We bear witness to a sweeping social movement for change—fostered and driven by a powerful group of Black nurses and nursing students determined to call out and dismantle anti‐Black racism and discrimination within the profession of nursing. The Black Nurses Task Force, launched by the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO) in July 2020, is building momentum for long‐standing change in the profession by critically examining the racist and discriminatory history of nursing, listening to and learning from the lived experiences (...) of the Black nursing community, and shaping concrete, actionable steps to confront anti‐Black racism and discrimination in academic settings, workplaces, and nursing organizations. The Black Nurses Task Force and the RNAO are standing up and speaking out in acknowledgment of the magnitude of anti‐Black racism and discrimination that exist in our profession, health system, justice system, and economic system. This social movement is demonstrating, in actions, how individuals and a collective act as change agents to drive meaningful and widespread change for our present and future Black nurses. We also acknowledge the Black nurses who have gone before us. (shrink)

Racism against Black people, Indigenous and other racialized people continues to exist in healthcare and academic settings. Racism produces profound harm to racialized people. Strategies to address systemic racism must be implemented to bring about sustainable changes in healthcare and academic settings. This quality improvement initiative provides strategies to address systemic racism and discrimination against Black nurses and nursing students in Ontario, Canada. It is part of a broader initiative showcasing Black nurses in action to end racism and discrimination. We (...) have found that people who have experienced racism need healing, support and protection including trauma-related services to facilitate their healing. Implementing multi-level, multi-pronged interventions in workplaces will create healthy work environments for all members of society, especially Black nurses who are both clients/patients and providers of healthcare. (shrink)

Thierry Laronde basing on the statement of the social utility of ideas, to denounce the policy of the European Office of Patents in which he blames for accepting in facts, software patenting and limit so the social circulation of ideas. Indeed in the case of the software, originality, only patentable, does not lie as in the theory as in an implementation by a soft-engineer which participates in a chain in which the assertion of an individual right is difficult even (...) impossible. A contrario GNU’s General Public Licence facilitates the distribution of the knowledge’s distribution, by the spread and the re-use of the code even though it does not offer any guarantee against the patenting of ideas. (shrink)

Cheryl Misak offers a strikingly new view of the development of philosophy in the twentieth century. Pragmatism, the home-grown philosophy of America, thinks of truth not as a static relation between a sentence and the believer-independent world, but rather, a belief that works. The founders of pragmatism, Peirce and James, developed this idea in more and less objective ways. The standard story of the reception of American pragmatism in England is that Russell and Moore savaged James's theory, and that (...) pragmatism has never fully recovered. An alternative, and underappreciated, story is told here. The brilliant Cambridge mathematician, philosopher and economist, Frank Ramsey, was in the mid-1920s heavily influenced by the almost-unheard-of Peirce and was developing a pragmatist position of great promise. He then transmitted that pragmatism to his friend Wittgenstein, although had Ramsey lived past the age of 26 to see what Wittgenstein did with that position, Ramsey would not have liked what he saw. (shrink)

This chapter is an edited transcription of an author-meets-critics session at the Truth 20|20 Conference, on Cheryl Misak’s book, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (2020, Oxford University Press). Misak provides a brief overview of Ramsey’s life and the remarkable philosophical significance of his work. Blackburn raises a biographical-philosophical question about the origins (in history and in Ramsey’s thought) of what is now called the ‘Ramsification’ of a theory, and whether this was novel with Ramsey or whether the (...) basic idea had appeared earlier in works by Newman and Russell. Hornsby raises questions about Ramsey’s work on truth, particularly to do with his stance on correspondence theories and endorsement of pragmatism. Hornsby further raises some skeptical concerns that a pragmatist account suitable for completing Ramsey’s project will ever be forthcoming. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Self-efficacy is the assessment of one’s capacity to perform tasks. Previous research has demonstrated that self-efficacy impacts ethical behavior and attitudes but its effect on ethical cognition and perceptions has not been studied. For the present study, participants analyzed an ethical dilemma after either high or low self-efficacy was induced. Participants analyzed the dilemma using one of two cognitive problem-solving techniques versus a third, control group, and what participants wrote about the problem was content-analyzed to determine how ethical cognition (...) is impacted by self-efficacy. Additionally, perceptions of the ethical problem were examined. Results revealed that differences in self-efficacy did not lead to changes in ethical cognition, but they did lead to changes in perceptions of ethical problems. Implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Cheryl Misak argues that truth ought to be reinstated to a central position in moral and political philosophy. She argues that the correct account of truth is one found in a certain kind of pragmatism: a true belief is one upon which inquiry could not improve, a belief which would not be defeated by experience and argument. This account is not only an improvement on the views of central figures such as Rawls and Habermas, but it can also make (...) sense of the idea that, despite conflict, pluralism, and the expression of difference, our moral and political beliefs aim at truth and can be subject to criticism. Anyone interested in a fresh discussion of political theory and philosophy will find this a fascinating read. (shrink)

This paper explores the careers of several British women astronomers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I postulate that the only category of scientific practice open to most of these women was that of an ‘amateur’. They would have become professionals had they had the opportunity but since they were barred from professional status they used their talents to promote the importance of amateur science. I propose the term ‘obligatory amateur’ for these women who, unlike men, were unable (...) to choose amateur or professional status. I explore this concept of a ‘gendered’ amateurism through the life and works of Annie Maunder, with references to British women astronomers contemporary with her. (shrink)

Fantasies of Flight invigorates the field of personality psychology by challenging the contemporary academic view that individuals are best studied as carriers of traits. Daniel Ogilvie exchanges a heart-to-heart, case study approach to understanding human behavior for the current strategies of categorizing and comparing individuals according to their manifest traits. Ogilvie asks and endeavors to answer questions like "What were the psychological conditions that led Sir James Barrie to create a character named Peter Pan?" and "What were the (...) dynamics behind the Marshall Herff Applewhite's conviction that a space ship, hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet, would rescue him and his Heaven's Gate followers after they enacted a mass suicide pact in 1997?" Answering these questions requires him to resurrect "old" ways to think about personality and "old" strategies for studying individuals one by one. Early in the book, Ogilvie reviews the history of why intensive case studies were discredited in psychology and describes how Sigmund Freud's psychobiographical account of Leonardo da Vinci's fascination with flight inadvertently abetted critics of psychoanalytic psychology. He then performs a partial psychobiography of James Barrie and the origins of Peter Pan, followed by an investigation of Carl Jung, who fashioned the collective unconscious to serve as humankind's link to eternity. Arguing that personality psychology needs to become less insular, Ogilvie integrates information from the disciplines of developmental psychology and neuroscience into a theory regarding the latent needs that both Barrie and Jung sought to satisfy. The theory, including its emphasis on the onset of self and consciousness, is then applied to an array of well-known and obscure individuals with ascensionistic inclinations. Well written and accessible, but complex and scholarly, this volume will restore interest in the investigation of people's inner lives. (shrink)

Many have argued that early visual processing is encapsulated from the influence of higher-level goals, expectations, and knowledge of the world. Here we confront the main arguments offered in support of such a view, showing that they are unpersuasive. We also present evidence of top–down influences on early vision, emphasizing data from cognitive neuroscience. Our conclusion is that encapsulation is not a defining feature of visual processing. But we take this conclusion to be quite modest in scope, readily incorporated into (...) mainstream vision science. (shrink)

Cheryl Misak presents a history of the great American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, from its inception in the 1870s to the present day. She traces the connections between classical American pragmatism and contemporary analytic philosophy, and draws out the continuing influence of pragmatist ideas in the recent history of philosophy.

Early Renaissance naturalists worked to identify the plans described in ancient sources. But during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, naturalists instead began to describe and name plans unknown to the ancients. They also divided nature much more finely, distinguishing species that their predecessors had lumped together. As a result, they created an information overload. Dictionaries of synonyms and local flora were invented in the early seventeenth century as partial solutions to this problem of information overload.

Volume 13, Issue 3-4, August - December 2019, Page 485-485.

Australia is restricted by the academic, social and administrative mechanisms of financialization. Exaggerated critiques about the adequacy of learner-centered approaches to education have been used to support a retrogressive shift from curriculum informed by contemporary educational theories, towards curriculum informed by management theories based on the dehumanizing educational theory of behaviourism. I therefore suggest a return to pre-1987 learning-centered educational theories, which include face-to-face relations, compassion and civility. This call is not new, but it has been largely ignored by powerful (...) agents in society: politicians, and regulatory-body representatives. It is therefore necessary to embark on an alternative approach to agential change. In this case, I appeal not to the powerful agents, but to all of us involved in VET. Since VET subsists on our activities, that is, since we daily reproduce it with our activities, it should be possible for us to withdraw those activities that reproduce the marketized approach to VET. (shrink)

Traditional approaches to animal ethics commonly emerge from one of two influential ethical theories: Regan’s deontology (The case for animal rights. University of California, Berkeley, 1983) and Singer’s preference utilitarianism (Animal liberation. Avon Books, New York, 1975). I argue that both of the theories are unsuccessful at providing adequate protection for animals because they are unable to satisfy the three conditions of a minimally decent theory of animal protection. While Singer’s theory is overly permissive, Regan’s theory is too restrictive. I (...) argue that a minimally decent animal ethic requires a framework that allows for context-dependent considerations of our complex human–animal relationship in a non-ideal world. A plausible theory which exemplifies this new ethic is virtue ethics. (shrink)

This study investigates professional tax practitioners' ethical judgments and behavioral intentions in cases involving client pressure to adopt aggressive reporting positions, an issue that has been identified as the most difficult ethical/moral problem facing public accounting practitioners. The multidimensional ethics scale (MES) was used to measure the extent to which a hypothetical behavior was consistent with five ethical philosophies (moral equity, contractualism, utilitarianism, relativism, and egoism). Responses from a sample of 67 tax professionals supported the existence of all dimensions of (...) the MES other than egoism. Regressions of ethical judgments and behavioral intentions on the MES dimensions indicate that ethical decision making is most heavily influenced by the moral equity dimension, followed by the contractualism dimension. In contrast, the utilitarianism and relativism dimensions were only related to ethical judgments and behavioral intentions in isolated instances. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between identity, emotion, and feminist collective action. Based on interview research, the analysis confirms the central importance of anger in collective action and its particular significance for feminist identity and activism. As an emotion thought deviant for women, the anger inherent in feminist collective action frames created problems for participants in terms of relationships with partners, friends, and work colleagues. Participants performed emotion work to deal with negative responses to their feminist identity, but this depleted (...) emotional energy and created stress. Participation in movement events provided much-needed emotional support and an outlet for deviant emotions. (shrink)

Argues that, in advanced industrial societies, pluralistic religions and social systems and structures and multi-dimensional selces must replace the unworkable, outmoded order of monotheism, the sovereign statesm and the unitary self.

When fat people are depicted in popular media, we often take their behavior to be representative of all fat people. How one fat person acts becomes representative of a broader pattern of behavior that all fat people are presumed to share, shaping the way we understand fatness. This way of generalizing presents fatness as a singular experience, reducing fat people to a monolithic narrative that often reinforces anti-fat bias. How do we avoid this reduction? How can we responsibly depict fat (...) characters without perpetuating negative stereotypes about real fat people? Using the case of “Fat Thor” from Avengers: Endgame, I propose the beginnings of an account of responsible artistic agency which can be used to improve the ways that marginalized communities are depicted in art, with a particular focus on fat communities. Central to this account are two features: inclusion of and deference to members of the communities depicted from a variety of backgrounds throughout the production process, and mindfulness of the preexisting narrative web built around the communities depicted. I will use this discussion to highlight the need for a drastic shift in how we consider marginalized populations in art—in reimagining both who tells their stories, and what stories are told on their behalf. (shrink)

Increased international migration of health professionals is weakening healthcare systems in low‐income countries, particularly those in sub‐Saharan Africa. The migration of nurses, physicians and other health professionals from countries in sub‐Saharan Africa poses a major threat to the achievement of health equity in this region. As nurses form the backbone of healthcare systems in many of the affected countries, it is the accelerating migration of nurses that will be most critical over the next few years. In this paper we present (...) a comprehensive analysis of the literature and argue that, from a human rights perspective, there are competing rights in the international migration of health professionals: the right to leave one's country to seek a better life; the right to health of populations in the source and destination countries; labour rights; the right to education; and the right to nondiscrimination and equality. Creative policy approaches are required to balance these rights and to ensure that the individual rights of health professionals do not compromise the societal right to health. (shrink)

This article applies the analytic rigor of philosophy to the vexed topic of business strategy, and uses the objective, public evidence of business strategy as an existence proof for the possibility of free will and purpose in the private realm of subjective intentionality. The first part distinguishes three types of intentionality in philosophy—purposive intentionality, referential intentionality, and the problematic intentionality of a godlike, miraculous “inner intender.” After rejecting this third type of intentionality, and noting that its rejection saves the first (...) two types of intentionality from guilt by association, the second part draws parallels with three types of strategy in business: purposive, referential, and godlike. The first defines the goals and objectives of a company; the second picks out and targets consumers in market driven strategy; and the third, with the help of philosophical reflections, demands a rethinking of the function of leadership without reliance on a single, godlike leader. In the third part of this article, the existence proof from the public world of business is used to shed light on the possibility of intentionality in the private world of subjective intentionality. Finally, the article draws conclusions for its three audiences: for the philosophers, with credit to Nietzsche who saw it all, a greater clarity about intentionality and free will; for business people, greater clarity about the importance of purposiveness and strategic intent; and for business philosophers, a demonstration showing how—through strategy and intentionality—we can both create value and give meaning to the lives of our employees, ourselves, and our customers. (shrink)

This essay is a contribution to a symposium on Madhav Khosla’s important book, India’s Founding Moment. It uses the book to reflect on the relevance of the story of the Indian founding to constitution making around the world in the twenty-first century. It explores this question through three themes that run through the book: people and process; the substance of constitutions; and global influences. In conclusion, I suggest that the principal value of the Indian example lies in its emphasis on (...) the development of a democratic people through the principles and processes for which a democratic constitution provides. The direct applicability of the Indian example should not be overstated, however. In matters of important detail, it was necessarily anchored in the particularities of the Indian case, including the nature of the societal divisions as they had evolved under colonial rule, attracting substantive constitutional solutions that would not necessarily be applicable elsewhere. The world of constitution making has moved in in 70 years, moreover, as might be expected. Many of the challenges for constitution making now reflect both the possibilities and the pathologies of post-modernity, to which the Indian founding provides at best a general guide. (shrink)

Historians are increasingly working with material that is not only digital but has been digitized. Early digitization projects aimed to encode data for systematic analysis; more recent projects have sought to reproduce unique archival material in a manner that allows for open-ended historical inquiry without the need to travel to archives and manipulate physical objects. Such projects have undeniable benefits for the preservation of documents and access to them. Yet historians must be aware of the scope of digitization, the reasons (...) why material is chosen to be digitized, and limitations on the dissemination of digitized sources. Furthermore, some physical aspects of sources, and of collections of sources, are lost in their digital simulacra. Nonetheless, digitization and the standardization of metadata offer significant possibilities for future archival research and documentation. (shrink)

Pragmatism is the idea that philosophical concepts must start with, and remain linked to human experience and inquiry. This book traces and assesses the influence of American pragmatism on British philosophy, with emphasis on Cambridge in the inter-war period, post-war Oxford, and recent developments.

"Living in Death: the Evolution of Modern Vampirism" traces the evolution of folkloric and fictional vampirism in three parts: the history of the vampire; the concept of undead; and the transition of the modern vampire during the nineteenth century to present. The thesis provides an explanation of why a culture that views life and death as a binary opposition would create a being that exists between these two finite realms of consciousness ultimately on the assumption that the body continues to (...) function after death. This "third" state of consciousness places the vampire in a liminal state of being; neither alive nor dead, but living in death. (shrink)

Volume 13, Issue 3-4, August - December 2019, Page 486-488.

Like all fields of inquiry, Irish studies has its own traditions, its own ways of organizing information. even the most adventurous of the native practitioners tend carefully to maintain disciplinary boundaries when presenting evidence to sustain a thesis, and American scholars have used Irish practice as their frame of reference. This essay, which engages with the time-honored and increasingly vexed enterprise of defining “Irishness,” introduces play into these traditions both in spirit and in methodology. An alternative approach to analyzing Ireland (...) might foreground the underlying assumptions about social relations and historical patterns that link Irish art and writing across diverse fields of inquiry. Exploring the many rhetorics of Ireland might make it impossible, for example, for those involved in the essential task of historical and scientific inquiry—to overlook the submessages of popular Irish representations.I begin, obliquely, with a contrast between American and Irish censorship of music videos. My inquiry targets some fundamental differences between American and Irish appropriations of the body, from which the essay suggests symmetries between the psychological development of individuals in Ireland and one stage in what might be termed the psychohistory of Irish culture. As an experimental, semidisruptive piece that challenges disciplinary lines in the field and introduces fresh theoretical categories, this essay reaches toward a new Irish studies. Cheryl Herr, associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, has published Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture and For the Land They Loved: Irish Political Melodramas, 1890-1925 . Two of her current projects involve spatial organization in Ireland and the syntax of English modernism. (shrink)

There has been an increase in research that focuses on female adolescents and adult women concerns relating to body image and dieting concerns. However, research on body and dieting concerns of specifically pre-adolescents is still a neglected area of research in comparison with female adolescents and adult women. Pre-adolescents are either research participants as part of a group, which includes younger children, or part of a group of adolescents. This article addresses the body and dieting concerns of pre-adolescent females as (...) a group on their own. A qualitative study was conducted, and data were collected by using a vignette with semi-structured questions. The data were analysed by using a thematic analysis. The results indicated that although the girls presented a ‘polite’ discourse that all girls should be accepted irrespective of weight, when they were futher engaged with during the interviews this was not reflective of their world view. Negative attributes were projected onto the heavier girl in the vignette, and the discourse of acceptance was linked to feelings of pity and sympathy as fat girls were ‘handicapped’ albeit not because of their own doing. Thin girls were linked to positive traits, such as kind, happy and with leadership potential. The pre-teens in the sample were all very familiar with terms related to food restrictions (dieting), and a number of them had indulged in dieting behaviour to lose weight. The research was conducted in one province in South Africa and provides baseline data for a bigger study, which includes other provinces, as well as girls from rural areas and girls from schools in poorer urban areas. The results indicated that the pre-teen girls have internalised gendered notions of what it means to be female and being thin is integrally linked to what patriarchy has constructed as the ideal female body. Contribution: This article is grounded within the discipline of Psychology. However, the scholarly contribution it intersects with include the disciplines of Public Health, Education and Gender Studies. It provides and engages a discourse at the intersections of the Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines, contributing to knowledge which is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary. (shrink)

Despite recognition of the importance of family in health‐care and progress in family theory development, there has been limited transfer of family theory to acute care nursing practice. We argue that this family theory–practice gap results from a persistent lack of conceptual clarity in family nursing and other barriers. Lack of conceptual clarity takes the form of conceptual overlap and semantic inconsistency, as well as the complexity of language found in the family nursing literature. Barriers include practice contexts, relational problems, (...) and knowledge types. Our exploration begins with a brief discussion of the intimate link between nursing theory and practice followed by an overview of some issues associated with the family nursing theory–practice gap. Based on a synthesis of family nursing literature, problems associated with conceptual clarity in family nursing theory are explored. We conclude with recommendations for family nursing research to develop concepts grounded in nursing practice. (shrink)

The problem with many archives is that they are searchable only by supplementary metadata, rather than secondary metadata ; information about a visual object is not always reliable, especially when it comes to Black Canadians. Supplementary metadata in Canadian archives are not classified by race or ethnicity, thus, the very structure of the archive erases from public memory the lived experiences of Black Canadians. Given the move toward digitization over the last fifteen years, the importance of the archive has become (...) a topic of discussion. Since the public can now search through on-line collections, the need to protect and promote material archives has never been more important. This paper will explore the question of the archive-as-subject, rather than archive-as-source, through storytelling. Storytelling is one of the many cultural expressions that have connected Black populations. Using first-person narrative, I give examples from my ten-year-long experience working in Black Canadian archives to probe how the archive can move from its depository role to become a site where memories about Black Canadian experiences across time, space, and place are curated and narrated. What are the ethical challenges around this kind of reform? (shrink)

(2014). Emergence, Story, and the Challenge of Positive Scenarios. World Futures: Vol. 70, Strategy, Story, and Emergence: Essays on Scenario Planning, pp. 52-87.

C.S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, argued that truth is what we would agree upon, were inquiry to be pursued as far as it could fruitfully go. In this book, Misak argues for and elucidates the pragmatic account of truth, paying attention both to Peirce's texts and to the requirements of a suitable account of truth. An important argument of the book is that we must be sensitive to the difference between offering a definition of truth and engaging in a (...) distinctively pragmatic project. The pragmatic project spells out the relationship between truth and inquiry; it articulates the consequences of a statement's being true. The existence of a distinct pragmatic enterprise has implications for the status of the pragmatic account of truth and for the way in which philosophy should be conducted. (shrink)

_Verificationism_ is the first comprehensive history of a concept that dominated philosophy and scientific methodology between the 1930s and the 1960s. The verificationist principle - the concept that a belief with no connection to experience is spurious - is the most sophisticated version of empiricism. More flexible ideas of verification are now being rehabilitated by a number of philosophers. C.J. Misak surveys the precursors, the main proponents and the rehabilitators. Unlike traditional studies, she follows verificationist theory beyond the demise of (...) positivism to examine its reappearance in the work of modern philosophers. Most interestingly, she argues that despite feminism's strenuous opposition to positivism, verificationist thought is at the heart of much of contemporary feminist philosophy. _Verificationism_ is an excellent assessment of a major and influential system of thought. (shrink)