Gratitude has been promoted as a beneficial emotional experience. However, gratitude is not universally experienced as positive. The current work examines whether an autonomous interpersonal style is associated with differential experience of gratitude. Study 1 found an inverse relationship between trait autonomy and both trait gratitude and positivity of response to receiving a hypothetical benefit from a friend. Study 2 replicated the finding that those higher in autonomy report less trait gratitude, and also demonstrated an inverse relationship between autonomy and (...) valuing gratitude. Study 3 found that those higher in autonomy had more self-image goals and reduced compassionate goals in relationships, and that valuing gratitude mediated the relationship between autonomy and relationship goals. These results show a consistent inverse relationship between autonomy and the experience and valuing of gratitude, suggesting that degree of autonomy is one determinant of whether gratitude is experienced as positive. (shrink)

A global health archive consisting of podoconiosis tissue slides and blocks, was donated to Brighton & Sussex Medical School in 2014. There is little guidance on the socioethical and legal issues surrounding the retrospective use of archived or ‘abandoned’ tissue samples, which poses a number of questions relating to the ethical standing of the archive. There is a great deal of interpretation in the guidelines that are currently in existence; however, modern ethical principles cannot be applied as it is not (...) feasible to either reconsent or retrospectively seek approval. Our research team believed that it was unethical to leave the archive in storage, as this option favours neither researcher nor subjects. Permission was obtained from the Human Tissue Authority and a local ethics board for the tissues to be utilized in on-going research on podoconiosis aetiology. There is a delicate balance between the benefits gained by society relating to the development and progress of scientific research and the risks to the donor regarding the reuse of their tissues. Clearer guidelines should be made available to ensure that researchers are able to reuse tissue archives in contemporary research. (shrink)

DISEASE X is the codename given by the World Health Organisation to a pathogen currently unknown to science that could cause havoc to humankind. Emerging infections are sending us multiple warnings that another Disease X is looming. We've had SARS in 2002, H5N1 bird flu in 2004, H1N1 'swine flu' in 2009, MERS in 2012, Ebola in 2014, Zika in 2015 and now COVID-19. These events are not freak events, but are happening continually, and at an increasing cadence. Written by (...) a long-standing ex-Reuters global health and science correspondent, DISEASE X will use privileged access to the body leading international efforts to control viruses, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), and its CEO, Dr Richard Hatchett. CEPI seed-funded three successful COVID vaccines, including Astra-Zeneca and Moderna. DISEASE X will explore the emergence of the novel coronavirus and the crisis it caused, analysing the responses of global health organisations and experts, including the WHO, national governments such as Britain, China and the USA, COVAX, the global vaccine allocation facility, pharmaceutical companies, and leading research scientists. Weaving in insights from the likes of Bill Gates, Sir Jeremy Farrar, Dr Anthony Fauci and Sir Patrick Vallance, the book will explain how the world's public health scientists are embarking on a 100 Days Mission to snuff out future threats before they become deadly pandemics. This is the inside story written for the public. (shrink)

Is moral or other regret for abortion an indicator that abortion may not be morally or prudentially choice worthy? This paper examines the work of Kate Greasley in this area, who offers an explanation of any asymmetry in openness to regret between women who have abortions and women who give birth. The latter, not unlike Derek Parfit’s 14-year-old who conceives deliberately, may feel duty-bound not to regret their decision (in their case, to continue their pregnancy) and to affirm the (...) life of their child. In response to Greasley, testimonial evidence of one group cannot be dismissed simply because regret may be less available to another group of decision-makers. Moreover, if moral regret for childbearing is uncommon, this is not because mothers have a moral duty, as Greasley argues, not to regret even a morally mistaken choice to conceive. On the contrary, one must separate the evaluation of choices and of the results of these choices, whether positive or negative. Regret, while not infallible, can elucidate values at stake in choices, and testimonial evidence in the form of regret should be taken more seriously in regard to certain kinds of choice. (shrink)

Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

“One is not born a woman, but becomes one”, Simone de Beauvoir A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir's unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex. But despite her successes, she wondered if she had sold herself short. Her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has been billed as one of the most legendary love affairs of the twentieth (...) century. But for Beauvoir it came at a cost: for decades she was dismissed as an unoriginal thinker who 'applied' Sartre's ideas. In recent years new material has come to light revealing the ingenuity of Beauvoir's own philosophy and the importance of other lovers in her life. This ground-breaking biography draws on never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how Simone de Beauvoir became herself. (shrink)

Down Girl is a broad, original, and far ranging analysis of what misogyny really is, how it works, its purpose, and how to fight it. The philosopher Kate Manne argues that modern society's failure to recognize women's full humanity and autonomy is not actually the problem. She argues instead that it is women's manifestations of human capacities -- autonomy, agency, political engagement -- is what engenders misogynist hostility.

This powerful critique of Marx's historical materialism - as a theory of power, as an account of history, and as a political theory -has been revised to take note of the profound intellectual and political changes that have occurred since the first edition was published. Reviews from the first edition 'Giddens draws upon a formidable knowledge of anthropology, archaeology, geography, and philosophy to demonstrate the limitations of Marxism and to formulate his own interpretation of the history of societies ... He (...) does a masterful job of setting his theory within a historical and critical framework of writings on Marx. His clarity of thought and his deft and often humorous handling of the unavoidable jargon of sociology and Marxist political theory makes this book a critical work of the highest quality.' Journal of International Law and Politics 'By contrast with many practictioners in the rather murky area of social theory, Giddens clearly seeks to make himself understood, and he has the useful quality of provoking one to argument. He has let light into some dark places.' The Times Higher Education Supplement 'Although Marx, Durkheim, and Weber continue to fill more index space than any other authors, Critique is Giddens's most explicit and committed statement of his own conceptualization of social theory ... It is his most original and therefore most vulnerable book, at once a cause for celebration and an invitation to critical reappraisal of the author's entire theoretical project.' Environment and Planning. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of how existential phenomenology has influenced qualitative research methods across a range of disciplines across the social, health, educational, and psychological sciences. It focuses specifically on how the concepts of “existential structures,” or “existentials”—such as selfhood, temporality, spatiality, affectivity, and embodiment—have been used in qualitative research. After providing a brief introduction to what qualitative research is and why philosophers should be interested in it, the chapter provides clear, straightforward examples of how qualitative researchers have used (...) existentials to analyze qualitative data and design qualitative studies. The chapter is intended to introduce philosophers to existential approaches to phenomenological qualitative research, with the aim of facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration. (shrink)

Subversive Pedagogies draws attention to creative and critical pedagogies as a resource for engaging pressing problems in global politics. The collection explores the radical potential of pedagogy to transform students, scholars, citizens and institutions. It brings together scholars and students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, including international relations, political science, indigenous studies, feminist theory and theatre studies, as well as practitioners in theatre and the arts. These diverse voices explore innovative pedagogical practices that extend our understanding of where pedagogy (...) happens, invite critical assessment of the ways the neoliberal university shapes and restricts pedagogical engagement, and offer both theoretical and practical tools to explore more creative and broader understandings of what pedagogy can and should do. (shrink)

From the late-fifteenth century onwards, scholars across Europe began to write books about how to read and evaluate histories. These pioneering works - which often take surprisingly modern-sounding positions - grew from complex early modern debates about law, religion, and classical scholarship. In this book, based on the Trevelyan Lectures of 2005, Anthony Grafton explains why so many of these works were written, why they attained so much insight - and why, in the centuries that followed, most scholars gradually (...) forgot that they had existed. Elegant and accessible, What Was History? is a deliberate evocation of E. H. Carr’s celebrated and icononclastic Trevelyan Lectures on What Is History?, and will appeal to a broad readership of students, scholars and historical enthusiasts. Anthony Grafton is one of the most celebrated historians writing in English today, and What Was History? is a powerful and imaginative exploration of some central themes in the history of European ideas. (shrink)

Calling into question all structural rules and principles relating to language, Joshua Kates presents a radical new path for interpreting this every day, taken-for-granted tool of communication. Traversing theory, literary criticism, philosophy, and the philosophy of language, the book speaks to contemporary debates on analytical and humanistic modes of inquiry. Language and texts are thought of as active 'events', replete with allusions to history, context and tradition that are always in the making. This emphasis makes the case for a rigorous (...) inquiry of text and talk in all their forms, bridging the continental and analytical divide in the process. (shrink)

One variety of love is familiar in everyday life and qualifies in every reasonable sense as a reactive attitude. ‘Reactive love’ is paradigmatically (a) an affectionate attachment to another person, (b) appropriately felt as a non-self-interested response to particular kinds of morally laudable features of character expressed by the loved one in interaction with the lover, and (c) paradigmatically manifested in certain kinds of acts of goodwill and characteristic affective, desiderative and other motivational responses (including other-regarding concern and a desire (...) to be with the beloved). ‘Virtues of intimacy’ as expressed in interaction with the lover are agent-relative reasons for reactive love, and like other reactive attitudes, reactive love generates reasons in its own right. Within a broad conception of the virtues, reactive love sheds light on the reactive attitudes more generally. (shrink)

We explore the role of episodic imagining in explaining why people both differentially report that it seems to them in experience as though time robustly passes, and why they differentially report that they believe that time does in fact robustly pass. We empirically investigate two hypotheses, the differential vividness hypothesis, and the mental time travel hypothesis. According to each of these, the degree to which people vividly episodically imagine past/future states of affairs influences their tendency to report that it seems (...) to them as though time robustly passes and to judge that time does robustly pass. According to the former, a greater degree of vividness will tend to increase the extent to which people make such reports, while according to the latter, it will tend to decrease the extent to which people make such reports. We found weak evidence in favour of the former hypothesis. We reflect on the implications of this finding for theorising about such reports. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 209-229, June 2022.

Matthias Steup (Steup 2008) has recently argued that our doxastic attitudes are free by (i) drawing an analogy with compatibilism about freedom of action and (ii) denying that it is a necessary condition for believing at will that S's having an intention to believe that p can cause S to believe that p . In this paper, however, I argue that the strategies espoused in (i) and (ii) are incompatible.

Without trust there is no credible human health research (HHR). This article accepts this truism and addresses a crucial question that arises: how can trust continually be promoted in an ever-changing and uncertain HHR environment? The article analyses long-standing mechanisms that are designed to elicit trust—such as consent, anonymization, and transparency—and argues that these are best understood as trust represented by proxies of trustworthiness, i.e., regulatory attempts to convey the trustworthiness of the HHR system and/or its actors. Often, such proxies (...) are assumed to operate as markers that trust exists or, at least, has not been lost. But, since trust can neither be “built” nor “secured,” this is a precarious assumption. Worryingly, there is no existing theoretical account of how to understand and evaluate these proxies of trustworthiness as part of a trusted HHR ecosystem. To remedy this, the paper argues for a radical reimagining of trust and trustworthiness as performative acts that ought to be understood in relation to each other and by reference to the common values at stake. It is shown that proxies of trustworthiness are the operational tools used to perform trustworthiness. It advocates for a values-based approach to understanding the relationship between trust and trustworthiness. This establishes a strong basis for an evaluative framework for proxies of trustworthiness, i.e., to determine how to perform trustworthiness well. Five common proxies in HHR are scrutinized from a values perspective. The contribution is to provide a far-reaching normative and practical framework by which existing and future proxies of trustworthiness can be identified, assessed, maintained, or replaced in rapidly changing HHR regulatory ecosystems where trust itself is crucial to the success of the entire HHR enterprise. (shrink)

The French existentialists Simone de Beauvoir and Jean‐Paul Sartre are renowned philosophers of freedom. But what “existentialist freedom” is is a matter of disagreement amongst their interpreters and, some argue, between Beauvoir and Sartre themselves. Since the late 1980s several scholars have argued that a Sartrean conception of freedom cannot justify the ethics of existentialism, adequately account for situations of oppression, or serve feminist ends. On these readings, Beauvoir disagreed with Sartre about freedom—making existentialist ethics, resistance to oppression, and feminism (...) coherently defensible. This article identifies four conceptions of freedom in order to clarify the questions of whether and how they disagreed, arguing that some incompatibilist readings of Sartre and Beauvoir conflate or confuse these conceptions in ways that render their conclusions unconvincing. However, there are stronger grounds on which to claim that Beauvoir disagreed with Sartre about morality—and the conditions of its possibility. (shrink)

Internalists about reasons following Bernard Williams claim that an agent’s normative reasons for action are constrained in some interesting way by her desires or motivations. In this paper, I offer a new argument for such a position—although one that resonates, I believe, with certain key elements of Williams’ original view. I initially draw on P.F. Strawson’s famous distinction between the interpersonal and the objective stances that we can take to other people, from the second-person point of view. I suggest that (...) we should accept Strawson’s contention that the activity of reasoning with someone about what she ought to do naturally belongs to the interpersonal mode of interaction. I also suggest that reasons for an agent to perform some action are considerations which would be apt to be cited in favor of that action, within an idealized version of this advisory social practice. I then go on to argue that one would take leave of the interpersonal stance towards someone—thus crossing the line, so to speak—in suggesting that she do something one knows she wouldn’t want to do, even following an exhaustive attempt to hash it out with her. An internalist necessity constraint on reasons is defended on this basis. (shrink)

By looking at the politics of classification within machine learning systems, this article demonstrates why the automated interpretation of images is an inherently social and political project. We begin by asking what work images do in computer vision systems, and what is meant by the claim that computers can “recognize” an image? Next, we look at the method for introducing images into computer systems and look at how taxonomies order the foundational concepts that will determine how a system interprets the (...) world. Then we turn to the question of labeling: how humans tell computers which words will relate to a given image. What is at stake in the way AI systems use these labels to classify humans, including by race, gender, emotions, ability, sexuality, and personality? Finally, we turn to the purposes that computer vision is meant to serve in our society—the judgments, choices, and consequences of providing computers with these capacities. Methodologically, we call this an archeology of datasets: studying the material layers of training images and labels, cataloguing the principles and values by which taxonomies are constructed, and analyzing how these taxonomies create the parameters of intelligibility for an AI system. By doing this, we can critically engage with the underlying politics and values of a system, and analyze which normative patterns of life are assumed, supported, and reproduced. (shrink)

There are growing discontinuities between the research practices of data science and established tools of research ethics regulation. Some of the core commitments of existing research ethics regulations, such as the distinction between research and practice, cannot be cleanly exported from biomedical research to data science research. Such discontinuities have led some data science practitioners and researchers to move toward rejecting ethics regulations outright. These shifts occur at the same time as a proposal for major revisions to the Common Rule—the (...) primary regulation governing human-subjects research in the USA—is under consideration for the first time in decades. We contextualize these revisions in long-running complaints about regulation of social science research and argue data science should be understood as continuous with social sciences in this regard. The proposed regulations are more flexible and scalable to the methods of non-biomedical research, yet problematically largely exclude data science methods from human-subjects regulation, particularly uses of public datasets. The ethical frameworks for Big Data research are highly contested and in flux, and the potential harms of data science research are unpredictable. We examine several contentious cases of research harms in data science, including the 2014 Facebook emotional contagion study and the 2016 use of geographical data techniques to identify the pseudonymous artist Banksy. To address disputes about application of human-subjects research ethics in data science, critical data studies should offer a historically nuanced theory of “data subjectivity” responsive to the epistemic methods, harms and benefits of data science and commerce. (shrink)

Between the two men there is perhaps little to choose on the point of principle, since Berkeley implicitly justifies the subordination of truth to supposed ...

Background: Ethical care in maternity is fundamental to providing care that both prevents harm and does good, and yet, there is growing acknowledgement that disrespect and abuse routinely occur in this context, which indicates that current ethical frameworks are not adequate. Care ethics offers an alternative to the traditional biomedical ethical principles. Research aim: The aim of the study was to determine whether a correlation exists between midwifery-led care and care ethics as an important first step in an action research (...) project. Research design: Template analysis was chosen for this part of the action research. Template analysis is a design that tests theory against empirical data, which requires pre-set codes. Participants and context: A priori codes that represent midwifery-led care were generated by a stakeholder consultative group of nine childbearing women using nominal group technique, collected in Perth, Western Australia. The a priori codes were applied to a predesigned template with four domains of care ethics. Ethical considerations: Ethics approval was granted by the Edith Cowan University research ethics committee REMS no. 2019-00296-Buchanan. Findings: The participants generated eight a priori codes representing ethical midwifery care, such as: 1.1 Relationship with Midwife; 1.2 Woman-centred care; 2.1 Trust women’s bodies and abilities; 2.2. Protect normal physiological birth; 3.1. Information provision; 3.2. Respect autonomy; 4.1. Birth culture of fear and 4.2. Recognition of rite of passage. The a priori codes were mapped to the care ethics template. The template analysis found that midwifery-led care does indeed demonstrate care ethics. Discussion: Care ethics takes into consideration what principle-based bioethics have previously overlooked: relationship, context and power. Conclusion: Midwifery-led care has been determined in this study to demonstrate care ethics, which suggest that further research is defensible with the view that it could be incorporated into the ethical codes and conduct for the midwifery profession. (shrink)

Human microbiome research makes causal connections between entire microbial communities and a wide array of traits that range from physiological diseases to psychological states. To evaluate these causal claims, we first examine a well-known single-microbe causal explanation: of Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. This apparently straightforward causal explanation is not so simple, however. It does not achieve a key explanatory standard in microbiology, of Koch’s postulates, which rely on manipulations of single-microorganism cultures to infer causal relationships to disease. When Koch’s postulates (...) are framed by an interventionist causal framework, it is clearer what the H. pylori explanation achieves and where its explanatory strengths lie. After assessing this ‘simple’, single-microbe case, we apply the interventionist framework to two key areas of microbiome research, in which obesity and mental health states are purportedly explained by microbiomes. Despite the experimental data available, interventionist criteria for explanation show that many of the causal claims generated by microbiome research are weak or misleading. We focus on the stability, specificity and proportionality of proposed microbiome causal explanations, and evaluate how effectively these dimensions of causal explanation are achieved in some promising avenues of research. We suggest some conceptual and explanatory strategies to improve how causal claims about microbiomes are made. (shrink)

With modern technological advances, distance education has become an increasingly important education delivery medium for, for example, the higher education provided by open universities. Among predictive factors of successful learning in distance education, the effects of non-cognitive skills are less explored. Grit, the dispositional tendency to sustain trait-level passion and long-term goals, has raised much research interest and gained importance for predicting academic achievement. The Grit Questionnaire, measuring Perseverance of Effort and Consistency of Interests, has been shown to be a (...) reliable instrument in traditional university student populations. However, the measurement and predictive validity of this questionnaire is still unknown for adult distance education university students who differ from traditional students in various ways. Based on a sample of 2,027 students from a distance education university, this study assessed the psychometric properties of the two-factor structure grit measured by the Grit Questionnaire. The findings suggest that the short form of the Grit Questionnaire is a potentially useful assessment tool for measuring the grit construct for distance learning higher education and that the Consistency of Interests factor is especially relevant to consider the improvement of learning performance for distance education in terms of courses credit and exam attempts. The measurement precision of the Perseverance of Effort factor, however, should be improved in future research to provide higher measurement accuracy and broader item coverage. (shrink)

Anthony Barron explores the relationship between the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the forms and themes of Beckett's critical and creative writings. He shows that Beckett's aesthetic preoccupations are consonant with some of Schopenhauer's seminal arguments regarding the arational basis of artistic composition and appreciation and the impotence of reason in human affairs. While Beckett's critical writings are, in places, formidably opaque, this work examines the ways in which such texts can be elucidated when their intertextual affinities with Schopenhauer's arguments (...) are revealed. Using Schopenhauer's thought as a presiding interpretative framework, Barron demonstrates how the widespread presence of philosophical and theological ideas in Beckett's creative texts signifies less about his personal convictions than it does about his authorial aims. He thereby highlights the ways in which discursive ideas were appropriated and manipulated by Beckett for purely literary ends -- Back cover. (shrink)

A theory of human origins that is one-half Charles Darwin and one-half Cain and Abel is bound to entail a lot of rethinking of traditional themes. Rene Girard's thesis of original human violence and the Bible's power to reveal it has been around for more than a generation, but its consequences for Christian theology are still only slowly being unpacked. Anthony Bartlett's book makes a signal contribution, representing an astonishing leap forward in understanding what a biblical disclosure of founding (...) violence means for Christian thought and life. If human language arose directly out of the primal experience of murder, then semiotics becomes a core area for theological examination. Tracing the discipline of semiotics through postmodern thinkers, then back through its birth in the Latin era, Bartlett shows how Girard's thought is itself a semiotic emergence, beyond standard Christian metaphysics. Above all, Girardian theory of human signs demands we see the generative impact of violence in our language and thought, and then, conversely, that the Word of God, crucified without retaliation and risen in the same identity, brings a totally new sign and relation into history, offering a thoroughgoing transformation of human life and meaning. (shrink)

This collection of germinal work in the field by Anthony Weston presents his pragmatic environmental philosophy, calling for reconstruction and imagination rather than deconstruction and analysis. It is a philosopher's invitation to environmental ethics in an unexpectedly inviting and down-to-earth key. On the pragmatic view advanced here, environmental values are thoroughly natural—what else could they be?—and are open-ended and in flux. Rather than passing judgment on the world as it is, we are called to rediscover and remake the world (...) as it might be. We require an environmental etiquette more than a formal ethic; an etiquette whose development must be an ongoing process; and a process in turn that is genuinely multicentric, challenging us to negotiate our place among the exuberant variety of living and other forms. (shrink)

Philosophers have turned their attention to gaslighting only recently, and have made considerable progress in analysing its characteristic aims and harms. I am less convinced, however, that we have fully understood its nature. I will argue in this paper that philosophers and others interested in the phenomenon have largely overlooked a phenomenon I call moral gaslighting, in which someone is made to feel morally defective—for example, cruelly unforgiving or overly suspicious—for harbouring some mental state to which she is entitled. If (...) I am right about this possibility, and that it deserves to be called gaslighting, then gaslighting is a far more prevalent and everyday phenomenon than has previously been credited. And it can also be a purely structural phenomenon, as well as an interpersonal one, which remains a controversial possibility in the current literature. (shrink)

In this paper, Kate Kirkpatrick argues that the recent return to moral exemplars in exemplarist moral theory might benefit from engaging with existentialists' use of exemplars in two ways: first, by considering the role of negative exemplars and the power of emotions other than admiration in moral formation; and second, by considering objections to exemplarist education, in particular Simone de Beauvoir's objection that narrative exemplars often serve an ideological function and perpetuate oppressive ideals — especially (but not only) about (...) women. After situating this discussion in ancient and recent debates about the role of literary narratives in moral formation, Kirkpatrick outlines a moral perfectionist reading of Beauvoir and an objection to exemplarist moral theory's reliance on exemplars that “we” admire on the basis that “the admirable” often serves to promote the interests of the powerful rather than the flourishing of all human beings. Finally, while agreeing with this symposium's editors that efforts to improve our understanding of how to use narrative exemplars in educational settings are valuable, she asks how, given the force of the Beauvoirian objection, their criterion of “appropriate critical reflection” might be met. (shrink)

According to the normativist, it is built into the nature of belief itself that beliefs are subject to a certain set of norms. I argue here that only a normativist account can explain certain non‐normative facts about what it takes to have the capacity for belief. But this way of defending normativism places an explanatory burden on any normativist account that an account on which a truth norm is explanatorily fundamental simply cannot discharge. I develop an alternative account that can (...) achieve explanatory adequacy where this sort of truth privileging account falls short. (shrink)

This research work examines Heidegger's (1889-1976) contention that phenomenology can inspire, illuminate, motivate, reinforce and guide (human) individual's actions. It achieves this by adapting Heidegger's phenomenological approach to analyze and interpret representative everyday factical experiences of nepotism, selfishness and mass mentality in the (Nigerian) society. Doing this helps to ascertain whether these experiences have any phenomenological link with inauthenticity. Also, it provides a close reading and interpretation of Heidegger's treatment of authentic existence, and explores the possibility of complimenting it with (...) the phenomenology of Commensality, as a mode of care and a way to authenticity. In this manner, it strategically explores possible ways of inspiring individual Daseins to authenticity, and with it engendering a positive transformation of the (Nigerian) society. Presenting and elaborating the phenomenology of Commensality, the work highlights the relationship and the differences between the phenomenology of Commensality and the ontical or sociological understanding of commensality as obtained in African traditional societies. Phenomenology of Commensality argues for the 'renaissance' of Commensality, concretely expressed as Onyenkeanyi, and not just for its 'revival'. The research work further develops the phenomenology of education for Commensality, discussing the possible content and focus of its curriculum, while differentiating it from ethics. The proper implementation of phenomenology of education for Commensality could inspire and illuminate individual Daseins to authenticity, and thereby becomes an improvement strategy for the positive transformation of the (Nigerian) society. As a phenomenology, it is appropriate that the people and places analyzed take on a definite character, which is why the Nigerian society is used. However, it is expected that the implications of the findings presented here will be general and accurate enough to allow application to any number of similar situations. (shrink)

The Politics of Well-Being argues that the relationship between well-being and ethical life has been overlooked. The more specific argument of the book is that ethical life requires political engagement, and the emergence of a society committed to critical thinking. It is argued that these conditions allow for our ordination and confirmation as ethical subjects. While well-being can be experienced in different ways, it is claimed that, after experience of ethical life, a more sustainable form of it is revealed to (...) us, a form which we would be drawn to preserve, a form which can be constituted as an object of hope. While the book draws on philosophical themes, its main focus is political. This is because its primary objective is to identify and to examine what needs to be done in order to realise ethical life. Its main focus in this respect is the identification and examination of the barriers which need to be overcome if ethical life is to be realised. It is acknowledged that this will not be an easy task. Indeed, it may be an impossible task. However, despite these barriers, and despite the dark days we are living through, the book is a call to hope rather than a surrender to despair. This book will be of interest to students of politics, psychology, cultural studies, philosophy and sociology, as well as anyone else interested in exploring new ideas about how the make the world a better place. (shrink)

An explanation of the nature of space-time, and how it is incompatible with temporal flow and any dynamical change, including simple motion.

Drawing on and developing the phenomenological work of figures such as Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, Knowing by Heart details the various feelings and feeling states that pertain to matters of the heart.