Integrating theory with case studies, this book examines the practical application of moral theory in clinical decision-making through 40 composite cases based on actual clinical experience. Complex, realistic, and challenging, these examples contain the multiplicity of factors faced in clinical crises, making this a superb exploration of the ways in which theory relates to actual life-or-death situations.

In a world of rapid technological advances, the moral issues raised by life and death choices in healthcare remain obscure. _Life and Death in Healthcare Ethics_ provides a concise, thoughtful and extremely accessible guide to these moral issues. Helen Watt examines, using real-life cases, the range of choices taken by healthcare professionals, patients and clients which lead to the shortening of life. The topics looked at include: * euthanasia and withdrawal of treatment * the persistent vegetative state (...) * abortion * IVF and cloning * life-saving treatment of pregnant women Clearly written and insightful, _Life and Death in Healthcare Ethics_ presupposes no prior knowledge of philosophy. It will be of interest to anyone confronting healthcare ethics for the first time, or seeking to develop his or her understanding of some core topics in the field. (shrink)

Most of the images evoked by the term shamanism are derived from the soul's field of experience. These images run the gamut of possibilities, from a disconcerting exoticism to the most intimate familiarity. Sometimes the shaman's role is limited to that of pathetic hero, struggling in solitude against hostile nature; sometimes he becomes the rudimentary model of the mystic or even of the psychiatrist of contemporary societies. These images, however, without being completely false, wrongly reduce the shamanic phenomenon to the (...) shaman's personality and limit his field of action to the individual psyche. This limitation hardly does justice to the realities of shamanistic societies. What is missing in the shaman-centered view is the collective's slumbering velleity of itself entering into shamanic experience. Each cure becomes an occasion for collective renewal and joy. The shaman's activities in séance, it is believed, are an expression of the direct contact he has established with the spirits and of his power over them; his duties are the realization of a ritual act carried out at the behest of the community. (shrink)

One of the concepts which deserves particular attention by philosophers of the 21th century is that of life and, more specifically, that of human life. Because life on Earth is limited, mankind has historically relied on religion for its promise of salvation and an afterlife.Yet, recently, people have been relying on alternative institutions, such as the state or market, for answers to their questions about the limited nature of human life. With the rise of dependence on (...) such instituions comes the rise of new questions: are the state and market responsible for defining the meaning of life and for providing adequate answers to the suffering and death that afflict humankind? Can the state make use of technology and scientific knowledge in order to regulate population according to its objectives? Is there any ethical limit to the experimentation with the different phases of human life? Is it possible to preserve a sacral sphere for human life? This book provides extensive reflection and possible solutions to these perplexities. (shrink)

The pursuit of happiness is a long-enshrined tradition that has recently become the cornerstone of the American Positive Psychology movement. However, “happiness” is an over-worked and ambiguous word, which, it is argued, should be restricted and only used as the label for a brief emotional state that typically lasts a few seconds or minutes. The corollary proposal for positive psychology is that optimism is a preferable stance over pessimism or realism. Examples are presented both from psychology and economics (...) that illustrate the dangers of optimism, and in which better outcomes can occur with a pessimistic stance. A more sophisticated approach is then presented in which, in relation to well-being and quality of life, neither optimism nor pessimism is seen as inherently better than the other, but, rather, in which psychological flexibility may contribute optimally to health and well-being. (shrink)

This is the earliest critical discussion in the context of modern/contemporary philosophy in the analytical tradition arguing that somebody with a reasonably stable character and the company of the right people would be able to enjoy eternity.

This paper begins with the lived accounts of emergency and critical care medical interventions in which an unhoused person is brought to the emergency department in cardiac arrest. The case is a dramatised representation of the extent to which biopolitical forces via reduction to bare life through biopolitical and necropolitical operations are prominent influences in nursing and medical care. This paper draws on the scholarship of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe to offer a theoretical analysis of the (...) power dynamics that influence the health care and death care of patients who are caught in the auspices of a neoliberal capitalist healthcare apparatus. This paper offers analysis of the overt displays of biopower over those individuals cast aside as generally unworthy of access to healthcare in a postcolonial capitalist system, in addition to the ways in which humans are reduced to ‘bare life’ in their dying days. We analyse this case study through Agamben's description of thanatopolitics, a ‘regime of death’, and the technologies that accompany the dying process, particularly in that of the homo sacer. Additionally, this paper illustrates the ways in which necropolitics and biopower are integral to understanding how the most advanced and expensive medical interventions make visible the political values of the healthcare system and how nurses and healthcare functions in these deathworlds. The purpose of this paper is to develop a greater understanding of biopolitical and necropolitical operations in acute and critical care environments, and to offer guidance to nurses in these spaces as they work to uphold ethical duties in a system that increasingly dehumanises. (shrink)

When and why is it right to kill? When and why is it wrong? Torbjörn Tännsjö examines three theories on the ethics of killing in this book: deontology, a libertarian moral rights theory, and utilitarianism. The implications of each theory are worked out for different kinds of killing: trolley-cases, murder, capital punishment, suicide, assisted death, abortion, killing in war, and the killing of animals. These implications are confronted with our intuitions in relation to them, and our moral intuitions are examined (...) in turn. Only those intuitions that survive an understanding of how we have come to hold them are seen as 'considered' intuitions. The idea is that the theory that can best explain the content of our considered intuitions gains inductive support from them. We must transcend our narrow cultural horizons and avoid certain cognitive mistakes in order to hold considered intuitions. In this volume, suitable for courses in ethics and applied ethics, Tännsjö argues that in the final analysis utilitarianism can best account for, and explain, our considered intuitions about all these kinds of killing. (shrink)

Death and grief in the ancient world -- Predictions and disability in Rome.

In the article, the author addresses with two ways of dealing with life, biopolitics, and necropolitics, and connects them to the excess of power over life and death in the era of neoliberal global capitalism. Dealing with necropolitical processes requires a different analysis of spaces and temporalities, of necrospaces and necrotemporalities. It also requires consideration of the possibilities of resistance to necropolitical processes by those who are by no means silent witnesses, by no means mere victims, (...) but subjects who have undergone a process of (de)subjectivation in a way that, as Achille Mbembe would argue, leads to a process of destruction of their own subjectivity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Their Father’s Library: Books Furnish Not Only a Room, But Also a Tradition ELIZABETH POWERS Although they shared close life dates and became famous in the same years for their epistolary novels, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and Fanny Burney (1752–1840) would seem to have been worlds apart literarily. (Goethe had in his Weimar library a copy of Evelina, while Burney was probably not ignorant of the (...) Europe-wide sensation The Sorrows ofYoung Werther.) What might be called their literary apprenticeship, however, was remarkably similar, consisting not of schooling in a traditional institution in which students (and, importantly, most eighteenth-century writers) were drilled in the classical curriculum, but, instead, from wide reading within the confines of their fathers’ libraries. It is true that Goethe and his younger sister Cornelia were supplied at home with a number of tutors and that their progress was monitored by their father, but their acquaintance with literature was fostered within the confines of the family home. Burney had no formal education at all. Indeed, on the appearance of Evelina, her father (according to her diary) remarked : “[S]he has had very little Education but what she has given herself,—less than any of the others!” Burney, however, had the advantage of growing up in a milieu in which books mattered. While the Goethes were eminently respectable, on the mother’s side part of what was the patriciate of the city of Frankfurt, the Burney household in London was bursting with wits and with what can only be called celebrities. The Burneys knew God and the world: David Garrick, Dr. Johnarion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 116 in their father’s library son, Hester Thrale. As Virginia Woolf noted of the famous father, Dr. Charles Burney, he was a musician “who could talk of intellectual things and ask clever people to his house.” Goethe has given plenty of evidence of roaming freely among his father’s books, a collection of 1,700 calfskin-bound volumes. When Burney went to serve at the court of King George III, Queen Charlotte was disappointed at how few books the author of Evelina possessed. (Similarities accumulate: Goethe also served at court, as minister in the duchy of Weimar.) But why cart around a load of books? As Burney wrote in her diary: “[M]y Father’s most delightful Library, as I then told her [the Queen], with my free access to it, had made [owning my own books] a thing unnecessary... ” Libraries in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, whether private or public affairs, were not like contemporary public libraries, catering to a wide array of tastes, but were repositories of what Matthew Arnold termed “the best that is known and thought in the world.” Let’s call it the Western intellectual and cultural heritage. Most respectable homes would possess at a minimum a Bible, while the holdings in private homes, as evident in the library of Goethe’s father, could reach astounding proportions. According to Burney biographer Claire Harman, Fanny’s brother left at his death one of the finest private libraries of the age. Moreover, the antiquity of the works in the venerable libraries scattered across Europe from Dublin to Saint Petersburg, and especially their survival despite centuries of vicissitudes, was testimony to the authoritative nature of the transmission. Anyone who took the Bible in hand, who took lessons from it, adhering, for instance, to the injunctions of the Ten Commandments, was conscious of subscribing to values shared by preceding generations. Literary practitioners, also showing obeisance to authoritative predecessors, followed earlier models, in the process contributing to an evolving literary heritage. There was no purity in this transmission. It was truly promiscuous, but its quasi-biological character, like a mother’s left-handedness in a child, can be seen in the family Elizabeth Powers 117 resemblances among writers of different eras. Just as individuals perpetuate traits of their parents, so literature and the other arts recycled features of artistic predecessors. Writers as diverse in background and language and religion as Ariosto and Milton transmitted the dna, so to speak, of such epical forebears as Homer and Virgil. This sort of family legitimacy was... (shrink)

In theory, at least, we might achieve a certain sort of invulnerability right at the end of life. Suppose that under favorable circumstances we can live a certain number of years, say 125, but no longer, and also that we can make life as a whole better and better over time. Under these assumptions we might hope to disarm death by spending 125 years making life as good as it can be. If we were lucky enough (...) to accomplish that, afterwards we would be immune to mortal harm. Especially for those who are closer to the beginning of life than to the end, however, this strategy leaves much to be desired. It is like devouring an entire banquet so as to eliminate the danger of someone stealing it from us. Like a feast, a good life is safely ours after it is over, but then safety comes too late to be of any use to us. To be of practical value, we need protection from mortal harm much earlier in life. (shrink)

The work of Foucault on liberal government, and that of his followers, is subject to two dangers. The first is to regard the critical character of liberalism (as governing through freedom) as providing safeguards against the despotic potentials of biopower and sovereignty. The second is to regard these heterogenous powers of life and death as somehow simply relocated or reinscribed within the field of liberal governmentality. The latter point is a major methodological error; the former closes the gap between (...) the analytics of government and the normativity of liberalism itself. By working through these dangers, our understanding of the ethos of liberal government is transformed. That ethos today requires us to link governing through freedom to the powers of life and death, the exercise of choice to the sovereign decision, the contract to violence, economic citizenship to moral discipline and obligation, and rights and liberties to enforcement. (shrink)

How should modern medicine's dramatic new powers to sustain life be employed? How should limited resources be used to extend and improve the quality of life? In this collection, Dan Brock, a distinguished philosopher and bioethicist and co-author of Deciding for Others (Cambridge, 1989), explores the moral issues raised by new ideals of shared decision making between physicians and patients. The book develops an ethical framework for decisions about life-sustaining treatment and euthanasia, and examines how these (...) class='Hi'>life and death decisions are transformed in health policy when the focus shifts from what is best for a patient to what is just for all patients. Professor Brock combines acute philosophical analysis with a deep understanding of the realities of clinical health policy. This is a volume for philosophers concerned with medical ethics, health policy professionals, physicians interested in bioethics, and undergraduate courses in biomedical ethics. (shrink)

First published in 2012. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The technological advances in medicine, including prolongation of life, have constituted several dilemmas at the end of life. In the context of the Belgian debates on end-of-life care, the views of Muslim women remain understudied. The aim of this article is fourfold. First, we seek to describe the beliefs and attitudes of middle-aged and elderly Moroccan Muslim women toward withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatments. Second, we aim to identify whether differences are observable among middle-aged and elderly (...) women’s attitudes toward withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatments. Third, we aim to explore the role of religion in their attitudes. Fourth, we seek to document how our results are related to normative Islamic literature. Qualitative empirical research was conducted with a sample of middle-aged and elderly Moroccan Muslim women living in Antwerp and with experts in the field. We found an unconditional belief in God’s sovereign power over the domain of life and death and in God’s almightiness. However, we also found a tolerant attitude, mainly among our middle-aged participants, toward withholding and withdrawing based on theological, eschatological, financial and quality of life arguments. Our study reveals that religious beliefs and worldviews have a great impact on the ethical attitudes toward end-of-life issues. We found divergent positions toward withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatments, reflecting the lines of reasoning found in normative Islamic literature. In our interviews, theological and eschatological notions emerged as well as financial and quality of life arguments. (shrink)

Some of the first figures the Nazis conscripted in their rise to power were rhetoricians devoted to popularizing the German vocabulary of Leben (life). This fascinating study reexamines this movement through one of its most prominent exponents, Ludwig Klages, revealing the philosophical-cultural crises and political volatility of the Weimar era.

Fundamentals -- Beginning-of-life issues -- Reproductive technologies -- Contraception, sterilization, and natural family planning -- End-of-life issues -- Cooperation with evil -- Respect for the body -- The ten commandments for health care professionals and patients.

In this book, Ramsey addresses the moral problems of medicine, life and death and not merely to those who share his faith.

We use content analysis to show that the diagnosis of the financial crisis of 2007–2009 shifted significantly from a focus on the need for structural change in the banking industry to an emphasis on culture and reform at the organizational level. We consider four overlapping subsystems in which this shift in problem–solution clusters played out—political, regulatory, legal, and consulting—and show that the “structural reform agenda,” which was initially strong and publicly prominent in the political arena, lost attention. Over time (...) it was displaced by a neoliberal managerialist turn, which watered down or abandoned structural solutions and instead played up a new “culture and conduct reform agenda.” We explain this shift in terms of the marketization of regulation, which—following Mautner (_Language and the market society_, 1st ed. Routledge, 2010)’s model of interdiscursive alignment—we detect in the shifting language of financial-services reform across the four subsystems in scope. We argue that a neoliberal turn took place with a _discursive closure_ that made the structural reform alternative gradually unsayable and, in the end, unthinkable. At the same time, the discourse turned to embrace the neoliberal agenda, built on the myth of self-regulating actors and markets, manifest in the culture problematic. This managerialist turn was able to mobilise, and be operationalised by, an industry of consultants, whereas structural change came to be seen by regulators as too risky to implement. We claim that these dynamics reveal how a form of “collective strategic ignorance,” based on powerful institutional myths, was systematically oriented to ignore and reject structural sources of crisis. Finally, we suggest that the observed pattern of displacement—whereby initial calls for structural change become later displaced by managerial and procedural solutions—is common to other social issues, such as audit reform and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

This metaphysical and personal exploration of the nature of life provides a rare guide to living and dying fearlessly and with grace. Using the wisdom obtained over a lifetime of spiritual seeking, study, and practice, along with insights gained from the death of her significant other, Clare Goldsberry explores the fundamental nature of life and death, as well as their meaning and purpose. Sharing the wisdom and knowledge of the ancient sages, spiritual teachers like the Buddha, philosophers (...) like Plato and Seneca, and modern-day quantum physicists, Goldsberry walks us through the mystery of death and dying-and explores the meaning and purpose of life. Drawing from Buddhism, Hinduism, and her partner's cancer journey, she provides a profound view of living and dying as seen through the ages by those who have sought answers regarding the most mysterious aspect of life-this thing we call death. Clare Goldsberry has experienced Protestant Christianity, Mormonism, the Ageless Wisdom Teachings, Gnosticism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. She writes about religion and spiritual traditions for Quest magazine and other publications, and her book A Stranger in Zion: A Christian's Journey through the Heart of Utah Mormonism won the Arizona Book Publishers Association's Glyph Award for Best Religion Book in 2003. Goldsberry has also published six books on marketing and sales strategies for small- to mid-sized manufacturing companies, and she founded her own marketing and public relations business in 1989. She lives and works in Arizona. (shrink)

By providing an interdisciplinary reading of advance directives regulation in international, European and domestic law, this book offers new insights into the most controversial legal issues surrounding the debate over dignity and autonomy ...

According to the "sanctity-of-life" view, all human lives are equally valuable and inviolable, and it would be wrong to base life-and-death medical decisions on the quality of the patient's life. Examining the ideas and assumptions behind the sanctity-of-life view, Kuhse argues against the traditional view that allowing someone to die is morally different from killing, and shows that quality-of-life judgments are ubiquitous. Refuting the sanctity-of-life view, she provides a sketch of a quality-of-life ethics (...) based on the belief that there is a profound difference between merely being alive and life being in the patient's interest. (shrink)

How should modern medicine's dramatic new powers to sustain life be employed? How should limited resources be used to extend and improve the quality of life? In this collection, Dan Brock, a distinguished philosopher and bioethicist and co-author of Deciding for Others, explores the moral issues raised by new ideals of shared decision making between physicians and patients. The book develops an ethical framework for decisions about life-sustaining treatment and euthanasia, and examines how these life and (...) death decisions are transformed in health policy when the focus shifts from what is best for a patient to what is just for all patients. Professor Brock combines acute philosophical analysis with a deep understanding of the realities of clinical health policy. This is a volume for philosophers concerned with medical ethics, health policy professionals, physicians interested in bioethics, and undergraduate courses in biomedical ethics. (shrink)

The case of Terri Schiavo, a young woman who spent 15 years in a persistent vegetative state, has emerged as a watershed in debates over end-of-life care. While many observers had thought the right to refuse medical treatment was well established, this case split a family, divided a nation, and counfounded physicians, legislators, and many of the people they treated or represented. In renewing debates over the importance of advance directives, the appropriate role of artificial hydration and (...) nutrition, and the responsibilities of family members, the case also became one of history's most extensively litigated health care disputes. The Case of Terri Schiavo assembles a team of first-hand participants and content experts to provide thoughtful and nuanced analyses. In addition to a comprehensive overview, the book includes contributions by Ms. Schiavo's guardian ad litem, a neurologist and lawyer who participated in the case, and scholars who examine issues related to litigation, faith, gender, and disability. The volume also includes a powerful dissent from the views of many scholars in the bioethics community. The book is intended for students, health care professionals, policy makers, and other in search of carefully reasoned analyses of the case that will shape our view of death and end-of-life medical care for decades. (shrink)

The author encountered evocations of suffering and death in all the studies and research he devoted, over 40 or so years, to the intellectual, social and religious life of western Muslim Judaism, and indeed the whole of traditional Jewish thought and its varied modes of expression: rabbinical law, Hebrew poetry, the literature of homily and preaching, mystical writings and the kabbala, dialect and popular literatures in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Berber. Some passages are taken from the Zohar (‘The town the (...) angel of death cannot enter’, for instance). The author also refers to the Talmud and magic therapeutics, the power of sacred names, Jewish and Muslim miracle workers, hunting down and casting out demons, etc. Agony, refusal to die, joyous commemoration of death, the cemetery and the cult of the dead, Judeo-Muslim pilgrimages, the wealth of the customs, beliefs and rites of the past lead the author to reflect on the question of death in the present-day world. (shrink)

According to Foucault, the human body is the targeted object of modern power systems. In his genealogical studies, Foucault describes the manner in which these power systems leave an imprint on the body and utilize knowledge of the body as an indirect means of exercising subtle forms of control. In recent years, several researchers have claimed that the status of the body, subsumed as it is by modern power networks, has become a means for conducting a unique (...) political critique in which the human being is viewed as an agent of oppression and freedom. This article takes a fresh look at Foucault’s notions of life and death that underpin the critical understanding the body–power relationship. While this approach recognizes the completeness of subjective structuring processes, it also enables the formulation of new insights regarding the status of the modern individual as the subject of separate and independent modes of speech and action. (shrink)

Abstractp53 is a multifunctional protein which plays a role in modulating gene transcription, policing cell cycle checkpoints, activating apoptosis, controlling DNA replication and repair, maintaining genomic stability and responding to genetic insults. Mutation of the p53 gene confers the single greatest known selective advantage favoring cancer formation. Point mutations result not only in the loss of tumor suppressor functions, but also in the gain of tumor promotion functions. These dual circumstances may be unique to p53 and, in part, could explain (...) the relatively powerful force behind this selection pressure. General mechanisms of gain of function by mutated p53 may include alteration in transcriptional modulation and newly acquired targets for transcriptional regulation and protein binding. Despite the direct significance of p53 mutations, loss of the remaining wild‐type allele is usually required for the formation of tumors in the natural setting. Novel applications of the basic scientific knowledge of p53 could lead to an improvement in cancer treatment, hopefully in the not so distant future. (shrink)

Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart.

By contributing a few hundred dollars to a charity like UNICEF, a prosperous person can ensure that fewer poor children die, and that more will live reasonably long, worthwhile lives. Even when knowing this, however, most people send nothing, and almost all of the rest send little. What is the moral status of this behavior? To such common cases of letting die, our untutored response is that, while it is not very good, neither is the conduct wrong. What is the (...) source of this lenient assessment? In this contentious new book, one of our leading philosophers argues that our intuitions about ethical cases are generated not by basic moral values, but by certain distracting psychological dispositions that all too often prevent us from reacting in accord with our commitments. Through a detailed look at how these tendencies operate, Unger shows that, on the good morality that we already accept, the fatally unhelpful behavior is monstrously wrong. By uncovering the eminently sensible ethics that we've already embraced fully, and by confronting us with empirical facts and with easily followed instructions for lessening serious suffering appropriately and effectively, Unger's book points the way to a compassionate new moral philosophy. (shrink)

This collection contains twenty-one thought-provoking essays on the controversies surrounding the moral and legal distinctions between euthanasia and "letting die." Since public awareness of this issue has increased this second edition includes nine entirely new essays which bring the treatment of the subject up-to-date. The urgency of this issue can be gauged in recent developments such as the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the Netherlands, "how-to" manuals topping the bestseller charts in the United States, and the many headlines devoted to (...) Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who has assisted dozens of patients to die. The essays address the range of questions involved in this issue pertaining especially to the fields of medical ethics, public policymaking, and social philosophy. The discussions consider the decisions facing medical and public policymakers, how those decisions will affect the elderly and terminally ill, and the medical and legal ramifications for patients in a permanently vegetative state, as well as issues of parent/infant rights. The book is divided into two sections. The first, "Euthanasia and the Termination of Life-Prolonging Treatment" includes an examination of the 1976 Karen Quinlan Supreme Court decision and selections from the 1990 Supreme Court decision in the case of Nancy Cruzan. Featured are articles by law professor George Fletcher and philosophers Michael Tooley, James Rachels, and Bonnie Steinbock, with new articles by Rachels, and Thomas Sullivan. The second section, "Philosophical Considerations," probes more deeply into the theoretical issues raised by the killing/letting die controversy, illustrating exceptionally well the dispute between two rival theories of ethics, consequentialism and deontology. It also includes a corpus of the standard thought on the debate by Jonathan Bennet, Daniel Dinello, Jeffrie Murphy, John Harris, Philipa Foot, Richard Trammell, and N. Ann Davis, and adds articles new to this edition by Bennett, Foot, Warren Quinn, Jeff McMahan, and Judith Lichtenberg. (shrink)

Drawing from a four-year study of US science institutions that support biological control of arthropods, this article examines the decline in biological control institutional capacity in California within the context of both declining public interest science and declining agricultural research activism. After explaining how debates over the public interest character of biological control science have shaped institutions in California, we use scientometric methods to assess the present status and trends in biological control programs within both the University of California (...) Land Grant System and the California Department of Food and Agriculture. We present available data on the number of scientific positions and the types of positions to discuss the impact on the amount of public interest research on biological control in California. We use sociograms to depict how biological control science networks have been reconfigured over time. Our quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that the following factors contributed to the decline of biological control science in California over the 45-year period analyzed: (1) the institutional reconfiguration of university research priorities; (2) the fraying networks within and increasing specialization of biological control science; (3) the transformation of the social organization of the life science work, including privatization; and (4) the abandonment of this thematic area by civil society activist groups. This broad array of forces suggests that biological control, as a public interest science, will require a deliberate intervention, based on advocacy of clear public interest criteria. (shrink)

If religion means a commitment to a set of theological propositions regarding the nature of God, the soul, and an afterlife, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was never a religious enthusiast. The influence of the great religious thinker Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher (1768-1834) on his family kept religious observance decorous and commitment vague.2 The theologian had maintained that true religion lay deep in the heart, where the inner person experienced a feeling of absolute dependence. Dogmatic tenets, he argued, served merely as inadequate symbols (...) of this fundamental experience. Religious feeling, according to Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion (On religion, 1799), might best be cultivated by seeking after truth, experiencing beauty, and contemplating nature.3 Haeckel practiced this kind of Schleiermachian religion all of his life. Haeckel’s association with the Evangelical Church, even as a youth, had been conventional. The death of his first wife severed the loose threads still holding him to formal observance. The power of that death, his obsession with a life that might have been, and the dark feeling of love forever lost drove him to find a more enduring and rational sub-. (shrink)

In this paper, Tyson E. Lewis theorizes an alternative genealogy of biopolitics that enables us to historicize three distinct phases of the dialectic of life and death within overall transformations of the social and material relations of production. Freud, Marcuse, and Agamben each signal decisive transformations from death to life, life to death, and now the indistinction of death and life in a state of exception. In conclusion, Lewis argues for a new politics that does not (...) simply champion one concept over the other but rather dwells precariously in their mutual exhaustion. (shrink)

Discusses the nature of power, describes its psychological and social aspects, and speculates about the relationship between power and freedom.

o ne -taking -Life ana Oavmg .Life The Islamic Context Jonathan E. Brockopp The great ethicists of the western world, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, and others, ...

The authors of the articles in this issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy address a wide variety of topics, from definitions of disease to bioenhancement. Each author, however, draws out the importance of careful use of language. Over the years, philosophers of medicine and bioethicists have debated questions such as what qualifies something as a disease, whether disease language is evaluative, whether the term “person” encompasses more than just human beings, and what language ought to be used (...) to best convey complex information to patients. Among a great deal of disagreement on these topics, one thing emerges distinctly: that clarity and careful attention to language is paramount in medicine. The articles in this issue contribute to that conversation, presenting complex arguments and illustrative examples of why it is so important to use clear and well-defined terms in medicine, and of the reality-altering power that our language carries. (shrink)

In Ethics 4, Spinoza argues that “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death” (E4p67). Spinoza’s argument for this claim depends on his view of imagination, reason, and scientia intuitiva and on his notion of conatus. I explicate Spinoza’s view of life in terms of power (potentia) and show that Spinozan death amounts to reconfiguration rather than absolute annihilation. I then show that E4p67 reflects (...) Spinoza’s well-known account of the three kinds of knowing. Thinking of death is quintessentially imaginative and passive. The free person of E4p67 is in contrast a rational person. To reason, and as becomes especially clear E5, to experience scientia intuitiva, moreover is to think of things “without any relation to time, but [rather] sub specie aeternatitis”(E2p44c2) and to experience activity To the extent, then, that we are rational, free, and active, death is a non-issue. Indeed, to the extent that we are able to meditate on life sub specie aeternitatis, we actually experience joy, love (E5p20s, p32c), eternity (Sp23s), and “the greatest satisfaction of the Mind” (E5p27). (shrink)

The Roman philosopher Boethius is best known for the _Consolation of Philosophy_, one of the most frequently cited texts in medieval literature. In the _Consolation_, an unnamed Boethius sits in prison awaiting execution when his muse Philosophy appears to him. Her offer to teach him who he truly is and to lead him to his heavenly home becomes a debate about how to come to terms with evil, freedom, and providence. The conventional reading of the _Consolation_ is that it is (...) a defense of pagan philosophy; nevertheless, many readers who accept this basic argument find that the ending is ambiguous and that Philosophy has not, finally, given the prisoner the comfort she had promised. In _The Prisoner's Philosophy_, Joel C. Relihan delivers a genuinely new reading of the _Consolation_. He argues that it is a Christian work dramatizing not the truths of philosophy as a whole, but the limits of pagan philosophy in particular. He views it as one of a number of literary experiments of late antiquity, taking its place alongside Augustine's _Confessions_ and _Soliloquies_ as a spiritual meditation, as an attempt by Boethius to speak objectively about the life of the mind and its relation to God. Relihan discerns three fundamental stories intertwined in the _Consolation_: an ironic retelling of Plato's _Crito,_ an adaptation of Lucian's _Jupiter Confutatus,_ and a sober reduction of _Job_ to a quiet dialogue in which the wounded innocent ultimately learns wisdom in silence. Relihan's claim that Boethius's text was written as a Menippean satire does not rest merely on identifying a mixture of disparate literary influences on the text, or on the combination of verse and prose or of fantasy and morality. More important, Relihan argues, Boethius deliberately dramatizes the act of writing about systematic knowledge in a way that calls into question the value of that knowledge. Philosophy's attempt to lead an exile to God's heaven is rejected; the exile comes to accept the value of the phenomenal world, and theology replaces philosophy to explain the place of human beings in the order of the world. Boethius Christianizes the genre of Menippean satire, and his _Consolation_ is a work about humility and prayer. _“Acknowledging that the _Consolation of Philosophy_ is ‘over-familiar and under-read,’ Joel Relihan puts to the side old bromides about the work and instead pays careful attention to the narrative Boethius constructs, grounding his readings in the contexts the work cultivates, especially its Menippean elements. The result is perhaps the first satisfying reading of the _Consolation_ to be produced, a satisfaction felt also in the ways Relihan mirrors Boethius himself in the thoroughness of his scholarship and the elegance of his exposition. No one who studies Boethius will be able to ignore this book.“ — Joseph Pucci, Brown University _ "Anyone who has been fascinated, intrigued, or perhaps puzzled by the meaning, structure, or argument of Boethius's _Consolation of Philosophy_ will find Joel Relihan's new book a welcome addition to the study of this core text of the early medieval world whose influence extends to the present time. Relihan's study is a tour de force that belongs in the library of all those who appreciate Boethius's depth and subtlety. Fortune's wheel has indeed turned in the favor of those who wish to explore with Relihan the intricacies and brilliance of the _Consolation_." —_Fr. John Fortin, O.S.B., Saint Anselm College _. (shrink)

This dissertation comprises three chapters, each of which is concerned with a normative topic having to do with death. Chapter 1, “Against Deprivationism,” is concerned with the deprivationist thesis that a person’s death is bad for her if and only if, and because and to the extent that, it makes her life worse for her than it otherwise would have been. I argue that deprivationism is probably false. Chapter 2, “Some Versions of Lucretius’ Puzzle,” is concerned with Lucretius’ Puzzle, (...) very roughly the question whether anything rationally recommends preferring later death to earlier death over preferring earlier creation to later creation. I distinguish among several different versions of this question and argue that we ought to answer some but not all of them in the affirmative. Chapter 3, “Numbers, Ratios, and Parity,” is concerned with the question whether it is the case that, although you are morally required, ceteris paribus, to prevent the deaths of two people rather than the death of one other person when you cannot prevent all three of these deaths, you are not morally required, ceteris paribus, to prevent the deaths of 1,001 people rather than the deaths of 1,000 other people when you cannot prevent all 2,001 of these deaths. I defend an affirmative answer to this question. (shrink)

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the "right to die"--or to live. __The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying__, informed by Foucault's genealogy of medicine and power as well as (...) by a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion--people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts--has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual "medicine." The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to "spiritual surveys," to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo's, __The Anticipatory Corpse__ explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. A ground-breaking work in bioethics, this book will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy. "With extraordinary philosophical sophistication as well as knowledge of modern medicine, Bishop argues that the body that shapes the work of modern medicine is a dead body. He defends this claim decisively with with urgency. I know of no book that is at once more challenging and informative as __The Anticipatory Corpse. __To say this book is the most important one written in the philosophy of medicine in the last twenty-five years would not do it justice. This book is destined to change the way we think and, hopefully, practice medicine." --_Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School _ "Jeffrey Bishop carefully builds a detailed, scholarly case that medicine is shaped by its attitudes toward death. Clinicians, ethicists, medical educators, policy makers, and administrators need to understand the fraught relationship between clinical practices and death, and __The Anticipatory Corpse __is an essential text. Bishop's use of the writings of Michel Foucault is especially provocative and significant. This book is the closest we have to a genealogy of death." --_Arthur W. Frank, University of Calgary _ "Jeffrey Bishop has produced a masterful study of how the living body has been placed within medicine's metaphysics of efficient causality and within its commitment to a totalizing control of life and death, which control has only been strengthened by medicine's taking on the mantle of a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual model. This volume's treatment of medicine's care of the dying will surely be recognized as a cardinal text in the philosophy of medicine." --_H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine_. (shrink)

It will engage bioethicists and philosophers as well as inform policy and law regarding issues at the beginning and end of life.