This paper briefly reviews highlights from decades of debates in medicine, law, bioethics, psychology and social research about children’s and parents’ views and consent to medical treatment and research. There appears to have been a rise and later a fall in respect for children’s views, illustrated among many examples by a recent book on the zone of parental discretion, which is reviewed. A return to greater respect for children’s views and consent is advocated.

In this paper we introduce a poset of subvarieties of BL-algebras, whose completion is the entire lattice of subvarietes; we exhibit also a description of this poset in terms of finite sequences of functions on the natural numbers.

Taking up the idea that sanity is a necessary condition for responsibility, Susan Wolf sets forth two criteria for determining whether an actor is sane. I argue that the second criterion is inappropriate for this determination since it invokes some hidden axiological standard. I reexamine a case study that Wolf describes and arrive at a different judgment about the responsibility of the actor. I argue that the foremost criterion for determining whether an actor is sane is functional rather than axiological. (...) The theory of responsibility, rather than the notion of sanity, must do the work of appraising the value of an actors’ behavior, and that must be done in light of the fact that responsible moral agents enjoy varying degrees of sanity. (shrink)

Rufus of Ephesus (fl.c.a.d.100) wrote a large body of works on a variety of medical topics. Generally speaking, the Arabic tradition is particularly important for the reconstruction of much of his œuvre. In the present article, I am going to present four new fragments of Rufus’On Melancholyand a fragment from an otherwise unknown monographOn Preferring Fresh Poppies. These new fragments provide fascinating new insights into Rufus’ approach to recording case histories.

In the contemporary period of history, so deeply contradictory and in many respects conflict ridden, eschatological themes, predictions of universal catastrophe and the ecological or nuclear destruction of mankind, and other motifs of the end of human history have become unprecedentedly widespread and greatly attractive. Despite the huge stores of scientific knowledge accumulated in the past few decades, many people are being drawn more and more into the stream of mystical monstrous visions and are beginning to connect the end of (...) the second millennium with implausible, obsessive apocalyptic presentiments with regard to the world as a whole as well as to our own Russian history. Soothsayers have appeared who have begun to link the phenomena of disintegration and decline and the destruction of political, ethical, and aesthetic criteria being manifested in our country in one way or another directly with the end of Russian history, with the final act of the Russian historical drama. In the sphere of concrete theoretical and philosophical-sociological knowledge, notions of the limit of historical progress, that history has fundamentally, in its essentials, run its course and that from now on the future will bring nothing essentially new, are being put forward and defended. (shrink)