Background The world literature shows that empirical research regarding the process of decision-making when cancer in adolescents is no longer curable has been conducted in High-income, English speaking countries. The objective of the current study was to explore in-depth and to explain the decision-making process from the perspective of Mexican oncologists, parents, and affected adolescents and to identify the ethical principles that guide such decision-making. Methods Purposive, qualitative design based on individual, fact-to-face, semi-structured, in-depth interviews. The participants were thirteen paediatric (...) oncologists, 13 parents or primary carers, and six adolescents with incurable cancer. The participants were recruited from the paediatric oncology services of three national tertiary-care medical centres in Mexico City. Results The oncologists stated that they broach the subject of palliative management when they have determined that curative treatment has failed. Respect for autonomy was understood as the assent of the parent/adolescent to what the oncologist determined to be in the best interest of the adolescent. The oncologists thought that the adolescent should be involved in the decision-making. They also identified the ability to count on a palliative care clinic or service as an urgent need. For the parents, it was essential that the oncologist be truly interested in their adolescent child. The parents did not consider it necessary to inform the child about impending death. The adolescents stated that the honesty of their oncologists was important; however, several of them opted for a passive role in the decision-making process. Conclusion The findings of this study evidence that to achieve good medical practice in low-middle income countries, like Mexico, it is urgent to begin effective implementation of palliative care, together with appropriate training and continuing education in the ethics of clinical practice. (shrink)

Montaigne never got to think that Cicero was a teacher of thought and life. First, Montaigne held a very negative position with respect to Cicero. Later than 1588, he arrived at one more balanced position. According Montaigne Cicero belongs to one world that separate the culture from the life, which represents the field where the truth of a being is pronounced and the ethical values are made concretely. Montaigne did not want to admit that Cicero also (...) rejected the separation of word, thought and action. When after 1588 Cicero is used by Montaigne extensively, the Cicero’s appointments are interpreted in a very personal way. For Montaigne, Cicero was simultaneously an egocentric and a republican orator, while the author of the Essais preferred an aristocratic ethics and praised the authoritarian regimes. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyze how the reflection on the origins of the civilization was developed in Rome, at the end of the Republic, in a city where during centuries, nobody tried to go beyond this point of absolute origin that was the foundation of the Vrbs. In order to explore not only Cicéro’s philosophic reflection, but also his rhetorical texts, especially the De inuentione, which contains at the beginning of its first book a very interesting explanatory (...) myth both on the birth civilization, and on the evolution of human institutions. Before Cicero, the satiric poet Lucilius had tried to give a Roman adaptation of the Stoic social naturalism, by depriving it of its universalist ambition and Lucretius had an extremely deep reflection of the evolution of the selfish instinct which characterizes the human beings as all the living beings, towards forms more and more sophisticated of sociability. We evoke also a Roman peculiarity in the expression of the social oikeiôsis. All this shows the density and the variety of the Roman thought on society at the end of the Republic. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Academy and Pyrrhonism The New Academy and Epicureanism The New Academy and Stoicism The New Academy and Middle Platonism Bibliography.

In "The Revolt of the Masses" Ortega y Gasset set two conceptions of political powers, represented by Cesar and Cicero, against each other. In this article I try to show how both are complementary, as it happened along the history.

This article discusses the relation between empirical and normative approaches in bioethics. The issue of dwarf tossing, while admittedly unusual, is chosen as a point of departure because it challenges the reader to look with fresh eyes upon several central bioethical themes, including human dignity, autonomy, and the protection of vulnerable people. After an overview of current approaches to the integration of empirical and normative ethics, we consider five ways that the empirical and normative can be brought together to speak (...) to the problem of dwarf tossing: prescriptive applied ethics, theoretical ethics, critical applied ethics, particularist ethics and integrated empirical ethics. We defend a position of critical applied ethics that allows for a two-way relation between empirical and normative theories. Against efforts fully to integrate the normative and the empirical into one synthesis, we propose that the two should stand in tension and relation to one another. The approach we endorse acknowledges that a social practice can and should be judged both by the gathering of empirical data and by normative ethics. Critical applied ethics uses a five stage process that includes: (a) determination of the problem, (b) description of the problem, (c) empirical study of effects and alternatives, (d) normative weighing and (e) evaluation of the effects of a decision. In each stage, we explore the perspective from both the empirical (sociological) and the normative ethical point of view. We conclude by applying our five-stage critical applied ethics to the example of dwarf tossing. (shrink)

This monograph addresses the question of the increasing irrelevance of philosophy, which has seen scientists as well as philosophers concluding that philosophy is dead and has dissolved into the sciences. It seeks to answer the question of whether or not philosophy can still be fruitful and what kind of philosophy can be such. The author argues that from its very beginning philosophy has focused on knowledge and methods for acquiring knowledge. This view, however, has generally been abandoned in the last (...) century with the belief that, unlike the sciences, philosophy makes no observations or experiments and requires only thought. Thus, in order for philosophy to once again be relevant, it needs to return to its roots and focus on knowledge as well as methods for acquiring knowledge. Accordingly, this book deals with several questions about knowledge that are essential to this view of philosophy, including mathematical knowledge. Coverage examines such issues as the nature of knowledge; plausibility and common sense; knowledge as problem solving; modeling scientific knowledge; mathematical objects, definitions, diagrams; mathematics and reality; and more. This monograph presents a new approach to philosophy, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics. It will appeal to graduate students and researchers with interests in the role of knowledge, the analytic method, models of science, and mathematics and reality. (shrink)

One of the world's most renowned theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli has entranced millions of readers with his singular perspective on the cosmos. In Helgoland, Rovelli examines the enduring enigma of quantum theory. The quantum world Rovelli describes is as beautiful as it is unnerving. Helgoland is a treeless island in the North Sea where the 21-year-old Werner Heisenberg first developed quantum theory, setting off a century of scientific revolution. Full of alarming ideas (ghost waves, distant objects that seem to (...) be magically connected, cats that appear both dead and alive), quantum physics has led to countless discoveries and technological advancements. Today our understanding of the world is based on this theory, yet it is still profoundly mysterious. As scientists and philosophers continue to fiercly debate the theory's meaning, Rovelli argues that its most unsettling contradictions can be explained by seeing the world as fundamentally made of relationships, not substances. We and everything around us exist only in our interactions with one another. This bold idea suggests new directions for understanding the structure of reality and even the nature of consciousness. Rovelli makes learning about quantum mechanics an almost psychedelic experience. Shifting our perspective once again, he takes us on a riveting journey through the universe so we can better understand our place in it. (shrink)

Human beings are getting fatter and sicker. As we question what we eat and why we eat it, this book argues that living well involves consuming a raw vegan diet. With eating healthfully and eating ethically being simpler said than done, this book argues that the best solution to health, environmental, and ethical problems concerning animals is raw veganism―the human diet. The human diet is what humans are naturally designed to eat, and that is, a raw vegan diet of fruit, (...) tender leafy greens, and occasionally nuts and seeds. While veganism raises challenging questions over the ethics of consuming animal products, while also considering the environmental impact of the agriculture industry, raw veganism goes a step further and argues that consuming cooked food is also detrimental to our health and the environment. Cooking foods allows us to eat food that is not otherwise fit for human consumption and in an age that promotes eating foods in ‘moderation’ and having ‘balanced’ diets, this raises the question of why we are eating foods that should only be consumed in moderation at all, as moderation clearly implies they aren’t good for us. In addition, from an environmental perspective, the use of stoves, ovens and microwaves for cooking contributes significantly to energy consumption and cooking in general generates excessive waste of food and resources. Thus, this book maintains that living well and living a noble life, that is, good physical and moral health, requires consuming a raw vegan diet. Exploring the scientific and philosophical aspects of raw veganism, this novel book is essential reading for all interested in promoting ethical, healthful, and sustainable diets. (shrink)

In his 1956 book ‘The Direction of Time’, Hans Reichenbach offered a comprehensive analysis of the physical ground of the direction of time, the notion of physical cause, and the relation between the two. I review its conclusions and argue that at the light of recent advances in physics Reichenbach analysis provides the best account for the physical underpinning of these notions. I integrate results in cosmology, and on the physical underpinning of records and agency into Reichenbach’s account, and discuss (...) which questions it leaves open. (shrink)

What is morally valuable—if anything at all—in entrepreneurship? Existing normative takes can be broadly categorized as belonging to two main views: a backward and a forward-looking approach. The former sees entrepreneurial activity as a permissible emergent product of individuals’ interactions within the boundaries of people’s existing rights; the latter looks at entrepreneurship in the broader context of market processes and emphasizes its role in generating Pareto-improvements in social welfare. In this paper, I suggest that certain instances of entrepreneurship can be (...) intrinsically valuable when they constitute Millian Experiments in Living, that is when entrepreneurial ventures are the expression of an entrepreneur’s conception of the good. Engaging in entrepreneurial activity which reflects one’s conception of the good helps individuals in cultivating their individuality and originality by means of subjecting their normative beliefs to empirical scrutiny, thus allowing one to confirm, revise, or refine them. (shrink)

Facts happen at every interaction, but they are not absolute: they are relative to the systems involved in the interaction. Stable facts are those whose relativity can effectively be ignored. In this work, we describe how stable facts emerge in a world of relative facts and discuss their respective roles in connecting quantum theory and the world. The distinction between relative and stable facts resolves the difficulties pointed out by the no-go theorem of Frauchiger and Renner, and is consistent with (...) the experimental violation of the Local Friendliness inequalities of Bong et al.. Basing the ontology of the theory on relative facts clarifies the role of decoherence in bringing about the classical world and solves the apparent incompatibility between the ‘linear evolution’ and ‘projection’ postulates. (shrink)

The concept of dignity is notoriously vague. In this paper it is argued that the reason for this is that there are three versions of dignity that are often confused. First we will take a short look at the history of the concept of dignity in order to demonstrate how already from Roman Antiquity two versions of dignity can be distinguished. Subsequently, the third version will be introduced and it will be argued that although the three versions of dignity hang (...) together, they should also be clearly distinguished in order to avoid confusion. The reason for distinguishing the three versions is because all three of them are only partially effective. This will be demonstrated by taking the discussion about voluntary ‘dying with dignity’ as an example. Inspired by both Paul Ricoeur’s concept of ethics and the ethics of care a proposition will be done as to how the three versions of dignity may sustain each other and help achieve what neither one of the versions can do on its own. (shrink)

On the basis of neuropsychological evidence, it is clear that attention should be given a role in any model of consciousness. What is known about the many instances of dissociation between explicit and implicit knowledge after brain damage suggests that conscious experience might not be linked to a restricted area of the brain. Even if it were true that there is a single brain area devoted to consciousness, the subicular area would seem to be an unlikely possibility.

Substructural logics and their application to logical and semantic paradoxes have been extensively studied. In the paper, we study theories of naïve consequence and truth based on a non-reflexive logic. We start by investigating the semantics and the proof-theory of a system based on schematic rules for object-linguistic consequence. We then develop a fully compositional theory of truth and consequence in our non-reflexive framework.

According to the implicit commitment thesis, once accepting a mathematical formal system S, one is implicitly committed to additional resources not immediately available in S. Traditionally, this thesis has been understood as entailing that, in accepting S, we are bound to accept reflection principles for S and therefore claims in the language of S that are not derivable in S itself. It has recently become clear, however, that such reading of the implicit commitment thesis cannot be compatible with well-established positions (...) in the foundations of mathematics which consider a specific theory S as self-justifying and doubt the legitimacy of any principle that is not derivable in S: examples are Tait’s finitism and the role played in it by Primitive Recursive Arithmetic, Isaacson’s thesis and Peano Arithmetic, Nelson’s ultrafinitism and sub-exponential arithmetical systems. This casts doubts on the very adequacy of the implicit commitment thesis for arithmetical theories. In the paper we show that such foundational standpoints are nonetheless compatible with the implicit commitment thesis. We also show that they can even be compatible with genuine soundness extensions of S with suitable form of reflection. The analysis we propose is as follows: when accepting a system S, we are bound to accept a fixed set of principles extending S and expressing minimal soundness requirements for S, such as the fact that the non-logical axioms of S are true. We call this invariant component the semantic core of implicit commitment. But there is also a variable component of implicit commitment that crucially depends on the justification given for our acceptance of S in which, for instance, may or may not appear reflection principles for S. We claim that the proposed framework regulates in a natural and uniform way our acceptance of different arithmetical theories. (shrink)

This is a profound study of Aristotle's concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom. Carlo Natali critically reconsiders Aristotle's famous doctrine of contemplations, relating it to contemporary theories of the good life.

The aim of this paper is to show that the Plautine Textgeschichte as reconstructed by M. Deufert may be regarded as convincing, although some aspects need to be corrected. A new examination of Gellius 3. 3, there is no reason to think that he devoted his editorial activity to Plautus. In the last part of the paper we discuss the famous problem of the identity of Sisenna. Although some recent scholars have tried to demonstrate that the Sisenna, who composed a (...) Plautine commentary, was the famous historian, I prefer to maintain Deufert’s opinion, viz. that Sisenna the commentator of Plautus lived in the second or third century AD. A new analysis of some of Sisenna’s grammatical fragments is also provided. (shrink)

This reply paper includes two brief remarks in rejoinder to the commentary papers of Myers and Patil, Podani, and Sarkar. The first observation concerns the fundamental nature of ecological diversity measures, while the second one specifically addresses some interesting mathematical connections between α- and β-diversity.

Dimitris Vardoulakis, The Doppelgänger: Literature's Philosophy Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 418-422 Authors Carlo Salzani, Monash University, Australia Journal Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy & Social Theory Online ISSN 1568-5160 Print ISSN 1440-9917 Journal Volume Volume 12 Journal Issue Volume 12, Number 3 / 2011.

We propose a definition of weak o-minimality for structures expanding a Boolean algebra. We study this notion, in particular we show that there exist weakly o-minimal non o-minimal examples in this setting.

A distinguished international team of scholars under the editorship of Carlo Natali have collaborated to produce a systematic, chapter-by-chapter study of one of the most influential texts in the history of moral philosophy. The seventh book of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics discusses weakness of will in its first ten chapters, then turns in the last four chapters to pleasure and its relation to the supreme human good.

The paper distinguishes between two kinds of mathematics, natural mathematics which is a result of biological evolution and artificial mathematics which is a result of cultural evolution. On this basis, it outlines an approach to the philosophy of mathematics which involves a new treatment of the method of mathematics, the notion of demonstration, the questions of discovery and justification, the nature of mathematical objects, the character of mathematical definition, the role of intuition, the role of diagrams in mathematics, and the (...) effectiveness of mathematics in natural science. (shrink)

This paper challenges the ‘Standard Account’ of the so-called endoxic method that Aristotle articulates in a well-known passage from book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics. That account is problematic because it misreads what Aristotle says and thereby attributes to him an unusually rigid and conservative method that he himself does not seem to employ. This paper carefully analyzes the semantics and syntax of the book VII passage in order to present a novel and improved understanding of the endoxic method. This (...) improved account helps adjudicate scholarly debates about the method’s purpose and scope. (shrink)

In what follows I consider the apparent contrast between two kinds of theories of context: a theory of objective context - exemplified in the works of Kaplan and Lewis - and a theory of subjective context -exemplified in the works of McCarthy and Giunchiglia. I consider then some difficulties for the objective theory. I don't give any formalization; instead I give some theoretical points about the problem. A possible result could be the abandon of the double indexing for a development (...) a multi-context theory (I give an example of a case). However other results could be possible and a challenge is posed to solve problems using the best results from each tradition of research. (shrink)

We introduce and study some local versions of o-minimality, requiring that every definable set decomposes as the union of finitely many isolated points and intervals in a suitable neighbourhood of every point. Motivating examples are the expansions of the ordered reals by sine, cosine and other periodic functions.

Testable predictions of quantum mechanics are invariant under time reversal. But the evolution of the quantum state in time is not so, neither in the collapse nor in the no-collapse interpretations of the theory. This is a fact that challenges any realistic interpretation of the quantum state. On the other hand, this fact raises no difficulty if we interpret the quantum state as a mere calculation device, bookkeeping past real quantum events.

The philosophy of mathematics of the last few decades is commonly distinguished into mainstream and maverick, to which a ‘third way’ has been recently added, the philosophy of mathematical practice. In this paper the limitations of these trends in the philosophy of mathematics are pointed out, and it is argued that they are due to the fact that all of them are based on a top-down approach, that is, an approach which explains the nature of mathematics in terms of some (...) general unproven assumption. As an alternative, a bottom-up approach is proposed, which explains the nature of mathematics in terms of the activity of real individuals and interactions between them. This involves distinguishing between mathematics as a discipline and the mathematics embodied in organisms as a result of biological evolution, which however, while being distinguished, are not opposed. Moreover, it requires a view of mathematical proof, mathematical definition and mathematical objects which is alternative to the top-down approach. (shrink)

One way to study and understand the notion of truth is to examine principles that we are willing to associate with truth, often because they conform to a pre-theoretical or to a semi-formal characterization of this concept. In comparing different collections of such principles, one requires formally precise notions of inter-theoretic reduction that are also adequate to compare these conceptual aspects. In this work I study possible ways to make precise the relation of conceptual equivalence between notions of truth associated (...) with collections of principles of truth. In doing so, I will consider refinements and strengthenings of the notion of relative truth-definability proposed by Fujimoto (2010): in particular I employ suitable variants of notions of equivalence of theories considered in Visser (2006) and Friedman & Visser (2014) to show that there are better candidates than mutual truth-definability for the role of sufficient condition for conceptual equivalence between the semantic notions associated with the theories. In the concluding part of the paper, I extend the techniques introduced in the first and show that there is a precise sense in which ramified truth (either disquotational or compositional) does not correspond to iterations of comprehension. (shrink)