Traditionally, people were recognized as being dead using cardio-respiratory criteria: individuals who had permanently stopped breathing and whose heart had permanently stopped beating were dead. Technological developments in the middle of the twentieth century and the advent of the intensive care unit made it possible to sustain cardio-respiratory and other functions in patients with severe brain injury who previously would have lost such functions permanently shortly after sustaining a brain injury. What could and should physicians caring for such patients do? (...) Significant advances in human organ transplantation also played direct and indirect roles in discussions regarding the care of such patients. Because successful transplantation requires that organs be removed from cadavers shortly after death to avoid organ damage due to loss of oxygen, there has been keen interest in knowing precisely when people are dead so that organs could be removed. Criteria for declaring death using neurological criteria developed, and today a whole brain definition of death is widely used and recognized by all 50 states in the United States as an acceptable way to determine death. We explore the ongoing debate over definitions of death, particularly over brain death or death determined using neurological criteria, and the relationship between definitions of death and organ transplantation. (shrink)

David Lewis's modal realism claims that nothing can exist in more than one world or time, and that statements about how something would have been are to be analysed in terms of its counterpart. I first explain why the counterpart relation depends on de re modal statements in an intensional language, so that intuitive properties of similarity relations cannot be used to show that the counterpart relation is not an equivalence relation. I then look at test sentences in (the intensional) (...) natural language, and show that none of them provide compelling evidence that a counterpart semantics is needed. (shrink)

These two texts are fundamental for the understanding not only of Neoplatonism but also of the conventions of biography in late antiquity. Neither has received such extensive annotation before in English, and this new commentary makes full use of recent scholarship. The long introduction is intended both as a beginner’s guide to Neoplatonism and as a survey of ancient biographical writing.

Health care reform poses numerous challenges. A core challenge is to make health care more efficient and effective without causing more harm than benefit. Additionally, those fashioning health-care policy must encourage patients to exercise caution and restraint when expending scarce resources; restrict the ability of politicians to advance their careers by promising alluring but costly entitlements, many of which they will not be able to deliver; face the demographic challenges of an aging population; and avoid regulations that create significant inefficiencies (...) and restrict access to health care. Given such real-world challenges, how should health care be reformed in the United States or elsewhere? This number of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy examines many of the complex issues that must be considered in reforming a health-care system. (shrink)

Cases of sexual harassment have become increasingly common in the courts, but there is at present no coherent definition of just what sexual harassment is supposed to consist. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines ultimately focus on issues of subjective victimization, a standard which is overly broad and prescriptively empty. In order to salvage the concept of sexual harassment, it is argued here that the element of unwelcomeness must be removed from it. Instead of considering welcomeness, it is argued that (...) sexual harassment can be given proscriptive clarity if it is delineated as gender harassment, coercive sexual harassment, and presumptive sexual harassment. (shrink)

At one point in his treatise against the ‘Gnostics’ Plotinus treats his adversaries as men of flesh and blood, not merely as proponents of false books and false beliefs: For I feel a certain shame with regard to some of my friends , who, having chanced upon this doctrine before the beginning of our friendship, have continued to adhere to it for reasons that I cannot understand. Not that they themselves show any compunction in saying what they say: they may (...) believe what they say to be true , but perhaps they rather wish others to be persuaded of the truth of their own opinions. (shrink)

My dissertation is concerned with the misconceptions many postmodernist theorists and critics harbor about the history of western philosophy and about various branches of it, misconceptions that I contend are the source of the simplistic account of both postwar culture and literature, and eighteenth-and nineteenth-century realist fiction, that they provide. ;In the first chapter, I consider the campaign that a host of postmodernists have mounted against something they typically refer to as the "logic of either/or," alleged to structure western thought. (...) This logic they claim they try to "subvert" by recourse to something else called the "logic of both/and," which, they assert, violates the law of noncontradiction. Instantiations of the "logic of both/and" that postmodernists cite as evidence of the "contradictory," subversive nature of postmodernism include, for example, that postmodernism is both a break from and a continuation of modernism, that postmodernist fiction is both about reality and about the processes of artistic creation, and that postmodern humor is both destructive and constructive. None of these states of affairs, however, is a contradiction, much less a violation of the law of noncontradiction. What postmodernists assume is that by the terms of classical logic, postmodernism, for example, must be either a break from or a continuation of modernism--that is, they attribute to classical logicians what is considered by them to be one of the most common fallacies of presumption: the either/or fallacy, or black-and-white thinking. It is the trivial notion that A and B can both be predicated of x that underwrites, in effect, the "radical" claims made by postmodernists on behalf of the "logic of both/and." ;In the second chapter, I address the reductive accounts of both realist and postmodernist fiction that postmodernists characteristically offer. Many assume, for example, that a realist metaphysics is implicit in realist fiction, and argue that, for this reason, realist fiction is outmoded. The ground of this assumption is, among other things, a misconception about what metaphysical realism is. A belief in a "world out there" is not, as a number of postmodernists seem to think, tantamount to a belief in the truth of metaphysical realism-- the thesis, simply put, that reality is mind-independent. There is no pat, one-to-one correspondence between literary realism and metaphysical realism , and no reason--stylistic or otherwise--why a realist novel cannot express an anti-realist metaphysics--not even any reason why an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century realist novel couldn't, since metaphysical anti-realism was as alive and well then as metaphysical realism is today. The latter point is important, for postmodernists often base their assertions about the metaphysical assumptions that inform eighteenth- and nineteenth-century realist fiction not on any textual evidence, but on a priori assumptions about the metaphysical beliefs it was possible for realist fiction to reflect. This "ideas-of-the-time" approach to literary history is problematic in its own right, but it becomes even more so if one's assumptions about what were or were not the ideas of the time, are, as in this case, false. (shrink)