After a brief review of some of the issues facing ethicists becoming involved in actual clinical situations, as I experienced these at the beginning of my career, I present a detailed narrative focused on a encounter I had with parents of a badly damaged neonate, a situation for which I was asked to provide a consultation focused on unstated ethical issues. The narrative continues through these issues and concludes with what parents described as an acceptable resolution. The essay concludes with a brief indication of what are taken as the basic issues in the situation.

Relying mostly on his Agony Argument, Derek Parfit argued against all the theories that take reasons for acting as based on the agent’s attitudes. I use R. M. Hare’s so-called “Conditional Reflection Principle” –here relabeled as “Mirror Principle” – to challenge Parfit’s contention that subjectivists about reasons cannot consistently endorse the view that “we all have a reason to want to avoid, and to try to avoid, all future agony.” Several objections to the Mirror Principle are examined and shown to result from incorrect interpretations of its content.

The authors make a reading of the remarkable books on pain of the Arquipatologia of Filipe Montalto (1614). They interpret this work as the first naturalization and simultaneously the consequent defense of an emotional theory of pain and illness. They then briefly discuss aspects of the reductionist attitude about pain, and its implications on matters of mental content, reference and “computational psychology”.

This article briefly presents Philosophical-Medical Meditations on Tears and Crying by the German physician Johan Schreiber, a dissertation which systematizes knowledge on the physiology of crying in the early eighteenth century. It is also a work which attributes some importance to the affections, including pain and sadness and to the causal relationship between prolonged crying and some diseases as well as the therapeutic effects of tears.

We present the Buddhist view of the origin of disease and suffering in the ignorance of the basic health or sanity of being and awareness, as well as the way to recognize and reintegrate it, which is the healing process. We question what is commonly thought about the place of suffering in Buddhism, based on the aspects of the Buddhist view and experience that most contrast with the dominant perception of what reality and human life are. It’s only by not camouflaging them that one can understand the specificity of the Buddha’s path and the proposals for healing and transcending disease and suffering it offers.

Anorexia nervosa is a psychiatric illness in which the emotions are immediately translated into body symptoms, with a strong and rigid connection between them, without conscientious of that translation by patient. In the process of therapy, the possibility of mentalization of the emotions allows auto regulation of cognitions and affects, in a process that involves patient and therapist, looking for meanings for the impasse. The aim of the treatment is always the patient well-being, even when there is no future.

I examine briefly the theme of “deliving” (desviver) as well as end of life medical decisions. I put forward for consideration features of the moribund’s status and aporias as seen from the humanist viewpoint as well as from the perception of falseness and the current requisites for a possible law of euthanasia, its dead ends and contradictions. I leave out the institutional conditions.

Euthanasia or “good death”, in the early seventeenth century, became part of the field of medical ethics through the English philosopher, Francis Bacon. He advocated that euthanasia, as “sweet and peaceful death” of the sick, should be sought by the physicians, with their care, and disapproved the abandonment, as determined by the Hippocratic tradition. The word euthanasia underwent a change in its Baconian sense, in the nineteenth century, when it came to mean death inten­tionally provoked as a way to achieve “good death.” Palliative medicine, however, represents the realization of current medicine regarding the commitment not to abandon the terminally ill, and to the effective search for a good death through care, as Francis Bacon defended.

Palliative sedation does not have a universally accepted definition. It is used as a measure of last resort for the control of refractory symptoms in the last days of life. The ethical principles invoked in its use are those of double effect and proportionality. Its prevalence varies according to the place of care, type of study and country. The most frequent indications for its use are the control of dyspnea, delirium and pain. The recommended first line drug is midazolam. The studies performed do not diminish the survival of the patient. It is important that fami­ly support is maintained throughout the process. Several scientific societies and medical associations have defined guidelines that regulate their implementation.

The aim of this research is to propose a reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics understood as an answer to the problem of non-being. This orientation will reveal the validity of the Aristotelian ontological approaches for the present, because today also the movement, the difference, the inidentity and the time constitute fundamental philosophical problems. We know that Aristotle displayed his ontology in dialogue and discussion with his predecessors. In this paper, I point out certain aspects of this debate to the extent that they contribute to highlighting those topics of the first philosophy that constitute a solution to the problem of non-being.

Di contro alla lettura che inserisce la filosofia della prassi di Gramsci nella linea di continuità di un “paradigma italiano” che assolutizza il momento soggettivo, l’articolo si concentra sul particolare statuto ontologico su cui poggia la revisione che Gramsci fa del materialismo storico marxiano. Se da un lato la materia è vista come dipendente da una sfera intersoggettiva, che gli conferisce “oggettività” solo quando agisce su di essa in una prassi trasformativa, dall’altro è rimarcato il carattere “immanente” della stesso soggetto storico agente, che si trova in un campo di “contraddizioni oggettive” e solo nella concretezza dell’attività pratica può esercitare egemonia e con ciò inverarsi. Sulla scorta dell’analisi di questa problematica, conil confronto con il testo dei Quaderni, e attraverso la lettura di tre interpreti di Gramsci quali Frosini, Burgio e Losurdo, si riflette infine sul rapporto tra Gramsci e Labriola da un lato e tra Gramsci e Gentile dall’altro.

The concept of spirit (Geist) developed by Kant on the Critique of Judgement may bring to memory the idea of a je ne sais quoi, spread across Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, which occupied a relevant position on the aesthetic thought of that period. The “Garden of je ne sais quoi”, allegorical place created by Marivaux, is one of the most precious testimonies of that idea. The present essay proposes a rereading of the 49th paragraph of Kant’s third Critique, relating it with the thinkers and poets who have found on je ne sais quoi a privileged way of expression. We will try to show how Kant’s concept of spirit revisits the je ne sais quoi, becoming another path to Marivaux’s garden.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss some difficulties concerning the reception of Aristotle’s De anima in Arabic language in view of direct sources, i.e., the translations and paraphrases, and indirect sources, i.e., the testimonies on them.

According to Kantian philosophy, it is freedom that should sanction religion and not religion that should sanction freedom. This thesis is the basic condition for religious tolerance, and it is grounded in three principles that regulate the relationship between politics and religion, namely: the principle of non-coercive force of religious belief; the moral requirement of truthfulness in professions of belief; and, the submission of religion to the principle of publicity. The objective of this paper is to present, explain and justify the application of these three principles towards the notion of religion and to indicate how they might help to understand political and moral issues regarding religious intolerance.

The oldest systematic program of German Idealism predicted the emergence of a “large‑scale Physics” that would be given “wings” to rise in the days to come. Similarly, Friedrich Schlegel’s experiments on the paradoxical representation of modern Physics as a “practical science of substance” forced him to radically confront the autonomy of the Philosophy of Nature, one of the dominant issues at the end of the 18th century. Schlegel tried to achieve a “higher Physics” by equating what he called the “Physics of the universe” with a “divine Logic”. This hybrid made him consider “natural Physics” in terms of a “Philosophy of Physics” subsuming within itself a “natural history of nature”. Founded upon an idea of Physics as the quintessence of a science yet to come, unified as a living whole, a Philosophy of Physics necessarily implies a Physics of Philosophy – and urges one to rethink the nature of all philosophy.

The aim of this article is to analyze the philosophy of Richard Rorty through the poetic theories of Harold Bloom. It is shown that redescription, the primary means by which Rorty addresses philosophy, pragmatism and culture, can be interpreted as misreading, a revisionist literary tool that implicates appropriation (revision), distortion (deviation), and correction (redirection). Finally, I propose a crossroad between the paths of Bloom and Rorty, a conversation between the Bloomian literary criticism and the Rortyan philosophy: the philosophy as a literary conversation.