In his explanation of the nature of the being of reason, Fr. José de Aguilar, S.J. presents a notion of «objective concept» which is common to both known real beings and beings of reaso...

Physicians who care for critically ill people with opioid use disorder frequently face medical, legal, and ethical questions related to the provision of life-saving medical care. We examine a complex medical case that illustrates these challenges in a person with relapsing injection drug use. We focus on a specific question: Is futility an appropriate and useful standard by which to determine provision of life-saving care to such individuals? If so, how should such determinations be made? If not, what alternative decisionmaking (...) framework exists? We determine that although futility has been historically utilized as a justification for withholding care in certain settings, it is not a useful standard to apply in cases involving people who use injection drugs for non-medical purposes. Instead, we are welladvised to explore each patient's situation in a holistic approach that includes the patient, family members, and care providers in the decision-making process. The scope of the problem illustrated demonstrates the urgent need to definitively improve outcomes in people who use injection drugs. Increasing access to high quality medication-assisted treatment and psychiatric care for individuals with opioid use disorder will help our patients achieve a sustained remission and allow us to reach this goal. (shrink)

Firearm injury in the United States is a public health crisis in which physicians are uniquely situated to intervene. However, their ability to mitigate harm is limited by a complex array of laws and regulations that shape their role in firearm injury prevention. This piece uses four clinical scenarios to illustrate how these laws and regulations impact physician practice, including patient counseling, injury reporting, and the use of court orders and involuntary holds. Unintended consequences on clinical practice of laws intended (...) to reduce firearm injury are also discussed. Lessons drawn from these cases suggest that physicians require more nuanced education on this topic, and that policymakers should consult front-line healthcare providers when designing firearm policies. (shrink)

© 2016 Regents of the University of California.The Review summarizes much of particle physics and cosmology. Using data from previous editions, plus 3,062 new measurements from 721 papers, we list, evaluate, and average measured properties of gauge bosons and the recently discovered Higgs boson, leptons, quarks, mesons, and baryons. We summarize searches for hypothetical particles such as supersymmetric particles, heavy bosons, axions, dark photons, etc. All the particle properties and search limits are listed in Summary Tables. We also give numerous (...) tables, figures, formulae, and reviews of topics such as Higgs Boson Physics, Supersymmetry, Grand Unified Theories, Neutrino Mixing, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Cosmology, Particle Detectors, Colliders, Probability and Statistics. Among the 117 reviews are many that are new or heavily revised, including those on Pentaquarks and Inflation. The complete Review is published online in a journal and on the website of the Particle Data Group. The printed PDG Book contains the Summary Tables and all review articles but no longer includes the detailed tables from the Particle Listings. A Booklet with the Summary Tables and abbreviated versions of some of the review articles is also available. (shrink)

Disagreements about scientific ontology have frequently been reconstructed as the result of a dispute between rival epistemic stances. In this paper, (i) we characterize some of these disagreements as deep disagreements. In addition, we show that deep disagreements about scientific ontology can arise not only from the adoption of different epistemic stances, but also between positions that fall within the same stance. The development of this point allows us, in turn, to establish a distinction between types of deep disagreement and (...) to explore the possibility that there are differences of degree between them. (shrink)

Dans les premiers chants de l’ Enfer, Dante déclare entre les lignes la tâche à laquelle il se sent appelé en tant que « poète chrétien » : d’un côté, il est invité à argumenter avec la rigueur du discours scientifique les vérités fondamentales de la religion ; de l’autre côté, il lui est confié la charge d’entraîner le lecteur dans une lecture anagogique de ces vérités en recourant aux fascinations allégoriques de la poésie. En accomplissant cette mission, Dante obtiendra, (...) pour lui-même et pour les autres êtres humains, cette perfection anthropologique naturelle qui culmine, après la mort terrestre, par le retour aux conditions métaphysiques qui se seraient actualisées en la personne d’Adam s’il n’avait pas péché. Cette conception est déjà opérante dans certaines pages de la Vie nouvelle et du Banquet, mais c’est surtout dans La Divine Comédie que Dante en revient spontanément à ce genre de techniques sur un mode original et particulièrement efficace. On en a un exemple éclairant quand, au Chant III de l’ Enfer, la poésie décrit le tourbillon, apparemment disharmonieux et dépourvu de sens, des sons qui émergent de la cavité infernale, en se basant non seulement sur l’application évidente d’au moins deux artifices rhétoriques déterminés, mais surtout sur l’évocation formellement rigoureuse des règles de la dialectique (selon la terminologie en usage dans les écoles) : le succès de cette opération dépend de la capacité, de la part du lecteur, de retrouver la signification authentique de la terminologie scientifique mise en œuvre en poésie, utilisée pour illustrer les vérités de la foi et la nouvelle beauté de la synthèse entre art poétique et disciplines du Trivium. (shrink)

C’est à travers la lecture de l’Isagoge de Porphyre commentée par Boèce que l’idée d’une organisation hiérarchique du réel, fondée sur la division des genres, des espèces et des différences, était introduite dans le patrimoine culturel des intellectuels du haut Moyen Âge au niveau élémentaire de l’étude de la dialectique. Cette étude, fondement du curriculum pédagogique des arts libéraux, impliquait une considération réaliste des formes de la pensée logiquement ordonnées : seules structures authentiques du point de vue ontologique, les formes (...) sont aussi les seuls objets de la connaissance scientifique puisqu’elles seules sont véritablement exemptes de la vicissitude et de l’accidentalité. Tout au long du haut Moyen Âge, le débat, polymorphe et complexe, sur la nature des universaux introduit donc la comparaison dynamique entre différentes conceptions du réel, de la connaissance et de la science, et aussi de la capacité du langage humain de dire, de manifester et de communiquer la vérité. L’analyse historique de l’évolution et des conséquences de cette perspective philosophique, d’origine porphyrienne d’une part, boécienne et augustinienne de l’autre, se développe ici à travers certains épisodes de la spéculation du haut Moyen Âge, et en particulier à l’époque carolingienne, cherchant à contribuer à une meilleure intelligence de la naissance de la méthodologie des sciences particulières et, plus spécifiquement, de la théologie. (shrink)

This paper discusses some problems related to the practical experience of social research in university institutions. It describes the process of access to field work and the relationship with university managers as key informants during a qualitative research about the present politics of economic..

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.4 (2005) 301-305 [Access article in PDF] The Beauty of Psychotherapy R. D. Hinshelwood Keywords awe, psychotherapy, representation, self-esteem The Enlightenment was devoted to clear uncontaminated reason; its success has given us the terrific achievements of science and technology. However, it has bequeathed problems too. Untrammeled reason has led to the devaluing and exclusion of emotions. Emotions are irrational—self-deception, akrasia, and so on. They were (...) a problem for the eighteenth-century philosopher Kant and right through to the modern therapist Aaron Beck. Callender rightly looks around the edges of rationalist thought to see what can be said about the emotional and subjective side of mankind. He argues that there is more to the human mind than cognition. Something has been left out. What can be found to fill the gap?Callender has searched for the missing link that might complete our view of human nature. And he came back with aesthetics. Meaning The Enlightenment failing is writ large for therapists who are confronted with people who feel things. So we need to ask what place the emotions have in understanding the nature of man? It is not a hypothetical question, but a very practical one for a therapist. Emotions, Callender says, and most people would agree with him, are what gives meaning to life, a sense of purpose in living, even an ill-defined or delusional purpose.He presents Kant's description of aesthetics. Aesthetic judgements have a number of features, the most enigmatic and perhaps profound is a "purposiveness without purpose." A work of art, say a portrait, may have a purpose insofar as it represents a person for his aggrandizement or for his descendents through many generations, but the aesthetic quality does not come from that purpose. The aesthetic purpose involves a different set of judgements. They are about the painting as a piece of art in itself. If it is possible to compare this kind of aesthetic judgement with a judgement of a person's life, then I find myself reminded of Wollheim's definition of a person: The simplest way of putting the matter, which is not to be taken as a metaphysical claim, is this: There are persons, they exist; persons lead lives; and as a result, in consequence—in consequence that is, of the way they do it—there are lives, of which those who lead them may, for instance, be proud, or feel ashamed. So there is a thing, and there is a process, and there is a product. (Wollheim 1984, 2) Although many things do not lead lives, we do. And our lives have a process and a product. Like an aesthetic product, our lives have a sense of emotional meaning, without it having a clear purpose.Aesthetic judgements are therefore of a particular and somewhat peculiar kind. They judges talent for producing "that for which no determinate [End Page 301] rules can be given," as the paper quotes Kant. Other kinds of judgements do have determinate rules. First are empirical judgements for getting practical things done; and moral judgements for assessing ethical good from bad. Aesthetic beauty does not have clear rules, although many systems of rules have been proposed starting with the rules of perspective as they were laid out by renaissance painters, through to systems of color, such as that proposed by Paul Klee, once color was correlated with electromagnetic wavelengths. However, artists have always kept one jump ahead and evaded imprisonment in codified rules. So too it is with leading a life, perhaps. The really creative life is not lead according to rules. The art of life is to live meaningfully without simply running along tramlines. Although moral conduct and the practicalities of life remain significant, perhaps leading a life implies simply a "flare for living." Representation Of these three kinds of judgements that a mind makes, two do have sets of rules. Only one based on rationality, empirical evidence, and reason. Reason judges what can be done and achieved in the real physical world. It is about pragmatics and the usefulness of action. Moral judgements, about what... (shrink)

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)