The voluntary and informed consent of subjects has been the central focus of concern in research reviews, overshadowing the importance of all other considerations. The Nuremberg Code, with its rights-based protection of the subject's autonomy above all else, made it difficult to justify research with no intended benefit when subjects are incompetent to make a valid informed choice to participate. Subsequent codes providing for research with incompetent subjects followed the lead of Nuremberg, substituting the informed authorization of a proxy for (...) the informed consent of the subject. (shrink)

: The purpose of this paper is to address from a normative perspective issues raised by John Mueller in Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element. Mueller criticizes economists, including Austrians, for failing to properly address unilateral transfers—in particular, charity, childcare, and crime—in economic thought. Mueller challenges economist Gary Becker’s position that giving increases the […] The post “Charity, Childcare, and Crime: From Objectivist Ethics to the Austrian School” appeared first on Libertarian Papers.

The use of analogy and metaphor as descriptive and explanatory devices in neuroscientific research was examined. In particular, four analogies/metaphors common to research having to do with the brain and its function were illustrated. It is argued that the use of these and other similar literary devices in neuroscientific research sometimes leads to certain conceptual confusions and, thus, fails to aid in clarifying the nature of those phenomena they are intended to explain. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

"The publication of the revised edition of Kathleen Marie Higgins's Nicizscbe's Zarathustra is a great boon to Nietzsche scholars and Zarathustra specialists alike, for Higgins's consistently subtle analysis of Nietzsche's bold experiment ...

From our first social bonding as infants to the funeral rites that mark our passing, music plays an important role in our lives, bringing us closer to one another. In _The Music between Us_, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins investigates this role, examining the features of human perception that enable music’s uncanny ability to provoke, despite its myriad forms across continents and throughout centuries, the sense of a shared human experience. Drawing on disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, musicology, linguistics, and (...) anthropology, Higgins’s richly researched study showcases the ways music is used in rituals, education, work, healing, and as a source of security and—perhaps most importantly—joy. By participating so integrally in such meaningful facets of society, Higgins argues, music situates itself as one of the most fundamental bridges between people, a truly cross-cultural form of communication that can create solidarity across political divides. Moving beyond the well-worn takes on music’s universality, _The Music between Us_ provides a new understanding of what it means to be musical and, in turn, human. (shrink)

A content analysis of 48 children's realistic animal stories shows an emphasis on pets and petkeeping that can both challenge and support traditional human-animal boundaries. The genre's sympathetic portrayal of pet animals and the condemnation of theirmistreatment invite the reader to challenge such boundaries. Yet the genre's stereotypical portrayal of these animals also constrains our conceptualization of the human-animal bond. The author discusses these and other narrative elements which render this form of popular culture ambiguous terrain for negotiating an ethic (...) of respect for nonhuman others which goes beyond most contemporary arrangements. (shrink)

In volume 1 of this three-volume work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing. Now, in volume 2, he examines these relations in fiction and theories of literature. Ricoeur treats the question of just how far the Aristotelian concept of "plot" in narrative fiction can be expanded and whether there is a point at which narrative fiction as a literary form not only blurs at the edges but ceases to exist at all. Though some semiotic (...) theorists have proposed all fiction can be reduced to an atemporal structure, Ricoeur argues that fiction depends on the reader's understanding of narrative traditions, which do evolve but necessarily include a temporal dimension. He looks at how time is actually expressed in narrative fiction, particularly through use of tenses, point of view, and voice. He applies this approach to three books that are, in a sense, tales about time: Virgina Woolf's _Mrs. Dalloway;_ Thomas Mann's _Magic Mountain;_ and Marcel Proust's _Remembrance of Things Past_. "Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear."—Eugen Weber, _New York Times Book Review _ "A major work of literary theory and criticism under the aegis of philosophical hermenutics. I believe that... it will come to have an impact greater than that of Gadamer's Truth and Method—a work it both supplements and transcends in its contribution to our understanding of the meaning of texts and their relationship to the world."—Robert Detweiler, _Religion and Literature_ "One cannot fail to be impressed by Ricoeur's encyclopedic knowledge of the subject under consideration.... To students of rhetoric, the importance of Time and Narrative... is all too evident to require extensive elaboration."—Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, _Quarterly Journal of Speech_. (shrink)

_Time and Narrative_ builds on Paul Ricoeur's earlier analysis, in _The Rule of Metaphor_, of semantic innovation at the level of the sentence. Ricoeur here examines the creation of meaning at the textual level, with narrative rather than metaphor as the ruling concern. Ricoeur finds a "healthy circle" between time and narrative: time is humanized to the extent that it portrays temporal experience. Ricoeur proposes a theoretical model of this circle using Augustine's theory of time and Aristotle's theory of plot (...) and, further, develops an original thesis of the mimetic function of narrative. He concludes with a comprehensive survey and critique of modern discussions of historical knowledge, understanding, and writing from Aron and Mandelbaum in the late 1930s to the work of the Annales school and that of Anglophone philosophers of history of the 1960s and 1970s. "This work, in my view, puts the whole problem of narrative, not to mention philosophy of history, on a new and higher plane of discussion."—Hayden White, _History and Theory _ "Superb.... A fine point of entrance into the work of one of the eminent thinkers of the present intellectual age."—Joseph R. Gusfield, _Contemporary Sociology _. (shrink)

The ancient law school about which we have the most information was at Beirut. Editors of legal papyri have occasionally speculated about possible connections between particular ancient texts and the activities of professors of law in that city, but no one has examined the evidence in a body. It is likely, I think, that legal papyri reflect the state of contemporary legal education at Beirut, and that they preserve, moreover, primary evidence for the history of scholarship in general. With so (...) broad a topic, it would be useful first to consider what we know about legal instruction in antiquity, particularly at Beirut, then to review the relevant papyrological evidence, and finally to draw the two subjects together by considering the possible relation between the marginal commentaries of legal papyri and the extensive scholia which fill the broad margins of many medieval manuscripts. (shrink)

This is the story of a woman, now long dead and almost forgotten, but for a crumbling gravesite overlooking the ocean at Bronte in Sydney and some small acts of remembrance that functioned to restore her voice ever so partially. The hint of her voice allowed genealogical traces to emerge and help heal the wounds of not only the individual family genealogy to which this woman was almost lost but also for the monumental primordial forgetting of women. The story of (...) this woman whose life seems exceptionally different from my own, whom I never met, is re-told a hundred years after she lived and breathed, to heal deep ancestral wounds and give voice to the struggles of the living and in particular to us—their grand-daughters. (shrink)

In these early years of the new millennium the world finds itself in a new age of violence and terror. Acts of terrorism, the war in Iraq, and the ongoing post-colonial struggles have created a climate of unprecedented state legitimated and terrorist-based violence, where the emergence of new forms of national insecurity and vulnerability have impacted on every nation and distant corner of the plane. One looks at the world situation and despairs: it is almost impossible to feel safe in (...) the face of such unpredictability. Patriarchy in its various guises, intent on domination and destruction, seems all encompassing and powerful. The questions we ask are enormous: how do we respond and what can we do? Where will genuine moral leadership come from? Where are the signs of hope—true hope—hope born from realism not romanticism? And in particular, as feminists and religionists and theologians, what should our particular contribution be? It is more important than ever to understand hope, and how it generates change. I believe that there are two aspects to global violence that we as feminist religionists and theologians need to tackle in particular. The first is to continue to offer analysis around understanding what hope is, where it derives from, and how it can be transformed into action and motivation. Second, we are experts in two of the principal characteristics of the current global power arrangements—gender and religion—so we have a special responsibility to provide analysis and visionary thinking to our communities. I would like to suggest that the particular contributions that we can make could be firmly placed in the realm of an emerging feminist religious imaginary, because this is the site where our political action and ideas are sustained, nurtured, challenged and where hope is born via imaginative and visionary thinking, where biophillic rationalities and responses are possible. This paper reads global violence and locates hope within a feminist religious imaginary. (shrink)

This paper considers the relationship between women, religion and the Australian state via an examination of federal anti-discrimination law. Much of the social research into religion-state relations over the last ten years, particularly with the rise of neo-liberalism, demonstrates that religious groups and ideas are actively involved in public debate, policy formation and implementation. While this has been examined by some scholars in social policy, particularly education, there has been little research on the relationship between women’s rights and post-secular politics. (...) This essay will address this gap by firstly locating women’s rights in the context of global forms of neo-liberalism and specifically by examining Australian federal anti-discrimination legislation, which seeks to protect religious freedom by allowing religious groups general exemption from adhering to non-discriminatory employment and training protocols. It is argued via evidence, that such exemptions are premised on the treatment of women as other to masculine norms. (shrink)

This article addresses research that deals with approaches to psychological and social trauma and ways to manage its disruptive power. In the first instance I apply this to the life of my great-grandmother in order to help understand why her life became unbearably difficult, the treatment she received as a female ‘hysteric’ in the 1940s and most importantly the impact that her life has continued to have through four generations of family life. In the second instance, I apply trauma theory (...) to the history of forgetting women and its implications for feminist action and recovery with specific reference to Feminist Theology. I suggest that there are powerful connections between the individual and collective forgetting of women’s lives, and that this forgetting is premised on forms of symbolic violence. I turn to the work of psychiatrists Judith Herman, and Russell Meares and feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, in order to provide an account of forgetting, remembering and finally recovery. (shrink)

Feminist theory has enhanced and expanded the agency, influence, status and contributions of women throughout the globe. However, feminist critical analysis has not yet examined how the assumption that religion is natural, timeless, universal and omnipresent supports sexist and race based oppression. This book proposes radical new thinking about religion in order to better comprehend and confront the systematic disempowerment of women and marginalized groups. Utilising feminist and post-colonial analysis of access, equity and violence, contributors draw on recent critical theory (...) to collapse accepted boundaries between religion and secularity with the aim of understanding that religion is a technology of governance in its function, meaning and history. The volume includes case studies focusing on how the category of religion is deployed to perpetuate male hegemony and racist inequities in Australia, Mexico, the United States, Britain and Canada. This trenchant feminist critique and academic analysis will be of key interest to scholars and students of Religion, Sociology, Political Science and Gender Studies. (shrink)

The principles of ontological parity and ordinality have distinct functions in Buchler's ontology. Ontological parity could be independently subscribed to, whereas ordinality signals the positive conception of the nature of reality as irreducibly complex or indefinitely related, which Buchler's metaphysical system seeks to articulate. Both principles inform Buchler's system, but each has a distinctive function. They are not, I suggest, necessarily at odds with one another, as some critics claim. I do identify several difficulties that follow from (1) the level (...) of generality claimed by Buchler and (2) the claim of irreducible complexity or indefinite relatedness. (shrink)

A Bazinian commitment to cinematic realism, grounded as it is in the ontology of the photograph, sets up the aesthetic ambition of cinema as irreparably opposed to the structures and ambitions of high modernism ? whether high modernism be taken to have its essence in formal experiment, medium specificity, or negation. Bazin himself licenses such an opposition, but the sense of a divide here is not his alone: there are structural and grammatical reasons why realism (photographic or otherwise) and modernism (...) appear as incompatible. Yet however strong this opposition is ? and however much he himself sometimes endorses it ? Bazin equally offers us resources for closing the gap. In his distinction between aesthetic and psychological realism, his sense of the importance of automatism in cinema's significance, and finally in his insistence that true representation is achieved through poetry, Bazin uncovers a concept of realism as transformative, not transparent, fidelity. This idea of poetic, formalist realism allows for a tentative reconciliation between modernism and realism generally. However, it does so by giving up on a robust idea of photographic transparency as the basis of cinema's power, and thus threatens to efface its specificity as a medium. Stanley Cavell's redescription of medium as automatism helps uncover a Bazinian version of cinematic specificity, one which allows for cinema's appetite for realism without reducing that capacity to a mere inflexible fact of the medium. (shrink)

The prevention of disability has been the driving force behind much research. In epidemiology three levels of prevention are defined: primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention. Primary prevention is the prevention of the initiation or occurrence of a disease; secondary prevention is the prevention or amelioration of the consequences of a disease, and tertiary prevention refers to rehabilitation or the limitation of disability associated with the disease. We have examples of all three levels of prevention in the area of childhood disability. (...) Primary prevention is the protection of infants against congenital rubella syndrome by ensuring that women of childbearing age have adequate immunity before they become pregnant. The prevention of choreoathetosis, mental retardation, and deafness, by treating hyperbilirubinemia and preventing kernicterus in newborns, is a great success story in prevention. Similarly, at the level of secondary prevention, is the reduction in mental retardation caused by phenylketonuria, or PKU, by eliminating phenylalanine in the diets of newborns who lack the enzyme to metabolize this amino acid. Tertiary prevention is the area of rehabilitation medicine, and is regarded as the least desirable level of prevention. Indeed, tertiary prevention can be seen as “doing the best we can” in terms of rehabilitation, often while seeking a means of really preventing the disease. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 223-224 [Access article in PDF] Jacqueline Broad. Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. x + 191. Cloth, $55.00. In this impressive study of early Modern Philosophy, Jacqueline Broad analyzes the influence that Cartesianism has had in the development of feminist thought. Her work covers the early modern philosophy of Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, (...) Ann Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Cudworth Masham and Catherine Trotter Cockburn. She points out the paradoxical relationship between current feminist philosophy and the writings of early Modern women. Broad concentrates on the metaphysical issues of mind-body dualism, thinking matter, and the role of reason in knowledge.Recent feminists have argued that even though Cartesianism appears to emphasize an egalitarian concept of reason, it entails a male bias which excludes women from philosophy. Broad covers the work of Genevieve Lloyd, Hilda Smith, Margaret Atherton and other feminists. Her goal is to show that the common Cartesian interpretation of early women's writings obscures the anti-Cartesian and anti-dualist aspects of their thought. Like Lloyd, she argues that historically women were associated with a lesser form of reason following the rise of Cartesianism.The conflict between reason and femininity is noted in the complexity of early Modern thought. Broad argues that even though Elisabeth is remembered as a critic of Descartes, many of her suggestions are not as anti-dualist as some scholars believe. Broad highlights the critical content of Elisabeth's letters to Descartes and discusses her criticisms of dualism and her Cartesian method of discovering truth and certainty. On the basis of her letters she contends that Elisabeth can be regarded as a precursor to feminist philosophers who give an equal role to the body and emotions in their metaphysical and ethical writings.Like Elisabeth, Margaret Cavendish rejects Cartesian dualism. The common thread that runs through early Modern feminist philosophy is the argument that interaction between two unlike substances is inconceivable. Broad argues that like Cavendish, Anne Conway ascribes spiritual characteristics to the body and material properties to the soul. According to Broad, their ontological views amount to a rejection of the stereotypes of femininity.Broad argues that Mary Astell's metaphysical views diverge from the modern Cartesians of her time. Although she is indebted to Descartes, Broad contends that she supports a metaphysical system which avoids some of the gender biases identifiable in Cartesianism. Astell, for example, does not find a life based on reason as a rival to a life concerned with the body; her emphasis on rationality is simply a reaction to the stereotype of women as irrational material beings.Damaris Masham is generally considered a philosophical rival of Astell, but Broad argues that Masham's arguments are focused on the same presuppositions as Astell's. She argues that both philosophers champion women's education, criticize the occasionalism of Norris and believe in interaction between the corporeal and incorporeal worlds. Broad emphasizes the common theological outlook inspired by Cambridge Platonism. Contrary to the interpretation of Ruth Perry, she finds that there is sufficient evidence that Masham was positively inspired by the second part of Astell's Serious Proposal.Broad concludes with an analysis of Catherine Cockburns' metaphysics and moral philosophy. According to Cockburn, women's ignorance is simply the result of being discouraged from rational pursuits. Cockburn's defense of Locke's notion of thinking matter and her rejection of Cartesian notions of substance mark the end of the Cartesian influence on women philosophers in England. [End Page 223]Broad has shown that a reverence for reason and dualistic theories do not necessarily go hand in hand. She points out that early Modern feminist thinkers are not simply handmaidens to the great philosophical masters. As other scholars have argued, one can find unique approaches to substance as well as original moral positions.This text is a significant contribution to the literature on early Modern philosophy. Broad's in depth analysis will not fail to interest scholars in metaphysics, the history of philosophy and moral theory. Kathy... (shrink)

Religious congregations of women have been socialized in a tradition rich in gospel values, but one which was also hierarchical and patriarchal. My own congregation, the Little Company of Mary, is an international one, involved in health care since our foundation in Victorian England. Within both spheres, religious and medical, the patriarchal influence was strong and uncritically accepted until the second half of the twentieth cen tury. Here, I attempt to bring feminist and nursing philosophy to bear on the care (...) debate within nursing. An ethic of care demands that we go beyond competence, important as that is. This ethic, found to be at the heart of our LCM identity, suggests to us today, that our founder, Mary Potter was a feminist ahead of her time. (shrink)

Foundation humanities courses often have as one of their objectives to raise awareness of ethical issues so that students get a taste for what might be involved in ethics courses and might build on that foundation in later courses. This three-week unit introduces Iris Marion Young’s social-connection model for responding to injustices caused by social structures and processes, and then applies that model to the response to injustices revealed in the memoir I Shall Not Hate by the Palestinian doctor Izzeldin (...) Abuelaish. Students are then asked to make short team presentations analyzing a structural injustice they have identified. (shrink)

James Elkins _On Pictures and The Words That Fail Them_ Cambridge University Press, 1998 ISBN: 0521571081 326 pages.