The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 57-59, December 2011.

This critique of papers by hartshorne, tracy and eslick seeks a possible rapport between process theology and thomistic natural theology. both schools seek a god who is love, intimately involved in daily human life. but a dipolar god is not sufficiently transcendent to be so immanent. hence only love which is purely actual being can satisfy process intentions. tracy's new "tensive analogical language" and eslick's teleological explanation of novelty are thus more feasible on thomistic than on process grounds.

Nell restricts cruelty to hominids, although good evidence suggests that secondary aggression in rodents and particularly primates may be considered cruel. A considerable literature shows that glucocorticoid secretion stimulated by stress facilitates learning, memory, arousal, and aggressive behavior. Either secondary aggression (to a conspecific) or increased affiliative behavior reduces stressor-induced activity, suggesting the reward system can be satisfied by other behaviors than cruelty.

In this volume, first published in 1983, Professor Rogers examines the usefulness of a phenomenological approach to sociology. Her broad purpose is to demonstrate the theoretical and methodological advantages phenomenological sociology holds. Thus she offers a selective, introductory exposition of phenomenology, highlighting its relevance for social scientists and undercutting the notion of phenomenology as a non-scientific, subjective, or esoteric method of study.

This article offers both a feminist and an ethnomethodological reanalysis of Harold Garfinkel's report on Agnes, the intersexed person he studied with several colleagues. Both reanalyses yield similar conclusions. Specifically, while it does illuminate the work of accomplishing gender, the report on Agnes simultaneously illustrates how gender operates as a powerful background expectancy among professional as well as “lay” sociologists.

SEARCHING and learning... are altogether recollection". A long and strong tradition in Platonic studies has taken this statement as a literal description of what happens when we come to know something that we had not known before. That literal interpretation is commonly linked to a similarly literal interpretation of Plato's statements about the soul's cycle of rebirths, and to a transcendent rather than a transcendental view of the Ideas, one which gives them an ontological status separate from sensible particulars. Sensibles (...) thus recall to our minds the Ideas which we saw in our earlier life in the other world, the world to which our disembodied souls will return as a reward for having pursued the philosophical life. (shrink)

This paper explores how Schutz’s ideas enrich and extend the ethic of care promulgated by feminist theorists such as Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick, and Eva Feder Kittay. Using Schutz’s ideas about the I-Thou relationship, systems of relevances, and growing old together, the author lays a foundation for continuing dialogue between feminist theorists of care and Schutzian phenomenologists.

The work of literary structuralists, particularly Roland Barthes, provides sharper insights into ethnomethodology than symbolic interactionism, labeling theory, or phenomenology. Further, it suggests that the metaphor of text may be fruitful for analysts of everyday life. Greater theoretical benefits derive from that metaphor, however, if one applies it using the ideas of literary theorists outside the structuralist tradition.

Following the recent condemnation of the National Health Service charging regulations by medical colleges and the UK Faculty of Public Health, we demonstrate that through enactment of this policy, the medical profession is betraying its core ethical principles. Through dissection of the policy using Beauchamp and Childress’ framework, a disrespect for autonomy becomes evident in the operationalisation of the charging regulations, just as a disregard for confidentiality was apparent in the data sharing Memorandum of Understanding. Negative consequences of the regulations (...) are documented to highlight their importance for clinical decision makers under the principles of beneficence and non-maleficence. Exploration of the principle of justice illuminates the core differentiation between the border-bound duties of the State and borderless duties of the clinician, exposing a fundamental tension. (shrink)

This paper explores how Schutz’s ideas enrich and extend the ethic of care promulgated by feminist theorists such as Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick, and Eva Feder Kittay. Using Schutz’s ideas about the I-Thou relationship, systems of relevances, and growing old together, the author lays a foundation for continuing dialogue between feminist theorists of care and Schutzian phenomenologists.

This book is a brilliant and painstaking analysis, at once historical and systematic, of Plato's penology. The initial sinking of a philosopher's heart at the sight of philosophy done by a classicist is soon stopped and even reversed. For Mackenzie immediately displays a mastery of the philosophical issues involved in a critique of penal institutions. The book opens with five chapters that clearly set forth the basic incongruity: experience shows that penal institutions are inevitable in human societies, and yet punishment--because (...) it does harm to the punished-needs to be justified. But the major philosophical theories fail in that justification: retribution, deterrence, and reform are finally incompatible with each other, and yet none can stand alone without doing violence to the intuitions of common sense. Plato's theory, then--basically reformative, with a touch of deterrence--is finally unsatisfactory. As the author says in her introduction, "different theories of punishment cannot be held conjointly because they conflict. But they cannot be held separately, either, or they risk being violent or unintelligible. Violence is what theories of punishment guard against, and if a theory is incomprehensible, it is no theory at all". Plato's theory is then said to fail by being incomprehensible. (shrink)

This article explores the disconnection between what pre-professional students expect from college and what their undergraduate education might foster, between the focus on “getting into medical school” and the development of humanistic physicians. It reviews the longstanding challenge inherent in helping pre-meds acquire not only sufficient scientific background but also well-developed interpersonal skills to help them understand patients’ experience of illness and their own interactions with other members of the health care team. Clinical experiences from the NEH Institute are interpreted (...) from the perspective of a pre-med advisor who also teaches literature; they are also incorporated into an undergraduate course on literature about illness. (shrink)

It is a truism that affectivity has been by and large neglected in Western philosophy in recent centuries, while analyses of knowledge, especially rational thought, abound. Classical American thought, which frequently takes community as a main theme, is something of an exception. But the fact remains that books with titles like this one's and Solomon's earlier The Passions raise hopes that a neglected and important philosophical topic is to receive some of the attention that it deserves. Solomon's Love: Emotion, Myth (...) and Metaphor, following a reverse order of the topics mentioned in its title, examines the metaphors and myths common to views of love in our culture, with a view to a philosophical reconstruction of the concept of romance. The main thesis continues that of his earlier book, viz., that emotions in general are actions. In Solomon's view, romantic love is not something that happens to us, that we undergo or "fall into," but something that we actively do. It is a free and conscious decision to give meaning to our experience by constructing, with a beloved, a "loveworld" in which we strive for a definable shared self. Choice, says Solomon, a feature of all emotions, is the most striking characteristic of love. Love has, like any choice, its reasons and conditions. It is a choice that our culture values highly because it enables us to achieve, in a society marked by public role-playing, individuality, and mobility, the stable identity of selves that would otherwise be impossible. Earlier societies provided these through stable family life and social order. (shrink)

This article examines the dynamics that have turned a recent Marian apparition on the window of a bank in Clearwater, Florida, from a local into a global phenomenon. Drawing from theories of globalization, we show how the apparition exemplifies what sociologist Roland Robertson refers to as the mutually implicative `universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism'. Among the factors analyzed are global pilgrimage, transnational migration, mediascapes and the Vatican's New Evangelization initiative. On the basis of this case study, the (...) article argues for the need to go beyond secularization theory - the dominant modernist approach to religion and social change - and to adopt a flexible, polymethodological framework that takes into account the complex, and often contradictory, relations between the local and the global and the mediating roles religion plays. (shrink)