Resource allocation decisions are often made on the basis of clinical and cost effectiveness at the expense of ethical inquiry into what is acceptable. This paper proposes that a more compassionate model of resource allocation would be achieved through integrating ethical awareness with clinical, financial and legal input. Where a publicly-funded healthcare system is involved, it is suggested that having an agency that focuses solely on cost-effectiveness leaving medical, legal and ethical considerations to others would help depoliticise rationing decisions and (...) command greater public acceptance. (shrink)

The conference entitled ‘Best Practices in Clinical Ethics Consultation and Decision-Making’, held in London 8–9 July 2010, was the first of its kind dedicated to identifying best practices in clinical ethics consultation and decision-making. Academics, health and social care professionals, clinical ethics committee members, lawyers, service users and carers from the UK, USA, Europe, Canada, Australia and Asia attended lectures, workshops, parallel paper sessions and clinical ethics case discussions across adult, maternity, children's, older persons, mental health and learning disabilities settings. (...) Seventy-eight best-practice points impacting on the quality of clinical ethics consultations and subsequent decisions were identified and grouped into eight themes: who tells the story; how the story is told; how the analysis, discussion and subsequent decisions are made; how values are weighted and balanced against one another; who decides; how the decision is made; how group dynamics and conflict are handled; how decisions are recorded. (shrink)

The factors preventing registered nurses from failing students in practice are multifaceted and have attracted much debate over recent years. However, writers rarely focus on what is needed to fail an incompetent pre-registration nursing student in their final placement. This hermeneutic study explored the mentor experience of failing a pre-registration nursing student in their final placement. A total of 19 mentors were recruited from 7 different healthcare organisations in both inner city and rural locations in the southeast of England. Participants (...) took part in individual reflective interviews about their experience of failing a pre-registration nursing student in their final placement. These experiences were interpreted through a hermeneutic discovery of meaning. The new horizon of understanding which developed as a result of this research is framed within the context of moral stress, moral integrity and moral residue with the overall synthesis being that these mentors’ stories presented a new horizon of moral courage. (shrink)

This paper's philosophical ideas are developed from a General Nursing Council for England and Wales Trust‐funded study to explore nursing knowledge and wisdom and ways in which these can be translated into clinical practice and fostered in junior nurses. Participants using Carper's (1978) ways of knowing as a framework experienced difficulty conceptualizing a link between the empirics and ethics of nursing. The philosophical problem is how to understand praxis as a moral entity with intrinsic value when so much of value (...) seems to be technical and extrinsic depending on desired ends. Using the Aristotelian terms poesis and praxis can articulate the concerns that the participants as well as Carper (1978) and Dreyfus (in Flyvbjerg, 1991) among others share that certain actions or ways of knowing important for nursing are being devalued and deformed by the importance placed on quantitative data and measurable outcomes. The sense of praxis is a moralized one and most of what nurses do is plausibly on any account of normative ethics a morally good thing; the articulation of the idea of praxis can go some way in showing how it is a part of the discipline of nursing. Nursing's acts as poesis can be a part of how practitioners come to have praxis as phronesis or practical wisdom. So to be a wise nurse, one needs be a wise person. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Spirit is both one of Hegel's most widely read books and one of his most obscure. The book is the most detailed commentary on Hegel's work available. It develops an independent philosophical account of the general theory of knowledge, culture, and history presented in the Phenomenology. In a clear and straightforward style, Terry Pinkard reconstructs Hegel's theoretical philosophy and shows its connection to ethical and political theory. He sets the work in a historical context and shows (...) the contemporary relevance of Hegel's thought for European and Anglo-American philosophers. The principal audience for the book is teachers and students of philosophy, but the great interest in Hegel's work and the clarity of Pinkard's exposition ensure that historians of ideas, political scientists, and literary theorists will also read it. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the question of whether certain experiences that originate in causes other than bereavement are properly termed ‘grief’. To do so, we focus on widespread experiences of grief that have been reported during the Covid-19 pandemic. We consider two potential objections to a more permissive use of the term: grief is, by definition, a response to a death; grief is subject to certain norms that apply only to the case of bereavement. Having shown that these objections are unconvincing, (...) we sketch a positive case for a conception of grief that is not specific to bereavement, by noting some features that grief following bereavement shares with other experiences of loss. (shrink)

This study is divided into three parts: the classical tradition; Althusser and after; and modern debates. It includes chapters on class consciousness, ideology and utopia, and the epistemology of sociology, looking at the work of Georg Lukas, Karl Mannheim and Lucien Goldman respectively.

He sets out not just to expose the illusions of postmodernism but to show the students he has in mind that they never believed what they thought they believed ...

There are two main ways in which an interest in the sociology of literature can be justified. The first form of justification is realist: literature is in fact deeply conditioned by its social context, and any critical account of it which omits this fact is therefore automatically deficient. The second way is pragmatist: literature is in fact shaped by all kinds of factors and readable in all sorts of contexts, but highlighting its social determinants is useful and desirable from a (...) particular political standpoint.Both of these cases would seem to have something going for them. Hardly anybody would want to deny that literature is in an important sense a social product; but this claim is so general that a specifically “sociological” treatment of literary works does not necessarily follow from it. Metaphors and line endings, after all, are also in some sense social products, so that to attend to these elements of a literary text is not necessarily to deny the work’s sociality. “Social product” would seem too comfortably broad a category, just as “economic product” would seem too crippingly narrow. A problem with the realist case about the sociology of literature, then, is that it is not very clear what exactly is being claimed. The pragmatist case would seem a persuasive rationale for, say, a feminist reading of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, since few people would want to claim that the poem was in some central way about patriarchal relations in the sense that The Rape of the Lock is. A Marxist critic who attended to questions of social class in Treasure Island, perhaps placing Long John Silver in the context of the British shop stewards’ movement and celebrating his antagonism to the gentry, would not necessarily be committed to holding that these issues were “in fact” crucial to the text; he or she would insist instead that they should be brought to light because they were crucial to history and society in general. Terry Eagleton’s recent works include collected essays—Against the Grain and William Shakespeare—as well as a novel, Saints and Scholars. His work in progress is on the ideology of the aesthetic. (shrink)

The philosophical account of vagueness I call "transvaluationism" makes three fundamental claims. First, vagueness is logically incoherent in a certain way: it essentially involves mutually unsatisfiable requirements that govern vague language, vague thought-content, and putative vague objects and properties. Second, vagueness in language and thought (i.e., semantic vagueness) is a genuine phenomenon despite possessing this form of incoherence—and is viable, legitimate, and indeed indispensable. Third, vagueness as a feature of objects, properties, or relations (i.e., ontological vagueness) is impossible, because of (...) the mutually unsatisfiable conditions that such putative items would have to meet. In this paper I set forth the core claims of transvaluationism in a way that acknowledges and explicitly addresses a challenging critique by Timothy Williamson of my prior attempts to articulate and defend this approach to vagueness. I sketch my favored approach to truth and ontological commitment, and I explain how it accommodates the impossibility of ontological vagueness. I argue that any approach to the logic and semantics of vagueness that both (i) eschews epistemicism and (ii) thoroughly avoids positing any arbitrary sharp boundaries (either first-order or higher-order) will have to be not an alternative to transvaluationism but an implementation of it. I sketch my reasons for repudiating epistemicism. I briefly describe my current thinking about how to accommodate intentional mental properties with vague content within an ontology that eschews ontological vagueness. And I revisit the idea, which played a key role in my earlier articulations of transvaluationism, that moral conflicts provide an illuminating model for understanding vagueness. (shrink)

I explore the prospects for overcoming the prima facie tension in the following four claims, all of which I accept: the phenomenal character of experience is narrow; virtually all aspects of the phenomenal character of experience are intentional; the most fundamental kind of mental intentionality is fully constituted by phenomenal character; and yet introspection does not by itself reliably generate answers to certain philosophically important questions about the phenomenally constituted intentional content of experience. The apparent tension results from the following (...) initially plausible thought: if indeed the answers to such questions are entirely fixed by phenomenal character by itself, then presumably these answers should be directly available introspectively. I focus the discussion specifically on certain questions about the phenomenal intentional content of agentive experience—e.g., the question whether the content of agentive experience is compatible with causal determinism. I consider three alternative possibilities for explaining why the answers to such questions are not directly available introspectively—two of which I argue against and the third of which I embrace. (shrink)

In a series of influential articles, Rae Langton has argued that Austinian speech-act theory can illuminate the way in which pornography contributes to the subordination of women. I will argue that Langton’s application of Austin is incorrect. In earlier work, I have argued against Langton’s view on the grounds that being subordinated is not the sort of condition that can be brought about through an illocutionary act. In this paper, however, I will set aside that objection and focus instead on (...) Langton’s claims about the type of illocutionary act pornography might be. I will argue, first, that Langton cannot say what she wants to say about the content of pornography and still have it that pornography is a verdictive or exercitive speech act, in Austin’s sense. Verdictive and exercitive speech acts do not, and cannot describe the states of affairs they bring about. Second, I will argue that pornography does not in any case satisfy the conditions necessary for a speech act to be verdictive or exercitive. Specifically, there do not exist accepted background conventions that would give the pornographer authority to render verdicts or to take executive action. This objection to Langton’s view has been made before; I’ll show that her response to the objection betrays a confusion of authority with power. (shrink)

When a chimpanzee stockpiles rocks as weapons or when a frog sends out mating calls, we might easily assume these animals know their own motivations--that they use the same psychological mechanisms that we do. But as Beyond the Brain indicates, this is a dangerous assumption because animals have different evolutionary trajectories, ecological niches, and physical attributes. How do these differences influence animal thinking and behavior? Removing our human-centered spectacles, Louise Barrett investigates the mind and brain and offers an alternative (...) approach for understanding animal and human cognition. Drawing on examples from animal behavior, comparative psychology, robotics, artificial life, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, Barrett provides remarkable new insights into how animals and humans depend on their bodies and environment--not just their brains--to behave intelligently. Barrett begins with an overview of human cognitive adaptations and how these color our views of other species, brains, and minds. Considering when it is worth having a big brain--or indeed having a brain at all--she investigates exactly what brains are good at. Showing that the brain's evolutionary function guides action in the world, she looks at how physical structure contributes to cognitive processes, and she demonstrates how these processes employ materials and resources in specific environments. Arguing that thinking and behavior constitute a property of the whole organism, not just the brain, Beyond the Brain illustrates how the body, brain, and cognition are tied to the wider world. (shrink)

In ”Embodiment and Epistemology,” Louise Antony considers a kind of ”Cartesian epistemology” according to which, so far as knowing goes, knowers could be completely disembodied, that is, pure Cartesian egos. Antony examines a number of recent challenges to Cartesian epistemology, particularly challenges from feminist epistemology. She contends that we might have good reason to think that theorizing about knowledge can be influenced by features of our embodiment, even if we lack reason to suppose that knowing itself varies relative to (...) such features. She also argues that a masculinist bias can result in mishandling of cognitive differences in cases where they actually exist and she examines a number of the ways in which the maleness of philosophy has, according to feminists, distorted epistemology. Even if a Cartesian approach offers one indispensable part of a comprehensive epistemology, according to Antony, we still need an epistemology that answers questions raised by our everyday, embodied lives. (shrink)

The engineering knowledge research program is part of the larger effort to articulate a philosophy of engineering and an engineering worldview. Engineering knowledge requires a more comprehensive conceptual framework than scientific knowledge. Engineering is not ‘merely’ applied science. Kuhn and Popper established the limits of scientific knowledge. In parallel, the embrace of complementarity and uncertainty in the new physics undermined the scientific concept of observer-independent knowledge. The paradigm shift from the scientific framework to the broader participant engineering framework entails a (...) problem shift. The detached scientific spectator seeks the ‘facts’ of ‘objective’ reality – out there. The participant, embodied in reality, seeks ‘methods’, about how to work in the world. The engineering knowledge research program is recursively enabling. Advances in engineering knowledge are involved in the unfolding of the nature of reality. Newly understood, quantum uncertainty entails that the participant is a natural inquirer. ‘Practical reason’ is concerned with ‘how we should live’– the defining question of morality. The engineering knowledge research program is selective seeking ‘important truths’, ‘important knowledge’, ‘important methods’ that manifest value, and serve the engineering agenda of ‘the construction of the good.’ The importance of engineering knowledge research program is clear in the new STEM curriculum where educators have been challenged to rethink the relation between science and engineering. A 2015 higher education initiative to integrate engineering colleges into liberal arts and sciences colleges has stalled due to the confusion and conflict between the engineering and scientific representations of knowledge. (shrink)

The ancient sorites paradox has important implications for metaphysics, for logic, and for semantics. Metaphysically, the paradox can be harnessed to produce a powerful argument for the claim that there cannot be vague objects or vague properties. With respect to logic, the paradox forces a choice between the highly counterintuitive ‘epistemic’ account of vagueness and the rejection of classical two-valued logic. Regarding semantics, nonclassical approaches to the logic of vagueness lead naturally to the idea that truth, for vague discourse, is (...) not direct language-world correspondence grounded in referential connections linking a statement’s basic subsentential constituents (names, predicates, the apparatus of quantification) to real objects and real properties; rather, truth is a matter of indirect correspondence between vague language and nonvague reality. (shrink)

In the second half of the eighteenth century, German philosophy came for a while to dominate European philosophy. It changed the way in which not only Europeans, but people all over the world, conceived of themselves and thought about nature, religion, human history, politics, and the structure of the human mind. In this rich and wide-ranging book, Terry Pinkard interweaves the story of 'Germany' - changing during this period from a loose collection of principalities into a newly-emerged nation with (...) a distinctive culture - with an examination of the currents and complexities of its developing philosophical thought. He examines the dominant influence of Kant, with his revolutionary emphasis on 'self-determination', and traces this influence through the development of romanticism and idealism to the critiques of post-Kantian thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. His book will interest a range of readers in the history of philosophy, cultural history and the history of ideas. (shrink)

The phrase "the meaning of life" for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited, stimulating, and quirky enquiry, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer. Eagleton first examines how centuries of thinkers and writers--from Marx and Schopenhauer to Shakespeare, Sartre, and Beckett--have responded to the ultimate question of meaning. He suggests, however, that it is (...) only in modern times that the question has become problematic. But instead of tackling it head-on, many of us cope with the feelings of meaninglessness in our lives by filling them with everything from football to sex, Kabbala, Scientology, "New Age softheadedness," or fundamentalism. On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic meaning. If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready made. Eagleton probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and concludes that it fails to holds up. He argues instead that the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living--that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life. Here then is a brilliant discussion of the problem of meaning by a leading thinker, who writes with a light and often irreverent touch, but with a very serious end in mind. "If you were to ask what provides some meaning in life nowadays for a great many people, especially men, you could do worse than reply 'football.' Not many of them perhaps would be willing to admit as much; but sport stands in for all those noble causes--religious faith, national sovereignty, personal honor, ethnic identity--for which, over the centuries, people have been prepared to go to their deaths. It is sport, not religion, which is now the opium of the people.". (shrink)

In Chapters 4 and 5 of his 1998 book From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis, Frank Jackson propounds and defends a form of moral realism that he calls both ‘moral functionalism’ and ‘analytical descriptivism’. Here we argue that this metaethical position, which we will henceforth call ‘analytical moral functionalism’, is untenable. We do so by applying a generic thought-experimental deconstructive recipe that we have used before against other views that posit moral properties and identify them with certain (...) natural properties, a recipe that we believe is applicable to virtually any metaphysically naturalist version of moral realism. The recipe deploys a scenario we call Moral Twin Earth. (shrink)

One of the founders of modern philosophical thought Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has gained the reputation of being one of the most abstruse and impenetrable of thinkers. This major biography of Hegel offers not only a complete account of the life, but also a perspicuous overview of the key philosophical concepts in Hegel's work in a style that will be accessible to professionals and non-professionals alike. Terry Pinkard situates Hegel firmly in the historical context of his times. The story (...) of that life is of an ambitious, powerful thinker living in a period of great tumult dominated by the figure of Napoleon. The Hegel who emerges from this account is a complex, fascinating figure of European modernity, who offers us a still compelling examination of that new world born out of the political, industrial, social, and scientific revolutions of his period. (shrink)

This book is a record of my dialogues with Stephen Hawking, his graduate assistants and his nurses during a four city public lecture tour I organized for Hawking, including Portland, Eugene, Seattle, Vancouver, BC. We discussed 20th century science and philosophy of science. Since I was often the one being questioned, much of the contents reflect my PhD research at the University of London. My focus was on understanding the limits of science, as represented by quantum theory and relativity. My (...) mentors had been Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos, and I was strongly influenced by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. In one in depth presentation to Hawking I suggested that Newtonian space-time and Maxwellian space-time were complementary, were defined by complementary symmetry principles. I had opportunity to present the same arguments to Kip Thorne and Freeman Dyson. Hawking simply remarked that I 'may be right'. Thorne confirmed that practitioners of General Relativity use both depending on the problem at hand. Dyson was emphatic – "Yes. Definitely. Absolutely.". (shrink)

Renowned as the chief challenger of traditional views of morality, man's freedom, and religion from 1650-1750, Benedict de Spinoza (1632-77) spread alarm and ...

It has often been thought that our knowledge of ourselves is _different_ from, perhaps in some sense _better_ than, our knowledge of things other than ourselves. Indeed, there is a thriving research area in epistemology dedicated to seeking an account of self-knowledge that would articulate and explain its difference from, and superiority over, other knowledge. Such an account would thus illuminate the descriptive and normative difference between self-knowledge and other knowledge.¹ At the same time, self- knowledge has also encountered its (...) share of skeptics – philosophers who refuse to accord it any descriptive, let alone normative, distinction. In this paper, we argue that there is at least one _species_ of self-knowledge that is different from, and better than, other knowledge. It is a specific kind of knowledge of one’s concurrent phenomenal experiences. Call knowledge of one’s own phenomenal experiences _phenomenal knowledge_. Our claim is that some (though not all) phenomenal knowledge is different from, and better than, non-phenomenal knowledge. In other. (shrink)

Introduction -- The beginnings of human judgment -- The chemistry, economics, and psychology of praise -- Blame: the necessity and devastation of guilt and shame -- Family judgments, family systems -- Just friends: praise and blame between peers -- Intimate judgments: praise and blame within couples -- Professional dues: praise and blame in the workplace -- Social media and the new challenges to our judgment meter -- Lifelong judgments.

This is a fascinating study of the a-temporal nature of evil in the West. The international authors who have contributed to this text not only concentrate on political, social and legally sanctioned cruelty from the past and present, but also explore the nature of moral transgression in contemporary art, media and literature. Although many forms and practices of what might be called evil' are analysed, all are bound by violence and/or the sexually perverse.

Plato famously promised to complement the Sophist and the Statesman with another work on a third sort of expert, the philosopher--but we do not have this final dialogue. Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher, but did not write it, in order to stimulate his audience and encourage his readers to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato's investigation (...) of knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, the second part of which presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. Gill contends that the dialogues leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher's method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato's philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato's exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose. (shrink)

It is generally accepted that sight—the capacity to see or to have visual experiences—has the power to give us knowledge about things in the environment and some of their properties in a distinctive way. Seeing the goose on the lake puts me in a position to know that it is there and that it has certain properties. And it does this by, when all goes well, presenting us with these features of the goose. One might even think that it is (...) part of what it is to be a perceptual capacity that it has this kind of epistemological power, such that a capacity that lacked this power could not be perceptual. My focus in this essay is the sense of taste—the capacity to taste things or to have taste experiences. It has sometimes been suggested that taste lacks sight-like epistemological power. I argue that taste has epistemological power of the same kind as does sight, but that as a matter of contingent fact, that power often goes unexercised in our contemporary environment. We can know about things by tasting them in the same kind of way as we can know about things by seeing them, but we often do not. I then consider the significance of this conclusion. I suggest that in one way, it matters little, because our primary interest in taste is not epistemic but aesthetic. But, I end by suggesting, it can matter ethically. (shrink)

The phrase "the meaning of life" for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited Very Short Introduction, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer. Eagleton first examines how centuries of thinkers and writers--from Marx and Schopenhauer to Shakespeare, Sartre, and Beckett--have responded to the ultimate question of meaning. He suggests, however, that it is only (...) in modern times that the question has become problematic. But instead of tackling it head-on, many of us cope with the feelings of meaninglessness in our lives by filling them with everything from football to sex, Kabbala, Scientology, "New Age softheadedness," or fundamentalism. On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic meaning. If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready made. Eagleton probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and concludes that it fails to holds up. He argues instead that the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living--that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life. Here then is a brilliant discussion of the problem of meaning by a leading thinker, who writes with a light and often irreverent touch, but with a very serious end in mind. (shrink)

Presenting no less than a history and critique of the concept of the aesthetic throughtout modern Western thought, The Ideology of the Aesthetic is a critical survey of modern Western philosphy, focusing in particular on the complex relations between aesthetics, ethics, and politics.