Background In 2001 a report on the provision of clinical ethics support in UK healthcare institutions identified 20 clinical ethics committees. Since then there has been no systematic evaluation or documentation of their work at a national level. Recent national surveys of clinical ethics services in other countries have identified wide variation in practice and scope of activities. Objective To describe the current provision of ethics support in the UK and its development since 2001. Method A postal/electronic questionnaire survey administered (...) to the chairs of all 82 clinical ethics services registered with the UK Clinical Ethics Network in July 2010. Results Response rate was 62% with the majority of responding services situated in acute trusts. All services included a clinical ethics committee with one service also having a clinical ethicist. Lay members were present in 72% of responding committees. Individual case consultation has increased since 2001 with 29% of chairs spending more than 50% of their time on this. Access to and involvement in the process of case consultation is less for patients and families than for clinical staff. There is wide variation in committee processes and levels of institutional support. Over half of the responding committees undertook some form of evaluation. Conclusion Clinical ethics services in the UK are increasing as is their involvement in case consultation. However, the significant variation in committee processes suggests that further qualitative research is needed to understand how these committees function and the role they play in their institution. (shrink)

In dialogue with the most famous myth for the origin of different languages - The Tower of Babel - A Psychoanalytic Exploration on Sameness and Otherness: Beyond Babel provides a series of timely reflections on the themes of sameness and otherness from a contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. How are we dealing with communication and its difficulties, the confusion of tongues and loss of common ground within a European context today? Can we move beyond Babel? Confusion and feared loss of shared values (...) and identity are a major part of the daily work of psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Bringing together an international range psychoanalytic practitioners and researchers, the book is divided into six parts and covers an array of resonant topics, including: language and translation; cultural identity; families and children; the cyber world; the psychotherapeutic process; and migration. Whereas the quest for unity, which underpins the myth of Babel, leads to mystification, simplification and the exclusion of people or things, multilingual communities necessitate mutual understanding through dialogue. This book examines those factors which further or threaten communication, aiming not to reduce but to gain complexity. It suggests that diversification enriches communication and that, by relating to others, we can create something new. As opposed to cultural and linguistic homogeneity, Babel is not only a metaphor for mangled communication, alienation, and distraction, it is also about the acceptance or rejection of differences between self and other. This book will be of great interest to psychoanalytic psychotherapists and researchers from a wide variety of backgrounds. (shrink)

This paper begins with a brief examination of the contemporary American political landscape. I describe three recent events that illustrate how attempts to control the narrative about events that transpired threaten to undermine our shared reality. I then turn to Book I of Plato’s Republic to explore the potentially tyrannizing effect of Socrates’s narrative voice. I focus on his descriptions of Glaucon, Polemarchus and his slave, and Thrasymachus to show how Plato presents Socrates’s narrative activity as a process that controls (...) how the auditor understands the events that follow. I then turn to an alternate understanding of Socratic narrative which extols its philosophically and politically liberatory possibilities. I use my own previous work on Socratic narrative, Jill Frank’s Poetic Justice, and Rebecca’s LeMoine’s Plato’s Cave as three examples that emphasize the more positive dimensions of Socratic narrative. Finally, I end with a brief exploration of Cornel West’s Democracy Matters, and bell hooks’ works on pedagogy to argue for the possibility a Socratically-informed public space for political discourse. (shrink)

In this article, I side with those who argue that the debate about the definition of “disease” should be reoriented from the question “what is disease” to the question of what it should be. However, I ground my argument on the rejection of the naturalist approach to define disease and the adoption of a normativist approach, according to which the concept of disease is normative and value-laden. Based on this normativist approach, I defend two main theses: (1) that conceptual analysis (...) is not the right method to define disease and that conceptual engineering should be the preferred method and (2) that the method of conceptual engineering should be implemented following the principles of Alexandrova’s account of social objectivity in the context of the definition of disease. (shrink)

This book explores five Platonic dialogues: Lysis, Charmides, Protagoras, Euthydemus, and the Republic. This book uses Socrates’ narrative commentary as its primary interpretive framework. No one has engaged in a sustained attempt to explore the Platonic dialogues from this angle. As a result, it offers a unique contribution to Plato scholarship. The portrait of Socrates that emerges challenges the traditional view of Socrates as an intellectualist and offers a holistic vision of philosophical practice.

Until the mid-20th century, biomedical research centered on the study of specific diseases, concerned with short periods of time and small groups of living research participants. However, the growth of longitudinal population studies and long-term biobanking now forces the research community to examine the possibility of the death of their research participants.The death of a research participant raises numerous ethical and legal issues, including the return of deceased individuals’ research results to related family members. As with the return of individual (...) research results for living research participants, the question of the obligation to return a deceased person’s research results to family members has yet to be settled. This question is particularly acute in the context of genetic research since the research results from one individual may have health implications for all biological relatives. (shrink)

At forstå med kroppen – Udvalgte dele af Løgstrups kritik af Kant.

Over the last twenty years the debate over the origin of modern Man has broadened, the supporters of a theory of regional diversification of Homo sapiens being often opposed by those holding to the single source theory (the ‘Out of Africa’ model). At the same time, the idea of Homo neanderthalensis as a separate species was being resurrected, supported by bone classification typology and drawing on arguments derived from palaeogenetic analyses, which buttressed the case for the existence of distinct species (...) and for privileging an African origin for modern humans. The prospects offered by palaeogenetic research to find answers for the questions concerning the relationship between modern humans and Neanderthals throw up numerous questions and all the obstacles have not yet been removed. Palaeoanthropology, from its point of view, casts major doubt on the thesis according to which man has always evolved in the same direction. (shrink)

Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen presents a new account of the role of moral philosophy and its relationship to our ordinary moral lives. She challenges the idea that moral theories have an authoritative explanatory or action-guiding role, and develops instead a descriptive, pluralistic, and elucidatory conception of moral philosophy.

In "Implementing Expanded Prenatal Genetic Testing: Should Parents Have Access to Any and All Fetal Genetic Information?," Bayefsky and Berkman argue in favor of establishing three categorie...

La Colombiade war bis zur französischen Revolution ein in Frankreich und in den westeuropäischen Ländern vielbeachtetes Epos. Aus heutiger Sicht ist das gut lesbare Gedicht erneut von Interesse: es wägt Segnungen und Schäden der Kolonialisierung gegeneinander ab, propagiert die Idee eines auf wissenschaftlichem und humanistischem Ethos gegründeten Europas, und artikuliert das aufklärerische Selbstbewusstsein einer schreibenden Frau. Die Einführung der Herausgeberin stellt das Gedicht in den Wissenshorizont der Entstehungszeit und skizziert die Rezeption. Der Anhang informiert über Textvarianten, bringt erläuternde Anmerkungen und (...) einen bibliographischen Informationsteil. (shrink)

Florence Tamagne présente dans ce livre dense, mais qui aurait parfois gagné à être plus ramassé, l'essentiel d'une thèse soutenue en 1998. Il faut se réjouir de cette publication, les travaux sur l'histoire de la sexualité étant fort rares. L'histoire de l'homosexualité présente de surcroît des difficultés propres. Elle souffre plus encore que l'histoire de l'hétérosexualité du silence des acteurs. L'auteur a donc fait feu de tout bois, combiné iconographie et littérature, discours sc...

A virtue centred approach to ethics has been criticized for being vague owing to the nature of its central concept, the paradigm person. From the perspective of the practitioner the most damaging charge is that virtue ethics fails to be action guiding and, in addition to this, it does not offer any means of act appraisal. These criticisms leave virtue ethics in a weak position vis-à-vis traditional approaches to ethics. The criticism is, however, challenged by Hursthouse in her analysis of (...) the accounts of right action offered by deontology, utilitarianism and virtue ethics. It is possible to defend the action guiding nature of virtue ethics: there are virtue rules and exemplars to guide action. Insights from Aristotle’s practical approach to ethics are considered alongside Hursthouse’s analysis and it is suggested that virtue ethics is also capable of facilitating action appraisal. It is at the same time acknowledged that approaches to virtue ethics vary widely and that the challenges offered here would be rejected by those who embrace a radical replacement virtue approach. (shrink)

This article is presented as a defence of voluntary active euthanasia from a virtue perspective and it is written with the objective of generating debate and challenging the assumption that killing is necessarily vicious in all circumstances. Practitioners are often torn between acting from virtue and acting from duty. In the case presented the physician was governed by compassion and this illustrates how good people may have the courage to sacrifice their own security in the interests of virtue. The doctor's (...) action created huge tensions for the nurse, who was governed by the code of conduct and relevant laws. Appraising active euthanasia from a virtue perspective can offer a more compassionate approach to the predicament of practitioners and clients. The tensions arising from the virtue versus rules debate generates irreconcilable difficulties for nurses. A shift towards virtue would help to resolve this problem and support the call for a change in the law. The controversial nature of this position is acknowledged. The argument is put forward on the understanding that many practitioners will not agree with the conclusions reached. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to add to the research surrounding nurses' work in hospitals. Throughout history, nurses have faced adverse working conditions, an aspect of their work that remains remarkably unchanged today. Prevailing historical ideologies and sociopolitical conditions influences the context of nurses' work in contemporary hospitals. This research revealed how ruling patriarchal power and nurses' altruistic ways normalize the conditions in hospitals as nurses' work. Moving discourses further add to the work of nurses in hospitals. For example, (...) cost containment strategies, overcapacity and short staffing have resulted in practices to accommodate these problems. While contemporary hospitals may look different, clearly, inside, little has changed since the early days; hospital issues have clearly become an ordinary part of nurses' work. This article discusses how the conditions in hospitals have become an ordinary part of nurses' work. The research in this article emphasizes how prevailing ideologies and institutional discourses make invisible and taken‐for‐granted, how this normalizing of nurses' work contributes to sustaining the hospital's power. (shrink)

The death of a research participant raises numerous ethical and legal issues regarding the return of research results to related family members. This question is particularly acute in the context of genetic research since the research results from an individual may be relevant to each of the biological relatives. This paper first investigates the ethical and legal frameworks governing the return of a deceased participant's individual research results to his or her related family members. Then, it weighs the rights and (...) interests of both the deceased individual and related family members in an attempt to identify key ethical considerations underlying the return of such results. This analysis of international guidelines and national laws and regulations reveals that though the legal framework regarding privacy and confidentiality of clinical and research information is well established (albeit not homogenous), guidelines are generally absent in the post-mortem context. Nevertheless, a brief analysis of this issue through two ethical perspectives (principlism and consequentialism) allows us to identify six key elements to be taken into consideration when returning a deceased participant's research results. (shrink)

Addressing vaccination hesitancy is a major challenge in the fight against infectious disease. Vaccine hesitancy has given rise to recent outbreaks of vaccine preventable diseases (e.g., measles) in developed countries. In developed regions, particularly Europe and North America non-structural barriers to vaccination such as risk perceptions and philosophical beliefs seem to play a crucial role in vaccination uptake (Larson et al. 2014), and also contribute to current vaccine hesitancy with regard to COVID-19. To combat these developments, understanding psychological factors in (...) vaccination hesitancy is increasingly important. A better understanding of these psychological factors in turn points to communication strategies that can reduce vaccine hesitancy. These strategies depend upon individuals’ possession of capacities that are required for morally responsible agency (“responsibility-level capacities”), and in particular the capacities to recognize and respond to reasons. Strategic communication concerning vaccines can improve the exercise of individuals’ responsibility-level capacities as they pertain to risk perception and outcome expectancies. We begin by introducing cutting-edge work from the philosophical literature on agency and responsibility, with a special focus on the responsibility-level capacities at work in the practical context of deciding whether to vaccinate. We then summarize lessons drawn from a variety of studies in psychology and behavioural economics on how individuals reason, decide, and behave in these practical contexts. These lessons help illuminate the extent to which individuals exercise responsibility-level capacities in such contexts while also pointing to strategies that can improve the exercise of those capacities. (shrink)

La reconnaissance du Ressuscité sur le chemin d’Emmaüs est explicitement associée à l’intelligence des Écritures. Jésus se révèle dans le reparcours de « toutes les Écritures ». P. L. choisit de vérifier cette proposition à travers une relecture des livres de Samuel. Il montre comment l’histoire mouvementée des débuts de la royauté modèle l’espérance et commence à fixer les traits du messie, qui trouveront en Jésus leur accomplissement. Sans ignorer l’approche historique et critique, l’auteur s’applique avant tout à identifier la (...) production du sens dans l’épaisseur du texte. Les premiers rôles du récit sont interrogés, mais tout autant les rôles secondaires, en particulier féminins. L’option de fond est que Dieu se révèle de manière privilégiée dans les gestes de la vie ordinaire, dans la « chair », avec sa dimension d’universalité. Ainsi espérance messianique et accomplissement des Écritures acquièrent-ils une consistance non seulement historique, mais anthropologique. (shrink)

Although non-profit organisations typically have high representation of females on their boards, relatively little is known about the effects of gender diversity in these organisations particularly in relation to financial management. In this archival study, resource dependency theory and agency analysis are combined to provide theoretical insight and empirical analysis of gender diversity on effective financial management in member-governed, community financial institutions. The investigation is possible due to the unique characteristics of the organisational form and region being examined—credit unions in (...) Northern Ireland. The sector has not been subject to external regulation on board gender, yet a wide array of gender mix on boards ranging from 100 % male to 100 % female are in existence. In addition, effective financial management is crucial to their survival and their ability to meet member objectives. Boards with higher female representation exhibit superior financial management first, in respect of loan book quality in the period of austerity following the financial crisis and second when measured against return on assets. (shrink)

Euthanasia has once again become headline news in the UK, with the announcement by Dr Michael Irwin, a former medical director of the United Nations, that he has helped at least 50 people to die, including two between February and July 1997. He has been quoted as saying that his ‘conscience is clear’ and that the time has come to confront the issue of euthanasia. For the purposes of this article, the term ‘beneficent voluntary active euthanasia’ (BVAE) will be used: (...) beneficent from the prima facie principle of beneficence, to do good, and voluntary to indicate that this must be carried out at the request of a competent client. This implies adherence to another prima facie principle, that of respect for autonomy. Active implies that something is done or given with the intention of hastening death. The word euthanasia itself simply means ‘good death’. This article examines the moral positions of two nurses and one junior doctor towards the subject of BVAE and an attempt is made to represent the main conflicting moral positions. The central arguments against BVAE and counterarguments are presented. The conclusion reached is that consenting adults should not be prevented from availing themselves of BVAE if another consenting adult (a medical doctor) is available and capable of carrying out their wishes. This being the case, it is suggested that BVAE should be available as an option in hospices and in the community. The aims of this article are: to generate debate among professionals; to present a three-way discussion that might be useful as a focus for educational purposes, particularly at undergraduate level; to challenge professionals to confront the issue of euthanasia; and to plead the case of those who request assistance in exercising autonomy by gaining control over their own deaths. (shrink)

The problems of exposing students to real life situations in which they can gain an insight into the dilemmas experienced by clients and staff are highlighted. The value of the Greek notion of catharsis (katharsis: a cleansing) is discussed and the use of literature is suggested as a means of providing students with vicarious experience of the real, but often inaccessible, situations in which nurses may have to make moral decisions.

Anne-Marie Schultz explores Plato’s presentation of Socrates as a philosopher who tells narratives about himself in the Theaetetus, Symposium, Apology, and Phaedo. She argues that scholars should regard Socrates as a public philosopher, while examining Socratic self-disclosive practices in the works of bell hooks, Kathy Khang, and Ta-Neishi Coates.

In her first book, _Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought_, Leah Kalmanson draws on a wide range of Asian ritual and philosophical repertoires in making a case for the role of practical exercises of self-cultivation in the work of existential inquiry. This review considers some of the ways in which Kalmanson’s selection of sources is consonant with the intervention she seeks to make, and suggests some possible avenues for beginning to think in a similarly (...) expansive way with and about western traditions. (shrink)

Hannah James makes a persuasive case for the use of donated bodies and body parts in surgical training, enabling high fidelity training, improved competency of surgeons and reduced risk of harm to patients from trainees ‘learning on the job’.1 She also identifies some pertinent ethical questions that arise from this practice that should be considered by training organisations, regulatory authorities and the trainees themselves. Many countries throughout the world have regulated programmes, governed by strict ethical principles, for donating bodies, usually (...) to academic institutions for the purposes of medical education.2 In the UK the Human Tissue Authority sets out guiding principles for institutions licensed to handle human tissue including donation of bodies for anatomical examination, education and research; consent, dignity, quality, and honesty and openness.3 The Nuffield Council on Bioethics, in its 2011 report, Human Bodies: donation for medicine and research, identified a number of relevant ethical values including autonomy, altruism, justice, dignity, reciprocity, maximising welfare, and honesty and respect.4 While this report did not focus specifically on donation of human tissue for education and training the principles identified are equally relevant in this context. In terms of maximising welfare whole body donation for education and training provides benefit to many patients over a relatively short time frame …. (shrink)

This article examines whether a training program in ethical decision making can change young athletes’ doping attitudes. Fifty-two young elite athletes were randomly assigned to either an ethical decision-making training group or a standard-knowledge-based educational program group. Another 17 young elite athletes were recruited for no-treatment control purposes. The ethical decision-making training comprised six 30-min online sessions in which the participants had to work through 18 ethical dilemmas related to doping. The standard-knowledge-based educational program was also conducted in six online (...) sessions of comparable length to that of the ethical training. A short version of the Performance Enhancement Attitude Scale was administered to measure the effects of the trainings on doping attitude. Prior to as well as after the intervention, the mean doping attitude scores of the young athletes were low to very low, indicating vehement rejections of doping. The results of our experiment showed that the ethical training led to an attenuation of these rejections. No intervention effect was found in the standard education group. The observed slight increase in the doping attitude score could be an indication that the ethical decision-making training was successful in breaking up the athletes’ stereotypical style of reasoning about doping. (shrink)

_From Illiteracy to Literature_ presents innovative material based on research with ‘non-reading’ children and re-examines the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, through the lens of the psychical significance of reading: the forgotten adventure of our coming to reading. Anne-Marie Picard draws on two specific fields of interest: firstly the wish to understand the nature of literariness or the "literary effect", i.e. the pleasures we derive from reading; secondly research on reading pathologies carried out at St Anne’s (...) Hospital, Paris. The author uses clinical observations of non-reading children to answer literary questions about the reading experience, using psychoanalytic theory as a conceptual framework. The notion that reading difficulties or phobias should be seen as a symptom in the psychoanalytic sense, allows Picard to shed light on both clinical vignettes taken from children’s case histories and reading scenes from literary texts. Children experiencing difficulties in learning to read highlight the imaginary stakes of the confrontation with the arbitrary nature of the letter and the "price to pay" for one’s entrance into the Symbolic. Picard applies the lesson "taught" by these children to a series of key literary texts featuring, at their very core, this confrontation with the signifier, with the written code itself.. This book argues that there is something in literature that drives us back, again and again, to the loss we have suffered as human beings, to what we had to undergo to become human: our subjection to the common place of language. Picard shows complex Lacanian concepts "at work" in the field of reading pathologies, emphasizing close reading and a clinical attention to the "letter" of the texts, far from the "psychobiographical" attempts at psychologizing literary authors. _From Illiteracy to Literature_ presents a novel psychodynamic approach that will be of great interest to psychotherapists and language pathologists, appealing to literary scholars and those interested in the process of reading and "literariness.". (shrink)

We recently reported strong, replicable (i.e., replicated) evidence for lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation (LCfC; Luthra et al., 2021), whereby lexical knowledge influences a prelexical process. Critically, evidence for LCfC provides robust support for interactive models of cognition that include top‐down feedback and is inconsistent with autonomous models that allow only feedforward processing. McQueen, Jesse, and Mitterer (2023) offer five counter‐arguments against our interpretation; we respond to each of those arguments here and conclude that top‐down feedback provides the most parsimonious (...) explanation of extant data. (shrink)

After receiving a copy of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch’s friend Brian Medlin writes back: ‘So far I think I disagree with what you say in “Wittgenstein and the Inner Life,” but I’ll have to make sure that I’ve understood you aright before I launch into a complaint.’ Here, I reconstruct Murdoch’s reading of Wittgenstein and show its ambivalence. While Murdoch acknowledges Wittgenstein’s aim to dissolve illusionary ideas about the inner, she also thinks he presents substantial theses threatening (...) the reality of inner life. Murdoch’s misreading of Wittgenstein as a constructive philosopher may be what worries Medlin, and it also prevents Murdoch from seeing Wittgenstein as an ally in the endeavour to demonstrate the morally transformative potential of our inner lives. (shrink)

Although previous studies have found that video games induce stress, studies have not typically measured all salient indicators of stress responses including stress appraisals, cardiovascular indicators, and emotion outcomes. The current study used the Biopsychosocial Model of Challenge and Threat (Blascovich & Tomaka, 1996) to determine if video games induce a cardiovascular stress response by comparing the effects of threat and challenge appraisals across two types of video games that have shown different cardiovascular outcomes. Participants received challenge or threat appraisal (...) instructions, and played a fighting game (Mortal Kombat) or a puzzle game (Tetris). Study outcomes were heart rate variability, systolic and diastolic blood pressure, and positive and negative emotion ratings measured before, during and after gameplay. Results indicated that threat appraisal instructions increased negative emotion ratings and decreased heart rate variability, but not blood pressure, which is an essential marker for cardiovascular stress responses. Increased blood pressure and decreased heart rate variability was associated with fighting game players when compared with the puzzle game players, indicating a cardiovascular stress response; however, fighting game players also reported higher positive emotion ratings. Based on the study findings, video games do not induce stress responses like mental stressors used in previous research, demonstrating that the interactive player experience in video gaming may have more complex effects on stress outcomes. Future research should comprehensively measure biopsychosocial stress indicators and multiple emotional states over time to fully examine the relationship between video games and stress. (shrink)

Depuis près d'un demi-siècle, Madame Hélène ACKERMANS a coopéré très activement à l'organisation de l'École des sciences philosophiques et religieuses des F.U.S.L. Avec Monseigneur Henri van Camp, elle a donné à la tribune des leçons publiques sa renommée internationale ; auprès de l'actuel comité de direction, elle n'a cessé de prodiguer ses multiples compétences et ses conseils avisés. En hommage à son travail, il a été demandé à quelques-uns des penseurs avec lesquels Madame Hélène ACKERMANS a noué des liens d'amitié, (...) de réfléchir au rôle de la philosophie dans la Cité. (shrink)

_From a renowned foreign-policy expert, a new paradigm for strategy in the twenty-first century_ In 1961, Thomas Schelling’s _The Strategy of Conflict_ used game theory to radically reenvision the U.S.-Soviet relationship and establish the basis of international relations for the rest of the Cold War. Now, Anne-Marie Slaughter—one of _Foreign Policy’_s Top 100 Global Thinkers from 2009 to 2012, and the first woman to serve as director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning—applies network theory to develop (...) a new set of strategies for the post-Cold War world. While chessboard-style competitive relationships still exist—U.S.-Iranian relations, for example—many other situations demand that we look not at individual entities but at their links to one another. We must learn to understand, shape, and build on those connections. Concise and accessible, based on real-world situations, on a lucid understanding of network science, and on a clear taxonomy of strategies, this will be a go-to resource for anyone looking for a new way to think about strategy in politics or business. (shrink)

Green consumerism is on the rise in America, but its environmental effects are contested. Does green marketing contribute to the greening of American consciousness, or does it encourage corporate greenwashing? This tenuous ethical position means that eco-marketers must carefully frame their environmental products in a way that appeals to consumers with environmental ethics and buyers who consider natural products as well as conventional items. Thus, eco-marketing constructs a complicated ethical identity for the green consumer. Environmentally aware individuals are already guided (...) by their personal ethics. In trying to attract new consumers, environmentally minded businesses attach an aesthetic quality to environmental goods. In an era where environmentalism is increasingly hip, what are the implications for an environmental ethics infused with a sense of aesthetics? This article analyzes the promotional materials of three companies that advertise their environmental consciousness: Burt's Bee's Inc., Tom's of Maine, Inc., and The Body Shop Inc. Responding to an increasing online shopping market, these companies make their promotional and marketing materials available online, and these web-based materials replicate their printed catalogs and indoor advertisements. As part of selling products to consumers based on a set of ideological values, these companies employ two specific discursive strategies to sell their products: they create enhanced notions of beauty by emphasizing the performance of their natural products, and thus infuse green consumerism with a unique environmental aesthetic. They also convey ideas of health through community values, which in turn enhances notions of personal health to include ecological well-being. This article explicates the ethical implications of a personal natural care discourse for eco-marketing strategies, and the significance of a green consumer aesthetic for environmental consciousness in general. (shrink)

Anne-Marie McCallion ABSTRACT: This is an interview with Rianna Walcott, the co-founder of Project Myopia – a student-led initiative to decolonise university curricula. The discussion explores the difference between ‘diversity’ and ‘decolonisation’: how these two concepts relate to and contradict one another. Walcott outlines some of the recent student efforts to ‘decolonise’ the university and ….

IN THE FIRST SEVERAL PARAGRAPHS of Nicomachean Ethics 9.8, Aristotle asks "whether a man should love himself most", and asserts that "men say that one ought to love best one's best friend". Yet earlier Aristotle describes loving as more essential to friendship than being loved; furthermore, he emphasizes that a man wishes well to his friend for his friend's sake, not as a means to his own happiness. Note also Aristotle's continued emphasis upon man as a political animal. In the (...) Politics as well as the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes the biological, even instinctive tendency of humans to seek each other's company. He considers it absurd for a man even to imagine living alone, since "without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods". It is only the human animal, however, who is even capable of that genuine friendship which, although rare, Aristotle considers "not only necessary but also noble; for... we think it is the same people that are good men and are friends" ; these friends are "alike in their excellence", one loving another "as being the man he is". (shrink)