Research on human cadavers is an important mechanism of scientific progress and comprises a large industry in the United States. However, despite its importance and influence, there is little ethical or regulatory oversight of cadaver-based research. This lack of transparency raises important ethical questions. Thus, this paper serves as a call for ethicists and regulators to pay increased attention to cadaver research. I argue that cadaver research ought to be considered a subset of human subjects research and held accountable to (...) higher ethical standards. After describing current practices, I argue that oversight of cadaver research as a form of human subjects research is appropriate because cadaver research is similar to other types of human research, participants in cadaver research incur risks of harm, and a current lack of oversight has allowed the cadaver industry to entice research participation through ethically questionable practices. This paper urges greater dialogue among human subjects research ethicists and regulators about what constitutes appropriate protections for participants in cadaver research. (shrink)

Beauchamp and Childress’ biomedical principlism is nearly synonymous with medical ethics for most clinicians. Their four principles are theoretically derived from the “common morality”, a universal cache of moral beliefs and claims shared by all morally serious humans. Others have challenged the viability of the common morality, but none have attempted to explain why the common morality makes intuitive sense to Western ethicists. Here I use the work of Charles Taylor to trace how events in the Western history of ideas (...) made the common morality seem plausible and yet, ironically, underscore the cultural particularity of the so-called common morality. I conclude that the supposedly universal common morality is actually quite culturally contained. Importantly, this should give us pause about the global authority of principlism and Beauchamp and Childress’ claim to a global bioethics project. (shrink)

Violence in psychiatric clinics has been a consistent problem since the birth of modern psychiatry. In this paper, I examine current efforts to understand and reduce both violence and coercive responses to violence in psychiatry, arguing that these efforts are destined to fall short. By and large, scholarship on psychiatric violence reduction has focused on identifying discrete factors that are statistically associated with violence, such as patient demographics and clinical qualities, in an effort to quantify risk and predict violent acts (...) before they happen. Using the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, I characterize the theoretical orientation of such efforts as identity thinking. I then argue that these approaches lead to epistemic imperceptiveness and a subtle form of conceptual restraint on patients. I suggest a reorientation in psychiatric research, away from identity thinking and toward a more productive and just approach to the problem of violence in psychiatric clinics. (shrink)

We describe a case of an elderly patient suffering from advanced dementia whose chronic confusion has become a source of frustration for her caregivers. Mrs. M experiences a touching interaction with a new nurse who takes a different approach with her. We describe this interaction and elaborate upon it by drawing from Catholic social teaching and the philosophy of play. Cases like these do not involve dramatic or esoteric ethical problematics, but rather the sort of dilemma born of the everyday (...) tragedies of lingering illness, aging and caretakers’ fatigue. Nathan’s approach offers a different way of seeing and being with the wearisome patient. (shrink)

Este artigo procura mostrar como Michel Foucault opera a leitura dos saberes da civilização ocidental em sua grande obra A História da Loucura. Ao longo dos anos sessenta, Foucault sempre esteve preocupado acerca da maneira com que usualmente nos concebemos. Investigando a linguagem racional ele descobre uma surpreendente modulação discursiva que esconde nossas mais básicas escolhas. Ele a chama de literatura. Cavando até o mais profundo e desconhecido nível de nossa cultura, a arqueologia de Foucault compartilha desde o prefácio de (...) História da Loucura algumas noções filosóficas que, acima de tudo, demandam um esclarecimento prévio antes de qualquer interpretação de seu pensamento. (shrink)

Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar o estatuto filosófico da história arqueológica empreendida por Michel Foucault no início de seu pensamento. Sua obra, simultaneamente filosófica e de história das ciências, tem o objetivo de realizar uma arqueologia da nossa cultura. Desde a História da Loucura Foucault sempre esteve interessado em fazer aparecer o modo como nossa cultura procurou encerrar e significar o que era fundamentalmente “outro” no homem. Mediante a leitura do primeiro Prefácio à História da Loucura , nós desejamos (...) compreender como os conceitos de razáo e loucura estáo conectados neste primeiro passo de sua obra. É acerca dos problemas filosóficos que este artigo irá tratar na tentativa de compreender o posicionamento filosófico desta nova maneira de escrever a história. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that fiction is necessarily incomplete, but some recent work postulates the existence of universal fictions—stories according to which everything is true. Building such a story is supposedly straightforward: authors can either assert that everything is true in their story, define a complement function that does the assertoric work for them, or, most compellingly, write a story combining a contradiction with the principle of explosion. The case for universal fictions thus turns on the intuitive priority we assign (...) to the law of non-contradiction. My goal in this paper is to show that our critical and reflective literary practices set constraints on story-telling which preclude universal fictions. I will raise four stumbling blocks for universal fictionalists: the gap between saying and making true, our actual interpretive reactions to story-level contradictions, the criteria we accept for what counts as a story in our literary practices, and the undesirability of the universal fictionalist’s closure principles. (shrink)

The premise that every work belongs to an art-kind has recently inspired a kind-centred approach to theories of art. Kind-centred analyses posit that we should abandon the project of giving a general theory of art and focus instead on giving theories of the arts. The main difficulty, however, is to explain what makes a given kind an art-kind in the first place. Kind-centred theorists have passed this buck on to appreciative practices, but this move proves unsatisfactory. I argue that the (...) root of this dissatisfaction stems not from the act of kicking the can down the road, but from not kicking it far enough. The missing ingredient, I argue, is a notion of convention which does the work of marking the difference between art and non-art for a given physical medium. (shrink)

It is widely believed, among philosophers of literature, that imagining contradictions is as easy as telling or reading a story with contradictory content. Italo Calvino’s The Nonexistent Knight, for instance, concerns a knight who performs many brave deeds, but who does not exist. Anything at all, they argue, can be true in a story, including contradictions and other impossibilia. While most will readily concede that we cannot objectually imagine contradictions, they nevertheless insist that we can propositionally imagine them, and regularly (...) do, simply by entertaining a text which prompts us to do so. I argue that this narrative does not bear scrutiny for two main reasons. First, because propositional imagining is beside the point, where truth in fiction is concerned; evaluating truth in fiction engages the cognitive architecture in ways that prohibit the mobilization of merely propositional imagination to that end. And second, because it is not obvious, given the strategies usually suggested, that we ever propositionally imagine contradictions in the first place—in fact, it seems we go out of our way to avoid directly imagining them. (shrink)

... PREFACE Paul Gochet (Liege) "[...] une entite physique ne peut etre envisagee que comme une sorte de concretisation, de consolidation locale dans un ...

Schopenhauer’s invective is legendary among philosophers, and is unmatched in the historical canon. But these complaints are themselves worthy of careful consideration: they are rooted in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of language, which itself reflects the structure of his metaphysics. This short chapter argues that Schopenhauer’s vitriol rewards philosophical attention; not because it expresses his critical take on Fichte, Hegel, Herbart, Schelling, and Schleiermacher, but because it neatly illustrates his philosophy of language. Schopenhauer’s epithets are not merely spiteful slurs; instead, they reflect (...) deep-seated theoretical and methodological commitments to transparency of exposition. (shrink)

Michel Weber, Éléments de routine ayurvédique. Autonomie, rituel et ascèse, Les Éditions Chromatika, 2021. (978-2-930517-82-7 ; pdf 978-2-930517-83-4 ; 104 pp., 14€) -/- L’Ayurvéda propose une philosophie de vie qui articule un vaste système métaphysique (une cosmologie théorique) avec une visée thérapeutique profonde (une anthropologie pratique). -/- À la croisée de la théorie et de la pratique, on trouve la routine (« dinacharya ») dont le but est de susciter l’individuation et la solidarité, c’est-à-dire l’autonomie (de chacun) respectueuse de la (...) communauté (de tous). Ce faisant, elle constitue une ascèse dont l’efficacité a été longuement éprouvée et rarement égalée. (shrink)

‘Philosophical dialogue’ indicates both a form of philosophical inquiry and its corresponding literary genre. In its written form, it typically features two or more characters who engage in a discussion concerning morals, knowledge, as well as a variety of topics that can be widely labelled as ‘philosophical’. Our philosophical dialogue takes place in Krakow, Poland. It is a rainy morning and two strangers are waiting at a tram stop. One of them is dressed neatly, and cannot stop fidgeting with his (...) closed umbrella. The other was caught unprepared by the morning downpour and water is dripping from his worn, soaked jacket. (shrink)

Influenced by the Wittgensteinian slogan “Don’t look for the meaning, look for the use,” ordinary language philosophers aimed to defuse various philosophical problems by analyzing key words in terms of what they are used to do or the conditions for appropriately using them. Although Moore, Grice and Searle exposed this error – mixing pragmatics with semantics – it still gets committed, now to a different end. Nowadays the aim is to reckon with the fact that the meanings of a great (...) many sentences underdetermine what we would normally mean in using them – even if the sentence is free of indexicality, ambiguity, and vagueness. This can be so because the sentence expresses a “minimal” proposition or even because it doesn’t fully express any proposition. Many theorists are led to defend “truth-conditional pragmatics” (or linguistic “contextualism”), to find a hidden indexical in every syntactic nook or semantic cranny, or otherwise to pay undue respect to seemingly semantic intuitions and intentions. This paper identifies various such moves and explains what’s regressive about them. (shrink)

Francis Sparshott introduced the term ‘remote art’ in his 1982 presidential address to the American Society for Aesthetics. The concept has not drawn much notice since—although individual remote arts, such as palaeolithic art and the artistic practices of subaltern cultures, have enjoyed their fair share of attention from aestheticians. This paper explores what unites some artistic practices under the banner of remote art, arguing that remoteness is primarily a matter of some audience’s epistemic distance from a work’s context of creation. (...) I introduce palaeoart—the depiction of extinct prehistoric fauna and flora, especially from the Mesozoic—as a paradigmatic case of remote art, showing that its remoteness is secured both by the deceptively rich cognitive load required for its creation and appreciation, and by its existence at the margins of the institutional artworld, which ensures that this cognitive loading is largely obscured. Too often, remote art is not just inscrutable, it is invisible to us. (shrink)

a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .

Boethius’ attempt to clarify the notion of divine providence in the Philosophiae consolatiois based on the conception of divine substance as ›eternity‹. Concerning his distinction between ›providence‹ and ›fate‹, this essay reconsiders and modi;es the view of some modern readers, according to which Boethius’s account entirely depends on Proclus. The fact that Boethius associates the notion of the One or the supreme Good with the notion of eternity suggests a rather free use of Proclus’s ideas. Although the solution of the (...) problem of the ›necessity‹ of future contingent events he proposes is not new, what he has to say on divine ›comprehension‹ does not seem to consist merely in a presentation of views of his Neopla­tonic predecessors. (shrink)

Many physicists regard the flow of time as an illusion. There is an upper level flow of time, the phenomenon of past/present/future; and there is a lower level flow of time which is really a flow of events. Perceptual completion accounts for the lower level flow of time in a few ways: apparent movement; amodal completion; and dynamic change as exemplified by a newly described modal completion that we called happening. It acts like an illusory percept connecting discrete stimuli in (...) all sensory modalities. The past/present/future distinction cannot exist unless an object is perceived to be the same now as it is then. This cognition requires object persistence. Experiments with object persistence suggest the circumstances when that, too, is an illusory percept. The illusory percepts of object persistence and perceptual completion can account for the entire flow of time. Our findings and conclusions are congruent with a few time theories and cosmologies that suggest that the flow of time is an illusion. (shrink)

Presenting a novel account of singular thought, a systematic application of recent work in the theory of speech acts, and a partial revival of Russell's analysis of singular terms, this book takes an original approach to the perennial problems of reference and singular terms by separating the underlying issues into different levels of analysis.

Confusion in terms inspires confusion in concepts. When a relevant distinction is not clearly marked or not marked at all, it is apt to be blurred or even missed altogether in our thinking. This is true in any area of inquiry, pragmatics in particular. No one disputes that there are various ways in which what is communicated in an utterance can go beyond sentence meaning. The problem is to catalog the ways. It is generally recognized that linguistic meaning underdetermines speaker (...) meaning because of the need for disambiguation and reference assignment and because people can speak figuratively or indirectly. But philosophers and linguists are coming to recognize that these are not the only ways. The situation may be described in Gricean terms: the distinction between what is said and what is implicated is not exhaustive. Charting the middle ground between the two will require attending to specific examples, noting their distinctive features, and articulating the relevant concepts. That is what I aim to do here. The basic idea will be to distinguish not only the implied from the explicit but the implicit from the implied. (shrink)

This volume is a wonderful introduction to Foucault and a testimony to the deep humanity of the man himself.

First published: 2010; Previous edition: 2012..

Das 17. Jahrhundert ist beherrscht von der Maschine. Sie dominiert als technische Konstruktion die Theorien und Praxen der wissenschaftlichen Revolution und bedingt entscheidend den Aufstieg der empirischen Wissenschaften. Als Metapher hat sie Erklärungskraft für barocke Modelle von Welt und Mensch, von Körper und Geist; bildlich repräsentiert sie kulturelle und natürliche, weltliche und religiöse Prozesse. Auch Literatur und Theater sind nicht ohne Maschinen zu denken. Darum geht es in diesem Buch: um die polyfunktionale Figur der Maschine in Bezug auf theater- und (...) literaturästhetische Diskurse und Performanzen. Denn Maschinen haben im rationalistisch-mechanistischen Barockzeitalter nicht nur philosophischen Erklärungswert - sie besitzen zugleich Generierungspotenzial: das Potenzial, Neues und Anderes, Mögliches und Unmögliches zu generieren. Die Poiesis der Maschine in der barocken Theater- und Literaturästhetik steht zur Diskussion. Vorgestellt werden zwei zentrale poietische Prozesse: Die Maschine generiert literarisch-theatrale Möglichkeitsräume auf der Bühne und im Buch. Zum einen setzt die Theatermaschine die barocke Ästhetik des Spektakulären um, gesteigert in der maschinellen Theatralisierung der Welt im Rahmen des barocken Festes. Zum anderen inszeniert die Maschinenliteratur Technikutopien auf der Schnittstelle zwischen Wirklichkeit und utopisch-visionärer Möglichkeit – und steht damit für das noch nicht diversifizierte literarische System der Frühen Neuzeit ein. Den Hauptteil des Buchs bildet ein Repertorium, welches die Werkgruppe der "Theatra Machinarum" erstmals systematisch erfasst: gedruckte, ein- oder mehrbändige Technikschaubücher vom 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert, die reale und imaginierte Maschinen in Bild und Text präsentieren und sich, häufig durch einen theatermetaphorischen Titel, als Inszenierungen von Wissen auf einer Bühne ausstellen. (shrink)

Grice’s distinction between what is said and what is implicated has greatly clarified our understanding of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. Although border disputes still arise and there are certain difficulties with the distinction itself (see the end of §1), it is generally understood that what is said falls on the semantic side and what is implicated on the pragmatic side. But this applies only to what is..

Comment Bachelard, fils d'un cordonnier, professeur de physique et chimie, a-t-il pu devenir cet humaniste aussi savant que philosophe, aussi penseur que poète? Il n'a pas emprunté les chemins balisés, ceux des élites universitaires et culturelles. Il a contrarié les pronostics et les conventions. Il s'est adjugé contre vents et marées le droit de penser par lui-même en bousculant les frontières des savoirs et de la culture et en dérangeant les us et coutumes établis. "Un ouvrage aussi lumineux que la (...) destinée et l'oeuvre de Gaston Bachelard. Au plus près de sa vie et de sa pensée". (Philippe Meirieu). (shrink)