Contributors to this volume demonstrate how the ethics of care factors into a variety of social policies and institutions, and can indeed be useful in thinking about a number of different social problems. Divided into two sections, the first looks at care as a model for an evaluative framework that rethinks social institutions, liberal society, and citizenship at a basic conceptual level. The second explores care values in the context of specific social practices or settings, as a framework that should (...) guide thinking. (shrink)

This paper is motivated by the increasing popularity of efficient designs for stated choice experiments. The objective in efficient designs is to create a stated choice experiment that minimizes the standard errors of the estimated parameters. In order to do so, such designs require specifying prior values for the parameters to be estimated. While there is significant literature demonstrating the efficiency improvements of employing efficient designs, the bulk of the literature tests conditions where the priors used to generate the efficient (...) design are assumed to be accurate. However, there is substantially less literature that compares how different design types perform under varying degree of error of the prior. The literature that does exist assumes small fractions are used, which is in contrast to computer-aided surveys that readily allow for large fractions. Further, the results in the literature are abstract in that there is no reference point to provide clear insight on the magnitude of any issue. Our objective is to analyze the robustness of different designs within a typical stated choice experiment context of a trade-off between price and quality. We use as an example transportation mode choice, where the key parameter to estimate is the value of time. Within this context, we test many designs to examine how robust efficient designs are against a misspecification of the prior parameters. The simple mode choice setting allows for insightful visualizations of the designs themselves and also an interpretable reference point for the range in which each design is robust. Not surprisingly, the D-efficient design is most efficient in the region where the true population VOT is near the prior used to generate the design: the prior is $20/h and the efficient range is $10–$30/h. However, the D-efficient design quickly becomes the most inefficient outside of this range, and the estimation significantly degrades above $50/h. The orthogonal and random designs are robust for a much larger range of VOT. The robustness of Bayesian efficient designs varies depending on the variance that the prior assumes. Implementing two-stage designs that first use a small sample to estimate priors are also not robust relative to uninformative designs. Arguably, the random design performs as well as any design, and it will perform even better if data cleaning is done to remove choice tasks where one alternative dominates the other. (shrink)

When the COVID-19 surge hit New York City hospitals, the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College, and our affiliated ethics consultation services, faced waves of ethical issues sweeping forward with intensity and urgency. In this article, we describe our experience over an eight-week period (16 March through 10 May 2020), and describe three types of services: clinical ethics consultation (CEC); service practice communications/interventions (SPCI); and organizational ethics advisement (OEA). We tell this narrative through the prism of time, (...) describing the evolution of ethical issues and trends as the pandemic unfolded. We delineate three phases: anticipation and preparation, crisis management, and reflection and adjustment. The first phase focused predominantly on ways to address impending resource shortages and to plan for remote ethics consultation, and CECs focused on code status discussions with surrogates. The second phase was characterized by the dramatic convergence of a rapid increase in the number of critically ill patients, a growing scarcity of resources, and the reassignment/ redeployment of staff outside their specialty areas. The third phase was characterized by the recognition that while the worst of the crisis was waning, its medium- and long-term consequences continued to pose immense challenges. We note that there were times during the crisis that serving in the role of clinical ethics consultant created a sense of dis-ease as novel as the coronavirus itself. In retrospect we learned that our activities far exceeded the familiar terrain of clinical ethics consultation and extended into other spheres of organizational life in novel ways that were unanticipated before this pandemic. To that end, we defined and categorized a middle level of ethics consultation, which we have termed service practice communication intervention (SPCI). This is an underappreciated dimension of the work that ethics consult services are capable of in times of crisis. We believe that the pandemic has revealed the many enduring ways that ethics consultation services can more robustly contribute to the ethical life of their institutions moving forward. (shrink)

It may be the case that the most challenging moral problem of the twenty‐first century will be the relationship between the individual moral agent and the practices and institutions in which the moral agent is embedded. In this paper, we continue the efforts that one of us, Joan Liaschenko, first called for in 1993, that of using feminist ethics as a lens for viewing the relationship between individual nurses as moral agents and the highly complex institutions in which they (...) do the work of nursing. Feminist ethics, with its emphasis on the inextricable relationship between ethics and politics, provides a useful lens to understand the work of nurses in context. Using Margaret Urban Walker's and Hilde Lindemann's concepts of identity, relationships, values, and moral agency, we argue that health care institutions can be moral communities and profoundly affect the work and identity and, therefore, the moral agency of all who work within those structures, including nurses. Nurses are not only shaped by these organizations but also have the power to shape them. Because moral agency is intimately connected to one's identity, moral identity work is essential for nurses to exercise their moral agency and to foster moral community in health care organizations. We first provide a brief history of nursing's morally problematic relationship with institutions and examine the impact institutional master narratives and corporatism exert today on nurses’ moral identities and agency. We close by emphasizing the significance of ongoing dialogue in creating and sustaining moral communities, repairing moral identities, and strengthening moral agency. (shrink)

A standard view in ethics is that ethical issues concern a different range of human concerns than does politics. This essay goes beyond the long-standing dispute about the extent to which applied ethics needs a commitment to ethical theory. It argues that regardless of the outcome of that dispute, applied ethics, because it presumes something about the nature of authority, rests upon and is implicated in political theory. After internalist and externalist accounts of applied ethics are described, “mixed” approaches are (...) considered that contain inevitable political dimensions. A feminist alternative, Walker’s metaethic of responsibility, shows that authority is best understood as relational and that situations of unequal power are therefore often the places where applied ethics arises. Furthermore, in a democratic society, commitments to democracy should shape the account of authority, and, thus, the nature of applied ethics as well. (shrink)

Feminist philosophy emerged in earnest in the 1970s. With that emergence and the latest surge of the Women's Movement now a quarter of a century old and with the turn of the century approaching quickly, the Society for Philosophy and Public Affairs and the Pacific Society for Women in Philosophy invited a group of feminist philosophers to reflect on feminism and philosophy as we approach the millennium. A roundtable was held at the 1995 meeting of the Pacific Division of the (...) American Philosophical Association, and much of the content of that session is included in this Symposium. The discussants include scholars with research interests across the traditional areas of philosophy (e.g., metaphysics and epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, history of philosophy, and philosophy of science), as well as not so traditional areas (e.g., lesbian philosophy). Each participant was asked to take ten minutes to focus on whatever she thought might be useful to discuss in a forum designed for taking stock of feminism and philosophy in the mid‐1990s. The contributors are Louise Antony, Joan Callahan (introduction), Claudia Card, Ruth Ginzberg, Martha Nussbaum, Naomi Scheman, Laurie Schrage, Nancy Tuana, Margaret Walker, and Charlotte Witt. (shrink)

Moral distress has been written about extensively in nursing and other fields. Often, however, it has not been used with much theoretical depth. This paper focuses on theorizing moral distress using feminist ethics, particularly the work of Margaret Urban Walker and Hilde Lindemann. Incorporating empirical findings, we argue that moral distress is the response to constraints experienced by nurses to their moral identities, responsibilities, and relationships. We recommend that health professionals get assistance in accounting for and communicating their values (...) and responsibilities in situations of moral distress. We also discuss the importance of nurses creating “counterstories” of their work as knowledgeable and trustworthy professionals to repair their damaged moral identities, and, finally, we recommend that efforts toward shifting the goal of health care away from the prolongation of life at all costs to the relief of suffering to diminish the moral distress that is a common response to aggressive care at end-of-life. (shrink)

A prominent figure in the Twin Cities art scene, Chris Faust marks the essence of the changing Midwestern landscape by documenting common scenes in an uncommon way. Known for his spectacular panoramic work, Faust is also increasingly admired for his unique night photographs, where he quietly unveils a world we never noticed was there and when the darkest hours evoke a mood of mystery and surrealism. The palette of light and shadow heightens our senses by revealing the stillness and ambiguities (...) of the landscape. Nocturnes, a beautiful collection of more than seventy tritone photographs, is a visual record of our world as few ever see it: during the nighttime hours. Emphasizing the passage of time as well as the necessity for change, the images reflect our disappearing rural terrain, abandoned urban streets, and aging industrial spaces, recalling aspects of our culture that are quickly fading into the past. With an affinity for certain old-world practices and tools, Faust works just with ambient light and uses no digital or electronic technology—only classic darkroom processing—allowing all the subtle textures and tones to emerge in his work. Faust’s photographs of the Midwest are shot in a panoramic format with wide, detailed images—spectacular in both their artistry and documentary impact. Chris Faust, a resident of St. Paul, is one of Minnesota’s finest photographers. His award-winning images are widely collected and exhibited throughout the region and the country. Joan Rothfuss is a writer and art historian who was curator of the Walker Art Center for more than seventeen years. She was coeditor of the Walker collection catalogue Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole. (shrink)

The need for informed analyses of health policy is now greater than ever. The twelve essays in this volume show that public debates routinely bypass complex ethical, sociocultural, historical, and political questions about how we should address ideals of justice and equality in health care. Integrating perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and public health, this volume illuminates the relationships between justice and health inequalities to enrich debates. Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice explores three questions: How do scholars approach (...) relations between health inequalities and ideals of justice? When do justice considerations inform solutions to health inequalities, and how do specific health inequalities affect perceptions of injustice? And how can diverse scholarly approaches contribute to better health policy? From addressing patient agency in an inequitable health care environment to examining how scholars of social justice and health care amass evidence, this volume promotes a richer understanding of health and justice and how to achieve both. -/- The contributors are Judith C. Barker, Paula Braveman, Paul Brodwin, Jami Suki Chang, Debra DeBruin, Leslie A. Dubbin, Sarah Horton, Carla C. Keirns, J. Paul Kelleher, Nicholas B. King, Eva Feder Kittay, Joan Liaschenko, Anne Drapkin Lyerly, Mary Faith Marshall, Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Jennifer Prah Ruger, and Janet K. Shim. (shrink)

The ethical ‘eye’ of nursing, that is, the particular moral vision and values inherent in nursing work, is constrained by the preoccupations and practices of the superordinate biomedical structure in which nursing as a practice discipline is embedded. The intimate, situated knowledge of particular persons who construct and attach meaning to their health experience in the presence of and with the active participation of the nurse, is the knowledge that provides the evidence for nurses’ ethical decision making. It is largely (...) invisible to all but other nurses. Two nurse researchers, Joan Liaschenko of the University of Minnesota and Patricia Rodney of the University of Victoria, have investigated the ethical concerns of practising nurses and noted in their separate enquiries the invisible nature of critical aspects of nursing work. Noting the similarities in their respective observations, and with the feminist ethics of Margaret Urban Walker as a theoretical framework, this article examines the concept of ‘invisibility’ as it relates to nursing work and nursing ethics. (shrink)

Metaphysics, morals and science -- The classics : value -- The neo-classics : utility -- The Keynesian revolution -- Development and under-development -- What are the rules of the game?

The authors developed this textbook in response to an increasing interest in ethics, and a growing number of courses on this topic that are now being offered in educational leadership programs. It is designed to fill a gap in instructional materials for teaching the ethics component of the knowledge base that has been established for the profession. The text has several purposes: First, it demonstrates the application of different ethical paradigms (the ethics of justice, care, critique, and the profession) through (...) discussion and analysis of real-life moral dilemmas that educational leaders face in their schools and communities. Second, it addresses some of the practical, pedagogical, and curricular issues related to the teaching of ethics for educational leaders. Third, it emphasizes the importance of ethics instruction from a variety of theoretical approaches. Finally, it provides a process that instructors might follow to develop their own ethics unit or course. * Part I provides an overview of why ethics is so important, especially for today's educational leaders, and describes a multiparadigm approach essential to practitioners as they grapple with ethical dilemmas. * Part II deals with the dilemmas themselves. Ethical dilemmas written by the authors' graduate students bring readers face-to-face with the kinds of dilemmas faced by practicing administrators in urban, suburban, and rural settings in an era full of complexities and contradictions. * Part III focuses on pedagogy and provides teaching notes for the instructor. The authors discuss the importance of self-reflection on the part of both instructors and students, and model how they thought through their own personal and professional ethical codes as well as reflected upon the critical incidents in their lives that shaped their teaching and frequently determined what they privileged in class. (shrink)

In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work.jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational (...) thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men's bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodied organizational structures and work relations is part of the larger strategy of control in industrial capitalist societies, which, at least partly, are built upon a deeply embedded substructure of gender difference. (shrink)

Should monkeys be used in painful and often deadly infectious disease research that may save many human lives? This is the challenging question that Anne Barnhill, Steven Joffe, and Franklin G. Miller take on in their carefully argued and compelling article “The Ethics of Infection Challenges in Primates.” The authors offer a nuanced and even-handed position that takes philosophical worries about nonhuman primate moral status seriously and still appreciates the very real value of such research for human welfare. Overall, they (...) argue for an extension and revision of the recommendations regarding chimpanzee research offered by the Institute of Medicine in 2011; the practical upshot of their argument would allow for infection challenge research for promising interventions for Ebola and Marburg virus diseases but not for smallpox or the common cold. The IOM recommendations regarding chimpanzee research put in motion an exceptionalist policy for this great ape population. Barnhill and colleagues’ proposal would enlarge the scope of that exceptionalism to embrace NHPs other than great apes. But is such exceptionalism warranted? It is not obvious to me either that the more sophisticated capacities of a species as a whole give it greater ethical protections or that less intellectually or socially sophisticated animals ought to therefore receive less protection when it comes to painful experimental interventions. (shrink)

Fifteen original essays open up a novel area of inquiry: the distinctively ethical dimensions of women's experiences of and in aging. Contributors distinguished in the fields of feminist ethics and the ethics of aging explore assumptions, experiences, practices, and public policies that affect women's well-being and dignity in later life. The book brings to the study of women's aging a reflective dimension missing from the empirical work that has predominated to date. Ethical studies of aging have so far failed to (...) emphasize gender. And feminist ethics has neglected older women, even when emphasizing other dimensions of 'difference.' Finally work on aging in all fields has focused on the elderly, while this volume sees aging as an extended process of negotiating personal and social change. (shrink)

A holobiont is a composite organism consisting of a host together with its microbiome, such as a coral with its zooxanthellae. To explain the often intimate integration between hosts and their microbiomes, some investigators contend that selection operates on holobionts as a unit and view the microbiome’s genes as extending the host’s nuclear genome to jointly comprise a hologenome. Because vertical transmission of microbiomes is uncommon, other investigators contend that holobiont selection cannot be effective because a holobiont’s microbiome is an (...) acquired condition rather than an inherited trait. This disagreement invites a simple mathematical model to see how holobiont selection might operate and to assess its plausibility as an evolutionary force. This paper presents two variants of such a model. In one variant, juvenile hosts obtain microbiomes from their parents (vertical transmission). In the other variant, microbiomes of juvenile hosts are assembled from source pools containing the combined microbiomes of all parents (horizontal transmission). According to both variants, holobiont selection indeed causes evolutionary change in holobiont traits. Therefore, holobiont selection is plausibly an effective evolutionary force with either mode of microbiome transmission. The modeling employs two distinct concepts of inheritance, depending on the mode of microbiome transmission: collective inheritance whereby juveniles inherit a sample of the collected genomes from all parents, as contrasted with lineal inheritance whereby juveniles inherit the genomes from only their own parents. A distinction between collective and lineal inheritance also features in theories of multilevel selection. (shrink)

In Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8, Aristotle defends a striking view about the good for human beings. According to Aristotle, the single happiest way of life is organized around philosophical contemplation. According to the narrowness worry, however, Aristotle's contemplative ideal is unduly Procrustean, restrictive, inflexible, and oblivious of human diversity. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle has resources for responding to the narrowness worry, and that his contemplative ideal can take due account of human diversity.

Frege begins Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, the work that introduces the project which was to occupy him for most of his professional career, with the question, 'What is the number one?' It is a question to which even mathematicians, he says, have no satisfactory answer. And given this scandalous situation, he adds, there is small hope that we shall be able to say what number is. Frege intends to rectify the situation by providing definitions of the number one and the (...) concept of number. But what, exactly, is required of a definition? Surely it will not do to stipulate that the number one is Julius Caesar - that would change the subject. It seems reasonable to suppose that an acceptable definition must be a true statement containing a description that picks out the object to which the numeral '1' already refers. And, similarly, that an acceptable definition of the concept of number must contain a description that picks out precisely those objects that are numbers - those objects to which our numerals refer. Yet, while Frege writes a great deal about what criteria his definitions must satisfy, the above criteria are not among those he mentions. Nor does he attempt to convince us that his definitions of '1' and the other numerals are correct by arguing that these definitions pick out objects to which these numerals have always referred. Yet, while Frege writes a great deal about what criteria his definitions must satisfy, the above criteria are not among those he mentions. Nor does he attempt to convince us that his definitions of ‘1’ and the other numerals are correct by arguing that these definitions pick out objects to which these numerals have always referred. There is, as we shall see shortly, a great deal of evidence that Frege’s definitions are not intended to pick out objects to which our numerals already refer. But if this is so, how can these definitions teach us anything about our science of arithmetic? And what criteria must these definitions satisfy? To answer these questions, we need to understand what it is that Frege thinks we need to learn about the science of arithmetic. (shrink)

In this article, the author addresses two feminist issues: first, how to conceptualize intersectionality, the mutual reproduction of class, gender, and racial relations of inequality, and second, how to identify barriers to creating equality in work organizations. She develops one answer to both issues, suggesting the idea of “inequality regimes” as an analytic approach to understanding the creation of inequalities in work organizations. Inequality regimes are the interlocked practices and processes that result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations. Work (...) organizations are critical locations for the investigation of the continuous creation of complex inequalities because much societal inequality originates in such organizations. Work organizations are also the target for many attempts to alter patterns of inequality: The study of change efforts and the oppositions they engender are often opportunities to observe frequently invisible aspects of the reproduction of inequalities. The concept of inequality regimes may be useful in analyzing organizational change projects to better understand why these projects so often fail and why they succeed when this occurs. (shrink)

In fragments of the lost Protrepticus, preserved in Iamblichus, Aristotle responds to Isocrates’ worries about the excessive demandingness of theoretical philosophy. Contrary to Isocrates, Aristotle holds that such philosophy is generally feasible for human beings. In defense of this claim, Aristotle offers the progress argument, which appeals to early Greek philosophers’ rapid success in attaining exact understanding. In this paper, I explore and evaluate this argument. After making clarificatory exegetical points, I examine the argument’s premises in light of pressing worries (...) that the argument reasonably faces in its immediate intellectual context, the dispute between Isocrates and Aristotle. I also relate the argument to modern concerns about philosophical progress. I contend that the argument withstands these worries, and thereby constitutes a reasonable Aristotelian response to the Isocratean challenge. (shrink)

In Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, leading figures in the fields of virtue ethics and ethics come together to present the first ...

_Philosophy and the Maternal Body_ gives a new voice to the mother and the maternal body which have often been viewed as silent within philosophy. Michelle Boulous Walker clearly shows how some male theorists have appropriated maternity, and suggests new ways of articulating the maternal body and women's experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

En 1994, Sue Rodriguez se suicide avec l’aide d’un médecin après une intense bataille judiciaire en Cour suprême du Canada dont l’objet était la décriminalisation du suicide assisté. À la suite de ce suicide, aucune accusation criminelle ne fut portée contre la ou les personnes ayant présumément aidé Sue Rodrigues à mettre fin à ses jours, et ce malgré le fait que le suicide assisté est un acte criminel au Canada. Cette non-intervention du droit pénal est examinée en fonction du (...) rôle que l’affaire Rodriguez a pu jouer dans la transformation des moralités au Canada. Dans ce livre, le suicide assisté de Sue Rodriguez est envisagé comme un « crime » utile (au sens durkheimien du terme), car il met en évidence une inconsistance entre les moralités dominantes inscrites dans le droit pénal et les conditions sociales qui ont rendu ce « crime » possible. Apparenté au crime de Socrate, le « crime » de Sue Rodriguez est analysé comme un héraut annonciateur de nouvelles moralités, comme un prélude préparant directement la voie à des changements dans le poids accordé aux moralités dominantes. Dans ce contexte, le rôle du droit pénal comme mode privilégié de régulation morale est remis en question. (shrink)

The paper examines a single, apparently simple argument for the existence of incompatibilities between the virtues as traits of character. This argument appeals not to empirical truths about human psychology or human nature but to the possibility of conflict between the exercise of different virtues in action. There are, for example, situations in which we can exercise the virtue of truthfulness only at the expense of not exercising the virtue of tact, as when we are asked a question to which (...) the straightforward answer will pain our questioner. The person who in these situations would give a straightforward answer possesses the virtue of truthfulness to a higher degree than the person who would respond more evasively, whereas the latter person possesses the virtue of tact to a higher degree than the former. But since the two responses are mutually exclusive, it follows that the degree to which we possess the virtue of truthfulness must, at least in some measure, correlate inversely with the degree to which we possess the virtue of tact. And similarly for many other pairs of virtues. My paper focusses on the two cardinal assumptions of this argument, viz., (i) that sometimes the exercise of one virtue can conflict with the exercise of another, and (ii) that the degree to which a person possesses a virtue correlates directly with the extent of its exercise, and defends both assumptions against a variety of objections which allege that, in different ways, they are insensitive to the complexity of the virtues. (shrink)

Not only can the influence of Gottlob Frege be found in contemporary work in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of language, but his projects—and the very terminology he employed in pursuing those projects—are still current in contemporary philosophy. This is undoubtedly why it seems so reasonable to assume that we can read Frege' s writings as if he were one of us, speaking to our philosophical concerns in our language. In Joan Weiner's view, however, Frege's words (...) can be accurately interpreted only if we set that assumption aside. Weiner here offers a challenging new approach to the philosophy of this central figure in analytic philosophy. Weiner finds in Frege's corpus, from Begriffsschrift on, a unified project of remarkable ambition to which each of the writings in that corpus makes a distinct contribution—a project whose motivation she brings to life through a careful reading of his Foundations of Arithmetic. The Frege that Weiner brings into clear view is very different from the familiar figure. Far from having originated one of the standard positions on the nature of reference, Frege turns out not to have had positive doctrines on anything like what contemporary philosophers mean by "reference." Far from having served as a standard-bearer for those who take the realists' side of contemporary disputes with anti-realists, Frege turns out to have had no stake in either side of the controversy. Through Weiner's lens, Frege emerges as a thinker who has principled reasons for challenging the very assumptions and motivations that animate philosophers to dispute these doctrines. This lucidly written and accessible book will generate controversy among all readers with an interest in epistemology, philosophy of language, history of philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

In Plato’s Symposium, the mysterious Apollodorus recounts to an unnamed comrade, and to us, Aristodemus’ story of just what happened at Agathon’s drinking party. Since Apollodorus did not attend the party, however, it is unclear what relevance he could have to our understanding of Socrates’ speech, or to the Alcibiadean “satyr and silenic drama” (222d) that follows. The strangeness of Apollodorus is accentuated by his recession into the background after only two Stephanus pages. What difference—if any—does Apollodorus make to the (...) Symposium? Does his inclusion call the dramatic and philosophical unity of the work into question? I argue that despite initial appearances, Plato has important philosophical reasons for including Apollodorus as a character. Far from being an odd appendage to an otherwise complete narrative, the figure of Apollodorus is useful for our understanding of Socrates’s conception of eros later in the work. (shrink)

Sovint el humans ens hem somiat déus. I Déu n'hi do si hem fet coses admirables: ciència, organització social, art,...motius n'hi ha per estar orgullosos. La vida, però, també ens mostra amb insistència la cara més fosca de nosaltres mateixos, i en aquests moments el més fàcil és passar de l'orgull a la desesperança més absoluta. El camí, però, no pot ser el de l'abandonament. Ni déus ni bèsties! Els déus no trien i, sense esforç ni dubtes, coneixen i realitzen (...) sempre el millor. Els animals, empresonats en la seva naturalesa, tampoc no trenquen gaire el cap a decidir què faran amb les seves vides. Nosaltres no tenim la sort dels uns ni la dels altres, i ens toca amb feines i treballs anar bastint la nostra realitat, aquella que nosaltres farem. Per això existeix l'ètica. "Coneix-te a tu mateix", ordenava l'oracle: només amb les nostres llums i amb les nostres ombres, amb l'instint, amb la ràbia, amb el sentiment, amb la paraula, amb la raó; només coneixent i assumint tot allò que som, tindrem la possibilitat, tal vegada, de construir un món més humà. (shrink)

"The spiritual needs and interests of both men and women have changed enough to merit a new edition of this superbly crafted, scholarly study of Sophia." -- Janet Forsythe Fishburn.

Afbeeldingen zijn belangrijke objecten. Ze zijn een rijke bron van informatie, onmisbaar voor een effectieve communicatie. Afbeeldingen zijn ook bijzondere objecten. Ze bestaan uit verf- of inktvlekken maar we zien er dingen in: mensen, bomen, huizen enz. Dit is vreemd want we weten allemaal dat er op het doek geen bomen zijn en geen huizen, en toch zien we ze. We vinden dit zo vanzelfsprekend dat niemand zich echt afvraagt hoe het komt. En dit is juist wat afbeeldingen wezenlijk onderscheidt (...) van al de andere objecten. De hamvraag is dan ook hoe enkele verfvlekken of potloodlijnen onmiskenbaar een boom kunnen betekenen. Met De kunst van het afbeelden presenteert J.B. Vert een samenhangende en overzichtelijke theorie over afbeeldingen. Zijn benadering is niet zoals gebruikelijk alleen vanuit de kunst maar vooral vanuit de cognitieve psychologie. Afbeeldingen zijn er immers om te worden gezien en we zien afbeeldingen met dezelfde ogen als waarmee we de wereld zien. We herkennen een object in een schilderij op dezelfde manier als we het herkennen in de wereld. Het effect van een afbeelding wordt vooral bepaald door de wijze waarop ons waarnemingssysteem is gebouwd en opereert. De lezer krijgt een uniek, uitgebreid, hanteerbaar en helder gestructureerd begrippenapparaat om afbeeldingen te beschrijven en erover te communiceren. De focus van het boek ligt weliswaar op de vlakke afbeelding, de begrippen zijn echter voor een groot deel ook op ruimtelijke en op abstracte beelden van toepassing. Joan B. Vert is 32 jaar werkzaam geweest als docent tekenen, eerst aan de Pedagogische Academie St.-Jozef te Zeist en later aan de Hogeschool Domstad te Utrecht. Hij heeft deelgenomen aan diverse ontwikkelgroepen van de Stichting Leerplanontwikkeling. (shrink)

Geroscience and philosophy of aging have tended to focus their analyses on the biological and chronological dimensions of aging. Namely, one ages with the passage of time and by experiencing the cellular-molecular deterioration that accompanies this process. However, our concept of aging depends decisively on the social valuations held about it. In this article, we will argue that, if we study social aging in the contemporary world, a novel phenomenon can be identified: the paradox of aging in the digital era. (...) If the social understanding of aging today is linked to unproductivity and obsolescence; then there is a possibility that, given the pace of change of digital technologies, we become obsolete at an early chronological and biological age, and therefore, feel old at a younger age. First, we will present the social dimension of aging based on Rowe and Kahn's model of successful aging. We will also show that their notion of social aging hardly considers structural aspects and weakens their approach. Second, departing from social aging in its structural sense, we will develop the paradox of aging in the digital era. On the one hand, we will explain how the institutionalization of aging has occurred in modern societies and how it is anchored in the concepts of obsolescence and productivity. On the other hand, we will state the kind of obsolescence that digitalization produces and argue that it can make cohorts of biologically and chronologically young individuals obsolete, and thus they would be personally and socially perceived as old. (shrink)

_Philosophy and the Maternal Body_ gives a new voice to the mother and the maternal body which have often been viewed as silent within philosophy. Michelle Boulous Walker clearly shows how some male theorists have appropriated maternity, and suggests new ways of articulating the maternal body and women's experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

Despite All Critique (2014) -- World Politics and Western Reason (1980) -- The Doubled Outsides of the Modern International (2005) -- The Subject of Security (1995) -- The Protection of Nature and the Nature of Protection (2005) -- Social Movements/World Politics (1994) -- Europe is Not Where It is Supposed to Be (2000) -- They Seek it Here, They Seek it There : Looking for Politics in Clayoquot Sound (2003) -- Violence, Modernity, Silence : From Weber to International Relations (1993) (...) -- Hobbes, Origins, Limits (2011) -- War, Terror, Judgement (2002) -- International, Imperial, Exceptional (2005) -- Which Democracy for Which Demos? (2013) -- The Political Theory of Boundaries and the Boundaries of Political Theory : Interview With Raia Prokhovnik (2012). (shrink)

Gender, ‘race’, poverty, health and discourses of health reform in the context of globalization: a postcolonial feminist perspective in policy researchIn this paper, I draw on extant literature and my empirical work to discuss the impact of globalization and healthcare reform on the lives of women — those from countries of the South as well as of the North. First, I review briefly the economic hardships identified in different sectors of the population that have been attributed to how globalization is (...) now working. Second, I examine what these global processes mean for health, with particular focus on poverty, gender, racialization and health. Third, I reflect on how nurse scientists might develop research agendas in the 21st century that would foster social transformation and social justice for all people. The position taken here is not an indictment of globalization. Rather, I argue that globalization is a fact in all of our lives. There are positive aspects of globalization. There are also negative aspects which we must collectively address, given that the issues identified can have deleterious consequences for the world’s poor, women in particular. I suggest that, to construct knowledge for practice and praxis, research agendas of the future should be inclusive of subaltern voices. I argue that drawing on a postcolonial feminist epistemology might help us to define such agendas, and express the multilayered sociopolitical contexts of health and illness in advocacy with policy‐makers. (shrink)

There is a section in Samuel Delany’s magnificent autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water, that dramatically raises the problem of writing the history of difference, the history, that is, of the designation of “other,” of the attribution of characteristics that distinguish categories of people from some presumed norm.1 Delany recounts his reaction to his first visit to the St. Marks bathhouse in 1963. He remembers standing on the threshold of a “gym-sized room” dimly lit by blue bulbs. The (...) room was full of people, some standing, the rest an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall to wall. My first response was a kind of heart-thudding astonishment very close to fear. I have written of a space at certain libidinal saturation before. That was not what frightened me. It was rather that the saturation was not only kinesthetic but visible.2Watching the scene establishes for Delany a “fact that flew in the face” of the prevailing representation of homosexuals in the 1950s as “isolated perverts,” as subjects “gone awry.” The “apprehension of massed bodies” gave him a “sense of political power”:what this experience said was that there was a population—not of individual homosexuals … not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex. [M, p. 174] 2. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965 , p. 173; hereafter abbreviated M. Joan W. Scott is professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author, most recently, of Gender and the Politics of History and is currently at work on a history of feminist claims for political rights in France during the period 1789-1945 as a way of exploring arguments about equality and difference. (shrink)