This article has two purposes. The first is to show how one can know in a simple way what is an ordinary and obligatory means to care for a person with a serious illness. Using the information at hand, one must be able to answer yes to each of these three questions: “Is this the ordinary, usual, or valid way of treating this illness?” “Is it working?” “Is it within the capacity of the patient to undergo and of the caregivers (...) to administer?” The second purpose of the article is to show the moral validity of these questions, using a historical overview of theological and magisterial teaching and a systematic analysis and moral testing of the three questions. (shrink)

"In this book Pierre Keller examines the distinctive contributions, and the respective limitations, of Husserl's and Heidegger's approach to fundamental elements of human experience. He shows how their accounts of time, meaning, and personal identity are embedded in important alternative conceptions of how experience may be significant for us, and discusses both how these conceptions are related to each other and how they fit into a wider philosophical context."--BOOK JACKET.

Dreyfus and Rubin's commentary on Division II of Being and Time raises three closely related puzzles about the possibility of authenticity: how could Dasein ever choose to become authentic, how could authentic Dasein ever choose to take up any particular possibility, and how could anything matter to authentic Dasein? They argue that Heidegger has a convincing answer to the first two puzzles, but they find his answer to the third "indirect and not totally convincing". I argue that they should find (...) Heidegger's answer to the third puzzle far worse than "not totally convincing", given their interpretation of his account of anxiety, and that the answers they claim he has in response to the first two puzzles are not supported by the text. I then show that the puzzles arise from distortions in Dreyfus and Rubin's interpretation of Heidegger's account of anxiety. The puzzles dissolve once the distortions are identified. (shrink)