Nihilism has been pervasive in the acute kidney injury field for decades, given that no studies, had been able to reduce AKI rates in hospitalized patients. Furthermore, children with AKI comprise an ...orphan population, where there is little incentive to develop diagnostics, therapeutics or devices specifically for them. The 3rd International Symposium on Acute Kidney Injury in Children, held in Cincinnati in October 2018, provided a platform to demonstrate the advancements in the diagnosis and treatment of children with, or at-risk for AKI, and also highlighted barriers to advancing care for this population. The progress made in the pediatric AKI since the 2nd International Symposium in 2016, highlighted the positive outcomes emanating from federal agency, private foundation and corporate sponsor investment in pediatric AKI. As a result, the time should be over for nihilism in the pediatric field.
Michael Marder in
Dump Philosophy
claims that that there has been so much dumping with modern civilization that we now live in a dump, with those parts of our environment not contaminated by dumping, ...now rare. The growth of the dump is portrayed as the triumph of nihilism, predicted by Nietzsche as the outcome of life denying Neoplatonist metaphysics. Marder’s proposed solution, characterized as “undumping”, is to accept the dump and to promote reinterpretations and informal communities within the dump. It is argued here that Marder provides great insight into our current situation and its causes; however, his proposed solution is too weak. To respond to the situation described, it is argued, it is necessary to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy dumping, or more broadly, healthy and unhealthy participation in nature. To make this distinction, it is necessary see humans as ecosystems and components of ecosystems, including the global ecosystem, as these have been characterized by anti-reductionist ecologists. Ecosystems can be healthy or unhealthy. Dumping and dumps should be identified as problematic outputs when they damage the health of ecosystems. The products of human activity not destined to be consumed or used for further productive activity, can then be identified and judged according to whether they augment or damage ecosystems’ health. Dumping should be severely restricted. This should be associated with making a commitment to life and its value, and living to augment life, developing the social and economic forms and institutions that facilitate living in this way.
Moral Relativism and Majority Rule Wreen, Michael
Metaphilosophy,
April 2019, 2019-04-00, 20190401, Letnik:
50, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A number of arguments against relativism are based on the concept of majority rule. Since, the arguments allege, on relativism moral truth is founded on majority opinion, relativism entails that (a) ...moral progress and reform are impossible, (b) propaganda, advertising, brainwashing, and high birth rates turn mistaken moral judgments into correct ones, (c) moral horrors, if enough people believe them acceptable, are not moral horrors at all, (d) finding out what’s right and what’s wrong is extremely easy, (e) moral reasoning is very different from what we normally take it to be, and (f) internal criticism of a moral code is impossible. These arguments get their due in this article, which first defines and explicates relativism and then exposes, explains, and criticizes the arguments. Especially important to understand about the relation between relativism and majority opinion is the notion of a convention. Accordingly, it is discussed at some length.
According TO JEAN-FRANCOS LYOTARD, THE POSTMODERN CONDITION is characterized by "incredulity towards metanarratives" (xxxiv). This refers to skepticism towards the overarching grand narratives that ...purport to explain how the world works—the view of dominant discourses such as history and religion as artificial constructs rather than natural or "given." This article explores how this experience is represented in video games, through a type of antagonist that I term the "postmodern psychopath." These are characters that are represented in a similar manner to the psychopaths usually depicted in fiction, that is, antagonists characterized by violence and criminality. However, I argue that the postmodern psychopath is driven specifically by the feelings of meaninglessness and "existential horror" that are considered among characteristics of postmodern age by critics such Pratt. To put it another way, this article defines the postmodern psychopath as a type of antagonist . . .
World and Novel Brenkman, John
Narrative (Columbus, Ohio),
01/2016, Letnik:
24, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
A century after Georg Lukács launched literary theory as we know it with the publication of The Theory of the Novel, that work remains a vital resource for novel theory. Lukács's famed thesis that ...the novel is "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God" establishes the intimate relation of the novel and nihilism. What is at stake in this relation is intensified by Nietzsche's suggestion that reality does not take the form of a world except under the watchful eye of a monotheistic God and by the multiple and contradictory meanings of nihilism itself in modern thought. These issues are explored by examining Lukács's twofold conception of the novel's "problematic individual" and "contingent reality" and transposing those terms into the question of the "essence of singularity" (Philip Roth) manifest in the creation of novelistic protagonists and the "ordeal of universalism" into which novelists themselves plunge by venturing their creation in the public sphere.
Does philosophy of religion, specifically, have anything to contribute to the cultural debate about the modern crisis of meaning, and particularly to attempts at retrieving a sense of enchantment ...beyond human construction? Suggesting a methodological rapprochement between philosophy of religion and phenomenology, I explore a recent popular attempt to reenchant the world through a retrieval of the sacred: All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (2011) by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. Using their work as a foil, I discuss the relation between phenomenology and metaphysics in the experience of the sacred, specifically the possibility of a pluralism that is nonetheless realist; the necessity of social embeddedness and pedagogy in the constitution of sacred meaning; and finally, the problem of moral discrimination within this sphere. Through this critical discussion a constructive argument emerges: philosophy of religion done in a phenomenological mode has resources to address these difficult issues, and thus to explore experiences of the sacred in ways that are metaphysically sophisticated, attentive to historical tradition and pedagogy in the constitution of meaning, as well as to the need of communal moral deliberation in the sphere of the sacred.
This paper addresses an action that, from a Deleuzian perspective, is capable of modifying the despairing current social situation in which we are immersed, through the creation of political Ideas. ...Even though Deleuze conceives social Ideas as vast civilizing structures, we propose to bring into the political domain the logic of other acts of creation, such as the artistic or the philosophical, where the monumental coexists with minor figures that are nonetheless capable of introducing novelty into the world. The politician is the figure of those who are capable of having an Idea that allows to break the habits that perpetuate the current situation, and gives consistency to the intensive forms of life that continually create and dissolve themselves in the flow of becoming. Thus, macro- and micro-politics do not oppose each other, but offer in their immanence an alternative to social nihilism.
Rather than bewailing that "nothing is new under the sun," as King Solomon did in the Book of Ecclesiastes, Frye and the contributors of this collection desire to listen in on how McCarthy's novels ...and plays participate in the great conversation of Western civilization (Ecclesiastes 1:9 ESV). According to him, McCarthy is "interested in the Bible as a text with a particular history, weightiness, style, and influence in the West" (99). In the midst of exploring the novels of McCarthy's Appalachian period, The Orchard Keeper, Outer Darkness, Child of God, and Suttree, Hardwig states that while "several critics have pointed to the allegorical nature of Outer Dark, another literary context comes to mind as the reader moves through the book: parody" (111).
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