Archéologie d'un même geste d'exclusion dont l'internement social de la folie et l'internement métaphysique de la déraison sont les effets, l'Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique décide de voir en Descartes le théoricien de cet acte violent de fondation de la raison occidentale. Après avoir exposé la polémique Foucault — Derrida, nous nous proposons, d'une part, d'identifier la « positivité » propre au discours foucaldien de la période « archéologique » et, d'autre part, de reprendre à notre compte la (...) lecture de Descartes. Nous espérons alors montrer que le « coup de force » cartésien ne vise nullement à exclure la folie mais, au contraire, à forger rationnellement la fiction d'un monde qui serait sans ordre. Le monde sensible devient le lieu d'un simulacre, et ce qui le rend fascinant c'est la catastrophe imaginaire qu'il y a derrière, savoir la nature peut-être irrationnelle de l'univers. C'est de la nécessité de cette fiction que le sujet pensant va pouvoir émerger comme le lieu de la critique.Being an archeology which, in a single excluding movement, produces the social confinement of madness and the metaphysical confinement of un-reason, The History of Madness in the Classical Age decides to see in Descartes the theoretician of this violent act of foundation of Western reason. After a presentation of the Foucault — Derrida polemic, the attempt is made, on the one hand, to identify the "positivity" proper to the Foucauldian discourse of the "archeological" period and, on the other hand, to re-read Descartes in a new light. One hopes to show that the Cartesian "revolution" in no way attempts to exclude madness but, on the contrary, to forge rationally the fiction of a world which would be without order. The sense world becomes the world of appearances, and what makes it fascinating is the imaginary catastrophe behind it, the knowledge of theperhaps irrational nature of the universe. It is by the necessity of this fiction that the thinking subject is going to be able to emerge as the place where the critique occurs. (shrink)

L’exemple espagnol de Podemos montre comment sortir positivement des limites de l’horizontalité du mouvement, à la fois si riche et infructueuse, et comment agencer un geste politique d’autoconstitution, d’organisation et de représentation. Ce passage de l’horizontalité à la verticalité, de l’agitation et de la résistance du mouvement vers le travail de gouvernement pose non seulement des questions de spatialité, mais surtout des questions de temporalité, de durée. L’important passe par la (re)création d’un flux de mouvement politique, un système ouvert de (...) gouvernance depuis le bas qui maintient unis mouvement et gouvernement – par le débat constituant constant et par une extension de ce débat aux citoyens. (shrink)

Ce volume collectif accompagne, à quelques mois d’intervalle, la publication de l’édition critique des textes consacrés par Bentham à l’Australie (_Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia_) chez UCL Press sous la direction de Tim Causer et Philip Schofield. Les versions numériques des deux ouvrages sont disponibles en accès ouvert sur le site de l’éditeur. Bentham consacre un premier essai au système pénal en Australie en 1791, à peine six ans après le début des déportations de prisonniers (...) vers la nouvelle colonie carcérale. Il s’oppose sans relâche à cette politique et tente de démontrer que son propre projet de prison panoptique est à la fois plus efficace et moins coûteux pour punir les criminels et conduire à leur réforme. En 1801, au moment où le ministère rejette définitivement la construction du panoptique près de Londres, Bentham érige les colonies australiennes en symboles de la corruption de la constitution et de la malhonnêteté des membres du gouve... (shrink)

Il faut saluer la réédition du précieux livre d’Éliane Viennot sur la reine Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), paru en 1993 chez Payot, et aujourd’hui proposé par les éditions Perrin en format poche. Ce livre qui dans ses deux grandes parties voulait reconstituer l’« histoire d’une femme » et l’« histoire d’un mythe », mettait, dans un style vif et souvent mordant, un terme aux publications complaisantes qui avaient, tout au long du siècle passé, monté en épingle les écarts de conduite (...) de la «... (shrink)

Bien qu’Alexandre Dumas l’ait représentée en train de donner des leçons (particulières) de grec au beau La Mole, Marguerite de Valois n’est plus connue pour être une intellectuelle. C’est l’une des évidences que le mythe de la Reine Margot a été chargé de recouvrir, avec un succès qu’on ne mesure pas puisque la réalité a disparu derrière lui. Sa vie montre en effet que, née dans un groupe social où les femmes étaient des mécènes, et à une époque où (...) des femmes très diverses avaient décidé d’investir la scène littéraire, elle a utilisé sa notoriété, ses moyens et sa très grande culture pour promouvoir des idées, aussi bien sur le plan politique que philosophique et littéraire, aussi bien par l’encouragement à la création que par l’écriture de plusieurs œuvres et la publication de certaines. L’entreprise de distorsion et d’effacement de cette mémoire était sans doute d’autant plus nécessaire que, comme bien des femmes de son époque moins en vue qu’elle-même, elle avait œuvré pour un monde mixte, dans un temps où la plupart des intellectuels travaillaient à organiser et à approfondir la partition des sexes. (shrink)

Mettre à la disposition du public l'ensemble des écrits de la « reine Margot » permet d'éclairer la personnalité d'une reine dont l'image est assurément obscurcie par le mythe et dont la production littéraire était jusque là trop méconnue. On saluera donc l'initiative des éditions Champion pour accueillir, outre les Mémoires, des textes polémiques et poétiques variés, présentés par une spécialiste confirmée de Marguerite. Dans cet ensemble indéniablement riche et instructif, la présen...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, (...) Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized, in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself... (shrink)

Traumatic events happen in every age, yet there is a particularly cataclysmic feeling to our own epoch that is so attractive to some and so terrifying to others. The terrible events of September 11th 2001 still resonate and the repercussions continue to this day: the desperation of immigrants fleeing terror, the uncertainty of Brexit, Donald Trump in the White House, the rise of the alt-right and hard left, increasing fundamentalism, and terror groups intent on causing destruction to the Western way (...) of life. If that were not enough, we also have to grapple with the enormity of climate change and the charge that if we do not act now, it will be too late. Is it any wonder many are left overwhelmed by the events they see on the news? Galvanised by the events outside of his consulting room, in 2015, David Morgan began The Political Mind seminars at the British Psychoanalytical Society and their successful run continues today. A series of superlative seminars, mostly presented by colleagues from the British Society plus a few select external experts, that examine a dazzling array of relevant topics to provide a psychoanalytic understanding of just what is going on in our world. This book is the first in The Political Mind series to bring these seminars to a wider audience. The Unconscious in Political and Social Life contains compelling contributions from Christopher Bollas, Michael Rustin, Jonathan Sklar, David Bell, Philip Stokoe, Roger Kennedy, David Morgan, M. Fakhry Davids, Ruth McCall, R. D. Hinshelwood, Renée Danziger, Josh Cohen, Sally Weintrobe, and Margot Waddell. They investigate so many vital issues affecting us today: the evolution of democracy, right-wing populism, prejudice, the rise of the far right, attitudes to refugees and migrants, neoliberalism, fundamentalism, terrorism, the Palestine-Israel situation, political change, feminism, austerity in the UK, financial globalisation, and climate change. This book needs to be read by all who are concerned by the state of the world today. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts with their awareness of what motivates human beings bring clarity and fresh insight to these matters. A deeper understanding of humanity awaits the reader of The Unconscious in Political and Social Life. (shrink)

This article surveys recent developments in the epistemology of modality.

It is widely assumed that sense perception cannot deliver knowledge of nonactual (metaphysical) possibilities. We are not supposed to be able to know that a proposition p is necessary or that p is possible (if p is false) by sense perception. This paper aims to establish that the role of sense perception is not so limited. It argues that we can know lots of modal facts by perception. While the most straightforward examples concern possibility and contingency, others concern necessity and (...) impossibility. The possibility of a perceptual route to some modal knowledge is not as radical as it may at first sound. On the contrary, acknowledging it has benefits. (shrink)

The epistemology of modality has focused on metaphysical modality and, more recently, counterfactual conditionals. Knowledge of kinds of modality that are not metaphysical has so far gone largely unexplored. Yet other theoretically interesting kinds of modality, such as nomic, practical, and ‘easy’ possibility, are no less puzzling epistemologically. Could Clinton easily have won the 2016 presidential election—was it an easy possibility? Given that she didn’t in fact win the election, how, if at all, can we know whether she easily could (...) have? This paper investigates the epistemology of the broad category of ‘objective’ modality, of which metaphysical modality is a special, limiting case. It argues that the same cognitive mechanisms that are capable of producing knowledge of metaphysical modality are also capable of producing knowledge of all other objective modalities. This conclusion can be used to explain the roles of counterfactual reasoning and the imagination in the epistemology of objective modality. (shrink)

This entry surveys recent developments in the epistemology of imagination, examining different views on the circumstances in which the imagination can function as a source of evidence, alongside more standard sources such as perception and inference.

This paper examines "moderate modal skepticism", a form of skepticism about metaphysical modality defended by Peter van Inwagen in order to blunt the force of certain modal arguments in the philosophy of religion. Van Inwagen’s argument for moderate modal skepticism assumes Yablo's (1993) influential world-based epistemology of possibility. We raise two problems for this epistemology of possibility, which undermine van Inwagen's argument. We then consider how one might motivate moderate modal skepticism by relying on a different epistemology of possibility, which (...) does not face these problems: Williamson’s (2007: ch. 5) counterfactual-based epistemology. Two ways of motivating moderate modal skepticism within that framework are found unpromising. Nevertheless, we also find a way of vindicating an epistemological thesis that, while weaker than moderate modal skepticism, is strong enough to support the methodological moral van Inwagen wishes to draw. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic put a large burden on many healthcare systems, causing fears about resource scarcity and triage. Several COVID-19 guidelines included age as an explicit factor and practices of both triage and ‘anticipatory triage’ likely limited access to hospital care for elderly patients, especially those in care homes. To ensure the legitimacy of triage guidelines, which affect the public, it is important to engage the public’s moral intuitions. Our study aimed to explore general public views in the UK on (...) the role of age, and related factors like frailty and quality of life, in triage during the COVID-19 pandemic. We held online deliberative workshops with members of the general public. Participants were guided through a deliberative process to maximise eliciting informed and considered preferences. Participants generally accepted the need for triage but strongly rejected ‘fair innings’ and ‘life projects’ principles as justifications for age-based allocation. They were also wary of the ‘maximise life-years’ principle, preferring to maximise the number of lives rather than life years saved. Although they did not arrive at a unified recommendation of one principle, a concern for three core principles and values eventually emerged: equality, efficiency and vulnerability. While these remain difficult to fully respect at once, they captured a considered, multifaceted consensus: utilitarian considerations of efficiency should be tempered with a concern for equality and vulnerability. This ‘triad’ of ethical principles may be a useful structure to guide ethical deliberation as societies negotiate the conflicting ethical demands of triage. (shrink)

Over the past decade, we have witnessed some early signs of progress in the battle against international bribery and corruption, a problem that throughout the history of commerce had previously been ignored. We present a model that we then use to assess progress in reducing bribery. The model components include both hard law and soft law legislation components and enforcement and compliance components. We begin by summarizing the literature that convincingly argues that bribery is an immoral and unethical practice and (...) that the economic harm it causes falls most heavily on those least able to absorb it. The next section summarizes the main provisions of anti-bribery legislation including the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the Organization for Eco nomic Development's Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Officials in International Business Transactions, the United Nations Convention Against Corruption and the laws of selected countries. We conclude this section with a discussion of the "moral imperialism" argument for not imposing Western laws and values on other cultures. The next section focuses on the roles played by NGOs including Transparency International (TI), the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the International Chamber of Commerce. We review trends in enforcement and prosecution, including a review of the United States' enforcement processes, mechanisms for cross-border legal assistance, a discussion of the distinctive nature of FCPA cases, and an assessment of what the future holds for enforcement. The final section focuses on compliance processes for corporations aimed at reducing the risk of FCPA and related violations. This section also addresses the ethics of gift giving and "grease" payments. The article concludes with a summary and suggestions for further research. Throughout the article, we reference important bribery cases and include comments from several authorities who are on the front lines of the battle against international bribery. (shrink)

Debates regarding clinical ethicists’ scope of practice are not novel and will continue to evolve. Rapid changes in healthcare delivery, outcomes, and expectations have necessitated flexibility in clinical ethicists’ roles whereby hospital-based clinical ethicists are expected to be woven into the institutional fabric in a way that did not exist in more traditional relationships. In this article we discuss three emerging roles: the ethicist embedded in the interdisciplinary team, the ethicist with an expanded educational mandate, and the ethicist as a (...) therapeutic presence in the patient care space. Such expanded capacities offer more robust, positive contributions to institutional culture, stakeholders’ relationships, and patient-centered care. (shrink)

Displays of eye movements may convey information about cognitive processes but require interpretation. We investigated whether participants were able to interpret displays of their own or others' eye movements. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants observed an image under three different viewing instructions. Then they were shown static or dynamic gaze displays and had to judge whether it was their own or someone else's eye movements and what instruction was reflected. Participants were capable of recognizing the instruction reflected in their (...) own and someone else's gaze display. Instruction recognition was better for dynamic displays, and only this condition yielded above chance performance in recognizing the display as one's own or another person's. Experiment 3 revealed that order information in the gaze displays facilitated instruction recognition when transitions between fixated regions distinguish one viewing instruction from another. Implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Developing a simple test to identify swiftly neonates with sepsis who carry the genetic variant which means that one dose of the recommended antibiotic, gentamicin, will cause the child to become profoundly deaf looks like an admirable objective. The baby needs antibiotics and needs them within 1 hour of admission to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Conventional genetic tests take much longer to yield results. The test being trialled produces results in 25 min; a baby who carries the variant (...) can be treated with a different antibiotic. All the test requires is a gentle swab of the baby’s inner cheek. Babies can be treated for potentially fatal sepsis without the risk that the drugs designed to save their lives will cost them their hearing. Parents and healthcare staff are relieved of worry—a great idea? PALOH is not a trial of the safety or efficacy of the test, only to assess how feasible it will be to carry out this test in a busy NICU, without disrupting the care of the baby. A tiny painless ‘scrape’ will take a sample of DNA—what’s the fuss about? Several other invasive and painful procedures will be carried out without a fuss.1 The problem is DNA. Genetic information must be safeguarded from falling into the wrong hands. In section 45 of Human Tissue Act 2004 (HTA), Parliament legislated to prohibit non-consensual DNA testing.1 It fits uncomfortably in a statute designed to regulate retention and uses of human material, after revelations that organs and tissue from the …. (shrink)

Challenges to the exercise of the basic socio-economic rights of half the global population give rise to some of the most pressing issues today. This timely book focuses on world poverty, providing a systematic exposition of the evolving legal responsibility of the international community of states to cooperate in addressing the structural obstacles that contribute to this injustice. This book analyzes the approach, contribution, and current limitations of the international law of human rights to the manifestations of world poverty, inviting (...) the reader to rethink human rights, and, in particular, the framing of responsibilities that are essential to their contemporary protection. (shrink)

Thought experiments provide a conspicuous case study for epistemologists of the imagination. Galileo’s famous thought experiment about falling stones is a central example in the debate about how thought experiments in science work. According to a standard interpretation, the thought experiment poses a challenge to an Aristotelian principle about falling bodies that conceives of bodies in an extremely liberal way. This chapter argues that this interpretation is implausible and then shows how the thought experiment might present a challenge to a (...) principle that conceives of bodies in a less permissive, more plausible way. The new interpretation of the thought experiment relies on a distinction between two ways of imagining Galileo’s experiment, one of which requires Aristotelians to temporarily ignore their belief in the principle under challenge. It is suggested that the distinction tracks an increasingly familiar distinction among dual-process theories in psychology: ‘intuitive’ and ‘reflective’ imagination. In order for Aristotelians to appreciate the thought experiment’s challenge to their theory, they are expected to use their intuitive imagination and not just their reflective imagination. (shrink)

Sider (2011, 2013) proposes a reductive analysis of metaphysical modality—‘(modal) Humeanism’—and goes on to argue that it has interesting epistemological and methodological implications. In particular, Humeanism is supposed to undermine a class of ‘arguments from possibility’, which includes Sider's (1993) own argument against mereological nihilism and Chalmers's (1996) argument against physicalism. I argue that Sider's arguments do not go through, and moreover that we should instead expect Humeanism to be compatible with the practice of arguing from possibility in philosophy.

This essay examines the work of Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib, two philosophers who have demonstrated that feminist theorists can usefully draw upon both postmodernism and the critical theory tradition, with which Fraser and Benhabib are more clearly associated. I argue that each theorist claims the universal ideals and normative judgements of modernism, and the contextualism, particularity, and skepticism of postmodernism. I do this by revisiting each of their positions in the now well-known Feminist Contentions exchange, by examining the diverse (...) ways in which they reconcile universalism and difference, and by exploring each theorist's critique of the Habermasian public sphere. (shrink)

Prisoners are legally categorized as a vulnerable group for the purposes of medical research, but their vulnerability is not limited to the research context. Prisoner-patients may experience lower standards of care, fewer options for treatment, violations of privacy, and the use of inappropriate surrogates as a result of their status. This case study highlights some of the ways in which a prisoner-patient’s vulnerable status impacted the care he received. The article argues the following: (1) Prisoner-patients are entitled to the same (...) quality of care as all other patients, and healthcare providers should be vigilant to ensure that the stigma of incarceration does not influence care decisions. (2) Options for treatment should reflect what is most medically appropriate in the hospital or other healthcare setting, even when not all treatments would be available in the correctional setting. (3) The presence of guards at the bedside requires that additional measures be taken to protect the privacy and confidentiality of prisoner-patients. (4) When endof-life decisions must be made for an incapacitated patient, prison physicians are not well placed to act as surrogate decision makers, which heightens the obligations of the healthcare professionals in the hospital to ensure an ethically supportable process and outcome. Therefore, healthcare professionals should provide extra protection for those prisoner-patients who do not have decision-making capacity, by utilizing a robust process for decision making such as those used for incapacitated patients without surrogates, rather than relying solely on prison physicians as surrogates. (shrink)

Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssaysA new paradigm in cell therapy for diabetes: Turning pancreatic α‐cells into β‐cells Abstract.

For healing the land and human relationships to land are a step toward healing a troubled relationship, borne of a history, which is painful for native people and shameful for settlers. Protection...

¿Hay algún retrato “verdadero” de Descartes? Si bien sabemos, salvo unas pocas excepciones, quiénes pintaron o grabaron el retrato de Descartes, reconocemos a Descartes sin saber si los cuadros y los grabados lo retratan “verdaderamente”. ¿Qué tienen en común los grabados de Hellemans y del autor desconocido de “Descartes como Fausto” con el cuadro de Weenix? La respuesta es inequívoca: los libro; hasta tal punto que el libro funge como un atributo. El ícono de la filosofía moderna es el que (...) se esconde para pensar; es el que, desde el secreto detrás de la máscara, mira al espectador y lo obliga, bajo el prisma de la iconografia, a devolverse del mundo de la representación a la letra del texto. (shrink)

Hay muchos retratos de Spinoza, pero ninguno de ellos está bien documentado, al menos suficientemente documentado como para satisfacer las exigencias del método iconográfico. Por falta de argumentos objetivos que permitan identificar a Spinoza entre tantos cuadros y grabados, tal vez podamos considerar que el “verdadero” retrato de Spinoza es el frontispicio de las Opera posthuma de 1677.

La felicidad no se reduce al bienestar afectivo de un organismo adaptado asu medio. El hombre debe reflexionar para construir su vida según unosvalores. No puede desatender ni su libertad, ni su responsabilidad ante elcompromiso voluntario de su acción. Ser feliz supone que el hombre seacapaz de lograr un equilibrio que supere sus contradicciones y sus conflictos.Si el hombre quiere ser feliz, no debe olvidar que la felicidad es el resultadode una conquista primero sobre él mismo y luego sobre un (...) mundo en elque debe tener en cuenta no solamente las fuerzas naturales, sino también alos demás hombres. (shrink)

This exploratory study investigates the divergent ways that people make sense of their own charisma. Through in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with people who self-identified as charismatic (_n_ = 11), findings reveal that self-identified charismatic people hold divergent views regarding (1) who they believe benefits from their charisma (self or others), (2) how they believe they came to be charismatic (developed or innate), (3) how they experience self-confidence (self-conscious or self-assured), and (4) how they manage rejection (preparation or resilience). Taken together, (...) these divergent views reflect at least two charisma profiles—what we term _opportunistic charisma_ (i.e., charisma employed for personal gain) and _humanistic charisma_ (i.e., charisma employed to empower others)—with implications for humanistic management theory and practice. (shrink)

Donation after cardiac death (DCD) traditionally occurs in two patient populations: (1) those who do not meet neurological death criteria but who have suffered severe neurological damage, and (2) those who are fully alert and awake but are dependent on machines. This case highlights the unique dilemma when a patient falls between these two populations—conscious and cognitively intact, but completely paralyzed except for limited eye movement, afflicted by what the medical community refers to as locked-in syndrome. Prompted by the treatment (...) team’s discomfort, an ethics consultant examined whether the team was obligated to discuss a decision to donate with the patient, who was a registered organ donor. This article shows how, in determining whether or not to talk to the patient or family during end-of-life decision making, the weight assigned to the various ethical concerns in the case— the patient’s condition, the decision to be made, and the family’s agreement or disagreement regarding the patient’s wishes—can “swing the pendulum” of ethical analysis in different ways. The comfort of the patient must be accorded the highest priority, as well as the needs of the patient’s family. This case study highlights the nuanced contextual factors necessary to guide a treatment team’s approach to DCD for a patient with uncertain decision-making capacity. (shrink)

Assertions about metaphysical modality play central roles in philosophical theorizing. For example, when philosophers propose hypothetical counterexamples, they often are making a claim to the effect that some state of affairs is possible. Getting the epistemology of modality right is thus important. Debates have been preoccupied with assessing whether imaginability—or conceivability, insofar as it’s different—is a guide to possibility, or whether it is rather intuitions of possibility—and modal intuitions more generally—that are evidence for possibility claims. The dissertation argues that the (...) imagination plays a subtler role than the first view recognizes, and a more central one than the second view does. In particular, it defends an epistemology of metaphysical modality on which someone can acquire modal knowledge in virtue of having performed certain complex imaginative exercises. (shrink)

La aversión de los renacentistas por el método silogístico les hizo experimentarnuevas formas literarias más “estéticas” que sirvieron a menudo paraencubrir la falta de cualquier especie de lógica o de razonamiento. El usodel método geométrico sería la respuesta de los filósofos del siglo XVII aesta falta de lógica y de razonamiento. Tal parece ser, en efecto, el caso deDescartes quien borró “la lengua de la Escuela y el estilo de la Escuela” ydecretó la universalidad del método matemático. Con todo, según (...) Spinoza,Descartes ni logró sustraerse a la férula escolástica, ya que heredó de lasespeculaciones teológicas medievales, ni alcanzó liberarse del todo delórganon aristotélico. (shrink)

Después de recordar las dificultades del pensamiento tomista cuando trata de la relación jerárquica entre dos facultades de Dios: la voluntad y el entendimiento y de precisar el intelectualismo tomista al mostrar que para Santo Tomás la voluntad divina tiene un límite, se vincula la discusión tomista con la obra de Descartes. Finalmente, se advierte que en Ockham y en su escuela nominalista se encuentra un antecedente de la posición cartesiana. La expresión "ne quidem ratione" remite a la doctrina de (...) Ockham y de su escuela sobre la simplicidad absoluta de la esencia divina. Pues tanto para Ockham como para Descartes "ni siquiera lógicamente (ne quidem ratione)" nos es posible asignar una distinción en las facultades divinas. Dios se hace incomprensible para nuestro pensamiento, para nuestra lógica. Y Él lo es, según Descartes y Ockham, porque su poder nos supera: la potentia Dei es absoluta. (shrink)

Drawing out literal and metaphorical meanings of 'foreignness' this wide-ranging volume offers much to scholars of postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies seeking new approaches to the study of alterity.

An increasing number of scientists and doctors are concerned that new laws are inhibiting ethical research. This paper argues that this is not the case. Laws do not inhibit medical progress. Misunderstanding the law may do so.