Performing and creative artists have unique occupational and lifestyle stresses and challenges that can negatively affect self-esteem. Low self-esteem not only has serious implications for their psychological and physical health, it can also affect their performance and creativity. There is a need to establish effective interventions to deal with this issue. To the best of our knowledge, there are no reported studies specific to workshops or interventions on enhancing self- esteem for artists. The Al and Malka Green Artists’ Health Centre (...) at the Toronto Western Hospital, University Health Network, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is a unique multidisciplinary and integrative clinic serving the special needs of the artist population. We developed a workshop entitled “Building Confidence and Self Esteem Toolbox Workshop” to address this this need. We then designed a single-blind, randomized, prospective, pilot study to evaluate the effectiveness of the workshop on enhancing self-esteem in artists, and to evaluate the long-term effectiveness of using the recommended tools in maintaining a healthy self-esteem, as well as maintaining physical and emotional health. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected. A validated “Self-Esteem Checkup” questionnaire was administered pre- and immediately post workshop, as well as at 2, 6, and 12 months post workshop. Open-ended questions were posed to study participants via email at 2 and 12 months following the workshop, and at 6 months in in-person interviews. Thirty-five professional artists consented to participate in the study, with 26 completing all study visits. Mean scores for all time points, and the individual questionnaire statement mean scores for the five timepoints increased significantly immediately post-workshop and remained statistically significantly improved by the by the 3rd follow-up 12 months later. (p<0.001). The mean self-esteem rating score increased significantly post-workshop and remained statistically significantly improved by the 3rd follow-up 12 months later. (p<0.01). Qualitative data showed positive feedback on the utilization of the tools learned in the workshop that helped maintain this improvement over a one-year period. This workshop may be an effective means of addressing the issue of self-esteem in artists. Further controlled studies of larger sample size and longer duration are needed to confirm these findings. (shrink)

The essays in this volume present versions of feminism that are explicitly liberal, or versions of liberalism that are explicitly feminist. By bringing together some of the most respected and well-known scholars in mainstream political philosophy today, Amy R. Baehr challenges the reader to reconsider the dominant view that liberalism and feminism are 'incompatible.'.

In this anthology of new and classic articles, fifteen noted feminist philosophers explore contemporary ethical issues that uniquely affect the lives of women. These issues in applied ethics include autonomy, responsibility, sexual harassment, women in the military, new technologies for reproduction, surrogate motherhood, pornography, abortion, nonfeminist women and others. Whether generated by old social standards or intensified by recent technology, these dilemmas all pose persistent, 'nagging,' questions that cry out for answers.

This paper rejects two main arguments for absolving the deferential wife and victims of deprived circumstances from responsibility or hlame for their servility: for Susan Wolf, circumstances can determine their reasons and acts, and for Sarah Buss, circumstances can give them excusing reasons for their acts. The paper argues that circumstances can give them justifying reasons to act in ways defending their intrin-sic worth when their acts can be legitimately interpreted as a protest against an attempt to degrade their (...) intrinsic value. (shrink)

Considering everything from Nike ads, emaciated models, and surgically altered breasts to the culture wars and the O.J. Simpson trial, Susan Bordo deciphers the hidden life of cultural images and the impact they have on our lives. She builds on the provocative themes introduced in her acclaimed work _Unbearable Weight_—which explores the social and political underpinnings of women's obsession with bodily image—to offer a singularly readable and perceptive interpretation of our image-saturated culture. As it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish (...) between appearance and reality, she argues, we need to rehabilitate the notion that not all versions of reality are equally trustworthy. Bordo writes with deep compassion, unnerving honesty, and bracing intelligence. Looking to the body and bodily practices as a concrete arena where cultural fantasies and anxieties are played out, she examines the mystique and the reality of empowerment through cosmetic surgery. Her brilliant discussion of sexual harassment reflects on the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill controversy as well as the film _Disclosure_. She suggests that sexuality, although one of the mediums of harassment, is not its essence, and she calls for the recasting of harassers as bullies rather than sex fiends. Bordo also challenges the continuing marginalization of feminist thought, in particular the failure to read feminist work as cultural criticism. Finally, in a powerful and moving essay called "Missing Kitchens"—written in collaboration with her two sisters—Bordo explores notions of bodies, place, and space through a recreation of the topographies of her childhood. Throughout these essays, Bordo avoids dogma and easy caricature. Consistently, and on many levels, she demonstrates the profound relationship between our lives and our theories, our feelings and our thoughts. (shrink)

The role genetic inheritance plays in the way human beings look and behave is a question about the biology of human sexual reproduction, one that scientists connected with the Human Genome Project dashed to answer before the close of the twentieth century. This is also a question about politics, and, it turns out, poetry, because, as the example of Lucretius shows, poetry is an ancient tool for the popularization of science. "Popularization" is a good word for successful efforts to communicate (...) elite science to non-scientists in non-technical languages and media. According to prominent sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, "sexual dominance is a human universal." He meant, of course, that men dominate women. Like sociobiology, genetic science is freighted with politics, including gender politics. Scientists have gender perspectives that may color what they "see" in nature. As the late Susan Okin Miller suggested in an unpublished paper tracing the detrimental impact of Aristotle's teleology on Western thought, scientists accustomed to thinking that men naturally dominate women might interpret genetic discoveries accordingly. Biologists have good, scientific reasons to fight the effects of bias. One must be critical of how scientists and popularizers of science, like "Genome" author Matt Ridley, frame truth and theory. Ridley's "battle of the sexes" metaphor and others have a doubtful place in serious explanations of science. (shrink)

This is an excerpt from the contentGender equality as a badge of modernity is one of the primary features of the homogenizing process known as globalization. Just as all but a handful of states now claim to be “republics”, regardless of the degree of substantive public rule, an affirmation of equal rights for men and women uniformly appears in modern constitutions and international conventions. Even more striking than the gap between formal and substantive democracy is the chasm that separates these (...) claims of gender equality from the reality of the lives of the world’s women and girls, a breach that is visible in multiple contexts, from the stubbornly low percentages of women in positions of political and economic power, to the cultural transmission of sexual subordination in mass media, to the growing number of impoverished, enslaved, and stateless women worldwide. Using the lens of citizenship to assess, understand and address this gap between formal and substantive equality is the principle project of Gender Equality. (shrink)

My strategy is to examine a recent trend in philosophical discussions of responsibility, a trend that tries, but I think ultimately fails, to give an acceptable analysis of the conditions of responsibility. It fails due to what at first appear to be deep and irresolvable metaphysical problems. It is here that I suggest that the condition of sanity comes to the rescue. What at first appears to be an impossible requirement for responsibility---the requirement that the responsible agent have created her- (...) or himself---turns out to be the vastly more mundane and non controversial requirement that the responsible agent must, in a fairly standard sense, be sane. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

Mindfulness, derived from Buddhist psychology and philosophy, has gained broad popularity in the last decades, due importantly to scientific interest and findings. Yet Buddhist mindfulness developed in Asian pre-scientific culture and religion, and is predicated upon long-term cultivation of introspective awareness of lived experience, not highly accessible to empirical study. Further complicating the ‘science' of mindfulness, mindfulness's very definition is multifaceted, resistant to dismantling and requires substantial amounts of personal practice to gain expertise. Most scientists investigating mindfulness have not achieved (...) a high level of this expertise. Here I address how mindfulness is currently being invented as a scientific fact or object of inquiry. The intrinsic porosity of subjective and objective factors influencing the investigation of mindfulness is highlighted: the evolving body of ‘scientific' experts, instruments used to measure mindfulness, the alliances of funders and other supporters of mindfulness research, and the public representation of the related findings. (shrink)

The legal environment -- Regulation of nursing practice -- Nurses in legal actions -- Standards of care -- Defenses to negligence or malpractice -- Prevention of malpractice -- Nurses as witnesses -- Professional liability insurance -- Accepting or refusing an assignment/patient abandonment -- Delegation to unlicensed assistive personnel -- Patients' rights and responsibilities -- Confidential communication -- Competency and guardianship -- Informed consent -- Refusal of treatment -- Pain control -- Patient teaching and health counseling -- Medication administration -- Clients (...) with AIDS and HIV testing -- Abusive situations -- Reproductive services -- Restraints -- Emergency psychiatric admissions -- Organ and tissue donation and transplantation -- Discharge against medical advice -- The medical record and documentation standards -- Electronic health information and communications -- Interdependent nursing functions: verbal orders and telenursing -- Event reporting and compliance -- Quality and safety in nursing practice -- Forensic issues -- Employer and employee rights -- Contracts -- Corporate liability -- Employment contracts and unionization -- Employment status liability -- Staffing issues and floating -- Americans with Disabilities Act -- Employees with AIDS/HIV infection and exposure to bloodborne pathogens -- Impaired nurses -- Sexual harassment in the workplace -- Violence in the workplace -- Intentional torts -- Environmental health and safety -- Ethical decision making -- Professional boundaries and patient relationships -- Moral courage and patient advocacy -- Social media and online professionalism -- Reporting illegal, unethical, or unsafe conduct -- Maternal versus fetal rights -- Futility of care -- Advance directives and end-of-life decisions -- Assisted suicide. (shrink)

Background Dynamic consent has been proposed as a process through which participants and patients can gain more control over how their data and samples, donated for biomedical research, are used, resulting in greater trust in researchers. It is also a way to respond to evolving data protection frameworks and new legislation. Others argue that the broad consent currently used in biobank research is ethically robust. Little empirical research with cohort study participants has been published. This research investigated the participants’ opinions (...) of adding a dynamic consent interface to their existing study. Methods Adult participants in the Extended Cohort for E-health, Environment and DNA longitudinal cohort study who are members of the EXCEED Public and Participant Engagement Group were recruited. Four focus groups were conducted and analysed for thematic content. Discussion topics were derived from a review of the current literature on dynamic consent. Results Participants were in favour of many aspects of a dynamic consent interface, such as being able to update their information, add additional data to their records and choose withdrawal options. They were supportive provided it was simple to use and not intrusive. Participants expressed a markedly high level of trust in the study and its investigators and were unanimously happy with their current participation. No strong support was found for adding a dynamic consent interface to EXCEED. Conclusions Trust in the study researchers was the strongest theme found. Openness and good data security were needed to retain their trust. While happy to discuss dynamic consent, participants were satisfied with the current study arrangements. There were indications that changing the study might unnecessarily disturb their trust. This raised the question of whether there are contexts where dynamic consent is more appropriate than others. This study was limited by the small number of participants who were committed to the study and biased towards it. More research is needed to fully understand the potential impact of adding a dynamic consent interface to an existing cohort study. (shrink)

In traditional linguistic accounts of context, one thinks of the immediate features of a speech situation, that is, a situation in which an expression is uttered. Thus, features such as time, location, speaker, hearer and preceding discourse are all parts of context. But context is a wider and more transcendental notion than what these accounts imply. For one thing, context is a relational concept relating social actions and their surroundings, relating social actions, relating individual actors and their surroundings, and relating (...) the set of individual actors and their social actions to their surroundings. (shrink)

How do I know whether there are any minds beside my own? This problem of other minds in philosophy raises questions which are at the heart of all philosophical investigations--how it is that we know, what is in the mind, and whether we can be certain about any of our beliefs. In this book, Anita Avramides begins with a historical overview of the problem from the Ancient Skeptics to Descartes, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, and Wittgenstein. The second part of (...) the book investigates the views of influential contemporary philosophers such as Strawson, Davidson, Nagel and Searle. (shrink)

Thesis: Those affected by mental disorders whose actions are episodically influenced by their disorder are often overlooked by philosophers of moral and ethical responsibility. Allen gives us reasons for thinking it is inappropriate to either: a) “summarily exclude people with mental problems out of the universe of moral agents, reducing them to the status of rocks, trees, animals, and infants” b) “include the group on the false assumption that their moral lives are precisely like the paradigmatic moral lives of the (...) epistemically-sound and well-regulated people never personally touched by a mental condition” We must explore a revised approach to moral and ethical responsibility and obligation for this group. (shrink)

The Gricean account of language is at the center of much current work in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Anita Avramides maintains that Grice's paradigm can be used to defend very different conceptions of mind and of meaning. In this clearly argued book she describes Grice's analysis of meaning and proposes two interpretations of it, one reductive and one nonreductive. Much current work in cognitive science assumes that the content of words and thoughts can be (...) explained in naturalistic terms. A leading idea (advanced mainly by Stephen Schiffer and Brian Loar) is that the naturalistic account of content will proceed in two stages: a reduction of the semantic features of word; to the contents of propositional attitudes and then a reduction of the latter to physical or functional notions. The appeal of Grice's work on meaning to this two stage reductionist strategy is that Gricean definitions seem to provide the only way of reducing the semantic to the psychological, a reduction that is required for a naturalistic account of intentionality. While Avramides defends the method of analysis as one suited to the concept of meaning, she rejects a reductive interpretation of the analysis. She argues that any attempt to reduce the semantic to the psychological leads to a mistaken conception of mind. She exposes the assumptions behind the reductive interpretation and offers fresh and original arguments for the antireductionist position. Against the reductive Gricean she defends the idea that there is a deep epistemological symmetry between semantic and propositional attitude notions, a result of which is that semantically characterized linguistic behavior is central to our concept of belief. Anita Avramides is Lecturer in Philosophy at The Queens College, The University of Oxfor. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Today, more corporations disclose information about their environmental performance in response to stakeholder demands of environmental responsibility and accountability. What information do corporations disclose on their websites? This paper investigates the environmental management policies and practices of the 200 largest corporations in the world. Based on a content analysis of the environmental reports of Fortune’s Global 200 companies, this research analyzes the content of corporate environmental disclosures with respect to the following seven areas: environmental planning considerations, top management support to (...) the institutionalization of environmental concerns, environmental structures and organizing specifics, environmental leadership activities, environmental control, external validations or certifications of environmental programs, and forms of corporate environmental disclosures. (shrink)

Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially. Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core (...) cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of childrens cognitive development. Carey shows how developmental cognitive science resolves aspects of long-standing philosophical debates about the existence, nature, content, and format of innate knowledge. She also shows that understanding the processes of conceptual development in children illuminates the historical process by which concepts are constructed, and transforms the way we think about philosophical problems about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought. (shrink)

Re-emergent scientific atheism bears the marks of its historical origins in the efforts of Bonč-Bruevič and Jaroslavskij. The disciples of the 'Lenin generation' use their 'fathers' somewhat as 'second-level classics'.

Recent developments in neuroscience have enabled technological advances to modulate cognitive functions of the brain. Despite ethical concerns about cognitive enhancement, both individuals and society as a whole can benefit greatly from these technologies, depending on how we regulate their use. To date, regulatory analyses of neuromodulation technologies have focused on a technology itself – for instance, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulation of a brain stimulation device – rather than the use of a technology, such as the use (...) of a brain stimulation device at work or school. Given that some forms of cognitive enhancement have already started to penetrate the general public’s everyday life, we should begin our discussion on potential regulatory issues regarding their use in various real-world situations. The goal of the article is to fill the gap by providing an analytic framework to examine these regulatory issues. More specifically, it aims to illustrate the issues around respecting autonomy and preventing coercive use of cognitive enhancement. The proposed framework categories the real-world settings where a neuromodulation technology can be used for cognitive enhancement based on two criteria – who is subjected to cognitive enhancement and who imposes cognitive enhancement. Based on this framework, the article analyzes regulatory issues arising out of every combination of subject/imposing party by taking one example case. Focusing on the regulations in the U.S., this analysis shows the current lack of adequate safeguards against the coercive use and calls for more attention from government agencies and researchers to develop sound policies regarding current and potentially more widespread use of cognitive enhancement. (shrink)

Ethics consultation has become an integral part of the fabric of U.S. health care delivery. This article summarizes the second edition of the Core Competencies for Health Care Ethics Consultation report of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. The core knowledge and skills competencies identified in the first edition of Core Competencies have been adopted by various ethics consultation services and education programs, providing evidence of their endorsement as health care ethics consultation (HCEC) standards. This revised report was prompted (...) by thinking in the field that has evolved since the original report. Patients, family members, and health care providers who encounter ethical questions or concerns that ethics consultants could help address deserve access to efficient, effective, and accountable HCEC services. All individuals providing such services should be held to the standards of competence and quality described in the revised report. (shrink)

The formal theory of rational choice as grounded in desire-satisfaction cannot account for the problem of such deformed desires as women's slavish desires. Traditional “informed desire” tests impose conditions of rationality, such as full information and absence of psychoses, but do not exclude deformed desires. I offer a Kantian-inspired addendum to these tests, according to which the very features of deformed desires render them irrational to adopt for an agent who appreciates her equal worth.

Urban communities in 21st century America are facing severe economic challenges, ones that suggest a mandate to contemplate serious changes in the way America does business. The middle class is diminishing in many parts of the country, with consequences for the economy as a whole. When faced with the loss of its economic base, any business community must make some difficult decisions about its proper role and responsibilities. Decisions to support the community must be balanced alongside and against responsibilities to (...) owners, shareholders and relevant “stakeholders” in a relatively new context. Corporations in urban communities “hollowed out” by white flight or urban sprawl must decide what level of support they can and should provide. This paper examines corporate decisions within the emerging urban prosperity initiatives, using the framework of integrative social contract theory proposed by Donaldson and Dunfee. We suggest that urban prosperity initiatives present a mandate on corporations sufficiently strong as to qualify as an authentic norm. Further, we argue that strict adherence to a corporate bottom line approach or “corporate isolationism” is not congruent with contemporary community standards. (shrink)