I was asked to evaluate M by her medical oncologist, Dr. T. As a psychiatrist, I was to perform the duties of a mental health specialist in the care of this fifty‐eight‐year‐old woman with metastatic breast cancer who had requested physician aid in dying. Dr. T had no specific concerns, but she was adhering to the letter of the law by referring the patient to me—a “mental health specialist”—because, according to the patient’s medical history, there was “evidence of a mental (...) disorder.” That evidence was comprised of depression treated in the remote past. Some years before California passed its End of Life Options Act in 2015, M had begun talking with Dr. T about the circumstances under which she might no longer want to be alive and might even choose to take active steps to end her life. She had fairly specific and durable criteria for knowing “when the time had come.” In our interview, she asserted very clearly that the time had not come but that, with the law now active, she hoped to have access to a lethal prescription in case it did. (shrink)

By titling his paper “Slowing the Slide Down the Slippery Slope of Medical Assistance in Dying: Mutual Learnings for Canada and the US,” Daryl Pullman, an esteemed medical ethicist, uses a rhetoric...

I discuss the fusion of horizons as Gadamer’s alternative to both historicism and romanticism. The hermeneutical implicalions of this alternative are also summarized, together with a number of critical problems associated with it.

Rhetoric is widely regarded by both its detractors and advocates as a kind of antithesis to reason. In this book Thomas B. Farrell restores rhetoric as an art of practical reason and enlightened civic participation, grounding it in its classical tradition—particularly in the rhetoric of Aristotle. And, because prevailing modernist world views bear principal responsibility for the disparagement of rhetorical tradition, Farrell also offers a critique of the dominant currents of modern humanist thought. Farrell argues that rhetoric is not (...) antithetical to reason but is a manner of posing and answering questions that is distinct from the approaches of analytic and dialectical reason. He develops this position in a number of ways: through a series of bold reinterpretations of Aristotle's _Rhetoric_; through a detailed appraisal of traditional rhetorical concepts as seen in modern texts from the Army-McCarthy hearings to Edward Kennedy's memorial for his brother, Mario Cuomo's address on abortion, Betty Friedan's _Feminine Mystique_, and Vaclav Havel's inaugural address; and through a fresh appraisal of theories on the character of language and discourse found in contemporary philosophy, literary criticism, anthropology, deconstructionism, Marxism, and especially in Habermas's critical theory of communicative action. (shrink)

Abstract This article identifies the tropes of “maturity” and “immaturity” in the dialogue between religion and science. On both sides of the aisle, authors charge, either directly or indirectly, that their dissenting interlocutors are not mature enough to see the value of their respective positions. Such accusations have recently emerged in discussions pertaining to Hindu theology, Indology, and science. Those who dismiss the substance dualism of Hindu yoga, according to Jonathan B. Edelmann, evince immaturity. Appeals to Hindu yoga are yet (...) one more appeal to religious experience. Indeed, what we find in Edelmann's text is an appeal to appreciate the private, unverifiable—or falsifiable, for that matter—“insights” of Hindu yogis. Yogic experience is interminably steeped in motivated perception and confirmation bias. There is simply no good evidence or rational argument to take yogic claims seriously. Insofar as that is the case, Indology must achieve consilience with the natural and human sciences, remaining thereby reductive of such supernatural claims. (shrink)

Plagiarism and other transgressions of the norms of academic integrity appear to be a persistent problem among upper secondary students. Numerous surveys have revealed high levels of infringement of what appear to be clearly stated rules. Less attention has been given to students’ understanding of academic integrity, and to the potential misconceptions and false beliefs that may make it difficult for them to comply with existing rules and handle complex real-life situations.In this paper we report findings from a survey of (...) European upper secondary students’ views on issues relating to academic integrity. We relate these findings to the students’ training about academic integrity, self-reported level of questionable behavior and country of study.A total of 1654 students at 51 institutions located in 6 European countries participated in the study. The participants generally believed they had a good understanding of the rules applying to them and knew how to behave in compliance with norms of academic integrity. The results indicate, however, that often, in practice, this belief was mistaken. Many students had an inadequate understanding of core elements of academic integrity. They were uncertain about how to act, and they struggled in the handling of complex situations that require context-sensitive judgement. While some differences between countries were identified, they were modest and exhibited no clear pattern. Our results also suggest that reducing students’ level of uncertainty and, to a lesser degree, improving their level of knowledge could lead them to engage less in certain types of questionable behaviours. Surprisingly, the effect of academic training is modest and ambiguous. The study also confirms that perception of peer behaviour has the strongest association with student engagement in questionable behaviours. Thus, academic integrity at the upper secondary level cannot be explained simply in terms of individual ethics or knowledge. (shrink)

Animal use in medical research is widely accepted on the basis that it may help to save human lives and improve their quality of life. Recently, however, objections have been made specifically to the use of animals in scientific investigation of human obesity. This paper discusses two arguments for the view that this form of animal use, unlike some other forms of animal-based medical research, cannot be defended. The first argument leans heavily on the notion that people themselves are responsible (...) for developing obesity and so-called ‘lifestyle’ diseases; the second involves the claim that animal studies of obesity's causes and therapies distract attention from preventive efforts. Drawing on both empirical data and moral reasoning, we argue that the relevant attributions of responsibility and claims about distraction are not plausible, and that, therefore, there is no reason to single out the use of animals in obesity research as especially problematic. (shrink)

Human life expectancy has increased dramatically through improvements in public health, housing, nutrition and general living standards. Lifespan is now limited chiefly by intrinsic senescence and its associated frailty and diseases. Understanding the biological basis of the ageing process is a major scientific challenge that will require integration of molecular, cellular, genetic and physiological approaches. This article reviews progress that has been made to date, particularly with regard to the genetic contribution to senescence and longevity, and assesses the scale of (...) the task that remains. (shrink)

Biblical writers present a grand vision of the priestly vocation, in which the sacramental life of worship is translated into an ethical mission to the world. It is a vision in which the priestly vocation of the ordained in the sanctuary and the priestly vocation of the laity in the world work in concert to fulfill the divine vision of a transformed earth.1.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Death Perception:How Temporary Ventilator Disconnection Helped my Family Accept Brain Death and Donate OrgansThomas B. FreemanThe night of my nephew’s closed head injury in Boston, I was on call as a neurosurgeon at Tampa General Hospital. I was therefore not shocked at first when my telephone rang at four o’clock in the morning, but I soon understood the severity of the tragic news. The next half hour was a (...) blur of frantic phone calls and devastating decisions leading to surgery to remove a subdural hematoma from my nephew’s head, even though he was only two brain stem reflexes away from brain death.I thought that my experience as a neurosurgeon would somehow help me. However, when my sister–in–law asked me if this was just like the other tragic closed head injuries that I had seen in 26 years of practice, my answer was very simple: this was the only severe closed head injury I had ever seen—in my family. At this point, I was no longer a neurosurgeon. I was an uncle. My nephew’s closed head injury overwhelmed both his brain’s capacity to survive and my entire family’s ability to think rationally or objectively while grieving so intensely.It is in this context that we were asked to consider organ donation. The appeal for organ donation is one of altruism. My nephew’s parents agreed that organ donation would be an important way to honor their son’s life, allow him to make one final contribution to save the lives of several patients, and help to bring peace to the family.I will never forget, however, my niece’s distraught response. She is altruistic by nature, but was tremendously conflicted by the choice to donate her own brother’s organs. At this point, all discussions about organ donation stopped until we could understand the source of her conflict. Since she did not have legal authority regarding the final decision, some family members wondered if organ donation should be allowed if she could not come to terms with the choice. She felt isolated, because she was the only person in the room who was experiencing conflict. As a neurosurgeon, I have always advised other families in this situation that they may have more peace if they can make such decisions unanimously, regardless of who has the ultimate legal authority for decision–making. This helps bring healing to the family, eliminates disruption of family values and unity, and reduces possible feelings of guilt.I asked my niece what she was feeling. She stated something that I had never heard before as a neurosurgeon. She had listened to the words that her brother was brain dead, but she felt that he was somehow still alive, since he was breathing on a ventilator and his heart was beating. She felt powerless due to her inability to do anything more for [End Page 9] him. She also wanted to be there when her brother “died,” which she would recognize by the cessation of his heartbeat. She would not abandon her brother.I searched for a way to respect my niece’s wishes and her legitimate request, while preserving the ability to proceed with organ donation. Solving this conundrum proved to be a pivotal part of the beginning of both her mourning process and acceptance of his death.As an uncle, I experienced the clear dissociation that modern medicine creates between medical care and the natural human process of recognizing and accepting death. My family observed the subtle difference between a deep coma and brain death. They noticed that my nephew’s color had changed when his temperature dropped to 94o F before the heating blanket was placed. They perceived the decrease in muscle tone when he stopped breathing faster than the ventilator rate. Outside of that, there was no significant difference in his appearance when he was “alive” or “dead.”In spite of heroic measures and superlative surgical and medical care, his closed head injury progressed unremittingly until he became brain dead 36 hours later. The diagnosis of “brain death” was pronounced to the family. Accepting the death of someone who is... (shrink)

Zubiri was especially keen on unde rstanding what mathematics is, and what literature is,not in the operational terms often employed to describe them, but as knowledge about reality. Through his philosophy of sentient intelligence, he came to understand that in bothcases, a new reality is created which is then explored, and the essential ingredient ispostulation. This insight was only possible because Zubiri recognized that reality is not azone of things, but formality. Zubiri’s notion of postulated reality can be extended to (...) a thirdarea, political theory, where analysis reveals that key realities are postulated by the action of politically empowered entities, usually states. However, postulated reality in thisarea differs in some important ways from mathematics and literature. Zubiri tuvo gran interés en entender qué es la matemática, y qué es la literatura, no ensentido funcional, sino en sentido de saber acerca de la realidad. Por su filosofía de inteligencia sentiente, llegó a entender que en ambos casos, se crea una realidad nueva que seexplora después, y el ingrediente esencial es la postulación. Tal percepción solo fue posibleya que Zubiri se dio cuenta de la realidad no es una zona de cosas, sino formalidad. Su noción de realidad por postulación se puede extender a un campo tercero, la teoría de la polí-tica, donde el análisis revela que las realidades claves son postulados por acción de entidades autorizadas políticamente, en general, estados nacionales. Pero, la realidad postuladaen este campo difiere de la matemática y de la literatura en sentidos importantes. (shrink)

The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience. By Benny Shanon. 2001. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 475 pages. $35 (paperback). ISBN 0199252939.

Causality has been a key concept throughout the history of philosophy. One of its main uses has been in securing proofs of the existence of God. A review of the history of causality discloses five distinct phases, with major changes to the uses and understanding of causality, with the last ending in a very confused idea of causality. Zubiri pointed out that there are really three elements conflated in the common idea of causality: real production of effects, functionality, and power (...) of the real. By sorting these out, and recognizing that causality in the majority of cases is merely a type of functional relation between "cause" and "effect", many problems are greatly clarified. The type of functionality involved varies greatly, and can involve notions unknown to Aristotle, Hume, or Kant. But especially important is the case of causality involving human beings, since knowledge of direct production of effects is available there that is absent elsewhere. Combined with understanding of the. (shrink)

Hume's analyses of human apprehension and of causality were the most penetrating up to his time and continue to have great influence. Contemporary Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri has examined both and identified three underlying errors: the failure to recognize that there are three stages of human intellection, and especially that the first, primordial apprehension, has quite unique characteristics; the attempt to place an excessive burden on the content of impressions while ignoring what Zubiri terms their 'formality of reality'; and the (...) failure to recognize that functionality, not causality, is the basis for most of our knowledge. Causal chains in general cannot be adequately known, and therefore are not and cannot be the basis of our knowledge of the external world. Only in the area of persons and morality does causality play a critical role. (shrink)

Computer-facilitated self-service technologies have become ubiquitous in today’s consumer-focused world. Yet, few human–computer interactions elicit such dramatically polarizing emotional reactions from users as those involving SSTs. ATMs, pay-at-the-pump gas stations, and self-scanning retail registers tend to produce both passionate supporters and critics. While negative comments often center on unpleasant personal user experiences, the actual “abuse” related to such systems is really much deeper and more complex. SSTs carry with them a number of potentially insidious consequences, including the exploitation of consumers (...) as uncompensated temporary workers; the sacrifice of our inherent humanity to delegate both skills and cognition to electronic helpers; and the enabling of a new type of posthuman consumer identity, where each transaction is completed by a cyborg entity constructed of the human on one side and the electronic mechanism on the other. As a result, we may ultimately lose the boundary between the human and the machine. (shrink)

A recent report by Tyner et al.1 suggests that p53 is bad for longevity. Heterozygotic mice carrying a p53 mutation that apparently enhances the stability of the wild‐type protein showed shorter lifespans and faster ageing while also developing fewer tumours. This fits with the idea that cellular ageing is the price paid for better protection against unlimited proliferation of cancer cells. But other work shows that there is a strong positive association between DNA repair‐mediated protection against cancer and ageing. So (...) what are we to make of the new data with regard to overall understanding of the mechanisms of ageing? BioEssays 24:577–579, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Introduction Genetic Architecture of the Life Span Genetics of Longevity Genetics and the Future of Old Age Conclusion.

Innovation leads to new products, business models and even changes to socio-economic systems. However, it is important that innovation has the ‘right impacts’. Responsible innovation can help to achieve this; however, it is unclear how to introduce responsible innovation to real-world, competitive, industry settings. We explore this challenge in the context of sustainability orientated start-up enterprises, developing innovations within agriculture, food or energy. We develop a tool that provides innovators with a systematic way to identify socio-ethical issues. Using the concept (...) of experiential learning, we track the impact of the tool across 12 cases. For the tool to install responsible innovation, we propose that a full learning cycle must be completed. We find evidence that the tool can enable a full learning cycle and provide a method to identify socio-ethical factors. We contribute by articulating and operationalising an approach to introduce responsible innovation principles into real-world contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric in History as Theory and Praxis: A Blast from the PastThomas B. FarrellPhilosophies of history have fallen on hard times. Grand comic metanarratives were the first casualty, auguring ironically in the futility of their own pronouncements. Positive and negative teleologies were next to fall. But if finalized themes and Utopian schemes are not exactly in vogue, it remains the case that history—as systematic documentation and reminiscence about the (...) past—is and must be ongoing. This is transparently because things that matter continue to happen: with ideas, cultures, nature itself. And even if we never really learn from history, all other things being equal, history has shown that it is helpful to keep careful records. In an age that personalizes nearly everything, it is easy enough to recognize the familiar dissociation of act and accountability on a personal scale. What may appear as nothing more serious than petty truancy for a person may become amnesia, revisionism, and much worse when the zone of accountability is widened, the deeds are deepened, the stakes are increased. In each case, the argument is the same: identification through a sort of opaque empathy. In short, you had to be there.I intend this essay to be a meditation on some of the ways my amorphousarea of study, rhetorical theory, finds itself implicated with history, some possible avenues it may open for invention and judgment in history. Time permitting, I will also hazard a speculation on that great chimera [End Page 323] that dangles before fields of scholarship and historical projects alike: that of progress.Aristotle’s famous definition of rhetoric, “that its function is not to persuade but to see the available means of persuasion in each case” (1991, 35), begins my inquiry in a productively ambiguous way. For one thing, the definition locates the function of rhetoric directly within the sphere of human history, through the terms available and in each case. For unless we believe that means of persuasion are fixed and that cases are eternally recurring, what the rhetorician “sees” must vary with the times. A second note maybe in order here. For Aristotle’s term for seeing, theoresai, also happens to be the Greek root term for what we call “theory.” In its most fundamental sense, then, the ocular-centered aesthetic of Greek tradition gives us theory as a mode of “seeing.” I could add at this point that this “seeing” needs to be shared with others and that there are many ways of “seeing,” but this maybe a less-than-productive ambiguity, given my aims here.Instead, I wish to consider three distinct construals of what sort of practice rhetoric is, along with some implications of these construals for the place of rhetoric as theory and practice in human history. These three construals are rhetoric as productive art, rhetoric as constitutive art, and rhetoricas inventional art.We begin with the conception of rhetoric as productive art. Simply put, this means that rhetoric makes things, prototypically speeches. Such a conception, like the other two I will be discussing, has ebbed and flowed throughout the long history of rhetorical tradition. The Sophists, when not purporting to teach virtue, did profess their competence in instructing other show to create persuasive documents. Such a preoccupation also appears in rhetorics of belles lettres and elocution. Today it can be found in modern composition curricula and in the rather different world of the professional speechwriter.There have been very few attempts to link an exclusively productive art conception of rhetoric to Aristotle and still fewer successful attempts. To view the matter this way, one would need to think of the Rhetoric and the Poetics as essentially parallel documents (one makes poems; the other, speeches). One would also have to ignore a wealth of disconfirming evidence. Nonetheless, Alan G. Gross is able to write (in the aptly titled collection Rereading Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”), “‘What did Aristotle mean by rhetoric?’ At this juncture, I can do little more than reiterate my claim that rhetoric is a productive art, and only a productive art” (2000, 35). George Kennedy, the translator of our earlier passage, sees the matter rather differently: “What [End Page 324] kind of... (shrink)

Green New Deal policies are proposed to tackle the climate emergency. These policies focus on driving climate innovation through unprecedented financial policy levers. However, while the macro-level financing dynamics are clear, the influence of niche level dynamics of sustainable innovation financing remain unexplored within these policy settings. Through the context of the European Green Deal and a focus on the agri-tech start-up sector in the Netherlands, we identify factors likely to reduce the efficacy of these policies from an innovation management (...) perspective—such as project matching issues, socio-ethical factors or the characteristics of agri-food climate innovations. We go on to conceptualise that these challenges represent a range of asymmetries—from classic information asymmetries to less common value and objective asymmetries—between climate innovators and private investors and financers. Many remedies for asymmetries involve costs, likely to further inhibit the efficacy of the European Green Deal and similar policies. A partnering approach is proposed, where the non-financial resources of incumbent actors are harnessed and leveraged to enhance climate innovation performance. (shrink)

Byrne (2005) demonstrates that reasoning and imagination are logical and governed by the same processing principles. In extending those principles to other forms of imaginative functioning, however, problems arise. The meaning of “true possibility” is stretched, and the causal role of the principles is not well established. Nevertheless, consideration of the extent to which ordinary cognitive processes govern creative functioning is valuable.

In my paper, I defend a view that many would regard as self-evidently false: the view that God’s freedom, his power to act, is in no way limited by his essential properties. I divide the paper into five sections. In section i, I call attention to a special class of non-contingent propositions and try to identify an important feature of these propositions; in section ii, I provide some initial reasons. based in part upon the unique features of these special propositions, (...) for thinking that God does have the power to perform actions which his essential properties entail he will never perform; in section iii, I call into question the assumption that a person has the power to do something only if it is logically possible that he will exercise that power; and, finally, in sections iv and v, I try to specify a sense in which divine freedom and the kind of human freedom required by the Free will Defense are in fact the same kind of freedom. (shrink)

Rapid advances in computer technology and what is termed ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in the past 70 years have led to speculation about the ultimate capabilities of electronic devices, including speculation about whether they will make humans obsolete at some future time. Zubiri’s distinction between sensible intelligence and sentient intelligence can be applied to understanding of the limitations of AI. Machines can only operate on the sensible intelligence paradigm, which entails limits. Sentient intelligence allows humans to carry out functions that sensible intelligence-based (...) devices can never do. Sensible intelligence-based devices, including AI, will therefore be restricted to amplifying human (i.e. sentient intelligence) capabilities, but never replacing them. Historically, extravagant claims for AI have not been borne out, despite many orders of magnitude increase in computation speed and memory capacity. Theoretical arguments, based on Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, also confirm this. (shrink)