In August 2000, Arthur Matas and his colleagues de scribed a protocol in which their institution began to accept as potential donors, individuals who came to the University of Minnesota hospital offering to donate a kidney to any patient on the waiting list. Matas and his colleagues refer to these donors as nondirected donors by which is meant that the donors are altruistic and that they give their organs to an unspecified pool of recipients with whom they (...) have no emotional relationship. This paper represents an ethical and policy critique of the nondirected donation protocol that was implemented at the University of Minnesota in August 1999. Specifically, I address the ethical questions: Whether altruistic living solid organ donations by strangers should be permitted? And if so, What are appropriate ethical guidelines for such donations? (shrink)

In August 2000, Arthur Matas and his colleagues de scribed a protocol in which their institution began to accept as potential donors, individuals who came to the University of Minnesota hospital offering to donate a kidney to any patient on the waiting list. Matas and his colleagues refer to these donors as nondirected donors by which is meant that the donors are altruistic and that they give their organs to an unspecified pool of recipients with whom they (...) have no emotional relationship. This paper represents an ethical and policy critique of the nondirected donation protocol that was implemented at the University of Minnesota in August 1999. Specifically, I address the ethical questions: Whether altruistic living solid organ donations by strangers should be permitted? And if so, What are appropriate ethical guidelines for such donations? (shrink)

From the introductory chapter. The distinctions taken between the necessary and the contingent, in philosophical discussion no less than in common life, are ordinarily supposed to be so definitive and are permitted so deeply to influence our conceptions that it seems well worth one's while to examine them in their origin. And the Aristotelian system will best serve our purpose as a corpus vile for very obvious reasons. In the first place, Aristotle is the earliest systematic philosopher who essayed to (...) treat consistently of all the greater problems of life and thought, and whose works remain to be studied. His method, too, was such that, standing as he did just on the verge of formalism, the definitions which he attempted still bear definite traces of the purely functional meaning of those terms, while his formulation of their significance has led naturally to their solidification as objective facts in the world. For Aristotle was wont to preface his own conclusions by inquiring, rather superficially to be sure, into the psychology of the conceptions in question ; yet, while the inadequacy of his psychology is now admitted on all hands, the inferences as to fact which he deduced therefrom are even now in part accepted as conclusive. When one reflects upon it this state of the question strikes one as absurd. For this reason there appears to be the greater justification for an analysis of the presuppositions on which these conceptions rest. If one grants their validity, the conclusions and the resultant contradictions of the system must be accepted as ultimate. But I am convinced that Aristotle's presuppositions and his real problems were wholly unreconcilable with each other, and so his contradictions serve all the better to point out the direction in which their solution lay. Plato made the acute observation that surprise is the beginning of philosophy, and Aristotle appropriated and further applied the thought.' The full sweep of the truth contained in these words is vastly greater, however, than they knew. The feeling of wonder is indeed the point of departure for philosophy ; but what precisely does it mean? It indicates first of all that an old habit has been broken up. Old conceptions, like the proverbial old bottles, have become so surcharged with the new wine of meaning that they have burst. But to say this is to describe the phenomenon merely as A brute fact without according it any symbolic value. This state of surprise must acquire an ideal worth, an indicative function, if it is really to become the parent of philosophy. Briefly, then, we may say : surprise indicates the need of reconstructing our supposed facts. And this statement is to be taken at its full value, with all its implications, if philosophy is to be achieved.... (shrink)

In this masterful work, both an illumination of Kant's thought and an important contribution to contemporary legal and political theory, Arthur Ripstein gives a comprehensive yet accessible account of Kant's political philosophy. In addition to providing a clear and coherent statement of the most misunderstood of Kant's ideas, Ripstein also shows that Kant's views remain conceptually powerful and morally appealing today.

I address the commentators' calls for clarification of theoretical terms, discussion of similarities to other proposals, and extension of the ideas. In doing so, I keep the focus on the purpose of memory: enabling the organism to make sense of its environment so that it can take action appropriate to constraints resulting from the physical, personal, social, and cultural situations.

The realist programme has degenerated by now to the point where it is quite beyond salvage. A token of this degeneration is that there are altogether too many realisms. It is as though by splitting into a confusing array of types and kinds, realism has hoped that some one variety might yet escape extinct. I shall survey the debate, and some of these realisms, below. Here I would just point out the obvious; that in so far as the successes of (...) science mount while realism continues to decline we must conclude that scientific success lends no support to realism. Since it is unlikely to support anti-realism, we have some reason to suspect that the philosophical debate over realism does not concern issues that can be settled by developments in the sciences, no matter how successful science may be. Further, since that success grounds a culture of acceptance for science and its entities, we have reason to believe that the existence of those entities is also not actually the issue that concerns realism. Afortiori, it is not the issue that concerns anti-realism either; nor, I might add, is anti-realism the winner in the philosophical debate that realism has lost. (shrink)

Faced with realist-resistant sciences and the no-nonsense attitude of the times realism has moved away from the rather grandiose program that had traditionally been characteristic of its school. The objective of the shift seems to be to protect some doctrine still worthy of the "realist" name. The strategy is to relocate the school to where conditions seem optimal for its defense, and then to insinuate that the case for such a " piecemeal realism" could be made elsewhere too, were there (...) but world enough and time. The burden of this paper is to examine this piecemeal approach and to show why, despite the relocation, it cannot escape the difficulties of its grander cousins. For that purpose I begin with some brief historical reminders, and with a quick review of the state of the argument before realism went to pieces. This will help us see what has been abandoned in realism's flight, and what baggage still remains. (shrink)

On the Suffering of the World is a collection of the later aphoristic writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, known for their incisive, aphoristic style and dark, pessimistic view of human existence. Edited and with an introduction by Eugene Thacker, On the Suffering of the World comprises a core selection of Schopenhauer's later writings, gathered together for the first time in print. These texts, produced during the last decades of Schopenhauer's long life, reveal a unique kind of philosophy, expressed in a (...) singular style. Eschewing the tradition of dry, totalizing, academic philosophy prevalent during the time, Schopenhauer's later writings mark a shift towards a philosophy of aphorisms, fragments, anecdotes and observations, written in a literary style that is by turns antagonistic, resigned, confessional, and filled with all the fragile contours of an intellectual memoir. Here Schopenhauer allows himself to pose challenging questions regarding the fate of the human species, the role of suffering in the world, and the rift between self and world that increasingly has come to define human existence, to this day. It is these writings of Schopenhauer that later generations of artists, poets, musicians, and philosophers would identify as exemplifying the pessimism of their era, and perhaps of our own as well. On the Suffering of the World is presented with an introduction that places Schopenhauer's thought in its intellectual context, while also connecting it to contemporary concerns over climate change, the anthropocene, and the spectre of human extinction. The book also includes a bibliography and chronology of Schopenhauer's life. (shrink)

Use of normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) for organ recovery in donation after circulatory death (DCD) raises two crucial, and intertwined, ethical questions. The first is whether the use of NRP...

Reading is not only “cold” information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such “hot” reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies (...) demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence ) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness ), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies. (shrink)

This paper constructs two classes of models for the quantum correlation experiments used to test the Bell-type inequalities, synchronization models and prism models. Both classes employ deterministic hidden variables, satisfy the causal requirements of physical locality, and yield precisely the quantum mechanical statistics. In the synchronization models, the joint probabilities, for each emission, do not factor in the manner of stochastic independence, showing that such factorizability is not required for locality. In the prism models the observables are not random variables (...) over a common space; hence these models throw into question the entire random variables idiom of the literature. Both classes of models appear to be testable. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article we investigate structural differences between “literary” metaphors created by renowned poets and “nonliterary” ones imagined by non-professional authors from Katz et al.’s 1988 corpus. We provide data from quantitative narrative analyses of the altogether 464 metaphors on over 70 variables, including surface features like metaphor length, phonological features like sonority score, or syntactic-semantic features like sentence similarity. In a first computational study using machine learning tools we show that Katz et al.’s literary metaphors can be successfully discriminated (...) from their nonliterary ones on the basis of response measures, in particular the ratings for familiarity, ease of interpretation, semantic relatedness, and comprehensibility. A second computational study then shows that the classifier can reliably detect and predict between-group differences on the basis of five QNA features generalizing from a... (shrink)

Two main goals of the emerging field of neurocognitive poetics are the use of more natural and ecologically valid stimuli, tasks and contexts and providing methods and models allowing to quantify distinctive features of verbal materials used in such tasks and contexts and their effects on readers responses. A natural key element of poetic language, metaphor, still is understudied insofar as relatively little empirical research looked at literary or poetic metaphors. An exception is Katz et al.’s corpus of 204 literary (...) metaphors by authors such as Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas, for which various rating data are available. We reanalyzed their corpus using a combination of quantitative narrative analysis, latent semantic analysis, and machine learning in order to identify relevant features of the metaphors that influenced the ratings. The combined application of computational tools sheds light on surface and affective-semantic features that co-determine the reception of poetic metaphors and successfully predicted the period of origin, authorship and goodness ratings of the metaphors. The present results can be used for generating quantitative hypotheses or selecting and matching verbal stimuli in empirical studies of literature and neurocognitive poetics. (shrink)

The relationship between metacognition and executive control is explored. According to an analysis by Fernandez-Duque, Baird, and Posner (this issue), metacognitive regulation involves attention, conflict resolution, error correction, inhibitory control, and emotional regulation. These aspects of metacognition are presumed to be mediated by a neural circuit involving midfrontal brain regions. An evaluation of the proposal by Fernandez-Duque et al. is made, and it is suggested that there is considerable convergence of issues associated with metacognition, executive control, working memory, and frontal (...) lobe function. By integrating these domains and issues, significant progress could be made toward a cognitive neuroscience of metacognition. (shrink)

The reality of the thinking subject -- The paralogisms and transcendental idealism -- The first paralogism -- The second paralogism -- Transcendental self-consciousness -- Other interpretations of the paralogisms -- Empirical apperception -- Pure apperception -- The person as subject -- Apperception and inner sense -- The third paralogism and Kant's conception of a person -- The embodied subject -- The fourth paralogism.

In the May 15, 1935 issue of Physical Review Albert Einstein co-authored a paper with his two postdoctoral research associates at the Institute for Advanced Study, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen. The article was entitled “Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” (Einstein et al. 1935). Generally referred to as “EPR”, this paper quickly became a centerpiece in the debate over the interpretation of the quantum theory, a debate that continues today. The paper features a striking case (...) where two quantum systems interact in such a way as to link both their spatial coordinates in a certain direction and also their linear momenta (in the same direction). As a result of this “entanglement”, determining either position or momentum for one system would fix (respectively) the position or the momentum of the other. EPR use this case to argue that one cannot maintain both an intuitive condition of local action and the completeness of the quantum description by means of the wave function. This entry describes the argument of that 1935 paper, considers several different versions and reactions, and explores the ongoing significance of the issues they raise. (shrink)

Determinism is established in quantum mechanics by tracing the probabilities in the Born rules back to the absolute (overall) phase constants of the wave functions and recognizing these phase constants as pseudorandom numbers. The reduction process (collapse) is independent of measurement. It occurs when two wavepackets overlap in ordinary space and satisfy a certain criterion, which depends on the phase constants of both wavepackets. Reduction means contraction of the wavepackets to the place of overlap. The measurement apparatus fans out the (...) incoming wavepacket into spatially separated eigenpackets of the chosen observable. When one of these eigenpackets together with a wavepacket located in the apparatus satisfy the criterion, the reduction associates the place of contraction with an eigenvalue of the observable. The theory is nonlocal and contextual. Keywords:. (shrink)

The narrative ethicist imagines life as multiple points of view, each reflecting a distinct imagination and each more or less capable of comprehending other points of view and how they imagine. Each point of view is constantly being acted out and then modified in response to how others respond. People generally have good intentions, but they get stuck realizing those intentions. Stories stall when dialogue breaks down. People stop hearing others' stories, maybe because those others have quit telling their stories. (...) The narrative ethicist's job is to help people generate new imaginations that can restart dialogues. (shrink)

Newton and Leibniz had profound disagreements concerning metaphysics and the relationship of mathematics to natural philosophy, as well as deeply opposed attitudes towards analysis. Nevertheless, or so I shall argue, despite these deeply held and distracting differences in their background assumptions and metaphysical views, there was a considerable consilience in their positions on the status of infinitesimals. In this paper I compare the foundation Newton provides in his Method Of First and Ultimate Ratios (sketched at some time between 1671 and (...) 1684, and published in the Principia of 1687) with that provided independently by Leibniz in his unpublished manuscript De quadratura arithmetica (1675-6) as well as in later writings. I argue that both appeal to a version of the Archimedean Axiom to underwrite their use of infinitesimal techniques, which must be interpreted as a shorthand for rigorously finitist methods. (shrink)

(Draft copy published as “Science Made Up: Constructivist Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.” In P. Galison and D. Stump (eds.) The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 231-54.).

What evidence and what arguments can be produced in support of the controversial suggestion, first made by Leo Strauss now over 65 years ago, that most earlier philosophers wrote esoterically and, what is more, that they did so, not merely from fear of persecution, but with an eye to enhancing their pedagogical effectiveness? I argue here that the inherent paradoxes of philosophical education combined with the inherent shortcomings of writing led many earlier thinkers to see the pedagogical necessity of something (...) like the Socratic method. And esoteric writing - a rhetoric of riddling concealment - is the closest literary approximation to the Socratic method. (shrink)

The spin-statistics connection is derived in a simple manner under the postulates that the original and the exchange wave functions are simply added, and that the azimuthal phase angle, which defines the orientation of the spin part of each single-particle spin-component eigenfunction in the plane normal to the spin-quantization axis, is exchanged along with the other parameters. The spin factor 2s belongs to the exchange wave function when this function is constructed so as to get the spinor ambiguity under control. (...) This is achieved by effecting the exchange of the azimuthal angle by means of rotations and admitting only rotations in one sense. The procedure works in Galilean as well as in Lorentz-invariant quantum mechanics. Relativistic quantum field theory is not required. (shrink)

This selection of the major works of constitutional theory during the Weimar period reflects the reactions of legal scholars to a state in permanent crisis, a society in which all bets were off. Yet the Weimar Republic's brief experiment in constitutionalism laid the groundwork for the postwar Federal Republic, and today its lessons can be of use to states throughout the world. Weimar legal theory is a key to understanding the experience of nations turning from traditional, religious, or command-and-control forms (...) of legitimation to the rule of law. Only two of these authors, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt, have been published to any extent in English, but they and the others whose writings are translated here played key roles in the political and constitutional struggles of the Weimar Republic. Critical introductions to all the theorists and commentaries on their works have been provided by experts from Austria, Canada, Germany, and the United States. In their general introduction, the editors place the Weimar debate in the context of the history and politics of the Weimar Republic and the struggle for constitutionalism in Germany. This critical scrutiny of the Weimar jurisprudence of crisis offers an invaluable overview of the perils and promise of constitutional development in states that lack an entrenched tradition of constitutionalism. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present and discuss a probabilistic framework that is adequate for the formulation of quantum theory and faithful to its applications. Contrary to claims, which are examined and rebutted, that quantum theory employs a nonclassical probability theory based on a nonclassical "logic," the probabilistic framework set out here is entirely classical and the "logic" used is Boolean. The framework consists of a set of states and a set of quantities that are interrelated in a (...) specified manner. Each state induces a classical probability space on the values of each quantity. The quantities, so considered, become statistical variables (not random variables). Such variables need not have a "joint distribution." For the quantum theoretic application, there is a uniform procedure that defines and determines the existence of such "joint distributions" for statistical variables. A general rule is provided and it is shown to lead to the usual compatibility-commutivity requirements of quantum theory. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of interference and the misunderstandings that are involved in the false move from interference to nonclassical probability. (shrink)

This is a comment on Peter Godfrey-Smith’s, “Models and Fictions in Science”. The comments explore problems he raises if we treat model systems as fictions in a naturalized and deflationary framework.

In this book, Professor Adkins undertakes an examination of certain key value-words in the period between Homer and the end of the fifth century. The behavior of these words both affected and was affected by the nature of the society in which their usage developed. The author shows how only with a complete understanding of the implications and significance of these value-words can the essence of the Greeks and their society be grasped.

This volume of translations unites three shorter works by Arthur Schopenhauer that expand on themes from his book The World as Will and Representation. In On the Fourfold Root he takes the principle of sufficient reason, which states that nothing is without a reason why it is, and shows how it covers different forms of explanation or ground that previous philosophers have tended to confuse. Schopenhauer regarded this study, which he first wrote as his doctoral dissertation, as an essential (...) preliminary to The World as Will. On Will in Nature examines contemporary scientific findings in search of corroboration of his thesis that processes in nature are all a species of striving towards ends; and On Vision and Colours defends an anti-Newtonian account of colour perception influenced by Goethe's famous colour theory. This is the first English edition to provide extensive editorial notes on the different published versions of these works. (shrink)