Die Gedenkschrift zu Ehren von Elisabeth und Werner Leinfellner spannt einen Bogen von aktuellen philosophischen Diskursen zum Werk und Leben des 2010 verstorbenen Wissenschaftler-Ehepaares. Fur viele sind beide untrennbar mit der Osterreichischen Ludwig Wittgenstein Gesellschaft (OLWG) und dem Internationalen Wittgenstein Symposien in Kirchberg am Wechsel verbunden. Die Artikel in diesem Band befassen sich mit aktueller Wittgensteinforschung und der Sprachkritik (Mauthner und Wittgenstein) ebenso wie dem Wirken von Elisabeth und Werner Leinfellner. Daruber hinaus geben sie Einblicke in das Werden der OLWG (...) und das osterreichische Geistesleben in der zweiten Halfte des 20. Jhdts. Mitarbeiter des Buches: Marco Bastianelli, Christian Erbacher, Johann Gotschl, Peter Kampits, Christian Kanzian, Peter Keicher, Eckehart Kohler, Camilla R. Nielsen, Klaus Puhl, Mary Snell-Hornby, Ilse Somavilla, Joseph Wang, Anja Weiberg, Paul Weingartner und Franz M. Wuketits. Herausgeber sind Sascha Windholz und Walter Feigl.". (shrink)

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the health system worldwide. The organ and tissue donation and transplantation (OTDT) system is no exception and has had to face ethical challenges related to the pandemic, such as risks of infection and resource allocation. In this setting, many Canadian transplant programs halted their activities during the first wave of the pandemic.MethodTo inform future ethical guidelines related to the COVID-19 pandemic or other public health emergencies of international concern, we conducted a (...) literature review to summarize the ethical issues.ResultsThis literature review identified three categories of ethical challenges. The first one describes the general ethical issues and challenges reported by OTDT organizations and transplantation programs, such as risks of COVID-19 transmission and infection to transplant recipients and healthcare professionals during the transplant process, risk of patient waitlist mortality or further resource strain where transplant procedures have been delayed or halted, and resource allocation. The second category describes ethical challenges related to informed consent in the context of uncertainty and virtual consent. Finally, the third category describes ethical issues related to organ allocation, such as social considerations in selecting transplant candidates.ConclusionThis literature review highlights the salient ethical issues related to OTDT during the current COVID-19 pandemic. As medical and scientific knowledge about COVID-19 increases, the uncertainties related to this disease will decrease and the associated ethical issues will continue to evolve. (shrink)

D.T. Suzuki. A Biography. A. Irwin Switzer III. Edited and enlarged by John Snelling. The Buddhist Society, London 1985. 63 pp. I11.

Language for God explores the ways language and images influence who we are and how we live. It declares the necessity of language and images for God that are expansive and inclusive of all genders. Lutheran perspectives are used as a compass to offer scriptural, theological, and historical insights to advance the reformation of Christian language.

One hundred years after Gestalt views first took hold our understanding of how perceptual processes organize the visual field into objects and their local backgrounds has progressed substantially. We now know that in addition to the image-based properties that the Gestalt psychologists identified as relevant, a myriad of other image-based factors influence figure–ground organization, as do subjective factors such as past experience, attention, and intentions. Moreover, properties of grounds as well as properties of figures play a role. The recent use (...) of indirect measures and brain imaging techniques has revealed that there is much more processing of the regions ultimately perceived as grounds than is supposed in traditional approaches, and that competition and feedback are involved in figure–ground organization. These recent advances offer great promise for uncovering the mechanisms that organize the visual field into figures and grounds. (shrink)

I. Immanuel Kant claims that the existence of God cannot be proved by speculative theology, yet that speculative theology is the only means by which the existence of God can definitively be proved. All knowledge, Kant argues, including that of God’s existence, must be based on the forms of possible experience or deduced from premises known to be true: in the case of the existence of God, however, the former is impossible because God transcends experience, and the latter is impossible (...) because the premises themselves, to be known to be true, would have to be grounded in possible experience, while, by the very nature of the question, possible experience has been excluded. Thus, the existence of God cannot be known in the usual sense, that is, by means of the theoretical employment of reason. (shrink)

The distinction of fact and value and the problems entailed by it are concerns only for modern, Western thought. The distinction is supported by Kant, who, however, also attempts to solve its consequent problems. His first attempt is made by arguing that the standard of value is itself a fact. This brings fact and value together, but only in an intelligible world. Kant's second attempt is found in the third Critique in the argument that man, as both rational and animal, (...) must view the world in teleological terms; so doing advances the task of science, finds support in objects of natural beauty, and leads to the creation of beauty in art. Thus, ultimately, the highest complete good, a world under moral laws is itself seen as in fact really possible as the final goal of human creative artistic activity. (shrink)

Admirers of Whitehead who know him best have suggested that Wordsworth had possibly a greater influence upon him than anyone except Plato. Nowhere apparently has Whitehead admitted such an influence, as he has that of Plato and Locke and that of William James, Bergson, and Alexander among traditional and contemporary philosophers But he had a predilection for poetry, and attributes to the great poets philosophical importance. They capture uniquely, he says, “a fragrance of experience”; and “… express deep intuitions of (...) mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact.” As observers of nature both Wordsworth and Whitehead ascribed to animate and inanimate life a degree of feeling or satisfaction in the course of being and becoming. Like the poet, Whitehead must have found “joy in widest commonalty spread.” The multiplication table, he noted at one time, “… is no good to the realist. It shuts him up with Plato's ideas out of space and out of time” when “… like Wordsworth and the rest of us he wants to hear the throstle sing.”. (shrink)

. Although the courts have ruled that companies are legal persons, they have not yet made clear the extent to which political free speech for corporations is limited by the strictures legitimately placed upon corporate commercial speech. I explore the question of whether or not companies can properly be said to have the right to civil free speech or whether corporate speech is always de facto commercial speech not subject to the same sorts of legal protections as is the right (...) to civil free speech. In the absence of clearly defined legal precedent, I emphasize moral reasons for determining the appropriate limits of corporate civil free speech. Appealing to arguments typically used to justify individual rights to civil free speech, I examine the extent to which this sort of justification may or may not be legitimately extended to corporations. I conclude that corporate rights to civil free speech must be restricted because granting rights of free speech to institutions may, in practice, undermine the moral rationale and practical feasibility of guaranteeing rights of civil free speech to individuals. Furthermore, I argue that granting corporations full rights to civil free speech will undercut attempts to develop good moral character in corporate institutions by undermining the efforts of watchdog organizations. (shrink)

This 1997 book was the first English translation of all of Kant's writings on moral and political philosophy collected in a single volume. No other collection competes with the comprehensiveness of this one. As well as Kant's most famous moral and political writings, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the Critique of Practical Reason, the Metaphysics of Morals, and Toward Perpetual Peace, the volume includes shorter essays and reviews, some of which have never been translated before. The volume has (...) been furnished with a substantial editorial apparatus including translator's introductions and explanatory notes to each text by Mary Gregor, and a general introduction to Kant's moral and political philosophy by Allen Wood. There is also an English-German and German-English glossary of key terms. (shrink)

Published in 1982, Carol Gilligan's _In a Different Voice_ proposed a new model of moral reasoning based on care, arguing that it better described the moral life of women. ____An Ethic of Care__ is the first volume to bring together key contributions to the extensive debate engaging Gilligan's work. It provides the highlights of the often impassioned discussion of the ethic of care, drawing on the literature of the wide range of disciplines that have entered into the debate. _Contributors:_ Annette (...) Baier, Diana Baumrind, Lawrence A. Blum, Mary Brabeck, John Broughton, Owen Flanagan, Marilyn Friedman, Carol Gilligan, Catherine G. Greeno, Catherine Jackson, Linda K. Kerber, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Zella Luria, Eleanor E. Maccoby, Linda Nicholson, Bill Puka, Carol B. Stack, Joan C. Tronto, Lawrence Walker, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler. (shrink)

This book explores a fundamental tension in Aristotle's metaphysics: how can an entity such as a living organisma composite generated through the imposition of form on preexisting matterhave the conceptual unity that Aristotle demands of primary substances? Mary Louise Gill bases her treatment of the problem of unity, and of Aristotle's solution, on a fresh interpretation of the relation between matter and form. Challenging the traditional understanding of Aristotelian matter, she argues that material substances are subverted by matter and (...) maintained by form that controls the matter to serve a positive end. The unity of material substances thus involves a dynamic relation between resistant materials and directive ends. Aristotle on Substance offers both a general account of matter, form, and substantial unity and a specific assessment of particular Aristotelian arguments. At every point, Gill engages Aristotle on his own philosophical ground through the detailed analysis of central, and often controversial, texts from the Metaphysics, Physics, On Generation and Corruption, De Anima, De Caelo, and the biological works. The result is a coherent, firmly grounded rethinking of Aristotle's central metaphysical concepts and of his struggle toward a fully consistent theory of material substances. (shrink)

Mary Wollstonecraft’s visionary treatise, originally published in 1792, was the first book to present women’s rights as an issue of universal human rights. Ideal for coursework and classroom study, this comprehensive edition of Wollstonecraft’s heartfelt feminist argument includes illuminating essays by leading scholars that highlight the author’s significant contributions to modern political philosophy, making a powerful case for her as one of the most substantive political thinkers of the Enlightenment era. No other scholarly work to date has examined as (...) closely both the ideological moorings and the enduring legacy of Wollstonecraft’s groundbreaking and courageous discourse. (shrink)

Imaging Wisdom, Seeing and Knowing in the Art of Indian Buddhism. Jacob N. Kinnard. Curzon Press, Richmond 1999. xi, 210 pp., 16 figures. £40.00. ISBN 0-7007-1083-3.