In recent approaches to ethics, the personal involvement of health care providers and their empathy are perceived as important elements of an overall ethical ability. Experiential working methods are used in ethics education to foster, inter alia, empathy. In 2008, the care-ethics lab ‘sTimul’ was founded in Flanders, Belgium, to provide training that focuses on improving care providers' ethical abilities through experiential working simulations. The curriculum of sTimul focuses on empathy sessions, aimed at care providers' empathic skills. The present study (...) provides better insight into how experiential learning specifically targets the empathic abilities of care providers. Providing contrasting experiences that affect the care providers' self-reflection seems a crucial element in this study. Further research is needed to provide more insight into how empathy leads to long-term changes in behaviour. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the usefulness of qualitative research for studying the ethics of care, bringing to light the lived experience of health care recipients, together with the importance of methods that allow reconstruction of the processes underlying this lived experience. Lived experiences of families being approached for organ donation, parents facing the imminent death of their child and patients being treated using stem cell transplantation are used to illustrate how ethical principles are differentiated, modified or (...) contradicted by the narrative context of persons concerned. The integration of empirical data into ethics will help caregivers in their ethical decision making and may enrich care ethics as a narrative and interpretative field. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes’s Dualism by Marleen RozemondSteven J. WagnerMarleen Rozemond. Descartes’s Dualism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. xx + 279. Cloth, $24.00.Rozemond gives particular attention to questions of mind-body distinctness vs. union and to the status of sensory ideas. Her historical emphasis, backed by impressive scholarship, is Descartes’s relation to the late scholastics. Rozemond is clear, alert to detail, and fair-minded. While the text is too long (esp. (...) in chapters 4–5), this study is indeed rich, its scope and architecture justified.Any good reading of a philosopher is defined—both enhanced and limited—by certain decisions. I have mentioned one of Rozemond’s: her account of Descartes’s dialogue with such predecessors as Suárez and Fonseca sheds important light. It makes one ask, further, whether standard histories are not just as wrong to ignore scholastic concerns in, say, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke. Yet Rozemond is less helpful with issues that make more sense when we read forward from the 1640s, not back. An historian also sets a level of philosophical engagement. One chooses between presenting a meaningful narrative, and struggling with the endless problems of detail that can both doom [End Page 678] a philosophical position and give it life. Rozemond inclines toward narrative, often stopping just short of hard questions. Yet she shows curiosity and intelligence throughout. As in the first case, another decision would not have been better or worse but simply yielded a different kind of history.Fundamental is a third choice. A philosopher’s thought may appear as an orderly structure; or as a mix of fixed points and shifting, inconsistent tendencies. Most of us are trained to the former style of representation (although we let philosophers “develop” over time). Rozemond’s Descartes, too, turns out this way. He occupies definite positions. Within each position he knows whether Ρ is a premise for Q, vice versa, or neither. This way of presenting a body of thought, i.e., as a determinate structure admitting logical assessment, is an indispensable tool for historians. Its value in any particular case is, however, a matter of judgment. Rozemond attacks textual problems with skill, often improving decisively on the competition, but the going looks smoother than it is. Sometimes she carries the privilege of selective reading too far. At other times, she overlooks the poor mutual fit of separately smooth solutions, or rests with an outcome that could not have satisfied Descartes. Some examples:1. There is an old question how far Descartes goes towards proving dualism in the Second Meditation, how much is left for the Sixth. Rozemond basically champions the Second Meditation. Although some texts favor this, she ignores important contrary passages. Her reconstruction of the “argument from separability” also fails completely to carry over to Descartes’s alternate proof (AT VII, 85–6) from the indivisibility of mind.2. Rozemond identifies (“pure”) intellection with thought or mind (56). This leaves a problem how sensation could be a mode of thought, given that for her sensations differ from pure thoughts in being ‘modes of the mind as united to the body’ (201, emphasis mine). She remarks that sensations are not ‘straightforward modes of the mind’; yet her earlier chapters have no place for obscure modal hybrids and indeed require the tidy metaphysical scheme that is now denied.3. Although Rozemond handles Descartes’s anti-empiricism well, the discussion of empty space (95–7) no sooner suggests than it drops a crucial question. Descartes traces belief in the void to a childhood prejudice according to which all bodies are perceptible; rejecting the prejudice is supposed to remove support for the hypothesis of the void. But can Descartes really pick up the doctrine of childhood prejudice, an anti-Aristotelian weapon, and turn it against the radically different atomist framework? Rozemond passes on the attendant philosophical and textual problems (cf. 133–7).4. Rozemond’s extensive treatment of sensory perceptions and qualities rewards study (particularly on the importance, for dualism, of problems about body). But she misses the chance for more. Her Descartes firmly “places sensory qualities in the mind.” The real one struggled repeatedly over whether sensory ideas can or must... (shrink)

Family values are argued to enable ethical family business conduct. However, how these arise, evolve, and how family leaders articulate them is less understood. Using an ‘identity work’ approach, this paper finds that the values underpinning identity work: arise from multiple sources, evolve in tandem with the context; and, that their articulation is relational and aspirational, rather than merely historical. Prior research mostly understood family values as rooted in the past and relatively stable, but our rhetorical analysis unlocks a more (...) dynamic and promising research direction advancing family business ethics. (shrink)

Lyman Tower Sargent has had a personal and professional impact upon me. I cannot separate the effects of reading his work from engaging with him as a mentor—and more. Hence, this piece will focus on personal and professional texts and their contexts. I revisit Sargent's “An Ambiguous Legacy: The Role and Position of Women in the English Eutopia,” an essay he contributed to my Future Females: A Critical Anthology. I include passages from my novels Oy Pioneer! and Oy Feminist Planets: (...) A Fake Memoir which describe protagonist Sondra Lear's relationship with Thurston Howell III, interactions stemming from my longstanding association with Sargent. I describe a prominent male scholar's positive—almost utopian—influence on what I am here calling a retrospective autobiographical portrait of the professor as a young woman. This piece emphasizes that a festschrift contribution is about reciprocity between author and honoree. (shrink)

Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is an established method for integrating values into technical design. It has been applied to different technologies and, more recently, to artificial intelligence (AI). We argue that AI poses a number of challenges specific to VSD that require a somewhat modified VSD approach. Machine learning (ML), in particular, poses two challenges. First, humans may not understand how an AI system learns certain things. This requires paying attention to values such as transparency, explicability, and accountability. Second, ML (...) may lead to AI systems adapting in ways that ‘disembody’ the values embedded in them. To address this, we propose a threefold modified VSD approach: 1) integrating a known set of VSD principles (AI4SG) as design norms from which more specific design requirements can be derived; 2) distinguishing between values that are promoted and respected by the design to ensure outcomes that not only do no harm but also contribute to good; and 3) extending the VSD process to encompass the whole life cycle of an AI technology in order to monitor unintended value consequences and redesign as needed. We illustrate our VSD for AI approach with an example use case of a SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing app. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to introduce the false hope harms (FHH) argument, as a new concept in healthcare. The FHH argument embodies a conglomerate of specific harms that have not convinced providers to stop endorsing false hope. In this paper, it is submitted that the healthcare profession has an obligation to avoid collaborating or participating in, propagating or augmenting false hope in medicine. Although hope serves important functions—it can be ‘therapeutic’ and important for patients’ ‘self-identity as active agents’— (...) the presentation of false hope along the hope continuum entails a misconstrued balancing act. By not speaking up against unrealistic patient and family requests—including some requests for rights to try, resuscitative efforts in terminally ill patients, or other demands for non-beneficial treatments—healthcare providers precipitate harms, i.e., the FHH. These harms arise on both individual and communal levels and cannot be ignored. The goal of this paper is not to offer a definition of false hope, because the phenomenon of false hope is too complex for any simple definition. Instead, this paper seeks to make four points while outlining the FHH argument: consumer medicine and false hope are connected; providers and patients are very vulnerable in the system of consumer medicine; providers have a responsibility to stand up against false hope; and how the FHH argument could perhaps offer a footing to resist giving in to false hope. (shrink)

‘SWAMPLAB’ is a strong case for intuitive insights through arts, sciences, and technologies to engage the self and establish meaningful social interactions including humans and non-humans. While zigzagging through processes of privatization, globalization, ecological, economic, social and political challenges, the power of such residencies or labs stems from the interplay with the local context and its habitants, in this case, nature reserve De Zegge, a 111 hectares swamp in the Northern part of Belgium. Mediation and participation are a core condition (...) for the design of knowledge and engagement since without informed consent and participants understanding the nature of the process, no change is possible. The more individuals express and explore their knowledge through social encounters, narratives, and dialogs, the more crucial tacit knowledge can be shared. Making things disputable is another responsibility. In society at large, there are very few examples where people feel interconnected and yet at the same time can disagree. The notion of Swamplab is rather a call for wonderment, for not using each other as a stepping stone but setting up open dialogs, listening and reflecting together, playing around, tinkering, since messiness is allowed. Including non-humans, be they wolves, moles or avatars, and virtual agents, is key to cracking the individual resistance to change understandings, opinions, and behavior. The result may lead to deeper engagement and Buckminster Fuller’s “comprehensive anticipatory design science” or what Bruno Latour calls a “progressive composition of the good common world”. (shrink)

Background: Patient participation in clinical ethics support services has been marked as an important issue. There seems to be a wide variety of practices globally, but extensive theoretical or empirical studies on the matter are missing. Scarce publications indicate that, in Europe, patient participation in CESS varies from region to region, and per type of support. Practices vary from being non-existent, to patients being a full conversation partner. This contrasts with North America, where PP seems more or less standard. While (...) PP seems to be on the rise in Europe, there is no data to confirm this. This study sought a deep understanding of both habits and the attitudes towards PP in the Netherlands, including respondents’ practical and normative perspectives on the matter. Methods and Results: We developed a national survey on PP for Dutch CESS staff. Our survey comprised a total of 25 open and close-ended questions, focused on four topics related to PP goals of CESS, status quo of PP, ideas and ideals concerning PP, and obstacles for PP. Discussion: The four most important findings were that: Patient participation in Dutch CESS is far from standard. Views on patient participation are very much intertwined with the goals of ethics support. Hesitations, fears and perceived obstacles for PP were not on principle and Most respondents see PP as a positive opportunity, yet requiring additional training, practical guidance and experience. Conclusions: Various normative reasons require PP. However, PP seems far from standard and somewhat rare in Dutch CESS settings. Our respondents did not raise many principled objections to PP. Instead, reasons for the lack of PP are intertwined with viewpoints on the goals of CESS, which seemingly focus on supporting health care professionals. Training and practical guidance was thought to be helpful for gaining experience for both CESS staff and HCPs. (shrink)

Adequate epistemic justification is best conceived as the appearance, over time, of knowledge to the subject. ‘Appearance’ is intended literally, not as a synonym for belief. It is argued through consideration of examples that this account gets the extension of ‘adequately justified belief’ at least roughly correct. A more theoretical reason is then offered to regard justification as the appearance of knowledge: If we have a knowledge norm for assertion, we do our best to comply with this norm when we (...) express as assertions only beliefs that appear to us to be knowledge. If we are doing our best, there is little point in further sanctions. So a norm of knowledge for assertion would lead to a secondary norm of justified belief as the appearance of knowledge, marking a point at which our assertions may be corrected but should not be blamed. (shrink)

The last decade has witnessed the mass distribution and adoption of smart home systems and devices powered by artificial intelligence systems ranging from household appliances like fridges and toasters to more background systems such as air and water quality controllers. The pervasiveness of these sociotechnical systems makes analyzing their ethical implications necessary during the design phases of these devices to ensure not only sociotechnical resilience, but to design them for human values in mind and thus preserve meaningful human control over (...) them. This paper engages in a conceptual investigations of how meaningful human control over smart home devices can be attained through design. The value sensitive design (VSD) approach is proposed as a way of attaining this level of control. In the proposed framework, values are identified and defined, stakeholder groups are investigated and brought into the design process and the technical constraints of the technologies in question are considered. The paper concludes with some initial examples that illustrate a more adoptable way forward for both ethicists and engineers of smart home devices. (shrink)

Spinoza's Ethics is one of the most remarkable, important, and difficult books in the history of philosophy: a treatise simultaneously on metaphysics, knowledge, philosophical psychology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy. It presents, in Spinoza's famous 'geometric method', his radical views on God, Nature, the human being, and happiness. In this wide-ranging 2006 introduction to the work, Steven Nadler explains the doctrines and arguments of the Ethics, and shows why Spinoza's endlessly fascinating ideas may have been so troubling to his contemporaries, (...) as well as why they are still highly relevant today. He also examines the philosophical background to Spinoza's thought and the dialogues in which Spinoza was engaged - with his contemporaries, with ancient thinkers, and with his Jewish rationalist forebears. His book is written for the student reader but will also be of interest to specialists in early modern philosophy. (shrink)

On the 24th of november 1991 the Belgian voters elected the 716 members of the nine provincial councils.The socialists are the biggest losers of this election, with the Volksunie as a close second. Also the Christian Democrats suffered a serious decline, mainly caused by the loss of the CVP in Flanders. The electoral gain of the Flemish Liberals is neutralized by the decline of the Liberal party in Wallonia. The Greens gain 32 seats, the Far Right 35. These national aggregates (...) hide striking regional differences. The national success of the Green is mainly due to the spectacular growth of Ecolo in the Walloons. The success of the Far Right is the sole result of a multiplication of votes for Vlaams Blok in Flanders. These results show that both the Flemish and the Walloon voters have sanctioned the traditional parties in a similar way. They opted, however, for totally different alternatives: the Flemish for the Far Right, the Walloons for the ecologists.The outcome of the provincial elections in the bilingual province of Brabant neatly mirrors these tendencies.In 1991 the outcome of the provincial elections showed a profile quite different from that of the national elections which were held on the same day. This is explained by the fact that the Flemish party Rossem, which won 3.2% of the votes, only ran for the national elections and not for the provincial elections. Hence, a considerable difference in voting behaviour on the national versus the local level. The comparison of the results of the national elections with those of the provincial confirms the claim that smaller parties generally score better at a lower level. In 1991 it can, however, not be said that the bigger parties did better on the national level. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Journal of Ancient History Jahrgang: 4 Heft: 2 Seiten: 158-190.

The distinction between presentism and eternalism is usually sought in some formula like ‘Only presently existing things exist’ or ‘Past, present, and future events are equally real’. I argue that ambiguities in the copula prevent these slogans from distinguishing significant opposed positions. I suggest in addition that one can find a series of significant distinctions if one takes spacetime structure into account. These presentisms and eternalisms are not contradictory. They are complementary elements of a complete naturalistic philosophy of time.

Snyder’s book ‘Exploiting hope’ is as relevant as ever. His book is about the hope of desperate individuals seeking treatments that cannot be found in conventional medicine. The book engages with hope in the setting of phase I cancer trials, stem cell interventions, right-to-try laws and crowd funding, offering a new language to explain our discomfort with some of these quests. At the same time the book seems particularly relevant given current events. While despair and quests for novel interventions touched (...) only a few patients with specific conditions up to a year ago, they are now familiar to us all. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic all of us probably experienced hope for interventions that could save us... (shrink)

Despite the fact that various authors have expressed concern about a general decline of civic engagement in Western societies, other indicators portray a transition from traditional and formal participation formats to more informal participation forms. This replacement thesis, however, entails the question whether these new forms can still be regarded as a form of political participation. The Alternative Food Circles in Belgium can be considered as a typical grass-roots example of 'political consumerism', which is portrayed as a contemporary alternative for (...) institutionalised politics. In a member survey, 163 members of the Circles were questioned about their motives to participate. They clearly paid little attention to influencing the political system, but notions of solidarity and social change were clearl y present. This form of political consumerism therefore cannot be considered a full form of political participation, but it clearly is a form of 'life style politics'. (shrink)

Environmental pollution, animal diseases, and food scandals have marked the agricultural sector in the Netherlands and elsewhere in the 1990s. The sector was high on the political and societal agenda and plans were developed to redesign the sector into a more sustainable direction. Generally, monitoring of the agricultural sector is done by means of quantitative indicators to measure social, ecological, and economic performance. To give more attention to the normative character of sustainable development, the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature, and (...) Food Quality requested for a participatory approach to evaluate Dutch agriculture, which was characterized by stakeholder workshops, dialogue, and learning. This article describes and reflects on this approach, using the Fourth Generation Evaluation framework developed by Guba and Lincoln (Fourth generation evaluation, 1989). Although there are several improvements to be made, the evaluation approach was successful in the way that it gave insight into perceptions, visions, and ambitions of agricultural stakeholders with regard to sustainability. It also encouraged learning about ways to make the agricultural sector more sustainable. And it contributed to the development of a monitoring approach that is complementary to the quantitative, indicator-based, evaluation approach that is generally used and that can be used every few years to see how perceptions and ambitions of stakeholders have developed. (shrink)

Healthcare is becoming increasingly automated with the development and deployment of care robots. There are many benefits to care robots but they also pose many challenging ethical issues. This paper takes care robots for the elderly as the subject of analysis, building on previous literature in the domain of the ethics and design of care robots. Using the value sensitive design approach to technology design, this paper extends its application to care robots by integrating the values of care, values that (...) are specific to AI, and higher-scale values such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The ethical issues specific to care robots for the elderly are discussed at length alongside examples of specific design requirements that work to ameliorate these ethical concerns. (shrink)

The past few years has seen a resurgence in the public interest in space flight and travel. Spurred mainly by the likes of technology billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the topic poses both unique scientific as well as ethical challenges. This paper looks at the concept of generation ships, conceptual behemoth ships whose goal is to bring a group of human settlers to distant exoplanets. These ships are designed to host multiple generations of people who will be born, (...) live, and die on these ships long before it reaches its destination. This paper takes reproductive ethics as its lens to look at how genetic enhancement interventions can and should be used not only to ensure that future generations of offspring on the ships, and eventual exoplanet colonies, live a minimally good life but that their births are contingent on them living genuinely good and fulfilling lives. The paper makes the further claim that if such a thesis holds, it also does so for human enhancement on Earth. (shrink)

In her first book, Marleen Rozemond explicates Descartes's aim to provide a metaphysics that would accommodate mechanistic science and supplant scholasticism.

The potential for vaccines to prevent the spread of infectious diseases is crucial for vaccination policy and ethics. In this paper, I discuss recent evidence that the current COVID-19 vaccines have only a modest and short-lived effect on reducing SARS-CoV-2 transmission and argue that this has at least four important ethical implications. First, getting vaccinated against COVID-19 should be seen primarily as a self-protective choice for individuals. Second, moral condemnation of unvaccinated people for causing direct harm to others is unjustified. (...) Third, the case for a harm-based moral obligation to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is weak. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, coercive COVID-19 vaccination policies (e.g., measures that exclude unvaccinated people from society) cannot be directly justified by the harm principle. (shrink)

Drawing upon research in philosophical logic, linguistics and cognitive science, this study explores how our ability to use and understand language depends upon our capacity to keep track of complex features of the contexts in which we converse.

Design for Values (DfV) philosophies are a series of design approaches that aim to incorporate human values into the early phases of technological design to direct innovation into beneficial outcomes. The difficulty and necessity of directing advantageous futures for transformative technologies through the application and adoption of value-based design approaches are apparent. However, questions of whose values to design are of critical importance. DfV philosophies typically aim to enrol the stakeholders who may be affected by the emergence of such a (...) technology. However, regardless of which design approach is adopted, all enrolled stakeholders are human ones who propose human values. Contemporary scholarship on metahumanisms, particularly those on posthumanism, have decentred the human from its traditionally privileged position among other forms of life. Arguments that the humanist position is not (and has never been) tenable are persuasive. As such, scholarship has begun to provide a more encompassing ontology for the investigation of nonhuman values. Given the potentially transformative nature of future technologies as relates to the earth and its many assemblages, it is clear that the value investigations of these design approaches fail to account for all relevant stakeholders (i.e., nonhuman animals). This paper has two primary objectives: (1) to argue for the cogency of a posthuman ethics in the design of technologies; and (2) to describe how existing DfV approaches can begin to envision principled and methodological ways of incorporating non-human values into design. To do this, the paper provides a rudimentary outline of what constitutes DfV approaches. It then takes up a unique design approach called Value Sensitive Design (VSD) as an illustrative example. Out of all the other DfV frameworks, VSD most clearly illustrates a principled approach to the integration of values in design. (shrink)

Rockefeller (religion and philosophy, Middlebury College) combines biography and intellectual history in an introduction to the philosophy of Dewey (1859-1952) which emphasizes the evolution of the religious faith and moral vision at the heart of his thought. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Po.

Steven Crowell has been for many years a leading voice in debates on twentieth-century European philosophy. This volume presents thirteen recent essays that together provide a systematic account of the relation between meaningful experience and responsiveness to norms. They argue for a new understanding of the philosophical importance of phenomenology, taking the work of Husserl and Heidegger as exemplary, and introducing a conception of phenomenology broad enough to encompass the practices of both philosophers. Crowell discusses Husserl's analyses of first-person authority, (...) the semantics of conscious experience, the structure of perceptual content, and the embodied subject, and shows how Heidegger's interpretation of the self addresses problems in Husserl's approach to the normative structure of meaning. His volume will be valuable for upper-level students and scholars interested in phenomenological approaches to philosophical questions in both the European and the analytic traditions. (shrink)

This article presents a social learning perspective as a means to analyze and facilitate collective decision making and action in managed resource systems such as platforms. First, the social learning perspective is developed in terms of a normative and analytical framework. The normative framework entails three value principles, namely, systems thinking, experimentation, and communicative rationality. The analytical framework is built up around the following questions: who learns, what is learned, why it is learned, and how. Next, this perspective is used (...) to analyze two managed resource systems: Fishery management in Lake Aheme, Benin and water resources management in Gelderland, The Netherlands. To assess platform performance in resource use negotiation, emerging lessons from the case studies are combined with propositions concerning membership of platforms, accessibility of platform meetings, skills and relations of platform members, realization of platforms, and third party facilitation of platform activities. (shrink)

Emerging technologies such as cloud computing, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence and robotics, among others, are transforming the field of manufacturing and industry as a whole in unprecedent ways. This fourth industrial revolution is consequentially changing how operators that have been crucial to industry success go about their practices in industrial environments. This short paper briefly introduces the notion of the Operator 4.0 as well as how this novel way of conceptualizing the human operator necessarily implicates human values in (...) the technologies that constitute it. Similarly, the design methodology known as value sensitive design (VSD) is drawn upon to discuss how these Operator 4.0 technologies can be design for human values and, conversely, how a potential value-sensitive Operator 4.0 can be used to strengthen the VSD methodology in developing novel technologies. (shrink)

The ethics of technology has primarily focused on what values are and how they can be embedded in technologies through design. In this context, some work has been done to show the efficacy of a number of design approaches. However, existing studies have not clearly pointed out the ways in which design-for-values approaches can be used by design team managers to properly organize and use technologies in practice. This chapter attempts to fill this gap by discussing the value sensitive design (...) (VSD) approach as a useful means of co-designing technologies as a toolkit for existing workflow management, in this case, Agile. It will be demonstrated that VSD shows promise as a way of democratically designing technologies as well as fostering democratic technology policy innovation. (shrink)

Autonomous weapons systems (AWS), sometimes referred to as “killer robots”, are receiving evermore attention, both in public discourse as well as by scholars and policymakers. Much of this interest is connected with emerging ethical and legal problems linked to increasing autonomy in weapons systems, but there is a general underappreciation for the ways in which existing law might impact on these new technologies. In this paper, we argue that as AWS become more sophisticated and increasingly more capable than flesh-and-blood soldiers, (...) it will increasingly be the case that such soldiers are “in the power” of those AWS which fight against them. This implies that such soldiers ought to be considered hors de combat, and not targeted. In arguing for this point, we draw out a broader conclusion regarding hors de combat status, namely that it must be viewed contextually, with close reference to the capabilities of combatants on both sides of any discreet engagement. Given this point, and the fact that AWS may come in many shapes and sizes, and can be made for many different missions, we argue that each particular AWS will likely need its own standard for when enemy soldiers are deemed hors de combat. We conclude by examining how these nuanced views of hors de combat status might impact on meaningful human control of AWS. (shrink)

Ce livre presente une investigation critique de la science generale de l'etre, instituee par Aristote au titre de la science de l'etant en tant qu'etant. L'auteur met en lumiere ce qu'est l'etre pour Aristote, ce que signifie precisement le type d'unite de ses significations multiples, et quelles sont les structures, principes et concepts epistemologiques par lesquels le reel peut etre explique dans son ensemble. L'originalite aristotelicienne qui se revele dans son apprehension horizontale du reel, est a la fois responsable de (...) son naufrage historique dans l'ocean dominant des pensees hierarchisantes, et de son renouveau axtremement stimulant pour la pensee actuelle. (shrink)

The nurse asks the ethics consultant what can be done to stop the patient’s blogging. R.J.’s messages on the public forum are taking their toll on the care environment and the health care providers...

A pandemic may cause a sudden imbalance between available medical resources and medical needs where fundamental care to a patient cannot be delivered. Inability to fulfil a professional commitment to deliver care as needed can lead to distress among caregivers and patients. This distress is sometimes alleviated through mechanisms that hide the facts that care is rationed and not all medical needs are met. We have identified three mechanisms that jeopardise accountable and optimal allocation of resources: hidden value judgements that (...) allow rationing under the disguise of triage or prioritisation, disguised conflict of interest between societal and individual patient’s needs and concealed biases in the application of medical tools. Under these three pitfalls decisions of resource allocation and who gets treated are handled as medical decisions: normative decisions are concealed and perceived as falling with the realm of medical judgement. Value judgements and moral agency are hidden to offer a ‘false sense of medical judgement’, while in fact there are several ethical judgements and biases at stake. The three pitfalls entail hidden normative deliberation and are inappropriate for sustainable healthcare delivery and resource allocation. We believe it is necessary to maintain transparency in decision making under conditions of insufficient resources to maintain trust in professional care givers and secure fair treatment allocation. Recognition of the pitfalls, by applying our recommendations, may help to ensure transparent and accountable distribution of care and contribute to public acceptance of the ethics behind rationing. (shrink)

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was one of the most important philosophers of all time; he was also arguably the most radical and controversial. This was the first complete biography of Spinoza in any language and is based on detailed archival research. More than simply recounting the story of Spinoza's life, the book takes the reader right into the heart of Jewish Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and, with Spinoza's exile from Judaism, right into the midst of the tumultuous political, social, intellectual (...) and religious world of the young Dutch Republic. Though the book will be an invaluable resource for philosophers, historians, and scholars of Jewish thought, it has been written for any member of the general reading public with a serious interest in philosophy, Jewish history, seventeenth-century European history, and the culture of the Dutch Golden Age. Spinoza: A Life has recently been awarded the Koret Jewish Book Award. (shrink)