BackgroundDecision-making in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest should ideally include clinical and ethical factors. Little is known about the extent of ethical considerations and their influence on prehospital resuscitation. We aimed to determine the transparency in medical records regarding decision-making in prehospital resuscitation with a specific focus on ethically relevant information and consideration in resuscitation providers’ documentation.MethodsThis was a Danish nationwide retrospective observational study of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests from 2016 through 2018. After an initial screening using broadly defined inclusion criteria, two experienced (...) philosophers performed a qualitative content analysis of the included medical records according to a preliminary codebook. We identified ethically relevant content in free-text fields and categorised the information according to Beauchamp and Childress’ four basic bioethical principles: autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice. ResultsOf 16,495 medical records, we identified 759 (4.6%) with potentially relevant information; 710 records (4.3%) contained ethically relevant information, whereas 49 did not. In general, the documentation was vague and unclear. We identified four kinds of ethically relevant information: patients’ wishes and perspectives on life; relatives’ wishes and perspectives on patients’ life; healthcare professionals’ opinions and perspectives on resuscitation; and do-not-resuscitate orders. We identified some “best practice” examples that included all perspectives of decision-making. ConclusionsThere is sparse and unclear evidence on ethically relevant information in the medical records documenting resuscitation after out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. However, the “best practice” examples show that providing sufficient documentation of decision-making is, in fact, feasible. To ensure transparency surrounding prehospital decisions in cardiac arrests, we believe that it is necessary to ensure more systematic documentation of decision-making in prehospital resuscitation. (shrink)

Why is there such a striking discrepancy between the flexibility, democracy and empowerment that the Bologna process aims for, and the superficial educational activities that it actually results in? Our answer is based on the ritual theory of the American anthropologist Roy Rappaport and the psychoanalytical framework of the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller. Interpreting schoolified education as a ritual, we argue that both the reform initiative and its ensuing educational activities should be interpreted as mainly productive of a certain appearance, (...) of compliance with prominent norms of modern society: the norms are articulated in policy documents and enacted in educational activity. We take schoolified education to be a normal ritual, in that this appearance is accepted ‘as if’ it corresponded with reality, while at the same time most people are aware (in a certain sense) of its superficial and ritualistic character. A twist, however, is added by the fact that modern society is distinctly anti-ritualistic, and therefore constantly tries to make education work ‘for real’. Drawing on Pfaller’s distinction between belief and faith, we show that this pursuit of de-ritualisation actually makes education progressively more formalised and coercive. (shrink)

Why is there such a striking discrepancy between the flexibility, democracy and empowerment that the Bologna process aims for, and the superficial educational activities that it actually results in? Our answer is based on the ritual theory of the American anthropologist Roy Rappaport and the psychoanalytical framework of the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller. Interpreting schoolified education as a ritual, we argue that both the reform initiative and its ensuing educational activities should be interpreted as mainly productive of a certain appearance, (...) of compliance with prominent norms of modern society: the norms are articulated in policy documents and enacted in educational activity. We take schoolified education to be a normal ritual, in that this appearance is accepted ‘as if’ it corresponded with reality, while at the same time most people are aware (in a certain sense) of its superficial and ritualistic character. A twist, however, is added by the fact that modern society is distinctly anti-ritualistic, and therefore constantly tries to make education work ‘for real’. Drawing on Pfaller’s distinction between belief and faith, we show that this pursuit of de-ritualisation actually makes education progressively more formalised and coercive. (shrink)

Hobbes's political theory has traditionally been taken to be an endorsement of state power and a prescription for unconditional obedience to the sovereign's will. In this book, Susanne Sreedhar develops a novel interpretation of Hobbes's theory of political obligation and explores important cases where Hobbes claims that subjects have a right to disobey and resist state power, even when their lives are not directly threatened. Drawing attention to this broader set of rights, her comprehensive analysis of Hobbes's account of (...) political disobedience reveals a unified and coherent theory of resistance that has previously gone unnoticed and undefended. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in the nature and limits of political authority, the right of self-defense, the right of revolution, and the modern origins of these issues. (shrink)

Oregon is the only state in the United States where a physician may legally prescribe a lethal dose of barbiturate for a patient intending suicide. The Oregon Death with Dignity Act was passed by voters in 1994 and came into effect after much legal wrangling in October of 1997. At the same time, a cabinetmaker named Pat Matheny was struggling with progressive weakness from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. I met with Pat and his family for a lengthy interview in (...) October 1998 in Coos Bay, Oregon, for a television news report on his decision to get a lethal prescription. Below is an extract from that interview. On the day this introduction was written, 10 March 1999, Pat took the prescribed lethal overdose of barbiturates and died at home. His illness was taking his voice, he could not move his hands or legs, and breathing was becoming very difficult. His mother told me he knew that was for him. (shrink)

This paper sets out from the hypothesis that the embodied competences and expertise which characterise dance and sports activities have the potential to constructively challenge and inform phenomenological thinking. While pathological cases present experiences connected to tangible bodily deviations, the specialised movement practices of dancers and athletes present experiences which put our everyday experiences of being a moving body into perspective in a slightly different sense. These specialised experiences present factual variations of how moving, sensing and interacting can be like (...) for us as body-subjects. To use of these sources inevitably demands that qualitative research methodologies – especially short-term ethnographical fieldwork – form part of the research strategy and qualify the way the researcher involves a second-person perspective when interviewing dancers and athletes about their experiences. In the subsequent phases analysing the data generated, I argue that researchers first strive to achieve internal consistency of empirical themes identified in the case of movement practices in question thus keeping to a contextualised and lived perspective, also denoted as an emic perspective. In subsequent phases phenomenological insights are then actively engaged in the exploration and discussion of the possible transcendental structures making the described subjective experiences possible. The specialised and context-defined experiences of ‘what a moving body can be like’ are accordingly involved as factual variations to constructively add to and potentially challenge phenomenological descriptions. Lastly, I exemplify how actual research strategies have been enacted in a variety of projects involving professional dancers’, golfers’ and sports dancers’ practices and experiences, respectively. (shrink)

Author Susanne Claxton offers a new ecophenomenological perspective to Heidegger and his engagement with the Greeks, and an alternative to the ruling binary in environmental ethics of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism.

In this article, we inquire into Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and Michele Merritt’s descriptions and use of dance improvisation as it relates to “thinking in movement.” We agree with them scholars that improvisational practices present interesting cases for investigating how movement, thinking, and agency intertwine. However, we also find that their descriptions of improvisation overemphasize the dimension of spontaneity as an intuitive “letting happen” of movements. To recalibrate their descriptions of improvisational practices, we couple Ezequiel Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier E. (...) Barandiaran’s enactive account of the constitution of agency with case studies of two expert performers of improvisation: a dancer and a musician. Our analyses hereof show that their improvisations unfold as a sophisticated oscillation of agency between specialized forms of mental and bodily control and, indeed, a more spontaneous “letting things happen.” In all, this article’s conclusions frame thinking in movement concerning improvisational practices as contextually embedded, purposively trained, and inherently relational. (shrink)

This book investigates how collaborative scientific practice yields scientific knowledge. At a time when most of today’s scientific knowledge is created in research groups, the author reconsiders the social character of science to address the question of whether collaboratively created knowledge should be considered as collective achievement, and if so, in which sense. Combining philosophical analysis with qualitative empirical inquiry, this book provides a comparative case study of mono- and interdisciplinary research groups, offering insight into the day-to-day practice of scientists. (...) The book includes field observations and interviews with scientists to present an empirically-grounded perspective on much-debated questions concerning research groups’ division of labor, relations of epistemic dependence and trust. (shrink)

On March 11, 2020 the World Health Organization classified COVID‐19, caused by Sars‐CoV‐2, as a pandemic. Although not much was known about the new virus, the first outbreaks in China and Italy showed that potentially a large number of people worldwide could fall critically ill in a short period of time. A shortage of ventilators and intensive care resources was expected in many countries, leading to concerns about restrictions of medical care and preventable deaths. In order to be prepared for (...) this challenging situation, national triage guidance has been developed or adapted from former influenza pandemic guidelines in an increasing number of countries over the past few months. In this article, we provide a comparative analysis of triage recommendations from selected national and international professional societies, including Australia/New Zealand, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Pakistan, South Africa, Switzerland, the United States, and the International Society of Critical Care Medicine. We describe areas of consensus, including the importance of prognosis, patient will, transparency of the decision‐making process, and psychosocial support for staff, as well as the role of justice and benefit maximization as core principles. We then probe areas of disagreement, such as the role of survival versus outcome, long‐term versus short‐term prognosis, the use of age and comorbidities as triage criteria, priority groups and potential tiebreakers such as ‘lottery’ or ‘first come, first served’. Having explored a number of tensions in current guidance, we conclude with a suggestion for framework conditions that are clear, consistent and implementable. This analysis is intended to advance the ongoing debate regarding the fair allocation of limited resources and may be relevant for future policy‐making. (shrink)

This book offers a new account of what it is to act for a normative reason. The first part of the book examines the problems of causal accounts of acting for reasons and suggests to solve them by a dispositional approach. The author argues for a dispositional account which unites epistemic, volitional, and executional dispositions in a complex normative competence. This ‘Normative Competence Account’ allows for more and less reflective ways of acting for normative reasons. The second part of the (...) book clarifies the relation between the normative reason that an agent acts for and his or her motivating reasons. It refutes the widely held ‘identity view’ that acting for a normative reason requires the normative reason to be identical with a motivating reason. The author describes how normative reasons are related to motivating reasons by a relation of correspondence, and proposes a new understanding of how normative reasons explain those actions that are performed for them. Determined by Reasons engages with current debates from a wide range of different philosophical areas, including action theory, metaethics, moral psychology, epistemology, and ontology, to develop a new account of acting for normative reasons. (shrink)

Chapter Introduction. Syntactic focus theory and the phenomenon of secondary predication The primary goal of this monograph is to examine the interaction of ...

Although artificial intelligence has been given an unprecedented amount of attention in both the public and academic domains in the last few years, its convergence with other transformative technologies like cloud computing, robotics, and augmented/virtual reality is predicted to exacerbate its impacts on society. The adoption and integration of these technologies within industry and manufacturing spaces is a fundamental part of what is called Industry 4.0, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The impacts of this paradigm shift on the human operators (...) who continue to work alongside and symbiotically with these technologies in the industry bring with it novel ethical issues. Therefore, how to design these technologies for human values becomes the critical area of intervention. This paper takes up the case study of robotic AI-based assistance systems to explore the potential value implications that emerge due to current design practices and use. The design methodology known as Value Sensitive Design (VSD) is proposed as a sufficient starting point for designing these technologies for human values to address these issues. (shrink)

Bobzien presents the definitive study of one of the most interesting intellectual legacies of the ancient Greeks: the Stoic theory of causal determinism. She explains what it was, how the Stoics justified it, and how it relates to their views on possibility, action, freedom, moral responsibility, moral character, fatalism, logical determinism and many other topics. She demonstrates the considerable philosophical richness and power that these ideas retain today.

This paper argues that under conditions of uncertainty, there is frequently a positive option value to staying alive when compared to the alternative of dying right away. This value can make it prudentially rational for you to stay alive even if it appears highly unlikely that you have a bright future ahead of you. Drawing on the real options approach to investment analysis, the paper explores the conditions under which there is a positive option value to staying alive, and it (...) draws out important implications for the problems of suicide and euthanasia. (shrink)

There is a trade-off between specificity and accuracy in existing models of belief. Descriptions of agents in the tripartite model, which recognizes only three doxastic attitudes—belief, disbelief, and suspension of judgment—are typically accurate, but not sufficiently specific. The orthodox Bayesian model, which requires real-valued credences, is perfectly specific, but often inaccurate: we often lack precise credences. I argue, first, that a popular attempt to fix the Bayesian model by using sets of functions is also inaccurate, since it requires us to (...) have interval-valued credences with perfectly precise endpoints. We can see this problem as analogous to the problem of higher order vagueness. Ultimately, I argue, the only way to avoid these problems is to endorse Insurmountable Unclassifiability. This principle has some surprising and radical consequences. For example, it entails that the trade-off between accuracy and specificity is in-principle unavoidable: sometimes it is simply impossible to characterize an agent’s doxastic state in a way that is both fully accurate and maximally specific. What we can do, however, is improve on both the tripartite and existing Bayesian models. I construct a new model of belief—the minimal model—that allows us to characterize agents with much greater specificity than the tripartite model, and yet which remains, unlike existing Bayesian models, perfectly accurate. (shrink)

The Moral Responsibility Account of Liability to Defensive Harm (MRA) states that an agent becomes liable to defensive harm if, and only if, she engages in a foreseeably risk-imposing activity that subsequently threatens objectively unjustified harm. Advocates of the account contend that liability to defensive harm is best understood as an aspect of distributive justice. Individuals who are liable to some harm are not wronged if the harm is imposed on them, and liability to defensive harm thus helps ensure that (...) harm is borne by whoever has least of an objection of justice against being burdened with it—or so advocates of the MRA insist. In this paper, I argue that liability to defensive harm is not grounded in considerations of distributive justice. While it depends on the wider societal context what allocation of a burden is distributively most just, liability to defensive harm is a distinctly localised affair. I propose that liability to defensive harm is best understood as part of the enforcement dimension of our rights to non-interference. Framing liability in this way does not invalidate the MRA. It does, however, render subjective impermissibility accounts of liability particularly promising. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the relation between body and space – specifically how the relation between the embodied awareness of movement and the sense of one’s body-space can be modified and changed deliberately in different kinds of dance practices. Using a multi-sited design, the ethnographical fieldwork, which formed the empirical ground for the study, was from the outset focused on acknowledging the diversity of the dancers’ practices. Each in their own way, the 13 professional dancers involved in the study (...) relate to and experience bodied potentialities, body-space and the spatiality of movement differently. Through their practice, they indicate that the body image is shaped through a multisensorial process of reification, and that seeing is to be related to a broader perceptual engagement. Furthermore, they exemplify how seeing can be deliberately used to expand the sense of their body-space and thereby to affect the spatiality of the fields of their embodied interaction. (shrink)

Imagine that, through no fault of your own, you nd yourself at the bottom of a deep well. Thugs have picked up an innocent person | call him Bob | and have thrown him down the well. Bob is now falling towards you. If you do nothing, your body will cushion Bob's otherwise lethal fall. This will guarantee his survival, but it will kill you. If you shoot your ray gun, you vaporize and kill Bob, thereby saving your life. Are (...) you morally permitted to shoot your ray gun?Most people believe that self-defence against an innocent threat such as Bob is permissible. Judith Thomson (1991) and Frances Kamm (1987) have tried to justify this widely held belief. Jeff McMahan (2002) and Michael Otsuka (1994) have argued against it. In this paper, I contend that arguments from both sides of the debate mistakenly take the existence of an important asymmetry between Bob and you for granted. That way, they miss how similar Bob and you are, in that both of you happen to nd yourselves, undeservingly and through no fault of your own, in a situation in which you can secure your own survival only if you kill an innocent person. In this paper, I argue that despite certain differences, we are justi ed in focusing on the simliarities between Bob and you, and that you should thus flip a coin to decide who should live (cf. Broome, 1991). By flipping a coin, you ensure that an indivisible good -- continuing one's life -- is distributed as fairly as is possible without wasting it. (shrink)

In recent decades, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has become a powerful forum for trade liberalization and regulatory harmonization. OECD members have worked to reconcile divergent national regulatory approaches, applying a single framework across sovereign states, in effect determining whose knowledge-making practices would guide regulatory action throughout the industrialized world. Focusing on US regulators, industry associations, and environmental groups, this article explores the participatory politics of OECD chemical regulation harmonization in the late 1970s to early 1980s. These efforts (...) were conditioned by differential institutional access and resources among stakeholders who sought to shape regulatory knowledge rules. Facing competing European and US approaches to chemical data—a minimum “base set” of test data versus case-by-case determinations—OECD members chose the European approach in 1980. However, US regulatory politics shifted with the election of President Reagan, prompting industry associations to lobby the US government to block the agreement. Examining the micropolitics of these standards in the making, I demonstrate that while long-term structures advantaged industrial actors, ideological alignment with the US government precipitated their decisive influence. The case illustrates the importance of attending to the distinctive politics of international harmonization and the effects on transnational knowledge-making and regulatory intervention. (shrink)

This paper offers an analytic perspective on epistemic dependence that is grounded in theoretical discussion and field observation at the same time. When in the course of knowledge creation epistemic labor is divided, collaborating scientists come to depend upon one another epistemically. Since instances of epistemic dependence are multifarious in scientific practice, I propose to distinguish between two different forms of epistemic dependence, opaque and translucent epistemic dependence. A scientist is opaquely dependent upon a colleague if she does not possess (...) the expertise necessary to independently carry out, and to profoundly assess, the piece of scientific labor which her colleague is contributing. If the scientist does possess the necessary expertise, I argue, her dependence is translucent. However, the distinction between opaque and translucent epistemic dependence does not exhaust dependence relations in scientific practice, because many dependence relations are neither entirely opaque nor translucent. I will discuss why this is the case, and show how we can make sense of the gray zone between opaque and translucent epistemic dependence. (shrink)

This volume brings together philosophical and interdisciplinary perspectives on improvisation. The contributions connect the theoretical dimensions of improvisation with different viewpoints on its practice in the arts and the classroom. The chapters address the phenomenon of improvisation in two related ways. On the one hand, they attend to the lived practices of improvisation both within and without the arts in order to explain the phenomenon. They also extend the scope of improvisational practices to include the role of improvisation in habit (...) and in planned action, at both individual and collective levels. Drawing on recent work done in the philosophy of mind, they also address questions such as whether improvisation is a single unified phenomenon, or whether it entails different senses that can be discerned theoretically and practically. Finally, they ask after the special kind of improvisational expertise which characterizes musicians, dancers, and other practitioners, an expertise marked by the artist's ability to participate competently in complex situations while deliberately relinquishing control. Philosophy of Improvisation will appeal to researchers working in philosophy, aesthetics, and pedagogy and the arts as well as practitioners involved in different kinds of music, dance, and theater performances. (shrink)

Through the ages, many thinkers have worried that our death fears mar our lives. Sharing this worry, the Epicureans have argued that we can live well only if we see death for what it is: a mere “nothing” that it is ill-fitting to fear. I show how this argument depends on the assumption that a mental state theory of well-being is correct. If we give up this assumption, it can be fitting to fear death. Using my philosophical discussion of when (...) and how it is fitting to fear death, I formulate three strategies for keeping our death-related fears in check. In this way, my paper follows the therapeutic tradition in philosophy, whose potential I urge effective altruists to explore. (shrink)

Building on the emotion-centered model of voluntary work behavior, this research tests the relations between leader narcissism, followers’ malicious and benign envy, and supervisor-targeted counterproductive work behavior. Results across five studies, two experimental studies, and two field surveys indicate that leader narcissism relates positively to followers’ negative emotions, which in turn mediates the positive relation between leader narcissism and supervisor-targeted CWB. Proposed negative relations between leader narcissism and positive emotions were only partly supported. Our findings advance the understanding of envy (...) and the detrimental impact of leader narcissism on organizational functioning. (shrink)

We frequently engage in activities that impose a risk of serious harm on innocent others in order to realise trivial benefits for ourselves or third parties. Many moral theories tie the evidence-relative permissibility of engaging in such activities to the size of the risk that an individual agent imposes. I argue that we should move away from such a reliance on quantified individual risks when conceptualising morally permissible risk imposition. Under most circumstances of interest, a conscientious reasoner will identify a (...) gap between the factors they deem potentially relevant to the riskiness of an agent’s behaviour, and the factors they are reasonably able to quantify. This then leads a conscientious reasoner to conclude that they cannot, in good faith, come up with a quantitative risk estimate that is genuinely tailored to the agent’s particular situation. Based on this, I argue that principles of morally permissible risk imposition fail to provide us with practical guidance if they ask us to take into account our agent-specific risks in a quantified manner. I also argue that principles of permissible risk imposition which appeal to quantified individual risks implausibly imply that it is frequently indeterminate whether engaging in some risky activity is morally permissible. For both of these reasons, I contend that principles of morally permissible risk imposition should make no reference to quantified individual risks. They should instead acknowledge that any quantitative estimates that an agent might usefully be able to consider will likely not be tailored to the agent’s idiosyncratic situation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Recently a bold and admirable interpretation of Chrysippus’ position on the Sorites has been presented, suggesting that Chrysippus offered a solution to the Sorites by (i) taking an epistemicist position1 which (ii) made allowances for higher-order vagueness. In this paper I argue (i) that Chrysippus did not take an epistemicist position, but − if any − a non-epistemic one which denies truth-values to some cases in a Sorites-series, and (ii) that it is uncertain whether and how he made allowances (...) for higher-order vagueness, but if he did, this was not grounded on an epistemicist position. (shrink)

I argue for the view that there are important similarities between knowledge and acting for a normative reason. I interpret acting for a normative reason in terms of Sosa’s notion of an apt performance. Actions that are done for a normative reason are normatively apt actions. They are in accordance with a normative reason because of a competence to act in accordance with normative reasons. I argue that, if Sosa’s account of knowledge as apt belief is correct, this means that (...) acting for a normative reason is in many respects similar to knowledge. In order to strengthen Sosa’s account of knowledge, I propose to supplement it with an appeal to sub-competences. This clarifies how this account can deal with certain Gettier cases, and it helps to understand how exactly acting for a normative reason is similar to apt belief. (shrink)

Based on an empirical study of a research team in natural science, the author argues that collaborating scientists do not trust each other completely. Due to the inherent incompleteness of trust, epistemic trust among scientists is not sufficient to manage epistemic dependency in research teams. To mitigate the limitations of epistemic trust, scientists resort to specific strategies of indirect assessment such as dialoguing practices and the probing of explanatory responsiveness. Furthermore, they rely upon impersonal trust and deploy practices of hierarchical (...) authorship. (shrink)

This paper summarizes (in German) recent tendencies in the philosophy of the life sciences.

This essay is concerned with the relation between motivating and normative reasons. According to a common and influential thesis, a normative reason is identical with a motivating reason when an agent acts for that normative reason. I will call this thesis the ‘Identity Thesis’. Many philosophers treat the Identity Thesis as a commonplace or a truism. Accordingly, the Identity Thesis has been used to rule out certain ontological views about reasons. I distinguish a deliberative and an explanatory version of the (...) Identity Thesis and argue that there are no convincing arguments to accept either version. Furthermore, I point out an alternative to the Identity Thesis. The relation between motivating and normative reasons can be thought of as one of representation, not identity. (shrink)

In this extended essay, I argue that Frege plagiarized the Stoics --and I mean exactly that-- on a large scale in his work on the philosophy of logic and language as written mainly between 1890 and his death in 1925 (much of which published posthumously) and possibly earlier. I use ‘plagiarize' (or 'plagiarise’) merely as a descriptive term. The essay is not concerned with finger pointing or casting moral judgement. The point is rather to demonstrate carefully by means of detailed (...) evidence that there are numerous (over a hundred) and extensive parallels both in formulation and --more importantly-- in content between the Stoics and Frege, parallels so plentiful that one would be hard pressed to brush them off as coincidence. These parallels include several that appear to occur in no other modern works that were published before Frege’s own and were accessible to him. Additionally, a cluster of corroborating historical data is adduced to support the suggestion, showing how easy it would have to been for Frege to plagiarize the Stoics. This (first) part of the essay is easy to read and vaguely entertaining, or so I hope. -/- (Corrigendum: At school, Frege likely had seven, not ten, years of intensive Latin and four years of intensive ancient Greek courses.). (shrink)

This paper examines whether an agent becomes liable to defensive harm by engaging in a morally permissible but foreseeably risk-imposing activity that subsequently threatens objectively unjustified harm. It first clarifies the notion of a foreseeably risk-imposing activity by proposing that an activity should count as foreseeably risk-imposing if an agent may morally permissibly perform it only if she abides by certain duties of care. Those who argue that engaging in such an activity can render an agent liable to defensive harm (...) ground this liability in the luck egalitarian thought that we may justly hold individuals responsible for the consequences of their voluntary choices. Against this, I argue that a luck egalitarian commitment to holding people responsible cannot, by itself, ground liability to defensive harm. It can help ground such liability only against the backdrop of a distributively just society, and only if further considerations speak morally in favour of attaching certain well-defined costs to individuals’ risk-imposing choices. I conclude by suggesting that if an account of liability applies robustly across distributively just and unjust contexts alike, then what grounds an agent’s liability is plausibly not her responsibility for threatening objectively unjustified harm, but her culpability for doing so. (shrink)

In the face of increasing intervention in childbirth, ‘normal birth’ is currently being promoted by the World Health Organization, national governments, professional bodies and other organisations throughout the world. This paper takes a postmodernist stance and explores the idea of the ‘normal’ before going on to analyse normal childbirth, referring to concepts of the normal and the natural. It refers to historical developments in childbearing and lay organisations along with research relating to women’s views of childbirth, to question the appropriateness (...) of using ‘normal’ to describe the very individual experiences of childbirth. It laments the way in which women have been treated and arguably continue to be ‘cared for’ in maternity/obstetric services. It adds to the current discussion by recalling psychoanalytical theory and philosophical analysis to conclude with a call for future consideration of the ‘good‐enough’ birth instead of concentrating on promoting normal birth which is very difficult, if not impossible to define in retrospect, or to prospectively promote. (shrink)

Die viel beschworene "Wiederkehr der Religion" ist zu einem nicht geringen Teil eine Wiederkehr bzw. eine Aktualisierung von Elementen mystischer Traditionen. Einem angemessenen Verstandnis der gegenwartigen Religionskultur ist also eine Sensibilitat fur das vielschichtige Phanomen des Mystischen vorausgesetzt. Vor diesem Hintergrund bietet der Band kulturhermeneutische, theologische, religionsphilosophische und religionswissenschaftliche Studien zu Wesen und Bedeutung der Mystik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Gemeinsames Ziel der Beitrage ist es, jener besonderen Leidenschaft fur das Unauslotbare auf die Spur zu kommen, die die verschiedensten Denker (...) von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart miteinander verbindet. (shrink)

According to Socrates, as he is described in Plato?s Phaedo, the definition of a true philosopher is a wise man who is continuously practicing dying and being dead. Already in this life, the philosopher tries to free his soul from the body in order to acquire true knowledge as the soul is progressively becoming detached from the body. Centuries after it was written, Plato?s Phaedo continued to play a role for some early Christian authors, and this article focuses on three (...) instances where Christian women mirror Socrates and/or his definition of philosophy. We find these instances in hagiographical literature from the fourth and fifth centuries at different locations in the Roman Empire - in the Lives of Macrina, Marcella and Syncletica. These texts are all to varying degrees impacted by Platonic philosophy and by the ideal of the male philosopher Socrates. As women mastering philosophy, they widened common cultural expectations for women, revealing how Christian authors in certain contexts ascribed authority to female figures. (shrink)

In this article, I show that Hegel’s philosophical articulation of the family is inextricably bound to his engagement with political economy by focusing on three central aspects of his theory of the family. Firstly, I analyze how Hegel construes the family as a historically distinct social dispositif and constitutive element of the modern order of property. I argue that Hegel’s construction of the family and its place in the modern order of property is not only gendered but also racialized. Secondly, (...) I focus on Hegel’s articulation of the nexus between the family and civil society and his critical diagnosis of the structural problems that result from it. Thirdly, I discuss Hegel’s concept of labor and the political-epistemic limitations of his problematization of civil society, which are bound to it. I draw attention to three aspects, namely the confinement of the concept of labor to civil society, Hegel’s rearticulation of the gendered matter/form distinction, and the relation between Hegel’s economic notion and speculative usage of “labor.” Finally, I consider briefly how a critical reading of Hegel’s articulation of the political economy of the family can provide productive insights for a multidimensional theory of the family today. (shrink)