What is "race"? What role, if any, should race play in our moral obligations to others and to ourselves? Ethics along the Color Line addresses the question of whether black Americans should think of each other as members of an extended racial family and base their treatment of each other on this consideration, or eschew racial identity and envision the day when people do not think in terms of race. Anna Stubblefield suggests furthermore that white Americans should consider the (...) same issues. She argues, finally, that for both black and white Americans, thinking of races as families is crucial in helping to combat anti-black oppression. Stubblefield is concerned that the philosophical debate—argued notably between Kwame Anthony Appiah and Lucius Outlaw—over whether or not we should strongly identify in terms of race, and whether or not we should take race into account when we decide how to treat each other, has stalled. Drawing on black feminist scholarship about the moral importance of thinking and acting in terms of community and extended family, the author finds that strong racial identification, if based on appropriate ideals, is morally sound and even necessary to end white supremacy. (shrink)

This article presents the pedagogical paradigm of reflexive interaction and its application in the field of technology-enhanced learning and children’s musical creativity. The main feature of reflexive interaction is the repetition-variation mechanism: something is repeated and varied during the interaction, through a continual process of imitation and variation. In the context of the MIROR project (EU-ICT Project), we exploited the educational potential of the reflexive interaction paradigm and implemented the MIROR platform, an educational device consisting of a set of softwares (...) that implement the reflexive paradigm not only in music improvisation (as was the case for the first interactive reflexive system), but also in the field of music composition and dance. The platform was conceived as a tool to stimulate and develop musical and motor creativity in children, although it can also be used to teach a specific musical instrument. The hypothesis of the MIROR project was that reflexive interaction sustains and promotes the learning and creative expression processes of music and movement. This initial hypothesis, which stemmed mainly from the pilot study in which we observed children who were interacting with the first prototype of the interactive reflexive musical system, was subjected to a series of empirical studies conducted within the MIROR project, and was theoretically defined in order to lay down the foundations of the reflexive interaction paradigm and its pedagogical implications. This article summarizes the state-of-the-art of the project and brings together, in a comprehensive overview, the theoretical framework, the pedagogical concepts, the empirical studies, and the description of the MIROR platform, with the aim to reflect on the results achieved so far and point out the contribution of the reflexive perspective to the field of children’s instrumental learning and creativity. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to describe specialist ambulance nurse students’ experiences of ethical conflicts and dilemmas in prehospital emergency care. In the autumn of 2015, after participating in a mandatory lecture on ethics, 24 specialist ambulance nurse students reported experiences and interpretations concerning conflicts and ethical dilemmas from prehospital emergency care. The text consisted of 24 written critical incidents which were interpreted using hermeneutic text interpretation. The text revealed three themes: Not safeguarding a patient’s body and identity; Not (...) agreeing on the care actions; and Not treating the patient with dignity. The SANs experiences ethical dilemmas and conflict of values when they witness how others violate a patient’s dignity. Discussion and reflection is based on ethical conflicts and dilemmas experienced when students see how caregivers do not safeguard the patient’s body or identity. When caregivers have a conflicting will, it results in patients not being treated in an ethical manner. Also, seeing how caregivers put themselves in a power position over patients is described as an ethical dilemma that students experience when they choose not to intervene. (shrink)

Many political theorists today deny that citizenship can be defended on liberal grounds alone. Cosmopolitans claim that loyalty to a particular state is incompatible with universal liberal principles, which hold that we have equal duties of justice to persons everywhere, while nationalist theorists justify civic obligations only by reaching beyond liberal principles and invoking the importance of national culture. In Liberal Loyalty, Anna Stilz challenges both views by defending a distinctively liberal understanding of citizenship. Drawing on Kant, Rousseau, and (...) Habermas, Stilz argues that we owe civic obligations to the state if it is sufficiently just, and that constitutionally enshrined principles of justice in themselves--rather than territory, common language, or shared culture--are grounds for obedience to our particular state and for democratic solidarity with our fellow citizens. She demonstrates that specifying what freedom and equality mean among a particular people requires their democratic participation together as a group. Justice, therefore, depends on the authority of the democratic state because there is no way equal freedom can be defined or guaranteed without it. Yet, as Stilz shows, this does not mean that each of us should entertain some vague loyalty to democracy in general. Citizens are politically obligated to their own state and to each other, because within their particular democracy they define and ultimately guarantee their own civil rights. Liberal Loyalty is a persuasive defense of citizenship on purely liberal grounds. (shrink)

In Valuing Health, Dan Hausman argues that well-being is not measurable, at least not in the way that science and policy would require. His argument depends on a demanding conception of well-being and on a pessimistic verdict upon the existing measures of subjective well-being. Neither of these reasons, I argue, warrant as much skepticism as Hausman professes.

I identify my priority in teaching Christian ethics as fostering relationality, both in individual and collective contexts. I argue that focusing on the idea of relationality enables us to explore connections that exist or should exist between individuals and groups. For me, fostering relationality involves building an intellectual understanding of moral relationality and embodying this understanding in practical situations. In order to contain the theme of this study, I focus on a specific aspect of relationality, namely the idea of attunement. (...) I propose attentive listening, openness to innovation and fostering the spirit of tranquillity as key components of the ethics of attunement. (shrink)

Editorial Board: Karl P. Ameriks, Margaret Atherton, Frederick Beiser, Fabien Capeillères, Faustino Fabbianelli, Daniel Garber, Rudolf A. Makkreel, Steven Nadler, Alan Nelson, Christof Rapp, Ursula Renz, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Denis Thouard, Paul Ziche, Günter Zöller The series publishes monographs and essay collections devoted to the history of philosophy as well as studies in the theory of writing the history of philosophy. A special emphasis is placed on the contextualization of philosophical historiography into the areas of the history of science, culture, and (...) the wider scope of intellectual history. (shrink)

Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary is the first full-length overview of the important work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Anna Marie Smith clearly shows how Laclau and Mouffe's work has brought Gramscian, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic perspectives to revitalize traditional political theory. With clarity and insight, she shows how they have constructed a highly effective theory of identity formation and power relations that carefully draws from the criticism of political theory from postmodern anti-foundationalist political theory.

This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘lawofthe Anthropocene’ with an imaginary reaching towards ‘law/sforthe Anthropocene’. It does so primarily by contrasting two imaginaries of human embodiment—law’s existing imaginary of quasi-disembodiment and an alternative imaginary of embodiment as co-woven with the lively incipiencies and tendencies of matter. It draws on ‘transcorporeality’ and ‘sympoiesis’ as inspiration for ‘sympoietic normativities’ as ways of co-living and co-organizing in the face of the catastrophic implications of the Anthropocene emergency.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

The goal of the present study was to investigate the interaction between different senses of polysemous nouns (metonymies and metaphors) and different meanings of homonyms using the method of event-related potentials (ERPs) and a priming paradigm. Participants read two-word phrases containing ambiguous words and made a sensicality judgment. Phrases with polysemes highlighted their literal sense and were preceded by primes with either the same or different – metonymic or metaphorical – sense. Similarly, phrases with homonyms were primed by phrases with (...) a consistent or inconsistent meaning of the noun. The results demonstrated that polysemous phrases with literal senses preceded by metonymic primes did not differ in ERP responses from the control condition with the same literal primes. In contrast, processing phrases with the literal sense preceded by metaphorical primes resulted in N400 and P600 effects that might reflect a very limited priming effect. The priming effect observed between metonymic and literal senses supports the idea that these senses share a single representation in the mental lexicon. In contrast, the effects observed for polysemes with metaphorical primes characterize lexical access to the word’s target sense and competition between the two word senses. The processing of homonyms preceded by the prime with an inconsistent meaning, although it did not elicit an N400 effect, was accompanied by a P600 effect as compared to the control condition with a consistent meaning of the prime. We suppose that the absence of the N400 effect may result from inhibition of the target meaning by the inconsistent prime, whereas the P600 response might reflect processes of reanalysis, activation, and integration of the target meaning. Our results provide additional evidence for the difference in processing mechanisms between metonymies and metaphors that might have separate representations in the mental lexicon, although they are more related as compared to homonyms. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAbel Evans's poem Vertumnus celebrates Jacob Bobart the Younger, second keeper of the Oxford Physick Garden, as a model monarch to his botanical subjects. This paper takes Vertumnus as a point of departure from which to explore the early history of the Physick Garden, situating botanical collections and collecting spaces within utopian visions and projects as well as debates about order more widely in the turbulent seventeenth-century. Three perspectives on the Physick Garden as an ordered collection are explored: the architecture (...) of the quadripartite Garden, with particular attention to the iconography of the Danby Gate; the particular challenges involved in managing living collections, whose survival depends on the spatial order regulating the microclimates in which they grow; and the taxonomic ordering associated with the hortus siccus collections. A final section on the ideal ‘Botanick throne’ focuses on the metaphor of the state as a garden in the period, as human and botanical subjects resist being order and can rebel, but also respond to right rule and wise cultivation. However, the political metaphor is Evans’s; there is little to suggest that Bobart himself was driven by utopian, theological and political visions. (shrink)

In my paper, I attempt a phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of intersexuality, which I view from the perspective of the problem of indeterminacy concerning the horizon of the givenness of homeworld founded on the broader basis of the pre-givenness of lifeworld. These horizons define the structure of the sedimentation of subjective experience, as well as the layers of cultural meanings sedimented in the lifeworld. The sedimented layers of self-experience and of the shared lifeworld function as a sphere of (...) indeterminacy, that is the horizons of constituted phenomena. In this sense all intentional acts have the nature of horizontal indeterminacy, the layers of which are revealed in the genetic question (Rückfrage) directed toward them. Horizontal indeterminacy also accounts for the distinction between homeworld and alienworld, which appears as something unobvious and unexpected against the obviousness of the homeworld, at the same time thematizing the latter. One of the elements of the sedimented conceptual system, functioning as the horizon of indeterminacy of both self-experience and the pre-reflective life-world, is the notion of human corporeality as given in the binary sexuality/gender. A unique opportunity for phenomenological insight into the constitution of the phenomenon of sex/gender is provided by Hida Viloria's lived experience of intersexuality. Her lived body, originally experienced pre-reflectively as a transparent medium and a perfectly handy tool of undisturbed intentionality, unproblematized also in the sexual activities, gradually undergoes alienation under the objectifying gaze determined by the binary pattern of sexuality. Becoming an alienated object, her body loses its transparency. Viloria begins to experience her corporeality and identity in a way determined by the sedimented "ideology" of sex and gender, trying on the "constructs" of masculine and feminine identities, eventually overcoming alienation and, in a process of secondary self-identification, reclaiming her lived body in its intersexuality and her identity in its non-binary gender fluidity. (shrink)

The notions of failure and denial are co-constitutive of both “global” theory and social order. Though these concepts have been used to evoke an array of metaphors and images to under­stand the condition of international relations as a knowledge production site and in rela­tion to other social sciences, they have not been deemed pivotal for much theorizing of world politics’ events, including the “success” of a sovereign state, or the subjects and knowledge production of decolonial realities. The article critically assesses (...) how the term failure is used by IR’s scholarly community as signifier and analogy and what it signifies and analogizes. It grapples with Bruno Latour’s “The Immense Cry Channeled” by Pope Francis and ‘“Love your Monsters.’” It concludes with a discussion of the ethics of critical theory and its empha­sis on critique. I problematize its critical moves to lodge racializations in the enslaved and colonized body and body politic of ‘failed’ states, and the normative projects it bolsters. I also point to its broader social and political implications, including its acknowledging of certain publics at the expense of others and its death limits in times of terror and the Anthropocene. I finally argue for a ‘global’ decolonizing social analysis that in an Fanonian sense, is a “real leap” as it introduces “invention into existence” by rupturing evolutionary trajectories and linear temporalities (i.e., pure immanence, or transcendentalism). (shrink)

Recent health legislation in Norway significantly increases access to specialist care within a legally binding time frame. The paper describes the contents of the new legislation and introduces some of the challenges with proliferations of rights to health care. The paper describes some of the challenges associated with the proliferation of legal rights to health care. It explains the benefits of assessing the new law in the light of a rights framework. It then analyses the problematic aspects of establishing additional (...) priority rules as solutions to rights conflicts. It then defends adequacy criteria for acceptable priority rules when such rules are unavoidable. It finally defends our proposed method and explores concrete applications. (shrink)

IN THE FIRST CHAPTER OF HIS BOOK Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, Robert Pasnau takes a position in a longstanding debate concerning the metaphysical status and the epistemological role of sensible forms in Aquinas’s theory of cognition. His main claim is that Aquinas was a materialist about sensation and developed “a theory of the sort that a modern materialist could love.”.

This paper looks to evolve a discourse about the body in medieval women's mystical experience via an understanding of the life and work of Saint Catherine of Genoa as écriture-féminine. Drawing upon Catherine's resolution of binarism through the articulation of sexuality and textuality, I argue that the female mystic's experience of the body as site of struggle helps move beyond analysis of a binary experience to a politics of speaking the body directly.

Henry of Ghent can be considered the secular master of the thirteenth century who describes with a more emphasis and originality the relation between knowledge and power. Henry asserts (art. XIII, q. 3 of the Summa quaestionum ordinariarum; Quodlibet XII, q. 2) that even if Faith, as an instilled habit in us, is prior to any other form of knowledge, in order to grasp the truth of the Holy Scriptures, we need the lumen naturale. Nevertheless, in order to attain a (...) better understanding of the terms of the theological propositions, a clarius lumen, is wanted: it is the special illumination granted to the theologians which allows them to grasp - already in this life! - those truths that ordinary man cannot grasp by means of the lumen naturale, or simply by means of the lumen fidei. Introducing a lumen speciale, intermediate between the lumen fidei, granted to every pious man, and the lumen gloriae, proper to the beati, Henry renders the theologian a special man. John Duns Scotus, Peter Auriol and Henry of Harclay, re-phrasing Henry’s doctrine, admit only the possibility that someone in this life scientifically knows the divine truths. On the other hand Henry of Ghent affirms that, at least only the theologian, really knows these truths. From this knowledge speciale derives as much power speciale related to vita activa. In accord with Henry, therefore, the theologian is the true scientist and legislator, even superior than the pope and so, maybe, he could be considered the happiest human being in via. (shrink)

The article analyzes attempts to “normalize” disabilities, particularly intellectual disabilities, in contemporary Russia. The NGOs that emerged in the 1990s put a lot of work into reforming the long-term state residential care system and changing the principles of care for people with disabilities. They offered so-called assisted living as an alternative — specially created conditions in which people who have no experience of living outside the state institutions can become familiar with a “normal” life. However, as the author shows, due (...) to the depoliticization of their activities and ongoing financial crises, initiatives that could have influenced the integration of people who spent most of their lives in residential institutions — and could have put an end to Soviet segregationist policies have radically transformed the Western idea of “normalization” by adapting it to the local context. By drawing on Patrick McKearney’s theory of “transparency” on the one hand and Vincento Carpanzano’s “realistic” imagination on the other, the author examines the epistemology of NGO staff and investigates why, even in an intended normalizing project, intellectual disability still serves as a marker of radical alterity. Focusing primarily on practices of imagination and fantasizing about the future, the article demonstrates how the staff of one specific NGO, instead of advocating for their clients’ rights and expanding socializing opportunities, essentialized the psychiatric diagnoses and intellectual differences of its clients and fetishized the hope of financial security, locking former orphans with intellectual disabilities into the status of “disabled.”. (shrink)

In the paper we are analyzing the Polish ART market. It can be noticed that the lack of legal regulation has resulted in many discrepancies among the policies adopted by various ART agencies. The social acceptance of ART procedures available mostly in private clinics led to growing commercialization of the Polish ART market. Additionally, the language of gift and altruistic rhetoric that are overwhelmingly employed by ART agencies reveals hypocrisy of the Polish ART market.

Monstrosity has its recognized place in cultural narratives but in philosophical discourse it remains mostly untouched. In my paper I make an attempt at phenomenological inquiry into the experience of the Other’s monstrous body. I am beginning with some remarks concerning Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, the philosophers who devoted some attention to the problem of monstrosity and the monstrous, but my analysis is mainly based on the works of Bernhard Waldenfels, Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Waldenfels emphasizes that the (...) corporeal self is somehow perceived as alien, always somewhat distanced and not totally graspable. He also argues that the closer the Other, the stronger activation of the boundary between the spheres of the ownness and the alienness is caused. A promising framework for the analysis of the ambivalent reaction brought about by the encounter with a monstrous human body can be provided by Husserl’s phenomenological inquiry into the process of pairing, developed in his Cartesian meditations. It seems that in this experience the pairing process is frustrating and deranged because the process of apperception is disturbed by a cluster of untypical or quite unique characteristics of the monstrous body. In result, its sense remains unclear, puzzling and challenging. Interesting light on the experience of the Other’s monstrous body could shed Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, especially the ideas of flesh and chiasm outlined in his last work. The radical character of the monster, while does not render it something totally different from the own, elucidates, however, the contingency of the order under which the human corporeality is subsumed. (shrink)

In December 2014, Physicians for Human Rights released their analysis of the summary of the Committee Report of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. PHR focused on the involvement of health care professionals in the CIA torture program, concluding that the health professionals’ commissions and omissions violated the prescriptions of many fundamental bioethical documents, including international declarations of bioethics and medical research ethics. The medical doctors’ involvement evokes some thoughts concerning bioethical education. It seems that instead of developing (...) virtues through practicing morally good habits, the experience of clinical training undermines the moral ideals that medical students identified themselves with at the commencement of their medical education. The hostile response they sometimes get from their mentors when trying to question morally troubling situations may shape the habit of ‘turning a blind eye’ to unethical behaviour, since the students do not want to jeopardize their grades and future medical career. Maybe it was the development of this habit and the failure to develop the habit of moral courage instead that prevented the medical doctors participating in torture programs from defending moral ideals of their profession more effectively. (shrink)

Using food regime analysis, this paper critically analyzes how corporate actors amass, secure and apply power in the global agrifood system through International Investment Agreements (IIAs). IIAs are a key enabler of increasing corporate power in the agrifood system. We focus on three sets of investment provisions in IIAs: (a) the stringent enforceability mechanism of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, (b) the expansion of the concept of expropriation, and (c) limitations or prohibitions on host countries to impose performance requirements (...) on foreign investors. We argue that these provisions compromise fairness in the international economic system. Attracted by promises of technology transfer, economic growth and employment, host states often prioritize policies that favor foreign investors even if such policies compromise domestic policy space. We provide analysis and examples of escalating corporate power at different stages of the industrial and transgenic model of agriculture. (shrink)