The term compassion fatigue has come to be applied to a disengagement or lack of empathy on the part of care-giving professionals. Empathy and emotional investment have been seen as potentially costing the caregiver and putting them at risk. Compassion fatigue has been equated with burnout, secondary traumatic stress disorder, vicarious traumatization, secondary victimization or co-victimization, compassion stress, emotional contagion, and counter-transference. The results of a Canadian qualitative research project on nurses? experience of compassion fatigue are presented. Nurses, self-identified as (...) having compassion fatigue, described a change in their practice by which they began to shield and distance themselves from the suffering of patients and families. Time to help patients and families cope with suffering seemed unavailable, and many felt they were running on empty and, ultimately, impotent as nurses. Feelings of irritability, anger, and negativity arose, though participants described denying or ignoring these emotions as a way to try to survive their work day. Difficulties with work carried over into the nurses? personal lives, affecting their relationships with family and friends. Such experiences invariably called into question the participants? identity, causing them to reflect on the kind of nurse they were. The participants? compassion fatigue created a sense of hopelessness regarding positive change, although some nurses described strategies that seemed to help alleviate their compassion fatigue. (shrink)

This paper examines Angela Davis’s 1969 Lectures on Liberation and her critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s views regarding freedom and enslaved agency. Across four sections, the paper etches out Davis’s response to what she calls Sartre’s ‘notorious statement’ through her own existential reading of Frederick Douglass’s resistance to chattel slavery. Instead of interpreting Davis’s existential insights through the work of Sartre or other Western continental philosophers, the paper engages Lewis Gordon, George Yancy, Frank Kirkland, and LaRose Parris to develop an (...) alternative frame for assessing Davis’s existential thinking. Embracing a diverse lineage of existential philosophy, the paper argues for Black-centered approaches to existential philosophy that resonate with, but are not reducible or indebted to, European existentialism. (shrink)

Two recent studies by Joseph Torchia and Paul Griffiths show the importance of Augustine’s critique of the vice of curiositas to contemporary life and thought. Superficially, it might seem that Augustine condemned curiosity because it “seeks to find out whatever it wishes without restriction of any kind.” Though profoundly influenced by Augustine, Bernard Lonergan praised intellectual curiosity precisely insofar as it is motivated by an unrestricted desire to know, rather than by less noble motives. Drawing upon the researches of (...) Torchia and Griffiths, this article endeavors to show that Augustine does not simply equate curiositas with an unrestricted desire to know, and that the virtue of intellectual curiosity as Lonergan understood it is in fact endorsed by Augustine by means of its relationship to the virtue of studiositas. This more nuanced view of the virtues and vices of intellect can provide guidance for contemporary intellectual pursuits, both how to pursue and not to pursue knowledge. (shrink)

Jonardon Ganeri, Paul Noordhof, and Murali Ramachandran (1996) have proposed a new counterfactual analysis of causation. We argue that this – the PCA-analysis – is incorrect. In section 1, we explain David Lewis’s first counterfactual analysis of causation, and a problem that led him to propose a second. In section 2 we explain the PCA-analysis, advertised as an improvement on Lewis’s later account. We then give counterexamples to the necessity (section 3) and sufficiency (section 4) of the PCA-analysis.

Because Paul could never address any problem without relating it to theology, Romans will never lack interpreters or debate. In this essay, the so-called “New Perspective on Paul,” which has sparked much recent discussion, is measured against the theology of Paul's central letter.

An appeal to philosophers who believe in social contract theory to revise their thinking in fundamental ways. In particular, it calls upon them to take corporations -- especially transnational corporations -- more seriously in their speculations on the "just state" than they have up till now. Why? Because transnational corporations today exercise de facto sovereignty--a sovereignty that always influences, sometomes equals, and often overpowers the sovereignty of nation states. (Excerpted from Paul Durbin's detailed analysis of book in 2006.).

-/- This article was first published in Technology and Contemporary Life, Philosophy and Technoloy vol. IV, ed. Paul T. Durbin, Dordrecht/Boston: D. Reidel, 1988, pp. 63-85.

Byrne & Russon's target article displays all the difficulties encountered when one fails to take a methodological behaviourist approach to imitation. Their conceptual apparatus is grounded in a mixture of introspection and folk psychology. Their distinction between action-level and program-level imitation falters on goal imputation for sequential acts. In an alternative gradient descent model, behaviour can be simulated as a frustration/satisfaction gradient descent in the animal's “potentiality space,” as defined by knowledge, inventiveness, and the surrounding environment.

Color experiences have representational content. But this content need not include a propositional component, particularly for reflectance physicalists such as Byrne & Hilbert (B&H). Insisting on such content gives primacy to language where it is not required, and makes the extension of the argument to nonhuman animals suspect.

The attitude of intention is not usually the primary focus in philosophical work on self-knowledge. A recent exception is the so-called “Transparency” theory of self-knowledge, which attempts to explain how we know our own minds by appeal to reflection on non-mental facts. Transparency theories are attractive in light of their relative psychological economy compared to views that must posit a dedicated mechanism of ‘inner sense’. However, it is argued here, focusing on proposals by Richard Moran and Alex Byrne, that (...) the Transparency approach to explaining knowledge of our intentions fails. Considerations of economy therefore recommend an alternative approach: the Rylean Theory Theory. The particular view defended here is that one way of coming to know what we intend is to self-ascribe an intention on the basis of making a conscious decision about what to do. This view requires that there are such things as conscious decisions, and so the existence of conscious decisions is defended against skeptical worries raised by Peter Carruthers. The conclusion is that we know of our intentions by theorizing about ourselves, but that this knowledge can still be first-personally privileged, authoritative, and non-alienated. (shrink)

Peter Byrne has presented arguments against the effectiveness of two 'defensive strategies' deployed in my books Eternal God and The Providence of God respectively. These strategies were originally presented to support the cogency of 'theological compatibilism' by arguing against the claims that it is inconsistent with human responsibility, and that it entails that God is the author of sin. In this present article the author offers a number of clarifications to his original thesis and argues that Byrne's arguments (...) do not succeed in their aim of undermining the two strategies. (shrink)

Review of Alex Byrne's book Transparency and Self-Knowledge.

Byrne & Russon suggest that the production of action by primates is hierarchically organised. We assess the evidence for hierarchical structure in the comprehension of action by primates. Focusing on work with human children we evaluate several possible indices of program-level comprehension.

A brief description of the goal and main lines of argument of The Quest for Reality, in reply to the responses of Paul Boghossian and Alex Byrne.

According to a long interpretative tradition, Aristotle holds that the formal cause is the ultimate object of induction when investigating perceptible substances. For, the job of induction is to find the essential nature common to a set of individuals, and that nature is captured solely by their shared formal cause. Against this view, I argue that Aristotle understands perceptible individuals as irreducibly composite objects whose nature is constituted by both their formal and their material cause. As a result, when investigating (...) perceptible objects, the job of induction is to discover their composite, formal and material nature. The process by which universal claims about this composite nature are justified, I argue, is similar to what we now know as mathematical induction. In particular, such claims are grounded in a non-enumerative, but replicable process in which things are resolved into their simplest components. As a result, the observation of past uniformities has, at most, a heuristic function in scientific inquiry. (shrink)

Three arguments for the thesis that sex is socially constructed are examined and rejected. No such argument could succeed, because sex is not socially constructed.

argument fails, and the purpose of this note is to bring out that failure. The view in question which Heck calls the Hybrid Vie~istinguishes between the meanings of names and the contents of beliefs which are expressible using names. According to the Hybrid View the meaning of a name is its referent: names do not have senses. Thus (a) "George Orwell wrote 1984" means the same as (b) "Eric Blair wrote 1984". However, the Hybrid View tells a different story about (...) the beliefs one expresses when one utters (a) or (b). The content of a belief expressed using a sentence that contains a name has more to it than just the referent of the name and whatever properties the sentence ascribes to the name's referent. There is.. (shrink)

On considère généralement que Marx n’a jamais envisagé le monde rural que comme un archaïsme condamné par le progrès de l’histoire. L’objectif de cet article est de problématiser cette idée, en examinant les différentes tensions qui travaillent la réflexion de Marx sur la terre et les paysans. Nous montrons que deux découvertes complémentaires le conduisent à relativiser sa croyance au caractère progressiste du développement capitaliste : la découverte des tendances écocidaires du capitalisme et celle de la vivacité des communes agraires. (...) De ces deux découvertes, il résulte que Marx critique finalement le capitalisme du point de vue de ses effets sur la terre et celles et ceux qui la travaillent. C’est donc aussi de ce point de vue que doivent être repensées la nature, la valeur et les conditions de réalisation du communisme. (shrink)

The human body has come to be seen as forever susceptible to both external and internal hazards, which in many circumstances require immediate, heroic, and expensive intervention. In response to this, there has been a shift from a treatment‐based healthcare model to one of prevention wherein nurses play an integral role by identifying and assessing risks for individuals, communities, and populations. This paper uses Deborah Lupton’s outline of the spectrum of risk and applies the theoretical works of Foucault and Plato (...) to demonstrate the means by which nurses maintain social order by identifying and counselling risk takers. It also utilizes the work of Deleuze and Guattari to illustrate how Plato’s framework for creating social order through the creation of the good citizen can be viewed as a micro‐fascist system, which has been adopted wholeheartedly by preventative health professionals. The goal of this paper is to present an alternate understanding of risk to provide nurses and other healthcare professionals with a non‐traditional appreciation of certain aspects of their practice as researchers and clinicians. (shrink)

According to the subset account of realization, a property, F, is realized by another property, G, whenever F is individuated by a non-empty proper subset of the causal powers by which G is individuated (and F is not a conjunctive property of which G is a conjunct). This account is especially attractive because it seems both to explain the way in which realized properties are nothing over and above their realizers, and to provide for the causal efficacy of realized properties. (...) It therefore seems to provide a way around the causal exclusion problem. There is reason to doubt, however, that the subset account can achieve both tasks. The problem arises when we look closely at the relation between properties and causal powers, specifically, at the idea that properties confer powers on the things that have them. If realizers are to be ontically prior to what they realize, then we must regard the conferral of powers by properties as a substantive relation of determination. This relation of conferral is at the heart of a kind of exclusion problem, analogous to the familiar causal exclusion problem. I argue that the subset account cannot adequately answer this new exclusion problem, and is for that reason ill-suited to be the backbone of a non-reductive physicalism. (shrink)

In this article I use Baudrillard’s claim that systems of exchange are ontologically and historically prior to systems of production, and Arendt’s understanding of birth as the arrival of something both quite familiar and quite new into the world as the starting-points for a theory of labour as relation. Such a theory has the virtue of avoiding the problem, found in Marx, Arendt and elsewhere, that labour is both a vital feature of being human and yet a drudgery that will (...) be absent from post-revolutionary society (in the case of Marx) or strictly relegated to the private realm (for Arendt). It also involves repositioning the work of social reproduction – of which women’s labour in giving birth is exemplary – as paradigmatic. (shrink)

Philosophers are accustomed to thinking about human existence as finite and deathbound. Anne O'Byrne focuses instead on birth as a way to make sense of being alive. Building on the work of Heidegger, Dilthey, Arendt, and Nancy, O'Byrne discusses how the world becomes ours and how meaning emerges from our relations to generations past and to come. Themes such as creation, time, inheritance, birth and action, embodiment, biological determinism, and cloning anchor this sensitive and powerful analysis. O'Byrne's (...) thinking advances and deepens important discussions at the intersections of feminism, continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and social and political thought. (shrink)

Various claims have been made concerning the role of narrative in grief. In this paper, we emphasize the need for a discerning approach, which acknowledges that narratives of different kinds relate to grief in different ways. We focus specifically on the positive contributions that narrative can make to sustaining, restoring and revising a sense of who one is. We argue that, although it is right to suggest that narratives provide structure and coherence, they also play a complementary role in disrupting (...) established structure and opening up new possibilities. We add that both of these roles point to the importance of interpersonal, social and cultural factors in shaping the trajectory of grief. We conclude by briefly considering the implications for distinguishing between typical and pathological forms of grief. (shrink)

This study is an introduction to the problems of moral philosophy designed particularly for those interested in theology and religious studies. It offers an account of the nature and subject matter of moral reasoning and of the major types of moral theory in contemporary moral philosophy. The account aims to bring out the major issues in moral theory, to present a clear, non-technical articulation of the structure of moral knowledge, and to explore the relation between religious belief and morality.

Siegel and Byrne debate whether perceptual experiences present rich properties or exclusively thin properties.

Objects partially resemble when they are alike in some way but not entirely alike. Partial resemblance, then, involves similarity in a respect. It has been observed that talk of “respects” appears to be thinly‐veiled talk of properties. So some theorists take similarity in a respect to require property realism. I will go a step further and argue that similarity in intrinsic respects (partial intrinsic resemblance) requires properties to be immanent in objects. For a property to be immanent in an object (...) is roughly for it to be wholly present in that object. (So understood, immanence does not imply repeatability, and thus tropes count as immanent.) If two objects are intrinsically similar in one way but not another, there must be a difference between the two ways. And if the similarity is between the objects as they are in themselves, then this difference, too, must be within the objects. Partial intrinsic resemblance thus requires internal structure. Without it, there can be no distinctions between ways in which things are intrinsically alike and ways in which they aren't. I will argue, further, that distinctions between properties that transcend objects fail to account for the possibility of partial intrinsic resemblance. (shrink)