Deep brain stimulation is an invasive technique designed to stimulate certain deep brain regions for therapeutic purposes and is currently used mainly in patients with neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. However, DBS is also used increasingly for other experimental applications, such as the treatment of psychiatric disorders, weight reduction. Apart from its therapeutic potential, DBS can cause severe adverse effects, some that might also have a significant impact on the patient’s personality and autonomy by the external stimulation of DBS (...) which effects lie beyond the individual’s control and free will. The article’s purpose is to outline the procedures of DBS currently used in therapeutic and experimental applications and to discuss the ethical concerns regarding this procedure. It will address the clinical benefit-risk-ratio, the particular ethics of research in this field, and the ethical issues raised by affecting a patient’s or an individual’s personality and autonomous behaviour. Moreover, a potential ethical guideline, the Ulysses contract is discussed for the field of clinical application as well as the question of responsibility. (shrink)

This book includes detailed critical analysis of a wide variety of versions of the indispensability argument, as well as a novel approach to traditional views about mathematics.

I argue that zombies are inconceivable. More precisely, I argue that the conceivability-intuition that is used to demonstrate their possibility has been misconstrued. Thought experiments alleged to feature zombies founder on the fact that, on the one hand, they _must_ involve first-person imagining, and yet, on the other hand, _cannot_. Philosophers who take themselves to have imagined zombies have unwittingly conflated imagining a creature who lacks consciousness with imagining a creature without also imagining the consciousness it may or may not (...) possess. (shrink)

The book approaches law from the legal-linguistic perspective. Its aim is to clarify the processes in which the meaning of law emerges in legal discourses. In order to enable the understanding of law as a discursive practice, professional and non-professional discourses are analyzed. With this aim in mind, the author focuses on the epistemological consequences of the discursiveness of law. Other relevant legal-linguistic operations such as legal interpretation or legal translation are scrutinized in terms of their theoretical prerequisites and their (...) practical consequences. Their analysis also shows the potential and the limits of law as a social and as a linguistic phenomenon that is determined by its discursiveness. Finally, the book demonstrates how the discursiveness as the distinctive feature of law establishes the connection between the science of law and other social sciences. (shrink)

Though ‘evil’ is often used loosely as merely the generic opposite of ‘morally good’, used precisely it is the worst possible term of opprobrium available. In this essay it is taken as applying primarily to persons, secondarily to conduct; evil deeds must flow from the volition to do something evil. An evil action is one so horrendously bad that no ordinary decent human being can conceive of doing it, and an evil person is one who knowingly wills or orders such (...) actions. Malignant evil—doing evil because it is evil—is not just possible but real, and is one of several kinds of evil delineated. There are incidental discussions of cruelty, Rosenbaum on Explaining Hitler, Baumeister on Evil, and Benn on wickedness. Footnotes1 Dedicated to Alan Gewirth, in honour of his 90th birthday, and in appreciation of his superb, illuminating, and ground-breaking philosophical work over many years. (shrink)

Boolos has suggested a plural interpretation of second-order logic for two purposes: to escape Quine’s allegation that second-order logic is set theory in disguise, and to avoid the paradoxes arising if the second-order variables are given a set-theoretic interpretation in second-order set theory. Since the plural interpretation accounts only for monadic second-order logic, Rayo and Yablo suggest an new interpretation for polyadic second-order logic in a Boolosian spirit. The present paper argues that Rayo and Yablo’s interpretation does not achieve the (...) goal. (shrink)

Although most styles of military ethics are hybrids that draw on multiple ethical theories, they are usually based primarily on the model of Aristotelian virtue ethics. Virtue ethics is well-suited for regulating the conduct of soldiers who have to make quick decisions on the battlefield, but its applicability to military personnel is threatened by the growing use of unmanned weapon systems. These weapons disrupt virtue ethics’ institutional and cultural basis by changing what it means to display virtue and transforming the (...) roles soldiers perform and the nature of the military profession itself. I argue that in light of these challenges to virtue ethics, at least as it is traditionally understood within the armed forces, soldiers operating unmanned weapons require a more heavily rule-based approach to military ethics. (shrink)

There has been much written in recent years about whether a pair of subjects could have visual experiences that represented the colors of objects in their environment in precisely the same way, despite differing significantly in what it was like to undergo them, differing that is, in their qualitative character. The possibility of spectrum inversion has been so much debated1 in large part because of the threat that it would pose to the more general doctrine of Intentionalism, according to which (...) the representational content of an experience fixes what it. (shrink)

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

This paper investigates the claim that the second-order consequence relation is intractable because of the incompleteness result for SOL. The opponents’ claim is that SOL cannot be proper logic since it does not have a complete deductive system. I argue that the lack of a completeness theorem, despite being an interesting result, cannot be held against the status of SOL as a proper logic.

§1. Introduction. LetMbe a totally ordered set. A (Dedekind) cutpofMis a couple (pL,pR) of subsetspL,pRofMsuch thatpL⋃pR=MandpL Z} andZ−for the cutqwithqL= {a∈M∣a

Logic and Philosophy of Logic

Model Theory in Logic and Philosophy of Logic

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This essay analyzes the use of military robots in terms of the jus in bello concepts of discrimination and proportionality. It argues that while robots may make mistakes, they do not suffer from most of the impairments that interfere with human judgment on the battlefield. Although robots are imperfect weapons, they can exercise as much restraint as human soldiers, if not more. Robots can be used in a way that is consistent with just war theory when they are programmed to (...) avoid using force against all but the most clearly hostile targets. However, the essay also cautions against using robots for counterinsurgency because they may alienate people in the contested area and lead to an escalation of hostilities. (shrink)

Patients with advanced dementia suffer from severe cognitive and functional impairment, including eating disorders. The focus of our research is on the issue of life-sustaining treatment, specifically on the social and ethical implications of tube feeding. The treatment decision, based on values of life and dignity, involves sustaining lives that many people consider not worth living. We explore the moral approach to caring for these patients and review the history of the debate on artificial nutrition and hydration showing the impact (...) of the varying perceptions of the value of these patients' lives on changing norms. We argue that in light of the value of solidarity, decisions about life-sustaining treatment for patients with advanced dementia should be made on a case by case basis, as with any other patient, in consideration of the medical implications of the intervention which might best serve the goals of care for the individual patient. (shrink)

Este artigo explora alguns aspectos da noção de "mundo da vida" apresentada por Edmund Husserl, de modo a contribuir com o desenvolvimento do modelo da interação entre ciência e valores proposto por Hugh Lacey. Em particular, almeja-se mostrar a fundação das estratégias descontextualizadoras de pesquisa científica nas experiências concretas, compostas de diversos níveis de operações intencionais.

The set of minimal indices of a Gödel numbering $\varphi$ is defined as ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi} = \{e: (\forall i < e)[\varphi_i \neq \varphi_e]\}$ . It has been known since 1972 that ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi} \equiv_{\mathrm{T}} \emptyset^{\prime \prime }$ , but beyond this ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi}$ has remained mostly uninvestigated. This paper collects the scarce results on ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi}$ from the literature and adds some new observations including that ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi}$ is autoreducible, but neither regressive nor (1,2)-computable. We also study several variants of (...) ${\rm MIN}_{\varphi}$ that have been defined in the literature like size-minimal indices, shortest descriptions, and minimal indices of decision tables. Some challenging open problems are left for the adventurous reader. (shrink)

Soldiers encounter extremely difficult ethical dilemmas during wars, as they must make decisions about how to follow the laws of war and their rules of engagement while still protecting themselves and accomplishing their missions. Scholarship on just war theory and military ethics generally describe soldiers' dilemmas as being ethical challenges that soldiers can overcome by using the correct ethical reasoning process. However, this essay argues that some of the apparent ethical dilemmas that soldiers confront are actually ethically insoluble dilemmas that (...) cannot be solved using ethical reasoning processes. Dilemmas are ethically insoluble when soldiers do not have sufficient knowledge of a situation or control over it to apply an ethical decision procedure. In these situations soldiers must guess at the right course of action and leave the outcome to luck. (shrink)

Jigsaw lessons, initially developed in the 1970s by Elliot Aronson for elementary schools in the wake of desegregation, are perfect for active learning in philosophy classrooms, fostering collaboration and interdependence. This essay describes how to use jigsaw lessons in philosophy classrooms and presents, as an example, instructions and materials for a jigsaw lesson for translation using identity in first-order logic.

Reminiscence of the author's education in infinity and how it turned him toward philosophy.

This article presents a research on the occurrences of Pithanon in Galen’s On Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato (PHP). Galen writes PHP to critique doctors, Peripatetics, and stoics about the powers that govern man. He considers his criticism to be justifiable because they have come to the wrong conclusions because of the wrong selection of premises. According to him, his opponents' conclusions are based on persuasive, mistaken, ambiguous or false assumptions. Pithanon is a key word he uses to identify one (...) of the premises that is applied by the stoics in order to prove their thesis about the hegemonikon. (shrink)

This paper investigates feasible ways of destroying artworks, assuming they are abstract objects, or works of a particular art-form, where the works of at least this art-form are assumed to be abstracta. If artworks are eternal, mind-independent abstracta, and hence discovered, rather than created, then they cannot be destroyed, but merely forgotten. For more moderate conceptions of artworks as abstract objects, however, there might be logical space for artwork destruction. Artworks as abstracta have been likened to impure sets (i.e., sets (...) of concrete things, as opposed to pure sets, i.e., sets of nothing but other sets) that have a beginning in time, namely when their members come into being, and an end in time, namely when their members cease to exist. Alternatively, artworks as abstracta have been thought of as types that are created with their first token. Artwork destruction is harder on this account: merely destroying every token might not yet destroy the type. To what extent such similes can be spelt out and made plausible as an ontology of artworks, and what options there are on the different accounts for artwork destruction, is explored in this paper. (shrink)

Deflationists argue that the truth predicate does not express a substantive property, but is only required for expressive purposes. Using the resources of a fully schematic, inferentialist account of higher-order logic, truth predicates are purely logical and indeed eliminable, since they are logically definable, for any reasonable language, when we extend the language by the appropriate higher-order quantifiers. Accordingly, the truth predicate is not required for expressive purposes. Alethic deflationism thus appears to collapse into a redundancy theory of truth. In (...) this chapter, I take first steps into investigating whether such an inferentialist redundancy theory could serve as a philosophically satisfactory account of truth. I investigate the charge that semantic paradoxes are merely avoided rather than solved and the assumption that providing a philosophically satisfactory account of truth must be based on the way truth predicates behave in natural languages. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Merleau-Ponty reformulates traditional transcendental philosophy in the sense of showing that the a priori conditions of experience cannot be separated from the concrete experiences. In the first section, I revisit Kant and Husserl, to show how these authors delimit the transcendental conditions as a formal domain independent from any concrete experience. Then I reconstruct the argumentative move through which Merleau-Ponty rejects this formal delimitation of the transcendental sphere and reintroduces it as inseparable from empirical (...) domain, initially in The Structure of Behavior and later in Phenomenology of Perception. (shrink)

In this chapter it is demonstrated that the way in which leaders implement a decision largely depends on the nature of it, that is, whether it is strategic or not. Leaders must be as open as possible and not withhold information from the persons involved in the process. Therefore, they should distribute as much relevant information as possible to meeting participants before a meeting. At the same time, they must be able to steer the process. It is not unusual for (...) there to be a separation between the formulation and implementation of a strategic decision. Often, it is the top leadership that formulates the decision problem and the middle managers that implement its solution. For this reason, it is relatively common that the top leadership signals that the implementation has been successful as soon as the middle managers begin to report positive results. This can sometimes happen even though most of the implementation is incomplete. However, there are also cases where the top leaders rule out certain implementation processes as failures when in fact they prove later on to be successful. A common problem in organizations is that leaders often inherit the task of implementing decisions that past leaders have made. In order to succeed with an implementation, leaders must understand the importance of the process. They must communicate their vision clearly, evaluate and monitor continuously, and allow interested parties to participate actively in the process. They should also understand that what at first may look like a failure, at a later stage may prove to be a success -/- . (shrink)

Connectionist networks excel at extracting statistical regularities but have trouble extracting higher-order relationships. Clark & Thornton suggest that a solution to this problem might come from Elman, but I argue that the success of Elman's single recurrent network is illusory, and show that it cannot in fact represent abstract relationships that can be generalized to novel instances, undermining Clark & Thornton 's key arguments.

We sought to evaluate whether health care professionals’ viewpoints differed on the role of ethics committees and hospitals in the resolution of clinical ethical dilemmas based on practice location. We conducted a survey study from December 21, 2013 to March 15, 2014 of health care professionals at six hospitals. The survey consisted of eight clinical ethics cases followed by statements on whether there was a role for the ethics committee or hospital in their resolution, what that role might be and (...) case specific queries. Respondents used a 5-point Likert scale to express their degree of agreement with the premises posed. We used the ANOVA test to evaluate whether respondent views significantly varied based on practice location. 240 health care professionals completed the survey. Only three individual queries of 32 showed any significant response variations across practice locations. Overall, viewpoints did not vary across practice locations within question categories on whether the ethics committee or hospital had a role in case resolution, what that role might be and case specific queries. In this multicenter survey study, the viewpoints of health care professionals on the role of ethics committees or hospitals in the resolution of clinical ethics cases varied little based on practice location. (shrink)