INTRODUCTION! In almost every area of contemporary philosophy the impact of Franz Brentano or his pupils can be detected. ...

Der vorliegende Band enthält Husserls Versuche, einen Beweis für seine These zu entwickeln, dass die Existenz realer transzendenter Objekte ohne Bezug auf ein aktuelles Bewusstsein undenkbar und also unmöglich sei. Die frühesten Texte, die Begründungen für diese These des transzendentalen oder transzendental-phänomenologischen Idealismus enthalten, stammen aus dem Jahr 1908. In ihnen erarbeitet Husserl einerseits die für den Beweisgang wesentlichen Elemente, wie insbesondere die Unterscheidung zwischen realen und idealen Möglichkeiten; andererseits versucht er seine These indirekt dadurch zu stützen, dass er den (...) Phänomenalismus und die realistische Schlusstheorie der äußeren Wahrnehmung, wonach diese in einem Schluss von unmittelbar gegebenen Sinnesdaten auf eine "an sich" bestehende reale Außenwelt bestehe, als unhaltbar zurückweist. Genauer und ausführlicher als in diesen Forschungsmanuskripten von 1908 argumentiert Husserl in den hier veröffentlichten Stücken zweier Vorlesungen, der Vorlesungen "Natur und Geist" (SS 1913) und "Ausgewählte phänomenologische Probleme" (SS 1915), für seinen transzendentalen Idealismus. Gleichwohl bleibt die Argumentation in diesen Texten abstrakt und in wesentlichen Hinsichten ergänzungsbedürftig. In Texten der Folgejahre bemüht sich Husserl, diesen "formal allgemeinen" Beweis, den er einer solipsistischen "Unterstufe" des transzendentalen Idealismus zuweist, zu vervollständigen. Es sind vor allem die von ihm bisher vernachlässigten Aspekte der Leiblichkeit und der Intersubjektivität, die Husserl in hier veröffentlichten Forschungsmanuskripten aus den Jahren 1914/1915 bis 1921 in seine Argumentationen mit einbezieht, indem er zeigt, dass das aktuelle Bewusstsein, auf das alle transzendenten objektiven Realitäten ihrem Sinne nach zurückbezogen sind, ein leibliches Bewusstsein sein muss, das für anderes leibliches Bewusstsein da ist und mit ihm auf dieselbe Realitätenwelt bezogen ist. (shrink)

While Meinong makes scattered remarks about perception in various writings, the one text in which he makes a concentrated effort to work out a theory of perception is Über die Erfahrungsgrundlagen unseres Wissens (1905). This paper is a critical examination of the theory which is presented there, but also some other texts are taken into account. Special attention will be given to Meinong's views on the object (Gegenstand) of perception, both the propositional object (Objektiv) and the non-propositional object (Objekt) which (...) is allegedly "part" of the propositional object. Also, some contrasts and parallels between these views and those of other members of the Brentano School, e.g. Husserl's notion of categorial perception are discussed. (shrink)

While Meinong makes scattered remarks about perception in various writings, the one text in which he makes a concentrated effort to work out a theory of perception is Über die Erfahrungsgrundlagen unseres Wissens (1905). This paper is a critical examination of the theory which is presented there, but also some other texts are taken into account. Special attention will be given to Meinong's views on the object (Gegenstand) of perception, both the propositional object (Objektiv) and the non-propositional object (Objekt) which (...) is allegedly "part" of the propositional object. Also, some contrasts and parallels between these views and those of other members of the Brentano School, e.g. Husserl's notion of categorial perception are discussed. (shrink)

In ‘The Politics of Experience’ and the visionary ‘Bird of Paradise’, R.D. Laing shows how the straitjacket of conformity imposed on us all leads to intense feelings of alienation and a tragic waste of human potential. He throws into question the notion of normality, examines schizophrenia and psychotherapy, transcendence and ‘us and them’ thinking, and illustrates his ideas with a remarkable case history of a ten-day psychosis. ‘We are bemused and crazed creatures,’ Laing suggests. This outline of ‘a thoroughly self-conscious (...) and self-critical human account of man’ represents a major attempt to understand our deepest dilemmas and sketch in solutions. ‘Everyone in contemporary psychiatry owes something to R.D. Laing’ Anthony Clare, the Guardian. (shrink)

XLRI, in association with a few Tata Group companies, established the XLRI-JRD Tata Foundation in Business Ethics in 1991 to mark their long-standing commitment and contribution to business ethics in India. The foundation seeks to address this by publicly affirming the urgent need for ethics in business and the need to bring about a conducive culture in which it can thrive.

Requests by patients or their families for treatment which the patient's physician considers to be "inappropriate" are becoming more frequent than refusals of treatment which the physician considers appropriate. Such requests are often based on the patient's religious beliefs about the attributes of God (sovereignty, omnipotence), the attributes of persons (sanctity of life), or the individual's personal relationship with God (communication, commands, etc). We present four such cases and discuss some of the basic religious tenets of the three Abrahamic faith (...) traditions as they relate to such requests. We suggest that religious reasons for requesting "inappropriate" treatment are "special" and deserve serious consideration. We offer guidance to assist clinicians and clinical ethicists as they attempt to resolve these conflicts, emphasising the importance of understanding the religious beliefs of the patient/surrogate and suggesting the assistance of a religious interpreter. We suggest open discussion with patients and families of both the clinical situation and the theological basis for these requests. We also suggest that clinicians use additional religious doctrines or principles from patients' own traditions to balance the reasons behind the requests. We conclude that most persistent requests for "inappropriate" treatment should be honoured. (shrink)

Hicks' edition of the De Anima contains valuable commentary from Hicks as well as useful summaries of the views of earlier commentators.

Originally published in 1907, this book contains the ancient Greek text of Aristotle's De Anima, his treatise on the differing souls of living things. An English translation is provided on each facing page, and Hicks supplies a very detailed commentary on each line at the end of the book, as well as a summary of each section. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Greek philosophy and the history of classical scholarship.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:R. D. Ackerman BELIEVING IN A FICTION: WALLACE STEVENS AT THE LIMITS OF PHENOMENOLOGY The "ring of men" of "Sunday Morning" will chant their "devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / Naked among them, like a savage source" (CP, pp. 69-70).' Solar nakedness is deferred even as it is named. The problem for belief is the question of appearance and (...) representation. Things appear as and like.... The phenomenological return to things is also a turn to fiction, as Husserl understood: "If anyone loves a paradox, he can really say... that the element which makes up the life of phenomenology... is fiction. ' " The sun is divine, and it is not; it is both naked and clothed, savage and civilized, source (or end) and means. But such paradox is ultimately unsatisfying, and as we will see with Stevens, the need for belief—for an image or idea of totality—forces the issue of fiction and reality. The Stevens we will have in view is not the Stevens—as if there were such a creature. Our Stevens is the one most persuaded by promises such as those of phenomenology, the one most concerned with decreation (reduction) and fresh beginnings, with discovery and recognition, with imagination, the body, and the earth. This is the Stevens for whom the barrier of language presages at last not absence and difference but fictive recovery of presence and identity, the one for whom poetry represents a way of belief beyond mysticism even as it bodes mythic proximity. Finally, this is the Stevens who predominates throughout the prose (as well as in much of the poetry), who tries mightily to secure a belief while disencumbering himself of metaphysics—but alas, I think, with small success. Although Stevens's association of the problem of belief with the idea of fiction occurs in early poems such as "A High-Toned Old Christian 79 80Philosophy and Literature Woman" and "To the One of Fictive Music," his most intensive involvement with fiction as belief dates from the early 1940s and spans the period of his major essays and his last four volumes of poems. He recounts, for instance, a 1942 conversation with a student: "I said that I thought that we had reached a point at which we could no longer really believe in anything unless we recognized that it was a fiction. The student said that that was an impossibility, that there was no such thing as believing in something that one knew was not true. It is obvious, however, that we are doing that all the time" (L, p. 430). What does it mean to believe in a fiction? That is my main subject here, as we seek out the limits of the phenomenological Stevens. His letters of this period are preoccupied with the problem of fictive belief: "If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else.... A good deal of my poetry recently has concerned an identity for that thing.... In one of the short poems that I have just sent to the harvard advocate, I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction. I think that the history of belief will show that it has always been in a fiction" (L, p. 370). The poem referred to, "Asides on the Oboe," begins: The prologues are over. It is a question now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose. (CP, p. 250) Acknowledging that "in the long run, poetry would be the supreme fiction" (L, pp. 430-31), Stevens nonetheless singles out the nominative function of poetry as the essence of its claim to supremacy: "Poetry means not the language of poetry but the thing itself.... The subject matter is what comes to mind when one says of the month of August... 'Thou art not August, unless I make thee so'" (L, p. 377). The quoted line (also from "Asides") underscores the paradox that for Stevens the essence of fiction (the nontrue) is its capacity to nominate the true or the real. This... (shrink)

We show there is only one consistent way to update a probability assignment, that given by Bayes's rule. The price of inconsistent updating is a loss of efficiency. The implications of this for the problem of induction are discussed.

Weber-Fechner Law states that the perceived intensity is proportional to the logarithm of the stimulus. Recent experiments suggest that this law also holds true for perception of numerosity. Therefore, the use of a logarithmic scale for the quantification of the perceived intensity may also depend on how the cognitive apparatus processes information. If Weber-Fechner law is the result of natural selection, then the logarithmic scale should be better, in some sense, than other biologically feasible scales. We consider the minimization of (...) the relative error as the target of natural selection and we provide a formal proof that the logarithmic scale minimizes the maximal relative error. (shrink)

This work is available on its own or as part of the 7 volume set Selected Works of R. D. Laing.

Savulescu maintains that our paper, which encourages clinicians to honour requests for "inappropriate treatment" is prejudicial to his atheistic beliefs, and therefore wrong. In this paper we clarify and expand on our ideas, and respond to his assertion that medicine, ethics and atheism are objective, rational and true, while religion is irrational and false.

Open peer commentary on the article “The Autopoiesis of Social Systems and its Criticisms” by Hugo Cadenas & Marcelo Arnold. Upshot: The authors claim that it is justified to extend the concept of autopoiesis from its biological origin to other disciplines, predominately those that have a social character. However, the authors do not lay strong enough conceptual grounds to justify this extension of autopoiesis because it is unclear what concept of autopoiesis it is that would achieve this objective, or why (...) the concept of autopoiesis itself should be crucial to this endeavor. (shrink)