The number of people who survive critical illness is increasing. In parallel, a growing body of literature reveals a broad range of side-effects following intensive care treatment. Today, more attention is needed to improve the quality of survival. Based on nine individual stories of illness experiences given by participants in two focus groups and one individual interview, this paper elaborates how former critically ill patients craft and recraft their personal stories throughout their illness trajectory. The analysis was conducted from a (...) phenomenological perspective and led to the meaning structure; a quest to find oneself after critical illness. In this structure, illness represented a breakdown of the participants’ lives, forcing them to develop a new understanding of themselves. Despite acute illness, they felt safe in hospital. Coming home, however, meant a constant balancing between health and illness, and being either in or out of control. To gain a deeper understanding of the participants’ narratives of survival, the meaning structure was developed from a phenomenological life world perspective, Heidegger’s concept of homelikeness and Arthur Frank’s typologies of illness narratives. In conclusion listening to and acknowledging the patients’ lived experiences of critical illness may support the patient efforts to establish the newly defined self and hence be vital for recovery. Phenomenology is one approach facilitating care tailored to the patients’ lived experience of critical illness and its aftermaths. (shrink)

Coping with uncertainty is a necessary part of ordinary life and is crucial to an understanding of how the mind works. For example, it is a vital element in developing artificial intelligence that will not be undermined by its own rigidities. There have been many approaches to the problem of uncertain inference, ranging from probability to inductive logic to nonmonotonic logic. Thisbook seeks to provide a clear exposition of these approaches within a unified framework. The principal market for the book (...) will be students and professionals in philosophy, computer science, and AI. Among the special features of the book are a chapter on evidential probability, which has not received a basic exposition before; chapters on nonmonotonic reasoning and theory replacement, matters rarely addressed in standard philosophical texts; and chapters on Mill's methods and statistical inference that cover material sorely lacking in the usual treatments of AI and computer science. (shrink)

Luck looms large in numerous different philosophical subfields. Unfortunately, work focused exclusively on the nature of luck is in short supply on the contemporary analytic scene. In his highly impressive recent book Epistemic Luck, Duncan Pritchard helps rectify this neglect by presenting a partial account of luck that he uses to illuminate various ways luck can figure in cognition. In this paper, I critically evaluate both Pritchard’s account of luck and another account to which Pritchard’s discussion draws our attention—viz., that (...) due to Nicholas Rescher. I also assess some novel analyses of luck that incorporate plausible elements of Pritchard’s and Rescher’s accounts. (shrink)

Forms of thought are involved whenever we name, describe, or identify things, and whenever we distinguish between what is, might be, or must be the case. It appears to be a distinctive feature of human thought that we can have modal thoughts, about what might be possible or necessary, and conditional thoughts, about what would or might be the case if something else were the case. Even the simplest thoughts are structured like sentences, containing referential and predicative elements, and studying (...) these structures is the main task of philosophical logic. This clear and accessible book investigates the forms of thought, drawing out and focusing on the central logical notions of reference, predication, identity, modality and conditionality. It will be useful to students and other interested readers in epistemology and metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and philosophical logic. (shrink)

This paper advances the debate over the question whether false beliefs may nevertheless have warrant, the property that yields knowledge when conjoined with true belief. The paper’s first main part—which spans Sections 2–4—assesses the best argument for Warrant Infallibilism, the view that only true beliefs can have warrant. I show that this argument’s key premise conflicts with an extremely plausible claim about warrant. Sections 5–6 constitute the paper’s second main part. Section 5 presents an overlooked puzzle about warrant, and uses (...) that puzzle to generate a new argument for Warrant Fallibilism, the view that false beliefs can have warrant. Section 6 evaluates this pro-Fallibilism argument, finding ultimately that it defeats itself in a surprising way. I conclude that neither Infallibilism nor Fallibilism should now constrain theorizing about warrant. (shrink)

According to the biological definition of death, a human body that has not lost the capacity to holistically organize itself is the body of a living human individual. Reasonable doubt against the conclusion that it has lost the capacity exists when the body appears to express it and no evidence to the contrary is sufficient to rule out reasonable doubt against the conclusion that the apparent expression is a true expression. This essay argues that the evidence and arguments against the (...) conclusion that the signs of complex bodily integration exhibited in ventilated brain dead bodies are true expressions of somatic integration are unpersuasive; that is, they are not adequate to exclude reasonable doubt against the conclusion that BD bodies are dead. Since we should not treat as corpses what for all we know might be living human beings, it follows that we have an obligation to treat BD individuals as if they were living human beings. (shrink)

This excellent collection contains 13 essays from Gadamer's _Kleine Schriften, _dealing with hermeneutical reflection, phenomenology, existential philosophy, and philosophical hermeneutics. Gadamer applies hermeneutical analysis to Heidegger and Husserl's phenomenology, an approach that proves critical and instructive.

The paper considers the recently published British Medical Association Guidance on ethical issues arising in relation to rationing of treatment during the COVID-19 Pandemic. It considers whether it...

We argue that the experience of knowing and having the truth about oneself known in the context of therapy is not an end in itself; rather, it is important because the trust engendered by this experience opens one up to learning about one’s social world and finding better ways to live in it. We consider the consequences of a lack of epistemic trust in terms of psychopathology.

The orphans of Romania were participants in what is sometimes called “the forbidden experiment”: depriving human infants of intimacy, affection, and human contact is an inhuman practice. It is an experiment which no ethical researcher would set out to do. This paper examines historical data, case histories, and research findings which deal with early deprivation and performs a phenomenological analysis of deprivation phenomena as they impact emotional and physical development. A key element of deprivation is the absence of intimate relationships (...) with other human beings. However, the absence of intimacy impacts not only the social/emotional abilities of infants, but their very ability to perceive the world. Philosophically and from a radically Merleau-Pontean perspective, the intimate face of the other appears to be a world opening event for the child. Its absence has a profound impact on the child’s experience of embodiment, coexistence, spatiality, temporality, and language. When seen through early deprivation, intimacy appears as a necessary foundation for establishing the transcendence of the world beyond perceptual presence, and it provides the possibility for language, culture, and history. (shrink)

Scholarly papers by Gėlėgzhamt︠s︡yn Luvsant︠s︡ėrėn on Mādhyamika, Buddhist philosophy, Mongolian philosophy and Buddhist studies in Mongolia.

Memoirs and papers presented at a conference held on the occasion of the 90th birthday of the Mongolian philosopher Ts. Balkhaajav.

Selected articles of Ēṭukūru Balarāmamūrti on Marxist philosophy; includes contributed on his life and work.

Beatrice. Jane Tennison. Elizabeth Bennett. Arya Stark. Katniss Everdeen. None of them is real. All of them appear not only to engage our interest but also to move us. Some of them might even be thought to affect us further—to inspire us to do things, or at least to regard things in a different light. The set of problems typically grouped under the designation “paradox of fiction” raises questions about an apparent contradiction, about our responding emotionally to entities and events (...) in the existence of which we do not believe. The kind of ontological incorrectness to which the paradox draws attention can be directly and indirectly related to a number of interesting explanations and corollary claims about our.. (shrink)

Originally published in 1933, this book was written to provide the younger reader with a guide to the basic elements of economics, preparing them with the tools to earn a living and spend money in a responsible fashion. The text was based on a series of lessons 'given to pupils of ordinary ability during their last two terms in a reorganized senior school'. Illustrative figures are included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in economics and (...) the history of education. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Notwithstanding recent controversies involving echo chambers and social media, “post-truth” has always been central to philosophical investigations of what is knowable and good. The internal tension of the term offers a choice: to gasp in feigned astonishment at the hell-in-a-handbasket state of public discourse, or to reflect critically on what is beyond, after, or other than the truth. In this essay, we approach post-truth via elements of narrative, biography, and myth, portraying Friedrich Nietzsche's polytropic figure, Zarathustra, as he might (...) have spoken to the contemporary moment. We demonstrate how Zarathustra affords access to the idea that truth and life are inextricable in the human condition. To temper this tension, we depict a character whose disposition toward post-truth spans from certainty and doubt to exuberance and despair. Our hope is to indicate how, for the humans of Motley Cow, post-truth is ubiquitous, institutional, and infrastructural. (shrink)

De geesteswetenschappen nemen in hoog tempo afscheid van het postmodernisme. Filosofen, historici, sociologen en antropologen staan opnieuw voor een intellectueel draaimoment. Na de linguistic turn en de cultural turn is er nu een ethische wende. In tal van cultuurwetenschappen probeert men om oudere tradities en concepten weer zinvol in te zetten. De geesteswetenschappelijke carrousel brengt deze heroriëntering in kaart. Deze nieuwe ronde in het debat over de verhouding van wetenschap, politiek en cultuur wordt eerst gevolgd op wetenschapsfilosofisch niveau. Vervolgens komt (...) de huidige politieke discussie over identiteit, tolerantie en solidariteit aan bod. Het leggen van een geloofwaardig verband tussen moraal, politiek en wetenschap blijkt een oefening in intellectuele evenwichtskunst. (shrink)