In this study, we discuss the colonial project as an eliminatory structure of indigenous ways of knowing and doing that is built into Canadian social and health institutions. We elaborate on the role nursing plays in maintaining systemic racism, marginalization and discrimination of Indigenous Peoples. Based on historical practices and present‐day circumstances, we argue that changing language in research and school curriculums turns decolonization into what Tuck and Yang call a ‘metaphor’. Rather, we propose decolonization as a political project where (...) nurses acknowledge their involvement in colonial harms and disrupt the assumptions that continue to shape how nurses interact with Indigenous people, including knowledge systems that perpetuate colonial interests and privilege. Decolonization requires nurses to understand the colonial practices that led to dispossession of land, erasure of knowledge, culture and identity, while upholding indigenous ways of knowing and doing in health, healing and living. As a political manifesto that liberates indigenous life from oppressive structures of colonialism and capitalism, The Red Deal is presented as a visionary platform for decolonization. The aim of this study is to articulate three dimensions of caretaking within The Red Deal as a framework to decolonize nursing knowledge development and practice. Based on the philosophical dimension embedded in The Red Deal that revoke norms and knowledge assumptions of capitalism that destroy indigenous ways of knowing and doing, we underscore an approach toward decolonizing nursing. Our approach rejects the apolitical nature of nursing as well as the unilateral western scientific knowledge approach to knowledge development and recognition. A critical emancipatory approach that addresses the socio‐political and historical context of health care, recognizes dispossession of land and adopts a ‘multilogical’ vision of knowledge that gives space for representation and voice is needed for true decolonization of nursing. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to critically review the design of methods for ethically robust forms of technology appraisal in the regulation of research and innovation in synthetic biology. It will focus, in particular, on the extent to which cost‐benefit analysis offers a basis for informing decisions about which technological pathways to pursue and which to discourage. A further goal is to consider what (if anything) the precautionary principle might offer in enabling better decisions. And this, in turn, raises (...) questions about why mention of precaution can excite accusations of unscientific bias or irrational, “anti‐innovation” extremism. What does the polarized debate tell us about the politics around synthetic biology? In seeking more rigorous, timely, and practical ways to govern these remarkable new technologies, what might we be missing?The sophistication, diversity, and scope of synthetic biology may seem to make it a rather idiosyncratic area for exploring these general issues. It may seem to be a special case, with the bewildering pace of change amplifying the difficulties. But at root, some of the trickiest issues are just specific instances of familiar and long‐standing conundrums in the governance of science and technology. The basic challenge is how to weigh up, for a wide range of potential options, the various pros and cons, as viewed from divergent perspectives, and find a way to justify the best course of action on behalf of society as a whole. This is the central problem addressed by a number of techniques in CBA. On the face of it, synthetic biology seems to present just one more application of these well‐established and self‐confident prescriptive methods.But there do emerge several obstinate, even prohibitive, difficulties for CBA. Although they are well acknowledged by the scholarly literature on and around this topic, they are often sidelined in practice. Yet all are central to the case for applying the concept of precaution to a field like synthetic biology. This essay will briefly explore multicriteria mapping, an appraisal method for exploring contrasting perspectives on emerging technologies, as one practical way to address them. The essay focuses on MCM, not because it presents any sort of panacea for appraisal, but because it is illustrative of the concrete implications of precaution. Setting out even just one among potentially many practical alternative methods at least refutes the last‐ditch argument that CBA is the only operational choice. (shrink)

In contemporary forms of psychoanalysis, particularly intersubjective systems theory, the turn towards contextualism has permitted the development of new ways of thinking and practicing that have dispensed with the notion of isolated individuality. For many who embrace this "post-subjectivist" way of thinking and practicing, the recognition that all human experience is fundamentally immersed in the world makes the question of individuality seem confusing, even anachronistic. Yet the challenge of individuality remains an important and pressing issue for contemporary theory and practice; (...) many clinicians are left to wonder about the role of "individual" experience and how to approach it conceptually or clinically. This volume of original essays gives the problem of individuality its due, without losing sight of the importance of contextualized experience. Drawing on a variety of disciplinary backgrounds - philosophical, developmental, biological, and neuroscientific - the contributors address the tension that exists between individuality and the emergence of contextualism as a dominant mode of psychoanalytic theory and practice, thereby providing unique insights into the role and place of individuality both in and out of the clinical setting. Ultimately, these essays demonstrate that individuality, no matter how it may be defined, always occurs within a contextual web that forms the basis of human experience. _Contributors:_ William J. Coburn, Philip Cushman, James L. Fosshage, Roger Frie, Frank M. Lachmann, Jack Martin, Donna Orange, Robert D. Stolorow, Jeff Sugarman. (shrink)

'...cannot fail to interest the general reader. More conprehensive...than other recent introductions..and more consistently focused than comparable anthologies.'—CHOICEREC.

"World hypotheses" correspond to metaphysical systems, and they may be systematically judged by the canons of evidence and corroboration. In setting forth his root-metaphor theory and examining six such hypotheses—animism, mysticism, formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism—Pepper surveys the whole field of metaphysics. Because this book is an analytical study, it stresses issues rather than men. It seeks to exhibit the sources of these issues and to show that some are unnecessary; that the rest gather into clusters and are interconnected in (...) systems corresponding closely to the traditional schools of philosophy. The virtue of the root-metaphor method is that it puts metaphysics on a purely factual basis and pushes philosophical issues back to the interpretation of evidence. This book was written primarily as a contribution to the field, but its plan excellently suits it for use as a text in courses in metaphysics, types of philosophical theory, or present tendencies in philosophy. (shrink)

This book presents a theory about the kind of thing a mind is and, on the basis of this theory, a view about how minds are individuated and when two mental states belong to the same mind.

This paper begins with an explanation of why, despite their obscurity, Tillich’s writings have been attractive to a wide audience. I then describe some of the main features of his mature theological position and discuss a number of the central questions and difficulties to which this position gives rise. The discussion focuses on such questions as whether Tillich can justify holding his own “interpretations” of traditional Christian ideas to have a privileged status, whether the deliteralization of traditional Christian language is (...) compatible with the idea that Christianity is a historical religion, how we are to understand Tillich’s notion of a symbolic or mythological account’s being adequate to revelatory experience, what it is for a “practical interpretation” of revelatory experience to be an adequate expression of such experience, and what is the best way of handling the problems raised by TiIlich’s claim that there are no literally true statements---or only one literally true statement---about God. (shrink)

“The human other, each singular and whole in its own right, is never the same but always a different person. Human beings don’t repeat each other; they contradict each other” (Goldschmidt, Contradiction Set Free). Originally published in German in 1976, in the long shadow of the Shoah, in response to the threat of atomic holocaust, and amidst growing recognition of ecological disaster, Goldschmidt’s Contradiction Set Free argues that emancipation lies in diversity rather than in unity, in the freeing up of (...) contradiction rather than in uniformity. I offer a close reading of Goldschmidt’s plea for pluralism, the foundation for our inescapable moral and political responsibilities to others. Today, what insights—and what hope—does his dialogic offer for the “joyfully creative” realization of our responsibilities to the other, both human and in the natural world? (shrink)

One of the recurrent temptations in theory of knowledge is to try to provide an inductive justification for employing the principles of inductive inference. The purpose of the present paper is to suggest that this approach is misguided by exposing the deficiencies of what appears to be the most carefully constructed attempt of this kind which has thus far been made. I refer to the attempt made by R. B. Braithwaite in his Scientific Explanation.