This article aims to review the standard objections to dualism and to argue that will either fail to convince someone committed to dualism or are flawed on independent grounds. I begin by presenting the taxonomy of metaphysical positions on concrete particulars as they relate to the dispute between materialists and dualists, and in particular substance dualism is defined. In the first section, several kinds of substance dualism are distinguished and the relevant varieties of this kind of dualism are selected. The (...) remaining sections are analyses of the standard objections to substance dualism : It is uninformative, has troubles accounting for soul individuation, causal pairing and interaction, violates laws of physics, is made implausible by the development of neuroscience and it postulates entities beyond necessity. I conclude that none of these objections is successful. (shrink)

In this paper we examine some proposals to disprove the hypothesis that the interaction between mind and matter causes the collapse of the wave function, showing that such proposals are fundamentally flawed. We then describe a general experimental setup retaining the key features of the ones examined, and show that even a more general case is inadequate to disprove the mind-matter collapse hypothesis. Finally, we use our setup provided to argue that, under some reasonable assumptions about consciousness, such hypothesis is (...) unfalsifiable. (shrink)

The central problem of the book of Job is represented in the question on how to combine the evils of an innocent with the righteousness of God. For the current doctrine of earthly rewards, such a case would be paradoxical. If each one must be treated according to his works, as a righteous man can suffer? There is a link between suffering and personal sin. Against this strict correlation, Job stands up with all the strength of his innocence. He fights (...) desperately to rediscover God that evades and whose kindness he continues to believe in. God intercedes only to reveal the transcendence of his being and his designs and reduce Job to the silence. This is the religious message of the book of Job: man should persist in faith even when his soul isn’t quiet. The book of Job asks us: is there free religion or it is always a self seeking trade? Rich and prosperous, Job becomes poor and with no future at all. Nevertheless, Job remains faithful and recognizes that God has the absolute right of disposing of all that had given him. Job says: “If we accept God’s riches, shouldn’t we also accept evil?”. Job demonstrated that he is able to profess and live a free religion, without any reward shadow. (shrink)

At the request of the Midwest Bioethics Center (MBC), we surveyed nurses' and physicians' attitudes and needs regarding Hospital Ethics Committees (HECs). The primary objective of this research project was to inform the practices and policies of the Ethics Committee Consortium of the Bioethics Center.Four thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine surveys were distributed to the medical and nursing staff of eight Kansas City metropolitan area hospitals. One thousand and fifty-five surveys were returned, representing a response rate of 21%.