We were not surprised by the opinion piece written for the Cambridge Quarterly by George J. Agich, Ph.D., who chairs the Cleveland Clinic Foundation's bioethics department. Dr. Agich uses the article to attack those who criticized his institution's proposed non-heart-beating organ donor protocol. Because we reported on this controversy for 60 Minutes in April 1997, we wanted to set the record straight.

We were not surprised by the opinion piece written for the CambridgeQuarterly by George J. Agich, Ph.D., who chairs the Cleveland Clinic Foundation's bioethics department. Dr. Agich uses the article to attack those who criticized his institution's proposed non-heart-beating organ donor protocol. Because we reported on this controversy for 60Minutes in April 1997, we wanted to set the record straight.

Frank Koughan and Walt Bogdanich's response to my article, reminds me of the Shakespearean line, My article was not about the specifics of the 60Minutes April 13, 1997, story on NHBD at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF), even though the story formed the basis for the reflection. I did not attack the critics, though I do believe that bioethicists are accountable for their scholarly and public pronouncements. Although I do not see why the 60Minutes' story should be treated (...) with deference, my article was designed to raise questions for a primarily bioethics audience about the involvement of bioethicists in media coverage of bioethics topics. I am flattered that they took notice of my piece, but think their efforts to set the record straight only obfuscate matters further. (shrink)

Frank Koughan and Walt Bogdanich's response to my article, “From Pittsburgh to Cleveland: NHBD Controversies and Bioethics,” reminds me of the Shakespearean line, “The lady protests too much, methinks.” My article was not about the specifics of the 60 Minutes April 13, 1997, story on NHBD at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation , even though the story formed the basis for the reflection. I did not attack the critics, though I do believe that bioethicists are accountable for their scholarly (...) and public pronouncements. Although I do not see why the 60 Minutes' story should be treated with deference, my article was designed to raise questions for a primarily bioethics audience about the involvement of bioethicists in media coverage of bioethics topics. I am flattered that they took notice of my piece, but think their efforts to set the record straight only obfuscate matters further. (shrink)

As is often the case in clinical ethics, the discourse in COVID-19 has focused primarily on difficult and controversial decision-making junctures such as how to decide who gets access to intensive care resources if demand outstrips supply. However, the lived experience of COVID-19 raises less controversial but arguably more profound moral questions around what it means to look after each other through the course of the pandemic and how this translates in care for the dying. This piece explores the interface (...) between the pandemic, ethics, and the role of palliative care. We argue that the ethical discourse should be broader, and that the principles that underly the discipline of palliative care provide a solid ethical foundation for the care of all patients through the coronavirus pandemic. (shrink)

rnst Mayr was born in Kempten, Germany, on July 5, 1904, making him, at age 95, the grand old man of evolutionary biology, one of the primary architects of the modem synthesis of genetic and evolutionary theory, and arguably one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century. His career interests have spanned a remarkable five different fields, including: (1) ornithology, (2) systematics, (3) zoogeography, (4) evolutionary theory, and (5) philosophy and history of science. Such broad research interests grew (...) from his education at a German Gymnasium (the equivalent of American high school, but at that time considerably more demanding), followed by a Candidacy in Medicine at the University of Greifswald in 1925 and a Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Berlin in 1926. (shrink)

In The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism, Alessandro Ferrara seeks a philosophical breakthrough from what looks like it could be a pending dead-end for democracy. The best hope, Ferrara superbly maintains, lies through an extension or updating – a “renewal,” as he calls it – of lines of thought bequeathed to us, by John Rawls and others, under the name of political liberalism. Somewhere near the crux of Ferrara’s reflection stands a class of institutional fixtures whose (...) name is missing from his title. I mean the class “constitution.” I use that word to name a country’s scriptural basic law, its publicly cognizable corpus of canonically worded sentences ordaining the country’s basic institutional framework. My suggestion will be that it is no less tellingly a “constitutional” than a “democratic” horizon that Ferrara’s work, in conjunction with Rawls’s, shows us to be facing. (shrink)

In his first summer lecture at Berkeley in 1914, Josiah Royce, American philosopher of community, confessed as follows.

John Rawls proposed, as what he called “the liberal principle of legitimacy,” that coercive exercises of political power can be justified to free and equal dissenters when “in accordance with a constitution (written or unwritten) the essentials of which all citizens, as reasonable and rational, can endorse.” Does “unwritten constitution” there refer to norms of constitutional import, but that subsist only as custom, not as law? To norms that subsist as common law but not as code law? To empirical regularities (...) of political practice, as opposed to normative rules and standards? Which interpretation is best? (shrink)

Psychological experirnents have repeatedly shown that in judging the likelihood of uncertain events people do not follow the principles of probability theory. A notorious example is given by the so called conjunction fallacy. In this paper I argue that this fallacy is not really a fallacy when it is analysed in the light of a dynamic theory of default reasoning. The question that immediately rises is whether the fact that this theory conforms better to the way people actually think provides (...) a reason to prefer it to probability theory. (shrink)

An attempt to discover what can be learned from the recent work of Frank Tipler on the Omega Point theory requires an analysis of his framework of understanding from scientific, philosophical, and theological perspectives. A critique of his crucial ideas, and of the salient points raised by some of his critics, can then be undertaken within the compass of his strengths. A critique of the critiques of Tipler's work allows one to evaluate the extent and limitations of his contributions.

If K is a field of finite Morley rank, then for any parameter set $A \subseteq K^{eq}$ the prime model over A is equal to the model-theoretic algebraic closure of A. A field of finite Morley rank eliminates imaginaries. Simlar results hold for minimal groups of finite Morley rank with infinite acl( $\emptyset$ ).

How has reason, believed since the Enlightenment to be the ally of freedom in the search for a better, more humanly satisfying world, been reduced to a technical rationality that has actually impoverished the bases of human freedom? What might be the options and obligations for sociologists who wish to restore reason to its proper status? -/- Working within the tradition of C. Wright Mills and Jurgen Habermas, Frank Hearn sets out to answer these questions. He surveys the treatment (...) of the relation between reason and freedom in both the classical tradition (especially the writings of Saint-Simon, Comte, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, and Freud) and an increasingly significant segment of social thought and criticism (and, for example, in the contrasting visions of Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch.) He then analyses both the concrete social and historical forms of expression taken by what Mills calls 'rationality without reason' and their impact on individual autonomy and the freedoms associated with democratic politics. Finally, he develops Mills's and Habermas's claims that the cultivation of democratic publics and a critical social theory committed to a vibrant public life are indispensable to the protection and revitalization of the values of reason and freedom and of the practices they entail. -/- This book updates and enriches Mills's influential argument by demonstrating its affinity with critical theory, by showing its contributions to a critical understanding of the classical tradition, and by showing its implications for contemporary social, political, and economic developments. (shrink)

A minimal field of non-zero characteristic is algebraically closed.

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 1, pp 54 - 69 In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on Husserl’s concept of the earth as _Boden_ or ground. Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regards the earth seen as pure _Boden_ as an idealization. He emphasizes the ontological necessity for the earth as _Boden_ to always hypostasize itself into the Copernican concept of earth as object. In turn, Merleau-Ponty builds this necessity into an essential feature of being, allowing (...) himself to retrieve ontology itself from its status as external to being, and to make room for it within the structure of being: ontology is one of the ways in which experiences become objectified, thereby allowing being to achieve its essential movement of hypostatization. (shrink)

This paper seeks to address two lacunae of the literature about French political theory in the second half of the 20th century. The first concerns the origins of the great Foucaldian thesis of the autonomy of power, and the second concerns the conceptual implications of the events of the 1950s surrounding the politics of communism on both sides of the Iron Curtain. There are many apparent responses to these questions in the existing literature. However, they are rendered insufficient by their (...) refusal to address the need for a specifically intellectual history. With regard to Foucault’s thesis of the autonomy of power, philosophers seem happy to abstract Foucault’s insight from its context, resting on the implication that it may have come out of nowhere. Conversely, when it comes to the implications of historical developments on political philosophy, historians seem to satisfy themselves with wordplay: before so many histories of the intellectuals, who needs intellectual history? It is however rather obvious that both history and philosophy are set to benefit from a specifically intellectual history, that is to say, from an account neither of an idea nor of a context, but of how the historical context of the early fifties made the Foucaldian idea conceivable. (shrink)

This paper seeks to provide a basis for a fruitful correspondence between the projects of Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty. It argues that both philosophers are committed to an ontology of relation and they both regards any terms to these relations as being hypostases of a horizontal movement. This commits them to very parallel views of history, politics, and perception.

The book maps out the dynamic relations between the forces at play in politics and the economy in the West through a philosophical analysis of the relations between the concepts of politics and of the economy. It finds that their porous relations inform what it is for humans to live.

This essay argues that the deontological view of morality is connected to extreme and massive forms of violence through a kind of phenomenological necessity. In the first main section, I examine one family of such violence, which usually comes under the label of “religious violence”. I argue that it is not the religious element but the disqualification of context from the realm of justification which characterizes such violence. In the second main section, I examine the phenomenology of duty to conclude (...) that duty, by definition, denies any normative relevance to context. In the third main section, I use this sketch of a phenomenology of duty to propose a hypothesis about the underpinnings of the connection between mass violence and duty, namely, that the notion of duty carries with it the exclusion of moderation, and places the agent before an impossible situation that can only be resolved by violence. (shrink)

Those who are interested in Freud and psychoanalysis will be familiar with questions such as ‘Is Freudian psychology pseudo-scientific?’ ‘Is Freudian psychology falsifiable?’ ’Is unfalsifiability an adequate criterion of pseudo-science?’, and they might naturally suppose that it is these questions of which Erwin has attempted a ‘final accounting’. Surprisingly, these questions hardly feature in Erwin's book. Though at the outset Peter Medawar's notorious judgment that psychoanalysis is ‘the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century’ is cited, Erwin does (...) not seem to think it is part of his final accounting to say either whether he thinks it justified or, if not, why someone of Medawar's distinction should nevertheless have thought so. (shrink)

Wittgenstein has a remark in which he admonishes us to remember that not everything which is expressed in the language of information belongs to the language game of giving information. In this paper I want to illustrate how the language of information may be used to disguise the character of the interest we take in social life, an interest whose candid and undisguised manifestations are to be found in literature.

Wittgenstein has a remark in which he admonishes us to remember that not everything which is expressed in the language of information belongs to the language game of giving information.In this paper I want to illustrate how the language of information may be used to disguise the character of the interest we take in social life, an interest whose candid and undisguised manifestations are to be found in literature.

This article assembles reasons for holding that the propaedeutic rationale for much of the discourse produced by ‘ethogenic science’ is inadequate. One reason is that the interactional principles that are the pretext for assembling the situational vignettes, which are the staple of ethogenics, are truisms and do not require documentation. Our familiarity with the risks and rewards of social life is already considerable and it is not clear how, or to what end, ethogenic science can augment them. Moreover ethogenic theorists (...) do not explain how a discipline that eschews experiment and causal inquiry can transcend the understanding of the subject and how, if it does not, it can do more than provide perspicuous views of the social facts and practices already known, or at least within reach of unspecialized observation. The programme of uncovering the mechanisms by which we register and evince our social standing is not one of which we are given a coherent account and is, in any case, not to be served by multiplying examples of how respect and contempt are merited or meted out. It is suggested that the need such discourse surreptiously meets is that of an autonomous craving for Wittgensteinian Übersichten - overviews - of the vicissitudes of social existence. (shrink)

His discussion of aesthetics was mingled in a curious way with criticism of assumptions which he said were made by Frazer in The Golden Bough and also with criticisms of Freud ’.