Machine Learning (ML) is on the rise in medicine, promising improved diagnostic, therapeutic and prognostic clinical tools. While these technological innovations are bound to transform health care, they also bring new ethical concerns to the forefront. One particularly elusive challenge regards discriminatory algorithmic judgements based on biases inherent in the training data. A common line of reasoning distinguishes between justified differential treatments that mirror true disparities between socially salient groups, and unjustified biases which do not, leading to misdiagnosis and erroneous (...) treatment. In the curation of training data this strategy runs into severe problems though, since distinguishing between the two can be next to impossible. We thus plead for a pragmatist dealing with algorithmic bias in healthcare environments. By recurring to a recent reformulation of William James’s pragmatist understanding of truth, we recommend that, instead of aiming at a supposedly objective truth, outcome-based therapeutic usefulness should serve as the guiding principle for assessing ML applications in medicine. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer ärztliche Umgang mit Opiaten und Sedativa bei Patienten am Lebensende kann ethische Fragen aufwerfen. Entsprechende Entscheidungen blieben bisher in aller Regel der ärztlichen Berufskunst und -pflicht überantwortet. Heute aber gerät dieser Bereich zunehmend auch in den Blickwinkel des Rechts. Ausdruck davon sind Bestrebungen, die indirekte Sterbehilfe, allenfalls auch die terminale Sedierung gesetzlich zu regeln. Ausgehend von einer Ist-Analyse der ärztlichen Praxis sowie von bereits bestehenden Regulierungen untersucht diese Arbeit die Konsequenzen derartiger Bestrebungen. Es zeigt sich, dass der Versuch, die (...) Thematik der indirekten Sterbehilfe für sich allein, also unter Vermeidung einer Regelung der direkt aktiven Sterbehilfe, zu behandeln, zu großen Schwierigkeiten führen würde. Ernüchternd sind aber auch die Erfahrungen aus den Niederlanden, derartige Fragen im Rahmen eines umfassenden Sterbehilfegesetzes anzugehen. Insgesamt ist somit zu befürchten, dass der Versuch einer detaillierten gesetzlichen Regelung dieses Bereiches mehr neue Grauzonen und Unsicherheiten schafft, als er zu beseitigen vermag. (shrink)

Ao tratar da obediência e banalidade do mal em Hannah Arendt, ensejamos discutir o estatuto da obediência e colocar essa em exame via reflexão. Desse modo, entendemos que a obediência sem reflexão pode ser um contra valor capaz de promover o mal. Nessa direção, a resistência pela reflexão e pela ação podem servir de barreiras para obstar esse mal. Elegemos a figura do pária rebelde como paradigma exemplar de resistência pelo que chamamos de uma desobediência ética que se ocupa da (...) responsabilidade pelo mundo. Escolhemos como metodologia a exegese textual já consagrada nos estudos de filosofia. (shrink)

O texto Imortalidade e Eternidade: um diálogo em torno da vida ativa privilegia três categorias: a memória, a narração e a imortalidade. Categorias que destacam a ação no mundo. A imortalidade se impõe como aquilo que está sendo perpetuado no tempo pela memória e pela narração. A noção que teria de ser superada, nesse contexto, é a noção de eternidade, tendo em vista que a mesma lança fora dos negócios humanos toda e qualquer ação. Com isso objetiva-se demonstrar a distinção (...) entre vida ativa e vida contemplativa. Para tanto, apoiamos nossa argumentação no pensamento de Hannah Arendt. Elegemos como Metodologia a pesquisa bibliográfica de caráter exegético. (shrink)

Ao discorremos sobre o pertencimento ao mundo e a questão dos refugiados em Hannah Arendt, buscamos trazer a lume uma discussão enfrentada pela autora no século passado, mas que se torna atual, haja vista a conjuntura mundial hodierna. Nosso problema focou a seguinte questão: é possível um mundo sem acolhimento dos seres humanos e de suas relações? Ao nos indagarmos sobre isto, enfrentamos o papel do direito internacional frente à questão, sobretudo, no que concerne à tensão entre direitos humanos e (...) soberania. Para Hannah Arendt, ocorreu uma flagrante incapacidade dos direitos humanos e, do direito, como lei para proteger e resguardar os apátridas e os refugiados. Neste contexto, as categorias de mundo e de refugiado emergem como categorias analíticas para compreendermos a ideia de pertencimento. Ainda nessa esteira, buscamos esclarecer o conceito de mundo em Hannah Arendt para melhor construção de nossa argumentação. Elegemos como metodologia a exegese textual, já consagrada nos estudos filosóficos. Destacamos como corpus central de nossa discussão a obra Escritos judaicos e, em especial, os textos Nós os refugiados e A Condição Humana. (shrink)

Later life is often seen as a time of losses. Through the death of loved ones and the dwindling of bodily capacities, older people are increasingly confronted with their own mortality. As losses accrue across different domains, they form a unique existential vantage point. We aim to shed light on this understudied dimension of later life by analysing older people’s everyday practices of sense-making. Drawing on the findings of a qualitative interview study (_n_=16, aged 65-93), we identify three distinct practices (...) by which older people make sense of death and bereavement: timing, communing, and missing. We conceptualise these practices as “farewell ceremonies,” a term we borrow from Simone de Beauvoir. The “farewell ceremony” describes a period of incremental goodbyes, which characterised the last ten years of Jean-Paul Sartre as well as the death process of Beauvoir’s mother Françoise. Beauvoir captures these farewell ceremonies in her memoirs _Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre_ and _A Very Easy Death_, which frame our philosophical reflection on practices of timing, communing, and missing. Bringing together Beauvoir’s literary and philosophical work with our empirical findings, we propose an integrated view on death and bereavement in later life that centres the intertwining perspectives of self and other. (shrink)

We examined the relation between home literacy environment (HLE) and early literacy development in a sample of children learning four alphabetic orthographies varying in orthographic consistency (English, Dutch, German, and Greek). Seven hundred and fourteen children were followed from Grade 1 to Grade 2 and tested on emergent literacy skills (vocabulary, letter knowledge, and phonological awareness) at the beginning of Grade 1 and on word reading fluency and spelling at the end of Grade 1, the beginning of Grade 2, and (...) the end of Grade 2. Their parents responded to a questionnaire assessing HLE [parent teaching (PT), shared book reading (SBR), access to literacy resources (ALR)] at the beginning of Grade 1. Results showed first that PT was associated with letter knowledge or phonological awareness in Dutch and Greek, while ALR was associated with emergent literacy skills in all languages. SBR did not predict any cognitive or early literacy skills in any language. Second, PT and ALR had indirect effects on literacy outcomes via different emergent literacy skills in all languages. These findings suggest that not all HLE components are equally important for emergent literacy skills, reading fluency, and spelling. No specific trend in the role of orthographic consistency in the aforementioned relations emerged, which suggests that other factors may account for the observed differences across languages when children start receiving formal reading instruction in Grade 1. (shrink)

Pensar a recuperação da Política a partir da ação e do espaço público comporta o grande objetivo deste texto. Queremos com isso trazer a baila duas categorias fundamentais no pensamento de Hannah Arendt. Para tal empreitada nos apoiamos em obras da autora de modo especial A condição Humana e Entre o passado e o Futuro. Elegemos como metodologia central a pesquisa bibliográfica.

A Phenomenology of the Devout Life is the first part of a three-part work, A Philosophy of Christian Life. Rather than approaching Christianity through its doctrinal statements, as philosophers of religion have often done, the book starts by offering a phenomenological description of the devout life as that is set out in the teaching of Francois de Sales and related authors. This is because for most Christians practice and life-commitments are more fundamental than formal doctrinal beliefs. Although George Pattison (...) will address the metaphysical truth-claims of Christianity in Part three, the guiding argument is that it is the Christian way of life that best reveals what these beliefs really are. As the work is a philosophical study, it does not presuppose the truth of Christianity but assumes only that there is a humanly accessible meaning to the intention to live a devout life, pleasing to God. This can be said to find expression in a certain view of selfhood that emphasizes the dimensions of feeling and will rather than intellect and that culminates in the experience of the annihilation of self. This is a model of selfhood deeply opposed to contemporary models that privilege autonomous agency and the devout life is therefore presented as offering a corrective to extreme versions of the contemporary view. (shrink)

Nous remercions le professeur George Steiner de nous avoir autorisés à reproduire le texte d’une brillante conférence (en français). Le problème qui l’attire dans ce texte, qui remonte aux années dominées par le travail « post-babélien », est la place, la fonction et la portée du futur dans l’horizon linguistique. L’analyse du mot anglais si particulier privacy est une remarquable illustration des thèses présentées.

This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictly intellectual non-political projects. (...) In fact, the refugee philosophers of science were highly active politically and debated questions about values inside and outside science, as a result of which their philosophy of science was scrutinized politically both from within and without the profession, by such institutions as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It will prove absorbing reading to philosophers and historians of science, intellectual historians, and scholars of Cold War studies. (shrink)

It is generally acknowledged that there were two schisms in the early history of the phenomenological movement. The first, the Great Phenomenological Schism, started between 1905 and 1913, as many of his younger contemporaries, for example Pfänder, Scheler, Reinach, Stein, and Ingarden, rejected Husserl’s transformation of phenomenology from the descriptive psychology of the Logical Investigations into the transcendental idealism of Ideas I. The second, the Phenomenological-Existential Schism, happened between 1927 and 1933, as it emerged that with Being and Time Heidegger’s (...) philosophy had moved away from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology of consciousness toward an ontological analytic of human existence as the way to an interpretation of the question of the meaning of Being. This paper is about neither the first schism per se nor the second schism per se but about the relationship between the two. It suggests that the first schism anticipated the second and the second recapitulated the first, so that, although the first could have occurred without the second, the second would not have happened as it did without the first. It also indicates that the second schism lies temporally much closer to the first schism than has been hitherto appreciated. Above all, the paper seeks an answer to this question: How do the Great Phenomenological Schism and the Phenomenological-Existential Schism illuminate one another philosophically? (shrink)

In this article, we investigate how the concept of Care Biography and related concepts are understood and operationalised and describe how it can be applied to advancing our understanding and practice of holistic and person‐centred care. Walker and Avant's eight‐step concept analysis method was conducted involving multiple database searches, with potential or actual applications of Care Biography identified based on multiple discussions among all authors. Our findings demonstrate Care Biography to be a novel overarching concept derived from the conjunction of (...) multiple other concepts and applicable across multiple care settings. Concepts related to Care Biography exist but were more narrowly defined and mainly applied in intensive care, aged care, and palliative care settings. They are associated with the themes of Meaningfulness and Existential Coping, Empathy and Understanding, Promoting Positive Relationships, Social and Cultural Contexts, and Self‐Care, which we used to inform and refine our concept analysis of Care Biography. In Conclusion, the concept of Care Biography, can provide a deeper understanding of a person and their care needs, facilitate integrated and personalised care, empower people to be in control of their care throughout their life, and help promote ethical standards of care. (shrink)

Berkeley's philosophy has been much studied and discussed over the years, and a growing number of scholars have come to the realization that scientific and mathematical writings are an essential part of his philosophical enterprise. The aim of this volume is to present Berkeley's two most important scientific texts in a form which meets contemporary standards of scholarship while rendering them accessible to the modern reader. Although editions of both are contained in the fourth volume of the Works, these lack (...) adequate introductions and do not provide com plete and corrected texts. The present edition contains a complete and critically established text of both De Motu and The Analyst, in addi tion to a new translation of De Motu. The introductions and notes are designed to provide the background necessary for a full understanding of Berkeley's account of science and mathematics. Although these two texts are very different, they are united by a shared a concern with the work of Newton and Leibniz. Berkeley's De Motu deals extensively with Newton's Principia and Leibniz's Specimen Dynamicum, while The Analyst critiques both Leibnizian and Newto nian mathematics. Berkeley is commonly thought of as a successor to Locke or Malebranche, but as these works show he is also a successor to Newton and Leibniz. (shrink)

Contrairement à une tendance majoritaire de l’exégèse du vocabulaire de la douleur dans le Corpus hippocratique (CH), qui le réduit à trois familles de mots et qui conçoit la douleur chez les médecins hippocratiques comme un phénomène exclusivement physique, nous avons des raisons de penser qu’on peut trouver plusieurs manières de signifier la douleur dans le CH et que les médecins hippocratiques ont thématisé des éléments émotionnels dans leurs diagnostics de la douleur.

This article examines the concept of Byzantinism that Julien Benda employed in his book La France Byzantine. In the fin-de-siècle European sensibility, Byzantinism was transferred from political to literary level, but Benda created an epistemological break when he asserted in his book that Byzantinism is literature in its normal function. Furthermore, of Byzantinist character is especially the modern literature. Thus, labeling modern literati as Byzantinist writers served as a critical tool for Benda, who condemned the degradation of modern intellectuals into (...) clerks. This transformation of literary normality affected also pure thought as is manifested in the ambiguous manner of expressing their ideas by modern thinkers. An example of such a Byzantinist use can be found in the manner Emmanuel Levinas exploited Husserl’s phenomenology. Finally, Benda engaged in a discussion with Paulhan’s view that literary philosophy is a form of critical terror. The position of Benda is that of a rationalist, whereas Paulhan is a thinker who focuses on the use of language. For Constantine Tsatsos, on the other hand, a Greek philosopher and author of a philosophical novel entitled Dialogues in a Monastery, the Byzantine moment is a part of great continuity of Greek culture, which is characterized by various structures in its period of long duration. One of these is the synthesis of Hellenism and Christianity that can be seen in Byzantium, where the transposition of the philosophical Eros to the mystical one plays a major role. This development is of paramount importance not only for the whole European culture but also for all questions of beauty and morality. The present paper concludes with a brief discussion of Richard Rorty’s account of pragmatic reason, which makes it possible to show how contemporary philosophy can be placed in the context of the debate about Byzantinism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.2 (2003) 295-301 [Access article in PDF] Some Recent Controversies in the Study of Later Greek Rhetoric George A. Kennedy The Greeks of the Roman Empireproduced no equal to Cicero or Quintilian: among their extensive writings there is no profound philosophical examination of political rhetoric and no comprehensive account of rhetorical education based on a lifetime of teaching. But the numerous later Greek rhetorical (...) treatises, dry reading as they may seem, sometimes even poorly written, have considerable significance for the intellectual history of the early centuries of the Christian era. They are a major source for our understanding of education, its materials, goals, and values, as experienced by most important thinkers of the times, pagan and Christian; the training they describe directly influenced the form and style of composition of much of the writing that has survived; they are evidence for cultural change and for the perception of Greek language and literature of the classical period more than five hundred years later; and they provide linguists and philologists with useful concepts and terminology to describe the workings of texts, pagan and Christian, ancient and modern.From 1931, when Hugo Rabe published the last of his editions of later Greek rhetorical texts, to 1974, when Josef Martin published Antike Rhetorik: Technik und Methode(1974), making extensive use of later Greek rhetorical treatises, study of later Greek rhetoric was at a low point. There was of course continued interest in On the Sublime, traditionally attributed to Longinus and surely the finest Greek work on rhetoric of the imperial period. Other important exceptions include Guilelmo Ballaira's edition of Tiberius' handbook of Demosthenic figures and Dieter Hagedorn's monograph, Zur Ideenlehre des Hermogenes(1964). Since the 1970s, with the expansion of research opportunities and younger scholars' search for opportunities in original work, there has been a modest renaissance that has produced new insight and new controversy. In some ways we now know more about the authors and their works; in some ways we are now uncertain about what we thought we [End Page 295] knew. Here I shall comment on several major contributions to the field and various continuing controversies, limiting the discussion to rhetorical theory from the time of the Roman Empire (thus omitting Demetrius and Philodemus as well as the orators).First, however, readers unfamiliar with this subject may appreciate a brief historical background. The antecedents of the concept of Rhetores Graecican be found in composite manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries, which collect a number of works that the teachers and scribes of the times thought basic for their studies. 1 One of these manuscripts, now known as Parisinus 1741, was the basis for the first printing of Rhetores Graeci, the Aldine edition in two volumes (Venice 1508-9). The principal texts included are, in the following order: Aphthonius' Progymnasmata, the five rhetorical treatises attributed to Hermogenes, Aristotle's Rhetorica, the pseudo-Aristotelian Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, Aristotle's Poetica, Sopatros' Quaestiones de compendis declamationibus, the Ars rhetoricathen attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demetrius' De interpretatione, Alexander's De figuris sensus et dictionis, Menander Rhetor's works on epideictic, two treatises on style attributed to Aelius Aristeides, and Apsines' De arte rhetorica.During the next four hundred years several of these works were given better editions, and additional rhetorical treatises were discovered in other manuscripts. Thus when Christian Walz set out in 1832 to edit Rhetores Graeciin what became an authoritative nine-volume edition, he felt able to omit the three Aristotelian works and the work attributed to Dionysius and to add additional handbooks of progymnasmata (in vol. 1), a few short treatises on rhetoric there and in volumes 3 and 9, and a very large amount of Byzantine scholia and commentary on Hermogenes, constituting all of volumes 2 and 4 through 8.Although Parisinus 1741 has remained a major authority for the text of Aristotle's Rhetoric, by 1854 when Leonard Spengel began publication of his Rhetores Graeciin three volumes, several manuscripts offering better texts of other works had been... (shrink)

Santayana argues that instinct and imagination are crucial to the emergence of reason from chaos. Santayana's Life of Reason, published in five books from 1905 to 1906, ranks as one of the greatest works in modern philosophical naturalism. Acknowledging the natural material bases of human life, Santayana traces the development of the human capacity for appreciating and cultivating the ideal. It is a capacity he exhibits as he articulates a continuity running through animal impulse, practical intelligence, and ideal harmony in (...) reason, society, art, religion, and science. The work is an exquisitely rendered vision of human life lived sanely. In this first book of the work, Santayana provides an account of how the human animal develops instinct, passion, and chaotic experience into rationality and ideal life. Inspired by Aristotle's De Anima, Darwin's evolutionary theory, and William James's The Principles of Psychology, Santayana contends that the requirements of action in a hazardous and uncertain environment are the sources of the development of mind. More specifically, instinct and imagination are crucial to the emergence of reason from chaos. Separating himself from the typical thought of the time by his recognition of the imagination, Santayana in this volume offers extensive critiques of various philosophies of mind, including those of Kant and the British empiricists. This Critical Edition, volume VII of The Works of George Santayana, includes a chronology, notes, bibliography, textual commentary, lists of variants, and other tools useful to Santayana scholars. The other four books of the volume include Reason in Society, Reason in Religion, Reason in Art, and Reason in Science. (shrink)