The essays in this book, by a variety of leading Augustine scholars, examine not only Augustine's multifaceted philosophy and its relation to his epoch-making theology, but also his practice as a philosopher, as well as his relation to other philosophers both before and after him. Thus the collection shows that Augustine's philosophy remains an influence and a provocation in a wide variety of settings today.

149 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34: ~ JANUARY 1996 theology and intellectual history. One should value the information it provides and the methodological lessons it has to teach but not rely too heavily on its presentation of philosophical issues and arguments. BONNIE KENT Columbia University Jorge J. E. Gracia, editor. Individuation in Scholasticism: The Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation, r r5o-x65o. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Pp. xiv + 619. Paper, $22.95. This impressive volume (...) focussing upon the problem of individuation in scholastic phi- losophy from the beginning of the thirteenth century up to the middle of the seven- teenth presents eighteen essays on individual medieval and Counter-Reformation think- ers written by some of the finest scholars in those periods. Four introductory chapters set forth the problem of individuation for the periods in question, explore the legacy of the early... (shrink)

Empathy is a lay term that is becoming increasingly viewed as a unitary function within the field of cognitive neuroscience. In this paper, a selective review of the empathy literature is provided. It is argued from this literature that empathy is not a unitary system but rather a loose collection of partially dissociable neurocognitive systems. In particular, three main divisions can be made: cognitive empathy , motor empathy, and emotional empathy. The two main psychiatric disorders associated with empathic dysfunction are (...) considered: autism and psychopathy. It is argued that individuals with autism show difficulties with cognitive and motor empathy but less clear difficulties with respect to emotional empathy. In contrast, individuals with psychopathy show clear difficulties with a specific form of emotional empathy but no indications of impairment with cognitive and motor empathy. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

There has been a long tradition of characterizing man as the animal that talks. However, the remarkable ability of using pictures also only belongs to human beings, after all we know empirically so far. Are there conceptual reasons for that coincidence? Such a question belongs to the philosophy of language just as well as to philosophical visualistics. Comparing the two abilities to use words or pictures yields several similarities as well as distinctions. A well-known conceptual disparity between pictures and words (...) appears in their relation to perception: the difference can be further determined in an act-theoretic manner by four modes of use of the sign vehicles during the corresponding sign acts. Furthermore, the figure/ground dichotomy means something different for language uses and picture uses. In both cases, however, there is a close relation to the function of context building, by which humans are able to communicate not only with respect to the present situation of behavior but with respect to arbitrary contexts as well. Although the structural comparison does clarify the conceptual relations, it cannot explain that the conceptual structure ought to be like that. Therefore, the paper concludes with the programme of a "concept-genetic" consideration of the two abilities (i.e., to use propositional language or to use pictures) that is able to give us such a foundation. (shrink)

Conceptualizing cosmopolitanism : a reappraisal -- A historical sociology of cosmopolitanism -- Cosmopolitanism and social theory -- Cosmopolitanism : social and cultural research -- Cosmopolitanism : legal and political research -- Cosmopolitanism in Ireland.

This collection of papers were originally presented during conferences on ethics in science and technology that UNESCO’s Regional Unit for Social and Human Sciences (RUSHSAP) has been convening since 2005. Since intercultural communication and information-sharing are essential components of these deliberations, the books also provide theme-related discourse from the conferences.

Vier opstellen over rechtssociologie en criminologie, vanuit fenomenologische invalshoek bezien.

The four short works in Untimely Meditations were published by Nietzsche between 1873 and 1876.They deal with such broad topics as the relationship between popular and genuine culture, strategies for cultural reform, the task of philosophy, the nature of education, and the relationship between art, science and life. They also include Nietzsche's earliest statement of his own understanding of human selfhood as a process of endlessly 'becoming who one is'. As Daniel Breazeale shows in his introduction to this new edition (...) of R. J. Hollingdale's translation of the essays, these four early texts are key documents for understanding the development of Nietzsche's thought and clearly anticipate many of the themes of his later writings. Nietzsche himself always cherished his Untimely Meditations and believed that they provide valuable evidence of his 'becoming and self-overcoming' and constitute a 'public pledge' concerning his own distinctive task as a philosopher. (shrink)

Background: Increasing interest in empirical ethics has enhanced understanding of healthcare professionals’ ethical problems and attendant decision-making. A four-stage decision-making model involving ethical attention, reasoning, intention and action offers further insights into how more than reasoning alone may contribute to decision-making.Aims: To explore how the four-stage model can increase understanding of decision-making in healthcare and describe the decision-making of an under-researched professional group.Methods: 23 purposively sampled UK community pharmacists were asked, in semi-structured interviews, to describe ethical problems in their work (...) and how they were resolved. Framework analysis of transcribed interviews utilised the four decision-making stages, together with constant comparative methods and deviant-case analysis.Results: Pharmacists were often inattentive and constructed problems in legal terms. Ethical reasoning was limited, but examples of appeals to consequences, the golden rule, religious faith and common-sense experience emerged. Ethical intention was compromised by frequent concern about legal prosecution. Ethical inaction was common, typified by pharmacists’ failure to report healthcare professionals’ bad practices, and ethical passivity emerged to describe these negative examples of the four decision-making stages. Pharmacists occasionally described more ethically active decision-making, but this often involved ethical uncertainty.Discussion: The four decision-making stages are a useful tool in considering how healthcare professionals try to resolve ethical problems in practice. They reveal processes often ignored in normative theories, and their recognition and the emergence of ethical passivity indicates the complexity of decision-making in practice. Ethical passivity may be deleterious to patients’ welfare, and concerns emerge about improving pharmacists’ ethical training and promoting ethical awareness and responsibility. (shrink)

One method for investigating the neurobiology of consciousness is to experimentally manipulate consciousness as a variable and then visualize the resultant functional brain changes with advanced imaging techniques. To begin investigation into this area, healthy volunteers underwent positron emission tomography scanning while listening to randomized word lists in both conscious and unconscious conditions. Following anaesthesia, subjects had no explicit memories. Nonetheless, subjects demonstrated implicit memory on a forced-choice test . These subsequent memory scores were correlated with regional brain metabolism measured (...) during encoding. Conscious recall and unconscious recognition memory demonstrated considerable anatomic overlap in correlating significantly with relative glucose metabolism in auditory verbal memory areas. However, only conscious recall correlated with mediodorsal thalamic nucleus activity; unconscious recognition memory did not. These findings suggest that conscious versus unconscious memory distinctions may depend on the presence or absence of correlated thalamic activity, and directly implicate the thalamus in the neurobiology of consciousness. (shrink)

Patients who are dying of cancer usually give up eating and then stop drinking. This raises ethical dilemmas about providing nutritional support and fluid replacement. The decision-making process should be based on a knowledge of the risks and benefits of giving or withholding treatments. There is no clear evidence that increased nutritional support or fluid therapy alters comfort, mental status or survival of patients who are dying. Rarely, subcutaneous fluid administration in the dying patient may be justified if the family (...) remain distressed despite due consideration of the lack of medical benefit versus the risks. Some cancer patients who are not imminently dying become dehydrated from reversible conditions such as hypercalcaemia. This may mimic the effects of advanced cancer. These conditions should be sought and fluid replacement therapy should be given along with the specific treatments for the condition. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that God’s causation of human free choices is best understood in light of Aquinas’s teaching on creation. Such a position is attractive because it provides a way of avoiding the compatibilism of classical interpretations of Aquinas. However, this position may be subject to other flaws. In fact, Francisco Suárez explicitly rejects the view that God’s creative causality can be understood either as the divine essence or as a predicamental relation of the created effect to God. (...) The purpose of this essay is to investigate, first, whether Suárez’s view of efficient causality rules out conceptualizing God’s motion of the will in terms of creation, and second, whether it provides a more plausible alternative. I argue on both points that it does not, and that an error common to both Suárez and his sixteenth-century opponents is one reason to conceptualize divine motion as a kind of creation. (shrink)

Like Caesar's Gaul, my essay is divided into three parts, according to the subjects mentioned in the subtitle. The “crisis consciousness” of the main title forms less a subdivision of the essay than a leitmotif accompanying all the parts as well as the whole.

In recent years, Aristotle's treatment of the imagination has become the subject of renewed interest. A pioneering paper by Malcolm Schofield argued that, far from being the rag-bag of widely separate and more or less unrelated concerns that it had previously been generally taken to be, phantasia was, for Aristotle, a ‘loose-knit family concept’ covering all aspects of what Schofield labelled ‘non-paradigmatic sensory experience’. With that conclusion I am more or less in agreement, although only on the condition that ‘sensory’ (...) be given a suitably broad interpretation. My purpose in this paper is to tease out, in a necessarily limited and circumscribed manner, the implications of a proper understanding of Aristotle's developed concept of deliberative imagination, phantasia bouleutikê, for his moral theory and his account of rational action, and to indicate ways in which this is related to his accounts of mental imaging in the rest of the Parva Naturalia. (shrink)