Requests by patients or their families for treatment which the patient's physician considers to be "inappropriate" are becoming more frequent than refusals of treatment which the physician considers appropriate. Such requests are often based on the patient's religious beliefs about the attributes of God (sovereignty, omnipotence), the attributes of persons (sanctity of life), or the individual's personal relationship with God (communication, commands, etc). We present four such cases and discuss some of the basic religious tenets of the three Abrahamic faith (...) traditions as they relate to such requests. We suggest that religious reasons for requesting "inappropriate" treatment are "special" and deserve serious consideration. We offer guidance to assist clinicians and clinical ethicists as they attempt to resolve these conflicts, emphasising the importance of understanding the religious beliefs of the patient/surrogate and suggesting the assistance of a religious interpreter. We suggest open discussion with patients and families of both the clinical situation and the theological basis for these requests. We also suggest that clinicians use additional religious doctrines or principles from patients' own traditions to balance the reasons behind the requests. We conclude that most persistent requests for "inappropriate" treatment should be honoured. (shrink)

Savulescu maintains that our paper, which encourages clinicians to honour requests for "inappropriate treatment" is prejudicial to his atheistic beliefs, and therefore wrong. In this paper we clarify and expand on our ideas, and respond to his assertion that medicine, ethics and atheism are objective, rational and true, while religion is irrational and false.

S'il est un point que les réflexions contemporaines sur le temps ont mis en relief et inscrit profondément dans notre conscience, c'est que l'avenir qu'on espère dépend directement du présent qu'on réalise. Telle est notre attitude en face du présent, telle elle sera inéluctablement en face de l'avenir; et donc l'avenir lui-même, puisque ce dernier n'est rien sinon un présent caché encore, au cœur d'un présent déjà actuel, et explicite. Il est en effet de l'essence même de notre condition humaine (...) d'avoir un présent structuré et comme stratifié. Certes on peut imaginer le présent comme un point sans épaisseur, comme la limite évanescente entre un segment de ligne qui marque le passé à jamais révolu, et l'avenir qui se meut vers nous pour basculer inexorablement vers le non-être en franchissant ce présent. Mais cette image, utile pour bien des tâches, ne correspond d'aucune manière à la réalité vivante de la conscience humaine et des activités qui lui sont propres. Nous sommes dans le présent ce que nous sommes et ce que, en un sens, nous croyons pouvoir dire que nous avons été. Une grande partie de ce que nous appelons le passé, notre passé personnel et sans doute notre passé spécifique, est présent, non seulement à titre de souvenir, pouvant être, ou non, évoqué, mais à titre de schéma dynamique modifiant notre être-au-monde, notre présente réaction au réel le plus réel, à la situation où nous avons à déployer notre activité. (shrink)

L B Daniels; Some Comments on ‘Value in Education’ by Johanna Burgess1, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 8, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 237–250, https.

Since the role of the Asian countries is increasing in the modern world, their philosophical traditions attract more and more attention. Due to this trend, a more complete panoramic view of the development of world philosophy as a whole is accessible, and it has become possible to understand that any constructions of the human mind that have arisen in a particular cultural field of experience cannot be regarded as exemplary and absolute. The researchers of Asian philosophies concentrate mostly on studying (...) the texts of individual thinkers. As a rule, they do not set themselves the task of examining these texts from the point of view of intercultural interactions and transformations of significant ideas and concepts in various cultural and historical contexts, defining the direction and mechanisms of cultural borrowing, as well as revealing new approaches and growth points. To achieve these goals, the research should focus at the problem of the self-determination and development of philosophy as a separate science in non-Western cultures, which are based on intellectual traditions with different origin than Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions. This article deals with the consideration of some topics that elucidate the features of the development of philosophical science in Japan, including the emergence of the concept of “philosophy” in this country, the definition of its subject, the formation of philosophical terminology, and various interpretations of what the term “Japanese philosophy” means. The author pays special attention to the characteristic of the main periods of progress of Japanese philosophical thought. In the conclusion, the author argues that the most important characteristic feature of the Japanese philosophy is its involvement in intercultural dialogue throughout its history. (shrink)

Содерж.: о Судзуки С±сане, Исиде Байгане, Ниномии Сонтоку, Сибусаве Эйити. В прил. включ. выдержки из работ представл. мыслителей.

Anagrams and syllabic wordplay of the kind championed by Frederick Ahl in his Metaformations have not always been favourably received by scholars of Latin poetry; I would hesitate to propose the following instance, were it not for the fact that its occurrence seems peculiarly apposite to the context in which it appears. That Roman poets were prepared to use such techniques to enhance the presentation of an argument by exemplifying its operation at a verbal level is demonstrated by the famous (...) passage of Lucretius in which the poet seeks to illustrate the tendency of semina … ardoris to create fire in wood by the literal presence of elements from the word for ‘fires’ in that denoting wood. A similar conception may underlie the association insinuated by the love elegists between amor and mors, suggesting that death is somehow ‘written into’ love: so Propertius declares laus in amore mori, while Tibullus appears to point to the lurking presence of death in the pursuit of love in the lines interea, dum fata sinunt, iungamus amores: | iam ueniet tenebris Mors adoperta caput – so swift and unexpected is death's approach that it is already present in aMOReS in the preceding line. Ovid's awareness of the poetic potential of this kind of play is fully exhibited in his celebrated account of Echo and Narcissus in Metamorphoses 3, where the subject matter gives the poet ample scope to exploit the humorous and pathetic possibilities afforded by Echo's fragmented repetitions of the frustrated entreaties of her beloved. (shrink)

It is well-recognized that uncertainty is an endemic feature and limitation of clinical judgment and practice that cannot be eliminated in many cases. Among the tasks of clinical ethics is the responsible management of uncertainties, first articulated in E. Haavi Morreim’s very nice concept of the "moral management of medical uncertainty." The papers in the 2012 Clinical Ethics issue of the Journal provide philosophically innovative and clinically applicable accounts of the varieties of uncertainty in clinical medicine and therefore in clinical (...) ethics: epistemic uncertainty, metaphysical uncertainty, and relational uncertainty. (shrink)

The papers in the 2010 “Clinical Ethics” number of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy explore issues along La Frontera, the borders and boundaries of clinical ethics. The first three papers in this “Clinical Ethics” number of the Journal explore borders and boundaries drawn within clinical ethics, concerning the moral standing of complementary and alternative medicine, palliative sedation, and induced abortion and feticide. The fourth and fifth papers explore the borders and boundaries between research ethics and clinical ethics.

Central concepts and consensus views in clinical ethics are marked by instability. The papers in this number of the Journal take up two such central concepts, quality of life and moral status, and two such consensus views, that germ-line gene transfer should not be undertaken for the purposes of enhancement of human traits and that the ethical obligation of physicians to treat HIV infected patients rests on consent of the physician. One outcome of these philosophical investigations is that these two (...) concepts and consensus views are less stable than one might have thought. I explore the possibility of generalizing this outcome in a reflection on clinical ethics as the management of instability and incompleteness, including the instability and incompleteness of clinical ethics itself. In the course of this reflection I liken clinical ethics to abstract expressionism in mid-twentieth century Western art. (shrink)

In Virgil's third eclogue, the goatherd Menalcas responds to his challenger Damoetas by offering as his wager in their contest of song a pair of embossed cups,caelatum diuini opus Alcimedontis, decorated with a pattern of vine and ivy. In the middle of this design, he says, are two figures. One is the astronomer Conon, and the other—at this point Menalcas, afflicted with a sudden loss of memory, professes to have forgotten the name of the second figure, and breaks off into (...) a question :quis fuit alter, | descripsit radio totum qui gentibus orbem, | tempora quae messor, quae curuus arator haberet?Various candidates for the identity of this second astronomer have been suggested, one of the most favoured being Eudoxus of Cnidus, whosePhaenomenahad been versified by the Hellenistic poet Aratus. In 1930 it was proposed by Léon Herrmann that Menalcas in fact answers his own question in his reference tocuruUS ARAToratEcl.3.42: the solution to Virgil's riddle is already written into the question, in the form of the anagram ofAratusconcealed within these two words. Strictly speaking, Hermann notes only that ‘Aratorau v. 42 évoque le nom d’Aratos’; he and later exponents of the theory tend to ignore the preceding ‘-us’—but there seems no reason to exclude it if an allusion to the Greek poet is to be seen in the two following syllables. (shrink)

Virgil's fourth Eclogue is one of the most quoted, adapted and discussed works of classical literature. This study traces the fortunes of Eclogue 4 in the literature and art of the Italian Renaissance. It sheds new light on some of the most canonical works of Western art and literature, as well as introducing a large number of other, lesser-known items, some of which have not appeared in print since their original publication, while others are extant only in manuscript. Individual chapters (...) are devoted to the uses made of the fourth Eclogue in the political panegyric of Medici Florence, the Venetian Republic and the Renaissance papacy, and to religious appropriations of the Virgilian text in the genres of epic and pastoral poetry. The book also investigates the appearance of quotations from the poem in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century fresco cycles representing the prophetic Sibyls in Italian churches. (shrink)

In the article, questions from the field of philosophy of mathematics are studied. The author is driven by the need to achieve a balance between the philosophy of science and the history of science in formation of concepts of the science development. In this regard, the author justifies the reliance on the methodology of implicit knowledge, combined with the epistemology principle of criticism in studying the development of mathematics as the most expedient and effective. The author expresses the necessity of (...) criticizing the methodology of counterexamples typical for mathematical empiricism declared by I. Lakatos. In the article, an explanation of the concept of implicit knowledge, as well as the examples from mathematics are given. The author believes that application of the concept of implicit knowledge in philosophical and mathematical terms allows us to reveal the unique specificity of mathematical science deeper. The author concludes that it is necessary to recognize the fundamental importance of the methodology of implicit knowledge for the epistemology, as well as for the development of philosophy and methodology of science in general. (shrink)

The article deals with historical dynamics of implicit and intuitive elements of mathematical knowledge. The author describes historical dynamics of implicit and intuitive elements and discloses a historical and evolutionary mechanism of building up mathematical knowledge. Each requirement to increase the level of theoretical rigor in mathematics is historically realized as a three-stage process. The first stage considers some general conditions of valid mathematical knowledge recognized by the mathematical community. The second one reveals the level of theoretical rigor increasing, while (...) the third one is characterized by explication of the hidden lemmas. A detailed discussion of historical substantiation of the basic algebra theorem is conducted according to the proposed technique. (shrink)

Au moment où il entreprend d'élaborer une preuve de l'existence de Dieu dont la force soit susceptible d'entraîner l'adhésion de tout esprit qui entend le sens des mots utilisés, s. Anselme veut faire appel à une notion de Dieu admise par tout le monde. Que signifie en effet ce mot Dieu, sinon, ce par rapport à quoi on ne saurait rien concevoir de plus parfait? La notion de Dieu et celle de la perfection la plus grande possible sont done, à (...) ses yeux, si intimement unies qu'on peut les employer l'une pour l'autre. Penser Dieu et penser 1'être le plus parfait possible, ce serait une seule et même chose. (shrink)

Heidegger''s conception of death as an attitude toward life, overlooked in current literature on death and dying, offers potential for deepening our understanding of the care of non-critically ill patients. By breaking away from the notion of death as an event distinct from life and viewing it as an anticipated possibility at every moment of life, Heidegger provides insight into our attempts to evade death through our fundamental attitudes and value commitments, which in turn determine our behavior and actions. When (...) combined with a method of application — the Nietzschean principle of reversal — these insights permit the understanding of diverse types of human mentality confronted with significant situations. Among the most important applications of these conceptions is to persons in need of medical care, and the resultant types, which are sampled as hypothetical cases, carry important implications for the sensitive care and psychosocial management of non-terminally ill patients. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the nature of the topological intuition and disclosure of the specifics of topological heuristics in the framework of philosophical theory of knowledge. As we know, intuition is a one of the support categories of the theory of knowledge, the driving force of scientific research. Great importance is mathematical intuition for the solution of non-standard problems, for which there is no algorithm for such a solution. In such cases, the mathematician addresses the so-called heuristics, built on (...) the basis of guesswork, obtained by intuition. The author substantiates the conclusion that topological intuition significantly specific compared to a traditional mathematical intuitions of Euclidean geometry. Today topology is a rapidly developing field of modern mathematics, integrates nicely with other sections of mathematical science. In its most general form of the topology can be defined as the branch of mathematics that studies the properties of spatial figures, does not change under deformations. The topological intuition is an instrument for development of topology on the basis of typological heuristics, which is the result of applying topological intuition to the objects topology. The author demonstrates in detail providing with the examples the specificity of topological heuristics and establishes its interconnection with Euclidean geometry. The author draws the conclusion about the fundamentality of topological intuition, and that it, perhaps, is primary in relation to traditionally understood mathematical intuition. (shrink)