When Herodotus uses the first person plural in phrases like "We know," "We say," and so on, the modern reader naturally takes this either to refer to his ethnic group or to be something like the scholarly first person plural: an appeal to consensus among a group of qualied experts. Neither is the case. Only once does Herodotus' "we" refer to the Greeks as a group; in virtually every other instance it must be interpreted as plural for singular. It refers, (...) that is, to Herodotus himself, and himself alone. Most importantly, it refers to him in his activity as inquirer, arbiter and composer of stories. History, as Herodotus presents it, has a plural voice. We can understand this, first, in relation to the poetic plural in lyric and epic. In epic, the plural voice is that of the audience, spectator and arbiter to a contest of powerful individuals. In lyric, a poet uses the plural in order to speak with the authority of the whole chorus, which is itself a kind of involved audience to the events it represents. A second way to understand the historian’s plural voice to is see how characters within Herodotus’ text use, or attempt to use, the same pluralising rhetoric. In one instance, a competitive individual tries and fails to assume the plural voice; in another, the voice belongs to a genuinely plural — and strangely anonymous — group of bystanders. Again, the plural voice is that of the interpreting, assessing audience, rather than that of the competing individual. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

Do the senses represent causation? Many commentators read Nicolas Malebranche as anticipating David Hume’s negative answer to this question. I disagree with this assessment. When a yellow billiard ball strikes a red billiard ball, Malebranche holds that we see the yellow ball as causing the red ball to move. Given Malebranche’s occasionalism, he insists that the visual experience of causal interaction is illusory. Nevertheless, Malebranche holds that the senses represent finite things as causally efficacious. This experience of creaturely causality (...) explains why Aristotelian philosophers and others struggle to recognize occasionalism’s truth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Summaries and CommentsElizabeth C. Shaw, Staff*, and James ChamberlainBAGGINI, Julian. The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2021. 319 pp. Cloth, $24.95; paper, $19.95Throughout this engaging and accessible book, Julian Baggini encourages his readers to treat the life and works of David Hume as a "model of how to live." Baggini presents summaries of (...) Hume's most famous philosophical arguments, along with biographical details about Hume's life, but always with the aim of learning from Hume about living well. He also discusses his own visits to several locations of importance to Hume.Over the course of The Great Guide, Baggini suggests many "Humean maxims and aphorisms" related to the good life. Some are drawn from Hume's own writings, such as the maxim that "the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue." Others are arrived at by considering aspects of Hume's own life and character, including his failings. For example, after considering Hume's racism, Baggini clearly has his own admiration for Hume in mind when he suggests the maxim "never slavishly follow even the greatest minds, for they too have prejudices, weaknesses, and blind spots."Baggini begins by describing those parts of Edinburgh and southern Scotland that Hume would have known in his youth. He recounts the young Hume's rejection of religious belief and of the Stoic project of attempting to find happiness by making oneself independent of others. However, Baggini notes, Hume never rejected the racist views he expressed in his essay "Of National Characters." Baggini argues that, although we should condemn Hume's views, we should treat his possession of these views primarily as evidence of the extent to which we are all socially conditioned. In Baggini's view, Hume's empiricist commitments are such that, were he to be alive today, experience would lead him to reject racism. Baggini thus aims to excuse Hume, at least somewhat, without excusing his racism.In chapter 2, Baggini follows Hume to La Flèche, in France's Loire valley, where Hume wrote most of his Treatise of Human Nature. As well as providing an account of Hume's time there, Baggini summarizes Hume's arguments about miracles, reason, and causation. He approvingly [End Page 809] notes Hume's skeptical conclusions concerning miracles, which he takes to demonstrate Hume's insistence on philosophizing only about the world as it really is. Baggini treats Hume's conclusions about cause and effect as significantly less skeptical. Although he observes that some scholars deny this, Baggini understands Hume to assert that causation is a "real power." His is a clear and helpful introduction to Hume's arguments concerning cause and effect, but readers of the relevant passages might hope for a little more discussion of what certainly appear to be Hume's skeptical claims about causal powers.Chapter 3 examines Hume's arguments about free will and personal identity, via a discussion of the complex factors which shaped his identity as a man of letters. Baggini observes Hume's sociability and his satisfaction in his success. He also commends Hume's broad-minded approach to philosophy and his willingness to write a wide variety of essays and, eventually, historical works.In chapter 4, Baggini discusses Hume's relationship with Paris. Returning to the topic of Hume's broad understanding of philosophy, Baggini argues that many of Hume's greatest insights were psychological ones. By comparing Hume's views on religion with the fervent atheism of the French philosophes, Baggini admiringly stresses Hume's moderation and his denial of any knowledge about "the ultimate ground of being." Since Hume believed he knew no more about the origins of the universe than anyone else, Baggini argues, he was able to develop friendships with and respect for moderate religious thinkers, as many philosophes were not. However, Baggini also suggests that Hume's "conservative instincts" sometimes led him astray, as where he "broadly endorsed the patriarchal attitudes of his time."Chapter 5 begins with an account of the dispute between Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which then forms the background for a discussion... (shrink)

Robert Nozick addresses the idea of egalitarian redistribution in an argument standardly considered original: the “Wilt Chamberlain Argument”. However, this argument is found in David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, first published in 1751. Placing this argument within a Humean and Hayekian, rather than a Lockean or Kantian, perspective radically changes its import for issues of economic justice. Rather than vindicating the radical individualism of Nozick and other libertarians, applied to our circumstances using Hume's conventionalist (...) and evolutionary account of justice, Hume's Wilt Chamberlain argument vindicates moderate redistribution constrained by the rule of general laws and the goal of fostering innovation and industriousness. (shrink)

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to (...) conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible. (shrink)

In the _Meditations_ and related texts from the early 1640s, Descartes argues that the self can be correctly considered as either a mind or a human being, and that the self’s properties vary accordingly. For example, the self is simple considered as a mind, whereas the self is composite considered as a human being. Someone might object that it is unclear how merely considering the self in different ways blocks the conclusion that a single subject of predication—the self—is both simple (...) and composite, which is contradictory. In response to this objection, this paper develops a reading of Descartes’s various ways of considering the self. I argue that the best reading of Descartes’s qualified claims about the self, i.e., about the self _qua_ mind or the self qua human being, presupposes an account of the unqualified self, that is, of the self _simpliciter_. I argue that the self _simpliciter_ is not a mind, and that it is not a human being either. This result might suggest the pessimistic conclusion that Descartes’s view of the self is incoherent. To avoid this result, I introduce a new metaphysical account of the Cartesian self. On my view, the self is individuated by a unified mental life. The self is constituted by the beings that jointly produce this mental life, and derives its unity from it. (shrink)

Part of the appeal of the biological approach to personal identity is that it does not have to countenance spatially coincident entities. But if the termination thesis is correct and the organism ceases to exist at death, then it appears that the corpse is a dead body that earlier was a living body and distinct from but spatially coincident with the organism. If the organism is identified with the body, then the unwelcome spatial coincidence could perhaps be avoided. It is (...) argued that such an identification would be a mistake. A living organism has a different part/whole relationship and persistence conditions than the alleged body. A case will be made that the concept ‘human body’ is a conceptual mess, vague in an unprincipled manner, and that an eliminativist stance towards dead bodies is the appropriate response. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

How does Descartes characterize the peculiar way in which each of us is aware of our bodies? I argue that Descartes recognizes a sense of bodily ownership, such that the body sensorily appears to be one's own in bodily awareness. This sensory appearance of ownership is ubiquitous, for Descartes, in that bodily awareness always confers a sense of ownership. This appearance is confused, in so far as bodily awareness simultaneously represents the subject as identical to, partially composed by, and united (...) to her body, without distinguishing these relations. Finally, the appearance of ownership is grounded in multiple other ways in which the body sensorily appears: namely, in the fact that the body appears to be inescapable, modified by bodily sensations, and an object of special concern. (shrink)

As a continuation of the work of the third author in [5], we make further observations on the features of Galois cohomology in the general model theoretic context. We make explicit the connection between forms of definable groups and first cohomology sets with coefficients in a suitable automorphism group. We then use a method of twisting cohomology (inspired by Serre’s algebraic twisting) to describe arbitrary fibres in cohomology sequences—yielding a useful “finiteness” result on cohomology sets. Applied to the special case (...) of differential fields and Kolchin’s constrained cohomology, we complete results from [3] by proving that the first constrained cohomology set of a differential algebraic group over a bounded, differentially large, field is countable. (shrink)

Malebranche holds that the feeling of having a body comes in three main varieties. A perceiver sensorily experiences herself (1) as causally connected to her body, in so far as the senses represent the body as causing her sensory experiences and as uniquely responsive to her will, (2) as materially connected to her body, in so far as the senses represent the perceiver as a material being wrapped up with the body, and (3) as perspectivally connected to her body, in (...) so far as the external senses represent the world from the body’s perspective. In addition to distinguishing these varieties of embodied experience, I explain why the perceiver experiences her connection to the body in these ways. Although Malebranche often casts the experience of embodiment in a negative light, his considered view is that this experience contributes to our survival and salvation. (shrink)

Mike Coxhead and James Chamberlain on the transformative potential of philosophical conversations in prison.

Malebranche holds that visual experience represents the size of objects relative to the perceiver's body and does not represent objects as having intrinsic or nonrelational spatial magnitudes. I argue that Malebranche's case for this body-relative thesis is more sophisticated than other commentators—most notably, Atherton and Simmons —have presented it. Malebranche's central argument relies on the possibility of perceptual variation with respect to size. He uses two thought experiments to show that perceivers of different sizes—namely, miniature people, giants, and typical human (...) beings—can experience the very same objects as having radically different sizes. Malebranche argues that there is no principled reason to privilege one of these ways of experiencing size over the others and, more specifically, that all three kinds of perceivers experience size veridically. From the possibility of this kind of veridical perceptual variation, Malebranche infers that visual experience represents only body-relative size. (shrink)

For the first time, this collection brings together a selection of philosophically challenging interpretations of Kierkegaard's thought in a coherent critique of his own philosophy.

This guest column marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Jacques Derrida. The journal in which it appears, Common Knowledge, was not especially receptive to deconstruction during Derrida's lifetime, but Lesley Chamberlain in retrospect sees reasons to reconsider his role in intellectual history now. The delicacy of Derrida's mission, she argues, has been misunderstood. He is best placed in the company not of the “deconstructionists” who thought to follow in his footsteps but, rather, in the company of the (...) moralistic and theologically minded German philosophers and thinkers who inspired him, from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. A personal fear of being pinned down, coupled with his tragic Jewish witness to a philosophical quest for certainty gone astray, led the “Sad Rider,” one of many possible Derridas, to want to “erase” as much as he wanted to write — despite which, he was not spared being turned into an industry. (shrink)

Some moral propositions are so obviously true that we refuse to doubt them, even where we believe that many people disagree. Following Fritz and McPherson, I call our behaviour in such cases ‘moral steadfastness’. In this paper, I argue for two metaethical implications of moral steadfastness. I first argue that morally steadfast behaviour is sufficiently prevalent to present an important challenge for some prominent analogies between moral epistemology and non-moral forms of epistemology. These analogies are often pressed by moral realists. (...) I then argue that moral quasi-realism, unlike realism, can explain and vindicate our presumption that moral steadfastness is frequently rational. On the assumption that we frequently act as it is rational to act, quasi-realism is therefore well placed to explain why we are so frequently morally steadfast. I conclude that this is an important respect in which quasi-realism is explanatorily preferable to realism. (shrink)

In this paper the author examines a new water ethos focused on sustainability within the parameters of a deep, green Christianity. The discussion begins witha brief outline of the problems facing water due to unsustainable practices and policies. At present paces the peoples, creatures, plants, and minerals of the world are at great risk of losing the nourishment of water needed to survive.The second portion begins with an overview of the complex values toward nature in the Christian tradition. The author (...) then develops three approaches for a new water ethos to guide decisions around sustainability and water. In the third approach of deep, green Christianity, the theological basis for a water ethos involves new understandings of Holy Spirit in relation to nature. Finally the author offers a revision of Catholic Social Teachings to serve as an ethical framework for sustainability of the environment and water. (shrink)

Now that we have looked at the characteristics of mystical experience, we are ready to discuss the assumption made in this paper that mystical experience can be translated into an understanding of “integration” or the drive for meaning which Fingarette pursues in a much more analytic fashion. Reviewing the conversion process as an “integration” process we have seen that for the sick-souled, beset with the meaninglessness or melancholy which paralyzes his will, his own awareness of wrong in his situation prevents (...) him from opening up to larger views of reality. But, as James has described, at the same time as the subject is attending so strongly to his own sense of worthlessness, “all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work toward rearrangements.” Yet the “rearrangements” can only come about by obeying the command of Chaung-Tse: “Cease striving.” The result is self-transformation in “reconciling, unifying states.” There is achieved “a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness; facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life.”However, James cautions us to realize that the same incursions of the subconscious which produce such “reconciling, unifying states” can also produce pathological states, “a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down.” In such a state the “meanings” of events become dreadful and the ruling emotion is pessimism. To this possibility James applied the pragmatic test, “By their fruits...,” and concluded that the mystical experience which brings optimism to the individual is a genuine experience and one which brings truth. In our context then, we would say that real “integration” brings the subject away from the “melancholy” and meaninglessness he felt into the “genuinely insightful resolution” of which Fingarette speaks.Conversion, then, is a process in James's analysis of religious experience analogous to the process of integration and meaning-discovery while mysticism is analogous to the state in which integration or meaning-discovery is achieved. Conversion is climaxed by self-surrender; mysticism is characterized by new determination, self-transformation: two ways of describing an indivisible event. Furthermore, the four characteristics James applies to mysticism are indeed characteristic of the experience of integration.Two other points should be added here which are much in line with James's treatment of experience. In the first place, one of the basic principles of radical empiricism is that not only objects but relations between objects are the subject of experience. Such an experience of relationships, of wholeness, is exactly what characterizes integration. At the same time, the five senses are suspended, and the “insight” is experienced with such a strong immediacy that it is almost sensed. James refers to this quality of mystical states: The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression, - that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist.I am not saying that every integration is a mystical experience. Rather I have been saying that James's discussion of religious experiences such as healthy-minded, sick-souled, melancholy, conversion, and mysticism provide analogues for better understanding the phenomenological processes and characteristics of the drive for meaning and integration which Fingarette analyzes. In fact, the very notion of religion itself for James bears not just an analogous resemblance but perhaps an identification with integration. For in his personal letters James had defined religious experience as “Any moment of life that brings the reality of spiritual things more ‘home’ to one.” And in Varieties James defines religion as “a man's total reaction upon life....; his attitude towards what he felt to be the primal truth.”If we look upon this outlook of James toward religion as an “exaggeration” of the reality of integration, we can follow James to what he perceives as the importance of religion upon an individual's life. The man of religious feeling possesses “the excitement of a higher kind of emotion,” an “enthusiastic temper of espousal in regions where morality strictly so called can at best but bow its head and acquiesce.” So we are brought again to the area of creativity in which an individual has experienced the widening of the area of his immediate experience and is “re-born” in the karmic pattern, a valid pattern for both James and Fingarette. As Fingarette describes it, the “converted” individual “creates” values which the dead reality he had previously faced did not possess. The result of the achieved integration is explained by James when referring to religious experience as “an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, ‘dynamogenic’ order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers.” This emotion “overcomes temperamental melancholy [meaninglessness] and imparts endurances to the subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life.”We might sum up this discussion not by a criticism of the shortcomings of James's treatment of the religious life, such as his apparent insensitivity to the part played by institutions in the religious experience itself, but rather by underscoring the richness of the phenomenological analysis James has undertaken. James Edie acknowledges that James's studies of religious experience itself rather than of religion. ... are not only more sound phenomenologically than some of the studies which have, under the influence of Husserl, up to now explicitly invoked the phenomenological method, but they are also the first to establish any solid basis for a true phenomenology of religious experience.And John Wild has pointed out the parallel between James's concept of melancholy and Heidegger's concept of anxiety as the genesis of the process of becoming: beginning with the prospect of death and nothingness, the individual gropes toward new birth.As we have seen, then, James's analysis of the varieties of religious experience leads to a fruitful discussion of the psychological processes involved in melancholy and meaninglessness, rearrangement and integration. In all such experiences, a sense of inner unity is reached to which the following words of Fingarette would apply by analogy: The soul-racking death which leads to blissful “rebirth” is the death of the subjectively experienced, anxiety-generated “self” perception; it is the emergence into the freedom of introspective “self-forgetfulness” of the psychically unified self. (shrink)

This paper defends the cognitive value of literary fiction by showing how Paul Ricoeur’s account of narrative understanding emphasizes the productive and creative elements of fictional discourse and defends its referential capacity insofar as fiction reshapes reality according to some universal aspect. Central to this analysis is Ricoeur’s retrieval of Aristotelian mimesis and mythos and their convergence in the notion of emplotment. This paper also supplements and specifies further Ricoeur’s account by retrieving an Aristotelian concept disregarded by Riceour, namely, synesis. (...) Although Ricoeur connects narrative understanding to the intelligibility of praxis and in turn phronêsis, as opposed to theoretical knowledge, he overlooks Aristotle’s discussion of synesis. This paper then clarifies how the fictional truth of narrative understanding remains related to, and yet distinct from, both theoretical discourse and praxis. (shrink)

Hume is believed by many to hold an emotivist thesis, according to which all expressions of moral judgements are expressions of moral sentiments. However, most specialist scholars of Hume either deny that this is Hume's position or believe that he has failed to argue convincingly for it. I argue that Hume is an emotivist, and that his true arguments for emotivism have been hitherto overlooked. Readers seeking to understand Hume's theory of moral judgements have traditionally looked to the first section (...) of Book 3 of his Treatise, which discusses the relation between morality and reason. I argue that there is evidence elsewhere which better supports Hume's emotivist thesis. Hume's arguments for emotivism focus more on the causes of moral sentiments than on their relation to reason or belief, and he argues that moral sentiments are such as to arise whenever we contemplate morally relevant objects. He also holds that the presence of moral sentiments precludes any possibility of moral belief, because moral beliefs could only be less vivid copies of moral sentiments, and these cannot simultaneously exist. Hume concludes that all moral judgements must be expressions of sentiments. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In this innovative study, Lea David critically investigates the relationship between human rights and memory, suggesting that, instead of understanding human rights in a normative fashion, human rights should be treated as an ideology. Conceptualizing human rights as an ideology gives us useful theoretical and methodological tools to recognize the real impact human rights has on the ground. David traces the rise of the global phenomenon that is the human rights memorialization agenda, termed 'Moral Remembrance', and explores what (...) happens once this agenda becomes implemented. Based on evidence from the Western Balkans and Israel/Palestine, she argues that the human rights memorialization agenda does not lead to a better appreciation of human rights but, contrary to what would be expected, it merely serves to strengthen national sentiments, divisions and animosities along ethnic lines, and leads to the new forms of societal inequalities that are closely connected to different forms of corruptions. (shrink)

Liberal thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were alert to the political costs and human cruelties involved in European colonialism, but they also thought that European expansion held out progressive possibilities. In Progress, Pluralism, and Politics David Williams examines the colonial and anti-colonial arguments of Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and L.T. Hobhouse. Williams locates their ambivalent attitude towards European conquest and colonial rule in a set of tensions between the impact of colonialism on European states, the (...) possibilities of progress in distant and diverse places, and the relationship between universalism and cultural pluralism. In so doing he reveals some of the central ambiguities that characterize the ways that liberal thought has dealt with the reality of an illiberal world. Of particular importance are appeals to various forms of universal history, attempts to mediate between the claims of identity and the reality of difference, and the different ways of thinking about the achievement of liberal goods in other places. Pointing to key elements in still ongoing debates within liberal states about how they should relate to illiberal places, Progress, Pluralism, and Politics enriches the discussion on political thought and the relationship between liberalism and colonialism. (shrink)

Thus, Meyers provides a valuable account, not only of current medical attitudes, but also of relevant case and statute law as it stands at present.

Heidegger responded to Darwin's displacement of the Created Universe by seeking value in a new materiality. His 1936 lecture The Origin of the Work of Art spelt out the need to get away from an Aristotelian concept of matter perpetuated by Aquinas and frame an approach more appropriate to a post-Darwinian age. The argument is not that Heidegger was a Darwinist or an evolutionist. It is that he responded to what Dewey called ‘the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old (...) questions’. (shrink)

Contemporary feminisms are ineluctably drawn into comparisons with historic discourses, forms of praxis and tactical repertoires. While this can underscore points of continuity and commonality in ongoing struggles, it can also result in nostalgia for a more unified and purposeful feminist politics. Kate Eichhorn argues that our interest in nostalgia should be to understand feminist temporalities, and in particular the specific context in which we experience such nostalgia. Accordingly, this article takes up the idea that neoliberalism and populism, which have (...) given rise to both neoliberal feminism and femonationalism, have produced a series of contestations regarding the purpose and nature of feminist politics, as expressed by white popular feminism in the United Kingdom. This article examines two dimensions of feminist nostalgia: first, nostalgia for a more radical form of feminist politics – one not co-opted by neoliberal forces, not individualistic and not centred around online activism; and second, a nostalgia for the idea of ‘sisterhood’ – a time before white feminists were called upon to engage with intersectionality or be inclusive of trans-women. We analyse these themes through analysis of white popular feminism produced in the United Kingdom between 2010 and 2020, cautioning against a feminist nostalgia which neglects to engage with the radical politics of intersectionality. (shrink)

In the People’s Republic of China, an approach has been adopted to ensure that all children born as a result of the one-child policy are healthy. The World Health Organization/United Nations Children’s Fund (WHO/UNICEF) has encouraged the Chinese Government to embrace this philosophy. Part of this approach has resulted in an attempt to increase the breastfeeding rates. This report describes a visit by two nursing faculty members of a Canadian university to an urban hospital maternity unit in the northeast of (...) China, where the staff were attempting to incorporate this philosophy into their maternity care with the assistance of nursing faculty members from the local university. The method chosen to integrate this philosophy was the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative initiated by WHO/UNICEF. (shrink)

In the People’s Republic of China, an approach has been adopted to ensure that all children born as a result of the one-child policy are healthy. The World Health Organization/United Nations Children’s Fund has encouraged the Chinese Government to embrace this philosophy. Part of this approach has resulted in an attempt to increase the breastfeeding rates. This report describes a visit by two nursing faculty members of a Canadian university to an urban hospital maternity unit in the northeast of China, (...) where the staff were attempting to incorporate this philosophy into their maternity care with the assistance of nursing faculty members from the local university. The method chosen to integrate this philosophy was the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative initiated by WHO/UNICEF. (shrink)

Joseph Carens develops one of the most prominent cases for open borders in the academic literature on the basis of freedom and equality. Yet the implementation of his social membership theory would mean that immigrants who have not yet lived in a country long enough to become members would be excluded from political and social rights, thus raising the possibility of their domination and subordination by citizens. Given that these problems arise because Carens aims to balance the freedom of individuals (...) with the “claims of belonging” to a political community, can we theorize the relationship between freedom and community differently? French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy does just that, by showing how to think freedom and community as mutually constitutive. Nancy thus offers the resources for an alternative case for open borders, grounded on the claim that the freedom of community entails openness to the outside. Drawing also on Nancy’s account of the common and of democratic politics, my Nancean argument for open borders challenges Carens’s exclusion of nonmembers from the rights of citizens, emphasizing instead the need for an ongoing political struggle to expand who is eligible to claim rights as well as the scope of the rights themselves. (shrink)

This article is based largely on a research study undertaken by the author into the teaching of human rights in nursing courses in the UK on behalf of the national section of the human rights organization Amnesty International. It attempts to provide a baseline estimate of human rights education in nursing curricula in the UK while making suggestions on how the teaching of human rights issues could be more clearly incorporated into nursing curricula, ending with some recommendations for further research.