Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar um diálogo entre a literatura que perpassa a temática entre os filósofos Jürgen Habermas e Immanuel Kant, e suas contribuições para pensarmos o campo da Educação. Caracteriza-se por um estudo bibliográfico, fundamentado na análise e interpretação da temática proposta. Aponta-se algumas aproximações relevantes da perspectiva habermasiana e o pensamento kantiano, sobretudo no que diz respeito a conceitos básicos como emancipação e conhecimento, apropriando-se dos sentidos e interpretações discutidas nas obras bibliográficas elencadas. A partir do (...) diálogo exposto, compreende-se as contribuições dos pressupostos comunicativos no campo educacional, na área de formação continuada de profissionais da educação, conduzindo assim a uma justiça social expressa por processos de ensino-aprendizagem, garantindo o preparo de profissionais da educação fundamentada na concepção de um professor reflexivo, pesquisador e que aprende com o coletivo, visando o atendimento às necessidades de seus estudantes. (shrink)

Este artigo objetivou adaptar a Escala de Altruismo Autoinformado (EAA), reunindo evidencias de sua validade de construto. Realizaram-se dois estudos em Joao Pessoa (PB), nos quais os participantes responderam a EAA e perguntas demograficas. No Estudo 1 participaram 331estudantes universitarios com ..

A study was conducted to investigate the perceptions of academic dishonesty in fifth-grade students. Two methods were used to gather data: a sorting task, which was used to indirectly assess the students' perceptions, and a rating scale task, which was used to externally validate the results of the sorting task. Results of the multidimensional scaling analysis yielded two dimensions, the first being tests/homework and papers, and the second, more ambiguous appearing to differentiate based on seriousness.

Alyne da Silva Pimentel Teixeira died of postpartum hemorrhage following the stillbirth of a 27-week-old fetus on November 16, 2002 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her death led in 2011 to the first decision of an international treaty body holding a government accountable for a preventable maternal death. The decision, Alyne da Silva Pimentel Teixeira v. Brazil, was given by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, established to monitor compliance by member states with the UN (...) Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. The decision upheld a complaint, filed in 2007 against the state and government of Brazil, finding discrimination in the field of health care for Alyne’s avoidable maternal death, in breach of the Women’s Convention. (shrink)

This article explores the effectiveness of the decision of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in the case of Alyne da Silva Pimentel Teixeira (deceased) v. Brazil, concerning a poor, Afro-Brazilian woman. This is the first decision of an international human rights treaty body to hold a state accountable for its failure to prevent an avoidable death in childbirth. Assessing the future effectiveness of this decision might be undertaken concretely by determining the degree of Brazil's actual (...) compliance with the Committee's recommendations, and how this decision influences pending domestic litigation arising from the maternal death. Alternative approaches include: determining whether, over time, the decision leads to the elimination of discrimination against women of poor, minority racial status in the health sector, and if it narrows the wide gap between rates of maternal mortality of poor, Afro-Brazilian women and the country's general female population. Determining the effectiveness of this decision will guide whether to pursue a more general strategy of judicializing maternal mortality. (shrink)

In Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, leading figures in the fields of virtue ethics and ethics come together to present the first ...

This chapter explores two kinds of testimonial trust, what we call ‘evidential trust’ and ‘non-evidential trust’ with the aim of asking how testimonial trust could provide epistemic reasons for belief. We argue that neither evidential nor non-evidential trust can play a distinctive role in providing evidential reasons for belief, but we tentatively propose that non-evidential trust can in some circumstances provide a novel kind of epistemic reason for belief, a reason of epistemic facilitation. The chapter begins with an extensive discussion (...) of standard accounts of both kinds of trust and criticises especially the standard accounts of non-evidential trust. A new account of non-evidential trust is offered that avoids a number of difficulties that plague the standard accounts by rejecting what we call ‘attitude-liability assumptions’. (shrink)

I explore how gender can shape the pragmatics of speech. In some circumstances, when a woman deploys standard discursive conventions in order to produce a speech act with a specific performative force, her utterance can turn out, in virtue of its uptake, to have a quite different force—a less empowering force—than it would have if performed by a man. When members of a disadvantaged group face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled (...) to perform—and in particular when their attempts result in their actually producing a different kind of speech act that further compromises their social position and agency—then they are victims of what I call discursive injustice. I examine three examples of discursive injustice. I contrast my account with Langton and Hornsby's account of illocutionary silencing. I argue that lack of complete control over the performative force of our speech acts is universal, and not a special marker of social disadvantage. However, women and other relatively disempowered speakers are sometimes subject to a distinctive distortion of the path from speaking to uptake, which undercuts their social agency in ways that track and enhance existing social disadvantages. (shrink)

Controversial and provocative, To Be Real is a blueprint for the creation of a new political force.

Phase 1 healthy volunteer clinical trials—which financially compensate subjects in tests of drug toxicity levels and side effects—appear to place pressure on each joint of the moral framework justifying research. In this article, we review concerns about phase 1 trials as they have been framed in the bioethics literature, including undue inducement and coercion, unjust exploitation, and worries about compromised data validity. We then revisit these concerns in light of the lived experiences of serial participants who are income-dependent on phase (...) 1 trials. We show how participant experiences shift attention from discrete exchanges, behaviors, and events in the research enterprise to the ongoing and dynamic patterns of serial participation in which individual decision-making is embedded in collective social and economic conditions and shaped by institutional policies. We argue in particular for the ethical significance of structurally diminished voluntariness, routine powerlessness in setting the terms of exchange, and incentive structures that may promote pharmaceutical interests but encourage phase 1 healthy volunteers to skirt important rules. (shrink)

Mathematicians judge proofs to possess, or lack, a variety of different qualities, including, for example, explanatory power, depth, purity, beauty and fit. Philosophers of mathematical practice have begun to investigate the nature of such qualities. However, mathematicians frequently draw attention to another desirable proof quality: being motivated. Intuitively, motivated proofs contain no "puzzling" steps, but they have received little further analysis. In this paper, I begin a philosophical investigation into motivated proofs. I suggest that a proof is motivated if and (...) only if mathematicians can identify (i) the tasks each step is intended to perform; and (ii) where each step could have reasonably come from. I argue that motivated proofs promote understanding, convey new mathematical resources and stimulate new discoveries. They thus have significant epistemic benefits and directly contribute to the efficient dissemination and advancement of mathematical knowledge. Given their benefits, I also discuss the more practical matter of how we can produce motivated proofs. Finally I consider the relationship between motivated proofs and proofs which are explanatory, beautiful and fitting. (shrink)

Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal's attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one's race in the way it might be to change one's sex. Considerations that support transgenderism (...) seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes. (shrink)

Human Rights Education (HRE) has traditionally been articulated in terms of cultivating better citizens or world citizens. The main preoccupation in this strand of HRE has been that of bridging a gap between universal notions of a human rights subject and the actual locality and particular narratives in which students are enmeshed. This preoccupation has focused on ‘learning about the other’ in order to improve relations between plural ‘others’ and ‘us’ and reflects educational aims of national identity politics in citizenship (...) education. The article explores the learning of human rights through narratives in relations, drawing on Hannah Arendt and Sharon Todd. For this re-thinking of relations in learning human rights, the article argues that HRE needs to address both competing historical narratives on the drafting of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) as well as unique life narratives of learners. (shrink)

This essay explores three issues in respect for autonomy that pose unfinished business for the concept. By this, I mean that the dialogue over them is ongoing and essentially unresolved. These are: whether we ought to respect persons or their autonomous choices; the role of relational autonomy; and whether nonhuman animals can be autonomous. In attending to this particular set of unfinished business, I highlight some critical moral work left aside by the concept of respect for autonomy as understood in (...) Beauchamp and Childress’ Principles of Biomedical Ethics. Specifically, while significant pragmatic traction is gained by the authors’ focus on autonomous choice, carving such a focus out from the broader questions of moral respect and the autonomy of the person leaves aside a number of questions that we might have thought a view about respect for autonomy in biomedicine ought to answer. These include: How should physicians respond when autonomous patients make decisions that appear nonautonomous? What is the impact of the view that autonomy is “relational” for cross-cultural differences in how autonomy is respected? If chimpanzees can be autonomous, what does that mean for how they should be treated? (shrink)

Knowledge-first theories of justification are theories of justification that give knowledge priority when it comes to explaining when and why someone has justification for an attitude or an action. The emphasis of this article is on knowledge-first theories of justification for belief. As it turns out, there are a number of ways of giving knowledge priority when theorizing about justification, and what follows is a survey of more than a dozen existing options that have emerged in the early 21st century (...) since the publication of Timothy Williamson’s *Knowledge and Its Limits*. This article traces several of the general theoretical motivations that have been offered for putting knowledge first in the theory of justification. This is followed by an examination of existing knowledge-first theories of justification and their standing objections. These objections are largely, but not exclusively, concerned with the extensional adequacy of knowledge-first theories of justification. There are doubtless more ways to give knowledge priority in the theory of justified belief than are covered here, but the survey is instructive because it highlights potential shortcomings that would-be knowledge-first theorists of justification may wish either to avoid or else to be prepared with a suitable error theory. This entry concludes with a reflection about the extent to which the short history of, arguably, failed attempts to secure an unproblematic knowledge-first account of justified belief has begun to resemble the older Gettier dialectic. (shrink)

Human beings with diminished decision-making capacities are usually thought to require greater protections from the potential harms of research than fully autonomous persons. Animal subjects of research receive lesser protections than any human beings regardless of decision-making capacity. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely animals’ lack of some characteristic human capacities that is commonly invoked to justify using them for human purposes. In other words, for humans lesser capacities correspond to greater protections but for animals the opposite is true. Without explicit (...) justification, it is not clear why or whether this should be the case. Ethics regulations guiding human subject research include principles such as respect for persons—and related duties—that are required as a matter of justice while regulations guiding animal subject research attend only to highly circumscribed considerations of welfare. Further, the regulations guiding research on animals discount any consideration of animal welfare relative to comparable human welfare. This paper explores two of the most promising justifications for these differences␣between the two sets of regulations. The first potential justification points to lesser moral status for animals on the basis of their lesser capacities. The second potential justification relies on a claim about the permissibility of moral partiality as␣found in common morality. While neither potential justification is sufficient to justify the regulatory difference as it stands, there is possible common ground between supporters of some regulatory difference and those rejecting the current difference. (shrink)

Flora Champy shows how Rousseau developed his political philosophy by reference to ancient examples, intertexts, and interlocutors. Her literary methodology involves close readings of published tex...

While bioethics as a field has concerned itself with methodological issues since the early years, there has been no systematic examination of how ethics is incorporated into research on the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project. Yet ELSI research may bear a particular burden of investigating and substantiating its methods given public funding, an explicitly cross-disciplinary approach, and the perceived significance of adequate responsiveness to advances in genomics. We undertook a qualitative content analysis of a sample (...) of ELSI publications appearing between 2003 and 2008 with the aim of better understanding the methods, aims, and approaches to ethics that ELSI researchers employ. We found that the aims of ethics within ELSI are largely prescriptive and address multiple groups. We also found that the bioethics methods used in the ELSI literature are both diverse between publications and multiple within publications, but are usually not themselves discussed or employed as suggested by bioethics method proponents. Ethics in ELSI is also sometimes undistinguished from related inquiries. (shrink)

The claim that we have a moral obligation, where a choice can be made, to bring to birth the 'best' child possible, has been highly controversial for a number of decades. More recently Savulescu has labelled this claim the Principle of Procreative Beneficence. It has been argued that this Principle is problematic in both its reasoning and its implications, most notably in that it places lower moral value on the disabled. Relentless criticism of this proposed moral obligation, however, has been (...) unable, thus far, to discredit this Principle convincingly and as a result its influence shows no sign of abating. I will argue that while criticisms of the implications and detail of the reasoning behind it are well founded, they are unlikely to produce an argument that will ultimately discredit the obligation that the Principle of Procreative Beneficence represents. I believe that what is needed finally and convincingly to reveal the fallacy of this Principle is a critique of its ultimate theoretical foundation, the notion of impersonal harm. In this paper I argue that while the notion of impersonal harm is intuitively very appealing, its plausibility is based entirely on this intuitive appeal and not on sound moral reasoning. I show that there is another plausible explanation for our intuitive response and I believe that this, in conjunction with the other theoretical criticisms that I and others have levelled at this Principle, shows that the Principle of Procreative Beneficence should be rejected. (shrink)

In 1837, Dirichlet proved that there are infinitely many primes in any arithmetic progression in which the terms do not all share a common factor. Modern presentations of the proof are explicitly higher-order, in that they involve quantifying over and summing over Dirichlet characters, which are certain types of functions. The notion of a character is only implicit in Dirichlet’s original proof, and the subsequent history shows a very gradual transition to the modern mode of presentation. In this essay, we (...) describe an approach to the philosophy of mathematics in which it is an important task to understand the roles of our ontological posits and assess the extent to which they enable us to achieve our mathematical goals. We use the history of Dirichlet’s theorem to understand some of the reasons that functions are treated as ordinary objects in contemporary mathematics, as well as some of the reasons one might want to resist such treatment. We also use these considerations to illuminate the formal treatment of functions and objects in Frege’s logical foundation, and we argue that his philosophical and logical decisions were influenced by many of the same factors. (shrink)

Legal battles continue in the UK over the Government’s plans to transport asylum seekers arriving on British shores to Rwanda in East Africa. Originally announced as a system for ‘processing’ asylum seekers, the Government has subsequently made it clear that there would not be an option for asylum seekers to return to the UK. The arrangement forms part of a deal between the UK and Rwanda, with the UK promising to invest £120 m in economic growth and development in Rwanda, (...) along with financing the cost of the ‘offshored’ asylum operation.1 The Government states that the policy is designed to break the business model of people traffickers involved in facilitating hazardous trips across the Channel in small, overcrowded and unseaworthy craft, leading to multiple drownings. Critics argue that the policy will do nothing to stop desperate people from seeking refuge in the UK, that transferring already traumatised people to Rwanda – which has been criticised for its human rights record – is inhumane and potentially outwith international law. Medical bodies, including the BMA, along with refugee organisations have expressed serious concerns about the health impact of such a system of ‘offshoring’. An equivalent system in Australia has been notorious for the devastating health impacts on those ‘offshored’ to the Pacific islands of Manus and Naura. Unusually in the UK the offshoring proposals have been greeted by unanimous condemnation by the Church of England. The lawfulness of the process is also subject to question. On the 14 July, a plane carrying a small number of asylum seekers to Rwanda was halted shortly before take-off following an intervention by the European Court of Human Rights. The ECtHR, part of the Council of Europe, of which the UK is still a member, said an Iraqi man known as KN faced ‘a real …. (shrink)

Generation Y is a cohort of the population larger than the baby boom generation. Consisting of approximately 80 million people born between 1981 and 2000, Generation Y is the most recent cohort to enter the workforce. Workplaces are being redefined and organizations are being pressed to adapt as this new wave of workers is infused into business environments. One critical aspect of this phenomenon not receiving sufficient research attention is the impact of Gen Y ethical beliefs and ethical conduct in (...) workplace contexts. It is widely accepted that distinct generational experiences shape ethical ideologies and ethical ideologies in turn affect the way people function in the workplace. Thus, Gen Y’s unique cohort experiences are likely to shape their ethical ideologies and consequent workplace judgments and actions. In this article, we examine Gen Y’s ethical ideology and study its impact on workplace functioning regarding leadership style, teamwork, and judgments about ethical violations. Our analyses indicate that Gen Y’ers tend toward situationalism (high idealism and high relativism), and their socially connected orientation produces more lenient judgments of collaborative vs. unilateral ethical violations. However, Gen Y’ers do exhibit individual variation. Relativist Gen Y’ers are more tolerant of ethical violations, whereas, Gen Y Idealists are less tolerant of ethical violations. High Idealists also show stronger teamwork and leadership characteristics. In addition, Gen Y’ers possessing servant leader traits exhibit incrementally better teamwork, and greater perceived unacceptability of ethical violations. We conclude by discussing implications of these findings for managing ethical climates and conduct. (shrink)

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCOB) is delighted to pick up the mantel of the Ethics briefings. For readers less familiar with the NCOB’s work, we are a leading independent policy and research centre, and the foremost bioethics body in the UK. We identify, analyse and advise on ethical issues in biomedicine and health so that decisions in these areas benefit people and society.1 Established in 1991, the NCOB has tackled a wide range of bioethics and medical ethics issues over (...) its thirty-two years, including issues relating to the beginning and end of life, health and society, data and technology, and research ethics. Early reports in the 1990s included, for example, ‘Genetics screening: the ethical issues’ and ‘Animal-to-human transplants: the ethics of Xenotransplantation’. More recent projects include setting out an ethical framework in the report ‘The future of ageing: ethical considerations for research and innovation’2 and a current joint project with the Ada Lovelace Institute3 considering the potential ethical implications of the convergence of AI and genomics technologies.4 In recent years, NCOB has increasingly focused on horizon scanning. What current and future national and international developments are likely to raise ethical issues in the short, medium and long-term? Insights for 2023 will soon be available at www.nuffieldbioethics.org/what-we-do/horizon-scanning, with new developments likely to be included alongside ongoing areas of medical and scientific research that we are tracking progress in, for example, in vitro derived gametes, surrogacy, biosafety and novel neurotechnologies. Disagreements between parents and healthcare teams about …. (shrink)

Scientific explanations are widely recognized to have instrumental value by helping scientists make predictions and control their environment. In this paper I raise, and provide a first analysis of, the question whether explanatory proofs in mathematics have analogous instrumental value. I first identify an important goal in mathematical practice: reusing resources from existing proofs to solve new problems. I then consider the more specific question: do explanatory proofs have instrumental value by promoting reuse of the resources they contain? In general, (...) I argue that the answer to this question is “no” and demonstrate this in detail for the theory of mathematical explanation developed by Marc Lange. (shrink)

Should monkeys be used in painful and often deadly infectious disease research that may save many human lives? This is the challenging question that Anne Barnhill, Steven Joffe, and Franklin G. Miller take on in their carefully argued and compelling article “The Ethics of Infection Challenges in Primates.” The authors offer a nuanced and even-handed position that takes philosophical worries about nonhuman primate moral status seriously and still appreciates the very real value of such research for human welfare. Overall, they (...) argue for an extension and revision of the recommendations regarding chimpanzee research offered by the Institute of Medicine in 2011; the practical upshot of their argument would allow for infection challenge research for promising interventions for Ebola and Marburg virus diseases but not for smallpox or the common cold. The IOM recommendations regarding chimpanzee research put in motion an exceptionalist policy for this great ape population. Barnhill and colleagues’ proposal would enlarge the scope of that exceptionalism to embrace NHPs other than great apes. But is such exceptionalism warranted? It is not obvious to me either that the more sophisticated capacities of a species as a whole give it greater ethical protections or that less intellectually or socially sophisticated animals ought to therefore receive less protection when it comes to painful experimental interventions. (shrink)

Prominent mathematician William Thurston was praised by other mathematicians for his intellectual generosity. But what does it mean to say Thurston was intellectually generous? And is being intellectually generous beneficial? To answer these questions I turn to virtue epistemology and, in particular, Roberts and Wood's (2007) analysis of intellectual generosity. By appealing to Thurston's own writings and interviewing mathematicians who knew and worked with him, I argue that Roberts and Wood's analysis nicely captures the sense in which he was intellectually (...) generous. I then argue that intellectual generosity is beneficial because it counteracts negative effects of the reward structure of mathematics that can stymie mathematical progress. (shrink)

Three approaches to intertextual writing are available to college instructors: mechanical, ethical, and rhetorical. The mechanical approach, a staple of writing instruction, teaches the use of citation styles such as MLA or APA; methods of citing sources; and the conventions of quotation. The ethical approach is primarily concerned with the character of individual writers and their adherence to community standards categorized as “academic integrity.” The great majority of source-based writing instruction attends to one or both of these approaches. A third (...) approach, rhetorical intertextuality, is overshadowed by the ethical concerns that currently permeate educational institutions. Rhetorical intertextuality does promote textual ethics, but in a positive way, through instruction in building meaning in a target text through collaboration with source texts. Rhetorical intertextuality brings the source texts themselves to life and aims to engage the audience in a conversation with target text and source texts. Drawing on Citation Project data, we advocate instruction in intertextual writing that hails students as authors, not transgressors. Rhetorical intertextuality can provide a positive frame for college instruction in intertextual writing, one that facilitates deep engagement with texts; intellectual approaches to paraphrasing and summarizing; and an emphasis on the rhetorical choices that writers make as they encounter and respond to the ideas of others. The objective of such instruction is a dialogic interface between writer, audience, and sources—a conversation. (shrink)

What accounts for the continued lack of clarity over the legal procedures for the patenting of DNA sequences? The patenting system was built for a "bricks-and-mortar" world rather than an information economy. The fact that genes are both material molecules and informational systems helps explain the difficulty that the patent system is going to continue to have.

I develop and defend the following neo-Aristotelian account of supererogation: an action is supererogatory if and only if it is overall virtuous and either the omission of an overall virtuous action in that situation would not be overall vicious or there is some overall virtuous action that is less virtuous than it and whose performance in its place would not be overall vicious. I develop this account from within the virtue-ethical tradition. And I argue that it is intuitively defensible and (...) fully compatible with the doctrine of the mean. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Jahrgang: 2013 Heft: 197 Seiten: 203-231.

Extensively employed in reproductive science, the term fetal–maternal interface describes how maternal and fetal tissues interact in the womb to produce the transient placenta, purporting a theory of pregnancy where ‘mother’, ‘fetus’, and ‘placenta’ are already-separate entities. However, considerable scientific evidence supports a different theory, which is also elaborated in feminist and new materialist literatures. Informed by interviews with placenta scientists as well as secondary sources on placental immunology and the developmental origins of health and disease, I explore evidence not (...) of interfacing during pregnancy, but of intra-action, or the mutual emergence of entities in simultaneous practices of differentiation and connection. I argue that attending to evidence that can be figured as intra-action enables us to recognize, account for, and attend to diffuse responsibilities for fetal–maternal outcomes that extend beyond mothers to the biosocial milieus of pregnancy. In reimaging the intra-action of placentas, a new understanding of what constitutes a ‘healthy pregnancy’ becomes possible. (shrink)

Resumen:El artículo propone una lectura de las Cartas para la educación estética de la humanidad desde la sociabilidad, concepto con el que el autor, en la última de las cartas, señala el terreno en el que se abriría la vía estética hacia libertad. Se muestra la propagación del concepto de sociabilidad a través de la antropología kantiana y la sociología simmeliana. Se postula la afinidad de este enfoque con los planteamienos contemporáneos del acontecimiento.Palabras clave: Schiller; Kant; Simmel; sociabilidad; políticas emancipatorias; (...) comensalidad; acontecimiento. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the role of film in educational settings and argue that testimony and narrative are dependent upon each other for developing ethical judgments. We use the film 12 Angry Men to enhance our thesis that the emotional response that sometimes is intended in using film as testimonies in classrooms requires a specific listening; a listening that puts pupils at risk when they relate testimonies to their own life narratives. The article raises the importance of listening in (...) training narrative ethos in relation to violence witnessed in film. The article contributes by enhancing an understanding of a relational dimension to testimony and narrative, which, in an Arendtian sense, is also put forward as a political relation. (shrink)

Previous work in Game Studies has centered on several loci of investigation in seeking to understand virtual gameworlds. First, researchers have scrutinized the concept of the virtual world itself and how it relates to the idea of “the magic circle”. Second, the field has outlined various forms of experienced “presence”. Third, scholarship has noted that the boundaries between the world of everyday life and virtual worlds are porous, and that this fosters a multiplicity of identities as players identify both with (...) themselves-offline and themselves-in-game. Despite widespread agreement that these topics are targets for research, so far those working on these topics do not have mutually agreed-upon framework. Here we draw upon the work of Alfred Schutz to take up this call. We provide a phenomenological framework which can be used to describe the phenomena of interest to Game Studies, as well as open new avenues of inquiry, in a way acceptable and useful to all. This helps to distinguish the core of the field from the supplemental theoretical and critical commitments which characterize diverse approaches within the field. (shrink)

From the acclaimed writer and thinker--whose award-winning books include both fiction and non-fiction--a dazzlingly original plunge into the drama of philosophy, revealing its hidden but essential role in today's debates on love, religion, politics, and science. Imagine that Plato came to life in the 21st century and set out on a multi-city speaking tour: How would he handle a host on Fox News who challenges him on religion and morality? How would he mediate a debate on the best way to (...) raise a child between a Freudian psychoanalyst and a Tiger Mom? How would he answer a neuroscientist who, about to scan Plato's brain, argues that all his philosophical problems can be solved by our new technologies? What would he make of Google, and the idea that knowledge can be crowdsourced rather than reasoned out by experts? With a philosopher's depth and a novelist's imagination, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein probes the deepest issues confronting us--from sexuality and child-rearing to morality and the meaning of life--by allowing us to eavesdrop on Plato as he encounters the modern world. By reviving the Platonic art of the dialogue for the 21st century, she demonstrates that the questions he first posed continue to confound and enlarge us. (shrink)

The standard notion of autonomy in medical ethics does not require that autonomous choices not be irrational. The paper gives three examples of seemingly irrational patient choices and discusses how a rational autonomy analysis differs from the standard view. It then considers whether a switch to the rational autonomy view would lead to overriding more patient decisions but concludes that this should not be the case. Rather, a determination of whether individual patient decisions are autonomous is much less relevant than (...) usually considered in determining whether health care providers must abide by these decisions. Furthermore, respect for rational autonomy entails strong positive requirements of respect for the autonomy of the person as a rational decision maker. The rationality view of autonomy is conceptually stronger than the standard view, allows for a more nuanced understanding of the practical moral calculus involved in respecting patient autonomy, and promotes positive respect for patient autonomy. (shrink)

Purpose: We sought to examine the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) literature research and scholarship types, topics, and contributing community fields of training as a first step to charting the broader ELSI community’s future priorities and goals. Methods: We categorized 642 articles and book chapters meeting inclusion criteria for content in both human genetics or genomics and ethics or ELSI during a 5-year period (2003–2008) according to research and scholarship types, topics, and the area of advanced training of the (...) first-listed author. Research and scholarship type categories were developed and characterized through in-depth review of 95 randomly sampled publications from the larger group. Results: There is a single dominant approach to ELSI, which focuses on ethical and other social issues “downstream” of advances in genomics, the contributors to which predominately have advanced training in medicine or science fields other than social science. A comparatively low percentage of publications primarily offer policy recommendations, and these are much more likely to be written by those with advanced training in law than is the case for the literature as a whole. Social science studies predominately employ qualitative methods and vary significantly with respect to the extent and types of recommendations offered. Two further types of ELSI research and scholarship offer alternative models for so-called “normative” work in this field. Conclusion: Considering topics, training, and types of ELSI research and scholarship from the most recent past allows for a baseline perspective that is sorely needed in charting this field’s future course. (shrink)

Research uses of human bodies maintained by mechanical ventilation after being declared dead by neurological criteria, were first published in the early 1980s with a renewed interest in research on the newly or nearly dead occurring in about last decade. While this type of research may take many different forms, recent technologic advances in genomic sequencing along with high hopes for genomic medicine, have inspired interest in genomic research with the newly dead. For example, the Genotype-Tissue Expression program through the (...) National Institutes of Health aims to collect large numbers of diverse human tissues with the eventual goal of elucidating the genetic bases of common diseases through a better understanding of the relationship between genetic variation and gene expression. (shrink)