Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 104-105.

Ocherk 1. Voprosy ontologii -- Ocherk 2. Voprosy ėtiki i ėstetiki -- Ocherk 3. Voprosy gnoseologii i aksiologii.

Shared decision-making between patients and physicians strives to balance decisional responsibility for clinical decisions. Directed by patients, SDM incorporates patients’ values and prefere...

Over the past decade, US patients and clinicians have endured medication shortages of nearly every class, including many lifesaving medications. These shortages have persisted despite determined efforts by federal, academic, and professional organizations. Medication shortages have resulted in lost lives, medication errors, and substantial financial cost. Economic drivers are the primary cause for drug shortages, exacerbated by manufacturing and quality problems, and unreliable and uncertain sources for many raw materials required to synthesize these drugs. Drug shortages force clinicians to make (...) untenable choices and decide which of their patients should receive a lifesaving scarce medication. The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed many hospitals’ ability to provide basic care and aggravated existing drug shortages. The influx of patients suffering from COVID-19 has exposed flaws in the fractured manner in which essential medications reach patients. The unique nature of COVID-19, often requiring prompt and decisive clinical decision-making, challenges the accepted approach for ethical analysis adopted by clinical ethicists. The author, a clinician and bioethicist, notes the ethical challenges he and other frontline providers have faced in deciding which patients are “more deserving” of a scarce medication. (shrink)

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own thought processes. Yanofsky describes (...) simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve; perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense; different levels of infinity; the bizarre world of the quantum; the relevance of relativity theory; the causes of chaos theory; math problems that cannot be solved by normal means; and statements that are true but cannot be proven. He explains the limitations of our intuitions about the world -- our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there. (shrink)

This chapter develops a perceptual solution to the epistemological problem of other minds, relying on central ideas from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The Merleau-Pontian account is contrasted with another attempted perceptual solution to the other minds problem, and it is argued that only the former meets the phenomenologists' desideratum of providing an alternative to inferential solutions. The chapter also provides responses to various objections to the perceptual solution, including a pair of objections recently put forward by Alec Hyslop.