Recent reports of the discovery of a “God module” in the human brain derive from the fact that epileptic seizures in the left temporal lobe are associated with ecstatic feelings sometimes described as an experience of the presence of God. The brain area involved has been described as either (a) the seat of an innate human faculty for experiencing the divine or (b) the seat of religious delusions.In fact, religious experience is extremely various and involves many parts of the brain, (...) including some that are prehuman in their evolutionary history and some that are characteristically human. In the continuing integration of such experiences, spiritual formation takes place. Thus the entire human brain might be described as a “God module.”Such a process is only possible because of the brain's complexity. The human brain is the most complex entity for its size that we know of. As used here, complexity is a specialized term denoting the presence of a web of interlinked and significant connections—the more intricate the web, the more complex the entity. Complex systems develop only in a milieu that provides both lawfulness and freedom, and they tend to be self‐organizing, becoming more complex and more effective as a result of both inward and outward experience. The evidence suggests that both personal growth and spiritual growth are processes of complexification of character, and of the brain itself. This thesis is tested in light of the work of William James and James W. Fowler. (shrink)

Books Reviewed in this Article: Introduction to the Critical Study of the Text of the Hebrew Bible. By J. Weingreen. Pp.vii, 103, Oxford, Clarendon Press; New York, Oxford University Press, 1982, £5.50. The Archaeology of the Land of Israel. By Yohanan Aharoni. Pp.xx, 344, Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1982, $27.50, $18.95 ; London, SCM Press, 1982, £12.50. A Commentary on the Gospel of Mark. By Terence J. Keegan. Pp.183, New York, Paulist Press, and Leominster, Fowler Wright Books, 1981, £4.45. (...) The Panorama of Luke: An Introduction to the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. By Neil Richardson. Pp.116, London, Epworth Press, 1982, £3.95. The Synoptic Gospels: An Introduction. By Keith F. Nickle. Pp.119, London SCM Press, 1982, £5.50. What is a Gospel? By Nicholas King. Pp.132, Leigh‐on‐Sea, Kevin Mayhew, 1982, £3.00. The Women Around Jesus: Reflections on Authentic Personhood. By Elisabeth Moltmann‐Wendel, translated by J. Bowden. Pp.xii, 148, London, SCM Press, 1982, £3.95. Paul and Paulinism: Essays in honour of C.K. Barrett. Edited by M.D. Hooker and S.G. Wilson. Pp.xxvii, 404, London, SPCK, 1982, £25.00. Divine Revelation and the Limits of Historical Criticism. By William J. Abraham. Pp.222, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982, £15.00. The Social Teaching of Vatican II. By Rodger Charles with Drostan Maclaren. Pp.xxvi, 569, San Francisco, Ignatius Press; Oxford, Plater Publications, 1982, £12.75. Option for the Poor: A Hundred Years of Vatican Social Teaching. By Donal Dorr. Pp.viii, 328, New York, Orbis Books; Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, 1983, £7.95. The Kindness that Kills. Edited by Digby Anderson. Pp.xii, 170, London SPCK, 1984, £3.95. Communism in the Bible. By José Porfiro Miranda. Pp.x, 86, London, SCM Press Ltd. 1982, £3.50. Why I am still a Catholic. Edited by Robert Nowell. Pp.157, London, Collins, 1982, £4.95. Does God Answer Prayer? By Peter Baelz. Pp.55, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982, £1.95. A Cry for Mercy. By Henri J.M. Nouwen. Pp.175, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1982, £3.50. The Living Reminder. By Henri J.M. Nouwen. Pp.80, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1982, £2.95. Making All Things New. By Henri J.M. Nouwen. Pp.95, Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 1982. £2.95. Picturing God. By Norman Pittenger. Pp.x, 147, London, SCM Press, 1982, £4.50. Christotherapy II, The Fasting and Feasting Heart. By Bernard J. Tyrrell. Pp.xiii, 337, New York, Paulist Press, 1982, £6.70. With Respect: A Doctor's Response to a Healing Pope. By Frank Lake. Pp.xxiii, 327, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982, £6.95. Euthanasia and Clinical Practice: Trends, Principles and Alternatives: The Report of a Working Party. Pp.viii, 88, London, The Linacre Centre, 1982, £2.75. Essays in Religion and Morality. By William James. Pp.xxviii, 345, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982, £17.50. Freud and Jung: Conflicts of Interpretation. By Robert Steele. Pp.vii, 390, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, £14.95. Archetype: A Natural History of the Self. By Anthony Stevens. Pp.xi, 324, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, £12.50. The Seeing Eye: Hermeneutical Phenomenology in the Study of Religion. By Walter L. Brenneman Jr. and Stanley O. Yarian, in association with Alan M. Olson. Pp.xii, 177, University Park and London, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982, £8.10. Contemporary Philosophy of Religion. Edited by S.M. Cahn and D. Schatz. Pp.x, 310, Oxford University Press, 1982, £6.95. Beyond Empiricism: Philosophy of Science in Sociology. By Andrew Tudor. Pp.xii, 213, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, £4.95. Philosophy and Human Geography: An Introduction to Contemporary Approaches. By R.J. Johnston. Pp.viii, 152, London, Edward Arnold, 1982, £5.50. The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences. By Eric A. Havelock. pp.viii, 362, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982, £17.70, £6.30. The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste. By James McEvoy. Pp.xviii, 560, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, £35.00. Kant's Life and Thought. By Ernst Cassirer, translated by James Haden, introduction by Stephan Körner. Pp.xxiii, 429, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1981, £17.50. Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. By Robert B. Pippin. Pp.xii, 247, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1982, £16.50. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. By Martin Heidegger, translated by Albert Hofstadter. Pp.xxxi, 396, Bloomington, Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1982, £16.50. In the Active Voice By Mary Douglas. Pp.xi, 306, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, £9.75. Structural Sociology. Edited by Ino Rossi. Pp.xiv, 363, New York, Columbia University Presss, 1982, £45.50. A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Renewal in Russia, 1905–1906. By J.W. Cunningham. Pp.384, Crestwood, St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1981, £7.95. Christians in Ulster 1968–1980. By Eric Gallagher and Stanley Worrall. P.241, Oxford University Press, 1982, £10.00. Scotland and the Papacy. By John Cooney. Pp.126, Edinburgh, Paul Harris, 1982, £8.95, £4.95. Scotia Pontificia. Edited by Robert Somerville. Pp.xiii, 177, Oxford, Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1982, £25.00. (shrink)

Mindreading (or folk psychology, Theory of Mind, mentalizing) is the capacity to represent and reason about others’ mental states. The Simulation Theory (ST) is one of the main approaches to mindreading. ST draws on the common-sense idea that we represent and reason about others’ mental states by putting ourselves in their shoes. More precisely, we typically arrive at representing others’ mental states by simulating their mental states in our own mind. This entry offers a detailed analysis of ST, considers theoretical (...) arguments and empirical data in favour of and against it, discusses its philosophical implications, and illustrates some alternatives to it. (shrink)

The task of this paper is to ground the notion of cyberethics of co-operation. The evolution of modern society has resulted in a shift from industrial society towards informational capitalism. This transformation is a multidimensional shift that affects all aspects of society. Hence also the ethical system of society is penetrated by the emergence of the knowledge society and ethical guidelines for the information age are needed. Ethical issues and conflicts in the knowledge society are connected to topics of ecological (...) and social sustainability. For information ethics and cyberethics, the sustainable design of society, social, and socio-technological systems is important. In this context the notions of sustainability and co-operation are discussed. Based on these categories, the approach of cyberethics of co-operation can be theoretically grounded. (shrink)

One way of increasing the supply of vital organs without violating the dead donor rule is to declare death on cardiopulmonary criteria after withdrawing life support. The question then is how quickly death may be declared.

The work draws together a rich tapestry of material across many different disciplines, covering the crucial relationship between medicine and law from the early apothecaries to the modern-day general practitioner. It presents an invaluable overview of the subject and offers vital background reading to anyone interested in medico-legal medicine, as well as providing a springboard for students of medicine and law interested in researching the field through its remarkable diversity of reference resources.

The aim of this chapter is to address the role of memory in past-life convictions. Although it is commonly accepted in the modern media - and popular western culture more generally - that people believe they have lived before because the memory contains detailed verifiable facts, little is known about how people actually reason about the veracity of their previous existence. To our knowledge, the current project is the most extensive research that probes the role of memory in past life (...) convictions. More specifically, we explore two questions. First, to what extent does memory lead to past-life belief, and is this conviction based on external validation or via the episodic sense of personal identity contained in the memory? Second, what is the conception of self on which one's current self is taken to be the same as the past-life self? -/- In what follows, we propose that memory plays an important role in convincing people that they have lived before. Fundamentally, this memory is episodic insofar as it represents the event as happened to the encoder. This memory contrasts with semantic memory - memory of facts...Further, we contend that it is the episodic sense of personal identity (rather than external validation) that typically contributes to the belief in a past life. Finally, we argue that the conception of self implicated in past-life belief is the non-trait conception. Of course, this fits naturally with the idea that the belief in a past life issues partly from the episodic sense of identity, since it is the non-trait conception of self that is implicated in the episodic sense of identity... -/- Our proposal in this chapter can be construed as a psychological extension of Reid's point in the context of past-life belief. People assume that they are the same person as someone in earlier times, despite large variations in the traits between those individuals, and they think this partly because of the testimony of their episodic memory. If our account is correct, then it makes the belief in a past life less bizarre, at least psychologically. For we are suggesting that the episodic sense of personal identity that led to your conviction that you existed at the time of your sixteenth birthday celebrations some decades ago, is also involved in other people's convictions that they existed 200 years ago. This proposal is also situated in recent cognitive approaches to the study of religion and religious experiences, which suggests that extraordinary convictions are often underpinned by the ordinary processes of social cognition (e.g. see Barrett 2000; Barrett 2007; Boyer 2001; Lawson and McCauley 1990; for reincarnation, see White Forthcoming-a,-b). (shrink)

Mohanty, J.N. Understanding Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.--Fink, E. The problem of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Operative concepts in Husserl's phenomenology.--Funke, G. A transcendental-phenomenological investigation concerning universal idealism, intentional analysis, and the genesis of habitus: archē, phansis, hexis, logos.--Pentzopoulou-Valalas, T. Reflections on the foundation of the relation between the a priori and the eidos in the phenomenology of Husserl.--Landgrebe, L. Regions of being and regional ontologies in Husserl's phenomenology. The problem posed by the transcendental science of the a priori of the (...) life world.--Wahl, J. Notes on the first part of Experience and judgment by Husserl.--Landgrebe, L. A letter from Ludwig Landgrebe to Jean Wahl.-- Wahl, J. A note on some empiricist aspects of the thought of Husserl.--Toulemont, R. The specific character of the social according to Husserl. (shrink)

Saigle, Dubljevic, and Racine (2018) claim that Libet-style experiments are insufficient to challenge that agents have free will. They support this with evidence from experimen- tal psychology that the folk concept of freedom is consis- tent with monism, that our minds are identical to our brains. However, recent literature suggests that evidence from experimental psychology is less than determinate in this regard, and that folk intuitions are too unrefined as to provide guidance on metaphysical issues like monism. In light of (...) this, it is worthwhile to examine the authors’ insuf- ficiency claim under the assumption that monism is false and dualism true (our minds are not identical to our brains). We conclude that, were dualism true, then Libet- style experiments would tell us no more about freedom and moral responsibility than what the authors initially claimed, thus further bolstering their point that Libet-style experiments are ill-suited to speak to the free will of agents. In what follows we first discuss some of the reasons to be skeptical of using folk intuitions to make claims about the nature of freedom and moral responsibility. We then draw from the work of E. J. Lowe to demonstrate that Libet-style experiments would likely give the same results regardless of the truth of monism or dualism. (shrink)

'An extremely useful collection of the early evidence for writers of 'myth as history' -D. Felton, Bryn Mawr Classical ReviewThis is the first volume in a set of two. Volume 1 introduces and collects together the scattered quotations of the Greek writers of the sixth to the fourth centuries BC who first recorded in prose the tales of Greek mythology, whilst Volume 2 will be a scholarly commentary.

Book reviewed in this article: In That Case: Medical Ethics in Everyday Practice. By Alastair Campbell and Roger Higgs. Medical Genetics Casebook: A Clinical Introduction to Medical Ethics Systems Theory. By Colleen D. Clements. Cases in Bioethics from the Hastings Center Report. Edited by Carol Levine and Robert M. Veatch. Hastings‐on‐Hudson.

We are living in an unprecedented era of biomedical revolution. Medicine is remaking humans, and controversy surrounds such topics as abortion, artificial organs, brain circuitry, eugenics, euthanasia, and gene therapy. At the same time, medical advances are posing complex ethical problems for both patients and professionals. The most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of its kind, Case Studies in Biomedical Ethics: Decision-Making, Principles, and Cases explores fundamental ethical questions arising from real situations faced by health professionals, patients, and others. Featuring a (...) wide range of more than 100 case studies drawn from current events, court cases, and physicians' experiences, the book is divided into three parts. Part I presents a basic framework for ethical decision-making in healthcare, covering such issues as separating evaluative questions from questions of fact; distinguishing between ethical and nonethical evaluations; and identifying the source of ethical judgments. Expanding upon this framework, Part II explains the ethical principles: beneficence and nonmaleficence, justice, respect for autonomy, veracity, fidelity, and avoidance of killing. Parts I and II provide students with the background to analyze the ethical dilemmas presented in Part III, which features cases on a broad spectrum of issues including abortion, genetics, mental health, confidentiality, health insurance, experimentation on humans, the right to refuse treatment, and death and dying. Each case is accompanied by the authors' commentary, which guides students in considering the issues. Ideal for undergraduate and graduate courses in biomedical ethics, bioethics, and medical ethics, Case Studies in Biomedical Ethics incorporates opening text boxes in each chapter that cross-reference relevant cases in other chapters. It also includes an appendix of important ethical codes and a glossary of key terms. (shrink)

_Minds, Brains, Computers_ serves as both an historical and interdisciplinary introduction to the foundations of cognitive science.

Medical ethics changed dramatically in the past 30 years because physicians and humanists actively engaged each other in discussions that sometimes led to confrontation and controversy, but usually have improved the quality of medical decision-making. Before then medical ethics had been isolated for almost two centuries from the larger philosophical, social, and religious controversies of the time. There was, however, an earlier period where leaders in medicine and in the humanities worked closely together and both fields were richer for it. (...) This volume begins with the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment when professors of medicine such as John Gregory, Edward Percival, and the American, Benjamin Rush, were close friends of philosophers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid. They continually exchanged views on matters of ethics with each other in print, at meetings of elite intellectual groups, and at the dinner table. Then something happened, physicians and humanists quit talking with each other. In searching for the causes of the collapse, this book identifies shifts in the social class of physicians, developments in medical science, and changes in the patterns of medical education. Only in the past three decades has the dialogue resumed as physicians turned to humanists for help just when humanists wanted their work to be relevant to real-life social problems. Again, the book asks why, finding answers in the shift from acute to chronic disease as the dominant pattern of illness, the social rights revolution of the 1960's, and the increasing dissonance between physician ethics and ethics outside medicine. The book tells the critical story of how the breakdown in communication between physicians and humanists occurred and how it was repaired when new developments in medicine together with a social revolution forced the leaders of these two fields to resume their dialogue. (shrink)

In celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Beauchamp and Childress’s Principles of Biomedical Ethics, a review is undertaken to compare the lists of principles in various bioethical theories to determine the extent to which the various lists can be reconciled. Included are the single principle theories of utilitarianism, libertarianism, Hippocratism, and the theories of Pellegrino, Engelhardt, The Belmont Report, Beauchamp and Childress, Ross, Veatch, and Gert. We find theories all offering lists of principles numbering from one to (...) ten. Many of the differences can be reconciled, but some critical differences remain. (shrink)

Our primary focus is on analysis of the concept of voluntariness, with a secondary focus on the implications of our analysis for the concept and the requirements of voluntary informed consent. We propose that two necessary and jointly sufficient conditions must be satisfied for an action to be voluntary: intentionality, and substantial freedom from controlling influences. We reject authenticity as a necessary condition of voluntary action, and we note that constraining situations may or may not undermine voluntariness, depending on the (...) circumstances and the psychological capacities of agents. We compare and evaluate several accounts of voluntariness and argue that our view, unlike other treatments in bioethics, is not a value-laden theory. We also discuss the empirical assessment of individuals? perceptions of the degrees of noncontrol and self-control. We propose use of a particular Decision Making Control Instrument. Empirical research using this instrument can provide data that will help establish appropriate policies and procedures for obtaining voluntary consent to research. (shrink)

In its October 2001 issue, this journal published a series of articles questioning the Whole-Brain-based definition of death. Much of the concern focused on whether somatic integration - a commonly understood basis for the whole-brain death view - can survive the brain's death. The present article accepts that there are insurmountable problems with whole-brain death views, but challenges the assumption that loss of somatic integration is the proper basis for pronouncing death. It examines three major themes. First, it accepts the (...) claim of the "disaggregators" that some behaviors traditionally associated with death can be unbundled, but argues that other behaviors (including organ procurement) must continue to be associated. Second, it rejects the claims of the "somaticists," that the integration of the body is critical, arguing instead for equating death with the irreversible loss of "embodied consciousness," that is, the loss of integration of bodily and mental function. Third, it defends higher-brain views against the charge that they are necessarily "mentalist," that is, that they equate death with losing some mental function such as consciousness or personhood. It argues, instead, for the integration of bodily and mental function as the critical feature of human life and that its irreversible loss constitutes death. (shrink)

The emergence of the “4th Industrial Revolution,” i.e. the convergence of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, advanced materials, and bioengineering technologies, could accelerate socioeconomic insecurities and anxieties or provide beneficial alternatives to the status quo. In the post-Covid-19 era, the entities that are best positioned to capitalize on these innovations are large firms, which use digital platforms and big data to orchestrate vast ecosystems of users and extract market share across industry sectors. Nonetheless, these technologies also have the potential (...) to democratize ownership, broaden political-economic participation, and reduce environmental harms. We articulate the potential sociotechnical pathways in this high-stakes crossroads by analyzing cellular agriculture, an exemplary 4th Industrial Revolution technology that synergizes computer science, biopharma, tissue engineering, and food science to grow cultured meat, dairy, and egg products from cultured cells and/or genetically modified yeast. Our exploration of this space involved multi-sited ethnographic research in both the cellular agriculture community and alternative economic organizations devoted to open source licensing, member-owned cooperatives, social financing, and platform business models. Upon discussing how these latter approaches could potentially facilitate alternative sociotechnical pathways in cellular agriculture, we reflect upon the broader implications of this work with respect to the 4th Industrial Revolution and the enduring need for public policy reform. (shrink)