[Organ transplantation. Questions in the interface of ethics and anthropology]. / Organtransplantation. Fragen im Schnittbereich von Anthropologie und Ethik.

In the field of organ transplantation medical ethics is confronted with a number of problems where the particular difficulty lies in the fact that ethical and anthropological questions interpenetrate. This article discusses two of these problems in this interface both of which are highly controversial: the real or apparent contradiction between the dead-donor rule and the traditional definition of death and the real or apparent contradiction between the ethical desirability of harvesting organs from non-heart beating donors and the irreversibility of brain death.

Neural correlates of religious experience.

The commonsense view of religious experience is that it is a preconceptual, immediate affective event. Work in philosophy and psychology, however, suggest that religious experience is an attributional cognitive phenomenon. Here the neural correlates of a religious experience are investigated using functional neuroimaging. During religious recitation, self-identified religious subjects activated a frontal-parietal circuit, composed of the dorsolateral prefrontal, dorsomedial frontal and medial parietal cortex. Prior studies indicate that these areas play a profound role in sustaining reflexive evaluation of thought. Thus, religious experience may be a cognitive process which, nonetheless, feels immediate.

The Socratic method in teaching medical ethics: potentials and limitations.

The Socratic method has a long history in teaching philosophy and mathematics, marked by such names as Karl Weierstrass, Leonard Nelson and Gustav Heckmann. Its basic idea is to encourage the participants of a learning group (of pupils, students, or practitioners) to work on a conceptual, ethical or psychological problem by their own collective intellectual effort, without a textual basis and without substantial help from the teacher whose part it is mainly to enforce the rigid procedural rules designed to ensure a fruitful, diversified, open and consensus-oriented thought process. Several features of the Socratic procedure, especially in the canonical form given to it by Heckmann, are highly attractive for the teaching of medical ethics in small groups: the strategy of starting from relevant singular individual experiences, interpreting and cautiously generalizing them in a process of inter-subjective confrontation and confirmation, the duty of non-directivity on the part of the teacher in regard to the contents of the discussion, the necessity, on the part of the participants, to make explicit both their own thinking and the way they understand the thought of others, the strict separation of content level and meta level discussion and, not least, the wise use made of the emotional and motivational resources developing in the group process. Experience shows, however, that the canonical form of the Socratic group suffers from a number of drawbacks which may be overcome by loosening the rigidity of some of the rules. These concern mainly the injunction against substantial interventions on the part of the teacher and the insistence on consensus formation rooted in Leonard Nelson's Neo-Kantian Apriorism.

Quality of life--evaluation or description?

'Quality of life' is part of many different discourses and has been used in a variety of meanings ranging from purely descriptive (as in some medical contexts) to distinctly evaluative meanings (as in some social science and political contexts). The paper argues that there are good normative reasons to make the concept of descriptive as possible at least in its medical applications and, furthermore, to reconstruct it in a thoroughgoing subjectivist way, making the reflexive self-evaluation of the subject himself or herself the ultimate standard. Attention is drawn to the fact that only few of the measures of quality of life applied in present-day medicine correspond to these requirements.

[Identity of the personality and personal identity: philosophical questions in relation to transplantation of brain tissue]. / Identität der Persönlichkeit und Identität der Person: Philosophische Fragen im Zusammenhang mit der Transplantation von Hirngewebe.

Advanced medical technology, though primarily a problem-solver, is also a problem-generator. Its progress confronts us with ever new problems of decision and with the problem of giving these decisions a sound ethical backing. The challenge for philosophy is, in this situation, to act as a kind of go-between: It should make a serious attempt to mediate between innovative medical technology and popular scepticism, and it should provide intellectual guidance for a structured and rational debate. Brain tissue transplantation is confronted mainly with two ethical problems: 1. Under which conditions are we justified to take transplantable brain tissue from aborted human embryos or fetuses? 2. Is it acceptable that the implantation of brain tissue taken from a human embryo or fetus might disturb, in one way or other, the identity of the recipient? To answer these questions, difficult anthropological issues must be discussed: 1. What are the criteria of death applying to embryos and fetuses? 2. What are the conditions for saying that the identity of a person is changed? The present contribution makes an effort to clarify the latter question. It examines the concept of identity in the context of brain tissue transplantation, makes a distinction between identity of personality and personal identity, and argues that even major changes of personality resulting from brain tissue transplantation would not by themselves amount to a change in personal identity. This result has to be reconsidered, however, in the light of the fact that brain tissue transplantation alters the make-up of the recipient's brain.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

[Ethical criteria of terminating treatment]. / Ethische Kriterien des Behandlungsabbruchs.

There is a good deal of agreement among ethicists about the general criteria for the termination of medical treatment, but also a good deal of disagreement about their application in concrete cases. The contribution discusses the criteria most frequently proposed--futility of treatment, doing more harm than good, rejection by the patient, distributional inefficiency--and examines their reasons, problems, and limits of application.

[Theses on the ethics and legal ethics of abortion]. / Thesen zur Ethik und Rechtsethik der Abtreibung.

The author subjects the principal ethical and pragmatic arguments for the moral and legal rejection of abortion to critical scrutiny. He concludes that a prohibition of abortion can be justified neither by considerations of individual and social consequences nor by the standard arguments intended to show that abortion is intrinsically wrong as a form of killing specifically human life.

Divergence of single axons in afferent projections to the cat's visual cortical areas 17, 18, and 19: a parametric study.

The proportions of neurons projecting via axon collaterals to two areas in the cat's occipital cortex (diverging neurons) were determined quantitatively in subcortical and cortical afferents by making use of the retrograde axonal transport of two different tracers. The proportions of diverging neurons were determined for that part of the afferent sites in which neurons filled with tracers from both injected areas occurred (overlap zone). A number of experimental variables were tested for their role in possibly influencing the results of quantitative double-label experiments, among them the types and the combinations of retrograde tracers, the position of the injections, the survival time, and the histological procedure. The most important variable was the position of the cortical injection, which had to be restricted clearly to the cortical grey matter and to one cortical area in order to avoid false-positive double labeling. Other experimental variables affected the total number of retrogradely labeled neurons and/or the ratio between neurons labeled with the two different tracers rather than the proportions of double-labeled neurons. In particular DL proportions were largely independent of the number and density of labeled neurons. They only deviated significantly from mean values in those sections in which the number of labeled neurons amounted to less than 20% of the maximal number of labeled neurons found in one section throughout the overlap zone. Our results show that divergence is common in afferents to the cat visual cortex. The amount of divergence, however, varies considerably according to the origin of the afferent projection. The proportion of diverging neurons expressed as the percentage of the total number of neurons projecting to areas 17 and 18 was 3% in the A-laminae of the dorsal part of the lateral geniculate nucleus, about 8% in the posteromedial lateral suprasylvian area, and about 15% in the C-laminae of the dorsal part of the lateral geniculate nucleus, in the medial interlaminar nucleus, in the lateral part of the lateral posterior nucleus, and in the claustrum. The proportions of diverging neurons in the afferent projections to areas 17 and 19, and to areas 18 and 19 were about 10%. Diverging neurons were also found in the projections of the intralaminar thalamic nuclei to the visual cortex.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)