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Philosophical Aspects Of The Abortion Debate
The philosophical aspects of the abortion debate are logical arguments that can be made either in support of or in opposition to abortion. Overview The philosophical arguments in the abortion debate are deontological or rights-based. The view that all or almost all abortion should be illegal generally rests on the claims: (1) that the existence and moral right to life of human beings (human organisms) begins at or near conception-fertilization; (2) that induced abortion is the deliberate and unjust killing of the embryo in violation of its right to life; and (3) that the law should prohibit unjust violations of the right to life. The view that abortion should in most or all circumstances be legal generally rests on the claims: (1) that women have a right to control what happens in and to their own bodies; (2) that abortion is a just exercise of this right; and (3) that the law should not criminalize just exercises of the right to control one's own body and its life-support functio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logical Argument
An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialectical and the rhetorical perspective. In logic, an argument is usually expressed not in natural language but in a symbolic formal language, and it can be defined as any group of propositions of which one is claimed to follow from the others through deductively valid inferences that preserve truth from the premises to the conclusion. This logical perspective on argument is relevant for scientific fields such as mathematics and computer science. Logic is the study of the forms of reasoning in arguments and the development of standards and criteria to evaluate arguments. Deductive arguments can be valid, and the valid ones can be sound: in a valid argument, premisses necessitate the conclusion, even if one or more of the premises is false ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Human
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, and language. Humans are highly social and tend to live in complex social structures composed of many cooperating and competing groups, from families and kinship networks to political states. Social interactions between humans have established a wide variety of values, social norms, and rituals, which bolster human society. Its intelligence and its desire to understand and influence the environment and to explain and manipulate phenomena have motivated humanity's development of science, philosophy, mythology, religion, and other fields of study. Although some scientists equate the term ''humans'' with all members of the genus '' Homo'', in common usage, it generally refers to ''Homo sapiens'', the only extant member. Anato ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cerebral Cortex
The cerebral cortex, also known as the cerebral mantle, is the outer layer of neural tissue of the cerebrum of the brain in humans and other mammals. The cerebral cortex mostly consists of the six-layered neocortex, with just 10% consisting of allocortex. It is separated into two cortices, by the longitudinal fissure that divides the cerebrum into the left and right cerebral hemispheres. The two hemispheres are joined beneath the cortex by the corpus callosum. The cerebral cortex is the largest site of neural integration in the central nervous system. It plays a key role in attention, perception, awareness, thought, memory, language, and consciousness. The cerebral cortex is part of the brain responsible for cognition. In most mammals, apart from small mammals that have small brains, the cerebral cortex is folded, providing a greater surface area in the confined volume of the cranium. Apart from minimising brain and cranial volume, cortical folding is crucial f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brain Stem
The brainstem (or brain stem) is the posterior stalk-like part of the brain that connects the cerebrum with the spinal cord. In the human brain the brainstem is composed of the midbrain, the pons, and the medulla oblongata. The midbrain is continuous with the thalamus of the diencephalon through the tentorial notch, and sometimes the diencephalon is included in the brainstem. The brainstem is very small, making up around only 2.6 percent of the brain's total weight. It has the critical roles of regulating cardiac, and respiratory function, helping to control heart rate and breathing rate. It also provides the main motor and sensory nerve supply to the face and neck via the cranial nerves. Ten pairs of cranial nerves come from the brainstem. Other roles include the regulation of the central nervous system and the body's sleep cycle. It is also of prime importance in the conveyance of motor and sensory pathways from the rest of the brain to the body, and from the body ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Death
Death is the irreversible cessation of all biological functions that sustain an organism. For organisms with a brain, death can also be defined as the irreversible cessation of functioning of the whole brain, including brainstem, and brain death is sometimes used as a legal definition of death. The remains of a former organism normally begin to decompose shortly after death. Death is an inevitable process that eventually occurs in almost all organisms. Death is generally applied to whole organisms; the similar process seen in individual components of an organism, such as cells or tissues, is necrosis. Something that is not considered an organism, such as a virus, can be physically destroyed but is not said to die. As of the early 21st century, over 150,000 humans die each day, with ageing being by far the most common cause of death. Many cultures and religions have the idea of an afterlife, and also may hold the idea of judgement of good and bad deeds in one's life ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brain Death
Brain death is the permanent, irreversible, and complete loss of brain function which may include cessation of involuntary activity necessary to sustain life. It differs from persistent vegetative state, in which the person is alive and some autonomic functions remain. It is also distinct from comas as long as some brain and bodily activity and function remain, and it is also not the same as the condition locked-in syndrome. A differential diagnosis can medically distinguish these differing conditions. Brain death is used as an indicator of legal death in many jurisdictions, but it is defined inconsistently and often confused by the public. Various parts of the brain may keep functioning when others do not anymore, and the term "brain death" has been used to refer to various combinations. For example, although one major medical dictionary considers "brain death" to be synonymous with "cerebral death" (death of the cerebrum), the US National Library of Medicine Medical Subject ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Tooley
Michael Tooley (born 1941) is an American philosopher, now emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, best known for his contributions to metaphysics. Education and career He has a BA from the University of Toronto and earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University in 1968. He taught at Stanford University and the Australian National University and since 1992 at the University of Colorado Boulder. Philosophical work Tooley has worked on philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, causality and metaphysical naturalism, and has debated the existence of God with William Lane Craig. His early paper "Abortion and Infanticide", arguing that there is no moral difference between them and that both are permissible, has been controversial. See also * Growing block universe Bibliography * ''The Problem of Evil'' (''Elements in the Philosophy of Religion'') (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) * ''Abortion – Three Perspectives'' (Oxford: Oxford University ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fetal Pain
Prenatal perception is the study of the extent of somatosensory and other types of perception during pregnancy. In practical terms, this means the study of fetuses; none of the accepted indicators of perception are present in embryos. Studies in the field inform the abortion debate, along with certain related pieces of legislation in countries affected by that debate. As of 2022, there is no scientific consensus on whether a fetus can feel pain. Prenatal hearing Numerous studies have found evidence indicating a fetus's ability to respond to auditory stimuli. The earliest fetal response to a sound stimulus has been observed at 16 weeks' gestational age, while the auditory system is fully functional at 25–29 weeks' gestation. At 33–41 weeks' gestation, the fetus is able to distinguish its mother's voice from others. Prenatal pain The hypothesis that human fetuses are capable of perceiving pain in the first trimester has little support, although fetuses at 8 weeks respond to touc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Self-awareness
In philosophy of self, self-awareness is the experience of one's own personality or individuality. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. While consciousness is being aware of one's environment and body and lifestyle, self-awareness is the recognition of that awareness. Self-awareness is how an individual consciously knows and understands their own character, feelings, motives, and desires. Neurobiological basis Introduction There are questions regarding what part of the brain allows us to be self-aware and how we are biologically programmed to be self-aware. V.S. Ramachandran has speculated that mirror neurons may provide the neurological basis of human self-awareness. In an essay written for the Edge Foundation in 2009, Ramachandran gave the following explanation of his theory: "... I also speculated that these neurons can not only help simulate other people's behavior but can be turned 'inward'—as it were—to create second-order repre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Communicate
Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inquiry studying them. There are many disagreements about its precise definition. John Peters argues that the difficulty of defining communication emerges from the fact that communication is both a universal phenomenon and a specific discipline of institutional academic study. One definitional strategy involves limiting what can be included in the category of communication (for example, requiring a "conscious intent" to persuade). By this logic, one possible definition of communication is the act of developing meaning among entities or groups through the use of sufficiently mutually understood signs, symbols, and semiotic conventions. An important distinction is between verbal communication, which happens through the use of a language, an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Action (philosophy)
An action is an event that an agent performs for a purpose, that is guided by the person's intention. The first question in the philosophy of action is to determine how actions differ from other forms of behavior, like involuntary reflexes. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, it involves discovering " at is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm". There is broad agreement that the answer to this question has to do with the agent's intentions. So driving a car is an action since the agent intends to do so, but sneezing is a mere behavior since it happens independent of the agent's intention. The dominant theory of the relation between the intention and the behavior is ''causalism'': driving the car is an action because it is ''caused'' by the agent's intention to do so. On this view, actions are distinguished from other events by their causal history. Causalist theories include Donald Davidson's account, who defines actions as bodily ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reasoning
Reason is the capacity of consciously applying logic by drawing conclusions from new or existing information, with the aim of seeking the truth. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, mathematics, and art, and is normally considered to be a distinguishing ability possessed by humans. Reason is sometimes referred to as rationality. Reasoning is associated with the acts of thinking and cognition, and involves the use of one's intellect. The field of logic studies the ways in which humans can use formal reasoning to produce logically valid arguments. Reasoning may be subdivided into forms of logical reasoning, such as: deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and abductive reasoning. Aristotle drew a distinction between logical discursive reasoning (reason proper), and intuitive reasoning, in which the reasoning process through intuition—however valid—may tend toward the personal and the subjectively opa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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