In this volume, Joseph Catalano offers an in-depth exploration of Jean-Paul Sartre's four major philosophical writings: Being and Nothingness, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, and The Family Idiot. These works have been immensely influential, but they are long and difficult and thus challenging for both students and scholars. Catalano here demonstrates the interrelation of these four works, their internal logic, and how they provide insights into important but overlooked aspects of Sartre's thought, (...) such as the body, childhood, and evil. The book begins with Sartre's final work, The Family Idiot, and systematically works backward to Being and Nothingness. Catalano then repeats the study by advancing chronologically, beginning with Being and Nothingness and ending with The Family Idiot and an afterword on Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Readers will appreciate Catalano's subtle readings as well as the new insights that he brings to Sartre's oeuvre. (shrink)

"[A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness] represents, I believe, a very important beginning of a deservingly serious effort to make the whole ...

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason ranks with Being and Nothingness as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the Critique to its deserved place among Sartre’s works and within philosophical discourse (...) as a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano asserts—the delivery of history into the hands of the average person. Sartre’s concern in the Critique is with the historical significance of everyday life. Can we, he asks, as individuals or even collectively, direct the course of our history? A historical context for our lives is given to us at birth, but we sustain that context with even our most mundane actions—buying a newspaper, waiting in line, eating a meal. In looking at history, Sartre argues, reason can never separate the historical situation of the investigator from the investigation. Thus reason falls into a dialectic, always depending upon the past for guidance but always being reshaped by the present. Clearly showing the influence of Marx on Sartre’s thought, the Critique adds the historical dimension lacking in Being and Nothingness. In placing the Critique within the corpus of Sartre’s philosophical writings, Catalano argues that it represents a development rather than a break from Sartre’s existentialist phase. Catalano has organized his commentary to follow the Critique and has supplied clear examples and concrete expositions of the most difficult ideas. He explicates the dialogue between Marx and Sartre that is internal to the text, and he also discusses Sartre’s Search for Method, which is published separately from the Critique in English editions. (shrink)

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason ranks with Being and Nothingness as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the Critique to its deserved place among Sartre’s works and within philosophical discourse (...) as a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano asserts—the delivery of history into the hands of the average person. Sartre’s concern in the Critique is with the historical significance of everyday life. Can we, he asks, as individuals or even collectively, direct the course of our history? A historical context for our lives is given to us at birth, but we sustain that context with even our most mundane actions—buying a newspaper, waiting in line, eating a meal. In looking at history, Sartre argues, reason can never separate the historical situation of the investigator from the investigation. Thus reason falls into a dialectic, always depending upon the past for guidance but always being reshaped by the present. Clearly showing the influence of Marx on Sartre’s thought, the Critique adds the historical dimension lacking in Being and Nothingness. In placing the Critique within the corpus of Sartre’s philosophical writings, Catalano argues that it represents a development rather than a break from Sartre’s existentialist phase. Catalano has organized his commentary to follow the Critique and has supplied clear examples and concrete expositions of the most difficult ideas. He explicates the dialogue between Marx and Sartre that is internal to the text, and he also discusses Sartre’s Search for Method, which is published separately from the Critique in English editions. (shrink)

As nursing students move toward becoming professionals, they must gain theoretical knowledge, learn clinical skills, and develop professional values. Joseph Catalano presents a wide range of pertinent topics and offers the most up-to-date coverage for the Issues & Trends course in this new 4th edition of his cutting-edge text. It explores the evolution and history of nursing, and examines the impact of reform, the legal system, and politics on the profession.

It is hard to think of two philosophers less alike than St. Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. Aquinas, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar, and Sartre, a twentieth-century philosopher and atheist, are separated by both time and religious beliefs. Yet, for philosopher Joseph S. Catalano, the two are worth bringing together for their shared concern with a fundamental issue: the uniqueness of each individual person and how this uniqueness relates to our mutual dependence on each other. When viewed in the (...) context of one another, Sartre broadens and deepens Aquinas’s outlook, updating it for our present planetary and social needs. Both thinkers, as Catalano shows, bring us closer to the reality that surrounds us, and both are centrally concerned with the place of the human within a temporal realm and what stance we should take on our own freedom to act and live within that realm. Catalano shows how freedom, for Sartre, is embodied, and that this freedom further illuminates Aquinas’s notion of consciousness. ​ Compact and open to readers of varying backgrounds, this book represents Catalano’s efforts to bring a lifetime of work on Sartre into an accessible consideration of philosophical questions by placing him in conversation with Aquinas, and it serves as a primer on key ideas of both philosophers. By bringing together these two figures, Catalano offers a fruitful space for thinking through some of the central questions about faith, conscience, freedom, and the meaning of life. (shrink)

Noted scholar Joseph S. Catalano here brings together his new work on Sartre's ethics with five of his classic essays on Sartre's moral thought. In an extended opening essay, Catalano uses Sartre's notion of mediation as a means to integrate the entire range of the French philosopher's moral insights. In the second half of the book, Catalano attempts to delineate a viable notion of good faith, and to distinguish between good and bad faith on the one (...) hand and authenticity and inauthenticity on the other hand. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Crafting Marks Into MeaningsJoseph S. CatalanoIn his fascinating book about the Mayan Code, Michael D. Coe writes, “I challenge any native English speaker to avoid thinking of the word ‘twelve’ when looking at ‘12,’ or an Italian to avoid the utterance ‘dodici’ when going through the same performance.” 1 I accept the challenge, and claim that I have done just that. What shall the reply be—“I should not have (...) done so?” One suspects that linguists confuse theoretical problems about writing and reading with the experience itself.The nature of reading and writing is difficult to understand because on the one hand it seems to involve a complex of conventional marks, but on the other hand these marks seem capable of being understood independently of their relationship to speech or to things. One can claim, of course, that the competent reader works under an illusion: meaning comes to a script through spoken language, through a deep-structured language, through concepts, or through the way the neurons work in the brain. Without denying that the written word enters into many relations, I want to make a case that the history of writing shows that we have crafted marks into meanings and, therefore, that a text is meaningful on the level of the script itself.Before proceeding, I want both to clarify my use of the term “script,” and to give the basic outline of this essay. Studies on writing frequently distinguish among writing systems, scripts, and orthographies. Writing system is the most general of these terms. For example, the alphabet forms one writing system, and Chinese characters another. A script is a particular form of writing system; examples are the Roman alphabetic script and the Greek alphabetic script. An orthography is the way a particular language uses a script; for example, the way the English or [End Page 47] French languages use the Roman alphabetic script. In the concrete, however, there are only orthographies, and without wishing to challenge the traditional distinction, I will frequently interchange script and orthography.The first part of the essay is a discussion of my perspective on writing. My perspective is a substantive part of my case about writing, and I will clarify it at some length. Then I will examine some of the steps that led to our ability to read and write fluently. I will be recommending that in reading histories about writing, we view speech merely as a mediation through which written marks are crafted into meanings. My claim is that every artifact, indeed, every thing, needs to be correctly “read” in order to be used, and that the invention of an elegant system of writing lifts this readability from its specific materiality. For example, to use a fork properly one must be able to read this use in the fork. Language lifts this readability from the matter of the fork, the silver or stainless steel, and makes the readability itself an object.IRecall the last time you were engrossed while reading a novel. Most likely, you were not concerned with questions about the meaning of meaning or the difference between meaning and signification. But did your engaged reading and writing involve an inner speech and, if it did, how did you recognize homonyms, for example the difference between there and their? I suspect that only a small part of our vocabulary is acquired by vocalization. But more importantly, I want to question whether writing must be related to speech to be understood.Frank Smith has persistently questioned the belief that reading must involve vocalizations, and he has criticized the notion that the best way to proceed with reading instruction is by mapping speech onto print. In Understanding Reading, he writes: “Phonics is complicated.... We now know that if we really expect to give children a mastery of phonetics, that we are not talking about a dozen or so rules. We are talking about 166 rules, which will still not account for hundreds of the words they might expect to meet in their early reading.” 2In Reading, he notes: “How is it possible to recognize written words without sounding them out? The answer is that we recognize words in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Script RoseJoseph S. CatalanoLearning to read words, musical notes or numbers is a process by which we attach sounds, pictures and meanings to marks. Looked at in this way, the English script “rose” is a sign of a sound, a picture or a meaning. But when we read fluently is the word “rose” a sign? I think not; and I shall try to make a case that, to (...) the properly disposed reader, the script “rose” (hereafter written rose) is a rose.ITo have the perspective I require on reading, a quasi-Davidsonian distinction between causes and reasons may be useful. Early training in matching marks with sounds and pictures, surface irritations of light on the eye, stimulation and fixing of our entire neurological complex are all part of the causal network of our ability to read. But none of these causes are the reasons for our ability to be absorbed in reading a text.Of course, a distinction between causes and reasons does not, of itself, explain how the written page can be a world in which we find things such as roses. In order to see how the script rose got to be a rose, it is useful to suspend the usual questions that we ask about written language. Thus, we must not concern ourselves about the ambiguity that might arise because the word rose can be taken to mean a flower, a hue or a person, nor about what happens when we translate from one language to another, nor about the distinction between a sign, whether natural or artificial, and what is signified, nor whether written language [End Page 85] corresponds to something other than itself, nor the question of the meaning of meaning.IIWe created better than we knew, when we invented writing. We intended to represent the spoken word; but we made roses, dreams and lives exist as marks on a page. If this seems mysterious, it is a mystery that is present in every artifact, and what I seek is a perspective on written language precisely as an artifact.Of course, scripts are artifacts, but what I am after is the workmanship. The workmanship is both obvious and hidden. It is there for us to see; it is what we read. But we do not see it as forged over a long period of time just to serve its function as marks that are readable.In general, certain aspects of written language are similar to ordinary artifacts, others are not so. The difference is more obvious than the similarity: Scripts differ from ordinary artifacts, because we first approach them as signs of sounds, pictures or meanings: A child does not learn about sitting by looking at a chair as a sign of a chair; for example, the child does not squat on the floor, when it sees a chair. More importantly, the craftsmanship that gave us written language, especially alphabetic writing, was directed toward forging “arbitrary” marks, and a chair is certainly not an arbitrary representation of something to sit upon. In Quiddities, in the section “A” for “Alphabet,” W. V. Quine neatly summarizes the remarkable feat of discovering meaningless marks to represent sounds.... the full power of writing awaited the convergence of writing with speech, and this reached its early stages five thousand years ago. Depictions of visible objects came to be pressed into phonetic duty on the rebus principle, as if in English we were to write melancholy by depicting a melon and a collie. This expedient was rendered more flexible and powerful, if less picturesque, by devoting the phonetic representations to brief sounds—single consonants or syllables. The sound was represented by a hieroglyph depicting something whose name merely began with that sound. The rebus principle thus gave way to an acrophonic one.It was a notable step of abstraction. Finding a melon and collie in melancholy is a matter of punning with familiar words; extracting a meaningless me-, on the other hand, and meaningless lan-, and so on, calls for appreciating fugitive sounds that are not words and name nothing.(pp. 1–2)[End Page 86]Quine is right to follow the traditional claim that writing... (shrink)

Here's a lively look at the forces that have shaped the nursing profession and those that are likely to do so in the future. The book explores the evolution of nursing, historically and theoretically, and examines the impact of reform, the legal system, and politics today.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Over the course of the last four decades, William Leon McBride has distinguished himself as one of the most esteemed and accomplished philosophers of his generation. This volume—which celebrates the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday—includes contributions from colleagues, friends, and formers students and pays tribute to McBride’s considerable achievements as a teacher, mentor, and scholar.

Review of Joseph Catalano's book Reading Sartre.

(2013). Life, the Unhistorical, the Suprahistorical: Nietzsche on History. International Journal of Philosophical Studies: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 64-91. doi: 10.1080/09672559.2012.744532.

The seventh edition of this pragmatic guide to determining right and wrong in the workplace is updated with new case studies and ancillary materials to combine stakeholder perspectives with a deep dive on workplace ethics issues. Using a unique stakeholder-based approach, this book takes business ethics out of the theory realm and provides practical ways to analyze any business decision. Including dozens of cases, Joseph Weiss looks beyond the impacts of ethical lapses on share price and profit to focus (...) on relationships between stakeholders, including individuals, groups, corporations, and governments. The new seventh edition includes seven new cases and ten new Point/Counterpoint exercises, which challenge students to argue both sides of a contemporary issue. It incorporates the latest research as well as updated cases dealing with recent scandals at organizations such as Boeing, Facebook, and Uber. Professors will have access to online support, including teaching notes, PowerPoint slides, and sample tests. The book is equipped with a step-by-step guide to implementing stakeholder analysis, tips to help students apply ethical principles in their personal and professional lives, and comprehensive coverage of employee workplace issues. Addressing relevant topics such as risk management, preferential hiring, and sexual harassment in conjunction with the digital divide, bribery, the environment, and more, Business Ethics, seventh edition explores ethical implications in today's increasingly interconnected global business environment. (shrink)

Nietzsche was a philosopher who prided himself, in deliberate contradistinction with previous philosophers, on his ‘historical sense’. But this leaves many questions unanswered about the precise role of the historical in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Perhaps most importantly, can the conception of genealogy in Nietzsche’s later philosophy, as a revised historical method, be taken to represent his mature philosophical methodology in general? I argue, firstly, that there is considerable continuity between Nietzsche’s conceptions of history in the early essay ‘On the uses and (...) disadvantages of history for life’ and those of his later philosophy. The former can therefore be used as a resource for understanding the latter. Through a reading of the early history essay I demonstrate that Nietzsche’s conception of the historical here is intimately bound up with the notion of the ‘unhistorical’ and that it is precisely renewed access to the unhistorical which is required in order for history to be conducive to the flourishing of humanity. I go on to contend that this holds for Nietzsche’s later writings as well, and that genealogy, being purely historical, must therefore be seen as one subsidiary part of a broader philosophy in which the unhistorical will play, literally, a vital role. (shrink)

Misconceived Consent: Miguel has stage IV lung cancer. He has nearly exhausted his treatment options when his oncologist, Dr. Llewellyn, tells him about an experimental vaccine trial that may boost his immune response to kill cancer cells. Dr. Llewellyn provides Miguel with a consent form that explains why the study is being conducted, what procedures he will undergo, what the various risks and benefits are, alternative sources of treatment, and so forth. She even sits down with him, carefully talks through (...) the most important points, and gives him time to ask questions. Though it is a Phase 1 study and the chance that he will benefit is very low, Miguel happily agrees to take part. A week later, after the first experimental injection, she asks him if he is worried about the risks. “Risks?” he asks. “I’m sure this is safe—you’re a doctor, after all!”. (shrink)

This book critically assesses arguments for the existence of the God of classical theism, develops an innovative account of objects’ persistence, and defends new arguments against classical theism. The authors engage the following classical theistic proofs: Aquinas’s First Way, Aquinas’s De Ente argument, and Feser’s Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Augustinian, Thomistic, and Rationalist proofs. The authors also provide the first systematic treatment of the ‘existential inertia thesis’. By connecting the thesis to relativity theory and recent developments in the philosophy of physics, and (...) by developing a variety of novel existential-inertia-friendly explanations of persistence, they mount a formidable new case against classical theistic proofs. Finally, they defend new arguments against classical theism based on abstract objects and changing divine knowledge. The text appeals to students, researchers, and others interested in classical theistic proofs, the existence and nature of God, and the ultimate explanations of persistence, change, and contingency. (shrink)

It is common to cite the child’s “right to an open future” in discussions of how parents and the state may and should treat children. However, the right to an open future can only be useful in these discussions if we have some method for deriving the content of the right. In the paper in which he introduces the right to an open future Joel Feinberg seems to provide such a method: he derives the right from the content of adult (...) autonomy rights. In this paper I argue that his argument fails. If it is to give us guidance about the content of the child’s right to an open future, then the right should be interpreted as a right to a maximally open future. But this strong interpretation is unjustified: the arguments that can be found in Feinberg in favor of the right are invalid, and, in any case, this interpretation has implausible implications. A moderate interpretation of the right to an open future, according to which children have a right to acquire some reasonable range of skills and options, is more plausible. However, if a moderate interpretation is correct, there is not only no argument in Feinberg to support it, there is also no method for deriving the content of the right. Without such a method we have to bring in other moral considerations in order to work out the limits on parental discretion and what children are owed. The right to an open future then does no normative work. (shrink)

The book combines philosophical exposition and legal analysis, and pays special attention to issues of tort law.

ABSTRACT Many recent articles argue that participants who seroconvert during HIV prevention trials deserve treatment when they develop AIDS, and there is a general consensus that the participants in HIV/aids treatment trials should have continuing post‐trial access. As a result, the primary concern of many ethicists and activists has shifted from justifying an obligation to treat trial participants, to working out mechanisms through which treatment could be provided. In this paper I argue that this shift frequently conceals an important assumption: (...) that if there is an obligation to supply treatment, then any party who could provide it may be prevailed upon to discharge the obligation. This assumption is false. The reasons why trial participants should get ART affect who has the duty to provide it. We should not burden governments with the obligations of sponsors, nor researchers with the obligations of the international community. And we should not deprive a group of treatment because their need is less salient than that of research participants. Insisting otherwise may lead to people being wrongfully deprived of access to antiretrovirals. (shrink)

Research projects sponsored by rich countries or companies and carried out in developing countries are often described as exploitative. One important debate about the prevention of exploitation in research centres on whether and how clinical research in developing countries should be responsive to local health problems. This paper analyses the responsiveness debate and draws out more general lessons for how policy makers can prevent exploitation in various research contexts. There are two independent ways to do this in the face of (...) entrenched power differences: to impose restrictions on the content of benefit-sharing arrangements, and to institute independent effective oversight. Which method should be chosen is highly dependent on context. (shrink)

With the entry of several Eastern European nations into the European Union, a ‘third’ space has developed in the discourse for nations perceived as not fully integrated ‘inside’ the EU system. This article investigates the construction of this ‘third space’ in the resultant ‘moral panic’ about undesired immigration from other EU countries and its potential drain on the social services of the United Kingdom and links it to Euroskeptic discourse in British media. The article uses construal operations from cognitive linguistics (...) combined with critical discourse studies as a way of denaturalizing the discourse in online comments that focus on the Bulgarian/romanian immigration issue which we then connect to anti-Roma discourse. Results reveal a view of the United Kingdom as contaminated by Roma and underscore the need for novel metaphors to be countered before they become entrenched and used as tools for political propaganda. (shrink)

While engaging in rich discussion, Conspiracy Theories analyzes current arguments and evidence while providing real-world examples so students can contextualize and visualize the debates. Each chapter addresses important current questions, provides conceptual tools, defines important terms, and introduces the appropriate methods of analysis.

We examine two competing solutions to Benardete paradoxes: causal finitism, according to which nothing can have infinitely many causes, and the unsatisfiable pair diagnosis (UPD), according to which such paradoxes are logically impossible and no metaphysical thesis need be adopted to avoid them. We argue that the UPD enjoys notable theoretical advantages over causal finitism. Causal finitists, however, have levelled two main objections to the UPD. First, they urge that the UPD requires positing a ‘mysterious force’ that prevents paradoxes from (...) arising. Since such a force is implausible, the UPD is in trouble. Second, they employ recombination or patchwork principles to argue that paradoxical situations would be possible if causal finitism were false. Since such situations are not possible, causal finitism is true, and so a substantive metaphysical thesis is needed to avoid the paradoxes. We argue that the UPD proponent can successfully respond to these objections. (shrink)