This volume is an introduction to both newer and more established ideas in the growing field of critical phenomenology from a number of disciplinary perspectives.

Clinicians at quaternary centers see part of their mission as providing hope when others cannot. They tend to see sicker patients with more complex disease processes. Part of this mission is offering longshot treatment modalities that are unlikely to achieve their stated goal, but conceivably could. When patients embark on such a treatment plan, it may fail. Often treatment toward an initial goal continues beyond the point at which such a goal is feasible. We explore the progression of care from (...) longshot to fantasy using two pediatric cases. This progression may be differentiated into four distinct stages of care related to the potential of achieving the initial goals of care. Physicians are often ill prepared for the progression of treatments from a longshot hope to an unfeasible and, therefore, typically unjustified intervention. We present a structured approach to guide clinicians at referral institutions where these situations may be common. The transition of care from “longshot” to “fantasy” is an inherent part of quaternary care for the sickest of patients that has been underexplored. Physicians are often poorly equipped to approach that transition. We advocate this approach to the shift from longshot to fantasy with the belief that such a structured method will have multiple benefits, including: reduced suffering for the patient; decreased emotional burden on patient and family; decreased provider moral distress; increased likelihood of seeking high quality palliative care earlier; and provision of honest and straightforward information to patients and their families. (shrink)

One of very few monographs devoted to Plato's Meno, this study emphasizes the interplay between its protagonists, Socrates and Meno. It interprets the Meno as Socrates' attempt to persuade his interlocutor, by every device at his disposal, of the value of moral inquiry—even though it fails to yield full-blown knowledge—and to encourage him to engage in such inquiry, insofar as it alone makes human life worth living.

Conditional logics were originally developed for the purpose of modeling intuitively correct modes of reasoning involving conditional—especially counterfactual—expressions in natural language. While the debate over the logic of conditionals is as old as propositional logic, it was the development of worlds semantics for modal logic in the past century that catalyzed the rapid maturation of the field. Moreover, like modal logic, conditional logic has subsequently found a wide array of uses, from the traditional (e.g. counterfactuals) to the exotic (e.g. conditional (...) obligation). Despite the close connections between conditional and modal logic, both the technical development and philosophical exploitation of the latter has outstripped that of the former, with the result that noticeable lacunae exist in the literature on conditional logic. My dissertation addresses a number of these underdeveloped frontiers, producing new technical insights and philosophical applications. -/- I contribute to the solution of a problem posed by Priest of finding sound and complete labeled tableaux for systems of conditional logic from Lewis' V-family. To develop these tableaux, I draw on previous work on labeled tableaux for modal and conditional logic; errors and shortcomings in recent work on this problem are identified and corrected. While modal logic has by now been thoroughly studied in non-classical contexts, e.g. intuitionistic and relevant logic, the literature on conditional logic is still overwhelmingly classical. Another contribution of my dissertation is a thorough analysis of intuitionistic conditional logic, in which I utilize both algebraic and worlds semantics, and investigate how several novel embedding results might shed light on the philosophical interpretation of both intuitionistic logic and conditional logic extensions thereof. -/- My dissertation examines deontic and connexive conditional logic as well as the underappreciated history of connexive notions in the analysis of conditional obligation. The possibility of interpreting deontic modal logics in such systems (via embedding results) serves as an important theoretical guide. A philosophically motivated proscription on impossible obligations is shown to correspond to, and justify, certain (weak) connexive theses. Finally, I contribute to the intensifying debate over counterpossibles, counterfactuals with impossible antecedents, and take—in contrast to Lewis and Williamson—a non-vacuous line. Thus, in my view, a counterpossible like "If there had been a counterexample to the law of the excluded middle, Brouwer would not have been vindicated" is false, not (vacuously) true, although it has an impossible antecedent. I exploit impossible (non-normal) worlds—originally developed to model non-normal modal logics—to provide non-vacuous semantics for counterpossibles. I buttress the case for non-vacuous semantics by making recourse to both novel technical results and theoretical considerations. (shrink)

"A collection of essays on the early modern English writer, proto-feminist, and rhetorician Mary Astell. Includes discussions on human nature, equality, rationality, power, freedom, friendship, marriage, and education"--Provided by publisher.

The paper is interested in likely routes for the evolution of normative practice, which, it is here assumed, is a necessary precursor to the development of language. It argues that each normative practice requires a policing practice, consisting of, at least, moves of commendation, condemnation, and retraction, and it contrasts policing with mere monitoring practice. So the evolution of norms can be seen to be the development of policing from mere monitoring practice. It conjectures that a likely site for such (...) a development to take place is in the active transmission of technology, notably, toolmaking technology. Using data and observations drawn from the archaeological record and the psychology of mimicry, it attempts to illustrate the likely emergence of policing practices. (shrink)

A discussion of women thinkers in political philosophy, and the nature of political inquiry --Provided by publisher.

Science and technology influence international affairs by many different mechanisms. Both create new issues, risks and uncertainties. Advances in science alert the international community to new issues and risks. New technological capabilities transform war, diplomacy, commerce, intelligence, and investment. This paper identifies six basic patterns by which advances in science and technology influence international relations: as a juggernaut or escaped genie with rapid and wide-ranging ramifications for the international system; as a game-changer and a conveyer of advantage and disadvantage to (...) different actors in the international system; as a source of risks, issues and problems that must be addressed and managed by the international community; as key dimensions or enablers of international macro phenomena; as instruments of foreign policy or sources of technical information for the management of an ongoing international regime; as the subject of projects and institutions whose planning, design, implementation and management provide grist for the mill of international relations and diplomacy. (shrink)

This essay analyzes one of Germany's former premier research institutions for biomedical research, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (KWIA) as a test case for the way in which politics and human heredity served as resources for each other during the Third Reich. Examining the KWIA from this perspective brings us a step closer to answering the questions at the heart of most recent scholarship concerning the biomedical community under the swastika: (1) How do we explain (...) why the vast majority of German human geneticists and eugenicists were willing to work for the National Socialist state and, at the very least, legitimized its exterminationist racial policy; and (2) what accounts for at least some of Germany's most renowned medically trained professionals' involvement in forms of morally compromised science that wholly transcend the bounds of normal scientific practice? Although a complete answer to this question must await an examination of other German biological research centers, the present study suggests that during the Nazi period the symbiotic relationship between human genetics and politics served to radicalize both. The dynamic between the science of human heredity and Nazi politics changed the research practice of some of the biomedical sciences housed at the KWIA. It also simultaneously made it easier for the Nazi state to carry out its barbaric racial program leading, finally, to the extermination of millions of so-called racial undesirables. (shrink)

Matter as such produces nothing, changes nothing, does nothing; and however convenient it may afterwards be to abbreviate our nomenclature and our descriptions, we must most carefully realize in the outset that the spermatozoon, the nucleus, the chromosomes or the germ-plasma can never act as matter alone, but only as seats of energy and as centres of force.Science is a human endeavor that is rarely if ever just about science: it is also a social, political, and economic enterprise. As such (...) it is structured around an ethos: a belief system, or theory, that accounts for the nature of relevant aspects of existence. Much like other belief systems in the broader culture in which they occur, we build stories in defense... (shrink)

Our task in this study, then, is to see what Hegel makes of Aristotle in unifying and interpreting his doctrine, to see how far ... some of the questions that are continually being raised about Hegel's purpose and meaning in the philosophy of mind.

What we experience is somewhat of a melange, something at once perceptual, mediated by the sense organs; scientific, reflecting our use of mathematical and other formal devices to make clear and systematic the causes of what is now taking place, and pointing us towards what might be expected; eventful, stretches of vital movement in which beginning and ending are, though separate, inescapably interlocked; and important, reflecting both our sense of value and the presence of an objective standard outside us and (...) unaffected by our interests. Initially these strands are inchoately together, constituting commonsense objects, artifactual or natural, the occupants of the world of which we unreflectively take account. On some occasions one of these facets may be to the fore, on other occasions it may be so recessive that its presence is overlooked. (shrink)

Book written to preserve the wisdom of the ancient healing sages of China, and to provide the conceptual tools needed for its practical application in healing diseases of the modern world.

This is the first complete English translation of Hasdai Crescas's Light of the Lord, a seminal work of medieval Jewish philosophy. Crescas challenges the Aristotelian underpinnings of medieval thought, introduces alternative physical and metaphysical theories, and presents service to the God of love and benefaction as the goal for humankind.

From this it is evident that despite the controversies of the last decades, there is no genuine opposition between symbolic logicians and Aristotelian logicians on the question of the legitimacy of the deduction of "some x is y" from "all x is y." Symbolic logicians have held that the Aristotelians mistakenly deduce the former from the latter; Aristotelians have said that the symbolic logicians mistakenly divorce the latter from the former. But in fact neither makes a mistake. Each side employs (...) a special meaning of "all." For the Aristotelian, "all" refers to a "general," an actual totality of existents; for the symbolic logician, "all" refers to a universal, a meaning. The general "all" as the Aristotelian sees, allows for the deduction of "some," where "some" means an "existent some." From "All professors at Yale are men," "some professors at Yale are men" follows. The symbolic logician sees that "all" as a universal does not allow for the deduction of "some" ; he rightly rejects the derivation of "Some gryphons at Yale are men" from "All gryphons at Yale are men." However,--and this the symbolic logician overlooks--from "All gryphons at Yale are men," we can legitimately derive "Some gryphons at Yale are men." There are, in short, two distinct meanings of "some,", of which only one, the Aristotelian, has been recognized even by symbolic logicians. The "some" which follows from the general "all" refers to an actual subdivision of an actual class; the "some" which follows from the universal "all" refers to an intellectually distinguished part of an intention or meaning. From the latter "some" the former, the existent, cannot be legitimately derived. (shrink)

We look on Fernán Pérez de Guzmán as an exile not only because he lived out the last thirty years of his life in the relative seclusion of his estate in Batres; he is an exile, too, because as a poet he has long been banished from critical acclaim. For an enthusiastic view, one has to go back to the 1860s and the eulogy of the literary historian José Amador de los Ríos, according to whom Fernán Pérez's graceful didacticism deserved (...) “[el] aprecio de la verdadera crítica.” Since then, “the appreciation of true critics” has been reserved for what is now considered a canonical work of prose history, the Generaciones y semblanzas, whereas most of his poetry has been condemned for stylistic inelegance — ironically, as we shall see, one of the very qualities he seems deliberately to have cultivated. (shrink)