The ethical principle of respect for autonomy has come into its own In American medicine since World War II as equal in importance to the traditional medicomoral principles of nonmaleficence and beneficence. Respect for autonomy provides the ethical underpinning for the patient's right to exercise an informed choice – whether to consent to or to refuse recommended medical treatment. However, an informed choice demands a certain level of competence. Typical criteria for patient competence to accept or to refuse medical treatments (...) Include ability to make a choice and ability to comprehend the nature of the treatment, as well as the risks and benefits of accepting or refusing the treatment. (shrink)

In its relationship with that which might be considered to exist beyond the perceived limits of philosophical discourse—for the sake of brevity let us call it the Absolute—Early German Romanticism tends to be presented either as mystically positivistic and therefore wholly unphilosophical, or as philosophically informed and committed to a sort of critical antifoundationalism that offers, at best, a negative non-relation to the Absolute. Naturally enough, these two opposing positions give rise to opposing reconstructions of Romantic aesthetics. Whilst broadly in (...) agreement with the latter interpretation, this article argues, in relation to Friedrich Schlegel, that in the rush to establish the philosophical credentials of Frühromantik, some of its complexity has been jettisoned and along with it a more accurate understanding of the guiding spirit of Romantic aesthetics. Drawing on Fichte and Walter Benjamin, it will be argued that Schlegel's notion of the Wechselerweis is intended to bridge the ideal and the real in a positive experience of negation and that his much-vaunted aesthetics amounts to an attempt to develop a philosophico-literary form that would be able to express or, rather, perform precisely this. (shrink)

In the context of any attempt to rethink the modalities, possibilities, conditions and limitations of critical thought, the otherwise sober and restrained notion of ‘critical distance’, with all it...

Why should philosophy, or even thinking, get in the way of seeing? In attempting to address this question, this paper identifies post-Romanticism as a phenomenologically inflected response to the failure of both pre-Romantic Reflexionsphilosophie and Hegelian speculative overcoming, one that seeks to express our relation to the world in a way that does not rely on a reflection model of consciousness and gives no support to the notion of a cognitively inaccessible absolute. It will be suggested that the poetry of (...) Fernando Pessoa offers lessons in such a post-Romanticism, showing how a phenomenological attentiveness to the world-disclosive power of poetry and to the everyday mereness of things constitutes a more coherent way of relating to the world. With reference to Heidegger and Jean-Luc Nancy, it will be argued that Pessoa’s poetry shows us that it is by reining in the reflection model of consciousness that we achieve a greater sense of the world and our position in it. (shrink)

This article focuses on two problems associated with tragedy. One ancient: what is it that draws us to the dramatic presentation of events of terrible suffering and loss? And one modern: namely, that while tragedies are still performed and appreciated, little new tragedy is being written. It will be argued in relation to the second problem that the vitality of tragedy as a dramatic form requires a less rigid approach to what might be considered tragic. And in relation to the (...) first problem it will be argued that this more expansive conception of tragedy will allow an understanding of the ‘pay-off’ of tragedy in a way that draws both on the tradition that focuses on tragedy as cathartic therapeutic, and on the tradition that sees it as a thought laboratory that allows ethical dilemmas to be posed and explored from different perspectives. This argument constitutes a two-fold dialectical synthesis and the effect of this is to facilitate an understanding of tragedy as establishing a ‘critical distance’ that sets the scene for the possibility of thinking. (shrink)

(2012). Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790–1805. By Stephanie M. Hilger. The European Legacy: Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 948-950. doi: 10.1080/10848770.2012.718258.