Background: Authors are required to describe in their manuscripts ethical approval from an appropriate committee and how consent was obtained from participants when research involves human participants.Objective: To assess the reporting of these protections for several study designs in general medical journals.Design: A consecutive series of research papers published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, BMJ, JAMA, Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine between February and May 2003 were reviewed for the reporting of ethical approval and patient consent. (...) Ethical approval, name of approving committee, type of consent, data source and whether the study used data collected as part of a study reported elsewhere were recorded. Differences in failure to report approval and consent by study design, journal and vulnerable study population were evaluated using multivariable logistic regression.Results: Ethical approval and consent were not mentioned in 31% and 47% of manuscripts, respectively. 88 papers failed to report both approval and consent. Failure to mention ethical approval or consent was significantly more likely in all study designs than in randomised controlled trials . Failure to mention approval was most common in the BMJ and was significantly more likely than in The New England Journal of Medicine. Failure to mention consent was most common in the BMJ and was significantly more likely than in all other journals. No significant differences in approval or consent were found when comparing studies of vulnerable and non-vulnerable participants.Conclusion: The reporting of ethical approval and consent in RCTs has improved, but journals are less good at reporting this information for other study designs. Journals should publish this information for all research on human participants. (shrink)

Many strategies have been proposed to address the supply of bespoke essays and other assignments by companies often described as ‘Essay Mills’ with the act of supply and use being invariably described as ‘contract cheating’. These proposals increasingly refer to the law as a solution in common with other action. In this article, the lead author revisits work undertaken in 2016 as a result of recent legal and extra-legal developments to assess whether the UK Fraud Act (2006) might now be (...) used to tackle some of the activities of the companies involved, by comparing their common practises, and their Terms and Conditions, with the Act. It was previously found that all sites have disclaimers regarding the use of their products but there were some obvious contradictions in the activities of the sites which undermined those disclaimers, for example plagiarism-free guarantees for the work. In this article, we ask and consider the question whether this is still the case having regard to the impact of a change in the law by the UK supreme court and recent action of the UK Advertising Standards Authority. We also consider whether a call for a new offence to be created which specifically targets the undesirable behaviours of these companies is still justified. (shrink)

This book provides an invaluable overview of the competing schools of thought in traditional and contemporary normative international theory and seeks to provide a new basis for doing international political theory and thinking about ethics in world politics today. · Part one explains the role and place of normative theory in the study of international politics before critically examining mainstream approaches in international relations and applied ethics. Here the student is introduced to the central debates between realists and idealists, and (...) cosmopolitans and communitarians. · Part two introduces the conceptual challenges of contemporary perspectives from critical theory, postmodernism and feminism and provides a platform for the author to develop her own Hegelian-Foucauldian approach for doing normative international theory. · In Part three the insights drawn from the first two parts are applied to the study of two key topics in contemporary theoretical debate: the principle of self-determination, and the democratic ideals of political cosmopolitanism. Finally conclusions are made for the future practice of theorizing international politics. Accessibly written and wide-ranging, this text will quickly become essential reading for all students and academics of politics and international relations seeking a deeper understanding of the underlying tensions and future potential of international or global political theory today. (shrink)

This chapter examines the relation between Beauvoir's philosophy and Hegel's thought. It discusses Beauvoir's uses of Hegelian terms and themes in her two major philosophical works: The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex. These themes include most centrally Beauvoir's adaptation of Hegel's account of the ‘struggle for recognition’ and his views on sexual difference, history and the nature of philosophical thought. The chapter goes on to discuss debates about the significance of Hegel for Beauvoir's philosophy in different interpretations of (...) Beauvoir. It will be concluded that debates over Beauvoir's relation to Hegel reflect the strategic and creative nature of her engagement with his thought. (shrink)

: In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise. The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because of the ways in which she deconstructs it. In enabling her reader to appreciate what is presupposed by a resistant politics that adopts violence as its (...) instrument, Beauvoir illuminates the problems encountered by the kinds of "realistic and positive" and "idealistic and moral" arguments through which the use of violence in politics is routinely justified. At the same time, Beauvoir demonstrates that to deconstruct the question of the legitimacy of violence is neither to banish nor resolve it. She does not offer a recipe for determining the legitimacy or otherwise of the use of violence in politics in general; instead, she illuminates the irremediable difficulty and inescapability of such judgments in a violent and intransigent world. (shrink)

The field of global ethics draws on traditions of moral theory, mostly derived from western philosophy, in order to address moral problems specific to an increasingly globalised world. This book provides an accessible introduction to the field of global ethics for students of politics, international relations and globalisation. It offers an overview and assessment of key perspectives in global ethics and their implications for substantive moral issues in global politics. These issues include the morality of state and non-state violence, the (...) obligations of rich to poor in a globalising world and the scope and nature of international human rights. The aim of the book is to help non-specialist students understand the assumptions underpinning different moral traditions and to enable them to make up their own minds about the best way of approaching moral judgment and prescription in a shared world, which is nevertheless marked by massive cultural differences and inequalities of power. (shrink)

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This book offers the first authoritative guide to assumptions about time in theories of contemporary world politics. It demonstrates how predominant theories of the international or global "present" are affected by temporal assumptions, grounded in western political thought, that fundamentally shape what we can and cannot know about world politics today. The first part of the book traces the philosophical roots of assumptions about time in contemporary political theory. The second part examines contemporary theories of world politics, including liberal and (...) realist International Relations theories and the work of Habermas, Hardt and Negri, Virilio and Agamben. In each case, it is argued, assumptions about political time ensure the identification of the particular temporality of western experience with the political temporality of the world as such and put the theorist in the unsustainable position of holding the key to the direction of world history. In the final chapter, the book draws on postcolonial and feminist thinking, and the philosophical accounts of political time in the work of Derrida and Deleuze, to develop a new "untimely" way of thinking about time in world politics. (shrink)

A review article on Leszek Kołakowski’s, ‘ Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing ?’ centering on Leibniz’s famous Question.

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is its (...) engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory. (shrink)

Benatar has a principle of asymmetry, i.e. that coming into existence as a human being is coming into a world in which harm is more likely than well-being. This is Thesis 1. Thesis 2 is that thesis 1 entails that one should not procreate. The threat of the end of civilization and the extinction of humanity by climate change renders ‘do not procreate’ a notion no longer counter-intuitive. Thesis 3 concerns ‘population and extinction’: he envisages ‘population zero’ as a desirable (...) consequence of thesis 2 even though ‘The last generation to die out would bear heavy burdens’. Benatar writes, ‘It would indeed have been better if no people had been added to the Edenic Lives of Adam and Eve’. The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck one hated. Benatar cites two schools of thought in the Talmud—the House of Hillel who thought the creation of humans was good and the House of Shammi thought it bad. Christians following Aquinas’ omne ens est bonum may find some Jewish notions quite the opposite of a Christian conviction, that, to be, is simply good. (shrink)

Critics of the notion of Necessary Being, and critics of arguments for the existence of God, have often claimed to find flaws in the notion or the arguments, and to find flaws that are due to the presence of concealed tautologies. No theist who recalls the unfortunate of St Anselm and its rejection by St Thomas would dare to claim, his hand on his heart, that tautology has never lurked like a serpent in the garden of natural theology. But the (...) ways in which tautology and talk about God come together on occasion may or may not undermine natural theology in general. I for one am loath to abandon arguments for the existence of God, or give up talk of Necessary Being, since, unlike Professor Findlay, I am unwilling to reverence, much less to worship, a focus imaginarius and I want a real God, or none at all. One of the questions is, of course: does the religious believer want a God who must be too real to be real at all? Another question is: if one can sensibly talk of a God so real as to be Necessary, are there grounds for saying that this possible Necessary Being exists? Between them these questions cover a great part, though by no means all, of the ground of modern discussions on the matter of God. (shrink)

To engage with Hegel's philosophy from a feminist perspective is necessarily to be confronted with questions about the politics of reading. Politics, that is, both in the obvious, traditional ideological sense and in the less obvious sense of the politics of the relation between reader and text. For some scholars this automatically places feminist readers in the category of a dubious scholarship which rests on a mistaken understanding of the meanings of both politics and truth.It seems to me a mistake (...) — and an inexcusable conceit — to say as some now do, that all scholarship is somehow ‘political’ or is itself politics practised by other means. That view demeans both politics and scholarship. Now this isnotto say that a scholar's motives must not be political, only that the methods and results of her researches must be judged according to scholarly standards and not political ones. The aim of scholarship is to seek and to tell the truth, as best one can discern it, and not to promote any particular partisan cause. Ball here confines the role of politics in the traditional sense to the Weberian category of ‘value’, which may motivate and orient scholarship but which cannot provide the criteria according to which scholarly work is carried out or its findings are judged. He dismisses the relevance of the category ‘politics’ to the understanding of the relation between reader and text as such and instead, argues that ‘truth’ is what that relation should be about. Yet, the work of interpretation and reflection in the reading of texts insofar as it involves a process of interaction between reader and text always problematises, I would argue, the distinction between politics and truth upon which Ball's analysis relies. There are various models on offer, both descriptive and prescriptive for what the process of textual interpretation does or should involve. One can contrast the notion of ‘scholarly standards’ as the route to the true meaning of a text with Skinner's new historicism, the virtuous circle of hermeneutics or the destabilising ambitions of deconstruction. These approaches elicit very different interpretive results but they also differ in their assumptions about what is or ought to be taken as authoritative for understanding and interpretation and in this sense they are characterised by a politics of the interplay between reader and text. This is a modest claim but one which disrupts the politics/truth distinction even if it doesn't necessarily imply the end of distinguishing between good and bad, valid and invalid understanding/interpretation. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications of Hannah Arendt's criticisms of Frantz Fanon and the theories of violence and politics associated with his influence for our understanding of the relationship between those two phenomena. Fanon argues that violence is a means necessary to political action, and also is an organic force or energy. Arendt argues that violence is inherently unpredictable, which means that end reasoning is in any case anti-political, and that it is a profound error to naturalize violence. We evaluate (...) their respective arguments concluding that in her well-founded rejection of the naturalization of violence, Arendt's understanding of the embodied nature of violence is less insightful than Fanon's. (shrink)

In recent years, policy?makers in England, Australia and other countries have called for measures to increase male recruitment to the teaching profession, particularly to the primary sector. This policy of targeted recruitment is predicated upon a number of unexamined assumptions about the benefits of matching teachers and pupils by gender. For example, it is held that the dearth of male ?role models? in schools continues to have an adverse effect on boys? academic motivation and engagement. Utilizing data from interviews with (...) more than 300 7? to 8?year?olds attending primary schools in the north?east and south?east of England, the paper sets out to scrutinize these claims. The findings revealed that the gender of teachers had little apparent effect on the academic motivation and engagement of either boys or girls. For the majority of the children, the gender of the teacher was largely immaterial. They valued teachers, whether men or women, who were consistent and even?handed and supportive of them as learners. (shrink)

In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise. The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because of the ways in which she deconstructs it. In enabling her reader to appreciate ate what is presupposed by a resistant politics that adopts violence as its (...) instrument, Beauvoir illuminates the problems encountered by the kinds of “realistic and positive” and “idealistic and moral” arguments through which the use of violence in politics is routinely justified. At the same time, Beauvoir demonstrates that to deconstruct the question of the legitimacy of violence is neither to banish nor resolve it. She does not offer a recipe for determining the legitimacy or otherwise of the use of violence in politics in general; instead, she illuminates the irremediable difficulty and inescapability of such judgments in a violent and intransigent world. (shrink)

‘Faithfulness’ is defined in The Oxford English Dictionary of 1901 in a way that leaves out what one might take as a central paradigm. The OED entry reads, in partFaithfulness … the quality of being faithful.A. Fidelity, loyalty …B. Strict adherence to one's pledged word; honesty, sincerity. …The feudal system, the army, and the rest of such things are provided for in ‘loyalty to a superior …’, and so are friends – after superiors. In, commercial interests are satisfactorily covered: ‘strict (...) adherence to one's pledged word, honesty. …’ It is a nice piece of social history: from William the Conqueror to the latter phases of the Industrial Revolution, in two definitions. But a very odd piece of social history, in that conjugal faithfulness, the most existential one that there is, does not rate a mention. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: A Phenomenology of Moral Presence at Sea Tragic Comedy (or Comic Tragedy): The Paradox of Sailing.

The paper concludes the argument that certain aesthetic objects conduce to a feeling of radical contingency, and to an openness to St Thomas's Third Way proof for the existence of God. Much is conceded to the late Mr Gershon Weiler's criticism of an earlier discussion. The upshot is (a) that Necessary Being as converse of radical contingency may be an Aesthetic Idea/Sublime of Kant's kind, and (b) that without the ‘I AM that I am’, it is empty. The ‘inference’ from (...) radical contingency to Necessary Being may function as George Eliot thought Wit to function, intellectually/aesthetically. (shrink)

In this essay, Hutchings contends that Simone de Beauvoir's argument in The Ethics of Ambiguity provides a valuable resource for feminists currently addressing the question of the legitimacy of political violence, whether of the state or otherwise. The reason is not that Beauvoir provides a definitive answer to this question, but rather because of the ways in which she deconstructs it. In enabling her reader to appreciate ate what is presupposed by a resistant politics that adopts violence as its (...) instrument, Beauvoir illuminates the problems encountered by the kinds of “realistic and positive” and “idealistic and moral” arguments through which the use of violence in politics is routinely justified. At the same time, Beauvoir demonstrates that to deconstruct the question of the legitimacy of violence is neither to banish nor resolve it. She does not offer a recipe for determining the legitimacy or otherwise of the use of violence in politics in general; instead, she illuminates the irremediable difficulty and inescapability of such judgments in a violent and intransigent world. (shrink)

The use and abuse and critique of Kant has generated a huge literature among contemporary political theorists; his work has been surreptitiously kept by some critics of the Enlightenment to exeplify starndards of modernity. Kimberly Hutchings reevaluates Kant's work in terms of its significance in the writings of Habersmas, Arendt, Lyotard and Foucault. This is not an exercise in the history of ideas; through her extremely lucid presentation of Kant's critical philosophy, Hutchings reveals the critique to be a (...) complex, ambiguous political practice. The common Kantian heritage in the thought of the four contemporary theorists challenges orthodox distinctions between modernist and postmodernist theorizing. Kant, Critique and Kant addresses why Kant's legacy is inescapable for current debates about both "critique" and politics. This reading sheds a new light on continental and political philosophy, international relations theory and feminist theory. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications of Hannah Arendt's criticisms of Frantz Fanon and the theories of violence and politics associated with his influence for our understanding of the relationship between those two phenomena. Fanon argues that violence is a means necessary to political action, and also is an organic force or energy. Arendt argues that violence is inherently unpredictable, which means that end reasoning is in any case anti-political, and that it is a profound error to naturalize violence. We evaluate (...) their respective arguments concluding that in her well-founded rejection of the naturalization of violence, Arendt's understanding of the embodied nature of violence is less insightful than Fanon's. (shrink)

He’s a terrible fellow, but at least he’s got substance.—Erich Auerbach on HeideggerMy esteemed colleague Purushottama Bilimoria drew my attention to Shane Mackinlay’s ‘Heidegger’s Temple: How Truth Happens when Nothing is Portrayed’. My friend wondered whether my piece on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art: Heidegger’ in Sophia 51, no.4 (2012): 465–478 was a reply to Mackinlay. It was not.I had not in fact read Shane Mackinlay’s elegant essay. Having read it now, I do not entirely agree with it: (...) Nor he, with my essay, no doubt. The Republic of Letters is wide open.The point perhaps that Bilimoria wanted to me to consider was that Mackinlay makes much of ‘nothing’, as did Bilimoria himself in his arrestingly titled, ‘Why is there Nothing rather than Something?’ (Sophia 51, no.4 (2012): 509–530). He, in conversation, has wanted me to make more of—the concept of?—nothing than I am accustomed to do. I doubt if I can rise to the challenge, beyond the Oxbridge ‘I don’t quite understand…’. If ev. (shrink)

This article enquires into the understanding of violence, and the place of violence in the understanding of politics, in the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. These two engaged in a dispute about the place of violence in their respective philosophical projects. The trajectories of their respective subsequent bodies of thought about power, politics and justice, and the degrees of affirmation or condemnation of the violent nature of reality, language, society and authority, can be analysed in relation to political (...) traditions of realism, radicalism and liberalism. We trace the starting points, and points of convergence and divergence between them, and consider the implications of their work for our capacity to critically judge episodes and uses of violence in political contexts. (shrink)

In contrast to liberal, Christian and other pacifist ethics and to just war theory, a range of 20th-century thinkers sought to normalize the role of violence in politics. This article examines the justificatory strategies of Weber, Sorel, Schmitt, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Fanon. They each engage in justificatory argument, deploying arguments for violence from instrumentality, from necessity and from virtue. All of these arguments raise problems of validity. However, we find that they are reinforced by the representation of violence in terms (...) of a specific aesthetic, either tragedy or sublimity, and by certain rhetorical textual strategies. We conclude that the persuasive force of these arguments for violence rests as much, if not more, on aesthetics and rhetoric, as it does on argument. (shrink)

A review of Peter Steele’s Plenty, a book in which each poem is faced by a colour plate of the painting or object which sparked it off. Hollander’s ecphrasis and Krieger’s ekphrasis are held in – possibly unresolvable – dialectic by Steele’s poems. The only resolution which one can find is one of wit rather than of philosophy.

In what follows, I claim that the ‘global’ in ‘Global Ethics’ needs also to be thought about in a different way, not as the scope or object of ethical judgement but in relation to the worlds reproduced by the practice of ethical judgement itself. In summary, ethical reflection on the meaning of the ‘global’ in the practice of Global Ethics as a field of academic inquiry is what is required if the future of Global Ethics is to be something other (...) than Ethics or Applied Ethics as traditionally conducted. (shrink)