Background The expressions of a “wish to hasten death” or “wish to die” raise ethical concerns and challenges. These expressions are related to ethical principles intertwined within the field of medical ethics, particularly in end-of-life care. Although some reviews were conducted about this topic, none of them provides an in-depth analysis of the meanings behind the “wish to hasten death/die” based specifically on the ethical principles of autonomy, dignity, and vulnerability. The aim of this review is to understand if and (...) how the meanings behind the “wish to hasten death/die” relate to and are interpreted in light of ethical principles in palliative care. Methods We conducted a meta-ethnographic review according to the PRISMA guidelines and aligned with Noblit and Hare’s framework. Searches were performed in three databases, Web of Science, PubMed, CINAHL, with no time restrictions. Original qualitative studies exploring the meanings given by patients, family caregivers and healthcare professionals in any context of palliative and end-of-life care were included. A narrative synthesis was undertaken. PROSPERO registration CRD42023360330. Results Out of 893 retrieved articles, 26 were included in the analysis, accounting for the meanings of a total of 2,398 participants. Several factors and meanings associated with the “wish to hasten death” and/or “wish to die” were identified and are mainly of a psychosocial and spiritual nature. The ethical principles of autonomy and dignity were the ones mostly associated with the “wish to hasten death”. Ethical principles were essentially inferred from the content of included articles, although not explicitly stated as bioethical principles. Conclusions This meta-ethnographic review shows a reduced number of qualitative studies on the “wish to hasten death” and/or “wish to die” explicitly stating ethical principles. This suggests a lack of bioethical reflection and reasoning in the empirical end-of-life literature and a lack of embedded ethics in clinical practice. There is a need for healthcare professionals to address these topics compassionately and ethically, taking into account the unique perspectives of patients and family members. More qualitative studies on the meanings behind a wish to hasten death, their ethical contours, ethical reasoning, and implications for clinical practice are needed. (shrink)

In Brazil, abortion is only allowed in cases of rape, serious risk to a woman's life or fetal anecephaly. Legal abortion services cover less than 4% of the Brazilian territory and only 1,800 procedures are performed, in average, per year. During the COVID‐19 pandemic, almost half of the already few Brazilian abortion clinics shut down and women had to travel even longer distances, reaching abortion services at later gestational ages. In this paper, we describe three bottom‐up advocacy strategies that emerged (...) from difficulties deepened during the COVID‐19 pandemic at a single abortion service in Brazil, amidst anti‐gender policies from the federal government. Telemedicine abortion, outpatient surgical abortion and the provision of abortion after 20 weeks' gestation are important strategies that may reduce inequalities that impact the most vulnerable populations, such as black and indigenous women, children, adolescents and women experiencing domestic violence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The presence of truth and honesty is a permanent demand, and becomes vital the more committed and intimate a relationship is. Medical practice is relevant to this discussion when one questions whether or not a physician should always tell their patient the truth in the face of a progressive or potentially fatal disease, regarding the diagnosis, outcome, therapy and evolution of the specific disease. From this discussion we aim, with the present report, to look at the truth applicable to (...) the patient‐physician relationship, and its ethical and moral implications; and also to look at where the Brazilian Code of Medical Ethics (BCME) and the medical literature stand regarding this issue. One concludes that there are only two moments not to tell a patient the truth: when the patient does not want to be informed, and when the truth could be iatrogenic. The question now is, when would the truth be iatrogenic? Physicians, in our opinion, would not be able to judge solitarily when the truth might be deleterious to their patient. Alternatively, we propose the appointment of a multidisciplinary commission to help the doctor with such a decision. (shrink)

Rationale Treatment guidelines recommend a more conservative surgical approach than mastectomy for early stage breast cancer and a stronger emphasis on adjuvant therapy. Registry data at South Australian teaching hospitals have been used to monitor survivals and treatment in relation to these guidelines.Aims and objectives To use registry data to: (1) investigate trends in survival and treatment; and (2) compare treatment with guidelines.Methods Registry data from three teaching hospitals were used to analyse trends in primary courses of treatment of breast (...) cancers during 1977–2003 (n = 4671), using univariate analyses and multiple logistic regression. Disease-specific survivals were analysed using Kaplan–Meier product limit estimates and multivariable Cox proportional hazards regression.Results The 5-year survival was 79.9%, but with a secular increase, reaching 83.6% in 1997–2003. The relative risk of death (95% confidence limits) was 0.74 (0.62, 0.88) for 1997–2003, compared with previous diagnoses, after adjusting for tumour node metastasis stage, grade, age and place of residence. Treatment changes included an increase in conservative surgery (as opposed to mastectomy) from 51.7% in 1977–1990 to 76.8% in 1997–2003 for stage I (P < 0.001) and from 31.1% to 52.2% across these periods for stage II (P < 0.001). Adjuvant radiotherapy also became more common (P < 0.001), with 20.6% of patients receiving this treatment in 1977–1990 compared with 60.7% in 1997–2003. Radiotherapy generally was more prevalent when conservative surgery was provided, although also relatively common in mastectomy patients when tumour diameters exceeded 50 mm or when there were four or more involved nodes. The proportion of patients receiving chemotherapy increased (P < 0.001), from 19.6% in 1977–1990 to 36.9% in 1997–2003, and the proportion having hormone therapy also increased (P < 0.001), from 34.3% to 59.4% between these periods.Conclusions Survivals appear to be increasing and treatment trends are broadly consistent with guideline directions, and the earlier research on which these recommendations were based. (shrink)

Este artigo tem por objetivo apresentar as proposições de Martin Buber (1878-1965) no campo da Filosofia da Educação mediante a análise de um texto específico de sua vasta produção, a saber: uma conferência realizada em 1929, intitulada Educação para a comunidade, que integra o livro Sobre comunidade, uma coletânea de textos de Buber organizada por Marcelo Dascal e Oscar Zimmermann.

If we admit that Latin-American literature is a part of what is called Western culture, why, I ask myself, has it not been able to influence any of the great literatures of the West, outside of the Spanish? To be more precise, when I speak of influencing, I am not referring to the historico-cultural event that signifies Latin America, which has changed the West, but specifically to literature, that is, writing, the book, the language, the contents, the creative structure and (...) the symbols. From its origins until today, Latin-American literature, like Jugoslavian literature—in spite of the Nobel prize awarded to Ivo Andric—or Bulgarian or Icelandic, remains a marginal phenomenon. It is produced within a closed circuit, having no real resonance except in Spain. Furthermore, it struggles between two guilt feelings: one, that of being late with regard to renovating currents of fashions of the day and the other, that of not responding to its own reality. Because of those burdens of a guilty conscience, it often feigns innovation by following outside models or exalting a nationalist realism that has not produced the slightest new form but only a mediocre art of propaganda. It simulates and copies, or it lags behind. It either tries to be up to date or pretends to overcome this uneasiness by inventing an intransigent Americanism, behaving like a telluric barbarian or accepting traditional popular forms that may produce works such as Martin Fierro, whose value for the Latin-Americans cannot be denied but whose range is limited. (shrink)

Em 1945, Otto Friedrich Bollnow publica uma recensão da obra fundamental de Ludwig Binswanger, aparecida em 1942, em que procura desenvolver uma concepção antropológica, tomando como ponto de partida e fundamento a Ontologia Fundamental de Martin Heidegger, tal como fora exposta em 1927, em Ser e Tempo. O presente trabalho consiste na tradução e apresentação desse texto de Bollnow, enquadrando-as numa hermenêutica da existência, desenvolvida por este autor ao longo da sua obra, e na tematização, por ambos os autores, (...) das tonalidades afectivas positivas, muito especialmente como o amor em Binswanger. (shrink)

La filosofía ha encontrado en la literatura de Jorge Luis Borges un ámbito único para reflexionar en torno de sus propios problemas. En este ensayo examinaré las tensiones y contradicciones que afloran dentro del paradigma metafísico de la inmediación y de la intuición. El cuento de «Funes, el memorioso» ofrece la ocasión para pensar en la imposibilidad del hombre de afirmar un sistema de signos o una facultad perceptiva que ignore el inexorable resto que guarde la diferencia entre lo real (...) y lo representado. Una vida humana que se afirme en el ideal de un saber absoluto, de una visión ininterrumpida, es finalmente funesta. El hombre vive de las mediaciones y de las interrupciones, recuerda porque olvida, despierta porque sueña, conoce porque ignora: mira porque tiene párpados. (shrink)

I examine Spinoza's claim in the Metaphysical Thoughts that the attributes of God are only distinguished by a distinction of reason. I contend that for Spinoza essential attributes, such as Thought or Extension, cannot be distinguished by Francisco Suarez's distinction of reasoning reason, as Martin Lin suggests, nor can he be using Suárez’ distinction of reasoned reason for this purpose, as Yitzhak Melamed believes. Since reasoning reason and the distinction of reasoned reason are the only two kinds of rational (...) distinction available to Spinoza, it follows that for him the distinction between God's essential attributes in the CM cannot be a distinction of reason. But I show that Spinoza is not mistakenly using Suarez's distinction in the CM. Rather, I argue, Spinoza consistently follows Suárez and uses reasoned reason to distinguish between God's necessary properties and not between God's essential attributes. (shrink)

The main theme of the article, which by genre falls into the area of semiotically influenced philosophy, is a reflection on the relationship between the human and the non-human, using two partial but parallel discourses. The first discourse is the perspective of general semiotics, which is defined in the article on the basis of two distinct forms of rationality that, in different guises, still intervene in debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences today. The first form of (...) this rationality is semiological, which can be classified under the encyclopaedic rubric of structuralism, and which has its main source of inspiration in general linguistics and its continuation in philosophical anti-humanism. The second perspective has its origins in Peirce’s logicist theory of the sign and his pragmatist metaphysics, and opens up thinking about the sign, the human, and the non-human to a non-language-centric view of the world. Despite their demonstrable theoretical and methodological incompatibility, the present text treats them as incompatible but largely complementary perspectives. It is in their mutual exposition that one can see the moments in which the view of modern human as a semiological and semiotic animal takes shape. The text brings this fundamental and founding theoretical schism into focus by examining two images from post/modern art: Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Averroës’s Search.”. (shrink)

The main theme of the article, which by genre falls into the area of semiotically influenced philosophy, is a reflection on the relationship between the human and the non-human, using two partial but parallel discourses. The first discourse is the perspective of general semiotics, which is defined in the article on the basis of two distinct forms of rationality that, in different guises, still intervene in debates about the nature of the humanities and social sciences today. The first form of (...) this rationality is semiological, which can be classified under the encyclopaedic rubric of structuralism, and which has its main source of inspiration in general linguistics and its continuation in philosophical anti-humanism. The second perspective has its origins in Peirce’s logicist theory of the sign and his pragmatist metaphysics, and opens up thinking about the sign, the human, and the non-human to a non-language-centric view of the world. Despite their demonstrable theoretical and methodological incompatibility, the present text treats them as incompatible but largely complementary perspectives. It is in their mutual exposition that one can see the moments in which the view of modern human as a semiological and semiotic animal takes shape. The text brings this fundamental and founding theoretical schism into focus by examining two images from post/modern art: Ted Chiang’s “The Great Silence” and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Averroës’s Search.”. (shrink)

En este artículo se analiza cómo se manifiestan el post-humanismo y el trans-humanismo en la obra de Borges. Se postula aquí que en la narrativa breve de Borges no sólo se manifiesta una reacción post-humanista contra el antropocentrismo imperante en la modernidad. También aparecen destellos poderosos de un trans-humanismo en virtud del cual se piensa en la inmortalidad y en la ampliación de las facultades cognitivas y espirituales de los seres humanos de un modo sumamente original porque excluye la necesidad (...) de los avances tecnológicos más sorprendentes. (shrink)

To what extent does human reason apply to the mind-independent world according to Spinoza? Does he even believe that human reason applies to that world at all? Being and Reason answers these questi...

RESUMO O presente artigo parte de várias considerações de Bakhtin a respeito do discurso romanesco a fim de compreender alguns aspectos discursivos do Dom Quixote, de Miguel de Cervantes. Procede-se, então, a uma comparação com o discurso de outra obra que reproduz parcialmente o Dom Quixote: o conto Pierre Menard, autor do Quixote, de Jorge Luis Borges. Por fim, discute-se brevemente o problema da quase ausência do Dom Quixote nas discussões de Bakhtin sobre o romance, apresentando-se a hipótese de Walter (...) Reed de que, tal como no conto de Borges, a própria teoria bakhtiniana também reproduz parcialmente o peculiar pensamento do Quixote. ABSTRACT This article discusses several of Bakhtin’s concepts regarding discourse in the novel genre as a way to understand some discursive aspects of Miguel de Cervantes’ Dom Quixote. We then proceed to a comparison with the discourse in another literary work that partially reproduces Dom Quixote: the short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” by Jorge Luis Borges. Finally, we briefly discuss the problem of Dom Quixote’s almost absence in Bakhtin’s work about the novel genre, while presenting the hypothesis by Walter Reed that, as in Borges’ short story, Bakhtin’s theory itself also partially reproduces the Quixote’s particular way of thinking. (shrink)

El tema aquí propuesto rebasa los límites de un ensayo por centrarse en un escritor tan erudito y enciclopédico como Borges. Pero no se trata de una excepción, en realidad cualquier propuesta sobre su obra suele afrontar el mismo riesgo. Con esta idea en mente, mi ensayo intenta dar un resumen de los puntos de encuentro que Borges mantiene con algunos representantes de la Ilustración, como Berkeley, Hume, Jonathan Swift, Kant y Leibniz. En este sentido mi enfoque bosqueja un derrotero (...) epistemológico al adentrarse en teorías del conocimiento que, refutando postulados metafísicos y teológicos, instalan la vida humana, como diría José Isaacson, en la pendiente interminable de la pregunta. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Borges Forgets NietzscheClancy MartinHow little moral would the world appear without forgetfulness! A poet could say that God has placed forgetfulness as a doorkeeper on the threshold of human dignity.—Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-HumanIn his short story "Funes, the Memorious," Jorges Luis Borges writes of his singular nineteen-year-old hero, Funes: "He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand (...) that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and differing forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen in front)." And he goes on to say that "... he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details" (pp. 42–43).1 About a century earlier, in 1872, in a passage from his famous unpublished essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects... Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things... We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us."2 [End Page 265]From this and other passages, mostly in "On Truth and Lies," Nietzsche scholars have derived Nietzsche's much-debated (or so-called, depending on who you talk to) "theory of perspectivism." This is the idea that, roughly speaking, "truths" about the world are at best truths uttered from the perspective of some knower, who inevitably brings to world (and thus, to those truths) a particular way of looking at things, of seeing some details and excluding others, of valuing some aspects of the world more than others, etc.I will not be addressing the well-known problems of Nietzsche's theory of perspectivism (if indeed he had such a truth-theory).3 What interests me here is something most scholars have ignored about Nietzsche's perspectivism,4 and what Borges tries to illuminate in his strange little fable: the importance of forgetting to thinking and the difficulties memory may present to one who would think about "truth" as something more than "an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch [has] an individual name" (p. 42). For Nietzsche, and for Borges writing under Nietzsche's influence, the human facts about forgetting and remembering illustrate that our epistemological projects are much more psychological than some philosophers would like to admit. Once we acknowledge the deeply psychological character of those projects, we see that they may not be "truth" projects at all, but rather psychologically valuable (perhaps even necessary) projects of strategic falsification.IThe "absent-minded" narrator of Borges's story tells us that he is adding his own tale to a collection of testimonials to Funes, as part of the project "that all those who knew him should write something about him" (pp. 35–36). Thus the play of words in the title: "Funes" is "memorious" not just because of the accident that results in his amazing and infallible memory, but also because this text is part of a larger memorial. A relationship between memory and knowing from a particular perspective is introduced immediately: Funes will be known and remembered through the gathering of many individual memorials to him. None of these testimonies will be "objective" or "impartial": all of them will necessarily preserve the perspective of the particular individual who is recalling Funes. As the narrator of our memorial confesses, his own efforts will be impoverished by "the deplorable fact of my being an Argentinian... when the theme is a Uruguayan" (p. 35). [End Page 266]Our narrator offers three... (shrink)

The influence and reputation of Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, is easily comparable to the impact of groundbreaking theoretical texts. Numerous philosophers, aestheticians and theorists of literature, music, or visual arts have been induced by this short story by J.L. Borges to reconsider the status of the literary work of art, to rethink the relationship between work and text. The essays collected here move from analyses of the identity of the literary work of art, as it is explicitly established (...) by Borges? narrator, to arguments that simply employ the Menard case as an opportunity for discussing broader issues of literary studies and the philosophy of literature. Selected essays even abandon the field of literature altogether, moving on to analogous issues in the theory of visual arts and music. (shrink)

This book shows otherwise. John Martin rehabilitates Neoplatonism, founded by Plotinus and brought into Christianity by St. Augustine.

Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy reflects his famous philosophical "turning." In this work, Heidegger returns to the question of being from its inception in Being and Time to a new questioning of being as event.

The Routledge International Handbook of Neuroaesthetics is an authoritative reference work that provides the reader with a wide-ranging introduction to this exciting new scientific discipline. The book brings together leading international academics to offer a well-balanced overview of this burgeoning field while addressing two questions central to the field; how the brain computes aesthetic appreciation for sensory objects, and how is art created and experienced.

Cultuursociologisch essay over de postchristelijke manieren waarop mensen lijden compenseren.

The contributors represent the complete spectrum of positions between a relativism that challenges the very concept of a single world and the idea that there are ascertainable, objective universals.

Martin highlights the degree to which H. L. A. Hart’s legal positivism relies on Hobbesian assumptions. Like Hart, Hobbes combines utilitarian and retributivist elements. The best way to make sense of Hobbes’s theory of punishment is to follow Quentin Skinner and view both the “sovereign” and the “state” as distinct legal fictions. Unlike Hobbes, Hart asserts these fictions as facts. As a result, Hart’s philosophy of criminal law in Punishment and Responsibility is in tension with his legal philosophy in (...) The Concept of Law. Martin worries that Hart’s mixed theory is untenable: the utilitarian element threatens to overtake his core retributivist thesis. Ultimately, however, neither Hart nor Hobbes has the resources to explain why the autonomous individual matters in the context of criminal law. (shrink)

Of course, although this view on meaning was the prevailing one for almost a century, many of the people who initiated the enterprise of logical semantics, including people like Frege and Wittgenstein, had an open eye for all that it did not catch. However, the logical means which Frege, Wittgenstein, Russell, and the generation that succeeded them, had at their disposal were those of classical mathematical logic and set-theory, and these indeed are not very suited for an analysis of other (...) aspects of meaning than those which the slogan covers. A real change in view then had to await the emergence of other concepts, which in due course became available mainly under the influence of developments in computer science and cognate disciplines such as artificial intelligence. And this is one of the reasons why it took almost a century before any serious and successful challenge of the view that meaning equals truthconditions from within logical semantics could emerge. (shrink)

Online supplement, "Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund" full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website. Martin Mulsow's seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in (...) the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected. (shrink)

Recent developments in Continental philosophy have included the emergence of a school of “speculative realism,” which rejects the human-centered orientation that has long dominated Continental thought. Proponents of speculative realism differ on several issues, but many agree on the need for an object-oriented ontology. Some speculative realists identify realism with materialism, while others accord equal reality to objects that are non-material, even fictional. Several thinkers retain a focus on difference, a well-established theme in Continental thought. This paper looks at speculative (...) realism from the perspective of systems theory. Many of the tenets of speculative realism have long been features of systems metaphysics and are expressed clearly in a systems framework. However, some views of some speculative realists differ substantially from systems theoretic ideas. (shrink)

L’addition, dans la cinquième édition en 1683 de La Logique ou L’Art de penser, d’un chapitre consacré à la définition générale du signe et de plusieurs chapitres relevant spécifiquement d’une analyse des signes linguistiques, a été parfois interprétée comme une apparition tardive du “problème du langage” dans le traité d’Arnauld et Nicole. Parce que la plupart de ces chapitres supplémentaires sont la transposition de passages auparavant destinés dans la Perpétuité de la foi (1669-1674) à réfuter le sens calviniste de Ceci (...) est mon corps, on a été enclin à attribuer l’importance de la question du signe et du “problème du langage” dans l’édition de 1683 à une origine théologique. J’essaie au contraire de montrer que, dès la première édition de L’Art de penser en 1662, la problématisation des écarts des expressions linguistiques avec une correspondance terme à terme entre les mots et les idées a été indissociable pour Port-Royal de l’analyse des opérations de l’esprit. Selon moi, dans la Perpétuité de la foi, la critique du sens calviniste de la formule eucharistique constitue elle-même une application de cette analyse logique du langage : les passages incorporés ensuite dans L’Art de penser sont dans le prolongement des réflexions de 1662 sur les difficultés d’adéquation entre le dire et le vouloir-dire. Je montre pour finir que la définition générale du signe à Port-Royal suppose une restructuration de la définition augustinienne du De doctrina christiana, et fonde en 1683 une identification de la relation de signification linguistique à un rapport de représentation des mots aux idées, qui vient redoubler le rapport de représentation des idées aux choses établi en 1662. (shrink)

This book explores a question central to philosophy--namely, what does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is, given one's evidence. In this book this view is rejected and replaced with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a proposition, one's evidence must normically support it--roughly, one's evidence must make the falsity of that proposition (...) abnormal in the sense of calling for special, independent explanation. This conception of justification bears upon a range of topics in epistemology and beyond. Ultimately, this way of looking at justification guides us to a new, unfamiliar picture of how we should respond to our evidence and manage our own fallibility. This picture is developed here. (shrink)

The phenomenon of altruism extends from the biological realm to the human sociocultural realm. This article sketches a coherent outline of multiple types of altruism of progressively increasing scope that span these two realms and are grounded in an ever-expanding sense of “self.” Discussion of this framework notes difficulties associated with altruism at different levels. It links scientific ideas about the evolution of cooperation and about hierarchical order to perennial philosophical and religious concerns. It offers a conceptual background for inquiry (...) into societal challenges that call for altruistic behavior, especially the challenge of environmental and social sustainability. (shrink)

Divided into four parts, this treatise begins with well-known criticisms of nonreligious ethics and then develops an atheistic metaethics. In Part 2, Martin criticizes the Christian foundation of ethics, specifically the ’divine command theory’ and the idea of imitating the life of Jesus as the basis of Christian morality. Part 3 demonstrates that life can be meaningful in the absence of religious belief. Part 4 criticizes the theistic point of view in general terms as well as the specific Christian (...) doctrines of the atonement, salvation, and the resurrection. (publisher, edited). (shrink)

In this paper I propose a new solution to the problem of change: situationalism. According to this view, parts of reality fundamentally disagree about what is the case and reality as a whole is unsettled (i.e. metaphysically indeterminate). When something changes, parts of the world irreconcilably disagree about what properties it has. From this irreconcilable disagreement, indeterminacy arises. I develop this picture using situations, which are parts of possible worlds; this gives it the name situationalism. It allows a B-theory endurance (...) view on which there is genuine incompatibility when things change. There are costs to the view, which are explored, but it is a novel approach which offers a distinct explanation of what happens when things exist through change. (shrink)

Studie předkládá interpretaci souboru článků, které Jan Patočka uveřejnil na počátku své filosofické kariéry a v nichž programově vyložil vlastní stanovisko k problematice historického poznání a smyslu dějin. Na základě výkladu Patočkových statí studie konstatuje, že soubor ve svém celku připravuje předložení ucelené filosofické koncepce a že jeho prostřednictvím Patočka přispěl k soudobé diskusi, „sporu o smysl českých dějin“. Studie nejprve nabízí představení tohoto sporu a jeho dobového kontextu a argumentuje, že tato souvislost má podstatný význam pro porozumění Patočkovým textům. (...) Na základě toho poté studie shrnuje Patočkovu interpretaci hlavních zainteresovaných argumentačních pozic a kritiku, kterou vůči nim snáší. V následujícím kroku studie předkládá interpretaci Patočkova vlastního pojetí dějin. Na závěr představuje východisko tohoto pojetí, Patočkovu koncepci člověka. The paper proposes an interpretation of a set of articles published by Jan Patočka at the beginning of his philosophical career, in which he programmatically sets forth his point of view of the problem of historical knowledge and the meaning of history. Based on the reading of the texts the paper arrives at the conclusion that this collection as a whole anticipates a comprehensive philosophical concept and that by means of these texts Patočka contributed to the discussion of the day, “the dispute over the meaning of Czech history”. The paper begins by presenting the dispute as well as its contemporary context and argues that this link bears essential significance to the understanding of Patočka’s texts. On this basis it then summarizes Patočka’s interpretation of the different parties of the argument and the critique to which he submits them. In the next step the paper presents Patočka’s interpretation of his own conception of history. It concludes by an exposition of the basis of this conception, Patočka’s concept of man. (shrink)

Disjunctivism about perceptual appearances, as I conceive of it, is a theory which seeks to preserve a naïve realist conception of veridical perception in the light of the challenge from the argument from hallucination. The naïve realist claims that some sensory experiences are relations to mind-independent objects. That is to say, taking experiences to be episodes or events, the naïve realist supposes that some such episodes have as constituents mind-independent objects. In turn, the disjunctivist claims that in a case of (...) veridical perception like this very kind of experience that you now have, the experiential episode you enjoy is of a kind which could not be occurring were you having an hallucination. The common strategy of arguments from hallucination set out to show that certain things are true of hallucinations, and hence must be true of perceptions. For example, it is argued that hallucinations must have non-physical objects of awareness, or that such states are not relations to anything at all, but are at best seeming relations to objects. In insisting that veridical perceptual experience is of a distinct kind from hallucination, the disjunctivist denies that any of these conceptions of hallucination challenges our conception of veridical perceptions as relations to mind-independent objects. More specifically, I assume that the disjunctivist advocates naïve realism because they think that this position best articulates how sensory experience seems to us to be just through reflection. If the disjunctivist is correct in this contention, then anyone who accepts the conclusion of the argument from hallucination must also accept that the nature of sensory experience is other than it seems to us to be. In turn, one may complain that any such error theory is liable to lead to sceptical consequences. A Humean scepticism about the senses launches a challenge about our knowledge of the world through questioning the conception we have of what sense experience is, and how it can provide knowledge of the world. (shrink)

The new western way of war from Vietnam in Iraq -- Theories of the new western way of war -- The global surveillance mode of warfare -- Rules of risk-transfer war -- Iraq: risk economy of a war -- A way of war in crisis.