Complexity is pleased to announce the installment of Prof Hiroki Sayama as its new Chief Editor. In this Editorial, Prof Sayama describes his feelings about his recent appointment, discusses some of the journal’s journey and relevance to current issues, and shares his vision and aspirations for its future.

This paper argues that it will be important for new genomic technologies to recognize the limits of traditional approaches to informed consent, so that other-regarding implications of genomic information can be properly contextualized and individual rights respected. Respect for individual autonomy will increasingly require dynamic consideration of the interrelated dimensions of individual and broader community interests, so that the interests of one do not undermine fundamental interests of the other. In this, protection of individual rights will be a complex interplay (...) between individual and community concerns. (shrink)

The identity of lesbian-mother combines a marginalized identity with one of the most revered mainstream identities. With data collected through exploratory in-depth interviews from nine lesbian-mothers, the authors use symbolic interaction framework to explore the strategies that lesbian birth mothers and comothers employ to gain acceptance for their marginal-mainstream identities in their family networks. Respondents experienced varying levels of resistance from their social networks, with comothers being especially vulnerable due to their lack of both biological and legal substantiation. The authors (...) explore the process of identity negotiation in three realms of everyday experience: in relationships with extended families, in relations within the nuclear family, and in lesbian relationships that have ended. (shrink)

Advocates for the professionalization of clinical bioethics argue that bioethics professionals play an important role in contemporary medicine and patient care, especially when addressing complex ethical questions that arise in the delivery of reproductive medicine. For bioethics consultants to serve effectively, they need adequate training in the medical and ethical issues that patients and clinicians will face, and they need skills to facilitate effective dialog among all parties. Because clinical ethics consultation is a “high‐stakes endeavor” that can acutely affect patient (...) care, efforts are under way to ensure that bioethics consultants have the competence to provide such guidance. Yet to date, no studies have examined whether the training of bioethics consultants meets the needs of health care professionals who are on the front lines of such issues. In fact, limited information is available on the reproductive health issues that bioethics training programs address or the degree to which these programs meet the needs of patients confronting reproductive health decisions and their clinicians. It is therefore important to answer this key question: What are the primary ethical issues encountered in reproductive medicine that currently affect patient care? Equally important, are bioethics training programs prepared to address those issues?To begin to answer these questions, we conducted parallel surveys of directors of graduate bioethics training programs and obstetrician‐gynecologists. The goal of this project is to lay the groundwork to establish a working partnership between bioethics educators and reproductive medicine practitioners to address the often troubling and frequently complex ethical issues in reproductive medicine. (shrink)

Through photographs and translations of Friedrich Nietzsche's evocative writings on his work sites, David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates explore the cities and landscapes in which Nietzsche lived and worked.

Through photographs and translations of Friedrich Nietzsche's evocative writings on his work sites, David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates explore the cities and landscapes in which Nietzsche lived and worked. "A brilliant juxtaposition of life and thought.... The sympathy of this pictorial biography is rivaled by few books on Nietzsche."—Charles M. Stang, _Boston Book Review_ "[A] distinguished addition to the Nietzsche-friendly corpus."—Alain de Botton, _Los Angeles Times Book Review_ "An odd and oddly endearing record of Nietzsche's travels."—John Banville, (...) _New York Review of Books_. (shrink)

After more than 15 years of study, the 1/f noise or complex-systems approach to cognitive science has delivered promises of progress, colorful verbiage, and statistical analyses of phenomena whose relevance for cognition remains unclear. What the complex-systems approach has arguably failed to deliver are concrete insights about how people perceive, think, decide, and act. Without formal models that implement the proposed abstract concepts, the complex-systems approach to cognitive science runs the danger of becoming a philosophical exercise in futility. The complex-systems (...) approach can be informative and innovative, but only if it is implemented as a formal model that allows concrete prediction, falsification, and comparison against more traditional approaches. (shrink)

Many adoptees face a number of challenges relating to separation from biological parents during the adoption process, including issues concerning identity, intimacy, attachment, and trust, as well as language and other cultural challenges. One common health challenge faced by adoptees involves lack of access to genetic-relative family health history. Lack of GRFHx represents a disadvantage due to a reduced capacity to identify diseases and recommend appropriate screening for conditions for which the adopted person may be at increased risk. In this (...) article, we draw out common features of traditionally understood “health disparities” in order to identify analogous features in the context of adoptees’ lack of GRFHx. (shrink)

Encounters with Alphonso Lingis is the first extensive study of this American philosopher who is gaining an international reputation to augment his national one. The distinguished contributors to this volume address most of the central themes found in Lingis's writings—including singularity and otherness, death and eroticism, emotions and rationality, embodiment and the face, excess and the sacred. The book closes with a new essay by Lingis himself.

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

It is extraordinary, when one thinks about it, how little attention has been paid by theorists of the nature and justification of punishment to the idea that punishment is essentially a matter of self-defense. H. L. A. Hart, for example, in his famous “Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment,” is clearly committed to the view that, at bottom, there are just three directions in which a plausible theory of punishment can go: we can try to justify punishment on purely consequentialist (...) grounds, which for Hart, I think, would be to try to construct a purely utilitarian justification of punishment; we can try to justify punishment on purely retributive grounds; or we can try to justify punishment on grounds that are some sort of shrewd combination of consequentialist and retributive considerations. Entirely absent from Hart's discussion is any consideration of the possibility that punishment might be neither a matter of maximizing the good, nor of exacting retribution for a wrongful act, nor of some imaginative combination of these things, but, rather, of something altogether different from either of them: namely, the exercise of a fundamental right of self-protection. Similarly, but much more recently, R. A. Duff, despite the fact that he himself introduces and defends an extremely interesting fourth possibility, begins his discussion by writing as though, apart from his contribution, there are available to us essentially just the options previously sketched by Hart. Again, there is no mention here, any more than in Hart's or any number of other recent discussions, of the possibility that we might be able to justify the institution of punishment on grounds that are indeed forward-looking, to use Hart's famous term, but that are not at all consequentialist in any ordinary sense of the word. (shrink)

Heidegger’s thinking has an underlying unity, this book argues, and has cogency for seemingly diverse domains of modern culture: philosophy and religion, aesthetics and literary criticism, intellectual history and social theory. “The theme of mortality—finite human existence—pervades Heidegger’s thought,” in the author’s words, “before, during, and after his magnum opus, _Being and Times_, published in 1927.” This theme is manifested in Heidegger’s work not “as funereal melodramatics or as despair and destructive nihilism” but rather “_as a thinking within anxiety_.” Four (...) major subthemes in Heidegger’s thinking are explored in the book’s four parts: the fundamental ontology developed in _Being and Time_; the “lighting and clearing” of Being, understood as “unconcealment”; the history of philosophy—with emphasis on Heraclitus, Hegel, and Nietzsche—interpreted as the “destiny” of Being; and the poetics of Being, explicated as the “fundamental experience” of mortality. Neither an introduction nor a survey, this book is a close reading of a wide range of Heidegger’s books, lectures, and articles—including extensive material not yet translated into English—informed by the author’s conversations with Heidegger in 1974_–_76. Each of the four subthemes is treated critically. The aim of the book is to push its interrogations of Heidegger’s thought as far as possible, in order to help the reader toward an independent assessment of his work and to encourage novel, radically conceived approaches to traditional philosophical problems. (shrink)

"Krell writes here with a brilliance of style that few other philosophers can match." —John Sallis Although the Romantic Age is usually thought of as idealizing nature as the source of birth, life, and creativity, David Farrell Krell focuses on the preoccupation of three key German Romantic thinkers—Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel—with nature’s destructive powers—contagion, disease, and death.

The essay reflects on Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation, ‘On the Use and Disadvantage of the Study of History for Life’, especially as Heidegger reads it in section 76 of Being and Time and as Derrida reads Heidegger's reading of it. Derrida's concludes his first seminar on Heidegger, Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l'Histoire; Cours de l'ENS-Ulm 1964–1965, by reflecting on Heidegger as a Nietzschean antiquarian.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Intensifying Phronesis:Heidegger, Aristotle, and Rhetorical CultureDaniel L. SmithAll too well versed in the commonness of what is multiple and entangled, we are no longer capable of experiencing the strangeness that carries with it all that is simple.—Martin Heidegger, Aristotle's Metaphysics θ 1-3IntroductionIn Norms of Rhetorical Culture Thomas Farrell returns to the thought of Aristotle to develop a contemporary conception of rhetoric as a mode of practical philosophy, one (...) that foregrounds the importance of phronesis. Returning to Aristotle's work to forge contemporary conceptions of rhetoric as practical philosophy is nothing new. What is novel about Farrell's approach, however, are his thoughts on Aristotle's conception of "phainomena," or appearances. "Appearances," Farrell states, "come to us as configurations, as ensembles of objects, habitats, paths, tools, tasks, icons, and more or less recognizable characters that engage and reassure us with their... familiarity" (1993, 27). Phainomena and their stability, therefore, constitute the milieux of human life. But coupled with the stability of phainomena that lends continuity and predictability to our lives is their dynamic element of mutability, contingency, and unpredictability. Therefore phainomena can also be "ambiguous or even equivocal and incomplete," according to Farrell (27). This stable-mutable aspect of phainomena, and thus human life itself, demands that we have ways of inhabiting and responding to the worlds these phainomena constitute.Farrell cites a comment by Merleau-Ponty on Cezanne as an "apt characterization" of Aristotle's thought: Cezanne, writes Merleau-Ponty, "did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear..." (quoted in Farrell, 27). For Farrell, Merleau-Ponty's observation concisely expresses a fundamental aspect of Aristotle's [End Page 77] thought, namely, a focus on the relation between the being of things and their dynamic modes of appearing, which are distinct but inextricably connected. Aristotle's conception of phainomena, Farrell's work suggests, offers possibilities for thinking about rhetoric as practical philosophy, a rhetoric that would be "an art of real life" (274), one that, because of the stability-contingency of real life, features the concept of phronesis.It is interesting to note that the issue of being-appearing that Farrell attributes to Aristotle sounds like a problematic of twentieth-century European phenomenology. Given Merleau-Ponty's status as one of the preeminent phenomenologists of the twentieth century, it is surprising that Farrell makes no mention of Merleau-Ponty's—or phenomenology's—interest in the dynamics of phainomena; nor does he make any explicit connections between Aristotle, rhetoric, and phenomenology. In fact, Farrell's thoughts on the connections between rhetoric and the being-appearing of phainomena are virtually eclipsed in his book when he turns to Jürgen Habermas. Farrell claims "that Habermas's project on discourse ethics, together with his practical placement of the public sphere, offers a basis for synthesizing the normative component of practical wisdom and a rhetoric goaded by emancipatory reason" (188). Farrell's interest in theorizing the enactment of "emancipatory reason" in the public sphere, through norm-governed rhetorical practices (of argumentation, deliberation, and so forth), takes precedence over theorizing the rhetoric-phainomena connection (or at the very least, does not facilitate a phenomenological consideration of rhetorical cultures and norms). This is not a criticism of Farrell, but rather the citing of an absence that opens a possibility. More specifically, because Farrell does not see, or perhaps is not interested in, the connection between his understanding of Aristotle and the problematic of phenomenology, he is not prompted to explore the possibilities that lie in bringing rhetorical studies into an encounter with phenomenology. Furthermore, given the connection Farrell makes between Aristotle and phainomena, Farrell's work suggests that it might be interesting to see what possibilities for rhetoric might exist in readings of Aristotle by phenomenologists.This essay will attempt to look into possibilities unexamined by Farrell. My aim in assuming this task, however, is not to theorize and facilitate the enactment of "emancipatory reason" in the public sphere through discourse governed by normative standards or ideals. Rather, my goal is to highlight the ways that phenomenology and phenomenological readings of Aristotle can help rhetorical scholars to examine... (shrink)

‘What it is like’ talk (‘WIL-talk’) — the use of phrases such as ‘what it is like’ — is ubiquitous in discussions of phenomenal consciousness. It is used to define, make claims about, and to offer arguments concerning consciousness. But what this talk means is unclear, as is how it means what it does: how, by putting these words in this order, we communicate something about consciousness. Without a good account of WIL-talk, we cannot be sure this talk sheds light, (...) rather than casts shadows, on our investigations of consciousness. The popular technical account of WIL-talk (see e.g. Lewis, 1995, and Kim, 1998) holds that WIL-talk involves technical terms — terms which look like everyday words but have a distinct meaning — introduced by philosophers. I argue that this account is incorrect by showing that the alleged technical terms were not introduced by philosophers, and that these terms do not have a technical meaning. (shrink)

Dene Bebbbington explains, and criticises, the intelligent design creationism of William Dembski.

Is it rational to be moral? How do rationality and morality fit together with being human? These questions are at the heart of David Schmidtz's exploration of the connections between rationality and morality. This inquiry leads into both metaethics and rational choice theory, as Schmidtz develops conceptions of what it is to be moral and what it is to be rational. He defends a fairly expansive conception of rational choice, considering how ends as well as means can be rationally chosen (...) and explaining the role of self-imposed constraints in a rational life plan. His moral theory is dualistic, ranging over social structure as well as personal conduct and building both individual and collective rationality into its rules of recognition for morals. To the "why be moral" question, Schmidtz responds that being moral is rational, but he does not assume we have reasons to be rational. Instead, Schmidtz argues that being moral is rational in a particular way and that beings like us in situations like ours have reasons to be rational in just that way. This approach allows him to identify decisive reasons to be moral; at the same time, it explains why immorality is as prevalent as it is. This book thus offers a set of interesting and realistic conclusions about how morality fits into the lives of humanly rational agents operating in an institutional context like our own. (shrink)

People prefer certainty. There's a psychological need to explain events or phenomena rather than accept one's ignorance, to say ???I don't know??? when faced with insufficient evidence.

A man fires a gun several times at the side of a barn and then draws a circle around a cluster of most of the bullet holes. Drawing a target retrospectively like this doesn't prove the shooting skills of the gunman ??? no one would consider him a sharpshooter if they knew what he'd done. When the equivalent of this happens in other circumstances we call it the Texas sharpshooter fallacy . As with many fallacies, it may not appear fallacious (...) at first inspection. (shrink)

Liberalism was not only the first modern ideology, it was also the first secular movement to have an international presence. The scholarly articles in this collection, skillfully edited by Iván Zoltán Dénes, examine liberal ideas and movements from Scotland to the Ottoman Empire. The volume seeks to uncover and analyze various relationships between liberalisms and nationalisms, national identities and modernity concepts, nations and empires, nation-states and nationalities, traditions and modernities, images of the self and the others, modernization strategies and identity (...) creations. This volume provides an important historical analysis that is essential toward understanding the questions and motivations of liberalism in the European Union today. This is, therefore, a timely contribution to both historiography and contemporary politics. (shrink)