In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 197-201 [Access article in PDF] An Interview with Donald Mitchell and James Wiseman The 2002 Fred Streng Book Award has been given to Donald W. Mitchell and James Wiseman for their edited collection, The Gethsemani Encounter: A Dialogue on the Spiritual Life by Buddhist and Christian Monastics. Donald W. Mitchell is professor of comparative philosophy at Purdue University and a member of (...) the editorial advisory board of Buddhist-Christian Studies. James Wiseman is a member of the Benedictine community of St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C., and is an associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America. Following is an edited interview with both.DONALD MITCHELL How long have Buddhist and Christian monastics been in dialogue? In 1978 the Benedictine Confederation founded what is now named the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID) in order to develop intermonastic dialogue, especially with Buddhism. MID has been in dialogue with Buddhism in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. Numerous MID spiritual exchanges and hospitality programs have taken place between Buddhist and Christian monastics over the years. How did the Dalai Lama get involved? His Holiness the Dalai Lama met with Thomas Merton in 1968, and from then on has been interested in Christian monasticism. He first got involved with MID when several of their members spoke with him at an East-West conference at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 1981. This was the beginning of a series of intermonastic hospitality exchanges, with Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns visiting Christian monasteries in the United States and Christian monastics being hosted at Tibetan Buddhist sites in India. Years later, at the Parliament of World's Religions in 1993, MID hosted a Buddhist-Christian dialogue on "Emptiness and Kenosis." The Dalai Lama took part in the dialogue and afterward told MID that he felt its dialogue with Buddhism had matured to the point [where] it would be helpful to have a weeklong retreat dialogue on the spiritual life in Buddhism and Christianity. Where did Gethsemani enter the picture? The Dalai Lama asked if it would be possible to hold the spiritual dialogue at Gethsemani Abbey, home of his friend Thomas Merton. In 1994 MID sent a delegation [End Page 197] to Dharamsala to discuss the proposal in more depth with the Dalai Lama. An agreement was reached to hold a retreat dialogue at Gethsemani Abbey with Buddhist and Christian teachers of spirituality coming from around the world. You're not a monk. How did you get involved? Good question. A year later, Sister Mary Margaret Funk, executive director of MID, met with me to request that I help organize the encounter as a lay advisor to MID. MID had used my book, Spirituality and Emptiness: The Dynamics of Spiritual Life in Buddhism and Christianity, to prepare for the Parliament dialogue on kenosis and emptiness. I agreed to help with inviting the Buddhist participants, crafting the program, and editing the proceedings. What developments in the dialogue have you seen occurring over the years? Many developments. As you can imagine, the Gethsemani Encounter in 1996 was itself a spiritual experience. As Ewert Cousins put it, there seemed to be two treasure boxes—Buddhism and Christianity—set before us in a spiritual atmosphere that enabled us to appreciate the gems of spiritual living shared by the participants. So the encounter itself brought the dialogue to a new stage of trust, understanding, and appreciation. This development can be seen in the fact that Buddhist participants suggested a project be undertaken to produce a Buddhist commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict. The result is Benedict's Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict, edited by Patrick Henry and published by Riverhead Books in 2001. What else? A small group of American Buddhist leaders and MID members met in 1999 to discuss the possibility of holding a Gethsemani Encounter II. It was decided to bring the dialogue ahead by focusing on one of the major topics that came up again and again at Gethsemani I—namely, the... (shrink)

During the mid 1980s, the renowned American documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman produced a four-part series of films that sought to record the operations of institutions in Talladega, Alabama, devoted to the care and training of people with disabilities. These films—designated as the Multi-handicapped Series—have received much less attention than Wiseman's earlier work, as if films about disability mark a drastic departure from his previous award-winning productions, such as Titicut Follies (1965) and Hospital (1970). The Multi-handicapped Series takes (...) up general categories of disabled populations as discrete documentary topics, Deaf (1986), Blind (1986), Multi-handicapped (1986) and Adjustment & Work (1986) as opposed to a specific location as in his earlier films. As a result, the latter series of films identify social and interpersonal structures developed in the name of specific conditions. Like Foucault's research on disciplinary tactics, Wiseman's films seek out many of the segregated social spaces typically occupied by persons classified as deviant: prisons, hospitals, charity networks, sheltered workshops, resident facilities, and vocational training structures. The Multi-handicapped Series focuses on the activities of professions and practitioners in education, administration, and therapy, as well as the institutional roles designed for bodies marked as disabled. Unlike its 19th century predecessor classification, feebleminded, the latter twentieth century U.S. policy answer has been waged as a matter of dividing disabilities into a binary structure of orthopedic or cognitive categories. Such a development has left many crossover bodies in a diagnostic no-body's-land. To analyze the history of these developments, this essay recognizes the formation of today's disability category as an effect of new regimes of power; a form of domination based upon the application of particularized diagnostic pathologies that provide the basis for cordoning off bodies which fail to fit neatly within the cognitive/orthopedic binary. As documents of the social spaces that are occupied by disabled people, Wiseman's films offer a rare contemplation of institutional practices and their application to populations viewed as nonnormative. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 1 Seiten: 7-31.

Most whistleblowers talk as if they never had a choice about whether to blow the whistle. This doesn't mean they acted suddenly, or impulsively, only that they believe they could not have done otherwise. Trying to make sense of this near universal answer to the question "Why did you do it?" the essay draws on narrative theory. Narrative theory distinguishes between actant and sender—that is, between actor and his or her values. This distinction helps to explain what it means to (...) face a difficult choice over something about which one feels one never had a choice. (shrink)

An Invitation to Formal Reasoning introduces the discipline of formal logic by means of a powerful new system formulated by Fred Sommers. This system, term logic, is different in a number of ways from the standard system employed in modern logic; most striking is its greater simplicity and naturalness. Based on a radically different theory of logical syntax than the one Frege used when initiating modern mathematical logic in the 19th Century, term logic borrows insights from Aristotle's syllogistic, Scholastic (...) logicians, Leibniz, and the 19th century British algebraists. Term logic takes its syntax directly from natural language, construing statements as combinations of pairs of terms, where complex terms are taken to have the same syntax as statements. Whereas standard logic requires extensive 'translation' from natural language to symbolic language, term logic requires only 'transcription' into the symbolic language. Its naturalness is the result of its ability to stay close to the forms of sentences usually found in every day discourse. Written by the founders of the term logic approach, An Invitation to Formal Reasoning is a unique introduction and exploration of this new system, offering numerous exercises and examples throughout the text. Summarising the standard system of mathematical logic to set term logic in context, and showing how the two systems compare, this book presents an alternative approach to standard modern logic for those studying formal logic, philosophy of language or computer theory. Fred Sommers is Professor Emeritus, Brandeis University, USA; George Englebretsen is Professor of Philosophy, Bishop's University, Canada. (shrink)

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have gained a degree of prominence across recent moral enhancement literature as a possible intervention for dealing with antisocial and aggressive impulses. This is due to serotonin's purported capacity to modulate persons’ averseness to harm. The aim of this article is to argue that the use of SSRIs is not something worth getting particularly excited about as a practicable intervention for moral enhancement purposes, and that the generally uncritical enthusiasm over serotonin's potential as a moral (...) enhancer is a consequence of the paucity of viable options for envisaging practicable moral enhancement interventions. While there are many conceptual issues raised by the idea of moral enhancement generally, and by the idea of serotonin as a morally affective agent, the aim here is to look at practical concerns. It is argued that SSRIs do not, nor cannot in the reasonably foreseeable future, be made to work as a reliably safe or reliably effective means for moral enhancement, even within the very limited remit of treating “reactive” aggression. SSRIs might be effective as a limited and partial mental health intervention (even this is questionable), but not as a generally effective moral enhancement technology. (shrink)

This paper criticizes the role of intuition-based ascriptions of cognition that are closely related to the ascription of mind. This practice hinders the explication of a clear and stable target domain for the cognitive sciences. To move forward, the proposal is to cut the notion of cognition free from such ascriptions and the intuition-based judgments that drive them. Instead, cognition is reinterpreted and developed as a scientific concept that is tied to a material domain of research. In this reading, cognition (...) becomes a changeable theoretical concept that can and must be adapted to the findings within this target domain. Taking humans as the best-established existing example of the relevant material target domain, this central case is extended to include all living systems. To clarify what it is about living systems that warrants their role as cognitive target domain, the new concept of cobolism is introduced as a complement to metabolism. Cobolism refers to the systematic ways in which each living system encompasses structures, processes and external events that maintain the fundamental metabolic processes that constitute the core of each living system. Cobolism is perfectly general, applies to bacterial and human cases alike, and provides a general format to describe wildly different cognitive organizations. It provides a clear target for the cognitive sciences to work on, turning them into what we can call the cognitive life sciences. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill underwent a mental crisis in the 1820s. He emerged from it, argues Fred Wilson, with a new understanding of the notion of introspective analysis more dequare as an empirical method than the sort of analysis that had been used by earlier utilitarian thinkiers such as Bentham and James Mill. Wilson's study places Mill's innovations in the context of earlier work in ethics and perception and of subsequent developments in the history of psychology. He shows the significance (...) of these topics with which Mill was concerned. The more adequate notion of introspective analysis enabled the younger Mill to reply to criticisms of various empiricist and utilitarian positions cencering the analysis of relations, the nature of our percievings of physical objects, the status of science of economics, and the nature of the utilitarian principle itself. Mill was thus able to reject the quantitative hedonism of his predecessors and to introduce qualitative hedonism in its place. Wilson suggest that the long tradition that views Mill's qualitative hedonism as inconsistent is mistaken, as area a variety of criticisms of his work in the psychology of perception and the philosophy of economics. A better grasp of the background of Mill's views of psychology and the philosophy of psychology easily shows the critics to be mistaken. (shrink)

This volume covers a wide range of conceptual, epistemological and methodological issues in the philosophy of science raised by reflection upon medical science and practice.

Ethnic cleansing and other methods of political and social exclusion continue to thrive in our globalized world, complicating the idea that unity and diversity can exist in the same society. When we emphasize unity, we sacrifice heterogeneity, yet when we stress diversity, we create a plurality of individuals connected only by tenuous circumstance. As long as we remain tethered to these binaries, as long as we are unable to imagine the sort of society we want in an age of diversity, (...) we cannot achieve an enduring solution to conflicts that continue unabated despite our increasing proximity to one another. By envisioning the public as a multivoiced body, Fred Evans offers a solution to the dilemma of diversity. The multivoiced body is both one and many: heterogeneous voices that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. By focusing on this traditionally undervalued or overlooked notion of voice, Evans shows how we can valorize simultaneously the solidarity, diversity, and richness of society. Moreover, recognition of society as a multivoiced body helps resists the pervasive countertendency to raise a chosen discourse to the level of "one true God," "pure race," or some other "oracle" that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. To support these views, Evans taps the major figures and themes of analytic and continental philosophy as well as modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and feminist thought. He also turns to sources outside of philosophy to address the implications of his views for justice, citizenship, democracy, and collective as well as individual rights. Through the seemingly simple conceit of a multivoiced body, Evans straddles both philosophy and political practice, confronting issues of subjectivity, language, communication, and identity. For anyone interested in moving toward a just society and politics, _The Multivoiced Body_ offers an innovative approach to the problems of human diversity and ethical plurality. (shrink)

The central dilemma concerning randomized clinical trials (RCTs) arises out of some simple facts about causal methodology (RCTs are the best way to generate the reliable causal knowledge necessary for optimally-informed action) and a prima facie plausible principle concerning how physicians should treat their patients (always do what it is most reasonable to believe will be best for the patient). A number of arguments related to this in the literature are considered. Attempts to avoid the dilemma fail. Appeals to informed (...) consent and mechanisms for minimizing the resulting harm are important for policy, but informed consent is problematic and mechanisms for minimization of harm do not address the dilemma. Appeals to some sort of contract model of justification are promising and illuminating. Keywords: randomized clinical trials, ethics CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

It is often claimed that a clinical investigator may ethically participate (e.g., enroll patients) in a trial only if she is in equipoise (if she has no way to ground a preference for one arm of the study). But this is a serious problem, for as data accumulate, it can be expected that there will be a discernible trend favoring one of the treatments prior to the point where we achieve the trial's objective. In this paper, I critically evaluate Benjamin (...) Freedman's 'clinical equipoise' solution to this dilemma. I argue that Freedman actually puts forth at least two distinct contrasts - one in terms of community vs. individual equipoise, and another concerning clinical vs. theoretical equipoise - and that neither of them resolves the dilemma. I then make a proposal for a more adequate account of how to think about the circumstances under which entering subjects in trials would be justified - a 'sliding-scale equipoise' that arises out of a discussion of patients' values. (shrink)

A central idea in moral and political philosophy, 'autonomy' is generally understood as some form of self-governance or self-direction. Certain Stoics, modern philosophers such as Spinoza, and most importantly, Immanuel Kant, are among the great philosophers who have offered important insights on the concept. Some theorists analyze autonomy in terms of the self being moved by its higher-order desires. Others argue that autonomy must be understood in terms of acting from reason or from a sense of moral duty independent of (...) the passions. Autonomy seems closely related to the notion of freedom, but in what sense: freedom from coercion, freedom from psychological constraints, or freedom from material necessity? Various approaches to these and similar questions yield different implications for public policy. Is capitalism, social democracy or socialism more favorable to autonomy? The essays in this volume address these important questions. (shrink)

:The term “moral bioenhancement” conceals a diverse plurality encompassing much potential, some elements of which are desirable, some of which are disturbing, and some of which are simply bland. This article invites readers to take a better differentiated approach to discriminating between elements of the debate rather than talking of moral bioenhancement “per se,” or coming to any global value judgments about the idea as an abstract whole. Readers are then invited to consider the benefits and distortions that come from (...) the usual dichotomies framing the various debates, concluding with an additional distinction for further clarifying this discourse qua explicit/implicit moral bioenhancement. (shrink)

This introductory article to the thematic section on “Spiritual Intelligence” sets out the ways in which spiritual intelligence is currently conceptualized. Most prominently, spiritual intelligence is understood as an adaptive intelligence which enables people to develop their values, vision, and capacity for meaning. Questions arise as to whether spiritual intelligence is a distinct form of intelligence, and how to frame it if it is. It is questionable whether psychometric approaches justify concluding there is a distinct spiritual intelligence, and the authors (...) reject any notion of a God spot in the brain specifically dedicated to spiritual intelligence, which is a much more broadly embodied phenomenon. The authors suggest that spiritual intelligence most likely makes use of existing cognitive architecture, though applied in a distinctive way. This article finishes with a brief introduction to the four main articles in this thematic section, which present spiritual intelligence as a kind of participation in transcendent being. The four articles approach the cognitive, embodied, meditative, and ritual aspects of spiritual intelligence as participation. (shrink)

This paper examines the context in which Anscombe wrote Intention—focusing on the years 1956–1958. At this time Anscombe was engaged in a number of battles against her university, her colleagues, and, ultimately, “the spirit of the age,” which included her public opposition to Oxford University’s decision to award Harry Truman an honorary degree. Intention, I show, must be understood as a product of the explicitly ethical and political debates in which Anscombe was involved. Understanding the intention with which she wrote (...) Intention suggests that we need radically to rethink its nature and character, and that the consequences of the book for work in ethics—consequences Anscombe foresaw and intended—are yet to be understood. (shrink)

The modern theory of computability is based on the works of Church, Markov and Turing who, starting from quite different models of computation, arrived at the same class of computable functions. The purpose of this paper is the show how the main results of the Church-Markov-Turing theory of computable functions may quickly be derived and understood without recourse to the largely irrelevant theories of recursive functions, Markov algorithms, or Turing machines. We do this by ignoring the problem of what constitutes (...) a computable function and concentrating on the central feature of the Church-Markov-Turing theory: that the set of computable partial functions can be effectively enumerated. In this manner we are led directly to the heart of the theory of computability without having to fuss about what a computable function is.The spirit of this approach is similar to that of [RGRS]. A major difference is that we operate in the context of constructive mathematics in the sense of Bishop [BSH1], so all functions are computable by definition, and the phrase “you can find” implies “by a finite calculation.” In particular ifPis some property, then the statement “for eachmthere isnsuch thatP” means that we can construct a functionθsuch thatP)for allm. Church's thesis has a different flavor in an environment like this where the notion of a computable function is primitive.One point of such a treatment of Church's thesis is to make available to Bishopstyle constructivists the Markovian counterexamples of Russian constructivism and recursive function theory. The lack of serious candidates for computable functions other than recursive functions makes it quite implausible that a Bishopstyle constructivist could refute Church's thesis, or any consequence of Church's thesis. Hence counterexamples such as Specker's bounded increasing sequence of rational numbers that is eventually bounded away from any given real number [SPEC] may be used, as Brouwerian counterexamples are, as evidence of the unprovability of certain assertions. (shrink)

We consider notions of boundedness of subsets of the natural numbers ℕ that occur when doing mathematics in the context of intuitionistic logic. We obtain a new characterization of the notion of a pseudobounded subset and we formulate the closely related notion of a detachably finite subset. We establish metric equivalents for a subset of ℕ to be detachably finite and to satisfy the ascending chain condition. Following Ishihara, we spell out the relationship between detachable finiteness and sequential continuity. Most (...) of the results do not require countable choice. (shrink)

A very weak omniscience principle is formulated, related omniscience principlesare considered, and the theorem that a function of bounded variation is the difference of two increasing functions is shown to be equivalent to the omniscience principle WLPO. It is a so shown that an arbitrary function with located variation on an interval is the difference of two increasing functions.

There have been significant changes in what economists include in the category of investment over the last six decades. The US government agency that compiles national income date, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, has tried to keep up with these changes, but it has not succeeded. The resulting tension between economic theory and official data can be overcome by adopting a different theoretical lens. Work on social reproduction and social investment suggests a more coherent definition of investment than that offered (...) by mainstream economists. The paper then contrasts the measurement of investment in the government data with a calculation of investment derived from this new approach. The results show that business investment is dwarfed by the combined investment made by government and households. This finding suggests that business investment is not the key engine that powers the economy. This has significant implications for economic and social policies. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that shaming interventions and messages during Covid-19 have drawn the relationship between public health and shame into a heightened state of contention, offering us a valuable opportunity to reconsider shame as a desired outcome of public health work, and to push back against the logics of individual responsibility and blame for illness and disease on which it sits. We begin by defining shame and demonstrating how it is conceptually and practically distinct from stigma. We then (...) set out evidence on the consequences of shame for social and relational health outcomes and assess the past and present dimensions of shame in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, primarily through a corpus of international news stories on the shaming of people perceived to have transgressed public health directions or advice. Following a brief note on shame (and policymaking) in a cultural context, we turn to the concept and practice of ‘shame-sensitivity’ in order to theorise a set of practical and adaptable principles that could be used to assist policymakers in short- and medium-term decision-making on urgent, tenacious, and emerging issues within public health. Finally, we consider the longer consequences of pandemic shame, making a wider case for the acknowledgement of the emotion as a key determinant of health. (shrink)

The mortality and morbidity resulting from noncommunicable diseases including cancer in sub- Saharan Africa are predicted to overtake that of infectious diseases by the year 2030. Esophageal cancer is on the increase in Tanzania. This study estimates risk factors for esophageal cancer, ethical issues and the level of awareness of cancer related services among adults in rural Kilimanjaro. A cross sectional descriptive study was conducted of adults aged 18 years and above in three wards, namely, Kahe, mabogini and Arusha Chini, (...) Moshi Rural District, Kilimanjaro region. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with a total of 419 individuals. The mean age was 36.47 =13.49) years. Of those who participated, 211 were male and 60% reported to have completed primary education. A majority of participants were knowledgeable about esophageal cancer risk factors. Overall, 15% and 23% of the participants reported to have been smoking and drinking alcohol, respectively. Male respondents were almost three times more likely to be smokers as compared to female respondents. Moreover, people who were self-employed were about five times more likely to be smokers as compared to those who were unemployed.. Male respondents were almost two times more likely to be drinkers as compared to female respondents. Overall, the level of awareness of cancer related health services was about 70%. The study findings confirm that despite a good level of knowledge about risk factors for esophageal cancer, the practice of exposure to risk factors is alarmingly high. Awareness of where to seek cancer related health services was high with hospitals been mentioned by the majority though there was low understanding on modalities of treatment among adults in Rural Kilimanjaro. Intervention measures should aim at further increasing knowledge of cancer risk factors and reduce the practice of such risks. Ethical matters including truth telling, ageism and autonomy need to be addressed to improve the perception of cancer related health issues and health seeking behaviour. (shrink)

In scientific language a distinction can be made between 'pedagogical' metaphors and 'theory constitutive' metaphors. pedagogical metaphors are considered to encourage memorability of information and to generate a better, more insightful and personal understanding. they play a role in the teaching or in the explanation of theories that can already be formulated completely-or almost completely-in a nonmetaphorical way. they normally do not bring about any new theoretical views in the science. (edited).

the theory of modal groups is an abstract theory that may be used to show formal similarities between various formulations of epistemic logics (eg Hintikka, Chisholm, and von Wright) and formal systems in other domains.