Acceptance of elderly or marginal health individuals as kidney donors is debated, with practices varying between centres. Transplant recipients, live kidney donors and health-care professionals caring for patients with renal failure were surveyed regarding their views on live donor kidney transplantation (LDKT) of marginal health (diabetes, hypertension, atherosclerosis, obesity, etc.) and elderly donors. Participants were recruited within a tertiary renal and transplant centre and invited to participate in focus groups and structured interviews. They also completed an anonymous questionnaire. Of 464 (...) participants who completed the questionnaire (36% health-care professionals and 64% patients), 49% and 64%, respectively, stated that marginal and elderly donors should be accepted for LDKT. In the structured interviews, emphasis was given to presenting to donor, recipient and their respective families a calculated risk regarding the effect that either a nephrectomy or transplant has on long-term quality of life. Participants stated that an independent third party in addition to the transplant team should discuss involved risks. Issues of ‘how desperate’ the recipient's situation is should also be considered. Health-care professionals stated that regardless of the strength of will of an individual to donate a kidney (despite age, health problems or personal risk), they should always have the right to say ‘no’ if performing a specific LDKT was against their professional and ethical values. About half of those surveyed considered that marginal health and elderly donors were acceptable for LDKT. Emphasis was given to the explanation to donors and recipients of the risks involved in such transplantation. (shrink)

Reasoning under uncertainty, that is, making judgements with only partial knowledge, is a major theme in artificial intelligence. Professor Paris provides here an introduction to the mathematical foundations of the subject. It is suited for readers with some knowledge of undergraduate mathematics but is otherwise self-contained, collecting together the key results on the subject, and formalising within a unified framework the main contemporary approaches and assumptions. The author has concentrated on giving clear mathematical formulations, analyses, justifications and consequences of (...) the main theories about uncertain reasoning, so the book can serve as a textbook for beginners or as a starting point for further basic research into the subject. It will be welcomed by graduate students and research workers in logic, philosophy, and computer science as a textbook for beginners, a starting point for further basic research into the subject, and not least, an account of how mathematics and artificial intelligence can complement and enrich each other. (shrink)

There is a tendency in contemporary (analytic) aesthetics to consider- ably restrict the scope of things that can be beautiful or ugly. This peculiarly modern tendency is holding back progress in aesthetics and robbing it of its potential contribution to other domains of inquiry. One view that has suffered neglect as a result of this tendency is the moral beauty view, whereby the moral virtues are beautiful and the moral vices are ugly. This neglect stems from an assumption to the (...) effect that virtues and vices simply cannot be beautiful or ugly. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it develops an account of form, under which, it argues, possession of form suffices for an object’s candidature for beauty and ugliness. Second, it argues that, under the foregoing proposal, the moral beauty view turns out to be a coherent position, and so should be taken seriously in both aesthetics and ethics. (shrink)

According to immoralists, some artworks are better aesthetically in virtue of their immorality. A. W. Eaton recently offered a novel defence of this view, seeking to overcome shortcomings in previous accounts, thereby occasioning a reconsideration of immoralism. Yet, as I argue in this paper, Eaton’s attempt is unsuccessful, insofar as it consists partly of inadequately supported claims, and partly—and more interestingly, albeit paradoxically––of covert moralist assumptions that are, eo ipso, incompatible with immoralism. I then turn to a parallel debate in (...) ethics concerning the possibility of admirable immorality, suggesting that a consideration of the state of that debate further supports my argument against immoralism. I close by suggesting some strategies by which immoralists may offer a rejoinder, although I note that their prospects are rather dim, not least because available defences of immoralism and similar positions all seem to share the same flawed pattern. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough formative of modern value theory, the moral beauty view—which states that moral virtue is beautiful and moral vice is ugly—is now mostly neglected by philosophers. The two contemporary defences of the view mostly capitalize on its intuitive attractiveness, but to little avail: such considerations hardly convince sceptics of what is nowadays a rather unpopular view. Historically, the view was supported by thought experiments; and although these greatly increase its plausibility, they also raise empirical questions, which they leave unanswered. Here, (...) I offer a novel defence of the moral beauty view, capitalizing on empirical evidence and arguing via an inference to the best explanation. (shrink)

We present six significant open problems in Pure Inductive Logic, together with their background and current status, with the intention of raising awareness and leading ultimately to their resolution.

In the quest for identity and healing, what belongs to the humanities and what to clinical psychology? Ginette Paris uses cogent and passionate argument as well as stories from patients to teach us to accept that the human psyche seeks to destroy relationships and lives as well as to sustain them. This is very hard to accept which is why, so often, the body has the painful and dispiriting job of showing us what our psyche refuses to see. In (...) jargon-free language, the author describes her own story of taking a turn downwards and inwards in the search for a metaphorical personal 'death'. If this kind of mortality is not attended to, then more literal bodily ailments and actual death itself can result. Paris engages with one of the main dilemmas of contemporary psychology and psychotherapy: how to integrate findings and insights from neuroscience and medicine into an approach to healing founded upon activation of the imagination. At present, she demonstrates, what is happening is damaging to both science and imagination. (shrink)

Ugliness is a neglected topic in contemporary analytic aesthetics. This is regrettable given that this topic is not just genuinely fascinating, but could also illuminate other areas in the field, seeing as ugliness, albeit unexplored, does feature rather prominently in several debates in aesthetics. This paper articulates a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness. Ultimately, I argue that deformity, understood in a certain way, and displeasure, jointly suffice for ugliness. First, I motivate my proposal, by locating a ‘deformity-related’ conception of ugliness in (...) aesthetic tradition, offering examples in support, and rejecting related alternative suggestions. Second, I argue that the proposal boasts considerable merits. Not only does it capture much of what we ordinarily think of as ugly, but it also comprises an objective criterion for ugliness, offers unity and comprehensiveness, and is informative and explanatorily potent. Third, I discuss a number of objections, thereby demonstrating that the proposal withstands reflective scrutiny. (shrink)

The Clinton administration's revised rules regulating but not prohibiting the common practice in managed care of linking physician compensation with cost cutting and control of services demonstrates the complexity of ethical issues in managed care. As originally proposed, the federal guidelines on payment for Medicare and Medicaid services would have precluded any interrelationship between payment to physicians and delivery of services. Such a restriction would have gutted the primary mechanism in managed care plans to curb the unacceptably high cost of (...) healthcare delivery: making physicians directly responsible for cost control by placing them at direct financial risk. At first blush such a linkage seems to involve an obvious and irreconcilable conflict of interest. How can a physician be responsible for the well-being of a patient while at the same time aware that a proportion of his or her income is linked to the provision of cost-conscious care? (shrink)

We examine the closure conditions of the probabilistic consequence relation of Hawthorne and Makinson, specifically the outstanding question of completeness in terms of Horn rules, of their proposed (finite) set of rules O. We show that on the contrary no such finite set of Horn rules exists, though we are able to specify an infinite set which is complete.

John Ayrton Paris, writer and physician, became a member of the Linnean Society in 1810, and served as president of the Royal College of Physicians from 1844 until his death. Intended for children and originally composed for the author's family, this three-volume work about science was first published in 1827. Dedicated to the writer Maria Edgeworth and with illustrations by George Cruikshank, it aims 'to blend amusement with instruction', since youth, as Paris writes, 'is naturally addicted to amusement'. (...) Topics covered in Volume 1 include momentum, geometry, elasticity and rotatory motion; the science behind these is demonstrated using a yo-yo, a jack-in-the-box and a slingshot, among various other toys and games. A fascinating and popular text in the history of science education, the engaging narrative seeks to prove 'how profitably, and agreeably, the machinery of fiction may be worked for the dissemination of truth'. (shrink)

¿De qué forma es posible el pensamiento auténtico, como un acto libre y creador, en el mundo actual? Tal pregunta, arranque de este libro, es elaborada por Carlos París desde una doble perspectiva: desde la “agresión” que supone la actual “sociedad de masas programadas” -cuya capacidad de absorción engloba y manipula la misma “protesta”- y desde las exigencias de la racionalidad científica actual. Nacido en Bilbao en 1925, y catedrático desde 1951 en las Universidades de Santiago, Valencia y Autónoma de (...) Madrid, el profesor París ha sido testigo de excepción -además de activo protagonista- de la evolución experimentada por la filosofía española en el curso de los últimos veinte años. La introducción en nuestro país de la “filosofía científica”, que tanto habría de contribuir a la higienización del ambiente filosófico tras de su prolongado enrarecimiento por la escolástica de la postguerra, tuvo en él a uno de sus promotores más caracterizados. Ha sabido conjugar el interés por los problemas de la ciencia y la técnica modernas con un interés parejo por los problemas del hombre y la sociedad, como lo acreditan sus libros y publicaciones en revistas. Los trabajos incluidos en esta obra dan una idea de su investigación en una amplia gama de dominios, que discurren desde la antropología filosófica hasta la metodología científica. (shrink)

Ten years of educational reform have not brought dramatic improvements. In Ideology and Educational Reform, David Paris traces the underlying ideological problems that make genuine reform difficult. These include different and often conflicting beliefs concerning the proper role of public education as well as the public's natural ambivalence about schools as government agencies.Paris describes three major themes in public education—common school, human capital, and clientelism. He critically evaluates current policies and proposed reforms associated with each of these topics, (...) including moral education, the school-economy relationship, school choice, and the delivery of social services. Paris proposes better ways for dealing with ideological problems in school practice, and he suggests appropriate directions for policy reform. (shrink)

La historia personal y profesional de Carlos París discurre al hilo de la convulsa historia de España del último medio siglo, y la narra con una honestidad de la que muy pocos pueden hacer gala. Así, sin ira y sin tapujos, describe, por ejemplo, cómo pasó de una adhesión inicial a presupuestos falangistas a ser candidato del PCE, valorando cada etapa y cada motivo de cambio con un gran sentido crítico. Por su pluma desfilan también personajes fundamentales en la vida (...) española de los últimos cincuenta años con quienes Carlos París ha tenido una sólida relación, como Manuel Fraga, Javier Solana, Manuel Castells, Rosa Regàs, Ricardo de la Cierva, José Antonio Maravall, José María Valverde, Nicolás Sartorius y un largo etcétera. De la lectura de estas memorias se desprende, en fin, el retrato de una gran figura intelectual y humana que jamás se ha limitado a ser convidado de piedra ni en su país ni en el tiempo que le ha tocado vivir.Carlos París (Bilbao, 1925) es Catedrático Emérito de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, en la que fundó su Departamento de filosofía y de cuya Facultad de Filosofía y Letras fue elegido decano en las primeras elecciones. Es Doctor Honoris Causa por la Universidad de Valencia y ha sido Presidente de la Sociedad Española de Filosofía y del Ateneo Científico, Literario y Artístico de Madrid. Su obra ha sido objeto de diversos estudios y congresos internacionales, y recientemente se ha creado un Foro dedicado al análisis y difusión de su pensamiento. Hay que destacar, sobre todo, sus ensayos: Física y filosofía, 1952; Crítica de la civilización nuclear, 1985 o Fantasía y razón moderna-Don Quijote, Odiseo y Fausto, 2001, entre muchos otros; y también sus obras de creación literaria: la novela Bajo constelaciones burlonas (1981) o el libro de relatos La machina speculatrix-Cuatro sarcasmos sobre el mundo actual (1989). (shrink)

The opinion of Mr. Justice Francis of the English High Court which denied the parents of Charlie Gard, who had been born with an extremely rare mutation of a genetic disease, the right to take their child to the United States for a proposed experimental treatment occasioned world wide attention including that of the Pope, President Trump, and the US Congress. The case raise anew a debate as old as the foundation of Western medicine on who should decide and on (...) what standard when there is a conflict between a family and the treating physicians over a possible treatment. This paper will explore the different approaches of the British and American courts on the issue and the various proposals from that of John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice to a processed-based approach for resolving such disputes. As carefully crafted as the opinion of Mr Justice Nicholas Francis in the Gard case proved to be, it left commentators unsatisfied. A widespread criticism, captured in an article by Michael Dougherty in The National Review was for the state to ‘get out of the way of the parents trying to act in the best interests of the child’.1 Although he conceded the parents could be adding to the suffering of the child by taking Charlie to America for an experimental therapy and agreed that such a choice ‘may be the wrong decision,’ in Dougherty’s view, it should still be ‘their decision’. Dougherty’s stand was the popular response to the question of ‘Who should decide?’ It fails, however, to propose any rationale for the decision. It provided no norms, no standards and no guidelines for the parents. Their motive could equally well be indifference to the suffering of the child as concern for his well-being. Furthermore, even good, loving parents may make …. (shrink)

One of the most pertinent sites of investigation in Fanon studies is the question of how Fanon theorizes the imbrication of gender with that of race and colonialism. For many, his silence or disavowals, whether explicit or implicit, allow an uncritical masculinism to slip into his theories of subjectivity, subjugation, and revolution. This article contributes to these discussions by arguing that for Fanon, gender and race are colonial technologies rather than natural sites of experience. Bringing together Fanon's recently translated clinical (...) writings and his political essay on the revolutionary roles of Algerian women in the war against French colonization, it is possible to see how Fanon theorizes the French imposition of gender norms as attempts to engineer the social reproduction of a marginalized and racialized population. In short, gender is an implicitly racialized technology in French colonial society whose aim is the naturalization of political and sexual arrangements of power that justify the continuation of French occupation. Fanon works to demystify gender and race as technologies so that the colonized may seize them in the interest of their own liberatory invention. (shrink)

This proceedings volume contains most of the invited talks presented at the colloquium. The main topics treated are the model theory of arithmetic and algebra, the semantics of natural languages, and applications of mathematical logic to complexity theory. The volume contains both surveys by acknowledged experts and original research papers presenting advances in these disciplines.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 7, Page 16-18, July 2011.

A family of symmetries of polyadic inductive logic are described which in turn give rise to the purportedly rational Permutation Invariance Principle stating that a rational assignment of probabilities should respect these symmetries. An equivalent, and more practical, version of this principle is then derived.

This essay will analyze a single script, the television commercial that advertises the Fiat 500L in the United States, released in 2013. This commercial has stimulated wide debate both in Italy and the United States. It was generally well received by the press, even if it did attract some criticism on the part of those who simply read it as the latest version of a series of stereotypes of Italian mores. Without neglecting the functional dynamic of advertising, this analysis will (...) focus in particular on the decisive role played by Italianness and the Italian language. (shrink)

We give a complete characterization of Priest's Finite Inconsistent Arithmetics observing that his original putative characterization included arithmetics which cannot in fact be realized.

This paper corrects three widely held misunderstandings about Maxent when used in common sense reasoning: That it is language dependent; That it produces objective facts; That it subsumes, and so is at least as untenable as, the paradox-ridden Principle of Insufficient Reason.

This paper concerns the question of how to draw inferences common sensically from uncertain knowledge. Since the early work of Shore and Johnson (1980), Paris and Vencovská (1990), and Csiszár (1989), it has been known that the Maximum Entropy Inference Process is the only inference process which obeys certain common sense principles of uncertain reasoning. In this paper we consider the present status of this result and argue that within the rather narrow context in which we work this complete (...) and consistent mode of uncertain reasoning is actually characterised by the observance of just a single common sense principle (or slogan). (shrink)

Considerable progress in personality and social psychology has been largely ignored by philosophers, many of whom still remain sceptical concerning whether the conception of character presupposed by virtue theory is descriptively adequate. Here, I employ the five-factor model of personality, currently the consensus view in personality psychology, to respond to a strong reading of the situationist challenge, whereby most people lack dispositions that are both cross-situationally consistent and temporally stable. I show that situationists rely on a false dichotomy between character (...) traits and situations, and that evidence supports the empirical adequacy of the sorts of character traits presupposed by virtue ethics. Additionally, I suggest that the personality traits of the five-factor model are relevant to virtue theory, in so far as they are malleable, morally salient, and seem to structurally parallel Aristotelian virtues and vices. Thus, contra situationism, the five-factor model supports the descriptive adequacy of a virtue-theoretical framework. (shrink)

I offer a set of sufficient conditions for beauty, drawing on Parsons and Carlson’s account of ‘functional beauty’. First, I argue that their account is flawed, whilst falling short of...

The question of how to theorize the relationship between consciousness and the social transformation of racism remains vexed. Most critical theories agree that some form of critical consciousness is necessary for the transformation of social life, but disagree about whether this change is sufficient. Furthermore, they disagree about whether the content of this change is at the level of cognitive beliefs, active ignorance, or ideology. In this article, I describe most accounts of social transformation of racism as relying upon what (...) I call awareness consciousness. I argue that the model of awareness consciousness in critical theory risks giving too much explanatory power to the role of self-knowledge in developing accounts of successful social transformation. In contrast, I defend an account of critical consciousness that emphasizes the primacy of social structures in constraining and enabling our practices. When social structures can no longer support our horizons of expectation there is the possibility for the development of what I call crisis consciousness and utopian consciousness. The materialist account I deploy locates the social transformation of racism in the experience of dysfunctional institutions and the consequent insight of how to collectively develop functional institutions that can enable new forms of social practice. (shrink)

We give an account of some relationships between the principles of Constant and Atom Exchangeability and various generalizations of the Principle of Instantial Relevance within the framework of Inductive Logic. In particular we demonstrate some surprising and somewhat counterintuitive dependencies of these relationships on ostensibly unimportant parameters, such as the number of predicates in the overlying language.

Es, quiza, la coleccion mas abierta que existe en cuestiones de etica, aunque se ha ocupado tambien de antropologia, estetica, ontologia, teoria del conocimiento e historia de la filosofia. El primer titulo que se publico en la coleccion fue la gran Historia de la filosofia y de la ciencia en tres volumenes de Ludovico Geymonat. A este le han seguido obras de A. J. Ayer, A. MacIntyre, Ernst Tugendhat, Antoni Domenech, Anna Estany, Agnes Heller, F. Fernandez Buey, Carlos Paris, (...) Emilio Lledo, Manuel Sacristan, John Rawls o Ludwig Wittgenstein. Victoria Camps ha dirigido, ademas, una gran Historia de la etica, en tres volumenes, en la que han colaborado los mejores especialistas espanoles. Para el autor solo el analisis de la evolucion biologica permite comprender el concepto de cultura como desarrollo y desembocadura de la vida. Es un proceso que culmina en la realidad humana y que la presente obra examina en sus grandes lineas. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 12, December 2019, Page 49-51.

“Playing God” is the charge frequently leveled when physicians and patients agree to withdraw life-sustaining medical treatments and let the patient die. The accusation rings hollow in the context of four hundred years of moral reflection on the duty of an individual to undergo medical treatments to preserve life. From the teachings of Soto and Banez in the 16th century through the President's, Commission 1983 report ‘deciding to forego life-sustaining treatments’ there is a clear and constant teaching that though life (...) is sacred it is not an absolute and our moral duty to preserve it is limited and based on rational reflection. No patient need undergo any treatment or procedure that is “disproportionately” costly, burdensome, or painful. The assessment of whether to accept or reject a proposed treatment is in part subjective and belongs to the individual patient. The only remaining issue is how to make that judgment for those unable to speak for themselves. (shrink)

Any given society will be comprised of multiple forms of life. That is to say, people will adhere to diverse patterns of organizing and justifying how they make use of their time. One might think that for all of us, time is divided by seconds, minutes, and hours and thus we all live in the same form of life. We are all given 24 hours in a day, and it is up to us all, individually, to decide how best to (...) maximize the value we can squeeze out of the time that we are given. In this view, abstract and homogenous time is the "natural" state of the world. Some people may want to spend their time by focusing on their careers, families, or volunteering, for example. What matters is that we are all free to choose what we will do with the finite seconds, minutes, and hours that we have. The assumed naturalness of "clock time", as Lewis Mumford describes it, allows us to develop a sense of injustice as the unjustified control or evaluation of another's time. To impose one form of life onto another is to violate their dignity as a self-determining agent who has their own reasons for shaping the pattern of their life in light of their own values and goals. So, preliminarily, we might distinguish between forms of life by examining how a bundle of social practices normatively shape the use of time. (shrink)

El objetivo del texto es hacer un estudio de la racionalidad mediante una revisión de algunos de sus dualismos, como son: racionalidad biológica o racionalidad cultural, racionalidad violenta o racionalidad pacífica, y racionalidad pura o racionalidad emocional. El dualismo entre biología y cultura irá apareciendo como hilo conductor a lo largo de las todo el trabajo, tomando en consideración las investigaciones propias de la neurofilosofía y de la filosofía para la paz. Así, irán surgiendo temas que bien pueden nutrir los (...) estudios para la paz y los conflictos y que, al mismo tiempo, serán auténticos desafíos para la neurofilosofía. (shrink)