This article offers a new account of the moral substance of shame. Through careful reflection on the motives and intentional structure of shame, I defend the claim that shame is an egocentric and morally blind emotion. I argue that shame is rooted in our desire for social affirmation and constituted by our ability to sense how we appear to others. What makes shame egocentric is that in shame we are essentially concerned about our own social worth and pained by the (...) perception of our self as socially worthless. In itself, shame entails no morally pertinent concern about others or understanding of what is morally significant. I contrast shame with the possibility of relating to others—and to oneself—with love and care. Indeed, I propose that love is essential for moral understanding and motivation. The argument of the article unfolds through critical appraisals of the main strategies for defending the moral value of shame. First, against the claim that shame entails respect for others, I argue that shame's sensitivity to the opinions of others is motivated by egocentric self-concern. Second, against the view that shame over failures to live up to moral values is morally valuable, I argue that regardless of whether the values guiding our shame are moral or not, the perspective of shame is oblivious to their moral meaning. Third, against the claim that shame is crucial for self-understanding, I argue that the desire for affirmation that drives shame is a powerful source of self-deception. (shrink)

This article develops a new phenomenological account of the shame people typically tend to feel when seen naked by others. Although shame at nakedness is a paradigmatic and widespread form of shame, it has been under-explored in the literature on shame. The central thesis of the article is that shame at nakedness is rooted in our desire for social affirmation and constituted by our capacity for social self-consciousness. I argue that our ability to sense how others see us and judge (...) us gives rise to a dynamic tension between our effort to control our public self-presentation and the experience of being exposed to others in an uncontrolled manner. What makes us prone to feel shame or shame anxiety at being seen naked is that we feel that we have revealed our naked and true self as potentially or actually shameful and that our public persona has been undermined. Furthermore, the vulnerability and lack of control that are part and parcel of naked exposure can be a source of shame. In my analysis, shame at nakedness encompasses both literal bodily nakedness and other kinds of uncontrolled and unguarded exposure. The article also offers an argument as to the roots of the more or less ubiquitous tendency to feel shame at exhibiting one’s genitals in public. I develop my account through critical engagements with the main contemporary attempts to account for shame at nakedness, critiquing their insufficiencies and reframing their insights. (shrink)

This article develops a new phenomenological analysis of the interpersonal motives and structure of shame. I pursue the argument that shame is rooted in our desire for social affirmation and conditioned by our ability to see ourselves as we appear to others. My central thesis is that shame is what we feel when, due to some trait or action of ours, we come to perceive ourselves as fundamentally despicable and non-affirmable. By showing how our urge for affirmation fuels and informs (...) our self-perception in shame, the analysis provides a better understanding of the simultaneously interpersonal and personal character of shame. Furthermore, it sheds new light on some central aspects of shame that have been insufficiently understood: on the emotional charge and quality of shame, on the role played by our values and identity in shame, and on the continuity, differences, and transfers between personal shame, social shame, and embarrassment. (shrink)

The guiding thesis of this chapter is that self-understanding is centrally an existential challenge. In particular, the chapter aims to lay bare the massive potential of our desire for social affirmation to influence and distort our self-understanding, mostly in a covert and unacknowledged fashion. To the extent that we are driven by this desire, we are primarily concerned with assessing, in an emotionally charged and self-deceptive manner, the social worth of our self, whereas we lack the will and ability to (...) understand ourselves in an open and unqualified manner. Ultimately, it is argued that whatever the cognitive demands of self-understanding and our ability to meet these demands may be, we can never know more about ourselves than we are existentially willing to face and acknowledge. (shrink)

Book review of Fredrik Westerlund, Heidegger and the Problem of Phenomena (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

Fredrik Svenaeus' book is a delight to read. Not only does he exhibit keen understanding of a wide range of topics and figures in both medicine and philosophy, but he manages to bring them together in an innovative manner that convincingly demonstrates how deeply these two significant fields can be and, in the end, must be mutually enlightening. Medicine, Svenaeus suggests, reveals deep but rarely explicit themes whose proper comprehension invites a careful phenomenological and hermeneutical explication. Certain philosophical approaches, (...) on the other hand - specifically, Heidegger's phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutics - are shown to have a hitherto unrealized potential for making sense of those themes long buried within Western medicine. Richard M. Zaner, Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics, Vanderbilt University. (shrink)

In this theoretical and explorative essay, two issues are discussed, which are based on personal experiences of teaching ethics. The first is what educational purpose does it serve to challenge students as ethical subjects while teaching a class? This issue is mainly discussed through an analysis of Gert Biesta’s works. He argues that an essential purpose for teachers is to enable students to appear as subjects. For this to happen, the teacher must “interrupt” the students by presenting that which challenges (...) his or her basic ethical preconceptions, which in turn forces the student to choose as a subject. However, if the teacher gives priority to such interruptions, s/he risks a conflict with his or her students. That gives rise to the second issue raised in the essay, whether the teacher should express his or her ethical perspectives while teaching ethics. The issue is discussed by analyzing Bruno Latour’s political philosophy. He argues that conflict is an essential feature in any democratic society where everyone’s concerns are presented. For that reason, he argues for the need of public “diplomats,” whose function is to enable an endeavor for peace. As diplomats, both their ethical agency and ability to judge what is worth highlighting is recognized. Thus, the essay concludes that a diplomatic teacher is someone who has the judgement to decide whether his or her ethical perspectives should be highlighted while teaching a class, or if it would disrupt an endeavor for peace. (shrink)

Reviews work on moral judgment motivational internalism from the last two decades.

ABSTRACTThe article sets Christianity into the perspective of contemporary China and its challenges, and discusses the role of intellectuals, from the “Cultural Christians” of the 1980s to the younger generation of “public intellectual” Christians of today. The five scholars represented in this issue are presented and put into context as voices in contemporary Chinese society.

This paper will explore the relationship between selfhood and depression, by focusing upon the lived body's capacity to 'resonate'with the world and thus open up an 'attuned' space of meaning. Persons will become differently tuned in different situations because they embody different patterns of resonance -- what is most often referred to as different temperaments -- but the self may also suffer from idiosyncrasies in mood profile that develop into deficiencies of resonance, making the person in question ill. In many (...) cases of depression one might describe this as a being out of tune in the sense of being oversensitive to the sad, anxious, and boring tune qualities of the world. This phenomenological model allows us to describe a spectrum of various normal sensitivities which might favour certain moods over others, but also to identify pathologies, like depression, in which the body is out of tune and makes the being-in-the-world overwhelmingly unhomelike. (shrink)

In this article I aim at developing a phenomenology ofillness through a critical interpretation of the worksof Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger. The phenomenonof ``Unheimlichkeit'' – uncanniness and unhomelikeness– is demonstrated not only to play a key role in thetheories of Freud and Heidegger, but also toconstitute the essence of the experience of illness.Two different modes of unhomelikeness – ``The minduncanny'' and ``The world uncanny'' – are in thisconnection explored as constitutive parts of thephenomenon of illness. The consequence I draw (...) fromthis analysis is that the mission of health careprofessionals must be not only to cure diseases, butactually, through devoting attention to thebeing-in-the-world of the patient, also to open uppossible paths back to homelikeness. This mission canonly be carried out if medicine acknowledges the basicimportance of the meaning-realm of the patient's life– his or her life-world characteristics. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to analyse the experience of embodiment in illness. Drawing upon Heidegger' sphenomenology and the suggestion that illness can be understood as unhomelike being-in-the-world, I try to show how the way we live our own bodies in illness is experienced precisely as unhomelike. The body is alien, yet, at the same time, myself. It involves biological processes beyond my control, but these processes still belong to me as lived by me. This a priori otherness of the (...) body presents itself in illness in an uncanny and merciless way. The unhomelike breakdown of our everyday being-in-the-world suffered in illness is explored through Heidegger's notion of the world being a “totality of relevance”, a pattern of meaning played out between different “tools”. The lived body is compared to a broken tool that alters and obstruct sour way of being “thrown” and “projecting” ourselves in the meaning patterns of the world through feelings,thoughts and actions. The similarities and differences between this unhomelikeness of illness and the specific unhomelikeness of authentic understanding,reached according to Heidegger in existential anxiety,are discussed. In order to illustrate how the lived body can present itself as “broken” and “other” to its owner, and in what way this unhomelike experience calls for help from health-care professionals, I make use of a clinical example of a severe and common disease: stroke. (shrink)

The relevance of the Aristotelian concept ofphronesis – practical wisdom – for medicine and medical ethics has been much debated during the last two decades. This paper attempts to show how Aristotle’s practical philosophy was of central importance toHans-Georg Gadamer and to the development of his philosophical hermeneutics, and how,accordingly, the concept of phronesiswill be central to a Gadamerian hermeneutics of medicine. If medical practice is conceived of as an interpretative meeting between doctor and patient with the aim of restoring (...) the health of the latter, then phronesis is the mark of the good physician, who through interpretation comes to know the best thing todo for this particular patient at this particular time. The potential fruitfulness of this hermeneutical appropriation of phronesis for the field of medical ethics is also discussed. The concept can be (and has been) used in critiques of the conceptualization of bioethics as the application of principle-based theory to clinical situations, since Aristotle’s point is exactly that problems of praxis cannot be approached in this way. It can also point theway for alternative forms of medical ethics, such as virtue ethics or a phenomenological andhermeneutical ethics. The latter alternative would have to address the phenomena of healthand the good life as issues for medical practice. It would also have to map out in detail the terrain of the medical meeting and the acts of interpretation through which phronesis is exercised. (shrink)

We characterize the expressive power of extensions of Dependence Logic and Independence Logic by monotone generalized quanti ers in terms of quanti er extensions of existential second-order logic.

La teoría depredador-presa sugiere que los depredadores generalistas están vinculados a la estabilidad demográfica de las presas, mientras que los especialistas son desestabilizadores. En este artículo hemos hecho una revisión general de las consecuencias demográficas de diferentes estrategias de depredación y hemos intentado testar la hipótesis de que la caza de subsistencia se produce de forma oportunista, la caza de persecución sería la realizada por depredadores especializados y la caza recreativa por depredadores generalistas. Desde esta hipótesis, la caza de persecución (...) tendría efectos desestabilizadores, mientras que los efectos de la caza de subsistencia y recreativa serían neutrales o estabilizadores. Hemos encontrado poco apoyo empírico para esta hipótesis, pero también es cierto que contamos con escasa información de campo. Los cazadores de recreo principalmente cazan de forma oportunista y la caza de persecución muestra una respuesta funcional de tipo III, es decir, disminuye la intensidad de presas cuando lo hace la abundancia de presas y aumenta dicha intensidad ante cierto nivel de abundancia de presas. Sugerimos que los cazadores de recreo limitan los efectos desestabilizadores sobre las poblaciones de caza y que la caza no es un método eficaz de eliminación completa de especies invasoras. Instamos a la realización de nuevos estudios que cuantifiquen las respuestas de los cazadores a la abundancia de presas, en particular estudios que evalúen las respuestas de los cazadores de subsistencia y la persecución ilegal. (shrink)

We introduce generalized quantifiers, as defined in Tarskian semantics by Mostowski and Lindström, in logics whose semantics is based on teams instead of assignments, e.g., IF-logic and Dependence logic. Both the monotone and the non-monotone case is considered. It is argued that to handle quantifier scope dependencies of generalized quantifiers in a satisfying way the dependence atom in Dependence logic is not well suited and that the multivalued dependence atom is a better choice. This atom is in fact definably equivalent (...) to the independence atom recently introduced by Väänänen and Grädel. (shrink)

In Every Thing Must Go James Ladyman and Don Ross argue for a radical version of naturalistic metaphysics and propose that contemporary analytic metaphysics is detached from science and should be discontinued. The present article addresses the issues of whether science and metaphysics are separable, intuitions and understanding should be excluded from scientific theory, and Ontic Structural Realism satisfies the criteria of the radical version of naturalism advanced by Ladyman and Ross. The point underlying those topics is that successful scientific (...) research presupposes metaphysics, and that basic epistemic virtues common to metaphysics and science may allow us—as opposed to what Ladyman and Ross suggest—to increase our understanding of the world and to put constraints on allowable metaphysical theories. (shrink)

Heidegger’s thoughts on modern technology have received much attention in many disciplines and fields, but, with a few exceptions, the influence has been sparse in biomedical ethics. The reason for this might be that Heidegger’s position has been misinterpreted as being generally hostile towards modern science and technology, and the fact that Heidegger himself never subjected medical technologies to scrutiny but was concerned rather with industrial technology and information technology. In this paper, Heidegger’s philosophy of modern technology is introduced and (...) then brought to bear on medical technology. Its main relevance for biomedical ethics is found to be that the field needs to focus upon epistemological and ontological questions in the philosophy of medicine related to the structure and goal of medical practice. Heidegger’s philosophy can help us to see how the scientific attitude in medicine must always be balanced by and integrated into a phenomenological way of understanding the life-world concerns of patients. The difference between the scientific and the phenomenological method in medicine is articulated by Heidegger as two different ways of studying the human body: as biological organism and as lived body. Medicine needs to acknowledge the priority of the lived body in addressing health as a way of being-in-the-world and not as the absence of disease only. A critical development of Heidegger’s position can provide us with a criterion for distinguishing the uses of medical technologies that are compatible with such an endeavor from the technological projects that are not. (shrink)

This book brings phenomenology, the main player in the continental tradition of philosophy, to bioethics. Medical science and emerging technologies are examined as endeavours that bring enormous possibilities in relieving human suffering but also great risks in transforming our fundamental life views.

Anthropomorphism has long been considered a cardinal error when describing animals. Ethicists have feared the consequences of misrepresenting animals in their reasoning. Recent research within human- animal studies, however, has sophisticated the notion of anthropomorphism. It is suggested that avoiding anthropomorphism merely creates other morphisms, such as mechanomorphism. Instead of avoiding anthropomorphism, it is argued that it is a communicative strategy that should be used critically. Instances of anthropomorphism in animal ethics are analyzed in this paper. Some analogies made between (...) people and non-human animals in present theories of animal ethics are clear instances of psychological anthropomorphism. Other analogies are implicit cases of cultural anthropomorphism. It is argued that animal ethics needs to take the wider discourse of critical anthropomorphism into account in order to sophisticate the understanding and use of anthropomorphic projections. Anthropomorphism is an efficient tool of communication, and it may be made an adequate one as well. (shrink)

This paper investigates the question of what an organ is from a phenomenological perspective. Proceeding from the phenomenology of being-in-the-world developed by Heidegger in Being and Time and subsequent works, it compares the being of the organ with the being of the tool. It attempts to display similarities and differences between the embodied nature of the organs and the way tools of the world are handled. It explicates the way tools belong to the totalities of things of the world that (...) are ready to use and the way organs belong to the totality of a bodily being able to be in this very world. In so doing, the paper argues that while the organ is in some respects similar to a bodily tool, this tool is nonetheless different from the tools of the world in being tied to the organism as a whole, which offers the founding ground of the being of the person. However, from a phenomenological point of view, the line between organs and tools cannot simply be drawn by determining what is inside and outside the physiological borders of the organism. We have, from the beginning of history, integrated technological devices (tools) in our being-in-the-world in ways that make them parts of ourselves rather than parts of the world (more organ- than tool-like), and also, more recently, have started to make our organs more tool-like by visualising, moving, manipulating, and controlling them through medical technology. In this paper, Heidegger’s analysis of organ, tool, and world-making is confronted with this development brought about by contemporary medical technology. It is argued that this development has, to a large extent, changed the phenomenology of the organ in making our bodies more similar to machines with parts that have certain functions and that can be exchanged. This development harbours the threat of instrumentalising our bodily being but also the possibility of curing or alleviating suffering brought about by diseases which disturb and destroy the normal functioning of our organs. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to balance two major conceptual tendencies in science policy studies, continuity and discontinuity theory. While the latter argue for fundamental and distinct changes in science policy in the late 20th century, continuity theorists show how changes do occur but not as abrupt and fundamental as discontinuity theorists suggests. As a point of departure, we will elaborate a typology of scientific governance developed by Hagendijk and Irwin ( 2006 ) and apply it to new empirical (...) material. This makes possible a contextualization of the governance of science related to the codification of the “third assignment” of the Swedish higher education law of 1977. The law defined the relation between university science and Swedish citizens as a dissemination project, and did so despite that several earlier initiatives actually went well beyond such a narrow conceptualisation. Our material reveals continuous interactive and rival arrangements linking the state, public authorities, the universities and private industrial enterprises. We show how different but coexisting modes of governance of science existed in Sweden during the 20th century, in clear contrast with the picture promoted by discontinuity theorists. A close study of the historical development suggests that there were several periods of layered governance when interactions and dynamics associated with continuity as well as discontinuity theories were prevalent. In addition, we conclude that the typology of governance applied in the present paper is fruitful for carrying out historical analyses of the kind embarked upon in spite of certain methodological shortcomings. (shrink)

This article discusses how decentered understandings of addiction might benefit from ongoing debates in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Departing from recent critiques in critical addiction studies, it claims that psychoanalysis offers a framework that both challenges abstract, essentialist ontologies and recognises addiction as a valid phenomenon. Crucial to this framework is a notion of freedom linked to the symbolic break with bodily enjoyment, which, according to Lacan, lies at the origin of the constitution of subjectivity and which neither presupposes the existence of (...) a conscious will nor rejects freedom as a mere product of abstract bio-political governmentality. The article explores how, in Lacanian psychoanalysis, addiction is seen as a way of denying this freedom through the realisation of an enjoyment independent of the symbolic order. Moreover, the article argues that its definition of addiction allows for both a decentered understanding of addiction and a critical challenging of current societal processes of addictification. (shrink)

A large slice of contemporary phenomenology of medicine has been devoted to developing an account of health and illness that proceeds from the first-person perspective when attempting to understand the ill person in contrast and connection to the third-person perspective on his/her diseased body. A proof that this phenomenological account of health and illness, represented by philosophers, such as Drew Leder, Kay Toombs, Havi Carel, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Kevin Aho, and Fredrik Svenaeus, is becoming increasingly influential in philosophy of medicine (...) and medical ethics is the criticism of it that has been voiced in some recent studies. In this article, two such critical contributions, proceeding from radically different premises and backgrounds, are discussed: Jonathan Sholl’s naturalistic critique and Talia Welsh’s Nietzschean critique. The aim is to defend the phenomenological account and clear up misunderstandings about what it amounts to and what we should be able to expect from it. (shrink)

Scientific risk evaluations are constructed by specific evidence, value judgements and biological background assumptions. The latter are the framework-setting suppositions we apply in order to understand some new phenomenon. That background assumptions co-determine choice of methodology, data interpretation, and choice of relevant evidence is an uncontroversial claim in modern basic science. Furthermore, it is commonly accepted that, unless explicated, disagreements in background assumptions can lead to misunderstanding as well as miscommunication. Here, we extend the discussion on background assumptions from basic (...) science to the debate over genetically modified (GM) plants risk assessment. In this realm, while the different political, social and economic values are often mentioned, the identity and role of background assumptions at play are rarely examined. We use an example from the debate over risk assessment of stacked genetically modified plants (GM stacks), obtained by applying conventional breeding techniques to GM plants. There are two main regulatory practices of GM stacks: (i) regulate as conventional hybrids and (ii) regulate as new GM plants. We analyzed eight papers representative of these positions and found that, in all cases, additional premises are needed to reach the stated conclusions. We suggest that these premises play the role of biological background assumptions and argue that the most effective way toward a unified framework for risk analysis and regulation of GM stacks is by explicating and examining the biological background assumptions of each position. Once explicated, it is possible to either evaluate which background assumptions best reflect contemporary biological knowledge, or to apply Douglas' 'inductive risk' argument. (shrink)

According to linguistic conventionalism, necessities are to be explained in terms of the conventionally adopted rules that govern the use of linguistic expressions. A number of influential arguments against this view concerns the ‘Truth-Contrast Thesis’. This is the claim that necessary truths are fundamentally different from contingent ones since they are not made true by ‘the facts’. Instead, they are supposed to be something like ‘true in virtue of meaning’. This thesis is widely held to be a core commitment of (...) the conventionalist position, and the view is frequently rejected on the grounds that this thesis is untenable. I argue that this line of reasoning is mistaken. While the thesis should be rejected, it is not, I argue, entailed by linguistic conventionalism – nor was it invariably accepted by the paradigmatic conventionalists. (shrink)

Debates about the legitimacy of embryonic stem-cell research have largely focused on the type of ethical value that should be accorded to the human embryo in␣vitro. In this paper, I try to show that, to broaden the scope of these debates, one needs to articulate an ontology that does not limit itself to biological accounts, but that instead focuses on the embryo’s place in a totality of relevance surrounding and guiding a human practice. Instead of attempting to substantiate the ethical (...) value of the embryo exclusively by pointing out that it has potentiality for personhood, one should examine the types of practices in which the embryo occurs and focus on the ends inherent to these practices. With this emphasis on context, it becomes apparent that the embryo’s ethical significance can only be understood by elucidating the attitudes that are established towards it in the course of specific activities. The distinction between fertilized embryos and cloned embryos proves to be important in this contextual analysis, since, from the point of view of practice, the two types of embryos appear to belong to different human practices: (assisted) procreation and medical research, respectively. In my arguments, I highlight the concepts of practice, technology, and nature, as they have been analyzed in the phenomenological tradition, particularly by Martin Heidegger. I come to the conclusion that therapeutic cloning should be allowed, provided that it turns out to be a project that benefits medical science in its aim to battle diseases. Important precautions have to be taken, however, in order to safeguard the practice of procreation from becoming perverted by the aims and attitudes of medical science when the two practices intersect. The threat in question needs to be taken seriously, since it concerns the structure and goal of practices which are central to our very self understanding as human beings. (shrink)

In discussions of Fitch’s paradox, it is usually assumed without further argument that knowledge is factive, that if a subject knows that p, then p is true. It is argued that this common assumption is not as well-founded as it should be, and that there in fact are certain reasons to be suspicious of the unrestricted version of the factiveness claim. There are two kinds of reason for this suspicion. One is that unrestricted factiveness leads to paradoxes and unexpected results, (...) the other is that the usual arguments for factiveness are not as compelling as is commonly thought. There may in fact be some kinds of contexts, where factiveness doesn’t hold for knowledge—the usual arguments for factiveness don’t suffice to support the claim that knowledge is unrestrictedly factive. Perhaps all that can be shown is that knowledge is at times factive, or that it is default factive, as it were: this doesn’t show that there can’t be counterexamples, however. Certain aspects of knowledge without unrestricted factiveness are examined briefly. (shrink)

According to possibilism, or non-actualism, fictional characters are possible individuals. Possibilist accounts of fiction do not only assign the intuitively correct truth-conditions to sentences in a fiction, but has the potential to provide powerful explanatory models for a wide range of phenomena associated with fiction (though these two aspects of possibilism are, I argue, crucially distinct). Apart from the classic defense by David Lewis the idea of modeling fiction in terms of possible worlds have been widely criticized. In this article, (...) I provide a defense of a possibilist account against some lines of criticism. To do so, I assume that names for fictional characters are directly referential and a possible-worlds model that accommodates transworld identity. On this background, I argue, it is possible to construct an elegant model of fictional discourse using familiar models of information exchange in ordinary discourse, and I sketch how this model can be used to i) make a natural distinction between fictional and counterfactual discourse, ii) account for creativity, and iii) sustain a natural definition of truth-in-fiction that avoids certain familiar objections to possibilism. Though I set aside questions about the metaphysical commitments of a possible-world interpretation here, there is accordingly reason to think that the battle over possibilist treatments of fiction will have to be fought over metaphysical foundations rather than technical shortcomings. (shrink)

Though it is often claimed that some general terms are rigid designators, it has turned out to be difficult to give a satisfying definition that avoids making all general terms rigid, and even if a non-rigid reading is available, makes that non-rigid reading matter. Several authors have attempted to develop examples that meet the trivialization challenge, with Martí and Martínez-Fernández providing what is, perhaps, the most convincing strategy. I show that the type of example Martí and Martínez-Fernández offer nevertheless fails (...) to meet the trivialization challenge and, accordingly, that we should still have serious doubts about whether continuing the search for a non-trivial definition of general term rigidity would be fruitful. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSome suggest that the duty of humanitarian intervention should be discharged by states that are historically responsible for the occurrence of violence. A fundamental problem with this suggestion is that historically responsible states might be ill-suited to intervene because they are unlikely to enjoy support from the local population. Cécile Fabre has suggested a way around that problem, arguing that responsible states ought to pay for humanitarian interventions even though they ought not to take part in the military operations. We (...) claim that Fabre’s idea is subject to two concerns. First, the duty to perform might not be appropriately transferrable from the historically responsible state to another state because it would allow the primary duty bearer to escape the worst costs of intervention. Second, an intervention might be as unlikely to generate local support when a historically responsible state pays for an intervention as when it performs it. These problems are enough to cast doubt on Fabr... (shrink)

This article develops a phenomenology of suffering with an emphasis on matters relevant to medical practice and bioethics. An attempt is made to explain how suffering can involve many different things—bodily pains, inability to carry out everyday actions, and failure to realize core life values—and yet be a distinct phenomenon. Proceeding from and expanding upon analyses found in the works of Eric Cassell and Elaine Scarry, suffering is found to be a potentially alienating mood overcoming the person and engaging her (...) in a struggle to remain at home in the face of loss of meaning and purpose in life. Suffering involves painful experiences at different levels that are connected through the suffering-mood but are nevertheless distinguishable by being primarily about my embodiment, my engagements in the world together with others, and my core life values. Suffering is in essence a feeling , but as such, it has implications for and involves the person’s entire life: how she acts in the world, communicates with others, and understands and looks upon her priorities and goals in life. Suffering-moods are typically intense and painful in nature, but they may also display a rather subconscious quality in presenting things in the world and my life as a whole in an alienating way. In such situations, we are not focused directly upon the suffering-mood—as in the cases of pain and other bodily ailments—but rather, upon the things that the mood presents to us: not only our bodies, but also other things in the world that prevent us from having a good life and being the persons we want to be. Such suffering may in many cases be transformed or at least mitigated by a person’s identifying and changing her core life values and in such a manner reinterpreting her life story to become an easier and more rewarding one to live under the present circumstances. (shrink)

In this paper we give an axiomatisation of the concept of a computability structure with partial sequences on a many-sorted metric partial algebra, thus extending the axiomatisation given by Pour-El and Richards in [9] for Banach spaces. We show that every Banach-Mazur computable partial function from an effectively separable computable metric partial Σ-algebra A to a computable metric partial Σ-algebra B must be continuous, and conversely, that every effectively continuous partial function with semidecidable domain and which preserves the computability of (...) a computably enumerable dense set must be computable. Finally, as an application of these results we give an alternative proof of the first main theorem for Banach spaces first proved by Pour-El and Richards. (shrink)

In this paper we give an axiomatisation of the concept of a computability structure with partial sequences on a many‐sorted metric partial algebra, thus extending the axiomatisation given by Pour‐El and Richards in [9] for Banach spaces. We show that every Banach‐Mazur computable partial function from an effectively separable computable metric partial Σ‐algebraAto a computable metric partial Σ‐algebraBmust be continuous, and conversely, that every effectively continuous partial function with semidecidable domain and which preserves the computability of a computably enumerable dense (...) set must be computable. Finally, as an application of these results we give an alternative proof of the first main theorem for Banach spaces first proved by Pour‐El and Richards. (© 2004 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim). (shrink)