Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson: Rhizomatic Connections is the first book length collection of essays exploring the relations between the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson. With contributions by established international scholars from cultural studies, philosophy and theology, Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson examines the articulation between their concepts, methods and modes of doing philosophy and how their thought relates to different disciplines. Organized thematically, each essay examines the section themes in the context of the contrasts, differences and conjunctions--the rhizomatic (...) connections--between their shared concepts. Deleuze, Whitehead, Bergson will make a significant impact upon and contribution to the scholarship on these philosophers, challenging many of the preconceptions, the "images of thought," through which they are all too often read and interpreted. (shrink)

Suicide among Veterans experiencing or at risk for homelessness remains a significant public health concern. Conducting research to understand and meet the needs of this at-risk population remains challenging due to myriad factors. To address this challenge, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs convened the Health Services Research and Development Suicide Prevention in Veterans Experiencing Homelessness: Research and Practice Development meeting, bringing together subject-matter experts in the fields of homelessness and suicide prevention, both from within and outside of VA. (...) During the meeting, attendees identified 10 potential research priorities at the intersection of suicide prevention and homelessness. After the meeting, Delphi methodology was used to achieve consensus on the relative importance of the identified research domains. Through this iterative Delphi process, agreement was reached regarding the need to increase understanding of barriers and facilitators to suicide risk assessment and emergency intervention for Veterans experiencing homelessness by examining the perspectives of both Veterans and healthcare providers. Elucidating the complex relationships between risk periods, subgroups, suicide means, and drivers of suicide among Veterans experiencing homelessness was also considered a top priority. This article documents the Delphi process and provides a research agenda for researchers, funding agencies, and policymakers to prioritize the most relevant and potentially impactful research domains aimed at preventing suicide among Veterans experiencing or at risk for homelessness. (shrink)

The concept of care has occupied a central place in nursing philosophy and scholarship since the modern formation of the profession. Perhaps the defining character of the scholarship has been the recognition not only of the complexity of the concept of care, its elusiveness and ambiguity, but also the lack of consensus or agreement regarding its meaning and value. I will make two interconnected arguments: first, I will argue that disputes around care are not an accidental feature or an unfortunate (...) condition of its applicability. Rather, care is an example of what I will call, following W.B. Gallie (1956), an “essentially contested” concept. Secondly, I will employ insights from the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859‐1941) to explore the concept of care and argue that the essentially contested processual nature of care is the source of its meaning and value. (shrink)

Throughout all of Deleuze’s work one finds an extended encounter with the Event of Difference. Deleuze’s extraordinary work on Leibniz is no exception. In the ‘later’ work, and regarding Leibniz, Deleuze remarks, “no philosophy has ever pushed to such an extreme the affirmations of one and the same world, and of an infinite difference and variety in this world”. This positive identification with Leibniz is not found in the ‘earlier’ wave of Deleuzian texts from the sixties where Leibniz is captured (...) hesitating over the possible and the virtual. Any such hesitation over the possible and the virtual is “disastrous” for a philosophy of the event and difference since it abolishes the reality of the virtual and subordinates it to the identical, replacing pure immanence with a ‘theological model’ of creation. Is the Leibniz of Deleuze’s early texts compossible with the later? What is the significance of the event of difference or fold that joins and separates Deleuze’s continuing encounter with Leibniz? We will examine what is at stake in these differing understandings of Leibniz to Deleuze’s philosophy of events of difference. (shrink)

This article interprets Foucault's life-long involvement with transgressive experiences as an art of not being oneself, an effort to escape identity and become other. By bringing together Foucault's own theoretical practices with those drawn from Deleuze and Blanchot, and linking these with biographical material, I show how Foucault's `encounters' with passion and pleasure in film, philosophy, S/M, drugs, the Greeks and suicide amount to an `art of living', an intensification of the power to affect oneself and others in processes of (...) `subjectivation', creating new possibilities of life. This is what Foucault more precisely called an `ethics' - an immanent ethics in which one becomes worthy of what happens to oneself by becoming a work of art. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Deleuze's ‘thinking with’ Whitehead gives access to a range of novel conceptual resources that offer a route out of phenomenology and back to life, a movement beyond intentionality and back to things ‘in their free and wild state’. I lay out four conceptual and methodological markers (there are many more) – creativity, event, prehension, empiricism – that characterise Deleuze's metaphysics and provide a guide for showing how these develop through a sustained becoming with Whitehead. (...) I conclude by looking at Deleuze and Guattari's use of the term most famously associated with Whitehead: the concept of ‘process’. (shrink)

Throughout all of Deleuze’s work one finds an extended encounter with the Event of Difference. Deleuze’s extraordinary work on Leibniz is no exception. In the ‘later’ work, and regarding Leibniz, Deleuze remarks, “no philosophy has ever pushed to such an extreme the affirmations of one and the same world, and of an infinite difference and variety in this world”. This positive identification with Leibniz is not found in the ‘earlier’ wave of Deleuzian texts from the sixties where Leibniz is captured (...) hesitating over the possible and the virtual. Any such hesitation over the possible and the virtual is “disastrous” for a philosophy of the event and difference since it abolishes the reality of the virtual and subordinates it to the identical, replacing pure immanence with a ‘theological model’ of creation. Is the Leibniz of Deleuze’s early texts compossible with the later? What is the significance of the event of difference or fold that joins and separates Deleuze’s continuing encounter with Leibniz? We will examine what is at stake in these differing understandings of Leibniz to Deleuze’s philosophy of events of difference. (shrink)

In questo articolo sostengo che Deleuze, Whitehead e Bergson condividono un simile approccio riguardo all'astrazione, un approccio che fondamentalmente è "pragmatista" (in senso ampio, vicino al pragmatismo "fantastico" di James Williams). Appoggiandosi a William James, un nome per questo approccio metodologico condiviso è empirismo radicale, meglio compreso, nella mia visione, nel contesto della filosofia del processo. Benché quegli autori condividano un approccio simile, evidenzierò alcune differenze tra gli empiristi radicali nel modo in cui essi pensano alle loro astrazioni chiave, che (...) coinvolgono i temi della relazione, del divenire e dello spazio-tempo. Tutti e tre i pensatori ci offrono astrazioni per pensare la vita come creazione del nuovo. (shrink)

Isabelle Stengers’ work on Whitehead is amongst the most important in Europe today. The contributors here—Isabella Palin, Stephen Meyers, DidierDebaise, and Andrew Goffey—offer a range of perspectives on Stengers’ effort to “think with” Whitehead. Stengers’ detailed response is included.

Reflecting Alan Robinson's fundamental contribution to computational logic, this book brings together seminal papers in inference, equality theories, and logic programming. It is an exceptional collection that ranges from surveys of major areas to new results in more specialized topics. Alan Robinson is currently the University Professor at Syracuse University. Jean-Louis Lassez is a Research Scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Gordon Plotkin is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Contents: Inference. Subsumption, (...) A Sometimes Undervalued Procedure, Larry Wos, Ross Overbeek, and Ewing Lusk. The Markgraf Karl Refutation Procedure, Hans Jurgen Ohlbach and Jorg H. Siekmann. Modal Logic Should Say More than it Does, Melvin Fitting. Interactive Proof Presentation, W. W. Bledsoe. Intelligent Backtracking Revisited, Maurice Bruynooghe. A Science of Reasoning, Alan Bundy. Inductive Inference of Theories from Facts, Ehud Y. Shapiro. Equality. Solving Equations in Abstract Algebras: A Rule-based Survey of Unification, Jean-Pierre Jouannaud and Claude Kirchner. Disunification: A Survey, Hubert Comon. A Case Study of the Completion Procedure: Proving Ring Commutativity Problems, Deepak Kapur and Hantao Zhang. Computations in Regular Rewriting Systems I and II, Girard Huet and JeanJacques Levy. Unification and ML Type Reconstruction, Paris Kanellakis, Harry Mairson, and John Mitchell. Automatic Dimensional Analysis, Mitchell Wand. Logic Programming. Logic Programming Schemes and Their Implementations, Keith Clark. A Near-Horn Prolog for Compilation, Donald Loveland and David Reed. Unfold/Fold Transformations of Logic Programs, P. A. Gardner and J. C. Shepherdson. An Algebraic Representation of Logic Program Computations, Andrea Corradini and Ugo Montanari. Theory of Disjunctive Logic Programs, Jack Minker, Arcot Rajasekar, and Jorge Lobo. Bottom-Up Evaluation of Logic Programs, Jeffrey Naughton and Raghu Ramakrishnan. Absys, the First Logic Programming Language: A View of the Inevitability of Logic Programming, E. W. Elcock. (shrink)

In the twenty-first century, 70.6 percent of Americans self-identify as Christians,1 58 percent of them still segregate themselves by race on Sunday mornings, and white Protestants make up the majority of this 58 percent.2 These facts belie the claim, popularized after Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election, that America is living in a postracial society3 And yet, the role played by religion in white people's lived experiences of race, racism, and white class privilege in the United States tends to be neglected (...) by philosophers and religious studies scholars, except perhaps when considering white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.4 Contemporary philosophy is secular in a way that generally excludes and... (shrink)

The dual role of olfaction in both smelling and tasting, i.e. flavour perception, makes it an important test case for philosophical theories of sensory individuation. Indeed, the psychologist Paul Rozin claimed that olfaction is a “dual sense”, leading some scientists and philosophers to propose that we have not one, but two senses of smell: orthonasal and retronasal olfaction. In this paper I consider how best to understand Rozin’s claim, and upon what grounds one might judge there to be one or (...) two distinct olfactory modalities. I conclude that while Rozin may be right that humans have dual occurrences of an olfactory ‘sense’, the concept of a sense-modality, and hence the ‘sense’ of smell, is ambiguous between two different notions: a physiological sensory channel and an experiential modality, along the lines suggested by J. J. Gibson. Furthermore, recognising that these are complementary rather than competing conceptions of a sense-modality enables the formulation of a powerful ‘dual-concept’ framework for posing and addressing questions concerning the complex architecture of human multisensory experience. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that there is a visual field, but the analogous notion of an auditory field is rejected by many philosophers on the grounds that the metaphysics or phenomenology of audition lack the necessary spatial or phenomenological structure. In this paper, I argue that many of the common objections to the existence of an auditory field are misguided and that, contrary to a tradition of philosophical scepticism about the spatiality of auditory experience, it is as richly spatial as (...) visual experience—and in some ways even more so. By carefully considering the spatiality and boundedness of audition, along with how sounds or their sources are experienced as occurring within the surrounding acoustic environment, we can gain a better understanding of (i) our auditory experience of space and (ii) the conditions for the existence of spatial sensory fields in general in a way that does not privilege vision over the other senses. (shrink)

Many philosophers and scientists take perceptual experience, whatever else it involves, to be representational. In ‘The Silence of the Senses’, Charles Travis argues that this view involves a kind of category mistake, and consequently, that perceptual experience is not a representational or intentional phenomenon. The details of Travis’s argument, however, have been widely misinterpreted by his representationalist opponents, many of whom dismiss it out of hand. This chapter offers an interpretation of Travis’s argument from looks that it is argued presents (...) a genuine and important challenge to orthodox representational views of experience. Whilst this challenge may not be insurmountable, it places a substantial burden upon the representationalist to explain not only how experiences come to have the contents that they do, but how those contents come to feature in our conscious mental lives. (shrink)

Many philosophers have held that perceptual experience is fundamentally a matter of perceivers being in particular representational states. Such states are said to have representational content, i.e. accuracy or veridicality conditions, capturing the way that things, according to that experience, appear to be. In this thesis I argue that the case against representationalism — the view that perceptual experience is fundamentally and irreducibly representational — that is set out in Charles Travis’s ‘The Silence of the Senses’ (2004) constitutes a powerful, (...) but much misunderstood and neglected argument against this prevailing philosophical orthodoxy. -/- In chapter 2, I present an interpretation of Travis’s arguments that poses a dilemma for the representationalist concerning the indeterminacy and availability of perceptual content. Chapters 3 and 4 evaluate a variety of arguments in favour of such content based upon the nature of appearances, or ‘looks’, including those by Byrne (2009), Siegel (2010) and Schellenberg (2011b), each of which I find to be problematic. Finally, chapters 5 and 6 examine the relationship between representational content and phenomenal character, i.e. what perceptual experience is subjectively like, outlining some potential responses to Travis’s anti-representationalism. These include the external individuation of content and self-knowledge, and the operation of perceptual discriminatory capacities (the latter of which does not necessarily favour a representationalist account of experience). -/- I conclude that Travis’s arguments establish substantive constraints upon the nature and role of perceptual content. Moreover, I argue that the debate centres less upon the existence of such content than its explanatory role, particularly in relation to phenomenal character and the contents of other mental states: belief, intention, thought, knowledge, and so on. This in turn highlights the need for representationalists to better clarify the role of the contents their theories posit, and why such theories constitute a better explanation of the relevant phenomena than the corresponding non-representational view.. (shrink)

In the past decade, digital technology, fiber optics, cellular phones, satellite television, home computers, and the Internet have substantially transformed business, education, and leisure practices. These technologies are becoming so integrated into our daily routines that their ubiquity often goes unnoticed. We are, nonetheless, in the midst of a telecommunications revolution, and the healthcare industry is becoming a major player. The burgeoning field of home-based telemedicine is evidence of this.

This monograph represents the first comprehensive study dedicated to the interdisciplinary French philosopher Michel Serres. As the title of this project unequivocally suggests, Serres s prolific body of work paints a rending portrait of what it means for a sentient being to live in the modern world. This book reflects Serres s profound conviction that philosopher c est anticiper / to philosophize (about something) is to anticipate ( Philosophie Magazine ). According to Serres, a philosopher is someone who possesses an (...) extremely broad base of knowledge coupled with the uncanny ability to envision what "might" transpire based upon his or her astute observations concerning phenomena that are already starting to unfold in a given society. Serres s explanation of what engaging in philosophical inquiry entails encourages us to imagine all of the present and future ramifications of certain trajectories that are clearly visible all around us. From 1968 to the present, Serres has been generating forceful, prophetic visions in his works that mingle philosophy, religion, theology, contemporary science, and literature. Comprehensive and insightful introduction both illuminates pressing contemporary issues and presages potential futures-to-come. This is a remarkable achievement and a genuine gift to readers both new and old to Serres s work. -Steven D. Brown, Professor of Psychology, University of Leicester An essential book for becoming aware of the threat of a return of obscurantism despite the development of new technologies and of the necessity of a new century of "Lumieres." -Issa Asgarally, Associate Professor, Mauritius Institute of Education, founder, Foundation for Interculturality and Peace Moser s engaging prose makes this study a great read, and he demonstrates a formidable grasp on the connections within Serres work, as well as the links between Serres and other major twentieth century thinkers. -Tom Trzyna, Professor Emeritus of English, Seattle Pacific University Both timely and thorough. His provocative critique of societal malaise, from our relationship to the planet, to ourselves, to each other, and to technology, as well as the solutions envisioned through an erudite and thoughtful analysis of Serres entire philosophical corpus is a remarkable contribution to Philosophy and French Studies. -Isaac Joslin, University of Denver Keith Moser s pioneering vision of the post-Marxist era, as reflected in the syncretism of philosophy, religion, theology, science and literature in Michel Serres body of work during the last half a century, transforms human consciousness beyond its illusory genophobia that has damaged the very semiotics of life. Moser s monograph taps into a tremendous flow of energy that evokes a passionate desire in a dead humanity to re-live and re-think. -Professor Ananta Sukla, Editor, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Keith Moser is Associate Professor of French at Mississippi State University. He is the author of "A Practical Guide to French Harki Literature, J.M.G. Le Clezio: A Concerned Citizen of the Global Village, Le Clezio dans la foret des paradoxes" (co-editor), and "Privileged Moments in the Novels and Short Stories of Le Clezio: His Contemporary Development of a Traditional French Literary Device." Moser has also contributed approximately forty essays to peer-reviewed publications such as "The French Review, The International Journal of Francophone Studies, Romance Notes, Dalhousie French Studies, Les Cahiers Le Clezio, Modern Language Review, French Cultural Studies, Forum for Modern Language Studies" (Oxford), "Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment" (Oxford), and "Pennsylvania Literary Journal."". (shrink)

Philosophers and scientists have studied sensory perception and, in particular, vision for many years. Increasingly, however, they have become interested in the nonvisual senses in greater detail and the problem of individuating the senses in a more general way. The Aristotelian view is that there are only five external senses—smell, taste, hearing, touch, and vision. This has, by many counts, been extended to include internal senses, such as balance, proprioception, and kinesthesis; pain; and potentially other human and nonhuman senses. This (...) “multisensory turn” has been driven partly by developments in contemporary psychology and neuroscience, which have revealed a host of complex interrelations and interactions between sensory modalities previously thought to be distinct. Contrasts between modalities and other crossmodal phenomena, including multisensory integration, synesthesia, and sensory substitution, have also begun to receive more attention in a burgeoning scientific and philosophical literature on multisensory perception and other crossmodal effects. This article focuses on recent empirically informed contributions to the philosophy of perception, as well as key scientific works that provide important background information and insights into the nature of the senses and sensory perception. Indeed, one of the lessons of the multisensory turn, and of contemporary philosophy of mind more generally, is that philosophers ignore this body of empirical research at their peril because many human and animal senses turn out to be richer and more complex than philosophers and scientists had previously imagined, making this a fruitful area for interdisciplinary interaction and research. (shrink)

Objective We sought to understand ethics and education needs of emergency nurses and physicians in paediatric and adult emergency departments in order to build ethics capacity and provide a foundation for the development of an ethics education programme. Methods This was a prospective cross-sectional survey of all staff nurses and physicians in three tertiary care EDs. The survey tool, called Clinical Ethics Needs Assessment Survey, was pilot tested on a similar target audience for question content and clarity. Results Of the (...) 123 participants surveyed, 72% and 84% of nurses and physicians fully/somewhat agreed with an overall positive ethical climate, respectively. 69% of participants reported encountering daily or weekly ethical challenges. Participants expressed the greatest need for additional support to address moral distress, conflict management with patients or families and resource issues. Of the 23 reported occurrences of moral distress, 61% were associated with paediatric mental health cases. When asked how the ethics consultation service could be used in the ED, providing education to teams was the most desired method. Conclusions Nurses report a greater need for ethics education and resources compared with their physician colleagues. Ethical challenges in paediatric EDs are more prevalent than adult EDs and nurses voice specific moral distress that are different than adult EDs. These results highlight the need for a suitable educational strategy, which can be developed in collaboration with the leadership of each ED and team of hospital ethicists. (shrink)

Once largely ignored, the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead has assumed a new prominence in contemporary theory across the humanities and social sciences. Philosophers and artists, literary critics and social theorists, anthropologists and computer scientists have all embraced Whitehead’s thought, extending it through inquiries into the nature of life, the problem of consciousness, and the ontology of objects, as well as into experiments in education and digital media. _The Lure of Whitehead_ offers readers not only a comprehensive introduction to (...) Whitehead’s philosophy but also a demonstration of how his work advances our emerging understanding of life in the posthuman epoch. Contributors: Jeffrey A. Bell, Southeastern Louisiana U; Nathan Brown, U of California, Davis; Peter Canning; Didier Debaise, Free U of Brussels; Roland Faber, Claremont Lincoln U; Michael Halewood, U of Essex; Graham Harman, American U in Cairo; Bruno Latour, Sciences Po Paris; Erin Manning, Concordia U, Montreal; Steven Meyer, Washington U; Luciana Parisi, U of London; Keith Robinson, U of Arkansas at Little Rock; Isabelle Stengers, Free U of Brussels; James Williams, U of Dundee. (shrink)

We attempt to defend the species-as-individuals hypothesis by examining the logical role played by the binomials (e.g., "Homo sapiens," "Pinus ponderosa") in biological discourse about species. Those who contend that the binomials can be properly understood as functioning in biological theory as singular terms opt for an objectual account of species and view species as individuals. Those who contend that the binomials can in principle be eliminated from biological theory in favor of predicate expressions opt for a predicative account of (...) species and view species as kinds. We contend that biologists' talk about species is talk about species as individuals, and we conclude that the most plausible account of species is an objectual account. (shrink)

General discussions of the appropriate relations between history and philosophy of science must be complemented by examinations of particular studies involving both fields. Martin Curd's attempt to illuminate the rationality of theory change through analysis of the Copernican Revolution is such a study; his work is undercut by serious flaws and actually displays an ahistorical approach. The result misleads both about the Copernican Revolution and the general problem of theory change in science. The study does illustrate several types of failing (...) that can vitiate efforts to bring historical considerations into philosophical discussion, namely, pitfalls in the characterization of theories, arguments, range of choices, and criteria. (shrink)

In his account of visual perception, Thomas Reid describes visible figure as both ‘real and external’ to the eye and as the ‘immediate object of sight’. These claims appear to conflict with Reid's direct realism, since if the ‘immediate’ object of vision is also its direct object, then sight would be perceptually indirect due to the role of visible figure as a perceptual intermediary. I argue that this apparent threat to Reid's direct realism may be resolved by understanding visible figure (...) as the set of geometrical properties that holds between an object's visible surfaces and some particular perspective or point of view. On this relational interpretation of visible figure, and once an ambiguity over the use of the term ‘object’ is resolved, Reid's account of vision is both epistemically and perceptually direct, as well as consistent with his account of the other senses and doctrine of signs. (shrink)

Rubin and Pearl offered approaches to causal effect estimation and Lewis and Pearl offered theories of counterfactual conditionals. Arguments offered by Pearl and his collaborators support a weak form of equivalence such that notation from the rival theory can be re-purposed to express Pearl’s theory in a way that is equivalent to Pearl’s theory expressed in its native notation. Nonetheless, the many fundamental differences between the theories rule out any stronger form of equivalence. A renewed emphasis on comparative research can (...) help to guide applications, further develop each theory, and better understand their relative strengths and weaknesses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HOMO FABER RECONSIDERED: TWO THOMISTIC REFLECTIONS ON WORK KEITH A. BRECLAw Georgetown University Washington, D.C. ATHOUGH WE APPEAR to be poised at the beginning of yet another chapter in the accelerating drama of the industrial revolution-or as some would have it, a postindustrial climax to that revolution-it is far from evident that homo faber and his distinctive activity have found for themselves either a philosophy or a philosopher. (...) The work activity may have become respectable as a philosophical subject only in the nineteenth century, but it has hardly been the object of extended or systematic inquiry, then or now. That is well illustrated by Marx and the Marxian legacy. Marx is arguably to be considered· the preeminent philosopher of work, having elevated work and the worker to the center of his activist program. Yet that same orientation to instigating action leads Marx intentionally to neglect elaborating the philosophical foundations of his thought. To be counted among the consequences of that neglect is a treatment of the work activity which appears to be inconsistent, or at best, incomplete.1 One measure of the inadequacy of Marx's treatment of the subject is to be found in a significant tendency among some twentieth-century Marxists or Marxist-inspired thinkers to abandon the centrality 1 On the unresolved tensions in Marx's concept of work, see, for example: G. A. Cohen, "Marx's Dialectic of Labor," Philosophy and Public Affairs 3 (Spring 1974): 260-261; Peter Fuss, "Theory and Practice in Hegel and Marx: An Unfinished Dialogue," in Terence Ball, ed., Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), pp. 113-114; and R. N. Berki, "On the Nature and Origins of Marx's Concept of Labor," Political Theory 7 (February 1979) : 35-37. 579 580 KEITH A. BRECLAW of work and the worker altogether. Andre Gorz bids a dramatic and final " farewell to the working class." Work has become so de-skilled and fragmented that the Marxian working class has been decisively replaced by a " non-class of non-workers." Work, now thoroughly absorbed and shaped by technocratic industry, is beyond hope of humanization. The radical program he recommends for the " non-class" is to maximize leisure which is already a realizable possibility within the technocratic economy. With that pronouncement, whatever dignity homo faber may have possessed is lost as he vanishes into the depths of a selfreproducing technocratic order.2 In this paper I wish to examine an alternative to Marxism for approaching work as a subject worthy of philosophical attention. \Vhile classical and scholastic thought may not appear at first to be promising grounds on which to consider the topic, the work of two contemporary Thomists-Jacques Maritain and Joseph Pieper-offers a significant and unique contribution in this area. However, I hesitate to say that either of these thinkers has accomplished the construction of a full-scale philosophy of work.3 In all fairness, that is not the intent of either one of them. At the same time, what they have accomplished in their reflections on work in some respects is more extensive and systematic than the results of speculation by Marxist thinkers.4 2 Andre Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (Boston: South End Press, 1982). Gorz's program for labor is built largely on conclusions about the evolution of capitalism since Marx associated with the thinkers of the Frankfurt School and their contemporary disciples. The notable claim is that the contribution of technology has come to dwarf labor as a factor of production to such an extent that Marx's labor theory of value is no longer operative. This dominant role for technology is also at the root of the deradicalization of the workers' movement. See Jurgen Habermas, "Technology and Science as 'Ideology'," in his Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). 3 M. D. Chenu, in his Theology of W orlo (Chicago: Regenery, 1963), judges that presently we lack not only a theology, but a philosophy, psychology or sociology of work as well (p. 5). There is little reason to conclude that the situation has been altered since Chem1 rendered that judgment. 4 Having said... (shrink)

In addition to the scientific and medical issues surrounding the use of fetal tissue transplants, the ethical implications should be considered. Two major ethical issues are relevant. The first of these is whether this experimental procedure can be justified on the basis of potential benefit to the patient. The second is whether the use of tissue obtained from intentionally aborted fetuses can be justified in the context of historical and existing guidelines for the protection of human subjects. The separation of (...) ethical decisions from medical practice and scientific research is necessary to prevent the exploitation of innocent human life. (shrink)

Process philosophy has emerged as an approach to consciousness within contemporary science although re-consideration of Whitehead and James clearly contrasts with twentieth century materialism. In spite of controversy a number of researchers have described the concept of quantum coherence within living organisms that provides the basis of new process oriented theories. Among these researchers are Penrose and Hameroff who suggest that quantum gravity yields coherent processes fundamental to the idea of consciousness. Pribram emphasizes holographic processes in the brain that give (...) rise to quantum brain dynamics. Bohm also recognizes a central role of holographic processes in physics. The work of these researchers and the convergence with earlier work in metaphysics are described. (shrink)