There is nothing more humbling to one’s inner moral compass than to realize that you do not initially know what is right or wrong! I found myself in just such a situation after reading the above case. Much has been written, both in the professional literature and the popular media, about the “Ashley Treatment” since Gunther and Diekema published their article in 2006. It is unclear if others in the United States or around the world have, to any significant degree, (...) adopted growth attenuation therapy and/or surgical intervention for children with severe neurological compromise, but the case quoted above suggests that hospital ethics committees may also be struggling with these decisions. An informal survey of pediatric endocrinologists, mentioned in a recent article on the topic, claims that many physicians are facing this dilemma as well. (shrink)

I would like to present the details of an actual case from my own experience over which I, along with the family, have agonized. I think this case brings into focus some of the unique issues in perinatal medicine where multiple patients, some real and some potential, can enter into a single decision. I hope that through this presentation others may gain insight into the complexities of applied ethics in perinatal medicine.

Standard views on surrogate decision making present alternative ideal models of what ideal surrogates should consider in rendering a decision. They do not, however, explain the physician''s responsibility to a patient who lacks decisional capacity or how a physician should regard surrogates and surrogate decisions. The authors argue that it is critical to recognize the moral difference between a patient''s decisions and a surrogate''s and the professional responsibilities implied by that distinction. In every case involving a patient who lacks decisional (...) capacity, physicians and the treatment team have to make judgments about the appropriateness of both the surrogate and the surrogate''s decision. They have to assess the surrogate''s decisional capacity and attitude toward the patient as well as the reasons that support the surrogate''s decision. This paper provides a model for acceptable surrogate decisions and a standard for blocking inappropriate surrogates. Only decisions based on widely shared reasons are allowable for surrogate refusal of highly beneficial treatment. (shrink)

This concise overview of the perception of Islam in eight of the most important German thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries allows a new and fascinating investigation of how these thinkers, within their own bodies of work, often espoused contradicting ideas about Islam and their nearest Muslim neighbors. Exploring a variety of 'neat compartmentalizations' at work in the representations of Islam, as well as distinct vocabularies employed by these key intellectuals, Ian Almond parses these vocabularies to examine the importance (...) of Islam in the very history of German thought. Almond further demonstrates the ways in which German philosophers such as Hegel, Kant, and Marx repeatedly ignored information about the Muslim world that did not harmonize with the particular landscapes they were trying to paint – a fact which in turn makes us reflect on what it means when a society possesses 'knowledge' of a foreign culture. (shrink)

Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Marking Time presents an innovative account of literary time, in which the temporality and ontology of the literary are seen to be essentially intertwined. Individual chapters trace the stakes of this view of time for the status and 'economy' of the literary text across five 20th-century writers in French whose work is characterized by a fundamental and searching self-questioning: Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Louis-René des Forêts, Pierre Klossowski, and Roger Laporte. A final chapter (...) draws on these analyses to develop an inherently unstable figure of 'saving time', which has important repercussions for how we conceive of literary value. (shrink)

Arguments strong enough to justify skeptical theism will be strong enough to justify the position that every claim about God is empirically unfalsifiable. This fact is problematic because that position licenses further arguments which are clearly unreasonable, but which the skeptical theist cannot consistently accept as such. Avoiding this result while still achieving the theoretical objectives looked for in skeptical theism appears to demand an impossibly nuanced position.

This paper outlines a conceptual framework for a sufficiency economy, defining sufficiency as the space between a generalizable notion of human wellbeing and ungeneralisable excess. It assumes an objective and universal concept of human needs to define a ‘floor’ and the concept of planetary boundaries to define a ‘ceiling’. This is set up as an alternative to the dominant preference satisfaction theory of value. It begins with a brief survey of the potential contributions of sufficientarianism and limitarianism to this endeavor (...) before outlining a theory of objective, universal human need. This recognizes the contextual variable nature of need satisfiers and the distinct methodology required to adjudicate necessities. It then turns to the planetary boundaries literature and utilizes a sequence of causal and normative reasoning to derive an operational ceiling and the concept of ungeneralisable luxuries. The final section addresses how the concepts of floors and ceilings might be operationalized via forms of dialogic democracy but noting the absence of any such institutions at the global level. Its policy conclusion is that a safe climate cannot be achieved through supply-side mitigation alone, and that fair demand-side mitigation necessarily requires a clear distinction between necessities and unnecessary luxuries, between which (hopefully) lies a space of sufficiency. (shrink)

This introduction to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy gives an overview of his philosophical thought to date and situates it within the broader context of contemporary French and European thinking. The book examines Nancy’s philosophy in relation to five specific areas: his account of subjectivity; his understanding of space and spatiality; his thinking about the body and embodiment; his political thought; and his contribution to contemporary aesthetics. In each case it shows the way in which Nancy develops or moves beyond (...) some of the key concerns associated with phenomenology, post-structuralism, and what could broadly be termed the “post-modern.”. (shrink)

Recalling the phenomenological and Hegelian bases of the critique of misplaced concreteness, and supplementing these by the contribution of Gregory Bateson, it is possible to say that a contemporary critique of digital media cannot appeal to an irrevocable concreteness nor finally defeat abstraction. Since the digital media complex is characterized by temporal decay, transversality, and singularity, a new departure for a critical theory of digital media must centre on the cultural unconscious and the limit, or edge, of the cultural complex.

From the 19th century to the present, philosophy has grappled with the domination of received form over ongoing experience and has proposed a return to the concrete in order to ally itself with social and intellectual liberation. My recent book, Groundwork of Phe-nomenological Marxism, identi????ies three historical phases of this task. The ????irst, associated with Karl Marx, takes political economy as its object and projects the liberation of labour. The second, asso-ciated with Edmund Husserl, takes mathematical physics as its ob-ject (...) and projects the liberation of philosophy and the human sci-ences from objectivism. The third takes ecology as its object and projects its central role in the rehabilitation of experienced nature from its objectivistic reduction to a resource—whose latest critical phase consists in the contemporary war between planetary tech-nology and place-based Indigeneity. Depuis le XIXe siècle jusqu’à nos jours, la philosophie s’est battue contre la domination de la forme reçue sur l’expérience en cours et a proposé un retour au concret pour s’allier à la libération sociale et intellectuelle. Mon dernier livre, Les Fondements du marxisme phénoménologique, identi????ie trois phases historiques de cette tâche. La première, associée à Karl Marx, prend l’économie poli-tique pour objet et projette la libération du travail. La seconde, as-sociée à Edmund Husserl, prend pour objet la physique mathéma-tique et projette la libération de la philosophie et des sciences hu-maines de l’objectivisme. La troisième prend l’écologie comme objet et projette son rôle central dans la réhabilitation de la nature vécue depuis sa réduction objectiviste à une ressource – dont la dernière phase critique consiste en la guerre contemporaine entre la techno-logie planétaire et l’indigénéité territoriale. (shrink)

This paper investigates phenomenological philosophy as the critical consciousness of modernity beginning from that point in the Vienna Lecture where Husserl discounts Papuans and Gypsies, and includes America, in defining Europe as the spiritual home of reason. Its meaning is analyzed through the introduction of the concept of institution in Crisis to argue that the historical fact of encounter with America can be seen as an event for reason insofar as the encounter includes elements previously absent in the European entelechy. (...) The conclusion shows that phenomenology must become a comparative, Socratic, diagnosis of the planetary crisis of reason. The entelechy of reason that becomes evident through the concept of institution should be understood less as a renewal of a pre-existing tradition than as an exogenic encounter and incursion of an outside that together define an instituting event as new in relation to its tradition. (shrink)

Mainstream moral beliefs about war seem to be inconsistent with mainstream moral beliefs about self-defense such as the imminence requirement, the requirement to retreat, and restrictions on responses to conditional threats. The chapter argues that these apparent inconsistencies are actually the result of the necessity principle applied to environments with different nonmoral social facts. War takes place in the anarchy of international relations, where a lack of effective cosmopolitan security institutions makes it necessary to confront nonimminent threats, stand one’s ground, (...) and respond to conditional threats in order to defeat and deter aggression. Self-defense, on the other hand, usually occurs in societies with effective police. In such an environment, it is unnecessary for private citizens to take similar actions to defeat and deter aggression. This is a good reason to believe that mainstream moral beliefs about war are closer to the true morality of war than recent critics claim. (shrink)

For Amartya Sen, Adam Smith’s notion of the impartial spectator is a device that brings “distant voices” into our moral deliberations in order to prevent us from the parochialism that can limit our views on particular issues. Whilst recognising its importance, this article suggests that there are some problems with the way Sen uses this in his The Idea of Justice. Tensions arise around issues relating to his interpretation of Smith, a one-sided and undialectical understanding of the operation of the (...) impartial spectator, an ambivalence in Sen’s approach between essentialism and cultural relativism, the capacity for people to carry out the demands of the impartial spectator and its efficacy in relation to real moral problems such as Smith’s case of infanticide. The conclusion is that in the search for openness, Sen leaves his idea of justice with insufficient grounding to forge a dialogue that can act as a challenge to entrenched beliefs rather than simply accept them in a limbo of fragile co-existence. (shrink)

Rather than providing a list of "how-tos" and "must dos," this volume is premised on the understanding that by learning more about the current conditions under which teachers and other educators work and learn, it is possible to understand, ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Experimenting with Islam:Nietzschean Reflections on Bowles’s AraplainaIan AlmondIn a letter to his friend Köselitz dated March 13 1881, Nietzsche wrote: "Ask my old comrade Gersdorff whether he'd like to go with me to Tunisia for one or two years.... I want to live for a while amongst Muslims, in the places moreover where their faith is at its most devout; this way my eye and judgement for all things (...) European will be sharpened."1 Various motifs in the work of Paul Bowles—a fascination with cruelty, an obsession with destruction, a predilection for abysses (metaphorical and literal) in the landscapes of his stories—invite some kind of reference to Nietzsche, however brief. Nietzsche's desire to live in the most intense pocket of Islam he could find had, one suspects, less to do with Islam than with his desire for a "trans-European eye"2 —four years after his remarks on Tunisia, Nietzsche would say the same thing about Japan in a letter to his sister.3 Nietzsche's proposed trip to Tunisia would lead to a better understanding of Europe, not Islam, and would provide him with an outside perspective on the European disease of modernity—a different set of lenses for his Kantian spectacles. This conception of Islam was, therefore, a means to self-knowledge, a handy instrument for diagnosing one's own illness, and a useful mirror to observe with greater clarity the more unattractive elements in one's own features. Most of Nietzsche's references to Islam and Islamic culture—and there are well over a hundred and fifty of them in the Gesamtausgabe—become clearer when one keeps this functional, almost anthropological, approach to the Islamic Other in mind.Although there is nothing new about this idea of the Orient as a tool of European self-awareness—as early as the 1780s, Sir William Jones was [End Page 309] already hoping the study of Sanskrit and Arabic would offer a "more extensive insight into the human [read "European"] mind"4 —an awareness of the genealogy of such Western interest in Arabs and Mohammedaner certainly helps us better understand Bowles's own eerie fascination with the faith. The parodies of missionaries, academics, and policemen which we find in stories such as "The Time of Friendship" and "A Distant Episode" confirm the distance Bowles attempted to put between his own texts and those Orientalist traditions of both Christian (i.e., Islam as a pool of potential believers) and Imperialist (Muslims as potential human resources) provenance. In attempting to escape such vocabularies and textual traditions, Bowles ultimately replicates and reshapes their original representations, producing an irony of delicate complexities, which is the object of this article.Near the beginning of Bowles's witty, though somewhat caustic autobiography Without Stopping, a moment takes place that gives an insight into the way, in later years, the narrator would approach different cultures with the intention of constructing new worlds. At age five, Bowles relates how he often found himself alone in his parents large upstate New York house. Abandoned to his own devices, the young narrator began to entertain himself by fabricating and mapping out new countries with his own imagination: "Soon I invented a planet with landmasses and seas. The continents were Ferncowland, Lanton, Zaganokworld and Araplaina. I drew maps of each and gave them mountain ranges, rivers, cities and railways."5 The image is captivating not only for its visual appeal, of a five-year-old Bowles, future author of Sheltering Sky, sitting on the carpet, crayoning out his map of Araplaina. It also suggests the presence, very early on, of what will always be a central motivation in Bowles's fascination with the world of Islam: a desire for novelty, for the really new, as an escape from boredom. Bowles's Tangiers would later provide the very Araplaina he had been seeking all along.In the world of Bowles's North African short stories, a number of common features seem to unite the otherwise disparate collection of tales found in The Time of Friendship and The Delicate Prey. Probably the foremost of these is cruelty. In "The Delicate Prey," the Moungari traveler... (shrink)

An extended critique of the applicability of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche's thesis of the end of metaphysics to the philosophical practice of Socrates.

Peter Mandler’s Return from the Natives examines Margaret Mead mid-career when she devoted much energy to promoting anthropology and anthropologists to government and industry and positioned herself as a prominent social commentator. By the time she returned to the field after an interlude of 14 years, something had happened to her professionally: she was treated as a bit of an embarrassment, no longer a scientific heavyweight, and much of this stems from the rather hare-brained “culture cracking” she engaged in during (...) the war. So while honors and kudos enhanced her official image, behind the scenes, she complained of being neglected and shunted aside. Her discipline became radicalized, and her balanced and accommodating approach was rejected. (shrink)

What will be the future of war? No-one can tell for sure, and so there is much speculation and many contending views. In this article I discuss one of those views, the notion that war of the future will primarily be a protracted form of terrorism, insurgency, and low-intensity conflict within 'failed' states and civilizations, which will sometimes lapse into ethnic cleansing and genocide. It will be 'dirty war'. The antagonists will be rage-filled 'warriors'. War will be fought in the (...) wastelands of the Third World. Wars will occur because of state failure, rather than because of state strength and expansion. They will feature 'irregular' forces rather than the disciplined hierarchical armies that have been the defining characteristic of recent Western military history. Frequently, the military forces of developed societies will be drawn into these conflicts. This is a plausible view of the future, one that is influential in Washington, and a number of serious academics2 subscribe to it. (shrink)

A study of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and of its relevance for contemporary sociology. Dr Craib sees Sartre as a central figure in modern European thought - providing links between Husserl and Heidegger on the one hand and Marxists and Structuralists on the other. He is concerned to relate Sartre's apparently abstract and often obscure philosophical work to methodological and other research problems in sociology; in particular he uses Sartrean philsophy to criticize the very influential work of Gouldner, Goffman (...) and Garfinkel. In the first part of the book Dr Craib concentrates on Being and Nothingness and considers the way in which Sartre's brand of phenomenology can inform studies of inter-personal relationships. In the second part, he examines La Critique de la raison dialectique, which deals with the wider structure of society, the nature of social classes and the development of history. He goes on to investigate the connections between these two levels of analysis, and the complex inter-relationships between the sociologist, his fellows, his objects of study and his theoretical work. (shrink)

It seems today that a sense of crisis permeates international affairs. From war to pollution to trade and beyond, there is much talk of the disintegration of the settled ways of doing things and fear of what comes next. The twenty-first century has turned sour for many believers in international order. This is not unique in history; order has been on the minds of writers for centuries, from Kant to Carr to Hedley Bull. It is hard to find a period (...) in history when there has not been some sense of crisis. The problem of international order is both a perennial theme and an urgent contemporary concern. The essays in this collection broaden the conversation to consider the ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction within the concept of world order. Order is neither self-evident nor universally agreed upon; to the contrary, it is contested, political, and contingent. Order is a very disorderly idea. (shrink)