Sylvia Wynter, novelist, dramatist, cultural critic, and philosopher, has called for a new poetics that “will have to take as its referent subject, that of the concrete individual human subject”. By “referent subject” Wynter means a shared sense, poetic in nature, that can nevertheless exclude many who are also expected to live it. Man, Wynter argues, as a referent subject first appeared in the Italian Renaissance. As Walter Mignolo has argued, this way of representing an individual is made visual in (...) Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a man of perfect... (shrink)

Though it has gone unnoticed so far in Beauvoir Studies, the term “singularity” is a technical one for Simone de Beauvoir. In the first half of the essay I discuss two reasons why this term has been obscured. First, as is well known Beauvoir has not been read in the context of the history of philosophy until recently. Second, in The Ethics of Ambiguity at least, singularité is translated both inconsistently and quite misleadingly. In the second half of the essay (...) I attempt to demonstrate the importance of this term in The Ethics. The will to disclose being is the will to disclose the singularity of the other, whether human, land, sky or painting. Ambiguity, which Beauvoir distinguishes from absurdity in Camus, is an image suggesting this necessarily mutual disclosure of singularity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond DisciplineOn the Status of Bodily Difference in PhilosophyEmily Anne ParkerMuch deserved attention has recently been directed to the fact that philosophy faculty are surprisingly homogeneous when compared to faculty in other fields, not only in the humanities and social sciences but also in the natural sciences (Alcoff 2011, 7–8). Perhaps it is as a result of this bodily homogeneity that sexual harassment and sexual assault in philosophy (...) departments are routine and that stories about such experiences, when they can be shared, are questioned or ignored. Certainly such experiences deserve attention. But they also deserve philosophical examination. Linda Martín Alcoff points out that a study of the relationship between percentages of (predominantly white, hetero, cisgendered, normatively abled) women in a department and the status of that department in Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet demonstrates a “reverse correlation, where the higher the percentages of women, the lower the rankings. Departments concerned about their Leiter rankings would be ‘rational,’ then to forego hiring too many women” (Alcoff 2011, 8). Alcoff suggests that instead of simply counting the nonwhite, cisgendered, heterosexual, normatively abled men in the field, we need to consider the connection between the “climate for women and the attitude toward feminist philosophy” and (as her own work elsewhere would suggest) the philosophy of race. Clearly Alcoff is right to suggest that we should not think of sexual harassment as the obstacle to participation of a very small sampling of bodily diversity in the field, but rather as a circular indicator and cause of a larger problem. [End Page 222]But what is the problem?I would like to suggest that the problem, still underdiscussed, is the implicit disciplining of what counts as philosophical. It is this quiet yet ubiquitous questioning that not only keeps philosophy homogeneous, but also prevents most critics of that homogeneity from doing more than reporting limited demographical information about the field. To be sure, when one wants to argue that there is something wrong with the culture of philosophy as a field, it seems necessary to marshal data. And yet it will always be the case that such studies can never answer questions about how a culture develops, what its assumptions, horizons, and cosmologies are. For this one needs (critical race, feminist, ability, queer, trans, economic, ecological) philosophy. And yet, circularly, disciplining what counts as philosophical sets limits to what questions can be explored.Kristie Dotson, Gayle Salamon, and Alexis Shotwell have each in separate contexts pointed out that what counts as “philosophy” should be recognized as the philosophical question that it itself apparently is (Dotson 2011, 2012; Salamon 2009; Shotwell 2010). This conversation about what counts as philosophy is directly related to the status not only of white hetero women in the field, but also the status of anyone who challenges the philosophical centrality of normatively raced-classed-abled-gendered bodies. In a recent paper, Dotson reflects on having been asked repeatedly, “How is this paper philosophy?” (Dotson 2012, 407). This question is extremely common, and as Shotwell points out, having to answer it is “a common experience for people who attempt to do work in philosophy while departing in archive and method from accepted norms” (117). Shotwell further suggests that it’s not just archive and method that make one suspect; it’s also the questions that one is willing to ask about oneself, about community, about world. Read together, Dotson and Shotwell make it clear not only that the question of whether one’s work is or is not philosophical is a common question, but that this is the case precisely because it is taken for granted what philosophy is, perhaps especially by those who ask whether X is or is not philosophy. Otherwise the question of how some project or other is philosophy simply wouldn’t be articulable as a question.For the moment I would like to take a widely common and implicit definition of philosophy seriously: “Philosophy” is whatever directs fundamental questions at itself. Perhaps this means that philosophy is the art of attempting to discern the creative within the wrongly presumed. We could then say that philosophy asks, What do we presuppose? Why, and... (shrink)

The Second Sex offers a philosophy of bodies that hinges on the crucial concepts of ambiguity and singularity. I revisit two widely influential essays on the status of “the body” in The Second Sex, those of Moira Gatens and Catriona Mackenzie. However, both of these readings mistakenly present Beauvoir as accepting lived experiences of politically overdetermined immanence, rather than exploring them as stifled modes of transcendence. Several years later, Moira Gatens took a very helpful “second look” at the status of (...) bodies and biology in Beauvoir. I contrast this with Judith Butler's reading of The Second Sex as a project engaged in the denaturalization of gender. My chapter charts a middle way between Gatens’ second essay and Butler's reading: I argue that The Second Sex does “denaturalize” gender, but it does so precisely to bring attention to the powers and plurality of bodies. Singularity as multiplicitous lived bodily variance, according to Beauvoir, will “always exist” regardless of the static and idealizing categories of some approaches to biology. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that the concept of “the body,” ironically generic and a-bodily, is a legacy of the modern political/ecological distinction. I proceed through five sections. First I suggest that the political and the ecological, in spite of a lot of excellent work undermining the nature-culture distinction, remain mutually resistant concepts. In section two I argue that this split can be partially understood through the work of Bruno Latour. For Latour modernity is defined by an attempt to purge (...) culture of nature. This is the “first Great Divide” that constitutes modernity as a concept and in fact a distinct nature-culture. For Latour, this distinction then gets externalized or projected to create a second Great Divide, one imagined by moderns between themselves and other societies. To illustrate the extent of the sway of this distinction, I read a recent and widely influential essay on doing history in the Anthropocene by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty underestimates the role of the nature-culture distinction in the making of climate crisis. Here I also explain that perhaps what is needed is recognition that the human as a morphology both separates itself from ecology and yet—incompatibly—is considered to be an ecological pinnacle. The human isn’t and yet is ecological. Differences among humans, when they are discussed, are attributed unilaterally to the political side of a new political-ecological split. After Latour the nature and culture distinction is questionable, but a political-ecological split survives that attributes the eruptions of discontinuous life entirely to human agency. In the third section I then turn to the work of Frantz Fanon to argue that Latour’s Great Divides are expressed as “Manichaean” in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The “ecological” import of Fanon’s concept of Manichaean-ism has largely been missed, thanks both to the salience of the political-ecological distinction and to the subtlety of Fanon’s account. But Fanon is not only talking about politics; he’s talking about ecology. The human, Fanon explains, is meant to be a natural master of the planet, a human among animals. The human is master of all “matter” with which all things related to bodies and all bodies related to things are identified. In the fourth section I suggest that it is this modern Manichaean-ism that produces a crucial double bind in the present: Those who fail to be “the body” of modernism are also those most harmed by its elemental (a word I borrow from a critical reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray for an indistinguishably political and ecological) destruction. Politics, at least in the tradition that gives rise to modern politics, is in fact and has always been the privileging of certain bodies over others. There is no perfectly apolitical bodily feature, though some features of bodies are more politically formative than others. Modernity does nothing to intervene on this. In fact it exacerbates this theme. Neither the discourse of politics nor the discourse of ecology offers refuge to those whose bodies are considered a threat to a human morphology that is planetarily alienated. In the final section of the essay I argue that this partitioning of politics (relations among the humans) from ecology produces “the body” and its generic justice. I return to Latour to argue that he ultimately does not appreciate the double bind discussed in section four. Fanon does. Therefore Fanon offers a better framework for undermining “the political,” not by reducing it to the modern sense of “the ecological,” but by giving attention to what he suggests is the “cortico-visceral” injustice of a modernity that denies its own earthly status. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that Judith Butler’s work represents a fundamental departure from that of Luce Irigaray. However, in a 2001 essay, Butler suggests that Irigaray’s work plays a formative role in her own, and that the problematization of the biological and cultural distinction that Irigaray’s notion of sexual difference accomplishes must be rethought and multiplied rather than simply rejected. In this essay, I place the notion of precarity in the work of Butler alongside that of sexual difference in Irigaray, (...) to show how together they seek to address violence to certain bodies through an approach that is at once ecological and political. I show that Butler’s concept of precarity has deep, largely unappreciated, roots in the work of Irigaray. Butler explores precarity as bodily multiplicity in ways that pluralize Irigaray’s own ethics and politics of difference. Butler is, in other words, rewriting sexual difference as precarity. (shrink)

The essays in this volume seek to resituate the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray both historically and in light of the demands of contemporary feminist theory by examining unexplored aspects of their thought. Authors also highlight the commonalties in thought between the two philosophers, articulating points of dialogue in logic, ethics, and politics.

"Political hierarchies and ecological crises are often considered to be two different problems. For example, many speak in the present of parallel concerns : climate change and racial injustice. Parker argues rather that these concerns share a common cause in the polis. Polis is an ancient Greek term for the city-state, from which the English term political derives. But polis is more than a term. It is a philosophy according to which there is one complete human body, and that (...) body is meant to govern all other things. In that sense there are not two concerns, but instead one concern : to perceive the ways in which this tradition of the polis constrains the present. Emily Anne Parker bridges the insights of social constructionism and new materialisms to create a philosophy of elemental difference. Difference, rather than needing to be either dismissed based on it social construction or reified in keeping with the hierarchies of the polis, is crucial for addressing the contemporary crises of the polis.""--taken from back cover. (shrink)

We argued in a recent issue of this journal that if abortion is restricted,1 then there are parallel obligations for parents to donate body parts to their children. The strength of this obligation to donate is proportional to the strength of the abortion restrictions. If abortion is never permissible, then a parent must always donate any organ if they are a match. If abortion is sometimes permissible and sometimes not, then organ donation is sometimes obligatory and sometimes not. Our argument (...) was based on the following ideas: (a) that a fetus has full moral status, (b) that parents have special obligations to their offspring, fetus or not, and (c) that this special obligation is to protect them. The result is the conclusion that abortion restrictivists cannot also consistently deny that organ donation should be compulsory. (shrink)

Some people oppose abortion on the grounds that fetuses have full moral status and thus a right to not be killed. We argue that special obligations that hold between mother and fetus also hold between parents and their children. We argue that if these special obligations necessitate the sacrifice of bodily autonomy in the case of abortion, then they also necessitate the sacrifice of bodily autonomy in the case of organ donation. If we accept the argument that it is obligatory (...) to override a woman’s bodily autonomy for the sake of an unborn child’s survival, we must continue to override the bodily autonomy of parents to ensure the survival of their living children, until the parent no longer has a special obligation to their child to the same degree as their special obligation to the fetus. And if the life of a child is truly more important than the bodily autonomy of its parents, as must be the case to force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, this should remain true until such a time that their children are no longer considered their responsibility. Thus, parity of reasoning suggests that policies compelling the gestation of a fetus should be accompanied by policies compelling organ donation. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 1 Seiten: 363-365.

Despite having paved the way for face, womb and penis transplants, hand transplantation today remains a small hybrid of reconstructive microsurgery and transplant immunology. An exceptionally limited patient population internationally complicates medical researchers’ efforts to parse outcomes “objectively.” Presumed functional and psychosocial benefits of gaining a transplant hand must be weighed in both patient decisions and bioethical discussions against the difficulty of adhering to post-transplant medications, the physical demands of hand transplant recovery on the patient, and the serious long-term health (...) risks of immunosuppressant drugs. This paper relates five narratives of hand transplantation drawn from an oral history project to show how narrative methods can and should inform ethical evaluations and the clinical process of hand transplantation. The interviews with patients and their partners analyzed here lead us to suggest that qualitative accounts of patient experiences should be used to complement clinical case studies reported in medical journals and to help develop instruments to assess outcomes more systematically. (shrink)

BackgroundThe evolution of the female orgasm in humans and its role in romantic relationships is poorly understood. Whereas the male orgasm is inherently linked to reproduction, the female orgasm is not linked to obvious reproductive or survival benefits. It also occurs less consistently during penetrative sex than does the male orgasm. Mate-choice hypotheses posit that the wide variation in female orgasm frequency reflects a discriminatory mechanism designed to select high-quality mates.ObjectiveWe aimed to determine whether women report that their orgasm frequency (...) varies between partners, whether this variation reflects mates' personal characteristics, and whether this variation reflects own and partner sexual behaviour during intercourse.DesignWe collected survey data from 103 women who rated the extent to which their orgasm frequency varied between partners, the characteristics of previous sexual partners who induced high-orgasm frequency and those who induced low-orgasm frequency,... (shrink)

This book provides an accessible introduction to jurisprudence and legal theory. It sets out a course of study that offers a highly effective series of introductions into a wide variety of theories and theoretical perspectives, from traditional approaches such as Natural Law to modern ones such as Feminist Theory, Economic Analysis of Law and Foucault and Law, The book is designed for students of jurisprudence and legal theory, but it will also assist those studying law and legal systems within courses (...) on Political Science, Philosophy and Sociology. (shrink)

Imagery is one of the new, exciting frontiers in cognitive therapy. From the outset of cognitive therapy, its founder Dr. Aaron T. Beck recognised the importance of imagery in the understanding and treatment of patient's problems. However, despite Beck's prescience, clinical research on imagery, and the integration of imagery interventions into clinical practice, developed slowly. It is only in the past 10 years that most writing and research on imagery in cognitive therapy has been conducted. The Oxford Guide to Imagery (...) in Cognitive Therapy is a landmark book, which will play an important role in the next phase of cognitive therapy's development. Clinicians and researchers are starting to recognise the centrality of imagery in the development, maintenance and treatment of psychological disorders - for example, in social phobia, agoraphobia, depression, PTSD, eating disorders, childhood trauma, and personality disorder. In the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, researchers are identifying the key role that imagery plays in emotion, cognition and psychopathology.The Oxford Guide to Imagery in Cognitive Therapy has been written both for clinicians and researchers. For clinicians, it is a user-friendly, practical guide to imagery, which will enable therapists to understand imagery phenomenology, and to integrate imagery-based interventions into their cognitive therapy practice. For researchers, it provides a state-of-the-art summary of imagery research, and points the way to future studies. Written by three well-respected CBT researcher-clinicians, it is essential reading for all cognitive therapists, who have recognised the limitations of purely 'verbal' CBT techniques, and want to find new ways to work with clients with psychological disorders. Readership: CBT therapists. (shrink)

Background: Autonomy is a central concept in both bioethics and rehabilitation. Bioethics has emphasized autonomy as self-governance and its application in treatment decision-making. In addition to discussing decisional autonomy, rehabilitation also focuses on autonomy as functional independence. In practice, responding to patients with diminished autonomy is an important component of rehabilitation care, but also gives rise to tensions and challenges. Our objective was to better understand the complex and distinctive ways that autonomy is understood and upheld in the context of (...) rehabilitation care by reviewing how autonomy is discussed in the rehabilitation literature. Methods: We conducted a scoping review addressing issues of autonomy in the context of mental and physical rehabilitation. Our process followed three sequential steps. We extracted and analyzed bibliometric information. We then examined how autonomy was defined and conceptualized. Finally, we examined how the articles discussed the roles of rehabilitation health professionals in responding to patient autonomy. Findings: The articles include 16 empirical reports, 17 case studies and 30 theoretical papers. The most common conceptual accounts of autonomy drew upon principlism, rights-based and legal analyses, and relational/social approaches. We identified four broad approaches for responding to patient autonomy: supporting, promoting, respecting and advocating. Conclusion: This review helps clarify some of the ambiguities and conceptual distinctions underlying discussions and practices related to autonomy in rehabilitation. It also draws attention to a wide range of activities that health professionals can undertake with the goal of supporting, promoting, respecting and advocating for patient autonomy in rehabilitation care. (shrink)

Cet article propose un tour d’horizon de différents types de biais que l’on peut rencontrer dans les études basées sur l’annotation de corpus vidéo de langue des signes. En tâchant de situer objectivement les choix effectués et les biais potentiels à chaque étape, nous décrivons les méthodologies que nous avons mises en place dans trois études, portant respectivement sur la synchronisation des composantes corporelles, le mouvement des sourcils et les clignements des yeux, puis la coarticulation.

Background: Autonomy is a central concept in both bioethics and rehabilitation. Bioethics has emphasized autonomy as self-governance and its application in treatment decision-making. In addition to discussing decisional autonomy, rehabilitation also focuses on autonomy as functional independence. In practice, responding to patients with diminished autonomy is an important component of rehabilitation care, but also gives rise to tensions and challenges. Our objective was to better understand the complex and distinctive ways that autonomy is understood and upheld in the context of (...) rehabilitation care by reviewing how autonomy is discussed in the rehabilitation literature. Methods: We conducted a scoping review addressing issues of autonomy in the context of mental and physical rehabilitation. Our process followed three sequential steps. We extracted and analyzed bibliometric information. We then examined how autonomy was defined and conceptualized. Finally, we examined how the articles discussed the roles of rehabilitation health professionals in responding to patient autonomy. Findings: The articles include 16 empirical reports, 17 case studies and 30 theoretical papers. The most common conceptual accounts of autonomy drew upon principlism, rights-based and legal analyses, and relational/social approaches. We identified four broad approaches for responding to patient autonomy: supporting, promoting, respecting and advocating. Conclusion: This review helps clarify some of the ambiguities and conceptual distinctions underlying discussions and practices related to autonomy in rehabilitation. It also draws attention to a wide range of activities that health professionals can undertake with the goal of supporting, promoting, respecting and advocating for patient autonomy in rehabilitation care. (shrink)

Inattentional Blindness occurs when observers engaged in resource-consuming tasks fail to see unexpected stimuli that appear in their visual field. Eye movements were recorded in a dynamic IB task where participants tracked targets amongst distractors. During the task, an unexpected stimulus crossed the screen for several seconds. Individuals who failed to report the unexpected stimulus were deemed to be IB. Being IB was associated with making more fixations and longer gaze times on distractor stimuli, being less likely to fixate the (...) unexpected stimulus, and having lower working memory capacity than those who were not IB. Noticing the unexpected stimulus was not contingent upon fixating it, suggesting that some individuals processed the unexpected stimulus via covert attention. The findings support earlier research on working memory and IB. In addition, IBs were less efficient attentional allocators than those who were not IB, as reflected in their eye tracking of irrelevant distractors. (shrink)

There has been little previous research regarding the effectiveness of ethics education interventions for residential care‐givers. The Researching Interventions to Promote Ethics in social care project responded to the question: Which is the most effective ethics education intervention for care‐givers in residential social care? A pragmatic cluster trial explored the impact of three ethics education interventions for: (a) interactive face‐to‐face ethics teaching; (b) reflective ethics discussion groups; and (c) an immersive simulation experience. There was also a control arm (d). 144 (...) trial participants were recruited from 39 residential care homes for older people in southern England. Change scores compared across intervention arms showed a significant reduction in work‐related moral stress in the teaching arm compared with control group (p =.03); there were no significant differences between control and intervention arms in change scores for moral sensitivity, interpersonal reactivity (empathy) or ethical leadership. Qualitative data themes were as follows: ethical care; care challenges; and ethical care inhibitors. Overall findings stimulate reflection on the value of three different ethics education interventions and the most appropriate means to evaluate their impact. Findings suggest the complexity and diverse nature of ethical competence in care. We suggest a way forward for research evaluating ethics education. (shrink)

Gils-Schmidt and Salloch recognise that human and climate health are inextricably linked, and that mitigating healthcare-associated climate harms is essential for protecting human health.1 They argue that physicians have a duty to consider how their own practices contribute to climate change, including during their interactions with patients. Acknowledging the potential for conflicts between this duty and the provision of individual patient care, they propose the application of Korsgaard’s neo-Kantian account of practical identities to help navigate such scenarios. In this commentary, (...) we argue that by focusing attention on this physician–patient level, the authors overlook the complexity of climate change, both within the healthcare sector and beyond. We recognise the importance of individual agency in tackling this issue, and we also recognise that the authors do briefly acknowledge the importance of considering these broader complexities; however, we emphasise the need for climate and health discussions/action to be situated in a wider framework of systemic change. Our concern is that overemphasis on patient-level interactions risks normalising the prioritisation of individual-level approaches to addressing climate change, detracting from such a broader approach. Physician training emphasises the need for trust, confidentiality and shared decision-making in the doctor–patient relationship. …. (shrink)

Failings in patient care and quality in NHS Trusts have become a recurring theme over the past few years. In this paper, we examine the Care Quality Commission’s Guidance about Compliance: Essential Standards of Quality and Safety and ask how NHS Trusts might be better supported in fulfilling the regulations specified therein. We argue that clinical ethics committees (CECs) have a role to play in this regard. We make this argument by attending to the many ethical elements that are highlighted (...) in the Commission’s Regulations and by providing practical examples of how CECs can (and in some case already do) provide ethics support to health professionals and trusts. Although CECs have been traditionally associated with case consultation, i.e., discrete problems caused by individual circumstances, in the previous 10 years the literature suggests that clinical ethics services have become more integrated into the life of the health care organization and are increasing construed as proactive agents of systematic change. We provide evidence from a recent survey of UK clinical ethics services that this trend is present in the UK. (shrink)

In September 2008, 10 years after the untimely death of Pere Alberch (1954–1998), the 20th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology gathered a group of Pere’s students, col- laborators, and colleagues (Figure 1) to celebrate his contribu- tions to the origins of EvoDevo. Hosted by the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) outside Vienna, the group met for two days of discussion. The meeting was organized in tandem with a congress held in May 2008 at the Cavanilles Institute (...) for Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (ICBiBE) in Valencia, Spain. The talks at the KLI were equal parts: nostalgic remembrance, excitement over new ways of thinking about old problems, and an unrepressed vitriol against the resurgence of reductionist thinking in EvoDevo. Here we highlight some of the key aspects of Pere’s life and work that informed and infused the talks. (shrink)

BackgroundLiterature on issues relating to comprehension during the process of obtaining informed consent (IC) has largely focused on the challenges potential participants can face in understanding the IC documents, and the strategies used to enhance comprehension of those documents. In this review, we set out to describe the factors that have an impact on comprehension and the strategies used to enhance the IC process in sub-Saharan African countries.MethodsFrom November 2021 to January 2022, we conducted a literature search using a PRISMA (...) tool. We searched electronic databases (PubMed, EMBASE, EBSCOHOST) to identify relevant peer reviewed studies. We then reviewed the references of these articles to find additional literature that might have been missed through the initial search. We were particularly interested in full text articles in English that focused on the IC process in SSA published between 2006 and 2020. We included systematic reviews, and studies from Western and Asian countries that included data about SSA. We excluded articles that focused on medical interventions and studies that did not require IC.ResultsOut of the 50 studies included most were multi-country (n = 13) followed by single country studies in South Africa (n = 12); Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda (n = 5) each; Gambia, Ghana and Nigeria (n = 2)each ; and one each for Botswana, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique. We identified three areas of focus: (1) socio-cultural factors affecting IC; (2) gaps in the ethical and legal frameworks guiding the IC process; and (3) strategies used to improve participants’ understanding of IC.ConclusionOur review showed wide recognition that the process of achieving IC in SSA is inherently challenging, and there are limitations in the strategies aimed at improving comprehension in IC. We suggest that there is a need for greater flexibility and negotiation with communities to ensure that the approach to IC is suited to the diverse socio-cultural contexts. We propose moving beyond the literal translations and technical language to understanding IC comprehension from the participants’ perspectives and the researchers’ views, while examining contextual factors that impact the IC process. (shrink)