Dementia accompanies aging in certain susceptible individuals. The chemical function of the brain remains normal, but certain neurotransmitter-selective diseases, such as Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, and Alzheimer's disease occur more commonly with age.There are at least two issues troubling researchers of senile dementia at the moment. One is the contribution of cell death, as opposed to selective neuronal atrophy, to the pathology of degenerative disorders. The other is how early the onset of dementia might be detected. The resolution of such (...) issues is important for the design of therapies for the common and most serious chronic, rather than acute, neurodegenerative disease.Alzheimer's disease is one of the most devastating neurological disorders. The ethical debate is often related to when human biological life ceases or when a person ceases to exist. If the elder is still a person, he/she is no more the same person. Huntington's disease is inherited as a highly penetrant, autosomal dominant neuronal disorder. A genetic test can accurately predict a person's risk and that of the children. As the knowledge of the genetic basis is increasing and prenatal diagnosis gets easier, the possibilities to avoid child disorders will become greater, but genetic testing raises problematic ethical issues. Ethical action involves the right to know and the right not to know, it involves freedom of choice and freedom implies knowledge. It is ethical that relatives in age of procreation should be informed. In any case, efficacy and safety of the procedure, the risk-benefit ratio for a particular disease must be judged to be acceptable and understood through informed consent by the patient or the family or both. (shrink)

The new methods of modern sciences can contribute to understand the genesis of mental illness, the disturbances in brain chemistry, physiology, anatomy or genetical information underlying different diseases of the nervous system. Understanding mental illness is not only challenging to science, but is also of great social importance. Moreover, the new developments of neurosciences put new lights on discussions such as brain-mind concepts, unity of mind, definition of consciousness and even definition of the person.For the majority of the scientists, it (...) is clear today that the mind can not be conceived any more as unique and indivisible. For philosophers, it is clear also that neuroscience influenced their vision of life and death: neurosciences are not strange to the debate whole-body death versus whole-brain death for instance. Modern scientific achievements have expanded our vision, allowing us to percieve previously unanticipated interrelationships between biological and psychological phenomena. The boundary between some behavioural and higher neural function studies and biology is arbitrary and changing. It has been imposed not by the natural contours of the disciplines, but by lack of knowledge. (shrink)

A Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Szent-Györgyi concerns himself with the underlying forces and conditions that have prevented the realization of the higher possibilities of the American Dream, and, by extension, of all mankind. He addresses himself especially to the youth of the world in his attempt to show how man, the more he progresses technologically, seems the more to regress psychologically and socially, until he resembles his primate ancestors in a state of high schizophrenia. The fundamental question asked by this (...) book is: Why is it that most of the scientific research that is done to elevate human life serves in the end to destroy it? That this phenomenon exists is unarguable. How to alter it is the problem the author tackles. He finds the possibility, indeed the instrument of our survival, in our youth. Dr. Szent-Györgyi calls upon youth the world over to organize and exercise their power to create a new world. He implores them not to waste their energies in petulance and frustration-the world is ripe for the radical changes needed for man's survival, and for youth to fritter away their opportunity would be to compound the tragedy and seal the fate of mankind. Born into the fourth generation of a noted family of scientists in Hungary, Albert Szent-Györgyi decided at an early age to devote his life to biological research. As a medical student he required international recognition for his studies in microscopic anatomy. The First World War, which he spent in the service of the Austro-Hungarian army, caused a break in his career. After the war he left his devastated country to work for ten years in various countries, notably Germany, Holland, England and the United States. He then returned to his native Hungary to help rebuild science there. In 1937, he won the Nobel Prize for his studies on metabolism and for the discovery of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C). He soon found himself in conflict with the growing movement of Nazism, was arrested, escaped, and was hunted for years by the secret service of Hitler. After World War II, disappointed by Soviet colonialism and the terrorist methods of Stalin, he left Hungary and found refuge at the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

Therapeutic practice with stem cells even if not yet realistic has open a cautious optimism among scientists. The mechanism controlling cell differentiation into cell types are not known in details yet. Exists real danger to influence wrongly the public opinion.

In the future, the Human Genome Project could eventually open the way to perhaps the determination of the complete wiling diagram of the human brain. This kind of progress may move neuroscience forward into the next level of understanding of human neurophysiology, development and behavior. The next crucial step would be to know, exactly what are the function of this genes, and why its lack or alteration causes a certain disease. Although, genomic has in some way contributed to almost every (...) aspects of neurobiology, the results are both significant and troubling.One of the areas, where HGP will contribute to neuroscience is the mapping of qualitative or complex traits. Complex traits like appearence, intelligence and personality are likely to be affected by hundreds or thousands of different genes, rather than one or a few. On the other hand, the complex organisms are not just the simple result of the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build the different part of organism or influence behaviour by themselves. In spite of the wide variety of misunderstanding, misinterpretation or possible misusing of these new genetic information, this sort of research may eventually lead to useful practical medical results for humans. This information can contribute to work out therapies to treat learning and memory disorders, neurological disorders like Alzheimer's disease, afflicting more and more people in an increasingly ageing population. Genetics believe, there are 3000 to 4000 hereditary diseases. Gene therapy could one day cure some of them, but only when all the details of their genetic basis are known. Biomedicine in the next century will probably have a completely new role in society based on the beginnings inherent in the HGP.There is a general agreement, that modern neuroscience raises important ethical concerns that not have been adequately addressed either by scientists themselves or by the bioethics community. Some scientists interpreted the rapid progress in neuroscience as additional conformation for a materialist account of human nature, resulting in an attack on traditional belief systems. There is a clear tension between the widely held believes and the intellectual views of many scientists. (shrink)

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

The topic of professionalism has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. The message of this current wave of professionalism is that medical educators need to be more attentive to the moral sensibilities of trainees, to their interpersonal and affective dimensions, and to their social conscience, all to the end of skilled, humanistic physicians. Urgent calls to address professionalism from such groups as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American (...) Board of Internal Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, among others. In fact, at the 2004 annual meeting of the AAMC six separate presentations addressed professionalism with such titles as "Evaluating Humanism and Professionalism," Professionalism: Expectation, Education, Evaluation," or "Toward Assessing Professional Behaviors of Medical Students through Peer Observations". Professionalism, then, has become part of the current academic medicine parlance, used by administrators, clinical faculty, residency programs, and professional organizations with an expectation of shared meanings and goals. All of these stakeholders focus on what has become a consistent list of attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism, which usually include variations on altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect. In fact, most of the scholarly work to date has been listing, describing, decrying, and measuring/evaluating it. In this collection of essays, we don’t argue with these attributes. Instead, we ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession’s beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, we will scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment. (shrink)

Arguably no concept is more fundamental to science than that of causality, for investigations into cases of existence, persistence, and change in the natural world are largely investigations into the causes of these phenomena. Yet the metaphysics and epistemology of causality remain unclear. For example, the ontological categories of the causal relata have been taken to be objects (Hume 1739), events (Davidson 1967), properties (Armstrong 1978), processes (Salmon 1984), variables (Hitchcock 1993), and facts (Mellor 1995). (For convenience, causes and effects (...) will usually be understood as events in what follows.) Complicating matters, causal relations may be singular (Socrates’s drinking hemlock caused Socrates’s death) or general (Drinking hemlock causes death); hence the relata might be tokens (e.g., instances of properties) or types (e.g., types of events) of the category in question. Other questions up for grabs are: Are singular causes metaphysically and/or epistemologically prior to general causes or vice versa (or neither)? What grounds the intuitive asymmetry of the causal relation? Are macro-causal relations reducible to micro-causal relations? And perhaps most importantly: Are causal facts (e.g., the holding of causal relations) reducible to non-causal facts (e.g., the holding of certain spatiotemporal relations)? (shrink)

This volume provides a philosophical introduction to and analysis of the study of metaphor. By proceeding from the concrete analysis of complex metaphors, White is able to identify a range of features which are incompatible with standard accounts of the way words function in metaphor.

In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) doing have become divorced from the theory's roots in classical and medieval philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas’ ‘guise of the good’ is primarily a metaphysical claim resting on the equivalence between actuality and goodness, from which conclusions about moral action are derived. I show the reasoning behind their theory and how it forms the basis for the claims about intention and action at the centre of the modern debate. Finally, I argue that the absence of its original foundation is apparent in recent attacks on the ‘guise of the good’. It is unsurprising that modern action theory and ethics have not always been able to comfortably accommodate the ‘guise of the good’; they are only telling half of the story. (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's sources of evidence, (...) but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

Linguistic anthropologists have studied emotion in societies around the world for several decades. This article defines the discipline, introduces its general relevance to emotion theory, then presents five of the most important contributions linguistic anthropology has made to the study of emotion.

Twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, together with an emerging science of consciousness, have created the need for a new cosmology, or model of the universe. The theory of process contained in THE REFLEXIVE UNIVERSE places consciousness within the context of contemporary science. One of the central themes of this extraordinary work is that each successive organization of matter, from fundamental particles in physics to living organisms, expresses a particular stage in the evolution of mind. Starting with the photon, the basic (...) unit of light, and moving through atomic physics, molecular chemistry, the morphology of plants and animals and finally to levels of human evolution, Young develops his theory in vivid step-by-step detail. Consciousness, in his point of view, is not isolated from the material universe. It exists in a continuum, one in which physical and nonphysical realms can be linked and the teachings of mythology and religion can be integrated. To order: FAX: 415-883-9280; e-mail: [email protected]; or write: Anodos Foundation, c/o Publishers Services, P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948. Visa and MasterCard only. Trade STOP orders 40% plus postage. (shrink)

Studien zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftssystematik im 19. Jahrhundert Josef M. Werle. Drittes Kapitel Argumente zugunsten der Zukunft der Philosophie II: Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche und wissenschaftssystematische ...