The eternal recurrence of the same. Simmel's critique ; Awareness ; Evidence ; Significance ; Coherence -- Demon or god? Deathbed revelation ; Daimonic prophecy ; Dionysian doctrine ; Diagnostic test -- The dwarf and the gateway. The gateway to Hades ; The dwarf's interpretation ; Zarathustra's cross-examination ; The inescapable cycle ; Crossing the gateway ; No time until rebirth ; The ancient memory ; Midnight swan song -- The great noon. Two conclusions ; Tragic end and analeptic satyr (...) play ; Zarathustra's hour ; Noon crucifixion ; Seventh-day convalescence ; Last temptation ; Third-day resurrection -- The laughing lions. Revaluation of values ; Dawn reunion ; Morning consecration ; Call to arms ; Final farewell and last will ; Zarathustra's great destiny -- The shepherd and the serpent. The eternally recurring human ; The future human ; Zarathustra the dragon-slayer ; The decapitation ; The heavy hammer ; No longer shepherd -- Circulus vitiosus deus. Impotence and revenge ; Backward-willing ; Self-redemption ; The third transformation ; The child spirit ; No longer human ; Zarathustra's dying gift -- Post-Zarathustra. Nietzsche and Zarathustra ; Reversing the bad conscience ; Atheism and the death of God ; Countering the ascetic ideal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ought We to Require Emotional Capacity as Part of Decisional Competence?Paul S. Appelbaum* (bio)AbstractThe preceding commentary by Louis Charland suggests that traditional cognitive views of decision-making competence err in not taking into account patients’ emotional capacities. Examined closely, however, Charland’s argument fails to escape the cognitive bias that he condemns. However, there may be stronger arguments for broadening the focus of competence assessment to include emotional capacities, centering (...) on the ways in which emotions aid humans in processing information. Before emotional capacities are added to the list of functions essential for decisional competence, though, the feasibility and utility of such a reorientation must be demonstrated.To what extent ought persons’ capacities to experience emotion be taken into account when determining whether they should be deemed competent to make their own decisions? In the previous article, Louis Charland (1998) argues that traditional models of decision-making competence—of which the MacArthur Competence Treatment Study is a typical example—are mistaken in focusing narrowly on persons’ cognitive abilities to the neglect of emotional factors. In contrast, he suggests, constructs of competence ought explicitly to require a capacity to experience emotions, which he believes is central to meaningful decision making, before deeming persons competent.Charland, as he acknowledges, is not the first to suggest that the presence of some degree of emotional capacity is a necessary element of competence, but his argument is among the most elaborate to date and is certainly worth closer examination. Looked at carefully, however, Charland’s argument does not make quite the case for the determination of emotional capacity in competence assessment that he claims for it. Indeed, as I demonstrate below, Charland may share the same “pernicious [End Page 377] cognitive bias” that he ascribes to more traditional approaches. However, despite what I identify as the problems in Charland’s argument, others have raised more disturbing questions about the lack of attention to emotional issues in competence assessment. Thus, I am not ready to reject entirely the possibility that determinations of decisional competence ought to consider emotional factors. I conclude by outlining the questions that remain to be answered to identify more clearly the potential benefits of such an approach.The Construct of Decision-Making CompetenceSome preliminary comments about the nature of the dominant construct of decision-making competence may provide a useful frame for my response to Charland’s paper. Contemporary ideas of competence are tied inextricably to the ideal of self-determination in modern Western societies. Such societies are committed to respect for individual choice, both as a good in its own right and on the grounds that each person knows best what choices will maximize his or her own welfare. In general, therefore, states will not intervene to prevent persons from acting on their decisions, even when the choices they make—like the decision to smoke or to refuse potentially life-saving medical care—may objectively be thought to be detrimental to them.In some cases, however, the presumption that people will act in their own interests, as well as the notion that there is something intrinsically valuable in respecting their choices, fails (Buchanan and Brock 1989). When people’s minds are so disordered that they cannot be said to be making meaningful choices, other values come into play. Such people are called “incompetent.” When persons reach that point, the state’s interest in protecting its citizens becomes primary and someone else must make decisions on their behalf. Note that the size of this group must be sharply limited, lest a liberal society’s commitment to self-determination be undermined: There is no more profound infringement of the rights of citizens than the determination that they are incompetent. Thus, the criteria for incompetence must be selected in a deliberately narrow fashion—alternately, one might say that the standards for competence are made intentionally broad—so that all but a tiny percentage of citizens will be permitted to make decisions on their own.In the Anglo-American world, the process of formulating criteria of competence by and large has been left to the common law courts. Over the course of centuries they have identified the capacities that are, in... (shrink)

This article shows that Nietzsche’s published presentations endorse the cosmological truth of eternal recurrence and that they indicate how belief in this truth can be supported with direct mnemonic evidence as well as a priori scientific proof. It also introduces a refutation of any attempt to construe Nietzsche’s doctrine as a thought experiment that would help to test or promote the affirmation of nonrecurring life.

In this study of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Paul S. Loeb proposes a fresh account of the relation between the book's literary and philosophical aspects and argues that the book's narrative is designed to embody and exhibit the truth of eternal recurrence. Loeb shows how Nietzsche constructed a unified and complete plot in which the protagonist dies, experiences a deathbed revelation of his endlessly repeating life, and then returns to his identical life so as to recollect this revelation and (...) gain a power over time that advances him beyond the human. Through close textual analysis and careful attention to Nietzsche's use of Platonic, biblical, and Wagnerian themes, Loeb explains how this novel design is the key to solving the many riddles of Thus Spoke Zarathustra - including its controversial fourth part, its obscure concept of the Übermensch, and its relation to Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. (shrink)

Ideas of love within religion are usually driven by one of two mythologies – either a personal God who commands love or a mystical God of ineffable love – but both are inadequate for motivating love of neighbour. The first tends towards legalism and the second offers no cognitive guidance. The situation is further complicated by there being different understandings of love of neighbour in the various Abrahamic religions, as exemplified in the approaches of two philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard and Emmanuel (...) Levinas. A better approach is therefore to explore actual practices of love in everyday life, and to discover how love might be performed openly and creatively. One such practice is recognition of vulnerability, and this too is often driven by a mythology, in this case one marked by fear, and by a violence either imposed or avoided. One paradigmatic example is the vulnerability felt by speakers, especially women, in front of an audience. A turning from wilful ignorance of vulnerability and a turning to reliance on collective work, modelled on an awareness of mutual vulnerability and openness to the unknown, will help to change our philosophical and social imaginary. The dark myth of vulnerability can be transformed into finding opportunities in vulnerability for openness to affection and so to an enhancement of life. It is only from the perspective of this new imaginary, and from everyday practices of it, that the double love-command – love of God and love of neighbour – will function as any kind of common ground between religions. (shrink)

(2002). Clarifying the Ethics of Clinical Research: A Path toward Avoiding the Therapeutic Misconception. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 22-23.

Genomic research—including whole genome sequencing and whole exome sequencing—has a growing presence in contemporary biomedical investigation. The capacity of sequencing techniques to generate results that go beyond the primary aims of the research—historically referred to as “incidental findings”—has generated considerable discussion as to how this information should be handled—that is, whether incidental results should be returned, and if so, which ones.Federal regulations governing most human subjects research in the United States require the disclosure of “the procedures to be followed” in (...) the research as part of the informed consent process. It seems reasonable to assume—and indeed, many commentators have concluded—that genomic investigators will be expected to inform participants about, among other procedures, the prospect that incidental findings will become available and the mechanisms for dealing with them. Investigators, most of whom will not have dealt with these issues before, will face considerable challenges in framing meaningful disclosures for research participants.To help in this task, we undertook to identify the elements that should be included in the informed consent process related to incidental findings. We did this by surveying a large number of genomic researchers (n = 241) and by conducting in‐depth interviews with a smaller number of researchers (n = 28) and genomic research participants (n = 20). Based on these findings, it seems clear to us that routine approaches to informed consent are not likely to be effective in genomic research in which the prospect of incidental findings exists. Ensuring that participants’ decisions are informed and meaningful will require innovative approaches to dealing with the consent issue. We have identified four prototypical models of a consent process for return of incidental findings. (shrink)

This study conducted the first empirical testing of Baker and Martinson's TARES test of ethical consideration factors for public relations practitioners. The TARES test is composed of 5 interconnected parts: truthfulness of the message, authenticity of the persuader, respect for the persuadee, equity of the appeal, and social responsibility for the common good. Results of an online exploratory survey indicate that the TARES test is better suited for a 3-factor configuration based on Day's definition of moral knowledge and that ethical (...) consideration levels differ based on age, education, gender, and political ideology. (shrink)

Voluntariness of consent to research has not been sufficiently explored through empirical research. The aims of this study were to develop a more comprehensive approach to assessing voluntariness and to generate preliminary data on the extent and correlates of limitations on voluntariness. We developed a questionnaire to evaluate subjects’ reported motivations and constraints on voluntariness. 88 subjects in five different areas of clinical research—substance abuse, cancer, HIV, interventional cardiology, and depression—were assessed. Subjects reported a variety of motivations for participation. Offers (...) of financial incentives were common but not influential, pressures from others were rare, and no threats were reported. However, certain financial incentives and—paradoxically—altruistic motivations led some subjects to feel more constrained. Consistent with previous studies, no one pattern of motivation was common to all research subjects. There was little evidence of constrained voluntariness, but some suggestion of areas of concern. Voluntariness appears to be susceptible to systematic empirical investigation. (shrink)

Cognitive science has converged in many ways with cognitive psychology, but while also maintaining a distinctive interdisciplinary nature. Here we further characterize this existing state of the field before proposing how it might be reconceptualized toward a broader and more distinct, and thus more stable, position in the realm of sciences.

This chapter contains sections titled: Recurrence‐Awareness Recurrence‐Evidence Recurrence‐Significance Recurrence‐Time Recurrence‐Coherence Conclusion.

There is a long and successful scholarly tradition of commenting on Nietzsche’s deep affinity for the philosophy of Heraclitus. But scholars remain puzzled as to why he suggested at the end of his career, in Ecce Homo, that the doctrine he valued most, the eternal recurrence of the same, might also have been taught by Heraclitus. This essay aims to answer this question through a close examination of Nietzsche’s allusions to Heraclitus in his first published mention of eternal recurrence in (...) The Joyful Science and in a related set of notes from the period when he was formulating and defending his doctrine of eternal recurrence while writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The key to answering this question, it is argued, is that Nietzsche came to believe that the doctrine of eternal recurrence, when properly understood as requiring identical repetition, has to presuppose a Heraclitean reality of eternal, absolute, and universal flux. (shrink)

This essay is one of ten contributions to a special editorial feature in The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 49.2, in which authors were invited to address the following questions: What is the future of Nietzsche studies? What are the most pressing questions its scholars should address? What texts and issues demand our urgent attention? And as we turn to these issues, what methodological and interpretive principles should guide us? The editorship hopes this collection will provide a starting point for discussions (...) about the most fruitful directions for Nietzsche scholarship to take and the most promising avenues for building on the best recent work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Examining the Ethics of Human Subjects ResearchPaul S. Appelbaum (bio)The work of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments confirms once again the value of combining empirical and normative approaches to problems in clinical and research ethics. The Committee, like its predecessor, the President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, spent relatively modest sums of money gathering targeted data to inform (...) its deliberations. The results of the Committee’s research, which are discussed by Nancy Kass and Jeremy Sugarman in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, enhance our understanding of the current ethical status of human subjects research, helping to focus attention on areas of particular concern, and lay the basis for future research and policy development.My comments here focus on the two major empirical studies conducted by the Committee—the Research Proposal Review Project and the Subject Interview Study. I will underscore just a few of the primary findings from these studies, consider their limitations, and explore their implications. Readers interested in the details of the studies should consult the Committee’s Final Report (ACHRE 1995), on which I rely in part and which provides additional information on the methodology and findings of the studies.Research Proposal Review ProjectWhat can be learned from the Committee’s review of 125 federally-funded human research studies? In answering that question, one cannot ignore the irony inherent in the Committee’s decision to review documents related to institutional review board (IRB) consideration of the selected protocols. The single most frequent complaint about the current system for protecting human subjects is that IRBs focus almost exclusively on review of consent forms and other research documents, as if they bore some close relationship to what actually transpires between investigators and potential research subjects. Only a small number of studies examine the research consent process. Nevertheless, existing data strongly [End Page 283] suggest that subject recruitment often involves an extended process of courtship, during which the information contained in consent forms is only a small part of the information passed between investigators and subjects (Benson, Roth, and Winslade 1985; Lidz et al. 1984).Indeed, the second of the Committee’s studies—the Subject Interview Study, which is discussed below—appears to confirm these findings. In-depth interviews with 99 individuals who reported that they were former or current research subjects suggest that “[f]or many, the decision to participate seemed to have been made before the consent form was given to them, and they signed it almost as a formality” (ACHRE 1995 [GPO, p. 742; Oxford, p. 471]). 1 Why, then, did the Committee focus its attention on documents that in many cases seem to play only a tangential role in the consent process? As is the case with IRBs around the country, the answer appears to be that consent forms and related documents are the only easily available window on consent transactions. In addition, under the current system, consent forms constitute the part of the process that IRBs can influence most easily. Consequently, it suits almost everyone’s needs—except perhaps those of the research subjects—to pretend that they reflect what actually transpires in the recruitment process. To the Committee’s credit, it was well aware of this dilemma. Nonetheless, it struggled to wring valid lessons from these limited data in its Final Report.Perhaps the most interesting finding from the Research Proposal Review Project is just how poor so many consent forms are. Given the disproportionate emphasis that many IRBs place on the content of the forms, one would expect that investigators by now would have learned to design documents that meet objective standards of adequacy, such as those applied by the Committee. Indeed, except in the most unusual circumstances, doing so would virtually guarantee that the IRB will ask no further questions about subject recruitment procedures. Although the data justify the inference that many investigators do not yet understand which information is essential to communicate to potential subjects, nor have learned how to do so effectively, they also force us to a still more radical conclusion. If the IRBs were doing their jobs, the Committee... (shrink)

This paper argues that efforts to understand historically remote patterns of thought are driven away from their original meaning if the investigation focuses on reconstruction of concepts. It is simply not appropriate to be looking for an archaic concept of soul, name or dream, for example, when considering the earliest documents which attest to their writers’ beliefs about certain types of phenomena. Instead, we propose to employ the notion of cognitive complex in order to investigate some important philosophical themes in (...) Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Iranian, and Ancient Near Eastern documents. Our principal theoretical claim is that archaic thought does not work with concepts but with complexes whose salient features are an over-abundance of properties, an over-production of connections, and weakness in abstraction. The basic level of complex formation may be the most inclusive level at which it is possible to form a mental image. Specific studies are focused on ancient texts which exhibit archaic patterns of thought. In Egyptian texts, “manifestation” seems to convey something which all categories of beings are capable of becoming, being and having, assuming and leaving; the “name” was considered to be an essential component of the individual’s survival; symbolic representations, such as images and words, are causally connected to the ‘objects’ the image or word signifies. In ANE records the human etemmu was plainly the corpse or skeleton of the dead person; on the other hand it was also the shadowy, volatile image of what he was during life. In ANE records the baffling idea of the divine me referred to an entire cultural area, an acquisition of civilized life; but at the same time it is also the result of an invention, a divine decision. The complexes involved in these archaic ideas about soul, name and dream are ideas fused with their ‘objects’; they have unstable traits and prototypical instances; and are thought at the most abstract level which have concrete images. (shrink)

This study attempts to refine and test a theory of social influences on ethical decisions of journalists. The theoretical model proposes that several social factors influence any given decision, and that a hierarchy of influences assigns relative value to each: individual, small group, organization, competition, occupation, extramedia, and law. Print and broadcast journalists reacted to 3 hypothetical scenarios that raised ethical problems. The journalists then rated the salience of various reasoning statements, each representing 1 of the 7 social influences. No (...) single source of ethical guidance appeared; in many cases different influences emerge as powerful under different circumstances. But of the 7 proposed influences, 5 showed consistent strength in predicting the decision the journalist makes. The individual influence was the weakest of the 7, despite its prominent strength in the literature. The organizational and small-group strength suggests company-level strategies for media policy-makers who wish to increase journalists'ethical awareness. Overall, the study seems to challenge a traditional assumption that in ethical dilemmas journalists are autonomous moral agents, acting on the basis of their own values alone. The data support the notion of a far more dynamic and complex pattern of social influences. (shrink)

This article explores the role of changing memes in large systems change toward marriage equality—popularly referred to as same-sex marriage—in the United States. Using an abbreviated case history of the transformation, the article particularly explores the shifting memes or core units of culture, in this case, word phrases associated with marriage equality over time, influencing the social change process. Using both the case history and the empirical work on memes, the article identifies nine lessons to support others tackling large systems (...) change challenges. (shrink)

The biblical image of Wisdom as the power who “orders all things well” in nature and in human life can be read in the light of contemporary information theory. Some current scientific speculation offers an interpretation of reality as a vast information‐processing system, in which informational situations are continuously transformed through algorithmic operations. This interpretation finds a metaphysical counterpart in the distinction between “nature natured” and “nature naturing” in the philosophical theology of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This confluence of religious, metaphysical, (...) and scientific imagery suggests a picture of the world in which the processes of “nature naturing,”“human humaning,” and “God Godding” inform and recur in each other. (shrink)

Recent Anglophone scholarship has successfully shown that Nietzsche's thought makes important contributions to a wide range of contemporary philosophical debates. In so doing, however, scholarship has lost sight of another important feature of Nietzsche's project, namely his desire to challenge the very conception of philosophy that has been used to assess his merits as a philosopher. In other words, contemporary scholarship has overlooked Nietzsche's contributions to metaphilosophy, i.e. debates around the nature, methods, and aims of philosophy. This important new collection (...) of essays brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to explore and discuss these contributions and debates. It will appeal to anyone interested in metaphilosophy, Nietzsche studies, German studies, or intellectual history. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the linguistic features in Nietzsche's presentations that have led readers to assume that “the same” means numerical identity. I also evaluate the following argument about personal identity that has been used to support this assumption: if we are not numerically identical to our recurring counterparts, then we have no reason to be concerned about the prospect of reliving our lives and Nietzsche's theory cannot have any of the existential significance he ascribes to it. My conclusion (...) is that Nietzsche actually has in mind a complete qualitative identity that includes all spatiotemporal properties. Thus, the supporting argument fails because the problem of persistence through change over time is not relevant to a theory in which persons are neither recurring at a later time nor undergoing any change when they recur. (shrink)

Exploring the "roads less travelled," MacDonald continues his monumental investigation of the history of ideas. This volume takes the reader from the earliest records about human nature in Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Near East and the Zoroastrian religion, through the secret teachings in the Hermetic and Gnostic scriptures and into the transformation of ideas about the mind, soul and spirit in the late antique and early medieval epochs.

This paper argues that efforts to understand historically remote patterns of thought are driven away from their original meaning if the investigation focuses on reconstruction of concepts , instead of cognitive ‘complexes’. My paper draws on research by Jan Assmann, Jean-Jacques Glassner, Keimpe Algra, Alex Purves, Nicholas Wyatt, and others on the cultures of Ancient Greece, Israel, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Etruria through comparative analyses of the semantic fields of spatial and temporal terms, and how these terms are shaped by their (...) relation to the sphere of the sacred. It shows that there are three super-ordinate timeframes - the cyclical, the linear and the static - each of which is composed of lower-order cycles (days, lunar months, and seasons). These timeframes reflect their cultures’ ideas about the nature, scope and power of the gods, and structure the common point-of-view about the present, the past and eternity. There are also super-ordinate spatial frames which reflect their cultures’ ideas about the heavens and which structure both the sacred precinct and the profane field of action and exchange. Close analysis of texts that use words such as eternity, forever, past, present, and future, for example, do not reveal that there is anything like a general abstract concept of time in virtue of which some thing or event can be said to be in time or to have its own time. Archaic patterns of thought do not differ from our “ modern ” patterns in having different concepts, but in not having anything like concepts at all. (shrink)

In this essay I evaluate a new and influential interpretation of Nietzsche’s idea of the slave revolt in morality. This interpretation was first proposed by Bernard Reginster and has since been extended by R. Lanier Anderson and Avery Snelson. Citing textual evidence from Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, these scholars have argued for the counterintuitive view that nobles, not slaves, instigated the slave revolt in morality. This is because Nietzsche says that nobles create new values, (...) introduces priests as nobles, and claims that priests began the slave revolt. However, against this new approach I argue that these scholars neglect important evidence from these same texts in which Nietzsche claims that the psychologically slavish can also create values, assumes that politically subordinated nobles can lose their psychological nobility, and asserts that the slave revolt was instigated by psychologically slavish priests. I also argue that these scholars ignore Nietzsche’s related claims that the priestly peasant Luther renewed the Jewish slave revolt against re-ascendant Roman nobles and that the plebeian philosopher Socrates led a slave revolt in morality against the Athenian nobles. Thus, it turns out that none of the leaders of the slave revolt were noble and that one of them was not even priestly. I conclude with a defense of the traditional and straightforward view that Nietzsche always conceived of the slave revolt in morality as an act of revenge by oppressed people who are politically and psychologically ignoble. (shrink)

Although the concept of conversion is usually encountered in religious contexts, the main contention of this paper is that there is a genuine significance in the concept of philosophical conversion. The scene is set by considering the New Testament meaning of epistrepho, “to turn away from,” and the Platonic use of the term in the Republic. The underlying concept here is that one must lose the old world in order to gain it anew. Through the process of conversion, both the (...) person and his world are transformed: but where the religious believer accepts the experience as beyond his ability to account for its power, the philosopher must always be able to account for the grounds and results of this transformation. There are some historical instances of philosophers who have gone through such a process and demand it of their readers. The two principal case studies of this are Descartes’ enterprise for a universal science and Husserl’s project in the foundation of pure phenomenology. Detailed attention is paid to a number of key texts in order to elucidate the rhetorical imagery and argumentative ‘moments’ in this process. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 22-24.