The phenomenon of ambivalence is an important one for any philosophy of action. Despite this importance, there is a lack of a fully satisfactory analysis of the phenomenon. Although many contemporary philosophers recognize the phenomenon, and address topics related to it, only Harry Frankfurt has given the phenomenon full treatment in the context of action theory - providing an analysis of how it relates to the structure and freedom of the will. In this paper, I develop objections to Frankfurt's account, (...) all revolving around the charge that his account contains a serious ambiguity between willing and identifying. With such objections in place, I then develop an analysis that avoids the difficulties and ambiguities that Frankfurt's analysis is prey to. I briefly distinguish ambivalence from other types of internal conflict. This paper aims to offer conceptual clarification on the phenomenon of ambivalence, which will then allow for discussions about the normative merits and demerits of ambivalence, the effects of ambivalence on autonomous action, and methods of resolution of ambivalence. (shrink)

An analysis of the identity issues involved in facial allograft transplantation is provided in this paper. The identity issues involved in organ transplantation in general, under both theoretical accounts of personal identity and subjective accounts provided by organ recipients, are examined. It is argued that the identity issues involved in facial allograft transplantation are similar to those involved in organ transplantation in general, but much stronger because the face is so closely linked with personal identity. Recipients of facial allograft transplantation (...) have the potential to feel that their identity is a mix between their own and the donor’s, and the donor’s family is potentially likely to feel that their loved one ‘‘lives on’’. It is also argued that facial allograft transplantation allows the recipients to regain an identity, because they can now be seen in the social world. Moreover, they may regain expressivity, allowing for them to be seen even more by others, and to regain an identity to an even greater extent. Informing both recipients and donors about the role that identity plays in facial allograft transplantation could enhance the consent process for facial allograft transplantation and donation. (shrink)

Although I agree with Sabine Muller’s conclusion that we should first seek to find alternatives to amputation for patients suffering from Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), I disagree with one of the major premises that she uses to argue for her claim. Muller argues that patients with BIID are likely not autonomous when they request that the limb be amputated. Muller’s argument that BIID suffers are not autonomous is flawed because she conflates philosophical conceptions of autonomy with the conception of (...) autonomy that is operative in the context of medicine. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 4, Page 43-57, December 2011.

Filozófiai és művészeti gyűjtemények számára egyaránt érdekes lehet Széplaky Gerda filozófus, esztéta, kritikus legújabb kötete, melynek írásai izgalmasan társítják az esztétikát a fenomenológiával. A szerző esszéi a testiség, a nézőben végbemenő fiziológiai folyamatok felől értelmezik a befogadás aktusát. Az első írás általánosságban szól a radikális kritikáról, majd a figyelemfelkeltő kötetcímmel megegyező című esszé (Kant hátán a szőr) a megrázkódtatásról, mint esztétikai fenoménról szól. Olyan további általánosabb témákról ejt még szót a szerző, mint az esztétikai hatásban megnyilvánuló erőszak vagy az (...) építészeti reprezentáció problémái. A kötet második felében konkrét alkotók művészetével kapcsolatos írások kaptak helyet, olyan témákban, mint Bukta Imre művészetének változásai, Szirtes János videoperformanszai, a játék esztétikai szerepe Bondor Csilla műveiben, vagy az Élet menete című holokauszt-emlékmű és kontextusai. "www.kello.hu © minden jog fenntartva". (shrink)

A major figure in women's studies and a long-term activist for women's issues, Gerda Lerner is a pioneer in the field of Women's History and one of its leading practitioners. "Why History Matters" is a summation of her work which includes pieces on the author's early life as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany and on her slow assimilation into American life.

This book review essay points to some of the more novel and controversial contributions of A Theory of Bioethics, by Joseph Millum and David DeGrazia (Cambridge University Press, 2021), such as their account of moral status. With a remarkable breadth of topics, the book is characterized by philosophical care and nuance and by spelling out the implications of the authors’ theorizing for real‐world, pressing questions, for instance, about the implications of Millum and DeGrazia's theoretical work on moral status for embryo (...) research, animal research with mice and apes, and human‐brain organoids. (shrink)

The concept of personhood has been central to bioethics debates about abortion, the treatment of patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious states, as well as patients with advanced dementia. More recently, the concept has been employed to think about new questions related to human-brain organoids, artificial intelligence, uploaded minds, human-animal chimeras, and human embryos, to name a few. A common move has been to ask what these entities have in common with persons (in the normative sense), and then draw (...) conclusions about what we do (or do not) owe them. This paper argues that at best the concept of “personhood” is unhelpful to much of bioethics today and at worst it is harmful and pernicious. I suggest that we (bioethicists) stop using the concept of personhood and instead ask normative questions more directly (e.g., how ought we to treat this being and why?) and use other philosophical concepts (e.g., interests, sentience, recognition respect) to help us answer them. It is time for bioethics to end talk about personhood. (shrink)

In some views, philosophy’s glory days in bioethics are over. While philosophers were especially important in the early days of the field, so the argument goes, the majority of the work in bioethics today involves the “simple” application of existing philosophical principles or concepts, as well as empirical work in bioethics. Here, we address this view head on and ask: What is the role of philosophy in bioethics today? This paper has three specific aims: (1) to respond to skeptics and (...) make the case that philosophy and philosophers still have a very important and meaningful role to play in contemporary bioethics, (2) to discuss some of the current challenges to the meaningful integration of philosophy and bioethics, and (3) to make suggestions for what needs to happen in order for the two fields to stay richly connected. We outline how bioethics center directors, funders, and philosopher bioethicists can help. (shrink)

The concept of personhood has been central to bioethics debates about abortion, the treatment of patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious states, as well as patients with advanced dementia. More recently, the concept has been employed to think about new questions related to human-brain organoids, artificial intelligence, uploaded minds, human-animal chimeras, and human embryos, to name a few. A common move has been to ask what these entities have in common with persons (in the normative sense), and then draw (...) conclusions about what we do (or do not) owe them. This paper argues that at best the concept of “personhood” is unhelpful to much of bioethics today and at worst it is harmful and pernicious. I suggest that we (bioethicists) stop using the concept of personhood and instead ask normative questions more directly (e.g., how ought we to treat this being and why?) and use other philosophical concepts (e.g., interests, sentience, recognition respect) to help us answer them. It is time for bioethics to end talk about personhood. (shrink)

Within the genres of news and current affairs television, it is the generic logic of the ‘feelgood’ genre of the talk show that legitimizes personalized discourse between famous hosts and politicians. The article presents a case study of such an interview, focusing on the ways in which the interaction between the verbal, the visual and the rhythmic modalities of the interview is employed by the multiple authors of the text to construct a variety of interpersonal footings for interviewer and interviewee (...) on the one hand and a series of preferred interpretations for the audience on the other. The method is deviant case analysis, using tools from semantics and pragmatics, discourse and conversation analysis, and visual analysis of news images. To explore the manner of interaction between the verbal and visual channel, the concept of rhythm is developed for dialogic audiovisual texts. Dialogic audiovisual rhythm is defined as arising from the interaction of speaker or addressee change with onset of new shot, and with frequency of shots per turn/ generic unit of the interview. Rhythmic sequences can then be segmented which make up the textual structure of the interview, delineating its semantic units and areas of strategic positioning between the private, the personal and the political. Three types of the personalization of politics can be discerned in the text: that of the private domain, that of political relations as private ones, and that of politics as history being made by great men. A forth type of personalization is that of the relations between the media and politics. Different combinations of verbal, visual and rhythmic means are used to realize these types discursively. (shrink)

In ‘Reification and Assent in Research Involving Those Who Lack Capacity’, Smajdor argues that adults with impaired capacity to grant informed consent (AWIC) are often excluded from participating in biomedical research because they cannot provide informed consent, leading to decreased chances AWIC will benefit from such research. Smajdor uses Honneth’s concept of reification to propose that securing assent (rather than consent) in cases involving AWIC offers patients moral recognition that is not tied to their capacities. Assent provides this recognition by (...) including the patient in a shared moral sphere, highlighting her agency and worth without reducing her to her incapacity or a thing-to-be-managed. Assent also avoids grounding in, or a reliance on, the future development of autonomy (pp.5–6).1 Our recent research on patient and caregiver perspectives of potential paediatric deep brain stimulation (pDBS) for refractory obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and dystonia demonstrates that paediatric neurosurgery patients desire the kind of recognition Smajdor associates with assent, and their caregivers largely agree.2 3 Since (generally) paediatric patients in the USA are unable to grant informed consent, their caregivers must provide it instead. This raises the question of how to properly integrate paediatric patients into the DBS decision-making process. One dimension along which this is evident is that …. (shrink)

Given the predominance of multilingualism in many countries there is great need for a new, interdisciplinary approach to the problem. Sociolinguistics—or the sociology of language—provides such an approach and can help to shed new light on a phenomenon which is often discussed in terms that tend to create more problems than they solve. In order to demonstrate how sociolinguistic theory and practice can contribute to the study of multilingualism this paper will attempt to outline briefly some of the basic premises (...) of sociolinguistic theory which appear relevant to the understanding of the phenomenon of multilingualism and also to define multilingualism as a social behaviour in response to a contact situation. (shrink)

Questions about when to limit unhelpful treatments are often raised in general medicine but are less commonly considered in psychiatry. Here we describe a survey of U.S. psychiatrists intended to characterize their attitudes about the management of suicidal ideation in patients with severely treatment-refractory illness. Respondents (n = 212) received one of two cases describing a patient with suicidal ideation due to either borderline personality disorder or major depressive disorder. Both patients were described as receiving all guideline-based and plausible emerging (...) treatments. Respondents rated the expected helpfulness and likelihood of recommending each of four types of intervention: hospitalization, additional medication changes, additional neurostimulation, and additional psychotherapy. Across both cases, most respondents said they were likely to provide each intervention, except for additional neurostimulation in borderline personality disorder, while fewer thought each intervention would be helpful. Substantial minorities of respondents indicated that they would provide an intervention they did not think was likely to be helpful. Our results suggest that while most psychiatrists recognize the possibility that some patients are unlikely to be helped by available treatments, many would continue to offer such treatments. (shrink)

The application of machine learning in health care holds great promise for improving care. Indeed, our own team is collaborating with experts in machine learning and statistical modeling to bu...

The late ancient commentators on Aristotle, most of them Platonists, have been gradually re-emerging on the philosophical and scholarly horizon during the last two or three decades. Their reappearance is not likely to cause any major transformations of the scene, but they are interesting enough in themselves to deserve careful study and they have been influential in the past to the extent that proper understanding of their work sheds light on the subsequent history of the interpretation of Aristotle. This and (...) much more is borne out by Blumenthal's excellent study. A considerable number of ancient commentaries have now appeared in English translations initiated by Richard Sorabji, and books and articles on them have begun to appear as never before. After writing some pioneering works on Plotinus's psychology, in which the relevance of Aristotle for the latter's fundamentally Platonic psychology is much in focus, Blumenthal set out in the 1970s to study the commentators and thus belongs to the pioneers in the contemporary awakening. (shrink)

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the (...) human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing. (shrink)

The editors of the _Journal of Medical Ethics_ support the call of the UK Health Alliance on Climate for urgent action to ensure that the current Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ‘finally delivers climate justice for Africa and vulnerable countries’. 1 As they note ‘Africa has suffered disproportionately although it has done little to cause the crisis’. The burden of climate change has thus far fallen disproportionately on Global South countries. The monsoon (...) in Pakistan this year killed over 1100 people and the public health implications of the flooding might affect the health of over 5 million people. 2 The South Asian monsoon impacts the lives of a billion people and the flooding associated with wet seasons is likely to occur eight times more frequently in future years than at present. 3 For many pacific islands such as Kiribati,... (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have identified a wide range of biases and heuristics in human decision making over the past few decades. Only recently have bioethicists begun to think seriously about the implications of these findings for topics such as agency, autonomy, and consent. This article aims to provide an overview of biases and heuristics that have been identified and a framework in which to think comprehensively about the impact of them on the exercise of autonomous decision making. I analyze the impact (...) that these biases and heuristics have on the following dimensions of autonomy: understanding, intentionality, absence of alienating or controlling influence, and match between formally autonomous preferences or decisions and actual choices or actions. (shrink)

In his paper, ‘Patients, doctors and risk attitudes,’ Nicholas Makins1 argues that healthcare professionals should defer to a patient’s higher-order risk attitudes (ie, the risk attitudes they desire to have or endorse within themselves upon reflection) when making medical decisions. We argue against Makins’ deference to higher-order risk attitudes on the basis that (1) there are significant practical concerns regarding our ability to easily and consistently access and verify the higher-order risk attitudes of patients, (2) there is a lack of (...) a theoretical limit on higher-order risk attitudes (eg, second, third, fourth order), and (3) the consideration of higher-order risk attitudes is actually more paternalistic than Makins suggests because it narrows what counts as an autonomous preference to the limited occasions in which an individual actually reflects on his or her own risk attitude. On the issue of practicality, we can reasonably expect that healthcare professionals would find difficulty eliciting the higher-order risk attitudes of their patients. Take for example the patient who has never expressed his higher-order desire to be more risk adverse and who is not willing nor comfortable expressing this desire. What is the healthcare professional expected to do in this situation? This is even more of a concern for the incapacitated patient, to which Makins seems to imply that …. (shrink)

This study investigated whether musical training and bilingualism are associated with enhancements in specific components of executive function, namely, task switching and dual-task performance. Participants belonging to one of four groups were matched on age and socioeconomic status and administered task switching and dual-task paradigms. Results demonstrated reduced global and local switch costs in musicians compared with non-musicians, suggesting that musical training can contribute to increased efficiency in the ability to shift flexibly between mental sets. On dual-task performance, musicians also (...) outperformed non-musicians. There was neither a cognitive advantage for bilinguals relative to monolinguals, nor an interaction between music and language to suggest additive effects of both types of experience. These findings demonstrate that long-term musical training is associated with improvements in task switching and dual-task performance. (shrink)

Bioethicists often draw sharp distinctions between hope and states like denial, self-deception, and unrealistic optimism. But what, exactly, is the difference between hope and its more suspect cousins? One common way of drawing the distinction focuses on accuracy of belief about the desired outcome: Hope, though perhaps sometimes misplaced, does not involve inaccuracy in the way that these other states do. Because inaccurate beliefs are thought to compromise informed decision making, bioethicists have considered these states to be ones where intervention (...) is needed either to correct the person’s mental state or to persuade the person to behave differently, or even to deny the person certain options. In this article, we argue that it is difficult to determine whether a patient is really in denial, self-deceived, or unrealistically optimistic. Moreover, even when we are confident that beliefs are unrealistic, they are not always as harmful as critics contend. As a result, we need to be more permissive in our approach to patients who we believe are unrealistically optimistic, in denial, or self-deceived—that is, unless patients significantly misunderstand their situation and thus make decisions that are clearly bad for them, we should not intervene by trying to change their mental states or persuade them to behave differently, or by paternalistically denying them certain options. (shrink)

How do we refer to chemical substances, and in particular to chemical elements? This question relates to many philosophical questions, including whether or not theories are incommensurable, the extent to which past theories are later discarded, and issues about scientific realism. This chapter considers the first explicit reference to types of colorless air in late-eighteenth-century chemical practice. Reference to a gas by one chemist was generally intended to give others epistemological, methodological, and practical access to the gas. This chapter proposes (...) a causal-descriptive theory of reference for chemical substances. Implications for debates about incommensurability and realism are also briefly noted. (shrink)