Limits of Private Law

In 2005 the Dutch Supreme Court decided a wrongful life case.2 This case concerned a woman who consulted her midwife during her pregnancy because there had been two cases of handicaps in her husband’s family, due to chromosomal disorder. The midwife did not think it necessary to investigate the matter any further. This was later considered a professional failure with dramatic effects. When born, baby Kelly turned out to have serious mental and physical handicaps from which she suffered severely. The parents claimed damage – both on their own accord and in Kelly’s name – and their claims were sustained by both the court of appeal and the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court not only considered the strictly legal issues but also considered moral and pragmatic arguments that had been put forward against such so-called ‘wrongful life claims’. Firstly, there is the moral opposition that sustaining these claims violates the principle regarding the dignity of human life, since it acknowledges that not being born is preferable to living in a condition like hers. Secondly, there is the pragmatic argument that sustaining claims like this will tempt doctors to practice ‘defensive medicine’ to avoid serious risk. Both arguments were carefully examined by the court and subsequently rejected. What does the Supreme Court in fact do here? Does it call out or explain the law to us? Or does it exceed its limits by elaborating on principles and policies, taking into account the moral grounds and the possible consequences of the ruling itself? In both directions the question arises: what constitutes the limits of private law

A Pluralism Worth Having: Feyerabend\u27s Well-Ordered Science

The goal of this dissertation is to reconstruct, critically evaluate, and apply the pluralism of Paul Feyerabend. I conclude by suggesting future points of contact between Feyerabend’s pluralism and topics of interest in contemporary philosophy of science. I begin, in Chapter 1, by reconstructing Feyerabend’s critical philosophy. I show how his published works from 1948 until 1970 show a remarkably consistent argumentative strategy which becomes more refined and general as Feyerabend’s thought matures. Specifically, I argue that Feyerabend develops a persuasive case against rationalism, or the thesis that there exist normative and exclusive rules of scientific rationality. In Chapter 2, I reconstruct Feyerabend’s pluralism and detail its relationship to his humanitarianism and epistemological anarchism. I understand Feyerabend’s pluralism as the combination of the principles of proliferation and tenacity. I show the evolution and justification of these principles from Feyerabend’s early papers until the late 1970s. In Chapter 3, I defend Feyerabend’s pluralism from its most prominent criticisms. I then clarify that Feyerabend’s pluralism amounts to a conception of the logic of theory pursuit and modify his view using insights from C.S. Peirce, Pierre Duhem, and Michael Polanyi. From Peirce, I show how economic, sociological, and value-laden features of theory pursuit may be used to constrain proliferation and tenacity. From Duhem and Polanyi, I try to show the proper role of tacit knowledge within a Feyerabendian framework. Finally, I show what implications Feyerabend’s pluralism has for models of distributing funds within scientific communities. I contend that it provides a more promising model that the ‘well-ordered science’ proposal advanced by numerous philosophers and social scientists. Specifically, I aim to understand what taking Feyerabend’s pluralism seriously entails for principles of balancing funding allocation decisions and the role of peer-review in evaluating the potential success of research proposals. I conclude by suggesting future lines of research for further analyzing and applying Feyerabend’s pluralism

Libertas Scribendi – Libertas Philosophandi. Some Remarks On The Method Of Research In The Field Of Legal History In Relation To A Book By Jerzy Kolarzowski "Idea praw jednostki w pismach Braci Polskich. U narodzin nowożytnej noncepcji praw człowieka

Libertas Scribendi – Libertas Philosophandi. Some Remarks On The Method Of Research In The Field Of Legal History In Relation To A Book By Jerzy Kolarzowski "Idea praw jednostki w pismach Braci Polskich. U narodzin nowożytnej noncepcji praw człowieka" ["The Idea of Individual Rights in the Writings of the Polish Brethren. Birth of the Concept of Human Rights"]Warsaw University Press, Warsaw 2009, pp. 241In discussion in which there participate almost all intellectuals (including the lawyers) who deal with broadly understood social sciences, the sintagma of human rights has been detectable for centuries. Its understanding however has been and still is ideologically conditioned. The present paper was inspired by Jerzy Kolarzewski’s monograph on Idea praw jednostki w pismach Braci Polskich. U narodzin nowożytniej koncepcji praw człowieka (The idea of rights of an individual as depicted in the papers of Polish Brethren. The genesis of modern concept of human rights) Warszawa 2009. The present contribution, apart from presenting the aforementioned study, tries to make a general reflection on the method of conducting legal history research by those who are engaged in seeking the links of “genetic” characters between the legal history phenomena and the phenomena of contemporary law. In other words the researchers that come into play are those who try to arrive at the moments of “concepts” of contemporary legal concepts, as set in history. These researchers try to juxtapose them upon the “genetic principle”

Karl Barth and the metatheological dilemma: Barth, Wittgenstein and the metadilemmas of the Enlightenment

It is the argument of this thesis that Barth's theology can be properly understood only if it is construed as an attempted resolution of the metatheological dilemma Franz Overbeck set for theology. To that extent, the definitive parameters of the problematic which Barth's theology made its own, the underlying historical dynamic without which the identity of Barth's theology would remain hidden, have no historical precedent other than the later stages of the Enlightenment and Hume and Kant. Though Overbeck was separated from Hume by more than a century, he pushed the metatheological dilemma implicit in Hume to its explicit logical conclusion.It can be shown that not only is it the case Overbeck's metatheological dilemma informs Romans II, it is the final horizon for Fides Quaerens Intellectum and the Church Dogmatics. Indeed, it is clear that Barth's answer to Overbeck - sui generis theological truth - is already implicit in Barth's theological development as early as his lecture "The Strange New World Within the Bible". Barth's encounter with Overbeck is responsible for the one thing missing from "The Strange New World Within the Bible" - the dialectical irony ever present in Barth's theology from Romans II onwards.The later and earlier philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein is the unifying metanarrative uncovering the specific means by which Barth attempted to achieve his objectives. Both the early and later philosophy contend with a metadilemma, Hume's metaphilosophical dilemma. Romans II is best understood if it is assimilated into the tradition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus represented by key figures of "Wittgenstein's Vienna" - Karl Kraus, Arnold Schoenberg and Adolf Loos. Without retracting one whit the central insights of Romans II, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum and the Church Dogmatics recapitulate the later Wittgenstein's attack on epistemological realism, a doctrine antithetical to the resolution of the metatheological dilemma.A final chapter sets Barth's doctrine of the Holy Spirit within the context of Barth's commitment to sui generis theology, showing in particular that Barth repudiated a realist hermeneutic, and, as a corollary of his whole position, subordinated meaning to (sui generis) truth

Philosophy and Science : The Place of Philosophy and Science in the Development of Knowledge and Understanding

This thesis examines the roles played by philosophy and science in the development of knowl-edge and understanding from ancient times to the present day. It is maintained that the sole contributor to this development has been science, philosophy for the most part acting as an impediment, contrary to the philosophically inspired myth that philosophy lays the groundwork for science, and consonant with the suspicions of most scientists who give thought to the matter. This thesis is expounded from two perspectives, the historical and the analytic. From the historical perspective, Part I of the thesis, the development of scientific ideas is traced in its philosophical context, principally that of the physical sciences from the time of Galileo, but also touching on the position of science in Greek thought. It is concluded that science effectively began with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and pro-gressed from that time generally in opposition to philosophical dogma, and, once established, almost entirely independently of it. From the analytical perspective, Part II of the thesis, some recent and contemporary philosophical issues in the areas of epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, cen-tred principally on issues concerning the connection between mind and the world, are evalu-ated for their contributions to our current knowledge and understanding. The evaluation is that, by its resort to inappropriate terminology, for the most part philosophy generates confu-sion in matters that in everyday terms are inherently simple and in scientific terms are more complex than philosophers ever imagined—the issue of consciousness is given particular attention. The discussion devolves upon the view, also put forward by Rudolf Carnap in his later years, that controversy in these areas of philosophy arises largely from a confusion of theory with the referents of theory, of word with object, and from the consequent ideological commitment of philosophers to irreconcilable positions in the realist–idealist spectrum. The thesis maintains that although it is a scientific (that is, empirically based) fact that theories, concepts, percepts and the like are constructs of the human mind (suggesting an idealist view, and therefore a fact causing difficulty for realists), it does not follow that the referents of these constructs are themselves constructs of the human mind—indeed, the proposition that they are is without meaning (and hence the realism–idealism dualism is meaningless). This is because the referents of constructs are accessible only by means of those constructs, which do not speak of their own basis in the human mind—the reality of an object referred to depends on the empirical validity of the construct by which the reference is made (and, of course, it may not be real in this sense at all, but be an illusion or a deliberate fiction), not on some philosophical notion of reality. Thus, for example, while the theory of evolution is a human construct, there is no sense in which evolution can be spoken of as a human construct or oth-erwise—evolution is dealt with in its entirety through its theory. Such a resolution of age-old philosophical controversy reflects no more than the human condition (as epitomised by Neurath’s simile of “sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea”), which is fully en-compassed by the scientific approach, and from which there is no escape by means of any religious or philosophical construction

Philosophy and Science : The Place of Philosophy and Science in the Development of Knowledge and Understanding

This thesis examines the roles played by philosophy and science in the development of knowl-edge and understanding from ancient times to the present day. It is maintained that the sole contributor to this development has been science, philosophy for the most part acting as an impediment, contrary to the philosophically inspired myth that philosophy lays the groundwork for science, and consonant with the suspicions of most scientists who give thought to the matter. This thesis is expounded from two perspectives, the historical and the analytic. From the historical perspective, Part I of the thesis, the development of scientific ideas is traced in its philosophical context, principally that of the physical sciences from the time of Galileo, but also touching on the position of science in Greek thought. It is concluded that science effectively began with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and pro-gressed from that time generally in opposition to philosophical dogma, and, once established, almost entirely independently of it. From the analytical perspective, Part II of the thesis, some recent and contemporary philosophical issues in the areas of epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, cen-tred principally on issues concerning the connection between mind and the world, are evalu-ated for their contributions to our current knowledge and understanding. The evaluation is that, by its resort to inappropriate terminology, for the most part philosophy generates confu-sion in matters that in everyday terms are inherently simple and in scientific terms are more complex than philosophers ever imagined—the issue of consciousness is given particular attention. The discussion devolves upon the view, also put forward by Rudolf Carnap in his later years, that controversy in these areas of philosophy arises largely from a confusion of theory with the referents of theory, of word with object, and from the consequent ideological commitment of philosophers to irreconcilable positions in the realist–idealist spectrum. The thesis maintains that although it is a scientific (that is, empirically based) fact that theories, concepts, percepts and the like are constructs of the human mind (suggesting an idealist view, and therefore a fact causing difficulty for realists), it does not follow that the referents of these constructs are themselves constructs of the human mind—indeed, the proposition that they are is without meaning (and hence the realism–idealism dualism is meaningless). This is because the referents of constructs are accessible only by means of those constructs, which do not speak of their own basis in the human mind—the reality of an object referred to depends on the empirical validity of the construct by which the reference is made (and, of course, it may not be real in this sense at all, but be an illusion or a deliberate fiction), not on some philosophical notion of reality. Thus, for example, while the theory of evolution is a human construct, there is no sense in which evolution can be spoken of as a human construct or oth-erwise—evolution is dealt with in its entirety through its theory. Such a resolution of age-old philosophical controversy reflects no more than the human condition (as epitomised by Neurath’s simile of “sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea”), which is fully en-compassed by the scientific approach, and from which there is no escape by means of any religious or philosophical construction

Revelation and Christian learning.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D88161 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Handbook of the First World Congress on Logic and Religion

This is the handbook of abstracts of the 1st World Congress on Logic and Religion, which took place in João Pessoa, Brazil, April 01-05, 2015

Moral enquiry in a pluralist society: From contention to conversation

Over the last five hundred years, several conceptually incommensurable theories of ethics have been promulgated. For some moral philosophers, this incommensurability is a matter of deep concern because, in complex cases, there is no tradition-independent method for resolving moral conflict. More recently, a new discipline of applied or practical ethics has emerged. Practical ethics attempts to fill the void between rival moral theories by appealing, first, to the role of reason from an impartial observer perspective and, second, to decision making protocols based on moral principles. This ―first generation‖ attempt at codifying practical ethics failed to bridge the incommensurability gap because decisions based on the application of principles turned out to be just as divisive, in complex cases, as decisions made from a theory-centred perspective. This thesis reconstructs and critiques two of the most prominent decision making protocols in practical ethics. For other philosophers, the diversity that one finds in ethical theory is precisely what a moral agent ought to expect from a complex discipline such as ethics, particularly in a pluralist society. These philosophers argue that the main problem is not that philosophy failed to deliver a unified or standard model of moral deliberation, but that philosophers took so long to appreciate why epistemological certainty is an unrealistic goal for a discipline primarily concerned with human behaviour. This thesis argues that the moral diversity one finds in a pluralist society requires moral agents to engage in two types of consensus about ethics. First, ethics requires a thin consensus about the teleological imperatives that enable people to live peaceably in the polis. This thin minimalist consensus engages moral agents in a discussion about universals held in common, universals that sustain a civil society, even while its moral agents hold incommensurable views on many other things. A second type of thick consensus is found in the concept of a practice. As defined by Alasdair MacIntyre, a practice is a long-lived coherent human activity consistent with the telos of the whole human life. The concept of a practice can be usefully employed in a pluralist society because it trades on a thick maximalist consensus on the internal goods that sustain the activity. In this context, rational agents who are separated by thick epistemological disagreement can be shown to hold more things in common than is often appreciated