Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s work of fiction can roughly be grouped into three distinct categories, each evoking a singular extraordinary state of mind. Poe-inspired tales of the macabre such as “The Tomb” (1917) and “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919) produce terror because of the atmosphere they convey and because of the particular end the main characters meet. Lovecraft’s later “Yog-Sothothery” or work in the Cthulhu Mythos tradition, including his signature pieces of weird fiction “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and (...) “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1931), inspires ‘horror’ because the life-worlds of the protagonists in these stories are utterly destroyed. However, the gentleman of Providence is also known for a different sort of fiction. His Dunsanian tales—among them short stories such as “The White Ship” (1919), “Celephaïs” (1920), and the three works“ The Silver Key” (1926), The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926–27), and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1932–33; with E. Hoffmann Price), centered on the exploits of Lovecraft’s recurring character and alter ego Randolph Carter—are epitomes to this feat. These prehistoric or dreamland tales do not inspire ‘terror’ or ‘horror’; rather, they predominately seek to evoke the extraordinary state of mind called ‘wonder. This article offers a preliminary exploration of Lovecraft’s relationship with wonder, highlights what wonder is, how Lovecraft was exposed to wonder at an early age, and argues that he developed a lifelong positive relationship with this particular state of mind. (shrink)

[A. W. Moore] Criteria of ineffability are presented which, it is claimed, preclude the possibility of truths that are ineffable, but not the possibility of other things that are ineffable—not even the possibility of other things that are non-trivially ineffable. Specifically, they do not preclude the possibility of states of understanding that are ineffable. This, it is argued, allows for a reappraisal of the dispute between those who adopt a traditional reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and those who adopt the new (...) reading recently championed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others. By maintaining that what the nonsense in the Tractatus is supposed to convey is ineffable understanding, rather than ineffable truth, we can do considerable justice to each of these readings. We can also do considerable justice to the Tractatus. /// [Peter Sullivan] Moore proposes to cut between 'traditional' and 'new' approaches to the Tractatus, suggesting that Wittgenstein's intention is to convey, through the knowing use of nonsense, ineffable understanding. I argue, first, that there is indeed room for a proposal of Moore's general kind. Secondly, though, I question whether Moore's actual proposal is not more in tune with Wittgenstein's later thought than with the attitude of the Tractatus. (shrink)

In this essay I consider the argument that Bernard Williams advances in ‘The Makropolus Case’ for the meaninglessness of immortality. I also consider various counter-arguments. I suggest that the more clearly these counter-arguments are targeted at the spirit of Williams's argument, rather than at its letter, the less clearly they pose a threat to it. I then turn to Nietzsche, whose views about the eternal recurrence might appear to make him an opponent of Williams. I argue that, properly interpreted, these (...) views in fact make him an ally. (shrink)

Anyone who has pondered the limitlessness of space and time, or the endlessness of numbers, or the perfection of God will recognize the special fascination of this question. Adrian Moore's historical study of the infinite covers all its aspects, from the mathematical to the mystical.

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a study of Frege's permutation argument in Part I, Section 10, of Frege's Basic Laws of Arithmetic.

This essay was written for a special issue of Philosophical Topics on the links between Kant and analytic philosophy. It explores these links through consideration of: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; the logical positivism endorsed by Ayer; and the (very different) variation on that theme endorsed by Quine. It is argued that in all three cases we see analytic philosophers trying to attain and express a general philosophical understanding of why the bounds of sense should be drawn where they should—but thereby confronting the (...) aporia, which Kant too confronted, that it is impossible to do this without transgressing those very bounds. It is suggested in conclusion that the problem is in trying to attain and express such an understanding; in other words, that such an understanding is attainable, but not expressible. (shrink)

Principled discussions of civil rights became inherently less likely as a direct result of the observation by Earl Warren, in Brown v. Board of Education, that, respecting freedmen, “Education of Negroes was almost non-existent, and practically all of the race were illiterate,” and in proportion as that observation increasingly became the foundation of common opinion on the subject. Warren's observation was not true in any meaningful or non-trivial sense. Nevertheless, it served to perpetuate the myth of a backward people needing (...) help to catch up instead of the truth of a people being held back. That is the perspective – the disadvantaged group perspective – that ultimately infected all discussion of civil rights, even after the designation of so-called “disadvantaged groups” had been extended beyond American blacks. To define civil rights, we may well begin with what all mankind would likely recognize. Thus the dictionary definition of “civil rights” stands: “the rights that belong to all individuals in a nation or community touching property, marriage, and the like.” In that definition the term “rights” may be further expanded to mean “legitimate claims,” following the definition of right as law – as “a claim or title or interest in anything whatever that is enforceable by law.” This definition applies with minimal distinction of regimes intruding and, therefore, without the host of recent complications in the United States that create the impression that civil rights have something to do with pluralism. Previously, the generic definition was thought to exhaust the meaning of the term in the United States. (shrink)

Patient safety has only recently been subjected to wide-spread systematic study. Healthcare differs from other high risk industries in being more diverse and multi-contextual, and less certain and regulated. Also many patient safety problems are low-frequency events associated with many, varied contributing factors. The subject of this paper is the epistemology of patient safety (the science of the method of finding out about patient safety). Patient safety research is considered here on the background of a risk management framework which requires (...) researchers to: • Understand the context - as a subset of healthcare quality, services and systems research, with technical and human behavioural (cultural) components and a range of external and internal organisational influences, a wide range of research disciplines is necessary • Identify the risks - identify the things that go wrong and the frequency and nature of different types of incidents from sources such as medical record review, observational studies, audit, incident and medico-legal reports • Analyse the risks - deconstruct the things that go wrong, identifying contributing factors and trying to detect trends and patterns in contributing factors, detection, mitigation factors, ameliorating factors and actions taken to reduce risk • Evaluate the risks - decide on priorities, identifying preventive and corrective strategies and judging the risk- and cost-benefit of potential corrective strategies such as standardisation or simplification of a process or device • Manage the risk - evaluate and scope preventive and/or corrective strategies and then implement these, or place the problem on a risk register pending solution, or accept that what is needed is unaffordable • Communicate and consult - use interactive sessions, audit, on-going feedback, reminders and patient mediated prompts • Monitor and review the state of the problem - get baseline trends and patterns so that changes can be tracked and properly attributed to an intervention A hierarchy of levels of evidence has been proposed for clinical research and we argue that insufficient weighting has been given to lower ranked levels of research and to qualitative research, although critical interpretive synthesis is now gaining acceptance in mainstream thinking (e.g. by the Cochrane Collaboration). Fundamental challenges remain including how to grasp the elusive concept of patient safety, how to quantify, characterise and cost the problems, how to judge the extent to which harm can be attributed to errors, violations or system failures, how to identify contributing factors and the extent to which they can be implicated, how to judge whether incidents or their precursors are preventable, how to generate strong evidence to make healthcare safer and how to translate research into practice. Future directions include addressing the mundane as well as rare, dramatic events, and developing further research in non-hospital settings and in developing countries. In summary, a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, using information from all available data sources and combining retrospective, real time and prospective study designs, is necessary to address some of the more difficult patient safety problems. (shrink)

The spectacular development of medical knowledge over the last two centuries has brought intrusive advances in the capabilities of medical technology. These advances have been remarkable over the last century, but especially over the last few decades, culminating in such high technology interventions as heart transplants and renal dialysis. These increases in medical powers have attracted societal interest in acquiring more such knowledge. They have also spawned concerns regarding the use of human subjects in research and regarding the byproducts of (...) basic research as in the recent recombinant DNA debate. As a consequence of the development of new biomedical knowledge, physicians and biomedical scientists have been placed in positions of new power and responsibility. The emergence of this group of powerful and knowledgeable experts has occasioned debates regarding the accountability of physicians and biomedical scientists. But beyond that, the very investment of resources in the acquisition of new knowledge has been questioned. Societies must decide whether finite resources would not be better invested at this juncture, or in general, in the alleviation of the problems of hunger or in raising general health standards through interventions which are less dependent on the intensive use of high technology. To put issues in this fashion touches on philosophical notions concerning the claims of distributive justice and the ownership of biomedical knowledge. (shrink)