An extract from this unpublished article is published in Neill & Ridley (eds.) Arguing about Art (2007).

Since the time of Confucius and Mencius, no other work has stood out so clearly as a major critique of Chinese dynastic institutions. In a lucid translation with a helpful introduction by de Bary, this is the most powerful affirmation of a liberal Confucian political vision in premodern times.

Populism is on the rise throughout the world and it poses a challenge to democratic theory. Conventional political thought has not dealt seriously with this challenge throughout most of its history. The article takes the challenge seriously, underscoring the rise of Donald Trump as an example of populism. I argue that dominant paradigms in the study of the history of political thought and in normative, Rawlsian approaches do not elucidate populism. I argue that we need to look beyond the mainstream (...) and to comparative political thought in particular. The Latin American political theory tradition, which has been in conversation with European ideas since the dawn of the modern age, provides a model of ‘princely performative populism’ that is more useful. Drawing on a Machiavellian conception of the prince’s aesthetic relationship to the people and the centrality of populist experiences in Latin America, my model provides a novel definition of pop... (shrink)

Concerns regarding corporate ethics have grown steadily throughout the past decade. In order to remain competitive, many organizational leaders are faced with the challenge of creating an ethical environment within their organization. A model is presented showing the process and elements necessary for the institutionalization of organizational ethics. The transformational leadership style lends itself well to the creation of an ethical environment and is suggested as a means to facilitate the institutionalization of corporate ethics. Finally, the benefits of using transformational (...) leadership are demonstrated through the components of a psychological contract, organizational commitment, and ethical culture to institutionalize organizational ethics. (shrink)

In neocolonial contexts of globalization, the epistemological terrain of radical diversity poses significant ethical challenges to transnational feminisms. In view of historical associations between knowledge and discourses of love which were conditioned by imperialist brands of humanism and benevolence under colonialism, this paper argues for a deconstructionist approach to conceptualizing love in relation to knowledge and for an ethics that severs the association with benevolence, instead making alterity the basis for its account.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger stirred educators when in 1951 he claimed teaching is more difficult than learning because teachers must ‘learn to let learn’. However in the main he left the aphorism unexplained as part of a brief four-paragraph, less than two-page set of observations concerning the relationship of teaching to learning; and concluded at the end of those observations that to become a teacher is an ‘exalted matter’. This paper investigates both of Heidegger's claims, interpreting letting learn in the (...) context of Heidegger's larger philosophical project, and suggesting why in light of that project to become a teacher is an exalted concern. The methodology guiding the inquiry is largely hermeneutic, the purpose of the essay to interpret teaching from a Heideggerian perspective: its nature and general method. (shrink)

In this article, we contribute to sociological literatures on morality, professional and institutional contexts, and morally stigmatized ‘dirty work’ by emphasizing and exploring how they mutually inform one another in lawyers’ work activities. Drawing on interview data with 58 practitioners in the commercial legal industry in Singapore, we analyze how they experience professional and institutional constraints on the expressions of morality in their work. Our findings illustrate how a dominant managerial and economic focus maintains and reproduces a constrained form of (...) morality, limited to instrumental, utilitarian and commercial ends, and subordinated to lucrative client and firm interests. We discuss our findings in terms of the need to research and reform professions in ways that support more rounded and unconstrained moral reflexivity and autonomy in how work is undertaken and valued. This in turn has implications for how organizations and professions might achieve alternative moral institutional orders, and for legal work to avoid the moral and social taints of dirty work. (shrink)

Noreen Khawaja's The Religion of Existence offers an interpretation of Søren Kierkegaard's account of sin and despair as an account of alienation and our struggle to overcome it. I argue that Khawaja's interpretation of Kierkegaard is incompatible with Kierkegaard's insistence that sin must necessarily be the sinner's own fault—a result of the sinner's own free choice. I consider two possible ways of harmonizing Khawaja's account with this claim, one proposing a fictive acceptance of fault for what is not actually one's (...) fault, and one based on the claim that sin presupposes sin-consciousness, but argue that neither constitutes a satisfactory solution. I conclude that while alienation does constitute sin for Kierkegaard, it does so for a different reason than Khawaja proposes. (shrink)

"Augustine's City of God is not a treatise of political or social philosophy." So begins Christian Tornau's section on political philosophy in his entry on Augustine for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Evident in this remark is the ambivalence with which historians of philosophy have generally treated the political philosophy of the great late antique philosopher of northern Africa. Despite its suggestive title and its extended apologetical attacks on the Earthly City, the City of God is decidedly not a work (...) of political philosophy in the traditional sense: it does not reason about the best form of government; it only rarely functions as a mirror for Christian princes; it recommends no real social or... (shrink)

According to Roger Scruton, it is not possible for photographs to be representational art. Most responses to Scruton’s scepticism are versions of the claim that Scruton disregards the extent to which intentionality features in photography; but these cannot force him to give up his notion of the ideal photograph. My approach is to argue that Scruton has misconstrued the role of causation in his discussion of photography. I claim that although Scruton insists that the ideal photograph is defined by its (...) ‘merely causal’ provenance, in fact he fails to take the causal provenance of photographs seriously enough. To replace Scruton’s notion of the ideal photograph, I offer a substantive account of the causal provenance of photographs, centred on the distinctive role of ‘the photographic event’. I conclude that, with a proper understanding of the photographic process, we have good reason to re-open the question of photography as a representational art. (shrink)

The author explores how the discursive practices of social texts relate to the subjectivities of readers. Employing Dorothy Smith's notion of femininity as textually mediated discourse, the author analyzes how teenage girls read the depictions of femininity in the glossy advertisements of fashion magazines. Through interviews with 48 girls aged 13 to 17 years, she explores both why and how young girls negotiate “what it means to be a woman.” Most young girls in her study draw on stereotypical meanings of (...) adult femininity. By giving these stereotypes truth status, these readers valorize not only patriarchal meanings of womanhood but also naturalize associations between femininity and the commodities through which this femininity is expressed as the everyday doing of gender. The author concludes by discussing implications of this study for both a feminist theory and a feminist politics of culture. (shrink)

As nursing moves towards a holistic approach to care, its publications on sexuality have proliferated. 'Sexuality' and 'Gender' are concepts which are extremely difficult to define. While sex refers to the physical differences of the body, gender concerns the psychological and sociocultural differences between females and males. This distinction between sex and gender is fundamental, since many differences between females and males are not biological in origin. And, when a person's gender and sex fall together in accordance with social norms, (...) it may not necessarily be a similar correlation for every individual. The nature of these similarities is essentially threefold. First, Thomas, Savage and Webb accept that there should be a nursing definition of sexuality. In different ways they acknowledge and refer to it as an integral part of a person's being and self concept. Secondly, the authors underline some of the complexities and difficulties nurses have defining and dealing with it in professional relationships as well as on the level of self reflection, knowledge, attitudes and beliefs. Thirdly, all three surveys show why such difficulties prevail, and go on to make suggestions for change in nursing interventions and training. This article summarizes these contributions and discusses the ethical problems which nurses face in dealing with the sexuality of their patients. Pendant que les soins deviennent plus complet, les publications sur la sexualité se sont multipliés. Sexualité et genre sont des idées qui sont difficiles à définir. Pendant que 'sexualité' fait allusion aux différences entre les corps, 'genre' regarde les différences psychologiques et socioculturelles entre femmes et hommes. Cette distinction entre sexualité et genre est fondamentale, puisque beaucoup des différences entre femmes et hommes ne sont pas d'origine biologique. Et quand le genre et la sexualité d'une personne sont en accord avec les normes sociaux, il n'y a toujours pas une même correlation pour chaque individu. La nature de ces ressemblances est triple: premièrement, Thomas, Savage et Webb acceptent qu'une définition pour infirmiers/ères de las sexualité devrait exister. De plusières manières ils l'acceptent, et en réfèrent comme à un part total de l'être et idée de soi de la personne. Deuxièmement, les auteurs soulignent quelques-unes des difficultés et complexités que les infirmier/ères rencontrent dans leurs relations professionnelles aussi bien que dans leurs reflexions, compréhensions, attitudes et convictions personelles. Troisièmement, les trois études montrent pourquoi ces difficultès continuent encore, et suggèrent des changements en interventions et formation professionnelle. L'article-ci résume ces contributions et discute les problèmes éthiques des infirmier/ères vis-à-vis de la sexualité de leurs malades. Weil sich die ganzheitliche Pflege vermehrt, vermehren sich auch die Veröffentli chungen über Sexualität. Sexualität und Geschlecht sind Begriffe, die sehr schwierig zu beschreiben sind. Sexualität bezieht sich auf die physikalischen, und Geschlecht auf die psychologischen und kulturellen Unterschiede zwischen Frauen und Männern. Diese Unterschiede zwischen Sexualität und Geschlecht sind grundsätzlich, denn viele Verschiedenheiten zwischen Frauen und Männern haben keinen biologischen Ursprung. Wenn die Sexualität und das Geschlecht einer Person zusammen fallen mit den gesellschaftlichen Normen, bedeutet es noch nicht, dass es sich für alle solche Leute auf das selbe hinbezieht. Das bedeutende dieser Aehnlichkeiten ist dreifach: erstens, Thomas, Savage und Webb akzeptieren dass es eine Definition der Sexualität für die Krankenpflege geben sollte. Auf verschiedene Arten bestätigen sie sie, und weisen auf das Wesen der Person und deren Selbst-Vorstellung als etwas Vollständiges hin. Zweitens, diese Autoren betonen die Verwicklungen und Schwierigkeiten, die das Krankenpflegepersonal hat mit der Sexualität in beruflichen Beziehungen wie auch in persönlichem Nachdenken, Einstellungen und Ueberzeugungen. Drittens, alle drei Ueberblicke zeigen warum solche Schwierigkeiten weiterhin bestehen, und machen Vorschläge für Aenderungen in Pflegeeingriffen und Unterricht. Dieser Artikel fasst diese Beiträge zusammen und diskutiert die ethischen Probleme die das Krankenpflegepersonal hat mit der Sexualität der Patienten. (shrink)

In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of "the subject in process/on trial" from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this "subject in process/on trial" as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

Photography is valued as a medium for recording and visually reproducing features of the world. I seek to challenge the view that photography is fundamentally a recording process and that every photograph is a record—a view that I claim is based on a ‘single-stage’ misconception of the process. I propose an alternative, ‘multi-stage’ account in which I argue that causal registration of light is not equivalent to recording and reproducing an image. Intervention or non-intervention by photographers is more sophisticated than (...) the traditional view allows. Using the multi-stage account, I describe four models for producing photographic images and pictures. (shrink)

Background and Objectives Primary care providers (PCPs) report decreased job satisfaction and high levels of burnout, yet little is known about their experience of moral distress. The aim of this study was to gain insight into the experiences of PCPs regarding moral distress including causative factors and proposed mitigation strategies. Methods This qualitative pilot study used semi-structured interviews to identify causes of moral distress in PCPs in an academic family medicine department. Interviews were analyzed using conventional content analysis. Results Of (...) 35 eligible participants, 12 completed the study (34% participation rate). Most were white, female, and had practiced for less than 10 years. Four PCPs had considered leaving their position due to moral distress. Participants identified five causes of moral distress: policies and procedures that conflict with patient needs, the unpredictable nature of primary care, need to “bend the rules,” lack of accountability, and lack of support staff. Six internal conflicts made resolving morally distressing situations difficult: perceived powerlessness, sense of responsibility, socialization to follow orders, emotional toll of the job, competing obligations, and fear of mistakes. Conclusions These findings matched themes in the current literature and identified an unbending infrastructure. This, coupled with the chaotic nature of primary care, resulted in frequent moral distress. Participants offered solutions to reduce and mitigate moral distress (also similar with current literature) and suggested moral distress and burnout are closely linked. (shrink)

: In neocolonial contexts of globalization, the epistemological terrain of radical diversity poses significant ethical challenges to transnational feminisms. In view of historical associations between knowledge and discourses of love which were conditioned by imperialist brands of humanism and benevolence under colonialism, this paper argues for a deconstructionist approach to conceptualizing love in relation to knowledge and for an ethics that severs the association with benevolence, instead making alterity the basis for its account.

Drawing from our interdisciplinary qualitative study of LGBTI conservative Christians and their allies, we name an especially toxic form of shame—what we call sacramental shame—that affects the lives of LGBTI and other conservative Christians. Sacramental shame results from conservative Christianity's allegiance to the doctrine of gender complementarity, which elevates heteronormativity to the level of the sacred and renders those who violate it as not persons, but monsters. In dispensing shame as a sacrament, nonaffirming Christians require constant displays of shame as (...) proof that LGBTI church members love God and belong in the community. Part of what makes this shame so harmful is that parents and pastors often dispense it with sincere expressions of care and affection, compounding the sense that one's capacity to give and receive love is damaged. We foreground LGBTI Christian movements to overcome sacramental shame by cultivating nonhubristic pride, and conclude by discussing briefly their new understandings of love and justice that could have far‐reaching benefits. (shrink)

Some photographs show determinate features of a scene because the photographed scene had those features. This dependency relation is, rightly, a consensus in philosophy of photography. I seek to refute many long-established theories of photography by arguing that they are incompatible with this commitment. In Section II, I classify accounts of photography as either single-stage or multi-stage. In Section III, I analyze the historical basis for single-stage accounts. In Section IV, I explain why the single-stage view led scientists to postulate (...) “latent” photographic images as a technical phenomenon in early chemical photography. In Section V, I discredit the notion of an invisible latent image in chemical photography and, in Section VI, extend this objection to the legacy of the latent image in digital photography. In Section VII, I appeal to the dependency relation to explain why the notion of a latent image makes the single-stage account untenable. Finally, I use the multi-stage account to advance debate about “new” versus “orthodox” theories of photography. (shrink)

Conventional gender analysis of development policy does not adequately explain the slow progress towards gender equality. Our research analyses the gender discourses embedded in agricultural and rural development policies in Myanmar and Nepal. We find that both countries focus on increasing women’s participation in development activities as a core gender equality policy objective. This creates a binary categorisation of participating versus non-participating women and identifies women as responsible for improving their position. At the same time, gender (in)equality is defined exclusively (...) as a women’s concern. Such discourses, as constitutive practices, produce specific knowledge about rural women and new subjectivities that prescribe and govern them solely as subjects of development. Our research suggests that such a limited discursive practice invisiblises gendered power relations and structural and institutional issues, ultimately slowing progress towards gender equality. We demonstrate the importance of studying policy as discourse, beyond the effectiveness of policies or mainstreaming tools, and call for empirical evidence on the impact of these discourses on women’s subjectivities and lived experiences. (shrink)

Discourses of interdisciplinary health‐care are becoming more centralised in the context of global healthcare practices, which are increasingly based on multisystem interventions. As with all dominant discourses that are narrated into being, many others have been silenced and decentralised in the process. While questions of the nature and constituents of interdisciplinary practices continue to be debated and rehearsed, this paper focuses on the discourse of interdisciplinary collaboration using psychiatry as an example, with the aim of highlighting competing and alternative discourses. (...) The fundamental premise of this paper is that collaborative relationships form the basis of interdisciplinary practices in psychiatry. Through a critical engagement and a deconstructive reading of the pretext, context and subtexts of interdisciplinarity, we interrogate the concept of interdisciplinary practice within psychiatry. We contend that an important part of understanding and further conceptualising the discourse is through fracturing it. This process is illustrated in the successive stages of our conceptual map of discourse development: establishing, maintaining and developing discourses. An understanding of interdisciplinary practice is not only critical for psychiatry, but also offers important insights into the performance of collaborative failures and indeed successes across nursing and allied health professions. (shrink)

This article explores how textual analysis can help us understand subjectivity as an empirical, rather than purely theoretical, phenomenon. The texts discussed here are advice columns in adolescent magazines; the analysis takes as its starting point girls’ accounts of magazine reading. Drawing on focus group discussions and interviews with 48 girls between the ages of 13 and 17 years, I explore how the accomplishment of ‘individuality’– as a culturally and historically-specific task of adolescence – is mediated by advice texts. Because (...) my analysis directs us to the existence of embodied subjects, I employ the notion of ‘Subject-ivity’. As a concept, ‘Subject-ivity’ reminds the analyst of the presence of an embodied, rather than theoretically constructed Self, brought into existence as a practical mode of consciousness. It thus provides a potential bridge between the sociological world of social subjects and highly theoretical work on subjectivity. (shrink)

The traditional doctrine that God is impassible is subject to the objection that it is incompatible with belief that God is loving and compassionate. However, the doctrine that God is passible has grave difficulties as well. I argue that Christian believers should take an analogical approach, by believing that God does something relevantly similar to loving us in a way that involves vulnerability to suffering, and thus conceiving of God as loving us in that way, while simultaneously believing that God (...) is in fact impassible. I conclude with answers to several likely objections. (shrink)

The growing practice of returning individual results to research participants has revealed a variety of interpretations of the multiple and sometimes conflicting duties that researchers may owe to participants. One particularly difficult question is the nature and extent of a researcher’s duty to facilitate a participant’s follow-up clinical care by placing research results in the participant’s medical record. The question is especially difficult in the context of genomic research. Some recent genomic research studies — enrolling patients as participants — boldly (...) address the question with protocols dictating that researchers place research results directly into study participants’ existing medical records, without participant consent. Such privileging of researcher judgment over participant choice may be motivated by a desire to discharge a duty that researchers perceive themselves as owing to participants. However, the underlying ethical, professional, legal, and regulatory duties that would compel or justify this action have not been fully explored. (shrink)

This paper examines the distinction that is sometimes drawn between analysis and interpretation in the context of qualitative research, and the processes of critical analysis that underpin reflective practice. The authors consider the complementary logical processes involved in analysis and interpretation, and propose a cycle of reductive, inductive and hypothetico-deductive testing that is both rational and creative. The authors argue that the goal of critical reflection and qualitative data analysis is not to produce knowledge that can be justified in terms (...) of ‘correspondence’ to ‘reality’. Instead we propose a pragmatic, coherence view of knowledge that emphasizes the centrality of dialogue with texts, evidence, beliefs and practice. We conclude that evidence and belief are inextricably linked and that combined processes of reductive, inductive and hypothetico-deductive logic need to be used in a transparent manner to establish the credibility of an interpretation. Although there is no clear demarcation between what is found and what is constructed, a commitment to coherence is the basis of a pragmatic theory of knowledge. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Gabiam’s timely and original book makes an excellent contribution to the limited literature on Palestinian refugees in Syria. The need to be seen to ‘suffer’ as her title suggests has long been a mantra of Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East. A visit to any Palestinian refugee living in a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (...) camp would be struck by the poverty and crowdedness of the camp as well as its bareness. But the situation for Palestinian refugees in Syria has always been somehow different. Of all the UNRWA countries, Palestinian refugees in Syria had more rights—guaranteed in legislation going back to the 1950s—amounting to a form... (shrink)

This first wave study of the Covid-19 pandemic investigates why the governments of different countries proceeded to lockdown at different speeds. We draw upon the literature on Corporate Governance Institutions (CGIs) to theorize that governments’ decision-making is undertaken in the light of prevailing beliefs, norms, and rules of the collectivity, as portrayed by the focal country’s CGIs, in their effort to maintain legitimacy. In addition, drawing on motivated cognition we posit that the government’s political ideology moderates this relationship because decision-makers (...) are biased when assessing the impact of lockdown on commerce. Running negative binomial regressions on a sample of 125 countries, we find that the more shareholder-oriented the CGIs, the slower the governmental response in shutting down the economy to protect from the pandemic. Moreover, the main relationship is stronger the more right-leaning the government’s ideology. Our study contributes to the research on corporate governance institutions and political ideology and illustrates how societal and ideological biases affect government decision-making, especially when important decisions about public welfare are taken with little information on hand. (shrink)

Bridging disciplines have much to teach us about how to combine analytical tools to tackle problems and questions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. This article uses examples from the older bridging disciplines of geography and anthropology in order to consider what the relatively young undertaking labeled “interdisciplinary studies” can learn from their long existence. It explains what is meant by the fallacy of nomothetic claim and considers the fruitful production of answers and solutions by viewing process (methodology) not domain (academic (...) turf), as the key to interdisciplinary success. Staking claim to interdisciplinarity is shown to be unproductive while finding the need for interdisciplinary approaches and following the mandates of that need in the pursuit of solutions to problems and questions strengthens both the disciplines and the development of interdisciplinary studies. (shrink)

The children’s reader, Udmurtiia naveki s Rossiei, celebrates the “450th anniversary of the voluntary entry of Udmurtia into the Russian State structure”. Published in Russian, one of its aims is to familiarize young children (aged 10 and under) with “key events” in Udmurt-Russian relations leading up to the inclusion of Udmurt-inhabited areas in the Russian Empire; emphasizing throughout the absence of inter-ethnic conflict in a “multi-ethnic Udmurtia”. Drawing on history, corpus linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, we show how the official (...) representations of Udmurtia and Udmurts, as presented in the reader, fail to provide them with a distinct ethnic voice – separate from Russia – within today’s Russian Federation. Specific attention is paid to the consequences of using ‘unity’ as an argument for achieving ethno-linguistic equality via a Russian civic identity; the way(s) in which this serves the Russian government’s agenda; and its effect on the construction of Udmurt identity. (shrink)

This text introduces the undergraduate student to Derrida's life and work. The volume offers an overview of Derrida's writing from the 1960s to his death in 2004.

This comment identifies and elaborates three assumptions that underlie the proposal made by the Rogers, Schröder, and von Scheve article. First, our theories of emotion need to take into account, and be consistent with, supported theories of social outcomes and processes. Second, a thorough understanding of affective processes requires investigation at multiple levels of analysis, which in turn requires multilevel theories—or single-level theories that interact well with theories at other levels. Third, our broad understanding of emotion will be served best (...) when we cultivate a field of intersecting and interacting theories of emotion. (shrink)