in a recent article entitled “Hume on the Passions,” Stephen Buckle opens with the claim that Hume’s theory of the passions has largely been neglected. “Apart from a couple of famous sections in the Treatise concerning the sources of action,” he writes, “the subject matter has rarely excited interest.”1 His analysis of why the subject of the passions in Hume has been uninspiring points to the fact that readers have largely misunderstood the point of Hume’s theory. They usually regard the (...) account as yet another mechanistic analysis of the passions in the vein of seventeenth-century science, alongside the offerings of Malebranche, Hobbes, and Spinoza. Buckle is right to point out that there is a.. (shrink)

The period from Kant to Hegel is one of the most intense and rigorous in modern philosophy. The central problem at the heart of it was the development of a new standard of theoretical reflection and of the principle of rationality itself. The essays in this volume, published in 2000, consider both the development of Kant's system of transcendental idealism in the three Critiques, the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, and the Opus Postumum, as well as the reception and transformation (...) of that idealism in the work of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. (shrink)

Health professionals do not always have the luxury of making “right” choices. This article introduces the “devil's choice” as a metaphor to describe medical choices that arise in circumstances where all the available options are both unwanted and perverse. Using the devil's choice, the paper criticizes the principle of double effect and provides a re-interpretation of the conventional legal and ethical account of symptom relief in palliative care.

This book examines Augustine's description of the actually existing world, especially that aspect most important for the human pursuit of happiness: the human being and God. It begins with an overview of the characteristics of the human individual and the context in which they must live out their lives, a context dominated by two seemingly contradictory realities: the existence of God and the existence of evil.

Aktualnejshaya problema segodnyashnego dnya - vyhod iz sistemy globalnyh krizisov, s kotorymi stolknulos naselenie Zemli, i perehod k "obschestvu razumnogo potrebleniya," obschestvu znaniya. Ogromnuyu rol v etom protsesse igraet obrazovanie - sotsialnyj institut, odnoj iz zadach kotorogo yavlyaetsya sohranenie i translyatsiya znaniya v sotsialnyh sistemah. A chto takoe informatsiya? Iznachalno ee teoriya voznikla dlya nuzhd tehniki. Iz-za etogo mnogie ee aspekty ostalis ne razvitymi, potomu chto oni prosto ne byli vazhnymi dlya tehnicheskih sistem. Primenenie teorii informatsii k biologicheskim sistemam uzhe (...) zastavilo zanyatsya voprosom vozniknoveniya novoj informatsii. A rabota s sotsialnymi sistemami vydvinula takie ponyatiya, kak tsennost, effektivnost, slozhnost informatsii i t. d. Bolee polnyj podhod k teorii informatsii, v svoyu ochered, pozvolyaet najti resheniya ryada problem v teorii sotsialnyh sistem, v chastnosti v obrazovanii, i pokazat puti optimizatsii etih protsessov. (shrink)