Altruism and solidarity are concepts that are closely related to organ donation for transplantation. On the one hand, they are typically used for encouraging people to donate. On the other hand, they also underpin the regulations in force in each country to different extents. They are often used indistinctly and equivocally, despite the different ethical implications of each concept. This paper aims to clarify to what extent we can speak of altruism and solidarity in the predominant models of organ donation. (...) It also raises the ethical question of whether these categories are adequate as a basis for such models, bearing in mind that organs are a scarce resource and that a shortage of them may mean that fewer lives are saved or improved. (shrink)

Ehrenfeucht’s lemma asserts that whenever one element of a model of Peano arithmetic is definable from another, they satisfy different types. We consider here the analogue of Ehrenfeucht’s lemma for models of set theory. The original argument applies directly to the ordinal-definable elements of any model of set theory, and, in particular, Ehrenfeucht’s lemma holds fully for models of set theory satisfying V=HOD. We show that the lemma fails in the forcing extension of the universe by adding a Cohen real. (...) We go on to formulate a scheme of natural parametric generalizations of Ehrenfeucht’s lemma, namely, the principles of the form EL, which asserts that P-definability from A implies Q-discernibility. We also consider various analogues of Ehrenfeucht’s lemma obtained by using algebraicity in place of definability, where a set b is algebraic in a if it is a member of a finite set definable from a. Ehrenfeucht’s lemma holds for the ordinal-algebraic sets, we prove, if and only if the ordinal-algebraic and ordinal-definable sets coincide. Using a similar analysis, we answer two open questions posed earlier by the third author and C. Leahy, showing that algebraicity and definability need not coincide in models of set theory and the internal and external notions of being ordinal algebraic need not coincide. (shrink)

Why is it so plausible that business organisations in contemporary society use values in their communication? In order to answer this question, a sociological, system theoretical approach is applied which approaches values not pre-empirically as invisible drivers for action but as observable semantics that form organisational behaviour. In terms of empirical material, it will be shown that business organisations resort to a communication of values whenever uncertainty or complexity is very high. Inevitably, value semantics are applied in organisations first when (...) the speakers are uncertain about which stakeholders to whom they have to address (uncertainty) or when different stakeholder groups have to be addressed simultaneously (complexity); second, when the identity of the organisation has to be described; and third, when future strategic options that cannot be expressed by quantitative terms have to be communicated. Values accordingly play a role in organisational practice when certain aspects are indeterminate. Therefore, they are a means for organisations to communicate under fuzzy circumstances. On the basis of these findings, new approaches to value management can now be formulated. (shrink)

Background Researchers are required to determine whether a person has capacity to consent to a research study before they are able to participate. The Mental Capacity Act and accompanying Code of Practice for England and Wales provide some guidance on this process, but researchers have identified that it can be difficult to determine capacity to consent when a person has complex cognitive or communication needs. This study aimed to understand the experiences and opinions of researchers who recruit people with dementia (...) to research projects, to inform the future development of training resources. Methods A mixed method, cross-sectional, electronic survey was circulated via social media and research networks in England and Wales. The survey remained open for ten weeks and included open and closed questions exploring respondents’ confidence in determining capacity in the context of recruiting people with dementia to consent, their views on training and support they have experienced and their suggestions for future training and support needs. Results 60 respondents completed the survey from across England and Wales. Although 75% of respondents had experience of determining capacity to consent with people with dementia to research, only 13% rated themselves as feeling ‘very confident’ in this. Qualitative content analysis of open responses led to the generation of six themes, explaining researchers’ confidence, competence and future training needs in this area: (1) Researcher uncertainties, (2) Lack of time, (3) Balancing information complexity with accessibility, (4) Gatekeepers, (5) Existing enablers and (6) Envisioning future training. Conclusions Researchers would benefit from specific training in undertaking conversations around consent with people with dementia. People with dementia may have fluctuating capacity, and despite support from caregivers, researchers have little practical guidance on methods of determining a person’s ability to understand or appreciate the information they have provided during the consent process. Given the development of large complex trials within dementia research, there is an urgency to develop specific and practical guidance and training for researchers working with people with dementia and their families. (shrink)

In both the philosophical and visual sense, ‘seeing is believing’ does not apply to nanotechnology, for there is nothing even remotely visible to create proof of existence. On the atomic and molecular scale, data is recorded by sensing and probing in a very abstract manner, which requires complex and approximate interpretations. More than in any other science, visualization and creation of a narrative becomes necessary to describe what is sensed, not seen. Nevertheless, many of the images generated in science and (...) popular culture are not related to data at all, but come from visualizations and animations frequently inspired or created directly from science fiction. Likewise, much of this imagery is based on industrial models and is very mechanistic in nature, even though nanotechnology research is at a scale where cogs, gears, cables, levers and assembly lines as functional components appear to be highly unlikely. However, images of mechanistic nanobots proliferate in venture capital circles, popular culture, and even in the scientific arena, and tend to dominate discourse around the possibilities of nanotechnology. The authors put forward that this new science is ultimately about a shift in our perception of reality from a purely visual culture to one based on sensing and connectivity. (shrink)

A dominant view of guilt and shame is that they have opposing action tendencies: guilt- prone people are more likely to avoid or overcome dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, making amends for past misdoings, whereas shame-prone people are more likely to persist in dysfunctional patterns of behaviour, avoiding responsibility for past misdoings and/or lashing out in defensive aggression. Some have suggested that addiction treatment should make use of these insights, tailoring therapy according to people’s degree of guilt-proneness versus shame-proneness. In this (...) paper, we challenge this dominant view, reviewing empirical findings from others as well as our own to question (1) whether shame and guilt can be so easily disentangled in the experience of people with addiction, and (2) whether shame and guilt have the opposing action tendencies standardly attributed to them. We recommend a shift in theoretical perspective that explains our main finding that both emotions can be either destructive or constructive for recovery, depending on how these emotions are managed. We argue such management depends in turn on a person’s quality of self-blame (retributive or ‘scaffolding’), impacting upon their attitude towards their own agency as someone with fixed and unchanging dispositions (shame and guilt destructive for recovery) or as someone capable of changing themselves (shame and guilt productive for recovery). With an eye to therapeutic intervention, we then explore how this shift in attitude towards the self can be accomplished. Specifically, we discuss empathy-driven affective and narratively-driven cognitive components of a process that allow individuals to move away from the register of retributive self-blame into a register of scaffolding ‘reproach’, thereby enabling them to manage their experiences of both shame and guilt in a more generative way. (shrink)

Growing evidence suggests mothers invest more in girls than boys and fathers more in boys than girls. We develop a hypothesis that predicts preference for girls by the parent facing more resource constraints and preference for boys by the parent facing less constraint. We test the hypothesis with panel data from the Tsimane’, a foraging-farming society in the Bolivian Amazon. Tsimane’ mothers face more resource constraints than fathers. As predicted, mother’s wealth protected girl’s BMI, but father’s wealth had weak effects (...) on boy’s BMI. Numerous tests yielded robust results, including those that controlled for fixed effects of child and household. (shrink)

Publicada en 1979, Violence se desarrolla en la ciudad nigeriana de Benín, durante el boom petrolífero de la década de 1970. La narrativa se centra en dos matrimonios que representan ambos extremos del espectro social, cuyos caminos se cruzan mientras sortean diversos obstáculos. La novela de Iyayi constituye una crítica marxista de la violencia ejercida por la pobreza y la desigualdad extrema. Violence muestra cómo ciertos cuerpos humanos se cosifican y explotan de manera sistemática, a la vez que aquellos que (...) no generan ganancias son descartados sin el menor rastro de humanidad. Desde la perspectiva de la ecocrítica urbana, este artículo examina instancias de cosificación corporal en la novela y, específicamente, de comoditización de energía y materia humanas entendidas como recursos naturales. El estudio propone que Iyayi no solo critica esta comoditización al presentarla como una consecuencia del proyecto capitalista, sino que también la cuestiona mediante actos de cuidado resistente que devuelven a los cuerpos cosificados su calidad de sujeto. Estos actos de cuidado constituyen una forma de refutar la separación artificial de Naturaleza y Sociedad, contenida en el dualismo de cuerpo y mente, que históricamente ha justificado la explotación y expropiación capitalista (neo)colonial. El presente artículo contribuye entonces tanto al campo de los estudios poscoloniales como a los de ecocrítica urbana y literaturas africanas, centrándose en una obra relativamente poco analizada y en problemáticas sumamente relevantes para la Nigeria contemporánea. (shrink)

El artículo que a continuación se presenta, forma parte de la tesis doctoral1 donde se presenta una actual investigación sobre la llamada Competencia Reflexiva en el marco del desarrollo profesional de los docentes. Se profundiza en el concepto de competencia profesional y se realiza un exhaustivo estudio de las competencias de la profesión docente que han fijado diferentes países2 hasta llegar a la relevante aportación sobre la competencia reflexiva. Desde el análisis de la praxis docente la investigación consigue determinar el (...) concepto de competencia reflexiva de la que señala su estructura y revela su dinámica. Mediante la implementación y evaluación de un programa formativo basado en el desarrollo de la reflexividad, la investigación demuestra que en la formación docente el desarrollo de la competencia reflexiva emerge como la de mayor potenc ia l profesionalizador. Al mismo tiempo el estudio justifica que la competencia reflexiva presenta un carácter instrumental, funcional y transversal en el ejercicio de la profesión, la cual se activa en movilizar todas las competencias docentes. En la actualidad la discusión acerca del desarrollo profesional del docente constituye uno de los puntos neurálgicos en lo que se refiere al cambio educativo, en un contexto donde el proceso de descentralización de la gestión pedagógica y las transformaciones de la sociedad reclaman un replanteamiento de las funciones y roles del profesor para conseguir las finalidades de la educación en el siglo XXI. Es este escenario cambiante el que propicia y justifica un nuevo discurso que enfatiza la mejora de las competencias profesionales y docentes. Palabras clave : Competencia, competencia reflexiva, profesiona lizac ió n docente, desarrollo de la reflexividad. (shrink)

Los juegos funerales en honor de Patroclo presentan como componente estructural el catálogo de los contrincantes en tres versiones diferentes. El presente trabajo analiza el modo en que este componente estructural revela los aspectos accidentales o inexplicables de la existencia humana desde la perspectiva de la ética homérica The Funeral Games in honor of Patroclus shows the catalogue of contenders as a structural component in three different versions. The present work analyzes the way in which this structural component reveals accidentals (...) or unexplainable aspects of human life from the point of view of Homeric Ethic. (shrink)

Public and government outrage over recent tax fraud and tax shelter cases led to significant changes in the preparer penalty laws under the Small Business Work Opportunity Act of 2007. This study experimentally examines the effectiveness of the revised preparer penalty provisions at reducing tax preparer aggressiveness. Specifically, we examine the impact of two significant components of the changes to the preparer penalty provisions - the increase in penalty amount and the increase in the likelihood of sustaining the tax position (...) required to avoid penalty imposition (required likelihood threshold) - on tax preparers’ willingness to (1) recommend an uncertain position and (2) sign a tax return containing an aggressive position. The results suggest that both the increase in penalty amount and the increase in required likelihood threshold reduce tax preparers’ willingness to recommend an uncertain position and/or sign a tax return containing an aggressive position. Of the two components, the results indicate that the increase in required likelihood threshold is more effective at reducing tax preparer aggressiveness than the increase in penalty amount. Congress may want to rethink its recent decision to reduce the required likelihood threshold for many of the decisions that tax preparers make with their clients. (shrink)

Assuming the consistency ofZF + “There is an inaccessible number of inaccessibles”, we prove that Kelley Morse theory plus types is not a conservative extension of Kelley-Morse theory.

MUC1 and MUC4 are the two membrane mucins that have been best characterized. Although they have superficially similar structures and have both been shown to provide steric protection of epithelial surfaces, recent studies have also implicated them in cellular signaling. They act by substantially different mechanisms, MUC4 as a receptor ligand and MUC1 as a docking protein for signaling molecules. MUC4 is a novel intramembrane ligand for the receptor tyrosine kinase ErbB2/HER2/Neu, triggering a specific phosphorylation of the ErbB2 in the (...) absence of other ErbB ligands and potentiating phosphorylation and signaling through the ErbB2/ErbB3 heterodimeric receptor complex formed in the presence of neuregulin. In contrast, MUC1 has a highly conserved cytoplasmic tail, which binds β‐catenin, a key component of adherens junctions and a regulator of transcription, in a process that is tightly regulated by MUC1 phosphorylation. The specific localization of these membrane mucins to the apical surfaces of epithelial cells suggests that their signaling functions may be important as sensor mechanisms in response to invasion or damage of epithelia. BioEssays 25:66–71, 2003. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy cuts to the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and of today's science wars.At the start of the 21st Century, ...

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

"Manuel DeLanda is a distinguished writer, artist and philosopher. In his new book, he offers a fascinating look at how the contemporary world is characterized by an extraordinary social complexity. Since most social entities, from small communities to large nation-states, would disappear altogether if human minds ceased to exist, Delanda proposes a novel approach to social ontology that asserts the autonomy of social entities from the conceptions we have of them." Editorial.

More than a simple expository history, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and F lix Guattari, while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics.Following in the wake of his groundbreaking War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a radical synthesis of historical development over the last one thousand years. More (...) than a simple expository history, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and F lix Guattari, while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history as an arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In every case, what one sees is the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress, and even more important, free of any deterministic source of its urban, institutional, and technological forms. Rather, the source of all concrete forms in the West's history are shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself. (shrink)

The study offers an account of Hegel’s religious epistemology based on his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. It is understood as a result of Hegel’s efforts to determine the sufficient conditions, which make the knowledge of God possible. Firstly, Hegel’s philosophy of religion is sketched as an investigation of the religious consciousness as well its subject, i.e. God. Secondly, the concept of Absolute Spirit is construed as a self-manifestation to specify Hegel’s understanding of God. Finally, the paper shows Hegel’s (...) way to epistemological realism, which is a middle position between theological anti-realism and theological agnosticism. (shrink)

Life in the text and the text in life: here we would place an “ethos of reading”. To sustain this, the categories of “subject” and “object” are rethought; the process of ethic liberation of sensibility and pleasure encouraged by Kant are described; the independence of taste with respect to knowle..

This essay revisits Karl Marx’s understanding of consumption, in an effort to rescue it from the overshadowing legacy of critical theory which has construed Marx as inveighing against false needs. It is argued that Marx regarded the expansion of needs entailed by capitalism in a generally favourable way, but saw capitalism as a system yoking use-value to the imperatives of profit accumulation, hence limiting and subjugating the consumption of the masses. While Marx’s position was radically different from conventional anti-consumerism it (...) is equally incompatible with complacent affirmations of ‘the consumer society’ in that Marx at all times aimed at a revolutionary change which will transform consumption both quantitatively and qualitatively. Marx’s views are first discussed as expressed in the perennially-cited text, the 1844Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. The second part moves on to examine the further evolution of Marx’s ideas as found in later texts, particularly theGrundrisse. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a surge in popularity of the fair-trade industry, which seeks to improve trading conditions and to promote the rights of marginalized workers. Although research suggests that fair-trade products are perceived as promoting social and economic responsibility, some individuals—namely, those who seek to maintain existing group inequalities or those induced to think inequality is a good thing—may not share this perception. Across three studies, we found that SDO relates negatively to fair-trade consumption, and this relationship (...) is mediated by the tendency for high-SDO individuals to see fair-trade products as less compatible with their conception of social justice. Our findings held after controlling for related individual-differences variables, and regardless of whether SDO was measured or manipulated. Implications for how to maximize the likelihood that people will perceive fair-trade products as “fair” are discussed. (shrink)

This paper undertakes an analysis of the narrativity of a form of discourse which has appeared recently (blogs) within the framework of an emergentist theory of narrativity and its discursive modes. The narrative/discursive characteristics of blogs emerge from a preexistent ground of more basic or less specific communicative practices; and narrative discursivity itself is an emergent phenomenon with respect to other cognitive and experiential phenomena. A number of formal and communicative characteristics of blog writing and of the blogosphere are discussed (...) as emergent modes of experience within the pragmatic context of computer-mediated communication. -/- Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish. (shrink)

Following the critically acclaimed _Zen at War_, Brian Victoria explores the intimate relationship between Japanese institutional Buddhism and militarism during the Second World War. Victoria reveals for the first time, through examination of the wartime writings of the Japanese military itself, that the Zen school's view of life and death was deliberately incorporated into the military's programme of 'spiritual education' in order to develop a fanatical military spirit in both soldiers and civilians. Furthermore, that D. T. Suzuki, the (...) most famous exponent of Zen in the West, is shown to have been a wartime proponent of this Zen-inspired viewpoint which enabled Japanese soldiers to leave for the battlefield already resigned to death. Victoria takes us onto the naval battlefield in the company of warrior-monk and Rinzai Zen Master Nakajima Genjô. We view the war in China through the eyes of a Buddhist military chaplain. The book also examines the relationship to Buddhism of Japan's seven Class-A war criminals who were hung by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in 1948. A highly controversial study, this book will be of interest, first and foremost, to students of Zen as well as all those studying the history of this period, not to mention anyone concerned with the perennial question of the 'proper' relationship between religion and the state. (shrink)