The article outlines the basic lines of a phenomenology of driving. The starting point is the thesis that “driving” does not occur in nature and is therefore a form of movement reserved for humans, which is linked to the invention of the wheel. This invention expanded the possibilities of mobility in technical and social terms. We argue that, on the one hand, travelling on wheels strengthens individuality and the feeling of freedom, but on the other hand it has a strong (...) socio-political component that is often ignored: Efficient driving requires a dense road network, and this only emerges as the achievement of a community. Referring back to Matthew B. Crawford’s philosophy of driving and Günther Anders’ philosophy of technology, the question of whether the “autonomous car” restricts or expands the freedom of drivers is discussed. Finally, it is shown that the concept of driving, as manifested above all in the automobile, has also had a significant influence on our concept of social progress. However, this concept has fallen into crisis due to the ecological collateral damage of combustion technology. (shrink)

The idea of philosophy as a kind of therapy, though by no means standard, has been present in metaphilosophical reflection since antiquity. Diverse versions of it were also discussed and applied by more recent authors such as Wittgenstein, Hadot and Foucault. In order to develop an explicit, general and systematic model of therapeutic philosophy a relatively broad and well-structured account provided by Martha Nussbaum is subjected to analysis. The results obtained, subsequently, form a basis for a new model constructed around (...) the set of notions intrinsically connected with any, philosophical, psychological, or medical, form of therapy. The conceptual framework of: disease and its symptoms, the health ideal, the process of treatment with its techniques, therapeutic theory, physician, patient, and the physician-patient relationship is constructed and investigated in the context of its possible metaphilosophical use. An illustrative application of this scheme to philosophical therapy developed by Stoicism is, then, discussed. Finally, the issue of the therapeutic metaphilosophy's scope as well as the problem of therapeutic philosophy's specificity and integrity are briefly indicated. (shrink)

abstract Applied ethics engages with concrete moral issues. This engagement involves the application of philosophical tools. When the philosophical tools used in applied ethics are problematic, conclusions about applied problems can become skewed. In this paper, I focus on problems with the idea that comparison cases must be exactly alike, except for the moral issue at hand. I argue that this idea has skewed the debate regarding the moral distinction between killing and letting die. I begin with problems that can (...) arise from attempts to produce comparison cases that are exactly alike, except for the moral issue at hand. I then argue that attempts to produce such examples are doomed to failure. Finally, I argue that abandoning concerns about similarity advances the debate regarding the moral distinction between killing and letting die. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When Doctors Get It WrongKonrad BlairThe BeginningIt was a gloomy winter day as I sat in the back of the car while my father and mother drove me to another appointment in Pittsburgh. It was and wasn’t like so many car trips of my childhood for so many doctors’ appointments. The same deadening silence filled [End Page 89] the car as we drew closer to our destination. My parents (...) never discussed the appointments with me and I just learned to never ask. This appointment was different though; it came about as a result of request by a psychology professor who was conducting a follow–up study on individuals treated by the team of endocrinologists I saw as a child.The professor had reached out to me through my parents, since that was the only contact information available. It had been more than ten years since I had seen any of the doctors who treated me as a child. I was living in another state when I received the call from my mother informing me of the request for my participation in the study. I was really quite shocked; in all the years I was treated in early childhood and adolescence, no one had ever asked me how I felt about the treatment I received. I knew I had a medical condition, but no one ever explained to me why I needed so many appointments, and why I had to take medicine three times a day. No one told me why, when I was two or three years old, I had surgery that left me with memories of gauze and a catheter between my legs, or why medical residents still wanted to examine me, or why I had to be humiliated and ashamed, again and again. I was in my early 30’s by this time. Surely if my condition was so important that someone wanted to talk to me now, so many years later, the conversation would have already happened?!My parents dropped me off at the scheduled location for the interview. The professor introduced himself and his colleague. I didn’t recognize them, which meant they weren’t the doctors who had treated me. I remember feeling somewhat relieved, as I never liked the doctors who treated me as a child. I remembered my last appointment there, and feeling that I was escaping from captivity, that I was free to go on with my life.I wasn’t sure what to expect from this meeting. The professor told me that to date no one had completed any follow–up on the pediatric patients treated by the hospital’s endocrinology team to see how they were faring in life. He said he thought that was quite odd, so had decided to take on the project himself. He began by asking, “so, D_____, [I went by another name then] how are you doing at this point in your life?”I felt a sudden surge of rage, and, to my own surprise, I found myself responding angrily, “Why the hell do you care? It’s been over ten years and nobody, I mean nobody gives a rat’s ass as to how I’m doing and coping with the ramifications of the treatment I received from Dr. X.” Looking back, more than ten years after this meeting, I can see that I had been angry for a long time. I had been compliant and knew to play my role as a good girl. I had a good job, and I was married, but I knew I was far from happy.And so with that first question began what would be the long painful journey to discovering what had been hidden from me for over half my life, the source of my confusion and unparalleled frustration. What I had experienced throughout my childhood would permeate every aspect of my being and perception of myself for years to come. Every day I had to confront the effects of that experience just to live another day.The MiddleI was in shock and disbelief as I read and reread the letter my attorney presented to me from the very group of... (shrink)

In some medical cases there is a moral distinction between killing and letting die, but in others there is not. In this paper I present an original and principled account of the moral distinction between killing and letting die. The account provides both an explanation of the moral distinction and an explanation for why the distinction does not always hold. If these explanations are correct, the moral distinction between killing and letting die must be taken seriously in medical contexts. Defeasibly, (...) when an agent kills she takes responsibility, but when an agent lets die she does not take responsibility. Therein lies the moral distinction between killing and letting die. The distinction, however, is defeated when an agent is already responsible for the surrounding situation. In such cases, killing does not involve taking any further responsibility and letting die does not avoid taking any responsibility. Medical examples are frequently complicated because patients' autonomous choices impact upon medical practitioners' surrounding responsibility. (shrink)

The Values in Action (VIA) classification of character strengths and virtues has been recently proposed by two leading positive psychologists, Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman as “the social science equivalent of virtue ethics.” The very possibility of developing this kind of an “equivalent,” however, is very doubtful in the light of the cogent criticism that has been leveled at modern moral theory by Alasdair MacIntyre as well as the well argued accusations that positive psychology, despite its official normative neutrality, is (...) pervaded by specifically Western individualism and instrumentalism. In order to evaluate whether the VIA project can be considered as substantially rooted in virtue ethical tradition, the classification was assessed against two fundamental features of the classical version of the latter: (1) the substantial interconnectedness of individual virtues, as expressed by the thesis of the unity of virtue, and (2) the constitutive character of the relationship between virtue and happiness. It turned out, in result, that the two above features are not only absent from but also contradicted by the VIA framework with the latter's: (1′) construal of individual virtues and character strengths as independent variables and (2′) official endorsement of the fact/value distinction. As soon as the arguments for the superiority of the classical virtue ethical perspective are provided, the potential responses available to the VIA's proponents are discussed. (shrink)

Proceedings of a conference held Dec. 4-5, 1998 at the Universit'at G'ottingen.

This chapter proceeds from the standard picture of the relation between intuitions and experimental philosophy: the alleged evidential role of intuitions about hypothetical cases, and experimental philosophy’s challenge to these judgments, based on their variation with philosophically irrelevant factors. I will survey some of the main defenses of this standard picture against the x-phi challenge, most of which fail. Concerning the most popular defense, the expertise defense, I will draw the bleak conclusion that intuitive expertise of the envisaged kind is (...) largely a myth. Next, I will consider the mischaracterization objection, which has mainly been developed by Deutsch and Cappelen on the basis of textual evidence: that philosophers do not appeal to intuitions as evidence for their case judgments, but instead argue for them. This would render the x-phi challenge mostly irrelevant, due to its focus on intuitions about hypothetical cases. I will then consider a few instructive replies to the mischaracterization objection, which are all unconvincing on further inspection. Finally, I will discuss some potential normative consequences of the mischaracterization objection, and I will argue that it recommends a shift away from the excessive focus on intuitions about cases in metaphilosophy and experimental philosophy, towards more work on the role of argumentation in the method of cases. More speculatively, I claim that philosophers should always argue for their case judgments, even if they have strong intuitions about them, because an argument-based methodology would be more transparent and philosophically fruitful than one that mainly relies on intuition. (shrink)

The practical aspect of ancient philosophy has been recently made a focus of renewed metaphilosophical investigation. After a brief presentation of three accounts of this kind developed by Martha Nussbaum, Pierre Hadot, and Michel Foucault, the model of the therapeutic argument developed by Nussbaum is called into question from the perspectives offered by her French colleagues, who emphasize spiritual exercise (Hadot) or the care of the self (Foucault). The ways in which the account of Nussbaum can be defended are then (...) discussed, including both a ‘negative’ defense, i.e. the indication of the weaknesses of Hadot and Foucault’s proposals, and a ‘positive’ one focused on the points in which Nussbaum can convincingly address doubts about her metaphilosophical account. In response to these analyses, some further remarks made by Hadot and Foucault are discussed in order to demonstrate that their accounts are not as distant from Nussbaum after all. Finally, a recent metaphilosophical study by John Sellars together with a therapeutic (medical) model developed by the author of the present article are suggested as providing a framework for potential reconciliation between all three accounts discussed and a resource for further metaphilosophical studies. (shrink)

Algorithmic predictions are promising for insurance companies to develop personalized risk models for determining premiums. In this context, issues of fairness, discrimination, and social injustice might arise: Algorithms for estimating the risk based on personal data may be biased towards specific social groups, leading to systematic disadvantages for those groups. Personalized premiums may thus lead to discrimination and social injustice. It is well known from many application fields that such biases occur frequently and naturally when prediction models are applied to (...) people unless special efforts are made to avoid them. Insurance is no exception. In this paper, we provide a thorough analysis of algorithmic fairness in the case of insurance premiums. We ask what “fairness” might mean in this context and how the fairness of a premium system can be measured. For this, we apply the established fairness frameworks of the fair machine learning literature to the case of insurance premiums and show which of the existing fairness criteria can be applied to assess the fairness of insurance premiums. We argue that two of the often-discussed group fairness criteria, independence (also called statistical parity or demographic parity) and separation (also known as equalized odds), are not normatively appropriate for insurance premiums. Instead, we propose the sufficiency criterion (also known as well-calibration) as a morally defensible alternative that allows us to test for systematic biases in premiums towards certain groups based on the risk they bring to the pool. In addition, we clarify the connection between group fairness and different degrees of personalization. Our findings enable insurers to assess the fairness properties of their risk models, helping them avoid reputation damage resulting from potentially unfair and discriminatory premium systems. (shrink)

The conceptual landscape connected with such notions as mental disease, mental disorder, or, considerably broader, madness is not only complex and internally heterogeneous, but also somewhat obscure. Even the very nature of complexity and heterogeneity at place, what is more, seems to be unclear, which is reflected in the numerous (and heated) debates philosophers of psychiatry engage in and, respectively, in the variety of fundamentally incompatible, if not incommensurable, high-level models of psychopathology they develop (Fulford & Colombo, 2004).The paper by (...) Justin Garson (2023) can be understood as a successful attempt at helping us to find our bearings in such a troublesome conceptual domain. As such, it can... Read More. (shrink)

We examine second order intuitionistic propositional logic, IPC². Let $F_\exists $ be the set of formulas with no universal quantification. We prove Glivenko's theorem for formulas in $F_\exists $ that is, for φ € $F_\exists $ φ is a classical tautology if and only if ¬¬φ is a tautology of IPC². We show that for each sentence φ € $F_\exists $ (without free variables), φ is a classical tautology if and only if φ is an intuitionistic tautology. As a corollary (...) we obtain a semantic argument that the quantifier V is not definable in IPC² from ⊥, V, ^, →. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that Graham Priest's dialetheic account of semantic paradoxes and the paraconsistent logics employed cannot achieve semantic universality. Dialetheism therefore fails as a solution to semantic paradoxes for the same reason that consistent approaches did. It will be demonstrated that if dialetheism can express its own semantic principles, a strengthened liar paradox will result, which renders dialetheism trivial. In particular, the argument is not invalidated by relational valuations, which were brought into paraconsistent logic (...) in order to avoid strengthened liar paradoxes. (shrink)

Determination of cell fate in the developing eye of Drosophila depends on a precise sequence of cellular interactions which generate the stereotypic array of ommatidia. In the eye imaginal disc, an initially unpatterned epithelial sheath of cells, the first step in this process may be the specification of R8 photoreceptor cells at regular intervals. Genes such as Notch and scabrous, known to be involved in bristle development, alos participate in this process, suggesting that the specification of ommatidial founder cells and (...) the formation of sensory organs in the adult epidermis may involve a similar mechanism, that of lateral inhibition. The subsequent steps of ommatidial assembly, following R8 assignment, involve a different mechanism: Undetermined cells read their position based on the contacts they make with neighbors that have already begun to differentiate. The development of the R7 photoreceptor cell, one of the eight photoreceptor cells in the ommatidium, is best understood. An important role seems to be played by sevenless, a receptor tyrosine kinase on the surface of the R7 precursor. It transmits the positional information– most likely encoded by the boss protein on the neighboring R8 cell membrane – into the cell via its tyrosine kinase, which activates a signal transduction cascade. Constitutive activation of the sevenless kinase by overexpression of an N‐terminally truncated form results in the diversion of other ommatidial cells into the R7 pathway suggesting that activation of the sevenless signalling pathway is sufficient to specify R7 development. Genetic dissection of this pathway should therefore identify components of a signalling cascade activated by a tyrosine kinase. (shrink)

BackgroundHealthcare is permeated by phenomena of vulnerability and their ethical significance. Nonetheless, application of this concept in healthcare ethics today is largely confined to clinical research. Approaches that further elaborate the concept in order to make it suitable for healthcare as a whole thus deserve renewed attention.MethodsConceptual analysis.ResultsTaking up the task to make the concept of vulnerability suitable for healthcare ethics as a whole involves two challenges. Firstly, starting from the concept as it used in research ethics, a more detailed (...) characterization and systematization of the different realms of human abilities and the various ways in which these realms contain vulnerability is to be established. Secondly, at the same time, the sought-after concept of vulnerability should avoid picturing the relation between healthcare recipient and provider as a relation between a dependent individual in need and another individual capable of providing all the help necessary. An adequate concept of vulnerability should enable one to understand when and in which respects care providers may be vulnerable as well. Philosophical accounts of vulnerability can help to meet both of these challenges.ConclusionsPhilosophical accounts of vulnerability can help to make the concept of vulnerability suitable for healthcare ethics as a whole. They come with a price, though. While the ethical role of vulnerability in medical ethics usually is to signify states of affairs that are to be diminished or overcome, philosophical accounts introduce forms of vulnerability that are regarded as valuable. Further analyzing and systematizing forms and degrees of vulnerability thus comprises the task to distinguish between amounts and types of vulnerability that can count as valuable, and amounts and types of vulnerability that are to be alleviated. (shrink)

Healthcare is permeated by phenomena of vulnerability and their ethical significance. Nonetheless, application of this concept in healthcare ethics today is largely confined to clinical research. Approaches that further elaborate the concept in order to make it suitable for healthcare as a whole thus deserve renewed attention. Conceptual analysis. Taking up the task to make the concept of vulnerability suitable for healthcare ethics as a whole involves two challenges. Firstly, starting from the concept as it used in research ethics, a (...) more detailed characterization and systematization of the different realms of human abilities and the various ways in which these realms contain vulnerability is to be established. Secondly, at the same time, the sought-after concept of vulnerability should avoid picturing the relation between healthcare recipient and provider as a relation between a dependent individual in need and another individual capable of providing all the help necessary. An adequate concept of vulnerability should enable one to understand when and in which respects care providers may be vulnerable as well. Philosophical accounts of vulnerability can help to meet both of these challenges. Philosophical accounts of vulnerability can help to make the concept of vulnerability suitable for healthcare ethics as a whole. They come with a price, though. While the ethical role of vulnerability in medical ethics usually is to signify states of affairs that are to be diminished or overcome, philosophical accounts introduce forms of vulnerability that are regarded as valuable. Further analyzing and systematizing forms and degrees of vulnerability thus comprises the task to distinguish between amounts and types of vulnerability that can count as valuable, and amounts and types of vulnerability that are to be alleviated. (shrink)

Drei Arten der Freundschaft gibt es nach Aristoteles. In der ersten, der Freundschaft im vollen und eigentlichen Sinn, lieben sich die Freunde aufgrund ihrer charakterlichen Vortrefflichkeit, in der zweiten, weil sie sich Lust bereiten und in der dritten, weil sie sich nützlich sind. Alle drei Freundschaftsformen erfordern Gegenseitigkeit und Unverborgenheit der Gesinnung. Bezüglich eines weiteren Kriteriums scheint der Text auf den ersten Blick undeutlich zu sein : das Wohlwollen ist zunächst Bestandteil der allgemeinen Freundschaftsdefinition, wird dann aber nach Meinung der (...) meisten Interpretatoren auf die Tugendfreundschaft eingeschränkt. John M. Cooper hat dagegen bereits 1976 die These aufgestellt, alle drei Formen der Freundschaft bei Aristoteles implizierten das Wohlwollen im vollen Sinn seiner Aristotelischen Definition. Dagegen hat vor allem A. W. Price argumentiert, dass es Wohlwollen im vollen Sinn nach Aristoteles nur in der Tugendfreundschaft gebe. Diese Position ist inzwischen so selbstverständlich geworden, dass Coopers Interpretation z. T. gar nicht mehr erwähnt wird. Ich möchte mich für die These Coopers einsetzen und dabei seine Argumente präzisieren und verstärken. (shrink)

Empirical evidence indicates that conscious states, distinguished by the presence of phenomenal qualities, are closely linked to synchronized neural activity patterns whose dynamical characteristics can be attributed to self-organized criticality and phase transitions. These findings imply that insight into the mechanism by which the brain controls phase transitions will provide a deeper understanding of the fundamental mechanism by which the brain manages to transcend the threshold of consciousness. This article aims to show that the initiation of phase transitions and the (...) formation of synchronized activity patterns is due to the coupling of the brain to the zero-point field (ZPF), which plays a central role in quantum electrodynamics (QED). The ZPF stands for the presence of ubiquitous vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field, represented by a spectrum of normal modes. With reference to QED-based model calculations, the details of the coupling mechanism are revealed, suggesting that critical brain dynamics is governed by the resonant interaction of the ZPF with the most abundant neurotransmitter glutamate. The pyramidal neurons in the cortical microcolumns turn out to be ideally suited to control this interaction. A direct consequence of resonant glutamate-ZPF coupling is the amplification of specific ZPF modes, which leads us to conclude that the ZPF is the key to the understanding of consciousness and that the distinctive feature of neurophysiological processes associated with conscious experience consists in modulating the ZPF. Postulating that the ZPF is an inherently sentient field and assuming that the spectrum of phenomenal qualities is represented by the normal modes of the ZPF, the significance of resonant glutamate-ZPF interaction for the formation of conscious states becomes apparent in that the amplification of specific ZPF modes is inextricably linked with the excitation of specific phenomenal qualities. This theory of consciousness, according to which phenomenal states arise through resonant amplification of zero-point modes, is given the acronym TRAZE. An experimental setup is specified that can be used to test a corollary of the theory, namely, the prediction that normally occurring conscious perceptions are absent under experimental conditions in which resonant glutamate-ZPF coupling is disrupted. (shrink)

An attempt is made to develop a basic framework for an existential-phenomenological perspective on personality disorders. Its starting point is taken from the psychiatrist Antoni Kępiński and the philosopher Józef Tischner. The former provides a clinical framework capacious enough to allow ethical, existential, and phenomenological explorations. This conceptual “space” is then explicitly recognized, addressed, and fulfilled by the latter’s investigation of personality dynamics proper to “the hideout.” In order to supplement this thread of thought with a specific illustration, a “case” (...) provided by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his Notes from the Underground is investigated. Then, in turn, Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be is referred to, so that the deepest roots of personality disorders can be identified with an ontological dynamic proper to the avoidance of non-being. Finally, some brief remarks are made concerning how all the above relates to the idea of a normatively neutral science and how it can be integrated with more up to date clinical practice. (shrink)

Two crucial questions, if unanswered, impede our understanding of Aristotle’s account of pleasure inenx.4-5: What are the activities that pleasure is said to complete? In virtue of what does pleasurealwaysaccompany these activities? The answers fall in place if we read Aristotle as responding to the Delian challenge that the finest, best and most pleasant are not united in one and the same thing. I propose an ‘ethical’ reading ofenx.4 according to which the best activities in question are those integral to (...) the exercise of virtue. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to undertake a conceptual investigation of the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm: a psychological project initiated by Paul Baltes and intended to study the complex phenomenon of wisdom. Firstly, in order to provide a wider perspective for the subsequent analyses, a short historical sketch is given. Secondly, a meta-theoretical issue of the degree to which the subject matter of the Baltesian study can be identified with the traditional philosophical wisdom is addressed. The main result yielded (...) by a careful conceptual analysis is that the philosophical and psychological concepts of wisdom, though not entirely the same, are at least parallel. Finally, one of the revealed aspects of the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm, i.e. its relative neglect of the non-cognitive and personal aspects of wisdom is brought to the fore. This deficiency, it is suggested, can be remedied by the application of the virtue ethics' conceptual framework. (shrink)

The extent to which machine metaphors are used in synthetic biology is striking. These metaphors contain a specific perspective on organisms as well as on scientific and technological progress. Expressions such as “genetically engineered machine”, “genetic circuit”, and “platform organism”, taken from the realms of electronic engineering, car manufacturing, and information technology, highlight specific aspects of the functioning of living beings while at the same time hiding others, such as evolutionary change and interdependencies in ecosystems. Since these latter aspects are (...) relevant for, for example, risk evaluation of uncontained uses of synthetic organisms, it is ethically imperative to resist the thrust of machine metaphors in this respect. In addition, from the perspective of the machine metaphor viewing an entity as a moral agent or patient becomes dubious. If one were to regard living beings, including humans, as machines, it becomes difficult to justify ascriptions of moral status. Finally, the machine metaphor reinforces beliefs in the potential of synthetic biology to play a decisive role in solving societal problems, and downplays the role of alternative technological, and social and political measures. (shrink)

'Cruel' simply ignores the supposed fact/value dichotomy and cheerfully allows itself to be used sometimes for a normative purpose and sometimes as a descriptive term.Personality disorders have always attracted considerable attention within the philosophy of psychiatry. It was not until two papers written by Louis Charland, however, that they simulated a wider and lively debate. The importance and, at least partly, the strength of Charland's analyses lie in the fact that they are relatively particular and focused in their...

Among the many strengths of the article by Lorenzo Gilardi and Giovanni Stanghellini one can find its open-ended character most directly reflected by the fact that these are "questions for further research," rather than a set of definitive theses, that are provided as concluding remarks. But it is not the mere occurrence of such a setting that is crucial. After all, even if somewhat atypical, the latter does happen to be used in scholarly literature. What makes the open-endedness of the (...) article and its somehow dialogical flavor so important is these features' full continuity with the method of dialectical psychopathology proposed. The form and the content, in other words, go hand in hand.As far as formal... (shrink)

The Virtuous Psychiatrist: Character Ethics in Psychiatric Practice Jennifer Radden & John Z. SadlerOxford: Oxford University Press, 2010256 pages, ISBN: 0195389379 (hbk); $49.95Contemporary bioeth...