The study of Agrippa's works confirms his constant interest in the theory and practice of alchemy. The apparent contradiction between De occulta philosophia, which uses alchemical doctrines, and De vanitate scientiarum, where alchemy is harshly criticized, is to be resolved in the light of a moral and cultural reform founded on a Hermetic-Christian perspective on the relationship between faith and reason. The analysis of the alchemic passages in De occulta philosophia proves that Agrippa's transmutatory operations have no secondary role in (...) his 'restored' magic. Furthermore, these operations are oriented towards a utopia, where original unity is to be regained. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the specific topic of oniric and prophetic praenotio, which Pomponazzi discussed in his main works. Pomponazzi aims at proving that dreams and prophecies are not inspired by Christian God, angels or demons, but are natural phaenomena, depending on divine, impersonal providence (fatum), which guarantees through astral movement the eternal preservation of human species.

MAPEDZAHAMA V, RUDGE T, WEST S and PERRON A. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 153–164 [Epub ahead of print]Black nurse in white space? Rethinking the in/visibility of race within the Australian nursing workplaceThis article presents an analysis of data from a critical qualitative study with 14 skilled black African migrant nurses, which document their experiences of nurse‐to‐nurse racism and racial prejudice in Australian nursing workplaces. Racism generally and nurse‐to‐nurse racism specifically, continues to be under‐researched in explorations of these workplaces; when racism (...) is researched, the focus is nurse‐to‐patient racism and racial prejudice. Similarly, research on the experiences of migrant nurses from a variety of ethnicities in Australia has tended to neglect their experiences of the social dynamics of the workplace, thus reinforcing their racialisation. When racialised, the migrant nurse becomes ‘the problem’ through a focus on English language competency and ensuing communication barriers. This paper applies Essed’s framework of ‘everyday racism’ to theorise narratives of racism by black African migrant nurses in Australia. In so doing, it not only brings to the fore silenced discussions of nurse‐to‐nurse racism in Australia, but also exposes the subtle, mundane nature of contemporary racism. For this reason, while the data we present must be read within their context, that is, the Australian nursing workplace, it has significance for advancing a critical analysis of racialised minority groups’ experiences of racism within seemingly ‘race‐less’ nursing workplaces internationally. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir is a representative of one of the leading philosophical schools in the middle of the 20th century. The article presents Beauvoir’s artistic method, applied in her novel The Mandarins, and examines the theoretical and biographical sources of the novel. The author demonstrates the place that the novel has in the Beauvoir’s literary and philosophical heritage and reveals the genre features of the work, introducing some special terms such as engaged, modern or philosophical novel and testimonial autobiographical project. (...) The article also analyzes the novel’s literary form and the binary structure of the narrative. The study of the main characters, who are Henri Perron, Anne Dubreuilh and her husband Robert, allows to give a couple of narrative lines. First of them is the inner line that opens the reflective, contemplative and intimate life of one of the main characters – Anne. The second one is the outer line that means that the reader receives the information about characters from the Henry’s actions. Basing on this structure, we draw a conclusion about the modifications in the genre of existential novel in the postwar years. The new themes can be found in the literature. Authors introduce to readers the certain social reality through the inner life of some characters – intellectuals, novelists or philosophers. The thesis about the inner transformation of the genre is proved on Beauvoir’ and Jean-Paul Sartre’s works and on the prewar works of Sartre and Albert Camus. Beauvoir’s new literary methods and plots, which are the logical development of her work, made her novel one of the pioneers in the postwar literature. (shrink)

The theory of nonnegative matrices is an example of a theory motivated in its origins and development by purely mathematical concerns that later proved to have a remarkably broad spectrum of applications to such diverse fields as probability theory, numerical analysis, economics, dynamical programming, and demography. At the heart of the theory is what is usually known as the Perron–Frobenius Theorem. It was inspired by a theorem of Oskar Perron on positive matrices, usually called Perron’s Theorem. This paper is primarily (...) concerned with the origins of Perron’s Theorem in his masterful work on ordinary and generalized continued fractions (1907) and its role in inspiring the remarkable work of Frobenius on nonnegative matrices (1912) that produced, inter alia, the Perron–Frobenius Theorem. The paper is not at all intended exclusively for readers with expertise in the theory of nonnegative matrices. Anyone with a basic grounding in linear algebra should be able to read this article and come away with a good understanding of the Perron–Frobenius Theorem as well as its historical origins. The final section of the paper considers the first major application of the Perron–Frobenius Theorem, namely, to the theory of Markov chains. When he introduced the eponymous chains in 1908, Markov adumbrated several key notions and results of the Perron–Frobenius theory albeit within the much simpler context of stochastic matrices; but it was by means of Frobenius’ 1912 paper that the linear algebraic foundations of Markov’s theory for nonpositive stochastic matrices were first established by R. Von Mises and V.I. Romanovsky. (shrink)

t. 1. Dialog s V. V. Davydovym -- t. 2. Nereshennye problemy razvivai︠u︡shchego obrazovanii︠a︡.

Change is inevitable, and increasingly rapid and continuous in healthcare as organizations strive to adapt, improve and innovate. Organizational change challenges healthcare providers because it restructures how and when patient care delivery is provided, changing ways in which nurses must carry out their work. The aim of this doctoral study was to explore frontline nurses’ experiences of living with rapid and continuous organizational change. A critical hermeneutic approach was utilized. Participants described feeling voiceless, powerless and apolitical amidst rapid and continuous (...) organizational changes which fuelled apathy, cynicism and disengagement from the organization. However, critical analysis of the data showed that nurses actively engaged with power, voice and politics through resistant and transgressive behaviours in micro‐ethical moments of practice. There is a need to reconceptualize the concepts of voice, power and politics in nursing as there is dissonance between nurses’ beliefs about these concepts and what they are enacting in practice. Recognizing their enactment of power, voice and political agency at the micro‐level may empower nurses. Empowerment would mitigate the high levels of reports of powerlessness experienced in practice during organizational changes. (shrink)

The debate surrounding the issue of collective moral responsibility is often steeped in metaphysical issues of agency and personhood. I suggest that we can approach the metaphysical problems surrounding the issue of collective responsibility in a roundabout manner. My approach is reminiscent of that taken by P.F. Strawson in "Freedom and Resentment" (1968). Strawson argues that the participant reactive attitudes - attitudes like resentment, gratitude, forgiveness and so on - provide the justification for holding individuals morally responsible. I argue that (...) the framework of the reactive attitudes extends to collectives and provides the justification for holding collectives morally responsible. (shrink)

Giordano Bruno’s interest in magic was not a marginal aspect of his philosophy. In the magical works written in 1589 and 1591, Bruno carried out his project of a cultural reform, which he also conceived as a pratical renovatio. In De magia naturali Bruno undertook a careful theoretical reexamination of Renaissance magic in order to ground its "experimental data" on physical foundation. Some traditional notions , which Bruno found in his sources and made use of, are analyzed in his paper (...) to show the deep change they underwent in the light of Bruno’s new ontology and cosmology. (shrink)

Inner speech has been shown to vary in form along several dimensions. Along condensation, condensed inner speech forms have been described, that are supposed to be deprived of acoustic, phonological and even syntactic qualities. Expanded forms, on the other extreme, display articulatory and auditory properties. Along dialogality, inner speech can be monologal, when we engage in internal soliloquy, or dialogal, when we recall past conversations or imagine future dialogues involving our own voice as well as that of others addressing us. (...) Along intentionality, it can be intentional (when we deliberately rehearse material in short-term memory) or it can arise unintentionally (during mind wandering). We introduce the ConDialInt model, a neurocognitive predictive control model of inner speech that accounts for its varieties along these three dimensions. ConDialInt spells out the condensation dimension by including inhibitory control at the conceptualization, formulation or articulatory planning stage. It accounts for dialogality, by assuming internal model adaptations and by speculating on neural processes underlying perspective switching. It explains the differences between intentional and spontaneous varieties in terms of monitoring. We present an fMRI study in which we probed varieties of inner speech along dialogality and intentionality, to examine the validity of the neuroanatomical correlates posited in ConDialInt. Condensation was also informally tackled. Our data support the hypothesis that expanded inner speech recruits speech production processes down to articulatory planning, resulting in a predicted signal, the inner voice, with auditory qualities. Along dialogality, covertly using an avatar’s voice resulted in the activation of right hemisphere homologues of the regions involved in internal own-voice soliloquy and in cerebellar deactivation, consistent with internal model adaptation. Switching from first-person to third-person perspective resulted in activations in precuneus and parietal lobules. Along intentionality, compared with intentional inner speech, mind wandering with inner speech episodes was associated with greater bilateral inferior frontal activation and decreased activation in left temporal regions. This is consistent with the reported subjective evanescence and presumably reflects condensation processes. Our results provide neuroanatomical evidence compatible with predictive control and in favor of the assumptions made in the ConDialInt model. (shrink)

RACINE L and PERRON A. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 190–201 Unmasking the predicament of cultural voyeurism: a postcolonial analysis of international nursing placementsThe growing interest in international nursing placements cannot be left unnoticed. After 11 years into this twenty‐first century, violations of human rights and freedom of speech, environmental disasters, and armed conflicts still create dire living conditions for men and women around the world. Nurses have an ethical duty to address issues of social justice and global health as a (...) means to fulfil nursing’s social mandate. However, international placements raise some concerns. Drawing on the works of postcolonial theorists in nursing and social sciences, we examine the risk of replicating colonialist practices and discourses of health in international clinical placements. Referring to Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism and unfinalizability, we envision a culturally safe nursing practice arising from dialogical encounters between the Self as an Other and with the Other as an Other. We suggest that exploring the intricacies of cultural and race relations in everyday nursing practice are the premises upon which nurses can understand the broader historic, racial, gendered, political and economic contexts of global health issues. Finally, we make suggestions for developing culturally safe learning opportunities at the international level without minimizing the impact of dialogical cultural encounters occurring at the local and community levels. (shrink)

PERRON A and HOLMES D. Nursing Inquiry 2011; 18: 191–204Constructing mentally ill inmates: nurses’ discursive practices in correctionsThe concepts of discourse, subjectivity and power allow for innovative explorations in nursing research. Discourse take many different forms and may be maintained, transmitted, even imposed, in various ways. Nursing practice makes possible many discursive spaces where discourses intersect. Using a Foucauldian perspective, were explored the ways in which forensic psychiatric nurses construct the subjectivity of mentally ill inmates. Progress notes and individual interviews (...) constitute discursive spaces within which nurses construct patients’ subjectivities. Progress notes provide a written (and permanent) form of discourse, while interviews set the space for a more fluid and contextual form of discourse. We identified five types of subjectivities – the (in)visible patient, the patient as risk, the deviant patient, the disturbed patient and the disciplined patient. These subjectivities were rooted in various types of discourses circulating in the selected setting. Despite the multiple discursive dimensions of forensic psychiatric nursing, progress notes remain the main formal source of information regarding nursing care even though it is not representative of the care provided nor is it representative of nurses’ complex discursive practices in corrections. (shrink)

The purpose of this text is to tell the story of the implementation of the _Act Respecting End-of-Life Care,_ referred to hereafter as _Law 2_ (Gouvernement du Québec, 2014) with an emphasis on the ambiguous role of ethics in the Interdisciplinary Support Groups (ISGs), created by Quebec's _Ministère de la santé et des services sociaux_ (MSSS). As established, ISGs provide “clinical, administrative and ethical support to health care professionals responding to a request for Medical aid in dying (MAiD)” (Gouvernement du (...) Québec, 2015). It is suggested that their composition includes the participation of a person with an expertise in ethics. These ISGs represent an important innovation for stakeholders involved in MAiD. To date, no scientific research has specifically addressed ISGs and little research has been conducted in other jurisdictions on the roles, operations and practices of MAiD support structures, especially the implication of ethics. Several ISGs have certainly developed promising practices that could benefit all stakeholders in the wider field of ethics and end of life. We will explore the development of ISGs in Quebec as a support structure for MAiD by highlighting the role that ethics has played (and should play) in these morally and humanly challenging situations. (shrink)

This article outlines the struggle between the power of the health care professional and the rights of the individual to choose freely a modality of treatment. Nurses are instrumental in assisting patients in making the best decision for a therapy they will have to assume for the rest of their lives. In guiding patients' decision, nurses must take into account these unavoidable contingencies: changes in lifestyle, nutritional restrictions, level of acceptance, compliance issues, ease of training and availability of support/facilities. Ensuring (...) that the patient makes an informed decision is therefore an ongoing challenge for nurses as they are taking part in a delicate balancing act between not directly influencing the patient's decision while making sure the patient is accurately informed. (shrink)

There are those who would argue that, recently, the profession of nursing has made a radical shift, while others believe that a schism has been created among both scholars and clinicians as a result of the emerging dominance of the evidence‐based nursing movement. This paper offers a philosophical critique of this movement using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of schizoanalysis. As a conclusion, the authors posit that nursing professionals maintain a stance of academic freedom of thought and scientific integrity (...) through the acceptance of multiplicity, diversity, and polyvocality, and by challenging with politically charged concepts the totalizing perspectives that often spread through the profession/discipline of nursing. (shrink)

Objective: To evaluate the effect of an intervention on the understanding and use of DNR orders by physicians; to assess the impact of understanding the importance of involving competent patients in DNR decisions. Design: Prospective clinical interventional study. Setting: Internal medicine department (70 beds) of the hospital of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Participants: Nine junior physicians in postgraduate training. Intervention: Information on the ethics of DNR and implementation of new DNR orders. Measurements and main results: Accurate understanding, interpretation, and use of (...) DNR orders, especially with respect to the patients’ involvement in the decision were measured. Junior doctors writing DNR orders had an extremely poor understanding of what DNR orders mean. The correct understanding of the definition of a DNR order increased from 31 to 93% (p<0.01) after the intervention and the patients’ involvement went from 17% to 48% (p<0.01). Physicians estimated that 75% of their DNR patients were mentally competent at the time of the decision. Conclusion: An intervention aimed at explaining the ethical principles and the definition of DNR orders improves understanding of them, and their implementation, as well as patient participation. Specific efforts are needed to increase the involvement of mentally competent patients in the decision. (shrink)

Objective:To evaluate the effect of an intervention on the understanding and use of DNR orders by physicians; to assess the impact of understanding the importance of involving competent patients in DNR decisions.Design:Prospective clinical interventional study.Setting:Internal medicine department (70 beds) of the hospital of La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.Participants:Nine junior physicians in postgraduate training.Intervention:Information on the ethics of DNR and implementation of new DNR orders.Measurements and main results:Accurate understanding, interpretation, and use of DNR orders, especially with respect to the patients’ involvement in the (...) decision were measured. Junior doctors writing DNR orders had an extremely poor understanding of what DNR orders mean. The correct understanding of the definition of a DNR order increased from 31 to 93% (p<0.01) after the intervention and the patients’ involvement went from 17% to 48% (p<0.01). Physicians estimated that 75% of their DNR patients were mentally competent at the time of the decision.Conclusion:An intervention aimed at explaining the ethical principles and the definition of DNR orders improves understanding of them, and their implementation, as well as patient participation. Specific efforts are needed to increase the involvement of mentally competent patients in the decision. (shrink)

The idea of agency has long been used in the nursing literature in the study of nurses' roles regarding the patients they take care of, but it has not often been used to study its relationship with nurses themselves and their status in the healthcare system. The purpose of this article is to analyze how the idea of agency is used in nursing research to better understand how we might advance our thinking around nurses' agency to shape nursing and healthcare (...) with an emancipatory intent. Based on the results of a literature review focused on the study of conceptions, treatments, and applications of the concept of agency in nursing, we present a critical discussion to reflect on the need to consistently define the idea of nurses' agency, to guide research concerned with this topic in theoretical frameworks with emancipatory and social change tenets, and to make a call to develop the idea of agency as a central one to rework nurses' relationship with themselves. The idea of agency provides a valuable analytical framework for the study of a wide range of issues around nurses' status in healthcare organizations and in the healthcare system while offering a means for nurses' emancipation. (shrink)

In this paper we present a framework for the dynamic and automatic generation of novel knowledge obtained through a process of commonsense reasoning based on typicality-based concept combination. We exploit a recently introduced extension of a Description Logic of typicality able to combine prototypical descriptions of concepts in order to generate new prototypical concepts and deal with problem like the PET FISH (Osherson and Smith, 1981; Lieto & Pozzato, 2019). Intuitively, in the context of our application of this logic, the (...) overall pipeline of our system works as follows: given a goal expressed as a set of properties, if the knowledge base does not contain a concept able to fulfill all these properties, then our system looks for two concepts to recombine in order to extend the original knowledge based satisfy the goal. (shrink)

Nurses have their own ways of talking about their experiences of injustice in healthcare organizations. The aim of this article is to describe how nurses talk about their work‐life experiences and discuss the discursive effects that arise from nurses' use of language regarding their political agency. To this end, we present the findings garnered from a study focused on exploring how nurses deploy their political agency to project their idea of social and political justice in public healthcare organizations and how (...) they face the challenges and uncertainties of (re)thinking their institutional order when it does not resonate with their professional ethos. We then discuss the implications that nurses' use of language has in relation to their ability to deploy their political agency to oppose the forms of injustice they face in their daily practice. We conclude by stating that careful attention should be placed on understanding the discursive implications of nurses' use of language on their individual and collective emancipation in healthcare organizations. (shrink)

This article aims to present the life and work of German thinker Hartmut Rosa as a philosopher of interest for nursing. Although his theoretical framework remains fairly unknown in the nursing domain, its main key concepts open up a philosophical and sociological approach that can contribute to the understanding of a wide range of study phenomena related to nurses, nursing, and healthcare. The concepts of social acceleration, alienation, and resonance are useful to explore healthcare organizations' performance by bringing the time (...) dimension of modernity to the center; to grasp nurses' experiences of caring for patients; and to understand nurses as agents endowed with the capacity to deploy their political agency to create alternative forms of relationship to themselves, to others, and the world, challenging the institutional order of healthcare organizations when it fails to resonate with their professional ethos. In this article, we propose Hartmut Rosa's theoretical framework as a new and inspiring phenomenological and critical lens that should be further explored to advance knowledge concerning phenomena that are found at the crossroads of the nursing domain and other fields of knowledge. (shrink)

In everyday discourse and in the context of social scientific research we often attribute intentional states to groups. Contemporary approaches to group intentionality have either dismissed these attributions as metaphorical or provided an analysis of our attributions in terms of the intentional states of individuals in the group.Insection1, the author argues that these approaches are problematic. In sections 2 and 3, the author defends the view that certain groups are literally intentional agents. In section 4, the author argues that there (...) are significant reasons for social scientists and philosophers of social science to acknowledge the adequacy of macro-level explanations that involve the attribution of intentional states to groups. In section 5, the author considers and responds to some criticisms of the thesis she defends. (shrink)

In “Group Testimony” (2007) I argued that the testimony of a group cannot be understood (or at least cannot always be understood) in a summative fashion; as the testimony of some or all of the group members. In some cases, it is the group itself that testifies. I also argued that one could extend standard reductionist accounts of the justification of testimonial belief to the case of testimonial belief formed on the basis of group testimony. In this paper, I explore (...) the issue of group testimony in greater detail by focusing on one putative source of testimony, that of Wikipedia. My aim is to the answer the following questions: Is Wikipedia a source of testimony? And if so, what is the nature of that source? Are we to understand Wikipedia entries as a collection of testimonial statements made by individuals, some subset of individuals, or is Wikipedia itself (the organization or the Wikipedia community) the entity that testifies? If Wikipedia itself is a source of testimony, what resources do we have for assessing the trustworthiness of such an unusual epistemic source? In answering these questions I hope to further elucidate the nature of collective epistemic agency (Tollefsen 2006), of which group testimony is a paradigm example. When a mans Discourse begineth…at some saying of another, of whose ability to know the truth, and of whose honesty in not deceiving, he doubteth not; and then the Discourse is not so much concerning the Thing, as the Person; and the Resolution is called Beleefe, and Faith: Faith in the man. (1651/1991, Ch. 7; p. 48). (shrink)

Although there have been a number of recent discussions about the emotions that we bring with us to our epistemic endeavors, there has been little, if any, discussion of the emotions we bring with us to epistemic appraisal. This paper focuses on a particular set of emotions, the reactive attitudes. As Peter F. Strawson and others have argued, our reactive attitudes reveal something deep about our moral commitments. A similar argument can be made within the domain of epistemology. Our "epistemic (...) reactive attitudes" reveal our epistemic commitments. Reflection on the role they play in our practice of epistemic appraisal can contribute to a number of different debates in contemporary epistemology, including the nature of epistemic norms and epistemic responsibility. (shrink)

Cet article a pour objectif d’exposer les potentialités d’adaptation de la théorie de l’interpellation d’Althusser à un cadre phénoménologique, et ce à l’aide de ses récupérations par Judith Butler et Sara Ahmed. Non seulement leurs écrits aident à pallier plusieurs critiques émises à l’égard de la théorie althussérienne de l’idéologie – notamment son déterminisme latent et son universalisation du sujet –, mais ils nous aident aussi à mieux comprendre comment l’idéologie fonctionne au niveau du corps marginalisé. En effet, l’idéologie agit (...) comme une orientation discursive et corporelle du sujet dans le monde, et ce en limitant son espace, sa temporalité et les objets lui étant accessibles. En liant interpellation et corps, il nous sera également possible de pousser la théorie de l’émancipation butlérienne vers une performativité corporelle ayant pour objet le corps vécu. À cet effet, nous soulignerons que les écrits d’Ahmed sur l’interpellation bonifient ceux de Butler, car ils ouvrent la porte vers une résistance à l’idéologie ancrée dans le corps via le concept de désorientation. Bien que la désorientation puisse servir de mécanisme d’assujettissement, elle peut également, selon certaines phénoménologues, créer de nouvelles voies d’émancipation (et possibilités) pour le sujet marginalisé. (shrink)

The concept of citizenship is becoming more and more prominent in specific fields, such as psychiatry/mental health, where it is constituted as a solution to the issues of exclusion, discrimination, and poverty often endured by the mentally ill. We argue that such discourse of citizenship represents a break in the history of psychiatry and constitutes a powerful strategy to counter the effects of equally powerful psychiatric labelling. However, we call into question the emancipatory promise of a citizenship agenda. Foucault's concept (...) of governmentality is helpful in understanding the production of the citizen subject, its location within the 'art of government', as well as the ethical and political implications of citizenship in the context of mental health. (shrink)

When restricted to proving $\Sigma _{i}^{q}$ formulas, the quantified propositional proof system $G_{i}^{\ast}$ is closely related to the $\Sigma _{i}^{b}$ theorems of Buss's theory $S_{2}^{i}$ . Namely, $G_{i}^{\ast}$ has polynomial-size proofs of the translations of theorems of $S_{2}^{i}$ , and $S_{2}^{i}$ proves that $G_{i}^{\ast}$ is sound. However, little is known about $G_{i}^{\ast}$ when proving more complex formulas. In this paper, we prove a witnessing theorem for $G_{i}^{\ast}$ similar in style to the KPT witnessing theorem for $T_{2}^{i}$ . This witnessing theorem (...) is then used to show that $S_{2}^{i}$ proves $G_{i}^{\ast}$ is sound with respect to $\Sigma _{i+1}^{q}$ formulas. Note that unless the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses $S_{2}^{i}$ is the weakest theory in the s₂ hierarchy for which this is true. The witnessing theorem is also used to show that $G_{i}^{\ast}$ is p-equivalent to a quantified version of extended-Frege for prenex formulas. This is followed by a proof that Gi p-simulates $G_{i+1}^{\ast}$ with respect to all quantified propositional formulas. We finish by proving that S₂ can be axiomatized by $S_{2}^{1}$ plus axioms stating that the cut-free version of $G_{0}^{\ast}$ is sound. All together this shows that connection between $G_{i}^{\ast}$ and $S_{2}^{i}$ does not extend to more complex formulas. (shrink)