Although clinical ethics consultation is a high-stakes endeavor with an increasing prominence in health care systems, progress in developing standards for quality is challenging. In this article, we describe the results of a pilot project utilizing portfolios as an evaluation tool. We found that this approach is feasible and resulted in a reasonably wide distribution of scores among the 23 submitted portfolios that we evaluated. We discuss limitations and implications of these results, and suggest that this is a significant step (...) on the pathway to an eventual certification process for clinical ethics consultants. (shrink)
In the standard narrative of her life, Barbara McClintock discovered genetic transposition in the 1940s but no one believed her. She was ignored until molecular biologists of the 1970s "rediscovered" transposition and vindicated her heretical discovery. New archival documents, as well as interviews and close reading of published papers, belie this narrative. Transposition was accepted immediately by both maize and bacterial geneticists. Maize geneticists confirmed it repeatedly in the early 1950s and by the late 1950s it was considered a (...) classic discovery. But for McClintock, movable elements were part of an elaborate system of genetic control that she hypothesized to explain development and differentiation. This theory was highly speculative and was not widely accepted, even by those who had discovered transposition independently. When Jacob and Monod presented their alternative model for gene regulation, the operon, her controller argument was discarded as incorrect. Transposition, however, was soon discovered in microorganisms and by the late 1970s was recognized as a phenomenon of biomedical importance. For McClintock, the award of the 1983 Nobel Prize to her for the discovery of movable genetic elements, long treated as a legitimation, may well have been bittersweet. This new look at McClintock's experiments and theory has implications for the intellectual history of biology, the social history of American genetics, and McClintock's role in the historiography of women in science. (shrink)
This article is a response to Barbara Forrest’ 2011 Synthese article, “On the Non-Epistemology of Intelligent Design.” Forrest offers an account of my philosophical work that consists almost entirely of personal attacks, excursions into my religious pilgrimage, and misunderstandings and misrepresentations of my work as well as of certain philosophical issues. Not surprisingly, the Synthese editors include a disclaimer in the front matter of the special issue in which Forrest’s article was published. In my response, I address three topics: (...) (1) My interest in Intelligent Design (ID) and public education and why as a Thomist I have grown more skeptical and explicitly critical of ID over the years, (2) the sorts of philosophical mistakes with which Forrest’s article is teeming, and (3) my Christian faith, religious exclusivism, and interfaith dialogue. (shrink)
Mitchell: Could we begin by discussing the problem of public art? When we spoke a few weeks ago, you expressed some uneasiness with the notion of public art, and I wonder if you could expand on that a bit.Kruger: Well, you yourself lodged it as the “problem” of public art and I don’t really find it problematic inasmuch as I really don’t give it very much thought. I think on a broader level I could say that my “problem” is with (...) categorization and naming: how does one constitute art and how does one constitute a public? Sometimes I think that if architecture is a slab of meat, then so-called public art is a piece of garnish laying next to it. It has a kind of decorative function. Now I’m not saying that it always has to be that way—at all—and I think perhaps that many of my colleagues are working to change that now. But all too often, it seems the case.Mitchell: Do you think of your own art, insofar as it’s engaged with the commercial public sphere—that is, with advertising, publicity, mass media, and other technologies for influencing a consumer public—that it is automatically a form of public art? Or does it stand in opposition to public art?Kruger: I have a question for you: what is a public sphere which is an uncommercial public sphere? Barbara Kruger is an artist who works with words and pictures. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Professor of English and art at the University of Chicago. (shrink)
The history of emotions is a burgeoning field—so much so, that some are invoking an “emotional turn.” As a way of charting this development, I have interviewed three of the leading practitioners of the history of emotions: William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns. The interviews retrace each historian’s intellectual-biographical path to the history of emotions, recapitulate key concepts, and critically discuss the limitations of the available analytical tools. In doing so, they touch on Reddy’s concepts of “emotive,” “emotional (...) regime,” and “emotional navigation,” as well as on Rosenwein’s “emotional community” and on Stearns’s “emotionology” and offer glimpses of each historian’s ongoing research. The interviews address the challenges presented to historians by research in the neurosciences and the like, highlighting the distinctive contributions offered by a historical approach. In closing, the interviewees appear to reach a consensus, envisioning the history of emotions not as a specialized field but as a means of integrating the category of emotion into social, cultural, and political history, emulating the rise of gender as an analytical category since its early beginnings as “women’s history” in the 1970s. (shrink)
In this response to essays by Barbara J. King, Gregory R. Peterson, Wesley J. Wildman, and Nancy R. Howell, I present arguments to counter some of the exciting and challenging questions from my colleagues. I take the opportunity to restate my argument for an interdisciplinary public theology, and by further developing the notion of transversality I argue for the specificity of the emerging theological dialogue with paleoanthropology and primatology. By arguing for a hermeneutics of the body, I respond to (...) criticism of my notion of human uniqueness and argue for strong evolutionary continuities, as well as significant discontinuities, between primates, humans, and other hominids. In addition, I answer critical questions about theological methodology and argue how the notion of human uniqueness, theologically restated as the image of God, is enriched by transversally appropriating scientific notions of species specificity and embodied personhood. (shrink)
This paper discusses three inter-related themes in Barbara Herman's Moral Literacy norm-constituted power completes’ practical reason or rational agency.
Santa Barbara County exhibits some of the highest rates of food insecurity in California, as well as in the United States. Through ethnographic research of three low-income, predominantly Latino communities in Santa Barbara County, this study examined the degree to which households had been experiencing heightened levels of food insecurity since the economic recession and ensuing coping strategies, including gender-specific repercussions and coping strategies. Methods included administering a survey with 150 households and conducting observation and unstructured interviews at (...) various local food-centered venues. Results indicated that households from the three communities were experiencing heightened levels of food insecurity and that all three communities were employing diversification of procurement, adjustments to a reduced or limited food budget, reliance on food assistance, and revitalization of the home as a site of domestic food production and preparation as coping strategies. The results also suggested that women suffered disproportionately higher psychological and physical costs associated with compounding crises. In conclusion, the experiences narrated by low-income households reflect a form of citizenship that appears compromised by a host of variables perceived to exist outside the realm of local control. Shifting toward an operational framework of food sovereignty may allow these communities to become more resilient in the face of future political, environmental, social, and economic stressors. (shrink)
A new essay to analyse the demonstration which Aristotle gave of Barbara ACP is realized with the techniques of mathematicallogic. The critical points are indicated; based on them it is considered that Aristotle’s proof is not conclusive.
The German poet Barbara Köhler's 2007 poem-cycle Niemands Frau [Nobody's Wife] is more than a feminist response to Homer's Odyssey. In shifting the focus from the escapades of the hero Odysseus to the web of women characters that populates Homer's epic poem – Nausicaa, Circe, the Sirens, Helen, Ino Leucothea, the shades of the dead women whom Odysseus meets in Hades, and “Nobody’s wife” Penelope – Köhler also undertakes a grammatical shift: from the masculine singular pronoun “er” to the (...) polyvalent pronoun “sie” that denotes the feminine singular, the gender-unmarked plural and the formal “you.” “Sie” acts as the “quantum linguistic particle” that transports the reader from a world analogous to that conceived by Newtonian physics into a quantum universe of plural probabilities. Köhler's work explores the difference in power dynamics that results from this transformation, generating intriguing ways of reconceiving subjectivity, relationality, rationality, and authorship. Taken at their word, the poems open up a prospect of no longer insisting on the sovereign individual subject and his linear modes of narration, inheritance, calculation and grammatical proposition. (shrink)
I compare Locke's views on the nature and powers of the self with E. J. Lowe's view, ‘non-Cartesian substance dualism’. Lowe agrees with Locke that persons have a power to choose or not to choose. Lowe takes this power to be non-causal. I argue that this move does not obviously succeed in evading the notorious interaction problem that arises for all forms of substance dualism, including those of Locke and Descartes. However, I am sympathetic to Lowe's attempt to give a (...) metaphysical account of a robust sort of agency that would explain how human beings might be genuinely autonomous. (shrink)
Stanley Cavell reflects on the writing of Barbara Cassin in light of his interest in interpreting certain philosophers as "philosophically destructive," where this destructiveness may in fact be understood as philosophically creative. Cavell suggests that the writings of Austin and Wittgenstein may be considered in these terms, and speculates on the potential interest these writers might have for Cassin. Cassin's call for a rethinking of philosophy might be seen as uniquely essential to the practice of Austin and Wittgenstein.
"When you find yourself neck deep in shit, start making bricks," or so I was advised by Luanne T. Frank, a faculty member during my graduate days, who was deftly "translating" Heidegger for us during one class session. And now, decades later, I look around and think, "I'd better get busy, really busy."With that prelude, and apologies to those weak of stomach or imagination—but this is not the time to be queasy—I approach Barbara Cassin's Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent (...) Relativism. Indeed, the paperback cover image is of a man knee deep in water, at the least, and he looks down reflectively, somberly, as if to ask: "Really? What to do?"When I first read Cassin's volume—a collection of previously... (shrink)
Barbara McClintock won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for her discovery of mobile genetic elements. Her Nobel work began in 1944, and by 1950 McClintock began presenting her work on "controlling elements." McClintock performed her studies through the use of controlled breeding experiments with known mutant stocks, and read the action of controlling elements (transposons) in visible patterns of pigment and starch distribution. She taught close colleagues to "read" the patterns in her maize kernels, "seeing" pigment and starch genes (...) turning on and off. McClintock illustrated her talks and papers on controlling elements or transposons with photographs of the spotted and streaked maize kernels which were both her evidence and the key to her explanations. Transposon action could be read in the patterns by the initiated, but those without step by step instruction by McClintock or experience in maize often found her presentations confusing. The photographs she displayed became both McClintock's means of communication, and a barrier to successful presentation of her results. The photographs also had a second and more subtle effect. As images of patterns arrived at through growth and development of the kernel, they highlight what McClintock believed to be the developmental consequences of transposition, which in McClintock's view was her central contribution, over the mechanism of transposition, for which she was eventually recognized by others. Scientific activities are extremely visual, both at the sites of investigation and in communication through drawings, photographs, and movies. Those visual messages deserve greater scrutiny by historians of science. (shrink)
An appreciation of the life and word of Barbara McClintock, with special emphasis on what made her a unique and visionary scientist. The obituary indicates unappreciated aspects of her work on biological sensing and how organisms restructure their genomes in response to challenges.
This is a book review of Barbara Vetter's Potentiality. -/- Philosophy is most intriguing when it teaches us seeing differently. Barbara Vetter’s book Po- tentiality & Possibility (OUP 2014) offers us precisely that: a new orthodoxy when it comes to our view of dispositions, possibility, and, most of all, potentiality. And it does so commendably well with the clarity of expression and the precision we often miss in the literature on causal powers and the like. -/- Vetter writes (...) on page 228: “This book is meant to be the beginning of a debate, not its end.” It is a pleasure and honour to be part of that beginning. Let us start. -/- A first big part of her book aims to show that the standard semantic and/or metaphysical inter- pretation of dispositional predicates and/or dispositions fails and that it ought to be replaced by her potentiality metaphysics. The first half of this commentary, 1., concerns consequences this view has. -/- A second huge part of Vetter’s project is to analyse possibility in terms of potentiality. This will be the focus of the second part, 2., of this review. (shrink)
La poésie de Barbara Guest s’inscrit à l’encontre des attentes de lecture habituelles, les événements du poème ayant la priorité sur le contenu : le sujet du poème s’efface en faveur de la plasticité à l’œuvre. Les poèmes- événements requièrent la participation imaginative du lecteur. Plusieurs événements et procédés se croisent : peinture et musique se côtoient en empruntant des processus humains comme le cinéma, le jeu sur la plasticité de l’œuvre d’art, la collaboration artistique, tissage et dé-tissage, mais (...) aussi des phénomènes naturels tels que l’iridescence, l’osmose et la symbiose. L’événement toutefois insaisissable qui a lieu au sein du poème devient le point de rencontre aléatoire entre différents moyens artistiques et des occurrences naturelles. C’est ainsi que la corrélation mystérieuse et miraculeuse peut s’établir entre le poème et son lecteur. Le poème polysémique ouvre des probabilités. Le texte se livre tel un événement de mots et de mondes dans une œuvre mouvante aux couleurs iridescentes et aux subtiles variations. (shrink)
(2006). James Hillman's A Terrible Love of War Chris Hedges’ War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning and Barbara Ehrenreich's Blood Rites. Journal of Military Ethics: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 67-73.
Some psychologists have recently tried to develop new approaches to psychology incompatible with both natural-science views of the discipline and basic tenets of postmodernism. In her new book on psychology’s interpretative turn, Barbara Held refers to these thinkers as "middleground theorists" or MGTs. Most of the MGTs reject psychological laws, defend free choice and agency, stress the role of values in psychological inquiry, and argue for a hermeneutical methodology. Some reject scientific realism and embrace epistemological relativism. Both Held and (...) I express doubts about some of these views. (shrink)
La poésie de Barbara Guest s’inscrit à l’encontre des attentes de lecture habituelles, les événements du poème ayant la priorité sur le contenu : le sujet du poème s’efface en faveur de la plasticité à l’œuvre. Les poèmes- événements requièrent la participation imaginative du lecteur. Plusieurs événements et procédés se croisent : peinture et musique se côtoient en empruntant des processus humains comme le cinéma, le jeu sur la plasticité de l’œuvre d’art, la collaboration artistique, tissage et dé-tissage, mais (...) aussi des phénomènes naturels tels que l’iridescence, l’osmose et la symbiose. L’événement toutefois insaisissable qui a lieu au sein du poème devient le point de rencontre aléatoire entre différents moyens artistiques et des occurrences naturelles. C’est ainsi que la corrélation mystérieuse et miraculeuse peut s’établir entre le poème et son lecteur. Le poème polysémique ouvre des probabilités. Le texte se livre tel un événement de mots et de mondes dans une œuvre mouvante aux couleurs iridescentes et aux subtiles variations. (shrink)
In Research Misconduct Policy in Biomedicine: Beyond the Bad-Apple Approach, Barbara Redman recommends that policy perspectives on research misconduct extend beyond the individual wrongdoer to encompass institutional and broader contexts. She rails against what she sees as a pervasive focus on the misbehavior of individuals that neglects organizational and psychosocial aspects of bad conduct. Her primary targets are the misconduct policies of the U.S. federal government and research institutions. In the U.S., research misconduct policy is grounded in the federal (...) definition of research misconduct as fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. The Office of Research.. (shrink)
Some psychologists have recently tried to develop new approaches to psychology incompatible with both natural-science views of the discipline and basic tenets of postmodernism. In her new book on psychology’s interpretative turn, Barbara Held refers to these thinkers as “middleground theorists” or MGTs. Most of the MGTs reject psychological laws, defend free choice and agency, stress the role of values in psychological inquiry, and argue for a hermeneutical methodology. Some reject scientific realism and embrace epistemological relativism. Both Held and (...) I express doubts about some of these views. (shrink)
: The response of Barbara Pfeffer Billauer to my article "If I Am Only My Genes, What Am I? Genetic Essentialism and a Jewish Response" highlights the conflict between a sociological understanding of religion and the resistance to such analysis from within a faith tradition. Ms. Billauer makes three main points; the first strangely credits to me, and then attacks, an argument the article takes great pains to refute, but does so to emphasize the faith's prescient guidance in matters (...) scientific. The second attempts to rebut my critical analysis of the tensions inherent in Jewish views of the body with an insistence that Judaism so perfectly balances the relation between the sacred and profane that there is not now, and never was, the slightest tension between corporeality and divinity in the Jewish corpus. The third uses my article as vehicle for her to expound on an interesting but tangential formulation of three Jewish terms. In all, the need to defend her interpretation of Judaism's solutions to the problems the article raises results in un-self-critical and ahistorical theorizing, making the utility of her arguments in a discussion of the sociology of religion unsatisfactory. (shrink)
Barbara Jordan (1936?1996), a formidable politician, won election to the Texas Senate (1966) and to the US Congress (1972). She became one of the most celebrated African?American politicians of the twentieth century, acclaimed both by white and black. Jordan was a voluntarist, viewing individuals as able to change the world through their own actions. She was committed to the American dream of inclusion, and also to the importance of positive ties to elites; to coping with the ?world as it (...) is?, to the futility of confrontation, and also to changing and influencing the attitudes of men at the top. Jordan opposed civil disobedience, nonviolent or not. Yet she admired symbols of defiance like Malcolm X and Mohammed Ali. A highly public figure, she was also exceptionally self?repressed. Critics likened her to the conservative Booker Washington, yet she was a staunch defender of voting rights and a radical integrationist. (shrink)
Stanley Cavell reflects on the writing of Barbara Cassin in light of his interest in interpreting certain philosophers as "philosophically destructive," where this destructiveness may in fact be understood as philosophically creative. Cavell suggests that the writings of Austin and Wittgenstein may be considered in these terms, and speculates on the potential interest these writers might have for Cassin. Cassin's call for a rethinking of philosophy might be seen as uniquely essential to the practice of Austin and Wittgenstein.
