I Am grateful for the honour of being invited to give the second Manson Lecture. Dr. Manson believed that the study of sick people leads into the widest fields of thought, but that increasing specialization within medicine diverts the doctor from seeing man and his nature whole: the chief question seems to be , “whether medicine is in the bondship of practice, whether it is a skilled art, or whether it can emerge to give its own contribution to abstract thought (...) and philosophy.” Indeed, pleading with doctors to join this Institute of Philosophy, he declared that medicine should be the most philosophic of the professions. In this he was reviving an ancient claim: the arguments for it have lately been restated with much Aristotelian piety by Scott Buchanan. Now here I find myself in a difficulty at the outset: I am to speak of the relationship between philosophy and medicine, at a lecture founded by a passionate believer in their conjunction, yet I am engaged in a particular branch of medicine which was for longer than any other preoccupied with philosophy and dependent on it, but had so little profit from its fidelity that it reckons progress from the time when it struggled away from this allegiance. Psychiatry has not been able to refrain since then from many a backward glance at the older philosophy she once swore by, and she has been much influenced by the philosophies of later times: she has—doubtless in punishment for her defection—become entangled now and then in bad, unrecognized philosophy of her own making. She has, at all events, never achieved more than a temporary indifference to philosophic thought. (shrink)

The Search for the Legacy of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is a collection of essays from experts in a variety of fields seeking to redefine the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The essayists place the legacy of the study within the evolution of racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Contributors include two leading historians on the study, two former United States Surgeons General, and other prominent scholars from a wide range of fields.

Counterfactuals is David Lewis' forceful presentation of and sustained argument for a particular view about propositions which express contrary to fact conditionals, including his famous defense of realism about possible worlds and his theory of laws of nature.

In the modern discussions about possibility of synthetic a priori propositions, the theory of definition has a fundamental importance, because the most definition’s theories hold that analytic judgments are involved by explicit definition . However, for Kant –first author who pointed out the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions–many analytic judgments are made by analysis of concepts which need not first be established by definition. Moreover, for him not all a priori knowledge is analytic. The statement that not all analytic (...) judgment is derived from definition and possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, indicates Kant didn’t believe, contrary to modern theories about analytic judgment, the definition is an essential ground of knowledge. (shrink)

Much attention has been devoted in recent years to the personal idealism of Martin Luther King, Jr. Among the major contributors to the scholarship in this area is Rufus Burrow, Jr., who places King firmly in the tradition of personal idealism, or personalism, while also uncovering the intellectual unease that made King both a deep and creative thinker and a committed and effective social activist.1 Clearly, Burrow's own sense of his role as a personalist informs his approach to the life (...) and thought of King. Although philosophical personalism figures prominently in Burrow's treatment of King in his writings, ethical and social personalism provides the primary theoretical framework for both Burrow's exploration of .. (shrink)

In the modern discussions about possibility of synthetic a priori propositions, the theory of definition has a fundamental importance, because the most definition’s theories hold that analytic judgments are involved by explicit definition. However, for Kant –first author who pointed out the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions–many analytic judgments are made by analysis of concepts which need not first be established by definition. Moreover, for him not all a priori knowledge is analytic. The statement that not all analytic judgment (...) is derived from definition and possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, indicates Kant didn’t believe, contrary to modern theories about analytic judgment, the definition is an essential ground of knowledge. (shrink)

Cathleen Kaveny's Prophecy Without Contempt seeks to reorient the conversation among religious ethicists and political theorists about religion in public life. Rather than focus on religious speech in general, Kaveny distinguishes deliberation and indictment as forms of discourse, and she subjects indictment to ethical evaluation. She aims to constrain the public exercise of inordinate indictment, while encouraging prophetic indictment that meets the demands of justice. While the book is a much-needed corrective, Kaveny's focus on the powerful rhetoric of prophetic indictment (...) omits the harms that can come to the body politic from unjust silence. Such silence deserves more moral attention. (shrink)

There is a widespread misinterpretation of kant according to which an analytic judgment is one that follows from a definition. Through a study of kant's theory of definition, And the role in knowledge that he ascribes to definition, It is shown that this is indeed a misinterpretation. Much criticism of kant's theory of analytic judgments is vitiated by substituting a modern definition of "analytic" for the one kant gave.

Hume distinguished the principle that everything has a cause from the principle of the uniformity of nature, Viz., That like causes have like effects. In the second analogy of experience kant attempts to refute what he (erroneously) believed had been hume's explanation of our acceptance of the first principle. He did not there attempt to establish the second principle, But j dodge has shown that the second analogy implicitly contains a justification of the principle of like cause-Like effect. Kant himself, (...) However, Justified the second principle only as a regulative principle of reflective judgment. (shrink)

Selected Papers from the Third International Kant Congress.