Ethics and the Clinical Encounter explores the moral dimensions of clinical medicine and the phenomenon of illness, to determine what ethics must be in order to be fully responsive to clinical encounters. Written in a lively and conversational style with minimal technical terminology, and enhanced by actual experience or real clinical situations, this volume lays out a clinical ethics methodology both in practical and theoretical terms. Here's what the experts had to say: Professor Zaner has provided us with a remarkably (...) lucid and trenchant discussion of the interface of philosophy and the field of medicine. He brings into play an extraordinary range of historial knowledge, extensive observations based on firsthand experience with medical practices, and an acute sense of philosophical argumentation. This is a work that will be an exemplary and indispensable text in the philosophy of medicine for years to come. -- Calvin Schrag... it is a highly original contribution usable in a number of fields.... It really has no competition.... The genius of Zaner's approach is to ground ethics from the 'bottom up' and to direct us to the concrete particulars of therapeutic encounters wherein lie moral and ethical matters... meaty, challenging, and ultimately rewarding.... -- Paul R. Dokecki Richard M. Zaner founded the Center for Clinical and Research Ethics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Having established Vanderbilt's first Hospital Ethics Committee (1985), he served as co-chair of VUMC's Ethics Committee since its inception in 1990. Zaner has published five original books, edited ten, and translated four more, and has published more than 100 sections of books and professional journals. (shrink)

This paper uses Schrag's framework to analyze an episode of pain and to discuss the phenomenological perspective of pain. The experience of pain is explicated through the metaphor of co-present, interwoven fields of consciousness, embodiment, attitudinal posture and custom, time, and space. Interventions based on the metaphor are discussed.

In the early 1700s the Flemish explorer Sicnarf Garhcs discovered a society, the Namuh, which he described in his two-volume compendium of primitive societies. As this society bears on my present topic, I begin with a summary of its salient features: It consists of two classes of people, the Tluda and the Dlihc, whom I shall hereafter refer to as the T's and the D's. Relative to the D's, the T's are strong, intelligent and knowledgeable about the world. The D's (...) are weak, ignorant and dim-witted. (shrink)

The following text explores performative art works commissioned within a specific “arts and health” cultural setting, namely that of a medical school within a British university. It examines the degree to which the professional autonomy of the artists was “instrumentalized” and diminished as a result of having to fit into normative frames set by institutional agendas. We ask to what extent do such “entanglements,” feel more like “enstranglements,” suffocating the artist’s capacity to envision the world afresh or any differently? What (...) kinds of pressures allow for certain kinds of “evidence” to be read and made visible,? Are You Feeling Better? was a 2016 programme curated by Frances Williams, challenging simplistic expectations that the arts hold any automatic power of their own to make “things better” in healthcare. It included two performative projects – The Secret Society of Imperfect Nurses, by Anthony Schrag with student nurses at Kings College London, and Hiding in Plain Sight by Becky Shaw with doctoral researchers in nursing and midwifery. These projects were situated in a climate of United Kingdom National Health Service cuts and austerity measures where the advancement of social prescribing looks dangerously like the government abnegating responsibility and offering art as amelioration. The text therefore examines the critical “stage” on which these arts-health projects were performed and the extent to which critical reflection is welcomed within institutional contexts, how learning is framed, expressed aesthetically, as well as understood as art practice. It further examines how artistic projects might offer sites of resistance, rejection and mechanisms of support against constricting institutional norms and practices that seek to instrumentalise artistic works to their own ends. (shrink)

In this review essay, Francis Schrag focuses on two recent anthologies dealing completely or in part with the role of neuroscience in learning and education: The Jossey-Bass Reader on the Brain and Learning, edited by Jossey-Bass Publishers, and New Philosophies of Learning, edited by Ruth Cigman and Andrew Davis. Schrag argues that philosophers of education do have a distinctive role in the conversation about neuroscience. He contends that the impact of neuroscience is likely to be substantial, though not (...) in the way its advocates imagine. It has the potential to enhance education by way of interventions that successfully alter the fundamental neural mechanisms of learning, but neuroscience is unlikely to affect classroom teaching substantially. (shrink)

This article identifies four approaches to arguing for democracy, showing that none has an adequate way of supporting both full adult inclusion and the exclusion of children. I focus in Section 2 on the arguments of David Estlund and Thomas Christiano, showing that their arguments against guardianship call into question the exclusion of children from the franchise. In Section 3, I explain why the exclusion of children constitutes an injustice, and in the final section, I consider two approaches to remedying (...) that injustice. Key Words: justice • democracy • children. (shrink)

Neuro-education, a new frontier for educational researchers, has its passionate advocates and equally passionate detractors. Some philosophers, including Noel Purdy and Hugh Morrison, Andrew Davis, and Ralph Schumacher, have argued that the entire enterprise is misguided. I evaluate and challenge their arguments. This permits me to articulate my own position: Neuroscience may make impressive contributions to education but, perhaps paradoxically, not by guiding the work of teachers.

Women philosophers have not received their due in the discipline's reference works. Kersey's international biographical dictionary of women philosophers from ancient times up until the present redresses that situation.... This very capably fills a very evident gap in the philosophy reference corpus. Wilson Library Bulletin This work developed from Kersey's discovery that there existed no biographical dictionaries of women philosophers, and few references to women in textbooks on the history of philosophy. Intended to fill that void, this source book covers (...) more than 170 women born before 1920 who wrote about or pondered questions of Western intellectual life. Using broad criteria, Kersey has included any woman who conducted serious work in the traditional fields of philosophy, including metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, or logic. Although acknowledging that the field has been dominated by men, the author excluded feminist scholars on the grounds that they have been given serious attention elsewhere, and also omitted women theologians or devotional writers. The volume includes extensive bibliographies of both primary and secondary works about each philosopher. An in-depth introduction establishes the context for the reference, and an appendix provides charts showing women philosophers by century, nationality, and discipline. An index of names completes the source book. This reference will be an important addition to university and public libraries, and a valuable reference for courses in philosophy and women's studies. (shrink)

Sketching a new portrait of the human self in this thought-provoking book, leading American philosopher Calvin O. Schrag challenges bleak deconstructionist and postmodernist views of the self as something ceaselessly changing, without origin or purpose. Discussing the self in new vocabulary, he depicts an action-oriented self defined by the ways in which it communicates. The self, says Schrag, is open to understanding through its discourse, its actions, its being with other selves, and its experience of transcendence. In his (...) discussion, Schrag responds critically to both modernists and postmodernists, avoiding what he calls the modernists' overdetermination of unity and identity and the postmodernists' self-enervating pluralism. He agrees with postmodernist attacks on both the classical theory of the self as a metaphysical substance and the modern epistemological construal of the self as transparent mind, yet he maintains that jettisoning the self as understood in these terms does not mean jettisoning it altogether. The self as subject is not dead, nor are the constitutive features of self-formation and self-understanding. In addressing the role of culture in the dynamics of self-formation, the author offers a critique of Max Weber's and Jürgen Habermas's view of modernity as a radical differentiation of three cultural spheres: science, morality, and art; he adds religion as a legitimate fourth cultural sphere. The overview of Schrag's philosophy that _The Self after Postmodernity_ provides will appeal to readers with an interest in literary criticism and religion as well as philosophy. (shrink)

For decades, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have questioned the appropriateness and utility of prior review of their research by human subjects' ethics committees. This essay seeks to organize thematically some of their published complaints and to serve as a brief restatement of the major critiques of ethics review. In particular, it argues that 1) ethics committees impose silly restrictions, 2) ethics review is a solution in search of a problem, 3) ethics committees lack expertise, 4) ethics committees (...) apply inappropriate principles, 5) ethics review harms the innocent, and 6) better options exist. (shrink)

. This work will be useful to all who wonder what to do about the largely negative results of postmodern thought.Ó ÑJoseph C. Flay The Resources of Rationality addresses the postmodernist assault on the claim of reason and develops a ...

Education reform is pointless if it does not influence what students can learn, what they want to learn, and most important, what they care about. This is a lesson that John Dewey tried to teach us, but one we have either forgotten or willfully neglected.In Back to Basics, Francis Schrag builds on Dewey's fundamental principles and offers a probing and thoughtful exploration of the most basic questions in education today: What is the purpose of schooling and what should our (...) educational aspirations be? What should be taught and how? Who is accountable and what are they accountable for? And how should educators respond to difficult societal issues, such as inequality of resources, or the conflicting demands of school reform?In grappling with each of these questions, Schrag examines our most basic beliefs about education and forces us to think in greater depth about what schools can and should do. (shrink)

This is a book about the human sciences. However, it is not a treatise on scientific methodology nor is it a proposal for a unification of the human sciences through an integration of their findings within a general conceptual scheme.

Speaking as one of the founders of American Continental philosophy, Calvin O. Schrag offers an exceptionally clear, balanced, and informative discussion of a complex questions vexing postmodern currents of philosophical and theological reflection: Does the "death" of the god conceived as a "highest being" in Western, and especially modern, traditions open a new space within which to rethink God in terms of a "gift" or "giving" that would stand beyond the usual spate of metaphysical categories? Schrag draws with (...) grace, ease, and precision upon the history of Western metaphysics, from Plato and Aristotle through Nietzsche and Heidegger. Most important to his central question of God as "otherwise than Being," however, are such influential post-Heideggerian thinkers as Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas. Schrag's inquiry engages these thinkers at a serious level and also expands recent discussions by relating them to the work of figures hitherto overlooked or underplayed, most notably Paul Tillich. (shrink)

This case raises ethical issues involving conflicts of interest arising from industrial funding of academic research; ethical responsibilities of laboratories to funding agencies; ethical responsibilities in the management of a research lab; ethical considerations in appropriate research design; communication in a research group; communication between advisor and graduate student; responsibilities of researchers for the environment; misrepresentation or withholding of scientific results.

Using Rawls's theory as illustration, I argue that any conception of justice which includes a commitment to equality of opportunity eventually must collide with a commitment to the family. I then contend that the link between justice and equality of opportunity cannot be severed by showing that one powerful attempt to do so founders. Borrowing from Martin Buber, I try to show that the perspective required by justice is different from and opposed to that required for intimate relations. Moreover, I (...) argue that the institution of the family provides the soil without which human intimacy withers. Finally, I try to suggest that the need for human. I?You encounters is a response to aspects of the human condition quite different from those which give rise to institutions of justice and the state. (shrink)

Expectations and possibilities for employee loyalty are shifting rapidly, particularly in the for-profit sector. I explore the natureof employee loyalty to the organization, in particular, those elements of loyalty beyond the notion of the ethical demands of employeeloyalty. I consider the moral significance of loyalty for the employee and whether the development of ties of loyalty to the workorganization is in fact a good thing for the employee or for the employer. I argue that employees have a natural inclination to (...) extendloyalty to the organization and that organizations consequently have an obligation to make clear to employees the degree to which theorganization will recognize and reward employee loyalty. (shrink)

Engages contemporary European thought on a variety of philosophical topics.

This case involves invasive research on captive wild populations of birds to study aggressive animal behavior. The case and associated commentaries raise and examine fundamental issues: whether and under what conditions, such research is ethically justified when the research has no expected, direct application to the human species; the moral status of animals and how one balances concern for the animal’s interests against the value of gains in scientific knowledge. They also emphasize the issue of the importance of a thorough (...) literature search to ensure appropriate research design and experimental design to minimize animal suffering. It raises the issue of circumstances in which such research should be modified or terminated. (shrink)