Background: After over 4 years since medical assistance in dying legalization in Canada, there is still much uncertainty about how this ruling has affected Canadian society. Objective: To describe the positive aspects of medical assistance in dying legalization from the perspectives of hospice palliative care providers engaging in medical assistance in dying. Design: In this qualitative descriptive study, we conducted an inductive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with hospice palliative care providers. Participants and setting: Multi-disciplinary hospice palliative care providers in (...) acute, community, residential, and hospice care in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada, who have engaged in end-of-life care planning with patients who have inquired about and/or requested medical assistance in dying. Ethical considerations: The research proposal was approved by University of British Columbia Research Ethics Board in Vancouver and University Health Network in Toronto. Participants were informed regarding the research goals, signed a written consent, and were assigned pseudonyms. Results: The 48 participants included hospice palliative care physicians (n = 22), nurses (n = 15), social workers (n = 7), and allied health providers (n = 4). The average interview length was 50 min. Positive aspects of medical assistance in dying legalization were identified at (1) the individual level: (a) a new end-of-life option, (b) patients’ last chance to express control over their lives, (c) patient and family comfort and relief, and (d) a unique learning experience for hospice palliative care providers; (2) the team level: (a) supportive collegial relationships, (b) broadened discussions about end-of-life and palliative care, and (c) team debriefs provide opportunities for education and support; and (3) the institutional level: (a) improved processes to facilitate the implementation logistics. Conclusion: While being involved in the medical assistance in dying process is complex and challenging, this study sheds light on the positive aspects of medical assistance in dying legalization from the hospice palliative care provider’s perspectives. Medical Assistance in Dying legalization has resulted in improved end-of-life conversations between hospice palliative care providers, patients, and their families. Improved communication leads to a better understanding of patients’ end-of-life care plans and bridges some of the existing gaps between hospice palliative care and medical assistance in dying. (shrink)

Human intuition and perception are basic and essential phenomena of consciousness. As such, they will never be replicated by computers. This is the challenging notion of Hubert Dreyfus, Ph. D., archcritic of the artificial intelligence establishment. It's important to emphasize that he doesn't believe that AI is fundamentally impossible, only that the current research program is fatally flawed. Instead, he argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being in (...) the world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. This helps to explain the practical problems in implementing artificial intelligence algorithms. (shrink)

BackgroundThe ageing of the population and the increased number of chronic diseases are associated with an increased frequency of end of life care in hospital settings. Residents rotating in hospital wards play a major part in their care, regardless of their specialty. General practitioner (GP) residents are confronted to such activities in hospital settings during their training. Our aim was to know how they feel about taking care of dying patients, as end-of-life care are very different from the clinical activity (...) they are trained to.MethodsWe surveyed all GP trainees of “Ile de France”. The survey was made of 41 questions regarding advanced directives divided in 7 sections about patients’ care, communication, mentoring and repercussion on personal life. The survey was done one time, during two pre-specified days.Results525 residents (53.8%) accepted to fulfill the survey. 74.1% of the residents thought that palliative care could have been better. Possible ways of improvements were: a reduction of unreasonable obstinacy (or therapeutic overkill, two terms defined in French law as curative treatment without reasonable hope of efficiency) (59.6%), patient’s (210 answers, 40%) and relative’s communication (information of patients and relatives about the severity of the disease and risk of death) (199 answers 37.9%). Residents also reported a lack of knowledge regarding end-of-life care specific treatments (411 answers, 79.3%) and 298 (47.2%) wished for better mentoring. Those difficulties were associated with repercussion on their private life (353 answers, 67.2%), particularly with their close relatives (55.4%). Finally, 56.2% of trainees thought that a systematic psychologic follow up should be instituted for those working in “at risk” hospital settings.ConclusionSelf-perception management of dying patients by GP resident emphasize their lack of training and supervision. The feeling of suboptimal care is associated with consequences on personal life. (shrink)

Les Presses universitaires de France ont publié, en 1994, une Encyclopédie universelle de philosophie, dans laquelle Hubert Mono Ndjana est présenté comme un spécialiste de la pensée des hommes politiques. Il avait en effet traduit en français Obiang Nguema Mbasogo en 1980 (Un Pari pour la liberté), publié un ouvrage en 1985 sur le chef d'Etat de son pays (L'Idée sociale chez Paul Biya), et deux autres sur la pensée et le pays de Kim Il Sung (Révolution et création (...) et Regard sur la Corée), en 1987. Sa pensée s'est également et abondamment préoccupée de la question du politique et des préoccupations épistémologiques. L'entretien que Jean-Philippe Nguemeta a eu le génie d'initier auprès d'Hubert Mono Ndjana permettra au lecteur d'avoir une vue synoptique de ce philosophe attentif, qui a passé toute sa vie à enseigner, sans négliger les grandes questions de son temps. Un décryptage exhaustif des énigmes de la civilisation, utile pour la culture générale et l'éducation... (shrink)

Dit boek is een hommage aan de filosoof Hubert Dethier (°21 juli 1933), die we zeker in de rij kunnen plaatsen van denkers als Jaap Kruithof, Hans Achterhuis en Etienne Vermeersch. Deze hommage is geen chronologische biografie. Het is daarentegen wel een verhaal waarin het leven van Hubert Dethier verweven wordt met de geschiedenis van zijn denken. Een denken dat zich situeert in de tweede helft van de vorige eeuw en het begin van de huidige eeuw en zich (...) moeiteloos projecteert naar de toekomst. Ontegensprekelijk een woelige en gewelddadige periode, maar ook een tijdgewricht van hoop en verwachting van het “nieuwe”.0. (shrink)

_Internet_ is een van de eerste boeken waarin het filosofische inzicht -van Plato tot Kierkegaard - betrokken wordt op het debat over de mogelijkheden en onmogelijkheden van het internet. Dreyfus laat zien dat de onstoffelijke, 'vrij zwevende' websurfer zijn oorsprong vindt in Descartes' scheiding van geest en lichaam, en hoe Kierkegaards inzichten in de opkomst van het moderne leespubliek vooruitlopen op de nieuwsgierige, maar elk risico vermijdende internet-junkie. Uitgaande van recente onderzoeken naar het isolement dat veel internetgebruikers ervaren, toont Dreyfus (...) aan hoe het internet, door zijn nadruk op privé-ervaringen, gebruikers berooft van wezenlijke, belichaamde vermogens zoals vertrouwen, stemmingen en betrokkenheid bij met anderen gedeelde lokale aangelegenheden. _Internet_ is verplichte kost voor iedereen die on line is en is geïnteressseerd in onze plaats in de 'e-revolutie'. (shrink)

Religiose Vielfalt ist nicht erst eine Erscheinung der "westlichen Moderne". Vielmehr existierten schon in fruhen Zeiten und an verschiedenen Orten der Welt oft mehrere Religionen nebeneinander, sei es dass diese unterschiedlichen Ursprungs waren oder sich aufgrund divergierender Auffassungen der religiosen Akteure innerhalb einer gemeinsamen Tradition ausdifferenzierten. Nicht immer war und ist diese Koexistenz eine friedliche. Die Religion der anderen wird haufig als "deviant" wahrgenommen oder gar als "nonkonformistisch" stigmatisiert und sanktioniert, bis hin zur physischen Vernichtung der "Devianten". Im vorliegenden Band (...) gehen vierzehn ausgewiesene Wissenschaftler_innen aus den Fachgebieten Religionswissenschaft, Soziologie, Sinologie und Judaistik aus ihrer jeweiligen fachlichen Perspektive und anhand diverser Fallbeispiele aus Geschichte und Gegenwart der Frage nach, unter welchen Umstanden, aus welchen Grunden und mit welchen Folgen religiose Pluralitat als Problem wahrgenommen wird. Das Buch verbindet so systematische Fragestellungen mit empirischen Fallbeispielen und liefert damit eine ausgezeichnete Grundlage fur die Erforschung des gesellschaftlichen Umgangs mit religioser Pluralitat. (shrink)

As this book makes clear, current use of data structures such as frames, scripts, and stereotypes in psychology, artificial intelligence, and all the other disciplines now grouped together as Cognitive Science develop ideas already explored by Husserl who believed that the analysis of mental representations was the proper subject of philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines that deal with the mind. This new anthology will serve as an ideal introduction to phenomenology for analytic philosophers, both as a text and as the (...) single most useful source book on Husserl for cognitive scientists. An MIT Press/Bradford Book. (shrink)

For fifty years Hubert Dreyfus has done pioneering work which brings phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. This is a selection of his most influential essays, developing his critique of the representational model of the mind in analytical philosophy of mind and mainstream cognitive science.

Essays discuss the themes of worldliness, affectedness, understanding, and the care-structure found in Heidegger's work on the nature of existence.

L'acte d'éduquer est, parfois à l'insu de l'éducateur lui-même, fondé sur des présupposés à la fois fondamentaux et instrumentaux. Eduquer suppose que l'humanité soit capable de faire elle-même son bonheur et que l'homme soit perfectible... Eduquer suppose de même que l'éducation ne réalise pas seulement ce que l'environnement, sans elle, aurait réalisé. Eduquer, à l'école, suppose que le maître en ait la capacité et la volonté, que le message adressé à tous sera reçu par chacun, que la motivation de l'élève (...) ne soit pas feinte, que sa communication avec le maître ne soit pas simple subterfuge et, plus généralement, que l'éducation soit autre chose qu'une manipulation de celui qui ne sait pas par celui qui sait. Si l'on ne parvient pas à faire de ces suppositions des certitudes, c'est tout l'édifice de l'éducation qui risque de s'effondrer à l'image de la fameuse statue d'airain aux pieds d'argile. Hubert Hannoun rappelle les récentes conquêtes des sciences psychologiques, psychosociologiques, logiques et axiologiques pour conclure à ce que cette certitude n'est jamais totale, coexistant toujours avec un minimum d'incertitude. Rejetant alors à la fois le nihilisme négateur de toute valeur et le scientisme qui se drape d'une toute-puissance du raisonnement que récusent les sciences actuelles de la cognition, il propose de faire le pari de la vérité et de la valeur des fondements de 'l'éducation. Ce pari, pour lui, est un pari énactant, à savoir un projet qui, dans le même acte et le même temps, forge sa propre réalisation. Nous ne décidons ni ne subissons pas les valeurs de notre action : nous en faisons le pari en agissant de telle sorte que ce pari soit gagné. S'inspirant des thèses actuelles de la complexité, il situe la pensée et l'action comme composantes d'un même système. A partir de là, Hubert Hannoun jette les bases de ce qui pourrait être une morale de l'éducation, ce comportement de l'éducateur sans lequel elle perdrait tout son sens. (shrink)

A Critique of Artificial Reason Hubert L. Dreyfus . HUBERT L. DREYFUS What Computers Still Can't Do Thi s One XZKQ-GSY-8KDG What. WHAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN'T DO Front Cover.

For Descartes, knowledge exists as ideas in the mind that represent the world. In a radical critique, Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor argue that knowledge consists of much more than the representations we formulate in our minds. They affirm our direct contact with reality—both the physical and the social world—and our shared understanding of it.

A l'origine, non pas une inspiration, une illumination, un don, mais une émotion de l'enfance, toujours simple, parfois banale, jamais anodine. Cette émotion, chacun peut l'éprouver. Pourquoi certains basculent-ils dans la création? Quel rôle a joué leur entourage? Comment entretiennent-ils leur flamme? Et jusqu'où sont-ils prêts à aller? Fidèle à sa méthode croisant science et entretiens approfondis, Hubert Ripoll a rencontré pour ce livre 24 créateurs, de tous horizons, tous et toutes consacrés, parmi lesquels Enki Bilal, Yves Bonnefoy, Claude (...) Lelouch, Gérald Passédat, Fabienne Verdier, Angelin Preljocaj... (shrink)

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are stored, not as representations in the mind, (...) but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

People unfamiliar with Chinese characters show poorer visual working memory (VWM) performance for Chinese characters than do literates in Chinese. In a series of experiments, we investigated the reasons for this expertise advantage. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the advantage of Chinese literates does not transfer to novel material. Experts had similar resolution as novices for material outside of their field of expertise, and the memory of novices and experts did not differ when detecting a big change, e.g., when (...) a character’s color was changed. Memorizing appears to function as a rather abstract representation of word forms because memory for characters’ fonts was poor independently of expertise (Experiment 3), though still visual. Distractors that were highly similar conceptually did not increase memory errors, but visually similar distractors impaired memory (Experiment 4). We hypothesized that literates in Chinese represent characters in VWM as tokens of visual word forms made available by long-term memory. In Experiment 5, we provided novices with visual word form knowledge. Participants subsequently performed a change detection task with trained and novel characters in a functional magnetic resonance experiment. We analyzed set size- and training-dependent effects in the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and the visual word form area. VWM for trained characters was better than for novel characters. Neural activity increased with set size and at a slower rate for trained than for novel characters. All conditions approached the same maximum, but novel characters reached the maximum at a smaller set size than trained characters. The time course of the bold response depended on set size and knowledge status. Starting from the same initial maximum, neural activity at small set sizes returned to baseline more quickly for trained characters than for novel characters. Additionally, high performers showed generally more neural activity in the IPS than low performers. We conclude that experts’ better performance in working memory (WM) is caused by the availability of visual long-term representations (word form types) that allow a sparse representation of the perceived stimuli and make even small changes big because they cause a type change that is easily detected. (shrink)

Our contemporary nihilism -- Homer's polytheism -- From Aeschylus to Augustine : monotheism on the rise -- From Dante to Kant : the attractions and dangers of autonomy -- Fanaticism, polytheism, and Melville's "evil art" -- David Foster Wallace's nihilism -- Conclusion : lives worth living in a secular age.

McDowell's claim that "in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness",1 suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non-mental content that is non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic. This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving problems, learning a new skill, receiving coaching, and (...) so forth, such monitoring is invaluable. But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it degrades performance to at best competence. On McDowell's view, there is no way to account for such a degradation in performance since the same sort of content would be involved whether we were fully absorbed in or paying attention to what we were doing. McDowell claims that it is an advantage of his conceptualism that it avoids any foundationalist attempt to build up the objective world on the basis of an indubitable Given or any other ground-floor experience. And, indeed, if the world is all that is the case and our minds are unproblematically open to it, all experience is on the same footing. But one must distinguish motor intentionality, and the interrelated solicitations our coping body is intertwined with, from conceptual intentionality and the world of propositional structures it opens onto. The existential phenomenologist can then agree with McDowell in rejecting traditional foundationalisms, while yet affirming and describing the ground-floor role of motor intentionality in providing the support on which all forms of conceptual intentionality are based. (shrink)

This volume presents a selection of Hubert Dreyfus's pioneering work in bringing phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. Each of the thirteen essays interprets, develops, and extends the insights of his predecessors working in the European philosophical tradition. One of Dreyfus' central contributions to reading the historical canon of philosophy comes from his recognition that great philosophers help us to understand the -background practices- of a culture - the practices that shape (...) and embody our most basic understanding of ourselves and the things and situations we encounter in our world. Background practices are all too often overlooked completely, or else their importance is misunderstood. Each chapter in this volume shows in one way or another how a broad range of philosophical topics can only be properly understood when we recognize how they are grounded in the background practices that shape our lives and give meaning to our activities, our tasks, our normative commitments, our aims and our goals. (shrink)

I want to combine two hitherto largely independent research projects, scientific understanding and mechanistic explanations. Understanding is not only achieved by answering why-questions, that is, by providing scientific explanations, but also by answering what-questions, that is, by providing what I call scientific descriptions. Based on this distinction, I develop three forms of understanding: understanding-what, understanding-why, and understanding-how. I argue that understanding-how is a particularly deep form of understanding, because it is based on mechanistic explanations, which answer why something happens in (...) virtue of what it is made of. I apply the three forms of understanding to two case studies: first, to the historical development of thermodynamics and, second, to the differences between the Clausius and the Boltzmann entropy in explaining thermodynamic processes. (shrink)

A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism is a complete guide to two of the dominant movements of philosophy in the twentieth century. Written by a team of leading scholars, including Dagfinn Føllesdal, J. N. Mohanty, Robert Solomon, Jean–Luc Marion Highlights the area of overlap between the two movements Features longer essays discussing each of the main schools of thought, shorter essays introducing prominent themes, and problem–oriented chapters Organised topically, around concepts such as temporality, intentionality, death and nihilism Features essays on (...) unusual subjects, such as medicine, the emotions, artificial intelligence, and environmental philosophy. (shrink)

»Neque quidquam intelligi potest esse sine esse.« On the necessity of being as an epistemological principle in Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Kues. The paper analyses the plausibility of the reasoning for the rational necessity of being. The decisive point for the question as to why for Meister Eckhart being alone is necessary, unvarying in itself and self-evident is the conviction that nothing can be thought which is distinct from being, outside of being or without being. Eckhart states this basic (...) philosophical insight repeatedly using the how-question: How could something be knowable as being which is not and cannot be? Nicolas Cusanus concurs with Eckhart’s claim that nothingness is absolutely excluded from being and embraces his strategy of argumentation, including the way it is stated. Cusanus adopts the central principle of Eckhart’s thought that being must be absolutely knowable by founding all multiplicity in unity, that is, in the being of unity, taking recourse in this point to the quomodo-question typical for Eckhart. Cusanus claims to have proved philosophically that being is rationally necessary, that it is a comprehensive, ultimate and incontrovertible certainty: Nothing can be truer and more secure than the presupposition of being, which is indispensable for all thinking. (shrink)

Que l'âme ne soit pas séparée du corps est une affaire entendue. Mais a-t-on pris la juste mesure de notre incarnation quand on cherche l'esprit dans le cerveau, comme on s'attend à trouver le génie dans la lampe? À rebours de cette conception, cet ouvrage, au carrefour de la philosophie phénoménologique et de la clinique, propose de prendre au sérieux l'idée d'un corps animé. Aux côtés du langage, le corps est d'abord un lieu privilégié de l'expression de l'esprit. Grâce à (...) lui nous entrons dans une entente de ce que le monde veut nous dire et c'est par son entremise que nous connaissons une transaction vivante avec ce que le monde exige de nous. Cet itinéraire dans le silence de la vie intentionnelle du corps se termine par quelques perspectives cliniques, parce qu'il faut bien admettre que nous n'aurions rien à quoi remédier si nous n'étions au risque de voir cette transaction fléchir dans la maladie. (shrink)

The ArgumentDevelopments in theoretical physics, even when they are revolutionary for physics, usually donotenter public awareness. The reaction to the special relativity theory is one of the few exceptions. The conceptual changes brought by special relativity to our notions of space and time, induced a lively debate not only within intellectual circles but in many strata of the educated middle class. In this article, I focus on a particular moment of public reaction to special and general relativity theory and to (...) its creator Albert Einstein. I try to paint a picture of the anti-Einstein campaign in Germany of 1920, with finer brush strokes than those applied previously by others. My aim is to embed the campaign into the cultural and political climate of the Weimar republic. Without leaving the realm of physics only a superficial understanding of what happened seems possible. My thesis is that the anti-Einstein-campaign was organized, and the physicists involved in it used, mainly in order to rally support for one of the German right-wing parties, the Deutschnationale Volkspartei. (shrink)

Back in 1950, while a physics major at Harvard, I wandered into C.I. Lewis’s epistemology course. There, Lewis was confidently expounding the need for an indubitable Given to ground knowledge, and he was explaining where that ground was to be found. I was so impressed that I immediately switched majors from ungrounded physics to grounded philosophy.

OF THE many issues surrounding the new interest in hermeneutics, current debate has converged upon two.

The article discusses the connection between theory formation and historical research in the study of religion. It presupposes that the study of religion is conceived of as an empirical discipline. The empirical basis of theories is provided primarily by historical research, including research in the very recent past, that is, the present time. Research in the history of religions, therefore, is an indispensable part of the study of religion. However, in recent discussions on the methods, aims, and theoretical presuppositions of (...) the discipline, research in the history of religions largely is ignored. To shed some light on this blind spot, the article builds on the philosophy of science of Critical Realism. While the first part deals with the role of historical research in theoretical discourses of the discipline, the second part explains fundamental ontological and epistemological positions of Critical Realism and their implications for empirical research. On this basis, some methodological problems of theory formation in the study of religion are discussed in the third part. In particular, it is argued that it is impossible to validate empirically theories of religion that aim to explain what religion is. The concluding part sketches ways of theory formation in the study of religion that does not take religion as the explanandum but as the theoretical perspective that guides research. (shrink)