The emphasis on duly in Kant's ethics is widely held to constitute a defect. Marcia W. Baron develops and assesses the criticism, which she sees as comprising two objections: that duty plays too large a role, leaving no room for the supererogatory, and that Kant places too much value on acting from duty. Clearly written and cogently argued, Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology takes on the most philosophically intriguing objections to Kant's ethics and subjects them to a rigorous yet (...) sympathetic assessment. (shrink)

"In the 25 essays that comprise this grimly fascinating volume, Reed shines a light into some very dark corners. From its opening tale of South African baboons with a taste for human babies to a thoroughly icky account of a middle-aged woman's seduction of young boys, these are literary snapshots of the world at its worst."--Amazon.com.

The book presents a new conceptual framework and a set of research principles with which to study and interpret technology from a phenomenological perspective.

Registered nurses (RNs) employed in an urban medical center in the USA identified moral distress as a practice concern. This study describes RNs' moral distress and the frequency of morally distressing events. Data were collected using the Moral Distress Scale and an open-ended questionnaire. The instruments were distributed to direct-care-providing RNs; 100 responses were returned. Morally distressing events included: working with staffing levels perceived as `unsafe', following families' wishes for patient care even though the nurse disagreed with the plan, and (...) continuing life support for patients owing to family wishes despite patients' poor prognoses. One high frequency distressing event was carrying out orders for unnecessary tests and treatments. Qualitative data analysis revealed that the nurses sought support and information from nurse managers, chaplaincy services and colleagues. The RNs requested further information on biomedical ethics, suggested ethics rounds, and requested a non-punitive environment surrounding the initiation of ethics committee consultations. (shrink)

According to recent commentators like Paul Guyer, Kant agrees with Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that physico-theology can never provide knowledge of God and that the concept of God, nevertheless, provides a useful heuristic principle for scientific enquiry. This paper argues that Kant, far from agreeing with Hume, criticizes Hume's Dialogues for failing to prove that physico-theology can never yield knowledge of God and that Kant correctly views Hume's Dialogues as a threat to, rather than an anticipation of, his own (...) view that the concept of God provides a useful heuristic principle for science. The paper concludes that Kant's critique of physico-theology reflects Kant's deep dissatisfaction with Hume's manner of argumentation and suggests that Kant's attempt to provide a more successful critique of physico-theology merits continued philosophical attention. (shrink)

This article experiments with multimedia storytelling to re-vision difference outside biomedical and humanistic frames by generating new understandings of living dis/artfully with illness. We present and analyze seven short videos created by women and trans people living with illness as part of an arts-based research project that aimed to speak back to hegemonic concepts of disability that create barriers to healthcare.1 We call for a welcoming in of disability studies’ disruptive and re-imaginative orientations to bodily difference to unsettle medicine’s humanistic (...) accounts. In turn, we advance medical post-humanistic approaches that call on disability studies to re-embody its theories and approaches. (shrink)

Cavell elaborates the view, traceable from Wittgenstein to Davidson, that there is no thought, and thus no meaning, without language, and shows how this concurs ...

Gideon Rosen (2014) has drawn our attention to cases of duress of a particularly interesting sort: the person's ‘mind is not flooded with pain or fear’, she knows exactly what she is doing, and she makes a clear-headed choice to act in, as Rosen says, ‘awful ways’. The explanation of why we excuse such actions cannot be that the action was not voluntary. In addition, although some duress cases could also be viewed as necessity cases and thus as justified, Rosen (...) wisely sets aside that complicating factor by zeroing in on those cases where the action clearly is not justified. So why do we excuse in these cases, where the action is not justified and the agent acted voluntarily?Rosen thinks the key lies in the ‘ill will’ condition, ‘the idea that an act is blameworthy only if it manifests insufficient concern or regard for those affected’. He says this is relatively uncontroversial; much of my paper is taken up with calling the ‘ill will’ condition into question. I also take issue with Rosen on just how justifications and excuses differ. I argue in favour of understanding justifications (in a context where we are asking how justifications and excuses differ) as not requiring truth, but only reasonable belief. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate Socrates as a friend in Plato's 'Phaedo'. I begin by setting out his friends' request for reassurance of how they will fare after Socrates dies. I argue that by structuring the discussion as he does, Socrates provides one final opportunity for his friends to prepare themselves for life without him, thus offering them the best kind of reassurance they could ask for.

1024x768 Na sociedade da informação as Tecnologias da Informação e do Conhecimento podem contribuir para o aumento da distância social entre quem detém as informações e o domínio das tecnologias e, aqueles que estão a margem da sociedade tecnológica que são considerados os excluídos digitais, revelando a exclusão sociodigital. Por conseguinte, a eliminação da exclusão social encontra-se conectada a inclusão digital. Portanto, a importância dos programas de inclusão sociodigital, destacando-se o Programa Nacional de Tecnologias na Educação, enquanto política pública para (...) a inclusão sociodigital, que foi implantado em 1997 pelo governo federal em âmbito nacional, por meio da parceira União/Estado/Municípios. Neste contexto, o objetivo desta pesquisa foi investigar a implantação do Proinfo em Minas Gerais, especificamente na região metropolitana de Belo Horizonte onde estão localizados seis Núcleos de Tecnologias Educacionais, os quais têm a função de promover as capacitações dos agentes educacionais. Para tal, foi escolhida como metodologia a pesquisa descritiva tendo como estratégias adotadas as pesquisas bibliográfica e documental. Concluiu-se que mesmo enfrentando vários problemas, a capacitação dos agentes educacionais vem sendo realizada em todos os Núcleos Tecnológicos Educacionais, através de cursos sugeridos pelo Proinfo, que disponibiliza os materiais didáticos através da Secretaria de Educação Básica. São ofertadas, também, oficinas de curta duração sobre o uso de softwares na educação. Assim, a implantação do Proinfo em Minas Gerais constitui-se de um elemento gerador de mudanças educacionais e sociais, promotor da inclusão sociodigital, podendo ser considerada uma política pública inovadora, que tem nos NTEs e NTMs a sua garantia de desenvolvimento e execução. Palavras-chave: Inclusão sociodigital. Proinfo. Capacitação de agentes educacionais. Normal 0 21 false false false PT-BR X-NONE X-NONE. (shrink)

This paper brings together the concepts of social norms and innovation diffusion to assess two community development projects with gender targets. The projects failed to meet their objectives although they embodied leading global ?good practices? for community-based participatory approaches. In order to succeed, the projects needed to reach and empower poor women; however, they were located in contexts with significant gender inequalities and weak governance in one case, and with political conflict in the other. In such contexts, participatory projects with (...) gender objectives likely require more strategic and longer term interventions than current community development models are allowing. (shrink)

Redrawing the Lines,the first book to focus on that interaction, brings together ten essays by key figures who have worked to connect literary theory and philosophy and to reassess the relationship between analytic and Continental ...

Friends as well as foes of Kant have long been uneasy over his emphasis on duty, but lately the view that there is something morally repugnant about acting from duty seems to be gaining in popularity. More and more philosophers indicate their readiness to jettison duty and the moral 'ought' and to conceive of the perfectly moral person as someone who has all the right desires and acts accordingly without any notion that (s)he ought to act in this way. Elsewhere' (...) I have argued that such a picture of the perfectly moral person is flawed. In this paper I examine the claim that acting from duty is morally repugnant. There is some truth to this charge, but, I argue, the repugnance attaches not to acting from duty as such, but only to certain ways of acting from duty. In isolating the objectionable elements of acting from duty, I hope not only to vindicate the skeletal concept but also to offer illumination on the question of just how we should understand morally good conduct. (shrink)

During the past decade ethical theory has been in a lively state of development, and three basic approaches to ethics - Kantian ethics, consequentialism, and virtue ethics - have assumed positions of particular prominence.

I argue that Plato distinguishes between personal immortality and immortality of the soul. I begin by criticizing the consensus view that Plato identifies the person and the soul. I then turn to the issue of immortality. By considering passages from 'Symposium' and 'Timaeus', I make the case that Plato thinks that while the soul is immortal by nature, if a person is going to be immortal, they must become so. Finally, I argue that Plato has a psychological continuity approach to (...) personal identity. Thus, for Plato, a person becomes immortal by avoiding reincarnation and securing for themselves psychological continuity forever. (shrink)

American doctors in the 1990s are being asked to serve as "double agents," weighing competing allegiances to patients' medical needs against the monetary costs to society. This situation is a reaction to rapid cost increases for medical services, themselves the result of the haphazard development since the 1920s of an inherently inflationary, open-ended system for funding and delivering health care. The answer to an inefficient system, however, is not to stint on care, but rather to restructure the system to remove (...) the inflationary pressures. As long as we are spending enormous resources on an inherently inefficient and inflationary system we cannot justify asking doctors to withhold beneficial care to save money for third-party payers. Doing so serves a largely political agenda and endangers the patient-centered ethic that is central to medicine. (shrink)

This valuable and interesting book attempts to discern the essential Freudian theses about the mind and to give them a cogent philosophical defense. Like many philosophers Gardner sees psychoanalytic explanation as continuous with folk psychology, though he holds that the latter needs considerable expansion in order to accommodate irrationality of the “Freudian” sorts.

Today there are over 1,500 public-use airports in the United States. Each of these airports provides a service to the surrounding community, whether in the form of a general aviation or commercial air service facility. An airport is dependent on many facets of the local government infrastructure for support services. Also, the airports have ties to neighboring or resident military installations. A military installation has similar missions and objectives to an airport, a situation that enables a working relationship that is (...) complementary to each party. For example, airports and military installations alike must provide such services as emergency response, fire protection, airspace control, environmental protection, and a safe infrastructure for aircraft operations. While many aspects of the relationships are intangible and subjective, others are easily measured. (shrink)

In considering the similarities between "momoirs"--popular memoirs written by mothers about motherhood experiences--and evocative autoethnographic mother-writing, I argue that differentiating these two forms of intimate observation and personal narrative requires a rethinking of autoethnographic practice. Specifically, I draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze to advocate for a radical specificity in autoethnographic writing. Thinking the autoethnographic narrative in terms of specificities and differences encourages us to think creatively about personal experiences and cultural relations beyond what is shared and communicable.

This volume frames the question of responsibility as a problem of agency in relation to the systems and structures of globalization. According to Ricoeur responsibility is a “shattered concept” when considered too narrowly as a problem of act, agency and individual freedom. To examine this Esther Reed develops a short genealogy of modern liberal and post-liberal concepts of responsibility in order to understand better the relationship dominant modern framings of the meanings of responsibility. Reed engages with writings by (...) major modern (Schleiermacher, Hegel, Marx, Weber) and post-liberal (Buber, Levinas, Derrida, Badiou, Butler, Young, Critchley) theorists to illustrate the shift from an ethnic responsibility built on notions of accountability and attributions to an ethic responsibility that starts variously from the 'other'. Reed sees Dietrich Bonhoeffer as the most promising partner of this theological dialogue, as his learning of responsibility from the risen Christ present now in the (global) church is a welcome provocation to new thinking about the meaning of responsibility learned from land, distant neighbour, (global) church and the bible. Bonhoeffer's reflections on the centre, boundaries and limits of responsibility remain helpful to Christian people struggling with an increasingly exhausted concept of accountability. (shrink)

This chapter describes Card's characterization as an idealization that captures why hate crime legislation seems (at least prima facie) to be a very good idea. The rationale for enhanced penalties is far more compelling if hate crimes are characterized as Card characterizes them. She focuses on hate crimes that are motivated by hatred. Hate crimes today should be viewed as part of an ongoing campaign of intimidation. Card is of course well aware of the position that the legal category of (...) hate crimes and enhanced penalties for hate crimes are called for to counter the message sent by hate crimes; in fact she notes that she was initially "attracted to the idea of penalty enhancement legislation for hate crimes as a way to send a strong social message against racism, sexism, anti‐Semitism, and homophobia". (shrink)

Balanço da produção científica em Educação Física em Estados do Nordeste, visando a identificar tendências, perspectivas e desafios que se apresentam à consolidação dessa produção. O estudo integra a pesquisa matricial do grupo LEPEL/UFBA.

O nexo entre biopolítica e soberania é de importância central em Michel Foucault e Giorgio Agamben, que possuem um entendimento distinto, porém complementar de tais conceitos. A relação entre essas ideias à luz dos 50 anos de publicação de A sociedade punitiva é abordada em alguns de seus pontos de contato, distanciamento e complementaridade. As interações entre poder soberano e vida humana apontam para um olhar crítico necessário sobre como os governos capturaram a vida como recurso administrável mas, também, passível (...) de inclusão e exclusão através do poder soberano, na figura do homo sacer. Palavras-Chave: Foucault. Agamben. Biopolítica. Soberania. Sociedade Punitiva. (shrink)

The development of nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant scientific events of the twentieth century. This revised and updated 3rd edition explores the challenges that faced the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project. It gives a clear introduction to fission weapons at the level of an upper-year undergraduate physics student by examining the details of nuclear reactions, their energy release, analytic and numerical models of the fission process, how critical masses can be estimated, (...) how fissile materials are produced, and what factors complicate bomb design. An extensive list of references and a number of exercises for self-study are included. Links are given to several freely-available spreadsheets which users can use to run many of the calculations for themselves. (shrink)