Despite their shared origins, medicine and dentistry are not always two sides of the same coin. There is a long history in medical philosophy of defining disease and various medical models have come into existence. Hitherto, little philosophical and phenomenological work has been done considering dental caries and periodontitis as examples of disease and illness. A philosophical methodology is employed to explore how we might define dental caries and periodontitis using classical medical models of disease – (...) the naturalistic and normativist. We identify shared threads and highlight how the features of these highly prevalent dental diseases prevent them fitting in either definition. The article describes phenomenology and the current thought around the phenomenology of illness, exploring how and why these dental illnesses might integrate into a phenomenological model. We discover that there are some features particular to dental caries and periodontitis: ubiquity, preventability and hyper-monitorablility. Understanding the differences that these dental diseases have compared to many other classically studied diseases leads us to ethical questions concerning how we might manage those who have symptoms and seek treatment. As dental caries and periodontitis are common, preventable and hyper-monitorable, it is suggested that these features affect the phenomenology of these illnesses. For example, if we experience dental illness when we have consciously made decisions that have led to it, do we experience them differently to those rarer illnesses that we cannot expect? Other diseases share these features are discussed. This paper highlights the central differences between the classical philosophical notion of disease in medicine and the dental examples of caries and periodontitis. It suggests that a philosophical method of conceptualising medical illness - phenomenology - should not be applied to these dental illnesses without thought. A phenomenological analysis of any dental illness is yet to be done and this paper highlights why a separate strand of phenomenology should be explored, instead of employing those that are extant. The article concludes with suggestions for further research into the nascent field of the phenomenology of dental illness and aims to act as a springboard to expose the dental sphere to this philosophical method of analysis. (shrink)

From the very beginning German dentists and their scientific and professional organizations were involved in the disastrous developments following the Nazi assumption of power of 1933. After purging and both organisational and ideological streamlining which had been comparatively rapidly accomplished in 1933/34 a development started which was characterized by extreme professional confrontation and lust for power in close entanglement with Nazi health policy objectives and deformation of scientific dentistry. A decisive role was assigned to the Reichszahnärzteführer Ernst Stuck (1893-1974) who (...) was the highest representative of the dental profession throughout the Nazi Regime. However, up to the present his life and position has not been thoroughly researched. What is more, history of dentistry has been looking at his activities in a merely cursory and appeasing way.In fact, his function as Reichszahnärzteführer needs to be critically scrutinized and evaluated. (shrink)

Dental caries is the main oral health challenge for children in Nigeria. Concern about its negative impact makes screening for caries in children an attractive public health strategy. The ability to detect the preclinical phase of caries, the availability of screening tools with high accuracy, and the possibility of treatment before onset of clinical symptoms with significant cost and health benefits, makes it appropriate for screening. However in Nigeria, the poor availability of highly specific and sensitive (...) screening tools, poor access to oral health care and concerns with pre-screening consent, raise the question of the appropriateness of conducting screening programmes for children. We argue that a number of structural challenges associated with poor uptake of oral health care services need to be addressed before screening for caries can be considered ethically appropriate. These include facilitating access of children to quality oral health care and a systematic national approach to oral health impl... (shrink)

Many ethical issues are posed by public health interventions. Although abstract theorizing about these issues can be useful, it is the application of ethical theory to real cases which will ultimately be of benefit in decision-making. To this end, this paper will analyse the ethical issues involved in Childsmile, a national oral health demonstration programme in Scotland that aims to improve the oral health of the nation's children and reduce dental inequalities through a combination of targeted and universal interventions. (...) With Scotland's level of dental caries among the worst in Europe, Childsmile represents one of the largest programmes of work aimed at combating oral health inequalities in the UK. The areas of ethical interest include several contrasting themes: reducing health inequalities and improving health; universal and targeted interventions; political values and evidence base; prevention and treatment; and underlying all of these, justice and utility. (shrink)

The first 1000 days of life, from conception to 2 years, are a critical window for the influence of environmental exposures on the assembly of the oral microbiome, which is the precursor to dental caries (decay), one of the most prevalent microbially induced disorders worldwide. While it is known that the human microbiome is susceptible to environmental exposures, there is limited understanding of the impact of prenatal and early childhood exposures on the oral microbiome trajectory and oral health. (...) A barrier has been the lack of technology to directly measure the foetal "exposome", which includes nutritional and toxic exposures crossing the placenta. Another barrier has been the lack of statistical methods to account for the high dimensional data generated by‐omic assays. Through identifying which early life exposures influence the oral microbiome and modify oral health, these findings can be translated into interventions to reduce dental decay prevalence. (shrink)

Pediatric dentists rely on access to hospital operating rooms for safe, effective, and humane delivery of dental care. The children who benefit most from dental treatment in a hospital operating room are those who are very young, have dental anxieties or phobias, are precommunicative or noncommunicative, need extensive or invasive dental treatments, or have special healthcare needs. Diminishing access to hospital operating rooms for pediatric dental treatment has become an escalating problem in contemporary times. Financial (...) barriers, hospital costs, reimbursement rates, health insurance policies and deductibles, out-of-network hospitals, socioeconomic factors, and the COVID-19 pandemic are prominent contributing factors. This problem in access to care has resulted in long waiting times for hospital operating rooms, deferral of medically necessary dental care, and pain and infection among this vulnerable patient population. Pediatric dentists have responded to the problem by utilizing alternative methods of care delivery, such as in-office deep sedation or in-office general anesthesia, and by implementing aggressive medical management of dental caries. However, the youngest of pediatric patients and children with special healthcare needs still remain at a disadvantage in receiving definitive dental treatment. This article aims to highlight the ethical challenges faced by pediatric dentists in contemporary practice in the face of limitations in hospital operating room access through four case scenarios. (shrink)

A recent decision by several Australian State politicians to support a parliamentary review of artificial water fluoridation has an intensified debate on the public health intervention. While there is a majority agreement among Australian dentists and other health professionals that adequate enamel fluoride is essential for dental health, the ethics of artificial fluoridation of public water supplies as a contemporary vehicle for facilitating adequate supply of fluoride to teeth is highly contested. Opponents of artificial water fluoridation insist that there (...) are many alternative sources of fluoride, that mandatory water fluoridation violates the ethical principle of autonomy and that water fluoridation is not only expensive and unnecessary but also may endanger health by causing fluorosis and, potentially, hypothyroidism and pathological bone fractures. In contrast, proponents of water fluoridation posit that mandatory water fluoridation facilitates health equity and that the benefits accruing to society from prevention of dental caries (beneficence principle) outweighs impairment of individual autonomy. This article utilizes Childress’ ‘justificatory conditions’ to evaluate the ethical appropriateness of artificial water fluoridation in Australia. The author concludes that there is insufficient ethical justification for artificial water fluoridation in Australia. (shrink)

For the past seventy years, a host of scientific and public health bodies in the United States have strongly endorsed the practice of adding fluoride compounds to public water supplies as a prophylactic against dental caries. Throughout that period, a constant undercurrent of skepticism and outright opposition has slowed the adoption of the practice in the United States and limited its spread to just a handful of countries around the world. One of the attractions of water fluoridation is (...) its affordability: the fluoride compounds are sourced from the phosphate and aluminum industries, for whom they would otherwise constitute an annoying toxic waste disposal problem. Despite this, proponents have nonetheless succeeded in shaping a narrative that casts fluoridation as “natural” or at least mimicking nature. I demonstrate how fluoridationists were able to persuasively argue that adding a pollutant to the water supply was safe and natural. In the process, I examine how environmental historians and historians of science approach topics such as fluoridation. I suggest that as a result of the influence of science and technology studies and an ontological turn toward hybridity, the two subdisciplines are becoming increasingly convergent. (shrink)

Editorial on papers relating to among other infanticide and intersex.

In Animal Rites, Cary Wolfe examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, ...

Animal studies and biopolitics are two of the most dynamic areas of interdisciplinary scholarship, but until now, they have had little to say to each other. Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in _Before the Law_, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics. Wolfe argues that the human­­­-animal distinction must be supplemented with the central distinction of biopolitics: the difference between those (...) animals that are members of a community and those that are deemed killable but not murderable. From this understanding, we can begin to make sense of the fact that this distinction prevails within both the human and animal domains and address such difficult issues as why we afford some animals unprecedented levels of care and recognition while subjecting others to unparalleled forms of brutality and exploitation. Engaging with many major figures in biopolitical thought—from Heidegger, Arendt, and Foucault to Agamben, Esposito, and Derrida—Wolfe explores how biopolitics can help us understand both the ethical and political dimensions of the current questions surrounding the rights of animals. (shrink)

Bringing these two emergent areas of thought into direct conversation in Before the Law, Cary Wolfe fosters a new discussion about the status of nonhuman animals and the shared plight of humans and animals under biopolitics.

This book shares the recent debates by systemic functional linguistics and other linguistic forums. Its principal focus is on how we use language to make meaning of the world, on how the systems and structures of the ideational function of language represent the realisation of our experiences of the world around us. The volume captures the endeavours of scholars working in different contexts, disciplines and languages around the world. Their contributions explore what underlies experiential and logical meaning-making through specific analyses (...) of recently-created, contextually diverse, single texts or collections of texts, from mono- to multimodal texts. The issues addressed are: layers of meaning through the transitivity system; agency and subjectivity; what kinds of participants and circumstances are associated with various processes and how these vary across languages; new ways of researching and capturing the interaction of the experiential function with the other functions of language - interpersonal, textual and logical - in communicative contexts; how multimodality and new ways of modelling experience semiotically influence the work of linguists, linguistic description and application. The book displays the dynamic dialogue on theoretical and applied interests of scholars interested in functional linguistics and working in a wide range of academic contexts. At post-graduate level advanced students will benefit from new perspectives, the innovative thinking and research accounts that make up the collection. The papers highlight the flexibility of systemic functional linguistic approach and exemplify how it can offer deeper and further insights into potential ways of exploring meaning-making by drawing on recent seminal developments in ideation. (shrink)

The principle of liberal neutrality requires governments to avoid acting to promote particular conceptions of the good life. Yet by determining who uses natural resources and how, environmental policy makers can affect the availability of resources needed by individuals to carry on meaningful lives and in doing so can effectively privilege some versions of the good life at the expense of others. A commitment to liberal neutrality by implication promotes environmental policy that accommodates competing activities in order to provide a (...) wide range of resources that can support diversity in individual lives. It also encourages caution with regard to legislation based on deep ecology, the intrinsic value of species, and the fear of impending environmental catastrophe. (shrink)

The paper by Cary Wolfe is an abridged translation of the chapter »Animal Studies«, Disciplinarity, and the (Post)Humanities from the monograph (Minnesota 2009). Wolfe discusses the relation between (trans-)disciplinarity and posthumanism with reference to concepts by Derrida, Foucault and Luhmann, allowing to consider a form of social communication in which human subjects still may participate, but no longer are their sovereign initiators. German Der Text von Cary Wolfe ist eine gekürzte Übersetzung des Kapitels »Animal Studies«, Disciplinarity, and the (Post)Humanities aus (...) der Monographie What is Posthumanism? (Minnesota 2009). Wolfe diskutiert die Beziehung zwischen (Trans-)Disziplinarität und Posthumanismus im Rückgriff auf Konzepte von Derrida, Foucault und Luhmann, die eine Form von gesellschaftlicher Kommunikation zu denken erlauben, an der menschliche Subjekte zwar noch teilhaben, aber deren souveräne Urheber sie nicht mehr sind. (shrink)

Patients with apraxia perform poorly when demonstrating how an object is used, particularly when pantomiming the action. However, these patients are able to accurately identify, and to pick up and move objects, demonstrating intact ventral and dorsal stream visuomotor processing. Appropriate object manipulation for skilled use is thought to rely on integration of known and visible object properties associated with ‘ventro-dorsal’ stream neural processes. In apraxia, it has been suggested that stored object knowledge from the ventral stream may be less (...) readily available to incorporate into the action plan, leading to an over-reliance on the objects’ visual affordances in object-directed motor behaviour. The current study examined grasping performance in left hemisphere stroke patients with (N = 3) and without (N = 9) apraxia, and in age-matched healthy control participants (N = 14), where participants repeatedly grasped novel cylindrical objects of varying weight distribution. Across two conditions, object weight distribution was indicated by either a memory-associated cue (object colour) or visual-spatial cue (visible dot over the weighted end). Participants were required to incorporate object-weight associations to effectively grasp and balance each object. Control groups appropriately adjusted their grasp according to each object’s weight distribution across each condition, whereas throughout the task two of the three apraxic patients performed poorly on both the memory-associated and visual-spatial cue conditions. A third apraxic patient seemed to compensate for these difficulties but still performed differently to control groups. Patients with apraxia performed normally on the neutral control condition when grasping the evenly weighted version. The pattern of behaviour in apraxic patients suggests impaired integration of visible and known object properties attributed to the ventro-dorsal stream: in learning to grasp the weighted object accurately, apraxic patients applied neither pure knowledge-based information (the memory-associated condition) nor higher-level information given in the visual-spatial cue condition. Disruption to ventro-dorsal stream predicts that apraxic patients will have difficulty learning to manipulate new objects on the basis of information other than low-level visual cues such as shape and size. (shrink)

The persistently high rates of sexual assault on college campuses have led to an increasing demand for a solution to the problem. In response, research in the field is growing rapidly. With any expanding field, proper focus needs to be given to ethical dilemmas that may arise when studying a sensitive topic. College students who have experienced a sexual assault are a highly vulnerable population. As the current literature is limited, this article considers the ethical implications of conducting research with (...) college sexual assault victims. Drawing upon the 2010 American Psychological Association Ethics Code, specific ethical concerns including respect for persons, competence, confidentiality and privacy, and beneficence and nonmaleficence are discussed. Recommendations for researchers studying sexual assault in college students are provided. (shrink)

Peppered throughout with previously unreported, and sometimes incendiary, higher education anecdotes, Nelson is at his flame-throwing best.The book calls on ...

Phenomenology’s reversal of naturalism hinges on the central claim that the worldly objects that we experience acquire their ontological solidity throughout series of intentional acts that are accomplished over the course of our subjective and intersubjective lives. This posture has historically given rise to realist critiques stating that such a “correlational” ontology undermines our capacity to formulate a coherent discourse on generative natural events that predate humans, such as the Big Bang, the Earth’s accretion, the formation of the oceans, etc. (...) In this paper, I articulate a Merleau-Pontian response to this problem. I establish a continuity between the temporality that is at play in the genesis of empirical bodies and the pre-objective tension that precedes perceptual givenness. I therefore suggest treating the past of nature as a transcendental past, always at work within our present experience, instead of an objective moment that would have determined in advance a causal chain of events. (shrink)

Life and career -- Early life and education (1115/1120-1147) -- In the service of Canterbury (1148-1156) -- Author and administrator (1157-1161) -- The Becket dispute (1162-1170) -- Final years (1171-1180) -- Writings -- Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum -- Policraticus -- Metalogicon -- Historia pontificalis -- Miscellaneous and spurious writings.

Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, which enjoyed both critical and popular success, features a bright colour palette and an eerily playful tone alongside a dark narrative exploring complexities of grief, depression, and bad relationships. The remote Swedish community to which protagonist Dani, her boyfriend, and his friends travel for a mid-summer festival is designed around beautiful objects, collective experiences, and rituals that foreground communal emotions, all of which contrast the technologically mediated communications foregrounded at the film’s outset. In (...) fact, this community offers meticulously constructed antidotes to the loneliness of the modern world, and to Western ideals of masculine emotional distance…but at a cost. This paper examines the intersection of emotion, community, and gender in Midsommar, using the concept of affective design – usually associated with technology design – as well as work on group-based emotions, to interrogate the film’s vision of a community that challenges gender norms and the boundaries of emotional experience. Through the depiction of ingroup boundary-policing, stark contrasts between visions of masculinity, and lush visions of aesthetic experience and emotional release, Midsommar offers a series of convincing compensatory mechanisms that invite viewers, along with the main character, to temporarily compromise morality for the sake of belonging. (shrink)

Unique in its collation of major theorists rarely considered together, Critical Environments incorporates detailed discussions of the work of Richard Rorty, Walter Benn Michaels, Stanley Cavell, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Niklas ...

My aim in this commentary article is to observe and comment on some of the main conceptual and methodological continuities and discontinuities between recent biosemiotics-informed learning theory and the model of Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) that Jablonka and Ginsburg ( 2022 ) present in this Target Article. UAL as a model, presents important synthesis and clarity around the ecological context and evolutionary dynamics underlying learning, with a wide range of implications. Still, there are conceptual “grey areas” that the authors themselves (...) note and that biosemiotics in particular has problematized in various ways. I highlight the general challenge of defining minimal consciousness in relation to a concept of minimal Umwelt, as well as the issue of animal cultures, and the transition from UAL to symbolic-cognition and human language, making connections to the evolution of hominin musicking capacities. (shrink)

This essay is about the United States Supreme Court's discursive creation of two kinds of persons, one corporate the other criminal, during its 1886 term. The aim is to contrast the Supreme Court's construction of corporate personhood in County of Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad with its view of the criminal's body in Ex parte Royall, a habeas corpus case. The Court's purpose in deciding these two cases was to design a way to disperse newly emergent and conflicting interests (...) in particular directions within the judicial apparatus. The result is that both criminal and corporate bodies come to be understood through discourse, not outside of it. So the body which is being introduced can be described as a discursive body, not as an anatomical given. (shrink)

Mid-Republican censors were bound by few formal restrictions in their lectiones of the Senate. So holds the scholarly communis opinio, at any rate, based primarily on Carolus Sigonius' emendation of Livy 23.23.6. This article shows Sigonius' emendation to be fatally flawed, however, and popular election to be a legal requirement for senatorial enrollment – and not just a social desideratum. This prerequisite is shown to originate in the fourth-century lex Ovinia, with ramifications for models of aristocratic rule at Rome, mid-Republican (...) political developments, and the curia itself. (shrink)

The West's foremost translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm thought deeply about how contemporary readers could benefit from this ancient work and its perennially valid insights into change and chance. For him and for his son, Hellmut Wilhelm, the Book of Changes represented not just a mysterious book of oracles or a notable source of the Taoist and Confucian philosophies. In their hands, it emerges, as it did for C. G. Jung, as a vital key to humanity's age-old collective (...) unconscious. Here the observations of the Wilhelms are combined in a volume that will reward specialists and aficionados with its treatment of historical context--and that will serve also as an introduction to the I Ching and the meaning of its famous hexagrams. (shrink)

We propose that middle childhood female ambivalent attachment, given the adaptive problem of uncertainty of future investment, is designed to evoke immediate investment from current caregivers, rather than new investment sources. We suggest greater specificity of strategic attachment solutions to adaptive problems that differ by sex, time, and relationship type.

A textbook anthology of important works of political thought revealing the development of ideas from the 12th to the 15th centuries. It includes new translations of both well-known and ignored writers, and an introductory overview.

Sontag is certainly attracted to the aesthetic she describes but not so wholeheartedly as many readers have assumed.1 One of the ironies of her career has been her reputation as an enthusiast for works toward which she actually expresses considerable ambivalence. Many of her essays include overt advocacy, but it is rarely uncomplicated or uncompromised.2 Despite her reputation for partisanship, she more typically begins her essays by recounting an experience of alienation, annoyance, uncertainty, or shock. For example, she describes the (...) "happening" as an event "designed to tease and abuse the audience"3 and speaks of the "profoundly discouraging," even "hopeless," emotions of her first days in North Vietnam. She is, therefore, often motivated by her sense of difference from the event or object she describes. But it is not her wish merely to find ways of assimilating and dominating unpleasant or alien experience; while that is certainly one of the main impulses in her work - to control apparently impossible subjects, to exhilarate in the Nietzschean will to power over the text - her will to power is always countered by a need to credit and honor the text's otherness. Sontag never finally assumes an easy familiarity with her subject but rather draws its difficult and negating otherness ever closer to herself. Her work may be understood, in a way, as a search for a text that is utterly unknowable, a text that will always elude and contradict what we may say about it, a text, in short, that cannot be contaminated by critical rhetoric. That is a quality she has recently attributed to Artaud's work: "Like Sade and Reich, Artaud is relevant and understandable, a cultural monument, as long as one mainly refers to his ideas without reading much of his work. For anyone who reads Artaud through, he remains fiercely out of reach, an unassimilable voice and presence."4 · 1. There is, to be sure, an atmosphere of iconoclasm and intellectual challenge about Sontag's criticism, but it is not especially self-congratulatory. She is only interested in difficult topics or in topics whose difficulties have been repressed, partly because that context energizes her mind and partly, as she has written of Diane Arbus, because she wants "to violate her own innocence, to undermine her sense of being privileged" · 2. The exception is some of the early reviews included in Against Interpretation, where the polemical requirements of the occasion distinguish those brief judgments from her more careful and extended pieces.· 3. Sontag, Against Interpretation , p. 267.· 4. Sontag, "Artaud," Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings , p. lix. Cary Nelson teaches critical theory at the University of Illinois. He is the author of The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space and Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in Contemporary American Poetry and Reading Criticism: The Literary Status of Critical Discourse. (shrink)

The paper by Cary Wolfe is an abridged translation of the chapter »Animal Studies«, Disciplinarity, and the (Post)Humanities from the monograph (Minnesota 2009). Wolfe discusses the relation between (trans-)disciplinarity and posthumanism with reference to concepts by Derrida, Foucault and Luhmann, allowing to consider a form of social communication in which human subjects still may participate, but no longer are their sovereign initiators.

This article challenges two dominant views of religious and cultural toleration, namely, that it is modern and that it is Western. It claims instead that both medieval Latin thought and many non-Western traditions embraced a position that coherently defends tolerance beliefs and practices. Specifically, the article identifies four approaches that clearly favour toleration: scepticism, functionalism, nationalism and mysticism.

This innovative collection points to the need for a reevaluation of the origins of toleration theory. Philosophers, intellectual historians, and political theorists have assumed that the development of the theory of toleration has been a product of the modern world, and John Locke is usually regarded as the first theorist of toleration. The contributors to Difference and Dissent, however, discuss a range of conceptual positions that were employed by medieval and early modern thinkers to support a theory of toleration, and (...) question the claim that Locke's theory of toleration was as original or philosophically adequate as his adherents have asserted. (shrink)