In 1913 the British Idealist Sir Henry Jones (1852-1922) spoke of journalism as an 'organic filament'2 that helped unite individuals in a greater citizenship. This Idealist perception of the media coalesced with the contemporaneous growth of a broader notion of journalism as a fourth estate. Beginning with the social philosophy of Edward Caird (1835-1908) and its extension into the Idealist conception of journalism, this article explores the attitudes of Idealist thinkers in Britain and Australia toward print and radio media. It (...) further examines how Idealist belief in journalism translated into publication of Idealist thought. The media and academic publications of four Australian Idealists are considered. Also identified is a sympathetic Australian media environment. Through this study emerges an Australian Idealism that, whilst anchored within the broader empire of Idealist philosophy, acquired a local, public form through a consistent and, at times, intensive use of print and radio media. (shrink)

This is yet another attempt to indicate a fatal flaw in modern philosophy, and to suggest a framework for a viable and constructive “postmodern” philosophy. It is a well-reasoned, well-written book, enjoyable to read despite its density and the doggedness of the sometimes surprising argument. The book’s surprises come from the fact that its core ideas derive from a “postmodernized” Aristotle, and that an odd lot of modern philosophers are constructively put to work showing the cogency of Aristotelian insights one (...) would have expected them to reject. (shrink)

In Ontario, Canada, autism has become widely politicized. In the last 20 years, instances of personal and organizational advocacy developed into wider-scale policy and programs. Government press releases indicate Ontario’s developing response to autism as a social policy issue, while reflecting societal perceptions and priorities surrounding autism. Informed by Critical Disability Studies and Critical Autism Studies, this article uses a content analysis to explore the manifest and latent priorities of Ontario’s provincial government displayed in press releases between 2001-2019 accessed through (...) the Ontario Newsroom, an online repository of press releases and media advisories that features different initiatives published by the government of Ontario. Press releases were selected based on the search term “autism” and analyzed in two steps. First, this article presents the most frequently used words in press release headlines. Second, key themes within press releases are explored. Press releases emphasize the stories of non-autistic people, altruists, positivists, treatment-seekers, autistic children, and normative families. What is left out is a social representation of autism. Prominent themes display ableist perceptions of autism, reproducing power imbalances and inequity based on disability and family status. These findings reveal government objectives and priorities, reflecting broader societal perceptions of autism. (shrink)

This essay seeks to see if one side or the other in the hunting debate gets more purchase if we first ask what gives the state the moral right to promote sport hunting when the practice is in deep decline. We look at the dominant economic and political reasons for state support, none of which settle the moral matter. We then look at various state appeals to moral justification (ethical hunting, the right to hunt, the value of heritage, etc.) and (...) determine that they beg the same prior questions that hunters beg--questions about the new scientific understanding of animal cognition and about the ideal individual and society in the 21st C. Neither side in the philosophical debate is helped by state promotion of hunting, given that anti-hunters also often dispense with the deeper questions and the relevant science. Conclusion: the debate should be based on the new scientific understanding of animals' capacities and on current ideals of the individual and society. State policy should reflect that. -/- thehe state should see that it is on slippery ground when it devises programs to gratify hunters and to encourage the innocent, the reluctant, and the lapsed to take up the practice. (shrink)

The editors cull the works of 11 noted French and German philosophers for their contributions to the debate about what animals are like and how we should relate to them. Each selection gives the gist of the philosopher's view followed by a noted scholar's comments. The result, as Peter Singer notes in his merciless Foreward, is that most of the Continentals have had almost nothing of interest to say on the topic.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) and sustained high blood glucose as prediabetes are an established comorbidity. People's experience in reconciling these long‐term conditions requires deeper appreciation if nurses are to more effectively support person‐centred care for people who have them. Our analysis explores the initial experience of people admitted to hospital with CVD who then find they also have sustained high blood glucose. Our methodology is informed by the philosophy of Gadamer and applies interpretive description to develop an interpretation of participant experiences. (...) The major theme emerging from participant interviews was the ‘invisible disequilibrium’ characterised by three subthemes: ‘losing equilibrium’, ‘becoming embattled’ and ‘evolving illness’. This study examines CVD and prediabetes in conjunction with the Gadamerian notion of the ‘whole’, as being in a social and emotional world in which illness is also a component part. We explore how participants lived within an ‘invisible disequilibrium’, with prediabetes frequently remaining unnoticed, while CVD was manifest. To identify multiple conditions and support effective intervention to manage them as part of person‐centric care, nursing practice should explore the ‘whole’ of the person's experience, value people’s knowledge as potential indicators of complex illness, thereby reducing the risk of accelerating complex illness. (shrink)

These 13 papers try to clarify the nature of literary reference and to show that such reference is a feature of all interpretation. The essays divide into three categories: those delimiting types of reference and their interrelationships, those precising the nature of a particular type,and those concerning the role of reference in literary theory.

Benso wants to lay the groundwork for a new environmental ethic. That involves replacing the ideas of self and non-human nature that permitted Auschwitz and now permits environmental destruction. Benso looks to Levinas and Heidegger who stress human "wholeness" rather than autonomy. The problem, not solved, is that both embed a radical distinction between humans and nature in their theories of the self.

Background Studies describing physicians’ experiences with sedation at the end of life are indispensible for informed palliative care practice, but they are scarce. We describe the accounts of physicians from the USA and the Netherlands, two countries with different regulations on end-of-life decisions regarding their use of sedation.Methods Qualitative face-to-face interviews were held in 2007–2008 with 36 physicians , including primary care physicians and specialists. We applied purposive sampling and conducted constant comparative analyses.Results In both countries, the use of sedation (...) was described in diverse terms, especially in the USA, and was often experienced as emotionally challenging. Respondents stated different and sometimes multiple intentions for their use of sedation. Besides alleviating severe suffering, most Dutch respondents justified its use by stating that it does not hasten death, while most American respondents indicated that it might hasten death but that this was justifiable as long as that was not their primary intention. While many Dutch respondents indicated that they initiated open discussions about sedation proactively to inform patients about their options and to allow planning, the accounts of American respondents showed fewer and less-open discussions, mostly late in the dying process and with the patient's relatives.Conclusions The justification for sedation and the openness with which it is discussed were found to differ in the accounts of respondents from the USA and the Netherlands. Further clarification of practices and research into the effect and effectiveness of the use of sedation is recommended to enhance informed reflection and policy making. (shrink)

En posant avec clarté des questions de philosophie de l’esprit, d’ontologie et d’épistémologie, ce livre témoigne à la fois de l’intérêt réel de la danse comme objet philosophique et du rôle unique que peut jouer la philosophie dans une meilleure compréhension de cet art. Qu’est-ce que danser ? Que nous apprend le mouvement dansé sur la nature humaine et la relation entre le corps et l’esprit ? À quelles conditions une œuvre est-elle correctement interprétée par les danseurs et bien identifiée (...) par les spectateurs ? (shrink)

BackgroundRandomized controlled trials (RCTs) are often complex and expensive to perform. Less than one third achieve planned recruitment targets, follow-up can be labor-intensive, and many have limited real-world generalizability. Designs for RCTs conducted using cohorts and routinely collected health data, including registries, electronic health records, and administrative databases, have been proposed to address these challenges and are being rapidly adopted. These designs, however, are relatively recent innovations, and published RCT reports often do not describe important aspects of their methodology in (...) a standardized way. Our objective is to extend the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) statement with a consensus-driven reporting guideline for RCTs using cohorts and routinely collected health data.MethodsThe development of this CONSORT extension will consist of five phases. Phase 1 (completed) consisted of the project launch, including fundraising, the establishment of a research team, and development of a conceptual framework. In phase 2, a systematic review will be performed to identify publications (1) that describe methods or reporting considerations for RCTs conducted using cohorts and routinely collected health data or (2) that are protocols or report results from such RCTs. An initial “long list” of possible modifications to CONSORT checklist items and possible new items for the reporting guideline will be generated based on the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) and The REporting of studies Conducted using Observational Routinely-collected health Data (RECORD) statements. Additional possible modifications and new items will be identified based on the results of the systematic review. Phase 3 will consist of a three-round Delphi exercise with methods and content experts to evaluate the “long list” and generate a “short list” of key items. In phase 4, these items will serve as the basis for an in-person consensus meeting to finalize a core set of items to be included in the reporting guideline and checklist. Phase 5 will involve drafting the checklist and elaboration-explanation documents, and dissemination and implementation of the guideline.DiscussionDevelopment of this CONSORT extension will contribute to more transparent reporting of RCTs conducted using cohorts and routinely collected health data. (shrink)

"Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and (...) striking insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is _simply the best introduction to the subject now available_."_ —Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of _The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters_ Contents:_ Chronology, Introduction _Chapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697_ _Idols, or false notions: _Francis Bacon, _The New Instrument_ _I think, therefore I am: _René Descartes, Discourse on Method _God, or Nature: _Baruch Spinoza, _Ethics_ _The system of the world: _Isaac Newton, _Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy_ _He searched for truth throughout his life: _Pierre Bayle, _Historical and Critical Dictionary_ _Chapter Two - _The Learned Maid: 1638–1740 _A face raised toward heaven:_ Anna Maria van Schurman, _Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman_ _The worlds I have made:_ Margaret Cavendish, _The Blazing World_ _A finer sort of cattle:_ Bathsua Makin, _An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen_ _I warn you of the world:_ Madame de Maintenon, _Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr_, and _Instruction: On the World_ _The daybreak of your reason:_ Émilie Du Châtelet, _Fundamentals of Physics_ _Chapter Three - _A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695 _The chief criterion of the True Church:_ John Locke, _Letter on Toleration_ _Freedom from any superior power on earth:_ John Locke, _Second Treatise on Civil Government_ _A white paper, with nothing written on it:_ John Locke, _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ _Let your rules be as few as possible:_ John Locke, _Some Thoughts Concerning Education_ _From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life:_ John Locke, _The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures_ _Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784_ _In the wilderness, they are reborn:_ Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_ _Without these Names, nothing can be known,_ Carl Linnaeus, _System of Nature_ _All the clouds at last are lifted:_ Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, _The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind_ _A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge:_ Jean le Rond d’Alembert, _Preliminary Discourse_ _Dare to know! :_ Immanuel Kant, _What Is Enlightenment?_ _Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779_ _The narrow limits of human understanding:_ David Hume, _Anof a Book Lately Published_ _The soul is but an empty word:_ Julien Offray de La Mettrie, _Man a Machine_ _All is reduced to sensation:_ Claude Adrien Helvétius, _On the Mind_ _An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods:_ Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, _Common Sense_ _Let each believe that his own ring is real:_ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, _Nathan the Wise_ _Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764_ _This is the country of sects:_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Letters_ _Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes:_ Voltaire, _The Culture and Spirit of Nations_ _The best of all possible worlds:_ Voltaire, _Candide_ _Are we not all children of the same God?:_ Voltaire, _Treatise on Tolerance_ _If a book displeases you, refute it! :_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Dictionary_ _Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776_ _Things must be so ordered that power checks power,_ Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, _The Spirit of the Laws_ _Complete freedom of trade must be ensured:_ François Quesnay, _General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom_ _The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare_ Beccaria, _On Crimes and Punishments_ _There is no peace in the absence of justice:_ Adam Ferguson, _An Essay on the History of Civil Society_ _Led by an invisible hand:_ Adam Smith, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ _Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785_ _Thus died this great man:_ Aphra Behn, _Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave_ _Not one sins the less for not being Christian: _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, _Embassy Letters_ _Do you not restore to them their liberty?:_ Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, _Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies_ _Some things which are rather interesting:_ Captain James Cook, _Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World_ _The inner genius of my being:_ Johann Gottfried von Herder, _Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind_ _Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782_ _The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: _Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality_ _The supreme direction of the General Will:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract _Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps,_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Julie, or the New Heloise_ _Build a fence around your child’s soul:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Emile, or On Education_ _This man will be myself:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Confessions_ _Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792_ _No higher design than to get her a husband:_ Mary Astell, _Reflections on Marriage_ _The days of my bondage begin:_ Anna Stanisławska, _Orphan Girl_ _A dying victim dragged to the altar:_ Denis Diderot, _The Nun_ _Created to be the toy of man:_ Mary Wollstonecraft, _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ _Man, are you capable of being just?:_ Olympe de Gouges, _Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen_ _Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792_ _I took upon me to assert my freedom:_ Benjamin Franklin, _Autobiography_ _Freedom has been hunted round the globe:_ Thomas Paine, _Common Sense_ _Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights:_ Thomas Jefferson and Others, _Declaration of Independence_ _A safeguard against faction and insurrection:_ James Madison, _Federalist No. 10_ _An end to government by force and fraud:_ Thomas Paine, _The Rights of Man_ _Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794_ _A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn:_ Edmund Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ _The future destiny of the human species:_ Nicolas de Condorcet, _A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind_ Texts and Studies, Index. 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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 276-277 [Access article in PDF] Wiep Van Bunge. From Stevin to Spinoza: An Essay on Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. xii + 217. Cloth, $80.00 By 1660 there were probably more followers of Descartes in the Dutch Republic, population 1.4 million, than in France, population 20 million. Protestantism and prosperity encouraged high rates of literacy and (...) the universities of Leiden and Utrecht were among the liveliest in the world. This vibrancy infused the metaphors that Descartes put into his great Discours de la methode published first in Leiden in 1637. In it he spoke about the beauty of cities that looked as if they had been built by a single architect and of the freedom to be found among people so busy with their business as to leave thinkers to their pursuits. Indirectly he spoke about his adopted homeland where he found many followers—some more eager than loyal. By the 1640s disputes raged in the Republic and the anti-Cartesian forces were led by the Aristotelian and anti-Copernican Gisbertus Voetius. What has been missing in our scholarship up to now has been any convincing account as to why these disputes occurred, and how they resonated within the Dutch context. Wiep Van Bunge's book takes a big step toward closing that knowledge gap.Van Bunge convincingly argues that the vibrancy of the stadtholder-less period up to 1672 produced a willingness to entertain new ideas. It also did not hurt to have Descartes on the scene and active on behalf of his mechanical philosophy, even to the point of addressing the Utrecht magistrates publicly and asking that his critics be chastised. What is remarkable—especially given the resistance to Descartes seen at Oxford and Cambridge—was the speed with which Cartesian ideas entered the Dutch classrooms where as many as a third of the students came from abroad. Again Van Bunge provides context when he starts with the Dutch engineer Simon Stevin and demonstrates the vitality of mathematics for a commercial society but also for a militant one. (The Netherlands was at war with Spain up to 1609.) A recent exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, April to July 2002, also illustrates another aspect of mathematics in the Republic. Precisely in the 1630s when Descartes was putting the finishing touches on his Discours, Pieter Saenredam applied geometry to the interiors of the elegant Utrecht churches so as to give his paintings a regularity and precision worthy of the Cartesian dream of order and clarity. The Dutch commitment to discipline and order also made their army one of the most accomplished in the world. It was perhaps over-determined that Descartes, who had trained with it, would find such a sympathetic audience in the Republic.One of the more fascinating aspects of Van Bunge's detailed study, first of Cartesianism and then of Spinozism in the Republic, concerns the political and ideological meanings to be extracted from the new philosophy. Hobbes also finds a place in the narrative, surprisingly taken up by republicans eager to construct a state that could control the passions. Abraham van Berkel, who put Hobbes's Leviathan into Dutch in 1667, gave the allegiance of his text and himself to Jan de Witt and the cause of the regents and the estates. We can only wonder what Hobbes would have made of the association. The republican affiliations of the mechanical philosophy in the Republic provide a distinctively Dutch context to the [End Page 276] political writings of Spinoza, the most famous and outrageous Cartesian of the century. Van Bunge is especially deft in finding Spinozists and providing far more evidence than I could back in 1981 when I argued for a radical enlightenment within the late seventeenth-century Dutch context (see The Radical Enlightenment. Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans [London: 1981]). None of these positions with their deeply heretical implications could be taken lightly or without danger. Men lost... (shrink)