In ordinary life everyone assumes that he has a great deal of knowledge about other minds or persons. This assumption has naturally aroused the curiosity of philosophers; though perhaps they have not been as curious about it as they ought to have been, for they have devoted many volumes to our consciousness of the material world, but very few to our consciousness of one another. It was thought at one time that each of us derives his knowledge of other minds (...) from the observation of other human organisms. I observe that there are a number of bodies which resemble my own fairly closely in their shape, size, and manner of movement; I conclude by analogy that each of these bodies is animated by a. (shrink)

Some research is too risky to be conducted on anyone whose life expectancy is more than a few hours. Yet sometimes, the research can still be carried out using subjects who are brain dead or are soon to undergo a terminal wean, and who have articulated values that inclusion in the study can honor. So argues a team of ethicists and researchers at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where such research was recently undertaken.

Some research is too risky to be conducted on anyone whose life expectancy is more than a few hours. Yet sometimes, the research can still be carried out using subjects who are brain dead or are soon to undergo a terminal wean, and who have articulated values that inclusion in the study can honor. So argues a team of ethicists and researchers at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where such research was recently undertaken.

Those who deny that general principles are important for moral deliberation have mostly misunderstood how principles work. Principles do not give us algorithms for living. They identify broad requirements we must live up to, but they do not actually tell us what to do. We are left instead to craft responses that honor our general commitments using the materials of the case at hand.

If it is not now determined whether there will be a sea battle tomorrow, can an assertion that there will be one be true? The problem has persisted because there are compelling arguments on both sides. If there are objectively possible futures which would make the prediction true and others which would make it false, symmetry considerations seem to forbid counting it either true or false. Yet if we think about how we would assess the prediction tomorrow, when a sea (...) battle is raging (or not), it seems we must assign the utterance a definite truth-value. I argue that both arguments must be given their due, and that this requires relativizing utterance-truth to a context of assessment. I show how this relativization can be handled in a rigorous formal semantics, and I argue that we can make coherent sense of assertion without assuming that utterances have their truth-values absolutely. (shrink)

überall einen richtigen Gebrauch der reinen Vernunft giebt, in welchem Fall es auch einen Canon derselben geben muß, so wird dieser nicht den speculativen, sondernden pr.ntischen Vernunftgebrauch betreffen, den wir also iezt ...

Preliminaries: Terminology and Notation We may make a distinction between temporally definite and temporally indefinite sentences. ...

Quality of life is a difficult concept to define and to measure. An hypothesis is proposed which suggests that the quality of life measures the difference, or the gap, at a particular period of time between the hopes and expectations of the individual and that individual's present experiences. Quality of life can only be described by the individual, and must take into account many aspects of life. The approach is goal-orientated, and one of task analysis. The hypothesis is developed in (...) a diagramatic way, and several methods of testing the hypothesis suggested. (shrink)

We are often faced with choices that involve the weighing of people's lives against each other, or the weighing of lives against other good things. These are choices both for individuals and for societies. A person who is terminally ill may have to choose between palliative care and more aggressive treatment, which will give her a longer life but at some cost in suffering. We have to choose between the convenience to ourselves of road and air travel, and the lives (...) of the future people who will be killed by the global warming we cause, through violent weather, tropical disease, and heat waves. We also make choices that affect how many lives there will be in the future: as individuals we choose how many children to have, and societies choose tax policies that influence people's choices about having children. These are all problems of weighing lives. How should we weigh lives? Weighing Lives develops a theoretical basis for answering this practical question. It extends the work and methods of Broome's earlier book Weighing Goods to cover the questions of life and death. Difficult problems come up in the process. In particular, Weighing Lives tackles the well-recognized, awkward problems of the ethics of population. It carefully examines the common intuition that adding people to the population is ethically neutral - neither a good nor a bad thing - but eventually concludes this intuition cannot be fitted into a coherent theory of value. In the course of its argument, Weighing Lives examines many of the issues of contemporary moral theory: the nature of consequentialism and teleology; the transitivity, continuity, and vagueness of betterness; the quantitative conception of wellbeing; the notion of a life worth living; the badness of death; and others. This is a work of philosophy, but one of its distinctive features is that it adopts some of the precise methods of economic theory (without introducing complex mathematics). Not only philosophers, but also economists and political theorists concerned with the practical question of valuing life, should find the book's conclusions highly significant to their work. (shrink)

The reflections put forward in this text concern the clinical and practical difficulties posed by the existence of patients in PVS, and the essential ethical issues raised, combining these ethical questions with practical and theoretical experience.Section 1 presents the methodology of the ethical reflection as we see it.Section 2 describes the clinical condition of patients in PVS. Section 3 develops the ethical difficulties relative to PVS from the French point of view. Section 4 illustrates the relevance of debating the ethical (...) significance of such problematic situations, whilst defending a practical position based on a philosophical conviction. Section 5 points out the limits of ethical reflection in a biomedical context, and calls for reflection closer to the source of the problems described. For a comprehensive appraisal of biomedical rationality, the final section suggests combining the bioethical debates with traditional philosophical ethical reflection so as to get a clearer understanding of the real, if limited, relevance of these debates. (shrink)

In this book, Jerome Kagan takes a provocative look at the mental developments underlying the startling transitions in the child's second year.It is Kagan&...

It is a non-dogmatic philosophical treatment of a universally important area of human experience and is intended for a primary audience of all administrators, executives, managers, politicians and leaders, as well as those either aspiring to these ranks or engaged in a study of them.

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist and a leading brain researcher show how the brain creates conscious experience.

It has been suggested that if the preservation and development of consciousness in the biological evolution is a result of natural selection, it is plausible that consciousness not only has been influenced by neural processes, but has had a survival value itself; and it could only have had this, if it had also been efficacious. This argument for mind-brain interaction is examined, both as the argument has been developed by William James and Karl Popper and as it has been discussed (...) by C.D. Broad. The problem of identifying mental phenomena with certain neural phenomena is also addressed. The main conclusion of the analysis is that an explanation of the evolution of consciousness in Darwinian terms of natural selection does not rule out that consciousness may have evolved as a mere causally inert effect of the evolution of the nervous system, or that mental phenomena are identical with certain neural phenomena. However, the interactionistic theory still seems, more plausible and more fruitful for other reasons brought up in the discussion. (shrink)

The reflections put forward in this text concern the clinical and practical difficulties posed by the existence of patients in PVS, and the essential ethical issues raised, combining these ethical questions with practical and theoretical experience.Section 1 presents the methodology of the ethical reflection as we see it.