by James W. Walters (1997)
When does a person qualify for protected and continuing life? At a time when technology can sustain marginal life, it is ever more important to understand what constitutes a person. What are the medical, ethical, mental, legal, and philosophical criteria that determine protectable human life? By providing a much-needed religious/philosophical context for the discussion - examining contemporary thinking on just what constitutes valuable life - Walters broadens his inquiry beyond the human to include other animals and also deals with the phenomenon of anencephalic infants, those who are born without higher brains. Searching for a measurable and humane standard of personhood, Walters looks at its current definition and declares it inadequate. He offers instead the idea of proximate personhood, with criteria for helping to determine which individuals possess a unique claim to life.
Melody Carlson
Grace Trey is an eighteen-year-old singer as passionate about her Christian faith as she is her phenomenal music talent. Both traits come from her father, one-hit wonder Jonny Trey, who found a new life in Jesus after losing his chart success. When she encounters her own music break of a lifetime, the sudden dive into the "real world" puts her deeper beliefs to the test.
Genevieve Lloyd
In this lucid and elegantly written book, Genevieve Lloyd reads Spinoza's philosophy as a profound articulation of ideas of individuality, selfhood, and freedom. Focusing on Spinoza's Ethics, Lloyd illuminates as well his transformation of Descartes's concepts of substance, mind, and body, and the relations between Spinoza's metaphysics and his ethical views. Spinoza's doctrine of the uniqueness of substance has been interpreted as absorbing individual self-consciousness into an all-embracing whole. Here, Lloyd addresses the dilemmas posed by the Cartesian legacy of what it means to be a self: the sense of isolation of a contained intellectual substance trying to establish contact with an "external" world, the limitations of an idea of knowledge that sharply distinguishes between reason and the passions, problems in thinking about time and mortality in ways that allow no middle ground between an afterlife and annihilation, and tensions in ideals of personhood that claim to transcend sexual difference. Throughout, Lloyd emphasizes the ethical importance of Spinoza's metaphysics. Out of his treatment of substance and its modes emerge new ways of thinking about self-consciousness, freedom, gender difference, the passions, and time. As the influence of Descartes wanes, Lloyd suggests that Spinoza's philosophy may help us rethink some of the most troubling issues surrounding our understanding of the self.
Shaun Gallagher and Jonathan Shear
"A long history of inquiry about human nature and the self stretches from the ancient tradition of Socratic self-knowledge in the context of ethical life to contemporary discussions of brain function in cognitive science. It begins with a conflict among the ancients. On one view, which comes to be represented most clearly by Aristotle, the issue is settled in terms of a composite and very complex human nature. Who I am is closely tied to my embodied existence. The other view, found as early as the Pythagoreans, and developed in the writings of Plato, Augustine and Descartes, held that genuine humanness is not the result of an integration of 'lower' functions, but a purification of those functions in favour of a liberating spirituality. The animal elements are excluded from the human essence. The modern debate on the problem of the self, although owing much to the insights of Locke and Hume, can still be situated within the context of the two schools of ancient thought, and this has led many to despair over the lack of apparent progress in this problem." "Today, of course, we often tend to look to science rather than philosophy to develop our understanding of a wide range of fundamental issues. To what extent is the problem of the self a scientific issue? Can insights from the study of neuropsychology and cognitive development in infancy provide a new perspective? Can the study of schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorders tell us anything about the nature of human self-consciousness?" "Many would answer yes to the above questions, but then is it not also the case that the study of exceptional 'self-actualised' human experience is equally relevant? And can the phenomenological tradition, dedicated to the systematic study of human experience, and contemporary analytic approaches in philosophy help us out of some of the impasses that have bedevilled the empiricist tradition?" "Models of the Self includes all these perspectives in an attempt to cast light on one of the most intractable problems in science and the humanities. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.
Enrique Dussel
"Enrique Ambrosini Dussel is and has been one of the most prolific Latin American philosophers of the last 100 years. He has written over fifty books, and over three hundred articles ranging over the history of the Latin American philosophy, political philosophy, church history, theology, ethics, and occasional pieces on the state of Latin American countries. Dussel is first and foremost a moral philosopher, a philosopher of liberation. But for him, philosophy must be liberated so that it may contribute to social liberation. In one sense, "beyond philosophy" means to go beyond contemporary, academicized, professionalized, and "civilized" philosophy by turning to all that demystifies the autonomy of philosophy and turns our attention to its sources. "Beyond philosophy," also means to go beyond philosophy in the Marxian sense of abolishing philosophy by realizing it. This is the definitive English language collection of Dussel's enormous body of work. It will allow the reader to get a good sense of the breath and depth of Dussel's opus, covering four major areas: ethics, economics, history, and liberation theology."--Publisher description.