Provides an introduction to a vast array of scholarly perspectives on emergent technologies and biotechnologies used to modify or augment the capabilities of human beings.

Corporate Physicians: Between Medicine and Management. By Diana Chapman Walsh.

Teachings of a Buddhist Monk. Ajahn Sumedho. Edited by Diana St Ruth. Foreword by Jack Kornfield. Sharpham North 1990. 109 pp., illustrated. £4.99.

Arendt Contra Sociology re-assesses the relationship between Hannah Arendt's work and the theoretical foundations of sociology, bringing her insights to bear on key themes within contemporary theoretical sociology. Departing from the view of Arendt as a political theorist who sought to rescue politics from society, and political theory from the social sciences, this book re-examines her distinctions between labour, fabrication and action as a theory of the fundamental ontology of human societies, revisiting her criticism of the tendency of many sociological (...) paradigms to conflate the activity of fabrication with that of action. (shrink)

Pedagogical situations require white lies: in teaching philosophy we make decisions about what to omit, what to emphasise, and what to distort. This article considers when it is permissible to distort the historical record, arguing for a tempered respect for the historical facts. It focuses on the rationalist/empiricist distinction, which still frames most undergraduate early modern courses despite failing to capture the intellectual history of that period. It draws an analogy with Michael Strevens's view on idealisation in causal explanation to (...) distinguish between myths and caricatures. Myths are distortions of the historical record that undermine students' understanding of the past, despite having other pedagogical benefits. Caricatures are distortions that either increase or are indifferent to understanding of the past. Mythmaking, the article argues, is unjustified. (shrink)

Husserlian phenomenology, as the study of conscious experience, has often been accused of solipsism. Husserl’s method, it is argued, does not have the resources to provide an account of consciousness of other minds. This chapter will address this issue by providing a brief overview of the multiple angles from which Husserl approached the theme of intersubjectivity, with specific focus on the details of his account of the concrete interpersonal encounter – “empathy.” Husserl understood empathy as a direct, quasi-perceptual form of (...) intentionality through which the sense of the Other is constituted. Furthermore, his account of empathy is holistically integrated with his overall theory of intersubjectivity, including his discussions of the objectivity of nature, and the social, historical, and communal aspects of subjectivity. Husserl’s theory of empathy continues to cast a long shadow, influencing both the analytic and continental approaches to the problem of other minds, as well as contemporary account of social cognition in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

This paper argues for a Husserlian account of phenomenal intentionality. Experience is intentional insofar as it presents a mind-independent, objective world. Its doing so is a matter of the way it hangs together, its having a certain structure. But in order for the intentionality in question to be properly understood as phenomenal intentionality, this structure must inhere in experience as a phenomenal feature. Husserl’s concept of horizon designates this intentionality-bestowing experiential structure, while his concept of motivation designates the unique phenomenal (...) character of this structure as it is experientially lived through. The way experience hangs together is itself a phenomenal feature of experience. (shrink)

Meyers examines the question of personal autonomy. She observes the effects of childrearing practices and sexual biases, and reflects upon the results in women. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Based on interviews with 40 first-time mothers, the authors develop an argument that supplements the critique of medicalized childbirth by focusing on the social context in which women give birth. Particularly important about that context is women's privatized responsibility for babies' well-being, and a dearth of social supports for mothering, including the sharing of that responsibility by fathers. Contextualizing childbirth in this way makes clearer not only why many women are favorable toward medical intervention but also the decisions women make (...) during hospital births. The women we interviewed displayed widely ranging reactions to giving birth in the hospital. Describing their experiences, these women often emphasized pain and anxiety. Both conditions appear to have been relieved as effectively by social support as by medical assistance. Furthermore, women who had generally supportive partners were less likely to receive medical intervention during the birth and less likely to suffer postpartum depression. (shrink)

Stimulated by our conversations at the 2018 International Philosophy of Nursing Society Conference and our shared interests, the coauthors present an argument for augmenting the broader discussion of “missed care” with our synthesized concept called structural missingness. We take the problem of missed care to be largely grounded on a particular economic construction of the healthcare system within an era of what some are calling the Capitalocene, capturing the pervasive influence of capitalism on nature, humanity and the world order. Our (...) perspective is that of the United States, however, extrapolations can be made to the social and healthcare systems in other countries. We are concerned with the underlying conditions that structurally reify inequality and ultimately undermine nursing practice. To situate the discussion, we briefly review existing literature on the contextualization of missed care. We understand contemporary circumstances of missed care as a function of the neoliberalization of healthcare, including the idea of nursing as a commodity. From this, we discuss the implications of missed care, which forms the basis of our critique. Synthesizing the term “structural missingness, we locate a moral imperative in the professional and disciplinary commitments of nursing to consider who and what have been left out. This moral imperative for the nursing profession, along with other social and health related professions, underscores our obligation to be involved in uncovering inequities and conceptualizing upstream solutions for structural missingness. (shrink)

Critical posthumanism as a philosophical, antifascist nonhierarchical imagination for nursing offers a liberatory passageway forward amidst environmental collapse, an epic pandemic, global authoritarianism, extreme health and wealth disparities, over‐reliance on technology and empirics, and unjust societal systems based in whiteness. Drawing upon philosophical and theoretical works from Black and Indigenous scholars, Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought, and Kaba's abolitionist organizing among others, we as activist nurse scholars continue the speculative discussion outlined in prior papers. Here (...) we further imagine how we can engage a radical philosophical mission of care for all beings human and non, walking and working alongside the people and communities nurses accompany, connected as we are on this dystopian celestial orb. Discussion is centred on critical analyses of traditional justice framing in nursing, and on the praxis possibilities found within rhizomatic thought, making kin, and just episteme while knitting filaments of nursing theory and history, humming song lyrics from collective memory, and critically dismantling received wisdoms to stumble toward a more emancipatory present future. (shrink)

The practice of viticulture in Israelite culture is the focus of Walsh's investigation. Viticulture, no less than drinking, marked the social sphere of Israelite practitioners, and so its details were often enlisted to describe social relations in the Hebrew Bible.

Faced with the absurdity of continued climate inaction, more people are becoming morally outraged about the projections of human suffering and loss due to global warming impacts. This article draws from the work of Albert Camus to examine human responses to absurdity through rebellion and how this can be applied to understand the notion of climate rebellion. Focusing on Camus’ works The Rebel and The Plague, as well as his speech “The Human Crisis”, I examine the conditions of climate injustice (...) that present the grounds for climate rebellion, what becoming a climate rebel might mean, the importance of solidarity in climate rebellion, and lastly how Camus’ value of limitation might inform ethical responses to minimize climate-related harm. (shrink)

Current debates over so-called ‘scientific imperialism’, on one plausible reading, explore significant general issues about the proper boundaries between distinct disciplines. They raise questions about whether some forms of territorial expansion by scientific disciplines into other domains of inquiry are undesirable. Clearly there is a strong normative undercurrent here, as the use of the pejorative term ‘imperialism’ would indicate. However, we face a genuine puzzle here: why should we regard some forms of expansion as illegitimate? Why should any particular boundaries (...) between various disciplines be regarded as sacrosanct? In response we note that one striking feature of the examples upon which opponents of scientific imperialism focus (such as the use of economics for sociological explanations) is that that they involve cases where folk conceptions of morality and philosophical anthropology appear to be threatened. We suggest that rather than seeking a more general pluralist account of the proper boundaries between disciplines, we should consider the epistemic and normative implications of particular expansions. (shrink)

Editors' Introduction to the special issue of Research in Ethical Issues in Organisations, the proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Australian Association of Professional and Applied Ethics, hosted by the Discipline of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of New England in 2020.

In this brief and powerful book, Diana Fuss takes on the debate of pure essence versus social construct, engaging with the work of Luce Irigaray and Monique ...

I argue that recent advances in developmental biology demonstrate the inadequacy of suborganismal mechanism. The category of the organism, construed as a ’natural purpose’ should play an ineliminable role in explaining ontogenetic development and adaptive evolution. According to Kant the natural purposiveness of organisms cannot be demonstrated to be an objective principle in nature, nor can purposiveness figure in genuine explain. I attempt to argue, by appeal to recent work on self-organization, that the purposiveness of organisms is a natural phenomenon (...) and, by appeal to the apparatus of invariance explanation, that biological purposiveness provides genuine, ineliminable biological explanations. (edited). (shrink)

This paper examines the difficulties of dealing with child labour in the supply chain. It begins by identifying a number of the factors which make global supply chains so difficult to manage. It goes on to outline a framework of different approaches that can be taken to managing the supply chain with relation to child labour, moving from national and international regulation, through to the role of NGOs and the companies themselves. Focusing on an ‘engagement’ strategy for dealing with child (...) labour, the paper traces a case study of Adidas‐Salomon and its attempts to implement their ‘standards of engagement’ in this area with relation to one of their supplier factories in Vietnam. The research draws on the direct involvement of one of the authors who visited the site and was able to interview staff and observe the operation in practice. Her findings are supported by wider work on the implementation of corporate approaches to human rights at a range of companies interviewed by another of the authors. The paper aims to highlight the issues needing to be addressed for companies considering the ‘involvement’ approach to child labour. It also aims to develop theory on our understanding of different approaches to corporate rights. (shrink)

The intensification of cross-sector collaboration phenomena has occurred in multiple fields of action. Organizations in the private, public, and social sectors are working together to tackle society’s most wicked problems. Some success has resulted in a generalized belief that cross-sector collaborations represent the new paradigm to manage complex problems. Yet, important knowledge gaps remain about how cross-sector alliances generate value for society, particularly to its beneficiaries. This paper answers the question: How cross-sector collaborations lead to systemic change? It uses a (...) qualitative embedded case study design. I use two general cases of alliance-based interventions in the developing country Colombia. Embedded cases within each general case identify evidence of collective action capacity of the beneficiaries. Findings identify and explain alliances’ contributions to beneficiaries’ capacity building: brokering trust and creating spaces where beneficiaries develop an emergent collective action capacity. Alliances also enable beneficiaries to enact that capacity by building bridges, circulating capitals, and buffering relationships to protect people’s initiatives. Alliances and empowered collectives of beneficiaries produce systemic change using five mechanisms: brokering trust, creating spaces, building bridges, circulating capitals, and buffering relationships. Beneficiaries increased capacity for collective action is an outcome that becomes an alliance input, leading overtime to further benefits involving systemic change. (shrink)

This is a collection of sixteen essays by a diverse group of international scholars that offers a wide-ranging and contemporary perspective on the major aspects of Christian Wolff’s ethics. The volume focuses on Wolff’s German Ethics, arguably his most important and influential text on moral philosophy, but many of the chapters also consider the development of the basic tenets of Wolff’s moral theory in his later Latin writings. The contributions cover a range of topics, including the systematic structure of the (...) text itself and the relation between Wolff’s ethics and the preceding natural law tradition. Many chapters pay special attention to the core concepts of Wolff’s moral philosophy, such as obligation, perfection, the highest good, and happiness. Other notable topics include Wolff’s conception of moral judgment and moral education, as well as the role of psychology and anthropology in his ethical thought. The volume also contains discussion of the influence of Wolff’s ethics on subsequent figures such as C.A. Crusius, G.F. Meier, and Kant. As a whole, the volume seeks to establish the importance of Wolff’s German Ethics within the history of ethics as well as inspire others to engage with his thought. (shrink)

The most compelling extant accounts of explanation casts all explanations as causal. Yet there are sciences, theoretical population biology in particular, that explain their phenomena by appeal to statistical, non-causal properties of ensembles. I develop a generalised account of explanation. An explanation serves two functions: metaphysical and cognitive. The metaphysical function is discharged by identifying a counterfactually robust invariance relation between explanans event and explanandum. The cognitive function is discharged by providing an appropriate description of this relation. I offer examples (...) of explanations from portfolio theory and population genetics that meet this characterisation. In each case the invariance relation holds between a statistical property of an ensemble and a change in structure of the ensemble. In neither case, however, does the statistical property cause the outcome it explains. There are genuine statistical, non-causal scientific explanations. (shrink)

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that (...) comprise the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie. (shrink)

In _The Later Middle Ages,_ the third volume of his monumental _History of Political Ideas,_ Eric Voegelin continues his exploration of one of the most crucial periods in the history of political thought. Illuminating the great figures of the high Middle Ages, Voegelin traces the historical momentum of our modern world in the core evocative symbols that constituted medieval civilization. These symbols revolved around the enduring aspiration for the _sacrum imperium,_ the one order capable of embracing the transcendent and immanent, (...) the ecclesiastical and political, the divine and human. The story of the later Middle Ages is that of the "civilizational schism"—the movement in which not only the reality but the aspiration for the _sacrum imperium_ gradually disappeared and the unification of faith and reason dissolved. His recognition of this civilizational schism provides Voegelin with a unique perspective on medieval society. William of Ockham, Dante, Giles of Rome, and Marsilius of Padua all emerge in Voegelin's study as predecessors to modern thought; each turns to personal authority and intellectual analysis in an attempt to comprehend the loss of the _sacrum imperium_ as an authoritative ideal. Voegelin is further drawn into investigations that, despite insufficient attention by scholars, still bear relevance to the study of the later Middle Ages. The mysticism apparent in _Piers Plowman_ and the apocalyptic revolt of Cola di Rienzo are merely two reactions to the disintegration of wholeness. Yet the story of the later Middle Ages does not merely revolve around disintegration. Voegelin recognizes the emergence of the constitutional political tradition as the most positive development of this period. He is at his best when explaining the difference between the presence of a representative institution and the growth of communal consciousness. Voegelin's study of the English political pattern is matched only by his unique perspective on the German imperial zone, culminating in a fitting conclusion on Nicholas of Cusa—the one political thinker with the ability to evoke the unity of mankind beyond fragmentation. _The Later Middle Ages_ is at once a brilliant examination of the symbols that characterized medieval society and a remarkable predecessor to Voegelin's study of the modern world, beginning with the Renaissance and the Reformation. (shrink)

This paper examines the difficulties of dealing with child labour in the supply chain. It begins by identifying a number of the factors which make global supply chains so difficult to manage. It goes on to outline a framework of different approaches that can be taken to managing the supply chain with relation to child labour, moving from national and international regulation, through to the role of NGOs and the companies themselves. Focusing on an ‘engagement’ strategy for dealing with child (...) labour, the paper traces a case study of Adidas‐Salomon and its attempts to implement their ‘standards of engagement’ in this area with relation to one of their supplier factories in Vietnam. The research draws on the direct involvement of one of the authors who visited the site and was able to interview staff and observe the operation in practice. Her findings are supported by wider work on the implementation of corporate approaches to human rights at a range of companies interviewed by another of the authors. The paper aims to highlight the issues needing to be addressed for companies considering the ‘involvement’ approach to child labour. It also aims to develop theory on our understanding of different approaches to corporate rights. (shrink)

Admiration is thought to have essential functions for social interaction: it inspires us to learn from excellent models, to become better people, and to praise others and create social bonds. In intergroup relations, admiration for other groups leads to greater intergroup contact, cooperation, and help. Given these implications, it is surprising that admiration has only been researched by a handful of authors. In this article we review the literature, focusing on the definition of admiration, links to related emotions, measurement, antecedents, (...) and associated behaviors. We propose a conceptual model of admiration that highlights admiration’s function for approaching and emulating successful models, thus contributing to social learning at the interpersonal level and to cultural transmission at the group and societal level. (shrink)

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is an emerging, multidisciplinary field of research that seeks to develop methods and tools for making AI systems more explainable or interpretable. XAI researchers increasingly recognise explainability as a context-, audience- and purpose-sensitive phenomenon, rather than a single well-defined property that can be directly measured and optimised. However, since there is currently no overarching definition of explainability, this poses a risk of miscommunication between the many different researchers within this multidisciplinary space. This is the problem we (...) seek to address in this paper. We outline a framework, called Explanatory Pragmatism, which we argue has two attractive features. First, it allows us to conceptualise explainability in explicitly context-, audience- and purpose-relative terms, while retaining a unified underlying definition of explainability. Second, it makes visible any normative disagreements that may underpin conflicting claims about explainability regarding the purposes for which explanations are sought. Third, it allows us to distinguish several dimensions of AI explainability. We illustrate this framework by applying it to a case study involving a machine learning model for predicting whether patients suffering disorders of consciousness were likely to recover consciousness. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Huw Price’s widely read “Truth as Convenient Friction” overstates the onerousness, and underrates the utility, of the ontological commitments involved in Charles S. Peirce’s version of the pragmatist account of truth. This argument comes in three parts. First, I briefly explain Peirce’s view of truth, and relate it to his account of assertion. Next, I articulate what I take Price’s grievance against Peirce’s view to be, and suggest that this criticism misses the target. Finally, (...) I argue that Peirce’s version of the pragmatist account of truth has greater explanatory power than the narrowly linguistic version put forward by Price, such that even the ontology-averse should accept it. (shrink)