Practical implementation of notions such as patient-orientation, client-centredness, and demand-driven care is far from straightforward in care and service supply to elderly clients living independently. This paper aims to provide preliminary insights into how it is possible to bridge the gap between policy intent, which reflects an increasing client orientation, and actual practice of care and service provision. Differences in personal objectives and characteristics generate different sets of needs among elderly clients that must have an appropriate (...) response in the daily routines of care and service providers. From a study of the available literature and by conceptual reasoning, we identify several important operational implications of client-oriented care and service provision. To deal with these implications the authors turn to the field of operations management. This field has deepened the understanding of translating an organisation’s policy into daily activities and working methods. More specifically, we elaborate on the concept of modularity, which stems from the field of operations management. With respect to elderly people who live independently, this concept, among others, seems to be particularly useful in providing options and variation in individual care and service packages. Based on our line of reasoning, we propose that modularity provides possibilities to enhance the provision of demand-based care and services. Furthermore, our findings offer direction on how organisations in housing, welfare and care can be guided in translating demand-based care to their operational processes. (shrink)

‘Client involvement’ has been a mantra within health policies, education curricula and healthcare institutions over many years, yet very little is known about how ‘client involvement’ is practised in home‐care services. The aim of this article is to analyse ‘client involvement’ in practise seen from the positions of healthcare professionals, an elderly person and his relative in a home‐care setting. A sociologically inspired single case study was conducted, consisting of three weeks of observations and interviews. The study has a (...) focus on the relational aspects of home care and the structural, political and administrative frames that rule home‐ care practice. Client involvement is shown within four constructed analytical categories: ‘Structural conditions of providing and receiving home care’; ‘Client involvement inside the home: performing a professional task and living an everyday life’; ‘Client involvement outside the home: liberal business and mutual goal setting’; and ‘Converting a home to a working place: refurnishing a life’. The meaning of involvement is depending on which position it is viewed from. On the basis of this analysis, we raise the question of the extent to which involvement of the client in public home‐care practice remains limited. (shrink)

Older people living in a residential setting have the right to respectful care based on professional ethics. The aim of this study was to describe employees' and clients' lived experiences of elder abuse. A qualitative phenomenological method was used with 26 employees and 20 residents from four homes for elderly people in the town of Ostrava, Czech Republic, and two managers from outside these institutions. All complaints about elder abuse (n 5 11) received by Ostrava Municipal Authority during (...) the period 2003 to 2007 were examined. Two main dimensions of the examined phenomenon were identified: forms of elder abuse and causes of elder abuse. Established forms of elder abuse were summarized as rights violation, financial abuse, psychological abuse, physical abuse and neglect. Causes of elder abuse included institution, employee and client characteristics. It is necessary in residential settings to create preventive policies that will focus on supervision regarding elderly people's rights violation and psychological and physical abuse, as well as on building organizational cultures that will respect ethical principles. (shrink)

ABSTRACTElder abuse is a serious and under-detected problem. Law reform agencies and legal profession regulatory authorities have called for action to ensure that lawyers meet their ethical obligations to older clients, including identifying and acting on risk factors for abuse. Screening tools to detect situations of elder abuse exist, but they are targeted mainly at health and social care practitioners. Drawing on international literature, this article identifies and discusses screening tools that could be adapted for use by legal professionals. (...) Three general categories of screening are relevant for lawyers who serve older clients: elder abuse screening tools that cover all domains of abuse or target specific behaviours, such as financial exploitation; screening for decision-making capacity, especially taking account of the impact of abuse or neglect on capacity; and screening to probe the suitability of a person to act in a formal decision-making role for an older person. The article emphas... (shrink)

Despite moves to enhance the autonomy of clients of health care services, the use of a variety of physical restraints on the freedom of movement of frail, elderly patients continues in nursing homes. This paper confronts the use of restraints on two grounds. First, it challenges the assumption that use of restraints is necessary to protect the welfare of frail, elderly patients by drawing on a range of data indicating the limited efficacy of restraints. Secondly, it argues (...) that the duty to respect individual autonomy extends to a duty to respect the autonomy of patients who are elderly, frail and living in nursing homes. (shrink)

Client participation in elderly care organizations requires shifting traditional power relations and establishing communicative action that involves the lifeworlds of clients and professionals alike. This article describes a particular form of client participation in which one client was part of a team of professionals in a residential care home. Their joint remit was to plan the implementation of a new personal care file for residents. We describe the interactions within this team through an ethnodrama, based on participant observations (...) and the embodied presence of the researcher (first author). The narratives and voices of all team members are dramatized in this ethnodrama. Throughout the project the team members experienced confusion relating to the confrontation between lifeworld and system, as experienced by the client and professionals in the team. We analyze these tensions by making use of a Habermasian theoretical framework. We conclude that forms for collective client participation in residential care homes should be developed based on communicative action between clients and professionals, with room for emotional engagement. (shrink)

Client participation in elderly care organizations requires shifting traditional power relations and establishing communicative action that involves the lifeworlds of clients and professionals alike. This article describes a particular form of client participation in which one client was part of a team of professionals in a residential care home. Their joint remit was to plan the implementation of a new personal care file for residents. We describe the interactions within this team through an ethnodrama, based on participant observations (...) and the embodied presence of the researcher (first author). The narratives and voices of all team members are dramatized in this ethnodrama. Throughout the project the team members experienced confusion relating to the confrontation between lifeworld and system, as experienced by the client and professionals in the team. We analyze these tensions by making use of a Habermasian theoretical framework. We conclude that forms for collective client participation in residential care homes should be developed based on communicative action between clients and professionals, with room for emotional engagement. (shrink)

This article asks how people come to interpret themselves and others as autonomous given their multiple dependencies. We draw on a cross-case comparison of ethnographic studies with two populations for whom autonomy is both central and problematic: elderly patients in post-acute care, and young adults with disabilities in an independent living program. Analyzing the institutional efforts to make their clients “as independent as possible,” we find that staff members at each organization formulate autonomy as a temporal project through (...) an ongoing calibration of open futures, ideal pasts, and situational competence. Constantly adjusting and fine-tuning where in time autonomy “really” is, workers arrange present dependence so that the contours of the future remain open for their clients. In other words, they make use of temporal markers to produce recognizable autonomous subjects whose dependencies are momentary. Theorizing this temporal project enables us to see more clearly how all of us engage in the constant business of “doing” autonomy, and to better understand the role of institutions in producing autonomous selves. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLawyers are increasingly called upon to deal with older clients and have ethical responsibilities to attest to their capacity for legal decision-making. As witnesses to enduring documents, the making of wills and other significant advance planning transactions, lawyers play a role in preventing elder abuse and in upholding the rights of older people. To date however, there has been very little empirical research examining how lawyers assess an older person’s legal decision-making capacity. This article presents research examining three years (...) of capacity complaints made to the New South Wales Office of Legal Services Commissioner. Four case studies from the complaint files expose some common failings in the way that lawyers interact with older clients who have experienced cognitive impairment. The process of capacity assessment is viewed through the theoretical lens of vulnerability to highlight how the actions of lawyers and regulators can exacerbate the inherent and situational vulnerability of o... (shrink)

ABSTRACTLawyers play an important role in protecting the interests of the vulnerable in society. Increasingly those engaged in working with clients who are mentally ill, elderly, or experiencing fluctuating mental capacity, are called upon to make decisions and protect interests of clients who struggle to understand the legal consequence and meaning of their decisions. Ethical principles that prohibit lawyers acting on anything other than competent instructions, and disapprove of acting ‘in the best interests’ of clients in (...) the absence of competent instructions, create a series of philosophical and practical challenges to lawyers who work in this area. This article considers the evolution of ethical guidelines in Australia and the United States, noting the significant divergence in philosophy and practice within these jurisdictions. (shrink)

This paper opposes universal mereological composition. Sider defends it: unless UMC were true, he says, it could be indeterminate how many objects there are in the world. I argue that there is no general connection between how widely composition occurs and how many objects there are in the world. Sider fails to support UMC. I further argue that we should disbelieve in UMC objects. Existing objections against them say that they are radically unlike Aristotelian substances. True, but there is a (...) stronger objection. This is that they are characterized by no properties, and so fail to be like anything – even themselves. (shrink)

Historically, opponents of realism have managed to slip beneath a key objection which realists raise against them. The opponents say that some element of the world is constructed by our cognitive practices; realists retort that the element would have existed unaltered, had our practices differed; the opponents sometimes agree, contending that we construct in just such a way as to render the counterfactual true. The contemporary instalment of this debate starts with conventionalism about modality, which holds that the borders of (...) the world's kinds and the careers of individuals in those kinds obtain only relative to our conventions of individuation. Realists object that the kinds and careers in nature would still have obtained, had our conventions been different, but conventionalists claim to be able to agree. I argue that this claim is false, and that conventionalism contradicts itself. (shrink)

An influential line of thought in metaphysics holds that where common sense discerns a tree or a dog or a baseball there may be just many microparticles. Provided the microparticles are arranged in the right way—are “treewise” or “dogwise” or “baseballwise” arranged—our sensory experiences will be just the same as if a tree or dog or baseball were really there. Thereforewhetherthere really are such familiar objects in the world can be decided only by determining whatmoreis needed for microparticles dogwise arranged (...) actually tocomposea dog. This paper argues that this line of thought sets up the wrong agenda. Composition is trivial; dogwise (etc.) arrangement is tricky. Dogwise arrangement will obtain in the wrong regions unless we stipulate that there are dogs, and that dogwise arrangement obtains only within their borders. The bearers of dogwise arrangement, moreover, will have to be dogs themselves, not their microparticles. Thus allowing that dogwise arrangement obtains at all is allowing that there are dogs. (shrink)

An influential line of thought in metaphysics holds that where common sense discerns a tree or a dog or a baseball there may be just many microparticles. Provided the microparticles are arranged in the right way—are “treewise” or “dogwise” or “baseballwise” arranged—our sensory experiences will be just the same as if a tree or dog or baseball were really there. Thereforewhetherthere really are such familiar objects in the world can be decided only by determining whatmoreis needed for microparticles dogwise arranged (...) actually tocomposea dog. This paper argues that this line of thought sets up the wrong agenda. Composition is trivial; dogwise (etc.) arrangement is tricky. Dogwise arrangement will obtain in the wrong regions unless we stipulate that there are dogs, and that dogwise arrangement obtains only within their borders. The bearers of dogwise arrangement, moreover, will have to be dogs themselves, not their microparticles. Thus allowing that dogwise arrangement obtains at all is allowing that there are dogs. (shrink)

Metaphysics, formerly the queen of science, fell into oblivion under the onslaught of empiricism and positivism and its very possibllity came to be denied. Professor Elders traces the history of this process and shows how St. Thomas innovated in determining both the subject of metaphysics and the manner in which one enters this science, particularly in the framework of his Aristotle commentaries. The work then considers being and its properties, its divisions into being in act and being in potency, into (...) the act of being essence, and into substance and the accidents. Finally the causes of being are considered. The work also introduces and surveys the extensive literature of Thomas interpretation of the past 50 years. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview, Dave Elder-Vass discusses his main contributions to critical realist theory over two decades. In the first half, he explains his early work on emergence, agency, str...

The far reaching changes in man's social and personal life taking place in our lifetime underline the need for a sound ethical evaluation of our rights and duties and of human behaviour both on the individual level and in the political society. On many issues judgments of value vary widely and a consultation of the thought of Thomas Aquinas on the basic questions will be helpful, the more since he is not only one of the greatest philosophers but also succeeded (...) in integrating in his moral philosophy the wisdom of the ancients, in particular of Aristotle and the Stoa. This book presents Aquinas's thought on such central questions as man's happiness, how to determine the morality of our actions, the natural law and the main virtues, as well as on the common good, war, human labour, love and friendship. Throughout the book the intellectual character of this moral philosophy is pointed out and problems are set in a historical perspective. (shrink)

The problem of structure and agency has been the subject of intense debate in the social sciences for over 100 years. This book offers a solution. Using a critical realist version of the theory of emergence, Dave Elder-Vass argues that, instead of ascribing causal significance to an abstract notion of social structure or a monolithic concept of society, we must recognise that it is specific groups of people that have social structural power. Some of these groups are entities with emergent (...) causal powers, distinct from those of human individuals. Yet these powers also depend on the contributions of human individuals, and this book examines the mechanisms through which interactions between human individuals generate the causal powers of some types of social structures. The Causal Power of Social Structures makes particularly important contributions to the theory of human agency and to our understanding of normative institutions. (shrink)

In post-Gricean pragmatics, communication is said to be successful when a hearer recovers a speaker’s intended message. On this assumption, proposals for ‘what is said’ – the semantic, propositional meaning of a speaker’s utterance – are typically centred around the content the speaker aimed to communicate. However, these proposals tend not to account for the fact that speakers can be deliberately vague, leaving no clear proposition to be recovered, or that a speaker can accept a hearer’s misconstrual even though the (...) speaker didn’t intend it. In such cases, identifying ‘what is said’ is more contentious, even though communication is arguably no less successful. Building on recent interactionist approaches to meaning, this chapter offers a proposal for ‘what is said’ that can account for cases of ‘imperfect’ communication in which the recovery of a speaker’s intention goes awry. This involves taking ‘what is said’ as the co-constructed meaning that the speaker and hearer jointly agree on, giving ‘grounded meanings’ – those mutually and manifestly accepted into the discourse by speaker and hearer – higher precedence in a theory of communication than simply the speaker’s intended meaning. In such cases, rather than speaker and hearer converging at the level of explicit utterance content, communication is expected to be successful as long as the hearer recovers a proposition which is compatible with the speaker’s higher-order discursive goal. The hearer’s uptake is then allowed to override the content of the speaker’s intended meaning in the process of negotiating ‘what is said’. (shrink)

Common sense supposes thoughts can cause bodily movements and thereby bring about changes in where the agent is or how his surroundings are. Many philosophers suppose that any such outcome is realized in a complex state of affairs involving only microparticles; that previous microphysical developments were sufficient to cause that state of affairs; hence that, barring overdetermination, causation by the mental is excluded. This paper argues that the microphysical swarm that realizes the outcome is an accident (Aristotle) or a coincidence (...) (David Owens) and has no cause, though each component movement in it has one. Mental causation faces no competition “from below”. (shrink)

Historically, opponents of realism have argued that the world’s objects are constructed by our cognitive activities—or, less colorfully, that they exist and are as they are only relative to our ways of thinking and speaking. To this realists have stoutly replied that even if we had thought or spoken in ways different from our actual ones, the world would still have been populated by the same objects as it actually is, or at least by most of them. (Our thinking differently (...) could cause some differences in which objects exist, or in what some existing objects are like, but that is another matter.) Yet this reply has repeatedly failed to amount to a decisive objection. For opponents of realism have repeatedly argued, in one way or another, that we construct the world’s objects in just such a way as to render such a counterfactual true. We construct them so as to appear not to be our constructs. Just such a debate is currently underway concerning the properties that are essential to the world’s objects. It is widely agreed, with varying caveats1, that there are such properties—that by virtue of belonging to one or another natural kind, the world’s objects possess certain properties essentially, and have individual careers that last exactly as long as those essential properties are jointly present. But what underlies the status as essential of the properties that are thus essential to objects in the world? The realist answer treats essential status as mind-independent, and assigns it to the way the world works (Elder.. (shrink)

The modern form of realism about properties has typically been far more austere than its Platonic ancestor. There is nothing especially austere about denying, as most modern property realists do, the reality of “disjunctive properties”—properties which would correspond, in the world, to disjunctive predicates such as “is an apple or an ocean,” “is observed by now and green or not observed by now and blue,” etc. But modern property realists typically deny far more. It has been argued, for example, that (...) the only real properties there are are properties flanked by contrary opposites—so that there is no real property corresponding, for example, to the predicate “is self-identical.” Perhaps the biggest step in the direction of austerity is the argument, offered by a number of modern property realists, that there can be in the world no “determinable properties” corresponding to such determinable predicates as “has mass,” “is colored,” or “has a valence.” For these arguments are said to establish that not even such familiar properties as redness or painfulness really exist; to predicates such as “is red” and “is painful,” no real property corresponds. The business of this paper is to examine the prevailing arguments against “determinable properties,” and to argue that the ontology which they entail is decidedly less austere than is commonly supposed. The motivation is mainly just to get a more accurate ontology of properties. But a side benefit, if my arguments are correct, will be an increased appreciation for the treatment of vague predicates that posits truth-value gaps—and with it, increased ease with the idea that corresponding to vague predicates there really are, in the world, vague properties. (shrink)

Este relato de experiência apresenta resultados da pesquisa sobre a Saúde em Santo Amaro: a partir dos saberes tradicionais das rezadeiras/benzedeiras que teve por objetivo analisar as práticas medicinais e espirituais com o sagrado. A pesquisa etnográfica foi realizada com as rezadeiras, dessa forma, estabelecendo fronteiras com os rituais de cura, fé e devoção, nos processos de aprendizagem, aos mais variados tipos de doenças, as rezas e as curas, sendo assim, realizadas por elas. As rezadeiras/benzedeiras são mulheres cujo valor histórico, (...) tornando-se as suas benzeduras símbolo de resistência humana, na sua prática sobre as benzeduras. Entretanto, vale fomentar na pesquisa, sobretudo, as suas práticas também estão relacionadas a conhecimentos católicos, indígena, africana, com seus “cânticos” e “rezas” religiosas, trazendo consigo o desejo da fé de resultar o seu trabalho por alcances estabelecidos nas suas práticas reverenciadas assim as pessoas que procuram por elas. O objeto é tentar caminhar ao longo da história, em conjunto com as práticas religiosas, percebendo as inúmeras implicações produzidas pela sociedade. O contexto etnográfico da pesquisa foi na cidade de Santo Amaro. Palavras-chave: Saúde, Benzedeira, Espiritualidade. (shrink)

How can a parcel of matter, or collection of particles, simultaneously compose three different objects, characterized by different modal properties? If the statue is gouged it still exists, but not exactly that piece of gold which originally occupied the statue’s borders, and the (mass of) gold within that piece can survive dispersal, while the piece cannot. The solution to this “problem of coinciding objects”, this paper argues, is that there is, in that space, only the statue. The properties which the (...) piece and the mass supposedly must have, to go on being, are not properties which anything can have necessarily or essentially. Not even having that origin can be essential. There is no object of which the statue is composed, though there are objects (viz., gold atoms) and a kind of stuff (viz., gold) of which it is composed. (shrink)

'Social construction' is a central metaphor in contemporary social science, yet it is used and understood in widely divergent and indeed conflicting ways by different thinkers. Most commonly, it is seen as radically opposed to realist social theory. Dave Elder-Vass argues that social scientists should be both realists and social constructionists and that coherent versions of these ways of thinking are entirely compatible with each other. This book seeks to transform prevailing understandings of the relationship between realism and constructionism. It (...) offers a thorough ontological analysis of the phenomena of language, discourse, culture and knowledge, and shows how this justifies a realist version of social constructionism. In doing so, however, it also develops an analysis of these phenomena that is significant in its own right. (shrink)

A mutation alters the hemoglobin in some members of a species of antelope, and as a result the members fare better at high altitudes than their conspecifics do; so high-altitude foraging areas become open to them that are closed to their conspecifics; they thrive, reproduce at a greater rate, and the gene for altered hemoglobin spreads further through the gene pool of the species. That sounds like a classic example (owed to Karen Neander, 1995) of a causal chain traced by (...) evolutionary biology. But a view now nearly universal among philosophers maintains that such biological causation is always shadowed, perhaps even rivaled, by causation on a different level.1 That the subgroup of antelopes forages in areas closed to the conspecifics is a state of affairs embodied or realized, notes this view, in certain movements and state changes done by certain physical microparticles—untold billions of microparticles and movements, but a finite and determinate (more on this below) collection nevertheless. That the subgroup reproduces at a greater rate is likewise realized by a huge collection of microparticle movements, a different collection. And the microparticle happenings comprised in the first collection are causally responsible, strictly in accordance with the laws of microphysics, for the microparticle happenings in the second. Biological causation is always shadowed, perhaps even rivaled, by causation on the level of microphysics. The view I mean is general: any case of causing uncovered by any of the special sciences can be recaptured at the level of microphysics. This view is I think what most philosophers mean by “physicalism”; in any case, “physicalism” is the label I shall use. Physicalism comes in two forms. Modest physicalism holds that any causal transaction reported by the special sciences can be retraced by microphysics.2 Hegemonic physicalism holds that retracing such a transaction at the level of.. (shrink)

In _Real Natures and Familiar Objects_ Crawford Elder defends, with qualifications, the ontology of common sense. He argues that we exist -- that no gloss is necessary for the statement "human beings exist" to show that it is true of the world as it really is -- and that we are surrounded by many of the medium-sized objects in which common sense believes. He argues further that these familiar medium-sized objects not only exist, but have essential properties, which we are (...) often able to determine by observation. The starting point of his argument is that ontology should operate under empirical load -- that is, it should give special weight to the objects and properties that we treat as real in our best predictions and explanations of what happens in the world. Elder calls this presumption "mildly controversial" because it entails that arguments are needed for certain widely assumed positions such as "mereological universalism". Elder begins by defending realism about essentialness. He then defends this view of familiar objects against causal exclusion arguments and worries about vagueness. Finally, he argues that many of the objects in which common sense believes really exist, including artifacts and biological devices shaped by natural selection, and that we too exist, as products of natural selection. (shrink)

Is there an alternative course to one which sets up hypotheses as to the nature of poetry and then proceeds to illustrate them? Happily, there is. Rather than beginning with the hypothesis we may begin with the fact, and let what may emerge. That is, rather than beginning with some notion of the nature of poetry, we may begin with individual poems and discover what we may of their nature or form. This procedure evidently involves four phases: examination of the (...) characteristics of individual poems, discovery, by comparison with other poems, of likenesses and differences, decision as to which of these likenesses and differences are relevant to poetic form, and the statement of form itself. Once we have discovered a given form, we shall be in a position to discuss the principles underlying the construction of such form, the various possibilities of such construction, and what constitutes excellence in a given form. Elder Olson, poet, critic, and Distinguished Service Professor in the department of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of six volumes of verse, including Collected Poems and Olson's Penny Arcade, and of numerous works of literary criticism. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Poetic Process" and "On Value Judgments in the Arts" , the title essay on his most recent collection of criticism. Among the many awards which he has received are the Academy of American Poets award, the Longview Foundation award, the Emily Clark Balsh award and, for Olson's Penny Arcade, the Society of Midland Authors award. Both his poetry and his criticism are the subject of a book by Thomas E. Lucas. Part II of "A Conspectus of Poetry" will appear in the Winter 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

When the activity depicted in a poem involves a succession of moments, it may take one of two possible forms: simple or complex. A simple activity is like a straight line; that is, it involves progression in a single direction, then in another. This changing of course, so to speak, is called a turning point or reversal. Every complex activity contains at least one such turning point; and it is possible to have a good many turning points if the action (...) is long enough, as in an epic like the Odyssey, which in fact is full of reversals, for Odysseus or his men or those whom they encounter are always getting into danger and then out of it, or else doing something and having to produce an opposite effect to the one intended; and of course all such things are reversals. . . . Generally speaking, we feel emotions more powerfully when they come upon us unexpectedly. Unexpected good fortune seems even better than it is, unexpected misfortune even worse, by comparison with what we had expected: consequently we respond with greater emotion. Since reversals always involve something of the unexpected, the complex form of activity offers more possibility of emotional power than the simple. The reversal must be unexpected if it is to be effective, and also...it must be probable; the complex activity must therefore always contain an apparent or on-the-surface probability, which founds our expectation, and the real probability, which defeats it. The real probability must be more probable than the apparent, for otherwise we should not accept it; and it must be hidden , for otherwise we should expect it as the more probable. Part I of a "Conspectus of Poetry" appeared in the Autumn 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. Elder Olson's contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Poetic Process" and "On Value Judgments in the Arts". (shrink)

Is there an alternative course to one which sets up hypotheses as to the nature of poetry and then proceeds to illustrate them? Happily, there is. Rather than beginning with the hypothesis we may begin with the fact, and let what may emerge. That is, rather than beginning with some notion of the nature of poetry, we may begin with individual poems and discover what we may of their nature or form. This procedure evidently involves four phases: examination of the (...) characteristics of individual poems, discovery, by comparison with other poems, of likenesses and differences, decision as to which of these likenesses and differences are relevant to poetic form, and the statement of form itself. Once we have discovered a given form, we shall be in a position to discuss the principles underlying the construction of such form, the various possibilities of such construction, and what constitutes excellence in a given form. Elder Olson, poet, critic, and Distinguished Service Professor in the department of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of six volumes of verse, including Collected Poems and Olson's Penny Arcade, and of numerous works of literary criticism. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Poetic Process" and "On Value Judgments in the Arts", the title essay on his most recent collection of criticism. Among the many awards which he has received are the Academy of American Poets award, the Longview Foundation award, the Emily Clark Balsh award and, for Olson's Penny Arcade, the Society of Midland Authors award. Both his poetry and his criticism are the subject of a book by Thomas E. Lucas. Part II of "A Conspectus of Poetry" will appear in the Winter 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

When we discuss the value of a work of art we are confronted immediately with two difficulties: the terms we use, and the peculiar character of art. No one, to my knowledge, has ever doubted that an artist produces a form of some kind, and that in any discussion of art as art that form must somehow be considered; but the terms we use generally have no reference to form. We miss the form in various ways We use terms that (...) are nonartistic—that is, terms that refer to something external to the work, as when we speak of the subject of a painting, of what was depicted rather than the depiction of it, though we know full well that what we respond to is not what was depicted but the depiction of it. "This is a play about Oedipus— what does that tell us of the diverse forms produced by Sophocles, Seneca, Dryden, Voltaire, Gide, Cocteau? Or again, we use terms which are analogical, for example, the "rhythm" of a painting; the difficulty with these is that they are ambiguous and also that, while they may relate to the work, they can designate it only insofar as there is similarity between it and the analogue. Again, we use terms which seem to designate a single form when in fact they refer to forms of the utmost heterogeneity, as when we speak of "the novel"; this usually arises out of the indiscriminate application of the term over some considerable span of history, so that the "historical slippage" of meaning is gradual and goes unnoticed. As the term broadens in meaning to include more and more heterogeneous forms, the essence of each is lost, and the term comes to apply only to accidental analogies between the forms. In the end very little can then be said, involving only the most abstract and general accidents of likeness. Henry James' The Art of Fiction, Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, and E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel illustrate this condition perfectly. The complaint that it is impossible to discuss tragedy because the term has been diversely employed and its proffered justification stem from this condition. The complaint and the justifications are both trivial, and the solution of the difficulty is simple. All that is necessary is to distinguish the different senses of the term by distinguishing the different things to which it is applied. Language is ambiguous, and we use it ambiguously; this in no way implies that the ambiguities cannot be cleared up. Finally, we may use terms which indeed have reference to the form of the work but place the part for the whole; that is, terms which are elements in its definition but do not constitute the complete definition. Thus we designate something, not through the form proper but through the device or method used, as in "drama," "sculpture," "etching," "collage," or through the means or medium, as in "charcoal sketch," "watercolor," "oil painting." The point is not that the object is not, say, a drama or a watercolor; of course it is. The point is rather that these terms do not as such refer to the form and refer to it completely. If in fact they stipulated form, all charcoal sketches would be alike in form, and all oil paintings, and all dramas. One consequence of speaking in such a fashion is that we are likely to confuse the method with the form and talk of, say, "the nature of drama" as though all drama were of the same "nature," whereas the dramatic method is used in a wide variety of forms; or to confuse the medium or means with the form and to assure that the work can have no properties beyond those of its medium, as though artists did not exist and all art were simply nature.Elder Olson, poet and critic, has received numerous awards for his verse . Among his many works are Tragedy and the Theory of Drama, and The Theory of Comedy. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Poetic Process"" , Part 1 of a "Conspectus of Poetry", and Part 2 of a "Conspectus of Poetry". (shrink)

I defend social media’s potential to support Aristotelian virtue friendship against a variety of objections. I begin with Aristotle’s claim that the foundation of the best friendships is a shared life. Friends share the distinctively human and valuable components of their lives, especially reasoning together by sharing conversation and thoughts, and communal engagement in valued activities. Although some have charged that shared living is not possible between friends who interact through digital social media, I argue that social media preserves the (...) relevantly human and valuable portions of life, especially reasoning, play, and exchange of ideas. I then consider several criticisms of social media’s potential to host friendships, and refute or weaken the force of these objections, using this conception of a distinctively human shared life. I conclude that we should use the shared life to evaluate features of specific social media and norms for users’ conduct. (shrink)

In their responses to Dr Osamu Muramoto Watchtower Society spokesmen David Malyon and Donald Ridley ,1–3 deny many of the criticisms levelled against the WTS by Muramoto.4–6 In this paper I argue as a Jehovah's Witness and on behalf of the members of AJWRB that there is no biblical basis for the WTS's partial ban on blood and that this dissenting theological view should be made clear to all JW patients who reject blood on religious grounds. Such patients should be (...) guaranteed confidentiality should they accept whole blood or components that are banned by the WTS. I argue against Malyon's and Ridley's claim that WTS policy allows freedom of conscience to individual JWs and that it is non-coercive and non-punitive in dealing with conscientious dissent and I challenge the notion that there is monolithic support of the WTS blood policy among those who identify themselves as JWs and carry the WTS “advance directive”. (shrink)

Margaret Archer and Pierre Bourdieu have advanced what seem at first sight to be incompatible theories of human agency. While Archer places heavy stress on conscious reflexive deliberation and the consequent choices of identity and projects that individuals make, Bourdieu's concept of habitus places equally heavy stress on the role of social conditioning in determining our behavior, and downplays the contribution of conscious deliberation. Despite this, I argue that these two approaches, with some modification, can be reconciled in a single (...) emergentist theory of human action that is sketched out in this article. It examines how human dispositions and our reflexive decisions are related to the determination of human action, linking dispositions and decisions to their neural base in human physiology and to the social factors that influence them. As a result, it argues, we can see human action as the outcome of a continuous interaction between dispositions and reflexivity. The article goes on to relate this explanation back to Bourdieu's concept of the habitus and Archer's account of reflexivity. It argues that the weaknesses in Bourdieu's theory of action can be resolved by a reasonable reinterpretation of the habitus that makes it consistent with the emergentist theory and creates space for human choices as well as social influences on our behavior. This opens up a role for the sort of reflexive deliberations advocated by Archer and thus to a reconciliation of the key contributions of both Archer and Bourdieu. (shrink)

The question of social structure and its relationship to human agency remains one of the central problems of social theory. One of the most promising attempts to provide a solution has been Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach, which invokes emergence to justify treating social structure as causally effective. Archer's argument, however, has been criticised by a number of authors who suggest that the examples she cites can be explained in reductionist terms and thus that they fail to sustain her claim for (...) the independent causal effectiveness of social structure. This paper offers an alternative argument to support the emergentist claim for the causal effectiveness of social structure, and shows how this argument refutes a representative critique of social emergence. (shrink)