An imagined retrospective of apocalyptic art.

Contemporary electronic music has splintered into numerous genres and subgenres, all of which share a concern with whether sound, in itself, bears meaning. Listening through the Noise considers how the experience of listening to electronic music constitutes a departure from the expectations that have long governed music listening in the West.

Joanna Demers argues that Houellebecqs apocalypse can be understood as a system analogous to Hegels, and interrogates the ethics of such a system.

This issue profiles various attempts, both successful and fraught, to engage the divide between asceticism and opulence, between materialism and poverty.

In this issue, our authors examine premodern art and theories of art, which preceded Descartes and the onset of philosophical modernity.

Reading is an affective and reflective relationship with a text, whether it is a new, groundbreaking monograph or one of those books that keeps getting pulled off the shelf year after year. Unlike traditional reviews, the pieces in this section may veer off in new directions as critical reading becomes an extended occurrence of thinking, being, and creation. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, by Simon Reynolds. New York: Faber and Faber, 2011.

Our contributors invite new ways of thinking Hegel's ideas through contemporary art and theories that arise from current perspectives; and of thinking through such art and perspectives via Hegelianism.

Our contributors invite new ways of thinking Hegels ideas through contemporary art and theories that arise from current perspectives; and of thinking through such art and perspectives via Hegelianism.

In this issue, our contributors demonstrate how art in the city, art “about” the city, art compared to the city, can bring to attention the insidious forces underlying every city’s gleaming, wide-awake veneer.

In this issue, our contributors demonstrate how art in the city, art “about” the city, art compared to the city, can bring to attention the insidious forces underlying every city’s gleaming, wide-awake veneer.

This introduction highlights the themes that arise from The Missed: the productivity and negativity of unrealized potential and missed opportunity.

This introduction highlights the themes that arise from The Missed: the productivity and negativity of unrealized potential and missed opportunity.

Building on our diverse research traditions in the study of reasoning, language and communication, the Polish School of Argumentation integrates various disciplines and institutions across Poland in which scholars are dedicated to understanding the phenomenon of the force of argument. Our primary goal is to craft a methodological programme and establish organisational infrastructure: this is the first key step in facilitating and fostering our research movement, which joins people with a common research focus, complementary skills and an enthusiasm to work (...) together. This statement—the Manifesto—lays the foundations for the research programme of the Polish School of Argumentation. (shrink)

Nurse practitioners (NPs), as advanced practice nurses, have evolved over the years to become recognized as an important and growing trend in Canada and worldwide. In spite of sound evidence as to the effectiveness ofNPs in primary care and other care settings, role implementation and integration continue to pose significant challenges. This article utilizes postcolonial theory, as articulated by Homi Bhabha, to examine and challenge traditional ideologies and structures that have shaped the development, implementation and integration of theNProle to this (...) day. Specifically, we utilize Bhabha's concepts of third space, hybridity, identity and agency in order to further conceptualize the nurse practitioner role, to examine how the role challenges some of the inherent assumptions within the healthcare system and to explore how development of each to these concepts may prove useful in integration of nurse practitioners within the healthcare system. Our analysis casts light on the importance of a broader, power structure analysis and illustrates how colonial assumptions operating within our current healthcare system entrench, expand and re‐invent, as well as mask the structures and practices that serve to impede nurse practitioner full integration and contributions. Suggestions are made for future analysis and research. (shrink)

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Contemporary picturebooks open up spaces for philosophical dialogues between people of all ages. As works of art, picturebooks offer unique opportunities to explore ideas and to create meaning collaboratively. This book considers censorship of certain well-known picturebooks, challenging the assumptions on which this censorship is based. Through a lively exploration of children's responses to these same picturebooks the authors paint a way of working philosophically based on respectful listening and creative and authentic interactions, rather (...) than scripted lessons. This dialogical process challenges much current practice in education. The authors propose that a courageous and critical practice of listening is central to the facilitation of mutually educative dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of education studies, philosophy of education, literacy teaching and learning, children's literature, childhood and pedagogy. (shrink)

Heidegger and ethics is a contentious conjunction of terms. Martin Heidegger himself rejected the notion of ethics, while his endorsement of Nazism is widely seen as unethical. This major new study examines the complex and controversial issues involved in bringing them together. By working backwards through his work, from his 1964 claim that philosophy has been completed to _Being and Time_, his first major work, Joanna Hodge questions Heidegger's denial that his enquires were concerned with ethics. She discovers a (...) form of ethics in Heidegger's thinking which elucidates his important distinction between metaphysics and philosophy. Against many contemporary views, she proposes therefore that ethics can be retrieved and questions the relation between ethics and metaphysics that Heidegger had made so pervasive. (shrink)

Exercise-based rehabilitation forms a key part of the UK National Health Service patient-care pathway for cardiac rehabilitation (CR). Only around half of all eligible patients attend core CR, however, with social inequalities affecting participation. Few qualitative studies have explored in-depth the key factors influencing engagement with CR, specifically from a sociological theoretical, and ethnographic perspective. Utilising an ethnographic approach allowed us to get a sense of the embodied experiences of 10 participants attending or declining core CR, together with a further (...) seven family members/significant others. This provided in-depth appreciation of participants’ lifeworld contexts as key influences on CR participation. The article draws on these qualitative data and focuses on 1) participants’ initial thoughts about CR; and 2) navigating the field of CR, analysed via thematic analysis. We utilise a Bourdieusian theoretical perspective to theorise the findings, including salient socio-cultural factors influencing attendance/non-attendance and (non)adherence. The article findings highlight how perceptions of CR and the ability to navigate the field are strongly influenced by habitus and capital, and how personal biographies and socio-material conditions affect adherence to CR programmes. The study provides original insights into embodied experiences of exercise-based CR, and novel understandings of the reasons for drop-out/poor adherence, theorised from a Bourdieusian perspective. (shrink)

A person who is liable to defensive harm has forfeited his rights against the imposition of the harm, and so is not wronged if that harm is imposed. A number of philosophers, most notably Jeff McMahan, argue for an instrumental account of liability, whereby a person is liable to defensive harm when he is either morally or culpably responsible for an unjust threat of harm to others, and when the imposition of defensive harm is necessary to avert the threatened unjust (...) harm. Others may favour a purely noninstrumental account of liability: one that looks only to the past behaviour of the potentially liable person. We argue that both views are vulnerable to serious objections. Instead we develop and defend a new view of liability to defensive harm: the pluralist account. The pluralist account states that liability to defensive harm has at least two bases. First, if an attacker is morally or culpably responsible for an unjust attack then he has forfeited what we call his agency right, and in doing so he has made himself partially liable to defensive harm. Whether the attacker is fully liable to defensive harm depends, however, on whether the imposition of defensive harm would infringe a different right held by the attacker: his humanitarian right. Humanitarian rights are rights to be provided with urgently needed resources or to be protected from serious harms when others can do so at reasonably low cost. We argue the pluralist account avoids the objections to which the instrumental and noninstrumental views are vulnerable, coheres with our intuitive reactions in a wide range of cases, and sheds new light on the way different rights combine to determine a person's liability to suffer harm. (shrink)

If the paradigm of secularization as replacement was falsified by the permanent vitality of the religious dimension on the world horizon and in the public sphere, the universalization of the paradigm of secularization as differentiation, on the contrary, turns out to be an essential guarantee of the maintenance and promotion of the rule of law and human rights. From an alternative perspective to both secularism and fundamentalism, public theology today is therefore called upon to reconstruct and argumentatively justify the function (...) of religious freedom as a basic principle of democratic society, within the framework of cognitive and normative disjunction between religion and citizenship which rules modernity. It is urgent to theologically demystify the regressive manipulation of this principle, as a vector of a democratically disruptive tribal pluralism, in contradiction with its nature as a catalyst for an integrative pluralism essential for social cohesion and the common good. (shrink)

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value.

This fully revised second edition suggests ways in which you can introduce philosophical enquiry to your Personal, Social and Health Education and Citizenship teaching and across the curriculum.

The question of whether AI systems such as robots can or should be afforded moral agency or patiency is not one amenable either to discovery or simple reasoning, because we as societies constantly reconstruct our artefacts, including our ethical systems. Consequently, the place of AI systems in society is a matter of normative, not descriptive ethics. Here I start from a functionalist assumption, that ethics is the set of behaviour that maintains a society. This assumption allows me to exploit the (...) theoretical biology of sociality and autonomy to explain our moral intuitions. From this grounding I extend to consider possible ethics for maintaining either human- or of artefact-centred societies. I conclude that while constructing AI systems as either moral agents or patients is possible, neither is desirable. In particular, I argue that we are unlikely to construct a coherent ethics in which it it is ethical to afford AI moral subjectivity. We are therefore obliged not to build AI we are obliged to. (shrink)

In this landmark collection of original essays, outstanding feminist critics in Britain, France, and the United States present new perspectives on feminism and ...

Civility is often treated as an essential virtue in liberal democracies that promise to protect diversity as well as active disagreement in the public sphere. Yet the fear that our tolerant society faces a crisis of incivility is gaining ground. Politicians and public intellectuals call for "more civility" as the solution--but is civility really a virtue? Or is it something more sinister--a covert demand for conformity that silences dissent? Mere Civility sheds light on this tension in contemporary political theory and (...) practice by examining similar appeals to civility in early modern debates about religious toleration. In seventeenth-century England, figures as different as Roger Williams, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke could agree that some restraint on the wars of words and "persecution of the tongue" between sectarians would be required; and yet, they recognized that the prosecution of incivility was often difficult to distinguish from persecution.--. (shrink)

Intuitions about retractions have been used to motivate truth relativism about certain types of claims. Among these figure epistemic modals, knowledge attributions, or personal taste claims. On MacFarlane’s prominent relativist proposal, sentences like “the ice cream might be in the freezer” or “Pocoyo is funny” are only assigned a truth-value relative to contexts of utterance and contexts of assessment. Retractions play a crucial role in the argument for assessment-relativism. A retraction of a past assertion is supposed to be mandatory whenever (...) the asserted sentence is not true at the context of use and the context of assessment. If retractions were not obligatory in these conditions, there would be no normative difference between assessment-relativism and contextualism. The main goal of this paper is to undermine the claim that retractions reveal this normative difference. To this effect, the paper offers a review of three important objections to the obligatoriness of retractions. Taken together, these objections make a strong case against the alleged support that retractions give to assessment-relativism. The objections are moreover supported by recent experimental results that are also discussed. This will satisfy a further goal, which is to undermine the idea that there is a constitutive retraction rule. The paper also discusses two ways to understand what such a rule would be constitutive of, and concludes with a discussion of how to describe what retractions are. (shrink)

Conferring legal personhood on purely synthetic entities is a very real legal possibility, one under consideration presently by the European Union. We show here that such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome. While AI legal personhood may have some emotional or economic appeal, so do many superficially desirable hazards against which the law protects us. We review the utility and history of legal fictions of personhood, discussing salient precedents where such fictions resulted in abuse or incoherence. We (...) conclude that difficulties in holding “electronic persons” accountable when they violate the rights of others outweigh the highly precarious moral interests that AI legal personhood might protect. (shrink)

In 2014, Article 3 of the the Belgian Euthanasia Act (2002) (the Euthanasia Act) was amended (‘the Amendment’) to include the ‘capacity for discernment’ requirement. This paper explores the implications of this highly controversial Amendment. I remain unconvinced of the benefits for children < 12 years old suffering chronic or terminal illnesses. In Part One, I argue that the phrase ‘capacity for discernment’ is problematic and vulnerable to abuse; neither a consistent, widely accepted definition of the phrase has been established (...) nor a standardised method or procedure to adequately gauge a minor’s capacity for discernment. In Part Two I advance the argument that specifically for children < 12 years, aggressive and sophisticated paediatric palliative care treatment, which risks, but does not intend death, is more ethically justified than Euthanasia treatment. A definition of a child’s interests is best achieved through a care-based ethics framework; namely, the child’s relationship with their parents and family members, their doctors and medical practitioners is held to be an interest of crucial importance for the child. I conclude that paediatric palliative care arguably better promotes and upholds this interest. (shrink)

Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology, yet only recently have the two disciplines developed greater interaction. Recent experiments in psychology that test the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning have found a great deal of variation, across individuals and (...) cultures, in categorization behaviour. Meanwhile, philosophers of language and mind have investigated the semantic properties of concepts, and how concepts are related to linguistic meaning and linguistic communication. A key motivation behind this was the idea that concepts must be shared across individuals and cultures. With the dawn of experimental philosophy, the proposal that the experimental data from psychology lacks relevance to semantics is increasingly difficult to defend. -/- This volume brings together leading psychologists and philosophers to advance the interdisciplinary debate on the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning, the relationship between concepts and linguistic meaning and communication, the challenges conceptual variation poses to communication, and the social and political effects of conceptual change. (shrink)

The idea that one can 'soak up' someone else's mood or sense the tension in a room is familiar - as in 'negative energy'. This ability to borrow or share states of mind is now pathologized, as the author shows in relation to affective transfer in psychiatric clinics.

Saunkeah et al. analyze the aptness of extending the Belmont Principles of Respect for Persons, Beneficence and Justice to AI/AN tribal communities as a whole. They argue that to protect AI/...

One of the interesting and occasionally controversial aspects of Dennett’s career is his direct involvement in the scientific process. This article describes some of Dennett’s participation on one particular project conducted at MIT, the building of the humanoid robot named Cog. One of the intentions of this project, not to date fully realized, was to test Dennett’s multiple drafts theory of consciousness. I describe Dennett’s involvement and impact on Cog from the perspective of a graduate student. I also describe the (...) problem of coordinating distributed intelligent systems, drawing examples from robot intelligence, human intelligence, and the Cog project itself. (shrink)

One of the interesting and occasionally controversial aspects of Dennett’s career is his direct involvement in the scientific process. This article describes some of Dennett’s participation on one particular project conducted at MIT, the building of the humanoid robot named Cog. One of the intentions of this project, not to date fully realized, was to test Dennett’s multiple drafts theory of consciousness. I describe Dennett’s involvement and impact on Cog from the perspective of a graduate student. I also describe the (...) problem of coordinating distributed intelligent systems, drawing examples from robot intelligence, human intelligence, and the Cog project itself. (shrink)

OBJECTIVE: Following two randomized controlled trials that demonstrated reduced mortality and better neurological outcome in cardiac arrest patients, mild therapeutic hypothermia was implemented in many intensive care units. Up to now, no large observational studies have confirmed the beneficial effects of mild therapeutic hypothermia. DESIGN: Internet-based survey combined with a retrospective, observational study. PATIENTS: All patients admitted to an intensive care unit in The Netherlands after cardiac arrest from January 1, 1999 until January 1, 2009. DATA SOURCE: Dutch National Intensive (...) Care Evaluation database. METHODS: The moment of implementation of mild therapeutic hypothermia for each hospital participating in the Dutch National Intensive Care Evaluation database was determined with an Internet survey. To compare mortality before and after implementation of mild therapeutic hypothermia, the odds ratio adjusted for Simplified Acute Physiology Score II score, age, gender, propensity score, and in- or out-of-hospital cardiac arrest was calculated. Patients were excluded if 1) they were admitted to an intensive care unit that did not respond to the survey, 2) they were admitted within 3 months after implementation of mild therapeutic hypothermia, 3) they had a Glasgow Coma Scale score of >8, or 4) they did not satisfy the Simplified Acute Physiology Score II inclusion criteria. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: A total of 13,962 patients were admitted to an intensive care unit following cardiac arrest. In total 8,645 patients were excluded, 5,544 because of a Glasgow Coma Scale score of >8. Of the resultant 5,317 patients, 1,547 patients were treated before and 3,770 patients after implementation of mild therapeutic hypothermia. Patients admitted after implementation of mild therapeutic hypothermia had lower minimal and maximal temperatures (p < .0001) during the first 24 hrs on the intensive care unit compared to patients admitted before implementation of mild therapeutic hypothermia. The adjusted odds ratio of the hospital mortality of patients treated after implementation of mild therapeutic hypothermia was 0.80 (95% confidence interval of 0.65-0.98, p = .029). CONCLUSION: The results of this retrospective, observational survey suggest that implementation of mild therapeutic hypothermia in Dutch intensive care units is associated with a 20% relative reduction of hospital mortality in cardiac arrest patients. (shrink)

Industry-funded religious liberty legal groups have sought to undermine healthcare policy and law while simultaneously attacking the rights of sexual and gender minorities. Whereas past scholarship has tracked religiously-affiliated healthcare providers’ growing political power and attendant transformations to legal doctrine, our account emphasizes the political donors and visionaries who have leveraged religious providers and the U.S. healthcare system’s delegated structure to transform social policy and bureaucratic agencies more generally.

The aim of this chapter is to engage with the inherent humanism of bioethics and consider the possibility of thinking bioethics otherwise - beyond the belief in the intrinsic dignity and superior value of the human, and beyond the rules and procedures rooted in this belief. It is also to challenge what we may call the ‘cognitivist pretence’ of humanism, i.e. the conviction that the human can be distinguished from other forms of life by the inherent ‘truth’ and teleology of (...) his being which is to be revealed to him, and which he can uniquely grasp. The human as both a discrete subject and an object of bioethics becomes thus a critical point of interrogation in this study. What I want to outline in response is a non-systemic bioethics of relations which does not abdicate its ethical responsibility or its political commitment, although it questions many of the premises of established moral and political theories. Indeed, I want to ‘put to the test the pretentious belief that only a liberal and humanistic view of the subject can guarantee basic elements of human decency: moral and political agency and ethical probity’. But my project is more genealogical than futurologist. By revisiting the story of bioethics’ emergence as a separate discipline, I want to consider the following question: what if the cyborg rather than the human had been adopted as its foundation? Or, to put it another way, what would a bioethics for humans, animals and machines look like? (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the processes of racialisation on the example of biomedical research. We argue that applying the concept of racialisation in biomedical research can be much more precise, informative and suitable than currently used categories, such as race and ethnicity. For this purpose, we construct a model of the different processes affecting and co-shaping the racialisation of an individual, and consider these in relation to biomedical research, particularly to studies on hypertension. We finish with a discussion on (...) the potential application of our proposition to institutional guidelines on the use of racial categories in biomedical research. (shrink)

Lacan was not an ahistorical post-structuralist. Starting from this controversial premiss, Teresa Brennan tells the story of a social psychosis. She begins by recovering Lacan's neglected theory of history which argued that we are in the grip of a psychotic's era which began in the seventeenth century and climaxes in the present. By extending and elaborating Lacan's theory, Brennan develops a general theory of modernity. Contrary to postmodern assumptions, she argues, we need general historical explanation. An understanding of historical (...) dynamics is essential if we are to make the connections between the outstanding facts of modernity - ethnocentrism, the relationship between the sexes and ecological catastrophe. (shrink)

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has (...) changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? (shrink)

In the decades since the Science Wars of the 1990s, climate science has become a crucible for the negotiation of claims about reality and expertise. This negotiation, which has drawn explicitly on the ideas and techniques of science and technology studies, has taken place in genres of fiction as well as non-fiction, which intersect in surprising ways. In this case study, I focus on two interwoven strands of this history. One follows Michael Crichton’s best-selling 2004 novel, State of Fear and (...) its reception by neo-conservatives as a commentary on the mis-uses of facts to stoke fear about anthropogenic climate change. The other considers Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s 2010 publishing success Merchants of Doubt as the inverse, a demonstration of the forms of disinformation that have been used to undermine scientific consensus around climate change. I show that both Crichton’s as well as Oreskes and Conway’s approaches were critiqued by academic STS even as their accounts constituted the most high-profile performances of its stakes and the politics of knowledge since the Science Wars. In highlighting the STS practices deployed by each, as well as how those practices were differently linked to accusations of fear-mongering and a perversion of the purity of STS, I demonstrate the need for a reflexive history of STS. Such an approach, I argue, can better consider the social life of STS ideas and practices amidst calls for more politically-engaged approaches to knowledge production. (shrink)

Recently, scholars have described the emotional consequences of transnational motherhood on families. Research, however, has neglected to address the lives of migrant fathers and how they compare to those of migrant mothers. This article fills the gap by analyzing the experiences of Mexican transnational mothers and fathers residing in New Jersey. Ethnographic data and interviews show that parents behave in similar ways when internationally separated from children. However, their migration patterns and emotional responses to separation differ. I show that these (...) differences are tied to Mexican gender ideology in which women’s maternal roles are sacralized, whereas fathers’ roles are tied to financial provision. Although the contemporary Mexican transnational family structure challenges gender norms, the analysis of how parents understand their family roles when separated from their children proves gender ideals to be highly durable in the transnational context. (shrink)