This book, based on the Round Table on Bioethics and Women held at UNESCO during the Fourth Session of the International Bioethics Committee (IBC), presents the ...

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

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)

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)

Experiential factors such as long-term deliberate practice are powerful and necessary conditions for outstanding achievement. Nevertheless, to be able to reject the role of biology based individual differences (including genetic ones) in the manifestation of talent requires designs that expose heterogeneous samples to so-called testing-the-limits conditions, allowing asymptotic levels of performance to be analyzed comparatively. When such research has been conducted, as in the field of lifespan cognition, individual differences, including biology based ones, come to the fore and demonstrate that (...) the orchestration of excellence requires joint attention to genetic–biological and experiential factors. (shrink)

Die Beiträge zur Altertumskunde enthalten Monographien, Sammelbände, Editionen, Übersetzungen und Kommentare zu Themen aus den Bereichen Klassische, Mittel- und Neulateinische Philologie, Alte Geschichte, Archäologie, Antike Philosophie sowie Nachwirken der Antike bis in die Neuzeit. Dadurch leistet die Reihe einen umfassenden Beitrag zur Erschließung klassischer Literatur und zur Forschung im gesamten Gebiet der Altertumswissenschaften.

Der vorliegende Band ist der zweite Teil einer Sammlung zentraler Arbeiten von Matthias Baltes. Den Hauptteil bilden neuere Aufsätze zur antiken Philosophie, insbesondere zu Platon und zum Platonismus sowie zu Epikur, von denen einige bisher unveröffentlicht sind. Ein kleinerer Teil umfasst frühere Arbeiten zur homerischen Dichtung. Beide Sammlungen bieten einen nahezu vollständigen Überblick über die Forschungsarbeiten von Matthias Baltes, vor allem zu dem Gebiet, dem er sich Zeit seines Lebens intensiv gewidmet hat: dem geistesgeschichtlichen Phänomen des Platonismus. Er (...) behandelt neben philologischen Einzelfragen auch übergreifende philosophische und theologische Aspekte dieser für die Antike wie für die Moderne wichtigen Gedankenwelt. (shrink)

Die Philosophie des Neuplatonismus zwischen Porphyrios, Jamblich und Syrian ist uns nur sehr lückenhaft bekannt. Schließen können wir diese Lücke nur mit Hilfe von Autoren wie des römischen Rhetors Marius Victorinus, der sich nach seiner Konversion zum Christentum daranmachte, mit Hilfe der von ihm vorher in Rom gelehrten Philosophie die christliche Trinitätslehre zu verteidigen. Wir wir seit den bahnbrechenden Arbeiten von P. Hadot über Marius Victorinus wissen, hat sich Victorinus dabei einer Form des Neuplatonismus bedient, die nachplotinisch ist. Aber während (...) P. Hadot diese Lehre als die des Plotinschülers Porphyrios nachzuweisen versucht, kommt die vorliegende Studie zu dem Ergebnis, dass sie nach Porphyrios und wahrscheinlich auch nach Jamblich anzusetzen ist. Da die Studie zudem versucht, die Gedankengänge der Marius Victorinus detailliert nachzuvollziehen, stellt sie nicht nur einen wichtigen Beirag zur Geschichte des antiken Platonismus, sondern auch zur Auseinandersetzung der alten Kirche mit diesem dar. (shrink)

The Plague State -- Conclusion: Locke's Labor -- 4 Locke the Landgrave: Inegalitarian Discipline -- Locke in Context: Shaftesbury's Pen or Ashcraft's Radical? -- Waldron's Locke -- The Democratic Intellect -- Teleology and Equality -- Conclusion: Locke's Inegalitarian Discipline -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Since 1900, debates about the justification of punishment have also been debates about the cause of crime. In the early twentieth century, the rehabilitative ideal of punishment viewed mental illness and dysfunction in individuals as the cause of crime. Starting in the 1970s, retributivism identified the immorality of human agents as the source of crime, which dovetailed well with the “tough-on-crime” political milieu of the 1980s and 1990s that produced mass incarceration. After surveying these historical trends, Wirts argues for a (...) social critical view that crime is best understood as a product of an unjust society, not faulty human beings. This view should take the lessons learned by the critiques of rehabilitation, however, and resist the tendency to reduce human beings to recipients of social services. (shrink)

The largest work ever published in the social and behavioural sciences. It contains 4000 signed articles, 15 million words of text, 90,000 bibliographic references and 150 biographical entries.

Donald Davidson has made enormous contributions to the philosophy of action, epistemology, semantics and philosophy of mind and today is recognized as one of the most important analytical philosophers of the late twentieth century. _Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge_ addresses * Davidson's writings on epistemology and theory of language with their implications of ontology and philosophy of mind * the central issue of whether truth is the ultimate goal of enquiry, challenged by contributions from Richard Rorty and Paul Horwich (...) * Davidson's approach to semantics and applied linguistics as addressed by Kirk Ludwig, Gabriel Segal, Peter Pagin, Stephen Neale, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore and Reinaldo Elugardo * Davidson's advances in the philosophy of mind in relation to the views of Williard V. Quine, John McDowell and Peter F. Strawson, in essays by Roger Gibson and Anita Avramides. (shrink)

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)