The potential for the occurrence of multiple-role relationships is increased when professors also consult with athletic teams on their campuses. Such multiple-role relationships have potential ethical implications that are unclear and largely unexplored, and consultants may find multiple-role relationships both difficult to deal with and unavoidable. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the nature of teacher-practitioner multiple-role relationships. Participants (N = 35) were recruited from Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP) certified consultants (CCs) who (...) were also affiliated with a university (N = 68). All participants completed a 28-item survey exploring the incidence and relevant issues pertaining to multiple-role relationships. Chi-square analyses revealed that licensed mental health practitioners (i.e., psychologists and counselors) were more likely than nonlicensed AAASP CCs to believe that multiple-role relationships were never appropriate in sport psychology, 2(1, N = 30) = 12.80, p < .001, and to have never taken part in a multiple-role relationship, 2(1, N = 33) = 12.44, p < .001. Independent samples t tests revealed that mental health practitioners also reported that they would have higher levels of concern for both the practitioner, t(30) = -2.77, p = .009, and the client, t(30) = -2.50, p = .018, in such a relationship. (shrink)

This article applies Paul Tillich's existentialist analysis of the human predicament, particularly what it means to exist and to be fallen, to social media. I argue that social media heightens feelings of alienation and estrangement, supporting this claim with evidence from empirical research in psychiatry and communication studies. Thus, I offer an application of a Tillichian approach to an area of culture previously unexamined in this way. I identify three primary ways in which social media exacerbates existentialist emotional states: social (...) media allows us to construct artificial versions of ourselves through the use of filters and photo editing software; it provides the means to quantify social approval in groups the size of which the human brain has not evolved for; it extends the size of our social networks but decreases the quality of interactions. Social media is yet to receive significant philosophical or theological engagement despite its prevalence, particularly within younger generations. I argue that this is a mistake – philosophy has a duty to engage with such a ubiquitous feature of modern life. (shrink)

This article brings time and theology together constructively in response to a pressing problem for the doctrine of personal salvation. The problem arises within the physics and metaphysics of time, as these support a so-called temporal B-theory in which time does not pass and reality is comprised of a block universe. Within this static temporal metaphysic, objective change is highly problematized. Yet salvation requires an objective change from fallenness to redemption. So, how can we understand a salvation-transformation in the block (...) universe? In other words, can sinners really change? I argue that on a B-theory of time, a salvation-transformation is best understood as a form of qualitative, phenomenological, and subjective change, rather than a robust ontological change. I conclude that the individual's transformation from fallen to saved is one of mind-dependent becoming. So, sinners can change. But, in this lifetime, that change can only be subjective. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics has recently indicated that temporal order is not always fixed, a finding that has far-reaching philosophical and theological implications. The phenomena, termed “indefinite causal order,” shows that events can be in a superposition with regard to their order. In the experimental setting with which this article is concerned, two events, A and B, were shown to be in the ordering relations “A before B” and “B before A” at the same time. This article introduces an ongoing project that (...) seeks to make sense of this result, with a particular focus on the methodology by which this research will be undertaken. Specific research questions, particularly regarding what indefinite causal order might mean for the metaphysics of time and the doctrine of salvation, are introduced. The collaborative approach detailed brings together the disciplinary skills of a working scientist and a working theologian. What is offered is a collaborative methodology for interaction between science and religion that is more than the sum of its parts. Alister McGrath’s idea of multiple rationalities is employed as an epistemological framework within which this research takes place. Within an epistemologically pluralistic model, collaborative efforts are not only encouraged but necessary. Complex reality requires an equally complex, usually interdisciplinary, explanation. I argue that such dialogue is both theologically justified and culturally valuable and indicates the direction in which this research will be taken. (shrink)

Chapter 15: "'What you do hurts all of us!' When women confront women through pro-life rhetoric." -/- In this chapter, I articulate a specific problem in the way the rhetoric and ideology of pro-life politics operates as a form of confrontation between women. This is a dilemma that emerges when women engage in the appearance of concern and solicitude while passively coercing other women as they may be ambivalent and vulnerable in forcing anti-abortion outcomes. This in a reinvestment in the (...) problem I raise in my prior work, The Pregnancy ≠ Childbearing Project: A Phenomenology of Miscarriage (2017), a dilemma that I think is essential to grapple with if not also to urgently reconcile: where is the solidarity among women as they are pregnant, independent of the outcomes or expectations of childbearing? Alongside of the testimony of my own personal experience, I analyze the substance of the confrontation narrated in Maisie Crow’s documentary Jackson (2016), juxtaposing it with the fictional hypothesis of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1998) to outline the character of harm in the confrontations between women through pro-life discourse. (shrink)

Despite broad agreement that the vulnerable have a claim to special protection, defining vulnerable persons or populations has proved more difficult than we would like. This is a theoretical as well as a practical problem, as it hinders both convincing justifications for this claim and the practical application of required protections. In this paper, I review consent-based, harm-based, and comprehensive definitions of vulnerability in healthcare and research with human subjects. Although current definitions are subject to critique, their underlying assumptions may (...) be complementary. I propose that we should define vulnerability in research and healthcare as an identifiably increased likelihood of incurring additional or greater wrong. In order to identify the vulnerable, as well as the type of protection that they need, this definition requires that we start from the sorts of wrongs likely to occur and from identifiable increments in the likelihood, or to the likely degree, that these wrongs will occur. It is limited but appropriately so, as it only applies to special protection, not to any protection to which we have a valid claim. Using this definition would clarify that the normative force of claims for special protection does not rest with vulnerability itself, but with pre-existing claims when these are more likely to be denied. Such a clarification could help those who carry responsibility for the protection of vulnerable populations, such as Institutional Review Boards, to define the sort of protection required in a more targeted and effective manner. (shrink)

Next SectionAccess to medicines, vaccination and care in resource-poor settings is threatened by the emigration of physicians and other health workers. In entire regions of the developing world, low physician density exacerbates child and maternal mortality and hinders treatment of HIV/AIDS. This article invites philosophers to help identify ethical and effective responses to medical brain drain. It reviews existing proposals and their limitations. It makes a case that, in resource-poor countries, ’locally relevant medical training’—teaching primarily locally endemic diseases and practice (...) in scarcity conditions, training in rural communities and admitting rural students preferentially—could help improve retention. Locally relevant training would arguably diminish medical brain drain in five ways. It would (i) make graduates less attractive for Western employers, (ii) align graduates’ expectations with actual practice, diminishing ‘burn-out’, (iii) enhance the professional prestige of local practice, (iv) hold rotations in, and recruit applicants from, rural areas, which is known to improve retention there, and (v) create local career development options that attract practitioners to stay. Such educational reform may raise worries about poor-quality care, breach of the freedom of education and occupation, breach of the freedom of movement, unequal distribution of opportunities among students, hypocrisy and resistance from influential actors. We address these worries. (shrink)

Vice’s answer to the question of this white ‘I’ who must try to live well in South Africa, configures shame, political silence and humble self-reconfiguration. I accept her insightful analysis of ‘whiteness’ in terms of the oppressor’s shame, but find that her specification of identity does not accommodate the multiplicity of privilege/oppression relations in which individuals participate. Since this implies that many South Africans, albeit unevenly, share the oppressor’s shame, her advice concerning ‘whites only’ political withdrawal seems inappropriate and curiously (...) self-subversive. Focussing instead on her reflections concerning moral emotions in ethically-compromised selves, which should motivate self-reconfiguration, and drawing from Kristeva on ‘forgiveness’, I argue that compromised selves in privilege/oppression relations cannot reconfigure themselves independently, and should rather negotiate on-going forgiveness relationships. Further, since privileged and oppressed shoulder different but reciprocal ethical responsibilities, besides considering the privileged self who should appeal for forgiveness,1 one must address a gap in Vice’s argument concerning the reciprocal shame of the oppressed. (shrink)

Growing data on the socioeconomic determinants of health pose a challenge to analysis and application of fairness in health. In Just health: meeting health needs fairly, Norman Daniels argues for a change in the population end of our thinking about just health. What about clinical care? Given our knowledge of the importance of wealth, education or social status to health, is fairness in medicine served better by continuing to avoid considering our patients’ social status in setting clinical priorities, or by (...) attempting to equalise existing health inequalities by giving priority to the socioeconomically disadvantaged at the point of care? In this article, I argue that doctors should not attempt the latter. Granted, giving priority to low status would go some way towards compensating unjust health inequalities and the impression of being left aside in other social spaces. It would represent reverse discrimination, but could still be justified inasmuch as disadvantaged groups could be identifiable, and as long as the intent was compensation rather than retribution. However, under current circumstances such priority would risk being attributed arbitrarily, would represent a form of medical proselytising, risk leaving the worst-off with less by alienating the powerful, and require teaching doctors to act in strongly counter-cultural ways—possibly at great cost. Crucially, however, we protect both equal health and equal regard by treating all alike: priority to low status would promote the first somewhat, but at the expense of sacrificing the second. (shrink)

Instead of paralysing readers with a technical account of its nature and genealogy, I aim to accumulate a sense of Derrida's quasi-transcendental thinking over a series of expositions. I begin with a critical account of the most prevalent misreading of Derrida's work, generated by attempts, such as Rorty's, to place it on one side of a clear duality that sets old-fashioned “philosophical” foundationalism against contemporary anti-foundationalist “textuality.” In contrast, through an analogy between what occurs in the giving of a gift (...) and the happening of différance, I shall try to articulate the more complex, quasi-transcendental “logic” of Derrida's thinking, which refuses a clear-cut “either/or” choice between the poles of this duality, precisely because these alternatives stand in a relation, not of analytical contradiction, but of aporia, or dilemma. If this exposition proves to be too abstruse and metaphysical for some, a second, more practical, example concerning the aporias of ethical decision- making should go some way to wards compensation. Through these expositions, I aim to show that a complex, quasi-transcendental way of thinking serves as a more sophisticated and accurate key to the interpretation of Derrida's texts than attempts to reduce it to the anti-foundationalist side of supposedly contradictory opposites. To support this claim, I return with a critical eye to Rorty's rejection of Jonathan Culler's argument that Derrida must and does maintain a philosophy/literature distinction, and of Christopher Norris's explanation for Derrida's claim that one cannot escape philosophy. I also try to answer Rorty's rejection of the very idea of quasi-transcendentality by reducing this mode of thinking to a mere restatement of the co-implication of binaries. I conclude with a brief outline of what deconstructive practice amounts to when understood in the light of quasi-transcendental thinking. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.23(3) 2004: 244-266. (shrink)

Reflecting on ‘human development’ theorists face conceptual confusion, borne out experientially by contemporary ecological, social, and economic crises. Since concepts create realities (i.e. justify and motivate practices), and philosophers create concepts, it is important to consider how philosophers might respond to conceptual difficulties caused by the modern era’s still influential ‘binary’ paradigm, exemplified by the law of the excluded middle, which entails a discursive split between modernism’s ultimately predictable cosmos and postmodernism’s insistence on fundamental chaos. Supposedly obliged to choose between (...) opposites, theorists are caught between the necessity and iniquity of both. This impasse sets up conditions for what Lyotard calls ‘differends,’ and constrains our power to create responsible concepts. To show that Morin’s ‘generalised complexity’ takes us beyond the modernist/postmodernist impasse, I take up his injunction to promote ‘an epistemological reversal,’ starting from the notion of ‘open system’ and moving through ‘emergence’ and ‘organization’ to ‘logical complexity.’ Our epistemological task accordingly is to establish strategies for interpreting multiple dimensions of phenomenal reality, given the irreducibly complex relation of co-implication between mutually negating opposites. I agree with Cilliers that deconstruction is exemplary in this respect, but aim to broaden the adventure by suggesting ideas for a ‘pragmatics of complexity’ involving vocabulary, concepts, strategies, metaphors, and heuristics derived also from other philosophers and psychoanalytic theorists. The difficulty of complex thought is that it must face messes ... interconnectedness among phenomena, fogginess, uncertainty, contradiction. However, we can elaborate some conceptual tools, some principles for this adventure, and we can begin to perceive the face of the new paradigm of complexity that should emerge. (Edgar Morin, On Complexity, 2008: 6). (shrink)

For addressing the problem of negotiating social orders in a way that protects one’s humanity, I have considered Deleuze and Guattari’s intriguing claim in Anti-Oedipus that “a schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch‘. I outlined the associated principles of schizoid living developed in Anti-Oedipus via a critique that reverses the value of two Freudian concepts, namely, ”neurosis’ and ”psychosis’. I then cited some of the book’s eulogising ”praise poetry’, which (...) describes the ”schizo’ and connected it to a contemporaneous text, J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, that addresses the same ethical problem of negotiating social orders. Through the activities and reflections of the novel’s protagonist, Michael K, who might be thought of as “a schizophrenic out for a walk‘, I showed that Coetzee explores various forms of resistance. He investigates the impotence of resistance as the active construction of an alternative story from the alienated position of the ”other’. I pointed out that this strategy fails because it remains within the neurotic desire to construct a coherent narrative. Similarly, I indicated that resistance fails as a gesture of pure refusal akin to schizophrenic antiproduction, because the neurotic response re-appropriates this extremity through self-serving gestures of externalisation. Finally, I pointed out how Coetzee alludes to a kind of resistance that might be called schizoid and that changes the rules of the game. In the novel, K experiments with the first and second options, but cannot make life possible, either as a servant to a social order, on his own terms, or on the absolute outside. Echoing the question posed by Deleuze and Guattari of whether the schizoid ”men of desire’ they praise exist yet, K only dreams of the third option in the novel’s final lines, which detail the thoughts of a man dying of starvation. (shrink)

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2006), Nietzsche presents Zarathustra as a sage and parodic prophet, who acquires and offers insight over the narrated journey of his spiritual development. Nietzsche’s conception of Zarathustra as a gift (to “all and none”) endorses learning as the kind of emulation condensed into Zarathustra’s complex formulation: rather than “corpses that I carry with me wherever I want... I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves—wherever I want.” Thus I aim, firstly, to (...) follow the text closely to see what is given. However, noting that Zarathustra is deeply imbued with figures of laughter, I also impose an interpretation. “Repeating differently,” as demanded by Zarathustra, I outline a practicable, spiral‐shaped “learning curve” of traversal and return to various “shades of laughter,” advancing from the worst laughters to “golden laughter,” which embraces complexity. This represents what it means to laugh well. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate that the complex ethos of affirmative laughter in Zarathustra remains strikingly pertinent for a contemporary era urgently tasked with embracing complexity. (shrink)

This philosophical investigation is motivated by the common association between happiness and self-transcendence, and a question posed by Freud: “Why is it so hard for men to be happy?” I consider the answers given in three key texts from the psychoanalytic tradition, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, and Abraham Maslow’s The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Based on a distinction between opposing forms of self-transcendence, ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution, the authors articulate the relation between (...) self-transcendence and happiness in different, but equally unsatisfactory, ways. In all three texts, a dominant ideological framing is discernible, which prioritises the present/positive and ignores the work of the absent/negative, ironically leaving us with a sense of futility concerning the pursuit of happiness. I propose that an approach influenced by Lacanian ideas, which acknowledges the role played by unhappiness in producing happiness, plausibly challenges the traditional conception of happiness that places it out of human reach as the effect of a perfectly self-transcendent state. Instead, understood as the effect of resistance to the notion of self-transcendence as self-perfection, happiness, while still difficult to achieve because it requires another kind of self-transcendence, becomes attainable here and now by ordinary individuals. (shrink)

This article proposes that cosmetic minimally-invasive procedures – Botox injections, soft-tissue fillers, microdermabrasion, chemical peels and laser treatments – are an under-researched area and provide a number of promising paths for skin studies research. I argue that cosmetic minimally-invasive procedures collapse the difference between the surfaces of the photograph and the skin – the primary surfaces of cosmetic surgery – more successfully than cosmetic surgical procedures. More precisely, I maintain that the difference between photograph and skin is collapsed in two (...) ways: first, through narrating the transformation of the skin’s surface in a way that more closely matches the photographic promises of the cosmetic surgery industry; and, second, by depicting the surgical penetration of the skin through advertising photography. The article concludes by suggesting that further investigation into cosmetic minimally-invasive procedures could offer a new way to think about relationships between ‘normative’ and ‘non-normative’ skin modification practices. (shrink)

Both Heidegger's Being and Time and Helen Keller's The Story of my Life address the problem of what it means for humans to be optimally human. In reading these texts together, I hope to show that Helen's life-story confirms Heidegger's existential analyses to some extent, but also, importantly, poses a challenge to them with respect to the interrelated issues of disability, language and others. Heidegger's hermeneutic explication of what it means to be human is intended to uncover supposedly basic human (...) existential structures. As a fore-structure for this explication, Heidegger projects an already able-bodied, self-sufficient adult, resolutely engaged in daily activity. I shall argue, however, that it is due to this starting-point in adult-Dasein that Heidegger's existential analyses miss important insights concerning the meaning of being human to be gained from Helen's experience. Starting from the essentially disabled child-Dasein, Helen describes her struggle to achieve the very condition that Heidegger assumes from the start, first through rescue by the other as teacher, who offered the gift of language and community, and thereafter in her grasp of language as a “pharmakon.” I hope to show in the end that Helen's experience of a struggle for humanity offers the model for an alternative projection, that of an essentially disabled and needy Dasein, which, I believe, provides a more viable fore-structure than Heidegger's for a hermeneutics of humanity. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(1) 2003: 98-112. (shrink)

In the spirit of the work edited by Michel Foucault (1975) on Pierre Rivière, I propose to put philosophy to work by tackling a case study in which I shall analyse certain court transcripts that pertain to the defence of serial killer, Stewart Wilken, in Die Staat Teen Stewart Wilken. My analysis of these documents is intended to uncover the practices and struggles of the discourses that come together, and into conflict, at this event. The analysis is divided into two (...) parts. In Part One, I thematize subjectivity in relation to the idea of enlightenment autonomy. Here I aim to show that the discourses in law, psychiatry and psychology that dominated at Wilken's trial, appear to have undergone “normalization.” In other words, what Foucault uncovered as early internecine struggles among discourses for supremacy have given way to a unanimous stance concerning the nature of the autonomous subject and its legal ramifications; effectively silencing alternatives. In Part Two, I shall skirt around the frayed edges of these dominant discourses, with the aim of showing in more detail how internal theoretical tensions, such as those evident in the expert testimony given at Wilken's trial, may open up spaces for other accounts of subject- formation. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(4) 2003: 289-305. (shrink)

While Kierkegaard and Levinas may well be thought of as religious or ethical thinkers, I should not like the reader to be misled by this into assuming that this article is primarily about religion or ethics. Rather, my main concern may more properly be described as metaphysical or epistemological, for I am interested in certain styles of thinking that underlie the religious/ethical themes dealt with here. Thus, this article aims to show that in relation to traditional metaphysical styles, and to (...) each other, the thinking of Kierkegaard and Levinas is parallel and divergent in complex ways. Both share a mistrust of modernist meta physics, which they aim to escape by pointing to the way in which conceptions of metaphysical totalities are breached by a destabilising infinity already internal to them. This anticipates later postmodern styles of thinking which challenge modern meta physics, its resentment against time, and its confidence in human power to represent all that is by means of closed systems of interpretation. To the ex tent that they offer philosophical alternatives that accommodate the temporal, both have had highly significant contributions to make to a postmodern style of thinking that has implications not limited to religion or ethics. A study of the philosophical strategies of these two thinkers, where they seem to succeed or fall short in relation to each other and to the traditional strategies of metaphysics, should go some way toward clarification of what I believe to be the most viable style of thinking for a postmodern world. As I see it, one is confronted with three options. The first, represented by Kierkegaard\'s \'infinite resignation,\' may be associated with a Derridean style of thinking. Kierkegaard him self abandons this in favour of a style of thinking for which faith and revelation stand as metaphors. Levinas, in contrast, offers an alternative whose leitmotif is ethical responsibility. I shall try to show in the end that the first of these, which best accommodates the 'undecidability' of a middle ground, is the most suitable for contemporary thinkers. (shrink)

With the help of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, this article addresses certain perplexities concerning personal identity that emerge from different kinds of interpersonal encounters. Lacan’s notion of the ‘fundamental fantasy’ incorporates the insight that phantasmic projections (of both self and other) form the basis of personal identity and interpersonal relations are a complex interplay between such projections. Nevertheless, in face of disconcerting pretence phenomena, the notion of a real self plays a profoundly important part in interpersonal relations. To call some phantasmic (...) projections ‘pretensions’ or ‘delusions’ is simultaneously to admit that some must, by contrast, embody or express a real self. Lacan’s paradoxical answer to the question of whether the fundamental fantasy embodies the real self is ‘yes and no’. To explain this, I unpack the notion of the fundamental fantasy insofar as it is construed as the basis upon which we construct a complex identity (a semblance) imperfectly shielded from the traumatic Real. I offer an indirect account of the Real, via a critique of Rowlands on absurdity. I then sketch the developmental formation of a complex semblance, guided at its core by the fundamental fantasy, which structures the comportment of the self with a three-fold other. While the fundamental fantasy forms the core of a person’s identity and might be named the basis of the real self, Lacan warns that one must traverse it to acknowledge the Real in oneself. I elaborate on this via Derrida’s conception of the parergon. My aim is to demonstrate the irreducible complexity of identity formation and to show that to be real is to accept the uncertainty associated with acknowledging the Real in me that exceeds both my pretensions and the phantasmic reality that structures my identity. (shrink)

Gadamer's project in Truth and Method is as much about truth in the human sciences as it is about human subjectivity, for, following Heidegger, he claims that truth is reducible to method (technical rationality) only if one is misled by old Enlightenment subject/object dualisms. Posing the question of the possibility and nature of truth in scientific thinking, where a strict division between subjective and objective has fallen away, Gadamer belongs, as one of its inaugural figures, to an alternative tradition of (...) philosophical complexity, which implicates environmental systems (culture, ideology, institutions), embedded in language, in the constitution of human subjectivity.With these theoretical shifts in mind, what caught my attention in a press report concerning the trial of (subsequently convicted) serial killer, Stewart Wilken (“Boetie Boer”), was the strangely anachronistic question that dominated the front page of a Port Elizabeth newspaper: “Boetie: Is he Sick or Evil?” This question, in my view, harks back to a questionable framework of Enlightenment autonomy, which depends upon the easy technical rationality of clear-cut dichotomies. In what follows I hope to show that in acknowledging the role of complex interrelations between cultural and other systems, a tradition of philosophical complexity justifiably claims a more adequate framework for understanding self- formation than that underpinning the discourses at work in Wilken's trial. I shall draw on Gadamer's hermeneutic model of an “embedded”subject, which is based on his speculative model of “play” out lined in Truth and Method, and supplement this with Lacan's psychoanalytic account of subject formation. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.21(4) 2002: 258-273. (shrink)

Nietzsche's analysis of the self-poisoning of ‘the will to power' and his insistence upon overcoming its ideological outcome (the dogmatist's fake ‘Truth') by recognizing the ‘un-truth' of a ‘logic of contamination,' demonstrates that he understands ‘truth' as a paradox. What may one accordingly expect in response to the question ‘Supposing truth is a woman – what then?', posed in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil (1966)? Supported by Derrida's Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, I argue that Nietzsche could have drawn two (...) radically different analogies between paradoxical ‘truth' and ‘woman.' However, due to the very kind of ideological conditioning (patriarchal), which his ‘free thinking' resists in principle, he explicitly draws only one, hazarding a self-betraying performative contradiction. The obvious move might be to retain the valuable critique of ideology made possible by his analysis of the ‘will to power,' while jettisoning the self-undermining rhetoric that constructs sexual difference according to values handed down by patriarchy. However, retaining and working through the terms of sexual difference, and highlighting Nietzsche's blindness concerning women, has the advantage of calling attention to its significance. The fact that one may say in retrospect that even Nietzsche (of all thinkers!) remained blindly subject to ideological conditioning, points to its unconscious nature and raises the question of what ‘overcoming' in relation to the will to power entails for the free thinkers he heralded. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 26 (1) 2007: pp. 44-55. (shrink)

This article addresses a strange investment within ‘continental' philosophy, in asserting the impotence of a Derridean approach when it comes to addressing practical (juridical, political, ethical, economic) issues. Such assertions of impotence regularly stand as the foil for whatever is proposed as a more complex, and therefore powerful, means to make sense of concrete phenomena. Invariably, however, the criticism of a Derridean approach is based on reductive misconceptions of its complex logic, and the proposed correctives repeat the very pattern of (...) thinking that Derrida has consistently adopted throughout his writing. A case in point is Zizek's criticism of what he calls ‘Derrida's operation.' While Zizek's critique is more nuanced and contemporary than the hackneyed charge of ‘textualism,' his reductive conception of the logical structure of Derridean thinking remains open to challenge. Further, his Lacanian corrective, whose logic is represented by the figure of a ‘Borromean knot,' precisely matches the ‘plural logic of the aporia' that underpins a Derridean approach to concrete phenomena. Accordingly, what follows is an attempt to show how Lacanian and Derridean discourses can be brought into alliance as a consequence of their isomorphic logical structure. This attempt is motivated by the conviction that one can do well without the pseudo-antagonism generated by the unjust criticism directed at one another by like-minded thinkers, which, moreover, provides such thinkers with a far too facile excuse for dismissing one another, even before opening texts. I also have a hidden agenda of sorts, which is to outline and, indeed, promote the ‘complexity-thinking' characteristic of both Derridean and Lacanian discourses, as the most viable and appropriate approach to practical issues. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 27 (1) 2008 pp. 10-26. (shrink)

The potential for the occurrence of multiple-role relationships is increased when professors also consult with athletic teams on their campuses. Such multiple-role relationships have potential ethical implications that are unclear and largely unexplored, and consultants may find multiple-role relationships both difficult to deal with and unavoidable. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the nature of teacher-practitioner multiple-role relationships. Participants (N=35) were recruited from Association for the Advancement of Applied Sport Psychology (AAASP) certified consultants (CCs) who were also (...) affiliated with a university (N=68). All participants completed a 28-item survey exploring the incidence and relevant issues pertaining to multiple-role relationships. Chi-square analyses revealed that licensed mental health practitioners (i.e., psychologists and counselors) were more likely than nonlicensed AAASP CCs to believe that multiple-role relationships were never appropriate in sport psychology, ?²(1,N= 30) = 12.80, p <.001, and to have never taken part in a multiple-role relationship, ?²(1, N= 33) = 12.44, p<.001. Independent samples t tests revealed that mental health practitioners also reported that they would have higher levels of concern for both the practitioner, r(30) = -2.77, p = .009, and the client, f(30) = -2.50, p = .018, in such a relationship. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

: Samia Hurst and Marion Danis provide a thoughtful framework for how to judge the morality of bedside rationing decisions. In this commentary, I applaud Hurst and Danis for advancing the level of debate about bedside rationing. But when I attempt to apply the framework to my own clinical practice, I conclude that the framework comes up short.

Lawyers and the legal system have been much criticized in recent years. Despite popular perceptions, the legal system contains numerous mechanisms and rules designed to ensure fair results. This paper shows how the legal system tries to implement, in commercial transactions, the ethical principles of truthfulness and fairness. The Anglo-American development of Equity Courts is reviewed briefly. Several examples of the Law's enforcement of ethical principles are presented, in four different legal areas: Contracts, Securities, Goods, and Real Estate. The intent (...) here is to present an overview of the problem, with area-specific illustrations, rather than a comprehenisve examination of the cases in just one area. (shrink)

The paper interprets Nietzsche’s description of authentic human person.Based on the works of Nietzsche, commentaries and philosophical interpretationsof various authors, authentic human person evolves into a superman by usingthe principles of discipline and mastery of oneself. His authenticity, however,requires persistence, courage and strength to endure many forms of sufferingsand to overcome alienation brought about by his environment. Otherwise,man would become slave of his desires or alien to his own powers, talents andcapacities. Thus, Nietzsche’s thought of superman is an invitation to (...) overcomeoneself, the self that is influenced by the non-self or factors outside one self. Itis only possible by using the will to power. The will to power of man overcomesthe influences of the world’s modernization and industrialization that alienateshim to his true self, and this true self is best expressed by his will to power. Onthis note, the author suggests that the readers must use their potentials to face up to challenges of this new era. Keywords: Philosophy, language and literature, emergence, authentic human person,philosophy of the superman, authenticity, alienation, morality, descriptivedesign, Philippines. (shrink)

Wilderness valued as mere resource for human?interest satisfaction is challenged in favor of wilderness as a productive source, in which humans have roots, but which also yields wild neighbors and aliens with intrinsic value. Wild value is storied achievement in an evolutionary ecosystem, with instrumental and intrinsic, organismic and systemic values intermeshed. Survival value is reconsidered in this light. Changing cultural appreciations of values in wilderness can transform and relativize our judgments about appropriate conduct there. A final valued element in (...) wildness is its idiographic historical particularity, and most surprising is the emergence of a novel morality when humans learn to let values go wild. (shrink)

Chaïm Perelman resuscitated the rhetorical tradition by developing an elegant and detailed theory of argumentation. Rejecting the single-minded Cartesian focus on rational truth, Perelman recovered the ancient wisdom that we can argue reasonably about matters that admit only of probability. From this one would conclude that Perelman's argumentation theory is inalterably opposed to natural law, and therefore that I would have done better to have written an article titled "Perelman's Theory of Argumentation as a Rejection of Natural Law."However, my thesis (...) is precisely that Perelman's theory of argumentation connects to the natural law tradition in interesting and productive ways. Perelman referred to natural law in. (shrink)

This study examines the use of a video news release in a specific story. Press coverage and editorial criticism in the case showed that journalists do not articulate sufficiently how the news owners' sway, through institutional controls, can lead to a hegemony of expedient action in the newsroom. Critical self-reflection by news workers will better enable journalists to ethically deliberate news choices that balance their responsibilities to owners, peers, and the public.