This project presents a comparative philosophical approach to understanding key elements in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard by juxtaposing his works with the philosophy and theology of the Eastern Orthodox Church.. The primary aim of the project is to look at three key areas of Kierkegaard’s philosophy that have been either underrepresented or misunderstood in the literature. These three areas are: Kierkegaard’s views on sin and salvation, Kierkegaard’s epistemology, and Kierkegaard’s philosophy of personhood. The dissertation ends with an epilogue that (...) briefly explores a further area where this comparative approach might provide fruitful results, namely Kierkegaard’s views on collective worship. I argue that the revolutionary nature of Kierkegaard’s break with prevalent views in the Western Christian traditions (Protestantism and Roman Catholicism) have not always been fully appreciated due to the fact that he is most often read through the lens of either Western Christianity or the Western philosophical traditions that he came to influence (e.g. existentialism and post-modernism). Viewing Kierkegaard in light of the Eastern Christian tradition offers a new interpretive lens that highlights the extent to which Kierkegaard aimed to break free from standard Western accounts of sin and salvation, knowledge of God, and human personhood. (shrink)

I have two main objectives. The first is to get a better understanding of what is at issue between friends and foes of higher-order quantification, and of what it would mean to extend a Boolos-style treatment of second-order quantification to third- and higherorder quantification. The second objective is to argue that in the presence of absolutely general quantification, proper semantic theorizing is essentially unstable: it is impossible to provide a suitably general semantics for a given language in a language of (...) the same logical type. I claim that this leads to a trilemma: one must choose between giving up absolutely general quantification, settling for the view that adequate semantic theorizing about certain languages is essentially beyond our reach, and countenancing an open-ended hierarchy of languages of ever ascending logical type. I conclude by suggesting that the hierarchy may be the least unattractive of the options on the table. (shrink)

Health professionals do not always have the luxury of making “right” choices. This article introduces the “devil's choice” as a metaphor to describe medical choices that arise in circumstances where all the available options are both unwanted and perverse. Using the devil's choice, the paper criticizes the principle of double effect and provides a re-interpretation of the conventional legal and ethical account of symptom relief in palliative care.

1. Erfðir og uppeldi.--2. Siðmenning og siðgæði.

The key to the euthanasia debate lies in how best to regulate what doctors do. Opponents of euthanasia frequently warn of the possible negative consequences of legalising physician assisted suicide and active euthanasia while ignoring the covert practice of PAS/AE by doctors and other health professionals. Against the background of survey studies suggesting that anything from 4% to 10% of doctors have intentionally assisted a patient to die, and interview evidence of the unregulated, idiosyncratic nature of underground PAS/AE, this paper (...) assesses three alternatives to the current policy of prohibition. It argues that although legalisation may never succeed in making euthanasia perfectly safe, legalising PAS/AE may nevertheless be safer, and therefore a preferable policy alternative, to prohibition. At a minimum, debate about harm minimisation and the regulation of euthanasia needs to take account of PAS/AE wherever it is practised, both above and below ground. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to describe the synthesis of the concept of moral stress and to attempt to identify its preconditions. Qualitative data from two independent studies on professional issues in nursing were analysed from a hypothetical-deductive approach. The findings indicate that moral stress is independent of context-given specific preconditions: (1) nurses are morally sensitive to the patient’s vulnerability; (2) nurses experience external factors preventing them from doing what is best for the patient; and (3) nurses feel that (...) they have no control over the specific situation. The findings from this analysis are supported by recent research on stress in the workplace but differ in that the imperatives directing work are moral in nature. Stress researchers have found that persons who experience that they have no control over their work situation and at the same time experience high demands may be prone to cardiovascular diseases. An important question raised by this study is whether moral stress should be recognized as a health risk in nursing. Further research is required in order to generate intervention models to prevent or deal with moral stress. (shrink)

In this article I reconsider David Benatar's primary argument for anti‐natalism—the asymmetry argument—and outline a three‐step process for rejecting it. I begin in Part 2 by reconstructing the asymmetry argument into three main premises. I then turn in Parts 3–5 to explain how each of these premises is in fact false. Finally, I conclude in Part 6 by considering the relationship between the asymmetry argument and the quality of life argument in Benatar's overall case for anti‐natalism and argue that it (...) is the latter argument that is actually doing the work. In this sense, the asymmetry argument is not only unsuccessful in generating Benatar's anti‐natalist conclusion, it is also unnecessary as well. (shrink)

This paper describes an experimental platform for approximate knowledge databases called the Approximate Knowledge Database, based on a semantics inspired by rough sets. The implementation is based upon the use of a standard SQL database to store logical facts, augmented with several query interface layers implemented in JAVA through which extensional, intensional and local closed world nonmonotonic queries in the form of crisp or approximate logical formulas can be evaluated tractably. A graphical database design user interface is also provided which (...) simplifies the design of databases, the entering of data and the construction of queries. The theory and semantics for AKDBs is presented in addition to application examples and details concerning the database implementation. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay explores performance-driven aspects of U.S. bands in the contexts of Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jacques Derrida’s Aporias, and the author’s experience teaching both elementary general music and beginning band. The author wonders what band education might look like when the profession’s fixation on futuristic performances and allegiances to past traditions are laid aside; the article proposes that the profession of band might benefit from a more present-focused, process-oriented approach (...) to making music, akin to that of the general music classroom setting. The author advocates for a deeper engagement in critical dialogue around the role tradition plays in current band education practices in ways that reach toward inclusive, present-focused music making. (shrink)

The invisibility of nursing work has been discussed in the international literature but not in relation to learning clinical skills. Evans and Guile's (Practice‐based education: Perspectives and strategies, Rotterdam: Sense, 2012) theory of recontextualisation is used to explore the ways in which invisible or unplanned and unrecognised learning takes place as newly qualified nurses learn to delegate to and supervise the work of the healthcare assistant. In the British context, delegation and supervision are thought of as skills which are learnt (...) “on the job.” We suggest that learning “on‐the‐job” is the invisible construction of knowledge in clinical practice and that delegation is a particularly telling area of nursing practice which illustrates invisible learning. Using an ethnographic case study approach in three hospital sites in England from 2011 to 2014, we undertook participant observation, interviews with newly qualified nurses, ward managers and healthcare assistants. We discuss the invisible ways newly qualified nurses learn in the practice environment and present the invisible steps to learning which encompass the embodied, affective and social, as much as the cognitive components to learning. We argue that there is a need for greater understanding of the “invisible learning” which occurs as newly qualified nurses learn to delegate and supervise. (shrink)

A large body of information and opinion related to COVID-19 is being shared via social media platforms. Recent reports have raised concerns about the reliability and verifiability of said information being disseminated and the way systems, processes and design of the platforms facilitates such spread. This, alongside other areas of concern, has resulted in several social media platforms taking steps towards tackling the spread of mis- and dis-information. Here we discuss approaches to online public health messaging from a range of (...) sources during COVID-19, with a focus on official and non-official sources in the United Kingdom. We highlight issues for ongoing public health decisions, and the potential impact for the future course of the pandemic. (shrink)

References to Jews and to matters included in Jewish discourse are commonplace in US popular culture in general and in US-produced hip-hop lyrics in particular. This article deals with the latter, and aims to analyse how Jews are represented there. It is suggested here that 1. these representations are rendered comprehensible by analysing them in the light of the term coined by Zygmunt Bauman: allosemitism, which denotes that Jews are ‘other’. This article further suggests that 2. the representations of Jews (...) featured in the lyrics cannot be made comprehensible without looking into the historical relations between American Jews and African Americans. According to Jeffrey Melnick, this relation is characterised by ‘robust ambivalences’. This article arrives at the conclusion that the representations of Jews draw on classical conspiratorial and economic antisemitic ideas that situate Jews within the realms of shadowy (economic and instrumental) power, but which at times can be understood as philosemitic, as Jews are represented as wealthy and influential role models. Hence the usage of the term allosemitism to analyse the empirics. (shrink)

This volume offers one of the first systematic analyses of the rise of modern social science. Contrary to the standard accounts of various social science disciplines, the essays in this volume demonstrate that modern social science actually emerged during the critical period between 1750 and 1850. It is shown that the social sciences were a crucial element in the conceptual and epistemic revolution, which parallelled and partly underpinned the political and economic transformations of the modern world. From a consistently comparative (...) perspective, a group of internationally leading scholars takes up fundamental issues such as the role of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution in the shaping of the social sciences, the changing relationships between political theory and moral discourse, the profound transformation of philosophy, and the constitution of political economy and statistics. (shrink)

Several studies reveal that positive attitudes towards individuals with a mental illness are correlated with knowledge about mental illness. The aim of this study was to explore and describe psychiatric nurses’ experiences of living next to people with mental health problems. In addition, it sought to identify and describe how they handle situations arising in a neighbourhood where people with a mental illness live. Two men and seven women participated in the study. The constant comparative method of grounded theory was (...) used for data collection and analysis. The process of ‘behaving as a nurse or not’ was identified as a core category. Four subcategories were identified: ‘receiving involuntary information’, ‘to take action or not’, ‘behaving as a mediator in the neighbourhood’ and ‘the freedom of choice’. The findings show that psychiatric nurses with professional knowledge about mental illness have moral concerns about their role as nurses during their leisure time. In conclusion, it is not obvious that psychiatric nurses want to live in the same neighbourhood as persons with a mental illness. However, this study shows that their knowledge about mental illness creates for them a moral dilemma consisting of a conflict between whether to care for these mentally ill persons or to preserve their own leisure time. (shrink)

Can appealing to children’s rights help to solve the non-identity problem in cases of procreation? A number of philosophers have answered affirmatively, arguing that even if children cannot be harmed by being born into disadvantaged conditions, they may nevertheless be wronged if those conditions fail to meet a minimal standard of decency to which all children are putatively entitled. This paper defends the tenability of this view by outlining and responding to five prominent objections that have been raised against it (...) in the contemporary literature: the identifiability objection; the non-existence objection; the waiving of rights objection, the lack of legitimate complaint objection; and the unfairness objection. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to identify and analyse ethical decision making in the home care of persons with long-term mental illness. A focus was placed on how health care workers interpret and deal with the principle of autonomy in actual situations. Three focus groups involving mental health nurses who were experienced in the home care of persons with chronic mental illness were conducted in order to stimulate an interactive dialogue on this topic. A constant comparative analysis of the (...) transcribed audiotaped sessions identified a central theme that concerned the moral symbolic meaning of ‘home’. This reflected the health care workers’ conflict between their professional role and their moral role, which they perceived as unclear. (shrink)

As the suspect interview is one of the key elements of a police investigation, it has received a great deal of merited attention from the scientific community. However, suspect interviews in child sexual abuse investigations is an understudied research area. In the present mixed-methods study, we examine Swedish and Norwegian police interviewers' self-reported goals, tactics, and emotional experiences when conducting interviews with suspected CSA offenders. The quantitative analyses found associations between the interviewers' self-reported goals, tactics, and emotions during these types (...) of suspect interviews. Interviewers who reported experiencing more negative emotions were more likely to employ confrontational tactics. Specifically, anger was positively associated with the goal of obtaining a confession and with aggressive tactics like raising one's voice and emphasizing the seriousness of the crime. Frustration and disgust displayed similar patterns. Somewhat contrasting these quantitative results, the thematic analysis identified a strong consensus that emotions should not and do not affect the police interviewers' work. Furthermore, the police interviewers described a range of strategies for managing emotions during the interview and for processing their emotional reactions afterwards. The present findings highlight the relevance of emotional processes in CSA suspect interviews and provide an initial exploration of the potentially complex relationship between the goals, tactics, and emotional experiences of police interviewers who question CSA suspects. (shrink)

I have a hairstylist whose lover was very sick. I’d been seeing this stylist for ten years and we’re good friends. [His lover was] becoming an invalid, not able to get out of bed. He said “I hate to ask you this but would you mind writing a prescription to help us out?” [So] I wrote a prescription to a patient who I had never seen, and I sent it to him in the mail and I heard the next time (...) I went in to get my hair cut that it was the most beautiful experience that my stylist had ever had. It was Valentine’s Day and they had a lovely meal with champagne. And they held each other and then, you know, his partner took his pills and was released. (shrink)

I have a hairstylist whose lover was very sick. I’d been seeing this stylist for ten years and we’re good friends. [His lover was] becoming an invalid, not able to get out of bed. He said “I hate to ask you this but would you mind writing a prescription to help us out?” [So] I wrote a prescription to a patient who I had never seen, and I sent it to him in the mail and I heard the next time (...) I went in to get my hair cut that it was the most beautiful experience that my stylist had ever had. It was Valentine’s Day and they had a lovely meal with champagne. And they held each other and then, you know, his partner took his pills and was released. (shrink)

In 1982, cinemas around the world screened Sophie's Choice, a film starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, adapted from the book by William Styron. The film opens with Stingo, a young journalist from the South, who arrives in New York in 1947 and rents a room in Brooklyn. Stingo is drawn into a relationship with Sophie and Nathan, the couple who live upstairs. Sophie is a Polish concentration camp survivor; Nathan is the man who saved her when she arrived in (...) America. Nathan is charismatic, schizophrenic, and violent.In one of the film's flashbacks, a German soldier imposes a terrible choice on Sophie, a young mother who arrives at Auschwitz with other prisoners from Krakow. Sophie is ordered to choose which of her two children will be sent to the ovens, and which will live. (shrink)

In law and common-sense morality, it is generally assumed that adults who meet a minimum threshold of parental competency have a presumptive right to parent their biological children. But what is the basis of this right? According to one prominent account, the right to parent one’s biological child is best understood as being grounded in an intimate relationship that develops between babies and their birth parents during the process of gestation. This paper identifies three major problems facing this view—the explanatory, (...) adjudicatory, and theoretical problems—and explains how an alternative autonomy-based account is capable of avoiding them. (shrink)

Sexual consent is advocated around the world to reduce sexual assault. The widespread affirmative consent model emphasizes a need for unambiguous consent. In this paper, we contribute to a deeper understanding of how ambiguities in the initiations of sexual activities are routinely solved to achieve consent. Drawing on conversation analytic research on joint decision-making, and a dataset of 80 cases of sexual initiation in contemporary TV-series and movies, we investigate the interactional practices by which sexual activities are presented as consensual (...) and how consent is achieved across sequences of interaction. We found there to be social advantages of synchronous initiation, compared to sequential verbal initiations, which were associated with various social vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities could however be circumvented by two practices, each of which made use of a distinct combination of verbal and embodied resources. While ambiguities exist, our results oppose the idea of sexual consent as a practically hopeless and awkward endeavor. Instead, consent consists of joint action that is achieved through recognizable and systematic ways. (shrink)

Thinking Radical Democracy is an introduction to nine key political thinkers who contributed to the emergence of radical democratic thought in post-war French political theory: Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, and Miguel Abensour. The essays in this collection connect these writers through their shared contribution to the idea that division and difference in politics can be perceived as productive, creative, and fundamentally democratic. The questions they raise regarding equality and (...) emancipation in a democratic society will be of interest to those studying social and political thought or democratic activist movements like the Occupy movements and Idle No More. --Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The two questions, “What is public health law?” and “How can law improve the public's health?” are perennial ones for public health law scholars. This paper proposes a framework for conceptualizing discussion and debate about the scope and opportunities for public health law within liberal democracies. Part 2 of the paper draws selectively on this framework in order to highlight some areas where law's potential role deserves greater acknowledgment and exploration.

The two questions, “What is public health law?” and “How can law improve the public’s health?”, are perennial ones for public health law scholars. They are ideological questions because perceptions about the proper boundaries of law’s role will shape perceptions of what law can do, in an operational sense, to improve health outcomes. They are also theoretical questions, in the sense that, without closing down debate about the limits of public health law, these questions can be addressed by mapping the (...) range of perspectives on how law might “go to work” for the public’s health. Finally, these are immensely practical questions. On our ability to understand the roles that law can play in public health improvement rests our capacity, as a society, to use law strategically as a policy tool. (shrink)

In a just society, who should be liable for the significant costs associated with creating and raising children? Patrick Tomlin has recently argued that children themselves may be liable on the grounds that they benefit from being raised into independent adults. This view, which Tomlin calls ‘Kids Pay’, depends on the more general principle that a beneficiary can incur an obligation to share in the cost of an essential benefit that the benefactor is responsible for her requiring. I argue in (...) this paper that this principle is both generally false and particularly suspect in the kinds of cases that Tomlin needs it to be true, namely, cases in which a benefactor has created the need to be benefitted to satisfy a self-regarding interest in providing the benefit. In a nutshell, I argue that because parents electively put their children into a needy circumstance for the purpose of satisfying a self-regarding interest in meeting their children’s needs, they lack a legitimate claim against their children to share in its associated costs. (shrink)

The first of five commentaries on “Bloomberg's Health Legacy: Urban Innovator or Meddling Nanny?” from the September‐October 2013.

Elective surgery can be cancelled when resources are overwhelmed by emergency cases. We hypothesized that such cancellations, on psychological grounds, are followed also by inferior clinical results and we conducted a retrospective survey of patients following joint replacement surgery. Sixty patients having suffered from administrative cancellation prior to their operation during an 18-month period and with six months follow-up were identified and compared with another 60 matched patients after having the same type of surgery but without prior cancellation. All patients (...) received questionnaires on complications and on visual analogue scale (VAS) assessment on subjective wellbeing and quality of life (QoL) at follow-up. The study group reported 50 complications versus 33 for controls (P < 0.03). A borderline significant difference was found for myocardial infarction, 4 versus 0 (P < 0.05). There was no difference in VAS registration and QoL measurements did not quite reach statistical significance (P = 0.06). Cancellations (postponements) of elective surgery for administrative reasons may be followed by inferior clinical results, and this merits further prospective study. (shrink)

Young citizens are increasingly being invited to take part in participatory democracy meetings as joint decision-making has grown popular in public administration. The backbone of participatory democracy is that some authority is granted to the citizenry and by drawing on video data from a year-long participatory project, this conversation analytic study shows that the adolescents are instructed to a deontic role rooted in epistemics, benefactive considerations, as well as temporal aspects relating to future citizenship and hope. The institutional representatives perform (...) actions that determine how the adolescents should, in their turn, perform actions of influence. In this way, authority is ascribed through an ambivalent configuration in which compliance with the directives is supposed to establish a strengthened deontic position. (shrink)

This article deals with Rabbi Meir Kahane’s assimilation doctrine, an under-studied aspect of previous published research on Kahane. The present study suggests that this doctrine is catalysed by a palingenetic myth of decline and rebirth, which also catalyses Kahane’s ideology. By proposing this, this article aims to offer a new perspective on the understanding of what drives Kahane’s ideology. It is further suggested that Kahane’s palingenetic myth is in part built around a myth of ‘intraracial antagonism’ between the American Jewish (...) Establishment and the ‘common Jew’. Following Bruce Lincoln’s theory of myth, it is here contended that Kahane’s assimilation doctrine is presented as ‘ideology in narrative form’. The study surveys the alleged causes and effects of assimilation, and what solutions Kahane presents to put an end to it. Among the alleged causes, Kahane singles out the AJE’s purported gutting of Jewish religious education, which is said to have alienated Jewish youth from their religion. Aside from curtailing Jewish continuity, Kahane for example identifies Jews engaging in social causes that allegedly run counter to Jewish interests as one alleged effect of assimilation. To end assimilation Kahane promotes a solution of campaigning in Jewish communities to ultimately put a stop to intermarriage, to instil hadar and ahavat Yisroel among Jews by the means of a regenerated Jewish educational system, and to encourage Jews to ‘return’ to Israel. (shrink)

This paper considers how we can conceptualize a “global response” to chronic, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) – including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and tobacco-related diseases. These diseases are the leading cause of death and disability in developed countries, and also in developing countries outside sub-Saharan Africa. The paper reviews emerging and proposed initiatives for global NCD governance, explains why NCDs merit a global response, and the ways in which global initiatives ultimately benefit national health outcomes. As the global response to NCDs (...) matures, and the number of initiatives and partnerships increases, it will become increasingly important to map their respective contributions, and to evaluate progress overall. It is not yet clear what institutional mechanism, if any, will rise above the sea of surrounding initiatives to play this global role. This paper therefore aims to provide a conceptual map for making sense of what individual initiatives contribute to global governance. This map also draws attention to the distinctively “global” public health functions that a global response to NCDs should seek to discharge. (shrink)

Judging by their contribution to the global burden of death and disability, chronic, non-communicable diseases are the most serious health challenge facing the world today. The statistics tell a frightening story. Over 35 million people died from chronic diseases in 2005 — principally cardiovascular disease, cancer, and chronic respiratory disease. Driven by population growth and population ageing, deaths from non-communicable diseases are expected to increase by 17% over the period 2005-2015, accounting for 69% of global deaths by 2030.Cardiovascular disease, the (...) leading cause of death in all regions except sub-Saharan Africa, is estimated to rise from 17.1 million deaths to 23.4 million deaths. Cancer deaths will increase from 7.4 million to 11.8 million over the same period. Due to population growth, mergers and acquisitions, and the marketing of global cigarette brands in developing countries, deaths from tobacco will rise from 5.4 million per year, through 6.4 million, to 8.3 million by 2030. These figures include a doubling in tobacco deaths in low- and middle-income countries from 3.4 million to 6.8 million lives annually. By 2015, smoking will cause 50% more deaths than HIV/AIDS. (shrink)

To a large extent liability for ICT perils is still a grey area, even though an increasing number of information security researchers adopt economic approaches to highlight market mechanisms and externalities. That is why this article focuses on the need for increased awareness of externalities and liability among ICT professionals and their customers. This is critical to achieve in order to promote appropriate ICT technologies and services with comprehensible privacy and security protection. What is needed is a better understanding of (...) the consequences of externalities from ICT perils. This would benefit customers and increase trust in ICT products and services which in turn may even increase suppliers' profit margin; customers would be prepared to buy more services and products if contracts and service level agreements would accept more liability. Moreover, suppliers could sell guaranties and insurances on top of their products and services. The result would be a win-win situation and would benefit society at large. (shrink)

First published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.