In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Addressing Alterity:Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative RelationDiane DavisTeaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain.—Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and InfinityThere is always the matter of a surplus that comes from an elsewhere and that can no more be assimilated by me, than it can domesticate itself in me. A teaching that may part ways with Heidegger's motif of our being (...) able to learn only what we already understand—when does learning take place? what do we already understand?—the Conversation belongs, as ethical relation, to the effort of thinking the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger. None of this amounts to thinking an object.—Avital Ronell, DictationsFrom Rhetorical Power to Reception Histories Steven Mailloux has brilliantly performed and explicated a "rhetorical hermeneutics" that demonstrates the "practical inseparability of interpretation and language use and thus of the discourses that theorize those practices, hermeneutics and rhetoric" (1998, 3). Many rhetoricians have challenged the specifics of Mailloux's various arguments and have more generally objected that "rhetorical hermeneutics" leans too far toward the hermeneutical, reducing rhetoric to an analytic or critical art and giving its productive (political) function the squeeze.1 Yet within these lively debates, very few have challenged his basic premise that rhetoric and hermeneutics are inextricably intertwined: the question has not been whether they are indissociable but which side of the production-reception coin rhetorical studies ought to emphasize.2 Michael Leff, for example, flipped Mailloux's adjective-noun relation to spotlight production, promoting a "hermeneutical rhetoric" that focuses more on political than literary texts; nonetheless, he agrees that "all interpretive work involves participation in a rhetorical exchange, and that every rhetorical exchange involves some interpretive work" (1997, 197-98). [End Page 191] Rosa Eberly goes further in Citizen Critics, offering a hermeneutical rhetoric that is less interested in "already-written discourses" than in spotlighting "rhetoric's power as an art productive of discourses and subjectivities for the present and the future" (2000, 34). Yet Eberly, too, affirms Mailloux's basic premise, which was nudged in the direction of conflation in the introduction to the 1997 collection Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, in which the editors, Walter Jost and Michael Hyde note in passing that their title can "be understood as virtually tautological."And there is of course no doubt that rhetoric has a hermeneutic dimension; or, more carefully, that rhetoric constitutes the hermeneutic dimension. If "hermeneutics" indicates "the art of understanding," as Friedrich Schleirmacher wanted, then interpretation clearly depends upon production.3 "Rhetoric not only has its place within the sphere of objects surveyed by hermeneutics," as Werner Hamacher puts it, "but also constitutes an integral component of every hermeneutic operation. Every step in an interpretation corresponds to a rhetorical—or grammatical—figure" (1996, 70). Put more bluntly: intelligibility, including self-intelligibility, is a tropological product; cognition itself is a trope that can in no way be secured. Hermeneutics—as it's being used here—is completely dependent on, even absorbed by, rhetoric.4 I have no problem with this. Nor with Mailloux's suggestion that the reverse is also true:In some ways rhetoric and interpretation are practical forms of the same extended human activity: Rhetoric is based on interpretation; interpretation is communicated through rhetoric. Furthermore, as a reflection on practice, hermeneutics and rhetorical theory are mutually defining fields: hermeneutics is the rhetoric of establishing meaning, and rhetoric the hermeneutics of problematic linguistic situations.(Mailloux 1998, 4)I don't disagree: As the production and appropriation of meaning, rhetoric and hermeneutics are an indissociable team; together, they complete understanding's circle. I take this as a given.However, I want to suggest that there is also a non-hermeneutical dimension of rhetoric that has nothing to do with meaning-making, with offering up significations to comprehension. This dimension is reducible neither to figuration nor to what typically goes by the name persuasion; it is devoted to a certain reception, but not to the appropriation of meaning. Preceding and exceeding all hermeneutic interpretation, it deals not in signified meaning but in the address itself, in the exposure to the other; it deals not... (shrink)

The current work investigated whether differences in phonological overlap between the past- and present-tense forms of regular and irregular verbs can account for the graded neurophysiological effects of verb regularity observed in past-tense priming designs. Event-related potentials were recorded from 16 healthy participants who performed a lexical-decision task in which past-tense primes immediately preceded present-tense targets. To minimize intra-modal phonological priming effects, cross-modal presentation between auditory primes and visual targets was employed, and results were compared to a companion intra-modal auditory (...) study (Justus, T., Larsen, J., de Mornay Davies, P., Swick, D. (2008). Interpreting dissociations between regular and irregular past-tense morphology: evidence from event-related potentials. Cognitive, Affective, Behavioral Neuroscience, 8, 178–194.). For both regular and irregular verbs, faster response times and reduced N400 components were observed for present-tense forms when primed by the corresponding past-tense forms. Although behavioral facilitation was observed with a pseudopast phonological control condition, neither this condition nor an orthographic-phonological control produced significant N400 priming effects. Instead, these two types of priming were associated with a post-lexical anterior negativity (PLAN). Results are discussed with regard to dual- and single-system theories of inflectional morphology, as well as intra- and cross-modal prelexical priming. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:News from the President’s Council on BioethicsDiane M. Gianelli (bio) and F. Daniel Davis (bio)Although the President's Council has moved into several new areas of interest during the past year, it also has devoted considerable effort to finalizing several upcoming reports and white papers. In early 2008, the Council will publish a collection of essays on human dignity and bioethics, a report on organ transplantation, and a white (...) paper on "brain death."The Council's report on organ transplantation—now near the end of the drafting and editing phases—has the public as its main audience and, as such, seeks to promote greater understanding of the ethical issues in organ procurement, allocation, and transplantation. The report situates these issues within the contexts of the history of transplantation, the clinical realities of this therapeutic modality, and the current policy framework of state and federal law and regulation.The Council is aware that other bodies—such as the Institute of Medicine—have, in recent years, produced excellent reports on transplantation. The Council's report, however, has a different focus. It explores such foundational issues as the meaning and experience of human embodiment, the philosophy of giving and receiving, and transplantation in relation to the ends and aims of medicine.The report also analyzes the ethics of deceased organ donation, living organ donation, organ allocation, and various proposals for increasing the supply of organs, with a focus on those that call for the replacement of the organ-as-gift philosophy with a market-oriented ethic of selling and buying.In another upcoming publication, the Council revisits the notion of "brain death." The Council did not plan to take on this issue when it began its organ transplantation project. But when researching material for that report, it became clear that—in recent years—some serious criticisms of the neurological standard for declaring death have arisen. Since the vast majority of organs procured from the dead come from "brain dead" patients—that is, those declared dead by the neurological standard—this presented an issue ripe for exploration.The last time a national bioethics body looked at the criteria for determining death was in 1981, when The President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research issued "Defining Death," its seminal report that articulated and defended the neurological standard for declaring death. It also proposed a uniform statute for states to adopt based [End Page 397] on that standard. After its publication, states that had not already rewritten their laws to recognize the new neurological standard did so. The Council's white paper on the topic takes a new look at "brain death" in light of the recent evidence and arguments on both sides of the issue.In the Council's last report to the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (December 2006), its upcoming volume on "Dignity" was described. Scholars from a variety of disciplines—and opinions—have written essays on "dignity and bioethics." The volume is ready to go to press.In addition to these documents, the Council, after devoting a number of sessions to the topic over the past couple of years, is considering publication of a white paper on newborn screening, with a probable focus on the benefits, harms, and burdens of mandated screening, and a look at the broader human significance of genetic information. The paper probably also will address the moral precepts that should guide such testing, as well as the precepts that should guide the acquisition and use of the genetic information gained through this process.Venturing into new territory this year, the Council heard from several speakers on "the healing professions" and "the ethical foundations of health care." Both of these topics are the subject of considerable attention and debate in the ethics literature. There is some concern, for example, that medicine and the other healing professions have lost—or are in danger of losing—their moral bearings. And in the controversies surrounding health care reform policies, what is at stake ethically often is obscured, confused, or lacking altogether.Under the rubric of "the professions," the Council heard various dimensions of the issue: the "crisis" in the ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:President’s Council on BioethicsEdmund D. Pellegrino (bio) and F. Daniel Davis (bio)Approximately two weeks before what was to have been its final meeting, the White House dissolved the President’s Council on Bioethics by terminating the appointments of its 18 members. The letters of dismissal, dated 10 June 2009, informed the members that their service on the Council would end with the close of business the next day.The Council’s (...) term was set to expire on 30 September 2009. After President Obama’s election in November and during the transition, we were advised to proceed on the assumption that the Council would be permitted to cease on that date. Reasons for the abrupt move to disband the Council are unknown. We have accepted the fact that we Council members served at the pleasure of the President and that he simply exercised his rightful prerogative. No explanation is therefore required.Some observers have speculated that the action was retaliatory. They related to the fact that several members of the Council disagreed with the President’s stem cell policy in a signed statement published in the Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum. Others have speculated that the move was pre-emptive. At its final meeting, scheduled for 25–26 June, the Council was set to sign-off on two of its final publications. One was a comprehensive report on the ethics of organ transplantation, and the other a white paper entitled Health Care and the Common Good. The aim was immediately to release the latter as a contribution to the intensifying debate about health care reform. Health Care and the Common Good could well have aided rather than impeded the President’s drive to better control health care costs and achieve universal coverage. The Council report attempted to ground both goals in the ethical framework of, as the title indicates, the common good of all Americans.In his letter terminating the members’ appointments, Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel Don Gips said that the President “recognizes the values of having a commission of experts in bioethical issues to provide objective and non-ideological bioethics advice to his administration.” Gips went on to say that the President is “currently rethinking the purposes and goals of such a bioethics commission, and is carefully considering a revitalized mission and mandate.” And, [End Page 309] responding to media enquiries, White House press officer Reid Cherlin explained that the President’s Council was terminated because it was a “philosophically leaning advisory group” and, according to a New York Times account by Nicholas Wade, “because it favored discussion over developing a shared consensus.” As for the ultimate outcome of the President’s “rethinking,” Cherlin indicated that President Obama will appoint a new commission with the mandate of offering “practical policy options” in bioethics.In the light of our experiences with the Council, we leave it with hopes that certain questions of national importance will be addressed. In light of the nature of federal advisory commissions, what is or are the proper roles of a national bioethics commission? If the aim is to provide advice and counsel to the President or, perhaps to the U. S. Congress, is that advice best rendered as a group consensus or as an in-depth exploration of the inevitably conflicting ethical perspectives on a given issue? How should such a commission be constituted—with what sorts of individuals? And what is the nature of the expertise that they individually and collectively bring to the commission’s functions? If the commission is to promote public debate and discussion, how exactly should it go about that task? And how is the efficacy of a commission to be assessed? Such questions inevitably lead us deep into contested territory, as the experience of this Council has shown: into the intersections of politics, religion, and science and into the relations between practice and theory—between policy and what some seem to deride as “philosophy.” Indeed, policy without an underlying philosophy is an edifice without a foundation; philosophy without policy is a foundation without an edifice.At the last meeting of the Council in March 2009, we launched a discussion of these questions with the... (shrink)

The large body of literature labeled “ethics in nursing education” is entirely devoted to curricular matters of ethics education in nursing schools, that is, to what ought to be the ethics content that is taught and what theory or issues ought to be included in all nursing curricula. Where the nursing literature actually focuses on particular ethical issues, it addresses only single topics. Absent from the literature, however, is any systematic analysis and explication of ethical issues or dilemmas that occur (...) within the context of nursing education. The objective of this article is to identify the spectrum of ethical issues in nursing education to the end of prompting a systematic and thorough study of such issues, and to lay the groundwork for research by identifying and provisionally typologizing the ethical issues that occur within the context of academic nursing. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage pose la question de la construction de sens au cours de religion catholique de Belgique francophone, avec une proposition qui concerne plus particulièrement les élèves de la fin du secondaire et leurs enseignant·es. Trois fils rouges guident le travail, qui lui confèrent une coloration spécifique. Le premier a trait au sens, entendu dans son acception la plus large, qui va du sens du langage au sens le plus ultime, en passant par le sens tel qu'il se décline au (...) coeur d’une existence. Le suivant renvoie à l’articulation entre la construction et la transmission d’un sens, la première expression se rapportant à la pratique des communautés de recherche, la seconde s’inscrivant dans l’acception classique du terme en lien aux savoirs. Le dernier fil conducteur est relatif à l’association de deux disciplines essentielles pour le cours: la philosophie et la théologie, avec une insistance sur la philosophie comme mode de vie et quête de sagesse, à rapprocher de la quête de sens, mais également sur l’intérêt d’introduire les jeunes à une forme de silence et d’introspection. (shrink)

Mentoring Away the Glass Ceiling in Academia: A Cultured Critique describes how women of diverse backgrounds perceive their mentoring experiences or the lack of mentoring experiences in the academy. This book provides a space for envisioning strategies and practices to improve mentoring practices and the collegiate environment.

An experiment investigated the relationship between the ability to encode verbal stimuli during an attentional lapse. The task employed a variation on the sustained attention to response task which involved the detection of an infrequent target against a background of words. As a manipulation, participants were either instructed to encode the stimuli or were merely exposed to the stimuli. Retrieval was measured using process dissociation. Irrespective of the instructions given to the participants during the task, participants were more likely to (...) retrieve information on the basis of recollection after an error was made than before, whilst the likelihood of retrieving information on the basis of familiarity remained invariant over the same period. The implications of this result for methods of investigating subjective experience are discussed. (shrink)

© 2015 NATCO, The Organization for Transplant Professionals.Despite the known benefits of kidney transplant, less than 30% of the 615 000 patients living with end-stage renal disease in the United States have received a transplant. More than 100 000 people are presently on the transplant waiting list. Although the shortage of kidneys for transplant remains a critical factor in explaining lower transplant rates, another important and modifiable factor is patients' lack of comprehensive education about transplant. The purpose of this article (...) is to provide an overview of known best practices from the broader literature that can be used as an evidence base to design improved education for ESRD patients pursuing a kidney transplant. Best practices in chronic disease education generally reveal that education that is individually tailored, understandable for patients with low health literacy, and culturally competent is most beneficial. Effective education helps patients navigate the complex health care process successfully. Recommendations for how to incorporate these best practices into transplant education design are described. Providing more ESRD patients with transplant education that encompasses these best practices may improve their ability to make informed health care decisions and increase the numbers of patients interested in pursuing transplant. (shrink)

For twenty years, Avital Ronell has stood at the forefront of the confrontation between literary study and European philosophy. She has tirelessly investigated the impact of technology on thinking and writing, with groundbreaking work on Heidegger, dependency and drug rhetoric, intelligence and artificial intelligence, and the obsession with testing. Admired for her insights and breadth of field, she has attracted a wide readership by writing with guts, candour, and wit. Coyly alluding to Nietzsche's gay science, The UberReader presents a solid (...) introduction to Avital Ronell's later oeuvre. It includes at least one selection from each of her books, two classic selections from a collection of her early essays, previously uncollected interviews and essays, and some of her most powerful published and unpublished talks. An introduction by Diane Davis surveys Ronell's career and the critical response to it thus far. With its combination of brevity and power, this Ronell primer will be immensely useful to scholars, students, and teachers throughout the humanities, but particularly to graduate and undergraduate courses in contemporary theory. (shrink)

Avital Ronell has won worldwide acclaim for her work across literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and popular culture, political theory and feminism, art and rhetoric, drugs and deconstruction. In works such as The Test Drive, Stupidity, Crack Wars, and The Telephone Book, she has perpetually raised new and powerful questions about how we think, what thinking does, and how we fool ourselves about the troubled space between thought and action. In this collection, some of today's most distinguished and innovative thinkers turn (...) their attention to Ronell's teaching, writing, and provocations, observing how Ronell reads and what comes from reading her. By reading Ronell, and reading Ronell reading, contributors examine the ethico-political implications of her radical dislocations and carefully explicate, extend, and explore the paraconcepts addressed in her works. (shrink)

Henceforth "to transform" should mean "to change the sense of sense."The field of the entity … is structured according to the diverse—genetic and structural—possibilities of the trace.The first article in the first issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is "The Rhetorical Situation," Lloyd Bitzer's critical exegesis on "the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse". Bitzer contends that the rhetor produces "the rhetorical text" when a "real" or "natural" —"objective and publicly observable" —situation "calls the discourse (...) into existence". That was 1968. Five volumes later, as you know, Richard E. Vatz flips the causal relation, maintaining instead that... (shrink)

In philosophy and rhetorical studies, self-knowledge inscribes the absolutely indivisible line that separates “the human” from “the animal.” Autodeixis, the self-reflexive power of the I, is the condition both for language acquisition and for reason; it names an exceptional sort of auto–affection in which a being demonstrates the capacity to step back from itself enough to recognize itself and so to refer to itself as itself. What I propose in this article, however, is that autodeixis involves not a specifically human (...) power to disclose an ontological as such but the extrahuman operations of an allegorical as if. The presumption of self-knowledge is not an innate quality of “the human” but the already relational condition for any living being that must repeat itself to be itself. A kind of preoriginary rhetoricity, I argue, is the very condition for the singularity and functioning of any living being. (shrink)

In a 1917 essay entitled “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” Freud suggests that modern science has dealt three devastating blows to human pride: the Copernican revelation that the earth revolves around the sun, decentering man’s presumed cosmological place in the universe as “lord of the world”; the Darwinian revelation that man shares a common ancestor with apes, which indicates that he is not inherently “a being different from animals or superior to them”; and the Freudian revelation that consciousness (...) is mostly ruled by the unconscious, which indicates that the ego is not master of “its own house” (1957–74, 139–41). Of these narcissistic wounds, each still gaping today, the second most interests us .. (shrink)

This article argues that rhetorical theory will never dominate a quasi-originary and ontolgising rhetoricity that nonetheless calls for it. This rhetoricity is not simply a game played ‘in the world’, to borrow Derrida's phrasing; it is—like writing, like metaphoricity, like the ‘yes-yes’ or (en)gage—one more name for ‘the game of the world’. To get some traction on this undeclinable yet unmasterable rhetoricity, we’ll examine what Derrida calls ‘a danger of rhetoricism’ in de Man's work, a tendency to overestimate the authority (...) of the linguistic, the verbal, the discursive. The goal is not so much to substantiate Derrida's suspicions about de Man's ‘rhetoricism’ as it is to get on the tail of a rhetorical force that is irreducible to it, an ineluctable affectability or responsivity that is bound up in the very structure of sur-vival. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of CommunicationDiane DavisBy Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication by Amit Pinchevski Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005. 299 pp. $28.00, paper.The rush of interference that produces gaps and unsettles cognition must be seen as a force that weighs in performatively and must be read. The interruptive moment of interference itself calls for a reading.Avital Ronell, StupidityCommunity (...) is made of the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension that singular beings are. … Communication is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional.Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative CommunityEmmanuel Levinas maintains a crucial distinction between the Said (le Dit) and the Saying (le Dire): whereas the Said names the realm of conceptual forms, themes, ideas—signified meaning—the Saying indicates a nonreferential performative intrusion that institutes, produces, transforms. Communication studies focuses almost exclusively on the Said, on the content of addressed language, but the Saying names the address as such, the opening toward the Other. When you address me, "you" simultaneously [End Page 289] give a said to be interpreted and withdraw from the interpretive context, breaking with the already said and exposing a gap or lacuna in the totalizing synchrony of representation and thematization. What is communicated in this interruption of meaningful exchange—this "rhetorical rupture," as Michael Hyde has put it—is communicability itself: a signification of signifyingness and so an exposure to exposedness. This interruption plays a critical role in the diverse philosophies of Heidegger, Derrida, Lacan, Bataille, and Blanchot, to name just a few. And for Levinas, it is the very opening of ethics. According to him, the interruption in meaning and identification involves an encounter with the Other as other (Autrui), with a surplus of alterity that I can neither appropriate nor abdicate and that therefore calls my self-sufficiency and spontaneity into question. Levinas: "We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics" (1969, 43).In By Way of Interruption, Amit Pinchevski offers a meticulous explication and application of Levinas's notion of the ethical relation in order to spotlight communication's nonhermeneutic, ethical dimension; he offers, that is, a rhetoric of the Saying. His book is a welcome addition to rhetorical studies and to communication theory more broadly, one that is well worth the read for anyone concerned with the intersections of communication and ethics.Noting that most every major theory of ethical communication bases itself on the presumption that better communication ("understood as the exchange of ideas, knowledge and information") leads to more understanding, which leads to "greater harmony" (6), Pinchevski instead proposes, alongside Levinas, that "the ethical possibilities in communication do not ultimately lie in its successful completion but rather in its interruption":Communication understood as the ability to reproduce meanings and effects from one mind into another is in essence an assault against the integrity of another as a distinct and singular being, as an Other. Thus, what introduces a problem for perfect communication may, in fact, be an opening for ethics insofar as there exists the possibility of encountering another as an Other.(7)Pinchevski argues that in focusing exclusively on the Said, communication studies has effectively ignored the ethical dimension of communication. It is "when there is a risk of misunderstanding, lack, and refusal of communication," he writes, that there can be "an event of communication truly worth the name." It is in the breakdown of meaningful exchange that "a [End Page 290] relation of a different kind" can expose itself, a relation "based neither on reciprocity nor on commonality, but instead on the irreducible difference between self and Other." Interruption, Pinchevski boldly states, is the "positive condition for communication" and "marks the beginning rather than the end of generosity and compassion" (7).After establishing the basic tenets of Levinasian ethics in the introduction, Pinchevski devotes the first two chapters to further explicating his specific disciplinary context (chapter 1) and to translating Levinas's ethical lexicon into this communicational framework, pointing up the ethical significance of interruption (chapter 2). In chapter 1, "The Biases of Communication," he offers a... (shrink)

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler demonstrates the priority of rhetoric to ethics, noting that any giving of an account already involves the scene of address: a relational dimension of language which supersedes the account itself . You demonstrate in The Telephone Book and elsewhere that you are called into being, that the call precedes you, indicating the priority of rhetoric to a certain pre-Heideggerian ontology. A major concern of this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric involves the (...) ways in which “the human” is constructed and/or deconstructed through this predicament of addressivity, particularly when the address comes in from or goes out to a nonhuman other: say, an animal, an .. (shrink)

But my real cat is not Alice’s little cat … because I am certainly not about to conclude hurriedly, upon waking, as Alice did, that one cannot speak with a cat on the pretext that it doesn’t reply or that it always replies the same thing. Everything that I am about to entrust to you no doubt comes back to asking you to respond to me, you, to me, reply to me concerning what it is to respond. If you can. (...) The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish the response from a reaction.A response that does not respond to a question is a response that is not the solution to a problem or the .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:News from the President’s Council on BioethicsF. Daniel Davis (bio) and Diane M. Gianelli (bio)As most readers of this column already know, the President's Council on Bioethics went through a major transition during the past year when Leon Kass—in October 2005—handed the chairman's gavel over to Georgetown University's Edmund Pellegrino. Dr. Kass has remained on the Council as a member.1When the gavel change took place, the Council's (...) phone started ringing. Everyone wanted to know the same thing: What topics would the Council take up this term? Dr. Pellegrino's answer was always the same: The Council's agenda would be established through a consultative process with the members themselves and with an eye to those problems and controversies in bioethics to which we, as a body, can make a contribution.Taking its cue from the list of potential topics suggested by members, the Council—over the course of the next several meetings—listened to experts on such topics as children and bioethics (with a focus on children in clinical research), organ transplantation, and that oft-cited-but-hard-to-define concept, "human dignity."The latter topic entered the arena of discussion because it is a concept that is cited frequently in the bioethics literature, and it is also one that has figured prominently in Council discussions and documents. Although the concept is widely invoked, there is no universal understanding of what it means, and it is not easy to encapsulate into a one-size-fits-all definition. Indeed, some critics maintain that appeals to human dignity are fig leaves used to camouflage unconvincing arguments. So between December 2005 and April 2006, the Council devoted several sessions to various perspectives on "human dignity: its meaning, its foundations, and its relevance to bioethics." After hearing from James Childress, Patricia Churchland, Daniel Sulmasy, and Paul Weithman2 on the topic, the Council decided to issue a volume of approximately 20 essays, some by Council members and others by scholars from a variety of relevant disciplines.3 The volume is expected to encompass a broad array of opinion on the topic of human dignity and is scheduled to be published next spring."Children" were also the focus of several sessions during the past year. The Council's last report addressed care giving for the elderly.4 After it was issued, several members suggested it was time to focus on the youngest members of [End Page 375] society. The challenge, of course, was to find a topic that was both timely and relevant—and one about which the Council was uniquely qualified to make a contribution. A number of experts in a variety of related fields testified before the Council about possible issues it could explore: newborn screening for genetic disorders; decision-making standards for those who lack capacity; ethical issues in neonatal and pediatric intensive care; pharmacology and psychiatric disorders in children; and children and clinical research. In addition, a number of groups and individuals involved in related topics met with staff to discuss their interests and concerns.This exploratory engagement with facets of the broad topic of children and bioethics led the Council to focus, more narrowly, on a cluster of issues concerning newborn screening for genetic disorders—a topic on which it is likely that the Council will issue a white paper, possibly by next summer. The stimulus for this particular focus has been the American College of Medical Genetics's recommendation that all newborns in the U.S. be screened for a panel of 29 disorders.5 Currently, each state decides for its residents which conditions are subject to mandated screening, so it is possible to get early diagnoses of treatable disorders in one geographical area but not in another. Proponents of screening find the federal approach to mandated screening more equitable. Potential ethical problems, however, exist with the proposal. Some want to ensure that newborns are screened only for treatable conditions on grounds that it would be too burdensome to discover one is carrying the gene for a late-onset disease that cannot be prevented. Others want to make sure that insurance coverage for individuals and their families is... (shrink)

The rush of interference that produces gaps and unsettles cognition must be seen as a force that weighs in performatively and must be read. The interruptive moment of interference itself calls for a reading.Community is made of the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension that singular beings are. … Communication is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional.Emmanuel Levinas maintains a crucial distinction between the Said (le Dit) and the Saying (le Dire): whereas the Said (...) names the realm of conceptual forms, themes, ideas—signified meaning—the Saying indicates a nonreferential performative intrusion that institutes, produces, transforms. Communication studies focuses .. (shrink)