In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Institute of Medicine’s Report on Non-Heart-Beating Organ TransplantationRoger Herdman (bio), Tom L. Beauchamp (bio), and John T. Potts Jr. (bio)In December 1997, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released a report on medical and ethical issues in the procurement of non-heart-beating organ donors. This report had been requested in May 1997 by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). We will here describe the genesis of (...) the IOM report, the medical and moral concerns that led the DHHS to sponsor it, the process of producing it, and its conclusions. The analyses, findings, and recommendations of the report are also reviewed, in particular the central issues that led to suggestions for policy changes.Transplantation BackgroundAs a first step, some background in the relevant aspects of organ transplantation will prove useful. For the purposes of this analysis, “transplantation” involves the transfer of cells, tissues, or solid organs from one human to another to replace the structure or function of comparable body components that, through injury or disease, are defective or of inadequate function. The IOM report deals with solid organs, primarily kidneys and livers, whose blood supply is reconnected in the organ recipient, in contrast to cells, like bone marrow, and tissues, like corneas. A variety of donor types exists for organ transplantation, each with particular medical and scientific conditions.Living donors are healthy (and usually genetically related) individuals who volunteer to provide either a whole, paired organ such as a kidney or a section of an organ such as a liver. Cadaver donors are individuals who have died and from whom a full array of organs can be taken. “Heart-beating” cadaver donors are individuals who have suffered “brain death,” that is, irreversible cessation of function of the whole brain including the brain stem; and “non-heart-beating” donors (NHBDs) are individuals who are ill or injured, but not “brain dead,” and who have suffered cardiopulmonary death, that is, irreversible cessation of cardiac and respiratory function. NHBDs can be “controlled,” which means that [End Page 83] they can be sustained by artificial life support systems until a medical and family decision is made to terminate futile life support. This can be done at a scheduled time and in a controlled manner, and organs can then be recovered for transplantation. NHBDs can also be “uncontrolled,” which means that their hearts and breathing have stopped through disease or injury at an unexpected time or in an uncontrolled manner, and they cannot be resuscitated; the organs of some individuals of this description can be recovered for transplantation. The IOM report focused on both controlled and uncontrolled NHBDs and on problems specific to them.The questions that were asked and addressed in the IOM report became current and salient beginning in 1992 with the establishment of the University of Pittsburgh “Policy for the Management of Terminally Ill Patients Who May Become Organ Donors After Death.” This policy addressed controlled NHBDs and the ethical questions raised by their use; much of the discussion was reported in the June 1993 special issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. Public notice and anxiety about some of these concerns were sharpened and refocused by national and local media allegations of improper treatment of donors at the Cleveland Clinic in 1997, specifically premature—i.e., antemortem—recovery of organs and administration of drugs that allegedly might hasten donor death.The DHHS Request for StudyIt is not surprising that several federal actions would be taken in response to these events. Some, such as the results of a transplantation task force, remain largely internal to DHHS at this writing. Others are public, such as the IOM study of the NHBD situation. In May 1997, the DHHS initiated contacts with the IOM with the goal of exploring federal concerns about the medical and ethical treatment of NHBDs, in particular the allegations directed at the Cleveland Clinic.The DHHS response should be understood in at least three contexts. First, living donors and uncontrolled NHBDs were essentially the only donor types in the early days of transplantation in the United States. The technologies, ethics, and social acceptance of controlling and terminating life support for... (shrink)

In the 1950s, Chomsky and his colleagues began attempts to reduce the complexity of natural language phonology and syntax to a few general principles. It wasn’t long before philosophers, notably John Searle and H. Paul Grice, started looking for ways to do the same for rational communication (Chapman 2005). In his 1967 William James Lectures, Grice presented a loose optimization system based on his maxims of conversation. The resulting papers (especially Grice 1975) strike a fruitful balance between intuitive exploration (...) and formal development. Though the work is not particularly formal, it marks the birth of modern formal pragmatics. Pragmatics is central to the theory of linguistic meaning because, to paraphrase Levinson (2000), the encoded content of the sentences we utter is only the barest sketch of what we actually communicate with those utterances. Utterance interpretation involves complex interactions among (i) semantic content, (ii) the context of utterance, and (iii) general pragmatic pressures (of which Grice’s maxims are one conception). The starting point for a formal pragmatics is the observation that speakers agree to a remarkable extent on the interpretations of the utterances they hear, suggesting that there are deep regularities across speakers, utterance contexts, and sentence types in how (i)–(iii) interact. An overarching challenge for pragmatic theory is that semantic content and the context of utterance influence each other. It is common, for instance, to find that the meaning of a sentence is crucially incomplete without contextual information. Indexicals and demonstratives are paradigm cases: ‘I am here now’ doesn’t have a fully specified denotation without information about who the speaker is, when he is speaking, and where he is speaking. Similarly, modal auxiliaries like must admit of a wide range of interpretations.. (shrink)

In recent years a number of books have been published that offer short autobiographical essays of academics, focusing on their research and how their life history affected their scholarly development. These could be labeled as "intellectual journey narratives." Some volumes focus on philosophers and their religious faith or lack thereof (e.g., Clark, 1997, Antony, 2007). Psychology has its own version of the intellectual journey narrative, in T. S. Krawiec's (1972, 1974, 1978) multivolume set of autobiographical essays by contemporary psychologists. In (...) 1987, Rosemary Pilkington edited her first volume of essays entitled Men and Women of Parapsychology: Personal Reflections, Esprit Volume 1. It contains autobiographical essays by Jule Eisenbud, Montague Ullman, Jan Ehrenwald, Eileen Coly, Joseph H. Rush, Gertrude R. Schmeidler, Emilio Servadio, Renée Haynes, Hans Bender, Karlis Osis, George Zorab and Bernard Grad. The second (2013) volume contains autobiographical essays by Mary Rose Barrington, Eberhard Bauer, William Braud (now deceased), Stephen Braude, Richard S. Broughton, Larry Dossey, Sally Rhine Feather, Erlendur Haraldsson, Arthur Hastings, Stanley Krippner, Lawrence LeShan, Roger Nelson, John Palmer, Guy Leon Playfair, William G. Roll (now deceased), Serena Roney-Dougal, Stephan A. Schwartz, Rex G. Stanford, Russell Targ, Charles T. Tart, and Walter von Lucadou. Between the two volumes almost every significant contemporary parapsychologist is represented, with the major exceptions being the late John Beloff and the late Ian Stevenson. (shrink)

The recent highlighting of meat’s environmental costs has added acute urgency to longstanding moral and political contestations around animal agriculture and the meat economy. This introductory essay sets out the volume’s key premise that the practices of our contemporary meat regime are shaped as much by cultural and imaginative factors as by ecological debate, political deliberation and moral reasoning. Specifically, drawing on work by Melanie Joy, Annie Potts and Nick Fiddes, we explore the value of literary-critical perspectives as a (...) complement to the more familiar ethical and political analyses. We begin by offering an historical overview of meat culture as it has developed in the last century in Europe and North America before outlining the ways in which a post-anthropocentric literary practice is emerging in relation to this context. This survey allows us to articulate the volume’s contribution to work in animal studies and the more recent field of vegan studies, as formulated by Laura Wright and others. (shrink)

Potts (2005) and many subsequent works have argued that the semantic content of appositive (non-restrictive) relative clauses, e.g., the underlined material in John, who nearly killed a woman with his car, visited her in the hospital, must be in some way separate from the content of the rest of the sentence, i.e., from at-issue content. At the same time, there is mounting evidence from various anaphoric processes that the two kinds of content must be integrated into a single, (...) incrementally evolving semantic representation. The challenge is how to reconcile this informational separation with these pervasive anaphoric connections. We propose a dynamic semantic account that accomplishes this by taking appositive and at-issue content to involve two different kinds of updates to the Context Set (CS). Treating the context set as a distinguished propositional variable, pcs, we argue that appositives directly impose their content on the CS by eliminating possible values assigned to pcs. In contrast, we treat at-issue assertions as introducing a new propositional dref and proposing that pcs be updated with its content, subject to addressee's response. In addition to capturing the behavior of appositives in discourse, we show that the account can be extended to capture the projection of appositive content past various sentential operators. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of how emojis are integrated into the text that they occur with. I use the typology of gestural iconic enrichments proposed by Schlenker (2018a, 2018b) to investigate the hypothesis that emojis denoting objects (e.g., ????) and activities (e.g., ????) project (i.e., interact with logical operators) when co-occurring with text in a similar way as gestures do with speech. In particular, I claim that [i.] emojis generate co-suppositions, i.e., assertion-dependent presuppositions, when immediately following text (e.g., the (...) sentence “John didn’t train today ????” gives rise to the inference that “if John had trained today, weightlifting would have been involved”); [ii.] emojis generate supplements (in the sense of Potts, 2005), just like appositive relative clauses, when they are separated from the accompanying text by a pause (e.g., the sentence “John trained today...????” gives rise to the inference that “John trained today, which involved weightlifting”); [iii.] when used as replacements for words (e.g., “Yesterday, John didn’t ???? ”), emojis have an at-issue semantics and can trigger standard presuppositions. (shrink)

Fresnel's theory of light was (a) impressively predictively successful yet (b) was based on an "entity" (the elastic-solid ether) that we now "know" does not exist. Does this case "confute" scientific realism as Laudan suggested? Previous attempts (by Hardin and Rosenberg and by Kitcher) to defuse the episode's anti-realist impact. The strongest form of realism compatible with this case of theory-rejection is in fact structural realism. This view was developed by Poincare who also provided reasons to think that it is (...) the only realist view of theories that really makes sense. (shrink)

John Dewey's Experience and Nature has been considered the fullest expression of his mature philosophy since its eagerly awaited publication in 1925. Irwin Edman wrote at that time that "with monumental care, detail and completeness, Professor Dewey has in this volume revealed the metaphysical heart that beats its unvarying alert tempo through all his writings, whatever their explicit themes." In his introduction to this volume, Sidney Hook points out that "Dewey's Experience and Nature is both the most suggestive and (...) most difficult of his writings." The meticulously edited text published here as the first volume in the series The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953 spans that entire period in Dewey's thought by including two important and previously unpublished documents from the book's history: Dewey's unfinished new introduction written between 1947 and 1949, edited by the late Joseph Ratner, and Dewey's unedited final draft of that introduction written the year before his death. In the intervening years Dewey realized the impossibility of making his use of the word 'experience' understood. He wrote in his 1951 draft for a new introduction: "Were I to write (or rewrite) Experience and Nature today I would entitle the book Culture and Nature and the treatment of specific subject-matters would be correspondingly modified. I would abandon the term 'experience' because of my growing realization that the historical obstacles which prevented understanding of my use of 'experience' are, for all practical purposes, insurmountable. I would substitute the term 'culture' because with its meanings as now firmly established it can fully and freely carry my philosophy of experience.". (shrink)

This book provides an intellectual biography of Max Horkheimer during the early and middle phases of his life and analyzes his model of early Critical Theory.

Late in his life, Hans-Georg Gadamer was asked to explain what the universal aspect of hermeneutics consisted in, and he replied, enigmatically, “in the _verbum interius_.” Gadamer devoted a pivotal section of his magnum opus, _Truth and Method_, to this Augustinian concept, and subsequently pointed to it as a kind of passkey to his thought. It remains, however, both in its origins and its interpretations, a mysterious concept. From out of its layered history, it remains a provocation to thought, expressing (...) something about the relation of language and understanding that has yet to be fully worked out. The scholastic idea of a word that is fully formed in the mind but not articulated served Augustine as an analogy for the procession of the Trinity, and served Thomas Aquinas as an analogy for the procession between divine ideas and human thought. Gadamer turned the analogy on its head by using the verbum interius to explain the obscure relation between language and human understanding. His learned interpretation of the idea of the inner word through Neoplatonism, Lutheranism, idealism, and historicism may seem nearly as complex as the medieval source texts he consulted and construed in his exegesis, but the profoundity of his insights are unquestioned. In unpacking Gadamer's interpretive feat, John Arthos provides an overview of the philosophy of the logos out of which the _verbum interius_ emerged. He summarizes the development of the _verbum _in ancient and medieval doctrine, traces its path through German thought, and explains its relevance to modern hermeneutic theory. His work unfolds in two parts, as an expansive intellectual history and as a close analysis and commentary on source texts on the inner word, from Augustine to Gadamer. As such, this book serves as an indispensable guide and reference for hermeneutics and the intellectual traditions out of which it arose, as well as an original theoretical statement in its own right. “Consummately researched, lucidly written, and persuasively argued throughout, __The Inner Word_ _succeeds brilliantly in bringing to light this neglected but pivotal matter in Gadamer’s work. Arthos is learned in the best ‘humanist’ way, for he succeeds in creating something new of his own that will speak eloquently to all of us.” —_Walter Jost, University of Virginia_ “Gadamer suggests that the Christian idea of incarnation is a key to his hermeneutics, but does not explain his position in a detailed or systematic manner. Arthos brings his considerable knowledge of hermeneutics and rhetoric to bear on Gadamer's insight, recounting the rich intellectual history to which Gadamer gestures, and providing an extended and detailed exegesis of this pivotal point in the third part of _Truth and Method_. Gadamer's account of 'linguisticality,' Arthos explains, can best be understood through his use of a complex metaphor—the ‘inner word.’ Arthos matches his erudition with clear and clean prose, and his account exemplifies, rather than just describes, Gadamer's hermeneutical philosophy. Any scholar interested in Gadamer's philosophy should have this book on his or her shelf.” —_Francis J. Mootz III, William S. Boyd Professor of Law, William S. Boyd School of Law_ “Arthos's strength lies for me in his careful reading of the sources. He effectively commands the literature on the subject. This work shows in a sophisticated way the legacy of trinitarian theology for philosophical hermeneutics. The very complex task of illuminating the phenomenon of the _verbum interius _and indicating its centrality for philosophical hermeneutics is accomplished by John Arthos with great sensitivity to the subject matter.” —_Andrzej Wiercinski, The International Institute for Hermeneutics_. (shrink)

"There are seven chapters, addressing philosophical issues pertaining to death, the badness of death, time and death, ideas on immortality, near death experiences, and extending life through medical technology. The book is shorter, and less elaborate, than Kagan's Death. And it goes into more depth about a selection of central issues related to death and immortality than May's book. It gives an original take on various basic puzzles pertaining to death, and integrates a discussion of these philosophical issues with an (...) analysis of near-death experiences, as well as an exploration of contemporary efforts to extend life by heroic medical means"--. (shrink)

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human persons possessed of reflective consciousness.

David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature presents the most important account of skepticism in the history of modern philosophy. In this lucid and thorough introduction to the work, John P. Wright examines the development of Hume's ideas in the Treatise, their relation to eighteenth-century theories of the imagination and passions, and the reception they received when Hume published the Treatise. He explains Hume's arguments concerning the inability of reason to establish the basic beliefs which underlie science and morals, (...) as well as his arguments showing why we are nevertheless psychologically compelled to accept such beliefs. The book will be a valuable guide for those seeking to understand the nature of modern skepticism and its connection with the founding of the human sciences during the Enlightenment. (shrink)

There is a growing consensus in the philosophical literature that sounds differ rather profoundly from colors. Colors are qualities, while sounds are particulars of some sort or other, such as events or pressure waves. A key motivation for this is that sounds seem to be transient, to evolve over time, to begin and end, while colors seem like stable qualities of objects' surfaces. I argue that sounds are indeed, like colors, stable qualities of objects. Sounds are not transient, and they (...) do not seem to be, even though they are typically perceived transiently. In particular, sounds are dispositions of objects to vibrate in response to being stimulated. This stable property view of sounds aligns nicely with, and owes an inspirational debt to, reflectance physicalist accounts of color. The upshot is a unified picture of colors, sounds, and the perception thereof. (shrink)

This volume presents new work on infinitism, the view that there are no foundational reasons for beliefs--an ancient view in epistemology, now growing again in popularity. Leading epistemologists illuminate its strengths and weaknesses, and address questions new and old about justification, reasoning, responsibility, disagreement, and trust.

This superb collection by the eminent physicist and critic John Ziman, opens with an album of portraits of scientists--Albert Einstein, Freeman Dyson, Lev Landau, Mark Azbel, Andrei Sakharov. Ziman takes readers into the world of the contemporary scientist, showing how discoveries are made and how claims are tested. He then travels into the minds of scientists as they are drawn into competing directions. Here Ziman exposes the path of discovery, which is strewn with complex human needs, governmental restrictions, the (...) desire for profits, and the exercise of technical virtuosity. (shrink)

This chapter reviews a number of related problems in the epistemology of testimony, and suggests some dilemmas for any theory of knowledge that tries to solve them. Here a common theme emerges: It can seem that any theory must make testimonial knowledge either too hard or too easy, and that therefore no adequate account of testimonial knowledge is possible. The chapter then puts forward a proposal for making progress. Specifically, an important function of the concept of knowledge is to govern (...) the acquisition and distribution of quality information within an epistemic community. Testimonial exchanges paradigmatically serve in the distribution role, but sometimes serve in the acquisition role. The resulting position, it is argued, explains why testimonial knowledge is sometimes easy to get, and sometimes much harder. (shrink)

What’s so bad about the placebo effect? John Worrall discusses the recent Nurofen labelling “scandal”.

Gerald Sykes -- Aldous Huxley -- Gerald Heard -- Christopher Isherwood -- John van Druten -- Marianna Masin -- J. Crawford Lewis -- Dorothy F. Mercer -- Kurt Friedrichs -- Swami Atulananda -- Jane Molard -- The Countess of Sandwich -- John Yale -- Joan Rayne -- Durgacharan -- Pravrajika Saradaprana.

In this much-needed contribution toward an understanding of the complexity of human consciousness, John Boghosian Arden, Ph.D., demonstrates that within the three broad subsystems - biophysiology, sociocultural dynamics, and intrapsychic aspects - not only do further subsystems exist, but so does a great degree of interconnectivity. Biophysiological processes cannot be conceptualized without considering individual psychological and sociocultural factors. To understand the evolution of human consciousness, one must take into account the systemic co-evolutionary nature of all aspects of consciousness. In (...) this clearly written volume, Arden describes consciousness as a multidimensional, fluid process in which bi-directional causal interrelationships occur. In one unifying and multidisciplinary theory, he deals with issues of causality, determinism versus free will, and the mind/body connection. Arden's fresh attempt to describe consciousness factors in the changes occurring in evolutionary theory, chaos theory, and logic. (shrink)

I defend the unpopular view that inference can create justification. I call this view inferential creationism. Inferential creationism has been favored by infinitists, who think that it supports infinitism. But it doesn’t. Finitists can and should accept creationism.

While philosophy believes it is impossible to have an experience of God without the senses, theology claims that such an experience is possible, though potentially idolatrous. In this engagingly creative book, John Panteleimon Manoussakis ends the impasse by proposing an aesthetic allowing for a sensuous experience of God that is not subordinated to imposed categories or concepts. Manoussakis draws upon the theological traditions of the Eastern Church, including patristic and liturgical resources, to build a theological aesthetic founded on the (...) inverted gaze of icons, the augmented language of hymns, and the reciprocity of touch. Manoussakis explores how a relational interpretation of being develops a fuller and more meaningful view of the phenomenology of religious experience beyond metaphysics and onto-theology. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1938, is based upon the Muirhead lectures on political philosophy delivered in the University of Birmingham in January and February of 1938. This title was intended to be of interest to students and scientific workers in the belief that Marxism will prove valuable to them in their scientific work, as well as to a wider audience.

Two seemingly complementary trends stand out currently in school science education in the United States: one is the increased emphasis on inquiry activities in classrooms, and the other is the high level of attention given to student understanding of the nature of science. This essay looks at the range of activities that fall within the first trend, noting, in particular, the growing popularity of inquiry activities that engage students in engineering-type tasks. The potential for public disengagement from science and technology (...) issues is described as a result of the continued juxtaposition of these sorts of inquiry activities with our current, idealized portrayals of the nature of science—the emphasis of the second trend. Drawing on Dewey's instrumental theory of knowledge, an alternative way of thinking about science is offered that would not only provide for a more authentic understanding of science, but also invite much needed public participation in the broad governance of science in modern-day democratic societies. (shrink)

Using philosophical and theological reflection, this book explores the rational grounding for Christian faith, inquiring into the basis for believing the Christian revelation, and using the answers to give an account of Christian faith itself. Setting the discussion in the context of the history of views on revelation, Divine Faith makes an original contribution to historiography and draws out hitherto unnoticed affinities between Catholic and Protestant thought. Re-examining the question from the beginning by asking how it is that the Christian (...) revelation is made, Lamont then looks at the fundamental philosophical issues concerning the nature of knowledge and the reasonableness of belief in testimony that are crucial to an understanding of Christian belief. Through theological considerations on the relations of grace and the church, and new advances in the philosophy of belief in testimony and how God speaks to communicate the Christian religion, this book offers an original and powerful account of the nature of Christian belief. (shrink)