This article tries to point out the dialectical and paradoxical character of Eckhart’s thought, which permits him at once to affirm and to negate categories such as being, nothingness, personality, substance, origin, creation, image. In this way, Eckhart can unite a personal-theistic and a non-personal-atheistic view. A dialectical structure can also be seen in Eckhart’s ethics. Further, the dialectical interpretation can elucidate the ambivalence in the concept of the scintilla animae. The origin and aim of Eckhart’s dialectics proves to consist (...) in the concept of non-distinction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:No-Self, Dōgen, the Senika Doctrine, and Western Views of SoulGerhard FadenNo-Self Versus SoulFrom the very beginning of Buddhism, the concept of no-self (P. anattā, J. muga) has been at the heart of Buddhist thought. Based on this concept, Buddhist apologetics rejected the concept of Atman in the Upanishads as well as Western concepts of soul. Christian authors, on the other hand, see an unbridgeable abyss between what they call (...) "Christian personalism" and Buddhist "rejection of souls."1 However, is there really such a clear-cut distinction? Posing this question means denying it. The no-self doctrine is one of the most intricate concepts within philosophy, and words like "self" and "soul" have countless interpretations. It seems to me that the Buddhist tradition itself has not always realized the crucial point of its fundamental doctrine, just as the Western concepts of "person" and "soul" more often than not fell behind the achievements of Plato and the New Testament. Especially the Theravāda line of Buddhism has developed a very counterintuitive picture of what it is to be a human person. "There is suffering, but there is no self who suffers." The most outstanding philosopher of Mahāyāna Buddhism, Nāgārjuna (ca. 150-250), introduced a more convincing interpretation when he said that according to Buddha the self or soul does neither exist nor not exist. This interpretation too, no less than the Theravāda doctrine, can refer to the early epoch of Buddhism. In the Pāli suttas a monk named Vacchagotta asked the Buddha, "Is there a self?" The Buddha gave no response. Then Vacchagotta asked, "Is there no self?" Again the Buddha was silent.2 In any case, the teaching of no-self leaves room for many divergent interpretations. In this paper, I shall propose to understand it as an original view of what is my true being, a view that has analogues in traditional Western philosophy. The truth is one; philosophy has to demonstrate that the different doctrines are nothing but aspects of a single universe. As for the dogmatic tenets of each religion, I would propose to see them like educators of the individual's thought: they set limits, develop abilities, suggest lines of sight, and the like. [End Page 41]The Concept of No-self in Pāli BuddhismIn the limited space of this essay, I can only give some marginal remarks. For a first approach, let us look at the origins of the no-self concept in the scriptures of Pāli Buddhism. They show clearly the aim of that doctrine: it consists in the liberation from objectifying theories of the soul. In the canonical texts, we find repeatedly the formula of rejecting the five aggregates, the so-called "heaps" (Skt. skhandha, P. khandha) that form the phantom of a persistent ego: body, sensation, conceptualization, volitions, and consciousness. None of these things is really mine. The Buddha tells to his disciples as follows: "Suppose, bhikkhus, people were to carry off the grass, sticks, branches, and foliage in this Jeta's Grove, or to burn them, or to do with them as they wish. Would you think: 'People are carrying us off, or burning us, or doing with us as they wish'?" Of course, the disciples do not think so. It is neither their self nor what belongs to their self. In the same way, the Buddha instructs them to think, the ear is not yours, and the mind is not yours, and so on, and to abandon it all.3In other words, by the teaching of anattā the Buddha invites his disciples to cease identifying their true being with things like body or consciousness. Only what really is mine can be my self. The khandhas seem to be mine. To a certain degree, I can dispose of them. However, really they are not mine; on the contrary, they are my master. The teaching of no-self does not originally mean there is no self, but nothing in this world can be my self. What is my self can never be taken from me. I cannot dispose of it, and on the other... (shrink)

The goal of this article is to explore how a social justice framework can help illuminate the role that consent should play in health and science policy. In the first section, we set the stage for our inquiry with the important case of Henrietta Lacks. Without her knowledge or consent, or that of her family, Mrs. Lacks’s cells gave rise to an enormous advance in biomedical science—the first immortal human cell line, or HeLa cells.

A new approach to Hume's problem of induction that justifies the optimality of induction at the level of meta-induction. Hume's problem of justifying induction has been among epistemology's greatest challenges for centuries. In this book, Gerhard Schurz proposes a new approach to Hume's problem. Acknowledging the force of Hume's arguments against the possibility of a noncircular justification of the reliability of induction, Schurz demonstrates instead the possibility of a noncircular justification of the optimality of induction, or, more precisely, of (...) meta-induction (the application of induction to competing prediction models). Drawing on discoveries in computational learning theory, Schurz demonstrates that a regret-based learning strategy, attractivity-weighted meta-induction, is predictively optimal in all possible worlds among all prediction methods accessible to the epistemic agent. Moreover, the a priori justification of meta-induction generates a noncircular a posteriori justification of object induction. Taken together, these two results provide a noncircular solution to Hume's problem. Schurz discusses the philosophical debate on the problem of induction, addressing all major attempts at a solution to Hume's problem and describing their shortcomings; presents a series of theorems, accompanied by a description of computer simulations illustrating the content of these theorems (with proofs presented in a mathematical appendix); and defends, refines, and applies core insights regarding the optimality of meta-induction, explaining applications in neighboring disciplines including forecasting sciences, cognitive science, social epistemology, and generalized evolution theory. Finally, Schurz generalizes the method of optimality-based justification to a new strategy of justification in epistemology, arguing that optimality justifications can avoid the problems of justificatory circularity and regress. (shrink)

Public health ethics, like the field of public health it addresses, traditionally has focused more on practice and particular cases than on theory, with the result that some concepts, methods, and boundaries remain largely undefined. This paper attempts to provide a rough conceptual map of the terrain of public health ethics. We begin by briefly defining public health and identifying general features of the field that are particularly relevant for a discussion of public health ethics.Public health is primarily concerned with (...) the health of the entire population, rather than the health of individuals. Its features include an emphasis on the promotion of health and the prevention of disease and disability; the collection and use of epidemiological data, population surveillance, and other forms of empirical quantitative assessment; a recognition of the multidimensional nature of the determinants of health; and a focus on the complex interactions of many factors—biological, behavioral, social, and environmental—in developing effective interventions. (shrink)

In bioethics, discussions of justice have tended to focus on questions of fairness in access to health care: is there a right to medical treatment, and how should priorities be set when medical resources are scarce. But health care is only one of many factors that determine the extent to which people live healthy lives, and fairness is not the only consideration in determining whether a health policy is just. In this pathbreaking book, senior bioethicists Powers and Faden confront (...) foundational issues about health and justice. How much inequality in health can a just society tolerate. The audience for the book is scholars and students of bioethics and moral and political philosophy, as well as anyone interested in public health and health policy. (shrink)

Calls are increasing for American health care to be organized as a learning health care system, defined by the Institute of Medicine as a health care system “in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.” We applaud this conception, and in this paper, we put forward a new ethics framework for it. No such (...) framework has previously been articulated. The goals of our framework are twofold: to support the transformation to a learning health care system and to help ensure that learning activities carried out within such a system are conducted in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

This encyclopedia entry provides an overview of the field of public health ethics. It focuses on what distinguishes public health ethics from other nearby subfields—especially biomedical ethics. It also frames the problems of public health ethics in terms of the concepts of justice and political legitimacy.

Structural Injustice advances a theory of what structural injustice is and how it works. Powers and Faden present both a philosophically powerful, integrated theory about human rights violations and structural unfairness, alongside practical insights into how to improve them.

Statistical mechanics attempts to explain the behaviour of macroscopic physical systems in terms of the mechanical properties of their constituents. Although it is one of the fundamental theories of physics, it has received little attention from philosophers of science. Nevertheless, it raises philosophical questions of fundamental importance on the nature of time, chance and reduction. Most philosophical issues in this domain relate to the question of the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics. This book addresses issues inherent in this reduction: (...) the time-asymmetry of thermodynamics and its absence in statistical mechanics; the role and essential nature of chance and probability in this reduction when thermodynamics is non-probabilistic; and how, if at all, the reduction is possible. Compiling contributions on current research by experts in the field, this is an invaluable survey of the philosophy of statistical mechanics for academic researchers and graduate students interested in the foundations of physics. (shrink)

This chapter offers a close reading of a passage from the literary and philosophical work Minima Moralia that enacts Theodor W. Adorno's radical concept of nonpropositional truth content in philosophical aesthetics after Auschwitz. Readers of Adorno's texts, especially those devoted to philosophical aesthetics, can hardly fail to be struck by their chiastic structure. The aesthetic theory that Adorno develops constitutes not only a theory of the aesthetic but also a theory that is itself aesthetic, hence a theory of literature that (...) exhibits qualities associated with literary texts, and a theory of music that harbors within itself traces of musical composition. The rhetorically self-conscious tropes of his posthumous Aesthetic Theory, the stylized literary studies of his Notes to Literature, his musically inflected meditations on musicological questions from Ludwig van Beethoven to Arnold Schönberg, and so many of his other texts perform this provocative inversion in a variety of registers and conceptual modulations. (shrink)

The volume contains the written versions of all papers given at the workshop, divided into five chapters and followed by Alvin Goldman's replies in the sixth.

During a conference entitled “Un logicien consciencieux. La philosophie de Evert Willem Beth,” held in Nancy in 1998 and published in this journal, volume 3, cahier 4 [Barth, Heinzmann et al. 1998-1999], the participants regretted that a reasoned biography of Beth was not available. In view of the efforts made since then in this direction, in particular by Paul van Ulsen in his PhD thesis in Dutch [2000], this article attempts to provide an overview of Beth’s work for a broader (...) community of philosophers of science. However, my focus is not so much on Beth’s widely discussed and important contributions to mathematical logic, where his most creative merits reside. My aim is to emphasize Beth’s philosophical and cultural background. Both are also discussed in the first two chapters of Ulsen’s thesis, which globally focuses on Beth’s work in logic. Of course, philosophical and scientific aspects cannot be systematically separated, but Beth’s influence on the philosophy of mathematics between the 1950s and 1960s seems to me large enough to highlight it here. Beth is one of the very few philosophers who also presented highly technically relevant results in logic, or one of the few logicians who also wrote philosophical papers, not only in his youth or old age, but throughout his career. In his 741-page magnum opus The Foundations of Mathematics [1959], he combines the treatment of philosophical and logico-mathematical problems under the perspective that the traditional deductive procedure is an essential and not merely incidental element in mathematical proof so that “logic must play the principal role in a philosophical examination of mathematical thought” [1959, XI]. By 1937, Beth was “convinced that the only possibility of founding mathematics in a truly satisfactory way is to apply intuitive and formal methods simultaneously in such a way that they can control and verify each other” (“L’évidence intuitive dans les mathématiques modernes” [1937, 165]). In 1956, he still justified the emphasis on the intuitive element of proof by “certain complications that the development of these [formalist] tendencies would later give rise to” (“Poincaré et la philosophie” [1956b, 238, transl. G. H.]). (shrink)

Max Weber ist ein Klassiker der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Sein Werk gehört weltweit zum Kernbestand von Forschung und Lehre, und dies gilt besonders für seine methodologischen Schriften, denen auch 100 Jahre nach ihrer Publikation nachhaltige Aufmerksamkeit beschieden ist. Allerdings gibt es immer noch kein einvernehmliches Verständnis von Webers Position. Der Grund dafür liegt in der mangelnden Aufarbeitung der Quellen. Viele wichtige Autoren, deren Werke Weber rezipierte, sind in Vergessenheit geraten. Sie in Erinnerung zu rufen, ist dringend notwendig, um seine Wissenschaftslehre (...) in ihrer ganzen Komplexität zu verstehen. 0Das vorliegende Sammelwerk leistet einen Beitrag zur Schließung dieser Forschungslücke. Es rekonstruiert den Denkraum des späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, in dem sich Weber bewegte, und zeigt anhand von Studien zu ausgewählten Autoren, wie umfassend und interdisziplinär sein Denken tatsächlich war. Dabei werden nicht nur Autoren aus den Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften berücksichtigt, sondern auch solche aus den Naturwissenschaften, denn Weber war mit dem Fortschritt dieser Disziplinen ebenfalls vertraut. (shrink)

Calls are increasing for American health care to be organized as a learning health care system, defined by the Institute of Medicine as a health care system “in which knowledge generation is so embedded into the core of the practice of medicine that it is a natural outgrowth and product of the healthcare delivery process and leads to continual improvement in care.” We applaud this conception, and in this paper, we put forward a new ethics framework for it. No such (...) framework has previously been articulated. The goals of our framework are twofold: to support the transformation to a learning health care system and to help ensure that learning activities carried out within such a system are conducted in an ethically acceptable fashion. (shrink)

In this article, we address the relevance of J.S. Mill’s political philosophy for a framework of public health ethics. In contrast to some readings of Mill, we reject the view that in the formulation of public policies liberties of all kinds enjoy an equal presumption in their favor. We argue that Mill also rejects this view and discuss the distinction that Mill makes between three kinds of liberty interests: interests that are immune from state interference; interests that enjoy a presumption (...) in favor of liberty; and interests that enjoy no such presumption. We argue that what is of focal importance for Mill in protecting liberty is captured by the essential role that the value of self-determination plays in human well-being. Finally, we make the case for the plausibility of a more complex and nuanced Millian framework for public health ethics that would modify how the balancing of some liberty and public health interests should proceed by taking the thumb off the liberty end of the scale. Mill’s arguments and the legacy of liberalism support certain forms of state interference with marketplace liberties for the sake of public health objectives without any presumption in favor of liberty. (shrink)

This volume offers a reappraisal of Donald Davidson's influential philosophy of thought, meaning, and language, Twelve specially written essays by leading philosophers in the field illuminate a range of themes and problems relating to these ...

The account of meta-induction (G. Schurz, Hume’s problem solved: the optimality of meta-induction, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2019) proposes a two-step solution to the problem of induction. Step 1 consists in a mathematical a priori justification of the predictive optimality of meta-induction, upon which step 2 builds a meta-inductive a posteriori justification of object-induction based on its superior track record (Sect. 1). Sterkenburg (Br J Philos Sci, forthcoming. 10.1086/717068/) challenged this account by arguing that meta-induction can only provide a (non-circular) justification (...) of inductive predictions for now and for the next future, but not a justification of inductive generalizations (Sect. 2). This paper develops a meta-inductive method that does provide an a posteriori justification of inductive generalizations, in the form of exchangeability conditions (Sect. 3). In Sect. 4, a limitation of the proposed method is worked out: while the method can justify weakly lawlike generalizations, the justification of strongly lawlike generalizations (claimed to hold for all eternity) requires epistemic principles going beyond meta-induction based on predictive success. (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

Vulnerability is one of the least examined concepts in research ethics. Vulnerability was linked in the Belmont Report to questions of justice in the selection of subjects. Regulations and policy documents regarding the ethical conduct of research have focused on vulnerability in terms of limitations of the capacity to provide informed consent. Other interpretations of vulnerability have emphasized unequal power relationships between politically and economically disadvantaged groups and investigators or sponsors. So many groups are now considered to be vulnerable in (...) the context of research, particularly international research, that the concept has lost force. In addition, classifying groups as vulnerable not only stereotypes them, but also may not reliably protect many individuals from harm. Certain individuals require ongoing protections of the kind already established in law and regulation, but attention must also be focused on characteristics of the research protocol and environment that present ethical challenges. (shrink)

Spitale et al. (2024) address a public health ethics question of great importance: How should governments communicate with the public during public health emergencies? The article highlights severa...

Executive Summary There is a general perception that biomedical research has not given the same attention to the health problems of women that it has given ...

Response to Emily A. Largent, Franklin G. Miller and Steven Joffe, A Prescription for Ethical Learning, Hastings Center Report, 43, s1, (S28-S29), (2013).

Like the National Commission and the President's Commission, the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was formed to carry out specific ethical tasks. Yet the committee also had an “openness” mission, a charge to investigate allegations that the U.S. government secretly exposed Americans to environmental releases of radiation. Eighteen months later—and after sixteen public meetings, more than 200 interviews, and the review of about 400,000 documents—the committee delivered a 925‐page report to the president.