Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page 57-59.

Nevertheless, and in spite of these drawbacks, it will be clearly intimated to him that the value of philosophy is, indeed, very great, although it happens ...

Mind-body dualism conceptualizes mind and body as distinct, but there are different ways that dualism may be instantiated. In this study, we examined how Hierarchical Dualism (the belief that mind and body are distinct, and the mind is superior) and Mutual-Influence Dualism (the belief that mind and body are separate but interrelate) related to health behaviors and mental health in three student samples: exclusively queer, exclusively straight, and a mixed university subject pool (N = 535). Participants in each sample endorsed (...) Mutual-Influence Dualism at a higher rate than Hierarchical Dualism. Mutual-Influence dualism was consistently associated with greater engagement in health-promoting behaviors and greater well-being, whereas Hierarchical Dualism differed by sample. These results suggest that dualist beliefs do not uniformly shape the lives of those who hold them: rather, the relation between dualist beliefs and health differs as a function of the type of dualism and the identities we hold. (shrink)

Critical care of neonatesThe recently published report of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Critical care decisions in fetal and neonatal medicine, is a valuable contribution to the discussion of decision making in the critical care of neonates. Drawing upon medical evidence, the working party highlights the many practical difficulties arising in neonatal care and by setting out clearly the nature of the ethical and other issues arising in this area of medicine, and their relationship with neonatal development, the resulting report (...) has the potential to lead both to improved practice and to better informed communication between doctors and families when they face difficult decisions about how best to treat very premature babies. Based on medical evidence, the working party sets out guidelines on decision-making about the resuscitation of babies born before the gestational age of 25 weeks and 6 days, dividing this period into four chronological periods: before 21 weeks and 6 days when resuscitation should normally only take place within the context of a research project; between 22 weeks and 23 weeks when resuscitation should not normally be carried out unless the parents request it; at 23 or 24 weeks when parental views should take precedence; and, after 24 weeks when resuscitation should be the norm unless not in the child’s best interests.There are several practical ethical difficulties with this aspect of the advice. To what extent, for example, does the paediatric assessment of the child, intended to play a role in decision-making about the appropriateness of resuscitation, itself depend on the initiation of resuscitation? To what extent is it reasonable and humane to expect parents to take full responsibility for making decisions about resuscitation between 23 and 24 weeks? On what grounds is it acceptable to attempt to resuscitate a baby <21 weeks and 6 …. (shrink)

If the a priori is the proper subject matter of transcendental philosophy, then the problems of the a priori are also problems for transcendental philosophy. the idea that defines transcendental philosophy is the idea that there are stable general structures which are discernible in experience, provide the foundations of our knowledge of it, and collectively constitute an a priori which transcends experience and informs it. the a priori is traditionally conceived as a nexus of relations which is held to be (...) logically/temporally prior to experience and responsible for its organization. in this essay, i challenge this traditional (kantian) understanding of the a priori and set forth an alternative to it based on the writings of maurice merleau-ponty. the intent is to provide a new conception of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper we will show that Hempel's covering law model can't deal very well with explanations that are based on incomplete knowledge. In particular the symmetry thesis, which is an important aspect of the covering law model, turns out to be problematic for these explanations. We will discuss an example of an electric circuit, which clearly indicates that the symmetry of explanation and prediction does not always hold. It will be argued that an alternative logic for causal explanation is (...) needed. And we will investigate to what extent non-monotonic epistemic logic can provide such an alternative logical framework. Finally we will show that our non-monotonic logical analysis of explanation is not only suitable for simple cases such as the electric circuit, but that it also sheds new light on more controversial causal explanations such as Milton Friedman's explanation of the business cycle. (shrink)

have recently provided a compelling demonstration of enhanced attentional control under post-hypnotic suggestion. Using the classic color-word interference paradigm, in which the task is to ignore a word and to name the color in which it is printed (e.g., RED in green, say ''green''), they gave a post-hypnotic instruction to participants that they would be unable to read. This eliminated Stroop interference in high suggestibility participants but did not alter interference in low suggestibility participants. replicated this pattern and further demonstrated (...) that it is not due to a visual strategy (such as blurring or looking at a different location). As a historical footnote, we describe a ''case study'' from 18 years ago in which we observed the same result using a hypnotic instruction to a single highly suggestible individual that he could not read. The elimination of Stroop interference has important implications for both the study of attention and the study of hypnosis. (shrink)

It is proved (Theorem 1) that if 0♯ exists, then any constructible forcing property which over L adds no reals, over V collapses an uncountable L-cardinal to cardinality ω. This improves a theorem of Foreman, Magidor, and Shelah. Also, a method for approximating this phenomenon generically is found (Theorem 2). The strategy is first to reduce the problem of `disabling' forcing properties to that of specializing certain trees in a weak sense.

We present a general derivation of the Duffin-Kemmer-Petiau (D.K.P) equation on the relativistic phase space proposed by Bohm and Hiley. We consider geometric algebras and the idea of algebraic spinors due to Riesz and Cartan. The generators βμ (p) of the D.K.P algebras are constructed in the standard fashion used to construct Clifford algebras out of bilinear forms. Free D.K.P particles and D.K.P particles in a prescribed external electromagnetic field are analized and general Liouville type equations for these cases are (...) obtained. Choosing particular values for the label p we classify the different types of the D.K.P Liouville operators. (shrink)

On 5 August 1968, publication of the Harvard Committee’s report on the subject of “irreversible coma” established a standard for diagnosing death on neurological grounds. On the same day, the 22nd World Medical Assembly met in Sydney, Australia, and announced the Declaration of Sydney, a pronouncement on death, which is less often quoted because it was overshadowed by the impact of the Harvard Report. To put those events into present-day perspective, the authors reviewed all papers published on this subject and (...) the World Medical Association web page and documents, and corresponded with Dr A G Romualdez, the son of Dr A Z Romualdez. There was vast neurological expertise among some of the Harvard Committee members, leading to a comprehensible and practical clinical description of the brain death syndrome and the way to diagnose it. This landmark account had a global medical and social impact on the issue of human death, which simultaneously lessened reception of the Declaration of Sydney. Nonetheless, the Declaration of Sydney faced the main conceptual and philosophical issues on human death in a bold and forthright manner. This statement differentiated the meaning of death at the cellular and tissue levels from the death of the person. This was a pioneering view on the discussion of human death, published as early as in 1968, that should be recognised by current and future generations. (shrink)

The requirement of gauge invariance for the Schwinger-DeWitt equations, interpreted as a manifestly covariant quantum theory for the evolution of a system in spacetime, implies the existence of a five-dimensional pre-Maxwell field on the manifold of spacetime and “proper time” τ. The Maxwell theory is contained in this theory; integration of the field equations over τ restores the Maxwell equations with the usual interpretation of the sources. Following Schwinger's techniques, we study the Green's functions for the five-dimensional hyperbolic field equations (...) for both signatures ± [corresponding to O(4, 1) or O(3, 2) symmetry of the field equations] of the proper time derivative. The classification of the Green's functions follows that of the four-dimensional theory for “massive” fields, for which the “mass” squared may be positive or negative, respectively. The Green's functions for the five-dimensional field are then given by the Fourier transform over the “mass” parameter. We derive the Green's functions corresponding to the principal part ΔP and the homogeneous function Δ 1 ; all of the Green's functions can be expressed in terms of these, as for the usual field equations with definite mass. In the O(3, 2) case, the principal part function has support for x2⩾τ2, corresponding to spacelike propagation, as well as along the light cone x2=0 (for τ=0). There can be no transmission ofinformation in spacelike directions, with this propagator, since the Maxwell field, obtained by integration over τ, does not contain this component of the support. Measurements are characterized by such an integration. The spacelike field therefore can dynamically establish spacelike correlations. (shrink)

This article analyzes US drone operations through a historical and ethnographic analysis of the remote split paradigm used by the US Air Force. Remote split refers to the globally distributed command and control of drone operations and entails a network of human operators and analysts in the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia as well as in the continental United States. Though often viewed as a teleological progression of “unmanned” warfare, this paper argues that historically specific technopolitical logics establish the (...) conditions of possibility for the work of war to be divisible into discreet and computationally mediated tasks that are viewed as effective in US military engagements. To do so, the article traces how new forms of authorized evidence and expertise have shaped developments in military operations and command and control priorities from the Cold War and the “electronic battlefield” of Vietnam through the Gulf War and the conflict in the Balkans to contemporary deployments of drone operations. The article concludes by suggesting that it is by paying attention to divisions of labor and human–machine configurations that we can begin to understand the everyday and often invisible structures that sustain perpetual war as a military strategy of the United States. (shrink)

In this paper I present a range of substructural logics for a conditional connective ↦. This connective was original introduced semantically via restriction on the ternary accessibility relation R for a relevant conditional. I give sound and complete proof systems for a number of variations of this semantic definition. The completeness result in this paper proceeds by step-by-step improvements of models, rather than by the one-step canonical model method. This gradual technique allows for the additional control, lacking in the canonical (...) model method, that is required. (shrink)