Berthold-Bond (philosophy, Bard College) traces the project through Hegel's epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of history. Paper edition ($18.95) not seen. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

This book represents a considerable revision and expansion of Public Choice II. Six new chapters have been added, and several chapters from the previous edition have been extensively revised. The discussion of empirical work in public choice has been greatly expanded. As in the previous editions, all of the major topics of public choice are covered. These include: why the state exists, voting rules, federalism, the theory of clubs, two-party and multiparty electoral systems, rent seeking, bureaucracy, interest groups, dictatorship, the (...) size of government, voter participation, and political business cycles. Normative issues in public choice are also examined including a normative analysis of the simple majority rule, Bergson–Samuelson social welfare functions, the Arrow and Sen impossibility theorems, Rawls's social contract theory and the constitutional political economy of Buchanan and Tullock. (shrink)

Criticism of Hegel has been a central preoccupation of “postmodern” philosophy, from critical theory and deconstruction to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Foucauldian “archaeology.” One of the most frequent criticisms is that Hegel's invocation of “absolute knowledge” installs him in a position of authorial arrogance, of God‐like authority, leaving the reader in a position of subservience to the Sage's perfect wisdom. The argument of this article is that this sort of criticism is profoundly ironic, since Hegel's construction of the role of (...) the Sage possessing absolute knowledge is in fact an elaborate mask covering over a radical project of disappearance of the author by which it becomes the reader who is left to author the text. The article explores Hegel's commitment to his own death as an author in his invention of a new method of demonstration, his epistemology, his philosophy of language, his theory of desire, and even in the seemingly least likely place of all, his portrait of “absolute knowledge.”. (shrink)

To celebrate the 270th anniversary of the De Gruyter publishing house, the company is providing permanent open access to 270 selected treasures from the De Gruyter Book Archive. Titles will be made available to anyone, anywhere at any time that might be interested. The DGBA project seeks to digitize the entire backlist of titles published since 1749 to ensure that future generations have digital access to the high-quality primary sources that De Gruyter has published over the centuries.

The mid-twentieth century saw a change in paradigms of art history: iconology. The main claim of this novel trend in art history was that renown Renaissance artists created imaginative syntheses between their art and contemporary cosmology, philosophy, theology and magic. The Neo-Platonism in the books by Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola became widely acknowledged for their lasting influence on art. It thus became common knowledge that Renaissance artists were not exclusively concerned with problems intrinsic to their work, but (...) that their artifacts encompassed a much larger intellectual and cultural horizon. This volume brings together historians - both those concerned with the history of their own discipline and also those whose research is on the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance itself - with historians from a wide variety of specialist fields, in order to engage with the contested field of iconology. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance history, Renaissance studies, historiography, philosophy, theology, gender studies, and literature. (shrink)

Recently, Kenneth Westphal has presented a highly interesting and innovative reading of Kant's critical philosophy.2 This reading continues a tradition of Kantscholarship of which, e.g., Paul Guyer's work is representative, and in which the antiidealistic potential of Kant's critical philosophy is pitted against its idealistic selfunderstanding. Much of the work in this tradition leaves matters at observing the tensions this introduces in Kant's work. But Westphal's proposed interpretation goes farther. Its attractiveness derives for the most part from the promise that (...) it permits an internal critique of Kant's transcendental idealism (TI), that is, a critique that is based on the very resources of Kantian transcendental philosophy.3 In contrast to these resources, which currently seem to go through a sort of revival in an enormous array of fields, TI is notorious for dismaying even sympathetic interpreters. How attractive and needed such an internal critique of TI would be becomes all the more patent when we place such a promise in the context of some of the contemporary discussions about TI after Allison's famous defense of it. Before directly engaging with Westphal's interpretation, I would therefore like to quickly sketch on what background it acquires its force (I). After characterizing the main features of Westphal's view (II), and supporting it in more detail by an account of Kant's theory of cognitive significance (III), I then want to review the extent of its success to present Kant as issuing an anti-skeptical argument (IV.1), or semantic views that are incompatible with TI (IV.2), or a 'proof of not merely empirical realism' (IV.3). I agree that purely idealist readings of Kant are mistaken. Westphal's... (shrink)

This article draws on ethnographic field data collected during an investigation of the informed consent process and AIDS clinical trials. It describes the involvement of care providers (physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants) during the enlistment, or recruitment, phase of the informed consent process. It shows that sometimes care providers are involved in the receipt, evaluation and distribution of information on clinical trials through their interactions with research professionals and patients. It suggests that the involvement of care providers has the potential (...) to influence the informed consent process. Some of the ethical and practice considerations of this are discussed. (shrink)

Order and change in nature have been for a long time understood in philosophy and theology as founded in divine reason. In the neo-Darwinist theory of evolution, their explanation is reduced to material change without reason. Molecular biologists like M. Behe and W. Demski argue that any reductionist explanation of living beings must be wrong. The evolution of irreducible complex structures is impossible on the basis of random variation and natural selection alone, and must be the result of intelligent design. (...) The article argues that ID-theory, unlike Biblical Creationism, is a challenge for neo-Darwinism and for modern theology as well—for, unlike the Roman magisterium, many Catholic theologians try to harmonize reductive explanation with the notion of creation. (shrink)

The article begins by recalling the most important understandings associated with the term prudence in the history of philosophy.Then it introduces the Aristotelian concept of prudence linked to practical truth—prudence seen in contrast to wisdom and knowledge of manufacturing. The article discusses various forms of rational knowledge associated with the right will, and proves the need of linking prudence to all the other ethical virtues based on moral principles. It emphasizes the problem of how to relate general principles to specific (...) actions which involve particular goods. For resolving this problem, the article refers to Aristotle who sees the solution in political ethics which has a significant impact on individual behavior; consequently, good law and proper education are considered to be necessary conditions which allow to form the moral judgment skills for providing a morally good life. The article concludes with the claim that the proper field to capture the specificity of prudence includes the theory of human action and that of human morality. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophy there has been a widespread reaction against the cartesian subjective-individualist conception of a person being normative to any understanding of human personality. Looking back to early greek tragedy we find another model such as the objective-participant conception which also dominates the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.

The idea of “place” has become a topic of growing interest in environmental ethics literature. I explore a variety of issues surrounding the conceptualization of “place” in bioregional theory. I show that there is a necessary vagueness in bioregional definitions of region or place because these concepts elude any purely objective, geographically literal categorization. I argue that this elusiveness is in fact a great meritbecause it calls attention to a more essential “subjective” and experiential geography of place. I use a (...) reading of Aldo Leopold’s Sand Country Almanac as an example of the value of a non-literalistic geography for the understanding of place. (shrink)

In Flip Thinking, Berthold Gunster, the founder of the Dutch omdenken--or flip thinking--philosophy, presents fifteen strategies to transform your thinking away from limitations and negativities and towards possibilities and opportunities. From disrupting (turn all the rules upside down) to flaunting (play up what you want to hide) and from importing (get the enemy on board) to amplifying (do more of what works), Gunster's strategies and stories will have you approaching even the most challenging problems--from an annoying neighbor to an (...) angry colleague to an unhappy partner--in a whole new way. (shrink)

A survey of Euclid's Elements, this text provides an understanding of the classical Greek conception of mathematics and its similarities to modern views as well as its differences. It focuses on philosophical, foundational, and logical questions — rather than strictly historical and mathematical issues — and features several helpful appendixes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Talking Cures, the Clinic, and the Value of the IneffableDaniel Berthold (bio)KeywordsMadness, disease, the normal, the abnormal, the ineffable, Hegel, Kierkegaard, LacanI am most grateful to my readers, James Phillips and Louis Sass, who have led me to several new insights by suggesting ways of complicating my reading of a Lacanian approach to Hegel's and Kierkegaard's conceptions of madness. I am a Kierkegaard and Hegel scholar, with very (...) little pretense to expertise about Lacan and regrettably even less about the theory and practice of psychiatry. In submitting my essay to Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Philosophy, I was hoping to entice a community of practitioners and theoreticians I have great respect for to consider the musings of a philosopher on topics which engage them as thinkers and actors in their professions. I could not possibly have hoped for more intelligent and provocative replies than I have been given by my two respondents.Phillips' framing of his response in terms of the distinction between the "madness of the philosophers" and the "madness of the clinic" is very helpful. It is a distinction that is indeed central to the question of the possibility of dialogue between philosophers and clinicians—so central, in fact, that it is generous of Phillips not to reproach me for failing to mention it. On the one hand, the challenge for philosophers is to show that their descriptions are not merely metaphoric and that their preoccupation with the dark side of human experience connects in some way with the reality of disease, so that there is some way for clinicians to translate their language into the language of psychiatry. Otherwise, philosophers will have only poetic or literary interest for the psychiatrist or psychologist.On the other hand, the challenge for clinicians is the extent to which they are open to moving beyond a reduction of "mental illness" to a purely biological conception of disease. One needn't go so far—nor should we—as Thomas Szasz or Michel Foucault in seeing "mental disease" as itself merely a metaphor. But granting the evidence of underlying organic disorder, symptoms nevertheless display themselves as mental and behavioral states (what Hegel calls "shapes of consciousness") that, as Hegel argued, are paralleled in "normal" experience, so that the distinction between disease and normality (and hence illness and metaphor) is often elusive. Madness "has the healthy consciousness for its presupposition," Hegel writes, because the healthy mind is still grappling with the same sorts of contradictions and feelings of alienation, the same "infinite pain" which characterizes insanity. Madness is not the absolute "other" of rationality, but an echo of it (1978, 3:382, 408).Hegel himself accepted the medicalization of madness that began to occur in the late eighteenth [End Page 325] century, and rejected the metaphysical and theological categories of what was called "romantic medicine." But he also cautioned against the narrowness of the "somatic" school which he felt lacked sufficient explanatory value if not connected to a "speculative" (i.e., philosophic) framework (see Berthold-Bond 1995, ch. 2).It might even be argued that every person seeking therapy is first of all suffering from "philosophic" madness, at least in the sense that initially she does not understand her own suffering as "disease," but experiences her torment in the vocabulary of the philosopher. Thus the philosopher's descriptions are the closest to the subject's own self-understanding, and while the therapist must seek to rephrase these descriptions into the vocabulary of the clinic (just as Hegel, for example, translated his own philosophic description of the madness of his friend Hölderlin in the Phenomenology as the "lost soul" whose "light dies away within it" into the medical category of Wahnsinn—mania or frenzy, which today we would call schizophrenia—in the classificatory scheme of mental disorder he gives in the Encyclopaedia; 1977, 400; 1978, 408)—there is a real question about which vocabulary is a metaphor for the other.The second main point Phillips addresses, which is taken up in different ways by Sass as well, has to do with the relation between speech and silence in madness. Phillips finds that Kierkegaard offers a more complex and subtle view than... (shrink)

I argue that not only do Nietzsche and Camus share a sense of the world as fundamentally “strange,” but that each adopts an authorial position as stranger to the reader as well. The various strategies of concealment, evasion, and silence they employ to assure their authorial strangeness are in the service of what Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault would later call “the death of the author,” the disappearance of the author as authority over his or her own text. I argue (...) further, however, that within this largely shared commitment, Nietzsche and Camus finally have quite different conceptions of the goals of their respective authorships and different manners of pursuing their deaths as authors. These contrasts leave us, finally, with distinct constructions of the author as stranger. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Das German Diagnosis Related Groups (G-DRG)-System hat zu einem weitgehend erlösorientierten Krankenhausfinanzierungssystem geführt. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden die ethischen Implikationen und Folgen dieses Systems am Beispiel rekonstruktiver Maßnahmen (Defektversorgung) bei Patient*innen mit Mundhöhlenkarzinomen herausgearbeitet. Dabei gilt es zugleich, das Wechselspiel von G‑DRG-System und Leitlinienentwicklung zu beleuchten. Vorangestellt werden einführende Angaben zum Mundhöhlenkarzinom und den bestehenden Behandlungsoptionen: konventionelle Rekonstruktionstechnik versus kostenintensive High-End-Chirurgie. Methodische Grundlage und argumentativer Bezugspunkt der Arbeit ist das theoretische Fallszenario „Versorgung mittelgroßer Defekte nach Tumorresektion“. Das G‑DRG-System und (...) die dadurch geschaffenen ökonomischen Anreize haben weitreichende ethische Implikationen in der bedarfsorientierten Behandlung von Patient*innen und führen zu mehrdimensionalen Wechselwirkungen. Die bestehende Tendenz zur High-End-Chirurgie birgt das Risiko der Über- und Fehlversorgung und läuft demnach den Prinzipien Benefizienz und Nonmalefizienz zuwider. Die einseitige Indikationsstellung zugunsten der High-End-Chirurgie lässt zudem auf eine direktive Patientenaufklärung schließen (Verstoß gegen das Prinzip des Respekts der Patientenautonomie). Kostspielige High-End-Verfahren konterkarieren überdies das Wirtschaftlichkeitsgebot und berühren somit zugleich Fragen der Verteilungsgerechtigkeit. Schließlich wirkt die klinische Bevorzugung von High-End-Verfahren auch auf die innermedizinische Logik, namentlich auf die Publikationslandschaft (publication bias), die Ausgestaltung der betreffenden Leitlinien sowie auf die chirurgische Expertise. Zu fordern ist eine Sensibilisierung aller in der Chirurgie tätigen Akteur*innen (Chirurg*innen; Leitlinienexpert*innen, Gutachter*innen). (shrink)

A unitary transformation replaces the given description of a quantum system by an equivalent one. It is observed, however, that not all members of a set of unitarily equivalent Hamilton operators are equally well suited for identifying the corresponding classical systems. A criterion is proposed for recognizing the privileged representatives of the set. A few explicit examples are reported that show the criterion at work.

This brief survey of Professor Karl LOwith's analysis of the modem histori cal consciousness is the outgrowth of a year's study at the University of Heidelberg while Professor L6with was still an active member of the faculty. An early version, in the form of a dissertation, was submitted to the History Department of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.A. Numerous friends and colleagues have helped me at various stages of this work and I am indebted to them even though I (...) cannot name them all indi vidually. However special thanks must be accorded to Professor W. J. Bos senbrook of Wayne State University for introducing me to the entire prob lem of anti-historicism and to Professor LOwith's work. I am also greatly indebted to Professor John Barlow of Indiana University for his patient assistance with the translations, however the final responsibility for all renditions rests, of course, solely with the author. (shrink)

In this book, Andy Mueller examines the ways in which epistemic and practical rationality are intertwined. In the first part, he presents an overview of the contemporary debates about epistemic norms for practical reasoning, and defends the thesis that epistemic rationality can make one practically irrational. Mueller proposes a contextualist account of epistemic norms for practical reasoning and introduces novel epistemic norms pertaining to ends and hope. In the second part Mueller considers current approaches to pragmatic encroachment in epistemology, ultimately (...) arguing in favor of a new principle-based argument for pragmatic encroachment. While the book defends tenets of the knowledge-first programme, one of its main conclusions is thoroughly pragmatist: in an important sense, the practical has primacy over the epistemic. (shrink)

Background The German Diagnosis-Related Groups (G-DRG) system has led to a revenue-orientated hospital financing system. This article examines the ethical implications and consequences of this system using the example of reconstructive measures (defect care) in patients with oral cavity carcinoma. At the same time, the interplay between the G‑DRG system and guideline development must also be scrutinized. This is preceded by introductory information on oral cavity carcinoma and the existing treatment options: conventional reconstruction techniques versus cost-intensive high-end surgery. Methods The (...) case scenario “treatment of medium-sized defects after tumor resection” forms the methodological basis and argumentative reference point of the study. Results and discussion The G‑DRG system and the economic incentives lead to far-reaching ethical implications concerning the demand-orientated treatment of patients and lead to multidimensional interactions. The existing tendency towards high-end surgery harbors the risk of overuse and misuse and, therefore, runs counter to the principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence. The one-sided indication in favor of high-end surgery also suggests that patient information is given in a directive manner (violation of respect for patient autonomy). Moreover, costly high-end procedures counteract the principle of economic efficiency and, thus, touch on issues of distributive justice. Finally, the clinical favoring of high-end procedures also affects logic within medicine, namely the publication landscape (publication bias), the design of the relevant guidelines, and surgical expertise. Conclusions There is a need to raise the awareness of all those working in the field of surgery (surgeons, guideline experts, reviewers). (shrink)