Faculty in a large, urban school of engineering designed a longitudinal study to assess the critical thinking skills of undergraduate students as they progressed through the engineering program. The Paul-Elder critical thinking framework was used to design course assignments and develop a holistic assessment rubric. This paper presents the analysis of the freshman course artifacts (baseline and course critical thinking assignments) and associated faculty scoring sessions for all three cohorts. A total of 649 first semester freshman students at least (...) 18 years old agreed to participate in the study. The majority were white males with a mean high school grade point average of 3.73, ACT composite score of 28.33, and final freshman engineering course grade of 3.57. There was a statistically significant positive relationship between the freshman course artifacts and the faculty scores. Data from the study are being used to enhance the critical thinking experiences for undergraduate engineering students. (shrink)

The Search for the Legacy of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is a collection of essays from experts in a variety of fields seeking to redefine the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The essayists place the legacy of the study within the evolution of racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Contributors include two leading historians on the study, two former United States Surgeons General, and other prominent scholars from a wide range of fields.

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

As a result of in-house discussions stimulated by previous Gonzaga engineering ethics conferences, Coffman Engineers began the implementation of what is to be a company-wide ethics training program. While preparing a curriculum aimed at consulting engineers, we found very little guidance as to how to proceed with most available literature being oriented towards the academic environment. We consulted a number of resources that address the teaching of engineering ethics in higher education, but questioned their applicability for the Consulting Engineering environment. (...) This lack of guidance led us to informal research into the ethical knowledge and attitudes of both consulting engineers and engineering students. Some of our findings were unexpected, and suggest that a simpler approach to teaching ethics to working professionals might be preferred to that typically promoted in higher education. (shrink)

Aim To study the views of people in a largely Muslim country, Kuwait, of the acceptability of a life-ending action such as physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Method 330 Kuwaiti university students judged the acceptability of PAS in 36 scenarios composed of all combinations of four factors: the patient's age (35, 60 or 85 years); the level of incurability of the illness (completely incurable vs extremely difficult to cure); the type of suffering (extreme physical pain or complete dependence) and the extent to (...) which the patient requests a life-ending procedure, euthanasia or PAS (no request, some form of request, repeated requests). In all scenarios, the patients were women who were receiving the best possible care. The ratings were subjected to cluster analysis and analyses of variance. Results Five clusters were found. For 44%, PAS was always very unacceptable, no matter what the circumstances. For 23%, it was unacceptable, but less so if the patient was older or requested it repeatedly. For 16%, it was unacceptable if the patient was young but was acceptable if the patient was elderly. For 5%, it was unacceptable if the patient had extreme pain but was acceptable if completely dependent. For 11%, it was unacceptable if the patient did not request it but acceptable if she did. Conclusion The majority of the Kuwaiti university students opposed PAS either categorically or with a slight variation according to circumstances. Nonetheless, a minority approved of PAS in some cases, particularly when the patient was elderly. (shrink)

Since its origin bioethics has been a specialized, academic discipline, focussing on moral issues, using a vast set of globalized principles and rational techniques to evaluate and guide healthcare practices. With the emergence of a plural society, the loss of faith in experts and authorities and the decline of overarching grand narratives and shared moralities, a new approach to bioethics is needed. This approach implies a shift from an external critique of practices towards embedded ethics and interactive practice improvement, and (...) from a legal defence of rights towards fostering interdependent practices of responsibility. This article describes these transitions within bioethics in relation to the broader societal and cultural dynamics within Western societies, and traces the implications for the methodologies and changing roles of the bioethicist. The bioethicist we foresee is not just a clever expert but also a relationally sensitive person who engages stakeholders in reciprocal dialogues about their practice of responsibility and helps to integrate various sorts of knowledge (embodied, experiential, visual, and cognitive-scientific). In order to illustrate this new approach, we present a case study. It concerns a project focusing on an innovation in elderly care, based on the participation of various stakeholders, especially older people themselves. (shrink)

Este relato de experiência apresenta resultados da pesquisa sobre a Saúde em Santo Amaro: a partir dos saberes tradicionais das rezadeiras/benzedeiras que teve por objetivo analisar as práticas medicinais e espirituais com o sagrado. A pesquisa etnográfica foi realizada com as rezadeiras, dessa forma, estabelecendo fronteiras com os rituais de cura, fé e devoção, nos processos de aprendizagem, aos mais variados tipos de doenças, as rezas e as curas, sendo assim, realizadas por elas. As rezadeiras/benzedeiras são mulheres cujo valor histórico, (...) tornando-se as suas benzeduras símbolo de resistência humana, na sua prática sobre as benzeduras. Entretanto, vale fomentar na pesquisa, sobretudo, as suas práticas também estão relacionadas a conhecimentos católicos, indígena, africana, com seus “cânticos” e “rezas” religiosas, trazendo consigo o desejo da fé de resultar o seu trabalho por alcances estabelecidos nas suas práticas reverenciadas assim as pessoas que procuram por elas. O objeto é tentar caminhar ao longo da história, em conjunto com as práticas religiosas, percebendo as inúmeras implicações produzidas pela sociedade. O contexto etnográfico da pesquisa foi na cidade de Santo Amaro. Palavras-chave: Saúde, Benzedeira, Espiritualidade. (shrink)

Is there an alternative course to one which sets up hypotheses as to the nature of poetry and then proceeds to illustrate them? Happily, there is. Rather than beginning with the hypothesis we may begin with the fact, and let what may emerge. That is, rather than beginning with some notion of the nature of poetry, we may begin with individual poems and discover what we may of their nature or form. This procedure evidently involves four phases: examination of the (...) characteristics of individual poems, discovery, by comparison with other poems, of likenesses and differences, decision as to which of these likenesses and differences are relevant to poetic form, and the statement of form itself. Once we have discovered a given form, we shall be in a position to discuss the principles underlying the construction of such form, the various possibilities of such construction, and what constitutes excellence in a given form. Elder Olson, poet, critic, and Distinguished Service Professor in the department of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of six volumes of verse, including Collected Poems and Olson's Penny Arcade, and of numerous works of literary criticism. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Poetic Process" and "On Value Judgments in the Arts" , the title essay on his most recent collection of criticism. Among the many awards which he has received are the Academy of American Poets award, the Longview Foundation award, the Emily Clark Balsh award and, for Olson's Penny Arcade, the Society of Midland Authors award. Both his poetry and his criticism are the subject of a book by Thomas E. Lucas. Part II of "A Conspectus of Poetry" will appear in the Winter 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Is there an alternative course to one which sets up hypotheses as to the nature of poetry and then proceeds to illustrate them? Happily, there is. Rather than beginning with the hypothesis we may begin with the fact, and let what may emerge. That is, rather than beginning with some notion of the nature of poetry, we may begin with individual poems and discover what we may of their nature or form. This procedure evidently involves four phases: examination of the (...) characteristics of individual poems, discovery, by comparison with other poems, of likenesses and differences, decision as to which of these likenesses and differences are relevant to poetic form, and the statement of form itself. Once we have discovered a given form, we shall be in a position to discuss the principles underlying the construction of such form, the various possibilities of such construction, and what constitutes excellence in a given form. Elder Olson, poet, critic, and Distinguished Service Professor in the department of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of six volumes of verse, including Collected Poems and Olson's Penny Arcade, and of numerous works of literary criticism. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Poetic Process" and "On Value Judgments in the Arts", the title essay on his most recent collection of criticism. Among the many awards which he has received are the Academy of American Poets award, the Longview Foundation award, the Emily Clark Balsh award and, for Olson's Penny Arcade, the Society of Midland Authors award. Both his poetry and his criticism are the subject of a book by Thomas E. Lucas. Part II of "A Conspectus of Poetry" will appear in the Winter 1977 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

When we discuss the value of a work of art we are confronted immediately with two difficulties: the terms we use, and the peculiar character of art. No one, to my knowledge, has ever doubted that an artist produces a form of some kind, and that in any discussion of art as art that form must somehow be considered; but the terms we use generally have no reference to form. We miss the form in various ways We use terms that (...) are nonartistic—that is, terms that refer to something external to the work, as when we speak of the subject of a painting, of what was depicted rather than the depiction of it, though we know full well that what we respond to is not what was depicted but the depiction of it. "This is a play about Oedipus— what does that tell us of the diverse forms produced by Sophocles, Seneca, Dryden, Voltaire, Gide, Cocteau? Or again, we use terms which are analogical, for example, the "rhythm" of a painting; the difficulty with these is that they are ambiguous and also that, while they may relate to the work, they can designate it only insofar as there is similarity between it and the analogue. Again, we use terms which seem to designate a single form when in fact they refer to forms of the utmost heterogeneity, as when we speak of "the novel"; this usually arises out of the indiscriminate application of the term over some considerable span of history, so that the "historical slippage" of meaning is gradual and goes unnoticed. As the term broadens in meaning to include more and more heterogeneous forms, the essence of each is lost, and the term comes to apply only to accidental analogies between the forms. In the end very little can then be said, involving only the most abstract and general accidents of likeness. Henry James' The Art of Fiction, Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction, and E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel illustrate this condition perfectly. The complaint that it is impossible to discuss tragedy because the term has been diversely employed and its proffered justification stem from this condition. The complaint and the justifications are both trivial, and the solution of the difficulty is simple. All that is necessary is to distinguish the different senses of the term by distinguishing the different things to which it is applied. Language is ambiguous, and we use it ambiguously; this in no way implies that the ambiguities cannot be cleared up. Finally, we may use terms which indeed have reference to the form of the work but place the part for the whole; that is, terms which are elements in its definition but do not constitute the complete definition. Thus we designate something, not through the form proper but through the device or method used, as in "drama," "sculpture," "etching," "collage," or through the means or medium, as in "charcoal sketch," "watercolor," "oil painting." The point is not that the object is not, say, a drama or a watercolor; of course it is. The point is rather that these terms do not as such refer to the form and refer to it completely. If in fact they stipulated form, all charcoal sketches would be alike in form, and all oil paintings, and all dramas. One consequence of speaking in such a fashion is that we are likely to confuse the method with the form and talk of, say, "the nature of drama" as though all drama were of the same "nature," whereas the dramatic method is used in a wide variety of forms; or to confuse the medium or means with the form and to assure that the work can have no properties beyond those of its medium, as though artists did not exist and all art were simply nature.Elder Olson, poet and critic, has received numerous awards for his verse . Among his many works are Tragedy and the Theory of Drama, and The Theory of Comedy. His contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Poetic Process"" , Part 1 of a "Conspectus of Poetry", and Part 2 of a "Conspectus of Poetry". (shrink)

ABSTRACTSince its origin bioethics has been a specialized, academic discipline, focussing on moral issues, using a vast set of globalized principles and rational techniques to evaluate and guide healthcare practices. With the emergence of a plural society, the loss of faith in experts and authorities and the decline of overarching grand narratives and shared moralities, a new approach to bioethics is needed. This approach implies a shift from an external critique of practices towards embedded ethics and interactive practice improvement, and (...) from a legal defence of rights towards fostering interdependent practices of responsibility. This article describes these transitions within bioethics in relation to the broader societal and cultural dynamics within Western societies, and traces the implications for the methodologies and changing roles of the bioethicist. The bioethicist we foresee is not just a clever expert but also a relationally sensitive person who engages stakeholders in reciprocal dialogues about their practice of responsibility and helps to integrate various sorts of knowledge . In order to illustrate this new approach, we present a case study. It concerns a project focusing on an innovation in elderly care, based on the participation of various stakeholders, especially older people themselves. (shrink)

James decides that the best price today on pork chops is at Supermarket S, then James makes driving motions for twenty minutes, then James’ car enters the parking lot at Supermarket S. Common sense supposes that the stages in this sequence may be causally connected, and that the pattern is commonplace: James’ belief (together with his desire for pork chops) causes bodily behavior, and the behavior causes a change in James’ whereabouts. Anyone committed to the idea that beliefs and desires (...) are states installed by evolution must, it seems, think something similar. For how can one see beliefs and desires as conferring selective advantage if not by supposing that, by causing bodily behavior in their subjects, they brought about changes in their subjects’ surroundings? Yet many, many philosophers currently think or worry that mental causation is illusory (see, e.g., Heil and Mele 1993, or Macdonald and Macdonald 1995). Any physical changes which a mental state appears to cause can be viewed as a complex event involving microparticles, and for any such complex event, many philosophers suppose, there will have been previous microphysical occurrences sufficient to cause it. Barring routine overdetermination of such complex events, the apparent causation of mental events seems to be excluded. Nor does it help to say that some salient segment of the previous microphysical event just is the mental event, differently described (Davidson 1970). For describing the previous events as microphysical seems to spotlight the very features in virtue of which they did their causal work; the mental features seem epiphenomenal (Yablo 1992b: pp. 425-36; Yablo 1992a). This paper argues that the complex physical events, which mental events seem excluded from causing, are not caused at all. For they are either accidents, in something like Aristotle’s sense (Sorabji 1980: pp. 3-25), or coincidences, in a sense which David Owens has recently sharpened (Owens 1992). (shrink)

Modal conventionalism is the view that two crucial forms of sameness are mind-dependent. There is no phenomenon of sameness in kind, on this view, except in virtue of our conventions for individuating nature’s kinds; there is no phenomenon of numerical sameness across time, for an individual member of some natural kind, except in virtue of our conventions for individuating such members.1 Modal conventionalism has its realist opponents. These opponents have argued, following Kripke’s lead more than thirty years ago (Kripke 1972), (...) that the boundaries of at least many of nature’s kinds are carved out by nature itself, and not by our classifi catory practices (e.g., Millikan 2000: passim, e.g., pp. 25 and 72). But they have not generally argued, with anything approaching the same vigor, that modal conventionalism is wrong in its other main claim. They have not in general argued that the world-given connections among properties, that make those properties mind-independently be membership conditions for some natural kind, at the same time make those properties mind-independently be persistence conditions for the members of the kind—properties the departure of which constitutes a ceasing-to-exist for the object that formerly had them. On the contrary, opponents of modal conventionalism have.. (shrink)

Faculty in a large, urban school of engineering designed a longitudinal study to assess the critical thinking skills of undergraduate students as they progressed through the engineering program. The Paul-Elder critical thinking framework was used to design course assignments and develop a holistic assessment rubric. This paper presents the analysis of the freshman course artifacts (baseline and course critical thinking assignments) and associated faculty scoring sessions for all three cohorts. A total of 649 first semester freshman students at least (...) 18 years old agreed to participate in the study. The majority were white males with a mean high school grade point average of 3.73, ACT composite score of 28.33, and final freshman engineering course grade of 3.57. There was a statistically significant positive relationship between the freshman course artifacts and the faculty scores. Data from the study are being used to enhance the critical thinking experiences for undergraduate engineering students. (shrink)

To be a realist about modality, need one claim that more exists than just the various objects and properties that populate the world—e.g. worlds other than the actual one, or maximal consistent sets of propositions? Or does the existence of objects and properties by itself involve the obtaining of necessities (and possibilities) in re? The latter position is now unpopular but not unfamiliar. Aristotle held that objects have essences, and hence necessarily have certain properties. Recently it has been argued that (...) the identity of any property is tied to the natural laws in which it figures, which entails that the occurrence of properties involves the obtaining of nomological necessities ([24], pp. 206-33 and 234-60; [23]; cf. [25] and [6]). Somewhat less recently, Wittgenstein ([28], p. 168) worried that the reality of at least some properties—precise shades of colors being a prime example—involved the obtaining in re of certain impossibilities. This paper argues that Wittgenstein’s worries were right, and not just concerning some properties, but all properties whatever. That there are objects and properties in the world at all, then, amounts to there obtaining modal states of affairs. This argument supplements, rather than replaces, the others. The position on property incompatibility advanced here actually helps defend Aristotelian essentialism against epistemological objections, or so I have argued ([15]). And while this paper’s position on property incompatibility diverges from the idea that a property’s nomic profile is essential to it—more on this in the next section—it is at least compatible with the thought that the necessity involved in the laws of nature enters into ontology at the ground level. (shrink)

As a disabled activist, I much prefer Aristotle's concept of ‘eu zen’, or ‘living well’ to that of ‘well-being’. ‘Eu zen’ is part of Aristotle's treatise on ‘eudaimonia’, which Grayling describes as: ‘…. a strong and satisfying sense of well-being and well-doing, of flourishing as only a rational and feeling human individual can flourish when his life and relationships are good’ (emphasis added). Aristotle's concepts are preferable because they promote ‘well-being’ through familial, social and civic activity, whilst recognising that such (...) activity requires resources, both human and material. These concepts are akin to those advocated by disabled people within the ‘independent living movement’; i.e. that the individual's ‘choice’, ‘control’, ‘dignity’ and ‘freedom’, over their lives and lifestyles, are supported by an inclusive community. However, both sets of principles are now being undermined by neoliberal managerial social work practice, which not only deny basic human rights which underpin ‘eu zen’, but lead to fear and a sense of ‘commodification’ or de-personalisation among disabled recipients. Relevant examples will come from experience, both personal as well as that from other disabled people. (shrink)

The dialogue is a common search for truth, because its aim is to gain insight into reality through the interplay of its participants. The dialogue form, i.e. an exchange of thought processes, reflects the structure of the human mind which is involved in an ongoing process of reflections and constructions. This process mirrors consciously and unconsciously the centrifugal and centripetal movements of the human body and of all organic matter. For these reasons, I argue that the praxis of dialogue represents (...) a truly human lifestyle, not limited to one specific worldview. Its form reveals implicitly various levels of meaning. (shrink)

It is widely supposed that, in Hilary Putnam’s phrase, there are no “ready-made objects” (Putnam 1982; cf. Putnam 1981, Ch. 3). Instead the objects we consider real are partly of our own making: we carve them out of the world (or out of experience). The usual reason for supposing this lies in the claim that there are available to us alternative ways of “dividing reality” into objects (to quote the title of Hirsch 1993), ways which would afford us every bit (...) as much practical and cognitive mastery as we now possess. Hence there is no warrant for supposing that the objects recognized by such alternative schemes are any less real than the objects we actually consider real—unless we are to appeal to a “God’s-eye perspective”, which virtually no one wants to do. The reasonable conclusion, many philosophers suppose, is that any system of objects exists only relative to a particular conceptual scheme or system of predicates. Our system of objects is, in this sense, partly of our own making. But this claim should not be heard as a reaffirmation of the idealism of Fichte or Husserl. It is more accurate to take it merely as a claim about sameness and difference among the objects of the world. It is the claim that sameness and difference, whether at the level of kinds or of individual objects, do not obtain mind-independently, but only relative to a conceptual scheme or predicate system (see, e.g., Putnam 1981, pp. 53-54). That is, whether two objects are of the same kind, and whether one and the same individual object now exists at such-and-such.. (shrink)

Background: Sharing information with relatives of elderly patients in primary care and in hospital has to fit into the complex set of obligations, justifications and pressures concerning the provision of information, and the results of some studies point to the need for further empirical studies exploring issues of patient autonomy, privacy and informed consent in the day-to-day care of older people.Objectives: To know the frequency with which “capable” patients over 65 years of age receive information when admitted to hospital, the (...) information offered to the families concerned, the person who gives consent for medical intervention, and the degree of satisfaction with the information received and the healthcare provided.Method: A descriptive questionnaire given to 200 patients and 200 relatives during the patients’ stay in hospital.Results: Only 5% of patients confirmed that they had been asked whether information could be given to their relatives. A significantly higher proportion of relatives received information on the successive stages of the care offered than did patients themselves. As the age of the patients increased, so the number who were given information, understood the information and were asked for their consent for complementary tests decreased. The degree of satisfaction with the information offered was high for both patients and relatives , despite the irregularities observed.Conclusions: The capacity of elderly patients to participate in the decision-making process is frequently doubted simply because they have reached a certain age and it is thought that relatives should act as their representatives. In Spain, the opinion of the family and doctors appears to play a larger role in making decisions than does the concept of patient autonomy. (shrink)

Political argument and institutions in the UnitedKingdom have frequently been represented as the products of ablend of nationalistic conservatism, liberal individualism andsocialism, in which consensus has been prized over ideology. This situation changed, as the standard story has it, with therise of Thatcherism in the late 1970s, and again with the arrivalof Tony Blair's ``New Labour'' pragmatism in the late 1990s. Solidarity as an element of political discourse makes itsappearance in the UK late in the day. It has been most (...) stronglylinked to the Third Way debate, as framed most influentially inthe work of Prof. Anthony Giddens.In this paper we review the history and pre-history of the debateon solidarity in the UK, focussing mostly on its implications forwelfare state reform. In particular we discuss the proposals forthe long-term care of the Elderly issued by the Royal Commissionon long-term care in 1999. In this context we critically examinethe idea that solidarity is a new concept in British politicalculture, and that it is a concept which has real political ``bite''in the project of welfare reform. We examine this through aconsideration of Giddens's attempted synthesis of politicalargument and social theory. (shrink)

Modern scholars have been concerned with the hostility shown to Alexander by the Hellenistic schools of philosophy. Two literary portraits have been distinguished, the Peripatetic and the Stoic, the former deriving from Theophrastus' book on Callisthenes, or starting with this work the Peripatetics worked out a theory of and applied it to Alexander, in order to belittle his achievements. It was a case of giving sophisticated expression to the kind of crude resentment expressed by Demades.

The locus classicus for Plutarch's own views on his methods is in the Alexander He has begun by asking for the indulgence of his readers if they do not find all the exploits of Alexander and Caesar recounted by the biographer or if they discover him not reporting some famous incident in detail (); and he goes on to compare his own search for evidence which will indicate the kind of soul, with the activity of the painter, who, in order (...) to create a likeness, concentrates on the eyes and pays little attention to the other parts. Commentators and critics have been right to take this as a key text for the purpose of understanding Plutarch's attitude towards his biographical work; nevertheless there are other passages in the Lives where we can at least glimpse his attitude to his subject, and we can only see the Alexander-remarks in correct perspective if we take these other passages into account. I propose therefore, starting with the Alexander, to see how far these critical remarks apply to Plutarch's theory and practice elsewhere in the Lives. (shrink)