Several types of inferences are employed in the diagnosis and prognosis of patients with brain injuries and disorders of consciousness. These inferences introduce unavoidable uncertainty, and can be evaluated in light of inductive risk: the epistemic and nonepistemic risks of being wrong. This article considers several ethically significant inductive risks generated by and interacting with inferences about patients with disorders of consciousness, and argues for prescriptive measures to manage and mitigate inductive risk in the context of disorders of consciousness.

As you face a life-defining change, you might ask yourself: Who will I become? This can be understood as a question about the nature and character of your future life, asked from your first person, or subjective, perspective. The nature and character of your conscious, first person, lived experience is a defining constituent of what it is like to be you. Framed this way, knowing the nature of your future lived experience is a way of knowing your future self. In (...) this paper, I explore this way of understanding one’s self and its implications for understanding life-defining changes in high-stakes contexts. My exploration of this way of understanding one’s self highlights the role of experience in grasping perceptual truths, and the importance of imagination, empathy, and testimony in self-understanding and prediction. (shrink)

There is an argument according to which there must be something nonrelationally valuable for anything to be of value. The chains of dependence between values must come to an end, and humanity meets the specifications. I explore alternatives to terminating a regress in nonrelational value and give reason to reject the “borrowing” conception of relational value that drives the argument. I doubt that the nonrelational value of humanity can be secured by an argument from the structure of value, but I (...) am optimistic about the prospects for explaining our value relationally and give reason to favor a reflexive relational model. (shrink)

L. Nathan Oaklander is one of the leading philosophers of time defending the tenseless or B-Theory of time. He has remained at the forefront of this field since the early 1980s and today he is arguably the most formidable opponent of the tensed or A-theory of time. Much of the direction of the debate in this field for the past twenty years or so, especially in regards to the new tenseless theory of time, has been influenced by Oaklander's work. This (...) book presents a carefully argued defense of the tenseless theory of time. The topics discussed include: the ontology of A- and B-theories of time; presentism; the open future theory; the A/B theory; defending the B-theory of time; temporal experience; temporal semantics; and time, identity, responsibility, and freedom. (shrink)

Citizens in wealthy liberal democracies are typically expected to see to basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter out of their own income, and those without the means to do so usually receive assistance in the form of cash transfers. Things are different with health care. Most liberal societies provide their citizens with health care or health care insurance in kind, either directly from the state or through private insurance companies that are regulated like public utilities. Except perhaps for small (...) co-pays or deductibles, citizens are not expected to see to their health needs out-of-pocket, at least for some basic level of care. Instead, when a citizen gets sick, the state or her insurance company foots the... (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is twofold: First, to critically discuss Lynne Rudder's Baker BA-theory of time, and second to contrast it with the R-theory (after Russell). In the course of my discussion I will contrast three different methodological approaches regarding the relation between common sense and ontology; clarify Russell's authentic view in contrast to the B-theory which is McTaggart's misrepresentation of Russell, and consider how the R-theory can respond to objections Baker makes to eternalism (as she understands it).

Criticized as a nostalgic anachronism by those who oppose her version of political theory and lauded as symbol of direct democratic participation by those who favor it, the Athenian polis features prominently in Hannah Arendt's account of politics. This essay traces the origin and development of Arendt's conception of the polis as a space of appearance from the early 1950s onward. It makes particular use of the Denktagebuch, Arendt's intellectual diary, in order to shed new light on the historicity of (...) one of her central concepts. The article contends that both critics and partisans of Arendt's use of the polis have made the same mistake: they have presumed that the polis represents a space of face-to-face immediacy. In fact, Arendt compared the polis to a series of analogues, many of which are not centered on direct exchanges between political actors and spectators. As a result, Arendt's early work on the polis turns out to anticipate many of the concerns of her later work on judgment, and her theory of the polis becomes a theory of topics. (shrink)

Clark & Thornton have demonstrated the paradox between the opacity of the transformations that underlie relational mappings and the ease with which people learn such mappings. However, C&T's trading-spaces proposal resolves the paradox only in the broadest outline. The general-purpose algorithm promised by C&T remains to be developed. The strategy of doing so is to analyze and formulate computational mechanisms for known cases of recoding.

Why did Hume drop sympathy as a key concept of his moral philosophy, and why—on the other hand—did Smith make it into the ‘didactic principle’ of his Theory of Moral Sentiments? These questions confront us with the basic issue of ethical theory concerning human nature. My point in dealing with these questions is to show what views of human nature their respective choices involved. And my procedure will be to take a close look at the revisions they made to their (...) ethical theories to bring out the contrasting aspects of their views of human nature. (shrink)

J. L. Schellenberg has constructed major arguments for atheism based on divine hiddenness in two separate works. This paper reviews these arguments and highlights how they are grounded in reflections on perfect divine love. However, Schellenberg also defends what he calls the ‘subject mode’ of religious scepticism. I argue that if one accepts Schellenberg's scepticism, then the foundation of his divine-hiddenness arguments is undermined by calling into question some of his conclusions regarding perfect divine love. In other words, if his (...) scepticism is correct, then Schellenberg's case for atheism cannot stand. Finally, I demonstrate how my argument avoids the many defences that Schellenberg has employed thus far in defending these particular atheistic arguments. (shrink)

Suffering is a central component of our lives. Our bodies break and become diseased. Our feelings get hurt, loved ones die, our goals are frustrated, our expectations are not met. It is a commonplace to think that suffering is, all and everywhere, bad. But might suffering also be good? If so, in what ways might suffering have positive, as well as negative, value? The papers collected for the this volume are original works by experts in a variety of disciplines that (...) address questions about the nature and value of suffering, its relation to other mental states and capacities, and to vital questions in ethics, theology, and aesthetic. This chapter examines the nature and value of emotions suffering in criminal punishment: what is emotional suffering, and can it be justified as as a form of legal punishment? (shrink)

This is a collection of essays on themes of legal philosophy which have all been generated or affected by Hart's work. The topics covered include legal theory, responsibility, and enforcement of morals, with contributions from Ronald Dworkin, Rolf Sartorius, Neil MacCormach, David Lyons, Kent Greenawalt, Michael Moore, Joseph Raz, and C.L. Ten, among others.

탈냉전 탈이념의 시대상을 피력하고, 21세기 세계사 주도권 참여를 위한한국인의 역사적 소명, 문명론적 근거를 제시한 저술.

The present article challenges the bifurcation of the world established by Kant, a bifurcation that continues to plague contemporary thinking about science, religion, and morality. This challenge is aided by Whitehead's alternative worldview.

Il importe de situer les enjeux humains de ce mouvement que d'aucuns qualifient de « nouvel ordre mondial » : quel souci de l'être humain en tant que tel manifeste-t-il ? L'homme est un être d'appartenances individuelles et collectives, il s'éprouve dans sa liberté et dans sa participation à l'histoire qui se fait. La société qui s'annonce sera-t-elle pour lui, offerte à son engagement, ou contre lui, le contraignant à se soumettre ou à se démettre ? Des penseurs contemporains montrent (...) que l'homme se construit en habitant l'écart entre particulier et universel , individualité et solidarité , « territoire » et « planète » . Comment cette « dialectique » pourra-t-elle s'exercer demain dans un univers aux contours flous et aux logiques opaques? On ne peut fonder un « contrat » éthique et politique avec d'autres si le temps social, économique ou culturel dissout les particularités et rend l'avenir improbable. Il se pourrait que la mondialisation oblige les « instances de sens » à faire mémoire, à raconter comment on devient hommes ensemble dans la complexité d'une histoire à faire. L'urgence est à la transmission. It is important to situate the human stakes of this movement that some people qualify as « new world order » : what concern of the human being as such does it manifest ? Man is a being of individual and collective belonging. He tests himself in his freedom and in his participation in history in the making. Will future society be for him, inviting him to participate, or against him, forcing him to submit or to give up ? Contemporaneous thinkers show that man constructs himself in living the gap between the particular and universal , individuality and solidarity , « territory » and « planet » . How can this « dialectic » be practiced tomorrow in a universe with vague outlines and opaque logics ? One cannot establish an ethical and political « contract » with others if the social, economic, or cultural time dissolves particularities and makes the future improbable. Il is possible that globalization obliges the « moments of sense » to remember, to tell about how we become human together in the complexity of a history to be made. The urgency is the transmission. (shrink)