The precise application of the term ‘heroic measures’ in the discourse of medicine and medical ethics is somewhat uncertain. What counts and what does not is, at the margins, a perpetually contentious issue. Basically, though, we can say that the term refers to the deployment of unusual technologies or treatment regimes, or of ordinary technologies or treatment regimes beyond their usual limits.

The essays included in this volume are concerned with assessing Newton's contribution to the thought of others. They explore all aspects of the conceptual background-historical, philosophical, and narrowly methodological-and examine questions that developed in the wake of Newton's science.

Many in science are disposed not to take biosemiotics seriously, dismissing it as too anthropomorphic. Furthermore, biosemiotic apologetics are cast in top-down fashion, thereby adding to widespread skepticism. An effective response might be to approach biosemiotics from the bottom up, but the foundational assumptions that support Enlightenment science make that avenue impossible. Considerations from ecosystem studies reveal, however, that those conventional assumptions, although once possessing great utilitarian value, have come to impede deeper understanding of living systems because they implicitly depict (...) the evolution of the universe backward. Ecological dynamics suggests instead a smaller set of countervailing postulates that allows evolution to play forward and sets the stage for tripartite causalities, signs, and interpreters—the key elements of biosemiosis—to emerge naturally out of the interaction of chance with configurations of autocatalytic processes. Biosemiosis thereby appears as a fully legitimate outgrowth of the new metaphysic and shows promise for becoming the supervenient focus of a deeper perspective on the phenomenon of life. (shrink)

Examining select high points in the speculative tradition from Plato and Aristotle through the Middle Ages and German tradition to Dewey and Heidegger, _Placing Aesthetics_ seeks to locate the aesthetic concern within the larger framework of each thinker's philosophy. In Professor Robert Wood's study, aesthetics is not peripheral but rather central to the speculative tradition and to human existence as such. In Dewey's terms, aesthetics is “experience in its integrity.” Its personal ground is in “the heart,” which is the (...) dispositional ground formed by genetic, cultural, and personal historical factors by which we are spontaneously moved and, in turn, are inclined to move, both practically and theoretically, in certain directions. Prepared for use by the student as well as the philosopher, _Placing Aesthetics_ aims to recover the fullness of humanness within a sense of the fullness of encompassing Being. It attempts to overcome the splitting of thought, even in philosophy, into exclusive specializations and the fracturing of life itself into theoretical, practical, and emotive dimensions. (shrink)

At the turn of the century Martin Buber arrived on the philosophic scene... The path to his maturity was one long struggle with the problem of unity- in particular with the problem of the unity of spirit and life; and he saw the problem itself to be rooted in the supposition of the primacy of the subject-object relation, with subjects "over here," objects "over there," and their relation a matter of subjects "taking in" objects or, alternatively, constituting them. But Buber (...) moved into a position which undercuts the subject-object dichotomy and initiates a second "Copernican revolution" in philosophical thought. (shrink)

A rigorous but always readable, pointed but not coercive introduction to metaphysics, beginning with the creation and explication of a metaphysical system and then defending it through a reading of the Western tradition from Parmenides to ...

It might be thought strange to begin a study in the ethics of Karl Barth with a quotation from James Baldwin, who bears no obvious theological credentials, ...

INTRODUCTION TO THE ARGUMENT OF 1768 Some ordinary facts about the world we live in can be readily explained by other ordinary facts. One can, for example, explain the fact that when we are facing north the sun rises on the right and ...

This volume includes Whewell's seminal studies of the logic of induction (with his critique of Mill's theory), arguments for his realist view that science discovers necessary truths about nature, and exercises in the epistemology and ontology of science. The book sets forth a coherent statement of a historically important philosophy of science whose influence has never been greater: every one of Whewell's fundamental ideas about the philosophy of science is presented here.

THE fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica is another of the projects undertaken by philosophers Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. Hutchins chaired the Board of Editors, while Adler served as director of planning. This latest edition has the distinction of being the largest single private publishing venture in history, involving a thirty-two million dollar investment, over fifteen years of effort, and many thousands of consultants and contributors. This essay will attempt to assess philosophy’s share in so massive an (...) undertaking. (shrink)

Maximizing want-satisfaction per se is a relatively unattractive aspiration, for it seems to assume that wants are somehow disembodied entities with independent moral claims all of their own. Actually, of course, they are possessed by particular people. What preference-utilitarians should be concerned with is how people's lives go—the fulfilment of their projects and the satisfaction of their desires. In an old-fashioned way of talking, it is happy people rather than happiness per se that utilitarians should be striving to produce.

What is seeing? A phenomenological approach to neuropsychology -- First things first: on the priority of the notion of being -- The undeconstructible foundations of human existence: on the magnetic bipolarity of human awareness -- The cosmos has an inside: on the cosmomorphic character of Anthropos.

This book provides a comprehensive view of the aesthetic realm, placing the various major artforms within the setting of nature and the built environment as they arise within the field of experience. Each chapter displays the regional ontology of the form considered: the comprehensive set of eidetic features that limn the space of the art. It draws upon artists' statements, writings of key figures in the history of philosophy--including Plato, Hegel, Dewey, and Heidegger-and writings from various commentators on art. This (...) volume is unique in its systematic and phenomenological approach, and in how it addresses aesthetics writ large. (shrink)

Written from a viewpoint its author describes as "dialogical neopragmatism", this book attempts to acquaint specialists in philosophy, theology, and history of art and religion as well as the general reader with "condensed samplings" of the history of the treatment, in the Eastern as well as in the Western tradition, of the two notions that operate in the two areas of experience indicated by the title. Working with so broad a canvas, the author hopes to instruct us in avoiding "methodological (...) imperialisms and cultural provincialisms". The thesis of the work is announced on p. 68: Attention to the analogies between issues in aesthetic theory and theories of religion could help the disciplines of history of art and of religion to define themselves. (shrink)

THE PLATONIC DIALOGUES are not treatises in disguise. They are protreptic and proleptic instruments, positioning the reader dispositionally and providing hints for the work of completing the direction of thought by attending to "the things themselves," the phenomena to which human beings, properly attuned, have native access. Plato, I would contend, is a protophenomenologist whose dialogues yield significant coherent results when approached from that point of view.

To suggest an addition to the transcendental properties of being requires some work—a great deal of it necessarily sketchy and dogmatically presented. But we will try to build everything from the bottom up, from the structures given in experience and what we can infer from them, proximately and remotely. That will constitute the first and densest part of the paper. This part has two subsections that we might designate roughly as “Nature” and “History.” Regarding Nature, in a basically Aristotelian analysis (...) with Nietzschian overtones, we will look at the notion of potentiality as that entails creativity and relationality in a hierarchy of powers and beings. At the human level, in a basically Hegelian analysis, we will claim that the notion of being founds History as the accumulation of creative human empowerment through institutionalization. A second major part—which we might call “History of Nature”—will extend the analysis by appealing to the results of scientific investigation that will retain but resituate the previous part. The concluding third part will then suggest an extension of the transcendentals to include creative empowerment through relation. (shrink)

IN A PREVIOUS ARTICLE I argued that Plato’s Line of Knowledge in the middle of his Republic taught a “pedagogy of complete reflection.” What I intend to show in this article is that the general lines of that “complete reflection” indicated in the Republic are brought down to the everyday in the Theaetetus where we are invited, among other things, to reflect upon what is involved in the fact that we are reading the dialogue in our lifeworld.

This is a richly suggestive book but, like Immanuel Kant's own work, it is not easy to bring into focus. Its basic argument is "that aesthetic necessity is justified through the relation of fine art to morality" as a practical relation between subjects and not simply on epistemological grounds. The work has the distinctive merit of drawing heavily upon the total corpus of Kant's works, especially the more neglected works collected in English in On History which deal with the development (...) of culture. In the process, we get a view not only of fine art, but also of the unity of Kant's thought that extends significantly beyond the usual epistemological and/or moral foci and centers upon the historical development of culture. Of course, the center of Kemal's attention is the Critique of Aesthetic and Teleological Judgment, the expressed aim of which is to establish the unity of experience in face of the tension between the clockwork universe of the Critique of Pure Reason and the world of moral freedom focused by the Critique of Practical Reason. (shrink)

This theoretical work by the prominent art historian first appeared in 1934 as Vie des formes. As Jean Molino indicates in his "Introduction," it contains "in condensed form a great specialist's global vision of his field of study". The book is divided quite neatly into six chapters, with the core chapters on matter and mind framed by chapters on space and time, which are framed in turn by "The World of Forms" in the beginning and "In Praise of Hands" at (...) the end. (shrink)

PLATO'S WAS a peculiar genius unmatched by any in the entire history of Western thought. He understood well the central play in human experience between appearance, which, ambiguously poised, is a vehicle of both revelation and concealment, and the reality which appearance both conceals and reveals--or better, which appearance conceals as it reveals. The grounds of this play lie both in the character of human structure and in the character of the whole within which that structure functions. Grounded in the (...) unconscious of physiology, the field of human awareness rises by stages from an immediately given, biologically-based circle of sensory awareness, through a culturally mediated sphere of different modes of situating the sensory surface within the greater whole, to a basic orientation toward that all-encompassing whole, which affords us the distance needed to grasp both the orientation itself as orientation and the stages preceding it. Ordinary life is locked into a struggle between the biologically grounded desires and the peculiarities of cultural mediation that seek to channel those desires. Ordinary life exists in relation to a kind of functional surface of things which it co-constitutes with those things in a sort of "dashboard knowledge," knowing what to push and pull and turn to get the desired responses. Sophists continually arise as masters of appearance, often taking themselves, especially if they think they have the sanction of the gods, as genuine lovers of wisdom. (shrink)

This is a collection of twelve essays, four of which are from the English-speaking world and eight from Poland, home of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden. Though he has written widely in ontology, epistemology, axiology, logic, and philosophical anthropology, Ingarden is chiefly known, especially in the English-speaking world, for his work in aesthetics. His chief works in this area, The Literary Work of Art and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art --both appearing in English translation in 1973-established him as (...) a philosopher of literature. But his work in aesthetics extended both to the level of general theory and to the level of the analysis of other aesthetic regions, such as painting, architecture, sculpture, music, and film. (shrink)

America, and the postmodern West in particular, are experiencing a moral and intellectual crisis, according to E. Robert Statham, Jr. In The Constitution of Public Philosophy, Statham argues that Walter Lippman was correct in locating this crisis in the impoverished nature of public philosophy, and he attempts to constitute a role for reason in contemporary America. Statham suggests that the negative rule of law via a written constitution requires the positive rule of reason, or political philosophy, in order to (...) flourish. (shrink)

This is a work that is extremely interesting, instructive--and problematic. Its authors are two architectural historians and theoreticians who are dissatisfied with both the modern notion of historical progress and the postmodern notion of sheer historical flux as they impact architectural theory and practice. For both moderns and postmoderns, the past is a matter of antiquarian curiosity at best. The authors aim at securing, from the study of the past, principles for the education of "citizen-architects" who will connect person to (...) person and human beings to the world. Both stand in some way under the acknowledged influence of Leo Strauss, who viewed "Western civilization in its premodern integrity" as the creative tension between Athens and Jerusalem. They embody this tension in the structure of the book, where the odd chapters display van Pelt's orientation toward Jerusalem and its prophetic tradition, while the even chapters show Westphal's orientation toward Athens and the philosophic tradition. (shrink)

SENSING PRESENTS TO US INDIVIDUALS. But, though directing us practically, the way it presents them misleads us systematically about the nature of the individuals with which we have our practical dealings and poses serious questions about the status of the universals we use to describe them. We are all quite aware of the consequences in the practical order of unsettling the question of universals. The notion of capacity can overcome the problems involved.

Today, in an epoch of the proclamation of radical incommunicability between ethnic groups, between the sexes, and between individuals sunk in the privacy of their own gratifications, supported by a theoretical rejection of principles or universals of any sort, I want to explore the possibility of "taking the universal viewpoint" and thus finding a way out of a situation of radical cultural disintegration without succumbing to one or the other mode of intellectual imperialism, theological or otherwise. I will attempt to (...) do so by attending to what, I would claim, is the most obvious and showing what is implicit in recognizing that. In focusing our attention, let us attempt to set aside for the time being everything we might think we know from other sources, science included: bracket temporarily all theories, all dogmas, all preferences, all commitments other than that of paying attention to what presents itself to careful attention here and now. Nothing should intrude except the evidence present to us, since, I would claim, that evidence is presupposed in appealing to these other factors, including arguments for the "theory-ladenness" of evidence. (shrink)

IN A PREVIOUS ARTICLE I argued that Plato’s Line of Knowledge in the middle of his Republic taught a “pedagogy of complete reflection.” What I intend to show in this article is that the general lines of that “complete reflection” indicated in the Republic are brought down to the everyday in the Theaetetus where we are invited, among other things, to reflect upon what is involved in the fact that we are reading the dialogue in our lifeworld.

With a myriad of others, Francis Crick has sought the nature of the soul in the observable functioning of the nervous system, beginning with seeing. In contrast, this paper explores the nature of the soul through the grounding of the act of seeing in the power of seeing as its “soul” and folds in the kinds of attention we pay through seeing. We begin with the eidetic characteristics of the visual field. We then explore three theoretical positions on where what (...) is seen presents itself: within the brain, on things, or between awareness and things. What makes possible the appearance of things is the self-presence of the seer revealed in the nature of touch which suffuses the functional, self-directive body. Objectifying the eyes by the ophthalmologist abstracts from their essential expressivity and from the speech that can explain that expression. In the situation of encounter, focus upon the empirical features breaks the character of the encounter where we live “outside” ourselves and within the space of common meaning expressed in language. Even in the empirical focus, the ophthalmologist recognizes, through her seeing, deviations from normality of functioning and uses techniques that follow from her having intellectually mastered the field of practice. As a native power, seeing is a universal orientation towards all instances of the colored kind, cutting through the problem of universals by finding them in powers and correlative kinds. Recognition of this is made possible by the functioning of the notion of Being that grounds both intellectual and volitional activities. A concluding section explores several tasks for neuro-psychological research and expands into the grounds of a general cosmology centered upon the free and intelligent commitment of neuro-psychologists. (shrink)