The relative indifference to Kant's interpretation of aesthetics and teleology can no doubt be accounted for in several ways. Partly, it is simply that the natural approach to Kant is to begin with the Prolegomena, and then depending on one's interests, to move directly to Kant's treatment of the problem of knowledge or ethical action--thereby leaving Kant's independent analysis of judgment for last, if at all. Moreover, it is impossible to grasp the complexity of the problem of judgment without a (...) substantial understanding of Kant's first two inquiries. (shrink)

Purpose: Explore public attitudes towards the trade-offs between justice and medical outcome inherent in organ allocation decisions.Background: The US Task Force on Organ Transplantation recommended that considerations of justice, autonomy and medical outcome be part of all organ allocation decisions. Justice in this context may be modeled as a function of three types of need, related to age, clinical urgency, and quality of life.Methods: A web-based survey was conducted in which respondents were asked to choose between two hypothetical patients who (...) differed in clinical urgency , age, pretransplant and post-transplant quality of life, and life expectancy.Results: A pool of 1600 people were notified via email about the survey; 623 responded. Respondents preferred giving organs to younger people up to an age difference of <15.4 years and more clinically urgent people up to a difference in urgency of <2.54 months . Priority varied with the quality of life of the worst-off patient and the relative status of the patients. If both had worse than average quality of life, respondents preferred the better-off patient. When both had better than average quality of life, they preferred the worse-off patient. In analysis according to age versus clinical urgency, the older the patient, the more urgency needed to receive priority. In quality of life versus clinical urgency, the better the control’s quality of life, the more urgency the competing patient required. The worse the patient’s post-transplant outcome, the more urgency needed to receive priority.Conclusions: It appears that clinical urgency is only one of many factors influencing attitudes about allocation decisions and that respondents may invoke different principles of fairness depending the relative clinical status of patients. (shrink)

It will be best to explain here, at the start, that I do not propose new etymologies for the words εὒξεινος and πόντος. I regard, then, εὒξεινος πόντος as meaning ‘the hospitable way’. My purpose is to show how such a name came to be given to the Black Sea by the Greeks. First, the word πόντος. The familiar explanation connects it with a series of words, of which I give the most important: Gk. πάτος ‘trodden path’; Skt. pάnthā ‘way’, (...) fem. pathyā ‘id.’; Zend paθ ‘id.’; Arm. hun ‘ford, road’; Lat. pons ‘bridge’. Further, as a verb the root appears in Gk. πατεν ‘tread down’ and is given in Walde-Pokorny as *pent- ‘tread, go’: W.-P. points out that the derived nouns mean ‘way’, and particularly a way that goes over or through water, as can be seen from the Armenian and Latin. (shrink)

The paper attempts to do the following: (1) provide a reconstruction of a valid argument for Frege’s thesis that a truth-apt sentence refers to its truth value---an argument that is the implicit argument of Frege’s original text, based on premises explicitly stated or clearly implied in “On Sense and Reference”; (2) examine a standard version (essentially Davidson’s) of the recent counterpart of the Fregean Argument (the so-called Slingshot) designed to refute, quite generally, fact-based correspondence theories of truth; and (3) show (...) exactly why Wittgenstein’s correspondence theory in the Tractatus is not subject to the Slingshot Argument. If so, then, contra Davidson, it is neither the case that a correspondence theory need be nonexplanatory of truth, nor the case that a “strategy of facts” cannot be sustained. Indeed, for Wittgenstein, the Slingshot cannot even come into play, unless we attempt to say what can only be shown. (shrink)

The root *pent-1 has achieved wide distribution in the IE. languages. In the course of its long history considerable modification of meaning has affected it, both as a primary verb and as it appears in derivative nouns, and here I refer particularly to Go. finpan ‘find’ and to Gk. πάτη ‘deceit’. With little ingenuity—against mere ingenuity, of course, the etymologist is bound to be on his guard—it is possible to trace the train of thought that connects the various forms. But (...) though the explanations here offered may well seem obvious, they have not, so far as I am aware, been previously published. The familiar dictionaries of Boisacq, Walde-Hofmann, and Walde-Pokorny do provide attempts at explanation, but these have little power of convincing. (shrink)

Etymology, especially that of an ancient language like Greek, is not as a rule a field in which one expects to get conclusive demonstration; and between rival explanations one is often provided with a choice which cannot be made with much confidence. But despite this I think that I should reply to the article by W. S. Allen on ‘The Name of the Black Sea in Greek’ , pp. 86–8), which has raised again the question dealt with in my article (...) ‘The Name of the Euxine Pontus’ , pp. 123–8). This is not so much because I do not feel satisfied with Allen's explanation , as because this particular etymology has considerable historical, in addition to linguistic, interest. (shrink)

The question of the source of the pronominal forms , and of the later fully declined forms, presents an unusual situation. It seems clear from earlier work that we should not look for the answer outside Greek, nor probably even outside colloquial Attic Greek of the fifth century. These are strong advantages, but despite them one cannot have much confidence in the solutions so far provided, and there is room for a fresh approach. In addition to this, the usage of (...) the forms does not seem to have been explained satisfactorily, and I shall attempt to clarify it. (shrink)

In line 1171 of Aeschylus' Agamemnon the MSS. read μ The remainder of the sentence, after μ, is much disputed, but I am not concerned with finding the true reading of it. The whole sentence runs, in the MSS., as follows: κος δ' οδν πρκεσαντ μ πλιν μν σπερ ον χει παθεν: which appears in Thomson's Oresteia as:… πρκεσεν τ μ ok χειν πλιν μν σπερ ον χει. It is the note on this passage in Thomson to which I wish (...) to draw attention. It is from Headlam, and says, in justification of reading μ οκ, that in such phrases the scribes, finding μο, constantly omitted ο as περιττν. It adds that ο should always be restored, at any rate where there is any trace of it. (shrink)