There are several branches of ethics. Clinical ethics, the one closest to medical decisionmaking, can be seen as a branch of medicine itself. In this view, clinical ethics is a unitary hermeneutics. Its rule is a guideline for unifying other theories of ethics in conjunction with the clinical context. Put another way, clinical ethics interprets the clinical situation in light of a balance of other values that, while guiding the decisionmaking process, also contributes to the very weighting of those values. (...) The case itself originates ideas, not only about which value ought to predominate in its resolution, but also provides the origin of clinical rules that can be used in other cases. These are interpretive rules. Some examples of these rules are presented as well. (shrink)

Like most other sciences, behavior analysis adopts an assumption of uniformity, namely that principles discovered under controlled conditions apply outside the laboratory as well. Since the boundary between public and private depends on the vantage point of the observer, observability is not an inherent property of behavior. From this perspective, private events are assumed to enter into the same orderly relations as public behavior, and the distinction between public and private events is merely a practical one. Private events play no (...) role in the experimental analysis of behavior, but they permit us to make sense of many commonplace phenomena where controlled observation is impossible but unsystematic data are available. Such interpretive exercises serve both to guide research and to displace occult explanations. (shrink)

Reviews the connections between different kinds of nonmonotonic logic and the general idea of varying degrees of belief.

Applying general and statistical knowledge to individuals is difficult either on epidemiological or epistemological grounds. This paper examines these difficulties from the perspective of computer registers of epidemiological data.

Relevance logic is ordinarily seen as a subsystem of classical logic under the translation that replaces arrows by horseshoes. If, however, we consider the arrow as an additional connective alongside the horseshoe and other classical connectives, another perspective emerges. Relevance logic, specifically the system R, may be seen as the output of a conservative extension of classical consequence into the language with arrow.

In this paper I address three problems posed by modern medical technology regarding comatose dying patients. The first is that physicians sometimes hide behind the tests for whole-brain death rather than make the necessary human decision. The second is that the tests themselves betray a metaphysical judgment about death that may be ontologically faulty. The third is that discretion used by physicians and patients and/or family in deciding to cease treatment when the whole-brain death criteria may not be met are (...) sometimes open to challenge. In each of these problems I find that the operative concept of death relates to life itself. This point is expanded by examining the uses of the word death in our language and culture. From these I formulate an initial ontology of death. In it, death is described through a relationship with life, rather than as an absence of life, of consciousness, awareness, or sensation. This ontology then leads to a proposal for an ethics of discretion about the discontinuation of treatment for comatose patients. (shrink)

Reads Presocratics such as Homer, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Empedocles from within the realm opened up by Heidegger's thinking.

Amor Dei, “love of God” raises three questions: How do we know God is love? How do we experience love of God? How free are we to love God? This book presents three kinds of love, worldly, spiritual, and divine to understand God’s love. The work begins with Augustine’s Confessions highlighting his Manichean and Neoplatonic periods before his conversion to Christianity. Augustine’s confrontation with Pelagius anticipates the unresolved disputes concerning God’s love and free will. In the sixteenth-century the Italian humanist, (...) Gasparo Contarini introduces the notion of “divine amplitude” to demonstrate how God’s goodness is manifested in the human agent. Pierre de Bérulle, Guillaume Gibieuf, and Nicolas Malebranche show connections with Contarini in the seventeenth-century controversies relating free will and divine love. In response to the free will dispute, the Scottish philosopher, William Chalmers, offers his solution. Cornelius Jansen relentlessly asserts his anti-Pelagian interpretation of Augustine stirring up more controversy. John Norris, Malebranche’s English disciple, exchanges his views with Mary Astell and Damaris Masham. In the tradition of Cambridge Platonism, Ralph Cudworth conveys a God who “sweetly governs.” The organization of sections represents the love of God in ascending-descending movements demonstrating that, “human love is inseparable from divine love.”. (shrink)

In this paper dedicated to Carlos Alchourrón, we review an issue that emerged only after his death in 1996, but would have been of great interest to him: To what extent do the formal operations of AGM belief change respect criteria of relevance? A natural criterion was proposed in 1999 by Rohit Parikh, who observed that the AGM model does not always respect it. We discuss the pros and cons of this criterion, and explain how the AGM account may be (...) refined, if we so desire, so that it is always respected. En este trabajo dedicado a Carlos Alchourrón consideramos un problema que surgió recién después de su muerte en 1996 pero que seguramente habría sido de gran interés para él: ¿hasta dónde las operaciones formales sobre el cambio de creencias de AGM respetan el criterio de relevancia? Un criterio natural ha sido propuesto en 1999 por Rohit Parikh quien asimismo observó que el modelo AGM no siempre lo respeta. Nosotros discutimos los pros y los contras de este criterio y explicamos cómo podría refinarse AGM para que, si así lo deseáramos, lo respetara siempre. (shrink)

We explore ways in which purely qualitative belief change in the AGM tradition throws light on options in the treatment of conditional probability. First, by helping see why it can be useful to go beyond the ratio rule defining conditional from one-place probability. Second, by clarifying what is at stake in different ways of doing that. Third, by suggesting novel forms of conditional probability corresponding to familiar variants of qualitative belief change, and conversely. Likewise, we explain how recent work on (...) the qualitative part of probabilistic inference leads to a very broad class of 'proto-probability' functions. (shrink)

A discussion of the connections and differences between completeness and representation theorems in logic, with examples drawn from classical and modal logic, the logic of friendliness, and nonmonotonic reasoning.

This overview of the "sister arts" of the nineteenth century by younger scholars in art history, literature, and American studies presents a startling array of perspectives on the fundamental role played by images in culture and society. Drawing on the latest thinking about vision and visuality as well as on recent developments in literary theory and cultural studies, the contributors situate paintings, sculpture, monument art, and literary images within a variety of cultural contexts. The volume offers fresh and sometimes extended (...) discussions of single works as well as reevaluations of artistic and literary conventions and analyses of the economic, social, and technological forces that gave them shape and were influenced by them in turn. A wide range of figures are significantly reassessed, including the painters Charles Willson Peale, Washington Allston, Thomas Cole, George Caleb Bingham, Fitz Hugh Lane, and Mary Cassatt, and such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and William Dean Howells. One overarching theme to emerge is the development of an American national subjectivity as it interacted with the transformation of a culture dominated by religious values to one increasingly influenced by commercial imperatives. The essays probe the ways in which artists and writers responded to the changing conditions of the cultural milieu as it was mediated by such factors as class and gender, modes of perception and representation, and conflicting ideals and realities. (shrink)

Moral capacity is an important feature of what it means to be human. In this volume, the contributors have taken on the daunting task of trying to distinguish between legal and moral capacity. This distinction is difficult at times for clinicians, philosophers and legal scholars alike. Part of the challenge of defining moral capacity lies in the difficulty of adequately categorizing it. For this reason, the editors have chosen to divide the book into three parts. The first looks at the (...) concepts involved in the discussion of moral capacity; the second considers the role of moral capacity in the lives of professionals; and the final part reflects on case studies of moral capacity or incapacity illustrating the challenge that moral capacity presents - its definition lying between two seemingly incommensurable models, those of the threshold and continuum. This volume takes a multidisciplinary approach to the subject, and ties the disciplines of medicine, philosophy and law into the health context. It will be of interest to medical health professionals as well as researchers working in the areas of philosophy and law. (shrink)

This is the story of the clattering of elevated subways and the cacophony of crowded neighborhoods, the heady optimism of industrial progress and the despair of economic recession, and the vibrancy of ethnic cultures and the resilience of ...

Ten years of educational reform have not brought dramatic improvements. In Ideology and Educational Reform, David Paris traces the underlying ideological problems that make genuine reform difficult. These include different and often conflicting beliefs concerning the proper role of public education as well as the public's natural ambivalence about schools as government agencies.Paris describes three major themes in public education—common school, human capital, and clientelism. He critically evaluates current policies and proposed reforms associated with each of these topics, including (...) moral education, the school-economy relationship, school choice, and the delivery of social services. Paris proposes better ways for dealing with ideological problems in school practice, and he suggests appropriate directions for policy reform. (shrink)

The organism is one of the fundamental concepts of biology and has been at the center of many discussions about biological individuality, yet what exactly it is can be confusing. The definition that we find generally useful is that an organism is a unit in which all the subunits have evolved to be highly cooperative, with very little conflict. We focus on how often organisms evolve from two or more formerly independent organisms. Two canonical transitions of this type—replicators clustered in (...) cells and endosymbiotic organelles within host cells—demonstrate the reality of this kind of evolutionary transition and suggest conditions that can favor it. These conditions include co-transmission of the partners across generations and rules that strongly regulate and limit conflict, such as a fair meiosis. Recently, much attention has been given to associations of animals with microbes involved in their nutrition. These range from tight endosymbiotic associations like those between aphids and Buchnera bacteria, to the complex communities in animal intestines. Here, starting with a reflection about identity through time, we consider the distinctions between these kinds of animal–bacteria interactions and describe the criteria by which a few can be considered jointly organismal but most cannot. (shrink)

As an introduction to this issue, I argue that the concept of autonomy is clearly important for many of the freedoms we enjoy. The problem in medicine with its use lies in interpreting the concept with respect to the impact of disease on persons, the models of medicine we employ, and the settings in which the problems arise. A short statement about the major points of the authors collected in this issue concludes the editorial.