In debates about criteria for human death, several camps have emerged, the main two focusing on either loss of the "organism as a whole" (the mainstream view) or loss of consciousness or "personhood." Controversies also rage over the proper definition of "irreversible" in criteria for death. The situation is reminiscent of the proverbial blind men palpating an elephant; each describes the creature according to the part he can touch. Similarly, each camp grasps some aspect of the complex reality of death. (...) The personhood camp, in contrast to the mainstream "organism" camp, recognizes that a human organism can still be a biological living whole even without brain function. The mainstream camp, in contrast to the personhood camp, recognizes that a person can be permanently, even irreversibly unconscious, and still be a living person so long as his/her body is alive. The author proposes that hylomorphic dualism incorporates both these key insights. But to complete the picture of the entire "death elephant," a fundamental paradigm shift is needed to make sense of other seemingly conflicting insights. The author proposes a "semantic bisection" of the concept of death, analogous to the traditional distinction at the beginning of life between "conception" and "birth." To avoid the semantic baggage associated with the term "death," the two new death-related concepts are referred to as "passing away" (or "deceased") and "deanimation," corresponding, respectively, to sociolegal ceasing-to-be (mirror image of birth) and ontological/theological ceasing-to-be of the bodily organism (mirror image of conception). Regarding criteria, the distinguishing feature is whether the cessation of function is permanent (passing away) or irreversible (deanimation). If the "dead donor rule" were renamed the "deceased donor rule" (both acronyms felicitously being "DDR"), the ethics of organ transplantation from non–heart-beating donors could, in principle, be validly governed by the DDR, even though the donors are not yet ontologically "deanimated." Thus, the paradigm shift satisfies both those who insist on maintaining the DDR and those who claim that it has all along been receiving only lip service and should be explicitly loosened to include those who are "as good as dead." Even so, a number of practical caveats remain to be worked out for non–heart-beating protocols. (shrink)

Offers a comprehensive nonmathematical treatment regarding the design and analysis of experiments, focusing on basic concepts rather than calculation of technical details. Much of the discussion is in terms of examples drawn from numerous fields of applications. Subjects include the justification and practical difficulties of randomization, various factors occurring in factorial experiments, selecting the size of an experiments, different purposes for which observations may be made and much more.

Clark and Chalmers (1998) defend the hypothesis of an ‘Extended Mind’, maintaining that beliefs and other paradigmatic mental states can be implemented outside the central nervous system or body. Aspects of the problem of ‘language acquisition’ are considered in the light of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather than ‘language’ as typically understood, the object of study is something called ‘utterance-activity’, a term of art intended to refer to the full range of kinetic and prosodic features of the on-line behaviour of (...) interacting humans. It is argued that utterance activity is plausibly regarded as jointly controlled by the embodied activity of interacting people, and that it contributes to the control of their behaviour. By means of specific examples it is suggested that this complex joint control facilitates easier learning of at least some features of language. This in turn suggests a striking form of the extended mind, in which infants’ cognitive powers are augmented by those of the people with whom they interact. (shrink)

In identifying that the 'essential tension' is the balance between conservative and innovative approaches in the development of knowledge - tried-and tested or new directions - Kuhn pointed out that these two attitudes are both appropriate. This study adds to this picture the social and psychological dynamics that underpin any such balancing.

, Lawrie Reznek argues that disease is not a natural kind term. I raise objections to Reznek's two central arguments for establishing that disease is not a natural kind. In criticizing his a priori, conceptual argument against naturalism, I argue that his conclusion rests on a weaker argument that appeals to the empirical diversity in the symptoms and manifestations of disease. I also raise questions about the account of natural kinds which Reznek utilizes and his point that conventions for classification (...) are excluded by there being natural kinds. Keywords: Disease, natural kind, value judgement CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In Rationalities in history, the distinguished historian David d'Avray writes a new comparative history in the spirit of Max Weber. In a strikingly original reassessment of seminal Weberian ideas, d'Avray applies value rationality to the comparative history of religion and the philosophy of law. Integrating theories of rational choice, anthropological reflections on relativism, and the recent philosophy of rationality with Weber's conceptual framework, d'Avray seeks to disengage 'rationalisation' from its enduring association with Western 'modernity.' This mode of analysis is contextualised (...) through the examples of Buddhism, Imperial China, and sixteenth-century Catholicism--in the latter case building upon unpublished archival research. This ambitious synthesis of social theory and comparative history will engage social scientists and historians from advanced undergraduate level upwards, stimulating interdisciplinary discourse, and making a significant contribution to the methodology of history. D'Avray explores the potential of this new Weberian analysis further in his companion volume, Medieval religious rationalities"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

There have in recent years been at least two important attempts to get to grips with Aristotle's conception of dialectic. I have in mind those by Martha C. Nussbaum in ‘Saving Aristotle's appearances’, which is chapter 8 of her The Fragility of Goodness, and by Terence H. Irwin in his important, though in my opinion somewhat misguided, book Aristotle's First Principles. There is a sense in which both of these writers are reacting to the work of G. E. L. Owen (...) on cognate matters, particularly his well-known paper ‘Tithenai ta phainomena’. Owen himself was in part reacting to what I suppose is the traditional view of how Aristotle regarded dialectic, as revealed in Topics I. 1. On that view dialectic is for Aristotle a lesser way of proceeding than is demonstration, the method of science. For demonstration proceeds from premises which are accepted as true in themselves and moves from them to conclusions which follow necessarily from those premises; and the middle term of such a demonstrative syllogism then provides the ‘reason why’ for the truth of the conclusion. Dialectic proceeds from premises which are accepted on a lesser basis ‘by everyone or by the majority or by the wise, i.e. by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and reputable of them’, and proceeds deductively from them to further conclusions. (shrink)

Christopher Miles Coope offers a letter, drafted by Helen Taylor but certified by Mill, in which Mill asserts the duty to vote, as evidence that he could not have regarded harmfulness to others as a necessary condition of moral wrongness. But it is clear that Mill regarded the duty to vote as one of imperfect obligation, and the wrongness of not fulfilling it as a matter roughly of not doing enough, in this case not doing one's fair share. He has (...) room for the common-sense harmlessness of staying at home. At the same time he grounds political duties in the harmfulness of neglecting the power of legislation and in the possibility, consistently maintained, that one can harm by inaction. Mill's view, central to his relation between morality and liberty, remains at work here, while also suggesting reflections on the peculiarity of his conception of harm. (shrink)

At the beginning of his influential De Nominum Analogia, Thomas de Vio Cajetan mentions three mistaken positions on analogy. He does not attach names to these positions, but each one was held by distinguished Thomists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Furthermore, their proponents were responding to the same set of challenges from John Duns Scotus that set the agenda for the De Nominum Analogia. In this paper, I would like to do something that Cajetan did not do, and that (...) is, directly consider the merits of the first position in his list of mistaken accounts of analogy; namely, the position that analogy is constituted by disjunction. More specifically, this paper investigates the polemical use for which Hervaeus Natalis deployed analogy of disjunction; the reply of John Duns Scotus; and the implications of this back and forth for understanding the Thomist-Scotist dispute over the concept of being. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a defence of aesthetic education in terms of aesthetic experience, claiming that aesthetic experience and art appreciation is a vital component of a flourishing life. Given schools have an important role to play in helping prepare young people for their adult lives, it is crucial they should consider how best to equip students with the means to achieve a flourishing life. It is on these grounds I defend arts education as compulsory across the curriculum. In (...) order to adopt this position, I firstly critically engage with two competing defences of including the arts on the curriculum on the basis of firstly, the role art has to play in supporting self-expression, and secondly, a defence of the arts in relation to their role in supporting moral improvement. After explaining why these arguments fail to do the work required to defend aesthetic education as thoroughly as is needed, I turn to the defence based on aesthetic experience because it allows for a defence of the arts to be made on the basis of art’s distinctive value. (shrink)

This is a chapter of a collective volume of Rawls's and Harsanyi's theories of distributive justice. It focuses on Harsanyi's important Social Aggregation Theorem and technically reconstructs it as a theorem in welfarist social choice.

Two types of truth table tasks are used investigating mental representations of conditionals: a possibilities-based and a truth-based one. In possibilities tasks, participants indicate whether a situation is possible or impossible according to the conditional rule. In truth tasks participants evaluate whether a situation makes the rule true or false, or is irrelevant with respect to the truth of the rule. Comparing the two-option version of the possibilities task with the truth task in Experiment 1, the possibilities task yields logical (...) answer patterns whereas the truth task yields defective patterns. Adding the irrelevant option to the possibilities task in Experiment 2 leads to a considerable amount of defective patterns in the possibilities task, but still to more logical patterns in the possibilities task than in the truth task. Experiment 3 shows that directionality matters since rule-to-situation tasks yield more logical answer patterns than do situation-to-rule tasks. We conclude that both task types are not comparable as such since wording, number of options and directionality influence the results. (shrink)

We outline a class of term-languages for epistemic grounding inspired by Prawitz’s theory of grounds. We show how denotation functions can be defined over these languages, relating terms to proof-objects built up of constructive functions. We discuss certain properties that the languages may enjoy both individually and with respect to their expansions. Finally, we provide a ground-theoretic version of Prawitz’s completeness conjecture, and adapt to our framework a refutation of this conjecture due to Piecha and Schroeder-Heister.

À partir d'une prise en compte de la réflexion actuelle sur la complexité du temps, illustrée par le déploiement des temps dans 1a pratique psychanalytique, il est possible de montrer qu'une spécificité chrétienne du temps est repérable, malgré la diversité des modèles théologiques qui ont pu ou peuvent en rendre compte. C'est la dimension eschatologique de ce temps chrétien qui est par elle-même significative pour nos contemporains, pourvu que les représentations qu'elle véhicule soient soumises à une régulation critique.From a consideration (...) of present day reflection on the complexity of time, illustrated by the unfolding of time in psychoanalytic practice, it is possible to show that a Christian specificity of time can be located in spite of the diversity of theological models that could have or can give an account of it. It is the eschatological dimension of itself significant for our contemporaries, as long as the representations which it transmits are controlled by critical rules. (shrink)

It is almost universally believed that in quantum theory the two following statements hold: all transformations are achieved by a unitary interaction followed by a von-Neumann measurement; all mixed states are marginals of pure entangled states. I name this doctrine the dogma of purification ontology. The source of the dogma is the original von Neumann axiomatisation of the theory, which largely relies on the Schrődinger equation as a postulate, which holds in a nonrelativistic context, and whose operator version holds only (...) in free quantum field theory, but no longer in the interacting theory. In the present paper I prove that both ontologies of unitarity and state-purity are unfalsifiable, even in principle, and therefore axiomatically spurious. I propose instead a minimal four-postulate axiomatisation: associate a Hilbert space \ to each system \; compose two systems by the tensor product rule \; associate a transformation from system \ to \ to a quantum operation, i.e. to a completely positive trace-non-increasing map between the trace-class operators of \ and \; evaluate all joint probabilities through that of a special type of quantum operation: the state preparation. I then conclude that quantum paradoxes—such as the Schroedinger-cat’s, and, most relevantly, the information paradox—are originated only by the dogma of purification ontology, and they are no longer paradoxes of the theory in the minimal formulation. For the same reason, most interpretations of the theory interpret the same dogma, not the strict theory stripped of the spurious postulates. (shrink)

The Greeks have long been regarded as innovators across a wide range of fields in literature, culture, philosophy, politics and science. However, little attention has been paid to how they thought and felt about novelty and innovation itself, and to relating this to the forces of traditionalism and conservatism which were also present across all the various societies within ancient Greece. What inspired the Greeks to embark on their unique and enduring innovations? How did they think and feel about the (...) new? This book represents the first serious attempt to address these issues, and deals with the phenomenon across all periods and areas of classical Greek history and thought. Each chapter concentrates on a different area of culture or thought, while the book as a whole argues that much of the impulse towards innovation came from the life of the polis which provided its setting. (shrink)

Chronic pain patients often miss receiving acknowledgement for the multidimensional struggles they face with their specific conditions. People suffering from chronic pain experience a type ofinvisibilitythat is also borne by other chronically ill people and their respective medical conditions. However, chronic pain patients face both passive and active exclusion from social participation in activities like family interactions or workplace inclusion. Although such aspects are discussed in the debates lead by the bio-psycho-social model of pain, there seems to be a lack (...) of a distinct interest in assessing more specifically the social aspects regarding chronic pain. As a result, the social aspects have yet to be taken into a more thorough theoretical consideration of chronic pain and to be practically implemented to help affected patients. By addressing chronic pain patients’ struggle for recognition, this paper attempts to shed light on some of these social aspects. We base this attempt on a theoretical framework that combines patients’ statements with an adaptation of Axel Honneth’s social-philosophical work onrecognition. Thus, this paper tries to make a suggestion on how the bio-psycho-social model of pain can live up to its name by helping to address more adequately some of the more neglected aspects in chronic pain patients’ suffering than has been possible to date. (shrink)

This article is a continuation of Part I, which looked at the relationship between Confucianism and Daoism by first introducing general approaches, before moving on to (1) perspectives on names and actualities; (2) cultivation, learning, the natural; and (3) conceptions of the person. Continuing with the theme‐based comparison of Confucianism and Daoism by looking specifically at the Lunyu 論語 (Analects of Confucius), Daodejing 道德經 (Classic of the Way and Virtuosity) or Laozi 老子 (Book of Master Lao), and the Zhuangzi 莊子 (...) (Book of Master Zhuang), this article looks at (1) politics, nonaction (wuwei 無為), and virtuosity (de 德); (2) morality, virtues, and human nature (xing 性); and finally (3) Dao 道, or “the way.” It references Part I, and while it can be read independently, it is best taken as a continuation of Part I. The conclusion included herein summarizes both Part II and Part I. (shrink)

Ce texte a déjà paru dans ÉTUDES/INUIT/STUDIES, 24, no 2, 2000, p. 89-113. Québec : Département d'anthropologie de l'Université Laval. Nous remercions Bernard Saladin d'Anglure de nous avoir autorisé à le reproduire ici. Résumé : Les rites inuit de la première fois, qui célèbrent les premières performances effectuées par les enfants et les adolescents inuit, ont été souvent mentionnés par les ethnographes de l'Arctique mais jamais véritablement analysés comme « séquence cérémonielle », pour - Anthropologie.

The phrase ‘evaluative inference’ was used by Toulmin for ‘that form of inference by which we pass from factual reasons to an ethical conclusion’; and the phrase has been attacked by Hare in his review of Toulmin and in his book . I shall try to dig out some of the questions at issue in that discussion, but to do so without the help of this technical term, or of any other that I can avoid.

This work presents some basic results on a theory of translations between logics and a short revision about Łukasiewicz's logics. Then, it is shown, using facts about algebraic semantics, that there is a conservative translation from every finite Łukasiewicz's logic into classical logic. However, this is not a constructive result.