We report to which extent elementary particles and the nucleons can be described by an Ansatz that is alternative to the established standard model, and can still yield predicted results that reproduce the observed ones, without using the formalism of quantum mechanics. The different Ansatz is motivated by the attempt to explain known properties of elementary particles as a consequence of an inner structure, in contrast to the approach of the standard model, where the properties are ascribed to point-like particles. (...) Based on the assumption of the existence of photons, the possibility of the creation of fermion and anti-fermion in an interaction of two photons of equal energy is shown. The properties of these created elementary material particles are found to agree with the ones observed. Also the possibility of the creation of a neutron by interaction of two photons of equal energy is shown. In this case, the newly formed neutron rests in the center of the collision system as a combined system of the localized two photons. The created neutron is shown to have the known properties of the neutron, and in addition, to have a definite shape of definite size. The proton is described as the particle formed by decay of the neutron, also owning the observed properties, and in addition a definite shape. For all particles described by the Ansatz, their properties are consequences of an inner structure. The merits of the alternative description as compared to the standard model and the application of quantum mechanics are discussed. (shrink)

Several theoretical publications on the Dirac equation published during the last decades have shown that, an interpretation is possible, which ascribes the origin of electron spin and magnetic moment to an autonomous circular motion of the point-like charged particle around a fixed centre. In more recent publications an extension of the original so called “Zitterbewegung Interpretation” of quantum mechanics was suggested, in which the spin results from an average of instantaneous spin vectors over a Zitterbewegung period. We argue that, the (...) corresponding autonomous motion of the electron should, if it is real, determine non-relativistic spin measurements. Such a direct connection with the established formal quantum mechanical description of spin measurements, into which spin is introduced as a “non-classical” quantity has, to our knowledge, not been reported. In the present work we show that, under certain “model assumptions” concerning the proposed autonomous motion, results of spin measurements, including measurements of angular correlations in singlet systems, can indeed be correctly described using classical probabilities. The success of the model is evidence for the “reality” of the assumed autonomous motion. The resulting model violates the Bell—inequalities to the same extent as quantum mechanics. (shrink)

As public research organisations are increasingly driven by their national and regional governments to engage in knowledge transfer, they have started to support the creation of companies. These research based spin-off companies (RBSOs) often keep contacts with the research institutes they originate from. In this paper we present the results of a study of four research institutes within two universities and two non-university public research organisations (PROs) in the Netherlands. We show that research organisations have distinct motivations to support the (...) creation of spin-off companies. In terms of resources RBSOs contribute, mostly in a modest way, to research activities by providing information, equipment and monetary resources. In particular, RBSOs are helpful for researchers competing for research grants that demand participation of industry. Furthermore, RBSOs may be seen as a proactive response by Dutch public research organisations to demands of economic relevance from their institutional environment. RBSOs enhance the prestige of their parent organisations and create legitimacy for public funds invested in PROs. At the same time, most RBSOs do not have a significant impact on the direction of the research conducted at the PROs. (shrink)

This book provides an interdisciplinary examination of international law by addressing four critical questions: How are international legal rules distinctive? How does an investigator determine the existence of a rule of international law? Does international law really matter in international politics? and What effect could the changing nature of international relations have on international law? Using Constructivist theory, Arend argues that international law can alter the identity of states, and, consequently, have a profound impact on state behavior.

The purpose of this paper is the clarification of some methodological problems concerning Rawls’ theory of justice. The first part seeks to make more precise Tugendhat’s distinction between 1st-person-theory and 3rd-person-theory. Rawls’ theory fulfills all criteria for 1st-person-theories. In the second part Rawl’s coherence model for the justification of norms („reflective equilibrium“) is critically analyzed and opposed to the hypothetical decision which individuals are to make in the original position (contract model). It is shown that the conception of reflective equilibrium (...) is in various aspects mistaken. In conclusion a problem is indicated which Rawls has not satisfactorily resolved: The veil of ignorance is supposed to guarantee that the decision for the basic principles of social justice is unanimous. Nevertheless it would appear that the individuals in the original position either have too little empirical knowledge in order to make a rational decision, or they have too much knowledge in order to come to an unanimous decision. The veil of ignorance is either too fine or not fine enough. (shrink)

Der Beginn der Epoche des Protokolls lässt sich auf das Ende der Römischen Republik datieren, sein eigentlicher Einsatz als Medium des Rechts beginnt mit der Einführung des schriftlichen Inquisitionsverfahrens im 13. Jh. Der Grundsatz der Wahrheitsermittlung von Amts wegen erfordert seiner Logik nach die Verschriftlichung eines Datenüberschusses, in der das Subjekt zum Objekt des Protokolls wird. Zugleich erweist sich das Protokoll als rechtlich nicht normierbare Grauzone, weil es keine klare Aufschreibregel geben kann, was ins Protokoll gehört und was nicht. The (...) age of the transcript begins with the end of the Roman republic; its actual adoption as medium of Law begins with the introduction of written inquisitional procedure in the 13 century. The establishment of truth as a legal principle necessitates the transcription of an excess of data, in which the subject becomes the record's object. At the same time, the transcript turns out to be a grey area, which cannot be legally standardized, because no rule can ultimately define what belongs to the record and what doesn't. (shrink)

The age of the transcript begins with the end of the Roman republic; its actual adoption as medium of Law begins with the introduction of written inquisitional procedure in the 13 century. The establishment of truth as a legal principle necessitates the transcription of an excess of data, in which the subject becomes the record's object. At the same time, the transcript turns out to be a grey area, which cannot be legally standardized, because no rule can ultimately define what (...) belongs to the record and what doesn't. (shrink)

This is the Spanish translation, by María Gabriela Fulugonio, of Arend Heyting’s classical text “Die logizistische Grundlegung der Mathematik”, which was originally presented at the Königsberg’s Symposium on Philosophy of Mathematics in 1930, and finally published in Erkenntnis in 1931.

L’ouvrage d’A. Wenger est la version remaniée de sa thèse de doctorat complétée par certains développements parus dans des revues spécialisées, Clio. Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés, Dix-huitième Siècle… La reprise de travaux antérieurs a entraîné parfois quelques redondances – sur l’onanisme ou la lectrice, par exemple – qu’une lecture plus attentive aurait pu éviter. Cette restriction est mineure au regard de l’intérêt de cette étude dont « l’objectif est de faire bouger les objets d’analyse t...

L’auteur a pris le risque de traiter d’une question qui, aujourd’hui encore, fait polémique : celle du rapport qu’entretient le philosophe et romancier Jean-Jacques Rousseau avec la différence sexuelle. L’un des mérites de l’étude de Laure Challandes est d’argumenter, avec une grande précision, sur la nécessaire frontière qui existe entre les textes théoriques, Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, Du contrat social, Émile ou de l’éducation, entre autres, et les textes fictifs, parmi lesque...

In this paper the thesis is argued that there is no need for a special legal logic to deal with the defeasibility of legal arguments. An important argument for this thesis is that legal judgements ask for a complete justification and that such a complete justification requires a deductively valid argument.

In this contribution I argue that Brouwer’s legal positivism suffers from an internal tension that is not easily solved. This tension stems from the combination of two strands in Brouwer’s thought. The first is that Brouwer wants to stick to the legal positivist view that the law is fixed by convention. The second is that there can be exceptions to the application of legal rules, based on legal principles. The combination of these two strands is, I argue, problematic, because the (...) conventional basis for legal principles will usually be lacking in hard cases. One may then argue, as Brouwer does, that where conventions are lacking there is no law and the judge is not bound by the law. But then exceptions to rules are also allowed where there are no conventional principles to justify these exceptions. This contradicts Brouwer’s starting point that exceptions to the application of rules are possible on the basis of legal principles. (shrink)

This article is a comment on Carel Smith’s paper. Smith rightly argues that the study of law has a hermeneutic character. But his interpretation of legal hermeneutics includes the thesis that in hard cases there is no right or true legal decision. This seems to have negative implications for the scholarly character of the study of law: in hard cases any solution goes. This paper argues, against Smith, that the study of law defends right answers for hard cases. It is (...) also normative in another sense: legal answers, in easy cases as well as in hard cases, always presuppose a normative interpretation of the legal sources. This contributes to the differences of opinion under lawyers. But it is no obstacle to the scholarly character of the study of law, as long as a rational debate about these legal answers and the underlying values and principles is possible. Smith’s rejection of the right answer thesis, however, prevents the possibility of such a rational debate. (shrink)

This report explores the relationship between philosophy and medicine in the Netherlands. In Section 1 we outline the ups and downs of medico-philosophical research in our country: pre-war flourishing, post-war decline, and modern renaissance. In Section 2 we review recent Dutch literature in the philosophy of medicine. The topics dealt with include methodology of medical science, alternative medicine, the basic concepts of medicine, anthropological medicine, medicalization, medicine and culture, and health care ethics.

This article presents the results of a qualitative study on the ethical aspects of inclusion practice for radiotherapy patients taking part in clinical research. The study focused on the standards and values of this process. Patients and physicians were interviewed about their views and experiences. Analysis of these interviews showed that candidate research participants need better protection from unwanted factors that could influence their choice about participation. Researchers need proper education about regulation, codes and directives in the field of research (...) ethics, and they should be aware of the underlying ethical concepts of these regulations. A sound institutional ethics policy is necessary in order to guide medical staff in decisions about the inclusion of patients in trials. (shrink)

Professional codes of ethics are regarded as elements of nurses' ethical knowledge base and consequently part of their ethics education. However, research focusing on these codes from an educational viewpoint is scarce. This study explored the need and applicability of nursing codes of ethics in modern health care, their importance in the nursing ethics curriculum, and the need for development of their teaching. A total of 183 Finnish nurse educators and 212 nursing students answered three structured questions, with an opportunity (...) to justify their responses, and one open-ended question. Descriptive statistics and content analysis were used to analyse the data. The results suggest that the existence of the codes was seen as important and their applicability mainly as appropriate, despite new challenges posed by modern health care. The codes were regarded as an important part of nurses' ethics education, but current integrated teaching methods require development. (shrink)

A ética do discurso justifica o conteúdo de uma moralidade que salienta a simetria entre os sujeitos e a solidariedade entre todos. Para Habermas “a solidariedade é a outra face da justiça” (1999, p. 42), ou seja, são duas faces da mesma moeda. Esta é uma afirmação chave em relação ao conteúdo cognitivo do âmbito moral. A validade das normas pressupõe uma fundamentação normativa estruturada linguisticamente, de forma a vincular a justiça com a solidariedade. A ênfase está em uma razão (...) prática capaz de fundamentar princípios igualitários e universalistas da moral e do direito (2009, p. 63). A legitimação do estado de direito deve preservar sua neutralidade ideológica, alicerçada em uma moral racional, isto é, laica (ou secular). Com isso, as exigências normativas devem ser aceitas por todos em uma sociedade pluralista, formada por cidadãos de diferentes credos e, inclusive, por não crentes (HABERMAS, 2009, p. 69). (shrink)

Nurses are responsible for the well-being and quality of life of many people, and therefore must meet high standards of technical and ethical competence. The most common form of ethical guidance is a code of ethics/professional practice; however, little research on how codes are viewed or used in practice has been undertaken. This study, carried out in six European countries, explored nurses’ opinions of the content and function of codes and their use in nursing practice. A total of 49 focus (...) groups involving 311 nurses were held. Purposive sampling ensured a mix of participants from a range of specialisms. Qualitative analysis enabled emerging themes to be identified on both national and comparative bases. Most participants had a poor understanding of their codes. They were unfamiliar with the content and believed they have little practical value because of extensive barriers to their effective use. In many countries nursing codes appear to be ‘paper tigers’ with little or no impact; changes are needed in the way they are developed and written, introduced in nurse education, and reinforced/implemented in clinical practice. (shrink)

This paper is about partially ordered multisets (pomsets for short). We investigate a particular class of pomsets that we call order-deterministic, properly including all partially ordered sets, which satisfies a number of interesting properties: among other things, it forms a distributive lattice under pomset prefix (hence prefix closed sets of order-deterministic pomsets are prime algebraic), and it constitutes a reflective subcategory of the category of all pomsets. For the order-deterministic pomsets we develop an algebra with a sound and (-) complete (...) equational theory. The operators in the algebra are concatenation and join, the latter being a variation on the more usual disjoint union of pomsets. This theory is then extended in order to capture refinement of pomsets by incorporating homomorphisms between models as objects in the algebra and homomorphism application as a new operator. (shrink)

L’ouvrage de C. Dubeau, La lettre et la mère. Roman familial et écriture de la passion chez Suzanne Necker et Germaine de Staël scrute les rapports de filiation entre deux femmes dont la postérité a dressé des tableaux tout en demi-teinte pour Suzanne Necker, tout flamboyant pour Germaine de Staël. La réflexion prend sa source et se justifie par la place fondamentale du rapport maternel et filial comme moteur et menace de l’écriture. Il est issu d’une thèse de doctorat présentée (...) à l’universit... (shrink)