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Although the relationship of Hart Crane and Yvor Winters has been much discussed, there has been no sustained critical attempt to consider Winters’s analysis of Crane’s suicidal enchantment as a point of entry into his larger diagnosis of American culture. This article examines how Winters's critical achievement and poetry, plus that of Robert Frost, help American literature to exorcise the ghost of Hart Crane. They also free the American intellectual and literary tradition from what may appear an incoherent, triumphalist mythology, and offer in its place a brilliant, suave, but sober understanding of ourselves, of the world, and of our place within it: one that does not reject the symbolic power of reality or the American continent, but which does seek to comprehend it by means of chastened perceptions and a solider reason. The achievement of Winters and Frost should serve as foundational for a mature literary culture in America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the sort of diversity in perspective appropriate for a presidential commission on bioethics, and by implication, high-level governmental commissions on ethics more generally. It takes as its point of comparison the respective reports on human cloning produced by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, appointed by President Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush's President's Council on Bioethics, under the leadership of its original chair, Leon Kass. I argue that the Clinton Commission Report exemplifies forensic diversity (the type of diversity between contesting parties in a legal case), while the Kass Council Report exemplifies academic diversity (the diversity found in a medieval disputatio). Drawing upon Thomas Aquinas, I argue that the type of diversity most appropriate for such advisory bodies is deliberative diversity, which facilitates the President's process of taking counsel. After considering their respective charges, I suggest that neither the Clinton Commission nor the Kass Council possessed an adequate degree of deliberative diversity for their respective tasks.

Virtue is the most perdurable concept in the history of ethics, which is understandable given the ineradicability of the moral agent in the events of the moral life. Historically, virtue enjoyed normative force as long as the philosophical anthropology and the metaphysics of the good that grounded virtue were viable. That grounding has eroded in both general and medical ethics. If virtue is to be restored to a normative status, its philosophical underpinnings must be reconstructed. Such reconstruction seems unlikely in general ethics, where the possibility of agreement on the good for humans is remote. However, it is a realistic possibility in the professional ethics fo the health professions where agreement on the telos of the healing relationship is more likely to arise. Nevertheless, virtue-based ethics must be related conceptually and normatively to other ethical theories in a comprehensive moral philosophy of the health professions. If he really does think there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our house, let us count our spoons. Samuel Johnson

Truly professional medical ethics requires a methodology that generates both moral discernment and consistently right judgments. In this article the author briefly reviews difficulties involved in ethical decision-making, the historical development of casuistry, and four ethical methodologies employed in clinical medicine today. These latter, which are outlined and compared, are as follows: the methodology developed by David Thomasma in the 1960s and 1970s; one created by Jonsen, Siegler, and Winslade; another developed by the author; and the Bochum Protocol authored by Hans-Martin Sass et al. of the Bochum Center for Medical Ethics in the Federal Republic of Germany.