In matters of discontinuation of life-sustaining treatment, traditional role of the family to speak on behalf of the incompetent patient is questionable. We explore the reasons why physicians perceive patient autonomy to be transferrable to family members. Principle of patient autonomy may not suffice when futile treatment is demanded and may serve to erode the ethical integrity of medical profession. An enhanced role for bioethics committees is proposed when physicians propose to discontinue life-sustaining treatment against the wishes of the patient (...) or their families. (shrink)

Increasing university students’ engagement with ethics is becoming a prominent call to action for higher education institutions, particularly professional schools like business and engineering. This paper provides an examination of student attitudes regarding ethics and their perceptions of ethics coverage in the curriculum at one institution. A particular focus is the comparison between results in the business college, which has incorporated ethics in the curriculum and has been involved in ethics education for a longer period, with the engineering college, which (...) is in the nascent stages of developing ethics education in its courses. Results show that student attitudes and perceptions are related to the curriculum. In addition, results indicate that it might be useful for engineering faculty to use business faculty as resources in the development of their ethics curricula. (shrink)

Background This study assessed patient perceptions of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act and opinions toward physicians who receive gifts and/or payments from pharmaceutical or medical device companies. Methods During their office visit, patients attending different specialty clinics volunteered to complete our survey. The survey asks if the patient knows what the Sunshine Act is, then asks questions on 5-point response scales to assess the patient's opinions toward physicians who receive compensation from companies, their self-rated knowledge of physician compensation, and how (...) they believe this compensation affects the cost of care. Results Over 13 months, 523 responses were collected: 8.6% of patients reported having knowledge of the Sunshine Act, 56.8% rated their knowledge of physician compensations as “poor,” and 67.1% agreed with the statement that patients should be aware of the compensation physicians receive. When asked how their opinion toward their physician would change if they learned the physician received free meals or gifts from companies, 58.9% replied “not at all,” and 36.11% of patients did not believe their cost of care would increase if their physician received compensation from companies. Conclusions Most patients were unfamiliar with the Sunshine Act, and believe their knowledge of physician compensation is poor. Over half of the respondents would not change their opinion of their physician based on knowledge of their physician receiving payments/gifts from companies, and over one-third of respondents did not believe such compensation increased the cost of care. The majority of respondents agreed that patients should be aware of payments/gifts to physicians. (shrink)

Liberal theory and practice rests upon, and constantly re-affirms, a division between the secular/rational and the religious/faithful aspects of individual life. This paper will explore the philosophical implications of an alternative Gandhian understanding of the role of faith and reason in individual life. The paper will argue that M K Gandhi thought of moral life differently from both the religious traditionalist and the liberal. The distinctiveness of Gandhi’s vision came from the manner in which he could reconcile two very different (...) ways of thinking about the good human life. These could be simply put as the religious insight into the good life as an essentially integrated life and the alternative liberal insight that morality was better connected with the idea of universalizability/reciprocity. The first section of this paper entitled “An alternative Gandhian understanding of faith, reason, and the integrity of the good life” philosophically unpacks Gandhi’s arguments about the integrity between faith and reason in reading religious texts with a view to living a good life. The second section is entitled “On religious belief: Gandhi and liberalism”. It brings out the differences between Gandhi and liberals on faith, reason, and the truth of religious belief. Both Gandhi and the liberals agree that religious beliefs should be held with modesty. However, the liberal argument for modesty comes from an avowed skepticism about the truth of religious belief. It is such skepticism that philosophically grounds the liberal division between faith and reason. In this section, there will be an attempt to bring out Gandhi’s reasons for being modest about religious beliefs held with certitude. The paper ends with the thought that though one cannot say which of these positions on faith and reason—Gandhian or liberal—is more coherent, there is some reason for exploring the Gandhian position if only because religious persons can act on Gandhi’s arguments quite consistently with their faith. (shrink)

What is Brahman? What is its relationship to Atman? What is an individual's place in the cosmos? Is a personalised god and ritualistic worship the only path to attain moksha? Does caste matter when a human is engaging with the metaphysical world? The answers to these perennial questions sparkle with clarity in this seminal account of a man, and a saint, who revived Hinduism and gave to Upanishadic insights a rigorously structured and sublimely appealing philosophy. Jagad Guru Adi Shankaracharya (788-820 (...) CE) was born in Kerala and died in Kedarnath, traversing the length of India in his search for the ultimate truth. In a short life of thirty-two years, Shankaracharya not only revived Hinduism, but also created the organisational structure for its perpetuation through the mathas he established in Sringeri, Dwaraka, Puri, and Joshimatha. Adi Shankaracharaya: Hinduism's Greatest Thinker is a meticulously researched and comprehensive account of his life and philosophy. Highly readable, and including a select anthology of Shankaracharya's seminal writing, the book also examines the startling endorsement that contemporary science is giving to his ideas today. A must-read for people across the ideological spectrum, this book reminds readers about the remarkable philosophical underpinning of Hinduism, making it one of the most vibrant religions in the world. (shrink)

This volume explores Nietzsche's decisive encounter with the ancient philosopher, Epicurus. The collected essays examine many previously unexplored and underappreciated convergences, and investigate how essential Epicurus was to Nietzsche's philosophical project through two interrelated overarching themes: nature and ethics. Uncovering the nature of Nietzsche's reception of, relation to, and movement beyond Epicurus, contributors provide insights into the relationship between suffering, health and philosophy in both thinkers; Nietzsche's stylistic analysis of Epicurus; the ethics of self-cultivation in Nietzsche's Epicureanism; practices of eating (...) and thinking in Nietzsche and Epicurus; the temporality of Epicurean pleasure; the practice of the gay science, and Epicureanism and politics. The essays also provide creative comparisons with the Stoics, Hobbes, Mill, Guyau, Buddhism, and more. Nietzsche and Epicurus offers original and illuminating perspectives on Nietzsche's relation to the Hellenistic thinker, in whom Nietzsche saw the embodiment of the practice of philosophy as an art of existing. (shrink)

Grau and Pury (Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 5, 155–168, 2014) reported that people’s views about love are related to their views about reference. This surprising effect was however not replicated in Cova et al.’s (in press) replication study. In this article, we show that the replication failure is probably due to the replication’s low power and that a metaanalytic reanalysis of the result in Cova et al. suggests that the effect reported in Grau and Pury is real. We then (...) report a large, highly powered replication that successfully replicates Grau and Pury 2014. This successful replication is a case study in the challenges involved in replicating scientific work, and our article contributes to the discussion of these challenges. (shrink)

We address Northcott’s criticism of Pearson’s correlation coefficient ‘r’ in measuring causal strength by replacing Pearson’s linear regressions by nonparametric nonlinear kernel regressions. Although new proof shows that Suppes’ intuitive causality condition is neither necessary nor sufficient, we resurrect Suppes’ probabilistic causality theory by using nonlinear tools. We use asymmetric generalized partial correlation coefficients from Vinod [2014] as our third criterion in addition to two more criteria. We aggregate the three criteria into one unanimity index, UI in [-100; 100], (...) quantifying causal strengths associated with causal paths: Xi -> Xj, Xj -> Xi, and Xi Xj. (shrink)

This article explores the influence of modernity in India, within the larger framework of state-led modernity and its impact on identity and locality. The discourse on modernity has retained the common thread of transience and reflexivity as two constitutive features, both of which are taken up to explain the uncertain and provisional influence of modernity on the Indian society and identity, and the radical engagement of social movements with modernity. The article studies the complex functioning of modernity in India by (...) presenting a theoretical outline on the contested nature of the concept, with an emphasis on the discussion around reflexivity, which forms one of the core attributes for the creation of multiple and alternative modernities, by reviewing state-led modernity in India and its impact on identity formation as a consequence of the numerous and variable cultural and value systems that confront individuals and by looking at the local appropriation of contested spaces to enter into a radical, value-based engagement with global modernity. (shrink)

It frequently happens in philosophy that a philosopher, in trying to resolve a long-standing dispute between two opposing schools of thought, comes up with a schema that not only resolves the targeted dispute, but in addition necessarily imposes a residual set of regulations and norms, to which it had to subscribe in its attempt to solve the dispute, given its own presuppositions and points of departure. This residual set of norms is then viewed by the subsequent generation of thinkers, who (...) start off their philosophy from a slightly different set of presuppositions, as being superfluous to what they conceive as the real project of the previous thinker. Hence, these subsequent philosophers build their philosophy by fundamentally modifying the stance of the previous thinker, all the while acknowledging the resolution of the dispute the latter carried out in his philosophy. One can view this process of fundamental shifts in orientation as the process of transition from one revolution to another in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to trace the transformations in Nietzsche's early thinking that led to the ideas published in Human, All Too Human, the first book of his mature philosophy. In contrast to his early works, in which he sides with art and philosophy in criticizing the scientific culture of his time, Nietzsche, in Human, All Too Human, hails the methodology of science as a way to overcome the metaphysical delusions of philosophy, art, and religion. However, in disagreement (...) with popular scholarly view, I show that Human, All Too Human does not represent a complete break with his earlier writings, but rather a shift in emphasis. I argue that the overall project connecting Nietzsche's early thought to Human, All Too Human is, first, the attempt to come to terms with the upheavals introduced into the cultural terrain by the Socratic turn, and second, to affirm a higher culture. (shrink)

Although deductive reasoning is a closed system, one's beliefs about the world can influence validity judgements. To understand the associated functional neuroanatomy of this belief-bias we studied 14 volunteers using event-related fMRI, as they performed reasoning tasks under neutral, facilitatory and inhibitory belief conditions. We found evidence for the engagement of a left temporal lobe system during belief-based reasoning and a bilateral parietal lobe system during belief-neutral reasoning. Activation of right lateral prefrontal cortex was evident when subjects inhibited a prepotent (...) response associated with belief-bias and correctly completed a logical task, a finding consistent with its putative role in cognitive monitoring. By contrast, when logical reasoning was overcome by belief-bias, there was engagement of ventral medial prefrontal cortex, a region implicated in affective processing. This latter involvement suggests that belief-bias effects in reasoning may be mediated through an influence of emotional processes on reasoning. (shrink)

Paul Raimond Daniels’s Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy is an engaging, instructive, and clearly written study of Nietzsche’s first book. It is a particularly fine achievement given the difficulties, in terms of both style and content, that Nietzsche’s text presents to the reader. Daniels’s aim is to present BT as an ideal introduction to Nietzsche’s philosophy, and, in light of its problematizing of the relation between art and truth, to argue that BT is crucial for evaluating the aims, successes, (...) and shortcomings of Nietzsche’s later philosophy. Furthermore, Daniels presents an “affirmative” interpretation, arguing that BT champions a life-affirming worldview that finds its highest expression in... (shrink)

Two recent works will be considered that discuss Heidegger and Nietzsche in the context of the problem of overcoming metaphysics and the onto-theological tradition. A common criticism will be that these works in their attempt to retrieve a conception of religion, politics or faith beyond onto-theology and metaphysics tend to justify or idealize particular historically and culturally conditioned perspectives, which are not immune from further philosophical critique. Simon Oliai’s approach to countering the burgeoning fundamentalisms in our global age is ultimately (...) not very convincing, representing as it does, a Western, liberal, Eurocentric worldview. The author’s use of Nietzsche or Heidegger for this purpose is also not very compelling. The remainder of this review essay appraises the volume edited by Cimino and van der Heiden, which attempts to rethink faith beyond onto-theology in several interesting ways. Although meant to be a comparative study, several contributions subscribe to a general Heideggerian (or Heidegger-inspired phenomenological-hermeneutical) theoretical framework, which itself is not rigorously scrutinized. A problematic implication is that Nietzsche’s own critical and constructive views of philosophy, his critique of religion and history, and his positive appraisal of faith and divinity are not seriously considered on their own terms: they are either mostly ignored, or they are selectively interpreted through a Heideggerian lens, with the result that this volume puts forward a mostly unfavorable view of Nietzsche. Some of the conceptual moves credited to Heidegger in the volume have their equivalents in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which a comparative and evaluative study such as this one must seriously take into account by resisting the uncritical acceptance of Heidegger’s own view of Nietzsche. (shrink)

This paper argues that for Nietzsche it is only when the strong type decays on its own terms that it is possible for a weak type to come into dominance by inverting the values of the strong. It sets right a latent inconsistency in Deleuze’s work, Nietzsche and Philosophy , which traces back the origin of decadence to the subterranean struggle between reactive forces. I show that Deleuze’s reading runs contrary to his own contention that for Nietzsche the negative is (...) a result of activity. I argue that the decadence of the strong is a consequence of its very creative activity and abundant health. Relying on Nietzsche’s later works, I isolate and analyze four typical traits of the strong type which not only determine this type as what it is but also make it vulnerable to decadence. (shrink)

A key question for cognitive theories of reasoning is whether logical reasoning is inherently a sentential linguistic process or a process requiring spatial manipulation and search. We addressed this question in an event-related fMRI study of syllogistic reasoning, using sentences with and without semantic content. Our findings indicate involvement of two dissociable networks in deductive reasoning. During content-based reasoning a left hemisphere temporal system was recruited. By contrast, a formally identical reasoning task, which lacked semantic content, activated a parietal system. (...) The two systems share common components in bilateral basal ganglia nuclei, right cerebellum, bilateral fusiform gyri, and left prefrontal cortex. We conclude that syllogistic reasoning is implemented in two distinct systems whose engagement is primarily a function of the presence or absence of semantic content. Furthermore, when a logical argument results in a belief–logic conflict, the nature of the reasoning process is changed by recruitment of the right prefrontal cortex. (shrink)

Spirituality in the workplace is gaining recognition and value among researchers, academicians, and business professionals. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of spirituality in the workplace on job satisfaction by measuring four dimensions of spirituality in the workplace: meaningful work, sense of community, organizational values, and compassion. The impact of each dimension on job satisfaction is hypothesized. A cross-sectional survey was used to collect data from 100 payroll employees in private insurance companies in Punjab. A correlation (...) analysis showed a positive relationship between all the dimensions of spirituality in the workplace and job satisfaction. A regression analysis revealed that although all the dimensions of spirituality in the workplace are important, organizational values and a sense of community are the most important in terms of the job satisfaction level of employees. This work will help insurance companies to better understand the concept of spirituality in the workplace and its importance. Insurance companies can improve their functioning by encouraging employee spirituality in the workplace. (shrink)

Robert Kraut has proposed an analogy between valuing a loved one as irreplaceable and the sort of “rigid” attachment that (according to Saul Kripke’s account) occurs with the reference of proper names. We wanted to see if individuals with Kripkean intuitions were indeed more likely to value loved ones (and other persons and things) as irreplaceable. In this empirical study, 162 participants completed an online questionnaire asking them to consider how appropriate it would be to feel the same way about (...) a perfect replica of a loved one, as well as other questions about replaceability. Participants who previously had endorsed Kripkean reference (n = 96) rated loved ones as less replaceable on two different measures than participants who had previously endorsed Descriptivist reference (n = 66, t(160)> 2.27, p <.02, eta2> .03). Additional results suggest that this difference extends to other targets as well and is at least partially dependent on sentimental attachment. (shrink)

Cognitive science uses the notion of computational information processing to explain cognitive information processing. Some philosophers have argued that anything can be described as doing computational information processing; if so, it is a vacuous notion for explanatory purposes.An attempt is made to explicate the notions of cognitive information processing and computational information processing and to specify the relationship between them. It is demonstrated that the resulting notion of computational information processing can only be realized in a restrictive class of dynamical (...) systems called physical notational systems (after Goodman's theory of notationality), and that the systems generally appealed to by cognitive science-physical symbol systems-are indeed such systems. Furthermore, it turns out that other alternative conceptions of computational information processing, Fodor's (1975) Language of Thought and Cummins' (1989) Interpretational Semantics appeal to substantially the same restrictive class of systems. (shrink)

It is proposed that there are important generalizations about problem solving in design activity that reach across specific disciplines. A framework for the study of design is presented that (a) characterizes design as a radial category and fleshes out the task environment of the prototypical cases; (b) takes the task environment seriously; (c) shows that this task environment occurs in design tasks, but does not occur in every nondesign task; (d) explicates the impact of this task environment on the design (...) problem space; and (e) demonstrates that, given the structure of the information-processing system, the features noted in the problem spaces of design tasks will not all occur in problem spaces where the task environment is vastly different. This analysis leads to the claim that there are a set of invariant features in the problem spaces of design situations that collectively constitute a design problem space. Protocol studies are reported in which the problem spaces of three design tasks in architecture, mechanical engineering, and instructional design are explored and compared with several protocols from nondesign problem-solving tasks. (shrink)

It is proposed that there are important generalizations about problem solving in design activity that reach across specific disciplines. A framework for the study of design is presented that (a) characterizes design as a radial category and fleshes out the task environment of the prototypical cases; (b) takes the task environment seriously; (c) shows that this task environment occurs in design tasks, but does not occur in every nondesign task; (d) explicates the impact of this task environment on the design (...) problem space; and (e) demonstrates that, given the structure of the information-processing system, the features noted in the problem spaces of design tasks will not all occur in problem spaces where the task environment is vastly different. This analysis leads to the claim that there are a set of invariant features in the problem spaces of design situations that collectively constitute a design problem space. Protocol studies are reported in which the problem spaces of three design tasks in architecture, mechanical engineering, and instructional design are explored and compared with several protocols from nondesign problem-solving tasks. (shrink)

Many cognitive accounts of emotional processing assume that emotions have representational content that can be influenced by beliefs and desires. It is generally thought that emotions also have non-cognitive, affective components, including valence and arousal. To clarify the impact of cognition on these affective components we asked participants to rate sentences along cognitive and affective dimensions. For the former case, participants rated the believability of the material. For the latter case, they provided valence and arousal ratings. Across two experiments, we (...) show that valence and arousal are differently influenced by beliefs, suggesting that these two largely independent affective components of emotion differ in their cognitive penetrability. While both components depended upon overall comprehension of sentence meaning, only valence was influenced by the consistency of the sentences with participants’ beliefs (i.e., whether it was believable or unbelievable). We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding cognition–emotion relationships. (shrink)

A symbolic computer model, employing the perceptual strategy, is presented for solving Tower of Hanoi problems. The model is calibrated—in terms of the number of problems solved, time taken, and number of moves made—to the performance of 20 normal subjects. It is then “lesioned” by increasing the decay rate of elements in working memory to model the performance of 20 patients with lesions to the prefrontal cortex. The model captures both the main effects of subject groups (patients and normal controls) (...) performance, and the subject groups (patients and normal controls) by problem difficulty interactions. This leads us to support the working memory hypothesis of frontal lobe functions, but for a narrow range of problems. (shrink)

We respond to Farah (1994) by making some general remarks about information encapsulation and locality and asking how these are violated in her computational models. Our point is not that we disagree, but rather that Farah's treatment of the issues is not sufficiently rigorous to allow an evaluation of her claims.