Compassion in healthcare has received significant attention recently, on an international scale, with concern raised about its absence during clinical interactions. As a concept, compassionate care has been linked to nursing. We examined historical discourse on this topic, to understand and situate current debates on compassionate care as a hallmark of high‐quality services. Documents we looked at illustrated how responsibility for delivering compassionate care cannot be consigned to individual nurses. Health professionals must have the right environmental circumstances to be able (...) to provide and engage in compassionate interactions with patients and their relatives. Hence, although compassionate care has been presented as a straightforward solution when crisis faces health services, this discourse, especially in policy documents, has often failed to acknowledge the system‐level issues associated with its provision. This has resulted in simplistic presentations of ‘compassion’ as inexpensive and the responsibility of individual nurses, a misleading proposal that risks devaluing the energy and resources required to deliver compassionate care. It also overlooks the need for organisations, not just individuals, to be charged with upholding its provision. (shrink)

How can we assess the reciprocal impacts of politics and medicine in the contemporary period? Using the example of rickets in twentieth century Britain, I will explore the ways in which a preventable, curable non-infectious disease came to have enormous political significance, first as a symbol of socioeconomic inequality, then as evidence of racial and ethnic health disparities. Between the 1920s and 1980s, clinicians, researchers, health workers, members of Parliament and later Britain's growing South Asian ethnic communities repeatedly confronted the (...) British state with evidence of persistent nutritional deficiency among the British poor and British Asians. Drawing on bitter memories of the ‘Hungry Thirties’, postwar rickets—so often described as a ‘Victorian’ disease—became a high-profile sign of what was variously constructed as a failure of the Welfare State; or of the political parties charged with its protection; or of ethnically Asian migrants and their descendants to adapt to British life and norms. Here I will argue that rickets prompted such consternation not because of its severity, the cost of its treatment, or even its prevalence; but because of the ease with which it was politicised. I will explore the ways in which this condition was envisioned, defined and addressed as Britain moved from the postwar consensus to Thatcherism, and as Britain's diverse South Asian communities developed from migrant enclaves to settled multigenerational ethnic communities. (shrink)

Is the gene 'special' for historians? What effects, if any, has the notion of the 'gene' had on our understanding of history? Certainly, there is a widespread public and professional perception that genetics and history are or should be in dialogue with each other in some way. But historians and geneticists view history and genetics very differently - and assume very different relationships between them. And public perceptions of genes, genetics, genomics, and indeed the nature and meanings of 'history' differ (...) yet again. Here, in looking at the meaning, and the implications - the significance - of the gene (and its corollary scientific disciplines and approaches) specifically to historians, I will focus on two aspects of the discourse. First, I will examine the ways in which historians have thus far approached genes and genetics, and the impact such studies have had on the field. There is considerable overlap between the subject matter of genetics/genomics and many of the most widely used analytic categories of contemporary historiography - race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, (dis)ability, among others. Yet the impact of genetics and genomics on society has been studied principally by anthropologists, sociologists and ethicists.2 Only two historical sub-disciplines have engaged with the rise of genetics to any significant degree: the histories of science and of medicine. What does this indicate or suggest? Second, I will explore the impact of the 'gene' and genetic understandings (of, for example, the body, health, disease, identity, the family, and evolution) on public conceptions of history itself. (shrink)

How do cultures of self-quantification intersect with the modern state, particularly in relation to medical provision and health promotion? Here I explore the ways in which British practices and representations of body weight and weight management ignored or interacted with the National Health Service between 1948 and 2004. Through the lens of overweight, I examine health citizenship in the context of universal health provision funded from general taxation, and track attitudes toward “overweight” once its health implications and medical costs affected (...) a public service as well as individual bodies and households. Looking at professional and popular discourses of overweight and obesity, I map the persistence of a highly individual culture of dietary and weight self-management in postwar Britain, and assess the degree to which it was challenged by a new measure of “obesity” – the body mass index – and by visions of an NHS burdened and even threatened by the increasing overweight of the citizens it was created to serve. (shrink)

Between 1946 and 1960, a new phenomenon emerged in the field of bacteriology. "Bacterial sex," as it was called, revolutionized the study of genetics, largely by making available a whole new class of cheap, fast-growing, and easily manipulated organisms. But what was "bacterial sex?" How could single-celled organisms have "sex" or even be sexually differentiated? The technical language used in the scientific press -- the public and inalienable face of 20th century science -- to describe this apparently neuter organism was (...) explicit: the cells "copulated," had "intimate contract," "conjugal unions," and engaged in "ménage à trois" relationships. And yet, to describe bacteria as sexually reproducing organisms, the definition of sex itself had to change. Despite manifold contradictions and the availability of alternative language, the notion of sexually active (even promiscuous) single-celled organisms has persisted, even into contemporary textbooks on cell biology and genetics. In this paper I examine the ways in which bacteria were brought into the genetic fold, sexualized, and given gender; I also consider the issues underlying the durability of "bacterial sex.". (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to investigate Gorgias’ argument against motion, which is found in his Peri tou mē ontos and preserved only in MXG 980a1˗8. I tried to shed new light both on this specific reflection and on the reliability of Pseudo-Aristotle’s version. By exploring the so called “change argument” and the “argument from divisibility", I focused on the particular strategy used by the Sophist in his synthetikē apodeixis, which should be investigated in relation to the dispute between (...) monistic and pluralistic ontology. In this regard, the puzzle from “divisibility everywhere” and its connection with the void as not-being can provide new elements to grasp the philosophical background in which the Sophist moves. On the one hand, Gorgias’ argument against motion is part of a broader dispute on the divisibility/indivisibility of being; on the other, his original elaboration of this puzzle seems to be perfectly understandable within the controversy between Eleatics and Atomists, and coherent with the argumentative style of the Sophist. (shrink)

With this paper I intend to rehabilitate the status of orality as medium of the public use of reason in the normative Kantian sense. As a first step, I reconstruct the reasons why Kant rejects the spoken word and designates the written word as the sole medium of public reasoning. As a second step, I argue for the possibility of employing the spoken word as medium of public reasoning while remaining within the normative framework of Kant’s concept of the public (...) use of reason. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, we discuss the potential of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies for the creation and adaptation of stories aimed at children and young adult, focusing on the specificities of their usage protocols. We begin by introducing narratives in VR and their connection to the field of children and young adult literature. Subsequently, 360º videos targeted at children and young people are presented, along with the reading and engagement protocols that arise from their peculiarities. Starting from the field of (...) Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR), we discuss about the main challenges posed by this medium for the enjoyment of immersive works, based on the analysis of the work Invasion!, produced by the Baobab studio. Thus, we conclude that both the production and reception of narratives in Virtual Reality presuppose the management of the viewer’s vision and attentional focus, considering the reading protocols already learned and naturalized through other media. (shrink)

I examine recent debates in the philosophy of biology over the determinism or indeterminism of the evolutionary process, focusing on two papers in particular: Glymour 2001 and Stamos 2001. I argue that neither of these papers succeeds in making the case for the indeterminism of the evolutionary process, and suggest that what is needed is a detailed analysis of the causal processes at every level from the quantum mechanical to the evolutionary.

Phenomenological description can be interpreted as an explicitation of experience as it is lived. However, there are at least two ways in which the explicitation of experience can be realised: the first is associated with an epistemic model, the second to an ontological model. The first is based on a principle of manifestation, the second on a principle of disposition. The aim of this paper is to show that only the second model, the ontological one, is able to account for (...) the concept of movement understood not as mere displacement but as change. In order to do this, however, it is necessary to introduce a notion that classical phenomenology – starting from the well-known Brentanian definition – considers to be oxymoronic: the notion of physical intentionality. (shrink)

The latter half of the twentieth century has been marked by debates in evolutionary biology over the relative significance of natural selection and random drift: the so-called “neutralist/selectionist” debates. Yet John Beatty has argued that it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish the concept of random drift from the concept of natural selection, a claim that has been accepted by many philosophers of biology. If this claim is correct, then the neutralist/selectionist debates seem at best futile, and at worst, (...) meaningless. I reexamine the issues that Beatty raises, and argue that random drift and natural selection, conceived as processes, can be distinguished from one another. (shrink)

In diesem Beitrag soll systematisch untersucht werden, wie in der Moderne der Begriff der Tyrannis umgedeutet wird, und wie die moderne Auffassung der Tyrannis mit der Aufwertung des Antagonismus zusammenhängt. Von der Antike bis zum Spätmittelalter wird die tyrannische Herrschaft über die durch sie selbst herbeigeführte Auflösung des Staates definiert: Als tyrannisch gilt die Regierung, die jene in der Antike als normativ gesetzte und im Mittelalter als gottgegeben aufgefasste Harmonie des Gemeinwesens zerstört. In der Moderne gelten dagegen alle Regierungen als (...) tyrannisch, die das Individuum bei oder gar in der Entfaltung seiner Talente und Eigenschaften hindern. Diese neue Begriffsbestimmung gründet auf die Aufwertung der Antagonismen als Bestandteile der menschlichen Natur und zugleich als Triebfeder des staatsrechtlichen Fortschritts. Die neuzeitliche Aufwertung der Antagonismen und das mit ihm zusammenhängende Primat der individuellen Freiheit haben zur Folge, dass vom Staat die Fähigkeit gefordert wird, die aus der Entfaltung der individuellen Freiheit entstehenden Antagonismen anzuerkennen. Erst in der Moderne wird nämlich der Anspruch zur Geltung gebracht, einen staatsrechtlichen Raum zu gestalten, der Antagonismen ohne Schmälerung der individuellen Freiheit zu regeln vermag. (shrink)

According to a common misconception, Kant rejects rhetoric as worthy of no respect and neglects popularity as a dispensable accessory. Two recent publications on the communicative dimension of Kant’s conception and practice of philosophy represent a very solid rebuttal of such criticism. The books in question are Kant’s Philosophy of Communication by G. L. Ercolini and A linguagem em Kant. A linguagem de Kant edited by Monique Hulshof and Ubirajara Rancan de Azevedo Marques, especially in light of the long chapter (...) “Kant e a Questão da Popularidade e da Linguagem da Filosofia” by Leonel Ribeiro dos Santos (pp. 17- 69). What Ercolini’s monograph and Santos’ chapter have in common, is that they both argue that Kant does indeed value and practice both rhetoric and popularity. However, they differ from each other in that Ercolini lets Kant’s reflection on popularity derive from occasional factors, while Santos locates its origin at the heart of Kant’s critical project. In order fully to appreciate their novelty, these two contributions call for an overview of the state of research on the subject of Kant’s conception of rhetoric. Thus, before closely examining them, I will briefly outline the relevant scholarship by dividing it into the three classes of those who interpret Kant (a) as a skillful rhetorician, (b) as dismissive of rhetoric, and finally (c) as according rhetoric a moral function. (shrink)

A myth exists that Jews can embrace the cultural components of Judaism without appreciating the legal aspects of the Jewish tradition. This myth suggests that law and culture are independent of one another. In reality, however, much of Jewish culture has a basis in Jewish law. Similarly, Jewish law produces Jewish culture. Roberta Rosenthal Kwall develops and applies a cultural analysis paradigm to the Jewish tradition that departs from the understanding of Jewish law solely as the embodiment of Divine (...) command. (shrink)

Christians of the fourth and fifth centuries adopted Late Antique aesthetics, characterized by brilliance, dazzle and colors, to create a new form of imagination, where the corpses of the martyrs and their physical remains became shining bodies. Relics became a spiritual body, whose μετάληψις often produced roses or violets. Therefore there was a strict association in Late Antique Christianity among roses, relics and the colour red.

The aim of the present paper is to investigate the connection between ancient medicine and sophistry at the end of 5th century B.C. Beginning with analyses of some passages from the De vetere medicina, De natura hominis and De arte, the article identifies many similarities between these treatises, on the one hand, and the sophistic doctrines, on the other: these concern primarily perceptual/intellectual knowledge and the interaction between reality, knowledge and language. Among the Sophists, Gorgias was particularly followed and imitated, (...) as he was admired not only for his tremendous rhetorical skills, but also for his philosophically significant work On not being, which probably influenced various discussions in the Hippocratic treatises. However, if Gorgias argues in favor of language as dynastēs megas, the authors of VM, NH and De arte consider knowledge to be far more relevant and reliable than logos. These Hippocratic treatises criticize the philosophical thesis and the resulting kind of reductionism. Above all they defend the supremacy of medicine over any other art. By using the same argumentative and rhetorical strategies that were employed by Gorgias, these treatises reverse the thought of those Sophists who exalted only the technē tōn logōn. (shrink)

Biologists and philosophers have been extremely pessimistic about the possibility of demonstrating random drift in nature, particularly when it comes to distinguishing random drift from natural selection. However, examination of a historical case-Maxime Lamotte's study of natural populations of the land snail, Cepaea nemoralis in the 1950s - shows that while some pessimism is warranted, it has been overstated. Indeed, by describing a unique signature for drift and showing that this signature obtained in the populations under study, Lamotte was able (...) to make a good case for a significant role for drift. It may be difficult to disentangle the causes of drift and selection acting in a population, but it is not impossible. (shrink)

Is gender determined by biology, society or experience? How have notions of gender and sexuality differed in past societies? Addressing such questions, Gender and Archaeology is the first critical introduction to the field of gender archaeology as it has evolved over the last two decades. It examines the impact of feminist perspectives on archaeology and shows the unique insights that gender archaeology offers on topics like the sexual division of labor, issues of sexuality, and the embodiment of gender identity. A (...) substantial case study of gender and space in the medieval English castle lucidly draws together and illustrates these issues. Comprehensive and accessible, Gender and Archaeology is sure to further debate in the field. (shrink)

When philosophers of physics explore the nature of chance, they usually look to quantum mechanics. When philosophers of biology explore the nature of chance, they usually look to microevolutionary phenomena, such as mutation or random drift. What has been largely overlooked is the role of chance in macroevolution. The stochastic models of paleobiology employ conceptions of chance that are similar to those at the microevolutionary level, yet different from the conceptions of chance often associated with quantum mechanics and Laplacean determinism.

Current corporate systems risk generating inequality among workers, insofar as they concentrate only on economic results by favoring, through the incentive and award system, only what can be seen, produced, and measured. As such, these systems are unable to recognize workers’ agapic behaviors – similar to the ones considered in organizational citizenship behavior literature – that cannot be quantified, i.e. workers’ generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, help for others and mercy. Although these types of behaviors may appear unproductive or irrational, they (...) create symbols of belonging to the company and social cohesion. This article claims that beyond focusing on reward systems, companies should recognize agapic behaviors to increase workers’ intrinsic motivation. These behavioral attitudes allow fraternal relationships -as conceived in the Civil Economy tradition- to arise within organizations; moreover, they contribute to advancing new managerial practical implications in the humanistic management field. (shrink)

Recent discussions in the philosophy of biology have brought into question some fundamental assumptions regarding evolutionary processes, natural selection in particular. Some authors argue that natural selection is nothing but a population-level, statistical consequence of lower-level events (Matthen and Ariew [2002]; Walsh et al. [2002]). On this view, natural selection itself does not involve forces. Other authors reject this purely statistical, population-level account for an individual-level, causal account of natural selection (Bouchard and Rosenberg [2004]). I argue that each of these (...) positions is right in one way, but wrong in another; natural selection indeed takes place at the level of populations, but it is a causal process nonetheless. (shrink)

The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

The capability approach developed by Amartya Sen focuses on the enhancement of people’s capabilities, i.e. their real freedom to choose a life course they have reason to value. Applying the CA to the organizational context, the focus of human resource management is transformed, shifting away from the needs of the organization to the freedoms of the individual. This shift happens also inside the so-called ‘liberated companies,’ firms with an organizational form that allows employees the complete freedom, along with the responsibility, (...) to take any actions they decide are best. In this paper we show the contribution of the capability approach for management and for organizational ethics by focusing on this innovative model of ‘liberated companies.’. (shrink)

Current corporate systems risk generating inequality among workers, insofar as they concentrate only on economic results by favoring, through the incentive and award system, only what can be seen, produced, and measured. As such, these systems are unable to recognize workers’ agapic behaviors – similar to the ones considered in organizational citizenship behavior literature – that cannot be quantified, i.e. workers’ generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, help for others and mercy. Although these types of behaviors may appear unproductive or irrational, they (...) create symbols of belonging to the company and social cohesion. This article claims that beyond focusing on reward systems, companies should recognize agapic behaviors to increase workers’ intrinsic motivation. These behavioral attitudes allow fraternal relationships -as conceived in the Civil Economy tradition- to arise within organizations; moreover, they contribute to advancing new managerial practical implications in the humanistic management field. (shrink)

Current corporate systems risk generating inequality among workers, insofar as they concentrate only on economic results by favoring, through the incentive and award system, only what can be seen, produced, and measured. As such, these systems are unable to recognize workers’ agapic behaviors – similar to the ones considered in organizational citizenship behavior literature – that cannot be quantified, i.e. workers’ generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, help for others and mercy. Although these types of behaviors may appear unproductive or irrational, they (...) create symbols of belonging to the company and social cohesion. This article claims that beyond focusing on reward systems, companies should recognize agapic behaviors to increase workers’ intrinsic motivation. These behavioral attitudes allow fraternal relationships -as conceived in the Civil Economy tradition- to arise within organizations; moreover, they contribute to advancing new managerial practical implications in the humanistic management field. (shrink)

Several scholars have highlighted the importance of examining moral disengagement in understanding aggression and deviant conduct across different contexts. The present study investigates the role of MD as a specific social-cognitive construct that, in the organizational context, may intervene in the process leading from stressors to counterproductive work behavior. Assuming the theoretical framework of the stressor-emotion model of CWB, we hypothesized that MD mediates, at least partially, the relation between negative emotions in reaction to perceived stressors and CWB by promoting (...) or justifying aggressive responses to frustrating situations or events. In a sample of 1,147 Italian workers, we tested a structural equations model. The results support our hypothesis: the more workers experienced negative emotions in response to stressors, the more they morally disengaged and, in turn, enacted CWB. (shrink)

Evolution in its contemporary meaning in biology typically refers to the changes in the proportions of biological types in a population over time (see the entry on the concept of evolution to 1872 for earlier meanings). As evolution is too large of a topic to address thoroughly in one entry, the primary goal of this entry is to serve as a broad overview of contemporary issues in evolution with links to other entries where more in-depth discussion can be found. The (...) entry begins with a brief survey of definitions of evolution, followed by a discussion of the different modes of evolution and related philosophical issues, and ends with a summary of other topics in the philosophy of evolution focusing particularly on topics covered in this encyclopedia. (shrink)

This article extends property-owning democracy to the digital realm and introduces “data-owning democracy,” a new political economic regime characterized by the wide distribution of data as capital among citizens. Drawing on republican theory and acknowledging data's unique role in the digital economy, it proposes a two-tier model that combines different modes of data ownership and corresponding rights. The first layer of “data-owning democracy” is characterized by a digital public infrastructure that enables citizens to collectively generate data and have a say (...) in how their citizen data are used. In the second layer, individuals automatically receive machine-readable copies of their data whenever they are generated—a slightly more advanced form of the European Union's existing right to data portability (Art. 20). With its focus on empowerment, data-owning democracy is designed to be complementary to existing data protection regulations. It also illustrates how political theory more broadly, and republican theory specifically, can be instructive for specifying the normative components of a new political economy dealing with questions of empowerment and digital rights. (shrink)

Current corporate systems risk generating inequality among workers, insofar as they concentrate only on economic results by favoring, through the incentive and award system, only what can be seen, produced, and measured. As such, these systems are unable to recognize workers’ agapic behaviors – similar to the ones considered in organizational citizenship behavior literature – that cannot be quantified, i.e. workers’ generosity, humanity, kindness, compassion, help for others and mercy. Although these types of behaviors may appear unproductive or irrational, they (...) create symbols of belonging to the company and social cohesion. This article claims that beyond focusing on reward systems, companies should recognize agapic behaviors to increase workers’ intrinsic motivation. These behavioral attitudes allow fraternal relationships -as conceived in the Civil Economy tradition- to arise within organizations; moreover, they contribute to advancing new managerial practical implications in the humanistic management field. (shrink)

It is well known that John Dewey was very far from embracing the traditional idea of cognition as something happening inside one’s own mind and consisting in a pictorial representation of the alleged purely external reality out there. His position was largely convergent with enactivist accounts of cognition as something based in life and consisting in human actions within a natural environment. The paper considers Dewey’s conception of cognition by focusing on its potential contributions to the current debate with enactivism. (...) It claims that Dewey’s anti-substantial, continuistic, and emergentistic conception of the mind as a typically human conduct pulls the rug out of the idea of cognition as representation, as well as pushes the current discussion towards a serious reconsideration of representationalist assumptions about conceptuality and language. The paper emphasises that Dewey—differently from enactivists—frames the role of cognition within experience: he argues that cognition concerns those intermediate phases of our experiences of the world which are characterised by an indeterminate or troubled situation, because he claims that human beings’ interactions with their own environment are qualitatively richer and broader than cognition, including as they do many different and intertwined modes of experience. Finally, the author suggests that a coherent development of Dewey’s lines of thought should avoid rigid distinctions and hierarchies between lower and higher degrees of cognition in humans, which are still maintained in certain forms of radical enactivism. Differently, we should consider the impact of the cultural and broadly linguistic configuration of the human–environment even on perception, motor action, and affective sensibility. (shrink)