The Protestant ethic — a moral code stressing hard work, rigorous self-discipline, and the organization of one's life in the service of God — was made famous by sociologist and political economist Max Weber. In this brilliant study (his best-known and most controversial), he opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and its view that change takes place through "the struggle of opposites." Instead, he relates the rise of a capitalist economy to the Puritan determination to work out anxiety over (...) salvation or damnation by performing good deeds — an effort that ultimately discouraged belief in predestination and encouraged capitalism. Weber's classic study has long been required reading in college and advanced high school social studies classrooms. (shrink)

Recent scholarship, focusing on the rapid decline of microscopy after the late 1680's, has shown that the limitations of microscopy and the ambivalent meaning of its findings led to a wide-spread sense of frustration with the new instrument. The present article tries to connect this fall from favor with the microscope's equally surprising but hitherto little noticed late rise to prominence. The crucial point is that when the microscope, more than a decade after the telescope, finally managed to arouse the (...) interest of natural philosophers, it did so as a corpuscularian tool, and as such it came to share the difficult fate of seventeenth-century corpuscularianism. The essay ends with the claim that the fall of microscopy was not only due to the failure of microscopy to corroborate corpuscularianism, but also to the changing definition of natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and to the separation of the domains of living matter from a physica whose recent mathematical framework excluded the organic world. (shrink)

Objectives: To investigate the current situation of completing the informed consent for do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders among the competent patients with terminal illness and the ethical dilemmas related to it. Participants: This study enrolled 152 competent patients with terminal cancer, who were involved in the initial consultations for hospice care. Analysis: Comparisons of means, analyses of variance, Student’s t test, χ2 test and multiple logistic regression models. Results: After the consultations, 117 (77.0%) of the 152 patients provided informed consent for hospice (...) care and DNR orders. These included 21 patients (17.9%) who signed the consent by themselves, and 96 (82.1%) whose consent sheet was signed only by family members. The reasons why patients were not involved in the discussions toward the consent (n = 82) included poor physical or psychological condition (44.9%), concerns of the consultant hospice team (37.2%), and the family’s refusal (28.2%). On a multivariate analysis, patients’ awareness of their poor prognosis (odds ratio = 4.07, 95% confidence interval = 2.05 to 8.07) and their understanding of hospice care (2.27, 1.33 to 3.89) were two independent factors (p<0.01) that influenced their participation in the discussions or their personal signature in the informed consent. Conclusion: The family-oriented culture in Asian countries may violate the principles of the Patient Self-Determination Act and the requirements of the Hospice Care Law in Taiwan, which inevitably poses an ethical dilemma. Earlier truth-telling and continuing education of the public by hospice care workers will be helpful in solving such ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

‘Vergil lässt keinen Zweifel darüber, dass in Wahrheit das Fatum nichts anderes ist als des höchsten Gottes Wille.’ Thus Heinze, apparently following an observation by Seruius auctus, and in turn generally followed by scholars who have subsequently considered the nature of the fata in the Aeneid. But questions concerning the interpretation of the Aeneid are rarely simple; and the question of Jupiter's relationship to the fata may repay further enquiry.

In Philosophy for April 1961 Mr J. R. Lucas argues that Gödel's theorem proves that Mechanism is false. I wish to dispute this view, not because I maintain that Mechanism is true, but because I do not believe that this issue is to be settled by what looks rather like a kind of logical conjuring-trick. In my discussion I take for granted Lucas's account of Gödel's procedure, which I am not competent to criticise.

Francis Robin Houssemayne Du Boulay, historian of England and Germany in the later Middle Ages, is remembered with admiration and affection by his colleagues as a fine scholar, and as a witty, charitable, and sometimes mercurial companion. Many professors of history and writers in Britain and the USA can testify to Boulay's inspiring gifts as a teacher. His unique historical vision, which is most powerfully communicated in his books on England in the later middle ages and Piers Plowman, offers his (...) readers a richly documented understanding of the lives and mentalities of medieval people, informed by sympathy and a deep charity. This is a valuable gift from a historian to a society in danger of losing its identity through forgetfulness of its past. (shrink)

We prove that the observational equivalence of third-order finitary Idealized Algol is decidable using Game Semantics. By modelling the state explicitly in our games, we show that the denotation of a term M of this fragment of IA is a compactly innocent strategy-with-state, i.e. the strategy is generated by a finite view function fM. Given any such fM, we construct a real-time deterministic pushdown automaton that recognizes the complete plays of the knowing-strategy denotation of M. Since such plays characterize observational (...) equivalence, and there is an algorithm for deciding whether any two DPDAs recognize the same language, we obtain a procedure for deciding the observational equivalence of third-order finitary IA. Restricted to second-order terms, the DPDA representation cuts down to a deterministic finite automaton; thus our approach gives a new proof of Ghica and McCusker’s regular-expression characterization for this fragment. Our algorithmic representation of program meanings, which is compositional, provides a foundation for model-checking a wide range of behavioural properties of IA and other cognate programming languages. Another result concerns second-order IA with full recursion: we show that observational equivalence for this fragment is undecidable. (shrink)

The relation between Emanuel Swedenborg and Immanuel Kant has been the subject of many discussions. The chief aim of this paper is not to elucidate this question from an historical point of view, but to compare the teachings of the two thinkers, as those teachings have come to us. Kant's "Träme eines Geistersehers" embodies a very unfavourable opinion about Swedenborg. It is a curious circumstance, that this judgement is not based on decisive arguments. On the contrary, Swedenborg's fundamental doctrines about (...) the existence of a spiritual world and the communication between the living and the dead, are accepted by Kant as plausible. Du Prel and others have concluded, that Kant was a Swedenborgian in his heart, and that his negative attitude was due to the fear of losing his scientific reputation. A careful consideration of the two philosophical systems does not tend to bear out this opinion; nevertheless, such a comparative study is very instructive. In the mental development of the two thinkers there are remarkable analogies. Both were occupied with the great problems of God and the human soul; and both were disappointed by the leading philosophical and theological doctrines of their days. To Swedenborg those doctrines seemed to lead straightforwardly to naturalism and atheism. Kant was struck by the diversity of the opinions expressed and by the succession of heterogeneous doctrines without lasting results. But the reactions of the two men in these circumstances were different. In his cosmological and anatomical works Swedenborg aims at acquiring a comprehensive view of the Universe, in which view God and the soul should obtain their proper places. When he had reached the age of about 55 years, a crisis set in, which he described as "the opening of his spiritual senses". From that time he could see the spiritual world and speak with its inhabitants; he could study the workings of God and of the soul with the help of living experience. Kant raised the question, whether there are departments of knowledge in which certainty is attainable, and what is the ground of this certainty. His answer is, that the fundamental propositions of mathematical physics are absolutely certain. The ground lies in the fact, that these propositions are not derived from experience, but that they are "synthetic judgments a priori". They express the workings of the "categories" and "forms of intuition". by means of which the mind constructs, out of a chaos of sense-impressions, the ordered universe of science. Of objects to which these propositions do not apply, e.g. God and the soul, no certain knowledge is possible. This precludes the knowledge of "another world", fundamentally different from our ordinary world. So there seems to be an irreconcilable opposition between the teachings of Kant and of Swedenborg, But further considerations tend to lessen this contrast. Notwithstanding his own teaching, Kant accepted a life after death and he even speculated on it. If we follow this example, we come to remarkable conclusions. It is reasonable to suppose, that the spirits, who have been men, use the same categories as we do. Then out of the impressions which reach them, they will construct a world built on the same pattern as our earthly world. So life before and after death will not be very different. And this is precisely Swedenborg's teaching. This may be confirmed by the experiences of our dream-life. In dreams, our mind out of different impressions builds a world closely resembling our ordinary world. The spiritual world, as described by Swedenborg, presents many analogies with the world of our dreams. Now it is a very remarkable circumstance, that modern physics has been under the necessity of modifying the system of categories as described by Kant. In quantum mechanics the connection between cause and effect is less stringent than in classical mechanics. This adds fresh interest to the study of a system like that of Swedenborg, where quantitative laws are largely replaced by qualitative laws. (shrink)

A fundamental assumption in Shors & Matzel's target article is that brain activity can be related to the traditional categories of mentalistic psychology. This has led them to make numerous further assumptions that are contradicted by the available evidence.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led a number of countries to introduce restrictive ‘lockdown’ policies on their citizens in order to control infection spread. Immunity passports have been proposed as a way of easing the harms of such policies, and could be used in conjunction with other strategies for infection control. These passports would permit those who test positive for COVID-19 antibodies to return to some of their normal behaviours, such as travelling more freely and returning to work. The introduction of (...) immunity passports raises a number of practical and ethical challenges. In this paper, we seek to review the challenges relating to various practical considerations, fairness issues, the risk to social cooperation and the impact on people’s civil liberties. We make tentative recommendations for the ethical introduction of immunity passports. (shrink)

It is unclear whether someone’s responsibility for developing a disease or maintaining his or her health should affect what healthcare he or she receives. While this dispute continues, we suggest that, if responsibility is to play a role in healthcare, the concept must be rethought in order to reflect the sense in which many health-related behaviours occur repeatedly over time and are the product of more than one agent. Most philosophical accounts of responsibility are synchronic and individualistic; we indicate here (...) what paying more attention to the diachronic and dyadic aspects of responsibility might involve and what implications this could have for assessments of responsibility for health-related behaviour. (shrink)

Combatting chronic, lifestyle-related disease has become a healthcare priority in the developed world. The role personal responsibility should play in healthcare provision has growing pertinence given the growing significance of individual lifestyle choices for health. Media reporting focussing on the ‘bad behaviour’ of individuals suffering lifestyle-related disease, and policies aimed at encouraging ‘responsibilisation’ in healthcare highlight the importance of understanding the scope of responsibility ascriptions in this context. Research into the social determinants of health and psychological mechanisms of health behaviour (...) could undermine some commonly held and tacit assumptions about the moral responsibility of agents for the sorts of lifestyles they adopt. I use Philip Petit's conception of freedom as ‘fitness to be held responsible’ to consider the significance of some of this evidence for assessing the moral responsibility of agents. I propose that, in some cases, factors outside the agent's control may influence behaviour in such a way as to undermine her freedom along the three dimensions described by Pettit: freedom of action; a sense of identification with one's actions; and whether one's social position renders one vulnerable to pressure from more powerful others. (shrink)

Health promotion efforts are commonly directed towards encouraging people to discard ‘unhealthy’ and adopt ‘healthy’ behaviours in order to tackle chronic disease. Typical targets for behaviour change interventions include diet, physical activity, smoking and alcohol consumption, sometimes described as ‘lifestyle behaviours.’ In this paper, I discuss how efforts to raise awareness of the impact of lifestyles on health, in seeking to communicate the need for people to change their behaviour, can contribute to a climate of ‘healthism’ and promote the moralisation (...) of people’s lifestyles. I begin by summarising recent trends in health promotion and introducing the notion of healthism, as described by Robert Crawford in the 1980s. One aspect of healthism is moralisation, which I outline and suggest is facilitated by efforts to promote health via information provision and educational strategies. I propose that perceived responsibility plays a role in mediating the tendency to moralise about health and behaviour. Since I argue that states ought to avoid direct and indirect moralisation of people’s health-related behaviour, this suggests states must be cautious with regard to the use of responsibility-indicating interventions to promote health. (shrink)

Currently, many women who are expecting to give birth have no option but to attempt vaginal delivery, since access to elective planned caesarean sections (PCS) in the absence of what is deemed to constitute ‘clinical need’ is variable. In this paper, we argue that PCS should be routinely offered to women who are expecting to give birth, and that the risks and benefits of PCS as compared with planned vaginal delivery should be discussed with them. Currently, discussions of elective PCS (...) arise in the context of what are called ‘Maternal Request Caesarean Sections’ (MRCS) and there is a good deal of support for the position that women who request PCS without clinical indication should be provided with them. Our argument goes further than support for acceding to requests for MRCS: we submit that healthcare practitioners caring for women with uncomplicated pregnancies have a positive duty to inform them of the option of PCS as opposed to assuming vaginal delivery as a default, and to provide (or arrange for the provision of) PCS if that is the woman's preferred manner of delivery. (shrink)

Truth diagrams are introduced as a novel graphical representation for propositional logic. To demonstrate their epistemic efficacy a set of 28 concepts are proposed that any comprehensive representation for PL should encompass. TDs address all the criteria whereas seven other existing representations for PL only provide partial coverage. These existing representations are: the linear formula notation, truth tables, a PL specific interpretation of Venn Diagrams, Frege’s conceptual notation, diagrams from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Pierce’s alpha graphs and Gardner’s shuttle diagrams. The comparison (...) of the representations succeeds in distinguishing ideas that are fundamental to PL from features of common PL representations that are somewhat arbitrary. (shrink)

This volume contains the final portion of Ingarden's extensive treatment of the existence of the external world. Entitled Welt und Bewußtsein, it is divided into four chapters: "Das Problem der Identität eines individuellen zeitlich bedingten Gegenstandes," "Die Form eines Seinsgebietes und die Form der Welt," "Das Problem der Form des reinen Bewußtseins," and "Anwendung der gewonnenen formal-ontologischen Ergebnisse auf das Problem der Existenz der Welt." The plan of the work calls for a third part, material ontology, as the systematic complement (...) to Pt. I, existential ontology, and Pt. II, formal ontology. In this volume, therefore, the problem is not resolved, although Ingarden has reduced the statements of the alternative solutions to just two—H. C. (shrink)

A revised version of an essay awarded first prize by the Institut International des Sciences Théoriques. Despite its title, the book is less concerned with Eddington than with the British epistemological tradition.--J. C. H.

In Kingdom and Glory, Agamben analyzed the dual perspective of the void, through the metaphor of the empty throne, in the governmental machine in the West. I engage with the ambiguous question of the void with regard to the concept of sovereignty through my reading of two Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing period, Liang Qichao (1872–1929) and Zhang Taiyan (1869–1936). This paper therefore addresses the question of sovereignty and the void in the discourse of nation in early modern China, (...) an issue that is related to the problem of the political economy or the politics of life. I argue that the rhetorical move in Liang Qichao’s argument for the birth of a new nation and new people was to move from the not-having (無) to the there is (有) in support of the formation of a new nation-state and a restricted logic of sovereignty, while Zhan Taiyan’s position was to affirm the dynamitic re-composition of the void by constantly negating the given fixated state, and thus proposing a different and radical vision of nation and full sovereignty of the lives of each and every one of the people who are co-inhabiting in the polis. (shrink)