In recent years, the lens of the media has narrowed issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide to a drama involving two players: Dr. Kevorkian and the law. This has left suffering patients and their families unrecognized and isolated when facing the most painful life decision.

Here at last is a book that addresses the role of psychiatry in dealing with a major, controversial topic in American medicine today& mdash;treatment decisions at the end of life. "End-of-Life Decisions: A Psychosocial Perspective" acknowledges and explores the role psychiatrists can play as advisers to the terminally ill and their loved ones. It describes the wide range of emotional and psychiatric issues faced by the patient, family, and physician that affect choices patients make to limit treatment or seek physician assistance in dying.

A distinguished group of contributors, all of whom have extensive experience dealing with end-of-life issues in clinical practice, address topics that may not have been considered previously. From dealing with issues of terminal illnesses in children, to making difficult treatment decisions for patients with AIDS; from judging the competency of clinically depressed patients for making sound decisions, to understanding the influence of family dynamics, economic forces, and language differences on doctor-patient communication& mdash;the book uses specific case studies and data to explore the role of professionals in end-of-life decisions.

"End-of-Life Decisions" strikes a careful balance between the need for patient autonomy and the challenge to make well-formulated treatment decisions. This book will heighten modern medicine& rsquo;s and society& rsquo;s consciousnessconcerning the difficult challenges faced by patients and their families when making end-of-life decisions

One of America's most celebrated poets, Emily Dickinson was virtually unpublished in her lifetime. When a slim volume of her poems emerged on the American scene in 1890, her work created shockwaves that have not subsided yet. Famously precise and sparse, Emily Dickinson's poetry is often described as philosophical, both because her poetry grapples with philosophical topics like death, spirituality, and the darkening operations of the mind, and because she approaches those topics in a characteristically philosophical manner: analyzing and extrapolating from close observation, exploring alternatives, and connecting thoughts into cumulative demonstrations. But unlike Lucretius or Pope, she cannot be accused of producing versified treatises. Many of her poems are unsettling in their lack of conclusion; their disparate insights often stand in conflict; and her logic turns crucially on imagery, juxtaposition, assonance, slant rhyme, and punctuation. The six chapters of this volume collectively argue that Dickinson is an epistemically ambitious poet, who explores fundamental questions by advancing arguments that are designed to convince. Dickinson exemplifies abstract ideas in tangible form and habituates readers into productive trains of thought-she doesn't just make philosophical claims, but demonstrates how poetry can make a distinct contribution to philosophy. All essays in this volume, drawn from both philosophers and literary theorists, serve as a counterpoint to recent critical work, which has emphasized Dickinson's anguished uncertainty, her nonconventional style, and the unsettled status of her manuscripts. On the view that emerges here, knowing is like cleaning, mending, and lacemakingL a form of hard, ongoing work, but one for which poetry is a powerful, perhaps indispensable, tool.

The English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820 - 1903) was a colossus of the Victorian age. His works ranked alongside those of Darwin and Marx in the development of disciplines as wide ranging as sociology, anthropology, political theory, philosophy and psychology. In this acclaimed study of Spencer, the first for over thirty years and now available in paperback, Mark Francis provides an authoritative and meticulously researched intellectual biography of this remarkable man that dispels the plethora of misinformation surrounding Spencer and shines new light on the broader cultural history of the nineteenth century. In this major study of Spencer, the first for over thirty years, Mark Francis provides an authoritative and meticulously researched intellectual biography of this remarkable man. Using archival material and contemporary printed sources, Francis creates a fascinating portrait of a human being whose philosophical and scientific system was a unique attempt to explain modern life in all its biological, psychological and sociological forms. Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life fills what is perhaps the last big biographical gap in Victorian history. An exceptional work of scholarship it not only dispels the plethora of misinformation surrounding Spencer but shines new light on the broader cultural history of the nineteenth century. Elegantly written, provocative and rich in insight it will be required reading for all students of the period.

Academic food ethics incorporates work from philosophy but also anthropology, economics, the environmental sciences and other natural sciences, geography, law, and sociology. Scholars from these fields have been producing work for decades on the food system, and on ethical, social, and policy issues connected to the food system. Yet in the last several years, there has been a notable increase in philosophical work on these issues-work that draws on multiple literatures within practical ethics, normative ethics and political philosophy. This handbook provides a sample of that philosophical work across multiple areas of food ethics: conventional agriculture and alternatives to it; animals; consumption; food justice; food politics; food workers; and, food and identity.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book introduces generative grammar as an area of study and asks what it tells us about the human mind. Wolfram Hinzen lays the foundation for the unification of modern generative linguistics with the philosophies of mind and language. He introduces Chomsky's program of a "minimalist"
syntax as a novel explanatory vision of the human mind. He explains how the Minimalist Program originated in work in cognitive science, biology, linguistics, and philosophy, and examines its implications for work in these fields. He considers the way the human mind is designed when seen as an
arrangement of structural patterns in nature, and argues that its design is the product not so much of adaptive evolutionary history as of principles and processes that are ahistorical and internalist in character. Linguistic meaning, he suggests, arises in the mind as a consequence of structures
emerging on formal rather than functional grounds. From this he substantiates an unexpected and deeply unfashionable notion of human nature.
Clearly written in nontechnical language and assuming a limited knowledge of the fields it examines and links, Minimal Mind Design will appeal to a wide range of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. It also provides an exceptionally clear insight into the nature and aims of
Chomsky's Minimalist Program.

When are borders justified? Who has a right to control them? Where should they be drawn? Today people think of borders as an island's shores. Just as beaches delimit a castaway's realm, so borders define the edges of a territory, occupied by a unified people, to whom the land legitimately belongs. Hence a territory is legitimate only if it belongs to a people unified by a civic identity. Sadly, this Desert Island Model of territorial politics forces us to choose. If we want territories, then we can either have democratic legitimacy, or inclusion of different civic identities-but not both. The resulting politics creates mass xenophobia, migrant-bashing, hoarding of natural resources, and border walls. To escape all this, On Borders presents an alternative model. Drawing on an intellectual tradition concerned with how land and climate shape institutions, it argues that we should not see territories as pieces of property owned by identity groups. Instead, we should see them as watersheds: as interconnected systems where institutions, people, the biota, and the land together create overlapping civic duties and relations, what the book calls place-specific duties. This Watershed Model argues that borders are justified when they allow us to fulfill those duties; that border-control rights spring from internationally-agreed conventions-not from internal legitimacy; that borders should be governed cooperatively by the neighboring states and the states system; and that border redrawing should be done with environmental conservation in mind. The book explores how this model undoes the exclusionary politics of desert islands.

"God Crucified" and Other Essays on the New Testament's Christology of Divine Identity The basic thesis of this important book on New Testament Christology, sketched in the first essay 'God Crucified, is that the worship of Jesus as God was seen by the early Christians as compatible with their Jewish monotheism. Jesus was thought to participate in the divine identity of the one God of Israel. The other chapters provide more detailed support for, and an expansion of, this basic thesis. Readers will find not only the full text of Bauckham's classic book God Crucified, but also groundbreaking essays, some of which have never been published previously

The "Nations" are the "seventy nations": a metaphor which, in the Talmudic idiom, designates the whole of humanity surrounding Israel. In this major collection of essays, Levinas considers Judaism's uncertain relationship to European culture since the Enlightenment, problems of distance and integration. It also includes essays on Franz Rosenzweig and Moses Mendelssohn, and a discussion of central importance to Jewish philosophy in the context of general philosophy. This work brings to the fore the vital encounter between philosophy and Judaism, a hallmark of Levinas's thought.

Americans have a deeply ambivalent relationship to guns. The United States leads all nations in rates of private gun ownership, yet stories of gun tragedies frequent the news, spurring calls for tighter gun regulations. The debate tends to be acrimonious and is frequently misinformed and illogical. The central question is the extent to which federal or state governments should regulate gun ownership and use in the interest of public safety. In this volume, David DeGrazia and Lester Hunt examine this policy question primarily from the standpoint of ethics: What would morally defensible gun policy in the United States look like? Hunt's contribution argues that the U.S. Constitution is right to frame the right to possess a firearm as a fundamental human right. The right to arms is in this way like the right to free speech. More precisely, it is like the right to own and possess a cell phone or an internet connection. A government that banned such weapons would be violating the right of citizens to protect themselves. This is a function that governments do not perform: warding off attacks is not the same thing as punishing perpetrators after an attack has happened. Self-protection is a function that citizens must carry out themselves, either by taking passive steps (such as better locks on one's doors) or active ones (such as acquiring a gun and learning to use it safely and effectively). DeGrazia's contribution features a discussion of the Supreme Court cases asserting a constitutional right to bear arms, an analysis of moral rights, and a critique of the strongest arguments for a moral right to private gun ownership. He follows with both a consequentialist case and a rights-based case for moderately extensive gun control, before discussing gun politics and advancing policy suggestions. In debating this important topic, the authors elevate the quality of discussion from the levels that usually prevail in the public arena. DeGrazia and Hunt work in the discipline of academic philosophy, which prizes intellectual honesty, respect for opposing views, command of relevant facts, and rigorous reasoning. They bring the advantages of philosophical analysis to this highly-charged issue in the service of illuminating the strongest possible cases for and against (relatively extensive) gun regulations and whatever common ground may exist between these positions.

Some philosophers hold that trust grows fragile when people become too rational. They advocate a retreat from reason and a return to local, traditional values. Others hold that truly rational people are both trusting and trustworthy. Everything hinges on what we mean by 'reason' and 'rational'. If these are understood in an egocentric, instrumental fashion, then they are indeed incompatible with trust. With the help of game theory, Martin Hollis argues against that narrow definition and in favour of a richer, deeper notion of reason founded on reciprocity and the pursuit of the common good. Within that framework he reconstructs the Enlightenment idea of citizens of the world, rationally encountering, and at the same time finding their identity in, their multiple commitments to communities both local and universal.

The essays in this volume answer to anxieties that the pragmatist tradition has had little to say about justice. While both the classical and neo-pragmatist traditions have produced a conspicuously small body of writing about the idea of justice, a common subtext of the essays in this volume is that there is in pragmatist thought a set of valuable resources for developing pragmatist theories of justice, for responding profitably to concrete injustices, and for engaging with contemporary, prevailing, liberal theories of justice. Despite the absence of conventionally philosophical theories of justice in the pragmatist canon, the writings of many pragmatists demonstrate an obvious sensitivity and responsiveness to injustice. Many pragmatists were and are moved by a deep sense of justice-by an awareness of the suffering of people, by the need to build just institutions, and a search for a tolerant and non-discriminatory culture that regards all people as equals. Three related and mutually reinforcing ideas to which virtually all pragmatists are committed can be discerned: a prioritization of concrete problems and real-world injustices ahead of abstract precepts; a distrust of a priori theorizing (along with a corresponding fallibilism and methodological experimentalism); and a deep and persistent pluralism, both in respect to what justice is and requires, and in respect to how real-world injustices are best recognized and remedied. Ultimately, Pragmatism and Justice asserts that pragmatism gives us powerful resources for understanding the idea of justice more clearly and responding more efficaciously to a world rife with injustice.

This is an introduction the thought of Robert Holcot, a great and influential but often underappreciated medieval thinker. Holcot was a Dominican friar who flourished in the 1330's and produced a diverse body of work including scholastic treatises, biblical commentaries, and sermons. By viewing the whole of Holcot's corpus, this book provides a comprehensive account of his thought. Challenging established characterizations of him as a skeptic or radical, this book shows Holcot to be primarily concerned with affirming and supporting the faith of the pious believer. At times, this manifests itself as a cautious attitude toward absolutists' claims about the power of natural reason. At other times, Holcot reaffirms, in Anselmian fashion, the importance of rational effort in the attempt to understand and live out one's faith. Over the course of this introduction the authors unpack Holcot's views on faith and heresy, the divine nature and divine foreknowledge, the sacraments, Christ, and political philosophy. Likewise, they examine Holcot's approach to several important medieval literary genres, including the development of his unique "picture method," biblical commentaries, and sermons. In so doing, John Slotemaker and Jeffrey Witt restore Holcot to his rightful place as one of the most important thinkers of his time.

This study focuses on Laches, Protagoras, and the conversation between Socrates and Agathon in the Symposium. For these dialogues the author "proposes a strategy of interpretation that insists on the dialogues' essentially interrogatory character. . . . Stokes argues that we are not entitled to ascribea thesis to Socrates (far less to Plato) unless he unambiguously asserts it as his own belief. . . . For the most part, Stokes argues, Socrates is doing what he claims to be doing: cross-examining his interlocutor. He draws the materials of his own argument from the respondent's explicit admissions and from his own knowledge of the respondent's character, commitments and ways of life.What is shown by such a procedure is not, . . . according to Stokes], that acertain thesis is true or false, but, rather, that a certain sort of person, with certain commitments, can be led, on pain of inconsistency, to assent to theses that at first seem alien to him. Sometimes, as it turns out, these are theses that Socrates also endorses in his own person." "Times Literary Supplement"

This book offers a new argument for the ancient claim that well-being as the highest prudential good - eudaimonia - consists of happiness in a virtuous life. The argument takes into account recent work on happiness, well-being, and virtue, and defends a neo-Aristotelian conception of virtue as an integrated intellectual-emotional disposition that is limited in both scope and stability. This conception of virtue is argued to be widely-held and compatible with social and cognitive psychology. The main argument of the book is as follows: (i) the concept of well-being as the highest prudential good is internally coherent and widely held; (ii) well-being thus conceived requires an objectively worthwhile life; (iii) in turn, such a life requires autonomy and reality-orientation, i.e., a disposition to think for oneself, seek truth or understanding about important aspects of one's own life and human life in general, and act on this understanding when circumstances permit; (iv) to the extent that someone is successful in achieving understanding and acting on it, she is realistic, and to the extent that she is realistic, she is virtuous; (v) hence, well-being as the highest prudential good requires virtue. But complete virtue is impossible for both psychological and epistemic reasons, and this is one reason why complete well-being is impossible.

This is the first of three volumes which will contain all of Locke's extant philosophical writings relating to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, not included in other Clarendon editions like the Correspondence. It contains the earliest known drafts of the Essay, Drafts A and B, both written in 1671, and provides for the first time an accurate version of Locke's text. Virtually all his changes are recorded in footnotes on each page. Peter Nidditch, whose highly acclaimed edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was published in this series in 1975, used pioneering editorial techniques in his compilation of Volume 1. Most of the work was completed before his tragically early death in 1983. Volumes 2 and 3, almost wholly the work of G. A. J. Rogers will contain the third extant draft of the Essay (Draft C), the Epitome and the Conduct of the Understanding. They will also include a History of the Writing of the Essay, together with other shorter writings by Locke.

What do you imagine when you think of Shaolin? Ferociously strong warriors flying through the air?

Shaolin is more than just the physical expression of martial arts. Rooted in Zen and Tao philosophy, it also offers a way of reconnecting our minds with our bodies through meditative movement to cultivate the core virtues of discipline and perseverance.

In this book, Shi Heng Yi, founder of Shaolin Temple Europe and lay disciple of the Songshan Shaolin Temple, introduces us to the contemplative practice that underpins Shaolin – a way of life that has existed for over 1,500 years – and shows how it can help us today.

Having experienced the challenges of modern life as a young man, Shi Heng Yi understands the pressures only too well. Here, he highlights twelve key practices to help improve sleep, relationships and decision-making, as much as balance, flexibility and strength, offering a powerful pathway to self-mastery and understanding.

Deep friendship may express profound loyalty, but so too may virulent nationalism. What can and should we say about this Janus-faced virtue of the will? This volume explores at length the contours of an important and troubling virtue - its cognates, contrasts, and perversions; its strengths and weaknesses; its awkward relations with universal morality; its oppositional form and limits; as well as the ways in which it functions in various associative connections, such as friendship and familial relations, organizations and professions, nations, countries, and religious tradition.

Cheryl Misak presents the first collective study of the development of philosophy in North America, from the 18th century to the end of the 20th century. Twenty-six leading experts examine distinctive features of American philosophy, trace notable themes, and consider the legacy and influence of notable figures. This will be the first reference point for future work on the subject, and a fascinating resource for anyone interested in modern philosophy or American intellectual history.

This book was designed primarily as a textbook; though the author hopes that it will prove to be of interests to others beside logic students. Part I of this book covers the fundamentals of the subject the propositional calculus and the theory of quantification. Part II deals with the traditional formal logic and with the developments which have taken that as their starting-point. Part III deals with modal, three-valued, and extensional systems.

Conversations with My Dog by Hannah Gold is a tale for those who love to seek new adventures and the promise of following their dreams, or nose, into the unknown. In a fast-paced world, driven by material achievement and the fear of loss; clarity can seem hard to find. Sometimes answers can come from the most surprising sources. When the author found herself confronted with challenges, she discovered, to her surprise, that wisdom came not from a philosophical master or spiritual guide, but her puppy named Monty. On the road with him, she learns to stop and ask him questions. He answers her through demonstrating the values of simplicity, fun and love of exploration. This description of the conversations that developed between them is a tale about rediscovering direction in life. It gives a light-hearted, gently thought-provoking account of the bigger journey of working out how to live. The search for the way ahead is the metaphor that illustrates the eternal bond of loyalty between a dog and its humanand makes this tale transcend normal conversation. 'Even when we are in small bodies, we have big spirits.' Writes Hannah Gold, relaying the replies of her wise four-legged friend, to her questions about life. 'The very young always know why they are here. Because they haven't forgotten. Sometimes life muddles things up with too many thoughts. But the heart is ageless.' Hannah's illustrations were created from sketches she made of Monty on their travels. These drawings provide a visual tapestry, depicting their journey together to inspire readers in finding their own path. Conversations with My Dog is an ideal companion for people considering significant change or embarking on a new direction, however uncertain, or even just searching for a little extra companionship and inspiration.

The book of peace that will open doors to new realities. Written in poetry form, short stories, a book of spells, bringing back old folk heroes Robin Hood and little Miss Riding Hood, along with shamans, angels, wizards and magicians. Questioning the way of life and its current state of affairs, whilst creating an opening for the reader to question their own mind and existence. The reader will be left with a personal choice as they enter a new future.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. No man can live a happy life, or even a supportable life, without the study of wisdom Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC-AD 65) is one of the most famous Roman philosophers. Instrumental in guiding the Roman Empire under emperor Nero, Seneca influenced him from a young age with his Stoic principles. Later in life, he wrote Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, or Letters from a Stoic, detailing these principles in full. Seneca's letters read like a diary, or a handbook of philosophical meditations. Often beginning with observations on daily life, the letters focus on many traditional themes of Stoic philosophy, such as the contempt of death, the value of friendship and virtue as the supreme good. Using Gummere's translation from the early twentieth century, this selection of Seneca's letters shows his belief in the austere, ethical ideals of Stoicism - teachings we can still learn from today.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Plato's Republic has influenced Western philosophers for centuries, with its main focus on what makes a well-balanced society and individual.