According to Dominic Lopes, expressiveness in pictures should be analyzed solely in terms of “expression looks” of various sorts, namely the look of a figure, a scene and/or a design. But, according to this view, it seems puzzling that expressive pictures should have any emotional effect on their audiences. Yet Lopes explicitly ties his “contour theory” of expression in pictures to empathic responses in spectators. Thus, despite his deflationary account of pictorial expression, he claims that pictures can give us practice (...) in various “empathic skills.” I argue that Lopes’s account of empathic responses to pictures, while interesting and enlightening, nevertheless ignores the most important way in which pictures exercise and enhance our empathic skills, namely, by giving us practice in taking the emotional perspective of another person. (shrink)

In Sight and Sensibility Dominic Lopes argues that expressiveness in pictures should be analyzed on the model of the “contour” theory of musical expressiveness, according to which an “expression” need not express anything about the inner psychological states of a person. According to his “contour theory of pictorial expression,” expression by scenes and designs requires “no being to whom the expressed emotion is attributable”. However, on this account expression has lost its fundamental raison d’être, that of manifesting somebody’s actual emotional (...) states. By contrast, I argue that successful works of pictorial expression depict the way the world appears to someone when in some emotional state. Moreover, the emotional attitude thus expressed by the work is an important unifying principle for pictures, and hence an important artistic value. (shrink)

Little is known about young children's ability to talk about absent members of their social network. We analyzed the speech of four children from 2 to 5 years. References to absent caregivers were relatively frequent, even when children were 2 years old. Such references were often generated spontaneously rather than being repetitions of a name produced by the child's interlocutor. Children's comments about absent family members occasionally expressed concern about contact with them but were predominantly neutral or reflective. By implication, (...) children can maintain a representation of the various members of their social network from an early age, despite separation. (shrink)

The Western cultural consensus based on the ideas of free markets and individualism has led many social scientists to consider poverty as a personal experience, a deprivation of material things, and a failure of just distribution. Mary Douglas and Steven Ney find this dominant tradition of social thought about poverty and well-being to be full of contradictions. They argue that the root cause is the impoverished idea of the human person inherited through two centuries of intellectual history, and that two (...) principles, the idea of the solipsist self and the idea of objectivity, cause most of the contradictions. Douglas and Ney state that Economic Man, from its semitechnical niche in eighteenth-century economic theory, has taken over the realms of psychology, consumption, public assistance, political science, and philosophy. They say that by distorting the statistical data presented for policy analysis, the ideas of the solipsist self and objectivity indeed often protect a political bias. The authors propose to correct this by revising the current model of the person. Taking cultural bias into account and giving full play to political dissent, they restore the "persons" who have been missing from the social science debates. Drawing from anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology, the authors set forth a fundamental critique of the social sciences. Their book will find a wide audience among social scientists and will also interest anyone engaged in current discussions of poverty. This book is a copublication with the Russell Sage Foundation. (shrink)

Several fields contributing to psychiatric advances, such as psychology, biology, and the humanities, have not yet met to produce a cohesive and integrated picture of human function and dysfunction, strength and vulnerability, etc., despite advances in their own areas. The failure may have its roots in a disagreement on what we mean by the human person and his or her relationship with the world, for which the incommensurate language of these disciplines may be partly to blame. Turns taken by western (...) philosophy over the past 400 years may help to explain this. Language is such an important tool for psychiatrists, that examination of it may afford an insight into the reasons for divisions in the field. This paper aims to examine and compare psychologies (and hence psychiatries) derived from modern western philosophy, with similar concepts in other cultures, through the study of developments in terminology, in terms of the simplest facts about what it means to be human. Terminology used in mental health in western cultures is examined, with particular consideration of the term “self” as it has come to be used in a technical sense. Analogous terms from non-English speaking European languages, and some non-western cultures are studied. Western philosophy and psychology have evolved a meaning for the term “self” which is quite different from equivalent terms in non-western cultures. It is a moot point whether or not the development in western psychiatry of what are now technical terms to describe normal human experience has become needlessly obscure and ambiguous. It is not evident that this “new” language represents a genuine advance in understanding; it distances mental health professionals from those who are not familiar with it; and it makes transcultural dialogue difficult. (shrink)

For decision making in government, it is necessary to have well-structured sources of information. In several countries, it is difficult to access government data as the information are dispersed, disconnected, and poorly structured. For this reason, this work presents a framework to gather, unify, and enrich missing person data from distributed web sources. The framework allows inserting new tasks specific to the user’s domain to improve data quality. In this study, Brazilian missing person data from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (...) and governmental websites were collected and semantically enriched. To enhance the understanding of the gathered missing people cases, we create interpretive models using machine learning techniques to extract knowledge and to encourage the use of standards for publishing the data that are frequently ignored by organizations, hindering analysis and decision-making on data. After the collection and semantic enrichment process, there was an increase of approximately 11% in the data present in the base. Also, the mining process evidenced the disappearance and reappearance of a person in Brazil according to several factors such as age, state initiatives, skin tone, hair colors, etc. (shrink)

In the mid-19 th century, increases in global migration and mobility produced a discernable rise in the number of ambiguous absences. This shift, combined with a novel expectation, linked to improved communications technology, that such absences might be resolved engendered the emergence of missing persons as a social category. A demand on the part of families of the missing that the state aid in their location would produce a Bourdieusian classification struggle over how to define and categorize (...) this new mass of absences. At issue would be whether an ambiguously absent individual was merely absent, as a routine component of social life, or whether the individual merited legitimation by the state as a new form of deviant: a "missing" person. Scholars have described the emerging administrative state’s enhanced powers of surveillance and classification and its persistent inclination to render their populations, in James Scott’s phrase, “legible.” Brought to the attention of the state, missing persons represented a body of people who had conspicuously fallen out of official sight. Yet, instead of attempting to fix this omission by gathering additional information on the lost — to, in effect, see the missing — as theories of the state would lead us to expect, the state chose to look away. In the United States, the state, in the form of municipal police departments, resisted classifying absences as cases of missingness and pushed back against families’ requests for aid. Leveraging the inherently ambiguous characteristics of the missing, the state promoted a definition of missing persons that conveniently freed it from the burden of managing an unmanageable population. In this article, drawing from archival data, I challenge prevailing theories of the modern state that emphasize its avidly classificatory nature by offering a case in which legibility was strategically withheld and a population was, in service of state interests, intentionally obscured. Only after the state lost its symbolic monopoly and the category was raced and gendered, becoming, in public discourse, associated with a socially valuable demographic – namely, young, white women – would the state, facing a threat to its legitimacy, deem the missing as worthy of being seen. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of personal identity depend upon thought experiments which describe psychological vicissitudes and question whether the original person survives in the person resulting from the described change. These cases are meant to determine the types of psychological change compatible with personal continuation. Two main accounts of identity try to capture this distinction; psychological continuity theories and narrative theories. I argue that neither fully succeeds since both overlook the importance of a relationship I call “empathic access.” I define empathic access (...) and discuss its role in a complete account of personal identity. (shrink)

This article details the personal involvement of the author in the early stages of the infamous Pinto fire case. The paper first presents an insider account of the context and decision environment within which he failed to initiate an early recall of defective vehicles. A cognitive script analysis of the personal experience is then offered as an explanation of factors that led to a decision that now is commonly seen as a definitive study in unethical corporate behavior. The main analytical (...) thesis is that script schemas that were guiding cognition and action at the time precluded consideration of issues in ethical terms because the scripts did not include ethical dimensions. (shrink)

This article draws on the free‐text commentaries from trans‐Tasman studies that used the MISSCARE questionnaire to explore the reasons why nurses miss care. In this paper, we examine the idea that nurses perpetuate a self‐effacing approach to care, at the expense of patient care and professional accountability, using what they describe as the art of nursing to frame their claims of both nursing care and missed nursing care. We use historical dialogue alongside a paradigmatic analysis to examine why nurses allow (...) themselves to continue working within settings that put their professional/personal selves aside in an attempt to deliver care within constraints that make completing care an impossible task. The findings suggest an ambivalence and conflict confront nurses attempting to provide care within the New Public Management environment. This can be seen in the tensions that draw a line between care as an art, and care as a financial target, juxtaposed with the inherent clash of values arising from the way nursing care is conceptualised within two contradictory paradigms. (shrink)

In THE MISSING MOMENT a distinguished molecular biologist explores the nature of time and argues for a radical rethinking of how time affects our sense of self, our mortality, and the future of science and medicine. Only in the past few years have we learned enough about the brain for this remarkable book to be written. We know now that our brains continually filter the present through memories and emotions of the past. In fact, strictly speaking, we live in (...) the past: since it takes the brain a second to process perceptions, what we think is the present actually happened a second ago. We also know where and how the unconscious operates and how painful memories are repressed; repression is not a psychological defect but an evolutionary necessity for our species. All thought, even the most rational, is permeated with unconscious feelings, fears, and emotions. Scientists, like the rest of us, make choices for reasons they don't understand. Thus the direction of scientific research is driven by private demons, not public needs. We can see this in medical science, where doctors develop the tools to diagnose genetic diseases they cannot cure, bringing pain rather than comfort to patients. Today science can do more good than ever before, and it can also do more harm. The time has come for scientists and others to abandon the notion that there is any such thing as the disinterested pursuit of truth. Instead, they must strive for a therapeutic self-awareness of their unconscious agendas and work for larger goals than personal immortality. (shrink)

There are two opposing views on the nature of corporations in contemporary debates on corporate social responsibility. Opponents of corporate personhood hold that a corporation is nothing but a group of individuals coming together to achieve certain goals. On the other hand, the advocates of corporate personhood believe that corporations are persons in their own right existing over and above the individuals who comprise them. They talk of corporate decision-making structures that help translate individual decisions and actions into corporate (...) decisions and actions. Importantly both the advocates and the opponents of corporate personhood rely on a contractual model of corporate–social interaction to explain corporate social responsibilty. However, this contractual model misses crucial aspects of the relationship between corporations and societies. Economic history reveals that the relationship between corporations and societies is essentially dynamic and heterogeneous and so extremely difficult to characterise in terms of a contract. The economic and the political aspects of this relationship are so finely intertwined with each other and it is impossible to extricate the one from the other. We need to be more conscious of the actual nature of corporate–social interaction in order to deal more comprehensively with issues of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

There are at least three related issues that need to be resolved in this case: Who should be the patient’s medical decision-maker?, Should the patient be treated and possibly admitted?, and...

Various traditions in mental health care, such as phenomenological, and existential and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, implicitly or explicitly acknowledge that a disruption of the self, or the person, or the agent is among the common denominators of different mental disorders. They often emphasize the importance of understanding patients as reasonsresponsive, in their full mental health relevant complexity, if their mental disorder is to be treated successfully. The centrality of the concept of the self is not mirrored in the mainstream scientific approaches (...) in psychiatry however; the self has rarely been considered as the object of scientific research, the empirical investigation of which might yield successful explanations of and interventions in mental disorders. Thus, even though self-related phenomena are clinically relevant in so far as they give important information about a mental disorder to the clinician and help the development of effective interventions, they are not considered among the scientifically relevant properties of mental disorders. Leaving the self-related phenomena out of the scientific research on mental disorders can be attributed to the presupposition that the self is not empirically tractable and its use will hinder psychiatry’s goal to be scientific. In this paper, taking issue with this, I argue the self is empirically tractable, and its use as a target of research will not hinder psychiatry’s scientific commitments. (shrink)

In a series of important papers, Galen Strawson has articulated a spectrum of “temporal temperaments,” populated at one end by “Diachronics”, who experience their selves (understood as the “mental entity” they are at this moment) as something that existed in the past and will exist in the future, and at the other end by “Episodics”, who lack any such sense of temporal extension. As a self-declared Episodic, Strawson provides lucid descriptions of what episodicity is like, but cannot furnish a corresponding (...) phenomenology of diachronic self-experience. He further argues that nothing normatively significant depends upon diachronicity, so Episodics can live fully moral (and fully satisfying) lives. I attempt to supply this missing phenomenology of diachronic self-experience using Kierkegaard’s account of “contemporaneity” (samtidighed). Kierkegaard operates with something quite close to Strawson’s “me/me*” (human/self) distinction, yet he nonetheless offers a compelling description of diachronic self-experience that is fully normative in character. I discuss some of the implications of this normativity for Strawson’s claim that there is nothing ethically or psychologically deficient in the Episodic’s self-experience. (shrink)

In this paper I contrast some widespread ideas about what Wittgenstein said about religious belief with statements Wittgenstein made about his purposes and method in doing philosophy, in order to argue that he did not hold the views commonly attributed to him. These allegedly Wittgensteinian doctrines in fact essentialize religion in a very un-Wittgensteinian way. A truly Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion can only be a personal process, and there can be no part in it for generalized hypotheses or conclusions about (...) religion in general. Why is it that in this case I seem to be missing the entire point?1. (shrink)

Background The fourth section of the 1967 Abortion Act states that individuals (including health care practitioners) do not have to participate in an abortion if they have a conscientious objection. A conscientious objection is a refusal to participate in abortion on the grounds of conscience. This may be informed by religious, moral, philosophical, ethical, or personal beliefs. Currently, there is very little investigation into the impact of conscientious objection on service users in Britain. The perspectives of service users are imperative (...) in understanding the real-world consequences and potential impact of conscientious objection and should be considered when creating and reviewing policies and guidelines. This research provided a platform for women and those who can become pregnant to share their experiences and opinions at a time when these voices are largely excluded in the great tradition of Western political philosophy and law-making processes. Method Five service users were interviewed using a narrative interview approach to uncover their abortion journeys and experiences of conscientious objection. Findings The findings were presented as found poems and uncovered that doctors are not always: informing service users that they have a conscientious objection to abortion, giving service users enough information to access abortion (indirect referral), treating them non-judgmentally, and providing medically correct information. Service users did not experience burdens such as long waiting times and were still able to access legal abortion. However, service users did experience negative emotional effects, as they were often left feeling scared, angry, and hopeless when they were not referred and/or were mistreated. Conclusions Findings indicate that conscientious objection could work in practice. However, it is currently failing some individuals on an emotional level, as not all doctors are adhering to guidelines. Conscientious objection in Britain needs to be addressed, to ensure service users receive fair, impartial, non-judgmental care. (shrink)

In arguing against the view that the ethical standards for business are separate from normal interpersonal standards, virtue theory has been applied to business ethics in a limited manner. Previous virtue theorists have argued that this separation need not occur because the virtues for succeeding in business are congruent with civic and personal virtues. However, they have neglected the fact that virtue theory stresses that virtues are formed to fulfil certain desires, ends, and purposes of the person. Since ends are (...) formed within a community, business and corporations should view themselves as members of the community which contributes to the ethical development of its individuals. Hence, I argue that business cannot have a separate standard of ethical behaviour than that of its community, because its goals are means which are subordinate to the ultimate goal of individual and community flourishing. (shrink)

This short article looks at a move made by some theists in defence of theism: the suggestion is that because the atheist has failed fully to grasp what the theist means by ‘God’ etc. so the atheist's criticisms must miss their target.View HTMLSend article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. (...) Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.MISS THE TARGET: HOW SOME ‘SOPHISTICATED’ THEISTS DODGE ATHEIST CRITICISMVolume 17, Issue 50Stephen LawDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175618000167Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. MISS THE TARGET: HOW SOME ‘SOPHISTICATED’ THEISTS DODGE ATHEIST CRITICISMVolume 17, Issue 50Stephen LawDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175618000167Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. MISS THE TARGET: HOW SOME ‘SOPHISTICATED’ THEISTS DODGE ATHEIST CRITICISMVolume 17, Issue 50Stephen LawDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1477175618000167Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

Catholic social teaching appeals to the universal dimension of the Church. Specific details and lived experience are sacrificed in an effort to address the universal Church. In striving to speak to the universal, particular voices are missing. American case law approaches the universal through the particular by grounding law in the cases of specific persons. Narrative is tied to the case, and as a result, embedded in the law. This paper asks how the study of Church teaching might (...) be enriched by being in conversation with American case law. In examining the benefits and liabilities of including narrative in an apostolic exhortation, this paper addresses ecclesiological questions and the relationship of law and religion. (shrink)

Background: Determination of the factors affecting missed nursing care and the impact of ethical leadership is important in improving the quality of care. Aim: This study aims to determine the missed nursing care and its relationship with perceived ethical leadership. Research design: A cross-sectional study. Participants and research context: The sample consisted of 233 nurses, of whom 92.7% were staff nurses and 7.3% were charge nurses, who work in three different hospitals in Turkey. The study data were collected using a (...) personal and professional characteristics data form, the Missed Nursing Care Survey, and the Ethical Leadership Scale. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the non-interventional ethics committee of Dokuz Eylül University Ethics Committee for Noninvasive Clinical Studies. All participants’ written and verbal consents were obtained. Findings: The most missed nursing care practices were ambulation, attending interdisciplinary care conferences, and discharge planning. According to the logistic regression analysis, sex, the number of patients that the nurse is in charge of giving care, the number of patients discharged in the last shift, and satisfaction with the team were determined as factors affecting missed care. No significant relationship was found between ethical leadership and missed nursing care, and a weak but significant relationship was found between the clarification of duties/roles subscale and missed nursing care. Discussion: Ethical leaders should collaborate with policy-makers at an institutional level to particularly achieve teamwork that is effective in the provision of care, to control missed basic nursing care, and to organize working hours and at the country level to determine roles and to increase the workforce. Conclusion: The results of this study contribute to the international literature on the most common type of missed nursing care, its reasons, and the relationship between the missed care and ethical leadership in a different cultural context. (shrink)

Previous studies on body ownership illusions have shown that under certain multimodal conditions, healthy people can experience artificial body-parts as if they were part of their own body, with direct physiological consequences for the real limb that gets ‘substituted’. In this study we wanted to assess (a) whether healthy people can experience ‘missing’ a body-part through illusory ownership of an amputated virtual body, and (b) whether this would cause corticospinal excitability changes in muscles associated with the ‘missing’ body-part. (...) Forty right-handed participants saw a virtual body from a first person perspective but for half of them the virtual body was missing a part of its right arm. Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation was applied before and after the experiment to left and right motor cortices. Motor evoked potentials (MEPs) were recorded from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and the extensor digitorum communis (EDC) of each hand. We found that the stronger the illusion of amputation and arm ownership, the more the reduction of MEP amplitudes of the EDC muscle for the contralateral sensorimotor cortex. In contrast, no association was found for the EDC amplitudes in the ipsilateral cortex and for the FDI amplitudes in both contralateral and ipsilateral cortices. Our study provides evidence that a short-term illusory perception of missing a body-part can trigger inhibitory effects on corticospinal pathways and importantly in the absence of any limb deafferentation or disuse. (shrink)

The concept of missed care refers to an irrefragable truth that required nursing care, which is left undone, occurs in the delivery of health care. As a technical concept, missed care offers nurses the opportunity to articulate a problematic experience. But what are we to make of missed care from an ethical perspective? Can nurses be held morally responsible for missed care? Ethically speaking, it is generally accepted that if a person has a moral obligation to do something, s/he needs (...) to have the capacity to do it. If a person does not have the capacity to fulfil a moral obligation, then s/he cannot be held responsible for failing to do so. This is captured by the “ought implies can” (OIC) principle. This paper brings the OIC principle to the forefront of the discussion on missed care. It is contended that nurses – qua moral agents – may be discharged from a moral obligation to carry out a required caring act because of some inability that is not of their making and therefore may not be morally responsible for missed care. However, the OIC principle may not be applied to all situations of missed care depending on their causes. In addition, following in the thought of Sapontzis (The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1991, XXIX, 383–393) it is contended that when an original obligation to deliver a required act of care cannot be fulfilled, other obligations may be generated as summed up in the “Principle of Making Amends” and the “Principle of Appropriate Feeling.” It is the view of this paper that these further principles could prevent the OIC principle from being used to simply excuse omissions of care from a normative standard and could support the view that nurses continue to have alternative obligations to make amends and to respond with appropriate feelings to missed care. (shrink)

Mary Taylor, Charlotte Bront"e's closest and lifelong friend, did indeed fulfill Bront"'s prediction in both her life and her writings. Recently, however, the authenticity of Taylor's feminist classic, Miss Miles, has been put into question. A controversy is now raging among experts and scholars of Victorian fiction over the true authorship of Miss Miles. Did Mary Taylor labor over this novel from her early womanhood until the end of her life, and offer it as her last great act of friendship (...) to women? Or is it the last work of Charlotte Bront"e, taken from her home to prevent its destruction, then published posthumously under Taylor's name? Regardless of its authorship, Miss Miles is a passionate and compelling novel, well deserving of its literary status on its own terms, and fascinating as a part of the Bront"e world. In this, the only edition of Miss Miles available, Taylor breaks with tradition by creating a profoundly feminist and morally intense novel which depicts female friendships as sustaining life and samity through the vicissitudes of Victorian womanhood. Set in the small Yorkshire village of Repton against the backdrop of starvation in the wool districts and the rise of Chartism in the 1830s, this extraordinary work chronicles the lives of four socially disparate women as they learn to find their own voices and support one another. Taylor's own courage and allegiance to her friends is wonderfully reflected in each of these individually ambitious women, while the novel's emphasis on the healing power of women's friendships echoes the relationship between Bront"e and Taylor herself. Originally published in 1890, Miss Miles continues to stand as an eloquent polemic in favor of a women's personal obligation to support herself. It is a classic that will delight all lovers of fine literature. (shrink)

Biomedicine in recent decades has been defined by an increasing tendency to turn social problems into biomedical questions. Precision or personalized health initiatives have gained attention due to...

The different sorts of virtuous people who display various virtues to a remarkable degree have brought the issue of individualisation of moral character to the forefront. It signals a more personal dimension of character development which is notoriously ignored in the current discourse on character education. The case is made that since in practice, the individualisation of moral character must, by necessity, advance side by side with the cultivation of virtues, a full account of character education needs to give consideration (...) to both concerns. After analysing the specific ways which temperament, social roles, and occupations respectively contribute to the individualisation of moral character, some practical implications are drawn to shed new light on the common practice of the inculcation of virtues. Firstly, since the varieties of moral personality is the norm, it is appropriate to encourage the educated to become virtuous people of different sorts. Secondly, given the influence that temperament may exert on virtue, having good knowledge of each child’s temperament, identifying the specific difficulties possibly confronting him/her accordingly, and then providing more opportunities to strengthen the cultivation of the related virtues are crucial. Thirdly, since children with different temperaments are inclined to identify with different sorts of moral exemplars, it is valuable to present them a great variety of moral models, from which they can choose the kind of virtuous people they would want to emulate. Lastly, since assuming different occupations and social roles is liable to result in various moral characters, character formation cannot be confined to the family or school. Among others, workplaces and communities are also important variables. (shrink)

Our society is changing at a pace hardly imagined a century, even a few decades ago. The role of education is crucial in helping prepare our young people to both cope with and take responsibility for shaping these changes in ways consistent with the values of a free society. To this end, four overarching themes for change in curriculum are examined: the competencies and attitudes needed to understand and engage in systems thinking; the development of self and inter-personal knowledge and (...) skills; understanding of the connectiveness of knowledge; and the ability to think critically. (shrink)

The issues are familiar to most in bioethics by now, through professional or personal experiences (or both). The rapidly expanding population of elderly persons who require care is raising critical...

Dwayne Tunstall turns to Lewis Gordon's Africana existential phenomenology in an effort to untangle Marcel's “reflective method” from its involvements with colonial racism. Tunstall's book interprets Marcel's religious existentialism as a development of his attempt to resist modernity's burgeoning dehumanization but observes that Marcel's sociopolitical thought leaves antiblack racism unexamined, which amounts to a failure to attend to “the most noxious form of depersonalization existing in the twentieth century.” In this review I call into question both Marcel's conception of “philosophy (...) proper” as well as Tunstall's appropriation of that conception in order to do philosophy personally. I am also hard pressed to accept Tunstall's implication that better responses to various manifestations of dehumanization are located in “extraphilosophical” practices or his more explicit claim that “theism” succeeds where philosophy proper has failed. (shrink)

Three-time New York Times bestselling author Dan Ariely teams up with legendary The New Yorker cartoonist William Haefeli to present an expanded, illustrated collection of his immensely popularWall Street Journal advice column, “Ask Ariely”. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely revolutionized the way we think about ourselves, our minds, and our actions in his books Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. Ariely applies this scientific analysis of the human condition in his “Ask Ariely” Q & A (...) column in the Wall Street Journal, in which he responds to readers who write in with personal conundrums ranging from the serious to the curious: What can you do to stay calm when you’re playing the volatile stock market? What’s the best way to get someone to stop smoking? How can you maximize the return on your investment at an all-you-can-eat buffet? Is it possible to put a price on the human soul? Can you ever rationally justify spending thousands of dollars on a Rolex? In Ask Ariely, a broad variety of economic, ethical, and emotional dilemmas are explored and addressed through text and images. Using their trademark insight and wit, Ariely and Haefeli help us reflect on how we can reason our way through external and internal challenges. Readers will laugh, learn, and most importantly gain a new perspective on how to deal with the inevitable problems that plague our daily life. (shrink)

Viren Swami calls on Greek philosophers, Renaissance artists, evolutionary psychologists, poets, playwrights and cultural historians, in his attempt to discover the essence of the body beautiful.

Excerpt from The Idea of Personality Not since the French Revolution have the masses of men had such a passionate trust in the power of ideas as they have today. Such ideas as society, state, person, are no longer the exclusive concern of the few favored experts in philosophy and political theory. Such other ideas as authority, responsibility, conscience, right, and freedom, have become more than the mere blunted foils of friendly, academic discussion. This democratization of ideas has been, on (...) the whole, a healthy stimulant. No one who recalls the riotous confusion of thought in the nineteenth century will regret a situation that seems to promise a period of redefinition. One does not have to be an obscurantist to regret the uncontrolled and, often uncritical way, in which the findings of physical science were applied in the fields of ethics, religion, politics, sociology, economics, and history. We should have been warned that speculation was moving too rapidly. The careful scientist rarely makes a sweeping and definite conclusion. More rarely still does he make a universal application of deductions, reached in his own sphere of investigation, to all branches of knowledge. If the philosophy of life, built upon the recent biological and sociological premises, has been unsatisfactory, this has been due to an apparent unwillingness to take the time required to distinguish what is of permanent value from what is simply the exaggeration of controversy, in the anxiety to establish a theory. It is conceivable that men should wish, under the impulse of fresh evidence, to re-examine their notions of God, the nature of human progress, society, and free-will; but it is not conceivable that conclusions, reached so rapidly and with so little discrimination between fact and hypothesis, should he always accurate and should really reflect life's problems and complexities. We need to be redeemed from our own overweening confidence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume's Missing Shade of Blue Re-viewed John 0. Nelson It is obviously important for Hume's purposes in the Treatise to maintain that simple ideas are always founded in precedent, resembling impressions;1 andhe explicitly, overandover, doesso, evensometimes being so carried away by this first principle ofhis science of man (T 7) or so careless as to say that not just all simple ideas but all ideas are founded in (...) precedent, resembling impressions. At the same time, as often noted, Hume explicitly maintains that it is possible for there to be a simple idea having no precedent, corresponding impression. He argues: There is however one contradictory phaenomenon, which may prove, that 'tis not absolutely impossible for ideas to go before their correspondent impressions... Suppose... a person to have enjoyed his sight for thirty years, and to have become perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kinds, excepting one particular shade of blue... Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, beplac'd before him... Now Iask, whether 'tis possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himselfthe idea ofthat particular shade, tho' it had never been conveyed to him by his senses? I believe there arefew but will be ofopinion that he can; and this may serve as a proof, that the simple ideas are not always derived from the correspondent impressions. (T 5) Nowjust prior to this concession (as Cummins calls it ), Hume has said that the full examination ofthis question [the causal relationship between ideas and impression] is the subject of the present treatise; and therefore we shall here content ourselves with establishing one general proposition, That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv'd from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent. (T 4) Volume XV Number 2 353 JOHN O. NELSON And just after the same concession, that a simple idea may be raised up which does not have a prior, correspondent impression, Hume says that it still remains true, that all our simple ideas proceed either mediately or immediately, from their correspondent impressions (T 7). Thus we have Hume explicitly asserting, it seems, both that all simple ideas have precedent correspondent impressions and that they do not. But this, on the face ofit, is an arrant contradiction! Can Hume have Homerically nodded? We have been quoting from the Treatise, but Hume makes the very same contradictory-seeming claims in the Enquiryl A thinker of Hume's acumen might nod for a page or two's quarter hour but not for all of nine years! Moreover, in both places Hume refers to the phenomenon of the impression-less idea ofblue as a contradictory phenomenon, indicating clearly enough that he was himself aware of there seeming to be an inconsistency here in his contentions. What can possibly be going on? Is Hume deliberately being paradoxical? Perhaps trying, for sensation's sake, to shock the reader and so increase sales of his work, as some commentators in the past might have wished to say? But this would be at the expense ofhis own contentions and principles and not the reader's, and not even Hume's bitterest foes and most malicious critics — so far as I know — have ever proposed that Hume would, figuratively speaking, like Oedipus, gouge out his own eyes, even in order to increase sales of the Treatise, nor does it make the slightest sense to think he would. The mystery deepens when we remember that Hume has said, in defining the program of the Treatise, that his intention is to establish the one general proposition that all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv'd from simple impressions, which are correspondentto them (T4). What astrange way, we want to exclaim, to show that all our simple ideas are derived from correspondent simple impressions by almost immediately afterwards arguing that it is possible to have an idea that has had no correspondent, precedent impression! Such an egregious nonsequitur mightbe expected ofan absolutely incompetent beginner in philosophy, but we are speaking of David Hume, generally recognized as the profoundest and most acute of... (shrink)

The practice of terminating a pregnancy following the diagnosis of a fetal abnormality raises questions about notions of bodily normality and the ways these shape ethical decision-making. This is particularly the case with terminations done on the basis of ostensibly minor morphological anomalies, such as cleft lip and isolated malformations of the limbs or digits. In this paper, I examine a recent case of selective termination after a morphology ultrasound scan revealed the fetus to be missing a hand . (...) Using the work of Georges Canguilhem, I show that a person with acheiria could be considered normal. Further, I show that this case reveals a kind of “undecidability” in the significance of fetal sex/gender and disability in termination. From this, I consider the conceptual interaction of disability with sex/gender, to argue that the ethics of disability termination are not as distinct from those of sex/gender selection as is commonly supposed. (shrink)

With the advanced methods of analysing old biological material, it is pressing to discuss what should be allowed to be done with human remains, particularly for well documented historical individuals. We argue that Queen Christina of Sweden, who challenged the traditional gender roles, has an interest in maintaining her privacy when there are continued attempts to reveal her ‘true’ gender. In the long-running philosophical debate on posthumous wronging, the fundamental question is: Who is wronged? Our aim is to find this (...) ‘missing subject’ using narrative theory.Narrative identity emphasises the fact that no person is alone in knowing or telling their life story. People’s lives are entangled and parts of the life story of a deceased person can remain in the living realm. Since the narrative identity of a person does not necessarily end upon their death, and this narrative continues to relate directly to the person who once existed, it is the narrative subject that can continue to be posthumously wronged. Queen Christina can no longer maintain her own identity, but we maintain it by our research into her life. We propose three duties relevant for posthumous wronging: the duty of truthfulness, the duty of recognition and the duty to respect privacy. (shrink)

Jonathan Beever and Nicolae Morar’s article “The Porosity of Autonomy: Social and Biological Constitution of the Patient in Biomedicine” and its accompanying commentaries in the American Journal of Bioethics—though insightful, innovative, and provocative—overlook key interlocutors necessary for any discussion of whether the mid-twentieth-century biomedical principle of autonomy should be revised or revoked. The conversation sparked by “The Porosity of Autonomy” will remain both incomplete and politically untenable so long as there is no meaningful engagement with persons/communities who appeal to (...) the principle of patient autonomy in order to articulate and challenge the conditions of their oppression. (shrink)

Excerpt from Happiness and Continuous Personality, or Life's Purposive AppearanceOur invasions of the unknown, by admittance, invitation and compulsion.The educational value OF destruction and suffering Struggle. The central requirement of survival. The animal or brute plane of struggle. The human plane and moral evolution. Spurs to human betterment enumerated. Rebuilding change and the meaning of today's tumult. Brutal factors of human progress. Schools and honest political economy. Education, perpetual peace and youthful civiliza tion. Equal rights to all and Special privileges (...) to none, its moral effect.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In the Social Contract Rousseau gives what could be called a philosophical rule of recognition for law in Modernity: a law is law if and only if 'the whole people rules over the whole people'. Thus, he defines self-legislation as, at bottom, collective intentional action. I will first map out the speech act structure [LEX] underlying self-legislation on this account. In particular, I argue for a first person plural counterpart of the reflexive structure inherent to intentions generally: the notion of (...) a collective self. Then I take issue with Bratman's analysis of shared intentional activity in terms of mutuality, submitting that it misses out on the specifically political presupposition involved in 'doing something together'. I will show why 'mutuality' requires representation of the unity of a polity, and how this representation can take form without either external authority or mutual responsiveness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:109 HUME'S MISSING SHADE OF BLUE, INTERPRETED AS INVOLVING HABITUAL SPECTRA David Hume claimed that his hypothetical case of the unseen shade of blue posed no fundamental problem to his general empiricist principle. But I believe it well may show exactly what he denied it showed — viz., that his empiricism rests on a mistake. Hume says: Suppose... a person to have enjoyed his sight for thirty years, (...) and to have become perfectly well acquainted with colours of all kinds, excepting one particular shade of blue, for instance, which it never has been his fortune to meet with. Let all the different shades of that colour, except that single one, be plac'd before him, descending gradually from the deepest to the lightest; 'tis plain, that he will perceive a blank, where that shade is wanting, and will be sensible, that there is a greater distance in that place betwixt the contiguous colours, than in any other. Now I ask, whether 'tis possible for him, from his own imagination, to supply this deficiency, and raise up to himself the idea of that particular shade, tho' it had never been conveyed to him by his senses? I believe there are few but will be of opinion that he can.... Sometimes one is surprised by the colour which emerges when one mixes paints, powders or lights of different hues, in the sense that one is unable to imagine this resulting colour until one actually sees it. I often have analogous experiences when sightreading music on the trombone. If there is a large, unfamiliar interval between the note I am playing and the one to be played next, so I cannot 'hear' the next note inwardly, I bring the slide to the correct position, set my lips at approximately the right tension, and presto! the correct note appears, despite 110 my inability to predict what it was going to sound like. Only after I have heard it can I also 'hear' it, i.e, predict its occurrence in this melodic line. Cases like these are not puzzling philosophically, because in them, the note, colour, etc. arises primarily from the equipment used — e.g., paints, powders or lights, the trombone and tension of the lips, and so on — rather than from the mind of the person who uses these things. But in Hume's example, no extra-mental objects or events play a direct role in creating the imagined colour. In fact, this colour never appears at all outside the subject's mind, and he never sees it. Therefore here the imagined colour is produced entirely by the subject himself, without his having copied it from anything in the external world. Yet this contradicts the maxim Hume laid down at the beginning of the Treatise that all simple ideas arise from correspondingly simple (sense) impressions. Two points perhaps mitigate the seriousness of the problem set by the missing shade of blue. First, Hume saw clearly, as Locke did not, that "innate" does 2 not mean the same as "justified." He was not so much concerned with the question of where ideas come from, as with how these ideas can be shown to be legitimate. His answer to the latter question is that experience alone is competent to show this. Second, strictly speaking, no idea is itself a piece of knowledge, but only something with the help of which one constructs knowledge-claims; and it is necessary for a person to justify knowledge-claims which are composed of innate ideas, by checking them against experience, just as much as knowledge-claims composed of non-innate materials. For example, suppose I possess innately the idea (visual image) of blue and the idea (tactile image) of cool. To say that these ideas are innate means that they are merely triggered or activated in my Ill mind by experiences I happen to have, but are not created by these experiences, and are not necessarily copies of them. Nevertheless, in order for me to know something which involves these ideas, I first must put them together in a judgment, and then confirm that judgment by appeal to experience. For instance, I might use these ideas to make the judgment... (shrink)

Personality traits describe dispositions influencing individuals' behavior and performance at work. However, in the context of personnel selection, the use of personality measures has continuously been questioned. To date, research in selection settings has focused uniquely on predicting task performance, missing the opportunity to exploit the potential of personality traits to predict non-task performance. Further, personality is often measured with self-report inventories, which are susceptible to self-distortion. Addressing these gaps, the planned study seeks to design new personality measures to (...) be used in the selection context to predict a wide range of performance criteria. Specifically, we will develop a situational judgment test and a behavior description interview, both assessing Big Five personality traits and Honesty-Humility to systematically compare these new measures with traditional self-report inventories regarding their criterion-related validity to predict four performance criteria: task performance, adaptive performance, organizational citizenship behavior, and counterproductive work behavior. Data will be collected in a simulated selection procedure. Based on power analyses, we aim for 200 employed study participants, who will allow us to contact their supervisors to gather criterion data. The results of this study will shed light on the suitability of different personality measures to predict an expanded range of performance criteria. (shrink)