Of the nature and origin of the mind, by B. de Spinoza.--Spinoza and the theory of organism, by H. Jonas.--Man a machine, and The natural history of the soul, by J. O. de la Mettrie.--On the first ground of the distinction of regions in space, and What is orientation in thinking? by I. Kant.--Soul and body, by J. Dewey.--The philosophical concept of a human body, by D. C. Long.--Are persons bodies? By B. A. O. Williams.--Lived body, environment, and ego, by (...) M. Scheler.--Metaphysical journal, and A metaphysical diary, by G. Marcel.--The body, by J.-P. Sartre.--The spatiality of the lived body and motility, by M. Merleau-Ponty.--Anthropodology: man a-foot, by R. M. Griffith.--Man and his body, by H. Plügge.--The nobility of sight: a study in the phenomenology of the senses, by H. Jonas.--Born to see, bound to behold: reflections on the function of upright posture in the esthetic attitude, by E. W. Straus.--Selected reading (p. [363]-367). (shrink)

Although American philosophers and physicians are generally familiar with the writings of Claude Bernard (1813–1878), especially his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), the medicial epistemology of Georges Canguilhem, born in 1904, is virtually unknown in English speaking nations. Although indebted to Bernard for his conception of the methods to be employed in the acquisition of medical knowledge, Canguilhem radically reformulates Bernard's concepts of ‘disease’, ‘health’, ‘illness’, and ‘pathology’. Contemporary exhortations to medical professionals and medical students that they (...) “pay more attention to the whole patient” take on significance in working through the writings of Canguilhem; of crucial importance is the relation that obtains between a patient's unique symptomatology and the proper drug regiment that is required. (shrink)

Youths with disruptive behavior disorders and psychopathic traits showed reduced amygdala responses to fearful expressions under low attentional load but no indications of increased recruitment of regions implicated in top- down attentional control. These findings suggest that the emotional deficit observed in youths with disruptive behavior disorders and psychopathic traits is primary and not secondary to increased top- down attention to nonemotional stimulus features.

This anthology includes authors whose original articles appeared in prior issues of HEC Forum, and who have been frequently cited in the principal bioethics journals. It details the necessary ethical considerations for those working in related fields.

The present ‘healthfare’ state in the United States in neither practically nor morally justified. The nation currently fails to provide adequate access to health care for tens of millions of uninsured citizens. To suggest that the United States' half-million physicians should provide their care as charity is an inadequate solution. The transfer of assets from the ‘haves’ to the ‘have-nots’ through taxation in a ‘healthfare state’ undermines human compassion, and fails to respect minimal moral requirements. However, alternative strategies are possible. (...) During the next 20 years health care could come to be financed on the basis of sound quasi-libertarian moral and prudential principles. In the interim deliberate political action is required to achieve novel health policy, available and affordable job and career training, and universal employment. It is possible to achieve universal access to adequate health care while sustaining individual choice, and at the same time to reduce or virtually eliminate taxpayersubsidised health care. This approach would, in time, eliminate the healthfare state and eventually encourage and even require citizens to go off the healthfare dole. (shrink)

The current study examined whether Callous-Unemotional (CU) traits, a core component of psychopathy, modulate neural responses of participants engaged in a social exchange game. In this task, participants were offered an allocation of money and then given the chance to punish the offerer. Twenty youth participated and responses to both offers and the participant’s punishment (or not) of these offers were examined. Increasingly unfair offers were associated with increased dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) activity but this responsiveness was not modulated (...) by CU traits. Increasing punishment of unfair offers was associated with increased dACC and anterior insula activity and this activity was modulated by CU traits. Higher CU trait participants showed a weaker association between activity and punishment level. These data suggest that CU traits are associated with appropriate expectations of other individual’s normative behavior but weaker representations of such information when guiding behavior of the self. (shrink)

An adequate understanding of the ubiquitous practice of mechanistic explanation requires an account of what Craver termed “constitutive relevance.” Entities or activities are constitutively relevant to a phenomenon when they are parts of the mechanism responsible for that phenomenon. Craver’s mutual manipulability account extended Woodward’s account of manipulationist counterfactuals to analyze how interlevel experiments establish constitutive relevance. Critics of MM argue that applying Woodward’s account to this philosophical problem conflates causation and constitution, thus rendering the account incoherent. These criticisms, we (...) argue, arise from failing to distinguish the semantic, epistemic, and metaphysical aspects of the problem of constitutive relevance. In distinguishing these aspects of the problem and responding to these critics accordingly, we amend MM into a refined epistemic criterion, the “matched interlevel experiments” account. Further, we explain how this epistemological thesis is grounded in the plausible metaphysical thesis that constitutive relevance is causal betweenness. (shrink)

Of the nature and origin of the mind, by B. de Spinoza.--Spinoza and the theory of organism, by H. Jonas.--Man a machine, and The natural history of the soul, by J. O. de la Mettrie.--On the first ground of the distinction of regions in space, and What is orientation in thinking? by I. Kant.--Soul and body, by J. Dewey.--The philosophical concept of a human body, by D. C. Long.--Are persons bodies? By B. A. O. Williams.--Lived body, environment, and ego, by (...) M. Scheler.--Metaphysical journal, and A metaphysical diary, by G. Marcel.--The body, by J.-P. Sartre.--The spatiality of the lived body and motility, by M. Merleau-Ponty.--Anthropodology: man a-foot, by R. M. Griffith.--Man and his body, by H. Plügge.--The nobility of sight: a study in the phenomenology of the senses, by H. Jonas.--Born to see, bound to behold: reflections on the function of upright posture in the esthetic attitude, by E. W. Straus.--Selected reading (p. [363]-367). (shrink)