Philip Reed (2023) argues that discrimination against (non-acutely) dying patients constitutes a unique kind—which he calls terminalism—because their status as persons with terminal illness marks them with a socially salient identity which, by means of direct and indirect discrimination, limits their sets of choices and resources, such as in hospice care or organ transplant policies. 1 Importantly, Reed also argues that while terminalism is an increasingly prevalent normative phenomenon, it has been overlooked in the literature, ‘hiding in plain sight’ as (...) even though we are ‘aware of it at some level’." 1 What could explain this paradox? Drawing from Jeffrey Bishop, Giorgio Agamben, and T. Kenny Fountain, I argue that an institutional episteme and operating assumption of medicine, from the training of medical students, discursively disciplines terminally ill persons as bare life, between medicine’s dichotomy of bodies: neither ‘biovaluable’ (the surplus value of separated human bodily material... (shrink)

The most comprehensive survey of Wittgenstein’s thought yet compiled, this volume of fifty newly commissioned essays by leading interpreters of his philosophy is a keynote addition to the Blackwell series on the world’s great philosophers, covering everything from Wittgenstein’s intellectual development to the latest interpretations of his hugely influential ideas. The lucid, engaging commentary also reviews Wittgenstein’s historical legacy and his continued impact on contemporary philosophical debate.

The hole argument purportedly shows that spacetime substantivalism implies a pernicious form of indeterminism. We show that the argument is seductive only because it mistakes a trivial claim (viz. there are isomorphic models) for a significant claim (viz. there are hole isomorphisms). We prove that the latter claim is false -- thereby closing the debate about whether substantivalism implies indeterminism.

Loneliness in medicine is a serious problem not just for patients, for whom illness is intrinsically isolating, but also for physicians in the contemporary condition of medicine. We explore this problem by investigating the ideal physician-patient relationship, whose analogy with friendship has held enduring normative appeal. Drawing from Talbot Brewer and Nir Ben-Moshe, we argue that this appeal lies in a dynamic form of companionship incompatible with static models of friendship-like physician-patient relationships: a mutual refinement of embodied virtue that draws (...) both persons together. The ideal physician-patient relationship has a dialectical character that fosters each member's improvement of phenomenologically recognizing and embodying moral virtues. A key component of this dynamic is a commitment to the common goal of the patient's health, realized through joint interactivities and conversations over time. The physician's presence to the patient's suffering—understood best as an alienating phenomenological condition for the patient—orients and discloses possibilities for virtuous caregiving by structuring the meanings of the goals, conversations, and joint narrative constitutive of their relationship. Presence to suffering, paradoxically, is perhaps an important prerequisite for this dynamic partnership. These activities dialectically build an interpretive horizon of understanding through which moral goods and character refinement—in and for the other—may become revealed for both persons in their shared being-in-the-world. This analysis of suffering, mood, and revealing of (possible) moral goods has implications for addressing the modern problem of loneliness for patients and physicians, who are increasingly inhibited from building flourishing relationships with each other. (shrink)

This paper is about the statics and dynamics of belief states that are represented by pairs consisting of an agent's credences (represented by a subjective probability measure) and her categorical beliefs (represented by a set of possible worlds). Regarding the static side, we argue that the latter proposition should be coherent with respect to the probability measure and that its probability should reach a certain threshold value. On the dynamic side, we advocate Jeffrey conditionalisation as the principal mode of changing (...) one's belief state. This updating method fits the idea of the Lockean Thesis better than plain Bayesian conditionalisation, and it affords a flexible method for adding and withdrawing categorical beliefs. We show that it fails to satisfy the traditional principles of Inclusion and Preservation for belief revision and the principle of Recovery for belief withdrawals{, as well as the Levi and Harper identities. We take this to be a problem for the latter principles rather than for the idea of coherent belief change. (shrink)

We pose and resolve a puzzle about spontaneous symmetry breaking in the quantum theory of infinite systems. For a symmetry to be spontaneously broken, it must not be implementable by a unitary operator in a ground state's GNS representation. But Wigner's theorem guarantees that any symmetry's action on states is given by a unitary operator. How can this unitary operator fail to implement the symmetry in the GNS representation? We show how it is possible for a unitary operator of this (...) sort to connect the folia of unitarily inequivalent representations. This result undermines interpretations of quantum theory that hold unitary equivalence to be necessary for physical equivalence. (shrink)

Nature seems to be such that we can describe it accurately with quantum theories of bosons and fermions alone, without resort to parastatistics. This has been seen as a deep mystery: paraparticles make perfect physical sense, so why don’t we see them in nature? We consider one potential answer: every paraparticle theory is physically equivalent to some theory of bosons or fermions, making the absence of paraparticles in our theories a matter of convention rather than a mysterious empirical discovery. We (...) argue that this equivalence thesis holds in all physically admissible quantum field theories falling under the domain of the rigorous Doplicher–Haag–Roberts approach to superselection rules. Inadmissible parastatistical theories are ruled out by a locality-inspired principle we call charge recombination. 1 Introduction2 Paraparticles in Quantum Theory3 Theoretical Equivalence3.1 Field systems in algebraic quantum field theory3.2 Equivalence of field systems4 A Brief History of the Equivalence Thesis4.1 The Green decomposition4.2 Klein transformations4.3 The argument of Drühl, Haag, and Roberts4.4 The Doplicher–Roberts reconstruction theorem5 Sharpening the Thesis6 Discussion6.1 Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics6.2 Structuralism and haecceities6.3 Paraquark theories. (shrink)

It has been claimed, out of admiration for the great thinker, that his political errors have nothing to do with his philosophy. If only we could be content with that! Wholly unnoticed was how damaging such a “defense” of so important a thinker really is. And how could it be made consistent with the fact that the same man, in the fifties, saw and said things about the industrial revolution and technology that today are still truly astonishing for their foresight?In (...) any case: no surprise should be expected from those of us who, for fifty years, have reflected on what dismayed us in those days and separated us from Heidegger for many years: no surprise when we hear that in 1933—and for years previous, and for how long after?—he “believed” in Hitler. But Heidegger was also no mere opportunist. If we wish to dignify his political engagement by calling it a “standpoint,” it would be far better to call it a political “illusion,” which had notably little to do with political reality. If Heidegger later, in the face of all realities, would again dream his dream from those days, the dream of a “people’s religion” [Volksreligion], the later version would embrace his deep disappointment over the actual course of affairs. But he continued guarding that dream—and kept silent about it. Earlier, in 1933 and 1934, he thought he was following his dream, and fulfilling his deepest philosophical mission, when he tried to revolutionize the university from the ground up. It was for that that he did everything that horrified us at that time. For him the sole issue was to break the political influence of the church and the tenacity of academic bossdom. Even Ernst Jünger’s vision of “the worker” [der Arbeiter] was given a place beside his own ideas about overcoming the metaphysical tradition via the reawakening of Being. Later, as is known, Heidegger wandered all the way to his radical talk of the end of philosophy. That was his “revolution.” Hans-Georg Gadamer is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. His books include Truth and Method, Philosophical Hermeneutics, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, and The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. John McCumber, associate professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, is the author of Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason. (shrink)

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.

The nature of antimatter is examined in the context of algebraic quantum field theory. It is shown that the notion of antimatter is more general than that of antiparticles. Properly speaking, then, antimatter is not matter made up of antiparticles—rather, antiparticles are particles made up of antimatter. We go on to discuss whether the notion of antimatter is itself completely general in quantum field theory. Does the matter–antimatter distinction apply to all field theoretic systems? The answer depends on which of (...) several possible criteria we should impose on the space of physical states. (shrink)

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein crossed the second Styx, from living memory to history, during the years since the present century began. He is recognized today as one of the most original and powerful thinkers of the twentieth century, and his work belongs to the body of literature philosophers will read and interpret afresh in each generation, for as long as the European intellectual tradition survives. He wrote nothing in political philosophy or jurisprudence, very little in ethics, and the only sustained record of (...) his philosophical ideas about religion and art consists in notes taken by students at his lectures. The Tractatus was published in 1921. In this book, Wittgenstein argues that the logical form of a proposition is utterly different from its superficial grammatical form. The greatest obstacles to understanding Wittgenstein's philosophy are not any inherent obscurity in his ideas, but the aphoristic style in which he wrote and the introverted character of his thought. (shrink)

Fragment of an Intellectual Autobiography:- BY HANS J. MORGENTHAU h My first political memories go back to the Tripolitan War M of between Italy and Turkey ...

SUMMARYThis essay combines the study of Humboldt's sources with a critique of the treatment of this subject in most studies of Humboldt and his linguistic thought. One crucial issue is the date of his early ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’, which is our first evidence of his mature thinking about language. This text is conventionally dated 1795, thus ruling out that Humboldt might be indebted to the anthropo-linguistic philosophy that he explored in Paris a few years later. But a host of (...) facts make the date untenable and the debt unquestionable, including incontrovertible evidence that ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ relies on Condillac's argument for the anti-idealist principle that the distinction between subject and object is the absolute precondition for self-awareness and reflection, and thus, by the same token, for the concept of Weltansicht. ‘Über Denken und Sprechen’ also shows that Humboldt was inspired to choose Condillac's and Destutt de Tracy's argument over that of Fichte for what Berkeley disapprovingly called ‘outness’. This analysis exemplifies the critique that is advanced in this essay. (shrink)

Thirteen leading contributors offer new essays in honour of the eminent philosopher and Wittgenstein scholar Peter Hacker. They discuss issues in the interpretation of Wittgenstein, investigate central topics in the history of analytic philosophy, and explore and assess Wittgensteinian ideas about language, mind, action, ethics, and religion.

The section dealing with the "phenomenology of consciousness" is finally dominated by the question, How does consciousness become self-consciousness, or how does consciousness become conscious that it is self-consciousness? This assertion, however, that consciousness is self-consciousness, is a central teaching of modern philosophy since Descartes. To this extent, Hegel’s idea of phenomenology lies in the Cartesian line. Contemporary parallels show how much this is the case, especially the quite unknown book of Sinclair, the friend of Hölderlin and Hegel, which deals (...) with the Sphragis in the Rhein hymn, and is entitled Truth and Certitude. The work attempts, beginning quite explicitly with the Cartesian concept cogito me cogitare, to lead one along the path from certitude to truth in two rather similar fashions, through Fichte, and, almost contemporaneously, in Hegel. (shrink)

PurposeThis paper scrutinizes the impact of socioeconomic, political, legal and religious factors on the internal ethical values of human rights organizations worldwide. The authors aim to examine the Code of Ethics for 279 HROs in 67 countries and the social and legal settings in which they operate.Design/methodology/approachUsing the framework of protect, respect and remedy, the authors look for keywords that represent the human rights lexicon in these three areas. In the protection of human rights, the authors select the terms: peace, (...) transparency, freedom and security. For the respect of humans, the authors use the terms: dignity, equality, respect and rights. Sources of remedies come from justice and ethics. The analysis seeks to determine what political economy settings drive the ethical value choices of the organizations. Those choices are proxied by those keywords they mention in their Code of Ethics.FindingsThe analysis show that the scope of ethical values mentioned are higher when the HRO is in a country with more domestic violence, lower income inequality, French civil or Islamic legal origin and higher trust in politicians. In regard to the determinants of the ten keywords individually, the authors conclude that the status of the socioeconomic, political, religious and legal settings impact with local HROs mention each of the keywords: peace, justice, transparency, dignity, equality, ethics, respect, freedom, security and rights.Research limitations/implicationsThe analysis is based on HROs that have a webpage in English and list the employee Code of Conduct.Originality/valueThis study is the first to examine the Code of Ethics for HROs. The authors demonstrate that country-specific characteristics help to drive their internal ethical values. (shrink)

The conflict which has tended recently to crystallize in particular around the name of Martin Heidegger goes back a long way. Where do philosophers stand in relation to political and social reality? What assistance can their problems and insights offer the process of coming to terms with this reality? In the context of the discussions surrounding Farias's book I set out my own position in Paris in November 1987; the full text was later published in German under the heading “Return (...) to Syracuse?” This title referred to the disappointment Plato felt in his own time when, at the invitation of the tyrant of Syracuse, that city's absolute ruler, he had twice gone to initiate the young prince in the basic principles of his thought concerning the just idea of the state and the just ordering of society. Things turned out badly and Plato had considerable difficulty getting back home again. Later still he was to suffer bitter disappointment when his intimate associate Dion, a member of the innermost circle of his academic community, was suddenly murdered by his own friends after heading a victorious operation to liberate Syracuse (one would like to know more about what lay behind that particular assassination). (shrink)

This interdisciplinary book brings together theoretical and empirical contributions from marketing and economic sociologists to analyse and develop novel ...