Book reviewed in this article: Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. By Mary Ann Glendon.

Though Nietzsche never developed a theory of history, his comments on time yield a radical approach to historical interpretation. Central to this philosophy is the concept of eternal recurrence. Time, with neither boundary nor purpose, returns from the past to repeat itself in its same form. This generates a psychological and moral problem for men, as it fails to provide the elements of meaning which Nietzsche considered essential to the human psyche. Men survive the aimlessness of history by living in (...) the unhistorical consciousness of the immediate present. Nietzsche's ideal is the suprahistorical man, whose awareness of history, and his disgust with it, lead him to find meaning in the structure of time-a structure of meaninglessness. The value system of history is this will to power and precludes the extension of historical judgment to situations beyond the sphere of inquiry. (shrink)

“Christ died for us” is the sine que non of every doctrine of the atonement.

The rediscovery of the force and scope of apocalypticism in primitive Christianity can help systematic theology to find new openings for thoughts of faith that have long languished in systems that obstruct their expression.

Let us look to America, not in order to make a servile copy of the institutions that she has established, but to gain a clearer view of the polity that will be the best for us; let us look there less to find examples than instruction; let us borrow from her the principles, rather than the details, of her laws. The laws of the French republic may be, and ought to be in many cases, different from those which govern the (...) United States; but the principles on which the American constitutions rest, those principles of order, of the balance of powers, of true liberty, of deep and sincere respect for right, are indispensable to all republics; they ought to be common to all …. —Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America. (shrink)

Almost nobody favors long consent forms for prospective research subjects. Almost everybody thinks they interfere with informed consent’s purpose—good decisions. Nevertheless, almost everybody believes consent forms have long been getting longer. Years ago, Paul Appelbaum lamented the “tendency to cram ever more information into consent forms.”1 Weeks ago, Ilene Albala and her colleagues (one of them Appelbaum) reported in IRB: Ethics & Human Research that the length of one institutional review board’s forms “increased roughly linearly by an average of 1.5 (...) pages per decade. In the 1970s, the average consent form was less than one page long and often only a paragraph or two, but by the mid-1990s the .. (shrink)

What value is this scholarly debate about the origins of Jaspers' phenomenology to psychiatric clinicians? For one thing, it might help kindle enough interest among scholars and clinicians in Jaspers' General Psychopathology to warrant its reprinting. This would expand the psychiatrist's appreciation of the relevance of philosophy to medical thinking and patient care. In the GP, Jaspers quotes Kant's opinion that "the psychiatrist's competence is really commensurate with how far his education and knowledge would qualify him to belong to the (...) philosophic faculty". (shrink)

Recent studies indicate that patients who are diagnosed with vegetative states may retain more awareness than their clinical assessments suggest. Disorders of consciousness traditionally have been diagnosed on the basis of outwardly observable behaviors alone, but new functional imaging studies have shown surprising levels of brain activity in some patients, indicating that even higher-level cognitive functions like language processing and visual imagery may be preserved. For example, one recently developed method purports to detect voluntary mental imagery solely on the basis (...) of neural response patterns observed with functional magnetic resonance imaging. This line of research has already led to some widely reported cases of patients who were discovered to have more brain activity than expected. In November 2009, Rom Houben, a Belgian man who was thought to be in a coma for 23 years, was diagnosed with locked-in syndrome through the use of neuroimaging; however, that assessment was later overturned by further testing. (shrink)

The absoluteness of Christianity is a predicate of the God of the eschatological kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, a kingdom embracing the power of a universal future which also includes the entire sweep of the history of religions.

In America today, public policy governing an increasing number of social issues is made through the judicial enforcement of constitutional rights. Cruzan raised the question whether policy regarding the withdrawal of medical care from incompetent patients is to be handled similarly. This essay argues that privacy-rights doctrine provides a poor basis for constructing public policy in this area. It suggests that the Court has been unable to articulate a convincing basis for privacy rights and that the basis the Court seems (...) to assume poorly fits many circumstances to which it is applied. The essay further contends that the Court has been unable to describe a persuasive method of analyzing the state interests that are at stake in privacy cases and to accommodate those interests in a reasonable way. The essay concludes that these are issues as to which policy is better formed through a political, not judicial, process. Keywords: constitutional rights, courts, fundamental right, personal right, public policy, rights CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)