, however, and that the religious thinker typical of our own age therefore conceives his primary challenge quite differently.—J. M. V. (shrink)

Butchvarov is chairman of the department of philosophy at the University of Iowa. His book, a contribution to a new series, the Northwestern University Publications in Analytical Philosophy, deals with "the conceptual foundations of epistemology." It is divided into four main parts. The first undertakes an account of the general concept of knowledge. The second treats the objects of a priori knowledge; the third, the nature of primary a posteriori knowledge. The fourth part regards nondemonstrative inference and the nature of (...) derivative knowledge in general. The focus of the book is upon fundamental epistemic concepts rather than such particular issues as knowledge of the future, of bodies, of other minds, etc. Butchvarov urges that such specialized problems be treated only after the general conceptual framework has been investigated, lest one's common-sense opinions on the former unduly influence his philosophical conclusions as to the latter. For the inherent demands of the discipline itself must be respected: "In philosophy, as in any other purely theoretical discipline, it is better to be wrong as the result of inquiry and argument than to be right as the result of mere conviction." One of the author's central conclusions concerns evidential criteria. One unquestionable criterion of evidence is the impossibility of mistake, the "demonstrative" criterion. Is there, in addition, any "nondemonstrative" criterion of evidence, with the consequent possibility of nondemonstrative derivative knowledge or at least nondemonstrative rational belief? While not ruling out the possibility of such a criterion, Butchvarov judges that at least one has not yet been brought forth. Particular criteria proposed as nondemonstrative, such as inductive and behavioral, either presuppose the demonstrative criterion or else lack intelligible content. More generally, the nondemonstrative criterion either would or would not possess something in common with the demonstrative criterion, such that both could be understood as species of the same genus, "criterion of evidence." But no successful attempt has thus far been made in showing just what this shared trait might be; and the thesis that there can be multiple criteria of evidence without any generic commonality equivocates on the very notion of evidence. It follows, therefore, that knowledge and rational belief are much more restricted than one would ordinarily surmise. This book manifests both the scholar's mastery of his field and the teacher's concern for clear, well-structured presentation. It reads well, employs good examples, and includes the all-important index.--J. M. V. (shrink)

Anders Nygren is widely known among English-speaking readers for his subtle and scholarly analysis of the forms of love, Agape and Eros, first published in 1930. Important facets of his far-ranging thought, however, have remained largely inaccessible to those who do not read Swedish. The present volume is a significant step in reducing that inaccessibility. Nygren's work is treated by seventeen different contributors in essays grouped under the following headings: Philosophy of Religion, Motif Research, The Meanings of Love, Systematic Theology, (...) Ethics, and Cultural and Ecumenical Concerns. Yet the book is more than merely a Festschrift. Over ten years in preparation, it aims at criticism as well as interpretation; and it includes an introductory "intellectual autobiography" by Nygren himself, a concluding response by Nygren to each of his critics, and a complete bibliography chronicling the 372 items published by Nygren from 1918 through 1970. Nygren's investigations fall on both sides of the line between philosophy and theology. The interest which unifies these inquiries is the philosophy of religion. "It is above all in the philosophy of religion that the great decisions are finally made." Nygren's earliest work was an attempt to establish the philosophy of religion on a purely scientific basis. It was in this regard that he developed his characteristic method of "motif research." Just as the supreme theoretical, aesthetic, and ethical categories are the true, the beautiful, and the good, respectively, so the supreme religious category is the eternal. All these categories are merely formal, however, and one must turn to the particular for content. Now, content in the theoretical domain consists of factual relationships; but content in the remaining three, "atheoretical," domains consists of the values or "fundamental motifs" which have been chosen from among a limited number of basic alternatives by a given historical group. The scholar forms a hypothesis regarding the fundamental motifs of the group in question; and if this hypothesis is verified by historical research, it then serves as a principle for organizing additional data concerning the group. Thus, the philosopher-historian of religion studies groups in an effort to determine their answers to the question, "What is the eternal?" It is chiefly in this domain that Nygren has applied his method, concluding, for example, that "agape" and "eros" are the characteristic Christian and Greek answers, respectively, to the fundamental religious question. Nygren maintains that this approach provides the means for treating the religious question systematically while simultaneously respecting the vast historical diversity of specific religious content. Just as the method of motif research is central to Nygren's work, so the discussion of that method and its applications constitutes, in effect, the central matter of this book. The project is carried off well. Nygren's final commentary is especially welcome, confirming or correcting positions presented by the contributors as his, and accepting or rejecting positions advanced by the contributors as their own.--J. M. V. (shrink)

A new approach to landscape ecology involves the application of the eco-field hypothesis and the General Theory of Resources. In this study, we describe the putative eco-field of bark beetles as a spatial configuration with a specific meaning-carrier for every organism-resource interaction. Bark beetles are insects with key roles in matter and energy cycles in coniferous forests, which cause significant changes to forestry landscapes when outbreaks occur. Bark beetles are guided towards host trees by the recognition of semiotic signals using (...) a specific eco-field. These signals mainly comprise a group of scents, which are called the odourtope. Their interactions with other organisms occur by sharing relevant information from the eco-field networks in the forest ecosystem. The eco-field networks modulate the expansion of the realized semiotic niche of the bark beetle towards the potential semiotic niche. Moreover, the niche construction process can be initiated by interchanging signals among species living in the same place, where these signals allow the exploitation of the required resources. If different organisms are interdependent on signals in eco-field networks, then this process may result in the establishment of mutualistic relationships. This is an example of how evolutionary processes are initiated by the recognition of signals in a network of eco-fields. (shrink)

The paucity of research data to guide current paediatric practice has led to children being termed therapeutic orphans. This difficulty is especially pertinent to research in emergency situations, such as acute resuscitation or critical care, where accepted ethical standards for overall research, have historically created practical difficulties for researchers. The welcome establishment of organisations to support UK paediatric research is helping to ensure safer and more effective medications for children, however as the balance between protection and access at the heart (...) of the paediatric research ethical debate shifts to ever increasing access for researchers to children, it remains crucial to ensure the protection for these vulnerable participants. The fundamental protection for research subjects, namely their full informed consent before any recruitment, is not tenable in true emergency situations and so other approaches are warranted if standards are to be improved by human subjects research in such areas. Proxy, deferred and retrospective consent have all been advocated as solutions to this difficulty and this paper explores the ethical justification for these approaches and their utility in safeguarding children and families in emergency situations when traditional informed consent, as currently defined, cannot be obtained in the necessary time frame to enable research. (shrink)