A series of essays by an international and trans-disciplinary group of contributors which explores the nature and extent of the utopian impulse. Working across a range of historical periods and cultures, the book investigates key aspects of utopian theory, texts, and socio-political practices.

Joseph J. Kockelmans provides a clear and systematic treatment of the central themes and topics of Heidegger's later writings, focusing on the all-important question of the relationship of truth and Being. If we are to understand Heidegger's thought, Kockelmans explains, we must conceive it as a path or way, rather than as a finished system. Adopting this approach himself, Kockelmans leads us with scholarly care through the wide range of issues that Heidegger wrote about between roughly 1935 and 1965. (...) After a discussion of Heidegger's own effort to learn to think, subsequent chapters present Heidegger's views on such matters as the meaning of Being; the ontological difference; heaven and earth; gods and mortals; and language, art, science, technology, ethics, and politics. In conclusion, Kockelmans reflects on the task of thinking in an age when classical philosophy has reached its logical end. (shrink)

By considering the history of bioethics and international humanitarian law, Joseph J. Fins contends that bioethics as an academic and moral community should stand in solidarity with Ukraine as it defends freedom and civility.

As scholars envision a new regulatory or statutory neurorights schema it is important to imagine unintended consequences if reforms are implemented before their implications are fully understood. This paper critically evaluates provisions proposed for a new Chilean Constitution and evaluates this movement against efforts to improve the diagnosis of, and treatment for, individuals with disorders of consciousness within the broader context of disability law, international human rights, and a capabilities approach to health justice as advanced by Amartya Sen and Martha (...) Nussbaum. Framed in this way, any neurorights regime would need to satisfy several criteria. First it would be obliged to balance both positive and negative rights in the furtherance of human capabilities. Second, it would need to be future oriented and informed about the science it sought to regulate and not fall prey to science fiction fantasies that remain ungrounded in reality. Third, it would need to be specific and avoid generalizations that would lead to conceptual confusion and litigation that could delay scientific progress. Finally, it would need to harmonize novel neurorights with long-established norms in international disability and human rights law. A failure to meet these criteria will destine any novel neurorights regime to the periphery. At this juncture Chile’s nascent constitutional venture into neurorights fails to satisfy these criteria. While there yet may be a role for a more capacious and bivalent articulation of neurorights that account for capabilities and precedent, the current Chilean neurorights reforms are vague and premature. As such they should undergo additional scholarly scrutiny and should not be adopted by other jurisdictions. (shrink)

The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Money surveys the role of money in the history of ideas. Volume 1: Ancient and Medieval Thought explores the worldviews of societies in the process of monetization. The volume is divided into sections on early Civilizations, classical Greece, the Roman era, and Medieval and Renaissance thought.

In Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology, Joseph J. Kockelmans provides the reader with a biographical sketch and an overview of the salient features of Husserl's thought. Kockelmans focuses on the essay for the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1928, Husserl's most Important effort to articulate the aims of phenomenology for a more general audience. Included are Husserl's text -- in the original German and in English translation on facing pages -- a synopsis, and an extensive commentary that relates Husserl's work as a whole (...) to the essay for the Encyclopedia. (shrink)

"We need a philosophy of both history and spirit to deal with the problems we touch upon here. Yet we would be unduly rigorous if we were to wait for perfectly elaborated principles before speaking philosophically of politics." Thus Merleau-Ponty introduces _Adventures of the Dialectic,_ his study of Marxist philosophy and thought. In this study, containing chapters on Weber, Lukacs, Lenin, Sartre, and Marx himself, Merleau-Ponty investigates and attempts to go beyond the dialectic.

The Irish antecedents of the struggle of Archbishop Hughes and his Irish emigrant flock against the Public School Society of the City of New York.

Patient narratives from two investigational deep brain stimulation trials for traumatic brain injury and obsessive‐compulsive disorder reveal that injury and illness rob individuals of personal identity and that neuromodulation can restore it. The early success of these interventions makes a compelling case for continued post‐trial access to these technologies. Given the centrality of personal identity to respect for persons, a failure to provide continued access can be understood to represent a metaphorical identity theft. Such a loss recapitulates the pain of (...) an individual's initial injury or illness and becomes especially tragic because it could be prevented by robust policy. A failure to fulfill this normative obligation constitutes a breach of disability law, which would view post‐trial access as a means to achieve social reintegration through this neurotechnological accommodation. (shrink)

This book offers comparative ontologies of both Islam and liberalism as discourses more broadly construed. The author argues that, despite recent efforts to speak of overlapping consensuses and discursive congruence, the fundamental categories that constitute 'Islam' and 'Liberalism' remain very different, and that these differences should be taken seriously. Thus far, no recent scholarly works have explicitly or meticulously broken down where these differences lie. The author rigorously explores questions related to rights, moral epistemologies, the role of religion in the (...) public sphere, and more general approaches to legal discourse, via primary and canonical sources constitutive of both Islam and liberalism. He then goes on to articulate why communitarian modes of thought are better suited for engaging with Islam and contemporary socio-political modes of organization than liberalism. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Politics and International Relations, Islam, Liberalism, and Communitarianism. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to indicate the extent to which there is a privileged relationship between the experience of the death of a friend and an understanding of what it means to be a self or a subject. In particular this claim is raised against Heidegger who in ¶47 of _Being and Time_ seems to have raised and explicitly denied any such connection but on closer review turns out to have in fact ignored it altogether. This essay aims (...) to wrestle back from Heidegger the irreducible significance of an other’s death by casting light on a specific kind of intersubjectivity that Heidegger fails to consider: friendship. Drawing on the recently published course materials from Heidegger’s tenure in Freiburg, and in particular the 1921 lectures on Augustine’s _Confessions_, this essays points to a decisive turning point in Heidegger’s theory of Mitsein, if only by exposing a road not taken. The argument is that it is precisely because Heidegger, in fact, considers only the death of a “random stranger” rather than anybody that one actually cares for, that he has an easy time dismissing the significance of the death of another. Against Heidegger this essay will argue that when a friend dies one loses not only her friend’s presence but also something of her own. In so suggesting, this essay departs from the otherwise familiar critiques of Heidegger styled after Fichte, Hegel, or Levinas. (shrink)

This essay critiques the fiercely utilitarian allocation scheme of Cameron et al. Children have no hope of recovery if their lives are cut short based on administrative protocols that misrepresent the nature of their conditions. Unilateral futility judgements - especially those based on a false predicate - are discriminatory. When considering the best interests of children, we should see possibility in disability and not advance ill-informed utilitarianism.

In this essay, the author reflects on his development as a physician by recounting two patient narratives of patients he cared for as a third year medical student. In the process of telling these stories of sickness, the author also provides a window on medical practice in the 1980’s in an academic medicine center and how practices have changed. Decades before what has been dubbed “narrative medicine,” the author learned the power of words to shape relationships and promote professional formation.