By utilizing new information from both clinical and experimental (lesion, electrophysiological, and gene-activation) studies with animals, the anatomy underlying anterograde amnesia has been reformulated. The distinction between temporal lobe and diencephalic amnesia is of limited value in that a common feature of anterograde amnesia is damage to part of an comprising the hippocampus, the fornix, the mamillary bodies, and the anterior thalamic nuclei. This view, which can be traced back to Delay and Brion (1969), differs from other recent models in (...) placing critical importance on the efferents from the hippocampus via the fornix to the diencephalon. These are necessary for the encoding and, hence, the effective subsequent recall of episodic memory. An additional feature of this hippocampalanterior thalamic and the perirhinal–medial dorsal thalamic systems are compromised, leading to severe deficits in both recall and recognition. (shrink)

Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would he balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun. But the future has no such reality (as the pictured past and the perceived present possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter (...) of thought. (shrink)

The form of nominalism known as 'mathematical fictionalism' is examined and found wanting, mainly on grounds that go back to an early antinominalist work of Rudolf Carnap that has unfortunately not been paid sufficient attention by more recent writers.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John P. Anton C. P. CAVAFY'S ARS POETICA ' It is generally recognized that Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was not born a poet but became one only through persistence and labor, reaching his "first step" sometime after the midpoint of his life. In his effort to assess the quality of his earlier poetic production and sharpen his sensitivity in facing self-criticism, he decided to put in writing his (...) personal thoughts on his work sometime in 1903. The text was written in English in a personal shorthand Cavafy had devised for his own use. It was found among the papers he left to A. Sengopoulos and published for the first time in 1963 by M. Peridis, who also supplied the suitable title Ars Poetica. It falls outside the scope of this essay to discuss the antecedents of this document. Taken as a whole, the text has all the clarity and directness required of a testament designed to serve as a personal guide and handbook. The problems it discusses are limited to the needs of the poet. In this regard, the Ars Poetica has neither the range of topics nor the theoretical scope of, for instance, Aristotle's Poetics. It is quite certain that the ideas that preoccupy Cavafy in the Ars Poetica had been on his mind for a period of years. However, the Ars Poetica is his first prose piece where he gives a systematic treatment to technical and critical issues directly related to the assessment of his work and his role as a poet. In order to project here a clear image of Cavafy's struggle to reach his technical maturity which came after 1910, we need first to discuss the persistent problems he faced during this crucial decade, then to examine the attitudes and values he embodied in certain representative early poems, and finally to relate them to the guiding principles he formulated in his self-addressed poetics of 1903. A number of interrelated problems confronted Cavafy in his late twenties and throughout his thirties. They emerged one by one, to 85 86Philosophy and Literature make more pressing the demand for a consistent solution and a complete recasting of his outlook. Coming to terms with them was extremely difficult. Aside from the emotional and sexual pressures he had to face alone, there was the absence of suitable ideas and conceptual tools to provide him with even the rudiments of an intellectual framework. Whatever he borrowed from Europe and England, or resurrected from his own Hellenic heritage, proved either beyond assimilation or insufficiently digested. The lingering issues fell roughly into four areas. (i) Despite his determination to devote his life to the writing of poetry, the quality of his work was discouraging. He knew this and as a result he often expressed uncertainty about his ability to proceed. Time and again he appeared suffering from a feeling of inadequacy, but nevertheless he sought to engage a reflective mood from which to draw encouragement and hope. (ii) On the theoretical side, he identified with the long tradition which assigned a coveted cultural role to the savant-poet as discloser of truth and spokesman for humanity; this despite the prevailing climate of opinion in his immediate environment which recognized no such high position in his case. Cavafy knew that his standing with the Greek community of Alexandria had gradually dwindled with the loss of family wealth and his lowly employment, and also that his expectations to be respected in his role as a poet and leader in communal affairs were futile. This denial of personal recognition in a society dominated by commerce and finance contributed to his mood of depression. The feeling of being an outcast, despite his associations with the upper social circles of Alexandria, became a constant irritant to his sense of pride. (iii) The course of culture, the destiny of human institutions and the workings of history, became puzzles as he tried to view them through the opaque glass of disillusionment. These were the grand themes actively discussed in the writings of leading European intellectuals, but to the young poet they had a different personal urgency. His vital concern in this connection was not understanding science... (shrink)

There are schools of logicians who claim that an argument is not valid unless the conclusion is relevant to the premises. In particular, relevance logicians reject the classical theses that anything follows from a contradiction and that a logical truth follows from everything. This chapter critically evaluates several different motivations for relevance logic, and several systems of relevance logic, finding them all wanting.

How far does a researcher’s responsibility extend when an incidental finding is identified? Balancing pertinent ethical principles such as beneficence, respect for persons, and duty to rescue is not always straightforward, particularly in neuroimaging research where empirical data that might help guide decision making are lacking. We conducted a systematic survey of perceptions and preferences of 396 investigators, research participants, and Institutional Review Board members at our institution. Using the partial entrustment model as described by Richardson, we argue that our (...) data supports universal reading by a neuroradiologist of all research MRI scans for incidental findings and providing full disclosure to all participants. (shrink)

Glassary is a companion volume to Glas. It offers English readers fuller access to the masterwork of Jacques Derrida, the leading philosopher in France. Derrida is important for his investigations of language, philosophy, and writing. He has perforated the boundaries between academic disciplines, has demonstrated the theological underpinnings of apparently atheological philosophies, and has thrown into question traditional notions about the "ownership" of ideas. Glas exemplifies Derrida's methodology of reading and his central philosophical and literary concerns. The reader fascinated by (...) its complexities will appreciate the assistance of Glassary. Written by the chief translator of Glas, John P. Leavey, Jr., it includes an essay by Gregory Ulmer and a foreword by Jacques Derrida. The book provides all of the apparatus a reader of Glas might immediately desire, including notes on difficult or ambiguous passages, identifications of allusions and puns, locations of citations, and translations of passages in languages other than French. But Leavey does not stop there. He includes a glossary of use to readers of Glas in any language and essays that relate it to Derrida's texts and to the modern French critical enterprise as a whole. Leavey's essay focuses on Glas and literature and philosophy; Ulmer's on Glas and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Critics of organ donation after circulatory death (DCD) argue that, even if donors are past the point of autoresuscitation, they have not satisfied the “irreversibility” requirement in the circulatory and respiratory criteria for determining death, since their circulation and respiration could be artificially restored. Thus, removing their vital organs violates the “dead-donor” rule. I defend DCD donation against this criticism. I argue that practical medical-ethical considerations, including respect for do-not-resuscitate orders, support interpreting “irreversibility” to mean permanent cessation of circulation and (...) respiration. Assuming a consciousness-related formulation of human death, I then argue that the loss of circulation and respiration is significant, because it leads to the permanent loss of consciousness and thus to the death of the human person. The DNR request by an organ donor should thus be interpreted to mean “do not restore to consciousness.” Finally, I respond to an objection that if “irreversibility” has a medical-ethical meaning, it would entail the absurd possibility that one of two individuals in the same physical state could be alive and the other dead—an implication that some think is inconsistent with understanding death as an objective biological state of the organism. I argue that advances in medical technology have created phenomena that challenge the assumption that human death can be understood in strictly biological terms. I argue that ethical and ontological considerations about our nature bear on the definition and determination of death and thus on the permissibility of DCD. (shrink)

Highlighting previously neglected democratic strains in Machiavelli's major writings, McCormick excavates institutions through which the common people of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance republics constrained the power of wealthy citizens and public magistrates, and he imagines how such institutions might be revived today.

The species of indeterminist tense logic called Peircean by A. N. Prior is proved to be recursively decidable.

In this bold addition to Oxford's What Everyone Needs to Know® series, John L. Esposito and Natana DeLong-Bas offer a guide to the often-discussed but seldom-understood concept of Sharia, responding to misunderstandings and distortions, as well as providing answers to questions about the origin, nature, and content of Sharia.

In this paper, I defend brain death as a criterion for determining death against objections raised by Don Marquis, Michael Nair-Collins, Doyen Nguyen, and Laura Specker Sullivan. I argue that any definition of death for beings like us relies on some sortal concept by which we are individuated and identified and that the choice of that concept in a practical context is not determined by strictly biological considerations but involves metaphysical, moral, social, and cultural considerations. This view supports acceptance of (...) a more pluralistic legal definition of death as well as acceptance of brain death as death. (shrink)

The complexity of the set of truths of arithmetic is determined for various theories of truth deriving from Kripke and from Gupta and Herzberger.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE MARVELOUS EXCHANGE: RAYMUND SCHWAGER'S INTERPRETATION OF THE ffiSTORY OF SOTERIOLOGY JOHNP. GALVIN The Oath-Olia University of America Washington, D.O. IN A WIDE-RANGING series of studies of disparate material, the French ethnologist and literary critic Rene Girard has proposed 'a remarkably comprehensive anthropological theory. Girard identifies imitation, which inevita.bly issues in rivalry and violence, as the decisive force in human conduct. In primitive societies,,Jacking centralized civil authority and confronted (...) with recurrent threats to survival, a fragile social order is preserved solely by discharging violence upon an arbitrarily chosen victim. According to Girard's analyses, periodic ritual reenactment of this primal event is the source of all great social institutions; the "scapegoat mechanism " thus lies at the root of human culture.1 While Girard has devoted increasing attention to examining the Judeo-Christian tradition from the perspective of his anthropology,2 more thorough application of his thought to Christian theological themes has been undertaken by Raymund Schwager, a Swiss Jesuit professor of dogmatics at the University of Innsbruck. In a book published in 1978, Schwager argued that Girard's theory offers a useful framework for addressing various biblical issues (the pervasiveness 1 Cf. especially Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977) ; Des choses cachees depuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1978); The Scapegoat (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1986). For discussion of the bearing of Girard's thought on biblical issues cf. Robert North, "Violence and the Bible: The Girard Connection," OBQ 47 (1985), 1-27. 2 Cf. esp. Des choses cachees depuis la fondation du monde, pp. 163-304. 675 676 JOHN P. GALVIN of violence in the Old Testament; the diversity of Old Testament depictions of God; the prophetic critique of sacrifice; and the salvific significance of Jesus' public life and death) which have pvoven intractable from other perspectives.3 Since the appearance of that work, he has extended his testing of the theological value of Girard's thought, chiefly through publication of a series of ten articles in the Zeitschrift fur katholische Theologie on major figures and themes from the history of soteriology. These essays, always conceived as an integral whole, have now been gathered in a single volume; as a unit, they form a significant account of the history of Christian thinking on a central theological topic.4 Sohwa;ger devotes his first six studies to the patristic period. His historical survey begins with an examination of the contrasting soteriologies of Marcion and Irenaeus, under the title " The God of the Old Testament and the God of the Crucified " (pp. 7-31). Marcion's questioning of the inner unity of the Old Testament 1 and the apostolic writings led him to reject the Old Testament as the revelation of a creator God of rigorous justice, far inferior to the God of love manifest in Jesus Christ. Corruption of Christ's teachings by his disciples led to the calling of Paul, who alone preached the gospel in pure form. Marcion 1 therefore assembled a canon of Pauline writings (minus alleged regressive intevpolations) rand reconstructed f:vom Lu~e what he judged to he the sole authentic written gospel, one communicated directly to Paul hy Christ. In opposition to such Gnostic thought, Irenaeus rejected any dualism in the understanding of creation and :vedemption and a Brauahen wir einen Siindenbook?: Gewalt und ErlOsung in den biblisohen Sohriften (Munich: Kosel, 1978); an English translation has recently been published: Must There Be Scapegoats?: Violenoe and Redemption in the Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987). For presentation and discussion of this stage of Schwager's work cf. John P. Galvin, "Jesus as Scapegoat?: Violence and the Sacred in the Theology of Raymund Schwager," Thomist 46 (1982), 173-194. 4 Der wunderbare Tausoh: Zur Gesohichte und Deutung der ErlOsungslehre (Munich: Kosel, 1986). Pp. 327. DM 34.00. RAYMUND SCHWAGEll AND SOTERlOLOGY 677 consequently defended the unity of the two testaments. Their distinct economies of salvation result from a wise divine pedagogy, ev;er attentive to different stages in the gradual maturation of the human raee. The Old Testament is a preparation for the recapitulation of all things in Christ; it should be understood typologically, iby reference to its... (shrink)

The source, status, and significance of the derivation of the necessity of identity at the beginning of Kripke’s lecture “Identity and Necessity” is discussed from a logical, philosophical, and historical point of view.

This paper challenges the recommendation of 1981 President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research that all jurisdictions in the United States should adopt the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which endorses a whole-brain, rather than a higher-brain, definition of death. I argue that the Commission was wrong to reject the "personhood argument" for the higher-brain definition on the grounds that there is no consensus among philosophers or the general population as to what (...) constitutes "personhood". I claim that philosophers agree that some potential for cognitive function is necessary for personhood and that, when this is absent in cases of anencephaly and persistent vegetative state (PVS), the individual should be considered dead. I further argue that the lack of consensus among the general population is due in large measure to misunderstandings about the medical reality of PVS and beliefs influenced by feelings for a specific individual in PVS. I also examine and reject two tutiorist arguments which have been used to support the Commission's position: that the higher-brain definition would threaten the severely senile and severely retarded, and that there are not currently adequate medical techniques for determining when all higher-brain activities have ceased. Keywords: death, personhood, persistent vegetative state, anencephaly CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

“The inquiry into the foundations of knowledge is a systematic inquiry into the problem of truth. This problem constitutes one of the three main concerns of philosophical analysis, the others being the problem of beauty and the problem of goodness.” Thus Evangelos P. Papanoutsos, Greece’s leading contemporary philosopher, introduces this third book of his “Trilogy of the Mind.” The first two volumes covered aesthetics and ethics; this one is a major work in epistemology. Combining rigorous analysis with thorough-going scholarship, displaying (...) an intimate acquaintance with the physical and humanistic sciences, and drawing on a deep understanding of philosophical method and the history of philosophy, Professor Papanoutsos is held in high esteem by his European colleagues. This translation of his masterpiece will enhance his reputation and influence among readers of English. The themes of The Foundation of Knowledge range over the topics that have been continually challenging to the modern era of philosophers: being and consciousness, experience and reason, common sense and science, and the domains of knowledge, including the nature of philosophical knowledge. Special attention is paid to the analysis of theoretical consciousness, the problems of categorical thinking, the theory of judgment, mathematics and logic, and the limits of historical understanding. (shrink)

As the expansion of the Internet and the digital formatting of all kinds of creative works move us further into the information age, intellectual property issues have become paramount. Computer programs costing thousands of research dollars are now copied in an instant. People who would recoil at the thought of stealing cars, computers, or VCRs regularly steal software or copy their favorite music from a friend's CD. Since the Web has no national boundaries, these issues are international concerns. The contributors-philosophers, (...) legal theorists, and business scholars, among others-address questions such as: Can abstract ideas be owned? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare to the violation of physical property rights? Can computer software and other digital information be protected? And how should legal systems accommodate the ownership of intellectual property in an information age? Intellectual Property is a lively examination of these and other issues, and an invaluable resource for librarians, lawyers, businesspeople, and scholars. (shrink)

This book will appeal to mathematicians and philosophers interested in the foundations of mathematics.

David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature presents the most important account of skepticism in the history of modern philosophy. In this lucid and thorough introduction to the work, John P. Wright examines the development of Hume's ideas in the Treatise, their relation to eighteenth-century theories of the imagination and passions, and the reception they received when Hume published the Treatise. He explains Hume's arguments concerning the inability of reason to establish the basic beliefs which underlie science and morals, (...) as well as his arguments showing why we are nevertheless psychologically compelled to accept such beliefs. The book will be a valuable guide for those seeking to understand the nature of modern skepticism and its connection with the founding of the human sciences during the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This essay reevaluates the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace the political authority of Kantian liberalism with, respectively, a ‘political theology’ and ‘Biblical atheism’ derived from the thought of early-modern state theorists like Hobbes and Spinoza. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that post-Kantian Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected ‘form’ of any kind, fixated myopically on material things and lacked any conception of the external constraints that (...) invariably condition the possibilities of philosophy, morality and politics. They considered Kantian reason and liberal politics to pose serious threats to ‘genuine’ expressions of rationality and as dangerous obfuscations of the necessity of political order—of the brute fact that human beings stand in need of ‘being ruled,’ as such. (shrink)

What is the moral status of humans lacking the potential for consciousness? The concept of potentiality often tips the scales in life-and-death medical decisions. Some argue that all human embryos have the potential to develop characteristics—such as consciousness, intellect, and will—that we normally associate with personhood. Individuals with total brain failure or in a persistent vegetative state are thought to lack the potential for consciousness or any other mental function. Or do they? In Potentiality John Lizza gathers classic articles (...) alongside newly commissioned chapters from leading thinkers who analyze the nature of potentiality in bioethics, a concept central to a number of important debates. The contributors illustrate how considerations of potentiality and potential persons complicate the analysis of the moral consideration of persons at the beginning and end of life. A number of works explicitly uncover the Aristotelian background of the concept, while others explore philosophical issues about persons, dispositions, and possibility. The common assumption that potentiality is intrinsic to whatever has the potentiality is challenged by a relational view of persons, an extrinsic account of dispositions, and attention to how extrinsic factors affect realistic possibilities. Although potentiality has figured prominently in bioethical literature, it has not received a great deal of logical, semantic, and metaphysical analysis in contemporary philosophical literature. This collection will bring these thorny philosophical issues to the fore. Incorporating cutting-edge research on the topic of potentiality, this thought-provoking collection will interest bioethicists, philosophers, health care professionals, attorneys engaged in medical and health issues, and hospital and governmental committees who advise on policy and law concerning issues at the beginning and end of life. (shrink)

In their target article, Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland seek to shift focus away from controversy over whether donors in protocols of controlled donation after circulatory death (cDCD) are dead. Citing...

This work, the first book-length study of its topic, is an important contribution to the literature of philosophical logic and philosophy of language, with implications for other branches of philosophy, including philosophy of mathematics. However, five of the book's ten chapters , including many of the author's most original contributions, are devoted to issues about natural language, and lie pretty well outside the scope of this journal, not to mention that of the reviewer's competence. For this reason I will here (...) largely confine my attention to the other half of the book, and so will be far from doing full justice to the book as a whole; indeed, there is such a wealth of detail in the book that I will be unable to do full justice even to the five chapters selected for comment.Non-distributive predicates.To begin with some points that have often been remarked, formulas in classical first-order logic are built up from predicates by means of a limited range of logical operators . Natural language involves many other such operators, beginning with temporal and modal operators, that are of great philosophical interest, but these are ignored by classical first-order logic. The reasons why it ignores them are surely that classical first-order logic was developed primarily for analyzing mathematical arguments, and that such grammatical categories as tense and mood play no significant role in mathematics.It has been less often remarked that the range of predicates considered in classical first-order logic is also limited. From Frege onwards, predicates have been taken to be essentially sentences with one or more gaps or places suitable to be filled in by singular noun phrases. Natural language involves also plural predicates, as well as mixed predicates with some …. (shrink)

The chapters of Rousseau’s Social Contract devoted to republican Rome prescribe institutions that obstruct popular efforts at diminishing the excessive power and influence of wealthy citizens and political magistrates. I argue that Rousseau reconstructs ancient Rome’s constitution in direct opposition to the more populist and anti‐elitist model of the Roman Republic championed by Machiavelli in the Discourses: Rousseau eschews the establishment of magistracies, like the tribunes, reserved for common citizens exclusively, and endorses assemblies where the wealthy are empowered to outvote (...) the poor in lawmaking and elections. On the basis of sociologically anonymous principles like generality and popular sovereignty, and by confining elite accountability to general elections, Rousseau’s neo‐Roman institutional proposals aim to pacify the contestation of class hierarchies and inflate elite prerogative within republics – under the cover of more formal, seemingly more genuine, equality. (shrink)