Georg Northoff employs a comparison with Parkinson's disease in an effort to tease apart the underlying pathophysiology of psychogenic catatonia. Northoff's extensive treatment of the subject is abetted by his own research as well as the research of others. Nevertheless, a number of points concerning basal ganglia/thalamocortical processing need to be raised, some adding support to his hypothesis and others detracting from it.

In recent years, many in medical education have examined the question of how best to reinvigorate the doctor-patient relationship, given the increasing technological distance that has emerged between them in modern medicine. In this paper it is argued that “humanism” and caring in medicine reflect the quality of transitional relatedness in the illness condition, a significant separation-attachment phase of life. By improving our understanding of the origin of caring, educational strategies for physicians in training may improve as might our abilities (...) to provide care. (shrink)

A re-issue of Gregory Bateson's classic work. It summarizes Bateson's thinking on the subject of the patterns that connect living beings to each other and to their environment.

The use of contingent valuation methods for estimating the economic value of environmental improvements and damages has increased significantly. However, doubts exist regarding the validity of the usual willingness to pay CV methods. In this article, we examine the CV approach in light of recent findings from behavioral decision research regarding the constructive nature of human preferences. We argue that a principal source of problems with conventional CV methods is that they impose unrealistic cognitive demands upon respondents. We propose a (...) new CV approach, based on the value-structuring capabilities of multiattribute utility theory and decision analysis, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)

Just as the existence of practical akrasia has been treated as important evidence for the existence of our practical agency, the alleged absence of epistemic akrasia—cases in which a believer believes some proposition contrary to her considered judgments about what she has most reason to believe—has recently been marshaled as grounds for skepticism about the existence of similar forms of epistemic agency. In this paper, I defend the existence of epistemic agency against such objections. Rather than argue against the impossibility (...) of epistemic akrasia, I argue that the impossibility of epistemic akrasia is actuallycompatible withthe existence of epistemic agency. The crucial mistake, I argue, is that skeptics about epistemic agency are failing to distinguish carefully between differences in the structure of believing and acting and differences in the structure of normative reasons to believe and normative reasons to act. I show that once these ‘environmental’ differences are properly distinguished, we can see that absence of epistemic akrasia provides no reason to doubt that practical and epistemic agency are on a par with one another. (shrink)

Landini discusses the second edition of Principia Mathematica, to show Russella (TM)s intellectual relationship with Wittgenstein and Ramsey.

The predicate-argument approach, focused on perception, is compared with the ease-of-predication (or predicability) approach, focused on encyclopedic knowledge. The latter offers functional prediction and implementation in connectionist models. However, the two approaches characterise predicates in different ways. They thus resemble predicational cantilevers built out from opposite sides of cognition, with a gap that is yet to be bridged.

Alvin Plantinga has recently argued that there are certain propositions which are necessary but known only a posteriori. If Plantinga is correct then he has shown that the traditional view that all necessary truths are knowable a priori is false. Plantinga's examples deserve special attention because they differ in important respects from other proposed examples of necessary a posteriori truths. His examples depend on a certain conception of possible worlds and in particular on his conception of the actual world. It (...) will be argued that these examples of necessary a posteriori propositions can be understood in two different ways. According to one way of understanding Plantinga, the propositions turn out to be contingent a posteriori truths, and according to the other way they turn out to be necessary a priori truths. The plausibility of Plantinga's position is due to a confusion between the two possible interpretations. (shrink)

This issue of the Hastings Center Report coincides with the annual conference of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, whose theme this year is “Where do we stand?” The issue addresses that theme with the article by Debra Mathews and colleagues and the set of brief response essays that follow it. Mathews et al., drawing on work carried out by the Association of Bioethics Program Directors, pose questions about how to understand and evaluate the worth of bioethics research. Those (...) questions require them to think very broadly about what bioethics is, in the first place, and how it is related to medicine, health policy, science, and society generally. In short, they are thinking at the highest level about the question, where do we stand? (shrink)

This collection of essays examines urban communities and societies in Asia and the West to shed much-needed light on issues that have emerged as the world experiences its new urban turn. An urbanized world should be an improving place, one that is better to live in, one where humans can flourish. This book examines contemporary practices of care of the self in cities in Asia and the West, including challenges to citizenship and even the right to the city itself. Written (...) by a range of academics from different backgrounds (from architecture and urbanism, anthropology, social science, psychology, gender studies, history, and philosophy) their trans- and multidisciplinary approaches shed valuable light on what are sometimes quite old problems, leading to fresh perspectives and news ways of dealing with them. One thing that unites all of these papers is their people-centred approach, because, after all, a city is its people. (shrink)

Offers a critical evaluation of the foundational assumptions and claims, scriptural, theological and philosophical, of John Hick's theocentric critique of the Christian affirmation of Jesus' uniqueness.

This paper argues that, while the existence of strong moral dilemmas is notoriously controversial, a case can be made for the existence of mild dilemmas. It is common for people to feel that they are caught in some type of moral dilemma. If mild dilemmas are a genuine feature of the moral terrain, perceptions by ordinary people that they are caught in a moral dilemma are to some extent vindicated.

[The war for a ring through the eyes of philosophers].

Contains 1,001 entries that explore issues of philosophy, psychology, and the physiology of the brain, touching on topics such as sleep, bilingualism, criminology, language, and the workings of the nervous system, and includes biographies of major authorities on the workings of the mind.