In this paper, we consider three arguments for the irrelevance of the doctrine of double effect in end-of-life decision making. The third argument is our own and, to that extent, we seek to defend it. The first argument is that end-of-life decisions do not in fact shorten lives and that therefore there is no need for the doctrine in justification of these decisions. We reject this argument; some end-of-life decisions clearly shorten lives. The second is that the doctrine of double (...) effect is not recognized in UK law ; therefore, clinicians cannot use it as the basis for justification of their decisions. Against this we suggest that while the doctrine might have dubious legal grounds, it could be of relevance in some ways, e.g. in marking the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable practice in relation to the clinician's duty to relieve pain and suffering. The third is that the doctrine is irrelevant because it requires there to be a bad effect that needs justification. This is not the case in end-of-life care for patients diagnosed as dying. Here, bringing about a satisfactory dying process for a patient is a good effect, not a bad one. What matters is that patients die without pain and suffering. This marks a crucial departure from the double-effect doctrine; if the patient's death is not a bad effect then the doctrine is clearly irrelevant. A diagnosis of dying allows clinicians to focus on good dying and not to worry about whether their intervention affects the time of death. For a patient diagnosed as dying, time of death is rarely important. In our conclusion we suggest that acceptance of our argument might be problematic for opponents of physician-assisted death. We suggest one way in which these opponents might argue for a distinction between such practice and palliative care; this relies on the double-effect doctrine's distinction between foresight and intention. (shrink)

The Mental Capacity Act received Royal Assent on 7 April 2005, and it will be implemented in 2007. The Act defines when someone lacks capacity and it supports people with limited decision-making ability to make as many decisions as possible for themselves. The Act lays down rules for substitute decision making. Someone taking decisions on behalf of the person lacking capacity must act in the best interests of the person concerned and choose the options least restrictive of his or her (...) rights and freedoms. Decision making will be allowed without any formal procedure unless specific provisions apply, such as a written advance decision, lasting powers of attorney or a decision by the court of protection. (shrink)

Kant’s critique/doctrine distinction tracks the difference between a canon for the understanding’s proper use and an organon for its dialectical misuse. The latter reflects the dogmatic use of reason to attain a doctrine of knowledge with no antecedent critique. In the 1790s, Fichte collapses Kant’s distinction and redefines dogmatism. He argues that deriving a canon is essentially dialectical and thus yields an organon: critical idealism is properly a doctrine of science or Wissenschaftslehre. Criticism is furthermore said to refute dogmatism, by (...) which Fichte means Spinozism. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s position in his Philosophical Letters by reviving Kant’s distinction. First, ‘critique’ for Schelling names a canon that is valid for all systems—including Spinozism—and thus favours none—not even the Wissenschaftslehre. Second, Schelling coins ‘dogmaticism’ to refer to what Kant calls ‘dogmatism’: reason’s uncritical claim to doctrine. Hence, he says all systems—even Fichte’s—are susceptible to the ‘enthusiasm’ of mistaking themselves for doctrines or ‘objects of knowledge’, instead of subjectively valid ‘objects of freedom’. I reconstruct Schelling’s argument for reviving Kant’s distinction, while noting two consequences for German idealism. First, if criticism favours no system, a system’s origin cannot be an act of knowledge, e.g., intellectual intuition, but only an act of endorsement. Second, if dogmaticism entails enthusiasm, a system’s goal cannot be absolute knowledge, but only infinite striving. Hence, by retrieving Schelling’s notion of dogmaticism, we can both gain a better understanding of the Letters and register the impact of a core Kantian distinction on the German idealist project. (shrink)

Meillassoux seeks knowledge of transcendental reality, blaming Kant for the ‘correlationist’ proscription of independent access to either thought or being. For Meillassoux, correlationism blocks an account of the meaning of ‘ancestral statements’ regarding reality prior to humans. I examine three charges on which Meillassoux’s argument depends: (1) Kant distorts ancestral statements’ meaning; (2) Kant fallaciously infers causality’s necessity; (3) Kant’s transcendental idealism cannot grasp ‘the great outdoors’. I reject these charges: (1) imposes a Cartesian misreading, hence Meillassoux’s false assumption that, (...) for Kant, objects don’t exist without subjects; (2) misreads Kant, who infers causality’s necessity from the possibility of experience; (3) casts Kant’s idealism as subjective, ignoring his perspectival portrayal of it. (shrink)

McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) description of beliefs, and misbeliefs in particular, is a commendable contribution to the literature; but we argue that referring to beliefs as adaptive or maladaptive can cause conceptual confusion. “Adaptive” is inconsistently defined in the article, which adds to confusion and renders it difficult to evaluate the claims, particularly the possibility of “adaptive misbelief.”.

This article introduces evolutionary psychology to a general readership, with the purpose of applying evolutionary psychology to suicide terrorism. Some of the key concepts related to evolutionary psychology are discussed, as well as several misconceptions associated with this approach to psychology. We argue that one of the primary, but insufficient, motivating factors for suicide terrorism is strong religious belief. Evolutionary psychological theories related to religious belief, and supporting empirical work, are described, laying a foundation for examining suicide terrorism. Several promising (...) directions for future research on suicide terrorism from an evolutionary psychological perspective are highlighted, particularly within the theoretical framework of kin selection, and the implications of applying evolutionary psychology to suicide terrorism are discussed. (shrink)

Current diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia place emphasis on delusions and hallucinations, whereas the classical descriptions of schizophrenia by Kraepelin and Bleuler emphasized disorganization and impoverishment of mental activity. Despite the availability of antipsychotic medication for treating delusions and hallucinations, many patients continue to experience persisting disability. Improving treatment requires a better understanding of the processes leading to persisting disability. We recently introduced the term classical schizophrenia to describe cases with disorganized and impoverished mental activity, cognitive impairment and predisposition to persisting (...) disability. Recent evidence reveals that a polygenic score indicating risk for schizophrenia predicts severity of the features of classical schizophrenia: disorganization, and to a lesser extent, impoverishment of mental activity and cognitive impairment. Current understanding of brain function attributes a cardinal role to predictive coding: the process of generating models of the world that are successively updated in light of confirmation or contradiction by subsequent sensory information. It has been proposed that abnormalities of these predictive processes account for delusions and hallucinations. Here we examine the evidence provided by electrophysiology and fMRI indicating that imprecise predictive coding is the core pathological process in classical schizophrenia, accounting for disorganization, psychomotor poverty and cognitive impairment. Functional imaging reveals aberrant brain activity at network hubs engaged during encoding of predictions. We discuss the possibility that frequent prediction errors might promote excess release of the neurotransmitter, dopamine, thereby accounting for the occurrence of episodes of florid psychotic symptoms including delusions and hallucinations in classical schizophrenia. While the predictive coding hypotheses partially accounts for the time-course of classical schizophrenia, the overall body of evidence indicates that environmental factors also contribute. We discuss the evidence that chronic inflammation is a mechanism that might link diverse genetic and environmental etiological factors, and contribute to the proposed imprecision of predictive coding. (shrink)

How democratic is contemporary Indonesia? While analysts differ, Indonesian citizens, when asked in systematic public opinion surveys conducted regularly by the authors since 1999, consistently express strong support for democratic principles and also believe that their country's democratic performance is high. Support for democratic performance is highly correlated with support for government performance, as measured by perceptions of the condition of the national economy and political system. At the same time, higher levels of education and income, in Indonesia as in (...) other countries, have created a considerable number of critical citizens, that is, citizens who value democracy but are critical of its performance. On our evidence for Indonesia, it is members of this group who are the most motivated and best prepared to demand a higher level of democratic performance from their elected officials. (shrink)

Bazzocchi disposes the text of the Tractatus in a user-friendly manner, exactly as Wittgenstein's decimals advise. This discloses the logical form of the book by distinct reading units, linked into a fashioned hierarchical tree. The text becomes much clearer and every reader can enjoy, finally, its formal and literary qualities.

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge—an interconnected causal network, where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms—causal islands—such that events in different mechanisms are not thought to be related even when they belong to the same causal chain. To distinguish these possibilities, we tested whether people make transitive judgments about causal chains by inferring, given A causes B and B causes C, (...) that A causes C. Specifically, causal chains schematized as one chunk or mechanism in semantic memory led to transitive causal judgments. On the other hand, chains schematized as multiple chunks led to intransitive judgments despite strong intermediate links. Normative accounts of causal intransitivity could not explain these intransitive judgments. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

In this book William G. Lycan offers an epistemology of philosophy itself, a partial method for philosophical inquiry. The epistemology features three ultimate sources of justified philosophical belief. First, common sense, in a carefully restricted sense of the term-the sorts of contingentpropositions Moore defended against idealists and skeptics. Second, the deliverances of well confirmed science. Third and more fundamentally, intuitions about cases in a carefully specified sense of that term. The first half of On Evidence in Philosophy expounds a version (...) of Moore's method and applies it to each of several issues. This version is shown to resist all the standard objections to Moore; most of them do not even apply. It is argued, in Chapters 5 and 6, that philosophical method is far lesspowerful than most have taken it to be. In particular, deductive argument can accomplish very little, and hardly ever is an opposing position refuted except by common sense or by science. The final two chapters defend the evidential status of intuitions and the Goodmanian method of reflectiveequilibrium; it is argued that philosophy always and everywhere depends on them. The method is then set within a more general explanatory-coherentist epistemology, which is shown to resist standard forms of skepticism.In sum, William G. Lycan advocates a picture of philosophy as a very wide explanatory reflective equilibrium incorporating common sense, science, and our firmest intuitions on any topic-and nothing more, not ever. (shrink)

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Anscombe on thought, experience, sensation, and the ethics of virtue Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe is one of analytical philosophy's most prominent figures, the founder of consequentialism, and a leading mind in the field of virtue ethics. Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: The collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, Volume 2, is part of a multivolume compilation of her life's work, providing insight into the mind of a groundbreaking 20th century philosopher. This volume's work explores memory, intentionality, causality and time, (...) delving into the language, actions, and logic of perception, sensation, and more. (shrink)

A directory of archives and manuscript repositories, with links to web pages for the repositories and to online finding aids. Searchable by: collection name; city; state; National Inventory of Documentary Sources (NIDS) number; and National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) number.