Pretendemos comentar os primeiros quatro capítulos da segunda parte dos _Pensamentos Metafísicos_ de Espinosa, dedicados, respectivamente, à eternidade, à unidade, à imensidão e à imutabilidade de Deus; sugerindo, ademais, uma leitura geral para a obra em questão como um todo. Procuramos, desse modo, investigar o sentido das demonstrações espinosanas nesses capítulos, propondo hipóteses para a estruturação delas bem como a, por vezes, insuficiência – justificada – de algumas delas, enfatizando, nisso tudo e dentre outros aspectos, o caráter _polêmico_ da obra.

O artigo visa desenvolver a noção de duração na _Ética_ de Espinosa, mostrando que seu entendimento passa pela discussão de uma outra noção, central na filosofia de Espinosa, qual seja, a noção de conatus. A partir, então, da análise aqui pretendida – análise essa que passará por um estudo sobre a existência, a essência, a substância e o modo, além da noção de definição – será possível uma compreensão positiva da indefinição, e um esclarecimento, enfim, do que Espinosa entende por (...) duração, bem como por conatus. (shrink)

The article aims to, from the study of several writings of Pascal,return to what the seventeenth century thinker would have consideredabout time and eternity: what they would be, if and how they wouldrelate. For this, it will be firstly outlined a course that will go through thestudy of the human condition, describing its situation of disproportion and misery, and the condition of the things of worldly life, in addition to man, until the understanding of the existence of another order is (...) reached. This will then mark a course from time to eternity, or, as it will be seen, from flow to presence. (shrink)

O percurso argumentativo do Discurso de Metafísica encontra um momento de tensão quando se atinge o artigo 13, pois, após abordar Deus e a substância individual com caracterizações que induzem ao fatalismo, Leibniz procura afirmar a contingência e a liberdade tanto divina quanto humana. O exame que se segue tem como objetivo a descrição dessa dificuldade, bem como a apresentação de tentativas de solucioná-la – articulando as noções e respostas dadas no Discurso de Metafísica e outros textos de Leibniz, e (...) buscando sempre manter uma coerência em relação à sua filosofia. (shrink)

It is common to appeal to governing laws of nature in order to explain the existence of natural regularities. Classical theism, however, maintains the sovereignty thesis: everything distinct from God is created by him and is under his guidance and control. It follows from this that God must somehow be responsible for natural laws and regularities. Therefore, theists need an account of the relation between regularities, laws, and God. I examine competing accounts of laws of nature and conclude that dispositional (...) essentialism provides the most satisfactory explanation of the relation between, and. (shrink)

A number of epistemologists have defended a necessary condition for knowledge that has come to be labeled as the “safety” condition. Timothy Williamson, Duncan Pritchard, and Ernest Sosa are the foremost defenders of safety. According to these authors an agent S knows a true proposition P only if S could not easily have falsely believed P. Disagreement arises, however, with respect to how they capture the notion of a safe belief. This article is a treatment of the different presentations and (...) defenses of the safety condition for knowledge. Special attention is first paid to an elucidation of the various aspects or features of the safety condition. Following a short demonstration of the manner in which the safety condition handles some rather tough Gettier-like cases in the literature, some problems facing safety conclude this article. (shrink)

The problems of racism and racially motivated violence in predominantly African American communities in the United States are complex, multifactorial, and historically rooted. While these problems are also deeply morally troubling, bioethicists have not contributed substantially to addressing them. Concern for justice has been one of the core commitments of bioethics. For this and other reasons, bioethicists should contribute to addressing these problems. We consider how bioethicists can offer meaningful contributions to the public discourse, research, teaching, training, policy development, and (...) academic scholarship in response to the alarming and persistent patterns of racism and implicit biases associated with it. To make any useful contribution, bioethicists will require preparation and should expect to play a significant role through collaborative action with others. (shrink)

The economics profession has become a favourite punching bag in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Economists are widely reviled and their influence derided by the general public. Yet their services have never been in greater demand. To unravel the paradox, we need to understand both the strengths and weaknesses of economics. This book offers both a defence and critique of economics. Economists' way of thinking about social phenomena has great advantages. But the flexible, contextual nature of economics is (...) also its Achilles' heel in the hands of clumsy practitioners. (shrink)

Ce livre prend position sur les enjeux et les visées des oeuvres d'art en matière de vérité et de morale : il répond, par un retour sur l'époque des Lumières, aux questions contemporaines sur l'idée d'un perfectionnement moral de l'individu (S. Cavell, M. Nussbaum, S. Laugier). Car les Lumières ont remis au coeur de la création artistique les émotions, les affects et les sentiments, mues par la conviction de l'efficacité d'une éducation esthétique de l'homme, d'une éducation sensible par le sensible, (...) en l'occurrence par les oeuvres. La vérité a-t-elle un sens en matière artistique? Notre besoin d'art est-il lié à notre conviction qu'elles nous rendent meilleurs et nous font mieux connaître le monde? L'autonomie de l'oeuvre, la liberté du créateur, la dévaluation de tout canon au nom d'un global turn qui contraint au relativisme rendent aujourd'hui difficile l'affirmation d'une vérité. (shrink)

"A demain le bon sexe"... disait, non sans une pointe d'ironie, Michel Foucault, au plus fort de la "révolution sexuelle", et l'on sentait que ce n'était pas gagné. Qu'est-ce que le bon sexe? J'ai écrit ce livre en neuf mois... et toute une vie... Sans doute, pour moi, une manière de réaliser une certaine façon qui fut mienne d'être femme je me revois, dans ma petite chambre mansardée, étudiante, tentant en vain de lire en son entier l'Histoire de la sexualité (...) de Michel Foucault... Que savais-je de la sexualité, que pouvais-je recevoir de cet essai, que je trouvais grandiose, lumineux et obscur? Foucault, le seul des philosophes à parler de "ces choses-là", était bien isolé. Il faudrait du temps pour que ses écrits fassent leur route et du temps pour changer les mentalités. Du temps aussi pour moi, pour pouvoir les entendre, qu'ils fassent écho en moi. "Le sexe, disait Foucault, ça s'administre, la sexualité, ça se subit ; quant à la sensualité, elle est chaque jour à inventer." J'ai voulu rouvrir le dossier, emprunter les chemins qu'il a tracés en 1976 en écrivant son Histoire de la sexualité, qui est l'histoire des discours sur la sexualité, eux-mêmes histoire des corps investis par le pouvoir. Danièle Sastre. (shrink)

In this paper evidence will be provided that Wittgenstein’s intuition about the logic of colour relations is to be taken near-literally. Starting from the Aristotelian oppositions between propositions as represented in the logical square of oppositions on the one hand and oppositions between primary and secondary colors as represented in an octahedron on the other, it will be shown algebraically how definitions for the former carry over to the realm of colour categories and describe very precisely the relations obtaining between (...) the known primary and secondary colours. Linguistic evidence for the reality of the resulting isomorphism will be provided. For example, the vertices that resist natural single-item lexicalization in logic (such as the O-corner, for which there is no natural lexicalization *nall (=not all)) are not naturally lexicalized in the realm of colour terms either. From the perspective of the architecture of cognition, the isomorphism suggests that the foundations of logical oppositions and negation may well be much more deeply rooted in the physiological structure of human cognition than is standardly assumed. (shrink)

Con Spinoza, la filosofía moderna alcanza una nueva comprensión de la subjetividad. Sobre la base de la crítica del racionalismo, Spinoza descubre, por primera vez, la afectividad para la filosofía. El filósofo reflexiona sobre la repercusión de los afectos en la formación del sujeto ético y piensa que el mayor conocimiento posible sobre los propios afectos redunda en la utilidad colectiva de la humanidad toda. Sostengo que, en la teoría general de los afectos que explica la naturaleza, principios y fundamentos (...) de los fenómenos afectivos, Spinoza anida una oportuna teoría del autoconocimiento. (shrink)

Events in the US in 2020 have laid bare the reality that racism and its effects continue to take a heavy toll on the lives of Black Americans. The three articles in this issue of AJOB each provide...

The present article focuses on the case of the 2012 hunger-strike of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. We analyze the ethical dilemma involved in the way the Israeli medical community reacted to these hunger-strikes and the question of force feeding within the context of the fundamental dual-loyalty structure inherent in the Israeli Prison Services—system. We argue that the liberal perspective that focuses the discussion on the dilemma between the principle of individual autonomy and the sanctity of life tends to be (...) oblivious to the asymmetrical relation of power that characterizes the prison system and to the socio-political context in which hunger-strikes take place. Emphasizing hunger-strikes as political acts implies that health practitioners’ conducts cannot be analyzed only through the prism of clinical medical ethics. It requires a public health ethics’ approach, an approach that understands health in the context of the complex relationship between society, state, organizations, communities and individuals. The authors are both academics and volunteers in Physicians for Human Rights—Israel thus our analysis is based both on sociological and public health ethics principles and on the continuous work and advocacy for the right to health of prisoners. (shrink)

In this paper, I present an account of group competence that is explicitly framed for cases of epistemic performances. According to it, we must consider group epistemic competence as the group agents’ capacity to produce knowledge, and not the result of the summation of its individual members’ competences to produce knowledge. Additionally, I contend that group competence must be understood in terms of group normative status. To introduce my view, I present Jesper Kallestrup’s denial that group competence involves anything over (...) and beyond the aggregation of individual competences. I have divided my response into two parts. First, I compare two conceptions of competence from Ernest Sosa’s reliabilist virtue epistemology, Thinking about oneself: The place and value of reflection in philosophy and psychology, Springer, 2019) and David Löwenstein’s account of know-how. Second, I take the results from this comparison and apply them to the issue of group know-how, by the hand of Orestis Palermos and Deborah Tollefsen’s twofold approach to the topic Socially extended epistemology, Oxford University Press, 2018). Finally, I return to Kallestrup’s denial to make my point in favour of the conception of genuine group competence as the group normative status to achieve success. (shrink)

Dans tous les pays et particulierement en Europe, les citoyens, les magistrats et les juristes en general deplorent la complexite normative. Comment traiter la complexite des normes a prendre en compte dans toutes les decisions fondees sur la regle de droit? Depuis une quinzaine d'annees, l'etude des systemes complexes a fait de grands progres tant du point de vue des methodes que de la modelisation. L'approche politique et l'approche scientifique semblent a priori eloignees, mais elles convergent sur l'interet de prendre (...) en compte un objet nouveau: la complexite des systemes. Ces systemes font emerger de nouvelles proprietes, non observables au niveau des elements constitutifs, par une dynamique difficilement previsible, et rendent vaine toute analyse en sous-systemes plus simples. Pour la premiere fois, des specialistes des systemes complexes, des juristes, des philosophes, des experts de l'action publique et de l'evaluation des lois conjuguent leurs reflexions pour depasser les problematiques de la simplification et proposent des concepts et des outils totalement nouveaux pour comprendre et traiter de facon simple l'inevitable complexite du droit. (shrink)

Abstract The distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual contents clearly has consequences for the configuration of the world of humans as well as for the possibility of attributing thought, in the strict sense, to systems and nonhuman organisms. With the aim of clarifying such a distinction, the following paper poses a basic notion of mental state and, especially, a clear definition of concept, along with the fundamental features of the states in which concepts occur. The conclusion of the paper is that (...) we have good and enough reasons to speak of conceptual and nonconceptual contents instead of more-or-less conceptual concepts. It means that there is a distinction of kind, not of degree, between both contents. -/- . (shrink)

Статтю присвячено аналізу розуміння ієрархії у православній філософській та богословській думці, та визначенню того, як це розуміння впливає на православний світогляд. Мета статті досягається за допомогою застосування авторами методології, розробленої представниками філософської школи інтегрального традиціоналізму, оскільки остання являє собою продукт глибокого вивчення та зіставлення досвіду різних релігійних традицій, а також виявляє критерії традиціоналістського світогляду як такого, спільні для різних традицій. Зокрема, автори використовують висновки французького філософа-традиціоналіста Рене Генона про сакральну та ініціатичну природу ієрархії у традиційних суспільствах для пошуку відповідників у (...) православній релігійній традиції. Такі відповідники автори знаходять у працях отців церкви, які вважаються канонічними для православної релігійної традиції та являють собою «становий хребет» її філософського світогляду. За підсумками проведеного дослідження, автори даної публікації виявили, що православний релігійний світогляд є ієрархічним за своєю суттю. (shrink)

This essay argues that the image of the brain in a vat metaphorically encapsulates articulations of the relationship between the corporeal and the technological dimensions found in cyberpunk fiction and cinema. Cyberpunk is concurrently concerned with actual and imaginary metamorphoses of biological organisms into machines, and of mechanical apparatuses into living entities. Its recurring representation of human beings hooked up to digital matrices vividly recalls the envatted brain activated by electric stimuli, which Hilary Putnam has theorized in the context of (...) contemporary epistemology. At the same time, cyberpunk imaginatively raises the same epistemological questions instigated by Putnam. These concern the cognitive processes associated with the collusion of human and mechanical creatures, and related metaphysical and ethical issues spawned by such processes. As a philosophical trope, the brain in a vat would appear to pivot on the notion of a disembodied subject consisting of sheer mentation. However, literary and cinematic interpretations of the image in cyberpunk persistently foreground the obdurate materiality of the flesh—often in its most grisly and grotesque incarnations. (shrink)

Trois délires politiques mortifères hantent notre époque. Dans le premier, le délire occidental, la pléonexie (vouloir toujours plus) à l'oeuvre dans le néolibéralisme se transforme en risque de tout perdre (dislocation des subjectivités, déchirure du lien social, épuisement de la planète, destruction des bases mêmes de la vie sur terre). Le second, le délire théo fasciste de l'islamisme djihadiste prétend, contre l'égoïsme érigé en système et la démesure caractérisant l'Occident, restaurer une pureté absolue. Or, quand cette pureté originaire revendiquée se (...) réalise, elle se transforme en souillure et en horreur absolues. Le troisième, le délire identitaire néo-fasciste (qui monte aujourd'hui partout en Europe) se présente comme le seul rempart possible contre les deux premiers. Contre la mondialisation néo-libérale, il prône un retour à la patrie. Non pas une patrie fondée sur un principe universaliste (du type "liberté, égalité, fraternité"), mais une patrie refermée sur elle-même, désignant des boucs émissaires, les étrangers, pour que des acolytes réputés "amis" se regroupent et décrètent contre ces "ennemis" l'"état d'exception". Ces trois délires tendent de plus en plus à former système : on ne sort de l'un que pour entrer dans l'un des deux autres. Puisqu'aucun des garde-fous démocratiques (État, médias et université) ne fonctionne plus, il faut songer à tout refonder à partir des principes de dignité et de commune humanité, également bafoués par ces trois délires. Il se pourrait bien que le travail actuellement fourni par Les Convivialistes puisse fournir les bases de cette reconstruction probablement une des dernières possibles avant la catastrophe annoncée."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In this research, a sliding mode regulator with sine mapping is suggested for the stabilization of electricity generators being affected by magnet interaction nonlinearities and generator nonlinearities. To reach this goal, our suggested regulator has the following contributions: it starts from the sliding mode regulator with the modifications that the saturation mapping is used to reach a smoother performance instead of the signum mapping, and the sine mapping is applied to reach an upper bound in the proportional gain error, it (...) is used to reach some chosen constant behaviors for the angle position, angle speed, and current in the electricity generators, and its stabilization is ensured based on the Lyapunov approach. We show the simulation of the suggested regulator in two electricity generators. (shrink)

A 1999–2000 national study of U.S. hospitals raised concerns about ethics consultation (EC) practices and catalyzed improvement efforts. To assess how practices have changed since 2000, we administered a 105-item survey to “best informants” in a stratified random sample of 600 U.S. general hospitals. This primary article details the methods for the entire study, then focuses on the 16 items from the prior study. Compared with 2000, the estimated number of case consultations performed annually rose by 94% to 68,000. The (...) median number of consults per hospital was unchanged at 3, but more than doubled for hospitals with 400+ beds. The level of education of EC practitioners was unchanged, while the percentage of hospitals formally evaluating their ECS decreased from 28.0% to 19.1%. The gap between large, teaching hospitals and small, nonteaching hospitals widened since the prior study. We suggest targeting future improvement efforts to hospitals where needs are not being met by current approaches to EC. (shrink)

A fundamental goal of research in neuroscience is to uncover the causal structure of the brain. This focus on causation makes sense, because causal information can provide explanations of brain function and identify reliable targets with which to understand cognitive function and prevent or change neurological conditions and psychiatric disorders. In this research, one of the most frequently used causal concepts is ‘mechanism’ — this is seen in the literature and language of the field, in grant and funding inquiries that (...) specify what research is supported, and in journal guidelines on which contributions are considered for publication. In these contexts, mechanisms are commonly tied to expressions of the main aims of the field and cited as the ‘fundamental’, ‘foundational’ and/or ‘basic’ unit for understanding the brain. Despite its common usage and perceived importance, mechanism is used in different ways that are rarely distinguished. Given that this concept is defined in different ways throughout the field — and that there is often no clarification of which definition is intended — there remains a marked ambiguity about the fundamental goals, orientation and principles of the field. Here we provide an overview of causation and mechanism from the perspectives of neuroscience and philosophy of science, in order to address these challenges. (shrink)

Patients and family members (N = 671) were surveyed in five Mid-Atlantic U.S. hospitals to ascertain the number and kinds of ethical concerns they are presently experiencing or have previously experienced while being sick or receiving medical care. Seventy percent of participants had at least one (range 0–14) type of ethical concern or question. The most commonly experienced concerns pertained to being unsure how to plan ahead or complete an advance directive (29.4%), being unsure whether someone in the family was (...) able to make their own decisions (29.2%), deciding about limiting life-sustaining treatments (28.6%), wondering about disclosing personal medical information to others in the family (26.4%) and not being sure whether to undergo treatment because of cost (26.2%). Most were interested to some degree in getting help from ethics consultants in the future (76.6%). Given this prevalence, common concerns might usefully be addressed systematically, rather than exclusively on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

The recent publication of a special number of the SAJP dedicated to a discussion of Samantha Vice’s thoughts on being a white South African prompted this reflection on justice, equity and the modern idea of the state – against the background of moral feelings of guilt and shame, cultural diversity and merging identities. Its aim is to provide a perspective on the unity of the public legal order of the state, the distinct meaning of citizenship and affirmative action in terms (...) of the distinction between constitutive and regulative legal principles also helping white South Africans to understand how affirmative action relates to injustices of the past. The classical understanding of equity will play a key role in this discussion, aimed at showing how we can avoid the apparent impasse of equality before the law and of “fair discrimination.”. (shrink)

BackgroundWhile previous research has examined various aspects of ethics consultation (EC) in U.S. hospitals, certain EC practices have never been systematically studied.MethodsTo address this gap, we surveyed a random stratified sample of 600 hospitals about aspects of EC that had not been previously explored.ResultsNew findings include: in 26.0% of hospitals, the EC service performs EC for more than one hospital; 72.4% of hospitals performed at least one non-case consultation; in 56% of hospitals, ECs are never requested by patients or families; (...) 59.0% of case consultations involve conflict; the usual practice is to visit the patient in all formal EC cases in 32.5% of hospitals; 56.6% of hospitals do not include a formal meeting in most EC cases; 61.1% of hospitals do not routinely assess ethics consultants’ competencies; and 31.6% of hospitals belong to a bioethics network. We estimate the total number of non-case consultations performed in U.S. hospitals to be approximately one half the number of case consultations; we estimate the total number of ECs performed in U.S. hospitals, including both case and non-case consultations, to be just over 100,000 per year.ConclusionsThese findings expand our current understanding of EC in U.S. hospitals, and raise several concerns that suggest a need for further research. (shrink)

The language of rights is increasingly used to regulate access to health care and allocation of resources in the health care field. The right to health has been grounded on different theories of justice. Scholars within the liberal tradition have grounded the right to health care on Rawls's two principles of justice. Thus, the right to health care has been justified as being one of the basic liberties, as enabling equality of opportunity, or as being justified by the maximin principle. (...) In this article, Filc analyzes—from a radical egalitarian standpoint—the limitations of the different attempts to ground an equal right to health on Rawls's theory of justice and offers a first approximation to a radical egalitarian formulation of the right to health. (shrink)

The language of rights is increasingly used to regulate access to health care and allocation of resources in the health care field. The right to health has been grounded on different theories of justice. Scholars within the liberal tradition have grounded the right to health care on Rawls's two principles of justice. Thus, the right to health care has been justified as being one of the basic liberties, as enabling equality of opportunity, or as being justified by the maximin principle. (...) In this article, Filc analyzes—from a radical egalitarian standpoint—the limitations of the different attempts to ground an equal right to health on Rawls's theory of justice and offers a first approximation to a radical egalitarian formulation of the right to health. (shrink)

Studie over het verschijnsel helderziendheid waarbij de verschillende in de loop der tijden ontwikkelde theorieën en verklaringen in een logisch verband behandeld worden.

Depuis quelques années, un mouvement d'idées venu des Etats-Unis, qualifié de "Révolution transhumaniste", a pris un essor considérable. Demain, on vivra 200 ou 300 ans... et bien sûr en parfaite santé : l'immortalité n'est pas loin! Ces prophéties s'appuient sur les avancées réelles de l'intelligence artificielle et de la recherche en biologie, en particulier dans le domaine du vieillissement, passant ainsi allègrement de l'homme préservé et/ou augmenté à un véritable homme dieu. Mais dès que l'on s'intéresse au cerveau, les données, (...) particulièrement complexes, ne vont pas dans leur sens. Il existe une contradiction criante entre la jeunesse éternelle promise et la réalité actuelle, marquée en particulier par les échecs thérapeutiques répétés dans les maladies neurodégénératives. Forts de leur expérience et de leur autorité dans le domaine des neurosciences et du vieillissement, Danièle Tritsch et Jean Mariani dénoncent l'imposture du transhumanisme et ses excès ou délires, données scientifiques à l'appui. De façon accessible et vivante, avec de nombreux exemples de la vie quotidienne, ils démontrent que les efforts lents et soutenus de la recherche biologique et médicale - auxquels contribuera l'intelligence artificielle - restent la seule voie pour comprendre le fonctionnement du cerveau, le maintenir en bonne santé (cerveau préservé), le doter de capacités nouvelles (cerveau augmenté) et, dans un délai non prévisible, guérir ou stabiliser les maladies neurodégénératives (cerveau réparé). L'homme dieu, quant à lui, ne s'appuie sur rien de tangible. (shrink)

Mounting evidence suggests that socioeconomic status is a determinant of health. As nations around the globe increasingly rely on market-based economies, the corporate sector has come to have a powerful influence on the socioeconomic gradient in most nations and hence upon the health status of their populations. At the same time, it has become more difficult for any one nation to influence corporate activities, given the increasing ease with which corporations relocate their operations from country to country, As a result (...) of all of these factors, nations wishing to assure the health of their populations will need to both involve the corporate sector and cooperate with other nations.In this article, we review the business ethics literature and consider what justification it might provide for requiring multinational corporations to attend to concerns about population health. (shrink)

_Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis_ paints a completely new picture of the man and his ideas. The book suceeds in showing how ideas can become more accessible, and re-evaluates his significance within the field of psychodynamic psychotherapy. The book is structured thematically around five key issues: diagnosis, the analyst's position during the treatment, the management of transference, the formulation of interpretations, and the organisation of analytic training. For each of these issues, Lacan's entire work both published and (...) unpublished material, has been taken into account and theoretical principles have been illustrated with clinical examples. The book also contains the first complete bibliography of Lacan's works in English. Clear, detailed, and wide ranging, _Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis_ will prove essential reading, not only for professionals and students within the fields of psychology and psychiatry, but for all those keen to discover a new Lacan. (shrink)

When health care providers make decisions to use resources, their devotion to the patient at hand must be mediated by a framework that puts individual autonomy and social equity into focus simultaneously. The concept of citizenship yields such a framework.