Counselling the dead!

The paper discusses the author's meeting and a counselling encounter in Varanasi (formerly known as Banaras) with a former High Court Judge, who has renounced the material world, excised all his attachments, abandoned his wife, his children, his grandchildren and a luxurious and prestigious life-style, and taken on the mantle of a sanyasi in search of enlightenment and nirvana. He has left his hometown and for the past two to three years has been living on the banks of the river Ganges in Varanasi, the holiest of holy cities in India, leading the life of a mendicant, living off the charity of the hordes of pilgrims who come to Varanasi all around the year.     

Dialogues with the dead

Serious work in history of philosophy requires doing something very difficult: conducting a hypothetical dialogue with dead philosophers. Is it worth devoting to it the time and energy required to do it well? Yes. Quite apart from the intrinsic interest of understanding the past, making progress toward solving philosophical problems requires a good grasp of the range of possible solutions to those problems and of the arguments which motivate alternative positions, a grasp we can only have if we understand well philosophy's past. Philosophers who concentrate too much on the present are apt to assume too simple a view of alternative theories and of important philosophical arguments. Ryle and Austin offer instructive examples of how it is possible to go wrong by ignoring or misrepresenting historical figures.     

More dead than dead: perceptions of persons in the persistent vegetative state

Patients in persistent vegetative state (PVS) may be biologically alive, but these experiments indicate that people see PVS as a state curiously more dead than dead. Experiment 1 found that PVS patients were perceived to have less mental capacity than the dead. Experiment 2 explained this effect as an outgrowth of afterlife beliefs, and the tendency to focus on the bodies of PVS patients at the expense of their minds. Experiment 3 found that PVS is also perceived as “worse” than death: people deem early death better than being in PVS. These studies suggest that people perceive the minds of PVS patients as less valuable than those of the dead – ironically, this effect is especially robust for those high in religiosity.     

Representationalism is a dead end

Synthese - Representationalism—the view that scientific modeling is best understood in representational terms—is the received view in contemporary philosophy of science. Contributions...     

Oversight of research involving the dead

Research involving the dead, especially heart-beating cadavers, may facilitate the testing of potentially revolutionary and life-saving medical treatments. However, to ensure that such research is conducted ethically, it is essential to: (1) identify appropriate standards for this research and (2) assign institutional responsibility and a mechanism for oversight. Protocols for research involving the dead should be reviewed by a special committee and assessed according to nine standards intended to ensure scientific merit, to protect deceased patients and their families, and to promote institutional integrity and responsibility. Federal regulation of research involving the dead will foster appropriate standards and, equally importantly, help establish the acceptability of such research.     

Evidence: wanted,alive or dead

This paper is meant to link the philosophical debate concerning the underdetermination of theories by evidence with a rather significant socio-political issue that has been taking place in Canada over the past few years: the so-called ‘death of evidence’ controversy. It places this debate within a broader philosophical framework by discussing the connection between evidence and theory; by bringing out the role of epistemic values in the so-called scientific method; and by examining the role of social values in science. While it should be admitted that social values play an important role in science, the key question for anyone who advocates this view is: what and whose values? The way it is answered makes an important epistemic difference to how the relation between evidence and theory is appraised. I first review various arguments for the claim that evidence underdetermines theory and shows their presuppositions and limitations, using conceptual analysis and historical examples. After broaching the relation between evidence and method in science by highlighting the need to incorporate epistemic values into the scientific method, my discussion focuses on recent arguments for the role of social values in science. Finally, I address the implications of the approach outlined for the current ‘death of evidence’ debate in Canada.     

Presentism, and speaking of the dead

Presentists standardly conform to the eternalist??s paradigm of treating all cases of property-exemplification as involving a single relation of instantiation. This, we argue, results in a much less parsimonious and philosophically explanatory picture than is possible if other alternatives are considered. We argue that by committing to primitive past and future tensed instantiation ties, presentists can make gains in both economy and explanatory power. We show how this metaphysical picture plays out in cases where an individual exists to partake in facts about its past and future, and also in cases where that individual no longer exists, and proxies (or surrogates) for that thing must be found.     

Phantasms of the living and of the dead

Summary In this outline no attempt has been made to prove survival, nor even to cite all of the more convincing types of cases, but to present in organized form some of the classes of evidence gathered by psychical research. During the eighty-odd years of organized research in this field, instances have been attested of apparitions which indirectly suggest the survival of personality.This article is an excerpt from one which appeared in theJournal of the American Society for Psychical Research, January, 1945, and is reprinted by permission of the author.