Abortion is one of the most controversial issues in today's world. People tend to turn to the law when trying to decide what is the best possible solution to an unwanted pregnancy. Here the author's views on abortion are discussed from a lawyer's and a woman's point of view. By taking into consideration the rights of the fetus an “antagonistic relationship” between the woman and her unborn child may occur. Therefore, women should have more autonomy in the issue. The article (...) concludes with examples of cases in the United States and Ireland where the rights of the fetus are considered more important than those of the mother because of existing laws. This article suggests that a more inclusive ethics of abortion is required rather than a new ethics of abortion when “translating fetal life into law”. (shrink)

The case of Vo v. France represents the latest phase of the European Court of Human Rights’ thinking on the scope of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to life) in relation to foetal life where a foetus had been lost owing to a medical accident. The Court by a majority decided that, “even assuming” Article 2 applied to the instant case (albeit to the life of the pregnant woman rather than that of the foetus), (...) it had not been violated. While the facts in Vo were extreme and exceptional, the Court will shortly hear the case of D v. Ireland concerning access to abortion for foetal anomaly, an application made under Articles 3, 8, 10 and 14 of the European Convention. If the case of D were declared admissible, the Court would then have to consider whether a denial of access to abortion for foetal anomaly constitutes inhuman and degrading treatment contrary to Article 3, or an interference with a pregnant woman’s right to respect for private life under Article 8 (and if so, how the doctrine of the margin of appreciation applies). The Grand Chamber precedent of Vo displays ambivalence about whether Article 2 should apply to foetal life, and its resort to the “even assuming” formula spared Member States the difficulty of having to justify their various abortion regimes, by reference to this Article. It remains to be seen whether in a case like D that is directly concerned with abortion, the Court will take a more definite stance on the correct balance to be struck between the State’s interest in protecting foetal life and the Convention rights of pregnant women. (shrink)

1,857 adults rated the grandparental solicitude they received in childhood. Through a simple model based on the evolutionary concepts of ontogenetically differentiated reproductive strategy and paternity confidence, an ordered discriminative pattern of grandparental caregiving was predicted and confirmed by solid main effects, based on 603 complete cases. The maternal grandmother was the most caring. Unlike prevalent gender stereotypes, she was followed by the maternal grandfather, the paternal grandmother, and the paternal grandfather. The preferential grandparental solicitude was not influenced by residential (...) distance, grandparent age, and availability of other grandparents. A predicted higher correlation for male than for female progenitors between solicitude and phenotypic resemblance could be confirmed. (shrink)

Physicalism is thought to entail that mental properties supervene on microphysical properties, or in other words that all God had to do was to create the fundamental physical properties and the rest came along for free. In this paper, we question the all-god-had-to-do reflex.

This article contains an analysis of the concept of hospitality as defined in the thinking of Jacques Derrida, who applies the concept of an unsolvable aporia. Thinking about the ethics of hospitality takes place between the right hospitality described by Kant, and the decision to open up to the Other, revealing the infinite hospitality of ethics. Questions posed by Derrida result from a combination of two different traditions of thought: first, how to reconcile Kantian universal law with the particularity of (...) political thinking, and second, how to introduce unconditional hospitality into a project of global governance. The author traces the efforts made to intersect the Kantian universalism with Lévinas’s ethical vision. She also analyses how this hospitality may refer to the political practice that is governed by general laws. (shrink)

Mind &Language, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 376-392, June 2019.

The Cognitive Reserve (CR) hypothesis suggests that the brain actively attempts to cope with neural damages by using pre-existing cognitive processing approaches or by enlisting compensatory approaches. This would allow an individual with high CR to better cope with aging than an individual with lower CR. Many of the proxies used to assess CR indirectly refer to the flexibility of thought. The present paper aims at directly exploring the relationships between CR and creativity, a skill that includes flexible thinking. We (...) tested a sample of 72 adults (aged between 45 and 78) assessing both their level of CR and their creativity. To evaluate CR we used the proxies commonly used in literature, namely, three subtests from the WAIS (vocabulary, similarities, and digit span) and the years of education. We also used an ad-hoc test asking people to report how frequently they tend to perform activities that are believed to increase CR. We used verbal creativity tasks (alternative uses and generation of acronyms) to assess individual levels of creativity. We asked participants to describe their main occupation (present or past) and coded each occupation as creative or not creative. Results (controlling for age-related differences) showed that scores from the WAIS correlated positively with creativity performance, even though correlations varied across the subtests. Focusing on the frequency and type of activities that people perform, and comparing individuals who have or had a creative job to those with a routine job, a clear relationship between creativity and CR emerged. This effect was more relevant than the level of job complexity. Implications for the study of CR and aging are discussed. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 33, Issue 2, Page 184-200, April 2024.

Designing the future of work is crucial to the health and well‐being of people and societies. Experts predict that developments such as the advancement of digital technologies, automation, and the movement of manufacturing jobs to low‐wage countries will lead to major transformations in the labour market, and some foresee significant job losses. Due to the close relationship between employment and health, major job losses would have significant negative impacts on the health and well‐being of individuals and societies. Job losses would (...) also pose a major challenge to solidaristic support within societies because they would negatively affect the recognition of similarities among people, which is vital for solidaristic practice and institutions. To prevent these negative effects, a fundamental redesign of the relationship between work and income is necessary. And for this project to succeed, we need to reconsider of the value of work. Building on definitions of flourishing people and societies, we argue that the value of work should not be determined by the labour market, but according to its importance for society. Using a solidarity‐based framework we argue that such a re‐valuation of work will help to ensure social cohesion and increase reciprocity in our societies. It will serve as a foundation upon which we can reconfigure the relationship between work and income without risking the loss of social cohesion and solidarity. (shrink)

A rare systematic thinker, Habermas has furthered our understanding of modernity, social interaction and linguistic practice, societal institutions, rationality, morality, the law, globalization, and the role of religion in multicultural societies. He has helped shape discussions of truth, objectivity, normativity, and the relationship between the human and the natural sciences. This volume provides an accessible and comprehensive conceptual map of Habermas' theoretical framework and its key concepts, including the theory of communicative action, discourse ethics, his social-political philosophy and their applications (...) to contemporary issues. It will be an invaluable resource for both novice readers of Habermas and those interested in a more refined understanding of particular aspects of his work. (shrink)

Recreational Drugs European Network (ReDNet) project aims to use the Psychonaut Web Mapping Project database (Psychonaut Web Mapping Group, 2009) containing novel psychoactive compounds usually not mentioned in the scientific literature and thus unknown to clinicians as a unique source of information. The database will be used to develop an integrated ICT prevention approach targeted at vulnerable individuals and focused on novel synthetic and herbal compounds and combinations. Particular care will be taken in keeping the health professionals working directly with (...) young people showing problematic behaviors regularly updated in terms of novel compounds and combinations as well. A user-friendly project website will be developed aimed primarily at delivering the information/prevention approaches, but will also be a way of communicating with project partners and relevant stakeholders (e.g. thematic forum facilities, instant messages, blogs, video chat, wikiblog, newsletters distributed via mailing list). The website will support various ICT prevention tools, including an SMS alert service. Different areas and sections will be aimed specifically at the different target groups. -/- . (shrink)

The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important documents in American history. As we commemorate its 150th anniversary, what do we really know about those who experienced slavery? In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs—some never before published—from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born (...) before and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration. Envisioning Emancipation illustrates what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era. From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of black families and workers in the American South, the images in this book challenge perceptions of slavery. They show not only what the subjects emphasized about themselves but also the ways Americans of all colors and genders opposed slavery and marked its end. Filled with powerful images of lives too often ignored or erased from historical records, Envisioning Emancipation provides a new perspective on American culture. (shrink)

Here I craft a case for recognizing the roots and patterns that ground the possibility of contemporary com-posting—as outlined in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble—by New Materialists and critical pragmatists, especially those who are affected by the social injustices and ill-advised practices of today’s formal education. I explore both Spinozan Ethics and American pragmatism in order to fashion a pattern that affects educational thought and action. That pattern of affect/affecting is one Haraway calls “attunement”, a state of co-relation that (...) makes “unexpected feats possible.” My goal is to encourage those educational theorists who dwell in a critical pragmatist archive and those who dwell in a New Materialist archive to “make kin,” to learn to play string figures with a companion species, as they com-post educational possibility in a world where agency is both more limited and more widely-distributed. (shrink)

Philosophy for Children claims to foster not only critical thinking, but also creative and caring thinking. However, its theoretical foundations draw mainly on the analytic and pragmatist philosophical tradition. Consequently, and made evident by the choice of the terms ‘caring thinking’ and ‘creative thinking’, it seem to reduce these concepts mostly to ‘thinking skills’. In this article I will first briefly explicate the difficulties of such a reduction. Secondly I will try to resolve this problem by embedding rationality, creativity and (...) caring in a more holistic anthropology. To this end I will refer to the German philosopher and poet Friedrich Schiller, who anchors reason and the emotions in aesthetics (that is, the relationship with the sensuous world). Finally, the article calls on the thought of D. W. Winnicott in order to show how Philosophy for Children can embrace an active creation of an emotionally meaningful (caring) and rationally reflected (critical thinking) reality through the sensuous play with concepts (creativity). (shrink)

This paper began in the startled realization that little if anything is said in Kant’s ethics about the more violent forms of immoral action. There are discussions of lying, deception, self-neglect, nonbeneficence—but apart from suicide, a great silence about the darker actions. At the least, this should be an occasion for curiosity. Although the degree of concern with acts of violence in contemporary ethics may be in its own way curious, it does not seem unreasonable to expect a moral theory (...) to provide an account of what is wrong with acts of violence. (shrink)

Calls for vigilance have been a recurrent theme in social justice education. Scholars making this call note that vigilance involves a continuous attentiveness, that it presumes some type of criticality, and that it is transformative. In this essay Barbara Applebaum expands upon some of these attributes and calls attention to three particular features of vigilance that, while they may be alluded to in the aforementioned discussions, are rarely made explicit. These three features are critique, staying in the anxiety of (...) critique, and vulnerability. Using the lens of Judith Butler's recent work and the discussions that her work has provoked, Applebaum examines these three features of vigilance and demonstrates how they are crucial for white people interrogating their complicity in systemic racism. Finally, she discusses how the expanded three features of vigilance can offer guidance to one of the enormously thorny questions that arises in the social justice classroom. (shrink)

The multiple tensions of the present time reverberate on identity compositions, translating norms endorsed in the games of economic globalization which stress coexistence, producing inclusion and exclusion at the same time. This context refers to the action of two antagonistic forces, the first being mixophobia, strongly disruptive and excluding, the second, on the other hand, moves towards inclusion, towards respect for otherness, acceptance of the other who is identified as mixophilia. Therefore, thinking about hospitality in the contemporary context leads us (...) to the analysis of the tensioning of assumptions, values ​​and models which normalize some identities and exclude others. The methodological course of reflection referenced in the arguments of Zygmunt Bauman’s thought gathers data from documentary research on political mobility guidelines, as well as data from a bibliographic review study on hospitality in education. The results demonstrate the urgency of strengthening studies on the construction of a culture of hospitality for different identities, via intercultural education. (shrink)

This article draws on data from a qualitative research study undertaken in an old UK university with the main aim of investigating the issue of the gender dimension of academic careers. It examines the idea of an individualistic academic career that demands self-promotion, which is still used as a measure of achievement by those in senior positions. However, there is a basic contradiction. While this idea is upheld, men simultaneously gain by an in-built patriarchal support system. They do not have (...) to make a conscious effort to be helped by it, thereby perpetuating the cultural hegemony of individualism. Women are not admitted to this support system, and if they are seen as needing or wanting to set up their own system, this is viewed as a weakness. The answer appears to be for women to strategically harness feminist ways of working in a collaborative and supportive way. (shrink)

Das Handbuch bildet erstmals den empirischen und theoretischen Problembestand der deutschsprachigen Europasoziologie in seinem ganzen Facettenreichtum ab, benennt und diskutiert kontroverse und offene Probleme. Angelegt als Beitrage zum europasoziologischen state of the art werden die Lemmata zu den einschlagigen Sachproblemen dabei unter den Hauptstrangen "Institutionenbildung und Institutionenpolitik", "Territoriale Restrukturierung", "Sozialstruktur und Sozialpolitik", "Transnationale Verflechtungen" und "Gesellschaftstheoretische Perspektiven" versammelt. Das Handbuch stellt die jeweils zentralen Theorieansatze und Konzepte, die relevanten empirischen Befunde sowie die wichtigsten feldspezifischen Kontroversen konzise dar und diskutiert mit (...) Umsicht das Innovationspotenzial und die kunftigen Herausforderungen. Insbesondere aufgrund des Nachschlagecharakters bietet es damit auch fur Interessierte auaerhalb der Soziologie und fur wissenschaftliche Laien einen kompetenten und aktuellen Uberblick zugleich uber den Wissensfundus und den Diskussionsstand des Faches. (shrink)

Novio, Eunice Barbara & Mark Joseph Santos (trans.). 2023. Filipino black jack: Maikling tala tungkol sa mga kawatang Pilipino sa Laos at Vietnam. In Banwa at Layag: Antolohiya ng mga Kuwentong Paglalakbay ng mga Pilipino sa Ibayong Dagat, ed. Axle Christien Tugano, pp. 179-181. Manila: Limbagang Pangkasaysayan.

Background Italy was the first European country to be involved with the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, many healthcare professionals were deployed and suddenly faced end-of-life care management and its challenges. Aims To understand the experiences of palliative care professionals deployed in supporting emergency and critical care staff during the COVID-19 first and second pandemic waves. Research design A qualitative descriptive design was adopted, and in-depth interviews were used to investigate and analyse participants’ perceptions and points of view. Participants and (...) research context Twenty-four healthcare professionals (physicians, nurses, psychologists, physiotherapists, and spiritual support) from the most affected areas of Italy were recruited via the Italian society of palliative care and researchers’ network. Ethical considerations The University Institutional Board granted ethical approval. Participants gave written informed consent and agreed to be video-recorded. Findings The overarching theme highlighted participants’ experience supporting health professionals to negotiate ethical complexity in end-of-life care. Crucial topics that emerged within themes were: training emergency department professionals on ethical dimensions of palliative and end-of-life care, preserving dying patients’ dignity and developing ethical competence in managing end-of-life care. Conclusions Our study showed palliative care teams’ challenges in supporting health professionals’ ethical awareness in emergencies. However, while they highlighted their concerns in dealing with the emergency staff’s lack of ethical perspectives, they also reported the positive impact of an ethically-informed palliative care approach. Lastly, this study illuminates how palliative care professionals’ clinical and ethical competence might have assisted a cultural change in caring for dying patients during COVID-19 and future emergencies. (shrink)

This paper explores the temporal dimension of risks associated with the production, trade and consumption of food. The paper operates at many levels of substantive and theoretical analysis: it focuses on problems for understanding and action that arise from the invisibility of the hazards, explores the effects of those hazards on consumers and sets out the differences in risks that are faced by farmers, processors, traders and consumers. With its emphasis on that which tends to be disattended in conventional social (...) science analysis – the temporal and the invisible – the paper has implications for social theory at the level of ontology and epistemology. It concludes with reflections on the role of social theory in such contemporary timescapes of risk. (shrink)

What is needed for something new to appear? According to Gilles Deleuze, one of the most brilliant contemporary philosophers, this question of "novelty" is the major problem posed by Bergson's work. In this companion book to Bergson's Matter and Memory, Deleuze demonstrates both the development and the range of three fundamental Bergsonian concepts: duration, memory, and the élan vital. Bergsonism is also important to an understanding of Deleuze's own work, influenced as it is by Bergson.Gilles Deleuze is Professor of Philosophy (...) at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes/Saint Denis. Among his most recent books in translation are Nietzsche and Philosophy, Cinema: Image Movement and, with Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Kafka, and One Thousand Plateaus.Hugh Tomlinson is the translator of Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy and Kant's Critical Philosophy. Barbara Habberjam is a translator living in England. (shrink)

This body of work is motivated by an apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, Darwin’s testimony in his autobiographical text about a supposed perceptual colour blindness before the aesthetic magnificence of natural landscapes, and, on the other hand, the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species, where he claims to perceive the forms of nature as beautiful and wonderful. My aim is to delve into the essence of the Darwinian perception of beauty in the context of the Weberian (...) concept of “disenchantment of the world”, assumed as a possible conceptual axis that enables the unravelling of the core of this contrast of perceptions. In acknowledging the theory of evolution as one of the most prominent scientific theories likely to have contributed to disenchantment, a number of questions arise: Is disenchantment compatible with aesthetic experience and sensibility before natural beauty? Was it Darwin’s disenchanted conception of the world that led him to believe he was colour blind? To answer these questions, a computer-assisted semantic analysis of lexical frequency and variability, most especially focused on aesthetic-emotional and religious or spiritual adverbs and adjectives, has been undertaken across the six editions of The Origin. The semantic analysis demonstrates that, although disenchanted, Darwin’s descriptions of, mainly, the adaptational excellence of living beings, reflect an aesthetically enriched perception of nature. It is concluded that Darwin’s perceptual colour blindness, then, might be based on a confusion rooted in the equation of equality between aesthetic sensibility in nature and the perception of its beauty as part of the vestigia Dei. (shrink)

Abilities, in contrast to mere dispositions, propensities, or tendencies, abilities seem to be features of agents that put the agent herself in control. But what is the distinguishing feature of abilities vis‐à‐vis other kinds of powers? Our aim in this paper is to point, in answer to this question, to a crucial feature of abilities that existing accounts have tended to neglect: their adaptivity. Adaptivity is a feature of how abilities are exercised. The main reason for its relative neglect has (...) been that most extant accounts have focused solely on whether abilities are exercised successfully in certain possible situations and have mostly understood the exercise of an ability in terms of complete successful performance. We begin by pointing out two aspects of abilities with regard to which current accounts seem (at best) incomplete: control and exercise. We then introduce adaptivity as we understand it, and end by putting it to work in developing a fuller understanding of abilities that does better than current accounts. (shrink)

Este artículo rastrea los orígenes del choque de ideas que vertebra el debate que Michael Ruse y Robert J. Richards llevan a cabo en Debating Darwin. En esta obra, los autores discuten sobre el contexto sociocultural que alimentó la teoría de la evolución de Charles Darwin para reconocer las similitudes conceptuales que comparte con dicotomías clásicas sobre las formas humanística o científica de percibir e interpretar el mundo. El objetivo de este artículo es, pues, reflexionar, a la luz de las (...) tesis del desencantamiento del mundo y de la incidencia del conocimiento científico en las imágenes del mundo, sobre la raíz de la que brota el malestar cultural que fundamenta estas formas duales de percepción y descripción del mundo en la historia de las ideas: la supuesta incapacidad de la concepción científica del mundo para satisfacer impulsos estético-existenciales básicos de la naturaleza humana. (shrink)

"The English version of _Dissemination_ [is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson.... Derrida's central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. Philosophy vainly attempts to control the irrecoverable dissemination of its own meaning, it strives—against the grain of language—to offer a sober revelation of truth. Literature—on the other hand—flaunts its own meretriciousness, abandons (...) itself to the Dionysiac play of language. In _Dissemination_—more than any previous work—Derrida joins in the revelry, weaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes and allusions, intended to 'deconstruct' both the pretension of criticism to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to the literature of truth."—Peter Dews, _New Statesman_. (shrink)

Seit etwa 50 Jahren prägt der Identitätsbegriff die Religionspädagogik. Die Grundlage dafür lieferte maßgeblich das Konzept der psychosozialen Identität von Erik H. Erikson. Trotz spätmoderner Kritik und Dekonstruktion geht die Rede von Identität weiter und ist der "Abschied von Erikson" (Keupp) bis heute gesellschaftlich und wissenschaftlich nicht gelungen. Barbara Pühl untersucht die Hintergründe für die bleibende Bedeutung des Begriffs und schreibt ihm eine neue Rolle in der Religionspädagogik zu.