Evaluation and its siblings audit, quality assurance, inspection, and other kinds of assessments have expanded in all public and private sectors. Scholars write about ‘the audit society’ (Power, 19...

This paper analyses various approaches to the concept of a ‘safety culture’ in terms of their epistemological assumptions regarding the nature of learning. As a result of this analysis, the study proposes a relational-interpretive framework for the promotion of safety in health care, which is based on relational theories and the philosophy of conceptual pragmatism as this can be used to integrate the various strands of current safety research. In particular, the approach based on a relational-interpretive perspective can bridge the (...) apparent dualist gap that exists between the rational objectivist perspective and the relativist perspective on the role of learning in developing a safety culture. According to the relational-interpretive perspective of safety management that is proposed here, organizational members need to give continuous attention to the accepted organizational norms and values, which shape the safety culture. A case study from a health care safety project in Sweden is utilized to illustrate the ideas advanced in this paper. (shrink)

The reintroduction of Aristotle's Analytics to the Latin West—in particular, the reintroduction of the Posterior Analytics—forever altered the course of medieval epistemological discussions. Although the Analytics fell decidedly from grace in later centuries, the sophisticated account of human cognition developed in the Posterior Analytics appealed so strongly to thirteenth-century European scholars that it became one of the two central theories of knowledge advocated in the later Middle Ages. Robert Grosseteste's 'Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libro', written in the 1220s, is most (...) likely the first complete Latin commentary on the Posterior Analytics. As the thirteenth century wore on, Aristotle’s account of human cognition was generally set in opposition to the Augustinian-influenced theory of divine illumination that was de rigueur in the early thirteenth century. Although common consensus holds that this pattern of opposition was set already in Grosseteste’s CPA, I argue that the story of the Posterior Analytics’s early reception is, in fact, quite different. In particular, I maintain that, rather than seeing himself as forced to choose between his earlier theory of divine illumination and the “new” Aristotelian epistemology, Grosseteste is perfectly content to blend and bring together the diverse elements of these systems and to present a consciously synthetic rather than adversarial picture of these differing accounts of human cognition. (shrink)

Through imaginative engagement readers of fiction become, to an extraordinary extent, the narrator’s ‘children’: they often submit themselves to the narrator’s authority without reserve. But precisely because of that, readers are deeply at a loss when their trust is betrayed. This underscores a core function of fiction, namely to evoke emotional response in the reader. In this paper, we hypothesize how a reader’s imaginative engagement can be subjected to narrative frustration due to processing or moral complexity. The types of narrative (...) frustration we consider differ in terms of their sources, and their emotional and behavioral impacts on the reader. Here, we break down these frustrations into their component parts, in an effort to better characterize the different classes of frustrations. We propose that frustrations arise from different combinations of local uncertainty, moral clash and global uncertainty. These sources of frustration in turn explain the reader’s emotional response and their consequent reading behavior as they imaginatively engage with fiction. (shrink)

This chapter addresses a difficulty facing Aquinas’s view of post-mortem identity that is posed by his account of the separated soul. Called the Two-Person Problem, the difficulty is that—although Aquinas denies that the human soul is identical to either the human being or the human person—the disembodied soul has agency and self-reference in the period between death and bodily resurrection. If the soul is not identical to you, however, who is it? And how can you be brought back at the (...) resurrection? This chapter considers two promising solutions to this problem. Unfortunately, neither of these proposals solves the Two-Person Problem. The chapter believes that Aquinas’s account of human nature does not, as it stands, possess the resources to overcome this difficulty; and so concludes that reconstructing a Thomistic account that involves immediate bodily resurrection, though a radical approach, is best suited to preserve the most essential features of Aquinas’s theory. (shrink)

Wittgenstein at the Movies is centered on in-depth explorations of two intriguing experimental films on Wittgenstein: Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein and Péter Forgács' Wittgenstein Tractatus. The featured essays look at cinematic interpretations of Wittgenstein's life and philosophy in a manner bound to provoke the lively interest of Wittgenstein scholars, film theorists, students of film aesthetics and artistic modernism, and those concerned with the world of Cambridge in the first half of the twentieth century.

_Dreaming_ is the second part of the trilogy _Forms of Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition_. It investigates some of the most fascinating and enduring discussions on dreams in the Greek, Latin, and Arabic reception of Aristotle’s psychology.

Centred on the diaries of Violet Thompson and Betty Whitla-Lucas, this exploratory paper self-reflexively plots key feminist problematics of integrating the personal with scholarship, while also enacting and working them through. By addressing my own familial connection to the archive, I explore the experience of using personal material within scholarship. Considering the increased incorporation of personal narrative into feminist scholarship, I question what is at stake in the production and reception of women’s life-writing. I propose a model of motivation and (...) desire for the process of reading and writing of women’s life-narratives, probing the relationship of desire that exists between women. Returning to the archive, Violet’s and Betty’s records of pregnancy are read as sites of power relations, examining the existence of inter-discursive networks of empowerment that disrupt the dominant cultural precepts on female sexuality. In closing, I reflect upon the interplay of private fantasy with public history and imagine the potential for the disparate forms of women’s life-writing, not only as feminist interventions in the cultural field but as contributions to discussions on the nature of feminine inscriptions. (shrink)

Maintaining intersubjectivity is crucial for accomplishing coordinated social action. Although conversational repair is a recognised defence of intersubjectivity and routinely used to address ostensible sources of trouble in social interaction, it is less clear how people address more equivocal trouble. This study uses conversation analysis to examine preschool classroom interaction, focusing on practices used to identify and address such trouble. Repair is found to be a recurrent frontline practice for addressing equivocal trouble, occasioning space for further information that might enable (...) identifying a specific trouble source. Where further information is forthcoming, a range of strategies are subsequently employed to address the trouble. Where this is not possible or does not succeed, a secondary option is to progress a broader activity-in-progress. This allows for the possibility of another opportunity to identify and address the trouble. Given that misunderstandings can jeopardise interactants’ ability to mutually accomplish courses of action, these practices defend intersubjectivity against the threat of equivocal trouble. (shrink)

Although elementary schools are considered a fertile ground for promoting positive behaviors among students, to date, almost no study has examined the effectiveness of a cyberbullying prevention program among elementary school students of typical and non-typical development. The present study evaluated the effectiveness of such a school-based European funded preventive program among sixth graders with and without special educational needs. The study also examined the predictive role of self-esteem in students’ cyberbullying involvement. Overall, 240 students from randomly selected Greek schools (...) completed a self-report questionnaire, which included a scale on cyberbullying and self-esteem. Following an experimental longitudinal research design, the intervention was applied to the experimental but not to the control group of students. Each group consisted of both students with and without SEN. The evaluation was based on the completion of the self-report questionnaire before, immediately after, and 6 months after the intervention was completed by trained general and special education teachers. According to the findings, students’ cyberbullying engagement decreased significantly in the second and third phase, and especially for those with SEN. Additionally, self-esteem negatively predicted students’ involvement in cyberbullying in all three phases. The findings partially support the appropriateness of interventions within the elementary school context in order to enhance self-esteem and promote a safe online culture among students of typical as well as atypical development. (shrink)

Theoretical models for physician-patient communication in clinical practice are described in literature, but none of them seems adequate for solving the communication problem in clinical practice that emerges in case of factitious disorder. Theoretical models generally imply open communication and respect for the autonomy of the patient. In factitious disorder, the physician is confronted by lies and (self)destructive behaviour of the patient, who in one way or another tries to involve the physician in this behaviour. It is no longer controversial (...) that the physician should communicate his consideration of a factitious disorder without insistence that the patient accepts this diagnosis. However, the balance between patient autonomy and open communication on the one hand, and the preservation of the patient's health, physician integrity and of a constructive physician-patient relationship on the other is easily disrupted. In this article, an epistemological model is described to facilitate a positive outcome of confrontation in treatment of factitious disorder. Analysing the problem in terms of systems theory will help the physician to assess what information is appropriate to use in which phase of the patient's treatment, while preserving the physician-patient relationship. (shrink)

Yarkoni's analysis clearly articulates a number of concerns limiting the generalizability and explanatory power of psychological findings, many of which are compounded in infancy research. ManyBabies addresses these concerns via a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research that is grounded in theory-building, committed to diversification, and focused on understanding sources of variation.

How do people decide which claims should be considered mere beliefs and which count as knowledge? Although little is known about how people attribute knowledge to others, philosophical debate about the nature of knowledge may provide a starting point. Traditionally, a belief that is both true and justified was thought to constitute knowledge. However, philosophers now agree that this account is inadequate, due largely to a class of counterexamples (termed ‘‘Gettier cases’’) in which a person’s justified belief is true, but (...) only due to luck. We report four experiments examining the effect of truth, justification, and ‘‘Gettiering’’ on people’s knowledge attributions. These experiments show that: (1) people attribute knowledge to others only when their beliefs are both true and justified; (2) in contrast to contemporary philosophers, people also attribute knowledge to others in Gettier situations; and (3) knowledge is not attributed in one class of Gettier cases, but only because the agent’s belief is based on ‘‘apparent’’ evidence. These findings suggest that the lay concept of knowledge is roughly consistent with the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief, and also point to a major difference between the epistemic intuitions of laypeople and those of philosophers. (shrink)

Freedom and the subject in Jean-Paul Sartre -- Freedom and necessity in Jacques Derrida -- Freedom and the subject in contemporary philosophy and theory -- Theorizing pathologies and therapeutics of freedom.

The philosophical work of Jean-Luc Marion has opened new ways of speaking about religious convictions and experiences. In this exploration of Marion’s philosophy and theology, Christina M. Gschwandtner presents a comprehensive and critical analysis of the ideas of saturated phenomena and the phenomenology of givenness. She claims that these phenomena do not always appear in the excessive mode that Marion describes and suggests instead that we consider degrees of saturation. Gschwandtner covers major themes in Marion’s work—the historical event, art, (...) nature, love, gift and sacrifice, prayer, and the Eucharist. She works within the phenomenology of givenness, but suggests that Marion himself has not considered important aspects of his philosophy. (shrink)

On 14 January 1999, the woman theologian Christina Landman published an article in the religious column, Godsdiens Aktueel, of the Afrikaans daily newspaper Beeld under the heading ‘Poligamie, ditsem!’ (Yes, for polygamy!). In the article, Landman pondered whether polygamy – which is allowed in South Africa for indigenous cultures – would not be an advantage for the Afrikaans society where extra-marital affairs were allegedly high. There was an immediate and long-running reaction to this article in the Afrikaans, as well (...) as in the English media, nationally and internationally, in the printed media, as well as on radio and television. This article will isolate themes in the responding letters of Afrikaans readers. The rejection of polygamy by Afrikaans readers rests on arguments that it is unbiblical, dehumanising to women and impractical. On the other hand, those Afrikaans readers who opt for polygamy argue that multiple-partner-relationships can save marriages from ending in divorce because of extra-marital affairs and can lighten the burden on overworked women. Contribution: This article contributes to the debate on polygamy and in particular from the Afrikaans population in South Africa whose culture and religion forbid polygamy. The discussion and findings as thematised in this article contribute to a body of knowledge not been dealt with in academic research. (shrink)

Global reproductive landscapes and with them cross-border routes are rapidly changing. This paper examines the reproductive routes and choices of fertility travellers from China to Russia as reported by medical professionals and fertility service providers. Providing new empirical data, it raises new ethical questions on the facilitation of cross-border reproductive travel and the commercialisation of reproductive treatment. The relaxation of the one-child policy in 2014 in China, the increasing demand for ART exceeding the capacity of national fertility clinics and the (...) difficulty of accessing treatment with donor eggs concomitant with a growing economic power of the upper–middle class are shaping the ART industry in Asia in new ways. A new development is Chinese citizens increasingly seeking ART treatment in Russia, which has a long-standing practice of ART governed by a liberal legislation. Furthermore, as China prohibits the export of gametes, Chinese fertility travellers rely on acquiring donor gametes once starting treatment abroad. Clinicians in Russia report three strategies amongst their Chinese patients: One group is using donor eggs of women of Asian appearance living in Russia or is hiring women of resembling appearance from third-party countries to donate their eggs in Russia to create resemblance in their offspring. Another group is buying white donor gametes to create Eurasian mixed children and thus ‘enhance’ their offspring. Providing novel empirical data, this article informs ethical deliberation and raises imminent questions for further research in this understudied geographic region and on cross-border reproductive treatment. (shrink)

This article reports on interviews conducted with 11 women at the Thohoyandou Victim Empowerment Programme, a centre located in Sibasa, Thohoyandou, in the Limpopo province of South Africa. The centre provides support and advocacy to female survivors of domestic violence. The participants were victims of gender-based violence and the study aimed at exploring the spiritual experiences of women assaulted by their partners. Interviews were conducted over 4 days and were held on the TVEP premises. This article discusses how women of (...) faith found meaning and support through their religious beliefs when experiencing violence in intimate spaces. Furthermore, the article drew insights from spiritual perceptions held by women that make them feel safer and assist them to find ways to cope with violence in intimate relationships. However, the study found that women prayed for divine intervention and change in their families and for God to help their husbands by removing all evil spirits from their lives. It was found that apart from prayer, the women do not have any other spiritual resources to combat gender-based violence. The authors suggest the deconstruction of harmful religious discourses towards healing religious discourses as a type of ‘intervention’ in the lives of the interviewees.Contribution: The article contributes towards understanding the harmful impact of religious discourses on the lives of women who are vulnerable towards domestic violence. Religious discourses that are either harmful or healing are here identified through the stories of women who have been violated in their intimate relationships, thus contributing to the body of knowledge in gender studies and to religious and social sciences in general. (shrink)

Microaggressions are a new moral category that refers to the subtle yet harmful forms of discriminatory behavior experienced by members of oppressed groups. Such behavior often results from implicit bias, leaving individual perpetrators unaware of the harm they have caused. Moreover, microaggressions are often dismissed on the grounds that they do not constitute a real or morally significant harm. My goal is therefore to explain why microaggressions are morally significant and argue that we are responsible for their harms. I offer (...) a conceptual framework for microaggressions, exploring the central mechanisms used for identification and the empirical research concerning their harm. The cumulative harm of microaggressions presents a unique case for understanding disaggregation models for contributed harms, blame allocation, and individual responsibility within structural oppression. Our standard moral model for addressing cumulative harm is to hold all individual contributors blameworthy for their particular contributions. However, if we aim to hold people responsible for their unconscious microaggressions and address cumulative harm holistically, this model is inadequate. Drawing on Iris Marion Young's social connection model, I argue that we, as individual perpetrators of microaggressions, have a responsibility to respond to the cumulative harm to which we have individually contributed. (shrink)

Academics across widely ranging disciplines all pursue knowledge, but they do so using vastly different methods. Do these academics therefore also have different ideas about when someone possesses knowledge? Recent experimental findings suggest that intuitions about when individuals have knowledge may vary across groups; in particular, the concept of knowledge espoused by the discipline of philosophy may not align with the concept held by laypeople. Across two studies, we investigate the concept of knowledge held by academics across seven disciplines (N (...) = 1,581) and compare these judgments to those of philosophers (N = 204) and laypeople (N = 336). We find that academics and laypeople share a similar concept of knowledge, while philosophers have a substantially different concept. These experiments show that (a) in contrast to philosophers, other academics and laypeople attribute knowledge to others in some “Gettier” situations; (b) academics and laypeople are much less likely to attribute knowledge when reminded of the possibility of error, but philosophers are not affected by this reminder; and (c) non‐philosophy academics are overall more skeptical about knowledge than laypeople or philosophers. These findings suggest that academics across a wide range of disciplines share a similar concept of knowledge, and that this concept aligns closely with the intuitions held by laypeople, and differs considerably from the concept of knowledge described in the philosophical literature, as well as the epistemic intuitions of philosophers themselves. (shrink)

Reviewers of this book have praised Christina Hoff Sommer's well-reasoned argument against many feminists' reliance on misleading, politically motivated 'facts' about how women are victimised.

This book provides an introduction to the emerging field of Continental philosophy of religion by treating the philosophical thought of its most important representatives, including its appropriations by several thinkers in the US. Part I provides a context to the field by looking at the religious aspects of the thought of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Jacques Derrida. It contends that although the work of these thinkers is not apologetic in nature, it prepares the ground for the more religiously motivated (...) work of more recent thinkers by giving religious language and ideas some legitimacy in philosophical discussions. Part II devotes a chapter to each of the contemporary French thinkers who articulate a phenomenology of religious experience: Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Jean-Yves Lacoste and Emmanuel Falque. This part argues that their respective philosophies can be read as an apologetics of sort, namely as making arguments for the coherence of thought about God and the viability of religious experience, though each does so in a different fashion and to a different degree. Part III considers the three major thinkers who have popularized and extended this phenomenology in the US context: Merold Westphal, John D. Caputo, and Richard Kearney. The book thus both provides an introduction to important contemporary thinkers many of whom have not yet received much treatment in English and also argues that their philosophies can be read as providing an argument for Christian faith. (shrink)

This book is an unusually readable and lucid account of the development of Derrida's work, from his early writings on phenomenology and structuralism to his most recent interventions in debates on psychoanalysis, ethics and politics. Christina Howells gives a clear explanation of many of the key terms of deconstruction - including differance, trace, supplement and logocentrism - and shows how they function in Derrida's writing. She explores his critique of the notion of self-presence through his engagement with Husserl, and (...) his critique of humanist conceptions of the subject through an account of his ambivalent and evolving relationship to the philosophy of Sartre. The question of the relationship between philosophy and literature is examined through an analysis of the texts of the 1970s, and in particular Glas, where Derrida confronts Hegel's totalizing dialectics with the fragmentary and iconoclastic writings of Jean Genet. The author addresses directly the vexed questions of the extreme difficulty of Derrida's own writing and of the passionate hostility it arouses in philosophers as diverse as Searle and Habermas. She argues that deconstruction is a vital stimulus to vigilance in both the ethical and political spheres, contributing significantly to debate on issues such as democracy, the legacy of Marxism, responsibility, and the relationship between law and justice. Comprehensive, cogently argued and up to date, this book will be an invaluable text for students and scholars alike. (shrink)

Native advertising has recently become a prominent buzzword for advertisers and publishers alike. It describes advertising formats which closely adapt their form and style to the editorial environment they appear in, intending to hide the commercial character of these ads. In two experimental studies, we test how advertising disclosures in native ads on news websites affect recipients’ attitudes towards a promoted brand in a short and long-term perspective. In addition, we explore persuasion through certain content features (i. e., message sidedness (...) and use of exemplars) and how they affect disclosure effects. Results show that disclosures increase perceived persuasive intent but do not necessarily decrease brand attitudes. However, disclosure effects do not persist over time and remain unaffected by content features. (shrink)

This volume collects twenty original essays on the philosophy of film. It uniquely brings together scholars working across a range of philosophical traditions and academic disciplines to broaden and advance debates on film and philosophy. The book includes contributions from a number of prominent philosophers of film including Noël Carroll, Chris Falzon, Deborah Knight, Paisley Livingston, Robert Sinnerbrink, Malcolm Turvey, and Thomas Wartenberg. While the topics explored by the contributors are diverse, there are a number of thematic threads that connect (...) them. Overall, the book seeks to bridge analytic and continental approaches to philosophy of film in fruitful ways. Moving to the individual essays, the first two sections offer novel takes on the philosophical value and the nature of film. The next section focuses on the film-as-philosophy debate. Section IV covers cinematic experience, while Section V includes interpretations of individual films that touch on questions of artificial intelligence, race and film, and cinema's biopolitical potential. Finally, the last section proposes new avenues for future research on the moving image beyond film. This book will appeal to a broad range of scholars working in film studies, theory, and philosophy. (shrink)

The development of photodynamic therapy and anti-vascular endothelial growth factor agents have revolutionized the treatment of retinal diseases, transforming the retina subspecialty by ushering in an age of pharmacological treatments for a wide range of diseases, including age-related macular degeneration.

In recent years, most political theorists have agreed that shame shouldn't play any role in democratic politics because it threatens the mutual respect necessary for participation and deliberation. But Christina Tarnopolsky argues that not every kind of shame hurts democracy. In fact, she makes a powerful case that there is a form of shame essential to any critical, moderate, and self-reflexive democratic practice. Through a careful study of Plato's Gorgias, Tarnopolsky shows that contemporary conceptions of shame are far too (...) narrow. For Plato, three kinds of shame and shaming practices were possible in democracies, and only one of these is similar to the form condemned by contemporary thinkers. Following Plato, Tarnopolsky develops an account of a different kind of shame, which she calls "respectful shame." This practice involves the painful but beneficial shaming of one's fellow citizens as part of the ongoing process of collective deliberation. And, as Tarnopolsky argues, this type of shame is just as important to contemporary democracy as it was to its ancient form. Tarnopolsky also challenges the view that the Gorgias inaugurates the problematic oppositions between emotion and reason, and rhetoric and philosophy. Instead, she shows that, for Plato, rationality and emotion belong together, and she argues that political science and democratic theory are impoverished when they relegate the study of emotions such as shame to other disciplines. (shrink)

In this paper, I present and explore some ideas about how factive emotional states and factive perceptual states each relate to knowledge and reasons. This discussion will shed light on the so-called ‘perceptual model’ of the emotions.

According to one understanding of the problem of dirty hands, every case of dirty hands is an instance of moral conflict, but not every instance of moral conflict is a case of dirty hands. So, what sets the two apart? The dirty hands literature has offered widely different answers to this question but there has been relatively little discussion about their relative merits as well as challenges. In this paper I evaluate these different accounts by making clear which understanding of (...) concept distinctness underlies them and which of them is, ultimately, the most plausible one in the case of dirty hands and ordinary moral conflict. In order to do so, I will borrow from the terminology employed in recent debates in the philosophy of evil which have tackled a similar problem to the one at hand, i.e. defining what sets evil apart from ordinary wrongdoing. Here it has been argued that concepts could be distinct in three ways: they can have a quantitative difference, a strong qualitative or a moderate qualitative difference. I conclude that the most convincing definition of dirty hands draws a moderate qualitative distinction between ordinary moral conflict according to which dirty hands are those moral conflicts that involve a serious violation or betrayal of a core moral value. (shrink)

Although birth marks the entrance of a human being into the world and establishes the very possibility of experience the philosophical implications of this event have been largely ignored in the history of thought. This is particularly troubling in phenomenology in general and in the work of Martin Heidegger in particular. While Heidegger raises the issue of birth he drops it very quickly on the path to defining Dasein''s existence as constituted from the standpoint of death, as being-towards-death. In this (...) paper I argue, contra Heidegger, that intentional existence can only be understood from the standpoint of birth. I begin by showing that intentionality inheres in a double difference that is fundamentally dependent on birth insofar as birth is an original differentiating from prenatal existence. I conclude with the argument that only a philosophy that regards Dasein from the standpoint of birth, as being-from-birth, can give an adequate account of humans as beings who live with others and who can initiate sense constitution and action. (shrink)

A unique take on death and bereavement without a belief in God or an afterlife Accepting death is never easy, but we don't need religion to find peace, comfort, and solace in the face of death. In this inspiring and life-affirming collection of short essays, prominent atheist author Greta Christina offers secular ways to handle your own mortality and the death of those you love.