This paper argues that professionals who make boundary-related decisions should be guided by relationship-based practice. In our roles as service users and professionals, drawing from our lived experiences of professional relationships, we argue we need to move away from distance-based practice. This includes understanding the boundary stories and narratives that exist for all of us – including the people we support, other professionals, as well as the organisations and systems within which we work. When we are dealing with professional boundary (...) issues, we should centre relationship-building skills that are central to many other aspects of our work. Skills that foster relationships at all levels – between professionals, service users, and services – need to be revalued. Our final recommendation is to create, develop, and foster safer spaces within and outside of organisations, as well as inter-professionally, for the discussion and exploration of boundary-related issues and practice. We are interested in hearing from those with experiences of being marginalised by boundaries so that they can inform a reshaping of our collective ideas around boundary related practices. To foster relationship-based practices in organisations, we have outlined several recommendations here; however, we recognize that these do not go far enough, and that collective action is needed to inform systemic change. (shrink)

The long-standing enigma of I.G. i. 115 has been brought into the lime-light once more by two recent articles, ‘The Law Codes of Athens’ by Sterling Dow in Proc. Massachusetts Hist. Soc., vol. lxxi and by E. Ruschenbusch in Historia, ix, Heft 2. This enigma has many facets, but I only wish to deal here with one. It concerns the precise nature and purpose of the inscription and, in particular, the significance of the words l. 10. The preamble to the (...) decree is quite specific. (shrink)

The long-standing enigma of I.G. i. 115 has been brought into the lime-light once more by two recent articles, ‘The Law Codes of Athens’ by Sterling Dow in Proc. Massachusetts Hist. Soc., vol. lxxi and by E. Ruschenbusch in Historia, ix, Heft 2 . This enigma has many facets, but I only wish to deal here with one. It concerns the precise nature and purpose of the inscription and, in particular, the significance of the words l. 10. The preamble to (...) the decree is quite specific. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Theologian's Doubts:Natural Philosophy and the Skeptical Games of GhazālīLeor HaleviIn the history of skeptical thought, which normally leaps from the Pyrrhonists to the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus in the sixteenth century, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1058-1111) figures as a medieval curiosity. Skeptical enough to merit passing acknowledgment, he has proven too baffling to be treated fully alongside pagan, atheist, or materialist philosophers. As a theologian defending certain Muslim (...) dogmas, Ghazālī has not met what historians consider the mark of the true skeptic, a mind doubting the possibility of all systems of knowledge. But what is fascinating about him is that he brought into practical operation the tools of what I call "functional skepticism."1He denied the claims to truth of Aristotelian physics—whose basis he showed to rest on groundless belief—then turned and argued for the possibility of the Resurrection tooth and nail. The scholarly debate on The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa) has concentrated on the extent to which Ghazālī qua Ashcarite theologian was seduced into Aristotelian philosophy despite himself.2 In my view this debate has been misguided in the attempt to distill the [End Page 19] essence of Ghazālī from the book's eclectic theology; I will argue for a different view of Ghazālī on the basis of a close reading of key passages. In the unusual sections where Ghazālī applies Aristotelian language to a world not following the ordinary laws of physics, some have found Ghazālī slipping, unconsciously perhaps, into an Aristotelian frame of mind. I will show that, as a skeptical theologian with a dialogic imagination, he was rather deconstructing Aristotelian discourse while playing a Wittgensteinian sort of language game.Natural Philosopher or Speculative Theologian?The disagreement about the extent to which philosophy infected Ghazālī is ancient. Ghazālī might have studied philosophy only in order to refute it. He himself defended his philosophizing with the claim that one cannot deconstruct a system of thought until one has understood it so deeply as to elaborate upon its fundamental principles.3 His Maqāṣid al-falāsifa was in fact received, especially in trans-Pyrenean Europe, as a philosopher's genuine summary of the object of philosophy.4 The book strikes me as suspiciously creative in its representation of philosophical discourse, but it appears in any case as an expert and surprisingly unbiased treatment.5 Arabic readers knew that Ghazālī had also written a polemical treatise against philosophy, Tahāfut al-falāsifa, but they still wondered about his engagement with the ideas he challenged. Abū Bakr Ibn al-cArabī, for example, commented that Ghazālī had been unable to extricate himself from philosophy.6 Other philosophers pondered whether or not he had been a closeted member of their charmed circle and sought in his writings traces of esoteric philosophy.7Averroës's own sober sense of distance between philosophy and theology was partially a reaction to what he perceived as Ghazālī's dangerous and carefree mixture of the two sciences.8 He attacked Ghazālī's book in The Incoherence [End Page 20] of the Incoherence to restore philosophy's sense of purity, an aim he sought to accomplish by separating religious concerns from the philosopher's field of inquiry.9 Ironically, such a separation is precisely what Ghazālī might have wished to provoke by crisscrossing and blurring the line between religion and philosophy.The modern debate on chapter 17 of Tahāfut al-falāsifa has concentrated on defining Ghazālī as either a natural philosopher or an occasionalist theologian. In his defense of the possibility of miracles Ghazālī presented two theories of causation, one denying the logical basis of Aristotelian notions of natural causality, and the other more or less adopting these notions. Jointly, the two theories have seemed incompatible, and for this reason scholars have attempted to sort Ghazālī out of the apparent confusion. In 1978 L. E. Goodman argued persuasively that Ghazālī exploited rather than denied the philosophers' ideas of causality. In two articles Michael Marmura challenged Goodman, contending... (shrink)

This paperback edition of Dodds's standard edition of Plato's Gorgias is designed to meet the needs both of undergraduates and professional scholars. The text and apparatus criticus are based on a fresh survey of the evidence: two major manuscripts are here for the first time fully collated, and account has been taken both of new papyri and of the exceptionally rich indirect tradition. The text is supplemented by a full introduction giving details on the subject and structure of the dialogue, (...) its characters and intended historical setting, the real date of composition, and the background to Plato and Athens at the time of composition. The commentary, besides explaining Platonic usages and discussing textual points, aims to treat the historical, philosphical, and literary questions which arise from the text. (shrink)

This paperback edition of Dodds's standard edition of Plato's Gorgias is designed to meet the needs both of undergraduates and professional scholars. The text and apparatus criticus are based on a fresh survey of the evidence: two major manuscripts are here for the first time fully collated, and account has been taken both of new papyri and of the exceptionally rich indirect tradition. The text is supplemented by a full introduction giving details on the subject and structure of the dialogue, (...) its characters and intended historical setting, the real date of composition, and the background to Plato and Athens at the time of composition. The commentary, besides explaining Platonic usages and discussing textual points, aims to treat the historical, philosphical, and literary questions which arise from the text. (shrink)

How can different religions be compared? Which religions are true? To raise such questions univocally of all religions there first needs to be some objective grounds of comparison. Neville's book develops and empirically tests a speculative hypothesis that provides these grounds. This hypothesis has two parts--the ontological and cosmological. Neville maps out these parts along with his primary concept of divinity explicated in terms of creation ex nihilo. He then uses his hypothesis to compare the multiple-layered concept of divinity--masks of (...) God--found in various religions, especially the Christian and Chinese. (shrink)

Martine argues that "the relation between the determinate and indeterminate dimensions of our experiences precludes any attempt to restrict our conceptions of intelligibility to the determinately biased models that we have used in the past". Consider the world we experience in our daily lives. We come into contact with all sorts of things. What these things are and what we know of them is determined as much by what they are not as by what they are. This suggests there are (...) boundaries to be drawn, but not eternal, unchanging, absolutely clear and distinct boundaries, between what is determinate and what is not. Yet our Western bias is for the absolutely clear, the certain. Such clarity, however, is found only in our maps of reality which, divorced from the phenomenal world, we confuse with that world. (shrink)

What are the relations, if any, between philosophy and literary style? Lang asserts "that the 'literariness' of philosophical writing is not accidental or ornamental but unavoidable--imbedded in that discourse and so also in its substantive questions and proposed solutions". Lang attempts to clarify and support his thesis in discussions of philosophy as literature and philosophy of literature.

The responses to the questions of why? when?, how?, where?, and in what ways? business ethics should be taught in the BusinessEthics classroom inundate the scholarly literature. Yet, to date, despite some very interesting ideas, with respect to the answers givento the above question, not only has nothing even close to consensus been reached, but this particular area of pedagogy is instagnation—authors still challenge both the very idea of teaching business ethics as well as the practical value of such courses (...) for ourstudents once they graduate to the corporate world.In this paper I will suggest that the reason for this lack of pedagogical progress is that there has been a serious oversight regarding the most important teaching question of all: Who? I will show that the pedagogical issue of whom should be teaching Business Ethics has been largely ignored, skirted or answered incorrectly. I will then boldly argue that the only necessary condition for successful courses inBusiness Ethics is that they be taught by experts in ethics, i.e., Ph.D.s in philosophy. (shrink)

The responses to the questions of why? when?, how?, where?, and in what ways? business ethics should be taught in the BusinessEthics classroom inundate the scholarly literature. Yet, to date, despite some very interesting ideas, with respect to the answers givento the above question, not only has nothing even close to consensus been reached, but this particular area of pedagogy is instagnation—authors still challenge both the very idea of teaching business ethics as well as the practical value of such courses (...) for ourstudents once they graduate to the corporate world.In this paper I will suggest that the reason for this lack of pedagogical progress is that there has been a serious oversight regarding the most important teaching question of all: Who? I will show that the pedagogical issue of whom should be teaching Business Ethics has been largely ignored, skirted or answered incorrectly. I will then boldly argue that the only necessary condition for successful courses inBusiness Ethics is that they be taught by experts in ethics, i.e., Ph.D.s in philosophy. (shrink)

The last phase of Greek philosophy has until recently been less intelligently studied than any other, and in our understanding of its development there are still lamentable lacunae. Three errors in particular have in the past prevented a proper appreciation of Plotinus' place in the history of philosophy. The first was the failure to distinguish Neoplatonism from Platonism: this vitiates the work of many early exponents from Ficinus down to Kirchner. The second was the belief that the Neoplatonists, being ‘mystics,’ (...) were necessarily incomprehensible to the plain man or even to the plain philosopher. To have encouraged the persistence of this superstition in the nineteenth century is the least pardonable of Creuzer's many sins. The third was the chronological confusion involved in the ascription to Saint Paul's contemporary of the works of the pretended Dionysius Areopagita, which contain a fully-developed Neoplatonic theology. Though the fraud had been exposed by Scaliger, these writings continued down to the beginning of the nineteenth century to be used as evidence that the ‘Nsoplatonic trinity’ was an inferior imitation of the Christian one. When this false trail was at length abandoned the fashion for orientalizing explanations persisted in another guise: to the earliest historians of Neoplatonism, Simon and Vacherot, the school of Plotinus was ‘the school of Alexandria,’ and its inspiration was mainly Egyptian. Vacherot says of Neoplatonism that it is ‘essentially and radically oriental, having nothing of Greek thought but its language and procedure.’ Few would be found to-day to subscribe to so sweeping a pronouncement; but the existence of an important oriental element in Plotinus' thought is still affirmed by many French and German writers. (shrink)