BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the health system worldwide. The organ and tissue donation and transplantation (OTDT) system is no exception and has had to face ethical challenges related to the pandemic, such as risks of infection and resource allocation. In this setting, many Canadian transplant programs halted their activities during the first wave of the pandemic.MethodTo inform future ethical guidelines related to the COVID-19 pandemic or other public health emergencies of international concern, we conducted a (...) literature review to summarize the ethical issues.ResultsThis literature review identified three categories of ethical challenges. The first one describes the general ethical issues and challenges reported by OTDT organizations and transplantation programs, such as risks of COVID-19 transmission and infection to transplant recipients and healthcare professionals during the transplant process, risk of patient waitlist mortality or further resource strain where transplant procedures have been delayed or halted, and resource allocation. The second category describes ethical challenges related to informed consent in the context of uncertainty and virtual consent. Finally, the third category describes ethical issues related to organ allocation, such as social considerations in selecting transplant candidates.ConclusionThis literature review highlights the salient ethical issues related to OTDT during the current COVID-19 pandemic. As medical and scientific knowledge about COVID-19 increases, the uncertainties related to this disease will decrease and the associated ethical issues will continue to evolve. (shrink)

Here the philosopher and physicist David Z Albert argues, among other things, that the difference between past and future can be understood as a mechanical phenomenon of nature and that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to present the entirety of what can be said about the world as a narrative of “befores” and “afters.”.

This book uncovers the lost history of Christianity's encounters with Pythagorean ideas before the Renaissance. David Albertson skillfully examines ancient and medieval theologians, particularly Thierry of Chartres and Nicholas of Cusa, who successfully reconceived the Trinity and the Incarnation within the framework of Greek number theory. David Albertson challenges modern assumptions about the complex relationship between religion and science.

David Alexander has argued that “weak inferential internalism” (WII), a position which amounts to a qualified endorsement of Richard Fumerton’s controversial “principle of inferential justification,” is subject to a fatal dilemma: Either it collapses into externalism or it must make an arbitrary epistemic distinction between persons who believe the same proposition for the same reasons. In this paper, I argue that the dilemma is a false one, for weak inferential internalism does not entail internalism simpliciter. Indeed, WII is compatible (...) with modest externalism, and so is consistent with what Armstrong calls “Type II justification,” the rejection of which leads to the arbitrary epistemic distinctions to which he rightly objects. (shrink)

David Cumin retrace, dans ce livre, toute l'évolution politique et intellectuelle du publiciste allemand, spécialiste de droit international, mais aussi politologue, philosophe, historien et théologien du IIe Reich jusqu'à la République de Bonn, en passant par la République de Weimar et le IIIe Reich. Juriste universitaire engagé dans une entreprise de refondation antinormativiste de la science du droit, Carl Schmitt est fondamentalement l'adversaire du parlementarisme, du pluralisme et du fédéralisme weimariens, et l'avocat du " système présidentiel " en tant (...) que gouvernement plébiscitaire, autoritaire et unitaire s'appuyant sur l'armée, la fonction publique et le fameux article 48 de la constitution du Reich. Au plan idéologique, ce nationaliste catholique est à la fois un proche du fascisme italien, une figure de la " révolution conservatrice " allemande, un collaborateur du national-socialisme. La problématique nodale de cette biographie, dans un contexte historique catastrophique, est de montrer comment un néoconservateur antilibéral et antimarxiste, devenu un conseiller du gouvernement présidentiel, cultivant un raisonnement ambigu de " défense de la constitution " et dénonçant la " révolution légale ", passe de Schleicher à Hitler, de la " dictature commissariale " au totaler Staat puis au Führerstaat ; s'engage dans une certaine version du national-socialisme ; acquiert et conserve une place de premier rang dans la doctrine allemande ; enfin présente son plaidoyer à et après Nuremberg. (shrink)

David Hume’s and later Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on concepts are generally presented as standing in stark opposition to each other. In a nutshell, Hume’s theory of concepts is taken to be subjectivistic and atomistic, while Wittgenstein is metonymic with a broadly pragmatistic and holistic doctrine that gained much attention during the second half of the 20th century. In this essay, I shall argue, however, that Hume’s theory of concepts is indeed much more akin to the views of Wittgenstein and (...) his epigones than many, including Wittgenstein himself, probably might have suspected. As I try to show, Hume anticipates many themes central to Wittgenstein’s writings on language and meaning, and actually takes initial steps towards both an anti-subjectivistic and anti-atomistic psychology and epistemology. (shrink)

Professor David Stewart called upon his 30 years of teaching experience to introduce readers to the important study of faith and reason. Beginning students often find primary sources alone too difficult so this text offers primary source materials by a variety of significant philosophers–including a balanced blend of classical and contemporary authors–but the materials are supported by clearly written introductions, which better prepare readers to understand the subject matter.

According to a certain conception of language, any sentence can, when used on an occasion, have any of indefinitely many truth-conditions. Such a conception of language gives us reason to think that the question of whether the notion of truth has a distinctive content cannot be settled by looking solely at the predication of truth. By focusing on the predicate ‘true’ when trying to determine the significance of the notion of truth, we may have been looking in the wrong place.

In Listening Subjects, David Schwarz uses psychoanalytic techniques to probe the visceral experiences of music listeners.

Paradise is often conceived as a place where suffering is not possible, so much so that the possibility of suffering in paradise has been used by various philosophers as a defeater for the possibility of paradise. [1] Employing a “reverse-engineered-theodicy,” I use Eleonore Stump’s morally-sufficient-reason for why God allows suffering in this earthly world to explore one condition that must obtain for suffering to remain impossible in paradise, namely, that internal fragmentation is not possible in paradise. After developing an intellectualist (...) explanation of the primal sin, I suggest one reason to believe that the internal fragmentation of redeemed humans in paradise is not possible. However, this reason does not extend to other non-human inhabitants of paradise, and so I suggest that it remains possible that these other inhabitants might yet become internally fragmented. Given that Christ-like consensual suffering that aids a third party’s internal integration is presumably morally justifiable, I conclude by suggesting that the suffering of the redeemed in paradise is in fact possible. Therefore, even in paradise, there is a place for hope that the redeemed do not suffer, and for trust in others that they do not bring such suffering into being. [1] For one example see. (shrink)

The assumptions that literary criticism and philosophy are closely linked—and that both disciplines can learn much from each other—lead David White to examine key passages in James Joyce’s novels both as a philosopher and as literary critic. In so doing, he develops a thesis that Joyce’s attempt to capture the mysterious process whereby perception and consciousness are translated into language entails a fundamental challenge to everyday notions of reality. Joyce’s stylistic brilliance and virtuosity, his destruction of normal syntax and (...) meaning, “shock one into a new reality.” In the book’s final section, White examines the subtle relation between literary language and human consciousness and traces parallels between Joyce’s stylistic experimentation and Wittgenstein’s and Husserl’s ideas about language. (shrink)

This article analyses a range of discourses articulated around the figure of the film archive between the late nineteenth and the early twenty-first centuries, accounting for the various possibilities that they open up for considering audiovisual heritage as a potential space either for revolutionary change or for political or textual resistance. Focused mainly on archival discourses in Mexico, the article traces their interaction with both national-historical and anti-imperialist narratives, and the implications of digital and online culture for the encounter between (...) the archiving of film and resistance. It accounts for the position of the archive in negotiations between state and private capital and spaces of artistic autonomy, and for the relationships between the archive, modernity, postmodernity and the notion of posterity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HumAnimality:The Silence of the AnimalDavid WoodDrawing Especially on Derrida and Agamben while looking over her shoulder at Foucault, Kalpana Seshadri’s central claim is that silence is not merely inscribed in discourse or in political life as the absence or negation of power, but can also be a site for transformation and resistance (Seshadri 2012). Derrida’s deconstruction weans us from any desire for a pure presence, whether in speech or (...) in silence, and draws us into the essential exteriorization he calls writing, which as gramme, trace, and program, opens onto the history and future of technology, and thereafter, the operations of power, in particular biopower, in the articulation of which Agamben in a way synthesizes Derrida and Foucault.Seshadri takes seriously the analogy between race discrimination and the human oppression of the animal. And yet the analogy is incomplete. Racial discrimination can be detected within unproblematically humanistic discourse and often in established legal concepts and frameworks, whereas speciesism needs to be more creative. Outcries over expressions such as “animal holocaust” show just how charged such analogical claims can be, and bring to the surface the complexities of their inscription in our political life and discourse.Seshadri focuses particularly on the paradoxes of autoimmunity (with Derrida) and sovereignty (with Agamben), the points at which the logics of life, power, and language break down, a process that can license both the reduction and curtailing of life (in slavery, in political oppression, and in factory farming), but which also allows for a different response. She writes of [End Page 193] “the possibilities that arise within regimes of domination to effectively annul, neutralize, or escape power in the very moment of its exercise” (Seshadri 2012, 19).Heidegger distinguishes between two reading strategies available to us when dealing with great thinkers, but which in effect are generalizable to anyone worth reading—first, frontal critique, going counter to the other, as he puts it, and second, going to their encounter (Heidegger 1976, 77). He adds that to take the latter path, one has to bring one’s own fundamental questions to the table. This may seem somewhat portentous, and it may seem too that one is merely using the other’s writing as a vehicle for exercising one’s own obsessions, but he is surely right. One’s own deep questions are never wholly personal, and there is no substitute for engagement with what is finally at stake.This is all to justify the line of response I am taking here. As I see it, Seshadri’s articulation of the “humAnimal” largely works on our conceptual protection and demarcation of the privilege of a certain concept of the human and the human subject, which, in the case of sovereignty, has a range of consequences that include but are far from limited to race and animal relations, and may even be distinctively applicable, as Spinoza or Deleuze might say, to what we imagine our bodies to be capable of. In this latter case what is being marked is not the plight of the animal but the impact of a certain discipline of life on the ways in which we live our own bodies. I am thinking in particular of that part of chapter 7, “HumAnimal Acts,” that deals with Philippe Petit’s high wire activity, in his particular his “agility” and, in a beautiful phrase, “exuberant body.”To be clear, this account is tied to Agamben’s rethinking of potentiality and Heidegger’s discussion of dynamis in Aristotle, each contributing to a renewed understanding of movement and life. For Seshadri, this also opens onto another kind of silence, an exuberant ethics, a politics of gesture, of “pure means,” creativity, the good life, the happy body, and so on. In the fascinating chapters 5 and 6 on the “Wild Child,” the upshot is a certain discombobulation, making the Human/Animal distinction tremble, as Derrida would say, arguably helping us live our humanity less dogmatically as well as helping us toward a more complex understanding of the various species of silence. But in each of these cases it could be said that while the shape and tenor of human animation is tweaked, critiqued, and deepened... (shrink)

Since Wittgenstein's Tractatus first appeared in 1921 two interpretations of it have been offered. The received view emphasizes the book's philosophy of mathematics, logic, and language. The alternative view stresses its philosophy of religion, ethics, and aesthetics; it thereby takes seriously Wittgenstein's assertion that the "point" of the Tractatus is ethical. The aim of my dissertation is to build upon and improve the alternative interpretation in three ways. First I show through examination of the Western mystical canon that Wittgenstein's axiology (...) is based on a conception of mentality in which the subject-object distinction is annulled. This clears the ground for clarification of the metaphor of the Tractatus as a "ladder" of transcendence. Next I illustrate through scrutiny of Schopenhauer's theory of art how this metaphor ties up with Wittgenstein's claim that "Ethics and Aesthetics are one." Like Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein holds that moral transformation may be wrought by aesthetic contemplation. I then conclude with a sketch of the Lebensform implied by such transformation which depends on the parallels implied by such transformation which depends on the parallels between Tolstoy's idea of the life outside of time and Wittgenstein's notion of das gute Leben. In so doing I depict the Tractatus's ethical point as gestural, recommending a kind of existence of which the book itself is an expressive part. (shrink)

In “Why Forgiving the Unrepentant is not Demeaning or Insulting: A Reply to Nicholas Wolterstorff,” David E. Wright argues against Wolterstorff’s view in Justice in Love that it is wrong or impossible to forgive the unrepentant wrongdoer. In response to Wolterstorff’s claim that it is impossible to forgive the unrepentant, Wright presents the case of Timothy and Hubert, which seems to show that one can forgive the unrepentant and take the wrong seriously. In response to Wolterstorff’s claim that it (...) is not morally permissible to forgive the unrepentant, Wright employs Trudy Govier and Colin Hirano’s invitational model of forgiveness, in which the act of forgiveness serves as the impetus or “invitation” for reconciliation. To illustrate this, Wright presents the case of Timothy and Jake, which seems to show that forgiving the unrepentant can be respectful of both the victim and the wrongdoer. (shrink)

Abstract: A 1991 article by psychologist John D. Carter offers an underdeveloped insight that typologies for relating science and religion might be fruitfully formulated in discipline-specific perspectives. This essay thus covers a specifically theological perspective only briefly outlined in Carter, and it expands four models that theologians have used to relate religion and science. This essay renames these models and expands their implications, especially for addressing the behavioral sciences. (1) The contrarian model generally opposes science, (2) the apologetic makes theology (...) congenial to science, (3) the correlational holds both disciplines in tension, and (4) the synthetic attempts a grand unification of them. Arguing from the theologian's perspective, this essay is intended to demonstrate that different models/methods for relating science and religion are really reflections of deeper religious attitudes and argues that the task for which a method is employed ultimately determines its adequacy within that attitude's constraints. (shrink)

In Empirical Realism David K. Clark asks, simply: is there a moral structure to the universe?

From respected thinker and public intellectual David Dark comes We Become What We Normalize, both a cultural critique and a robust summons to resist complicity when it comes to conversations on politics, religion, and media. Dark offers a spirited call to witness to ethics, community, and change for ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.

This paper aims to provide a mathematically tractable background against which to model both modal cognitivism and modal expressivism. I argue that epistemic modal algebras comprise a materially adequate fragment of the language of thought, and endeavor to show how such algebras provide the resources necessary to resolve Russell's paradox of propositions. I demonstrate, then, how modal expressivism can be regimented by modal coalgebraic automata, to which the above epistemic modal algebras are dually isomorphic. I examine, in particular, the virtues (...) unique to the modal expressivist approach here proffered in the setting of the foundations of mathematics, by contrast to competing approaches based upon both the inferentialist approach to concept-individuation and the codification of speech acts via intensional semantics. (shrink)

'ART' AND 'LIFE'... AND DEATH: MARCEL DUCHAMP, ROBERT MORRIS AND NEO-AVANT- GARDE IRONY DAVID HOPKINS Peter Bürger charges avant-garde art of the and 60s ...

In Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision, theologian David Wells argues that the Church is in danger of losing its moral authority to speak to a culture whose moral fabric is torn. Although much of the Church has enjoyed success and growth over the past years, Wells laments a "hollowing out of evangelical conviction, a loss of the biblical word in its authoritative function, and an erosion of character to the point that today, no (...) discernible ethical differences are evident in behavior when those claiming to have been reborn and secularists are compared." The assurance of the Good News of the gospel has been traded for mere good feelings, truth has given way to perception, and morality has slid into personal preference. Losing Our Virtue is about the disintegrating moral culture that is contemporary society and what this disturbing loss means for the church. Wells covers the following in this bold critique: how the theologically emptied spirituality of the church is causing it to lose its moral bearings; an exploration of the wider dynamic at work in contemporary society between license and law; an exposition of the secular notion of salvation as heralded by our most trusted gurus -- advertisers and psychotherapists; a discussion of the contemporary view of the self; how guilt and sin have been replaced by empty psychological shame; an examination of the contradiction between the way we view ourselves in the midst of our own culture and the biblical view of persons as created, moral beings. Can the church still speak effectively to a culture that has become morally unraveled? Wells believes it can. In fact, says Wells, no time in this century has been more opportune for the Christian faith -- if the church can muster the courage to regain its moral weight and become a missionary of truth once more to a foundering world. - Publisher. (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

In this paper the author explores the relationship between his research and his personal development. The author is part of a community of scholars at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies that is passionate about translating faith and knowledge into practical action in culture and society. His work therefore has broader relevance. The paper highlights the need for recognising multiple identities and ‘inter-disciplines’ involved in research which can then lead to the development of the community as whole. The main question (...) it seeks to intentionally address is: What kind of person-in-community am I becoming through research? (shrink)

This essay presents the use-first-and-investigate-later (UFAIL) approach to technological use through two case studies: the atomic bomb in World War II and chemical defoliants during the Vietnam War. The methodology of UFAIL is as follows: despite limited understanding of an array of potential effects (medical, environmental, etc.), technology users employ a commitment to ex post facto investigations of these effects. In generalizing these cases, the essay argues (a) that failure to check rapid technological uptake will result in continued disaster and (...) (b) the abatement of the negative consequences of UFAIL is a more tempered approach to the infiltration of technologies into society by rigorous and preemptive investigation into the potential effects of a technology. (shrink)

Mammalian oocytes exhibit a series of cell cycle transitions that coordinate the penultimate events of meiosis with the onset of embryogenesis at fertilization. The execution of these cell cycle transitions, at G2/M of meiosis‐I and metaphase/anaphase of meiosis I and II, involve both biosynthetic and post‐translational modifications that directly modulate centrosome and microtubule behavior. Specifically, somatic cells alter the signal transduction pathways in the oocyte and influence the expression of maturation promoting factor (MPF) and cytostatic factor (CSF) activity through a (...) microtubule‐dependent mechanism. The regulation of the oocytes' cell cycle machinery by hormone‐mediated somatic cell signals, involving both positive and negative stimuli, ensures that meiotic cell cycle progression is synchronized with the earliest pivotal events of mammalian reproduction. (shrink)