The belief that memory is essential to the self is common. Extreme amnesia, e.g., Korsakoff Syndrome, is held to dissolve the afflicted person’s self. This belief is a misconception that rests on a confusion of epistemic with ontological relevance. Epistemically, memory is relevant to the self: a subject’s self-knowledge partly depends on memories of past experiences. However, it is not by virtue of these memories that the subject is a self: ontologically, memory is irrelevant to that status. The fact (...) that an individuals conception of herself as existing through time is wanting does not prevent that individual from being a self at a given point in time. As the past is there whether or not it is remembered, so the self is there whether or not it remembers. If instead we define the self as awareness of being a subject of experience, the self may survive even the most extreme forms of amnesia. Being a self is an important social value, a prerequisite of numerous legal or moral rights. This in itself is questionable, like the social exclusion it may entail. Denying an amnesic person a self is therefore more than a logical mistake: it is a social exclusion that can also be questioned on ethical grounds. (shrink)

The belief that memory is essential to the self is common. Extreme amnesia, e.g., Korsakoff Syndrome, is held to dissolve the afflicted person’s self. This belief is a misconception that rests on a confusion of epistemic with ontological relevance. Epistemically, memory is relevant to the self: a subject’s self-knowledge partly depends on memories of past experiences. However, it is not by virtue of these memories that the subject is a self: ontologically, memory is irrelevant to that status. The fact (...) that an individuals conception of herself as existing through time is wanting does not prevent that individual from being a self at a given point in time. As the past is there whether or not it is remembered, so the self is there whether or not it remembers. If instead we define the self as awareness of being a subject of experience, the self may survive even the most extreme forms of amnesia. Being a self is an important social value, a prerequisite of numerous legal or moral rights. This in itself is questionable, like the social exclusion it may entail. Denying an amnesic person a self is therefore more than a logical mistake: it is a social exclusion that can also be questioned on ethical grounds. (shrink)

Patient’s decision making competence is a widely discussed subject. Issues of competence, autonomy, well-being and protection of the patient come up every day. In this article we analyse what role PDMC plays in Dutch legislation and what dilemmas healthcare professionals may experience, notably in patients suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome. Dilemmas emerge if professionals want to meet the requirements mentioned in Dutch law and the desires of their patients. The autonomy of the patient and the healthcare professionals’ duty to take (...) care of their patient’s best interests, create a tension and lead to uncomfortable situations. Healthcare professionals describe difficulty finding a balance between these issues and assessing the degree of mental competence still present. In long term care situations, quality of the relationship between healthcare professionals and their patients seems to be of much more importance in decision making on minor issues of competence than simply relying on legal or house rules. In being committed to their cases, professionals will be more sensitive to individuals habits, abilities, welfare and dignity, which will make it easier to decide on issues of competence, and to find creative solutions to their dilemmas. (shrink)

pt. 1. Collection of Sastri's writings and a kavya on him -- pt. 2. Select research papers presented at the birth centenary seminars.

Exegesis on Śārīrakamīmāṃsābhāṣya of Śaṅkarācārya and Śrībhāṣya of Rāmānuja, 1017-1137, commentaries on the Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, basic work of the Vedanta school in Hindu philosophy.

Revision of papers originally presented at the Radhakrishnan Centennial Conference, Miami University, 1988.

The question that this paper tries to answer is Q: “Can good academic bioethics be done without commitment to moral theory?” It is argued that the answer to Q is an unequivocal “Yes” for most of what we could call “critical bioethics,” that is, the kind of bioethics work that primarily criticizes positions or arguments already in the literature or put forward by policymakers. The answer is also “Yes” for much of empirical bioethics. The second part of the paper then (...) provides an analysis of Q in relation to “constructive bioethics,” that is, bioethics work aimed at providing an argument for a particular position. In this part, it is argued that a number of the approaches or methods used that initially look like they involve no commitment to moral theory, nevertheless, involve such a commitment. This is shown to be the case for reflective equilibrium, mid-level theory, the use of theory fragments, and argument by analogy. (shrink)

Physician-written “do not resuscitate” DNR orders elicit negative reactions from stakeholders that may decrease appropriate end-of-life care. The semantic significance of the phrase has led to a proposed replacement of DNR with “allow natural death” . Prior to this investigation, no scientific papers address the impact of such a change. Our results support this proposition due to increased likelihood of endorsement with the term AND.

Previous claims that psychology is propaedeutic to the other sciences have been met with enthusiastic indifference. Contributing to this indifference has been the fact that psychology, a young and unproved discipline which habitually borrowed the methods of the older sciences, has too frequently revised its notion as to its own nature and subject-matter. More important, however, has been the faith of the physical sciences in the absolute character of their own basic concepts: in the reality of Absolute Space and Absolute (...) Time and in the universality of deterministic principles, for, as long as physics presumed to deal with entities which are what they are regardless of the nature of man, nothing other than these entities appeared to demand prior consideration. The problem of the nature of the observer in the physical experiment became important to physics only as a consequence of the recent ‘subjective’ revolution. It is this revolution which has revitalized the problem of the propaedeutic science and has accentuated the distinction which we must make between the behavioral phenomenon of individuals creating formal arrays of words or symbols which are without operational meaning and the discriminatory responses, or operations, by which the empirical meaning of such arrays is determined. (shrink)