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.

The first edition of The Mind and its Discontents was a powerful analysis of how, as a society, we view mental illness, looking beyond just biological models of mental pathologies. In the ten years since, there has been growing interest in the philosophy of psychiatry, and a new edition of this text is more timely and important than ever.

The Generality Constraint is a condition discussed by Gareth Evans that is meant to distinguish candidate subjects into those who have conscious thought of the type needed for a neo-Fregean conception of an objective world and those who are not subjects of that type. I argue that it implicitly applies to free-ranging creatures in a world of objects that they perceive and on which they act. This is quite unlike the behaviour exhibited by pigeons who attempt to maximise rewards in (...) a limited operant response situation where those rewards are indexed to particular numbers of key pecks as the ability needed to master that task is not the kind of thing Evans is interested in and it can be explained much more parsimoniously. (shrink)

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)

Informed consent is the practical expression of the doctrine of autonomy. But the very idea of autonomy and conscious free choice is undercut by the view that human beings react as their unconscious brain centres dictate, depending on factors that may or may not be under rational control and reflection. This worry is, however, based on a faulty model of human autonomy and consciousness and needs close neurophilosophical scrutiny. A critique of the ethics implied by the model takes us towards (...) a 'care of the self' view of autonomy and the subject's attunement to the truth as the crux of reasoning rather than the inner mental/neural state views of autonomy and human choice on offer at present. (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)

Euripides’ Alcestis (1959) raises the issue of ethical duties within families and exposes the romantic postures and rhetoric that can dominate such discussions. Should anybody be asked to sacrifice themselves or even undergo significant health risks for members of their own family? (An issue that is also relevant in considering our duties to future generations in terms of the earth we leave to them.) The issue that is dramatized to a heroic level in Alcestis arises in live organ and tissue (...) donation within a family and challenges the idea that families should be trusted to sort out solutions that they can all live with. Alcestis intensifies the debate because the sacrifice of one life for another is its topic but, in doing so, it exposes many traps lying in wait for ethicists and medical jurists who boldly enter such debates (where emotions create shifting ground on which angels fear to tread). (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)

Examines the relationship between thought and language by considering the views of Kant and Wittgenstein alongside many strands of contemporary debate in the area of mental content.

The journey metaphor used by Nie and colleagues (2016) can be analyzed in terms of the way in which health care professionals can support well-being and attend to the aspects of illness that often...

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 of freedom of the will seems to conflict with the principle of causal efficacy implicit in many theories of mind. The conflict is normally resolved within a compatibilist view whereby the desires and beliefs of the agent, replete with a respectable if yet to be elucidated causal pedigree, are taken to be the basis of individual freedom. The present view is an alternative which erects mental content on a framework of rule following and then argues that rule‐following is (...) conceptually distinct from causally produced activity. The normative aspect of rule‐following defies reduction to descriptive or dispositional terms. According to this view we cannot get beyond the agent as a self‐determining rational individual in formulating a theory of mind and action. The theory is neo‐Kantian in that it identifies rules or conceptions of laws as central in human thought. It, follows Wittgenstein's treatment of rule‐following and generates a plausible (but non‐causal) account of mental explanation and weakness of the will. (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)

Abstract:What is in the best interests of a child, and could that ever include interventions that we might regard as prima facie detrimental to a child’s physical well-being? This question is raised a fortiori by growth attenuation treatments in children with severe neurological disorders causing extreme developmental delay. I argue that two principles that provide guidance in generating a conception of best interests for each individual child yield the right results in such cases. The principles are as follows: thepotentiality principle, (...) whereby every child should be able to develop its potential and is entitled to receive certain help in doing so, and theprinciple of psychosomatic harmony, whereby every human being is entitled to treatment that is appropriate to or enables a life in which mind and body are in tune with each other. These principles indicate a certain response to what we can call Ashley-type cases and admit certain caveats. (shrink)