I argue that good communication is vital to philosophy’s project of understanding truth. I consider what good communication would involve, especially with regards to the needs of a popular philosophy magazine such as Philosophy Now. What makes a good or bad article? And how can one edit oneself for clarity? Finally I consider the difference the internet makes. and some of its implications for future philosophers.

Abstract:Patients with repeated minor head injury are a challenge to our clinical skills of neurodiagnosis because the relevant evidence objectively demonstrating their impairment was collected in New Zealand (although published in theBMJandLancet) and, at the time, was mired in controversy. The effects of repeated closed diffuse head injury are increasingly recognized worldwide, but now suffer from the relentless advance of imaging technology as the dominant form of neurodiagnosis and the considerable financial interests that underpin the refusal to recognize that acute (...) accelerational injury is the most subtle and insidiously damaging (especially when seen in the light of biopsychosocial medicine), and potentially one of the most financially momentous (given the large incomes impacted and needing compensation) phenomena in modern sports medicine. The vested interests in downplaying this phenomenon are considerable and concentrated in North America where diffuse head injury is a widespread feature of the dominant winter sports code: Gridiron or American Rules football. The relationship of this to shattered lives among the brightest and best of young men and the relatively dated objective evidence are a toxic mix in terms of ethical analysis and, therefore, there is a malignant confluence of social forces that tends toward minimizing the injury. (shrink)

Abstract The phenomenology of Multiple Personality (MP) syndrome is used to derive an Aristotelian explanation of the failure to achieve rational integration of mental content. An MP subject is best understood as having failed to master the techniques of integrating conative and cognitive aspects of her mental life. This suggests that in irrationality the subject may lack similar skills basic to the proper articulation and use of mental content in belief formation and control of action. The view that emerges centres (...) mind on the activity of a subject rather than a structured causal nexus. (shrink)

It is striking that some arguments in the bioethical literature seem implausible, counterintuitive, and even ridiculous when reported to competent moral agents. When examined, these arguments bear uncanny resemblances to the discourse of patients with debilitating mental disorders. I examine the kinds of irrationality involved, and discuss the fact that such irrationality is worrying in a discipline that purports to serve as a guide for real‐life practical reasoning. I offer some thoughts about correctives that we might use to temper some (...) of the odd opinions that bedevil our subject in the name of ethical analysis. It seems that one ought to be suspicious of neatly rational arguments that produce counterintuitive conclusions, but the alternative seems to be that we explore new constructions of old problems in Bioethics such that our discussion of them does justice to what we regard as of fundamental significance to our lives together as human beings. (shrink)

Joseph Fins's book Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics, and the Struggle for Consciousness is a considerable addition to the literature on disorders of consciousness and the murky area of minimally conscious states. Fins brings to this fraught area of clinical practice and neuroethical analysis a series of stories and reflections resulting in a pressing and sustained ethical challenge both to clinicians and to health care systems. The challenge is multifaceted, with diagnostic and therapeutic demands to be met by (...) clinicians and a mix of moral, scientific-economic, and political resonances for health care analysts. Everything in the book resonates with my own clinical experience and the often messy and emotionally wrenching business of providing ongoing care for patients with severe brain injuries and disorders, people who frequently resist the categorizations that well-organized health care systems prefer and that can dictate terms of patient management. (shrink)

Patients with covert awareness who present as being vegetative raise the question of moral status and clinical decisions about those who have suffered major brain injuries. When the idea of moral s...

This symposium represents the first major foray of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry into what may well become one of its significant strands of scholarship. The JBI has always encouraged critical and marginal areas of bioethics scholarship and particularly those which make use of contemporary continental philosophy and cultural theory in addition to traditional analytic methods. For that reason this symposium is an expression of a “natural fit” or a “match made in heaven” (or at least the Platonic version of (...) that idea). The authors span times and sites in history and culture, from ancient Greece to present day Brisbane. They draw on a variety of literary genres and figures, ranging from Greek tragedy to an epic Chinese novel; from Jane Austen to William Styron, a major American novelist and essayist; from the modern English science fiction of Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese expatriate in London, to the 20th-century English poetry of Philip Larkin. The symposium also engages with some recur. (shrink)

The idea that there is an inherent incentive in moral judgment or, in Classical terms, that there is an essential relationship between virtue and well?being is sharply criticized in contemporary moral theory. The associated theses that there is a way of living which is objectively good for human beings and that living that way is part of understanding moral truth are equally problematic. The Aristotelian argument proceeded via the premise that a human being was a rational social being. The present (...) reworking of that thesis builds on the internal connection between rationality and concept use. Moral judgment is linked to the grasp of moral concepts and thereby to an appreciation of how it is with other persons. The judgment that another person instances a morally relevant ascription is grounded on an empathic grasp of how it is with that person and thus tied to the thought that one ought to act in such and such a way or. in other words, to a disposition to act. Because the empathically grasped content of moral concepts is related to a number of mental ascriptions and reactive attitudes, the grasp of that content is interwoven deeply in the structure of human mental life and any attempt systematically to devalue or undermine it is threatening to one's mental integrity as a rational social being. Thus there is a deep link between moral sense or the disposition to act morally and an adequately grounded conception of human well?being. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of thought crucially involve an array of abilities to identify general properties or features of the world (corresponding to concepts) and objects that instantiate those general properties. Abilities of both types can be grounded in a naturalistic account of the usefulness of cognitive structures in adaptive behaviour. Language enhances these abilities by multiplying the experience bases giving rise to them and helping to overcome subjective biases.

The two commentators have examined and illuminated different aspects of the analysis of delusions that we have offered. Their discussions both raise points that clarify that analysis in helpful ways. Richard Bentall (2014) makes the telling point that distinguishing the mental phenomena that count as delusions is not always straightforward and that, at the margins, there is a perennial problem with patterns of thought that seem to fall outside the realm of shared meanings that most of us derive from our (...) experiences. The problem is evident in certain marginal conditions that come to psychiatric attention, like conversion reactions, body dysmorphic disorder, anorexia, and the many obsessions or strained .. (shrink)

The legalisation of euthanasia creates a certain tension when it is compared with those traditional medical principles that seem to embody respect for the sanctity of life. It also creates a real need for us to explore what we mean by harm in relation to dying patients. When we consider that we must train physicians so that they not only understand ethical issues but also show the virtues in their clinical practice, it becomes important for us to strive to train (...) them in virtue rather than mere knowledge. We can only do this by conveying a real sense of the needs of the patient and an ability to relate to patients as people not problems. Such attitudes take shape in a training programme in which practical situations are explored and discussed and the limits of scientific medical responses to those challenges are exposed. Keywords: bioethics education, euthanasia, moral judgment, training, virtue CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)