Mood disorders, including major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder, are highly prevalent, frequently disabling, and sometimes deadly. Additional research and more effective medications are desperately needed, but clinical trials research in mood disorders is fraught with ethical issues. Although many authors have discussed these issues, most do so from a theoretical viewpoint. This manuscript uses available empirical data to inform a discussion of the primary ethical issues raised in mood disorders research. These include issues of consent and decision-making capacity, including (...) patients’ motivations for participating in research. We also address drug withdrawals, placebo controls, and the overall safety of research. Finally, we examine the extant literature for studies discussing potential indirect benefits of clinical trials research to participants. Taken together, the evidence suggests that clinical trials research incorporating drug withdrawals and placebo controls can be conducted safely and ethically, even in patients with severe or treatment-resistant mood disorders. In fact, given the dearth of effective treatment options for this population, it is our opinion that a moral imperative exists to extend the offer of research participation to severely ill or treatment-resistant groups. (shrink)

According to Quine’s indispensability argument, we ought to believe in just those mathematical entities that we quantify over in our best scientific theories. Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment is part of the standard indispensability argument. However, we suggest that a new indispensability argument can be run using Armstrong’s criterion of ontological commitment rather than Quine’s. According to Armstrong’s criterion, ‘to be is to be a truthmaker (or part of one)’. We supplement this criterion with our own brand of metaphysics, 'Aristotelian (...) realism', in order to identify the truthmakers of mathematics. We consider in particular as a case study the indispensability to physics of real analysis (the theory of the real numbers). We conclude that it is possible to run an indispensability argument without Quinean baggage. (shrink)

La verdad, entendida por Tomás de Aquino como la adecuación entre el intelecto y la realidad, forma, en aquel que la busca y la dice, una virtud moral denominada veracidad. Dicha comprensión de la verdad, epistemológica y moral, inspira una manera de entender tanto la pedagogía como la responsabilidad social universitarias. Este artículo desarrolla las relaciones entre epistemología realista, virtud moral y universidad, y muestra cómo la noción de veracidad ha servido de inspiración para las apuestas pedagógicas de la Universidad (...) Santo Tomás. (shrink)

Plochmann and Robinson closely analyze this great dialogue in the first two-thirds of their book, turning in the final four chapters to a broader discussion of its unity, sweep, and philosophic implications.

Given the long-standing controversy about whether the brain-dead should be considered alive in an irreversible coma or dead despite displaying apparent signs of life, the ethical and policy issues posed when family members insist on continued treatment are not as simple as commentators have claimed. In this article, we consider the kind of policy that should be adopted to manage a family's insistence that their brain-dead loved one continues to receive supportive care. We argue that while it would be ethically (...) inappropriate to continue to devote scarce acute care resources to such patients in a hospital setting, it may not be ethically inappropriate for patients to receive these resources in certain other settings. Thus, if a family insists on continuing to care for their brain-dead loved at their home, we should not, from a policy perspective, interfere with the family's wishes. We also argue that healthcare professionals should make some effort to facilitate the transfer of brain-dead patients to these other settings when families insist on continued treatment despite being informed about the lack of any potential for recovery of consciousness. Our arguments are strengthened by the fact that patients in a persistent vegetative state, who, when correctly diagnosed, also have no potential for recovery of consciousness, are routinely transferred from hospitals to nursing homes or long-term care facilities where they continue to be ventilated, tube fed and to receive other supportive care. We also briefly explore the question of who should be responsible for the costs of such treatment at the long-term care facility. (shrink)

The problem of physician-assisted death, assisted suicide and active euthanasia, has been debated predominantly in the ethically familiar vocabulary of rights, duties, and consequences. Patient autonomy and the right to die with dignity vie with the duty of physicians to heal, but not to kill, and the specter of “the slippery slope” from voluntary euthanasia as a last resort for patients suffering from terminal illness to PAD on demand and mercy killing of “hopeless” incompetent patients. Another dimension of the debate (...) over PAD concerns the evaluative question of what constitutes a good death. At stake are Issues of character and virtue in the face of death and dying and their Implications for legitimizing the practice of PAD. Critics of PAD argue that “natural” death in the context of comfort care, as provided by hospice programs, is the good death. In contrast, PAD amounts to an easy way out, an evasion of the ultimate human challenge and task of dying. Because hospice care is clearly preferable to PAD, the former should be encouraged and the latter remain prohibited. (shrink)

Engaging in a dialogue with such major representatives of the dominant consensus as Kant, Habermas, and Rawls, and informed by the philosophical writings of ...

_Explores democracy with religious freedom and its dependence on theism._.

In this innovative examination of works by Poe, Melville, Twain, Nabokov, Barth, and Pynchon, Herbert F. Smith establishes an aesthetic theory that allows for fresh readings of six problematic texts. He explores how the texts came to be written and what semiotic processes are involved in their creation, and in so doing he opens the way for new theoretical speculation.