Late Tokugawa society and the crisis of community -- Before the Kojikiden : the divine age narrative in Tokugawa Japan -- Motoori Norinaga : discovering Japan -- Ueda Akinari : history and community -- Fujitani Mitsue : the poetics off community -- Tachibana Moribe : cosmology and community -- National literature, intellectual history, and the new Kokugaku -- Conclusion : imagined Japan(s).

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

For half a century, Ernest Fortin's scholarship has charmed and educated theologians and philosophers with its intellectual search for the best way to live. Written by friends, colleagues, and students of Fortin, this book pays tribute to a remarkable thinker in a series of essays that bear eloquent testimony to Fortin's influence and his legacy. A formidable commentator on Catholic philosophical and political thought, Ernest Fortin inspired others with his restless inquiries beyond the boundaries of conventional scholarship. With essays on (...) subjects ranging across philosophy, political science, literature, and theology Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach reflects the astonishing depth and breadth of Fortin's contribution to contemporary thought. (shrink)

For half a century, Ernest Fortin's scholarship has charmed and educated theologians and philosophers with its intellectual search for the best way to live. Written by friends, colleagues, and students of Fortin, this book pays tribute to a remarkable thinker in a series of essays that bear eloquent testimony to Fortin's influence and his legacy. A formidable commentator on Catholic philosophical and political thought, Ernest Fortin inspired others with his restless inquiries beyond the boundaries of conventional scholarship. With essays on (...) subjects ranging across philosophy, political science, literature, and theology Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach reflects the astonishing depth and breadth of Fortin's contribution to contemporary thought. (shrink)

This article looks at the context of research in treating burns at the dawn of the atomic age. Funded by the Army and other defense agencies, burn research increased as concerns over an atomic attack on an American city intensified.

On September 23, 1949, President Harry Truman announced that the Soviet Union had successfully detonated an atomic bomb. The news that the Soviet Union had done this came as little surprise to a number of American scientists and to some members of the intelligence community who had predicted that the Soviets would quickly acquire this advanced weapons technology. But for many Americans this news was disturbing. Truman’s announcement was taken up by, among others, a young Baptist evangelist named Billy Graham. (...) Opening a tent revival in Los Angeles just two days after the President’s report, Graham preached how the news of the Soviet bomb test had “startled the world” and launched an “arms race unprecedented in the history of the world.” President Truman, he informed his listeners, said that we “must be prepared for any eventuality at any hour….” Perhaps even more ominously he asked the crowd, “Do you know the area that is marked out for the enemy’s first atomic bomb? New York! Secondly, Chicago; and thirdly, the city of Los Angeles!” It was not only evangelical preachers who foresaw catastrophic implications from a growing arsenal of atomic weapons. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 193-220 [Access article in PDF] Unveiling Esther as a Pragmatic Radical Rhetoric Susan Zaeske Ahasuerus, king of Persia, hosted in the courtyard of his pavilion a grand feast bountiful in royal wine. Likewise, Queen Vashti gave a feast for the women in the king's palace. On the last day of the celebration, an inebriated Ahasuerus commanded Vashti to appear wearing her crown (only (...) her crown, according to some interpretations 1 ) to show the people her beauty. She refused. Burning with anger, Ahasuerus consulted his advisors with regard to how he should respond to the affront. They concluded that not just the king, but all husbands of the kingdom had been wronged. They advised the king to depose Vashti and issue a law commanding all wives to obey their husbands. Following this advice, Ahasuerus uncrowned Vashti and selected as his new queen the beautiful Esther, who hid the fact that she was a Jew.Esther had been raised in the provinces by her cousin, Mordecai, 2 who came with her to the king's city. One day when Mordecai encountered the king's prime minister, Haman, he refused to obey the law commanding all to bow before the king's official because Haman was an infamous enemy of the Jews. Haman was so angered by Mordecai's insolence that he decided to seek revenge by destroying not just Mordecai, but all the Jews in the kingdom. After casting lots to determine the best time to approach the king, Haman obtained Ahasuerus's permission to annihilate the Jews.When he learned of the imminent execution, Mordecai put on sackcloth and ashes and made his way through the streets of Susa, wailing. Through a messenger, Mordecai bid Esther to intercede with the king on behalf of her people. She protested that doing so would be a dangerous act because approaching the king without summons was an offense punishable by death. Reminded by Mordecai that inaction on her part meant death for her people, and possibly herself, Esther resolved to beseech the king. She commanded Mordecai to gather all the Jews in the city to fast and pray for her for three days. Then, Esther pledged, "I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish!" (Esther 4:16). [End Page 193]On the third day, Esther stood waiting in the inner courtyard of the palace, in front of the king's quarters, where he was sitting on his throne. When Ahasuerus noticed the queen, she won his favor and he extended his gold scepter. The king then said to her, "What do you want Queen Esther? What is your petition? Even if it be half of my kingdom, you may have it"(Esther 5:3). Esther did not immediately state her request, but invited the king and Haman to a banquet she would prepare for them. At the banquet, the king again invited her request. Again, she deferred, instead asking both men to another banquet.During the night between banquets, the king suffered a bout of insomnia and ordered the book of records brought to him. Ahasuerus read that Mordecai the Jew had saved his life by informing the king's guards of an assassination plot. The next day, the king asked Haman how best to honor a man for his loyalty. Thinking that Ahasuerus wished to honor him, Haman suggested that such a man should be paraded through the streets on a fine horse. To Haman's horror, he was ordered to lead a celebratory parade for his worst enemy, Mordecai.Haman was so distraught that he was almost late for the second banquet in the queen's chambers. Once all were assembled, the king repeated his offer to receive Esther's petition. She answered, "If I have obtained your favor, Your Majesty and if it please the king, let my life be granted to me at my request. And my people's at my petition! For we've been sold, I and my people, for destruction! For slaughter and annihilation... (shrink)

In December 1998, two groups of scientists announced that they had successfully isolated and cultured human pluripotent stem cells. This news was greeted with both tremendous enthusiasm and concern. Because these cells can develop into most types of cells or tissues in the human body, they hold great promise for scientific research and medical advances. For example, stem cells can potentially be used to:Generate cells and tissues for transplantation and therapy for conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, stroke, (...) burns, heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis;Improve scientists’ understanding of the complex events that occur during normal human development, as well as the abnormal events which cause conditions such as birth defects and cancer; andSubstantially change the development and testing of drugs. New medications could be tested initially on stem cells, and only drugs which were safe and effective on the cells would be tested further on laboratory animals and humans. (shrink)

In 1946, Tom Brock spent part of his summer dumping mustard gas bombs off a barge into the Atlantic Ocean. Brock was a civilian employed by the United States Army Transport Service in Charleston, South Carolina. His job was to dispose of surplus bombs and drums filled with mustard gas. Sulphur mustard, commonly called “mustard gas,” can take several forms: a liquid, a solid, or a vapour. Mustard gas, named for its mustard-like color and smell, is a vesicant that is (...) toxic to humans and causes blistering and burns, affecting the lungs, eyes, and skin. Brock recalled that he and the soldiers enjoyed watching the occasional bomb explode as it sunk into the water. “We thought it was fun,” explained Brock. “I was 18 or 19 years old. We weren’t scared. We didn’t fear any explosive. We thought we were immortal.” Later that summer he was required to guard a barge of bombs that were leaking mustard gas, which looked to him like hot molasses. Due to the known health risks, Brock was told to wear a protective suit and gas mask. However, it was a hot day so he loosened the straps around his legs. As a result, enormous blisters developed, swelling out like a balloon from his toes to his knees. His summer job was no longer fun as he experienced firsthand the health hazards of exposure to mustard gas. (shrink)

Ever want to be famous? They didn't. It just sorta happened. Playing for friends at a pizzeria one day - full-on, massive world tour the next. Insane to a power of ten. Then, right in the middle the madness, they crash and burn. The reality of life is - stuff happens... Now, their fans are asking - what is it going to take to get pop music's latest 'phenomenon' back together? Can it even be done? In the fast paced, high-pressure (...) world that is pop music, will their passion be enough to ensure that our five accidental superstars will find their way back to doing what they were so amazingly good at? This is a story of unimaginable gain, devastating loss, and the remarkable ability of five friends, to overcome it all... (shrink)

My strategy is to examine a recent trend in philosophical discussions of responsibility, a trend that tries, but I think ultimately fails, to give an acceptable analysis of the conditions of responsibility. It fails due to what at first appear to be deep and irresolvable metaphysical problems. It is here that I suggest that the condition of sanity comes to the rescue. What at first appears to be an impossible requirement for responsibility---the requirement that the responsible agent have created her- (...) or himself---turns out to be the vastly more mundane and non controversial requirement that the responsible agent must, in a fairly standard sense, be sane. (shrink)

The Rejected Body argues that feminist theorizing has been skewed toward non-disabled experience, and that the knowledge of people with disabilities must be integrated into feminist ethics, discussions of bodily life, and criticism of the cognitive and social authority of medicine. Among the topics it addresses are who should be identified as disabled; whether disability is biomedical, social or both; what causes disability and what could 'cure' it; and whether scientific efforts to eliminate disabling physical conditions are morally justified. Wendell (...) provides a remarkable look at how cultural attitudes towards the body contribute to the stigma of disability and to widespread unwillingness to accept and provide for the body's inevitable weakness. (shrink)

: Chronic illness is a major cause of disability, especially in women. Therefore, any adequate feminist understanding of disability must encompass chronic illnesses. I argue that there are important differences between healthy disabled and unhealthy disabled people that are likely to affect such issues as treatment of impairment in disability and feminist politics, accommodation of disability in activism and employment, identification of persons as disabled, disability pride, and prevention and "cure" of disabilities.

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

The legal environment -- Regulation of nursing practice -- Nurses in legal actions -- Standards of care -- Defenses to negligence or malpractice -- Prevention of malpractice -- Nurses as witnesses -- Professional liability insurance -- Accepting or refusing an assignment/patient abandonment -- Delegation to unlicensed assistive personnel -- Patients' rights and responsibilities -- Confidential communication -- Competency and guardianship -- Informed consent -- Refusal of treatment -- Pain control -- Patient teaching and health counseling -- Medication administration -- Clients (...) with AIDS and HIV testing -- Abusive situations -- Reproductive services -- Restraints -- Emergency psychiatric admissions -- Organ and tissue donation and transplantation -- Discharge against medical advice -- The medical record and documentation standards -- Electronic health information and communications -- Interdependent nursing functions: verbal orders and telenursing -- Event reporting and compliance -- Quality and safety in nursing practice -- Forensic issues -- Employer and employee rights -- Contracts -- Corporate liability -- Employment contracts and unionization -- Employment status liability -- Staffing issues and floating -- Americans with Disabilities Act -- Employees with AIDS/HIV infection and exposure to bloodborne pathogens -- Impaired nurses -- Sexual harassment in the workplace -- Violence in the workplace -- Intentional torts -- Environmental health and safety -- Ethical decision making -- Professional boundaries and patient relationships -- Moral courage and patient advocacy -- Social media and online professionalism -- Reporting illegal, unethical, or unsafe conduct -- Maternal versus fetal rights -- Futility of care -- Advance directives and end-of-life decisions -- Assisted suicide. (shrink)

When discussing the extinction of humanity, there does not seem to be any clear agreement about what ‘humanity’ really means. One aim of this paper is to show that it is a more slippery concept than it might at first seem. A second aim is to show the relationship between what constitutes or defines humanity and what gives it value. Often, whether and how we ought to prevent human extinction depends on what we take humanity to mean, which in turn (...) depends on what we value about humans. Finally, I will offer a definition of humanity that I argue offers a plausible account of when we might say humanity has gone extinct, and reflects what we value about humans, and relatedly, what many actually care about in terms of why we should be preserved. (shrink)

Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially. Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core (...) cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of childrens cognitive development. Carey shows how developmental cognitive science resolves aspects of long-standing philosophical debates about the existence, nature, content, and format of innate knowledge. She also shows that understanding the processes of conceptual development in children illuminates the historical process by which concepts are constructed, and transforms the way we think about philosophical problems about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are good reasons to limit the scope of luck egalitarianism to co‐existing people. First, I outline reasons to be sceptical about how “luck” works intergenerationally and therefore the very grounding of luck egalitarianism between non‐overlapping generations. Second, I argue that what Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen calls the “core luck egalitarian claim” allows significant intergenerational inequality which is a problem for those who object to such inequality. Third, luck egalitarianism cannot accommodate the intuition that it might be required (...) to leave future generations better off than we are, even if it would come at no cost to ourselves. Finally, I argue that following another, broader, version of luck egalitarianism would require us to level down future generations and possibly even ourselves, which is a problem for those persuaded by the levelling‐down objection. (shrink)

This paper argues that T.M. Scanlon’s contractualism can provide a solution to the non-identity problem. It first argues that there is no reason not to include future people in the realm of those to whom we owe justification, but that merely possible people are not included. It then goes on to argue that a person could reasonably reject a principle that left them with a barely worth living life even though that principle caused them to exist, and that current people (...) could not justify creating people with barely worth living lives on the grounds that it caused those people to exist. (shrink)

This paper explores what could be wrong with the fact of human extinction. I first present four reasons why we might consider human extinction to be wrong: it would prevent millions of people from being born; it would mean the loss of rational life and civilization; it would cause existing people to suffer pain or death; it would involve various psychological traumas. I argue that looking at the question from a contractualist perspective, only reasons and are admissible. I then consider (...) what implications this limitation on reasons has for the wrongfulness of various forms of human extinction. (shrink)

Locke bases his moral and political philosophy on his doctrine of the ‘law of nature’. Scholars have debated the content and grounding of this law and its relationship to Christian theology. The ambiguities of the Lockean natural law’s content are traceable to an unclear grammatical construction in a crucial passage of the Treatises of Government, which can be resolved by following out a related set of arguments in that work. The ambiguities of the Lockean natural law’s grounding can then be (...) resolved by the hypothesis, strongly supported by textual evidence, that Locke relies tacitly on the reasoning of a parallel passage in Hobbes. Lockean natural law rests on neither atheistic nor specifically Christian premises but on a hypothetical natural theology. Locke’s conclusions from that natural theology represent an attempt to follow out Hobbesian logic while also tightening it up on one important point on which Hobbes himself appears to vacillate. (shrink)

In this article I make two main critiques of Kaczmarek and Beard's article ‘Human Extinction and Our Obligations to the Past’. First, I argue that there is an ambiguity in what it means to realise the benefits of a sacrifice and that this ambiguity affects the persuasiveness of the authors’ arguments and responses to various objections to their view. Second, I argue that their core argument against human extinction depends on an unsupported assumption about the existence and importance of existential (...) benefits. (shrink)

I want to get both personal and philosophical in this piece. I want to reflect on how my relationship with Sue Sherwin has fostered my own relational autonomy. At the same time, I want to discuss what theories of relational autonomy, like Sue's, add to the bioethics literature on autonomy. With this second objective, I hope to begin clearing up some confusion that I see in this literature about the nature of relational autonomy.Sue was my PhD supervisor, but more than (...) that, she has been my mentor and my role model. I doubt I would still be part of the discipline of philosophy if it weren't for Sue. I came to Dalhousie University as a PhD student in 1995 with a burning love for philosophy but an intense dislike for... (shrink)

Background Currently there is increasing recognition of the need for research in developing countries where disease burden is high. Understanding the role of local factors is important for undertaking ethical research in developing countries. We explored factors relating to information and communication during the process of informed consent, and the approach that should be followed for gaining consent. The study was conducted prior to a family-based genetic study among people with podoconiosis (non-filarial elephantiasis) in southern Ethiopia. Methodology/Principal Findings We adapted (...) a method of rapid assessment validated in The Gambia. The methodology was entirely qualitative, involving focus-group discussions and in-depth interviews. Discussions were conducted with podoconiosis patients and non-patients in the community, fieldworkers, researchers, staff of the local non-governmental organisation (NGO) working on prevention and treatment of podoconiosis, and community leaders. We found that the extent of use of everyday language, the degree to which expectations of potential participants were addressed, and the techniques of presentation of information had considerable impact on comprehension of information provided about research. Approaching podoconiosis patients via locally trusted individuals and preceding individual consent with community sensitization were considered the optimal means of communication. Prevailing poverty among podoconiosis patients, the absence of alternative treatment facilities, and participants' trust in the local NGO were identified as potential barriers for obtaining genuine informed consent. Conclusions Researchers should evaluate the effectiveness of consent processes in providing appropriate information in a comprehensible manner and in supporting voluntary decision-making on a study-by-study basis. (shrink)

[ Susan Hurley] I argue that the aim to neutralize the influence of luck on distribution cannot provide a basis for egalitarianism: it can neither specify nor justify an egalitarian distribution. Luck and responsibility can play a role in determining what justice requires to be redistributed, but from this we cannot derive how to distribute: we cannot derive a pattern of distribution from the 'currency' of distributive justice. I argue that the contrary view faces a dilemma, according to whether (...) it understands luck in interpersonal or counterfactual terms. /// [Richard J. Arneson] Does it make sense to hold that, if it is bad that some people are worse off than others, it is worse if those who are worse off come to be so through sheer bad luck that it is beyond their power to control? In her contribution to this symposium, Susan Hurley cautions against a closely related fallacy: from the fact that people have come to an unequal condition through unchosen bad luck, it does not follow that, if we aim to undo the influence of unchosen luck, we ought to institute equality of condition. Forswearing the fallacy that Hurley analyses is compatible with answering the question affirmatively, and more generally with holding that principles of distributive justice should be sensitive to the distinction between chosen and unchosen bad luck. This essay explores how this might be done. (shrink)