In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionStuart J. Youngner (bio), Laura A. Siminoff (bio), and Renie Schapiro (bio)This issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (KIEJ) centers on a piece of empirical research. The motivation behind the study of Laura Siminoff, Christopher Burant, and Stuart Youngner (2004) was to find out more about what the general public understands and believes about when a person is dead. More specifically, the study tried to determine (...) how members of the public define death, especially their acceptance and interpretation of the medical concept of "brain death," and their attitudes toward the so-called "dead donor rule," an informal but powerful social and legal norm insisting that the taking of organs for transplantation not cause the death of the source of those organs.As the demand for organs increases and the waiting list grows, the United States has explored multiple ways to expand the pool of potential donors. One approach has been to gerrymander (coherently or not) the line between life and death to shift patients who are extremely compromised but traditionally considered to be in the living category into the dead category. In this way, the dead donor rule remains technically intact. This reasoning is explicit in the report of the Harvard Medical School Ad Hoc Committee (1968) that "introduced" "brain death" to the American culture. Since then, other efforts to redraw the line have been proposed and rejected.One alternative to gerrymandering is to consider under what conditions, if any, it is morally acceptable to violate the dead donor rule. Some would argue that this alternative is the more "honest" approach. Rather than sidestepping moral problems by calling people dead, it brings the moral problems to the surface where the necessity of sticking to the rule can be considered on its own merits. However, when the Journal of the American Medical Association printed a position paper that proposed making anencepahlic newborns an exception to the dead donor rule, along with arguments about why this was acceptable, the outcry was so great that the proposal was retracted (AMA 1995).Clearly, our society has identified organ transplantation as a priority, although two papers in this volume (those by Courtney Campbell and by Megan Crowley-Matoka and Robert Arnold) take issue with that prioritization. The fact that the donor pool has remained relatively stable (and inadequate) despite massive efforts [End Page 211] to increase it speaks, at least in part, to the cultural and legal resistance to "new" ways to procure more organs. Voluntarism seems to have peaked. Financial incentives clash with the heavily endorsed notion of the "gift of life" and seem to many to violate the dignity of the human body. Presumed consent or eminent domain, in which the community has a greater claim to a person's organs than that person or his/her family, go against the grain of American individual freedom and the ethos of patient autonomy.Abandoning the dead donor rule generally is regarded as an even tougher sell to the American public and its legislators. The study by Siminoff and colleagues attempts, among other things, to gauge just how tough this sell would be. What the data actually demonstrate is a matter of interpretation, and this issue of the KIEJ is devoted to some of those interpretations. The authors, with the exception of Daniel Hausman, came together for a meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, during which the study's methods and data were presented with time for questions, clarifications, and general discussion. The authors then worked with the editors to generate the papers printed in this volume.The issue begins with a presentation of the study conducted by Siminoff and colleagues. The same paper also appears in the journal Social Science and Medicine, where it includes the conclusions of the authors (Siminoff, Burant, and Youngner 2004). In the current volume, we present only the methodology of and data from the study, allowing a number of distinguished commentators to offer their own conclusions and reflections.The first response comes from Tracy Schmidt, Executive Director of Intermountain Donor Services, one of our nation's organ procurement organizations (OPOs). For years, organ procurement professionals have reported anecdotal stories about families who wished to donate organs of... (shrink)

Drawing on parallels in Hutcheson and Hume, I raise two worries about Bratman’s theory of shared agency. First, has Bratman captured the interpersonal character of shared agency? Second, has he captured its practical character? By “its practical character,” I mean the sense in which shared agency is something we can undertake under that description, and not just a condition we might happen to find ourselves in? I argue that Bratman’s theory falls short of answering this second worry. The source of (...) the shortcoming, I argue, is a fundamental methodological commitment that structures his action theory as a whole. This is the commitment to regard the concepts of action and shared action as empirical concepts, rather than as practical concepts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.1 (2000) 153-156 [Access article in PDF] JHI 2000 Donald R. Kelley It was just sixty years ago that this Journal first made its appearance. Two hundred thirty-nine issues later it continues in a world transformed by war, overpopulation, cultural shocks, scientific and technological transformations, globalization, the avalanche of information produced by electronic exchange, and "the acceleration of just about everything." Yet despite (...) these factors and the strains of postmodernism and cultural alterity, 1 it has not entirely lost touch with its intellectual innocence, faith in humanistic learning, and reliance on enlightened reason. This continuity itself may seem something of a novelty in an age of distrust of history and "rage against reason," but for some of us it reflects the critical spirit and intellectual context out of which such ostensibly subversive attitudes emerge, and reemerge. To some extent, moreover, the diversity of opinions about intellectual traditions is the result of specializations, and special interests, which have changed the climate of opinion since the time of Arthur O. Lovejoy, principal founder of the JHI. Lovejoy's vision was super- as well as inter-disciplinary; that is, he intended to include in the agenda of "history of ideas" particular areas of history of philosophy, literature, art, science, social science, etc., as well as the larger intellectual and cultural areas into which these disciplinary histories extend. 2 These days, however, all these disciplinary traditions have their own more specialized journals and do not need to seek a vehicle in publications of more general interest. What remains then, for the most part, is the interdisciplinary arena in which larger questions of human experience should be posed--and for Lovejoy, as for so many epigones and critics, the main "larger question" is not only one of value but also of specifically historical inquiry. 3 [End Page 153]The first issue of the JHI appeared under the editorship of Lovejoy (with Philip Wiener, who did most of the editorial work, as "managing editor"), assisted by a committee that included two historians, three philosophers, four literary scholars, and one political theorist; namely, Crane Brinton, Gilbert Chinard, Morris Cohen, Francis Coker, Richard McKeon, Perry Miller, Marjory Nicolson, J. H. Randall, J. Salwyn Schapiro, and Louis Wright. The first volume featured contributions from each of these, including Wiener, except for Miller (vol. 2), Shapiro (vol. 3), McKeon (vol. 8), and Coker. 4 During the first five years there were also reviews of books by Dilthey (by Horace L. Friess), Croce (Schapiro), Mannheim (Randall), Perry Miller (Herbert W. Schneider), Van Wyck Brooks (Miller) and Alfred Kazin (F. O. Matthiessen). In this period the disciplinary distribution of articles was not markedly different from that of the past five years, nor was the ranking of fields by number of submissions. 5 Most important, the original interdisciplinary thrust of Lovejoy's agenda, if not his attachment to the spiritualist currency of "unit-ideas," has survived growing specialization.At first the history of ideas was pursued largely in the shadow of the history of philosophy; for in this field, according to Lovejoy, "is to be found the common seed-plot, the locus of initial manifestation in writing, of the greater number of the more fundamental and pervasive ideas, and especially of the ruling preconceptions, which manifest themselves in other regions of intellectual history." 6 Lovejoy's concern was always with concepts, especially "-isms," and yet in some ways he anticipated the "linguistic turn" of the later years of this century, pointing out in particular "the role of semantic shifts, ambiguities, and confusions, in the history of thought and taste," for "nearly all of the great catchwords have been equivocal--or rather, multivocal." 7 If ideas could be given stable definitions, they were nonetheless often, in the context of language, in conflict, even in the mind of a single thinker; for such was the "anomaly of knowledge." 8 So Lovejoy was at pains to distinguish the various meanings of [End Page 154] catch-words like "nature," "perfectibility," "romanticism," "progress," and "pragmatism," not to mention more inflammatory terms of wartime ideological debate.But... (shrink)

ResumenEl trabajo se propone, por un lado, presentar los argumentos que M. Shapiro y J. M. Schaffer hicieron contra la interpretación heideggeriana del cuadro de van Gogh. Y, por otro, someter a un análisis crítico cada una de las objeciones. La idea central es presentar la polémica que produjo la recepción del texto de Heidegger Der Ursprung des Kusntwerkes y mostrar que dicha recepción se funda en un desconocimiento del pensamiento heideggeriano -tal como sucede en el caso de M. Shapiro- (...) y en una incorrecta descripción de la producción del sentido –tal es el caso de J. M. Schaffer-.Conceptos Clave:Significado, Referente, Obra de Arte, EstéticaThe study aims, on one hand, at submitting the objections that M. Shapiro and J.M: Schaffer made against Heidegger´s interpretation of Van Gogh´s painting, and, on the other hand, at making a critical analysis of every objection. The main idea consists in presenting the controversy created by the reception of Heidegger´s Der Ursprung des Kusntwerkes and showing that said reception is based on the ignorance of Heidegger´s thought – as in the case of M. Shapiro – and on the improper description of the production of meaning – as in the case of J.M. Schaffer.Key concepts:Meaning, Referent, Work of Art, Aesthetics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWith over 560 citations reported on Google Scholar by April 2018, a publication by Juslin and Gabrielsson presented evidence supporting performers’ abilities to communicate, with hig...

Feeling like doing something is not the same as deciding to do it. When you feel like doing something, you are still free to decide to do it or not. You are having an inclination to do it, but you are not thereby determined to do it. I call this the moment of drama. This book is about what you are faced with, in this moment. How should you relate to the inclinations you “have,” given that you are free to (...) “act on” them or not? To answer this question, we need an account of what sort of thing we are relating to, in this moment. But here we find a genuine philosophical problem. Our inclinations are forms of motivation, with respect to which we are distinctively passive. To be motivated is to be self-moved. But how can we be passive in relation to our own self-movement? Is our relation to our inclinations like that of rider to horse? Or is it like our relation to our own, spontaneous judgments or perceptions? I lay out three constraints on any theory of inclination, and I argue that familiar theories fail to meet them, because they make being inclined to φ‎ too similar or dissimilar to φ‎-ing. I then put forward the “inner animal” view, which holds that when you are merely inclined to act, the instinctive part of yourself is already active, while the rest of you is not. In this moment, your will is “at a crossroads.” You can humanize your inclination, or dehumanize yourself. (shrink)

There is a puzzle in the very notion of passive motivation ("passion" or "inclination"). To be motivated is not simply to be moved from the outside. Motivation is in some sense self-movement. But how can an agent be passive with respect to her own motivation? How is passive motivation possible? In this paper I defend the ancient view that inclination stems from a motivational source independent of reason, a motivational source that is both agential and nonrational.

In this paper I try to undermine complacency with a predominant conception of desire, for the sake of refocusing attention on a philosophical problem. The predominant conception holds that to have a desire is to occupy an evaluative outlook, a perspective from which the agent 'sees' the world in practically salient terms. I argue that it is not clear what this theory is a theory of, because the concept of desire at its center is deeply ambiguous. Understood as a theory (...) of desire in what I call the "placeholder" sense, the evaluative outlook theory is at bottom a theory of action explanation. So construed, its claim is relatively uncontroversial, and falls far short of being a full theory of action explanation. Understood as a theory of desire in what I call the "substantive" sense, it does not even go so far as to acknowledge the central problem such a theory has to answer. That problem is how we can be passive (in a particular sense) with respect to our own motivation. (shrink)

The utilitarian conception, which I call “action as production,” holds that action is a way of making use of the world, conceived as a causal mechanism. According to the rational intuitionist conception, which I call “action as assertion,” action is a way of acknowledging the value in the world, conceived as a realm of status. On the Kantian constructivist conception, which I call “action as participation,” action is a way of making the world, qua causal mechanism, come to count as (...) a realm of status. My rather limited aim in this paper is to identify three substantively different answers the question of how action relates an agent to the world, regarded as a context of action. (shrink)

In this paper I defend Kant’s Incorporation Thesis, which holds that we must “incorporate” our incentives into our maxims if we are to act on them. I see this as a thesis about what is necessary for a human being to make the transition from ‘having a desire’ to ‘acting on it’. As such, I consider the widely held view that ‘having a desire’ involves being focused on the world, and not on ourselves or on the desire. I try to (...) show how this view is connected with a denial of any deep distinction between reason and inclination. I then argue for an alternative view of what ‘having a desire’ involves, one according to which it involves being focused both on the world and on ourselves. I show how this view fits naturally with the Kantian distinction between reason and inclination, accounts for independent intuitions about ‘having a desire’, and supports the Incorporation Thesis. I then make some further suggestions about how we might conceive of the object of incorporation. (shrink)

Recent studies indicate that mammalian chromosomes contain discretecis‐acting loci that control replication timing, mitotic condensation, and stability of entire chromosomes. Disruption of the large non‐coding RNA gene ASAR6 results in late replication, an under‐condensed appearance during mitosis, and structural instability of human chromosome 6. Similarly, disruption of the mouse Xist gene in adult somatic cells results in a late replication and instability phenotype on the X chromosome. ASAR6 shares many characteristics with Xist, including random mono‐allelic expression and asynchronous replication timing. (...) Additional “chromosome engineering” studies indicate that certain chromosome rearrangements affecting many different chromosomes display this abnormal replication and instability phenotype. These observations suggest that all mammalian chromosomes contain “inactivation/stability centers” that control proper replication, condensation, and stability of individual chromosomes. Therefore, mammalian chromosomes contain four types ofcis‐acting elements, origins, telomeres, centromeres, and “inactivation/stability centers”, all functioning to ensure proper replication, condensation, segregation, and stability of individual chromosomes. (shrink)

A task of any moral theory is to account for both the rigidity and the flexibility of moral rules. Utilitarianism faces the problem of building rigidity into a framework that tends towards objectionable flexibility. Kantianism faces the problem of building flexibility into a framework that tends towards objectionable rigidity. I offer an argument on this front on behalf of Kantians. I show how Kantians can maintain that actions are right and wrong "in themselves," while still maintaining that such actions can (...) be corrupted under certain "nonideal" circumstances. (shrink)

Adapting critical methods from such wide-ranging fields as anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, biology, and other sciences, Schapiro appraises fundamental semantic terms such as "organic style," "pictorial style", "field and vehicle," and "form and content"; he elucidates eclipsed intent in a well-known text by Freud on Leonardo da Vinci, in another by Heidegger on Vincent van Gogh.