Terrence Deacon has constructed a tome in which he unleashes his considerable learning in quest of several answers to the question, ‘What are we?’ He is uniquely qualified to take an approach which details the origin and development of, first, language, then the brain, and, lastly, their ‘co-evolution.’ Described on the jacket as ‘a world-renowned researcher in neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology,’ all of his background is called upon at various times to pull together the mass of data and supposition that (...) Deacon brings to the table. (shrink)

Contemporary theories of consciousness are based on widely different concepts of its nature, most or all of which probably embody aspects of the truth about it. Starting with a concept of consciousness indicated by the phrase “the feeling of what happens” (the title of a book by Antonio Damásio), we attempt to build a framework capable of supporting and resolving divergent views. We picture consciousness in terms of Reality experiencing itself from the perspective of cognitive agents. Each conscious experience is (...) regarded as composed of momentary feeling events that are combined by recognition and evaluation into extended conscious episodes that bind cognitive contents with a wide range of apparent durations (0.1 secs to 2 or more secs, for us humans, depending on circumstances and context). Three necessary conditions for the existence of consciousness are identified: a) a ground of Reality, envisaged as an universal field of potentiality encompassing all possible manifestations, whether material or 'mental'; b) a transitional zone, leading to; c) a manifest world with its fundamental divisions into material, 'informational' and quale-endowed aspects. We explore ideas about the nature of these necessary conditions, how they may relate to one another and whether our suggestions have empirical implications. (shrink)

It seems certain to me that I will die and stay dead. By “I”, I mean me, Greg Nixon, this person, this self-identity. I am so intertwined with the chiasmus of lives, bodies, ecosystems, symbolic intersubjectivity, and life on this particular planet that I cannot imagine this identity continuing alone without them. However, one may survive one’s life by believing in universal awareness, perfection, and the peace that passes all understanding. Perhaps, we bring this back with us to (...) the Source from which we began, changing it, enriching it. Once we have lived – if we don’t choose the eternal silence of oblivion by life denial, vanity, indifference, or simple weariness – the Source learns and we awaken within it. Awareness, consciousness, is universal – it comes with the territory – so maybe you will be one of the few prepared to become unexpectedly enlightened after the loss of body and self. You may discover your own apotheosis – something you always were, but after a lifetime of primate experience, now much more. Since you are of the Source and since you have changed from life experience and yet retained the dream of ultimate awakening, plus you have brought those chaotic emotions and memories back to the Source with you (though no longer yours), your life & memories will have mattered. Those who awaken beyond the death of self will have changed Reality. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic; an account of consequence, of what follows from what, offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. Since philosophy itself proceeds by way of argument and inference, a clear view of what logical consequence amounts to is of central importance to the whole discipline. In this book JC Beall and Greg Restall present and defend what thay call logical pluralism, the view that there is more than one genuine deductive consequence relation, (...) a position which has profound implications for many linguists as well as for philosophers. We should not search for one true logic, since there are many. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic; an account of consequence, of what follows from what, offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. Since philosophy itself proceeds by way of argument and inference, a clear view of what logical consequence amounts to is of central importance to the whole discipline. In this book JC Beall and Greg Restall present and defend what thay call logical pluralism, the view that there is more than one genuine deductive consequence relation, (...) a position which has profound implications for many linguists as well as for philosophers. We should not search for one true logic, since there are many. (shrink)

Uses modernist and postmodernist theoretical perspectives to examine the formation and reformation of states throughout history and around the globe.

Aboriginal Australians have an intrinsic relationship to Country, kinship and community. The processes related to colonisation have decimated traditional lifestyles, ecology and even families. The challenge for energy engineers lies in the ability to reconcile the profession of engineering with the contemporary and traditional cultural and physical needs of Aboriginal people. A discussion around Aboriginal peoples’ most deeply held values will be linked to both global and professional ethical canons. This discussion has implications for Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples globally. A (...) fictitious case study—the ‘Warrigal Downs Energy Hub’—provides us with a hypothetical project to which we can link both examples and frameworks. Our team of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educators and engineers provides us with a right, wrong and even better way to work sensitively, meaningfully and reciprocally with Aboriginal people in Australia and, indeed, globally. (shrink)

Alfred Tarski’s work on truth has played such a central role in the discourse on truth that most coming to it for the first time have probably already heard a great deal about what is said there. Unfortunately, since the work is largely technical and Tarski was only tan- gentially philosophical, a certain incautious assimilation dominates many philosophical discussions of Tarski’s ideas, and so, examining Tarski on the concept of truth is in many ways an act of unlearning. -/- In (...) this paper I focus on those key ideas in Tarski’s work that have made a lasting impact on the philosophical discourse. These are the notions of T-sentence, Convention T, Tarskian truth definition, and Tarski’s general limiting theses on the expressibility and definability of truth. Though these ideas are in name familiar, we will seek in this essay to uncover and remove certain widespread misunderstandings of each. Tarski’s name also features prominently in discussions of the liar paradox, so we will take time out to explain Tarski’s connection to this ancient puzzle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique by Nathan BrownGreg EllermannBrown, Nathan. Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique. Fordham University Press, 2021. 318pp.Nathan Brown's Rationalist Empiricism is, above all, a book about philosophical method. It is also a highly significant study of the conceptual architecture of Marxism, developed by way of a critical return to the lesson of Althusser. Drawing on a range of disparate materials–from the (...) works of Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Meillassoux to contemporary experiments in digital photography and metrology–Brown demonstrates the necessity of "a mutual interruption of reason and experience" (31) for any theoretical or political practice that would avoid falling into ideological complacency.The book opens with an appraisal of "the speculative turn" (1) in 21st-century thought, a turn Brown characterizes as an intellectual dead-end. He remarks that the various new materialisms and object-oriented ontologies of the last decades were united by an inattention to method. Unconcerned to establish the necessity of their claims or with the relation between reasoning and reality, these philosophies made assertions instead of arguments; they mistook dogmatism for speculation.For Brown, it is the dialectic–specifically, the dialectic of reason and experience–that promises to renew the possibility of speculative thinking. Such renewal will entail refusing "the severance of speculation from critique" (2). It also requires thinking through a more basic problem: the relation between rationalism and empiricism. While rationalism "explore[s] what has to be thought according to the internal order and consistency of ideas," empiricism, as Brown has it, "claim[s] the genesis of ideas in experience" (3). Since Kant's first Critique, this binary and the effort to overcome it have set the terms of philosophical debate. Brown's striking contention is that the search for a synthesis or a hidden ground uniting these two positions (as, for instance, in Deleuze or Michel Henry) invariably leads us back to the transcendental–an improvement on the dogmatism of contemporary theory but a reduction of knowledge to "conditions of experience" [End Page 128] nonetheless (47). Brown therefore proposes another path: "a relational disjunction of rationalism and empiricism" animated by "the critical power of the tension between [them] to check one another's claims and to propel those claims further" (3). In other words, he develops a methodological dialectic whose two poles-the rationalist and the empiricist-alternately take on speculative and critical functions. There is no static alignment of the key categories in Brown's book. "Speculation and critique cannot be parceled out," he writes, "according to the division of reason and experience. Metaphysics, science, politics: each of these fields relies integrally upon the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience, their 'epistemological polarity'" (250). In Bachelard's terms, pivotal for the overall argument, reason and experience must be allowed to "transmute," "propel," and "say 'no' to one another" (8). It is their ungrounded dialectical relation that sustains true speculative thought.This methodological position has profound ontological implications. Looking to Althusser, Brown finds the beginnings of a theory of rationalist empiricism in the structural Marxist notion of the "concrete-in-thought" (15-16): the self-critical and experimentally verified knowledge of a science. Crucially, for Althusser there can be no concrete-in-thought without a "concrete-real," external to theory itself (15). Developing to the fullest this underappreciated point, Brown shows that rationalist empiricism must be a realism. Thus, the book's second, third, and fourth chapters elaborate a continuous argument concerning "the primacy of being over thought" (59), and the relationship between speculative and scientific knowledge. The central question is how speculation might extend or "extrapolate from the exteriorizing force of science, without being reducible to its forms of experience" (261). Refracting Hegel's Logic through the thought of Heidegger and Meillassoux, Brown ultimately offers a new account of the ontological difference–between being and beings, between speculative truth and "ontic," scientific knowledge–that privileges neither side and insists on their coordination. Once again, he declines to seek a synthesis, arguing that "true critique" (as Hegel characterized his speculative method) depends on "the ontological primacy of becoming" (91), on an absolute time bound up with... (shrink)

We present a new frame semantics for positive relevant and substructural propositional logics. This frame semantics is both a generalisation of Routley–Meyer ternary frames and a simplification of them. The key innovation of this semantics is the use of a single accessibility relation to relate collections of points to points. Different logics are modeled by varying the kinds of collections used: they can be sets, multisets, lists or trees. We show that collection frames on trees are sound and complete for (...) the basic positive distributive substructural logic $\mathsf {B}^+$, that collection frames on multisets are sound and complete for $\mathsf {RW}^+$ (the relevant logic $\mathsf {R}^+$, without contraction, or equivalently, positive multiplicative and additive linear logic with distribution for the additive connectives), and that collection frames on sets are sound for the positive relevant logic $\mathsf {R}^+$. The completeness of set frames for $\mathsf {R}^+$ is, currently, an open question. (shrink)

When we read On the Origin of Species, we cannot help but hear echoes of the Wealth of Nations. Darwin’s “economy of nature” features a “division of labour” that leads to complexity and productivity. We should not, however, analyze Darwin’s ethics through this lens. Darwin did not draw his economic ideas from Smith, nor did he base his ethics on an economic foundation. Darwin’s ethics rest on Smith’s notion—from the Theory of Moral Sentiments—of an innate human faculty of sympathy. Darwin (...) gave this notion an evolutionary interpretation, concluding that any species of social animals that develops a high enough level of intelligence will evolve moral principles. But the specific moral principles evolved by any particular species will vary, depending on that species’ particular evolutionary history. Darwin’s theory of moral sentiments thus diverged profoundly from Smith’s, while remaining in the same intellectual lineage. Although my reading of Darwin’s ethics departs from the dominant trend, it is not without precedent. A century ago, William James propounded a similar interpretation of Darwin. James’s interpretation has been largely forgotten, but he had Darwin right. It seems that James then developed his own moral philosophy on what he saw as a Darwinian foundation. It may be that James read Darwin’s evolutionary ethics through a pragmatic lens and so refashioned it, in his turn, into something again profoundly different from what Darwin had conceived, but again remaining in the same intellectual lineage. (shrink)

The idea that fictions may educate us is an old one, as is the view that they distort the truth and mislead us. While there is a long tradition of passionate assertion in this debate, systematic arguments are a recent development, and the idea of empirically testing is particularly novel. Our aim in this chapter is to provide clarity about what is at stake in this debate, what the options are, and how empirical work does or might bear on its (...) resolution. We distinguish between merely influencing people’s opinions and providing genuine learning, where the latter requires that the source of the change in opinion should be reliable. Other important ideas here are the extent to which authors of fiction may be considered to provide testimony, or something like it, and the possibility of recognizing an unstated purpose in the project of the fictional work. We ask whether fictions can furnish us not merely with ideas but with reasons for believing them, perhaps by constituting thought experiments. We consider whether the focus should be on understanding rather than on knowledge, and whether fictions can inform us about the qualities of another’s experiences. We briefly describe some experimental work of recent decades and suggest that the evidence for learning from fiction is currently meagre. (shrink)

Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising--on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen? First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt show how the new problems on campus have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into (...) American childhood and education: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths--and the resulting culture of safetyism--interferes with young people's social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life. Lukianoff and Haidt investigate the many social trends that have intersected to promote the spread of these untruths. They explore changes in childhood such as the rise of fearful parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, and the new world of social media that has engulfed teenagers in the last decade. They examine changes on campus, including the corporatization of universities and the emergence of new ideas about identity and justice. They situate the conflicts on campus within the context of America's rapidly rising political polarization and dysfunction. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines. (shrink)

Mythopoetry, the imagistic voice of the muses which manifests in myth and natural poetry, has been invoked as an impression of ideal curriculum with which to cherish intimate, vital experience (and to oppose its exile from educational life). In this statement, I intend to see through the pleasant surface of the label, mythopoetry, to see what image may lie just out of sight, beyond the "inspired writing" that mythopoetry implies. Beyond words themselves, meaning is found in sound and in expressive (...) representation. “Music, when soft voices die, / Vibrates in the memory” (Shelley). (shrink)

An advanced-level logic textbook that presents proof construction on equal footing with model building. Potentially relevant to students of mathematics and computer science as well.

The literature on values in science struggles with questions about how to describe and manage the role of values in scientific research. We argue that progress can be made by shifting this literature’s current emphasis. Rather than arguing about how non-epistemic values can or should figure into scientific assessment, we suggest analyzing how scientific assessment can accommodate non-epistemic values. For scientific assessment to do so, it arguably needs to incorporate goals that have been traditionally characterized as non-epistemic. Building on this (...) insight, we show how the adequacy-for-purpose framework recently developed for assessing scientific models can provide a general framework for describing scientific assessment so that it goes beyond purely epistemic considerations. Adopting this framework has significant advantages and opens the possibility of effecting a partial rapprochement between critics and proponents of the value-free ideal. (shrink)

:The distinction between brute luck and option luck is fundamental for luck egalitarianism. Many luck egalitarians write as if it could be used to specify which outcomes people should be held responsible for. In this paper, I argue that the distinction can’t be used this way. In fact, luck egalitarians tend to rely instead on rough intuitive judgements about individual responsibility. This makes their view vulnerable to what’s known as the neutrality objection. I show that attempts to avoid this objection (...) are unsuccessful. I conclude that until it provides a better account of attributing responsibility, luck egalitarianism remains incomplete. (shrink)

Different natural deduction proof systems for intuitionistic and classical logic —and related logical systems—differ in fundamental properties while sharing significant family resemblances. These differences become quite stark when it comes to the structural rules of contraction and weakening. In this paper, I show how Gentzen and Jaśkowski’s natural deduction systems differ in fine structure. I also motivate directed proof nets as another natural deduction system which shares some of the design features of Genzen and Jaśkowski’s systems, but which differs again (...) in its treatment of the structural rules, and has a range of virtues absent from traditional natural deduction systems. (shrink)

This book introduces an important group of logics that have come to be known under the umbrella term 'susbstructural'. Substructural logics have independently led to significant developments in philosophy, computing and linguistics. _An Introduction to Substrucural Logics_ is the first book to systematically survey the new results and the significant impact that this class of logics has had on a wide range of fields.The following topics are covered: * Proof Theory * Propositional Structures * Frames * Decidability * Coda Both (...) students and professors of philosophy, computing, linguistics, and mathematics will find this to be an important addition to their reading. (shrink)

This article will discuss Paulo Freire’s global influences on environmental pedagogies and argue that ecopedagogical reinventions are essential for ‘quality’ education, as touted in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #4, for global, all-inclusive ‘development’ that is planetarily sustainable. The politics of how ‘development’ is taught or not taught to be critically read linguistically and dialogically will be problematized through Freire’s work, and reinventions of his work, on ecopedagogy. As Freire was a pedagogue of critical literacy, ecopedagogical literacy widens (...) ‘reading the word to read the world’ (all humans, human populations) to read Earth to read the world as part of Earth. Such reading is not anthropocentric. The article will first describe Freire’s influence on reinventing environmental pedagogies, including education for (un)sustainable development (ESD), with specific discussions on how language of ‘development’ and corresponding (un)sustainability is framed. These influences from Freire will then be discussed through his de/re/constructions of citizenship, utopia and education, and globalization. Throughout the article, I will argue the need for teaching ecopedagogical literacy with ecolinguistics is essential to better understand the politics of language and (non)hierarchical dialogue which influence how ‘development’ goals are constructed, including the SDGs. (shrink)

A key aspect of teaching ‘development’ is understanding the conundrums and tensions between balance and imbalance with constructs of global and...

Natural deduction with alternatives extends Gentzen–Prawitz-style natural deduction with a single structural addition: negatively signed assumptions, called alternatives. It is a mildly bilateralist, single-conclusion natural deduction proof system in which the connective rules are unmodi_ed from the usual Prawitz introduction and elimination rules — the extension is purely structural. This framework is general: it can be used for (1) classical logic, (2) relevant logic without distribution, (3) affine logic, and (4) linear logic, keeping the connective rules fixed, and varying purely (...) structural rules. The key result of this paper is that the two principles that introduce kinds of irrelevance to natural deduction proofs: (a) the rule of explosion (from a contradiction, anything follows); and (b) the structural rule of vacuous discharge; are shown to be two sides of a single coin, in the same way that they correspond to the structural rule of weakening in the sequent calculus. The paper also includes a discussion of assumption classes, and how they can play a role in treating additive connectives in substructural natural deduction. (shrink)

Herein, I review the shattering moment in my life when I awoke from the dream of self to find being as part of the living world and not in my head, discovering my perspectival center to be literally everywhere. Since awakening to the world takes one beyond thought and language thus also beyond the symbolic construction of time, it is strange to place this event and its aftermath as happening long ago in my life. It is forever present. This fact (...) puts into question the reality of my daily journey from dawn to dusk with all the mundane tasks I must complete. My linear march into aging and death inexorably continues, yet it seems somehow unreal, worth a smile as the inevitable changes ensue. Still, I write of the events leading up to my time out of mind and then review the serious repercussions that followed when I was drawn back into ego only to find I did not have the conceptual tools or the maturity to understand what had occurred. I close by looking back with theories that might explain what happened. I am now ready to allow the memory to sink into peaceful oblivion and reference it from within my mind no more. Ironically, the memory itself with its façade of knowledge may prevent me from a new, unexpected mystical experience. Only by forgetting can I hope to leave a crack in the verbal armament of self, so the world soul may break through and free me once again. (shrink)

This paper focuses, not on the existing conditions of institutional association, but on hoped-for conditions that would have to be met for professional relationships within higher education to aspire to what Aristotle referred to as ?virtuous friendship?. Such relationships, it is argued, constitute the social content of hope in that they look to new perspectives on institutional renewal and professional regeneration. They provide a context of mutuality and reciprocity within which individuals can begin to realise, through the acquisition of ?functional (...) capabilities?, their particular capacities. The question then arises as to the conditions necessary for generating and sustaining such relationships within the increasingly differentiated and stratified institutional settings of the higher education sector and across an academic workforce that has become fractionalised and atomised around increasingly complex divisions of academic labour. It is that question which this paper seeks to address. ?Civil society is fragile, and it needs to be extended? (Hall, 1995, p. 27). (shrink)

To explain the origin of anything, we must be clear about that which we are explaining. There seem to be two main meanings for the term consciousness. One might be called open in that it equates consciousness with awareness and experience and considers rudimentary sensations to have evolved at a specific point in the evolution of increasing complexity. But certainly the foundation for such sensation is a physical body. It is unclear, however, exactly what the physical requirements are for a (...) “central experiencer” to emerge in the course of evolution. Some suggest that it would require a basic brain, others a central nervous system, and others stipulate only a cellular membrane. The open definition is most often assumed by the so-called hard sciences. -/- The closed meaning of consciousness differentiates between a special sort of experience, i.e., conscious experience, and a special sort of awareness (i.e., self-awareness). This is the approach of psychoanalysis and psychology that accepts the existence of an unconscious mind. It is also the view of most phenomenological philosophers and psychologists (Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, etc.). This entry discusses several scientific and philosophical views of consciousness and its origins. (shrink)

This article delves into ecopedagogy, grounded in the work of the Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire on popular education and critical pedagogies, to teach students to critically deconstruct the subjectivity and transformability of our world (all humans, human populations) with the rest of Earth (i.e., rest of Nature). As Friere emphasized humans’ unique characteristic of ‘unfinishedness’ with abilities of self-reflexivity through our histories and goal-setting from our dreams, (environmental) pedagogues must teach toward deepened and widened understandings for praxis grounded in socio-environmental (...) justice and planetary sustainability, including disrupting anthropocentricism. This ‘unfinishedness’ has made humans agents of world-Earth unsustainably and dominance in constructing the Anthropocene, but also allows for possibilities of transformation to counter them. I argue that ecopedagogy is essential in disrupting the following falsely taught ideologies that justifies the Anthroposphere: (1) false commonsense that separates environmental and social violence (i.e., socio-environmental violence) and instills anthropocentrism that separates humans from the rest of Nature (i.e., world-Earth distancing); (2) fatalism that extinguishes hope of ending humans’ acts of unsustainable environmental violence; (3) ‘development’ for sustaining hegemony and planetary unsustainability (i.e., Development rather than development); and (4) epistemological dominance that legitimizes the first three ideologies given (e.g., epistemologies of the North). (shrink)

This essay reads Helen Phillips’s extraordinary novel of motherhood, The Need (2019), alongside recent theorists of post-politics. Phillips’s novel is illuminating because it reveals how an adequate understanding of the post-political requires supplementing current accounts with the categories of gender and heterogeneous time. The Need subverts the postfeminist articulation of politics as an arena in which “feminism” is practicable only in preemptively curtailed and diminished form. It does so by cracking open the “reality” enforced by neoliberal motherhood to show how (...) its apparent solidity rests on the excision of alternate times—on a foreclosure of the temporal otherness that is the condition for historical change. (shrink)

Alasdair Urquhart’s work on models for relevant logics is distinctive in a number of different ways. One key theme, present in both his undecidability proof for the relevant logic R and his proof of the failure of interpolation in R, is the use of techniques from geometry. In this paper, inspired by Urquhart’s work, I explore ways to generate natural models of R+\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$^+$$\end{document} from geometries, and different constraints that an accessibility relation (...) in such a model might satisfy. I end by showing that a set of natural conditions on an accessibility relation, motivated by geometric considerations, is jointly unsatisfiable. (shrink)

Band 13 der psycho-logik widmet sich aus fächerübergreifendem Blickwinkel dem Thema Identität, das in den Sozial- und Geisteswissenschaften zu einem Schlagwort des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts geworden ist. Gerade die moderne und liberale Gesellschaftsordnung, die uns ungeahnt viel Freiheit ermöglicht hat, charakterisiert ein Patchwork aus Identifikationsangeboten, das zugleich die kollektive und personale Identitätsfindung problematisch macht. Aktuell hat die narrative Theorie die erinnerte und erzählte Lebensgeschichte zum Gründungsort des Selbst erhoben. Sie spielt auch in den Beiträgen dieses Bandes eine prominente Rolle. (...) Es zeigt sich, dass die Identitätskonstruktion ein Prozess ist, in dem sich Identität als etwas Fragiles und Plurales offenbart. Identität ist ein tragisches Spiel zwischen Einheit und Mannigfaltigkeit: Identität(en). Forscher*innen aus Deutschland, Irland und den USA mit ihren Beiträgen aus Literaturwissenschaft, Theologie, Philosophie und Psychologie diskutieren u. a. das Band zwischen Identität und Erinnerung bei Marcel Proust, transsexuelle Identitätskonstruktionen in US-amerikanischen Biopics, den Film als Identitätsbildungsmedium des Publikums, Identitätspolitik(en) am Beispiel des Zugangs zu US-amerikanischen Hochschulen, die Identitätsfindung in Lebensgeschichten und den psychotherapeutischen Umgang mit gebrochenen Identitäten. Fotoarbeiten des Künstlers Hermann Recknagel runden den Band ab. Mit Beiträgen von Michaela I. Abdelhamid, Carsten Albers, Paul Clogher, Katherine Duval, Winfried Eckel, Fiona Ennis, Annette Hilt, Christopher A. Nixon, Paul Nnodim, Hermann Recknagel, Patricia Rehm-Grätzel, Martin Reker, Annika Schlitte und Hartwig Wiedebach. (shrink)

International guidelines recommend that prenatal screening for fetal abnormalities should only be offered within a non-directive framework aimed at enabling women in making meaningful reproductive choices. Whilst this position is widely endorsed, developments in cell-free fetal DNA based Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing are now raising questions about its continued suitability for guiding screening policy and practice. This issue is most apparent within debates on the scope of the screening offer. Implied by the aim of enabling meaningful reproductive choices is the idea (...) that screening services should support women in accessing prenatal tests that best enable them to realize the types of reproductive choice that they find important. However, beyond whatever options meet the quality standards required for facilitating an informed decision, the remaining criteria of facilitating autonomous choice is strictly non-directive. As a result, policy makers receive little indication prior to consultation with each individual woman, about what conditions should be prioritized during the offer of screening. In this paper we try to address this issue by using the capabilities approach to further specify the non-directive aim of enabling meaningful reproductive choice. The resulting framework is then used to assess the relative importance of offering prenatal screening where concerning different types of genetic condition. We conclude that greater priority may be ascribed to offering prenatal screening for conditions that more significantly diminish a woman’s central capabilities. It follows that serious congenital and earlier-onset conditions are more likely to fulfill these criteria. (shrink)

This paper provides a general framework for conceptualizing triage for intensive care unit admissions in public health emergencies such as the COVID‐19 pandemic. It applies this framework to some of the guidelines issued during the pandemic and addresses some controversial issues, including the role of age, the use of lives or life years, and the relevance of quality of life considerations. The paper defends a view on which triage protocols for public health emergencies should aim to maximize the number of (...) life years saved, may take into account age as a proxy, and should ignore quality of life considerations. (shrink)

In this paper I introduce a sequent system for the propositional modal logic S5. Derivations of valid sequents in the system are shown to correspond to proofs in a novel natural deduction system of circuit proofs (reminiscient of proofnets in linear logic, or multiple-conclusion calculi for classical logic). -/- The sequent derivations and proofnets are both simple extensions of sequents and proofnets for classical propositional logic, in which the new machinery—to take account of the modal vocabulary—is directly motivated in terms (...) of the simple, universal Kripke semantics for S5. The sequent system is cut-free and the circuit proofs are normalising. (shrink)

Pereira’s “The Projective Theory of Consciousness” is an experimental statement, drawing on many diverse sources, exploring how consciousness might be produced by a projective mechanism that results both in private selves and an experienced world. Unfortunately, pulling together so many unrelated sources and methods means none gets full attention. Furthermore, it seems to me that the uncomfortable breadth of this paper unnecessarily complicates his project; in fact it may hide what it seeks to reveal. If this conglomeration of diverse sources (...) and methods were compared to trees, the reader may feel like the explorer who cannot see the forest for the trees. Then again, it may be the author who is so preoccupied with foreground figures that the everpresent background is ultimately obscured. (shrink)

In the near future developments in non-invasive prenatal testing may soon provide couples with the opportunity to test for and diagnose a much broader range of heritable and congenital conditions than has previously been possible. Inevitably, this has prompted much ethical debate on the possible implications of NIPT for providing couples with opportunities for reproductive choice by way of routine prenatal screening. In view of the possibility to test for a significantly broader range of genetic conditions with NIPT, the European (...) Society of Human Genetics and American Society of Human Genetics recommend that, pending further debate, prenatal screening for reproductive choice should only be offered where concerning serious congenital conditions and childhood disorders. In support of this recommendation, the ESHG and ASHG discuss a number of ethical issues on which they prompt further debate: the informational privacy of the future child, the trivialization of abortion, the risk of information overload, and issues of distributive justice. This paper responds to this call with further reflection on each ethical issue and how it relates to the moral justification of providing couples with opportunities for meaningful reproductive choice. The paper concludes that whilst there may be good reasons for qualifying the scope of any unsolicited prenatal screening offer to serious congenital conditions and childhood disorders, if prenatal screening is justified for providing couples with opportunities for meaningful reproductive choice, then health services may have obligations to empower couples with the same opportunity where concerning other conditions. (shrink)

An text for introducing both formal and philosophical logic.