I will argue that there are difficulties with the application of the four principles approach to incompetent children. The most important principle – respect for autonomy – is not directly applicable to incompetent children and the most appropriate modification of the principle for them is not clear. The principle of beneficence – that one should act in the child’s interests – is complicated by difficulties in assessing what a child’s interests are and to which standard of interests those choosing for (...) children should be held. A further problem with the four principles approach is that parental authority does not follow clearly from the four principles. (shrink)

Over recent decades, pain has received increasing attention as – with ever greater sophistication and rigour – theorists have tried to answer the deep and difficult questions it poses. What is pain’s nature? What is its point? In what sense is it bad? The papers collected in this volume are a contribution to that effort ...

Common errors on the mind.--Errors of suppressed correlatives.--The civil service examinations.--The classical controversy.--Metaphysics and debating societies.--The university ideal, past and present.--The art of study.--Religious tests and subscriptions.--Procedure of deliberative bodies.

Edward Said's book Orientalism stands in a long lineage of critique of European scholarship responsible for shaping European understandings of foreign cultures. His book contributed significantly to the debate about the epistemological presuppositions informing European scholars of other cultures. However, while Said exposed in considerable detail the ways in which the Orient was distorted by the theories of the European academy, he left unexamined the possibility of genuine cross-cultural understanding. This article considers the significance of hermeneutics for cross-cultural rather than (...) historical understanding. It explores the implicit claim Gadamer makes for the universal validity of hermeneutics not only for understanding in history, but for a genuine intellectual rapprochement across geographical and cultural lines as well. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.21(4) 2002: 330-344. (shrink)

In this paper I examine two controversialissues that occurred in two different centuriesbut that are inextricably linked with eachother – the 1835 murder committed by a Frenchpeasant, Pierre Riviere and documented byMichel Foucault and the 1990's debate regardingthe controversial methods of FacilitatedCommunication used with students labeledautistic in the United States. In this paper Iargue that both controversies foreground thecrisis of the humanist subject. In other words,I argue that both controversies are generatedby a seemingly simple question: Are personsidentified as mentally disabledcapable/incapable (...) of representing themselves?In response to this question, I will use amaterialist analysis to explore theimplications that the poststructuralistdepiction of the humanist subject as a fictionholds for both the Riviere case and theFacilitated Communication debate. (shrink)

A collection, edited by David Bain, Michael Brady, and Jennifer Corns, originating in our Value of Suffering Project. Table of Contents: Michael Wheeler - ‘How should affective phenomena be studied?’; Julien Deonna & Fabrice Teroni – ‘Pleasures, unpleasures, and emotions’; Hilla Jacobson – ‘The attitudinal representational theory of painfulness fleshed out’; Tim Schroeder – ‘What we represent when we represent the badness of getting hurt’; Hagit Benbaji – ‘A defence of the inner view of pain’; Olivier Massin – ‘Suffering pain’; (...) Frederique de Vignemont – ‘The value of threat’; Colin Leach – ‘Bad feelings can be good and good feelings can be bad’; Tasia Scrutton – ‘Mental suffering and the experience of beauty’; Brock Bastian – ‘From suffering to satisfaction: why we need pain to feel pleasure’; Marilyn McCord Adams – ‘Pain and moral agency’; Jennifer Corns – ‘Hedonic rationality’; Jonathan Cohen & Matthew Fulkerson – ‘Suffering and rationality’; Tom McClelland – ‘Suffering invites understanding’; Michael Brady – ‘Suffering as a virtue’; Glen Pettigrove TBA. Further authors TBA. (shrink)

Accounts of the nature of unpleasant pain have proliferated over the past decade, but there has been little systematic investigation of which of them can accommodate its badness. This paper is such a study. In its sights are two targets: those who deny the non-instrumental disvalue of pain's unpleasantness; and those who allow it but deny that it can be accommodated by the view—advanced by me and others—that unpleasant pains are interoceptive experiences with evaluative content. Against the former, I argue (...) that pain's unpleasantness does indeed have noninstrumental disvalue; against the latter I argue both that my critics’ own desire-theoretic accounts of pain's unpleasantness cannot accommodate such disvalue, and that my evaluativist view can—either by appealing to “anti-unpleasantness” desires or by exploiting pain's perceptuality. (shrink)

These papers were presented at a panel, organized by us and chaired by Liz Wilson, on ‘Women’s Leadership and Monastic Organizations in Therav?da Buddhist Traditions’, at the 2008 American Academy of Religion meeting, Chicago. Here, we bring together articles that examine the roots of the teachings on nuns in P?li literature with others which investigate issues relating to contemporary Therav?da nuns, as well as an analysis of relevant debates in ancient China. The objective of these papers is to contribute to (...) discussion of the multiple ways in which professionally celibate women are represented, organized and empowered in the textual and contemporary traditions of P?li and Therav?da Buddhism, to study how representations of female monasticism are related to organizational structures of leadership and agency, and explore how debates over the need for ‘dual ordination’ have occurred in traditions other than the Therav?da. (shrink)

Meditation involves psychophysical training which can result in a range of benefits including creating a calm mind and increasing self-awareness, relaxation, and tranquility. Increasing evidence, mostly based on short-term focused interventions, suggests that meditation-based activities may also have favorable effects on physical wellbeing including cellular aging. Hence, the aim of this study was to investigate if continued practice of meditation benefited quality of life, state of mindfulness, and plasma telomerase level in healthy adults. 30 long-term and skilled meditators were recruited (...) from meditation centers in different parts of the island following a two-tier screening process of 70 eligible participants and 30 age- and gender-matched healthy non-meditators were recruited from the community. Mindfulness level and the quality of life were measured using the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire and Quality of Life Questionnaire, respectively, while the levels of plasma telomerase enzyme were measured using Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay. Skilled meditators had a better mindfulness level and quality of life than those in the comparison group. Similarly, higher plasma telomerase levels were observed in skilled meditators compared to non-meditators. Trait mindfulness level and plasma telomerase level showed a significant relationship with the duration of meditation practice. Regression analysis indicated that trait mindfulness level significantly predicts the plasma telomerase level. The findings of this comparative study add to the evidence on sustained benefits of meditation on wellbeing and healthy aging and supports incorporating meditation-based activities into lifestyle practices. (shrink)

VVe argue in this essay that the real violence in schools is a result of the structural violence of oppresive social conditions that force students, especially low-income African American and Latino males, tofeel vulnerable, angry, and resistant to the normative expectations of “police-like” school environments. Instead of making attempts to transform these oppressive conditions and explore alternatives outsideof these frameworks, schools utilize the ideological state apparatuses (ISA’s) to justify the construction of certain students (e.g., African American and Latino males) as (...) “violent/deviant/disabled” therebymaking it an individual rather than a social problem. On the other hand, we contend, a political economic analysis of educational contexts makes critical linkages between race, class, and disabilityand in doing so offers an alternative way of re-theorizing identity. Additionally this argument will aIso demonstrate how a political economic analysis exposes and re-orients one towards a collective (global) struggle for social transfornlation in critical multicultural contexts. (shrink)

The unpleasantness of pain motivates action. Hence many philosophers have doubted that it can be accounted for purely in terms of pain’s possession of indicative representational content. Instead, they have explained it in terms of subjects’ inclinations to stop their pains, or in terms of pain’s imperative content. I claim that such “noncognitivist” accounts fail to accommodate unpleasant pain’s reason-giving force. What is needed, I argue, is a view on which pains are unpleasant, motivate, and provide reasons in virtue of (...) possessing content that is indeed indicative, but also, crucially, evaluative. (shrink)

Pain asymbolia is a rare condition caused by brain damage, usually in adulthood. Asymbolics feel pain but appear indifferent to it, and indifferent also to visual and verbal threats. How should we make sense of this? Nikola Grahek thinks asymbolics’ pains are abnormal, lacking a component that make normal pains unpleasant and motivating. Colin Klein thinks that what is abnormal is not asymbolics’ pains, but asymbolics: they have a psychological deficit making them unresponsive to unpleasant pain. I argue that an (...) illuminating account requires elements of both views. Asymbolic pains are indeed abnormal, but they are abnormal because asymbolics are. I agree with Klein that asymbolics are incapable of caring about their bodily integrity; but I argue against him that, if this is to explain not only their indifference to visual and verbal threat, but also their indifference to pain, we must do the following: (i) take asymbolics’ lack of bodily care not as an alternative to, but as an explanation of their pains’ missing a component, and (ii) claim that the missing component consists in evaluative content. Asymbolia, I conclude, reveals not only that unpleasant pain is composite, but that its ‘hedomotive component’ is evaluative. (shrink)

Current research in business ethics gives serious cause for concern because it may be designed more to advance academic careers than to encourage ethical business. The author is completing his doctoral thesis in business ethics at the Management School, Imperial College, London.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1868 Edition.

Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a pair of objections—due to (...) John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains. (shrink)

Pain may appear to undermine the radically intentionalist view that the phenomenal character of any experience is entirely constituted by its representational content. That appearance is illusory. After categorizing versions of pain intentionalism along two dimensions, I argue that an 'objectivist' and 'non-mentalist' version is the most promising, if it can withstand two objections concerning what we say when in pain, and the distinctiveness of pain. I rebut these objections, in a way available to both opponents of and adherents to (...) the view that experiential content is entirely conceptual. (shrink)

Radical Ontic Structural Realism (ROSR) claims that structure exists independently of objects that may instantiate it. Critics of ROSR contend that this claim is conceptually incoherent, insofar as, (i) it entails there can be relations without relata, and (ii) there is a conceptual dependence between relations and relata. In this essay I suggest that (ii) is motivated by a set-theoretic formulation of structure, and that adopting a category-theoretic formulation may provide ROSR with more support. In particular, I consider how a (...) category-theoretic formulation of structure can be developed that denies (ii), and can be made to do work in the context of formulating theories in physics. Keywords: structural realism, category theory, general relativity.. (shrink)

' But, although such a being (a purely intellectual being) might perhaps be conceived to exist, and although, in studying our internal frame, ...

Compare your pain when immersing your hand in freezing water and your pleasure when you taste your favourite wine. The relationship seems obvious. Your pain experience is unpleasant, aversive, negative, and bad. Your experience of the wine is pleasant, attractive, positive, and good. Pain and pleasure are straightforwardly opposites. Or that, at any rate, can seem beyond doubt, and to leave little more to be said. But, in fact, it is not beyond doubt. And, true or false, it leaves a (...) good deal more to be said: about the nature of sensory affect; its relations to perception, motivation, and rationality; its value; and the mechanisms underlying it. Much is said about these matters in the contributions that follow. Here, in this introductory essay, we map the dialectical landscape and locate our contributors’ papers within it. (shrink)