Existential dependence

Addiction often involves what some writers call existential dependence (Seeburger 1993) that is, the development of an identity to which the addictive practices are crucial. In this way, devotion to the relevant behavior becomes bound up with the meaning of one s life. Pete Hamill (1994) describes his relation to drinking in this way ... 

Existential dependence is not necessarily regrettable. Most of our lives are structured around the appetites in one way or another. They and their expression tend to be dear to us. The pains and perplexities of this devotion sometimes tempt us to ideals of detachment but on reflection our appetitive lives matter to most of us in ways that we do not regret. 

It is important to distinguish the effects on rationality of the dependency itself from the more direct effects of the ingestion of certain addictive substances. As dependencies, all addictions create liabilities to irrationalities when one is deprived (or threatened with deprivation) of the substance. Addictive substances differ, however, in their intoxicating properties. Being "high" may itself diminish rationality. I suspect these differences are linked to the different capacities of substances to lead to what I call existential dependency some of these impairments of consciousness are precisely what one comes to "need." ( , 1 am indebted to discussion with Susan Neiman.)... 

Correia, Fabrice. 2005. Existential dependence ami cognate notions. Miinchen Philosophia. Correia, Fabrice. 2008. Ontological dependence. Philosophy Compass 3(5) 1013-1032. 

Maximum population densities supportable by vegetarian diets would also be quite high in North America and Western Europe, but these highly carnivorous societies now use a great deal of fertilizer nitrogen in order to support that particular dietary habit. Naturally, this reality must be taken into account when trying to estimate the extent of the world s existential dependence on Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis, the principal goal of the next chapter. 

The existential state of being a patient is perhaps an even more immediate domain of the moral. The loss of autonomy, the fear of the unknown, the dissolution of identity accompanying pain in its multifarious forms, the dehumanization of being subjected to the administrative processes of healthcare, and the psychological dependence each of these challenges fosters combine to make the physician the patient s advocate in a different way to the social one described above. Here, individual concerns are paramount, and the most immediate response must be a humane one. 

A correspondence can be formally described as a tgd with one and only one existentially quantified variable being equal to one of the universally quantified variables, and one term on each side of the dependency (for the case of the relational schemas). The correspondence states that every value of the source schema element represented by the first variable should also exist in the instance values of target schema element represented by the second. 

In contrast to the United States, China has little room to reduce substantially its high dependence on nitrogen fertilizer. This dependence is overwhelmingly existential— to secure basic adequate nutrition for the conntry s more than 1.2 billion people— rather than a matter of economic choice or of a preferred diet as in the U.S. case. Origins of this recent dependence are closely connected with the most tragic period of China s modern history, and their recounting provides perhaps the most compelling illustration of the epochal difference made by the Haber-Bosch synthesis. 

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