This paper provides a description of the role of the clinical ethicist as it is generally experienced in Canada. It examines the activities of Canadian ethicists working in healthcare institutions and the way in which their work incorporates more than ethics case consultation. The Canadian Bioethics Society established a Taskforce on Working Conditions for Bioethics (hereafter referred to as the Taskforce), to make recommendations on a number of issues affecting ethicists and to develop a model role description. This essay carefully (...) assesses this model role description. (shrink)

This paper provides a description of the role of the clinical ethicist as it is generally experienced in Canada. It examines the activities of Canadian ethicists working in healthcare institutions and the way in which their work incorporates more than ethics case consultation. The Canadian Bioethics Society established a “Taskforce on Working Conditions for Bioethics” (hereafter referred to as the Taskforce), to make recommendations on a number of issues affecting ethicists and to develop a model role description. This essay carefully (...) assesses this model role description. (shrink)

Complexity, agency, and time -- The vicissitudes of experience -- Belief, spirituality, and time -- The human predicament -- Capital flows, sovereign decisions, and world resonance machines -- The theorist and the seer.

We report the results of two experiments that show that participants rely on both emotion and reason in moral judgments. Experiment 1 showed that when participants were primed to communicate feelings, they provided emotive justifications not only for personal dilemmas, e.g., pushing a man from a bridge that will result in his death but save the lives of five others, but also for impersonal dilemmas, e.g., hitting a switch on a runaway train that will result in the death of one (...) man but save the lives of five others; when they were primed to communicate thoughts, they provided non-emotive justifications for both personal and impersonal dilemmas. Experiment 2 showed that participants read about a protagonist's emotions more quickly when the protagonist was faced with a personal dilemma than an impersonal one, but they read about the protagonist's decision to act or not act equally quickly for personal and impersonal dilemmas. (shrink)

Humans have been shown capable of performing many cognitive tasks using information of which they are not consciously aware. This raises questions about what role consciousness actually plays in cognition. Here, we explored whether participants can learn cue-target contingencies in an attentional learning task when the cues were presented below the level of conscious awareness, and how this differs from learning about conscious cues. Participants’ manual (Experiment 1) and saccadic (Experiment 2) response speeds were influenced by both conscious and unconscious (...) cues. However, participants were only able to adapt to reversals of the cue-target contingencies (Experiment 1) or changes in the reliability of the cues (Experiment 2) when consciously aware of the cues. Therefore, although visual cues can be processed unconsciously, learning about cues over a few trials requires conscious awareness of them. Finally, we discuss implications for cognitive theories of consciousness. (shrink)

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Volume 19, Issue 4, Page 638-642, October 2011.

ABSTRACTResistance to austerity in Ireland has until recently been largely muted. In 2013 domestic water charges were introduced and throughout 2014 a series of protests against the charges emerged, culminating in over 90 separate marches on November 1. In this paper we examine the discourses which are produced and circulated by politicians and the mainstream media about this protest movement, and offer a brief insight into the contemporary Irish context of austerity and crisis. We analyse the role of the phrase (...) ‘sinister fringe’ as a discursive device, and unpick the ways in which it has been used to explain the water charges protests to the Irish public. Our conclusions speak to the currency of the protest paradigm as a means of understanding news media reporting of protest. Ultimately we raise concerns regarding the effects of this dominant frame on deliberative democracy. (shrink)

In The Distant Relation Eoin Thomson presents innovative readings of canonical philosophic and literary texts, focusing on the distance that mediates the relation between word and thing, past and present, I and you. Through a novel convergence, itself arising from a field of philosophic and literary experimentation, he challenges previous traditions while demonstrating that his strategy is appropriate to the texts considered. The Distant Relation breaks down the artificial division between philosophy and literature by weaving contemporary philosophic arguments through (...) close readings of Carpentier, Rulfo, Paz, and Garcia Marquez. Thomson draws the reader into the largely uninhabited space between philosophy and literature, providing new critical strategies that allow text and reader to respond to the very distance they share. These strategies involve a reconceptualisation of distance that recognises the productive and affirmative nature of separation. The Distant Relation will attract anyone interested in the ongoing struggle to overcome conventional interpretations of language, time, and identity within the broader context of philosophical trends and Spanish American studies. Eoin S. Thomson is an independent scholar who has taught in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. (shrink)

We welcome Ms Smajdor’s critique into our investigations of expected future tax gains to the state from children conceived by in vitro fertilisation .1 To better inform the JME readership, we wish to correct some misinterpretations of our research by Smajdor, and to highlight some weaknesses of current IVF funding policies.Our investigation sought to establish the long-term net tax contribution from an IVF-conceived child, assuming that the child was average in every respect .2 We conducted this analysis on the basis (...) that IVF, and other assisted reproductive treatments, are unique among all medical interventions—unique in the sense that their success leads to the creation of human life; a life that would not have existed had the technology not been available and accessible to couples willing to undergo treatment. Hence, this method provides us with an opportunity to explore lost tax revenue to the state resulting from children that have not been born due to limited public access to IVF treatments currently observed in the UK and many other countries.In our investigations, the costs of IVF were treated as an investment in human capital with future long-term cost and revenue implications for the state. Our evaluation ignored the many humanistic reasons for offering IVF treatment to infertile couples and concentrated solely on the possible economic benefits.3 The perspective of the analysis was that of the state; hence …. (shrink)

Hybrid deduction-refutation systems are presented for four first degree entailment based logics. The hybrid systems are shown to deductively and refutationally sound and complete with respect to their logics. The proofs of completeness are presented in a uniform way. This paper builds on work in [6], where Goranko presented a deductively and refutationally sound and complete hybrid system for classical logic.

Connolly draws on the recent changes in the Malaysian state of Penang to open up new perspectives on urban development, governance and the politics of place. Reviewing the role of residents, activists, planners and other experts in socio-natural changes and urban regeneration, it builds an important new framework of landscape political ecology.

One prominent criticism of Newtonianism held that gravitational attraction is an occult quality. The charge, pressed most forcefully by Leibniz, claims that Newton had abandoned the intelligibility of mechanism and allowed for an unexplained and inexplicable force in nature. This paper focuses on one of Newton’s replies to this accusation: his claim that gravitation is no more mysterious than phenomena like inertia and impenetrability. I argue that we can understand and motivate this Newtonian position by looking at the account of (...) material substance developed in Newton’s early manuscript essay De gravitatione. This account makes clear Newton’s sensitivity to the explanatory limits of mechanism. Newton was perceptive in noting that while the mechanical philosophy sought to provide explanations in terms of matter and motion, it failed to explain matter and motion themselves. This sheds light on the motivations behind the theory of bodies in De gravitatione. And it helps to explain why he was so unmoved by what many saw as a serious challenge to his theory of gravity. (shrink)

ABSTRACTUsing qualitative content analysis, informed by a Critical Discourse Analysis approach, this article examines the production, content and reception of print and online media discourses concerning the 2017 ‘Welfare Cheats, Cheat Us All’ campaign in the Republic of Ireland. Our article is situated in the context of recent debates concerning the media’s role in articulating ‘disgust’ discourses focused on ‘welfare fraud’, poverty and unemployment. Central to these processes is the social construction of those who are deemed to be the ‘deserving (...) poor’ or the ‘undeserving poor’. Our corpus includes records of in-house debate within the Department of Social Protection; the campaign’s documentation; print media and on-line media coverage of the campaign. The article’s findings demonstrate the ways in which welfare ‘fraud’ is mis-represented by the state and media. It also evidences ways in which such hegemonic discourses can be challenged in traditional and ‘new’ media settings. (shrink)

Eoin Carney | : Continuing on from recent discussions on the overlap between Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy and care ethics, this article will aim to clarify the status of practice in Ricoeur’s work. I will argue that even though Ricoeur’s philosophy is indeed marked by its “desire for a foundation,” as care ethicist Joan Tronto has pointed out, this aim is more of a fragile wager than a principle, and is always at risk of being overturned by practices and other (...) worldviews. I will demonstrate this point by arguing that Ricoeur’s hermeneutic approach to practice leads to the view that objective methods of knowledge and explanation are always grounded by the broader hermeneutic task of practical understanding and care for the self; in moral reasoning, Ricoeur’s analysis of the conflict between respect for the rule and respect for persons results in his prioritizing of respect for the singular other rather than the universal rule, meaning that the other can always disrupt and reorient universal or foundational modes of reasoning; and finally within healthcare relations Ricoeur aims to develop an alternative understanding of respect that places it in a dialectical relation with care. These practice-oriented readings of hermeneutics, morality, and respect aim to open up a dialogue between care ethics and philosophical approaches that have often been placed outside of care ethics. | : Poursuivant les récentes discussions concernant les recoupements entre la philosophie de Paul Ricoeur et les éthiques du care, cet article a pour objectif de clarifier le statut de la pratique dans l’oeuvre de Ricoeur. Je soutiendrai que même si la philosophie ricoeurienne est bien marquée par un « désir d’un fondement », ainsi que l’éthicienne du care Joan C. Tronto le souligne, cet objectif repose plus sur un pari que sur un véritable principe, et risque toujours d’être renversé par les pratiques ou d’autres visions du monde. Je démontrerai cela en soutenant trois arguments. 1) L’approche herméneutique de Ricoeur concernant la pratique mène à penser que les méthodes objectives de connaissance et d’explication sont toujours soutenues par une tâche herméneutique plus large de la compréhension pratique et du souci de soi. 2) En ce qui a trait au raisonnement moral, l’analyse de Ricoeur sur le conflit entre le respect de la règle et le respect de la personne accorde la priorité au respect de l’autre singulier plutôt que de la règle universelle. Ainsi, l’autre peut toujours perturber et réorienter l’universel ou les modes fondateurs du raisonnement. 3) Réfléchissant aux relations thérapeutiques, Ricoeur tend à suggérer une nouvelle compréhension du respect qui se place dans une relation dialectique avec le souci. Ces lectures – de l’herméneutique, de la moralité et du respect – orientées vers la pratique ouvrent la voie à un dialogue entre les éthiques du care et des approches philosophiques que l’on considère souvent éloignées de celles-ci. (shrink)

For Ricœur any study of Freud, or of psychoanalysis more generally, needs to take into account the crucial dimension of the analytic experience itself. Psychoanalysis, as a “mixed discourse,” aims to anticipate questions of meaning and explication alongside technical questions of energies, repression, displacement, and so on. The analytic experience is one which is practical and intersubjective, but which is also guided by various techniques or methods. These techniques, I will argue, should be understood as a type of techne, one (...) which is less concerned with hermeneutic questions of meaning than with quasi-scientific questions of force, feedback, struggle, and process. The practice of psychoanalysis, on the other hand, deals with the ways in which these forces or drives become meaningful for a particular subject, and within a singular context or history. This article will aim to draw out both the interrelationship between techniques and practical understanding, and also the productive incommensurability between the two. (shrink)

The base rate fallacy is directly dependent on a particular judgment paradigm in which information may be unambiguously designated as either “base rate” or “individuating,” and in which subjects make two-stage sequential judgments. The paradigm may be a poor match for real world settings, and the fallacy may thus be undefined for natural ecologies of judgment.

Defenders of legislative supremacy against judicial review have primarily invoked various virtues of legislative process – in particular, its deliberative qualities, the diverse perspectives and inputs it allows, and especially, its connection to a principle of democratic equality. However, I argue that such virtues have been overemphasised as justifications for legislative supremacy. Instead, I argue that insufficient attention has been paid to the form of legislation as a justification for giving legislatures the ‘final say’ on issues of fundamental rights. Firstly, (...) I argue that legal philosophy has underemphasised the extent to which legislative form, rather than legislative process, can mediate ‘majoritarian’ rule, and how this undermines the most commonplace arguments for rights-based judicial review of parliamentary legislation. Secondly, I suggest that the same formal attributes give legislation a virtue of political transparency which can be contrasted with the esotericism of constitutional jurisprudence, itself considered as a distinctive species of political domination. (shrink)

For Rousseau, the primary function of the republican constitution is not to contain state power, but rather to cultivate certain personal dispositions and social forms through which the stability of a political order based on the general will can be realised. Thus, his constitutional projects for Corsica and Poland formulate peculiar constitutional devices aimed at fostering a distinctive vision of austerity as the social horizon of republican politics. I outline how Rousseau's political thought translates to a peculiar conception of constitutionalism (...) as cultivating stability conditions for the realisation of his principles of political right. In particular, I focus on how Rousseau's conception of austerity illustrates his prescient sense of the source of inequality and domination in liberal societies, insidiously embedded in symbolic and ritual forms. I also address the limitations of austerity as a constitutional antidote to domination in liberal societies. (shrink)

Adapt!: On a New Political Imperative, by Barbara Stiegler, reveals how neoliberalism in the 1930s took the shape of an entire social philosophy; it also shows how her book must be updated today. As Stiegler reviews, Walter Lippmann insisted that major state and social institutions must be reformed to support neoliberal aims of capital priority and rapid growth, the primacy of technical experts, management of mass opinion to insulate those inviolable ends, and courts equipped with neoliberal jurisprudence and authority to (...) secure the entire complex. Stiegler’s brilliance, however, falls below her discernment of new phases in this evolution. The last third of this paper explores the formation of supplements that intensify the regime. White triumphalism, spiritual callousness, denials of climate change, evasion of planetary circuits of imperial power, and aspirational fascism grow together in several countries as sacrosanct ends of neoliberal capitalism face inflows and obstacles its leaders can neither admit nor control. (shrink)

Anyone who has ever been moved by picture, poem or symphony will understand the power of art to bring meaning to the often dissonant counterpoint of light and darkness which is reflected in life and death. Human creativity, as the expression of hope, need and desire, is a statement of belief that life is meaningful. From classical philosophies of beauty to Celtic scholarship, through the mysticism of Patrick Kavanagh and the witness of women's writing, and from the sacred sounds of (...) Faure through the spiritual impact of the visual arts to the prophetic soundings of contemporary Irish writing, these essays suggest, that the imagination can indeed uncover neglected wells of spirituality for our contemporary society. (shrink)

Deliberation is widely viewed as being intrinsic to republican citizenship. Neo-Roman republicans such as Philip Pettit value deliberation primarily for its role in rendering coercive political authority non-arbitrary and thus non-dominating. Accordingly, a deliberative public sphere is seen as necessary to foil domination in politics. In this article, I consider a countervailing view shared by two otherwise very different theorists – Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Bourdieu’s account of social practice, deliberation can harbour subtle forms of symbolic violence in (...) ways which neo-republican theory struggles to account for. Rousseau’s ‘communitarian’ politics of austerity is, I argue, undergirded by a similar concern that complex political discourse will represent a mystifying ‘sophistry’, encoded in differentiating signifiers, and thus become an insidious site of domination. Both perspectives, I argue, help to illuminate important blind spots in the neo-republican account of political deliberation in its relationship to domination. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider what it might mean to approach boredom as a problem of post-history, rather than of modernity as such. Post-history, or ‘end of history’, in this sense, is linked with the impossibility or unlikelihood of political-systemic change, and thus with the disappearance of the contingency or temporal flux that had been understood as the context or prerequisite of political action and political freedom. I will, argue, firstly, that both Rousseau and Fukuyama depict societies that are ‘post-historical’, (...) in this sense, and which are marked by ‘boredom’ of this specifically post-historical kind. Secondly, I will argue that both thinkers link post-historical boredom with the disappearance or diminution of the ‘drive for recognition’ that both understood as both an agent and effect of ‘history’. Thirdly, I will argue that while Fukuyama understands post-historical boredom as an ‘irritant’ that threatens to restart history without quite succeeding in doing so, Rousseau understands it as an essentially stabilising (and happy) condition that maintains post-historical man in an equilibrium modelled on the order of nature itself. And fourthly, I consider certain ways in which this ‘post-historical’ boredom might coexist and overlap with the ‘promise of intensity’ experienced in post-Fordist neoliberal society. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Because Rousseau identifies popular sovereignty with the enactment of fundamental laws, he seems to conflate popular sovereignty with constituent power: the people are sovereign because they constitute the state, without actually ruling it. However, he assigns the lawgiver, or (‘legislator’) an antecedent task that has a more obviously ‘constituent’ character – the task of constituting the people itself, as a political subject and political unity. Thus Rousseau’s lawgiver offers a template for understanding the relationship between popular sovereignty and constituent (...) power. Accordingly, I make three arguments concerning the ‘constituent’ role of the lawgiver. Firstly, I argue that Rousseau’s lawgiver belongs within a ‘realist’ tradition of constituent power, which understands the people not as the bearer of constituent power, but as its product. Secondly, since the lawgiver’s task is to alchemise peoplehood by bequeathing the people a ritual life, this helps us understand how constituent power remains ‘live’ within the social life of the republic. And thirdly, since the lawgiver effects a rupture in political time of which Rousseau judges the people itself incapable, its role is to compensate not only for the people’s incapacity to reason, but more importantly, its incapacity to act. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider what it might mean to approach boredom as a problem of post-history, rather than of modernity as such. Post-history, or ‘end of history’, in this sense, is linked with the impossibility or unlikelihood of political-systemic change, and thus with the disappearance of the contingency or temporal flux that had been understood as the context or prerequisite of political action and political freedom. I will, argue, firstly, that both Rousseau and Fukuyama depict societies that are ‘post-historical’, (...) in this sense, and which are marked by ‘boredom’ of this specifically post-historical kind. Secondly, I will argue that both thinkers link post-historical boredom with the disappearance or diminution of the ‘drive for recognition’ that both understood as both an agent and effect of ‘history’. Thirdly, I will argue that while Fukuyama understands post-historical boredom as an ‘irritant’ that threatens to restart history without quite succeeding in doing so, Rousseau understands it as an essentially stabilising (and happy) condition that maintains post-historical man in an equilibrium modelled on the order of nature itself. And fourthly, I consider certain ways in which this ‘post-historical’ boredom might coexist and overlap with the ‘promise of intensity’ experienced in post-Fordist neoliberal society. (shrink)

The relationship between constitutional secularism and gender equality acquires peculiar dimensions in the context of the laïcité project in republican France – particularly, in the contemporary conflict between a laïcité interpreted as a politics of emancipatory social transformation, and the more minimalist liberal conception prevailing in French law. The dominant narrative in the republican establishment, shared between left and right, has been that laïcité will lead to gender emancipation not only by dissolving any sectarian dimensions of women’s citizenship – that (...) is, by sustaining a religiously neutral public sphere – but also, by preventing the domination as well as the coercion of religious choice in the intimate and private spheres of family and community. In this narrative, laïcité represents a more ambitious project of gender emancipation than that promised by the liberalisms more redolent of the Anglo-American world. The apogee of this expansionary interpretation of constitutional secularism is expressed in the 2004 prohibition on conspicuous markers of religious affiliation in the public schools, and the recent debate on the ‘full’ Islamic veil. This article considers the relationship of laïcité to gender equality through the lens of the broader theoretical debate surrounding the relationship of political liberalism to the politics of non-domination. The elusive challenge is to craft a constitutional secularism that can sustain a viable politics of non-domination – going beyond the formalist voluntarism redolent of classical liberalisms, offering undominated as well as uncoerced religious choice – yet also avoiding an overzealous emancipatory stance that itself assumes a regulative role for women’s religious choices. (shrink)

The republican project of freedom as non-domination commits the State to endowing citizens with the resources and attitudes necessary to both apprehend domination and abstain from dominating others. This, some have argued, renders it incompatible with political liberalism, which eschews the promotion of personal liberal virtues, being derived independently of any 'comprehensive doctrine'. Republican freedom is therefore depicted as penetrating deeper, in its application, into intimate and 'private' spheres. I argue, through a Rousseauist interpretation of Rawls's social contract, that its (...) 'political' stricture need not, however, preclude any socially transformative, emancipatory role. Thus, the promotion of freedom as non-domination is compatible with the 'modelled constraints' of Rawls's original position. Far from transgressing the 'political' limits of State power, the goods associated with non-domination may instead be seen as necessary to the realisation of 'moral personality'—independently of the 'final ends' for which it may be exercised. (shrink)