This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This article is focused on the nature of directives. It draws on Curl and Drew’s analysis of entitlement and contingency in request types and applies this to a corpus of directives that occur in UK family mealtimes involving parents and young children. While requests are built as contingent to varying degrees on the recipient’s willingness or ability to comply, directives embody no orientation to the recipient’s ability or desire to perform the relevant activity. This lack of orientation to ability or (...) desire may be what makes them recognizable as directives. When examining directives in sequence the contingencies were successively reduced or managed during the delivery of the directive, thereby treating contingencies as a resource of the speaker rather than of the recipient. In a sense the entitlement claimed is ‘to tell’ rather than ‘to ask’. In sequences involving multiple/repeated directives, non-compliance led to upgraded directives. The difference in the entitlement claimed, the response options available and the trajectory of multiple requests/directives suggests that participants orient to requests and directives as different actions, rather than more or less forceful formulations of the same. (shrink)

Widely hailed as one of the most significant works in modern political philosophy, John Rawls's _Political Liberalism_ defended a powerful vision of society that respects reasonable ways of life, both religious and secular. These core values have never been more critical as anxiety grows over political and religious difference and new restrictions are placed on peaceful protest and individual expression. This anthology of original essays suggests new, groundbreaking applications of Rawls's work in multiple disciplines and contexts. Thom Brooks, Martha Nussbaum, (...) Onora O'Neill, Paul Weithman, Jeremy Waldron, and Frank Michelman explore political liberalism's relevance to the challenges of multiculturalism, the relationship between the state and religion, the struggle for political legitimacy, and the capabilities approach. Extending Rawls's progressive thought to the fields of law, economics, and public reason, this book helps advance the project of a free society that thrives despite disagreements over religious and moral views. (shrink)

In this volume based on her 2014 Locke Lectures, Martha C. Nussbaum provides a bracing new view that strips the notion of forgiveness down to its Judeo-Christian roots, where it was structured by the moral relationship between a score-keeping God and penitent, self-abasing, and erring mortals.

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, explore such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves (...) emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements. (shrink)

This book is a study of ancient views about 'moral luck'. It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek (...) thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interrelated treatment of both literary and philosophical texts. The Fragility of Goodness has proven to be important reading for philosophers and classicists, and its non-technical style makes it accessible to any educated person interested in the difficult problems it tackles. This new edition features an entirely new preface by Martha Nussbaum. (shrink)

Ferruccio Busoni's Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music appeared in 1910. Schoenberg, in his copy of the little book, wrote critical marginal comments which crystallize two opposed outlooks in musical aesthetics. Busoni writes: Notation, the writing out of compositions, is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later. But notation is to improvisation as the portrait is to the living model… …What the composer's inspiration necessarily loses through notation, his interpreter should restore (...) by his own…. (shrink)

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engaging book, Martha Nussbaum examines texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm--including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca--and (...) recovers a valuable source for our moral and political thought of today.The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engaging book, Martha Nussbaum examines texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm--including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca--and recovers a valuable source for our moral and political thought of today. (shrink)

This paper studies some normative relations that hold between actions, their preconditions and their effects, with particular attention to connecting what are often called ‘ought to be’ norms with ‘ought to do’ norms. We use a formal model based on a form of transition system called a ‘coloured labelled transition system’ (coloured LTS) introduced in a series of papers by Sergot and Craven. Those works have variously presented a formalism (an ‘action language’) nC+ for defining and computing with a (coloured) (...) LTS, and another, separate formalism, a modal language interpreted on a (coloured) LTS used to express its properties. We consolidate these two strands. Instead of specifying the obligatory and prohibited states and transitions as part of the construction of a coloured LTS as in nC+, we represent norms in the modal language and use those to construct a coloured LTS from a given regular (uncoloured) one. We also show how connections between norms on states and norms on transitions previously treated as fixed constraints of a coloured LTS can instead be defined within the modal language used for representing norms. (shrink)

The development of any novel reproductive technology involving manipulation of human embryos is almost inevitably going to be controversial and evoke sincerely held, but diametrically opposing views. The plethora of scientific, ethical and legal issues that surround the clinical use of such techniques fuels this divergence of opinion. During the policy change that was required to allow the use of mitochondrial donation in the UK, many of these issues were intensely scrutinised by a variety of people and in multiple contexts. (...) This extensive process resulted in the publication of several reports that informed the recommendations made to government. We have been intrinsically involved in the development of mitochondrial donation, from refining the basic technique for use in human embryos through to clinical service delivery, and have taken the opportunity in this article to offer our own perspective on the issues it raises. (shrink)

Maria Rentetzi. Trafficking Materials and Gendered Research Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna.

The cosmopolitan tradition begins with Diogenes, who claimed as his identity "citizen of the world." Martha Nussbaum traces the cosmopolitan ideal from ancient times to the present, weighing its limitations as well as merits. Using the capabilities approach, Nussbaum seeks to integrate the "noble but flawed" vision of world citizenship with cosmopolitanism's concern with moral and political justice for all.--.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mild Cognitive Impairment:Which Kind Is It?Andy Hamilton (bio)Keywordshuman kinds, mild cognitive impairment, multiple personality disorder, practical kinds, social constructionThere is much stimulating material in the Graham and Ritchie's paper (2006), concerning not just disease-classification but also the ethics of diagnosis. My concern is with the way in which they adduce Ian Hacking's views in the philosophy of science in support of their own. The authors quote with approval (...) his "dynamic nominalism" and its influence on Zachar's concept of "practical kinds." Hacking's view, as the authors quote it, is that "People classified in a certain way tend to conform to or grow into the ways that they are described; but they also evolve in their own ways, so that the classifications and descriptions have to be constantly revised" (1995, 21). The act of classifying changes both the classifier and the subject of classification, resulting in facts and categories that are both socially created and real. Hacking calls this "the looping effect of human kinds," and comments that "Multiple personality [disorder] is an almost too perfect illustration of this feedback effect" (1995, 21). The authors comment that Zachar (2000) builds on Hacking's position, discarding essentialist notions of classification that are limited to inherent biological properties, and turning instead to "practical kinds—nonarbitrary cultural artifacts intended to meet pragmatic needs (e.g. therapeutic, predictive prognostic, labeling effects, and physiology)" (Graham and Ritchie 2006, 36). Practical kinds, they believe, offer a way out of the clinical approach focused on mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as a precursor to, or mild form of, Alzheimer's disease. The inclination of the authors, as I read them, is to treat MCI as a practical or human kind, and not, like Alzheimer's disease, as a natural kind.My concern is whether the "looping effect of human kinds" can be transferred to the case of MCI from Hacking's original case study in Rewriting the Soul, multiple personality disorder (MPD). Hacking wished there to undermine the traditional debate over whether MPD is a "social or psychiatric artifact." He claims, correctly I think, that the presupposition behind the question "Is MPD a real disorder as opposed to a product of social circumstances?" should be rejected. The fact that a disorder is a product of social circumstances does not make it less real (1995, 12). On the looping of human kinds, Hacking comments that "The concept of child abuse [implicated in MPD] may itself be so made and molded by attempts at knowledge and intervention, and social reaction to these studies, that there is no stable object, child abuse, to have knowledge about." This is a "no fact of the matter" response, and it [End Page 51] is based on the recognition of conceptual change. He later adds that child abuse "is a real evil, and it was so before the concept was constructed. It was nevertheless constructed. Neither reality nor construction should be in question" (1995, 61, 68). However, Hacking's conclusions about the reality of MPD express only a muted skepticism. Utilitarian skeptics approach this question by asking, "What is the most effective treatment?" Hacking writes that "in their hearts [such skeptics] suspect that the outcome of multiple therapy [therapy that condones or even encourages the development of multiples in the patient] is a type of false consciousness" (1995, 267). The skeptics about MPD are making a moral judgment, he believes; but on whether that moral judgment is correct, he is silent, although the suspicion must be that he agrees with it.How do these considerations apply to the case of MCI? Graham and Ritchie rightly note that classifying a subject as suffering from MCI, and informing them of the diagnosis, will affect them adversely—it will cause suffering not least because there is at present no cure. However, it must surely be conceded that any disease at all—physical or mental—is a social entity insofar as it involves behavioral ascriptions to the subject concerning their incapacity. The authors also note the vested interests—especially from the pharmaceutical industry—in developing a diagnostic category of MCI. These interests are present in the development of any significant diagnostic... (shrink)

La infracción al deber objetivo de cuidado (IDOC) es una figura introducida en Ecuador en el 2014 con el COIP, con 4 requisitos concurrentes. Para las actuaciones de los Anestesiólogos es necesario evaluar conjuntamente: la ley y reglamento de la especialidad, las normas mínimas de seguridad de la CLASA y los documentos sobre “cirugía segura” de la OMS. Investigamos en este artículo si existe relación entre estas últimas normas y los requisitos mencionados. El objetivo es encontrar la antes mencionada relación (...) y revisar su realidad procesal. Para ello realizamos análisis documental mediante lógica jurídica. Como resultado obtuvimos una correspondencia entre estas normas y los elementos de la IDOC, así como una ausencia de su consideración dentro de las sentencias evaluadas. Se concluye que, si bien son legalmente exigibles, estas normas no son siempre analizadas cuando se juzga una supuesta IDOC, por lo que es necesaria su incorporación al ámbito judicial. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music.

The essays in this volume were written to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of G. E. L. Owen, who by his essays and seminars on ancient Greek philosophy has made a contribution to its study that is second to none. The authors, from both sides of the Atlantic, include not only scholars whose main research interests lie in Greek philosophy, but others best known for their work in general philosophy. All are pupils or younger colleagues of Professor Owen who are indebted (...) to his practice of philosophical scholarship as a first-order philosophical activity. At the heart of G. E. L. Owen's work has been a preoccupation with the role of philosophical reflection on language in the metaphysics and epistemology of Plato, Aristotle and other ancient Greek thinkers. This is accordingly the general topic of the present volume, which includes five papers on Plato's critical dialogues and seven on Aristotle, prefaced by two on Heraclitus and followed by a study of the debate in Hellenistic philosophy on the sorites. This is a book for specialists in Greek philosophy and philosophers of language which will also be of interest to some linguists. (shrink)

Objectives: To investigate the quality of consent gained for the use in research of tissue that is surplus after surgery. To compare the use of two consent forms: a simple locally introduced form and a more complex centrally instigated form. To discuss the attitudes of patients towards the use of their surplus tissue in research.Design: Data were collected through interviews and analysed with a combination of quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques.Participants and setting: Patients of the breast care unit at a (...) teaching hospital were interviewed at home or in a quiet room at the hospital.Results: 57 people were interviewed out of 81 approached, between October 2003 and March 2004. Most participants had a poor level of knowledge about the consent they had given, but reported being happy about having given it. The patients who had signed the locally introduced form had considerably more knowledge than those who had signed the centrally instigated form . Participants considered being well informed to be less important than believing that their opinions were valued and respected.Conclusions: The findings suggest that traditional models of informed consent are not universally applicable and, in this case, seem to overstate what people wish to know. The simple consent form achieved a better quality of informed consent and provided a better model of practice than the complex form, and it seemed that a focused approach to consent seeking is more effective and acceptable than more complex approaches. (shrink)