Several recent articles raise an issue long unaddressed in the medical literature: physician compliance with patient or family requests for futile or ineffectice therapy. Although they agree philosophically that such treatment ought not be given, most physicians have followed the course described by Stanley Fiel, in which a young patient dying of cystic fibrosis was accepted “for evaluation” by a transplant center even though he has already passed the threshold of viability as a candidate for a heart-lung transplant. Dr. Fiel (...) reported this action was taken not in the hope of doing the transplant but so that the family could assure themselves they had done “everything possible.” The patient, after a long and stressful cross-country flight, arrived at the hospital in respiratory failure. He died soon thereafter far from home and familiar surroundings. (shrink)

The popular belief that religion is the same everywhere or that all religions are ‘at bottom’ identical in essentials is a widespread falsehood that is saved from being completely worthless by the fact that religion does exhibit a universal or common structure wherever it appears. This structure is intimately related to the structure of human life in the world. The enduring pattern that enables us to understand religions widely separated in both time and space depends largely on the fact that (...) man and the process of human life in the world have their own structures which remain, despite the undeniable variety introduced by vast differences of culture, ethnic features, geographical location, climate etc. Structure means pattern or form; it is reality significantly organised. It can be grasped as that which endures above and beyond changing historical details. Because human life has a structure, we are able to understand the wrath of Achilles or sympathise with the love of Abélard for Héloïse although we are separated from both by centuries of time. (shrink)

van der Velde & de Kamps argue for the importance of considering the binding problem in accounts of human mental representation. However, their proposed solution fails as a complete account because it represents the bindings between roles and their fillers through associations (or connections). In addition, many criticisms leveled by the authors towards synchrony-based bindings models do not hold.

Despite the title, I do not intend to launch another expedition into the domain of epistemology. I wish instead to call attention to some problems which have arisen for philosophical theologians and philosophers of religion, as a result of two facts about the development of modern philosophy and its bearing on the analysis and interpretation of religious insight. Following these considerations, I shall propose in brief compass a programme for the future which I believe will prove fruitful for the philosophical (...) treatment of religious concerns. (shrink)

Outpatient services are increasingly recognised as an important component of health care provision and may be improved through the application of modern management techniques. We have performed a time and role audit of consultation and waiting times in two medical clinics using different queuing systems: namely, a serial processing clinic where patients wait in a single queue and a quasi-parallel processing clinic where patients are directed to the shortest queue to maintain clinic flow. Data collected were used to construct a (...) computer simulation of patient flows in clinic. Assessment of patient satisfaction in the clinic process was determined using a self-administered questionnaire. Mean waiting time was shorter in the quasi-parallel processing clinic: 26 (SD 17) minutes compared with 36(24) minutes in the serial processing clinic. In the serial processing clinic 61% of patients waited more than 30 minutes compared with 41% in the quasi-parallel processing clinic. In the serial processing clinic 8% of 142 patients surveyed complained of the time spent waiting. The computer simulation we produced was able to determine waiting times with different clinic structures. The simulation showed that reductions in waiting time up to 30% might be achieved by changing our serial processing clinic to a quasi-parallel processing one. Performance of medical outpatient clinics can be improved by examining and changing clinic management. Computer simulation of outpatient clinics offers a means of assessing the impact of such changes on waiting time in clinic and on waiting lists. (shrink)

In the first comprehensive biography of Ferdinand de Saussure, John E. Joseph restores the full character and history of a man who is considered the founder of modern linguistics and whose ideas have influenced literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and virtually every other branch of humanities and the social sciences.

This work is an exploration of divine command theory, which is the theory that what makes something morally obligatory is that God commands it.

If one is an egalitarian, what should one want to equalize? Opportunities or outcomes? Resources or welfare? These positions are usually conceived to be very different. I argue in this paper that the distinction is misconceived: the only coherent conception of resource equality implies welfare equality, in an appropriately abstract description of the problem. In this section, I motivate the program which the rest of the paper carries out.

This book presents a detailed fieldwork-based study of the ancient Indian religion of Jainism. Drawing on field research in northern Gujarat and on the study of both ancient Sanskrit and Prakrit and modern vernacular Jain religious literature, John Cort provides a rounded portrait of the religion as it is practiced today.

_A new theory of how and why we cooperate, drawing from economics, political theory, and philosophy to challenge the conventional wisdom of game theory_ Game theory explains competitive behavior by working from the premise that people are self-interested. People don’t just compete, however; they also cooperate. John Roemer argues that attempts by orthodox game theorists to account for cooperation leave much to be desired. Unlike competing players, cooperating players take those actions that they would like others to take—which Roemer (...) calls “Kantian optimization.” Through rigorous reasoning and modeling, Roemer demonstrates a simpler theory of cooperative behavior than the standard model provides. (shrink)

This review of Martin Jay’s recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth-construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of (...) paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth-telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process. (shrink)

_God and Morality_ evaluates the ethical theories of four principle philosophers, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, Kant, and R.M. Hare. Uses their thinking as the basis for telling the story of the history and development of ethical thought more broadly Focuses specifically on their writings on virtue, will, duty, and consequence Concentrates on the theistic beliefs to highlight continuity of philosophical thought.

Utilitarians, maximinners, prioritarians, and sufficientarians each provide examples of situations demonstrating, often apparently compellingly, that a sensible ethical observer must adopt their view and reject the others. I argue, to the contrary, that an attractive ethic is eclectic or pluralistic, in the sense of coinciding with these apparently different views in different regions of the space of social states. I reject the view that an appealing ethic can be universally maximin, prioritarian, or utilitarian. Key Words: distributive justice • utilitarianism • (...) maximin • sufficiency • priority. (shrink)

As a work of a scholarship it seems to me to compare favourably with the best books on the subject, including those by Marcus Singer and Onora Nell.' Prof.

This article summarizes a variety of current as well as previous research in support of a new theory of consciousness. Evidence has been steadily accumulating that information about a stimulus complex is distributed to many neuronal populations dispersed throughout the brain and is represented by the departure from randomness of the temporal pattern of neural discharges within these large ensembles. Zero phase lag synchronization occurs between discharges of neurons in different brain regions and is enhanced by presentation of stimuli. This (...) evidence further suggests that spatiotemporal patterns of coherence, which have been identified by spatial principal component analysis, may encode a multidimensional representation of a present or past event. How such distributed information is integrated into a holistic percept constitutes the binding problem. How a percept defined by a spatial distribution of nonrandomness can be subjectively experienced constitutes the problem of consciousness. Explanations based on a discrete connectionistic network cannot be reconciled with the relevant facts. Evidence is presented herein of invariant features of brain electrical activity found to change reversibly with loss and return of consciousness in a study of 176 patients anesthetized during surgical procedures. A review of relevant research areas, as well as the anesthesia data, leads to a postulation that consciousness is a property of quantumlike processes, within a brain field resonating within a core of structures, which may be the neural substrate of consciousness. This core includes regions of the prefrontal cortex, the frontal cortex, the pre- and paracentral cortex, thalamus, limbic system, and basal ganglia. (shrink)

This article explores the rhetoric, and mass mediation, of the national Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration ceremony, as broadcast on British television. I argue that the televised national ceremonies should be approached as an example of multi-genre epideictic rhetoric, working up meanings through a hybrid combination of genres, author/animators and modes. Epideictic rhetoric has often been depreciated as simply ceremonial ‘praise or blame’ speeches. However, given that the topics of praise/blame assume the existence of social norms, epideictic also acts to presuppose (...) and evoke common values, in general, and a collective recognition of shared social responsibilities, in particular. My methodology draws on the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, given, first, its central prominence in analysing argumentative strategies in discourse and, second, the ways it facilitates a reflexive ‘shuttling’ between text-discursive features, intertextual relations and wider contexts of society and history. Here, I examine how a catastrophic past is invoked in speech and evoked through image and music, in response to the demands that uncertainty of the future ‘places upon one’s conscience’. (shrink)

Ramscar and colleagues (2010, this volume) describe the “feature-label-order” (FLO) effect on category learning and characterize it as a constraint on symbolic learning. I argue that FLO is neither a constraint on symbolic learning in the sense of “learning elements of a symbol system” (instead, it is an effect on nonsymbolic, association learning) nor is it, more than any other constraint on category learning, a constraint on symbolic learning in the sense of “solving the symbol grounding problem.”.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.1 (2003) 1-20 [Access article in PDF] Crime, Compassion, and The Reader John E. MacKinnon IN "WRITING AFTER AUSCHWITZ," Günter Grass describes how at the age of seventeen he stubbornly refused to believe the evidence arrayed before him and his classmates of Nazi atrocities, the photographs showing piles of eyeglasses, shoes, hair, and bones. "Germans never could have done, never did do a thing like (...) that," he recalls thinking. And "when the Never collapsed," he and other young Germans were assured that they were free of responsibility. "It took several more years," Grass reports, "before I began to realize: This will not go away; our shame cannot be repressed or come to terms with." Later, he confesses that those of his age "belonged to the Auschwitz generation—not as criminals, to be sure, but in the camp of the criminals." 1Although one would be hard-pressed to find a novel more dramatically different in style and narrative development than Grass's own dark, audacious fables, Bernhard Schlink's The Reader 2 nonetheless shares this fascination with the notion of collective guilt, in particular the burden of inheritance endured by Germany's "second generation." Set in a university town in the late 1950s, the novel tells the story of a high school student, Michael Berg, who falls in love with Hanna Schmitz, a woman twenty years his senior. Though capable of genuine concern and deep affection, Hanna is oddly secretive, often brusque and officious, occasionally given to cruelty and sarcasm, and prone to unpredictable fits of pique. She also has an endearing quirk: she likes Michael to read to her. Eventually, and without explanation, she vanishes from Michael's life. It is seven years before he sees her again, when, as a law student, he attends a trial of concentration-camp guards, one of whom is Hanna. She stands accused, along with four other [End Page 1] women, of serving at both Auschwitz and a satellite camp near Cracow, of being actively involved in the selection of prisoners for almost certain death, and of locking several hundred women in a church, where they burned to death during a bombing raid.In light of testimony given at trial, Hanna's puzzling conduct, and his own recollections of their time together, it finally dawns on Michael that Hanna cannot read, that she was and remains illiterate. But while in retrospect this may explain certain episodes of frustration, incomprehension, and overreaction on her part, does it have any bearing on her guilt? What would Michael himself have done if similarly situated, and similarly limited? Thus, the story of Michael and Hanna serves as an allegory of the relation between the two generations of Germans, those who were Nazis, or who at least assisted or accommodated them, and the "lucky late-born." It is against this background that Schlink is able most searchingly to investigate questions of complicity, recrimination, and atonement.As much courtroom drama as rite-of-passage tale, The Reader is also something of a philosophical investigation. According to Eva Hoffman, in fact, Schlink has managed to compose "a fictionalized essay... a kind of philosophical parable." For all the briskly evocative prose, she adds, The Reader "gradually acquires some of the severity of a legal or logical argument, in which propositions are set forth and then tested from various points of view." 3 In a recent article, Jeremiah P. Conway offers a sympathetic interpretation of the novel, attending in particular to the philosophical issues that it raises. Conway challenges Martha Nussbaum's claim that it is logically incoherent for us to feel compassion for one whom we hold responsible for a morally reprehensible act. 4 For in Hanna, he suggests, we have a compelling counterexample, a fit object of our compassion no less than our condemnation. And yet, Conway's challenge is grounded in an even more fundamental denial that The Reader is at all concerned to establish the circumstances of Hanna's life as mitigating her crime.In what follows, I will argue that this interpretation is untenable... (shrink)