Introduction: Neuropsychiatry has generally been regarded as a hybrid discipline that lies in the borderland between the disciplines of psychiatry and neurology. There is much debate on its current and future identity and status as a discipline. Materials and Methods: Taking a historical perspective, the future of neuropsychiatry is placed within the context of recent developments in clinical neuroscience. Results: The authors argue that with the maturation of the discipline, it must define its own identity that is not dependent entirely (...) upon the parent disciplines. The requirements for this are the claiming of neuropsychiatric territory, a strong training agenda, an emphasis on treatments that are uniquely neuropsychiatric, and a bold embrace of new developments in clinical neuroscience. Conclusion: The exponential growth in neuroscientific knowledge places neuropsychiatry in an excellent position to carve out a strong identity. It is imperative that the leaders of the discipline seize the moment. (shrink)

Eight hundred and eighty-seven students from two major universities in Delhi, India, were surveyed, using a self-administered questionnaire, about their sexual knowledge, attitudes and behaviour. The data show that female students seem to be rejecting traditional Indian repressive sexual standards of premarital and non-procreative sex and the gender differences are beginning to narrow. Despite their sexual awareness, the students were highly ignorant of the facts of life. Being male and married did not make them more knowledgeable.

Engineering is 'the people-serving profession'. The work of engineers involves interaction with clients, other engineers, and the public at large. More than any other profession, their work also directly involves and affects the environment. This book makes the case that engineers have special professional obligations to protect and enhance the environment, and the authors - one, an engineer and the other, a philosopher - seek to provide an ethical basis for these obligations. In exploring these ethical issues, the authors aim (...) to show that engineers make a difference. The text opens with a series of case studies in which engineers face complex and challenging decisions about the environment. Succeeding chapters examine different ideas about environmental ethics for engineers, including professional codes and both modern and historical discussions of environmental responsibility. The book concludes with a collection of readings that complement the text. Students, as well as practising engineers, will find much of interest in this well-argued and thought-provoking book. (shrink)

The author clarifies the existential philosophy that is implicit in Kurt Goldstein's philosophy of organism (Goldstein, 1963; 1995). Situated in response to the growing trend that psychological phenomena are reducible to the nervous system, the author argues for the reverse: that the significance of nervous system activity can only be understood by viewing it as background to foreground performances. Like the organization of perception into meaningful figure-- ground Gestalts, the existential modes of embodiment, sociality, temporality, spatiality, and attunement are organized (...) together to accomplish foreground performances. It is only within this context that the activity of the nervous system may be understood as significant or insignificant. Speech is given as an example. The article concludes with a commentary on how the trend of reducing psychological phenomena to neurological phenomena has impaired our understanding of brain disorders and psychological disorders. (shrink)

Dio-Xiphilinus, Herodian, and the Historia Augusta give three apparently contradictory accounts of the circumstances in which Commodus' all-powerful praetorian prefect, Sex. Tigidius Perennis, was overthrown in A.D. 185. My purpose here is not to try to decide between them, but primarily to correct what I think a patent misinterpretation, now current, of a crucial statement in that given by Xiphilinus in his epitome of Dio.

The study of Plato has become involved in so many entanglements of higher criticism that it is difficult even to approach the interpretation of any particular dialogue without bias or preconceptions. A swarm of problems starts up for settlement as a preliminary consideration to the correct understanding of Plato’s aims in writing the dialogue, and there is a danger lest its precise issue and philosophical value may be obscured by discussions about its place in the chronological order of the dialogues, (...) as to whether it expresses the views of Socrates or of Plato, or represents a particular stage in the development of Plato's own thought, and so on. That this danger is real is forcibly suggested by a remark of Professor Taylor: “To understand a great thinker is, of course, impossible, unless we know something of the relative order of his works and of the actual period of his life to which they belong....We cannot, then, even make a beginning with the study of Plato until we have found some trustworthy indication of the order in which his works, or at least the most significant of them, were written.”. (shrink)

Ian Kennedy extols the virtues of self-determination by patients: they should make their own decisions about medical treatment after being given advice by their doctors; for doctors to make such decisions on their patients' behalf is authoritarian and unacceptable (I). I present a case where, despite thorough consultation and counselling, the decisions made by the patient and supported by her doctors were found to be consistently inappropriate to her changing lifestyle.

The virtue of religion should be practiced by individuals and societies. Catholic theologians have disagreed about how religion can be practiced in the U.S. Msgr. John A. Ryan believed it could be practiced by the state, while John Courtney Murray, S.J., believed it could only be practiced by American civil society. Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley are chiefly concerned with showing how the virtue of religion can be practiced in civil society by individuals, families, and the Church. Only then will (...) it be possible to reconsider liberal politics. But what comes next? (shrink)

Debates about Catholic social doctrine often revolve around whether a given theory or practice is compatible with the magisterium or not. There is a body of scholarly literature on the nature and scope of the magisterium, but little has been written on the magisterium as it pertains to social doctrine. This essay explores what magisterial documents and scholarship say about the sources, levels, and scope of the magisterium in relation to social doctrine. It then considers how the levels of magisterium (...) can help the faithful understand contemporary teaching on capital punishment. The better they understand the magisterium in relation to social doctrine, the more charitable and fruitful debate will be. (shrink)

Dit boek is een inleiding in het denken over recht en staat met een zwaar accent op de vraag hoe de staat om moet gaan met religie. 0Paul Cliteur en Afshin Ellian zijn hoogleraar encyclopedie van de rechtswetenschap aan de universiteit van Leiden.

Purpose: Tracing the historical roots of Mitterer's non-dualizing philosophy in Austrian philosophers who studied the relationship between object and language around 1900. Method: Discussing the epistemological relevance of the "tertium non datur" principle and disclosing the mutual influence of early language critics Mauthner, Stöhr, and Wahle, who also anticipated many of Wittgenstein's later insights. Findings: Mitterer's philosophy can be considered the endpoint of the Austrian tradition of language criticism. His non-dualizing approach is a methodological constructivism that does not comply with (...) "tertium non datur." Implications: Non-dualizing philosophy can also be applied to media theory. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky is among the most influential contemporary thinkers. Peter Wilkin looks in particular at the philosophical basis of his social and political thought, especially his ideal about power, knowledge and human nature. He shows how Chomsky's ideas can help to defend naturalism as in social and political thought. Chomsky's critical writings of social inquiry and his normative ideas on libertarian socialism and human emancipation are interpreted as synthesising a number of important ideas and approaches at a time when these (...) ideas have fallen out of favour. (shrink)

The article is concerned with the question of how legal institutions are structured with the use of constitutive, institutive, consequential, and terminative rules. To that end, the regulation of international treaties as laid down in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 is analysed. This leads to the discovery of two additional categories of rules: content rules and invalidating rules. Finally, the special status of unique legal institutions is investigated. Unique legal institutions – for example, heads of (...) state, parliaments, and supreme courts – enjoy validity in a legal system to the exclusion of the validity of any other legal institution of the same category in that system. (shrink)

Монография предназначена для студентов, аспирантов, преподавателей юридических и философских факультетов, а также для всех тех, кто интересуется философско-правовой проблематикой.

Bioethics has become a field of new challenges for Ibero-America and the Caribbean. A seeming uniformity in the region hides a rich heterogeneous society. A brief survey of bioethical developments in different Ibero- American countries is provided as well as the bioethical problems and approaches peculiar to the region. Some of the unique features of bioethics in this region, it is suggested, could infuse new life into the U.S. and European bioethics discussion. Finally, a bibliography of Ibero-American bioethics literature is (...) provided for North American and European readers. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis had a profound influence on formation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. However, at the same time, he rejects Freud’s idea that the unconscious consists of latent mental contents that cause a certain type of behavior. Instead of a hidden experience, Merleau-Ponty argues that the unconscious is an ambiguous consciousness. In The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception, he specifies this ambiguity by means of the concepts of habit, bad faith, bodily expression, affective intentionality and body schema. In this paper, (...) I will present the interconnection of these aspects of the human existence, following Merleau-Ponty’s two early major works. Further, I will show the difference of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of bad faith from that of Sartre, and, finally, I will suggest a limitation of Merleau-Ponty’s approach to the unconscious. (shrink)