Background The first COVID-19 wave started in February 2020 in France. The influx of patients requiring emergency care and high-level technicity led healthcare professionals to fear saturation of available care. In that context, the multidisciplinary Ethics- Support Cell (EST) was created to help medical teams consider the decisions that could potentially be sources of ethical dilemmas. Objectives The primary objective was to prospectively collect information on requests for EST assistance from 23 March to 9 May 2020. The secondary aim was (...) to describe the Cell’s functions during that period. Research design This observational, real-time study of requests for Cell consultations concerned ethical dilemmas arising during a public health crisis. The EST created a grid to collect relevant information (clinical, patient’s/designated representative’s preferences and ethical principles strained by the situation), thereby assuring that each EST asked the same questions, in the same order. Participants and research context Only our university hospital’s clinicians could request EST intervention. Ethical considerations The hospital Research Ethics Committee approved this study (no. CER-2020-107). The patient, his/her family, or designated representative was informed of this ethics consultation and most met with EST members, which enabled them to express their preferences and/or opposition. Findings/results 33 requests (patients’ mean age: 80.8 years; 29 had COVID-19: 24 with dyspnea, 30 with comorbidities). 17 Emergency Department solicitations concerned ICU admission, without reference to resource constraints; others addressed therapeutic proportionality dilemmas. Discussion Intervention-request motives concerned limited resources and treatment intensity. Management revolved around three axes: the treatment option most appropriate for the patient, the feasibility of implementation, and dignified care for the patient. Conclusions COVID-19 crisis forced hospitals to envisage prioritization of ICU access. Established decision-making criteria and protocols do not enable healthcare professionals to escape ethical dilemmas. That acknowledgement highlights ethical risks, enhances the added-value of nursing and encourages all players to be vigilant to pursue collective deliberations to achieve clear and transparent decisions. (shrink)

Background At the beginning of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, many non-Covid healthcare services were suspended. In April 2020, the Department of Health in England mandated that non-Covid services should resume, alongside the continuing pandemic response. This ‘resetting’ of healthcare services created a unique context in which it became critical to consider how ethical considerations did (and should) underpin decisions about integrating infection control measures into routine healthcare practices. We draw on data collected as part of the ‘NHS Reset Ethics’ project, (...) which explored the everyday ethical challenges of resetting England’s NHS maternity and paediatrics services during the pandemic. Methods Healthcare professionals and members of the public participated in interviews and focus group discussions. The qualitative methods are reported in detail elsewhere. The focus of this article is our use of Frith’s symbiotic empirical ethics methodology to work from our empirical findings towards the normative suggestion that clinical ethics should explicitly attend to the importance of relationships in clinical practice. This methodology uses a five-step approach to refine and develop ethical theory based on a naturalist account of ethics that sees practice and theory as symbiotically related. Results The Reset project data showed that changed working practices caused ethical challenges for healthcare professionals, and that infection prevention and control measures represented harmful barriers to the experience of receiving and offering care. For healthcare professionals, offering care as part of a relational interaction was an ethically important dimension of healthcare delivery. Conclusions Our findings suggest that foregrounding the importance of relationships across a hospital community will better promote the ethically important multi-directional expression of caring between healthcare professionals, patients, and their families. We offer two suggestions for making progress towards such a relational approach. First, that there is a change of emphasis in clinical ethics practice to explicitly acknowledge the importance of the relationships (including with their healthcare team) within which the patient is held. Second, that organisational decision-making should take into account the moral significance afforded to caring relationships by healthcare professionals, and the role such relationships can play in the negotiation of ethical challenges. (shrink)

Inspired by Voltaire's advice that a text needs to be concise to have real influence, this anthology contains fiery extracts by forty eighteenth-century authors, from the most famous philosophers of the age to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. These passages are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common a passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance. Each text resonates powerfully with the issues our world faces today. Tolerance was first published by the Société française (...) d'étude du dix-huitième siècle (the French Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies) in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations in January 2015 as an act of solidarity and as a response to the surge of interest in Enlightenment values. With the support of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, it has now been translated by over 100 students and tutors of French at Oxford University."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Engineers encounter difficult ethical problems in their practice and in research. In many ways, these problems are like design problems: they are complex, often ill-defined; resolving them involves an iterative process of analysis and synthesis; and there can be more than one acceptable solution. This book offers a real-world, problem-centered approach to engineering ethics, using a rich collection of open-ended scenarios and case studies to develop skill in recognizing and addressing ethical issues.

Everyone involved with the care and welfare of children and young adults is confronted with the issue of bullying. Bullying behaviors create an uncomfortable, threatening, and hostile environment that make it difficult for children to learn. 101 Facts about Bullying breaks down what the research says about bullying and its effects, offering ideas for what can and should be done to minimize or reduce it. Kevorkian systematically discusses topics ranging from relational bullying to cyber bullying to media and video violence (...) to the legal ramifications of bullying, debunking myth and uncloaking the facts about bullying and its prevention. (shrink)

Zahavi’s book has added greatly to our understanding of some of the difficult issues surrounding the notion of empathy. In this note, however, I argue that by overlooking some essential features of empathy, Zahavi’s account unnecessarily limits its scope. In particular, I argue that Zahavi’s account, by characterizing empathy as an immediate, direct perceptual access to the other’s experiences, overlooks its normative dimension.

A central area of current philosophical debate in the foundations of mathematics concerns whether or not there is a single, maximal, universe of set theory. Universists maintain that there is such a universe, while Multiversists argue that there are many universes, no one of which is ontologically privileged. Often model-theoretic constructions that add sets to models are cited as evidence in favour of the latter. This paper informs this debate by developing a way for a Universist to interpret talk that (...) seems to necessitate the addition of sets to V. We argue that, despite the prima facie incoherence of such talk for the Universist, she nonetheless has reason to try and provide interpretation of this discourse. We present a method of interpreting extension-talk (V-logic), and show how it captures satisfaction in `ideal' outer models and relates to impredicative class theories. We provide some reasons to regard the technique as philosophically virtuous, and argue that it opens new doors to philosophical and mathematical discussions for the Universist. (shrink)

There is a disagreement among contemporary commentators about Avicena's view of the theoretical intellect in "Kitāb alnafs". Is its activity performed by an internal sense helped by the intellect, or is it a activity proper of the intellect independently of material forms? Some passages of V.5 and V.6 suggest that both elements are necessary to the knowledge: unifying the multiplicity and multiplying the unity; in others words, it is not enough that the intellect conceptualizes the minor and major terms of (...) the syllogism, it also needs to intuit the middle term. (shrink)

Caroline New is an energetic activist who has interpolated critical realist ideas into the front-line of political activism. In this wide-ranging interview, she begins by reflecting on her life and how she became a realist and her account is illustrated with personal anecdotes recalling memories of well-known philosophers and activists from the time. She discusses how her position set her apart from other feminists and she examines the interacting threads of longstanding debates on the political left, as well as (...) longstanding debates within critical realist circles, such as the relative importance of quantitative methods in social research and the scope for agency as a source of intentional change. Finally she brings some of her ideas to bear on contemporary issues. This engaging interview notably provides some of the social context in which critical realism developed, while also pointing towards its future potential. (shrink)

It is often assumed that concepts from the formal sciences, such as mathematics and logic, have to be treated differently from concepts from non-formal sciences. This is especially relevant in cases of concept defectiveness, as in the empirical sciences defectiveness is an essential component of lager disruptive or transformative processes such as concept change or concept fragmentation. However, it is still unclear what role defectiveness plays for concepts in the formal sciences. On the one hand, a common view sees formal (...) concepts to be protected against defects because of their precise and stable nature. On the other, studies going back as far as Lakatos (1963) showcase the changeability of such concepts. -/- In this paper, I will investigate if and how defectiveness based on the occurrence of inconsistencies can appear with formal concepts. To make the case as strong as possible, I employ a strict notion of formal concept that assumes the concept to have a fixed and definite extension. I will show that there are indeed certain types of defectiveness that cannot occur with such concepts; but that there are other types of defectiveness that do occur. This means that while formal concepts have to be treated differently than non-formal concepts, questions about defectiveness---as raised in the conceptual engineering debate and philosophy of science---can still be applied to them. I will highlight this point by showing how formal sciences have special strategies available to them that allow them to resolve defectiveness of their concepts in a flexible and informative manner. (shrink)

Caroline New is an energetic activist who has interpolated critical realist ideas into the front-line of political activism. In this wide-ranging interview, she begins by reflecting on her life and how she became a realist and her account is illustrated with personal anecdotes recalling memories of well-known philosophers and activists from the time. She discusses how her position set her apart from other feminists and she examines the interacting threads of longstanding debates on the political left, as well as (...) longstanding debates within critical realist circles, such as the relative importance of quantitative methods in social research and the scope for agency as a source of intentional change. Finally she brings some of her ideas to bear on contemporary issues. This engaging interview notably provides some of the social context in which critical realism developed, while also pointing towards its future potential. (shrink)

Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering is a superlative collection of essays that does what too few scholarly works have dared: it takes seriously the philosophical significance of women’s lived experience. Every woman, regardless of her own reproductive story, is touched by the often restrictive beliefs and norms governing discourses about pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Thus the concerns of this anthology are relevant to all women and central to any philosophical project that takes women’s lives seriously. In (...) this volume 16 authors- including both established feminists and some of today’s most innovative new scholars- engage in sustained reflection on the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and mothering, and on the beliefs, customs, and political institutions by which those experiences are informed. Many of the topics in this collection, though familiar, are here taken up in a new way: contributors think beyond the traditional pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy, speak to the manifold nature of mothering by considering the experiences of adoptive mothers and birthmothers, and upend the belief that childrearing practices must be uniform despite psycho-sexual differences in children. Many chapters reveal the radical shortcomings of conventional philosophical wisdom by placing trenchant assumptions about subjectivity, gender, power and virtue in dialogue with women’s experience. The volume is diverse both in its content and in its scholarly approach; certain of the essays are informed by their authors’ own experiences, others draw from extant narratives; many engage such canonical thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Heidegger, while others draw from the works of contemporary feminists including Sara Ruddick, Iris Marion Young, Virginia Held, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. All readers, regardless of their philosophical training and commitments, will find much to appreciate in this volume. (shrink)

À primeira vista, a investigação psicológica de Avicenna é pouco precisa quanto ao modo pelo qual a alma se relaciona com as intenções sensíveis. Dadas algumas passagens do Kitāb al-nafs nas quais se discute a relação entre elas e a faculdade estimativa, pode-se chegar a algumas conclusões acerca do estatuto ontológica das intenções. Utilizarei os exemplos fornecidos por Avicena em I.5, II.2 e IV.1 para mostrar em quais sentidos o termo maʻnā é utilizado e se elas existem no mundo ou (...) resultam de uma relação particular. (shrink)

Genetic modification leads to several important moral issues. Up until now they have mainly been discussed from the viewpoint that only individual living beings, above all animals, are morally considerable. The standpoint that also collective entities such as species belong to the moral sphere have seldom been taken into account in a more thorough way, although it is advocated by several important environmental ethicists. The main purpose of this article is to analyze in more detail than often has been done (...) what the practical consequences of this ethical position would be for the use of genetic engineering on animals and plants. The practical consequences of the holistic standpoint (focused on collective entities) of Holmes Rolston, III, is compared with the practical consequences of the individualistic standpoints (focused on individual living beings) of Bernard E. Rollin and Philipp Balzer, Klaus Peter Rippe, and Peter Schaber, respectively. The article also discusses whether the claim that species are morally considerable is tenable as a foundation for policy decisions on genetic engineering. (shrink)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used in disaster risk management applications to predict the effect of upcoming disasters, plan for mitigation strategies, and determine who needs how much aid after a disaster strikes. The media is filled with unintended ethical concerns of AI algorithms, such as image recognition algorithms not recognizing persons of color or racist algorithmic predictions of whether offenders will recidivate. We know such unintended ethical consequences must play a role in DRM as well, yet there is (...) surprisingly little research on exactly what the unintended consequences are and what we can do to mitigate them. The aim of this perspective is to call researchers working on fairness, accountability, and transparency to work with DRM and local experts—so we can ensure that disaster mitigation and relief is accountable, considers local values, and is not unintentionally biased. (shrink)

In Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation, Iris Marion Young describes the lived bodily experience of women who have “chosen” their pregnancies. In this essay, Lundquist underscores the need for a more inclusive phenomenology of pregnancy. Drawing on sources in literature, psychology, and phenomenology, she offers descriptions of the cryptic phenomena of rejected and denied pregnancy, indicating the vast range of pregnancy experience and illustrating substantial phenomenological differences between “chosen” and unwanted pregnancies.

Climate change and decarbonization raise complex justice questions that researchers and policymakers must address. The distributions of greenhouse gas emissions rights and mitigation efforts have dominated justice discourses within scenario research, an integrative element of the IPCC. However, the space of justice considerations is much larger. At present, there is no consistent approach to comprehensively incorporate and examine justice considerations. Here we propose a conceptual framework grounded in philosophical theory for this purpose. We apply this framework to climate mitigation scenarios (...) literature as proof of concept, enabling a more holistic and multidimensional investigation of justice. We identify areas of future research, including new metrics of service provisioning essential for human well-being. [Can be freely read by clicking the ReadCube link below.]. (shrink)

In this paper Animalism is analysed. It will be argued that Animalism is correct in claiming (i) that being of a certain sort of animal S is a fundamental individuative substance sortal concept (animal of the species Homo Sapiens), (ii) that this implies that Animalism is correct in claiming that persons such as us are, by necessity, human beings, (iii) that remaining the same animal is a necessary condition for our identity over time. Contrary to Animalism it will be argued (...) that this does not imply that person should be understood as a phased sortal concept. It will be argued that Animalism rests upon a prior conception of person, and that this implies that person must be understood as a basic substance sortal concept through which we have to individuate ourselves and others. It is further argued that this, together with the insights of Animalism, implies that persons, by necessity, are beings of a biological nature. (shrink)

Almost a quarter-century after the Carnegie report, Scholarship Reconsidered, the scholarship of teaching remains a contested idea, celebrated by some and critiqued by others. This new book is particularly relevant now however as it explores the notion of the scholarship of teaching through the lens of authenticity, a complex, intriguing and particularly striking and distinctively helpful notion which has caught the attention of several authors in adult and higher education. However, those writing about authenticity do not always make explicit what (...) it is that they mean by this notion, nor are they clear about the philosophical foundations underpinning it. In developing the notion of the scholarship of teaching as an 'authentic practice', the author draws on several complementary philosophical ideas to explore the nature of this practice, why it is imperative for universities to engage in it, what meaningful engagement wold look like and the conditions under which it might qualify as 'authentic'. Core constructs employed include practice virtue communicative action 'being', 'power', critical reflection and transformationThe scholarship of teaching is described as a practice sustained through critical reflection and critical self-reflection. Being a scholar of teaching is viewed as an ongoing transformative learning process, a process of becoming authentic, the latter ultimately aimed at both helping students to become authentic and creating a better world in which to teach, learn and live. Although explored as a practice in its own right, the scholarship of teaching is seen to be strengthened by being situated within a wider integrated notion of academic practice. The book combines the author's previous research on authenticity with earlier work on the meaning of the scholarship of teaching, offering a provocative, fresh and timely perspective on the scholarship of teaching and professional learning in our times but also providing guidance on how to create a better world in which to learn, teach and live. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers and social scientists have shown increased interest in questions of social, global, and intergenerational distributive justice related to energy production and consumption. However, so far there have been only a few attempts to analyse questions of distributive energy justice from a religious point of view, which should be considered a lack since religions are an important basis of morality for a large part of the world’s population. In this article, I analyse issues of distributive energy justice from a (...) Christian theological viewpoint by employing the Catholic common good tradition as a theoretical framework. First, I present and argue for a global and ecological interpretation of the Catholic common good tradition. Then I analyse the implications of such an interpretation on questions of distributive energy justice, focusing on the view of property rights within the Catholic common good tradition. I conclude that, in comparison with Nussbaum’s liberal capabilities approach, the common good tradition provides stronger reasons for individuals and groups in more economically developed countries to share their resources and knowledge with individuals and groups in less economically developed countries. (shrink)

Up Against Foucault offers both a feminist critique of Foucauldian theories as well as an attempt to reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable perspectives. Feminists are often "up against Foucault" because he questions key conclusions in feminism regarding the nature of gender relations, and men's possession of power. This book, however, fills the gap in literature about Foucault by showing how his theories of sexuality and power relations are often applicable to the everyday realities of women's lives. Drawing upon their diverse backgrounds (...) in social theory and philosophy, the contributors discuss the ways in which Foucault provokes feminists into questioning their grasp of power relations, and examines the implications of his decision to overlook categories of gender in his discussion of sexuality and power relations. They also show that in spite of his lack of interest in gender, Foucault's ways of understanding the control of women and female sexuality ultimately have much to offer feminism. (shrink)

We contribute to the scientific debate by studying the storylines, discourses and related normative judgments in parliamentary motions by private members of the Swedish parliament from the time period 2010–2019. The paper makes use of an ecofeminist theoretical framework to problematize these storylines, discourses and normative judgments. We conclude that the focus in the material is on economic and technical issues, while issues of justice play a marginal role. None of the important dimensions of energy justice are adequately considered and (...) many of the dominant storylines and discourses are based on the implicit assumption that issues of justice are insignificant. (shrink)

O objetivo deste estudo é analisar as considerações acerca da alma presentes no Kitab al-nafs, com especial atenção à discussão levantada na seção I.1, a qual trata da substancialidade da alma. Deste modo, o fio condutor será a busca pela definição da alma tendo em vista a sua relação com o corpo de modo a apontar a insuficiência de defini-la como faculdade, forma e perfeição dada a independência do corpo. Iniciarei com a primeira constatação da existência da alma para poder, (...) em seguida, abordar as definições propostas em I.1 e os raciocínios avicenianos que apontam como, em todos os casos, o corpo também é pressuposto. Assim, poder-se-à discutir o que significa classificá-la na categoria de substância, quais as implicações desta definição na relação com o corpo e como esta definição está diretamente vinculada à primeira versão do experimento mental do homem suspenso no ar apresentada no final do K. al-nafs I.1. (shrink)

This article presents a collaborative research based on the cooperation of teachers, students and searchers gathered around a narrative workshop project in an experimental school, the Micro-Lycée de Sénart, near Paris. Searchers and practitioners built together this workshop dedicated to drop out students to analyse how it can help them to develop themselves, their social skills and their creativity to face life issues. The research team also wants to see if this kind of professional activity can change the teachers’ representations, (...) behaviours and practical experience. The research team used the frame of biographical research in education as theoretic background and methodology. The purpose of this article is to point out interests and limits of such an approach in the collaborative research field. (shrink)

Energy production and consumption give rise to issues of justice for future humans. By analysing a specific case – Swedish energy politics – this article contributes to the discussion of how consideration for future humans should affect energy policy making. It outlines three different energy scenarios for the period 2035-2065 – the nuclear-renewables, the renewables-low and the renewables-high scenarios – and assesses them from the point of view of justice for future individuals by using the capabilities approach as a normative (...) framework. We cannot make a definitive assessment of the different scenarios due to the great uncertainties involved in determining the impacts on individuals living between 2035 and 2065 and individuals born thereafter, but we still conclude that we have certain reasons to prefer the renewables-low scenario since it avoids certain risks connected with the other scenarios. The economic growth in this scenario is lower than in the others, but we question whether this is a disadvantage from the point of view of the capabilities approach. _Keywords:_ energy scenarios, justice, future generations, capabilities approach. (shrink)

We survey recent developments in the theory of class forcing for- malized in the second-order set-theoretic setting.

The aims of this study were to measure the readability of Australian based informed consent documents and determine whether informed consent readability guidelines have been established by Australian human research ethics committees (HRECs). A total of 20 informed consent documents, 10 HIV/AIDS and 10 type 2 diabetes, were measured for readability using the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) and Gunning Fog Index (Fog). Published guidelines and policy statements of the two local HREC who approved the 20 clinical trials under study (...) where examined to identify whether they had any formal policies/guidelines on the readability of informed consent documents. The two HRECs were contacted via e-mail to also determine whether they utilised any informal readability standards or “rules of thumb” that may not have been mentioned in the published documents. The HIV/AIDS and type 2 diabetes informed consent documents were, on average, written at a grade 13 reading level. Formal readability standards had not been established by the two local HRECs, however, they did verify the use of informal rules for assessing readability of informed consent documents. Based on Australian literacy data, the majority of informed consent documents were written well beyond the reading ability of many Australians. Unreadable informed consent documents may result in patients rejecting trial participation altogether or conversely may result in their participating in a trial with inadequate consent. Therefore, a step toward reducing the complexity of informed consent documents may be to implement objective readability assessments into the human research ethics application and review process. (shrink)

This clearly presented study examines the nature of religious experiences, and asks whether they can be used as evidence for religious beliefs. The author discusses important philosophical issues raised by religious experience, such as the role of models and metaphors in their description, and the way experiences in general are used as evidence for claims about the world. Using contemporary and classic sources from the world's religions, the author gives an account of different types of religious experience. She also draws (...) extensively on psychological, sociological, and philosophical literature to meet sceptical challenges, and concludes that, like most experiences, they are most effective as evidence within an argument which combines evidence from a wide range of sources. (shrink)

It is widely held that free speech is a distinctive and privileged social kind. But what is free speech? In particular, is there any unified phenomenon that is both free speech and which is worthy of the special value traditionally attached to free speech? We argue that a descendent of the classic Millian justification of free speech is in fact a justification of a more general social condition; and, via an argument that 'free speech' names whatever natural social kind is (...) justified by the best arguments, that free speech is therefore this more general condition. This condition involves not merely the orthodox freedom (in some sense) of speakers to distribute words, but also two less frequently acknowledged dimensions of free speech: audience understanding and consideration. We conclude with some discussion of the policy implications of this conception of free speech. (shrink)

In Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation, Iris Marion Young describes the lived bodily experience of women who have “chosen” their pregnancies. In this essay, Lundquist underscores the need for a more inclusive phenomenology of pregnancy. Drawing on sources in literature, psychology, and phenomenology, she offers descriptions of the cryptic phenomena of rejected and denied pregnancy, indicating the vast range of pregnancy experience and illustrating substantial phenomenological differences between “chosen” and unwanted pregnancies.

Previous analyses of descriptively defined psychotic phenomena have concluded that they can occur in benign spiritual experiences as well as pathological states. Attempts to forge a distinction between psychotic experiences in spiritual and pathological contexts on the basis of the form or content of the experience (broadly described) can be disproved by counterexample; distinguishing on the basis of negative or positive consequences of the phenomena for the individual can be seen to beg the question. In the present paper, it is (...) argued that examining the fundamental conceptual organization of psychotic and mystical mental states not only elucidates the observed similarities between them, but can highlight the differences, and the processes by which negatively evaluated pathological features can be seen to emerge. Oriental philosophical systems such as Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, and Tantric Hinduism, provide conceptualizations of mystical states of mind, from which a model can be drawn, while the epistemologies of these systems provide an illuminating metaphysical perspective on both psychotic and mystical experiences. It is concluded that mystical and psychotic experiences can be distinguished not only by emotional and behavioral consequences, but by real differences in the states themselves; certain features, such as loss of subject/object boundaries and loss of the relative dimensional structure of perception, are common to both processes. (shrink)

Classic and modern emotion theories suggest that the perception of bodily sensations, or interoception, is foundational to emotion processing. The present research examined whether interoception is...

A cause is proportional to its effect when, roughly speaking, it is at the right level of detail. There is a lively debate about whether proportionality is a necessary condition for causation. One of the main arguments against a proportionality constraint on causation is that many ordinary and seemingly perfectly acceptable causal claims cite causes that are not proportional to their effects. In this paper, I suggest that proponents of a proportionality constraint can respond to this objection by developing an (...) idea that is present in Yablo’s early work on proportionality, but which has strangely been ignored by both Yablo and others in the subsequent debate. My suggestion is that proportionality—and, indeed, causation itself—is relative to a domain of events. At the metaphysical level, this means that the causal relation has an extra relatum—namely, a domain of events. At the level of language, it introduces a new way in which causal claims are context-sensitive: what is expressed by a causal claim depends on the contextually relevant domain of events. As I argue, this suggestion allows us to accommodate the truth of ordinary causal claims while extending the explanatory benefits of a proportionality constraint. (shrink)

The ability to explain the occurrence of errors in children's speech is an essential component of successful theories of language acquisition. The present study tested some generativist and constructivist predictions about error on the questions produced by ten English-learning children between 2 and 5 years of age. The analyses demonstrated that, as predicted by some generativist theories [e.g. Santelmann, L., Berk, S., Austin, J., Somashekar, S. & Lust. B. (2002). Continuity and development in the acquisition of inversion in yes/no questions: (...) dissociating movement and inflection, Journal of Child Language, 29, 813-842], questions with auxiliary DO attracted higher error rates than those with modal auxiliaries. However, in wh-questions, questions with modals and DO attracted equally high error rates, and these findings could not be explained in terms of problems forming questions with why or negated auxiliaries. It was concluded that the data might be better explained in terms of a constructivist account that suggests that entrenched item-based constructions may be protected from error in children's speech, and that errors occur when children resort to other operations to produce questions [e.g. Dabrowska, E. (2000). From formula to schema: the acquisition of English questions. Cognitive Liguistics, 11, 83-102; Rowland, C. F. & Pine, J. M. (2000). Subject-auxiliary inversion errors and wh-question acquisition: What children do know? Journal of Child Language, 27, 157-181; Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. However, further work on constructivist theory development is required to allow researchers to make predictions about the nature of these operations. (shrink)

Revisiting the structure/agency debate, the article puts forward the broad position shared by Giddens’structuration theory and Bhaskar's transformational model. It defends Giddens’concept of structure as‘rules and resources’against charges of idealism, arguing that its strength is its focus on the interface of structure and agency. But both Giddens and Bhaskar emphasise social reproduction as an unintended consequence of social action. Taking issue with postmodern pessimism, the article goes on to consider the conditions of possibility, and requisite forms of knowledgeability, for deliberate (...) social transformation. (shrink)

Sade's personal fate has too long encouraged critics to concentrate on his personal isolation and personal revolt. Extraordinary as his life was, the light that it throws on his work casts into shade the intellectual context that was much more important to its generation than his actual experience. This book is about how Sade took a pure version of eighteenth-century materialism and rendered it into an even purer form of pornography. The eternal yet unequal clashing of atomic bodies became the (...) endless torture of human ones. It traces the intellectual genealogy that links Sade to his materialist forebears (d'Holbach, Condillac, Buffon, Diderot, La Mettrie, Robinet, Delisle de Sales) and shows how the germs of cruel pleasure were already present in elements of their work, as much in their rhetoric and stylistics as in their arguments. Sade, aided by his grounding in the interpretative techniques of illicit clandestine and libertine literature, read them attentively and developed their presentation as well as their content into a flawlessly logical and self-referential system. Thus the arrogant philosopher (the author / the libertine) did not just mouth his cruel positions but enacted them, proving the behaviour of matter as he/she did so. This reading of Sade's work refers its principal elements - shape, style and contents - back to the hardcore of materialism, offering an account which, while not making it more tolerable, renders it at once more accessible and more comprehensible. (shrink)

This review provides a commentary on coloured-hearing arising on hearing music: music-colour synaesthesia. Although traditionally explained by the hyperconnectivity theory (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001a) and the disinhibited feedback theory (Grossenbacher & Lovelace, 2001) as a purely perceptual phenomenon, the review of eight coloured-hearing neuroimaging studies shows that it may not be assumed that these explanations are directly translatable to music-colour synaesthesia. The concept of 'ideaesthesia' (Nikolić, 2009) and the role of conceptual and semantic inducers challenge the likelihood of a single (...) mechanism underlying the cause of synaesthesia and argue for a move away from a purely sensory to sensory explanation. Finally, music-colour synaesthesia forms a challenge for established philosophical theories and the position of synaesthesia is considered within the larger context of musical qualia. (shrink)

This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in (...) the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research. (shrink)

Existing debates on business ethics under-represent consumers’ perspectives. In order to progress understanding of ethical judgement in the marketplace, we unpack the interconnections between consumer ethical judgment, consent and context. We address the question of how consumers judge the morality of threat-based experiential marketing communications. Our interpretive qualitative research shows that consumers can feel positively about being shocked, judging threat appeals as more or less ethical by the nature of the negative emotions they experience. We also determine that the intersection (...) between ethical judgement, consent and context lies where consumers’ perceptions of fairness and consequences lend contextualised normative approval to marketing practice. Our research makes three original contributions to existing literature. First, it extends theory in the area of ethical judgement, by highlighting the importance of consent for eliciting positive moral responses. Second, it adds to embryonic research addressing the role of emotions in ethical judgement, by ascertaining that negative emotions can elicit positive consumer ethical judgement. Third, our research contributes an original concept to ethical judgement theorisation, namely consumer-experienced positive shock. We define CEPS as a consensual shock value judged as ethical due to its ephemerality, commercial resonance, brand alignment, target-audience appropriateness and contextual acceptability. We also extrapolate the dimensions of CEPS into an ethical judgement typology, elucidating how consumers judge some threat-based communications as ethical, but not others. Consequently, our work dovetails with wider business ethics debates on ethical judgement, adding value by clarifying the conditions that generate positive consumer ethical judgement. (shrink)

In this paper, we apply the capabilities approach—with the addition of capability ceilings—to energy justice. We argue that, to ensure energy justice, energy policies and scenarios should consider enabling not only minimal capability thresholds but also maximum capability ceilings. It is permissible, perhaps even morally required, to limit the capabilities of those above the threshold if it is necessary for enabling those below the threshold to reach the level required by justice. We make a distinction between tragic and non-tragic conflicts (...) of capabilities: tragic conflicts are instances when one cannot raise an agent’s capabilities above the threshold that justice requires without pushing someone else below the threshold or restricting someone from reaching the threshold. In contrast, a non-tragic choice is when increasing someone above the threshold required by justice does not entail pushing someone else’s capabilities below the threshold. We utilise this framework to discuss energy justice and emissions of greenhouse gases. Drawing on the relation between points on the human development index and levels of energy consumption, we conclude that non-tragic mitigation policies now are highly preferable to tragic policies later. (shrink)