This paper proposes a new perspective on the methodology of qualitative inquiry in ethics, especially the interaction between empirical work and theory development, and introduces standards to evaluate the quality of this inquiry and its findings. The kind of qualitative inquiry the authors are proposing brings to light what participants in practices of care and welfare do and refrain from doing, and what they undergo, in order to offer ‘stepping stones’, political-ethical insights that originate in the practice studied and enable (...) practitioners to deal with newly emerging moral issues. As the authors’ aim is to study real-life complexity of inevitably morally imprinted care processes, their empirical material typically consists of extensive and comprehensive descriptions of exemplary cases. For their research aim the number of cases is not decisive, as long as the rigorous analysis of the cases studied provides innovative theoretical insights into the practice studied. Another quality criterion of what they propose that should be called ‘N=N case studies’ is the approval the findings receive from the participants in the practice studied. (shrink)

Learning to work as a relational caring professional in healthcare and social welfare, is foremost a process of transformative learning, of Building, of professional subjectification. In this article we contribute to the design of such a process of formation by presenting a structured map of five domains of formational goals. It is mainly informed by many years of care-ethical research and training of professionals in healthcare and social work. The five formational domains are:Relational Caring Approach,Perception,Knowledge,Interpretation, andPractical Wisdom. The formation process, (...) described as the recurring detour of a continuing practice, requires ‘exposure’, in-depth learning and learning communities. Relational caring—care consequently resulting from and structured by relational thinking, exploring, and steering—requires ‘inquiry’ as a continuous learning process in practice. The process is ultimately aimed at fostering mature, competent, and practically wise professional caregivers who are able to relationally connect with and attune to care receivers, and adequately navigate existential, moral, and political-institutional tensions in relational caring in complex organizations in Late-Modern society. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic is a tragedy for those who have been hard hit worldwide. At the same time, it is also a test of concepts and practices of what good care is and requires, and how quality of care can be accounted for. In this paper, we present our Care-Ethical Model of Quality Enquiry and apply it to the case of residential care for older people in the Netherlands during the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of thinking about care in healthcare and (...) social welfare as a set of separate care acts, we think about care as a complex practice of relational caring, crossed by other practices. Instead of thinking about professional caregivers as functionaries obeying external rules, we think about them as practically wise professionals. Instead of thinking about developing external quality criteria and systems, we think about cultivating reflective quality awareness. Instead of abstracting from societal forces that make care possible but also limit it, we acknowledge them and find ways to deal with them. Based on these critical insights, the CEMQUE model can be helpful to describe, interrogate, evaluate, and improve existing care practices. It has four entries: the care receiver considered from their humanness, the caregiver considered from their solicitude, the care facility considered from its habitability and the societal, institutional and scholarly context considered from the perspective of the good life, justice and decency. The crux is enabling all these different entries with all their different aspects to be taken into account. In Corona times this turns out to be more crucial than ever. (shrink)

Recent publications have argued that practical wisdom is increasingly important for medical practices, particularly in complex contexts, to stay focused on giving good care in a moral sense to each individual patient. Our empirical investigation into an ordinary medical practice was aimed at exploring whether the practice would reveal practical wisdom, or, instead, adherence to conventional frames such as guidelines, routines and the dominant professional discourse. We performed a thematic analysis both of the medical files of a complex patient and (...) her daughter’s diary. We did find practical wisdom, but only sporadically, whereas it has proved to be essential for professional care. This deficit appeared to result from several factors like: the organization of the practice; established routines; a hierarchical culture; and a traditional medical discourse. Moreover, we discerned various negative consequences. More empirical research into practical wisdom in everyday medical practices is needed for the benefit of professional and morally good care for every patient. (shrink)

This article is about caregivers being attentive to patients in healthcare. From earlier work on the understanding of the other, we know that it is impossible to completely understand the experiences of others. By the sharing of subjectivity—intersubjectivity—we may try to ‘grasp’ the other’s point of view. However, we can never assume that the same experience produces the same experience. Now, if it is principally impossible to understand the experience of one another, and if paying attention always implies an understanding (...) of what to pay attention to, then how is it possible to be attentive to the experiences of those who are entirely at the mercy of our care? How can caregivers perceive the impossibility of understanding the experiences of patients as an appeal to be attentive to their experiences? This is discussed in this article. It departs from the authors being confronted with inexplicabilities in the empirical study of attentiveness in healthcare. It presents two examples and discusses the meaning of these emergent properties. This leads to a discussion of the existent literature on the indefiniteness and openness of attentiveness. It becomes clear why, although we can understand and predict much of it, attentiveness will always be characterized by a certain uncontrollability as well. (shrink)

We have a certain fascination with the incredible untapped potential of our minds. Some studies once suggested that we use only 10% of the mind's capacity. Today that estimate has been revised to about 2%-3%. Imagine what more we could do with all of that as yet unrealized potential. What is standing in our way? How do we move into a more full realization of who we are? These are the questions that this book seeks to answer.

This article builds on collaborative research (observations, interviews, and writing and reflection workshops) conducted on Early Childhood Educators (ECEs). The text studies the inclusive education efforts of ECEs within early childhood centers. In this setting, the educational and care work carried out raises the question of encounters with others. Inclusive education places children, families, and ECE in liminal or in-between spaces. ECEs have to reconcile the similarities and differences between young children and their parents within early childhood centers. As a (...) result, certain points of rupture and convergence emerge between ECEs and families. The active involvement of ECEs appears to be a key component of this professional posture so conducive to inclusive education. (shrink)

The exchange of ideas between nations during the Enlightenment was greatly facilitated by cultural ventures, commercial enterprise and scientific collaboration. But how were they exchanged? What were the effects of these exchanges on the idea or artefact being transferred? Focussing on contact between England, France and Ireland, a team of specialists explores the translation, appropriation and circulation of cultural products and scientific ideas during the Enlightenment. Through analysis of literary and artistic works, periodicals and official writings contributors uncover: the key (...) role played by literary translators and how they adapted, naturalized and sometimes distorted plays and novels to conform to new cultural norms; the effects of eighteenth-century anglomania, and how this was manifested in French art; how the vagaries of international politics and conflict affected both the cultural products themselves and the modes of dissemination; how religious censorship engendered new Irish Catholic and French Huguenot diasporas, with their particular intellectual pursuits and networks of exchan≥ the significance of newspapers and periodicals in disseminating new knowledge and often radical philosophical ideas. By exploring both broad areas of cultural activity and precise examples of cultural transfer, contributors to Intellectual journeys reveal the range and complexity of intellectual exchange and its role in the formation of a truly transnational Enlightenment. (shrink)

Client participation in elderly care organizations requires shifting traditional power relations and establishing communicative action that involves the lifeworlds of clients and professionals alike. This article describes a particular form of client participation in which one client was part of a team of professionals in a residential care home. Their joint remit was to plan the implementation of a new personal care file for residents. We describe the interactions within this team through an ethnodrama, based on participant observations and the (...) embodied presence of the researcher (first author). The narratives and voices of all team members are dramatized in this ethnodrama. Throughout the project the team members experienced confusion relating to the confrontation between lifeworld and system, as experienced by the client and professionals in the team. We analyze these tensions by making use of a Habermasian theoretical framework. We conclude that forms for collective client participation in residential care homes should be developed based on communicative action between clients and professionals, with room for emotional engagement. (shrink)

The history of the phrase absolute music has been studied by many theorists of music and music historians, while historians of philosophy proved to be rather reluctant to such syncretic concept. However, absolute music is exactly the case of non-philosophical appropriation of a philosophical category, which fits theoretical framework of the studies in intellectual history. Initial exploration on the synthesis of history of philosophy and musicology and music history has shown that the conceptual field of intellectual history enables the transition (...) from abstract ideas to concrete social history of thought. It is proved that "absolute music" is not an authentic concept of music culture of the nineteenth century, but rather a good invention of new musical hermeneutics, which defined a period in the development of music and paradigm of concepts that characterized autonomy of musical form. The subject of historical and philosophical studies of the phrase "absolute music" lies in transformation of a philosophical term into a unit of aesthetic discourse, and later its reincarnation in the concept of musical historiosophy. Both philosophical and musicological approaches to the history of absolute music are based on the assumption that only theoretically relevant assertions and judgments appeal to the hermeneutic reconstruction and generalization, whereas political and social references of the discourse of absolute music can be left aside. So futher research shall focus on possibilities of how to reach the concrete social background of that form of thinking which employs the idiom absolute music. (shrink)

Architecture and urbanism seem to be »weak« disciplines, constantly struggling for a better understanding of their nature and disciplinary borders. The huge amount of metaphors appearing in the discourse of both not only reference to their creative nature but also indicate their weakness and the missing piece strengthening their own understanding: a definition of space for architecture and of city for urbanism. But using metaphors in this field implies a problem - though metaphors achieve to bring opposites together, there remains (...) the question how literal they can actually become in order to relate to these subjects properly. In this volume, several authors from various fields using different approaches discuss this question. (shrink)

This paper discusses Freud's model of the psychical apparatus in the “Project”, and concludes that it is a remarkably sophisticated work which even today is still highly relevant to neuropsychological theorising. Freud rejects the notion that what happens in the brain can be clearly localised in space and time. This anticipates the notion of a distributed system found in recent developments in computing (“neural net works”) and in Derrida's conception of systems characterised by différance. Every part of such a system (...) is constituted by its relation to the rest of the system. Although such systems are spatio-temporal, processes occur ring in them can not be pinpointed in space and time. Against the common charge that Freud has a passive hydraulic-reflex model of the psychical apparatus, the authors argue that Freud presents it as an open, complex, self-organising system. Ricoeur's (1972) claim that the model of the psychical apparatus in the “Project” is essentially solipsistic, is accordingly rejected. In conclusion the authors explain why they prefer the model in the “Project” to the more linear model found in Ch. VII of the Traumdeutung. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.20(3) 2001: 1- 21. (shrink)

This is a review article of Ross (2005), a book which attempts to show the implications of cognitive science and economics for each other. Ross makes neoclassical economics central to the unification of the behavioural sciences, and defends its fundamental health against its critics. He locates the source of the empirical and conceptual problems besetting neoclassical economics in the mistaken assumption that the economic agents neoclassicism talks about refer directly to real, whole people. Ross argues that people are atypical as (...) economic agents; bugs and other non-social animals are much more typical, and neoclassical economics applies to them in a straightforward way. How then does economics apply to the atypical agents that people are? Ross’s answer builds on Ainslie (2001), who models people as being the result of strategic interactions between successive economic agents, and on Glimcher’s (2003) work on the neuroeconomics of game playing in monkeys which, Ross argues, can be extrapolated to humans. The author is impressed by the boldness of Ross’s vision, and the arguments offered to support it. However, doubts remain about Ross’s theory of the self, the lifespan of the proposed successive economic agents out of which real people are composed, the implicit suggestion that in economics approximations can be overcome, and finally the conclusiveness of Ross’s case against the need for revolutionary reappraisals of neoclassical economics. (shrink)

This paper gives a sketch for a reconstruction of the Freudian unconscious, and an argument for its existence. The strategy followed attempts to side-step the extended debates about the validity of Freud's methods and conclusions, by basing itself on the desire/belief schema for understanding and explaining human behaviour – a schema neither folk psychology nor scientific psychology can do without. People are argued to have, as ideal types, two fundamental modes of fulfilling their desires: engaging with reality, and wishful thinking. (...) The first mode tries to acknowledge the constraints reality imposes on the satisfaction of desires, while the second mode tries to ignore, deny or disguise these constraints, inasmuch as they threaten to make such satisfaction impossible or unfeasible. Crucially, wishful thinking can be used so as to ignore or deny any desire that is incompatible with other strong desires. Thus we end up unaware of the existence or nature of some of our desires, of the fact that they are in flu enc ing our thought and be hav iour, and of the process our own mind has used to thwart awareness of them. Once we acknowledge this possibility, we are already seriously entertaining the possibility of the Freudian unconscious, or something fairly close to it. The more aware the subject is that her wishful thinking is just that, the less effective it becomes. Wishful thinking thus requires an unconscious; it is inimical to a clear, complete and unambiguous acknowledgement of its own status. Next, various aspects of my account (and Freud's) that allow a conception of the unconscious in non-Cartesian terms are emphasised: the unconscious is largely constituted by semantic phenomena of a particular type: forms of representation which would conceal their meaning even if the full light of 'attention', Cartesian 'consciousness' or 'introspection' were cast upon them. If wishful thinking is an integral part of mental life, philosophers and others wishing to “educate humanity” will have to proceed differently from what would have been appropriate had rational thought and action been the only available option for satisfying desires. Mankind cannot bear too much reality – T.S. Eliot S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.22(4) 2003: 361-377. (shrink)

Pharmakologisches „cognition enhancement“ zielt auf die Verbesserung der geistigen Leistungsfähigkeit mithilfe von Präparaten, die primär als Medikamente eingesetzt werden. Der Beitrag befasst sich mit der ethischen Bewertung des Gebrauchs von Stimulanzien als „enhancer“ durch Kinder und Jugendliche. Am Beispiel von Diagnose und Behandlung der Aufmerksamkeitsdefizit-Hyperaktivitätsstörung (ADHS) werden die Schwierigkeiten der Abgrenzung von Therapie und Enhancement beschrieben und daraus auf verschiedenen Ebenen ethisch relevante Fragen bezüglich Cognition enhancement entwickelt. Diese betreffen z. B. die Wirkungen von Stimulanzien auf ein sich entwickelndes System (...) und eine mögliche grundlegende Änderung der Erziehungs- und Sozialisationssituation durch pharmakologisches Enhancement, aber auch das Problem der Normierung von Verhalten und der Einschränkung der Autonomie der Betroffenen. Die vorgestellten Überlegungen geben Anlass, Cognition enhancement durch Stimulanzien im Jugendbereich vorläufig kritisch zu beurteilen. (shrink)

If climate change represents a severe threat to humankind, why then is response to it characterized by inaction at all levels? The authors argue there are two complementary explanations for the lack of motivation. First, our moral judgment system appears to be unable to identify climate change as an important moral problem and there are pervasive doubts about the agency of individuals. This explanation, however, is incomplete: Individual emitters can effectively be held morally responsible for their luxury emissions. Second, doubts (...) about individual agency have become overly emphasized and fail to convincingly exonerate individuals from responsibility. This book extends the second explanation for the motivational gap, namely that the arguments for the lack of individual agency do in fact correspond to mechanisms of moral disengagement. The use of these mechanisms enables consumption elites to maintain their consumptive lifestyles without having to accept moral responsibility for their luxury emissions. (shrink)

Straipsnio tikslas – ištirti Latvijos filosofijos istoriografijos tendencijas per pastaruosius tris dešimtmečius. Autoriaus dėmesio centre dvi pagrindinės filosofijos istorijos rašymo prieigos – idėjų istorija ir intelektinė istorija. Iširus Sovietų Sąjungai Latvijos kultūriniame diskurse išpopuliarėjo terminas „idėjų istorija“. Filosofijos istorikai ėmėsi nušviesti glaudžius ryšius tarp Vakarų šalių ir Latvijos kultūrų. Tačiau pastarąjį dešimtmetį Latvijos filosofijos istorikai vis labiau renkasi intelektinės istorijos prieigą.

Freivalds defined an acceptable programming system independent criterion for learning programs for functions in which the final programs were required to be both correct and "nearly" minimal size, i.e., within a computable function of being purely minimal size. Kinber showed that this parsimony requirement on final programs limits learning power. However, in scientific inference, parsimony is considered highly desirable. A lim-computablefunction is (by definition) one calculable by a total procedure allowed to change its mind finitely many times about its output. (...) Investigated is the possibility of assuaging somewhat the limitation on learning power resulting from requiring parsimonious final programs by use of criteria which require the final, correct programs to be "not-so-nearly" minimal size, e.g., to be within a lim-computable function of actual minimal size. It is shown that some parsimony in the final program is thereby retained, yet learning power strictly increases. Considered, then, are lim-computable functions as above but for which notations for constructive ordinals are used to bound the number of mind changes allowed regarding the output. This is a variant of an idea introduced by Freivalds and Smith. For this ordinal notation complexity bounded version of lim-computability, the power of the resultant learning criteria form finely graded, infinitely ramifying, infinite hierarchies intermediate between the computable and the lim-computable cases. Some of these hierarchies, for the natural notations determining them, are shown to be optimally tight. (shrink)

Since the beginning ofthe 1980s, successive Belgian governments have pursued a social security policy that is a combination of cutting social expenditure on the one hand and improving the plight of lower income categories among benefit recipients on the other. This has been realised by means of a strategy of 'targeting within universalism ', i.e. improving the benefits for the poor and restricting them for the better off, but without abolishing the entitlements oft he latter category completely. The Belgian experience (...) puts inperspective the 'middle class matters' argument, which predicts that, if cuts are made in social expenditure,the middle classes will use their political resources to defend the provisions they benefit from and to diminish the benefits reserved for the poor. (shrink)

This article gives a survey of results of research concerning effects of public policy in the Netherlands. This survey is preceded by a summary of some important American projects.The Dutch research reported concerns effects of educational and housing policy on income distribution, effects of sururbanization policy, participation policy, and still other policies.In both countries the dominant conclusion is that the goals of public policy are at least partially realized by the means chosen. However, the conclusion that the welf are state (...) is totally f ailing would go to f ar.Research concerning effects of public policy is still rare. Moreover, it is clear that some goals are realized at least in part by the chosen means.When public policy appears not to be effective, this can be explained from several factors : the contents of policy and the underlying theory, the policy process, the society, the research, and a view which is toonarrow because it takes only short term effects of one particular policy program into account. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to shape a theoretical framework of attentiveness in care, which may function as a background to study attentiveness in a health care setting empirically. More insight into the functions, forms, and aspects of attentiveness in a particular health care setting is important, as there is a lack of indicators and criteria that enable a sharp picture of the caring side of health provision. The concept of attentiveness and its relation to care have seldom been (...) examined thoroughly and broadly. This article argues that attentiveness is constitutive for good care, as it can create a space in which a relationship may arise. (shrink)

The ego-focus of pioneer women on the South African frontier, 1760–1860, reflects distinct traits of mystical spirituality. The pioneer spirituality of women on the borders increasinglycame to expression in ego-texts with experiential inclinations. The leaning towards Jesuscentredmystical spirituality developed parallel to pietistic tendencies in Holland and Germany,and allegorical and tropological applications of the bridal metaphors in the Song of Songsformed a distinct element of female pietism on the frontier. Women believers in the interiorfavoured tropological applications of bridal metaphors in the (...) Song of Songs. The popularity ofsuch tropological applications can firstly be attributed to the physical conditions under whichpioneer women found themselves. Secondly, the availability of German pietistic workscontributed towards the religious culture of mystical and individualistic readings of bridalmetaphors in the Song of Songs. Tropological readings of the Song of Songs’ bridal metaphorsare traced to the theology of Bernard of Clairvaux particularly and other pre-reformationalmystical sources. (shrink)