Tag: philosophy
Blog Posts (7)
June 17, 2013
In Memory of Edmund D. Pellegrino
I cannot claim to have had anything more than a casual and intermittent personal acquaintance with Professor Pellegrino, whose passing this last week is a great loss for bioethics, medicine, academia, and the church alike. I did, however, have the priv...January 9, 2012
In Memoriam--Bernard Gert
We sadly note the passing of philosopher and bioethicists, Bernard “Bernie” Gert. Bernie was also a member of American Society for Bioethics and Humanities and received its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.…
June 9, 2009
Metamorphosis: The Margaret Battin Story
It’s the workaholics who are told that “your work is your life”. It’s many in academia who find that they are drawn to study the issues that afflict them or plague them or trouble them most about themselves or about the world.…
May 15, 2009
Do You Want Fries with That?
One of the oldest jokes around for those trained in philosophy includes a punch line about serving fries at insert name of favorite fast food restaurant.…
April 10, 2008
Can Plato pay the bills?
According to an article earlier this week in NYT, philosophy has become a hot major on college campuses:
Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world, from the morality of the war in Iraq to the latest political scandal.
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January 14, 2008
Steven Pinker on "The Moral Instinct"
Yesterday’s NYT Mag included an article by Steven Pinker about the science of morality:
… Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the nave belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?).
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September 12, 2007
Toward a theory of life
Seed recently posted an interesting article from Carl Zimmer about the multidisciplinary effort to develop a theory — instead of a defintion — of life:
“A science in which the most important object has no definitionthat’s absolutely unacceptable,” says [Radu Popa, geobiologist and the author of Between Probability and Necessity: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life].
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Published Articles (6)
American Journal of Bioethics: Volume 10 Issue 12 - Dec 2010
Rethinking Roe v. Wade: Defending the Abortion Right in the Face of Contemporary Opposition Bertha Manninen
American Journal of Bioethics: Volume 9 Issue 9 - Sep 2009
Mirror Neurons and the Reenchantment of Bioethics James Duffy
American Journal of Bioethics: Volume 9 Issue 4 - Apr 2009
Review of Imagine What It's Like: A Literature and Medicine Anthology Judy Schaefer
American Journal of Bioethics: Volume 9 Issue 4 - Apr 2009
Review of R. S. Downie and Jane Macnaughton Bioethics and the Humanities: Attitudes and Perceptions Dan Bustillos
American Journal of Bioethics: Volume 8 Issue 8 - Aug 2008
Ethics, Pandemics, and the Duty to Treat Heidi Malm
American Journal of Bioethics: Volume 7 Issue 12 - Dec 2007
Clash of Definitions: Controversies About Conscience in Medicine Ryan E. Lawrence
News (5)
May 17, 2012 9:54 am
“The Self” in the Future: Will it be Extinguished, by Neuroscience? (Institute for Emerging Ethics & Technologies)
Will “the self” survive because it can provide people with a greater sense of happiness? Or is it – perhaps along with the constructs “Free Will” and “Determinism” – doomed to the dustbin of history? Should cyborgs, avatars, and a rewired human brain be developed with a stronger or weaker sense of self? An interview with Dr. Garret Merriam, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern Indiana.
May 10, 2012 11:30 am
Neurononsense: Why brain sciences can't explain the human condition (ABC News)
The new sciences in fact have a tendency to divide neatly into two parts. On the one hand there is an analysis of some feature of our mental or social life and an attempt to show its importance and the principles of its organisation. On the other hand, there is a set of brain scans. Every now and then there is a cry of “Eureka!” – for example, when Joshua Greene showed that dilemmas involving personal confrontation arouse different brain areas from those aroused by detached moral calculations. But since Greene gave no coherent description of the question, to which the datum was supposed to suggest an answer, the cry dwindled into silence.
April 10, 2012 11:07 pm
Check This Box: Science Is Getting Easier/Harder/Both/Neither? (Huffington Post)
A core concept of the Enlightenment was that the more that reasoning is based on experimentation the more we can learn about the world. Manipulation of variables, recommended in the 17th century by Francis Bacon, proved to be a turning point in the history of science. By uncovering previously invisible truths and giving human beings novel and effective ways to manage their environment scientific method gave the idea of progress a whole new meaning. Until then it wasn’t at all clear that civilization wasn’t in some kind of steady state, or even that we weren’t in decline from some “golden age.” But it turned out that the golden age was still ahead of us, if we were smart enough to invest in it and wise enough not to misuse the knowledge being gained.
March 10, 2012 9:35 am
Why It's OK to Let Apps Make You a Better Person (The Atlantic)
Evan Selinger considers the ramifications of using apps to improve our habits. And also whether willpower as we normally think about it even exists. #bioethics #neuroethics #brain #philosophy
March 2, 2012 4:50 pm
Abortion Article Author Receives Death Threats (Telegraph (UK))
Dr Francesca Minerva, a former Oxford University ethicist, who co-wrote a controversial article that argued killing newborn babies should be as permissible as abortion, has said she has received death threats over the paper. #philosophy #bioethics