To define knowledge in terms of (i) belief, (ii) justification, and (iii) truth is primarily epistemological and therefore seems to be untenable. What is wrong with the ontological view of knowledge? If objects like dream and shadow could be said to be real and worth investigating, why should knowledge itself not be treated as a knowable reality? Knowability suggests its possibility-like, pursuit-like, gradual disclosive—as distinguished from enclosed or complete—character. Disclosure isself-revealing or, as Indians say, svaprakasa. That is, its justification arises (...) from within. (shrink)

Jonathan Bennett has produced a sequel to his book on the first half of the Critique of Pure Reason. He does not try to cover all the rest of the Critique. He restricts himself to the Transcendental Dialectic. He rightly claims that his is the only book in English treating exclusively of the Dialectic as a whole. It is not written as a commentary dealing with passage by passage. Many passages are left untreated. A distinctive merit is his extensive comparison (...) of Kant with Descartes and Leibniz. (shrink)

Horace, Janus, and Pighius' Acta In PBSR 54 , 213–28 Andrew Lintott dusts down the fragments of the Acta Urbana published by S. V. Pighius in 1615 and universally supposed today to be a forgery. Lintott himself, after a most learned discussion, concurs, but one senses a wistful longing for the fragments to be genuine. The purpose of this note is to offer another reason why sadly this is unlikely.

Many medical ethicists accept the thesis that there is no moral difference between withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining therapy. In this paper, we offer an interesting counterexample which shows that this thesis is not always true. Withholding is distinguished from withdrawing by the simple fact that therapy must have already been initiated in order to speak coherently about withdrawal. Provided that there is a genuine need and that therapy is biomedically effective, the historical fact that therapy has been initiated entails a (...) claim to continue therapy that cannot be attributed to patients who have not yet received therapy. This intrinsic difference between withholding and withdrawing therapy is of moral importance. In many instances, patients will waive this claim. But when one considers withdrawing therapy from one patient to help another in a setting of scarce resources, this intrinsic moral difference comes into sharp focus. In an era of shrinking medical resources, this difference cannot be ignored. (shrink)

Science studies not only material entities and phenomena, but their reflections in the minds of men, in the form of sensations, perceptions, concepts, and the like. The study of a phenomenon like language involves simultaneous examinations of material entities and the aspect of language which pertains to meaning, which takes shape as a result of man's reflection in cognition of the world around him.