Probability theory promises to deliver an exact and unified foundation for inquiry in epistemology and philosophy of science. But philosophy of religion is also fertile ground for the application of probabilistic thinking. This volume presents original contributions from twelve contemporary researchers, both established and emerging, to offer a representative sample of the work currently being carried out in this potentially rich field of inquiry. Grouped into five parts, the chapters span a broad range of traditional issues in religious epistemology. The (...) first three parts discuss the evidential impact of various considerations that have been brought to bear on the question of the existence of God. These include witness reports of the occurrence of miraculous events, the existence of complex biological adaptations, the apparent 'fine-tuning' for life of various physical constants and the existence of seemingly unnecessary evil. The fourth part addresses a number of issues raised by Pascal's famous pragmatic argument for theistic belief. A final part offers probabilistic perspectives on the rationality of faith and the epistemic significance of religious disagreement. (shrink)

Edited by Marthe Chandler and Ronnie Littlejohn, this work is a collection of expository and critical essays on the work of Henry Rosemont, Jr., a prominent and influential contemporary philosopher, activist, translator, and educator in the field of Asian and Comparative Philosophy. The essays in this collection take up three major themes in Rosemont's work: his work in Chinese linguistics, his contribution to the theory of human rights, and his interest in East Asian religion. Contributions include works by (...) the leading scholars in Chinese philosophy in the Western world and Rosemont's close associates: Roger T. Ames, Bao Zhiming, Mary Bockover, Marthe Chandler, Ewing Y. Chinn, Erin M. Cline, Fred Dallmayr, Jeffrey Dippmann, Herbert Fingarette, Harrison Huang, Eric Hutton, Philip J. Ivanhoe, David Jones, William La Fleur, Ronnie Littlejohn, Ni Peimin, Michael Nylan, Harold Roth, Sumner Twiss, Tu Weiming, David Wong, with responses from Henry Rosemont, Jr. and a brief Reminiscence by Noam Chomsky. (shrink)

Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, purports to be an individual who admires faith but cannot attain to its unearthly standards. The discontinuity between Kierkegaard, who self-identified as a religious author, and de Silentio, who approaches Abraham in self-doubt, is apparent—and as a result, some have argued for an utter dissociation between these two authors. I argue that such dissociation undermines the potency of the work, especially with regard to the perspective on faith presented therein. The (...) significance of de Silentio’s perspective becomes clear when set against the backdrop of Kierkegaard’s view of the relationship between anxiety and faith; in this light, de Silentio turns out to represent an early stage of the individual’s religious development, and Kierkegaard turns out to have recently surpassed this stage before writing the work. (shrink)

The ontological paradigms of Schelling and the late Merleau-Ponty bear striking resemblances to Spinoza’s ontology. Both were developed in response to transcendental models of a Cartesian mold, resisting tendencies to exalt the human ego to the neglect or the detriment of the more-than-human world. As such, thinkers with environmental concerns have sought to derive favorable ethical prescriptions on their basis. We begin by discerning a deadlock between two such thinkers: Ted Toadvine and Sean McGrath. With ecological responsibility in mind, both (...) actually resist Spinozist reduction of the human being to the status of a mere mode among modes. But despite having the same general aim, they end up endorsing contrary practical conclusions. Our objective is to pinpoint the reasons behind this deadlock, indicative of two strands of post-Spinozist environmental thought which stand in tension, and to begin to propose an integrative way forward. The ethical weight afforded by Toadvine to the notion of resistance in the work of the late Merleau-Ponty, namely nature’s resistance to harmonizing, unifying pretensions, invites inquiry into two Merleau-Pontean notions he does not address: the barbarian principle, and the proposal to “Do a Psychoanalysis of Nature.” We trace these to their origins in the works of Schelling’s middle period, arguing that the Schellingian location of resistance in Spirit’s dark ground—alternately conceived as primordial Dionysiac madness, bottled-up within the substratum of consciousness—lends to an understanding of the human, and human responsibility, that harbors favorable implications for environmental ethics. (shrink)

As boundaries between domesticity and the undomesticated increasingly blur for cohabitants of Vancouver Island, home to North America’s densest cougar population, predatorial problems become more and more pressing. Rosemary-Claire Collard responds on a pragmatic plane, arguing that the encounter between human and cougar is only ever destructive, that contact results in death and almost always for the cougar. Advocating for vigilance in policing boundaries separating cougar from civilization, therefore, she looks to Foucault’s analysis of modern biopower in the first volume (...) of his History of Sexuality for support in favor of a more contemporary notion of biosecurity. In response to Collard’s arguments, concerned with ethical conclusions drawn on the basis of her policy-based proposal, I challenge the prohibition she places on encounter. In the first section, “Becoming Killable,” I address her use of Donna Haraway’s phraseology, and in the second section, “Biological Dangers,” I scrutinize her reading of Foucault, arguing that the appeals she makes distort the mode of argumentation at work for each thinker. The final section, “Facing Cougar, Facing Death,” advocates further ethical possibilities generated on the basis of Foucault’s correlation between overcoming the fear of death and resisting abuses of power with respect to others. My contention is that our transgressing boundaries constructed to separate humanity from the inhumane curtails tendencies toward the marginalization and subjugation of those animal others whose very existence brings us face to face with the fact of our own mortality. (shrink)

This study describes how a primary school teacher and her students explored multiple means of communication through the use of a project on storytelling and drumming to personalize and translate cultural differences into universal human experiences they could understand. It documents how the teacher and two researchers collaborated with planning and implementing the drumming project so that it integrated social studies with multiple modes of literacy. It discusses how the teacher and researchers examined cultural universals within this project to provide (...) students with a frame of reference to engage in an authentic understanding of diverse cultures within their classrooms. Finally, the study examined the students’ work within the actual drumming project. (shrink)

After a number of decades of research into the dynamics of rational belief, the belief revision theory community remains split on the appropriate handling of sequences of changes in view, the issue of so-called iterated revision. It has long been suggested that the matter is at least partly settled by facts pertaining to the results of various single revisions of one’s initial state of belief. Recent work has pushed this thesis further, offering various strong principles that ultimately result in a (...) wholesale reduction of iterated to one-shot revision. The present paper offers grounds to hold that these principles should be significantly weakened and that the reductionist thesis should ultimately be rejected. Furthermore, the considerations provided suggest a close connection between the logic of iterated belief change and the logic of evidential relevance. (shrink)

Fleur Johns argues that the contraposition of a ‘bottom-up’ approach of politics of prototypical technique rather than the ‘top-down’ politics of the master plan or normative principle no longer seems as straightforwardly radical as it appeared when James C Scott posited the value of local knowledge or métis against grand plans of high modernization, just over 20 years ago. This paper seeks to follow Johns’ call, ‘to capture and probe some of the effects of sensibility, rationality or style widely reproduced (...) in the details of development work’. It draws upon fieldwork in Nairobi to open up a discussion of a shift in sensibility from a ‘bottom-up’ or ‘postliberal’ approach to a framing of open-ended encounter. The paper critiques this imaginary of relational encounter by engaging contemporary work in critical black studies. It suggests that the problem of critique is that it reproduces the problems of governing imaginaries, continually seeking to rework the human subject via adaptive capacities, sensitivities to difference and openness to alterity, while leaving intact the coloniality of being, the antiblack world. (shrink)

Experiences of substitute decision-makers with requests for consent to non-therapeutic research participation during the dying process, including to what degree such requests are perceived as burdensome, have not been well described. In this study, we explored the lived experiences of family members who consented to non-therapeutic research participation on behalf of an imminently dying patient. We interviewed 33 family members involved in surrogate research consent decisions for dying patients in intensive care. Non-therapeutic research involved continuous physiological monitoring of dying patients (...) prior to and for 30 min following cessation of circulation. At some study centres participation involved installation of bedside computers. At one centre electroencephalogram monitoring was used with a subset of participants. Aside from additional monitoring, the research protocol did not involve deviations from usual end-of-life care. Thematic analysis of interviews suggests most family members did not perceive this minimal-risk, non-therapeutic study to affect their time with patients during the dying process, nor did they perceive research consent as an additional burden. In our analysis, consenting for participation in perimortem research offered families of the dying an opportunity to affirm the intrinsic value of patients’ lives and contributions. This opportunity may be particularly important for families of patients who consented to organ donation but did not proceed to organ retrieval. Our work supports concerns that traditional models of informed consent fail to account for possible benefits and harms of perimortem research to surviving families. Further research into consent models which integrate patient and family perspectives is needed. All data relevant to the study are included in the article. (shrink)

In liberal modernity, the democratic collective will of society was understood to emerge through the public and deliberative freedoms of associational life. Today, however, democratic discourse is much more focused on the formation of plural and diverse publics in the private and social sphere. In these ‘non-linear’ approaches, democracy is no longer seen to operate to constitute a collective will standing above society but as a mechanism to distribute power more evenly through the social empowerment of individuals and communities as (...) the ultimate decision-makers. Government is brought back ‘to the people’ and democracy is seen to circulate through the personal decisions made in everyday life. This article seeks to analyse the development of non-linear approaches to the political sphere, which seek to overcome the rationalist assumptions of the public/private divide, paying particular attention to the work of two key liberal theorists, John Dewey and Friedrich von Hayek. (shrink)

Discussions of the issue of iterated belief revision are commonly accompanied by the presentation of three “concrete” operators: natural, restrained and lexicographic. This raises a natural question: What is so distinctive about these three particular methods? Indeed, the common axiomatic ground for work on iterated revision, the AGM and Darwiche-Pearl postulates, leaves open a whole range of alternative proposals. In this paper, we show that it is satisfaction of an additional principle of “Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives”, inspired by the literature (...) on Social Choice, that unites and sets apart our three “elementary” revision operators. A parallel treatment of iterated belief contraction is also given, yielding a family of elementary contraction operators that includes, besides the well-known “conservative” and “moderate” operators, a new contraction operator that is related to restrained revision. (shrink)

In _“Beyond This Narrow Now”_ Nahum Dimitri Chandler shows that the premises of W. E. B. Du Bois's thinking at the turn of the twentieth century stand as fundamental references for the whole itinerary of his thought. Opening with a distinct approach to the legacy of Du Bois, Chandler proceeds through a series of close readings of Du Bois's early essays, previously unpublished or seldom studied, with discrete annotations of _The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches_ of (...) 1903, elucidating and elaborating basic epistemological terms of his thought. With theoretical attention to how the African American stands as an example of possibility for Du Bois and renders problematic traditional ontological thought, Chandler also proposes that Du Bois's most well-known phrase—“the problem of the color line”—sustains more conceptual depth than has yet been understood, with pertinence for our accounts of modern systems of enslavement and imperial colonialism and the incipient moments of modern capitalization. Chandler's work exemplifies a more profound engagement with Du Bois, demonstrating that he must be re-read, appreciated, and studied anew as a philosophical writer and thinker contemporary to our time. (shrink)

We think the present moment is a timely one for debating the relation between evidentiary protocols and academic disciplines. Since academic practices for constituting and deploying evidence tend to be discipline-specific, the much-discussed crisis of the disciplines in recent years has given rise to a series of controversies about the status of evidence in current modes of investigation and argument: deconstruction, gender studies, new historicism, cultural studies, new approaches to the history and philosophy of science, the critical legal studies movement, (...) and so on. Unfortunately, these controversies too often devolve into oversimplified debates about who has the evidence and who does not, who did their homework and who did not, or about the dangers of an ill-defined academic relativism. Attention needs to be better and otherwise directed: at the configuration of the fact-evidence distinction in different disciplines and historical moments, for example; or at the relative function of such notions as “self-evidence,” “experience,” “test,” “testimony,” and “textuality” in various academic discourses; or at the ways in which the invoked “rules of evidence” are themselves the products of historical developments, and themselves undergo redifferentiation and reformulation. James Chandler, professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of Wordsworth’s Second Nature . He is currently completing England in 1819, studies in and of romantic case history. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, teaches philosophy and the history of science at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on the history of horror as it relates to the epistemology of norms and deviations and is editing a collection of essays on Heidegger, philosophy, and National Socialism. Harry Harootunian, a coeditor of Critical Inquiry and professor of history and East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, is the author of Things Seen and Unseen: Discourse and Ideology in Tokigawa and editor, with Masao Miyoshi, of Postmodernism and Japan. (shrink)

Our tendency is not to read Romantic poetry as alluding to the texts it reminds us of. We think of the Augustans as the author of what Reuben Brower calls "the poetry of allusion."5 We envision Romantic poets carrying on their work in reaction to these Augustans and in mysterious awe, whether fearful or admiring, of most other poets—sometimes even of each other. No self-respecting Romantic, it is usually assumed, will deliberately send his reader elsewhere for a meaning to complement (...) the effect of his own words. If a reader's mind wanders to an earlier poem, that is not the Romantic poet's fault but a matter of accident or perhaps of cruel destiny. The Romantic wants to keep the poem an intimate affair—just the two of us—and does what he can to keep his reader's attention on himself.[…]What follows is an effort to test the applicability of Wasserman's Augustan hypothesis to the poetic mode of high Romanticism. This effort should not be taken to imply either that the Romantics simply continue in the allusive mode of the Augustans or that the assumptions that lead Bloom and others to read Romantic poetry as they do are utterly mistaken. I will in fact be arguing quite otherwise. Nor must there be any confusion about Wasserman's conception of the Augustan mode. Some of the language of his summary, for example where he speaks of "the rich interplay between the author's text and the full contexts it allusively arouses," might lead one to liken his work to the criticism now associated with the notion of "intertextuality." For the practitioners of this criticism, as Jonathan Culler explains, "to read is to place a work in a discursive space, relating it to other texts and to other codes of that space, and writing is a similar activity."8 Writing and reading a poem are in this account both acts of "intertextual location," if you will, but the reader of the poem need not concern himself with the aims and circumstances of its writer's "similar activity." The decisive difference between this view and the one Wasserman offers for the Augustans is that Wasserman's is intentionalist and historicist. This shows plainly in his exegetical commentary on the Rape, where his characteristic claim follows the formula: "Pope [expects, invites, prods, wants] his reader to [discover, exercise his wit on, recognize, see] X in his allusion to such-and-such a text." And to support his claim he repeatedly brings his historicist scholarship to bear on questions about "the kind of ready knowledge Pope demands of his reader" and what "facts [were] known to any serious reader" of the time.95. See Reuben Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion , esp. pp. 1-14.8. Jonathan Culler, "Presupposition and Intertextuality," MLN 91 : 1382-3; Culler refers primarily to the work of Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva but notes that Bloom himself occasionally sounds curiously like an intertextualist critic.9. Wasserman, "Limits of Allusion," pp. 427, 429. For a response to Wasserman less sympathetic than mine, see Irvin Ehrenpreis, Literary Meaning and Augustan Values , pp. 12-15.James K. Chandler, an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, has published work on Wordsworth's poetry and politics and is currently completing a book on the subject. (shrink)

To see what might be at stake in the question of Pope’s place in the poetic canon—in the question as such, before anything is said of critical theory—we must understand that late eighteenth-century England was developing a different sort of canon from the one which Pope and the Augustans had in view. As everyone knows, Pope’s classics were, well, classical. His pantheon was populated with poets of another place and time whose stature was globally recognized. One recalls the tribute to (...) these “Bards triumphant” in An Essay on Criticism : Still green with Bays each ancient Altar stands, Above the reach of Sacrilegious Hands, Secure from Flames, from Envy’s fiercer Rage, Destructive War, and all-involving Age. See, from each Climes the Learn’d their Incense bring; Hear, in all Tongues consenting Paeans ring! In Praise so just, let ev’ry Voice be join’d, And fill the Gen’ral Chorus of Mankind!14Pope’s song of praise here forms just a part of mankind’s “Gen’ral Chorus.” These are poets for all climates and languages, and for all nations, even “Nations unborn” and “Worlds…that must not yet be found” . Although I want to place adequate stress on Pope’s deep commitment to this universalized canon, it would be misleading to suggest that he was completely uninterested in the poetry of his own nation. He studied it an imitated it. He even sketched a plan for a possible history of poetry in England. It is to the point here, however, that this project remained only a sketch and that England would have no major overview of its national accomplishment until the 1770s and 1780s, when Thomas Warton issued the first three volumes of his pioneering History of English Poetry, and Johnson, his Lives of the English Poets.Building on the scholarship of René Wellek, Lawrence Lipking has offered a compelling account of the emergence of these great works at that time, buy reference to the “interested and demanding public” that called for them.15 What the public wanted and got, Lipking explains, “was a history of English poetry, or a survey of English poets, that would provide a basis for criticism by reviewing the entire range of the art. Warton and Johnson responded to a national desire for an evaluation of what English poets had achieved” . Such terms are most useful, although “evaluation” connotes a greater degree of neutrality than even Lipking’s own subsequent analysis permits. For example, among the public needs served by such work as Johnson’s and Warton’s, Lipking lists the “patriotic” and the “political” as primary. These needs are obviously related. The patriotic need expresses itself as a hunger for “a glorious national poetic pantheon” ; that is, for a specifically national rather than a global canon of classics. Such a canon would in turn serve political purposes that Lipking sees motivating “the poets” of mid-century, Thomson and Akenside and Collins and Gray and Mason and Smart,” who all “wrote variations on the mythopolitical them of Milton: sweet Liberty, the nymph who had freed English pens to outstrip the cloistered conservative rule-bound verses of less favored nations.” Politically, in other words, and this is the crucial point, “English literary history was shaped by the need for a definition of the superiority of the national character” . James Chandler, assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, is the author of Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics . His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Romantic Allusiveness”. (shrink)

Here is the paper that was attacked by George Rea in his “How many minds…?” paper. Has this issue been resolved? Can there be entities such that there is no definite answer to the question “Are there 13 minds at work here, or 14?” -/- .

Recent work has considered the problem of extending to the case of iterated belief change the so-called `Harper Identity' (HI), which defines single-shot contraction in terms of single-shot revision. The present paper considers the prospects of providing a similar extension of the Levi Identity (LI), in which the direction of definition runs the other way. We restrict our attention here to the three classic iterated revision operators--natural, restrained and lexicographic, for which we provide here the first collective characterisation in the (...) literature, under the appellation of `elementary' operators. We consider two prima facie plausible ways of extending (LI). The first proposal involves the use of the rational closure operator to offer a `reductive' account of iterated revision in terms of iterated contraction. The second, which doesn't commit to reductionism, was put forward some years ago by Nayak et al. We establish that, for elementary revision operators and under mild assumptions regarding contraction, Nayak's proposal is equivalent to a new set of postulates formalising the claim that contraction by ¬A should be considered to be a kind of `mild' revision by A. We then show that these, in turn, under slightly weaker assumptions, jointly amount to the conjunction of a pair of constraints on the extension of (HI) that were recently proposed in the literature. Finally, we consider the consequences of endorsing both suggestions and show that this would yield an identification of rational revision with natural revision. We close the paper by discussing the general prospects for defining iterated revision in terms of iterated contraction. (shrink)

This article is organized in four sections. The first section introduces sensing governance in terms of the governance of effects rather than causation, focusing on the work of Bruno Latour in establishing the problematic of contingent interaction, rather than causal depth, as key to emergent effects, which can be unexpected and catastrophic. The second section considers in more depth how sensing governance enables politics by other means through putting greater emphasis on relations of interaction, rather than on ontologies of being, (...) and links the methodological approach of sensing governance closely to actor network assumptions that disavow structures of causation. The final two sections analyze how correlation works to reveal new agencies and processes of emergence and how new technologies have been deployed in this area, providing some examples of how the shift from causal relations to sensing effects has begun to alter governmental approaches. (shrink)

This is a paper on borderline cases and the law of Excluded Middle. In it I try to make use of some long forgotten, but perhaps valuable, work on the topic – a bit of Hegel for instance.

This article draws on the suggestion that modern technology is “autonomous” in that our social control mechanisms are unable to control technology and instead merely adapt society to integrate new technologies. In this article, I suggest that common law judges tend systematically to support the integration of novel technologies into society. For example, courts sometimes require parties seeking compensation for serious injuries to submit to medical technologies to which the parties object for genuine reasons of fear or moral objection. Where (...) a novel technology alters the environment in some way, courts sometimes legitimize that alteration by refusing to recognize harm and instead characterizing avoidance of the technology as self-imposed harm. The examples selected in this article were chosen to support the hypothesis in one way or another, and future work will aim to look for counter examples and to conduct a more complete assessment of the hypothesis. (shrink)

Cherie Moraga’s play, Heroes and Saints, and Helena Maria Viramontes’ novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, offer readers perspectives on the lives of migrant farm workers in California that challenge the moral imagination and conscience. Both focus on health hazards of pesticides and on the often prohibitive difficulty of getting health care for those who fall ill as a result of exposure. This paper offers a reflection on the direct political and moral appeal these works present to readers who (...) may not see or acknowledge the sacrifices sustained by those whose undercompensated labors are an integral part of our food systems. (shrink)

The concept of humoral control--the direction of bodily processes by complex organic fluids--has gained ascendancy in recent decades, and enlisted the interest of more than humoral specialists.

Spinoza’s attitude toward nonhuman animals is uncharacteristically cruel. This essay elaborates upon this ostensible idiosyncrasy in reference to Hasana Sharp’s commendable desire to revitalize a basis for animal ethics from within the bounds of his system. Despite our favoring an ethics beginning from animal affect, this essay argues that an animal ethic adequate to the demands of our historical moment cannot be developed from within the confines of strict adherence to Spinoza’s system—and this is not yet to speak of a (...) more robust animal ethics which would advocate actual care and compassion for the animals themselves. We argue that on the assumption of Spinoza’s ontological biocentrism, in the presence of Spinozist determinism and the absence of an axiological biocentrism, an anthropocentric axiology necessarily follows. Any Spinozist animal ethic must fall back, therefore, upon appeals to the maximization of human pleasure and power; hence Spinoza’s ruthless injunction to “use (the animals) at our pleasure.” These are the very ontological and ethical assumptions which have incited human self-exaltation in the modern period, in pursuit of power and pleasure even despite the destructive long-term consequences for all the living. We suggest that an adequate animal ethic would require either an abandonment of Spinoza’s ontological biocentrism or the adoption of an axiological biocentrism. (shrink)

Almost everyone believes in modality de dicto. Necessarily, puppies are young dogs. The necessity here derives from the meaning of “puppy.” The term means young dog. Essentialism is belief in a more exotic sort of modality, one that does not derive from meaning in this direct and simple way. In the first two sections of this paper, I consider indexical and nonindexical kind terms and the sort of modality applicable to each. In the last section, I consider individuals and proper (...) names. (shrink)

In a recent article, David Christensen casts aspersions on a restricted version of van Fraassen's Reflection principle, which he dubs ‘Self‐Respect’. Rejecting two possible arguments for sr, he concludes that the principle does not constitute a requirement of rationality. In this paper we argue that not only has Christensen failed to make a case against the aforementioned arguments, but that considerations pertaining to Moore's paradox indicate that sr, or at the very least a mild weakening thereof, is indeed a plausible (...) normative principle. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche and Albert Schweitzer end up defending radically similar, yet critically opposed conclusions about the human animal and its place in nature, particularly with regard to the ethical awareness that does or does not follow from this situatedness. Arthur Schopenhauer’s notion of the will accounts for their similar foundational assumptions. But what accounts for the fact that their shared desire to affirm the will to life leads to fundamentally opposed ethical conclusions? What keeps Schweitzer’s ascetic ethic of reverence for (...) life from evolving into Nietzsche’s anti-ascetic vision of a second innocence beyond good and evil? We argue that situating the notion of reverence for life within an environmental virtue ethics, as one environmental virtue among many, aiming at ecological conversion, better articulates and motivates the disposition demanded by the ethics of reverence for life. (shrink)

Перевод статьи: Davies T., Chandler R. Online deliberation design: Choices, criteria, and evidence // Democracy in motion: Evaluating the practice and impact of deliberative civic engagement / Nabatchi T., Weiksner M., Gastil J., Leighninger M. (eds.). -- Oxford: Oxford univ. press, 2013. -- P. 103-131. А. Кулик. -/- Вниманию читателей предлагается обзор эмпирических исследований в области дизайна онлайн-форумов, предназначенных для вовлечения граждан в делиберацию. Размерности дизайна определены для различных характеристик делиберации: назначения, целевой аудитории, разобщенности участников в пространстве и во (...) времени, среды коммуникации и организации делиберативного процесса. После краткого обзора критериев оценки вариантов дизайна рассматриваются эмпирические данные, соотносящиеся с каждым из вариантов. Эффективность онлайн-делиберации зависит от того, насколько условия коммуникации соотносятся с заданиями делиберации. Компромиссы, как, например, между анонимным или идентифицируемым участием, предполагают различные дизайны в зависимости от цели делиберации и состава участников. Выводы исследования получены на материале существующих технологий и могут измениться по мере коэволюции технологий и пользователей. (shrink)

In this paper I identify Schleiermacher as an intermediary between the two stages of the religious set forth in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Gesturing toward categories integral to the Kierkegaardian project at large, I also argue that he occupies a pivotal role between Socratic ignorance and second immediacy. These schemata uncover answers to a dilemma that has recently been articulated: whereas Kierkegaard administers highest praise to Schleiermacher at the beginning of his pseudonymous authorship, he becomes inexplicably hostile toward him at the (...) end of his life and authorship. (shrink)

Between Schelling’s Über Dante in philosophischer Beziehung (1803) and the Dantean drafts of die Weltalter (1811-1815) stand the transitional texts of his middle period, the Philosophie und Religion (1804) and Freiheitsschrift (1809). His short essay on Dante contrasts an ancient conception of the closed cosmos with the modern universe as dynamic and expanding, then claims to extract from the Divine Comedy its eternal, threefold form. This article considers these schemata as they relate to the Philosophie und Religion and the Freiheitsschrift, (...) disclosing an enduring Dantean influence which first predicts, then persists throughout this stage of Schelling’s philosophical development. (shrink)

This essay argues that Schelling's late transition from Negative to Positive Philosophy constitutes a pointed inversion of the path of systematic ascent mapped by Hegel for the first time in the Phenomenology's Preface, which itself establishes Hegel's development out of and beyond Schelling's early philosophy; that a key notion to inspire the Hegelian vision articulated in the Preface returns to cap off the critique implicit in Schelling's late inversion, where this notion emerges from their divergent readings of Aristotle's Metaphysics; and (...) finally, that while Hegel's theorization of the end of all philosophizing represents his innovative enlargement from within the framework he finds in Aristotle, Schelling's vision of this same end facilitates the crisis of reason which opens unto revelation, and so is akin to the vision which carries Aquinas beyond Aristotle, albeit in Schelling's post‐Spinozist mode of thought. (shrink)

Recent improvements in virtual reality allow for the representation of authentic environments and multiple users in a shared complex virtual world in real time. These advances have fostered clinical applications including in psychiatry. However, although VR is already used in clinical settings to help people with mental disorders, the related ethical issues require greater attention. Based on a thematic literature search the authors identified five themes that raise ethical concerns related to the clinical use of VR: reality and its representation, (...) autonomy, privacy, self-diagnosis and self-treatment, and expectation bias. Reality and its representation is a theme that lies at the heart of VR, but is also of specific significance in a clinical context when perceptions of reality are concerned, for example, during psychosis. Closely associated is the autonomy of VR users. Although autonomy is a much-considered topic in biomedical ethics, it has not been sufficiently discussed when it comes to applications of VR in psychiatry. In this review, the authors address the different themes and recommend the development of an ethical framework for the clinical use of VR. (shrink)

Antithetical desires displayed throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship indicate the disjunctive assumption that the individual exists either in a state of increasing autonomy, expressed negatively as striving for freedom from divine constraint, or in a state of self-annihilating submission, expressed positively in terms of kenotic unification. Proximity to the divine thereby entails forfeiture of individuality, contrary to the explicit aim of Kierkegaard’s authorial project, and aversion to materiality. This essay enunciates the conflict (I), traces the crescendo of loss that births the pseudonymous (...) authorship and ends in realized longing for death (II), and approaches a more holistic vision of psycho-spiritual development (III). (shrink)

Manifold expressions of a particular critique appear throughout Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus: for Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms faith is categorically not a first immediacy, and it is certainly not the first immediate, the annulment of which concludes the first movement of Hegelian philosophy. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms make it clear that he holds the Hegelian dogmaticians responsible for the promulgation of this misconception, but when Kierkegaard’s journals and papers are consulted another transgressor emerges: the renowned anti-idealist F.D.E. Schleiermacher. I address the extent (...) to which this particular indictment is justified; over-against Gerhard Schreiber, I argue that this characterization of Schleiermacher’s view of religion is indeed a de facto critique. I begin by presenting and demonstrating the ubiquity of the phenomenon at the heart of Schleiermacher’s conception of perfect God-consciousness, then proceed to apply criticisms raised by Kierkegaardian pseudonyms Judge William, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus, and Anti-Climacus, supplemented with concerns raised by Kierkegaard himself, in order to demonstrate that these criticisms do indeed apply to and problematize Schleiermacher’s view. (shrink)

Seeking to determine what it is that incites Kierkegaard’s enthusiasm during Schelling’s early lectures at Berlin, then what it is that thoroughly extinguishes his hope in months to follow, I establish: first, that the criticisms of Hegel in Schelling’s negative philosophy depend upon Kantian distinctions and reflect Kant’s critical methodology; secondly, that the leveling function Schelling assigns to these distinctions corresponds to the notion of irony as a destructive force found in The Concept of Irony; finally, that Kierkegaard will come (...) to concretize an account that adheres more closely to Kant’s transition from negative to positive than to Schelling’s. (shrink)

Background In recent years, patient advocacy has emerged as a prominent concept within healthcare. How nursing students decide what is best for their patients is not well understood. Objective The objective is to examine nursing students' views on doing what is best for patients during their clinical experiences and how they seek to establish patient interests when providing care. Research questions guiding the interview were as follows: (1) What are nursing students' perceptions of patient interests? (2) What factors influence nursing (...) students' perceptions of advocating for patient’s interests? Research design Qualitative descriptive research using thematic analysis. Participants and research context Data was collected through individual online interviews with nine nursing students with clinical experience. Ethical considerations The study was approved by the University Research Ethics Committee. Participants provided digital informed consent. Results The students asserted that they are able to understand the patients' interests by placing emphasis on the patients' needs. They believe that it is crucial to adopt a collaborative strategy for the provision of care to meet these requirements. In addition, some of them expressed concern over the most effective methods of advocating for the interests of patients. Three themes were identified. (1) Focussing on patient needs first, (2) taking a collective approach, and (3) learning how to advocate. Conclusions Students understand and value the ethical commitments associated with advocating for the patient's best interest by considering factors such as prioritising the patient's needs, adopting a strategy that involves everyone, and acquiring the ability to undertake the advocacy role. Additionally, nursing education strategies in clinical contexts require additional study to inspire students to do what is in their patient’s best interests. (shrink)