We present the perspective of a Bioethics Consultation Service operating in an urban hospital in Dayton, Ohio, USA, as it adapted to treating Sars-CoV-2 patients throughout 2020. Since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Ohio on 9 March 2020, until 1 January 2021, the Bioethics Consultation Service was consulted 60 times, a 22.5% increase from the same period of 2019. The most common diagnoses requiring consultation included end-stage renal disease requiring dialysis, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and sepsis. Only 10% (...) of consultations were for patients hospitalized with COVID-19. This is a qualitative analysis of the cases we saw and a discussion of factors that affected our service while adapting to COVID-19 standards of care. (shrink)

Neste artigo, interessamo-‑nos pelo neologismo «perverformatif» [«performativo»] usado por Jacques Derrida em La Carte postale e em Marx & Sons. Se Derrida é um outro «mestre do performativo», título que ele reservava ao «Plato» de La Carte Postale não é por negar a Lei ou a sua «verdade», mas porque tem necessidade delas para assegurar a incidência de um desafio. O que performativamente se põe em obra e em abismo nos «Envios» passa assim por um desejo «perverso» de fazer advir (...) esta lei e de a desviar. A nossa hipótese é a de que é precisamente o que se performa no idioma daquele que não tem senão uma língua que não é a sua e para quem as palavras «contêm a sua própria perversidade». Interrogaremos, pois, os rastros deste vocábulo, a sua virtualidade a operar e o seu alcance – linguístico, mas também ético e político – no pensamento de Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

In this entertaining and provocative introduction, Royle offers lucid explanations of various key ideas, including deconstruction, undecidability, iterability, differance, aporia, the pharmakon, the supplement, a new enlightenment, and the democracy to come. He also gives attention, however, to a range of less obvious key ideas of Derrida, such as earthquakes, animals and animality, ghosts, monstrosity, the poematic, drugs, gifts, secrets, war, and mourning. Derrida is seen as an extraordinarily inventive thinker, as well as a brilliantly imaginative and often very funny (...) writer. Other critical introductions tend to highlight the specifically philosophical nature and genealogy of his work. Royle's book proceeds in a new and different way, in particular by focusing on the crucial but strange place of literature in Derrida's writings. He thus provides an appreciation and understanding based on detailed reference to Derrida's texts, interwoven with close readings of such writers as Shakespeare, Coleridge, P.B. Shelley, Poe, Emily Brontë, Franz Kafka and Elizabeth Bowen. In doing so, he explores Derrida's consistent view that deconstruction is "a coming-to-terms with literature". He emphasizes the ways in which "literature", for Derrida, is indissociably bound up with other concerns, such as philosophy and psychoanalysis, politics and ethics, responsibility and justice, law and democracy. (shrink)

My thesis is that there is an aesthetic dimension of nature that is metaphysically significant, qualitatively pluralistic, and artistically creative, and that this accounts for the sensuous complexity of experience, as well as the possibility of discovering new qualitative features about the world and expressing them in novel forms, as exemplified in art. I call the philosophy that endorses the reality of this dimension Transcendentalist Aesthetics. The term "Transcendentalist" recalls the philosophy of New England Transcendentalism with its core in Ralph (...) Waldo Emerson, and which influenced the philosophical writings of Charles S. Peirce and the art of the nineteenth-century American landscape painters of the Hudson River School and Luminism. The primary overall goal is to present and argue for a Transcendentalist Aesthetics by making use of the philosophy of Emerson and Peirce, together with the writings and landscapes of the painters. More specifically, Emerson's claims about nature and art and the painters' representations of nature provide various poetic observations of nature that provide an empirical starting point concerning the rich aesthetic complexity of the world. This complexity finds a theoretical ground in Peirce's metaphysical cosmology, which presents a rationally coherent account of the greater structures and processes of the universe while possessing important aesthetic consequences for lived experience and art. The landscape paintings also have a role in that they are expressive of the Transcendentalist philosophy itself, serve as case studies for theoretical interpretation, and are concrete evidence that new qualitative features about the world may be discovered and realized in novel artistic ways. (shrink)

Comparing the ways in which the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio and the Australian cybernetic performance artist Stelarc criticize or defend technological cultural practices, this article argues that Virilio's ambiguous responses to avant-garde art highlight his key ideas far move clearly than his single-minded critique of 'termninal' mass-cultural practices - without any relationship to art - in Polar Inertia and Open Sky. Virlio's The Art of the Motor attacks the strategies of 20th-century technological avant- gardes (such as Futurism and the (...) work of Stelarc) for their apparent eugenicist and fascist sympathies, but Virilios more recent interviews in Cyberrnonde and Voage d'hiver defend the ways in which the pre-technological avant-gardes (such as Impressionism) resist the realist perspective of photography, and argue that the technological arts should offer similar resistance to the impact of cyberculture. Whereas Virilio concludes that such technological 'resistance' is probably impossible, Stelarc's recent research identifies exceptions to Virilio's rules. (shrink)

1. People standardly communicate by uttering phrases or sentences with certain intonation patterns, accompanied by facial expressions, eye contact and often a variety of gestures. If all goes well...

Corporations despite their status as legally fictitious persons are not such, and to confound them with real persons in even the minimal legal sense is to negate much of the force of the concept of rights when applied to the society. When corporations have rights individual rights become meaningless. While corporations may need some form of protection to make them financially feasible investments, they need not be given the full protection of rights which are assigned to the individual. A much (...) attenuated version of corporate rights is warranted. I would argue against Werhane's notion of a corporation possessing “secondary rights” which can be asserted only after the claims of individual rights have been met. Ibid., p. 62.One solution to the problems raised in this essay would be to ascribe rights to individuals only. This could occur without interfering with the financial independence of the corporation by a simple legal prescription that individuals within a corporation be held responsible for their activities and that the corporation p e r se not be blamed for individual actions. This is consistent with the judgments against the Nazi war criminals who were denied the defense of justifying their actions on the basis of following orders. Responsibility for those actions which are the result of the workings of the “invisible hand” cannot be ascribed to any individual or group of individuals. Donaldson is helpful on this point in recommending an “office of social responsibility” be created as part of the corporation to monitor those actions which otherwise escape scrutiny. Donaldson, Corporations and Morality, p. 207.A more radical solution is to restructure the corporation in such a way as to introduce the element of democracy in the workplace. Opponents would argue that such a practice would diminish the profit-making potential of the corporation by limiting the discretion of the corporate officers in making decisions. Similar arguments have been advanced against the democratic state. Yet democratic states have proven to be viable institutions capable of effective action and demonstrably more survivable than the authoritarian regimes which are the analogs of the corporation.Given the current hierarchical structure of the corporation and its ability to dissolve in the face of questions of responsibility, individual accountability is the only viable solution. This requires that members of the corporation not find cover behind the “invisible hand.” This in turn necessitates the granting of a greater degree of discretionary power to corporate functionaries at all levels. We cannot be responsible for a state of affairs over which we have no effective control. The courts would make the ultimate decision as to the assignation of responsibility in particular cases of corporate crime, with the stipulation that the ascription be to an individual and not “the corporation.” By making corporate officers individually responsible for their actions a much more effective deterrent to corporate crimes would be created. Corporations can easily afford most of the fines that are imposed on them, and corporations cannot be put in prison.The view of the corporation advanced here puts it in a legal and moral position greatly inferior to that of the individual as well as the state. Consequently, corporate needs and welfare must remain a tertiary concern. The rights of the individual must figure primarily, and the welfare of the state as preserver of those rights secondarily, in social policy decisions. The libertarian vision of the corporation is therefore a misguided result of the conflation of the corporation and the individual in the legal and moral realms. Corporations and individuals are ontologically distinct entities and must be recognized as such. The failure to do so has enabled corporations to abrogate individual rights with legal and moral impunity. Such a situation is inconsistent with the demands of a rights-based democracy. (shrink)

IS THE REAL RATIONAL? Can we ever manage to explain the nature of reality—the make-up of the universe as a whole? Is there not an insuperable obstacle here—an infeasibility that was discerned already by Immanuel Kant who argued roughly as follows.

Orientalism in Louis XIV's France presents a history of Oriental studies in seventeenth-century France, mapping the place within the intellectual culture of the period that was given to studies of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chinese texts, as well as writings on Mughal India.

The French feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff has taught us something about “the collectivity,” which she discovers in women’s struggle for access to the philosophical, but also about “the unknown” and “the unthought.” It is the unthought which will matter most to what I intend to say today about a fundamental ignorance on which speaker vulnerability is built. On International Women’s Day, it seems appropriate to speak about – or, at least, to evoke – the silencing which has been imposed (...) on women by an oppressive form of ignorance. My question is: how do our resounding voices as women – on 8 March 2016 – avoid what feminist philosophers have distinguished as wilful forms of silencing? Silencing exploits vulnerability; and speaker vulnerability is an exposure either to violence or affection, in its dependence on an audience. My response seeks to undo the silencing of women by transforming an ignorance of vulnerability into a distinctively ethical avowal. To see the significance of this undoing, we will consider how our contemporary global world reduces vulnerability to an openness to violence, ignoring what has been unthought: an openness to affection. A wilful ignorance of vulnerability develops not as a lack of knowledge but its disavowal – on which various forms of oppression are built. An active disavowal of thinking (the unthought) is the other side of a striving for invulnerability; and this striving is encouraged by a social world which remains ignorant of its own wounding, as well as its own potential for ethical relations in vulnerability. Like la mauvaise foi of the French existentialist, invulnerability is a form of self-deception; and those who claim it embrace ignorance of their own and others’ vulnerability too. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness is to explain the experience of qualia. But everything gets easier once we realise that what has to be explained is not how qualia can exist as objective entities but rather why the conscious subject should believe that they exist. This essay lays out a programme for doing this. It makes radical proposals as to how the “qualia illusion” is created, and why sustaining this illusion is biologically adaptive.

Habermas has alleged: (1) that Hegel has given a social theory that is abstract and technical, separating theory from practice ; and (2) that the criticism Hegel exercises at times is compromised by his uncritical acceptance of modern western culture. Both allegations amount to the claim that in some way Hegel proscribes internal critique, a citizen’s critique of her own nation-state. However, this charge is based on a misunderstanding of the role that history plays in Hegel’s account, and the difference (...) as Hegel understands it between nations of antiquity and those modernity. Once these are properly understood, it is clear that Hegel advocates identification with a supranational modern culture for which national particularity is necessarily an object of criticism. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Biotechnological Solution to Disease Who Benefits from Gene Therapy? Are we Essentially Human Beings or Essentially Persons, and does it Matter? Genetic Influences, Environmental Influences and the Formation of Human Identities Interactionism's Implications for Identity The Scope of Therapy and the Notion of Disease Buchanan, Brock, Daniels and Wikler on Protecting Normal Functioning Therapy, Obligation and Procreative Liberty's Diminishment.

As words, images, and concepts are the media through which hermeneutic understanding takes place, reflection on their nature is central to any appreciation of how hermeneutics operates. The joy of coming to recognition entails the knowing of something again that we already know as if for the first time. In the image, what we already know (pre‐reflectively) emerges as if illuminated, from all the contingent and variable circumstances that condition it; it is grasped in its essence. It is known as (...) something”. The speculative dimension of language elucidates the capacity of an image to be future orientated. Words, images, and concepts have actual and potential satellite meanings able to upset and transform their core meanings. Indeterminacy of meaning is central. Reading, writing, and attentive looking are practices which because of the speculative dimensions of word, image, and concept disturb and disrupt what we think we know with certainty. (shrink)

This article is about a relationship between the Socratic practice of philosophy and the aesthetic practice of watching and appreciating film. The conclusion that I defend is that certain narrative films, like the elenctic method in the hands of Socrates, are philosophical tools for examining our cognitive and emotional life and thus for gaining insight into aspects of our character. In the early sections of the article I construct an analogy between the practice of watching narrative film and the practice (...) of self-examination through dialogue and reflection. I argue that good aesthetic practice in film appreciation is analogous to good philosophical practice in the manner of Socrates, and I treat the elenchus as a method of self-examination rather than of conceptual analysis and Socrates himself as an examiner of people rather than of abstract concepts. In the later sections I discuss three films directed by Christopher Nolan—Memento, The Prestige, and Inception —as paradigm cases of Socratic film. I argue that these films show us something about ourselves by prompting extemporaneous emotional responses and cognitive judgments that we come, reflectively, to reject. (shrink)

Eclipse of Grace offers original insights into the roots of modern theology by introducing systematic theologians and Christian ethicists to Hegel through a focus on three of his seminal texts: Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Presents brilliant and original insights into Hegel’s significance for modern theology Argues that, theologically, Hegel has been misconstrued and that much more can be gained by focusing on the logic that he develops out of an engagement with (...) Christian doctrines Features an original structure organized as a set of commentaries on individual Hegel texts, and not just presenting overviews of his entire corpus Offers detailed engagement with Hegel’s texts rather than relying on generalizations about Hegelian philosophy Provides an illuminating, accessible and lucid account of the thinking of the major figures in modern German philosophy and theology. (shrink)