The issue of aftercare for participants in clinical research was explored in the context of an asthma drug trial. Although there may be financial constraints and practical difficulties with implementation, the results show that it may be feasible for clinical investigators and commercial sponsors to take on some limited responsibility for the medical care of research subjects after clinical trials. However, the ethical implications for this practice remain unclear. On the one hand, society may have a moral obligation to compensate (...) and reward some of its members who assume the risk of research subjects for the benefit of society as a whole. On the other hand, the promise of aftercare may provide an inducement to volunteers which, under certain conditions may be considered morally wrong and scientifically unsound. (shrink)

The dissociation Block provides between phenomenal and access consciousness (P-consciousness and A-consciousness) captures much of our intuition about conscious experience. However, it raises a major methodological puzzle, and is not uniquely supported by the empirical evidence. We provide an alternative interpretation based on the notion of levels of representation and partial awareness.

The argument from faultless disagreement against moral realism is based on the alleged possibility of cognitively faultless moral disagreement, CFD. This possibility contradicts the pre-theoretic intuition that moral truth is knowable, in principle, the so-called epistemic constraint on moral truth, EC. In this paper, I discuss the realist’s two options to cope with this argument. First of all, I point out the realist’s strategies to explain the possibility of cognitively faultless error, which is implied by CFD. Then I discuss one (...) promising option to respond to the argument from faultless disagreement: accepting both CFD and EC but blocking the ensuing contradiction by invoking an equivocation as regards the notion of knowability. After pointing out the drawbacks of this solution I discuss the other promising option: rejecting CFD by drawing on an agnostic stance on the part of cognitively blameless thinkers as regards moral propositions they cannot agree on. Yet this option faces the problem that EC has to be denied. In concluding the paper, I outline the prospects of an attractive objectivist shape of moral antirealism, which is also affected by the argument from faultless disagreement. (shrink)

Discusses how the conscious self is created by the brain, explains brain structure, and explores the mind-body connection.

After a time of theoretical condemnation common sense as well as academic curiosity have rediscovered again the all-permeating powers of narration. Narrativity and culture are, this is a conviction grounding this essay, closely interwoven. But from this doesn’t follow that narration has to be seen as a guardian of general order. On the contrary, if we contemplate the appearance of narratives in everyday life and in literature we may detect differences but also affinities in subverting common beliefs. Yet, literary narrations (...) tend to work in their own way through what in philosophical discourse is reduced to conceptualizing. The topics dealt with in this essay include Schiller’s substantiation of aesthetic awareness and Goethe’s narrative response; the great master-narratives of the 20th century: Proust, Joyce and Beckett; and the question, what an advanced art of narration can contribute to an experience which is yearning to break open the iron cage of traditions in thought as well as in literary invention. (shrink)

In the light of Jacques Ellul's ideas on technology and Ivan Illich's views on education, what follows is a discussion of the present attempt of Botswana (amidst the Southern African Countries) to expand and modernize its educational system through the use of new technology to educate its people. The problems encountered in adopting technology are used as cautions for the Third World countries attracted to new technology for educating the vast majority. Illich's proposal for replacing the formal schools with the (...) tools of conviviality for the learners is considered useful and relevant. (shrink)

The purpose of Judaism -- The Exodus-Sinai continuum of Jewish life -- Genesis : Abraham and "the call" -- Exodus : embracing the covenant -- Leviticus : roadmap to a more perfect world -- Numbers : from wilderness to prophecy -- Deuteronomy : how central is God? -- Sinai applied : seven core values of the rabbinic tradition -- The American Jewish community and the public square -- Jews and the struggle for civil rights -- Soviet Jewry : a cause (...) of our own -- Protecting and defending the state of Israel -- What is a Jewish issue? -- Beyond self-interest -- Social justice takes root -- Reconciling Exodus and Sinai -- Conclusion : responding to "the call". (shrink)

Professor sellars has written a paper in which he holds that the statement (1) "karl's mind believes it is raining" is logically equivalent to a statement of the form (2) "karl's body is in state 'p'." in thomas' analysis of these two statements he argues that the plausibility of this position depends upon whether the facts expressed by (1) and (2) possess the same sort of "intentionality" and "aboutness." he offers various formulations of these statements which he argues show that (...) what is expressed in (1) is "intentional" and has "aboutness", But is not just a fact about karl's body. Thus, (1) and (2) do not possess the same sort of "intentionality" or "aboutness." (staff). (shrink)

It is easy to overlook the fact that the kind of personalist criticism Brower, Wimsatt, and other New Critics were reacting against was a method of interpretation bequeathed by the nineteenth century which most of us would now regard as naïve, simplistic, and sometimes absurd. With the exception of a few poems such as Browning's dramatic monologues, which provided the speaker with an explicit identity as unmistakable as that of a character in a play—"I am poor brother Lippo, by your (...) leave! / You need not clap your torches to my face"—lyric and didactic poems of the first person were invariably treated as personal statements. The voice, emotions, attitudes, and state of mind of the speaker were those of the poet, and even the most symbolic details were often read as literal aspects of the poet's self or environment. Many critical studies and anthologies remain today on library shelves testifying to the persistence of these critical habits of the late 1940s and 1950s. On the assumption that Rochester's love poems describe his actual sexual experiences, Vivian de Sola Pinto was able to write a much longer biography of the poet than would have been possible if personalist criticism had not been in vogue.1 David Nichol Smith could assert that Dryden's Religio Laici "was wholly spontaneous"—the familiar Romantic criterion - and show the poet arguing out "his problems for the peace of his own mind."2 If it became unfashionable to speak in that manner of these and numerous other poems, it was because the New Critics, along with the Chicago critics, had shown convincingly that a lyric poem can be dramatic, the imitation of a fictitious speaker responding to an imagined situation, and that a didactic poem can deal with public issues instead of private agonies. · 1. See Vivian de Sola Pinto, Rochester: Portrait of a Restoration Poet .· 2. David Nichol Smith, John Dryden , p. 61. Phillip Harth is Merritt Y. Hughes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is the author of Swift and Anglican Rationalism and Contexts of Dryden's Thought. (shrink)

Meta-ethical realism faces the serious epistemological problem of how to explain our epistemic access to moral reality. In the face of this challenge many are sceptical about non-naturalist realism. Nonetheless, there is good reason to acknowledge moral objectivity: morality shows all the signs of a truth-apt discourse but doesn’t exhibit the typical relativity inducing features. This suggests a middle-ground position, a theory that embraces the virtues of realism but does avoid its vices: objectivist antirealism. In this paper, I’ll discuss, mainly (...) following Crispin Wright’s account of moral truth as superassertibility, a promising version of objectivist antirealism and show how to cope with notorious problems, notably those arising from the thought that moral disagreement might be possible in which nobody is guilty of a cognitive shortcoming, which contradicts the antirealist claim that moral truth is not beyond our epistemic reach. The solution is to deny the possibility of cognitively faultless moral disagreement by arguing that cognitively blameless thinkers either agree or stay agnostic and, therefore, never disagree about any moral proposition. Since assuming an agnostic stance on the part of such thinkers contradicts the antirealist’s conception of truth—even within the limits of intuitionistic logic—I’ll propose an alternative logical revision for the moral discourse: a three-valued logic with epistemically construed truth-values. (shrink)

In a well-known paper entitled, ‘Survival Lottery’, published in a philosophical journal, John Harris proposed for discussion an interesting idea for saving the lives of certain kinds of patients who are at the point of death. Let us assume that there are two such patients, one that could be saved by a heart transplant and the other by the transplantation of a pair of lungs. However, no suitable organs are available for this purpose. Might it perhaps not be immoral to (...) select, by national lottery, a healthy person, who would be sacrificed, his organs used as transplants, and thus two lives be saved through the sacrifice of only one? This proposal is subjected first to a critical philosophical and ethical analysis, and then to a critical analysis from the point of view of Jewish Ethics as embodied in Halakhah. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Cultuurkritische essays over het dreigende uiteenvallen van Europa.

The story of The Expanse is inseparable from the Inners’ oppression of the Belters. This chapter focuses on the relationship between the Inners and the Belt. It provides insight into the colonial relationship between them. Emphasizing the colonial relationship between the Inners and the Belt gives us insight into why attempts to forge a peaceful alliance between Earth, Mars, and the Belt fail time and time again. If we understand the Belt's attack as transcending mere bloodthirst and demolishing the unquestioned (...) colonial system that denies their very humanity, the case for anti‐colonial violence becomes much more compelling. Marco's vision of the future, in which Earth and Mars keep to their planets and a self‐determining Belt can finally live free of persecution, is juxtaposed against Avasarala's vision of peace in Luna Station. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to connect the current debate on relative truth to the discussions of theories of truth in general, in which the so-called platitudes about truth have recently played a prominent role. Truth-relativists propose adding to the standard truth predicate an argument-place for an extra parameter over and above a possible world and they presume that the predicate that results from this relativization is a truth predicate. Yet this relativization arguably isn't just an innocuous extrapolation of (...) the Lewis-Kaplan line in semantics that naturally conserves the predicate's status as a truth predicate. This status has to be specifically established. I'll discuss arguments to the effect that truth-relativists fail on that score since relative truth doesn't satisfy certain basic platitudes about truth, in particular the Equivalence Schema and the normativity of truth. This suggests that a relativized truth predicate cannot play the role required of a truth predicate. I shall discuss the relativist's defensive strategies in detail, the most promising of which is to claim that it is legitimate to deny the Equivalence Schema by arguing that relativism introduces a revisionary concept of truth and so fundamentally revises semantics. However, I'll point out that solely invoking semantic revision doesn't suffice to justify a denial of the Equivalence Schema and that any further justification of such a denial is ad hoc or question begging. Moreover, I suggest that with respect to the normativity of truth the prospects of truth-relativism are equally dim. (shrink)

In this article, various objections will be discussed that have been put forward against ethical relativism, but which haven’t been considered seriously enough on the part of relativists and have been overrated on the part of their opponents. The objections will be concentrated into three arguments: the action-theoretic, the epistemological and the truth-theoretic argument. The article will discuss whether they can be rebutted by proponents of the two main types of relativism: indexical relativism and truth-relativism. The conclusion will be as (...) follows: one version of indexical relativism, the analytical version, gets into serious troubles by the action-theoretic argument, while its revisionary version will remain unaffected, the epistemological argument fails with respect to indexical relativism and stands on shaky ground as regards truth-relativism, the truth-theoretic argument puts considerable pressure on truth-relativism. (shrink)

Three standard psychometric tests were administered to parents who volunteered their children for a randomised, double-blind placebo-controlled trial of a new asthma drug and to a control group of parents whose children were eligible for the trial but had declined the invitation. The trial took place at a children's hospital in Australia. The subjects comprised 68 parents who had volunteered their children and 42 who had not, a participation rate of 94 per cent and 70 per cent, respectively. The responses (...) of these parents to the Gordon Survey of Interpersonal Values Questionnaire, the Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory and the Cattell Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire were analysed by computer. There was a marked difference between the psychological profiles of the two groups of parents. Volunteering parents put more value on benevolence while non-volunteering parents were more concerned with power and prestige. The self-esteem of volunteering parents was much lower than that of non-volunteering parents. Finally, volunteering parents were more introverted, exhibited greater anxiety and low supergo, while non-volunteering parents appeared to have greater social confidence and emotional stability. Since an individual's values, self-esteem and personality may be important antecedents of behaviour, these findings suggest that parents who volunteer their children for clinical research are not only socially disadvantaged and emotionally vulnerable, but may also be psychologically predisposed to volunteering. Furthermore, these findings provide evidence for the existence of a psychosocial 'filter' effect of the informed consent procedure, which may be discouraging the better educated, more privileged and psychologically resilient members of society from participation as research subjects. (shrink)

Contrasting the properties of conscious and unconscious processes is crucial for understanding how consciousness occurs in the brain. In this chapter, we review the theoretical framework and empirical methods used to delineate and contrast conscious vs. unconscious perception. After outlining the main approaches to measure unconscious influences on brain and behavior, we describe some of the psychophysical tools employed to render stimuli unconscious, including the depletion of sensory signals, attentional resources, and vigilance states. We then provide an overview of the (...) extent and limits of unconscious perception, and conclude on the future of the contrastive approach to the study of consciousness. (shrink)

Though a growing number of voices in public discourse are expressing reservations about the new space race and its implications, inherently political questions have remained largely untouched by political theorists: Who is space for and for whose benefit? What are the ideological presumptions and functions of private space exploration? To confront this astro-aporia, we proceed in four parts. First, we develop a typology of two broad positions that predominate in contemporary criticism of space exploration: those who are “space pessimists” and (...) those who are “space neutral”; second, we critique those two positions for relying on an instrumental rationality that cedes too much ground to the logic of instrumentalizing and exploiting that which is deemed non-human nature; third, we examine the linked material and ideological forces fueling the current space race and its enthusiastic supporters; and finally, we formulate a dialectical position that remains critical of space exploitation as it is currently undertaken, but on grounds other than mere utility, thus offering a way to reorient the discussion toward a critical theory of space. From this perspective, space's meaning-making role for humanity can be understood as good and should be held in common, rather than being either abandoned or plundered. (shrink)

The ubiquitous pathways of positive feedback in the human brain are generally held to be a necessary condition for the phenomenon of conscious sensation. However, no dynamic mechanism, no causal link has been established between the physical brain and its mental attributes, our sensations, thoughts, our consciousness. I suggest that the missing link between the world of neurons and that of mind is to be found in the transformations the brain performs on the coordinates of physical space and time. In (...) particular, the convolution of past, present and future, that characterizes subjective sensations, blurs the distinction between cause and effect, and allows the emergence of a self-generated phenomenon of consciousness. (shrink)

Only recently has Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality begun to be read as a genealogy rather than a variation on the social contract tradition. This article argues that reading Rousseau as a genealogist not only clarifies his analysis of amour-propre’s inflammation, but also illuminates a conception of freedom achieved through the continuous political practice of shaping of amour-propre. In the first section of this article, I situate this conception of freedom against two separate but relevant bodies of Rousseau scholarship: those (...) who read him as a genealogist, and those who emphasize the ambiguities of amour-propre. Next, I look to The Social Contract’s passages on censorship and court of honor in order to evaluate their roles as institutions that forestall the inflammation of amour-propre. Finally, I examine the social institutions that citizens actively participate in as they practice their freedom: the festivals, dances, balls and games described in The Letter to D’Alembert and Considerations on the Government of Poland. It is in these institutions that we see the political implications of Rousseau’s genealogical system manifest: because his genealogy illuminates the human tendency toward vice, the cultivation of virtuous citizenship appears as a constant struggle rather than an idealist achievement. (shrink)

Adorno and Horkheimer’s legacy is incomplete without reference to their infamous political quietism. To thinkers such as Habermas, this was the unfortunate consequence of their alleged evacuation of reason. Attending to the treatment of Nietzsche in Dialectic of Enlightenment illuminates the distinct irony of such charges. Here, in their most popular book, Nietzsche is presented as precisely that which they praised him for warning against elsewhere: an advocate of cruelty animated by a reactionary morality. I contend that this exaggeration is (...) not accidental, but rather illustrative; the authors present a consciously hyperbolized version of Nietzsche in order to articulate how he made possible his own misappropriation, and to distinguish themselves sharply from Nietzsche given their disagreements about the necessity of reason. Ultimately, however, even though Adorno and Horkheimer performatively differentiate themselves from the nihilism they saw in Nietzsche, their alternative would ironically be subject to precisely the same charges of irrationalism and political aporia that they sought so desperately to avoid. (shrink)

Towards reassessing and reconciling some of the conflicted readings of H. P. Lovecraft’s writings, Sondergard proposes that the author be read through the lens of his own idiolect rather than through interpretive systems constructed from referents external to Lovecraft’s often xenophobically self-referential perceptions. Modeling a semiotic system extrapolated from analysis of Lovecraft’s canon as well as of his life, the essay proceeds to employ it to reexamine “Herbert West—Reanimator,” a story that has been cited as evidence of the author’s racism.