This is a response to the letter to the editor “Prioritizing the Prevention of Early Deaths during Covid‐19,” by Govind Persad.

When the Covid‐19 pandemic reached the United States in spring 2020, many states and hospitals announced crisis standards of care plans that used age as a categorical exclusion criterion. Such age choosing was quickly flagged as discriminatory, and so some states and hospitals shifted to embedding age as a tiebreaker deeper in their plans. Different rationales were given for using age as a tiebreaker: that younger patients were more likely to survive than older patients, that saving younger patients would save (...) more life years, and that younger patients deserved a chance to live through life's stages. We provide a critical analysis of these three rationales, noting the differences between them, and then questioning the ethical and legal justifications for such age choosing. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have emerged as an attractive means of implementing logic circuits, providing instant manufacturing turnaround and negligible prototype costs. They hold the promise of replacing much of the VLSI market now held by mask-programmed gate arrays. FPGAs offer an affordable solution for customized VLSI, over a wide variety of applications, and have also opened up new possibilities in designing reconfigurable digital systems. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays discusses the most important aspects of FPGAs in a textbook manner. It provides (...) the reader with a focused view of the key issues, using a consistent notation and style of presentation. It provides detailed descriptions of commercially available FPGAs and an in-depth treatment of the FPGA architecture and CAD issues that are the subjects of current research. The material presented is of interest to a variety of readers, including those who are not familiar with FPGA technology, but wish to be introduced to it, as well as those who already have an understanding of FPGAs, but who are interested in learning about the research directions that are of current interest. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 109-111.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 157-172 [Access article in PDF] Symposium: On Ken Burns's "Jazz" Jazz: America's Classical Music? 1 Lee B. Brown I VIEWERS OF KEN BURNS'S third cultural epic "Jazz" probably fell into one of three categories. 2 Some found it gripping. Some found it grating. Some found it both at once.The series has unforgettable moments: spectacular jitterbug sequences; Jimmy Lunceford's horn men fanning their trumpet (...) bells with hat mutes in sync; the close-up of the whirring cross-hand drumming of Art Blakey; the bitter-sweet glance Billie Holiday and Lester Young exchange in their last filmed appearance together; the occasional marriage of visuals to music. One riveting three minutes comes when the talking heads tune out, a 78-rpm disk of Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" is set spinning, and the thrilling notes pour out on a carousel of visual imagery—finally freeze-framing on the face of the young genius himself.On the downside, the series is massively repetitious. As a result of Burns's decision to track two major figures—Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington—from cradle to grave, the same cuts of Armstrong appear again and again, no matter what the time frame. Some of the series' commentators are particularly annoying—the fiddler of Burns's Civil War series, Matt Glaser, for instance, with his fatuous theories [End Page 157] about Louis Armstrong and Albert Einstein. And the documentary's heavy load of social freight—by Wynton Marsalis, and his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch 3 —threatens to flatten the music.The series is designed as informative entertainment, not Jazz 101. But Burns pays a price here, as he did in his documentary about baseball, in which not even the basics of the game, let alone any of the subtleties, were explained. In "Jazz" we get no explanation of what Jelly Roll Morton did to transform ragtime into jazz. (The series could easily have pressed Morton himself into service. With no sacrifice of his considerable charm, Morton did explain it, beautifully, in his recorded Library of Congress interviews. 4) Although the swing era gets big billing, no attempt is made to explain how swing rhythm actually works, as contrasted with earlier practices. (I have watched swing drummer Panama Francis entertain a packed hall with a brief but riveting illustration of how it works.)As jazz history, the film also has problems. Some legendary figures are resurrected unconvincingly. When Marsalis tells us what the legendary trumpet player Buddy Bolden sounded like, the illustrative off-camera trumpet is Marsalis's, not Bolden's, who embedded not one note in a record groove. Further, we face the tiresomely obvious problem of omissions. We hear nothing of Albert Ayler, Keith Jarrett, Sun Ra, Mildred Bailey, Benny Carter, Lennie Tristano, Erroll Garner, Eric Dolphy, Art Pepper, or Woody Herman. All we learn about Bill Evans—whose influence on jazz piano was huge—is that Miles Davis hired him even though he was white. Omissions are inevitable, of course. But there is a muted pattern to the exclusions. It was impossible for the series to avoid Benny Goodman, given his central role in the swing era. But white figures are too often either ignored or treated as alienated outsiders. We hear New York Times columnist Margo Jefferson opine that Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death because he wasn't allowed to play with black musicians. In fact, many of the greatest players—white and black—never played with musicians of their own caliber.Most figures covered in the film are treated either with respect or with reverence. But things get nasty when matters turn to avant-gardists. Thus, Branford Marsalis—Wynton's talented brother—singles out the volcanic pianist Cecil Taylor for a particularly hostile attack. 5 Instead of explaining what Ornette Coleman meant by "free jazz," Albert Murray tells us that jazz is, by definition, free music—and by implication, that Coleman's concept must be fatuous. And Wynton has complained [End Page 158] elsewhere about a jazz avant-garde retreat into what he calls "a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ch'an/Zen-Catholic Dialogue Spreads a "Welcome Table" at the 2009 Annual MeetingFrancis V. TisoA retreat program designed by the participants in the ongoing Ch'an/Zen-Catholic Dialogue explored the dialogue of religious experience and the dialogue of life, set amid the redwoods of Guerneville, California. The 28–31 January 2009 meeting was cochaired by the Rev. Heng Sure of the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery and the Institute for World Religions, Berkeley, California, and by (...) Most Rev. John C. Wester, Bishop of Salt Lake City, Utah.Sr. Mary Ann Donovan of the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, led an experience of lectio divina based on John 15:1–17, Jesus's simile of the vine and the branches. Rev. Victoria Austin of the San Francisco Zen Center gave an "encouragement talk," which would typically be delivered to Zen retreatants. She referred to the Gospel passage, noting: "We don't prune the vine because it is dead, but because it has the capacity to be fruitful. We don't purify the mind to get rid of dirt, but to return to the mind's original purity, which is the source of our conscience and is the true life within us." Rev. Jan Chosen Bays of Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon observed that "Vows make our life energy more focused, keeping us from losing purpose and meaning. Vows prune away unnecessary things. When we ask for help with the challenge of being faithful to our vows, we call up and encounter unexpected sources of support and 'grace.' "The Ch'an Buddhist presentation focused on meditation experience, which was described as "recovering the natural state of the mind." Prof. Martin Verhoeven of the Pacific School of Religion pointed out that in meditation "we are returning to the origin, not moving forward to 'gain something.'" Linking ethical engagement with contemplation, he said, "When the mind of a meditator is motivated to act out of genuine compassion, its action is accurate and correct. Action is neither driven nor obstructed by ego or sentiment." These comments resonated with Rev. Heng Sure's presentation on the statement on the environment from the recent Gethsemane III conference "Simple and Sufficient," in which Buddhist and Christian monastics embraced an ecologically valid way of life. Urging the group to notice the connections between contemplation and ethical action, Bishop John C. Wester commented: "This [End Page 145] work embodies mercy by lifting people up; it embodies justice as it arises out of our common humanity."Because of the financial challenges that all three sponsoring institutions are facing, it was decided to conclude formal sponsorship of the Ch'an/Zen-Catholic Dialogue with this meeting. However, participants agreed to work together to reconstitute the dialogue regionally. A steering committee was designated to undertake new logistical arrangements and to draft a narrative of the previous seven years of dialogue for posting on our respective websites. Bishop Wester summarized the convictions of participants, both Buddhist and Catholic, by observing: "It is impossible not to be affected by this experience. Dialogue in this atmosphere has had an impact on my own way of ministering to others. I feel that my faith, sensitivity, compassion, and reverence have been enhanced by participating in these meetings."Participants in the 2009 dialogue meeting included Rev. Heng Sure, Berkeley Buddhist Monastery; Bishop John C. Wester, Salt Lake City; Dr. Snjezana Akpinar, Dharma Realm Buddhist University; Rev. Gigen Victoria Austin, San Francisco Zen Center; Rev. Jan Chozen Bays, Great Vow Zen Monastery; Sr. Phyllis D'Anna, SND, Zen Center, Palo Alto; Sr. Mary Ann Donovan, SC, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley; Dr. Ron Epstein, Dharma Realm Buddhist Association; Mrs. Lorraine Moriarty, Society of St. Vincent De Paul; Bhikshuni Heng Jiao, City of 10,000 Buddhas; Bhikshuni Heng Liang, City of 10,000 Buddhas; Rev. Canon Francis Tiso, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; Rev. James Massa, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; Rev. Thomas W. Devereaux, Diocese of Santa Rosa ecumenical and interreligious officer; Dr. Martin Verhoeven, Pacific School of Religion; and Ron Brown, observer (Cloverdale, California). [End Page 146]Francis V. TisoUnited States Conference of Catholic BishopsCopyright © 2009 University of Hawai'i Press... (shrink)

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 1981. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 157-172 [Access article in PDF] Symposium: On Ken Burns's "Jazz" Jazz: America's Classical Music? 1 Lee B. Brown I VIEWERS OF KEN BURNS'S third cultural epic "Jazz" probably fell into one of three categories. 2 Some found it gripping. Some found it grating. Some found it both at once.The series has unforgettable moments: spectacular jitterbug sequences; Jimmy Lunceford's horn men fanning their trumpet (...) bells with hat mutes in sync; the close-up of the whirring cross-hand drumming of Art Blakey; the bitter-sweet glance Billie Holiday and Lester Young exchange in their last filmed appearance together; the occasional marriage of visuals to music. One riveting three minutes comes when the talking heads tune out, a 78-rpm disk of Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" is set spinning, and the thrilling notes pour out on a carousel of visual imagery—finally freeze-framing on the face of the young genius himself.On the downside, the series is massively repetitious. As a result of Burns's decision to track two major figures—Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington—from cradle to grave, the same cuts of Armstrong appear again and again, no matter what the time frame. Some of the series' commentators are particularly annoying—the fiddler of Burns's Civil War series, Matt Glaser, for instance, with his fatuous theories [End Page 157] about Louis Armstrong and Albert Einstein. And the documentary's heavy load of social freight—by Wynton Marsalis, and his mentors Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch 3 —threatens to flatten the music.The series is designed as informative entertainment, not Jazz 101. But Burns pays a price here, as he did in his documentary about baseball, in which not even the basics of the game, let alone any of the subtleties, were explained. In "Jazz" we get no explanation of what Jelly Roll Morton did to transform ragtime into jazz. (The series could easily have pressed Morton himself into service. With no sacrifice of his considerable charm, Morton did explain it, beautifully, in his recorded Library of Congress interviews. 4) Although the swing era gets big billing, no attempt is made to explain how swing rhythm actually works, as contrasted with earlier practices. (I have watched swing drummer Panama Francis entertain a packed hall with a brief but riveting illustration of how it works.)As jazz history, the film also has problems. Some legendary figures are resurrected unconvincingly. When Marsalis tells us what the legendary trumpet player Buddy Bolden sounded like, the illustrative off-camera trumpet is Marsalis's, not Bolden's, who embedded not one note in a record groove. Further, we face the tiresomely obvious problem of omissions. We hear nothing of Albert Ayler, Keith Jarrett, Sun Ra, Mildred Bailey, Benny Carter, Lennie Tristano, Erroll Garner, Eric Dolphy, Art Pepper, or Woody Herman. All we learn about Bill Evans—whose influence on jazz piano was huge—is that Miles Davis hired him even though he was white. Omissions are inevitable, of course. But there is a muted pattern to the exclusions. It was impossible for the series to avoid Benny Goodman, given his central role in the swing era. But white figures are too often either ignored or treated as alienated outsiders. We hear New York Times columnist Margo Jefferson opine that Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death because he wasn't allowed to play with black musicians. In fact, many of the greatest players—white and black—never played with musicians of their own caliber.Most figures covered in the film are treated either with respect or with reverence. But things get nasty when matters turn to avant-gardists. Thus, Branford Marsalis—Wynton's talented brother—singles out the volcanic pianist Cecil Taylor for a particularly hostile attack. 5 Instead of explaining what Ornette Coleman meant by "free jazz," Albert Murray tells us that jazz is, by definition, free music—and by implication, that Coleman's concept must be fatuous. And Wynton has complained [End Page 158] elsewhere about a jazz avant-garde retreat into what he calls "a... (shrink)

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Little is known about the origins of the Brown Book of Ludwig Wittgenstein. One of his better-known texts, it was first published in print in 1958 and is based on notes that Wittgenstein had dictated to two of his pupils, Francis Skinner and Alice Ambrose, at Cambridge University during the academic year of 1934 – 35. The present paper examines some of the few extant remarks by Wittgenstein and others about the circumstances from which the text emerged against (...) the backdrop of various source materials, including a set of handwritten and typed notes that belong to a collection of Ambrose’s papers at Cambridge University Library. (shrink)

Most recent texts in moral philosophy have either concentrated on practical moral issues or else, if theoretical, have tended toward one-sided presentations of recent, fashionable views. Discussions of applied ethics cannot go very far without revealing underlying philosophical assumptions about how deeper, more general issues are treated. Similarly, recent approaches to ethics are difficult to understand without a knowledge of the context of the historical views against which these approaches are reacting. The Nature of Moral Thinking will satisfy the intellectually (...) curious student, providing a solid and fair discussion of the classical philosophical questions about our moral thinking, surveying the main types of meta-ethical and normative ethical theories, while not excluding the more recent discussions of moral realism, of anti-realism, and of virtue morality. Francis Snare demonstrates that glib intellectualistic thinking about morality, especially in regard to relativism andsubjectivism, is seriously flawed. He also focuses attention on the question of whether particular theories of the origins of morality (for example, those of Nietzsche and Marx) undermine morality. All students and teachers of ethics and philosophy will find this book one of the most complete and detailed introductory-level surveys of the foundations of ethics with emphasis on the problems of the subjectivity, the relativity, and the origins of morality. (shrink)

Francis Bacon, lawyer, statesman, and philosopher, remains one of the most effectual thinkers in European intellectual history. We can trace his influence from Kant in the 1700s to Darwin a century later. The Advancement of Learning , first published in 1605, contains an unprecedented and thorough systematization of the whole range of human knowledge. Bacon’s argument that the sciences should move away from divine philosophy and embrace empirical observation would forever change the way philosophers and natural scientists interpret their (...) world. (shrink)

Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative ought judgments bring (...) with them a commitment to act in accordance with those judgments. Instead, I propose an alternative account of our normative concepts according to which only ought simpliciter judgments commit one to acting in accordance with those judgments. In addition to answering the sceptical challenge, the proposal offers an independently motivated account of what makes a concept normatively authoritative. (shrink)

The recent philosophy of Quantum Bayesianism, or QBism, represents an attempt to solve the traditional puzzles in the foundations of quantum theory by denying the objective reality of the quantum state. Einstein had hoped to remove the spectre of nonlocality in the theory by also assigning an epistemic status to the quantum state, but his version of this doctrine was recently proved to be inconsistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics. In this essay, I present plausibility arguments, old and new, (...) for the reality of the quantum state, and expose what I think are weaknesses in QBism as a philosophy of science. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley was the foremost philosopher of the British Idealist school, which came to prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century. Bradley, who was a life fellow of Merton College, Oxford, was influenced by Hegel, and also reacted against utilitarianism. He was recognised during his lifetime as one of the greatest intellectuals of his generation and was the first philosopher to receive the Order of Merit, in 1924. His work is considered to have been important to the (...) formation of analytic philosophy. In metaphysics, he rejected pluralism and realism, and believed that English philosophy needed to deal systematically with first principles. This work, first published in 1893, is divided into two parts: 'Appearance' deals with exposing the contradictions that Bradley believed are hidden in our everyday conceptions of the world; and in 'Reality', he builds his positive account of reality and considers possible objections to it. (shrink)

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization? Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an (...) exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity. (shrink)