The concept of autonomy has had a central place in the German aesthetic tradition since the eighteenth century, specifically, after Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment. Although Kant denied that aesthetic judgments yield cognitive truth, aesthetic judgments are autonomous in that they do not rely on or presuppose a concern with the object's purpose, utility, or even its actual existence. For Theodor Adorno, the autonomy of art lies in the work of art, in its production, not specifically in the (...) aesthetic judgments of the subject. This article shows that by shifting autonomy from aesthetic judgments to art production, Adorno effectively makes art the reservoir for human freedom. Although this point is often eluded to in Adorno scholarship by individuals such as Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart, it is often passed over without additional explanation and discussion. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 2, Page 146-160, June 2022.

This article argues that Fichte is correct in claiming, as he does in the Foundations of Natural Right, that a derivation of the law of right from the moral law is impossible because the former relies on lex permissiva. I focus on Kant’s deduction of the concept of merely intelligible possession in the Metaphysics of Morals precisely because Kant attempts what Fichte says is not possible. By illustrating the problems involved in the concept of the lex permissiva, one is then (...) in a position to see why Fichte believes the derivations mustremain separate and why Fichte stresses that the law of right must be argued for without reference to morality or the moral law. (shrink)

My argument in this paper is given in two parts. In Part I, I review the ancient understanding of aporia, focusing on works by Plato and Aristotle. I illustrate two ways of understanding aporia: “cathartic” and “zetetic.” Cathartic aporia refers to the experience of being purged of hubris and ignorance through the dialectic. Zetetic aporia, on the other hand, requires us to engage in, recognize, and work through certain philosophical puzzles or problems. In Part II, I discuss the idea of (...) Big Data and then argue that in the “age of answers” neither conception of aporia appears to be necessarily cultivated by the average Internet user. Our experience of wonder suffers when we rely so heavily on the Internet as a “surrogate expert,” and when our social media use betrays the fact that we always seem to gravitate towards the like-minded. (shrink)

My argument in this paper is given in two parts. In Part I, I review the ancient understanding of aporia, focusing on works by Plato and Aristotle. I illustrate two ways of understanding aporia: “cathartic” and “zetetic.” Cathartic aporia refers to the experience of being purged of hubris and ignorance through the dialectic. Zetetic aporia, on the other hand, requires us to engage in, recognize, and work through certain philosophical puzzles or problems. In Part II, I discuss the idea of (...) Big Data and then argue that in the “age of answers” neither conception of aporia appears to be necessarily cultivated by the average Internet user. Our experience of wonder suffers when we rely so heavily on the Internet as a “surrogate expert,” and when our social media use betrays the fact that we always seem to gravitate towards the like-minded. (shrink)

This paper investigates a contemporary flowering of flânerie similar to that which Walter Benjamin analyzed in the first decades of the Parisian arcades. The flâneur has resurrected in a new space of the recent past as the computer hacker of digital culture. There is, however, a significant difference between the two figures’ ways of relating to the world that gives the hacker an important socio-political agency – with which Benjamin tried, unsuccessfully, to imbue in the flâneur.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 227-229 [Access article in PDF] Philip Pothen. Nietzsche and the Fate of Art. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. x + 235. Paper, $29.95. Most scholarship argues that Nietzsche grants art a position of vital importance for culture, history, and philosophy. Philip Pothen seeks to challenge this general view of Nietzsche [End Page 227] while at the same time raising new questions (...) about Nietzsche's thoughts on art and how Nietzsche's views on art relate to his philosophical concerns. He does not locate Nietzsche's "deep suspicion and at times hostility" (1) toward art in a specific period of Nietzsche's thought, but instead traces it from the notebooks of the 1870s through Nietzsche's so-called "positivist period" to the very end of his productive life. The result is an honest attempt to recognize Nietzsche's ambivalent and at times hostile attitude toward that which is often times unquestionably admired.Although the Birth of Tragedy is the central text for most scholarship about Nietzsche's thoughts on art, this scholarship does not generally look to contemporaneous unpublished private writings. By conducting a close reading of Nietzsche's first published work in juxtaposition with selections from the Nachlass, Pothen shows that even as early as the 1870s, Nietzsche was developing some of the major themes of his subsequent writings on art. Nietzsche had begun to make decisive breaks with conceptual presuppositions inherited from Schopenhauer and the Kantian philosophical framework as well as from Wagner.Nietzsche's earlier belief in a rebirth of the Dionysian through works of genius such as Wagner's was severely criticized by Nietzsche himself in his 1886 Preface to the Birth of Tragedy. The second chapter of this book looks at Nietzsche's criticism of the concept of "genius" and the recognition of the "death of art" in modern artists such as Wagner. Pothen shows that Nietzsche gives a highly naturalistic account of genius, criticizing traditional notions that elevate the genius to a higher status than the merely talented artist.According to Pothen, the decadence of modern art, the deception of the artist, and the "end of art" suggests a type of "sickness" for Nietzsche. Art "represents a suppression of the instincts of becoming" (56). Pothen claims the future of art and its possible "death" are much more severe for Nietzsche than, for instance, Hegel. The challenging conclusion is that Nietzsche, not Hegel, properly announces the "death of art" in modernity.What, however, of the "monological work of art" that Nietzsche first formulates in the Gay Science? By considering the fourth part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a decisive conclusion and not an inferior appendage, Pothen argues that this work "for All and None" illustrates "a radical and perhaps impossible orientation" (9) that the godless artist must take up according to Nietzsche. It is a creative position "in favor of solitude [Einsamkeit], forgetting [vergessen] and inner strength" (74).Chapter four of Pothen's book addresses the concept of the "will to power." Pothen argues that it is a "metaphysical principle" of explanation that nevertheless undermines certain other metaphysical concepts such as a unified "subject" as well as traditional aesthetic concepts such as artistic autonomy. Pothen challenges Heidegger's claim that art is the "highest expression" of the will to power for Nietzsche while utilizing Heidegger's insights into art to highlight and question previous themes in the book such as the reduction of art to physiology (117-32).Chapter five concentrates on Nietzsche's analysis of the psychology of production and his critique of the Kantian themes of "disinterestedness" and the "judgment of taste." The book ends with a look at Nietzsche's final productive year of 1888. In works such as The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche, Pothen suggests, holds decadent works such as Wagner's as representative of all art produced "in the time of the death of God and the revaluation of all values" (169). For Nietzsche, modernity's inability to understand its own time might "herald the death or the end of this art of works... (shrink)

Kenneth Goodpaster has criticized ethicists like Feinberg and Frankena for too narrowly circumscribing the range of moral considerability, urging instead that “nothing short of the condition of being alive” is a satisfactory criterion. Goodpaster overlooks at least one crucial objection: that his own “condition of being alive” may aIso be too narrow a criterion of moral considerability, since “being in existence” is at least as plausible and nonarbitrary a criterion as is Goodpaster’s. I show that each of the arguments that (...) Goodpaster musters in support of his criterion can be used equally weIl to bolster “being in existence” as a test of moral considerability. Moreover, I argue that “being in existence” appears to be a stronger criterion overall, since it is broader. Until or unless a fuller justification is forthcoming of “being alive” as a satisfactory criterion of moral considerability-a justification which must demonstrate that “mere things,” included under the condition of “being in existence,” do not deserve moral consideration--Goodpaster’sthesis is confronted with a serious problem. (shrink)

Kenneth Burke : A Dialogue of Motives employs the philosophy of ethics of Emmanuel Levinas to develop a uniquely dramatistic philosophy of ethics. Jeffrey Murray analyzes Kenneth Burke 's A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives and offers the notion of "a dialogue of motives " as a completion of Burke 's proposed trilogy and as a supplement to Burke 's own tools for rhetorical criticism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 22-49 [Access article in PDF] Kenneth Burke: A Dialogue of Motives Jeffrey W. Murray [Figures] Introduction In "Four Master Tropes," Appendix D of A Grammar of Motives (1969a), Kenneth Burke investigates the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. His "primary concern with them... [is] not with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery and description of 'the truth'" (...) (1969a, 503). Burke's placement of "the truth" in quotation marks reflects his rejection of any simplistically objectivist notion of truth. He is not interested in how these rhetorical figures ornament truth, as if truth existed prior to the entrance of rhetoric. Rather, the relationship between these four master tropes and truth is more complicated. Truth is, for Burke, a rhetorical product as much as a rhetorical precursor. Hence, the tropes function not only epistemologically in the discovery of truth, but also ontologically in the very constitution of truth. 1 Burke's subsequent discussion of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony illustrates how each trope functions dramatistically to make, and to make known, the world.When Burke discusses the trope of irony, the relationship between rhetoric and truth is further complicated. Irony is dialogical. 2 Whereas metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche offer particular perspectives for viewing and knowing the world, irony offers a "perspective of perspectives" (1969a, 512). Ultimately, irony depends upon the perspectives of Others—of other symbol users—and is thus an explicitly dialogical rather than rhetorical trope. Moreover, this inclusion of the voices of Others in the construction of "truth" distinguishes irony as ethical. Irony may, in fact, offer the clearest view of Burke's own incipient theory of ethics. Over against his few explicit discussions of ethics, which reflect either an Aristotelian or Kantian approach to ethics, 3 Burke's development of the master trope of irony as a dialogical vehicle for the construction of intersubjective [End Page 22] truth reveals his maturing approach to ethics and a tacit synthesis of his dramatistic accounts of epistemology, ontology, and ethics.Yet another concept is even more foundational for Burke's incipient theory of ethics within a dramatistic framework. Recalcitrance precedes irony as an account of the presencing of otherness in and through language. Prior to the experience of irony as a clash of perspectives, recalcitrance is the very crashing in of the second perspective. It is the resistance that is met by any particular symbolic framing of the world. Together, recalcitrance and irony form the core of Burke's (underdeveloped) dramatistic theory of ethics and constitute the groundwork for his proposed final installment of his trilogy, which might instead be appropriately "A Dialogue of Motives."Using Emmanuel Levinas's phenomenology of the Other and reconception of ethics as the call to responsibility, 4 this article will demonstrate that Burke's notions of recalcitrance and irony are the groundwork for a full dramatistic description of the phenomenological encounter with the Other and of the nature of the ethical encounter. Moreover, this discussion of recalcitrance and irony will be placed in the context of Burke's two major works, A Grammar of Motives (1969a) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1969b), in an attempt to indicate the implicit trajectory of these works toward the third volume of the trilogy, referred to here as "A Dialogue of Motives." 5 The addition of "A Dialogue of Motives" will rectify Burke's lack of emphasis on ethics and upon the Other, and together, Burke's A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and "A Dialogue of Motives"will recast traditional philosophy's main branches of ontology, epistemology, and ethics into dramatistic—i.e., grammatical, rhetorical, and dialogical—terms.In addition, this proposed completion of Burke's trilogy provides a unique conception of dialogue that promises to expand and enrich existing conceptions of dialogue within the field of communication studies. Specifically, a dramatistic notion of dialogue bifurcates traditional notions of two-way, dialogical communication into a "rhetoric" of motives that seeks identification and a "dialogue" of motives that maintains difference. To that end, Burke's notion of dialectic will be discussed in order to... (shrink)

This volume illustrates the central importance of diversity of human values throughout healthcare. The readings are organized around the main stages of the clinical encounter from the patient's perspective. They run from staying well and 'first contact' through to either recovery or to long-term illness, death and dying.

Kenneth Burke: A Dialogue of Motives employs the philosophy of ethics of Emmanuel Levinas to develop a uniquely dramatistic philosophy of ethics. Jeffrey Murray analyzes Kenneth Burke's A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives and offers the notion of "a dialogue of motives" as a completion of Burke's proposed trilogy and as a supplement to Burke's own tools for rhetorical criticism.

The new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Policy on the Use of a Single Institutional Review Board (sIRB) for Multi-Site Research was adopted primarily to simplify and speed the review of complex multisite clinical trials. However, speeding review requires overcoming a number of obstacles. Perhaps the most substantial obstacle is the time and effort needed to develop reliance agreements among the participating sites. We conducted 102 semistructured interviews with sIRB personnel, including directors, chairs, reviewers, and staff, from 20 IRBs that (...) acted as sIRBs for multisite research, including 6 commercial/independent sIRBs, and 10 university-based academic and 4 federal sIRBs. Almost without exception, the interviewees agreed that reliance agreements were complex, difficult to develop, and time-consuming. A major problem for relying sites was that different agreements specified different responsibilities for the relying sites. Attitudes differed about whether these problems will be resolved as IRB staff and managers become more experienced with sIRBs. However it is clear that the process of developing reliance agreements must be simplified. Federal assistance in standardizing at least some sections of reliance agreements might reduce the difficulties involved. (shrink)

This book examines the implication of Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy of ethics for the theory, criticism, and practice of human communication.

Electronic institutional review board systems (eIRBs) have become an integral component in ensuring compliance with Human Research Protection Program (HRPP) and IRB requirements. Despite this, few of these systems are configured to administer the single IRB (sIRB) process mandated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for multisite research. We interviewed 103 sIRB administrators, chairs, members, and staff members about their experiences with sIRB multisite research review. We observed three main obstacles to adapting existing eIRB systems to accommodate the sIRB (...) process: (1) Existing systems are not designed for sIRBs and are not configured to administer sIRB responsibilities, (2) they are not interoperable, and (3) resources to improve existing systems are lacking. Our findings suggest that IRBs that act as an sIRB will need major changes to their electronic systems in order to accommodate sIRB processes. These difficulties threaten both the ability of IRBs to focus on ethical rather than bureaucratic problems and the efficiency of multisite trials. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo prospectively study the cingulate cortex for the localization and role of the grasping action in humans during electrical stimulation of depth electrodes.MethodsAll the patients with intractable focal epilepsy and a depth electrode stereotactically placed in the cingulate cortex, as part of their pre-surgical epilepsy evaluation from 2015 to 2017, were included. Cortical stimulation was performed and examined for grasping actions. Post-implantation volumetric T1 MRIs were co-registered to determine the exact electrode position.ResultsFive patients exhibited contralateral grasping actions during electrical stimulation. (...) All patients had electrodes implanted in the ventral bank of the right cingulate sulcus adjacent to the vertical anterior commissure line. Stimulation of other electrodes in adjacent regions did not elicit grasping.ConclusionGrasping action elicited from a localized region in the mid-cingulate cortex directly supports the concept of the cingulate cortex being crucially involved in the grasping network. This opens an opportunity to explore this region with deep brain stimulation as a motor neuromodulation target for treatment in specific movement disorders or neurorehabilitation. (shrink)

BackgroundUnderstanding representations of disease in various art genres provides insights into how patients and health care providers view the diseases. It can also be used to enhance patient care and stimulate patient self-management.MethodsThis paper reviews how cardiovascular diseases are represented in novels, films, and paintings: myocardial infarction, aneurysm, hypertension, stroke, heart transplantation, Marfan’s disease, congestive heart failure. Various search systems and definitions were used to help identify sources of representations of different cardiovascular diseases. The representations of the different diseases were (...) considered separately. The Common Sense Model was used a theoretical model to outline illness perceptions and self-management in the various identified novels, films, and paintings.ResultsMyocardial infarction followed by stroke were the most frequently detailed diseases in all three art genres. This reflects their higher prevalence. Representations ranged from biomedical details through to social and psychological consequences of the diseases.ConclusionsArtistic representations of cardiovascular diseases reflect cognitions, emotions, and images of prevalent disease. These representations shape views and behaviour of ill and healthy persons regarding heart diseases. As these representations are amenable to change, they deserve further research, which may be instrumental in improving the quality of life of persons struck by cardiovascular diseases. Changing illness perceptions appears to be a method to improve self-management and thereby quality of life in patients with various cardiovascular diseases. (shrink)

This edited volume illustrates the central importance of diversity of human values throughout healthcare. The readings are organised around the main stages of the clinical encounter from the patient's perspective. This introductory chapter opens up crucial issues of methodology and of practical application in this highly innovative approach to the role of ethics in healthcare.

This volume of articles, literature and case studies illustrates the central importance of human values throughout healthcare. The readings are structured around the main stages of the clinical encounter from the patient's perspective.

Background: Legislation on physician-assisted suicide is being considered in a number of states since the passage of the Oregon Death With Dignity Act in 1994. Opinion assessment surveys have historically assessed particular subsets of physicians.Objective: To determine variables predictive of physicians’ opinions on PAS in a rural state, Vermont, USA.Design: Cross-sectional mailing survey.Participants: 1052 physicians licensed by the state of Vermont.Results: Of the respondents, 38.2% believed PAS should be legalised, 16.0% believed it should be prohibited and 26.0% believed it should (...) not be legislated. 15.7% were undecided. Males were more likely than females to favour legalisation . Physicians who did not care for patients through the end of life were significantly more likely to favour legalisation of PAS than physicians who do care for patients with terminal illness . 30% of the respondents had experienced a request for assistance with suicide.Conclusions: Vermont physicians’ opinions on the legalisation of PAS is sharply polarised. Patient autonomy was a factor strongly associated with opinions in favour of legalisation, whereas the sanctity of the doctor–patient relationship was strongly associated with opinions in favour of not legislating PAS. Those in favour of making PAS illegal overwhelmingly cited moral and ethical beliefs as factors in their opinion. Although opinions on legalisation appear to be based on firmly held beliefs, approximately half of Vermont physicians who responded to the survey agree that there is a need for more education in palliative care and pain management. (shrink)