Discussion about a dignified death has almost exclusively been applied to palliative care and people dying of cancer. As populations are getting older in the western world and living with chronic illnesses affecting their everyday lives, it is relevant to broaden the definition of palliative care to include other groups of people. The aim of the study was to explore the views on dignity at the end of life of 12 elderly people living in two nursing homes in Sweden. A (...) hermeneutic approach was used to interpret the material, which was gathered during semi-structured interviews. A total of 39 interviews were transcribed. The analysis revealed three themes: (1) the unrecognizable body; (2) fragility and dependency; and (3) inner strength and a sense of coherence. (shrink)

We are walking too quickly down the road to physical and psychological utopia without pausing to assess the potential damage to our humanity from this brave new ...

Die globale Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrise wirft noch immer eine Reihe von grundlegenden Fragen auf. Dies beginnt schon bei der Analyse der Ursachen. Die Probleme des Krisenmanagements sind offensichtlich - allen voran die langfristigen Folgen ausufernder Staatsverschuldung. Aus Sicht der Entwicklungslander bleibt die Sorge, dass dies zu Lasten wichtiger Investitionen in Armutsbekampfung, Klimaschutz und andere zentrale Aufgaben nachhaltiger globaler Politik gehe. Der politische Wille, in globaler Abstimmung eine strukturelle Neuordnung der Finanzmarkte einzuleiten, ist inzwischen erlahmt, die Finanzinstitute sind uberwiegend zum "Business (...) as usual" zuruckgekehrt. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden Handlungsoptionen fur eine stabile wie entwicklungsvertragliche und damit ethisch vertretbare globale Finanzordnung erortert. (shrink)

On a widely held characterization, triadic joint attention is the capacity to perceptually attend to an object or event together with another subject. In the last four decades, research in developmental psychology has provided increasing evidence of the crucial role that this capacity plays in socio-cognitive development, early language acquisition, and the development of perspective-taking. Yet, there is a striking discrepancy between the general agreement that joint attention is critical in various domains, and the lack of theoretical consensus on how (...) to account for it. This paper pursues three interrelated aims: (i) it examines the contrast between reductive and non-reductive views of (triadic) joint attention, by bringing into focus the notion of recursive mindreading; (ii) it assembles, advances, and discusses a number of arguments against reductive views; (iii) finally, in dialogue with some prominent non-reductive views, it outlines the case for a non-reductive view that gives pride of place to the idea that co-attenders relate to one another as a ‘you’. (shrink)

Niniejszy artykuł podejmuje dwie zasadnicze kwestie. Pierwsza to zagadnienie recepcji filozofii Schellinga w Polsce po drugiej wojnie światowej. Druga to pytanie, w jaki sposób należy rozumieć abstrakcje filozoficzne Schellinga. Za podstawę interpretacji przyjęto kontekstualne rozumienie filozofii, na jakim opierał się w swoich badaniach Ryszard Panasiuk. Z tych dwóch założeń podstawowych wynika struktura artykułu: część pierwsza dotyczy sposobu, w jaki ideologia marksistowsko-leninowska, wychodząc z klasowo-dialektycznego i „partyjnego” rozumienia filozofii, uznała idealizm filozoficzny za wroga. Punktem odniesienia będzie koncepcja Georga Lukácsa „Die Zerstörung (...) der Vernunft” oraz wykładnia filozofii Schellinga jako irracjonalizmu. Część druga skupia się na tym, dlaczego zaprzestano badań nad Schellingiem oraz idealizmem po drugiej wojnie światowej, oraz w jakich warunkach i kiedy pojawiły się pierwsze opracowania monograficzne. Część trzecia jest historyczno-krytyczną i kontekstualną interpretacją filozofii przyrody Schellinga. Filozofię Schellinga można rozumieć jako nową antropologię, integralnie łączącą człowieka i przyrodę. W tym sensie jest ona antytezą racjonalistycznego redukcjonizmu. (shrink)

Whether or not quantum physics can account for molecular structure is a matter of considerable controversy. Three of the problems raised in this regard are the problems of molecular structure. We argue that these problems are just special cases of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics: insofar as the measurement problem is solved, the problems of molecular structure are resolved as well. In addition, we explore one consequence of our argument: that claims about the reduction or emergence of molecular structure (...) cannot be settled independently of the choice of a particular resolution to the measurement problem. Specifically, we consider how three standard putative solutions to the measurement problem inform our under- standing of a molecule in isolation, as well as of chemistry’s relation to quantum physics. (shrink)

The ability to combine words into novel sentences has been used to argue that humans have symbolic language production abilities. Critiques of connectionist models of language often center on the inability of these models to generalize symbolically (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Marcus, 1998). To address these issues, a connectionist model of sentence production was developed. The model had variables (role‐concept bindings) that were inspired by spatial representations (Landau & Jackendoff, 1993). In order to take advantage of these variables, a novel (...) dual‐pathway architecture with event semantics is proposed and shown to be better at symbolic generalization than several variants. This architecture has one pathway for mapping message content to words and a separate pathway that enforces sequencing constraints. Analysis of the model's hidden units demonstrated that the model learned different types of information in each pathway, and that the model's compositional behavior arose from the combination of these two pathways. The model's ability to balance symbolic and statistical behavior in syntax acquisition and to model aphasic double dissociations provided independent support for the dual‐pathway architecture. (shrink)

A polemical account of Australian philosophy up to 2003, emphasising its unique aspects (such as commitment to realism) and the connections between philosophers' views and their lives. Topics include early idealism, the dominance of John Anderson in Sydney, the Orr case, Catholic scholasticism, Melbourne Wittgensteinianism, philosophy of science, the Sydney disturbances of the 1970s, Francofeminism, environmental philosophy, the philosophy of law and Mabo, ethics and Peter Singer. Realist theories especially praised are David Armstrong's on universals, David Stove's on logical probability (...) and the ethical realism of Rai Gaita and Catholic philosophers. In addition to strict philosophy, the book treats non-religious moral traditions to train virtue, such as Freemasonry, civics education and the Greek and Roman classics. (shrink)

As a continuation of the work of the third author in [5], we make further observations on the features of Galois cohomology in the general model theoretic context. We make explicit the connection between forms of definable groups and first cohomology sets with coefficients in a suitable automorphism group. We then use a method of twisting cohomology (inspired by Serre’s algebraic twisting) to describe arbitrary fibres in cohomology sequences—yielding a useful “finiteness” result on cohomology sets. Applied to the special case (...) of differential fields and Kolchin’s constrained cohomology, we complete results from [3] by proving that the first constrained cohomology set of a differential algebraic group over a bounded, differentially large, field is countable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Incoherence of Determining Death by Neurological Criteria: A Commentary on Controversies in the Determination of Death, A White Paper by the President’s Council on Bioethics*Franklin G. Miller** (bio) and Robert D. Truog (bio)Traditionally the cessation of breathing and heart beat has marked the passage from life to death. Shortly after death was determined, the body became a cold corpse, suitable for burial or cremation. Two technological changes (...) in the second half of the twentieth century prompted calls for a new, or at least expanded, definition of death: the development of intensive care medicine, especially the use of mechanical ventilators, and the advent of successful transplantation of vital organs. Patients with profound neurological damage, leaving them incapable of breathing on their own and in an irreversible coma, could be maintained for some period of time with the aid of mechanical ventilation. The situation of these patients posed two ethical questions. Is it appropriate to stop life-sustaining treatment? If so, is it acceptable to retrieve vital organs for transplantation to save the lives of others before stopping treatment?In 1968, the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death proposed that death could be determined on the basis of neurological criteria, thus providing a positive answer to these two questions (Ad Hoc Committee 1968). According to the position of this committee, patients diagnosed with the cessation of brain function are dead, despite the fact that they breathe and circulate blood with the aid of mechanical ventilation. [End Page 185] Because they are dead, it is appropriate, indeed imperative, to stop mechanical ventilation. And because they are dead, it becomes ethical to procure vital organs for transplantation before stopping what otherwise would be life-sustaining treatment. Remarkably, this innovative neurological determination of death became, with little debate or controversy, the established position in medical ethics and the law throughout the United States.The Harvard Committee articulated the diagnosis of “irreversible coma,” but merely asserted that this condition constituted death. No explanatory rationale was provided. It fell to the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research to provide an authoritative rationale in its 1981 report, Defining Death. The second paragraph of the report set the stage as follows: “The question addressed here is not inherently difficult or complicated. Simply, it is whether the law ought to recognize new means for establishing that the death of a human being has occurred” (President’s Commission 1981, p. 3). The Commission claimed that “death is a unitary phenomenon” (p. 7) and that the determination of death by neurological criteria, in terms of the absence of all brain function, is consistent with the traditional conception of death as the cessation of vital functioning of the organism as a whole. The key issue is the integrative functioning of the human organism, which ceases to exist, according to the Commission, when the whole brain, including higher cortical areas and the brain stem, fails to function. Although “brain-dead” patients do not appear to be dead—i.e., the reality of their death is “masked” by the activity of mechanical ventilation—the patient’s body has irreversibly lost all capacity for integrative functioning. In the words of the Commission: “When artificial means of support mask this loss of integration as measured by the old methods [cessation of respiration and heart beat], brain-oriented criteria and tests provide a new window on the same phenomenon” (p. 33). The President’s Commission was instrumental in developing and establishing “The Uniform Definition of Death Act”: “An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead” (p. 2).Although the question posed by the President’s Commission was easy to articulate, the answer, over time, has proved complicated and controversial. The coherence and cogency of determining death by neurological criteria has been challenged. Various experts have demonstrated that “brain-dead” patients maintained on mechanical ventilation display a range of vital, integrative, functioning, which conflicts with the judgment that they are dead (Truog and... (shrink)

As aesthetic appreciators of the environment, we often encounter cases where our environmental commitments and our aesthetic responses do not seem to match. Some highly altered or contaminated environments may occasion powerful and insightful aesthetic experiences. In this article, I discuss some arguments that have been offered in favor of the view that this mismatch is not possible when we appreciate a particular environment with full awareness of its damaged or altered condition. I show that these arguments are not conclusive (...) and that there is room for valuable experiences of damaged or highly altered environments. Our knowledge of the damaged condition of an environment, while perceptually significant, does not necessarily make the resulting aesthetic experience to be negative. Finally, I show that these cases do not necessarily diminish the role that aesthetics can play in shaping our environmental sensibility and commitments. (shrink)

Telic monism in logic is the thesis that there is one single philosophically primary goal to logic. A different way to put it is that there is only one canonical application to logic. This thesis is widely present—implicitly or more explicitly—in the literature on the philosophy of logic, yet has not been examined nor argued for extensively. In this paper I will present and critically examine telic monism. One prominent candidate for the canonical application of logic, namely the formal codification (...) of logical consequence in natural language, will be challenged directly. The critique will then be generalized by appealing to a practice-based philosophy of logic. The general argument I put forth here claims that we have no principled reason to assume there to be just one primary goal to logic. Rather, I claim that it is more plausible that there actually is a variety of goals, purposes and applications to logic, without one of them enjoying primacy over the others. If this argument succeeds, at least one of the consequences is that it allows for a kind of logical pluralism that has previously been deemed insignificant, namely logical instrumentalism. (shrink)

Excerpt from Les Etapes de la Philosophie Mathematique Nous voudrions indiquer maintenant comment notre enquete historique nous a guide vers les conclusions que nous avons soutenues dans les dernieres pages de notre travail. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the (...) aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Ein zentrales Thema des christlichen Glaubens wird in diesem Textbuch von fuhrenden zeitgenossischen Philosophen und Philosophinnen beleuchtet. In systematischer Anordnung werden neben deutschsprachigen "Klassikern" und neuen Originaltexten auch einige der einflussreichsten Autoren der angelsachsischen Debatte in Ubersetzung zuganglich gemacht. Auch diese von der analytischen Philosophie gepragten Texte wurden teilweise eigens fur diesen Band geschrieben oder uberarbeitet. Die Auseinandersetzungen im kontinentaleuropaischen protestantischen und katholischen Denken um Seele, Unsterblichkeit und leibliche Auferstehung in der Mitte des letzten Jahrhunderts werden hier auf lebendige und (...) begrifflich prazise Weise weitergefuhrt. Die Religionsphilosophie und die Theologie werden am Reichtum der Argumente und Positionen nicht vorbeigehen konnen. Mit Texten von Oscar Cullmann, Gisbert Greshake, Gerd Haeffner, Thomas Schartl, Eleonore Stump, Peter van Inwagen, Dean Zimmerman, Alvin Plantinga, William Hasker, Lynne Baker, Hud Hudson und Godehard Bruntrup. (shrink)

Religionen sind auf vielfaltige, oft widerspruchliche Weise in offentliche Diskurse und politische Prozesse zuruckgekehrt. Sie spielen heute fast in allen Regionen und auch auf globaler Ebene eine wichtige Rolle. Andererseits sind religiose Fundamentalismen oder die politische Instrumentalisierung von Religionen in Konflikten bedrohliche Phanomene, die sich weltweit ausbreiten. So ambivalent wie die Religionen ist auch die Moderne. Die klassische, westliche Moderne mit ihrer Orientierung an selbstverantwortlicher Gestaltung der Welt, Demokratie und Menschenrechten ist fragwurdig geworden: Desorientierung und globale soziale, okonomische wie okologische (...) Ungleichgewichte gehen mit ihr einher. In der Suche nach dem eigenen Pfad der Moderne entstehen vielfaltige Gegenbewegungen. Die Beitrage thematisieren dieses ambivalente Verhaltnis von Religion und der umstrittenen Moderne. (shrink)

Prevailing ethical thinking about informed consent to clinical research is characterized by theoretical confidence and practical disquiet. On the one hand, bioethicists are confident that informed consent is a fundamental norm. And, for the most part, they are confident that what makes consent to research valid is that it constitutes an autonomous authorization by the research participant. On the other hand, bioethicists are uneasy about the quality of consent in practice. One major source of this disquiet is substantial evidence of (...) the “therapeutic misconception”—the tendency of patient-subjects in clinical trials to confuse participating in research with receiving personalized medical care. This .. (shrink)

Corporate governance is often split between rule-based and principle-based approaches to regulation in different institutional contexts. This split is often informed by the types of institutional configurations, their strengths, and the complementarities within them. This approach to corporate governance regulation is mostly discussed in the context of developed economies and their regulatory demands. However, in developing and weak market economies, such as in Sub-Saharan Africa, there is no such explicit split and the debates on such contexts in the comparative corporate (...) governance literature have been meagre. Nonetheless, there are sparks of good corporate governance practices in the region. Drawing from institutional theory and a case study of a largest economy, we explore the appropriateness or suitability of corporate governance regulatory frameworks in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our findings suggest that Nigeria needs an integrated system that combines elements of both rule-based and principle-based regulation, supported by a multi-stakeholder co-regulation strategy. This paper departs from the mainstream rule-based and principle-based categorisations by forging ahead new perspectives on corporate governance regulation, especially in weak market economies. (shrink)

Various formalisms for recasting quantum mechanics in the framework of classical mechanics on phase space are reviewed and compared. Recent results in stochastic quantum mechanics are shown to avoid the difficulties encountered by the earlier approach of Wigner, as well as to avoid the well-known incompatibilities of relativity and ordinary quantum theory. Specific mappings among the various formalisms are given.

This essay attempts to confront one of the major problems associated with multiculturalism, namely the hostile divisiveness stemming from newly articulated constructs of difference. Synthesizing hermeneutic concepts derived from Gadamer and Rorty, I develop an approach called xenologica which, unlike the problematic universalism associated with the Enlightenment, values difference but, at the same time, promotes mutual recognition, tolerance and solidarity. Xenologica, for illustrative purposes, is applied to one of the most contentious domains of difference, race, with the aim of overcoming (...) some of the theoretical and practical limitations of classic antiracism. (shrink)

ExcerptWhen we examine European anti-Semitism during the 1930s, and especially the Shoah, the case of Germany looms so large that the Nazi regime immediately appears as the paradigmatic form of fascism and the manifold policies directed against European Jewry during the 1930s little more than German racial policy writ large. Without in any way trivializing or, worse, relativizing in an ethical sense the German case, one might nevertheless suggest that it occupies too much conceptual space and occludes a more precise (...) comparative understanding of other European cases where anti-Semitic policies had been autonomously generated, relatively independent of direct Nazi pressure. (shrink)

ExcerptMy focus shall be on challenges to civility in Europe raised by the presence of sizable immigrant communities, which, unlike those of earlier times, are significantly different from host populations in terms of national origin, race, religion, ethnicity, and culture. Coming principally from former colonial territories, their otherness additionally bears the deep historical imprint of inferiority and subordination, merited or not, to the degree that to Europeans they sometimes appear to be, at worst, uncivilized, or, at best, to live in (...) another non-European or semi-European world. Though they inhabit the same geographical space as the host population, and have become…. (shrink)

Prior studies in business ethics highlight the role of philanthropy in shaping stakeholders’ perceptions of a firm’s underlying moral tendencies and values. Scholars argue that philanthropy-based character inferences influence whether and how stakeholders engage with firms. We extend this line of reasoning to examine the impact of philanthropy on firms’ contracting costs in the capital market. We posit that philanthropy-based character inferences reduce investors’ agency concerns, thereby reducing firms’ cost of capital. We also posit that the strength of the philanthropy–cost (...) of capital relationship is contingent on uncertainty regarding a firm’s character, visibility of a firm, and prevailing philanthropic norms. We test and find support for our arguments in a longitudinal study of philanthropy and the cost of capital. Our findings have implications for business ethics research on corporate philanthropy and corporate social performance and for organizational research on social judgment. (shrink)

Mathematicians often speak of conjectures as being confirmed by evidence that falls short of proof. For their own conjectures, evidence justifies further work in looking for a proof. Those conjectures of mathematics that have long resisted proof, such as the Riemann hypothesis, have had to be considered in terms of the evidence for and against them. In recent decades, massive increases in computer power have permitted the gathering of huge amounts of numerical evidence, both for conjectures in pure mathematics and (...) for the behavior of complex applied mathematical models and statistical algorithms. Mathematics has therefore become (among other things) an experimental science (though that has not diminished the importance of proof in the traditional style). We examine how the evaluation of evidence for conjectures works in mathematical practice. We explain the (objective) Bayesian view of probability, which gives a theoretical framework for unifying evidence evaluation in science and law as well as in mathematics. Numerical evidence in mathematics is related to the problem of induction; the occurrence of straightforward inductive reasoning in the purely logical material of pure mathematics casts light on the nature of induction as well as of mathematical reasoning. (shrink)

Engaging in a dialogue with such major representatives of the dominant consensus as Kant, Habermas, and Rawls, and informed by the philosophical writings of ...

According to the BD-model of mindreading, we primarily understand others in terms of beliefs and desires. In this article we review a number of objections against explicit versions of the BD-model, and discuss the prospects of using its implicit counterpart as an explanatory model of early emerging socio-cognitive abilities. Focusing on recent findings on so-called ‘implicit’ false belief understanding, we put forward a number of considerations against the adoption of an implicit BD-model. Finally, we explore a different way to make (...) sense of implicit false belief understanding in terms of keeping track of affordances. (shrink)

Both children and adults predict the content of upcoming language, suggesting that prediction is useful for learning as well as processing. We present an alternative model which can explain prediction behaviour as a by-product of language learning. We suggest that a consideration of language acquisition places important constraints on Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) theory.

Lexicalized theories of syntax often assume that verb-structure regularities are mediated by lemmas, which abstract over variation in verb tense and aspect. German syntax seems to challenge this assumption, because verb position depends on tense and aspect. To examine how German speakers link these elements, a structural priming study was performed which varied syntactic structure, verb position, and verb overlap.structural priming was found, both within and across verb position, but priming was larger when the verb position was the same between (...) prime and target. Priming was boosted by verb overlap, but there was no interaction with verb position. The results can be explained by a lemma model where tense and aspect are linked to structural choices in German. Since the architecture of this lemma model is not consistent with results from English, a connectionist model was developed which could explain the cross-linguistic variation in the production system. Together, these findings support the view that language learning plays an important role in determining the nature of structural priming in different languages. (shrink)

That bad things happen to good people was as true in early China as it is today. Franklin Perkins uses this observation as the thread by which to trace the effort by Chinese thinkers of the Warring States Period, a time of great conflict and division, to seek reconciliation between humankind and the world. Perkins provides rich new readings of classical Chinese texts and reflects on their significance for Western philosophical discourse.

The Death of the Past argues that critical problems in the philosophy of history, such as the the truth of historical texts, how texts relate to the past that they are about, and the nature of historical explanation, can be successfully investigated if we accept the claim that historical writing is historicist--perspectival (from the standpoint of the historian) rather than purporting to be like an eyewitness account (as in the first-person "presentist" views critiqued by Enzo Traverso). This approach admits all (...) relevant evidence as subject to analysis in order to determine the widest point of view, as opposed to the biased "eyewitness" approach, which observes only partially. The link between the past itself and historical knowledge is radically broken, giving the latter the wisdom of hindsight across a broader temporal field from the events examined up to the present. The truth about the past is only accessible from a later point in time; "the past" itself is not a reality for the historian; it no longer exists. Frank Ankersmit offers a surprising foundation for the historicist notion of history: Leibniz' monadological universe, in which each monad or substance has its own point of view. There is no deeper ontology to which they owe their status--just an infinity of monads and a corresponding infinity of points of view on other monads. So with historical representations, statements about the past that can be either true or false but not depictions of the past itself. In striking contrast to Hayden White's view, Ankersmit insists that historical writing is no less rational than the sciences-- mathematical and scientific writing has its counterpart in the writing of history. (shrink)