Anesthesiology training programs are tasked with equipping trainees with the skills to become medically and ethically competent in the practice of anesthesia and to be prepared to obtain board certification, yet there is currently no standardized ethics curriculum within anesthesia training programs in the United States. To bridge this gap, and to provide a validated ethics curriculum to meet the aforementioned needs, in July 2021, a survey was sent to anesthesia scholars in the field of biomedical ethics to identify key (...) areas that should be included in such an ethics curriculum. The responses were rated on a Likert scale and ranked. This paper identifies the top ten topics identified as high priority for inclusion in an anesthesiology training program and consequently deemed most relevant to meet the educational needs of graduates of an anesthesiology residency: (1) capacity to consent; (2) capacity to refuse elective versus lifesaving treatment; (3) application of surrogate decisionmaking; (4) approach to do not resuscitate (DNR) status in the operating room; (5) patient autonomy and advance directives; (6) navigating patient beliefs that may impair care; (7) “futility” in end-of-life care: when to withdraw life support; (8) disclosure of medical errors; (9) clinical criteria for “brain death” and consequences of this definition; and (10) the impaired anesthesiologist. (shrink)

It is a longstanding if not altogether coherent tradition of logic and rhetorical studies that an argument can be incorrect or fallacious in virtue of some ...

William Baird collection in Social Sciences is the gift of the Estate of William Cameron Baird.

Vol. presents a method for critically evaluating relevance in arguments based on case studies & a new relevance theory incorporating techniques of argumentation theory, logic & artificiaI intelligence. For scholars/students in argumentation & rhetoric.

I defend two objections to Tadros’s views on punishment. First, I allege that his criticisms of retributivism are persuasive only against extreme versions that provide no justificatory place for instrumentalist objectives. His attack fails against a version of retributivism that recognizes a chasm between what offenders deserve and the allthings-considered permissibility of treating offenders as they deserve. Second, I critique Tadros’s duty view – his alternative theory of punishment. Inter alia, I object that he derives principles from highly unusual examples (...) of self-defense he subsequently tries to apply to ordinary cases of punishment. (shrink)

This monograph poses a series of key problems of evidential reasoning and argumentation. It then offers solutions achieved by applying recently developed computational models of argumentation made available in artificial intelligence. Each problem is posed in such a way that the solution is easily understood. The book progresses from confronting these problems and offering solutions to them, building a useful general method for evaluating arguments along the way. It provides a hands-on survey explaining to the reader how to use current (...) argumentation methods and concepts that are increasingly being implemented in more precise ways for the application of software tools in computational argumentation systems. It shows how the use of these tools and methods requires a new approach to the concepts of knowledge and explanation suitable for diverse settings, such as issues of public safety and health, debate, legal argumentation, forensic evidence, science education, and the use of expert opinion evidence in personal and public deliberations. (shrink)

This article applies tools from argumentation theory to slippery slope arguments used in current ethical debates on genetic engineering. Among the tools used are argumentation schemes, value-based argumentation, critical questions, and burden of proof. It is argued that so-called drivers such as social acceptance and rapid technological development are also important factors that need to be taken into account alongside the argumentation scheme. It is shown that the slippery slope argument is basically a reasonable form of argument, but is often (...) flawed when used in ethical debates because of failures to meet the requirements of its scheme. (shrink)

Because motives and intentions are internal, and not directly observable by another agent, it has always been a problem to find a pathway of reasoning linking them to externally observable evidence...

This chapter is concerned with the foundations of Hobbes’s natural philosophy, notably his account of space and time, as well as an inertial law the author terms the “persistence principle” and a mechanistic principle of action by contact. The author argues that these foundational concepts and principles serve as a framework that places constraints upon the kinds of hypotheses that may figure in the explanation of phenomena, but they do not uniquely determine how natural philosophy is to be developed. In (...) particular, the author shows that Hobbes took questions about the infinitude and uniqueness of the world as unanswerable in principle, although he regarded the question of the vacuum as an empirical matter that could be settled by experiment. Hobbes did, however, hold that certain doctrines were incoherent and should be rejected on a priori grounds. (shrink)

A comprehensive look at the decline of the United States offers non-ideological remedies on how to overcome national self-doubt, reclaim optimism, and secure a prosperous future for American citizens.

While T.W. Adorno is a lively figure on the contemporary cultural scene, his thought in many ways cuts across the grain of emerging postmodern orthodoxies. Although Adorno anticipated many post-structuralist critiques of the subject, philosophy, and intellectual practice, his work clashes with the postmodern celebration of media culture, attacks on modernism as obsolete and elitist, and the more affirmative attitude toward contemporary culture and society found in many, but not all, postmodern circles. Adorno is thus a highly contradictory figure in (...) the present constellation, anticipating some advanced tendencies of contemporary thought, while standing firming against other regnant intellectual attitudes and positions. (shrink)

One of Parfit’s arguments for the thesis that identity never matters involves generalizing from “divergence” cases in which identity arguably does not matter. The primary divergence case for Parfit is fission. According to Parfit’s assessment, it is not true that the fissioner gets what matters with respect to either fissionee by way of being identical to each fissionee but does so by way of the M-relation, psychological continuity with its normal cause, the persistence of enough of the brain. The same (...) is true in all other divergence cases by Parfit’s accounting. Parfit generalizes. From (E) Whenever M and identity diverged, it would be M that mattered, not identity. Parfit infers (F) Whenever M and identity diverge and even when these relations coincide, it is M that matters, not identity. In this paper, I challenge the inference from (E) to (F). (shrink)

Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley and William Congreve introduce into their play-worlds major female characters who demand independence and equality from their male counterparts. This book focuses on each major female character who demands independence and equality of her gallant-libertine before she will commit to marriage or courtship with him. This demand for equality is a contrast to the social and marital relationships found in the real world of 17th century English Restoration society where marriage was a bargaining process for (...) property and where the woman was treated as the man's property. Each of the three playwrights develops his virtuous women in a different way. Wycherley's approach to his characters, for instance, is quite different from that of Etherege and Congreve. But in each case, the playwrights present major female characters who prove themselves superior in wit and wisdom and thoroughly modern in their outlook. (shrink)

Hamblin distinguished between formal and descriptive dialectic. Formal normative models of deliberation dialogue have been strongly emphasized as argumentation frameworks in computer science. But making such models of deliberation applicable to real natural language examples has reached a point where the descriptive aspect needs more interdisciplinary work. The new formal and computational models of deliberation dialogue that are being built in computer science seem to be closely related to some already existing and very well established computing technologies such as problem (...) solving and decision making, but whether or how dialectical argumentation can be helpful to support these systems remains an open question. The aim of this paper is to examine some real examples of argumentation that seem to hover on the borderlines between deliberation, problem solving and decision making. (shrink)

The Nature and Status of Critical Questions in Argumentation Schemes.

Globalization has been one of the most hotly contested phenomena of the past two decades. It has been a primary attractor of books, articles, and heated debate, just as postmodernism was the most fashionable and debated topic of the 1980s. A wide and diverse range of social theorists have argued that today's world is organized by accelerating globalization, which is strengthening the dominance of a world capitalist economic system, supplanting the primacy of the nation-state by transnational corporations and organizations, and (...) eroding local cultures and traditions through a global culture. Contemporary theorists from a wide range of political and theoretical positions are converging on the position that globalization is a distinguishing trend of the present moment, but there are hot debates concerning its nature, effects, and future.2 Moreover, advocates of a postmodern break in history argue that developments in transnational capitalism are producing a new global historical configuration of post- Fordism, or postmodernism as an emergent cultural logic of capitalism (Harvey 1989; Soja 1989; Jameson 1991; and Gottdiener 1995). Others define the emergent global economy and culture as a "network society" grounded in new communications and information technology (Castells 1996, 1997, and 1998). For its defenders, globalization marks the triumph of capitalism and its market economy (see apologists such as Fukuyama 1992 and Friedman 1999 who perceive this process as positive), while its critics portray globalization as negative (see, for example, Mander and Goldsmith 1996; Eisenstein 1998; and Robins and Webster 1999). Some theorists see the emergence of a new transnational ruling elite and the universalization of consumerism (Sklair 2001), while others stress global fragmentation of “the clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1996). Driving “post” discourses into novel realms of theory and politics, Hardt and Negri (2000) present the emergence of “Empire” as producing evolving forms of sovereignty, economy, culture, and political struggle that unleash an unforeseeable and unpredictable flow of novelties, surprises, and upheavals. Discourses of globalization initially were polarized into pro or con celebrations or attacks.. (shrink)

The distribution of organisms in morphologic space is clumpy. Cats are like felids, dogs are like canids and snails are (mostly) like gastropods. But cats are not like dogs and snails are not like clams. This clumpy distribution of morphology has long posed one of the greatest challenges to evolutionary biologists. Does it represent the extinction and disappearance of a oncecontinuous distribution of morphologies, clades perched on the summits of persistent selective peaks ala Sewell Wright, or a primary signature of (...) the evolutionary processes? And if the latter, what processes are responsible for generating it? Although often couched in discussions of the origin of higher taxa, such taxa are but proxies for this clumpy distribution, and ultimately the latter is the critical issue for macroevolution and for Stephen Jay Gould’s opus. Underneath all the controversies over whether species constitute individuals, whether speciation serves to divide intra-specific adaptation driven by natural selection from a set of inter- and supra-specific evolutionary processes, and over the impact of catastrophic mass extinctions on evolutionary trends, the fundamental issue is simply one of clumpiness (or, if you prefer, the inhomogeneous distribution of morphologies). Iurii Filipchenko, a Russian geneticist and the mentor of Theodosius Dobzhansky, introduced the term macroevolution in 1927 because he believed that the origin of the characters associated with higher taxa (those beyond the species level) required a different process of evolution. Filipchenko believed macroevolution was driven by cytoplasmic inheritance, but his general argument was consistent with other saltationists and macro-mutationists of the time, including the paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborne and the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt. These evolutionary biologists shared the.. (shrink)