Objectives: To analyse and compare the surveys on German doctors and judges on end of life decision making regarding their attitudes on the advance directive and on the dying process.Design: The respondents were to indicate their agreement or disagreement to eight statements on the advance directive and to specify their personal view on the beginning of the dying process.Participants: 727 doctors in three federal states and 469 judges dealing with guardianship matters all over Germany.Main measurements: Comparisons of means, analyses of (...) variance, pivot tables and factor analyses .Results: Three attitude groups on advance directive were disclosed by the analysis: the decision model, which emphasises the binding character of a situational advance directive; the deliberation model, which puts more emphasis on the communicative aspect; and the delegation model, which regards the advance directive as a legal instrument. The answers regarding the beginning of the dying process were broadly distributed, but no marked difference was observed between the responding professions. The dying process was assumed by most participants to begin with a life expectancy of only a few days.Conclusions: A high degree of valuation for advance directive was seen in both German doctors and judges; most agreed to the binding character of the situational directive. Regarding the different individual concepts of the dying process, a cross-professional discourse on the contents of this term seems to be overdue. (shrink)

We extend the discussion in the target article about distinctions between extrinsic coding and the alternative we and the target article both favor, intrinsic coding. Central to our thinking about intrinsic coding is population coding and the concept of high-dimensional neural response spaces.

In 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental he...

The target article does not consider neural data on primate spatial representations, which we suggest provide grounds for believing that navigational space may be three-dimensional rather than quasi–two-dimensional. Furthermore, we question the authors' interpretation of rat neurophysiological data as indicating that the vertical dimension may be encoded in a neural structure separate from the two horizontal dimensions.

Language's intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous capacities has been complicated by (i) the assumption that intentional (that is, voluntary) production (...) of communicative acts requires mental-state attribution, and (ii) variation in approaches investigating communication across sensory modalities. To move forward, we argue that a framework fusing research across modalities and species is required. We structure intentional communication into a series of requirements, each of which can be operationalised, investigated empirically, and must be met for purposive, intentionally communicative acts to be demonstrated. Our unified approach helps elucidate the distribution of animal intentional communication and subsequently serves to clarify what is meant by attributions of intentional communication in animals and humans. (shrink)

In Neutrality and the Academic Ethic, distinguished philosopher Robert L. Simon explores the claim that universities can and should be politically neutral. He examines conceptual questions about the meaning of neutrality, distinguishes different conceptions of what neutrality involves, and considers in what sense, if any, institutional neutrality is both possible and desirable. In Part II, a collection of original and previously published essays provides different views on these and related issues.

Rather than defend each instance of problem suggested by Williams, what I propose to do is to respond by making two clarificatory points: first, I rule out two ways of understanding mathematical problems that might be clouding the water; and then, second, I further characterise how Deleuze thinks some mathematical problems, two in particular, are not just examples of mathematical problems, but provide mathematical models for what a mathematical problem in general can be understood to be. This is important because (...) it is how mathematical problems can be modelled in mathematics that provides Deleuze with a model for how problems can be modelled in other discourses. This will then get to the bottom of what is at stake in my approach to Deleuze and to Deleuze studies in general. (shrink)

A renaissance in Spinoza studies took place in France at the end of the 1960s, which gave new impetus to the study of Spinoza’s work and continues to have a marked effect on the direction of research in the field today. The effect of this renewed interest and direction did not remain isolated to France but quickly spread across the continent. Although certain of the figures involved in this event have become rather well known in some academic circles, and their (...) work widely read, the details of these developments and the specific texts that contributed to and sustained this new direction in research have remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. The aim of this essay, therefore, is to provide a survey of this event, to review the background to these developments, to introduce the main protagonists – along with some of the lesser known but equally important figures – and to single out and asses the key texts, their specific focus and their contribution to the new direction in research. (shrink)

In this paper, two different ways of thinking about individuality in Spinoza are presented to draw out what is at stake in trying to make sense of what could be described as a double point of view of the degree of the power to act of a singular thing in Spinoza’s Ethics: sometimes it seems to be fixed to a precisely determined degree; sometimes it seems to admit a certain degree of variation. The problem of resolving this apparent contradiction has (...) been responsible for a variety of interpretations among scholars working in the field of Spinoza studies, notably the different interpretations of Spinoza’s theory of relations offered by Pierre Macherey and Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s interpretation of the dynamic changes in an individual’s power to act diverges somewhat from that of Macherey. For Macherey, dynamic changes are incorporated by an individual according to the varying degree, or proportion, to which the active expression of its fixed power to act are inhibited or limited. Whereas for Deleuze, an individual’s power to act is open to “metaphysical” or ontological changes. An individual for Deleuze is limited by the passive affections that it experiences in its interactions with other more composite bodies, which, at any given moment, have the potential to limit its further integration, and, therefore, the further development of its power to act, and by consequence, its actual existence. This limit determines the margin of variation, or proportion, of the expression of the given individual’s power to act, which varies from a minimum, below which it would cease to exist (intensity = 0), to a maximum, which would only be limited by the extent to which its power to act is further integrated at any given moment in more composite relations, expressing the affective life of the individual. The paper will examine the implications of this difference to their respective interpretations of Spinoza, with a view to characterising the role that Spinoza plays in Deleuze’s broader project of constructing a philosophy of difference. (shrink)

Albert Lautman (b. 1908–1944) was a philosopher of mathematics whose views on mathematical reality and on the philosophy of mathematics parted with the dominant tendencies of mathematical epistemology of the time. Lautman considered the role of philosophy, and of the philosopher, in relation to mathematics to be quite specific. He writes that: ‘in the development of mathematics, a reality is asserted that mathematical philosophy has as a function to recognize and describe’ (Lautman 2011, 87). He goes on to characterize this (...) reality as an ‘ideal reality’ that ‘governs’ the development of mathematics. The relation between mathematical problems as they arise in the historical development of mathematics and the solutions that are provided to these problems by mathematicians, in the form of new mathematical theories, definitions or axioms, are governed by a what Lautman characterises as a dialectics of mathematics. The aim of this paper is to give an account of this Lautmanian dialectic and of how it can be understood to govern the development of solutions to mathematical problems. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze maintains that an individual’s power to act is open to “metaphysical” or ontological changes. An individual for Deleuze is limited by the passive affections that it experiences in its interactions with other more composite bodies, which, at any given moment, have the potential to limit its further integration, and, therefore, the further development of its power to act, and by consequence, its actual existence. This limit determines the margin of variation of the expression of the given individual’s power (...) to act, which varies from a minimum, below which it would cease to exist (intensity = 0), to a maximum, which would only be limited by the extent to which its power to act is further integrated at any given moment in more composite relations, expressing the affective life of the individual. The paper will examine the implications of this interpretations of Spinoza, with a view to characterising the role that Spinoza plays in Deleuze’s broader project of constructing a philosophy of difference. (shrink)

Physicians make some medical decisions without disclosure to their patients. Nondisclosure is possible because these are silent decisions to refrain from screening, diagnostic or therapeutic interventions. Nondisclosure is ethically permissible when the usual presumption that the patient should be involved in decisions is defeated by considerations of clinical utility or patient emotional and physical well-being. Some silent decisions - not all - are ethically justified by this standard. Justified silent decisions are typically dependent on the physician's professional judgment, experience and (...) knowledge, and are not likely to be changed by patient preferences. We condemn the inappropriate exclusion of the patient from the decision-making process. However, if a test or treatment is unlikely to yield a net benefit, disclosure and discussion are at times unnecessary. Appropriate silent decisions are ethically justified by such considerations as patient benefit or economy of time. (shrink)

Language’s intentional nature has been highlighted as a crucial feature distinguishing it from other communication systems. Specifically, language is often thought to depend on highly structured intentional action and mutual mindreading by a communicator and recipient. Whilst similar abilities in animals can shed light on the evolution of intentionality, they remain challenging to detect unambiguously. We revisit animal intentional communication and suggest that progress in identifying analogous capacities has been complicated by (i) the assumption that intentional (that is, voluntary) production (...) of communicative acts requires mental-state attribution, and (ii) variation in approaches investigating communication across sensory modalities. To move forward, we argue that a framework fusing research across modalities and species is required. We structure intentional communication into a series of requirements, each of which can be operationalised, investigated empirically, and must be met for purposive, intentionally communicative acts to be demonstrated. Our unified approach helps elucidate the distribution of animal intentional communication and subsequently serves to clarify what is meant by attributions of intentional communication in animals and humans. (shrink)

Una visión de la película de Lars Von Trier: Anticristo.

What I plan to do in this paper is to provide a survey of the ways in which Spinoza’s philosophy has been deployed in relation to early modern thought, in the history of ideas and in a number of different domains of contemporary philosophy, and to offer an account of how some of this research has developed. The past decade of research in Spinoza studies has been characterized by a number of tendencies; however, it is possible to identify four main (...) domains that characterize these different lines of research: studies of Spinoza’s individual works, of its problematic concepts, from the point of view of the history of ideas, and comparative studies of Spinoza’s ideas. (shrink)

Recent evidence suggests that consciousness of encoding is not necessary for the rapid formation of new semantic associations. We investigated whether unconsciously formed associations are as semantically precise as would be expected for associations formed with consciousness of encoding during episodic memory formation. Pairs of faces and written occupations were presented subliminally for unconscious associative encoding. Five minutes later, the same faces were presented suprathreshold for the cued unconscious retrieval of face-occupation associations. Retrieval instructions required participants to classify the presented (...) individuals according to their putative regularity of income, length of education, and creativity value of occupational activity. The three instructions yielded more classifications consistent with a person’s occupation if the person had been subliminally presented with his written occupation versus a meaningless word . This suggests that consciousness is not necessary to encode, long-term store, and retrieve semantically precise associations between primarily unrelated items. (shrink)