In the latter half of the twentieth century, developed countries of the world have made tremendous strides in organ donation and transplantation. However, in this area of medicine, Japan has been slow to follow. Japanese ethics, deeply rooted in religion and tradition, have affected their outlook on life and death. Because the Japanese have only recently started to acknowledge the concept of brain death, transplantation of major organs has been hindered in that country. Currently, there is a dual definition of (...) death in Japan, intended to satisfy both sides of the issue. This interesting paradox, which still stands to be fully resolved, illustrates the contentious conflict between medical ethics and medical progress in Japan. (shrink)

At the core of the essay that follows is a set of intuitions that distinguish the mental and subjective from the public and objective. I call these intuitions Cartesian intuitions even though Descartes himself ignored some of them. I argue that some of them survive the best efforts of critics to explain them away. This, I contend, is the basis of the mind-body problem, which should be seen as a paradox, in which both materialist and dualist lines of argument seem (...) conclusive. My aim is thus to clarify and to bolster what I call the neo-Cartesian half of the mind-body paradox, to show that there really is a paradox, one that remains with us, undissolved. ;I use two forms of arguments to accomplish this. One is the Knowledge Argument, according to which there are certain things which you can know everything physical about but not know everything about and which, because of that, make physicalism false. The Knowledge Argument says that your having this extra knowledge depends on the existence of special properties called qualia, which are supposed to be separate from any physical or functional properties. I argue that the Knowledge Argument is what survives from Descartes's original critique of materialism. I defend the Knowledge Argument, or at least I defend the claim that it has not so far been refuted. ;The other form of argument is the Absent Qualia Argument. I use it further to support the case against functionalism, the approach to the mind according to which mental states are definable by their causal relations to behaviors, perceptions, and each other. Against this position, I argue that there might be so-called absent qualia states which filled the causal roles of some of our genuine mental states but did not look or feel like anything. The functionalist response to this position is that since absent qualia states cause the same beliefs as genuine states do we could never know whether we were having real states or absent qualia replicas. I argue that there is no such skeptical problem. ;At the heart of both arguments is an account of our direct reference to our own phenomenal states. Critics of the Knowledge Argument have argued that the Cartesian intuitions the argument exploits can be explained away as a result of two distinct forms of reference: roughly, the direct reference distinctive to the mental, the descriptive reference distinctive to our neurophysiological talk. But I argue that we could not refer directly to our phenomenal states unless we did so by way of properties distinct from any neurophysiological properties. Critics of the Absent Qualia Argument can argue that our direct reference to phenomenal states requires mental processing with phenomenal aspects, processing that necessarily runs outside any causal role that might be shared with absent qualia replicas. These side-effects mean that absent qualia are impossible in us. I grant that but argue that this would not rule out the possibility of absent qualia in nonsentient creatures. They might be similar enough to have states with identical causal roles to our phenomenal states; but since they would be free of experience, there would be no chance for the side-effects that make absent-qualia states impossible to realize in us. (shrink)

PHYSICAL theory may be said to have had its starting point around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when scholastic philosophers translated into Latin the Arabic version of Greek mathematics and natural science. Since then an interplay of speculation and observation has resulted in the corpus of knowledge known as modern physics. I shall try to indicate some features of the thinking of scientists that enabled them to construct the present theory of the physical world.

Cornelius Lanczos is professor emeritus at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Hungarian-born he made significant contributions to the development of relativity and quantum theory in the earlier decades of this century, and during the past twenty years he has established himself as an authority on numerical analysis. In addition he has a deep appreciation of literature from the Old Testament onwards, of music and of the arts. His writings in recent years have consisted largely in philosophical speculations on aspects (...) of physics. The present book is an historical account of man’s investigation of the nature and properties of space. Lanczos’ gift of clear exposition and his broad culture have made it a readable and valuable review of the development of the notion of space throughout the ages. (shrink)

The origins of this book are described in the Preface.

It is perhaps difficult to realize that quantum theory is nearly sixty years old, though the successful attempts to give it a precise mathematical formulation date back only to 1925. The concepts and implications of quantum mechanics, in particular the uncertainty relation, were so revolutionary that they led to a vast literature on the philosophy of physics. The continual publication of philosophical works on modern physics indicates that there are still no agreed solutions to the fundamental questions posed by quantum (...) theory. (shrink)