Most organized religions have indicated a level of support for organ donation including the diagnosis of death by the brain criterion. Organ donation is seen as a gift of love and fits within a communitarian ethos that most religions embrace. The acceptance of the determination of death by the brain criterion, where it has been explained, is reconciled with religious views of soul and body by using a notion of integration. Because the soul may be seen as that which integrates (...) the human body, in the absence of any other signs of human functioning, loss of integration is considered to be an indication that soul and body have separated. To some extent this view would seem to be informed by an Aristotelian notion of the soul, but it fits well enough with religious notions of the person continuing after death. There have been several developments internationally that indicate that the acceptance of so-called ‘brain death’ by organized religions has been challenged by new developments including the acceptance of a lesser standard than loss of all brain function and a rejection by the US President's Council on Bioethics of the notion of loss of integration as an explanation of death by the brain criterion. (shrink)

The practical problem of how to conduct oneself as a Christian and a Philosopher or Bioethicist in public debate an when asked to be engaged in government committees is difficult. One solution that has had some support has been to approach the issues on the grounds of our natural law tradition but understood anthropocentrically – the ultimate end is not communion with God by integral human development. This is often called New Natural Law (NNL). This separation of Philosophy and Theology (...) has had its critics and most notably the current Poe and his immediate predecessor. In their own writing addressed to people of goodwill, they took a different approach that was essentially Christocentric and involving s close partnership between Philosohy and Theology. In my own experience over thirty years of public involvement in Bioethics, I have discovered that the NNL approach has two overwhelming problems. What is offered to the secular dialogue, as an anthropocentric natural law, often sounds false to secular others because we propose something guided by our beliefs, but failing to acknowledge that contribution. However something that I have discovered latterly in that approach is in fact false by our own standards. By the strictures we impose on our contribution we in fact ignore the New Law instituted by Christ, the law of love. The New Natural Law (NNL) Project has proved to be a failure where it has been tried, and, I know realize, was doomed from the outset, because in being anthropocentric it was essentially lacking and the answers that it gave to problems were often unsatisfactory because lacking love and the particular demand of needing to be capable of being oriented towards God, the God of love. The NNL approach tended to produce a casuistry that was too liberal and too lacking in understanding of the essential role that affectivity plays in our lives, created as we are in the imago dei, in the image and likeness of the God of love. Such a morality demands much more than anthropocentricism can demand. In recognizing these difficulties I propose instead a more pragmatic approach that reflects a partnership between Philosophy and Theology as espoused by the Second Vatican Council, and by Pope’s Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II, and which engages the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Servais Pinckaers. An approach that I have tried with some success in chairing government committees. (shrink)

This paper explores the determination of death as it pertains to ethical decisions about organ and tissue donation. The Church holds that death can be diagnosed on the basis of evidence showing the complete cessation of all brain function and the corresponding loss of integration of the body. On the basis of evidence presented by D. Alan Shewmon and others, influential secular bodies have rejected the integrationist view, arguing instead for a much more liberal view that a loss of spontaneous (...) breathing and loss of consciousness are sufficient for a diagnosis of death; that is, some brain function may continue after death. New laws and guidelines in various countries are based on this mode-of-being view. The author defends the Church’s integrationist view, arguing that loss of all brain function means loss of integration in the intercommunicative sense that pertains to the separation of the life principle, or soul, from the body in death. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.3 (Autumn 2010): 491–514. (shrink)

The author was consulted by two Catholic schools in separate cases of a student and a teacher preparing to undergo sex reassignment. Such cases give rise to special ethical and pastoral concerns. This article discusses the disorders that may lead to sex reassignment, distinguishing between con­genital disorders of sex development (intersex conditions) and gender identity disorder (gender dysphoria). It also notes the ethical differences between the correction of congenital anomalies and interventions to relieve dysphoria: in the former, treatment is meant (...) to restore as much normal function as possible; in the latter, mutilating intervention destroys what were otherwise healthy bodily functions. In Catholic schools, concern for the well-being of an affected student or teacher is required, as is a clear understanding of the condition being treated, the ethical implications of treatment, the privacy issues, the effects on other students and staff, and the effects on a teacher’s ability to give faithful witness to Catholic teaching. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.1 (Spring 2012): 85–97. (shrink)

The review article reconstructs the reception of Gramsci's writings in Italy from the postwar-period to the present. Compared to the Italian debate that has given little attention to Gramsci's writings, except for in some periods such as the 1970s, Gramsci's fortune has continued to grow internationally. Recent Italian contributions, such as the book of Alberto Bugio, Grasmci storico, criticised in this review, remain indebted to an historicist approach that does not allow a use of Gramscian categories as an optic for (...) interpreting and enacting the transformation of the present. The analysis concentrates on concepts such as 'passive revolution', 'fascism', 'Taylorism' and 'bureaucracy'. (shrink)

Through a reading of all the articles collected in the monographic section of «Scienza & Politica», this introduction shows how "cooperation" is a multifaceted concept, crisscrossed by contradictions and ambivalences. The author provides a brief historical and political analysis of the concept of cooperation, stressing its importance in contemporary debates and pointing out both the most productive and problematic aspects of the recent development of a political theory of cooperation.

The essay reconstructs the contradictory nature of the concept of cooperation, highlighting historically some of the antinomies that remain latent even in the modern usage of this concept. Through the analysis and comparison of the texts of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim and Alfred Marshall two problematic axes of the concept are particularly stressed: cooperation as an extension of the human potential in opposition to cooperation as objectification and exploitation; cooperation as social norm in opposition to the cooperation of (...) the cooperative movement. These antinomies are not exceeded in a harmonious and all-encompassing concept of cooperation, but instead are brought into play to return the complexity and the internal contradictions of a concept that runs through the sociological, economic and political contemporary debate. (shrink)

‘68 in Italy, compared to the same movement in other European countries, is characterized by its long duration and its particular intensity. It is in fact a movement that has produced powerful and lasting effects on the Italian society for at least a decade, as it is visible in its central presence in the historical memory of the country, still today. But the outbreak of ‘68, like the social and legislative achievements of the 70s, owe their conditions of possibility to (...) a break – a political break but above all a theoretical break – which occurred earlier, at the beginning of the 1960s. Going back to the genesis of the breakdown of the conservative imagery of the 1950s, while being an operation of intellectual history, can be useful to investigate how the “theoretical novelty” emerges, in this case through a break with its own tradition, albeit aiming to its reactivation. (shrink)

L’articolo ricostruisce la genealogia del concetto di ideologia nei Quaderni del carcere di Antonio Gramsci, mostrando come esso sia centrale nell’elaborazione del marxista sardo e come sia funzionale a una lettura materialista ma non riduzionista dei fenomeni “sovrastrutturali”. L’ideologia viene analizzata attraverso la costellazione concettuale di cui fa parte, insieme ai concetti di blocco storico, senso comune, religione, scienza e filosofia. All’interno di questo quadro emerge un concetto di ideologia peculiare ed “eterodosso” per un marxista della prima metà del XX (...) secolo, che anticipa teorizzazioni successive e acquisizioni scientifiche in altri campi del sapere. La teoria dell’ideologia in Gramsci, per come è qui ricostruita, rappresenta la premessa necessaria alla sua teoria dell’egemonia. (shrink)

Tonti-Fillipini, Nicholas We all have friends or family who are gay or lesbians. These are people we know and love and are a part of our families. The Rudd government's removal of laws that discriminated against them was most significant in ending inequality in the law. Now though we face something very different: the redefinition of marriage to exclude the words "a man and a woman" from what marriage means.

words compose a significant part of speech. Despite this, learning them is complicated. Abstract concepts collect more heterogeneous exemplars and are more detached from sensory modalities than concrete concepts. Recent views propose that, because of their complexity, other people are pivotal for abstract concepts’ acquisition and use, e.g., to explain their meaning. We tested this hypothesis using a combined behavioral and thermal imaging paradigm. Twenty-one Italian children determined whether acoustic stimuli were or not correct Italian words. Concrete terms yielded faster (...) responses than abstract ones: for the first time, this effect appears with response times in very young children. More crucially, the higher increase in temperature of the nasal tip suggests that, with abstract concepts, children might be more socially and cognitively engaged. (shrink)

Исследование посвящено философскому осознанию природы духовности человека. Автор рассматривает духовность внутреннего мира человека как единство высших чувств души и нравственного сознания. Для специалистов в области философии, методологии науки.