The practice of prenatal diagnosis has brought with it the utilization of pregnancy termination as a preventive approach. In this paper the genetic/teratologic, fetal and maternal indications for termination of pregnancy used in Hungary are described, as well as the legal requirements and the proposed mode of termination at the different stages of gestation. The author is the director of the largest prenatal genetic counseling service in Hungary. Keywords: elective abortion, medico-legal aspects, prenatal diagnosis, genetic disorders, Hungary, bioethics CiteULike Connotea (...) Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

János Erdelyi: The Individual and the Ideal Individuality and ideality are the two principles according to which aesthetes yesterday and today interpret art. But individuality must have priority because the systems of ideality, established for instance by Winckelmann and Schiller, produce nothing but lifeless, abstract and uniform figures who represent a concept or the genus. Individuality, on the contrary, is an analogon to nature where everything has its end and sense in itself, and everything must be judged by itself. This (...) is the difference between the figures and works of Shakespeare and those of the idealizing authors. Individuality, however, does not simply mean the imitation of nature; rather it means a well-balanced synthesis of the material and the spiritual in something characteristic. This renders the objection of ugliness invalid, too, because it only pertains to the sensual perception, that is the beginning of perception. Those identifying the beautiful with the ideal are also at risk of insisting on objects which in the course of time lose their novelty and power. The study by the Hungarian aesthete and literary critic János Erdélyi, written in 1847, is an important attempt to enforce the principle ‘life as it is’ in the philosophy of art. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with what I believe is the epistemological mission of Kant’s doctrine of taste. The third Critique inherits two problems from the first. The evident one is that the categorial constitution of nature must be complemented with the notion of purposiveness. The less evident one is that the transcendental theory of experience needs a common sense in order to secure a common objectivity. The judgment of taste, conceived of by Kant as a ‘cognition in general’ not restricted (...) to either the particular subject or the particular object, offers a solution. It turns out to be a judgment that cannot be made without assuming the purposiveness of nature and the uniformity of the cognizing subjects. (shrink)