This article offers a novel reconstruction of Foucault’s methodology that emphasises his respect for the natural sciences. Foucault’s work has long been suspected of reducing knowledge to power, and thus collapsing into unconstrained relativism and methodological incoherence. These concerns are predicated on a misunderstanding of Foucault’s overall approach, which takes the form of a historico-critical project rather than a normative epistemology. However, Foucault does sometimes make normative epistemological judgements, especially about the human sciences. Furthermore, there are outstanding questions about what (...) secures the descriptive rigour of the genealogical method. To address these issues, I develop two claims that will significantly enrich our understanding of Foucault’s methodology. The first is that Foucault’s respect for the natural sciences is crucial in making sense of his normative epistemological judgements. The second is that the descriptive rigour of his genealogical method derives from the fact it is modelled on empirical inquiry. (shrink)

From whence spring the sparks of creativity? It is to this very question that the field of depth psychology--especially that of C.G. Jung and his intellectual descendants--has much to contribute. Just as the Muses were the offspring of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, our memories are the ancestors of our creativity that finds its multifaceted expression in the written word, image, theater, dance, and music. The Unconscious Roots of Creativity seeks to push the investigation into that domain of memory that (...) is beyond our conscious reach. With articles from 16 contributors, the "red thread" running through each of the offerings in this volume is that, whatever its ultimate expression, the creative impulse has its roots deep in the psyche. Edited By Kathryn Madden, Leonard Cruz and Steven Buser with articles by Linda Carter, Anna Maria Costantino, Carol Thayer Cox, Leonard Cruz, Lisa Raye Garlock, James Hollis, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Ian Livingston, Kathryn Madden, Jordan S. Potash, Susan Rowland, Murray Stein, Ann Ulanov, Tjeu van den Berk, Robin van Loben Sels, and Heidi S. Volf. (shrink)

This essay uses the global impact of the Coronavirus as a heuristic semiotic for exploring the future of the church. Unlike the pandemic of 1918, which left few dents on the world's economic, social, and cultural systems, almost all the nations of the world have passed laws and implemented procedures that are only comparable to world wars in their impact on entire populations. Nations are acting in unison, but not in unity. This post-COVID, post-Corona world is the 'time that is (...) given' to the church. But it will not be a post-pandemic world. We may become COVID-proof, but we will never be pandemic-proof. There is no pre-COVID reset. There is only risk assessment from natural extinction risks to existential dangers of our own creation that are catching up to us. Disruption is the new status that is never quo; stability is the new abnormality; global cataclysm is the ever-present peril. The only way to prepare for a future of constant 'the end of the world as we know it?' moments is by developing a high Contextual Quotient, and deepening our Contextual Intelligence so we can choose 'the next right thing' in a world of volcanic volatility. CONTRIBUTION: This essay frames the semiotics of a missional ecclesiology in the COVIDian wake from the hermeneutics of blessings not curses. What virtues might we expect to come out of a virus that is fast-forwarding the future, virtues that will shape the contours of Christianity. What if the pandemic is a shock treatment that is putting the world, and the church, back in a new and better equilibrium? What if there are goldmines on the other side of the landmines and minefields? (shrink)

El autor se pregunta por el sentido de la religión en nuestro mundo, en la Modernidad. Nuestro mundo —el moderno— se caracteriza por la libertad en el núcleo del ser humano, la razón crítica como el árbitro de lo que hay que afirmar o no, y la historia, el proceso, el dinamismo visto en el corazón de la vida humana y la sociedad. Pero, más que nada, la Modernidad mundializada siente una creciente necesidad de estar en diálogo con quienes piensan (...) de modo diferente a nosotros. Esta necesidad de diálogo nos interpela agudamente cuando, como en el caso de la religión, el diálogo debe versar sobre cuestiones cruciales en la comprensión que el ser humano tiene de sí mismo y de su entorno. (shrink)

Numerous authors have expressed concern that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) poses an existential risk to humanity. These authors argue that we might build AI which is vastly intellectually superior to humans (a ‘superintelligence’), and which optimizes for goals that strike us as morally bad, or even irrational. Thus, this argument assumes that a superintelligence might have morally bad goals. However, according to some views, a superintelligence necessarily has morally adequate goals. This might be the case either because abilities for moral (...) reasoning and intelligence mutually depend on each other, or because moral realism and moral internalism are true. I argue that the former argument misconstrues the view that intelligence and goals are independent, and that the latter argument misunderstands the implications of moral internalism. Moreover, the current state of AI research provides additional reasons to think that a superintelligence could have bad goals. (shrink)

Solidarity is a fundamental social value in many European countries, though its precise practical and theoretical meaning is disputed. In a health care context, I agree with European writers who take solidarity normatively to mean roughly equal access to effective health care for all. That is, solidarity includes a sense of justice. Given that, I will argue that precision medicine represents a potential weakening of solidarity, albeit not a unique weakening. Precision medicine includes 150 targeted cancer therapies (mostly for metastatic (...) cancer), all of which are extraordinarily expensive. Our critical question: Must a commitment to solidarity as defined mean that all these targeted cancer therapies should be guaranteed to all within each country in the European Union, no matter the cost, no matter the degree of effectiveness? Such a commitment would imply that cancer was ethically special, rightfully commandeering unlimited resources. That in itself would undermine solidarity. I offer multiple examples of how current and future dissemination of these targeted cancer drugs threaten a commitment to solidarity. An alternative is to fund more cancer prevention efforts. However, that too proves a threat to solidarity. Solidarity, with or without a sense of justice, is too abstract a notion to address these challenges. Further, we need to accept that we can only hope to achieve “rough justice” and “supple solidarity.” The precise practical meaning of these notions needs to be worked out through a fair and inclusive process of rational democratic deliberation, which is the real and practical foundation of just solidarity. (shrink)

We consider a proportional-prize contest to forecast future events, and show that, in equilibrium, this mechanism possesses perfect forecasting ability for any group size when the contestants share common knowledge about the probabilities by which future events realize. Data gathered in a laboratory experiment confirm the performance invariance to group size. By contrast, when realization probabilities are not common knowledge, there are some differences across group sizes. The mechanism operates marginally better with three or four compared to two players. However, (...) this effect is mainly driven by players’ behavior rather than by differences in the beliefs they form about the realization probabilities. (shrink)

Can Rawlsian public reason sufficiently justify public policies that regulate or restrain controversial medical and technological interventions in bioethics (and the broader social world), such as abortion, physician aid-in-dying, CRISPER-cas9 gene editing of embryos, surrogate mothers, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis of eight-cell embryos, and so on? The first part of this essay briefly explicates the central concepts that define Rawlsian political liberalism. The latter half of this essay then demonstrates how a commitment to Rawlsian public reason can ameliorate (not completely resolve) (...) many of the policy disagreements related to bioethically controversial medical interventions today. The goal of public reason is to reduce the size of the disagreement by eliminating features of the disagreement that violate the norms of public reason. The norms of public reason are those norms that are politically necessary to preserve the liberal, pluralistic, democratic character of this society. What remains is reasonable disagreement to be addressed through normal democratic deliberative processes. Specific issues addressed from a public reason perspective include personal responsibility for excessive health costs, the utility of a metaphysical definition of death for organ transplantation, and the moral status of excess embryos generated through IVF and/or their use in medical research. (shrink)

Segundo-Ortin & Calvo argue that plants have a surprisingly varied and complex behavioral repertoire. Which of these behavioral capacities are credible indicators of sentience? If we use the standards of evidence common in discussions of animal sentience, the behavioral capacities reviewed are insufficient evidence of sentience. Even if some putative indicators of animal sentience are present in plants, it is not clear whether what we should conclude is that plants are sentient or that those indicators are inadequate.

According to a growing number of researchers, AI may pose catastrophic – or even existential – risks to humanity. Catastrophic risks may be taken to be risks of 100 million human deaths, or a similarly bad outcome. I argue that such risks – while contested – are sufficiently likely to demand rigorous discussion of potential societal responses. Subsequently, I propose four desiderata for approaches to the reduction of catastrophic risks from AI. The quality of such approaches can be assessed by (...) their chance of success, degree of beneficence, degree of non-maleficence, and beneficent side effects. Then, I employ these desiderata to evaluate the promises, limitations and risks of alignment research, timelines research, policy research, halting or slowing down AI research, and compute governance for tackling catastrophic AI risks. While more research is needed, this investigation shows that several approaches for dealing with catastrophic AI risks are available, and where their respective strengths and weaknesses lie. It turns out that many approaches are complementary and that the approaches have a nuanced relationship to approaches to present AI harms. While some approaches are similarly useful for addressing catastrophic risks and present harms, this is not always the case. (shrink)

This article considers the imago Dei from the perspective of paleoanthropology. We identify structural, functional, and relational elements of the imago Dei that emerged mosaically during human evolution. Humans are unique in their ability to relate to each other and to God, and in their membership of cultural communities where shared attention, the transmission of moral norms, and symbolic behavior are important elements. We discuss similarities between our approach and the concept of theosis adopted in the Eastern Orthodox Church.

De Bie et al. (2023) call attention at the conclusion of their essay to the “novel questions” generated by complete ectogenesis. The question I explore is how complete ectogenesis from conception t...

Accelerated approval of aducanumab for mild Alzheimer's by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on June 7, 2021, has generated substantial medical, scientific, and ethical controversy. That approval was contrary to the nearly unanimous judgment of the FDA's Advisory Committee that little reliable evidence existed of significant benefit, even though the drug did reduce β‐amyloid. Three major ethical problems were created by this approval: (1) Medicare resources would be unjustly squandered, given the drug's $56,000 annual price and the 3.1 million (...) older potential American patients needing the drug; (2) physicians will feel ethically compelled to provide the drug to desperate, insistent patients, given FDA approval and in spite of side effects of brain bleeds and brain swelling; (3) and false hopes are generated for patients. A needed corrective by the federal government would reduce reimbursement to the bare cost of producing the drug (plus only a modest profit) until a phase IV trial has been successfully completed. (shrink)

The annual cost of healthcare in the United States reached $2.5 trillion in 2009 (about 17.6% of GDP) with projections to 2019 of about $4.5 trillion (about 20% of likely GDP).

Machery's dismissive position on parsimony requires that we examine especially carefully the data he provides as evidence for his complex triple-system account. We use the prototype-exemplar debate as an example of empirical findings which may not, in fact, support a multiple-systems account. We discuss the importance of considering complexity in scientific theory.

John Rawls has held up as a model of public reason the U.S. Supreme Court. I argue that the Dobbs Court is justifiably criticized for failing to respect public reason. First, the entire opinion is governed by an originalist ideological logic almost entirely incongruent with public reason in a liberal, pluralistic, democratic society. Second, Alito’s emphasis on “ordered liberty” seems completely at odds with the “disordered liberty” regarding abortion already evident among the states. Third, describing the embryo/fetus from conception until (...) birth as an “unborn human being” begs the question of the legal status of the embryo/fetus, as if an obiter dictum settled the matter. Fourth, Alito accuses the Roe court of failing to exercise judicial restraint, although Alito argued to overturn Roe in its entirety. In brief, the Dobbs opinion is an illiberal, disingenuous, ideological swamp that swallows up public reason and the reproductive rights of women. (shrink)

The author offers perspectives that can assist healthcare managers in achieving the highest ethical standards as they face their roles as healthcare providers, employers, and community service organizations. He also examines how to comply with relevant laws and regulations, provide high quality patient care with limited resources, and more.

The subject of free will has suffered something of a renascence in recent popularized American philosophy. The issue is, of course, a Gordian knot of underlying metaphysical and ontological presupposition, in both the analytic and continental traditions. In this paper, I attempt a bit of an untangling, and in doing so, I find that the fundamental position of the contemporary champion of “no freedom” (Galen Strawson) is not only compatible with a radical Sartrean freedom, but that the two philosophers’ deeper (...) ontology is much the same, supports the same metaphysics and the same outline of an existentialist ethics. My approach is a combination of analytic and continental method and background: I continue to believe that there is no necessary separation between the analytic and continental camps, and that there is much to be gained from the reabsorption of analytic style into the broader philosophic tradition. (shrink)

Leonard Krieger has long been revered as a contemporary master historian. With an eye toward placing his critical achievements before an expanded readership, he helped compile this core collection of his most important essays. Together these essays bring under a single cover the key themes and ideas of his life's work to serve as a handbook for intellectual history and historians of every stripe. This book reflects Krieger's conviction that the value of intellectual history is as a source of (...) orientation in a world of information overload. In Krieger's hands, intellectual history has stressed "thinking-through" the relations between ideas and events rather than the compilation and recapitulation of mere facts and historical categories. The essays in this collection cover a range of topics, including history of ideas, intellectual history, early modern political history, German political history, Hegel, Marx, and more. Many of these essays are already classics of historical scholarship. With the demise of the Soviet Union and state-sponsored Marxism, and with the reunification of Germany, Krieger's history takes on new relevance and a renewed importance. With a splendid introduction by Michael Ermath, and an extensive bibliography of Krieger's most important books and essays, this is a "must read" for every serious student of modern history. Leonard Krieger was University Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Chicago until his death in 1990. (shrink)

Health reform must include health care rationing, both for reasons of fairness and efficiency. Few politicians are willing to accept this claim, including the Clinton Administration. Brown and others have argued that enormous waste and inefficiency must be wrung out of our health care system before morally problematic cost constraining options, such as rationing, can be justifiably adopted. However, I argue that most of the policies and practices that would diminish waste and inefficiency include implicit (and therefore morally problematic) rationing. (...) Critics of rationing see as its most morally and psychologically troubling feature that an identified individual is denied potentially beneficial care. That psychic anguish may not be eliminable, and perhaps ought not be eliminated. But if rationing protocols are fairly adopted through a process of free and informed rational democratic deliberation to which all have access, the moral objections are largely overcome. Such a process is possible only if implicit rationing is recognized and rejected. Keywords: Justice, health care rationing, health reform, democratic decision-making CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

I agree with Professor ter Meulen that there is no need to make a forced choice between “justice” and “solidarity” when it comes to determining what should count as fair access to needed health care. But he also asserts that solidarity is more fundamental than justice. That claim needs critical assessment. Ter Meulen recognizes that the concept of solidarity has been criticized for being excessively vague. He addresses this criticism by introducing the more precise notion of “humanitarian solidarity.” However, I (...) argue that these notions are still not precise enough and are in need of behavioral translation, especially in relation to the problem of fair health care rationing. More specifically, I argue that translation ought to take the form of a well-ordered process of rational democratic deliberation, which I describe and defend in this essay. Such a process is what is required to construct a working model of just solidarity as opposed to a merely abstract idealization of just solidarity. (shrink)

The debate around age-based healthcare rationing was precipitated by two books in the late 1980s, one by Daniel Callahan and the other by Norman Daniels. These books ignited a firestorm of criticism, best captured in the claim that any form of age-based healthcare rationing was fundamentally ageist, discriminatory in a morally objectionable sense. That is, the elderly had equal moral worth and an equal right to life as the nonelderly. If an elderly and nonelderly person each had essentially the same (...) medical problem requiring the same medical treatment, then they had an equal right to receive that treatment no matter what the cost of that treatment. Alternatively, if cost was an issue because the benefits of the treatment were too marginal, then both the elderly and nonelderly patients requiring that treatment ought to be denied it. If there were something absolutely scarce about the treatment, then some fair process would have to be used to make an allocation decision. (shrink)